It is very nice of them to have gone to the step of saying explicitly "creationism" not even "creation science" or "intelligent design." The history here is interesting. First the Supreme Court said no creationism in science classes, so then the creationists made up "creation science" which was claimed to be scientific. The whole "Earth created 6000 years ago, and a global flood 5000 years or so ago" made the courts not look kindly on that. See Epperson v. Arkansas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epperson_v._Arkansas and then later Edwards v. Aguilard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_v._Aguillard. By sheer coincidence, right after the Edwards decision, intelligence design showed up on the scene as a totally new, totally scientific idea. They claimed that this had nothing to do with creationism or creation science, even though the first textbook on the subject, Pandas and People, had a search and replace of "creation science" for "intelligent design" from an earlier draft. Some of these, didn't go so well, like the infamous "cdesign proponentsists" in one draft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandas_And_People Not too surprisingly, a federal court didn't buy into this claim and ruled that intelligent design was creation science which was creationism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District. These Louisiana creationists seem to have the standard problem of being not quite bright enough to pull off the attempted deception and so just use all the terms as synonyms for creationism. That means that if this just gets to a low level court, they will get hammered quickly.
Unfortunately, given the current right-wing makeup of the Supreme Court, it isn't implausible that an appeal to the Supreme Court will get everything overturned and will end up with creationism in public schools again. The original Edwards case was a 7-2 decision (Scalia's dissent is deeply wrong but worth reading). The current court might very well rule differently. And Obama's appointments don't help matters much. Sotomayor doesn't have much of a good record on First Amendment issues with almost no record at all on Establishment issues, and we've got close to nothing on Kagan.
If this precedent holds we may be in very good shape. The obvious generalization is to allowing such circumvention for fair use. If that occurs, then most of the problems with this legislation go out the window.
By the time this patent was filed for spam filters were already around. Indeed, in 1996 one had such sophisticated filters that used by as Jason Rennie's program iFile whiched used a Bayesian statistical approach to sort potential spam into a junk folder. Prior art is going to kill this quickly.
In "The Atrocity Archives" by Charlie Stross, a top-secret British agency solves this problem by allowing gays but only if they are open about it. So in order to keep their security clearance gays are required to publicly attend at least one Pride parade a year. And that's one of the less weird things in the book.
Raises an interesting question, am I the only one who thinks we'd be better of as a world if the UN Bill of Rights was as absolute in it's protections as particular clauses in some of our constitutions (like the first in America for example) and ALL U.N. member states were REQUIRED to implement it as part of their own constitutions (and where no constitution exists as in Britain be required to create one and make said bill of rights the entirey there-off ?)
Considering that there's been a push multiple times by many countries in the UN to make religious beliefs protected from ridicule and blasphemy http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2008/1113/p09s02-coop.html this would lead to bad stuff very quickly. Also, note that not having a constitution works ok. Britain protects most rights pretty well compared to most of the world, and in some respects does a better job protecting rights than the US does. However, both Syria and Jordan have written protection of free speech in their constitutions and that doesn't really do much. What is on paper doesn't matter as much as wide institutional issues. Don't force written constitutions on other countries just because that happens to have worked well for the US.
Missing the point. The bounties aren't what's competitive. What's competitive is the browser market. That they need to keep upping the amount of money they are offering to find problems in their browsers is a function of the competitive browser market.
This is a sign of a truly competitive market. When Chrome and Mozilla are competing to the point where they need to bid on how much they pay for people to find flaws in their own software then there's serious competition. And the result is that we, the consumers, benefit the most. This is market dynamics with honest companies at their best.
We are rapidly learning more about the cometary impact rate on Jupiter, and now Neptune. It should be possible to extrapolate from this to calculate the impact rate on Earth.
Better extrapolation method: look at historic impacts on Earth. See Chapman's 1994 paper in Nature "Impacts on the Earth by asteroids and comets: assessing the hazard" v. 367, Issue 6458, pg. 33-40. This paper gives a good summary of the literature at the time (my impression is that this hasn't changed much since then but this is far from my area of expertise).
We seem to be getting a handle on the risk from asteroids, but a comet can come our way without warning.
