Even more, if splitting up the songs in your album sullies their integrity, why not just release the album as a single, large file? Why even call them separate songs in the first place? Why let them be used separately in any situation (e.g. car commercials)?
Except that Nintendo is raking in large fields of cash. It's arguably the most successful console of this generation, even though it disappoints a lot of gamers.
In fact, having a robust normal microbiota is associated with health and commensal E. coli (like those from which typical lab strains are derived) are part of that. They hang out, digest materials you wouldn't, make some vitamins, keep your immune system up to snuff (these interactions are essentially 'expected' by your system), and most importantly take up space and nutrients that potential pathogens could use.
In addition, the pathogenic E. coli have several virulence factors that lab strains don't (except when studying the disease-causing strains, of course). Finally, you, yes YOU or maybe YOU over there are chock full of bacteria that are directly associated with disease and full of nasty virulence factors. You are for all purposes a walking disease-passing machine which is simply capable of keeping these microbes in check. One errant cough could have you passing on an antibiotic-resistant S. pyogenes and causing someone who is immune compromised to come down with Scarlet Fever. In short, you are much more dangerous than these E. coli, yet a lot of you probably don't even wash your hands properly.
Why is that frightening? Every in vivo molecular bio lab has hundreds (thousands?) of 'unique' bacterial strains, particularly E. coli. They are less viable in your system than the billions of bacteria hanging out on your skin (some of which are probably Staph. aureus) right now. In addition, they're usually derivatives of E. coli K12. Similar E. coli are in your colon right now, being nice, normal microbiota.
I may have misinterpreted your comment, though. It's mostly the last sentence that makes me think you're saying that the bacteria are dangerous or something. A sufficient quantity of bacteria for this experiment would involve 16 small tubes of broth and one day, so I don't see how it's... frightening. Your refrigerator is more diverse and vastly more likely to spread disease.
I guess it's difficult since their page keeps talking about 'our E. coli', but we also never see any results from 'their E. coli'. I think they're more hypothetical at this point.
They have an interesting model and system, but nothing on their actual E. coli or their results. Everything is idealized and simulated. I think there must have just been some kind of miscommunication. If they had actually created bacteria that solved sudoku, they would have done better in the contest.
Umm, no. A mosque is pretty trivial, it in no way compares to large-scale human rights violations and is a drop in the bucket in terms of social weight. Incidentally, preventing people from privately building structures for practicing their religion directly violates basic principles of individual ownership and liberty. You seem too eager to sell the principles we should be defending just to trivially smack something Islamic.
No, my attitude is that everyone should be held to basic standards, including human rights. If you want to have crazy personal beliefs that don't significantly impact others, go right ahead. If, like fundamentalist Islam, they entail violations of human rights, you should be opposed legally and punished internationally. If you're 'in between' and forward the violation of human rights with your speech (but not in actions), you should be loudly criticized.
That is *not* a justification for knee-jerk violence and vague prejudice, however.
Perhaps they're too preoccupied dealing with overreactions like this: "Where is the opposition from the left to the celebratory mosque being built overlooking the 9/11 site?"
I mean really, who cares? I am simply not the kind of person to get pissed off by offensive private speech/ownership. You'd think 'the right' would also be in favor of that, but when it comes to Islam they have clearly positioned themselves in irrational prejudice. Now, despite my criticism of your statements, some of which are easily bash-able, I am vehemently opposed to Islam intellectually and to fundamentalist Islam (which is very popular) on a human level. It's used to back actions diametrically opposed to basic human rights and freedoms and it has a clear and straightforward substrate: the Quran. With the Quran, it's easy to find justifications for killing people for what we rightly consider minor crimes (or not crimes at all) or for the subjugation of women. Now, my part in my opposition to Islam is to criticize it publicly on an academic level and based on its opposition to human rights. I also participate in rational skeptic and humanist groups which oppose Islam on both fronts as well with political advocacy and by showing alternatives. What do you do?
In fact, your whole last paragraph unintentionally makes one good argument for why 'the left' (and the center...) tends to focus on being diverse. You seem to be condemning all Muslims and treating them as dangerous or offensive and 'the right' will play that card much as they've appealed to racists since the '60s. In response, acknowledging that there's plenty of 'good' Muslims is a good political play and is more accurate, while the whole ordeal is distracting from the real issue due to hyperbole. This happens to a much greater extent in Europe where it does an even greater disservice, as they have much more serious problems with Muslim immigrants who oppose the core of Western beliefs in those countries (freedom of speech, equal rights, etc). They have to deal with the actual xenophobes and racists who use Islam as a proxy for their intolerance, which pushes some people to think that attacking Islam is just veiled xenophobia. Both 'sides' are at fault for being irrational, but at least one's irrationality is the product of an aversion to prejudicial hatred.
