> Yes but everytime an article comes up about SETI we get the "if only one in a billion stars have a planet and only one in a billion of them has life speech" in support of spending money without any physical or testable evidence. It's just faith by the sceintists that the odds are on their sides.
Actually its just faith that things work elsewhere in the universe pretty much the way they work here.
> Heres a riddle for your evolutionist mind though: Explain how rapidly flying material from the supposed big bang somehow got together to form stars and planets and the like.
You show your ignorance of big-bang theory. BBT is about space expanding, not about stuff flying around after an explosion.
> Don't forget that at the point of the big bang there were no planets or stars to create gravity.
Ah, you're ignorant of much more basic issues than the BBT.
> On the contrary: if there was no need for the idea of intelligent design (note that I didn't call it a theory), nobody would've come up with it.
Quite so... but the need is political rather than scientific.
The need is the fundamentalist requirement that their kids not grow up believing in "evil"ution. But creationism won't pass muster in the US court system, so they need a secularized creationism that can.
I've seen a.sig that says something like "ID is just creation science with all the religion and science taken out".
> If you want to believe in ID, great; just please don't call it science.
Right-o.
> ID is a God Of The Gaps argument. We don't understand how the finely-balanced nature of the cosmos is possible, therefore God must have done it... well, what happens if/when we discover there's a natural phenomenon behind it?
We help God pack his bags and move him to a smaller, remoter gap.
> The Apostle Paul said that 'through Adam sin and death came into the world'. If that is not true then none of it is true. Death, of either men or dinasours cannot have occured before Adam's sin in the Garden, because death was part of the curse God placed on man for his sin.
Which is why we keep hearing biblical literalists making idiotic claims about T.rex eating rutabagas before Adam bit the apple.
BTW, what you quote is what Paul said, but it's not what Genesis says. The curses given verbatim in Genesis clearly apply to serpents and humans. There isn't the slightest suggestion that carnivores didn't eat meat before then.
> As far as Evolution being a 'science', all it has to do is propose a falsifiable hypothesis which can be used as a test.
The entire science of genetics has been over a century of continuous tests of the theory of evolution. Remember that when Darwin published, Mendel still hadn't. The entire history of biological science since 1859 has been a history of validating the theory of evolution.
> Yes, so-called "Intelligent Design" is inherently a religious concept. So what? How does that invalidate it? The existence of God cannot be disproven scientifically. As long as something cannot be disproven, it is a valid theory.
The fact that it can't be disproven shows its worthlessness as a theory. There is no conceivable observation that isn't compatible with 'goddidit', which makes 'goddidit' completely useless as an explanation for anything.
[Snip fantasia on Genesis I]
> For having been written thousands of years ago by a man (Moses) who knew nothing about science, it seems pretty close to me.
Regardless who wrote it and when, it sounds pretty wrong to me.
> I understand why some people refuse to believe in a God. It takes a very open mind to believe in something you have no evidence of.
Alas, it takes an open mind to believe in things we do have evidence of, such as the big bang and biological evolution.
And if you're so keen on believing stuff without any supporting evidence, why don't you believe in all the other gods and unicorns that people have professed throughout the ages? You're merely engaging in special pleading.
> Eliminating Intelligent Design, or whatever you want to call it, from school curriculum amounts to nothing more than censorship, just like eliminating evolution.
No, omitting ID is just like omitting other pseudosciences based on bad arguments.
> Intelligent Design, a recent theory that has gained enough respect from the scientific community
ID has no respect in the scientific community whatsoever. (If it did, Dembski wouldn't be making up paranoid conspiracy theories to explain why it doesn't.)
> that it is being taught alongside evolution in many schools and colleges
A number of creationist pressure groups have tried to get it adopted by state school boards, but AFAIK they haven't actually succeeded anywhere.
Which is all for the best, since if you ask an ID advocate what should go in their lesson plan all you'll get is a blank look. All the political noise the ID movement has stirred up over the past few years is based on nothing more than a couple of easily refuted arguments that evolution must have had some help somewhere along the way.
> explains that to even reach the stage at which we exist there are no fewer than twenty-six variables necessary for our universe to even consider permitting life and a further sixty-six within our galaxy and Earth itself that allowed the multitude of living beings not only to come into being but to flourish
Those aren't findings of the ID movement; they're arguments that the ID movement appeals to. (Showing, in passing, that ID is nothing more than the old fine-tuning argument painted up with a fresh layer of pseudo-science.)
