Well if the difference is a matter of reporting bias/standards, that's very good news. I'm guessing you don't have that data up on a public facing wiki or anything, so I won't say [citation needed]. I'm curious though that if only 40% of fetal deaths in Norway would be counted as infant mortality in the U.S., that means some deaths aren't counted as such, and I'm wondering what the difference is and what the criterion is.
The author wasn't talking about how life only occupies a tiny sliver of the planet as a whole. Duh, most of the planet is molten iron.
The author was talking about how life only occupies a tiny sliver of the areas of the planet that do or could contain significant amounts of water.
And the O.P. was saying, rightly I think, that this isn't true. Everywhere there's water on this planet, there's life. There might be a tiny sliver that doesn't have life, but that's okay, because astronomers aren't assuming that water necessarily means life anyway.
It's gotten to the point of being grotesque that we citizens of the USA are putting 3rd World (sorry, "developing nations") children ahead of our very own.
Except we aren't. It's utterly retarded to suggest that the U.S. provides more or better quality care for babies elsewhere in the world than our own.
So your whole rant is bullshit.
We do have a very sad infant mortality rate, at least compared to a lot of other 1st World countries. That has nothing to do with the meager amount of support we have given to developing nations.
And where do people go when "conventional wisdom" tells them "do NOT question conventional wisdom, you are an uninformed fool" ?
You go someplace to get your ignorant ass informed, then come back with the capability of making a useful contribution.
In some parts of the world, 1500 years of conventional wisdom says that mutilating a girl's sex organs is the proper thing to do. Does that mean it should never be questioned, even by the uninformed ?
Nope, go right ahead. Part of the extremely subtle distinction I was making was between "conventional wisdom" that's just what people have decided to think, and actual evidence-supported fact.
But being informed sure helps. Being informed is rather essential to actually doing something effective about the issue, rather than just forming a righteous opinion that has no impact on the world.
You, like the current crop of AGW crazies, would have us all believe that questioning (by the informed OR uninformed) is verboten, and only the high-priests are allowed to hold the "holy knowledge". Bollocks to you.
Yeah except that's the exact opposite of what I'm saying.
Questioning by the informed is quite welcome. Questioning by the informed is an integral part of science. Questioning by the informed is how we arrived at the science we have today. Questioning by the informed is going on right now in the scientific community, no matter that your uninformed ass ignorantly assumes that can't be so.
Those questions are being asked.
Just not by you.
You can use as your excuse that it's "high priests" with secret "holy knowledge" that are preventing you from being able to ask useful informed questions, but that's B.S. The knowledge is out there, it's just acquiring it would require a lot of work. Well, that and if you actually became educated you might realize that there's a reason why all the informed questions are much narrower in scope than yours. Thus you go the much easier route of just claiming that no questioning at all is welcome so it doesn't matter if you have the knowledge or not. Of course, since you don't have the knowledge, you must instead act like there's no difference between your questioning and that of an informed person. Laughing off your uninformed skepticism is the same as laughing off all skepticism at all.
This is the lack of distinction I'm talking about.
Bollocks to you and your willful defense of ignorance.
I was hoping this would be just the ticket for helping me with my cross-border baby-smuggling operation. But the thing's transparent, kinda defeating the whole purpose of "smuggling", and it's huge but can only carry one baby!
I'm sticking with my REI-brand frame backpack for baby smuggling. Swing and a miss, CSU. Swing and a miss.
Apparently it's sharks with frick'n lasers, and dolphins with frick'n handcuffs.
Who knew?
By the way, it might seems like sharks + lasers is scarier than dolphins + handcuffs, but just wait until they decide that cuffing random swimmers is hilarious.
I can't help but think that they purposely set the limits low so that when the machines operate better than anticipated, NASA (or anyone else for that matter) can take a higher degree of credit than if they were more realistic with the expectations.
That's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it is that it is impossible in most cases to precisely predict how long a specific instance of a part will last before failure, and you can at best describe it probabilistically. So first, you're going to design it to last as long as possible. Then, you're going to take your estimated Mean Time Before Failure and back off by a couple standard deviations so that there's a high probability that the part will last at least that long, rather than a 50% chance of it lasting longer than the mean (assuming normal distribution for part failure).
