"I don't think the fundamentalists really want Genesis taught as a theory alongside evolution"
Then why did they launch court cases attempting to acomplish exactly that? (I'm talking about the last round, whose rejection gave rise to "Intelligent Design"). Actually, I think they really do want Genisis taught all by itself, with no evolution at all.
"So simply saying 'evolution is the currently accepted theory by the majority of the scientific community but, just like all science, there are alternative models supported by some groups of people,' in a science class is perfectly acceptable to me, and I think it would be acceptable to the fundamentalists as well"
I do not think the fundamentalists would be satisfied with that. But in the interests of accuracy, perhaps we could say "Evolution is perhaps the most thouroughly well supported theory in all of science. It is the basis of the entire modern science of biology. Like all science, you can examine the evidence for it yourself, and draw your own conclusions. There are people who chalenge evolution in the metaphysical and political arenas, but there is no scientific challenge to it to speak of, because science is sure about it in the same sense that science is sure about plate tectonics or heliocentrism."
You want people to understand the nuances of GMO foods after you leave room for doubt on evolution? Sounds unlikely to me.
The properties of the set itself are well defined, and it does not have a sense of humor; as to the teaspoon, we can only speculate.
Your post indicated a misunderstanding of the admittedly confusing language of my original post, so I sought to clarify. If you actually understood perfectly, and pretending to misinterpret stupid set-theory examples is just your idea of funny, than I apologize for having implied otherwise, and you need to get out more.
No. The set I am describing does not contain anything that is not itself or the teaspoon on the corner of my desk. Therefore, the moon is not in the set; you are not in the set; the number 5 is not in the set. There is nothing in the set except itself and the teaspoon.
"many sets include themselves: they obviously have to be infinite though."
Not at all; Let the set A contain all things which are either the teaspoon sitting on the corner of my desk, or are sets that do not contain anything that is not themselves or the teaspoon sitting on the corner of my desk. A contains itself, but is not infinite. There are probably less silly examples.
1) I can also delete spam by hand, and I can politely say "No thanks" to telemarketers. 2) What's the difference? 3) I can complain about anything I damn well please, thank you very much.
AOL provides a free service which many find useful. Certainly they have the right to try to make some money off it. But if, in so doing, they make it suckier, I see no reason in the world I should not say "That sucks". If they make it sucficiently sucky, I shall go elsewhere, but I reserve the right to express my opinion in other ways as well.
In particular, this is not so bad in itself, but looks a lot like the first step toward reducing the signal/noise ratio on IM until it becomes less useful. The assumption that AOL should feel free to add some stuff to my buddies list is rather troubling.
If Google News (a free service) occasionally stuck some links in my favorites list, would I have a right to complain?
The 2001 Prius had a perfectly reasonable back seat; I have not been in the new one, but it looks reasonable from the outside. But in any case, carrying four adults should not (and does not) require a giant vehicle with lousy milage. An SUV is a stupid vehicle for commuting. Then again, in my opinion commuting 50 miles to work is stupid to begin with.
Almost all my gaming has been HERO. I always liked the seperation of special effects from generic powers, vs D&Ds laundry lists of spells.
Of course, I'm going to play whatever my friend who GMs wants to, and he too has converted from HERO to D&D. Also because of Ebberon, but in a different sense. His name is Keith Baker...
But the point is really that the compiler "knows" it is not changed, which lets it do various optimizations it could not otherwise. Which might well cause problems if you use const_cast<>
Oh, I understand the reasoning behind it. I don't intend to jump into the wider Israel/Palestinian debate here, because it's just a stupidly complex, f'ed up mess. But this one aspect seems pretty clear cut to me. I know someone who's parents were born in what is now Israel, but he (and they if they were still alive) would not be alowed to move there today. I know another guy who was born in Toledo, Ohio, as were his parents and their parents, but he has this inalieanble right to live in Israel. Because of his ancestors ethnicity. IMHO, that is indefensibly racist.
The holocaust was a terrible consequence of one ethnic group gaining the upper hand and scapegoating and oppressing another. Some look at it and say we must form better societies, where ethnicity does not divide us so. Others want to form a society where their ethnic group is dominant. IMO, the later are idiots, and doomed to become oppressors themselves.
"Germany was the last modern state I know of that still had a citizenship law that was based on the dubious notion of 'blood'"
Israel. Anyone with one Jewish grandparent, can become a citizen upon setting foot there, and can remain a citizen as long as they like, living wherever they like, so long as they set foot there once every five years; regardless of whether they or their ancestors lived in Israel more recently than thousands of years ago. Non-jews will find it quite difficult to become citizens. Particularly if they or their parents lived there recently.
Germany reforms a racist policy, leaving only Israel. I guess ironic doesn't imply funny.
"one thing I've never really understood was people who say 'oh, yeah, took me weeks and I only ever solved it once or twice.'"
They are lying. They never spent a fantastic amount of time doing the cube, but it was a big deal back when, and everyone had one and probably many of their friends could solve it (having read the solution in a book). The idea of having solved it "once" seems plausible, not terribly baostful, a perfectly innocent little white lie. But serious cubers know it's BS. Claiming to have solved it on your own even once is actually a stupendous boast; discovering the solution on your own is fantastically difficult, and the probability is near zero of doing so without the cube having been a major part of your life.
