For me, it tends to boil down to this: figuring something out versus inventing something from scratch.
You'd be wrong, because nothing is entirely invented from scratch. Basically, this is the "myth of the lone inventor" in another disguise.
All inventions are incremental. Indeed, all human progress happens on the fringes of what we already have. Many inventions were more or less independently invented by multiple people. The television, for example, was independently invented by at least three people that I can think of. Farnsworth usually gets the credit because he came up with the best design of the one piece (the magnetic deflection system; previous designs used mechanical deflection). IMO he deserved the patent, but he certainly did not invent anything "from scratch".
Every time I read some religious person trying to put a religious spin on a science discovery or story, it makes me think of the sci-fi geeks as typified by the Simpson's Comic Book Shop Guy, who hound their favorite authors with continuity problems and science and math gaffes.
I'm not trying to put a religious spin on a science discovery. I don't even claim that the points of view that I put (which aren't necessarily mine) are doing that. If it helps, you might want to think about this not as religion, but as philosophy. Theology is really philosophy which just happens to be religious in nature.
Science does affect philosophy and vice versa. From one point of view: Philosophy is having an effect on how theoretical physicists understand things like causality and time. Moral philosophy has an effect on what biological and medical experiments we consider "ethical".
From the othe point of view, to pick a couple of extreme examples: Die-hard Ayn-Randian Capitalists can only really keep their "what tragedy of the commons?" philosophy going by believing that climate change isn't caused by humans, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. Some have even going to the extent of claiming a liberal scientific conspiracy. (This from a philosophy supposedly based on rationalism!) Similarly, animal liberation-type philosophies are affected by scientific discoveries about how sentient or self-aware animals are, and so on.
So you can consider this as an example of how science is having an effect on Christian philosophy. Yeah, it's wankery, just like the finer points of any highly-developed philosophical system seems like wankery to a non-proponent. And the geeks in The Simpson's spotting science gaffes is the same kind of wankery. Christianity is hardly alone here.
Also not speaking for the parent poster, but I'd just like to make a couple of comments from a theological point of view.
First off, evolution actually fits better with Christian theology than young-earth creation, because it depicts "creation" as an ongoing process rather than a one-off event. It places God in history rather than outside it, which is one of the themes that you'll find running through the Bible.
Secondly, various biblical verses claim that humans are "made in God's image", or words to that effect. This has caused a lot of theological discussion over the years, such as the way that God has been depicted in art. Should God be represented as a grey-haired old man in the sky? "God is spirit" (see John 4:24), after all.
Well if God has no body, it makes more sense to say that the part that when we say "made in God's image", we're not talking about our bodies, which we understand to be evolved animal bodies, but rather the "spirit" part.
This looks like intellectual wankery, much like counting pin-head-dancing angels, and you'd be partly right. But for people who care about this sort of thing, evolutionary theory actually answers a number of long-standing theological problems, and the answers turn out to be much simpler than anyone thought.
And with all due respect, "evolution" is not used by many people in the way you use it. The same, as slashdotters all know, goes for "hacker", "free software" and "intellectual property".
BTW as far as NIMBY goes I agree. I have a nuclear power plant in my city. I like it a lot more than a coal, gas, or oil plant.
That's easy for you to say, because you don't have the uranium mine or the enrichment plant next door. You only like having the nuclear power plant near you because the pollution that nuclear power generates is near someone else.
If so, explain how 'God' is different to 'The King of the Potato People', and why belief in one is delusional and psychiatrically treatable while the other is not.
Actually, neither belief is delusional by itself. And psychiatrists don't treat beliefs, they treat illnesses.
The Diagostic and Statistical Manual defines a delusion as a fixed false belief that is not "ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture" (DSM IV-TR). Belief in God is culturally accepted, and therefore not delusional by itself.
Of course, even believing in The King of the Potato People (may his eyes see all) isn't necessarily an indicator of a mental illness, especially if no other indicators are present.
We may only have low level control of our body systems by using spooky things like prayer.
Right, or less spooky things like meditation or self-hypnosis.
If anyone is curious about this, I highly recommend Joseph Campbell's excellent book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The one mistake he makes, understandable since he was writing in the early 20th century, is assuming that Freudian psychotherapy is the "real thing" that old religions tried to imitate. Today, it's easier to see that while Freud was a very important pioneer, "Freudianism" was yet another religion, though the dust hasn't quite settled on that argument yet.
