So..I consider myself religious, and I believe the God created everything just like the bible says....However I don't know everything, I refuse to get into debates about it because science is not really my strong suit. I also believe evolution is wrong, and 50-100 years from now, someone will bring this up and laugh about it.
So basically what you're saying is, you're not particularly well acquainted with the facts, so you've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people who are well acquainted with the facts are wrong? I'm starting to believe that we're long overdue for an extinction.
As opposed to something that isn't random. It's no more scientifically legitimate to arbitrarily decide that it's random than it is to arbitrarily decide it that it's directionally changed by some natural mechanism, or to arbitrarily decide that God intervened to make the changes.
No, that's certainly true. There's nothing to say that random looking things are truly random. If we have this conversation too loudly, we may attract MarxistHacker42, though. Certainly, if somebody can suggest a mechanism by which mutations (which appear to be random errors in a chemical process) are predictable or otherwise non-random, I'm sure that fame and fortune (or at least fame) await.
You seem to be quibbling with a very small portion of evolutionary theory, though. If it were to suggest "mutation" rather than "random mutation" would you be satisfied that it's a scientific and falsifiable theory, or is there more to your complaint? I have no problem with suggesting that evolution is driven by chemical processes whose outcome cannot currently be predicted and whose distribution appears to be flat, but that seems like it's simply a long way of saying "random" processes. Sure, there are some people who are perfectly happy to see The Hand of God in every hand at the poker table, and radioactive decay may be deterministic on some grand cosmic scale, but it seems to me like "random" is a reasonable approximation for those things.
To me, asking whether it's good fairies or invisible crab people who determine who wins at the roulette table is not really a question for science, but that doesn't mean that characterizing the distribution of results and modeling the properties of the wheel aren't, and I'd hesitate to call somebody who believes a roulette wheel is random a dogmatic nutbar.
So far the facts are for a different theory which is microevolution which is small changes within the same species which generally degrade the DNA (loss of information) and has NEVER shown that DNA information is added.
I hereby challenge you to provide an objective, quantifiable definition of "information" in DNA that can be used to validate your statement. We can use numbers!
Next question, what are your thoughts on the remarkable coincidence described here? I know that it could have been magic, but it also appears to be a very strong indication of common descent.
That was her reason given for her firing. The board suspended her for walking off the job without permission and badmouthing the boss, both facts that are conveniently overlooked in thes slashdot ID witch hunt.
Do feel free to support that statement with some sort of evidence.
Without arguing against Darwinism, I'm pointing out that predictions from Creationist models often overlap with those from Darwinist models. This is one of those cases. Similarity in genetic structure does point to similar or shared origins, which is posited by both evolutionists (shared ancestors) and creationists (same maker / designer).
That's the problem. Anything is consistent with magic performed by an omnipotent entity. Shared genetic defects? Magic. No shared genetic defects? Also magic. The grass is green because The Designer wanted it to be so. Grass isn't green? The Designer wanted it that way. That's why creationism isn't good science. There is no observation that could possibly be inconsistent with it.
I'm sure you've seen evidence supporting creation in other places, but since you haven't been convinced, I won't try again here. But I would like to point out that Darwin's original idea of speciation though natural selection was still inconsistent with "the data," even though he didn't know it at the time. Remember Gregor Mendel? He was contemporary with Darwin, but since he didn't get as much press, Darwin was never aware of Mendels' discoveries regarding genetics. When Darwin saw variations in gene expression, he assumed they were caused by random genetic mutations which occurred in each individual. Mandel's work disproved that, showing that differences in genetic structure are caused by mix'n'matching existing genetic data from the parents, with very low granularity (whole chromosomes ata a time). Actual genetic mutations are very rare. So, while natural selection can select for beneficial expressions of gene sequences, it weeds out "poor" sequences very slowly (since they are often merely "hidden" by dominant genes).
I'm not sure if you're making stuff up or if you're simply repeating something you pulled off the Internet, but mutations are significantly more common than you seem to think they are. Mendel's work definitely does not prove what you think it does.
Also, natural selection cannot create new data, so some additional model is required to explain where new gentic data comes from.
Well, mutations are a pretty good source of new information.
