I can accept that you and the other posters debating the details are correct, after all IANAP.
I was under the impression Einstein at least partialy based his work on Newton's equations. In "The Principa" Newton explicity wrote the assumption "Time is constant". I have read two biographies about Einstein, both some time ago now, I can not recall if he knew of Newton's assumption when he questioned it.
It is fairly obvious that my posts were not aiming for technical correctness, rather I was using (what I thought were) simple examples. The examples were supposed to make the point that the term "crackpot" is relative (pun intended) and scientific concepts sould be attacked with the scientific method, regardless of their origin.
I also belive that a good science teacher will continually emphasise the method of science while teaching it's concepts. Sadly good science teachers are rare until you reach University level. TFA and the "crackpot" rebuttal are both like a bad science teacher, they give me nothing but an assertion.
BTW: I think the guy in the article is indeed a "crackpot" but that is simply my offhand opinion. Remeber IANAP, rebutting what I see as an "advanced" physics argument seems like alot of needlees head scratching on my part. I have a decent (if somewhat rusty) grasp on calculus, I'm sure if you scribbled a rebuttal to TFA on the back of an envolope I could comprehend it, but please don't.;-)
Not sure that a simplification is a lie, I was taught the high school atomic model in the early 70's. In the late 80's I went to uni and did a BSc with the standard first year physics and chemistry and found that things were not that simple. I also remeber being told in high school that you can't find the sqrt of a -ve number, then along came a maths lecturer with his blasphemous ideas about "i".
My tertary education is in computer science and operations research, materials science is both facinating and (to me) poorly understood. I haven't seen any exploding rollers but I recently saw a full bottle of (accidently) super-cooled lemonade freeze solid when I opened the lid. The "freeze line" started at the top and went down the bottle within a second or two, not a bad party trick if I could (deliberately) reproduce it.
"Do you believe (as I do) that logic is valid, despite the fact that it's unprovable?"
Yes I do, I also think it is far more useful than the "because X said so" world views. The philosophical question of wether logic is "real" or just seems that way because we can't escape the biological foundations of thought is another matter.
"I like to define faith as the axioms of one's belief system"
Well said, axioms are simply assumptions that by definition are accepted without proof. eg: Newton wrote in The Principa that he assumed time was constant, the assumption appeared to be an "obvious fact"....until Einstien came along.
"This claim by religious moderates that so-called "faith" and rational biological science are compatible is total nonsense."
I am not religious but I am interested in philosophy and belive that if you look closely EVERYTHING is ultimately based on "faith" in something. Science is based on the "faith" that the Universe is predictable and exists outside ones own thought processes. Not a huge leap of "faith" but still a leap.
"Isn't that the school kids version electrons orbiting a nucleus a simplified model which works mostly."
Why yes it is! The crackpot that literally dreamed it up was Rutherford. You are right though it is not the most modern idea. As far as puddings are concerned it appears to be rasins not razors, so I was wrong there also, neither "mistake" negates the point of my example.
From the link: In 1898, J.J. Thomson proposed that atoms are clumps of matter with electrons embedded in them, like raisins in a fruitcake. This idea was soon rejected, and replaced by Rutherford's idea that electrons orbit around the nucleus like planets, with empty space between them. During the early twentieth century, it was believed that electrons, protons, and neutrons are elementary particles which cannot be broken down further.
A wise school teacher will go to great pains to relate why the pudding idea lost out and the fact that Rutherford was still not completely accurate, they are also likely to gloss over the "what are protons made of" question and point the kid to a book. An ignorant teacher will put a misleading bumper sticker about the nature of truth on the front cover of the same book.
That's true, he didn't, it came from the formula E=MV^2 that was found by a French woman dropping steel balls into clay, it was a correction to Newtons erroneous E=MV. The C is just a constant V, Einstein got the idea because of experiments around the time had shown the puzzling result that light travels at the same speed in all directions.
Now when Einstien published his paper he assumed it was all just a mathematical curiosity, he did not think it translated to the physical Universe and was suprised when his papers were so enthusasticaly received. In other words Einstien made up a fundementally new physics that was such a "crackpot" idea that (for a while) he didn't belive it himself! He also kicked of the the crackpot field of quantum mechanics and then spent the rest of his life imploring others not to take it too seriously. Another example: The modern idea of an atom, literally came from a dream (the guy woke up with the crackpot idea that electrons orbit a nucleus), before then the most credible theory was that atoms looked like puddings with razor blades stuck in them.
