Again, totally missing the point. Meteorology is indeed a science, but making a prediction about which of a large number of mostly random events will occur in the weather is the APPLICATION of the science, not the DISCOVERY process of the science that I have been talking about. A better example of the predictive nature of the discovery process would be when someone first came to understand the relationship between temperature and dew point. Once that relationship was discovered, anybody could measure the temperature, measure humidity, and predict at what temperature fog would form in the air, even if that person had never even seen fog before. And had that person made such a prediction, and had the temperature then changed to match the dewpoint, that person would then see fog. And that phenomenon has been and will be observed time and time again, in a totally predictable and repeatable manner. Furthermore, it would be observable EVEN TO PEOPLE WHO DIDN'T BELIEVE IT. A "fact" that is observable only to people who believe in it is not a fact at all...it's only a BELIEF. A result of proper science, on the other hand, is observable and repeatable to anyone who wishes to have a look for themselves, whether they believe or not.
I think you've totally missed the point. I'm not talking about prediction as in fortelling the future...I'm talking about prediction like, "If my theory is correct, then if I conduct such-and-such an experiment, the result will be XXX." Or, "If my theory is correct, then I predict that some day such-and-such a discovery will be made." The whole point is that someone who does this is NOT relying on mystical powers or supernatural tools. Rather, he is further testing his theory by seeing if his knowledge can allow him to predict the outcome of further investigation. Using your "checking the mail" analogy, if I had a theory that my mail carrier came at 2:00 every day, then I could predict that there will be mail in my box if I check it at 2:05. Having it happen or not happen once or twice does not prove anything, but having a long string days where I found mail at 2:05 would tend to support my theory.
As far as prophecy, it's interesting that you specify that it is real TO A BELIEVER...the hallmark of a non-repeatable and unveriable belief.
...evidence has no capacity to support or deny. Whether something supports something else is a decision made by a human being.
That's a very interesting idea that I respect.
Another value of science is not only the ability to collect evidence, but the ability to predict the results of experiments that have not been conducted yet, or to predict that a certain discovery will be made at some point in the futre. If such events do in fact occur in accordance with the predictions, that is even stronger evidence that the investigators are on the right track, and in those cases your theory above plays a far lessor role. I have not heard of a religion-based theory that has this sort of predictive success (though I'm happy to learn about them if there are any.)
It can be tested by a person who is starving and is about to die.
I'd be interested to hear exactly what it is that you are talking about. If, as I suspect, you are referring to some religion-based method to save a starving person, I would like to hear of any controlled experiments that showed such a method would work at a success rate greater than any other method (rolling dice, doing a special dance, etc.) One common mistake made by people who don't understand the scientific process is to take any and all successes as evidence of effectiveness...while conveniently ignoring all the failures. Do a survey and count up the number of truely desperate people who have had prayers go unanswered.
On the other hand, if you surveyed the number of starving people--about to die--I'm quite certain you would find that the great majority of those who survived were given some food. The giving of food by any source is a far better predictor of survival than any religion-based method of treatment.
By the way, I grew up going to church every Sunday. My brother and I even went without our parents some times. I am not anti-religion by a long shot. But over the years I came to realize that the religious lessons I learned were really only a framework for what I consider to be the more practical--and more important--lessons: how to treat people, the value of humility, the value of faith (read: "optimism"), etc. The latter does not require the former, although a great many people frame it that way.
The key to the process is that anyone should be able to replicate the results obtained by another person, and that if one claims that something is true, then one should be able to demonstrate it. Anything that doesn't fit that framework--that "lies outside their beloved process"--falls into another process that can best be described as "believe it because I say so." How can anyone offer a cogent counter-argument that cannot be replicated and cannot be demonstrated?
Yeah, I t hink that's the one I saw. They were looking at death by severed jugular or death by crushed trachea. But so much of the contraption was built from non-sabretooth materials, using motions designed by the builders of the model, with a lot of subjectivity over what was fatal and what was not, that I didn't have much confidence in the results. It was fun to watch, though.
I haven't studied the issue, but I feel like your generalization of scientists is wrong. Most good scientists welcome the chance to be proven wrong...that's what peer review is all about, and why scientists have such confidence in properly derived conclusions. If they look down on anyone who doesn't "worship science," it's most likely because the conclusions drawn by those people are NOT replicable and have NOT been subjected to real peer review--which is why such conclusions fail to convince those who understand (not "worship") the scientific process.
