The headline shouted "DNA of Woolly Mammoth Fully Sequenced", but then we read "Scientists have decoded the mitochondrial DNA".
So the headline was almost totally incorrect and misleading. The mtDNA is typically about 0.1% of a mammal's total DNA. Sequencing the mtDNA is only about 1000th of "fully sequenced". They have a long, long way to go before a "fully sequenced" claim can be made.
Their achievement is newsworthy enough by itself. There's no reason to exaggerate it so wildly.
Immanuel Kant would tell you that if everyone pirates software, there will be little new software produced and that is not desirable. Because it is not desirable for everyone to pirate, it is not moral for you to pirate.
And, like all the others making such claims, he would be wrong.
Where do people get the idea that nobody would ever produce anything if they weren't paid? If that were true, we'd have no community orchestras or theater groups, there'd be no church choirs, no teenage kids would be forming garage bands, etc.
And there'd be no free/open-source software.
Granted, people like to make money from such efforts. But a lack of pay doesn't seem to stop people from producing.
When it comes to art, entertainment and software, one could well make the argument that we get higher quality when people aren't paid. You'd have little trouble finding examples to support such a thesis.
Interesting site. They've done a lot of research on the topic.
Actually, I mostly think it's funny that Christians can keep talking about returning Christmas to its religious roots, when the slightest investigation shows that the holiday has never been primarily religious. They've been alternately trying to suppress the holiday and converting it to a religious holiday for ages, never very successfully.
It's one of the better examples of the general Christian contempt for history, and their preference for making up fake history that says what they want history to say.
Of course, this isn't exactly unique with Christians. One hint in the article is the comment on other gods who were supposed to have been born on the solstice.
Maybe what we need is a big campaign to return the solstice to its pagan roots.
You won't see "proof" in the fossil record that "first we had a microbe, then we had a fish, then we had a land mammal that evolved to an ape that evolved to a human".
You don't see "proof" of much of anything in the fossil record. All you see is fossils, usually incomplete and badly mangled. And they're a tiny subset of the critters that actually existed, since it takes rather special conditions for your body to be preserved rather than devoured.
You might see evidence that they occured in that order, but we haven't even filled in species for all of the steps, much less proven that they step from one to the next.
Yup; expecting the intermediate steps is a standard strawman argument that can never be satisfied due to the sketchiness of the fossil record. But by Darwin's time, they had enough sequences to document a lot of very similar patterns that were most parsimoniously interpreted as the transmutation of one species into another (or sometimes several others).
And, of course, at the time this was revolutionary, because the prevailing belief was that the world was created whole in a short time. The fossil remains of creatures that didn't exist any more, and the apparent changes in these creatures through the fossil beds, gave them a lot to think and theorize about. The world's history was obviously a lot more complex than what their culture's myths described. It sure looked like many species had changed form over time.
Recent research has indicated that species under selective pressure mutate more rapidly than other species (yes, mutate more rapidly). Furthermore, it has implied that those species mutate in the direction of a solution to the selective pressure.
I've read those reports, too. Very interesting. It's definitely a case of "further research is needed". Lots of people will want to see the research done. But right now, it's just an "ears up" preliminary conjecture.
I have seen people point out that a stable, unchanging species could well be under strong selection pressure - to stay in exactly their current niche. There could be a high mutation rate (e.g., due to a high level of mutagens in their diet), but the selective pressure would weed out the mutated forms with a vengeance. If the selection was from predation, we'd never see the mutated forms as fossils.
As an example of this, birders know how easy it is to identify many species at a glance, from small details of their shape or flight pattern. Many birds are under strong selective pressure due to the requirements of flight (low mass, high-energy food, exact aerodynamic shape, fast reaction time, etc). Even slight variations can be rapidly fatal, so there's very little intra-species variation. You don't see many mutants in wild populations, because variants die at a very young age and become food for something else.
But maybe there is a partial control of mutation rate. It sure would be interesting to know the mechanism.
Jeez; how did I miss that one? I even remember looking at it as I typed it, thinking that a cute little dog was a funny name for a ship of such historic importance.
I wonder how its spelling changed? Oh, well; I've seen some even more bizarre changes in other posts, things that couldn't be explained by the usual fat-finger mechanisms.
One of my posts several months ago ended up with a string of Chinese characters in the middle. It was pretty, but I wouldn't have known how to type that even if I'd wanted to.
Actually, "Santa Claus" is a mispronunciation of "Saint Nicholas", who was apparently a real 4th-century person. Let's see... Yep; there's a web site showing pictures of his church in Cappadocia. See the pictures of him at the bottom. Not quite the modern commercial Santa, but not all that far off.
Of course, his current association with the ancient solstice holiday (Saturnalia to the Romans) has little to do with him. Or with Jesus, for that matter.
The real complaint should be about the ongoing attempts by Christians to corrupt the solstice holiday (with its traditions of evergreen tree worship, lights to counter the dark, and trading gifts) into some sort of Christian religious thing. That's bogus history and theology, as anyone who has read the biblical accounts of his birth will understand. But then, Christians have never been known for their accurate histories.
Very interesting. I'd seen parts of that document, but I hadn't read that it was introduced as court evidence.
