Oh, absolutely. I have vast reams of faith in science.
What I don't have vast reams of faith in is the non-science public. They often don't understand what they're funding. I'm glad when they take an interest, but I'm also cautious: sometimes, a little learning is a dangerous thing.
String theory is an excellent example. For some reason, it captures a lot of the public imagination, despite the fact that they can't do any of the math and can't appreciate any of the reasons why it's conducted the way it is. Interest is great, but the bickering among theoretical physicists about whether it is or isn't science risks tainting the whole field in the public's imagination.
We've already got a case where a large field of scientists is believed, by a significant portion of the public, to be almost universally involved in a hoax. The fact that none of them even begin to have the slightest grasp of that field does not seem to deter very loud and obnoxious arguments accusing them of fraud.
So as I say, I've got great faith in science. It's everybody else who makes me nervous.
With the arts, you're entitled to an opinion just by being human. That's what art is for. There isn't any right and wrong. One can get an appreciation for details with only a little education, but it's just giving you language with which to discuss it.
With other fields, whereof one cannot speak, one really should remain silent. String theory, in particular, seems to attract substantial commentary by those who have essentially zero grasp of it. Science popularization exists to try to give some flavor of the field, but it can also mislead people into thinking that it's an art. Knowing a little oversimplified string theory doesn't give you the right to an opinion, the way it can in art.
As I've said, I'm all for popularization. It's nice to see people interested, and if that interest turns into respect and support, yay. But if that interest turns into dismissal of the field, as it can, then the students are in some ways dumber than they started despite knowing a tiny bit more, because they don't realize how much they don't know.
The real issue is what you do with your stewardship of the faith that that layman puts in you and your discipline.
Absolutely. The irony of democracy is that you're hoping that somehow 100 million people who know (essentially) nothing about the Middle East or transportation infrastructure or the boundaries of physics will somehow be able to make intelligent decisions about it.
At least when it comes to foreign policy or economics you have the advantage that even the experts are really kind of guessing. They're very undeveloped fields, or at best soft sciences. You might as well ask the people.
Science, especially physics, feels very different. There may be no good way even for an expert to distinguish categorically between the string theorists and those who oppose them, but there's a very huge gap between those who work in those fields and those who don't.
The least we can do, as you say, is to behave like adults and act as if we deserve the trust that's been placed in us. I suspect that most people would simply de-fund most of the science if it were presented to them directly; they're not in a position to understand the ramifications. I'm very glad they don't, and in the long run THEY are glad they don't.
I was actually talking about science popularizers in general, rather than about Greene in particular. They all run this risk of giving people the impression that they know more than they do. That they know everything there is to know about the topic, except for a bunch of boring math that's really just the details. That's a mistaken impression.
Often, that's unimportant. They've developed an appreciation for science, and feel more kindly disposed to the work they do. Yay.
Sometimes, though, it's very bad. You've surely listened in on at least some of the interminable climate-change arguments, where essentially everybody is arguing from the position equivalent to having read one of Greene's works and imagines that they're now expert. I'm not taking sides there; I happen to believe that one side has the vast majority of scientists on their side, but they themselves are not really in a position to back up their arguments except by reference.
At least in climate change, they're talking about an argument with political and economic ramifications in which they have a stake. On string theory, the only forseeable ramification is the disposition of a few tens of millions in grant money, a trivial sum. If they think they're arguing philosophically about the ultimate nature of the universe, it's really just hot air.
It's a long stretch from CERN to the Web as we see it today. Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP/HTML, but it was the Mozilla browser that caused it to take off. HTML and HTTP were one of several competing protocols, like Gopher and WAIS, any of which could have become the basis of what is now the Web.
HTTP and HTML were the right thing at the right time; they won. But it had nothing to do with the physics work, and something else would likely have filled that economic niche had Dr. Berners-Lee decided to be a chef rather than a physicist.
I happen to be all in favor of the LHC and other projects. The money spent on them pales before far less noble goals, like unnecessary wars domestic and foreign. I'm glad to see people interested in Science, even if I think that their reasons for it are specious. I'm glad that scientists get to be thought of as heroes and explorers rather than ivory-tower eggheads.