To put it simply: Designing something so that you can be fairly certain it will last as long as you need it necessarily means designing it so that if things go well it can last much longer. That's not sandbagging, it's called margin and it's needed to usefully meet the requirements. The requirement is "A device that lasts for at least X years". Not "A device that on average lasts X years".
This doesn't apply that much to the Mars rovers though. They were engineered as robustly as possible within the weight limits to be sure they could survive at all in a largely unknown environment. The 90 day mission had nothing to do with the design of any particular component except for the solar panels, and that only because they didn't know the Martian wind would blow the dust off for them.
Heh, yeah, I love how he tries to prove the mainframe is more powerful than laptops by first making his opinion the default, then requiring you to do something completely ridiculous to prove him wrong, like rewrite the entire software stack for the business mainframe. Oh you aren't going to recreate a hundred person-years of work just to demonstrate what common sense (and half an ounce of computer knowledge) would show plainly? That means I'm right! Put up or shut up, boyo!
The measure of power of hardware is not "what you can do with it", where that means existent software. The function of the software can be recreated on a different machine. Turing completeness and all that. The measure of power is, and always has been, equivalent number of operations per second. And hey that means you get to count your specialized FFT hardware as if it's equal to the same number of operations required on a laptop processor. All the vectorized instructions and the specialized I/O controllers go straight to the bottom line.
Guess what? The 1977 mainframe still gets its ass kicked by a machine running at close to 1 IPC at 500 MHz. The mainframes were very nice architectures with a lot of beefy design in them. They had it because they needed it. You needed a dozen I/O channels with dedicated controllers because the main CPUs couldn't handle that and anything else, and there was no other way to keep a sufficient data throughput from storage.
Yeah. "Questioning the conventional wisdom" has become a worthy pursuit for its own sake. The part of questioning the conventional wisdom where you first understand the conventional wisdom, and then come up with an informed question, seems to have fallen by the wayside. But if you point out this distinction, then you're apparently attacking the idea of questioning in the first place.
It simple states that water can exists in environments that is hostile to life as we know it.
No shit, Sherlock.
Yeah, seriously. The "conventional wisdom" is not that water implies life, but rather that the absence of water implies the absence of life.
We search for water on other worlds not because we're sure that's where there will be life, but rather because it's the first, most basic indicator of the possibility of the only kind of life we know can exist.
Water alone is not sufficient? Duh! Nobody ever thought it was.
I do take issue with the idea that only 12% of the water on earth has life. AFAIK, a cup of water from any natural source in or in the ground has some sort of life in it.
Yeah, like the very first look we took 600 feet under the Anarctic ice sheet showed complex life. Sounds fishy. Or shrimpy as the case may be.
Nothing we know about the universe or any part of it is in fundamental conflict or contradiction with the Biblical creation story.
Unless you interpret Genesis literally, and you interpret "literally" in a really bizarre way that means "exactly what it says, only what it says, but including every possible implication" so "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds" means that every "kind" of creature on earth was created exactly as it is today and "kinds", which oh by the way means "species", never change.
Yeah, I don't really get it.
I think there's a reason the GP said "Creationists" and not "Christians".
Unless the Time Machine opened a portal not just back in time, but to another dimension, and now he's specifically telling Franklin to use the wrong convention for their universe!
Oh and uh somehow the temporal field and the tachyons and so forth prevent the time traveler from annihilating instantly.
I'm a Christian but not a Creationist, because I find it utterly foolish to attempt to interpret Genesis as though it is a physics and biology textbook when it's obviously* a metaphorical establishment of God as the Creator of Everything. Some gods only created the sun, or the earth, or the waves, but our God created everything, and to that end the author listed God creating "everything" known. Yet the universe He created, as seen in our telescopes, is vastly more amazing than what Genesis describes or what anyone at the time of its writing could have comprehended. Could you imagine Genesis explaining galaxy clusters and pulsars and black holes, or bacteria and DNA? Precise physical reality was not the point, any more than a line about a table that was one cubit across and 3 cubits around was supposed to tell you the value of Pi. The point was -- everything you know of was created by the will of God.
If you want to know if I know HOW he did it, well, I dunno. If evolution explains it suffuciently for science to make sense of it all, I'm fine with that.
