Techdirt had an interview with the designers who created the PADD's for TNG - they stated that the PADDS were indeed meant to be touch-controlled, as were the wall-mounted computer displays.
In our age of wall-mountable flat-screens, using a touch-screen version on a computer would be incredible close to TNG's computer controls, the only missing piece is the quality of voice-input, something which those same TNG designers say they kept from the old show but wouldn't deem practical. Indeed the main problem with voice input isn't technological - we had voice input systems in the 1990s already, it's practical. Shielding the input from outside conversation is hard, shielding the rest of the room from the person talking to his computer is impossible.
Memes are not good or evil in themselves, but they are all paracitic and potentially harmful. The meme only wants to spread, the more successfully it does so- the better. The most successful memes are both long-lived and fast spreading, religions are among the most successful memeplexes, but Beethoven's first symphony is one too (practically everybody can hum the first bar).
Memetics studies the way ideas spread among populations by analogy to viruses and other life-forms. It's a very STRONG analogy and virtually every conclusion drawable from it relates directly to observable real-world processes, which means that we can draw such conclusions and with a very high degree of confidence expect them to hold true.
Saying a meme exists is not saying it's a bad thing, but memes can be bad or good and their success at spreading is almost never influenced by whether they are or not. Critical thinking and demand for proof are our best protections against bad memes. Urban legends are very good examples of very bad memes (Arthur Goldstuck's research have shown just HOW bad) - sites like snopes.com are a defense mechanism for those who have a strong meme-selection immunity in the form of wanting proof. In the most extreme cases, memes are the way mass hysteria spreads - frequently missattributed as demon-infection or other religious explanations, it's physical symptoms to a psychological problem that spreads very rapidly, particularly in high stress situations. The most prevalent outbreaks have been in schools, where frequently the calls for help was to the local minister first (this happens in wealthy and highly educated communities with no lesser prevalence than poor and uneducated ones), secondly to health authorities who - often do the worst possible thing: they start looking for infectious agents. In reality the best treatment is to recognize it for what it is and close the school for a day or two while explaining calmly to people what caused it - and that it will pass if the students are seperated for a few days. Indeed mass-hysteria is most common in high-stress situations and the vast majority of outbreaks (read up on it, it's incredibly interesting) happen during exam times. Ironically - each time it happens the results are almost identical, you'd think teachers and school authorities by now would be educated about it and handle it better. That's the worst kind of meme - the kind that can make people physically ill, spreads more rapidly than any disease and has a debilitating effect on a community - further aggravated by the fact that when it happens the responses are almost always incorrect. Calling the local minister does not have the appropriate calming effect, the initial hysteria is missatrributed to spiritualist explanations, which aggravates the condition and makes it spread faster - calling the minister to come pray only reinforces that meme - nothing makes a meme spread better than when authority figures seem to confirm it- so it spreads more easily.
Yep - all ideas are mental infectious agents. Welcome to research of the 1970s, you only have 40 years of science to catch up with now.
>>It's like whoever designed the religious laws somehow knew about germ theory hundreds of years before anyone else.
>Indeed He did.
Your trite response would have been so much more impressive if the parent's post wasn't true of ALL religions. They all have rules and laws which would reduce disease, and other which would actually increase it's spread. This is true of the one you are thinking off as well.
The most likely answer is that cultures develop certain traditions based on observation - that lots of people who eat a certain food tend to die for example, they don't really have an explanation and it's not scientific but the observation gradually sinks in, and the cultural response is to stop doing the bad thing. Over time it becomes tradition, tradition becomes religion and the explanation becomes "God forbade it" - now the effect is still there (reducing a disease) but even the REASON for the forbidding has been forgotten, and it becomes simply a rule we use to tell our fellow believers from non-believers.
It can get even more complex. There is a lot of Shintoist religious hocus pocus around acupuncture and when practised by Shintoist it is mostly ineffective for anything, yet it survived because it IS an effective treatment for some things. Some acunpuncturists have subjected themselves to scientific testing and the scientific method. They've replaced their explanations of WHY it works with proper medical reasons - and limited the scope and methodology of application to those cases for which it really IS a proper scientifically verified treatment. Their version of acupuncture is proper medical science, and highly efficacious at treating some pain conditions. Most accunpuncture salesmen however are selling snakeoil, based on old hocus pocus, their treatments are rarely as effective as the other kind, and often don't work at all, because they credit religion and false explanations for their work, while the scientifically trained ones know how the body actually works and are using a methodology to influence it's workings in a specifically planned way instead.
Basically - sorry, but your argument does nothing to promote your point of view. Every religion gets some real things right, mostly by accident, it doesn't prove any of them are true about anything else.
>I don't understand why people fail to realize this. As an extension, abstinence prevents a world of problems from even happening.
That's a false assumption, it prevents some problems (assuming human perfection in execution on a level that is near impossible to achieve), but it causes a whole bunch of OTHER health problems. Religious people don't like to admit it but any sexologist will tell you that severe sexual frustration causes massive health problems including many psychological ones but also physical ones (and of course psychological problems can have physical symptoms which just throws more fuel on the fire).
That's not even considering the massive and proven health benefits of a regular and healthy sex life.
Sorry, science says it's a BAD SOLLUTION and the negative side effects are far worse than the risks of non-abstinence. The fact that abstinence in reality is a near impossible thing to achieve on a large scale just means that attempts to enforce it actually AGGRAVATES the problems it was meant to resolve - because it means that the sex which DOES happen is now unsafe on a much larger scale.
Ultimately safe sex is a far better compromise than abstinence if your goal is disease control.
>>And of course, the actions people take in accordance to their religion can make it worse : like burying your dead instead of recycling them as tasty, nutritious Soylent Green!
>TFTFY
While I found your fix hillarious, somebody should probably point out that canibalism would probably be even WORSE for promoting disease spread than burial. For starters it's the only reasonable method for something like a prion disease to become infectious at all.