And what does the facebook debacle have to do with "the other side"? If you're implying that any bending over backwards for Muslim intolerance is something only for 'the left', you're dead wrong. In fact, it often (as in this case) has a direct monetary incentive, something a non-lefty should sympathize with!
Agreed. And just like any social setting, there are intolerant jerks who will rail on someone, personally, for holding different opinions. Luckily they're very rare.
I can't defend everything said by the GP, but I disagree with some of what you said.
First, science is not silent on the issue of ontology. It has a fairly clear methodology for the rejection of hypotheses and by practicality, those which do not meet rigorous standards are treated as effectively false (e.g. moon leprechauns). It is often silent when it comes to religious claims, however. There are a few obvious reasons (and I certainly couldn't name all the reasons):
1) We grow up in cultures where NOMA is stressed and religion is supposed to be private (except in politics and innuendo... and when it violates the status quo!). This is a comfortable scenario (in some ways) for both science and society in general - conflict is avoided. Science could be taught to anyone and there isn't supposed to be a fear of losing your religion. Religious people can be scientists without fearing that conflict (and they do very good work).
2) Science is usually fairly silent when it comes to pseudoscience or otherwise false/unpredictive claims. There isn't going to be a lot of discussion of religious claims in the primary literature (aside from polls) because they aren't useful in science. They're less productive than a confused undergrad's failed experiment (like mine...).
Of course I agree that most members of religions (and most people) are basically decent, or at least average, and that extreme members of any group can unfairly give them a bad name. This is true for any group, as you point out. However, context is important here. First, by discussing well-verified claims as on the same level as fanciful stories and myths (which we do in NOMA), we indulge in a kind of epistemological relativism that gives the extremism some undeserved legitimacy. When claims don't have to be defended but can be waved away as personal, religious beliefs, shouldn't you expect very strange beliefs to be considered acceptable (to an individual)? But I'm starting to rant again... sorry.
I am not saying that extremists are the only people reading their religions correctly or who are honest about their beliefs. However, they at least take the questions very seriously, I would say more seriously than most, and they have very clear religious substrates for their beliefs and actions: religious social movements and sacred texts, which will often call for sacrifices, ostracization, discrimination, and inequality right along with calls for peace and charity. It is not coincidence that someone can find their religion to support almost anything they'd like to do and receive the tacit social support that comes with NOMA- and religion-positive societies.
tl;dr: if a religion simply asked that you treat others as you would like to be treated and to give charitably, no one would have any basis for criticizing religion for the atrocities of the religious. Instead, there are oftentimes vague, fairly inconsistent religious instruction manuals with built-in prejudice supported by society and social groups. We can thank basic human decency for the fact that most people ignore the horrible parts of their religions.
"Denying or affirming religion is the same action. By GGP asserting that the being in people's beliefs is "imaginary," it is denying not merely the reality, but the very possibility of it becoming reality."
No, it's calling them imaginary, as in false. I know everyone likes to pretend that in science, everything is tentatively true or reasonable until data comes in to explicitly support or deny it, but that's simply not true. In science, fanciful ideas with no predictive value do not receive respect, they are treated as false until shown otherwise. The null hypothesis and all that. If you claim that leprechauns cause tidal shifts, I will gladly tell you it's imaginary, despite having done no original research on the subject. If you claim a fanciful, capricious creature created the universe, I'll do the same. It's shorthand for, "that has no empirical support and seems more like speculation than serious academic thought".
"Denial of anything unknown, whether it is asserted by a theorist or a scientist, is denial of potential knowledge"
What does that even mean? Who is denying "potential knowledge"? Rational skepticism holds that you wait for the evidence. Go ahead, bring evidence, scientists are completely open to it! Do the work! Until then, your claims will be treated as putatively false, certainty in their falsehood increasing with how little they have to do with empirical research.
"Science, which posits that knowledge is unprovable absolutely, only deny assertions that observations deny. That which is unobservable can neither be denied nor affirmed by science."
The confusion here stems from mixing layman's terms and the philosophy of science. Let's say I claim that purple space creatures seeded life on earth. The way to state an objection in philosophy of science terms is this: such a claim is supported by no empirical observations, or if there are observations, they are of a questionable nature (as tends to be the case with fantastical claims). It also doesn't make any predictions, and is thus fruitless. It could be true. Any fantastic claim *could* be true, even when it conflicts with a mountain of data. It is for precisely this reason that you'd simply say, "that's imaginary" instead. It communicates the same idea - your claim (or my claim) is implausible, supported by nothing, is useless, and fits the pattern of imaginary things.
"Your GP isn't being critical, he's being intolerant and narrow-minded."