Well yeah, I agree with that completely. Also noteworthy since that's not something I've ever heard a self-described Creationist say.:)
1a. God also declares himself to have existed for all time. This gets complicated to some, but if God created the Universe, he existed outside of it
Time is part of the universe. God exists. "I am", is what He said. You mentioned God is powerful enough to know the future, but I think in reality the concept simply lacks meaning for God as He exists outside of time. To me, the answer to the paradox of Predestination, how we can have free will if God knows our future, is that this is only a paradox for limited human thinking. God knows what we're "going" to do because from His perspective we've "already" done it.
if he wanted to do it in six days and make it look like billions of years, he could.
Yeah, and if He wanted to do it in billions of years, starting from a single instantaneous explosion of energy and, simply by following the natural consequence of the Laws of the Universe He created, resulting in the universe around us like the ultimate billiards shot, He could.
So the question is: Why would God make the universe in 6 days, but make it look like it took billions of years? Why would He spend 6 days doing it when He could do it instantaneously? What difference does it make? If He made it in 6 days but also made it look like it took a billion according to all observable physical evidence, then does that 'fact' have any physical relevance at all? Why does that matter at all?
What spiritual truth is revealed by God taking literally 6 "days" to do it? What is lost by simply reading that as a metaphor for the magnificence of God and His role as Creator?
However, I am somewhat dismayed that the discussion has devolved into an 'either-or' choice. A single paragraph in a science text, pointing out that many religions have other explanations for the creation of the Universe and of life on Earth would satisfy me.
Okay, up to this point I've simply been reflecting on your beliefs and bouncing mine off you. But this is the part where I take a real issue with what you've said.
Why do you need so much as a single line about religion in a science textbook to be satisfied in any way? It has no relevance whatsoever. What's the intended meaning: All the science stuff you're about to read might be wrong because the Scrolls of Athena disagree? The existence of many creation myths is not a relevant scientific data point -- outside of cultural anthropology -- so there's no reason to include the fact. Only scientific evidence should change how science views the origin of the planets or life. Even in the highly improbable case that one of the creation myths is literally true, that will be borne out by evidence.
Discussion of the various creation myths belongs in a comparative religion class. Or
designing a novel structure in a CAD tool optimised for some known series of simulations (i.e. knowing which parameters are relevant to each simulation and adjusting for them)
Uh... yeah, parameters like "aerodynamics". People use these simulations to make real aircraft that have to work, really. You can't just optimize for "relevant parameters" to cut corners around optimizing for overall performance in reality, because the simulations are designed to mimic reality as closely as possible and do a demonstrably good job of doing so. That's the simulation's purpose!
is not the same as proposing a design which can be prototyped, built, tested, flown... and paid for.
For sure!
Which is not the same as saying the design in the CAD program will not have closely similar behavior in the real world if they could build it.
I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt as a result of the flattering implication that engineering involves artistry, but on the whole you've got such an ignorant and insulting view of aerospace engineering that I can't call it anything but ignorant and insulting.
Burt Rutan drew up some "artists' renderings" (they're called CAD models usually) of a plane that in computer models appeared to be able to circumnavigate the world without refueling. Then they built it and it did.
Aerospace firms around the globe rely on computer models to predict the aerodynamic behavior of everything from commercial airliners to supersonic fighters. They use these models because they work. They may not be perfect, but they can be used to reliably predict the behavior of designs in the real world within a margin of error.
The idea that just having the computer model means there's "nothing to see here" is simply wrong. Anyone with a clue would be impressed that they could demonstrate these fuel savings even though they are just in a simulation.
There is no scale provided so you wonder what they are calculating on, is it fuel per mile per passenger? Anything else would be irrelevant.
The two designs carry the exact same number of passengers as the planes they are hypothetically replacing, the 180-passenger 737 and 350-passenger 777, so there's no difference in this case between miles per gallon and passenger-miles per gallon.:)
Yes, and this is a serious problem. There is no such thing as an apolitical view of history, as among other things, every viewpoint has its own judgments of the same events. There is no way to teach history independently of those judgments; the best you can do is point out where the judgments are and hope that the students will figure out what to take with a grain of salt and what not to.
And the worst you can do is to start with your political views, let those views guide the entire process, and make historical fact subservient to those views.
Yes, it's impossible to completely avoid your biases. It is quite possible to not make your biases the primary factor and deliberately skew the output as much as possible.
Yeah blocking "deviating from accepted teachings" sounds terrible when you take it as an absolute, like the current history books are some kind of holy religious text that you cannot contradict. But we aren't talking about minor deviations from some extremely specific interpretation of historians all with an identical leaning. Actual historians do not all share the same leaning, and they agree only in a variety of generalities. This takes a giant leap outside of this into Ideology Land.
