"I'm just tired of/.'ers calling Christians retards because of their beliefs"
Then don't make retarded posts. Buddhism and Christianity are both, in my opinion, silly mumbo-jumbo, but I don't care. Beleive whatever you want. However, some people think their beleifs, for which they have no evidence, deserve to be respected by others just because they beleive it, and they push these beleifs at others, and try to get them taken seriously in public schools, etc. These people deserve ridicule. It's not unprovoked. They put forth blatantly false ideas, and attack good science with nonsense that has already been debunked many times over. The mocking carries over into the next relevant story, because they are just so mock-worthy. If you're not one of them, then don't be offended; it's not Christianity as a whole we criticise, but idiocy, Christian or otherwise.
"Copernicus, Galileo and Newton had nothing on Mayan astronomy"
Except, you know, correctness; a reasonably coherent model of the heavens; heliocentrism; universal gravitation... For pete's sake, the Maya thought the earth was flat. Aristotle knew it was round, and with no better tech than the mayans, calculated its circumference.
"the most sophisticated astronomy of any preindustrial (preglobal) civilization"
Would have to be that of Gallileo, Copernicus, Newton, et al.
"I'm not proposing how Mayans could have been aware of the meteor,"
Because they obviously could not possibly have been, any more than they could have been aware of dinosaurs, or any of the other events that occurred in the millions and millions of years between then and when some tree shrews first developed opposable thumbs, much less the millions and millions of years more before those shrews became something we'd call ape-like, let alone human.
The Mayans have no more connection to the meteor than a population of cows in China does.
Have you considered the coincidence that the modern state of Nepal looks kind of like a devils tail if you squint right? I think those Mayans were on to something!
What coincidences? A meteor hit the earth. 64.5 million years later, humans developed, and spread out around the earth. A comparative eyeblink ago, pretty much all of them developed astonomical systems; including those who happened to live in the area the meteor hit. None of them could possibly have been aware of the meteor.
I've no doubt the various dollar coins have been a great success when it comes to selling them to coin collectors. But I for one don't see competing with private makers of collectible trinkets as a terribly good role for government.
A good role for government would be replacing low-denomination curency with more cost effective coins, saving the country money. By which measure, if you rarely see the coin yourself, it has failed; no matter who says otherwise.
Whoever told you dollar coins are a success ought to consider that maybe the US Mints mission and measures of success ought to reach beyond their own gift shop.
What the hell has global warming to do with socialism? Never mind, I'm sure your ideas are fascinating, but I've no wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Regardless, my point was, science is all about not having to take anyones word for it. Don't like Al Gore? No problem. Science isn't about who advocates it; it's about evidence you can check yourself. Evidence you can check yourself indicates that over the very recent past the earth has been warming at 1000 times the fastest rate previously.
If you've got evidence we can check ourselves that indicates this warming is due to a nefarious commie plot, let's hear it. Otherwise, those of us who understand what science is are trying to have a conversation, so please quit interupting.
"The insurgents in Iraq seem to be fighting a quite capable war of attrition using, for the most part, arms quite accessible to the general public here"
The insurgents in Iraq will almost certainly make us get tired of Americans getting killed for no obvious benefit to our country, and go away. I rate slightly lower their chances of deposing the US government, and taking over the United States.
"Ice cores tell you the temps at a particular location. You have to go looking for other sources (tree rings, sedimentary evidence, etc) to get reasonably accurate temps elsewhere to build up a good picture of the global climate."
Yup, and we've done that. It appears that over the last hundred years, the earth has warmed up at a rate roughly 1000 times the fastest it ever did before. Now, there's a lot of error in those measurements, but taking the most optimistic assumptions you possibly could, if you really strained the limits of plausibility, maybe the last hundred years hae only seen warming 100 times faster than the fastest ever before.
