I'm curious, how or why did the IPX influence the Performa? It's just a box, a donut box instead of a pizza box perhaps. Was it really a radical design back then?
Yes, I knew what movie you thought they were talking about:) But IIRC, he didn't even go into space in Firefox, just flew a very fast plane. Sorry, just being pedantic.
Aside from the films others have mentioned, War of the Worlds (the period adaptation, not the Spielberg/Cruise version) is currently due to open on 30 March 2005. I hope it will be good enough to cause a ruckus!
You are perfectly correct, there is nothing banning conventional weapons in space (although I guess the ABM treaty did, if they were intended to be deployed against ballistic missiles?). I think the Salyut guns were the best example of an operational deployment, but the Soviets did test a few other systems, www.astronautix.com has some info on them (on the right hand side, there's section called Soviet Combat Spacecraft).
About the treaty still having force, I think Russia legally assumed the rights and responsibilities of the USSR. I can't google up anything very authoritative, but a number of sites have statements like this:
The Russian Federation continues, as from 24 December 1991, the membership of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the United Nations and maintains, as from that date, full responsibility for all the rights and obligations of the USSR under the Charter of the United Nations and multilateral treaties deposited with the Secretary-General.
Well, surely it has something to do with their economies going down the gurgler... I think Russia even has a contracting population, for instance. I wouldn't expect (re-)developing countries to care too much about the environment, and there were certainly still environmental horror stories coming of of eastern Europe recently... massive quantities of acid being dumped from mines into the Danube and things of that sort.
But yes, on balance it's good for meeting Kyoto's targets!
The US-Mexican border has erupted in war at least four times in the last two hundred years (that counts the California-Mexican war and the Texas-Mexican war, since they're both part of the US now).
The UN was not created to fight Communism. It would have been a bit silly to give the Soviet Union a veto in the Security Council, if that were so. Instead, it was founded to promote world peace, as a League of Nations with teeth. And if you think it's possible to "stack" a global organisation with anti-US countries, when that organisation has virtually every country in the world as its members, then perhaps you should ask yourself why so many countries are anti-US?
Either bad fossil evidence and jackalope-type fossil creation exists, and thus largely invalidates many evolutionary claims, or it doesn't.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. If "jackelopes" were common, then it might. If they are rare - and I submit that they are - then to say this "largely invalidates many evolutionary claims" is unlikely to be true. You have to get specific here, you can't rely on generalities.
You want more evidence? What about the so-called genetic progress that is claimed by evolutionists, when no genetic changes have been observed outside of mutations within a pre-defined range, and plain degregation/minimalization/consolidation of the genetic material?
Creationist hogwash. Where does this "pre-defined" range come from? You can take any measurable genetic change and say it falls within a "pre-defined range" - even if that's the difference between an ant and an antelope. "What about... plain degregation/minimalization/consolidation of the genetic material?" Yeah, what about it? What does this even mean?
There's a huge difference between basing your science of pre-conceived assumptions and basic your science on emperical evidence.
Any pre-conceived assumptions you'd like to admit to? You wouldn't happen to be a Christian by any chance, would you?
Current evolutionary science practices tend to lean towards the former of the two by relying on the accepted theories of the day. This is the same kind of nonsense that was behind hundreds of years of the flat-world model of geography.
You don't think it's odd that creationism was the accepted theory prior to the 19th century, and that evidence to the contrary accumulated, scientists began to favour evolutionary theories despite much resistance? Perhaps its because evolution fits the evidence better than creationism does? No, perish the thought: scientists much just be stupid.
There have been fossil evidence, for instance, putting man's existense in time with many ancient animals that were thought to be long before our existence.
The point is that we didn't evolve from the species of apes (or monkeys) currently living - we both evolved from common ancestors. This is obvious when you think about it, but creationists will point to a monkey, snort in derision, and say, "Do you seriously believe we descended from THAT?" when of course no evolutionist is saying any such thing.
Whether that common ancestor is ape-like enough to technically count as an ape is an interesting question, I don't know - is there a doctor of zoology in the house?
