To consider oneself as a rational human being one must consider what is demanded for the relationship between faith and observation. Faith in this sense is defined as a belief in the correctness of any explanatory theory or in the existence of any thing absent direct observational evidence at the exact present moment. For example, one may have faith that all atoms are composed of a nucleus and electrons even though one cannot perform a direct observation on any given atom at any instant in time to confirm this. I submit that to be a rational human being one must demand certain criterion from their faiths.
If a faith is concerned with the existence of some thing then that thing must be observable under at least some experimental condition in a repeatable fashion. In this way the thing can be said to exist in the observed form to within the accuracy of the experiment. If this were not demanded to be the case then one could have faith in the existence of entirely preposterous unobservable things and still be considered a fully rational human being. Examples include aliens bent on the destruction of Earth and humanity with advanced technology that renders them undetectable, ghosts of the dead that have come to haunt or relate with the living, and any number of gods that have been worshiped throughout human history.
Difficulties arise when the object of faith is not directly observable but the predicted consequences of its existence are observable under at least some experimental condition in a repeatable fashion. This is a fantastic concept and areas that encounter such a situation are typically at the forefront of science and innovation. Examples include quarks of the standard model of particle physics and the complex valued quantum mechanical wave function.
If a faith is concerned with the correctness of some explanatory theory then that theory must make accurate predictions of the outcome of an experiment under at least some experimental condition in a repeatable fashion. In this way the theory can be said to be correct to within the accuracy of the experiment. If this were not demanded to be the case then one could have faith in an explanation for some observed phenomenon without the burden of consistency with all other accepted theories.
Difficulties arise when the correctness of some explanatory theory cannot be tested at the present time under any experimental conditions due to constraints imposed by the phenomenon. Examples include the big bang model for the creation of the universe and the theory of evolution for the origin of species. In both of these cases there is a tremendous amount of observational evidence to indicate the correctness of the theories but it is presently impossible to carry out an experiment that can reproduce the observed phenomena because of the demands for large amounts of time, space, and energy that are beyond the capacity of humanity to produce.
These thoughts are really just a rough draft and probably in need of further consideration and revision.
This is a good point. The article summary is clearly biased for a discussion in one direction. I propose that rather than discuss the notion of ID that we take the discussion a bit deeper. ID is serving only as a proxy for the real conflict. In that sense ID only serves to complicate the discussion with unnecessary details. There is too much in the ID/Evolution debate that is prone to nit-picking and nobody ends up going after the meat of the problem.
Instead pretend that some article exists ->here- (nobody reads the real articles so you don't have to read the imaginary one either) that discusses the relationship between faith and observation, and then discusses how to present the results of these two experiences to other human beings.
It is unnecessary to bring God, Christianity, Evolution, ID, or many other things into the discussion. In fact please avoid them since they usually just cloud the discussion and will in the long run reduce the strength of the argument.
This is a great idea that should be generalized to allow humans to more easily observe nature (both in and out of the water) without the interference of cameras and trucks/boats etc.
Although I have not seen it I have heard that such a stunt was portrayed in some Jim Carey Pet Detective movie to the delight of potty humorists everywhere (I look forward to seeing it myself some day:).
It would also be a riot if other alien species do this type of thing to observe humans. Bump into someone on the street and a camera falls out of their mouth and all kinds of alien cursing starts coming from within the guy's body.
Ohhhh that show is so painful to watch. The diaglog is painfully painfull to listen to. The science is dumbed down to such a painfully painfully painful level that it too becomes painful. I think I'm in pain just thinking about it.
This is true, but we must also consider the magnitudes of the death and reproduction rates.
Squirrels: These animals have high procreation rates for mamals. Then, automobile death rates for squirrels is also really rather low as a whole of the total population. So, I would agree that squirrels will probably not evolve car avoidance skills in the near future.
Fish: Very interesting case. Fish are very diverse in terms of their procreation and maturation rates. One cannot simply lump all fish into the same catagory when trying to understand why lures still work, why some fish are endangered, and why some fish are experiencing population explosions. I am not a fisherman, but I understand that certain lures are more capable of catching certain fish than other lures. I good fisherman will select the right lure for the right moment like a golfer picking a club. The question then is this: Do fish caught by lures suffer significantly in terms of population compared to their procreation rate? Then after that is answered you have to ask: Is the time frame in which the population decline applied sufficiently long that the animals have time to adapt? In what way would they adapt? Non-intelligent ways first probably. Giving birth to more offspring, increased fear of interaction with unknown things (e.g. humans). Now, what about the fish that are not fished by humans? There are certain pest fish that are very difficult to get rid of from lakes and streams. Attempting mass chemical kill offs doesn't do the trick. Some fish in a group are exposed to only low doses of the chemical and others have a naturally high tolerance for the poison before suffering death. Those fish will be able to procreate if the kill off attempt is not sufficiently broad and deep to kill those resistant to the chemical attack (in terms of intensity and methods of killing). This is very tricky now, and not fully answered.
