I was discussing the global warming issue just last Tuesday with someone who was very adamant that humans are responsible for everything.
Are humans responsible for everything when it comes to Global Warming or the greenhouse effect? Of course not, don't be silly. And nobody who actually has a clue but is concerned about the issue claims that. The claim is that humans are responsible for a significant deviation in the expected natural lavels of global warming via the greenhouse effect.
As I offered more and more opposing evidence suggesting that there is no definitive proof that mankind is responsible
There isn't any "definitive proof" that humans are responsible for significant deviations in factors affecting global climate. Just like there isn't any "definitive proof" that evolution is correct, or that dark matter exists. What there is, is a weight of evidence toward the degree of impact of human factors that puts the burden of proof pretty squarely on those claiming humans are not responsible.
What do we know? We know that in the past 200 years humans have produced large volumes of carbon dioxide and methane through various industrial processes. We now know that current levels of carbon dioxide and methane are the highest they've been for over 650,000 years. We know that global temperature correlates extremely closely with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over a range of 650,000 years. We know that atmospheric carbon dioxide traps heat, and can cause global warming. We know that there has been an acceleration in the rate or rise of global temperatures (beyond what would be expected coming out of the "little ice age" 400 years ago) that is apparently unprecendented for the last 2000 years or so.
Are humans solely responsible for the current warming trend? No, we're coming out of small dip in global climate, so there was some warming anyway. You'll also find that solar variation accounts for around 30% or the observed warming (or at least that's what the IPCC reports claim), and other natural cycles are responsible for some as well. The fact remains that humans have produced a lot of carbon dioxide and methane in the last 200 years, that those gases do cause warming, and that the levels of those gases are unprecendented to the last 650,000 years. Humans are providing a significant forcing compared to natural fluctuations, it would be surprising if that didn't have an impact.
Bottom line: Some OSS is good, some is crap. J"OSS" isn't any kind of magic term.
Very, very true. Anyone can write a piece of crap and release it as OSS. A quick browse through freshmeat or soureforge will turn up any number of OSS projects that are, quite simply, complete garbage. But then that shouldn't really be the point. OSS isn't a magic term that makes software good, sure, but the real point is that "Proprietary Shrink Wrapped Software" isn't a magic term that makes software good either. Which is to say the claim shouldn't be that OSS software is all good, but merely that OSS can be an entirely viable option - sometimes it is every bit as good, and sometimes better, than proprietary alternatives.
Why is that even worth mentioning? As obvious as it may seem to us, the reality is that the concept of freely available, community developed software being anything but cheap crap is not really that widespread in the mainstream. The concept that maybe, for this project, using an open source solution (and the advantages that that model of development offers) might be the best way to go, is only really starting to dawn on a lot of businesses. OSS advocacy (the sane kind at least) isn't about OSS as a magic solution, but rather about OSS as entirely viable solution in some cases, and a solution that offers its own unique advantages.
What we need is a standard way for X windows to have a thing like 'screen' were you can save your current output and move it to any computer that can handle X windows.
You mean like xmove? Basically xmove starts up a pseudoserver which clients can connect to. At startup clients connecting to the pseudoserver display on the default XServer, but can be moved to any other display on the network.
I agree that a cleaned up easy to use xmove system would be a nice idea though.
I'll expand on the issue of dark matter a little. It's still rather simplified, but it is more to the point on the issue of dark matter particularly.
The original problem that lead to postulating dark matter involves observations of galaxies. Galaxies rotate and physics makes predictions about the orbital velocity of stars in a galaxy based on their distance from the centre of the galaxy. The problem is that these predictions don't square very well with observations. In general observations show stars distant from the center of the galaxy orbiting much faster than expected. You can express this in terms of rotation curves making the problem relatively clear. The proposed solution to this is to assume that there must be extra unobserved (hence dark) mass providing extra gravitational energy, and thus extra orbital velocity, to the more outlying stars.
There are other theories to explain the observations such as Modified Newtonian Dynamics, but they tend to run into their own problems, and currently aren't anywhere near as widely accepted as the dark matter solution.
Finland has a reasonably strong cinematic history. Probably the most notable film for non-Finns recently would The Man Without a Past which was nominated for best foreign film at the Academy awards, and won the grand jury prize at Cannes, among numerous other awards.
If you don't stoop to watching foreign film and hence never heard of that, you could always try the Hollywood films from Finnish director Renny Harlin which includes wonderful schlock such as Die Hard 2, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Deep Blue Sea, and The Exorcist: The Beginning.
Do they have anything useful to say as to how humans have arrived at the set(s) of moral codes we use now?
Well that's more an issue for archeology and cultural anthropology and thus quite outside the purview of philosophy which is what Kant and Russell specialised in, so no, they, and other philosophers have little to say about how our cultures arrived at their various moral codes.
