That means American personal cars and homes produce between 1/4 and 1/5 of the world's CO2 emissions.
That can't be correct. Total human emissions of CO2 only account for about 3% of the world's CO2 emissions, so do you mean that American cars and homes account for between 1/4 and 1/5 of that 3%?
You do realize medicare/medicaide is more expensive than private insurance, don't you? Sure, you may not pay for it up front when visiting the doctor or paying for your drugs, but you do pay for it in taxes, along with everyone else.
Of course you pay for it in taxes. The question is whether the *total cost* of services rendered is higher with Medicare or with private insurance. Medicare has somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% overhead and administrative costs, compared to around 25% for private insurance. Hence, private insurance is less efficient.
This combination has almost all of the functionality of Matlab. In my opinion the plots look nicer than Matlab's, and it runs faster as well. Plus, There are a *ton* of extra packgages that can be installed to augment the basic functionality, and more are being written every day by a vibrant and active community.
I learned Matlab as a graduate student, but now, as a professor, I start all of my new coding projects in Python.
Okay, I've had it. I am a Christian myself, but this is just embarrassing. This guy is even a "young earth" creationist, which in my opinion should disqualify him from serving on any committee associated with science. If you agree, please consider writing your local news station to suggest that they report on this story. If it gets wide enough press, perhaps there will be some pressure to hand the job over to someone who actually accepts the tenets of basic science.
It is easily feasible to 'cut the cord' provided you are not too demanding in your programming requirements. In any reasonably-large city you can easily pull down all the major networks in HD over the air with a small digital antenna and a pc-HDTV card or equivalent. Quality is reputed to be even better than the quality of HD cable. Many other shows are easily available through your browser at nearly the same time they are broadcast. If you *must* see the latest HBO series, well, then choices are either to bend over and pay, or break the law and fire up the rationalization engine.
One notable exception is that if you are a big sports fan you will definitely miss live programming on ESPN.
Me? I've been watching only broadcast TV using Myth for over 10 years. That's $6,000 saved so far, minimum.
I already posted this in my own thread, and don't want to spam, but you should check out work that has been done integrating Dasher with a gazetracker:
I've seen this in a textbook published in 1998, which contains references to papers dating from the 1960's. That text highly recommendeds a collection of review articles found here, and what appears to be a later book by the same author is here.
generally I think these texts were oral traditions first, then scattered textual records, some of which appear to have drawn from a source proto-gospel which is referred to as "Q" (which is an abbreviation for some German word, cannot remember what).
I'm totally with you on the oral traditions part, and that raises the question of the reliability of oral tradition over time. But I think oral tradition can be much more self-correcting than it is usually given credit for. Of course, if you have that tradition spreading, then a new angle that corresponds to a new location may not be corrected. But the scattered textual records, say, for example, of Paul's early letters, show remarkable agreement given their geographic dispersion. And Paul was pretty close to the source.
I can think of an example of stuff that is suspected of being fake: the whole "doubting Thomas" story, which only appears in John, is thought by Elaine Pagels (whom you should consider reading, she's very interesting) to be an agenda-driven fabrication taking a shot at the Thomists, whose much different interpretation of Jesus (the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic gospel) did not make it into the cannon.
Just as a case study, then. You mentioned above (not quoted) that human institutions decided what would eventually be canon. But why was Thomas's gospel rejected? Consider the following discussion of the canon and Gnosticism, selected from Alister McGrath's "Introduction to Chritian Theology." (It would take me much longer to say it less well). That, by the way, seems like a mostly fair and balanced survey, especially when you get into more recent ideas. Anyway:
The word "canon"... derives from the Greek word "kanon" meaning "a rule" or "a fixed reference point."... What criteria were used in drawing up the canon? The basic principle appears to have been that of the recognition rather than the imposition of authority. In other words, the works in question were recognized as already posessing authority, rather than having an arbitrary authority imposed upon them.... By the time of Irenaeus [130-200], it was generally accepted that there were four gospels....
