You keep bringing in more undefined words: "God", "universe", "metaverse". None of these words has any meaning until you define what you mean by them. And once you define them, you discover those definitions lead to consequences - often consequences that you had no idea of when you first proposed the definitions. Some of those consequences may be experimentally observable. Or they may not. But until you define what you're talking about, you can't even ask the question.
This is precisely the difference between science and religion. Science insists on precise, rigorous definitions, then follows those definitions to see where they lead. Religion revels in using fuzzy, mystical sounding language to confuse people and create the illusion it has actually said something. But it hasn't. It's said absolutely nothing, and that's why it never has to worry about its statements being disproven. Until you define what you mean by "God", you can't even ask the question, "Does God exist?" It's a meaningless pattern of syllables.
What do you mean by "outside of the universe"? When I speak of "the universe", I define it to mean, "everything that exists." Therefore, anything that exists is part of the universe, by definition. Perhaps you're using a different definition.
You could, of course, hypothesize that it exists in some region of the universe that doesn't interact with our region - outside our Hubble volume, for example. But that doesn't mean there can be no evidence. For one thing, it might have interacted with our Hubble volume at some point in the past, which could have left a signature that would still be visible today. Also, it's possible that future developments in physics will reveal a currently unknown mechanism by which even distant regions of the universe can interact.
In any case, when religious people speak of "God", I'm pretty sure most of them aren't defining it as, "something that can't interact with our region of the universe in any way."
Even that isn't really true. If you give a precise definition of what you mean by "God" - that is, if you present a coherent theory - that theory will make predictions, and those predictions could (at least theoretically) be compared to experiment. Let's replace the word "God" by "Entity X":
Is there any evidence for or against the existence of Entity X?
Well, that's a not a very meaningful question, since I haven't told you what I mean by "Entity X". So now I'll clarify that Entity X means your dog. You probably have a very good idea of whether you have a dog or not, with lots of evidence one way or the other. And you knew that even before I defined "Entity X". You just didn't know that was what I was talking about, because I hadn't asked a well defined question.
I've interviewed lots of people using puzzles of this sort, and I find they work really really well for picking out the better programmers. You need to understand how to do it correctly, though. You're not looking for whether they "get the right answer". You're looking to see how they approach the problem and what sorts of solutions they try (even if they end up not working). When you interview a bunch of people this way, you find they split into a few groups, and the differences between groups are really obvious. For example, some people will just have no idea how to even approach the problem. Others will struggle to figure out an O(n^2) solution. And others will instantly take it for granted that of course there's a trivial O(n^2) solution, but you're obviously looking for something better than that. The differences aren't subtle.
Jeannie is another excellent Siri-like app for Android, and has existed for quite a while. I've been using it for about a month, and I'm amazed at how well it can pull up answers to questions spoken in natural English. The UI could use a little cleaning up, especially the way it presents weather forecasts, but those are minor details. The core speech recognition and natural language recognition are quite solid.
That is my point. That is why the more scientific answer to questions regarding the existence of god are of the "I don't known" persuasion.
What I've been trying to express (not very clearly, I guess!) is that science doesn't give any answer at all to your question, not even "I don't know", because you haven't asked a meaningful question. Answering, "I don't know," would indicate your question was well defined, and we didn't know the answer to it. But that's not the case.
A more truly scientific response would be, "Define what you mean by God." Once you do that - once you offer something approximating a coherent theory - we can discuss what evidence exists and what bearing it has on the question of whether this "God" does or does not exist. But until you do that, we can't even answer, "I don't know," because you haven't asked a meaningful question.
Science does not make definitive statements about the existence or non-existence of anything. The only thing it makes definitive statements about is whether the predictions of particular theories are or are not consistent with the evidence. When you speak of "God", what theory are you referring to, and what predictions does that theory make?
You still haven't answered my question: what would you accept as evidence against the existence of God? And let me add a few more. The set of things that cannot be disproved is infinite. Do you believe in all of them? If not, then clearly the inability to disprove something is not (in your mind) a reason to believe in it. How do you decide which ones to believe in? If your belief in God is not based on evidence, what is it based on? (Please do not answer "faith" unless you also give a precise definition of what you mean by that. When people say a belief is "based on faith," that's often a euphemism for "not based on anything at all, but I insist it's true anyway.")
