"I fail to see the problem. This is a very likely possibility. We deal quite regularly with infinite series in mathematics, where the correct outcome relies on the infinite nature of the series."
It's more like infinite number of cardinals. Which poses a problem, because there's going to be the strict hierarchy of gods.
"Will there ever be an "end of time" or "end of existence"? What comes after that? Nothing? Anything? Was there ever a "beginning of time" or "beginning of existence"? What came before that? Nothing? Anything?"
Now think about it some more. How do you define the word "before"? Does it make sense to say "before the beginning of time"?
To actually define this you need to embed our Universe inside of a larger Universe which should still provide an arrow of time for your question to be valid.
"What with the law of conservation of energy and all, it certainly seems that everything we can observe is infinite. Not infinitely stuck in the present state, but infinite nonetheless."
So far, our Universe seems to be finite (albeit very big).
"You can't create or destroy matter or energy; you can only change its state. They are infinite."
Sorry, this statement has no sense.
"So why not an infinite chain of gods? An infinite chain of creators. We create things all the time. We're figuring out how to create more and more things as time goes on, in fact."
Occam's razor. Why do we need gods if we simply can have infinite Universe? Also, that obviates the problems with low-probability events - in an infinite Universe any event is bound to happen.
"You yourself argued that Kalam's argument requires an infinite chain "ad infinitum". This would mean that our creator could potentially be involved in creating other creators, since the chain before our creator is infinite, so why stop with ours."
Wrong. That means that our creator must be created by some other creator which is created by some other creator, etc. It's not logically inconsistent, but fails Occam's razor.
On the next level, why not think about possibility of continuum (aleph-1 set!) of Universes/creators?:)
"Want to win in places like Afghanistan? Start by raising their standard of living to something akin to ours. School them, build roads, develop their industries and resources, maybe give them something worthwhile to lose! When they have the luxuries that the "developed" worlds do then and only then will we begin to see progress."
USSR did exactly this in Afghanistan (and at a grand scale). Hadn't worked back then. Religion and ideology trumps schools and roads every time.
"Only if it is necessary that both the universe and God be created. The universe with its one-dimensional timeline is pretty clear to have had an origin (with the big bang), it's unclear if it is necessary for an entity existing outside of time to be created."
Fail.
Infinite Universe doesn't need to have an origin, even with 'one dimensional timeline'.
"Islamic thinkers used pure reason to derive the fact that our universe had to have an origin, and thus that the universe tended to show evidence of God, rather than the opposite... back in the middle ages. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalam_cosmological_argument)"
Kalam's argument is stupid on many levels.
First, it's applicable to God - it also has to be created by something (a meta-God?). Which in turn must be created by something else, ad infinitum.
If you try to apply an argument that God is infinite and thus has no beginning, then this argument can very well be applied to the Universe itself.
And this is only on a level of philosophical arguments (i.e. within the model postulated by the author).
If we look at the real world, we'll see events happening without cause everywhere (virtual particles, radioactive decay, etc.).
And General Relativity also posits that it's possible to have the 'beginning of time'.
"Again, he's completely ignorant of history. You can conduct natural experiments, as it were, by comparing and contrasting the evolution of societies with and without the Abrahamic God, and also how culture change after missionaries enter their culture. It's a fascinating study, and one that is at complete odds with his theory."
Yup. Abrahamic societies generally become more hateful. Just look at Africa.
"Hidden authoritarianism is the secret cause for the battle of the sexes? I must weed this out of my life right this instant, so my wife will never argue with me again!"
Battle of... what?
Hm. Grandparent seems to have hit the core of your problems.
"How do you measure qualification in any field of literature analysis"
Answer: we don't.
There are no objective criteria to judge the quality of literary analysis, philosophy and theology, they are entirely subjective. Once a text in philosophy/theology passes the basic test of self-consistency and coherency, one can't really judge if it's 'bad' or 'good'.
PS: I've studied hermeneutics as a part of the course on mathematical logic. I suspect, mostly to show that hermeneutics isn't really related to any form of formal logic.
"And you also get upset when theists call you asshats, am I right? (Do you never wonder why?)"
Nope. Theists are deluded, what can one expect from them?
"Dawkins has made being-an-asshole-to-theists his raison d'etre, but it neither makes him right, nor even sound particularly smart. His arguments are laughably bad when he strays outside the area he knows (evolutionary biology) and into a region he knows nothing about (theology). To be fair, though - he's still not as stupid as the Westborough fuckers."