Insects: Now things can get crazy because they all basically fall into the catagory of pest animals where some will die and some will live. If you want to exterminate them from an area you must kill them *all* with a number of different methods simultainiously. Almost impossible. Clearly, the best method is not extermination, but rather population control. Learn to live with some, and find a way to prevent population explosions. This is a totally unsolved problem. The current control methods are bassicaly just clever kill offs. (e.g. insertion of sterile females into the society).
Remember, it only took about 10 years before antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria appeared after the introduction of pennacillin (sp?).
The Bush administrations use of the word moral values is nothing more than a code word for anti-homosexual, anti-abortion, abstinance only sex education, and anti-embrionic stem cell research. It has nothing to do with any kind of substantive debate on real moral and ethical questions. (Such as what kind of environmental responsibility do we have and how does that relate to the stability and sustainability of the economy? Or maybe when is the use of force justified to alter the policies or behavior of soverign states? Nahhhh, lets not talk about that. Shoot first ask questions later.)
So your comment is entirely correct about the Bush administration being hypocritical. No suprises there. Move along, move along.
Please don't over generalize. I care, my friends care, and my family cares. We are all pissed as hell that W is going to be around for another 4 years as the leader of our country.
As I see it, this is a very dark time for the US. Our leadership rejects science when the results don't agree with their policies, they promote religion as the answer to moral and ethical questions (bad idea), and their skill in diplomacy is about what I would expect to see from a bully on a fifth grade playground.
Remember, although a record number of people voted to elect W, a record number of people also voted against him. Those people are now screaming for help. Now more than ever we need help from our friends and allies abroad to help control this country from going off the deep end.
Just because a slight majority elected W don't abandon the rest of us.
You are absolutely correct in pointing out that there are many many natural cycles and fluctuations in the short term weather and long term climactic behavior of the planet. It is also quite true that there is a significant amount of data that documents this ongoing process as contributing to the current changes in the Earth's ecosystem. The problem with this line of thought is that these natural processes, which are well known and well documented through detail analysis of tree cores, ice cores, rock sedimentary layers etc., do NOT explain all the existing data about current climactic trends. They do fill in some of the puzzle pieces but can not explian the existing data. The reason for serious worry and concern is that the parts of the data that all the natual phenomenon can't explain are large shifts in the chemical compositon of the atmophere, soil, and oceans that have occured in the last 100 years.
In simple words, this is a bullet to the head of the idea that humanity has no impact on the environment and that we should all just go about our business like nothing is happening.
Just off the top of my head, but I'm not so sure that this is the way it works for the magnets in a hard drive that control the movement of the read/write head. I believe that the effect of the magnetic field inside the HD case is limited by the material the magnets are mounted to. If you touch a magnet to that material you will notice that it has only a very very weak attraction. This is because it has a very small permeability (mu). This way the magnetic field line can only come out of the sides between the two magnets. Then, you just mount them close together and stick the read/write arm in there. When they are close, the magnetic field lines will not extend far out from the sides.
I'm sure someone can offer a more detailed explaination, but I think this is approximately correct.
Demand what McDonalds does (according to the article). Every day after you punch out you get a computer printout of when you logged in and when you logged out. You can keep that paper and use it as evidence of when and how long you worked. Very simple.
I suspect that a lot of the reason that this technology is being developed in Japan is because it is VERY uncommon to find organ donors in Japan. There are strong traditional beliefs about preserving a family members body. At least this is what my (Japanese) wife tells me.
Fun Troll
First: Nobody ever claimed to have actually discovered the real laws that govern the universe. (e.g. F=ma is only a first order approximation and not even a mathematically rigorous law either(because m and F can't be defined independently))
Second: We don't have to live in a "well-formed"(whatever that means) universe. Just as we don't have to have a solar system with circular orbits.
It sounds like you have some "my place in the universe" issues you need to work on.:)
On the mirrored page did anyone else notice something odd in the background of pictures 20 and 21? I may be having eye problems, but it distinctly looks like some kind of lego woman next to the fireplace.
Slashdot Mirror
To consider oneself as a rational human being one must consider what is demanded for the relationship between faith and observation. Faith in this sense is defined as a belief in the correctness of any explanatory theory or in the existence of any thing absent direct observational evidence at the exact present moment. For example, one may have faith that all atoms are composed of a nucleus and electrons even though one cannot perform a direct observation on any given atom at any instant in time to confirm this. I submit that to be a rational human being one must demand certain criterion from their faiths.
