I agree whole heartedly, and I'd take exception to any creationist or otherwise that accuses an entire field of study to be entirely "falsefied".
Your post is much more vigorous than mine, and explains the shortcomings of dating. I appreciate your time in working it up.
But I hope that no one misses the main point. The tendancy people have of drawing lines and categoricaly throughing garbage across that line is idiotic. Specifically for a person of science (from a person of science) to fly the flag of science as a banner of perfection in defence of their claims is irreprehensible, as I believe the poster I responded to was doing.
True science is much more humble and unpretensious, eager to discover truth through the metrics of usefulness(1). At least it should be.
(1) Here usefull is not a judgement of a theories applicability to humanity, but an ecapsulation of the goals of the scientific method to find reproducable results. i.e. if the results are reproducible, then the theory is "useful".
One of the greatest threats to science today is encompassed the phrase "they are not theories." All to often some very insecure scientists will become overly convinced of their own opinions to the point of taking any critisizm as an attempted discrediting. They often retort with logic that sounds like a the school bully describing why he's the boss of everything... "If you do not like [it] and have some reason for challenging [me], go out, collect the necessary [friends] and [meet me by the bike rack after school]."
Limitations should not be swept under the carpet, and have been acknowledged freely by every professor I've had. People shouldn't feel bullied by Science but invited to participate. For instance,
Carbon-14 dating (among others) has limitations. Carbon dating of artifacts from Roman times shows some fluxuations of almost 100 years of items with known and dated origions. Given that they were for the most part less than 2000 years old, thats almost 5% difference in relatively fresh samples.
I'm sure to an archeologist like yourself, this is old news, and not very noteworthy. It does not discredit carbon dating, but it does show its limitations. Scientists admit freely the limitations and will usually put a range of dates on an artifact, and base the judgements on factors including but not limited to carbon-dating and other methods.
But as you also know, the amount of carbon-14 that is generated in the atmosphere, is not constant over time and location. It is unlikely that two objects from the same year would come up with the same date.
If that isn't bad enough, all dating practices based on radioactive decay are subject to statistical error as the specific decay of these atoms are random in nature.
Raising the "Anti-Creationist" flag and rallying the troups turns science into a political spectical, and hurts science more than helps it.
If that was as bad as it got, it wouldn't be *that* bad. Even so, you are talking out of the wrong end,
Or is this the show that had the gadgets that made people super human but only worked for three days or something. Some how these gadgets managed to cause the fall of a whole society.
Nooo, as Vanessa Angel reasoned in the episode (and she is never wrong) the gadgets staved off the attackers for a brief period, but as the society developed an immunity to the gadgets they no longer protected them. Of course, you missed the obvious caloric increases, and sonic booms, lack of bone mass to hold up their muscle streangth for a plot point that is actually explained.
Isn't this the show that had a planet locked in it's orientation to the sun...What kind of weather would a planet that didn't spin have?
Probably the one that was mentioned on the episode. Are you just grepping through slashdot comments or did you watch any of these episodes your talking about. Btw, planets with permenant day/night sides were also treated by Star Trek TNG, Bab5, Voyager and many others.
The sane thing was to setup the base off world. Shut down the Earth gates except for scheduled checkin. That would have been thought out. Now you say you lose all those attacks on Earth. Yes but you gain a new world to investigate in depth. Something that could have run through out the series.
1) The thing was encased in a mountain, with protocols developed for every contingency (even time travel).
2) An off world base? Come on, be reasonable. We don't even have a base on the moon.
3) What assurity would there be against attacks against earth? The enemy learned in season 2 how to burn through the Iris. Keeping it closed or shut down wasn't going to do anything. That was explained often in the series.
I'd like to hear what you think is a good science fiction show, and why. Just as a bet that some people only know how to critisize and don't know how to enjoy.
1) The Carter-Mortout thing was alright when was just fine as something you could sense like it was in the first few seasons. It didn't need to get so adolescent. The Carter-Jack and Vanessa Angel thing, I think, was a product of the shows producer (you know who that is). Anyway, your very right, the make-shift romances (except for the Daniel-Shoree one where she was off stage the whole time) was dumb.
2) I don't mind technobabble as long as it makes sence. I remember watching many episodes where people with a much better grasp of technology (like the planet killer woman) would explain what was going on in "Golden Book" simplicity. I thought it was funny and good social commentary how Carter always needed to interpret the simple language into techno-babble. Then the camera would pan to Jack wearing an expression that said sarcasticaly "Oh yes, now I understand."
3) I'll add that not using Shoree during his ascention was missing out (actually I saw the episode after it so maybe I missed it). Daniel quit the show, I hear, because he didn't like where it was going. Daniel was cool though, and was with General Hammond for being just as good if not better than the Movie actor.
There's always been good continuity, like you said. A good example was when Carter's ex-symbiot saving her from the white worms and giving a clue to the rest of the crew how to stop them. But it was down right soap opera story-arc for the last 3/4 of the fifth season.
I've been a SG-1 fan from the beginning. The cultures are thought out, the government reactions to the cultures have a certain "truth is stranger than fiction" ring to them. The Air Force was on the one hand treating the gate like a hole to be plugged up, and on the other hand wanting to exploit what it could find on the other side.
But my favorite aspects are...