I suspect this is related to a show I saw recently...I don't specifically remember if it was the Discovery Channel but it probably was. The show featured simulations of various "animal vs. animal" fights, to see who would win. It was mildly amusing, in a Mythbusters sort of way, but I remember thinking at the time that the methodology and assumptions seemed bogus. Science-wise, it seemed about as valid as a middle school science fair project. For example, the one I saw had two animals facing off with each other, but standing more or less stationary. In other words, it was a test of penetration, cutting, and crushing, without taking into account mobility, intelligence, and will. To top it off, they would just examine the damage after each trial, and declare, "Yup, that would have killed him," or, "Nope, that wouldn't have killed him."
Furthermore, if this experiment was conducted in the course of making a show for Discovery, I find it questionable that they didn't mention that in the article in Discovery News.
I've been using Myth for about 18 months now. The process was about the same as everything else I tinker with...I wrestled with it until it was mostly functional and then I lived with the result because I was too lazy to fight with the last 10%. I'm telling you this because my impression is that the interface looks good but the responsiveness is sluggish and things just don't seem as snappy as the only Tivo I ever used. I'm sure some of it could be fixed...the remote that came with the capture card is not the greatest, my mini-atx board is fanless and therefore slower, etc.
Bottom line: for my viewing habits, I'm happy with Myth. It's free and it records shows, and that's about all I want to do with it. If I wanted to watch live tv on it, I'd have to put in a little more work.
This has been covered elsewhere in the discussion, but concrete doesn't "dry out," as the article states. It actually "hydrates," meaning that it uses water to harden, but doesn't need the water to go away or evaporate when it's done doing its thing. In fact, concrete can harden under water.
That kind of response to law enforcement pisses me off. No, the crime is not "creating a website," any more than lying to people on the phone to get bank details and then emptying their bank account is the crime of "talking to people on the phone."
Senator Leahy is engaged in a legislative battle against online scammers, and he needs your support. If you would like to help, click on this link. To ensure that you are a registered voter, you will be asked to verify your name, address, and social security number. You may then make a donation online, right from your checking account!
Why, just last night I got a bunch of helpful popup windows alerting me that "we have detected that your computer may be infected with spyware or a virus." There was also a button that I could click to download software that would fix it. Sounds like we're way ahead of the game, so chew on that for a while, U.K.!
This is a timely story submission, because I've been fighting with a new Myth box for over a week now (Myth's not the problem -- it's the marginally supported accelerated graphics on my Via board, which I require because the CPU is only 600MHz.)
But I first got Myth running about a year ago on my "working" box. To answer your question, I'd say that since Myth is a "roll your own" solution anyway, I think it's definitely worth playing around with. A basic setup would give you the capability to schedule recordings and watch them when you want. With the proper processor/graphics card you could move from there to watching live tv (encoding and decoding simultaneously -- not at all difficult, but I went the hard way because I wanted a fanless system.) From there, there are a bunch of different modules to play with. In short, you can get some functionality right away, and can spend time later getting that seamless and polished entertainment center integration that we all dream about.
is any app that steals the cursor focus from where I'm currently typing (or clicking) in order to show me some alert or dialog. And when I get 2 or 3 follow-on alerts yanking me back for more clicks, I want to put my boot throught the keyboard. I think whoever came up with that scheme did some bad human engineering.
Thanks for the clarification. So he was looking for the establishment of a "disputed fact," which has a legal definition that I didn't know.
My ignorance on that subject reminds me of when I was shopping for my first house and spent a good amount of time telling my wife what an idiot the person was who wrote an ad saying that a house "conveyed with all appliances," -- a clear misuse of the word, as far as I knew. Of course, I was dead wrong then too.
....it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities.
This is pretty much beside the point, but I read that statement carefully, and I'm not sure it actually means anything. How do you "create a disputed fact"? How do you create any fact, for that matter?