When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
If you believe that, then let me ask you a question: what would you accept as evidence against the existence of God?
I can easily point to things I would accept as evidence for the existence of God. For example, if the last trumpet were to ring out, the dead were to rise up out of the ground, angels were to appear proclaiming the end of the world, all as described in the Bible, I would say, "I guess I'd better reconsider that religion business." This sounds like an extreme example, of course, but in another sense it's not extreme at all: the Bible confidently predicts that exactly this will happen. The only question is when. That's a prediction that can be verified by evidence.
But what if it doesn't happen? Is that evidence against the existence of God? Early Christians believed the end of the world was imminent, and anxiously prepared for it. But it didn't come, so they kept waiting. Centuries went by, and it still didn't come. They just kept waiting. A thousand years went by, and people said, "Ok, this has to be it. It's the millennium. Surely the world is really going to end now." And it didn't. And another thousand years went by, and it still didn't come. And did this have any effect on their faith? No, not at all. They just kept waiting.
That's the problem with saying, "There is no evidence against the existence of God." It's impossible for there to be evidence against the existence of God, because there is absolutely nothing that could ever happen, nothing you could ever observe, that most religious people would accept as evidence against the existence of God. No matter what evidence you present them, they'll find a way to interpret it as being consistent with their beliefs, and then just keep believing.
With Android being so diverse and wide a market I say picking your MFG is the important part. And what I see in that list.. HTC is the brand to avoid. But I already knew that. Motorola or Samsung for me please.
Are we looking at the same chart? That big block of red in the middle is all Motorola phones - Devour, Backflip, Cliq XT. Whereas every HTC phone released in 2010 is either fully up to date, or only one release behind.
In this case, they don't even need to slip in a "bug" to make this possible. Just leave the bootloader unlocked (because why should they lock it?), and customers can download their favorite ROM. It's all completely legal, as long as that ROM is hosted outside the US.
My argument is who cares if there's 4 or 400 or 4 million stations between here and the next star, it'll all work just as well as a colonization / space travel policy.
Sadly, it isn't that simple. So all those stations are sitting out there in interstellar space. What will they use as a power source? Nearly all energy on earth either comes from 1) the sun, or 2) the ground. Hanging out in interstellar space, you don't have either. No sunlight to run solar panels, just starlight that is far too faint to generate much power. No oil, no radioactive material to fission. The density of matter out there is roughly one hydrogen atom per cubic meter. And you want to have a whole chain of these stations, each with a large population of people who spend their entire lives living out there? That means transporting all supplies from the nearest star... which is a few light years away.
That's basically what they're doing. From Reuters:
The company has previously said it would charge only the cost of manufacturing it plus a 5 percent mark-up, which would be reinvested into tropical disease research. "We are not going to make any money from this project," Witty said.
Is it just me, or does the summary have nothing to do with the article? All the article says is that UC officials agreed to get union approval before creating online courses. Nowhere does it say the unions are refusing to give that approval. In fact, it doesn't say much of anything at all. It's impossible to tell from the linked article what's actually going on. But the poster somehow turned this into "unions are trying to block online courses", even though they provided zero support that it's actually true.
Google's priority is to return search results in under 100ms. That requires tight integration. It's all about cache management, not platform APIs. Some data has to be pushed to clients, rather than pulled through APIs, or performance will suffer badly.
The article isn't about search. He barely mentions it, and for good reason. Search is one of the few Google services that already is easy to access programmatically, even all you're doing is sending an HTTP GET that mocks the Google search page. But he's talking about Gmail, Docs, Google+, Maps... All those other products that you could do really neat things with if they had real APIs.
There's no conceivable scenario wherein humanity would have to worry about the radiation on that time scale.
If you think there is "no conceivable scenario", you really need to work on improving your imagination. I can think of dozens of scenarios. You really think the only possible outcomes are that someone digs up all that radioactive waste to use as fuel, or that civilization collapses? You can't conceive of a future in which neither of those happens? Come on, that's just silly.
Nearly all of the Android malware comes from third party app stores, most of them in China. There have only been a handful of cases where malicious apps got into the Android Market, and they got removed quickly. I know lots of people with Android phones. I don't know of any of them of who have installed a custom ROM or run a virus scanner, nor of them ever having a malware infection.
