Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings -- [ROTATE 1-3/3-1]:
1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,
2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process,
3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?
I find it rediculous, most USians do too, aparently.
If only that were true. Apparently some polls show pretty consistently, that about 10-15% of Americans think evolution is likely to be the explanation for the origin of humans; whereas about 40% take a literal reading of Biblical creation and the rest believe that evolution is directly guided by god.
I don't know how reliable this data is, I've seen a few similar studies from Gallup a couple of time, but nothing would make me happier than if someone can point me to a thorough debunking, because this makes me rather terrified.
It's only really being discussed in United States media. It's not even a real issue in schools
I am taking a university-level evolutionary biology class right now; they just changed the syllabus last week to add a class that deals with this nonsense. Sure no one there takes it seriously, but there's still time spent talking about it, which in itself is just plain sad.
While I agree with you, there's also something to be said for testing common configurations, the ones you would be likely to actually buy. Just because they could remove a discrepancy when testing, doesn't mean you'll be able to when buying the laptop.
Try explaining that to your 80 year old grandparents.
I don't see your point. There is nothing technical or novel in this concept. I can understand the ubiquitous example grandparents being uneasy with the concept of online banking in general, but if they got that far, surely they can understand "Don't trust email."
There's no grey areas, there's no technical know-how involved, and no on-the-spot decision making skills are needed. You never trust email; nothing important from a financial institution is ever communicated solely by email. Period.
These days, they're polished enough that you basically have to assume any email that claims to be from your bank is forged, then examine it and try to prove otherwise.
Well, yeah, why wouldn't you assume that? In fact, there's no need to examine it to try to prove otherwise, just go to your online banking site (which, it doesn't take a genius to bookmark when you sign up for it), if the bank wanted to tell you something, you'll be notified there too.
What, are you saying I should also assume that the letters I get telling me I won 10 million dollars are not real either?
Did they? My understanding was that Hernán Cortés had the ruling family and other people with power tortured and/or killed. Of the general population, those who didn't die in the violence of the Spanish invasion were forced to flee and probably ended up mixing with other tribes.
All true, but the fact remains that the indigenous American civilizations went into a sharp (relatively speaking) decline 100-200 years before the Spanish got there. The area was significantly depopulated by Cortes' time; I believe there are several examples of cities whose population size wouldn't be matched again until early 19th century, being virtually deserted, long before any invaders looking for a "New World".
As far as I know, the reasons for this are still unknown - doesn't necessarily make it "mysterious", we just don't have the info.
Can laser beams travel so slowly that you can see their progress?
Can mobs of various primitive, semi-sentient beings repeatedly defeat large imperial armies (presumably with state of the art training and equipment), by throwing random objects at them?
Can ships exploding in space not only make a lot of noise, but also not annihilate other ships in close proximity?
Can you really cover the same distance in varying numbers of parallax seconds?
Can all religion be explained with symbiotic micro-organisms?
contrary to the eternal "it's just epicycles" cry among Slashdotters, it is testable, falsifiable, and predictive
Sure, it's a sound theory, well, hypothsis. Whether it's "stupid" or not is not for me to judge, I am not a theoretical physicist. What bothers me is that it has not been tested in any meaningful way, it was invented to account for discrepancies in our understanding of physics and our observations of the universe; and yet so many people treat it as established fact.
Basic lesson: for every revolutionary new theory that works, there are a hundred that don't, and it can take a long time to decide which is which.
Exactly. And dark matter is just such a revolutionary new theory, it's no different from the article presented (apart from being around for 70-odd years with little to no progress to show for it).
It just seems odd to jump to the conclusion that the vast majority of the universe is composed of an unknown type of matter simply because we cannot reconcile our demonstrably poor understanding of physics, with our demonstrably poor ability to accuratley measure the universe as a whole.
All our servers (about 30) and desktops (about 200) are Dell. Once they get the account info they are always very helpful, so I guess it's large enough to make it into the "big enough for us to care about" category.
I've never had any trouble overnighting and same-daying server parts; and in addition all the servers are parts and function interchangeable, so usually when something breaks I can either scavenge parts from something else, or move the service to a less used machine, and get the replacement parts in less than 12 hours.
I supposed there's cheaper options out there (actually, I'm less and less convinced of that), but Dell has been working very well for us.
Your comment got to 5, so somebody's got to say it. Significative indentation is nothing less than a stroke of genius. You indent your code anyway, right? So why is everybody forced to keep track of *two* kinds of block delimiters at the same time? Get rid of the stinkin' parentheses, and be done with it!
