Some of the questions you mentioned are answered in the Bible. Others (such as the problem of evil) are heavily disputed. None of the answers go more than one or two levels deep, and none allow for a way to find out more. This is unsatisfying and suggests that the methodology behind religious inquiry is unsound. If it's good enough for you then I'm glad; I don't find being a skeptical atheist particularly pleasant.
But as you've guessed, it's really your second set of questions that I'm after. My hope is that scientific inquiry will gain us enough knowledge about ourselves and the universe to be able to bootstrap up to something better. I don't see religious inquiry accomplishing this because it's too focused on introspection, which is far too vulnerable to our biases, illusions, and tendency to deceive ourselves. Between "alternative" medicine, urban legends, conspiracy theorists, UFO watchers, and ESPers, I have very little faith in the ability of totally subjective evidence-free personal experiences to tell us about the deepest secrets of the universe.
The point is that the nature of the universe controls our lives. Given that it is bigger and more powerful than me and has demonstrated the ability and willingness to torture me into insanity, I have a vested interest in knowing what's really going on. Unfortunately, most real investigation into the issue is blocked by religious folks who are convinced that these questions are their domain. The fact that they don't have any real answers beyond a trivial smokescreen and haven't made any appreciable progress in millenia doesn't seem to bother them much. It does bother me, though -- I'm not smart enough to figure everything out on my own, but how can I get help when everyone's distracted by red herrings?
I'm not after conclusive proof of the (non-)existence of a divine. I want the same standard of evidence that we use for everything else -- that a nontheistic explanation is simpler, explains more, and is more consistent with everything else we know. Yes, you can always invoke a conspiracy theory-like god to get around the problem, but if you followed that path long enough I think you'd end up with contradictory views anyway. The first tenet of religions is that gods have to be worth worshipping.
For those who must say that God exists, try this: science is for understanding how we exist, spirituality is for understanding why.
I hear this a lot but I have not found it to be true. No religion gives a real understanding of the why, or even goes more than one or two trivial steps through an answer -- "Why do we exist?" "Because God made us this way" "Why?" "Uh...". The Munchausen Trilemma still holds.
I am also unconvinced that it's impossible to make a good argument for atheism. "Is there a god?" is not directly answerable, but it would be possible to show evidence that religions and religious beliefs are best explained as the products of human nature and human history, not divine influence.
I'm not militant or anything, but just telling people to shut up and leave the questions alone isn't going to fly.
Your question is a little ambiguous because any voltage that isn't constant (DC) can be called an AC signal. There's nothing special about the sinusoidal voltage you get from a wall socket, it's just not much use to a computer. Digital systems are supposed to act like boolean logic, so ideally there are only two voltage levels (0V and 5V, say) allowed in the circuit. They do have AC (time-varying) signals -- a clock, inputs, and outputs. Transistors in the circuit are switched on and off in response to the clock and inputs to produce the outputs. When a transistor turns on, it connects part of the circuit to either 0V or 5V, so you need a stable source of those voltages. That's why digital circuits need DC power supplies.
In analog circuits, it's a slightly different story. Electronic devices like transistors don't work the same way at all voltage levels (I'm greatly simplifying transistors here). So if you want to make, say, an audio amplifier, you want the transistors in the circuit to act in a controlled way (e.g. not like switches). To do this, you "bias" the transistors by adding DC voltages to your AC signals within the circuit, which means you need a DC supply. Once you have one or two of those, it's easy to derive other DC voltages from them, so you often don't need any more. That's why you need DC in analog circuits.
There are many circuits that only use AC power or work on AC signals without needing extra power. The former are things like light bulbs or motors where you only care about absorbing power or can use sinusoidal electromagnetic fields. The latter are things like simple filters or signal splitters, which don't add anything to the signal (but might take something away).
Hope that answered your question. Feel free to ask more if you like.
Did you pull those numbers out of your ass or is it really $5000/year for textbooks in law school? That's gotta be more books than you can actually read in that time.
Wait a minute. I argued that a key factor in the quality of private schools is their ability to teach only certain kinds of students, and in particular to filter out those whose parents don't care as much about education. Your response was to give an example of a school that specializes in teaching certain kinds of students and tell me that you're now home-schooling your son....
Dude, you're proving my point. Your son was going to do well no matter what because you and your wife know enough and care enough to make it happen no matter what. Not everyone has that advantage.
Yes, for two reasons. First, in the long run, kids who don't learn become everybody's problem when they start working, voting, etc. Second, education provides a way to help break the cycle of things like poverty and gang violence, which themselves contribute to lack of concern for education.
