Christian or not most scientists are great at their field but bad at philosophy so they have no problem with this conflict.
I think you are using a bunch of bad science, bad religion and bad philosophy while trying to proof your point.
But let's deconstruct the assumptions in Evolution.
1) God created the universe as a deterministic system in which creatures evolve based on physical laws and rules. 2) We are as God intended.
Both science and christianity disagrees with your assumptions. Evolution doesn't require determinism, it just requires a correlation between the phenotypes of a life form and the reproductive success of it. Also: At the moment and not unlikely forever, it is impossible to tell if the universe is deterministic or not. If you e.g. look at QM, you will find different interpretations of it, some are deterministic, others are stochastic, but all interpretations are making exactly the same predictions. You thus can't empirically decide if the world is deterministic or non-deterministic. Also look at Compatibilism Now your second point: The bible says we are made in god's image. Theologians agree since hundreds of years that this claim isn't related to our or gods physical form, but instead related to human characteristics like the ability to recognize moral truths. Also don't forget the other important narrative from genesis, especially the part about being thrown out of paradise and eternal sin.
You base your viewpoint that Christianity and Science is incompatible on your view that the universe is horrible and brutal. That isn't a scientific claim. Science can describe things but things like "the universe is horrible" are a question of values and not scientific ones.
Fear didn't cause Fukushima. Japan had plans for several new nuclear power plants. Fear wasn't their problem. It simply didn't make sense economically to replace the plant with a new one. Fukushima was working fine and produced a lot of cheap power, replacing it with a new one would have been very expensive.
Often the firmware is what turns a bunch of cheap standard parts into a real product. Unless you want to go open source hardware, too, you need to keep your firmware proprietary, because most of the engineering is actually part of the firmware and pcb layout is just a small part of your product. And it is easy to do a compatible pcb from the scratch.
Yes, but believing you don't have a free will can change a lot. Maybe there are different believes able to functionally replace this, just like humanism is likely able to functionally replace religion. (We don't know this yet, and birth rates in mostly humanist societies doesn't exactly look too promising, maybe they will disappear as quickly as they appeared.) Just stopping to believe in free-will will likely not yield a sustainable setup, just like nihilism doesn't work out into a sustainable setup and people still want values, morals, meaning of life, etc.
And second, while I get what you're saying about a probabilistic universe not really leading to free-will, it at least tears down the concept of fate. And most people see a dichotomy between free-will and fate.
I think a good way to look at free-will is to understand it as a good model. Even if the brain would be completely deterministic without a reliable way to predict and manipulate its behaviour free-will is a good model to look at the brain and its decision making process.
Even if true, the information "there is no free-will" can severely hurt the decision making process of the brain because the concept of free-will is a part of this process. If you tell people they got no free-will and are not accountable for their actions, they will make worse decision than if they believe that they got free-will and are accountable for their actions.
However: Molecules as a whole do not act quantum-mechanically. They move about according to classical mechanics - and that's how we model them physically too. Because once things get as heavy as an atomic nucleus (save for hydrogen, under some circumstances), their quantum 'uncertainty' in position etc is so small that it's chemically insignificant. So you need QM to describe how two atoms are bonded, but classical mech does a good job of describing how the molecules as a whole bounce around.
Molecules as a whole still act quantum-mechanical. There is just no reason to use QM to model their behaviour because the differences between the predictions by classical mechanics and QM are not significant and classical mechanics are way easier to use. Just like you don't use relativistic calculations to predict the behaviour to model the behaviour of a moving car: Time dilation and other relativistic effects are still there, even at low speeds, they are just insignificantly small.
The real question here is: Will the effects of tiny changes caused by QM effects in brain always stay tiny and insignificant or will some of them ultimately cause macroscopic and thus significant changes?
If we look close enough at a computer, a device engineered to be deterministic, we will still notice some non-deterministic effects. E.g: Clock jitter and multiple clocks will lead to slightly different behaviour. Or just switch on your PC and then look at PIDs of processes started at boot, some of them will be slightly different on each boot even without any user input and even if you use a read-only media to boot.
