I think the perception is that if you are caught with open source code in your application, then you run the risk of having to make it completely open source, no if ands, or buts.
However, if you are caught with regular proprietary code, you would be able to negotiate some licensing deal with the owner(s) of that code.
I think that may be the perception, however it is ridiculous.
One wonders why Bush bothered to pledge that US citizens would never be spied on in the first place.
He was telling us what we wanted to hear. If he told us the truth, there would have been a public outcry, a congressional investigation, and they would have shutdown, or seriously hampered, the program. By just telling us what we wanted to hear, he got a pass for two or three more years, perhaps more.
See how that works? You can't trust what they say. You have to investigate and hold them accountable.
I say just juggle some identities, as a good compromise.
In Facebook, I make sure that everything I put on there is above board. That doesn't stop a buddy posting a photo of me puking my guts out, but that's a risk inherent of Facebook.
For message boards, newsgroups, and purely text-based avenues, I have a few different usernames that I use, and I make sure certain areas of my life never overlap. I think really the only way someone could link my various usernames would be to have a database of all message groups everywhere, do an analysis of the writing styles to develop a language signature, and then match those against all other language signatures in the database. Or, hopefully match odd clues about my identity I might throw out, such as what state I live in, where I went to school, what language I know...
I suppose TIA or the CIA is already working on such a database, but I don't figure I'm really a challenge for them -- I just want to baffle corporate HR people when I'm applying for a job, or the professional "online background" checkers they might hire.
I don't know that Dark Matter is evenly distributed. But if it were, I don't think it would warp light. It would be like a smooth pane of glass -- it doesn't warp light because it's even. If it were lumpy, then it might -- like a warped pane of glass. If dark matter is evenly distributed, it would affect light the same across the board -- and then there wouldn't be any difference in any light anywhere for us to see an effect.
But also, I think you have to have a lot of gravitational pull to warp light. AFAIK, it only happens with really big stars. I don't know if there's enough dark matter to warp light to a noticeable effect, on the level of gravitational lensing.
Dark Matter is not an aether. It's a very simple proposition:
All dark matter does is weigh. It doesn't reflect light; it doesn't interact with any other particles. All it does is exert gravitational attraction. Now, think about that for a moment. Suppose such a stuff as dark matter, which only exerts gravitational attraction, but has no other observable phenomena, actually existed. How would we come to know about it? What phenomena would we be observing that would indicate the existance of such a stuff? Only one: mass -- and nothing else.
All that we know about the universe is that there is missing mass. We've measured all the mass from everything that can be observed and we've come up short. We've accounted for every 'thing' we can observe and it doesn't weigh enough. So therefore, there is something out there that weighs, but doesn't generate any other observable phenomena -- it doesn't emit light nor does it crash into anything. It just weighs. That's all it is -- weight alone.
When it comes to elections the most important thing is that people have faith in the vote. Computers have never, and will never be able to provide this.
I believe that there is a way to do elections in a more secure way than just pen, paper, and ballot box. I doesn't necessarily involve computers, but it does involve math -- the kind of math that having a computer do would make the process phenomenally more easy. Encryption type stuff.
The basic problem is you want your vote to be private, yet anonymously totaled into the grand tally. Vote by mail fails this, because you boss can call you into his/her office to 'go over' your ballot before you mail it. If you can verify your vote in the tally after you've voted, your boss can still review it with you. And, of course, the biggest problem, you don't know if *your* vote is in the tally. Even if you saw the complete tally, and saw a ballot that matched your votes exactly, you couldn't know if it was yours or someone else's. And, as you know, the problem with computers counting the votes is that they can eat votes, forget votes, disappear votes, flip votes, and keep totally separate tallies of votes -- one to assure voters that their vote was counted, another to ensure that the 'right' candidate wins.
So the three goals you want to assure is that you can vote privately, you can know that your vote is in the official tally, and that the tallying cannot be compromised. Well, that was the easy part. Now comes the hard part.