1) No captains chairs. No bridges, no ship to ship bantering. Don't get me wrong, I liked Star Trek the first for this, and TNG did it right but SG-1's lack of it was refreshing.
2) Earth is the star in every episode, terribly outnumbered, flawed, and childishly ideolistic, and the series is ready to show that.
3) Episodal. I think anyone who wants "story arc" really wants to watch a soap opera. Really they do, except they don't get the geeky "holier than thou" satisfaction of telling people they like daytime television.
Now, whats wrong with this picture? I've recently watched some taped season 5 episodes, and guess what. Here's what must have happened, a bunch of out of work writers that filled such shows as Babylon 5 and Star Trek DS9 with charectar drama (read paralysis by analysis), story arc (read soap opera), and captains chairs with lots of ship to ship banter have rewritten the SG-1 universe. It has to be.
One episode the major science words were "Miosis" and "Mitosis" used in a way that made me think they never got past JR High biology. Another had the Gould in a captains chair saying "I'm the great God Osiris, I have nothing to fear". Yet another had a symbiot telling Capt Carter that his former host loved her, I mean really loved her, like really really loved her.
So I say, "Oh well". What ever these writers are the keep getting jobs can do what they want with SG-1, its basically ruined now. At least we had such episodes in season 5 as "the Tomb" and four other seasons of fun episodes.
General Hammond looks bored now, nothing for him to do now that SG-1 has taken off on their own (and everyone seems to have forgotten all the other SG teams up to like 24.) Retire General Hammond, and I'll share some beach sand with you remembering the days of good science fiction that took research and thought to write.
"Neutral comparison" of the world's religions is a comparison which disregards all one sided information given to you by your parents, school, church etc., since that would give your religion an unfair advantage.
Heh, a re-read of that origional post also produces the problem with that definition. One of the points you missed discussing.
If for example you mean "disregard parental doctrines, and work it out on their own" then that is obviously going to be scewed and not regard all those people that did neutraly compare and came up with the same conclusions as their parents.
The examples that followed supported it. Everything from cleaning up the house, to brushing teeth have real world value that is verified by real-world existence. Sure it makes people feel better to have socks off the floor. But there are measurable hygenal benefits doing these things. It doesn't take a parents conditioning to discover the benefits on ones own.
"I feel better" is probably the root of the value, but there are identifiable and social and health benefits also. With such easy and ready evidence at our disposal, its easy to see when our parents were right. This evidence brings religion and hygene far above the nature of "fairy tales".
Conditioning has its place, but at the end of the day, by itself, it simply does not hold enough weight to carry the evidence of the majority of people who continue with the religion of there parents. And trying to justify the removal of such instances from consideration when evaluating the tendencies of people searching for religion with such an argument is skewing the results. As I had mentioned before, it in essence says "If they don't believe their parents religion, they won't wind up believing their parents religion."
And worse, using it as a measure of critical thinking is a flawed, elitist, "Anyone who thinks like me is smart" ego-centric way of doing things.
I generally don't respond to nit-picking. You addressed none of the major points in my previous post, and instead used small points to reverberate the same tired ideology. But they are well made points.
...which is a lot smaller than you might think.
You've obviously never had one. But lets look at your examples...
1) You like the food that your mom cooked for you
I also like Thai, Chinese, Brazilian and other foods my mother didn't cook for me. After living away from my mother for this long, I realize there are things she cooks pretty well, some things my wife does much better, and some things that we go to a restraunt for. So, not to put to fine a point on it, I like some my mothers cooking becuase since I've entered into the real world I've realized she cooks some things really well. My real world experience has validated the value of my mothers cooking in some respects, and not in others.
you brush your teethes every day because your mom told you so
Again, don't you think that the real world showed me the value of brushing teeth? Especially after a few cavities and a near brush with gum disease? I didn't start brushing every day until a few years after I left the house. (Am I just the worst example of your points or what?) The Dentist and sore gums persuaded me to brush my teeth. Without your mother, don't you think you'd be brushing your teeth still also?
you do the daily chores because your mom conditioned you to do so.
Your still coming up with bad examples. I do chores becuase I want a clean house, and trying to clean a house that's been untended for a month is a real bother. Nope, again real world experience validated and re-enforced that parental teaching otherwise I wouldn't be doing it these days.
It says a lot about the critical thinking skills of a vast majority of people, since most religions are mutually exclusive, and therefore most people, if they accept their parents' doctrines, are by necessity wrong.
I don't subscribe to techno-elitism or even intellectual-elitism where we think that we are smarter than the rest of the world. I think people who do are the first ones fooling themselves.
The mutually exclusiveness is a plot point, and probably not much of a concern for practicle people. The critical thinking, validation of real world experience has nothing to do with "this is the one true church." What matters to people is that the religion brings a healthier happier lifestyle, improves the world around them, and genuinely brings them closer to God.
Most people believe because of their childhood indoctrination.
I've always been curious about such a belief, becuase it lays little stock on one of the driving forces of the universe --the rebelious nature of teenagers.
I don't think that parents choose the religion for their children. In fact, the majority of people find no reason to disbelieve their parents doctrines. I think that says a lot about the viability of morals and religion.
