The strict typing and verbose exception handling is annoying if you just want to get something done quick. However, if you have a large team of programmers (of varying skill levels) and a large code base, you start to appreciate that the language tries to force good programming practice, and that a lot of bugs are caught not at runtime but at compile time...This is a lot more important than raw performance, since a lot more time is spent on maintaining a product than building it in the first place (90% is number often cited).
If you feel that's the case then I suggest you consider what else you can do beyond just static types to force good programming practice and catch more bugs at compile (or verification) time. Adding some basic annotations to your code specifying, for example, preconditions and postconditions for methods, and invariant properties for classes, forces good programming practices and catches even more bugs at compile time, and can certainly make maintnenance easier.
If you're writing production code (as opposed to doing rapid prototyping) then really you ought to have a clear idea of what you intend a method to do before you write it. Given good semantics (and such thigns do exist) it isn't hard to encode those intentions formally into pre and post conditions on the method. You already do this to some extent with static types: you specify a type signature for the method; we're only really talking about having some slightly more explicit assertions about what the method does. If you're willing to do that then you automatically have much better documentation of your methods, and means to verify said documentation against the actual code you've written (by formalising the documentation), which is both good programming practice, and good for maintainability. Even better, because of the formalised statement of what the method is supposed to do, you can do some static verification akin to static type checking and catch more errors earlier.
If you like Java than check out JML which is an annotation language for Java that allows for this sort of thing. There are extra tools you can get (like ESC/Java and others) to do further static checks based on those annotations, the annotations themselves automatically get included in the JavaDocs for better documentation, and you can use the annotations to automatically generate unit tests and a testing harness for your code. That's a lot of easy wins for the little extra work of being a little bit more specific than just static types.
Ah yes, a random site that simply makes the claim that the fossil is a forgery. It should be noted, of course, that there are in fact 7 different specimens of Archaeopteryx, discovered at various different times in various places and in various degrees of intactness. We aren't talking about a single forged specimen but instead about 7 different independent forgeries that all happen to coincide almost exactly. That's a remarkable conspiracy you're claiming, and you have, let's be frank, absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back that up - the best you seem to be able to point to is a creationist who says "well it looks suspicious to me".
Couldn't find any details on that either - care to provide some decent references?
And how do you suppose the intermediate forms of things like dino/birds work? Things like the lungs are too different to have viable intermediaries.
And how, exactly, would you know a lot about the structures of the lungs of dinosaurs? Soft tissue doesn't get preserved. The best we've got is the strcuture of the rib cage and chest cavity which, even for dromaeosaurids was remarkably similar to birds? The best you could claim is that the lungs of modern reptiles and birds are too different - but then the general morphology of a crocodile and a chicken are very different yet we have many intermediate forms of various dinosaurs showing how that can work. It seems easy enough to believe that the lungs, and everything else, changed and adapted as well. What exactly is your firm foundation for believeing that dinosaurs didn't develop birdlike lungs?
This is a silly game - for every intermedite form produced you'll simply shoehorn it into one category of the other and say "but what is between those?". The world's supply of discoverable fossil's is very much finite, while you can keep splitting hairs indefinitely.
In practice Archeopteryx is between lizards and birds. Between lizards and Archeopteryx are therapod dinosaurs. Between early lizard like therapods and Archeopteryx are late more bird-like dromaeosaurids and between early dromaeosaurids like Troodons and Archeopteryx are various feathered dinosaurs, which includes fossils that simply had feathers, apparently for warmth, through to later fossils that actually had clearly flight adapted feathers.
Want to try something different? How about whale evolution? We can start with a land dwelling mammal that looked fairly dog like but had certain ear structures not found in other mammals that are more suitable for hearing underwater. Then there's ambulocetus which was similar, but in practice was rather akin to a mammalian crocodile, with back legs obviously adpated for swimming, the same ear structures as our first creature, and a nose structure, similar to a crocodile, that was ideal for breathing while immersed in shallow water. Next there are things like rodhocetus which is remarkably whale like, yet still posses back legs, and still has a nasal structure placng the nostrils toward the tip as in ambulocetus. There's aetiocetus which shows the transition from snout tip nostrils toward nostils at the top of the skulls as in modern whales. Then there's basilosaurus which is decidedly whale like, but lacking in a few modern whale features, and retaining distinct, but quite useless, hind limbs similar to those of rodhocetus.
You can find similar sets of forms for the development of horses, the development of snakes from lizards, and even for the ape to man path, among many others.
Oh, I'm sure you can parse those and say "but what's between that?", but I think for most people who are not being mindlessly dogmatic that represents fairly reasonable evidence of transitions from lizards to birds, or from land dwelling mammals to whales, an, if they bothered to do the extra research and reading, the development of horses, snakes and man.
Just as we must constantly update students' computers and books, updating science and core academic curriculum is essential. Keeping them in the dark with an antiquated, unproven teaching theory is impractical and unhealthy. The theory of evolution remains simply that, a theory...A newer, alternative view provides balance to the age-old argument, pitting creationism against evolution. It's called intelligent design.
Yes, but science isn't about "balance", it's about trying to find the best explanations for reality. If a view doesn't explain observable reality very well then science has little interest in trying to strike a balance with that view, it simply want to find a better explanation.
Intelligent design is not creationism or naturalism; it simply follows the empirical evidence of design wherever it leads.