The early church was confronted with a major challenge from a movement known as Gnosticism.... In such a context, an appeal to tradition became of major importance. Iraneus [130-200] insisted that... the church had faithfully proclaimed the same gospel from the time of the apostles until the present day [less than 150 years, then]. The Gnostics had no such claim to continuity with the early church. They had merely invented new ideas, and were impoperly suggesting that these were "Christian."
I would give the same arguments for the gospel of Thomas. You often see today this idea, advanced by those who want Jesus to be "just a wise teacher," that the early church was this powerful institution who crushed any dissent. In fact, it was weak politically, and you can make a strong case that much of this 'dissent' was just a rejection of part of the original message, packaged as a 'weaker' Christianity. I think the proper response to ideas like that is to reject them, just like Intelligent Design is being rejected today (as it should be, I think). But that's not political, it's just defending the truth. Anyway, you can make that case.
Is it possible for the truth to be reported perfectly? I don't think so, outside of mystical guidance, which has to be rejected out of hand from a scientific standpoint.
This, I think is the most serious issue, and it comes back to the circular reasoning argument that I discussed earlier. Forget science for a moment, but keep logic. If, hypothetically, there is a God, and Jesus was his son incarnated as a human, and if God desired people to know about this, then why wouldn't he m
Wow. I am completely impressed by the restraint you showed in your reply, which highlights the rudeness in my own post. I must first apologize for that.
As a matter of fact, I have reviewed the specious types of documents to which you refer, and no serious Christian or secular scholars take them seriously--that's why they only appear in poorly-researched polemic works like the one you describe and not Biblical Archaeology Review. The cited passage is not from a contemporary document, it's from nearly two centuries after Christ was allegedly crucified. Tacitus was one hundred years before that, but still a century after Jesus' lifetime--well after Christianity was well-established. There's a reference from Pliny the Younger from 11 years after that. Then there are Talmudic references are even newer than the one you mention.
I would be hugely in your debt if you could send me references to some of the documents you cite. I always hated the way 'The case for Christ' was written, as much as I was excited about the ideas it contained.
There; I just did.
I'm afraid you didn't...
And, I am officially an ass. Apologies, again.
The latest thing is the James ossuary, whose authenticity is in debate.... Assuming it's legitimate, and assuming the Jesus in question is Christ, that would be the earliest mention of his name, at 63 A.D. 63 years is a long time, and that would be the closest mention we've found.
As a math guy, I am constrained to point out that Jesus probably died around 30 A.D., which would cut the time in half. But even a couple of hundred years, in my understanding, is not a great deal of time when you're talking about the transmission of old texts. Anyway, I'm definitely not an expert.
My only point is that when one is discussing unprecedented events, especially when far removed from those events or any evidence that they happened, the burden of proof is upon the person claiming those unprecedented events occurred. That seems like a fair logical rule to me.
Yeah, I totally agree -- I've been thinking the same thing lately.
It comes down to faith, which is a very personal matter. If you believe in God... then no one has any place telling you you're wrong: but neither should you have to look for... evidence to support your faith.... Faith by definition exists outside of reason.
Please forgive the numerous edits; I hope I kept the main point intact. I've encountered that last bit in George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God . Maybe it's been around much longer -- I don't know. In any case, it's a convenient definition of faith that I think is a little too simple. Almost anything you and I believe is based to some extent on faith. Nobody can possible be an expert in every field, and so much of the information we believe about the world we believe because we trust the experts who tell us (and yes, their agreement). Trust, really is a pretty good synonym for faith, the more I think of it. And nobody would argue that trust and reason are mutually exclusive.
This is particularly important when it comes to Christianity. The kind of "makes me feel good / works for me" pseudo-faith (in nothing in particular) you describe may indeed be orthogonal to reason, but the Christian faith is a belief in something specific - "I believe that Christ rose from the dead," in the end. Even Paul admits that the whole faith is bunk if he did not.
