Of course! That's what we've been doing wrong: our scientists have been too smart, so nothing has surprised them! What we need are some really dumb scientists who will be taken by surprise on everything. Ta-da! Remarkable progress!
Vonnegut got it right then: with his story about the android that was shunned by human society. Its job was to drop napalm on unsuspecting villages and villagers from a jet. But then it cleared up it's nasty case of bad breath, and was welcomed into human society with open arms.
The current estimate is that there is a 1 in 100,000 chance per anum of a civilization-destroyer class strike. Dunno about smaller strikes. There is some circumstantial evidence that various places in the past were hit by some form of "fire from the sky" that wiped out whole city-states, but it could be mythical for all we know. The crater in Arizona is only twenty thousands years old, I think, so mankind was at least on the planet during the last major strike, if probably not in the right area.
The scariest strike is the one that makes you look at the Gulf of Mexico in a whole new way. Imagine that the Gulf's current shape was largely set by a huge crater more than a hundred miles accross. That strike, millions of years old, is the one they think might have wiped out the dinos.
Counter-intuitively, there is a better chance of civilization being destroyed every Saturday night than of you winning the lottery that week. This is because when a strike does come, it is total: almost everyone gets it.
Considering that, after they saved our butts in the Revolutionary War, we almost immediately ignored and abbrogated our treaty to aid France in its own time of need?
When productivity in one sector increases, prices fall. But that extra money saved doesn't just vanish: it's spent on OTHER things that people want, increasing demand in different sectors of the economy which consequently grow. Overall employment is not necessarily reduced by this process at all! And this can continue on for however long human beings continue to be capable of producing things other human beings want and would be willing to trade for.
Re:Well, part of the reason...
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You paid for a rather small portion of it: most NPR funding is no longer from tax dollars. Whether that small portion gives you complete control over all their content is highly debateable. But the fact is, under this policy: their content IS still fully accessible, just not in the direct way that you happen to preffer.
If they're closing down these places because of safety concerns, how come they don't shut down police stations too? Chinese police stations for some reason have these incerdibly dangerous upper story windows that witnesses and prisoners are constantly falling out of to their deaths. So tragic really...
They've already grown and transplanted functioning bladders to. The reason why this is less exciting then one would expect is that these organs are of a relatively simple structure: either just a big bag, or a clump of similar cells. Making them was just a process of either inducing them to divide correctly, or in the case of the bladder, growing it on a simple lattice. That's nothing like what it would take to make the cells form a functioning heart, or a lung, or a liver.
No. Ice floats because, like all floating things, it displaces it's own weight in water. However, ice IS water. When floating ice melts, the water level stays exactly the same. Only ice melting off of LAND will cause a rise in the water levels.
Re:Anyone read it yet?
on
Wolframania
·
· Score: 2
What else he demonstrates won't make any difference: all that's needed is an out of context quote or reference, along with a treasured whiff of scientific conspiracy.
I think you've kind of slipped off the deep end if you think that reciting a few paragraphs of what _you_ believe is an appropriate answer to the problem at hand.
You STILL can't go around saying that "Mormons don't believe in the same god that the Christians do" without ALREADY begging the question of what a Christian is! Plenty of other sects have different ideas about Christ. Back in Antioch, there were still litterally hundreds of different sects claiming Christ as their diety or spiritual inspiration. So, as far as I can tell, the only one creative redefining the term is you: by defining as definitive YOUR particular impression of what Christ is.
So what? Why should I, or anyone else trying to be honest about using clear and informative definitions, be impressed with a classic poison definition?
i.e.: you've decided what a "Christian" must be, and Mormons don't qualify. I suppose a Mormon could do the same for you. So what?
Defining things to cut certain others out of the running is all very well and good as long as you tell be beforehand how you plan on defining the word "Christian," but it's not a very useful way to go about creating informative definitions for controversial categories.
Re:Anyone read it yet?
on
Wolframania
·
· Score: 2
So, in other words, this is going to turn into yet another line item on a Creationist phamplet? Revolutionary new scientist Wolfram definitively proved with hard mathematics that evolution can't happen: but was censored by the scientific community? Sigh...
---If this were true, one could say that there was some type of intelligence that went into it's creation, thereby implicating the existence of "God".---
Quite the opposite I would say: it would demonstrate that complexity can and does arise regardless of the prescence of intelligence or not.