Discovery Institute does not actively support creationism, it is common institute for advocates of Intelligent Design. This is a common misunderstanding to think that ID == Creationism, but when you study its past a little better, you see that first active proponents had no connection to creationist movement.
The problem with your statement is that (at least as I defined them in the above), if neodarwinism is true, then ID is false, and if ID is true, then neodarwinism is false. Thus they are equally falsifiable theories. If neodarwinism is a scientific theory, then so necessarily is ID.
So, exactly what evidence might one use to show that "neodarwinism" is true to the exclusion of ID? Imagine you have a magic evidence making machine that can create any observation you want. What observation would allow you to make the distinction between "random mutation" and "random looking mutation controlled by an undescribed force by an unknown mechanism"?
Given *some* description of the designer and its mechanisms, I would be the first to say that ID could potentially be testable. As it stands now, it's simply an overly broad piece of hand waving. It has to be, because the majority of powerful interests that push it are really using it as nothing more than stealth creationism and any attempt to nail it down turns it into real creationism. Sure, there's a minority of people who really think that they're going somewhere with the science for its own sake, but those people certainly aren't Discovery Institute fellows.
I certainly agree that the supernatural cannot be a subject of what we normally consider "science." However, the work in ID that I've seen, such as that attempting to show "irreducible complexity," is an attempt to show the impossibility of the neodarwinist mechanism of macroevolution. That is certainly a legitimate goal of science.
And this brings up the next obvious question: How do you show that something is irreducibly complex? More importantly, assuming that the the IC thing has N parts and definitely cannot function with N-1 parts (so far, we haven't seen such a thing, but let's pretend...), how do you handle the case that allows it to function with N + 1 parts? So far, Dr. Behe and company have not really addressed that point. Their work appears to boil down to, "I can't figure out how it could be done, and I reject your suggestions as to how it could have happened because you can't prove that it *did* happen that way." The hair on the back of my neck bristles at the horrible sound of the goalposts screeching across the ground.
Why would my employer care how much it costs me to get to work?
The same reason your employer should be concerned about the cost of housing within the commute distance and other major factors in your cost of living. They affect the price of an input crucial to their business: You.
That's like asking why United Airlines should be worried about tensions in the Middle East making it hard to get oil shipments out, since the logistical and financial burden is the oil industry's problem, right?
Hate to see the ACLU and the EFF on the same side of the same suit, given how much I hate one of them, and adore the other.
I can't for the life of me see how you find the two organizations as particularly different. My guess is that the ACLU, if it takes a position, probably agrees with the EFF on practically every position the EFF takes.
It introduces a new methodology other than the original technique, which may increase the statistical chance of finding water. Does that ring with you?
I think that makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, it does increases you likelihood of success the same way appending a random search to your normal search algorithm does. Presumably, you'd be forced to look in areas other than the sensible areas you had tried before, so you're more likely to find water than if you had simply given up after performing a reason-based search. I wouldn't expect "sensible search + dowsing" to find more results than "sensible search + digging in random locations" but I would expect either to result in marginally more hits than the "sensible search alone" method.
This is not entirely unexpected. Without going over the numbers, there's something important to remember that people often forget when doing their statistical tests: If your tests say that the results are significant with a p-value of 0.05, you're still likely to flag uninteresting results as interesting about 1 in 20 times. A lot of tests showing nothing with a few anomalies is pretty much what I'd expect from something that isn't really different from random chance.
Are you sure about that? Considering that the British NHS costs about $200 million a year, and America having five times the population, it would cost at least a trillion dollars a year, over twice the budget of the entire US military.
Capitalism and market economies are all about efficiency. Efficiency isn't the same as "cutting corners".
I think that you're making the same mistake the poster you're responding to was making. You're right that market economies are all about efficiency, but efficiency is being measured with only one variable: profit. That's usually a pretty good variable to optimize for because profit is a decent measure of how much value-added you've produced. The problem here is that the stakes are higher than the cost of an individual business failure. The cost of a catastrophic nuclear power plant failure near a populated area is significantly greater to the population than the loss of that plant (or the entire corporation) is to its shareholders. That means that if the difference in profit between doing something marginally safely and doing it very safely is high enough, there's incentive to cut the safety level back to marginal.
