I'd hardly call a CPU with a 23-stage pipeline and no out of order execution 'elegant'. Maybe to a hardware guy, but all I see when I look at Cell is absolutely atrocious integer performance.
Apple's margins on hardware are over 20%. Throw in the R&D on OS X, and you clear maybe $100 on each unit. Apple would have to charge $300-$400 on each copy to make it worthwhile, though they could go with the lower figure if they move enough volume.
I have to disagree with that very strongly. There are no quality components in my PowerMac. I've opened it up. All I see are mediocre fans, a low-end graphics card, generic RAM, and little else. Nice case though.
I'm curious, what do you consider an Apple class machine? If you put the guts of a Dell into a G5 case (which is probably the second most expensive component in a PowerMac), you'd have an Apple class machine. There is nothing else particularly special in there.
How can you use it to approximate the behavior of other apps?
If you break down the SPEC scores, you can get a pretty good idea of how things will behave. They've got significant non-trivial scientific kernels in there (computation fluid dynamics, for example), and real-world apps like GCC. It's fairly safe to say that many CFD codes will have similar performance patterns, just as will most compilers.
The thing about SPEC is that its a bunch of real-world kernels (everything from fluid dynamics to gzip to GCC), and a whole set of results, not just a single number. It's not a perfect indicator of performance, but its a pretty damn good one.
I'm curious why you chose to use the G5 PowerPC as your reference. Ironically, the long-pipeline G5 is on the Intel side of the "MHz Myth", given that at 2.3 GHz, it performs like a 1.8 or 2.0 GHz Opteron on integer code.
It really depends. A circuit with lots of capacitors is often the indication of a well-designed power supply components. You'll see some truely huge capacitors in amplifiers, for example.
As an aerospace major, I'm waiting for them to get to fluid dynamics, if only because it'll make for interesting debate. I'm sick of arguing microbiology. I want to see what they have to say about potential flows!
I don't think there wil be any Dark Ages. The very fact that "absolute truth religion" is now trying to ride the coat-tails of science suggests that science has won, in the ways that matter anyway. Eventually, religion will become like Catholicism or Hinduism, less concerned about pushing emperical truth and more concerned with the morals of their followers.
So why would ID not be treated as valid science, when it is easier to understand and vastly more probable?
You cannot say that ID is "vastly more probable" without quantifying the probability of an intelligent creator, just as you quantified (however poorly), the probability of life. It's like saying "5 is less than chair". Now, try and quantify the probability of an intelligent creator, and you'll see why ID is not a valid science.
All these posts and so little respect for others and their opinions.
People who know better generally tend to be that way. Scientists and engineers tend to be just as self-righteous as the religious, except they are actually productive contributors to society.
Did you know that as viruses "mutate" or "evolve", they are loosing part of their DNA? They don't become resistive because they effect a positive change, or an addition, to thwart antibodies. They become unrecognisable because they have lost part of their idenity. At least that is a scientific theory. Or don't ID people know how to formulate scientific theory? So if evolution "predicted" resistive viruses, wouldn't it then be considered the Deconstruction of Species?
Nothing about evolution says that genetic material must accumulate. What's your point?
I know of plenty of Christian scientists who can.
How many of those Christian scientists are actually biologists, with training in the field in which they are commenting?
Some of the most intelligent people of our time have believed that science is not harmed if an intelligent designer created the reality we know currently.
Which is a different point entirely. Lot's of scientists believe that there is an intelligent creator. Most would not argue that belief in an intelligent creator is a scientific concept.
And we still can't prove or disprove some of Einstin's theories.
We can't prove any of Einstien's theories. We can, in principle, attempt to disprove any of them. Logically, the only things that can be proven are analytic truths, and even those can only be proven in the context of an arbitrary set of axioms. Science, however, is ultimately grounded in emperical truths. These cannot be proven, only evidenced and supported, or disproven. Analytic truths can be derived from these, and are provable analytically, but they are still couched in the original emperical assumptions. Thus, the difference between religion and science is not that one speaks of the provable and the other doesn't. The difference is that one speaks of things that can be evidenced and supported, or disproven, and another speaks of things that cannot. The reason we support science, therefore, and not religion, is not because one can give us truth while the other cannot, as neither can give us truth, but because one can give us useful facsimiles of truth while the other cannot give us anything pragmatically useful.
The fact is that we will never understand how the earth was formed, or how humans came to be here. Why? Because none of us were there.
