Since mathematics is the only pure science, perhaps you can enlighten me how exactly it contradicts scripture.
For what definition of "pure" would that be? Mathematics provides basic logical reasoning tools that help us deduce complex causal relationships and create models that show impressively how phenomena work without the need of a deity standing behind the curtain pulling the strings. Mathematics also gave us direct access to information technology that we use to simulate interactions accurately, including but not limited to evolutionary mechanisms. By providing these means mathematics contradicts religion on a daily basis both directly and indirectly.
I'm sure there's some scripture somewhere that contradicts one of the laws of chemistry - can you name it?
First, it's not as if chemistry is based on a set of commandments where I can now just invoke something like "the 9th law of chemistry", but yes there are a few concepts that come to mind. For example, pretty much all of biochemistry that provides concrete insights into how organisms work and interact with their environment. These models are based very concretely on evolution, so I'm pretty sure everything that happens in a cell is not something that is compatible with scripture. Heck, you can't even begin to grasp proteins without evolution. But it goes deeper than that. Alchemy was the last science based on and compatible with Christian religion. Once we discovered fire wasn't an element, we departed from the bible for good.
Surely there's a commandment against information theory, something about not computing on the Sabbath, maybe?
There may not be a commandment, but I do recall the demonization of knowledge being a fundamental concept in the bible. Wasn't there even some Tree of Knowledge or something that made God really angry at humans for eating its fruits? I may have that mixed up though, correct me as necessary. I do also seem to remember that Satan, who is apparently the personification of evil, is known as the bringer of light and knowledge. As such he is probably a direct descendant of Prometheus with whom the ancient gods got really upset for bringing the humans fire and thus technology. From a sociological viewpoint that makes sense, because knowledge really is the nemesis of belief and vice versa.
Or perhaps the problem is that there are people who observe variations among species in nature and automatically jump to the conclusion that such variations are somehow proof that God doesn't exist.
Sort of, yes. There are countless areas of scientific knowledge that lead you to the conclusion that the concept of an invisible deity is not only superfluous but also counterproductive reasoning. So, it's not restricted to evolution, you can arrive at this conclusion from almost any field of science.
That the possibility of life adapting to its environment - rather than a sign of God's genius - is proof of his absence.
No. There are really two concepts of God we're talking about here. The first is the literal biblical god, whose existence really has been disproved over time through countless breakthroughs in understanding. The second is the general idea of an omnipotent being that guides all of the universe, but has taken every conceivable precaution so his existence can never be demonstrated but also can (on account of omnipotence) never be ruled out. Of course the number of hypothetically existing but unprovable things that can be constructed from sheer imagination is endless and not restricted to gods. Creating unprovable hypotheses is easy and you cannot logically infer truth from the mere fact that they cannot be demonstrated as false.
Or to put it differently: I can postulate that the world is in reality powered by invisible unicorn excrement and top that off with a statement about how the unicorns are infinitely
Evolutionary theory teaches that there is a physical process by which living organisms adapt to, and are shaped by, the environment over periods of many, many generations. Though we can't explain it completely yet, we believe we will someday discover how life came about on this planet.
No. Abiogenesis is not part of evolution. And that's not an arbitrary distinction either. The chemical processes that lead to the spontaneous assembly of the first complex self-replicating macromolecules are poorly understood because we don't yet know the composition and environmental conditions of the early earth. Abiogenesis is a concrete chemistry problem and active research field in biochemistry. Evolution on the other hand, is an abstract mathematical model that describes a universal process of change and adaptation. Biological organisms are just one of many possible substrates on which evolution can take place, for instance the process has also been observed and implemented in many areas of information technology. We can, indeed, explain it very well, profoundly and completely.
That science has been wrong more often than not.
Not in the way religion has, and must be, per definition. Science creates models that serve to predict outcomes. When the actual outcome does not fit the prediction made by using the model, it's time to refine (or in some cases rebuild) the model. As such, science invites failure because scientists are eager to learn from them. Failure is one of the mechanisms that make science stronger as time progresses. You can't even say that science has been wrong more often than not. Our models have become very, very good. Most people don't realize how immensely we rely on them every single day to make billions of decisions, most of which are completely correct. (You made that point yourself, but I had to throw my 2 cents in here)
That science often believes things on faith - for example, there's faith that someday we'll discover the means by which the first living cells came to be. It may even be a well founded faith - backed up by years of experimentation and data. But it's still faith.
This is a potentially misleading argument. Science does not really require faith. Science could be done by automatons that don't have any capacity for faith. The danger of this wording is it creates the impression that science and faith are somehow on the same level and are interrelated if not interchangeable. Science believes things based on models that are supported by measurements and abstract mathematics. Furthermore, no scientific theory stands on its own, it exists in an ecosystem of proven and reliable ideas that supply a mutually supporting and robust outlook on the world. Even hypotheses, often conceptually mistaken to be equivalent to theories, rest on some evidence and usually offer models that are at least plausible. But nobody really goes out and equates a hypothesis with proven theory, since that would indeed mean taking things on faith.
Having actually met a person in college who chose not to believe in God because of her HS biology class, I find it troubling that evolution is taught at all. Not because I take issue with the scientific theory, but because for so many, the fight over evolution is a fight over teaching against the existence of God.
