I'm sorry, but you simply cannot claim "consistency" as proof of divine intervention. Tolkein was pretty consistent too. Considering that he's supposedly all-powerful, I would expect the Christain god to be more consistent than he already is. The Bible as it stands contradicts itself in many places.
One thing I do not believe in is credentials. I do not give special standing to a person simply because he has a piece of paper. I'm afraid I don't have time to thoroughly read your link, but I skimmed it and could not find any mention of evidence which did not rest on the assumption that the contents of the Bible are already true. If I have missed some convincing, objective, external evidence perhaps you could point it out.
Your discussion of the Book of Job is bizarre. It took me thirty seconds to punch up the Wikipedia article on the Orion constellation and discover that the distances to the various stars involved range from 240 light-years to 1300 light-years. This is most emphatically not a structure which is gravitationally bound.
Yes, Pleiades is gravitationally bound, but so what? Some vaguely suggestive imagery that just happens to coincide with how the actual cluster is structured is not particularly convincing. Especially when the other one is completely wrong.
I really don't understand why you accept such vague nonsense. "He hung the Earth on nothing" could mean practically anything. If this god really wanted to prove that he knew stuff others didn't, why not simply come right out and say "The Earth is a sphere that rests in space, suspended by nothing, resting on nothing."? Or he could say something like, "Although it appears to be instantaneous, the speed of light is actually roughly equal to one billion cubits in a single heartbeat." Why make us guess and speculate and twist words to divine their meaning? It just makes no sense. A good prediction should be understandable before it comes to pass, after all, so discovering that the Earth really is "hung on nothing" and then going back and deciding that, hey, Job got it right after all is doing things entirely backwards.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to defend the ridiculous proposal in the article. For all its faults, at least NASA actually flies stuff! My only point is that experience with the Shuttle and what it requires does not necessarily convey to everything else.
The real problem with the Shuttle was simply that it was a $10 billion craft with a $5 billion budget. Everything else stems from that. If Congress had funded it more fully or if NASA had managed to realize early in the game that they were only going to get half the money they needed, it would have turned out a whole lot better. Considering that, the rest ended up pretty well.
I work on the Shuttle External Tank, so I see every day how demanding, how difficult and precise manned space flight has to be.
Not to diminish your work in any way, but what you see every day is how demanding, how difficult, and how precise manned space flight has to be when done by NASA.
The Russian program shows that a "big dumb" approach with much less focus on precision and "failure is not an option" can achieve similar results, or at the very least a similar safety record.
The Shuttle is just a poor design for a space vehicle. It's essentially a test vehicle which NASA attempts to use as an operational vehicle. It was designed for a much bigger budget than it actually got, and NASA has been paying the price for that shortfall for nearly three decades now.
At least one successful ejection has been made from an SR-71 at mach 3, which is roughly the speed that Challenger was doing when it broke up, assuming that your 1km/s figure is correct. The reason why this was survivable is because what kills an ejecting pilot isn't speed, but rather dynamic pressure caused by speed. Dynamic pressure increases with the square of speed,but it also drops off with altitude. Your 300m/s figure is correct, but that's assuming a sea-level ejection. If you're at a high altitude then the true speed goes up accordingly. (If you're familiar with aviation terms, it's the indicated airspeed that kills you, not the true airspeed.) I don't know how high Challenger was when it broke up, but if it was more than about 12 miles then it's conceivable that ejections from it could have been survivable.
Not to take away from your post overall, as you make many excellent points, I just wanted to elaborate on that one thing.
It is true that Moore's Law was much more limited in scope than people generally take it to mean, as you indicate. It's usually taken to mean not only the law itself (increasing transistor counts) but the benefit that comes from that law. Used to be that the benefit was essentially automatic. You bought a new computer, loaded your software on it, and it was all twice as fast. That's not happening anymore, so the task of extracting a benefit from Moore's Law is falling on both software and hardware now. That's all it was trying to say.
This adversarial attitude floating around in these comments that the hardware engineers have "created" the problem is bizarre. It's not like they all got together one day a few years ago and decided that increasing clock speeds was too hard and so let's not do it anymore. They're hitting fundamental limits which is why they're heading for more explicit parallelism rather than simple clock speed increases. It's not like they have a choice about it.
There is no known method for taking a serial program and parallelizing it in an automated fashion. What you propose would be great but nobody knows how to do it.