Tradition has been called "the democracy of the dead". Its a mechanism where parents vote on philosophies by trying to give the best of what they know and have to their children. Children have veto power, the right to drop or accept these petitions wholesale or in part. They then pass on these as votes to their children.
However, to say that "Virtually everybody who attempts to neutrally compare the world's religions and pick the best one ends up a non-believer" is pretty meaningless unless you can fairly qualify what it means to "neutrally compare".
If for example you mean "disregard parental doctrines, and work it out on their own" then that is obviously going to be scewed and not regard all those people that did neutraly compare and came up with the same conclusions as their parents.
Funny, you could say the same about Government, and maybe you do. In fact, you seem to have much more of a bone to pick with authority in general more than "Religion". You seem to dislike law enforcement, and have misunderstood morals as part of that.
Because your right about a few things, Russia is a bad example of the evils of religion as it was opposed to religion, yet had its share of commiting "evil". To equate the two means that you dislike what they have in common, authority over the masses.
And your right about another thing, morals don't need to be contrived at all, or authoritatively enforced. They are based on their ability to increase the general quality of life or "moral" of a society. So if a moral is good, living it makes you and the people around you lead better, more free and fulfilling lives. Not living a good moral leads to an unfulfilling life, whether there is any authoritative enforcement or not.
But whether a moral is good or not is often disputed, and even more often are the specific purposes of a moral misuderstood, many come to the conclusion that they are forced and/or contrived. This is at least not the meaning or intention of a moral.
So lets work out one part of the debate, one doesn't need God to understand the need for morals. As my Grandfather said, "There is no God, that is why we need religion," or by simular connotation we need morals. Without some all powerful being that can come in and clean up our messes, we need a set of guidelines that will keep us from causing them.
With such an ability to hurt the people around us these days, we need to know good guidelines that keep us from that.
These things I'm sure you already understand.
But since you brought it up anyway, I don't want to leave without setting where I stand on one particular issue.
he doesn't exist.
Many consider the protestant reformation as the final gasp, where western society looked for God and found he wasn't there, and didn't answer. Many popularist and humanist movements sprang up from that time. You may feel the weight of their conviction anchor you to that belief. While they may not have seen God and have every other reason to disbelieve, their conclusion was wrong. I just thought I'd let you know that.
But the validation of morals is, as you might say, agnostic to God.
Slashdot is a great example of the piece of human nature that makes us want to be in send mode more than receive.
True, and in interesting point. I think that encapsulates one side of the token of much of what I was saying. The downside is people like you describe in your post although we might not agree on whether that describes me or not.
The slashdotter's responce you refer to was not as interesting as Taco's who said "Basically he doesn't understand what GNOME and KDE are, and since we're all holier-than-thou know-it-alls around here, we might as well laugh at Microsoft's expense;)".
Note the tone of disdain towards the community, although this doesn't go as far as to equate KDE and Gnome as OS's as I said before. Few have the perspective of the OS mob that Taco does, and comparing and contrasting his views with Rusty's always makes for interesting discussion.
But back to the point, in essence I'm not carping on the Slashdot team. Its unfortunate that you take it that way. In fact, I'm agreeing with their sentiment. Most of Open Source is a wonderful thing, used as an example of cooperative economies and the future of progressive movements by David Brin and others.
But without self-policing becomes a socially devalued rant by people who want to be Open Source Managers but not Open Source Programmers.
So as my parting shot, I invite you to look beyond the fashionably defined lines of Open Source combat to see a very interesting evolutionary process, and the roles people have and will play in them.
Re:Wow.. this was one way to put it
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Yeah, I've noticed Taco going that direction lately also. The most recent case being when in synical gesturing equated KDE and Gnome to Windows as examples of Browsers integrated into Operating systems. There was a time when he was smarter than to call KDE and Gnome an operating system.
I think it started a long time ago when he wanted to get his Scanner working with Linux (for scanning Anime Cells I think.) After some attempts to get it to work, he found out that his only hope was being thwarted by a bunch of well meaning but rude OSS extortion emailers who were badgering the scanner company.
Since then, he's taken an increasingly squinty-eyed view at the OSS audience as those same few have tried to thwart, maim and destroy his creation. A creation that ironicaly was made for "open" audience participation. Their efforts of late have gotten more desperate, paranoid, and rampant.
Add to that RMS requiring Taco to call this site GNU/Slashdot and where can you turn? Back to the comfortable world where all this mess was closed and swept under the carpet. Customers didn't interact with the products becuase producers didn't care to listen anyway. No shouting, complaining, or moaning to be heard. What a peaceful world that must seem these days to this abused open-source hero.
So Codeweavers moves to a liscence that definately effects a competing(?) company in an adverse way, with more squabbling and name calling. Its understandable to see why Taco would identify more with the people being screwed with than the people wanting fairness.
Such is the curiously misapplied "free as in ${yada}" debate that really makes for fodder for corporate comic strips, confusion/derision for Joe Sixpack, and fuel for end-users who think Open Source means the best contribution they can make is as a manager and not a programmer.
The professor estimated Gwen's falling velocity, applied Newton's Second Law of Motion and calculated the G-forces exerted when she went from 95 mph to a standstill in an instant. "It's not surprising her neck broke," Kakalios says.
Kakalios made Gwen's death an exam problem during the course's first semester last fall.