Hm? How do you measure qualifications in theology? So far, I haven't been able to discern 'good' theologists from 'bad' ones.
I like English spelling for example. It's so easy! One just needs to remember how words are spelled. The same for pronunciation, there are no general rules. Just remember how words are pronounced!
I'm not a native English speaker, but English for me was harder to learn than German (which has word genders and complex morphology).
Ukrainian was by far the easiest, its writing system is completely phonetic and rules are rather straightforward. Though it's a bit skewed, since Russian is my native language.
I've also tried Finnish since I know a little of Udmurt language and they are kinda related. But its variety of grammar cases was just too baffling for me.
"Rust actually tries to solve some future/current problems, like garbage collection on hundred-core CPUs for instance. You can't just stop every CPU while you collect garbage, like Go does since it has no concept of separate domains of data."
To be fair, it's possible to do garbage collection without stopping _any_ mutator thread (i.e. threads doing useful work). Though it's really really hard.
It's so hard that Azul systems had to design their own CPUs to do this - they have a hardware assist for read barriers. They do scale to thousands of CPUs and terabytes of RAM though.
"And a bunch of if statements on the return value is much different than a bunch of catch statements for different exceptions?"
Yes. You need to have a tree of ifs on EVERY level in the function call hierarchy. But one can have exception handling only on a few nodes.
"Let me guess, you also think using GOTO is never acceptable but don't realize that an IF statement boils down to a goto."
And you write ELF binaries directly? Cause everything boils down to it.
For the record, I think that GOTO is acceptable in: 1) Generated code. 2) To break out of nested loops. Though labeled break/continue statements are better for this purpose.
Go has the same problems. They try to make it 'simpler' but along the way they actually make it more complex.
For example, try-catch-finally idiom is an easy and standard way to deal with exceptions. But no, they had to invent their own half-assed implementation just to be 'minimal'.
Also, they insist on using fucking _return_ _codes_ to indicate errors. WTF? It only makes code more complex because of tons of stupid 'if error' statements.
Bioinformatics is currently a very interesting subject. You can dabble into cloud computing, non-relational databases, etc. And that's only from the IT side.
Problem is in Windows architecture. Its security subsystem is so complex that it's nearly unusable. You can, in theory, create very flexible security policy using ACLs which can be attached to almost all objects in Windows but in practice nobody uses it. So glaring security bugs can live for years.
"It only reduces the amount of waste if it doesn't produce other kinds of waste in equal amounts."
It doesn't produce more waste than usual.
"I highly doubt that even the newest generation of nuclear reactors takes in fissable heavy metals and outputs something at most as dangerous as CO2. I would be happy if you prove me wrong."
There will be waste, but most of it short-lived (decay to safe levels in 100-200 years). Not as harmless as CO2, but quite close not to worry about it much. As for chemical toxicity, the amount of waste is so small (even with our current reactors) that it doesn't matter. If our waste were as poisonous as arsenic but not radioactive we could have just dumped it in the sea without any problems.
"Getting enough of the materials to make the batteries for a significant number of electric vehicles."
Which materials? Lithium is dirt cheap. Steel/aluminium/other_construction_materials are no different from common cars. Even rare-earth magnets are can be replaced with induction magnets.
"I might be missing something, but 2kw to charge sounds very unrealistic to me."
Not at all. Chevy Volt has 8 kW*hr of usable charge, which gives about 6 hours of charging at 75% efficiency. And Volt has 40 miles of all-electric range which should cover daily needs of about 80% of population.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the timestamp of this presentation :) It's a bit of old news.
It was discussed here: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=48449
And it mostly shows that NIO is deficient. I encountered similar problems in my tests. Solved them by using http://mina.apache.org/ .
"I fail to see the problem. This is a very likely possibility. We deal quite regularly with infinite series in mathematics, where the correct outcome relies on the infinite nature of the series."
It's more like infinite number of cardinals. Which poses a problem, because there's going to be the strict hierarchy of gods.
"Will there ever be an "end of time" or "end of existence"? What comes after that? Nothing? Anything? Was there ever a "beginning of time" or "beginning of existence"? What came before that? Nothing? Anything?"
Now think about it some more. How do you define the word "before"? Does it make sense to say "before the beginning of time"?