And yes, it's appropriate to say that this is unacceptable because it's wrong. That 1st Amendment complaint is a great idea, but I'm not shying away from saying we should not have this in history textbooks because it is a disservice to the teaching of history.
Yeah, and therefore there's no difference between what a large number of learned historians consider true, and what a small group of people whose entire motivation is to restructure history in favor of their political ideology are willing to say is true.
But hey I'm sure that's not your point, since that would be stupid. You're just pointing out that, in general, number of people who agree with something is not an indication of veracity. That's all well and good.
Now let's bring this out of the hypothetical realm of pure logic where an existence proof (long since proven) is all you need to demonstrate the imperfection of historians. Let's talk about this specific case.
In this specific case, the historians are right, and the ideologically motivated revisionists are full of crap.
The US did not acquire Texas from Mexico. Texas won its independence from Mexico and then joined the US many years later as an independent nation.
Yeah, ten whole years, and that only because they weren't allowed to join the U.S. as fast as they wanted to.
Texans are quite proud of having won their independence and become their own country, however briefly. And I say that's something to be proud about.
They just don't like to talk so much about how the whole point of independence was to become a U.S. state, which obviously they couldn't do when the territory was owned by Mexico.
That's probably why you had only heard "many" years.
Because the Space Shuttles are old, decaying and really unfit. It takes a major disaster (Challenger, Columbia) before they fix basic design problems. I wouldn't trust an aging Commodore 64 as my primary computer, nor should we rely on the Shuttle. Really, Bush, Clinton and Obama should have all pressed for a new launch vehicle long ago.
Agreed. The Space Shuttle program was already extended well past when it should have been ended, and was continued only because of the OP's "but we have nothing else" logic. The failure to come up with any replacement doesn't change the facts about the Shuttle. Which is why the program was going to be terminated regardless of what Obama did or didn't change at NASA.
I find it quite funny that Obama apparently can trust the private sector with space flight which it hasn't really achieved, but can't trust it to run an organization without government support and can't trust it to run health care which businesses have had a proven track record of doing better than governments.
I find that statement funny because:
Different things are different.
The private sector "hasn't really achieved" space flight in the same way it "hasn't really achieved" jet fighter flight. As in, in reality, they're basically responsible for all of it. And that's just counting the things with NASA logos on them. There's tons of examples of successful private space flight.
The biggest change is in how the government is going to grant contracts to private companies: Instead of cost-plus contracts for things that don't exist yet they'll pay the lowest market rate for working solutions. That's bad only if you think the way defense contractors do business with the government is super-awesome (for your stock portfolio).
In the end, we need to do one of two things A) Sell NASA and give its research to taxpayers. B) Give NASA proper funding to do things.
Hey I'm all for giving NASA more funding to "do things", but not in the context of a Shuttle replacement. There is absolutely no reason why NASA needs to blow it's budget on building a new space truck for hauling cargo and people in and out of low earth orbit. That's exactly the kind of thing the private sector should be handling, allowing NASA to take advantage of market forces. Trying to build a shuttle replacement is what has been sapping NASA for the past few years, causing them to cancel projects of the kind they should be doing. So no, I don't think it's worth spending the political energy necessary to really beef up NASA's budget, just so they can waste most of it on a new space truck and have enough left over to do something actually useful and interesting.
Which is why your other suggestion is way worse. NASA still serves an important role doing the kinds of research and exploration that there is little motivation for the private sector to do. The private sector would have never launched Cassini or the Mars rovers, much less continued the program for 6 years, or tested ion drives in space just because in many years it might be useful to reach asteroids. The purpose of NASA (and other space agencies) should be to expand the reach of humanity. To push back the limits. To make things possible.
Save (and increase!) NASA's budget for that. Let private industry focus on today's realities and what should already be routine.
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Well if the difference is a matter of reporting bias/standards, that's very good news. I'm guessing you don't have that data up on a public facing wiki or anything, so I won't say [citation needed]. I'm curious though that if only 40% of fetal deaths in Norway would be counted as infant mortality in the U.S., that means some deaths aren't counted as such, and I'm wondering what the difference is and what the criterion is.
No we don't. Are infant mortality is lower then pretty much an other country.
