Hate to break it to you, but only the most credulous readers of the New Testament believe 2 Peter to actually have been written by Peter. It was almost certainly written by someone who wanted to claim the authority of Peter, but was not Peter himself. It was probably written sometime between 100 and 160 A.D., after Peter himself was martyred.
People have been willing to die for all sorts of baseless ideas; people poison themselves so they can hitch rides on comets, they blow themselves up because they think Osama bin Laden wants them to. The willingness to die speaks only to the psychological hold these ideas have on the believer. They are not objective evidence as to the factual basis for these beliefs.
I don't need to waste my time reading what some 19th century lawyer thought was proved by it. I already know that legal standards of evidence developed starting in the 13th century in England are irrelevant for evaluating the truth of statements in manuscripts which were written in the first few centuries A.D.
No, the jury (or the judge, acting as finder of "fact" when there is no jury) can choose to ignore testimony or evidence that it believes not to be credible. Just because. It does not need to be explicitly questioned by the other side.
It is, of course, in the interest of the other side to elicit testimony or produce evidence that tends to question the credibility of witness testimony that was harmful to the case. But not required.
The point still remains that the rules followed in a court of law are not meant to establish "absolute truth." They are intended to provide a fair, just, and hopefully reliable system for determining outcomes of trials. That the O.J. Simpson jury decided that the government had not met the burden of proof to convict O.J. does not mean that it is conclusively proven that O.J. did not actually kill Nicole Simpson.
The judicial rules of evidence are completely and totally irrelevant to questions of historical fact or religious belief. That you have confused these very different fields is evidence that you are a clueless nut.
The fact that you seem to think the Gospels are some objective eyewitness testimony, as if they were simply wire service bulletins "This just in: Reuters reports Jesus Christ found risen from the dead. Interviewed at the scene, Mary Magdalene stated that..." is additional evidence you are a clueless nut.
They are written accounts, probably written many years after the events, by people who were hardly objective in their descriptions, and often wrote about events (like the Annunciation and the Nativity) they were highly unlikely to have any first hand knowledge of. They got important historical and geographical details confused. Where they share common text, it often appears they are quoting from each other or from an earlier common source. They have clumsy patch jobs on them, like John 21:23. They were deliberately chosen because they were in accord with a particular Orthodox school of thought, and other texts were deliberately suppressed.
Congratulations, you win the "buzzword bingo" prize for today.
Several important distinctions are being masked by the fuzzy terminology here.
1) "Quantum mechanics": the particular quantum mechanics being discussed here is the use of "random matrix theory", which is basically a short cut. Given a large number of constituent interacting particles, as in a large atomic nucleus, the idea is that the precise solution isn't important, and can be approximated by assuming the details are random.
Turns out you can still get very useful results that way. Perhaps even deep results. But I see no reason that is fundamental to the "ultimate secrets of the universe." Presumably the nucleons "know" how to follow the real rules precisely. Just like the zeta function "knows" where its zeroes are.
The connection seems to be that similar mathematical techniques can be applied to the problem of the zeros of the zeta function.
2) "Prime numbers" and "zeta function" The zeta function provides a very deep connection between the field of "functions of a complex variable" and "prime numbers." It is not, as far as I know, a magic shortcut that would allow one to factor large numbers. Knowing something about the distribution of primes is very different from knowing every prime number, or identifying prime factors.
3) "Quantum computing" and "prime factors". Quantum computers provide theoretically fast techniques to factor numbers. However, certain kinds of encryption system depend on the absence of *practically* fast techniques to factor numbers. This is independent of the discussed research, and is rather a technological question, having to do with how many qubits can be maintained at once, for how long, and how many quantum operations can be performed on those qubits, for actual laboratory apparatus.
You may not take into account any evidence you may have heard from other sources other than what is directly presented.
Huh?
Your argument by analogy is incredibly flawed, in multiple ways.
*Even* if I stipulate that the New Testament is, indeed, eyewitness testimony (although we have no concrete proof that the writers of any particular text we have were actually eyewitnesses, as opposed to second- or third-hand reporters), it is hardly unbiased.
You miss the most important aspect about the rules of evidence in a court of law: that the judge is presumed to be applying the rules of evidence in an impartial way. Reasons to exclude evidence include that it is inflammatory, or that it cannot be properly contested by cross-examination, that it cannot be authenticated, etc., etc. If the jury were to see such evidence, they would be improperly influenced, and the judge's role is to prevent that.
Gospels are not evidence in the legal sense. They were written *specifically* to persuade people to believe in the Christian religion. They are *not* impartial accounts. We cannot cross-examine the writers of the Gospel to get them to explain certain unclear points of authorship and motivation.
For instance, the Gospels do not, and would not, include any accounts from the thousands of people in and around Jerusalem who did NOT see Christ after the resurrection. Instead, we are left pretty much with those accounts that third-century authorities decided would be most proper for use in Christian worship. Everything else was to be suppressed.
The real reason to have a reserve requirement is to control the value of the multiplier.
Having 20% (say) reserves against demand deposits obviously does not protect against a run that causes demand for more than 21% of demand deposits.
The protection against bank failure is the confidence the public has that, through deposit insurance and the willingness of the central bank to do whatever is necessary to preserve the integrity of the system, no bank will be allowed to fail in such a way as to wipe out customer deposits.
If depositors are sure the goverment will make them whole if an individual bank fails, there is no reason for a run to start.