Think of it as being "Moore's law is now also a software problem".
In the past, Moore's law meant that you could buy new hardware and have your stuff go way faster without any further work.
Now, Moore's law mainly means that you get more parallelism. Without software work, this means that your stuff runs at the same speed it used to. Thus software also needs to change in order to obtain the benefit.
I'm going to take your three examples out of order, for a specific rhetorical purpose. Here are my thoughts:
2) The destruction of the Temple and the founding of Israel. This is the strongest example of your three and it's why I want to discuss it first. However it's still not even remotely convincing to me.
The destruction of the Temple should have been pretty obvious to anyone under Roman rule. Those Romans didn't screw around, and the Jews weren't about to stop rebelling, so the outcome was pretty much inevitable. Maybe it wasn't obvious at the time, but this just makes it an act of bettter-than-average perception.
The founding of a country at the location of Israel is also pretty much a given. The prophecy is self-fulfilling. Israel was founded precisely because it was promised to "God's people". If this prophecy weren't there then it wouldn't have happened.
3) Armageddon. Essentially everything here is future tense. You can't use a "prediction" that hasn't come true yet just because you really think it will.
1) Prediction of Jesus's betrayal. I saved the best for last. You're looking at a prection in the Bible which describes other events that take place in the Bible. I'm not sure if you realize just how ridiculous this is for an outsider. For me, the Bible is about as holy and factual as, say, Macbeth.
To me, the fact that the Book of Zechariah predicts details later described in the Book of Matthew is just as much a proof that the Christian god exists as the fact that the witches at the beginning of Macbeth predict details later described at the end of Macbeth is proof that witchcraft works. That is to say, none at all, because they are works of fiction, albeit based on historical events.
That you even think this prophecy is worth mentioning or will somehow bolter your case with me makes me think that you don't even really believe my position is legitimate. You are, from what I can tell, completely unable to realize where I'm coming from. You think that the Bible describes literal truth and, not only that (which would be a reasonable position for a religious person to hold!), you can't even conceive of someone not thinking that the Bible describes literal truth. Obviously from our discussion you are able to entertain this idea, but you apparently don't really grasp what it actually means.
To restate: to me, Jesus Christ is a fictional character. As a fictional character, Jesus may well be based on a historical person, just as Macbeth was, but just like Macbeth, the fictional character of Jesus Christ is distinct from the actual person that it is based on.
As I have said before, in the end, you have to want to believe the evidence. It comes down to this: A man convinced against his will remains unconvinced still.
It has nothing to do with belief. I am perfectly willing to come to any conclusions which come from evidence I discover or which is given to me. But so far you haven't given me any evidence for your position at all. The best you can come up with is circular reasoning in which you prove your faith by relying on tenets of that faith. That sort of thing simply isn't going to make me change my mind, and it has nothing to do with wanting to "believe the evidence".
Let me give you some examples of a prediction that I could believe. They must be specific and also of a nature that they can't be self-fulfilling. A description of the location of lost, buried treasure dating from before the prediction would do it. Predicting the Shoemaker-Levy comet's impact on Jupiter would be a very good one. Predicting any comet which has a long enough period not to be predictable through simple astronomy would do it. Predicting the exact time and place of a major earthquake, for example the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, would be a very good piece of evidence. Scientific facts that were undiscovered at the time would be pretty good too, such as the fact that organisms are composed of enormo
Oh please, the bible's "predictions" are about as good as Nostradamus's. That is, they are so vague that you can twist them into meaning just about anything. If you dispute this, then I'd like you to point out three examples where it predicted a precise historical event, with names, places, and dates, and not just some poemy wishwash that could be interpreted a thousand different ways.
As for a god not wanting to reprogram me, why doesn't he do anything else to show that he's here either? Yeah, yeah, it's all supposed to be about faith, so he can't prove that he exists. Except that this notion is also compatible with the idea that there is no god, which is a considerably simpler explanation for the facts at hand.
But the personal experience I have had contradicts that. It indicates a different phenomenon is operating.
How does that personal experience contradict it? You don't explain this, and I don't see how it possibly could. Do you keep a careful tally of every time you see someone you know from afar, how often they turn around and see you, how long it takes each time, etc.? If not then you're just opening yourself up to your own selection bias.
A flat rule like that which automatically invalidates my perceptions, is not reasonable either.
