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Solar System Date of Birth Determined
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "UC Davis researchers have dated the earliest step in the formation of the solar system — when microscopic interstellar dust coalesced into mountain-sized chunks of rock — to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years. In the second stage, mountain-sized masses grew quickly into about 20 Mars-sized planets and, in the third and final stage, these small planets smashed into each other in a series of giant collisions that left the planets we know today. The dates of these intermediary stages are well established. The article abstract is available from Astrophysical Journal Letters."
Of course it was. Even then, everything crashed on Mondays.
So to borrow from someone else's profound statement, all of our recorded history in well within the margin of error (by 4 orders of magnitude or so).
There's a nice political joke in there for those not yet in their holiday brain coma.
...to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years.
Similarly, I've discovered my birthday to be defined as subsequent to July.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
To think that the span of a human life is at best about 1/250 millionth of that cycle. Light from distant stars does eventually get here, it just happens on timescales that are beyond imagination.
Such a shame that we occupy such a small blink in the process, and can't witness cosmic events on any larger a level.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Can we break those intermediate steps into seven phases or so and declare each of those a "day", get a copy to the Pope, and settle this whole religion versus science mess now? Or at least build some bridges for the Bible folks and the Science folks to agree to something that makes a little more sense?
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Yeesh, you people are so negative! The hint is right there in his username!
I need to know the calendar date so I can convince my boss it's a holiday. In fact, why don't we make it an international paid holiday?
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
So god made the earth about the time civilization was making beer...and the solar system is over 4 billion years old... man sometimes Im a little late to work but this guy takes the cake! Hes still pretty keen on taking the credit though...
Have you ever wondered why we haven't encountered intelligent life forms other than ourselves? An advanced race with regular slower-than-light starships would be able to colonize an entire galaxy within a few million years (barely an instant on a geological timescale). One possible explanation for our apparent solitude in the universe is that the number of planets with the proper conditions for developing life is vanishingly small. (Read about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox for other possibilities)
For example Earth's moon creates tides (and tide pools) and stabilizes the earth's seasons and axial tilt. According to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis the Moon was created as a result of a chance collision between the proto-earth and a Mars-sized object. Without the presence of the Moon the conditions might have been too harsh to support life.
As we learn more about how the solar system formed we will be better able to predict which stars might have life-bearing planets, so we can begin our own colonization of the galaxy (assuming humans can survive long enough to overcome war, disease and ecological destruction).
It's been amusing over the past 10 years to see young-earth creationists squirm about the fact that cosmology has become a high-precision science, with the age of the universe going from having 50% error bars to 1.5% error bars. Now these folks have apparently measured the age of the solar system to within .05%. For a long time, young-earth creationists (YECs) were trying to say that the science was all very uncertain, so you couldn't trust the science. Hmm...now it appears that Archbishop Ussher's date for creation is off by 2000 standard deviations. Oops!
It's unfortunate that the authors don't seem to be in the habit of posting preprints on arxiv, or on their university web site. TFA doesn't really explain very well, for example, how they know the primordial Mn/Cr ratio so precisely, and why the Mn/Cr ratio in the universe as a whole wouldn't change at the same rate as the ratio in asteroids. As a California taxpayer, is it too unreasonable of me to expect research funded by my tax money to be available freely?
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That's funny - where in the Word is there mention of a flat earth? It actually talks a lot about stars and worlds. About our sins tossed from God as far as East is from West (hint - eternally distant from God). There's actually nothing in there that refutes evolving critters, and nothing in there that stipulates six 24 hour days for creation with the seventh for rest, and certainly nothing in there that says that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Ironically, the Scriptures even talks against those who crunch numbers and bicker over words. The conflict is not from God or from the Scriptures - it's from preconceived and erroneous notions of people who claim to align themselves with God and the Scriptures and from those who follow cultural notions rather than the essence of the Word. These same people who charged Galileo for heresy were the true heretics against the Scriptures. Creation is a process. When you plant a seed, you have created a tree. But it achieves the status of tree over time. Ditto with everything... Big Bang - Light Be!
to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years
And on the seven hundred fifty-nine million seven hundred three thousand seven hundred seventy-third day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seven hundred fifty-nine million seven hundred three thousand seven hundred seventy-third day from all his work which he had made.
You just got troll'd!
It's written in the stars...
Maybe "slippery when wet"?