The issue, really, is "what is the empirical evidence of design" because that is really the heart of the matter. In practice it amounts to "these are things which are not yet explained in the current theory". They are not, per se, things that are contrary to the current theory, just points that haven't yet been heavily scrutinised and explanations provided. How exactly do you know something was designed? Effectively you simply say "I cannot see how this could have evolved". That's not really the same thing as saying it can't have evolved - that is, saying that evolutionary theory specifically predicts such a thing cannot exist. It is not a falsification, but merely a lack of explanation.
It is actually surprisingly easy to take this same method of argument, of pointing to the gaps where explanation hasn't yet reached, and create a similar theory to Intelligent Design for any subject area in science - there's always something that has yet to be fully explained. Take, for instance, gravity. You can construct a reasonable sounding argument using exactly the same techniques as Intelligent Design and end up with a theory that, I'm quite sure, you could get not insignificant support for from various religious groups.
Intelligent design is accepted by religious and nonreligious academics and scientists; supported by microbiologists and mathematics. In a Natural History Magazine study, three proponents of intelligent design summarize their findings this way:
* Every living cell contains many ultra-sophisticated molecular machines. * Intelligence leaves behind a characteristic signature. * Darwin's finches and four-winged fruit fly theories cannot account for all features of living things.
And the "Uncaused Force" theory is supported by physics and mathematics (just check those journal articles cited in the essay: they are all real, and say exactly what the essay claims they do). You could summarise "Uncaused Force" findings this way:
* At various scale levels there are observable forces that have no observable cause. * Interaction in our universe by somethign external to our universe leaves behind observable signatures. * Einstein's relativity cannot account for the observed forces.
It's all just the same argument, so why do you not accept "Uncaused Force"?
You can't falsify a theory by noting that it hasn't yet explained something - it is interesting to note, but it is not a falsification. Claiming that a theory is flawed is not evidence for an alternate theory.
Whatever you consider supremely important, above all else, is the object of worship.
If you wish to extend worship to be so broad then animals do worship things, and your initial point is moot - in essence you are just playing semantic games. Some animals, I'm sure, consider the next meal supremely important. Dogs certainly seem to worship (in the sense you seem to wish to use it here) their masters. A great many animals worship their offspring in the sense you define worship. Should I consider dogs human? What of chimps? Penguins?
Either you have no division between animal and man or you are excluding those, like myself, who do not engage in religious worship. I wouls suggest your attempts to define men an "special" are rapidly leading nowhere...
All of the things you mentioned in your post are true. In all these things, man only differs from animals in degree. There is ONE trait of humans though, and only ONE, that distinguishes humans not in degree, but in kind. No religious activity equivalent to prayer, sacrifice or worship has ever been observed in any other species.
Given that I have never been moved to worship, prayer, or religion, does that mean I am not human, or pehaps that I simply lack a soul?
I think you'll find that chimps are quite capable of compassion, and yet also capable of acts of cruelty that, given their apparent understanding, are acts of malice rather than just animal play. The question is not whether there are any animals that are incapable of acts that humans are - that much is quite clear: the average sheep is remarkably lacking in intelligence; but rather whether is is really possible to draw any clear division between animal and man. In practice everything we seek to use to define such a line turns out to have some counter-example. It would seem that humans are just another animal, no ore blessed nor cursed than any other.
I think there should be a definate emphasis here that the US isn't in a dabate now over science in general, it's a debate about teaching controversial science in the classroom.
That's just a weak excuse - the debate, ultimately, is about science and the scientific method. The particular controversy of the moment is simply one example of that. It is entirely possible to use identical methods of argument to the ID people to create a controversy about any particular field of science. Here's one: it sounds every bit as serious, and scientific as ID arguments, and demonstrates the controvesy about gravity. If you can figure out why that essay doesn't mean that "uncaused force" is a valid point and that gravity is controversial science you'll also have figured out why ID isn't valid in scientific debate, and why evolution isn't really controversial science.
These are the people who want to bring back Old Testament style theocracy, and think that it jibes with the Constitution...but these people, given a chance, will do everything they can to ensure nothing that conflicts with their interpretation of the Bible gets taught
On that general front you might want to keep an eye on the Constitution Restoration Act 2005, which basically seeks to bar the Supreme Court from hearing any case that seeks "relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government".
The practical implications should that actually get passed are, well, rather interesting. One is left wondering exactly how different this is from the Iraqi constitution's reference to the Koran being "a sovereign source of law" (at least it become "a" rather than "the"). It is a long way from making the US a practicing theocracy, but it does go a long way toward laying some necessary groundwork to make such a thing possible.
I believe you'll find that science is concerned with falsifiability rather than provability. You have to head into the rather more esoteric realms of pure math before you tend to face questions of provability (and interestingly even the question of whether a thing can be proved can require proof).
Is science falsifiable? I think under most accepted definitions of science you could say that it is indeed falsifiable, at least in a theoretic sense, which is all that's required for these purposes. Provability is a straw man: it is not a claim that science is making.
Why does no one ever attempt to explain that God created man using evolution as a tool? Whatever happened to the divine clockwinder theory?
People do, but that doesn't mean it gets any acceptance from certain groups. One of the fundamental issues is that a lot of christians believe humans have a soul and that animals do not. For that to be true you need some divine intervention in the evolutionary process to grant humans a soul once they become human. My understanding is that even the Catholic church, which accepts evolution, holds that such an intervention occurred. Once you have to believe that God has some active hand in the evolutionary process it's not much of a stretch to accept a few more fiddles along the way and thus you get Intelligent Design: the belief that evolution occurs, but with ongoing active tweaking by some external entity.
