Finding oil is a very important and high-stakes issue for oil companies. Literally trillions of dollars are riding on it. Exxon's exploration budget alone is around $20 billion per year. When the chips are down and they need to find the most likely spots to drill - what kind of geology do they use? Flood geology, or mainstream? Which one actually delivers the goods?
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plankton (with a few plants and dinosaurs), but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
Dawkins and many others notwithstanding, evolution doesn't disprove god(s) or mandate atheism. What it does do is undermine (very thoroughly) an argument for god(s) that used to be a 'slam dunk': the 'argument from complexity in the biological world'.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand the distinction, and people like Dawkins don't help. Many religious types treat 'discounting an argument for god(s)' the same as 'advancing an argument against god(s)', and go ballistic. But it's important to note the difference. There's still room to believe in god(s) even if you accept the ridiculously overwhelming evidence that evolution happened and is happening. (I don't believe in god(s), FWIW, but many people do.)
Stein and his ilk really remind me of the worst features of Ned Flanders sometimes. "Well, I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!"
Chemical rockets need to be basically thin balloons full of fuel. Nuclear rockets have ISP to spare, and can be much tougher. Even then, a big nuclear rocket would need about 10 lbs of nucleotides; old nuclear tests put something like three orders of magnitude more into the atmosphere and didn't kill anybody. Read the article.
It would be pure st00pid to build a nuclear ground to orbit to ground space plane. Without sufficient shielding anything electronic aboard would have its circuits destroyed. With sufficient shielding it'd never get off the ground.
Forgive me, but that's spoken like someone who hasn't done the math. Go read the actual, y'know, article I linked to.
My problem with the others is that their approach seems to be "how can we make a game act like a file manager", where I'm looking at it more like "how can we make a file manager act like a game"?
If it slows down the computer, it slows down the user.
I'm trying to abide by that for my 3D file manager. It's not ready for release yet, but there's some screenshots here. I'm still not sure it's the right idea, but I'm trying not to get in the user's way. I don't force you to walk across a "room" (directory); if you can see it, you can put the cursor on it and hit the space bar. Bang, you're teleported to that object.
Anyway, if anyone can come up with a better name than "First Person File Manager", I'd love to hear it.
We need to move our solar power generation to space... Except that this, too, does not scale.
Sure, it does... provided we can move the required masses around. And we can, with something like a closed-cycle gas-core nuclear engine that uses hydrogen to cool the core, and then spits it out as exhaust. The hydrogen can't be made radioactive, so the exhaust is totally clean, and I've seen (reusable) designs that'll lift a thousand tons to orbit in one shot.
Use nuclear power when it makes sense (large power-to-mass ratios needed) and solar for the rest.
My question, and one that Dawkins would probably ask as well, is whether any or all of those positive effects that religion has had on civilisation were possible only through religion, of if they were attainable in any other way.
That's a separate question. I strongly suspect that the benefits are possible without religion (heck, I'm not religious but I think I'm a pretty good guy and beneficial to society overall:-> ) but the only point I was making is that, historically, they were achieved with religion. Religion was a net benefit. Whether it's a net benefit now... well, I have my doubts.
Whether or not you believe that theists are deluded, it's impossible to argue with the second half of that point, namely that religious belief has a negative impact on civilisation.
Um, well, actually, it's possible to argue that religion has been a net benefit. David Sloan Wilson does so in his book, which I recommend, "Evolution For Everyone".
Wilson makes the useful distinction between beliefs that are "factually realistic" (actually correct) and "practically realistic" (false but motivating useful behaviors). Religion may not be true, but historically it has helped organize societies and regulate human behavior in socially useful ways. However, Wilson points out that it's not clear that we must give up factual realism for practical realism. And he also notes that behaviors that are adaptive in one context can be useless or maladaptive in other contexts.
An example (these aren't in "Evolution For Everyone", they're my own observations): Jewish dietary law prohibits mixing milk and meat in the same meal. Rabbis have taken this as far as prohibiting eating meat too soon after drinking milk, to allow the milk to have made it past the stomach. Now, storing cheese too close to meat, particularly without refrigeration, is a bad thing - the meat will go bad very quickly. So, a rule that has the effect of keeping meat and cheese stored separately is a good thing. Even if the rule has useless side-effects, it can be a net benefit if the side costs aren't too great.