Now, there's one possible explanation for what's different in the recent past to cause this that seems to fit, i.e. the industrial revolution. You certainly can't prove it, but there are reasonable mechanisms that could arguably account for it.
Meanwhile, people propose other ideas that could account for 10% increases in warming, or maybe a radical doubling of the rate. These ideas are not remotely on the right scale for the observed data. This is pointed out, and people keep yammering on as if they were deaf. So the actual scientists wind up sounding a bit shrill.
An attempt at refuting the idea that a change in solar output was responsible? No one took that seriously, not because they are zealots, but because the suggeted change in solar output was in the ~5% range, so it didn't take a lot of "refuting" the idea it was responsible for the 100,000% change in warming.
Attempting to poke holes in scientific arguments is valuable, and helps scientists refine their theories. Spouting nonsense to confuse laymen is not valuable.
No, my definition of science, as referenced in my post, is: "you need never take anyones word for it". A scientist is someone who doesn't need you to take their, or anyone elses, word for it. You can collect the evidence yourself, and look at it yourself.
But it's not really my definition. It is, if I recall corectly, Robert Boyles. But in any case either he or one of the other originators of the scientific revolution, who adopted it as the motto of the Royal Society. Naturally, it sounds better in latin: "Nullius in Verba"
So basically, if there is anyone who is bad, it's everyone who disagrees with you, lumped into one undifferentiated mass and presumed to all agree with each other.
I've never actually heard of animal rights groups bombing reseach labs, but what would that have to do with environmentalism in any case?
I, for one, would never criticize all christians for being anti-science, as I know some perfectly nice, pro-science christians. I guess it's hard for you to imagine the idea that I disagree with them on one topic, but still think they are nice people who are right about other topics, but there you have it.
I'll happily criticize anti-science people for being idiots. Some of these people ocasionally seek to avoid such criticism by claiming their anti-science ideas derive from their christianity, and that I should thus respect those ideas. If I were a christian, I might be offended by these people; as I am not, I'll settle for just still thinking they are idiots.
What kind of experiment can you perform to test the accuracy of plate tectonics?
I don't know what you mean by "global warming doomsday theory", but I do know the ability to perform an experiment is not the limit of science. It's certainly nice when one can perform an experiment that forces the evidence into existence. But in many fields (Geology, Astronomy, Paleontology, etc.) this is not possible, and we must settle for examining what evidence is naturally ocurring. The hallmark of science is simply that others may examine that same evidence; you need never take anyones word for it.
Evidence that anyone may examine makes it quite clear that the earth getting warmer at a rate somewhere between 100 and 10,000 times faster than it ever has before. There is currently only one very reasonable explanation for this phenomena that anyone has come up with, though a lot of people keep throwing up all manner of poor theories that don't actually fit the data, in what looks like an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid the obvious conclusion.
I don't actually use a laptop much, so my evaluation of the desired functionality is based on a desktop computer. There, the energy wasted by 5 minutes of sleep when it could maybe be hibernating is not worth worrying about. Frankly, I wouldn't think it ought to be even on a laptop; with screen off and disks spun down, 5 minutes of keeping your ram powered should be a trivial fraction of your battery life.
As far as being able to handle hardware changes while hibernating (or even running), or never needing a "restart" that was different than a hibernate/wake, I don't know if any current OS supports that, but I don't see why they shouldn't.
"The power management software can tell that I'm about to go on a trip and won't be using the computer for a couple hours vs I'm just getting up to use the bathroom?"
It can tell if you've been gone for more than X minutes, which handles that fine, as well as your getting up for just a second, then unexpectedly getting pulled away.
"you still have to power it off before you unplug or you risk FS damage"
Not if the system does it properly; Joel doesn't go into all the details explicitly, but what should happen is this: You hit the one button, the system goes to lock mode, and begins persisting memory to disk (preparing for hibernate); when that is done, the disk can be powered down, and the system enters "sleep", consuming less power, but ready to wake up in an instant; after some amount of time, it actually enters hibernate, powering down completely. If you pull the plug in mere sleep mode, no problem. Note that what I've described is just my understanding of the default behaviour when closing the lid of various laptop models.
