I still don't agree with your evidence in this context. For instance, let's consider just two cases:
1) The Big Bang happens, physics remains constant for billions of years, and then here we are - still chugging away with the same rules.
2) We appear in the blink of an eye, 2 nanoseconds ago, with all of our memories pre-set, and photons around the universe already set in-transit to give the appearance of having come from light years away.
The evidence you cite works for both of these situations. What evidence is there to show that 1 is more likely than 2? We don't know a thing about the true nature of the universe, so we can't even assign meaningful probabilities to these two.
No - and honestly, this is probably just a matter of definition (and bear in mind my original post was speculation as to how others are using the word "faith"). What I'm saying is that there is uncertainty, but we pick a side ("There is no god", "The laws of physics won't radically change") - despite the complete lack of evidence.
I disagree with you on the subject of "evidence" - though it's probably just another difference of definition. Without making basic assumptions, there is no "evidence" of anything. Without assuming that the laws of physics are predictable, a crater cannot be evidence of a meteor strike, since the laws of physics may have been anything when the crater was created. So you can't speak of there being "evidence" for your assumptions - eventually you get to a basic assumption that cannot be proven and for which there is no evidence.
E.g.: More reasonable than the alternative - that the laws of physics will begin to radically flux tomorrow, something that has never been observed to occur.
Behind this statement lies the assumption that things that have been observed are an indication of how things will be observed in the future. There is no evidence for this assumption, except that that is how things have always been observed - circular reasoning again.
At some point, you just have to take on faith that there is predictability to the universe. It's a completely reasonable belief to have.
We live our lives trusting that certain things we've learned over our lives will always be true - despite our lack of certainty. Some might call this faith.
"Faith" is when you believe in something in spite of the evidence. To the extent that I believe those propositions, I believe them based on the evidence, so my belief doesn't constitute faith.
Not "in spite of" the evidence - "without any" evidence. There's no evidence that there is no god, and there's no evidence that there is - there's only faith.
But what evidence is there that the universe will continue to work as you've already observed? The simple fact that that's what you've observed in the past? That's circular reasoning. At some point you have to say "that's just what I believe". There's no way to prove that the universe will not be radically different tomorrow than it is today, and no evidence that doesn't rely on circular reasoning. You have to take some things on faith.
I think when people make statements like this, they're referring to things like "faith that the world will act in an hour the way it acts now", or "faith that I am not in the Matrix, and can believe that my own eyes are not deceiving me".
Without basic assumptions ("faith", if you want), we couldn't function at all. But I think the point of science is to reduce these assumptions to as few as possible, and then get down to how the world works given those axioms. Generally fundamentalists will have the same basic assumptions as scientists, but then another few hundred piled on top of that.
Sorry, my mistake. I'd thought you were using "victim" to mean the victim of the crime being perpetrated - obviously the thief was not that. In terms of being a "victim" of a greater social problem, then it really depends on the thief. But the fact is that (non-white-collar) thieves are almost certainly victims of crime or abuse themselves. I can't see why you would have a problem with that statement.
I just don't see the politics in Wilson's position though. He was given a task, carried it out, and then spoke up when he heard that his research was being misrepresented. No one denies that he was qualified.
While the perception of impropriety should be avoided, just because the perception was there doesn't mean the impropriety was. This really just strikes me as "Hey - know anyone who would be good at X?", "Yes, my husband is qualified, and is in a position to carry that out".
Obviously without a recorded history, this is all speculation, but I simply don't see any evidence of actual wrongdoing on Wilson's/Plame's part.
But I think my main reason for siding on the Plame/Wilson side is that Wilson was speaking out to spread the truth, while the administration was trying to discredit the man trying to spread the truth. That just rubs me the wrong way.
Assuming that someone who robs you is the victim is pretty sick, and you might want to seek help with that.
Wow, that was condescending.
He was obviously referring to the more general fact that people who break into cars tend to be on the lower rungs of society. After the break-in, GPP was still better off than the thief. He obviously wasn't making the thief out to be the "victim" of the crime.