What the anthropological view is I can't honestly say having not really done any research into the matter. Again, however, I don't see a necessity to explain the development of moral codes by dictat from some divine entity. At the most basic level I'm sure it's possible to construct a reasonable scenario where moral codes were developed in an essentially evolutionary manner - those societies that hewed to more useful moral codes (that generated more cooperative and productive societies) are clearly more likely to be successful and expand than societies that pursue less cooperative moral codes. Over time and with the development of language to codify and fix successful moral codes it's entirely conceivable that the moral codes of antiquity that we are familiar with were developed. That, of course, is not to say that that is how current moral codes were developed, merely that it is entirely conceivable, and reasonably plausible.
You're right. My earlier question had to do with addressing whether religion is the basis for our current moral codes (or more specifcally, I had laws in mind.) But I did ask about neccessity. As you point out, you could in fact have a moral code that consists of nothing more than "it's immoral to wear clothes". Such an independant code would not be useful not accepted in the world once he got out of the box, but it could be done.
I think the point is that, presuming you had a small society of people in the box to allow for generalisation and/or issues of universality, it is entirely possible for someone in the the box to construct a moral code almost identical Kant's or Russell's, despite their complete lack of exposure ot any religion of any kind. While Kant and Russell were exposed to religion, their means of derivation for the moral attitudes mean that exposure to religion is not a requirement to develop the same or similar moral codes. You can argue, of course, that Kant or Russell's moral codes are wrong and useless, but then I could make the same argument about your moral code with equally sufficient foundation. I think you'll find that Kant and Russell's moral codes agree with your own on a sufficiently large number of points that you would accept them as valuable (at least as valuable as any religious moral code differing from your own, if not more so - see islamic, hindu, confucian, and buddhist moral codes for example), wich is the main point here. A person does not need religion to arrive at and follow a moral code that most non-fundamentalist religious people would find respectable.
You may as well say Plato is a necessary ingredient of morality given that all modern thinking is influenced, at least in some way, byt his writings. Is mathematics necessary for morality? Can you honestly say that your life hasn't been influenced in some way by the mathematical ideas of the last however many thousands of years?
The question was whether religion was necessary for morality. The answer is that, reardless of how things happened to have developed here. the isn't any reason that religion is required. A person raised in a box shielded from all religious principles is just as capable of developing a moral code from his experiences as anyone else. I don't see how your argument makes religion necessary for morality.
Hm, so are you of the opinion that religion can have no benefit at all, and that there is a natural moral code completely independant of any religious beliefs?
I would think that you could subscribe to a number of views and still disgree with the concept that religion is a necessity in informing a moral code. You can take the view that there is a natural moral code that can be logically derived, following Kant or similar. You can take the view that morality is simply a human construction, that religious moral codes are actually just human dictates rather than dictated by some deity, and thus construct your own moral code via whatever means you see fit. You can take the view that morality is relative, back it up by pointing to the diversity and contradictory nature of the various different religious moral codes , and construct your own moral code upon experience and logical inference and extrapolation. None of those require subscribing to or being informed by any religious moral code, and can result in moral beliefs of, for example, Kant, or Bertrand Russell, which represents quite a high standard really.
And make sure they update comments if changes necessitate it. There's nothing worse than reading through a function's description, complete with well-documented inputs/outputs/conditions/etc. and finding out that those things no longer apply because somebody changed a 1 to a 2.
That's why it's nice to have some formal semantics for inputs, outputs and conditions so that the documentation can be easily and automatically converted to, say, unittests. Take, for instance, JML which provides semantics for commenting your functions in a way that
(1) Can be used to generate automatic runtime checks for debugging (2) Can be automatically included in your documentation (3) Can be used to automatically generate JUnit unit tests
If you change the code but not the comment in a way that means it no longer behaves as the comment indicates... well the code will fail the unit test.
Even little things like Python's doctest module can be kind of nice, ensuring that the docstrings still represent the code they are meant to be documenting.
Well see in the bledisloe cup where australia has already won it for the past 3 years
Do you mean the Bledisloe cup which New Zealand has won for the last 3 years? It's not still 2002 you know....and as far as NRL is concered, doesnt NZ have a team?
That would be the New Zealand Warriors. Yes, they are a bit up and down but they were minor premieres and grand finalists in 2002 (you know, back when you guys still had the Bledisloe cup). And then there's the fact that many of the Australian NRL teams are packed with Kiwi players...
If you want an "easy to use" linux cluster try Scyld, it's pretty much plug and go integrated linux cluster solution out of the box. Then again, that's what you would expect from a distribution tailored explicitly for clustering and HPC solutions.