If that was true... wouldn't scientists have gotten there by now ? On the contrary, it seems we keep on digging deeper, asking the more and more complex questions and we always find answers that are mathematical, scientific and rational without having to get to God. The only time you get to god is if you give up and go for God as a cop-out. Now it's true that deep enough the theories aren't that verified yet (we've yet to come up with a way to experimentally test string theory), but that's ALWAYS been the case. New ideas arise to answer questions - it takes time for science to develop the means to test them, when it can it either proves them false or begins a process of refinement. Religion's answers to anything rational is always and without exception cop-out's that don't REALLY explain anything, just provide an excuse to stop asking the question, and usually based on "common sense" ideas which are verifiably false, mixed with a great deal of deliberate self-delusion, cognitive dissonance and psychological manipulation - none of which promote rational thought.
A good example is the Adam and Eve myth - it seems obvious that if you go back far enough you'd find a first set of parents. They way plants grow and such suggest it - except - reality is that we're basing that common-sense conclusion on incomplete data, just like our ancestors did. In reality, the further back you go - the MORE ancestors you have. You had two parents, FOUR grandparents, eight grandparents, 16 great grandparents (well cousin marriages were much more common then so maybe 15). Either way - the general trend is that any human living today will find his number of ancestors increasing exponentially with ever generation going back. But the number of PEOPLE in total decreases exponentially on the same timeline. So the number of people who are your ancestors out of any previous age becomes an every growing percentage of the total population ! That does NOT make "common sense" but it makes perfect mathematical sense. Add in that until pretty recently the higher up in society you were the more likely you were to raise your kids to adulthood and you can see why EVERYBODY has a famous ancestor or 5. Personally I can prove that Cardinal Richelieu was one of my ancestors and I live in Africa !
But that's the simple reality - the Adam and Eve mistake is common sense with a religious cop-out, but it isn't rational and it isn't true. These days with what we know about speciation the entire concept falls flat.
Oh and please note that I did NOT say AVERAGE number of ethnicities per square kilometer. By an average measure New York and San Francisco would get roughly the same score - but San Francisco is far more diverse and if you actually work out the total ethnicities in each square kilometer (a good size for our purposes) area, you will find San Francisco get a much higher score than New York does. That is what we want, as we need a metric that includes the degree of cultural intermingling - not just the amount of ethnicities present.
Indeed such studies have been done - they consistently find that the higher the degree of intermingling of cultures, the lower the violent crime rates. More-over, the rate of racially motivated violent crimes go down exponentially in reverse correlation to the degree of ethnic mixture. Interestingly when the score is two however, you get the most dangerous neighbourhoods in the world. Two cultures living in close quarters rarely get along, but 5 get along great.
Number of ethnicities per square kilometer over number of violent crimes per year?
This is not exactly hard maths. Both Canada and Brazil got you beat. Hell despite the highest violent crime rate in the world south Africa very nearly still beats you.
So now were arguing semantics. You define core belief so narrowly that if even one Republican voter doesn't agree with a belief yet votes for the party anyway (because he agrees with something else in their platform) then it isn't a core Republican belief anymore. If not... well what percentage is enough to qualify for "uniting View? "
Either way the very concept of a core.party belief is despicable. "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all sorts of directions, that's the only way progress can be made " - Terry Pratchett
>, it was comforting not to live in the state o my country when the church (which is in doctrine IDENTICAL to the presbyterian church in America - and in CORE doctrine to ALL the Evangelical churches - all subscribing to the same six declarations of faith) was essentially in charge and morality was law.
I should clarify this - at the time when the church ruled my country, my marriage would have been illegal, because interracial marriage was deemed immoral.
Strange how for two days now I have challenged you with MORE accurate knowledge of the bible than you yourself held, and made points about it's expectations that you could not refute and you didn't question my knowledge of the topic then. You disagreed only with my interpretation of the conclusions to be drawn.
Here I wasn't talking about the bible - only about the backwards attitude of the moral majority, I was also quite obviously exaggerating for the purpose of effect. To force a woman to bear a child after she was raped is morally the equivalent of forcing her to marry her rapist.
That was my point. Rape being the one case where the bible itself CONDONES abortion. The methodology (stoning at birth) is crude and terribly cruel, and we have better and more humane methods today but the principle is exactly the same.
I also never said ALL republicans are christians, certainly not true ones. I doubt very many of their richy-rich supporters are - to genuinely cling to a religion that say the only thing you care about in life guarantees you damnation would be senseless. I also never suggested that Christians, even Evangelicals and even the most hardcore fundamentalists could never be democrats.
I worked on the basic reality: the vast majority of them are republican, and through the republican party their stated aim is to enforce theocratic morality as legislated law. Never where that morality is about charity or giving, but always when it's prohibitory commands. Whenever they can through those actions reduce my right to freedom of thought, freedom of association and freedom of expression they push for it. I should also tell you that I am bisexual. I'm now engaged to a wonderful young lady but my previous relationship was with a very nice guy, it just didn't work out. But if it had, it's comforting to know that my country would have respected my wishes had I chosen to marry him and it would be entirely legal. Before that I was married once before. I took it very seriously - she didn't, did some pretty terrible things to me actually - in the end I left her with full support of my very religious family (my sister holds a PHD in theology, her husband is a minister). She was of a different race to me. Even though that marriage failed, it was comforting not to live in the state o my country when the church (which is in doctrine IDENTICAL to the presbyterian church in America - and in CORE doctrine to ALL the Evangelical churches - all subscribing to the same six declarations of faith) was essentially in charge and morality was law.
But let me be charitable in how I put this. Give the church the power to make morality into law, and that power will corrupt. The greatest gift America ever gave their churches was the separation of church and state. By NOT giving the churches political power, they protected them from the inevitable corruption of that power. This is not to say that they are incorruptible otherwise but at least the true horrors of a church that is the state and what it does to a religion and it's followers were spared you. At it's worst - you get the inquisition, where people out of genuine faith can inflict the most horrible tortures on people of the SAME religion over only minor differences of interpretation. That is what can happen to even YOUR religion, as noble as you think it is, if it has too much power for too long - it already has more than once. In Iceland it happened the other way around, Protestant torture of Catholics were rampant and terrible. Leave the church out of politics, it's the best thing you can do for the church's own sake, I lived through what happens when even good churches get to dictate state policy... believe me- it's NOT a pretty picture.
