People see me doing that sometimes, and wonder why I'm going through so much trouble. I have a hard time convincing them that once you've learned it, the shell is far more efficient. (Especially since I type fast.)
I do have a handful of shortcut FVWMButtons on the left side of my screen (virtual screens, clock, xterm, emacs, etc.) for my most-used things, but, yeah, when I have to really do something with the filesystem, give me a shell I know how to use anyway.
I stopped using either a while back, because both of them required too many mouse clicks and interface searching to get them to do what I wanted, and to clone the setup from place to place. Give me an ASCII configuration file that I can just copy any day. No, it's not "user friendly," but it's Geek friendly. I can read the docs.
I've even started setting up new accounts on my machines using FVWM with a sane default configuration. People tend not to futz with their configurations too much anyway, and the startup time and resource usage is just much less without the overhead of KDE. And, what's more, these are all grad students in Physics, and I *want* them to get facile with Unix. They really ought to know enough Perl to read and write files and manipulate numbers, and know a little programming. Having to figure out text configuration files would be a good exercise, as whiny as it may make them....
Not for everybody, but certainly for me. As a geek, I much prefer FVWM to the overhead of Gnome or even KDE.
I ask the question not as a rhetorical question, but because I really want to know.
What does Xara do that OpenOffice.org Draw does not? (Indeed, I still use XFig sometimes even though OOo Draw generally does more, because XFig does one or two things better than OOo Draw.)
I'll tell you the feature I really want: full postscript import, *with* embedded images. I an get pretty far now with ps2fig followed by whatever the heck the name of the program that converts XFig to OOo Draw, but I lose any embedded images in the eps file in so doing.
A secondary feature would be eps as "picture" objects *with* preview. OOo does eps as picture objects, but doesn't give you a preveiw unless the eps file itself has an embedded preview.
But are there other things one would find in Xara that OOo Draw doesn't do?
Black holes are, well, dark... so all the 'dark' matter is concentrated in localized places, namely the center of the galaxies.
Black holes at the center of galaxies have masses of 10^6 to 10^9 times the mass of the Sun. (Our Galaxy's black hole is towards the smaller side of that range.
Large galaxies themselves have masses of 10^11 to 10^12 times the mass of the Sun.
The black holes at the centers of galaxies, as far as just gravity is concerned, are dynamically unimportant to the outer parts of the galaxies.
Plus, the problem is more than that. It's not just that we don't have enough matter to explain the rotation curves of galaxies or the velocity dispersion of galaxy clusters, it's not in the right place. As you get farther from the center of the galaxy, you need more and more matter compared to what we see. Adding more matter right at the center wouldn't help that, even if the black holes were big enough (which they aren't).
(The black holes may be dynamically important to the evolution of galaxy structure for other more complicated reasons-- the generation of energy in their accretion disks can create jets and such that may limit the growth of galaxies-- but that's a separate issue from expalining the rotation curves we see in spiral galaxies.)
Really?! I'm interessted in astronomy and physics at a hobbyist level, and have always assumed that the simulations of gravity and galaxy formation was done with relativistic mathematics. Instead they have used approximations using newtonian theories? WTF? No wonder they came out wrong!
Newton's gravity is what you get from relativity when your velocity is a lot less than the speed of light and your mass density is small enough. It's the limit of relativity. So, in a sense, when you're using Newton's gravity in a regime where that's the limit of relativity, you are using relativity.
This is the reason that my physical intutition goes squick at this new model. I'll have to read and think about the paper to find out of my physical intuition is flawed, but we shouldn't need the full equations of GR to figure out how fast gas and stars rotate about the galaxy any more than we need to do the full quantum mechanical proton-by-proton and electron-by-electron treatment to figure out simple fluid flow problems.
I noticed you were referring to an article on arXiv.org.
Err... you do realize that the "we don't need dark matter" is also on arxiv.org, and lists itself as only submitted?
Plus, it's submitted to ApJ, but is not following the ApJ citation standard. Not that that really means anything, but it does tell you that the authors still have some i-crossing and t-dotting to do.
The neutrino, when originally discovered, was discovered because something was missing. Particle collisions were seemingly violating the conservation of energy and momentum. Postulating the existence of an unknown, massless or nearly massless particle that interacted only weakly solved that problem.
Only later was the neutrino discovered.
Unanswered questions, very specific unanswered questions (we need *something* to do *this*) often do lead to new discoveries in science.