Blame it on JUnit. Since it provides a way to make unit testing easier, it's easier to get people to actually do it. When I was in school, we talked about unit testing, but never really did it very well. By employing the latest buzzwords such as JUnit and Spring in your design, it's much less work to build your unit tests that it would be with other languages.
At this point I'd like to point out the existence of JML, an annotation syntax and set of associated tools for Java that makes a lot of things easier and more convenient. JML allows you to do design by contract in Java and if you compile with the provided compiler jmlc it will automatically include runtime checks based on your pre and post conditions and invariants. Another tool, jmldoc, will generate JavaDoc documentation augmented with the extra specification your provided with JML annotations, making for much better documentation. You also have jmlunit which will automatically generate JUnit test classes based on your annotations.
That means you get automatically generated unit tests, the constraints of which are automatically included in your documentation (as well as in the actual code as annotations) and the option to use those constraints as runtime checks for debugging purposes. That's an awful lot of cheap benefits just for writing annotations to your code as you go.
General examples of using JML for DbC can be found here, and examples of jmlunit generating JUnit test classes can be found here.
But have you actually read any of it - original source material rather than soundbites, op-ed charaterisations, etc.? It's a lot less strident than the media portrays it, often goes to great pains to try and consider all the possibilities, ty different models, discuss alternative causes etc. Sit down and read some of it sometime, you might be surprised to learn that the scientists involved in this debate are not anywhere near as politicised as you think.
There are a couple of feedbacks from water vapour, there's the reflection via cloudcover, and there's radiated heat trapped by the water vapour. There are all sorts of factors involved in that using a lot of complex issues to do with cloud formation that I can't say I understand. There has been a lot of work on modelling, but I don't think it's all that well understood yet all things considered. Certainly the models (with forcings) have a resulting equilibrium state, and most that I've seen end up warmer but I don't think it's a settled question. Try this random reference on the subject.
But there is a problem, which I've never seen adequately addressed, with the IPCC Hockey Stick curves. This the controversy with Mann et al. We do know from historical evidence that there actually was a Medieval Warm period, and the evidence is that it was hotter than now. There was also a cool period in around 1700. Both of these vanish from the record with the IPCC hockey stick curves. Then, if you get into how these curves were derived, lets say just that the derivation is very remote from any observational evidence.
That's a fairly strong claim. I think you'll find that Mann recognises medieval warm periods and cooler periods in the 1700s. The medieval warm period just isn't warmer than present temperatures in his reconstruction based on proxy data. In fact, that's the case for most reconstructions based on proxy data from a wide variety of sources. There are differences in the different reconstructions, but in general there's a reasonable amount of agreement. Don't take my word for it though, here's a plot with 10 different reconstructions along with full citations of the source papers for each so you can check the methodology on each of them. Given the variety of methods used for derivation amongst those reports, from glacier records to tree rings, it's at least resonably convincing.
As to alternative views - the only evidence I've seen for a significantly warmer medieval period is derived from exactly the same data as Mann's, in roughly the same manner, so if you think one is suspect... What we do have is one report by two Canadians, one an economist the other a businessman, claiming radically different results from everyone else using different slightly techniques. I'm not writing them off, but I would be interested to see a little more work on the issue, especially when there are discussions of issues with their techniques (and nice simplified versions) that seem quite reasonable.
None of this is to say that McIntyre and McKitrick are wrong, but one has to ask why you believe them and dismiss the ten other reports by different people that generally agree quite well.
It's that kind of black and white approach to this and other topics, both by the people and especially the media, that has trivialized the issue at hand.
it's always useful to apply Fisher's deduction:
"The more issues a person attempts to shoehorn down into an artificial liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American."
Debate about climate change is a debate in the US because the whole issue is deconstructed and soundbitten into a pair of simplistic politicised extremes with nary a scrap serious reasoning left. If you actually read the IPCC reports, and the peer reviewed criticisms (as opposed to the op-ed pieces) there's a lot less debate than you might think, and neither position is anywhere as extreme as the soundbites and op-eds make out. The climate is warming, we have some decent ideas as to what factors are causing it (and they are many and diverse), and it seems human actions are somewhat of a factor. Don't take my word for it though, actually do some reading on your own.
I could be missing something, but isn't this basic astronomy (or whatever science you care to term it)? Water vapor (among other gasses) is responsible for keeping a planet heated, and not a frozen ball of rock like Mars. Maintaining that delicate balance of how much water is in the air is important of course, but noting that water is causing the atmosphere to retain heat is... nothing new.
Yes, this is not some groundbreaking new assertion. In fact it is things like this - feedback mechanisms (both positive and negative) that make climate change modelling so hard. If it was a simple matter of "C02 creates more warmth" we'd have figured it all out a while ago. More warmth can produce more water vapor, but depending on what type of clouds are formed you can end up with trapped heat, or more solar radiation reflected and a cooling effect. There are many other feedback mechanisms that I simply can't recall and many more I've never heard of. How and when they respond, and how they interact makes for a very difficult and complex problem indeed.