> (this whitepaper that was in My Favorites breaks these criteria into probabilities -- great read if you prefer to see the evidence of this hypothesis)
Probability arguments are what creationists use to deny that something has happened. (Scientists also acknowledge that the universe is a very improbable place, or would be if all configurations of matter and energy were equally probable, but from that recognition they part with creationists by investigating the causes of the observed non-randomness rather than invoking armchair arguments to deny causes.)
> Some perhaps are content with chaos theory, but I'm glad there's another scientific viewpoint that can rationalize the concept that free will is the only variable that yet seems unaccounted for
The existence of free will hasn't even been demonstrated; it's small wonder that it hasn't been accounted for.
>... and with all likelihood, that too was carefully strewn into the universe to keep a perpetual working model. Although I suppose we have to keep in mind that this too is only a theory
No, it isn't even a theory. It's speculation unconstrained by any evidence.
> So I'm glad that there are still some minds out there, like Copernicus and Einstein, that are not satisfied with science by rote, and I think that if we allow ourselves break out of the current dominant paradigms for just a little bit the change in perspective can open many new insights.
Hope you were just trolling. That would be a good trollpost, but a pathetic serious post.
There is another FOSS IDE called gps. They call the unsupported version the "academic edition", but you can download the source, and a peak at a few files shows that it's GPL'd. (Their economic model is to give it away for free and sell support for those who need it.)
It's a cross-platform IDE, with binaries available for Linux, Solaris, and various versions of Windows, and in principle you should be able to build it on any *n*x system where you can get GTK2 to run.
The bad news is that language support is still limited. It has full support for Ada and partial support for C and C++, which are lower priorities for the authors. It comes with instructions for setting up support for your language, but that looks like a non-trivial task.
I've just started playing with it so I can't give a good review, but so far it has been very helpful. The features listed at their Web site are:
Language-sensitive editor
Automatic generation of body files
Source code reformatting
Intelligent source code navigation
Context-sensitive search and replace
Application builder
Automatic code fixing
Version control (CVS, ClearCase, etc.)
Visual file comparison
Graphical source-level debugger
Project and program entities explorer
Project wizard
Types and program entities graphs
Call graphs
File dependency graphs
Project dependency graphs
You can use the built-in editor or make it pop up your favorite editor. If you use the gnuclient Emacs interface you get the same kind of language-sensitive pop-up menus you get with the built-in editor.
> But to claim that it is legalized bribery is totally ignorant.
What's the issue? A gives B money; B votes for something A wants. We could call it something different, such as "lobbying", but that doesn't in the least change the substance of what's going on.
Re: Fault-tolerant/robust system engineering
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
> I was reading somewhere (possibly Scientific American) about the building of systems (computer software or robots) which can tolerate a restart or failureof one or more of them and keep working.
Yes, and I seriously considered writing a letter to the editors suggesting that 99.999% of the goals of that research could be met simply by switching from Windows to Linux. I wish I had written it; I don't object to research into fault tolerant systems, but I do object to the idea that reliability is something you graft onto a system as an afterthought.
Re: LinuxBIOS in flight computers
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> The language used for all of this is ADA, which is one devious language to program in.
Actually, I find Ada [sic] quite elegant to program in.
> Everything requires exception handling, and every exception needs to be handled.
Actually exception handlers are optional. But in avionics you probably do want to handle exceptions, regardless of which language you're using.
> The 2 million lines of code is surprising, not because it seems like a lot, but because it seems like so little.
Ada is somewhat verbose because it uses "begin" and "end" instead of "{" and "}", and a few other things along that line, but it's absurd to pass judgement on the size of a program without the slightest idea how many function points it implements.
In my experience, the more familiar I become with Ada the more lean and elegant my programs are. As with virtually every other programming language, you can set up abstractions and program at "a higher level" than Joe Noobie would do. Possibly the F-22 avionics were programmed by noobies or idiots, but somehow I doubt it.
Re: Editors, upon submission...
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> Please consider having Slashdot do a quick search, esp in the last 2-3 weeks. Even if this is done at the submittor level, then they could avoid this. I have no doubt that most submittors would prefer to avoid this.
