I would agree with you, but it depends on where you live. If you're a college student living in on-campus apartments, you should shred your documents. I've seen people dumpster diving for financial information in such areas. The campus police had a hard time staying on top of the problem where I lived. College students are good targets because their trash is frequenly mostly paper, they have to put their SSN on just about everything (at least, they used to), and their trash is almost inevitably full of credit card statements and other financial detritus. Combine that with big, shared dumpsters full of bags like that and you have a prime target. Sure, somebody probably isn't going to grab your specific garbage can in the suburbs, but the likelihood of being a target in some areas is quite high.
so the simple explanation is that we underwent millions of years of tiny changes and genetic reinforcement of desired traits through natural selection without dying out or ending up dramatically different than we are, rather than the complex explanation that someone created us that way? Ohhhh, thanks for clearing that up.
Or, articulated in another way: The simple explanation is that things got to be the way they are through mechanisms that we have observed, following the rules that the universe appears to follow. This, rather than the explanation that for a brief time, some external force that we've never observed was applied and changed everything in miraculous ways and made it look like everything was based on rules.
I'm not sure why people consider an omnipotent being who does things that we've never observed and then attempts to make it look like everything occurred through observable natural mechanisms is a simpler explanation than the idea that things simply occurred through observable natural mechanisms. I suppose it's all in your definition of simple.
I'll have to bow out of the discussion on chemistry, and I'll look into Gentry on my own. What little I could find doesn't seem to present both sides of the story particularly well thus far.
I will comment on a few other things.
I too have issues with Hovind...
Then I strongly recommend against using his $250K pseudochallenge as anything other than an example of dishonest public grandstanding and an attempt to fool people who don't understand the issues. It's a transparent insult to the intelligence of anybody who looks into it, and I don't think that Kent Hovind is the type of person you want your ideas to be associated with.
Take a look at the history of science; investigate how de Broglie was about to be denied his PhD until his advisors ridiculed his ideas to Einstein at a lunch one day, and Einstein, instead of laughing back, commented on how insightful the idea was.
The important note here is that de Broglie wasn't denied his Ph.D. in the end. It took some work, but his theories were accepted and he eventually won a Nobel Prize for them. He didn't do it by claiming that there was a conspiracy to keep his ideas out of press. He met with resistance in the academic world, but he didn't try to start a grassroots uprising of the uneducated. He didn't opt for the popular press and condemn the scientific establishment. As far as I know, he didn't claim that they had any religious attachment to the prevailing theories. The fact is, de Broglie's case is just another case of where peer review eventually works. Sure, it rejects good ideas sometimes. But it rejects a lot more bad ones that would otherwise make it impossible to tell which ideas had been tested and which had simply been asserted.
In a more exteme example, take the FDA. I'm sure it keeps a lot of good treatments off the market, but you can bet that if it didn't exist, half of the medicines on our shelves would be placebos, a quarter would be downright dangerous, and nobody would know what to trust.
My advice to anybody suspicious that the scientific establishment is keeping you down: It's probably not. Keep trying. Maybe people will eventually come around. Be warned, though: the fact that they say you're wrong doesn't automatically make you a martyr or a misunderstood genius. It more likely than not means that you're wrong.
That's the kind of thing the original poster was laughing at. Sure, it's possible, but why opt for that explanation rather than for the simpler one? The simple explanation for me is that I have a life history from birth until today. I graduated from high school, went to college, got a job, etc. The less reasonable one is that I was born in a laboratory in adult form yesterday, and my memories were implanted by an evil corporation bent on controlling the world. Sure, it could be true, but does it sound logical for me to say that that since I can't be totally sure of either one, both of them are equally valid theories?
It looks like there were dinosaurs a long time ago. Why prefer to believe that an omnipotent being made it look that way to trick you when you could simply believe that there were dinosaurs a long time ago?
If you're a probstat guru, then surely you understand the absurdity of saying "see, this happened, so it wasn't unlikely at all". Please.
The point that I was trying to make is that a simple calculation that a specific event would happen looking into the past is not as simple as it may seem. There's a lot more to probability than than a simple calculation. It also has to do with your point of observation. I don't think we want to get too deeply into this, but the fact is, can't simply state that something is impossible because its probability is low, especially when you consider the probability of something similar happening (like any other HT combination) is exactly 1.
The issue is that exactly one precise protein is required, with its chirality exactly right. Flip your coin 368 times and see how often you get only heads. That's just to get the chirality correct, not counting the sequence as well.
Which protien are you referring to? This is what I'm not understanding here. Your claim is that based on the simplest (I assume) modern organism, the proteins in that modern organism are the ones required to begin life. I don't see how that has to be the case. All that notwithstanding, there's a lot more to evolution than abiogenesis. In fact, the theory of evolution doesn't seek to explain abiogenesis. It simply complements it as a more complete theory of how things may have progressed. This is similar to Hovind requring that one proves the origins of the universe to prove so-called "macro" evolution. Bull.
As for the idea of having a complaint about evolution published, go research the sad story of Scientific American and Forrest Mims. No way is any mainline journal going to publish an anti-evolution paper if they know about it.
