Knowing the real value of such a cure and if they really think there are good chances to find it, I'd say "no" too until I saw some good 10-digit figures in my bank account.
Well, aren't you just the fucking spirit of Christmas?
I appreciate the effort you put into your journal entry, but you missed some really important points. The summary of Intelligent Design that you have is not accurate for your exposition - it should say, "Bias continues to exist in the random mutation component of Evolution."
The method of video taping and sampling DNA only works if the bias continues to exist - or if the bias happened to have existed over a long enough duration for which we have DNA records. Otherwise, it's still not falsifiable.
Also, expecting to find out in 30 years if mutation has bias is kind of like expecting to find out in the next hand if the dealer is cheating. Speciation takes a long, long time to observe on a statistical basis. Remember, you're talking about the statistical nature of speciation. You would need to observe hundreds, or thousands of events of speciation to gain understanding.
From a Creationsist perspective, Intelligent Design is convenient, because they can say that the Intelligent Design happened at any point that they define - and they will always define that point somewhere before DNA records exist. In other words, from a Creationist perspective, Intelligent Design will never be falsifiable.
And from the people who don't believe in Creationism, it's still going to be rough - because those people have a lot of theories about the origin of life on the earth, but they will probably never be able to have confidence about which mechanism in truth happened. Very frustrating for them. At the core, Evolution talks about the origin of species, not the origin of life. Since they don't have much of a leg to stand on, the Evolutionists will always have an irritating, unfalsifiable blind-spot that Intelligent Design ("Intelligent Origin?") will always occupy.
Your attempt to mediate and define the argument will be met with resistance from both sides.
Your argument about the rate of speciation also ignores the possibility that a designer could match exactly the rate of speciation predicted - but merely be causing different species to arise than would otherwise have happened.
Sure. If someone is making objectively verifiable predictions at a higher success rate than guessing, then yes - that's definitely an interesting phenomenon. I would be more interested in the results than in the person's belief as to how they did it, but yes, I would also be interested in how they say they did it. In general, if someone is willing to say how they do something interesting, I am more likely to tentatively trust their results - it opens the possibility for others to experiment with the same means. If others are unable to reproduce, then I start to lose interest rapidly. As the phrase goes - Show me the money.
You can not falsify if God answers prayers - you have no idea if answering your prayers falls into God's "design".
"A search space already defined by a programmer." Wow. Um, consider the size of the search space, and the effectiveness of Genetic algorithms (especially compared to other carefully designed methods - even against a human attempting the same task).
You could say, "all your genetic algorithm did was select a solution 4000 bits long which satisfied your original constraint." To which, I say, "yes, it did it in a day, and you should look again at how big 2^4000 is."
It's kind of like saying, "Life is a bad example, since organisms just organize molecules already created by the universe."
Absolutely! You've done an excellent job of underselling the significance of Moses' predictions too - because he didn't just predict the order of things that were common - he predicted the occurance of things that were incredibly unlikely. So, multiply 10! by something like 10^10. *grin*
Here's the thing, though... There's a difference between a religious text and fact, and I don't buy for a minute the story of Moses and Pharaoh as being an accurate historical account.
By and large, people pick and chose which stories from which religious texts they believe are true - for instance, everything in the Bible, nothing in the Koran. (On what logical basis, I wonder?) I tend to think they're all just amazing fables filled with mostly good ideas about morality... But I'm not too impressed with the scientific record-keeping track-record.
There have been plenty of easily falsifiable (or confirmable) predictions by people that claimed to get their knowledge from God.... Many of these predictions have been proven true.
Yes. Many people have claimed that God gave them the knowledge that they would win the Powerball, and many of these predictions have been proven true. (I know I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, here.)
It's a question of predicting something novel which is either repeatable (which I think we'll agree, religious predictions never are), or which has stark statistical significance. The problem is that the significance of religious predictions is almost always based on subjective and emotional - not mechanical and measurable - results.
If you think there are reliable sources of prophecies, please share.
ID is falsifiable if someone can demonstrate a creature evolving through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings
Can you falsify the assertion that God causes the fall of every sparrow? Of course not - the influence of a divine being is not measurable - it just happens. It could be that the transition from one quantum state to another quantum state of every particle in the entire universe only happens because God is concentrating really hard, and makes it happen... but even if that's true there's no way to construct an experiment which could falsify that explanation.
There's no way you could construct an experiment in which a creature could evolve through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings, because there's no way you could stop a divine being (by definition "intelligent") from intervening. There's no "God Kryptonite." Or "God Lead."
Gradual evolution can be falsified if one can show a creature rapidly evolve.