So you encountered one of the few cases where encountering actual facts made a person think and change their mind about religion and you find that alarming. Rest assured, it doesn't happen that often. Many people instead compartmentalize their minds into ridiculously incompatible world views, each used when it seems opportune. And the vast majority, like you noticed, simply doesn't care how the world works. You could tell them the earth is steam-powered by unicorn excrement and they'd swallow it without question. Which is, incidentally, the essence of religious teaching and brings me back to you
If this was a real project (which it isn't) with real funding and serious intentions, this could be a very cool engineering feat. If you base the assembly process on solar-powered automated collectors and separators, a 3D printer-like unit could be used to create any object shape the island needs for construction. However, anyone planning such an undertaking would have to take two big problems into account: toxic chemicals present in the recycled and susceptibility of the island in the face of frequent thunderstorms. Both of which could be tackled by careful engineering, but it won't be easy.
But hey, living on an awesome sci-fi plastic flotilla/arcology? Sign me up!
Or, you know, doctors would only be people who aren't in it for the money, because those are the doctors you really want anyway. The same would apply for all other professions. Everybody would be free to do what they like, even if that happens to be nothing at all. I think we'd see some pretty amazing advances in science and art without the ever-looming yoke of scarcity.
People seem to be so enamored with the status quo, with our entire society based on the concept of scarcity and monetary value, they tend to freak out if the subject of abolishing it even comes up. I just hope when the time comes we'll make the right decision and let go of this model instead of keeping it alive artificially (as we do now with so many other bad ideas that have become obsolete but are still on life support).
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You seem to neglect that there is a rather vocal portion of the TV viewing demographic that is in love with the idea of television, movies and music reinforcing their world view of ignorance over substance. Listen to popular songs and see how many of them talk about spirituality. If there was a scientific explanation of what was happening on the island there would be riots in the streets with the religious nutters acting like you defiled the story of Christ and they would be right. The narrative was a Christian allegory, a morality play for a modern time and as much as I was disgusted with the way they treated the series as a pulpit for their views I'm more concerned at how they treated science as something not even worth explaining because, " We all die in the end."
I absolutely agree.
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You're clearly not a scientist
Nice assumption. Guess again. Maybe you can make it more insulting by throwing in a "clearly you're not a good one" in there?
I find that in science, answers to questions almost always raise many new questions, they never wrap the whole field up nicely.
That's a straw man argument, I never said anything to the contrary. Clearly, you're trying to misunderstand my initial statement. It's not about the fact that we already know everything, we certainly don't. But the unknown isn't locked up behind some unsurmountable barrier either. And if you think we don't have a very good framework for your field originating from our vast knowledge of chemistry and physics, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Our knowledge today is amazing and it gets even better every year. There just is no need to invoke the supernatural anymore to explain anything.
We live in a world where the "how does this work" questions are generally answerable and regularly do get answered. Even *gasp* in biology ignorance isn't celebrated and there is no magical line beyond which knowledge cannot be obtained. Contrary to modus operandi of Lost, obviously. Which was my point to begin with.
they were holding on to their fantasy about what life would have been like without the island
Or, for people who prefer meta explanations: the writers didn't yet know how to integrate the alternate universe. Signs point to the possibility that they wanted to explore two different timelines that separated when the bomb was detonated but in the end they could not figure out how to make them come together without making one of them meaningless. So they came up with the afterlife idea during the brainstorming for the series finale instead. There, done.
And yes, most Dungeons and Dragons game masters are better at writing story arcs than those guys. But overall, I still enjoyed watching most of it.
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Heh, most of us gave up on Flashfoward after the horrible and prolonged torture of physics and repeated painful explanation of the FFs as a quantum event affecting the global "consciousness field". That was the point when it became obvious that the flashforwards were really an unexplainable plot device stuffed with terrible non-science unsuccessfully posing as authentic physics in a vain attempt at making their cognitively underpowered viewers feel smart.
Sorry, I'm an Atheist and the ending for me was like watching the crew of the enterprise meeting Santa Claus at the North Pole
Being an atheist doesn't preclude a person from enjoying fantasy-themed fiction, even if it's "spiritual" fiction. But with Lost it became clear very early on that the writers didn't have a clue about their own storyline, much less where the line that separates scifi from fantasy actually runs. Being annoyed at that has nothing to do with Atheism, it's just a common human reaction to being screwed over after a long con. As an Atheist myself, I didn't even have an issue with the afterlife ending, I actually liked the way those characters were sent off. I did take issue with the inept and clueless way the audience was treated from the second season on, but I decided to keep watching it because there were some decent moments in there. But really, at this point it shouldn't surprise anyone that there just was no answer to most of these "mysteries".
On a side note: wishing for an afterlife is not at all incompatible with Atheism. An afterlife would be the coolest thing ever. So would world peace and the option for every human being to live a happy and fulfilling life. I can wish for many things, that doesn't mean I have to postulate they exist simply because I would like them to be true. It does mean, however, that in order for something to change, we need to do it ourselves instead of sitting around and praising the divinity of the status quo.
