As I recall Asimov's robots ended up becoming hidden figures using Hari Seldon's psychohistorical methods to guide humanity to a better society with minimal interference. That's something of a far cry from running amok and destroying humanity.
None of the questions asked about 100% certainty. They asked how confident the respondents were that particular propositions were true, ranging from "Not at all confident" to "Extremely/very confident"; I think most scientists in the relevant fields would be able and willing to answer them as they were put.
Our problems are traditional and societal, not legislative and institutional. The CofE gets to appoint Lords; imagine if the Baptist Church got to directly appoint a number of Senators! Faith schools are also directly supported by tax monies in the UK.
Mammon on the other hand he doesn't serve either. He could make a lot more money than he does, but he often waives speaking fees and he donates to charities. Simply making a good living, even a very good living, is not the same as worshipping money.
Dawkins isn't primarily trying to convert believers into atheists; he's trying to level the playing field so that it is as acceptable to criticise or even mock a religious or otherwise superstitious belief as it is to criticise or mock a political belief or any other kind. He is also trying to raise opposition to the institutional legislative advantages religion, particularly the Church of England, has in government, such as the seats in the House of Lords which are automatically assigned to CoE bishops, and to end the practice of governmental support of faith schools.
He's also made it quite plain that he doesn't dislike "religious people" in general - he is in fact close personal friends with many, including prominent bishops and other clerics.
Yes, it's actually considered a positive thing (not a "commandment" but more along the lines of a mitzvah) among LaVeyan Satanists to mock any and all dogmas in the world, as I understand it.
No, I think you're straw-manning their view, though not necessarily deliberately. The ones I've spoken to are quite serious about their philosophy, not just poking fun at Christianity (though there's a little bit of that too). They also don't worship Satan in quite the same sense; the Satan figure is overtly symbolic, not taken to be a literal personality as the Christian deity is.
It's a bit weird and to my point of view unnecessarily so, but they do seem to be mostly serious. They're not (at least for the most part) a joke religion along the lines of Pastafarianism; it's a bit more nuanced than that.
True. I was replying to the comment that the 9/11 type attack couldn't be done today. That simply isn't true; perhaps the security theater has done something after all, if it has given people that much of a false sense of security.
The fortified cockpit door doesn't help if the pilot or copilot employed by the airline is the terrorist. He kills the other occupant of the cockpit, if necessary, and flies the plane into the target. The passengers, even if they realize what's going on, can't do anything about it because they're locked out of the cockpit.
The changes make it more difficult. They don't make it impossible.
The British Medical Journals do a spoofy article around Christmas every year, in which they pick an absurd subject and whomp up serious-looking studies on them. They do it at Christmas I guess because April 1st is just so obvious.
Examples include
"Longevity of screenwriters who win an academy award: longitudinal study" BMJ 2001;323:1491,
"Ice cream evoked headaches (ICE-H) study: randomised trial of accelerated versus cautious ice cream eating regimen" BMJ 2002;325:1445,
"How long did their hearts go on? A Titanic study" BMJ 2003;327:1457,
"The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute" BMJ 2005;331:1498.
This article would fit right in to that tradition.
This is useful for looking at close up stuff if you're nearsighted (it's equivalent to magnifying the image from what it would be), and also for conveying disbelief that someone made a dumb comment or asked a question whose answer should be obvious. This withering facial expression is only available to the bespectacled.
It doesn't matter whether I have personally done any particular experiment; science is not the sum of the results obtained, it is a way of finding things out; gather data, test hypotheses, form a falsifiable theory, design and perform experiments to either support the theory or require its modification or outright dismissal.
Religions, on the other hand, rely upon dogma. They posit a particular set of assumptions, but do not allow for their falsification, and frequently do not even allow followers to ask the question. If evidence arises that contradicts the assumptions, where science would toss out or modify the theory religions either flatly deny the facts, or they dodge and squirm and move goalposts to try and fudge the contradiction.