But being a scientist, I happen to appreciate a focus on truth, and that means recognizing that a lot of the support scientists get are for reasons people really don't understand and might even oppose if they looked at closely.
It's exactly unlike religious claptrap. You don't need to be holy to understand the truth. You just need to take a bunch of classes. You can run the same math, and if you spot an error, they'll hand you awards for it.
I'm not asking anybody to believe anything. Just the opposite, in fact. I'm asking people to reserve judgment on something they likely know very little about. Watching shows like Greene's are a bit like reality TV, entertaining and even potentially informative but not as much as people might think.
I do encourage people to read science popularization. I think it's great. I'm just trying to avoid the downsides: people who watch a few hours of TV and imagine that they're qualified to express an opinion on a difficult topic. If you want to learn the topic, by all means, crack a book and start learning. But the arguments over string theory are far, far louder than that.
Science popularizers like Greene have to tread a careful line. They're not paid to talk about the most important work, which most people wouldn't understand. Real cutting-edge physics is comprehensible only to those extremely skilled in the art, which cuts out even the vast majority of scientists. But people like believing that they're getting dispatches from the front, especially in physics, because that's where people imagine lays the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.
You can't even pretend to know much about string theory without some very advanced work in quantum mechanics AND general relativity, which means knowing an awful lot of very, very difficult calculus. For 99.9% even of readers of Scientific American, they're skipping straight past all of that.
Which means, in essence, telling comforting lies. That's common in education, simplifying a subject to the point where it's essentially false. It's common in science (cf. genetics), but in other fields as well. History, as taught in schools, is so far from reality that college professors have to spend a full year (at least) undoing the damage.
It's similar to the situation with space research: most of the actual science is done by the robots, but people like the human stories associated with manned flight. The real science is done practically with the rounding errors in the budget.
In the case of string theory, that means that a bunch of people doing interesting but (bluntly) irrelevant speculation get far, far more attention than they deserve. It's not that they're right, wrong, or Not Even Wrong. People want to know what they're doing, because they've been told that we're Just Around The Corner from The Big Answers. It's a lie, and essentially everybody familiar enough with the work knows it. But they also know it's where the funding comes from.
I mean seriously... a multi-billion-dollar supercollider? How on earth does that get funded? Because a bunch of people who can't tell a fermion from a boson imagine that they're part of a grand human experiment. And maybe, in the grand human scheme of things, it is worth the money, though I personally doubt it. Still, it's the dirty little secret of scientific work: popularizers write a lot of books about stuff that's really of very little earthy interest, in order to attract enough attention to the field of science to keep the actual work going on. The grad students counting bacterial colonies or coming up with new protein folding algorithms or other tedious stuff that slowly an un-telegentically advances understanding.
I don't like the little turf war going on between the string theoriests, who get more attention than they deserve, and the anti-string-theorists, who are doing equally unproductive work. Both are intriguing speculations that might one day be of intense interest, but at the moment are of little value either practical or philosophical. They get attention only because they're right at the edge, but most of us are so far from the edge that they'd be invisible under any other circumstances. Both should be left to labor diligently in quiet, and let their little funding turf war be lumped in with the rest of the academic bickering rather than become a great philosophical debate.
Even scientists, when they're not being absolutely rigorous, use "theory" in the "hypothesis" sense. It's common in culture, and scientists are still human, especially when off the clock.
This is a scientific context and the summary really should be rewritten to use the more precise and accurate word "speculation", but "hur hur evolution is a theory not a fact" is so spectacularly and deliberately misinformed that no amount of rigor on the part of scientists is going to stamp it out. Those who grasp it will understand what was meant; those intent on misunderstanding will find a way to do so regardless.
Purely technical question: what do you do with the expired sticker?
A sticker that goes on the license plate can be replaced with a new sticker; you just put the new one on top. But a sticker that goes on the inside of a windshield won't be seen.