And the biology doesn't really make sense, as cells are not built anything like Geiger counters, sitting in a labile state waiting for a single sub-atomic event to trigger them.
Neurons aren't geiger counters as they aren't deliberately biased into a labile state, but if they still can be biased into a labile state by chance. A neurons membrane biased around the threshold voltage is a amplifier for small events. Small events are thus grow into larger ones and can ultimately grow into large ones.
For most neurons a classical model is likely enough to accurately predict their behaviour, but a small number of neurons is likely in a state where a classical model can't predict their behaviour. From a snapshot of the state of the brain and its inputs it should be possible to predict the short time evolution of this state with good accuracy but prediction accuracy of the long time evolution of the state is likely pretty bad.
(also 'predetermined' and 'predictable' don't mean the same thing; something may be deterministic but impossible to predict, even in principle, because the theory may limit what you can know about the system. Again the case with some interpretations of QM)
Yes. But predetermination without predictability is a claim that isn't falsifiable and thus metaphysics and not science.
I doubt that, it might be faster than the multi-ghz Intel system without using the GPU, but using a GPU, even a onboard on, you should be way faster. You could build a fast DES cracker using that FPGA, but your task seems to be mostly regular CPU and GPU tasks. It is impressive to implement all this by yourself, but looking at the blockdiagram I would say a e.g.: Freescale i.MX51 or some Ti OMAPs with a small mcu for IR,MIDI and DMX512 could do everything as well or better than that SoC, including running at less than 5 watts.
If you care only about logic of the FPGA that might work, but the FPGA isn't just logic but also IO cells, SERDES, builtin memory controllers, ram resources etc. Because of that you can't replace the FPGA with a ASIC manufactured in a many generations older process, two or three process nodes is fine and you can use a gate array process to lower the mask cost. But that doesn't fundamentally change the problem: For low volume products FPGAs are cheaper than ASICs. These days you need a pretty big volume to make the switch to a ASIC profitable. FPGAs are used in mid volume consumer products these days.
ASICs actually got more expensive. The individual ASIC is cheaper now, but the non recurring costs of making a ASIC went up a lot. Smaller process nodes need more masks and more complicated masks. If your mask set is $2.000.000 and you are going to sell ASICs 10,000 made with it, even if the individual ASIC is free after paying for the masks, you are still at $200 per piece. The $100 FPGA is a better option then and at 10.000 pcs you are going to get a pretty large fpga for $100.
Current generation video projectors and playback servers won't support 48fps and 3D at the same time. Their interfaces and decoders are fast enough for 2x24fps@2k (3D) or 48fps@2k(2D) but not for 2x48fps.
New 4K media blocks should be able to do this, but at the momemt these are still rare. It would be great if cinema update again, but I doubt they will throw away their old (and expensive) playback servers and video projectors (even more expensive) just to support 2k 3d@48fps. (And throw them away again, when there is finally a solution to do 4k 3d @ 48fps)
There is a huge amount of correlation between the members these groups but if you look closer they are very different things. "Evolution denial" is junk science which claims to be real science. Science can easily be used to show that it is junk. But you can't use science to show which actions are bad and which ones are wrong. Being pro-life doesn't make any testable scientific claims. It is a purely moral claim that can't be tested or otherwise refuted.
As a hard agnostic, I also disagree. Because if there is something in people's heads, it's a form of existence in itself. Like Santa Claus.
You might be interessed in Popper's theory of reality. Popper says there are interacting 3 worlds: World 1: physical objects World 2: mental objects/states World 3: products of the mind
What do you mean? Anyone could just look up in the sky and directly observe the sun and moon going around the earth.
This hardly supports your statement that geocentrism was a good theory. It was not. It had all the hallmarks, even beyond being wrong, of being a bad theory. It produced an incredibly complicated model. When Galileo looked into his telescope he immediately saw a much simpler and more predictive model.
