If we breed a mammoth from old DNA, but have no mammoth culture in which to raise it, do we really get a mammoth?
Not all social animals have culture. Ants for example are social creatures, but are not cultural creatures. even most primates are not cultural. otherwise your point would be a good one. However, you do raise a good point, nonetheless. If mammoths are social creatures, even if they are not cultural, then we may not know if such a mammoth would ever be psychologically healthy or developed. A lot of social animals when isolated exhibit a lot of strange behaviors, even to the point of a substantial impairment of brain functions. This is something like that lab mice article except that social environment is cruicial.
But I see your point, the flexibility is lost -- however sending many robotic explorations and getting little packets of data is a "manageable risk" situation rather than putting all the eggs in one human venture would give us either zero or lot of results.
I mentioned opposable thumbs for a number of reasons. First of all, opposable thumbs are symbolic of our rather flexible capacity to manipulate objects and deal with contingency. I also wanted to hint at that, among other things, opposable thumbs are rare and they are the secret to our success. intelligence is not enough. dolphins will never build rockets, both because they physically can't do it, and because they are underwater. i was endorsing a colonization effort.
and trying to be funny. (:
I entirely agree with you. And the cost of manned missions and the difficulty is demanding.
Jesus fulfilled the law, Christians are no longer subject to it. Your post is therefore effectively flamebait, troll, or simple anti-semitism. Which is it?
Furthermore the questions in the text are legitimate for Jews those jews who do believe that the law still obtains.
If any people here are practicing Jews, or know a lot about it, could you tell me what the general perspective is on this issue? thx
Jesus fulfilled the law, Christians are no longer subject to it. Your post is therefore effectively flamebait, troll, or simple anti-semitism. Which is it?
Your answer assumes too much. I know for a fact that the history of early Christianity debated hotly the issue of whether or not Christian's must obey Jewish law. James the Just, brother of Jesus (however you want to construe the kin-term brother) argued that Christians are bound to the law, while Paul argued the opposite. The Christian tradition has followed Paul for the most part. But I think that there are still quite a few Christians who do not believe that Christians are no longer subject to the law on theological grounds. Further, I do not believe that most Christians truly believe that Christians are no longer subject to Mosaic law, else why would the continue quoting the Ten Commandments, persist in observing the Sabbath, or use Old Testament biblical texts to justify their bigotry or their moral outrage against gays, lesbians, or 'deviants' of various kinds?
Christian morality is better than the kind of morality presented in the Old Testament. The God of the New Testament is Love, the God of the Old Testament is Vengeance. Without lids over our eyes and hearts, we cannot truthfully regard the kinds of things that happen in the Old Testament as morally justified. Generally, Jews, who do believe that they are bound to the law still, do not (nor do they think that it is reasonable to do so) follow all of the prescriptions or rules given in 'every jot' of Mosaic law. I do not see how my statement can be correctly construed as Anti-Semitic as I was being critical of a)Christians who believe that the Bible represents the eternal and perfect truth of God where every part of the Bible must be equally true and b)the kind of religion, not specific to Judaic religion, that is used to justify killing, racism, ethnocentricism, sexism, and myopia-used because the texts themselves support such viewpoints. This is not limited to Judaism. If it were, it could only be taken as a criticism of the beliefs of Jews from the distant past.
I do not reject the Bible as a source of religious truths, but I do reject an uncritical reading of it. Blind faith leads to a blind conscience-if you believe blindly that the genocide of the Canaanites was justified because 'god's people' needed a place to live as determined by that God, then you are putting shutters over what your conscience, that true gift of God which tells us what is right or wrong, and becoming a Pharisee, who were determined that every point in the law be observed but missed the heart of the Law, which is love, mercy, and charity. Considering the numerous coutnerfactual and contradictory statements in the Bible, it seems important, indeed necessary, to me that we judge with our hearts and our heads right and wrong. Who wants to worship a god when they feel, or at least have the suspicion that they feel, that they have a higher moral standard than their God? As I feel that I cannot have a higher moral standard than my God, then I must either conclude that I am wrong or that the texts that i'm reading are wrong, and given the vagueness, inconsistencies, and, more generally, shockingness of some of the acts of the god of the old testament, i'm inclined to favor that it is the text of the old testament that does not give an accurate portrayal of the God of Love I would worship.
My original post was not, contrary to the opinions of so many moderators, off-topic, as it directly responded to the parent post, which was making the claim that a) the Bible must be taken as a whole and b)that therefore it must be wholly true, or wholly false. I disputed this claim with a post which shows that, at least in one way, a simple reading of 'whole truth' cannot be maintained. My position may or may not have been correct, but it certainly was not off topic. If it was, all of the other posts on religion in this thread not mentioning alien or SETI were offtopic. Moderators ought to take more time an
I found this post on the net and i think that its a decent reply to the parent post. (citation at end)
"February 05, 2003
WHY CAN'T I OWN CANADIANS?