--
make install -not war
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
In that sense, I think that astrophysics, followed by geology, are the most melancholy of sciences.
sig sig sig siggy sig
The thought of one such mentally ill leader having access to the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world is... disturbing.
It's supposed to be.
The MAD doctrine deters nuclear war by threatening a retaliation that would likely bring down civilization and possibly end the human race and much of life on Earth.
For it to work, US presidents have to put on a show, looking crazy enough that they'd actually do it - but sane enough that the won't shoot first and can be reasoned with on issues that otherwise would have been "solved" by the outcome of a war. (IMHO it's likely the term "Mutually Assured Destruction" was chosen at least partly for the acronym, to help put on this show. Psych warfare was pretty well developed by the start of the Cold War.)
MAD is pretty terrifying. But it reversed the ongoing escalation of wars right after the bombs were proven to work under battle conditions (and two fried cities were substituted for the years of war that had been expected to be necessary to end the Japan part of WWII). It's been over half a century and no nukes have been used in war since those two.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is good news! The Solar System has been bummed out lately 'cause it couldn't prove it's birthday to anyone. All of the other solar systems could get into the cool clubs, but not ours.
Now it's PARTY TIME and the drinks are on Sol!
-David
It's a fucking *long* time until Sunday then.
The cake is a pie
The idea with evolution is that includes extinction, therefore making all sorts of implied statements about God. Like he let's his creations (even indirect ones) die, that he made mistakes etc etc. I'm not saying they're right, but that's where the big hubhub about evolution comes into play. Or at least that's what it was back when Darwin first published. Just because something is not litterally banned in the scriptures, if the logical conclusion from the scripture (god is perfect and benevolent) contradicts with premises and predictions of evolution (or cosmology or whatever), then there CAN be a conflict between the scriptures and science, even if it's not litterally in the scriptures. That all being said, I think the conflict is just silly.
You need to understand that radiocarbon dating and isochron dating are two different methods of dating an object, although both are based in radiometric dating. A rebuttal of radiocarbon dating is not a rebuttal of radiometric dating or other methodologies, and further a specialist can easily show just about anything to a lay-person, without it necessarily being true.
I'd say that Milton's a crank scientist, but if you believe him can you outline where you disagree with Richard Dawkin's review of Milton's book?
You have to wonder when just about every other person in a profession disagrees with you if it's more likely that you're wrong or that they're all wrong.
Like how according to the bible the sky used to require pillars to stay up there?
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Come on, we all know everything was created by a flying spaghetti monster, not a freaking fairy!
I'm sure he thinks he does, but I don't really have any intention of buying his book. Any time one starts with a discussion on physics and ends up being pointed to a sermon on the wrongness of "Darwinism" it's pretty clear that physics isn't the real topic and real data isn't the point. My guess is that like everybody else publishing that sort of junk in the popular press, Milton is bringing up the same old tired appeals to all of modern physics being wrong (speed of light bouncing all over the place despite lack of data to support it, every type of radiometric decay miraculously changing in concert with every other type, etc.) in order to support his personal religious views. Nothing says kook better than somebody desperately making modification after modification to atomic theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, etc. in order to get the numbers to work out right and patch up the holes that their ideas poke in other well established frameworks rather than simply accepting the preponderance of evidence that Earth is, in fact, quite old.
Seriously: Where did the straight line come from? Most of the objections to common radiometric dating are irrelevant to the dating method used in this article and the one in the link I referenced (i.e. people who understand radiometric dating will weep if the response contains words like "carbon dating" or references to hucksters dating sea snail shells). So what's wrong with the line? Why, aside from God's Divine Preference for Straight Lines are the points in the graph collinear? Until somebody can, on one hand, completely destroy radiometric dating and its underlying theory and, on the other, explain that beautiful collinearity, they're just blowing so much smoke.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
In some sense the smaller the are the most likely we are to survive and the less resources we are going to need to maintain ourselves. So maybe small size is a virtue (and ants or small microorganisms have more evolutionary potential to survive from a supernova or asteroid, maybe).
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he's French-Canadian. For us, the comma is the decimal separator, so 4,568 million actually looks like "4.568" million -- whereas it actually is "4.568" billion.
...
Of course, the next sentence shows 2,080,000 and that just completely ruins this
Nevermind.
Al
There are plenty of examples of mainstream religious doctrine changing to accommodate scientific discovery. It doesn't happen fast but it is more or less inevitable.
Unfortunately it isn't all progress because there are people making up new religious bullshit all the time.