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As to the lack of a mechanism for the island, I guess it's like real life, where your "how does this work" questions are rarely answered.
That only applies if you're religious and kinda celebrating ignorance. The reality is that we live in a time where we're technically able to explain almost any common occurrence or effect. Sure, there's a lot of cutting-edge stuff like String Theory, and some dark corners in Astronomy, but as far as everyday life is concerned we have a pretty decent grip on what's going on.
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Acknowledging the bizarre elements, Lindelof was quick to point out: "This show isn't 'The X-Files.' Everything that happens to these characters is grounded to reality as we know it. Time and space are not bent."
which turned out later to be the complete opposite of the truth.
A much more sinister (realistic?) explanation would be that the writers really do not have any concept of scientific reality and hence are unable to recognize that they departed from it. For me, this suspicion was finally confirmed when the whole time travel thing started. The writers clearly had no idea that all those strange "coincidences" were unlikely beyond the point of being absurd. In the end, Lost's genre was more fantasy than anything else, it certainly wasn't scifi.
It may be a bit crazy, but consider that we don't invest as much energy as we used to in physical labor. I think it's quite a fitting use for this excess energy, since our bodies want to absorb it anyway we may as well put it to good use. There is, however, one small problem: the glucose metabolic pathway is only one of many, and it consist of several systems working in a chain. To actually get the full amount of energy out, we need to look a little deeper into replicating the natural processes our bodies use. But this is definitely a promising start!
The efficiencies aren't going to stay that low. Since the basic reaction is enzymatic, we can assume a great deal of eventual efficiency once this is scaled up. (At this point the question remains open when we'll be ready to make devices that actually perform the entire conversion of a glucose molecule into water and CO2.)
Taking myself as an example, I eat about 2000 to 3000 kcal worth of stuff every day. I really need about 1000 of it, the rest is just used by my body to predispose me for an especially early death. Let's be conservative and say that most of us could spare 1000 kcal/day that could be converted into electrical energy. This equates to roughly 4000 kJ of energy. Distributed over 24 hours, that would mean a sustained power output of 46 W, easily enough to power quite a few personal electronic devices. It's enough to power a MacBook and a cell phone.
Also keep in mind that the power requirements of implanted (or closely worn) devices are generally much lower, especially once direct retinal projection technology takes off which is the point where all those power-hungry displays become obsolete.
Yes, it does. That word can have a lot of meanings and different definitions are usually applied in different contexts. So yeah, in this case, it does mean what he thinks it means.
I remember when I was 11, I had the only computer in the house and was the only person who actually knew what a computer was. In hindsight, I had been toiling along aimlessly for years until I got my first Commodore for my 9th birthday. That thing literally transformed me, and woke me up in countless ways. I hate to think about how miserable my childhood might have been if my parents hadn't allowed me to live my hobby like they did. There were no usage restrictions of any kind, they just trusted me. Granted, there was no internet, but there was lots of pirated software and other stuff going around, including porn which I assume parents today are most afraid of. On that note, we also had several freely accessable TVs in the house, allowing among other things unrestricted access to egregious German porn channels. And you know what? I didn't even watch TV, except maybe for an occasional episode of TNG.
The point is, my parents used a trust system and it worked out great, because trust then goes both ways. They believed in talking to their children. They believed that children, while still immature, are capable of insight and reason. Because they always explained the reasoning behind their rules, there needed to be very few rules in the first place. These methods also have the added benefit of children that adhere to the spirit of the rules rather than merely to the letter. However hard parents try, they will never be able to "protect" their children from exposure to gross, unsuitable material - especially online. Filtering and censorships do not work. And what's worse, when filtering does break down, a child will be exposed to bad content wholly unprepared.
Of course it sucks that children come across, say, waterballoon fetishists on youtube every day by accident. The problem is probably a lot more severe if a child has an illness such as autism. Being admittedly largely ignorant when it comes to the education of autistic children, I'd still be interested to learn if it isn't possible to convey the nature of fetish porn to an 11-year old child and teach him how to avoid this stuff by himself?
Just a few links off the top google search results on the subject. While facts will certainly never really matter to people who feel so strongly in favor of religious indoctrination and against sex, it's certainly easy for the rest of us to see the obvious effects at work here. It's a lovely subject of discussion between fundamentalists and enlightened people, but for the sake of all adolescents who are just starting out on this whole sex thing, I'd rather see that relgious brainwashing stay out of sex education (or any form of education for that matter).
Religions teach abstinence until the person meets another person, and then makes a permanent commitment to that person. Then religions say Go for it!
I sincerely hope you're being sarcastic. Religions perceive sex as a necessary evil, to be used for procreation only. Actually, most religions go even further and condone the concept of love (and by extension sex) only if it subject to some kind of religious regulation mechanism, because anything else gnaws away at the oppressive stranglehold religion has over everyday life. In order to exist, religion needs to have a monopoly on everything fulfilling and meaningful.
Sex is an addiction to anyone who has done it. Once you start, you don't stop.
Again, you're kidding, right? Sexuality, for most people, is a natural part of their existence, a part of themselves. Sex addiction is not a recognized medical condition, it's a catchphrase invented by tabloid media designed to appeal to stupid people.