If a faith is concerned with the existence of some thing then that thing must be observable under at least some experimental condition in a repeatable fashion. In this way the thing can be said to exist in the observed form to within the accuracy of the experiment. If this were not demanded to be the case then one could have faith in the existence of entirely preposterous unobservable things and still be considered a fully rational human being. Examples include aliens bent on the destruction of Earth and humanity with advanced technology that renders them undetectable, ghosts of the dead that have come to haunt or relate with the living, and any number of gods that have been worshiped throughout human history.
Difficulties arise when the object of faith is not directly observable but the predicted consequences of its existence are observable under at least some experimental condition in a repeatable fashion. This is a fantastic concept and areas that encounter such a situation are typically at the forefront of science and innovation. Examples include quarks of the standard model of particle physics and the complex valued quantum mechanical wave function.
If a faith is concerned with the correctness of some explanatory theory then that theory must make accurate predictions of the outcome of an experiment under at least some experimental condition in a repeatable fashion. In this way the theory can be said to be correct to within the accuracy of the experiment. If this were not demanded to be the case then one could have faith in an explanation for some observed phenomenon without the burden of consistency with all other accepted theories.
Difficulties arise when the correctness of some explanatory theory cannot be tested at the present time under any experimental conditions due to constraints imposed by the phenomenon. Examples include the big bang model for the creation of the universe and the theory of evolution for the origin of species. In both of these cases there is a tremendous amount of observational evidence to indicate the correctness of the theories but it is presently impossible to carry out an experiment that can reproduce the observed phenomena because of the demands for large amounts of time, space, and energy that are beyond the capacity of humanity to produce.
These thoughts are really just a rough draft and probably in need of further consideration and revision.
This is a good point. The article summary is clearly biased for a discussion in one direction. I propose that rather than discuss the notion of ID that we take the discussion a bit deeper. ID is serving only as a proxy for the real conflict. In that sense ID only serves to complicate the discussion with unnecessary details. There is too much in the ID/Evolution debate that is prone to nit-picking and nobody ends up going after the meat of the problem.
Instead pretend that some article exists ->here- (nobody reads the real articles so you don't have to read the imaginary one either) that discusses the relationship between faith and observation, and then discusses how to present the results of these two experiences to other human beings.
It is unnecessary to bring God, Christianity, Evolution, ID, or many other things into the discussion. In fact please avoid them since they usually just cloud the discussion and will in the long run reduce the strength of the argument.
This is a great idea that should be generalized to allow humans to more easily observe nature (both in and out of the water) without the interference of cameras and trucks/boats etc.
:).
Although I have not seen it I have heard that such a stunt was portrayed in some Jim Carey Pet Detective movie to the delight of potty humorists everywhere (I look forward to seeing it myself some day
It would also be a riot if other alien species do this type of thing to observe humans. Bump into someone on the street and a camera falls out of their mouth and all kinds of alien cursing starts coming from within the guy's body.
Just stick a bunch of flash based ads in the journal articles. Embed hyperlinks to products and services etc.
Annoying, but it would probably do the trick. Then, the people who pay don't have to suffer the ads.
Ohhhh that show is so painful to watch. The diaglog is painfully painfull to listen to. The science is dumbed down to such a painfully painfully painful level that it too becomes painful. I think I'm in pain just thinking about it.
Arrrrrgggggg!!!!!
This is true, but we must also consider the magnitudes of the death and reproduction rates.
Squirrels: These animals have high procreation rates for mamals. Then, automobile death rates for squirrels is also really rather low as a whole of the total population. So, I would agree that squirrels will probably not evolve car avoidance skills in the near future.
Fish: Very interesting case. Fish are very diverse in terms of their procreation and maturation rates. One cannot simply lump all fish into the same catagory when trying to understand why lures still work, why some fish are endangered, and why some fish are experiencing population explosions. I am not a fisherman, but I understand that certain lures are more capable of catching certain fish than other lures. I good fisherman will select the right lure for the right moment like a golfer picking a club. The question then is this: Do fish caught by lures suffer significantly in terms of population compared to their procreation rate? Then after that is answered you have to ask: Is the time frame in which the population decline applied sufficiently long that the animals have time to adapt? In what way would they adapt? Non-intelligent ways first probably. Giving birth to more offspring, increased fear of interaction with unknown things (e.g. humans). Now, what about the fish that are not fished by humans? There are certain pest fish that are very difficult to get rid of from lakes and streams. Attempting mass chemical kill offs doesn't do the trick. Some fish in a group are exposed to only low doses of the chemical and others have a naturally high tolerance for the poison before suffering death. Those fish will be able to procreate if the kill off attempt is not sufficiently broad and deep to kill those resistant to the chemical attack (in terms of intensity and methods of killing). This is very tricky now, and not fully answered.
