I wasn't serious of course, I know you won't, because you have no evidence of said ignorance or ineptitude. I just keep trying to invent news ways of saying....oh, never mind.
Why don't you write the Duke team a letter explaining why their supposed ignorance of theology makes them incompetent researchers? I'm sure that they'll get a good laugh out of it.
Who said there's a unique center of the universe? Not me. I know my 2 year-old thinks SHE's the center of the universe, but it will be a year or two before she can submit such a tightly reasoned post to Slashdot.
who says spacetime existed at all before the Big Bang? Not me - it may be meaningless to talk about "before."
Maybe try reading this. I don't agree with everything he says (e.g., no evidence that faith is innate IMO), but at least it's not incoherent rubbish. It seems from the conversations I've had that nearly all thoughtful, well educated Christians now reject the GotG.
Also, I'd recommend lsitening to (or at least reading the libretto of) Schoenberg's Moses und Aron. In addition to being one of the greatest achievements in music in the last 100 years, it's a powerful meditation on theism (Schoenberg was a Jew).
If your God is the "God of the Gaps," be warned that the gaps are small and getting smaller all of the time, and the faith you take so much comfort in is doomed. You children won't believe it, and your grandchildren will think it's comical.
Any competent researcher is going to have lots of training in dealing with those sorts of issues having to do with multiple variables - they arise all the time in many different kinds of contexts,and ther have been recent advances in sorting out the causaul from the merely correlative. cf Judea Pearl's Causality.
I wouldn't harbor the illusion that you're the first one to think about it.
That's a pretty tortured apology, when a simpler explanation is that it just doesn't work.
So is it your contention that these prayers would work if they weren't being studied?
If we are talking about the God of the Bible, then to argue about that God, you must use the reference volume written to describe Him.
That's so laden with hidden assumptions I'm not going to untangle it. Exercise left to the intellectually honest Believer (empty set?). But I would assert that we are talking about a measuring purely human phenomenon here. People got sick. People prayed for some of them. No evidence was found that it helped. No reference to the God of the Bible (which Bible?). No need to invoke a particular canon or reference any given dogma.
The confusion continues. A proposition may be worthy of belief without being a presumption. Belief is a psychological phenomenon. How much, and how well you test a proposition before accepting it as a belief varies. A skeptic requires a lot of careful examination and testing, always willing to admit alternative possibilities. A true believer stranuously avoids this.
The other thing is that no conclusion is absolute.
I don't understand this "absolute" concept. What does it mean and why does it matter? Does it mean it is impossible that I'm ever going to reconsider a conclusion - i.e. that I award it the status of dogma? In that case none of my conculsions are absolute. Does this mean they're delusional? NO it does NOT. Does it mean that they are no better than some baseless dogmatic assertion? NO.
This is getting to be a very tired strawman, so let me put it as simply as I know how: you don't have to ASSUME something is bunk to CONCLUDE that something (say, Peter Popoff's performances, or a pyramid scheme) is bunk. The conclusion may not be silly at all.
The biggest problem with your argument in favor of highly selective skepticism is that this testable: we can study the data and determine whether it really helps. The subject study on prayer says it doesn't help - if there's a signal in the noise, they can't find it. However, there is a a clear signal in the seatbelt data.
I'll bet snake oil doesn't help much either. But wait, there are more factors then whether or not you took your snake oil! Just because snake oil fails, it doesn't mean it never works! It works just fine if you, uh, don't get sick in the first place...
OTOH, your belief in a god who is just a little tiny bit powerful is an interesting throwback.
Not really. The del dot B = 0 equation can easily be amended to del dot B = rho, where rho is the magnetic monpole density, and that makes it beautifully balanced with the del dot E equation, and there are no problems for relativity.
I looked at that website, and its the same old young-Earth creationism drivel taht's been making the rounds for decades. No integrity, no credibility, and no science.
Scientific investigation subjects theories to stepwise refinement.
