In Soviet Russia: 3. Profit! 2. ??? 1. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of sigs, you insensitive clod!
What, there weren't any new overlords you could welcome?
Increasing HLV Capacity with more SRBs
on
NASA's New Shuttle
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Is there any fundamental reason they are limited to two SRBs for the HLV unit?
SRBs have a lot of residual thrust for fairly cheap. Once you have a rotationally-symmetric stack, eliminating the balance considerations of the SSTS, it would seem you could significantly increase your maximum lift capability by putting four or six SRBs around your central unit. More lift with very little redesign requirements.
Retire shuttle fleet: 2010 CEV/HLV system online for trips to the ISS: 2011 Return to the moon: 2018
So the are hoping to have the system online for orbit functions only one year after the shuttle fleet retires. It's the moon shot that's a few years later.
Re:I like it, but I also have questions and doubts
on
NASA's New Shuttle
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· Score: 2, Informative
The funny thing is that NASA arbitrarily set the CEV weight at 25 tonnes, just above the LEO capability of the heaviest rocket currently available (Delta 4 Heavy).
The Delta 4 is not rated for human spaceflight, and probably cannot be without huge changes in technology and redesign.
So they needed a new rocket anyway, and one might as well set your capacity high so you can get more done in orbit and on the moon.
Nearly every single part in the whole design isn't manufactured anymore.
Consider a simple toggle switch used on the control board. Probably made by a company that doesn't exist anymore. There are a zillion switches available from digikey, but none of them have exactly the same size, shape, or electrical characteristics.
In anything involving human spaceflight, all the parts need to go through an incredibly expensive and time-consuming certification process. Morever, the spacecraft and every assembled module inside of it need to go through a similar process. If you change out that one switch, you need to recertify the entire board, at time, expense, etc.
Now flash from 1965 -- Saturn V design era, dawn of the electronics industry -- to 2005, which has a much more mature and entirely different electronics industry. What fraction of the components do you think have identical equivalents today? Switches, sensors, motors, actuators, displays, indicators, dials, you name it, nobody makes it anymore. And wouldn't you rather use newer, lighter components anyway? This is a problem, after all, where weight really matters.
What's true of electronics is almost as true of metals, machining, plumbing, pumping, insulation, etc.
By the time you replace missing components with modern equivalents, you've spent nearly as much in recertification as you would have to design something entirely new from scratch, and you get a vehicle that's nowhere near as efficient as it could be. There's no need for that panel to be so from the bulkhead, because the replacement computer is the size of a watch, not a washing machine. So why don't we give the astronauts more legroom, or space to store more stuff? Because we're using the Saturn V design, and changing that layout would mean yet another recertification.
The CEV and planned designs use shuttle era lifting components - engines, etc. - which is smarter because they are still in production, if old. But rockets don't change as much as electronics; it's a decent compromise. The actual crew modules will be a completely new design, which is probably the right way to go.
Slashdotters should understand the danger of overuse of legacy code. Rebuilding the Saturn V would be not too unlike trying to reuse code written in Turtle LOGO in 1983 for generating animated video on a cellphone. The API is so obsolete that it really does make sense just to use what you've learned from the old design and rewrite it from scratch.
I'll bet $100 NASA's beaten by the Chinese or Burt Rutan. Any takers?
No bet on the Chinese. I don't think they'll do it by then, but I wouldn't put it outside their potential capabilities.
I'd take your bet on Rutan, though. The man's accomplishments are fantastic, but all he's accomplished so far are two flights to the lower edge of space, which is a whole different ballgame both technologically and financially than LEO, let alone the moon. We're talking orders of magnitude more difficult and more expensive. It remains to be seen whether Rutan's "finesse" inexpensive approach will work for orbit and reentry. I hope so, but it's unproven.
For the time being, getting to the moon requires the resources of a major government.
Ever heard of carbon-fiber composites? Strong and light but fairly brittle fibers embedded in a flexible, resilient, but low tensile strength epoxy matrix. And the combination is wicked cool stuff. The matrix balances the load between all the fibers nicely, and prevents any one fiber from bending to the shatter point. The fibers themselves make the composite incredibly strong for its weight.
Silicon carbide grains (hard, rigid) embedded in a block of aluminum (soft, flexible) is another composite with fantastic combined properties. Makes for nice structural members that need to survive a lot of abrasion.