I'm not saying that dark matter necessarily has to exist, but the galaxy and cluster gravitational dispersion evidence were strong indicators that there had to be more gravity there. Postuatling that we weren't seeing all the mass was a very reasonable postulate. Now there are lots of other reasons (e.g. CMB, large scale structure evolution) to suspect it's there. And, possibly, in the next decade, we will finally identify the dark matter particle in the lab. We'll see.
The best solution is to not have any such system and simply DO example problems in lecture.
If only.
There is a lot of research that backs up the effectiveness of "active learning." You don't really learn something until your brain has to actively grapple with it.
There is an "old" model of education whereby the professor presents the material and the students learn by listening. In practice, this does not work so well-- and educational research has shown this. This is true even when professors do example problems. A better characterization of what goes on in a lecture is that the professor's lecture notes are transferred to the students' class notes without passing through the brains of either.
It's one thing to look at a problem that's been done and say, yeah, I know how to do that. It's entirely another thing to be able to take the concepts of a class and apply them to a novel problem. The latter is deeper learning. Requiring the students to actively think in class helps promote that sort of learning. Clickers are one tool that, when used well, can facilitate that sort of thing.
I agree. I can see this being useful for sensitive questions, but do a teacher have to ask the students sensitive questions in public like that? Why?? I can't recall a time I've been, and I recall my education being pretty good. And if they really must do it -- anonymous questionnaires? One can cover what you're writing with your hand and then fold a piece of paper before you throw it in a box... It's over with within minutes.
Speaking from experience-- raising hands has serious problems. If you've asked students to pick an answer, and then have them raise hands one by one, students wait to see what lots of other students are doing. I know, because I've done this in my large class. When they all have to answer at once, though, it's much harder for them to see what the bulk of everybody else has done.
The low-tech solution I've used is colored cards with the letters A, B, C, D, and E on them. In some ways, that works as well as the clickers. (It's better because it's truly instantaneous once you've given the students time to think about it, because it's very robust to stupid technical problems, it's cheap, you know if there are large swaths of the classroom in certain places with the wrong answer, and if you choose the right colors it's pretty. It's not as good because it's not anonymous (although it's debatable if that's all bad), and because you have no record either statistically or individually of what answers were.)
In fact, research has shown that using clickers to help enable "Peer Instruction" techniques can greatly improve the quality and durability of learning.
Hopefully, some empirical evidence outweighs what you think ought to be true.
Sheesh. Somebody with a chip that big on his shoulder is unlikely to have anything useful to say.
Gee, taking attendance at class; horrible, eh? Sick when teachers think they should do that.
Re: the hw/exam system, how about commenting on the actual problems and questions that you answer? Are they good or bad? Do they do a decent job of testing whether you've learned the material and do they help you learn the material? That would seem to be more important than how much work your professors have to do grading classes with hundreds of people in them.
Finally, gee, somebody wants to use something you don't want to use, and they should get bent, eh? Thanks for the contribution.
My question is why does it HAVE to be wireless? why couldn't you add it on to the desks/tables/etc.? it'd be much simpler/cheaper to design it to work over wires (though it would still take alot of wires for a sufficiently large classroom). This would prevent any problems with range or interference from other students that IR or RF can have.
Yipers. You're talking about redesigning a room. With a wireless solution, you can bring stuff in and just set it up. The most work you'll have to do is hang wireless receivers various places. There's many fewer of those to deal with than every individual desk.
-Rob
Personally, as an educator, I would find clickers to be a nuisance, and wouldn't find them useful anyway. It is far more effective to try to interact with the students and understand where their learning is at, individually, then tailor my teaching to whatever common problems or such need the most attention.
Where clickers are most useful are in large lecture classes. When you have 100+ students out in the audience, you simply don't have the time to tailyr education to individuals without giving short shrift to a lot of other individuals. It's also frequently very difficult to understand just where the students as a whole are. Clickers, when well used, can help with all of that.
The fact remains, though, that some teachers won't like them. Some, however, do... but would love it if there were an open-source solution, so that we weren't stuck with using the software and such provided.
Which ones are well-supported by SANE, so us Linux (etc.) users can use it?