Religions know this, and that's why they say to wait until you found the right person, to not only have sex with, but to also have a family with.
And until you found "the right person", you are required to act as if you're a sexless, joyless, dishonest zombie. You're not even allowed to find out if that person is actually sexually compatible, until ít's too late. Oh, I forget "the right person" has to meet certain requirements of gender and, in many cases, social status. Otherwise, they're obviously not the right person. And once you have declared one person to be "the right person", you can never change your mind, or an invisible sky tyrant will crush your immortal soul for all eternity. Sounds awesome.
Sort of. You have to install the VIA Java Cryptography Service Provider to use the hardware acceleration, and I have the distinct feeling that standard SSH implementations won't be able to use that unless you patch them accordingly.
Actually I pulled the sample straight from the documentation for the project in the OP.
I didn't realize this, sorry. But nevertheless, it seemed like an unfair and artificial comparison to me. Most people would agree that Rails is a nice, mature MVC framework and I doubt the same can be said about SolarPHP (which I personally don't know anything about). My perception was that your examples were chosen to present Ruby in a more concise and more elegant light, by force.
Again, which is not to say that there isn't a good point to be made here. Ruby code tends to be a little more concise and, as a PHP-heavy programmer myself, I have to concede that PHP's syntax is anything but elegant. It's one step away from the surreal ASCII art that is Perl;-)
You may have a valid point, but I can't get over the trollish way you souped up those code examples to prove your point. You made the PHP example over-commented, bulky and redundant on purpose. A more accurate counterpart would more likely look like this: public function actionIndex() {
$this->list = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array(
'where' => array('blogs.status = ?' => 'public'),
'order' => 'blogs.created DESC'
)); }
Without knowing the actual library used for the PHP example, there might be saner and less ugly variants.
In your case it's 300 €, but keep in mind that the amount you pay for insurance is directly linked to your income, not to how much you've been sick last year. You could argue it's unfair that you have to subsidize a bunch of students and old people for a while, but it sure beats any other system I've seen. I agree it's not fun to pay the insane amount of insurance and taxes here in Europe, and yes, a huge part of it is going to be wasted on government pork and mismanagement. We need to address that. I'd speculate we could cut those insurance premiums in half if we abolished all the profiteering, corruption and misappropriation. But all in all, it's the price we pay for a pretty decent attempt at social equality.
Don't you hate it when people refuse to accept the premise of a technical question and write long monologues why the submitter is working with false assumptions even though they don't know what exactly they are dealing with? Yeah, me too. Makes them look arrogant, ignorant and smug. I'm going to go ahead though and reject the submitter's premise: there is no chance in hell that you're on the right track with whatever project you're attempting to do. But instead of merely dissing you for incompetence, I'll lay out a few scenarios (might as well, since you didn't supply any of your own).
If the actual physical bits matter to you... you're either a hard drive manufacturer or a clueless person who should read up on how drives actually work. And we both know you're not working for a manufacturer. What you need to know is that there are several layers of indirection between the write call from within an OS down to the actual magnetic platter. These layers are there for a reason. At the very least, the onboard controller of the drive abstracts away the physical block allocation, and the drive won't work without the controller at all. Since the intricacies of the drive's physical address space are not accessible from the outside, there will never never never be a reason to try and fiddle with it directly. Because you can't.
If you are looking for disk I/O without a filesystem... we're finally in saner territory. There are valid reasons to do this, e.g. speed and overhead considerations. Some database vendors actually have features like these. In this scenario, you're using the entire drive as one big addressable blob. A good starting point would be to have a look at the source code of a simple filesystem, such as ext2. Strip away all the actual file handling stuff and learn what you can from the disk I/O routines. On the other hand, if you didn't arrive at this conclusion yourself, that's not a very encouraging sign.
If you simply want a drive without error correction... you're not developing software that will run on any modern system. If you accept this caveat, you can buy an ancient drive off ebay and use that. However, keep the first scenario firmly in mind: there is simply no reason to control the exact placement of every single byte if you don't plan on literally putting the drive under a microscope afterwards. Otherwise, this has no practical implications and, again, you are on the wrong track.
If you're a DRM/malware/virus developer... I will sleep very comfortably tonight, because you had to ask about this on Slashdot, signaling once more that you're doing it wrong.
They didn't want to wait the month for the samples from the scene to get analyzed to determined there were 2 different samples of DNA in the area and find out people had skipped town[...]
No, that was not the case. There was a lot of time between the analysis of the crime scene and the collection of random DNA samples. From TFA:
"Over the course of a year they advertised for witnesses many times, offered rewards and interviewed all his neighbours many times. I wasn’t interviewed as I’d been living in Bristol at the time. Eventually, they phoned me up and asked I’d mind helping them out. It was clear they were scraping the bottom of the barrel."
It doesn't really matter whether the majority of police officers are "good and honorable people" (which is probably doubtful anyway since it's a profession that attracts bullies disproportionately). What does matter is that it's their job to get you. That's right, they're out to get you. Any law professor will tell you that they are allowed to lie to you at any time, and do a couple of other things to you, just to catch you for something, preferably for the crime they're investigating. They have no incentive whatsoever to make sure they get the right guy, their only job is to get someone convicted.