Another example: it appears that sex during menstruation leads to increased risk of endometriosis. A rule prohibiting sexual contact during menstruation is - to that extent - a good thing. Of course, the religious rules tend to go way beyond that, prohibiting all physical contact whatsoever, even to not sitting where a menstruating woman has sat. But the rule is "practically realistic" to an extent, even if it's not "factually realistic" that a menstruating woman is really 'ritually unpure'. (Here's a rule that tends to lead to the denigration of women, to the point of that silly prayer for men thanking God that they weren't born women, etc.)
In both of these cases, understanding the facts leads to rules that are factually realistic and also a good deal more practically realistic. So, it's possible to say that religion has historically been a net benefit while also concluding that it's no longer such a great benefit, and in many modern cases does real harm.
the vast bulk of scientists seem to be so lackadaisical about their basic human obligation to police their own in an even-handed manner
Gee, like the religious are so proactive about "their basic human obligation to police" the Discovery Institute? Or even Fred Phelps?
What, exactly, are scientists supposed to do in a case where a science teacher is "twisting science into scientism and advocating atheism under the color of science"? Can you give an example of such behavior?
If an idea cannot be deconstructed and reproduced within the scientific method, it is considered without value.
Um, no, it's considered not scientific. Big difference. You're confusing science with what is sometimes called 'scientism' (of which there are far fewer practitioners in reality than in the minds of those who use that term).
That book I recommended? "Evolution For Everyone" by David Sloan Wilson? It covers your point about utility, but he uses the terms "practical realism" (useful in the real world) and "factual realism" (actually true) to describe them.
However, as he states, "It's not clear that we must sacrifice factual realism for practical realism." And, as we learn from studying evolution, what's adaptive (useful) in one context can become a major problem in other contexts. We're in a vastly different context from our stone age ancestors, for example.
I like how David Gerrold put it in one of his novels: "We don't necessarily want accurate maps, we want useful ones. But accuracy is extraordinarily useful."
Science has limitations. The scientific process can't be applied to lifestyle choices, because the experiments you'd need to do would take longer than the span of your own life to create a set of relevant data.
Of course, you can study similar people and lifestyles throughout history and get some indication, just as studying engineering from the past gives you indications about what to do or not do in that subject. The failure of the Tacoma Narrows bridge, for example, had important lessons for the Macinac bridge (they left some grids for wind to blow through).
Doesn't mean the science can help with everything, but it keeps expanding its range - we can protect against lightning and disease quite a bit better than in the past directly because of science. If you want to see how science can apply usefully to humans and their 'lifestyle choices', check out "Evolution For Everyone" by David Sloan Wilson. Good book, and it did change my mind on the historical utility of religion (though not its veracity).
1. Bad guys want to kill Cheney. That seems quite plausible.
2. They find out the exact model of his pacemaker. That sounds feasible with some knowledge of the field, money, time and determination.
3. They have a bunch of researchers examine it for EMP sensitivity. Then build something like this to blast it from a distance. With a bit of math plus trial-and-error it should be possible to find some frequencies it's sensitive to. Bonus points if you get it to deliver a jolt to the heart as it dies. Actually, existing HERF guns will do a decent job of this anyway...
Finding oil is a very important and high-stakes issue for oil companies. Literally trillions of dollars are riding on it. Exxon's exploration budget alone is around $20 billion per year. When the chips are down and they need to find the most likely spots to drill - what kind of geology do they use? Flood geology, or mainstream? Which one actually delivers the goods?
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plants and dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
Yes, console games are a much bigger business than PC games. I said that in my post. So what's your point, smartmouth?
Well, actually, you didn't say that (I just reread it a couple times). And I meant my post more in a humorous tone, I apologize if it came across as snarky - tone of voice doesn't carry in text.
My point was that games on PCs are becoming a smaller niche - still big enough to park a battleship in, as you say. I agree that MS isn't going away anytime soon, but I don't think it'll take more than a decade for them to become like IBM - still big, but not The Dominant Player anymore.
A lot less people all the time. Every single electronic gizmo nowadays has its own menu system, along with half the websites and such. People are used to learning slightly different interfaces all the time these days, 'familiarity' is much less of a barrier. And then there's the fact that Vista's Aero interface isn't all that familiar to XP-users compared to the latest Linux systems, anyway.
There are still plenty of dealbreakers - niche Windows-only software - but those niches are shrinking, and 'familiarity' alone isn't enough to save Windows forever.
Evolution is simply a model that best fits the evidence, is it not? Wasn't the model of the earth flat at one time?