That has got to be one of the most uniquely staged sentences I have ever read. I can stare at it for hours. Somewhere in there is a pun waiting to happen I think. Maybe more.
Yeah, being the governor at a time when Bush gets elected and allows the energy companies to manipulate the supplies and drive up prices. You think it is just a coincidence that energy prices spiked immediately after Bush is elected?
Q. President Bush didn't really do anything until his approval rating in California had fallen to 26 percent. Isn't that true?
A. He appointed Brownell and Pat Wood. They helped save our behinds. He may have taken a while to do it, and I think the world of President Clinton but the Clinton administration didn't give us any help. They were just trying to get us to raise rates 300-400 percent and I wasn't going to do that.
He also tries to play innocent...
Q. Some experts say you shouldn't have signed those contracts, that you should have known that the prices were coming down.
A. They don't know squat.
This thing was a scam, a total scam to rip off Californians and there has been a massive shift of wealth from San Diego and the rest of this state to Texas and North Carolina.
No question, we passed a law that didn't make sense. We didn't know what we were doing back in 1996. The energy companies were smart, they took advantage of it. They may have acted legally, they may have acted illegally, but by the time I got into it the two giants that are supposed to run this system, Edison and PG&E, were on their knees.
You hired me to get a job done. I got the job done and I'm plenty tired of people sitting on the fence saying 'Oh, we should done this and should have done that.' We got 11 plants online. And they said the energy problem was going to bring me down. Where is Enron today?
Edison and PG&E were on their knees when the state demanded they charge a fraction of what it cost them to aquire that power. Also note that out of the power suppliers, the Gray Davis state run plants were among *the* most expensive.
Then to make sure that energy companies got money after he left office, he negotiated long term contracts at the *peak* of the crisis.
Lets not forget his $93,000 price tag from Enron either.
He got 11 plants online alright. One of them was a enviromentaly clean plant that used the natural gas produced from a southern California trash dump. The builders got loans, and lots of promises from Gray Davis.
None of those promises paid off. Their plant sat idle for almost a year, and no one would buy Electricity from them. Not even when he promised to. Now they have a three month contract to fund a multi million dollar facility.
My wife and I have Ti wedding rings/ Mithril?
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Her origional white gold setting for the diamond kept bending so we're going to get a titanium tiffany (pronged) setting. It seemed fitting for an eternal bond to have a nearly indestructible ring (it even has a higher melting point than Platinum).
Also, after we got married we read the Lord of the Rings trillogy and noticed the use of "mithril" which was like silver but a very light and strong metal. I wondered if JRRT was speaking of Ti but I never looked into it.
Phil Reeds short reply - attacking your gross misrepresentations about benificial mutations having never been observed - aside;
Not so fast, Phil Reed has shown that he cannot find a scientific arguement with both hands and a flashlight. Just in case this is still in doubt lets look at how he defines evolution.
...evolution is strictly defined as changes in alleles (genes) in a population over time.
This is a strict definition? Lets compare it to the definition from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments
Notice that in his religious zeal he completely bypasses the process criteria and effect, i.e. the "unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process", in order to conclude via non-sequiter that things change over time... ***whala*** evolution.
Now, beyond that I can only say that I won't be drug down into a creation vs evolution debate. I'll be quick to point out evolutionary zealots who do not understand the science they are advocating but there is no use in it for me to go further.
However, I'm afraid you suffer from the same, so I'll offer a few corrections...
Ok, he has calculated that the odds for a fully functional cell forming is about 10^440
That was an assertion that anonymous coward proposed, and not Llewelyn who wrote the post that Razorguy produced arguements that were a gross disservice to science. And I was exposing RazorGuy's disservice more than defending anyone.
Llewelyn was talking about the unlikelyhood of random production of the basic building blocks of life, that "first success", which would not have the benefit of the processes of mutation and evolution that are built into the genetic code. Although he did not produce a number, it does fit along the lines of abiogenisis and based on shear randomness would be astronomicaly improbable.
Your ignoring that basic fact of his arguement makes me suspicious that your looking for straw-men more than the truth. The next sentence provides more evidence.
As to creationism - please don't try to advocate it; for the Fundamentalist Christian Young Earth Creationism to work, ALL of science has to be mangled into utter unintelligibility. Cosmology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, paleontology, archeology, meteorology, and all their (very useful) subfields - must be dismissed as garbage in order to force the world-veiw that YE Creationism demands.
You start out by advocating the dismissal outright of "creationism", but back it up with vague hand waving at a selective strawman representation in "Young Earth Creationism".
But wait there is more...
Not only that, but all the problems that you present for abiogenesis plague your "Creator" - did it simply arise by chance? What are the odds there?
Where did I reference "my creator" in the post you are refering to? Either you have your own divining power or you just conjered it up as part of a strawman. Lets say my creator is "Natural Selection" from the unlikely event of a decendent allel many millions of years ago. Whats the odds that you shake a box and "Natural Selection" comes out? There are many governing laws in this universe, how many times do you shake a box and come up with gravitation, "PV=NRT". Sure you could argue that for the box to exist you need those things already, and... then you've answered your own question.
Plenty of beneficial mutations have been observed.
Peace my paranoid friend, no one is arguing that there have been no beneficial changes to genetic code. You can save your energy on that strawman.