I'm trying to hatch an idea of a completely secure voting process, based on some kind of math. The entire tally is an encrypted string, and each ballot is somehow encryptically added to the tally. Each poll worker has their own encrypted tally string. The poll worker hands the ballot of to a voter, who then adds their encrypted ballot to the encrypted tally. The voter then hands the encrypted tally back to the poll worker. Because it's encrypted, the vote is anonymous. Because at one point the voter has the tally in their hot little hands, they can be assured that their vote is actually in the encrypted tally.
At the end of the election, all the poll workers pool their tallies, which are mathemagically added together when they are pooled. This process keeps bubbling up until all of the encrypted tallies are added together, until all tallies are accounted for, and we know the winners.
The encrypted string is all of the votes, tallied, so there's no time wasted counting. They're already added up.
Obviously, the magic here is the math involved in creating these encrypted tally strings, but think my idea can at least be a launching pad towards something that actually works.
On an unrelated (sort of) note, somebody at my university received a notice that they were engaged in copyright infringement, came to the computer center and asked what they had done -- they didn't even know what it meant to download music or movies. Or so they claimed.
Did the study measure lightness or whiteness of the avatar? The article says "darker-skinned", but I wonder if people are more likely to help a whiter avatar - say, a gray avatar over a light-green skinned avatar.
Of course, I have no way of knowing if this was typical of him or just an overlook on his part.
Well, you do have a way of knowing -- you could read what I wrote. First, I said that he was a good science teacher -- okay, maybe I have a warped view of what a good science teacher is. Second, I said that "[h]e spent half a class one day " ( 22 minutes out of a 45 minute class period ) -- but maybe you misread that as "half the class", meaning half the total semester of class time .
But if you're taking my word for it that this guy existed and even taught a class, why would you doubt the rest of my story? Why would you believe one part of my story but not the whole story? You don't think there can be creationist teachers that can still teach good science classes? They're all raging, proselytizing evangelicals?
Science dictates you take the simpler answer - the one that doesn't require a certain set of environmental conditions that can exist naturally *and* a man in a white coat to actually provide them (a rather massive, additional variable in the equation).
I believe Einstein said it best: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." I suggest you take this to heart, as I'll show you:
People of a certain bent might see evidence for Creationism, but that simply means they are not following the principles of science, in that instance.
Suppose I were thinking logically, and were asked to draw a conclusion about evidence of abiogensis or intelligence creation when presented with the thought experiment of a scientist who created an organism in a test tube. The only evidence of non-reproductive biogenesis we have is what the scientist created; note that we have no evidence of spontaneous biogenesis from non-living material, except that which came from human intervention. We suppose that life originated on Earth at some point, but we don't have any evidence whatsoever of how it did so originally; it may have spontaneously generated, it may have been introduced by intelligent space aliens, it may have arisen from a space-faring spore, or it may have been molded from clay by the hand of God. But nobody was around to observe it, so we have no evidence about the genesis of life on Earth. So, the only evidence we have for the genesis of life, at least in this thought experiment, is that a human being was required to create it -- after all, we don't see it popping up out of dirt, do we? No, the only genesis of life that comes not from re-production was the artificial creation by a human being.
So, if you say that life can arise on its own, without descending from existing life, you would be arguing a position with no evidence. In Einstein's terms, you've made it too simple. But to argue a position that life can be created by a human being, or an intelligent being in general, is to take a position with evidence, as in the case of our thought experiment.
If we suspect that life may arise without intelligent interference, we have no evidence for our suspicions, but it we suspect that life requires intelligent interference, we do have evidence of that when a scientist creates life.
The theory could withstand those lines of inquiry if those students were given the theory. Instead they're given a tiny, perhaps broken, subset of the theory. Then they're told a larger, more elaborate crackpot theory and given "evidence" to support that theory.
The students *were* given the theory. ( What theory are we taking about here, anyway? Big Bang? Evolution? We were taught all of that). We weren't told a larger crackpot theory. We were just given some questions that seemed not to make sense, like who do we know that the source of radioative dating material was all undecayed at the time of formation.
Perhaps they learn a tiny bit of critical thinking in discarding the "conventional" theory,
Perhaps!? We spend the whole friggin' semester on it!
but at the cost of incorrect knowledge.
If you think the scientific method gives incorrect knowledge, well.. what exactly are you trying to argue here? That we don't know anything, not even in science?