I can't see a Windows box without the need for a "restart" action. But other than that, I'm with Joel: one "I'm leaving the computer" button is all that's needed. I see this not as dumbing down the system, but smartening it up. The peice of data the machine needs from me, and the only one I should really need to supply, it that I'm going away for a bit. The rest of the details about how to react to that are the systems problem, and should be handled automatically.
I'm saying your modified humans, who were only say, 50% descended from humans, would be 50% human, and thus 50% primate. If they were also descended from other primates, they might be more primate than human, but they can't be less.
But yes, at some point classification breaks down, because like much of biological science it is based on drawing hard lines around fuzzy concepts.
So Ceres is a planet, though I don't know if you consider that a problem. Also, one could envision a couple as-yet undiscovered Oort cloud objects in the same fairly circular orbit and whichever is a tiny bit bigger is a planet and the other is not, and that would be unsatisfying.
"No biggie, but the shortest I'll tag a ticket for is 30 minutes. Originally I had said 1 hour, but my supervisor vigorously disagreed with my estimate of context switching's effect on productivity"
When doing planning-phase time estimates, our mantra is "Everything takes a day".
A whole pile of little things in the same part of the same project might get done in a day, but if you're going to bother getting enough about a particular context into your brain to do real work, you better have something to do worth a whole day.
Luckily for me, the originator of this mantra is my boss, and the CTO.
It all depends on the scope of the phenomena. If a huge number of things support your theory, and some tiny fraction don't, it's reasonable to think your theory is basically sound, but you need to work out the details. If a significant amount of evidence is against you, maybe you should rethink the basics. This is only reasonable. The support for evolution is so enormous, it's unimagineable that enough new data could start popping up now to possibly call the basics into question. It is, in the common, non-technical parlance, established fact.
"'Well, you have to draw the "fact" line somewhere... the poster I was replying to was sugesting neither observations, nor anything based on them should be considered facts.'
No, he was noting correctly that actual evolution of humans hasn't been observed. I think that he missed (which I thought was part of your point) that all the aspects of evolution have been observed to some degree and hence are facts in themselves."
Both are reasonable interpretations of his original post, and I think yours is the more obvious one. I made my post partly because I thought my less obvious interpretation might his intent; based on his replies in the other branch of this thread, I was correct.
Your trans-humanity speculations are interesting, though I'm not sure I can envision the posibility of being "biologically compatible with unmodified humans" yet "genetically more diverse than the rest of the kingdom Animalia". Be that as it may, "...are they still primates?" Yes. By modern cladistic standards, unquestionably. That which descends from a primate is a primate. To whatever extent a being is human, it is a primate to that same extent, at a minimum.
"I'm no rocket scientist... but that doesn't invalidate the questions."
Of course it does. You don't know the basic background information, you're not going to produce useful questions.
You keep referencing how it would have been obvious to you the foam was a problem. Well, why wasn't it? Are you trying to suggest you were desperately trying to ask someone before the fact "What happens when the foam insulation falls off the tank during launch?", but they just wouldn't listen? If not, then how can you claim the problem is your frustrated ability to ask questions?
How much of MY tax money would you like NASA to spend evalutating questions from unknown strangers on the internet about designs nobody has ever called complete, or even ready for review?
"About the only thing that could falsify evolutioniary theory would be evidance that God was accountable for the creation and alterations of all things"
Not at all; that's the Creationists false dichotomy, but it's bull. Falsification of a theory does not require, nor supply, evidence for any other explanation (or non-explanation, in this case).