Insects: Now things can get crazy because they all basically fall into the catagory of pest animals where some will die and some will live. If you want to exterminate them from an area you must kill them *all* with a number of different methods simultainiously. Almost impossible. Clearly, the best method is not extermination, but rather population control. Learn to live with some, and find a way to prevent population explosions. This is a totally unsolved problem. The current control methods are bassicaly just clever kill offs. (e.g. insertion of sterile females into the society).
Remember, it only took about 10 years before antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria appeared after the introduction of pennacillin (sp?).
The Bush administrations use of the word moral values is nothing more than a code word for anti-homosexual, anti-abortion, abstinance only sex education, and anti-embrionic stem cell research. It has nothing to do with any kind of substantive debate on real moral and ethical questions. (Such as what kind of environmental responsibility do we have and how does that relate to the stability and sustainability of the economy? Or maybe when is the use of force justified to alter the policies or behavior of soverign states? Nahhhh, lets not talk about that. Shoot first ask questions later.)
So your comment is entirely correct about the Bush administration being hypocritical. No suprises there. Move along, move along.
Please don't over generalize. I care, my friends care, and my family cares. We are all pissed as hell that W is going to be around for another 4 years as the leader of our country.
As I see it, this is a very dark time for the US. Our leadership rejects science when the results don't agree with their policies, they promote religion as the answer to moral and ethical questions (bad idea), and their skill in diplomacy is about what I would expect to see from a bully on a fifth grade playground.
Remember, although a record number of people voted to elect W, a record number of people also voted against him. Those people are now screaming for help. Now more than ever we need help from our friends and allies abroad to help control this country from going off the deep end.
Just because a slight majority elected W don't abandon the rest of us.
You are absolutely correct in pointing out that there are many many natural cycles and fluctuations in the short term weather and long term climactic behavior of the planet. It is also quite true that there is a significant amount of data that documents this ongoing process as contributing to the current changes in the Earth's ecosystem. The problem with this line of thought is that these natural processes, which are well known and well documented through detail analysis of tree cores, ice cores, rock sedimentary layers etc., do NOT explain all the existing data about current climactic trends. They do fill in some of the puzzle pieces but can not explian the existing data. The reason for serious worry and concern is that the parts of the data that all the natual phenomenon can't explain are large shifts in the chemical compositon of the atmophere, soil, and oceans that have occured in the last 100 years.
In simple words, this is a bullet to the head of the idea that humanity has no impact on the environment and that we should all just go about our business like nothing is happening.
Just off the top of my head, but I'm not so sure that this is the way it works for the magnets in a hard drive that control the movement of the read/write head. I believe that the effect of the magnetic field inside the HD case is limited by the material the magnets are mounted to. If you touch a magnet to that material you will notice that it has only a very very weak attraction. This is because it has a very small permeability (mu). This way the magnetic field line can only come out of the sides between the two magnets. Then, you just mount them close together and stick the read/write arm in there. When they are close, the magnetic field lines will not extend far out from the sides.
I'm sure someone can offer a more detailed explaination, but I think this is approximately correct.
Demand what McDonalds does (according to the article). Every day after you punch out you get a computer printout of when you logged in and when you logged out. You can keep that paper and use it as evidence of when and how long you worked. Very simple.
I suspect that a lot of the reason that this technology is being developed in Japan is because it is VERY uncommon to find organ donors in Japan. There are strong traditional beliefs about preserving a family members body. At least this is what my (Japanese) wife tells me.
Fun Troll First: Nobody ever claimed to have actually discovered the real laws that govern the universe. (e.g. F=ma is only a first order approximation and not even a mathematically rigorous law either(because m and F can't be defined independently)) Second: We don't have to live in a "well-formed"(whatever that means) universe. Just as we don't have to have a solar system with circular orbits. It sounds like you have some "my place in the universe" issues you need to work on. :)
Lazy Slackers.
In MY day we worked 365 and 1/4 days a year and we liked it!
the best use of AOL media yet. Box of AOL CD-Tissue paper. Makes you feels just that much better every time you blow your nose or wipe you butt.
On the mirrored page did anyone else notice something odd in the background of pictures 20 and 21? I may be having eye problems, but it distinctly looks like some kind of lego woman next to the fireplace.
You missed IR for your keyboard. :)