As much as I disapprove of SciAm's behavior here, it's not exactly a real scientific journal. It's a commercial magazine for educated lay people.
If you want to see the last case I'm aware of where such publishing did happen, check out Science and Nature for the 60's and 70's where they published Gentry's work. It was totally peer reviewed, but once it became known that he was a creationist, his ability to get published was terminated.
That sounds a bit dramatized. If you're talkign about Robert Gentry, you're referring to polonium halos. I'd be outside my field to comment on this directly, but as I understood it, the theory just hasn't really caught on. If you'd like to post some more evidence that indicates that his creationist background had something to do with it, please do. Gentry was publishing an alternative view of known data. To make an alternative view that conflicts with the mainstream view stick, it has to be pretty damned convincing. From the looks of his bibliography, Gentry got his shot in several publications. This kind of thing happens all the time. Sometimes your pet theories don't catch on when there's one that explains things just as well and also matches up with other theories.
You're basically asking for Bill Gates to publish RMS's credos in defense of the GPL.
Ahh. The ever popular "vast conspiracy of the scientific establishment" argument. The problem with Hovind and his kind is that they go to the popular press trying to tear down thousands of separate, well-supported pieces of scientific all at once and expect it to fall like a house of cards. That's not how the real world works. The reality is, to get something published, it should have solid data and stand on its own. If you find something really wrong with a scientific practice, present your argument and your data. If they're as irrefutable as these people seem to think they are, it will get published. Many journals allow anonymous publication, and as long as you don't try to take on too many theories at once with your lone data set, you should survive. Also, note the difference between publishing new evidence and publishing an alternate view of old evidence. It's easier to go agai
I believe I have just enough background to follow what you're saying, but I'm not sure that where you're going is accurate. Admittedly, the finer points of ochem are lost on me, but I at least follow the concepts of chirality and what proteins are made of.
I have a stronger grasp of probability and statistics, however. Your preemptive strike against talkorigins.org notwithstanding, there is a good write up by Dr. Ian Musgrave there at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob. html.
Let's assume that you're right about lipid globules. It still looks like Dr. Musgrave's statistical analysis hangs together quite a bit better than yours, and your post didn't come near addressing all of his answers to your claim. I'll assume you're leaving out details for brevity, but it does appear that there are a lot of assumptions in your post that stack the deck a bit. Also, 10^50 is the accepted standard for impossible? Please. Flip a quarter 165 times. The sequence you just got was one of more than 2*10^50 possible sequences. It was impossible. It should never have happened. You can't look backward and calculate a probability like that without some context.
Finally, the fact that you believe that Hovind's $250K offer is actually meaningful says a lot about how carefully you examine his works. He requires you to "Prove beyond reasonable doubt that the process of evolution (option 3 above, under 'known options') is the only possible way the observed phenomena could have come into existence." Read that last part carefully. THE ONLY POSSIBLE WAY. Not "the best theory" but the ONLY way. He's asking you to disprove all of theology. Not to mention it goes to a panel of "experts" hand picked by him (the person who has an interest in keeping the challenge alive and pointing to it to support his claims) whose identities he will not reveal. I have a challenge. Prove that you were conceived by human beings and born to a female mother. Prove it to the exclusion of all other possibilities, including the claim that God made you directly and faked all evidence of your birth. And prove it in front of a panel the I pick. I'll let you know what their verdict is. I promise. If you can do it, I'll empty my pockets for you and dance around naked in the streets.
I have a challenge for Mr. Hovind: Get one of your complaints about evolutionary theory published like a real scientist rather than writing popular bunk for the credible masses. Not a whole book that tries to shoot everything down. Write one paper that picks at one supporting detail. If you don't like radiological dating, write some original research that debunks it or calls it into question and GET IT PUBLISHED in a real scientific journal. That's a hell of a lot easier than his impossible challenge, and he hasn't even gone that far. In case you were wondering, that's what all the real scientists are busy doing. They're testing their work in front of scientists rather than in the court of public opinion.
When it comes to new Linux users, the install is the last thing you want them to have to worry about. Installing Linux is the hardest way to learn unless you're a serious gearhead. When I want to teach somebody Linux, I frequently choose Debian as the tool of choice to begin with. Here's why:
1) I do the install and get the hardware working. Even Mandrake can screw up on some hardware, and if you don't even know how to edit text files, you're not going to be able to recover. Most people learn an OS that's pre-installed for them. Why not Linux?
2) They don't have to stress about packaged depends. It's taken care of in a very simple, powerful, and elegant way. I've been using APT for years now, and I still learn something new about cool ways to use it almost weekly.
3) Packages aren't broken "out of the box" as they frequently are in RH or Mandrake. Users can use a subset of the utilities and get used to them rather than searching for which text editor crashes the least.
4) The rules on how packages behave are standardized, and file location/behavior is very predictable. Good for people to learn about good UNIX directory structure use.
5) Things work and configure properly on their own, but you can hand-tune text config files without breaking some bizarre mother configuration script that depends on it being the only thing that ever edits the files.
