There are also a number of Islamic scientists from a millennium ago (plus or minus) and Greeks from a couple of millennia ago who would be somewhat put out by your assertion that science as we know it is somehow new.
I'm not saying science is new. I'm saying science as we consider it is new. The part of scientific principle that asserts that things must be verifiable and provable. (thus ID is thrown out, because it is not verifiable and thus not "science", where as in the medieval ages, and in all the other ages that you mentioned, it would have been considered science.)
ermm.. what're you talking about? science has been used, continually, as an authoritarian means of control for millenia. it is a primary fault of science that it is unable to cure itself of this fact.
Except science hasn't been around for millenia. Especially in so far as we know it.
Also, many modern conceptions of science do not allow it to be an authoritarian means of control, because you can prove your position and become the correct one. The same way Einstein was able to advance his theory, and replace the simple Newtonian physics for a number of near-relativistic situations where his observations make a fundamental point of criticism.
This is like asserting that Linux is a means of control because only 10~15 people have contributed 90% of the Linux kernel. Point is that nothing but your self determination holds you from contributing back, and effecting significant changes.
Very true, and you'll notice that I never specified Christianity as the ideology in question. Again, please read what I actually wrote.
And I'll continue to read into your implied statements. I'm sick of people trying to get away with "Well, I didn't SAY that." No, you just implied it. Now shut up, and stop hedging your bets, so that if someone agrees with your implied statements they will agree, and if someone disagrees with your implied statements, you can say you didn't say it.
In short, the problem isn't the ideology; it's the ideologues. The great advantage of science in relation to all the examples I mentioned above is that it's not an ideology at all, and thus ideologues -- the sort of people who need Something to believe in as The Truth, whatever that Something may be -- tend not to be attracted to it in the first place.
You're making the assumption that EVERY who believes in science feels the same way as you. Truth is, everyone sees their position as "The Truth", or they wouldn't believe in it. Whether it's science or religion or whatever.
The second you admit that you accept that your "truthes" in science may be completely bogus if the true nature of reality were completely different from what it actually is, I'll let you go. But as long as you assert that science is absolutely objective; I will disagree with you.
Your theology is sophisticated and admirable; unfortunately, it's also not typical of the people who use religion as a blunt instrument to attack science -- and like it or not, there are a lot of those people, and they have significant political power.
I'll agree here. Religion makes a nice weapon for control. "If you don't do this, then you will be punished for all eternity."
I had people argue with me about taking the Eukerist, and not believing in the Trinity.
I was like, "I accept Jesus as my savior... Bible says that's sufficient for salvation... so what are you trying to accomplish? I'm still going to heaven."
Mostly turns out that they were upset that my belief system didn't match theirs. It didn't bother me, because theirs was sufficiently similar to mine.
I really liked stumping them with, "Are you saying if I don't take the Eukerist that I'm going to hell?" "Well, no, but you're not taking in the presense of God." "But God is everywhere right? So, why can't I just enjoy and accept his presense all the time, why do I need some stupid ritual to establish that?" "Uh..."
Of course, most people hate arguing with me, anyways.:)
Scientists have always admitted that they don't know everything. Various anti-science types like to caricature scientists as claiming to know everything, but this has no relation to reality. It is probably not a coincidence that the anti-scientists tend to follow specific religious and political ideologies in which the claim of universal, absolute, and revealed truth plays a central part.
Perhaps its human nature to do the same thing to someone else that they do to you. Blindly asserting that anti-scientists must dictate claims of universal, absolute, and revealed truth.
Dictation of authority has long been a method of control, and science is not immune, it just hasn't had the opportunity yet, to be used as a totalitarian standing point.
In the same vein, Christianity in itself does not dictates absolute truth. There are a variety of Christianities out there, and fundamentally they agree on just a few points. There is a God, he had a son named Jesus who died to release us from our sins, and much of our most accepted foundations of faith are recorded in the Bible.
Just because some dictate authority from this position does not mean that all of them do. Likewise, just because most scientists refuse to give authoritarian assertions, does not mean that they all don't. I think these people are generally considered "pseudo-scientists", or "scienticians", but one can easily use science as a position of control, since it by nature asserts that it has the best current explaination.
I'd be quite careful with depicting religious belief as automatically and totally dictating truth.
Any system of control will naturally claim to have all the answers, and some of the general pulic tends to have a misunderstanding that science has all the answers.