I generally find that the models on the shelf in CompUSA and the like are not supported by SANE (at least the ones that are on the less expensive end). Meanwhile, the ones that SANE says they support are all more than a month or two old. I don't know why so much of the computer industry feels the need to put out a new model number with essentially the same functionality every couple of months, but printers and scanners in particular seem to suffer from that. It makes it difficult for those of us using free drivers to keep up with.
What's a good, low-end, *current* scanner that you can get that works with SANE?
Hopefully though, this discovery will further bring to light all the lax security that companies that control our personal information have. It would be nice to see data brokers and banks start to care about security a little more.
Heh. Hopefully.
More likely, it will bring calls to limit these nefarious tools that can be used for criminal purposes. We already are paranoid about color printers running off images of dollar bills. Now we'd better make laws saying that any image processing program must contain checks against this sort of thing.
I will not be surprised if that response is seriously proposed.
Hell, under the DMCA, it may be illegal to download Gimp now. After all, it is a tool that has been demonstrated to break an effective security measure (the paper around a PIN number), although the PIN number may not be IP and thus may not be covered under the DMCA.
But we also have the Grokster case as precedent to allow us to hold the Gimp developers responsible for this use of their tool.
Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard.
You mean Hotmail?
(Of course, that statement in general is an excellent short description of Microsoft's strategy to maintain dominance. Maybe add to it "that is proprietarily controlled by Microsoft" at the end, since that's what they'd really prefer. When you're the monopolist or near-monopolist, industry standards that are open are very inconvenient for you.)
How has evolution ever been 'predicted' in the fossil record? How can you predict something you already know? It's more like trying to fit an theory to the evidence which cannot be tested.
Because we don't already have the whole fossil record in front of us.
Evolution predicts that you ought to find certain things in the fossil record as we more completely fill out the fossil record. Those predictions in the past have been borne out.
ID doesn't predict anything about the fossil record, since it's all just magic anyway. Anything can happen at any time.
So then what you're saying is that string theory, multiple universe theory, the theory of evolution and a good deal many others are superstitions because they can't be tested?
Your listing evolution in with those other two is unfair. It can and has been tested, repeatedly. Not by lab experiments, but by predictions of what we might find in the fossil record. Astronomy works the same way -- we don't do lab experiments, we go out and look in the Universe. (And thanks to the finite speed of light, we're always looking at the past.) Yet there are predictions of future observations that have been borne out.
So evolution isn't a superstition by any means, because it can and has been tested.
As for the other two: lots of scientists would agree that it's philosophy rather than science. String theory is hot at the moment, and lots of Physicists don't think it's good science. Those who think that but understand something about it think that it's good mathematics, so it's still worthy. But is it science? Myself, I'm more on the fence. I can see that one day, string theory could well produce predictions that we could test, but they won't get there if they don't do the development they're doing now. So I want to see them continuing. String theory does show promise of explaining things that our current understanding of Physics at the extremes can't explain, so it's worth pursuing.
As for the many-worlds interpretation--- that's a different matter altogether. That's a philosophical interpretation of how things in quantum mechanics work that you don't really need in order to employ the full predictive power of quantum mechanics. Maybe, perhaps, one day there will be predictions of the many-worlds interpretation that are different from other interpretations, at which point we could test it. But right now, it's really more a matter of how you like to think about Quantum Mechanics rather than a theory unto itself.
So all three things you list are not comparable things, and they are all in very different states of being well-designed and well-understood scietific theories vs. being mathematics or philosophy.
As a Christian, do you agree that ID should be taught in schools, or that (at the risk of making it a loaded question) church and schools should be separate?
ID should not be taught in science clases, any more than should any other religion's creations story.
However, the whole creationism/intelligent design movement in the USA is certainly a valid and fascinating and even important topic for a sociology class. I don't know whether it belongs in high school or not (now that we've got all those annoying standardized tests that limit the freedom of teachers to discuss other interesting and important topics).
Indeed, the Bible ought to be taught in schools-- as literature and (with caution) history. So much of the literature of western civilization makes allusions to the Bible that if you aren't at least passingly familiar with it as an extremely influential work of literature, it's hard to say that you've got a good liberal-arts education.
What should not be taught in schools is religion as religion. The sort of stuff you get in Sunday School does not belong in our public schools. That's where church and schools should be kept separate.
Wrong. People love to think that evolution is the complete explanation of life as we know it, and want to teach that as "science" and as fact. However, we still have so little true understanding about the origins of life. Assumptions are made about the first instant of life, but it cannot be recreated in a lab.