Once the user gets used to the shell, the directory structure, and basic system management, we talk about the installation process, and they can ususally basically handle it on their own. I learned Linux through the "trial by fire" of installing it wihtout even knowing how to use the text editors. It was painful and it took forever. No matter how pretty a face you put on the installer, you can't get around the fact that OS installs are usually not for beginners. Better to make the system self-consistent and manageable than to allow the user to easily install an OS himself that he has no hope of properly managing for himself.
Actually, before Deep Blue's time (and, apparently, before yours), there was a chess computer project called Deep Thought. I think that's what Duncan3 was referring to.
Exactly. There should be a 1 month moratorium on new legislation after a disaster like that. Congress should be able to approve emergency spending, and that's it. Otherwise, you know that anything that comes out in the first few weeks is going to be complete reactionary crap.
Indeed. The LLNL clusters use Quadrics interconnects. They're phenomenally fast, and they're what really separate loose clusters and useful general purpose supercomputers. However, Weta doesn't need too much cross talk between the nodes (like a physicist doing fluid dynamics calculations might). Rendering separate frames is basically a perfectly parallel operation. Send some geometry data and a single machine can render the frame without needing to send anything to any other nodes. Big advantage.
There are a lot of big machines out there that are loosely connected like this one is. I suspect that's why they don't end up listed on the Top 500 site. They're not nearly as useful for the types of calculations done by most of the scientific computing sites out there as a really expensive cluster with a bitchin' interconnect.
How does the law prevent criminals from doing anything, exactly? Criminals break laws; that's why they are criminals.
If you want your children to be safe, you must actively protect them. Laws only provide for justice after the fact. What good is that if your child is kidnapped, raped, or killed?
Your point is taken, but implicit in this statement is the idea that laws are no good because they aren't a panacea. Sure, the fact that it's illegal to kill children doesn't keep children from getting killed. But does that mean that it should be legal? I also agree that parents have a responsibility to protect their children, but again, does that mean that the person who kills a child isn't responsible for it? Computer!'s point is that the situation shouldn't be as bad as it is. Sure, parents have responsibility to keep kids somewhat sheltered, but the rest of the population has some responsibility not to make the world such a shithole to raise kids in, and it seems like the more people there are on the Internet, the worse the signal to noise ratio gets.
Personally, I think we should make a new Internet: one that's so hard to use that businesspeople never figure it out and it's never a viable medium for selling things. Maybe one that requires learning Lisp or programming in ook!;-)
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
That is an appropriate analogy, but if I were SCO, I'd still be worried about a fix coming out too quickly. SCO is claiming that they had something that was worth about a billion dollars on the open market, and that IBM screwed them out of it. If it turns out that these "secrets" are code that a bunch of college students can replace in 24-48 hours, that $1B damages figure looks pretty rediculous. Hell... I'll rewrite every line of code in the kernel for $900M. It'll take me a while, but I think it's worth it.
True, but nobody's forcing the Debian users to stay on the stable track. It's easy to upgrade to testing or unstable (just did it on an established box yesterday). In my experience, testing is easily more mature (apps are less likely to die right out of the box) than RedHat or Mandrake when they're released. Learning the Ways of Apt can allow a user to find his or her favorite proximity to the bleeding edge without having to reinstall every time a new Mandrake distro comes out or having to install every library package on all of the CDs "just in case" they need one way down the road. The "slow to update" complaint is the only one I regularly hear about Debian, and even that one isn't true if you're willing to run any of the thousands of newer packages they make available to everybody.
Apologies. I'm a Debian zealot, but I really am full of love if you get to know me.;-)
U R A NATURALISTIC FALLACY SUX0R UR BRANE IS 0WN3D BY DAVID HUME
I'm sorry, but it's too bad about the moderation on this one. Something about a reference to being "0WN3D" by an 18th century philosopher is just classic. My kingdom for some mod points.
Better yet, tell the company that if they fire you, the agree not to produce the same goods or services they produced for a period of one year. Work for a memory manufacturer? Get it put in your contract that once you're gone, you'll stop working for memory manufacturers for a year and they can produce baskets and sock puppets for a year. Fair enough, yes?
I did undergraduate degrees in both economics (focussing on banking and financial markets) and engineering (the computer hardware variety). Not an uncommon combo as engineering and econ are both basically applied math in different disciplines. So, I'm by no means an expert, but I have some grounding that most/.ers don't. You're absolutely correct to say that there is no value other than the dividends eventually paid by the stock.
Interestingly enough, you and I aren't alone in being misunderstood on this point. My faculty advisor in economics just stopped talking about the stock market during the boom because he would be shouted down by laymen who were sucessful in the stock market and therefore experts. Now is a good time to note that basically everybody was successful at that point. The real question now is, where are all of those people now? This gentleman has taken his Harvard Ph.D. and continued to earn healthy returns by trading bonds and options. Everybody else seems to be in the tank. Everybody is worshipping Warren Buffet again now that he's cashing in--the same people who thought that the guy was a fossil to be value investing during the boom.
