In my mind, a god or an afterlife or reincarnation would all pretty much exist outside of the universe as we know it. At which point, science doesn't need to say anything about it, and the two can exist quite peacefully. What happened before the big bang? How big is space? How high is up?
Okay. Let's say I grant you that an afterlife exists, and that religions are a reliable source of information about it, and science is not.
Even then, even with this gigantic concession in your favor on this issue, you still have a huge problem in saying that science and religion are compatible: religion says that souls go to the afterlife. Science says that there's no such thing as a soul, and there cannot be such a thing as a soul, and in fact the entire concept is nonsense.
If souls existed, Alzheimer's would not be a problem - after all, your "you"-ness is stored in an intangible substrate that is not affected by neural degeneration. If souls existed, brain trauma and cancer would not affect personality.
If souls existed, Pfizer would not be making billions of dollars per year on medication for mental illnesses. How can mere chemicals affect a spirit? And yet they do, which leads to the inescapable conclusion that there is no spirit.
So there's no such thing as a soul. What's left to go to the afterlife? Nothing. If afterlives exist, they are empty, because God forgot to emerge soul when he was putting humanity together.
And as to your other point, about how science doesn't tell us what happened before the Big Bang? Neither does religion, because that is simply not a valid question (it's like asking "what's north of the North Pole?"), as is "how high is up"; with regards to "how big is space", I don't think any religion on the planet has actually given a correct or even consistent answer to that, but science has definitely answered "how much of space can we see" and given some good estimates on how large it is in total.
Maybe in your small little world it is not possible for the two to coexist... but, I know people who have PhDs in the physical scientists who are devoutly religious. In their minds, the two address very different domains of human endeavors, and do not pose any conflicts. To them, physics exists in its entirety, god is real, no problem.
See, that's funny because your statement is a very common sidestep on this point. I said that science and religion are incompatible; I did not say that people cannot be both scientific and religious. I mean, hell, the current director of the NSF is a born-again Christian! It's clearly possible for humans to hold conflicting beliefs; that doesn't make the beliefs stop conflicting! Trinitarian Christians believe in the Holy Trinity, which is basically designed to be self-conflicting; that doesn't mean that, therefore, it's compatible with reality just because some people can believe in it.
Only the most rigid and dogmatic view of either preclude the existence of the other. You appear to come down on the dogmatic view that only science exists, and that all religion is bullshit.
I dare you to prove me wrong:)
Find me a truth-claim that A. is consistent with a universe in which some religion is true and B. is not explainable through natural means and C. is actually true, and we might have somewhere to start.
Otherwise yes, I will go on believing that religions are all bullshit, because I have never found one that isn't, despite the fact that religious adherents have had millenia to come up with some evidence.
Really? So when science says "souls don't exist" and religion says "souls do exist", the two ideas can coexist? That's some mighty fine doublethink you've got going on there.
I mean, there's a gigantic glaring incompatibility between the two of them; religion presupposes the existence of a class of entities we term "supernatural", and science has found absolutely no support for such a hypothesis, and as we keep on looking the gaps into which such things could fit keep on shrinking.
Saying that they can coexist just fine requires changing the definition of either "religion" or "science" beyond all recognition - and it's not going to be science that does the changing.
1. My son/daughter believes in creationism now, they've accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior and have been saved, so they're going to Heaven when they die. 2. I have a few friends whose children heard of this evolution stuff from some fancy-pants schoolteacher, and no longer believes in creationism or even Jesus, and is thus a sinner doomed to Hell. My other friend's kids were fine, and still don't believe in evolution, but a few did, so that could be my kid.
Bullshit. They don't really believe this.
Why? Because, if they really, truly, actually believed points 1 and 2, then the only logical thing to do is to kill their children right now.
I mean, just think about it. If their children die now, they're guaranteed eternal happiness in Heaven. If they live, there's a nonzero chance that they will be damned to eternal torment in Hell. Those are logical consequences of your two points.
What parent wouldn't make the small sacrifice of damning themselves to Hell, for the sake of making sure that their children go to Heaven if they really believed in both of those things?