You're mixing your apples and your oranges up.
Evolution doesn't explain how life started. It doesn't even address that. It explains how more life changes over time. It explains how more complex life may arise from simler life. It explains how one species may fade away in favor of another. But it says nothing about how it all started.
It's also not a "fact", in the scientific sense of the word. It's a theory. Just like the theory of gravity. Facts are the basic observations, from which we build connections and understanding in order to put together a viable theory.
Evolution represents our best understanding of the development of life. Modern biology does not make sense except in the context of evolution. It's a big topic that schoolkids aren't going to be able to fully understand in high school science classes, no more than they will fully understand Newton's theory of gravity (never mind General Realtivity). But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taught, and that it shouldn't be taught as "the" answer.
If we really want our kids to have a clue about science, we need to teach the process of science, and our best understanding today of how the natural world works. Insisting that creationism (whether you call it that or ID) be taught alongside evolution as a viable alternative is tantamount to insiting that you teach the Aristotlean "everything has its natural place" as a viable alternative to gravity to explain why things fall down.
Is it closed-minded to teach kids in science that Aristotle was wrong? Is it closed-minded in science to teach kids that the world is round rather than flat? Is it closed-minded in science to teach kids that the Earth orbits around the Sun, and that the Ptolemeic model is wrong? No! Because all of those things represent our best understanding today of how the world works, and to teach the kids otherwise would be to trick them with false understanding. As far as science is concerned, Creationism is on the same level as all of those things. Evolution is what we should be teaching in science classes, because it represents our best understanding of how the world works.
Slashdot Mirror
Moi aussi.
People see me doing that sometimes, and wonder why I'm going through so much trouble. I have a hard time convincing them that once you've learned it, the shell is far more efficient. (Especially since I type fast.)
I do have a handful of shortcut FVWMButtons on the left side of my screen (virtual screens, clock, xterm, emacs, etc.) for my most-used things, but, yeah, when I have to really do something with the filesystem, give me a shell I know how to use anyway.
-Rob
I stopped using either a while back, because both of them required too many mouse clicks and interface searching to get them to do what I wanted, and to clone the setup from place to place. Give me an ASCII configuration file that I can just copy any day. No, it's not "user friendly," but it's Geek friendly. I can read the docs.
I've even started setting up new accounts on my machines using FVWM with a sane default configuration. People tend not to futz with their configurations too much anyway, and the startup time and resource usage is just much less without the overhead of KDE. And, what's more, these are all grad students in Physics, and I *want* them to get facile with Unix. They really ought to know enough Perl to read and write files and manipulate numbers, and know a little programming. Having to figure out text configuration files would be a good exercise, as whiny as it may make them....
Not for everybody, but certainly for me. As a geek, I much prefer FVWM to the overhead of Gnome or even KDE.
-Rob
Yes he did. Hell, I've never even seen it or know anything about the story.
So what you're saying is that your ignorance is evidnece for a lack of broad cultural influence?
Hmm.
-Rob
I ask the question not as a rhetorical question, but because I really want to know.
What does Xara do that OpenOffice.org Draw does not? (Indeed, I still use XFig sometimes even though OOo Draw generally does more, because XFig does one or two things better than OOo Draw.)
I'll tell you the feature I really want: full postscript import, *with* embedded images. I an get pretty far now with ps2fig followed by whatever the heck the name of the program that converts XFig to OOo Draw, but I lose any embedded images in the eps file in so doing.
A secondary feature would be eps as "picture" objects *with* preview. OOo does eps as picture objects, but doesn't give you a preveiw unless the eps file itself has an embedded preview.
But are there other things one would find in Xara that OOo Draw doesn't do?
Black holes are, well, dark... so all the 'dark' matter is concentrated in localized places, namely the center of the galaxies.
Black holes at the center of galaxies have masses of 10^6 to 10^9 times the mass of the Sun. (Our Galaxy's black hole is towards the smaller side of that range.
Large galaxies themselves have masses of 10^11 to 10^12 times the mass of the Sun.
The black holes at the centers of galaxies, as far as just gravity is concerned, are dynamically unimportant to the outer parts of the galaxies.
Plus, the problem is more than that. It's not just that we don't have enough matter to explain the rotation curves of galaxies or the velocity dispersion of galaxy clusters, it's not in the right place. As you get farther from the center of the galaxy, you need more and more matter compared to what we see. Adding more matter right at the center wouldn't help that, even if the black holes were big enough (which they aren't).