This is called "The scandal of the particular," as I'm sure you're read. And for anyone who strives to maintin intellectual integrity, it demands reason. A man is alleged to have risen from the dead, the stakes resting on our decision
Straw man. I discounted the Josephus document alone, as I'm fairly certain most historians you talk to would. I never called it "unofficial," but it almost certainly was doctored. Even if this document were accepted as factual, it's not by any means conclusive.
Have you really checked out the dozen or so "outside" documents that Christians regularly discuss? Yes, the Josephus article looks doctored, but you can even extract from it a subset of the content that looks plausible and tells you things about Christ. The most interesting one to stick in my memory is a different Jewish document which describes Christ performing 'astounding acts through the use of evil power.' Basically, it's a hostile source that accepts the events themselves, but tries to discredit them based on the source of Christ's power. I'd cite, but I've loaned out my copy of "The Case for Christ" (good content, but unfortunately written in a very aggressively persuasive style).
All you need to do is produce ONE Roman or Jewish record
There; I just did.
As for money, God works through people; we are the tools he uses to accomplish his work. In today's economy, getting things done requires money. So, in the process of using people (and money, due to our economy) to do things, God entrusts money to those who will obey him in using it. Now, you might make a legitimate case for not holding large sums of money. I think you could easily argue that being a good steward of a large income flow would involve continually giving away most of it. I think John Wesly thought a lot about this; he would be a good source.
Also, I would point out that your earlier argument against Jesus' miracles (and resurrection) based on the fact that these things don't happen in nature appears circular. If God exists as a power outside of nature, and He has the power to alter our world, then Christ's miracles are not difficult to believe (and see above source). Only the a priori assumption that God does not exist or posess such power makes the miracles impossible. But that assumption is essentially the same as the conclusion.
P.S. I haven't posted in a while; how do you get such nicely formatted quote/response exchanges? I tried blockquote/italic, but it doesn't look right.
Desease fire, drought, flood, earthquakes, who causes these? A man dies of virulent skin cancer in the prime of his life. Happens all the time. Why did God set it up that way? There is noone else to blame...
It is indeed tragic that these things happen. And they hurt. Let us not forget in the intellectual debate that these things are very real. I don't have a quick-fire answer that will satisfy you or me as to these things. It's just that they don't imply that God is absent, or evil. It just shows that for whatever reason, he allowed evil to exist in the world. It's much (well, pretty much exactly) like the description of Melkor in the Silmarillion.
That's simple. If I'm a God I don't present this obviously difficult puzzle to creatures with limited capacity. I skip that and go straight to the part where we all live together in harmony for all of eternity.
It was called the garden of Eden. We left. (Note that I think of Eden in an archetypal sense. Just want to avoid needless flames.)
So far there is no evidence for the existence of a god that has not been dismissed decisively (other than eye witness reports by peasants, discovery channel and various other unreliable sources).
Read, for a good starting point, Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ," a good summary of the historical evidence surrounding the person of Jesus, and an analysis of its validity. Strobel (an atheist) set out to apply his journalistic skills to truly examine said evidence and, hopefully, dismiss it convincingly.
It is either science or religion. There is no middle way. Anyone claiming there is takes two points of view that are in contradiction (hence either one or both assumptions are false).
To say, for example, that beleiving Jesus rose from the dead is absurd because people don't rise from the dead, is to implicitly use as a starting assumption that there is no God. Big suprise that this assumption leads to a similar conclusion. I believe in Jesus. I am a scientist. I believe in Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy. I believe hard-core evolutionists tend to use circular logic at times, but I believe that evolution occurs. In short, I accept pretty much all the established theories. None of these in any way whatsoever challenges any of the tenents of my faith. I would invite you to show me the contradictions in two such beliefs.
The difference is between the 'Scientific Method' characterized by experiment and measurement, and the 'Investigative Method', characterized by careful study of historical evidence. Your detectives would be using the latter. I'm sure the author was alluding to the fact that there is indeed a great wealth of historical evidence regarding the person of Jesus that is able to be analyzed investigatively, rather than scientifically.