I suppose you have to scrape the old one off. Do they make that easy? The ones my garage uses to remind me of my next oil change just peel off, though I suspect they may want ones you have to destroy to remove (to prevent theft).
The question of super powers is presumably related to why humans are here in the first place. A deity presumably could have created humans as angels, so there would have to be some other point to the operation. One could guess that it has something to do with how great it is that humans overcome difficulties to love their creator, or something like that.
It doesn't really cover why humans have limitations that are identical to the kinds that evolution considers to be ancestors. OK, humans get cancer because we're learning to cope with adversity. Why do otters get cancer? Or antelope?
The details all get swept under the rug with the word "ineffable". God has his reasons, and we haven't been let in on it. It's not something you can actually disprove, but it's not terribly helpful, either.
Sure, they could have, but you would't know why. There's nothing that evolution did produce that couldn't have been produced by conscious design.
The difference is that there are things that a conscious designer can do that evolution can't. There are many more effective ways to design livers, or other body parts, if you were starting from a completely clean slate. (Livers, for example, have some ability to grow back, but kidneys don't, and it would be awfully nice if they could.)
The theory of evolution constrains what you'd expect to see, and you can use that to your advantage. Every difference and similarity between a frog's liver and a human one is informative; it got that way based on the different ways that humans and frogs evolved. It lets you know what lessons you can take, and which ones you can't.
By contrast, the design theory looks at each and every feature and says, "I dunno." Why did the designer feel all vertebrates needed livers, but no other species? No idea; that was just the mood he was in. It certainly isn't optimal. Everything that was included, or idea that was rejected, is arbitrary. Fossil organisms, too, are entirely unexplained; they just happened to bear traits similar to existing ones for no reason.
That doesn't mean it didn't happen that way. It would be hard, perhaps impossible, to disprove. It just so happens that every single time we look at a feature of an organism, it looks exactly as though a designer made a design constrained by the requirements of evolution. It's a valid theory, just not a terribly useful one, one that tells us nothing about the organism and nothing about the designer except that it chose to make everything look precisely as if it had evolved.
For instance, one school teacher now has every student submit ten arguments for and against evolution.
Oh, man. In theory, that is an absolutely brilliant assignment. Critical thinking skills, insight, broad understanding of the concept...
In practice, it's going to be a load of horse puckey. Because if it were intended as a critical thinking assignment, they'd be doing it about the theory of gravitation or atomic theory or germ theory. Instead, they pick the one area where there are a large number of pre-existing insanely wrong arguments that can serve only to make the student dumber, and teach them to confuse "you can pick and choose your arguments to show anything you want" with "skepticism". Plus, it gives the invalid impression that scientists aren't essentially 100% certain that the most common "alternatives" to evolution are absolutely wrong.
I'm tired of EVERYTHING being connected to evolution.
I'm sorry, but in biology, it IS all connected to evolution. Common physiology is common because of common descent. Otherwise it's just trivia. "Hey, frogs have livers, just all all vertebrates. What a wacky coincidence."
Pedagogy is a challenging problem, in every field. Teaching students to appreciate literature is hard, because they're too young to have an appreciation for the context, but they'll have a hard time learning the context without starting somewhere. Same goes for history.
The key that makes evolution particularly hard isn't just that there are many wrong ways to look at it. The same goes for friction, or centrifugal force, or statistics. It's that you're competing with a lot of people who want to lie to them, and who demand that their opinion is somehow the equal to scientific fact. Given a chance, they'll un-learn the simplifications we teach them as a matter of pedagogy, but they'll never un-learn the lies unless you demonstrate every day why the truth is so important.
There's really no point in teaching biology without teaching evolution. Evolution isn't just a topic in biology; it's the common thread in every single lesson. Without evolution, biology is stamp collecting. "Hey, there's a frog liver. It's got absolutely no connection to the livers of any other organism. I just figured we'd kill a frog and take it apart for the lulz."
No teacher should be teaching biology without teaching evolution, every single day. If it goes against your beliefs, then so does biology. Teach something else, or somewhere else.