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you commie.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Ironically if you see the imaginary figure that everyone believes in but can't see or hear you then become a saint.
God's word maybe never changes. Unless some bible thumper takes it and twists it around, of course. It's amazing how you try to "defend" the words of the Bible by quoting it wrongly.
Twice.
In a single sentence of just seven words.
First: Nowhere in the Bible, it says anything about the world being flat. We read about the waters being divided and the water being told to recede so land can form, but I can't remember a single word stating anything about the shape of Earth.
Second: The bible never ever mentions anything about a timeline or a date for the creation. What happened is that some Bishop in the 4th or 5th century tried to puzzle together a creation date for Earth, based on the various stories told therin and the acting figures, as well as their relation towards each other. Now, first of all he only had a rather bad translation of the original text to work with, second he tried to rely on the dates given (which also were a bit contradicting in the various books) and finally he took human life spans of his time as a standard. He made so many assumptions and filled the blanks with the information and rumors available to him about the ancient kingdoms of the east (which were spotty to say the least, and wrong in many cases) that as a statistician I can only dismiss his "calculations" as guesswork.
So, if you really want to rely on the Bible as the sole authority, you can neither claim that earth is flat nor that it's 5000 years old. Neither is by any means supported by the Book.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm curious, where does it say that?
This is the kind of unhelpful response that doesn't win any converts to your way of thinking. The book is about various aspects relating to the theory of evolution by natural selection through random mutations, but the point of it is not to argue as an apologist towards a religion or towards a bible. Milton is himself irreligious and not a member of any religion. (To the other poster: And yet reportedly Milton's summary of Dawkins' review is that it is a hysterical atheistic screed denouncing him as a closest creationist, and short on any specific hard evidential criticisms. Have I read Dawkins' review myself? No more than you have read Milton's book.)
My own technical experience is in electrical engineering, not radiometric or isochron dating. Yes I am quite open to the possibility that I am the proverbial layman bamboozled by a technical charlatan and the profession itself is eminently respectable and completely in consensus at all points. On the other hand, the other field I know a lot about, economics, I am well-aware of there being no consensus whatsoever but contains the most heated debates imaginable about all points in the field. They are a science (someone is right after all and someone is wrong) but it is a 'softer' science because it is not like whipping particles around in an accelerator again and again and making measurements. And as for electrical engineering, where there is no debate on fundamentals, at least what we study (e.g. an electric machine) is right there in front of us, and we are not engaging in speculative historical study based on neat tools we think might work about a hypothetical machine ten trillion years ago. Where does isochron or more broadly, radiometric dating, rate on the scale of 'hard' or 'soft' science? You seem to be suggesting right at the 'hard' pole, while I think in fact (thanks to Milton), it is located much more in the 'soft' part of line, with results only as strong as the risky assumptions made in arriving at those results.
The main criticism I remember he pointed out again and again is contamination, and the inability to separate decay by-products from the isotope from the decay by-products of other materials that decay into the same elements, and the elements and isotopes of the nominal by-product initially present at time zero when they were formed. He then takes the two or three main types of rock-dating and constructs a skeptical attack on each one, demonstrating the range of factors we know will ruin our results or contaminate them so as to render the result meaningless. Yes it is skepticism, and no he doesn't have a better way to do radiometric dating that avoids the doubts raised, but that is not his job or mine either. Does your meteor Pb206:Pb207 line still mean anything in the face of the skeptical attack? I am not sure. This isn't my area of expertise. I still remember reading Milton's skepticism though and going, aha, the age of the earth is more speculative than it first would appear according to the mass media and PBS.
Whatever, flame me, it doesn't matter. I'd encourage you to read a skeptical attack on isochron dating (Milton's perhaps, as I already mentioned) to see if it problematizes your linear line or not at all. If not, you can be all the more confident you 'know' the earth is very old. I have no agenda. I am not a Christian, but consciously reject it. I don't want you to believe the bible. If anything I am a deist, when I am not agnostic.
if you know the exact date' we can have a public holiday!
Yet it does talk about a rabbit chewing its cud - which is false.
± 2,080,000 years? I thought they'd say something like "March 12, 4,568,422,12 BC"...
mountain-sized masses grew quickly into about 20 Mars-sized planets and, in the third and final stage, these small planets smashed into each other in a series of giant collisions that left the planets we know today.
