Existed as in in the spec and in every interpreter. Those are core language features that have existed since the absolute beginning; you can't very well leave them out like you can, say, generators, since those are a Mozilla add-on in 1.6. Not to mention that no one has left them out at any point anyway.
I think you're confusing DOM level 0 stuff with Javascript anyway. Your mention of browsers pretty much seals it. I'm not "confusing" language features with support for various DOM objects and the built-in functions -- I'm saying we certainly didn't learn about or use any of them at the time. That's NOT saying they weren't there -- it just looks like we spent so much time fighting the browser implementation bugs and DOM incompatibilities that we never got to them. Personally, I assumed the functions-as-objects, closures, etc. were added a few years later, because that's when I first saw them.
Hence my point, again, that it was not a good first language at the time.
Existed as in being part of the spec, or existed as in being useable across the platforms that "supported" JavaScript?
It's been long enough now that I don't have a clear memory of the state of these individual features, but I definitely remember being constantly frustrated by the things that JavaScript could supposedly do, but which were impossible to get working across Netscape and IE on the Mac and Windows.
Point being, at the time it was not a good first language. Banging my head against that wall was useful in a way when I got out of school (since I had a long list of hacks and things to avoid for cross-browser compatibility) but that cost me a huge amount of extra work with no extra gain in my CS knowledge, just a gain in my knowledge of browser bugs.
If you have a significant portion of the population armed at all times then the chance of terrorist getting much further than "I have a bom..." before someone drops them would reduce the chances of such act to virtually zero. Thank Jeebus Cripes I don't live in such a world. Why, just yesterday I was affronted by the temerity of a fellow plane passenger, and I stood up immediately, shrilling "I have a bombastic style of poetry! And I am prepared quote at will!"
If you want to do "infrastructure" programming, such as OS development, language development, clustering, virtualization, storage, etc, [...]. In my experience most jobs in this broad area are still done in-house. Wait... isn't this exactly the stuff that most companies do *not* do in-house ("Hey, boss -- I'm thinking we should design a new programming language and OS for this next project")? Only companies like Google do any of this kind of stuff in-house.
But excellent points overall... there are very different niches available, and it's a waste of effort to try to prepare yourself for all of them. Get some exposure to the gamut, then narrow down and get some experience *at depth* if at all possible -- i.e., working on a big project with other people with source control, collaborative design, testing, bug triage and debugging.. all that stuff that you'll never see on 2-week individual projects.
Don't panic if there's an acronym or two that show up on job listings that you're missing. You will be learning new stuff throughout your career.
I also want to emphasize that "people" skills are extremely important, no matter your niche. If you're a wreck in basic conversations, practice with your cat, neighbor, anyone. Memorize a list of fallback "small talk" questions you can ask if you're lost, and learn how to listen and ask follow-up questions. You have to get to know people, you have to gain their trust, and you have to learn how to work anyway with people who fail to gain yours. You have to know how to stop your client/boss/coworker when they're explaining something and you lose the thread. You have to know how to ask questions. You have to learn how to offer criticism without offending, and how to just shut up sometimes. You have to know how to tear your own suggestion to shreds and decide on someone else's as the better solution, plus how to null route someone else's suggestion without bruising their ego.
Sometimes someone else will make a mistake that costs you hours of time (and sometimes you will make that mistake). Someone will send an email out to the entire team that contains an obvious error that makes you look bad (or perhaps you will send this email). There's a serious problem in the code, and you think you know who did it. How you handle this stuff will make a huge difference in your quality of life.
That choice doesn't always exist. Especially when you have dependents and bills to pay and the job you have just barely makes it. Right -- this guy's going to have a much easier time supporting his dependents now that he is in prison and has basically thrown his entire remaining career off a cliff. He can't even legally work with computers at all for a few years (even as a temp receptionist or some crap job like that!), and after that it's still going to be awfully hard to find an employer.
Or were you arguing that the high-powered rifle rampage has a better chance of feeding the kids? Huh -- not unless you're strapping your kills to the roof of the car and firing up the BBQ.
Seriously, I agree that walking out isn't always the best option, but it's always going to be a hell of a lot smarter than trying to violently destroy your employer or fellow employees.
You know, everyone is always bad-mouthing Javascript, but [...] Please, bad mouth the interpreters, which have mostly been junk (especially Microsoft's, which is abysmal), but not the language itself. Oh, I'm badmouthing the interpreters all right, though the language features you're mentioning weren't in there yet either -- this was the mid-nineties, remember.