It makes some comparisons a little easier. The distance you want to go is, in a sense, constant, while the amount of gas you use (aka the money you have to spend) is the variable. Some Duke researchers even got a journal paper out of it:
(That's a popular account; the original article is in Science, behind a paywall.)
The key comparison: going from 18 mpg to 28 mpg saves 198 gallons of gas over 10k miles, but going from 34 to 54 mpg (again, 14 mpg) saves only half as much (94 gallons).
Slashdotters are used to doing the math in their heads and probably don't much care, but for the less math-aware, having the constant of the distance they want to go in the denominator makes the math more intuitive.
I'm not sure that's a problem, though. You can't fly a plane into a building any more. The door is locked, and neither passengers or pilots will ever again believe you're merely looking to head to Cuba. By the time you get through the door, they've either landed, crashed, or been shot down. It would be horrific, but no more horrific than blowing up a crowded train. You might even manage to kill more people on the train, especially if you derailed a crowded one at rush hour.
Both al Qaeda and the TSA seem to have an unhealthy fixation on planes, rather than turning their attentions elsewhere. Until recently, I think a lot of Americans had joined them on that, though I think that "don't touch my junk" has finally caused a backlash.
It's impossible to estimate the click-through rate, but it's not zero. Even if spamming isn't profitable, the fact that there's money to be taken on one side will attract people on the other. It may well be that the actual spam-senders are fleecing gullible people on both sides.
That generates a reason for spam to exist, and there's no reason to moderate spam. Spam bots don't rest, and even if you've hit every email address in existence, you might as well hit it again, just in case you can slip this one past the spam filter.
All of which means that as long as one seller believes there's even one buyer, it leads to infinite spam.
people who like physics based sci-fi are not comfortable with meta-physics
Especially hackneyed, half-assed metaphysics.
Then again, from what I've observed, a lot of 'em really like hackneyed, half-assed metaphysics. It feels "deep" without actually requiring or providing any substantial insight. But you can't keep it going too long, or the lack of insight becomes obvious. One movie is about all you can keep it going for, i.e. Matrix 1.
It's definitely worth a try, but I'm skeptical that it will work. Raising money is hard; large, high-profile charities spend as much as 80% of their incomes just on raising more money.
Would you be willing to spend $10 on a TV show that doesn't exist, for a single episode? Are there likely to be 9,999 more like you? And if there are, how are the 10,000 of you going to decide which scripts you want to see made?
As the topic says, it's the big sci-fi that suffers. Not everything costs that much. Indie films are shot for under $10k, with lots of volunteers, catch-as-catch-can locations, and catering by mom. Some of it turns out really good (though I think I can say that the you-never-get-to-see-the-monster indie horror film is pretty much played out). It's good for character-driven films. Just not so good for action.
> one way would be to make a pilot and make it available for free.
A pilot is VERY expensive to make. A pilot is like a movie: all of the sets and costumes and such have to be made up front, before you've seen a single dollar in revenue. All that for "if they like it, they might deign to pay a buck for it; charge any more and they'll get it on BitTorrent."
Even if they start with a 5 minute short, there's a huge up-front expense in construction. The lighting and sound overhead will make it a good fraction of the price of a full pilot.
This is the new reality, and they'll have to find a way to cope. But there's still going to be a lot of big money involved that can front the costs and eat the losses.
It's really computer espionage and/or sabotage. Those have been parts of warfare for as long as there has been war.
Since the Internet lets you engage in espionage and sabotage with zero risk of being physically caught, it changes the dynamic to something we haven't seen before. But it's not completely unrelated to warfare as it's always been done. The real constant about it is the lack of constants, as the level of technology constantly increases and presents new opportunities to thwart or take advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, absolutely. I have vast reams of faith in science.
What I don't have vast reams of faith in is the non-science public. They often don't understand what they're funding. I'm glad when they take an interest, but I'm also cautious: sometimes, a little learning is a dangerous thing.