You really need to read this. "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Regarding the transition from apelike ancestors to the current varieties of primates, it's a lot more than theoretical. For example, if humans were created separately from chimpanzees, how come we share at least six endogenous retroviruses in the same places in our genomes, and no other primates have those retroviruses there?
And as to transitional fossils - here's my favorite, one you can even partially test on your own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as 'irreducibly complex' - just Google around a bit.)
It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Fossils representing over 11 separate stages have been found. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.
Common descent explains this, and many other similar things, handily. I'm still waiting on creationist explanations. Can you point me to one?
One of my.sigs, seen on Slashdot: "Choice, flexibility and cost are really the driving factors [for Linux adoption]. And Microsoft would have to stop being Microsoft to ever compete with that combination." - emkey
...the fact that evolution is happening doesn't depend on whether the first life forms were created by abiogenesis, aliens, or even God.
See "Code of the Lifemaker", an SF book by James P. Hogan. You can read it for free here. Just read the prologue - it makes the point very, very well the difference between the origin of life and its subsequent evolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plankton (with a few plants and dinosaurs), but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
Because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming?
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand the distinction, and people like Dawkins don't help. Many religious types treat 'discounting an argument for god(s)' the same as 'advancing an argument against god(s)', and go ballistic. But it's important to note the difference. There's still room to believe in god(s) even if you accept the ridiculously overwhelming evidence that evolution happened and is happening. (I don't believe in god(s), FWIW, but many people do.)
Stein and his ilk really remind me of the worst features of Ned Flanders sometimes. "Well, I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!"
Ah, I misunderstood the tone there. My apologies.
Chemical rockets need to be basically thin balloons full of fuel. Nuclear rockets have ISP to spare, and can be much tougher. Even then, a big nuclear rocket would need about 10 lbs of nucleotides; old nuclear tests put something like three orders of magnitude more into the atmosphere and didn't kill anybody. Read the article.
Forgive me, but that's spoken like someone who hasn't done the math. Go read the actual, y'know, article I linked to.
...we switch from chemical rockets to nuclear ones. Chemical reactions just don't have the power-per-mass ratio that nuclear ones do.
No, that's these guys.
My problem with the others is that their approach seems to be "how can we make a game act like a file manager", where I'm looking at it more like "how can we make a file manager act like a game"?
I'm trying to abide by that for my 3D file manager. It's not ready for release yet, but there's some screenshots here. I'm still not sure it's the right idea, but I'm trying not to get in the user's way. I don't force you to walk across a "room" (directory); if you can see it, you can put the cursor on it and hit the space bar. Bang, you're teleported to that object.
Anyway, if anyone can come up with a better name than "First Person File Manager", I'd love to hear it.
Sure, it does... provided we can move the required masses around. And we can, with something like a closed-cycle gas-core nuclear engine that uses hydrogen to cool the core, and then spits it out as exhaust. The hydrogen can't be made radioactive, so the exhaust is totally clean, and I've seen (reusable) designs that'll lift a thousand tons to orbit in one shot.
Use nuclear power when it makes sense (large power-to-mass ratios needed) and solar for the rest.
That's a separate question. I strongly suspect that the benefits are possible without religion (heck, I'm not religious but I think I'm a pretty good guy and beneficial to society overall :-> ) but the only point I was making is that, historically, they were achieved with religion. Religion was a net benefit. Whether it's a net benefit now... well, I have my doubts.
Um, well, actually, it's possible to argue that religion has been a net benefit. David Sloan Wilson does so in his book, which I recommend, "Evolution For Everyone".
Wilson makes the useful distinction between beliefs that are "factually realistic" (actually correct) and "practically realistic" (false but motivating useful behaviors). Religion may not be true, but historically it has helped organize societies and regulate human behavior in socially useful ways. However, Wilson points out that it's not clear that we must give up factual realism for practical realism. And he also notes that behaviors that are adaptive in one context can be useless or maladaptive in other contexts.
An example (these aren't in "Evolution For Everyone", they're my own observations): Jewish dietary law prohibits mixing milk and meat in the same meal. Rabbis have taken this as far as prohibiting eating meat too soon after drinking milk, to allow the milk to have made it past the stomach. Now, storing cheese too close to meat, particularly without refrigeration, is a bad thing - the meat will go bad very quickly. So, a rule that has the effect of keeping meat and cheese stored separately is a good thing. Even if the rule has useless side-effects, it can be a net benefit if the side costs aren't too great.
