It didn't throw out "a few thousand years of mathematical thought." All it did was dash the hopes of some mathematicians that a mathematical system could "lift itself up by its bootstraps"
That was the "few thousand years of mathematical thought" that were tossed out.
So not everything can be proved
...which means that math cannot provide any ultimate, unchanging truth. That's not an indictment against path, but an observation that it wasn't quite the eternal bulwark that the poster described.
Those who are uncomfortable with living among the shifting sands of scientific knowledge should go into fields such as mathematics, where true proof exists
Yeah, until some smartass like Gödel comes along and proves that any sufficiently powerful system is self-inconsistent, thus throwing out a few thousand years of mathematical thought.
If you're looking for eternal truth, math ain't the place to dig.
There is nobody clamouring for teaching ID here in the UK,
You realize, of course, that the driving distance from New York City and Topeka, Kansas is about the same as the driving distance from London to Naples, Italy. Do you think that Londoners and Neopolitans share the same political and religious views?
and there is certainly no so-called "culture war" between Christian and secular communities.
In other news, UK's culture is more homogeneous than that of a country with 5 times the population and 39 times the land area. Whodathunkit.
The Rabis think it's quite amusing that Christians take the Genesis story to be the literal truth." You see, the old testament is derived from the Torah. Rabis have been studying it for a long time (i.e. millenia).
Christianity evolved from Judaism approximately 2,000 years ago. It wasn't designed last year by people with no religious background. In other words, Christianity (and Islam) are exactly as old as Judaism, since they're all branches from the same tree. Ergo, none of the three have exclusive rights to the "correct" interpretation of the teachings that they originally all held in common: the Torah.
Then how exactly do I classify myself, a person that believes the scientific evidence behind evolution, but still believes that the process itself was triggered by a benevolent being, and perhaps was even guided by that being?
One term I've heard to describe us is "theist evolutionist". Another term is heretic depending on which religious group, if any, you happen to identify yourself with.
Along those lines, does anyone know of a mainstream Protestant denomination that's theologically similar to Southern Baptist but it pro-science?
Praying with your wife and kids will not improve your marriage.
I call BS. OK, suppose there's no God, and praying is nothing more than vocalized meditation. Alright. So, what we have is a family who regularly gets together and meditates on their desire to treat each other better and reaffirm their mutual goals.
In what possible way could that not improve a marriage and family life?
Religion is a motivation on the macro level, it does not influence micro portions of your life.
That's true for you, and largely for me, too. It is demonstrably false for many, many others.
You clearly don't live in a big city like los angeles.
That's true, but you can't extrapolate your own local conditions to the rest of the world. The fact is that a minutely small percentage of the surface area world is anything like LA or other big cities. Although a huge amount of people live in those small areas, there's no "average condition for the world" that we get to vote on.
The more knowledge you acquire, the more you realize a god is not a requirement to live a happy and moral life (if you so choose).
Well, I'd known enough happy, moral Mormons, Buddhists, atheists, and others with a different religious background from my own to know that. You should understand, though, that discarding a lifetime of sure beliefs and convictions is hard to do, especially now that I have kids. What about them? Do I continue to teach them the beliefs of my own childhood, or do I drop it and hope that I'm not wrong, that I'm not committing the worst possible crime against my children?
I was born and raised a Southern Baptist, and still consider myself one. Doctrinally, I agree with them 99% of the time.
But.
The concept that macroevolution has taken place and is responsible for life on our planet is as clear to me as the concept that the sky is blue. It's fact. It happened. This isn't arguable. Now, I still believe that God created the universe and everything in it, but it's abundantly obvious to me that He used the laws of physics (as we currently understand them - subject to update) and evolution (same disclaimer) as the raw tools of the creation. This does not conflict in any way with my understanding of the Bible, or any of the rest of my theology.
However, I'm overwhelmed by the increasingly shrill screaming of other conservative Christians - whom I probably agree with on most other issues - stating that evolution is the tool of Satan and it's a devious lie meant to doom believers to hell.
The more I hear this, the more I realize that I have almost nothing else in common with these people. I can't look at the sky and see green. I can't look at fossils and see a God that loves screwing with the minds of his faithful. I can't look at the stupendously overwhelming amount of proof that evolution is a defining process of our world and see a 6,000 year old planet. I just can't do it.
So now I'm questioning exactly where I stand on the other ideas that I share with my brothers and sisters who now wholly reject my worldview. I thought I knew exactly where I stood, but the only thing I'm really sure of is that I don't know anymore.