Take for example this case. A guy was found stabbed in a cupboard. They had no clue who might have done it. Finally, it was decided that he actually stabbed himself and then put himself in a cupboard. You have to wonder, why did the police go around collecting DNA samples in the first place if there was no foreign DNA on the crime scene to begin with. Clearly, either DNA was collected from random people in the hope of getting them convicted for any other crime, or the final conclusion that the guy stabbed himself is another lie to make their crime solving statistics look good after months of fruitless investigation.
By the way, while the individual likelihood of being misidentified through your DNA markers as a match for one given piece of evidence is very small, your chance "matching" some completely random piece of evidence among the millions they got lying around is actually getting higher with increasing database size. So if your DNA is on file, and is routinely compared to every new piece of evidence that comes in, an individual's chance of being framed by the birthday paradox is higher than one might think.
Slashdot Mirror
For what definition of "pure" would that be? Mathematics provides basic logical reasoning tools that help us deduce complex causal relationships and create models that show impressively how phenomena work without the need of a deity standing behind the curtain pulling the strings. Mathematics also gave us direct access to information technology that we use to simulate interactions accurately, including but not limited to evolutionary mechanisms. By providing these means mathematics contradicts religion on a daily basis both directly and indirectly.
First, it's not as if chemistry is based on a set of commandments where I can now just invoke something like "the 9th law of chemistry", but yes there are a few concepts that come to mind. For example, pretty much all of biochemistry that provides concrete insights into how organisms work and interact with their environment. These models are based very concretely on evolution, so I'm pretty sure everything that happens in a cell is not something that is compatible with scripture. Heck, you can't even begin to grasp proteins without evolution. But it goes deeper than that. Alchemy was the last science based on and compatible with Christian religion. Once we discovered fire wasn't an element, we departed from the bible for good.
There may not be a commandment, but I do recall the demonization of knowledge being a fundamental concept in the bible. Wasn't there even some Tree of Knowledge or something that made God really angry at humans for eating its fruits? I may have that mixed up though, correct me as necessary. I do also seem to remember that Satan, who is apparently the personification of evil, is known as the bringer of light and knowledge. As such he is probably a direct descendant of Prometheus with whom the ancient gods got really upset for bringing the humans fire and thus technology. From a sociological viewpoint that makes sense, because knowledge really is the nemesis of belief and vice versa.
Sort of, yes. There are countless areas of scientific knowledge that lead you to the conclusion that the concept of an invisible deity is not only superfluous but also counterproductive reasoning. So, it's not restricted to evolution, you can arrive at this conclusion from almost any field of science.
No. There are really two concepts of God we're talking about here. The first is the literal biblical god, whose existence really has been disproved over time through countless breakthroughs in understanding. The second is the general idea of an omnipotent being that guides all of the universe, but has taken every conceivable precaution so his existence can never be demonstrated but also can (on account of omnipotence) never be ruled out. Of course the number of hypothetically existing but unprovable things that can be constructed from sheer imagination is endless and not restricted to gods. Creating unprovable hypotheses is easy and you cannot logically infer truth from the mere fact that they cannot be demonstrated as false.
Or to put it differently: I can postulate that the world is in reality powered by invisible unicorn excrement and top that off with a statement about how the unicorns are infinitely
No. Abiogenesis is not part of evolution. And that's not an arbitrary distinction either. The chemical processes that lead to the spontaneous assembly of the first complex self-replicating macromolecules are poorly understood because we don't yet know the composition and environmental conditions of the early earth. Abiogenesis is a concrete chemistry problem and active research field in biochemistry. Evolution on the other hand, is an abstract mathematical model that describes a universal process of change and adaptation. Biological organisms are just one of many possible substrates on which evolution can take place, for instance the process has also been observed and implemented in many areas of information technology. We can, indeed, explain it very well, profoundly and completely.
Not in the way religion has, and must be, per definition. Science creates models that serve to predict outcomes. When the actual outcome does not fit the prediction made by using the model, it's time to refine (or in some cases rebuild) the model. As such, science invites failure because scientists are eager to learn from them. Failure is one of the mechanisms that make science stronger as time progresses. You can't even say that science has been wrong more often than not. Our models have become very, very good. Most people don't realize how immensely we rely on them every single day to make billions of decisions, most of which are completely correct. (You made that point yourself, but I had to throw my 2 cents in here)
This is a potentially misleading argument. Science does not really require faith. Science could be done by automatons that don't have any capacity for faith. The danger of this wording is it creates the impression that science and faith are somehow on the same level and are interrelated if not interchangeable. Science believes things based on models that are supported by measurements and abstract mathematics. Furthermore, no scientific theory stands on its own, it exists in an ecosystem of proven and reliable ideas that supply a mutually supporting and robust outlook on the world. Even hypotheses, often conceptually mistaken to be equivalent to theories, rest on some evidence and usually offer models that are at least plausible. But nobody really goes out and equates a hypothesis with proven theory, since that would indeed mean taking things on faith.