Not exactly. Comets that are anywhere near the inner system become visible very quickly due to their outgassing. In contrast asteroids are much harder to spot. On the other hand, asteroids stay where they are supposed to and don't have wildly elliptic orbits so they are much easier to track in the long run and tag. So there's a mix here, but overall asteroids are more likely to strike without warning. Comets will likely give us at least a few days to have a giant orgy.
Note that this hypothesis is more plausible than it might seem at first glance since we've seen comets impact gas giants before. Most famously, in 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 was observed directly impacting on Jupiter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker-Levy_9. This also isn't the first time this sort of technique has been used to detect historic comet impacts. As TFA notes, this technique was previously used to show that a similar event likely occurred around 230 years ago on Saturn.
Although comets hit the outer planets frequently, this is due to a variety of issues including the large size of the planets and the exact orbit of Jupiter (which makes Jupiter very effective at clearing interplanetary debris). Thus, this sort of situation doesn't pose much of a risk for Earth. However, even a single such comet colliding with Earth would be an extinction level event. The asteroid that caused the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan is generally estimated to be around 10 km diameter and most comets are generally larger than that (Halley's Comet has a mean diameter of 11 km, and many have larger mean diameters). Comets are also much easier to spot generally than asteroids and so we have a better idea about their orbits and are more likely to have a lot of warning before a potential impact event on Earth. Asteroids are much harder to see and pose much more of a threat even though they are smaller objects (with the exception of a handful such as Ceres).
The discovery of additional Near Earth Asteroids isn't scary at all. We knew these objects almost certainly had to be there. We didn't know where exactly they were. Now we can go and track their orbits and if anyone gets close to being a threat maybe have some small chance at dealing with it or preparing for the really bad results if we can't deal with it. This is a good thing. Not searching for these objects would just be like trying to deal with a big angry predator by sticking your head in the ground and hoping it goes away.
Scaled up to industrial size, the method could save microprocessor companies a lot of money, Yu said, because about 30% of the space in a microchip wafer is taken up by the wires between components
Given that, I'm going to tentatively answer your question with a "yes."
Can be found here http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf. The statistical correlations found were weak, in some cases not even statistically significant. Also, for some questions they didn't see any backfire effect (where corrections make people believe the lies more) for all questions. For example, when dealing with liberals, there was no backfire effect when correcting the misconception that George Bush banned stem cell research (he in fact restricted it to a specific set of cell lines). However, in this case, correction did not alter the belief level although it didn't create a backfire result. Clearly, more research is needed. There's also a relevant older article which shows that uninformed people are more likely to think they are informed. http://ann.sagepub.com/content/560/1/143.abstract. This connects with the Dunning-Kruger effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect where incompetent individuals generally overestimate their own competency.
Carl Zimmer has a more detailed breakdown of what happened with a list of what bloggers are moving- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/07/07/oh-pepsi-what-hath-thou-wrought/. Major bloggers leaving include Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math/Bad Math, and Rebecca Skloot (who may be known to many more for her excellent book on HeLa cells and their namesake than for blogging). This wasn't a single isolated instance that is causing these people to leave, but for many the final straw in what they saw as very problematic and difficult to work with people at Seed Magazine (which runs Scienceblogs). Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority discusses some of these issues here- http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2010/07/pepsico_scienceblogs_and_the_f.php (he's uncertain if he is leaving or not and so may be a moderate voice). Meanwhile Abbie Smith of ERV thinks that much of the reaction is hysterics and hypocrisy http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2010/07/sciblogs_caves_to_hysterics.php.
So we have a choice between a censored internet or becoming slaves to corporate overlords. This is the issue with the two party system.
Are we talking about the same country here? This article is about Australia, not the United States. Australia is not a 2 party system. While there are two parties that are larger than the others the National Party, the Greens and Family First all have sentators. Granted only one of those three has representatives, the National Party, which is for most purposes the right wing end of the Liberal Party, but the point should be clear. By most standards Australia doesn't have a two party system (if you want deal with a real two party system go to the US). This seems somewhat connected to this XKCD http://xkcd.com/661/.