This point is certainly underappreciated. What people like Neweton and Einstein (idealy) do is develop _models_ that help us understand the conventions of the natural world. They allow us to explain and predict its behavior in terms of (hopefully) successively more accurate terms, figuring out which elements are important and which are not.
But when it comes to the natural world itself, we can't with any deal of assurity prove even our most basic assumptions. One of the most startling of these is causality: the idea of causality is quite entirely a conceptual idea: there is no way to actually prove that one event "causes" another: only that they are correlatively linked by a particular relation or supposed mechanism.
I fail to see how these beliefs, if true, disqualify Mormons from being Christian without first begging the question of who gets to decide what the "proper" Christian beliefs are. Mormons are certainly Christians in the sense of the word I use to be most honest, clear, and fair as I can with my definitions: they are followers of the diety represented by Jesus Christ, and some of the ideas attributed to him.
Generally, I think it to be bad form to assume the position of your fantasy opponents, and speak for them so you can knock down your own utterances. While I am not a believer, I also don't think that people who happen to feel that they a have personal knowledge of God, and are following their hearts on how they understand certain aspects of him, deserve ridicule or pre-emptory challenge. Plenty of even literalist Christians are quite humble in their own free admission that they relaly know very little about what they believe to be god's Creation. There's no need to paint all literalists with such a broad brush.
While you sound cool, I think you should consider that by not calling those "other Christians" Christians you are engaging in the same tactics. It is one thing to feel that other Christians are arrogant or misguided about Christ's teachings: but I think it is sort of pointless and pre-emptive to undefine them as Christians: especially when they disagree as much with you as you do with them about what being a Christian means and necessitates.
---And, to be frank, I don't really care whether there are aliens out there. Whether or not they are out there is not going to affect me, my salvation, and my personal goals here on Earth.---
Isn't that, well, a little uninquistive, not to mention self-centered? Certainly, what we know and can deal with, and have moral obligatins to deal with, are more important. But that hardly makes the possible existence of alien life uninteresting or meaningless. It could well have very real impacts on life here: how we see ourselves and hte universe around us.
Slashdot Mirror
in your opinion...
Of course! That's what we've been doing wrong: our scientists have been too smart, so nothing has surprised them! What we need are some really dumb scientists who will be taken by surprise on everything. Ta-da! Remarkable progress!
Vonnegut got it right then: with his story about the android that was shunned by human society. Its job was to drop napalm on unsuspecting villages and villagers from a jet. But then it cleared up it's nasty case of bad breath, and was welcomed into human society with open arms.
Yeah, info on this thing is popping up everywhere.
---Even IF one makes it to earth, it somehow has to somehow land on the 30% of land mass.---
Compared to a city-sized rock, the ocean would be like a thin film of water protecting your thick skull from a bullet.
Wouldn't this also be like trying to spot the tip of your nose with a high-powered telescope? What's Hubble's LOWEST resolution?
The current estimate is that there is a 1 in 100,000 chance per anum of a civilization-destroyer class strike. Dunno about smaller strikes. There is some circumstantial evidence that various places in the past were hit by some form of "fire from the sky" that wiped out whole city-states, but it could be mythical for all we know. The crater in Arizona is only twenty thousands years old, I think, so mankind was at least on the planet during the last major strike, if probably not in the right area.
The scariest strike is the one that makes you look at the Gulf of Mexico in a whole new way. Imagine that the Gulf's current shape was largely set by a huge crater more than a hundred miles accross. That strike, millions of years old, is the one they think might have wiped out the dinos.
Counter-intuitively, there is a better chance of civilization being destroyed every Saturday night than of you winning the lottery that week. This is because when a strike does come, it is total: almost everyone gets it.
Considering that, after they saved our butts in the Revolutionary War, we almost immediately ignored and abbrogated our treaty to aid France in its own time of need?
Sigh.
When productivity in one sector increases, prices fall. But that extra money saved doesn't just vanish: it's spent on OTHER things that people want, increasing demand in different sectors of the economy which consequently grow. Overall employment is not necessarily reduced by this process at all! And this can continue on for however long human beings continue to be capable of producing things other human beings want and would be willing to trade for.
You paid for a rather small portion of it: most NPR funding is no longer from tax dollars. Whether that small portion gives you complete control over all their content is highly debateable. But the fact is, under this policy: their content IS still fully accessible, just not in the direct way that you happen to preffer.
If they're closing down these places because of safety concerns, how come they don't shut down police stations too? Chinese police stations for some reason have these incerdibly dangerous upper story windows that witnesses and prisoners are constantly falling out of to their deaths. So tragic really...