So you encountered one of the few cases where encountering actual facts made a person think and change their mind about religion and you find that alarming. Rest assured, it doesn't happen that often. Many people instead compartmentalize their minds into ridiculously incompatible world views, each used when it seems opportune. And the vast majority, like you noticed, simply doesn't care how the world works. You could tell them the earth is steam-powered by unicorn excrement and they'd swallow it without question. Which is, incidentally, the essence of religious teaching and brings me back to you
If this was a real project (which it isn't) with real funding and serious intentions, this could be a very cool engineering feat. If you base the assembly process on solar-powered automated collectors and separators, a 3D printer-like unit could be used to create any object shape the island needs for construction. However, anyone planning such an undertaking would have to take two big problems into account: toxic chemicals present in the recycled and susceptibility of the island in the face of frequent thunderstorms. Both of which could be tackled by careful engineering, but it won't be easy.
But hey, living on an awesome sci-fi plastic flotilla/arcology? Sign me up!
Or, you know, doctors would only be people who aren't in it for the money, because those are the doctors you really want anyway. The same would apply for all other professions. Everybody would be free to do what they like, even if that happens to be nothing at all. I think we'd see some pretty amazing advances in science and art without the ever-looming yoke of scarcity.
People seem to be so enamored with the status quo, with our entire society based on the concept of scarcity and monetary value, they tend to freak out if the subject of abolishing it even comes up. I just hope when the time comes we'll make the right decision and let go of this model instead of keeping it alive artificially (as we do now with so many other bad ideas that have become obsolete but are still on life support).
You seem to neglect that there is a rather vocal portion of the TV viewing demographic that is in love with the idea of television, movies and music reinforcing their world view of ignorance over substance. Listen to popular songs and see how many of them talk about spirituality. If there was a scientific explanation of what was happening on the island there would be riots in the streets with the religious nutters acting like you defiled the story of Christ and they would be right. The narrative was a Christian allegory, a morality play for a modern time and as much as I was disgusted with the way they treated the series as a pulpit for their views I'm more concerned at how they treated science as something not even worth explaining because, " We all die in the end."
I absolutely agree.
Nice assumption. Guess again. Maybe you can make it more insulting by throwing in a "clearly you're not a good one" in there?
That's a straw man argument, I never said anything to the contrary. Clearly, you're trying to misunderstand my initial statement. It's not about the fact that we already know everything, we certainly don't. But the unknown isn't locked up behind some unsurmountable barrier either. And if you think we don't have a very good framework for your field originating from our vast knowledge of chemistry and physics, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Our knowledge today is amazing and it gets even better every year. There just is no need to invoke the supernatural anymore to explain anything.
We live in a world where the "how does this work" questions are generally answerable and regularly do get answered. Even *gasp* in biology ignorance isn't celebrated and there is no magical line beyond which knowledge cannot be obtained. Contrary to modus operandi of Lost, obviously. Which was my point to begin with.
they were holding on to their fantasy about what life would have been like without the island
Or, for people who prefer meta explanations: the writers didn't yet know how to integrate the alternate universe. Signs point to the possibility that they wanted to explore two different timelines that separated when the bomb was detonated but in the end they could not figure out how to make them come together without making one of them meaningless. So they came up with the afterlife idea during the brainstorming for the series finale instead. There, done.
And yes, most Dungeons and Dragons game masters are better at writing story arcs than those guys. But overall, I still enjoyed watching most of it.
Heh, most of us gave up on Flashfoward after the horrible and prolonged torture of physics and repeated painful explanation of the FFs as a quantum event affecting the global "consciousness field". That was the point when it became obvious that the flashforwards were really an unexplainable plot device stuffed with terrible non-science unsuccessfully posing as authentic physics in a vain attempt at making their cognitively underpowered viewers feel smart.
Being an atheist doesn't preclude a person from enjoying fantasy-themed fiction, even if it's "spiritual" fiction. But with Lost it became clear very early on that the writers didn't have a clue about their own storyline, much less where the line that separates scifi from fantasy actually runs. Being annoyed at that has nothing to do with Atheism, it's just a common human reaction to being screwed over after a long con. As an Atheist myself, I didn't even have an issue with the afterlife ending, I actually liked the way those characters were sent off. I did take issue with the inept and clueless way the audience was treated from the second season on, but I decided to keep watching it because there were some decent moments in there. But really, at this point it shouldn't surprise anyone that there just was no answer to most of these "mysteries".
On a side note: wishing for an afterlife is not at all incompatible with Atheism. An afterlife would be the coolest thing ever. So would world peace and the option for every human being to live a happy and fulfilling life. I can wish for many things, that doesn't mean I have to postulate they exist simply because I would like them to be true. It does mean, however, that in order for something to change, we need to do it ourselves instead of sitting around and praising the divinity of the status quo.
That only applies if you're religious and kinda celebrating ignorance. The reality is that we live in a time where we're technically able to explain almost any common occurrence or effect. Sure, there's a lot of cutting-edge stuff like String Theory, and some dark corners in Astronomy, but as far as everyday life is concerned we have a pretty decent grip on what's going on.
which turned out later to be the complete opposite of the truth.
A much more sinister (realistic?) explanation would be that the writers really do not have any concept of scientific reality and hence are unable to recognize that they departed from it. For me, this suspicion was finally confirmed when the whole time travel thing started. The writers clearly had no idea that all those strange "coincidences" were unlikely beyond the point of being absurd. In the end, Lost's genre was more fantasy than anything else, it certainly wasn't scifi.
