Well, every time i see his name, I can't help thinking of Enderby - one of Burgess's best characters.
I can just imagine Enderle writing his articles, like Enderby and his poetry, sat on the toilet - perhaps that's where his shiny red notebook works best?
There's certainly enough crap in his writing to suggest a lavatorial source of inspiration...
I see an opportunity of an enterprising digital camera manufacturer here - Sony already do a DV camera that records to DVD - adding some tagging information (GPS coordinates + date/time + operators security code) to each image should be feasible, and given that one PD was saving $6000 per month in Polaroid costs, I'd have thought that even at $10K per throw, a high quality camera could be produced that would provide adequate traceability of the images taken.
I challenge you to find a single example of a mutation that has produced complexity that was not present is the organism's parent/s before the mutation.
There won't be one - the increase in complexity is gradual, over hundreds if not thousands of generations. I recommend you read Dawkins - his scenario for the creation of an eye should suffice to convince you that such an increase in complexity is indeed possible - small benefits, in large populations, over many generations, can and do add up to dramatic increases in complexity.
I still hold that evolution doesn't imply any increase in complexity - indeed, the human appendix is a perfect counterexample, showing that structures no longer needed can survive if they do not adversely affect the individual organism. The appendix evolved for a reason in our distant ancestors, it is a structure (complexity) that we no longer need, yet it is there.
Explain why a creator would put a useless and occasionally (but so occasional as to not cause evolutionary pressure for its elimination) dangerous extra piece of tubing in our bodies, if you will?
And I still maintain that creation is a myth - one believed by people three, four, maybe even five thousand years ago that were as bright as you or I, but who didn't have the benefit of a few thousand years of written knowledge to learn from.
It makes sense, but like I said in my original post, I'm a bit perverse - my opposition to theism makes me dislike any theory that allows the god-botherers a loophole to claim their nonsense is plausible.
If I could come up with a really good argument for a universe with a beginning that simultaneously made the idea of a god transparently irrelevant, then I'd accept the Big Bang as a point of departure.
But I dislike religion more than I like tidy theories, so I'll continue in my disputatious mode.
I'm not a scientist - just a networks guy who knows some stuff, so it's not going to stop me from advancing the cause of cosmology or anything;P.
rather than believing in the upward process of evolution that pushes towards better and better species
Where does evolution imply some teleological notion of progress?
All evolution (or the theory of natural selection as it should more properly be called) implies is that species evolve to be better fitted to their environment - if there's no intrinsic pressure to change, then a species will tend to stagnate - it is only environmental change that causes a species to adapt.
There really is no need to hypothesise a multitude of original forms - time and the changes in the environment over time are quite sufficient to account for all the forms we see today.
There's no reason to hang on to your creation myths any more - they are redundant and ultimately misguided, especially given your misunderstanding of evolution.
Evolution just means 'change over time' - this is undeniably true of all life that we know of, and says nothing about a creator of whatever sort.
Your assertion that it is mathematically improbable makes me want to sit you down with a flask of hot cocoa and Dawkins' 'The Blind Watchmaker', to show you the error of your ways.
The spontaneous creation of lifeforms (even unicellular) as they exist today is highly improbable, but given our knowledge that organisms change, adapt and become more complicated through natural selection, the gradual creation of unicellular life isn't so improbable, without the need for supernatural interference.
We know that amino acids in the presence of phosphates can form stable chains, and we know that these chains can attract and join together other amino acids to form enzyme-like structures.
We also know that the Earth is very, very old, and very, very big in terms of the number of molecules that are available for the generation of life.
It's exactly that - a self-contained system, independent of any assumed reality, relevant only to the human mind, but happily useful in the 'real world' (whatever form it happens to eventually take).
spread over around 10000 papers in various journals
Each one of which was peer-reviewed by competent referees, and then picked apart by the best brains in the field following publication.
And no - it's not the same as refereeing a scientific paper - each and every one of these pieces of work was looked at by a multitude (OK - up to 1,000 or so) of experts, and found to be logically sound.
I'll grant there is a finite probability of error, but it's about as probable that the classification of finite groups is wrong as it is that I am actually typing this from another planet via the soon-to-be-discovered Aethernet.