The post you refer to IS a bit extreme, but the viewpoint is valid. The dispute you (and the author of the article) cite is a good example. No one actually knows the correct date. The goal then is not "truth" (there is none to be had), the goal is information. Wikipedia has provided a subset of information and will continue to always be a subset.
Well, for a start, I don't agree that the viewpoint is valid (as my response to the post I linked to shows).
I have a scientific training and I'm about to start a PhD in history, and I think that such thinking is pernicious - scientists are too sensible to fall for it, but this is unfortunately often not the case in the humanities. Just because the truth is often difficult, or sometimes even impossible, to find, does not mean we should not try. It's still a useful goal to strive towards.
That nobody knows the exact date does not excuse inaccuracy - the article was inaccurate to imply that we do. Of course wikipedia only provides a subset of human knowledge, nothing can provide a complete set. That doesn't mean incorrect or misleadingly partial information is permissible.
The idea that the truth is impossible to find, and that information must be tainted by the point of view of the observer is clearly accurate to some extent given that almost no topic is not challenged and re-challenged with varying degrees of success by experts in a given topic's field of study. The nature of light, the size of the earth, the time and place of important historical events, the behavior of a type of animal... all of these are called into question over and over as we understand more and more about them.
No, most topics are not challenged over and over. In any given field of study there are a large number of facts that are settled and never challenged, basically because they are, well, true. At most, they are refined - so we have 99.9% of the whole story, instead of only 99%. The size of the earth is one such fact. (This hasn't been controversial since the 19th century, and if you think it will be again, you're dreaming.) The time and place of important historical events are others. (Name me one such event which has an uncertain date or place and I'll give you 100 more that don't.) You are mistaking the clashes that take place at the frontier of knowledge for the whole - you might get this impression from reading the newspaper, but if you actually get deep into a particular field of study, you will find it's not true. And the bulk of an encyclopedia is going to be concerned with those boring facts that mostly don't change. If something is controversial, and the encyclopedia has to address it, then the controversy should be noted, not one side arbitrarily omitted.
No, no, no, you're all wrong! He discusses this in an essay he wrote later (or maybe it was in Profiles of the Future). He didn't patent the idea because he didn't think it would be a practicality any time soon, perhaps not even in his lifetime. And anyway, as he himself pointed out, even if he had patented it in 1945, the patent would have expired before the first geosynchronous communications satellite was launched.
He instead blames cultural relativism, a nice easy boogy man to blame. They believe it can be done because they don't understand that there is right and wrong. Perhaps instead I do it because I find the Wikipedia a useful resource already.
Unfortunately, some peopledo seem to take a relativist position with respect to errors in Wikipedia. Hopefully, they are in a minority!
The article is not wrong. It gives one date as authorative where there's honest historical question, just like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica did. It evinces a little confusion in the body of the text about the date. That is not great, but the article as a whole is still useful and generally correct.
No, to me, that's still wrong: in glossing over an open question in this way, it's giving a false impression of authoritativeness. An encyclopedia is supposed to summarise what we know, but we don't know when Hamilton was born, to better than one of two possible years anyway, so it is wrong to imply that we do. (Also, was it an open question in 1911? If not, the comparison doesn't help, as the EB was merely reflecting current knowledge, even if that knowledge later turned out to be wrong - and there's nothing any encyclopedia can do about that!) And yes, the rest of the article may be "generally correct", but the point is, I can't really be sure which parts are generally correct, can I? Anyway, it's no news that there are errors in wikipedia, the bigger problem is that the page was getting worse over time, not better. I still think it would be useful to do statistical tests to see if this is a general problem or not.
Well, no, actually, because I don't know you from a bar of soap. Which is the problem in a nutshell. With EB you know that whoever wrote an article is an expert on that particular subject (or at least is in the possession of decent research skills!)
Look, I think wikipedia is a good thing, but I only use it as a reference for other people, and then only when I know enough about the subject of the article to know that it's accurate enough. I'd never rely on it as a general reference work, but apparently that's what a lot of people do. EB is far more reliable for that sort of thing.