Au contraire, I would guess that every time a story hits Slashdot about 9000 clowns immediately submit it again in hopes of duping the editors into a dupe.
Re: the 'let's go kill people' software
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
> the 'let's go kill people' software
Yeah, but the pilot ain't the one that it's supposed to kill.
Found more on Google.
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The first hit on Google was this interesting take on the story.
> They don't turn the commercials louder, it is actually a very similar thing that is happening with the music. This applies to TV commercials as well.
> When you listen to a song or watch a show, if you were to watch the levels of the different frequencies, you would find that only a few of them are high at any one time. With commercials they go out of there way to ensure that as many of them as possible are near the top. This creates the effect of sounding louder with out the volume actually being any higher.
They use a technology called compression, which basically means the loud parts are quieter and the quiet parts are louder, which lets them crank up the gain without having the sound break up on the transient louds. If you hear a song on the radio and then play it off a CD immediately afterward you can really tell the difference - or at least you could back when music actually had a dynamic range.
Yes, they do it with songs as well as commercials, but IMO they are worse about it with commercials. (Television commercials are really bad about it, and it's especially annoying during quiet shows like X Files, where you have to turn the sound up to follow the conversations.) They also speed songs up somewhat, at least last time I paid any attention. (I used to listen to Classic Rock, but got tired of hearing two Bob Seeger warhorses every hour, so I rarely listen to any radio except Classical anymore.)
What you describe sounds like they may modify the spectrum as well as the amplitude, or maybe it's just an effect of the compression. I played with an audiophile compressor/limiter a long time ago, but I didn't have a spectrum analyser to watch the effects with.
OTOH, what you're seeing may be an evolutionary phenomenon tracing back to Phil Spector's "wall of sound" from the '60s. But the fitness function guiding that evolution would surely be the same thing that drives the use of compression, i.e. the need to grab the channel-flippers' attention. Presumably music has evolved to saturate the spectral bandwidth, and the engineers help things along a bit.
> From what I see from the link provided, Faucounau's "plausible approach" has nothing to recommend it as scholarship. Maybe the book itself is better, but I've read enough "plausible approaches" to the Phaistos disk to be skeptical of any attempt to decipher a single-text script.
It's essentially impossible, since there isn't anything to constrain the meaning. Linear B at least had all the little pictures associated with the words and short phrases, and there's a pretty big corpus of it.
> One of the big proponents on the net of Faucounau's work (according to the link provided) is a fellow named Grapheus, whose scholarship is best illustrated by the following [...]
Grapheus is a well-known Usenet kook on topics of language and Greek history.
> Linear A is not Greek. It's undeciphered.
There is a certain amount of overlap between the symbols used for Linear A and Linear B, suggesting that Linear B was adapted to Greek when the languages came into contact. It's actually a piss-poor way to represent Greek, which tells us that it was invented for a language with a phonology very different from Greek.
There's an obvious notion that the symbols shared between Linear A and Linear B represented the same sound in both languages, but when we map the known sound values from Linear B onto Linear A inscriptions the result does not match or even resemble any known language. Barring the discovery of a Rosseta stone for it, it will never be deciphered. Linear B wouldn't have been deciphered if it hadn't been a familiar language and lots of drawings on the tables to guide and confirm the decipherment.
But in the bigger picture, IIRC, there isn't even a fully consistent set of symbols used across the various Linear A inscriptions, telling us that at best it wasn't a very standardized writing system and at worst the inscriptions might not even all be in the same language.
> One of the problems with Occam's Razor is that people weild it as if it were a law of physics. It is a useful guideline in many cases, but not all. Sometimes the weirder and more complicated answer is the correct one.
True, but of course we only conclude that they are the correct ones when the evidence guides us that way.
The power of Occam's Razor is that it cuts the legs out from under arguments based on special pleading.
Slashdot Mirror
> Yes but everytime an article comes up about SETI we get the "if only one in a billion stars have a planet and only one in a billion of them has life speech" in support of spending money without any physical or testable evidence. It's just faith by the sceintists that the odds are on their sides.
Actually its just faith that things work elsewhere in the universe pretty much the way they work here.
> Heres a riddle for your evolutionist mind though: Explain how rapidly flying material from the supposed big bang somehow got together to form stars and planets and the like.