(The black holes may be dynamically important to the evolution of galaxy structure for other more complicated reasons-- the generation of energy in their accretion disks can create jets and such that may limit the growth of galaxies-- but that's a separate issue from expalining the rotation curves we see in spiral galaxies.)
-Rob
Really?! I'm interessted in astronomy and physics at a hobbyist level, and have always assumed that the simulations of gravity and galaxy formation was done with relativistic mathematics. Instead they have used approximations using newtonian theories? WTF? No wonder they came out wrong!
Newton's gravity is what you get from relativity when your velocity is a lot less than the speed of light and your mass density is small enough. It's the limit of relativity. So, in a sense, when you're using Newton's gravity in a regime where that's the limit of relativity, you are using relativity.
This is the reason that my physical intutition goes squick at this new model. I'll have to read and think about the paper to find out of my physical intuition is flawed, but we shouldn't need the full equations of GR to figure out how fast gas and stars rotate about the galaxy any more than we need to do the full quantum mechanical proton-by-proton and electron-by-electron treatment to figure out simple fluid flow problems.
-Rob
I noticed you were referring to an article on arXiv.org.
Err... you do realize that the "we don't need dark matter" is also on arxiv.org, and lists itself as only submitted?
Plus, it's submitted to ApJ, but is not following the ApJ citation standard. Not that that really means anything, but it does tell you that the authors still have some i-crossing and t-dotting to do.
-Rob
So was the neutrino.
The neutrino, when originally discovered, was discovered because something was missing. Particle collisions were seemingly violating the conservation of energy and momentum. Postulating the existence of an unknown, massless or nearly massless particle that interacted only weakly solved that problem.
Only later was the neutrino discovered.
Unanswered questions, very specific unanswered questions (we need *something* to do *this*) often do lead to new discoveries in science.
I'm not saying that dark matter necessarily has to exist, but the galaxy and cluster gravitational dispersion evidence were strong indicators that there had to be more gravity there. Postuatling that we weren't seeing all the mass was a very reasonable postulate. Now there are lots of other reasons (e.g. CMB, large scale structure evolution) to suspect it's there. And, possibly, in the next decade, we will finally identify the dark matter particle in the lab. We'll see.
-Rob
The best solution is to not have any such system and simply DO example problems in lecture.
If only.
There is a lot of research that backs up the effectiveness of "active learning." You don't really learn something until your brain has to actively grapple with it.
There is an "old" model of education whereby the professor presents the material and the students learn by listening. In practice, this does not work so well-- and educational research has shown this. This is true even when professors do example problems. A better characterization of what goes on in a lecture is that the professor's lecture notes are transferred to the students' class notes without passing through the brains of either.
It's one thing to look at a problem that's been done and say, yeah, I know how to do that. It's entirely another thing to be able to take the concepts of a class and apply them to a novel problem. The latter is deeper learning. Requiring the students to actively think in class helps promote that sort of learning. Clickers are one tool that, when used well, can facilitate that sort of thing.
-Rob
I agree. I can see this being useful for sensitive questions, but do a teacher have to ask the students sensitive questions in public like that? Why?? I can't recall a time I've been, and I recall my education being pretty good. And if they really must do it -- anonymous questionnaires? One can cover what you're writing with your hand and then fold a piece of paper before you throw it in a box... It's over with within minutes.
Speaking from experience-- raising hands has serious problems. If you've asked students to pick an answer, and then have them raise hands one by one, students wait to see what lots of other students are doing. I know, because I've done this in my large class. When they all have to answer at once, though, it's much harder for them to see what the bulk of everybody else has done.
The low-tech solution I've used is colored cards with the letters A, B, C, D, and E on them. In some ways, that works as well as the clickers. (It's better because it's truly instantaneous once you've given the students time to think about it, because it's very robust to stupid technical problems, it's cheap, you know if there are large swaths of the classroom in certain places with the wrong answer, and if you choose the right colors it's pretty. It's not as good because it's not anonymous (although it's debatable if that's all bad), and because you have no record either statistically or individually of what answers were.)
-Rob
Clickers are a solution looking for a problem.
In fact, research has shown that using clickers to help enable "Peer Instruction" techniques can greatly improve the quality and durability of learning.