Its not like it is going to convince the millions of people who don't like mixing science with their religion that they shouldn't waste time praying for their loved ones.
Why do you think this study shows that prayer is a waste of time? All it shows is that it doesn't help the patient, which I could have told you. It says nothing about whether or not it helps the person praying, or whether or not it helps strengthen the family/community of the patient, or any other number of things which might have indirect benefit.
Sometimes, a patient (or anyone going through a difficult time, for that matter) just wants to know that their family/community cares about them. Prayer is one of a number of ways to demonstrate that.
So the next time that you're having difficulties, and someone you know offers to pray for you, thank them, because they're demonstrating that they give a shit about you.
OTOH, the next time a random stranger accosts you about religion, and when you tell them to get lost, they offer to pray for you... well, you can ignore that. They couldn't care less about you.
Re:Meta-commentary: "Gorgeous" really relevant?
on
The Real Purpose of DRM
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· Score: 4, Insightful
As was pointed out yesterday by several posters, this year's April Fool's was more than a little misogynistic [...]
You use that word a lot. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Mysogyny is an aversion or hatred of women. I have a six year old daughter, and believe me, the "PONIES" stuff was a pretty good (if way, way too obvious to be a prank) parody. But it doesn't signify mysogyny in any way.
Similarly, describing Ms. Newitz as "gorgeous" may be clumsy, insensitive and more than a little bit objectifying, but it's hardly mysogynistic. The overwhelming majority of single straight male slashdotters don't hate women, they just don't get them (in more ways than one).
One of the things that doesn't seem to have been mentioned is that the satirist in question is Richard Neville. If anyone knows about counter-productive censorship, it's him.
Neville was one of the editors responsible for Oz. He's something of an underground Australian icon, and not just for giving Australia a nickname.
Let's just put it this way: If the PM was looking to pick a fight, he could not possibly have chosen a worse target.
Indeed. What isn't legal in Australia is what US feminists refer to as "abortion on demand".
In most places in Australia, what you need is a referral from a doctor. In theory, this means that you can't obtain a termination without a legitimate medical (that includes psychological) reason for it. I've never heard of a case of this being challenged, though that's possibly because of doctor-patient confidentiality.
In practice, of course, it's usually easy to find a doctor who can give you a referral.
On a personal note, I think that this puts the abortion debate in Australia (such that it is; it doesn't seem to be a hot issue like it is in the US) on a better footing that it is elsewhere. The debate is not about "rights" vs "life". Abortion is a medical procedure, and so should be understood as a public health issue, inseparable from such issues as sex education. But then, the US has never had a very good relationship with public health.
One other thing that should be noted, for the benefit of non-Australians, is that to this date, precisely nobody has applied to have RU486 legalised in Australia, even during the term of the previous Health Minister, who was a practicing doctor. So say what you will about the anti-abortion agenda of the fundies (I certainly will, at length), but IMO the purported "veto power" was almost entirely moot.
I can't speak for Elonka, but when I was helping (a little) with the codes book which is going to be published Real Soon Now, I got the extremely strong impression that, about Iraq at any rate, she was strongly in favour of robust, informed debate. She filled the book with quotes about the moral and pragmatic issues of war from multiple perspectives for precisely that reason.
So if I had to guess, if you asked her that question, the answer would almost certainly be along the same lines.
On a personal note, as to whether or not there's more terrorism in store for the US homeland: Of course there is! What I can't tell you is whether it will be from an Al Qaeda franchise or from the next Timothy McVeigh.
Especially the women point...women are attracted to men that can provide what they need for their children, home, better life...etc. In the old caveman days, this was brute strength and brawn. Today, it is money.
Not with the women worth keeping, IMO. I married a geek. She values the fact that I can carry on a decent conversation, and I value the fact that she can help maintain our server.
I'm going all gooey inside just at the thought of it.
My favourite practical feature is putting the bedrooms together with the laundry between them. It makes you wonder who designs modern homes which places them as far apart as possible.
On the contrary, C is one of the worst languages you can use as your first language. I've tried teaching C to first year students. You end up teaching the syntax and vagaries of C and not very much programming or computer science.
One of the first things that beginning programmers want to do is do stuff with strings. Do you really want to explain C strings to people who have never programmed before? (There's a reason that microcomputer BASICs got peoples imaginations working. You can do stuff in it straight away!)