Except the 30 others that are lower. The best ones have half the mortality rate that we do.
Our numbers are not bad in an absolute or historical sense. But it's sad because we could be doing much better.
So sad we should completely forget about helping the countries in the world who have it much, much worse? No way.
The author wasn't talking about how life only occupies a tiny sliver of the planet as a whole. Duh, most of the planet is molten iron.
The author was talking about how life only occupies a tiny sliver of the areas of the planet that do or could contain significant amounts of water.
And the O.P. was saying, rightly I think, that this isn't true. Everywhere there's water on this planet, there's life. There might be a tiny sliver that doesn't have life, but that's okay, because astronomers aren't assuming that water necessarily means life anyway.
It's gotten to the point of being grotesque that we citizens of the USA are putting 3rd World (sorry, "developing nations") children ahead of our very own.
Except we aren't. It's utterly retarded to suggest that the U.S. provides more or better quality care for babies elsewhere in the world than our own.
So your whole rant is bullshit.
We do have a very sad infant mortality rate, at least compared to a lot of other 1st World countries. That has nothing to do with the meager amount of support we have given to developing nations.
And where do people go when "conventional wisdom" tells them "do NOT question conventional wisdom, you are an uninformed fool" ?
You go someplace to get your ignorant ass informed, then come back with the capability of making a useful contribution.
In some parts of the world, 1500 years of conventional wisdom says that mutilating a girl's sex organs is the proper thing to do. Does that mean it should never be questioned, even by the uninformed ?
Nope, go right ahead. Part of the extremely subtle distinction I was making was between "conventional wisdom" that's just what people have decided to think, and actual evidence-supported fact.
But being informed sure helps. Being informed is rather essential to actually doing something effective about the issue, rather than just forming a righteous opinion that has no impact on the world.
You, like the current crop of AGW crazies, would have us all believe that questioning (by the informed OR uninformed) is verboten, and only the high-priests are allowed to hold the "holy knowledge". Bollocks to you.
Yeah except that's the exact opposite of what I'm saying.
Questioning by the informed is quite welcome. Questioning by the informed is an integral part of science. Questioning by the informed is how we arrived at the science we have today. Questioning by the informed is going on right now in the scientific community, no matter that your uninformed ass ignorantly assumes that can't be so.
Those questions are being asked.
Just not by you.
You can use as your excuse that it's "high priests" with secret "holy knowledge" that are preventing you from being able to ask useful informed questions, but that's B.S. The knowledge is out there, it's just acquiring it would require a lot of work. Well, that and if you actually became educated you might realize that there's a reason why all the informed questions are much narrower in scope than yours. Thus you go the much easier route of just claiming that no questioning at all is welcome so it doesn't matter if you have the knowledge or not. Of course, since you don't have the knowledge, you must instead act like there's no difference between your questioning and that of an informed person. Laughing off your uninformed skepticism is the same as laughing off all skepticism at all.
This is the lack of distinction I'm talking about.
Bollocks to you and your willful defense of ignorance.
I was hoping this would be just the ticket for helping me with my cross-border baby-smuggling operation. But the thing's transparent, kinda defeating the whole purpose of "smuggling", and it's huge but can only carry one baby!
I'm sticking with my REI-brand frame backpack for baby smuggling. Swing and a miss, CSU. Swing and a miss.
Apparently it's sharks with frick'n lasers, and dolphins with frick'n handcuffs.
Who knew?
By the way, it might seems like sharks + lasers is scarier than dolphins + handcuffs, but just wait until they decide that cuffing random swimmers is hilarious.
I can't help but think that they purposely set the limits low so that when the machines operate better than anticipated, NASA (or anyone else for that matter) can take a higher degree of credit than if they were more realistic with the expectations.
That's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it is that it is impossible in most cases to precisely predict how long a specific instance of a part will last before failure, and you can at best describe it probabilistically. So first, you're going to design it to last as long as possible. Then, you're going to take your estimated Mean Time Before Failure and back off by a couple standard deviations so that there's a high probability that the part will last at least that long, rather than a 50% chance of it lasting longer than the mean (assuming normal distribution for part failure).
To put it simply: Designing something so that you can be fairly certain it will last as long as you need it necessarily means designing it so that if things go well it can last much longer. That's not sandbagging, it's called margin and it's needed to usefully meet the requirements. The requirement is "A device that lasts for at least X years". Not "A device that on average lasts X years".