No, it can't. Individuals express different traits, and they can do it in a way that doesn't contribute to their survival at all. And then there can be a large environmental shift that makes some of those traits beneficial compared to their absence, and you have what appears to be "rapid evolution" when they live and their cousins die.
evolution in action will be caught on tape, so to speak, at some point, and then the question resolved
Two things: fossil record, and genetic algorithms.
If you can demonstrate that random processes and death can create higher order signals
(It doesn't look at evolution, but it gets the first part of your question - higher-order signals from random processes. As for the "death" part, look back at genetic algorithms.)
You missed the point entirely. Newton couldn't explain gravity, but he could describe it. The predictions were falsifiable. Intelligent Design has none of that.
Yes, Newton was probably more dissatisfied with his inability to explain gravity than anybody. But falling back on "the only way species could exist today is because an intelligent designer made it that way" is a gigantic step backwards (like saying "the only way the planets could move the way they do is because an intelligent designer made them that way"), and redefining science such that it seems as hokey as the bullshit is truly something to be concerned about - some kids might fall for it, and move further towards believing science is indistinguishable from magic - occult magic. You know, The Devil.
"For the second year in a row, Microsoft Corp. invited a small number of hackers onto its Redmond, Wash., campus to crack the company's products for all to see."
Well said. But I can't resist taking my cheap shot at this guy...
I think it's more like a potluck. This guy brought a date to a potluck, didn't bring any food to the potluck, ate a bunch of other people's food, complained about how bad the crab cakes and caviar were, and then took a dump in the punch bowl.
It starts out "Yes it's garbage, but it's delivered so much faster!"
Then, "Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work."
And later, "This isn't promising."
Well, which is it? Encouraging, or non-promising? He don't sound like much of a friend of the project. He spends his entire article spewing napalm everywhere, and apparently never actually talked with Jim Wales to give him a chance to respond.
The guy is apparently taking one post, and using this as a sign of victory for the apparent hordes who believe that "it's garbage."
Fine, Andrew Orlowski, you don't like it. We get it. But you're not much of a journalist, either.
P.S. all of your analogies about chefs and food are crap, too. You could easily have taken the time to fix your precious Baby Washington entry. If everyone who cares took a minute to fix a bad article they cared about, guess what? There wouldn't be too many bady articles that anybody cared about.
P.P.S. next time you feel like bashing a huge project supported only by charity and selfless contributions, you might want to reconsider. Yes, the glass is half-empty, but it's also half-full, you dink.
Sounds great. If the developers had no legitimate complaints about process, schedule, or tools, then they should be held personally liable for security flaws in code they write.
But if the developers had legitimate complaints about process, schedule, or tools, then their managers should be held personally liable for causing the developers to have no realistic way to avoid writing security flaws.
And given my background, I'd be focusing on revision control software - maybe BitKeeper, and backup of same.
And then of course use a unit testing framework from day one, and buy some books about coding - ranging from PeopleWare to Death March, from Effective C++ and Effective STL to The Dilbert Principle, from Design Patterns and Refactoring to Best Software I...
Yes, and they've also found that different people impede law enforcement and investigation effoerts because they "have different motivations, hide bodies in different places, use different methods for killing people, and won't admit their guilt", which can "cause trouble for examiners."
If the people involved think it's a real issue that the software fundamentally works differently - instead of it being a problem that the examiners need to understand how different systems work, they're idiots. If the SlashDot readers are making this into an "issue" when it's not, they're idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing the real value of such a cure and if they really think there are good chances to find it, I'd say "no" too until I saw some good 10-digit figures in my bank account.
Well, aren't you just the fucking spirit of Christmas?
As Sartre said - "Hell is other people."
I appreciate the effort you put into your journal entry, but you missed some really important points. The summary of Intelligent Design that you have is not accurate for your exposition - it should say, "Bias continues to exist in the random mutation component of Evolution."
The method of video taping and sampling DNA only works if the bias continues to exist - or if the bias happened to have existed over a long enough duration for which we have DNA records. Otherwise, it's still not falsifiable.
Also, expecting to find out in 30 years if mutation has bias is kind of like expecting to find out in the next hand if the dealer is cheating. Speciation takes a long, long time to observe on a statistical basis. Remember, you're talking about the statistical nature of speciation. You would need to observe hundreds, or thousands of events of speciation to gain understanding.
From a Creationsist perspective , Intelligent Design is convenient, because they can say that the Intelligent Design happened at any point that they define - and they will always define that point somewhere before DNA records exist. In other words, from a Creationist perspective, Intelligent Design will never be falsifiable.