When asked "where did the big bang come from?" the scientist should reply "we're working on it, here's what we know and think so far..."
You misunderstand the theory of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is the ultimate origin, the beginning of time and space itself. There was nothing before the Big Bang, because all matter and space ultimately originated at the Big Bang. In fact, there wasn't even a before the Big Bang -- time itself originated then, too!
Here's what wikipedia says:
"In 1931 Lemaître went further and suggested that the evident expansion in forward time required that the universe contracted backwards in time, and would continue to do so until it could contract no further, bringing all the mass of the universe into a single point, a "primeval atom", at a point in time before which time and space did not exist. As such, at this point, the fabric of time and space had not yet come into existence."
So, the Big Bang didn't "come from" anywhere. It's an ultimate origin, just like a Creator God.
Most creationists are radical monotheists, although they may not be able to argue the position well. Check out Maimonides' _Guide for the Perplexed_ for a good understanding of radical monotheism. An unchanging, omnipotent, omniscient God has no beginning nor no end; therefore, the question of "Where did God come from" is non-sensical. The God that creationists suppose transcends time.
Additionally, creationism is when God is required, so while it's not either, it does demonstrate that God is not required to form a living organism from non-living raw materials.
Gotta disagree with you there. It does not demonstrate that God is not required. You haven't shown that God was present or not present during the synthesizing of life, so therefore you can't say that God wasn't there doing some necessary mojo that only he could do when the scientists mixed the right chemicals together.
Bullshit. He was the best science teacher there. He taught his students more about science, real science, than any of the other teachers. He got them to think, got them doing experiments, and got them to learn, using the scientific method. You're trolling.
Did he ask you to question gravity?
Of course he did, just like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein did. If you think science is about accepted wisdom versus questions, observations, and experiments, *you* need to go back to high school science class, 'cause you didn't learn a damn thing about science.
Instead, he tried to trick you and his other students.
How is posing a question 'tricking' anybody? If the scientific method really does work ( and I believe that it does ), then you *can't* trick anybody who's learned it.
...and using that authority to try and indoctrinate a bunch of naive kids into your cult through deception is not what I would call 'good'.
More bullshit. I don't know who're you're railing against, but it isn't good old Mr. D.
Unless you answer where god came from then I don't think you have answered anything.
If the question is "Where did we come from?" and the 'truth' really is "God created us", then he has answered the question. You're moving the goalpost in this case.
It's like a creationist asking a scientist, "Where did we come from?" "The Big Bang." "OK, where did the Big Bang come from? If you can't answer that, then you're just moving the problem around, and you haven't actually answered anything."
Or more simply, if you're asking where cars come from, an appropriate answer is Detroit. You don't have to say where Detroit came from, or how steel gets made. The question has been answered. If you want an answer, good or bad, about ultimate origins, make sure you ask that question.
Thanks for the answer. I'd always wondered about that one.
The disappointing thing is that your science teacher was spreading doubt on the subject when the answers were out there to be found. When a vast number of scientists say it's true, "I don't think it's right" is not a valid answer unless you've got a PhD. He may not have been spreading religion, but he was spreading doubt about a well-founded science, as if the scientists themselves were ignorant of it. They are not, and it's extremely bad form to imply that they are.
I'm a scientifically-minded skeptic, but I gotta say I disagree with you 100% here. I think that the essence of science is doubt, skepticism, and inquiry. These theories are not so fragile that we have to protect them with a shield of awe. If the science is well-founded, then it should be able to clear these hurdles easily. It should be able to withstand the most withering lines of inquiry -- And it does.
If you teach kids to blindly accept what "the authorities" tell you, whether those authorities are the Bible, or well-respected grey-bearded scientists, then you will get adults who accept whatever the authorities tell them -- in other words, people who can't be scientists, because they don't know how to think for themselves, and therefore can't use the scientific method.
When we teach science, we shouldn't say "Believe this because a bunch of scientists believe in it!". Instead, we should teach them to ask questions, develop a hypothesis, and think about ways to prove or disprove it. When they're old enough, they should be doing experiements. Think, ask questions, make observations, and do experiments to test your theories. That is science, not the consensus of elites.