Much of what you said above takes things out of context or makes massive confusions about differences in scale. Let's look at two of them:
He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislature.
Well, thats a bit different now, because we seem to think that there can't be any times of peace so instead we have a standing army always and find new conflicts to fight.
You are missing the point here. The primary objection is "kept among us"- this is an objection to quartering soldiers in private homes (which was then not allowed by the Third Amendment).
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and Amount and Payment of their Salaries.
Hm, appointing unfair judges for life... Based on the will of ~0.000033667% of the people? Sound familiar?
But that's not at all the same. The judges being objected to weren't appointed for life. They were appointed to serve at the pleasure of the King. That's a very different circumstance. Hence the phrasing " on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices."
And of course almost all your objections ignore the fact that these events have all occurred with the consent of the legislator you voted for. That's very different then when things occur by an unelected monarch and a parliament which one can't vote.
He has a deal with the mysterious British agency known as the Laundry. He doesn't publish the fourth volume and they don't render him metabolically inactive. Don't any of you pay attention to what Charlie Stross has to say?
It's a lot easier than tossing out your beloved theory or trying to build it up from scratch based on solid scientific evidence to support each individual tenet. I think the latter is what needs to be done, but it will take time. We need to re-figure out what we know absolutely. IOW, what aspects of special relativity are not contradicted by a CPT violation? If the Lorentz Transformation is called into question then so is science fiction's much beloved time dilation And what about the Twins Paradox? Yikes.
Time dilation has been observed in a number of different contexts, most famously by putting atomic clocks on airplanes and measuring the resulting slow down as they fly around the globe. Even if SR fails, time dilation is still an experimentally verified fact.
Ok. I read the article and I'm still confused. I understand why different mass for particles and their antiparticles would violate CPT, which is obviously major. But I don't see how this violates special relativity. Why does this violate special relativity?
At any rate, some creationists theorize such a world where high(er) mountains were created due to coinciding plate movement along with the flood. The root words used in the bible imply that water covered hills and mountains: Creationists are theorizing how that might have been possible.
And in this case going so far as to pick a specific meaning of a word which doesn't even fit with the word meaning. In the desire to preserve their interpretation of Genesis they twist the language in a way that no native speaker would. Indeed, the general lack of actual understanding of the text manifests itself in a great many ways (for example the term they use to talk about kinds, "baraminology" which is supposed to come from the Hebrew for "created kind" which they apparently thought was "bara min" when the correct Hebrew would be "min baru." In this particular case, what apparently happened was they knew that "bara" translated as "created" in Genesis 1:1 and didn't realize that unlike in English the active and passive forms were different. This summarizes their general level of scholarship pretty well.)
They're not just making up mechanisms. They're theorizing and modeling with concrete physics. That was the point of linking the runaway subduction proposal.
No. They are engaging primitive speculative hypotheses that only fit the data at a very cursory level.
It's worth repeating: Theories are falsifiable. It's not rational to criticize a theory based on "intentions." So what if they're starting from a religious stand point? Judge the theory on its merits.
Intentions are a useful heuristic about likelyhood of correctness. If someone tries to find the truth they are much more likely to be correct than if they start with a preconceived set of notions (in this case the ideas that the Earth is about 6000 years old and that there was a global flood some 5000 years ago).
I have read a number of creation ideas, proposals, models and theories that are no longer credible and creationists know it. They discover the holes and move on. Just like science has done. I just got done reading A Brief History of Time. The history of physics it describes is exactly like that.
Not at all comparable. When physicists do that they *change.* The creationists will never alter their underlying premises which they insist on, that the Earth is young, and that there was a global flood. That's not good science. And comparing that to physicists who are willing to alter all their hypotheses as the data dictates is almost laughable.
Do you understand what the term "by definition" means or what I was saying about being careful about uses of short inferential distance?
Okay. I am not being pedantic about it but I think you are. I think we both know what the most important communication is with a statement like the one I brought up. Faulting the semantics of the syntax in the medium in which it was delivered is of little value.
You don't seem to be getting the point here. The problem is not one of simple "semantics." How one thinks, how one speaks and how one writes are all deeply interconnected. Sloppy speach and sloppy writing lead to sloppy thinking. Using the phrase "by definition" when something isn't definitional is one easy way to encourage poor thinking.