I'd mod this up if I had points right now. I once did exactly this. My group was in the final stages of putting out a release. I told them I'd accepted a new job, but would stay on until the release date (that worked out to about six weeks notice) to avoid delaying it and to give lots of time for knowledge transfer. This shows your loyalty and professionalism. Your current company will appreciate that you "went the extra mile" (or is that kilometer in the UK?), and your new manager will be impressed that you're someone who can be trusted, who doesn't just think about himself.
Once you lay out a comprehensive and complete list of what the costs are -- especially the hidden costs -- then I'll hop on board.
That's a standard rationalization for not doing things you don't want to do. "I refuse to do anything until we have perfect information." It also is just plain silly. You will never have perfect information about anything. So what? You make the best decisions you can based on the information you have available.
We will never have a "comprehensive and complete" list of every hidden cost. So what? Just because there are costs we don't know about, why is that a reason not to account for the ones we do know about? Our estimates of the environmental cost of burning a gallon of gasoline will never be absolutely perfect, but so what? They're already a lot better than assuming it's $0, which is effectively what we're doing by not even attempting to factor them in.
In my field (molecular dynamics), nearly all of the major codes are from academic groups: Gromacs, Amber, Charmm, NAMD... About the only one I can think of that isn't is Desmond, which is from a private (but non-profit) research institute.
The point you were responding to was that the media overemphasizes nuclear problems while downplaying or ignoring coal ones.
If you're including global warming among the problems caused by coal, then I don't think that's true. Far more stories get published about global warming than about nuclear disasters. I would say that some media sources (especially those with a strong political slant) do a bad job of reporting on global warming, lending far too much credibility to fringe views that aren't justified by the evidence. But that's another matter. If you're claiming the media doesn't report about global warming, or that it ignores the connection to burning coal, that simply isn't true.
Yes, that is a completely valid criticism of coal burning power plants. It's also completely unrelated to the point I was responding to. The poster mentioned an explosion that killed someone, "[b]ut it wasn't a nuclear plant (it was coal) so no one cared." He wasn't criticizing coal power. He was criticizing the media for (he seemed to believe) using different standards for nuclear accidents than for accidents at other types of power plants. I pointed out that the media had very good reasons for treating these two accidents differently.
I completely agree with you: fossil fuels are causing major problems throughout the world. Rising sea levels are just one of those problems. We need to do something about them. But that's a different subject.
OMG you just cited the Daily Mail. How desperate can you be?
Ummm... what is that supposed to mean? You're clearly trying to imply something, but I honestly don't know what. Anyway, it was just the first hit that came up in a Google search for "fukushima uninhabitable area". If you prefer a different news source, I'm sure you can find lots of them with very little difficulty. This story was reported by almost every major news agency in the world.
Anyway, they have banned people from living in that zone, which is bad, but a long way from banning anyone from entering.
Absolutely false. From the article: "Japan has banned people from entering within 20 km (12 miles) of the Fukushima plant, located 240 km northeast of Tokyo." Please check your facts before making assertions like this. Don't just make things up and spread misinformation around the internet.
Of course, a >1000 square km area in Fukushima has been officially declared uninhabitable, and is expected to remain so for a couple of decades. How large an area was made uninhabitable by that coal plant explosion? It seems to me the two are just a little bit different in their impact...
You clearly didn't read the article, or at least didn't pay much attention to it. Let me repeat: the pinwheel house is not from the MIT project. It inspired them to start the project. Other than that, it has no connection to the MIT project of any sort. Their goal is to produce even less expensive houses: ones that can actually be built for $1000.
How are they doing on that goal? Well, if you had followed the link to their web page, you would already know. They have developed 13 designs so far. And the cost? Here's what they say:
Chang said that the project's biggest success so far is in China. "We can build a house for $1800. In the Philippines the cost is closer to $2000, but that's still pretty good. Our progress is similar to what's happened in the $100 Laptop project. The cost of the actual laptop is closer to $200, but even so, the cost is impressively low. If we build a house for $1800, it'll still be the most inexpensively designed house in China."
It sounds like they're making pretty good progress. How's your project to be rich, healthy, and immortal without effort coming along?