I think that markets are great, but don't assume that they always optimize for the most important variable. The key to using market is knowing when to use them in their bare state, and knowing when other variables are more important. In the latter case, the trick is simply a regulatory system that ties profit to safety (i.e. we fine the crap out of you if you fail to meet very stringent safety and cleanliness standards).
Ok, this comment is so marxist, that I don't know where to start... First of all, what we need is people trying to make a profit.
Well, what we need is a system in which people are accountable for their mistakes. If the response to a safety incident or an environmental problem is a colossal fine or shutting down the power plant, then a for-profit power plant is indeed feasible. The key is that when we go all free market on these things, we tend not to pay attention to what incentives we give people. If a person in charge of a power plant thinks that he can increase profit margins and get a tidy bonus by relaxing those expensive environmental controls, he has a strong incentive to do so. We simply need to make sure that he has a much stronger disincentive to do so in the form of a strong regulation and inspection regime.
The real trick here is that for-profit organizations also have a tendency to lobby the government to stop looking over their shoulders. We either need to make sure that our leaders have the integrity not to listen (and that history is not a pretty one), or somehow tweak the system so that the incentive to lobby away controls goes away. In that sense, the OP's solution of government run facilities isn't particularly crazy--even though it's "Marxist" which, I suppose is always universally bad to some people. The free market is great for optimizing cost of production and producing huge volumes of desirable goods at low cost. Don't mistake that for being the same thing as producing those goods the way they "should" be produced, though. Cost isn't always the variable we want to optimize for.
There are three ways mounting a TC volume with a hidden volume inside it:
1) Mount "inner" partition: This gives you access the "inner" volume and requires the secondary key.
2) Mount the "outer" partition while protecting the "inner" partition: This requires *both* keys and results in the "outer" partition being visible, but it will not allow you to overwrite any of the hidden data.
3) Mount the "outer" partition with just the "outer" key. This gives you the "outer" partition and TrueCrypt has *no clue* that a hidden partition exists. Attempts to fill the partition will happily be granted, potentially overwriting any hidden data. This is how law enforcement with only the "outer" key would see things. No filesystem arithmetic solution exists.
I assume that you are British. So I would like to know if your tax collectors are armed, the IRS has armed agents yet no one considers them a law enforcement agency. Talk about feudal system tax collectors.
The IRS Criminal Investigation group is, as far as I know, considered a law enforcement organization. And they are armed because they often investigate organized crime and tax evading nutbars who are extremely likely to shoot at them.
If this is Truecrypt's killer ap, and you deny having another password, they'll bring it up in court and claim you're hiding it from them - getting you in trouble in other ways.
In a properly civilized justice system, wouldn't it be rather hard for them to back up that claim? If the court in question actually works that way, why do they need to get to your second volume anyway? They can just accuse you of the crime in question and have you convicted on their say-so.
This means they'll simply detain you until you either comply (providing the second set of keys) or until they feel you can't comply.
I think that this will strongly depend on your jurisdiction. If you're living in a place where they can throw you in the can forever without any evidence that you've committed a crime beyond the possibility that you did it, encryption keys and plausible deniability are the least of your worries. If that's the case where you live, I highly recommend against having any sort of encrypted or random looking data on your hard drive under any circumstances, whether it was generated by TrueCrypt or not.
My guess is that we have enough H in our oceans to keep us going for quite a while. If somebody asked me which molecules I'd be happiest "wasting" in the pursuit of energy, I'd probably go for H2O. We have lots of it, as long as whatever we're doing with it also provides us enough energy to efficiently extract it from sea water.
Anybody want to run the numbers to figure out what percentage of our water we'd be losing per year to sustain our current level of energy use assuming the efficiencies quoted in the article and JimboFBX's suggested 1% hydrogen loss?
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You seem to be quibbling with a very small portion of evolutionary theory, though. If it were to suggest "mutation" rather than "random mutation" would you be satisfied that it's a scientific and falsifiable theory, or is there more to your complaint? I have no problem with suggesting that evolution is driven by chemical processes whose outcome cannot currently be predicted and whose distribution appears to be flat, but that seems like it's simply a long way of saying "random" processes. Sure, there are some people who are perfectly happy to see The Hand of God in every hand at the poker table, and radioactive decay may be deterministic on some grand cosmic scale, but it seems to me like "random" is a reasonable approximation for those things.