Basically it comes down to egocentrism - the desire to believe that humans are somehow special and separate from other living entities. To believe that you really need to believe that there was some active intervention to set humans apart. This really has little to do with religion necessarily (though most religions tend to grant humans such special status and hence have some explaining to do), but rather a general unwillingness to accept ourselves as simply a part of nature.
In practice humans are really only very subtley different from other animals. Every time someone claims to have some defining property that sets humans apart from animals (self awareness, tool use, awareness of mortality, language, social learning, etc.) we find new examples of animals that do the same. Tool use is now widely noted across the animal kingdom, and self awareness, and awareness of mortality are reported for a variety of animals. At least some level of language has been noted amongst various animals, and efforts to teach great apes more advanced languages have been remarkably successful. We really don't give animals anywhere near enough credit.
"They can do lots of things, but still you can't talk to them, and that is one of the things we will get this decade," he predicted.
I saw Mr. Gates say this same thing at a Expo Keynote speech in the '90s. I said it then, I'll say it now, we'll get real speech recognition in computers sort of, but it's not clear people really want to talk to them anyway.
The real problem is that when people think about "talking to computers" what they are really thinking of is something Star Trek style where you can tell the computer generally what you want and it will interpret what you say and get the job done. That's way more than decent speech recognition (which is bloody hard), that's having some decent level of AI that is capable of understanding, and operating based upon, natural language. That is a very long way off indeed, and half assed predictions of it occurring this decade are laughable.
So what about just basic quality voice recognition that the computer can respond to? Stop and think about what would be required to fully verbally specify a lot of basic tasks in standardised computer pareable language. For the most part it is going to be more trouble than it's worth, and only valuable for a small variety of generally trivial tasks.
Talking to computers will become a useful and widely used interface as soon as computers can comprehend and interpret natural language and not before.
To be perfectly honest I've been thinking about going the reverse direction - I agree LaTeX just doesn't do drawing well. I think it might be easier and more productive to, say, build a presentation builder out of inkscape and simply have SVG or PDF presentations. One day I might even get around to seeing whether that can be done.
...which means you want a built in tarball roller? Not a bad idea. Anybody want to add a button to Kile's File/Save?
Okay done. Well, it's not in the File/Save, but automatically archiving a project into tar.gz format at the click of a button has been available for a while.
Well, back when I was messing with this stuff there was a version of rxvt that could be compiled against Cygwin to run on Windows natively (no X/Cygwin required) and that was what I used. As I recall it had some minor quirks due to the "X11 program native on windows" compatability issues, but if you're used rxvt on UNIX it should all seem normal enough.
Before we start, I agree with you entirely: LaTeX is a silly option as any sort of replacement for OpenDocument formats, and the person who suggested it was a fool. I ought to clear up a few points however....presentations, OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it.
LaTeX actually does exceptionally good presentations if you actually know how to use it. There are some packages out there to help, or you can simply roll your own to get the best results. In fact LaTeX offers something no Office suite I've ever seen does: the ability to have a single document that is both the presentation and the full paper report at the mere toggle a switch.
I think the biggest problem is that the basic LaTeX slides package sucks (it was designed for OHP transparencies) and some of the other presentation pakages are a little underwhelming in terms of visual flair. In practice it is quite easy to quickly design "templates" (in practice documentclasses) that look as good or better than anything I've seen PowerPoint produce - I've even written the better part of a GUI tool to let you drag and drop images and text to design one - but it takes a little know how which, apparently, most LaTeX presenters don't have.
LaTeX represents a damn fine solution to the issue of presentations, especially when you are doing one as a summary of more detailed paper report.
macro language (admitedly not standardised in OpenDocument). OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it;
What exactly do you think TeX is? TeX is a macro language. It may not have the "live updates" that you seem to have in mind, but that more to do with the compilation step rather than any lack of macro capability of TeX's part. Run TeX again and you'll get all your updates/changes magically propogating through.
I'm smart, most of us here are smart, but I'll admit that sometimes I run into the occasional road block where I can't do something in Linux that I can do in Windows.
I did spend at least an hour getting Quake III to work in Linux properly. It still doesn't quite work as well as in Windows.
It's been a while since I used Windows (probably around 2000 or 2001), but I used to run into roadblocks there too. You say you had trouble getting Quake III working on Linux? It took me quite some time to get a decent working TeX installation on Windows. Perl, I seem to recall, was also a little annoying: you could install ActivePerl but every now and then you'd run into hiccups with paths or environment variables. Nothing hard of course, but then there's nothing too hard about setting up Quake III on Linux, it just takes a little time to find all the hoops to jump through.
Of course I understand getting TeX, Perl, Python, a decent shell and terminal emulator (which believe me took quite some effort on Windows) is now a lot easier because Cygwin has matured (it was still a little young and quirky at the time I was using it, and TeX certainly wasn't in the package list initially), but then installing Doom3 on Linux was a hell of a lot easier. Everything has it's quirks and its difficulties - it's all about what you want to do, and as long as your expectations are defined by Windows then clearly Linux will look harder. In my experience, depending on what exactly it is you need to do, Linux and Windows turn about to be about as hard to manage as each other.
What about us people who don't know what commands do what? Man pages are fairly useless if you don't know which command to ask for.