I agree. Probably that one article doesn't do a good enough technical job of describing the vast body of work that backs up the ideas. But I really recommend reading more of the Q&A documents and trying to find the technical ones because, as a whole, they are quite intriguing.
They have about as much validity as that one. They just manage to disguise it even more with fake technical expertise.
Most people would rather not have a god they owe their existence and their obedience to. Is it any wonder that these ideas would catch on like wildfire?
Not entirely flat. Just not what we see today. It's interesting that the biblical text says the water covered all the "high hills" and not all the "mountains." This is actually quite in agreement with regular plate tectonic theory. The major difference is the timeline. Secular theory puts it way in the past. Creationist theory puts it recently at the time of Noah's Flood.
Ok. First of all, what the Biblical text actually says is "kol heharim hag'voim." (I'm transliterating because Slashdot isn't happy with Hebrew characters. "heharim" means "tall mountains." The word "har" is a mountain, the prefix "he" is the direct article, and the "im" ending makes it plural. This Genesis 6:18. There are a few different Hebrew words for "hill" but har is unambiguously a mountain. I don't know where you got the idea that the text said anything about "high hills." (Ok, actually checking now and I see that the KJV translates it that way. This seems like an oddity of the KJV more than anything else. The Vulgate for example says "omnes montes excelsi" and that clearly means tall mountains, not tall hills. I can't discuss the Septuagint's text at all reasonably because I don't know enough Greek. It may also be an example where the meaning of the Englihs word has changed and so there's no fault to the KJV. A lot of the claimed bad translations in the KJV are really due to the shifting nature of English)
Even aside from this abuse of the text, "secular theory" doesn't do anything like that at all. Geology suggests long-term processes which are still ongoing and observable today (indeed, we can use precise laser beams to measure ongoing continental drift).
See Runaway subduction as the driving mechanism for the Genesis Flood [icr.org]. The subtler point here is to show how serious Creationists have become about researching and theorizing scientifically plausible mechanisms that would produce what we observe today
No. Runaway subduction is the sort of thing that if it could happen (there's not enough energy in the system for it to occur over such a short timespan) would leave evidence.
You can't just make up mechanisms to protect a cherished hypothesis. That's not science. Science looks at the evidence and says "ok, what's the simplest explanation of the evidence we have? What is the most probable explanation" you don't just keep making marginally plausible hypotheses to defend an idea. That's not science. That's apologetics. There's nothing subtle about that.
In the context of fossil formation, fossils must, by definition, be buried and preserved quickly, one way or another
Do you understand what the term "by definition" means or what I was saying about being careful about uses of short inferential distance? Because you don't seem to be getting the point. Saying something follows quickly from a definition is not the same as saying it is by definition! For example, if we define a prime number to be a positive integer that has exactly two distinct positive divisors, one can conclude that 2 is the only even prime. That's an easy conclusion from the definition. But to say "by definition, 2 is the only even prime" would be wrong. That's the exact same sort of thing you are doing. The definition of "fossil" says nothing at all about fossilization times. That's a conclusion from the definition.
The assumption is that that information has not been there the whole time. If the Genesis account of creation is true, all that genetic diversity was present at the beginning and benefited animals, given the command to populate the earth, by natural selection helping the animals to adapt to all sorts of environments.
For the last two issues above, see Adam, Eve and Noah vs Modern Genetics [creation.com]
Yay, more apologetic cargo cult science that doesn't work at all. That article posits under no evidence other than their reading of the Biblical text very high mutations rates. There's no way
This should make the argument stronger not weaker. Later amendments override earlier elements in the Constitution. So the First Amendment should have a higher priority than copyright concerns when they come into conflict.