To actually define this you need to embed our Universe inside of a larger Universe which should still provide an arrow of time for your question to be valid.
"What with the law of conservation of energy and all, it certainly seems that everything we can observe is infinite. Not infinitely stuck in the present state, but infinite nonetheless."
So far, our Universe seems to be finite (albeit very big).
"You can't create or destroy matter or energy; you can only change its state. They are infinite."
Sorry, this statement has no sense.
"So why not an infinite chain of gods? An infinite chain of creators. We create things all the time. We're figuring out how to create more and more things as time goes on, in fact."
Occam's razor. Why do we need gods if we simply can have infinite Universe? Also, that obviates the problems with low-probability events - in an infinite Universe any event is bound to happen.
"You yourself argued that Kalam's argument requires an infinite chain "ad infinitum". This would mean that our creator could potentially be involved in creating other creators, since the chain before our creator is infinite, so why stop with ours."
Wrong. That means that our creator must be created by some other creator which is created by some other creator, etc. It's not logically inconsistent, but fails Occam's razor.
On the next level, why not think about possibility of continuum (aleph-1 set!) of Universes/creators? :)
It's OK to delete information selectively. But wholesale mass deletion is a bit different.
And blogs are different from Slashdot discussions. For one thing, comment threads are usually smaller.
Deleting all your posts can mess up other peoples' conversations. It's not really ethical.
Making all your posts anonymous might be a reasonable compromise.
"Want to win in places like Afghanistan? Start by raising their standard of living to something akin to ours. School them, build roads, develop their industries and resources, maybe give them something worthwhile to lose! When they have the luxuries that the "developed" worlds do then and only then will we begin to see progress."
USSR did exactly this in Afghanistan (and at a grand scale). Hadn't worked back then. Religion and ideology trumps schools and roads every time.
Yep. A good way to describe a singularity at the beginning of space-time.
A more formal way to do this is with the help of light cones and spacetime-diagrams.
"Only if it is necessary that both the universe and God be created. The universe with its one-dimensional timeline is pretty clear to have had an origin (with the big bang), it's unclear if it is necessary for an entity existing outside of time to be created."
Fail.
Infinite Universe doesn't need to have an origin, even with 'one dimensional timeline'.
You don't understand.
Courtier's reply tells that theology isn't really different from the study of invisible dress.
The fact that many people do the similar things doesn't change anything.
XKCD: http://xkcd.com/451/
"Islamic thinkers used pure reason to derive the fact that our universe had to have an origin, and thus that the universe tended to show evidence of God, rather than the opposite... back in the middle ages. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalam_cosmological_argument)"
Kalam's argument is stupid on many levels.
First, it's applicable to God - it also has to be created by something (a meta-God?). Which in turn must be created by something else, ad infinitum.
If you try to apply an argument that God is infinite and thus has no beginning, then this argument can very well be applied to the Universe itself.
And this is only on a level of philosophical arguments (i.e. within the model postulated by the author).
If we look at the real world, we'll see events happening without cause everywhere (virtual particles, radioactive decay, etc.).
And General Relativity also posits that it's possible to have the 'beginning of time'.
"Again, he's completely ignorant of history. You can conduct natural experiments, as it were, by comparing and contrasting the evolution of societies with and without the Abrahamic God, and also how culture change after missionaries enter their culture. It's a fascinating study, and one that is at complete odds with his theory."
Yup. Abrahamic societies generally become more hateful. Just look at Africa.
Or at Renaissance.
"Hidden authoritarianism is the secret cause for the battle of the sexes? I must weed this out of my life right this instant, so my wife will never argue with me again!"
Battle of... what?
Hm. Grandparent seems to have hit the core of your problems.
"How do you measure qualification in any field of literature analysis"
Answer: we don't.
There are no objective criteria to judge the quality of literary analysis, philosophy and theology, they are entirely subjective. Once a text in philosophy/theology passes the basic test of self-consistency and coherency, one can't really judge if it's 'bad' or 'good'.
So PZ Myers text of "The Courtier's Reply" ( http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php ) isn't really better or worse than "Summa Theologica" (yes, I read it - still can't scrub my mind clean).
PS: I've studied hermeneutics as a part of the course on mathematical logic. I suspect, mostly to show that hermeneutics isn't really related to any form of formal logic.