In fact, science could be just as usable as a forced authoritarian doctrine to control a people as any religion. The mere fact that it hasn't been yet so abused is not indicative of a fundamental nature of science.
Actually, in the grand spirit of Americans complaining about things that don't actually effect them, I am in fact a right hander. My dad is left handed though, and I've gotten comfortable enough at using a mouse left handed (because I'm too lazy to move it back to the other side) that it doesn't feel entirely weird.
let me just say I'm glad they decided not to compromise. Every mouse that tries to keep things left/right neutral only end up being awkward because they've had to sacrafice comfort & feel to make it "switchable".
True, unless you're going with the symetrical design to begin with, making a switchable version just doesn't work. Of course, offering a mirror-image version that would be produced in smaller quantities for left-handers that insist on having a left-handed version would be a nice consideration.
Any task repeated often enough comes to feel like that's the "correct" hand.
As provable by my pool game. I learned pool by emulating my dad. Now, when I start shooting people are confused and think that I'm left-handed. I didn't even think there *was* a "handed" way of playing pool.
This mouse was clearly not designed to be used equally with both hands... if you're left handed, it's going to be a bitch to use. (Correction, if you use your mouse with your left hand, it's going to be a bitch to use.)
Oh, don't worry about calling me pedantic... I am a pedantic prick.
Plus, I was trying to be funny, then I realized my post wasn't funny at all. If you could have gotten that I was just kidding around, it probably would have saved us a ton of time.
Just check the odds, given that there are about 10000000000000000000000 stars in the universe, you think there is no other extraterrestrial intelligence naming its star "Sun" ?;)
I don't know... but we can resolve this issue when we meet up with them. Actually, that'd be a damn weird Sci-Fi book, meet up with a species that just by pure random oddity of chance speaks what sounds like English, and they insist that we call their solar system "Sol", and get very upset that we suggest that they need change their name so that ours can stay Sol, and this brings us to a big war, where both sides suffer tremendously...
All over such a stupid thing as naming their own stars the same thing.
sun: A star, especially when seen as the centre of any single solar system.
My definition of "sun" varies from this definition. Thus, the confusion.
You do realise that sun is a generic noun, whereas the Sun is the specific sun in our solar system, also called Sol. "Our sun" (lowercase) is the Sun (capitalized), or Sol.
To me, "Sol" is "the Sun", and everything else is a star, and not a "sun".
If this were the case that "sun" meant the local star, then "Sol" would be insufficient as the name of our local star, because if I were on the surface of a planet orbiting a different star, and speaking Latin, then I would call that star a "sol".
To put it accurately, there is our Sun/Sol, and there is everyone else's stars. If "sun/sol" were to refer to another systems star, then our system should be named something other than "Sol", and be arbitrary, such that it would be distinguishable for all human languages in speech.
Personally, I feel that my definition works best. Our star is "the Sun", or "Sol", every language's term for "Sun" is our star, and only our star. Any other system we visit that has an intelligent life form will have a word for their star opposing it against all the stars in the sky, and that will be the name of their star.
I was wondering if you'd been reading too much science fiction, but now I wonder if you've not read enough....
No, it comes from an arbitrary semantic choice that I made. That "Sun" cannot be used unilaterally upon every star in the system. We have a word for a star that isn't our own... it's written "star".
Our confusion is simply in the matter that to me "Sun" is our star, and no other, and any use of "Sun" applied to any other star is by analogy that it is like the Sun, but in essense it is not the Sun, it is a different star.
If we had a colony land on a planet and they called their star "the Sun", then it would be incredibly lazy of them. Of course, again, if they were speaking Latin, wouldn't they then call their star "Sol", also?
The only way to resolve this is to state that "Sun" and "Sol" are proper names refering to our star, and no other.
Hmm. Wasn't Caesar part of a triumvirate? And now the northern star is a triple star system... Seems to me this guy knew his astronomy!
Well, many Caesar were parts of a triumvirate... but Julius Caesar the one in the play, and the first Caesar was not part of a triumvirate. In fact, that's part of the reason he died... too much power in the hands of one man, and people got scared.
Did you ever play SimEarth? I don't know how exactly I did it, but one time I managed to get a planet of robots. It was pretty cool. Little self replicating robots.
I just gotta nit pick this. "Sol" is latin for "Sun", "our sun" would be "nostrus Sol". Which is kind of redundant, because there's only one Sun... ours.
If you want to say that Sol is our star, then yeah, that works, but "our Sun" is a bit redundant.