It's also interesting that people would put this sort of admission into print. It sorta belies all of their claims to be interested in science, which is materialistic almost by definition.
Of course, they probably thought that they were just writing for their own circle. Seeing this document presented in court must have been exasperating for them.
You never hear real scientists saying "Evolution is fact!" because it isn't.
Actually, you do - with important qualifications.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote several papers that said just this. Of course, he said a lot more. (He had a column to fill, after all.;-) He and others have made a distinction between the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution.
What he pointed out in several articles was that by the early 1800's, when Darwin was sailing on the Bugle, it was already widely accepted that biological evolution was a historical fact, thoroughly documented in the fossil record. What was missing was a good explanation of this fact. People examining fossils could see the general outline of the evolutionary process; they just didn't understand how it worked.
Facts are what we observe, combined with the easy inferences from the observations. To be scientific, you need not just a lot if facts, you also need explanations of those facts. Such an explanation is first called a hypothesis before it has been tested, and then a theory after it has passed sufficiently many tests.
What Darwin did was to propose an explanation for the observed fact of biological evolution over geologic time. His explanation was unusual in that the mechanism didn't require any guiding intelligence. But it did have explanatory power, and also made testable predictions. So, while the religious folks derided Darwin's heresy, the scientists set about trying to poke holes in his explanation.
In the 1860's, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was really just a hypothesis, not a theory. But now, more than a century later, it's a true theory. We've had plenty of opportunities to test it, and it has passed the tests quite handily. So now it's a true scientific theory. Biological research these days is mostly concerned with working out the details of the mechanisms. Nobody seriously expects that the basic theory will be overturned.
Not that it hasn't been modified along the way. Darwin didn't know about DNA or genes, and could only write vaguely about the mechanism of intelligence. He observed that this mechanism was imperfect, something that any plant or animal breeder would agree with. He also proposed that some variations were "random", which need not have been true, but which we now know is essentially true. He also proposed that the inherited code was not modified by an organism's environment, contrary to others such as Lysenko, and it turns out he was right in this, too. True, environmental things may alter your DNA, but not in any "directed" fashion.
But most importanly (and ignored by most creationists and ID proponents), his theory invoked a very non-random directing force, natural selection. This was difficult for him to observe, but we've since watched and tested it innumerable times, and again it turns out he was quite correct.
OTOH, he didn't guess about viral transduction. And he didn't anticipate Barbara McClintock's idea of the way that eukaryotic cells arose via merger of independent single-cell organisms. So he did miss a few important things that have since modified his theory a bit. But none of these things have significantly weakened his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Of course, we are now on the verge of implementing designer genes...
The point is that their motivation is a religion which is against lying.
Actually, as many theologians and historians have pointed out, the text says (KJV):
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
This says little about lying in general. It just forbids lying to harm another person. It would be difficult to argue that the ID proponents are doing this, even when they lie about their motivations in court. They aren't lying about any neighbor, but about their personal motivations. Hiding your own thoughts from another isn't forbidden by the bible. You can't hide your thoughts from God, but you can hide them from other people. You aren't obligated to bare your innermost thoughts to any passerby who asks, much less to any agent of a court of law.
Some have pointed out that the bible does condone lying in certain circumstances. Consider the commandment to "Honor thy father and mother". Suppose one knew of a crime committed by a parent. This happens to some people. If you testify against them, you are certainly dishonoring them. So this commandment requires that you lie about what you know. One might consider silence, but in many circumstances, that would be taken as agreement with the charges, so that might not be an option.
It would be easy to understand a religious person thinking of this, and deciding that agreeing with Darwin (or tacitly agreeing by not speaking against his theory) would constitute dishonoring God. After all, Darwinism is a "godless" theory that explains the universe without reference to any guiding intelligence. In that case, one could easily justify lying about one's personal thoughts in a court, as people did in this case. The bible seems to condone such lying, although indirectly.
So there's really no credible irony here in their hiding their motivations from the court. They are merely doing their duty to honor their God for what they believe He did.
Intelligent design isn't science because it isn't provable.
Actually, ID isn't science because it isn't disprovable. The usual scientific term is "falsifiable", actually, but "disprovable" is a good enough nearsynonym.
As explained by any number of theory-of-science texts, scientific methods rarely if ever actually prove anything. The usual approach is to come up with as many hypotheses as you can that seem to fit observations, and then you attempt to disprove all of them. Any theories left standing after thorough testing are tentatively accepted as true, pending future tests that find evidence against them.
This is why scientists still keep trying to find tests that will disprove General Relativity. There's general understanding that GR probably isn't the final theory, especially since it hasn't been thoroughly integrated with QM (Quantum Mechanics) yet. But GR has this long history of passing every bizarre test that physicists can dream up. If it had failed even one of them, the story would be different. But physicists generally accept that GR is "true" in the sense that it will be found to be a special case of the "Theory of Everything" that they're looking for.
The basic problem with ID is that we don't seem to have come up with a way to test it. It doesn't make predictions, which is the usual basis of tests. "What will happen if...?" "Whatever God wants." That's not a testable prediction. It's not actually a prediction at all, in any scientifically useful sense. So we can't make any observations that might disprove it.