So the only logical thing to do, if you really believe those two statements, is to kill your children right now. Not gonna do it? Then that's because you don't really believe in Heaven and Hell, like a rational person.
They don't act as if they really believe in Heaven and Hell, so why should trust them when they say they do?
Guess what my Faith offers many "theories" that are useful. For example, my Faith tells me that I will be better off if I forgive those who wrong me. Guess what, in the last 50 years, psychologists/psychiatrists have done studies that show that people who carry a grudge have more health problems than those who don't.
Your faith also tells you that casting demons out into a herd of pigs is a valid way of curing mental illnesses, that you can breed striped animals by having the mother and father copulate while looking at a striped rod, that bats are a kind of bird, that souls exist, and that if you pray for something, you will get it.
On the whole, I wouldn't trust your faith as being a valid source of knowledge. Its win/loss ratio is pretty pathetic, despite the fact that its cheerleaders emphasize the wins and ignore the losses.
(scientists, on the other hand, emphasize the wins and offer retractions for the losses. I'd like to see that happen to the Bible!)
Really, the difference is strictly one of semantics.
I'm glad that semantics developed the keyboard you're typing on, the computer that processed the message, the global network that carried it, the high-speed interchanges that routed it, and the server farm that processed it.
After all, you could have just prayed that he'd get this message, and it would have arrived just as reliably, right? It's all a matter of semantics, right?
There's a great big difference between science and religion: one of them works, and the other one doesn't. If you ignore that great big glaring disparity, then yes, the rest is just semantics.
Said organized scripture may even have scientific or archeological evidence associated with it. But the definition of faith is that, regardless of whether or not anyone can produce any observable, repeatable evidence, one accepts something as truth.
Here's the funny thing - Christianity doesn't. Genesis was trivially a fairy tale, but did you know that Exodus never happened? The whole "Pharaoh enslaves the Jews, Jews eventually flee" sequence is pure interpolation by later Jewish residents of the area; if anything, the ancestors of the Jews actually ruled parts of northern Egypt for a time.
Furthermore, a whole lot of archaeological evidence from that period that we do have is significantly distorted, because it was gathered by archaeologists who would dig "with a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other", as it were. After all, if you think the Bible is a perfect, unerring guide to history, why not let it guide your archaeological research? It's a pity that "guidance" is really more of a taint.
Thomas got to fondle Jesus's intestines. I'm pretty sure any scientist would be convinced with evidence of that caliber. Nowadays all we get are waterfalls frozen into three streams!
Pity nobody's ever been able to replicate Thomas's experiment.
Well, that's your problem right there, now isn't it? This change would not only affect apps written in the future, but would have to be backwards compatible with well-written apps from the past that are simply no longer updated.
Pointers to dummy, blank information is better than null pointers any day.
You know, I was about to post "there's no way that could work, it would make developing for the Android too difficult if the user can arbitrarily lock you out of the phone's features".
But then I realized that there's a very simple solution: if the user denies access, just give the app dummy data. Deny access to my GPS co-ords? Well then, whenever the app asks for location data it's told we're at the North Pole. Deny access to contacts? The app is told you only have one contact, whose name is "access denied".
Then, if the app is badly written and doesn't check, it'll just get useless data; if it's smarter, it can check the data it gets, test to see if it's the well-known dummy values, and if so prompt the user for access or something. It would be better than this all-or-nothing approach, at least.
Batch files are easy and brain damaged. There's a reason why when Microsoft released Powershell, pretty much everyone flocked to it.
Doing anything beyond the simplest of tasks in a batch file is anywhere between intensely confusing and impossible. Want to have multiple statements in an if-else-end fragment? Too damn bad, sucker - you're gonna have to use a goto.
The worst part is that Microsoft's broken batch file compatibility multiple times in little ways without much fanfare, so if you just google for information you'll frequently get stuff that's out of date. For instance, want to ask the user for input? Which do you use, CHOICE or SET/P? Nowadays CHOICE just bails out, and you're supposed to use that funky SET parameter. Oh but wait, now that I look at it, it was just gone for Windows 2000 and XP. It's back in Vista and Windows 7. Silly me.