Suppose you are God, and you want people to choose you; to choose good. For a choice to exist, there must be alternatives. We could not freely choose good if there were not an evil alternative
He dismissively claims there's evidence if you look -- the most substantive thing he says -- but he brushes by it as though it weren't that important, probably because it's patently false.
Reference, for example, "The Case for Christ," by Lee Strobel, for a summary of said evidence, and an analysis of its validity. I believe Larry's off-handed comment was intended to be nuetral rather than dismissive, and to avoid the impression that he was trying to preach to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Mint Debian Edition?
That means American personal cars and homes produce between 1/4 and 1/5 of the world's CO2 emissions.
That can't be correct. Total human emissions of CO2 only account for about 3% of the world's CO2 emissions, so do you mean that American cars and homes account for between 1/4 and 1/5 of that 3%?
What you are missing here is a citation for that 3% number. Here, let me google that for you: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=what+fraction+of+co2+is+due+to+humans
You do realize medicare/medicaide is more expensive than private insurance, don't you? Sure, you may not pay for it up front when visiting the doctor or paying for your drugs, but you do pay for it in taxes, along with everyone else.
Of course you pay for it in taxes. The question is whether the *total cost* of services rendered is higher with Medicare or with private insurance. Medicare has somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% overhead and administrative costs, compared to around 25% for private insurance. Hence, private insurance is less efficient.
This combination has almost all of the functionality of Matlab. In my opinion the plots look nicer than Matlab's, and it runs faster as well. Plus, There are a *ton* of extra packgages that can be installed to augment the basic functionality, and more are being written every day by a vibrant and active community. I learned Matlab as a graduate student, but now, as a professor, I start all of my new coding projects in Python.
Okay, I've had it. I am a Christian myself, but this is just embarrassing. This guy is even a "young earth" creationist, which in my opinion should disqualify him from serving on any committee associated with science. If you agree, please consider writing your local news station to suggest that they report on this story. If it gets wide enough press, perhaps there will be some pressure to hand the job over to someone who actually accepts the tenets of basic science.
Rent a trailer or borrow a truck. You can even rent an SUV several times per year for far less than the price premium of an SUV over a compact.
It is easily feasible to 'cut the cord' provided you are not too demanding in your programming requirements. In any reasonably-large city you can easily pull down all the major networks in HD over the air with a small digital antenna and a pc-HDTV card or equivalent. Quality is reputed to be even better than the quality of HD cable. Many other shows are easily available through your browser at nearly the same time they are broadcast. If you *must* see the latest HBO series, well, then choices are either to bend over and pay, or break the law and fire up the rationalization engine.
One notable exception is that if you are a big sports fan you will definitely miss live programming on ESPN.
Me? I've been watching only broadcast TV using Myth for over 10 years. That's $6,000 saved so far, minimum.
I already posted this in my own thread, and don't want to spam, but you should check out work that has been done integrating Dasher with a gazetracker:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/SpecialNeeds.html
Oh, it's already been done. 20 words per minute, no less.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/SpecialNeeds.html
Wouldn't it be a lot faster and cheaper to integrate eye-tracking technology into Dasher?
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/
Because, ideally, all four cores should be running at 100% -- the idea is to make maximal use of your available resources, right?
I've seen this in a textbook published in 1998, which contains references to papers dating from the 1960's. That text highly recommendeds a collection of review articles found here, and what appears to be a later book by the same author is here.
Reminds me of this article: Computer model behaves like humans on visual categorization task.
"Marketing for geeks is simple: don't try to market any product to geeks."
.sig :).
I just found a new
generally I think these texts were oral traditions first, then scattered textual records, some of which appear to have drawn from a source proto-gospel which is referred to as "Q" (which is an abbreviation for some German word, cannot remember what).
I'm totally with you on the oral traditions part, and that raises the question of the reliability of oral tradition over time. But I think oral tradition can be much more self-correcting than it is usually given credit for. Of course, if you have that tradition spreading, then a new angle that corresponds to a new location may not be corrected. But the scattered textual records, say, for example, of Paul's early letters, show remarkable agreement given their geographic dispersion. And Paul was pretty close to the source.