>A, that is hardly a core republican belief. It is a belief that some republicans hold; but your statement would exclude any kind of humanist from ever being a republican, and thats just flat out not true.
I don't think that's true. What percentage of Republican nominees openly support Gay marriage ? I'd be surprised if Ron Paul isn't the only one - and I'm not evens sure about him. The reality is that the vast majority of the republican voters demand this off them. I'd say that pretty much qualifies as a core republican belief then.
>B, that does not mean that they are saying that the government has a say in who you have intercourse with. It is saying that the government has a say in who it provides otherwise withheld incentives that go along with marriage-- these incentives are not and never have been rights.
The majority of them would make gay sex illegal if they have a chance - preventing gay marriage is what they are SETTLING for. More-over your logic doesn't hold, if the government offers a privilege to anybody it MUST provide it equally to all citizens, anything else is outright discrimination. Not very long ago in a lot of US states they said the exact same thing about interracial marriage backed all in the name of the thoroughly debunked pseudoscience of eugenics. I put it to you that all discriminatory marriage laws are as bad as eugenics laws and challenge you to provide me ANY rational reason to feel otherwise. Every argument made against gay marriage was likewise made against interracial marriage - and notably, it was in the red states (present day red states I mean) that these laws were made and upheld the longest. Government must treat all citizens as equal before the law, if it provides an incentive it can not exclude anybody from that - anything else is reprehensible discrimination. Who I choose to marry is NOT the government's concern. If they wish to provide incentives to marriage it doesn't become their concern at that point EITHER. But lets take your version to it's full logical conclusion: assume government removes all marriage incentives from EVERYBODY, would you then agree that it has no say in who marries who and that since all marriage is now purely a civil contract gay marriage should now be legal ? If you won't actively campaign to give UP your privileges for straight mariage you MUST demand that it be available to all citizens.
*Yes this position means I'm not in favor of affirmative action. I understand the sentiment that undoing past wrongs may require a temporary increase in privileges for the victims - but that isn't what affirmative action is in PRACTICE. Affirmative action with a stated deadline, I WOULD support.
>Interesting how the Moral Majority is not the republican party, and your entire post is a gigantic non-sequitur. Grats for derailing the conversation with irrelevance.
They are a significant proportion of the republican base, so significant that idiots like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman could very well be the next most powerful person alive - as if Bush didn't fuck up my lfe enough. In case you're still unsure, I'm not American. I wish I didn't have to CARE who you chose to rule yourself, but sadly I do because your imperialistic power-hungry stupidity has meant that I live in a world where the decisions of your president determines MY day to day quality of life. A president whose election I have no say in, that's pretty reprehensible but it's the reality. All I can do try and save myself the horrors that every Republican president in my lifespan has inflicted on every other country in the world (including my own) is to to try and talk some sense into a few Americans and point out how my third world country is actually MORE progressive than yours, and has through that attitude brought itself back from the brink of civil war into a state of truly admirable progress and how I am truly more free than you - because my government does not, indeed CANNOT care about my personal life. In fact discrimination on the ground
Oh I forgot.. rape victims should marry the scumbags right?
Let's not forget that afterwards when the grooms family has made amends we should ritualistically murder them. Such is the example of God's chosen. Let us learn from Jacob after Dina was raped.
Heaven forbid we show some sympathy to a lust inspiring sin tempting poor teenage girl who dared to be anywhere without a chaperone
Is it not Republicans who believe that who I like to fuck is somehow a government concern? Neither party believes in small government. The only difference is which aspect of your life they choose to control. Having a choice between my sex life being controlled along with what books I can read or helping a hungry man eat and a rape victim not have to bear the fruits of her rapists loins I think the lattegr is the lesser evil.
Interesting how the moral majority won't even make an exception for rape victims. The Bible gives a rape victim the right to have the baby stoned at birth surely abortion is a more humane
Documentaries are notorious for bad science. I have seen all too many of them that focuses on a researcher testing a theory - finding positive results and then declaring it a victorious discovery. The reality of science is never that simple and good scientists NEVER try to prove their theories. They try to DISPROVE their theories - and only consistent failure by themselves and other scientists to do so gives their theories credence. The kind of "science" you see in documentaries are at best views on interesting research being done - they are far from establishing any useful facts.
I wasn't aware of that - it certainly changes the picture. My view tends to be that the bible is much like the history books of ancient greek historians - mixed with lots of mythology and a tendency to choose the good story over the acurate account. We know the battle depicted in 300 really happened (the Battle of Thermopylae), we know the location (though these days it's quite a bit further from the beach than it was then), and most historians now are quite sure the real Persian army was about 100 thousands, that's roughly a tenth of what the ancient texts recorded - and the Greek army was closer to 7000 than the 300 recorded (and kept to in the movie). We suspect the battle of Troy really happened, but was it really over a woman ? Was there really a horse ? Was there really a hero called Achilles ? Even if there was - we can be sure he wasn't invincible EXCEPT for his tendon, that's exaggeration, he was probably quite a powerful warrior, but getting his Achilles-tendon cut would take down even the best fighter. Or the ENTIRE EVENT could have been made up. Troy has been found, and archeology shows it was destroyed and rebuilt hundreds of times - it's a ladder of cities upon cities - impossible to confirm any particular event with that. The bible I think is much the same, so telling the really true bits from the myth is very hard, archeology can help - but archeology is a science that must make a lot of guesswork because it has so little evidence to work from and must interpret that evidence without any verifiable context.
An example I remember from university: until very recently it was widely believed that greek actors wore high-heels, probably because they hoped it would help their voices carry. The reason for the belief was an archeological find: a statuette of a greek actor, who had spikes on his feet. More recently somebody suggested the spikes were added to the statuete so it could be made to stand in a display/carry board with holes drilled into it. An equally plausible explanation - and now the more popular theory (and it means that the actors could have worn any shoes).
So that makes trying to speak conclusively on the truth of any ancient text an excercise in futility. The bible is no different.
I was 14 and it was a stupid and dangerous game to play - no doubt about that, very lucky the kid got away with a broken nose. I should mention the shot never left my hand. I was showing how I would move when doing shotput, not actually tossing a shot in the middle of nowhere. Basically he got hit really hard in the nose with an iron ball held in my hand, but he wasn't thrown with it, probably why the damage was fairly minor.
