I think a recursive data-structure known as a. tree is pretty optimal for representing and navigating hierarchies. Why would I need a spiking neural net, and if I need such a thing, where can I get an SDK that gives me spiking nets for hierarchical organization of information for my little file-explorer?
If you want to be pedantic, please use correct terminology. First, the median is an average, the arithmetic mean another, the mode another, the geometric mean yet another. You probably equate average with arithmetic mean, but that's not strictly true. Second, the central limit theorem proves that for any random variable that has finite (stable) variance the mean and the median are equal. Not sure if 'driver ability' has finite variance, but if it is anything like IQ, length or weight, then yes, the (arithmetic) mean divides the top 50% from the bottom 50%.
It's clear that you're a microsoftie as you obviously have no clue on what the halting problem is. The fact that you cannot write a program that can compute whether arbitrary programs halt or not, in no way implies that it is impossible to prove that a given program halts. Let me give an example of a program that can be proven to halt.
int main() {.return 0; }
No loops, no recursion, just a return statement. If you're a coder and truly have no clue whether your program halts or not, you have no business writing programs in the first place.
Macro evolution is micro evolution on long time scales, and has nothing to do with origin of life. If you think the two are truly different you have quite some explaining to do how isolated populations undergoing micro-evolution are *not* going to evolve arbitrarily apart from eachother. What mechanism would make sure that they stay within the same species?
Yes I agree. The fine should be commensurate with the severity of the wrong. Microsoft has completely ignored a court order, and if it were an individual, it would face serious jail-time. $7 billion feels like a slap on the wrist. It's business license should be revoked for a couple of years.
Why is infinite regress 'logically' impossible? What necessity is there that there is a beginning as well as there is an end? There's a strong intuition that there must be one, though logically, there's nothing that demands it.
With IQ, the 'outliers' are pretty tame, i.e. don't disturb the variance. Central Limit Theorem holds and mean = median. For contrast, try wealth. That doesn't have a mean, only a median.
Dude, everybody knows all languages were created by God when he punished humans for creating a too big a tower. They are all related to each other in exactly this way.
It's a bit of a silly argument. One that philosophers really love to spend centuries on. There is however a very simple answer: there is no truth, there are simply degrees of belief (not faith, belief). This Bayesian view of knowledge dismisses your argument as silly, as belief is not a boolean. You will have to quantify it. So yes, I have about five nines 99.999% belief in the accuracy of my memory, maybe more. This is quite in contrast with my 0.0000000001% belief (maybe less) in a divine being. You call both 'faith'. I call the first true, the second false.
Truth in this Bayesian sense is intimately tied with evidence. To ask 'is this true', you are actually asking: how much evidence would you need to be convinced otherwise? Much more useful than the sophistry that you employ in this thread. So my question to you is: what type of evidence do you need to be convinced that your memory does or does not work? And have you witnessed that evidence?
Yes, the kind of rape that would leave the victim fighting for her life for several weeks afterwards would lead to a reduced chance of pregnancy, or rather, a higher chance of spontaneous abortion. However, for a less violent rape, where the victim doesn't need to be hospitalized, there is no indication that the rate of pregnancy is lower. It's probably tough to comprehend for a creationist, but evolutionary success is completely independent of emotional or moral well-being..If the injected sperm is compatible with the egg, it will fertilize. Genetics: not much to do about that.
Of course, a Christian such at Atkins doesn't really understand biology, and he feels more comfortable believing that God has created women to reject sperm that is injected under duress, and therefore pregnant woman are guilty of lust while being raped. Do you agree with this view?
For consistency's sake, I hope you are part of a group that wants to put each and every American soldier involved in hostilities on trial in a criminal court, as they might have been involved in killing human beings.
Oh, Christian countries used to have these laws on the books as well. In the 1950s women were still considered possessions, with no rights of their own. Married women were expected to service the family, and not make a fuss in public. Rape was hardly treated as a criminal offence, unless it would humiliate the man. In essence, we are only 50 years ahead of the Saudis and Morocco, and since Mr. Akin and his fellow Republicans seems to want to drive the country back to the good old days, I don't think we have much reason for any smugness.
I think the entire discussion is about a Republican running for one of the highest offices in the United States that firmly believes that 'true' rape victims will never get pregnant. I.e., if you get pregnant, it wasn't rape. This individual, when elected will influence law-making in a Christian country. And you are saying there is no moral equivalence between the US and muslim states? Open your eyes: it's happening!