Here's my suggestion: why not include the ability to have citations/footnotes? If I could click on a link to a source for an important assertion (online or off, personally I'd prefer the latter), a source that I could in theory check myself, then at least I'd know where people are getting their information from - there's a big difference between a scholarly biography of Alexander Hamilton and "The Founding Fathers for Dummies". And with the reference in hand, if I had to, I could track it down myself and verify it. There's no technical reason why this couldn't be done - not doing so is just following the model of dead tree encyclopedias too slavishly.
It would only be cherry picking if he searched through a bunch of different articles, looking for any error he could find. By his account, it's a standard test of his for any encyclopedia - he looks at one article. It's hardly conclusive, sure, and yes, it's arbitrary, but so what? It's still an objective test, as far as it goes.
Why are there so many people defending Wikipedia on this? The article is wrong. That's not a hanging offence - as you say, EB will have mistakes too. But the article in Wikipedia seems to have gotten not less but more wrong over time. Surely this is not Wikipeda's goal! The question is, is this an isolated example or part of a larger trend? And that's what we can't tell from a single example. So the experiment should be repeated for a statistically significant sample of all articles.
His underlying assumption is that there is an objective, true reality Out There (which an encyclopedia should approximate). This was a commonly held view during the Age of Reason, which IIRC is usually dated from around 1700 to about 1905.
Actually, the Age of Reason is usually dated to the 18th century, perhaps beginning a little before then. But hey, that's only important if you believe in an objective reality, so who cares, right?
Of course the sciences have moved on since then and many people now believe that understanding the role of the observer is integral to any understanding of reality-- that the two are somehow forever entwined.
Whether this is true or not, for most intents and purposes, it's irrelevant. Sure, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle means that the more precisely I determine the velocity of a particle, the more uncertain its position becomes; but that doesn't mean that, say, using a laser to work out the velocity of that oncoming truck is going to make it smear out across the landscape instead of me. In the real world (take that ironically if you like), we have to rely on perceptions and authorities. And anyone who declares themselves to believe that truth is relative does not, in fact, act like it.
My personal belief is that whether or not an objective reality is Out There somewhere, all that we can know is our perceptions of it, and the only knowledge that we can actually share with each other is discussions of those perceptions. Which is generally sufficient for daily tasks.
Even granting that to be true, which I'm not necessarily, it still may be the case that some people's "perceptions" of a particular subject are more germane or more valuable than others. Such as an eyewitness to an event, as opposed to somebody who was not there. Or somebody who has specialised knowledge about a subject, rather than some random person on the Internet who likes to think they are an expert.
Sure. It's been a while since I've read specifically on this subject, so these are a bit old, but I got a lot out of these:
Crossan, John Dominic (1991): The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. North Blackburn, CollinsDove.
Lane Fox, Robin (1986): Pagans and Christians. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Lane Fox, Robin (1991): The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Romer, John (1988): Testament: The Bible And History. London, Michael O'Mara.
I thought The Unauthorized Version, especially, was brilliant, although his opinions on the dating of the Gospels are unorthodox (he thinks John was the earliest - but he makes a good case). Testament was good for a broad introduction. Also, more recently, articles and book reviews from time to time in The Skeptic, particularly by Tim Callahan, although I haven't read any of his books.
Spouting claims like this without any evidence doesn't help your cause either. Please englighten me.
Sorry; I assumed since you mentioned them that you knew who they were, they are very well known. The Skeptic's Dictionary has good summaries of the skeptical position on both Velikovksy and Sitchin. Velikovsky was not a scientist, as you described him, but a psychiatrist; similarly, Sitchin is a journalist, not a Hebrew scholar. It was said of Velikovsky that astronomers thought his astronomy was ludicrous, but were impressed by his history, while historians were impressed by his astronomy, but not his history. (The same could probably be said of Sitchin, though fewer academics ever noticed his existence, as opposed to Velikovsky.) And as a graduate in both astrophysics and history, I think both his astronomy and his history are rubbish!