Again, they're not being particularly malicious, their memories of the cube may even be so vauge that they just assume they must have solved it "once". But they didn't solve it all on their own, or they'd know claiming to have solved it "once" was a ridiculous claim.
For the record, I spent many months developing my algorithm until I could reliably produce a cube that had a 25% chance of being solved, vs having 2 or 4 edge peices flipped. After several more monts of frustration, I let somone show me that final move. Now I can do the cube in a little under 2 minutes.
"semi-guided trial-and-error " won't get you there. The position I could reliably get too was very "close" to solved, but still requires discovering the specific 20 twist series that will get you from there to solved, via positions that seem much less close.
I'll notice a corners problem pretty much immediately, but an edge flip will take me to about half way thtough, but that's because I use a "corners first" algorithm. I learned that algorithm form a friend who was in the first speed solving competitions back in the 80s. I've seen someone try to trick her with a cube reasembled to be impossible. They held out the cube saying "Hey can you solve this for me?", without even taking it from them, she said "No"
"This is the same (public university) professor that liked to show us a petrified tree which ran through layers of rock that should have been millions of years apart."
And did he have an explanation for this? Or was it yet another case of, "hey, here's this weird thing; If it is what I say it is, it doesn't fit with current geologic theory, therefore, that theory must be entirely wrong"? Maybe he's wrong about what his sample is. Maybe there is some other explanation. I don't know any of the facts of the case, or care to (I'm not a geologist), but I'd guess that it is not the earth-shattering refutation of geology that is implied, or others would be interested. I simply don't beleive in a great plate-tectonicist conspiracy.
"did you read that article about how the mars rovers have lasted so long?"
The rovers are a perfect example. They are a fabulous feat of design, there is not an ounce abord them that could be done without; whoever said they were "over engineered" didn't know what they were talking about. They are not at all like a natural system. Using my favorite voice-box nerve example, you can bet the rovers don't have a two foot wire where a two inch one would do. On the other hand, we're all impressed the rovers have lasted a couple years. To consider a natural system successful, I'd expect Mars to be teeming with their descendents a couple million years from now.
"You're not seriously bringing out the tired old vestigal organs argument, are you?" No, I'm not, even though it's a perfectly good argument.
"People used to think the thyroid didn't do anything either."
They thought that 200 years ago; I don't think the thyroid could have been much misused as you suggest, since the discovery of its function dates to pretty close to the discovery of evolution. If you're just going to reject all scientific advances from the last two centuries as being on shaky ground, you'll have a hard time getting by in the modern world.
In any case, I wasn't talking about vestigal organs. I was talking about "junk" DNA. Here's a brief primer, since I gather you're not too familiar with how DNA works: You've got these massively long strings of DNA in the nuclei of your cells. Certain small sections of these get copied into RNA molecules which go off somwhere else in the cell, and then smaller sections of the copies are used to produce proteins. The sections that get copied are called Genes. But there is quite a bit of DNA that never gets copied by RNA at all. It never reacts or interacts with anything except that it gets copied over when the whole strand does, and passed on to offspring. And of course, random mutations cause it to change very slowly so the level of similarity of it between species is a great indicator of how far back they had a common ancestor. Because the "junk" dna doesn't do anything, these mutations are never selected for or against. Of course, that's assuming some things I realize you don't necessarily accept, but sorry, you just can't talk meaningfully about molecular biology without accepting evolution.
"I'll concede common origin, but not necessarily ancestor. I can find immense commonality among all of DaVinci's paintings too"
But common origin doesn't explain why you would have more in common with a cow than with a fish or bird, and more in common with them than with an insect. If you share a common ancestor with a cow more recently than with a fish, that explains it quite nicely.
"You can't make an argument FOR evolution as an origin of life by attacking creationism, at least not to me, because I'm not defending the creationists"
Excellent. I was just reacting to what I took to be your sugestion that an evolution-simulating designer was more probable that evolution itself.
But if you're not coming from a religously inspired belief in Creationism, I've again got to ask, why evolution? I guess I never got an answer to whether you were "agnostic" on heliocentrism or plate tectonics; I've just been assuming you accept them. Have you personally made any observations that would support heliocentrism? Certainly, a being capable of designing life on earth could easily fake the evidence for plate tectonics. Do you question these?
You geo profs demonstration makes a good point. But note that those "few generations back" would be about ten generations. And that the phlogiston theory made useful and correct predictions, but still fell before long in the face of contradictory evidence. (And "fell" is maybe a bit strong; fairer to say it was revised by the realization that "phlogiston" was actually "lack of oxygen", it was wrong in the same way electrical theory was wrong about which way stuff flows) Evolution also made useful, correct predictions, but differs in that it has continued to do so for the last 150 years or so. When it comes to survivng test after test without significant overhaul, evolution is the all time champ. Darwin got it righter earlier than the big guns in any other field. "popular scientific ideas of your day"? Evolution isn't the latest flash in the pan; it's the basic underpinning of everything we know about biology.
"all new complex systems in his experience come from 'intelligent design', "
Not at all. Termite mounds are quite complex. I observe that humans design neat and tidy, but often fragile systems. Whereas natural ones tend to be messy but robust. The natural systems I'm aware of are not much like the designed ones at all.