Laura Schlessinger is a US radio personality who dispenses advice to people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22 and cannot be condoned under any circumstances. The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a US resident:
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him or her that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to follow them.
a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
d) Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify?
Why can't I own Canadians?
e) I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sunday (the Sabbath).In the book of Exodus verse 35:2 it clearly states he should be put to death.
Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
g) Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
i) I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev.24:10-16). Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14). I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted disciple and adoring fan."
You're taking the Bible as if it is one entity that either all of it is true or all of it is false. But the bible is a historical accumulation of different texts with different authors and different histories.
Well the strange thing about funding is that it isn't necessarily like all the money that an agency has can be used how it wants to use it. NASA for example might be short of funds for space exploration but have an excess of cash to be appropriated for certain kinds of research, and no matter how NASA might wish to appropriate the fund.
Groups of lions have no need to dominate the entire savannah. But they do compete. Sometimes they even fight it out.
Most cooperation in the wild occurs within biological kin groups or within particular symbiotic relationships between species.
Humans do cooperate. We wouldn't have been able to do anything we have done if we didn't. We couldn't have flown to the moon for instance. It took cooperation. But if you mean cooperation between groups, then no we aren't very cooperative. Or haven't been.
Its "academics". But don't worry, I don't personally find it a big deal, but a lot of immature slashdotters do.
still, academics can be candid, but then what they say can be censored and/or altered afterwards by state-run media...or corporate media for that matter. though in our corporate media what scientists say is usually hacked up by non-experts trying to pre-digest it for the general populace.
The human race has never and will never work togethr.
This is a dumb and/or ignorant comment. Cooperation is the hallmark of the human species. The degree to which we cooperate with one and another (even outside of the family) distinguishes us from all other species.
Axe to Grind. In fact, does this Anon. Coward even have an axe left?
Re:Wonderful news! What's next?
on
Open Source Science
·
· Score: 2, Informative
But I'm not sure I agree there are "excessive profits" at journals, especially since some of them have recently spent big $$ to digitize and archive old articles--in many cases dating back over a hundred years. But since many of us are almost exclusively using online access to journals, distribution charges will decrease dramatically.
I'm not so sure that electronic journals have been such a good deal. This article seems to say quite the opposite:
This article says that profit margins are excessively high (40%) and that a lack of competition in the market does not encourage efficiency of operation. Nor is this the only article that argues something like this.
Ironic, then, that MTV relies on privately owned space technology to do a significant part of its broadcasting work globally...
You make a decent point. It is ironic. Though of course most commercial satellites aren't put up for exploratory reasons. However, I was being sarcastic in my original post. Personally I don't watch much TV and am very pro-space exploration and colonization. HOWEVER I do not think humans are 'wired' (if wired is taken to mean a natural genetic predisposition) to want to explore what is out there (or anywhere). Culturally some groups may be wired this way though...
I'm replying to this post, but I am really replying to the thread. So you people win, I lose. Fine. Yes, I made the mistake (twice!). And I also think that the "grammar" post was hilarious. I applaud those who modded it up. However, I would like to point out that it wasn't quite a grammar mistake. If you look at the sentences in which I made the mistakes it should be evident that the mispelled words still served the same function in the sentence, and function, my friends, isgrammar. I take it as evidence for this that you all understood the two sentences, probably with very little effort. Ordinarily it might cause some confusion, but there were ample contextual clues within the sentence and in the sound of the mispelled word itself. The error would be better described as a spelling error. Do people confuse spelling with grammar so often? Spelling is merely a conventionalized standard for indicating words and it is words and not spelling that have grammar in the ordinary linguistic sense of grammar. Spelling of course has its own rules or "grammar" as well, but that is entirely something else. LAZINESS fully characterizes my mistake, IGNORANCE does not. I am not ignorant of English grammar or spelling (I happen to be an ESL teacher).
Honestly, I don't take spelling to be terribly important in an online forum that regularly ignores the established standards of spelling and grammar. Nor do I in general take spelling and grammar skills of any individual form of language-use to be generally indicative of an individual's falicity with language-use in other use-domains.