So maybe we can now make diamond-coated nanotubes, giving us an insulated conductor (what a concept), that's super abrasion- and corrosion-resistant to boot. Or use nanotubes for their mechanical strength, but the integrated diamond improves the wear resistance of the cable you're using for lifts to orbit.
People always worry that death and disease are good checks on the population and that eliminating them will cause rampant overpopulation and malthusian collapse. It's always turned out to be false.
They worried about it with the development of vaccines. They worried about it with improved birthing processes - before 1850 a woman could reasonably expect to have half of her 5-6 children die in childbirth or childhood. Allow them all to live, and the population explodes, right?
Except that you found people just had fewer babies instead, and because of the higher standard of living and less need to spend effort on just surviving - more time for productive work - the economy grew to support the new population just fine.
First-world countries, with their better medicine, higher standards of living, and longer lifespans, invariably have drastically lower population growth rates than third-world countries.
Is there reason to believe that this hypothetical creator should have designed brains incapable of being tricked? Why didn't this creator make us able to fly, breath underwater, or stick to the walls? What else are you going to ask me to explain, and why should I be obligated to provide an answer?
Because if you make complaints that evolutionary theory can't explain phenomenon X, then you should make an attempt to explain how yours can. It's unreasonable to poke holes at one theory and then argue that your favorite theory doesn't need to address those issues.
Your argument is equivalent to: "You can't prove that X caused Y. Therefore Z must have caused Y. And no, I don't have to prove it!"
Next point:
#1 >> how do you know that he/she/it programmed [our reasoning capability] to accurately reflect reality?
>We don't.
#2 >>Prove the above statement wrong.
>I definitely can't prove that wrong.
You go on to say:
But if Plantinga's argument is true, then that statement is preferable to the theory of evolution because it at least is not self-defeating.
Then you'd better do an improved job of elucidating that argument. So far the only argument you've given that evolution as a belief is "self-defeating" is, in your words: "on the supposition that evolution is responsible for our reasoning ability, we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) correspond to reality".
Yet in point #1 and #2 above you've admitted yourself that creation mythology cannot give us any greater confidence that our perceptions and reason reflect reality.
So please give a coherent argument about what, exactly, makes evolution "self-defeating", and indeed what that term even means.
The statement "I think therefore..." cannot provably end in any statement about the nature of the univers, creation, or a creator. As others have pointed out, this entire line of thinking suffers from the so-called "brain in a vat" problem.
Meanwhile, evolutionary theory has such an unbelievable wealth of data behind it that at this point in underlies the study of biology every bit as thoroughly as atomic theory underlies chemistry, or as quantum theory, relativity, and gravity underlie physics. Indeed there are things not yet explained or fully understood in evolutionary theory. But physicists have not yet reconciled gravity and quantum theory, either. Do you therefore doubt that gravity exists?
You also might be surprised to find that I've read Dembski quite thoroughly. The man has not the faintest understanding of complexity, which is a rigorously defined concept in information science. CSI is a hand-wavy term that approximately means "anything that appears difficult to understand" and/or "anthing for which Dembski claims he cannot conceive of an evolutionary mechanism".
"Irreducible complexity" is only slightly better defined. Yet the ability of a nonguided stepwise selection process to generate irreducible complexity, something IDers claim is impossible, has been demonstrated repeatedly and published. See for example Lenski et. al, Nature 423:139-145. I saw the process daily in the course of my PhD research. The fact that IDers claim it is impossible is just that: an empty claim with no evidence or research behind it.
If you are talking about Intelligent Design (which is in no sense a form of "fundamentalism")
Snort. ID is a dressed-up creationist argument artificially and consciously created by the Discovery institute to function as a social wedge, forcing rationalism/science apart from religon. This has been publicly documented for some time. It has few or no adherents who do not subscribe to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
It's no better than the early-Enlightenment jerks who created false mythologies designed t
What's required for survival is not truth-detection, but behavior consistent with survival
Indeed it is. Which is precisely why our senses are so easily fooled: given stimuli that do not correspond to those seen in survival tasks in the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, i.e. hunting and gathering on the African plains or whatever), our brains do not necessarily respond correctly.
Now explain why a creator would have built brains that are so subject to misdirection, geometric optical illusions, etc. Why would he/she/it have done so?
belief in evolution is self-defeating because on the supposition that evolution is responsible for our reasoning ability, we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) correspond to reality.