The fact is, people are largely misinformed. It used to be that people bought stocks for the dividends. Growth investors were a rarity. Things were a lot more logical back then. Now that everybody is seeking huge capital gains, it adds all sorts of instability and strangeness to the market. People don't buy based on fundamental value but rather on the expectation that others won't buy based on fundamental value either. This causes massive divergences from the real value of the stock. Eventually, a process known as "mean reversion" kicks in (spurred on by a panic, buyer's remorse, an economic slowdown, whatever) and the bottom drops out, bringing us roughly back to where we should be. We've seen it before and we'll see it again. It's just a lot worse now that a big share of the stock is held by people on eTrade who don't understand what they're buying rather than by the business elite and pension funds (which have an interest in stability and steady dividend payouts) as it was in the earlier half of the century.
Think about this: Capital gains do not create wealth. They merely redistribute it. To make money on capital gains, you must sell the stock to somebody. If you buy low, sell high, that means that an equal amount of stock is being bought high and sold low. No new wealth is created. Buying at fundamental prices and trading to balance a portfolio, however, minimzes this effect (I'm talking macroeconomically now--not about individual investors). Companies produce something of value, sell it, and the people who own the company get to keep the proceeds. This is good and natural.
I'm not a big fan of the President's "stimulus" plan as it's laid out, but I have to say that reducing the tax on dividends might be good. It's certainly not going to have immediate stimulus effects as he claims it will, but it may encourage investors to think more about what is really driving the value of what they buy. I'd almost be in favor of raising the capital gains tax if I weren't worried that it would discourage companies from investing in policies that promote growth. One thing that scares me, however, is that Bush has stated or implied on more than one occasion that he'd like the market to go back up to where it was. Why? What if the stocks weren't worth what they were selling for? What econimc good does inflating the price do for us?
Anyway, to hear a real expert (Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics at Yale) talk about it, I highly recommend a book by Robert Schiller: Irrational Exuberance. It was a NY Times bestseller, is highly readable, and is scary as hell. He wrote it in 2000 and accurately predicted almost everything that has happened since, including a discussion on what events might tilt the balance (corporate scandal, war, and terrorist attacks are mentioned). It makes an excellent post mortem read right now. I think it should be mandatory reading for anybody who plans to retire using anything other than a matress full of cash.
What you describe as "stream of payments" , or dividends for the rest of us, is only one factor to look at when deciding where to invest. You DO share in the profits--when you sell your stock at a higher price than you paid for it. Given a choice between Company A, which pays annual dividends of 5% and increases in value very slightly and Company B, which pays no dividends but rises in value (hopefully intrinsic, but more practically market value) much faster than Company A, why would you assume that Company A is a better value because it pays regular dividends? Wouldn't you have to do a real net net net analysis to figure out which company would do more for you during the time that you owned it? Think of Company A as GE and company B as BRKA. Now assume you were making your purchase with your retirement funds. Now look at current and 10 year financials for both companies. Any question where you would have been better off putting your money.
This is exactly the problem. The fundamental value of a company is only in the dividends (or the joy you get out of having part ownership of something). If a company will not pay dividends there is no reason for the price to go up or down. What you're talking about is speculation on the stupidity of others. If the stock rises in value, it should be because it is expected to pay more dividends over the course of its existance.
I'm not talking about where it's wise (or, more accurately, lucky) to put your money. I'm talking about the fact that for the past several years, people have had no clue what they're actually buying stock for. Ask yourself this: at the most fundemental level, what is the value of a stock that pays no dividends. If you say "it may go up in price" you're following the same BS reasoning as if you were "investing" in Beanie Babies. Why would it go up in price? Because somebody else believed it had more value than it did when you bought it. Basically, you're hoping for a sucker to come along and buy something worthless that you bought for more than it's worth.
There's no way of getting around it. Your statement that selling stock at a higher price than when you bought it is "sharing in the profits" is not entirely accurate. You're sharing in profits that have not yet been made or paid out. You're selling your future (projected) stream of dividends. Ask any economist or analyst to calculate the fundamental value of a stock and they will calculate the present discounted value of of the projected stream of dividends given projected growth, the projected prevailing interest rate, and some risk premium. There's nothing else to the value of the stock. The reason the stock market skyrocketed and then crashed was because people believed (as you seem to) that a stock should go up in value if the company does well whether or not stock holders actually get their hands on any of the profits. It's like going into a partnership buying a small hotel and then not taking any of the profits for yourself--ever. It doesn't matter how well the hotel does. You don't get jack, and nobody in their right mind would buy your ownership stake from you because they won't get jack either.
The question you have to ask yourself is this: If I hold this stock until the end of time, will I make my money back with interest? If not, the price of the stock is too high. The market is overvaluing the stream of payments. Any speculation on whether it will go up or down in price is not based on fundamental value, but rather on the hope that others will make stupid decisions and drive up the price artificially. Does that sound like a prudent way of saving for retirement? It sounds to me more like buying up troll dolls or some other worthless crap in the belief that they'll become trendy again. Maybe you'll be right, but it's for the wrong reasons, and I'm certainly not going to be impressed with your decision even if you do make out like a bandit.
Another point to ponder: If you do this calculation the DJIA or the S
Thank you! Finally, somebody who understands that the only fundamental value in a stock is in the stream of payments provided by the corporation. Ask most people if they would consider buying a hypothetical stock that never paid dividends, and most people will say that they would, depending on what they thought the price would do. What the hell? Why should the price of ownership in a company ever go up if, as a part owner, you never get to share in the profits??