I think they could have gotten more "Oomph!" from their press release if they'd mentioned this fact. Also, they may have wanted to measure the distance in a standard publicity unit, such as roundtrip NY-LA distances ("A little over 350,000 round-trips from New York to Los Angeles").
Pff! you and your NY-LA distances... My car gets two football fields to a bathtub, and that's the way I like it!
most Europeans I meet here are loath to use their phone here because of the costs; if they really need a phone they can get a prepaid one dirt cheap or buy a SIM card which means they lose their number temporarily.
This is likely why so many of them use SMS to talk more than actually calling each other. You can send 3 or 4 SMSs for a minute long phone call.
Well, WINE has the advantage that they know what route everyone else has taken to patch this first.
I'm also accutely aware that Microsoft had to test the patch before releasing it. The issue has always been that they were going to wait until patch Tuesday to release it, and not release it as soon as possible.
Kudos to which ever Senior VP approved us to put it out early.
Ah... explains the confusion. His statement was he wondered if any modern OS could be written in a Turing-incomplete programming language.
My assertion was that you couldn't allow for NAND, and arbitrarily bound loop constructs, lest the OS would be built in a Turing-complete programming language (or sufficiently complete as to satisfy what is commonly regarded as Turing-complete. Namely, given infinite memory, it would be Turing complete.)
On further reflection, it may be that the person you are speaking of refered to NAND as turing complete because, given an infinite number of nand gates wired correctly, you can construct a turing machine. Personally, I find the argument weak, but I can see where he is comming from. I think the better statement, if more pedantic, would be along the lines of "NAND gates are all that is required to build a turing machine"
Yeah, someone else clarrified this issue to me. I agreed and reformulated the statement "NAND is Turing-complete" into something quite similar to your statement here.
Slashdot Mirror
There are also a number of Islamic scientists from a millennium ago (plus or minus) and Greeks from a couple of millennia ago who would be somewhat put out by your assertion that science as we know it is somehow new.
I'm not saying science is new. I'm saying science as we consider it is new. The part of scientific principle that asserts that things must be verifiable and provable. (thus ID is thrown out, because it is not verifiable and thus not "science", where as in the medieval ages, and in all the other ages that you mentioned, it would have been considered science.)
ermm .. what're you talking about? science has been used, continually, as an authoritarian means of control for millenia. it is a primary fault of science that it is unable to cure itself of this fact.
Except science hasn't been around for millenia. Especially in so far as we know it.
Also, many modern conceptions of science do not allow it to be an authoritarian means of control, because you can prove your position and become the correct one. The same way Einstein was able to advance his theory, and replace the simple Newtonian physics for a number of near-relativistic situations where his observations make a fundamental point of criticism.
This is like asserting that Linux is a means of control because only 10~15 people have contributed 90% of the Linux kernel. Point is that nothing but your self determination holds you from contributing back, and effecting significant changes.
Very true, and you'll notice that I never specified Christianity as the ideology in question. Again, please read what I actually wrote.
And I'll continue to read into your implied statements. I'm sick of people trying to get away with "Well, I didn't SAY that." No, you just implied it. Now shut up, and stop hedging your bets, so that if someone agrees with your implied statements they will agree, and if someone disagrees with your implied statements, you can say you didn't say it.
In short, the problem isn't the ideology; it's the ideologues. The great advantage of science in relation to all the examples I mentioned above is that it's not an ideology at all, and thus ideologues -- the sort of people who need Something to believe in as The Truth, whatever that Something may be -- tend not to be attracted to it in the first place.
You're making the assumption that EVERY who believes in science feels the same way as you. Truth is, everyone sees their position as "The Truth", or they wouldn't believe in it. Whether it's science or religion or whatever.
The second you admit that you accept that your "truthes" in science may be completely bogus if the true nature of reality were completely different from what it actually is, I'll let you go. But as long as you assert that science is absolutely objective; I will disagree with you.
Your theology is sophisticated and admirable; unfortunately, it's also not typical of the people who use religion as a blunt instrument to attack science -- and like it or not, there are a lot of those people, and they have significant political power.
:)
I'll agree here. Religion makes a nice weapon for control. "If you don't do this, then you will be punished for all eternity."
I had people argue with me about taking the Eukerist, and not believing in the Trinity.
I was like, "I accept Jesus as my savior... Bible says that's sufficient for salvation... so what are you trying to accomplish? I'm still going to heaven."