String theory is an excellent example. For some reason, it captures a lot of the public imagination, despite the fact that they can't do any of the math and can't appreciate any of the reasons why it's conducted the way it is. Interest is great, but the bickering among theoretical physicists about whether it is or isn't science risks tainting the whole field in the public's imagination.
We've already got a case where a large field of scientists is believed, by a significant portion of the public, to be almost universally involved in a hoax. The fact that none of them even begin to have the slightest grasp of that field does not seem to deter very loud and obnoxious arguments accusing them of fraud.
So as I say, I've got great faith in science. It's everybody else who makes me nervous.
With the arts, you're entitled to an opinion just by being human. That's what art is for. There isn't any right and wrong. One can get an appreciation for details with only a little education, but it's just giving you language with which to discuss it.
With other fields, whereof one cannot speak, one really should remain silent. String theory, in particular, seems to attract substantial commentary by those who have essentially zero grasp of it. Science popularization exists to try to give some flavor of the field, but it can also mislead people into thinking that it's an art. Knowing a little oversimplified string theory doesn't give you the right to an opinion, the way it can in art.
As I've said, I'm all for popularization. It's nice to see people interested, and if that interest turns into respect and support, yay. But if that interest turns into dismissal of the field, as it can, then the students are in some ways dumber than they started despite knowing a tiny bit more, because they don't realize how much they don't know.
The real issue is what you do with your stewardship of the faith that that layman puts in you and your discipline.
Absolutely. The irony of democracy is that you're hoping that somehow 100 million people who know (essentially) nothing about the Middle East or transportation infrastructure or the boundaries of physics will somehow be able to make intelligent decisions about it.
At least when it comes to foreign policy or economics you have the advantage that even the experts are really kind of guessing. They're very undeveloped fields, or at best soft sciences. You might as well ask the people.
Science, especially physics, feels very different. There may be no good way even for an expert to distinguish categorically between the string theorists and those who oppose them, but there's a very huge gap between those who work in those fields and those who don't.
The least we can do, as you say, is to behave like adults and act as if we deserve the trust that's been placed in us. I suspect that most people would simply de-fund most of the science if it were presented to them directly; they're not in a position to understand the ramifications. I'm very glad they don't, and in the long run THEY are glad they don't.
I was actually talking about science popularizers in general, rather than about Greene in particular. They all run this risk of giving people the impression that they know more than they do. That they know everything there is to know about the topic, except for a bunch of boring math that's really just the details. That's a mistaken impression.
Often, that's unimportant. They've developed an appreciation for science, and feel more kindly disposed to the work they do. Yay.
Sometimes, though, it's very bad. You've surely listened in on at least some of the interminable climate-change arguments, where essentially everybody is arguing from the position equivalent to having read one of Greene's works and imagines that they're now expert. I'm not taking sides there; I happen to believe that one side has the vast majority of scientists on their side, but they themselves are not really in a position to back up their arguments except by reference.
At least in climate change, they're talking about an argument with political and economic ramifications in which they have a stake. On string theory, the only forseeable ramification is the disposition of a few tens of millions in grant money, a trivial sum. If they think they're arguing philosophically about the ultimate nature of the universe, it's really just hot air.
Absolutely. Talk to philosophers of science and you'll get all sorts of arguments about the line between fact, observation, theory, and so forth.
But even most scientists are only dimly aware of that, much less the general public.
It's a long stretch from CERN to the Web as we see it today. Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP/HTML, but it was the Mozilla browser that caused it to take off. HTML and HTTP were one of several competing protocols, like Gopher and WAIS, any of which could have become the basis of what is now the Web.
HTTP and HTML were the right thing at the right time; they won. But it had nothing to do with the physics work, and something else would likely have filled that economic niche had Dr. Berners-Lee decided to be a chef rather than a physicist.
I happen to be all in favor of the LHC and other projects. The money spent on them pales before far less noble goals, like unnecessary wars domestic and foreign. I'm glad to see people interested in Science, even if I think that their reasons for it are specious. I'm glad that scientists get to be thought of as heroes and explorers rather than ivory-tower eggheads.