I'll tell you what questions this "raises" -- but prepare to be dissapointed. I had a high-school science teacher, who was a great teacher, but was a creationist. Yes, he really was a great science teacher. He spent half a class one day explaining "questions"* about cosmology and creationism. He didn't proselytize, didn't say that he had the answers, or that the Bible did. He just asked some questions that got the students thinking. IMHO, I think that's good -- though questions early on are like inoculations of skepticism. And, there are good, scientific answers that sufficiently motivated students looked up ( this was before widespread internet)
Anywho, one of the questions was something like "Suppose a scientist creates life from scratch in a test tube. Is that evidence of abiogenesis, or creationism?" One answer, that most scientifically minded people choose, is that the scientist isn't doing anything that couldn't have happened in nature without the scientist, so therefore it's evidence of abiogenesis. Other people, those more creation minded, say that an intelligent being, in this case a scientist, created life from raw materials, so therefore, its evidence that life is created by intelligence.
Please, don't shoot, I'm just the messenger. You're asking what questions would be raised, I'm telling you the questions that people get out of this.
* He also posed another question about radiometric dating of rocks that I never got a satisfactory answer for. For instance, say they date some rocks, and there is 0.03% lead to uranium, or some such ratio, and therefor the rock is X million years old. How do we know that when the rock was originally formed, it was 100% uranium in the sample that we are now taking from the rock? If a rock cools from molten lava, aren't active and decayed isotopes mixed together, thus throwing off the dating scales based on that ratio?
SINEs and LINEs do nothing - they only propagate themselves.
C'mon -- you don't really know that they do nothing. Perhaps they're useful when winiding DNA into chromosomes, or have some larger scale structural purpose, rather than just coding genes.
"With about 1 million copies, SINEs make up about 13% of the human genome.[8] While previously believed to be "junk DNA", recent research suggests that both LINEs and SINEs have a significant role in gene evolution, structure and transcription levels[9]. The distribution of these elements has been implicated in some genetic diseases and cancers."
"The energy dissipated during the fall is about 250 or 300 GJ, and the leftover energy at impact is about 600 GJ. So it's about a quarter kiloton of TNT for the North tower and about a fifth of a kiloton for the South tower; that's still a hell of a lot of energy, more than sufficient to liquefy a pretty healthy chunk of steel, and it doesn't change the fact that there's a lot more energy in the office contents."
Sorry, I'm a critical minded skeptic. Show me the equation.
Others have suspected tactical nukes, from the evidence of melted cars that had nothing fall on them.
Please! Have you ever seen a nuclear detonation?
Have you ever seen a detonation of a tactical nuke? I haven't, and neither have you.
Show me the equations ( meaning, show me the work, not just the results ) and I'll start listening to you. I haven't seen any conventional theory yet that explains the amount of heat.
It also answers the idiot who thinks that just because the structure below the falling floors was intact, that it would have stopped the collapse. Hint: objects falling onto other objects is work (in the physics sense) and generates heat.
Falling objects generate that much heat?
I doubt it. If that were true, then whenever a plane falls out of the sky, there should be no wreckage, just blobs of molten metal and incenerated organic material. Or if you dropped a penny from a tall building. Is it the mass or acceleration that generates the heat? What is the formula?
Except that there was no evidence of thermite/thermate found at the site
No evidence of *anything* was found, because no investigation was done. All the steel beam evidence was shipped to China to be recycled.
"This is how it's been since day one...and this is six weeks later. As we get closer to the center of this it gets hotter and hotter - it's probably 1500 degrees."
OK, 1.5 months later, and it's still 1500 degrees. jet fuel and offices only burn at 600 F. What process created enough heat to get the steel temperatures to over 2500 degrees? Remember, you can't 'concentrate' heat. A heated element will get get hotter than the heat source.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the perception is that if you are caught with open source code in your application, then you run the risk of having to make it completely open source, no if ands, or buts.
However, if you are caught with regular proprietary code, you would be able to negotiate some licensing deal with the owner(s) of that code.
I think that may be the perception, however it is ridiculous.