References and Links please...
Well, I gave you my reasoning as to why that slab story is dubious at best, we can discuss that. I'm not about to go through google and dredge up a bunch of dodgy pravda.ru stories (I call it pravda.ru and not Pravda because it actually has no connection with the old Soviet newspaper of that name, AFAIK). But one pravda.ru exclusive that came up recently was about an expedition to Tunguska to prove that the 1908 explosion was caused by a UFO. Even the ufologists on the ufo-updates mailing list found this an absurd, unscientific thing to do. And sure enough, the expedition found the "proof" they set out to find.
Plato goes out of his way to say that the story NOT a parable and that Atlantis really existed.
Yes, and lots of fiction writers have put things like that in their stories too, eg Edgar Allan Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle". It's a rhetorical device, it doesn't make the story more believable, but it makes it a little easier to suspend one's disbelief, maybe. If Plato had been writing a work of history, maybe I would give it more credence, but it's a philosophical dialogue, more concerned with Truth than truth.
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I'm curious, how or why did the IPX influence the Performa? It's just a box, a donut box instead of a pizza box perhaps. Was it really a radical design back then?
Yes, I knew what movie you thought they were talking about :) But IIRC, he didn't even go into space in Firefox, just flew a very fast plane. Sorry, just being pedantic.
Aside from the films others have mentioned, War of the Worlds (the period adaptation, not the Spielberg/Cruise version) is currently due to open on 30 March 2005. I hope it will be good enough to cause a ruckus!
No.
About the treaty still having force, I think Russia legally assumed the rights and responsibilities of the USSR. I can't google up anything very authoritative, but a number of sites have statements like this:
The Russian Federation continues, as from 24 December 1991, the membership of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the United Nations and maintains, as from that date, full responsibility for all the rights and obligations of the USSR under the Charter of the United Nations and multilateral treaties deposited with the Secretary-General.
But yes, on balance it's good for meeting Kyoto's targets!
And how many times in the last, say, 85 years?
The UN was not created to fight Communism. It would have been a bit silly to give the Soviet Union a veto in the Security Council, if that were so. Instead, it was founded to promote world peace, as a League of Nations with teeth. And if you think it's possible to "stack" a global organisation with anti-US countries, when that organisation has virtually every country in the world as its members, then perhaps you should ask yourself why so many countries are anti-US?
Why? I find it very easy to believe, myself. But more importantly, it's what the evidence clearly points to.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. If "jackelopes" were common, then it might. If they are rare - and I submit that they are - then to say this "largely invalidates many evolutionary claims" is unlikely to be true. You have to get specific here, you can't rely on generalities.
You want more evidence? What about the so-called genetic progress that is claimed by evolutionists, when no genetic changes have been observed outside of mutations within a pre-defined range, and plain degregation/minimalization/consolidation of the genetic material?
Creationist hogwash. Where does this "pre-defined" range come from? You can take any measurable genetic change and say it falls within a "pre-defined range" - even if that's the difference between an ant and an antelope. "What about ... plain degregation/minimalization/consolidation of the genetic material?" Yeah, what about it? What does this even mean?
There's a huge difference between basing your science of pre-conceived assumptions and basic your science on emperical evidence.
Any pre-conceived assumptions you'd like to admit to? You wouldn't happen to be a Christian by any chance, would you?
Current evolutionary science practices tend to lean towards the former of the two by relying on the accepted theories of the day. This is the same kind of nonsense that was behind hundreds of years of the flat-world model of geography.
You don't think it's odd that creationism was the accepted theory prior to the 19th century, and that evidence to the contrary accumulated, scientists began to favour evolutionary theories despite much resistance? Perhaps its because evolution fits the evidence better than creationism does? No, perish the thought: scientists much just be stupid.
Such as?
Whether that common ancestor is ape-like enough to technically count as an ape is an interesting question, I don't know - is there a doctor of zoology in the house?