Another slashdot article about a month ago suggested that the type of collisions needed to create our moon were relatively rare, based on dust analysis of new systems. However, 20 Mars-sized proto-planets seems like it would create pretty good chances for moon-creating collisions. (Although gas giants probably hog most.)
Table-ized A.I.
And then came Patch Tuesday...
I'd never heard of Richard Milton, so went to look at his website (one of four, actually; the other three are about how to do your own PR, increase google hits, etc.). It seems to be down (and not archived by the Wayback Machine since mid-2007), but the latest incarnation may be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20061205072241/www.alternativescience.com/ .
It's interesting, and he makes some good points, but apparently he's not done much of his research so very well (see esp. the stuff on the Michelson interferometer) and when I saw this quote: "Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould has famously criticised the central feature of Darwinist thinking, gradualism, in many books" I knew the guy was not understanding at least part of that which he wrote about.
I appear to be mistaken. Milton just seems to be fond of fringe science. He's a rarity, but they do exist. Why, I'm not sure.
I just read Dawkins' review, and I'm thinking that Milton has some rather thin skin for a would-be Galileo. I would think that laboring alone to overturn most of the scientific theories of the 19th and 20th century would have gotten him used to receiving criticism. I don't see accusations of "closet creationist" being thrown around except in Dawkins pointing out that his anti-evolution arguments are essentially rehashes of well known creationist canards from the likes of Henry Morris. Then again, while I don't see any reason not to take Milton at his word (there are plenty of people with too much raw intelligence and too little relevant information who love acting as gadflies to assume that he couldn't possibly be one of them), you have to forgive suspicion in a time when slogans like "Intelligent Design theory is not religion!" are the norm.
This is sort of the reason for my original post: You're now explicitly disclaiming any real knowledge of the topic when you opened with what was essentially an attack on an entire field of scientists as frauds or idiots. That raises my spider sense in the same way political pundits are always "just joking" when somebody catches them in a lie. Accusations of arrogance from somebody who basically just said, "My knowledge of the topic comes from a single fringe book in the popular press, but physicists and geologists are all liars or incompetent" don't really hold much water. You'll find your posts get a warmer reception when they question the establishment rather than insult it from the peanut gallery.
Then we have something in common--my degrees are in engineering (computer) and economics. I'll agree with you on the fact that econ is one of those fields with a lot of different models explaining the same things, and reasonable cases can be made for a number of them. As somebody with an econ background, though, you've probably seen the nutbar economic theories debated on the Internet. The various economic schools may not agree on everything, but there are a lot of things that they do agree on, and most armchair Internet economists tend to fall on the other side of that line. Sadly, those ideas can seem pretty palatable in general terms, especially when one h
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Thank you for your honest and charitable response. It is (too) easy to be like Voltaire and just mock everything, even complicated matters about which it is very hard to get a handle on and yet still remarkably easy to tease and poke fun of (such as when someone tells me what exactly happened 4.5 thousand million years ago, and I have obviously been guilty of that in the grandparent post teasing this latest report on 'assured' results in rock dating. While I have strong doubts that a historical science like radiometric dating even comes anywhere close to the levels of assured results that I would expect in my own field of power/electrical engineering, it doesn't make it right to lampoon something I am obviously not ready to back up with my own sustained arguments. Thanks for keeping me humble. :)
"Get off my lawn!"
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
You mean the universe didn't start on 01-01-1980?
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Its coming out I tell ya! Better believe it!
"This is the kind of unhelpful response that doesn't win any converts to your way of thinking."
Scientists are frequently arrogant, perhaps because the validity of scientific findings are independent of whether or not you or anyone else agrees with them. Simply put, there's no real need for winning converts -- nor is it accurate to write it off as "a way of thinking".
It always amuses me to see something like this get reported as certain. Inevitably someone will come out next year and make it older or younger. It's like being a deserted island for one year. Then seeing a large carved boulder and saying "we can be certain that the bolder has been here for around 500 years by calculating the amount of erosion around it and the fact that it only rained once this past year". Then of course next year it rains 50 times, making the calculations just a little bit off.
I'm curious, where does it say that?
For the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and on them he has set the world. 1 Samual 2:8
Who shakes the earth under heaven from its foundations and its pillars totter Psalm 75:3
He has established the world; it shall never be moved Psalm 93:1
The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astonished at his reproof Job 26:11
Who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars remble. Job 9:6
Want flat circle talk too?