I observe that every living thing on earth uses the same chemical reactions to metabolize oxygen in it's mitochondria, despite the fact that others are available. I note that every water-breathing sea creature has a cartilgeonious skeleton, whereas every air breathing one has a bony one (that resembles that of land dwellers to boot.) You want a repeatable phenomenon? Find a fish and cut it open; does it have a bony skeleton?
The nerve that controls your voice box emerges from your spinal column at the back of your neck, travels down into you chest cavity, loops under your aorta, and goes back up again to end a couple inches from where it started, without having connected to anything in between. That does not strike me as the work of a competent designer. But of course, if it evolved that way it would make perfect sense. Do living things really seem designed to you? I find that odd.
Every living thing has in their DNA huge amounts of junk that never gets transcribed by RNA and made into protiens. It doesn't do anything at all. Why would a desgner put it there? Even better, why would a designer put the same junk in different species, carefully distributing it so that the similarity in the junk was exactly proportional to the similarity in the non-junk? You have almost all the same junk in your dna as a chimp does; less but most of the same as a gorrilla. A fair bit less in common with a cow. You've even got some in common with a fly that a tree doesn't have. Why? There's no reason for it; all that junk could be changed to just spell the desgners name over and over or something. So it seems to me if there is a designer, all life was carefully designed to exactly mimic what it would be like if it actually evolved, and at that point the designer seems like an unecessary complication that adds nothing to my understanding.
Where you learned something makes no difference at all; the fact that it happened in the past does not make books authoritative.
"As a reasonable person, the improbability of evolution on the grand scale is simply too great for me to believe it. From a scientific perspective, we can't test it..." I'm not sure why you find evolution improbable at all, but we absolutely can test it, and do so constantly. Think of some thing evolution would imply, and go check it out. I'll tell you what; I don't actually have any idea what percentage of junk DNA humans share with cows, but I'll bet you any amount you name it is greater than the percentage either shares with any non-mamal. Want to bet? If you really don't beleive evolution you should bet in a second. There are huge numbers of non-mamal species whose genomes are well known enough to settle this bet. The odds are stupendously in your favor, u
Well, you are welcome to do that by simply clicking on the link I provided. The fact is, the use of this sonic weapon vs pirates is not the BS the orginal poster suggests. It happened in front of many witnesses and has been widely reported on with quotes from those witnesses, etc. etc. The BBC story has a picture of it. The Reuters one has first-hand accounts of what it sounded like. It is quite simply not BS.
Ahh, the usual shlashbot rush to be the first to say some obscure slashdot-only tech story is BS from some crank. But if you want to win at that game, you need to make sure it acrtually is an obscure slashdot-only tech story. As opposed to something that Google finds from a couple thousand different news sources.
"And even if true, next time, won't the pirates just wear earplugs?"
You do not remotely comprehend the volume level we are talking about.
"Fortunately, this discussion was not about the narrow issue of public school science classes, but the treatment of ID proponents in broad public discourse."
Ahh, good point. In public discourse generally, ID proponents should be treated just like anyone else trying stenuously to convince others of ideas that have no evidential backing. I don't particularly care if this means they get treated like preachers or crazy people.
"If a 'theory' is not falsible, it does not fall within the realm of scientific analysis."
So true. Which is why ID can never be science; no evidence could possibly run against it. But I do wish you would say "evidence" rather than "experiment". Otherwise you've got to junk most of (off the top of my head) Astrophysics, Geology, Meteorology, Anthropology, and Biology. The core of all those sciences is not subject to experiment; we have to get by with just looking at evidence that already exists, which luckily is a perfectly good way to learn about the world. If you withold judgement about 90% of science, I think you're too cautious. If not, why pick on evolution? The evidence for it is much more diretly available to the lay person than that for plate tectonics or heliocentrism. Are you "Agnostic" on heliocentrism?
"Where do you, personally, draw the line between an ID proponent 'forcing' his or her ideas on you and simply telling you about them?"
When someone tries to pass laws requiring that what is taught in a public school science class be something different than the consensus amongst scientists in that field, they are over the line.
"None can be proved by experiment." "Experiment" is not the halmark of science. "Evidence" is. Whether you force that evidence into existence with an experiment or collect it through observation does not matter. For example, you cannot experiment with plate tectonics either.
While we're at it, science never "proves" anything, so be as agnostic as you want. Nobody can really prove that the evidence their senses report has any relation to objective reality (because all evidence comes through their senses.)
One collection location had raw sewage? Bah. I had a job collecting samples from the inflows of sewage treatment plants. Drive around to six obsolete, decrepit plants, swapping out the collectors in the automated samplers (How many will have overflowed today?) Take them all back to the shiny new plant that will get all the sewage after you're done. Mix the samples in exacting proportions, and decant into various containers. (This will involve spilling; skin contact considered very bad) Pack them up in a cooler and ship it to a lab across the country which will see how well it kills fish. Take a bath in rubbing alcohol. The upside was that you'd be done at around noon, and the job was in Puerto Rico. The downside was, this study was being done to figure out how much treatment and dilution would be needed before the stuff could be dumped in the ocean, and since you were still doing the study, not even that was happening yet... So you didn't much feel like going to the beach. For the record though, the industrial waste was actually the nasty stuff. The air at the plant that served an industrial area would make your eyes burn and skin itch. The mostly human waste plants were bearable once you put on big rubber gloves, a filter mask and stuffed something up your nose.