But being a scientist, I happen to appreciate a focus on truth, and that means recognizing that a lot of the support scientists get are for reasons people really don't understand and might even oppose if they looked at closely.
It's exactly unlike religious claptrap. You don't need to be holy to understand the truth. You just need to take a bunch of classes. You can run the same math, and if you spot an error, they'll hand you awards for it.
I'm not asking anybody to believe anything. Just the opposite, in fact. I'm asking people to reserve judgment on something they likely know very little about. Watching shows like Greene's are a bit like reality TV, entertaining and even potentially informative but not as much as people might think.
I do encourage people to read science popularization. I think it's great. I'm just trying to avoid the downsides: people who watch a few hours of TV and imagine that they're qualified to express an opinion on a difficult topic. If you want to learn the topic, by all means, crack a book and start learning. But the arguments over string theory are far, far louder than that.
You're right! I can't believe I missed that. (Not a grammar nazi, but I am a professional writer, and I don't usually make mistakes of that kind.)
Science popularizers like Greene have to tread a careful line. They're not paid to talk about the most important work, which most people wouldn't understand. Real cutting-edge physics is comprehensible only to those extremely skilled in the art, which cuts out even the vast majority of scientists. But people like believing that they're getting dispatches from the front, especially in physics, because that's where people imagine lays the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.
You can't even pretend to know much about string theory without some very advanced work in quantum mechanics AND general relativity, which means knowing an awful lot of very, very difficult calculus. For 99.9% even of readers of Scientific American, they're skipping straight past all of that.
Which means, in essence, telling comforting lies. That's common in education, simplifying a subject to the point where it's essentially false. It's common in science (cf. genetics), but in other fields as well. History, as taught in schools, is so far from reality that college professors have to spend a full year (at least) undoing the damage.
It's similar to the situation with space research: most of the actual science is done by the robots, but people like the human stories associated with manned flight. The real science is done practically with the rounding errors in the budget.
In the case of string theory, that means that a bunch of people doing interesting but (bluntly) irrelevant speculation get far, far more attention than they deserve. It's not that they're right, wrong, or Not Even Wrong. People want to know what they're doing, because they've been told that we're Just Around The Corner from The Big Answers. It's a lie, and essentially everybody familiar enough with the work knows it. But they also know it's where the funding comes from.
I mean seriously... a multi-billion-dollar supercollider? How on earth does that get funded? Because a bunch of people who can't tell a fermion from a boson imagine that they're part of a grand human experiment. And maybe, in the grand human scheme of things, it is worth the money, though I personally doubt it. Still, it's the dirty little secret of scientific work: popularizers write a lot of books about stuff that's really of very little earthy interest, in order to attract enough attention to the field of science to keep the actual work going on. The grad students counting bacterial colonies or coming up with new protein folding algorithms or other tedious stuff that slowly an un-telegentically advances understanding.
I don't like the little turf war going on between the string theoriests, who get more attention than they deserve, and the anti-string-theorists, who are doing equally unproductive work. Both are intriguing speculations that might one day be of intense interest, but at the moment are of little value either practical or philosophical. They get attention only because they're right at the edge, but most of us are so far from the edge that they'd be invisible under any other circumstances. Both should be left to labor diligently in quiet, and let their little funding turf war be lumped in with the rest of the academic bickering rather than become a great philosophical debate.
Even scientists, when they're not being absolutely rigorous, use "theory" in the "hypothesis" sense. It's common in culture, and scientists are still human, especially when off the clock.
This is a scientific context and the summary really should be rewritten to use the more precise and accurate word "speculation", but "hur hur evolution is a theory not a fact" is so spectacularly and deliberately misinformed that no amount of rigor on the part of scientists is going to stamp it out. Those who grasp it will understand what was meant; those intent on misunderstanding will find a way to do so regardless.
The term BCE has been used since the 19th century. It predates everybody here, and it also predates the term "politically correct".
Purely technical question: what do you do with the expired sticker?
A sticker that goes on the license plate can be replaced with a new sticker; you just put the new one on top. But a sticker that goes on the inside of a windshield won't be seen.