How so? They're being obviously critical, calling religious claims imaginary and stating that efforts could be better spent on other activities. How are they being intolerant?
tl;dr: science doesn't work like you think it does, it does not tentatively respect nonsense claims but treats them with the lack of respect they deserve. This can be pedantically stated as, "claims with no supporting data or apparent predictive value are not entertained without strong criticism." It's actually quite a harsh environment, for good reason.
Let's not forget that the results overwhelmingly show atheism/agnosticism and 'liberal' religious attitudes to dominate the "elite" scientists' opinions, whereas the societal context has overwhelming theism and a huge amount of religious conservatism. Yet the author is stressing the amount of religion among scientists? It just keeps decreasing and decreasing, *despite* the society in which scientists were raised. I haven't read the book, but the choice of emphasis in these articles is very silly.
I have seen far, far too many Christians tie themselves in knots making God's "love" compatible with large-scale genocide (have you read the Old Testament?) and misogyny to accept their claims about deified love at face value. But good on you for recognizing the human decency of scientists, who are often confused with their nerdy, self-obsessed caricatures in movies.
Mod parent up. I haven't read the book, but hopefully the author doesn't find it all that strange or incompatible for atheists to be spiritual. Spiritual != religious just like running a soup kitchen != religious.
Religion does not answer the 'why'. It wishes it could and gives you speculation, ignorance, and, best of all, ancient speculation and ignorance.
It is true that science isn't going to give you personal value judgments. It will show you how X affects Y, it can show you how dismal conditions are if you set up society certain ways, but it won't tell you that it's "good" because that isn't something directly supportable by the data, it must be set up by individuals and societies. Because science won't do that, for some reason people assume it's A-OK for someone in a frock to jump in and claim authority over that domain - you must question that. Human ethics and philosophy address those questions (and are more general) without having to appeal to pseudoscientific/unscientific claims to existence of things like a deity, hell, creation myths, or intrinsic properties of the universe (which religion does routinely, despite your appeal to NOMA). This does not make a given set of ethics or philosophy automatically right, either, nor does it mean they have "the answers".
There's a common confusion here. Grandparent is not being explicitly intolerant - they are being critical. Criticizing religion or stating a problem are not in the same league as demanding coercion or social ostracization (i.e. racism). The fact that racism is based on ignorance, blind fear, and the intrinsic properties of a person also makes it a poor comparison for a criticism of religion, which has (quite obviously) many intellectual faults and is an academic (heh) topic, something chosen by people.
I think I've made it clear that I also oppose religious thinking, but that should not detract from my point.
The second point I'd like to make is about being "open-minded" in science. Being open-minded does not mean accepting ideas uncritically or even being polite about all ideas. It means being open to a reasonable possibility and deferring to the data and predictions, no matter how strange. Some ideas or claims are simply stupid or insulting (and utterly unsupported) and being "open-minded" should not and *will not* impede scientists from saying so. Luckily, most scientists who are also religious don't confuse their religion with their science and try to keep up a strict barrier: most caims about existence subject to rigorous skepticism are placed in the 'science' area, "personal beliefs" about existence largely shielded from skepticism in the "religion" area. While I think this is intellectually indefensible, they are at least *mostly* consistent within each of their domains.
I seem to be rambling. The point is that the status quo holds claims of existence to have at least two domains: religious and scientific. These domains are fairly arbitrary, the primary difference being that religious claims are utterly unsupported by rigorous empiricism and are not routinely subjected to intense rational skepticism. Pointing out the failings of religion and their illogic does *not* make one intolerant, it makes one observant. It does *not* make one narrow-minded to criticize or to treat truly ridiculous ideas as laughable, it makes one realistic.
Finally, if I had such a knee-jerk reaction as the parent, I'd call them intolerant as well - they are clearly not fine with criticisms of religion and want it to be suppressed as "intolerance". Instead, I know that they are just falling prey to the status quo of religious claims getting the nerf bat treatment.
tl;dr: grandparent isn't intolerant, they're critical. There's a difference and scientists, of all people, know this very well.
Universe created itself: funny, I don't see this being any kind of non-Christian dogma. The people you're probably criticizing i.e. skeptics tend to be fine with admitting they don't know where 'everything' came from. Pretending to know things when you truly don't is a more religious idea. Yes, there's the Big Bang, but that's a highly explanatory model of how our universe formed, but does not answer the ultimate question of 'why is there something?'.
The Nature Channel = Humanist ethics: care to name a single person who forwards this? You can certainly learn a lot about ethics itself from some nature programs, but have you ever actually met anyone who claims to base their actions on, 'lion eats dead zebra'?
"none of us actually exist": what?
I expect someone might claim that the "Jewish zombie' quip is just as inaccurate as your claims, but that simply isn't the case. The most that can be legitimately said about that oft-repeated meme is that it's disrespectful to Christianity and Jesus returned from the dead != undead (as if that's the point).