...but NASA also needed $12 billion and a decade to make a pen that worked in 0 gravity... and the Russians just used a pencil, classic.
There's pretty much nothing true in that statement besides the claim that "the Russians just used pencils" - NASA did too, until after Fisher developed the space pen (without government funding) and asked NASA to try it. In fact, after NASA adopted the space pen, so did the Russians.
And there's problems with using pencils in space - wood pencils are flammable, and the graphite in mechanical pencils can snap off more easily and damage vulnerable equipment (it's conducive, after all) or the astronauts themselves, if they accidentally inhale it.
The imagination is a powerful thing. I've seen kids come out of the movie theater after watching Kung Fu Panda, and they were trying to kung fu fight each other. That was after what... 90 minutes of animated animals fighting each other. I remember when Power Rangers was popular. Kids all over the place were "playing" Power Rangers, punching and hitting and kicking at each other.
I have to say - it sounds more like kids just like punching each other in general, and although they will incorporate environmental cues into this activity, they would have still been doing it any way.
Punching each other is just one of those things kids do, regardless of whether it's inspired by Power Rangers or Kung Fu Panda or just general rambunctiousness.
Also helps you stay not a single male; for some reason, my wife really seems to appreciate that I make breakfast for us both most mornings even though she makes fun of the way I make eggs*.
But yeah, the fact that it is at all possible for people to graduate from high school without knowing how to cook anything more complicated than macaroni and cheese is an absolute failure of the modern educational system (and keep in mind that the "educational system" includes both parents and teachers).
*I like them sunny-side up, but I want the whites to be cooked an the yolks not so I separate them out, cook the whites first, and then put the yolks on top for about a minute.
I don't, because it will either be an Adobe plugin, hence slow and a memory hog, or it will be written from scratch, hence not fully compatible and probably slow as well.
Umm, this is Firefox we're talking about. You know, open source software? There is a third option, which boils down to "incorporate another open-source PDF framework", and those are generally faster than the Adobe plugin and reasonably compatible.
Yes, the Laffer curve is very pretty. Now please present your evidence to support your assertion that we are in the centre or right side of that curve.
That's a result of what I call the Fundamental Theorem of Republican Economics: the Laffer curve exists, and its slope is always negative. No exceptions.
He would be acting in a ridiculous manner if he had mentioned taking legal action at any point in the blog post. He didn't. He is merely pointing out the newspaper's unethical actions.
There is nothing ridiculous about saying, "hey, you copied my research, could you at least give me a link back?"
I mean, what do you expect him to do? Roll over and take it without comment? On a blog? Those guys will carefully annotate their most recent dump if they think it'll bring in readers.
Anyone have any idea how this thing actually works?
The best I could come up with is based on a very small part of the article:
But how does it work? Cademartiri acknowledged that the phenomenon is complex with several effects occurring simultaneously. Among these effects, it appears that carbon particles, or soot, generated in the flame are key for its response to electric fields. Soot particles can easily become charged. The charged particles respond to the electric field, affecting the stability of flames, he said.
So I guess what happens is that the electrical field charges the soot and other light carbony things generated in the fire, which causes them to disperse sort of like what happens with this toy? How does that help extinguish the fire, though? Wouldn't the outward motion of the carbon particulates just bring in more oxygen?
At the same time, there is no other competing technology that has anything close to the potential downside that nuclear energy has.
Eh? Tell that to the 161 people per TWh who die because of coalright now. I bet you anything that even if you roll the numbers from the fallout of whatever ends up happening at Fukushima into the deaths per TWh statistic for nuclear power, it probably won't even get near the deaths per TWh for oil, much less coal (keep in mind that these plants have been safely generating power for the last 40 years).
And those are the statistics for deaths that are happening right now, not some crazy worst case scenario that may never even happen.
But no, it's not about the instant deaths. It's the increase in cancer deaths and the billions of years of contamination of the nearby land, and the worldwide reach of the fallout that people don't like. If a wind farm gets hit by a tsunami in Massachusetts, you won't die of cancer in 20 years in Iowa.