Another example: it appears that sex during menstruation leads to increased risk of endometriosis. A rule prohibiting sexual contact during menstruation is - to that extent - a good thing. Of course, the religious rules tend to go way beyond that, prohibiting all physical contact whatsoever, even to not sitting where a menstruating woman has sat. But the rule is "practically realistic" to an extent, even if it's not "factually realistic" that a menstruating woman is really 'ritually unpure'. (Here's a rule that tends to lead to the denigration of women, to the point of that silly prayer for men thanking God that they weren't born women, etc.)
In both of these cases, understanding the facts leads to rules that are factually realistic and also a good deal more practically realistic. So, it's possible to say that religion has historically been a net benefit while also concluding that it's no longer such a great benefit, and in many modern cases does real harm.
Gee, like the religious are so proactive about "their basic human obligation to police" the Discovery Institute? Or even Fred Phelps?
What, exactly, are scientists supposed to do in a case where a science teacher is "twisting science into scientism and advocating atheism under the color of science"? Can you give an example of such behavior?
Um, no, it's considered not scientific. Big difference. You're confusing science with what is sometimes called 'scientism' (of which there are far fewer practitioners in reality than in the minds of those who use that term).
That book I recommended? "Evolution For Everyone" by David Sloan Wilson? It covers your point about utility, but he uses the terms "practical realism" (useful in the real world) and "factual realism" (actually true) to describe them. However, as he states, "It's not clear that we must sacrifice factual realism for practical realism." And, as we learn from studying evolution, what's adaptive (useful) in one context can become a major problem in other contexts. We're in a vastly different context from our stone age ancestors, for example.
I like how David Gerrold put it in one of his novels: "We don't necessarily want accurate maps, we want useful ones. But accuracy is extraordinarily useful."
Of course, you can study similar people and lifestyles throughout history and get some indication, just as studying engineering from the past gives you indications about what to do or not do in that subject. The failure of the Tacoma Narrows bridge, for example, had important lessons for the Macinac bridge (they left some grids for wind to blow through).
Doesn't mean the science can help with everything, but it keeps expanding its range - we can protect against lightning and disease quite a bit better than in the past directly because of science. If you want to see how science can apply usefully to humans and their 'lifestyle choices', check out "Evolution For Everyone" by David Sloan Wilson. Good book, and it did change my mind on the historical utility of religion (though not its veracity).
3. They have a bunch of researchers examine it for EMP sensitivity. Then build something like this to blast it from a distance. With a bit of math plus trial-and-error it should be possible to find some frequencies it's sensitive to. Bonus points if you get it to deliver a jolt to the heart as it dies. Actually, existing HERF guns will do a decent job of this anyway...
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plants and dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
Well, actually, you didn't say that (I just reread it a couple times). And I meant my post more in a humorous tone, I apologize if it came across as snarky - tone of voice doesn't carry in text.
My point was that games on PCs are becoming a smaller niche - still big enough to park a battleship in, as you say. I agree that MS isn't going away anytime soon, but I don't think it'll take more than a decade for them to become like IBM - still big, but not The Dominant Player anymore.
Go look up the relative figures on sales (units and revenue) between PC and consoles last year. Go ahead, I'll wait.
A lot less people all the time. Every single electronic gizmo nowadays has its own menu system, along with half the websites and such. People are used to learning slightly different interfaces all the time these days, 'familiarity' is much less of a barrier. And then there's the fact that Vista's Aero interface isn't all that familiar to XP-users compared to the latest Linux systems, anyway.
There are still plenty of dealbreakers - niche Windows-only software - but those niches are shrinking, and 'familiarity' alone isn't enough to save Windows forever.
Here's two.
You really need to read this. "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
And as to transitional fossils - here's my favorite, one you can even partially test on your own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as 'irreducibly complex' - just Google around a bit.)
It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Fossils representing over 11 separate stages have been found. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.
Common descent explains this, and many other similar things, handily. I'm still waiting on creationist explanations. Can you point me to one?
One of my .sigs, seen on Slashdot: "Choice, flexibility and cost are really the driving factors [for Linux adoption]. And Microsoft would have to stop being Microsoft to ever compete with that combination." - emkey
See "Code of the Lifemaker", an SF book by James P. Hogan. You can read it for free here. Just read the prologue - it makes the point very, very well the difference between the origin of life and its subsequent evolution.