If someone could find an effective way to test for the existence of an intelligence behind the universe, you can be quite sure that scientists would be fascinated. They'd all be applying for funding to do the tests. But no such test seems to have been defined (yet).
There has been some good science fiction on the topic.
If it fits anywhere is in a class of religious studies.
Oh, I dunno about that. I'd think a "History of Ideas" class would be more appropriate.
Sure, it would fit in a religious studies curriculum. But that would put it off in a corner where serious science students usually don't wander.
Many scientists have suggested that a bit of knowledge of scientific history is useful. Studying the disputes and discarded theories is useful in understanding how we reached our current understanding. It could also help in handling new "theories" that repeat previous mistakes.
One of the useful example s that I've seen in several classes is the history of the "luminiferous aether". This was supposedly the substance that filled all space, which was the substrate for wave phenomena such as light. The common understanding is that Einstein showed that there was no such substance. But a correct history would show that he did no such thing. Rather, he came up with a new theoretical approach that didn't make mention at all of any space-filling substance. That is, he showed that the "aether" wasn't needed to explain the observable universe's behavior. Maybe it exists; maybe it doesn't; we don't care.
Similarly, some historians have pointed out that Darwin effectively did the same thing for biology. He didn't show that there's no God. Rather, he showed that we don't need such an intelligence to explain the biological world and the fossil record. Maybe there's a god; maybe there isn't; for scientific purposes it doesn't matter. We can explain what we see with Natural Selection; adding God doesn't improve the theory's explanatory power. (It actually makes things worse, because your universe now contains one more thing that needs explaining, but you can't observe it at all;-)
Darwin apparently understood this. He made a few comments to the effect that what the religious people would find unforgivable was not that he had shown that there's no God, but that he had shown God to be irrelevant to understanding the world.
Too bad there's no (known) way to ask him what he thinks of the ongoing debate over his theory.
"It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."
There's no irony here at all. What these individuals were doing is properly called "perjury". In pretending to a non-religious motive, they were simply lying. This seems to have been made clear by statements they made outside the courtroom, where they were quite vocal about their religious beliefs. Unfortunately for them, the judge found them out. But he did mischaracterize their behavior as "ironic".
We will now have the usual flamewar over the meaning of the term "irony"...
(Except within the jurisdiction of Judge Jones' court, where there is now a legal definition of the term.;-)
I noticed that the coverage seems to play fast and loose with the distinction between "forbidden to teach Intelligent Design" and "not required to teach Intelligent Design".
So I went looking for some quotes from the decision or the judge. And I found that the judge wrote "[O]ur conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom."
So the judge himself seems to agree that this isn't just tossing the school board's requirement that ID be taught; he actually forbids the teaching of ID.
So we can imagine a science teacher saying something like "There are religious people who seriously suggest that life on Earth was the result of a god's 'Intelligent Design' rather than Darwin's evolution by Natural Selection. But there's no scientific evidence to support Intelligent Design, while there is a great deal of evidence that supports Natural Selection."
This statement would appear to be in violation of the judge's explicit order, since it presents ID as an alternative to evolution (which science rejects).
We should hope that this isn't how the courts will actually view the decision. It could be a serious blow to the teaching of science history. Contention with religion is an important part of the history of science. Darwin put off publishing his theory for decades, partly because (as a trained minister) he fully understood the reaction he would get. The power of religious people to suppress teaching evolution has led directly to such things as the overuse of antibiotics and the subsequent evolution of resistance in many disease organisms. We have a raging malaria epidemic in parts of the tropic because of such evolution. These are not trivial consequences, and they should be taught in the schools as part of the history of the biological sciences.
This judge seems to have outlawed such teaching, along with tossing out the attempt to require teaching ID as a valid scientific theory.
I suppose we can look forward to some more court cases over this topic.
Well at least the company apologised, I just wish they'd seen sense in the first place,...
Don't be too surprised when a month or two from now another manager at Warner Chappell has a company lawyer send Ritter another C&D letter for exactly the same thing.
By adopting Firefox's icon, they do lend Firefox a sense of credibility.
Oh, I dunno about that. Actually, when I first noticed that funny icon in FF, I saw no clue hinting what it was. So I clicked on it - and I still didn't see a clue. It didn't seem to actually do anything. So I sorta forgot about it.
Now, thanks to/., I know that it has something to do with RSS. It still doesn't seem to actually do anything, though. So I'll keep using NetNewsWire Lite to do RSS.
I did find a few things in FF's docs that mention RSS. I experimented with them a bit, to see what this RSS thingie was all about. But I couldn't find anything that did anything sensible, so again I sorta forgot about it.
I'll be that MS will have similar problems with this mysterious icon, until they find a way to explain to users what it is, what it does, and how to use it. FF doesn't do this, though, at least on my machines. Even after getting familiar with RSS via another app, I still have no idea how to do it with FF. I expect that the same will happen with IE for the first N releases.
Actually, I'll predict that IE will handle this user-ed problem in MS's usual way: It'll be turned on by default, with links to lots of approved commercial RSS sites. Most users will use only those, because they won't have a clue that any others exist or how to reach them.
If you want learn human anatomy, disect a chicken, and a chicken isn't even a mammal.
Actually, you'd be a lot better off disecting a mouse. Chickens do have some similarities to humans, but they are more useful in physiology classes as an example of divergent evolution. The organs aren't always the same, and even when homologous, they often have different functions.