Yes - there's a lot of difficult mathematics out there, but it's all built piece by piece on simple sets of axioms, and checked and rechecked at each stage.
So I wouldn't worry yourself about mathematics being wrong - it's a completely self-contained system, and (Godel statements excepted) entirely based on valid provable statements.
Prefer - means (and here, meaning makes sense) that I find it intellectually more comfortable than the alternative, which is to believe in something with a beginning, which then tempts us to ask nonsensical questions about 'meaning' where none need exist - questions about meaning have validity only in reference to the acts and intentions of intelligent beings.
Now if you want to view the whole universe as an intellect of sorts, then that's up to you.
Myself, I ask 'what would a beginning imply' - and find the whole doctrine of first causes creeping into whatever scenario I can imagine.
The universe is wonderful enough without asking whether it means anything, and my atheism is of the sort that actively disapproves of theism, so any theory that removes one more of the theists planks is attractive to me.
Salt and pepper-haired myself, I still prefer Hoyle's advocation of a steady-state, infinite in both time and space universe - it attracts me philosophically as an atheist, since acceptance of the Big Bang requires the acceptance of a beginning, and invites awkward theological questions of the 'what made it happen' type.
A universe infinite in time and space is not susceptible to such questions from the God-botherers, no matter how many hoops we have to jump through to account for the Hubble constant, the microwave background, etc. etc.
But if you have read Kuhn, please make sure to read Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
One's no good without the other - Kuhn to give the social constructs that influence scientific discovery, Popper to provide a means of weeding out pseudosciences.
As an alternative, if you've not got time to read two books, just read The Making of Memory by Stephen Rose - it's an account of how science works, by a neuroscientist, for the general reader, and also a fascinating read (apologies to PETA / ALF types - this man cuts little fluffy chicks heads off in the interest of science. If you don't like it - tough).
Seems to me that now they're out of Symbian, they are a company w/out a product, since IIRC they announced that they were stopping making organisers a while back.
I think you've misread the CIA document - it doesn't give any figures for English, it merely highlights it as being 'important'.
I don't know what the figures are, either - but even if only 5% of Indians could speak English well, that's still 50 million - more than the number of British that can speak English well;).
It's more a question about the loss of educated people to the public sector, and how much this will cost in increased public sector wages in the future as wage levels rise to attract better candidates.
Not specifically about IT outsourcing, but more about call centre outsourcing - does the drain of educated people to call centres have any implications for the rest of the economy?
Call centre staff can earn more than teachers, police, nurses, etc - are those professions suffering as a result of the call centres picking out the English speakers?
Is this storing up problems for India's public sector in the future?
I think I know Dean's a dipshit, but don't know whether campaign ad spending influences the editorial decisions of the networks.;)
It's still the only bit of the article that made me stop and think about its implications, because we just don't get that sort of spending on UK elections (it's against the law, for one thing), so media sympathy is bought by good old-fashioned influence-peddling.
How come I've never heard of it happening before, then?
I've been around for nearly 40 years, and don't recall protestors being corralled on a regular basis ever coming to light before Bush.
You're right - I don't like him. But I didn't like Clinton either. I did, however, think Bush Sr was one of the better presidents your country has seen - pity he upset the Israelis by threatening to cut their aid if they didn't stop building settlements, or he might have been reelected.
I love it when I so obviously upset an authority-lover such as your good self - 'Clinton did it' has nothing to do with my point that it's just plain wrong, and as for the British protestors, this wasn't some bunch of anarchist fence-crashers, but a fair cross-section of respectable middle class Brits who just happened to object to our government following your village idiot like the poodles they are.
Please give me a grin with another half-assed response, Mr AC Asshat.
No - the real help is that being able to video the fibre formation helps in understanding the reaction dynamics, which is important.
This could lead to improvements in catalyst design, maybe to new methods of production with the sort of yield that will make these nanofibres economically viable.
Everywhere Bush goes, when people turn up to demonstrate against him, local law enforcement are told by the Secret Service to move the demonstrators to a 'protest zone' (conveniently out of the line of sight of the media, in most cases).
