> It'd be nice when the US Government would invest in it's own citizens.
I take it you are not also a PhD student. I can only speak from my own experience, but I think in general that science and engineering departments in US universities really prefer to admit domestic students. The problem is not a lack of government support for US citizens in postgraduate education.. it's a lack of interest.
I'm having a lot of trouble understanding some of your arguments.
how then did he preach Jesus to the world before Jesus was born?
I just said that the scholarly consensus is that Paul's epistles were written earlier than the gospels. That in no way implies that Paul preached Jesus to the world before Jesus was born. It simply means that Paul wrote about Jesus before the gospel writers wrote about him.
how did he reference the gospels in his writings if they had not yet been written?
It's possible, as someone else said, that the quotation occurred in the opposite direction. It's also possible that Luke and Paul quoted the same earlier source. That source might have been written or oral. Or it could be that you are right, and Luke was written before 1 Timothy (that's the quotation that 20 seconds of googling turned up). That would make me sloppy, because I seemed to say that ALL of Paul's writings predate the gospels. But it doesn't change the fact that some of Paul's writings are earlier, which makes the argument of the person I was responding to seem a lot less convincing.
we conclude that Paul's writings must have been written after the gospels.
This just doesn't follow. Why couldn't Paul have written some or all of his epistles before Luke wrote his gospel and account of the Apostles?
The oldest in the NT would be Revelation, written by the apostle John in around AD96.
This statement is really perplexing to me. Most or all of the New Testament had been written by the year 96. If that date is correct, it would make Revelation just about the youngest book, not the oldest.
It makes me wonder.. are you a native speaker of English? No offense.
Now I'm being lazy. Feel free to just tell me to read the books you mentioned instead of bothering you.:) When you say "early Christians", how early do you mean? And is the evidence for these "edit wars" found in letters, commentaries, other gospels, etc outside of the bible, or is the argument based on criticism of the biblical text itself? Finally, (and maybe I should have asked this second), what do you mean by an "edit war"? What does Pagels allege was edited?
I've read a few articles about "edit wars" between Paulinists and the early Christians, in which Paul gradually was inserted to a prominent role.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but I'd appreciate a source or two. I've never heard of this before, and I'd like to read them for myself.
(Paul is, interestingly, also the source of most of the "old testament doesn't apply anymore, except for some bits, but we're not going to tell you exactly which!" dogma)
Oh? The text I see most frequently cited in this connection is the account from Acts 10 of Peter's dream about food.
Yes, I forgot, thanks for the correction. The gtalk messages weren't billed as text messages. That actually made the whole thing seem a great deal more arbitrary and infuriating. Anyway, I started using a 3rd party client (meebo) that uses only data.
The GPs experience does not reflect mine. I have unlimited data and 400 texts per month. During the first month, I sent a very large number of gchat and AIM instant messages, believing (sensibly, I think) that they would not be counted against my allotment of text messages. They are, after all, instant messages, and I was paying for internet access. I was wrong. I sent and received a total of around 700 IMs, which is about $60 worth of texts after deducting the 400 that come with my plan. Not a pleasant surprise.
I'm guessing that you support the bill, but you are complaining because the moral opinions of its author don't line up with yours. What difference do his motives make?
(Btw, did you read the article? Your description of his reasoning doesn't sound right.)
There are no golden plates handed down from on high telling us what science is supposed to be like. Science as it is practiced by working scientists is complicated, and it often bears only a passing resemblance to the idealized "scientific method" you learned in elementary school.
Sometimes we are completely justified in throwing away or shelving observations that don't fit with established theories. In the real world, experimental observations can't be neatly disentangled from scientific theory. To test a hypothesis, we must first assume the reliability of a set of laws or theories. If something goes contrary to expectation, it might not be clear why. Is the problem with the hypothesis, or is it with one of our assumptions? Could the experimenter have made an error without realizing it? Could he be dishonest? We have finite time and resources and lots of other research problems.. How much should we invest in sorting this all out? It's just not as simple as, "We possess facts 1, 2, and 3, therefore Theory A is false."
