I certainly don't disagree with your assessment of the Creationist abuse of the term theory. I do, however, think that American Heritage #1 entry for theory is perfectly adequate to represent scientific theories. The duty of a dictionary isn't the same as that of an encyclopaedia.
I just meant to point out that theories aren't 0.01% or 99.99% or 100.0% or any other percentage correct. They're just falsifiable models. I'm unaware of any theory for which anyone can claim 100% correctness, only efficacy and unfalsifiability.
"Let's drill out every bit of oil and dig up every bit of coal and force feed the economy into olympic level steriod consumption. We'll revoke all the anti-pollution laws. We'll ignore global warming, planing to use the newly generated riches to get off the planet just before the asteriod wipes this shithole out."
PROOF CONCLUSIVE THAT GEORGE W BUSH POSTS ON SLASHDOT!!!
"These are all theory, which is not the colloquial meaning (like "guess"), but the scientific definition which is more like; we're 99.9% sure, we just need to tweak the last 0.1%."
No, that is not the scientific definition of a theory. In fact, it's not even close.
I'm not inferring anything except that the story will be reported differently in our polarized media. That is what my post said, wasn't it?
BTW, don't try to educate me about Palm Beach County elections. I live in PBC and am intimate with local politics. It doesn't surprise me that the case was made here because you don't have lawsuits without complainants, and people here are very suspicious of the process because of the crap that happened in 2000. You can basically assume that every election from now until hell freezes over is going to be monitored, torn apart and sued to no end in this county.
Now, as to whether it would be reasonable to infer what you suggest that I infer: PBC is deep blue. FL at large is red. If irregularities in the only county successfully tested, Democratic or otherwise, are representative of patterns throughout the state, then there might be a case to made for fraud. However, like you, I'm more inclined to blame incompetence and the closed-source/trade-secret mentality. Our Rep (Wexler, D) is a major advocate for paper trails on voting hardware, and I also think that would go a long way.
"Sarcasm aside, I do hope this makes the national news"
It will. It will make NPR and NBC and the NYT, and all the Fox News zombies will claim it's a non-story because it's reported by the great Liberal Media Conspiracy. You know, like the administration suppression of NASA research that none of the "conservative" media outlets bothered to report.
"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation"
reminds me of something I heard once in a meeting at work. A middle manager, upon being told a single, sensible and direct way to solve a problem, blurted out:
Hah! The cassette adapter (remember LOAD CS1/CS2) required a crappy lo-fidelity desktop cassette recorder/player. If you hooked it to anything resembling a decent piece of audio equipment, it would not work because any kind of anti-hiss or noise suppression circuit would quash the data.
I've always been a little skeptical of "traditional" media blogging anyway. The whole thing smacks of embrace-and-extend co-opting of the otherwise independent spirit of the phenomenon.
"Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts"
What the study failed to mention is that 86 per cent of the time to implement was spent convincing the executives and attorneys that using Linux was worth pursuing.
"Because I see everybody is falling over themselves getting out their MP3 phones."
Emphasis on falling. I haven't yet seen a compelling one, but that's probably mostly my bias showing. I'm not a huge fan of overintegration and I consider attaching just about anything to a phone to be overintegration. I'm using an LG1300 and I think it's got too much crap packed in it.
"Then put the music yourself."
I'm not talking about what consumers want, I'm talking about what the industries want. Hardware manufacturers have the most interest in providing versatility and value to their customers, so they will generally take the highest road. However, to the extent they have to deal with carriers and content providers, they are kneecapped.
Well said. One thing you didn't mention, but that I think is worth adding, is that the "normal" progression of scientific theories almost always sees the new theory arise to explain phenomenological domains not well covered by the old. For example:
* Newton's gravity explained the movements of the planets where previous theories could not, but the perihelion of Mercury precessed in a way that defied the new theory. * General Relativity's gravity explained the precession of the perihelion of Mercury and other large-scale things that Newton's could not, but failed to explain what was going on at atomic scales. * QM explains behaviors of atoms and their constituents.
My point: revolutionary theories that upend established ones rarely arise in the history of science. No matter how radical their content, new theories appear incrementally to address deficits in otherwise solid theories. IMO, this pattern is also a reason to be skeptical of any claim to "disprove" an existing theory.
"Can you explain why that is necessarily true? So if I believed that God "created" us/evolutionary processes and then abandoned us -- after all, he never did anything I asked, even when I was way-too-Christian -- I must be an inherently irrational person"
You may or may not be irrational, but there is nothing in my statement that I can detect to lead you to that conclusion.
What I said was that rational people are interested in the existence of God for reasons other than explaining the morphological history of life forms, the implication being that people who characterize the question otherwise haven't gotten beyond the primitive "explanation of nature" myth notion of the divine.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly don't disagree with your assessment of the Creationist abuse of the term theory. I do, however, think that American Heritage #1 entry for theory is perfectly adequate to represent scientific theories. The duty of a dictionary isn't the same as that of an encyclopaedia.
I just meant to point out that theories aren't 0.01% or 99.99% or 100.0% or any other percentage correct. They're just falsifiable models. I'm unaware of any theory for which anyone can claim 100% correctness, only efficacy and unfalsifiability.
"Let's drill out every bit of oil and dig up every bit of coal and force feed the economy into olympic level steriod consumption. We'll revoke all the anti-pollution laws. We'll ignore global warming, planing to use the newly generated riches to get off the planet just before the asteriod wipes this shithole out."
PROOF CONCLUSIVE THAT GEORGE W BUSH POSTS ON SLASHDOT!!!