And if a creator built our reasoning capabilities, how do you know that he/she/it programmed it to accurately reflect reality? We'd be seeing whatever he/she/it wanted us to see, for whatever reasons. You'll get less mileage out of this argument for creation than for evolution, even.
Pointing out that evolutionary theory itself can't guarantee the accuracy of our reasoning faculties (which is true) gets you absolutely nowhere because Creation mythology is significantly worse. Consider:
"God did indeed create the universe. But he created us and it six seconds ago, with our archeological history and memories of the past intact. Nothing existed before you began to read this sentence."
Prove the above statement wrong. You certainly can't invoke anything it says in the bible, because that -- or rather your memory of it -- was created six seconds ago as well. It says exactly what the creator wanted it to say, for reasons of his/her/its own.
As soon as you invoke a creator, falsifiability is utterly gone, your conclusions can be ANYTHING, and future argumentation is pretty much futile. Thus creation mythology serves primarily as a tool for a person to project their own emotional needs and desires into their own understanding of reality.
Fortunately, there are other ways to evaluate the accuracy of our reasoning capabilities than evolutionary theory or creation mythology. Sparing a couple thousand years of philosophy, I'll stick to the pragmatic argument: Reason seems to work. It gives us effective tools for functioning, ergo we're best off assuming that our intellect and reason is what it seems to be, and make use of it.
End note: Your sig links to a story about Antony Flew "converting to religion". You'll notice he's a self-described Deist: a philosophy that is in no way contradictory to any contemporary understanding of evolution, physics, or any other branch of the sciences. He explicitly states he doesn't believe any sort of revealed religion. How does this bolster any point in favor of creationism or any other branch of post-Enlightenment fundamentalist thought? The point is lost, because Flew explicitly still rejects all that.
I race triathlons. When you're swimming in 55-degree ocean water, but your eyes are at body temperature, the goggles fog so badly that it can become next-to-impossible to see the damn buoy you're aiming for. And the last thing you want is to be lost, swimming a zigzag and adding 35% to your distance.
> Stone lasts a very long time. Can the same be said of LCD video displays?
This was my first thought as well. Stones last effectively forever... their lifespan is determined by when society decides to pave over or build on top of the old soil more than the durability of the stone.
These LCD gravestones will, if they are lucky, make it one generation. You would be able to see your grandparents' video, when you were young, but you probably couldn't show it to your kids. Unless someone is actively maintaining them, which isn't going to happen unless someone's being paid to actively maintain them.
Also, how are the videos stored? DVD? Solid state? Tape? All these devices have very limited lifespan on the order of 10-30 years. So they will have to be continually renewed and recopied.
Four generations down, which descendant is financially responsible for maintenance of electronic gravestones? Is the mortuary going to sell a contract for maintenance of the headstone in perpetuity? I doubt it, and even if they did nobody's going to hold them to the contract four generations frow now.
The vast majority of these will all break and be left idle within a generation or two. Which means in 50 years, you have a headstone with an ugly broken metal box of junk embedded in it.
But I suppose there are people who will buy any kitch out there, if someone's selling.
If you wanted to do something more permanent, have someone's life story and maybe a few photographs micro-etched into a corrosion-resistant metal plate, like the nickel-alloy discs of the rosetta project, which are expected to have a 2000-year lifespan.
This is exactly right. DRM (suppossedly) is about giving the manufacturer the right to control the data. If you give the manufacturer that right, you give up your own right to bitch about what they do with it, even if they use that control to make your life inconvenient. What you don't have the ethical space to do is legislate that the company has control... and then break the law whenever the company's control inconveniences you.
If I advocated that all citizens should be law-abiding in all cases, but then I myself violated whichever laws happened to be inconvenient because I judged them as "terrible implementation", what would you say about my ethics?
If he'd bitched about the implementation and then taken his business elsewhere, okay. But he bitched and then solved his problem by violating the very system he advocates as "essential"!
is a serious exercise in computer architecture, vlsi design, and algorithm development;
Architecture... design... development. All words about the creation or design of something new, which is engineering or applied science.
"Science", used alone, means the use of the scientific method to discover new information about the nature of reality. (Or, in the case of mathematics or computer science, the nature of abstract logical contrstucts... which makes it debatable depending on your precise definition).