"And you also get upset when theists call you asshats, am I right? (Do you never wonder why?)"
Nope. Theists are deluded, what can one expect from them?
"Dawkins has made being-an-asshole-to-theists his raison d'etre, but it neither makes him right, nor even sound particularly smart. His arguments are laughably bad when he strays outside the area he knows (evolutionary biology) and into a region he knows nothing about (theology). To be fair, though - he's still not as stupid as the Westborough fuckers."
Hm? How do you measure qualifications in theology? So far, I haven't been able to discern 'good' theologists from 'bad' ones.
Yeah.
I like English spelling for example. It's so easy! One just needs to remember how words are spelled. The same for pronunciation, there are no general rules. Just remember how words are pronounced!
I'm not a native English speaker, but English for me was harder to learn than German (which has word genders and complex morphology).
Ukrainian was by far the easiest, its writing system is completely phonetic and rules are rather straightforward. Though it's a bit skewed, since Russian is my native language.
I've also tried Finnish since I know a little of Udmurt language and they are kinda related. But its variety of grammar cases was just too baffling for me.
"Rust actually tries to solve some future/current problems, like garbage collection on hundred-core CPUs for instance. You can't just stop every CPU while you collect garbage, like Go does since it has no concept of separate domains of data."
To be fair, it's possible to do garbage collection without stopping _any_ mutator thread (i.e. threads doing useful work). Though it's really really hard.
It's so hard that Azul systems had to design their own CPUs to do this - they have a hardware assist for read barriers. They do scale to thousands of CPUs and terabytes of RAM though.
"And a bunch of if statements on the return value is much different than a bunch of catch statements for different exceptions?"
Yes. You need to have a tree of ifs on EVERY level in the function call hierarchy. But one can have exception handling only on a few nodes.
"Let me guess, you also think using GOTO is never acceptable but don't realize that an IF statement boils down to a goto."
And you write ELF binaries directly? Cause everything boils down to it.
For the record, I think that GOTO is acceptable in:
1) Generated code.
2) To break out of nested loops. Though labeled break/continue statements are better for this purpose.
Go has the same problems. They try to make it 'simpler' but along the way they actually make it more complex.
For example, try-catch-finally idiom is an easy and standard way to deal with exceptions. But no, they had to invent their own half-assed implementation just to be 'minimal'.
Also, they insist on using fucking _return_ _codes_ to indicate errors. WTF? It only makes code more complex because of tons of stupid 'if error' statements.
Personally, I like Rust's ( http://wiki.github.com/graydon/rust/project-faq ) design more. At least, it has some new features.
They are patent holders for that particular patents :)
Seriously, why design tests which need calculators? Even graphing ones!
Why not limit calculations to easy mental math?
Bioinformatics is currently a very interesting subject. You can dabble into cloud computing, non-relational databases, etc. And that's only from the IT side.
Problem is in Windows architecture. Its security subsystem is so complex that it's nearly unusable. You can, in theory, create very flexible security policy using ACLs which can be attached to almost all objects in Windows but in practice nobody uses it. So glaring security bugs can live for years.
It's almost like SELinux.
"It only reduces the amount of waste if it doesn't produce other kinds of waste in equal amounts."
It doesn't produce more waste than usual.
"I highly doubt that even the newest generation of nuclear reactors takes in fissable heavy metals and outputs something at most as dangerous as CO2. I would be happy if you prove me wrong."
There will be waste, but most of it short-lived (decay to safe levels in 100-200 years). Not as harmless as CO2, but quite close not to worry about it much. As for chemical toxicity, the amount of waste is so small (even with our current reactors) that it doesn't matter. If our waste were as poisonous as arsenic but not radioactive we could have just dumped it in the sea without any problems.
Unfortunately, as vaccines go BCG is on the 'very ineffective' side of the spectrum. It's better than nothing, but just barely.
"Getting enough of the materials to make the batteries for a significant number of electric vehicles."
Which materials? Lithium is dirt cheap. Steel/aluminium/other_construction_materials are no different from common cars. Even rare-earth magnets are can be replaced with induction magnets.
"I might be missing something, but 2kw to charge sounds very unrealistic to me."
Not at all. Chevy Volt has 8 kW*hr of usable charge, which gives about 6 hours of charging at 75% efficiency. And Volt has 40 miles of all-electric range which should cover daily needs of about 80% of population.