While not depriving people outright of their freedom of speech, in my book this counts as harrassment, and is probably unconstitutional as an unwarranted infringment of the peoples right to free expression.
And in the UK, protestors going to Lakenheath to protest the B52s had their buses turned round under a provision of the Terrorism Act, thus denying them the right to protest.
These are only a couple of examples that spring to mind - I'm sure if you like I can get you chapter and verse.
that the article put forward was that the media have a vested interest in seeing as much money as possible going into campaign advertising, and that they marginalise those candidates who fail to pay them by denying them news coverage.
How much of this is true, and how much Dean being an unattractive, unsympathetic dipshit of a candidate had to do with the lack of campaign coverage for him, we'll never know.
But for those of us cynical about politics, it's a good mini-conspiracy theory that campaign ad money could, in the worst of all possible worlds, buy news coverage for a candidate.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just imagine Enderle writing his articles, like Enderby and his poetry, sat on the toilet - perhaps that's where his shiny red notebook works best?
There's certainly enough crap in his writing to suggest a lavatorial source of inspiration...
There won't be one - the increase in complexity is gradual, over hundreds if not thousands of generations. I recommend you read Dawkins - his scenario for the creation of an eye should suffice to convince you that such an increase in complexity is indeed possible - small benefits, in large populations, over many generations, can and do add up to dramatic increases in complexity.
I still hold that evolution doesn't imply any increase in complexity - indeed, the human appendix is a perfect counterexample, showing that structures no longer needed can survive if they do not adversely affect the individual organism. The appendix evolved for a reason in our distant ancestors, it is a structure (complexity) that we no longer need, yet it is there.
Explain why a creator would put a useless and occasionally (but so occasional as to not cause evolutionary pressure for its elimination) dangerous extra piece of tubing in our bodies, if you will?
And I still maintain that creation is a myth - one believed by people three, four, maybe even five thousand years ago that were as bright as you or I, but who didn't have the benefit of a few thousand years of written knowledge to learn from.
If I could come up with a really good argument for a universe with a beginning that simultaneously made the idea of a god transparently irrelevant, then I'd accept the Big Bang as a point of departure.
But I dislike religion more than I like tidy theories, so I'll continue in my disputatious mode.
I'm not a scientist - just a networks guy who knows some stuff, so it's not going to stop me from advancing the cause of cosmology or anything ;P.
Where does evolution imply some teleological notion of progress?
All evolution (or the theory of natural selection as it should more properly be called) implies is that species evolve to be better fitted to their environment - if there's no intrinsic pressure to change, then a species will tend to stagnate - it is only environmental change that causes a species to adapt.
There really is no need to hypothesise a multitude of original forms - time and the changes in the environment over time are quite sufficient to account for all the forms we see today.
There's no reason to hang on to your creation myths any more - they are redundant and ultimately misguided, especially given your misunderstanding of evolution.
Evolution just means 'change over time' - this is undeniably true of all life that we know of, and says nothing about a creator of whatever sort.
Your assertion that it is mathematically improbable makes me want to sit you down with a flask of hot cocoa and Dawkins' 'The Blind Watchmaker', to show you the error of your ways.
The spontaneous creation of lifeforms (even unicellular) as they exist today is highly improbable, but given our knowledge that organisms change, adapt and become more complicated through natural selection, the gradual creation of unicellular life isn't so improbable, without the need for supernatural interference.
We know that amino acids in the presence of phosphates can form stable chains, and we know that these chains can attract and join together other amino acids to form enzyme-like structures.
We also know that the Earth is very, very old, and very, very big in terms of the number of molecules that are available for the generation of life.
Ah - stuff it - just go and read Dawkins.
Head.
Hit.
It's exactly that - a self-contained system, independent of any assumed reality, relevant only to the human mind, but happily useful in the 'real world' (whatever form it happens to eventually take).
You lucky bastard - we had Euclid's Elements to plough through as 13 year olds at school.
I repeat - you lucky, lucky, Cartesian bastard.
Still, it made all the rest (yes - even Riemann spaces) seem easy afterwards...
Each one of which was peer-reviewed by competent referees, and then picked apart by the best brains in the field following publication.