However, evidence shows that there are rules guiding those changes as brought about by jumping gene, gene survival and other theories, and by every-day live occurances like the existance of heterogeneous-sexes and their reproduction. Changes happen becuase it is built into the genetic code for them to happen. Rarely if at all (and never observed) have random mutations produced outside of these procedures been beneficial.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is another "Oh no, lets lose them in that astroid belt over there" scene in Star Wars I can't be held responsible for my actions...
Heh, good point.
I agree whole heartedly, and I'd take exception to any creationist or otherwise that accuses an entire field of study to be entirely "falsefied".
Your post is much more vigorous than mine, and explains the shortcomings of dating. I appreciate your time in working it up.
But I hope that no one misses the main point. The tendancy people have of drawing lines and categoricaly throughing garbage across that line is idiotic. Specifically for a person of science (from a person of science) to fly the flag of science as a banner of perfection in defence of their claims is irreprehensible, as I believe the poster I responded to was doing.
True science is much more humble and unpretensious, eager to discover truth through the metrics of usefulness(1). At least it should be.
(1) Here usefull is not a judgement of a theories applicability to humanity, but an ecapsulation of the goals of the scientific method to find reproducable results. i.e. if the results are reproducible, then the theory is "useful".
One of the greatest threats to science today is encompassed the phrase "they are not theories." All to often some very insecure scientists will become overly convinced of their own opinions to the point of taking any critisizm as an attempted discrediting. They often retort with logic that sounds like a the school bully describing why he's the boss of everything... "If you do not like [it] and have some reason for challenging [me], go out, collect the necessary [friends] and [meet me by the bike rack after school]."
Limitations should not be swept under the carpet, and have been acknowledged freely by every professor I've had. People shouldn't feel bullied by Science but invited to participate. For instance,
Carbon-14 dating (among others) has limitations. Carbon dating of artifacts from Roman times shows some fluxuations of almost 100 years of items with known and dated origions. Given that they were for the most part less than 2000 years old, thats almost 5% difference in relatively fresh samples.
I'm sure to an archeologist like yourself, this is old news, and not very noteworthy. It does not discredit carbon dating, but it does show its limitations. Scientists admit freely the limitations and will usually put a range of dates on an artifact, and base the judgements on factors including but not limited to carbon-dating and other methods.
But as you also know, the amount of carbon-14 that is generated in the atmosphere, is not constant over time and location. It is unlikely that two objects from the same year would come up with the same date.
If that isn't bad enough, all dating practices based on radioactive decay are subject to statistical error as the specific decay of these atoms are random in nature.
Raising the "Anti-Creationist" flag and rallying the troups turns science into a political spectical, and hurts science more than helps it.
From "The Gnomes of Zurich" on Muh!
"...The gnomes of Zurich
Make a lot of money
...The gnomes of Zurich
Make a lot of Gold..."
If that was as bad as it got, it wouldn't be *that* bad. Even so, you are talking out of the wrong end,
Or is this the show that had the gadgets that made people super human but only worked for three days or something. Some how these gadgets managed to cause the fall of a whole society.
Nooo, as Vanessa Angel reasoned in the episode (and she is never wrong) the gadgets staved off the attackers for a brief period, but as the society developed an immunity to the gadgets they no longer protected them. Of course, you missed the obvious caloric increases, and sonic booms, lack of bone mass to hold up their muscle streangth for a plot point that is actually explained.
Isn't this the show that had a planet locked in it's orientation to the sun...What kind of weather would a planet that didn't spin have?
Probably the one that was mentioned on the episode. Are you just grepping through slashdot comments or did you watch any of these episodes your talking about. Btw, planets with permenant day/night sides were also treated by Star Trek TNG, Bab5, Voyager and many others.
The sane thing was to setup the base off world. Shut down the Earth gates except for scheduled checkin. That would have been thought out. Now you say you lose all those attacks on Earth. Yes but you gain a new world to investigate in depth. Something that could have run through out the series.
1) The thing was encased in a mountain, with protocols developed for every contingency (even time travel).
2) An off world base? Come on, be reasonable. We don't even have a base on the moon.
3) What assurity would there be against attacks against earth? The enemy learned in season 2 how to burn through the Iris. Keeping it closed or shut down wasn't going to do anything. That was explained often in the series.
I'd like to hear what you think is a good science fiction show, and why. Just as a bet that some people only know how to critisize and don't know how to enjoy.
Yep, I'll buy that. Very good points.
1) The Carter-Mortout thing was alright when was just fine as something you could sense like it was in the first few seasons. It didn't need to get so adolescent. The Carter-Jack and Vanessa Angel thing, I think, was a product of the shows producer (you know who that is). Anyway, your very right, the make-shift romances (except for the Daniel-Shoree one where she was off stage the whole time) was dumb.
2) I don't mind technobabble as long as it makes sence. I remember watching many episodes where people with a much better grasp of technology (like the planet killer woman) would explain what was going on in "Golden Book" simplicity. I thought it was funny and good social commentary how Carter always needed to interpret the simple language into techno-babble. Then the camera would pan to Jack wearing an expression that said sarcasticaly "Oh yes, now I understand."
3) I'll add that not using Shoree during his ascention was missing out (actually I saw the episode after it so maybe I missed it). Daniel quit the show, I hear, because he didn't like where it was going. Daniel was cool though, and was with General Hammond for being just as good if not better than the Movie actor.