You show your ignorance of big-bang theory. BBT is about space expanding, not about stuff flying around after an explosion.
> Don't forget that at the point of the big bang there were no planets or stars to create gravity.
Ah, you're ignorant of much more basic issues than the BBT.
> The truth is, there are significant problems with Evolution as it is currently reported.
Name three.
> > There is NO NEED for intelligent design.
> On the contrary: if there was no need for the idea of intelligent design (note that I didn't call it a theory), nobody would've come up with it.
Quite so... but the need is political rather than scientific.
The need is the fundamentalist requirement that their kids not grow up believing in "evil"ution. But creationism won't pass muster in the US court system, so they need a secularized creationism that can.
I've seen a
> If you want to believe in ID, great; just please don't call it science.
Right-o.
> ID is a God Of The Gaps argument. We don't understand how the finely-balanced nature of the cosmos is possible, therefore God must have done it... well, what happens if/when we discover there's a natural phenomenon behind it?
We help God pack his bags and move him to a smaller, remoter gap.
> The Apostle Paul said that 'through Adam sin and death came into the world'. If that is not true then none of it is true. Death, of either men or dinasours cannot have occured before Adam's sin in the Garden, because death was part of the curse God placed on man for his sin.
Which is why we keep hearing biblical literalists making idiotic claims about T.rex eating rutabagas before Adam bit the apple.
BTW, what you quote is what Paul said, but it's not what Genesis says. The curses given verbatim in Genesis clearly apply to serpents and humans. There isn't the slightest suggestion that carnivores didn't eat meat before then.
> As far as Evolution being a 'science', all it has to do is propose a falsifiable hypothesis which can be used as a test.
The entire science of genetics has been over a century of continuous tests of the theory of evolution. Remember that when Darwin published, Mendel still hadn't. The entire history of biological science since 1859 has been a history of validating the theory of evolution.
> Yes, so-called "Intelligent Design" is inherently a religious concept. So what? How does that invalidate it? The existence of God cannot be disproven scientifically. As long as something cannot be disproven, it is a valid theory.
The fact that it can't be disproven shows its worthlessness as a theory. There is no conceivable observation that isn't compatible with 'goddidit', which makes 'goddidit' completely useless as an explanation for anything.
[Snip fantasia on Genesis I]
> For having been written thousands of years ago by a man (Moses) who knew nothing about science, it seems pretty close to me.
Regardless who wrote it and when, it sounds pretty wrong to me.
> I understand why some people refuse to believe in a God. It takes a very open mind to believe in something you have no evidence of.
Alas, it takes an open mind to believe in things we do have evidence of, such as the big bang and biological evolution.
And if you're so keen on believing stuff without any supporting evidence, why don't you believe in all the other gods and unicorns that people have professed throughout the ages? You're merely engaging in special pleading.
> Eliminating Intelligent Design, or whatever you want to call it, from school curriculum amounts to nothing more than censorship, just like eliminating evolution.
No, omitting ID is just like omitting other pseudosciences based on bad arguments.
> Haven't you got anything better to do that to keep 'refining' Creationism whenever in response to Evolution showing it to be unnecessary.
Rich irony here: think of it as evolution in action.
> Intelligent Design, a recent theory that has gained enough respect from the scientific community
ID has no respect in the scientific community whatsoever. (If it did, Dembski wouldn't be making up paranoid conspiracy theories to explain why it doesn't.)
> that it is being taught alongside evolution in many schools and colleges
A number of creationist pressure groups have tried to get it adopted by state school boards, but AFAIK they haven't actually succeeded anywhere.
Which is all for the best, since if you ask an ID advocate what should go in their lesson plan all you'll get is a blank look. All the political noise the ID movement has stirred up over the past few years is based on nothing more than a couple of easily refuted arguments that evolution must have had some help somewhere along the way.
> explains that to even reach the stage at which we exist there are no fewer than twenty-six variables necessary for our universe to even consider permitting life and a further sixty-six within our galaxy and Earth itself that allowed the multitude of living beings not only to come into being but to flourish
Those aren't findings of the ID movement; they're arguments that the ID movement appeals to. (Showing, in passing, that ID is nothing more than the old fine-tuning argument painted up with a fresh layer of pseudo-science.)