Perl, of course, is the ideal language for such a thing, and you would be looking for Acme::Smirch, which does a fabulous job of taking any perl script and producing a perfectly functional perl script that uses no alphanumeric characters or whitespace. The results of applying smirch to the smirch module are... well they're impossible to get past the lameness filter, but I think it is safe to say that it is fairly obfuscated.
Come now, this was a mistake on the part of the specification and design team. Unless you have a specification that says "you cannot do X" then how is the testing team to know (1) To try and do X to check if it is prevented (2) That X is incorrect if they do manage to do it And of course had the specification covered this, then the programmers, assuming they were any good, would have to account for it in their code, and the condition would be included in the test process and checked in testing.
If the correctness of your system is important (like with a life critical system) then expending effort trying to get your specification as complete as possible is going to help a lot. That means that your specification probably ought to be a formal one so you can adjust it if required and analyse the effects of those adjustments.
You are assuming tight, correct specs - a genuine rarity.
Which is, in a sense, the problem. If you are developing a life critical application, then spending a few iterative design rounds tightening up and testing the specification are more than going to pay off in terms of potential errors caught. There are formal languages for specifications (so you can be precise and not rely on an English language "description" of what is required), and those formal languages are amenable to analysis. In practice just sitting down and formalising requirements into this language goes a very long way toward determining where ambiguities lie, and which parts need to be checked with the client to be certain you've captured the requirement correctly. It's, in a sense, similar to doing iterative design by coding up a quick prototype and using the need to formalise your ideas into code to get a better idea of where the issues lie. If people took specification a little more seriously, at least as far as being a little bit more rigorous and formal, I think projects in general for which safety or security is important would be far better off.
When you are writing software for life-critical applications, there is various software and techniques that ensures bug-free code. Just look at all the airplanes, powerplants, car computers, etc. It's not very usual at all to see one fail critically.
When you are writing software for life critical systems, there are methods you can follow that allow you much greater assurance of correct code and drastically reduce the testing burden (byt being abel to prove that certain classes of errors don't exist in the code). It's akin to static types, which allow you to statically catch a lot of type errors obviating reducing the need to spend time testing for possible type errors.
The languages and methods used are things like SPARK and B-method The beauty of systems like SPARK is that they provide a degree of flexibility in how much work you go to depending on how much extra assurance you want. It is quite possible to simply specify critical portions of code with a little extra formality (basically extended static checks beyond what type checing alone can give you) through to fully specifying everything and doing formal proofs for the whole system. You can tailor the effort and assurance to the needs of the project.
(This time without that dangling link - that'll teahc me not to preview)
When you are writing software for life-critical applications, there is various software and techniques that ensures bug-free code. Just look at all the airplanes, powerplants, car computers, etc. It's not very usual at all to see one fail critically.
When you are writing software for life critical systems, there are methods you can follow that allow you much greater assurance of correct code and drastically reduce the testing burden (byt being abel to prove that certain classes of errors don't exist in the code). It's akin to static types, which allow you to statically catch a lot of type errors obviating reducing the need to spend time testing for possible type errors.
I find the attemps of the so-called pro-science lobby to ridicule the ID argument in the form of the flying spaghetti monster very unscientific and cowardly. I realise that it helps them laugh, and helps them pursuade themselves that they personally have a sound basis for their own beliefs even though they have taken as little effort to validate them as they think the "religious fundamentalists" have for theirs.
In the end FSM is about using the same method of argument to arrive at odd conclusions. I personally don't find it terribly good at that - it isn't really a good mapping of ID style arguments. You can try this essay about gravity which maps very closely to ID arguments, and using the same methods manages to show that gravity is a flawed theory, and that we need to teach the controversy on that one too. If you can explain why that argument isn't valid, then you can explain why ID's arguments aren't valid.
Such a method of argument - deconstructing the oppositions argument and using it to demonstrate something absurd - is entirely valid. It's one of the better demonsatrations of why Plantinga's ontological argument for the existence of God is flawed - you can prove the existence of invisible tartan elephants by exactly the same method. Just because the FSM does a poor job of it doesn't mean it isn't a valid approach.
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I was discussing the global warming issue just last Tuesday with someone who was very adamant that humans are responsible for everything.
Are humans responsible for everything when it comes to Global Warming or the greenhouse effect? Of course not, don't be silly. And nobody who actually has a clue but is concerned about the issue claims that. The claim is that humans are responsible for a significant deviation in the expected natural lavels of global warming via the greenhouse effect.
