That's what makes evolution a theory rather than a myth - nobody "believes" that evolution is "true". We just agree that it's the best explanation that we have for a multitude of observations.
This is a fundamental difference between religion and science that, sadly, many people coming from a religious perspective fail to grasp. It's a paradigm issue. One paradigm says truth is handed down from on high. One paradigm says that you take what others have found, and you keep questioning it, trying to refine or refute it. But if you're solidly in the faith-only paradigm, and you see those science people rejecting your refutation, you're not going to see that they have valid reasons to reject it, you're only going to see that they're not taking your objections seriously, so obviously they must be doing the same thing you are: accepting truth from on high, worshipping Darwin, whatever.
It doesn't help that the K-12 education system essentially requires students to accept truth from on high. A greater emphasis on lab assignments in science classes might help, particularly if teachers can come up with labs where students are graded on procedure and analysis rather than conclusions, so they can be encouraged to actually think about what they're seeing instead of just trying to get the right answer.
I think you've got that backward. ID basically says evolution occurred, but through constant tweaking by God* instead of random chance and natural selection. It's not really compatible with Deism, which posits that God set everything up at the beginning and then stood back and watched it unfold.
*Techincally they say "a designer," which is disingenuous at best and deceptive at worst. Because ID depends on the idea that some things are too complex to have arisen by chance, and therefore must have been designed, if the designer is not God, then the designer too must have been designed. At this point you either have an infinite series of designers, or you're back to needing a prime mover -- i.e. God.
Unfortunately people have been taking "balance" a bit too far. The truth isn't always somewhere in between -- sometimes one side really is right and the other really is wrong.
Science has built-in methods to deal with this. They're called the scientific method and peer review. Unfortunately, the Intelligent Design crowd is ignoring the first by working backward from their conclusion and trying to bypass the second by getting themselves inserted into educational curriculum instead of hashing their ideas out with the scientific community.
By comparison, we're making a big deal over the 100th anniversary of Einstein's big breakthroughs, including special relativity, which overturned Newtonian physics. Einstein was celebrated from the start. Why? Because he actually applied the scientific method, came up with something that explained observations better than the predominant theory did, and went through channels with his theories. Other physicists looked at it, said, "Damn, he's right!" and he revolutionized physics.
Hmm, if we could put some serious thrusters on the 'scope and move it away from the target, maybe we could red-shift all the light coming in and make it infrared, then process it back up to visible wavelengths in the lab.
Of course, at those speeds, we wouldn't be able to use radio control. Or get any data back. And it wouldn't be hanging around in Earth orbit very long.
I was hoping the Troy in 15 Minutes post would be included.
Also, for Lost fans, the author had a great series of episode recaps last season. I hadn't been back to see if she kept them up this year, which is why this is the first I've heard of the book.
As others have mentioned, trees and grasses are very different types of plants, and the presence of one does not necessarily imply the presense of the other.
Previously it was believed that grasses didn't appear until after the K-T extinction -- the end of the dinosaur era, and the predominant ground cover was thought to be mosses or something similar.
You can generally identify a carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore by looking at the teeth, and when it comes to dinosaurs, that's something we have *plenty* of.
I see no reason why there should not also be an option for "advanced" users to disable any kind of pop-up message in favor of either a wholly manual operation
In the Options/Preferences/Settings box, look under Advanced:Update.
You can disable automatic checking entirely, and you can choose between "ask me what to do" and "just install it, already!"
(I suspect the GP was trying to say that forcing updates was the only way to keep *most users* up to date, not that it was the only way to do updates at all.)
I remember when I was a kid I had a ton of Legos, including some of the larger Duplo blocks left over from when I was *really* young. At one point my brother and I picked up a set of Tyco blocks (some dinosaur mecha, if I remember right). What was interesting about it was that the blocks and pegs were the same size, so they could connect with Legos, but the flat pieces were half the thickness of a normal piece instead of one-third. That made for some interesting possibilities.
There was also a set of Tic-Tac-style candies (I forget the name -- Ipso or something like that) that we found at some store that came in square plastic boxes with pegs on two edges and holes on the other. Each edge was exactly like the top or bottom of an 8x2 Lego piece. We'd use them to build walls or base plates. I never saw them anywhere else, so I assumed they were discontinued pretty quickly, whether Lego put pressure on them or they just didn't catch on.
We'd mix and match those different brands of blocks all the time. Having the other companies' blocks never stopped us from buying more Legos.
I don't know, I only see a story on Slashdot about Digg. I don't see a story on Slashdot about Slashdot posting a story about Digg. I think we missed this one, too!
Comments aren't digg's focus. The stories are. You'll get some commentary on the story, but that's about it. And I think there's some simplistic beauty in that - the goal there isn't to get an off-topic discussion going, it's to provide a simple mechanism for commenting *on the story.* So threads aren't really needed. This doesn't mean they're better or worse than/., just different.
I know a lot of people here hate the word, but that makes Digg sound an awful lot like a blog...
Every other story I've read on/. over the past few weeks has had at least one comment saying, "Hey, get your act together, this was on Digg 3 days ago!"
I wonder how long it'll take for someone to post one here?