I'm a working scientist (ok, PhD student), so I read journal articles pretty often. I can understand the rub in principle, but let's say that we come up with some way for all scientific data to be freely shared. So what? In almost all cases, the only people who actually benefit from access to particular data are a small handful of specialists. Could someone explain to me why this is a real problem and not just something that people with too much time on their hands (and who would never actually read, let alone understand, real research results) get worked up about?
I agree partially. The teacher does deserve some blame for writing an obnoxious and culpably ignorant letter. But she is surely not a shill for Microsoft. Starks probably knew that, and just tried to make a point in an aggressive way. If it had been me, I would have taken a couple of deep breaths and been cordial, instead of coming off as a brainwashed asshole who is trying to proselytize kids into my free software-based cult, but I guess it takes all kinds.
unless the language is in the tail end of its life, like Fortran...
Fortran will continue to thrive for many years. I don't know numbers, but based on my personal experience, it's the preferred language of most computational scientists and engineers. The most recent revision occured in 2003. According to this, a new one is being worked on.
Something like what you're talking about has been done, you'll be please to know.:) When I was an undergrad (7 years ago), I did research for a materials scientist. A kid in my group was working on building models of amorphous alloys using the same statistical tools that geographers use to build artificial cities.
Maybe, but I doubt it. The people who continuously monitor control systems are not engineers, they are operators. Engineers are usually "exempt" employees, so their overtime is free. I might also say that if your control engineers are stretched too thin by call-outs, the solution is not more engineers, it's different engineers. I used to work as THE process control engineer at a small chemical plant. Having to go into work at 3 am to fix a problem is very strong incentive to find the real cause of that problem and fix things so it doesn't happen again.
Anyhoo, probably the most common reason to hook a control system up to the internet is to make data accessible to people in other parts of the company.
I'm working on a PhD in chemical engineering, and I do simulations. I occasionally use Lonestar and Ranger, which are clusters at TACC, the U. of Texas' supercomputing center. Lonestar is capable of around 60 TFLOPS and Ranger can do around 500-600 TFLOPS. A few users run really large jobs using thousands of cores for days at a stretch, but the majority of people use 128 or fewer cores for a few hours at a time.
My research group does materials research using density function theory, which is an approximate way of solving the Schroedinger equation. Each of our jobs usually uses 16 or 32 cores, and takes anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple of days to finish. Usually we are interested in looking at lots of slightly different cases, so we run dozens of jobs simultaneously.
The applications are pretty varied. Some topics we are working on - 1) Si nanowire growth 2) Si self-interstitial defects 3) Au cluster morphology 4) Catalysis by metal clusters 5) Properties of strained semiconductors
You're talking about a religion that has had its primary texts re-written countless times over the centuries, already.
You should try reading a little less Dan Brown and a little more actual scholarship. There is certainly debate about the actual origins of the biblical text - whether, for example, the gospels represent mostly eyewitness accounts or are just a written version of oral traditions that circulated for decades in the early church. But there is very little dispute about the fact that the text as we have it today differs little from the original.
Maybe, maybe not. Different people mean different things by "nanotechnology," and some prefer to distinguish nanotechnology and nanoscience. IMO, exploiting known physical phenomena to create nanoscale devices is engineering (or "technology"), not basic science.
Not very much, apparently, or you would know already.:)
Christian apologists love this question because the answer is clear and relatively uncontroversial, at least as far as the New Testament is concerned. Just google for "new testament textual criticism" or "new testament manuscripts".
A few years ago, I worked for the Evil Empire (ExxonMobil) as a summer intern. At that time, engineering students nearing graduation were a little nervous about working in the oil industry. What would happen to us if we spent most of our careers in oil, and then suddenly alternative energy sources took off? (It was kind of a dumb thing to worry about in retrospect. Major career changes are the norm.)
To convince us to stick with the company, a senior engineer gave us a presentation. He said first of all that our fears weren't unfounded. All the oil majors anticipate major technology changes to occur during our lifetimes. We will have to totally change gears and move to oil sand, oil shale, nuclear, or whatever.
The second thing he said was more interesting. ExxonMobil doesn't consider itself to be an oil company. As the parent suggests, ExxonMobil is in the energy business.