It's hard to sit down and take a carefully-researched and well thought-out look at whether education is really important and how doing well in school will affect your life if you don't have an education in the first place.
When my parents were thinking about sending me to a private school (~15 years ago) I had to take tests which looked very similar to the intelligence tests I've seen since then (spatial and language skills, etc.). You may be right about your schools. However, even if they do let in some lower-performing students (who are very different from handicapped students, BTW), they at least get to control the ratio. If they're getting more applicants than they have spots, then they're screening somehow. Public schools (at least in Texas) have absolutely no control over who gets in -- it's all geography. And that's not counting the implicit screening based on wealth and parental interest.
You're right, though -- more data on what schools actualy do would be helpful.
3. Private schools get to choose who they admit and keep, which allows them to only teach smart, well-behaved, native English speakers with parents who care about education.
The actual number is usually over 50%, depending on how the question is asked. In particular, over half of Americans support teaching Creationism alongside evolution in public schools.
Unless you're a night owl, the polls will close too late for you to follow along in the UK. Here's a list of times in the Eastern Standard time zone (GMT-5). The earliest states won't officially stop voting until midnight GMT, and many might stay open later to let more people vote. It'll take a few hours to finish counting the votes after that. In the event of a total Obama blowout, you might get a result by 2:00am GMT, but you're really better off waiting until the next morning. McCain is way behind in the polls and likely to stay that way, so the real question is how big of a mandate Obama gets and how many Senate seats the Democrats will take over, not who wins. The Senate may be more important since if the Democrats get 60 seats (a long shot) they'll be able to override filibusters.
Having a loose cannon is more trouble than it's worth. You get what you want in the short run, but in the long run you alienate all your friends and would-be allies.
America's enemies in the Middle East (and elsewhere) became our enemies in the first place because of geopolitical chess games during the Cold War. This was a bipartisan hobby, but it's something the Democrats have been moving away from. The Republicans (and unfortunately, this includes McCain) pay lip service to diplomacy, but don't really understand that you make it work by getting people to like you first, *then* asking them for favors. Obama's popularity with the rest of the world will be a big plus in foreign policy, and his lefty peace-nik roots will hopefully keep him from trying to play games with other people's lives.
I watch the results at Real Clear Politics and the aggregates/projections from Pollster, Princeton, and 538. Advertising budgets for the various candidates and states are also public. Less solid evidence includes leaked internal memos about the parties own projections for success or failure. McCain has surrendered most of the Kerry swing states, and his last hope is to try to take Pennsylvania, which has gone Democratic in the last four elections. Obama, meanwhile, wins by holding Colorado and New Hampshire (likely) or getting at least one of the big swing states (also likely). He's averaging +9% in the (still-rising) national polls, and is competitive in once-secure states like North Dakota and North Carolina. As we can see from early voting results so far, he has a better ground game, and from the beginning has had a better organized campaign. I know the race is expected to tighten, but it would have to tighten a *lot* to make it "very close".
Right now, all evidence is that the race will not be close, and that it would take a major gaffe from Obama to change that. It could happen -- nobody's saying it's over till it's over -- but as the McCain campaign continues to get bad press over Sarah Palin and Republican supporters form a circular firing squad, this race is looking more like 1992 than 2000.
The presidential race probably won't have as many problems. The polls are predicting an Obama shut-out. The question now is not whether the Democrats will win the White House and gain seats in the house and senate, but how big of a landslide it will be.
Wouldn't it have been raids from local Indian tribes that posed the real threat? It sounds more like the states wanted to be able to maintain their own private armies for defense against outside forces.
eBay is actually a good place to get electronic test equipment. New gear is targeted at companies that have money to burn. The Agilent and Tektronix web sites will quote you prices that will make your head spin -- entry-level is about a thousand dollars and it goes *way* up from there. You can find older scopes on eBay starting in the $300-$400 range. They won't be as nice, but they'll probably meet your needs if you're just starting out. Look for ones that you can actually see working on the seller's page or that are guaranteed to work. Function generators and power supplies are also good buys.
Umm... what? The line you quote is talking about a custom piece of *internal hardware* -- an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). ASICs are very common in all kinds of devices and have nothing directly to do with software compatibility, hardware interfaces, or interoperability. All it means is that they made it a little cheaper (and possibly a little better) by using special-purpose hardware rather than a high-performance off-the-shelf microcontroller.