I recall a biology class in which the professor suggested that one of the reasons we see so much more cancer patients today than we did, say, 200 years ago is simply the fact that we live longer. The longer you live, the greater the chance for something to go wrong with a couple of cells dividing. (A massive rise in carcinogen exposure doesn't improve matters, of course.)
This same professor was working on research that a number of the symptoms of old age might be due to genetic causes that just don't get expressed unti after reproductive age. If something kills you before you reproduce, natural selection weeds the trait out pretty fast and it ends up being very rare. If it doesn't kill you until after you've had 12 kids, it sticks around in the gene pool.
That has got to be the greatest comedy I've ever seen on stage! I was in London for a few days back in 1999, and the one thing I wanted to make sure I did (aside from sightseeing, of course) was see the Reduced Shakespeare Company.
Really, the fact that it's still possible, with a minimum of training, to understand Shakespeare's language. It's close enough that it can be read with commentary, and really isn't much more opaque than trying to follow the slang of a region/subculture with which you're not familiar.
Heck, millions of people still read the King James version of the Bible, which was written by Shakespeare's contemporaries. That's a lot of people who are still exposed to that version of the language on a regular basis.
Give it a couple more centuries and translations will be necessary. You can just barely read Chaucer, but it takes a lot more effort than it takes to read Shakespeare. Once you get back to Beowulf, you're basically dealing with a foreign language. It's hard to tell whether drift will be sped up by new forms of communication or slowed down by global community, but if there are still English speakers in a few hundred years, you can be sure that we'll sound like Shakespeare, Shakespeare will sound like Chaucer, and Chaucer will sound like the guy who wrote Beowulf.
Well, technically R&J are married at the point they have sex (though many people suspect Willy was *ahem* "encouraged" to put the wedding scene in for the sake of propriety). Underage sex, on the other hand... remember, Juliet is only 14. Presumably the age of consent was a lot lower in Renaissance Italy, especially if Shakespeare was right that they would have considered her an old maid.
The thing with Shakespeare -- or any play, for that matter -- is that you're reading a script. A script isn't meant to be read, it's meant to be performed. You might as well try to follow a symphony by reading the sheet music.
A good troupe of actors with a good director can take even the archaic language of four centuries ago and perform it in a way that's easy to follow and, believe it or not, entertaining. Action, body language and inflection can do wonders for making the meaning clear.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what makes evolution a theory rather than a myth - nobody "believes" that evolution is "true". We just agree that it's the best explanation that we have for a multitude of observations.
This is a fundamental difference between religion and science that, sadly, many people coming from a religious perspective fail to grasp. It's a paradigm issue. One paradigm says truth is handed down from on high. One paradigm says that you take what others have found, and you keep questioning it, trying to refine or refute it. But if you're solidly in the faith-only paradigm, and you see those science people rejecting your refutation, you're not going to see that they have valid reasons to reject it, you're only going to see that they're not taking your objections seriously, so obviously they must be doing the same thing you are: accepting truth from on high, worshipping Darwin, whatever.
It doesn't help that the K-12 education system essentially requires students to accept truth from on high. A greater emphasis on lab assignments in science classes might help, particularly if teachers can come up with labs where students are graded on procedure and analysis rather than conclusions, so they can be encouraged to actually think about what they're seeing instead of just trying to get the right answer.
What makes you think that God is supernatural?
Um.... how about the meaning of the word "supernatural?"
Sorry, but that's kind of like asking "What makes you think the stars are astronomical?"
I think you've got that backward. ID basically says evolution occurred, but through constant tweaking by God* instead of random chance and natural selection. It's not really compatible with Deism, which posits that God set everything up at the beginning and then stood back and watched it unfold.
*Techincally they say "a designer," which is disingenuous at best and deceptive at worst. Because ID depends on the idea that some things are too complex to have arisen by chance, and therefore must have been designed, if the designer is not God, then the designer too must have been designed. At this point you either have an infinite series of designers, or you're back to needing a prime mover -- i.e. God.
Unfortunately people have been taking "balance" a bit too far. The truth isn't always somewhere in between -- sometimes one side really is right and the other really is wrong.
Science has built-in methods to deal with this. They're called the scientific method and peer review. Unfortunately, the Intelligent Design crowd is ignoring the first by working backward from their conclusion and trying to bypass the second by getting themselves inserted into educational curriculum instead of hashing their ideas out with the scientific community.
By comparison, we're making a big deal over the 100th anniversary of Einstein's big breakthroughs, including special relativity, which overturned Newtonian physics. Einstein was celebrated from the start. Why? Because he actually applied the scientific method, came up with something that explained observations better than the predominant theory did, and went through channels with his theories. Other physicists looked at it, said, "Damn, he's right!" and he revolutionized physics.
Only one problem. It's the Museum of Natural History, not the Museum of Supernatural History.
And moving to Australia!
Are you having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day?
This is the first ID joke I've read in weeks that's actually been funny. It's too bad my mod points have expired.
Hmm, if we could put some serious thrusters on the 'scope and move it away from the target, maybe we could red-shift all the light coming in and make it infrared, then process it back up to visible wavelengths in the lab.