Make SELinux enforcing again!
That raises my spider sense
:-)
wuh?
my degrees are in engineering (computer) and economics
For that you got Spider Sense? You barstard, all I got was a boring printed degreee certificate and a course transcript.
I'll bet you had an overdraft though, I didn't, neh neh [rasberry blowing sounds..].
having completed my mission to prove that all scientists are mature adults who only ever act sensibly, I depart.
Are there any interesting scientific facts that you can deduce from the bible? Or is it all just pseudo-moral stuff and metaphorical mumbo jumbo that cannot be rightfully interpreted in any meaningful way?
Does seem that the writers made it just vague enough that people will fail to directly contradict it with newly discovered truths, but seemingly close enough to saying something that people do try to read meanings into it.
I believe it is inferred from certain passages, for example when Satan takes Jesus up to the top of a mountain to tempt him, and shows him the whole world laid out below. On a spherical world, you can't see everything from the top of a mountain but you can if it's flat.
In the same, if read literally the Bible also says that pi=3.0 (from the passage about a container measuring 10 across and 30 around).
But of course, nobody would try to read something like the Bible quite so absolutely literally these days, now would they...?
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Whatever happened to just using billions of years? If they are attempting to keep the years and tolerance in equivalent units they could have just said, 4.568 billion years within a range [tolerance] of 0.00208 billion years and let people do the math.
So today would be Stardate 4 billion five hundred sixty eight million one hundred seventy thousand seven hundred twelve point twenty, take or leave a couple of million!
Not much info on how to "accurately" cimpute our suns' stardate on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardate, someone care to update?
It's not necessarily meant to be misunderstood, or at least not understood. The problem is more that with the changes since its conception, people forgot what the various idioms and parables mean. Not to mention that the original text was in Hebrew (OT) or Aramaic (NT), which was translated to Greek, then this translation was used to convert it to Latin, and this finally to English. COULD it be that SOME parts MIGHT have been translated wrongly? Especially since the people who did those translations did them century or millenia after the original text was written, long after the original meaning of it was already lost to the people who could at least read (I do not say understand) the original text.
This is how we got dogmas like the virgin Mary (which was in the original most likely meant to mean "the young girl/woman Mary") and the seven days of creation (which is in the original more akin to "seven chapters" or "sevel daily tasks").
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Bad example. You take the Devil and Jesus together and then you go and say they couldn't do something. According to the book, either of them could already do what they please, now imagine them together.
And if you take away decimal calculations, which were by no means invented in those times, then yes, Pi=3.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know what you try to do.
1. Announce DNF time and again.
2. ???
3. Prophet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It would have been better if they had found out it was 4,567 years ago, or at least it would have been easier to remember, though, not entirely correct.
It's a shame they can't give us an exact date. That would be one hell of a birthday cake :-)
Because a billion means different things depending on where you live.
You mean, "qui donne une merde concernant ces culs muets", surely?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It has had a pretty good uptime since then.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
4,568 million years is a decimal number (4.568) for most of europe,
why do you use the comma in that manner anyways?
That's what I was refering to. The Bible is full of figures of speech, parables, allegories and hints, sometimes because freedom of speech was not really part of the human rights package back then, partly because back then, what was said made sense to the people but just isn't understood anymore. "You are the salt of the Earth" made sense to the people listening to Jesus. Today you have to wonder, salt in the earth? That's decidedly not a good idea. It means nothing will grow, why should the good people be the ones that ruin the crops? But back then, salt was worth its weight in gold, it was essential, it was the stuff needed to keep food from going bad in the pre-refrigerator times. Especially in a hot land like the middle east. So salt was precious, essential, no life and no prosperity could be possible without it.
Now, take it literally and this parable means you are supposed to ruin the land you live on. Of course, nobody would claim that's what Jesus had in mind. But it's a pretty good example how things can be twisted around when you take the Bible literally.
So yes, the word used in the Genesis was "day". But it is likely that it wasn't meant to mean "24 hours, one rotation of the Earth", what we consider a "day" today. It is more likely that it was supposed to mean a "day's work". For a God, that is, of course.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
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Not really, the sun is down half the day
....isn't that far off then?
4568 million years vs. somewhere around 6000 yrs. That's only 6 orders of magnitude, I mean, really they're just ZEROES.
-Styopa
I am made of the dust of the stars And the oceans flow in my veins ...