The historical truth is much more complicated than that. Galileo used a very simple heliocentric model with circular orbits instead of elliptical orbits. Because of that, his model wasn't more predictive and didn't result in more accurate results. From the historic point of view it also wasn't a simpler model. Galileo's model was easier to calculate but was incompatible with the flawed aristotelian view of physics held at that time. Galileo also used a totally wrong argument about the tides as a "proof" for heliocentrism.
Of course Galileo had no more direct evidence than his forebearers, but what he did have was a useful model that could be used to better explain observation. That is the core of a scientific theory.
The core of a scientific theory are more accurate predictions not just simpler equations. The mainstream breakthough for heliocentrism happend when Keppler used his heliocentric model with elliptical orbits to provide vastly more accurate predictions than any competing geocentrical model.
Since Popper we know something must be falsifiable to be science. If supersymmetry got enough tweakable parameters to account for whatever results might happen in our experiments, it doesn't seem to be falsifiable.
I have a lot of respect for atheist philosophers like Hume and Mackie who examined theistic arguments carefully and responded rigorously
That's like having more respect for C programmers who previously learned Visual Basic. It doesn't necessarily make them better or worse per se, but then who am I to judge - it was their time to waste however they chose.
It's the other way around. Its like a functional programming advocate dismissing all imperative programming languages based on his experience with Visual Basic. Dawkins and Hitchens avoid going after hard targets and instead focus on easy ones. They should do it the other way around: If they got good arguments against the theology of someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then you can just leave the easy targets as an excercise to the reader. Or: If you got good arguments against C++, dismissing Visual Basic is redundant.
Actually you don't, because what the "youtube atheist movement" doesn't understand is that religion is and always was mostly a social interaction thing than the interpretation of holy books, dogmas and so on. You may know more about the later, but the churchgoer knows way more about the practical and social aspects of religion, e.g.: how it feels to sing or pray with a whole church. Also the history knowledge of the "youtube atheist movement" shows distinctive selective knowledge. E.g.: non-religious reasons for the crusades or about the killing of believers by atheists in the name of the reason during the french revolution.
They are looking at intentional jamming, not at white noise. Your solution would be almost perfect for white noise channels but not for channels with jamming. E.g.: No jammer will be able to distribute its noise evenly in both time and space. You should be able add a nice bit of performance if you are able to predict the behaviour of the jammer to some extend. So spread spectrum with non-uniform frequency distribution of the signal energy could be a topic. Some jammers might not even send real noise but pseudo random noise. Then you could try to subtract the jammer from your received signal.
I think the pope isn't really wrong here. While it is perfectly understandable and legal to use a tax haven like Ireland, it is still a real problem and not really a fair behaviour. It only works out for Ireland because big companies from all over the world choose to tax their EU earnings in Ireland. If all EU states would lower their tax to 12.5%, it wouldn't work for anyone. Any state should be free to set their tax rates to any level they like, but please only for money really earned in that state and not for money earned elsewhere. At the moment it works this way: Most of the money is earned in France, UK and Germany but all tax is paid in Ireland. Often there is nothing but a office in Ireland or the product is packaged.
Well, condoms are really not such a good long time method, however most slashdoters should be smart enough to get much smaller failure rates. A huge amount of condom failures are related to doing stupid things like clueless people trying to do their own kind of NFP. ("I think you can't get pregnant right after your period, lets fuck without condom")
If you having sex getting her pregnant is nearly always a possibility. It is pretty unlikely in the short term if you use the pill, IUD or sterillisation well.
That isn't like the 230-240V one-phase wiring you usually got in European homes. With european 230V wirings you got one wire with 230V to neutral. But with that wiring you got two 120V wirings with 180 degree phase shift between them, so the voltage between them is 240V, and both still got 120V to neutral. It is similiar to the 400V three phase power system used in Europe. You don't use such a 240V connection or a three-phase connection for small devices, but only for devices using a huge amount of power.
Slashdot Mirror
Christian or not most scientists are great at their field but bad at philosophy so they have no problem with this conflict.
I think you are using a bunch of bad science, bad religion and bad philosophy while trying to proof your point.
But let's deconstruct the assumptions in Evolution.
1) God created the universe as a deterministic system in which creatures evolve based on physical laws and rules.