But yeah, I wouldn't do that now - as a 14 year old kid filled with hormones, I didn't think far enough to not do it.
>Not if you define seperate species as species that are unable to interbreed. Various lines of Homo could have descended separately down the evolutionary tree for a while, but not diverged enough that when they came together again, they were unable to interbreed.
There was even a recent/. story about research proving that -after finding characteristic neanderthal genes in all humans outside Africa. Prove positive that early homo sapiens could and DID interbreed with homo neanderthalenses.
>The prophets probably have been in existence given the timeframe of 1000-400 before the canonization, but even the existence of david and salomon are under question up until now at least as universal rulers over israel. I personally dont doubt both existed, but I personally doubt Salamon really was the ruler over the huge rich realm. But in the end, who really cares about all this.
One major piece of evidence in favor of Solomon's existence and scale of his empire is archeological. Kings list a number of fortified cities built by him - all of them have been found, and their ruins matched the technical descriptions in the bible so closely that the archeologists actually use the bibilical phrases once one wall was located to predict (and consistently find) other major landmarks (such as the main gates). But all that proves is that powerful kings tend to be proud of their achievements and document them well.
THIS. You can also mention to those detractors that 99% of all crimes against children are committed by people they know. Stranger-fear is irrational and based on er... nothing, and on the contrary the conditioned "don't talk to strangers" thing is more harmful to kids safety. There was a case recently of a child who got lost in a Utah state park, he saw numerous adults during the 6 days before he was found - and didn't approach any of them, in fact hid away, because he'd been told not to talk to strangers. Scared already... he clung to what he'd be taught as safety measures, and did the worst thing he could - and stayed lost and in danger that much longer.
The good news is he was found - it's also how we know this. Not talking to strangers nearly cost him his life. Talking to strangers is NOT dangerous.
LOL, sorta reminds me of my last fight (I told the story in another comment so I won't again) but your comment about shot-put reminded me of something else. Back in my first year of high school we still had hazing (back then it was also still legal), on one occasion this consisted of me and a few other standard 6's (as it was called at the time) being sent to carry the athletic gear of the field after practice. Among them the boxes of shotput balls. As kids do, we got to playing around a bit, I grabbed one and demonstrated my shotput technique (I was also in the team in highschool - we were REQUIRED to participate in athletics and it was the only event I was any good at) not realizing there was a kid behind me. Shot struck him right on the nose and broke it. It was entirely an accident and the kid in question later became my best friend in highschool - but I know the force a shot contains, and I can quite believe that 17 year old who does it on the team could knock somebody unconscious even barefisted.
>Sure you did. I seriously doubt you did anything you say. You act like you had power in high school and, individually, students have no power. Asshole students should be failed, but in this day and age, no one is failed. That is why we get people like you; people who think they know everything when really, they are ignorant of how the real world works.
I didn't grow up in America, I grew up in South Africa - and I started high-school the year Nelson Mandela took office. Let's just say the political climate at the time were highly in favor of students and oppositional to discipline and control because the government had just finished a 50 year rebellion against a system that used discipline and control to subjugate people. The truth is - I was smarter than the bad teachers. Which is perhaps why I outearn them 5 times over at age 30.
> It is a shame your teachers never taught you what they were supposed to teach you. See, they weren't supposed to teach you to question authority. They were supposed to teach discipline, how to think, and a particular subject. Instead of creating an adult, they created an overgrown teen-ager.
They didn't teach me question authority my point is that they SHOULD have. Questioning authority is a GOOD thing - and the biggest mistake in society is that our schools try to suppress this vital skills. Universities actively GRADE on the same skill. They DEMAND that you question their authority and knowledge, particularly in the humanities but in technical fields as well. All of science depends on questioning established and authoritive knowledge. All social progress depends on somebody questioning authority. On a Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus. I believe schools should ENCOURAGE this. You think my teachers were supposed to teach me how to think - the bad ones would have agreed with you, but I think they SHOULD have been teaching me how to think CRITICALLY. The good ones agreed.
>Oh, and to be successful in university, all one has to do is parrot back the professor's words and not express one's own opinions if they run counter to the professor's.
I don't know about your university, but in mine that would have been an instant fail. On the contrary, to get a (very rare in some of my subjects like philosophy of science) A you had to do the exact opposite: contradict the professor's opinion - and then give a sound and rational argument with solid evidence on why your theory is valid. If you could prove your theory to be at least as valid an interpretation of the facts as his - THAT was an A, if you parroted what he said, you'd get an automatic fail because that wasn't considered having learned anything.
> It will be funny when you go out into the real world and question authority with "solidly thought out rational arguments" and kill your career
I've been working in the real world for over a decade, I earn in the top 5% in in my chosen career (programming and operating system development), I am working for one of the best and most innovative companies in the field - very much like working at google was ten years ago and I'm earning at 30 what my dad (an electrical engineer, one of the best in this third world country - a man who designed the power grids for more than half the cities in this country 15 years ago) is earning at 55. I am in fact very successful - and the fact that I DO question authority and do it WELL has only HELPED my career. I don't just accept what managers say - I demand it makes sense, or I convince them why they should change it. Managers who are not open to such arguments have been there in my career. I quit the jobs they offered and moved on to companies that still VALUED my knowledge enough to value my opinions.
>Nothing like being passed over for promotions, raises, and bonuses, then fired for insubordination to make one a desirable employe
Odd how none of those things have EVER happened to me. I've been given promotions, raises and bonusses (I once got a 6K bonus for exceptional ef
>The problem is there are no examples of a 5th grade dropout begging on the street corner.
"I dropped out in 8th grade, and that was stupid. You see if you drop out in 8th grade you may as well have dropped out in second grade because you're qualified for exactly the same job. In fact the second grade drop-out is MORE qualified than you because he's got 6 years experience" - Chris Rock.
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I decided to look up the link, it was arstechnica actually, not techdirt. Sorry.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/08/how-star-trek-artists-imagined-the-ipad-23-years-ago.ars
Techdirt had an interview with the designers who created the PADD's for TNG - they stated that the PADDS were indeed meant to be touch-controlled, as were the wall-mounted computer displays.