Fundemental physics is not yet a "done deal", there are many gaping holes in our understanding and the recent (last decade or so) puzzling results labeled dark energy/matter have got a new generation of crackpots all fired up, dispite this vast army of crackpots across the globe, we still don't have enough of them to fill the holes and probably never will.
Anyway, I'm sure your not anti-science and I'm also reasonably certain the guy in TFA is a crackpot who has got it wrong but that's just my opinion. When you talk about science you need to rebutt the idea not the person, the fact they plucked a new equation out of their arse says nothing about it's validity. Luckily most crackpot ideas are so trivial to rebutt that scientists don't bother, some are harder and a paper or two gets published, some become accepted wisdom and it can take generations to spot the flaw, either way nobody has time to check them all.
"How fscking stupid can you iberals be? Next thing the weather you don't like will be the fault of GWB."
You know, that comment sums up what is wrong with debates on the environment, the war on social problem X, poverty, cartoon riots, immigration, gitmo, torture, blah, blah, blah,... and finally religion and politics in general.
Some random "iberal" does/says something either deliberately or without thinking it through and all of a sudden a billion "iberals" around the planet are tarred with the same brush. Next thing you know "oneservitives" are burning "iberal" flags and emabssies and "iberals" are taunting them by repeating the original stupid act/comment.
From an Australian veiwpoint GWB's current aim (as far as I can tell) is to delay the move away from oil and coal not stop it, we have the same misguided stance in our leader. Untill recently both were willfull obstructionists on the issue of climate change but politically that tactic was becoming an "emporer has no clothes" liability. Both leaders pragmatically accepted the evidence from three decades of high profile and high quality research and promptly became enthusiastic procastanators.
All this does not mean conservative leaders, oil/coal executives, republicans, born again christians, texans, white guys or any other group that GWB "belongs to", thinks or even acts the same!!!
The rest of your comment I happen to agree with but it is wasted. Most of the people you are trying to influence won't bother reading past the first sentence.
"So there's nothing about shooting the medics first that hasn't been part of Real Life for decades already"
1. You don't understand military strategy. Killing one enemy removes exactly one enemy from the battlefield, wounding one enemy removes more than one enemy from the battlefield.
2. It is not just the enemies of the USA who selectively ignore the Geneva convention.
3. You start your post with "If I recall correctly...", you don't and my bet is you have never asked a WW2 medic anything!
"It's just hunting revenue." - No, they will not sell you a license to use it nor are the in the habit of wasting donors money by suing, they prefer to point out their rights and ask for cooperation as in TFA. Nothing new, the first time I heard the red cross was doing this was in the 80's.
"Plus if you advertise that a donation is going to a specific cause.."
It is going to a specific "cause", ie: the Red Cross. Perhaps they should pull out of the US and let FEMA do the work, lots of luck with the next hurricane dude.
"So this is what the red cross are doing with your 9/11 funds. (As we already know they funneled the cash into all of their projects not just 9/11 recovery"
The red cross do not accept public donations for a particular use, people donate to the organisation in the knowlage they know how to put your money to good use. Contrary to what most Americans think, 9/11 was a minor disaster (in terms of life/limb) compared to so many other ongoing disasters in 2001.
I also cannot belive the bile that is being spewed at a charity organisation that has literally saved millions of lives and given assistance to hundreds of millions more. Their symbol is protected under the rules of war, give them a fucking break and change the colour!!!!
Ditto, been doing it for 15yrs. Print __FILE__, __LINE__, timestamp, pid and threadID with every message (macro's will make it simpler), these are the "must have's" everything else is negotiable. It does help to have some consistency in the messages when using words like fatal-error, error, warning, ect, but that is hard to enforce in most commercial environments.
Friends: Even though I find the MSVC search tool very usefull, one of the first things I do when setting up a development box at work is to download a windows version of grep.
"I know any amount of stuff by means other than proving it within a consistent axiomatic system. I know my name. I know my favourite colour. I know I'm wasting my time trying to explain something on Slashdot."
An axiom is nothing more than an accepted but unproven truth, ie: an assumption. I would consider the things in your list "axioms" that your mind uses to build it's world view. The question of the minds axioms being consistent and the applicability of Godel to the human mind are open until we can show (one way or another) that the brain can be described by Turing's UCM. Naturally if your mind has the axiom of a soul that is independant of the physical body none of this will make much sense because the soul is already outside the system.