Hopefully, some empirical evidence outweighs what you think ought to be true.
The problem isn't really scorn, so much. By and large, students in college classes *don't* put down other students who aren't getting it.
Students themselves, however, feel very timid about going out on a limb and doing something that might make them look stupid. (As do we all.)
As such, the anonymitiy of the clickers is more for the comfort of the students than it is to save the students from scorn of other students.
Sheesh. Somebody with a chip that big on his shoulder is unlikely to have anything useful to say.
Gee, taking attendance at class; horrible, eh? Sick when teachers think they should do that.
Re: the hw/exam system, how about commenting on the actual problems and questions that you answer? Are they good or bad? Do they do a decent job of testing whether you've learned the material and do they help you learn the material? That would seem to be more important than how much work your professors have to do grading classes with hundreds of people in them.
Finally, gee, somebody wants to use something you don't want to use, and they should get bent, eh? Thanks for the contribution.
My question is why does it HAVE to be wireless? why couldn't you add it on to the desks/tables/etc.? it'd be much simpler/cheaper to design it to work over wires (though it would still take alot of wires for a sufficiently large classroom). This would prevent any problems with range or interference from other students that IR or RF can have.
Yipers. You're talking about redesigning a room. With a wireless solution, you can bring stuff in and just set it up. The most work you'll have to do is hang wireless receivers various places. There's many fewer of those to deal with than every individual desk. -RobPersonally, as an educator, I would find clickers to be a nuisance, and wouldn't find them useful anyway. It is far more effective to try to interact with the students and understand where their learning is at, individually, then tailor my teaching to whatever common problems or such need the most attention.
Where clickers are most useful are in large lecture classes. When you have 100+ students out in the audience, you simply don't have the time to tailyr education to individuals without giving short shrift to a lot of other individuals. It's also frequently very difficult to understand just where the students as a whole are. Clickers, when well used, can help with all of that.
The fact remains, though, that some teachers won't like them. Some, however, do... but would love it if there were an open-source solution, so that we weren't stuck with using the software and such provided.
Which ones are well-supported by SANE, so us Linux (etc.) users can use it?
I generally find that the models on the shelf in CompUSA and the like are not supported by SANE (at least the ones that are on the less expensive end). Meanwhile, the ones that SANE says they support are all more than a month or two old. I don't know why so much of the computer industry feels the need to put out a new model number with essentially the same functionality every couple of months, but printers and scanners in particular seem to suffer from that. It makes it difficult for those of us using free drivers to keep up with.
What's a good, low-end, *current* scanner that you can get that works with SANE?
-Rob
Hopefully though, this discovery will further bring to light all the lax security that companies that control our personal information have. It would be nice to see data brokers and banks start to care about security a little more.
Heh. Hopefully.
More likely, it will bring calls to limit these nefarious tools that can be used for criminal purposes. We already are paranoid about color printers running off images of dollar bills. Now we'd better make laws saying that any image processing program must contain checks against this sort of thing.
I will not be surprised if that response is seriously proposed.
Hell, under the DMCA, it may be illegal to download Gimp now. After all, it is a tool that has been demonstrated to break an effective security measure (the paper around a PIN number), although the PIN number may not be IP and thus may not be covered under the DMCA.
But we also have the Grokster case as precedent to allow us to hold the Gimp developers responsible for this use of their tool.
-Rob
Isn't OpenDRM an oxymoron?
Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard.
You mean Hotmail?
(Of course, that statement in general is an excellent short description of Microsoft's strategy to maintain dominance. Maybe add to it "that is proprietarily controlled by Microsoft" at the end, since that's what they'd really prefer. When you're the monopolist or near-monopolist, industry standards that are open are very inconvenient for you.)
-Rob
How has evolution ever been 'predicted' in the fossil record? How can you predict something you already know? It's more like trying to fit an theory to the evidence which cannot be tested.
Because we don't already have the whole fossil record in front of us.
Evolution predicts that you ought to find certain things in the fossil record as we more completely fill out the fossil record. Those predictions in the past have been borne out.
ID doesn't predict anything about the fossil record, since it's all just magic anyway. Anything can happen at any time.
-Rob
When did I say I know for sure? (Assuming by "it", you mean how was life made in the first place.)
I don't.
That's why we still do science. Because we don't know everything yet. But we *do* know something....
-Rob
So then what you're saying is that string theory, multiple universe theory, the theory of evolution and a good deal many others are superstitions because they can't be tested?