I'm at the stage where I can't get past the significant whitespaciness of Python (even though it seems like a cool language).
The parentheses are what specifies the structure, the indentation is just a visual clue, no one is forced to keep both. If your structure is correct, any modern editor (or, failing that, *tidy) should be able to indent it for you.
That's the main issue, whitespace is more "fluid" than code, some people like tabs, some like spaces, some do 2, some 4, some 8. So not all tools, and especially not all people, are diligent in round-tripping the whitespace exactly as you gave it to them.
There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to do a 's/\s+//g' on my code (ignoring comments for a sec) and still have the editor format it properly for me.
This defense firmly puts the blame on the reader, for being so stupid as to take the words at face value. Silly you, for believing us, they say.
Even if Wikipedia's only legacy is to get that through to people, I'd say it's a great success.
It's an information resource, not the guardian of truth; why does The Register think it so hilarious that readers shouldn't just believe what they see without question?
Maybe it would've been easier if it wasn't referred to as an encyclopedia in the first place? It's true that Wikipedia is not as good as "traditional" encyclopedias at being an encyclopedia, but it's much better at being what encyclopedias are supposed to be.
Oh and I actually read that whole rant - such passionate hatred, and for what? A way to share information? It's really hard to get where that's coming from (also the spelling and grammar leave a lot to be desired).
The whole notion of eventual intelligence has been debunked by a recent study at MIT, where I am an undergrad in molecular engineering.
Could you provide a reference for this study that settled things with such finality?
It is pretty clear, according to the most modern research, that intelligence is solely determined by genetic makeup.
We are still talking about the same study, right?
It's pretty cutting edge research, so I am not surprised you weren't aware. It's ok.
No I do feel bad - I should've been aware that a study has been published that debunks virtually all previous studies on the subject and completely reverses our understanding of development and intelligence.
Another subject not discussed, apparently, is that a gene could presumably affect rate of development or growth, rather than eventual intelligence (this may be much more plausible, for example).
Yeah, no frikin' kidding - a growth factor receptor just might be related to development.
Here's a paper linking a mutation in IGF2R to differences in rate of growth and height from birth to 7 years. There's also a bunch of studies in mice regarding its imprinting and role in development (incidentally, one mentions that it's regulated so that the paternal allele is repressed, so the gene is maternally expressed).
Also seems it's been implicated as a tumor suppressor; though that's kinda irrelevant.
I do! It's that everyone has the gene, but those with a specific mutation (presumably causing loss of function) score lower on IQ test. So not having the gene expressed at all, would likely correlate with a much lower IQ still (well, among other things).
Slashdot Mirror
1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,
2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process,
3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?
Looks fairly non-leading to me.
If only that were true. Apparently some polls show pretty consistently, that about 10-15% of Americans think evolution is likely to be the explanation for the origin of humans; whereas about 40% take a literal reading of Biblical creation and the rest believe that evolution is directly guided by god.
I don't know how reliable this data is, I've seen a few similar studies from Gallup a couple of time, but nothing would make me happier than if someone can point me to a thorough debunking, because this makes me rather terrified.
I am taking a university-level evolutionary biology class right now; they just changed the syllabus last week to add a class that deals with this nonsense. Sure no one there takes it seriously, but there's still time spent talking about it, which in itself is just plain sad.
I was under the impression it was an ORM layer. Seems that by definition you can't have more than one framework in your project.
Isn't the whole point of TFA that this kind of false security is easily replicated by phishers?
Not enough to send you his credit card numbers or online banking login information.
While I agree with you, there's also something to be said for testing common configurations, the ones you would be likely to actually buy. Just because they could remove a discrepancy when testing, doesn't mean you'll be able to when buying the laptop.
I don't see your point. There is nothing technical or novel in this concept. I can understand the ubiquitous example grandparents being uneasy with the concept of online banking in general, but if they got that far, surely they can understand "Don't trust email."
There's no grey areas, there's no technical know-how involved, and no on-the-spot decision making skills are needed. You never trust email; nothing important from a financial institution is ever communicated solely by email. Period.
Well, yeah, why wouldn't you assume that? In fact, there's no need to examine it to try to prove otherwise, just go to your online banking site (which, it doesn't take a genius to bookmark when you sign up for it), if the bank wanted to tell you something, you'll be notified there too.
What, are you saying I should also assume that the letters I get telling me I won 10 million dollars are not real either?
Most Wrong. Reproductive Cycle. Ever.