You're correct, I had not read the article when I made the above comments, I was replying to the other commenter. Just for you, I have now read the article and can tell you from an informed perspective that it is full of shit.
He talks about stuff I never touch, maybe he's right about those. I doubt it, because he talks about several things I do use, and the bad things they force on you. Well, I don't do things those bad ways, or feel any urge to.
Let's take intelli-sense. I use intelli-sense, and think it's the gtreat. But it had never remotely occurred to me to use bottom-up vs. top-down design so as to get more out of intelli-sense. His whole argument there is based on the premise that once you get in the habit of using it, you must code so as to use intellisense, because you won't be able to get by without it. But if you can't get by without it, your doomed already. It's not nearly that good. It's totally fabulous for things like not having to remember if "reverse_iterator" has an underscore in it; it's useless for knowing if there is such a thing in the first place. Judging by his example, he likes to write lines of code that constitute meaningless syntax errors, then go back and change them, and his problem is that intellisense is targeted to people who like to write valid code. Hmmm... actually, I can't get his example to happen at all...
Here's another random quote:
"Visual Studio doesn't want you to use arrays or loops to create and position these buttons. It wants you to use the designer, and it wants to generate the code for you and hide it away where you can't see it."
As of the current version, VS is not sentient. It doesn't "want" anything. If you want to write code to use arrays and loops to position buttons, have at it. VS will compile your code no problem. Why you would want to do this, I can't imagine, but you can. Personally, I'll use the designer to generate code for me and hide it away where I don't have to see it. Note that of course I easily CAN see it if I want to. It's ugly stuff, no doubt, and I'd think little of any human coder who wrote stuff that way. Then again, we're talking about code that can be auto-generated by a stupid wizard. Having a competent coder waste time on such would be truly inane.
His basic complaint seems to be that VS gives him too many tools, and he picks the wrong one for the job. I don't buy it, because the right tool for his job is also available, and the tool he picked is actually the right one for a different job.
"I originally learnt to program (in Turbo Pascal and C) in a self-directed manner, and I had the same problem as the kid you talk about. It wasn't until many years later at Uni, that I finally learnt to program."
Every good coder I know did it this way. What I don't understand is why half of them think others should skip the self-directed thrashing about and skip straight to the learning it the right way. Learning it the right way is great once you've discovered the joy of creation/control/whatever but run up against the limits of your self-discovered techniques. I've never heard of someone who had never done any coding on there own, took some classes, and was worth a damn.
If visual design tools get somone interested in programming, and they eventually discover wizard-generated code they don't understand is causing them problems, the ones who are destined to be good coders will decide they must understand it.
In any case, everyone talks about "flashy wizard generated dialogs" as if this is all VS does. I don't even make dialogs. I just use it for the excellent text editor, pretty good project management, top of the line C++ compiler, awesome debugger, nicely configurable interface, etc. Frankly, as IDEs go, VS kicks ass. It's like a giant, vastly comprehensive toolbox; and everyone here is complaining that rachet based sockets teach you bad habits, you should only use crescent wrenches (which the toolbox actually also has). I don't know for sure, because I'm doing woodworking; but I suspect they are full of it because the chisels, saws and drills are first rate.
"Then start them out with 'The Incredible Machine' or some other mousetrap-alike"
Maybe. But when I was getting into coding, any suspicion that what I was doing was a toy, and not the real thing would have killed my interest. I wanted to write programs that looked and felt just like the "real" ones, and these days that means a GUI. I'll admit, I'm speculating, not speaking from experience. I coded for 4 different command-line-only OSes before I ever saw a GUI; and I scoffed at the first one I saw (Mac) along with the other self-repecting geeks. By 93 I was out of college and working at my first programming job.
I guess I don't understand what "bad habits" one will suposedly acquire from VS. Is making an app with a nice GUI a bad habit? Is it the drag-and-drop building of said gui people object to? Seems like the optimal way handle automatable stupid stuff like putting together gui widgets. Who want's to tweak source to line up checkboxes? I certainly don't see how VS "forces" any of this on you. I for one don't use any of that, because my code is generally library stuff with no user front end at all.
I think you missed the part where I dated myself; lets try again: I don't have it anymore, as all my cassette tape stored data were destroyed in the mid 80s when my kid sister taped over them in what I call the great Cyndi Lauper debacle. Nor do I imagine you have the (TRS80) hardware it ran on, or that you would want it if you did. This is my first program ever we're talking about. It wasn't a "mapper" for dungeons. It had one particular dungeon hard-coded into it; not as a big aray of data, but coded into the very control logic of the program. Modifying it is not a thing you would want to do. It didn't draw you a pretty map. It wrote out extended-ascii box-draw charachters that looked like a map if you squinted right.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't think the fundamentalists really want Genesis taught as a theory alongside evolution"
Then why did they launch court cases attempting to acomplish exactly that? (I'm talking about the last round, whose rejection gave rise to "Intelligent Design"). Actually, I think they really do want Genisis taught all by itself, with no evolution at all.