As I offered more and more opposing evidence suggesting that there is no definitive proof that mankind is responsible
There isn't any "definitive proof" that humans are responsible for significant deviations in factors affecting global climate. Just like there isn't any "definitive proof" that evolution is correct, or that dark matter exists. What there is, is a weight of evidence toward the degree of impact of human factors that puts the burden of proof pretty squarely on those claiming humans are not responsible.
What do we know? We know that in the past 200 years humans have produced large volumes of carbon dioxide and methane through various industrial processes. We now know that current levels of carbon dioxide and methane are the highest they've been for over 650,000 years. We know that global temperature correlates extremely closely with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over a range of 650,000 years. We know that atmospheric carbon dioxide traps heat, and can cause global warming. We know that there has been an acceleration in the rate or rise of global temperatures (beyond what would be expected coming out of the "little ice age" 400 years ago) that is apparently unprecendented for the last 2000 years or so.
Are humans solely responsible for the current warming trend? No, we're coming out of small dip in global climate, so there was some warming anyway. You'll also find that solar variation accounts for around 30% or the observed warming (or at least that's what the IPCC reports claim), and other natural cycles are responsible for some as well. The fact remains that humans have produced a lot of carbon dioxide and methane in the last 200 years, that those gases do cause warming, and that the levels of those gases are unprecendented to the last 650,000 years. Humans are providing a significant forcing compared to natural fluctuations, it would be surprising if that didn't have an impact.
Jedidiah.
Bottom line: Some OSS is good, some is crap. J"OSS" isn't any kind of magic term.
Very, very true. Anyone can write a piece of crap and release it as OSS. A quick browse through freshmeat or soureforge will turn up any number of OSS projects that are, quite simply, complete garbage. But then that shouldn't really be the point. OSS isn't a magic term that makes software good, sure, but the real point is that "Proprietary Shrink Wrapped Software" isn't a magic term that makes software good either. Which is to say the claim shouldn't be that OSS software is all good, but merely that OSS can be an entirely viable option - sometimes it is every bit as good, and sometimes better, than proprietary alternatives.
Why is that even worth mentioning? As obvious as it may seem to us, the reality is that the concept of freely available, community developed software being anything but cheap crap is not really that widespread in the mainstream. The concept that maybe, for this project, using an open source solution (and the advantages that that model of development offers) might be the best way to go, is only really starting to dawn on a lot of businesses. OSS advocacy (the sane kind at least) isn't about OSS as a magic solution, but rather about OSS as entirely viable solution in some cases, and a solution that offers its own unique advantages.
Jedidiah.
What we need is a standard way for X windows to have a thing like 'screen' were you can save your current output and move it to any computer that can handle X windows.
You mean like xmove? Basically xmove starts up a pseudoserver which clients can connect to. At startup clients connecting to the pseudoserver display on the default XServer, but can be moved to any other display on the network.
I agree that a cleaned up easy to use xmove system would be a nice idea though.
Jedidiah.
I'll expand on the issue of dark matter a little. It's still rather simplified, but it is more to the point on the issue of dark matter particularly.
The original problem that lead to postulating dark matter involves observations of galaxies. Galaxies rotate and physics makes predictions about the orbital velocity of stars in a galaxy based on their distance from the centre of the galaxy. The problem is that these predictions don't square very well with observations. In general observations show stars distant from the center of the galaxy orbiting much faster than expected. You can express this in terms of rotation curves making the problem relatively clear. The proposed solution to this is to assume that there must be extra unobserved (hence dark) mass providing extra gravitational energy, and thus extra orbital velocity, to the more outlying stars.
There are other theories to explain the observations such as Modified Newtonian Dynamics, but they tend to run into their own problems, and currently aren't anywhere near as widely accepted as the dark matter solution.
Jedidiah.
Finland has a reasonably strong cinematic history. Probably the most notable film for non-Finns recently would The Man Without a Past which was nominated for best foreign film at the Academy awards, and won the grand jury prize at Cannes, among numerous other awards.
If you don't stoop to watching foreign film and hence never heard of that, you could always try the Hollywood films from Finnish director Renny Harlin which includes wonderful schlock such as Die Hard 2, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Deep Blue Sea, and The Exorcist: The Beginning.
Jedidiah.
Do they have anything useful to say as to how humans have arrived at the set(s) of moral codes we use now?
Well that's more an issue for archeology and cultural anthropology and thus quite outside the purview of philosophy which is what Kant and Russell specialised in, so no, they, and other philosophers have little to say about how our cultures arrived at their various moral codes.