I can think of an example of stuff that is suspected of being fake: the whole "doubting Thomas" story, which only appears in John, is thought by Elaine Pagels (whom you should consider reading, she's very interesting) to be an agenda-driven fabrication taking a shot at the Thomists, whose much different interpretation of Jesus (the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic gospel) did not make it into the cannon.
Just as a case study, then. You mentioned above (not quoted) that human institutions decided what would eventually be canon. But why was Thomas's gospel rejected? Consider the following discussion of the canon and Gnosticism, selected from Alister McGrath's "Introduction to Chritian Theology." (It would take me much longer to say it less well). That, by the way, seems like a mostly fair and balanced survey, especially when you get into more recent ideas. Anyway:
I would give the same arguments for the gospel of Thomas. You often see today this idea, advanced by those who want Jesus to be "just a wise teacher," that the early church was this powerful institution who crushed any dissent. In fact, it was weak politically, and you can make a strong case that much of this 'dissent' was just a rejection of part of the original message, packaged as a 'weaker' Christianity. I think the proper response to ideas like that is to reject them, just like Intelligent Design is being rejected today (as it should be, I think). But that's not political, it's just defending the truth. Anyway, you can make that case.
Is it possible for the truth to be reported perfectly? I don't think so, outside of mystical guidance, which has to be rejected out of hand from a scientific standpoint.
This, I think is the most serious issue, and it comes back to the circular reasoning argument that I discussed earlier. Forget science for a moment, but keep logic. If, hypothetically, there is a God, and Jesus was his son incarnated as a human, and if God desired people to know about this, then why wouldn't he m
Wow. I am completely impressed by the restraint you showed in your reply, which highlights the rudeness in my own post. I must first apologize for that.
As a matter of fact, I have reviewed the specious types of documents to which you refer, and no serious Christian or secular scholars take them seriously--that's why they only appear in poorly-researched polemic works like the one you describe and not Biblical Archaeology Review. The cited passage is not from a contemporary document, it's from nearly two centuries after Christ was allegedly crucified. Tacitus was one hundred years before that, but still a century after Jesus' lifetime--well after Christianity was well-established. There's a reference from Pliny the Younger from 11 years after that. Then there are Talmudic references are even newer than the one you mention.
I would be hugely in your debt if you could send me references to some of the documents you cite. I always hated the way 'The case for Christ' was written, as much as I was excited about the ideas it contained.
And, I am officially an ass. Apologies, again.
As a math guy, I am constrained to point out that Jesus probably died around 30 A.D., which would cut the time in half. But even a couple of hundred years, in my understanding, is not a great deal of time when you're talking about the transmission of old texts. Anyway, I'm definitely not an expert.
Yeah, I totally agree -- I've been thinking the same thing lately.
Please forgive the numerous edits; I hope I kept the main point intact. I've encountered that last bit in George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God . Maybe it's been around much longer -- I don't know. In any case, it's a convenient definition of faith that I think is a little too simple. Almost anything you and I believe is based to some extent on faith. Nobody can possible be an expert in every field, and so much of the information we believe about the world we believe because we trust the experts who tell us (and yes, their agreement). Trust, really is a pretty good synonym for faith, the more I think of it. And nobody would argue that trust and reason are mutually exclusive.
This is particularly important when it comes to Christianity. The kind of "makes me feel good / works for me" pseudo-faith (in nothing in particular) you describe may indeed be orthogonal to reason, but the Christian faith is a belief in something specific - "I believe that Christ rose from the dead," in the end. Even Paul admits that the whole faith is bunk if he did not.