You forget another group. One that says that killing human beings is not necessarily murder, at least not a murder that needs to be prosecuted in the legal system. This group includes the people that support the troops to do 'what it takes' to bring peace in countries such as Germany, Korea, Vietnam, Chili, Honduras, Panama, Granada, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. We're not prosecuting soldiers for killing enemies, so we're obviously not against killing people. We have now covered almost the entirety of the religious right. Killing is fine. Killing babies is fine as well (how many American soldiers have been prosecuted for killing pregnant women and children when bombing a village?) It surely isn't worth a criminal investigation, and I haven't heard many people pushing for a full scale investigation at each and every killing where American soldiers were involved.
Having firmly established that killing human beings is not considered to be morally wrong in principle, and also having established that killing innocents (collateral damage) is not considered morally reprehensible, we can move the debate to when it is okay to kill human beings in the womb. There seems to be sufficient leeway here to set a reasonable date between clump of cells and innocent human being that shouldn't be killed on whim. It's just a matter of removing the hypocrisy in both pro-life and pro-choice groups. Abortion is killing, but killing is not necessarily murder.
Of course. You are a tribal man. The tribe can take care of the tribe. Who needs civilization anyway? If everybody would take care of their 20 dearest, we can achieve everything. The tribe can invent physics. The tribe can create great literature. The tribe can fly to the moon!
Oh yes, I would completely applaud teaching the controversy in science. Let's start with physics, and before the kids have a good grasp of Newtonian physics, let's explain to them that there are problems near the speed of light, that strict determinism does not imply predictability, and that the continuity hypothesis fails at elementary particle level. Then go on an explain them that relativity theory and quantum theory themselves tackle these issues, but cannot seem to be combined, and talk about quantum gravity as a possible solution. Maybe you find some string theory and chaos theory to really bring these kids into the forefront of science.
Or, we might just teach them that F=ma, that E = 1/2 m v^2, and that science works with facts, theories and falsification. When they are at the Ph.D. level or a bit beyond, they might be able to truly start to do some active science. But first, the basics. Teaching the method of science can be done nicely by letting the kids do experiments and question the results. I think however that it is greatly unfair to teach them that any kid can poke holes into the foundations of a subject of science that is studied by the brightest brains of the past centuries, especially if you are going to let them believe that they were right and that their arguments haven't been countered before.
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I think a recursive data-structure known as a. tree is pretty optimal for representing and navigating hierarchies. Why would I need a spiking neural net, and if I need such a thing, where can I get an SDK that gives me spiking nets for hierarchical organization of information for my little file-explorer?
Yeah sure. "Guns don't kill people, gun owners do". And that makes gun owners non-dangerous how exactly?
Unlike popular myth, Nazi Germany, as well as Saddam's Iraq, actively promoted gun ownership by their citizens.
If you want to be pedantic, please use correct terminology. First, the median is an average, the arithmetic mean another, the mode another, the geometric mean yet another. You probably equate average with arithmetic mean, but that's not strictly true. Second, the central limit theorem proves that for any random variable that has finite (stable) variance the mean and the median are equal. Not sure if 'driver ability' has finite variance, but if it is anything like IQ, length or weight, then yes, the (arithmetic) mean divides the top 50% from the bottom 50%.
Science advances one funeral at a time -- Max Planck
The Arctic ice is not a problem for rising sea-levels. Melting ice from Greenland is.
Gerrymandering.
No loops, no recursion, just a return statement. If you're a coder and truly have no clue whether your program halts or not, you have no business writing programs in the first place.
Macro evolution is micro evolution on long time scales, and has nothing to do with origin of life. If you think the two are truly different you have quite some explaining to do how isolated populations undergoing micro-evolution are *not* going to evolve arbitrarily apart from eachother. What mechanism would make sure that they stay within the same species?
Yes I agree. The fine should be commensurate with the severity of the wrong. Microsoft has completely ignored a court order, and if it were an individual, it would face serious jail-time. $7 billion feels like a slap on the wrist. It's business license should be revoked for a couple of years.
Why is infinite regress 'logically' impossible? What necessity is there that there is a beginning as well as there is an end? There's a strong intuition that there must be one, though logically, there's nothing that demands it.
With IQ, the 'outliers' are pretty tame, i.e. don't disturb the variance. Central Limit Theorem holds and mean = median. For contrast, try wealth. That doesn't have a mean, only a median.
Central Limit Theorem.
Central Limit Theorem. Look it up, you might learn something.