Well, for a start, I don't agree that the viewpoint is valid (as my response to the post I linked to shows). I have a scientific training and I'm about to start a PhD in history, and I think that such thinking is pernicious - scientists are too sensible to fall for it, but this is unfortunately often not the case in the humanities. Just because the truth is often difficult, or sometimes even impossible, to find, does not mean we should not try. It's still a useful goal to strive towards.
That nobody knows the exact date does not excuse inaccuracy - the article was inaccurate to imply that we do. Of course wikipedia only provides a subset of human knowledge, nothing can provide a complete set. That doesn't mean incorrect or misleadingly partial information is permissible.
The idea that the truth is impossible to find, and that information must be tainted by the point of view of the observer is clearly accurate to some extent given that almost no topic is not challenged and re-challenged with varying degrees of success by experts in a given topic's field of study. The nature of light, the size of the earth, the time and place of important historical events, the behavior of a type of animal... all of these are called into question over and over as we understand more and more about them.
No, most topics are not challenged over and over. In any given field of study there are a large number of facts that are settled and never challenged, basically because they are, well, true. At most, they are refined - so we have 99.9% of the whole story, instead of only 99%. The size of the earth is one such fact. (This hasn't been controversial since the 19th century, and if you think it will be again, you're dreaming.) The time and place of important historical events are others. (Name me one such event which has an uncertain date or place and I'll give you 100 more that don't.) You are mistaking the clashes that take place at the frontier of knowledge for the whole - you might get this impression from reading the newspaper, but if you actually get deep into a particular field of study, you will find it's not true. And the bulk of an encyclopedia is going to be concerned with those boring facts that mostly don't change. If something is controversial, and the encyclopedia has to address it, then the controversy should be noted, not one side arbitrarily omitted.
Is that even possible?
No, no, no, you're all wrong! He discusses this in an essay he wrote later (or maybe it was in Profiles of the Future). He didn't patent the idea because he didn't think it would be a practicality any time soon, perhaps not even in his lifetime. And anyway, as he himself pointed out, even if he had patented it in 1945, the patent would have expired before the first geosynchronous communications satellite was launched.
Unfortunately, some people do seem to take a relativist position with respect to errors in Wikipedia. Hopefully, they are in a minority!
The article is not wrong. It gives one date as authorative where there's honest historical question, just like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica did. It evinces a little confusion in the body of the text about the date. That is not great, but the article as a whole is still useful and generally correct.
No, to me, that's still wrong: in glossing over an open question in this way, it's giving a false impression of authoritativeness. An encyclopedia is supposed to summarise what we know, but we don't know when Hamilton was born, to better than one of two possible years anyway, so it is wrong to imply that we do. (Also, was it an open question in 1911? If not, the comparison doesn't help, as the EB was merely reflecting current knowledge, even if that knowledge later turned out to be wrong - and there's nothing any encyclopedia can do about that!) And yes, the rest of the article may be "generally correct", but the point is, I can't really be sure which parts are generally correct, can I? Anyway, it's no news that there are errors in wikipedia, the bigger problem is that the page was getting worse over time, not better. I still think it would be useful to do statistical tests to see if this is a general problem or not.
That's good news then! Thanks for that.
Well, no, actually, because I don't know you from a bar of soap. Which is the problem in a nutshell. With EB you know that whoever wrote an article is an expert on that particular subject (or at least is in the possession of decent research skills!)
Look, I think wikipedia is a good thing, but I only use it as a reference for other people, and then only when I know enough about the subject of the article to know that it's accurate enough. I'd never rely on it as a general reference work, but apparently that's what a lot of people do. EB is far more reliable for that sort of thing.
Here's my suggestion: why not include the ability to have citations/footnotes? If I could click on a link to a source for an important assertion (online or off, personally I'd prefer the latter), a source that I could in theory check myself, then at least I'd know where people are getting their information from - there's a big difference between a scholarly biography of Alexander Hamilton and "The Founding Fathers for Dummies". And with the reference in hand, if I had to, I could track it down myself and verify it. There's no technical reason why this couldn't be done - not doing so is just following the model of dead tree encyclopedias too slavishly.