This doesn't apply that much to the Mars rovers though. They were engineered as robustly as possible within the weight limits to be sure they could survive at all in a largely unknown environment. The 90 day mission had nothing to do with the design of any particular component except for the solar panels, and that only because they didn't know the Martian wind would blow the dust off for them.
Heh, yeah, I love how he tries to prove the mainframe is more powerful than laptops by first making his opinion the default, then requiring you to do something completely ridiculous to prove him wrong, like rewrite the entire software stack for the business mainframe. Oh you aren't going to recreate a hundred person-years of work just to demonstrate what common sense (and half an ounce of computer knowledge) would show plainly? That means I'm right! Put up or shut up, boyo!
The measure of power of hardware is not "what you can do with it", where that means existent software. The function of the software can be recreated on a different machine. Turing completeness and all that. The measure of power is, and always has been, equivalent number of operations per second. And hey that means you get to count your specialized FFT hardware as if it's equal to the same number of operations required on a laptop processor. All the vectorized instructions and the specialized I/O controllers go straight to the bottom line.
Guess what? The 1977 mainframe still gets its ass kicked by a machine running at close to 1 IPC at 500 MHz. The mainframes were very nice architectures with a lot of beefy design in them. They had it because they needed it. You needed a dozen I/O channels with dedicated controllers because the main CPUs couldn't handle that and anything else, and there was no other way to keep a sufficient data throughput from storage.
Yeah. "Questioning the conventional wisdom" has become a worthy pursuit for its own sake. The part of questioning the conventional wisdom where you first understand the conventional wisdom, and then come up with an informed question, seems to have fallen by the wayside. But if you point out this distinction, then you're apparently attacking the idea of questioning in the first place.
It simple states that water can exists in environments that is hostile to life as we know it.
No shit, Sherlock.
Yeah, seriously. The "conventional wisdom" is not that water implies life, but rather that the absence of water implies the absence of life.
We search for water on other worlds not because we're sure that's where there will be life, but rather because it's the first, most basic indicator of the possibility of the only kind of life we know can exist.
Water alone is not sufficient? Duh! Nobody ever thought it was.
I do take issue with the idea that only 12% of the water on earth has life. AFAIK, a cup of water from any natural source in or in the ground has some sort of life in it.
Yeah, like the very first look we took 600 feet under the Anarctic ice sheet showed complex life. Sounds fishy. Or shrimpy as the case may be.
A gas is a compressible fluid.
I don't care what it is when I use a CFD, only what it behaves like.
Heh. Science vs. engineering in a nutshell.
Or theorists vs experimentalists if you prefer.
Nothing we know about the universe or any part of it is in fundamental conflict or contradiction with the Biblical creation story.
Unless you interpret Genesis literally, and you interpret "literally" in a really bizarre way that means "exactly what it says, only what it says, but including every possible implication" so "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds" means that every "kind" of creature on earth was created exactly as it is today and "kinds", which oh by the way means "species", never change.
Yeah, I don't really get it.
I think there's a reason the GP said "Creationists" and not "Christians".
Unless the Time Machine opened a portal not just back in time, but to another dimension, and now he's specifically telling Franklin to use the wrong convention for their universe!
Oh and uh somehow the temporal field and the tachyons and so forth prevent the time traveler from annihilating instantly.
The script is still in progress, okay?
I'm a Christian but not a Creationist, because I find it utterly foolish to attempt to interpret Genesis as though it is a physics and biology textbook when it's obviously* a metaphorical establishment of God as the Creator of Everything. Some gods only created the sun, or the earth, or the waves, but our God created everything, and to that end the author listed God creating "everything" known. Yet the universe He created, as seen in our telescopes, is vastly more amazing than what Genesis describes or what anyone at the time of its writing could have comprehended. Could you imagine Genesis explaining galaxy clusters and pulsars and black holes, or bacteria and DNA? Precise physical reality was not the point, any more than a line about a table that was one cubit across and 3 cubits around was supposed to tell you the value of Pi. The point was -- everything you know of was created by the will of God.
If you want to know if I know HOW he did it, well, I dunno. If evolution explains it suffuciently for science to make sense of it all, I'm fine with that.