But honestly, there are a few reasons that I am indulging myself in this lengthy reply. First I wanted to grant that the criticism was of course (mostly) correct; secondly I wanted to acknowledge that I also think that it was quite funny, especially the part about compression. On my part however I do not think that it shows good character to arbitrarily ridicule (even in the soft and humorous way in this present case case) someone for something so trivial. And finally, I would like to note that this present post has been written by me largely to humor me.. because even if my pride had been a tad singed in the exchange (and of course it was), I trust that the entire conversation has been conducted entirely in the spirit of comraderie and friendly jesting. And it has certainly taught me a few lessons (brevity not being one of them), namely that, "A typo is leaving out a leter, addfing one in, swpaping a letter, or hitting a key right next to anothert" as our ubiquitous fellow slashdotter "Anonymous Coward" put it and not, as I had thought, a more broad category of typing error(On an aside, I should like to say that this particular post was quite clever and if I could have, I would have modded it up).
oh shit did I take too big a hit!!?
notice by the way that the 'a' is really an abbreviation (cough..compression) of 'of a' as corresponds to how we actually speak language.
I'm really freakin' hilarious! Helluva post bro! Gotta get some kind and celebrate the Humboldt way!
Ahh yes. the infamous typo flame.
thanks. as you should know, spelling is not a correlate to intelligence, and based off of a lot of profs i know, not education either. But thanks. Its warming to know that someone read my post carefully to notice EVERY detail. Smoke on brother.
Phish has always been cool about their audio property. They have no problem with people recording their shows and trading their music. See there policy at: http://www.phish.com/print/guidelines.html
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just kidding.
Not all social animals have culture. Ants for example are social creatures, but are not cultural creatures. even most primates are not cultural. otherwise your point would be a good one. However, you do raise a good point, nonetheless. If mammoths are social creatures, even if they are not cultural, then we may not know if such a mammoth would ever be psychologically healthy or developed. A lot of social animals when isolated exhibit a lot of strange behaviors, even to the point of a substantial impairment of brain functions. This is something like that lab mice article except that social environment is cruicial.
I mentioned opposable thumbs for a number of reasons. First of all, opposable thumbs are symbolic of our rather flexible capacity to manipulate objects and deal with contingency. I also wanted to hint at that, among other things, opposable thumbs are rare and they are the secret to our success. intelligence is not enough. dolphins will never build rockets, both because they physically can't do it, and because they are underwater. i was endorsing a colonization effort.
and trying to be funny. ( :
I entirely agree with you. And the cost of manned missions and the difficulty is demanding.
Unmanned exploration is good because it brings good solid data. Manned exploration is good because we have opposable thumbs.
What makes you think that pictoral language will make it any easier to communicate? Understanding pictoral symbols still relies on conventions.
Furthermore the questions in the text are legitimate for Jews those jews who do believe that the law still obtains.
If any people here are practicing Jews, or know a lot about it, could you tell me what the general perspective is on this issue? thx
Christian morality is better than the kind of morality presented in the Old Testament. The God of the New Testament is Love, the God of the Old Testament is Vengeance. Without lids over our eyes and hearts, we cannot truthfully regard the kinds of things that happen in the Old Testament as morally justified. Generally, Jews, who do believe that they are bound to the law still, do not (nor do they think that it is reasonable to do so) follow all of the prescriptions or rules given in 'every jot' of Mosaic law. I do not see how my statement can be correctly construed as Anti-Semitic as I was being critical of a)Christians who believe that the Bible represents the eternal and perfect truth of God where every part of the Bible must be equally true and b)the kind of religion, not specific to Judaic religion, that is used to justify killing, racism, ethnocentricism, sexism, and myopia-used because the texts themselves support such viewpoints. This is not limited to Judaism. If it were, it could only be taken as a criticism of the beliefs of Jews from the distant past.
I do not reject the Bible as a source of religious truths, but I do reject an uncritical reading of it. Blind faith leads to a blind conscience-if you believe blindly that the genocide of the Canaanites was justified because 'god's people' needed a place to live as determined by that God, then you are putting shutters over what your conscience, that true gift of God which tells us what is right or wrong, and becoming a Pharisee, who were determined that every point in the law be observed but missed the heart of the Law, which is love, mercy, and charity. Considering the numerous coutnerfactual and contradictory statements in the Bible, it seems important, indeed necessary, to me that we judge with our hearts and our heads right and wrong. Who wants to worship a god when they feel, or at least have the suspicion that they feel, that they have a higher moral standard than their God? As I feel that I cannot have a higher moral standard than my God, then I must either conclude that I am wrong or that the texts that i'm reading are wrong, and given the vagueness, inconsistencies, and, more generally, shockingness of some of the acts of the god of the old testament, i'm inclined to favor that it is the text of the old testament that does not give an accurate portrayal of the God of Love I would worship.
My original post was not, contrary to the opinions of so many moderators, off-topic, as it directly responded to the parent post, which was making the claim that a) the Bible must be taken as a whole and b)that therefore it must be wholly true, or wholly false. I disputed this claim with a post which shows that, at least in one way, a simple reading of 'whole truth' cannot be maintained. My position may or may not have been correct, but it certainly was not off topic. If it was, all of the other posts on religion in this thread not mentioning alien or SETI were offtopic. Moderators ought to take more time an
"February 05, 2003
WHY CAN'T I OWN CANADIANS?