It may be a bit crazy, but consider that we don't invest as much energy as we used to in physical labor. I think it's quite a fitting use for this excess energy, since our bodies want to absorb it anyway we may as well put it to good use. There is, however, one small problem: the glucose metabolic pathway is only one of many, and it consist of several systems working in a chain. To actually get the full amount of energy out, we need to look a little deeper into replicating the natural processes our bodies use. But this is definitely a promising start!
The efficiencies aren't going to stay that low. Since the basic reaction is enzymatic, we can assume a great deal of eventual efficiency once this is scaled up. (At this point the question remains open when we'll be ready to make devices that actually perform the entire conversion of a glucose molecule into water and CO2.)
Taking myself as an example, I eat about 2000 to 3000 kcal worth of stuff every day. I really need about 1000 of it, the rest is just used by my body to predispose me for an especially early death. Let's be conservative and say that most of us could spare 1000 kcal/day that could be converted into electrical energy. This equates to roughly 4000 kJ of energy. Distributed over 24 hours, that would mean a sustained power output of 46 W, easily enough to power quite a few personal electronic devices. It's enough to power a MacBook and a cell phone.
Also keep in mind that the power requirements of implanted (or closely worn) devices are generally much lower, especially once direct retinal projection technology takes off which is the point where all those power-hungry displays become obsolete.
Yes, it does. That word can have a lot of meanings and different definitions are usually applied in different contexts. So yeah, in this case, it does mean what he thinks it means.
I remember when I was 11, I had the only computer in the house and was the only person who actually knew what a computer was. In hindsight, I had been toiling along aimlessly for years until I got my first Commodore for my 9th birthday. That thing literally transformed me, and woke me up in countless ways. I hate to think about how miserable my childhood might have been if my parents hadn't allowed me to live my hobby like they did. There were no usage restrictions of any kind, they just trusted me. Granted, there was no internet, but there was lots of pirated software and other stuff going around, including porn which I assume parents today are most afraid of. On that note, we also had several freely accessable TVs in the house, allowing among other things unrestricted access to egregious German porn channels. And you know what? I didn't even watch TV, except maybe for an occasional episode of TNG.
The point is, my parents used a trust system and it worked out great, because trust then goes both ways. They believed in talking to their children. They believed that children, while still immature, are capable of insight and reason. Because they always explained the reasoning behind their rules, there needed to be very few rules in the first place. These methods also have the added benefit of children that adhere to the spirit of the rules rather than merely to the letter. However hard parents try, they will never be able to "protect" their children from exposure to gross, unsuitable material - especially online. Filtering and censorships do not work. And what's worse, when filtering does break down, a child will be exposed to bad content wholly unprepared.
Of course it sucks that children come across, say, waterballoon fetishists on youtube every day by accident. The problem is probably a lot more severe if a child has an illness such as autism. Being admittedly largely ignorant when it comes to the education of autistic children, I'd still be interested to learn if it isn't possible to convey the nature of fetish porn to an 11-year old child and teach him how to avoid this stuff by himself?
http://americanaffairs.suite101.com/article.cfm/high_std_rates_abstinence_ed_link
http://www.newsweek.com/id/74005
http://gayteens.about.com/b/2009/11/17/rising-std-rates-linked-to-abstinence-only-education.htm
http://www.avert.org/abstinence.htm
Just a few links off the top google search results on the subject. While facts will certainly never really matter to people who feel so strongly in favor of religious indoctrination and against sex, it's certainly easy for the rest of us to see the obvious effects at work here. It's a lovely subject of discussion between fundamentalists and enlightened people, but for the sake of all adolescents who are just starting out on this whole sex thing, I'd rather see that relgious brainwashing stay out of sex education (or any form of education for that matter).
I sincerely hope you're being sarcastic. Religions perceive sex as a necessary evil, to be used for procreation only. Actually, most religions go even further and condone the concept of love (and by extension sex) only if it subject to some kind of religious regulation mechanism, because anything else gnaws away at the oppressive stranglehold religion has over everyday life. In order to exist, religion needs to have a monopoly on everything fulfilling and meaningful.
Again, you're kidding, right? Sexuality, for most people, is a natural part of their existence, a part of themselves. Sex addiction is not a recognized medical condition, it's a catchphrase invented by tabloid media designed to appeal to stupid people.
And until you found "the right person", you are required to act as if you're a sexless, joyless, dishonest zombie. You're not even allowed to find out if that person is actually sexually compatible, until ít's too late. Oh, I forget "the right person" has to meet certain requirements of gender and, in many cases, social status. Otherwise, they're obviously not the right person. And once you have declared one person to be "the right person", you can never change your mind, or an invisible sky tyrant will crush your immortal soul for all eternity. Sounds awesome.
Oops. Didn't know that, thanks for clearing it up. I think I'd rather make my next home server CPU a C7 instead of an Atom then!
Sort of. You have to install the VIA Java Cryptography Service Provider to use the hardware acceleration, and I have the distinct feeling that standard SSH implementations won't be able to use that unless you patch them accordingly.