It's hard to imagine anything that would single-handedly make us disbeleive Evolution, but that's just because it's so well supported. Success deos not make scientific theories unscientific. But falsification need not be binary; we can easily imagine things we could discover that would make us doubt portions of evolutionary theory at least a little. Like a marine mamal with a cartiligenous skeleton; or a fish with a bony one. We could imagine as many examples like that as you like, and if they started popping up left and right all over the place, we'd want to rethink evolution. The reason it's hard to imagine evidence that evolution is false is that it is true; and it's hard to imagine things one knows are false. There are millions of things that could be different if evolution were wrong. That means evolution is science. That they're not different means it is true.
Some of the complainers definitely are unknowledgeable, including the ones referenced in this article. Some may be knowledgeable, but sorting these out from the masses of unknoledgeable ones is not cost-free.
"If there is a mechanism where NASA can get additional expertise/oversight with little to no increase in cost, then let's do it."
Absolutely. Is taking the time to answer every crank who makes some noise on a blog in case one of them turns out to not be a crank a cost-effective way to get that? Seems unlikely.
"One thing that all the 'leave the experts alone' posters are forgetting is that NASA is spending OUR money."
That is exactly what we do not forget. It's our money too, and we don't want it wasted dealing with people who think that because they pay taxes, their questions must be answered regardless of how inefficiently they ask them, and how little effort they put into finding the answers elsewhere.
I mean, read the article. A guy who didn't know what he was talking about, and who nobody should have expected to know what he was talking about, essentially made some stuff up, and made a bunch of noise about it. And dealing with it resulted in wasting a whole bunch of NASAs time, by which I mean, a whole bunch of OUR money.
"I don't see the point to this level of pedantry. A popular division of "fact" and 'theory' is that observations are facts while theories, no matter how firm or correct are not. But obviously not everyone is in agreement as to what should be fact versus nonfact. Personally, I think it more reasonable to seperate the two merely because it's always possible that your theory is incorrect in some substantial way and it's healthy to keep that in mind."
Well, you have to draw the "fact" line somewhere... the poster I was replying to was sugesting neither observations, nor anything based on them should be considered facts. A perfectly reasonable position given that all observations depend on the un-proven theory that what your senses report is at all based on reality, and you're not just halucinating the entire thing. So I was sugesting he either specify that position more explicitly, or use a more conmmon parlance. Since I think most people would consider "the sun will rise tommorow" a fact; I think he should call Evolution a fact, since I beleive his reservations about Evolution are similar to his reservations about concluding the sun will rise tommorow.
"First, including humans in the category of "primate" is not universally recognized nor need it continue so. Science may at some point deem it necessary to declassify humans as primates. A statement that becomes false due to a trivial reclassification has something seriously wrong with it. "
You've got to be kidding. For anyone for whom the word 'primate' has anything like the same meaning as it does for most of us, or any of the slightly different meanings it has had historically, humans are primates. Science is not going to deem it necessary to declassify humans as primates short of the utter collapse of biology.
"Second, your statement is wrong because it is possible to be a primate and have evolved from another primate"
OK, sure. I was taking the 'from' to imply a distinct, direct, ancestrial clade as I beleive is typical in such discussions, and I think was the posters intent. "Primates" is a massive classification icluding all apes, monkey, lemurs, everything like them, and everything any of them descended from for a ridicuously long way back. Saying "Humans evolved from primates" is like saying the design of the new Volkswagen Jetta diesel, in green with leather seats, is related to the design of other wheeled vehicles.
Help is great. Having to answer every unfounded criticism any uninformed person on the internet spent 30 seconds typing and zero time researching is not help. It's a collosal waste of time.
Monday morning quarterbacks second-guessing your decisions after you've lost the game can be annoying. But that's not what's being complained about here. What's being complained about here are people wanting to stick their heads into the huddle during the game and demand the quaterback explain to them, while the clock is running, how he can possibly expect to score a home run with no bat.
