I suppose, to be fair, I should have limited my description of proponents of ID as liars and hypocrites to those who propose it as a scientific theory, and an alernative to theories of evolution. Unfortunately, as far as I can determine, that is just about all of them.
I doubt that Bush is either bright enough or knowledgable enough to think in those terms. His argument against this kind of science is basically "because God said it's bad."
I doubt if they use floating point numbers. The software is probably written in COBOL, in which case it most likely uses Binary Coded Decimal, or (as you suggest) integers. In addition, there are software packages (such as Maple) which can deal with arbitrarily large numbers.
Because of the rounding/truncation problems inherent in floating-point arithmetic, only a moron would use it for financial calculations.
Goedel's Theorem (_not_ theory) is a result of mathematical logic. It has nothing to do with truth or falsity, it's to do with mathematical statements which are either valid or invalid within a formal system. If you don't know what a formal system is, I'm sure Wikipedia (or any decent textbook on mathematical logic) will help you out. Euclidean geometry may well (if you're old enough to have been taught it in high school) have been the first formal system you encountered. Science is not a formal system.
The difference between mathematical proofs and scientific "proofs" is that mathematics is a priori (that is, a conclusion follows from premises) whereas scientific theories (not theorems) are only falsifiable. They may be regarded as "proven" when two conditions are fulfilled: the theory has not (yet) been falsified; the theory has predicted something which has later been observed.
While I don't doubt the intelligence of some proponents proponents of ID, I dispute their intellectual integrity. That kind of wilful stupidity involves a great deal of self-deception and hypocrisy. Ignoring facts is never easy, and involves some effort.
Apropos the stem cell scandal - if the stakes are high enough, weak people will be tempted to compromise their integrity. It's rather sad. Fortunately the process of peer review (and attempting to reproduce results) smokes these fuckers out every time.
I've been supporting myself (and a family), taking responsibility for my own actions, etc, for the best part of 40 years. I'm still a socialist, and I'd bet I have a great deal more compassion for others than you do. I can't speak for your morals, but I've observed that many conservatives are either completely amoral or actively evil.
It's amusing that you lump Democrats and socialists together btw. It marks you out as a dumb-as-shit right-wing American who keeps drinking the kool-aid, because most thinking people realise that there is almost no difference between your Democrat and Republican parties.
> I believe that evolution's most serious weakness is that we have never been able to show that it is possible for mutations to lead to working genes.
You've just proved my point for me. What you claim is impossible is _precisely_ what happens every time some germ develops immunity to a particular antibiotic. I'm sure someone who's actually educated in the life sciences (as opposed to an interested observer like myself) could come up with a lot of even better examples.
None of them are well reasoned. They aren't science (they aren't falsifiable), they're bad theology (god of the gaps), and the proponents of all forms of ID lie, obfuscate and distort facts on a reular basis.
A gerrymander (we used to have one here in SA under Tom Playford, too) is not quite the same as a rigged election. The fraud is in the electoral boundaries (so everyone _knows_ it's fraudulent, and either applauds it or moans about it, depending) not in the count. Branch stacking is different again. You just add a whole bunch of new electors and swamp the entrenched vote. It's a bit like allowing the dead to vote.
In Australia, the vote in Federal and State elections is resistant to tampering in either of these ways (cemetery vote and swapping of ballot boxes, eg) because everyone is watching everyone else like a cat at a mouse hole, and because the Electoral Commission is reasonably honest. (To be frank, I don't really care what happens in Labor or Liberal branches. Whatever happens, a politician is going to get preselection.) They also make sure there's no obvious gerrymandering.
Besides that, everyone in Australia knows that the only place that's more corrupt than Queensland is New South Wales (although there isn't much in it).
You'd have to have immense resources. Every stage of the process (from casting the votes, through counting them and to the final tally) is overseen by scrutineers from at least the two major parties and probably a couple of the minor ones. It would have to involve ballot-box substitution on a massive scale.