You can see lots of examples by just looking at the digestive system. Birds use their beaks to roughly chop their food, while mammals do this with their incisor teeth. These are positioned similarly, but they aren't homologous structures.
Then birds send the chopped food to their crop, an organ that doesn't exist in humans. Squirrels have analogous cheek pouches, but those are yet another structure that's missing in humans.
We use our stomach for storage, but it's also the first digestive organ. The equivalent organ in birds is the gizzard, which is mostly for fine grinding of food. This is often augmented by swallowed pebbles, which serve the same grinding function as our molar teeth. In this case, both position and function are different.
In birds, the first actual chemical digestion occurs in the intestine, while in mammals digestion has already started in the stomach.
So in this one subsystem, avian and mammalian organs and functions don't much line up very well. Overall, there are obvious similarities, true, but neither is very useful in understanding the other in any depth.
For an even more extreme counter-example, take a look at bird and mammal lungs. They aren't even topologically similar. Birds have flow-through lungs, with air and blood passing through in opposite directions, to make a counter-current gas exchanger. And birds' lungs have a fixed size, with the air flow produced by muscles around the air sacs, organs entirely missing in mammals.
Nope; a chicken isn't a very good classroom example if you want to teach human anatomy. Better stick with the mice or rats.
But avian physiology is a fun example when debating creationists. Almost as much fun as squid anatomy.;-)
", but we need more evidence before we can be sure"
clearly indicates he needs further evidence.
You're showing some very good reasoning powers!
One of the long-standing bits of scientific wisdom is that the most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that says "Further research is needed".
This is intended to be funny, of course, but it's a case of "Ha, ha; only serious." It's quite conventional for scientists to point out that their information is incomplete, and openly admit that they don't know the full story about their subject. This is one of the ways that science differs from religion, politics, and other fields of human inquiry.
This particular study is clearly preliminary. The researchers are publishing, in part, to bring the topic before interested eyes. But what they're saying is more of a hypothesis than a statement of fact. Further research is needed.
That's a) offensive, to me, and even more so to anyone who's ever contributed to wikipedia,...
Hmmm... I didn't take it as offensive. Maybe it's because my fiddle is sitting in its open case on the other side of the room (right next to my accordion). I played both at a gig just last night. We fiddlers tend to develop thick skins about the misuse of that word.;-)
b) untrue. I have never contributed to Wikipedia.
Well, why the hell not? I have, and I can assure you that it isn't difficult. Go look up the pages on a few topics that you know something about, and look for gaps. Fill them in. Correct a few typos while you're at it. If you feel brave, pick out a couple of keywords or phrases that don't have a page yet, and create the pages. Check after a few days to see if anyone had done any editing of your words. If so, remind yourself that this is a wiki, and you shouldn't let your ego get involved. But chances are that the edits will just expand on what you wrote, or maybe rework a sentence to make it clearer.
You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don't want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly.
What I especially notice is something they all have in common: They waste a huge amount of screen real estate with spaces and overly-large icons. If you look at the actual information content of that example, it's about on a par with an 80x24 dumb terminal.
One lesson I've learned over and over is that when I'm working on something, a major constraint on my "productivity" is now much information I can get on the screen at once. Debugging software or web pages or whatever takes multiple windows and somehow getting the stuff you need to work on all displayed. A GUI that wastes screen space like this is a major impediment to getting the job done.
When using a new system, I tend to start off with things like eliminating the title bar on xterms (they take two lines of text and contain no useful information at all - especially since the title text is usually incorrect). I try to find ways to reduce things like menu and function bars to a single bar, to make more space for the actual data. I try to trick the software into using the smallest icons available. I make the borders as small as I can while still being able to grab them with the pointer. And so on. They're all ways to eliminate the pretty GUI stuff and replace it with the actual information that I'm working on.
My main experience with gnome is that I can't eliminate this space waste very well. With KDE, I can do a lot better, so I use that. Sometimes I find fvwm or twm on a machine, and I immediately switch to them because they're very parsimonious of screen pixels.
Pretty GUIs have their place. But so do GUIs that let me display actual information, making maximum use of what pixels are available.
(I use Macs a lot, too. They're really frustrating this way, because you just can't eliminate most of the space-wasting pretty GUI stuff. Effectively, a Mac reduces a screen to about half as many pixels as are really there.;-)
Speculation and forming conjectures or hypotheses are a normal part of the scientific process. What you're seeing is journalists listening to this and exaggerating wildly.
But that's a normal part of the journalistic process...
Slashdot Mirror
The headline shouted "DNA of Woolly Mammoth Fully Sequenced", but then we read "Scientists have decoded the mitochondrial DNA".
So the headline was almost totally incorrect and misleading. The mtDNA is typically about 0.1% of a mammal's total DNA. Sequencing the mtDNA is only about 1000th of "fully sequenced". They have a long, long way to go before a "fully sequenced" claim can be made.
Their achievement is newsworthy enough by itself. There's no reason to exaggerate it so wildly.
Immanuel Kant would tell you that if everyone pirates software, there will be little new software produced and that is not desirable. Because it is not desirable for everyone to pirate, it is not moral for you to pirate.