That's not just bluster, either. I haven't tried to independently verify this, but the presenter claimed that ExxonMobil is the second largest holder of mineral rights to uranium ore in the world. The largest is the Russian government.
"J. Lyons and Co., one of the UK's leading catering and food manufacturing companies in the first half of the 20th century, sent two of its senior managers to the USA in 1947 to look at new business methods developed during the Second World War. During their visit they came across digital computers then used exclusively for engineering and mathematical computations. They saw the potential of computers to help solve the problem of administering a major business enterprise."
The NY Times claim is stronger and more arrogant than is really warranted, but (assuming Wikipedia is accurate) it does seem to have some basis in reality.
Most chemical engineers take something called "Unit operations lab" before they graduate. The specific content varies from university to university, but for the most part, students do experiments on small scale versions of equipment typically found in chemical plants. We had a cooling tower experiment with a bunch of thermocouples all over it that we had to collect data from. Our department was cheap, so there was only one display and a big dial to select which probe you wanted to read. The professor disconnected one of them from the dial so it read some really wonky value when it was selected. He didn't do it to teach us anything valuable about placing too much trust in intruments, or whatever. He just wanted to catch people making up data.:)
No Christian (that's what I'm defending, ultimately) person I've ever met has claimed any of the beliefs you describe. And these are, by and large, run-of-the-mill lay people, including quite a number in po-dunk towns, where we might expect such anti-intellectualism to run rampant. I'm sure they exist, but I think they are largely a figment of the overactive atheist imagination. That's putting it a little poetically. The more common term is "straw man." I realize this is just my experience, but honestly, are these really beliefs that you commonly encounter, or are they just a composite of what you imagine religious people must be like?
Hopefully it's clear that, yes, I think radical fideism and mysticism are broken ways of trying to understand the world. There are strains of those things in church history, but I say in no uncertain terms that they were mistakes.
The "thoughtful and well-informed" individuals I'm thinking of are not just experts in the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, although some knowledge of theology is relevant in these kinds of discussions. They are Christians who, notwithstanding the obvious intellectual deficiencies of theism, have mysteriously managed to get tenure in top philosophy departments. Or they are ordinary but studious lay people, like the guy who writes thinkingchristian.net
I will say in parting (I have to go to a conference tomorrow) that Christianity is not simply a myth in the same sense as the gods of the Greeks or Norse, and it isn't a philosophy or set of statements about the nature of a higher reality, as are some other modern religions. Its central doctrine is based on an historical event, and this event is subject to verification or falsification in all of the ordinary ways. It is therefore at least possible to have evidence for or against it.
You might be doing many things, but making simple observations of reality is not one of them. The fraction of people who call themselves atheists is increasing in many places. That's a simple observation. Once you start dragging in all kinds of wild, inflammatory accusations of cognitive disorders and drawing tenuous analogies between diseases and beliefs which many thoughtful, well-informed people on both sides agree are very difficult to evalute, you are well past the point of simple observation.
I went to a Richard Dawkins lecture earlier this year. I recognize that this is just my impression of the event, but it felt a lot like a political rally or a tent meeting. Before he came to the podium, the president of the atheist student organization that invited him to speak got up and introduced herself and the club. She said that the main purpose of the organization was to represent atheism in a winsome way to the community and university. At the end of Dawkins' lecture, members of the audience got to ask him questions. From memory, the first question went something like this: "A lot of atheists think that we shouldn't promote atheism. What would you say to them?" I don't remember his answer, but it's not hard to imagine, given that he has written a popular book dedicated to the promotion of atheism.
Your line of reasoning might in some narrow, technical sense be correct, but I think it misses the point. It doesn't diminish the fact that there are an increasing number of people who so identify with their lack of belief that they are willing to organize and join clubs and stand in line to enthusiastically shake the hand of one of the chief exponents of their lack of belief. In that sense, it can be fairly said that atheism, or perhaps the influence of atheism, is growing.
Slashdot Mirror
How does it seem destructive to the environment?
> It'd be nice when the US Government would invest in it's own citizens.