You don't need a beaker and a lab, but you need to be discovering something, and using the scientific method to do so. These guys are primarily designing new things, which is engineering; the grandparent poster was correct.
That doesn't mean they're not smart, of course: engineers and applied scientists are generally extremely bright people.
Dietary supplements alone won't cure me, but they just might help, and as such it would be ridiculous for me not to try them.
A word of caution: anything one puts in one's body can conceivably be either beneficial or detrimental. People have far too strong a tendency to believe that anything plant-based or "natural" cannot harm them.
You in particular sound like you've done your homework on the things you're taking, but I get nervous at the hordes of people who fill themselves with many plant-based drugs thinking they have nowhere to go but up.
Good luck with your struggle with melanoma; that's a rough lot.
But Beta is better than VHS too, and I don't know very many people with Beta cassette players.
So, so, tired of this urban myth.
Beta lost a fair fight in the marketplace, and it deserved to. Yes, beta produced higher quality recordings and images. But it was more expensive, and the quality difference was not visible on consumer televesions of the time. Repeat, consumer TVs were not high enough quality to see the difference between Beta and VHS. So why would a consumer buy a more expensive device that gives them no benefit? They didn't, and it lost in the marketplace.
Studios and editing houses had higher-quality monitors, and so Beta made sense for them. And in such places, Beta lived on for many years.
Beta lost fair and square because it didn't deliver a benefit commensurate to its' price.
it is center-left at best. Look at their recent decision further eroding private property rights.
The court is neither conservative nor liberal, it is primarily statist and authoritarian, as is most of our government right now.
Many liberals, including my self, were horrified at that ruling. Calling that ruling "liberal" merely shows that you have a deep failure to understand the term.
Seriously, it has to be Lucas' atrociously bad character directing.
Because there are other people in the film, like Ewan McGregor and Samuel L. Jackson, who are fine actors elsewhere and squeeze out the most wooden performances of their life in SWIII.
Look at Obi-Wan when he's "bowing out of the political moment" and talking to Anakin after the crash at the beginning of the movie. Pay attention to the ridiculous, unnatural arm gestures he's making - then try to find McGregor body-acting that badly in any other movie. Or watch Mace Windu's overacted nod in response to Yoda's "a prophecy which misread, might have been" or listen to the lines opposite Palpatine: "He controls the courts! He is too dangerous to leave alive! I am over-acting!"
Those moments are so wooden and overacted - by actors I KNOW are better than that - that I can practically see Lucas on the edge of the set when they filmed them. Jackson gives a nice, subtle, natural nod of agreement to yoda's line and Lucas says "No, Sam, we really need to see that you agree with Yoda. Make that head-bob a bit more forceful."
Everywhere you look, you see the hand of a director who doesn't understand subtlety, natural movement, or natural tone of voice. He's always urging the actors to ham it up a bit more, unaware of what a hash he's making of the character moments. It's the same kind of Aspergers' syndrome personality that can write lines like "hold me the way you did on Naboo, back before the war, when it was just us" and think it's a natural romantic moment.
Lucas simply doesn't "get" natural human emotion and interaction.
Which is too bad, really, because he writes a pretty damn entertaining story and can visualize vast action sequences like nobody else.
Likewise, Clinton was the last great conservative president.
A balanced budget. Reduced overall government spending by every metric: in real dollars and as a fraction of GDP. Pro-business environment and economic growth. Worldwide free-trade agreements. The list goes on.
I think part of the reason Clinton is so deeply vilified by the right is that he actually DID for the economy and for economic policy what so many republicans have only PROMISED for so long. That makes him a threat to the myth of "The GOP is the party of financial responsibility". Well, okay, dubya has buried that myth a good bit deeper, now.
I switched to dvorak in college, but shortly afterward switched to dvorak on kinesis. Of course, I have to use other people's qwerty keyboards all the time.
The result is that I touchtype dvorak on a contoured kinesis... at home where I am 90% of the time... and I touchtype qwerty on flat keyboards, like when I'm using my laptop or someone else's computer. The skills are entirely separate, like riding a bike and skiing.
Fifteen years later, I'm entirely incapable of touchtyping dvorak on a flat keyboard or qwerty on a kinesis. My brain simply won't make the connection. I'm sure I could re-learn, but this combination works so well, why would I bother?