Damn, I wish there was some kind of prize or trophy that slashdot offered for a poster who has the decency to accept when a poster calls them out.
:)
You, sir, are a member of a very select group
One wonders why Bush bothered to pledge that US citizens would never be spied on in the first place.
He was telling us what we wanted to hear. If he told us the truth, there would have been a public outcry, a congressional investigation, and they would have shutdown, or seriously hampered, the program. By just telling us what we wanted to hear, he got a pass for two or three more years, perhaps more.
See how that works? You can't trust what they say. You have to investigate and hold them accountable.
I say just juggle some identities, as a good compromise.
In Facebook, I make sure that everything I put on there is above board. That doesn't stop a buddy posting a photo of me puking my guts out, but that's a risk inherent of Facebook.
For message boards, newsgroups, and purely text-based avenues, I have a few different usernames that I use, and I make sure certain areas of my life never overlap. I think really the only way someone could link my various usernames would be to have a database of all message groups everywhere, do an analysis of the writing styles to develop a language signature, and then match those against all other language signatures in the database. Or, hopefully match odd clues about my identity I might throw out, such as what state I live in, where I went to school, what language I know...
I suppose TIA or the CIA is already working on such a database, but I don't figure I'm really a challenge for them -- I just want to baffle corporate HR people when I'm applying for a job, or the professional "online background" checkers they might hire.
You'd rather it be a secret department?
Their index wasn't that great at the beginning?
First off, I'm not a scientist.
I don't know that Dark Matter is evenly distributed. But if it were, I don't think it would warp light. It would be like a smooth pane of glass -- it doesn't warp light because it's even. If it were lumpy, then it might -- like a warped pane of glass. If dark matter is evenly distributed, it would affect light the same across the board -- and then there wouldn't be any difference in any light anywhere for us to see an effect.
But also, I think you have to have a lot of gravitational pull to warp light. AFAIK, it only happens with really big stars. I don't know if there's enough dark matter to warp light to a noticeable effect, on the level of gravitational lensing.
Dark Matter is not an aether. It's a very simple proposition:
All dark matter does is weigh. It doesn't reflect light; it doesn't interact with any other particles. All it does is exert gravitational attraction. Now, think about that for a moment. Suppose such a stuff as dark matter, which only exerts gravitational attraction, but has no other observable phenomena, actually existed. How would we come to know about it? What phenomena would we be observing that would indicate the existance of such a stuff? Only one: mass -- and nothing else.
All that we know about the universe is that there is missing mass. We've measured all the mass from everything that can be observed and we've come up short. We've accounted for every 'thing' we can observe and it doesn't weigh enough. So therefore, there is something out there that weighs, but doesn't generate any other observable phenomena -- it doesn't emit light nor does it crash into anything. It just weighs. That's all it is -- weight alone.
When it comes to elections the most important thing is that people have faith in the vote. Computers have never, and will never be able to provide this.
I believe that there is a way to do elections in a more secure way than just pen, paper, and ballot box. I doesn't necessarily involve computers, but it does involve math -- the kind of math that having a computer do would make the process phenomenally more easy. Encryption type stuff.
The basic problem is you want your vote to be private, yet anonymously totaled into the grand tally. Vote by mail fails this, because you boss can call you into his/her office to 'go over' your ballot before you mail it. If you can verify your vote in the tally after you've voted, your boss can still review it with you. And, of course, the biggest problem, you don't know if *your* vote is in the tally. Even if you saw the complete tally, and saw a ballot that matched your votes exactly, you couldn't know if it was yours or someone else's. And, as you know, the problem with computers counting the votes is that they can eat votes, forget votes, disappear votes, flip votes, and keep totally separate tallies of votes -- one to assure voters that their vote was counted, another to ensure that the 'right' candidate wins.
So the three goals you want to assure is that you can vote privately, you can know that your vote is in the official tally, and that the tallying cannot be compromised. Well, that was the easy part. Now comes the hard part.