Mostly turns out that they were upset that my belief system didn't match theirs. It didn't bother me, because theirs was sufficiently similar to mine.
I really liked stumping them with, "Are you saying if I don't take the Eukerist that I'm going to hell?" "Well, no, but you're not taking in the presense of God." "But God is everywhere right? So, why can't I just enjoy and accept his presense all the time, why do I need some stupid ritual to establish that?" "Uh..."
Of course, most people hate arguing with me, anyways.
Scientists have always admitted that they don't know everything. Various anti-science types like to caricature scientists as claiming to know everything, but this has no relation to reality. It is probably not a coincidence that the anti-scientists tend to follow specific religious and political ideologies in which the claim of universal, absolute, and revealed truth plays a central part.
Perhaps its human nature to do the same thing to someone else that they do to you. Blindly asserting that anti-scientists must dictate claims of universal, absolute, and revealed truth.
Dictation of authority has long been a method of control, and science is not immune, it just hasn't had the opportunity yet, to be used as a totalitarian standing point.
In the same vein, Christianity in itself does not dictates absolute truth. There are a variety of Christianities out there, and fundamentally they agree on just a few points. There is a God, he had a son named Jesus who died to release us from our sins, and much of our most accepted foundations of faith are recorded in the Bible.
Just because some dictate authority from this position does not mean that all of them do. Likewise, just because most scientists refuse to give authoritarian assertions, does not mean that they all don't. I think these people are generally considered "pseudo-scientists", or "scienticians", but one can easily use science as a position of control, since it by nature asserts that it has the best current explaination.
Which wouldn't be noteworthy, except for the numerous other factions that make no such admission, ever.
http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/13-12.htm
I'd be quite careful with depicting religious belief as automatically and totally dictating truth.
Any system of control will naturally claim to have all the answers, and some of the general pulic tends to have a misunderstanding that science has all the answers.
In fact, science could be just as usable as a forced authoritarian doctrine to control a people as any religion. The mere fact that it hasn't been yet so abused is not indicative of a fundamental nature of science.
Oooo... I forgot about that. Good call.
Yeah, my first thoughts upon reading this were:
In other news: Scientists admit that they don't know everything.
As a fellow leftie...
Actually, in the grand spirit of Americans complaining about things that don't actually effect them, I am in fact a right hander. My dad is left handed though, and I've gotten comfortable enough at using a mouse left handed (because I'm too lazy to move it back to the other side) that it doesn't feel entirely weird.
let me just say I'm glad they decided not to compromise. Every mouse that tries to keep things left/right neutral only end up being awkward because they've had to sacrafice comfort & feel to make it "switchable".
True, unless you're going with the symetrical design to begin with, making a switchable version just doesn't work. Of course, offering a mirror-image version that would be produced in smaller quantities for left-handers that insist on having a left-handed version would be a nice consideration.
Any task repeated often enough comes to feel like that's the "correct" hand.
As provable by my pool game. I learned pool by emulating my dad. Now, when I start shooting people are confused and think that I'm left-handed. I didn't even think there *was* a "handed" way of playing pool.
This mouse was clearly not designed to be used equally with both hands... if you're left handed, it's going to be a bitch to use. (Correction, if you use your mouse with your left hand, it's going to be a bitch to use.)
ped^H^H^Hsemantic
Oh, don't worry about calling me pedantic... I am a pedantic prick.
Plus, I was trying to be funny, then I realized my post wasn't funny at all. If you could have gotten that I was just kidding around, it probably would have saved us a ton of time.
Just check the odds, given that there are about 10000000000000000000000 stars in the universe, you think there is no other extraterrestrial intelligence naming its star "Sun" ? ;)
I don't know... but we can resolve this issue when we meet up with them. Actually, that'd be a damn weird Sci-Fi book, meet up with a species that just by pure random oddity of chance speaks what sounds like English, and they insist that we call their solar system "Sol", and get very upset that we suggest that they need change their name so that ours can stay Sol, and this brings us to a big war, where both sides suffer tremendously...
All over such a stupid thing as naming their own stars the same thing.
sun: A star, especially when seen as the centre of any single solar system.
My definition of "sun" varies from this definition. Thus, the confusion.
You do realise that sun is a generic noun, whereas the Sun is the specific sun in our solar system, also called Sol. "Our sun" (lowercase) is the Sun (capitalized), or Sol.
To me, "Sol" is "the Sun", and everything else is a star, and not a "sun".