That should be another rule controlling language choice for students -- please, please don't choose a language whose implementation is so raw that your students will spend more time learning how to get around specific bugs (useless information the next year...) than they will actually learning how to use the language features.
unfortunately he doesn't go far enough into the core of the problem, which is today's universities are mass producing what employers want, rather then the thinkers of tomorrow. Is that even true, though? The "drones" are the reason why so many projects fail (because they have no clue about larger risks, and no way to solve difficult problems), which costs those same employers vast amounts of money.
I code mostly in Java in my professional life, but when I was in school we were forced to diversify, and it was a definite plus.
The intro course used mostly JavaScript for some reasons (!), but other (even relatively low-level courses) required projects written in C, Schema, and Java. I took an operating systems course where we had to write a project in some kind of mini-assembly language... it's all a bit fuzzy now (I graduated 10 years ago), but I remember it being tough to wrap my head around for a while. And that's a good thing, right?
I also did a couple of summer-long solo projects that probably taught me more than anything -- just fighting through the problems on my own, learning the hard way about the value of clean code, OO, version control, debugging skills, etc. etc..
Perhaps obviously, I'm much better a *Java* developer than I would have been without the other stuff. So I agree wholeheartedly that students must learn more than one language in their schooling -- either for professional reasons OR for academic reasons; you simply have to flex your thinking in more than one way if you're going to learn.
It also strikes me as a tough way to learn... how do you learn what X language is, and the reasons behind its design, totally in isolation? How do you learn what OO is if "functional" is a meaningless concept to you?
I keep thinking that *heated* hydrogen would be incredible for this purpose.
That is probably because you are thinking in terms of density of the lifting gas instead of the only pertinent parameter, density difference between the air and the lifting gas. If you could halve the density of hydrogen (by heating it to ~300C), you would have about 7% higher lift. You can't do much better than that (about %0.5 more lift is possible), even with very hot hydrogen. That can be done much more simply and safely by increasing the pressure of hydrogen by %7 when on the ground.
It's been a very long time since I've thought about this stuff, but how does that make sense? If we increase the pressure of hydrogen by *any* percent, we're losing our density ratio (and lift), right?
My general assumption is that the outside air density is more or less constant (assuming these cargo flights aren't going to head up very high), and we can't really have the pressure outside be greater than the pressure inside the balloon (because to support that pressure we'd need a heavy material), so yeah, the density of the lifting gas is the main factor.
How *much* of a difference heating the hydrogen can make... dunno. But it'd be fun to watch.
Hey, if they're already automated, cargo-only, etc...
I keep thinking that *heated* hydrogen would be incredible for this purpose. Cool and compress the stuff down when you're landed, and heat 'er up when it's time to go. The lifting power would be incredible compared with regular H (already excellent).
I guess from a logical perspective, it's also true that more than one of these factors could have been important -- one triggered in some way by another, or even just coincidentally.
But as for the fascination with the Cretaceous mass extinction -- I think it comes directly from our fascination with dinosaurs... the enormous and toothy types scare the bejesus out of us, to put it one way, and it's perhaps even more awe-inspiring to think of them all being wiped out than it is to imagine them alive. And from popular interest comes crackpots, I suppose.:)
Though I'm reading up now on some of the pre-dinosaur beasties... neat stuff.
I'm not up with using faith as a noun ("There is no logic in faith..."). One has faith _in_ something or someone. That's still a noun. Maybe you mean it shouldn't work as a general term, only in relation to a specific thing?
The real questions, then, are is it reasonable to believe there is a God? How can one tell if one's belief or non-belief is sound?
To answer these questions, one would explore issues of evidence (What evidence exists for the existence or non-existence of God? What would such evidence look like? What kind of evidence are admissible and inadmissible?), issues of authority (How can we trust the evidence? How can we judge other's claims and answers?), and so on. That's true. I think the frustration of the people who've already gone through that exercise is that it's very do-able, most concepts of God aren't even logically consistent internally, and in the end there is no evidence that supports any real belief in God... certainly not the level of absolute assurance that many people have.
"No logic in faith"? No, rather one uses logic to help one decide what to believe or not to believe. I guess that could be re-worded as "no valid logic in faith."
Sorry for sounding cranky and condescending about it, but it's an important logical exercise that amazingly few people go through. They find a question that we're still puzzling over, and say "ah... perhaps it's logical to believe in God after all," because that's the conclusion they wanted to reach in the first place.
But no, the answer is "ah, so we don't have an answer with any good level of certainty for that one." Suggesting a sentient, supernatural being that violates every law we *do* know about -- and would be even harder to explain than the original question -- is simply not a reasonable conclusion.