And that, to me, is the legacy of Intelligent Design and other related idiocies. By wrapping themselves in the warm blanket of self-delusion, its supporters have exposed those around them to a huge amount of spiritual collateral damage. A very large part of me wants to get as far as possible from these people, but the rest doesn't know what to do. These were my friends, my fellow believers, but they don't want me any more than I want them. In a way, I'm glad that they forced me to rethink my beliefs. In another way, I curse them for the same reason.
The ID crowd has done far more harm to their cause than any Darwin-fish bumper sticker could have dreamed. Science was only able to make me question my understanding of the universe. It took a conspiracy of my old friends to make me question my understanding of God.
I should have said purchases made for personal reasons, i.e. not by a business.
Fair enough. I'll purchase my next yacht through an S-corp shell - business entertainment and all that, you know. And what about people who buy a boat in lieu of a house? $100,000 doesn't buy much house these days, but that would put them into the luxury category under your plan.
And again, I reiterate: the law of unintended consequences is the bane of simple solutions. Always. Every single time. It's a 100% guarantee that someone will ignore your intent and instead follow the letter of your regulations. This should be a familiar problem to the large number of Slashdotters that make their living writing code.
Create a luxury sales tax. Have the sales tax only affect purchases the rich can afford. Electronics over $5k for example.
Our new quad-Xeon server cost more than $5k, but it helps us stay in business (employing about 50 people). You'd levy luxury taxes on my business capital.
Vehicles over $50k.
A dump truck will easily run you $75k+. You'd levy luxury taxes on the construction crew down the road.
Anything classified as a yacht.
From the American Heritage dictionary:
Yacht: Any of various relatively small sailing or motor-driven vessels, generally with smart graceful lines, used for pleasure cruises or racing.
You'd levy luxury taxes on the remote control sailboat my kid bought, if the government decided it had "smart graceful lines".
You'd levy luxury taxes on the farmland my next door neighbor bought.
I hereby sentence you to handwrite "I do not understand the law of unintended consequences, but I will do my best to learn it" one hundred times, then blog about why simple solutions almost never do what we think they will.
No. Adding a "hot or not"-style rating system and a "top 100" link would be comprehensive. The current site is just a way to trick young Slashdotters into viewing banner and Google ads on 400 consecutive pages.
In it, a man asks the question when looking directly at the butter container in the refrigerator. "Where's the butter?" actually means butter my toast, buy the butter, remember when we're out of butter.
Or maybe he just means "I can't find the butter, so I'm going to ask for help even though the heinous war-bitch I accidentally married is going to launch into a diatribe about how I'm trying to oppress her and deny her inner goddess. Please, Lord, just let her help me find the butter without telling me that the patri-fascist corporate hegemony trained me to hate women, and why my mother was a sellout enabler for putting up with my insensitive ass for 18 years."
I think that's the more likely explanation: Occam's Razor and all that.
About 1-4 watts, depending on who built it? (16mA, you asked for current).
Or, more realistically, the spec sheet for a Panasonic number PNA4602M infrared detector module lists maximum of current 3.0mA (2.4mA typical), and requires a maximum 5.3 volt supply. In other words, at full power, it dissipates.016 watts - two orders of magnitude less than your number.
So, (.016w)*(1kw / 1000w)*(24 hours / day)*(365 days / year) =.14kWh/year.
At $0.07/kWh here, that works out to about $0.01 worth of electricity per year. I can live with that.
No, it's not. The article is about devices that claim to turn themselves off while not really doing so, such as by keeping the CRT leads hot so that it will come back on more quickly when full power is applied.
My TV, a Sony Wega, doesn't do that - or at least it doesn't remain in standby for very long before going to "full off" mode.
It sounds like the real beef is with device that have poorly designed standby modes, and any legislation should address that ("No device shall draw more than 5mA when in 'standby' mode") rather than outlawing it all together.
It's like those stupid anti-cellphone-while-driving laws that make people feel good while not addressing the real issue, which is that its stupid to drive while distracted by anything. Government gets to say "look what we're doing!" without actually having done anything.
I think it is absolutely stupid that we make the people that can least afford it pay the most for electricity.
Would you expect them to drop the price for their worst customers? If that happened, what incentive would anyone have to pay their bill on time, when the alternative would be to get automatically switched to a cheaper plan?