Personally, I prefer smaller theater, circularly polarized 3D experiences. I thought that Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was much more pleasant at a 'normal' theater than in IMAX, where there was significant and obvious bleeding of the images.
With that said, I haven't seen a side-by-side comparison using the same screen size, which would be important. I also tend to find 3D distracting when you have to hold your head perfectly level at all times (you'll be quickly reminded why) and a scene with high contrasts shows you 2-3 images at once. In my opinion, 3D is usually encumbering for an experience, not an improvement. The exceptions are tasteful nature documentaries (no random attacks on the audience just because they can) and Avatar. The worst of the worst are those films with about 10 minutes of 3D, where it's obviously not worth even the novelty and all it does is remind you that hey, you're watching a movie. Completely destroys the point of many movies, which is immersion.
Yes, I did hone my complaining skills on the job:).
Wikipedia is wrong. IMAX 3D is and has been linear polarization for quite some time now (when it wasn't the shuttered glasses). The only way it could be accurate is if IMAX switched within the last few weeks, which would not represent an Avatar experience anyways.
I know this because I've worked at an IMAX theater for ~4 years. Here's a quick test to see if the 3D glasses you are using are circularly or linearly polarized:
1. Get to pairs of glasses (borrow a friend's).
2. Place one of the lenses of one pair in front of one from the other so that you're looking through two lenses at once.
3. Rotate the glasses, see if the light getting through cycle through black/clear (a period of 180).
Linearly polarized glasses will do this, since it relies on the angle at which you overlap the glasses/projected image. Circularly polarized will not and will be either all-dark or all-light regardless of rotation.
I'd like to add that while there are TLRs for Gram-negative structures (e.g. lipopolysaccharide), the same is true for things like lipoteichoic acid, found in Gram-positive bacteria. In fact, the same TLR that binds lipopolysaccharide binds lipoteichoic acid!
Bacteria in the blood or otherwise sterile tissues is 'recognized' as a bad thing by many cells, particularly immune cells. Gram-negative or Gram-positive, your system (if effective) will produce a response and inflammation.
And yeah, the summary was way too sensationalistic and... stupid. Gram-negative is a normal term, not something you put in scare quotes, and a particular Acinetobacter species (or more likely, subtype) is the actual topic of the article. The Gram stain has been around for over 100 years. If people start thinking a particular Gram type is scary then I'm going to have a few angry years.
> No. If you were asked to peer review a paper, would YOU sign off on it without seeing the data that went into it or (usually) the program code that processed the data? Really?
Yes. Do you seriously expect to see the data for every experiment or paper put together? Do you have any idea how much raw data there can be? Peer review doesn't work by looking at raw data *unless* there's a reason that it's particularly dubious or if the dataset is extremely small and part of the paper itself. Ideally, the data would be open. Realistically, you don't get paid for open data (not as often, anyways) and you can use that same data to make further papers, making it in your interest to *not* disclose with the very first one. This is common in all sorts of sciences.
> Most of this global warming stuff isn't much more than the data. They take raw data and either process it and make projections or use it to feed a computer model that makes projections. The only part published is the end result which is taken on faith since there isn't much more to work with. The raw data isn't submitted as part of the publication/peer review process and apparently the actual computer code driving the models is equally private.
Yes, a lot of science is proprietary. However, if you had actually managed to *read the summary*, not even RTFA, just the summary, you'd know that there is also quite a bit of open work done on climate and it matches the *normal science*.
> So exactly has been being reviewed all these years?
The papers. What else do you think gets reviewed? Peer review at a journal isn't about tearing through another person's data, it's about screening for signs of fraud or incompetence. Peer review doesn't stop there, either, it continues on after publication as your *peers* (colleagues) criticize your reports or works. If necessary, a reviewer (at the journal) could access more particular things or ask for them.
> And forget duplicating the 'work.' You would basically be finding your own datasets (often with no way to even know if you are using the same data) and doing everything from scratch. Science has really fallen this far?
What, you think scientists were completely open in the past compared to today? BS. Despite your utter speculation as to how you could duplicate an experiment without *sharing the dataset or exact model*, it's done all the time in all kinds of sciences. Papers are specific enough for anyone competent in the field to do the same work, it doesn't mean you can have someone else's work handed to you on a silver platter with explanations of what a listed Monte Carlo method is.
Perhaps in the future, rather than running your mouth off with apparently no familiarity with science, you ask some actual scientists! They're quite accessible, even those apparently 'fallen' climatologists.
Slashdot Mirror
Even more, if splitting up the songs in your album sullies their integrity, why not just release the album as a single, large file? Why even call them separate songs in the first place? Why let them be used separately in any situation (e.g. car commercials)?
Not sure which part of that is scary. I did that yesterday, just not with a nanopore machine.