Laura Schlessinger is a US radio personality who dispenses advice to people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22 and cannot be condoned under any circumstances. The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a US resident:
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him or her that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to follow them.
a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
d) Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify?
Why can't I own Canadians?
e) I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sunday (the Sabbath).In the book of Exodus verse 35:2 it clearly states he should be put to death.
Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
g) Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
i) I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev.24:10-16). Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14). I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted disciple and adoring fan."
You're taking the Bible as if it is one entity that either all of it is true or all of it is false. But the bible is a historical accumulation of different texts with different authors and different histories.
The text was found at:
http://www.liola.com/archives/000622.php
Well the strange thing about funding is that it isn't necessarily like all the money that an agency has can be used how it wants to use it. NASA for example might be short of funds for space exploration but have an excess of cash to be appropriated for certain kinds of research, and no matter how NASA might wish to appropriate the fund.
I stand corrected and further educated.
Most cooperation in the wild occurs within biological kin groups or within particular symbiotic relationships between species.
Humans do cooperate. We wouldn't have been able to do anything we have done if we didn't. We couldn't have flown to the moon for instance. It took cooperation. But if you mean cooperation between groups, then no we aren't very cooperative. Or haven't been.
Slashdot isn't a democracy or even a government. I think that moderators just don't have much incentive in actually giving thoughtful moderation.
still, academics can be candid, but then what they say can be censored and/or altered afterwards by state-run media...or corporate media for that matter. though in our corporate media what scientists say is usually hacked up by non-experts trying to pre-digest it for the general populace.
This is a dumb and/or ignorant comment. Cooperation is the hallmark of the human species. The degree to which we cooperate with one and another (even outside of the family) distinguishes us from all other species.
Axe to Grind. In fact, does this Anon. Coward even have an axe left?
I'm not so sure that electronic journals have been such a good deal. This article seems to say quite the opposite:
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_8/odlyzko/
This article says that profit margins are excessively high (40%) and that a lack of competition in the market does not encourage efficiency of operation. Nor is this the only article that argues something like this.
You make a decent point. It is ironic. Though of course most commercial satellites aren't put up for exploratory reasons. However, I was being sarcastic in my original post. Personally I don't watch much TV and am very pro-space exploration and colonization. HOWEVER I do not think humans are 'wired' (if wired is taken to mean a natural genetic predisposition) to want to explore what is out there (or anywhere). Culturally some groups may be wired this way though...
I'm wired to watch my MTV.
Honestly, I don't take spelling to be terribly important in an online forum that regularly ignores the established standards of spelling and grammar. Nor do I in general take spelling and grammar skills of any individual form of language-use to be generally indicative of an individual's falicity with language-use in other use-domains.
But honestly, there are a few reasons that I am indulging myself in this lengthy reply. First I wanted to grant that the criticism was of course (mostly) correct; secondly I wanted to acknowledge that I also think that it was quite funny, especially the part about compression. On my part however I do not think that it shows good character to arbitrarily ridicule (even in the soft and humorous way in this present case case) someone for something so trivial. And finally, I would like to note that this present post has been written by me largely to humor me.. because even if my pride had been a tad singed in the exchange (and of course it was), I trust that the entire conversation has been conducted entirely in the spirit of comraderie and friendly jesting. And it has certainly taught me a few lessons (brevity not being one of them), namely that, "A typo is leaving out a leter, addfing one in, swpaping a letter, or hitting a key right next to anothert" as our ubiquitous fellow slashdotter "Anonymous Coward" put it and not, as I had thought, a more broad category of typing error(On an aside, I should like to say that this particular post was quite clever and if I could have, I would have modded it up).
oh shit did I take too big a hit!!?
notice by the way that the 'a' is really an abbreviation (cough..compression) of 'of a' as corresponds to how we actually speak language.
I'm really freakin' hilarious! Helluva post bro! Gotta get some kind and celebrate the Humboldt way!
Ahh yes. the infamous typo flame. thanks. as you should know, spelling is not a correlate to intelligence, and based off of a lot of profs i know, not education either. But thanks. Its warming to know that someone read my post carefully to notice EVERY detail. Smoke on brother.
I'm not part of the 'pro-piracy' crowd. I just think that its cool that their not being tight-asses about it.
Space Junk may already be putting us earthbound. Give it a few years. There was an article yesterday in The Hindu, India's National Paper.
refilling the cash machine must be a btch
I'd fuel my rockets with Chinese take-away.
Phish has always been cool about their audio property. They have no problem with people recording their shows and trading their music. See there policy at: http://www.phish.com/print/guidelines.html