Errr... so if it's not about the instant deaths, and it's about the increase in mortality rates - you should be all for nuclear power to replace coal power, because coal power kills people in a shitload of different ways.
I mean, just look at this visualization - the rightmost column is deaths per terrawatt/hour, and coal has everything beat by a longshot.
Long story short, both HR and upper management then colluded, ignored my requests and I documented everything and they were investigated by federal agencies. A year later, we settled through federal mediators for a years salary.
So basically, they got rid of you for free, one year behind schedule?
Clearly the federal mediators aren't biased at all, no sir. Especially not in the face of blatant and well-documented illegal actions taken by HR and management.
Do you think the guy who "puts food food on the table" would work an extra 100 hours per week to save your job? In general, the answer so far has been no; he probably isn't even willing to take a pay cut in order to let you keep your job.
In fact, if things have gotten bad to the point where you have to work a hundred hours a week to keep the company afloat, that means management has failed to effectively manage - and yet it almost always ends up being people who aren't in management that have to scramble to fix things.
Even after all that, here you are, defending the idea that people who work a hundred hours a week are somehow doing something praiseworthy, instead of simply feeding management's incompetence. Funny how that works.
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Okay. Let's say I grant you that an afterlife exists, and that religions are a reliable source of information about it, and science is not.
Even then, even with this gigantic concession in your favor on this issue, you still have a huge problem in saying that science and religion are compatible: religion says that souls go to the afterlife. Science says that there's no such thing as a soul, and there cannot be such a thing as a soul, and in fact the entire concept is nonsense.
If souls existed, Alzheimer's would not be a problem - after all, your "you"-ness is stored in an intangible substrate that is not affected by neural degeneration. If souls existed, brain trauma and cancer would not affect personality.
If souls existed, Pfizer would not be making billions of dollars per year on medication for mental illnesses. How can mere chemicals affect a spirit? And yet they do, which leads to the inescapable conclusion that there is no spirit.
So there's no such thing as a soul. What's left to go to the afterlife? Nothing. If afterlives exist, they are empty, because God forgot to emerge soul when he was putting humanity together.
And as to your other point, about how science doesn't tell us what happened before the Big Bang? Neither does religion, because that is simply not a valid question (it's like asking "what's north of the North Pole?"), as is "how high is up"; with regards to "how big is space", I don't think any religion on the planet has actually given a correct or even consistent answer to that, but science has definitely answered "how much of space can we see" and given some good estimates on how large it is in total.
See, that's funny because your statement is a very common sidestep on this point. I said that science and religion are incompatible; I did not say that people cannot be both scientific and religious. I mean, hell, the current director of the NSF is a born-again Christian! It's clearly possible for humans to hold conflicting beliefs; that doesn't make the beliefs stop conflicting! Trinitarian Christians believe in the Holy Trinity, which is basically designed to be self-conflicting; that doesn't mean that, therefore, it's compatible with reality just because some people can believe in it.
I dare you to prove me wrong :)
Find me a truth-claim that A. is consistent with a universe in which some religion is true and B. is not explainable through natural means and C. is actually true, and we might have somewhere to start.
Otherwise yes, I will go on believing that religions are all bullshit, because I have never found one that isn't, despite the fact that religious adherents have had millenia to come up with some evidence.
Really? So when science says "souls don't exist" and religion says "souls do exist", the two ideas can coexist? That's some mighty fine doublethink you've got going on there.
I mean, there's a gigantic glaring incompatibility between the two of them; religion presupposes the existence of a class of entities we term "supernatural", and science has found absolutely no support for such a hypothesis, and as we keep on looking the gaps into which such things could fit keep on shrinking.
Saying that they can coexist just fine requires changing the definition of either "religion" or "science" beyond all recognition - and it's not going to be science that does the changing.
Bullshit. They don't really believe this.
Why? Because, if they really, truly, actually believed points 1 and 2, then the only logical thing to do is to kill their children right now.