Slashdot Mirror
It is very nice of them to have gone to the step of saying explicitly "creationism" not even "creation science" or "intelligent design." The history here is interesting. First the Supreme Court said no creationism in science classes, so then the creationists made up "creation science" which was claimed to be scientific. The whole "Earth created 6000 years ago, and a global flood 5000 years or so ago" made the courts not look kindly on that. See Epperson v. Arkansas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epperson_v._Arkansas and then later Edwards v. Aguilard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_v._Aguillard. By sheer coincidence, right after the Edwards decision, intelligence design showed up on the scene as a totally new, totally scientific idea. They claimed that this had nothing to do with creationism or creation science, even though the first textbook on the subject, Pandas and People, had a search and replace of "creation science" for "intelligent design" from an earlier draft. Some of these, didn't go so well, like the infamous "cdesign proponentsists" in one draft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandas_And_People Not too surprisingly, a federal court didn't buy into this claim and ruled that intelligent design was creation science which was creationism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District. These Louisiana creationists seem to have the standard problem of being not quite bright enough to pull off the attempted deception and so just use all the terms as synonyms for creationism. That means that if this just gets to a low level court, they will get hammered quickly.
Unfortunately, given the current right-wing makeup of the Supreme Court, it isn't implausible that an appeal to the Supreme Court will get everything overturned and will end up with creationism in public schools again. The original Edwards case was a 7-2 decision (Scalia's dissent is deeply wrong but worth reading). The current court might very well rule differently. And Obama's appointments don't help matters much. Sotomayor doesn't have much of a good record on First Amendment issues with almost no record at all on Establishment issues, and we've got close to nothing on Kagan.
If this precedent holds we may be in very good shape. The obvious generalization is to allowing such circumvention for fair use. If that occurs, then most of the problems with this legislation go out the window.
By the time this patent was filed for spam filters were already around. Indeed, in 1996 one had such sophisticated filters that used by as Jason Rennie's program iFile whiched used a Bayesian statistical approach to sort potential spam into a junk folder. Prior art is going to kill this quickly.
In "The Atrocity Archives" by Charlie Stross, a top-secret British agency solves this problem by allowing gays but only if they are open about it. So in order to keep their security clearance gays are required to publicly attend at least one Pride parade a year. And that's one of the less weird things in the book.
Raises an interesting question, am I the only one who thinks we'd be better of as a world if the UN Bill of Rights was as absolute in it's protections as particular clauses in some of our constitutions (like the first in America for example) and ALL U.N. member states were REQUIRED to implement it as part of their own constitutions (and where no constitution exists as in Britain be required to create one and make said bill of rights the entirey there-off ?)
Considering that there's been a push multiple times by many countries in the UN to make religious beliefs protected from ridicule and blasphemy http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2008/1113/p09s02-coop.html this would lead to bad stuff very quickly. Also, note that not having a constitution works ok. Britain protects most rights pretty well compared to most of the world, and in some respects does a better job protecting rights than the US does. However, both Syria and Jordan have written protection of free speech in their constitutions and that doesn't really do much. What is on paper doesn't matter as much as wide institutional issues. Don't force written constitutions on other countries just because that happens to have worked well for the US.
Missing the point. The bounties aren't what's competitive. What's competitive is the browser market. That they need to keep upping the amount of money they are offering to find problems in their browsers is a function of the competitive browser market.
This is a sign of a truly competitive market. When Chrome and Mozilla are competing to the point where they need to bid on how much they pay for people to find flaws in their own software then there's serious competition. And the result is that we, the consumers, benefit the most. This is market dynamics with honest companies at their best.
We are rapidly learning more about the cometary impact rate on Jupiter, and now Neptune. It should be possible to extrapolate from this to calculate the impact rate on Earth.
Better extrapolation method: look at historic impacts on Earth. See Chapman's 1994 paper in Nature "Impacts on the Earth by asteroids and comets: assessing the hazard" v. 367, Issue 6458, pg. 33-40. This paper gives a good summary of the literature at the time (my impression is that this hasn't changed much since then but this is far from my area of expertise).
We seem to be getting a handle on the risk from asteroids, but a comet can come our way without warning.
Not exactly. Comets that are anywhere near the inner system become visible very quickly due to their outgassing. In contrast asteroids are much harder to spot. On the other hand, asteroids stay where they are supposed to and don't have wildly elliptic orbits so they are much easier to track in the long run and tag. So there's a mix here, but overall asteroids are more likely to strike without warning. Comets will likely give us at least a few days to have a giant orgy.