Except that Nintendo is raking in large fields of cash. It's arguably the most successful console of this generation, even though it disappoints a lot of gamers.
In fact, having a robust normal microbiota is associated with health and commensal E. coli (like those from which typical lab strains are derived) are part of that. They hang out, digest materials you wouldn't, make some vitamins, keep your immune system up to snuff (these interactions are essentially 'expected' by your system), and most importantly take up space and nutrients that potential pathogens could use.
In addition, the pathogenic E. coli have several virulence factors that lab strains don't (except when studying the disease-causing strains, of course). Finally, you, yes YOU or maybe YOU over there are chock full of bacteria that are directly associated with disease and full of nasty virulence factors. You are for all purposes a walking disease-passing machine which is simply capable of keeping these microbes in check. One errant cough could have you passing on an antibiotic-resistant S. pyogenes and causing someone who is immune compromised to come down with Scarlet Fever. In short, you are much more dangerous than these E. coli, yet a lot of you probably don't even wash your hands properly.
Why is that frightening? Every in vivo molecular bio lab has hundreds (thousands?) of 'unique' bacterial strains, particularly E. coli. They are less viable in your system than the billions of bacteria hanging out on your skin (some of which are probably Staph. aureus) right now. In addition, they're usually derivatives of E. coli K12. Similar E. coli are in your colon right now, being nice, normal microbiota.
I may have misinterpreted your comment, though. It's mostly the last sentence that makes me think you're saying that the bacteria are dangerous or something. A sufficient quantity of bacteria for this experiment would involve 16 small tubes of broth and one day, so I don't see how it's... frightening. Your refrigerator is more diverse and vastly more likely to spread disease.
Outside of this article, there's no indication that these E. coli actually exist. Check the U Tokyo iGem page: http://2010.igem.org/Team:UT-Tokyo/Sudoku_construct
I guess it's difficult since their page keeps talking about 'our E. coli', but we also never see any results from 'their E. coli'. I think they're more hypothetical at this point.
They have an interesting model and system, but nothing on their actual E. coli or their results. Everything is idealized and simulated. I think there must have just been some kind of miscommunication. If they had actually created bacteria that solved sudoku, they would have done better in the contest.
Umm, no. A mosque is pretty trivial, it in no way compares to large-scale human rights violations and is a drop in the bucket in terms of social weight. Incidentally, preventing people from privately building structures for practicing their religion directly violates basic principles of individual ownership and liberty. You seem too eager to sell the principles we should be defending just to trivially smack something Islamic.
No, my attitude is that everyone should be held to basic standards, including human rights. If you want to have crazy personal beliefs that don't significantly impact others, go right ahead. If, like fundamentalist Islam, they entail violations of human rights, you should be opposed legally and punished internationally. If you're 'in between' and forward the violation of human rights with your speech (but not in actions), you should be loudly criticized.
That is *not* a justification for knee-jerk violence and vague prejudice, however.
Perhaps they're too preoccupied dealing with overreactions like this: "Where is the opposition from the left to the celebratory mosque being built overlooking the 9/11 site?"
I mean really, who cares? I am simply not the kind of person to get pissed off by offensive private speech/ownership. You'd think 'the right' would also be in favor of that, but when it comes to Islam they have clearly positioned themselves in irrational prejudice. Now, despite my criticism of your statements, some of which are easily bash-able, I am vehemently opposed to Islam intellectually and to fundamentalist Islam (which is very popular) on a human level. It's used to back actions diametrically opposed to basic human rights and freedoms and it has a clear and straightforward substrate: the Quran. With the Quran, it's easy to find justifications for killing people for what we rightly consider minor crimes (or not crimes at all) or for the subjugation of women. Now, my part in my opposition to Islam is to criticize it publicly on an academic level and based on its opposition to human rights. I also participate in rational skeptic and humanist groups which oppose Islam on both fronts as well with political advocacy and by showing alternatives. What do you do?
In fact, your whole last paragraph unintentionally makes one good argument for why 'the left' (and the center...) tends to focus on being diverse. You seem to be condemning all Muslims and treating them as dangerous or offensive and 'the right' will play that card much as they've appealed to racists since the '60s. In response, acknowledging that there's plenty of 'good' Muslims is a good political play and is more accurate, while the whole ordeal is distracting from the real issue due to hyperbole. This happens to a much greater extent in Europe where it does an even greater disservice, as they have much more serious problems with Muslim immigrants who oppose the core of Western beliefs in those countries (freedom of speech, equal rights, etc). They have to deal with the actual xenophobes and racists who use Islam as a proxy for their intolerance, which pushes some people to think that attacking Islam is just veiled xenophobia. Both 'sides' are at fault for being irrational, but at least one's irrationality is the product of an aversion to prejudicial hatred.