I mean, just think about it. If their children die now, they're guaranteed eternal happiness in Heaven. If they live, there's a nonzero chance that they will be damned to eternal torment in Hell. Those are logical consequences of your two points.
What parent wouldn't make the small sacrifice of damning themselves to Hell, for the sake of making sure that their children go to Heaven if they really believed in both of those things?
So the only logical thing to do, if you really believe those two statements, is to kill your children right now. Not gonna do it? Then that's because you don't really believe in Heaven and Hell, like a rational person.
They don't act as if they really believe in Heaven and Hell, so why should trust them when they say they do?
Hahaha! I love how your post completely and totally contradicts the grandparent post, which says that Genesis was not a scientific theory.
Clearly, some people do think that it is, and this is a serious problem.
You guys have been saving these jokes up for years, haven't you?
And it's not like Microsoft has stopped doing that. Why do you think it was the Xbox 360 that went up against the PS 3, and not the Xbox 2?
Your faith also tells you that casting demons out into a herd of pigs is a valid way of curing mental illnesses, that you can breed striped animals by having the mother and father copulate while looking at a striped rod, that bats are a kind of bird, that souls exist, and that if you pray for something, you will get it.
On the whole, I wouldn't trust your faith as being a valid source of knowledge. Its win/loss ratio is pretty pathetic, despite the fact that its cheerleaders emphasize the wins and ignore the losses.
(scientists, on the other hand, emphasize the wins and offer retractions for the losses. I'd like to see that happen to the Bible!)
I'm glad that semantics developed the keyboard you're typing on, the computer that processed the message, the global network that carried it, the high-speed interchanges that routed it, and the server farm that processed it.
After all, you could have just prayed that he'd get this message, and it would have arrived just as reliably, right? It's all a matter of semantics, right?
There's a great big difference between science and religion: one of them works, and the other one doesn't. If you ignore that great big glaring disparity, then yes, the rest is just semantics.
Here's the funny thing - Christianity doesn't. Genesis was trivially a fairy tale, but did you know that Exodus never happened? The whole "Pharaoh enslaves the Jews, Jews eventually flee" sequence is pure interpolation by later Jewish residents of the area; if anything, the ancestors of the Jews actually ruled parts of northern Egypt for a time.
Furthermore, a whole lot of archaeological evidence from that period that we do have is significantly distorted, because it was gathered by archaeologists who would dig "with a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other", as it were. After all, if you think the Bible is a perfect, unerring guide to history, why not let it guide your archaeological research? It's a pity that "guidance" is really more of a taint.
Thomas got to fondle Jesus's intestines. I'm pretty sure any scientist would be convinced with evidence of that caliber. Nowadays all we get are waterfalls frozen into three streams!
Pity nobody's ever been able to replicate Thomas's experiment.
Well, that's your problem right there, now isn't it? This change would not only affect apps written in the future, but would have to be backwards compatible with well-written apps from the past that are simply no longer updated.
Pointers to dummy, blank information is better than null pointers any day.
You know, I was about to post "there's no way that could work, it would make developing for the Android too difficult if the user can arbitrarily lock you out of the phone's features".
But then I realized that there's a very simple solution: if the user denies access, just give the app dummy data. Deny access to my GPS co-ords? Well then, whenever the app asks for location data it's told we're at the North Pole. Deny access to contacts? The app is told you only have one contact, whose name is "access denied".
Then, if the app is badly written and doesn't check, it'll just get useless data; if it's smarter, it can check the data it gets, test to see if it's the well-known dummy values, and if so prompt the user for access or something. It would be better than this all-or-nothing approach, at least.
Batch files are easy and brain damaged. There's a reason why when Microsoft released Powershell, pretty much everyone flocked to it.
Doing anything beyond the simplest of tasks in a batch file is anywhere between intensely confusing and impossible. Want to have multiple statements in an if-else-end fragment? Too damn bad, sucker - you're gonna have to use a goto.