The collusion comes into place when the first bank is given $1000 by the Federal Reserve.
This is an idiotic post. The Federal Reserve does not just give money away to banks. They give paper currency and coin against electronic balances held by member banks at the Federal Reserve, but that is just trading one type of money for another, not creating it. The Federal Reserve also offers a "discount window" from which banks can request loans at a particular overnight rate, but they charge interest, and can refuse to give the loans if they feel it is not wise to do so, and banks typically do not rely on this for day-to-day-operations. They *do* engage in open market operations to buy and sell government securities, but that is separate from the multiplier.
Banks put their money in reserve accounts at the Federal Reserve, and can lend those reserves to one another at what is basically a market-determined rate. But this is irrelevant to the multiplier. Changing which bank's reserve account at the Federal Reserve holds money does not create or destroy it.
The key link that you've missed out on is that the money goes through the participants in the economy. Your local bank gets deposits because you decided your piggy bank was full and you'd rather earn interest on it. Or because you did work that your employer decided to pay you for.
What is the bank supposed to do with that money? Stick it in a super-sized mattress until you want it? No, they'll lend it to people who want to buy things or to run a business, or through the Federal Reserve to other banks that have customers who want to borrow money.
The trick is that people do not typically take that loan money and keep it in a nice little pile of green paper. Instead, they borrowed the money because they had a good idea of how they could *spend* it. They spend it, let's say at a local merchant, who doesn't need to spend it himself right away, and decides to deposit in a bank.
THAT idea, that all currency, including loans, ends up virtually immediately being redeposited into the banking system, is what causes the multiplier. This happens because currency itself is not particularly useful, whereas deposits can earn interest.
That's not hocus-pocus or collusion. It simply means that when the Federal Reserve DOES engage in changing the money supply by buying and selling government securities, that it has to account for the multiplier effect to know how much money is actually added to the economy for a given operation.
The $600 billion dollar figure is for physical paper currency. Unless *everybody* dealt in cash all the time, there is no reason this number has to agree with the total money supply.
It's not like there was a whole lot more documentation laying around in Rome in the 5th century than we have today containing eyewitness accounts of what was going in the boonies of Judea in 30 CE. The main losses were (1) the dying off of the original participants before they made authoritative written records which could be widely disseminated---having a text becomes important only once the apostles are no longer around (2) the efforts to wipe out non-canonical texts once the canon was decided.
The names of the gospel authors are traditional. They are by no means certain. Likewise for the identities of the Seventy.
Luke, if he was the author of the book named Luke, was a companion of Paul, and there is no reason to believe he was present during Christ's ministry. He claimed to have carefully collected information, but it was presumably not his own eyewitness information.
The Gospel of Mark was anonymous, but believed by Papias to have been written by Mark a disciple of *Peter*. If this is true, then he presumably would have had access to Peter's eyewitness testimony, but his evidence is then second-hand.
These are complex questions; if you choose to simply believe the names that are printed in your 20th century translation, and their traditional identities, fine, but that's not actual evidence.
Where is your evidence that the Gospels were actually written by EYEWITNESSES, as opposed to the more likely theory that these were written some time after the fact, based on oral tradition and perhaps a written record of Christ's sayings? That the synoptic nature may be because these gospels (and there were *many* more gospels floating around at the time the 4 canonical gospels were selected) depend on each other or a common source for their information?
The names associated with the gospels are traditional. They aren't journalistic bylines. No one knows who really was the first to write down these accounts.
Do you really think the writer of Luke, for instance, was an eyewitness to the Annunciation? Christ's birth? An eyewitness to the shepherds in the fields visited by angels? It's preposterous.
So the Koran that Saddam had written in his own blood was a secular Koran? If Iraq was such a secular state, then why did the minority Sunnis have all the poltical power? Coincidence?
The secular nature of the regime was much stronger before the first Gulf war and the sanctions and bad governance that screwed up the Iraqi economy. The education of women and their participation in political and economic life, the prevalance of a largely secular middle class, and the fact that Christians (like Tariq Aziz) could hold political power are evidence of secular nature of the regime.
The fact that Saddam felt he had to polish his Islamist credentials to bolster his power does not change the basic secular orientation of his Baathist regime. Baathism was/is a pan-Arab socialist ideology, pretty much devoid of Islamic pretensions. Compare to Egypt and Syria, which are relativly secular regimes.
The concentration of power among Sunnis is primarily due to the tribal nature of Saddam's power (he was Sunni, his clan was Sunni, his region was Sunni), and also because Shiites were poorer, felt to be less loyal to his regime, and more likely to fall under Iranian influence.
Also, if Shiite's were allowed to hold power, the presence of the Shiite holy sites in Iraq would given Shiite imams an independent source of legitimacy, which the Sunni's could not match (because their holy sites are in Saudia Arabia and Israel.)
Funny, my priests don't work wonders and miracles.
Then you've got some pretty useless priests, don't you?
Why, you've got better ones? Where do you go to church? I thought *you* were the one who thought religious stuff was believed because it worked. Guess my church doesn't count as religion, then.
Your use of terminology just gets crazier and crazier.
Wonders and miracles get reduced to the basic abilities of a parish priest?
Augustine of Hippo uses the same cultural context in talking about miracles as a 20th century science fiction writer? Clarke's "law" doesn't claim that all miracles are the product of advanced technology.