This is called "The scandal of the particular," as I'm sure you're read. And for anyone who strives to maintin intellectual integrity, it demands reason. A man is alleged to have risen from the dead, the stakes resting on our decision
Have you really checked out the dozen or so "outside" documents that Christians regularly discuss? Yes, the Josephus article looks doctored, but you can even extract from it a subset of the content that looks plausible and tells you things about Christ. The most interesting one to stick in my memory is a different Jewish document which describes Christ performing 'astounding acts through the use of evil power.' Basically, it's a hostile source that accepts the events themselves, but tries to discredit them based on the source of Christ's power. I'd cite, but I've loaned out my copy of "The Case for Christ" (good content, but unfortunately written in a very aggressively persuasive style).
There; I just did.
As for money, God works through people; we are the tools he uses to accomplish his work. In today's economy, getting things done requires money. So, in the process of using people (and money, due to our economy) to do things, God entrusts money to those who will obey him in using it. Now, you might make a legitimate case for not holding large sums of money. I think you could easily argue that being a good steward of a large income flow would involve continually giving away most of it. I think John Wesly thought a lot about this; he would be a good source.
Also, I would point out that your earlier argument against Jesus' miracles (and resurrection) based on the fact that these things don't happen in nature appears circular. If God exists as a power outside of nature, and He has the power to alter our world, then Christ's miracles are not difficult to believe (and see above source). Only the a priori assumption that God does not exist or posess such power makes the miracles impossible. But that assumption is essentially the same as the conclusion.
P.S. I haven't posted in a while; how do you get such nicely formatted quote/response exchanges? I tried blockquote/italic, but it doesn't look right.
Desease fire, drought, flood, earthquakes, who causes these? A man dies of virulent skin cancer in the prime of his life. Happens all the time. Why did God set it up that way? There is noone else to blame...
It is indeed tragic that these things happen. And they hurt. Let us not forget in the intellectual debate that these things are very real. I don't have a quick-fire answer that will satisfy you or me as to these things. It's just that they don't imply that God is absent, or evil. It just shows that for whatever reason, he allowed evil to exist in the world. It's much (well, pretty much exactly) like the description of Melkor in the Silmarillion.
That's simple. If I'm a God I don't present this obviously difficult puzzle to creatures with limited capacity. I skip that and go straight to the part where we all live together in harmony for all of eternity.
It was called the garden of Eden. We left. (Note that I think of Eden in an archetypal sense. Just want to avoid needless flames.)
So far there is no evidence for the existence of a god that has not been dismissed decisively (other than eye witness reports by peasants, discovery channel and various other unreliable sources).
Read, for a good starting point, Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ," a good summary of the historical evidence surrounding the person of Jesus, and an analysis of its validity. Strobel (an atheist) set out to apply his journalistic skills to truly examine said evidence and, hopefully, dismiss it convincingly.
It is either science or religion. There is no middle way. Anyone claiming there is takes two points of view that are in contradiction (hence either one or both assumptions are false).
To say, for example, that beleiving Jesus rose from the dead is absurd because people don't rise from the dead, is to implicitly use as a starting assumption that there is no God. Big suprise that this assumption leads to a similar conclusion. I believe in Jesus. I am a scientist. I believe in Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy. I believe hard-core evolutionists tend to use circular logic at times, but I believe that evolution occurs. In short, I accept pretty much all the established theories. None of these in any way whatsoever challenges any of the tenents of my faith. I would invite you to show me the contradictions in two such beliefs.
The difference is between the 'Scientific Method' characterized by experiment and measurement, and the 'Investigative Method', characterized by careful study of historical evidence. Your detectives would be using the latter. I'm sure the author was alluding to the fact that there is indeed a great wealth of historical evidence regarding the person of Jesus that is able to be analyzed investigatively, rather than scientifically.
Suppose you are God, and you want people to choose you; to choose good. For a choice to exist, there must be alternatives. We could not freely choose good if there were not an evil alternative
He dismissively claims there's evidence if you look -- the most substantive thing he says -- but he brushes by it as though it weren't that important, probably because it's patently false.
Reference, for example, "The Case for Christ," by Lee Strobel, for a summary of said evidence, and an analysis of its validity. I believe Larry's off-handed comment was intended to be nuetral rather than dismissive, and to avoid the impression that he was trying to preach to anyone.