Actually I pulled the sample straight from the documentation for the project in the OP.
I didn't realize this, sorry. But nevertheless, it seemed like an unfair and artificial comparison to me. Most people would agree that Rails is a nice, mature MVC framework and I doubt the same can be said about SolarPHP (which I personally don't know anything about). My perception was that your examples were chosen to present Ruby in a more concise and more elegant light, by force.
Again, which is not to say that there isn't a good point to be made here. Ruby code tends to be a little more concise and, as a PHP-heavy programmer myself, I have to concede that PHP's syntax is anything but elegant. It's one step away from the surreal ASCII art that is Perl ;-)
You may have a valid point, but I can't get over the trollish way you souped up those code examples to prove your point. You made the PHP example over-commented, bulky and redundant on purpose. A more accurate counterpart would more likely look like this:
public function actionIndex()
{
$this->list = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array(
'where' => array('blogs.status = ?' => 'public'),
'order' => 'blogs.created DESC'
));
}
Without knowing the actual library used for the PHP example, there might be saner and less ugly variants.
In your case it's 300 €, but keep in mind that the amount you pay for insurance is directly linked to your income, not to how much you've been sick last year. You could argue it's unfair that you have to subsidize a bunch of students and old people for a while, but it sure beats any other system I've seen. I agree it's not fun to pay the insane amount of insurance and taxes here in Europe, and yes, a huge part of it is going to be wasted on government pork and mismanagement. We need to address that. I'd speculate we could cut those insurance premiums in half if we abolished all the profiteering, corruption and misappropriation. But all in all, it's the price we pay for a pretty decent attempt at social equality.
Don't you hate it when people refuse to accept the premise of a technical question and write long monologues why the submitter is working with false assumptions even though they don't know what exactly they are dealing with? Yeah, me too. Makes them look arrogant, ignorant and smug. I'm going to go ahead though and reject the submitter's premise: there is no chance in hell that you're on the right track with whatever project you're attempting to do. But instead of merely dissing you for incompetence, I'll lay out a few scenarios (might as well, since you didn't supply any of your own).
If the actual physical bits matter to you...
you're either a hard drive manufacturer or a clueless person who should read up on how drives actually work. And we both know you're not working for a manufacturer. What you need to know is that there are several layers of indirection between the write call from within an OS down to the actual magnetic platter. These layers are there for a reason. At the very least, the onboard controller of the drive abstracts away the physical block allocation, and the drive won't work without the controller at all. Since the intricacies of the drive's physical address space are not accessible from the outside, there will never never never be a reason to try and fiddle with it directly. Because you can't.
If you are looking for disk I/O without a filesystem...
we're finally in saner territory. There are valid reasons to do this, e.g. speed and overhead considerations. Some database vendors actually have features like these. In this scenario, you're using the entire drive as one big addressable blob. A good starting point would be to have a look at the source code of a simple filesystem, such as ext2. Strip away all the actual file handling stuff and learn what you can from the disk I/O routines. On the other hand, if you didn't arrive at this conclusion yourself, that's not a very encouraging sign.
If you simply want a drive without error correction...
you're not developing software that will run on any modern system. If you accept this caveat, you can buy an ancient drive off ebay and use that. However, keep the first scenario firmly in mind: there is simply no reason to control the exact placement of every single byte if you don't plan on literally putting the drive under a microscope afterwards. Otherwise, this has no practical implications and, again, you are on the wrong track.
If you're a DRM/malware/virus developer...
I will sleep very comfortably tonight, because you had to ask about this on Slashdot, signaling once more that you're doing it wrong.
No, that was not the case. There was a lot of time between the analysis of the crime scene and the collection of random DNA samples. From TFA:
"Over the course of a year they advertised for witnesses many times, offered rewards and interviewed all his neighbours many times. I wasn’t interviewed as I’d been living in Bristol at the time. Eventually, they phoned me up and asked I’d mind helping them out. It was clear they were scraping the bottom of the barrel."
It doesn't really matter whether the majority of police officers are "good and honorable people" (which is probably doubtful anyway since it's a profession that attracts bullies disproportionately). What does matter is that it's their job to get you. That's right, they're out to get you. Any law professor will tell you that they are allowed to lie to you at any time, and do a couple of other things to you, just to catch you for something, preferably for the crime they're investigating. They have no incentive whatsoever to make sure they get the right guy, their only job is to get someone convicted.
Take for example this case. A guy was found stabbed in a cupboard. They had no clue who might have done it. Finally, it was decided that he actually stabbed himself and then put himself in a cupboard. You have to wonder, why did the police go around collecting DNA samples in the first place if there was no foreign DNA on the crime scene to begin with. Clearly, either DNA was collected from random people in the hope of getting them convicted for any other crime, or the final conclusion that the guy stabbed himself is another lie to make their crime solving statistics look good after months of fruitless investigation.
By the way, while the individual likelihood of being misidentified through your DNA markers as a match for one given piece of evidence is very small, your chance "matching" some completely random piece of evidence among the millions they got lying around is actually getting higher with increasing database size. So if your DNA is on file, and is routinely compared to every new piece of evidence that comes in, an individual's chance of being framed by the birthday paradox is higher than one might think.