I take it you are not also a PhD student. I can only speak from my own experience, but I think in general that science and engineering departments in US universities really prefer to admit domestic students. The problem is not a lack of government support for US citizens in postgraduate education.. it's a lack of interest.
I'm having a lot of trouble understanding some of your arguments.
how then did he preach Jesus to the world before Jesus was born?
I just said that the scholarly consensus is that Paul's epistles were written earlier than the gospels. That in no way implies that Paul preached Jesus to the world before Jesus was born. It simply means that Paul wrote about Jesus before the gospel writers wrote about him.
how did he reference the gospels in his writings if they had not yet been written?
It's possible, as someone else said, that the quotation occurred in the opposite direction. It's also possible that Luke and Paul quoted the same earlier source. That source might have been written or oral. Or it could be that you are right, and Luke was written before 1 Timothy (that's the quotation that 20 seconds of googling turned up). That would make me sloppy, because I seemed to say that ALL of Paul's writings predate the gospels. But it doesn't change the fact that some of Paul's writings are earlier, which makes the argument of the person I was responding to seem a lot less convincing.
we conclude that Paul's writings must have been written after the gospels.
This just doesn't follow. Why couldn't Paul have written some or all of his epistles before Luke wrote his gospel and account of the Apostles?
The oldest in the NT would be Revelation, written by the apostle John in around AD96.
This statement is really perplexing to me. Most or all of the New Testament had been written by the year 96. If that date is correct, it would make Revelation just about the youngest book, not the oldest.
It makes me wonder.. are you a native speaker of English? No offense.
Now I'm being lazy. Feel free to just tell me to read the books you mentioned instead of bothering you. :) When you say "early Christians", how early do you mean? And is the evidence for these "edit wars" found in letters, commentaries, other gospels, etc outside of the bible, or is the argument based on criticism of the biblical text itself? Finally, (and maybe I should have asked this second), what do you mean by an "edit war"? What does Pagels allege was edited?
I've read a few articles about "edit wars" between Paulinists and the early Christians, in which Paul gradually was inserted to a prominent role.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but I'd appreciate a source or two. I've never heard of this before, and I'd like to read them for myself.
(Paul is, interestingly, also the source of most of the "old testament doesn't apply anymore, except for some bits, but we're not going to tell you exactly which!" dogma)
Oh? The text I see most frequently cited in this connection is the account from Acts 10 of Peter's dream about food.
Paul's writings predate the gospels. They are generally accepted to be the earliest in the New Testament.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Apostle#Writings
Yes, I forgot, thanks for the correction. The gtalk messages weren't billed as text messages. That actually made the whole thing seem a great deal more arbitrary and infuriating. Anyway, I started using a 3rd party client (meebo) that uses only data.
The GPs experience does not reflect mine. I have unlimited data and 400 texts per month. During the first month, I sent a very large number of gchat and AIM instant messages, believing (sensibly, I think) that they would not be counted against my allotment of text messages. They are, after all, instant messages, and I was paying for internet access. I was wrong. I sent and received a total of around 700 IMs, which is about $60 worth of texts after deducting the 400 that come with my plan. Not a pleasant surprise.
I don't understand.
I'm guessing that you support the bill, but you are complaining because the moral opinions of its author don't line up with yours. What difference do his motives make?
(Btw, did you read the article? Your description of his reasoning doesn't sound right.)
There are no golden plates handed down from on high telling us what science is supposed to be like. Science as it is practiced by working scientists is complicated, and it often bears only a passing resemblance to the idealized "scientific method" you learned in elementary school.
Sometimes we are completely justified in throwing away or shelving observations that don't fit with established theories. In the real world, experimental observations can't be neatly disentangled from scientific theory. To test a hypothesis, we must first assume the reliability of a set of laws or theories. If something goes contrary to expectation, it might not be clear why. Is the problem with the hypothesis, or is it with one of our assumptions? Could the experimenter have made an error without realizing it? Could he be dishonest? We have finite time and resources and lots of other research problems.. How much should we invest in sorting this all out? It's just not as simple as, "We possess facts 1, 2, and 3, therefore Theory A is false."