2) We are as God intended.
Both science and christianity disagrees with your assumptions. Evolution doesn't require determinism, it just requires a correlation between the phenotypes of a life form and the reproductive success of it. Also: At the moment and not unlikely forever, it is impossible to tell if the universe is deterministic or not. If you e.g. look at QM, you will find different interpretations of it, some are deterministic, others are stochastic, but all interpretations are making exactly the same predictions. You thus can't empirically decide if the world is deterministic or non-deterministic. Also look at Compatibilism
Now your second point:
The bible says we are made in god's image. Theologians agree since hundreds of years that this claim isn't related to our or gods physical form, but instead related to human characteristics like the ability to recognize moral truths. Also don't forget the other important narrative from genesis, especially the part about being thrown out of paradise and eternal sin.
You base your viewpoint that Christianity and Science is incompatible on your view that the universe is horrible and brutal. That isn't a scientific claim. Science can describe things but things like "the universe is horrible" are a question of values and not scientific ones.
Current empirical evidence looks like "stick to a single partner" is actually a more effective strategy to combat AIDS in Africa than "use condoms":
washington post article
obviously not for 50-60 bucks. If you make a 2h AAA game you must be able to sell it for 10 bucks.
Fear didn't cause Fukushima. Japan had plans for several new nuclear power plants. Fear wasn't their problem. It simply didn't make sense economically to replace the plant with a new one. Fukushima was working fine and produced a lot of cheap power, replacing it with a new one would have been very expensive.
Often the firmware is what turns a bunch of cheap standard parts into a real product. Unless you want to go open source hardware, too, you need to keep your firmware proprietary, because most of the engineering is actually part of the firmware and pcb layout is just a small part of your product. And it is easy to do a compatible pcb from the scratch.
Not having Free Will changes nothing.
Yes, but believing you don't have a free will can change a lot. Maybe there are different believes able to functionally replace this, just like humanism is likely able to functionally replace religion. (We don't know this yet, and birth rates in mostly humanist societies doesn't exactly look too promising, maybe they will disappear as quickly as they appeared.) Just stopping to believe in free-will will likely not yield a sustainable setup, just like nihilism doesn't work out into a sustainable setup and people still want values, morals, meaning of life, etc.
And second, while I get what you're saying about a probabilistic universe not really leading to free-will, it at least tears down the concept of fate. And most people see a dichotomy between free-will and fate.
I think a good way to look at free-will is to understand it as a good model. Even if the brain would be completely deterministic without a reliable way to predict and manipulate its behaviour free-will is a good model to look at the brain and its decision making process.
Even if true, the information "there is no free-will" can severely hurt the decision making process of the brain because the concept of free-will is a part of this process. If you tell people they got no free-will and are not accountable for their actions, they will make worse decision than if they believe that they got free-will and are accountable for their actions.
However: Molecules as a whole do not act quantum-mechanically. They move about according to classical mechanics - and that's how we model them physically too. Because once things get as heavy as an atomic nucleus (save for hydrogen, under some circumstances), their quantum 'uncertainty' in position etc is so small that it's chemically insignificant. So you need QM to describe how two atoms are bonded, but classical mech does a good job of describing how the molecules as a whole bounce around.
Molecules as a whole still act quantum-mechanical. There is just no reason to use QM to model their behaviour because the differences between the predictions by classical mechanics and QM are not significant and classical mechanics are way easier to use. Just like you don't use relativistic calculations to predict the behaviour to model the behaviour of a moving car: Time dilation and other relativistic effects are still there, even at low speeds, they are just insignificantly small.
The real question here is: Will the effects of tiny changes caused by QM effects in brain always stay tiny and insignificant or will some of them ultimately cause macroscopic and thus significant changes?
If we look close enough at a computer, a device engineered to be deterministic, we will still notice some non-deterministic effects. E.g: Clock jitter and multiple clocks will lead to slightly different behaviour. Or just switch on your PC and then look at PIDs of processes started at boot, some of them will be slightly different on each boot even without any user input and even if you use a read-only media to boot.