Not all criticism is constructive, or even meaningful.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm just tired of /.'ers calling Christians retards because of their beliefs"
Then don't make retarded posts. Buddhism and Christianity are both, in my opinion, silly mumbo-jumbo, but I don't care. Beleive whatever you want. However, some people think their beleifs, for which they have no evidence, deserve to be respected by others just because they beleive it, and they push these beleifs at others, and try to get them taken seriously in public schools, etc. These people deserve ridicule. It's not unprovoked. They put forth blatantly false ideas, and attack good science with nonsense that has already been debunked many times over. The mocking carries over into the next relevant story, because they are just so mock-worthy. If you're not one of them, then don't be offended; it's not Christianity as a whole we criticise, but idiocy, Christian or otherwise.
"Copernicus, Galileo and Newton had nothing on Mayan astronomy"
Except, you know, correctness; a reasonably coherent model of the heavens; heliocentrism; universal gravitation... For pete's sake, the Maya thought the earth was flat. Aristotle knew it was round, and with no better tech than the mayans, calculated its circumference.
"the most sophisticated astronomy of any preindustrial (preglobal) civilization"
Would have to be that of Gallileo, Copernicus, Newton, et al.
"I'm not proposing how Mayans could have been aware of the meteor,"
Because they obviously could not possibly have been, any more than they could have been aware of dinosaurs, or any of the other events that occurred in the millions and millions of years between then and when some tree shrews first developed opposable thumbs, much less the millions and millions of years more before those shrews became something we'd call ape-like, let alone human.
The Mayans have no more connection to the meteor than a population of cows in China does.
Have you considered the coincidence that the modern state of Nepal looks kind of like a devils tail if you squint right? I think those Mayans were on to something!
What coincidences? A meteor hit the earth. 64.5 million years later, humans developed, and spread out around the earth. A comparative eyeblink ago, pretty much all of them developed astonomical systems; including those who happened to live in the area the meteor hit. None of them could possibly have been aware of the meteor.
Somehow I think a meteor impact 65,000,000 years ago had little effect on the Mayans thinking 2000 years ago.
I've no doubt the various dollar coins have been a great success when it comes to selling them to coin collectors. But I for one don't see competing with private makers of collectible trinkets as a terribly good role for government.
A good role for government would be replacing low-denomination curency with more cost effective coins, saving the country money. By which measure, if you rarely see the coin yourself, it has failed; no matter who says otherwise.
Whoever told you dollar coins are a success ought to consider that maybe the US Mints mission and measures of success ought to reach beyond their own gift shop.
What the hell has global warming to do with socialism? Never mind, I'm sure your ideas are fascinating, but I've no wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Regardless, my point was, science is all about not having to take anyones word for it. Don't like Al Gore? No problem. Science isn't about who advocates it; it's about evidence you can check yourself. Evidence you can check yourself indicates that over the very recent past the earth has been warming at 1000 times the fastest rate previously.
If you've got evidence we can check ourselves that indicates this warming is due to a nefarious commie plot, let's hear it. Otherwise, those of us who understand what science is are trying to have a conversation, so please quit interupting.
"The insurgents in Iraq seem to be fighting a quite capable war of attrition using, for the most part, arms quite accessible to the general public here"
The insurgents in Iraq will almost certainly make us get tired of Americans getting killed for no obvious benefit to our country, and go away. I rate slightly lower their chances of deposing the US government, and taking over the United States.
Maybe it's like all the people who "support the war in Iraq" yet are not, themselves, in Iraq.
"Ice cores tell you the temps at a particular location. You have to go looking for other sources (tree rings, sedimentary evidence, etc) to get reasonably accurate temps elsewhere to build up a good picture of the global climate."
Yup, and we've done that. It appears that over the last hundred years, the earth has warmed up at a rate roughly 1000 times the fastest it ever did before. Now, there's a lot of error in those measurements, but taking the most optimistic assumptions you possibly could, if you really strained the limits of plausibility, maybe the last hundred years hae only seen warming 100 times faster than the fastest ever before.