Actually it's quite reasonable. Individual events are nearly meaningless. If you can put together a study and show that the unexpected happens more often than you would expect due to probability, then you begin to have some real evidence. If other people can replicate your study then I might start to believe that things are actually happening. The best thing your individual experience can do is suggest something in a very mild way.
Basically, human brains are very crappy machines. They do certain things extremely well, of course, but observation and statistics are not among them. Eyewitnesses will swear with absolute conviction to seeing events which provably never happened. In a hilarious YouTube video, people miss watching a guy in a gorilla suit walk onto a basketball court and wave to the camera because they were asked a question which turned their attention elsewhere. People will do a funny dance and the next day it rains and they will remain forever convinced for the rest of their lives that this is a magical rain dance, no matter how many times it fails.
You cannot trust your brain. It lies to you and makes stuff up constantly. Of course it's a tool that we must deal with if we want to discover truth (or indeed do just about anything else), but this means that you must take measures to protect your conclusions from the corrupting influence of your brain. Talking about "stuff you saw" is not going to fly.
A major downside of democracy is that it fosters the idea that it's OK to screw over 49% of people just because 51% of people think that it's a great idea to do it.
Reducing feedlot meat consumption by 20% and the world's food supply will probably double.
So instead of producing far more food than we need and letting people starve due to politics, we'd be producing way, way, way, way, way more food than we need and letting people starve due to politics.
Those network effects you look down on so much are probably responsible for far more than a 20% performance gain due to additional research dollars being available.
So what? Virtual memory wasn't invented just because computer architects thought existing address schemes weren't clever enough. It was invented so you could use disk space to emulate extra RAM at the cost of a loss of performance.
Does it matter why it was invented? Fact of the matter is that virtual memory is used for all sorts of things. Virtual memory gives you separate address spaces, is used for memory mapping files, creating shared memory regions, doing copy-on-write optimizations, and more. Swap is just one small piece of the puzzle.
Yes, in the common vernacular, "virtual memory" is often synonymous with "swap", but when you're talking to a crowd of technical people then they're not going to automatically know what you mean with such a general term.
It's not odd if you look at the bigger picture. Forget about "RAM" and "disk", it's all just storage with different characteristics. With a modern OS, your RAM is basically just a big cache sitting in front of the disk. Stuff that gets used most often stays in RAM, stuff that gets used less often moves to disk. From this perspective, the fact that some less-used data starts its life in RAM and some more-used data starts its life on disk isn't really all that strange.
Many anti-skeptics seem to be unable to differentiate between believing that something is impossible, and simply doubting it. Don't make that mistake. I don't believe that these things are impossible. But in the virtually complete absence of evidence for them, I will doubt them. There's simply no reason to consider every imaginable phenomenon, whether ghosts or ESP or invisible pink unicorns.
Your examples are all explained through selection bias. For every ship that sank that happened to be famous and have a book with eerily similar sinking ship written before it sank, there are thousands of ships which sank without such things. For every time you spot a friend and he spots you, there are many incidences where he doesn't, and you just don't remark on it because it's, well, not remarkable. (And I'll point out that humans, having evolved partly as prey animals, are very good at rapidly picking out another animal that's staring at them, so the fact that he didn't scan the crowd just means that his finely honed prey-animal visual centers are still intact, a few tens of thousands of years after leaving the jungle.)
I'm really puzzled that you admit that these things are all explainable through selection bias, yet you think that they have some significance anyway. Why is that? Either it's due to selection bias, in which case absolutely nothing out of the ordinary is happening, or it's not, and something extraordinary is occurring. You have to pick one, you can't have both.
Your feelings about these events are utterly meaningless. All that matters are facts. If feel very strongly that something is true or false, that has no bearing on the actual truth or falsehood.
Are there phenomena that science hasn't discovered yet? Of course. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an idiot and doesn't understand science. But there's no reason to think that these undiscovered phenomena will end up so conveniently matching old folklore and ghost stories.
That would be pretty good, although I would entertain very carefully the possibility that I had gone insane and was imagining the whole thing, or that some extremely elaborate conspiracy was playing with me. But at that point I'd be more willing to believe in a deity than a conspiracy, because I really don't think that large conspiracies can exist, whereas I simply don't see any evidence for deities.