The fact that you see no problem with Plame's husband doing the African factfinding speaks utter volumes.
Sorry to butt in, but I gotta ask - what does this have to do with Plame's outing? Are there not internal procedures to deal with potential conflicts of interest? Or was the administration's only recourse to out a covert agent?
Once again, he never took credit for its creation. He took credit for his part in its creation, which wasn't negligable and worth at least a tip of the hat.
Now if he had taken every opportunity for the past ten years to shout "Al Gore invented the internet", it might be somethinge else. But the fact is, he mentioned it in direct response to what distinguished him as a potential presidential candidate. In that context, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say - like any other bullet-point on a resume.
Maybe it's just me, but I get really annoyed seeing "Internet" and "Gore" in the same sentence. It's not so much the political position, but the fact that it doesn't make any sense. He did not claim to invent the internet. The claims that he did make were accurate.
I imagine I'd be just as annoyed if all of a sudden Democrats started harping about how Bush "claimed he scaled Mount Everest in a single day! What a maroon!". Sure, it bears no resemblance to reality, but repeat a lie long enough...
I remember playing Contra as a kid and telling my grandma "Look! I just killed those guys!". I was rewarded with a brief lecture on how killing is wrong in real life.
I was ten years old, and even then thought it was stupid. "These are pixels on a screen, not people - can't she tell the difference?". As graphics improve, children's ability to tell graphics from reality also improve (remember how awesome the T-Rex in Jurassic Park looked when you first saw it? Go back and look at it now.) To gamers today, the hookers in GTA3 are no different from the sprites in Contra. They're pixels on a screen.
And we'll need much better systems (including tactile and odor outputs) than what we have now to even begin to break that mental barrier.
True, but the forced sequence in TP feels far more restrictive than any other zelda I've played. In the others at least it felt like there was some breathing room.
Still, I wouldn't want it to get too common either. I wish they'd come up with something just as cool - but completely different - for this Zelda. They do tend to tell the same story over and over in many different ways, but maybe experimental graphics styles could be added to the list of what Zelda is known for.
They already know people are going to buy it - why not use it as a research lab of sorts? Especially for non-dealbreakers like graphics style.
Well, in Zelda, Link's Awakening, and Link to the Past, you weren't forced to go through Dungeon 1 before moving on to 2, for instance. In the original, you had access to pretty much the entire map (all 256 "rooms" of it) right from the beginning - and could do a lot of adventuring before even entering the first dungeon.
It's become less and less so as more games have been released. And now in TP, it just feels like you're trapped in room X until you're done there, and can move on to room X+1.
That's my point - the atrocities of the past were by no means necessary, nor were they necessarily responsible for the good that followed them. Maybe they were, but it's certainly premature in the science of social prediction to start making violent decisions based on that possibility.
Think ancient history, perhaps the suppression of the Nika Riots in Constantinople, or the Jewish Revolt of 66-73AD. Were those massacres? Were they justified?
If Constantinople had fallen before the middle ages, there would have been no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution, and dare I say, no America.
While it's likely there would have been no "Renaissance", no "Enlightenment", what would have taken their place? Without an accurate method of predicting social change (and we have nothing even approaching that), there's no way to know what lies down the road untravelled. Maybe we would have reached space a thousand years ago, or maybe we'd still be tending potatoes in fields under Byzantian rule. You seem awfully certain (again - a bad thing) that the course of history has been the best possible one that could have happened.
But I'll admit, your solution is half-correct. You seem to want to dominate the middle east though. I think that recent history has shown that that path just leads to more hatred. It's been over 50 years now since it was tried in Iran, and look at the state of that country right now. Ironically, more progress occurred when they were just left alone for forty years. Before the Iraq war, Iranians were electing reformists - trying to escape their radial religious government. Now the radicals are back in power, which I believe has a direct correlation to the fear created by the US messing around in the middle east again.