'Only a Barbarian believes that his tribes customs are the laws of nature'
So, this pretty much proves that the creationists were right. The earth was created only 4,000 years ago. They were just a little off by a few billion years.
Secondly it proves that the Earth's a Libra and according to today's horoscope says: More planetary changes bring the focus back to home matters and yet more change. A makeover for your room might appeal, but the planetary line-up could be a lot better than it currently is. Hold on to your ideas and wait until you have more time and a healthier looking budget!
which is mostly correct.
Stand facing north or south magnetic pole. If you lack a compass use stars, moss on the trees or satellite antennae (they are facing the Equator) to align yourself.
Now, standing like that, one of your hands is your east hand and the other is your west hand. Shake hands with yourself to congratulate yourself on a job well done in bringing the east and west together. About our sins tossed from God as far as East is from West (hint - eternally distant from God). Here is a fun experiment.
Stand facing north or south magnetic pole. If you lack a compass use stars, moss on the trees or satellite antennae (they are facing the Equator) to align yourself.
Now, standing like that, one of your hands is your east hand and the other is your west hand. Shake hands with yourself to congratulate yourself on a job well done in bringing the east and west together.
Now that you know how to do that, you can do amazing things like twiddling your thumbs.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You do realize that you can't see "the entire world laid out below" even if it was flat. The atmosphere alone prevents that. This would infer that either the devil was showing him a "vision" of the world, or that they had some sort of superior overview that transcends normal vision - being the devil and Jesus and all. I'm not really arguing, I'm just pointing that out.
But of course, nobody would try to read something like the Bible quite so absolutely literally these days, now would they...?
well said.
Do we know its sign?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Wow, how in the holy hell did THAT happen? Can we get this fixed, already? Also, convert the US off of Imperial ...
Most of the US likes Imperial and has no desire to switch. Yes it's just because we all grew up using it, but that's something that can't be easily undone. Imperial isn't like a cubit or something where it varies from person to person. All of the measurements are a very specifically defined amount and work perfectly fine for everyday use, and would technically be fine for scientific use if people wanted to utilize them.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Explains why my drill index has THREE different measuring systems, then, all for Imperial. Fractional, numeric for sizes in between those expressed as fractions, and lettered sizes. Any system where it's not immediately obvious without a few years of experience what size is the next smallest after, say, 1/4", is a pain in the ass and a confusing, antiquated barrier to entry. I'm an American, I like Fahrenheit because it works just fine, but Imperial for tools and shop measurement is plain counterproductive. Pisses me off every time I have to go to two different hex driver sets because an unknown bolt might be metric or Imperial.
I think the science was just a cover-up to find Duke Nukem Forever's original release date.
-
It has had a pretty good uptime since then.
Bah, that's easy when the majority of your system is just running their idle loops! Out of the whole dang system only one core has any active clients, and it's been starting to look a little flakey lately as the client process is gobbling up all the resources.
The enemies of Democracy are
If you read it literally, the Bible says that the Earth is older than the stars. I don't read that part literally though. I believe God explained the origins of the universe in terms that Moses would understand.
Unfortunately, Bible detractors contend that if any one part of the Bible is figurative, then no part of it can be taken literally (because everyone knows that a book cannot contain both literal meaning and figurative analogies.) That is one of the primary reasons that creationists stick so hard to the guns of a literal 6,000 year old Earth.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If I remember correctly somewhere in the Bible it says that God exists outside of the contraints of time. So ya, I don't hold tightly to a "new Earth". However I do think man and dinosaurs probably overlapped. Why there is a disparity there in the fossil record, I can't really say. Maybe humans just didn't get stuck in situations where they would fosilize very often.
Don't you think what you've said can apply to any religio-mythological text? How come here, in Slashdot a comment like this is made in reference to Judeo-Christian belief? As far as I know, Genesis says it was dark (the void), then there was light (Big Bang?) and then Earth and the Heavens (not necessarily in that order). Then the oceans (yep those came first) and the beasts (several waves of species, apparently by the fossil record), then G-d got lonely/smoked some crack and created man from dust(early storms primordial clay and amino acids?). It's a little out of order but it follows the "boomstick" rule; how would YOU explain the scientific understanding of creation to early civilized man, fresh out the trees? If you tried by explaining that all of creation was at one point in time packed into an area possibly no larger and a pinhead and there was this hyper-rapid expansion, continuing on... blah blah blah. It sounds just as fantastic IF NOT MORE.