In the end, though, I can't just *tell* you this and have you understand it. I didn't just *accept* it from someone I trusted. You have to do the work yourself, and if you live in the US at least, there are probably going to be plenty of people around you who will argue for God until their last breath.
> The problem with the "public should be taught the limitations of science" model is that the limitations of science should be seen as the limitations of human knowledge.
Ridiculous. We know plenty of things we cannot hold to scientific rigor. Not that there aren't people like you trying to exclude them from being called "knowledge" by various means.
You're thinking of "science" in the most limited sense, results obtained through the simple scientific method. We can "know" an awful lot more than that still using a scientific approach, just with differing levels of certainty. Here, this may help:
science n.
1a. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
1b. Such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena.
1c. Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study.
2. Methodological activity, discipline, or study: I've got packing a suitcase down to a science.
3. An activity that appears to require study and method: the science of purchasing.
4. Knowledge, especially that gained through experience.
Note #4 in particular, which still does not admit any religion-based "knowledge".
I know that my mother loved me.
You know she acted in a way you'd expect from someone who loved you. So yeah, it's quite probable that she did. "Love" is a mushy thing to define, but it's one of those words that does have meaning even though it's very blurry at the edges.
I know that other minds exist.
Sure, though what "minds" means exactly is tough to say. We can more or less assume that our interior lives have their parallels in the other people we see around, anyway, though the exact experience is going to be different for everybody.
I know who gave me those shirts.
Was it God? No, seriously, "science" agrees that your memory of this kind of event is probably true, though you'd be surprised by the tricks memory will play on you.
I know a lot of things that will never be repeated and for which little if any evidence remains, putting them well outside the possibility of scientific rigor.
Your level of certainty on those things is thus far below where you might consider putting them in a textbook or publishing a scientific paper, but well above the level of certainty where you can take them mostly as "assumed" to go about your everyday life.
Even *you* are not placing that much certainty in them. Take one of those shirts. Wait a few years, then have a conversation with someone who says "Gift? No -- you're thinking of the one with gray stripes.. *that* was the birthday present. This shirt was one you already had that was similar." And you'll be uncertain, then they'll pull out the video you have from your party, and sure enough, it's a gray-striped shirt you're unwrapping. And you'll update this particular "fact", just like that.
Please quit with the "only science can produce true knowledge" bit. Otherwise, I'm going to have to ask how you know that, because I've yet to hear someone who doesn't beg the question when answering that. And yes, I really do mean "beg the question" because they work out complex ways to assume precisely what they're trying to prove in ways that would make baby Godel cry.
I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but how exactly are they defining "true knowledge"? Basically, there's pure science, where we state some things are as close to "true facts" as we can know because they've been tested in a million different ways, then there's an extremely long tail after that from laws to very-well-supported theories (plate tectonics, evolution and suchlike) to less-researched theories, up through various types of memories of perceived events and histories and interpretations of those... Area of
You are correct. My post contained an unfortunate typo. I think we'll all be okay.
Thanks for the post, BTW. I was obsessed with dinosaurs for a few years when I was a kid, but haven't dug into them in any depth since then... this kind of discussion churns up memories of sitting in a dim corner of the library, poring over books that were way over my head.:)
His chosen persona is absolutely affecting his job prospects, interactions with other open source developers, personal life, etc..
I think he's mostly unaware of how *much* it's affecting those things. Even when we know it's (partly) tongue-in-cheek, it's still abrasive. The clever insults don't make up for the general irritating manner, for me at least.
I was mostly struck by the fact that he has such an audience in spite of all that, because of his development work.
Because there's nothing that sets me off, casting anxious glances around me, dropping things, stumbling over my words, and generally acting strange more than the knowledge that I'm being surveilled by hastily-trained government officials looking for suspicious behavior.
I used to get jumpy just driving through those booths on the way up to Canada. Do I have any what in the car? No, I don't smoke! Shit, *that* sounded fake. I'll give him a nervous laugh to reassure him that I'm telling the truth. Huh-ha!
Wait, did he just call me an asshole?! Ah, no -- "that's all" with an accent. Okay, restart the stalled car (he's going to think it's stolen, isn't he?) and move on.
I don't know the details of how that works psychologically, but damn... it messes with your head.
All that small talk I get nowadays from the petty officials in US airports, while they try to suss out if I'm HERE TO KILL PEOPLE or just home visiting family in the US? I loathe it. Cold sweats. I know what they're trying to figure out, and it makes me think about killing people. Wait, did I just make the kind of joke a terrorist might make?
This is partly why I moved out of the US. These are not good things, they are not helping anything, and they are just fucking with our heads. Some of them are aware of this.