Are you taking the position that continued scientific discovery could (or will) reveal that Christ's resurrection was simply advanced medical technology? That's quite an unusual theology you have there.
What about those people who don't believe in God, or don't believe they are acting according to the will of God? Are there inventions not technological? Or you disbelieve in free will?
You did not make clear in your initial discussion that the "unit" of food was "one year's consumption for one person."
In what way is an economy on the absolute brink of starvation relevant as an economic model? One in which a person, working for a whole year, all out, with no time off, can *just barely* grow enough food to subsist for the year?
No population could possibly grow up to the point of total exhaustion of labor in food production.
In any case, in your world, where people are dying of starvation, the efficiency of farming is likely to *increase* as the population *decreases*, because the millionth bit of farm land is the absolute *least* productive plot of land in the whole country, and 500,000 people can pick the *most* productive half of the land, and grow more than enough food for themselves, at least 500,001 units. Then, they'll be able to enjoy some cars.
Its not rocket science Michael, don't try to make it harder then it really is. Support one distro (my suggestion is Debian, as you get a nice slow moving target, or Ubuntu, for predictable release cycles) but it doesn't really matter which one you support
We are the Linux inquisition! Or main distribution is Debian. Or Ubuntu. Our TWO distributions are Debian and Ubuntu...
If you RTFA, he precisely said when they picked one distribution, they kept hearing they picked the wrong one.
"If we say we like Ubuntu, then people will say we picked the wrong one. If we say we like and support Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat, and Xandros, then someone would ask us, 'Why don't you support Mandriva?
Don't you DARE refer to scientific beliefs as faith!
Faith in experimental results is very different from faith in revealed religious truth. Even religious folks admit that RELIGIOUS FAITH IS BELIEF WITHOUT PROOF.
I can buy a dilution fridge and get drawings from Gabrielse, and have machinist make electrodes for a Penning trap, and try it myself, and see if I can trap an electron too. This happens all the time as graduate students start their own labs and build new apparatus.
However, there is no way I can demonstrate to myself the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity except by thinking and reading until I change my mind one way or the other. There's no experiment I can do.
Question the Trinity, and a religious guy will call you a heretic or tell you to read a text. Question Gabrielse's results, and he'll invite you to his lab to turn the knobs, or redo the experiment with your objections in mind, and come back with new information.
Have you ever done a science experiment with your own hands?
Complete isomorphism of a theory has to mean that it requires equal cognitive power to understand it. Translating the theory to Japanese means Japanese people can read it, but it doesn't mean anything *scientifically* or *logically* more than the same theory in English or German.
You can call science a religion if you want, but only by closing your eyes to the profound differences between how these modes of thinking operate.
Are you really saying that you can go into a scientific laboratory or lecture hall, and then go into a house of worship or seminary, and honestly cannot tell the difference in approach between what goes on there?
Physics (or other science) does not split into sects over time. The geocentrists are no longer with us. The people who disbelieve in atoms are no longer with us. The people who believed in the phlogiston theory of combustion are no longer with us. Instead, basically every physicist in the world believes in the same things, with one or two questions in dispute, which tend to get settled and replaced with new questions. 100 years ago, every physicist in the world believed in atoms and Maxwell's equations and Newton's theory of gravity. Now, every physicist in the world believes in atoms and Maxwell's equations, and quantum field theory and General Relativity, which is equivalent to Newton's theory of gravity in the limit.
There are sociological issues involved, OF COURSE. Scientists are imperfect humans working together. But they are *different* sociological issues than confront religion.
People who believe in Judaism are still with us. There are still Zoroastrians. There are still Buddhists. There are still Catholics and Protestants of various stripes, and Muslims, and Animists, etc., etc., etc.
Protestants over time show no signs of accepting Catholic doctrine, and Catholics show no signs of accepting Protestantism. The guys who believe in transubstantiation don't "win" by convincing others of the truth of their position. Perhaps violent conflict results in conversion, and natural birth and death rates can cause changes over time.
Also, virtually every person in the world subscribes to one and only one religion (or atheistic belief). Only scientists of a single specialty identify strongly with a particular side of a scientific question (excepting evolution, but I believe this to be a religious controversy, not a scientific one).
Do you think these are describing the same process? If so, you have a very fuzzy way of looking at the world, and your analysis seems remarkably primitive.
C has one million people. They can produce one million food or 500 thousand cars. D has one million people. They can produce one million food or 250 thousand cars. What trade will not be a fucking model example of trade being bad? And again, what happens to Comparative Advantage when not all goods are equal?
C and D together can produce 1 million food **and** 500 thousand cars. If they trade, that can be divided in some way that will be better for *both* countries.
For example, D can produce 1 million food, and give 500 thousand of that to C. C can produce 500 thousand cars, and give 251 thousand of them to D.
D gets 500 thousand food and 251 thousand cars. C gets 500 thousand food and 249 thousand cars.
BOTH are better off than possible under autarky. If D produced 500 thousand food on its own, they would have had only 125 thousand cars. Hey! 124 thousand more cars!
If C produced 500 thousand food on its own, then it would have only produced 250 thousand cars. Hey! one thousand more cars!
The statement under discussion is "trade is better than autarky."
Not "trade makes some socialist utopia possible."
If people do not have enough resources to avert starvation, trade won't magically make enough food for them. But their chances will be *better* if there is trade.