I'm a working scientist (ok, PhD student), so I read journal articles pretty often. I can understand the rub in principle, but let's say that we come up with some way for all scientific data to be freely shared. So what? In almost all cases, the only people who actually benefit from access to particular data are a small handful of specialists. Could someone explain to me why this is a real problem and not just something that people with too much time on their hands (and who would never actually read, let alone understand, real research results) get worked up about?
It reminds me of the XKCD this morning...
I agree partially. The teacher does deserve some blame for writing an obnoxious and culpably ignorant letter. But she is surely not a shill for Microsoft. Starks probably knew that, and just tried to make a point in an aggressive way. If it had been me, I would have taken a couple of deep breaths and been cordial, instead of coming off as a brainwashed asshole who is trying to proselytize kids into my free software-based cult, but I guess it takes all kinds.
unless the language is in the tail end of its life, like Fortran...
Fortran will continue to thrive for many years. I don't know numbers, but based on my personal experience, it's the preferred language of most computational scientists and engineers. The most recent revision occured in 2003. According to this, a new one is being worked on.
Something like what you're talking about has been done, you'll be please to know. :) When I was an undergrad (7 years ago), I did research for a materials scientist. A kid in my group was working on building models of amorphous alloys using the same statistical tools that geographers use to build artificial cities.
Maybe, but I doubt it. The people who continuously monitor control systems are not engineers, they are operators. Engineers are usually "exempt" employees, so their overtime is free. I might also say that if your control engineers are stretched too thin by call-outs, the solution is not more engineers, it's different engineers. I used to work as THE process control engineer at a small chemical plant. Having to go into work at 3 am to fix a problem is very strong incentive to find the real cause of that problem and fix things so it doesn't happen again.
Anyhoo, probably the most common reason to hook a control system up to the internet is to make data accessible to people in other parts of the company.
I'm working on a PhD in chemical engineering, and I do simulations. I occasionally use Lonestar and Ranger, which are clusters at TACC, the U. of Texas' supercomputing center. Lonestar is capable of around 60 TFLOPS and Ranger can do around 500-600 TFLOPS. A few users run really large jobs using thousands of cores for days at a stretch, but the majority of people use 128 or fewer cores for a few hours at a time.
My research group does materials research using density function theory, which is an approximate way of solving the Schroedinger equation. Each of our jobs usually uses 16 or 32 cores, and takes anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple of days to finish. Usually we are interested in looking at lots of slightly different cases, so we run dozens of jobs simultaneously.
The applications are pretty varied. Some topics we are working on -
1) Si nanowire growth
2) Si self-interstitial defects
3) Au cluster morphology
4) Catalysis by metal clusters
5) Properties of strained semiconductors
You're talking about a religion that has had its primary texts re-written countless times over the centuries, already.
You should try reading a little less Dan Brown and a little more actual scholarship. There is certainly debate about the actual origins of the biblical text - whether, for example, the gospels represent mostly eyewitness accounts or are just a written version of oral traditions that circulated for decades in the early church. But there is very little dispute about the fact that the text as we have it today differs little from the original.
Maybe, maybe not. Different people mean different things by "nanotechnology," and some prefer to distinguish nanotechnology and nanoscience. IMO, exploiting known physical phenomena to create nanoscale devices is engineering (or "technology"), not basic science.
I'd like to know...
Not very much, apparently, or you would know already. :)
Christian apologists love this question because the answer is clear and relatively uncontroversial, at least as far as the New Testament is concerned. Just google for "new testament textual criticism" or "new testament manuscripts".
A few years ago, I worked for the Evil Empire (ExxonMobil) as a summer intern. At that time, engineering students nearing graduation were a little nervous about working in the oil industry. What would happen to us if we spent most of our careers in oil, and then suddenly alternative energy sources took off? (It was kind of a dumb thing to worry about in retrospect. Major career changes are the norm.)
To convince us to stick with the company, a senior engineer gave us a presentation. He said first of all that our fears weren't unfounded. All the oil majors anticipate major technology changes to occur during our lifetimes. We will have to totally change gears and move to oil sand, oil shale, nuclear, or whatever.