I've come to the sad conclusion that people grow out of trading baseball cards and into trading stocks, and they don't bother learning the new rules.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. It's amazing that for rendering input that should theoretically be coded to open standards, people are actually happy to say that they only need three different programs to read all of the pages correctly. Isn't the point of open standards that any one of the three should do?
This just reinforces my belief that people should have to be licensed before they're allowed to charge money to do web design.;-)
I stand by my point. If you can find a slower, more bloated web browser than Mozilla (aside from Mozilla rewritten in Java and maybe that HotJava abomination that Sun calls a browser), I'll be impressed. It's a fucking web browser! The user interface shouldn't be nearly as sluggish as it is! Sure, my machine isn't all that new (dual PIII 500 with 512MB RAM) and Mozilla has been getting faster, but compared to something like Galeon or even Internet Explorer, it drags. I should probably upgrade if I'm doing video processing or 3D gaming, but this thing renders HTML for Christ's sake!
I know it's not nice to bash open source projects that people pour a lot of hours into, but I think that for something like a web browser, their overly complex UI design eats way too many cycles. It actually feels heavy as it chugs through pages. I may be a sarcastic asshole sometimes, but I'm having a hard time seeing how I'm a troll and that response is any better.
In fact the point that the mosquitos mutated that rapidly is fairly bad news for evolutionists, as it begs the question of why there aren't transitional forms all over the planet right now.
I really don't see how one follows from the other, but according to evolutionary theory, we're all transitional forms. The "from what" comes from the (ample) fossil record. The "to what" is anybody's guess. How is the fact that mosquitos are evolving quickly a problem for the theory of evolution?
Hopefully, given some time, they'll figure out how to get around problems they caused themselves with the old Mac OS. Resource forks, anybody? "Let's give developers direct access to funky filesystem attributes so we can NEVER use a different filesystem in the future" doesn't make for an easy transition to a UNIX like environment. The run of the mill UNIX apps have a tendency to chew up and spit out Mac files that utilize resource forks. Sure, there's a hacked version of rsync available, but Christ, didn't somebody think of this? A tarball untarred elsewhere loses vital file attributes and toasts applications? Brilliant.
Slashdot Mirror
I would agree with you, but it depends on where you live. If you're a college student living in on-campus apartments, you should shred your documents. I've seen people dumpster diving for financial information in such areas. The campus police had a hard time staying on top of the problem where I lived. College students are good targets because their trash is frequenly mostly paper, they have to put their SSN on just about everything (at least, they used to), and their trash is almost inevitably full of credit card statements and other financial detritus. Combine that with big, shared dumpsters full of bags like that and you have a prime target. Sure, somebody probably isn't going to grab your specific garbage can in the suburbs, but the likelihood of being a target in some areas is quite high.
Or, articulated in another way: The simple explanation is that things got to be the way they are through mechanisms that we have observed, following the rules that the universe appears to follow. This, rather than the explanation that for a brief time, some external force that we've never observed was applied and changed everything in miraculous ways and made it look like everything was based on rules.
I'm not sure why people consider an omnipotent being who does things that we've never observed and then attempts to make it look like everything occurred through observable natural mechanisms is a simpler explanation than the idea that things simply occurred through observable natural mechanisms. I suppose it's all in your definition of simple.
I will comment on a few other things.
I too have issues with Hovind...
Then I strongly recommend against using his $250K pseudochallenge as anything other than an example of dishonest public grandstanding and an attempt to fool people who don't understand the issues. It's a transparent insult to the intelligence of anybody who looks into it, and I don't think that Kent Hovind is the type of person you want your ideas to be associated with.
Take a look at the history of science; investigate how de Broglie was about to be denied his PhD until his advisors ridiculed his ideas to Einstein at a lunch one day, and Einstein, instead of laughing back, commented on how insightful the idea was.
The important note here is that de Broglie wasn't denied his Ph.D. in the end. It took some work, but his theories were accepted and he eventually won a Nobel Prize for them. He didn't do it by claiming that there was a conspiracy to keep his ideas out of press. He met with resistance in the academic world, but he didn't try to start a grassroots uprising of the uneducated. He didn't opt for the popular press and condemn the scientific establishment. As far as I know, he didn't claim that they had any religious attachment to the prevailing theories. The fact is, de Broglie's case is just another case of where peer review eventually works. Sure, it rejects good ideas sometimes. But it rejects a lot more bad ones that would otherwise make it impossible to tell which ideas had been tested and which had simply been asserted.
In a more exteme example, take the FDA. I'm sure it keeps a lot of good treatments off the market, but you can bet that if it didn't exist, half of the medicines on our shelves would be placebos, a quarter would be downright dangerous, and nobody would know what to trust.
My advice to anybody suspicious that the scientific establishment is keeping you down: It's probably not. Keep trying. Maybe people will eventually come around. Be warned, though: the fact that they say you're wrong doesn't automatically make you a martyr or a misunderstood genius. It more likely than not means that you're wrong.
It looks like there were dinosaurs a long time ago. Why prefer to believe that an omnipotent being made it look that way to trick you when you could simply believe that there were dinosaurs a long time ago?