What amazes me is that one would think we'd get past the point of trying to be absolute in the first place when it comes to belief versus science. My own personal preference is to realize that science provides the answer to HOW things happened and the measurable forces behind it. It permits us to truly understand on a equal, quantifiable level regardless of philosophical/theological belief. Belief has its place in how we see things as well; it deals more with the philosophical WHY and how/what we decide to focus this brief existence on.
Personally, I've never seen the conflict between the two and look at those on both sides who never miss an opportunity to bash each other and prove the other wrong as both amusing and tragic.
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
The flat earth is 5000 years old.
Is it possible this post is missing its <irony> tags?
God created the lights in Heaven on the fourth day. And the seventh day was Saturday when he rested.
4 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights--the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning--the fourth day.
Scientists are frequently arrogant
And humorously, frequently so too are their detractors -- the OP of this thread being a great example. And even more humorous is when the detractor is beaten into a corner and ends up complaining about the scientist's non-diplomatic arrogance "not helping", when what they are really complaining about is that arrogant knowledge beat out arrogant ignorance.
The enemies of Democracy are
When they say 6000 years, they're rounding the numbers: 6000 years plus or minus 4500 million.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think it is safe to say that God's word does change.
>"the word of God is living and active" - Hebrews 4:12
If it is living then it too must evolve.
Nah, that just means God created it.
'though, it would be a hilarious twist if we could somehow make up something about an evolving word of God and try to force it into religion. Hey, THEY started breaking down the wall between church and state!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know it was a joke, but isochron dating is actually a really interesting technique. It's a way of telling how long ago stuff that came from a shared pool of matter separated off. A good trick is to use samples from meteorites which should have formed about the same time as the rocky planets from the same pool of matter. The details of the system are covered really well here and a good graph of meteorite results is here. One of the snazzy things about the system is that if your samples violate the assumptions necessary to make the measurement, it's usually easily detectable. The built in check is the correlation coefficient on the linear regression of the data. If the points aren't strongly collinear, there's something wrong with the date. Most violations of the necessary conditions for a correct result produce scattering in the points.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
In Engineering terms, 10^9 in SI or Imperial is still 10^9 and if you prefer I say 5.xxx x 10^9 years with a tolerance of .002 x 10^9 so be it. Then people reading the units of time would know the ratio of .002xxx/5.xxx = a very small difference.
Let me rephrase it:
If someone believes that Firefly documents events that take place in our physical reality, then they would not make good rocket scientists.
that, it might have been born at night, but it certainly wasn't born last night!
Galileo was not actually persecuted for claiming a heliocentric solar system per se- he was put on trial for interpreting biblical scripture (by himself) in order to make his views jibe with the cosmology of the church.
His crime, then, really was in the realm of the church. His science was never really questioned. Play with fire, get burned, i guess.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
Playing the devil's advocate here, you *could* say that if the entire universe were created at once, it would take at least 4 or so years for the first light from other stars to reach us, thus making earth seem to be older than the stars. The night sky would be completely dark but for a few planets, if the alignment was right.
But yeah, it all falls apart under logical examination.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
It's good to read of the fruits on another person's life's work, and I appreciate the effort and good intentions of the intelligent people who make these "When did the universe begin" and "When does life begin" and "Physics geeks say your math is off" arguments.
... when the latest theory is disproved by another scientist's bold assertion, or by revelations that much of what this kind of science asserts as fact is not factual.
It's also disappointingly typical of many scientist, though, to doggedly pursue an answer without a sound, logical question, or in this case, a question based on theories with fundamental flaws.
If you insist on linear thinking and pursue the beginning of everything, you duck the question of what was there before the beginning. If everything started somewhere at some time, logically it must have had a place to start in. Is that what you're telling us? Can you give an accurate address of a home by listing the city but not the state?
We can't make sense of the question's premise so we decide that's a kind of science we can't comprehend but we'll proceed with the question anyway. Worry about the details later
It's not unlike the scientists who once believed the earth was flat. In this case, we seem to believe in a linear universe, and for some reason, we feel a need to attach another troubled concept -- time -- to this belief. And we accept it.
We ain't maximizing the lengths of possible generations becuz the Holy Bible states that this dude begot that dude when he turned this age, and then that dude begot the next dude when he was whatever age, and so on and so forth. Alls you gotta do is add up the cottonpicking dates and you'll arrive at the number 42, which is the number of roads that one must take.