"Only people who are confused about the nature of knowledge..."
You seem very certain about your own ideas on the nature of knowlage, perhaps you could show me how you know that I actually exist or perhaps you could elaborate on what you belive. Either way stop branding me a fool and realise things are not always black and white.;-)
"but nothing in Godel's proof puts an absolute barrier to knowability"
When we describe reality what we are really doing is describing our brains model of reality. Applying Godel to the brain means we could have infinite knowlage but still not fully understand ourselves or the Universe in wich we arose. This does not mean seeking knowlage is pointless just that the knowlage is eternally doomed to be incomplete, ie: we can know anything but not everything.
Somehow I don't think Greenpeace was responsible for Chernobyl. I don't know how old you are but IIRC that particular incident stopped reactor building in it's tracks, the fact that Greenpeace foretold that kind of disaster was not lost on the public. Also I am gratefull to Greenpeace for their (almost) single handed efforts to stop the French "testing" nukes in MY backyard.
Having said that, there is a political dogma in Greenpeace that says "never use reactors", but this is born from ignorance of new technology. Some of the founders do not agree with this position and want it changed for obviously pragmatic reasons. Having watched Greenpeace since the 70's, my guess is they will quietly change their dogma well before the oil and coal industries change theirs.
"In any event, there is a difference between true and proveable and "knowable", just as there is a difference between a model, an axiomatic system, and reality. People like to throw around Godel's theorem a lot without fully appreciating its limits in scope. It is a powerful theorem of mathematical logic in that it shows that we cannot fully axiomatize the world. Still, it does not have the implications that you might suspect."
Our mind is a model of reality, I belive (but cannot prove) that it is based on an axiomatic system whose axioms may contradict each other. You cannot show it does not imply something about philosophy in exactly the same way that I cannot show that it does. It is a belief, phycologoicaly similar in some ways to the belief in God.
"if you want a better idea of the type of barrier we are facing in this case, you would be better served by complexity and information theory....the type of problem involved in turbulence simulation, not logical issues of provability and incompleteness"
I was going way OT, I was not talking about turbulence in particular I was agreeing with the GP who suggested there are things humans will never know.
"but this knowledge comes from outside the logical system"
"could it be the case that we might not even be able to understand and explain some phonemena simply because our brain power is not adequate."
Godel has already shown that no system of description is adequate, this is independant of of the amount of brain power on hand (or in head). People often wonder why maths is so good at describing the Universe, I belive it is because it is actually describing the model used by the brain to create the illusion of "I". ie: The simulated Universe containing the simulated self we all carry around in our heads. The "physical universe we live in" is an illusion.
A favourite quote from the above link: Although this theorem can be stated and proved in a rigorously mathematical way, what it seems to say is that rational thought can never penetrate to the final ultimate truth... But, paradoxically, to understand Gödel's proof is to find a sort of liberation. For many logic students, the final breakthrough to full understanding of the Incompleteness Theorem is practically a conversion experience. This is partly a by-product of the potent mystique Gödel's name carries. But, more profoundly, to understand the essentially labyrinthine nature of the castle is, somehow, to be free of it.
I find the quote interesting because it relates a similar experience to religious conversion, ie: acceptance of the unknowable.
"I smell someone whoring their ideas for grant money."
Ditto, magic formula with no details applied to a completely different (high profile) problem. BTW: Glaziers have been predicting how glass will crack for a very long time and have embeded the technology in a $5 tool called a "glass cutter".
Using statistics to predict individual crack formation in a uniform material such as glass or metal is like predicting an avacado using the periodic table
Sorry to burst your bubble, an Irishman who has publicly told the IRA to go fuck themselves will not be trembling in his boots at the thought of a surly support geek. My guess is he would personally throttle you with the xbox cable and have security toss your body out of his plane.
I agree that Bill does have a point in the letter (ie: his hobby is sending HIM broke and he has a right to charge for his time). Normally I would agree with your view on ad hominem attacks but the OP has a valid point about hypocricy when Bill's "argument" relies solely on his own moralistic stance that considers copyright infringment equal to theft. If someone takes one position in what they write but takes the opposite position in what they do, they are begging for their "argument" to be ridiculed. Especially when the argument is about a moral issue such as Bill's letter that accuses people of "theft" but really just boils down to Bill bitching about his own finances. The OP was not the one who brought in ad hominem attacks Bill was, the OP's factual remarks about Bill practising "real theft" (ie: removing a physical resource) could be considered an ad hominem defense.