Look, the only way I believe you can come up with an "elf theory" that has as wide an applicability as the widely accepted "electron theory" is by doing a search-and-replace for the word "electron." I.e., your theory would be completely isomorphic to the current theory, and therefore of no greater or lesser value, except that you have changed the words, so that no one can recognize it. That has NO value.
I do not believe you (or anyone else alive today) can come up with a better theory for electronic behavior without using something that is absolutely logically equivalent. Maybe you can come up with a slightly better *description* of the theory, so one person understands it better. But if it is true understanding, it will be in accord with the theory.
Why do I believe this? Because very-very-very smart people are trying as hard as they can to understand quantum field theory better than before, and they haven't announced anything different. And other very-very-very smart and diligent people like Gabrielse are trying as hard as they can to make more and more precise measurements on electrons and other things, and they haven't announced anything different.
When people discovered evidence for quarks, and revolutionized the understanding of the atomic nucleus and subatomic particles, they got Nobel Prizes for it. They weren't censored and excommunicated, they were heralded as bringers of progress.
You can believe it is all some great religious exercise, but let me tell you, these people are not acting like religious folks. They are acting like scientists.
Yes, it is conceivable that there is some great conspiracy among scientists to put forward some arcane, unjustifiable "electron orthodoxy."
But it is much more likely you are being deliberately difficult, or are just stupid.
You see, that's the problem with any complex controlled experiment- it can't be done by just anybody and thus can't actually be proven.
I haven't climbed to the top of Mount Everest, either. But that doesn't mean I don't accept the existence of "the top of Mount Everest", and it doesn't mean that I believe everyone who claims to have been there are engaged in some "Everest religion" or "Everest conspiracy."
You have a practically useless notion of proof.
Do you believe 2+2=4 is proven? Can you actually *prove* it yourself? Starting from what axioms? If you haven't proven 2+2=4 rigorously, is it not true? Or just a religious belief?
Has anybody ever actually seen a single electron? 'cause I haven't
Gabrielse, et al. have isolated a single electron in a "Penning trap" and can do detailed experiments on the motion of that single electron in a magnetic field.
You act as if nothing has happened in science since about 1905.
Different analogies make theories available to DIFFERENT PEOPLE
Silly preschool analogies let preschoolers (or slashdotters) believe they understand a theory, when they understand nothing. Because when your elves are in a microchip, you must change your story, while the scientist keeps the same theory.
What, do your elves get sleepy in microchips, and they need dwarves to take over?
Preschoolers cannot design microchips. That's not because they don't have the right analogy, but because the behavior of microchips is complex enough that it cannot be usefully done without some amount of skill and knowledge.
The electrical engineering textbooks use the same electronic theory as the chemistry textbooks and the particle physics textbooks. The presentation emphasizes different *aspects,* but they are still the same theory. Quantum mechanics and the basic parameters of the standard model of particle physics form a coherent, rigorous, scientific theory of electron behavior, which applies to every application of electrons in modern technology.
Fooling oneself into believing one understands something is worse than simply not understanding.
Tell me how the US can benefit when a countries like China and India produce just about everything cheaper than the US?
I will try to explain things v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y this time.
Different economies have different ratios of productivity for different goods.
Let us consider, for simplicity only (because the same mathematics works for arbitrarily many countries and goods), that there are only two countries, call them U.S. and India, and two goods, say wheat and software.
Let's say that Indian farmers produce a bushel of wheat for 0.01 dollar, and one kloc of software for 0.02 dollar. And American farmers produce a bushel of wheat for 2 dollars and one kloc of software for 100 dollars. See, both much, much cheaper in India.
Assuming these markets are in equilibrium, that means that the U.S. can produce one kloc LESS of software and produce 50 more bushels of wheat instead, given American resources only. India can produce one kloc MORE of software by producing 2 bushels less of wheat, given Indian resources only. Why can I say this? Because that equality is what determines the prices. You could also describe this without prices, by changing the variables to be simply "bushels of wheat" and "kloc of code" and talking about the slope of the "production possibility frontier", but it really means the same thing.
What this hypothetical shift means is that, for each step of this process, where one kloc of code is outsourced from the U.S. to India, the two countries, together, get 48 MORE bushels of wheat. Some of that extra wheat produced will get sent to India, and some of the excess wheat will stay in the U.S.
The simplest way to describe this is that Americans are "specializing" in wheat production, and Indians are "specializing" in software production.
There's no disadvantage here for the U.S.; people need to eat wheat just like they need software. Same amount of software and more wheat = more goods for EVERYONE.
You can do the same argument, vice versa, to show that you could get the same amount of wheat and more software by India "outsourcing wheat production."
This is a very crude sketch of the basic mathematical proof you will see in an intermediate microeconomics course in any university in the world.
Now, I have chosen large differences in the slopes to make the example clear; the likelihood of *all* possible goods having *exactly* the same relative prices in all economies is *very* low, because countries are so different in the distribution of natural resources, labor, and capital, in all their varieties. In any case, if they were, coincidentally, all the same, trade just wouldn't happen, because there would be no need for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sexbot = endless billions in profit
What is so difficult for the robotics industry to comprehend here?
The engineers seem to lose motivation around the prototype stage, and have little interest in developing production models.
To compensate for this lame joke, follow this link to an actual informative comment.
Hate to break it to you, but only the most credulous readers of the New Testament believe 2 Peter to actually have been written by Peter. It was almost certainly written by someone who wanted to claim the authority of Peter, but was not Peter himself. It was probably written sometime between 100 and 160 A.D., after Peter himself was martyred.