Note that this hypothesis is more plausible than it might seem at first glance since we've seen comets impact gas giants before. Most famously, in 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 was observed directly impacting on Jupiter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker-Levy_9. This also isn't the first time this sort of technique has been used to detect historic comet impacts. As TFA notes, this technique was previously used to show that a similar event likely occurred around 230 years ago on Saturn.
Although comets hit the outer planets frequently, this is due to a variety of issues including the large size of the planets and the exact orbit of Jupiter (which makes Jupiter very effective at clearing interplanetary debris). Thus, this sort of situation doesn't pose much of a risk for Earth. However, even a single such comet colliding with Earth would be an extinction level event. The asteroid that caused the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan is generally estimated to be around 10 km diameter and most comets are generally larger than that (Halley's Comet has a mean diameter of 11 km, and many have larger mean diameters). Comets are also much easier to spot generally than asteroids and so we have a better idea about their orbits and are more likely to have a lot of warning before a potential impact event on Earth. Asteroids are much harder to see and pose much more of a threat even though they are smaller objects (with the exception of a handful such as Ceres).
The discovery of additional Near Earth Asteroids isn't scary at all. We knew these objects almost certainly had to be there. We didn't know where exactly they were. Now we can go and track their orbits and if anyone gets close to being a threat maybe have some small chance at dealing with it or preparing for the really bad results if we can't deal with it. This is a good thing. Not searching for these objects would just be like trying to deal with a big angry predator by sticking your head in the ground and hoping it goes away.
Any impact on Moore's Law?
Well, according to TFA:
Scaled up to industrial size, the method could save microprocessor companies a lot of money, Yu said, because about 30% of the space in a microchip wafer is taken up by the wires between components
Given that, I'm going to tentatively answer your question with a "yes."
Can be found here http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf. The statistical correlations found were weak, in some cases not even statistically significant. Also, for some questions they didn't see any backfire effect (where corrections make people believe the lies more) for all questions. For example, when dealing with liberals, there was no backfire effect when correcting the misconception that George Bush banned stem cell research (he in fact restricted it to a specific set of cell lines). However, in this case, correction did not alter the belief level although it didn't create a backfire result. Clearly, more research is needed. There's also a relevant older article which shows that uninformed people are more likely to think they are informed. http://ann.sagepub.com/content/560/1/143.abstract. This connects with the Dunning-Kruger effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect where incompetent individuals generally overestimate their own competency.
Actually, the real risk is trioxin. That's the zombie-maker.
Carl Zimmer has a more detailed breakdown of what happened with a list of what bloggers are moving- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/07/07/oh-pepsi-what-hath-thou-wrought/. Major bloggers leaving include Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math/Bad Math, and Rebecca Skloot (who may be known to many more for her excellent book on HeLa cells and their namesake than for blogging). This wasn't a single isolated instance that is causing these people to leave, but for many the final straw in what they saw as very problematic and difficult to work with people at Seed Magazine (which runs Scienceblogs). Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority discusses some of these issues here- http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2010/07/pepsico_scienceblogs_and_the_f.php (he's uncertain if he is leaving or not and so may be a moderate voice). Meanwhile Abbie Smith of ERV thinks that much of the reaction is hysterics and hypocrisy http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2010/07/sciblogs_caves_to_hysterics.php.
So we have a choice between a censored internet or becoming slaves to corporate overlords. This is the issue with the two party system.
Are we talking about the same country here? This article is about Australia, not the United States. Australia is not a 2 party system. While there are two parties that are larger than the others the National Party, the Greens and Family First all have sentators. Granted only one of those three has representatives, the National Party, which is for most purposes the right wing end of the Liberal Party, but the point should be clear. By most standards Australia doesn't have a two party system (if you want deal with a real two party system go to the US). This seems somewhat connected to this XKCD http://xkcd.com/661/.
Much of what you said above takes things out of context or makes massive confusions about differences in scale. Let's look at two of them:
He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislature.
Well, thats a bit different now, because we seem to think that there can't be any times of peace so instead we have a standing army always and find new conflicts to fight.