You know that's exactly what people on the left say about you, right? That you guys are too busy with jingoistic cheerleading and hating immigrants/liberals/terrorists to bother thinking about anything. The NR hosts a blog called "Liberal Fascism" whose header image is a smiley face with a Hitler mustache. One of the front page articles is called "Barack Obama is hazardous to a culture of life -- lives depend on your vote!". Yeah, no appeals to emotion there.
News flash: *everyone* thinks their own ideas are well-thought-out and their opponents' ideas are fluff. They're half-right -- almost everyone's ideas about almost everything are fluff. It takes depressing amounts of evidence and analysis to be sure of even the simplest and most concrete of things. When it comes to softer stuff like macroeconomics it's hard to get any evidence that isn't tarred with interpretations and post-hoc rationalizations. There's certainly no position solid enough to be worth calling names over.
On the other hand, much of what makes those witch hunts possible is a misunderstanding of how common certain certain behaviors are. The more people are open about what they do, the less threatening they seem. Long-term low-level exposure is the key to tolerance. Plus, if you're honest about who you are from the beginning, you're less likely to end up in situations where the truth can hurt you. "I was fired because my boss found out I'm a Muslim" is a lot worse than "I wasn't hired because the interviewer found out I'm a Muslim".
Most of what people talk about with regard to Facebook is this way. You'd be hard-pressed to hire someone who *didn't* engage in underage drinking.
It's already possible to mechanically limit a car's speed, isn't it? It doesn't matter; nobody would put up with a crippled car. The 55mph speed limit was the same way. The government is not an unstoppable monster; public opinion does matter.
If you look carefully at my comments, you'll see that I never said anything about whether piracy is right. What I did was make a comment about (many) other people's motivations, one which I feel is justified by their behavior. (It was also, as I mentioned, sort of a personal response to another poster, but it was a public message so I'll ignore that.) Meanwhile, you're talking about some right vs. wrong stuff that I have no idea where it came from. I am flattered that you assume I'm having cognitive dissonance instead of just being a selfish, uncaring bastard (which is what I'm really doing), but I'd be even more flattered if you bothered to listen before responding.
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Some of the questions you mentioned are answered in the Bible. Others (such as the problem of evil) are heavily disputed. None of the answers go more than one or two levels deep, and none allow for a way to find out more. This is unsatisfying and suggests that the methodology behind religious inquiry is unsound. If it's good enough for you then I'm glad; I don't find being a skeptical atheist particularly pleasant.
But as you've guessed, it's really your second set of questions that I'm after. My hope is that scientific inquiry will gain us enough knowledge about ourselves and the universe to be able to bootstrap up to something better. I don't see religious inquiry accomplishing this because it's too focused on introspection, which is far too vulnerable to our biases, illusions, and tendency to deceive ourselves. Between "alternative" medicine, urban legends, conspiracy theorists, UFO watchers, and ESPers, I have very little faith in the ability of totally subjective evidence-free personal experiences to tell us about the deepest secrets of the universe.
You do know that the story of the angelic rebellion, the war in heaven, and the fall of Lucifer are almost completely apocryphal, right?
The point is that the nature of the universe controls our lives. Given that it is bigger and more powerful than me and has demonstrated the ability and willingness to torture me into insanity, I have a vested interest in knowing what's really going on. Unfortunately, most real investigation into the issue is blocked by religious folks who are convinced that these questions are their domain. The fact that they don't have any real answers beyond a trivial smokescreen and haven't made any appreciable progress in millenia doesn't seem to bother them much. It does bother me, though -- I'm not smart enough to figure everything out on my own, but how can I get help when everyone's distracted by red herrings?
I'm not after conclusive proof of the (non-)existence of a divine. I want the same standard of evidence that we use for everything else -- that a nontheistic explanation is simpler, explains more, and is more consistent with everything else we know. Yes, you can always invoke a conspiracy theory-like god to get around the problem, but if you followed that path long enough I think you'd end up with contradictory views anyway. The first tenet of religions is that gods have to be worth worshipping.
Care to enlighten me?
For those who must say that God exists, try this: science is for understanding how we exist, spirituality is for understanding why.
I hear this a lot but I have not found it to be true. No religion gives a real understanding of the why, or even goes more than one or two trivial steps through an answer -- "Why do we exist?" "Because God made us this way" "Why?" "Uh...". The Munchausen Trilemma still holds.