In our age of wall-mountable flat-screens, using a touch-screen version on a computer would be incredible close to TNG's computer controls, the only missing piece is the quality of voice-input, something which those same TNG designers say they kept from the old show but wouldn't deem practical.
Indeed the main problem with voice input isn't technological - we had voice input systems in the 1990s already, it's practical. Shielding the input from outside conversation is hard, shielding the rest of the room from the person talking to his computer is impossible.
Actually, yes they are - ever heard of memetics ?
Memes are not good or evil in themselves, but they are all paracitic and potentially harmful. The meme only wants to spread, the more successfully it does so- the better. The most successful memes are both long-lived and fast spreading, religions are among the most successful memeplexes, but Beethoven's first symphony is one too (practically everybody can hum the first bar).
Memetics studies the way ideas spread among populations by analogy to viruses and other life-forms. It's a very STRONG analogy and virtually every conclusion drawable from it relates directly to observable real-world processes, which means that we can draw such conclusions and with a very high degree of confidence expect them to hold true.
Saying a meme exists is not saying it's a bad thing, but memes can be bad or good and their success at spreading is almost never influenced by whether they are or not. Critical thinking and demand for proof are our best protections against bad memes.
Urban legends are very good examples of very bad memes (Arthur Goldstuck's research have shown just HOW bad) - sites like snopes.com are a defense mechanism for those who have a strong meme-selection immunity in the form of wanting proof.
In the most extreme cases, memes are the way mass hysteria spreads - frequently missattributed as demon-infection or other religious explanations, it's physical symptoms to a psychological problem that spreads very rapidly, particularly in high stress situations.
The most prevalent outbreaks have been in schools, where frequently the calls for help was to the local minister first (this happens in wealthy and highly educated communities with no lesser prevalence than poor and uneducated ones), secondly to health authorities who - often do the worst possible thing: they start looking for infectious agents. In reality the best treatment is to recognize it for what it is and close the school for a day or two while explaining calmly to people what caused it - and that it will pass if the students are seperated for a few days.
Indeed mass-hysteria is most common in high-stress situations and the vast majority of outbreaks (read up on it, it's incredibly interesting) happen during exam times. Ironically - each time it happens the results are almost identical, you'd think teachers and school authorities by now would be educated about it and handle it better.
That's the worst kind of meme - the kind that can make people physically ill, spreads more rapidly than any disease and has a debilitating effect on a community - further aggravated by the fact that when it happens the responses are almost always incorrect. Calling the local minister does not have the appropriate calming effect, the initial hysteria is missatrributed to spiritualist explanations, which aggravates the condition and makes it spread faster - calling the minister to come pray only reinforces that meme - nothing makes a meme spread better than when authority figures seem to confirm it- so it spreads more easily.
Yep - all ideas are mental infectious agents. Welcome to research of the 1970s, you only have 40 years of science to catch up with now.
>>It's like whoever designed the religious laws somehow knew about germ theory hundreds of years before anyone else.
>Indeed He did.
Your trite response would have been so much more impressive if the parent's post wasn't true of ALL religions. They all have rules and laws which would reduce disease, and other which would actually increase it's spread. This is true of the one you are thinking off as well.
The most likely answer is that cultures develop certain traditions based on observation - that lots of people who eat a certain food tend to die for example, they don't really have an explanation and it's not scientific but the observation gradually sinks in, and the cultural response is to stop doing the bad thing. Over time it becomes tradition, tradition becomes religion and the explanation becomes "God forbade it" - now the effect is still there (reducing a disease) but even the REASON for the forbidding has been forgotten, and it becomes simply a rule we use to tell our fellow believers from non-believers.
It can get even more complex. There is a lot of Shintoist religious hocus pocus around acupuncture and when practised by Shintoist it is mostly ineffective for anything, yet it survived because it IS an effective treatment for some things. Some acunpuncturists have subjected themselves to scientific testing and the scientific method. They've replaced their explanations of WHY it works with proper medical reasons - and limited the scope and methodology of application to those cases for which it really IS a proper scientifically verified treatment. Their version of acupuncture is proper medical science, and highly efficacious at treating some pain conditions. Most accunpuncture salesmen however are selling snakeoil, based on old hocus pocus, their treatments are rarely as effective as the other kind, and often don't work at all, because they credit religion and false explanations for their work, while the scientifically trained ones know how the body actually works and are using a methodology to influence it's workings in a specifically planned way instead.
Basically - sorry, but your argument does nothing to promote your point of view. Every religion gets some real things right, mostly by accident, it doesn't prove any of them are true about anything else.
>I don't understand why people fail to realize this. As an extension, abstinence prevents a world of problems from even happening.
That's a false assumption, it prevents some problems (assuming human perfection in execution on a level that is near impossible to achieve), but it causes a whole bunch of OTHER health problems. Religious people don't like to admit it but any sexologist will tell you that severe sexual frustration causes massive health problems including many psychological ones but also physical ones (and of course psychological problems can have physical symptoms which just throws more fuel on the fire).
That's not even considering the massive and proven health benefits of a regular and healthy sex life.
Sorry, science says it's a BAD SOLLUTION and the negative side effects are far worse than the risks of non-abstinence. The fact that abstinence in reality is a near impossible thing to achieve on a large scale just means that attempts to enforce it actually AGGRAVATES the problems it was meant to resolve - because it means that the sex which DOES happen is now unsafe on a much larger scale.
Ultimately safe sex is a far better compromise than abstinence if your goal is disease control.
>>And of course, the actions people take in accordance to their religion can make it worse : like burying your dead instead of recycling them as tasty, nutritious Soylent Green!
>TFTFY
While I found your fix hillarious, somebody should probably point out that canibalism would probably be even WORSE for promoting disease spread than burial. For starters it's the only reasonable method for something like a prion disease to become infectious at all.
>Ask these enough times and you'll arrive at God.
If that was true... wouldn't scientists have gotten there by now ? On the contrary, it seems we keep on digging deeper, asking the more and more complex questions and we always find answers that are mathematical, scientific and rational without having to get to God.
The only time you get to god is if you give up and go for God as a cop-out.
