I started higher education in a community college. At that college "Linear Algebra" was one of the highest levels of mathematics offered. Partly due to a particularly bad instructor (and partly due to me, but I will never admit it), I ended up learning on my own enough linear algebra to pass the class with a B.
Unfortunately learning on my own was a terrible option. There were some topics scarcely touched on in Linear Algebra that would appear again in Abstract Algebra. When that point came, I had to lean heavily on the instructor's office hours because I was utterly lost.
By self-teaching I was not able to determine ancillary things that would later be very important.
Calculus II on the other hand, was taught by a good professor. He was able to tell me things like "pay particular attention to partial fraction decomposition because it will be very important in differential equations." When I took differential equations, LaPlace transforms weren't so bad because I had taken exhaustive notes a couple years earlier on handling ugly fractions.
There is tremendous value in learning from an expert in the subject. College is a place where a whole bunch of experts congregate. Why would you not attend college?
He just has to pay a few hundred million to get the rockets to take it up.
<conspiracy>Awww c'mon, with todays high tech video software at everyone's finger tips, you could fake a better moon landing for way less than that!</conspiracy>
He said he broke in to use storage space. Are you going to take him at face value
Well said. You've got to admit, that is a ridiculous excuse. I suspect the reason his punishment was "harsh" (I personally find it light) was because the judge believed the guy was lying through his teeth.
When we compare the time, cost and risk required to store a movie (typically what? 700-1400MB for divx or 2000-3000MB for dvdr?) on another computer with the time, cost and risk required to store a movie on a $0.10 CD-R - I don't see how anybody would reasonably believe "storage" was anything approaching the truth.
CS majors breaking into government computers are giving the rest of us a really bad public image. We should lobby for harsher sentences for these *ssholes.
If you make it lucrative for sites to host material enabling piracy, then you are going to encourage new sites to pop up hoping to get bought out by the MPAA.
I'm thinking the "all the kids got out of school for christmas and are looking to download the latest juvenile teen flick" theory is fairly probable.
It's kind of sad that most people do not know more about Ursula Le Guin. I first learned about her when I was looking for a good sci fi book to read and came across what I think is the only book to win both the hugo and nebula awards in the same year: Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness."
To be fair, her books have extraordinary levels of character development, very detailed accounts of what is going on and well... they are just very deep. You don't just run back to the book the same way you might with others. So not everyone will stick one of her books out. But they are worth the read.
Okay, I read Spolsky's book on user interface, and this article... I don't find them contradictory. And I don't see why Fitt's law is unreasonably important. If your hand is on the mouse, it will be easier to move the mouse than to hit a key, and the five easiest spots to put the cursor are the four corners of the screen and the spot the it is currently on.
The more you conform to established metaphores, the more easily you can make your product usable. Creating new metaphores is difficult, and getting them accepted is even more difficult.
Apple has been wildly successful at creating new metaphors and getting them used. Nobody complained when buttons suddenly changed from "OK" and "Cancel" to "Save" and "Don't Save", even though the metaphor of buttons-as-verbs was pretty non-standard.
It would be monstrous to make a huge "back" button in Firefox, just because you click it more. By that reasoning, all buttons should be different size, proportionately to how likely they are to be clicked.
I don't think that is the implication at all. A few buttons that are clicked a disproportionately large number of times should be made larger. Where you divide the "big buttons" from the "small buttons" is up to you.
What is wrong with making the whole bar fatter? Is it impossible to redesign the notion of a toolbar which would allow this? It would certainly be easier to hit the back button if it consumed more screen real estate and was flush up against the left hand side of the screen when maximized.
I've seen ugly user interfaces that were easy to use and pretty user interfaces that were terrible to use. I don't think taste is a good metric to throw into the equation.
Okay, given enough time you can eventually decode an original message encrypted with a one time pad. But you will be unable to tell that it is the original message since you will undoubtedly have decoded several other messages of the same length.
When discussing "breaking" a cypher, we usually refer to being able to read all messages, past and present, as easily as the person for whom the messages are intended. This is not possible with a one time pad unless your pads were generated with a pseudo-random number generator.