All true, but the fact remains that the indigenous American civilizations went into a sharp (relatively speaking) decline 100-200 years before the Spanish got there. The area was significantly depopulated by Cortes' time; I believe there are several examples of cities whose population size wouldn't be matched again until early 19th century, being virtually deserted, long before any invaders looking for a "New World".
As far as I know, the reasons for this are still unknown - doesn't necessarily make it "mysterious", we just don't have the info.
Can mobs of various primitive, semi-sentient beings repeatedly defeat large imperial armies (presumably with state of the art training and equipment), by throwing random objects at them?
Can ships exploding in space not only make a lot of noise, but also not annihilate other ships in close proximity?
Can you really cover the same distance in varying numbers of parallax seconds?
Can all religion be explained with symbiotic micro-organisms?
It seems unlikely that a cannon would be the weapon of choice for a Jedi. And are you saying that the Jedi from the European Union don't use cannons?
Yeah, but if you track sand into them, you'll never get it out.
Sure, it's a sound theory, well, hypothsis. Whether it's "stupid" or not is not for me to judge, I am not a theoretical physicist. What bothers me is that it has not been tested in any meaningful way, it was invented to account for discrepancies in our understanding of physics and our observations of the universe; and yet so many people treat it as established fact.
Basic lesson: for every revolutionary new theory that works, there are a hundred that don't, and it can take a long time to decide which is which.
Exactly. And dark matter is just such a revolutionary new theory, it's no different from the article presented (apart from being around for 70-odd years with little to no progress to show for it).
It just seems odd to jump to the conclusion that the vast majority of the universe is composed of an unknown type of matter simply because we cannot reconcile our demonstrably poor understanding of physics, with our demonstrably poor ability to accuratley measure the universe as a whole.
I've never had any trouble overnighting and same-daying server parts; and in addition all the servers are parts and function interchangeable, so usually when something breaks I can either scavenge parts from something else, or move the service to a less used machine, and get the replacement parts in less than 12 hours.
I supposed there's cheaper options out there (actually, I'm less and less convinced of that), but Dell has been working very well for us.
I figured the two technologies were Google and Wikipedia...
I'm at the stage where I can't get past the significant whitespaciness of Python (even though it seems like a cool language).
The parentheses are what specifies the structure, the indentation is just a visual clue, no one is forced to keep both. If your structure is correct, any modern editor (or, failing that, *tidy) should be able to indent it for you.
That's the main issue, whitespace is more "fluid" than code, some people like tabs, some like spaces, some do 2, some 4, some 8. So not all tools, and especially not all people, are diligent in round-tripping the whitespace exactly as you gave it to them.
There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to do a 's/\s+/ /g' on my code (ignoring comments for a sec) and still have the editor format it properly for me.
I think it absolutely should, it's just that OS requirements should be far lower than what we are used to.
In the last episode, a large fly crawling around an open access panel short-circuits the cabin power supply, and they crash into the Moon.
Even if Wikipedia's only legacy is to get that through to people, I'd say it's a great success.
It's an information resource, not the guardian of truth; why does The Register think it so hilarious that readers shouldn't just believe what they see without question?
Maybe it would've been easier if it wasn't referred to as an encyclopedia in the first place? It's true that Wikipedia is not as good as "traditional" encyclopedias at being an encyclopedia, but it's much better at being what encyclopedias are supposed to be.
Oh and I actually read that whole rant - such passionate hatred, and for what? A way to share information? It's really hard to get where that's coming from (also the spelling and grammar leave a lot to be desired).
Could you provide a reference for this study that settled things with such finality?
It is pretty clear, according to the most modern research, that intelligence is solely determined by genetic makeup.
We are still talking about the same study, right?
It's pretty cutting edge research, so I am not surprised you weren't aware. It's ok.
No I do feel bad - I should've been aware that a study has been published that debunks virtually all previous studies on the subject and completely reverses our understanding of development and intelligence.
Yeah, no frikin' kidding - a growth factor receptor just might be related to development.
Here's a paper linking a mutation in IGF2R to differences in rate of growth and height from birth to 7 years. There's also a bunch of studies in mice regarding its imprinting and role in development (incidentally, one mentions that it's regulated so that the paternal allele is repressed, so the gene is maternally expressed).
Also seems it's been implicated as a tumor suppressor; though that's kinda irrelevant.
I do! It's that everyone has the gene, but those with a specific mutation (presumably causing loss of function) score lower on IQ test. So not having the gene expressed at all, would likely correlate with a much lower IQ still (well, among other things).
I'm guessing your girlfriend doesn't want for ammunition.
Oh, and why would you capitalize 'penis'?