And what does the facebook debacle have to do with "the other side"? If you're implying that any bending over backwards for Muslim intolerance is something only for 'the left', you're dead wrong. In fact, it often (as in this case) has a direct monetary incentive, something a non-lefty should sympathize with!
So what you're saying is that I completely misinterpreted what you said and failed at the quote?
Accepted, good sir. When can I expect my incompetence medal to arrive?
Agreed. And just like any social setting, there are intolerant jerks who will rail on someone, personally, for holding different opinions. Luckily they're very rare.
I can't defend everything said by the GP, but I disagree with some of what you said.
First, science is not silent on the issue of ontology. It has a fairly clear methodology for the rejection of hypotheses and by practicality, those which do not meet rigorous standards are treated as effectively false (e.g. moon leprechauns). It is often silent when it comes to religious claims, however. There are a few obvious reasons (and I certainly couldn't name all the reasons):
1) We grow up in cultures where NOMA is stressed and religion is supposed to be private (except in politics and innuendo... and when it violates the status quo!). This is a comfortable scenario (in some ways) for both science and society in general - conflict is avoided. Science could be taught to anyone and there isn't supposed to be a fear of losing your religion. Religious people can be scientists without fearing that conflict (and they do very good work).
2) Science is usually fairly silent when it comes to pseudoscience or otherwise false/unpredictive claims. There isn't going to be a lot of discussion of religious claims in the primary literature (aside from polls) because they aren't useful in science. They're less productive than a confused undergrad's failed experiment (like mine...).
Of course I agree that most members of religions (and most people) are basically decent, or at least average, and that extreme members of any group can unfairly give them a bad name. This is true for any group, as you point out. However, context is important here. First, by discussing well-verified claims as on the same level as fanciful stories and myths (which we do in NOMA), we indulge in a kind of epistemological relativism that gives the extremism some undeserved legitimacy. When claims don't have to be defended but can be waved away as personal, religious beliefs, shouldn't you expect very strange beliefs to be considered acceptable (to an individual)? But I'm starting to rant again... sorry.
I am not saying that extremists are the only people reading their religions correctly or who are honest about their beliefs. However, they at least take the questions very seriously, I would say more seriously than most, and they have very clear religious substrates for their beliefs and actions: religious social movements and sacred texts, which will often call for sacrifices, ostracization, discrimination, and inequality right along with calls for peace and charity. It is not coincidence that someone can find their religion to support almost anything they'd like to do and receive the tacit social support that comes with NOMA- and religion-positive societies.
tl;dr: if a religion simply asked that you treat others as you would like to be treated and to give charitably, no one would have any basis for criticizing religion for the atrocities of the religious. Instead, there are oftentimes vague, fairly inconsistent religious instruction manuals with built-in prejudice supported by society and social groups. We can thank basic human decency for the fact that most people ignore the horrible parts of their religions.
"Denying or affirming religion is the same action. By GGP asserting that the being in people's beliefs is "imaginary," it is denying not merely the reality, but the very possibility of it becoming reality."
No, it's calling them imaginary, as in false. I know everyone likes to pretend that in science, everything is tentatively true or reasonable until data comes in to explicitly support or deny it, but that's simply not true. In science, fanciful ideas with no predictive value do not receive respect, they are treated as false until shown otherwise. The null hypothesis and all that. If you claim that leprechauns cause tidal shifts, I will gladly tell you it's imaginary, despite having done no original research on the subject. If you claim a fanciful, capricious creature created the universe, I'll do the same. It's shorthand for, "that has no empirical support and seems more like speculation than serious academic thought".
"Denial of anything unknown, whether it is asserted by a theorist or a scientist, is denial of potential knowledge"
What does that even mean? Who is denying "potential knowledge"? Rational skepticism holds that you wait for the evidence. Go ahead, bring evidence, scientists are completely open to it! Do the work! Until then, your claims will be treated as putatively false, certainty in their falsehood increasing with how little they have to do with empirical research.
"Science, which posits that knowledge is unprovable absolutely, only deny assertions that observations deny. That which is unobservable can neither be denied nor affirmed by science."
The confusion here stems from mixing layman's terms and the philosophy of science. Let's say I claim that purple space creatures seeded life on earth. The way to state an objection in philosophy of science terms is this: such a claim is supported by no empirical observations, or if there are observations, they are of a questionable nature (as tends to be the case with fantastical claims). It also doesn't make any predictions, and is thus fruitless. It could be true. Any fantastic claim *could* be true, even when it conflicts with a mountain of data. It is for precisely this reason that you'd simply say, "that's imaginary" instead. It communicates the same idea - your claim (or my claim) is implausible, supported by nothing, is useless, and fits the pattern of imaginary things.
"Your GP isn't being critical, he's being intolerant and narrow-minded."