There is an interesting historical case where US Intelligence was able to crack some messages sent by the soviet embassy to moscow during WWII even though the communications were supposedly encrypted using one time pads. This was accomplished because the embassy was mistakenly using the same pad more than once. By definition that's a more-than-one time pad, but interesting none the less.
There is an unbreakable cypher, but the amount of data it is good for is limited. Important information, say between an embassy in a semi-hostile country and Washington, would likely be unbreakably encrypted.
But in general you are right. The goal of a general purpose cypher is to make cracking sufficiently difficult that it cannot be broken in a reasonable amount of time.
An interesting footnote on this whole "hours of time coding" issue...
The world's largest privately held software company is a company called SAS in North Carolina. Their software is basically an environment for doing statistical analysis. Regression, multiple regression, correlation, wilcoxon rank tests, and a slew of other things I haven't got to yet. But the important part is, if you were going to do a study to figure out the "optimal" amount of time to work, and consider not just productivity from the programmer, but all sorts of correlated variables (will someone work 80 hours/week for 10 years? How much will it cost to recruit and train a newbie when someone burns out?) then you would probably use a program like SAS to analyze the data. This is a company that has plenty of computer science and statistics Ph.D.'s on staff.
Their conclusion? 35 hours per week. Keeps the productivity high, the turn over low, and the company growing at double digit rates nearly every year (or maybe it has been every year).
Something to think about during your next interview cycle.
If you have a family, you're probably not working at EA Games. Why would your significant other put up with your 7 days-a-week work schedule for below average pay and modest benefits? Like the article said, the company preys on the young and naive. The truth is, most of them could get a better paying job in an area with lower cost of living. But they are so enamoured with being a games programmer, they stick it out.
or have a medical condition and need the money or insurance coverage
If you have a medical condition, you probably aren't up for 80 hour work weeks. So you're probably not working at EA games.
I worked as a programmer in the computer games industry for five years - when I was young. It was a lot of fun, but I am glad I eventually grew up and left. It's really weird when you go into a different field and find it is challenging, fun, pays better and requires fewer hours. The adrenaline rush of being able to enjoy my life with someone else far exceeds the adrenaline rush I got when that last CD-ROM got burned and shipped off to duplication.
So if the larger issue is cheating, why not allow people to play single player without steam and only require steam for multiplayer?
Or is valved frightened that people are going to cheat at single player and finish the game??
Steam is at least as much about piracy as cheating. As a result Valve has clearly stated that they are willing to inconvenience a lot of their customers so that a few will buy instead of pirate. I'm glad my midterms preclude me from installing HL2 until next week.
Amen to that. You know this same damned topic comes up on slashdot about every 9 months. And every time, I interject the same thing:
The best method of archival storage of color images is an archival quality CD-R!
The CD-R takes up so much less space than a rack of kodachrome slides (the only color archival quality film) and is orders of magnitude less expensive and an order of magnitude higher quality than a box of pigmented ink printed pictures, that it wins hands down. Newspapers just love publishing this crap about the 5 year shelf life of an economy CD-R. For about $1/CD you can buy a spindle of Mitsui MAM-A Gold Standard CD-R's. In archival storage, these things have an expected shelf life of 200 (TWO HUNDRED) years which exceeds the expected shelf life of both the kodachrome and the prints.
Then people bring up "but what will you read them with in 200 years?" Well, seeing as how somebody on a whim figured out a way to reproduce audio from a scan of a record, I strongly suspect someone could restore data on a 200 year old archival quality CD based an on optical scan as well.
I love photography, and I am slightly bitter about the decline of film, but the facts are hard to deny. Digital is just a better medium to preserve your most cherished memories).
If the economy is down, how can companies make money?
Economics is a broad subject, and not one of which I am well trained, but... In hard times, large corporations always seem to weather it better than smaller corporations. A down economy translates into less opportunity for a competitor to come from behind and snipe your customers. When the hard times become better, large corporations usually come out better as well.
When the economy is down, the wealthiest few do not suffer, and their wealth is safer than during good times when their investments may decline due to a competitive market.