And no - it's not the same as refereeing a scientific paper - each and every one of these pieces of work was looked at by a multitude (OK - up to 1,000 or so) of experts, and found to be logically sound.
I'll grant there is a finite probability of error, but it's about as probable that the classification of finite groups is wrong as it is that I am actually typing this from another planet via the soon-to-be-discovered Aethernet.
Yes - there's a lot of difficult mathematics out there, but it's all built piece by piece on simple sets of axioms, and checked and rechecked at each stage.
So I wouldn't worry yourself about mathematics being wrong - it's a completely self-contained system, and (Godel statements excepted) entirely based on valid provable statements.
Now if you want to view the whole universe as an intellect of sorts, then that's up to you.
Myself, I ask 'what would a beginning imply' - and find the whole doctrine of first causes creeping into whatever scenario I can imagine.
The universe is wonderful enough without asking whether it means anything, and my atheism is of the sort that actively disapproves of theism, so any theory that removes one more of the theists planks is attractive to me.
I'm reading the presentation at the moment, but my math's a bit rusty (20 years rusty, if truth be told), so I can't comment on it.
A universe infinite in time and space is not susceptible to such questions from the God-botherers, no matter how many hoops we have to jump through to account for the Hubble constant, the microwave background, etc. etc.
But then I'm just perverse ;)
One's no good without the other - Kuhn to give the social constructs that influence scientific discovery, Popper to provide a means of weeding out pseudosciences.
As an alternative, if you've not got time to read two books, just read The Making of Memory by Stephen Rose - it's an account of how science works, by a neuroscientist, for the general reader, and also a fascinating read (apologies to PETA / ALF types - this man cuts little fluffy chicks heads off in the interest of science. If you don't like it - tough).
Seems to me that now they're out of Symbian, they are a company w/out a product, since IIRC they announced that they were stopping making organisers a while back.
I don't know what the figures are, either - but even if only 5% of Indians could speak English well, that's still 50 million - more than the number of British that can speak English well ;).
It's more a question about the loss of educated people to the public sector, and how much this will cost in increased public sector wages in the future as wage levels rise to attract better candidates.
Thanks for the link, though.
Call centre staff can earn more than teachers, police, nurses, etc - are those professions suffering as a result of the call centres picking out the English speakers?
Is this storing up problems for India's public sector in the future?
Never take anything I say on politics seriously - it's the one subject where I feel able to indulge my under-the-bridge trollish nature.
It's still the only bit of the article that made me stop and think about its implications, because we just don't get that sort of spending on UK elections (it's against the law, for one thing), so media sympathy is bought by good old-fashioned influence-peddling.
How come I've never heard of it happening before, then?
I've been around for nearly 40 years, and don't recall protestors being corralled on a regular basis ever coming to light before Bush.
You're right - I don't like him. But I didn't like Clinton either. I did, however, think Bush Sr was one of the better presidents your country has seen - pity he upset the Israelis by threatening to cut their aid if they didn't stop building settlements, or he might have been reelected.
Please give me a grin with another half-assed response, Mr AC Asshat.
This could lead to improvements in catalyst design, maybe to new methods of production with the sort of yield that will make these nanofibres economically viable.
Well done the Danes, I say.
Everywhere Bush goes, when people turn up to demonstrate against him, local law enforcement are told by the Secret Service to move the demonstrators to a 'protest zone' (conveniently out of the line of sight of the media, in most cases).
While not depriving people outright of their freedom of speech, in my book this counts as harrassment, and is probably unconstitutional as an unwarranted infringment of the peoples right to free expression.
And in the UK, protestors going to Lakenheath to protest the B52s had their buses turned round under a provision of the Terrorism Act, thus denying them the right to protest.
These are only a couple of examples that spring to mind - I'm sure if you like I can get you chapter and verse.
How much of this is true, and how much Dean being an unattractive, unsympathetic dipshit of a candidate had to do with the lack of campaign coverage for him, we'll never know.
But for those of us cynical about politics, it's a good mini-conspiracy theory that campaign ad money could, in the worst of all possible worlds, buy news coverage for a candidate.