And from the people who don't believe in Creationism, it's still going to be rough - because those people have a lot of theories about the origin of life on the earth, but they will probably never be able to have confidence about which mechanism in truth happened. Very frustrating for them. At the core, Evolution talks about the origin of species, not the origin of life. Since they don't have much of a leg to stand on, the Evolutionists will always have an irritating, unfalsifiable blind-spot that Intelligent Design ("Intelligent Origin?") will always occupy.
Your attempt to mediate and define the argument will be met with resistance from both sides.
Your argument about the rate of speciation also ignores the possibility that a designer could match exactly the rate of speciation predicted - but merely be causing different species to arise than would otherwise have happened.
Sure. If someone is making objectively verifiable predictions at a higher success rate than guessing, then yes - that's definitely an interesting phenomenon. I would be more interested in the results than in the person's belief as to how they did it, but yes, I would also be interested in how they say they did it. In general, if someone is willing to say how they do something interesting, I am more likely to tentatively trust their results - it opens the possibility for others to experiment with the same means. If others are unable to reproduce, then I start to lose interest rapidly. As the phrase goes - Show me the money.
You can not falsify if God answers prayers - you have no idea if answering your prayers falls into God's "design".
"A search space already defined by a programmer." Wow. Um, consider the size of the search space, and the effectiveness of Genetic algorithms (especially compared to other carefully designed methods - even against a human attempting the same task).
You could say, "all your genetic algorithm did was select a solution 4000 bits long which satisfied your original constraint." To which, I say, "yes, it did it in a day, and you should look again at how big 2^4000 is."
It's kind of like saying, "Life is a bad example, since organisms just organize molecules already created by the universe."
Absolutely! You've done an excellent job of underselling the significance of Moses' predictions too - because he didn't just predict the order of things that were common - he predicted the occurance of things that were incredibly unlikely. So, multiply 10! by something like 10^10. *grin*
Here's the thing, though... There's a difference between a religious text and fact, and I don't buy for a minute the story of Moses and Pharaoh as being an accurate historical account.
By and large, people pick and chose which stories from which religious texts they believe are true - for instance, everything in the Bible, nothing in the Koran. (On what logical basis, I wonder?) I tend to think they're all just amazing fables filled with mostly good ideas about morality... But I'm not too impressed with the scientific record-keeping track-record.
There have been plenty of easily falsifiable (or confirmable) predictions by people that claimed to get their knowledge from God. ... Many of these predictions have been proven true.
Yes. Many people have claimed that God gave them the knowledge that they would win the Powerball, and many of these predictions have been proven true. (I know I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, here.)
It's a question of predicting something novel which is either repeatable (which I think we'll agree, religious predictions never are), or which has stark statistical significance. The problem is that the significance of religious predictions is almost always based on subjective and emotional - not mechanical and measurable - results.
If you think there are reliable sources of prophecies, please share.
Where do you see Behe mentioned at all on the Avida project, or specific mention of Behe's claims?
An "Intelligent Designer" could interfere every time. Statistics buy you nothing in the debate.
ID is falsifiable if someone can demonstrate a creature evolving through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings
Can you falsify the assertion that God causes the fall of every sparrow? Of course not - the influence of a divine being is not measurable - it just happens. It could be that the transition from one quantum state to another quantum state of every particle in the entire universe only happens because God is concentrating really hard, and makes it happen... but even if that's true there's no way to construct an experiment which could falsify that explanation.
There's no way you could construct an experiment in which a creature could evolve through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings, because there's no way you could stop a divine being (by definition "intelligent") from intervening. There's no "God Kryptonite." Or "God Lead."
Gradual evolution can be falsified if one can show a creature rapidly evolve.
No, it can't. Individuals express different traits, and they can do it in a way that doesn't contribute to their survival at all. And then there can be a large environmental shift that makes some of those traits beneficial compared to their absence, and you have what appears to be "rapid evolution" when they live and their cousins die.
evolution in action will be caught on tape, so to speak, at some point, and then the question resolved
Two things: fossil record, and genetic algorithms.
If you can demonstrate that random processes and death can create higher order signals
One thing: chaos theory
(It doesn't look at evolution, but it gets the first part of your question - higher-order signals from random processes. As for the "death" part, look back at genetic algorithms.)
Let's try to get them to change their license plate:
Kansas: The Luddite State
Or how about
Kansas: God Made This License Plate Exactly As It Is Today
Hmmm... Shorter is better...
Kansas: God Did It (And He Didn't Use Methods We Can Observe With "Science")
Sorry - I tried to make it short, but I got carried away...
You missed the point entirely. Newton couldn't explain gravity, but he could describe it. The predictions were falsifiable. Intelligent Design has none of that.