I suppose you have to scrape the old one off. Do they make that easy? The ones my garage uses to remind me of my next oil change just peel off, though I suspect they may want ones you have to destroy to remove (to prevent theft).
The question of super powers is presumably related to why humans are here in the first place. A deity presumably could have created humans as angels, so there would have to be some other point to the operation. One could guess that it has something to do with how great it is that humans overcome difficulties to love their creator, or something like that.
It doesn't really cover why humans have limitations that are identical to the kinds that evolution considers to be ancestors. OK, humans get cancer because we're learning to cope with adversity. Why do otters get cancer? Or antelope?
The details all get swept under the rug with the word "ineffable". God has his reasons, and we haven't been let in on it. It's not something you can actually disprove, but it's not terribly helpful, either.
Sure, they could have, but you would't know why. There's nothing that evolution did produce that couldn't have been produced by conscious design.
The difference is that there are things that a conscious designer can do that evolution can't. There are many more effective ways to design livers, or other body parts, if you were starting from a completely clean slate. (Livers, for example, have some ability to grow back, but kidneys don't, and it would be awfully nice if they could.)
The theory of evolution constrains what you'd expect to see, and you can use that to your advantage. Every difference and similarity between a frog's liver and a human one is informative; it got that way based on the different ways that humans and frogs evolved. It lets you know what lessons you can take, and which ones you can't.
By contrast, the design theory looks at each and every feature and says, "I dunno." Why did the designer feel all vertebrates needed livers, but no other species? No idea; that was just the mood he was in. It certainly isn't optimal. Everything that was included, or idea that was rejected, is arbitrary. Fossil organisms, too, are entirely unexplained; they just happened to bear traits similar to existing ones for no reason.
That doesn't mean it didn't happen that way. It would be hard, perhaps impossible, to disprove. It just so happens that every single time we look at a feature of an organism, it looks exactly as though a designer made a design constrained by the requirements of evolution. It's a valid theory, just not a terribly useful one, one that tells us nothing about the organism and nothing about the designer except that it chose to make everything look precisely as if it had evolved.
For instance, one school teacher now has every student submit ten arguments for and against evolution.
Oh, man. In theory, that is an absolutely brilliant assignment. Critical thinking skills, insight, broad understanding of the concept...
In practice, it's going to be a load of horse puckey. Because if it were intended as a critical thinking assignment, they'd be doing it about the theory of gravitation or atomic theory or germ theory. Instead, they pick the one area where there are a large number of pre-existing insanely wrong arguments that can serve only to make the student dumber, and teach them to confuse "you can pick and choose your arguments to show anything you want" with "skepticism". Plus, it gives the invalid impression that scientists aren't essentially 100% certain that the most common "alternatives" to evolution are absolutely wrong.
Too bad.
I'm tired of EVERYTHING being connected to evolution.
I'm sorry, but in biology, it IS all connected to evolution. Common physiology is common because of common descent. Otherwise it's just trivia. "Hey, frogs have livers, just all all vertebrates. What a wacky coincidence."
Pedagogy is a challenging problem, in every field. Teaching students to appreciate literature is hard, because they're too young to have an appreciation for the context, but they'll have a hard time learning the context without starting somewhere. Same goes for history.
The key that makes evolution particularly hard isn't just that there are many wrong ways to look at it. The same goes for friction, or centrifugal force, or statistics. It's that you're competing with a lot of people who want to lie to them, and who demand that their opinion is somehow the equal to scientific fact. Given a chance, they'll un-learn the simplifications we teach them as a matter of pedagogy, but they'll never un-learn the lies unless you demonstrate every day why the truth is so important.
I'm curious: is that teacher still working?
There's really no point in teaching biology without teaching evolution. Evolution isn't just a topic in biology; it's the common thread in every single lesson. Without evolution, biology is stamp collecting. "Hey, there's a frog liver. It's got absolutely no connection to the livers of any other organism. I just figured we'd kill a frog and take it apart for the lulz."