I love it when the word "statistical" comes up a half dozen times in a post that contains absolutely no statistics. My spider sense is tingling...
The point that I was trying to make is that a simple calculation that a specific event would happen looking into the past is not as simple as it may seem. There's a lot more to probability than than a simple calculation. It also has to do with your point of observation. I don't think we want to get too deeply into this, but the fact is, can't simply state that something is impossible because its probability is low, especially when you consider the probability of something similar happening (like any other HT combination) is exactly 1. The issue is that exactly one precise protein is required, with its chirality exactly right. Flip your coin 368 times and see how often you get only heads. That's just to get the chirality correct, not counting the sequence as well.
Which protien are you referring to? This is what I'm not understanding here. Your claim is that based on the simplest (I assume) modern organism, the proteins in that modern organism are the ones required to begin life. I don't see how that has to be the case. All that notwithstanding, there's a lot more to evolution than abiogenesis. In fact, the theory of evolution doesn't seek to explain abiogenesis. It simply complements it as a more complete theory of how things may have progressed. This is similar to Hovind requring that one proves the origins of the universe to prove so-called "macro" evolution. Bull.
As for the idea of having a complaint about evolution published, go research the sad story of Scientific American and Forrest Mims. No way is any mainline journal going to publish an anti-evolution paper if they know about it.
As much as I disapprove of SciAm's behavior here, it's not exactly a real scientific journal. It's a commercial magazine for educated lay people.
If you want to see the last case I'm aware of where such publishing did happen, check out Science and Nature for the 60's and 70's where they published Gentry's work. It was totally peer reviewed, but once it became known that he was a creationist, his ability to get published was terminated.
That sounds a bit dramatized. If you're talkign about Robert Gentry, you're referring to polonium halos. I'd be outside my field to comment on this directly, but as I understood it, the theory just hasn't really caught on. If you'd like to post some more evidence that indicates that his creationist background had something to do with it, please do. Gentry was publishing an alternative view of known data. To make an alternative view that conflicts with the mainstream view stick, it has to be pretty damned convincing. From the looks of his bibliography, Gentry got his shot in several publications. This kind of thing happens all the time. Sometimes your pet theories don't catch on when there's one that explains things just as well and also matches up with other theories.
You're basically asking for Bill Gates to publish RMS's credos in defense of the GPL.
Ahh. The ever popular "vast conspiracy of the scientific establishment" argument. The problem with Hovind and his kind is that they go to the popular press trying to tear down thousands of separate, well-supported pieces of scientific all at once and expect it to fall like a house of cards. That's not how the real world works. The reality is, to get something published, it should have solid data and stand on its own. If you find something really wrong with a scientific practice, present your argument and your data. If they're as irrefutable as these people seem to think they are, it will get published. Many journals allow anonymous publication, and as long as you don't try to take on too many theories at once with your lone data set, you should survive. Also, note the difference between publishing new evidence and publishing an alternate view of old evidence. It's easier to go agai
I have a stronger grasp of probability and statistics, however. Your preemptive strike against talkorigins.org notwithstanding, there is a good write up by Dr. Ian Musgrave there at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob. html.
Let's assume that you're right about lipid globules. It still looks like Dr. Musgrave's statistical analysis hangs together quite a bit better than yours, and your post didn't come near addressing all of his answers to your claim. I'll assume you're leaving out details for brevity, but it does appear that there are a lot of assumptions in your post that stack the deck a bit. Also, 10^50 is the accepted standard for impossible? Please. Flip a quarter 165 times. The sequence you just got was one of more than 2*10^50 possible sequences. It was impossible. It should never have happened. You can't look backward and calculate a probability like that without some context.
Finally, the fact that you believe that Hovind's $250K offer is actually meaningful says a lot about how carefully you examine his works. He requires you to "Prove beyond reasonable doubt that the process of evolution (option 3 above, under 'known options') is the only possible way the observed phenomena could have come into existence." Read that last part carefully. THE ONLY POSSIBLE WAY. Not "the best theory" but the ONLY way. He's asking you to disprove all of theology. Not to mention it goes to a panel of "experts" hand picked by him (the person who has an interest in keeping the challenge alive and pointing to it to support his claims) whose identities he will not reveal. I have a challenge. Prove that you were conceived by human beings and born to a female mother. Prove it to the exclusion of all other possibilities, including the claim that God made you directly and faked all evidence of your birth. And prove it in front of a panel the I pick. I'll let you know what their verdict is. I promise. If you can do it, I'll empty my pockets for you and dance around naked in the streets.
I have a challenge for Mr. Hovind: Get one of your complaints about evolutionary theory published like a real scientist rather than writing popular bunk for the credible masses. Not a whole book that tries to shoot everything down. Write one paper that picks at one supporting detail. If you don't like radiological dating, write some original research that debunks it or calls it into question and GET IT PUBLISHED in a real scientific journal. That's a hell of a lot easier than his impossible challenge, and he hasn't even gone that far. In case you were wondering, that's what all the real scientists are busy doing. They're testing their work in front of scientists rather than in the court of public opinion.