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In Soviet Russia:
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of sigs, you insensitive clod!
What, there weren't any new overlords you could welcome?
Is there any fundamental reason they are limited to two SRBs for the HLV unit?
SRBs have a lot of residual thrust for fairly cheap. Once you have a rotationally-symmetric stack, eliminating the balance considerations of the SSTS, it would seem you could significantly increase your maximum lift capability by putting four or six SRBs around your central unit. More lift with very little redesign requirements.
The current plan is:
Retire shuttle fleet: 2010
CEV/HLV system online for trips to the ISS: 2011
Return to the moon: 2018
So the are hoping to have the system online for orbit functions only one year after the shuttle fleet retires. It's the moon shot that's a few years later.
The funny thing is that NASA arbitrarily set the CEV weight at 25 tonnes, just above the LEO capability of the heaviest rocket currently available (Delta 4 Heavy).
The Delta 4 is not rated for human spaceflight, and probably cannot be without huge changes in technology and redesign.
So they needed a new rocket anyway, and one might as well set your capacity high so you can get more done in orbit and on the moon.
Nearly every single part in the whole design isn't manufactured anymore.
Consider a simple toggle switch used on the control board. Probably made by a company that doesn't exist anymore. There are a zillion switches available from digikey, but none of them have exactly the same size, shape, or electrical characteristics.
In anything involving human spaceflight, all the parts need to go through an incredibly expensive and time-consuming certification process. Morever, the spacecraft and every assembled module inside of it need to go through a similar process. If you change out that one switch, you need to recertify the entire board, at time, expense, etc.
Now flash from 1965 -- Saturn V design era, dawn of the electronics industry -- to 2005, which has a much more mature and entirely different electronics industry. What fraction of the components do you think have identical equivalents today? Switches, sensors, motors, actuators, displays, indicators, dials, you name it, nobody makes it anymore. And wouldn't you rather use newer, lighter components anyway? This is a problem, after all, where weight really matters.
What's true of electronics is almost as true of metals, machining, plumbing, pumping, insulation, etc.
By the time you replace missing components with modern equivalents, you've spent nearly as much in recertification as you would have to design something entirely new from scratch, and you get a vehicle that's nowhere near as efficient as it could be. There's no need for that panel to be so from the bulkhead, because the replacement computer is the size of a watch, not a washing machine. So why don't we give the astronauts more legroom, or space to store more stuff? Because we're using the Saturn V design, and changing that layout would mean yet another recertification.
The CEV and planned designs use shuttle era lifting components - engines, etc. - which is smarter because they are still in production, if old. But rockets don't change as much as electronics; it's a decent compromise. The actual crew modules will be a completely new design, which is probably the right way to go.
Slashdotters should understand the danger of overuse of legacy code. Rebuilding the Saturn V would be not too unlike trying to reuse code written in Turtle LOGO in 1983 for generating animated video on a cellphone. The API is so obsolete that it really does make sense just to use what you've learned from the old design and rewrite it from scratch.
I'll bet $100 NASA's beaten by the Chinese or Burt Rutan. Any takers?
No bet on the Chinese. I don't think they'll do it by then, but I wouldn't put it outside their potential capabilities.
I'd take your bet on Rutan, though. The man's accomplishments are fantastic, but all he's accomplished so far are two flights to the lower edge of space, which is a whole different ballgame both technologically and financially than LEO, let alone the moon. We're talking orders of magnitude more difficult and more expensive. It remains to be seen whether Rutan's "finesse" inexpensive approach will work for orbit and reentry. I hope so, but it's unproven.
For the time being, getting to the moon requires the resources of a major government.
Nonsense. I had a date last night.
Via skype.
Ever heard of carbon-fiber composites? Strong and light but fairly brittle fibers embedded in a flexible, resilient, but low tensile strength epoxy matrix. And the combination is wicked cool stuff. The matrix balances the load between all the fibers nicely, and prevents any one fiber from bending to the shatter point. The fibers themselves make the composite incredibly strong for its weight.
Silicon carbide grains (hard, rigid) embedded in a block of aluminum (soft, flexible) is another composite with fantastic combined properties. Makes for nice structural members that need to survive a lot of abrasion.