No teacher should be teaching biology without teaching evolution, every single day. If it goes against your beliefs, then so does biology. Teach something else, or somewhere else.
It makes some comparisons a little easier. The distance you want to go is, in a sense, constant, while the amount of gas you use (aka the money you have to spend) is the variable. Some Duke researchers even got a journal paper out of it:
http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2008/06/gpmfuqua.html
(That's a popular account; the original article is in Science, behind a paywall.)
The key comparison: going from 18 mpg to 28 mpg saves 198 gallons of gas over 10k miles, but going from 34 to 54 mpg (again, 14 mpg) saves only half as much (94 gallons).
Slashdotters are used to doing the math in their heads and probably don't much care, but for the less math-aware, having the constant of the distance they want to go in the denominator makes the math more intuitive.
I'm not sure that's a problem, though. You can't fly a plane into a building any more. The door is locked, and neither passengers or pilots will ever again believe you're merely looking to head to Cuba. By the time you get through the door, they've either landed, crashed, or been shot down. It would be horrific, but no more horrific than blowing up a crowded train. You might even manage to kill more people on the train, especially if you derailed a crowded one at rush hour.
Both al Qaeda and the TSA seem to have an unhealthy fixation on planes, rather than turning their attentions elsewhere. Until recently, I think a lot of Americans had joined them on that, though I think that "don't touch my junk" has finally caused a backlash.
Probably also because of mild weather, year-round, too.
Well, except for the hurricanes.
But the weather, at least, is generally pretty warm, so you don't usually have to watch out for frozen o-rings. Usually.
It's impossible to estimate the click-through rate, but it's not zero. Even if spamming isn't profitable, the fact that there's money to be taken on one side will attract people on the other. It may well be that the actual spam-senders are fleecing gullible people on both sides.
That generates a reason for spam to exist, and there's no reason to moderate spam. Spam bots don't rest, and even if you've hit every email address in existence, you might as well hit it again, just in case you can slip this one past the spam filter.
All of which means that as long as one seller believes there's even one buyer, it leads to infinite spam.
people who like physics based sci-fi are not comfortable with meta-physics
Especially hackneyed, half-assed metaphysics.
Then again, from what I've observed, a lot of 'em really like hackneyed, half-assed metaphysics. It feels "deep" without actually requiring or providing any substantial insight. But you can't keep it going too long, or the lack of insight becomes obvious. One movie is about all you can keep it going for, i.e. Matrix 1.
It's definitely worth a try, but I'm skeptical that it will work. Raising money is hard; large, high-profile charities spend as much as 80% of their incomes just on raising more money.
Would you be willing to spend $10 on a TV show that doesn't exist, for a single episode? Are there likely to be 9,999 more like you? And if there are, how are the 10,000 of you going to decide which scripts you want to see made?
As the topic says, it's the big sci-fi that suffers. Not everything costs that much. Indie films are shot for under $10k, with lots of volunteers, catch-as-catch-can locations, and catering by mom. Some of it turns out really good (though I think I can say that the you-never-get-to-see-the-monster indie horror film is pretty much played out). It's good for character-driven films. Just not so good for action.
> one way would be to make a pilot and make it available for free.
A pilot is VERY expensive to make. A pilot is like a movie: all of the sets and costumes and such have to be made up front, before you've seen a single dollar in revenue. All that for "if they like it, they might deign to pay a buck for it; charge any more and they'll get it on BitTorrent."
Even if they start with a 5 minute short, there's a huge up-front expense in construction. The lighting and sound overhead will make it a good fraction of the price of a full pilot.
This is the new reality, and they'll have to find a way to cope. But there's still going to be a lot of big money involved that can front the costs and eat the losses.
It's really computer espionage and/or sabotage. Those have been parts of warfare for as long as there has been war.
Since the Internet lets you engage in espionage and sabotage with zero risk of being physically caught, it changes the dynamic to something we haven't seen before. But it's not completely unrelated to warfare as it's always been done. The real constant about it is the lack of constants, as the level of technology constantly increases and presents new opportunities to thwart or take advantage.