Of course, at those speeds, we wouldn't be able to use radio control. Or get any data back. And it wouldn't be hanging around in Earth orbit very long.
Oh, well, the idea was nice while it lasted...
I was hoping the Troy in 15 Minutes post would be included.
Also, for Lost fans, the author had a great series of episode recaps last season. I hadn't been back to see if she kept them up this year, which is why this is the first I've heard of the book.
As others have mentioned, trees and grasses are very different types of plants, and the presence of one does not necessarily imply the presense of the other.
Previously it was believed that grasses didn't appear until after the K-T extinction -- the end of the dinosaur era, and the predominant ground cover was thought to be mosses or something similar.
You can generally identify a carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore by looking at the teeth, and when it comes to dinosaurs, that's something we have *plenty* of.
I see no reason why there should not also be an option for "advanced" users to disable any kind of pop-up message in favor of either a wholly manual operation
In the Options/Preferences/Settings box, look under Advanced:Update.
You can disable automatic checking entirely, and you can choose between "ask me what to do" and "just install it, already!"
(I suspect the GP was trying to say that forcing updates was the only way to keep *most users* up to date, not that it was the only way to do updates at all.)
I remember when I was a kid I had a ton of Legos, including some of the larger Duplo blocks left over from when I was *really* young. At one point my brother and I picked up a set of Tyco blocks (some dinosaur mecha, if I remember right). What was interesting about it was that the blocks and pegs were the same size, so they could connect with Legos, but the flat pieces were half the thickness of a normal piece instead of one-third. That made for some interesting possibilities.
There was also a set of Tic-Tac-style candies (I forget the name -- Ipso or something like that) that we found at some store that came in square plastic boxes with pegs on two edges and holes on the other. Each edge was exactly like the top or bottom of an 8x2 Lego piece. We'd use them to build walls or base plates. I never saw them anywhere else, so I assumed they were discontinued pretty quickly, whether Lego put pressure on them or they just didn't catch on.
We'd mix and match those different brands of blocks all the time. Having the other companies' blocks never stopped us from buying more Legos.
I don't know, I only see a story on Slashdot about Digg. I don't see a story on Slashdot about Slashdot posting a story about Digg. I think we missed this one, too!
I know a lot of people here hate the word, but that makes Digg sound an awful lot like a blog...
Who on /. hasn't spent hours staring at the C, contemplating its mysteries and trying to fathom its depths?
Every other story I've read on /. over the past few weeks has had at least one comment saying, "Hey, get your act together, this was on Digg 3 days ago!"
I wonder how long it'll take for someone to post one here?
I recall a biology class in which the professor suggested that one of the reasons we see so much more cancer patients today than we did, say, 200 years ago is simply the fact that we live longer. The longer you live, the greater the chance for something to go wrong with a couple of cells dividing. (A massive rise in carcinogen exposure doesn't improve matters, of course.)
This same professor was working on research that a number of the symptoms of old age might be due to genetic causes that just don't get expressed unti after reproductive age. If something kills you before you reproduce, natural selection weeds the trait out pretty fast and it ends up being very rare. If it doesn't kill you until after you've had 12 kids, it sticks around in the gene pool.
I always said decaf coffee was an abomination. Now we have evidence to back it up!
That has got to be the greatest comedy I've ever seen on stage! I was in London for a few days back in 1999, and the one thing I wanted to make sure I did (aside from sightseeing, of course) was see the Reduced Shakespeare Company.
Really, the fact that it's still possible, with a minimum of training, to understand Shakespeare's language. It's close enough that it can be read with commentary, and really isn't much more opaque than trying to follow the slang of a region/subculture with which you're not familiar.
Heck, millions of people still read the King James version of the Bible, which was written by Shakespeare's contemporaries. That's a lot of people who are still exposed to that version of the language on a regular basis.
Give it a couple more centuries and translations will be necessary. You can just barely read Chaucer, but it takes a lot more effort than it takes to read Shakespeare. Once you get back to Beowulf, you're basically dealing with a foreign language. It's hard to tell whether drift will be sped up by new forms of communication or slowed down by global community, but if there are still English speakers in a few hundred years, you can be sure that we'll sound like Shakespeare, Shakespeare will sound like Chaucer, and Chaucer will sound like the guy who wrote Beowulf.
I've got it! They could call the series "The Bard's Tale!"
Well, technically R&J are married at the point they have sex (though many people suspect Willy was *ahem* "encouraged" to put the wedding scene in for the sake of propriety). Underage sex, on the other hand... remember, Juliet is only 14. Presumably the age of consent was a lot lower in Renaissance Italy, especially if Shakespeare was right that they would have considered her an old maid.
The thing with Shakespeare -- or any play, for that matter -- is that you're reading a script. A script isn't meant to be read, it's meant to be performed. You might as well try to follow a symphony by reading the sheet music.
A good troupe of actors with a good director can take even the archaic language of four centuries ago and perform it in a way that's easy to follow and, believe it or not, entertaining. Action, body language and inflection can do wonders for making the meaning clear.
Not to mention the way each character has half a dozen nicknames, depending on who is addressing him.