Heh. Never underestimate the value of spending a day working through man pages for every program in/usr/bin, it can be remarkably educational. I admit that's trickier on a lot of modern Linux systems that have so many programs in there, but you can skip over a lot of them (all the obvious KDE and GNOME apps) and only worry about the weird obscure looking ones you don't recognise. A lot of the time you'll do man [obscure command] read the summary at the top and go "Huh, didn't realise there was something to do that" and not worry about it. The point is that one day you'll be sitting there trying to figure out how to do something and remember "I read a man page for something that could do that..." a quick skim through ls/usr/bin and (usually after at most 2 or 3 missed guesses) you can pull up the manpage for what you want. Sometimes knowing that there is something that can do [obscure task] is the most important part. Other than that, reading the man page through for some of the more common commands that have a vast array of switches (ls, grep, cut, sort, etc.) can make you realise that some of those can do things you really wouldn't have expected them to be able to , and suggest cunning new ways to use them is tasks where you might not thought they would apply.
Just knowing what's available and all the various things that can be done with the tools is a very valuable lesson, and worth a little time investment. It takes less time than you might think to skim through and at least become acquainted with what all the various obscure programs in/usr/bin actually do.
Any bearded terminal hacker will tell you, when asked about the book they learned from, that while they went from one book to another in their early days, the most productive thing they ever did was learn how to read the documentation already available to them.
While the available documentation (man pages usually) are nice, there are a few books out there that quitte simply are great references and provide better material than the standard documentation. My personal favourite is UNIX Power Tools. It is mostly just a vast, vast collection of tips, tricks and cunning insights into the finer points of UNIX, its shells, and the various command line tools you can expect to find from some exeptionally experienced long time UNIX hackers. It's not a book you sit and read cover to cover, it's the sort of book where you go "I wonder how I could do [obscure thing]?" look it up in the index (another great feature is that the book has one of the most comprehensive and impressive indexes - finding out how to do what you want to do is easy), flip to the relevant section and start reading. Each section is heavily (and well!) cross referenced so in the middle of reading how to do [obscure thing] you read a comment about [other thing you hadn't realised you could do] and have to go and read that section too. An hour or so later you realise that you really need to get back to work and do [obscure thing], but you now also know many cunning ways to exploit UNIX that you would never have thought of yourself, and certainly wouldn't have realised you could do just from reading man pages.
If I buy a new gadget and discover that it fails to meet my needs or expectations, I can return it, not so with books movies or music, If I cant return something, then you better beleave that I am going to be damn sure that I know what I am getting when I purchase it.
Actually that's not true, certainly not with books, unless you buy from a particularly poor bookstore. The bookstores I shop at are happy to accept a returned book if the spine is not broken (no crease marks down the spine) and presuming it is in good condition. I have learned to read books cover to cover without creasing the spine, so should I ever feel disappointed by a book I can always take it back to the store and get my cash back. The worst I have ever experienced is a store that would only give me store credit instead of cash - which isn't so bad considering the amount of books I buy.
For the most part I don't really have any issues, because I generally only buy books I want to keep, but every now and then (like The DaVinci Code for instance) I have finished a book and taken it straight back to the store for a cash refund. This never presents problems.
I know. Look at how much money is made from selling bottled water. That's a commodity if I ever saw one.
It's quite unbelievable really. And the US has to be one of the worst cases. I mean consider how much is made by somemajorpurveyors of bottled water in the US.
Firstly, there is no single battleground between Linux and Windows. There are a number of separate battlegrounds: mobile devices, embedded systems, home desktops, corporate workstations, small servers, mid-range servers, enterprise servers, e-mail servers etc. Winning or losing in any one of these may not have much of an impact in any other.
Some areas may not have much effect but there are significant ties between the others and Microsoft has often exploited this fact to leverage from one to the other.
The obvious example is home desktops and corporate desktops. There was a time when home desktops were a diverse lot with Apple and Amiga being big players, and even more diversity further back. Microsoft managed to deal with IBM and so their platform (MS-DOS) became the platform of choice in the coporate world (due to the dominance of IBM in that market). This dominance on coporate desktops slowly but surely bled into the home desktop market, because people were used to their MS systems at work. The dominance in the corporate desktop granted to Microsoft by IBM played a significant role in MS sucessful expansion into the home desktop market (there were, of course other factors, like the availability of cheap IBM clones, but it is foolish to deny the corporate desktop dominance played no role). Now the tables have turned and it is the corporate desktop where MS is feeling a little heat, and now it is the home desktop that gives MS an advantage: everyone uses MS at home and so learns MS by default, whereas other systems will require "expensive retraining" if used on the corporate desktop.
Similar games are played in the server to desktop arena, where the dominance of Office is used to push MS server solutions which will integrate with the desktops, and the server solutions are in turn used to strengthen the desktop (such as the Exchange/Outlook rerlationship).
The coming thing could well be embedded and mobile devices, and how well they interact and interface with the system. There's a reason MS is pushing hard in this area.
In practice while all the different battlegrounds are indeed their own little domains, there are undeniable effects that come into play as success in one domain increases viability in another. One of the reasons Linux is more viable as a corporate desktop now is the past success of Linux in the corporate server market. Were Linux servers significantly less common it would be much harder to create a viable desktop to compete with the MS desktop which would have far better server/desktop integration.
Actually epsilon needn't be that small, but we can expect it to be bounded by some function of the size of hurricane delta, so you really ought to be watching delta closely if you have any concerns about epsilon.
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The strict typing and verbose exception handling is annoying if you just want to get something done quick. However, if you have a large team of programmers (of varying skill levels) and a large code base, you start to appreciate that the language tries to force good programming practice, and that a lot of bugs are caught not at runtime but at compile time...This is a lot more important than raw performance, since a lot more time is spent on maintaining a product than building it in the first place (90% is number often cited).
If you feel that's the case then I suggest you consider what else you can do beyond just static types to force good programming practice and catch more bugs at compile (or verification) time. Adding some basic annotations to your code specifying, for example, preconditions and postconditions for methods, and invariant properties for classes, forces good programming practices and catches even more bugs at compile time, and can certainly make maintnenance easier.