Science can be applied to religious beliefs. It can be tested, for example, whether being prayed for improves the outcomes of patients undergoing medical procedures. The true difference between science and religion is that when this is done, as it has been, and the results come in, if the scientists get an unexpected result (the prayed-for do significantly better, or indeed worse) they say "Huh, we should make sure this is right, and if it is we will have to adjust our theories."
Conversely, if the religious get an answer they weren't expecting (prayer makes no significant difference at all) they will cast about for excuses and insist that their original idea still holds true, as in "It seems like.prayer didn't make a difference, but that's because it's God's way of testing us, and He held back on the miracles because we weren't showing enough faith."
As long as you're referring to a Boston and a London on the same land mass (there are several cities of each name) you could indeed walk from one to the other. It would take you a while, but it's perfectly possible to walk from London, Ontario to Boston, Massachusetts.
If your point is that you can't *walk* from London, England to Boston, Massachusetts, as distinguished from travelling via other transportation or walking an equivalent distance, that's because there's an ocean in the way which will interfere with the process of walking.
Unless there's an equivalent interference with the processes of "micro-evolution" that prevents it from happening over long periods of time (i.e. prevents the genetic differences from accumulating) then it will become "macro-evolution" once enough genetic differences accumulate to make two populations mutually infertile and thereby fully speciated.
That's a positive claim, and just as you would have to demonstrate an ocean or something else that interferes with walking to say "it's impossible to walk from Boston to London" you would have to demonstrate that something prevents the "micro-evolutionary" changes from accumulating to that extent to say that "macro-evolution" is impossible, or distinct from "micro-evolution" in its process.
Well, you have to admit that the hereditary aristocracies of his time would never dream of using their positions of wealth and power just to crassly get more for themselves like those damn commoners. Oh, wait...
Yes, multimedia smartphone is what I meant. There were many PDA type phones about that were billed as smartphones (in fact I had one); I should have been more specific. Point taken!
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As I recall Asimov's robots ended up becoming hidden figures using Hari Seldon's psychohistorical methods to guide humanity to a better society with minimal interference. That's something of a far cry from running amok and destroying humanity.
It certainly would have helped if he'd published it a couple of months ago.
What I don't get is why a five-a-day product is sold by the dozen.
None of the questions asked about 100% certainty. They asked how confident the respondents were that particular propositions were true, ranging from "Not at all confident" to "Extremely/very confident"; I think most scientists in the relevant fields would be able and willing to answer them as they were put.
"You know you've stayed too long when you start using the customer's calendar system." - Qeng Ho proverb
Our problems are traditional and societal, not legislative and institutional. The CofE gets to appoint Lords; imagine if the Baptist Church got to directly appoint a number of Senators! Faith schools are also directly supported by tax monies in the UK.
Mammon on the other hand he doesn't serve either. He could make a lot more money than he does, but he often waives speaking fees and he donates to charities. Simply making a good living, even a very good living, is not the same as worshipping money.
Dawkins isn't primarily trying to convert believers into atheists; he's trying to level the playing field so that it is as acceptable to criticise or even mock a religious or otherwise superstitious belief as it is to criticise or mock a political belief or any other kind. He is also trying to raise opposition to the institutional legislative advantages religion, particularly the Church of England, has in government, such as the seats in the House of Lords which are automatically assigned to CoE bishops, and to end the practice of governmental support of faith schools.
He's also made it quite plain that he doesn't dislike "religious people" in general - he is in fact close personal friends with many, including prominent bishops and other clerics.
Yes, it's actually considered a positive thing (not a "commandment" but more along the lines of a mitzvah) among LaVeyan Satanists to mock any and all dogmas in the world, as I understand it.
No, I think you're straw-manning their view, though not necessarily deliberately. The ones I've spoken to are quite serious about their philosophy, not just poking fun at Christianity (though there's a little bit of that too). They also don't worship Satan in quite the same sense; the Satan figure is overtly symbolic, not taken to be a literal personality as the Christian deity is.
It's a bit weird and to my point of view unnecessarily so, but they do seem to be mostly serious. They're not (at least for the most part) a joke religion along the lines of Pastafarianism; it's a bit more nuanced than that.