No, but we can say with 99% certainty that a particular theory of earth's formation is the most likely. In a universe without absolute truth (and that's a mathematical truth!), hoping for anything better is futile.
Liberally minded people like to think themselves more capable of independant thought because they don't subscribe to this Christian mumbo jumbo.
The entertaining thing about Christianity is that it is logically inconsistent. This is something you learn in almost any philosophy class, and something Spinoza figured out long ago. Therefore, it is correct to say that those who subscribe (verbetim) to Christianity are incapable of independent thought. That is not to say that all Chrisitians are incapable of independent thought, but rather that the ones who are don't subscribe to Christianity in full, logical contridictions and all.
While you yourselves have taken up evolution as religon, and will blindly believe anything someone else tells you.
It's not blind belief, but rather, educated belief. Qualitatively, both are the same, and neither offers any more guarantee of reliability than the other. In practice, belief in scientists have tended to result in useful knowledge, while belief in priests have resulted in nothing usesful.
I say blindly because as I have already stated unless you can adequately debate molecular biology,
Evolution from lower life forms indicates an increase of genetic material from the lower form to a higher.
Which is not true. Amphibians have more DNA in all than we do, and rice (of all things) has more genes than we do. Surely you would agree that we are higher lifeforms.
Sure, dogs are bred to weed out undesirable traits and to accentuate desirable ones, yet this is still a dog. In 100,000 years of breeding, I'm not going to get a dog that has the slightest bit more genetic material than the one I started with 10,000 years ago.
10,000 years is a rather short timespan during which to perform your experiment. Breeding of dogs hasn't been around even that long, so the fact that dogs are genetically similar to their predecessors acounts for nothing.
The basis for radiometric dating methods assumes three things: a constant rate of decay, an isolated system where neither the radioactive element nor the decay product is added nor removed, and third that the initial ratio of parent to decay product is known.
The rate of decay of elements falls out of nuclear science. Nuclear science is not something ID folks want to take on --- nuclear scientists can bury you in equations in a way evolutionists cannot. The other two bits are assumptions, but good ones. Barring unforseen vectors, radioactive carbon simply does not add itself to the system. Certainly not in ways that cannot be checked for in contamination tests. Tthe assumption aboout knowing the initial ratio of parent to decay product is a good one too. The chemistry of life, as compared to its genetics, is something that is remarkably constant throughout the biosphere.
For myself, I have many other pieces of evidence that provide me with a 'preponderance of the evidence' indicating the fallability of evolution.
Better than these sad examples?
I would hope, that creationism, pastafarianism, and others should welcome and stand on their own merit.
And their merits are poor.
Unless you're afraid of what you might find, that there actually is a God of universe.
Yep, I see a whole lotta fear out there.
The entertaining thing is that if there is a God, he's going to be far happier with the scientists for advancing the state of humanity than with religious-but-otherwise-unproductive. Yes, this a belief, like yours, but since it is a belief, there is no way for you to prove me wrong.
I'm curious, what's your domain of expertise? What makes you qualified to comment that Behe "domolishes critics in his reply"? I, by training, am an aerospace engineer, who has taken college-level biology courses. That makes me completely unqualified to talk at any level of complexity about genetics, but does mean that I know (or at least, should know), what makes a good scientific argument and what doesn't.
I've only gotten through the first several pages, but at least those are flimsy arguments at best (the rest could be great, I don't know, I don't have the patience to continue). His basic claim in that section is the inabilitty of evolutionists to recreate something he would consider "irreducibly complex" suggests intelligent design. First of all, the very argument is biased in his favor. Scientists do not hold that there is anything irreducibly complex. Any definition that is created is Behe's. They can guess at what he would consider irreducibly complex, but as Behe shows, if they prove that scenario, he is entirely free to say "I don't consider that irreducibly complex".
From the point of view of a geneticist, if there were anything irreducibly complex, a gene would be as good as any other. Behe has no backing to his claim that the gene isn't "irreducible enough", other than the fact that his focus seems to be on larger scale cell structures and not the intricate details of the genetic code. If anything, the fact that the e.coli were able to adapt an existing gene to serve the purpose of the deleted one (increasing in efficiency 10x according to Behe's own comments) just show the process of evolution at work!
That was never the most accepted theory in science. It has been known for thousands of years, by educated men, that the world is round. The Greeks did rough calculations of the radius of the earth in several hundred BC.