"So simply saying 'evolution is the currently accepted theory by the majority of the scientific community but, just like all science, there are alternative models supported by some groups of people,' in a science class is perfectly acceptable to me, and I think it would be acceptable to the fundamentalists as well"
I do not think the fundamentalists would be satisfied with that. But in the interests of accuracy, perhaps we could say "Evolution is perhaps the most thouroughly well supported theory in all of science. It is the basis of the entire modern science of biology. Like all science, you can examine the evidence for it yourself, and draw your own conclusions. There are people who chalenge evolution in the metaphysical and political arenas, but there is no scientific challenge to it to speak of, because science is sure about it in the same sense that science is sure about plate tectonics or heliocentrism."
You want people to understand the nuances of GMO foods after you leave room for doubt on evolution? Sounds unlikely to me.
My favorite was the entire huge module with only one comment: /* Make sure j != 2 !!!*/
No sign of a variable named j anywhere...
The properties of the set itself are well defined, and it does not have a sense of humor; as to the teaspoon, we can only speculate.
Your post indicated a misunderstanding of the admittedly confusing language of my original post, so I sought to clarify. If you actually understood perfectly, and pretending to misinterpret stupid set-theory examples is just your idea of funny, than I apologize for having implied otherwise, and you need to get out more.
No. The set I am describing does not contain anything that is not itself or the teaspoon on the corner of my desk. Therefore, the moon is not in the set; you are not in the set; the number 5 is not in the set. There is nothing in the set except itself and the teaspoon.
"many sets include themselves:
they obviously have to be infinite though."
Not at all; Let the set A contain all things which are either the teaspoon sitting on the corner of my desk, or are sets that do not contain anything that is not themselves or the teaspoon sitting on the corner of my desk. A contains itself, but is not infinite.
There are probably less silly examples.
1) I can also delete spam by hand, and I can politely say "No thanks" to telemarketers.
2) What's the difference?
3) I can complain about anything I damn well please, thank you very much.
AOL provides a free service which many find useful. Certainly they have the right to try to make some money off it. But if, in so doing, they make it suckier, I see no reason in the world I should not say "That sucks". If they make it sucficiently sucky, I shall go elsewhere, but I reserve the right to express my opinion in other ways as well.
In particular, this is not so bad in itself, but looks a lot like the first step toward reducing the signal/noise ratio on IM until it becomes less useful. The assumption that AOL should feel free to add some stuff to my buddies list is rather troubling.
If Google News (a free service) occasionally stuck some links in my favorites list, would I have a right to complain?
The 2001 Prius had a perfectly reasonable back seat; I have not been in the new one, but it looks reasonable from the outside. But in any case, carrying four adults should not (and does not) require a giant vehicle with lousy milage. An SUV is a stupid vehicle for commuting. Then again, in my opinion commuting 50 miles to work is stupid to begin with.
Almost all my gaming has been HERO. I always liked the seperation of special effects from generic powers, vs D&Ds laundry lists of spells.
Of course, I'm going to play whatever my friend who GMs wants to, and he too has converted from HERO to D&D. Also because of Ebberon, but in a different sense. His name is Keith Baker...
"Also- which is better- 4 people carpooling 50 miles in a vehicle that gets 15-20 MPG, or someone commuting alone 50 miles in a Prius?"
4 people carpooling 50 miles in a Prius.
But the point is really that the compiler "knows" it is not changed, which lets it do various optimizations it could not otherwise. Which might well cause problems if you use const_cast<>
Oh, I understand the reasoning behind it. I don't intend to jump into the wider Israel/Palestinian debate here, because it's just a stupidly complex, f'ed up mess. But this one aspect seems pretty clear cut to me. I know someone who's parents were born in what is now Israel, but he (and they if they were still alive) would not be alowed to move there today. I know another guy who was born in Toledo, Ohio, as were his parents and their parents, but he has this inalieanble right to live in Israel. Because of his ancestors ethnicity. IMHO, that is indefensibly racist.
The holocaust was a terrible consequence of one ethnic group gaining the upper hand and scapegoating and oppressing another. Some look at it and say we must form better societies, where ethnicity does not divide us so. Others want to form a society where their ethnic group is dominant. IMO, the later are idiots, and doomed to become oppressors themselves.
"Germany was the last modern state I know of that still had a citizenship law that was based on the dubious notion of 'blood'"
Israel. Anyone with one Jewish grandparent, can become a citizen upon setting foot there, and can remain a citizen as long as they like, living wherever they like, so long as they set foot there once every five years; regardless of whether they or their ancestors lived in Israel more recently than thousands of years ago. Non-jews will find it quite difficult to become citizens. Particularly if they or their parents lived there recently.
Germany reforms a racist policy, leaving only Israel. I guess ironic doesn't imply funny.
"one thing I've never really understood was people who say 'oh, yeah, took me weeks and I only ever solved it once or twice.'"