But anyway, I'm still not an economist so take with the appropriate grain(s) of salt.
You are trying to straw-man the argument, but the fact is you cannot find a journal article which has survived peer review based solely on lack of contradictory evidence.
The original post attempted to build a foundation using a mathematical construct that was wrong. Most notably he said "Under the scientific process (and any system of logic), nothing can be proven true, things can only be proven false." It is true that science should never claim anything to be the absolute truth, but that statement was much more broad and more importantly was wrong. You CAN use logic to prove something true. Science is not the only application of logic. It doesn't make his conclusion wrong, but his argument would be rejected until an appropriate basis were found.
And you keep attempting to say my argument is that science requires absolute truth, which is not true. What I am saying is that nobody takes you seriously unless you provide supporting evidence. Which is why Carl Sagan made the comment he did. You keep clinging to my use of the word "proof" which simply shows that you are not actually a scientist because we use "proof" and "evidence" essentially interchangably even though it is not rigorously correct to do so.
I work with scientists. My field of study is statistics. My training is mining data to find evidence that supports their theory so they can get published.
Nobody in science will take a theory seriously unless it has supporting evidence. Maybe it is better that you stop replying because it is clear you do not work in research and have never had an article of yours rejected because its support was insufficiently strong (not that a counter-example was known, only that sufficient convincing evidence was not presented), and more importantly you don't actually know what you're talking about.
Half of the original post used the argument "Under the scientific process (and any system of logic), nothing can be proven true, things can only be proven false." Which is wrong, and I showed it to be wrong. Regardless of what you think is germaine to the argument, using an analogy that is wrong does NOT support your argument.
Pick up a journal in your university and read some of the new theories presented in it. Not a single one will say "gee, we just didn't find any counter-examples, so this must be true." In every case the author will provide reasoning behind his theory, and produce evidence that supports his theory.
I work in science, I've seen the crackpot theories go by. The problem is, it is not generally feasible to disprove the crackpot theories. In fact, with many new theories of physics even the reasonable ones are not feasibly testable. If we accept whatever theory comes along until a contradiction can be found, then we would have to accept that nude pictures of Britney Spears exist at the center of the sun until someone can prove otherwise. This is not practical, so we have to filter based on those that have sound reasoning BEHIND them.
You are totally misunderstanding both his and my post
I understand his post just fine, he just used a flawed argument. His statement that any system of logic cannot prove something true is wrong. And I showed it was wrong by proving true what he said could not be proven true.
As for your Britney example is it testable?
Yes. Go to the center of the sun and you will be able to determine whether or not it is true.
If we accept that the temperature of the sun is pretty high and that a sufficient test would be to see if a picture (basically paper) can withstand such a temperature (or lower) then testing is pretty easy - the photo would burn and the postulated hypothesis is falsified = science.
I don't accept that the temperature is high in the center of the sun. Physics is different there under those high pressure conditions. They push the heat out so that it is quite comfortable. Honest! Go to the center of the sun and find out. Besides, I never said the picture was on ordinary paper.
It only gives evidence that it would be extremeley likely to burn unless we discover otherwise for some reason.
How do you know it would burn in the center of the sun? I say the center is quite comfortable, you've provided no counter-example of a similar star whose center you've visited.
But more to the point. Science requires some evidence before something is accepted. My Britney Spears picture example is far fetched, but not impossible, right? So why will science texts the world over not include my theory in them? Nude pictures of people at the center of the sun is a pretty extraordinary claim, unless I back it with some extraordinary evidence it isn't worth very much. Evidence doesn't prove something true, but it helps us separate the possible from the absurd.
You must have supporting evidence to be taken seriously, not just a theory for which no counter-examples exist.
Come on. You do at least know you're dismissing the information theory/thermodynamics arguments out of hand don't you?
No, I am dismissing an attempt to redefine evolution into something clearly distinct from what it really is out of hand. This is a fairly common strategy on both sides: Attempt to get the other side to agree to some skewed definitions in order to guide the argument to something easier to attack. But in either case, it's a logical fallacy.