> (this whitepaper that was in My Favorites breaks these criteria into probabilities -- great read if you prefer to see the evidence of this hypothesis)
Probability arguments are what creationists use to deny that something has happened. (Scientists also acknowledge that the universe is a very improbable place, or would be if all configurations of matter and energy were equally probable, but from that recognition they part with creationists by investigating the causes of the observed non-randomness rather than invoking armchair arguments to deny causes.)
> Some perhaps are content with chaos theory, but I'm glad there's another scientific viewpoint that can rationalize the concept that free will is the only variable that yet seems unaccounted for
The existence of free will hasn't even been demonstrated; it's small wonder that it hasn't been accounted for.
>
No, it isn't even a theory. It's speculation unconstrained by any evidence.
> So I'm glad that there are still some minds out there, like Copernicus and Einstein, that are not satisfied with science by rote, and I think that if we allow ourselves break out of the current dominant paradigms for just a little bit the change in perspective can open many new insights.
Hope you were just trolling. That would be a good trollpost, but a pathetic serious post.
The next paradigm shift is that we'll stop using the phrase "paradigm shift".
You insensitive clod!
> Was it not enough to extend the 8085 first to 8086, than to 80286, than to 80386 and now to x86-64? When will this end?
With the x86-640KB, if a famous prediction attributed to Bill Gates is true.
Surely those 0.1% differences are below the threshold of noise in the marketplace, if not in the sampling methodology?
BTW, I thought I had heard on the news that AMD was really hurting these days. Again. Anyone know?
> The big deal is you'd end up with a glass 125% full of water.
It keeps you from getting bogged down in the half-empty/half-full debate.
There is another FOSS IDE called gps. They call the unsupported version the "academic edition", but you can download the source, and a peak at a few files shows that it's GPL'd. (Their economic model is to give it away for free and sell support for those who need it.)
It's a cross-platform IDE, with binaries available for Linux, Solaris, and various versions of Windows, and in principle you should be able to build it on any *n*x system where you can get GTK2 to run.
The bad news is that language support is still limited. It has full support for Ada and partial support for C and C++, which are lower priorities for the authors. It comes with instructions for setting up support for your language, but that looks like a non-trivial task.
I've just started playing with it so I can't give a good review, but so far it has been very helpful. The features listed at their Web site are:
- Language-sensitive editor
- Automatic generation of body files
- Source code reformatting
- Intelligent source code navigation
- Context-sensitive search and replace
- Application builder
- Automatic code fixing
- Version control (CVS, ClearCase, etc.)
- Visual file comparison
- Graphical source-level debugger
- Project and program entities explorer
- Project wizard
- Types and program entities graphs
- Call graphs
- File dependency graphs
- Project dependency graphs
You can use the built-in editor or make it pop up your favorite editor. If you use the gnuclient Emacs interface you get the same kind of language-sensitive pop-up menus you get with the built-in editor.Screenshots are available at the link above.
> But to claim that it is legalized bribery is totally ignorant.
What's the issue? A gives B money; B votes for something A wants. We could call it something different, such as "lobbying", but that doesn't in the least change the substance of what's going on.
> I was reading somewhere (possibly Scientific American) about the building of systems (computer software or robots) which can tolerate a restart or failureof one or more of them and keep working.
Yes, and I seriously considered writing a letter to the editors suggesting that 99.999% of the goals of that research could be met simply by switching from Windows to Linux. I wish I had written it; I don't object to research into fault tolerant systems, but I do object to the idea that reliability is something you graft onto a system as an afterthought.
> The language used for all of this is ADA, which is one devious language to program in.
Actually, I find Ada [sic] quite elegant to program in.
> Everything requires exception handling, and every exception needs to be handled.
Actually exception handlers are optional. But in avionics you probably do want to handle exceptions, regardless of which language you're using.
> The 2 million lines of code is surprising, not because it seems like a lot, but because it seems like so little.
Ada is somewhat verbose because it uses "begin" and "end" instead of "{" and "}", and a few other things along that line, but it's absurd to pass judgement on the size of a program without the slightest idea how many function points it implements.
In my experience, the more familiar I become with Ada the more lean and elegant my programs are. As with virtually every other programming language, you can set up abstractions and program at "a higher level" than Joe Noobie would do. Possibly the F-22 avionics were programmed by noobies or idiots, but somehow I doubt it.