They are lying. They never spent a fantastic amount of time doing the cube, but it was a big deal back when, and everyone had one and probably many of their friends could solve it (having read the solution in a book). The idea of having solved it "once" seems plausible, not terribly baostful, a perfectly innocent little white lie. But serious cubers know it's BS. Claiming to have solved it on your own even once is actually a stupendous boast; discovering the solution on your own is fantastically difficult, and the probability is near zero of doing so without the cube having been a major part of your life.
Again, they're not being particularly malicious, their memories of the cube may even be so vauge that they just assume they must have solved it "once". But they didn't solve it all on their own, or they'd know claiming to have solved it "once" was a ridiculous claim.
For the record, I spent many months developing my algorithm until I could reliably produce a cube that had a 25% chance of being solved, vs having 2 or 4 edge peices flipped. After several more monts of frustration, I let somone show me that final move. Now I can do the cube in a little under 2 minutes.
"semi-guided trial-and-error " won't get you there. The position I could reliably get too was very "close" to solved, but still requires discovering the specific 20 twist series that will get you from there to solved, via positions that seem much less close.
I'll notice a corners problem pretty much immediately, but an edge flip will take me to about half way thtough, but that's because I use a "corners first" algorithm. I learned that algorithm form a friend who was in the first speed solving competitions back in the 80s. I've seen someone try to trick her with a cube reasembled to be impossible. They held out the cube saying "Hey can you solve this for me?", without even taking it from them, she said "No"
"This is the same (public university) professor that liked to show us a petrified tree which ran through layers of rock that should have been millions of years apart."
And did he have an explanation for this? Or was it yet another case of, "hey, here's this weird thing; If it is what I say it is, it doesn't fit with current geologic theory, therefore, that theory must be entirely wrong"? Maybe he's wrong about what his sample is. Maybe there is some other explanation. I don't know any of the facts of the case, or care to (I'm not a geologist), but I'd guess that it is not the earth-shattering refutation of geology that is implied, or others would be interested. I simply don't beleive in a great plate-tectonicist conspiracy.
"did you read that article about how the mars rovers have lasted so long?"
The rovers are a perfect example. They are a fabulous feat of design, there is not an ounce abord them that could be done without; whoever said they were "over engineered" didn't know what they were talking about. They are not at all like a natural system. Using my favorite voice-box nerve example, you can bet the rovers don't have a two foot wire where a two inch one would do. On the other hand, we're all impressed the rovers have lasted a couple years. To consider a natural system successful, I'd expect Mars to be teeming with their descendents a couple million years from now.
"You're not seriously bringing out the tired old vestigal organs argument, are you?"
No, I'm not, even though it's a perfectly good argument.
"People used to think the thyroid didn't do anything either."
They thought that 200 years ago; I don't think the thyroid could have been much misused as you suggest, since the discovery of its function dates to pretty close to the discovery of evolution. If you're just going to reject all scientific advances from the last two centuries as being on shaky ground, you'll have a hard time getting by in the modern world.
In any case, I wasn't talking about vestigal organs. I was talking about "junk" DNA. Here's a brief primer, since I gather you're not too familiar with how DNA works: You've got these massively long strings of DNA in the nuclei of your cells. Certain small sections of these get copied into RNA molecules which go off somwhere else in the cell, and then smaller sections of the copies are used to produce proteins. The sections that get copied are called Genes. But there is quite a bit of DNA that never gets copied by RNA at all. It never reacts or interacts with anything except that it gets copied over when the whole strand does, and passed on to offspring. And of course, random mutations cause it to change very slowly so the level of similarity of it between species is a great indicator of how far back they had a common ancestor. Because the "junk" dna doesn't do anything, these mutations are never selected for or against. Of course, that's assuming some things I realize you don't necessarily accept, but sorry, you just can't talk meaningfully about molecular biology without accepting evolution.
"I'll concede common origin, but not necessarily ancestor. I can find immense commonality among all of DaVinci's paintings too"
But common origin doesn't explain why you would have more in common with a cow than with a fish or bird, and more in common with them than with an insect. If you share a common ancestor with a cow more recently than with a fish, that explains it quite nicely.
"You can't make an argument FOR evolution as an origin of life by attacking creationism, at least not to me, because I'm not defending the creationists"
Excellent. I was just reacting to what I took to be your sugestion that an evolution-simulating designer was more probable that evolution itself.
But if you're not coming from a religously inspired belief in Creationism, I've again got to ask, why evolution? I guess I never got an answer to whether you were "agnostic" on heliocentrism or plate tectonics; I've just been assuming you accept them. Have you personally made any observations that would support heliocentrism? Certainly, a being capable of designing life on earth could easily fake the evidence for plate tectonics. Do you question these?
You geo profs demonstration makes a good point. But note that those "few generations back" would be about ten generations. And that the phlogiston theory made useful and correct predictions, but still fell before long in the face of contradictory evidence. (And "fell" is maybe a bit strong; fairer to say it was revised by the realization that "phlogiston" was actually "lack of oxygen", it was wrong in the same way electrical theory was wrong about which way stuff flows) Evolution also made useful, correct predictions, but differs in that it has continued to do so for the last 150 years or so. When it comes to survivng test after test without significant overhaul, evolution is the all time champ. Darwin got it righter earlier than the big guns in any other field. "popular scientific ideas of your day"? Evolution isn't the latest flash in the pan; it's the basic underpinning of everything we know about biology.