Dude, everybody knows all languages were created by God when he punished humans for creating a too big a tower. They are all related to each other in exactly this way.
It's a bit of a silly argument. One that philosophers really love to spend centuries on. There is however a very simple answer: there is no truth, there are simply degrees of belief (not faith, belief). This Bayesian view of knowledge dismisses your argument as silly, as belief is not a boolean. You will have to quantify it. So yes, I have about five nines 99.999% belief in the accuracy of my memory, maybe more. This is quite in contrast with my 0.0000000001% belief (maybe less) in a divine being. You call both 'faith'. I call the first true, the second false.
Truth in this Bayesian sense is intimately tied with evidence. To ask 'is this true', you are actually asking: how much evidence would you need to be convinced otherwise? Much more useful than the sophistry that you employ in this thread. So my question to you is: what type of evidence do you need to be convinced that your memory does or does not work? And have you witnessed that evidence?
Of course, a Christian such at Atkins doesn't really understand biology, and he feels more comfortable believing that God has created women to reject sperm that is injected under duress, and therefore pregnant woman are guilty of lust while being raped. Do you agree with this view?
And if they are black?
For consistency's sake, I hope you are part of a group that wants to put each and every American soldier involved in hostilities on trial in a criminal court, as they might have been involved in killing human beings.
Oh, Christian countries used to have these laws on the books as well. In the 1950s women were still considered possessions, with no rights of their own. Married women were expected to service the family, and not make a fuss in public. Rape was hardly treated as a criminal offence, unless it would humiliate the man. In essence, we are only 50 years ahead of the Saudis and Morocco, and since Mr. Akin and his fellow Republicans seems to want to drive the country back to the good old days, I don't think we have much reason for any smugness.
I think the entire discussion is about a Republican running for one of the highest offices in the United States that firmly believes that 'true' rape victims will never get pregnant. I.e., if you get pregnant, it wasn't rape. This individual, when elected will influence law-making in a Christian country. And you are saying there is no moral equivalence between the US and muslim states? Open your eyes: it's happening!
You forget another group. One that says that killing human beings is not necessarily murder, at least not a murder that needs to be prosecuted in the legal system. This group includes the people that support the troops to do 'what it takes' to bring peace in countries such as Germany, Korea, Vietnam, Chili, Honduras, Panama, Granada, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. We're not prosecuting soldiers for killing enemies, so we're obviously not against killing people. We have now covered almost the entirety of the religious right. Killing is fine. Killing babies is fine as well (how many American soldiers have been prosecuted for killing pregnant women and children when bombing a village?) It surely isn't worth a criminal investigation, and I haven't heard many people pushing for a full scale investigation at each and every killing where American soldiers were involved.
Having firmly established that killing human beings is not considered to be morally wrong in principle, and also having established that killing innocents (collateral damage) is not considered morally reprehensible, we can move the debate to when it is okay to kill human beings in the womb. There seems to be sufficient leeway here to set a reasonable date between clump of cells and innocent human being that shouldn't be killed on whim. It's just a matter of removing the hypocrisy in both pro-life and pro-choice groups. Abortion is killing, but killing is not necessarily murder.
Of course. You are a tribal man. The tribe can take care of the tribe. Who needs civilization anyway? If everybody would take care of their 20 dearest, we can achieve everything. The tribe can invent physics. The tribe can create great literature. The tribe can fly to the moon!
So, you prefer research from non-scientists? Good luck with that ... Mali, here we come.
Oh yes, I would completely applaud teaching the controversy in science. Let's start with physics, and before the kids have a good grasp of Newtonian physics, let's explain to them that there are problems near the speed of light, that strict determinism does not imply predictability, and that the continuity hypothesis fails at elementary particle level. Then go on an explain them that relativity theory and quantum theory themselves tackle these issues, but cannot seem to be combined, and talk about quantum gravity as a possible solution. Maybe you find some string theory and chaos theory to really bring these kids into the forefront of science.
Or, we might just teach them that F=ma, that E = 1/2 m v^2, and that science works with facts, theories and falsification. When they are at the Ph.D. level or a bit beyond, they might be able to truly start to do some active science. But first, the basics. Teaching the method of science can be done nicely by letting the kids do experiments and question the results. I think however that it is greatly unfair to teach them that any kid can poke holes into the foundations of a subject of science that is studied by the brightest brains of the past centuries, especially if you are going to let them believe that they were right and that their arguments haven't been countered before.