I certainly hope you don't think Darwin had it all figured out when he wrote his famous book.
I think Darwin had some inspirational insight as to why animals were slightly different in isolated ecosystems. I don't think the insight was especially profound. I think any researcher with a similar background visiting the same places would come to the same theory. The only thing that makes Darwin special is he wrote about it first. He certainly didn't have it all figured because we still don't have it all figured out (something the pro-creation argument is fond pointing out).
Actually, I believe that flightless birds are caught in that stage between not having wings and having wings for flight that every bird original came from.
It is also possible that the flightless birds on the Galapagos islands were fully winged flighted birds some time ago, but their wings provided no survivability benefit in this unusual isolated eco system, and so the birds spent most of their time walking around on the ground. In this case maintaining wings becomes a liability and those in the next generation with smaller wings would give up less energy maintaining those wings and therefore have an increased probability of increased numbers of offspring.
The problem is actually much MUCH harder than you make it out.
Hypothetically, you could 'track' down every single organisms history/growth over 1M years.
How would you do this? Can you get DNA for every distinct species that has existed over the last 1M years? Even if we could find fossils of each of them (which is statistically laughable), how likely is it to get gap-free DNA sequences from them?
Its just data, animals only multiply at max/min speeds, so its like simulating a trillion balls bouncing, its possible.
It is very hard to obtain data. And we don't understand much of what we do see. These problems are very complex and finding ways to deal with them using computers is what the (probably poor named) field of bioinformatics is all about. I attended the IEEE Computational Systems - Bioinformatics conference this year and it seems like every other or every third presentation was a new way to find gapped alignments in DNA and protein in a more efficient way than the next guy.
But it is more like simulating far more than 1 trillion balls FOR EACH SPECIES. One 1 year = 1 micron of movement for each ball and at each step the ball could break off into 1 trillion more pieces. It is theoretically doable, but practically impossible. The sun would burn out before all the computers in the world would have finished the first hours worth of computation. Leaving us 999,999.99999 years short of the solution.
If not all genes are used and a lot are infact idle, then why do some organisms need more genes? when they could use the spares?
That's a VERY good question, there are many theories, but we are still searching for answers. Some suppose that the "extra" stuff are mutations the came and went and are no longer needed. Some believe that the extra stuff is a mutation that gives us resistance to some viruses. Nobody knows for sure.
I used mathematical proof because that is what he used to argue his point.
It's still erroneous. If I say "There is a nude picture of Britney Spears at the center of the sun" it will not be accepted as fact until a counter-example is found. As the late Carl Sagan quipped "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
Under the scientific process (and any system of logic), nothing can be proven true, things can only be proven false.
Is mathematics not a system of logic? Most things in mathematics require a proof that they are true. Wiles isn't famous because he exhaustively searched the entire set of real numbers to see if a^n + b^n = c^n had any integer valued solutions for a,b,c and n. He's famous because he proved that it is true that no such integers exists (well, he proved with the help of many before him who proved intermediate steps).
Hypothesis: if x is a real number in the domain [0,inf), then the square root of x is a real number. A single counter example could prove this hypothesis false, however to prove it true, you would have to test every value of x between 0 and positive infinity to see if the hypothesis fails.
Hmmm, I dunno about that. It is trivial to show that the square root of 0 is real. Thus for non-zero: Assume X is a non-negative real number and sqrt(X) is a non real number. Then sqrt(X) is of the form a + bi where a and b are real numbers, not both zero, and X = (a+bi)(a+bi) = sqrt(X)^2 = a^2 + 2abi + (bi)^2 = a^2-b^2 + 2abi. But since X is a real number then 2abi = 0, if 2abi = 0 then a = 0 or b=0.
case 1: b = 0
if b = 0, X = a^2. But a is real, a contradiction.
case 2: a = 0
if a = 0, X = -(b^2). But -(b^2) is negative, a contradiction.
Thus by contradiction, if X is a real non-negative number, sqrt(X) is real.
Slashdot Mirror
I started higher education in a community college. At that college "Linear Algebra" was one of the highest levels of mathematics offered. Partly due to a particularly bad instructor (and partly due to me, but I will never admit it), I ended up learning on my own enough linear algebra to pass the class with a B.