I'm trying to hatch an idea of a completely secure voting process, based on some kind of math. The entire tally is an encrypted string, and each ballot is somehow encryptically added to the tally. Each poll worker has their own encrypted tally string. The poll worker hands the ballot of to a voter, who then adds their encrypted ballot to the encrypted tally. The voter then hands the encrypted tally back to the poll worker. Because it's encrypted, the vote is anonymous. Because at one point the voter has the tally in their hot little hands, they can be assured that their vote is actually in the encrypted tally. At the end of the election, all the poll workers pool their tallies, which are mathemagically added together when they are pooled. This process keeps bubbling up until all of the encrypted tallies are added together, until all tallies are accounted for, and we know the winners.
The encrypted string is all of the votes, tallied, so there's no time wasted counting. They're already added up.
Obviously, the magic here is the math involved in creating these encrypted tally strings, but think my idea can at least be a launching pad towards something that actually works.
On an unrelated (sort of) note, somebody at my university received a notice that they were engaged in copyright infringement, came to the computer center and asked what they had done -- they didn't even know what it meant to download music or movies. Or so they claimed.
Um... Okay.
Did the study measure lightness or whiteness of the avatar? The article says "darker-skinned", but I wonder if people are more likely to help a whiter avatar - say, a gray avatar over a light-green skinned avatar.
Of course, I have no way of knowing if this was typical of him or just an overlook on his part.
Well, you do have a way of knowing -- you could read what I wrote. First, I said that he was a good science teacher -- okay, maybe I have a warped view of what a good science teacher is. Second, I said that "[h]e spent half a class one day " ( 22 minutes out of a 45 minute class period ) -- but maybe you misread that as "half the class", meaning half the total semester of class time .
But if you're taking my word for it that this guy existed and even taught a class, why would you doubt the rest of my story? Why would you believe one part of my story but not the whole story? You don't think there can be creationist teachers that can still teach good science classes? They're all raging, proselytizing evangelicals?
Science dictates you take the simpler answer - the one that doesn't require a certain set of environmental conditions that can exist naturally *and* a man in a white coat to actually provide them (a rather massive, additional variable in the equation).
I believe Einstein said it best: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." I suggest you take this to heart, as I'll show you:
People of a certain bent might see evidence for Creationism, but that simply means they are not following the principles of science, in that instance.
Suppose I were thinking logically, and were asked to draw a conclusion about evidence of abiogensis or intelligence creation when presented with the thought experiment of a scientist who created an organism in a test tube. The only evidence of non-reproductive biogenesis we have is what the scientist created; note that we have no evidence of spontaneous biogenesis from non-living material, except that which came from human intervention. We suppose that life originated on Earth at some point, but we don't have any evidence whatsoever of how it did so originally; it may have spontaneously generated, it may have been introduced by intelligent space aliens, it may have arisen from a space-faring spore, or it may have been molded from clay by the hand of God. But nobody was around to observe it, so we have no evidence about the genesis of life on Earth. So, the only evidence we have for the genesis of life, at least in this thought experiment, is that a human being was required to create it -- after all, we don't see it popping up out of dirt, do we? No, the only genesis of life that comes not from re-production was the artificial creation by a human being.
So, if you say that life can arise on its own, without descending from existing life, you would be arguing a position with no evidence. In Einstein's terms, you've made it too simple. But to argue a position that life can be created by a human being, or an intelligent being in general, is to take a position with evidence, as in the case of our thought experiment.
If we suspect that life may arise without intelligent interference, we have no evidence for our suspicions, but it we suspect that life requires intelligent interference, we do have evidence of that when a scientist creates life.
The theory could withstand those lines of inquiry if those students were given the theory. Instead they're given a tiny, perhaps broken, subset of the theory. Then they're told a larger, more elaborate crackpot theory and given "evidence" to support that theory.
The students *were* given the theory. ( What theory are we taking about here, anyway? Big Bang? Evolution? We were taught all of that). We weren't told a larger crackpot theory. We were just given some questions that seemed not to make sense, like who do we know that the source of radioative dating material was all undecayed at the time of formation.
Perhaps they learn a tiny bit of critical thinking in discarding the "conventional" theory,
Perhaps!? We spend the whole friggin' semester on it!
but at the cost of incorrect knowledge.