"all new complex systems in his experience come from 'intelligent design', "
Not at all. Termite mounds are quite complex. I observe that humans design neat and tidy, but often fragile systems. Whereas natural ones tend to be messy but robust. The natural systems I'm aware of are not much like the designed ones at all.
I observe that every living thing on earth uses the same chemical reactions to metabolize oxygen in it's mitochondria, despite the fact that others are available. I note that every water-breathing sea creature has a cartilgeonious skeleton, whereas every air breathing one has a bony one (that resembles that of land dwellers to boot.) You want a repeatable phenomenon? Find a fish and cut it open; does it have a bony skeleton?
The nerve that controls your voice box emerges from your spinal column at the back of your neck, travels down into you chest cavity, loops under your aorta, and goes back up again to end a couple inches from where it started, without having connected to anything in between. That does not strike me as the work of a competent designer. But of course, if it evolved that way it would make perfect sense. Do living things really seem designed to you? I find that odd.
Every living thing has in their DNA huge amounts of junk that never gets transcribed by RNA and made into protiens. It doesn't do anything at all. Why would a desgner put it there? Even better, why would a designer put the same junk in different species, carefully distributing it so that the similarity in the junk was exactly proportional to the similarity in the non-junk? You have almost all the same junk in your dna as a chimp does; less but most of the same as a gorrilla. A fair bit less in common with a cow. You've even got some in common with a fly that a tree doesn't have. Why? There's no reason for it; all that junk could be changed to just spell the desgners name over and over or something. So it seems to me if there is a designer, all life was carefully designed to exactly mimic what it would be like if it actually evolved, and at that point the designer seems like an unecessary complication that adds nothing to my understanding.
Where you learned something makes no difference at all; the fact that it happened in the past does not make books authoritative.
"As a reasonable person, the improbability of evolution on the grand scale is simply too great for me to believe it. From a scientific perspective, we can't test it..."
I'm not sure why you find evolution improbable at all, but we absolutely can test it, and do so constantly. Think of some thing evolution would imply, and go check it out. I'll tell you what; I don't actually have any idea what percentage of junk DNA humans share with cows, but I'll bet you any amount you name it is greater than the percentage either shares with any non-mamal. Want to bet? If you really don't beleive evolution you should bet in a second. There are huge numbers of non-mamal species whose genomes are well known enough to settle this bet. The odds are stupendously in your favor, u
Well, you are welcome to do that by simply clicking on the link I provided. The fact is, the use of this sonic weapon vs pirates is not the BS the orginal poster suggests. It happened in front of many witnesses and has been widely reported on with quotes from those witnesses, etc. etc. The BBC story has a picture of it. The Reuters one has first-hand accounts of what it sounded like. It is quite simply not BS.
Ahh, the usual shlashbot rush to be the first to say some obscure slashdot-only tech story is BS from some crank. But if you want to win at that game, you need to make sure it acrtually is an obscure slashdot-only tech story. As opposed to something that Google finds from a couple thousand different news sources.
"And even if true, next time, won't the pirates just wear earplugs?"
You do not remotely comprehend the volume level we are talking about.
"Fortunately, this discussion was not about the narrow issue of public school science classes, but the treatment of ID proponents in broad public discourse."
Ahh, good point. In public discourse generally, ID proponents should be treated just like anyone else trying stenuously to convince others of ideas that have no evidential backing. I don't particularly care if this means they get treated like preachers or crazy people.
"If a 'theory' is not falsible, it does not fall within the realm of scientific analysis."
So true. Which is why ID can never be science; no evidence could possibly run against it. But I do wish you would say "evidence" rather than "experiment". Otherwise you've got to junk most of (off the top of my head) Astrophysics, Geology, Meteorology, Anthropology, and Biology. The core of all those sciences is not subject to experiment; we have to get by with just looking at evidence that already exists, which luckily is a perfectly good way to learn about the world. If you withold judgement about 90% of science, I think you're too cautious. If not, why pick on evolution? The evidence for it is much more diretly available to the lay person than that for plate tectonics or heliocentrism. Are you "Agnostic" on heliocentrism?
"Where do you, personally, draw the line between an ID proponent 'forcing' his or her ideas on you and simply telling you about them?"
When someone tries to pass laws requiring that what is taught in a public school science class be something different than the consensus amongst scientists in that field, they are over the line.
"None can be proved by experiment."
"Experiment" is not the halmark of science. "Evidence" is. Whether you force that evidence into existence with an experiment or collect it through observation does not matter. For example, you cannot experiment with plate tectonics either.
While we're at it, science never "proves" anything, so be as agnostic as you want. Nobody can really prove that the evidence their senses report has any relation to objective reality (because all evidence comes through their senses.)
One collection location had raw sewage? Bah.
I had a job collecting samples from the inflows of sewage treatment plants. Drive around to six obsolete, decrepit plants, swapping out the collectors in the automated samplers (How many will have overflowed today?) Take them all back to the shiny new plant that will get all the sewage after you're done. Mix the samples in exacting proportions, and decant into various containers. (This will involve spilling; skin contact considered very bad) Pack them up in a cooler and ship it to a lab across the country which will see how well it kills fish. Take a bath in rubbing alcohol.