They've already grown and transplanted functioning bladders to. The reason why this is less exciting then one would expect is that these organs are of a relatively simple structure: either just a big bag, or a clump of similar cells. Making them was just a process of either inducing them to divide correctly, or in the case of the bladder, growing it on a simple lattice. That's nothing like what it would take to make the cells form a functioning heart, or a lung, or a liver.
No, all he has to do is explain why he is unconvinced, and finds the theories unconvincing. The burden of proof IS on the claimaint.
No. Ice floats because, like all floating things, it displaces it's own weight in water. However, ice IS water. When floating ice melts, the water level stays exactly the same. Only ice melting off of LAND will cause a rise in the water levels.
What else he demonstrates won't make any difference: all that's needed is an out of context quote or reference, along with a treasured whiff of scientific conspiracy.
I think you've kind of slipped off the deep end if you think that reciting a few paragraphs of what _you_ believe is an appropriate answer to the problem at hand.
You STILL can't go around saying that "Mormons don't believe in the same god that the Christians do" without ALREADY begging the question of what a Christian is! Plenty of other sects have different ideas about Christ. Back in Antioch, there were still litterally hundreds of different sects claiming Christ as their diety or spiritual inspiration. So, as far as I can tell, the only one creative redefining the term is you: by defining as definitive YOUR particular impression of what Christ is.
So what? Why should I, or anyone else trying to be honest about using clear and informative definitions, be impressed with a classic poison definition?
I think you've sort of proved my point for me.
i.e.: you've decided what a "Christian" must be, and Mormons don't qualify. I suppose a Mormon could do the same for you. So what? Defining things to cut certain others out of the running is all very well and good as long as you tell be beforehand how you plan on defining the word "Christian," but it's not a very useful way to go about creating informative definitions for controversial categories.
So, in other words, this is going to turn into yet another line item on a Creationist phamplet? Revolutionary new scientist Wolfram definitively proved with hard mathematics that evolution can't happen: but was censored by the scientific community? Sigh...
---If this were true, one could say that there was some type of intelligence that went into it's creation, thereby implicating the existence of "God".---
Quite the opposite I would say: it would demonstrate that complexity can and does arise regardless of the prescence of intelligence or not.
This point is certainly underappreciated. What people like Neweton and Einstein (idealy) do is develop _models_ that help us understand the conventions of the natural world. They allow us to explain and predict its behavior in terms of (hopefully) successively more accurate terms, figuring out which elements are important and which are not.
But when it comes to the natural world itself, we can't with any deal of assurity prove even our most basic assumptions. One of the most startling of these is causality: the idea of causality is quite entirely a conceptual idea: there is no way to actually prove that one event "causes" another: only that they are correlatively linked by a particular relation or supposed mechanism.
I fail to see how these beliefs, if true, disqualify Mormons from being Christian without first begging the question of who gets to decide what the "proper" Christian beliefs are. Mormons are certainly Christians in the sense of the word I use to be most honest, clear, and fair as I can with my definitions: they are followers of the diety represented by Jesus Christ, and some of the ideas attributed to him.
Generally, I think it to be bad form to assume the position of your fantasy opponents, and speak for them so you can knock down your own utterances.
While I am not a believer, I also don't think that people who happen to feel that they a have personal knowledge of God, and are following their hearts on how they understand certain aspects of him, deserve ridicule or pre-emptory challenge. Plenty of even literalist Christians are quite humble in their own free admission that they relaly know very little about what they believe to be god's Creation. There's no need to paint all literalists with such a broad brush.
While you sound cool, I think you should consider that by not calling those "other Christians" Christians you are engaging in the same tactics. It is one thing to feel that other Christians are arrogant or misguided about Christ's teachings: but I think it is sort of pointless and pre-emptive to undefine them as Christians: especially when they disagree as much with you as you do with them about what being a Christian means and necessitates.
---And, to be frank, I don't really care whether there are aliens out there. Whether or not they are out there is not going to affect me, my salvation, and my personal goals here on Earth.---
Isn't that, well, a little uninquistive, not to mention self-centered? Certainly, what we know and can deal with, and have moral obligatins to deal with, are more important. But that hardly makes the possible existence of alien life uninteresting or meaningless. It could well have very real impacts on life here: how we see ourselves and hte universe around us.
Silly: angels don't dance. Dancing, at least according to our current Attorney General, is sinful.