If you're writing production code (as opposed to doing rapid prototyping) then really you ought to have a clear idea of what you intend a method to do before you write it. Given good semantics (and such thigns do exist) it isn't hard to encode those intentions formally into pre and post conditions on the method. You already do this to some extent with static types: you specify a type signature for the method; we're only really talking about having some slightly more explicit assertions about what the method does. If you're willing to do that then you automatically have much better documentation of your methods, and means to verify said documentation against the actual code you've written (by formalising the documentation), which is both good programming practice, and good for maintainability. Even better, because of the formalised statement of what the method is supposed to do, you can do some static verification akin to static type checking and catch more errors earlier.
If you like Java than check out JML which is an annotation language for Java that allows for this sort of thing. There are extra tools you can get (like ESC/Java and others) to do further static checks based on those annotations, the annotations themselves automatically get included in the JavaDocs for better documentation, and you can use the annotations to automatically generate unit tests and a testing harness for your code. That's a lot of easy wins for the little extra work of being a little bit more specific than just static types.
Jedidiah.
Ah yes, a random site that simply makes the claim that the fossil is a forgery. It should be noted, of course, that there are in fact 7 different specimens of Archaeopteryx, discovered at various different times in various places and in various degrees of intactness. We aren't talking about a single forged specimen but instead about 7 different independent forgeries that all happen to coincide almost exactly. That's a remarkable conspiracy you're claiming, and you have, let's be frank, absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back that up - the best you seem to be able to point to is a creationist who says "well it looks suspicious to me".
Jedidiah.
the standard whale evolutionary path has been discredited, by evolutionists.
Really? Care to provide some references to that? Care to even describe how it was discredited? What exactly is the issue? Wikipedia isn't the best of sources, but it is usually up to date on the latest points, but they make no reference to criticism. There are plenty of other pages about whale origins, and their bibiolgraphies are reasonably up to date. Any searches on Google for "whale evolution discredited" or "cetacean evolution flawed" turns up nothing but creationist sites, and a wikipedia article about recapitulation theory (which is quite unrelated).
Just like the evolution of horses.
Couldn't find any details on that either - care to provide some decent references?
And how do you suppose the intermediate forms of things like dino/birds work? Things like the lungs are too different to have viable intermediaries.
And how, exactly, would you know a lot about the structures of the lungs of dinosaurs? Soft tissue doesn't get preserved. The best we've got is the strcuture of the rib cage and chest cavity which, even for dromaeosaurids was remarkably similar to birds? The best you could claim is that the lungs of modern reptiles and birds are too different - but then the general morphology of a crocodile and a chicken are very different yet we have many intermediate forms of various dinosaurs showing how that can work. It seems easy enough to believe that the lungs, and everything else, changed and adapted as well. What exactly is your firm foundation for believeing that dinosaurs didn't develop birdlike lungs?
Jedidiah.
This is a silly game - for every intermedite form produced you'll simply shoehorn it into one category of the other and say "but what is between those?". The world's supply of discoverable fossil's is very much finite, while you can keep splitting hairs indefinitely.
In practice Archeopteryx is between lizards and birds. Between lizards and Archeopteryx are therapod dinosaurs. Between early lizard like therapods and Archeopteryx are late more bird-like dromaeosaurids and between early dromaeosaurids like Troodons and Archeopteryx are various feathered dinosaurs, which includes fossils that simply had feathers, apparently for warmth, through to later fossils that actually had clearly flight adapted feathers.
Want to try something different? How about whale evolution? We can start with a land dwelling mammal that looked fairly dog like but had certain ear structures not found in other mammals that are more suitable for hearing underwater. Then there's ambulocetus which was similar, but in practice was rather akin to a mammalian crocodile, with back legs obviously adpated for swimming, the same ear structures as our first creature, and a nose structure, similar to a crocodile, that was ideal for breathing while immersed in shallow water. Next there are things like rodhocetus which is remarkably whale like, yet still posses back legs, and still has a nasal structure placng the nostrils toward the tip as in ambulocetus. There's aetiocetus which shows the transition from snout tip nostrils toward nostils at the top of the skulls as in modern whales. Then there's basilosaurus which is decidedly whale like, but lacking in a few modern whale features, and retaining distinct, but quite useless, hind limbs similar to those of rodhocetus.
You can find similar sets of forms for the development of horses, the development of snakes from lizards, and even for the ape to man path, among many others.
Oh, I'm sure you can parse those and say "but what's between that?", but I think for most people who are not being mindlessly dogmatic that represents fairly reasonable evidence of transitions from lizards to birds, or from land dwelling mammals to whales, an, if they bothered to do the extra research and reading, the development of horses, snakes and man.
Jedidiah.
Just as we must constantly update students' computers and books, updating science and core academic curriculum is essential. Keeping them in the dark with an antiquated, unproven teaching theory is impractical and unhealthy. The theory of evolution remains simply that, a theory...A newer, alternative view provides balance to the age-old argument, pitting creationism against evolution. It's called intelligent design.
Yes, but science isn't about "balance", it's about trying to find the best explanations for reality. If a view doesn't explain observable reality very well then science has little interest in trying to strike a balance with that view, it simply want to find a better explanation.
Intelligent design is not creationism or naturalism; it simply follows the empirical evidence of design wherever it leads.