You are missing the point here. The primary objection is "kept among us"- this is an objection to quartering soldiers in private homes (which was then not allowed by the Third Amendment).
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and Amount and Payment of their Salaries.
Hm, appointing unfair judges for life... Based on the will of ~0.000033667% of the people? Sound familiar?
But that's not at all the same. The judges being objected to weren't appointed for life. They were appointed to serve at the pleasure of the King. That's a very different circumstance. Hence the phrasing " on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices."
And of course almost all your objections ignore the fact that these events have all occurred with the consent of the legislator you voted for. That's very different then when things occur by an unelected monarch and a parliament which one can't vote.
I've never seen that quote in a reliable source. I'm pretty sure that he never said it.
He has a deal with the mysterious British agency known as the Laundry. He doesn't publish the fourth volume and they don't render him metabolically inactive. Don't any of you pay attention to what Charlie Stross has to say?
It's a lot easier than tossing out your beloved theory or trying to build it up from scratch based on solid scientific evidence to support each individual tenet. I think the latter is what needs to be done, but it will take time. We need to re-figure out what we know absolutely. IOW, what aspects of special relativity are not contradicted by a CPT violation? If the Lorentz Transformation is called into question then so is science fiction's much beloved time dilation And what about the Twins Paradox? Yikes.
Time dilation has been observed in a number of different contexts, most famously by putting atomic clocks on airplanes and measuring the resulting slow down as they fly around the globe. Even if SR fails, time dilation is still an experimentally verified fact.
Ok. I read the article and I'm still confused. I understand why different mass for particles and their antiparticles would violate CPT, which is obviously major. But I don't see how this violates special relativity. Why does this violate special relativity?
At any rate, some creationists theorize such a world where high(er) mountains were created due to coinciding plate movement along with the flood. The root words used in the bible imply that water covered hills and mountains: Creationists are theorizing how that might have been possible.
And in this case going so far as to pick a specific meaning of a word which doesn't even fit with the word meaning. In the desire to preserve their interpretation of Genesis they twist the language in a way that no native speaker would. Indeed, the general lack of actual understanding of the text manifests itself in a great many ways (for example the term they use to talk about kinds, "baraminology" which is supposed to come from the Hebrew for "created kind" which they apparently thought was "bara min" when the correct Hebrew would be "min baru." In this particular case, what apparently happened was they knew that "bara" translated as "created" in Genesis 1:1 and didn't realize that unlike in English the active and passive forms were different. This summarizes their general level of scholarship pretty well.)
They're not just making up mechanisms. They're theorizing and modeling with concrete physics. That was the point of linking the runaway subduction proposal.
No. They are engaging primitive speculative hypotheses that only fit the data at a very cursory level.
It's worth repeating: Theories are falsifiable. It's not rational to criticize a theory based on "intentions." So what if they're starting from a religious stand point? Judge the theory on its merits.
Intentions are a useful heuristic about likelyhood of correctness. If someone tries to find the truth they are much more likely to be correct than if they start with a preconceived set of notions (in this case the ideas that the Earth is about 6000 years old and that there was a global flood some 5000 years ago).
I have read a number of creation ideas, proposals, models and theories that are no longer credible and creationists know it. They discover the holes and move on. Just like science has done. I just got done reading A Brief History of Time. The history of physics it describes is exactly like that.
Not at all comparable. When physicists do that they *change.* The creationists will never alter their underlying premises which they insist on, that the Earth is young, and that there was a global flood. That's not good science. And comparing that to physicists who are willing to alter all their hypotheses as the data dictates is almost laughable. Do you understand what the term "by definition" means or what I was saying about being careful about uses of short inferential distance?
Okay. I am not being pedantic about it but I think you are. I think we both know what the most important communication is with a statement like the one I brought up. Faulting the semantics of the syntax in the medium in which it was delivered is of little value.
You don't seem to be getting the point here. The problem is not one of simple "semantics." How one thinks, how one speaks and how one writes are all deeply interconnected. Sloppy speach and sloppy writing lead to sloppy thinking. Using the phrase "by definition" when something isn't definitional is one easy way to encourage poor thinking.
