> NOT getting the results that most of the scientific community would REALLY want as such a cool discovery that could advance thinking is a great example to show religious types.
As a deeply religious type with a couple of degrees in science, I can tell you that I saw examples of this kind all the time in my own research when I was a postgraduate at university. Things I hoped would work out frequently didn't when I analysed the data. Not all religious types are nutcases, you know, plenty of us understand and accept, for example, the scientific method, or evolution by natural selection. I can work out the age of the Universe from Hubble's constant just as easily as anyone else (if I found my astronomy text book, it's a while ago now).
Because sign language is the native language of many deaf people, not Japanese or English - whether written or spoken. Wouldn't you prefer your robots to speak in your native language, instead of some foreign language?
Most translations, and certainly all the modern ones into major languages, come from the original languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. While later translations into Latin or other languages are useful corroborative material, multiple original language texts for every single verse have been found. For the New Testament at least, these texts number in the thousands.
I have studied New Testament Greek, and translated the passage in question into English. Along time ago, though.
Is "logos" used anywhere else in reference to Jesus Christ?
By the time of the writing of John's gospel, the word logos had a deep meaning in Greek philosophy as an ordering force in the universe. The word is accurately translated as reason or logic, and when referring to words emphasises the ideas those words represent, rather than the spoken words themselves. The spoken word had another name in Greek, rhema.
In Judaism at the time, God's word was seen as a means of God's action in the universe. In the Old Testament, God usually accomplishes things by speaking, and there are a number of passages that refer to God's Word as an entity doing stuff in its own right.
The author of the passage probably had both of these streams of tradition in mind when writing the passage. I do not recall another passage in the Bible where Jesus is referred to by that word, although it has been very popular in theology since then.
Would there have been a clearer way to easily distinguish between the meanings "the Word was God" and "the Word was a god"? Is the article normally used when referring to a member of a group?
Greek had no indefinite article (a or an), but instead used other grammar to represent the same idea. I can't remember what the grammar was, but I do remeber it as one of the trickier parts of Greek.
Is "theos" ever used without an article to refer to the general class of gods, rather than one specific god?
Yes. However, in this particular instance, while I can't remember the grammar that supports the "Word was God" translation, I would want very strong evidence that the author had "Word was a god" in mind before accepting it. John was a monotheist. John had not ever heard of a trinity, as the concept was only invented to explain this and other biblical passages in the third century, well after he was dead. For him, I am sure, you either had one God like the rest of Judaism, or many, like the Greeks. He was a Jew, not a Greek, and like the rest of the Christian church, believed in one God. I find it very unlikely he would have said "the Word was a god, of the same class as God, but a different one."
Comparative religion isn't a subject in which a priest is an expert.
As a person who has formally studied science, Christian theology, and comparative religion, I have to agree. Comparative religion is a topic in which many priests and ministers quite reasonably don't have any great interest or expertise. My comparative religion paper, taught in the theology faculty at my university, only had half a dozen students in my year.
It's certainly a separate field to theology, without a whole lot of overlap.
While any religion or system of philosophy will contain elements that are not objectively provable or even falsifiable, that doesn't mean it's a complete subjective free for all.
For instance, any successful belief system will have as implicit goals to be both self consistent and consistent with experience. I mean, these things generally arise out of people's desire to make sense of their lives, which presupposes both goals. These are objective constraints on what makes a successful belief system, even though they allow a huge amount of variety.
Christianity has a number of accepted sources of theology. Raw material if you like. One is the text of the Bible, another is a person's subjective experience, and a third is reason. An unreasonable interpretation of the text of the Bible is bad Christianity, no matter how popular it is. If your reading of the Bible leads you to think that black is white and things fall upwards, or leads you to think contradictory statements, then your reading is unreasonable.
ID is not consistent with our experience, in fact when you get down to it in practise I don't think it's self-consistent either, therefore it arises from an unreasonable reading of the Bible.
As a person with degrees in both science and Christian theology, I normally try to stay well out of the way of these discussions. But your comment struck a nerve.
Seriously, Intelligent Design is just as bad Christian religion as it is science. It would equally be out of place in a philosophy class as in a science class as in a theology class. It could find a place in Comparative Religion, but at least at my university, the comparative religion classes tried to bring out the best and most interesting parts of other religions, and not make the lecture into a freak show.