The upside was that you'd be done at around noon, and the job was in Puerto Rico. The downside was, this study was being done to figure out how much treatment and dilution would be needed before the stuff could be dumped in the ocean, and since you were still doing the study, not even that was happening yet... So you didn't much feel like going to the beach.
For the record though, the industrial waste was actually the nasty stuff. The air at the plant that served an industrial area would make your eyes burn and skin itch. The mostly human waste plants were bearable once you put on big rubber gloves, a filter mask and stuffed something up your nose.
You're correct, I had not read the article when I made the above comments, I was replying to the other commenter. Just for you, I have now read the article and can tell you from an informed perspective that it is full of shit.
He talks about stuff I never touch, maybe he's right about those. I doubt it, because he talks about several things I do use, and the bad things they force on you. Well, I don't do things those bad ways, or feel any urge to.
Let's take intelli-sense. I use intelli-sense, and think it's the gtreat. But it had never remotely occurred to me to use bottom-up vs. top-down design so as to get more out of intelli-sense. His whole argument there is based on the premise that once you get in the habit of using it, you must code so as to use intellisense, because you won't be able to get by without it. But if you can't get by without it, your doomed already. It's not nearly that good. It's totally fabulous for things like not having to remember if "reverse_iterator" has an underscore in it; it's useless for knowing if there is such a thing in the first place. Judging by his example, he likes to write lines of code that constitute meaningless syntax errors, then go back and change them, and his problem is that intellisense is targeted to people who like to write valid code. Hmmm... actually, I can't get his example to happen at all...
Here's another random quote:
"Visual Studio doesn't want you to use arrays or loops to create and position these buttons. It wants you to use the designer, and it wants to generate the code for you and hide it away where you can't see it."
As of the current version, VS is not sentient. It doesn't "want" anything. If you want to write code to use arrays and loops to position buttons, have at it. VS will compile your code no problem. Why you would want to do this, I can't imagine, but you can. Personally, I'll use the designer to generate code for me and hide it away where I don't have to see it. Note that of course I easily CAN see it if I want to. It's ugly stuff, no doubt, and I'd think little of any human coder who wrote stuff that way. Then again, we're talking about code that can be auto-generated by a stupid wizard. Having a competent coder waste time on such would be truly inane.
His basic complaint seems to be that VS gives him too many tools, and he picks the wrong one for the job. I don't buy it, because the right tool for his job is also available, and the tool he picked is actually the right one for a different job.
"I originally learnt to program (in Turbo Pascal and C) in a self-directed manner, and I had the same problem as the kid you talk about. It wasn't until many years later at Uni, that I finally learnt to program."
Every good coder I know did it this way. What I don't understand is why half of them think others should skip the self-directed thrashing about and skip straight to the learning it the right way. Learning it the right way is great once you've discovered the joy of creation/control/whatever but run up against the limits of your self-discovered techniques. I've never heard of someone who had never done any coding on there own, took some classes, and was worth a damn.
If visual design tools get somone interested in programming, and they eventually discover wizard-generated code they don't understand is causing them problems, the ones who are destined to be good coders will decide they must understand it.
In any case, everyone talks about "flashy wizard generated dialogs" as if this is all VS does. I don't even make dialogs. I just use it for the excellent text editor, pretty good project management, top of the line C++ compiler, awesome debugger, nicely configurable interface, etc. Frankly, as IDEs go, VS kicks ass. It's like a giant, vastly comprehensive toolbox; and everyone here is complaining that rachet based sockets teach you bad habits, you should only use crescent wrenches (which the toolbox actually also has). I don't know for sure, because I'm doing woodworking; but I suspect they are full of it because the chisels, saws and drills are first rate.
"Then start them out with 'The Incredible Machine' or some other mousetrap-alike"
Maybe. But when I was getting into coding, any suspicion that what I was doing was a toy, and not the real thing would have killed my interest. I wanted to write programs that looked and felt just like the "real" ones, and these days that means a GUI. I'll admit, I'm speculating, not speaking from experience. I coded for 4 different command-line-only OSes before I ever saw a GUI; and I scoffed at the first one I saw (Mac) along with the other self-repecting geeks. By 93 I was out of college and working at my first programming job.
I guess I don't understand what "bad habits" one will suposedly acquire from VS. Is making an app with a nice GUI a bad habit? Is it the drag-and-drop building of said gui people object to? Seems like the optimal way handle automatable stupid stuff like putting together gui widgets. Who want's to tweak source to line up checkboxes? I certainly don't see how VS "forces" any of this on you. I for one don't use any of that, because my code is generally library stuff with no user front end at all.
I think you missed the part where I dated myself; lets try again: I don't have it anymore, as all my cassette tape stored data were destroyed in the mid 80s when my kid sister taped over them in what I call the great Cyndi Lauper debacle. Nor do I imagine you have the (TRS80) hardware it ran on, or that you would want it if you did. This is my first program ever we're talking about. It wasn't a "mapper" for dungeons. It had one particular dungeon hard-coded into it; not as a big aray of data, but coded into the very control logic of the program. Modifying it is not a thing you would want to do. It didn't draw you a pretty map. It wrote out extended-ascii box-draw charachters that looked like a map if you squinted right.