I still have family there, though, so I can't get around it completely. But if you see my photo on the news... yeah, I didn't do it. I just managed to act suspicious enough.
That's just his style. He's edgy and extreme and "in your face", right?
Let's analyze a little. His blog is called "Zed's So Fucking Awesome", highlighting a word that appears 28 more times in that page (I mean "Zed", not "fuck". That shows up 32 more times).
He has a photo of him wearing a Ming the Merciless goatee and brandishing his emphatically left-handed guitar.
The first 3 links I see scanning downwards are "me", "rants", and "All About Me".
Now, it's not so simple as saying "oh, he's full of himself." No, that may also be true, but this is part of his persona. This is how he likes the world to see him. It's badass to be full of yourself and not give a damn what anyone thinks. It's badass to make a long list of everyone who's "pissed in my cheerios", litter it with obscenities and challenges and references to your ninja powers, and post it for all to see.
I didn't read much past that whole martial arts section... he started posting chat logs to show how other people can be rude online.
So, I don't think I'd enjoy interacting with him (obviously the attitude is more important than anything else he wants to get done in life), but then again, it's a big world and I'm probably safe from that.
I'm not sure what this says about RoR, if anything. There are Zed-like personalities all over the place. What's interesting to me is that he became part of the *public* face of the RoR community. Even what "community" means in that context is interesting... not so long ago, the "community" would have been puttering along on its forums while the company managed the public face and made sure the main developers of whatever software product were safely kept far away from both the community and that public face.
With RoR, we get to see the developers (many with fairly primitive "public-face" skills...) in the spotlight. And people react to attention in funny ways when they aren't used to it. There are all kinds of benefits to this kind of bubble-up, but this is one of the downsides... and we just gotta try and get over it. Part of that would be ignoring the Zeds, I imagine.
What percentage of the population can afford an HDTV now as compared to 5 years ago? Ah, but now that's bad for the environment. Constructing huge quantities of high-tech electronic gadgets for everyone that will be obsolete or broken & out by the curb in a few years time is bit of a disaster.
If they stayed more expensive (perhaps by including recycling pickup & environmental costs in the price) and higher-quality lower-churn that might be better for all of us. I think poor people will be okay if they can't have a huge LCD TV... I think the GP was talking more about equality in voting, health care tech, access to information, that kind of thing.
First point: secularism is no guarantee of liberty. Religion is no guarantee of tyranny... I remind you that this country was first settled by Puritans. Other posts are already discussing the Puritan thing, but I might also point out that it's very interesting to note the level of religiosity among the "founding fathers" who had so much influence on what made America successful. Remember, this was still decades before Darwin was even born (so the other option to "God made the creatures" was basically "dunno"), in a country including a whole lot of people who were more or less driven to the US because of their die-hard religious views.
Lotta those weird "deist" types in there, somehow.
Ron Paul being a creationist is completely irrelevant to his ability to be a good president. Religious views have no bearing on one's ability to run the country. It's not the *only* thing to check when making a political decision, but it's still extremely relevant. Have you noticed how um, nonexistent GWB's rational thought processes are? Easy decisions, sure -- go with the gut! And it works. Hard decisions... uh, pray? And then go with the gut? Or just listen to my buddies?
I don't know how sophisticated Ron Paul's critical thinking is, but honestly -- any creationist has to have a serious disconnect with the real world. This is the guy we want dealing with the many science-heavy issues we have to deal with? This is the guy we want leading the US foreign policy (dealing with lots of other countries full of, holy shit, heathens and infidels)?
Sorry, but no. When he blogs about "churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance", that sounds like his religion might affect his politics.
And it's slim pickings for rational candidates nowadays, but it'd be pretty hard to convince me the Creationist is the bright spark among them.
Because every professional just _has_ to keep his own SMTP server with multiple redundant mail drops, back-up and web interface, simplified interface for WAP/mobile devices and a spam filter, right?
Instead professionals should simply get Google Apps for their domain and have Google Mail work as "professional@thatismydomain.com". Duh:) There are plenty more options, you know....
Check into basically *any* hosting package. If you're with a reputable company, you'll get the SMTP servers with multiple redundant mail drops, backup, web interface, spam filters, etc. just thrown in with the shared hosting for your simple 5 page website.
It's not expensive (easily under $10/month.. you can go under $5, but with some cost in quality...), you don't need to manage your own server, and you don't have Google mining your email to decide which ads to show.
If you're more paranoid (and have a bit of technical know-how) you can get a cheap virtual private server with root access, lock it down so even the hosting company can't get into it, and run your mail server there. A VPS puts you into the "over 20 bucks" a month range, though, and a decent chunk of time for setup the first time, so weigh that carefully.