More to the point, it should be noted that "science" is only about four or five hundred years old. What the Greeks did was not, generally, science. Naturalism and applied mathematics are better terms. What they lacked was the philosophical principles that make science what it is today. Those weren't laid out, in the West anyway, until around the Enlightenment. Notably, they, being mathematicians more often than not, paid little to no attention to experiment or observation, preferring to appproach problems entirely analytically. So you cannot say, for example, that it was the belief of science for many years that the four elements were earth, wind, fire and water. Many people believed that, but they were never scientists in the modern sense of the word.
but I think that all ideas should be given fair weight
The key statement here is "fair weight". Yes, all theories should be given fair weight. That is not to say they should be given equal weight. There are lots of ideas out there that we do not have time to teach to school children. We must use, thus, some pruning process to decide what are the most useful ideas to teach to children. While exposure to the beliefs of intelligent-design folks could be useful, it's hardly useful enough to warrent getting into an already crammed cirriculum. We live in a country where students aren't taught, in school, about basic logic. If they are lucky, they are tought how to construct a logical argument, but usually, they aren't taught that either. They aren't taught philosophy, or international politics, or even European history (so they have no idea where 90% of their country's basic culture comes from). In the face of all these far more important things that they are not taught, I can't say I have any remorse about ID remaining off the cirriculum.
To this day, philosophers debate what "science" is.
Yet scientists don't, and regardless happily go about improving hte world.
I'm not convinced that scientists should have control over our public schools' science curriculum any more than I'm convinced that priests should set the curriculum for (comparative) religion classes.
Your analogy is flawed. Comparative religion isn't a subject in which a priest is an expert. Comparative religion is, depending on the exact nature of the class, either a branch of cultural study (anthropology, etc), or a branch of philosophy. Personally, I think an anthropologist or a philosopher who has studies cultural philosophy would make a fine person to set the cirriculum for a comparative religion class.
Public education is so crucial to our society that it should be set by the people or their duly elected representatives, not some unelected technocracy.
That presupposes that democratic processes are always better than their alternatives. This has shown to be emperically false (most corporations and households are not democracies), and indeed is hardly the principle under which our country was founded.
Intelligent design's criticism of evolution is that Darwin's gradual change over time doesn't seem to match the fossil record very well.
Darwin's theories of gradual change aren't evolution as we know it today. They are the basis for modern theories of evolution, but as with chemistry, these basic ideas have changed quite dramatically to arrive in their modern forms.
There is not much difference between swift evolution proponents (that speciation can occur quickly) and ID. ID simply states that if swift evolution is the case, then there must be intelligence involved. This theory actually is 'scientific' (i.e. falsifiable) in the sense that it can be examined in information theory. DNA is a signal that has random processes applied to it, etc. If you can demonstrate that random processes and death can create higher order signals, then ID is false since ID's basic premise is that it is impossible for a complex singal to arise spontaneously.
Your idea doesn't work. ID's claim is that if swift evolution occurs, then intelligence must be evolved. You can demonstrate the existance of swift evolution all you want, but there is no way to demonstrate that intelligence is not involved. There is no experiment you can create to which an ID person cannot just say "your results are the work of intelligence at work".
Your argument is fallacious. Just because people, in the past, had incorrectly accused someone of being unscientific does not mean that nobody can correctly accuse someone of being unscientific now. Yes, you can generally define science how you want, but there are only a few definitions that will fly with the mainstream usage of the word (same with most terms, really). Verifiability has pretty much been a central tenant of science ever since philosophers of the Enlightenment were hashing out the concept. You can say something that is not couched in that tenant is still science, but that doesn't mean anybody should take you seriously.
I actually know why this happened. We learned about it in our flight dynamics class. The problem was the result in a mistmatch between what the pilot thought the airplane was doing, and what it was actually doing. The A320 had software that prevented the pilot from stalling the airplane during flight. However, the protection only kicked in above 90', because the software assumed that if you were below that, you wanted to land (which involves a stall right at touchdown). The pilot was trying to do a flyby, and was supposed to be above 100', but for whatever reason he came in at around 30'. Now, the reasons he didn't pull up and ramp up the engines are debatable, but the equitable explanations suggest that he assumed that the airplane's stall protection would kick in, while the airplane had disabled them because it thought it was about to land.
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I'd hardly call a CPU with a 23-stage pipeline and no out of order execution 'elegant'. Maybe to a hardware guy, but all I see when I look at Cell is absolutely atrocious integer performance.