Creationism and ID both are just the latest examples of a simplistic way of reading the Bible leading to beliefs that are incompatible with how we know the world to be. More sophisticated ways to read the Bible that do not lead to such beliefs have existed for as long as the Bible has been around. It isn't a new discussion - simplistic understandings of the Bible have conflicted with knowledge about the physical world for more than a thousand years. St Augustine was arguing with people that Christian belief need not conflict with other forms of knowledge back in the 4th century or so. Back then, IIRC, it was the shape of the world, now, its evolution.
I live in New Zealand, well south of Australia, but have lived in Ireland and Germany. The sun down here is far more burning than in Europe - I used to laugh at the way Europeans get burned in sun that I don't even notice.
I have had a malignant melanoma and now never go out in the sun.
It's not about latitude, it's about the ozone hole over Antarctica. Our sun will burn even when it doesn't heat.
There might be some clue in the fact that at work we call him Freak. Another clue is that he bought a house with an extra bedroom so he had room for the life-sized R2D2 model he was building. Some people do things like that and for the rest of us it's better to just accept the fact and make sure we don't stand too close.:)
> pointy haird boss with tie
As it happens, his boss doesn't wear a tie. We're pretty casual here.
The guy who made this is a mate of mine, and I saw the engine working yesterday.
> My question is, how much thrust does his jet produce?
Not much. It uses a lot of propane, and makes a lot of hot air and noise, but is pretty inefficient from a thrust point of view.
Of course, he is working on a kerosene afterburner.
> Also, could he attach a generator to the spindle of the turbo and make electric power?
No. The way to do it is to put another turbine into the exhaust stream. This turbine can be used to generate power or spin a wheel. It's unhealthy to attach things to shafts rotating at 100K RPM, as I think someone else on this thread mentioned. Another home-jet-builder north of here (Auckland, New Zealand) apparently used an extra turbine in this way to power a go-kart.
When I saw it running, it got up to 100K RPM and 500 degrees Celsius (~900 F) but I saw no ice on the gas bottle. It wasn't running very long, the gaffer tape holding the air hose onto the combustion chamber was getting too hot and was about to give way.
Anyhow, if you don't mind coming up with your own protocol, and high lag is a way of life (like a Mars-Earth IP link), just transmit everything redundantly over a UDP like protocol with extra redundancy! Then keep everything on file for retransmission if packets still get lost.
A protocol with lots of redundant redundancy to reduce the effect of errors, but without ACK/NAK and therefore without the hassle with windowing that high latency brings.
I think NASA has already come up with space-borne versions of the major TCP/IP protocols to solve this problem, but I forget the link. There was a/. story about it once. Here it is: Interplanetary Internet protocol in devel.
The previous era of computing was hardware-limited.
Hey, I'm still hardware limited. I spend and I spend on hard drive space, but still I can't have all my files on my hard drive at once.
Already we are seeing that the notion of a strictly one-dimensional hierarchical file system becoming archaic. Having a system of files is useless if you are so overrun with data that amongst the plethora of files nothing is meaningful.
I disagree. My personal files are gigabytes large, and include plenty of small files - interesting pieces of text, Dilbert cartoons, snippets of code - as well as big things like South Park videos. I pay attention to how I file it in my hierarchical file system and I can always find it again because its location just makes sense.
Hierarchical name spaces are incredibly scalable, if you bother to use them wisely. I think if it's difficult to find stuff, you just aren't using the file system's capabilities to their fullest. The limits of hierarchical file systems are a long way off.
This is why, I believe, UNIX's everything-is-a-file attitude is so successful. Files and directories just work.
Among other things, did you know that, for ordinary letters (and most other stuff too), the USPS is just about the cheapest major delivery service in the world? It's true.... You certainly can't beat its price/performance; show me any other company that can deliver, say, a phone bill in three days for less than a buck, or even less than fifty cents.
In my country, New Zealand, normal mail costs about twenty US cents and FastPost, the next-business-day service, costs about forty US cents. Both are pretty reliable and normal mail is used for phone bills by both major telcos.
I guess I'm missing something here. A 24-bit graphics card can produce 2^24 different colors. An analog signal can express an infinite number of colors. What particular number can you represent in 24 bits that I can't represent in analog? IE, given the same tube, what color is your graphics card going to produce that my analog signal can't?
While an analogue signal can theoretically represent an infinite number of colours, in the real world noise gets in the way. So an analogue signal can only represent a finite number of usable, distinguishable colours.