And the biology doesn't really make sense, as cells are not built anything like Geiger counters, sitting in a labile state waiting for a single sub-atomic event to trigger them.
Neurons aren't geiger counters as they aren't deliberately biased into a labile state, but if they still can be biased into a labile state by chance. A neurons membrane biased around the threshold voltage is a amplifier for small events. Small events are thus grow into larger ones and can ultimately grow into large ones.
For most neurons a classical model is likely enough to accurately predict their behaviour, but a small number of neurons is likely in a state where a classical model can't predict their behaviour. From a snapshot of the state of the brain and its inputs it should be possible to predict the short time evolution of this state with good accuracy but prediction accuracy of the long time evolution of the state is likely pretty bad.
(also 'predetermined' and 'predictable' don't mean the same thing; something may be deterministic but impossible to predict, even in principle, because the theory may limit what you can know about the system. Again the case with some interpretations of QM)
Yes. But predetermination without predictability is a claim that isn't falsifiable and thus metaphysics and not science.
I doubt that, it might be faster than the multi-ghz Intel system without using the GPU, but using a GPU, even a onboard on, you should be way faster.
You could build a fast DES cracker using that FPGA, but your task seems to be mostly regular CPU and GPU tasks. It is impressive to implement all this by yourself, but looking at the blockdiagram I would say a e.g.: Freescale i.MX51 or some Ti OMAPs with a small mcu for IR,MIDI and DMX512 could do everything as well or better than that SoC, including running at less than 5 watts.
If you care only about logic of the FPGA that might work, but the FPGA isn't just logic but also IO cells, SERDES, builtin memory controllers, ram resources etc.
Because of that you can't replace the FPGA with a ASIC manufactured in a many generations older process, two or three process nodes is fine and you can use a gate array process to lower the mask cost.
But that doesn't fundamentally change the problem: For low volume products FPGAs are cheaper than ASICs. These days you need a pretty big volume to make the switch to a ASIC profitable. FPGAs are used in mid volume consumer products these days.
ASICs actually got more expensive. The individual ASIC is cheaper now, but the non recurring costs of making a ASIC went up a lot. Smaller process nodes need more masks and more complicated masks.
If your mask set is $2.000.000 and you are going to sell ASICs 10,000 made with it, even if the individual ASIC is free after paying for the masks, you are still at $200 per piece. The $100 FPGA is a better option then and at 10.000 pcs you are going to get a pretty large fpga for $100.
Current generation video projectors and playback servers won't support 48fps and 3D at the same time. Their interfaces and decoders are fast enough for 2x24fps@2k (3D) or 48fps@2k(2D) but not for 2x48fps.
New 4K media blocks should be able to do this, but at the momemt these are still rare. It would be great if cinema update again, but I doubt they will throw away their old (and expensive) playback servers and video projectors (even more expensive) just to support 2k 3d@48fps. (And throw them away again, when there is finally a solution to do 4k 3d @ 48fps)
(hi, "pro-lifers" and evolution deniers)
There is a huge amount of correlation between the members these groups but if you look closer they are very different things. "Evolution denial" is junk science which claims to be real science. Science can easily be used to show that it is junk.
But you can't use science to show which actions are bad and which ones are wrong. Being pro-life doesn't make any testable scientific claims. It is a purely moral claim that can't be tested or otherwise refuted.
As a hard agnostic, I also disagree. Because if there is something in people's heads, it's a form of existence in itself. Like Santa Claus.
You might be interessed in Popper's theory of reality. Popper says there are interacting 3 worlds:
World 1: physical objects
World 2: mental objects/states
World 3: products of the mind
Here is a good introduction by Popper himself:
Three Worlds by Karl Popper - The Tanner Lecture on Human Values
What do you mean? Anyone could just look up in the sky and directly observe the sun and moon going around the earth.
This hardly supports your statement that geocentrism was a good theory. It was not. It had all the hallmarks, even beyond being wrong, of being a bad theory. It produced an incredibly complicated model. When Galileo looked into his telescope he immediately saw a much simpler and more predictive model.