Well yeah, I agree with that completely. Also noteworthy since that's not something I've ever heard a self-described Creationist say. :)
1a. God also declares himself to have existed for all time. This gets complicated to some, but if God created the Universe, he existed outside of it
Time is part of the universe. God exists. "I am", is what He said. You mentioned God is powerful enough to know the future, but I think in reality the concept simply lacks meaning for God as He exists outside of time. To me, the answer to the paradox of Predestination, how we can have free will if God knows our future, is that this is only a paradox for limited human thinking. God knows what we're "going" to do because from His perspective we've "already" done it.
if he wanted to do it in six days and make it look like billions of years, he could.
Yeah, and if He wanted to do it in billions of years, starting from a single instantaneous explosion of energy and, simply by following the natural consequence of the Laws of the Universe He created, resulting in the universe around us like the ultimate billiards shot, He could.
So the question is: Why would God make the universe in 6 days, but make it look like it took billions of years? Why would He spend 6 days doing it when He could do it instantaneously? What difference does it make? If He made it in 6 days but also made it look like it took a billion according to all observable physical evidence, then does that 'fact' have any physical relevance at all? Why does that matter at all?
What spiritual truth is revealed by God taking literally 6 "days" to do it? What is lost by simply reading that as a metaphor for the magnificence of God and His role as Creator?
However, I am somewhat dismayed that the discussion has devolved into an 'either-or' choice. A single paragraph in a science text, pointing out that many religions have other explanations for the creation of the Universe and of life on Earth would satisfy me.
Okay, up to this point I've simply been reflecting on your beliefs and bouncing mine off you. But this is the part where I take a real issue with what you've said.
Why do you need so much as a single line about religion in a science textbook to be satisfied in any way? It has no relevance whatsoever. What's the intended meaning: All the science stuff you're about to read might be wrong because the Scrolls of Athena disagree? The existence of many creation myths is not a relevant scientific data point -- outside of cultural anthropology -- so there's no reason to include the fact. Only scientific evidence should change how science views the origin of the planets or life. Even in the highly improbable case that one of the creation myths is literally true, that will be borne out by evidence.
Discussion of the various creation myths belongs in a comparative religion class. Or
designing a novel structure in a CAD tool optimised for some known series of simulations (i.e. knowing which parameters are relevant to each simulation and adjusting for them)
Uh... yeah, parameters like "aerodynamics". People use these simulations to make real aircraft that have to work, really. You can't just optimize for "relevant parameters" to cut corners around optimizing for overall performance in reality, because the simulations are designed to mimic reality as closely as possible and do a demonstrably good job of doing so. That's the simulation's purpose!
is not the same as proposing a design which can be prototyped, built, tested, flown... and paid for.
For sure!
Which is not the same as saying the design in the CAD program will not have closely similar behavior in the real world if they could build it.
I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt as a result of the flattering implication that engineering involves artistry, but on the whole you've got such an ignorant and insulting view of aerospace engineering that I can't call it anything but ignorant and insulting.
Burt Rutan drew up some "artists' renderings" (they're called CAD models usually) of a plane that in computer models appeared to be able to circumnavigate the world without refueling. Then they built it and it did.
Aerospace firms around the globe rely on computer models to predict the aerodynamic behavior of everything from commercial airliners to supersonic fighters. They use these models because they work. They may not be perfect, but they can be used to reliably predict the behavior of designs in the real world within a margin of error.
The idea that just having the computer model means there's "nothing to see here" is simply wrong. Anyone with a clue would be impressed that they could demonstrate these fuel savings even though they are just in a simulation.
There is no scale provided so you wonder what they are calculating on, is it fuel per mile per passenger? Anything else would be irrelevant.
The two designs carry the exact same number of passengers as the planes they are hypothetically replacing, the 180-passenger 737 and 350-passenger 777, so there's no difference in this case between miles per gallon and passenger-miles per gallon. :)
They make us weak, if you 'believe' in evolution.
Maybe if you believe, but not if you understand.
Yes, and this is a serious problem. There is no such thing as an apolitical view of history, as among other things, every viewpoint has its own judgments of the same events. There is no way to teach history independently of those judgments; the best you can do is point out where the judgments are and hope that the students will figure out what to take with a grain of salt and what not to.
And the worst you can do is to start with your political views, let those views guide the entire process, and make historical fact subservient to those views.
Yes, it's impossible to completely avoid your biases. It is quite possible to not make your biases the primary factor and deliberately skew the output as much as possible.