People have been willing to die for all sorts of baseless ideas; people poison themselves so they can hitch rides on comets, they blow themselves up because they think Osama bin Laden wants them to. The willingness to die speaks only to the psychological hold these ideas have on the believer. They are not objective evidence as to the factual basis for these beliefs.
I don't need to waste my time reading what some 19th century lawyer thought was proved by it. I already know that legal standards of evidence developed starting in the 13th century in England are irrelevant for evaluating the truth of statements in manuscripts which were written in the first few centuries A.D.
No, the jury (or the judge, acting as finder of "fact" when there is no jury) can choose to ignore testimony or evidence that it believes not to be credible. Just because. It does not need to be explicitly questioned by the other side.
It is, of course, in the interest of the other side to elicit testimony or produce evidence that tends to question the credibility of witness testimony that was harmful to the case. But not required.
The point still remains that the rules followed in a court of law are not meant to establish "absolute truth." They are intended to provide a fair, just, and hopefully reliable system for determining outcomes of trials. That the O.J. Simpson jury decided that the government had not met the burden of proof to convict O.J. does not mean that it is conclusively proven that O.J. did not actually kill Nicole Simpson.
The judicial rules of evidence are completely and totally irrelevant to questions of historical fact or religious belief. That you have confused these very different fields is evidence that you are a clueless nut.
The fact that you seem to think the Gospels are some objective eyewitness testimony, as if they were simply wire service bulletins "This just in: Reuters reports Jesus Christ found risen from the dead. Interviewed at the scene, Mary Magdalene stated that..." is additional evidence you are a clueless nut.
They are written accounts, probably written many years after the events, by people who were hardly objective in their descriptions, and often wrote about events (like the Annunciation and the Nativity) they were highly unlikely to have any first hand knowledge of. They got important historical and geographical details confused. Where they share common text, it often appears they are quoting from each other or from an earlier common source. They have clumsy patch jobs on them, like John 21:23. They were deliberately chosen because they were in accord with a particular Orthodox school of thought, and other texts were deliberately suppressed.
Congratulations, you win the "buzzword bingo" prize for today.
Several important distinctions are being masked by the fuzzy terminology here.
1) "Quantum mechanics": the particular quantum mechanics being discussed here is the use of "random matrix theory", which is basically a short cut. Given a large number of constituent interacting particles, as in a large atomic nucleus, the idea is that the precise solution isn't important, and can be approximated by assuming the details are random.
Turns out you can still get very useful results that way. Perhaps even deep results. But I see no reason that is fundamental to the "ultimate secrets of the universe." Presumably the nucleons "know" how to follow the real rules precisely. Just like the zeta function "knows" where its zeroes are.
The connection seems to be that similar mathematical techniques can be applied to the problem of the zeros of the zeta function.
2) "Prime numbers" and "zeta function" The zeta function provides a very deep connection between the field of "functions of a complex variable" and "prime numbers." It is not, as far as I know, a magic shortcut that would allow one to factor large numbers. Knowing something about the distribution of primes is very different from knowing every prime number, or identifying prime factors.
3) "Quantum computing" and "prime factors". Quantum computers provide theoretically fast techniques to factor numbers. However, certain kinds of encryption system depend on the absence of *practically* fast techniques to factor numbers. This is independent of the discussed research, and is rather a technological question, having to do with how many qubits can be maintained at once, for how long, and how many quantum operations can be performed on those qubits, for actual laboratory apparatus.
You may not take into account any evidence you may have heard from other sources other than what is directly presented.
Huh?
Your argument by analogy is incredibly flawed, in multiple ways.
*Even* if I stipulate that the New Testament is, indeed, eyewitness testimony (although we have no concrete proof that the writers of any particular text we have were actually eyewitnesses, as opposed to second- or third-hand reporters), it is hardly unbiased.
You miss the most important aspect about the rules of evidence in a court of law: that the judge is presumed to be applying the rules of evidence in an impartial way. Reasons to exclude evidence include that it is inflammatory, or that it cannot be properly contested by cross-examination, that it cannot be authenticated, etc., etc. If the jury were to see such evidence, they would be improperly influenced, and the judge's role is to prevent that.
Gospels are not evidence in the legal sense. They were written *specifically* to persuade people to believe in the Christian religion. They are *not* impartial accounts. We cannot cross-examine the writers of the Gospel to get them to explain certain unclear points of authorship and motivation.
For instance, the Gospels do not, and would not, include any accounts from the thousands of people in and around Jerusalem who did NOT see Christ after the resurrection. Instead, we are left pretty much with those accounts that third-century authorities decided would be most proper for use in Christian worship. Everything else was to be suppressed.
The real reason to have a reserve requirement is to control the value of the multiplier.
Having 20% (say) reserves against demand deposits obviously does not protect against a run that causes demand for more than 21% of demand deposits.
The protection against bank failure is the confidence the public has that, through deposit insurance and the willingness of the central bank to do whatever is necessary to preserve the integrity of the system, no bank will be allowed to fail in such a way as to wipe out customer deposits.
If depositors are sure the goverment will make them whole if an individual bank fails, there is no reason for a run to start.
The collusion comes into place when the first bank is given $1000 by the Federal Reserve.