However, this is not what is meant by colour gamut. Every graphics signal will use some colour space to describe colours: modern monitors use RGB, meaning that the colour of a pixel is described as a triple of red, green and blue intensities, all of which must be positive. TVs use (for historical reasons) a stranger colour space of chroma, luminance and - er - something else. Printers use CMYK, etc etc.
The colour gamut is the set of colours that it is possible to express in a colour space. Because our vision system is a bit interesting, and because the world is never perfect, colour spaces that are physically realisable can never display every shade of every colour. Some have better gamuts that others, meaning they can display more colours than others.
So the previous poster was saying that the colour space used to display NTSC television happens to suck when trying to describe red, because while it is analogue, some shades of red are just outside its range.
Monitors are better, but you actually you can't make a device using three primary colours that can equal the real world. Even with a monitor, bright shades of cyan, say, will be displayed as mixtures of blue and green. A mixture is inherently less saturated than a pure colour. Now you can always get a brighter, more saturated cyan from a cyan-coloured laser, for instance, or a painter's pigment. This will be true for every colour that is a mixture of primaries.
Colour spaces have been defined, like the CIE space, that can describe all perceivable colours. They use some mathematical trickery to define "super-saturated" primaries, in other words red, green and blue that are brighter and more pure than physically possible. So you can't make a monitor to display it.
I don't remember if spectroscopy is able to distinguish between the existence of free oxygen and oxygen in combination with other things.
IIRC from astronomy courses at university, spectroscopy cannot distinguish free oxygen from oxygen bound in a molecule with something else.
If you read the article, you'll notice that these guys have pulled together a very smart hack from the star's spectroscopy data. However, with a dim object like a planet they are likely to miss most of the elements in the atmosphere.
The oxygen they found could be bound to anything. I guess the most likely molecule would be carbon dioxide, but even if it was water they wouldn't be able to tell. It's unlikely to be O2, which would be an indicator of life.
I've been trying to figure out what you mean by "socialist," because you must not be using the definition one usually encounters in the US. To an American, it suggests a strong central government, nationalization of many service industries, high taxes and pervasive regulation.
The meanings assigned to terms like communism, socialism and Marxism in the US often do not bear thinking about. Marx's ideas were about class struggle and the importance of the working class having power. Nothing to do with taxes or regulation.
I find the comparison between Marx and OSS software interesting, if of limited application. With the GPL, everyone has power over their software and no-one can take it away from them. This does relate to Marx's ideas about power, even if not much else does.
Slashdot Mirror
In the seminary where I learned my theology, we called this "bibliolatry" - making the Bible itself into an idol.
> NOT getting the results that most of the scientific community would REALLY want as such a cool discovery that could advance thinking is a great example to show religious types.
As a deeply religious type with a couple of degrees in science, I can tell you that I saw examples of this kind all the time in my own research when I was a postgraduate at university. Things I hoped would work out frequently didn't when I analysed the data. Not all religious types are nutcases, you know, plenty of us understand and accept, for example, the scientific method, or evolution by natural selection. I can work out the age of the Universe from Hubble's constant just as easily as anyone else (if I found my astronomy text book, it's a while ago now).
Because sign language is the native language of many deaf people, not Japanese or English - whether written or spoken. Wouldn't you prefer your robots to speak in your native language, instead of some foreign language?
Most translations, and certainly all the modern ones into major languages, come from the original languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. While later translations into Latin or other languages are useful corroborative material, multiple original language texts for every single verse have been found. For the New Testament at least, these texts number in the thousands.
Is "logos" used anywhere else in reference to Jesus Christ?
By the time of the writing of John's gospel, the word logos had a deep meaning in Greek philosophy as an ordering force in the universe. The word is accurately translated as reason or logic, and when referring to words emphasises the ideas those words represent, rather than the spoken words themselves. The spoken word had another name in Greek, rhema.
In Judaism at the time, God's word was seen as a means of God's action in the universe. In the Old Testament, God usually accomplishes things by speaking, and there are a number of passages that refer to God's Word as an entity doing stuff in its own right.
The author of the passage probably had both of these streams of tradition in mind when writing the passage. I do not recall another passage in the Bible where Jesus is referred to by that word, although it has been very popular in theology since then.
Would there have been a clearer way to easily distinguish between the meanings "the Word was God" and "the Word was a god"? Is the article normally used when referring to a member of a group?