Apple's margins on hardware are over 20%. Throw in the R&D on OS X, and you clear maybe $100 on each unit. Apple would have to charge $300-$400 on each copy to make it worthwhile, though they could go with the lower figure if they move enough volume.
I have to disagree with that very strongly. There are no quality components in my PowerMac. I've opened it up. All I see are mediocre fans, a low-end graphics card, generic RAM, and little else. Nice case though.
I'm curious, what do you consider an Apple class machine? If you put the guts of a Dell into a G5 case (which is probably the second most expensive component in a PowerMac), you'd have an Apple class machine. There is nothing else particularly special in there.
How can you use it to approximate the behavior of other apps?
If you break down the SPEC scores, you can get a pretty good idea of how things will behave. They've got significant non-trivial scientific kernels in there (computation fluid dynamics, for example), and real-world apps like GCC. It's fairly safe to say that many CFD codes will have similar performance patterns, just as will most compilers.
The thing about SPEC is that its a bunch of real-world kernels (everything from fluid dynamics to gzip to GCC), and a whole set of results, not just a single number. It's not a perfect indicator of performance, but its a pretty damn good one.
You forgot the part of the story where Rachet and Clank run in with a gender transmogrification device.
I'm curious why you chose to use the G5 PowerPC as your reference. Ironically, the long-pipeline G5 is on the Intel side of the "MHz Myth", given that at 2.3 GHz, it performs like a 1.8 or 2.0 GHz Opteron on integer code.
It really depends. A circuit with lots of capacitors is often the indication of a well-designed power supply components. You'll see some truely huge capacitors in amplifiers, for example.
As an aerospace major, I'm waiting for them to get to fluid dynamics, if only because it'll make for interesting debate. I'm sick of arguing microbiology. I want to see what they have to say about potential flows!
Wow. Excellent explanation! That's a very good argument that is understandable without getting mired in the minutae of microbiology.
I don't think there wil be any Dark Ages. The very fact that "absolute truth religion" is now trying to ride the coat-tails of science suggests that science has won, in the ways that matter anyway. Eventually, religion will become like Catholicism or Hinduism, less concerned about pushing emperical truth and more concerned with the morals of their followers.
What the fuck are you talking about. Christianity meets modern-day "I'm okay you're okay" bullshit?
So why would ID not be treated as valid science, when it is easier to understand and vastly more probable?
You cannot say that ID is "vastly more probable" without quantifying the probability of an intelligent creator, just as you quantified (however poorly), the probability of life. It's like saying "5 is less than chair". Now, try and quantify the probability of an intelligent creator, and you'll see why ID is not a valid science.
All these posts and so little respect for others and their opinions.
People who know better generally tend to be that way. Scientists and engineers tend to be just as self-righteous as the religious, except they are actually productive contributors to society.
Did you know that as viruses "mutate" or "evolve", they are loosing part of their DNA? They don't become resistive because they effect a positive change, or an addition, to thwart antibodies. They become unrecognisable because they have lost part of their idenity. At least that is a scientific theory. Or don't ID people know how to formulate scientific theory? So if evolution "predicted" resistive viruses, wouldn't it then be considered the Deconstruction of Species?
Nothing about evolution says that genetic material must accumulate. What's your point?
I know of plenty of Christian scientists who can.
How many of those Christian scientists are actually biologists, with training in the field in which they are commenting?
Some of the most intelligent people of our time have believed that science is not harmed if an intelligent designer created the reality we know currently.
Which is a different point entirely. Lot's of scientists believe that there is an intelligent creator. Most would not argue that belief in an intelligent creator is a scientific concept.
And we still can't prove or disprove some of Einstin's theories.
We can't prove any of Einstien's theories. We can, in principle, attempt to disprove any of them. Logically, the only things that can be proven are analytic truths, and even those can only be proven in the context of an arbitrary set of axioms. Science, however, is ultimately grounded in emperical truths. These cannot be proven, only evidenced and supported, or disproven. Analytic truths can be derived from these, and are provable analytically, but they are still couched in the original emperical assumptions. Thus, the difference between religion and science is not that one speaks of the provable and the other doesn't. The difference is that one speaks of things that can be evidenced and supported, or disproven, and another speaks of things that cannot. The reason we support science, therefore, and not religion, is not because one can give us truth while the other cannot, as neither can give us truth, but because one can give us useful facsimiles of truth while the other cannot give us anything pragmatically useful.