If you think the scientific method gives incorrect knowledge, well.. what exactly are you trying to argue here? That we don't know anything, not even in science?
When asked "where did the big bang come from?" the scientist should reply "we're working on it, here's what we know and think so far..."
You misunderstand the theory of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is the ultimate origin, the beginning of time and space itself. There was nothing before the Big Bang, because all matter and space ultimately originated at the Big Bang. In fact, there wasn't even a before the Big Bang -- time itself originated then, too!
Here's what wikipedia says:
"In 1931 Lemaître went further and suggested that the evident expansion in forward time required that the universe contracted backwards in time, and would continue to do so until it could contract no further, bringing all the mass of the universe into a single point, a "primeval atom", at a point in time before which time and space did not exist. As such, at this point, the fabric of time and space had not yet come into existence. "
So, the Big Bang didn't "come from" anywhere. It's an ultimate origin, just like a Creator God.
Most creationists are radical monotheists, although they may not be able to argue the position well. Check out Maimonides' _Guide for the Perplexed_ for a good understanding of radical monotheism. An unchanging, omnipotent, omniscient God has no beginning nor no end; therefore, the question of "Where did God come from" is non-sensical. The God that creationists suppose transcends time.
Additionally, creationism is when God is required, so while it's not either, it does demonstrate that God is not required to form a living organism from non-living raw materials.
Gotta disagree with you there. It does not demonstrate that God is not required. You haven't shown that God was present or not present during the synthesizing of life, so therefore you can't say that God wasn't there doing some necessary mojo that only he could do when the scientists mixed the right chemicals together.
Your teacher was NOT a good teacher.
Bullshit. He was the best science teacher there. He taught his students more about science, real science, than any of the other teachers. He got them to think, got them doing experiments, and got them to learn, using the scientific method. You're trolling.
Did he ask you to question gravity?
Of course he did, just like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein did. If you think science is about accepted wisdom versus questions, observations, and experiments, *you* need to go back to high school science class, 'cause you didn't learn a damn thing about science.
Instead, he tried to trick you and his other students.
How is posing a question 'tricking' anybody? If the scientific method really does work ( and I believe that it does ), then you *can't* trick anybody who's learned it.
...and using that authority to try and indoctrinate a bunch of naive kids into your cult through deception is not what I would call 'good'.
More bullshit. I don't know who're you're railing against, but it isn't good old Mr. D.
Unless you answer where god came from then I don't think you have answered anything.
If the question is "Where did we come from?" and the 'truth' really is "God created us", then he has answered the question. You're moving the goalpost in this case.
It's like a creationist asking a scientist, "Where did we come from?" "The Big Bang." "OK, where did the Big Bang come from? If you can't answer that, then you're just moving the problem around, and you haven't actually answered anything."
Or more simply, if you're asking where cars come from, an appropriate answer is Detroit. You don't have to say where Detroit came from, or how steel gets made. The question has been answered. If you want an answer, good or bad, about ultimate origins, make sure you ask that question.
The disappointing thing is that your science teacher was spreading doubt on the subject when the answers were out there to be found. When a vast number of scientists say it's true, "I don't think it's right" is not a valid answer unless you've got a PhD. He may not have been spreading religion, but he was spreading doubt about a well-founded science, as if the scientists themselves were ignorant of it. They are not, and it's extremely bad form to imply that they are.
I'm a scientifically-minded skeptic, but I gotta say I disagree with you 100% here. I think that the essence of science is doubt, skepticism, and inquiry. These theories are not so fragile that we have to protect them with a shield of awe. If the science is well-founded, then it should be able to clear these hurdles easily. It should be able to withstand the most withering lines of inquiry -- And it does.
If you teach kids to blindly accept what "the authorities" tell you, whether those authorities are the Bible, or well-respected grey-bearded scientists, then you will get adults who accept whatever the authorities tell them -- in other words, people who can't be scientists, because they don't know how to think for themselves, and therefore can't use the scientific method.
When we teach science, we shouldn't say "Believe this because a bunch of scientists believe in it!". Instead, we should teach them to ask questions, develop a hypothesis, and think about ways to prove or disprove it. When they're old enough, they should be doing experiements. Think, ask questions, make observations, and do experiments to test your theories. That is science, not the consensus of elites.