The second thing he said was more interesting. ExxonMobil doesn't consider itself to be an oil company. As the parent suggests, ExxonMobil is in the energy business.
That's not just bluster, either. I haven't tried to independently verify this, but the presenter claimed that ExxonMobil is the second largest holder of mineral rights to uranium ore in the world. The largest is the Russian government.
Point taken, but FYI:
"J. Lyons and Co., one of the UK's leading catering and food manufacturing companies in the first half of the 20th century, sent two of its senior managers to the USA in 1947 to look at new business methods developed during the Second World War. During their visit they came across digital computers then used exclusively for engineering and mathematical computations. They saw the potential of computers to help solve the problem of administering a major business enterprise."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)
The NY Times claim is stronger and more arrogant than is really warranted, but (assuming Wikipedia is accurate) it does seem to have some basis in reality.
Most chemical engineers take something called "Unit operations lab" before they graduate. The specific content varies from university to university, but for the most part, students do experiments on small scale versions of equipment typically found in chemical plants. We had a cooling tower experiment with a bunch of thermocouples all over it that we had to collect data from. Our department was cheap, so there was only one display and a big dial to select which probe you wanted to read. The professor disconnected one of them from the dial so it read some really wonky value when it was selected. He didn't do it to teach us anything valuable about placing too much trust in intruments, or whatever. He just wanted to catch people making up data. :)
No Christian (that's what I'm defending, ultimately) person I've ever met has claimed any of the beliefs you describe. And these are, by and large, run-of-the-mill lay people, including quite a number in po-dunk towns, where we might expect such anti-intellectualism to run rampant. I'm sure they exist, but I think they are largely a figment of the overactive atheist imagination. That's putting it a little poetically. The more common term is "straw man." I realize this is just my experience, but honestly, are these really beliefs that you commonly encounter, or are they just a composite of what you imagine religious people must be like?
Hopefully it's clear that, yes, I think radical fideism and mysticism are broken ways of trying to understand the world. There are strains of those things in church history, but I say in no uncertain terms that they were mistakes.
The "thoughtful and well-informed" individuals I'm thinking of are not just experts in the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, although some knowledge of theology is relevant in these kinds of discussions. They are Christians who, notwithstanding the obvious intellectual deficiencies of theism, have mysteriously managed to get tenure in top philosophy departments. Or they are ordinary but studious lay people, like the guy who writes thinkingchristian.net
I will say in parting (I have to go to a conference tomorrow) that Christianity is not simply a myth in the same sense as the gods of the Greeks or Norse, and it isn't a philosophy or set of statements about the nature of a higher reality, as are some other modern religions. Its central doctrine is based on an historical event, and this event is subject to verification or falsification in all of the ordinary ways. It is therefore at least possible to have evidence for or against it.
You might be doing many things, but making simple observations of reality is not one of them. The fraction of people who call themselves atheists is increasing in many places. That's a simple observation. Once you start dragging in all kinds of wild, inflammatory accusations of cognitive disorders and drawing tenuous analogies between diseases and beliefs which many thoughtful, well-informed people on both sides agree are very difficult to evalute, you are well past the point of simple observation.
I went to a Richard Dawkins lecture earlier this year. I recognize that this is just my impression of the event, but it felt a lot like a political rally or a tent meeting. Before he came to the podium, the president of the atheist student organization that invited him to speak got up and introduced herself and the club. She said that the main purpose of the organization was to represent atheism in a winsome way to the community and university. At the end of Dawkins' lecture, members of the audience got to ask him questions. From memory, the first question went something like this: "A lot of atheists think that we shouldn't promote atheism. What would you say to them?" I don't remember his answer, but it's not hard to imagine, given that he has written a popular book dedicated to the promotion of atheism.
Your line of reasoning might in some narrow, technical sense be correct, but I think it misses the point. It doesn't diminish the fact that there are an increasing number of people who so identify with their lack of belief that they are willing to organize and join clubs and stand in line to enthusiastically shake the hand of one of the chief exponents of their lack of belief. In that sense, it can be fairly said that atheism, or perhaps the influence of atheism, is growing.