Cultural dominance doesn't have to be forced - although the free speech necessary to affect social change might. People around the world are smart enough to compare their own surroundings to others, and recognize that certain ways of life are better. But to dominate them forcefully/covertly is to have a huge gap of understanding between those dictating the new "culture" and those living it, and thus breed more contempt.
I cannot mention any of them here because I would be moderated troll, since they are unacceptable.
Let me guess - genocide is the solution to all our terrorist problems?
I understand who the enemy really is, and what needs to be done to them. No you don't. The worst atrocities in history have been perpetrated by people who were certain they were right, and proceed to treat their "enemy" as sub-human.
It seems to indicate that the general usage "prime number" implies Natural numbers, while different branches of math have an expanded definition.
Of course, the absolute, no-nonsense, definitive source (Merriam-Webster) says +/-, so who am I to argue?
Personally, I'm drawn to the mathforum.com link from my first post. Allowing negative primes would break some long-standing assumptions about primes, so don't allow them.
Of course you have to consider that with "trickle-down" statement you made, that $25 still makes it into the hands of the population, but it is more than likely $100-$200 now
I have yet to see a convincing argument for this effect.
Because according to current evolutionary theory, leaves are purely a plant-thing. Plants diverged from animals millions (billions?) of years ago. So if a mammal - which is a relatively recent invention - has leaves that are clearly related to the leaves plants have, I'd say that that invalidates current theories.
I'm not talking "leaf-like appendages" that could evolve naturally. I'm talking about actual plant leaves, right down to the DNA level. In a broader sense, one of the main tenets of evolution is that it is a gradual process with each specimen leading to the next. If you were to find an animal with a significant amount of DNA from two completely distinct branches of evolution (plants and mammals, for instance), that would be a pretty strong case for re-evaluating the current theory.
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't agree with your evidence in this context. For instance, let's consider just two cases:
1) The Big Bang happens, physics remains constant for billions of years, and then here we are - still chugging away with the same rules.
2) We appear in the blink of an eye, 2 nanoseconds ago, with all of our memories pre-set, and photons around the universe already set in-transit to give the appearance of having come from light years away.
The evidence you cite works for both of these situations. What evidence is there to show that 1 is more likely than 2? We don't know a thing about the true nature of the universe, so we can't even assign meaningful probabilities to these two.
Is it just that you're afraid of uncertainty?
No - and honestly, this is probably just a matter of definition (and bear in mind my original post was speculation as to how others are using the word "faith"). What I'm saying is that there is uncertainty, but we pick a side ("There is no god", "The laws of physics won't radically change") - despite the complete lack of evidence.
I disagree with you on the subject of "evidence" - though it's probably just another difference of definition. Without making basic assumptions, there is no "evidence" of anything. Without assuming that the laws of physics are predictable, a crater cannot be evidence of a meteor strike, since the laws of physics may have been anything when the crater was created. So you can't speak of there being "evidence" for your assumptions - eventually you get to a basic assumption that cannot be proven and for which there is no evidence.
E.g.:
More reasonable than the alternative - that the laws of physics will begin to radically flux tomorrow, something that has never been observed to occur.
Behind this statement lies the assumption that things that have been observed are an indication of how things will be observed in the future. There is no evidence for this assumption, except that that is how things have always been observed - circular reasoning again.
At some point, you just have to take on faith that there is predictability to the universe. It's a completely reasonable belief to have.
We live our lives trusting that certain things we've learned over our lives will always be true - despite our lack of certainty. Some might call this faith.
"Faith" is when you believe in something in spite of the evidence. To the extent that I believe those propositions, I believe them based on the evidence, so my belief doesn't constitute faith.
Not "in spite of" the evidence - "without any" evidence. There's no evidence that there is no god, and there's no evidence that there is - there's only faith.
But what evidence is there that the universe will continue to work as you've already observed? The simple fact that that's what you've observed in the past? That's circular reasoning. At some point you have to say "that's just what I believe". There's no way to prove that the universe will not be radically different tomorrow than it is today, and no evidence that doesn't rely on circular reasoning. You have to take some things on faith.