If this were the case that "sun" meant the local star, then "Sol" would be insufficient as the name of our local star, because if I were on the surface of a planet orbiting a different star, and speaking Latin, then I would call that star a "sol".
To put it accurately, there is our Sun/Sol, and there is everyone else's stars. If "sun/sol" were to refer to another systems star, then our system should be named something other than "Sol", and be arbitrary, such that it would be distinguishable for all human languages in speech.
Personally, I feel that my definition works best. Our star is "the Sun", or "Sol", every language's term for "Sun" is our star, and only our star. Any other system we visit that has an intelligent life form will have a word for their star opposing it against all the stars in the sky, and that will be the name of their star.
I was wondering if you'd been reading too much science fiction, but now I wonder if you've not read enough....
No, it comes from an arbitrary semantic choice that I made. That "Sun" cannot be used unilaterally upon every star in the system. We have a word for a star that isn't our own... it's written "star".
Our confusion is simply in the matter that to me "Sun" is our star, and no other, and any use of "Sun" applied to any other star is by analogy that it is like the Sun, but in essense it is not the Sun, it is a different star.
If we had a colony land on a planet and they called their star "the Sun", then it would be incredibly lazy of them. Of course, again, if they were speaking Latin, wouldn't they then call their star "Sol", also?
The only way to resolve this is to state that "Sun" and "Sol" are proper names refering to our star, and no other.
Right, not "our Sun", but rather "the Sun".
"Our Sun" is just redundant, because there's only one "Sun"... ours.
nuke the planet
:(
I most certainly did not! Nope... not at all... I'd never be that mean... I mean...
Damn, you got me
Hmm. Wasn't Caesar part of a triumvirate? And now the northern star is a triple star system... Seems to me this guy knew his astronomy!
Well, many Caesar were parts of a triumvirate... but Julius Caesar the one in the play, and the first Caesar was not part of a triumvirate. In fact, that's part of the reason he died... too much power in the hands of one man, and people got scared.
Did you ever play SimEarth? I don't know how exactly I did it, but one time I managed to get a planet of robots. It was pretty cool. Little self replicating robots.
Yes, but Saturn is a planet of Sol (our sun)
:(
I just gotta nit pick this. "Sol" is latin for "Sun", "our sun" would be "nostrus Sol". Which is kind of redundant, because there's only one Sun... ours.
If you want to say that Sol is our star, then yeah, that works, but "our Sun" is a bit redundant.
Crap, I wanted this to be funnier...
I think they could have gotten more "Oomph!" from their press release if they'd mentioned this fact. Also, they may have wanted to measure the distance in a standard publicity unit, such as roundtrip NY-LA distances ("A little over 350,000 round-trips from New York to Los Angeles").
Pff! you and your NY-LA distances... My car gets two football fields to a bathtub, and that's the way I like it!
most Europeans I meet here are loath to use their phone here because of the costs; if they really need a phone they can get a prepaid one dirt cheap or buy a SIM card which means they lose their number temporarily.
This is likely why so many of them use SMS to talk more than actually calling each other. You can send 3 or 4 SMSs for a minute long phone call.
Well, WINE has the advantage that they know what route everyone else has taken to patch this first.
I'm also accutely aware that Microsoft had to test the patch before releasing it. The issue has always been that they were going to wait until patch Tuesday to release it, and not release it as soon as possible.
Kudos to which ever Senior VP approved us to put it out early.
That all depends on what the meaning of "is" is.
Two points, I'm not the original challenger.
Ah... explains the confusion. His statement was he wondered if any modern OS could be written in a Turing-incomplete programming language.
My assertion was that you couldn't allow for NAND, and arbitrarily bound loop constructs, lest the OS would be built in a Turing-complete programming language (or sufficiently complete as to satisfy what is commonly regarded as Turing-complete. Namely, given infinite memory, it would be Turing complete.)
On further reflection, it may be that the person you are speaking of refered to NAND as turing complete because, given an infinite number of nand gates wired correctly, you can construct a turing machine. Personally, I find the argument weak, but I can see where he is comming from. I think the better statement, if more pedantic, would be along the lines of "NAND gates are all that is required to build a turing machine"
Yeah, someone else clarrified this issue to me. I agreed and reformulated the statement "NAND is Turing-complete" into something quite similar to your statement here.
Well, you'd need infinite tape to make a real Turing machine anyways... so.
Right, because published specs means they can't implement this same boneheaded security flaw.
I will guarentee you that the function in question at the very least is NOT from Microsoft's code.