What the anthropological view is I can't honestly say having not really done any research into the matter. Again, however, I don't see a necessity to explain the development of moral codes by dictat from some divine entity. At the most basic level I'm sure it's possible to construct a reasonable scenario where moral codes were developed in an essentially evolutionary manner - those societies that hewed to more useful moral codes (that generated more cooperative and productive societies) are clearly more likely to be successful and expand than societies that pursue less cooperative moral codes. Over time and with the development of language to codify and fix successful moral codes it's entirely conceivable that the moral codes of antiquity that we are familiar with were developed. That, of course, is not to say that that is how current moral codes were developed, merely that it is entirely conceivable, and reasonably plausible.
Jedidiah.
You're right. My earlier question had to do with addressing whether religion is the basis for our current moral codes (or more specifcally, I had laws in mind.) But I did ask about neccessity. As you point out, you could in fact have a moral code that consists of nothing more than "it's immoral to wear clothes". Such an independant code would not be useful not accepted in the world once he got out of the box, but it could be done.
I think the point is that, presuming you had a small society of people in the box to allow for generalisation and/or issues of universality, it is entirely possible for someone in the the box to construct a moral code almost identical Kant's or Russell's, despite their complete lack of exposure ot any religion of any kind. While Kant and Russell were exposed to religion, their means of derivation for the moral attitudes mean that exposure to religion is not a requirement to develop the same or similar moral codes. You can argue, of course, that Kant or Russell's moral codes are wrong and useless, but then I could make the same argument about your moral code with equally sufficient foundation. I think you'll find that Kant and Russell's moral codes agree with your own on a sufficiently large number of points that you would accept them as valuable (at least as valuable as any religious moral code differing from your own, if not more so - see islamic, hindu, confucian, and buddhist moral codes for example), wich is the main point here. A person does not need religion to arrive at and follow a moral code that most non-fundamentalist religious people would find respectable.
Jedidiah.
You may as well say Plato is a necessary ingredient of morality given that all modern thinking is influenced, at least in some way, byt his writings. Is mathematics necessary for morality? Can you honestly say that your life hasn't been influenced in some way by the mathematical ideas of the last however many thousands of years?
The question was whether religion was necessary for morality. The answer is that, reardless of how things happened to have developed here. the isn't any reason that religion is required. A person raised in a box shielded from all religious principles is just as capable of developing a moral code from his experiences as anyone else. I don't see how your argument makes religion necessary for morality.
Jedidiah.
Hm, so are you of the opinion that religion can have no benefit at all, and that there is a natural moral code completely independant of any religious beliefs?
I would think that you could subscribe to a number of views and still disgree with the concept that religion is a necessity in informing a moral code. You can take the view that there is a natural moral code that can be logically derived, following Kant or similar. You can take the view that morality is simply a human construction, that religious moral codes are actually just human dictates rather than dictated by some deity, and thus construct your own moral code via whatever means you see fit. You can take the view that morality is relative, back it up by pointing to the diversity and contradictory nature of the various different religious moral codes , and construct your own moral code upon experience and logical inference and extrapolation. None of those require subscribing to or being informed by any religious moral code, and can result in moral beliefs of, for example, Kant, or Bertrand Russell, which represents quite a high standard really.
Jedidiah.
And make sure they update comments if changes necessitate it. There's nothing worse than reading through a function's description, complete with well-documented inputs/outputs/conditions/etc. and finding out that those things no longer apply because somebody changed a 1 to a 2.
That's why it's nice to have some formal semantics for inputs, outputs and conditions so that the documentation can be easily and automatically converted to, say, unittests. Take, for instance, JML which provides semantics for commenting your functions in a way that
(1) Can be used to generate automatic runtime checks for debugging
(2) Can be automatically included in your documentation
(3) Can be used to automatically generate JUnit unit tests
If you change the code but not the comment in a way that means it no longer behaves as the comment indicates... well the code will fail the unit test.
Even little things like Python's doctest module can be kind of nice, ensuring that the docstrings still represent the code they are meant to be documenting.
Jedidiah.
Well see in the bledisloe cup where australia has already won it for the past 3 years
...and as far as NRL is concered, doesnt NZ have a team?
Do you mean the Bledisloe cup which New Zealand has won for the last 3 years? It's not still 2002 you know.
That would be the New Zealand Warriors. Yes, they are a bit up and down but they were minor premieres and grand finalists in 2002 (you know, back when you guys still had the Bledisloe cup). And then there's the fact that many of the Australian NRL teams are packed with Kiwi players...
I believe it was the last time I watched a test at the WACA on TV.
If you want an "easy to use" linux cluster try Scyld, it's pretty much plug and go integrated linux cluster solution out of the box. Then again, that's what you would expect from a distribution tailored explicitly for clustering and HPC solutions.
Jedidiah.
Blame it on JUnit. Since it provides a way to make unit testing easier, it's easier to get people to actually do it. When I was in school, we talked about unit testing, but never really did it very well. By employing the latest buzzwords such as JUnit and Spring in your design, it's much less work to build your unit tests that it would be with other languages.