How so? They're being obviously critical, calling religious claims imaginary and stating that efforts could be better spent on other activities. How are they being intolerant?
tl;dr: science doesn't work like you think it does, it does not tentatively respect nonsense claims but treats them with the lack of respect they deserve. This can be pedantically stated as, "claims with no supporting data or apparent predictive value are not entertained without strong criticism." It's actually quite a harsh environment, for good reason.
Uh... that almost-quote usually refers to every person being guilty. So you're essentially saying everyone is religious, based on this study?
I'm going to assume you didn't even read the summary... I mean do I really have to explain how you're wrong?
Let's not forget that the results overwhelmingly show atheism/agnosticism and 'liberal' religious attitudes to dominate the "elite" scientists' opinions, whereas the societal context has overwhelming theism and a huge amount of religious conservatism. Yet the author is stressing the amount of religion among scientists? It just keeps decreasing and decreasing, *despite* the society in which scientists were raised. I haven't read the book, but the choice of emphasis in these articles is very silly.
I have seen far, far too many Christians tie themselves in knots making God's "love" compatible with large-scale genocide (have you read the Old Testament?) and misogyny to accept their claims about deified love at face value. But good on you for recognizing the human decency of scientists, who are often confused with their nerdy, self-obsessed caricatures in movies.
Mod parent up. I haven't read the book, but hopefully the author doesn't find it all that strange or incompatible for atheists to be spiritual. Spiritual != religious just like running a soup kitchen != religious.
Religion does not answer the 'why'. It wishes it could and gives you speculation, ignorance, and, best of all, ancient speculation and ignorance.
It is true that science isn't going to give you personal value judgments. It will show you how X affects Y, it can show you how dismal conditions are if you set up society certain ways, but it won't tell you that it's "good" because that isn't something directly supportable by the data, it must be set up by individuals and societies. Because science won't do that, for some reason people assume it's A-OK for someone in a frock to jump in and claim authority over that domain - you must question that. Human ethics and philosophy address those questions (and are more general) without having to appeal to pseudoscientific/unscientific claims to existence of things like a deity, hell, creation myths, or intrinsic properties of the universe (which religion does routinely, despite your appeal to NOMA). This does not make a given set of ethics or philosophy automatically right, either, nor does it mean they have "the answers".
There's a common confusion here. Grandparent is not being explicitly intolerant - they are being critical. Criticizing religion or stating a problem are not in the same league as demanding coercion or social ostracization (i.e. racism). The fact that racism is based on ignorance, blind fear, and the intrinsic properties of a person also makes it a poor comparison for a criticism of religion, which has (quite obviously) many intellectual faults and is an academic (heh) topic, something chosen by people.
I think I've made it clear that I also oppose religious thinking, but that should not detract from my point.
The second point I'd like to make is about being "open-minded" in science. Being open-minded does not mean accepting ideas uncritically or even being polite about all ideas. It means being open to a reasonable possibility and deferring to the data and predictions, no matter how strange. Some ideas or claims are simply stupid or insulting (and utterly unsupported) and being "open-minded" should not and *will not* impede scientists from saying so. Luckily, most scientists who are also religious don't confuse their religion with their science and try to keep up a strict barrier: most caims about existence subject to rigorous skepticism are placed in the 'science' area, "personal beliefs" about existence largely shielded from skepticism in the "religion" area. While I think this is intellectually indefensible, they are at least *mostly* consistent within each of their domains.
I seem to be rambling. The point is that the status quo holds claims of existence to have at least two domains: religious and scientific. These domains are fairly arbitrary, the primary difference being that religious claims are utterly unsupported by rigorous empiricism and are not routinely subjected to intense rational skepticism. Pointing out the failings of religion and their illogic does *not* make one intolerant, it makes one observant. It does *not* make one narrow-minded to criticize or to treat truly ridiculous ideas as laughable, it makes one realistic.
Finally, if I had such a knee-jerk reaction as the parent, I'd call them intolerant as well - they are clearly not fine with criticisms of religion and want it to be suppressed as "intolerance". Instead, I know that they are just falling prey to the status quo of religious claims getting the nerf bat treatment.
tl;dr: grandparent isn't intolerant, they're critical. There's a difference and scientists, of all people, know this very well.
Hmm, let's see.
Universe created itself: funny, I don't see this being any kind of non-Christian dogma. The people you're probably criticizing i.e. skeptics tend to be fine with admitting they don't know where 'everything' came from. Pretending to know things when you truly don't is a more religious idea. Yes, there's the Big Bang, but that's a highly explanatory model of how our universe formed, but does not answer the ultimate question of 'why is there something?'.
The Nature Channel = Humanist ethics: care to name a single person who forwards this? You can certainly learn a lot about ethics itself from some nature programs, but have you ever actually met anyone who claims to base their actions on, 'lion eats dead zebra'?