And to radical revision, thorough rethinking, obsolesence and complete dismissal. However, if you have a theory that did a very good job of explaining a whole mountain of evidence, you're not going to throw the babyout with the bathwater when a problem arises - first, you see if you can fix the theory. Or, you may layer a more sophisticated theory on top. We still teach Maxwell's Equations, for example, because they're great for explaining a wide range of important phenomena. Or even further back, most astrodynamicists still use Newton's theory of gravity, not so much Einstein's.
As such, the basic theory of evolution is based on random chance that produces endless mutations which are culled through natural selection (aka, survival of the fittest).
A non-sequitur on a good day. The random chance merely provides the local variation: babysteps to explore the near neighborhood in genome space. The more important aspects of evolution is why certain trajectories through this space are taken, and how and how fast, and how this influences related populations. But wait, it gets better:
Therefore it is random chance rather than intelligent design that is responsible for all we know and see.
No it's not. Evolution is highly NON-random. This tired anticoncept has been brought up time and time again and it's never been even close to an interesting argument. Read Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker for a good background on this silly strawman.
The simple truth is that without independent verification of the theory by experimentation, both abiogenesis and its codependent theories of evoltion are simply theories.
Not that "only a theory" shibboleth again! You're not doing your school's reputation any good by raising that hoary old battle cry. Show me how it is possible to do better than a good theory. Our scientific theories are right up there with music and art as the greatest achievements of civilization. The difference is that they're never finished.
I think you're assuming that PHBs are rational. They are epecially irrational when the FUD sets in. I have little hope for this, since they're accustomed to buying whatever line MSFT feeds them.
Has anyone noticed that MSFT's stock sort of peaked about 9 months ago and hasn't seen much improvement in the latest run-up of tech stocks? They're looking for something, anything, to convince Mr. Moneybags to slap down even more big honkin' purchase orders to get their stock moving again. As one of the most closely followed companies in the world, their predictable earnings growth has already been discounted, so they need something new, and in a near monoploy, something new is hard to come by.
Re:So why ever go to university?
on
MIT Everyware
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· Score: 1
It's the hard classes that make the difference. You don't learn all that much from attending a lecture or reading class notes - the real training comes from doing the work outside of class - homework, projects, preparing for test. Believe me; I've tried it both ways, and the hard way works best.
If you wanted to study martial arts, you wouldn't get far by just watching the instructor demonstrate the techniques. If you want to be awesome like your instructor, you must train as he or she did: pain, fatigue, self doubt, more pain, and ultimately mastery. The same goes for engineering.
You'd also want to consider things like radiation hardening for the case. I'm sure the people at NASA could help you with that.
not really an issue. The shuttle flies at 400 km altitude, which is not a bad radiation environment, and the RAID would be inside a midddeck locker, which enjoys a fair bit of protection form radiation. That an the usual aluminum cases provide plenty of protection. Also, we'll be near solar minimum when we launch.
Re:I don't have an answer, but...
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RAID for Zero-G?
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· Score: 1
It IS expensive per unit mass, but it's highly nonlinear. once you get manifested on STS, you can have a certaim amount of weight, and it's usually plenty. Volume, dimension, and power dissipation are more important resources here. Small is good (small and cool are better), but not if we have to spend a lot of meny to create a custom solution.
They actually do pack midddeck locker equipment in foam.
Good stuff, thanks. Don't know why someone modded that "troll."
We don't want to DIY, but we may have a packaging problem with standard rack-mounted components. For some obscure reason (or possibly no reason at all), the midddeck lockers are just a hair too small to accomodate rack-mount equipment. So, ideally I'd have an internally redundant RAID controller that I could repackage easily.
The chokepoint is the downlink, and the SHUTTLE deosn't really use DSN per se. Anyway, DSN generally tapes all the data they get (without unpacking it), but passes it along ASAP to its destination. There the responsibility for efficient archiving and retrieval lies.