And, like all the others making such claims, he would be wrong.
Where do people get the idea that nobody would ever produce anything if they weren't paid? If that were true, we'd have no community orchestras or theater groups, there'd be no church choirs, no teenage kids would be forming garage bands, etc.
And there'd be no free/open-source software.
Granted, people like to make money from such efforts. But a lack of pay doesn't seem to stop people from producing.
When it comes to art, entertainment and software, one could well make the argument that we get higher quality when people aren't paid. You'd have little trouble finding examples to support such a thesis.
Interesting site. They've done a lot of research on the topic.
Actually, I mostly think it's funny that Christians can keep talking about returning Christmas to its religious roots, when the slightest investigation shows that the holiday has never been primarily religious. They've been alternately trying to suppress the holiday and converting it to a religious holiday for ages, never very successfully.
It's one of the better examples of the general Christian contempt for history, and their preference for making up fake history that says what they want history to say.
Of course, this isn't exactly unique with Christians. One hint in the article is the comment on other gods who were supposed to have been born on the solstice.
Maybe what we need is a big campaign to return the solstice to its pagan roots.
They're only 5% evil. So far.
Oh, yeah; I've confused them before. And they both did a bunch of other things.
;-)
But y'know how it is. All them women scientists look alike.
(For that matter, are you sure you could tell a picture of Charles Darwin from a picture of Karl Marx?)
You won't see "proof" in the fossil record that "first we had a microbe, then we had a fish, then we had a land mammal that evolved to an ape that evolved to a human".
You don't see "proof" of much of anything in the fossil record. All you see is fossils, usually incomplete and badly mangled. And they're a tiny subset of the critters that actually existed, since it takes rather special conditions for your body to be preserved rather than devoured.
You might see evidence that they occured in that order, but we haven't even filled in species for all of the steps, much less proven that they step from one to the next.
Yup; expecting the intermediate steps is a standard strawman argument that can never be satisfied due to the sketchiness of the fossil record. But by Darwin's time, they had enough sequences to document a lot of very similar patterns that were most parsimoniously interpreted as the transmutation of one species into another (or sometimes several others).
And, of course, at the time this was revolutionary, because the prevailing belief was that the world was created whole in a short time. The fossil remains of creatures that didn't exist any more, and the apparent changes in these creatures through the fossil beds, gave them a lot to think and theorize about. The world's history was obviously a lot more complex than what their culture's myths described. It sure looked like many species had changed form over time.
Recent research has indicated that species under selective pressure mutate more rapidly than other species (yes, mutate more rapidly). Furthermore, it has implied that those species mutate in the direction of a solution to the selective pressure.
I've read those reports, too. Very interesting. It's definitely a case of "further research is needed". Lots of people will want to see the research done. But right now, it's just an "ears up" preliminary conjecture.
I have seen people point out that a stable, unchanging species could well be under strong selection pressure - to stay in exactly their current niche. There could be a high mutation rate (e.g., due to a high level of mutagens in their diet), but the selective pressure would weed out the mutated forms with a vengeance. If the selection was from predation, we'd never see the mutated forms as fossils.
As an example of this, birders know how easy it is to identify many species at a glance, from small details of their shape or flight pattern. Many birds are under strong selective pressure due to the requirements of flight (low mass, high-energy food, exact aerodynamic shape, fast reaction time, etc). Even slight variations can be rapidly fatal, so there's very little intra-species variation. You don't see many mutants in wild populations, because variants die at a very young age and become food for something else.
But maybe there is a partial control of mutation rate. It sure would be interesting to know the mechanism.
Jeez; how did I miss that one? I even remember looking at it as I typed it, thinking that a cute little dog was a funny name for a ship of such historic importance.
I wonder how its spelling changed? Oh, well; I've seen some even more bizarre changes in other posts, things that couldn't be explained by the usual fat-finger mechanisms.
One of my posts several months ago ended up with a string of Chinese characters in the middle. It was pretty, but I wouldn't have known how to type that even if I'd wanted to.
So have you seen the Whitespace programming language? If not, you should google for it. You'll be impressed
;-)
(And then you should look up the Brainfuck programming language. You'll never complain about perl or python syntax again.
Actually, "Santa Claus" is a mispronunciation of "Saint Nicholas", who was apparently a real 4th-century person. Let's see ... Yep; there's a web site showing pictures of his church in Cappadocia. See the pictures of him at the bottom. Not quite the modern commercial Santa, but not all that far off.
Of course, his current association with the ancient solstice holiday (Saturnalia to the Romans) has little to do with him. Or with Jesus, for that matter.
The real complaint should be about the ongoing attempts by Christians to corrupt the solstice holiday (with its traditions of evergreen tree worship, lights to counter the dark, and trading gifts) into some sort of Christian religious thing. That's bogus history and theology, as anyone who has read the biblical accounts of his birth will understand. But then, Christians have never been known for their accurate histories.
Very interesting. I'd seen parts of that document, but I hadn't read that it was introduced as court evidence.
It's also interesting that people would put this sort of admission into print. It sorta belies all of their claims to be interested in science, which is materialistic almost by definition.
Of course, they probably thought that they were just writing for their own circle. Seeing this document presented in court must have been exasperating for them.