"These are all theory, which is not the colloquial meaning (like "guess"), but the scientific definition which is more like; we're 99.9% sure, we just need to tweak the last 0.1%."
No, that is not the scientific definition of a theory. In fact, it's not even close.
Start here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=theory
I'm not inferring anything except that the story will be reported differently in our polarized media. That is what my post said, wasn't it?
BTW, don't try to educate me about Palm Beach County elections. I live in PBC and am intimate with local politics. It doesn't surprise me that the case was made here because you don't have lawsuits without complainants, and people here are very suspicious of the process because of the crap that happened in 2000. You can basically assume that every election from now until hell freezes over is going to be monitored, torn apart and sued to no end in this county.
Now, as to whether it would be reasonable to infer what you suggest that I infer: PBC is deep blue. FL at large is red. If irregularities in the only county successfully tested, Democratic or otherwise, are representative of patterns throughout the state, then there might be a case to made for fraud. However, like you, I'm more inclined to blame incompetence and the closed-source/trade-secret mentality. Our Rep (Wexler, D) is a major advocate for paper trails on voting hardware, and I also think that would go a long way.
"Sarcasm aside, I do hope this makes the national news"
It will. It will make NPR and NBC and the NYT, and all the Fox News zombies will claim it's a non-story because it's reported by the great Liberal Media Conspiracy. You know, like the administration suppression of NASA research that none of the "conservative" media outlets bothered to report.
Their comment
"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation"
reminds me of something I heard once in a meeting at work. A middle manager, upon being told a single, sensible and direct way to solve a problem, blurted out:
"But we need options so we can make decisions!"
Hah! The cassette adapter (remember LOAD CS1/CS2) required a crappy lo-fidelity desktop cassette recorder/player. If you hooked it to anything resembling a decent piece of audio equipment, it would not work because any kind of anti-hiss or noise suppression circuit would quash the data.
" the world would be much better off without television. you wouldn't be sitting on the couch, you'd be doing something."
Maybe if you watched more television, you'd learn how to recognize a joke from the laugh tracks.
I can't believe this comment isn't moderated through the roof. It says more about congressional hypocrisy than any of the missives surrounding it.
I think you forgot the first adjective: "smug".
"For instance, there was a marked 30% drop in the sale of Merlot after Sideways came out."
Heh. I also noticed that my neighborhood BJ's, which prior to that movie had exactly one Pinot Noir in regular stock, now has about fifteen varieties.
I've always been a little skeptical of "traditional" media blogging anyway. The whole thing smacks of embrace-and-extend co-opting of the otherwise independent spirit of the phenomenon.
You so should have gotten +5 funny for this. Noone else even seems to have got the joke.
BTW, how do you spell it?
"Are you saying that wikipedia's articles are padded out by irrelevent information?"
Nope, just that the conclusion of the article summary is hardly justified on its face.
"Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that." -- Homer Simpson
So if I go to Wikipedia and type the word "gibblefinch" a few thousand times into an article, I can reduce its error rate?
"it is quite plausible that they'd lose many times that gain if there were a boycott by the religious factions"
;-)
Heck, yeah. That's why Proctor and Gamble and the Walt Disney Company are out of business... oh, wait...
"Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts"
What the study failed to mention is that 86 per cent of the time to implement was spent convincing the executives and attorneys that using Linux was worth pursuing.
"it seems the only real winner after a hybrid purchase is the environment."
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me...
"Standardization."
I'm with you paison, but I'm not holding my breath for that to happen in the US.
"Because I see everybody is falling over themselves getting out their MP3 phones."
Emphasis on falling. I haven't yet seen a compelling one, but that's probably mostly my bias showing. I'm not a huge fan of overintegration and I consider attaching just about anything to a phone to be overintegration. I'm using an LG1300 and I think it's got too much crap packed in it.
"Then put the music yourself."
I'm not talking about what consumers want, I'm talking about what the industries want. Hardware manufacturers have the most interest in providing versatility and value to their customers, so they will generally take the highest road. However, to the extent they have to deal with carriers and content providers, they are kneecapped.
The reason MP3 wireless phones aren't taking off is the competing interests of the wireless carriers and content distribution services.
It costs $1 to download a whole song from .
It costs $2 to download a ring tone (smaller than a whole song) from the carrier.
Phone manufacturers are caught in the middle...
But I'm pretty sure it doesn't have any spelling errors...
Well said. One thing you didn't mention, but that I think is worth adding, is that the "normal" progression of scientific theories almost always sees the new theory arise to explain phenomenological domains not well covered by the old. For example:
* Newton's gravity explained the movements of the planets where previous theories could not, but the perihelion of Mercury precessed in a way that defied the new theory.
* General Relativity's gravity explained the precession of the perihelion of Mercury and other large-scale things that Newton's could not, but failed to explain what was going on at atomic scales.
* QM explains behaviors of atoms and their constituents.
My point: revolutionary theories that upend established ones rarely arise in the history of science. No matter how radical their content, new theories appear incrementally to address deficits in otherwise solid theories. IMO, this pattern is also a reason to be skeptical of any claim to "disprove" an existing theory.
"Can you explain why that is necessarily true? So if I believed that God "created" us/evolutionary processes and then abandoned us -- after all, he never did anything I asked, even when I was way-too-Christian -- I must be an inherently irrational person"
You may or may not be irrational, but there is nothing in my statement that I can detect to lead you to that conclusion.
What I said was that rational people are interested in the existence of God for reasons other than explaining the morphological history of life forms, the implication being that people who characterize the question otherwise haven't gotten beyond the primitive "explanation of nature" myth notion of the divine.