"none of us actually exist": what?
I expect someone might claim that the "Jewish zombie' quip is just as inaccurate as your claims, but that simply isn't the case. The most that can be legitimately said about that oft-repeated meme is that it's disrespectful to Christianity and Jesus returned from the dead != undead (as if that's the point).
Personally, I prefer smaller theater, circularly polarized 3D experiences. I thought that Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was much more pleasant at a 'normal' theater than in IMAX, where there was significant and obvious bleeding of the images.
:).
With that said, I haven't seen a side-by-side comparison using the same screen size, which would be important. I also tend to find 3D distracting when you have to hold your head perfectly level at all times (you'll be quickly reminded why) and a scene with high contrasts shows you 2-3 images at once. In my opinion, 3D is usually encumbering for an experience, not an improvement. The exceptions are tasteful nature documentaries (no random attacks on the audience just because they can) and Avatar. The worst of the worst are those films with about 10 minutes of 3D, where it's obviously not worth even the novelty and all it does is remind you that hey, you're watching a movie. Completely destroys the point of many movies, which is immersion.
Yes, I did hone my complaining skills on the job
Wikipedia is wrong. IMAX 3D is and has been linear polarization for quite some time now (when it wasn't the shuttered glasses). The only way it could be accurate is if IMAX switched within the last few weeks, which would not represent an Avatar experience anyways.
I know this because I've worked at an IMAX theater for ~4 years. Here's a quick test to see if the 3D glasses you are using are circularly or linearly polarized:
1. Get to pairs of glasses (borrow a friend's).
2. Place one of the lenses of one pair in front of one from the other so that you're looking through two lenses at once.
3. Rotate the glasses, see if the light getting through cycle through black/clear (a period of 180).
Linearly polarized glasses will do this, since it relies on the angle at which you overlap the glasses/projected image. Circularly polarized will not and will be either all-dark or all-light regardless of rotation.
I'd like to add that while there are TLRs for Gram-negative structures (e.g. lipopolysaccharide), the same is true for things like lipoteichoic acid, found in Gram-positive bacteria. In fact, the same TLR that binds lipopolysaccharide binds lipoteichoic acid! Bacteria in the blood or otherwise sterile tissues is 'recognized' as a bad thing by many cells, particularly immune cells. Gram-negative or Gram-positive, your system (if effective) will produce a response and inflammation. And yeah, the summary was way too sensationalistic and... stupid. Gram-negative is a normal term, not something you put in scare quotes, and a particular Acinetobacter species (or more likely, subtype) is the actual topic of the article. The Gram stain has been around for over 100 years. If people start thinking a particular Gram type is scary then I'm going to have a few angry years.
If someone's willing to pay for it, that would be great.
> No. If you were asked to peer review a paper, would YOU sign off on it without seeing the data that went into it or (usually) the program code that processed the data? Really?
Yes. Do you seriously expect to see the data for every experiment or paper put together? Do you have any idea how much raw data there can be? Peer review doesn't work by looking at raw data *unless* there's a reason that it's particularly dubious or if the dataset is extremely small and part of the paper itself. Ideally, the data would be open. Realistically, you don't get paid for open data (not as often, anyways) and you can use that same data to make further papers, making it in your interest to *not* disclose with the very first one. This is common in all sorts of sciences.
> Most of this global warming stuff isn't much more than the data. They take raw data and either process it and make projections or use it to feed a computer model that makes projections. The only part published is the end result which is taken on faith since there isn't much more to work with. The raw data isn't submitted as part of the publication/peer review process and apparently the actual computer code driving the models is equally private.
Yes, a lot of science is proprietary. However, if you had actually managed to *read the summary*, not even RTFA, just the summary, you'd know that there is also quite a bit of open work done on climate and it matches the *normal science*.
> So exactly has been being reviewed all these years?
The papers. What else do you think gets reviewed? Peer review at a journal isn't about tearing through another person's data, it's about screening for signs of fraud or incompetence. Peer review doesn't stop there, either, it continues on after publication as your *peers* (colleagues) criticize your reports or works. If necessary, a reviewer (at the journal) could access more particular things or ask for them.
> And forget duplicating the 'work.' You would basically be finding your own datasets (often with no way to even know if you are using the same data) and doing everything from scratch. Science has really fallen this far?
What, you think scientists were completely open in the past compared to today? BS. Despite your utter speculation as to how you could duplicate an experiment without *sharing the dataset or exact model*, it's done all the time in all kinds of sciences. Papers are specific enough for anyone competent in the field to do the same work, it doesn't mean you can have someone else's work handed to you on a silver platter with explanations of what a listed Monte Carlo method is.
Perhaps in the future, rather than running your mouth off with apparently no familiarity with science, you ask some actual scientists! They're quite accessible, even those apparently 'fallen' climatologists.