But to my mind, this just accentuates the fact that the concept of "species" is broken and is no longer useful for scientific advancement. The flaws of the term can be frustrating, but it's silly to say it's "no longer useful".
First, do we have a replacement set of terminology? Taxonomy of life is unavoidably an imperfect business, but we can't just say "yeah, life actually is a big intermingled mess, there are lots of gray areas and overlap... so animals may only be referred to as individuals by their given names."
So I think we're stuck with an imperfect system -- though really, it's not such a big deal. The biologists all understand the limitations of the system, and scientific advancement can easily continue because of that understanding -- they make up new terms as they need them and move on.
There's also the huge amount of extant research using this system that's still relevant.
Lol, you really need to learn what the expression "Oh, snap" means:) It is suddenly staggeringly clear it is *you* who are ignorant of the true meaning of the snap.
But -- if we get *enough* cells out there, absorbing solar energy that would normally have been primarily heat and turning it into electricity that's used for lower-heat purposes... isn't that going to cool the planet?
Heh.
You know, this goes along with the idea that many windmills will change the weather (possibly for the better, e.g. attenuating hurricanes), and lots of wave turbines will ruin surfing but slow erosion....or is it only me imagining these things?
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I think you're confusing DOM level 0 stuff with Javascript anyway. Your mention of browsers pretty much seals it. I'm not "confusing" language features with support for various DOM objects and the built-in functions -- I'm saying we certainly didn't learn about or use any of them at the time. That's NOT saying they weren't there -- it just looks like we spent so much time fighting the browser implementation bugs and DOM incompatibilities that we never got to them. Personally, I assumed the functions-as-objects, closures, etc. were added a few years later, because that's when I first saw them.
Hence my point, again, that it was not a good first language at the time.
Existed as in being part of the spec, or existed as in being useable across the platforms that "supported" JavaScript?
It's been long enough now that I don't have a clear memory of the state of these individual features, but I definitely remember being constantly frustrated by the things that JavaScript could supposedly do, but which were impossible to get working across Netscape and IE on the Mac and Windows.
Point being, at the time it was not a good first language. Banging my head against that wall was useful in a way when I got out of school (since I had a long list of hacks and things to avoid for cross-browser compatibility) but that cost me a huge amount of extra work with no extra gain in my CS knowledge, just a gain in my knowledge of browser bugs.
But excellent points overall... there are very different niches available, and it's a waste of effort to try to prepare yourself for all of them. Get some exposure to the gamut, then narrow down and get some experience *at depth* if at all possible -- i.e., working on a big project with other people with source control, collaborative design, testing, bug triage and debugging.. all that stuff that you'll never see on 2-week individual projects.
Don't panic if there's an acronym or two that show up on job listings that you're missing. You will be learning new stuff throughout your career.
I also want to emphasize that "people" skills are extremely important, no matter your niche. If you're a wreck in basic conversations, practice with your cat, neighbor, anyone. Memorize a list of fallback "small talk" questions you can ask if you're lost, and learn how to listen and ask follow-up questions. You have to get to know people, you have to gain their trust, and you have to learn how to work anyway with people who fail to gain yours. You have to know how to stop your client/boss/coworker when they're explaining something and you lose the thread. You have to know how to ask questions. You have to learn how to offer criticism without offending, and how to just shut up sometimes. You have to know how to tear your own suggestion to shreds and decide on someone else's as the better solution, plus how to null route someone else's suggestion without bruising their ego.
Sometimes someone else will make a mistake that costs you hours of time (and sometimes you will make that mistake). Someone will send an email out to the entire team that contains an obvious error that makes you look bad (or perhaps you will send this email). There's a serious problem in the code, and you think you know who did it. How you handle this stuff will make a huge difference in your quality of life.
That choice doesn't always exist. Especially when you have dependents and bills to pay and the job you have just barely makes it. Right -- this guy's going to have a much easier time supporting his dependents now that he is in prison and has basically thrown his entire remaining career off a cliff. He can't even legally work with computers at all for a few years (even as a temp receptionist or some crap job like that!), and after that it's still going to be awfully hard to find an employer.
Or were you arguing that the high-powered rifle rampage has a better chance of feeding the kids?
Huh -- not unless you're strapping your kills to the roof of the car and firing up the BBQ.
Seriously, I agree that walking out isn't always the best option, but it's always going to be a hell of a lot smarter than trying to violently destroy your employer or fellow employees.
Please, bad mouth the interpreters, which have mostly been junk (especially Microsoft's, which is abysmal), but not the language itself. Oh, I'm badmouthing the interpreters all right, though the language features you're mentioning weren't in there yet either -- this was the mid-nineties, remember.