I don't see why an all-powerful God would do something so bizarre and intricate, though. All he would have to do would be to slightly tweak my brain so as to make me believe, or if he didn't want to screw with my brain, just make page #10 of my brand new mystery bible show exactly what I'm thinking when I read it.
It would be a little unclean, but there's nothing that says you can't put generated docs into the repository too, and it would make sense if you want the repository to have everything you need to get started, rather than just the source.
Speaking personally, I know I'd much rather have the police come up to me when I'm about to commit an illegal act and tell me that they plan to prosecute me if I go through with it, rather than wait for me to actually do it and then haul me off to jail. But maybe I'm just weird that way.
So if you doubt the existence of something, such as electromagnetic radiation or life after death, then these cease to exist or be true? You may BELIEVE they don't exist, but they still could be there.
Where did I ever say that they cease to exist or be true? Please, respond to what I say, not to things you imagine I think.
Of course doubt has no bearing on existence. My point is simply that doubt is what you should hold in the absence of evidence. That you might end up doubting something which is true is of no consequence. If there is no evidence for subatomic particles, you should doubt their existence. If there is no evidence that Jesus H. Christ rose from the dead, you should doubt that.
I guess a better way to ask the question would be: If you get a communication from someone, some stranger to you, what evidence will you accept that this message really came from that particular person? How can the content and the source of a communication be authenticated?
This is easy. Before they die, they give me a sealed envelope containing a large random number. When they communicate with me after their demise, they tell me the number. I then open the envelope and compare. If they match, then I have shown that it was really them to a high degree of confidence. If they don't, I imagined it or the guy was fucking with me.
What if the communication does claim that it is from God, but He didn't leave His phone number or email address? Is there a way that the message itself could convince you that it is truly from God? What could there be in the message content that would convince you "beyond all doubt"?
Again, if an all-powerful God wants to convince me that he's talking to me, he'll figure out a way, I don't need to do it for him. Certainly a variant of the envelope trick would do it. If he tells me that there's an envelope taped to the bottom of my desk with a particular random number in it, that shows that either it's an all-powerful God or some prankster who knows how to get into my house without leaving traces. Further similar acts could gradually rule out the prankster.
You did notice the part where it said that he was in Africa without access to advanced medical facilities and that the boy was only days away from dying without this operation, right? But hey, better to let a kid die when you can save him than embarrass your profession through expediency, I guess.
Certainly nothing can be proven beyond all doubt. But there's a big difference between something fairly straightforward being demonstrated through a diverse set of evidence and an extraordinary event being demonstrated by a single work of what most people consider to be fiction.
You keep harping on this "eyewitness" thing, and I simply cannot understand why. There's essentially no evidence that these people even existed, much less that they're telling the truth. People generally do not rise from the dead. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there is none.
Most of us have never seen a person com back from the dead, but that by itself is no reason to doubt the testimony of the eyewitnesses.
How foolish! That is every reason to doubt the testimony of the eyewitnesses! If something happens which never happened before and which never happened again and which goes against essentially every known fact that we have, you better bet that I'm going to doubt the testimony of four guys who decided to start worshipping a Jewish carpenter. If four guys came running up to you and said that they had just seen an alien that looks exactly like Jane Fonda, am I not allowed to doubt them just because they supposedly saw it with their own eyes? That's not how the world works, my friend!
Before mankind invented modern detectors of electromagnetic radiation and subatomic particles, anyone speaking of their existence and reality would have been doubted on the same grounds. Nobody had ever perceived the existence of these very real physical realities, but they have always existed. Why then doubt that life can and does continue after the physical tent, our bodies cease to function?
You are seriously confused as to the function and purpose of doubt. You are absolutely right that the existence and reality of electromagnetic radiation and subatomic particles would have been doubted. And correctly so. A proposition without evidence deserves doubt. This doubt does not become incorrect just because the proposition in question happens to be true. Doubt is how you discover this truth.
If God personally showed up in front of you in human form and gave you a letter, how would you have Him authenticate His person and writing? What evidence would convince you of the truth of the letter and its author?
If an all-powerful God appeared before me then the proof is easy. He is all powerful, after all, so I can just ask him to come up with a proof which will convince me beyond all doubt. I don't need to come up with it myself!
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I'm sorry, but you simply cannot claim "consistency" as proof of divine intervention. Tolkein was pretty consistent too. Considering that he's supposedly all-powerful, I would expect the Christain god to be more consistent than he already is. The Bible as it stands contradicts itself in many places.