Well, if they're designed to be rack-mounted (they are), then they have to push iar out the back, since there's no place to go up if you're once of several units in a rack. The Apple RAIDs have two digitally controlled fans.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't serious of course, I know you won't, because you have no evidence of said ignorance or ineptitude. I just keep trying to invent news ways of saying....oh, never mind.
If the result of the Duke study had been positive, you woudn't see a single post here about "not testing God."
Unless, that is, it turned out that one denomination's prayers were more efficacious than the rest.
Why don't you write the Duke team a letter explaining why their supposed ignorance of theology makes them incompetent researchers? I'm sure that they'll get a good laugh out of it.
Who said there's a unique center of the universe? Not me. I know my 2 year-old thinks SHE's the center of the universe, but it will be a year or two before she can submit such a tightly reasoned post to Slashdot.
who says spacetime existed at all before the Big Bang? Not me - it may be meaningless to talk about "before."
Maybe try reading this. I don't agree with everything he says (e.g., no evidence that faith is innate IMO), but at least it's not incoherent rubbish. It seems from the conversations I've had that nearly all thoughtful, well educated Christians now reject the GotG.
Also, I'd recommend lsitening to (or at least reading the libretto of) Schoenberg's Moses und Aron . In addition to being one of the greatest achievements in music in the last 100 years, it's a powerful meditation on theism (Schoenberg was a Jew).
Google pointed me to this little essay by a believer.
If your God is the "God of the Gaps," be warned that the gaps are small and getting smaller all of the time, and the faith you take so much comfort in is doomed. You children won't believe it, and your grandchildren will think it's comical.
Any competent researcher is going to have lots of training in dealing with those sorts of issues having to do with multiple variables - they arise all the time in many different kinds of contexts,and ther have been recent advances in sorting out the causaul from the merely correlative. cf Judea Pearl's Causality.
I wouldn't harbor the illusion that you're the first one to think about it.
That's a pretty tortured apology, when a simpler explanation is that it just doesn't work.
So is it your contention that these prayers would work if they weren't being studied?
That's so laden with hidden assumptions I'm not going to untangle it. Exercise left to the intellectually honest Believer (empty set?). But I would assert that we are talking about a measuring purely human phenomenon here. People got sick. People prayed for some of them. No evidence was found that it helped. No reference to the God of the Bible (which Bible?). No need to invoke a particular canon or reference any given dogma.
The confusion continues. A proposition may be worthy of belief without being a presumption. Belief is a psychological phenomenon. How much, and how well you test a proposition before accepting it as a belief varies. A skeptic requires a lot of careful examination and testing, always willing to admit alternative possibilities. A true believer stranuously avoids this.
I don't understand this "absolute" concept. What does it mean and why does it matter? Does it mean it is impossible that I'm ever going to reconsider a conclusion - i.e. that I award it the status of dogma? In that case none of my conculsions are absolute. Does this mean they're delusional? NO it does NOT. Does it mean that they are no better than some baseless dogmatic assertion? NO.
This is getting to be a very tired strawman, so let me put it as simply as I know how: you don't have to ASSUME something is bunk to CONCLUDE that something (say, Peter Popoff's performances, or a pyramid scheme) is bunk. The conclusion may not be silly at all.
The biggest problem with your argument in favor of highly selective skepticism is that this testable: we can study the data and determine whether it really helps. The subject study on prayer says it doesn't help - if there's a signal in the noise, they can't find it. However, there is a a clear signal in the seatbelt data.
I'll bet snake oil doesn't help much either. But wait, there are more factors then whether or not you took your snake oil! Just because snake oil fails, it doesn't mean it never works! It works just fine if you, uh, don't get sick in the first place...
OTOH, your belief in a god who is just a little tiny bit powerful is an interesting throwback.
They are reobserving them, as time and geometry permit. However, since they used Arecibo observations, they are limited to only part of the sky.
Not really. The del dot B = 0 equation can easily be amended to del dot B = rho, where rho is the magnetic monpole density, and that makes it beautifully balanced with the del dot E equation, and there are no problems for relativity.