That should be another rule controlling language choice for students -- please, please don't choose a language whose implementation is so raw that your students will spend more time learning how to get around specific bugs (useless information the next year...) than they will actually learning how to use the language features.
I code mostly in Java in my professional life, but when I was in school we were forced to diversify, and it was a definite plus.
The intro course used mostly JavaScript for some reasons (!), but other (even relatively low-level courses) required projects written in C, Schema, and Java. I took an operating systems course where we had to write a project in some kind of mini-assembly language... it's all a bit fuzzy now (I graduated 10 years ago), but I remember it being tough to wrap my head around for a while. And that's a good thing, right?
I also did a couple of summer-long solo projects that probably taught me more than anything -- just fighting through the problems on my own, learning the hard way about the value of clean code, OO, version control, debugging skills, etc. etc..
Perhaps obviously, I'm much better a *Java* developer than I would have been without the other stuff. So I agree wholeheartedly that students must learn more than one language in their schooling -- either for professional reasons OR for academic reasons; you simply have to flex your thinking in more than one way if you're going to learn.
It also strikes me as a tough way to learn... how do you learn what X language is, and the reasons behind its design, totally in isolation? How do you learn what OO is if "functional" is a meaningless concept to you?
It's been a very long time since I've thought about this stuff, but how does that make sense? If we increase the pressure of hydrogen by *any* percent, we're losing our density ratio (and lift), right?That is probably because you are thinking in terms of density of the lifting gas instead of the only pertinent parameter, density difference between the air and the lifting gas. If you could halve the density of hydrogen (by heating it to ~300C), you would have about 7% higher lift. You can't do much better than that (about %0.5 more lift is possible), even with very hot hydrogen. That can be done much more simply and safely by increasing the pressure of hydrogen by %7 when on the ground.
My general assumption is that the outside air density is more or less constant (assuming these cargo flights aren't going to head up very high), and we can't really have the pressure outside be greater than the pressure inside the balloon (because to support that pressure we'd need a heavy material), so yeah, the density of the lifting gas is the main factor.
How *much* of a difference heating the hydrogen can make... dunno. But it'd be fun to watch.
Hey, if they're already automated, cargo-only, etc...
I keep thinking that *heated* hydrogen would be incredible for this purpose. Cool and compress the stuff down when you're landed, and heat 'er up when it's time to go. The lifting power would be incredible compared with regular H (already excellent).
Just be careful around it, that's all.
I guess from a logical perspective, it's also true that more than one of these factors could have been important -- one triggered in some way by another, or even just coincidentally.
:)
But as for the fascination with the Cretaceous mass extinction -- I think it comes directly from our fascination with dinosaurs... the enormous and toothy types scare the bejesus out of us, to put it one way, and it's perhaps even more awe-inspiring to think of them all being wiped out than it is to imagine them alive. And from popular interest comes crackpots, I suppose.
Though I'm reading up now on some of the pre-dinosaur beasties... neat stuff.
To answer these questions, one would explore issues of evidence (What evidence exists for the existence or non-existence of God? What would such evidence look like? What kind of evidence are admissible and inadmissible?), issues of authority (How can we trust the evidence? How can we judge other's claims and answers?), and so on. That's true. I think the frustration of the people who've already gone through that exercise is that it's very do-able, most concepts of God aren't even logically consistent internally, and in the end there is no evidence that supports any real belief in God... certainly not the level of absolute assurance that many people have. "No logic in faith"? No, rather one uses logic to help one decide what to believe or not to believe. I guess that could be re-worded as "no valid logic in faith."
Sorry for sounding cranky and condescending about it, but it's an important logical exercise that amazingly few people go through. They find a question that we're still puzzling over, and say "ah... perhaps it's logical to believe in God after all," because that's the conclusion they wanted to reach in the first place.
But no, the answer is "ah, so we don't have an answer with any good level of certainty for that one." Suggesting a sentient, supernatural being that violates every law we *do* know about -- and would be even harder to explain than the original question -- is simply not a reasonable conclusion.
In the end, though, I can't just *tell* you this and have you understand it. I didn't just *accept* it from someone I trusted. You have to do the work yourself, and if you live in the US at least, there are probably going to be plenty of people around you who will argue for God until their last breath.
u = ++monkey;
That increments monkey.
Assuming we wrongly believe in goal-oriented evolution in the first place, you'd still need something like
u = monkey + 1;
> The problem with the "public should be taught the limitations of science" model is that the limitations of science should be seen as the limitations of human knowledge.