One thing I do not believe in is credentials. I do not give special standing to a person simply because he has a piece of paper. I'm afraid I don't have time to thoroughly read your link, but I skimmed it and could not find any mention of evidence which did not rest on the assumption that the contents of the Bible are already true. If I have missed some convincing, objective, external evidence perhaps you could point it out.
Your discussion of the Book of Job is bizarre. It took me thirty seconds to punch up the Wikipedia article on the Orion constellation and discover that the distances to the various stars involved range from 240 light-years to 1300 light-years. This is most emphatically not a structure which is gravitationally bound.
Yes, Pleiades is gravitationally bound, but so what? Some vaguely suggestive imagery that just happens to coincide with how the actual cluster is structured is not particularly convincing. Especially when the other one is completely wrong.
I really don't understand why you accept such vague nonsense. "He hung the Earth on nothing" could mean practically anything. If this god really wanted to prove that he knew stuff others didn't, why not simply come right out and say "The Earth is a sphere that rests in space, suspended by nothing, resting on nothing."? Or he could say something like, "Although it appears to be instantaneous, the speed of light is actually roughly equal to one billion cubits in a single heartbeat." Why make us guess and speculate and twist words to divine their meaning? It just makes no sense. A good prediction should be understandable before it comes to pass, after all, so discovering that the Earth really is "hung on nothing" and then going back and deciding that, hey, Job got it right after all is doing things entirely backwards.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to defend the ridiculous proposal in the article. For all its faults, at least NASA actually flies stuff! My only point is that experience with the Shuttle and what it requires does not necessarily convey to everything else.
The real problem with the Shuttle was simply that it was a $10 billion craft with a $5 billion budget. Everything else stems from that. If Congress had funded it more fully or if NASA had managed to realize early in the game that they were only going to get half the money they needed, it would have turned out a whole lot better. Considering that, the rest ended up pretty well.
I work on the Shuttle External Tank, so I see every day how demanding, how difficult and precise manned space flight has to be.
Not to diminish your work in any way, but what you see every day is how demanding, how difficult, and how precise manned space flight has to be when done by NASA.
The Russian program shows that a "big dumb" approach with much less focus on precision and "failure is not an option" can achieve similar results, or at the very least a similar safety record.
The Shuttle is just a poor design for a space vehicle. It's essentially a test vehicle which NASA attempts to use as an operational vehicle. It was designed for a much bigger budget than it actually got, and NASA has been paying the price for that shortfall for nearly three decades now.
At least one successful ejection has been made from an SR-71 at mach 3, which is roughly the speed that Challenger was doing when it broke up, assuming that your 1km/s figure is correct. The reason why this was survivable is because what kills an ejecting pilot isn't speed, but rather dynamic pressure caused by speed. Dynamic pressure increases with the square of speed ,but it also drops off with altitude. Your 300m/s figure is correct, but that's assuming a sea-level ejection. If you're at a high altitude then the true speed goes up accordingly. (If you're familiar with aviation terms, it's the indicated airspeed that kills you, not the true airspeed.) I don't know how high Challenger was when it broke up, but if it was more than about 12 miles then it's conceivable that ejections from it could have been survivable.
Not to take away from your post overall, as you make many excellent points, I just wanted to elaborate on that one thing.
It is true that Moore's Law was much more limited in scope than people generally take it to mean, as you indicate. It's usually taken to mean not only the law itself (increasing transistor counts) but the benefit that comes from that law. Used to be that the benefit was essentially automatic. You bought a new computer, loaded your software on it, and it was all twice as fast. That's not happening anymore, so the task of extracting a benefit from Moore's Law is falling on both software and hardware now. That's all it was trying to say.
This adversarial attitude floating around in these comments that the hardware engineers have "created" the problem is bizarre. It's not like they all got together one day a few years ago and decided that increasing clock speeds was too hard and so let's not do it anymore. They're hitting fundamental limits which is why they're heading for more explicit parallelism rather than simple clock speed increases. It's not like they have a choice about it.
There is no known method for taking a serial program and parallelizing it in an automated fashion. What you propose would be great but nobody knows how to do it.
Think of it as being "Moore's law is now also a software problem".
In the past, Moore's law meant that you could buy new hardware and have your stuff go way faster without any further work.