Unfortunately learning on my own was a terrible option. There were some topics scarcely touched on in Linear Algebra that would appear again in Abstract Algebra. When that point came, I had to lean heavily on the instructor's office hours because I was utterly lost.
By self-teaching I was not able to determine ancillary things that would later be very important.
Calculus II on the other hand, was taught by a good professor. He was able to tell me things like "pay particular attention to partial fraction decomposition because it will be very important in differential equations." When I took differential equations, LaPlace transforms weren't so bad because I had taken exhaustive notes a couple years earlier on handling ugly fractions.
There is tremendous value in learning from an expert in the subject. College is a place where a whole bunch of experts congregate. Why would you not attend college?
He just has to pay a few hundred million to get the rockets to take it up.
<conspiracy>Awww c'mon, with todays high tech video software at everyone's finger tips, you could fake a better moon landing for way less than that!</conspiracy>
He said he broke in to use storage space. Are you going to take him at face value
Well said. You've got to admit, that is a ridiculous excuse. I suspect the reason his punishment was "harsh" (I personally find it light) was because the judge believed the guy was lying through his teeth.
When we compare the time, cost and risk required to store a movie (typically what? 700-1400MB for divx or 2000-3000MB for dvdr?) on another computer with the time, cost and risk required to store a movie on a $0.10 CD-R - I don't see how anybody would reasonably believe "storage" was anything approaching the truth.
CS majors breaking into government computers are giving the rest of us a really bad public image. We should lobby for harsher sentences for these *ssholes.
If you make it lucrative for sites to host material enabling piracy, then you are going to encourage new sites to pop up hoping to get bought out by the MPAA.
I'm thinking the "all the kids got out of school for christmas and are looking to download the latest juvenile teen flick" theory is fairly probable.
It's kind of sad that most people do not know more about Ursula Le Guin. I first learned about her when I was looking for a good sci fi book to read and came across what I think is the only book to win both the hugo and nebula awards in the same year: Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness."
To be fair, her books have extraordinary levels of character development, very detailed accounts of what is going on and well... they are just very deep. You don't just run back to the book the same way you might with others. So not everyone will stick one of her books out. But they are worth the read.
Okay, I read Spolsky's book on user interface, and this article... I don't find them contradictory. And I don't see why Fitt's law is unreasonably important. If your hand is on the mouse, it will be easier to move the mouse than to hit a key, and the five easiest spots to put the cursor are the four corners of the screen and the spot the it is currently on.
The more you conform to established metaphores, the more easily you can make your product usable. Creating new metaphores is difficult, and getting them accepted is even more difficult.
Apple has been wildly successful at creating new metaphors and getting them used. Nobody complained when buttons suddenly changed from "OK" and "Cancel" to "Save" and "Don't Save", even though the metaphor of buttons-as-verbs was pretty non-standard.
It would be monstrous to make a huge "back" button in Firefox, just because you click it more. By that reasoning, all buttons should be different size, proportionately to how likely they are to be clicked.
I don't think that is the implication at all. A few buttons that are clicked a disproportionately large number of times should be made larger. Where you divide the "big buttons" from the "small buttons" is up to you.
What is wrong with making the whole bar fatter? Is it impossible to redesign the notion of a toolbar which would allow this? It would certainly be easier to hit the back button if it consumed more screen real estate and was flush up against the left hand side of the screen when maximized.
I've seen ugly user interfaces that were easy to use and pretty user interfaces that were terrible to use. I don't think taste is a good metric to throw into the equation.
Okay, given enough time you can eventually decode an original message encrypted with a one time pad. But you will be unable to tell that it is the original message since you will undoubtedly have decoded several other messages of the same length.
When discussing "breaking" a cypher, we usually refer to being able to read all messages, past and present, as easily as the person for whom the messages are intended. This is not possible with a one time pad unless your pads were generated with a pseudo-random number generator.