> Please consider having Slashdot do a quick search, esp in the last 2-3 weeks. Even if this is done at the submittor level, then they could avoid this. I have no doubt that most submittors would prefer to avoid this.
Au contraire, I would guess that every time a story hits Slashdot about 9000 clowns immediately submit it again in hopes of duping the editors into a dupe.
> the 'let's go kill people' software
Yeah, but the pilot ain't the one that it's supposed to kill.
The first hit on Google was this interesting take on the story.
> They don't turn the commercials louder, it is actually a very similar thing that is happening with the music. This applies to TV commercials as well.
> When you listen to a song or watch a show, if you were to watch the levels of the different frequencies, you would find that only a few of them are high at any one time. With commercials they go out of there way to ensure that as many of them as possible are near the top. This creates the effect of sounding louder with out the volume actually being any higher.
They use a technology called compression, which basically means the loud parts are quieter and the quiet parts are louder, which lets them crank up the gain without having the sound break up on the transient louds. If you hear a song on the radio and then play it off a CD immediately afterward you can really tell the difference - or at least you could back when music actually had a dynamic range.
Yes, they do it with songs as well as commercials, but IMO they are worse about it with commercials. (Television commercials are really bad about it, and it's especially annoying during quiet shows like X Files, where you have to turn the sound up to follow the conversations.) They also speed songs up somewhat, at least last time I paid any attention. (I used to listen to Classic Rock, but got tired of hearing two Bob Seeger warhorses every hour, so I rarely listen to any radio except Classical anymore.)
What you describe sounds like they may modify the spectrum as well as the amplitude, or maybe it's just an effect of the compression. I played with an audiophile compressor/limiter a long time ago, but I didn't have a spectrum analyser to watch the effects with.
OTOH, what you're seeing may be an evolutionary phenomenon tracing back to Phil Spector's "wall of sound" from the '60s. But the fitness function guiding that evolution would surely be the same thing that drives the use of compression, i.e. the need to grab the channel-flippers' attention. Presumably music has evolved to saturate the spectral bandwidth, and the engineers help things along a bit.
> From what I see from the link provided, Faucounau's "plausible approach" has nothing to recommend it as scholarship. Maybe the book itself is better, but I've read enough "plausible approaches" to the Phaistos disk to be skeptical of any attempt to decipher a single-text script.
It's essentially impossible, since there isn't anything to constrain the meaning. Linear B at least had all the little pictures associated with the words and short phrases, and there's a pretty big corpus of it.
> One of the big proponents on the net of Faucounau's work (according to the link provided) is a fellow named Grapheus, whose scholarship is best illustrated by the following [...]
Grapheus is a well-known Usenet kook on topics of language and Greek history.
> Linear A is not Greek. It's undeciphered.
There is a certain amount of overlap between the symbols used for Linear A and Linear B, suggesting that Linear B was adapted to Greek when the languages came into contact. It's actually a piss-poor way to represent Greek, which tells us that it was invented for a language with a phonology very different from Greek.
There's an obvious notion that the symbols shared between Linear A and Linear B represented the same sound in both languages, but when we map the known sound values from Linear B onto Linear A inscriptions the result does not match or even resemble any known language. Barring the discovery of a Rosseta stone for it, it will never be deciphered. Linear B wouldn't have been deciphered if it hadn't been a familiar language and lots of drawings on the tables to guide and confirm the decipherment.
But in the bigger picture, IIRC, there isn't even a fully consistent set of symbols used across the various Linear A inscriptions, telling us that at best it wasn't a very standardized writing system and at worst the inscriptions might not even all be in the same language.
BTW, a certain David Packard, scion of the H-P Packards, published a book about the patterns observed in the symbol groupings of the Linear A inscriptions. I've thumbed through a library copy, but didn't have time to read it.
> It's all about the radio. If your song has a lower volume than another one, it'll just sound Lame when it'll start.
> Of course all radios should/would/could normalize their playlists
I just wish they wouldn't blast the commercials out even louder than the music.
> One of the problems with Occam's Razor is that people weild it as if it were a law of physics. It is a useful guideline in many cases, but not all. Sometimes the weirder and more complicated answer is the correct one.
True, but of course we only conclude that they are the correct ones when the evidence guides us that way.
The power of Occam's Razor is that it cuts the legs out from under arguments based on special pleading.