Now it's true that deep enough the theories aren't that verified yet (we've yet to come up with a way to experimentally test string theory), but that's ALWAYS been the case. New ideas arise to answer questions - it takes time for science to develop the means to test them, when it can it either proves them false or begins a process of refinement.
Religion's answers to anything rational is always and without exception cop-out's that don't REALLY explain anything, just provide an excuse to stop asking the question, and usually based on "common sense" ideas which are verifiably false, mixed with a great deal of deliberate self-delusion, cognitive dissonance and psychological manipulation - none of which promote rational thought.
A good example is the Adam and Eve myth - it seems obvious that if you go back far enough you'd find a first set of parents. They way plants grow and such suggest it - except - reality is that we're basing that common-sense conclusion on incomplete data, just like our ancestors did.
In reality, the further back you go - the MORE ancestors you have. You had two parents, FOUR grandparents, eight grandparents, 16 great grandparents (well cousin marriages were much more common then so maybe 15). Either way - the general trend is that any human living today will find his number of ancestors increasing exponentially with ever generation going back. But the number of PEOPLE in total decreases exponentially on the same timeline.
So the number of people who are your ancestors out of any previous age becomes an every growing percentage of the total population !
That does NOT make "common sense" but it makes perfect mathematical sense. Add in that until pretty recently the higher up in society you were the more likely you were to raise your kids to adulthood and you can see why EVERYBODY has a famous ancestor or 5. Personally I can prove that Cardinal Richelieu was one of my ancestors and I live in Africa !
But that's the simple reality - the Adam and Eve mistake is common sense with a religious cop-out, but it isn't rational and it isn't true. These days with what we know about speciation the entire concept falls flat.
Oh and please note that I did NOT say AVERAGE number of ethnicities per square kilometer. By an average measure New York and San Francisco would get roughly the same score - but San Francisco is far more diverse and if you actually work out the total ethnicities in each square kilometer (a good size for our purposes) area, you will find San Francisco get a much higher score than New York does.
That is what we want, as we need a metric that includes the degree of cultural intermingling - not just the amount of ethnicities present.
Indeed such studies have been done - they consistently find that the higher the degree of intermingling of cultures, the lower the violent crime rates. More-over, the rate of racially motivated violent crimes go down exponentially in reverse correlation to the degree of ethnic mixture. Interestingly when the score is two however, you get the most dangerous neighbourhoods in the world.
Two cultures living in close quarters rarely get along, but 5 get along great.
Number of ethnicities per square kilometer over number of violent crimes per year?
This is not exactly hard maths. Both Canada and Brazil got you beat. Hell despite the highest violent crime rate in the world south Africa very nearly still beats you.
So now were arguing semantics. You define core belief so narrowly that if even one Republican voter doesn't agree with a belief yet votes for the party anyway (because he agrees with something else in their platform) then it isn't a core Republican belief anymore. If not... well what percentage is enough to qualify for "uniting View? "
Either way the very concept of a core.party belief is despicable.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all sorts of directions, that's the only way progress can be made " - Terry Pratchett
>, it was comforting not to live in the state o my country when the church (which is in doctrine IDENTICAL to the presbyterian church in America - and in CORE doctrine to ALL the Evangelical churches - all subscribing to the same six declarations of faith) was essentially in charge and morality was law.
I should clarify this - at the time when the church ruled my country, my marriage would have been illegal, because interracial marriage was deemed immoral.
Strange how for two days now I have challenged you with MORE accurate knowledge of the bible than you yourself held, and made points about it's expectations that you could not refute and you didn't question my knowledge of the topic then. You disagreed only with my interpretation of the conclusions to be drawn.
Here I wasn't talking about the bible - only about the backwards attitude of the moral majority, I was also quite obviously exaggerating for the purpose of effect. To force a woman to bear a child after she was raped is morally the equivalent of forcing her to marry her rapist.
That was my point. Rape being the one case where the bible itself CONDONES abortion. The methodology (stoning at birth) is crude and terribly cruel, and we have better and more humane methods today but the principle is exactly the same.
I also never said ALL republicans are christians, certainly not true ones. I doubt very many of their richy-rich supporters are - to genuinely cling to a religion that say the only thing you care about in life guarantees you damnation would be senseless. I also never suggested that Christians, even Evangelicals and even the most hardcore fundamentalists could never be democrats.
I worked on the basic reality: the vast majority of them are republican, and through the republican party their stated aim is to enforce theocratic morality as legislated law. Never where that morality is about charity or giving, but always when it's prohibitory commands. Whenever they can through those actions reduce my right to freedom of thought, freedom of association and freedom of expression they push for it.
I should also tell you that I am bisexual. I'm now engaged to a wonderful young lady but my previous relationship was with a very nice guy, it just didn't work out. But if it had, it's comforting to know that my country would have respected my wishes had I chosen to marry him and it would be entirely legal. Before that I was married once before. I took it very seriously - she didn't, did some pretty terrible things to me actually - in the end I left her with full support of my very religious family (my sister holds a PHD in theology, her husband is a minister). She was of a different race to me. Even though that marriage failed, it was comforting not to live in the state o my country when the church (which is in doctrine IDENTICAL to the presbyterian church in America - and in CORE doctrine to ALL the Evangelical churches - all subscribing to the same six declarations of faith) was essentially in charge and morality was law.
But let me be charitable in how I put this. Give the church the power to make morality into law, and that power will corrupt. The greatest gift America ever gave their churches was the separation of church and state. By NOT giving the churches political power, they protected them from the inevitable corruption of that power. This is not to say that they are incorruptible otherwise but at least the true horrors of a church that is the state and what it does to a religion and it's followers were spared you.
At it's worst - you get the inquisition, where people out of genuine faith can inflict the most horrible tortures on people of the SAME religion over only minor differences of interpretation.
That is what can happen to even YOUR religion, as noble as you think it is, if it has too much power for too long - it already has more than once. In Iceland it happened the other way around, Protestant torture of Catholics were rampant and terrible.
Leave the church out of politics, it's the best thing you can do for the church's own sake, I lived through what happens when even good churches get to dictate state policy... believe me- it's NOT a pretty picture.