Now, Moore's law mainly means that you get more parallelism. Without software work, this means that your stuff runs at the same speed it used to. Thus software also needs to change in order to obtain the benefit.
I'm going to take your three examples out of order, for a specific rhetorical purpose. Here are my thoughts:
2) The destruction of the Temple and the founding of Israel. This is the strongest example of your three and it's why I want to discuss it first. However it's still not even remotely convincing to me.
The destruction of the Temple should have been pretty obvious to anyone under Roman rule. Those Romans didn't screw around, and the Jews weren't about to stop rebelling, so the outcome was pretty much inevitable. Maybe it wasn't obvious at the time, but this just makes it an act of bettter-than-average perception.
The founding of a country at the location of Israel is also pretty much a given. The prophecy is self-fulfilling. Israel was founded precisely because it was promised to "God's people". If this prophecy weren't there then it wouldn't have happened.
3) Armageddon. Essentially everything here is future tense. You can't use a "prediction" that hasn't come true yet just because you really think it will.
1) Prediction of Jesus's betrayal. I saved the best for last. You're looking at a prection in the Bible which describes other events that take place in the Bible. I'm not sure if you realize just how ridiculous this is for an outsider. For me, the Bible is about as holy and factual as, say, Macbeth.
To me, the fact that the Book of Zechariah predicts details later described in the Book of Matthew is just as much a proof that the Christian god exists as the fact that the witches at the beginning of Macbeth predict details later described at the end of Macbeth is proof that witchcraft works. That is to say, none at all, because they are works of fiction, albeit based on historical events.
That you even think this prophecy is worth mentioning or will somehow bolter your case with me makes me think that you don't even really believe my position is legitimate. You are, from what I can tell, completely unable to realize where I'm coming from. You think that the Bible describes literal truth and, not only that (which would be a reasonable position for a religious person to hold!), you can't even conceive of someone not thinking that the Bible describes literal truth. Obviously from our discussion you are able to entertain this idea, but you apparently don't really grasp what it actually means.
To restate: to me, Jesus Christ is a fictional character. As a fictional character, Jesus may well be based on a historical person, just as Macbeth was, but just like Macbeth, the fictional character of Jesus Christ is distinct from the actual person that it is based on.
As I have said before, in the end, you have to want to believe the evidence. It comes down to this: A man convinced against his will remains unconvinced still.
It has nothing to do with belief. I am perfectly willing to come to any conclusions which come from evidence I discover or which is given to me. But so far you haven't given me any evidence for your position at all. The best you can come up with is circular reasoning in which you prove your faith by relying on tenets of that faith. That sort of thing simply isn't going to make me change my mind, and it has nothing to do with wanting to "believe the evidence".
Let me give you some examples of a prediction that I could believe. They must be specific and also of a nature that they can't be self-fulfilling. A description of the location of lost, buried treasure dating from before the prediction would do it. Predicting the Shoemaker-Levy comet's impact on Jupiter would be a very good one. Predicting any comet which has a long enough period not to be predictable through simple astronomy would do it. Predicting the exact time and place of a major earthquake, for example the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, would be a very good piece of evidence. Scientific facts that were undiscovered at the time would be pretty good too, such as the fact that organisms are composed of enormo
I would hope you wouldn't sit naked (without a firewall).
I do. Of course I run a reasonably secure OS, not that pile of junk Windows.
Oh please, the bible's "predictions" are about as good as Nostradamus's. That is, they are so vague that you can twist them into meaning just about anything. If you dispute this, then I'd like you to point out three examples where it predicted a precise historical event, with names, places, and dates, and not just some poemy wishwash that could be interpreted a thousand different ways.
As for a god not wanting to reprogram me, why doesn't he do anything else to show that he's here either? Yeah, yeah, it's all supposed to be about faith, so he can't prove that he exists. Except that this notion is also compatible with the idea that there is no god, which is a considerably simpler explanation for the facts at hand.
But the personal experience I have had contradicts that. It indicates a different phenomenon is operating.
How does that personal experience contradict it? You don't explain this, and I don't see how it possibly could. Do you keep a careful tally of every time you see someone you know from afar, how often they turn around and see you, how long it takes each time, etc.? If not then you're just opening yourself up to your own selection bias.
A flat rule like that which automatically invalidates my perceptions, is not reasonable either.