The worst part is that Microsoft's broken batch file compatibility multiple times in little ways without much fanfare, so if you just google for information you'll frequently get stuff that's out of date. For instance, want to ask the user for input? Which do you use, CHOICE or SET /P? Nowadays CHOICE just bails out, and you're supposed to use that funky SET parameter. Oh but wait, now that I look at it, it was just gone for Windows 2000 and XP. It's back in Vista and Windows 7. Silly me.
There's pretty much nothing true in that statement besides the claim that "the Russians just used pencils" - NASA did too, until after Fisher developed the space pen (without government funding) and asked NASA to try it. In fact, after NASA adopted the space pen, so did the Russians.
And there's problems with using pencils in space - wood pencils are flammable, and the graphite in mechanical pencils can snap off more easily and damage vulnerable equipment (it's conducive, after all) or the astronauts themselves, if they accidentally inhale it.
I have to say - it sounds more like kids just like punching each other in general, and although they will incorporate environmental cues into this activity, they would have still been doing it any way.
Punching each other is just one of those things kids do, regardless of whether it's inspired by Power Rangers or Kung Fu Panda or just general rambunctiousness.
Also helps you stay not a single male; for some reason, my wife really seems to appreciate that I make breakfast for us both most mornings even though she makes fun of the way I make eggs*.
But yeah, the fact that it is at all possible for people to graduate from high school without knowing how to cook anything more complicated than macaroni and cheese is an absolute failure of the modern educational system (and keep in mind that the "educational system" includes both parents and teachers).
*I like them sunny-side up, but I want the whites to be cooked an the yolks not so I separate them out, cook the whites first, and then put the yolks on top for about a minute.
Umm, this is Firefox we're talking about. You know, open source software? There is a third option, which boils down to "incorporate another open-source PDF framework", and those are generally faster than the Adobe plugin and reasonably compatible.
That's a result of what I call the Fundamental Theorem of Republican Economics: the Laffer curve exists, and its slope is always negative. No exceptions.
Because "four legs good, two legs bad" has become "four legs good, two legs better."
He would be acting in a ridiculous manner if he had mentioned taking legal action at any point in the blog post. He didn't. He is merely pointing out the newspaper's unethical actions.
There is nothing ridiculous about saying, "hey, you copied my research, could you at least give me a link back?"
I mean, what do you expect him to do? Roll over and take it without comment? On a blog? Those guys will carefully annotate their most recent dump if they think it'll bring in readers.
Anyone have any idea how this thing actually works?
The best I could come up with is based on a very small part of the article:
So I guess what happens is that the electrical field charges the soot and other light carbony things generated in the fire, which causes them to disperse sort of like what happens with this toy? How does that help extinguish the fire, though? Wouldn't the outward motion of the carbon particulates just bring in more oxygen?
What other effects are going on?
Eh? Tell that to the 161 people per TWh who die because of coal right now. I bet you anything that even if you roll the numbers from the fallout of whatever ends up happening at Fukushima into the deaths per TWh statistic for nuclear power, it probably won't even get near the deaths per TWh for oil, much less coal (keep in mind that these plants have been safely generating power for the last 40 years).
And those are the statistics for deaths that are happening right now, not some crazy worst case scenario that may never even happen.
Errr... so if it's not about the instant deaths, and it's about the increase in mortality rates - you should be all for nuclear power to replace coal power, because coal power kills people in a shitload of different ways.
I mean, just look at this visualization - the rightmost column is deaths per terrawatt/hour, and coal has everything beat by a longshot.
So basically, they got rid of you for free, one year behind schedule?
Clearly the federal mediators aren't biased at all, no sir. Especially not in the face of blatant and well-documented illegal actions taken by HR and management.
Do you think the guy who "puts food food on the table" would work an extra 100 hours per week to save your job? In general, the answer so far has been no; he probably isn't even willing to take a pay cut in order to let you keep your job.
In fact, if things have gotten bad to the point where you have to work a hundred hours a week to keep the company afloat, that means management has failed to effectively manage - and yet it almost always ends up being people who aren't in management that have to scramble to fix things.
Even after all that, here you are, defending the idea that people who work a hundred hours a week are somehow doing something praiseworthy, instead of simply feeding management's incompetence. Funny how that works.