Yes, Newton was probably more dissatisfied with his inability to explain gravity than anybody. But falling back on "the only way species could exist today is because an intelligent designer made it that way" is a gigantic step backwards (like saying "the only way the planets could move the way they do is because an intelligent designer made them that way"), and redefining science such that it seems as hokey as the bullshit is truly something to be concerned about - some kids might fall for it, and move further towards believing science is indistinguishable from magic - occult magic. You know, The Devil.
Generating costs estimated at 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour
Okay, so I go to the web page, and it says:
Generating costs estimated at 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour
Seems like a pretty important thing to screw up in the article description.
(Okay - I see - I go into the page, and later it says, 2.5 to 3.5 cents. Got it.)
Kent Brockman: I, for one, welcome our new Greek overlords.
Kent Brockman (listens to earpiece)
Kent Brockman: This just in, the classical Greek civilization fell thousands of years ago. And I, for one, welcome back our Republican overlords.
"For the second year in a row, Microsoft Corp. invited a small number of hackers onto its Redmond, Wash., campus to crack the company's products for all to see."
Admiral Ackbar sez...
IT'S A TRAP!
Okay, so maybe the Jane Fonda and Bill Gates celebrity pages suck.
But try looking up the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season in your desk set encyclopedia.
Well said. But I can't resist taking my cheap shot at this guy...
I think it's more like a potluck. This guy brought a date to a potluck, didn't bring any food to the potluck, ate a bunch of other people's food, complained about how bad the crab cakes and caviar were, and then took a dump in the punch bowl.
It starts out "Yes it's garbage, but it's delivered so much faster!"
Then, "Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work."
And later, "This isn't promising."
Well, which is it? Encouraging, or non-promising? He don't sound like much of a friend of the project. He spends his entire article spewing napalm everywhere, and apparently never actually talked with Jim Wales to give him a chance to respond.
The guy is apparently taking one post, and using this as a sign of victory for the apparent hordes who believe that "it's garbage."
Fine, Andrew Orlowski, you don't like it. We get it. But you're not much of a journalist, either.
P.S. all of your analogies about chefs and food are crap, too. You could easily have taken the time to fix your precious Baby Washington entry. If everyone who cares took a minute to fix a bad article they cared about, guess what? There wouldn't be too many bady articles that anybody cared about.
P.P.S. next time you feel like bashing a huge project supported only by charity and selfless contributions, you might want to reconsider. Yes, the glass is half-empty, but it's also half-full, you dink.
bar-ra-try: the offence of habitually exciting quarrels, or moving or maintaining lawsuits; vexatious persistnace in, or incitement to, litagation.
Sounds great. If the developers had no legitimate complaints about process, schedule, or tools, then they should be held personally liable for security flaws in code they write.
But if the developers had legitimate complaints about process, schedule, or tools, then their managers should be held personally liable for causing the developers to have no realistic way to avoid writing security flaws.
_boneHeadedIdeaCount++;
Thanks for the link on Invisible Shield! I hadn't seen that before.
I recently discovered this, ErgoPod 500, which looks pretty awesome to me.
Along with The Perfect Chair.
Or maybe even, the Stance Angle Chair.
Not having any better idea, I'd probably go for an Alienware Area-51 ALX with NVIDIA SLI.
And given my background, I'd be focusing on revision control software - maybe BitKeeper, and backup of same.
And then of course use a unit testing framework from day one, and buy some books about coding - ranging from PeopleWare to Death March, from Effective C++ and Effective STL to The Dilbert Principle, from Design Patterns and Refactoring to Best Software I...
Oh, and UPS the whole damn thing.
Some (lots) of us who voted for Bush did so because we disliked Kerry, not because we thought Bush was right on everything.
I can't believe you voted for Turd Sandwich. Giant Douche was clearly the better candidate.
(Thank you, South Park.)
Yes, and they've also found that different people impede law enforcement and investigation effoerts because they "have different motivations, hide bodies in different places, use different methods for killing people, and won't admit their guilt", which can "cause trouble for examiners."
If the people involved think it's a real issue that the software fundamentally works differently - instead of it being a problem that the examiners need to understand how different systems work, they're idiots. If the SlashDot readers are making this into an "issue" when it's not, they're idiots.
Who the idiots really are remains to be seen.
Look, if you guys are going to make fun of anything make fun of this:
Public health officials said the infected person visited the following areas:
Microsoft -- Cafeteria, One Microsoft Way, between Building #40 and #41, Redmond, WA on August 17, 18 and 19, 11:30 am to 4:00 pm.
This guy takes a four and a half hour lunch break!
Now I want to work at Microsoft!
I for one welcome our new load-bearing algae overlords.