I agree. Probably that one article doesn't do a good enough technical job of describing the vast body of work that backs up the ideas. But I really recommend reading more of the Q&A documents and trying to find the technical ones because, as a whole, they are quite intriguing.
They have about as much validity as that one. They just manage to disguise it even more with fake technical expertise.
Most people would rather not have a god they owe their existence and their obedience to. Is it any wonder that these ideas would catch on like wildfire?
Ah, found the link I was looking for earlier where Razib Khan crunches the numbers for belief in Biblical literalism and IQ: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2008/05/biblical-literalism-or-low-iq-which-came-first/.
Not entirely flat. Just not what we see today. It's interesting that the biblical text says the water covered all the "high hills" and not all the "mountains." This is actually quite in agreement with regular plate tectonic theory. The major difference is the timeline. Secular theory puts it way in the past. Creationist theory puts it recently at the time of Noah's Flood.
Ok. First of all, what the Biblical text actually says is "kol heharim hag'voim." (I'm transliterating because Slashdot isn't happy with Hebrew characters. "heharim" means "tall mountains." The word "har" is a mountain, the prefix "he" is the direct article, and the "im" ending makes it plural. This Genesis 6:18. There are a few different Hebrew words for "hill" but har is unambiguously a mountain. I don't know where you got the idea that the text said anything about "high hills." (Ok, actually checking now and I see that the KJV translates it that way. This seems like an oddity of the KJV more than anything else. The Vulgate for example says "omnes montes excelsi" and that clearly means tall mountains, not tall hills. I can't discuss the Septuagint's text at all reasonably because I don't know enough Greek. It may also be an example where the meaning of the Englihs word has changed and so there's no fault to the KJV. A lot of the claimed bad translations in the KJV are really due to the shifting nature of English) Even aside from this abuse of the text, "secular theory" doesn't do anything like that at all. Geology suggests long-term processes which are still ongoing and observable today (indeed, we can use precise laser beams to measure ongoing continental drift).
See Runaway subduction as the driving mechanism for the Genesis Flood [icr.org]. The subtler point here is to show how serious Creationists have become about researching and theorizing scientifically plausible mechanisms that would produce what we observe today
No. Runaway subduction is the sort of thing that if it could happen (there's not enough energy in the system for it to occur over such a short timespan) would leave evidence. You can't just make up mechanisms to protect a cherished hypothesis. That's not science. Science looks at the evidence and says "ok, what's the simplest explanation of the evidence we have? What is the most probable explanation" you don't just keep making marginally plausible hypotheses to defend an idea. That's not science. That's apologetics. There's nothing subtle about that.
In the context of fossil formation, fossils must, by definition, be buried and preserved quickly, one way or another
Do you understand what the term "by definition" means or what I was saying about being careful about uses of short inferential distance? Because you don't seem to be getting the point. Saying something follows quickly from a definition is not the same as saying it is by definition! For example, if we define a prime number to be a positive integer that has exactly two distinct positive divisors, one can conclude that 2 is the only even prime. That's an easy conclusion from the definition. But to say "by definition, 2 is the only even prime" would be wrong. That's the exact same sort of thing you are doing. The definition of "fossil" says nothing at all about fossilization times. That's a conclusion from the definition.
The assumption is that that information has not been there the whole time. If the Genesis account of creation is true, all that genetic diversity was present at the beginning and benefited animals, given the command to populate the earth, by natural selection helping the animals to adapt to all sorts of environments. For the last two issues above, see Adam, Eve and Noah vs Modern Genetics [creation.com]
Yay, more apologetic cargo cult science that doesn't work at all. That article posits under no evidence other than their reading of the Biblical text very high mutations rates. There's no way
Cryptography is classified as munitions. Trying to export the wrong stuff without a license is like trying to export a tank or a missile.
This is false. While they were considered as munitions under Clinton's Executive Order 13026 crypto was put under much weaker commercial controls. See http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=1996_register&docid=fr19no96-98.pdf
This should make the argument stronger not weaker. Later amendments override earlier elements in the Constitution. So the First Amendment should have a higher priority than copyright concerns when they come into conflict.