You never hear real scientists saying "Evolution is fact!" because it isn't.
;-) He and others have made a distinction between the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution.
...
Actually, you do - with important qualifications.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote several papers that said just this. Of course, he said a lot more. (He had a column to fill, after all.
What he pointed out in several articles was that by the early 1800's, when Darwin was sailing on the Bugle, it was already widely accepted that biological evolution was a historical fact, thoroughly documented in the fossil record. What was missing was a good explanation of this fact. People examining fossils could see the general outline of the evolutionary process; they just didn't understand how it worked.
Facts are what we observe, combined with the easy inferences from the observations. To be scientific, you need not just a lot if facts, you also need explanations of those facts. Such an explanation is first called a hypothesis before it has been tested, and then a theory after it has passed sufficiently many tests.
What Darwin did was to propose an explanation for the observed fact of biological evolution over geologic time. His explanation was unusual in that the mechanism didn't require any guiding intelligence. But it did have explanatory power, and also made testable predictions. So, while the religious folks derided Darwin's heresy, the scientists set about trying to poke holes in his explanation.
In the 1860's, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was really just a hypothesis, not a theory. But now, more than a century later, it's a true theory. We've had plenty of opportunities to test it, and it has passed the tests quite handily. So now it's a true scientific theory. Biological research these days is mostly concerned with working out the details of the mechanisms. Nobody seriously expects that the basic theory will be overturned.
Not that it hasn't been modified along the way. Darwin didn't know about DNA or genes, and could only write vaguely about the mechanism of intelligence. He observed that this mechanism was imperfect, something that any plant or animal breeder would agree with. He also proposed that some variations were "random", which need not have been true, but which we now know is essentially true. He also proposed that the inherited code was not modified by an organism's environment, contrary to others such as Lysenko, and it turns out he was right in this, too. True, environmental things may alter your DNA, but not in any "directed" fashion.
But most importanly (and ignored by most creationists and ID proponents), his theory invoked a very non-random directing force, natural selection. This was difficult for him to observe, but we've since watched and tested it innumerable times, and again it turns out he was quite correct.
OTOH, he didn't guess about viral transduction. And he didn't anticipate Barbara McClintock's idea of the way that eukaryotic cells arose via merger of independent single-cell organisms. So he did miss a few important things that have since modified his theory a bit. But none of these things have significantly weakened his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Of course, we are now on the verge of implementing designer genes
The point is that their motivation is a religion which is against lying.
Actually, as many theologians and historians have pointed out, the text says (KJV):
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
This says little about lying in general. It just forbids lying to harm another person. It would be difficult to argue that the ID proponents are doing this, even when they lie about their motivations in court. They aren't lying about any neighbor, but about their personal motivations. Hiding your own thoughts from another isn't forbidden by the bible. You can't hide your thoughts from God, but you can hide them from other people. You aren't obligated to bare your innermost thoughts to any passerby who asks, much less to any agent of a court of law.
Some have pointed out that the bible does condone lying in certain circumstances. Consider the commandment to "Honor thy father and mother". Suppose one knew of a crime committed by a parent. This happens to some people. If you testify against them, you are certainly dishonoring them. So this commandment requires that you lie about what you know. One might consider silence, but in many circumstances, that would be taken as agreement with the charges, so that might not be an option.
It would be easy to understand a religious person thinking of this, and deciding that agreeing with Darwin (or tacitly agreeing by not speaking against his theory) would constitute dishonoring God. After all, Darwinism is a "godless" theory that explains the universe without reference to any guiding intelligence. In that case, one could easily justify lying about one's personal thoughts in a court, as people did in this case. The bible seems to condone such lying, although indirectly.
So there's really no credible irony here in their hiding their motivations from the court. They are merely doing their duty to honor their God for what they believe He did.
Intelligent design isn't science because it isn't provable.
...?" "Whatever God wants." That's not a testable prediction. It's not actually a prediction at all, in any scientifically useful sense. So we can't make any observations that might disprove it.
Actually, ID isn't science because it isn't disprovable. The usual scientific term is "falsifiable", actually, but "disprovable" is a good enough nearsynonym.
As explained by any number of theory-of-science texts, scientific methods rarely if ever actually prove anything. The usual approach is to come up with as many hypotheses as you can that seem to fit observations, and then you attempt to disprove all of them. Any theories left standing after thorough testing are tentatively accepted as true, pending future tests that find evidence against them.
This is why scientists still keep trying to find tests that will disprove General Relativity. There's general understanding that GR probably isn't the final theory, especially since it hasn't been thoroughly integrated with QM (Quantum Mechanics) yet. But GR has this long history of passing every bizarre test that physicists can dream up. If it had failed even one of them, the story would be different. But physicists generally accept that GR is "true" in the sense that it will be found to be a special case of the "Theory of Everything" that they're looking for.
The basic problem with ID is that we don't seem to have come up with a way to test it. It doesn't make predictions, which is the usual basis of tests. "What will happen if
If someone could find an effective way to test for the existence of an intelligence behind the universe, you can be quite sure that scientists would be fascinated. They'd all be applying for funding to do the tests. But no such test seems to have been defined (yet).
There has been some good science fiction on the topic.
If it fits anywhere is in a class of religious studies.