Yeah blocking "deviating from accepted teachings" sounds terrible when you take it as an absolute, like the current history books are some kind of holy religious text that you cannot contradict. But we aren't talking about minor deviations from some extremely specific interpretation of historians all with an identical leaning. Actual historians do not all share the same leaning, and they agree only in a variety of generalities. This takes a giant leap outside of this into Ideology Land.
And yes, it's appropriate to say that this is unacceptable because it's wrong. That 1st Amendment complaint is a great idea, but I'm not shying away from saying we should not have this in history textbooks because it is a disservice to the teaching of history.
Yeah, and therefore there's no difference between what a large number of learned historians consider true, and what a small group of people whose entire motivation is to restructure history in favor of their political ideology are willing to say is true.
But hey I'm sure that's not your point, since that would be stupid. You're just pointing out that, in general, number of people who agree with something is not an indication of veracity. That's all well and good.
Now let's bring this out of the hypothetical realm of pure logic where an existence proof (long since proven) is all you need to demonstrate the imperfection of historians. Let's talk about this specific case.
In this specific case, the historians are right, and the ideologically motivated revisionists are full of crap.
The US did not acquire Texas from Mexico. Texas won its independence from Mexico and then joined the US many years later as an independent nation.
Yeah, ten whole years, and that only because they weren't allowed to join the U.S. as fast as they wanted to.
Texans are quite proud of having won their independence and become their own country, however briefly. And I say that's something to be proud about.
They just don't like to talk so much about how the whole point of independence was to become a U.S. state, which obviously they couldn't do when the territory was owned by Mexico.
That's probably why you had only heard "many" years.
Al Bundy, but that's it.
So, when Obama proposed to increase NASA's budget, what social injustice is he intending to redress?
Though I admit it makes sense if you use a broad enough definition, one more akin to "societal ills".
Because the Space Shuttles are old, decaying and really unfit. It takes a major disaster (Challenger, Columbia) before they fix basic design problems. I wouldn't trust an aging Commodore 64 as my primary computer, nor should we rely on the Shuttle. Really, Bush, Clinton and Obama should have all pressed for a new launch vehicle long ago.
Agreed. The Space Shuttle program was already extended well past when it should have been ended, and was continued only because of the OP's "but we have nothing else" logic. The failure to come up with any replacement doesn't change the facts about the Shuttle. Which is why the program was going to be terminated regardless of what Obama did or didn't change at NASA.
I find it quite funny that Obama apparently can trust the private sector with space flight which it hasn't really achieved, but can't trust it to run an organization without government support and can't trust it to run health care which businesses have had a proven track record of doing better than governments.
I find that statement funny because:
Different things are different.
The private sector "hasn't really achieved" space flight in the same way it "hasn't really achieved" jet fighter flight. As in, in reality, they're basically responsible for all of it. And that's just counting the things with NASA logos on them. There's tons of examples of successful private space flight.
The biggest change is in how the government is going to grant contracts to private companies: Instead of cost-plus contracts for things that don't exist yet they'll pay the lowest market rate for working solutions. That's bad only if you think the way defense contractors do business with the government is super-awesome (for your stock portfolio).
In the end, we need to do one of two things
A) Sell NASA and give its research to taxpayers.
B) Give NASA proper funding to do things.
Hey I'm all for giving NASA more funding to "do things", but not in the context of a Shuttle replacement. There is absolutely no reason why NASA needs to blow it's budget on building a new space truck for hauling cargo and people in and out of low earth orbit. That's exactly the kind of thing the private sector should be handling, allowing NASA to take advantage of market forces. Trying to build a shuttle replacement is what has been sapping NASA for the past few years, causing them to cancel projects of the kind they should be doing. So no, I don't think it's worth spending the political energy necessary to really beef up NASA's budget, just so they can waste most of it on a new space truck and have enough left over to do something actually useful and interesting.
Which is why your other suggestion is way worse. NASA still serves an important role doing the kinds of research and exploration that there is little motivation for the private sector to do. The private sector would have never launched Cassini or the Mars rovers, much less continued the program for 6 years, or tested ion drives in space just because in many years it might be useful to reach asteroids. The purpose of NASA (and other space agencies) should be to expand the reach of humanity. To push back the limits. To make things possible.
Save (and increase!) NASA's budget for that. Let private industry focus on today's realities and what should already be routine.