The issue, really, is "what is the empirical evidence of design" because that is really the heart of the matter. In practice it amounts to "these are things which are not yet explained in the current theory". They are not, per se, things that are contrary to the current theory, just points that haven't yet been heavily scrutinised and explanations provided. How exactly do you know something was designed? Effectively you simply say "I cannot see how this could have evolved". That's not really the same thing as saying it can't have evolved - that is, saying that evolutionary theory specifically predicts such a thing cannot exist. It is not a falsification, but merely a lack of explanation.
It is actually surprisingly easy to take this same method of argument, of pointing to the gaps where explanation hasn't yet reached, and create a similar theory to Intelligent Design for any subject area in science - there's always something that has yet to be fully explained. Take, for instance, gravity. You can construct a reasonable sounding argument using exactly the same techniques as Intelligent Design and end up with a theory that, I'm quite sure, you could get not insignificant support for from various religious groups.
Intelligent design is accepted by religious and nonreligious academics and scientists; supported by microbiologists and mathematics. In a Natural History Magazine study, three proponents of intelligent design summarize their findings this way:
* Every living cell contains many ultra-sophisticated molecular machines.
* Intelligence leaves behind a characteristic signature.
* Darwin's finches and four-winged fruit fly theories cannot account for all features of living things.
And the "Uncaused Force" theory is supported by physics and mathematics (just check those journal articles cited in the essay: they are all real, and say exactly what the essay claims they do). You could summarise "Uncaused Force" findings this way:
* At various scale levels there are observable forces that have no observable cause.
* Interaction in our universe by somethign external to our universe leaves behind observable signatures.
* Einstein's relativity cannot account for the observed forces.
It's all just the same argument, so why do you not accept "Uncaused Force"?
You can't falsify a theory by noting that it hasn't yet explained something - it is interesting to note, but it is not a falsification. Claiming that a theory is flawed is not evidence for an alternate theory.
Jedidiah.
Whatever you consider supremely important, above all else, is the object of worship.
If you wish to extend worship to be so broad then animals do worship things, and your initial point is moot - in essence you are just playing semantic games. Some animals, I'm sure, consider the next meal supremely important. Dogs certainly seem to worship (in the sense you seem to wish to use it here) their masters. A great many animals worship their offspring in the sense you define worship. Should I consider dogs human? What of chimps? Penguins?
Either you have no division between animal and man or you are excluding those, like myself, who do not engage in religious worship. I wouls suggest your attempts to define men an "special" are rapidly leading nowhere...
Jedidiah.
All of the things you mentioned in your post are true. In all these things, man only differs from animals in degree. There is ONE trait of humans though, and only ONE, that distinguishes humans not in degree, but in kind. No religious activity equivalent to prayer, sacrifice or worship has ever been observed in any other species.
Given that I have never been moved to worship, prayer, or religion, does that mean I am not human, or pehaps that I simply lack a soul?
It's always useful to know these things...
Jedidiah.
I think you'll find that chimps are quite capable of compassion, and yet also capable of acts of cruelty that, given their apparent understanding, are acts of malice rather than just animal play. The question is not whether there are any animals that are incapable of acts that humans are - that much is quite clear: the average sheep is remarkably lacking in intelligence; but rather whether is is really possible to draw any clear division between animal and man. In practice everything we seek to use to define such a line turns out to have some counter-example. It would seem that humans are just another animal, no ore blessed nor cursed than any other.
Jedidiah.
I think there should be a definate emphasis here that the US isn't in a dabate now over science in general, it's a debate about teaching controversial science in the classroom.
That's just a weak excuse - the debate, ultimately, is about science and the scientific method. The particular controversy of the moment is simply one example of that. It is entirely possible to use identical methods of argument to the ID people to create a controversy about any particular field of science. Here's one: it sounds every bit as serious, and scientific as ID arguments, and demonstrates the controvesy about gravity. If you can figure out why that essay doesn't mean that "uncaused force" is a valid point and that gravity is controversial science you'll also have figured out why ID isn't valid in scientific debate, and why evolution isn't really controversial science.
Jedidiah.
These are the people who want to bring back Old Testament style theocracy, and think that it jibes with the Constitution...but these people, given a chance, will do everything they can to ensure nothing that conflicts with their interpretation of the Bible gets taught
On that general front you might want to keep an eye on the Constitution Restoration Act 2005, which basically seeks to bar the Supreme Court from hearing any case that seeks "relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government".
The practical implications should that actually get passed are, well, rather interesting. One is left wondering exactly how different this is from the Iraqi constitution's reference to the Koran being "a sovereign source of law" (at least it become "a" rather than "the"). It is a long way from making the US a practicing theocracy, but it does go a long way toward laying some necessary groundwork to make such a thing possible.
Jedidiah.
I believe you'll find that science is concerned with falsifiability rather than provability. You have to head into the rather more esoteric realms of pure math before you tend to face questions of provability (and interestingly even the question of whether a thing can be proved can require proof).
Is science falsifiable? I think under most accepted definitions of science you could say that it is indeed falsifiable, at least in a theoretic sense, which is all that's required for these purposes. Provability is a straw man: it is not a claim that science is making.
Jedidiah.
Why does no one ever attempt to explain that God created man using evolution as a tool? Whatever happened to the divine clockwinder theory?
People do, but that doesn't mean it gets any acceptance from certain groups. One of the fundamental issues is that a lot of christians believe humans have a soul and that animals do not. For that to be true you need some divine intervention in the evolutionary process to grant humans a soul once they become human. My understanding is that even the Catholic church, which accepts evolution, holds that such an intervention occurred. Once you have to believe that God has some active hand in the evolutionary process it's not much of a stretch to accept a few more fiddles along the way and thus you get Intelligent Design: the belief that evolution occurs, but with ongoing active tweaking by some external entity.