I understand and agree with the point, but the wording is weird. Maybe the judge was misquoted.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, totally missing the point. Meteorology is indeed a science, but making a prediction about which of a large number of mostly random events will occur in the weather is the APPLICATION of the science, not the DISCOVERY process of the science that I have been talking about. A better example of the predictive nature of the discovery process would be when someone first came to understand the relationship between temperature and dew point. Once that relationship was discovered, anybody could measure the temperature, measure humidity, and predict at what temperature fog would form in the air, even if that person had never even seen fog before. And had that person made such a prediction, and had the temperature then changed to match the dewpoint, that person would then see fog. And that phenomenon has been and will be observed time and time again, in a totally predictable and repeatable manner. Furthermore, it would be observable EVEN TO PEOPLE WHO DIDN'T BELIEVE IT. A "fact" that is observable only to people who believe in it is not a fact at all...it's only a BELIEF. A result of proper science, on the other hand, is observable and repeatable to anyone who wishes to have a look for themselves, whether they believe or not.
I think you've totally missed the point. I'm not talking about prediction as in fortelling the future...I'm talking about prediction like, "If my theory is correct, then if I conduct such-and-such an experiment, the result will be XXX." Or, "If my theory is correct, then I predict that some day such-and-such a discovery will be made." The whole point is that someone who does this is NOT relying on mystical powers or supernatural tools. Rather, he is further testing his theory by seeing if his knowledge can allow him to predict the outcome of further investigation. Using your "checking the mail" analogy, if I had a theory that my mail carrier came at 2:00 every day, then I could predict that there will be mail in my box if I check it at 2:05. Having it happen or not happen once or twice does not prove anything, but having a long string days where I found mail at 2:05 would tend to support my theory.
As far as prophecy, it's interesting that you specify that it is real TO A BELIEVER...the hallmark of a non-repeatable and unveriable belief.
...evidence has no capacity to support or deny. Whether something supports something else is a decision made by a human being.
That's a very interesting idea that I respect.
Another value of science is not only the ability to collect evidence, but the ability to predict the results of experiments that have not been conducted yet, or to predict that a certain discovery will be made at some point in the futre. If such events do in fact occur in accordance with the predictions, that is even stronger evidence that the investigators are on the right track, and in those cases your theory above plays a far lessor role. I have not heard of a religion-based theory that has this sort of predictive success (though I'm happy to learn about them if there are any.)
It can be tested by a person who is starving and is about to die.
I'd be interested to hear exactly what it is that you are talking about. If, as I suspect, you are referring to some religion-based method to save a starving person, I would like to hear of any controlled experiments that showed such a method would work at a success rate greater than any other method (rolling dice, doing a special dance, etc.) One common mistake made by people who don't understand the scientific process is to take any and all successes as evidence of effectiveness...while conveniently ignoring all the failures. Do a survey and count up the number of truely desperate people who have had prayers go unanswered.
On the other hand, if you surveyed the number of starving people--about to die--I'm quite certain you would find that the great majority of those who survived were given some food. The giving of food by any source is a far better predictor of survival than any religion-based method of treatment.
By the way, I grew up going to church every Sunday. My brother and I even went without our parents some times. I am not anti-religion by a long shot. But over the years I came to realize that the religious lessons I learned were really only a framework for what I consider to be the more practical--and more important--lessons: how to treat people, the value of humility, the value of faith (read: "optimism"), etc. The latter does not require the former, although a great many people frame it that way.
The key to the process is that anyone should be able to replicate the results obtained by another person, and that if one claims that something is true, then one should be able to demonstrate it. Anything that doesn't fit that framework--that "lies outside their beloved process"--falls into another process that can best be described as "believe it because I say so." How can anyone offer a cogent counter-argument that cannot be replicated and cannot be demonstrated?
Yeah, I t hink that's the one I saw. They were looking at death by severed jugular or death by crushed trachea. But so much of the contraption was built from non-sabretooth materials, using motions designed by the builders of the model, with a lot of subjectivity over what was fatal and what was not, that I didn't have much confidence in the results. It was fun to watch, though.
I haven't studied the issue, but I feel like your generalization of scientists is wrong. Most good scientists welcome the chance to be proven wrong...that's what peer review is all about, and why scientists have such confidence in properly derived conclusions. If they look down on anyone who doesn't "worship science," it's most likely because the conclusions drawn by those people are NOT replicable and have NOT been subjected to real peer review--which is why such conclusions fail to convince those who understand (not "worship") the scientific process.
I suspect this is related to a show I saw recently...I don't specifically remember if it was the Discovery Channel but it probably was. The show featured simulations of various "animal vs. animal" fights, to see who would win. It was mildly amusing, in a Mythbusters sort of way, but I remember thinking at the time that the methodology and assumptions seemed bogus. Science-wise, it seemed about as valid as a middle school science fair project. For example, the one I saw had two animals facing off with each other, but standing more or less stationary. In other words, it was a test of penetration, cutting, and crushing, without taking into account mobility, intelligence, and will. To top it off, they would just examine the damage after each trial, and declare, "Yup, that would have killed him," or, "Nope, that wouldn't have killed him."