Amusingly, about the only worse mainstream language I can think of for this purpose is VB. C's syntax and semantics at least have the advantage of being consistent. (In its defence, VB wasn't exactly designed to be the way it is. It was a fairly inextensible language which nonetheless got extended as the years progressed. "Congealed" might be a better word than "designed".)
Save C for semester 2. Semester 1 should use a language which emphasises the basics. A functional language (say, Scheme or Haskell, but not ML; ML is a cool family of languages, but the syntax is way too arcane for a first language) would be my first choice, but even Java is a better choice than C. Hell, even C++ is a better choice. The syntax is at least as quirky as that of C, but at least it has a decent standard library which lets you do stuff straight away.
Private industry can usually do things "better" because corporations are by nature authoritarian. An authoritarian government is more efficient than a democratic one, but more people tend to get shot.
I don't know about you, but my video card driver, mouse driver, printer driver, webcam driver and digital camera driver don't run inside the kernel. More to the point, my windowing system doesn't either.
But you're right: Linux (unlike, say, BeOS or QNX) hasn't really caught up to the fact that drivers can be happily run outside the kernel and not lose performance. (Indeed, you can gain a lot of performance by having a simple kernel which only does context switching and IPC, but that's another story.) Just because it sucks less doesn't mean that it doesn't suck.
On the contrary; you seem to be confusing intellectuals with engineers. There are a great many intellectuals who don't do anything but ponder things.
I think the OP is confusing those issues, yes. But some of the confusion arises precisely because the overwhelming majority of experts (e.g. engineers and scientists) are so busy building and doing things that they don't comment on matters of public interest. IMO, an intellectual in this sense is an expert who contributes to public debate. The wikipeda entry calles these people public intellectuals.
My favourite example (and not least because he is a man whom I truly, truly admire) is David Lorge Parnas. He's a computer scientist and software engineer of the highest order, but is also a true intellectual. He is never shy to comment on any area of public policy which falls within his area of expertise. For example, he publically resigned from the advisory board of the Star Wars missile defence system, and became one of its most vocal critics.
Every time Bruce Schneier speaks, someone on slashdot berates him for being a media whore. This, believe it or not, is a symptom of anti-intellectualism. Schneier is a true expert who involves himself in public debate, and is therefore a public intellectual, whether you agree with him or not. (He's also a media whore, but if you ever want "our side" heard in public debate on security systems, somebody has to be.)
Other modern-day public intellectuals who regularly turn up on slashdot include Lawrence Lessig, Ed Felten and Vint Cerf.
My first one was a very obscure machine called the Comx-35. You couldn't get much software for it, but on the plus side, it had a radiation-hardened CPU. (It was the same one used in the Voyager, Viking and Galileo spacecraft.)
Slashdot Mirror
Next time you fill up your SUV, spare a thought for the people of Kiribati. If the sea levels rise much further, their whole country will disappear.
Yes.
You'd be wrong, because nothing is entirely invented from scratch. Basically, this is the "myth of the lone inventor" in another disguise.
All inventions are incremental. Indeed, all human progress happens on the fringes of what we already have. Many inventions were more or less independently invented by multiple people. The television, for example, was independently invented by at least three people that I can think of. Farnsworth usually gets the credit because he came up with the best design of the one piece (the magnetic deflection system; previous designs used mechanical deflection). IMO he deserved the patent, but he certainly did not invent anything "from scratch".
I'm not trying to put a religious spin on a science discovery. I don't even claim that the points of view that I put (which aren't necessarily mine) are doing that. If it helps, you might want to think about this not as religion, but as philosophy. Theology is really philosophy which just happens to be religious in nature.
Science does affect philosophy and vice versa. From one point of view: Philosophy is having an effect on how theoretical physicists understand things like causality and time. Moral philosophy has an effect on what biological and medical experiments we consider "ethical".
From the othe point of view, to pick a couple of extreme examples: Die-hard Ayn-Randian Capitalists can only really keep their "what tragedy of the commons?" philosophy going by believing that climate change isn't caused by humans, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. Some have even going to the extent of claiming a liberal scientific conspiracy. (This from a philosophy supposedly based on rationalism!) Similarly, animal liberation-type philosophies are affected by scientific discoveries about how sentient or self-aware animals are, and so on.
So you can consider this as an example of how science is having an effect on Christian philosophy. Yeah, it's wankery, just like the finer points of any highly-developed philosophical system seems like wankery to a non-proponent. And the geeks in The Simpson's spotting science gaffes is the same kind of wankery. Christianity is hardly alone here.