Ridiculous. We know plenty of things we cannot hold to scientific rigor. Not that there aren't people like you trying to exclude them from being called "knowledge" by various means.
You're thinking of "science" in the most limited sense, results obtained through the simple scientific method. We can "know" an awful lot more than that still using a scientific approach, just with differing levels of certainty. Here, this may help:
science n.
1a. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
1b. Such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena.
1c. Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study.
2. Methodological activity, discipline, or study: I've got packing a suitcase down to a science.
3. An activity that appears to require study and method: the science of purchasing.
4. Knowledge, especially that gained through experience.
Note #4 in particular, which still does not admit any religion-based "knowledge".
I know that my mother loved me.
You know she acted in a way you'd expect from someone who loved you. So yeah, it's quite probable that she did. "Love" is a mushy thing to define, but it's one of those words that does have meaning even though it's very blurry at the edges.
I know that other minds exist.
Sure, though what "minds" means exactly is tough to say. We can more or less assume that our interior lives have their parallels in the other people we see around, anyway, though the exact experience is going to be different for everybody.
I know who gave me those shirts.
Was it God? No, seriously, "science" agrees that your memory of this kind of event is probably true, though you'd be surprised by the tricks memory will play on you.
I know a lot of things that will never be repeated and for which little if any evidence remains, putting them well outside the possibility of scientific rigor.
Your level of certainty on those things is thus far below where you might consider putting them in a textbook or publishing a scientific paper, but well above the level of certainty where you can take them mostly as "assumed" to go about your everyday life.
Even *you* are not placing that much certainty in them. Take one of those shirts. Wait a few years, then have a conversation with someone who says "Gift? No -- you're thinking of the one with gray stripes.. *that* was the birthday present. This shirt was one you already had that was similar." And you'll be uncertain, then they'll pull out the video you have from your party, and sure enough, it's a gray-striped shirt you're unwrapping. And you'll update this particular "fact", just like that.
Please quit with the "only science can produce true knowledge" bit. Otherwise, I'm going to have to ask how you know that, because I've yet to hear someone who doesn't beg the question when answering that. And yes, I really do mean "beg the question" because they work out complex ways to assume precisely what they're trying to prove in ways that would make baby Godel cry.
I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but how exactly are they defining "true knowledge"? Basically, there's pure science, where we state some things are as close to "true facts" as we can know because they've been tested in a million different ways, then there's an extremely long tail after that from laws to very-well-supported theories (plate tectonics, evolution and suchlike) to less-researched theories, up through various types of memories of perceived events and histories and interpretations of those... Area of
Thanks for the post, BTW. I was obsessed with dinosaurs for a few years when I was a kid, but haven't dug into them in any depth since then... this kind of discussion churns up memories of sitting in a dim corner of the library, poring over books that were way over my head.
His chosen persona is absolutely affecting his job prospects, interactions with other open source developers, personal life, etc..
I think he's mostly unaware of how *much* it's affecting those things. Even when we know it's (partly) tongue-in-cheek, it's still abrasive. The clever insults don't make up for the general irritating manner, for me at least.
I was mostly struck by the fact that he has such an audience in spite of all that, because of his development work.
Perfect. Just perfect.
Because there's nothing that sets me off, casting anxious glances around me, dropping things, stumbling over my words, and generally acting strange more than the knowledge that I'm being surveilled by hastily-trained government officials looking for suspicious behavior.
I used to get jumpy just driving through those booths on the way up to Canada. Do I have any what in the car? No, I don't smoke! Shit, *that* sounded fake. I'll give him a nervous laugh to reassure him that I'm telling the truth. Huh-ha!
Wait, did he just call me an asshole?! Ah, no -- "that's all" with an accent. Okay, restart the stalled car (he's going to think it's stolen, isn't he?) and move on.
I don't know the details of how that works psychologically, but damn... it messes with your head.
All that small talk I get nowadays from the petty officials in US airports, while they try to suss out if I'm HERE TO KILL PEOPLE or just home visiting family in the US? I loathe it. Cold sweats. I know what they're trying to figure out, and it makes me think about killing people. Wait, did I just make the kind of joke a terrorist might make?
This is partly why I moved out of the US. These are not good things, they are not helping anything, and they are just fucking with our heads. Some of them are aware of this.
I still have family there, though, so I can't get around it completely. But if you see my photo on the news... yeah, I didn't do it. I just managed to act suspicious enough.
That's just his style. He's edgy and extreme and "in your face", right?
Let's analyze a little. His blog is called "Zed's So Fucking Awesome", highlighting a word that appears 28 more times in that page (I mean "Zed", not "fuck". That shows up 32 more times).