Furthermore, if this experiment was conducted in the course of making a show for Discovery, I find it questionable that they didn't mention that in the article in Discovery News.
Of course it was!
Er, wouldn't that involve uninstalling the bots from the computers of 100,000 clueless people?
Reminds me of the sequal-ready ending to a cheesy horror flick.
I've been using Myth for about 18 months now. The process was about the same as everything else I tinker with...I wrestled with it until it was mostly functional and then I lived with the result because I was too lazy to fight with the last 10%. I'm telling you this because my impression is that the interface looks good but the responsiveness is sluggish and things just don't seem as snappy as the only Tivo I ever used. I'm sure some of it could be fixed...the remote that came with the capture card is not the greatest, my mini-atx board is fanless and therefore slower, etc.
Bottom line: for my viewing habits, I'm happy with Myth. It's free and it records shows, and that's about all I want to do with it. If I wanted to watch live tv on it, I'd have to put in a little more work.
Hey, it just occurred to me: shouldn't GRUB be the "GRub Unified Bootloader," to keep with the tradition of recursive/redundant acronyms?
When I first saw the headline, I read, "Microsoft in talks to by China."
...eat whatever the hell you want over them.
This has been covered elsewhere in the discussion, but concrete doesn't "dry out," as the article states. It actually "hydrates," meaning that it uses water to harden, but doesn't need the water to go away or evaporate when it's done doing its thing. In fact, concrete can harden under water.
So I express an opinion within several minutes of other people who express a similar opinion, and that's "redundant." Twice. Got it.
Pardon my ignorance...but I took a look at that link. While I wouldn't use it myself, it does seem plausible. Is it real?
That kind of response to law enforcement pisses me off. No, the crime is not "creating a website," any more than lying to people on the phone to get bank details and then emptying their bank account is the crime of "talking to people on the phone."
Senator Leahy is engaged in a legislative battle against online scammers, and he needs your support. If you would like to help, click on this link. To ensure that you are a registered voter, you will be asked to verify your name, address, and social security number. You may then make a donation online, right from your checking account!
Why, just last night I got a bunch of helpful popup windows alerting me that "we have detected that your computer may be infected with spyware or a virus." There was also a button that I could click to download software that would fix it. Sounds like we're way ahead of the game, so chew on that for a while, U.K.!
This is a timely story submission, because I've been fighting with a new Myth box for over a week now (Myth's not the problem -- it's the marginally supported accelerated graphics on my Via board, which I require because the CPU is only 600MHz.)
But I first got Myth running about a year ago on my "working" box. To answer your question, I'd say that since Myth is a "roll your own" solution anyway, I think it's definitely worth playing around with. A basic setup would give you the capability to schedule recordings and watch them when you want. With the proper processor/graphics card you could move from there to watching live tv (encoding and decoding simultaneously -- not at all difficult, but I went the hard way because I wanted a fanless system.) From there, there are a bunch of different modules to play with. In short, you can get some functionality right away, and can spend time later getting that seamless and polished entertainment center integration that we all dream about.
I submitted this same story with a funnier headline.
Oh wait, that one was posted too.
is any app that steals the cursor focus from where I'm currently typing (or clicking) in order to show me some alert or dialog. And when I get 2 or 3 follow-on alerts yanking me back for more clicks, I want to put my boot throught the keyboard. I think whoever came up with that scheme did some bad human engineering.
Thanks for the clarification. So he was looking for the establishment of a "disputed fact," which has a legal definition that I didn't know.
My ignorance on that subject reminds me of when I was shopping for my first house and spent a good amount of time telling my wife what an idiot the person was who wrote an ad saying that a house "conveyed with all appliances," -- a clear misuse of the word, as far as I knew. Of course, I was dead wrong then too.
Evidence? We don't need no steenking evidence! /should have apologized in advance.
....it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities.
This is pretty much beside the point, but I read that statement carefully, and I'm not sure it actually means anything. How do you "create a disputed fact"? How do you create any fact, for that matter?
I understand and agree with the point, but the wording is weird. Maybe the judge was misquoted.