Now, there's one possible explanation for what's different in the recent past to cause this that seems to fit, i.e. the industrial revolution. You certainly can't prove it, but there are reasonable mechanisms that could arguably account for it.
Meanwhile, people propose other ideas that could account for 10% increases in warming, or maybe a radical doubling of the rate. These ideas are not remotely on the right scale for the observed data. This is pointed out, and people keep yammering on as if they were deaf. So the actual scientists wind up sounding a bit shrill.
An attempt at refuting the idea that a change in solar output was responsible? No one took that seriously, not because they are zealots, but because the suggeted change in solar output was in the ~5% range, so it didn't take a lot of "refuting" the idea it was responsible for the 100,000% change in warming.
Attempting to poke holes in scientific arguments is valuable, and helps scientists refine their theories. Spouting nonsense to confuse laymen is not valuable.
No, my definition of science, as referenced in my post, is: "you need never take anyones word for it". A scientist is someone who doesn't need you to take their, or anyone elses, word for it. You can collect the evidence yourself, and look at it yourself.
But it's not really my definition. It is, if I recall corectly, Robert Boyles. But in any case either he or one of the other originators of the scientific revolution, who adopted it as the motto of the Royal Society. Naturally, it sounds better in latin: "Nullius in Verba"
So basically, if there is anyone who is bad, it's everyone who disagrees with you, lumped into one undifferentiated mass and presumed to all agree with each other.
I've never actually heard of animal rights groups bombing reseach labs, but what would that have to do with environmentalism in any case?
I, for one, would never criticize all christians for being anti-science, as I know some perfectly nice, pro-science christians. I guess it's hard for you to imagine the idea that I disagree with them on one topic, but still think they are nice people who are right about other topics, but there you have it.
I'll happily criticize anti-science people for being idiots. Some of these people ocasionally seek to avoid such criticism by claiming their anti-science ideas derive from their christianity, and that I should thus respect those ideas. If I were a christian, I might be offended by these people; as I am not, I'll settle for just still thinking they are idiots.
What kind of experiment can you perform to test the accuracy of plate tectonics?
I don't know what you mean by "global warming doomsday theory", but I do know the ability to perform an experiment is not the limit of science. It's certainly nice when one can perform an experiment that forces the evidence into existence. But in many fields (Geology, Astronomy, Paleontology, etc.) this is not possible, and we must settle for examining what evidence is naturally ocurring. The hallmark of science is simply that others may examine that same evidence; you need never take anyones word for it.
Evidence that anyone may examine makes it quite clear that the earth getting warmer at a rate somewhere between 100 and 10,000 times faster than it ever has before. There is currently only one very reasonable explanation for this phenomena that anyone has come up with, though a lot of people keep throwing up all manner of poor theories that don't actually fit the data, in what looks like an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid the obvious conclusion.
I don't actually use a laptop much, so my evaluation of the desired functionality is based on a desktop computer. There, the energy wasted by 5 minutes of sleep when it could maybe be hibernating is not worth worrying about. Frankly, I wouldn't think it ought to be even on a laptop; with screen off and disks spun down, 5 minutes of keeping your ram powered should be a trivial fraction of your battery life.
As far as being able to handle hardware changes while hibernating (or even running), or never needing a "restart" that was different than a hibernate/wake, I don't know if any current OS supports that, but I don't see why they shouldn't.
"The power management software can tell that I'm about to go on a trip and won't be using the computer for a couple hours vs I'm just getting up to use the bathroom?"
It can tell if you've been gone for more than X minutes, which handles that fine, as well as your getting up for just a second, then unexpectedly getting pulled away.