I am also unconvinced that it's impossible to make a good argument for atheism. "Is there a god?" is not directly answerable, but it would be possible to show evidence that religions and religious beliefs are best explained as the products of human nature and human history, not divine influence.
I'm not militant or anything, but just telling people to shut up and leave the questions alone isn't going to fly.
Your question is a little ambiguous because any voltage that isn't constant (DC) can be called an AC signal. There's nothing special about the sinusoidal voltage you get from a wall socket, it's just not much use to a computer. Digital systems are supposed to act like boolean logic, so ideally there are only two voltage levels (0V and 5V, say) allowed in the circuit. They do have AC (time-varying) signals -- a clock, inputs, and outputs. Transistors in the circuit are switched on and off in response to the clock and inputs to produce the outputs. When a transistor turns on, it connects part of the circuit to either 0V or 5V, so you need a stable source of those voltages. That's why digital circuits need DC power supplies.
In analog circuits, it's a slightly different story. Electronic devices like transistors don't work the same way at all voltage levels (I'm greatly simplifying transistors here). So if you want to make, say, an audio amplifier, you want the transistors in the circuit to act in a controlled way (e.g. not like switches). To do this, you "bias" the transistors by adding DC voltages to your AC signals within the circuit, which means you need a DC supply. Once you have one or two of those, it's easy to derive other DC voltages from them, so you often don't need any more. That's why you need DC in analog circuits.
There are many circuits that only use AC power or work on AC signals without needing extra power. The former are things like light bulbs or motors where you only care about absorbing power or can use sinusoidal electromagnetic fields. The latter are things like simple filters or signal splitters, which don't add anything to the signal (but might take something away).
Hope that answered your question. Feel free to ask more if you like.
Did you pull those numbers out of your ass or is it really $5000/year for textbooks in law school? That's gotta be more books than you can actually read in that time.
Wait a minute. I argued that a key factor in the quality of private schools is their ability to teach only certain kinds of students, and in particular to filter out those whose parents don't care as much about education. Your response was to give an example of a school that specializes in teaching certain kinds of students and tell me that you're now home-schooling your son. ...
Dude, you're proving my point. Your son was going to do well no matter what because you and your wife know enough and care enough to make it happen no matter what. Not everyone has that advantage.
Yes, for two reasons. First, in the long run, kids who don't learn become everybody's problem when they start working, voting, etc. Second, education provides a way to help break the cycle of things like poverty and gang violence, which themselves contribute to lack of concern for education.
It's hard to sit down and take a carefully-researched and well thought-out look at whether education is really important and how doing well in school will affect your life if you don't have an education in the first place.
When my parents were thinking about sending me to a private school (~15 years ago) I had to take tests which looked very similar to the intelligence tests I've seen since then (spatial and language skills, etc.). You may be right about your schools. However, even if they do let in some lower-performing students (who are very different from handicapped students, BTW), they at least get to control the ratio. If they're getting more applicants than they have spots, then they're screening somehow. Public schools (at least in Texas) have absolutely no control over who gets in -- it's all geography. And that's not counting the implicit screening based on wealth and parental interest.
You're right, though -- more data on what schools actualy do would be helpful.
You forgot:
3. Private schools get to choose who they admit and keep, which allows them to only teach smart, well-behaved, native English speakers with parents who care about education.
The actual number is usually over 50%, depending on how the question is asked. In particular, over half of Americans support teaching Creationism alongside evolution in public schools.
Unless you're a night owl, the polls will close too late for you to follow along in the UK. Here's a list of times in the Eastern Standard time zone (GMT-5). The earliest states won't officially stop voting until midnight GMT, and many might stay open later to let more people vote. It'll take a few hours to finish counting the votes after that. In the event of a total Obama blowout, you might get a result by 2:00am GMT, but you're really better off waiting until the next morning. McCain is way behind in the polls and likely to stay that way, so the real question is how big of a mandate Obama gets and how many Senate seats the Democrats will take over, not who wins. The Senate may be more important since if the Democrats get 60 seats (a long shot) they'll be able to override filibusters.
Having a loose cannon is more trouble than it's worth. You get what you want in the short run, but in the long run you alienate all your friends and would-be allies.
America's enemies in the Middle East (and elsewhere) became our enemies in the first place because of geopolitical chess games during the Cold War. This was a bipartisan hobby, but it's something the Democrats have been moving away from. The Republicans (and unfortunately, this includes McCain) pay lip service to diplomacy, but don't really understand that you make it work by getting people to like you first, *then* asking them for favors. Obama's popularity with the rest of the world will be a big plus in foreign policy, and his lefty peace-nik roots will hopefully keep him from trying to play games with other people's lives.