Yeah, I know it sucks for those affected, but that's pretty much the way everything else in life works. My credit card company doesn't give me a rebate if I pay later, after all. Why should my electric company?
Along the same lines, replacing my FreeBSD/alpha firewall with a WRT54G saved me nearly $8 per month. The 9VDC transformer is cool to the touch, which is a nice change from the hairdryer^WAlpha's power cable, which was warm at a distance.
No, sir, my current and future home networking equipment will not require 3-phase circuits.
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That was the "few thousand years of mathematical thought" that were tossed out.
So not everything can be proved
...which means that math cannot provide any ultimate, unchanging truth. That's not an indictment against path, but an observation that it wasn't quite the eternal bulwark that the poster described.
Yeah, until some smartass like Gödel comes along and proves that any sufficiently powerful system is self-inconsistent, thus throwing out a few thousand years of mathematical thought.
If you're looking for eternal truth, math ain't the place to dig.
You realize, of course, that the driving distance from New York City and Topeka, Kansas is about the same as the driving distance from London to Naples, Italy. Do you think that Londoners and Neopolitans share the same political and religious views?
and there is certainly no so-called "culture war" between Christian and secular communities.
In other news, UK's culture is more homogeneous than that of a country with 5 times the population and 39 times the land area. Whodathunkit.
Christianity evolved from Judaism approximately 2,000 years ago. It wasn't designed last year by people with no religious background. In other words, Christianity (and Islam) are exactly as old as Judaism, since they're all branches from the same tree. Ergo, none of the three have exclusive rights to the "correct" interpretation of the teachings that they originally all held in common: the Torah.
One term I've heard to describe us is "theist evolutionist". Another term is heretic depending on which religious group, if any, you happen to identify yourself with.
Along those lines, does anyone know of a mainstream Protestant denomination that's theologically similar to Southern Baptist but it pro-science?
I call BS. OK, suppose there's no God, and praying is nothing more than vocalized meditation. Alright. So, what we have is a family who regularly gets together and meditates on their desire to treat each other better and reaffirm their mutual goals.
In what possible way could that not improve a marriage and family life?
Religion is a motivation on the macro level, it does not influence micro portions of your life.
That's true for you, and largely for me, too. It is demonstrably false for many, many others.
That's true, but you can't extrapolate your own local conditions to the rest of the world. The fact is that a minutely small percentage of the surface area world is anything like LA or other big cities. Although a huge amount of people live in those small areas, there's no "average condition for the world" that we get to vote on.
Well, I'd known enough happy, moral Mormons, Buddhists, atheists, and others with a different religious background from my own to know that. You should understand, though, that discarding a lifetime of sure beliefs and convictions is hard to do, especially now that I have kids. What about them? Do I continue to teach them the beliefs of my own childhood, or do I drop it and hope that I'm not wrong, that I'm not committing the worst possible crime against my children?
Thanks, Kansas School Board. Thanks for nothing.
But.
The concept that macroevolution has taken place and is responsible for life on our planet is as clear to me as the concept that the sky is blue. It's fact. It happened. This isn't arguable. Now, I still believe that God created the universe and everything in it, but it's abundantly obvious to me that He used the laws of physics (as we currently understand them - subject to update) and evolution (same disclaimer) as the raw tools of the creation. This does not conflict in any way with my understanding of the Bible, or any of the rest of my theology.
However, I'm overwhelmed by the increasingly shrill screaming of other conservative Christians - whom I probably agree with on most other issues - stating that evolution is the tool of Satan and it's a devious lie meant to doom believers to hell.
The more I hear this, the more I realize that I have almost nothing else in common with these people. I can't look at the sky and see green. I can't look at fossils and see a God that loves screwing with the minds of his faithful. I can't look at the stupendously overwhelming amount of proof that evolution is a defining process of our world and see a 6,000 year old planet. I just can't do it.
So now I'm questioning exactly where I stand on the other ideas that I share with my brothers and sisters who now wholly reject my worldview. I thought I knew exactly where I stood, but the only thing I'm really sure of is that I don't know anymore.
And that, to me, is the legacy of Intelligent Design and other related idiocies. By wrapping themselves in the warm blanket of self-delusion, its supporters have exposed those around them to a huge amount of spiritual collateral damage. A very large part of me wants to get as far as possible from these people, but the rest doesn't know what to do. These were my friends, my fellow believers, but they don't want me any more than I want them. In a way, I'm glad that they forced me to rethink my beliefs. In another way, I curse them for the same reason.