;-)
Oh, I dunno about that. I'd think a "History of Ideas" class would be more appropriate.
Sure, it would fit in a religious studies curriculum. But that would put it off in a corner where serious science students usually don't wander.
Many scientists have suggested that a bit of knowledge of scientific history is useful. Studying the disputes and discarded theories is useful in understanding how we reached our current understanding. It could also help in handling new "theories" that repeat previous mistakes.
One of the useful example s that I've seen in several classes is the history of the "luminiferous aether". This was supposedly the substance that filled all space, which was the substrate for wave phenomena such as light. The common understanding is that Einstein showed that there was no such substance. But a correct history would show that he did no such thing. Rather, he came up with a new theoretical approach that didn't make mention at all of any space-filling substance. That is, he showed that the "aether" wasn't needed to explain the observable universe's behavior. Maybe it exists; maybe it doesn't; we don't care.
Similarly, some historians have pointed out that Darwin effectively did the same thing for biology. He didn't show that there's no God. Rather, he showed that we don't need such an intelligence to explain the biological world and the fossil record. Maybe there's a god; maybe there isn't; for scientific purposes it doesn't matter. We can explain what we see with Natural Selection; adding God doesn't improve the theory's explanatory power. (It actually makes things worse, because your universe now contains one more thing that needs explaining, but you can't observe it at all
Darwin apparently understood this. He made a few comments to the effect that what the religious people would find unforgivable was not that he had shown that there's no God, but that he had shown God to be irrelevant to understanding the world.
Too bad there's no (known) way to ask him what he thinks of the ongoing debate over his theory.
Let's say you wanted to create a world as complicated as earth - what knowledge and technology would this require?
That's easy to find out. Just go ask the Malgratheans. They should know, since they've done it twice, including the fjords and fake fossils.
OK; you might have to wake them up first.
The judge in the case wrote:
...
;-)
"It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."
There's no irony here at all. What these individuals were doing is properly called "perjury". In pretending to a non-religious motive, they were simply lying. This seems to have been made clear by statements they made outside the courtroom, where they were quite vocal about their religious beliefs. Unfortunately for them, the judge found them out. But he did mischaracterize their behavior as "ironic".
We will now have the usual flamewar over the meaning of the term "irony"
(Except within the jurisdiction of Judge Jones' court, where there is now a legal definition of the term.
I noticed that the coverage seems to play fast and loose with the distinction between "forbidden to teach Intelligent Design" and "not required to teach Intelligent Design".
So I went looking for some quotes from the decision or the judge. And I found that the judge wrote "[O]ur conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom."
So the judge himself seems to agree that this isn't just tossing the school board's requirement that ID be taught; he actually forbids the teaching of ID.
So we can imagine a science teacher saying something like "There are religious people who seriously suggest that life on Earth was the result of a god's 'Intelligent Design' rather than Darwin's evolution by Natural Selection. But there's no scientific evidence to support Intelligent Design, while there is a great deal of evidence that supports Natural Selection."
This statement would appear to be in violation of the judge's explicit order, since it presents ID as an alternative to evolution (which science rejects).
We should hope that this isn't how the courts will actually view the decision. It could be a serious blow to the teaching of science history. Contention with religion is an important part of the history of science. Darwin put off publishing his theory for decades, partly because (as a trained minister) he fully understood the reaction he would get. The power of religious people to suppress teaching evolution has led directly to such things as the overuse of antibiotics and the subsequent evolution of resistance in many disease organisms. We have a raging malaria epidemic in parts of the tropic because of such evolution. These are not trivial consequences, and they should be taught in the schools as part of the history of the biological sciences.
This judge seems to have outlawed such teaching, along with tossing out the attempt to require teaching ID as a valid scientific theory.
I suppose we can look forward to some more court cases over this topic.
Well at least the company apologised, I just wish they'd seen sense in the first place, ...
Don't be too surprised when a month or two from now another manager at Warner Chappell has a company lawyer send Ritter another C&D letter for exactly the same thing.
That's about as helpful as the other instructions that I've seen.
..."
"Click the icon on the bottom left,
Um, on the bottom left of all my FF windows is the word "Done". There's no icon of any sort near there.
So WTF were you really suggesting that I do? Those words aren't very helpful, as there's no way to follow them.
This is with FF 1.5, on a Mac Powerbook running OSX 10.3.9, FWIW. The FF windows on my linux box look very similar, with no icons in the lower left.
By adopting Firefox's icon, they do lend Firefox a sense of credibility.
/., I know that it has something to do with RSS. It still doesn't seem to actually do anything, though. So I'll keep using NetNewsWire Lite to do RSS.
Oh, I dunno about that. Actually, when I first noticed that funny icon in FF, I saw no clue hinting what it was. So I clicked on it - and I still didn't see a clue. It didn't seem to actually do anything. So I sorta forgot about it.
Now, thanks to
I did find a few things in FF's docs that mention RSS. I experimented with them a bit, to see what this RSS thingie was all about. But I couldn't find anything that did anything sensible, so again I sorta forgot about it.
I'll be that MS will have similar problems with this mysterious icon, until they find a way to explain to users what it is, what it does, and how to use it. FF doesn't do this, though, at least on my machines. Even after getting familiar with RSS via another app, I still have no idea how to do it with FF. I expect that the same will happen with IE for the first N releases.