I think the letter is just the venting of frustration by someone who wanted to be an oxymoron (ie: paid hobbyist) but had trouble getting other hobbyists to agree and then pay him. You cannot expect hobbyists to listen when one of their own goes commercial with plans to significantly bump up the cost of their hobby. He will always be seen by those people as a traitor and a sellout, what is strange is that people who were not even born at the time will point to the letter as "poof" for their copy-cat opinions.
$40K was a huge amount of money back in the 70's, $2hr was not that bad for a collage kid. He was trying to keep a foot in both the hobby and commercial worlds, his letter demonstrates a confusion of priorities that is common for a young person near the end of formal education.
People were paying for software long before bill came along. The thing that has changed since Bill's letter is that anyone can cheaply access the internet and legally download a vast range of free alternatives, often written by people who hope you or your employer might one day buy their maintinance services. The hobby side has exploded in popularity and is beyond recognition, it now includes all sorts of people who are not the slightest bit interested in what's under the hood.
Of course every programmer (both then and now) who has been paid for any length of time realises there are plenty of people with problems who don't want to pay to have them fixed. This is nothing new and it wont (as Bill hoped) go away, just ask any mechanic!
I'm glad you can see a bigger picture in your own family. I don't think humans will change any time soon but I have noticed that the internet has given the historically ignorant (like me) a place to easily check out the stuff seen on TV.
Thirty-odd years ago, high schools in Australia taught very little about anything historical outside of what the white guys did during the first 100yrs or so of settlement. Sheep and the welcome stranger, (a gold nugget about the size of a washing machine) made up a large part of the curiculum, the same thing year after year got extremely boring. It created a very one sided view amoungst a generation of people who were shown history was boring.
Also some people around here get very upset about typo's, especially they're vs their, thanks for not going there.
Slashdot Mirror
I can accept that you and the other posters debating the details are correct, after all IANAP.
;-)
I was under the impression Einstein at least partialy based his work on Newton's equations. In "The Principa" Newton explicity wrote the assumption "Time is constant". I have read two biographies about Einstein, both some time ago now, I can not recall if he knew of Newton's assumption when he questioned it.
It is fairly obvious that my posts were not aiming for technical correctness, rather I was using (what I thought were) simple examples. The examples were supposed to make the point that the term "crackpot" is relative (pun intended) and scientific concepts sould be attacked with the scientific method, regardless of their origin.
I also belive that a good science teacher will continually emphasise the method of science while teaching it's concepts. Sadly good science teachers are rare until you reach University level. TFA and the "crackpot" rebuttal are both like a bad science teacher, they give me nothing but an assertion.
BTW: I think the guy in the article is indeed a "crackpot" but that is simply my offhand opinion. Remeber IANAP, rebutting what I see as an "advanced" physics argument seems like alot of needlees head scratching on my part. I have a decent (if somewhat rusty) grasp on calculus, I'm sure if you scribbled a rebuttal to TFA on the back of an envolope I could comprehend it, but please don't.
Not sure that a simplification is a lie, I was taught the high school atomic model in the early 70's. In the late 80's I went to uni and did a BSc with the standard first year physics and chemistry and found that things were not that simple. I also remeber being told in high school that you can't find the sqrt of a -ve number, then along came a maths lecturer with his blasphemous ideas about "i".
My tertary education is in computer science and operations research, materials science is both facinating and (to me) poorly understood. I haven't seen any exploding rollers but I recently saw a full bottle of (accidently) super-cooled lemonade freeze solid when I opened the lid. The "freeze line" started at the top and went down the bottle within a second or two, not a bad party trick if I could (deliberately) reproduce it.
"Do you believe (as I do) that logic is valid, despite the fact that it's unprovable?"
Yes I do, I also think it is far more useful than the "because X said so" world views. The philosophical question of wether logic is "real" or just seems that way because we can't escape the biological foundations of thought is another matter.
"I like to define faith as the axioms of one's belief system"
Well said, axioms are simply assumptions that by definition are accepted without proof. eg: Newton wrote in The Principa that he assumed time was constant, the assumption appeared to be an "obvious fact"....until Einstien came along.
"This claim by religious moderates that so-called "faith" and rational biological science are compatible is total nonsense."