At this point I'd like to point out the existence of JML, an annotation syntax and set of associated tools for Java that makes a lot of things easier and more convenient. JML allows you to do design by contract in Java and if you compile with the provided compiler jmlc it will automatically include runtime checks based on your pre and post conditions and invariants. Another tool, jmldoc, will generate JavaDoc documentation augmented with the extra specification your provided with JML annotations, making for much better documentation. You also have jmlunit which will automatically generate JUnit test classes based on your annotations.
That means you get automatically generated unit tests, the constraints of which are automatically included in your documentation (as well as in the actual code as annotations) and the option to use those constraints as runtime checks for debugging purposes. That's an awful lot of cheap benefits just for writing annotations to your code as you go.
General examples of using JML for DbC can be found here, and examples of jmlunit generating JUnit test classes can be found here.
Jedidiah.
But have you actually read any of it - original source material rather than soundbites, op-ed charaterisations, etc.? It's a lot less strident than the media portrays it, often goes to great pains to try and consider all the possibilities, ty different models, discuss alternative causes etc. Sit down and read some of it sometime, you might be surprised to learn that the scientists involved in this debate are not anywhere near as politicised as you think.
Jedidiah.
There are a couple of feedbacks from water vapour, there's the reflection via cloudcover, and there's radiated heat trapped by the water vapour. There are all sorts of factors involved in that using a lot of complex issues to do with cloud formation that I can't say I understand. There has been a lot of work on modelling, but I don't think it's all that well understood yet all things considered. Certainly the models (with forcings) have a resulting equilibrium state, and most that I've seen end up warmer but I don't think it's a settled question. Try this random reference on the subject.
Jedidiah.
But there is a problem, which I've never seen adequately addressed, with the IPCC Hockey Stick curves. This the controversy with Mann et al. We do know from historical evidence that there actually was a Medieval Warm period, and the evidence is that it was hotter than now. There was also a cool period in around 1700. Both of these vanish from the record with the IPCC hockey stick curves. Then, if you get into how these curves were derived, lets say just that the derivation is very remote from any observational evidence.
That's a fairly strong claim. I think you'll find that Mann recognises medieval warm periods and cooler periods in the 1700s. The medieval warm period just isn't warmer than present temperatures in his reconstruction based on proxy data. In fact, that's the case for most reconstructions based on proxy data from a wide variety of sources. There are differences in the different reconstructions, but in general there's a reasonable amount of agreement. Don't take my word for it though, here's a plot with 10 different reconstructions along with full citations of the source papers for each so you can check the methodology on each of them. Given the variety of methods used for derivation amongst those reports, from glacier records to tree rings, it's at least resonably convincing.
As to alternative views - the only evidence I've seen for a significantly warmer medieval period is derived from exactly the same data as Mann's, in roughly the same manner, so if you think one is suspect... What we do have is one report by two Canadians, one an economist the other a businessman, claiming radically different results from everyone else using different slightly techniques. I'm not writing them off, but I would be interested to see a little more work on the issue, especially when there are discussions of issues with their techniques (and nice simplified versions) that seem quite reasonable.
None of this is to say that McIntyre and McKitrick are wrong, but one has to ask why you believe them and dismiss the ten other reports by different people that generally agree quite well.
Jedidiah.
It's that kind of black and white approach to this and other topics, both by the people and especially the media, that has trivialized the issue at hand.
it's always useful to apply Fisher's deduction:
"The more issues a person attempts to shoehorn down into an artificial liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American."
Debate about climate change is a debate in the US because the whole issue is deconstructed and soundbitten into a pair of simplistic politicised extremes with nary a scrap serious reasoning left. If you actually read the IPCC reports, and the peer reviewed criticisms (as opposed to the op-ed pieces) there's a lot less debate than you might think, and neither position is anywhere as extreme as the soundbites and op-eds make out. The climate is warming, we have some decent ideas as to what factors are causing it (and they are many and diverse), and it seems human actions are somewhat of a factor. Don't take my word for it though, actually do some reading on your own.
Jedidiah.
I could be missing something, but isn't this basic astronomy (or whatever science you care to term it)? Water vapor (among other gasses) is responsible for keeping a planet heated, and not a frozen ball of rock like Mars. Maintaining that delicate balance of how much water is in the air is important of course, but noting that water is causing the atmosphere to retain heat is... nothing new.
Yes, this is not some groundbreaking new assertion. In fact it is things like this - feedback mechanisms (both positive and negative) that make climate change modelling so hard. If it was a simple matter of "C02 creates more warmth" we'd have figured it all out a while ago. More warmth can produce more water vapor, but depending on what type of clouds are formed you can end up with trapped heat, or more solar radiation reflected and a cooling effect. There are many other feedback mechanisms that I simply can't recall and many more I've never heard of. How and when they respond, and how they interact makes for a very difficult and complex problem indeed.