"you still have to power it off before you unplug or you risk FS damage"
Not if the system does it properly; Joel doesn't go into all the details explicitly, but what should happen is this: You hit the one button, the system goes to lock mode, and begins persisting memory to disk (preparing for hibernate); when that is done, the disk can be powered down, and the system enters "sleep", consuming less power, but ready to wake up in an instant; after some amount of time, it actually enters hibernate, powering down completely. If you pull the plug in mere sleep mode, no problem. Note that what I've described is just my understanding of the default behaviour when closing the lid of various laptop models.
I can't see a Windows box without the need for a "restart" action. But other than that, I'm with Joel: one "I'm leaving the computer" button is all that's needed. I see this not as dumbing down the system, but smartening it up. The peice of data the machine needs from me, and the only one I should really need to supply, it that I'm going away for a bit. The rest of the details about how to react to that are the systems problem, and should be handled automatically.
I'm saying your modified humans, who were only say, 50% descended from humans, would be 50% human, and thus 50% primate. If they were also descended from other primates, they might be more primate than human, but they can't be less.
But yes, at some point classification breaks down, because like much of biological science it is based on drawing hard lines around fuzzy concepts.
So Ceres is a planet, though I don't know if you consider that a problem. Also, one could envision a couple as-yet undiscovered Oort cloud objects in the same fairly circular orbit and whichever is a tiny bit bigger is a planet and the other is not, and that would be unsatisfying.
"No biggie, but the shortest I'll tag a ticket for is 30 minutes. Originally I had said 1 hour, but my supervisor vigorously disagreed with my estimate of context switching's effect on productivity"
When doing planning-phase time estimates, our mantra is "Everything takes a day".
A whole pile of little things in the same part of the same project might get done in a day, but if you're going to bother getting enough about a particular context into your brain to do real work, you better have something to do worth a whole day.
Luckily for me, the originator of this mantra is my boss, and the CTO.
It all depends on the scope of the phenomena. If a huge number of things support your theory, and some tiny fraction don't, it's reasonable to think your theory is basically sound, but you need to work out the details. If a significant amount of evidence is against you, maybe you should rethink the basics. This is only reasonable. The support for evolution is so enormous, it's unimagineable that enough new data could start popping up now to possibly call the basics into question. It is, in the common, non-technical parlance, established fact.
"'Well, you have to draw the "fact" line somewhere... the poster I was replying to was sugesting neither observations, nor anything based on them should be considered facts.'
No, he was noting correctly that actual evolution of humans hasn't been observed. I think that he missed (which I thought was part of your point) that all the aspects of evolution have been observed to some degree and hence are facts in themselves."
Both are reasonable interpretations of his original post, and I think yours is the more obvious one. I made my post partly because I thought my less obvious interpretation might his intent; based on his replies in the other branch of this thread, I was correct.
Your trans-humanity speculations are interesting, though I'm not sure I can envision the posibility of being "biologically compatible with unmodified humans" yet "genetically more diverse than the rest of the kingdom Animalia". Be that as it may, "...are they still primates?" Yes. By modern cladistic standards, unquestionably. That which descends from a primate is a primate. To whatever extent a being is human, it is a primate to that same extent, at a minimum.
"I'm no rocket scientist... but that doesn't invalidate the questions."
Of course it does. You don't know the basic background information, you're not going to produce useful questions.
You keep referencing how it would have been obvious to you the foam was a problem. Well, why wasn't it? Are you trying to suggest you were desperately trying to ask someone before the fact "What happens when the foam insulation falls off the tank during launch?", but they just wouldn't listen? If not, then how can you claim the problem is your frustrated ability to ask questions?
How much of MY tax money would you like NASA to spend evalutating questions from unknown strangers on the internet about designs nobody has ever called complete, or even ready for review?
"About the only thing that could falsify evolutioniary theory would be evidance that God was accountable for the creation and alterations of all things"
Not at all; that's the Creationists false dichotomy, but it's bull. Falsification of a theory does not require, nor supply, evidence for any other explanation (or non-explanation, in this case).