>A, that is hardly a core republican belief. It is a belief that some republicans hold; but your statement would exclude any kind of humanist from ever being a republican, and thats just flat out not true.
I don't think that's true. What percentage of Republican nominees openly support Gay marriage ? I'd be surprised if Ron Paul isn't the only one - and I'm not evens sure about him. The reality is that the vast majority of the republican voters demand this off them. I'd say that pretty much qualifies as a core republican belief then.
>B, that does not mean that they are saying that the government has a say in who you have intercourse with. It is saying that the government has a say in who it provides otherwise withheld incentives that go along with marriage-- these incentives are not and never have been rights.
The majority of them would make gay sex illegal if they have a chance - preventing gay marriage is what they are SETTLING for. More-over your logic doesn't hold, if the government offers a privilege to anybody it MUST provide it equally to all citizens, anything else is outright discrimination. Not very long ago in a lot of US states they said the exact same thing about interracial marriage backed all in the name of the thoroughly debunked pseudoscience of eugenics.
I put it to you that all discriminatory marriage laws are as bad as eugenics laws and challenge you to provide me ANY rational reason to feel otherwise. Every argument made against gay marriage was likewise made against interracial marriage - and notably, it was in the red states (present day red states I mean) that these laws were made and upheld the longest.
Government must treat all citizens as equal before the law, if it provides an incentive it can not exclude anybody from that - anything else is reprehensible discrimination. Who I choose to marry is NOT the government's concern. If they wish to provide incentives to marriage it doesn't become their concern at that point EITHER.
But lets take your version to it's full logical conclusion: assume government removes all marriage incentives from EVERYBODY, would you then agree that it has no say in who marries who and that since all marriage is now purely a civil contract gay marriage should now be legal ?
If you won't actively campaign to give UP your privileges for straight mariage you MUST demand that it be available to all citizens.
*Yes this position means I'm not in favor of affirmative action. I understand the sentiment that undoing past wrongs may require a temporary increase in privileges for the victims - but that isn't what affirmative action is in PRACTICE. Affirmative action with a stated deadline, I WOULD support.
>Interesting how the Moral Majority is not the republican party, and your entire post is a gigantic non-sequitur. Grats for derailing the conversation with irrelevance.
They are a significant proportion of the republican base, so significant that idiots like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman could very well be the next most powerful person alive - as if Bush didn't fuck up my lfe enough. In case you're still unsure, I'm not American. I wish I didn't have to CARE who you chose to rule yourself, but sadly I do because your imperialistic power-hungry stupidity has meant that I live in a world where the decisions of your president determines MY day to day quality of life. A president whose election I have no say in, that's pretty reprehensible but it's the reality.
All I can do try and save myself the horrors that every Republican president in my lifespan has inflicted on every other country in the world (including my own) is to to try and talk some sense into a few Americans and point out how my third world country is actually MORE progressive than yours, and has through that attitude brought itself back from the brink of civil war into a state of truly admirable progress and how I am truly more free than you - because my government does not, indeed CANNOT care about my personal life. In fact discrimination on the ground
Oh I forgot .. rape victims should marry the scumbags right?
Let's not forget that afterwards when the grooms family has made amends we should ritualistically murder them. Such is the example of God's chosen. Let us learn from Jacob after Dina was raped.
Heaven forbid we show some sympathy to a lust inspiring sin tempting poor teenage girl who dared to be anywhere without a chaperone
Is it not Republicans who believe that who I like to fuck is somehow a government concern? Neither party believes in small government. The only difference is which aspect of your life they choose to control. Having a choice between my sex life being controlled along with what books I can read or helping a hungry man eat and a rape victim not have to bear the fruits of her rapists loins I think the lattegr is the lesser evil.
Interesting how the moral majority won't even make an exception for rape victims. The Bible gives a rape victim the right to have the baby stoned at birth surely abortion is a more humane
Documentaries are notorious for bad science. I have seen all too many of them that focuses on a researcher testing a theory - finding positive results and then declaring it a victorious discovery.
The reality of science is never that simple and good scientists NEVER try to prove their theories. They try to DISPROVE their theories - and only consistent failure by themselves and other scientists to do so gives their theories credence.
The kind of "science" you see in documentaries are at best views on interesting research being done - they are far from establishing any useful facts.
>On the other hand there are naked boobs there, so what do Christians say about naked boobs?
Oooh, I know that one. They say "Naked boobs were created by God almighty as shameful attachments for Eve to use in luring men to their sinful doom."
I wasn't aware of that - it certainly changes the picture. My view tends to be that the bible is much like the history books of ancient greek historians - mixed with lots of mythology and a tendency to choose the good story over the acurate account.
We know the battle depicted in 300 really happened (the Battle of Thermopylae), we know the location (though these days it's quite a bit further from the beach than it was then), and most historians now are quite sure the real Persian army was about 100 thousands, that's roughly a tenth of what the ancient texts recorded - and the Greek army was closer to 7000 than the 300 recorded (and kept to in the movie).
We suspect the battle of Troy really happened, but was it really over a woman ? Was there really a horse ? Was there really a hero called Achilles ? Even if there was - we can be sure he wasn't invincible EXCEPT for his tendon, that's exaggeration, he was probably quite a powerful warrior, but getting his Achilles-tendon cut would take down even the best fighter. Or the ENTIRE EVENT could have been made up. Troy has been found, and archeology shows it was destroyed and rebuilt hundreds of times - it's a ladder of cities upon cities - impossible to confirm any particular event with that.
The bible I think is much the same, so telling the really true bits from the myth is very hard, archeology can help - but archeology is a science that must make a lot of guesswork because it has so little evidence to work from and must interpret that evidence without any verifiable context.
An example I remember from university: until very recently it was widely believed that greek actors wore high-heels, probably because they hoped it would help their voices carry. The reason for the belief was an archeological find: a statuette of a greek actor, who had spikes on his feet.
More recently somebody suggested the spikes were added to the statuete so it could be made to stand in a display/carry board with holes drilled into it. An equally plausible explanation - and now the more popular theory (and it means that the actors could have worn any shoes).
So that makes trying to speak conclusively on the truth of any ancient text an excercise in futility. The bible is no different.