I understand that this is the wikipedia philosophy, but has anyone checked to see if it actually works? This datum suggests that it may not.
Why are there so many people defending Wikipedia on this? The article is wrong. That's not a hanging offence - as you say, EB will have mistakes too. But the article in Wikipedia seems to have gotten not less but more wrong over time. Surely this is not Wikipeda's goal! The question is, is this an isolated example or part of a larger trend? And that's what we can't tell from a single example. So the experiment should be repeated for a statistically significant sample of all articles.
Actually, the Age of Reason is usually dated to the 18th century, perhaps beginning a little before then. But hey, that's only important if you believe in an objective reality, so who cares, right?
Of course the sciences have moved on since then and many people now believe that understanding the role of the observer is integral to any understanding of reality-- that the two are somehow forever entwined.
Whether this is true or not, for most intents and purposes, it's irrelevant. Sure, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle means that the more precisely I determine the velocity of a particle, the more uncertain its position becomes; but that doesn't mean that, say, using a laser to work out the velocity of that oncoming truck is going to make it smear out across the landscape instead of me. In the real world (take that ironically if you like), we have to rely on perceptions and authorities. And anyone who declares themselves to believe that truth is relative does not, in fact, act like it.
My personal belief is that whether or not an objective reality is Out There somewhere, all that we can know is our perceptions of it, and the only knowledge that we can actually share with each other is discussions of those perceptions. Which is generally sufficient for daily tasks.
Even granting that to be true, which I'm not necessarily, it still may be the case that some people's "perceptions" of a particular subject are more germane or more valuable than others. Such as an eyewitness to an event, as opposed to somebody who was not there. Or somebody who has specialised knowledge about a subject, rather than some random person on the Internet who likes to think they are an expert.
Sure. It's been a while since I've read specifically on this subject, so these are a bit old, but I got a lot out of these:
I thought The Unauthorized Version, especially, was brilliant, although his opinions on the dating of the Gospels are unorthodox (he thinks John was the earliest - but he makes a good case). Testament was good for a broad introduction. Also, more recently, articles and book reviews from time to time in The Skeptic , particularly by Tim Callahan, although I haven't read any of his books.
Spouting claims like this without any evidence doesn't help your cause either. Please englighten me.
Sorry; I assumed since you mentioned them that you knew who they were, they are very well known. The Skeptic's Dictionary has good summaries of the skeptical position on both Velikovksy and Sitchin. Velikovsky was not a scientist, as you described him, but a psychiatrist; similarly, Sitchin is a journalist, not a Hebrew scholar. It was said of Velikovsky that astronomers thought his astronomy was ludicrous, but were impressed by his history, while historians were impressed by his astronomy, but not his history. (The same could probably be said of Sitchin, though fewer academics ever noticed his existence, as opposed to Velikovsky.) And as a graduate in both astrophysics and history, I think both his astronomy and his history are rubbish!
References and Links please...
Well, I gave you my reasoning as to why that slab story is dubious at best, we can discuss that. I'm not about to go through google and dredge up a bunch of dodgy pravda.ru stories (I call it pravda.ru and not Pravda because it actually has no connection with the old Soviet newspaper of that name, AFAIK). But one pravda.ru exclusive that came up recently was about an expedition to Tunguska to prove that the 1908 explosion was caused by a UFO. Even the ufologists on the ufo-updates mailing list found this an absurd, unscientific thing to do. And sure enough, the expedition found the "proof" they set out to find.
Ahh, a consider this a virtual +1, Funny for you!
Yes, and lots of fiction writers have put things like that in their stories too, eg Edgar Allan Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle". It's a rhetorical device, it doesn't make the story more believable, but it makes it a little easier to suspend one's disbelief, maybe. If Plato had been writing a work of history, maybe I would give it more credence, but it's a philosophical dialogue, more concerned with Truth than truth.
What do you mean? It's quite accurate - you didn't think this was the first time Atlantis has been "discovered", did you?