So maybe we can now make diamond-coated nanotubes, giving us an insulated conductor (what a concept), that's super abrasion- and corrosion-resistant to boot. Or use nanotubes for their mechanical strength, but the integrated diamond improves the wear resistance of the cable you're using for lifts to orbit.
People always worry that death and disease are good checks on the population and that eliminating them will cause rampant overpopulation and malthusian collapse. It's always turned out to be false.
They worried about it with the development of vaccines. They worried about it with improved birthing processes - before 1850 a woman could reasonably expect to have half of her 5-6 children die in childbirth or childhood. Allow them all to live, and the population explodes, right?
Except that you found people just had fewer babies instead, and because of the higher standard of living and less need to spend effort on just surviving - more time for productive work - the economy grew to support the new population just fine.
First-world countries, with their better medicine, higher standards of living, and longer lifespans, invariably have drastically lower population growth rates than third-world countries.
This problem solves itself.
Is there reason to believe that this hypothetical creator should have designed brains incapable of being tricked? Why didn't this creator make us able to fly, breath underwater, or stick to the walls? What else are you going to ask me to explain, and why should I be obligated to provide an answer?
Because if you make complaints that evolutionary theory can't explain phenomenon X, then you should make an attempt to explain how yours can. It's unreasonable to poke holes at one theory and then argue that your favorite theory doesn't need to address those issues.
Your argument is equivalent to: "You can't prove that X caused Y. Therefore Z must have caused Y. And no, I don't have to prove it!"
Next point:
#1
>> how do you know that he/she/it programmed [our reasoning capability] to accurately reflect reality?
>We don't.
#2
>>Prove the above statement wrong.
>I definitely can't prove that wrong.
You go on to say:
But if Plantinga's argument is true, then that statement is preferable to the theory of evolution because it at least is not self-defeating.
Then you'd better do an improved job of elucidating that argument. So far the only argument you've given that evolution as a belief is "self-defeating" is, in your words: "on the supposition that evolution is responsible for our reasoning ability, we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) correspond to reality".
Yet in point #1 and #2 above you've admitted yourself that creation mythology cannot give us any greater confidence that our perceptions and reason reflect reality.
So please give a coherent argument about what, exactly, makes evolution "self-defeating", and indeed what that term even means.
The statement "I think therefore..." cannot provably end in any statement about the nature of the univers, creation, or a creator. As others have pointed out, this entire line of thinking suffers from the so-called "brain in a vat" problem.
Meanwhile, evolutionary theory has such an unbelievable wealth of data behind it that at this point in underlies the study of biology every bit as thoroughly as atomic theory underlies chemistry, or as quantum theory, relativity, and gravity underlie physics. Indeed there are things not yet explained or fully understood in evolutionary theory. But physicists have not yet reconciled gravity and quantum theory, either. Do you therefore doubt that gravity exists?
You also might be surprised to find that I've read Dembski quite thoroughly. The man has not the faintest understanding of complexity, which is a rigorously defined concept in information science. CSI is a hand-wavy term that approximately means "anything that appears difficult to understand" and/or "anthing for which Dembski claims he cannot conceive of an evolutionary mechanism".
"Irreducible complexity" is only slightly better defined. Yet the ability of a nonguided stepwise selection process to generate irreducible complexity, something IDers claim is impossible, has been demonstrated repeatedly and published. See for example Lenski et. al, Nature 423:139-145. I saw the process daily in the course of my PhD research. The fact that IDers claim it is impossible is just that: an empty claim with no evidence or research behind it.
If you are talking about Intelligent Design (which is in no sense a form of "fundamentalism")
Snort. ID is a dressed-up creationist argument artificially and consciously created by the Discovery institute to function as a social wedge, forcing rationalism/science apart from religon. This has been publicly documented for some time. It has few or no adherents who do not subscribe to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
It's no better than the early-Enlightenment jerks who created false mythologies designed t
Indeed it is. Which is precisely why our senses are so easily fooled: given stimuli that do not correspond to those seen in survival tasks in the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, i.e. hunting and gathering on the African plains or whatever), our brains do not necessarily respond correctly.
Now explain why a creator would have built brains that are so subject to misdirection, geometric optical illusions, etc. Why would he/she/it have done so?
belief in evolution is self-defeating because on the supposition that evolution is responsible for our reasoning ability, we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) correspond to reality.