Basically it comes down to egocentrism - the desire to believe that humans are somehow special and separate from other living entities. To believe that you really need to believe that there was some active intervention to set humans apart. This really has little to do with religion necessarily (though most religions tend to grant humans such special status and hence have some explaining to do), but rather a general unwillingness to accept ourselves as simply a part of nature.
In practice humans are really only very subtley different from other animals. Every time someone claims to have some defining property that sets humans apart from animals (self awareness, tool use, awareness of mortality, language, social learning, etc.) we find new examples of animals that do the same. Tool use is now widely noted across the animal kingdom, and self awareness, and awareness of mortality are reported for a variety of animals. At least some level of language has been noted amongst various animals, and efforts to teach great apes more advanced languages have been remarkably successful. We really don't give animals anywhere near enough credit.
Jedidiah.
Seen it, used it, and I prefer to write my own.
Jedidiah.
"They can do lots of things, but still you can't talk to them, and that is one of the things we will get this decade," he predicted.
I saw Mr. Gates say this same thing at a Expo Keynote speech in the '90s. I said it then, I'll say it now, we'll get real speech recognition in computers sort of, but it's not clear people really want to talk to them anyway.
The real problem is that when people think about "talking to computers" what they are really thinking of is something Star Trek style where you can tell the computer generally what you want and it will interpret what you say and get the job done. That's way more than decent speech recognition (which is bloody hard), that's having some decent level of AI that is capable of understanding, and operating based upon, natural language. That is a very long way off indeed, and half assed predictions of it occurring this decade are laughable.
So what about just basic quality voice recognition that the computer can respond to? Stop and think about what would be required to fully verbally specify a lot of basic tasks in standardised computer pareable language. For the most part it is going to be more trouble than it's worth, and only valuable for a small variety of generally trivial tasks.
Talking to computers will become a useful and widely used interface as soon as computers can comprehend and interpret natural language and not before.
Jedidiah.
To be perfectly honest I've been thinking about going the reverse direction - I agree LaTeX just doesn't do drawing well. I think it might be easier and more productive to, say, build a presentation builder out of inkscape and simply have SVG or PDF presentations. One day I might even get around to seeing whether that can be done.
Jedidiah.
...which means you want a built in tarball roller? Not a bad idea. Anybody want to add a button to Kile's File/Save?
Okay done. Well, it's not in the File/Save, but automatically archiving a project into tar.gz format at the click of a button has been available for a while.
Jedidiah.
Well, back when I was messing with this stuff there was a version of rxvt that could be compiled against Cygwin to run on Windows natively (no X/Cygwin required) and that was what I used. As I recall it had some minor quirks due to the "X11 program native on windows" compatability issues, but if you're used rxvt on UNIX it should all seem normal enough.
Jedidiah.
Before we start, I agree with you entirely: LaTeX is a silly option as any sort of replacement for OpenDocument formats, and the person who suggested it was a fool. I ought to clear up a few points however. ...presentations, OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it.
LaTeX actually does exceptionally good presentations if you actually know how to use it. There are some packages out there to help, or you can simply roll your own to get the best results. In fact LaTeX offers something no Office suite I've ever seen does: the ability to have a single document that is both the presentation and the full paper report at the mere toggle a switch.
I think the biggest problem is that the basic LaTeX slides package sucks (it was designed for OHP transparencies) and some of the other presentation pakages are a little underwhelming in terms of visual flair. In practice it is quite easy to quickly design "templates" (in practice documentclasses) that look as good or better than anything I've seen PowerPoint produce - I've even written the better part of a GUI tool to let you drag and drop images and text to design one - but it takes a little know how which, apparently, most LaTeX presenters don't have.
LaTeX represents a damn fine solution to the issue of presentations, especially when you are doing one as a summary of more detailed paper report.
macro language (admitedly not standardised in OpenDocument). OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it;
What exactly do you think TeX is? TeX is a macro language. It may not have the "live updates" that you seem to have in mind, but that more to do with the compilation step rather than any lack of macro capability of TeX's part. Run TeX again and you'll get all your updates/changes magically propogating through.
Jedidiah.
I'm smart, most of us here are smart, but I'll admit that sometimes I run into the occasional road block where I can't do something in Linux that I can do in Windows.
I did spend at least an hour getting Quake III to work in Linux properly. It still doesn't quite work as well as in Windows.
It's been a while since I used Windows (probably around 2000 or 2001), but I used to run into roadblocks there too. You say you had trouble getting Quake III working on Linux? It took me quite some time to get a decent working TeX installation on Windows. Perl, I seem to recall, was also a little annoying: you could install ActivePerl but every now and then you'd run into hiccups with paths or environment variables. Nothing hard of course, but then there's nothing too hard about setting up Quake III on Linux, it just takes a little time to find all the hoops to jump through.
Of course I understand getting TeX, Perl, Python, a decent shell and terminal emulator (which believe me took quite some effort on Windows) is now a lot easier because Cygwin has matured (it was still a little young and quirky at the time I was using it, and TeX certainly wasn't in the package list initially), but then installing Doom3 on Linux was a hell of a lot easier. Everything has it's quirks and its difficulties - it's all about what you want to do, and as long as your expectations are defined by Windows then clearly Linux will look harder. In my experience, depending on what exactly it is you need to do, Linux and Windows turn about to be about as hard to manage as each other.
Jedidiah.
What about us people who don't know what commands do what? Man pages are fairly useless if you don't know which command to ask for.