There is an interesting historical case where US Intelligence was able to crack some messages sent by the soviet embassy to moscow during WWII even though the communications were supposedly encrypted using one time pads. This was accomplished because the embassy was mistakenly using the same pad more than once. By definition that's a more-than-one time pad, but interesting none the less.
Here's a link google turned up, I dunno how reliable you consider the source though.
There is an unbreakable cypher, but the amount of data it is good for is limited. Important information, say between an embassy in a semi-hostile country and Washington, would likely be unbreakably encrypted.
But in general you are right. The goal of a general purpose cypher is to make cracking sufficiently difficult that it cannot be broken in a reasonable amount of time.
I read about this one guy who strapped a jato unit onto his car...
(no snopes links plz)
An interesting footnote on this whole "hours of time coding" issue...
The world's largest privately held software company is a company called SAS in North Carolina. Their software is basically an environment for doing statistical analysis. Regression, multiple regression, correlation, wilcoxon rank tests, and a slew of other things I haven't got to yet. But the important part is, if you were going to do a study to figure out the "optimal" amount of time to work, and consider not just productivity from the programmer, but all sorts of correlated variables (will someone work 80 hours/week for 10 years? How much will it cost to recruit and train a newbie when someone burns out?) then you would probably use a program like SAS to analyze the data. This is a company that has plenty of computer science and statistics Ph.D.'s on staff.
Their conclusion? 35 hours per week. Keeps the productivity high, the turn over low, and the company growing at double digit rates nearly every year (or maybe it has been every year).
Something to think about during your next interview cycle.
Diabetics should also avoid stress and exercise daily. How are you going to manage that working 80+ hours a week at EA games?
However, if they have a family to support
If you have a family, you're probably not working at EA Games. Why would your significant other put up with your 7 days-a-week work schedule for below average pay and modest benefits? Like the article said, the company preys on the young and naive. The truth is, most of them could get a better paying job in an area with lower cost of living. But they are so enamoured with being a games programmer, they stick it out.
or have a medical condition and need the money or insurance coverage
If you have a medical condition, you probably aren't up for 80 hour work weeks. So you're probably not working at EA games.
I worked as a programmer in the computer games industry for five years - when I was young. It was a lot of fun, but I am glad I eventually grew up and left. It's really weird when you go into a different field and find it is challenging, fun, pays better and requires fewer hours. The adrenaline rush of being able to enjoy my life with someone else far exceeds the adrenaline rush I got when that last CD-ROM got burned and shipped off to duplication.
So if the larger issue is cheating, why not allow people to play single player without steam and only require steam for multiplayer?
Or is valved frightened that people are going to cheat at single player and finish the game??
Steam is at least as much about piracy as cheating. As a result Valve has clearly stated that they are willing to inconvenience a lot of their customers so that a few will buy instead of pirate. I'm glad my midterms preclude me from installing HL2 until next week.
This guy's advice is not smart.
Amen to that. You know this same damned topic comes up on slashdot about every 9 months. And every time, I interject the same thing:
The best method of archival storage of color images is an archival quality CD-R!
The CD-R takes up so much less space than a rack of kodachrome slides (the only color archival quality film) and is orders of magnitude less expensive and an order of magnitude higher quality than a box of pigmented ink printed pictures, that it wins hands down. Newspapers just love publishing this crap about the 5 year shelf life of an economy CD-R. For about $1/CD you can buy a spindle of Mitsui MAM-A Gold Standard CD-R's. In archival storage, these things have an expected shelf life of 200 (TWO HUNDRED) years which exceeds the expected shelf life of both the kodachrome and the prints.
Then people bring up "but what will you read them with in 200 years?" Well, seeing as how somebody on a whim figured out a way to reproduce audio from a scan of a record, I strongly suspect someone could restore data on a 200 year old archival quality CD based an on optical scan as well.
I love photography, and I am slightly bitter about the decline of film, but the facts are hard to deny. Digital is just a better medium to preserve your most cherished memories).
If the economy is down, how can companies make money?
Economics is a broad subject, and not one of which I am well trained, but... In hard times, large corporations always seem to weather it better than smaller corporations. A down economy translates into less opportunity for a competitor to come from behind and snipe your customers. When the hard times become better, large corporations usually come out better as well.