And if a creator built our reasoning capabilities, how do you know that he/she/it programmed it to accurately reflect reality? We'd be seeing whatever he/she/it wanted us to see, for whatever reasons. You'll get less mileage out of this argument for creation than for evolution, even.
Pointing out that evolutionary theory itself can't guarantee the accuracy of our reasoning faculties (which is true) gets you absolutely nowhere because Creation mythology is significantly worse. Consider:
Prove the above statement wrong. You certainly can't invoke anything it says in the bible, because that -- or rather your memory of it -- was created six seconds ago as well. It says exactly what the creator wanted it to say, for reasons of his/her/its own.
As soon as you invoke a creator, falsifiability is utterly gone, your conclusions can be ANYTHING, and future argumentation is pretty much futile. Thus creation mythology serves primarily as a tool for a person to project their own emotional needs and desires into their own understanding of reality.
Fortunately, there are other ways to evaluate the accuracy of our reasoning capabilities than evolutionary theory or creation mythology. Sparing a couple thousand years of philosophy, I'll stick to the pragmatic argument: Reason seems to work. It gives us effective tools for functioning, ergo we're best off assuming that our intellect and reason is what it seems to be, and make use of it.
End note: Your sig links to a story about Antony Flew "converting to religion". You'll notice he's a self-described Deist: a philosophy that is in no way contradictory to any contemporary understanding of evolution, physics, or any other branch of the sciences. He explicitly states he doesn't believe any sort of revealed religion. How does this bolster any point in favor of creationism or any other branch of post-Enlightenment fundamentalist thought? The point is lost, because Flew explicitly still rejects all that.
I race triathlons. When you're swimming in 55-degree ocean water, but your eyes are at body temperature, the goggles fog so badly that it can become next-to-impossible to see the damn buoy you're aiming for. And the last thing you want is to be lost, swimming a zigzag and adding 35% to your distance.
> Stone lasts a very long time. Can the same be said of LCD video displays?
... their lifespan is determined by when society decides to pave over or build on top of the old soil more than the durability of the stone.
This was my first thought as well. Stones last effectively forever
These LCD gravestones will, if they are lucky, make it one generation. You would be able to see your grandparents' video, when you were young, but you probably couldn't show it to your kids. Unless someone is actively maintaining them, which isn't going to happen unless someone's being paid to actively maintain them.
Also, how are the videos stored? DVD? Solid state? Tape? All these devices have very limited lifespan on the order of 10-30 years. So they will have to be continually renewed and recopied.
Four generations down, which descendant is financially responsible for maintenance of electronic gravestones? Is the mortuary going to sell a contract for maintenance of the headstone in perpetuity? I doubt it, and even if they did nobody's going to hold them to the contract four generations frow now.
The vast majority of these will all break and be left idle within a generation or two. Which means in 50 years, you have a headstone with an ugly broken metal box of junk embedded in it.
But I suppose there are people who will buy any kitch out there, if someone's selling.
If you wanted to do something more permanent, have someone's life story and maybe a few photographs micro-etched into a corrosion-resistant metal plate, like the nickel-alloy discs of the rosetta project, which are expected to have a 2000-year lifespan.
And the Bananaphone / Badgerphone / Aftermath stuff.
Given the number of times "Bananaphone" has circulated through my head unbidden, it has clearly overwhelmed the other ten combined in my memory.
Which is why "Bananaphone: the aftermath" made so much sense...
This is exactly right. DRM (suppossedly) is about giving the manufacturer the right to control the data. If you give the manufacturer that right, you give up your own right to bitch about what they do with it, even if they use that control to make your life inconvenient. What you don't have the ethical space to do is legislate that the company has control ... and then break the law whenever the company's control inconveniences you.
If I advocated that all citizens should be law-abiding in all cases, but then I myself violated whichever laws happened to be inconvenient because I judged them as "terrible implementation", what would you say about my ethics?
If he'd bitched about the implementation and then taken his business elsewhere, okay. But he bitched and then solved his problem by violating the very system he advocates as "essential"!
And we will be left with Linux/open source unix implementions as the era of desktop/workstations come to an end.
Yeah, and tablet PCs will take over any day now.
Architecture
"Science", used alone, means the use of the scientific method to discover new information about the nature of reality. (Or, in the case of mathematics or computer science, the nature of abstract logical contrstucts
You don't need a beaker and a lab, but you need to be discovering something, and using the scientific method to do so. These guys are primarily designing new things, which is engineering; the grandparent poster was correct.