There's always been good continuity, like you said. A good example was when Carter's ex-symbiot saving her from the white worms and giving a clue to the rest of the crew how to stop them. But it was down right soap opera story-arc for the last 3/4 of the fifth season.
To put a real serious rant here....
I've been a SG-1 fan from the beginning. The cultures are thought out, the government reactions to the cultures have a certain "truth is stranger than fiction" ring to them. The Air Force was on the one hand treating the gate like a hole to be plugged up, and on the other hand wanting to exploit what it could find on the other side.
But my favorite aspects are...
1) No captains chairs. No bridges, no ship to ship bantering. Don't get me wrong, I liked Star Trek the first for this, and TNG did it right but SG-1's lack of it was refreshing.
2) Earth is the star in every episode, terribly outnumbered, flawed, and childishly ideolistic, and the series is ready to show that.
3) Episodal. I think anyone who wants "story arc" really wants to watch a soap opera. Really they do, except they don't get the geeky "holier than thou" satisfaction of telling people they like daytime television.
Now, whats wrong with this picture? I've recently watched some taped season 5 episodes, and guess what. Here's what must have happened, a bunch of out of work writers that filled such shows as Babylon 5 and Star Trek DS9 with charectar drama (read paralysis by analysis), story arc (read soap opera), and captains chairs with lots of ship to ship banter have rewritten the SG-1 universe. It has to be.
One episode the major science words were "Miosis" and "Mitosis" used in a way that made me think they never got past JR High biology. Another had the Gould in a captains chair saying "I'm the great God Osiris, I have nothing to fear". Yet another had a symbiot telling Capt Carter that his former host loved her, I mean really loved her, like really really loved her.
So I say, "Oh well". What ever these writers are the keep getting jobs can do what they want with SG-1, its basically ruined now. At least we had such episodes in season 5 as "the Tomb" and four other seasons of fun episodes.
General Hammond looks bored now, nothing for him to do now that SG-1 has taken off on their own (and everyone seems to have forgotten all the other SG teams up to like 24.) Retire General Hammond, and I'll share some beach sand with you remembering the days of good science fiction that took research and thought to write.
Johnny Lingo...
So he's not crazy after all, just vain.
Heh, a re-read of that origional post also produces the problem with that definition. One of the points you missed discussing.
The examples that followed supported it. Everything from cleaning up the house, to brushing teeth have real world value that is verified by real-world existence. Sure it makes people feel better to have socks off the floor. But there are measurable hygenal benefits doing these things. It doesn't take a parents conditioning to discover the benefits on ones own.
"I feel better" is probably the root of the value, but there are identifiable and social and health benefits also. With such easy and ready evidence at our disposal, its easy to see when our parents were right. This evidence brings religion and hygene far above the nature of "fairy tales".
Conditioning has its place, but at the end of the day, by itself, it simply does not hold enough weight to carry the evidence of the majority of people who continue with the religion of there parents. And trying to justify the removal of such instances from consideration when evaluating the tendencies of people searching for religion with such an argument is skewing the results. As I had mentioned before, it in essence says "If they don't believe their parents religion, they won't wind up believing their parents religion."
And worse, using it as a measure of critical thinking is a flawed, elitist, "Anyone who thinks like me is smart" ego-centric way of doing things.
I generally don't respond to nit-picking. You addressed none of the major points in my previous post, and instead used small points to reverberate the same tired ideology. But they are well made points.
...which is a lot smaller than you might think.
You've obviously never had one. But lets look at your examples...
1) You like the food that your mom cooked for you
I also like Thai, Chinese, Brazilian and other foods my mother didn't cook for me. After living away from my mother for this long, I realize there are things she cooks pretty well, some things my wife does much better, and some things that we go to a restraunt for. So, not to put to fine a point on it, I like some my mothers cooking becuase since I've entered into the real world I've realized she cooks some things really well. My real world experience has validated the value of my mothers cooking in some respects, and not in others.
you brush your teethes every day because your mom told you so
Again, don't you think that the real world showed me the value of brushing teeth? Especially after a few cavities and a near brush with gum disease? I didn't start brushing every day until a few years after I left the house. (Am I just the worst example of your points or what?) The Dentist and sore gums persuaded me to brush my teeth. Without your mother, don't you think you'd be brushing your teeth still also?
you do the daily chores because your mom conditioned you to do so.
Your still coming up with bad examples. I do chores becuase I want a clean house, and trying to clean a house that's been untended for a month is a real bother. Nope, again real world experience validated and re-enforced that parental teaching otherwise I wouldn't be doing it these days.
It says a lot about the critical thinking skills of a vast majority of people, since most religions are mutually exclusive, and therefore most people, if they accept their parents' doctrines, are by necessity wrong.
I don't subscribe to techno-elitism or even intellectual-elitism where we think that we are smarter than the rest of the world. I think people who do are the first ones fooling themselves.
The mutually exclusiveness is a plot point, and probably not much of a concern for practicle people. The critical thinking, validation of real world experience has nothing to do with "this is the one true church." What matters to people is that the religion brings a healthier happier lifestyle, improves the world around them, and genuinely brings them closer to God.
Most people believe because of their childhood indoctrination.