1 1lead.pdf
This is an idiotic post. The Federal Reserve does not just give money away to banks. They give paper currency and coin against electronic balances held by member banks at the Federal Reserve, but that is just trading one type of money for another, not creating it. The Federal Reserve also offers a "discount window" from which banks can request loans at a particular overnight rate, but they charge interest, and can refuse to give the loans if they feel it is not wise to do so, and banks typically do not rely on this for day-to-day-operations. They *do* engage in open market operations to buy and sell government securities, but that is separate from the multiplier.
Banks put their money in reserve accounts at the Federal Reserve, and can lend those reserves to one another at what is basically a market-determined rate. But this is irrelevant to the multiplier. Changing which bank's reserve account at the Federal Reserve holds money does not create or destroy it.
The key link that you've missed out on is that the money goes through the participants in the economy. Your local bank gets deposits because you decided your piggy bank was full and you'd rather earn interest on it. Or because you did work that your employer decided to pay you for.
What is the bank supposed to do with that money? Stick it in a super-sized mattress until you want it? No, they'll lend it to people who want to buy things or to run a business, or through the Federal Reserve to other banks that have customers who want to borrow money.
The trick is that people do not typically take that loan money and keep it in a nice little pile of green paper. Instead, they borrowed the money because they had a good idea of how they could *spend* it. They spend it, let's say at a local merchant, who doesn't need to spend it himself right away, and decides to deposit in a bank.
THAT idea, that all currency, including loans, ends up virtually immediately being redeposited into the banking system, is what causes the multiplier. This happens because currency itself is not particularly useful, whereas deposits can earn interest.
That's not hocus-pocus or collusion. It simply means that when the Federal Reserve DOES engage in changing the money supply by buying and selling government securities, that it has to account for the multiplier effect to know how much money is actually added to the economy for a given operation.
http://federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/1997/1997
The $600 billion dollar figure is for physical paper currency. Unless *everybody* dealt in cash all the time, there is no reason this number has to agree with the total money supply.
http://federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/Current/
It's not like there was a whole lot more documentation laying around in Rome in the 5th century than we have today containing eyewitness accounts of what was going in the boonies of Judea in 30 CE. The main losses were (1) the dying off of the original participants before they made authoritative written records which could be widely disseminated---having a text becomes important only once the apostles are no longer around (2) the efforts to wipe out non-canonical texts once the canon was decided.
The names of the gospel authors are traditional. They are by no means certain. Likewise for the identities of the Seventy.
Luke, if he was the author of the book named Luke, was a companion of Paul, and there is no reason to believe he was present during Christ's ministry. He claimed to have carefully collected information, but it was presumably not his own eyewitness information.
The Gospel of Mark was anonymous, but believed by Papias to have been written by Mark a disciple of *Peter*. If this is true, then he presumably would have had access to Peter's eyewitness testimony, but his evidence is then second-hand.
These are complex questions; if you choose to simply believe the names that are printed in your 20th century translation, and their traditional identities, fine, but that's not actual evidence.
Where is your evidence that the Gospels were actually written by EYEWITNESSES, as opposed to the more likely theory that these were written some time after the fact, based on oral tradition and perhaps a written record of Christ's sayings? That the synoptic nature may be because these gospels (and there were *many* more gospels floating around at the time the 4 canonical gospels were selected) depend on each other or a common source for their information?
The names associated with the gospels are traditional. They aren't journalistic bylines. No one knows who really was the first to write down these accounts.
Do you really think the writer of Luke, for instance, was an eyewitness to the Annunciation? Christ's birth? An eyewitness to the shepherds in the fields visited by angels? It's preposterous.
So the Koran that Saddam had written in his own blood was a secular Koran? If Iraq was such a secular state, then why did the minority Sunnis have all the poltical power? Coincidence?
The secular nature of the regime was much stronger before the first Gulf war and the sanctions and bad governance that screwed up the Iraqi economy. The education of women and their participation in political and economic life, the prevalance of a largely secular middle class, and the fact that Christians (like Tariq Aziz) could hold political power are evidence of secular nature of the regime.
The fact that Saddam felt he had to polish his Islamist credentials to bolster his power does not change the basic secular orientation of his Baathist regime. Baathism was/is a pan-Arab socialist ideology, pretty much devoid of Islamic pretensions. Compare to Egypt and Syria, which are relativly secular regimes.
The concentration of power among Sunnis is primarily due to the tribal nature of Saddam's power (he was Sunni, his clan was Sunni, his region was Sunni), and also because Shiites were poorer, felt to be less loyal to his regime, and more likely to fall under Iranian influence.
Also, if Shiite's were allowed to hold power, the presence of the Shiite holy sites in Iraq would given Shiite imams an independent source of legitimacy, which the Sunni's could not match (because their holy sites are in Saudia Arabia and Israel.)
Funny, my priests don't work wonders and miracles.
Then you've got some pretty useless priests, don't you?
Why, you've got better ones? Where do you go to church? I thought *you* were the one who thought religious stuff was believed because it worked. Guess my church doesn't count as religion, then.
Your use of terminology just gets crazier and crazier.
Wonders and miracles get reduced to the basic abilities of a parish priest?
Augustine of Hippo uses the same cultural context in talking about miracles as a 20th century science fiction writer? Clarke's "law" doesn't claim that all miracles are the product of advanced technology.
Are you taking the position that continued scientific discovery could (or will) reveal that Christ's resurrection was simply advanced medical technology? That's quite an unusual theology you have there.
What about those people who don't believe in God, or don't believe they are acting according to the will of God? Are there inventions not technological? Or you disbelieve in free will?