It's funny because it's true. I was dead serious, it works for me.
Nah. Buy good tools, crap tools are an invitation to frustration.
To avoid pilferage, paint them pink, and optionally add a little glitter as well.
His stuff is dark, complex, deep (no pun intended), and philosophically best described as brutally objective.
You can download just about all his backlist for free from his blog at rifters.com too.
^This.
I'd like to see some public questioning of these ”other methods” but I don't suppose that will happen until they fail.
True. I was replying to the comment that the 9/11 type attack couldn't be done today. That simply isn't true; perhaps the security theater has done something after all, if it has given people that much of a false sense of security.
The fortified cockpit door doesn't help if the pilot or copilot employed by the airline is the terrorist. He kills the other occupant of the cockpit, if necessary, and flies the plane into the target. The passengers, even if they realize what's going on, can't do anything about it because they're locked out of the cockpit.
The changes make it more difficult. They don't make it impossible.
The British Medical Journals do a spoofy article around Christmas every year, in which they pick an absurd subject and whomp up serious-looking studies on them. They do it at Christmas I guess because April 1st is just so obvious.
Examples include
This article would fit right in to that tradition.
Binary is the way to go; it is the only irreducible base system.
This is useful for looking at close up stuff if you're nearsighted (it's equivalent to magnifying the image from what it would be), and also for conveying disbelief that someone made a dumb comment or asked a question whose answer should be obvious. This withering facial expression is only available to the bespectacled.
It doesn't matter whether I have personally done any particular experiment; science is not the sum of the results obtained, it is a way of finding things out; gather data, test hypotheses, form a falsifiable theory, design and perform experiments to either support the theory or require its modification or outright dismissal.
Religions, on the other hand, rely upon dogma. They posit a particular set of assumptions, but do not allow for their falsification, and frequently do not even allow followers to ask the question. If evidence arises that contradicts the assumptions, where science would toss out or modify the theory religions either flatly deny the facts, or they dodge and squirm and move goalposts to try and fudge the contradiction.
Science can be applied to religious beliefs. It can be tested, for example, whether being prayed for improves the outcomes of patients undergoing medical procedures. The true difference between science and religion is that when this is done, as it has been, and the results come in, if the scientists get an unexpected result (the prayed-for do significantly better, or indeed worse) they say "Huh, we should make sure this is right, and if it is we will have to adjust our theories."
Conversely, if the religious get an answer they weren't expecting (prayer makes no significant difference at all) they will cast about for excuses and insist that their original idea still holds true, as in "It seems like.prayer didn't make a difference, but that's because it's God's way of testing us, and He held back on the miracles because we weren't showing enough faith."
As long as you're referring to a Boston and a London on the same land mass (there are several cities of each name) you could indeed walk from one to the other. It would take you a while, but it's perfectly possible to walk from London, Ontario to Boston, Massachusetts.
If your point is that you can't *walk* from London, England to Boston, Massachusetts, as distinguished from travelling via other transportation or walking an equivalent distance, that's because there's an ocean in the way which will interfere with the process of walking.
Unless there's an equivalent interference with the processes of "micro-evolution" that prevents it from happening over long periods of time (i.e. prevents the genetic differences from accumulating) then it will become "macro-evolution" once enough genetic differences accumulate to make two populations mutually infertile and thereby fully speciated.
That's a positive claim, and just as you would have to demonstrate an ocean or something else that interferes with walking to say "it's impossible to walk from Boston to London" you would have to demonstrate that something prevents the "micro-evolutionary" changes from accumulating to that extent to say that "macro-evolution" is impossible, or distinct from "micro-evolution" in its process.
Well, you have to admit that the hereditary aristocracies of his time would never dream of using their positions of wealth and power just to crassly get more for themselves like those damn commoners. Oh, wait...
Yes, multimedia smartphone is what I meant. There were many PDA type phones about that were billed as smartphones (in fact I had one); I should have been more specific. Point taken!
She always reminds me that you can't say 4G without orgy.