The ID crowd has done far more harm to their cause than any Darwin-fish bumper sticker could have dreamed. Science was only able to make me question my understanding of the universe. It took a conspiracy of my old friends to make me question my understanding of God.
Damn them all for damning me.
Last night. You do realize that light pollution can be reversed with the flick of a switch, don't you?
Sheer inertia. Because this is Slashdot and it's not semantic anyway. Because that's what everone else does.
You're correct; I won't argue that. In the real world I use tags much as you describe, but this isn't that world.
Fair enough. I'll purchase my next yacht through an S-corp shell - business entertainment and all that, you know. And what about people who buy a boat in lieu of a house? $100,000 doesn't buy much house these days, but that would put them into the luxury category under your plan.
And again, I reiterate: the law of unintended consequences is the bane of simple solutions. Always. Every single time. It's a 100% guarantee that someone will ignore your intent and instead follow the letter of your regulations. This should be a familiar problem to the large number of Slashdotters that make their living writing code.
No. I wrapped your quote in a <em>, and started this paragraph with a <p>.
I do use it a lot for portraying conversations:
Eightyford: Don't we use br's?
Me: Sometimes. I just used one.
Eightyford: w00t!
I don't think I ever use them for anything else.
Our new quad-Xeon server cost more than $5k, but it helps us stay in business (employing about 50 people). You'd levy luxury taxes on my business capital.
Vehicles over $50k.
A dump truck will easily run you $75k+. You'd levy luxury taxes on the construction crew down the road.
Anything classified as a yacht.
From the American Heritage dictionary:
You'd levy luxury taxes on the remote control sailboat my kid bought, if the government decided it had "smart graceful lines".
Property purchases (i.e. land) exceeding $1 million.
You'd levy luxury taxes on the farmland my next door neighbor bought.
I hereby sentence you to handwrite "I do not understand the law of unintended consequences, but I will do my best to learn it" one hundred times, then blog about why simple solutions almost never do what we think they will.
No. Adding a "hot or not"-style rating system and a "top 100" link would be comprehensive. The current site is just a way to trick young Slashdotters into viewing banner and Google ads on 400 consecutive pages.
Or maybe he just means "I can't find the butter, so I'm going to ask for help even though the heinous war-bitch I accidentally married is going to launch into a diatribe about how I'm trying to oppress her and deny her inner goddess. Please, Lord, just let her help me find the butter without telling me that the patri-fascist corporate hegemony trained me to hate women, and why my mother was a sellout enabler for putting up with my insensitive ass for 18 years."
I think that's the more likely explanation: Occam's Razor and all that.
Our temple is on Main Street, and we take Geometry very seriously (for reasons that haven't been explained to me yet).
Yours,
Junior Warden J.S.G.
You misspelled "more armed criminals than armed 'civilians'".
True, if by "around the corner" you mean "last month".
He probably meant England as a whole.
Or, more realistically, the spec sheet for a Panasonic number PNA4602M infrared detector module lists maximum of current 3.0mA (2.4mA typical), and requires a maximum 5.3 volt supply. In other words, at full power, it dissipates .016 watts - two orders of magnitude less than your number.
So, (.016w)*(1kw / 1000w)*(24 hours / day)*(365 days / year) = .14kWh/year.
At $0.07/kWh here, that works out to about $0.01 worth of electricity per year. I can live with that.
My TV, a Sony Wega, doesn't do that - or at least it doesn't remain in standby for very long before going to "full off" mode.
It sounds like the real beef is with device that have poorly designed standby modes, and any legislation should address that ("No device shall draw more than 5mA when in 'standby' mode") rather than outlawing it all together.
It's like those stupid anti-cellphone-while-driving laws that make people feel good while not addressing the real issue, which is that its stupid to drive while distracted by anything. Government gets to say "look what we're doing!" without actually having done anything.
Would you expect them to drop the price for their worst customers? If that happened, what incentive would anyone have to pay their bill on time, when the alternative would be to get automatically switched to a cheaper plan?
Yeah, I know it sucks for those affected, but that's pretty much the way everything else in life works. My credit card company doesn't give me a rebate if I pay later, after all. Why should my electric company?
No, sir, my current and future home networking equipment will not require 3-phase circuits.
We turn on the TV to see if our DVR has recorded anything worth watching or to play video games. Other than that, it's never on.