To me, asking whether it's good fairies or invisible crab people who determine who wins at the roulette table is not really a question for science, but that doesn't mean that characterizing the distribution of results and modeling the properties of the wheel aren't, and I'd hesitate to call somebody who believes a roulette wheel is random a dogmatic nutbar.
Next question, what are your thoughts on the remarkable coincidence described here? I know that it could have been magic, but it also appears to be a very strong indication of common descent.
I'm not sure if you're making stuff up or if you're simply repeating something you pulled off the Internet, but mutations are significantly more common than you seem to think they are. Mendel's work definitely does not prove what you think it does.
Well, mutations are a pretty good source of new information.
Given *some* description of the designer and its mechanisms, I would be the first to say that ID could potentially be testable. As it stands now, it's simply an overly broad piece of hand waving. It has to be, because the majority of powerful interests that push it are really using it as nothing more than stealth creationism and any attempt to nail it down turns it into real creationism. Sure, there's a minority of people who really think that they're going somewhere with the science for its own sake, but those people certainly aren't Discovery Institute fellows.
And this brings up the next obvious question: How do you show that something is irreducibly complex? More importantly, assuming that the the IC thing has N parts and definitely cannot function with N-1 parts (so far, we haven't seen such a thing, but let's pretend...), how do you handle the case that allows it to function with N + 1 parts? So far, Dr. Behe and company have not really addressed that point. Their work appears to boil down to, "I can't figure out how it could be done, and I reject your suggestions as to how it could have happened because you can't prove that it *did* happen that way." The hair on the back of my neck bristles at the horrible sound of the goalposts screeching across the ground.
That's like asking why United Airlines should be worried about tensions in the Middle East making it hard to get oil shipments out, since the logistical and financial burden is the oil industry's problem, right?
This is not entirely unexpected. Without going over the numbers, there's something important to remember that people often forget when doing their statistical tests: If your tests say that the results are significant with a p-value of 0.05, you're still likely to flag uninteresting results as interesting about 1 in 20 times. A lot of tests showing nothing with a few anomalies is pretty much what I'd expect from something that isn't really different from random chance.
I think that markets are great, but don't assume that they always optimize for the most important variable. The key to using market is knowing when to use them in their bare state, and knowing when other variables are more important. In the latter case, the trick is simply a regulatory system that ties profit to safety (i.e. we fine the crap out of you if you fail to meet very stringent safety and cleanliness standards).
The real trick here is that for-profit organizations also have a tendency to lobby the government to stop looking over their shoulders. We either need to make sure that our leaders have the integrity not to listen (and that history is not a pretty one), or somehow tweak the system so that the incentive to lobby away controls goes away. In that sense, the OP's solution of government run facilities isn't particularly crazy--even though it's "Marxist" which, I suppose is always universally bad to some people. The free market is great for optimizing cost of production and producing huge volumes of desirable goods at low cost. Don't mistake that for being the same thing as producing those goods the way they "should" be produced, though. Cost isn't always the variable we want to optimize for.
There are three ways mounting a TC volume with a hidden volume inside it:
1) Mount "inner" partition: This gives you access the "inner" volume and requires the secondary key.
2) Mount the "outer" partition while protecting the "inner" partition: This requires *both* keys and results in the "outer" partition being visible, but it will not allow you to overwrite any of the hidden data.
3) Mount the "outer" partition with just the "outer" key. This gives you the "outer" partition and TrueCrypt has *no clue* that a hidden partition exists. Attempts to fill the partition will happily be granted, potentially overwriting any hidden data. This is how law enforcement with only the "outer" key would see things. No filesystem arithmetic solution exists.
My guess is that we have enough H in our oceans to keep us going for quite a while. If somebody asked me which molecules I'd be happiest "wasting" in the pursuit of energy, I'd probably go for H2O. We have lots of it, as long as whatever we're doing with it also provides us enough energy to efficiently extract it from sea water.
Anybody want to run the numbers to figure out what percentage of our water we'd be losing per year to sustain our current level of energy use assuming the efficiencies quoted in the article and JimboFBX's suggested 1% hydrogen loss?