1) I do the install and get the hardware working. Even Mandrake can screw up on some hardware, and if you don't even know how to edit text files, you're not going to be able to recover. Most people learn an OS that's pre-installed for them. Why not Linux?
2) They don't have to stress about packaged depends. It's taken care of in a very simple, powerful, and elegant way. I've been using APT for years now, and I still learn something new about cool ways to use it almost weekly.
3) Packages aren't broken "out of the box" as they frequently are in RH or Mandrake. Users can use a subset of the utilities and get used to them rather than searching for which text editor crashes the least.
4) The rules on how packages behave are standardized, and file location/behavior is very predictable. Good for people to learn about good UNIX directory structure use.
5) Things work and configure properly on their own, but you can hand-tune text config files without breaking some bizarre mother configuration script that depends on it being the only thing that ever edits the files.
Once the user gets used to the shell, the directory structure, and basic system management, we talk about the installation process, and they can ususally basically handle it on their own. I learned Linux through the "trial by fire" of installing it wihtout even knowing how to use the text editors. It was painful and it took forever. No matter how pretty a face you put on the installer, you can't get around the fact that OS installs are usually not for beginners. Better to make the system self-consistent and manageable than to allow the user to easily install an OS himself that he has no hope of properly managing for himself.
Actually, before Deep Blue's time (and, apparently, before yours), there was a chess computer project called Deep Thought. I think that's what Duncan3 was referring to.
Exactly. There should be a 1 month moratorium on new legislation after a disaster like that. Congress should be able to approve emergency spending, and that's it. Otherwise, you know that anything that comes out in the first few weeks is going to be complete reactionary crap.
There are a lot of big machines out there that are loosely connected like this one is. I suspect that's why they don't end up listed on the Top 500 site. They're not nearly as useful for the types of calculations done by most of the scientific computing sites out there as a really expensive cluster with a bitchin' interconnect.
If you want your children to be safe, you must actively protect them. Laws only provide for justice after the fact. What good is that if your child is kidnapped, raped, or killed?
Your point is taken, but implicit in this statement is the idea that laws are no good because they aren't a panacea. Sure, the fact that it's illegal to kill children doesn't keep children from getting killed. But does that mean that it should be legal? I also agree that parents have a responsibility to protect their children, but again, does that mean that the person who kills a child isn't responsible for it? Computer!'s point is that the situation shouldn't be as bad as it is. Sure, parents have responsibility to keep kids somewhat sheltered, but the rest of the population has some responsibility not to make the world such a shithole to raise kids in, and it seems like the more people there are on the Internet, the worse the signal to noise ratio gets.
Personally, I think we should make a new Internet: one that's so hard to use that businesspeople never figure it out and it's never a viable medium for selling things. Maybe one that requires learning Lisp or programming in ook! ;-)
That is an appropriate analogy, but if I were SCO, I'd still be worried about a fix coming out too quickly. SCO is claiming that they had something that was worth about a billion dollars on the open market, and that IBM screwed them out of it. If it turns out that these "secrets" are code that a bunch of college students can replace in 24-48 hours, that $1B damages figure looks pretty rediculous. Hell... I'll rewrite every line of code in the kernel for $900M. It'll take me a while, but I think it's worth it.
Apologies. I'm a Debian zealot, but I really am full of love if you get to know me. ;-)
I'm sorry, but it's too bad about the moderation on this one. Something about a reference to being "0WN3D" by an 18th century philosopher is just classic. My kingdom for some mod points.
"PH33R MY L337 PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY!"
--John Stuart Mill
Better yet, tell the company that if they fire you, the agree not to produce the same goods or services they produced for a period of one year. Work for a memory manufacturer? Get it put in your contract that once you're gone, you'll stop working for memory manufacturers for a year and they can produce baskets and sock puppets for a year. Fair enough, yes?
Interestingly enough, you and I aren't alone in being misunderstood on this point. My faculty advisor in economics just stopped talking about the stock market during the boom because he would be shouted down by laymen who were sucessful in the stock market and therefore experts. Now is a good time to note that basically everybody was successful at that point. The real question now is, where are all of those people now? This gentleman has taken his Harvard Ph.D. and continued to earn healthy returns by trading bonds and options. Everybody else seems to be in the tank. Everybody is worshipping Warren Buffet again now that he's cashing in--the same people who thought that the guy was a fossil to be value investing during the boom.
The fact is, people are largely misinformed. It used to be that people bought stocks for the dividends. Growth investors were a rarity. Things were a lot more logical back then. Now that everybody is seeking huge capital gains, it adds all sorts of instability and strangeness to the market. People don't buy based on fundamental value but rather on the expectation that others won't buy based on fundamental value either. This causes massive divergences from the real value of the stock. Eventually, a process known as "mean reversion" kicks in (spurred on by a panic, buyer's remorse, an economic slowdown, whatever) and the bottom drops out, bringing us roughly back to where we should be. We've seen it before and we'll see it again. It's just a lot worse now that a big share of the stock is held by people on eTrade who don't understand what they're buying rather than by the business elite and pension funds (which have an interest in stability and steady dividend payouts) as it was in the earlier half of the century. Think about this: Capital gains do not create wealth. They merely redistribute it. To make money on capital gains, you must sell the stock to somebody. If you buy low, sell high, that means that an equal amount of stock is being bought high and sold low. No new wealth is created. Buying at fundamental prices and trading to balance a portfolio, however, minimzes this effect (I'm talking macroeconomically now--not about individual investors). Companies produce something of value, sell it, and the people who own the company get to keep the proceeds. This is good and natural.