I've always been curious about such a belief, becuase it lays little stock on one of the driving forces of the universe --the rebelious nature of teenagers.
I don't think that parents choose the religion for their children. In fact, the majority of people find no reason to disbelieve their parents doctrines. I think that says a lot about the viability of morals and religion.
Tradition has been called "the democracy of the dead". Its a mechanism where parents vote on philosophies by trying to give the best of what they know and have to their children. Children have veto power, the right to drop or accept these petitions wholesale or in part. They then pass on these as votes to their children.
However, to say that "Virtually everybody who attempts to neutrally compare the world's religions and pick the best one ends up a non-believer" is pretty meaningless unless you can fairly qualify what it means to "neutrally compare".
If for example you mean "disregard parental doctrines, and work it out on their own" then that is obviously going to be scewed and not regard all those people that did neutraly compare and came up with the same conclusions as their parents.
It also gives too much weight to parental power.
Funny, you could say the same about Government, and maybe you do. In fact, you seem to have much more of a bone to pick with authority in general more than "Religion". You seem to dislike law enforcement, and have misunderstood morals as part of that.
Because your right about a few things, Russia is a bad example of the evils of religion as it was opposed to religion, yet had its share of commiting "evil". To equate the two means that you dislike what they have in common, authority over the masses.
And your right about another thing, morals don't need to be contrived at all, or authoritatively enforced. They are based on their ability to increase the general quality of life or "moral" of a society. So if a moral is good, living it makes you and the people around you lead better, more free and fulfilling lives. Not living a good moral leads to an unfulfilling life, whether there is any authoritative enforcement or not.
But whether a moral is good or not is often disputed, and even more often are the specific purposes of a moral misuderstood, many come to the conclusion that they are forced and/or contrived. This is at least not the meaning or intention of a moral.
So lets work out one part of the debate, one doesn't need God to understand the need for morals. As my Grandfather said, "There is no God, that is why we need religion," or by simular connotation we need morals. Without some all powerful being that can come in and clean up our messes, we need a set of guidelines that will keep us from causing them.
With such an ability to hurt the people around us these days, we need to know good guidelines that keep us from that.
These things I'm sure you already understand.
But since you brought it up anyway, I don't want to leave without setting where I stand on one particular issue.
he doesn't exist.
Many consider the protestant reformation as the final gasp, where western society looked for God and found he wasn't there, and didn't answer. Many popularist and humanist movements sprang up from that time. You may feel the weight of their conviction anchor you to that belief. While they may not have seen God and have every other reason to disbelieve, their conclusion was wrong. I just thought I'd let you know that.
But the validation of morals is, as you might say, agnostic to God.
My wifes favorite are the Guy Noir episodes. I like the music, I remember an all electric guitar version of Bethoven's Fuge in G.
But hey, what can you say about a place where all the children are above average...
Since Duke of URL mentioned it in his Slashback, I just wanted to pause and note.
Slashdot is a great example of the piece of human nature that makes us want to be in send mode more than receive.
;)".
True, and in interesting point. I think that encapsulates one side of the token of much of what I was saying. The downside is people like you describe in your post although we might not agree on whether that describes me or not.
The slashdotter's responce you refer to was not as interesting as Taco's who said "Basically he doesn't understand what GNOME and KDE are, and since we're all holier-than-thou know-it-alls around here, we might as well laugh at Microsoft's expense
Note the tone of disdain towards the community, although this doesn't go as far as to equate KDE and Gnome as OS's as I said before. Few have the perspective of the OS mob that Taco does, and comparing and contrasting his views with Rusty's always makes for interesting discussion.
But back to the point, in essence I'm not carping on the Slashdot team. Its unfortunate that you take it that way. In fact, I'm agreeing with their sentiment. Most of Open Source is a wonderful thing, used as an example of cooperative economies and the future of progressive movements by David Brin and others.
But without self-policing becomes a socially devalued rant by people who want to be Open Source Managers but not Open Source Programmers.
So as my parting shot, I invite you to look beyond the fashionably defined lines of Open Source combat to see a very interesting evolutionary process, and the roles people have and will play in them.
Yeah, I've noticed Taco going that direction lately also. The most recent case being when in synical gesturing equated KDE and Gnome to Windows as examples of Browsers integrated into Operating systems. There was a time when he was smarter than to call KDE and Gnome an operating system.
I think it started a long time ago when he wanted to get his Scanner working with Linux (for scanning Anime Cells I think.) After some attempts to get it to work, he found out that his only hope was being thwarted by a bunch of well meaning but rude OSS extortion emailers who were badgering the scanner company.
Since then, he's taken an increasingly squinty-eyed view at the OSS audience as those same few have tried to thwart, maim and destroy his creation. A creation that ironicaly was made for "open" audience participation. Their efforts of late have gotten more desperate, paranoid, and rampant.
Add to that RMS requiring Taco to call this site GNU/Slashdot and where can you turn? Back to the comfortable world where all this mess was closed and swept under the carpet. Customers didn't interact with the products becuase producers didn't care to listen anyway. No shouting, complaining, or moaning to be heard. What a peaceful world that must seem these days to this abused open-source hero.
So Codeweavers moves to a liscence that definately effects a competing(?) company in an adverse way, with more squabbling and name calling. Its understandable to see why Taco would identify more with the people being screwed with than the people wanting fairness.