It's hard to imagine anything that would single-handedly make us disbeleive Evolution, but that's just because it's so well supported. Success deos not make scientific theories unscientific. But falsification need not be binary; we can easily imagine things we could discover that would make us doubt portions of evolutionary theory at least a little. Like a marine mamal with a cartiligenous skeleton; or a fish with a bony one. We could imagine as many examples like that as you like, and if they started popping up left and right all over the place, we'd want to rethink evolution.
The reason it's hard to imagine evidence that evolution is false is that it is true; and it's hard to imagine things one knows are false. There are millions of things that could be different if evolution were wrong. That means evolution is science. That they're not different means it is true.
Some of the complainers definitely are unknowledgeable, including the ones referenced in this article. Some may be knowledgeable, but sorting these out from the masses of unknoledgeable ones is not cost-free.
"If there is a mechanism where NASA can get additional expertise/oversight with little to no increase in cost, then let's do it."
Absolutely. Is taking the time to answer every crank who makes some noise on a blog in case one of them turns out to not be a crank a cost-effective way to get that? Seems unlikely.
"One thing that all the 'leave the experts alone' posters are forgetting is that NASA is spending OUR money."
That is exactly what we do not forget. It's our money too, and we don't want it wasted dealing with people who think that because they pay taxes, their questions must be answered regardless of how inefficiently they ask them, and how little effort they put into finding the answers elsewhere.
I mean, read the article. A guy who didn't know what he was talking about, and who nobody should have expected to know what he was talking about, essentially made some stuff up, and made a bunch of noise about it. And dealing with it resulted in wasting a whole bunch of NASAs time, by which I mean, a whole bunch of OUR money.
"I don't see the point to this level of pedantry. A popular division of "fact" and 'theory' is that observations are facts while theories, no matter how firm or correct are not. But obviously not everyone is in agreement as to what should be fact versus nonfact. Personally, I think it more reasonable to seperate the two merely because it's always possible that your theory is incorrect in some substantial way and it's healthy to keep that in mind."
Well, you have to draw the "fact" line somewhere... the poster I was replying to was sugesting neither observations, nor anything based on them should be considered facts. A perfectly reasonable position given that all observations depend on the un-proven theory that what your senses report is at all based on reality, and you're not just halucinating the entire thing. So I was sugesting he either specify that position more explicitly, or use a more conmmon parlance. Since I think most people would consider "the sun will rise tommorow" a fact; I think he should call Evolution a fact, since I beleive his reservations about Evolution are similar to his reservations about concluding the sun will rise tommorow.
"First, including humans in the category of "primate" is not universally recognized nor need it continue so. Science may at some point deem it necessary to declassify humans as primates. A statement that becomes false due to a trivial reclassification has something seriously wrong with it. "
You've got to be kidding. For anyone for whom the word 'primate' has anything like the same meaning as it does for most of us, or any of the slightly different meanings it has had historically, humans are primates. Science is not going to deem it necessary to declassify humans as primates short of the utter collapse of biology.
"Second, your statement is wrong because it is possible to be a primate and have evolved from another primate"
OK, sure. I was taking the 'from' to imply a distinct, direct, ancestrial clade as I beleive is typical in such discussions, and I think was the posters intent. "Primates" is a massive classification icluding all apes, monkey, lemurs, everything like them, and everything any of them descended from for a ridicuously long way back. Saying "Humans evolved from primates" is like saying the design of the new Volkswagen Jetta diesel, in green with leather seats, is related to the design of other wheeled vehicles.
Help is great. Having to answer every unfounded criticism any uninformed person on the internet spent 30 seconds typing and zero time researching is not help. It's a collosal waste of time.
Monday morning quarterbacks second-guessing your decisions after you've lost the game can be annoying. But that's not what's being complained about here. What's being complained about here are people wanting to stick their heads into the huddle during the game and demand the quaterback explain to them, while the clock is running, how he can possibly expect to score a home run with no bat.
Not all criticism is constructive, or even meaningful.