I watch the results at Real Clear Politics and the aggregates/projections from Pollster, Princeton, and 538. Advertising budgets for the various candidates and states are also public. Less solid evidence includes leaked internal memos about the parties own projections for success or failure. McCain has surrendered most of the Kerry swing states, and his last hope is to try to take Pennsylvania, which has gone Democratic in the last four elections. Obama, meanwhile, wins by holding Colorado and New Hampshire (likely) or getting at least one of the big swing states (also likely). He's averaging +9% in the (still-rising) national polls, and is competitive in once-secure states like North Dakota and North Carolina. As we can see from early voting results so far, he has a better ground game, and from the beginning has had a better organized campaign. I know the race is expected to tighten, but it would have to tighten a *lot* to make it "very close".
Right now, all evidence is that the race will not be close, and that it would take a major gaffe from Obama to change that. It could happen -- nobody's saying it's over till it's over -- but as the McCain campaign continues to get bad press over Sarah Palin and Republican supporters form a circular firing squad, this race is looking more like 1992 than 2000.
The presidential race probably won't have as many problems. The polls are predicting an Obama shut-out. The question now is not whether the Democrats will win the White House and gain seats in the house and senate, but how big of a landslide it will be.
Wouldn't it have been raids from local Indian tribes that posed the real threat? It sounds more like the states wanted to be able to maintain their own private armies for defense against outside forces.
eBay is actually a good place to get electronic test equipment. New gear is targeted at companies that have money to burn. The Agilent and Tektronix web sites will quote you prices that will make your head spin -- entry-level is about a thousand dollars and it goes *way* up from there. You can find older scopes on eBay starting in the $300-$400 range. They won't be as nice, but they'll probably meet your needs if you're just starting out. Look for ones that you can actually see working on the seller's page or that are guaranteed to work. Function generators and power supplies are also good buys.
Umm... what? The line you quote is talking about a custom piece of *internal hardware* -- an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). ASICs are very common in all kinds of devices and have nothing directly to do with software compatibility, hardware interfaces, or interoperability. All it means is that they made it a little cheaper (and possibly a little better) by using special-purpose hardware rather than a high-performance off-the-shelf microcontroller.
We think, you guys feel.
You know that's exactly what people on the left say about you, right? That you guys are too busy with jingoistic cheerleading and hating immigrants/liberals/terrorists to bother thinking about anything. The NR hosts a blog called "Liberal Fascism" whose header image is a smiley face with a Hitler mustache. One of the front page articles is called "Barack Obama is hazardous to a culture of life -- lives depend on your vote!". Yeah, no appeals to emotion there.
News flash: *everyone* thinks their own ideas are well-thought-out and their opponents' ideas are fluff. They're half-right -- almost everyone's ideas about almost everything are fluff. It takes depressing amounts of evidence and analysis to be sure of even the simplest and most concrete of things. When it comes to softer stuff like macroeconomics it's hard to get any evidence that isn't tarred with interpretations and post-hoc rationalizations. There's certainly no position solid enough to be worth calling names over.
On the other hand, much of what makes those witch hunts possible is a misunderstanding of how common certain certain behaviors are. The more people are open about what they do, the less threatening they seem. Long-term low-level exposure is the key to tolerance. Plus, if you're honest about who you are from the beginning, you're less likely to end up in situations where the truth can hurt you. "I was fired because my boss found out I'm a Muslim" is a lot worse than "I wasn't hired because the interviewer found out I'm a Muslim".
Most of what people talk about with regard to Facebook is this way. You'd be hard-pressed to hire someone who *didn't* engage in underage drinking.
It's already possible to mechanically limit a car's speed, isn't it? It doesn't matter; nobody would put up with a crippled car. The 55mph speed limit was the same way. The government is not an unstoppable monster; public opinion does matter.
It lets you do functional programming. Hence, F#.
If you look carefully at my comments, you'll see that I never said anything about whether piracy is right. What I did was make a comment about (many) other people's motivations, one which I feel is justified by their behavior. (It was also, as I mentioned, sort of a personal response to another poster, but it was a public message so I'll ignore that.) Meanwhile, you're talking about some right vs. wrong stuff that I have no idea where it came from. I am flattered that you assume I'm having cognitive dissonance instead of just being a selfish, uncaring bastard (which is what I'm really doing), but I'd be even more flattered if you bothered to listen before responding.