That doesn't mean they're not smart, of course: engineers and applied scientists are generally extremely bright people.
A word of caution: anything one puts in one's body can conceivably be either beneficial or detrimental. People have far too strong a tendency to believe that anything plant-based or "natural" cannot harm them.
You in particular sound like you've done your homework on the things you're taking, but I get nervous at the hordes of people who fill themselves with many plant-based drugs thinking they have nowhere to go but up.
Good luck with your struggle with melanoma; that's a rough lot.
But Beta is better than VHS too, and I don't know very many people with Beta cassette players.
So, so, tired of this urban myth.
Beta lost a fair fight in the marketplace, and it deserved to. Yes, beta produced higher quality recordings and images. But it was more expensive, and the quality difference was not visible on consumer televesions of the time. Repeat, consumer TVs were not high enough quality to see the difference between Beta and VHS. So why would a consumer buy a more expensive device that gives them no benefit? They didn't, and it lost in the marketplace.
Studios and editing houses had higher-quality monitors, and so Beta made sense for them. And in such places, Beta lived on for many years.
Beta lost fair and square because it didn't deliver a benefit commensurate to its' price.
it is center-left at best. Look at their recent decision further eroding private property rights.
The court is neither conservative nor liberal, it is primarily statist and authoritarian, as is most of our government right now.
Many liberals, including my self, were horrified at that ruling. Calling that ruling "liberal" merely shows that you have a deep failure to understand the term.
Yeah. Thunderbird.
Which leads me to think that the Onion is perfectly well aware of the issue...
Seriously, it has to be Lucas' atrociously bad character directing.
Because there are other people in the film, like Ewan McGregor and Samuel L. Jackson, who are fine actors elsewhere and squeeze out the most wooden performances of their life in SWIII.
Look at Obi-Wan when he's "bowing out of the political moment" and talking to Anakin after the crash at the beginning of the movie. Pay attention to the ridiculous, unnatural arm gestures he's making - then try to find McGregor body-acting that badly in any other movie. Or watch Mace Windu's overacted nod in response to Yoda's "a prophecy which misread, might have been" or listen to the lines opposite Palpatine: "He controls the courts! He is too dangerous to leave alive! I am over-acting!"
Those moments are so wooden and overacted - by actors I KNOW are better than that - that I can practically see Lucas on the edge of the set when they filmed them. Jackson gives a nice, subtle, natural nod of agreement to yoda's line and Lucas says "No, Sam, we really need to see that you agree with Yoda. Make that head-bob a bit more forceful."
Everywhere you look, you see the hand of a director who doesn't understand subtlety, natural movement, or natural tone of voice. He's always urging the actors to ham it up a bit more, unaware of what a hash he's making of the character moments. It's the same kind of Aspergers' syndrome personality that can write lines like "hold me the way you did on Naboo, back before the war, when it was just us" and think it's a natural romantic moment.
Lucas simply doesn't "get" natural human emotion and interaction.
Which is too bad, really, because he writes a pretty damn entertaining story and can visualize vast action sequences like nobody else.
Likewise, Clinton was the last great conservative president.
A balanced budget. Reduced overall government spending by every metric: in real dollars and as a fraction of GDP. Pro-business environment and economic growth. Worldwide free-trade agreements. The list goes on.
I think part of the reason Clinton is so deeply vilified by the right is that he actually DID for the economy and for economic policy what so many republicans have only PROMISED for so long. That makes him a threat to the myth of "The GOP is the party of financial responsibility". Well, okay, dubya has buried that myth a good bit deeper, now.
Kinesis keyboards can have this feature as well.
... at home where I am 90% of the time ... and I touchtype qwerty on flat keyboards, like when I'm using my laptop or someone else's computer. The skills are entirely separate, like riding a bike and skiing.
I switched to dvorak in college, but shortly afterward switched to dvorak on kinesis. Of course, I have to use other people's qwerty keyboards all the time.
The result is that I touchtype dvorak on a contoured kinesis
Fifteen years later, I'm entirely incapable of touchtyping dvorak on a flat keyboard or qwerty on a kinesis. My brain simply won't make the connection. I'm sure I could re-learn, but this combination works so well, why would I bother?