You did not make clear in your initial discussion that the "unit" of food was "one year's consumption for one person."
In what way is an economy on the absolute brink of starvation relevant as an economic model? One in which a person, working for a whole year, all out, with no time off, can *just barely* grow enough food to subsist for the year?
No population could possibly grow up to the point of total exhaustion of labor in food production.
In any case, in your world, where people are dying of starvation, the efficiency of farming is likely to *increase* as the population *decreases*, because the millionth bit of farm land is the absolute *least* productive plot of land in the whole country, and 500,000 people can pick the *most* productive half of the land, and grow more than enough food for themselves, at least 500,001 units. Then, they'll be able to enjoy some cars.
Ever hear of "diminishing returns"?
Its not rocket science Michael, don't try to make it harder then it really is. Support one distro (my suggestion is Debian, as you get a nice slow moving target, or Ubuntu, for predictable release cycles) but it doesn't really matter which one you support
We are the Linux inquisition! Or main distribution is Debian. Or Ubuntu. Our TWO distributions are Debian and Ubuntu...
If you RTFA, he precisely said when they picked one distribution, they kept hearing they picked the wrong one.
"If we say we like Ubuntu, then people will say we picked the wrong one. If we say we like and support Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat, and Xandros, then someone would ask us, 'Why don't you support Mandriva?
Sound familiar?
Funny, my priests don't work wonders and miracles.
They minister and preach, but they believe miracles, to the extent they exist, are made by God.
You seem to have a doctrine of miracles that is quite limited. "Advanced technology"??
Funny, technology to me is man-made by definition. Not god-made.
Don't you DARE refer to scientific beliefs as faith!
Faith in experimental results is very different from faith in revealed religious truth. Even religious folks admit that RELIGIOUS FAITH IS BELIEF WITHOUT PROOF.
I can buy a dilution fridge and get drawings from Gabrielse, and have machinist make electrodes for a Penning trap, and try it myself, and see if I can trap an electron too. This happens all the time as graduate students start their own labs and build new apparatus.
However, there is no way I can demonstrate to myself the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity except by thinking and reading until I change my mind one way or the other. There's no experiment I can do.
Question the Trinity, and a religious guy will call you a heretic or tell you to read a text. Question Gabrielse's results, and he'll invite you to his lab to turn the knobs, or redo the experiment with your objections in mind, and come back with new information.
Have you ever done a science experiment with your own hands?
Complete isomorphism of a theory has to mean that it requires equal cognitive power to understand it. Translating the theory to Japanese means Japanese people can read it, but it doesn't mean anything *scientifically* or *logically* more than the same theory in English or German.
You can call science a religion if you want, but only by closing your eyes to the profound differences between how these modes of thinking operate.
Are you really saying that you can go into a scientific laboratory or lecture hall, and then go into a house of worship or seminary, and honestly cannot tell the difference in approach between what goes on there?
Physics (or other science) does not split into sects over time. The geocentrists are no longer with us. The people who disbelieve in atoms are no longer with us. The people who believed in the phlogiston theory of combustion are no longer with us. Instead, basically every physicist in the world believes in the same things, with one or two questions in dispute, which tend to get settled and replaced with new questions. 100 years ago, every physicist in the world believed in atoms and Maxwell's equations and Newton's theory of gravity. Now, every physicist in the world believes in atoms and Maxwell's equations, and quantum field theory and General Relativity, which is equivalent to Newton's theory of gravity in the limit.
There are sociological issues involved, OF COURSE. Scientists are imperfect humans working together. But they are *different* sociological issues than confront religion.
People who believe in Judaism are still with us. There are still Zoroastrians. There are still Buddhists. There are still Catholics and Protestants of various stripes, and Muslims, and Animists, etc., etc., etc.
Protestants over time show no signs of accepting Catholic doctrine, and Catholics show no signs of accepting Protestantism. The guys who believe in transubstantiation don't "win" by convincing others of the truth of their position. Perhaps violent conflict results in conversion, and natural birth and death rates can cause changes over time.
Also, virtually every person in the world subscribes to one and only one religion (or atheistic belief). Only scientists of a single specialty identify strongly with a particular side of a scientific question (excepting evolution, but I believe this to be a religious controversy, not a scientific one).
Do you think these are describing the same process? If so, you have a very fuzzy way of looking at the world, and your analysis seems remarkably primitive.
C has one million people. They can produce one million food or 500 thousand cars. D has one million people. They can produce one million food or 250 thousand cars. What trade will not be a fucking model example of trade being bad? And again, what happens to Comparative Advantage when not all goods are equal?
C and D together can produce 1 million food **and** 500 thousand cars.
If they trade, that can be divided in some way that will be better for *both* countries.
For example, D can produce 1 million food, and give 500 thousand of that to C. C can produce 500 thousand cars, and give 251 thousand of them to D.
D gets 500 thousand food and 251 thousand cars.
C gets 500 thousand food and 249 thousand cars.
BOTH are better off than possible under autarky. If D produced 500 thousand food on its own, they would have had only 125 thousand cars. Hey! 124 thousand more cars!
If C produced 500 thousand food on its own, then it would have only produced 250 thousand cars. Hey! one thousand more cars!
See? Trade benefits *both* parties.
Listen. Your examples are idiotic.
The statement under discussion is "trade is better than autarky."
Not "trade makes some socialist utopia possible."