Your listing evolution in with those other two is unfair. It can and has been tested, repeatedly. Not by lab experiments, but by predictions of what we might find in the fossil record. Astronomy works the same way -- we don't do lab experiments, we go out and look in the Universe. (And thanks to the finite speed of light, we're always looking at the past.) Yet there are predictions of future observations that have been borne out.
So evolution isn't a superstition by any means, because it can and has been tested.
As for the other two: lots of scientists would agree that it's philosophy rather than science. String theory is hot at the moment, and lots of Physicists don't think it's good science. Those who think that but understand something about it think that it's good mathematics, so it's still worthy. But is it science? Myself, I'm more on the fence. I can see that one day, string theory could well produce predictions that we could test, but they won't get there if they don't do the development they're doing now. So I want to see them continuing. String theory does show promise of explaining things that our current understanding of Physics at the extremes can't explain, so it's worth pursuing.
As for the many-worlds interpretation--- that's a different matter altogether. That's a philosophical interpretation of how things in quantum mechanics work that you don't really need in order to employ the full predictive power of quantum mechanics. Maybe, perhaps, one day there will be predictions of the many-worlds interpretation that are different from other interpretations, at which point we could test it. But right now, it's really more a matter of how you like to think about Quantum Mechanics rather than a theory unto itself.
So all three things you list are not comparable things, and they are all in very different states of being well-designed and well-understood scietific theories vs. being mathematics or philosophy.
-Rob
As a Christian, do you agree that ID should be taught in schools, or that (at the risk of making it a loaded question) church and schools should be separate?
ID should not be taught in science clases, any more than should any other religion's creations story.
However, the whole creationism/intelligent design movement in the USA is certainly a valid and fascinating and even important topic for a sociology class. I don't know whether it belongs in high school or not (now that we've got all those annoying standardized tests that limit the freedom of teachers to discuss other interesting and important topics).
Indeed, the Bible ought to be taught in schools-- as literature and (with caution) history. So much of the literature of western civilization makes allusions to the Bible that if you aren't at least passingly familiar with it as an extremely influential work of literature, it's hard to say that you've got a good liberal-arts education.
What should not be taught in schools is religion as religion. The sort of stuff you get in Sunday School does not belong in our public schools. That's where church and schools should be kept separate.
-Rob
Wrong. People love to think that evolution is the complete explanation of life as we know it, and want to teach that as "science" and as fact. However, we still have so little true understanding about the origins of life. Assumptions are made about the first instant of life, but it cannot be recreated in a lab.
You're mixing your apples and your oranges up.
Evolution doesn't explain how life started. It doesn't even address that. It explains how more life changes over time. It explains how more complex life may arise from simler life. It explains how one species may fade away in favor of another. But it says nothing about how it all started.
It's also not a "fact", in the scientific sense of the word. It's a theory. Just like the theory of gravity. Facts are the basic observations, from which we build connections and understanding in order to put together a viable theory.
Evolution represents our best understanding of the development of life. Modern biology does not make sense except in the context of evolution. It's a big topic that schoolkids aren't going to be able to fully understand in high school science classes, no more than they will fully understand Newton's theory of gravity (never mind General Realtivity). But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taught, and that it shouldn't be taught as "the" answer.
If we really want our kids to have a clue about science, we need to teach the process of science, and our best understanding today of how the natural world works. Insisting that creationism (whether you call it that or ID) be taught alongside evolution as a viable alternative is tantamount to insiting that you teach the Aristotlean "everything has its natural place" as a viable alternative to gravity to explain why things fall down.
Is it closed-minded to teach kids in science that Aristotle was wrong? Is it closed-minded in science to teach kids that the world is round rather than flat? Is it closed-minded in science to teach kids that the Earth orbits around the Sun, and that the Ptolemeic model is wrong? No! Because all of those things represent our best understanding today of how the world works, and to teach the kids otherwise would be to trick them with false understanding. As far as science is concerned, Creationism is on the same level as all of those things. Evolution is what we should be teaching in science classes, because it represents our best understanding of how the world works.
-Rob
there are any intelligent design folks who actually hold an advanced degree in computer science, physics, or AI.
There are.
You can always find somebody with all the right credentials to support any wacky idea.
It just goes to show that the support of one or a few "experts" is not good evidence for much of anything.
-Rob