The fact is that we will never understand how the earth was formed, or how humans came to be here. Why? Because none of us were there.
No, but we can say with 99% certainty that a particular theory of earth's formation is the most likely. In a universe without absolute truth (and that's a mathematical truth!), hoping for anything better is futile.
Liberally minded people like to think themselves more capable of independant thought because they don't subscribe to this Christian mumbo jumbo.
The entertaining thing about Christianity is that it is logically inconsistent. This is something you learn in almost any philosophy class, and something Spinoza figured out long ago. Therefore, it is correct to say that those who subscribe (verbetim) to Christianity are incapable of independent thought. That is not to say that all Chrisitians are incapable of independent thought, but rather that the ones who are don't subscribe to Christianity in full, logical contridictions and all.
While you yourselves have taken up evolution as religon, and will blindly believe anything someone else tells you.
It's not blind belief, but rather, educated belief. Qualitatively, both are the same, and neither offers any more guarantee of reliability than the other. In practice, belief in scientists have tended to result in useful knowledge, while belief in priests have resulted in nothing usesful.
I say blindly because as I have already stated unless you can adequately debate molecular biology,
Evolution from lower life forms indicates an increase of genetic material from the lower form to a higher.
Which is not true. Amphibians have more DNA in all than we do, and rice (of all things) has more genes than we do. Surely you would agree that we are higher lifeforms.
Sure, dogs are bred to weed out undesirable traits and to accentuate desirable ones, yet this is still a dog. In 100,000 years of breeding, I'm not going to get a dog that has the slightest bit more genetic material than the one I started with 10,000 years ago.
10,000 years is a rather short timespan during which to perform your experiment. Breeding of dogs hasn't been around even that long, so the fact that dogs are genetically similar to their predecessors acounts for nothing.
The basis for radiometric dating methods assumes three things: a constant rate of decay, an isolated system where neither the radioactive element nor the decay product is added nor removed, and third that the initial ratio of parent to decay product is known.
The rate of decay of elements falls out of nuclear science. Nuclear science is not something ID folks want to take on --- nuclear scientists can bury you in equations in a way evolutionists cannot. The other two bits are assumptions, but good ones. Barring unforseen vectors, radioactive carbon simply does not add itself to the system. Certainly not in ways that cannot be checked for in contamination tests. Tthe assumption aboout knowing the initial ratio of parent to decay product is a good one too. The chemistry of life, as compared to its genetics, is something that is remarkably constant throughout the biosphere.
For myself, I have many other pieces of evidence that provide me with a 'preponderance of the evidence' indicating the fallability of evolution.
Better than these sad examples?
I would hope, that creationism, pastafarianism, and others should welcome and stand on their own merit.
And their merits are poor.
Unless you're afraid of what you might find, that there actually is a God of universe.
Yep, I see a whole lotta fear out there.
The entertaining thing is that if there is a God, he's going to be far happier with the scientists for advancing the state of humanity than with religious-but-otherwise-unproductive. Yes, this a belief, like yours, but since it is a belief, there is no way for you to prove me wrong.
I'm curious, what's your domain of expertise? What makes you qualified to comment that Behe "domolishes critics in his reply"? I, by training, am an aerospace engineer, who has taken college-level biology courses. That makes me completely unqualified to talk at any level of complexity about genetics, but does mean that I know (or at least, should know), what makes a good scientific argument and what doesn't.
I've only gotten through the first several pages, but at least those are flimsy arguments at best (the rest could be great, I don't know, I don't have the patience to continue). His basic claim in that section is the inabilitty of evolutionists to recreate something he would consider "irreducibly complex" suggests intelligent design. First of all, the very argument is biased in his favor. Scientists do not hold that there is anything irreducibly complex. Any definition that is created is Behe's. They can guess at what he would consider irreducibly complex, but as Behe shows, if they prove that scenario, he is entirely free to say "I don't consider that irreducibly complex".
From the point of view of a geneticist, if there were anything irreducibly complex, a gene would be as good as any other. Behe has no backing to his claim that the gene isn't "irreducible enough", other than the fact that his focus seems to be on larger scale cell structures and not the intricate details of the genetic code. If anything, the fact that the e.coli were able to adapt an existing gene to serve the purpose of the deleted one (increasing in efficiency 10x according to Behe's own comments) just show the process of evolution at work!
That was never the most accepted theory in science. It has been known for thousands of years, by educated men, that the world is round. The Greeks did rough calculations of the radius of the earth in several hundred BC.