If people do not have enough resources to avert starvation, trade won't magically make enough food for them. But their chances will be *better* if there is trade.
Look, the only way I believe you can come up with an "elf theory" that has as wide an applicability as the widely accepted "electron theory" is by doing a search-and-replace for the word "electron." I.e., your theory would be completely isomorphic to the current theory, and therefore of no greater or lesser value, except that you have changed the words, so that no one can recognize it. That has NO value.
I do not believe you (or anyone else alive today) can come up with a better theory for electronic behavior without using something that is absolutely logically equivalent. Maybe you can come up with a slightly better *description* of the theory, so one person understands it better. But if it is true understanding, it will be in accord with the theory.
Why do I believe this? Because very-very-very smart people are trying as hard as they can to understand quantum field theory better than before, and they haven't announced anything different. And other very-very-very smart and diligent people like Gabrielse are trying as hard as they can to make more and more precise measurements on electrons and other things, and they haven't announced anything different.
When people discovered evidence for quarks, and revolutionized the understanding of the atomic nucleus and subatomic particles, they got Nobel Prizes for it. They weren't censored and excommunicated, they were heralded as bringers of progress.
You can believe it is all some great religious exercise, but let me tell you, these people are not acting like religious folks. They are acting like scientists.
Yes, it is conceivable that there is some great conspiracy among scientists to put forward some arcane, unjustifiable "electron orthodoxy."
But it is much more likely you are being deliberately difficult, or are just stupid.
You see, that's the problem with any complex controlled experiment- it can't be done by just anybody and thus can't actually be proven.
I haven't climbed to the top of Mount Everest, either. But that doesn't mean I don't accept the existence of "the top of Mount Everest", and it doesn't mean that I believe everyone who claims to have been there are engaged in some "Everest religion" or "Everest conspiracy."
You have a practically useless notion of proof.
Do you believe 2+2=4 is proven? Can you actually *prove* it yourself? Starting from what axioms? If you haven't proven 2+2=4 rigorously, is it not true? Or just a religious belief?
Has anybody ever actually seen a single electron? 'cause I haven't
Gabrielse, et al. have isolated a single electron in a "Penning trap" and can do detailed experiments on the motion of that single electron in a magnetic field.
You act as if nothing has happened in science since about 1905.
Different analogies make theories available to DIFFERENT PEOPLE
Silly preschool analogies let preschoolers (or slashdotters) believe they understand a theory, when they understand nothing. Because when your elves are in a microchip, you must change your story, while the scientist keeps the same theory.
What, do your elves get sleepy in microchips, and they need dwarves to take over?
Preschoolers cannot design microchips. That's not because they don't have the right analogy, but because the behavior of microchips is complex enough that it cannot be usefully done without some amount of skill and knowledge.
The electrical engineering textbooks use the same electronic theory as the chemistry textbooks and the particle physics textbooks. The presentation emphasizes different *aspects,* but they are still the same theory. Quantum mechanics and the basic parameters of the standard model of particle physics form a coherent, rigorous, scientific theory of electron behavior, which applies to every application of electrons in modern technology.
Fooling oneself into believing one understands something is worse than simply not understanding.
Tell me how the US can benefit when a countries like China and India produce just about everything cheaper than the US?
I will try to explain things v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y this time.
Different economies have different ratios of productivity for different goods.
Let us consider, for simplicity only (because the same mathematics works for arbitrarily many countries and goods), that there are only two countries, call them U.S. and India, and two goods, say wheat and software.
Let's say that Indian farmers produce a bushel of wheat for 0.01 dollar, and one kloc of software for 0.02 dollar. And American farmers produce a bushel of wheat for 2 dollars and one kloc of software for 100 dollars. See, both much, much cheaper in India.
Assuming these markets are in equilibrium, that means that the U.S. can produce one kloc LESS of software and produce 50 more bushels of wheat instead, given American resources only. India can produce one kloc MORE of software by producing 2 bushels less of wheat, given Indian resources only. Why can I say this? Because that equality is what determines the prices. You could also describe this without prices, by changing the variables to be simply "bushels of wheat" and "kloc of code" and talking about the slope of the "production possibility frontier", but it really means the same thing.
What this hypothetical shift means is that, for each step of this process, where one kloc of code is outsourced from the U.S. to India, the two countries, together, get 48 MORE bushels of wheat. Some of that extra wheat produced will get sent to India, and some of the excess wheat will stay in the U.S.
The simplest way to describe this is that Americans are "specializing" in wheat production, and Indians are "specializing" in software production.
There's no disadvantage here for the U.S.; people need to eat wheat just like they need software. Same amount of software and more wheat = more goods for EVERYONE.
You can do the same argument, vice versa, to show that you could get the same amount of wheat and more software by India "outsourcing wheat production."
This is a very crude sketch of the basic mathematical proof you will see in an intermediate microeconomics course in any university in the world.
Now, I have chosen large differences in the slopes to make the example clear; the likelihood of *all* possible goods having *exactly* the same relative prices in all economies is *very* low, because countries are so different in the distribution of natural resources, labor, and capital, in all their varieties. In any case, if they were, coincidentally, all the same, trade just wouldn't happen, because there would be no need for it.
No, "YOU ARE WRONG" is not the same as "SHUT UP."
The proper response to your being wrong is go read a textbook (and understand it) on basic economics.
And if you already did so, try again, perhaps with a different textbook, because it didn't work the first time.