Actually, I'll predict that IE will handle this user-ed problem in MS's usual way: It'll be turned on by default, with links to lots of approved commercial RSS sites. Most users will use only those, because they won't have a clue that any others exist or how to reach them.
If you want learn human anatomy, disect a chicken, and a chicken isn't even a mammal.
;-)
Actually, you'd be a lot better off disecting a mouse. Chickens do have some similarities to humans, but they are more useful in physiology classes as an example of divergent evolution. The organs aren't always the same, and even when homologous, they often have different functions.
You can see lots of examples by just looking at the digestive system. Birds use their beaks to roughly chop their food, while mammals do this with their incisor teeth. These are positioned similarly, but they aren't homologous structures.
Then birds send the chopped food to their crop, an organ that doesn't exist in humans. Squirrels have analogous cheek pouches, but those are yet another structure that's missing in humans.
We use our stomach for storage, but it's also the first digestive organ. The equivalent organ in birds is the gizzard, which is mostly for fine grinding of food. This is often augmented by swallowed pebbles, which serve the same grinding function as our molar teeth. In this case, both position and function are different.
In birds, the first actual chemical digestion occurs in the intestine, while in mammals digestion has already started in the stomach.
So in this one subsystem, avian and mammalian organs and functions don't much line up very well. Overall, there are obvious similarities, true, but neither is very useful in understanding the other in any depth.
For an even more extreme counter-example, take a look at bird and mammal lungs. They aren't even topologically similar. Birds have flow-through lungs, with air and blood passing through in opposite directions, to make a counter-current gas exchanger. And birds' lungs have a fixed size, with the air flow produced by muscles around the air sacs, organs entirely missing in mammals.
Nope; a chicken isn't a very good classroom example if you want to teach human anatomy. Better stick with the mice or rats.
But avian physiology is a fun example when debating creationists. Almost as much fun as squid anatomy.
", but we need more evidence before we can be sure"
clearly indicates he needs further evidence.
You're showing some very good reasoning powers!
One of the long-standing bits of scientific wisdom is that the most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that says "Further research is needed".
This is intended to be funny, of course, but it's a case of "Ha, ha; only serious." It's quite conventional for scientists to point out that their information is incomplete, and openly admit that they don't know the full story about their subject. This is one of the ways that science differs from religion, politics, and other fields of human inquiry.
This particular study is clearly preliminary. The researchers are publishing, in part, to bring the topic before interested eyes. But what they're saying is more of a hypothesis than a statement of fact. Further research is needed.
wikifiddlers
...
... I didn't take it as offensive. Maybe it's because my fiddle is sitting in its open case on the other side of the room (right next to my accordion). I played both at a gig just last night. We fiddlers tend to develop thick skins about the misuse of that word. ;-)
That's a) offensive, to me, and even more so to anyone who's ever contributed to wikipedia,
Hmmm
b) untrue. I have never contributed to Wikipedia.
Well, why the hell not? I have, and I can assure you that it isn't difficult. Go look up the pages on a few topics that you know something about, and look for gaps. Fill them in. Correct a few typos while you're at it. If you feel brave, pick out a couple of keywords or phrases that don't have a page yet, and create the pages. Check after a few days to see if anyone had done any editing of your words. If so, remind yourself that this is a wiki, and you shouldn't let your ego get involved. But chances are that the edits will just expand on what you wrote, or maybe rework a sentence to make it clearer.
When looking at this legendary example picture:
o t34ji.jpg [imageshack.us]
;-)
http://img234.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screensh
You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don't want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly.
What I especially notice is something they all have in common: They waste a huge amount of screen real estate with spaces and overly-large icons. If you look at the actual information content of that example, it's about on a par with an 80x24 dumb terminal.
One lesson I've learned over and over is that when I'm working on something, a major constraint on my "productivity" is now much information I can get on the screen at once. Debugging software or web pages or whatever takes multiple windows and somehow getting the stuff you need to work on all displayed. A GUI that wastes screen space like this is a major impediment to getting the job done.
When using a new system, I tend to start off with things like eliminating the title bar on xterms (they take two lines of text and contain no useful information at all - especially since the title text is usually incorrect). I try to find ways to reduce things like menu and function bars to a single bar, to make more space for the actual data. I try to trick the software into using the smallest icons available. I make the borders as small as I can while still being able to grab them with the pointer. And so on. They're all ways to eliminate the pretty GUI stuff and replace it with the actual information that I'm working on.
My main experience with gnome is that I can't eliminate this space waste very well. With KDE, I can do a lot better, so I use that. Sometimes I find fvwm or twm on a machine, and I immediately switch to them because they're very parsimonious of screen pixels.
Pretty GUIs have their place. But so do GUIs that let me display actual information, making maximum use of what pixels are available.
(I use Macs a lot, too. They're really frustrating this way, because you just can't eliminate most of the space-wasting pretty GUI stuff. Effectively, a Mac reduces a screen to about half as many pixels as are really there.
Speculation and forming conjectures or hypotheses are a normal part of the scientific process. What you're seeing is journalists listening to this and exaggerating wildly.
...
But that's a normal part of the journalistic process