Actually it's quite reasonable. Individual events are nearly meaningless. If you can put together a study and show that the unexpected happens more often than you would expect due to probability, then you begin to have some real evidence. If other people can replicate your study then I might start to believe that things are actually happening. The best thing your individual experience can do is suggest something in a very mild way.
Basically, human brains are very crappy machines. They do certain things extremely well, of course, but observation and statistics are not among them. Eyewitnesses will swear with absolute conviction to seeing events which provably never happened. In a hilarious YouTube video, people miss watching a guy in a gorilla suit walk onto a basketball court and wave to the camera because they were asked a question which turned their attention elsewhere. People will do a funny dance and the next day it rains and they will remain forever convinced for the rest of their lives that this is a magical rain dance, no matter how many times it fails.
You cannot trust your brain. It lies to you and makes stuff up constantly. Of course it's a tool that we must deal with if we want to discover truth (or indeed do just about anything else), but this means that you must take measures to protect your conclusions from the corrupting influence of your brain. Talking about "stuff you saw" is not going to fly.
Right, I disagree with you therefore I must be stupid, uneducated, or both.
I was going to argue against your point, but what the hell, why even bother.
A major downside of democracy is that it fosters the idea that it's OK to screw over 49% of people just because 51% of people think that it's a great idea to do it.
Reducing feedlot meat consumption by 20% and the world's food supply will probably double.
So instead of producing far more food than we need and letting people starve due to politics, we'd be producing way, way, way, way, way more food than we need and letting people starve due to politics.
I don't really see the point.
Those network effects you look down on so much are probably responsible for far more than a 20% performance gain due to additional research dollars being available.
So what? Virtual memory wasn't invented just because computer architects thought existing address schemes weren't clever enough. It was invented so you could use disk space to emulate extra RAM at the cost of a loss of performance.
Does it matter why it was invented? Fact of the matter is that virtual memory is used for all sorts of things. Virtual memory gives you separate address spaces, is used for memory mapping files, creating shared memory regions, doing copy-on-write optimizations, and more. Swap is just one small piece of the puzzle.
Yes, in the common vernacular, "virtual memory" is often synonymous with "swap", but when you're talking to a crowd of technical people then they're not going to automatically know what you mean with such a general term.
It's not odd if you look at the bigger picture. Forget about "RAM" and "disk", it's all just storage with different characteristics. With a modern OS, your RAM is basically just a big cache sitting in front of the disk. Stuff that gets used most often stays in RAM, stuff that gets used less often moves to disk. From this perspective, the fact that some less-used data starts its life in RAM and some more-used data starts its life on disk isn't really all that strange.
Many anti-skeptics seem to be unable to differentiate between believing that something is impossible, and simply doubting it. Don't make that mistake. I don't believe that these things are impossible. But in the virtually complete absence of evidence for them, I will doubt them. There's simply no reason to consider every imaginable phenomenon, whether ghosts or ESP or invisible pink unicorns.
Your examples are all explained through selection bias. For every ship that sank that happened to be famous and have a book with eerily similar sinking ship written before it sank, there are thousands of ships which sank without such things. For every time you spot a friend and he spots you, there are many incidences where he doesn't, and you just don't remark on it because it's, well, not remarkable. (And I'll point out that humans, having evolved partly as prey animals, are very good at rapidly picking out another animal that's staring at them, so the fact that he didn't scan the crowd just means that his finely honed prey-animal visual centers are still intact, a few tens of thousands of years after leaving the jungle.)
I'm really puzzled that you admit that these things are all explainable through selection bias, yet you think that they have some significance anyway. Why is that? Either it's due to selection bias, in which case absolutely nothing out of the ordinary is happening, or it's not, and something extraordinary is occurring. You have to pick one, you can't have both.
Your feelings about these events are utterly meaningless. All that matters are facts. If feel very strongly that something is true or false, that has no bearing on the actual truth or falsehood.
Are there phenomena that science hasn't discovered yet? Of course. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an idiot and doesn't understand science. But there's no reason to think that these undiscovered phenomena will end up so conveniently matching old folklore and ghost stories.
That would be pretty good, although I would entertain very carefully the possibility that I had gone insane and was imagining the whole thing, or that some extremely elaborate conspiracy was playing with me. But at that point I'd be more willing to believe in a deity than a conspiracy, because I really don't think that large conspiracies can exist, whereas I simply don't see any evidence for deities.