I'm not a big fan of the President's "stimulus" plan as it's laid out, but I have to say that reducing the tax on dividends might be good. It's certainly not going to have immediate stimulus effects as he claims it will, but it may encourage investors to think more about what is really driving the value of what they buy. I'd almost be in favor of raising the capital gains tax if I weren't worried that it would discourage companies from investing in policies that promote growth. One thing that scares me, however, is that Bush has stated or implied on more than one occasion that he'd like the market to go back up to where it was. Why? What if the stocks weren't worth what they were selling for? What econimc good does inflating the price do for us?
Anyway, to hear a real expert (Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics at Yale) talk about it, I highly recommend a book by Robert Schiller: Irrational Exuberance. It was a NY Times bestseller, is highly readable, and is scary as hell. He wrote it in 2000 and accurately predicted almost everything that has happened since, including a discussion on what events might tilt the balance (corporate scandal, war, and terrorist attacks are mentioned). It makes an excellent post mortem read right now. I think it should be mandatory reading for anybody who plans to retire using anything other than a matress full of cash.
This is exactly the problem. The fundamental value of a company is only in the dividends (or the joy you get out of having part ownership of something). If a company will not pay dividends there is no reason for the price to go up or down. What you're talking about is speculation on the stupidity of others. If the stock rises in value, it should be because it is expected to pay more dividends over the course of its existance.
I'm not talking about where it's wise (or, more accurately, lucky) to put your money. I'm talking about the fact that for the past several years, people have had no clue what they're actually buying stock for. Ask yourself this: at the most fundemental level, what is the value of a stock that pays no dividends. If you say "it may go up in price" you're following the same BS reasoning as if you were "investing" in Beanie Babies. Why would it go up in price? Because somebody else believed it had more value than it did when you bought it. Basically, you're hoping for a sucker to come along and buy something worthless that you bought for more than it's worth.
There's no way of getting around it. Your statement that selling stock at a higher price than when you bought it is "sharing in the profits" is not entirely accurate. You're sharing in profits that have not yet been made or paid out. You're selling your future (projected) stream of dividends. Ask any economist or analyst to calculate the fundamental value of a stock and they will calculate the present discounted value of of the projected stream of dividends given projected growth, the projected prevailing interest rate, and some risk premium. There's nothing else to the value of the stock. The reason the stock market skyrocketed and then crashed was because people believed (as you seem to) that a stock should go up in value if the company does well whether or not stock holders actually get their hands on any of the profits. It's like going into a partnership buying a small hotel and then not taking any of the profits for yourself--ever. It doesn't matter how well the hotel does. You don't get jack, and nobody in their right mind would buy your ownership stake from you because they won't get jack either.
The question you have to ask yourself is this: If I hold this stock until the end of time, will I make my money back with interest? If not, the price of the stock is too high. The market is overvaluing the stream of payments. Any speculation on whether it will go up or down in price is not based on fundamental value, but rather on the hope that others will make stupid decisions and drive up the price artificially. Does that sound like a prudent way of saving for retirement? It sounds to me more like buying up troll dolls or some other worthless crap in the belief that they'll become trendy again. Maybe you'll be right, but it's for the wrong reasons, and I'm certainly not going to be impressed with your decision even if you do make out like a bandit.
Another point to ponder: If you do this calculation the DJIA or the S
I've come to the sad conclusion that people grow out of trading baseball cards and into trading stocks, and they don't bother learning the new rules.
Interesting stuff. Thanks for the link. This might be grounds for renewed faith.
This just reinforces my belief that people should have to be licensed before they're allowed to charge money to do web design. ;-)
I know it's not nice to bash open source projects that people pour a lot of hours into, but I think that for something like a web browser, their overly complex UI design eats way too many cycles. It actually feels heavy as it chugs through pages. I may be a sarcastic asshole sometimes, but I'm having a hard time seeing how I'm a troll and that response is any better.
Great browser, but damn! I've wasted hours waiting for Mozilla menus to draw after clicking on them.
I really don't see how one follows from the other, but according to evolutionary theory, we're all transitional forms. The "from what" comes from the (ample) fossil record. The "to what" is anybody's guess. How is the fact that mosquitos are evolving quickly a problem for the theory of evolution?
Hopefully, given some time, they'll figure out how to get around problems they caused themselves with the old Mac OS. Resource forks, anybody? "Let's give developers direct access to funky filesystem attributes so we can NEVER use a different filesystem in the future" doesn't make for an easy transition to a UNIX like environment. The run of the mill UNIX apps have a tendency to chew up and spit out Mac files that utilize resource forks. Sure, there's a hacked version of rsync available, but Christ, didn't somebody think of this? A tarball untarred elsewhere loses vital file attributes and toasts applications? Brilliant.