Such is the curiously misapplied "free as in ${yada}" debate that really makes for fodder for corporate comic strips, confusion/derision for Joe Sixpack, and fuel for end-users who think Open Source means the best contribution they can make is as a manager and not a programmer.
The professor estimated Gwen's falling velocity, applied Newton's Second Law of Motion and calculated the G-forces exerted when she went from 95 mph to a standstill in an instant. "It's not surprising her neck broke," Kakalios says.
Kakalios made Gwen's death an exam problem during the course's first semester last fall.
That has got to be one of the most uniquely staged sentences I have ever read. I can stare at it for hours. Somewhere in there is a pun waiting to happen I think. Maybe more.
Someone has not studied their Franco-American, Inca-Mayan,Spanish-American,Aztec-Inca and other large scale Native American Wars.
These were as bloody as any european war of the same era.
Here's Gray Davis's own words...
He also tries to play innocent...
Edison and PG&E were on their knees when the state demanded they charge a fraction of what it cost them to aquire that power. Also note that out of the power suppliers, the Gray Davis state run plants were among *the* most expensive.
Then to make sure that energy companies got money after he left office, he negotiated long term contracts at the *peak* of the crisis.
Lets not forget his $93,000 price tag from Enron either.
Gray Davis was either incompetant, or irresponsible, or paid off. But I find it very hard to believe he was innocent.
He got 11 plants online alright. One of them was a enviromentaly clean plant that used the natural gas produced from a southern California trash dump. The builders got loans, and lots of promises from Gray Davis.
None of those promises paid off. Their plant sat idle for almost a year, and no one would buy Electricity from them. Not even when he promised to. Now they have a three month contract to fund a multi million dollar facility.
I have a space. Now what does it do to me again?
I assume you meant
the letter K, the number 6 (vi), and the letter M
Her origional white gold setting for the diamond kept bending so we're going to get a titanium tiffany (pronged) setting. It seemed fitting for an eternal bond to have a nearly indestructible ring (it even has a higher melting point than Platinum).
Also, after we got married we read the Lord of the Rings trillogy and noticed the use of "mithril" which was like silver but a very light and strong metal. I wondered if JRRT was speaking of Ti but I never looked into it.
Phil Reeds short reply - attacking your gross misrepresentations about benificial mutations having never been observed - aside;
...evolution is strictly defined as changes in alleles (genes) in a population over time.
... then you've answered your own question.
Not so fast, Phil Reed has shown that he cannot find a scientific arguement with both hands and a flashlight. Just in case this is still in doubt lets look at how he defines evolution.
This is a strict definition? Lets compare it to the definition from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments
Notice that in his religious zeal he completely bypasses the process criteria and effect, i.e. the "unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process", in order to conclude via non-sequiter that things change over time... ***whala*** evolution.
Now, beyond that I can only say that I won't be drug down into a creation vs evolution debate. I'll be quick to point out evolutionary zealots who do not understand the science they are advocating but there is no use in it for me to go further.
However, I'm afraid you suffer from the same, so I'll offer a few corrections...
Ok, he has calculated that the odds for a fully functional cell forming is about 10^440
That was an assertion that anonymous coward proposed, and not Llewelyn who wrote the post that Razorguy produced arguements that were a gross disservice to science. And I was exposing RazorGuy's disservice more than defending anyone.
Llewelyn was talking about the unlikelyhood of random production of the basic building blocks of life, that "first success", which would not have the benefit of the processes of mutation and evolution that are built into the genetic code. Although he did not produce a number, it does fit along the lines of abiogenisis and based on shear randomness would be astronomicaly improbable.
Your ignoring that basic fact of his arguement makes me suspicious that your looking for straw-men more than the truth. The next sentence provides more evidence.
As to creationism - please don't try to advocate it; for the Fundamentalist Christian Young Earth Creationism to work, ALL of science has to be mangled into utter unintelligibility. Cosmology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, paleontology, archeology, meteorology, and all their (very useful) subfields - must be dismissed as garbage in order to force the world-veiw that YE Creationism demands.
You start out by advocating the dismissal outright of "creationism", but back it up with vague hand waving at a selective strawman representation in "Young Earth Creationism".
But wait there is more...
Not only that, but all the problems that you present for abiogenesis plague your "Creator" - did it simply arise by chance? What are the odds there?
Where did I reference "my creator" in the post you are refering to? Either you have your own divining power or you just conjered it up as part of a strawman. Lets say my creator is "Natural Selection" from the unlikely event of a decendent allel many millions of years ago. Whats the odds that you shake a box and "Natural Selection" comes out? There are many governing laws in this universe, how many times do you shake a box and come up with gravitation, "PV=NRT". Sure you could argue that for the box to exist you need those things already, and
Plenty of beneficial mutations have been observed.
Peace my paranoid friend, no one is arguing that there have been no beneficial changes to genetic code. You can save your energy on that strawman.
However, evidence shows that there are rules guiding those changes as brought about by jumping gene, gene survival and other theories, and by every-day live occurances like the existance of heterogeneous-sexes and their reproduction. Changes happen becuase it is built into the genetic code for them to happen. Rarely if at all (and never observed) have random mutations produced outside of these procedures been beneficial.