I am not religious but I am interested in philosophy and belive that if you look closely EVERYTHING is ultimately based on "faith" in something. Science is based on the "faith" that the Universe is predictable and exists outside ones own thought processes. Not a huge leap of "faith" but still a leap.
"Isn't that the school kids version electrons orbiting a nucleus a simplified model which works mostly."
Why yes it is! The crackpot that literally dreamed it up was Rutherford. You are right though it is not the most modern idea. As far as puddings are concerned it appears to be rasins not razors, so I was wrong there also, neither "mistake" negates the point of my example.
I went looking for a pudding reference and found this article discussing the limits of science.
From the link: In 1898, J.J. Thomson proposed that atoms are clumps of matter with electrons embedded in them, like raisins in a fruitcake. This idea was soon rejected, and replaced by Rutherford's idea that electrons orbit around the nucleus like planets, with empty space between them. During the early twentieth century, it was believed that electrons, protons, and neutrons are elementary particles which cannot be broken down further.
A wise school teacher will go to great pains to relate why the pudding idea lost out and the fact that Rutherford was still not completely accurate, they are also likely to gloss over the "what are protons made of" question and point the kid to a book. An ignorant teacher will put a misleading bumper sticker about the nature of truth on the front cover of the same book.
"Einstein didn't just make up E=mc^2."
That's true, he didn't, it came from the formula E=MV^2 that was found by a French woman dropping steel balls into clay, it was a correction to Newtons erroneous E=MV. The C is just a constant V, Einstein got the idea because of experiments around the time had shown the puzzling result that light travels at the same speed in all directions.
Now when Einstien published his paper he assumed it was all just a mathematical curiosity, he did not think it translated to the physical Universe and was suprised when his papers were so enthusasticaly received. In other words Einstien made up a fundementally new physics that was such a "crackpot" idea that (for a while) he didn't belive it himself! He also kicked of the the crackpot field of quantum mechanics and then spent the rest of his life imploring others not to take it too seriously. Another example: The modern idea of an atom, literally came from a dream (the guy woke up with the crackpot idea that electrons orbit a nucleus), before then the most credible theory was that atoms looked like puddings with razor blades stuck in them.
Fundemental physics is not yet a "done deal", there are many gaping holes in our understanding and the recent (last decade or so) puzzling results labeled dark energy/matter have got a new generation of crackpots all fired up, dispite this vast army of crackpots across the globe, we still don't have enough of them to fill the holes and probably never will.
Anyway, I'm sure your not anti-science and I'm also reasonably certain the guy in TFA is a crackpot who has got it wrong but that's just my opinion. When you talk about science you need to rebutt the idea not the person, the fact they plucked a new equation out of their arse says nothing about it's validity. Luckily most crackpot ideas are so trivial to rebutt that scientists don't bother, some are harder and a paper or two gets published, some become accepted wisdom and it can take generations to spot the flaw, either way nobody has time to check them all.
Somehow I doubt that.
"How fscking stupid can you iberals be? Next thing the weather you don't like will be the fault of GWB."
You know, that comment sums up what is wrong with debates on the environment, the war on social problem X, poverty, cartoon riots, immigration, gitmo, torture, blah, blah, blah,... and finally religion and politics in general.
Some random "iberal" does/says something either deliberately or without thinking it through and all of a sudden a billion "iberals" around the planet are tarred with the same brush. Next thing you know "oneservitives" are burning "iberal" flags and emabssies and "iberals" are taunting them by repeating the original stupid act/comment.
From an Australian veiwpoint GWB's current aim (as far as I can tell) is to delay the move away from oil and coal not stop it, we have the same misguided stance in our leader. Untill recently both were willfull obstructionists on the issue of climate change but politically that tactic was becoming an "emporer has no clothes" liability. Both leaders pragmatically accepted the evidence from three decades of high profile and high quality research and promptly became enthusiastic procastanators.
All this does not mean conservative leaders, oil/coal executives, republicans, born again christians, texans, white guys or any other group that GWB "belongs to", thinks or even acts the same!!!
The rest of your comment I happen to agree with but it is wasted. Most of the people you are trying to influence won't bother reading past the first sentence.
So by that logic if terrorists behead one of your relitives on Arabic TV it is ok for you to behead one of their relatives on FOX.
IIRC in Stalin vs Hitler, it was common for your immediate superior to shoot you!