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You keep bringing in more undefined words: "God", "universe", "metaverse". None of these words has any meaning until you define what you mean by them. And once you define them, you discover those definitions lead to consequences - often consequences that you had no idea of when you first proposed the definitions. Some of those consequences may be experimentally observable. Or they may not. But until you define what you're talking about, you can't even ask the question.
This is precisely the difference between science and religion. Science insists on precise, rigorous definitions, then follows those definitions to see where they lead. Religion revels in using fuzzy, mystical sounding language to confuse people and create the illusion it has actually said something. But it hasn't. It's said absolutely nothing, and that's why it never has to worry about its statements being disproven. Until you define what you mean by "God", you can't even ask the question, "Does God exist?" It's a meaningless pattern of syllables.
What do you mean by "outside of the universe"? When I speak of "the universe", I define it to mean, "everything that exists." Therefore, anything that exists is part of the universe, by definition. Perhaps you're using a different definition.
You could, of course, hypothesize that it exists in some region of the universe that doesn't interact with our region - outside our Hubble volume, for example. But that doesn't mean there can be no evidence. For one thing, it might have interacted with our Hubble volume at some point in the past, which could have left a signature that would still be visible today. Also, it's possible that future developments in physics will reveal a currently unknown mechanism by which even distant regions of the universe can interact.
In any case, when religious people speak of "God", I'm pretty sure most of them aren't defining it as, "something that can't interact with our region of the universe in any way."
Even that isn't really true. If you give a precise definition of what you mean by "God" - that is, if you present a coherent theory - that theory will make predictions, and those predictions could (at least theoretically) be compared to experiment. Let's replace the word "God" by "Entity X":
Is there any evidence for or against the existence of Entity X?
Well, that's a not a very meaningful question, since I haven't told you what I mean by "Entity X". So now I'll clarify that Entity X means your dog. You probably have a very good idea of whether you have a dog or not, with lots of evidence one way or the other. And you knew that even before I defined "Entity X". You just didn't know that was what I was talking about, because I hadn't asked a well defined question.
I've interviewed lots of people using puzzles of this sort, and I find they work really really well for picking out the better programmers. You need to understand how to do it correctly, though. You're not looking for whether they "get the right answer". You're looking to see how they approach the problem and what sorts of solutions they try (even if they end up not working). When you interview a bunch of people this way, you find they split into a few groups, and the differences between groups are really obvious. For example, some people will just have no idea how to even approach the problem. Others will struggle to figure out an O(n^2) solution. And others will instantly take it for granted that of course there's a trivial O(n^2) solution, but you're obviously looking for something better than that. The differences aren't subtle.
Jeannie is another excellent Siri-like app for Android, and has existed for quite a while. I've been using it for about a month, and I'm amazed at how well it can pull up answers to questions spoken in natural English. The UI could use a little cleaning up, especially the way it presents weather forecasts, but those are minor details. The core speech recognition and natural language recognition are quite solid.
That is my point. That is why the more scientific answer to questions regarding the existence of god are of the "I don't known" persuasion.
What I've been trying to express (not very clearly, I guess!) is that science doesn't give any answer at all to your question, not even "I don't know", because you haven't asked a meaningful question. Answering, "I don't know," would indicate your question was well defined, and we didn't know the answer to it. But that's not the case.
A more truly scientific response would be, "Define what you mean by God." Once you do that - once you offer something approximating a coherent theory - we can discuss what evidence exists and what bearing it has on the question of whether this "God" does or does not exist. But until you do that, we can't even answer, "I don't know," because you haven't asked a meaningful question.
Science does not make definitive statements about the existence or non-existence of anything. The only thing it makes definitive statements about is whether the predictions of particular theories are or are not consistent with the evidence. When you speak of "God", what theory are you referring to, and what predictions does that theory make?
You still haven't answered my question: what would you accept as evidence against the existence of God? And let me add a few more. The set of things that cannot be disproved is infinite. Do you believe in all of them? If not, then clearly the inability to disprove something is not (in your mind) a reason to believe in it. How do you decide which ones to believe in? If your belief in God is not based on evidence, what is it based on? (Please do not answer "faith" unless you also give a precise definition of what you mean by that. When people say a belief is "based on faith," that's often a euphemism for "not based on anything at all, but I insist it's true anyway.")