/usr/bin, it can be remarkably educational. I admit that's trickier on a lot of modern Linux systems that have so many programs in there, but you can skip over a lot of them (all the obvious KDE and GNOME apps) and only worry about the weird obscure looking ones you don't recognise. A lot of the time you'll do man [obscure command] read the summary at the top and go "Huh, didn't realise there was something to do that" and not worry about it. The point is that one day you'll be sitting there trying to figure out how to do something and remember "I read a man page for something that could do that..." a quick skim through ls /usr/bin and (usually after at most 2 or 3 missed guesses) you can pull up the manpage for what you want. Sometimes knowing that there is something that can do [obscure task] is the most important part. Other than that, reading the man page through for some of the more common commands that have a vast array of switches (ls, grep, cut, sort, etc.) can make you realise that some of those can do things you really wouldn't have expected them to be able to , and suggest cunning new ways to use them is tasks where you might not thought they would apply.
/usr/bin actually do.
Heh. Never underestimate the value of spending a day working through man pages for every program in
Just knowing what's available and all the various things that can be done with the tools is a very valuable lesson, and worth a little time investment. It takes less time than you might think to skim through and at least become acquainted with what all the various obscure programs in
Jedidiah.
Any bearded terminal hacker will tell you, when asked about the book they learned from, that while they went from one book to another in their early days, the most productive thing they ever did was learn how to read the documentation already available to them.
While the available documentation (man pages usually) are nice, there are a few books out there that quitte simply are great references and provide better material than the standard documentation. My personal favourite is UNIX Power Tools. It is mostly just a vast, vast collection of tips, tricks and cunning insights into the finer points of UNIX, its shells, and the various command line tools you can expect to find from some exeptionally experienced long time UNIX hackers. It's not a book you sit and read cover to cover, it's the sort of book where you go "I wonder how I could do [obscure thing]?" look it up in the index (another great feature is that the book has one of the most comprehensive and impressive indexes - finding out how to do what you want to do is easy), flip to the relevant section and start reading. Each section is heavily (and well!) cross referenced so in the middle of reading how to do [obscure thing] you read a comment about [other thing you hadn't realised you could do] and have to go and read that section too. An hour or so later you realise that you really need to get back to work and do [obscure thing], but you now also know many cunning ways to exploit UNIX that you would never have thought of yourself, and certainly wouldn't have realised you could do just from reading man pages.
Jedidiah.
If I buy a new gadget and discover that it fails to meet my needs or expectations, I can return it, not so with books movies or music, If I cant return something, then you better beleave that I am going to be damn sure that I know what I am getting when I purchase it.
Actually that's not true, certainly not with books, unless you buy from a particularly poor bookstore. The bookstores I shop at are happy to accept a returned book if the spine is not broken (no crease marks down the spine) and presuming it is in good condition. I have learned to read books cover to cover without creasing the spine, so should I ever feel disappointed by a book I can always take it back to the store and get my cash back. The worst I have ever experienced is a store that would only give me store credit instead of cash - which isn't so bad considering the amount of books I buy.
For the most part I don't really have any issues, because I generally only buy books I want to keep, but every now and then (like The DaVinci Code for instance) I have finished a book and taken it straight back to the store for a cash refund. This never presents problems.
Jedidiah.
I know. Look at how much money is made from selling bottled water. That's a commodity if I ever saw one.
It's quite unbelievable really. And the US has to be one of the worst cases. I mean consider how much is made by some major purveyors of bottled water in the US.
Jedidiah.
Firstly, there is no single battleground between Linux and Windows. There are a number of separate battlegrounds: mobile devices, embedded systems, home desktops, corporate workstations, small servers, mid-range servers, enterprise servers, e-mail servers etc. Winning or losing in any one of these may not have much of an impact in any other.
Some areas may not have much effect but there are significant ties between the others and Microsoft has often exploited this fact to leverage from one to the other.
The obvious example is home desktops and corporate desktops. There was a time when home desktops were a diverse lot with Apple and Amiga being big players, and even more diversity further back. Microsoft managed to deal with IBM and so their platform (MS-DOS) became the platform of choice in the coporate world (due to the dominance of IBM in that market). This dominance on coporate desktops slowly but surely bled into the home desktop market, because people were used to their MS systems at work. The dominance in the corporate desktop granted to Microsoft by IBM played a significant role in MS sucessful expansion into the home desktop market (there were, of course other factors, like the availability of cheap IBM clones, but it is foolish to deny the corporate desktop dominance played no role). Now the tables have turned and it is the corporate desktop where MS is feeling a little heat, and now it is the home desktop that gives MS an advantage: everyone uses MS at home and so learns MS by default, whereas other systems will require "expensive retraining" if used on the corporate desktop.
Similar games are played in the server to desktop arena, where the dominance of Office is used to push MS server solutions which will integrate with the desktops, and the server solutions are in turn used to strengthen the desktop (such as the Exchange/Outlook rerlationship).
The coming thing could well be embedded and mobile devices, and how well they interact and interface with the system. There's a reason MS is pushing hard in this area.
In practice while all the different battlegrounds are indeed their own little domains, there are undeniable effects that come into play as success in one domain increases viability in another. One of the reasons Linux is more viable as a corporate desktop now is the past success of Linux in the corporate server market. Were Linux servers significantly less common it would be much harder to create a viable desktop to compete with the MS desktop which would have far better server/desktop integration.
Jedidiah.
Actually epsilon needn't be that small, but we can expect it to be bounded by some function of the size of hurricane delta, so you really ought to be watching delta closely if you have any concerns about epsilon.
Jedidiah.