I'll tell you what questions this "raises" -- but prepare to be dissapointed. I had a high-school science teacher, who was a great teacher, but was a creationist. Yes, he really was a great science teacher. He spent half a class one day explaining "questions"* about cosmology and creationism. He didn't proselytize, didn't say that he had the answers, or that the Bible did. He just asked some questions that got the students thinking. IMHO, I think that's good -- though questions early on are like inoculations of skepticism. And, there are good, scientific answers that sufficiently motivated students looked up ( this was before widespread internet)
Anywho, one of the questions was something like "Suppose a scientist creates life from scratch in a test tube. Is that evidence of abiogenesis, or creationism?" One answer, that most scientifically minded people choose, is that the scientist isn't doing anything that couldn't have happened in nature without the scientist, so therefore it's evidence of abiogenesis. Other people, those more creation minded, say that an intelligent being, in this case a scientist, created life from raw materials, so therefore, its evidence that life is created by intelligence.
Please, don't shoot, I'm just the messenger. You're asking what questions would be raised, I'm telling you the questions that people get out of this.
* He also posed another question about radiometric dating of rocks that I never got a satisfactory answer for. For instance, say they date some rocks, and there is 0.03% lead to uranium, or some such ratio, and therefor the rock is X million years old. How do we know that when the rock was originally formed, it was 100% uranium in the sample that we are now taking from the rock? If a rock cools from molten lava, aren't active and decayed isotopes mixed together, thus throwing off the dating scales based on that ratio?
SINEs and LINEs do nothing - they only propagate themselves.
C'mon -- you don't really know that they do nothing. Perhaps they're useful when winiding DNA into chromosomes, or have some larger scale structural purpose, rather than just coding genes.
Here's a quote from the very article you linked to:
"With about 1 million copies, SINEs make up about 13% of the human genome.[8] While previously believed to be "junk DNA", recent research suggests that both LINEs and SINEs have a significant role in gene evolution , structure and transcription levels[9]. The distribution of these elements has been implicated in some genetic diseases and cancers."
RTFA.
"The energy dissipated during the fall is about 250 or 300 GJ, and the leftover energy at impact is about 600 GJ. So it's about a quarter kiloton of TNT for the North tower and about a fifth of a kiloton for the South tower; that's still a hell of a lot of energy, more than sufficient to liquefy a pretty healthy chunk of steel, and it doesn't change the fact that there's a lot more energy in the office contents."
Sorry, I'm a critical minded skeptic. Show me the equation.
Others have suspected tactical nukes, from the evidence of melted cars that had nothing fall on them.
Please! Have you ever seen a nuclear detonation?
Have you ever seen a detonation of a tactical nuke? I haven't, and neither have you.
Show me the equations ( meaning, show me the work, not just the results ) and I'll start listening to you. I haven't seen any conventional theory yet that explains the amount of heat.
It also answers the idiot who thinks that just because the structure below the falling floors was intact, that it would have stopped the collapse. Hint: objects falling onto other objects is work (in the physics sense) and generates heat.
Falling objects generate that much heat? I doubt it. If that were true, then whenever a plane falls out of the sky, there should be no wreckage, just blobs of molten metal and incenerated organic material. Or if you dropped a penny from a tall building. Is it the mass or acceleration that generates the heat? What is the formula?
Except that there was no evidence of thermite/thermate found at the site
No evidence of *anything* was found, because no investigation was done. All the steel beam evidence was shipped to China to be recycled.
Others have suspected tactical nukes, from the evidence of melted cars that had nothing fall on them.
We have plenty of evidence of molten steel, even 6 weeks after the collapse.
Do you have any evidence of molten lead, or is this your own personal speculation?
"This is how it's been since day one...and this is six weeks later. As we get closer to the center of this it gets hotter and hotter - it's probably 1500 degrees."
OK, 1.5 months later, and it's still 1500 degrees. jet fuel and offices only burn at 600 F. What process created enough heat to get the steel temperatures to over 2500 degrees? Remember, you can't 'concentrate' heat. A heated element will get get hotter than the heat source.