When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
If you believe that, then let me ask you a question: what would you accept as evidence against the existence of God?
I can easily point to things I would accept as evidence for the existence of God. For example, if the last trumpet were to ring out, the dead were to rise up out of the ground, angels were to appear proclaiming the end of the world, all as described in the Bible, I would say, "I guess I'd better reconsider that religion business." This sounds like an extreme example, of course, but in another sense it's not extreme at all: the Bible confidently predicts that exactly this will happen. The only question is when. That's a prediction that can be verified by evidence.
But what if it doesn't happen? Is that evidence against the existence of God? Early Christians believed the end of the world was imminent, and anxiously prepared for it. But it didn't come, so they kept waiting. Centuries went by, and it still didn't come. They just kept waiting. A thousand years went by, and people said, "Ok, this has to be it. It's the millennium. Surely the world is really going to end now." And it didn't. And another thousand years went by, and it still didn't come. And did this have any effect on their faith? No, not at all. They just kept waiting.
That's the problem with saying, "There is no evidence against the existence of God." It's impossible for there to be evidence against the existence of God, because there is absolutely nothing that could ever happen, nothing you could ever observe, that most religious people would accept as evidence against the existence of God. No matter what evidence you present them, they'll find a way to interpret it as being consistent with their beliefs, and then just keep believing.
With Android being so diverse and wide a market I say picking your MFG is the important part. And what I see in that list.. HTC is the brand to avoid. But I already knew that. Motorola or Samsung for me please.
Are we looking at the same chart? That big block of red in the middle is all Motorola phones - Devour, Backflip, Cliq XT. Whereas every HTC phone released in 2010 is either fully up to date, or only one release behind.
In this case, they don't even need to slip in a "bug" to make this possible. Just leave the bootloader unlocked (because why should they lock it?), and customers can download their favorite ROM. It's all completely legal, as long as that ROM is hosted outside the US.
My argument is who cares if there's 4 or 400 or 4 million stations between here and the next star, it'll all work just as well as a colonization / space travel policy.
Sadly, it isn't that simple. So all those stations are sitting out there in interstellar space. What will they use as a power source? Nearly all energy on earth either comes from 1) the sun, or 2) the ground. Hanging out in interstellar space, you don't have either. No sunlight to run solar panels, just starlight that is far too faint to generate much power. No oil, no radioactive material to fission. The density of matter out there is roughly one hydrogen atom per cubic meter. And you want to have a whole chain of these stations, each with a large population of people who spend their entire lives living out there? That means transporting all supplies from the nearest star... which is a few light years away.
The company has previously said it would charge only the cost of manufacturing it plus a 5 percent mark-up, which would be reinvested into tropical disease research. "We are not going to make any money from this project," Witty said.
Is it just me, or does the summary have nothing to do with the article? All the article says is that UC officials agreed to get union approval before creating online courses. Nowhere does it say the unions are refusing to give that approval. In fact, it doesn't say much of anything at all. It's impossible to tell from the linked article what's actually going on. But the poster somehow turned this into "unions are trying to block online courses", even though they provided zero support that it's actually true.
Google's priority is to return search results in under 100ms. That requires tight integration. It's all about cache management, not platform APIs. Some data has to be pushed to clients, rather than pulled through APIs, or performance will suffer badly.
The article isn't about search. He barely mentions it, and for good reason. Search is one of the few Google services that already is easy to access programmatically, even all you're doing is sending an HTTP GET that mocks the Google search page. But he's talking about Gmail, Docs, Google+, Maps... All those other products that you could do really neat things with if they had real APIs.
There's no conceivable scenario wherein humanity would have to worry about the radiation on that time scale.
If you think there is "no conceivable scenario", you really need to work on improving your imagination. I can think of dozens of scenarios. You really think the only possible outcomes are that someone digs up all that radioactive waste to use as fuel, or that civilization collapses? You can't conceive of a future in which neither of those happens? Come on, that's just silly.
Nearly all of the Android malware comes from third party app stores, most of them in China. There have only been a handful of cases where malicious apps got into the Android Market, and they got removed quickly. I know lots of people with Android phones. I don't know of any of them of who have installed a custom ROM or run a virus scanner, nor of them ever having a malware infection.