When the economy is down, the wealthiest few do not suffer, and their wealth is safer than during good times when their investments may decline due to a competitive market.
But anyway, I'm still not an economist so take with the appropriate grain(s) of salt.
You are trying to straw-man the argument, but the fact is you cannot find a journal article which has survived peer review based solely on lack of contradictory evidence.
The original post attempted to build a foundation using a mathematical construct that was wrong. Most notably he said "Under the scientific process (and any system of logic), nothing can be proven true, things can only be proven false." It is true that science should never claim anything to be the absolute truth, but that statement was much more broad and more importantly was wrong. You CAN use logic to prove something true. Science is not the only application of logic. It doesn't make his conclusion wrong, but his argument would be rejected until an appropriate basis were found.
And you keep attempting to say my argument is that science requires absolute truth, which is not true. What I am saying is that nobody takes you seriously unless you provide supporting evidence. Which is why Carl Sagan made the comment he did. You keep clinging to my use of the word "proof" which simply shows that you are not actually a scientist because we use "proof" and "evidence" essentially interchangably even though it is not rigorously correct to do so.
I work with scientists. My field of study is statistics. My training is mining data to find evidence that supports their theory so they can get published.
Nobody in science will take a theory seriously unless it has supporting evidence. Maybe it is better that you stop replying because it is clear you do not work in research and have never had an article of yours rejected because its support was insufficiently strong (not that a counter-example was known, only that sufficient convincing evidence was not presented), and more importantly you don't actually know what you're talking about.
Half of the original post used the argument "Under the scientific process (and any system of logic), nothing can be proven true, things can only be proven false." Which is wrong, and I showed it to be wrong. Regardless of what you think is germaine to the argument, using an analogy that is wrong does NOT support your argument.
Pick up a journal in your university and read some of the new theories presented in it. Not a single one will say "gee, we just didn't find any counter-examples, so this must be true." In every case the author will provide reasoning behind his theory, and produce evidence that supports his theory.
I work in science, I've seen the crackpot theories go by. The problem is, it is not generally feasible to disprove the crackpot theories. In fact, with many new theories of physics even the reasonable ones are not feasibly testable. If we accept whatever theory comes along until a contradiction can be found, then we would have to accept that nude pictures of Britney Spears exist at the center of the sun until someone can prove otherwise. This is not practical, so we have to filter based on those that have sound reasoning BEHIND them.
You are totally misunderstanding both his and my post
I understand his post just fine, he just used a flawed argument. His statement that any system of logic cannot prove something true is wrong. And I showed it was wrong by proving true what he said could not be proven true.
As for your Britney example is it testable?
Yes. Go to the center of the sun and you will be able to determine whether or not it is true.
If we accept that the temperature of the sun is pretty high and that a sufficient test would be to see if a picture (basically paper) can withstand such a temperature (or lower) then testing is pretty easy - the photo would burn and the postulated hypothesis is falsified = science.
I don't accept that the temperature is high in the center of the sun. Physics is different there under those high pressure conditions. They push the heat out so that it is quite comfortable. Honest! Go to the center of the sun and find out. Besides, I never said the picture was on ordinary paper.
It only gives evidence that it would be extremeley likely to burn unless we discover otherwise for some reason.
How do you know it would burn in the center of the sun? I say the center is quite comfortable, you've provided no counter-example of a similar star whose center you've visited.
But more to the point. Science requires some evidence before something is accepted. My Britney Spears picture example is far fetched, but not impossible, right? So why will science texts the world over not include my theory in them? Nude pictures of people at the center of the sun is a pretty extraordinary claim, unless I back it with some extraordinary evidence it isn't worth very much. Evidence doesn't prove something true, but it helps us separate the possible from the absurd.
You must have supporting evidence to be taken seriously, not just a theory for which no counter-examples exist.
Come on. You do at least know you're dismissing the information theory/thermodynamics arguments out of hand don't you?
No, I am dismissing an attempt to redefine evolution into something clearly distinct from what it really is out of hand. This is a fairly common strategy on both sides: Attempt to get the other side to agree to some skewed definitions in order to guide the argument to something easier to attack. But in either case, it's a logical fallacy.