I don't see why an all-powerful God would do something so bizarre and intricate, though. All he would have to do would be to slightly tweak my brain so as to make me believe, or if he didn't want to screw with my brain, just make page #10 of my brand new mystery bible show exactly what I'm thinking when I read it.
It would be a little unclean, but there's nothing that says you can't put generated docs into the repository too, and it would make sense if you want the repository to have everything you need to get started, rather than just the source.
What is it that prevents you from putting the documentation into git as well? Does git somehow refuse to store plain English text?
Speaking personally, I know I'd much rather have the police come up to me when I'm about to commit an illegal act and tell me that they plan to prosecute me if I go through with it, rather than wait for me to actually do it and then haul me off to jail. But maybe I'm just weird that way.
So if you doubt the existence of something, such as electromagnetic radiation or life after death, then these cease to exist or be true? You may BELIEVE they don't exist, but they still could be there.
Where did I ever say that they cease to exist or be true? Please, respond to what I say, not to things you imagine I think.
Of course doubt has no bearing on existence. My point is simply that doubt is what you should hold in the absence of evidence. That you might end up doubting something which is true is of no consequence. If there is no evidence for subatomic particles, you should doubt their existence. If there is no evidence that Jesus H. Christ rose from the dead, you should doubt that.
I guess a better way to ask the question would be: If you get a communication from someone, some stranger to you, what evidence will you accept that this message really came from that particular person? How can the content and the source of a communication be authenticated?
This is easy. Before they die, they give me a sealed envelope containing a large random number. When they communicate with me after their demise, they tell me the number. I then open the envelope and compare. If they match, then I have shown that it was really them to a high degree of confidence. If they don't, I imagined it or the guy was fucking with me.
What if the communication does claim that it is from God, but He didn't leave His phone number or email address? Is there a way that the message itself could convince you that it is truly from God? What could there be in the message content that would convince you "beyond all doubt"?
Again, if an all-powerful God wants to convince me that he's talking to me, he'll figure out a way, I don't need to do it for him. Certainly a variant of the envelope trick would do it. If he tells me that there's an envelope taped to the bottom of my desk with a particular random number in it, that shows that either it's an all-powerful God or some prankster who knows how to get into my house without leaving traces. Further similar acts could gradually rule out the prankster.
You did notice the part where it said that he was in Africa without access to advanced medical facilities and that the boy was only days away from dying without this operation, right? But hey, better to let a kid die when you can save him than embarrass your profession through expediency, I guess.
Certainly nothing can be proven beyond all doubt. But there's a big difference between something fairly straightforward being demonstrated through a diverse set of evidence and an extraordinary event being demonstrated by a single work of what most people consider to be fiction.
You keep harping on this "eyewitness" thing, and I simply cannot understand why. There's essentially no evidence that these people even existed, much less that they're telling the truth. People generally do not rise from the dead. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there is none.
Most of us have never seen a person com back from the dead, but that by itself is no reason to doubt the testimony of the eyewitnesses.
How foolish! That is every reason to doubt the testimony of the eyewitnesses! If something happens which never happened before and which never happened again and which goes against essentially every known fact that we have, you better bet that I'm going to doubt the testimony of four guys who decided to start worshipping a Jewish carpenter. If four guys came running up to you and said that they had just seen an alien that looks exactly like Jane Fonda, am I not allowed to doubt them just because they supposedly saw it with their own eyes? That's not how the world works, my friend!
Before mankind invented modern detectors of electromagnetic radiation and subatomic particles, anyone speaking of their existence and reality would have been doubted on the same grounds. Nobody had ever perceived the existence of these very real physical realities, but they have always existed. Why then doubt that life can and does continue after the physical tent, our bodies cease to function?
You are seriously confused as to the function and purpose of doubt. You are absolutely right that the existence and reality of electromagnetic radiation and subatomic particles would have been doubted. And correctly so. A proposition without evidence deserves doubt. This doubt does not become incorrect just because the proposition in question happens to be true. Doubt is how you discover this truth.
If God personally showed up in front of you in human form and gave you a letter, how would you have Him authenticate His person and writing? What evidence would convince you of the truth of the letter and its author?
If an all-powerful God appeared before me then the proof is easy. He is all powerful, after all, so I can just ask him to come up with a proof which will convince me beyond all doubt. I don't need to come up with it myself!