Greek had no indefinite article (a or an), but instead used other grammar to represent the same idea. I can't remember what the grammar was, but I do remeber it as one of the trickier parts of Greek.
Is "theos" ever used without an article to refer to the general class of gods, rather than one specific god?
Yes. However, in this particular instance, while I can't remember the grammar that supports the "Word was God" translation, I would want very strong evidence that the author had "Word was a god" in mind before accepting it. John was a monotheist. John had not ever heard of a trinity, as the concept was only invented to explain this and other biblical passages in the third century, well after he was dead. For him, I am sure, you either had one God like the rest of Judaism, or many, like the Greeks. He was a Jew, not a Greek, and like the rest of the Christian church, believed in one God. I find it very unlikely he would have said "the Word was a god, of the same class as God, but a different one."
As a person who has formally studied science, Christian theology, and comparative religion, I have to agree. Comparative religion is a topic in which many priests and ministers quite reasonably don't have any great interest or expertise. My comparative religion paper, taught in the theology faculty at my university, only had half a dozen students in my year.
It's certainly a separate field to theology, without a whole lot of overlap.
While any religion or system of philosophy will contain elements that are not objectively provable or even falsifiable, that doesn't mean it's a complete subjective free for all.
For instance, any successful belief system will have as implicit goals to be both self consistent and consistent with experience. I mean, these things generally arise out of people's desire to make sense of their lives, which presupposes both goals. These are objective constraints on what makes a successful belief system, even though they allow a huge amount of variety.
Christianity has a number of accepted sources of theology. Raw material if you like. One is the text of the Bible, another is a person's subjective experience, and a third is reason. An unreasonable interpretation of the text of the Bible is bad Christianity, no matter how popular it is. If your reading of the Bible leads you to think that black is white and things fall upwards, or leads you to think contradictory statements, then your reading is unreasonable.
ID is not consistent with our experience, in fact when you get down to it in practise I don't think it's self-consistent either, therefore it arises from an unreasonable reading of the Bible.
As a person with degrees in both science and Christian theology, I normally try to stay well out of the way of these discussions. But your comment struck a nerve.
Seriously, Intelligent Design is just as bad Christian religion as it is science. It would equally be out of place in a philosophy class as in a science class as in a theology class. It could find a place in Comparative Religion, but at least at my university, the comparative religion classes tried to bring out the best and most interesting parts of other religions, and not make the lecture into a freak show.
Creationism and ID both are just the latest examples of a simplistic way of reading the Bible leading to beliefs that are incompatible with how we know the world to be. More sophisticated ways to read the Bible that do not lead to such beliefs have existed for as long as the Bible has been around. It isn't a new discussion - simplistic understandings of the Bible have conflicted with knowledge about the physical world for more than a thousand years. St Augustine was arguing with people that Christian belief need not conflict with other forms of knowledge back in the 4th century or so. Back then, IIRC, it was the shape of the world, now, its evolution.
I live in New Zealand, well south of Australia, but have lived in Ireland and Germany. The sun down here is far more burning than in Europe - I used to laugh at the way Europeans get burned in sun that I don't even notice.
I have had a malignant melanoma and now never go out in the sun.
It's not about latitude, it's about the ozone hole over Antarctica. Our sun will burn even when it doesn't heat.
I work with this guy.
:)
> what caused him to want to do this?
There might be some clue in the fact that at work we call him Freak. Another clue is that he bought a house with an extra bedroom so he had room for the life-sized R2D2 model he was building. Some people do things like that and for the rest of us it's better to just accept the fact and make sure we don't stand too close.
> pointy haird boss with tie
As it happens, his boss doesn't wear a tie. We're pretty casual here.
I know this guy quite well, and saw the engine running yesterday.
Yes, he is crazy. At work we call him Freak.
But then, this is the third time his website has been slashdotted, by my count, which is more than you can say for most people.
The guy who made this is a mate of mine, and I saw the engine working yesterday.
:)
> My question is, how much thrust does his jet produce?
Not much. It uses a lot of propane, and makes a lot of hot air and noise, but is pretty inefficient from a thrust point of view.
Of course, he is working on a kerosene afterburner.
> Also, could he attach a generator to the spindle of the turbo and make electric power?
No. The way to do it is to put another turbine into the exhaust stream. This turbine can be used to generate power or spin a wheel. It's unhealthy to attach things to shafts rotating at 100K RPM, as I think someone else on this thread mentioned. Another home-jet-builder north of here (Auckland, New Zealand) apparently used an extra turbine in this way to power a go-kart.