I'm not saying it would be impossible, but it would be much harder than you think. It's easier and cheaper to manipulate peoples' opinions before they vote (thank you Rupert Murdoch).
We do things in much the same way in Australia. While you might not like the results of an election, you can be pretty sure it wasn't rigged, at least at the vote-counting level. (Rigging peoples' opinions, otoh, is another matter entirely.)
> Didn't the Brits have to switch from wine to barley beverages when their climate cooled several hundred years ago?
Not really. Ales are traditional in that part of the world, and have been for a _very_ long time. True, they could grow grapes (briefly) in Britain, but wine wasn't really a dominant part of the culture. They're basically Germans, for christ's sake.
You may be correct in general. I spent the summer of 1976-7 in Sydney, and it was pretty fucking wet. As I implied, I prefer Darwin (better atmosphere and much more interesting people). In the Wet, you've been working through a hot, humid bastard of a day and (you can set your watch by it) at about 1800 it just buckets down and chills everything off very nicely. OTOH, my shoes went mouldy.
A lot of very good wines (particularly reds) don't taste too good straight out of the bottle, so sniffing the cork is a very reliable way of detecting cork-taint. Sometimes slightly corked wines are still drinkable, just not as stunning as the other bottle you had from the same case. (I must admit I don't do it in restaurants because it seems pretentious, but I often do it at home.)
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I suppose, to be fair, I should have limited my description of proponents of ID as liars and hypocrites to those who propose it as a scientific theory, and an alernative to theories of evolution. Unfortunately, as far as I can determine, that is just about all of them.
I think the Aristotelian term for this kind of person is "Republican".
I doubt that Bush is either bright enough or knowledgable enough to think in those terms. His argument against this kind of science is basically "because God said it's bad."
> Should contraception be banned, for example, as it prevents a "potential human" from becoming a human?
This is, in fact, the Roman Catholic church's position.
I doubt if they use floating point numbers. The software is probably written in COBOL, in which case it most likely uses Binary Coded Decimal, or (as you suggest) integers. In addition, there are software packages (such as Maple) which can deal with arbitrarily large numbers.
Because of the rounding/truncation problems inherent in floating-point arithmetic, only a moron would use it for financial calculations.
However, you'd have to have done some pretty nifty reverse engineering to make it totally 100% bug-for-bug compatible ...
Just getting stuff to work at all is quite an achievement, given what you're working with.
Goedel's Theorem (_not_ theory) is a result of mathematical logic. It has nothing to do with truth or falsity, it's to do with mathematical statements which are either valid or invalid within a formal system. If you don't know what a formal system is, I'm sure Wikipedia (or any decent textbook on mathematical logic) will help you out. Euclidean geometry may well (if you're old enough to have been taught it in high school) have been the first formal system you encountered. Science is not a formal system.
The difference between mathematical proofs and scientific "proofs" is that mathematics is a priori (that is, a conclusion follows from premises) whereas scientific theories (not theorems) are only falsifiable. They may be regarded as "proven" when two conditions are fulfilled: the theory has not (yet) been falsified; the theory has predicted something which has later been observed.
While I don't doubt the intelligence of some proponents proponents of ID, I dispute their intellectual integrity. That kind of wilful stupidity involves a great deal of self-deception and hypocrisy. Ignoring facts is never easy, and involves some effort.
Apropos the stem cell scandal - if the stakes are high enough, weak people will be tempted to compromise their integrity. It's rather sad. Fortunately the process of peer review (and attempting to reproduce results) smokes these fuckers out every time.
Breathtaking! Newt, is that you?
I've been supporting myself (and a family), taking responsibility for my own actions, etc, for the best part of 40 years. I'm still a socialist, and I'd bet I have a great deal more compassion for others than you do. I can't speak for your morals, but I've observed that many conservatives are either completely amoral or actively evil.