I think when people make statements like this, they're referring to things like "faith that the world will act in an hour the way it acts now", or "faith that I am not in the Matrix, and can believe that my own eyes are not deceiving me".
Without basic assumptions ("faith", if you want), we couldn't function at all. But I think the point of science is to reduce these assumptions to as few as possible, and then get down to how the world works given those axioms. Generally fundamentalists will have the same basic assumptions as scientists, but then another few hundred piled on top of that.
Sorry, my mistake. I'd thought you were using "victim" to mean the victim of the crime being perpetrated - obviously the thief was not that. In terms of being a "victim" of a greater social problem, then it really depends on the thief. But the fact is that (non-white-collar) thieves are almost certainly victims of crime or abuse themselves. I can't see why you would have a problem with that statement.
So, yes. If someone robs you, and you think that THEY are the victim, you have a mental disorder.
Sure, but you're being disingenuous again. No one claimed that the victim of a robbery is the perpetrator. That's stupid, and you know it.
I just don't see the politics in Wilson's position though. He was given a task, carried it out, and then spoke up when he heard that his research was being misrepresented. No one denies that he was qualified.
While the perception of impropriety should be avoided, just because the perception was there doesn't mean the impropriety was. This really just strikes me as "Hey - know anyone who would be good at X?", "Yes, my husband is qualified, and is in a position to carry that out".
Obviously without a recorded history, this is all speculation, but I simply don't see any evidence of actual wrongdoing on Wilson's/Plame's part.
But I think my main reason for siding on the Plame/Wilson side is that Wilson was speaking out to spread the truth, while the administration was trying to discredit the man trying to spread the truth. That just rubs me the wrong way.
Assuming that someone who robs you is the victim is pretty sick, and you might want to seek help with that.
Wow, that was condescending.
He was obviously referring to the more general fact that people who break into cars tend to be on the lower rungs of society. After the break-in, GPP was still better off than the thief. He obviously wasn't making the thief out to be the "victim" of the crime.
The fact that you see no problem with Plame's husband doing the African factfinding speaks utter volumes.
Sorry to butt in, but I gotta ask - what does this have to do with Plame's outing? Are there not internal procedures to deal with potential conflicts of interest? Or was the administration's only recourse to out a covert agent?
There are 11 types of people in the world, those who know binaries and those who don't.
Okay, maybe I'm dense, but where does the third type of person come in? Or is this "binaries" somehow different from the "binary" I'm thinking of?
Once again, he never took credit for its creation. He took credit for his part in its creation, which wasn't negligable and worth at least a tip of the hat.
Now if he had taken every opportunity for the past ten years to shout "Al Gore invented the internet", it might be somethinge else. But the fact is, he mentioned it in direct response to what distinguished him as a potential presidential candidate. In that context, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say - like any other bullet-point on a resume.
Ad hominems aside, if you had a strong belief in something, and an audience willing to listen - wouldn't you speak?
Maybe it's just me, but I get really annoyed seeing "Internet" and "Gore" in the same sentence. It's not so much the political position, but the fact that it doesn't make any sense. He did not claim to invent the internet. The claims that he did make were accurate.
I imagine I'd be just as annoyed if all of a sudden Democrats started harping about how Bush "claimed he scaled Mount Everest in a single day! What a maroon!". Sure, it bears no resemblance to reality, but repeat a lie long enough...
I remember playing Contra as a kid and telling my grandma "Look! I just killed those guys!". I was rewarded with a brief lecture on how killing is wrong in real life.
I was ten years old, and even then thought it was stupid. "These are pixels on a screen, not people - can't she tell the difference?". As graphics improve, children's ability to tell graphics from reality also improve (remember how awesome the T-Rex in Jurassic Park looked when you first saw it? Go back and look at it now.) To gamers today, the hookers in GTA3 are no different from the sprites in Contra. They're pixels on a screen.
And we'll need much better systems (including tactile and odor outputs) than what we have now to even begin to break that mental barrier.
Unfortunately, the bootup process is powered by blood.
True, but the forced sequence in TP feels far more restrictive than any other zelda I've played. In the others at least it felt like there was some breathing room.