He has a photo of him wearing a Ming the Merciless goatee and brandishing his emphatically left-handed guitar.
The first 3 links I see scanning downwards are "me", "rants", and "All About Me".
Now, it's not so simple as saying "oh, he's full of himself." No, that may also be true, but this is part of his persona. This is how he likes the world to see him. It's badass to be full of yourself and not give a damn what anyone thinks. It's badass to make a long list of everyone who's "pissed in my cheerios", litter it with obscenities and challenges and references to your ninja powers, and post it for all to see.
I didn't read much past that whole martial arts section... he started posting chat logs to show how other people can be rude online.
So, I don't think I'd enjoy interacting with him (obviously the attitude is more important than anything else he wants to get done in life), but then again, it's a big world and I'm probably safe from that.
I'm not sure what this says about RoR, if anything. There are Zed-like personalities all over the place. What's interesting to me is that he became part of the *public* face of the RoR community. Even what "community" means in that context is interesting... not so long ago, the "community" would have been puttering along on its forums while the company managed the public face and made sure the main developers of whatever software product were safely kept far away from both the community and that public face.
With RoR, we get to see the developers (many with fairly primitive "public-face" skills...) in the spotlight. And people react to attention in funny ways when they aren't used to it. There are all kinds of benefits to this kind of bubble-up, but this is one of the downsides... and we just gotta try and get over it. Part of that would be ignoring the Zeds, I imagine.
If they stayed more expensive (perhaps by including recycling pickup & environmental costs in the price) and higher-quality lower-churn that might be better for all of us. I think poor people will be okay if they can't have a huge LCD TV... I think the GP was talking more about equality in voting, health care tech, access to information, that kind of thing.
Lotta those weird "deist" types in there, somehow. Ron Paul being a creationist is completely irrelevant to his ability to be a good president. Religious views have no bearing on one's ability to run the country. It's not the *only* thing to check when making a political decision, but it's still extremely relevant.
Have you noticed how um, nonexistent GWB's rational thought processes are? Easy decisions, sure -- go with the gut! And it works. Hard decisions... uh, pray? And then go with the gut? Or just listen to my buddies?
I don't know how sophisticated Ron Paul's critical thinking is, but honestly -- any creationist has to have a serious disconnect with the real world. This is the guy we want dealing with the many science-heavy issues we have to deal with? This is the guy we want leading the US foreign policy (dealing with lots of other countries full of, holy shit, heathens and infidels)?
Sorry, but no. When he blogs about "churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance", that sounds like his religion might affect his politics.
And it's slim pickings for rational candidates nowadays, but it'd be pretty hard to convince me the Creationist is the bright spark among them.
Mmm-kay?
...ew.
Hey, did Lumbergh actually call Milton "Milt"?
I never noticed that.
Instead professionals should simply get Google Apps for their domain and have Google Mail work as "professional@thatismydomain.com". Duh
Check into basically *any* hosting package. If you're with a reputable company, you'll get the SMTP servers with multiple redundant mail drops, backup, web interface, spam filters, etc. just thrown in with the shared hosting for your simple 5 page website.
It's not expensive (easily under $10/month.. you can go under $5, but with some cost in quality...), you don't need to manage your own server, and you don't have Google mining your email to decide which ads to show.
If you're more paranoid (and have a bit of technical know-how) you can get a cheap virtual private server with root access, lock it down so even the hosting company can't get into it, and run your mail server there. A VPS puts you into the "over 20 bucks" a month range, though, and a decent chunk of time for setup the first time, so weigh that carefully.
First, do we have a replacement set of terminology? Taxonomy of life is unavoidably an imperfect business, but we can't just say "yeah, life actually is a big intermingled mess, there are lots of gray areas and overlap... so animals may only be referred to as individuals by their given names."
So I think we're stuck with an imperfect system -- though really, it's not such a big deal. The biologists all understand the limitations of the system, and scientific advancement can easily continue because of that understanding -- they make up new terms as they need them and move on.
There's also the huge amount of extant research using this system that's still relevant.
Third party observer: "Aw, snap!"
Indubitably, my brother; indubitably -- my diss is now affirmed.
I loosed them.
Fly free, little apostrophes! You're free! You're free!
But -- if we get *enough* cells out there, absorbing solar energy that would normally have been primarily heat and turning it into electricity that's used for lower-heat purposes... isn't that going to cool the planet?
...or is it only me imagining these things?
Heh.
You know, this goes along with the idea that many windmills will change the weather (possibly for the better, e.g. attenuating hurricanes), and lots of wave turbines will ruin surfing but slow erosion.