Also not speaking for the parent poster, but I'd just like to make a couple of comments from a theological point of view.
First off, evolution actually fits better with Christian theology than young-earth creation, because it depicts "creation" as an ongoing process rather than a one-off event. It places God in history rather than outside it, which is one of the themes that you'll find running through the Bible.
Secondly, various biblical verses claim that humans are "made in God's image", or words to that effect. This has caused a lot of theological discussion over the years, such as the way that God has been depicted in art. Should God be represented as a grey-haired old man in the sky? "God is spirit" (see John 4:24), after all.
Well if God has no body, it makes more sense to say that the part that when we say "made in God's image", we're not talking about our bodies, which we understand to be evolved animal bodies, but rather the "spirit" part.
This looks like intellectual wankery, much like counting pin-head-dancing angels, and you'd be partly right. But for people who care about this sort of thing, evolutionary theory actually answers a number of long-standing theological problems, and the answers turn out to be much simpler than anyone thought.
And with all due respect, "evolution" is not used by many people in the way you use it. The same, as slashdotters all know, goes for "hacker", "free software" and "intellectual property".
Corporations are not much better. Yeah, they're much more efficient, but that's only because they're totalitarian.
That's easy for you to say, because you don't have the uranium mine or the enrichment plant next door. You only like having the nuclear power plant near you because the pollution that nuclear power generates is near someone else.
Would you say the same about political beliefs?
Actually, neither belief is delusional by itself. And psychiatrists don't treat beliefs, they treat illnesses.
The Diagostic and Statistical Manual defines a delusion as a fixed false belief that is not "ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture" (DSM IV-TR). Belief in God is culturally accepted, and therefore not delusional by itself.
Of course, even believing in The King of the Potato People (may his eyes see all) isn't necessarily an indicator of a mental illness, especially if no other indicators are present.
Right, or less spooky things like meditation or self-hypnosis.
If anyone is curious about this, I highly recommend Joseph Campbell's excellent book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The one mistake he makes, understandable since he was writing in the early 20th century, is assuming that Freudian psychotherapy is the "real thing" that old religions tried to imitate. Today, it's easier to see that while Freud was a very important pioneer, "Freudianism" was yet another religion, though the dust hasn't quite settled on that argument yet.
Why do you think this study shows that prayer is a waste of time? All it shows is that it doesn't help the patient, which I could have told you. It says nothing about whether or not it helps the person praying, or whether or not it helps strengthen the family/community of the patient, or any other number of things which might have indirect benefit.
Sometimes, a patient (or anyone going through a difficult time, for that matter) just wants to know that their family/community cares about them. Prayer is one of a number of ways to demonstrate that.
So the next time that you're having difficulties, and someone you know offers to pray for you, thank them, because they're demonstrating that they give a shit about you.
OTOH, the next time a random stranger accosts you about religion, and when you tell them to get lost, they offer to pray for you... well, you can ignore that. They couldn't care less about you.
You use that word a lot. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Mysogyny is an aversion or hatred of women. I have a six year old daughter, and believe me, the "PONIES" stuff was a pretty good (if way, way too obvious to be a prank) parody. But it doesn't signify mysogyny in any way.
Similarly, describing Ms. Newitz as "gorgeous" may be clumsy, insensitive and more than a little bit objectifying, but it's hardly mysogynistic. The overwhelming majority of single straight male slashdotters don't hate women, they just don't get them (in more ways than one).
One of the things that doesn't seem to have been mentioned is that the satirist in question is Richard Neville. If anyone knows about counter-productive censorship, it's him.
Neville was one of the editors responsible for Oz. He's something of an underground Australian icon, and not just for giving Australia a nickname.
Let's just put it this way: If the PM was looking to pick a fight, he could not possibly have chosen a worse target.
Indeed. What isn't legal in Australia is what US feminists refer to as "abortion on demand".
In most places in Australia, what you need is a referral from a doctor. In theory, this means that you can't obtain a termination without a legitimate medical (that includes psychological) reason for it. I've never heard of a case of this being challenged, though that's possibly because of doctor-patient confidentiality.
In practice, of course, it's usually easy to find a doctor who can give you a referral.
On a personal note, I think that this puts the abortion debate in Australia (such that it is; it doesn't seem to be a hot issue like it is in the US) on a better footing that it is elsewhere. The debate is not about "rights" vs "life". Abortion is a medical procedure, and so should be understood as a public health issue, inseparable from such issues as sex education. But then, the US has never had a very good relationship with public health.