I certainly hope you don't think Darwin had it all figured out when he wrote his famous book.
I think Darwin had some inspirational insight as to why animals were slightly different in isolated ecosystems. I don't think the insight was especially profound. I think any researcher with a similar background visiting the same places would come to the same theory. The only thing that makes Darwin special is he wrote about it first. He certainly didn't have it all figured because we still don't have it all figured out (something the pro-creation argument is fond pointing out).
Actually, I believe that flightless birds are caught in that stage between not having wings and having wings for flight that every bird original came from.
It is also possible that the flightless birds on the Galapagos islands were fully winged flighted birds some time ago, but their wings provided no survivability benefit in this unusual isolated eco system, and so the birds spent most of their time walking around on the ground. In this case maintaining wings becomes a liability and those in the next generation with smaller wings would give up less energy maintaining those wings and therefore have an increased probability of increased numbers of offspring.
The problem is actually much MUCH harder than you make it out.
Hypothetically, you could 'track' down every single organisms history/growth over 1M years.
How would you do this? Can you get DNA for every distinct species that has existed over the last 1M years? Even if we could find fossils of each of them (which is statistically laughable), how likely is it to get gap-free DNA sequences from them?
Its just data, animals only multiply at max/min speeds, so its like simulating a trillion balls bouncing, its possible.
It is very hard to obtain data. And we don't understand much of what we do see. These problems are very complex and finding ways to deal with them using computers is what the (probably poor named) field of bioinformatics is all about. I attended the IEEE Computational Systems - Bioinformatics conference this year and it seems like every other or every third presentation was a new way to find gapped alignments in DNA and protein in a more efficient way than the next guy.
But it is more like simulating far more than 1 trillion balls FOR EACH SPECIES. One 1 year = 1 micron of movement for each ball and at each step the ball could break off into 1 trillion more pieces. It is theoretically doable, but practically impossible. The sun would burn out before all the computers in the world would have finished the first hours worth of computation. Leaving us 999,999.99999 years short of the solution.
If not all genes are used and a lot are infact idle, then why do some organisms need more genes? when they could use the spares?
That's a VERY good question, there are many theories, but we are still searching for answers. Some suppose that the "extra" stuff are mutations the came and went and are no longer needed. Some believe that the extra stuff is a mutation that gives us resistance to some viruses. Nobody knows for sure.
I used mathematical proof because that is what he used to argue his point.
It's still erroneous. If I say "There is a nude picture of Britney Spears at the center of the sun" it will not be accepted as fact until a counter-example is found. As the late Carl Sagan quipped "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
Under the scientific process (and any system of logic), nothing can be proven true, things can only be proven false.
Is mathematics not a system of logic? Most things in mathematics require a proof that they are true. Wiles isn't famous because he exhaustively searched the entire set of real numbers to see if a^n + b^n = c^n had any integer valued solutions for a,b,c and n. He's famous because he proved that it is true that no such integers exists (well, he proved with the help of many before him who proved intermediate steps).
Hypothesis: if x is a real number in the domain [0,inf), then the square root of x is a real number.
A single counter example could prove this hypothesis false, however to prove it true, you would have to test every value of x between 0 and positive infinity to see if the hypothesis fails.
Hmmm, I dunno about that. It is trivial to show that the square root of 0 is real. Thus for non-zero: Assume X is a non-negative real number and sqrt(X) is a non real number. Then sqrt(X) is of the form a + bi where a and b are real numbers, not both zero, and X = (a+bi)(a+bi) = sqrt(X)^2 = a^2 + 2abi + (bi)^2 = a^2-b^2 + 2abi. But since X is a real number then 2abi = 0, if 2abi = 0 then a = 0 or b=0.
case 1: b = 0
if b = 0, X = a^2. But a is real, a contradiction.
case 2: a = 0
if a = 0, X = -(b^2). But -(b^2) is negative, a contradiction.
Thus by contradiction, if X is a real non-negative number, sqrt(X) is real.