I'd mod this up if I had points right now. I once did exactly this. My group was in the final stages of putting out a release. I told them I'd accepted a new job, but would stay on until the release date (that worked out to about six weeks notice) to avoid delaying it and to give lots of time for knowledge transfer. This shows your loyalty and professionalism. Your current company will appreciate that you "went the extra mile" (or is that kilometer in the UK?), and your new manager will be impressed that you're someone who can be trusted, who doesn't just think about himself.
Once you lay out a comprehensive and complete list of what the costs are -- especially the hidden costs -- then I'll hop on board.
That's a standard rationalization for not doing things you don't want to do. "I refuse to do anything until we have perfect information." It also is just plain silly. You will never have perfect information about anything. So what? You make the best decisions you can based on the information you have available.
We will never have a "comprehensive and complete" list of every hidden cost. So what? Just because there are costs we don't know about, why is that a reason not to account for the ones we do know about? Our estimates of the environmental cost of burning a gallon of gasoline will never be absolutely perfect, but so what? They're already a lot better than assuming it's $0, which is effectively what we're doing by not even attempting to factor them in.
In my field (molecular dynamics), nearly all of the major codes are from academic groups: Gromacs, Amber, Charmm, NAMD... About the only one I can think of that isn't is Desmond, which is from a private (but non-profit) research institute.
The point you were responding to was that the media overemphasizes nuclear problems while downplaying or ignoring coal ones.
If you're including global warming among the problems caused by coal, then I don't think that's true. Far more stories get published about global warming than about nuclear disasters. I would say that some media sources (especially those with a strong political slant) do a bad job of reporting on global warming, lending far too much credibility to fringe views that aren't justified by the evidence. But that's another matter. If you're claiming the media doesn't report about global warming, or that it ignores the connection to burning coal, that simply isn't true.
Yes, that is a completely valid criticism of coal burning power plants. It's also completely unrelated to the point I was responding to. The poster mentioned an explosion that killed someone, "[b]ut it wasn't a nuclear plant (it was coal) so no one cared." He wasn't criticizing coal power. He was criticizing the media for (he seemed to believe) using different standards for nuclear accidents than for accidents at other types of power plants. I pointed out that the media had very good reasons for treating these two accidents differently.
I completely agree with you: fossil fuels are causing major problems throughout the world. Rising sea levels are just one of those problems. We need to do something about them. But that's a different subject.
OMG you just cited the Daily Mail. How desperate can you be?
Ummm... what is that supposed to mean? You're clearly trying to imply something, but I honestly don't know what. Anyway, it was just the first hit that came up in a Google search for "fukushima uninhabitable area". If you prefer a different news source, I'm sure you can find lots of them with very little difficulty. This story was reported by almost every major news agency in the world.
Anyway, they have banned people from living in that zone, which is bad, but a long way from banning anyone from entering.
Absolutely false. From the article: "Japan has banned people from entering within 20 km (12 miles) of the Fukushima plant, located 240 km northeast of Tokyo." Please check your facts before making assertions like this. Don't just make things up and spread misinformation around the internet.
Here you go. More precisely, they've banned anyone from going within 20 km of the plant. Using area=pi*r*r gives an area of 1256 square km.
Of course, a >1000 square km area in Fukushima has been officially declared uninhabitable, and is expected to remain so for a couple of decades. How large an area was made uninhabitable by that coal plant explosion? It seems to me the two are just a little bit different in their impact...
You clearly didn't read the article, or at least didn't pay much attention to it. Let me repeat: the pinwheel house is not from the MIT project. It inspired them to start the project. Other than that, it has no connection to the MIT project of any sort. Their goal is to produce even less expensive houses: ones that can actually be built for $1000.
How are they doing on that goal? Well, if you had followed the link to their web page, you would already know. They have developed 13 designs so far. And the cost? Here's what they say:
Chang said that the project's biggest success so far is in China. "We can build a house for $1800. In the Philippines the cost is closer to $2000, but that's still pretty good. Our progress is similar to what's happened in the $100 Laptop project. The cost of the actual laptop is closer to $200, but even so, the cost is impressively low. If we build a house for $1800, it'll still be the most inexpensively designed house in China."
It sounds like they're making pretty good progress. How's your project to be rich, healthy, and immortal without effort coming along?