It's amusing that you lump Democrats and socialists together btw. It marks you out as a dumb-as-shit right-wing American who keeps drinking the kool-aid, because most thinking people realise that there is almost no difference between your Democrat and Republican parties.
> I believe that evolution's most serious weakness is that we have never been able to show that it is possible for mutations to lead to working genes.
You've just proved my point for me. What you claim is impossible is _precisely_ what happens every time some germ develops immunity to a particular antibiotic. I'm sure someone who's actually educated in the life sciences (as opposed to an interested observer like myself) could come up with a lot of even better examples.
I vaguely remember something about it (it didn't really register down here). Did the fraud actually influence the outcome of an election?
You do realise, of course, that it won't help at all. Wilful ignorance of this kind is immune to facts coupled with reason.
None of them are well reasoned. They aren't science (they aren't falsifiable), they're bad theology (god of the gaps), and the proponents of all forms of ID lie, obfuscate and distort facts on a reular basis.
You're right, Karl _was_ the funniest Marx Brother ...
A gerrymander (we used to have one here in SA under Tom Playford, too) is not quite the same as a rigged election. The fraud is in the electoral boundaries (so everyone _knows_ it's fraudulent, and either applauds it or moans about it, depending) not in the count. Branch stacking is different again. You just add a whole bunch of new electors and swamp the entrenched vote. It's a bit like allowing the dead to vote.
In Australia, the vote in Federal and State elections is resistant to tampering in either of these ways (cemetery vote and swapping of ballot boxes, eg) because everyone is watching everyone else like a cat at a mouse hole, and because the Electoral Commission is reasonably honest. (To be frank, I don't really care what happens in Labor or Liberal branches. Whatever happens, a politician is going to get preselection.) They also make sure there's no obvious gerrymandering.
Besides that, everyone in Australia knows that the only place that's more corrupt than Queensland is New South Wales (although there isn't much in it).
You'd have to have immense resources. Every stage of the process (from casting the votes, through counting them and to the final tally) is overseen by scrutineers from at least the two major parties and probably a couple of the minor ones. It would have to involve ballot-box substitution on a massive scale.
I'm not saying it would be impossible, but it would be much harder than you think. It's easier and cheaper to manipulate peoples' opinions before they vote (thank you Rupert Murdoch).
We do things in much the same way in Australia. While you might not like the results of an election, you can be pretty sure it wasn't rigged, at least at the vote-counting level. (Rigging peoples' opinions, otoh, is another matter entirely.)
> Didn't the Brits have to switch from wine to barley beverages when their climate cooled several hundred years ago?
Not really. Ales are traditional in that part of the world, and have been for a _very_ long time. True, they could grow grapes (briefly) in Britain, but wine wasn't really a dominant part of the culture. They're basically Germans, for christ's sake.
> Ever see a fish mating with a wheat plant?
... bastard.
That just put a really, really ugly image in my mind that I'm afraid will stay with me forever
You may be correct in general. I spent the summer of 1976-7 in Sydney, and it was pretty fucking wet. As I implied, I prefer Darwin (better atmosphere and much more interesting people). In the Wet, you've been working through a hot, humid bastard of a day and (you can set your watch by it) at about 1800 it just buckets down and chills everything off very nicely. OTOH, my shoes went mouldy.
Along parts of the south coast, also Kangaroo Island and (probably) Tasmania.
I should probably re-read "The Stainless Steel Rat" at this point. I wonder if it's still available.
Oops. s/under/over/
Too much red wine.
Underrated? WTF! I should have AT LEAST got flamebait for this one. How humiliating.
Part of the reason is because it's really hard, maybe even impossible, to design a completely secure system.
Nope, no brainwashing, just observation.
A lot of very good wines (particularly reds) don't taste too good straight out of the bottle, so sniffing the cork is a very reliable way of detecting cork-taint. Sometimes slightly corked wines are still drinkable, just not as stunning as the other bottle you had from the same case. (I must admit I don't do it in restaurants because it seems pretentious, but I often do it at home.)