Jedidiah,
Perl, of course, is the ideal language for such a thing, and you would be looking for Acme::Smirch, which does a fabulous job of taking any perl script and producing a perfectly functional perl script that uses no alphanumeric characters or whitespace. The results of applying smirch to the smirch module are... well they're impossible to get past the lameness filter, but I think it is safe to say that it is fairly obfuscated.
Jedidiah.
Come now, this was a mistake on the part of the specification and design team. Unless you have a specification that says "you cannot do X" then how is the testing team to know
(1) To try and do X to check if it is prevented
(2) That X is incorrect if they do manage to do it
And of course had the specification covered this, then the programmers, assuming they were any good, would have to account for it in their code, and the condition would be included in the test process and checked in testing.
If the correctness of your system is important (like with a life critical system) then expending effort trying to get your specification as complete as possible is going to help a lot. That means that your specification probably ought to be a formal one so you can adjust it if required and analyse the effects of those adjustments.
Jedidiah.
You are assuming tight, correct specs - a genuine rarity.
Which is, in a sense, the problem. If you are developing a life critical application, then spending a few iterative design rounds tightening up and testing the specification are more than going to pay off in terms of potential errors caught. There are formal languages for specifications (so you can be precise and not rely on an English language "description" of what is required), and those formal languages are amenable to analysis. In practice just sitting down and formalising requirements into this language goes a very long way toward determining where ambiguities lie, and which parts need to be checked with the client to be certain you've captured the requirement correctly. It's, in a sense, similar to doing iterative design by coding up a quick prototype and using the need to formalise your ideas into code to get a better idea of where the issues lie. If people took specification a little more seriously, at least as far as being a little bit more rigorous and formal, I think projects in general for which safety or security is important would be far better off.
Jedidiah.
When you are writing software for life-critical applications, there is various software and techniques that ensures bug-free code. Just look at all the airplanes, powerplants, car computers, etc. It's not very usual at all to see one fail critically.
When you are writing software for life critical systems, there are methods you can follow that allow you much greater assurance of correct code and drastically reduce the testing burden (byt being abel to prove that certain classes of errors don't exist in the code). It's akin to static types, which allow you to statically catch a lot of type errors obviating reducing the need to spend time testing for possible type errors.
The languages and methods used are things like SPARK and B-method The beauty of systems like SPARK is that they provide a degree of flexibility in how much work you go to depending on how much extra assurance you want. It is quite possible to simply specify critical portions of code with a little extra formality (basically extended static checks beyond what type checing alone can give you) through to fully specifying everything and doing formal proofs for the whole system. You can tailor the effort and assurance to the needs of the project.
(This time without that dangling link - that'll teahc me not to preview)
Jedidiah
When you are writing software for life-critical applications, there is various software and techniques that ensures bug-free code. Just look at all the airplanes, powerplants, car computers, etc. It's not very usual at all to see one fail critically.
When you are writing software for life critical systems, there are methods you can follow that allow you much greater assurance of correct code and drastically reduce the testing burden (byt being abel to prove that certain classes of errors don't exist in the code). It's akin to static types, which allow you to statically catch a lot of type errors obviating reducing the need to spend time testing for possible type errors.
The languages and methods used are things like SPARK and B-method among others. The beauty of systems like SPARK is that they provide a degree of flexibility in how much work you go to depending on how much extra assurance you want. It is quite possible to simply specify critical portions of code with a little extra formality (basically extended static checks beyond what type checing alone can give you) through to fully specifying everything and doing formal proofs for the whole system. You can tailor the effort and assurance to the needs of the project.
Jedidiah.
I find the attemps of the so-called pro-science lobby to ridicule the ID argument in the form of the flying spaghetti monster very unscientific and cowardly. I realise that it helps them laugh, and helps them pursuade themselves that they personally have a sound basis for their own beliefs even though they have taken as little effort to validate them as they think the "religious fundamentalists" have for theirs.
In the end FSM is about using the same method of argument to arrive at odd conclusions. I personally don't find it terribly good at that - it isn't really a good mapping of ID style arguments. You can try this essay about gravity which maps very closely to ID arguments, and using the same methods manages to show that gravity is a flawed theory, and that we need to teach the controversy on that one too. If you can explain why that argument isn't valid, then you can explain why ID's arguments aren't valid.
Such a method of argument - deconstructing the oppositions argument and using it to demonstrate something absurd - is entirely valid. It's one of the better demonsatrations of why Plantinga's ontological argument for the existence of God is flawed - you can prove the existence of invisible tartan elephants by exactly the same method. Just because the FSM does a poor job of it doesn't mean it isn't a valid approach.
Jedidiah.