When I saw it running, it got up to 100K RPM and 500 degrees Celsius (~900 F) but I saw no ice on the gas bottle. It wasn't running very long, the gaffer tape holding the air hose onto the combustion chamber was getting too hot and was about to give way.
I didn't stand too close.
A protocol with lots of redundant redundancy to reduce the effect of errors, but without ACK/NAK and therefore without the hassle with windowing that high latency brings.
I think NASA has already come up with space-borne versions of the major TCP/IP protocols to solve this problem, but I forget the link. There was a /. story about it once. Here it is: Interplanetary Internet protocol in devel.
Hey, I'm still hardware limited. I spend and I spend on hard drive space, but still I can't have all my files on my hard drive at once.
Already we are seeing that the notion of a strictly one-dimensional hierarchical file system becoming archaic. Having a system of files is useless if you are so overrun with data that amongst the plethora of files nothing is meaningful.
I disagree. My personal files are gigabytes large, and include plenty of small files - interesting pieces of text, Dilbert cartoons, snippets of code - as well as big things like South Park videos. I pay attention to how I file it in my hierarchical file system and I can always find it again because its location just makes sense.
Hierarchical name spaces are incredibly scalable, if you bother to use them wisely. I think if it's difficult to find stuff, you just aren't using the file system's capabilities to their fullest. The limits of hierarchical file systems are a long way off.
This is why, I believe, UNIX's everything-is-a-file attitude is so successful. Files and directories just work.
Among other things, did you know that, for ordinary letters (and most other stuff too), the USPS is just about the cheapest major delivery service in the world? It's true. ... You certainly can't beat its price/performance; show me any other company that can deliver, say, a phone bill in three days for less than a buck, or even less than fifty cents.
In my country, New Zealand, normal mail costs about twenty US cents and FastPost, the next-business-day service, costs about forty US cents. Both are pretty reliable and normal mail is used for phone bills by both major telcos.
So there. :)
While an analogue signal can theoretically represent an infinite number of colours, in the real world noise gets in the way. So an analogue signal can only represent a finite number of usable, distinguishable colours.
However, this is not what is meant by colour gamut. Every graphics signal will use some colour space to describe colours: modern monitors use RGB, meaning that the colour of a pixel is described as a triple of red, green and blue intensities, all of which must be positive. TVs use (for historical reasons) a stranger colour space of chroma, luminance and - er - something else. Printers use CMYK, etc etc.
The colour gamut is the set of colours that it is possible to express in a colour space. Because our vision system is a bit interesting, and because the world is never perfect, colour spaces that are physically realisable can never display every shade of every colour. Some have better gamuts that others, meaning they can display more colours than others.
So the previous poster was saying that the colour space used to display NTSC television happens to suck when trying to describe red, because while it is analogue, some shades of red are just outside its range.
Monitors are better, but you actually you can't make a device using three primary colours that can equal the real world. Even with a monitor, bright shades of cyan, say, will be displayed as mixtures of blue and green. A mixture is inherently less saturated than a pure colour. Now you can always get a brighter, more saturated cyan from a cyan-coloured laser, for instance, or a painter's pigment. This will be true for every colour that is a mixture of primaries.
Colour spaces have been defined, like the CIE space, that can describe all perceivable colours. They use some mathematical trickery to define "super-saturated" primaries, in other words red, green and blue that are brighter and more pure than physically possible. So you can't make a monitor to display it.
IIRC from astronomy courses at university, spectroscopy cannot distinguish free oxygen from oxygen bound in a molecule with something else.
If you read the article, you'll notice that these guys have pulled together a very smart hack from the star's spectroscopy data. However, with a dim object like a planet they are likely to miss most of the elements in the atmosphere.
The oxygen they found could be bound to anything. I guess the most likely molecule would be carbon dioxide, but even if it was water they wouldn't be able to tell. It's unlikely to be O2, which would be an indicator of life.
The meanings assigned to terms like communism, socialism and Marxism in the US often do not bear thinking about. Marx's ideas were about class struggle and the importance of the working class having power. Nothing to do with taxes or regulation.
I find the comparison between Marx and OSS software interesting, if of limited application. With the GPL, everyone has power over their software and no-one can take it away from them. This does relate to Marx's ideas about power, even if not much else does.