Second. I loved the graphics style.
Still, I wouldn't want it to get too common either. I wish they'd come up with something just as cool - but completely different - for this Zelda. They do tend to tell the same story over and over in many different ways, but maybe experimental graphics styles could be added to the list of what Zelda is known for.
They already know people are going to buy it - why not use it as a research lab of sorts? Especially for non-dealbreakers like graphics style.
Well, in Zelda, Link's Awakening, and Link to the Past, you weren't forced to go through Dungeon 1 before moving on to 2, for instance. In the original, you had access to pretty much the entire map (all 256 "rooms" of it) right from the beginning - and could do a lot of adventuring before even entering the first dungeon.
It's become less and less so as more games have been released. And now in TP, it just feels like you're trapped in room X until you're done there, and can move on to room X+1.
That's my point - the atrocities of the past were by no means necessary, nor were they necessarily responsible for the good that followed them. Maybe they were, but it's certainly premature in the science of social prediction to start making violent decisions based on that possibility.
Think ancient history, perhaps the suppression of the Nika Riots in Constantinople, or the Jewish Revolt of 66-73AD. Were those massacres? Were they justified?
If Constantinople had fallen before the middle ages, there would have been no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution, and dare I say, no America.
While it's likely there would have been no "Renaissance", no "Enlightenment", what would have taken their place? Without an accurate method of predicting social change (and we have nothing even approaching that), there's no way to know what lies down the road untravelled. Maybe we would have reached space a thousand years ago, or maybe we'd still be tending potatoes in fields under Byzantian rule. You seem awfully certain (again - a bad thing) that the course of history has been the best possible one that could have happened.
But I'll admit, your solution is half-correct. You seem to want to dominate the middle east though. I think that recent history has shown that that path just leads to more hatred. It's been over 50 years now since it was tried in Iran, and look at the state of that country right now. Ironically, more progress occurred when they were just left alone for forty years. Before the Iraq war, Iranians were electing reformists - trying to escape their radial religious government. Now the radicals are back in power, which I believe has a direct correlation to the fear created by the US messing around in the middle east again.
Cultural dominance doesn't have to be forced - although the free speech necessary to affect social change might. People around the world are smart enough to compare their own surroundings to others, and recognize that certain ways of life are better. But to dominate them forcefully/covertly is to have a huge gap of understanding between those dictating the new "culture" and those living it, and thus breed more contempt.
instead of eliminating the source of the threat.
I cannot mention any of them here because I would be moderated troll, since they are unacceptable.
Let me guess - genocide is the solution to all our terrorist problems?
I understand who the enemy really is, and what needs to be done to them.
No you don't. The worst atrocities in history have been perpetrated by people who were certain they were right, and proceed to treat their "enemy" as sub-human.
Might want to change this Wikipedia article then.
It seems to indicate that the general usage "prime number" implies Natural numbers, while different branches of math have an expanded definition.
Of course, the absolute, no-nonsense, definitive source (Merriam-Webster) says +/-, so who am I to argue?
Personally, I'm drawn to the mathforum.com link from my first post. Allowing negative primes would break some long-standing assumptions about primes, so don't allow them.
Nice try.
Of course you have to consider that with "trickle-down" statement you made, that $25 still makes it into the hands of the population, but it is more than likely $100-$200 now
I have yet to see a convincing argument for this effect.
Because according to current evolutionary theory, leaves are purely a plant-thing. Plants diverged from animals millions (billions?) of years ago. So if a mammal - which is a relatively recent invention - has leaves that are clearly related to the leaves plants have, I'd say that that invalidates current theories.
I'm not talking "leaf-like appendages" that could evolve naturally. I'm talking about actual plant leaves, right down to the DNA level. In a broader sense, one of the main tenets of evolution is that it is a gradual process with each specimen leading to the next. If you were to find an animal with a significant amount of DNA from two completely distinct branches of evolution (plants and mammals, for instance), that would be a pretty strong case for re-evaluating the current theory.