More to the point, it should be noted that "science" is only about four or five hundred years old. What the Greeks did was not, generally, science. Naturalism and applied mathematics are better terms. What they lacked was the philosophical principles that make science what it is today. Those weren't laid out, in the West anyway, until around the Enlightenment. Notably, they, being mathematicians more often than not, paid little to no attention to experiment or observation, preferring to appproach problems entirely analytically. So you cannot say, for example, that it was the belief of science for many years that the four elements were earth, wind, fire and water. Many people believed that, but they were never scientists in the modern sense of the word.
but I think that all ideas should be given fair weight
The key statement here is "fair weight". Yes, all theories should be given fair weight. That is not to say they should be given equal weight. There are lots of ideas out there that we do not have time to teach to school children. We must use, thus, some pruning process to decide what are the most useful ideas to teach to children. While exposure to the beliefs of intelligent-design folks could be useful, it's hardly useful enough to warrent getting into an already crammed cirriculum. We live in a country where students aren't taught, in school, about basic logic. If they are lucky, they are tought how to construct a logical argument, but usually, they aren't taught that either. They aren't taught philosophy, or international politics, or even European history (so they have no idea where 90% of their country's basic culture comes from). In the face of all these far more important things that they are not taught, I can't say I have any remorse about ID remaining off the cirriculum.
To this day, philosophers debate what "science" is.
Yet scientists don't, and regardless happily go about improving hte world.
I'm not convinced that scientists should have control over our public schools' science curriculum any more than I'm convinced that priests should set the curriculum for (comparative) religion classes.
Your analogy is flawed. Comparative religion isn't a subject in which a priest is an expert. Comparative religion is, depending on the exact nature of the class, either a branch of cultural study (anthropology, etc), or a branch of philosophy. Personally, I think an anthropologist or a philosopher who has studies cultural philosophy would make a fine person to set the cirriculum for a comparative religion class.
Public education is so crucial to our society that it should be set by the people or their duly elected representatives, not some unelected technocracy.
That presupposes that democratic processes are always better than their alternatives. This has shown to be emperically false (most corporations and households are not democracies), and indeed is hardly the principle under which our country was founded.
Intelligent design's criticism of evolution is that Darwin's gradual change over time doesn't seem to match the fossil record very well.
Darwin's theories of gradual change aren't evolution as we know it today. They are the basis for modern theories of evolution, but as with chemistry, these basic ideas have changed quite dramatically to arrive in their modern forms.
There is not much difference between swift evolution proponents (that speciation can occur quickly) and ID. ID simply states that if swift evolution is the case, then there must be intelligence involved. This theory actually is 'scientific' (i.e. falsifiable) in the sense that it can be examined in information theory. DNA is a signal that has random processes applied to it, etc. If you can demonstrate that random processes and death can create higher order signals, then ID is false since ID's basic premise is that it is impossible for a complex singal to arise spontaneously.
Your idea doesn't work. ID's claim is that if swift evolution occurs, then intelligence must be evolved. You can demonstrate the existance of swift evolution all you want, but there is no way to demonstrate that intelligence is not involved. There is no experiment you can create to which an ID person cannot just say "your results are the work of intelligence at work".
Your argument is fallacious. Just because people, in the past, had incorrectly accused someone of being unscientific does not mean that nobody can correctly accuse someone of being unscientific now. Yes, you can generally define science how you want, but there are only a few definitions that will fly with the mainstream usage of the word (same with most terms, really). Verifiability has pretty much been a central tenant of science ever since philosophers of the Enlightenment were hashing out the concept. You can say something that is not couched in that tenant is still science, but that doesn't mean anybody should take you seriously.
I don't think we're remembering the same incident. The A320 crash at the Habsheim airshow only killed only 3 of 136 people onboard.
I actually know why this happened. We learned about it in our flight dynamics class. The problem was the result in a mistmatch between what the pilot thought the airplane was doing, and what it was actually doing. The A320 had software that prevented the pilot from stalling the airplane during flight. However, the protection only kicked in above 90', because the software assumed that if you were below that, you wanted to land (which involves a stall right at touchdown). The pilot was trying to do a flyby, and was supposed to be above 100', but for whatever reason he came in at around 30'. Now, the reasons he didn't pull up and ramp up the engines are debatable, but the equitable explanations suggest that he assumed that the airplane's stall protection would kick in, while the airplane had disabled them because it thought it was about to land.