I looked at that website, and its the same old young-Earth creationism drivel taht's been making the rounds for decades. No integrity, no credibility, and no science.
And to radical revision, thorough rethinking, obsolesence and complete dismissal. However, if you have a theory that did a very good job of explaining a whole mountain of evidence, you're not going to throw the babyout with the bathwater when a problem arises - first, you see if you can fix the theory. Or, you may layer a more sophisticated theory on top. We still teach Maxwell's Equations, for example, because they're great for explaining a wide range of important phenomena. Or even further back, most astrodynamicists still use Newton's theory of gravity, not so much Einstein's.
A non-sequitur on a good day. The random chance merely provides the local variation: babysteps to explore the near neighborhood in genome space. The more important aspects of evolution is why certain trajectories through this space are taken, and how and how fast, and how this influences related populations. But wait, it gets better:
No it's not. Evolution is highly NON-random. This tired anticoncept has been brought up time and time again and it's never been even close to an interesting argument. Read Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker for a good background on this silly strawman.
Not that "only a theory" shibboleth again! You're not doing your school's reputation any good by raising that hoary old battle cry. Show me how it is possible to do better than a good theory. Our scientific theories are right up there with music and art as the greatest achievements of civilization. The difference is that they're never finished.
I think you're assuming that PHBs are rational. They are epecially irrational when the FUD sets in. I have little hope for this, since they're accustomed to buying whatever line MSFT feeds them.
Has anyone noticed that MSFT's stock sort of peaked about 9 months ago and hasn't seen much improvement in the latest run-up of tech stocks? They're looking for something, anything, to convince Mr. Moneybags to slap down even more big honkin' purchase orders to get their stock moving again. As one of the most closely followed companies in the world, their predictable earnings growth has already been discounted, so they need something new, and in a near monoploy, something new is hard to come by.
It's the hard classes that make the difference. You don't learn all that much from attending a lecture or reading class notes - the real training comes from doing the work outside of class - homework, projects, preparing for test. Believe me; I've tried it both ways, and the hard way works best.
If you wanted to study martial arts, you wouldn't get far by just watching the instructor demonstrate the techniques. If you want to be awesome like your instructor, you must train as he or she did: pain, fatigue, self doubt, more pain, and ultimately mastery. The same goes for engineering.
not really an issue. The shuttle flies at 400 km altitude, which is not a bad radiation environment, and the RAID would be inside a midddeck locker, which enjoys a fair bit of protection form radiation. That an the usual aluminum cases provide plenty of protection. Also, we'll be near solar minimum when we launch.
It IS expensive per unit mass, but it's highly nonlinear. once you get manifested on STS, you can have a certaim amount of weight, and it's usually plenty. Volume, dimension, and power dissipation are more important resources here. Small is good (small and cool are better), but not if we have to spend a lot of meny to create a custom solution.
They actually do pack midddeck locker equipment in foam.
Good stuff, thanks. Don't know why someone modded that "troll."
We don't want to DIY, but we may have a packaging problem with standard rack-mounted components. For some obscure reason (or possibly no reason at all), the midddeck lockers are just a hair too small to accomodate rack-mount equipment. So, ideally I'd have an internally redundant RAID controller that I could repackage easily.
For writing, we don't need anywhere near peak performance. We estimate peak rates of 4.5 mB/sec, and average more around 0.5 mB/sec.
Even given that this is true (it's not true at all), why does this make evolutionary biology pseudoscience? What is your definition of pseudoscience?
There are Venus missions under study now. The leading one is called the Venus In-Situ Explorer.
See http://spacescience.nasa.gov/missions/concepts.htm
The chokepoint is the downlink, and the SHUTTLE deosn't really use DSN per se. Anyway, DSN generally tapes all the data they get (without unpacking it), but passes it along ASAP to its destination. There the responsibility for efficient archiving and retrieval lies.
Well, if they're designed to be rack-mounted (they are), then they have to push iar out the back, since there's no place to go up if you're once of several units in a rack. The Apple RAIDs have two digitally controlled fans.