I was 14 and it was a stupid and dangerous game to play - no doubt about that, very lucky the kid got away with a broken nose. I should mention the shot never left my hand. I was showing how I would move when doing shotput, not actually tossing a shot in the middle of nowhere. Basically he got hit really hard in the nose with an iron ball held in my hand, but he wasn't thrown with it, probably why the damage was fairly minor.
But yeah, I wouldn't do that now - as a 14 year old kid filled with hormones, I didn't think far enough to not do it.
>Not if you define seperate species as species that are unable to interbreed. Various lines of Homo could have descended separately down the evolutionary tree for a while, but not diverged enough that when they came together again, they were unable to interbreed.
There was even a recent /. story about research proving that -after finding characteristic neanderthal genes in all humans outside Africa. Prove positive that early homo sapiens could and DID interbreed with homo neanderthalenses.
>The prophets probably have been in existence given the timeframe of 1000-400 before the canonization, but even the existence of david and salomon are under question up until now at least as universal rulers over israel. I personally dont doubt both existed, but I personally doubt Salamon really was the ruler over the huge rich realm. But in the end, who really cares about all this.
One major piece of evidence in favor of Solomon's existence and scale of his empire is archeological. Kings list a number of fortified cities built by him - all of them have been found, and their ruins matched the technical descriptions in the bible so closely that the archeologists actually use the bibilical phrases once one wall was located to predict (and consistently find) other major landmarks (such as the main gates).
But all that proves is that powerful kings tend to be proud of their achievements and document them well.
THIS.
You can also mention to those detractors that 99% of all crimes against children are committed by people they know. Stranger-fear is irrational and based on er... nothing, and on the contrary the conditioned "don't talk to strangers" thing is more harmful to kids safety. There was a case recently of a child who got lost in a Utah state park, he saw numerous adults during the 6 days before he was found - and didn't approach any of them, in fact hid away, because he'd been told not to talk to strangers. Scared already... he clung to what he'd be taught as safety measures, and did the worst thing he could - and stayed lost and in danger that much longer.
The good news is he was found - it's also how we know this. Not talking to strangers nearly cost him his life.
Talking to strangers is NOT dangerous.
LOL, sorta reminds me of my last fight (I told the story in another comment so I won't again) but your comment about shot-put reminded me of something else. Back in my first year of high school we still had hazing (back then it was also still legal), on one occasion this consisted of me and a few other standard 6's (as it was called at the time) being sent to carry the athletic gear of the field after practice. Among them the boxes of shotput balls. As kids do, we got to playing around a bit, I grabbed one and demonstrated my shotput technique (I was also in the team in highschool - we were REQUIRED to participate in athletics and it was the only event I was any good at) not realizing there was a kid behind me. Shot struck him right on the nose and broke it.
It was entirely an accident and the kid in question later became my best friend in highschool - but I know the force a shot contains, and I can quite believe that 17 year old who does it on the team could knock somebody unconscious even barefisted.
>Sure you did. I seriously doubt you did anything you say. You act like you had power in high school and, individually, students have no power. Asshole students should be failed, but in this day and age, no one is failed. That is why we get people like you; people who think they know everything when really, they are ignorant of how the real world works.
I didn't grow up in America, I grew up in South Africa - and I started high-school the year Nelson Mandela took office. Let's just say the political climate at the time were highly in favor of students and oppositional to discipline and control because the government had just finished a 50 year rebellion against a system that used discipline and control to subjugate people. The truth is - I was smarter than the bad teachers. Which is perhaps why I outearn them 5 times over at age 30.
> It is a shame your teachers never taught you what they were supposed to teach you. See, they weren't supposed to teach you to question authority. They were supposed to teach discipline, how to think, and a particular subject. Instead of creating an adult, they created an overgrown teen-ager.
They didn't teach me question authority my point is that they SHOULD have. Questioning authority is a GOOD thing - and the biggest mistake in society is that our schools try to suppress this vital skills. Universities actively GRADE on the same skill. They DEMAND that you question their authority and knowledge, particularly in the humanities but in technical fields as well. All of science depends on questioning established and authoritive knowledge. All social progress depends on somebody questioning authority. On a Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus.
I believe schools should ENCOURAGE this.
You think my teachers were supposed to teach me how to think - the bad ones would have agreed with you, but I think they SHOULD have been teaching me how to think CRITICALLY. The good ones agreed.
>Oh, and to be successful in university, all one has to do is parrot back the professor's words and not express one's own opinions if they run counter to the professor's.
I don't know about your university, but in mine that would have been an instant fail. On the contrary, to get a (very rare in some of my subjects like philosophy of science) A you had to do the exact opposite: contradict the professor's opinion - and then give a sound and rational argument with solid evidence on why your theory is valid. If you could prove your theory to be at least as valid an interpretation of the facts as his - THAT was an A, if you parroted what he said, you'd get an automatic fail because that wasn't considered having learned anything.
> It will be funny when you go out into the real world and question authority with "solidly thought out rational arguments" and kill your career
I've been working in the real world for over a decade, I earn in the top 5% in in my chosen career (programming and operating system development), I am working for one of the best and most innovative companies in the field - very much like working at google was ten years ago and I'm earning at 30 what my dad (an electrical engineer, one of the best in this third world country - a man who designed the power grids for more than half the cities in this country 15 years ago) is earning at 55. I am in fact very successful - and the fact that I DO question authority and do it WELL has only HELPED my career. I don't just accept what managers say - I demand it makes sense, or I convince them why they should change it. Managers who are not open to such arguments have been there in my career. I quit the jobs they offered and moved on to companies that still VALUED my knowledge enough to value my opinions.
>Nothing like being passed over for promotions, raises, and bonuses, then fired for insubordination to make one a desirable employe
Odd how none of those things have EVER happened to me. I've been given promotions, raises and bonusses (I once got a 6K bonus for exceptional ef
>The problem is there are no examples of a 5th grade dropout begging on the street corner.
"I dropped out in 8th grade, and that was stupid. You see if you drop out in 8th grade you may as well have dropped out in second grade because you're qualified for exactly the same job. In fact the second grade drop-out is MORE qualified than you because he's got 6 years experience" - Chris Rock.