The historical truth is much more complicated than that. Galileo used a very simple heliocentric model with circular orbits instead of elliptical orbits. Because of that, his model wasn't more predictive and didn't result in more accurate results.
From the historic point of view it also wasn't a simpler model. Galileo's model was easier to calculate but was incompatible with the flawed aristotelian view of physics held at that time. Galileo also used a totally wrong argument about the tides as a "proof" for heliocentrism.
Of course Galileo had no more direct evidence than his forebearers, but what he did have was a useful model that could be used to better explain observation. That is the core of a scientific theory.
The core of a scientific theory are more accurate predictions not just simpler equations. The mainstream breakthough for heliocentrism happend when Keppler used his heliocentric model with elliptical orbits to provide vastly more accurate predictions than any competing geocentrical model.
Since Popper we know something must be falsifiable to be science. If supersymmetry got enough tweakable parameters to account for whatever results might happen in our experiments, it doesn't seem to be falsifiable.
That's like having more respect for C programmers who previously learned Visual Basic. It doesn't necessarily make them better or worse per se, but then who am I to judge - it was their time to waste however they chose.
It's the other way around. Its like a functional programming advocate dismissing all imperative programming languages based on his experience with Visual Basic. Dawkins and Hitchens avoid going after hard targets and instead focus on easy ones. They should do it the other way around: If they got good arguments against the theology of someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then you can just leave the easy targets as an excercise to the reader. Or: If you got good arguments against C++, dismissing Visual Basic is redundant.
Actually you don't, because what the "youtube atheist movement" doesn't understand is that religion is and always was mostly a social interaction thing than the interpretation of holy books, dogmas and so on. You may know more about the later, but the churchgoer knows way more about the practical and social aspects of religion, e.g.: how it feels to sing or pray with a whole church.
Also the history knowledge of the "youtube atheist movement" shows distinctive selective knowledge. E.g.: non-religious reasons for the crusades or about the killing of believers by atheists in the name of the reason during the french revolution.
A TGV test train reached 574.8 km/h in April 2007. The new record is the average speed of 350 km/h.
They are looking at intentional jamming, not at white noise. Your solution would be almost perfect for white noise channels but not for channels with jamming.
E.g.: No jammer will be able to distribute its noise evenly in both time and space. You should be able add a nice bit of performance if you are able to predict the behaviour of the jammer to some extend. So spread spectrum with non-uniform frequency distribution of the signal energy could be a topic. Some jammers might not even send real noise but pseudo random noise. Then you could try to subtract the jammer from your received signal.
And only then the memristor is linear. Linearity is what makes resistors, inductors and capacitors so useful in circuit modeling.
I think the pope isn't really wrong here. While it is perfectly understandable and legal to use a tax haven like Ireland, it is still a real problem and not really a fair behaviour. It only works out for Ireland because big companies from all over the world choose to tax their EU earnings in Ireland. If all EU states would lower their tax to 12.5%, it wouldn't work for anyone.
Any state should be free to set their tax rates to any level they like, but please only for money really earned in that state and not for money earned elsewhere.
At the moment it works this way: Most of the money is earned in France, UK and Germany but all tax is paid in Ireland. Often there is nothing but a office in Ireland or the product is packaged.
Well, condoms are really not such a good long time method, however most slashdoters should be smart enough to get much smaller failure rates. A huge amount of condom failures are related to doing stupid things like clueless people trying to do their own kind of NFP. ("I think you can't get pregnant right after your period, lets fuck without condom")
If you having sex getting her pregnant is nearly always a possibility. It is pretty unlikely in the short term if you use the pill, IUD or sterillisation well.
Who wants to know the truth? They should have invented the truthiness predictor.
That isn't like the 230-240V one-phase wiring you usually got in European homes. With european 230V wirings you got one wire with 230V to neutral. But with that wiring you got two 120V wirings with 180 degree phase shift between them, so the voltage between them is 240V, and both still got 120V to neutral. It is similiar to the 400V three phase power system used in Europe. You don't use such a 240V connection or a three-phase connection for small devices, but only for devices using a huge amount of power.