"So there's nothing about shooting the medics first that hasn't been part of Real Life for decades already"
1. You don't understand military strategy. Killing one enemy removes exactly one enemy from the battlefield, wounding one enemy removes more than one enemy from the battlefield.
2. It is not just the enemies of the USA who selectively ignore the Geneva convention.
3. You start your post with "If I recall correctly...", you don't and my bet is you have never asked a WW2 medic anything!
"It's just hunting revenue." - No, they will not sell you a license to use it nor are the in the habit of wasting donors money by suing, they prefer to point out their rights and ask for cooperation as in TFA. Nothing new, the first time I heard the red cross was doing this was in the 80's.
"Plus if you advertise that a donation is going to a specific cause.."
It is going to a specific "cause", ie: the Red Cross. Perhaps they should pull out of the US and let FEMA do the work, lots of luck with the next hurricane dude.
"So this is what the red cross are doing with your 9/11 funds. (As we already know they funneled the cash into all of their projects not just 9/11 recovery"
The red cross do not accept public donations for a particular use, people donate to the organisation in the knowlage they know how to put your money to good use. Contrary to what most Americans think, 9/11 was a minor disaster (in terms of life/limb) compared to so many other ongoing disasters in 2001.
I also cannot belive the bile that is being spewed at a charity organisation that has literally saved millions of lives and given assistance to hundreds of millions more. Their symbol is protected under the rules of war, give them a fucking break and change the colour!!!!
Ditto, been doing it for 15yrs. Print __FILE__, __LINE__, timestamp, pid and threadID with every message (macro's will make it simpler), these are the "must have's" everything else is negotiable. It does help to have some consistency in the messages when using words like fatal-error, error, warning, ect, but that is hard to enforce in most commercial environments.
Friends: Even though I find the MSVC search tool very usefull, one of the first things I do when setting up a development box at work is to download a windows version of grep.
lol, I agree. To be considered a mature adult you should be able to beat a 2yr old at their own game.
"I know any amount of stuff by means other than proving it within a consistent axiomatic system. I know my name. I know my favourite colour. I know I'm wasting my time trying to explain something on Slashdot."
;-)
An axiom is nothing more than an accepted but unproven truth, ie: an assumption. I would consider the things in your list "axioms" that your mind uses to build it's world view. The question of the minds axioms being consistent and the applicability of Godel to the human mind are open until we can show (one way or another) that the brain can be described by Turing's UCM. Naturally if your mind has the axiom of a soul that is independant of the physical body none of this will make much sense because the soul is already outside the system.
"Only people who are confused about the nature of knowledge..."
You seem very certain about your own ideas on the nature of knowlage, perhaps you could show me how you know that I actually exist or perhaps you could elaborate on what you belive. Either way stop branding me a fool and realise things are not always black and white.
"but nothing in Godel's proof puts an absolute barrier to knowability"
When we describe reality what we are really doing is describing our brains model of reality. Applying Godel to the brain means we could have infinite knowlage but still not fully understand ourselves or the Universe in wich we arose. This does not mean seeking knowlage is pointless just that the knowlage is eternally doomed to be incomplete, ie: we can know anything but not everything.
Somehow I don't think Greenpeace was responsible for Chernobyl. I don't know how old you are but IIRC that particular incident stopped reactor building in it's tracks, the fact that Greenpeace foretold that kind of disaster was not lost on the public. Also I am gratefull to Greenpeace for their (almost) single handed efforts to stop the French "testing" nukes in MY backyard.
Having said that, there is a political dogma in Greenpeace that says "never use reactors", but this is born from ignorance of new technology. Some of the founders do not agree with this position and want it changed for obviously pragmatic reasons. Having watched Greenpeace since the 70's, my guess is they will quietly change their dogma well before the oil and coal industries change theirs.
"In any event, there is a difference between true and proveable and "knowable", just as there is a difference between a model, an axiomatic system, and reality. People like to throw around Godel's theorem a lot without fully appreciating its limits in scope. It is a powerful theorem of mathematical logic in that it shows that we cannot fully axiomatize the world. Still, it does not have the implications that you might suspect."
Our mind is a model of reality, I belive (but cannot prove) that it is based on an axiomatic system whose axioms may contradict each other. You cannot show it does not imply something about philosophy in exactly the same way that I cannot show that it does. It is a belief, phycologoicaly similar in some ways to the belief in God.