One other thing that should be noted, for the benefit of non-Australians, is that to this date, precisely nobody has applied to have RU486 legalised in Australia, even during the term of the previous Health Minister, who was a practicing doctor. So say what you will about the anti-abortion agenda of the fundies (I certainly will, at length), but IMO the purported "veto power" was almost entirely moot.
I can't speak for Elonka, but when I was helping (a little) with the codes book which is going to be published Real Soon Now, I got the extremely strong impression that, about Iraq at any rate, she was strongly in favour of robust, informed debate. She filled the book with quotes about the moral and pragmatic issues of war from multiple perspectives for precisely that reason.
So if I had to guess, if you asked her that question, the answer would almost certainly be along the same lines.
On a personal note, as to whether or not there's more terrorism in store for the US homeland: Of course there is! What I can't tell you is whether it will be from an Al Qaeda franchise or from the next Timothy McVeigh.
Not with the women worth keeping, IMO. I married a geek. She values the fact that I can carry on a decent conversation, and I value the fact that she can help maintain our server.
I'm going all gooey inside just at the thought of it.
My favourite practical feature is putting the bedrooms together with the laundry between them. It makes you wonder who designs modern homes which places them as far apart as possible.
On the contrary, C is one of the worst languages you can use as your first language. I've tried teaching C to first year students. You end up teaching the syntax and vagaries of C and not very much programming or computer science.
One of the first things that beginning programmers want to do is do stuff with strings. Do you really want to explain C strings to people who have never programmed before? (There's a reason that microcomputer BASICs got peoples imaginations working. You can do stuff in it straight away!)
Amusingly, about the only worse mainstream language I can think of for this purpose is VB. C's syntax and semantics at least have the advantage of being consistent. (In its defence, VB wasn't exactly designed to be the way it is. It was a fairly inextensible language which nonetheless got extended as the years progressed. "Congealed" might be a better word than "designed".)
Save C for semester 2. Semester 1 should use a language which emphasises the basics. A functional language (say, Scheme or Haskell, but not ML; ML is a cool family of languages, but the syntax is way too arcane for a first language) would be my first choice, but even Java is a better choice than C. Hell, even C++ is a better choice. The syntax is at least as quirky as that of C, but at least it has a decent standard library which lets you do stuff straight away.
Private industry can usually do things "better" because corporations are by nature authoritarian. An authoritarian government is more efficient than a democratic one, but more people tend to get shot.
I don't know about you, but my video card driver, mouse driver, printer driver, webcam driver and digital camera driver don't run inside the kernel. More to the point, my windowing system doesn't either.
But you're right: Linux (unlike, say, BeOS or QNX) hasn't really caught up to the fact that drivers can be happily run outside the kernel and not lose performance. (Indeed, you can gain a lot of performance by having a simple kernel which only does context switching and IPC, but that's another story.) Just because it sucks less doesn't mean that it doesn't suck.
No -1 Flamebait from me, but I do wonder why you work for a public school district.
I think the OP is confusing those issues, yes. But some of the confusion arises precisely because the overwhelming majority of experts (e.g. engineers and scientists) are so busy building and doing things that they don't comment on matters of public interest. IMO, an intellectual in this sense is an expert who contributes to public debate. The wikipeda entry calles these people public intellectuals.
My favourite example (and not least because he is a man whom I truly, truly admire) is David Lorge Parnas. He's a computer scientist and software engineer of the highest order, but is also a true intellectual. He is never shy to comment on any area of public policy which falls within his area of expertise. For example, he publically resigned from the advisory board of the Star Wars missile defence system, and became one of its most vocal critics.
Every time Bruce Schneier speaks, someone on slashdot berates him for being a media whore. This, believe it or not, is a symptom of anti-intellectualism. Schneier is a true expert who involves himself in public debate, and is therefore a public intellectual, whether you agree with him or not. (He's also a media whore, but if you ever want "our side" heard in public debate on security systems, somebody has to be.)
Other modern-day public intellectuals who regularly turn up on slashdot include Lawrence Lessig, Ed Felten and Vint Cerf.
My first one was a very obscure machine called the Comx-35. You couldn't get much software for it, but on the plus side, it had a radiation-hardened CPU. (It was the same one used in the Voyager, Viking and Galileo spacecraft.)