"if you want a better idea of the type of barrier we are facing in this case, you would be better served by complexity and information theory....the type of problem involved in turbulence simulation, not logical issues of provability and incompleteness"
..and that is why I pointed to Godel.
I was going way OT, I was not talking about turbulence in particular I was agreeing with the GP who suggested there are things humans will never know.
"but this knowledge comes from outside the logical system"
"could it be the case that we might not even be able to understand and explain some phonemena simply because our brain power is not adequate."
... But, paradoxically, to understand Gödel's proof is to find a sort of liberation. For many logic students, the final breakthrough to full understanding of the Incompleteness Theorem is practically a conversion experience. This is partly a by-product of the potent mystique Gödel's name carries. But, more profoundly, to understand the essentially labyrinthine nature of the castle is, somehow, to be free of it.
Godel has already shown that no system of description is adequate, this is independant of of the amount of brain power on hand (or in head). People often wonder why maths is so good at describing the Universe, I belive it is because it is actually describing the model used by the brain to create the illusion of "I". ie: The simulated Universe containing the simulated self we all carry around in our heads. The "physical universe we live in" is an illusion.
A favourite quote from the above link: Although this theorem can be stated and proved in a rigorously mathematical way, what it seems to say is that rational thought can never penetrate to the final ultimate truth
I find the quote interesting because it relates a similar experience to religious conversion, ie: acceptance of the unknowable.
"I smell someone whoring their ideas for grant money."
Ditto, magic formula with no details applied to a completely different (high profile) problem. BTW: Glaziers have been predicting how glass will crack for a very long time and have embeded the technology in a $5 tool called a "glass cutter".
Using statistics to predict individual crack formation in a uniform material such as glass or metal is like predicting an avacado using the periodic table
I don't need a crystal ball to tell me you will die young.
Sorry to burst your bubble, an Irishman who has publicly told the IRA to go fuck themselves will not be trembling in his boots at the thought of a surly support geek. My guess is he would personally throttle you with the xbox cable and have security toss your body out of his plane.
I agree that Bill does have a point in the letter (ie: his hobby is sending HIM broke and he has a right to charge for his time). Normally I would agree with your view on ad hominem attacks but the OP has a valid point about hypocricy when Bill's "argument" relies solely on his own moralistic stance that considers copyright infringment equal to theft. If someone takes one position in what they write but takes the opposite position in what they do, they are begging for their "argument" to be ridiculed. Especially when the argument is about a moral issue such as Bill's letter that accuses people of "theft" but really just boils down to Bill bitching about his own finances. The OP was not the one who brought in ad hominem attacks Bill was, the OP's factual remarks about Bill practising "real theft" (ie: removing a physical resource) could be considered an ad hominem defense.
I think the letter is just the venting of frustration by someone who wanted to be an oxymoron (ie: paid hobbyist) but had trouble getting other hobbyists to agree and then pay him. You cannot expect hobbyists to listen when one of their own goes commercial with plans to significantly bump up the cost of their hobby. He will always be seen by those people as a traitor and a sellout, what is strange is that people who were not even born at the time will point to the letter as "poof" for their copy-cat opinions.
$40K was a huge amount of money back in the 70's, $2hr was not that bad for a collage kid. He was trying to keep a foot in both the hobby and commercial worlds, his letter demonstrates a confusion of priorities that is common for a young person near the end of formal education.
People were paying for software long before bill came along. The thing that has changed since Bill's letter is that anyone can cheaply access the internet and legally download a vast range of free alternatives, often written by people who hope you or your employer might one day buy their maintinance services. The hobby side has exploded in popularity and is beyond recognition, it now includes all sorts of people who are not the slightest bit interested in what's under the hood.
Of course every programmer (both then and now) who has been paid for any length of time realises there are plenty of people with problems who don't want to pay to have them fixed. This is nothing new and it wont (as Bill hoped) go away, just ask any mechanic!
I'm glad you can see a bigger picture in your own family. I don't think humans will change any time soon but I have noticed that the internet has given the historically ignorant (like me) a place to easily check out the stuff seen on TV.
Thirty-odd years ago, high schools in Australia taught very little about anything historical outside of what the white guys did during the first 100yrs or so of settlement. Sheep and the welcome stranger, (a gold nugget about the size of a washing machine) made up a large part of the curiculum, the same thing year after year got extremely boring. It created a very one sided view amoungst a generation of people who were shown history was boring.
Also some people around here get very upset about typo's, especially they're vs their, thanks for not going there.