I'm not an EE, but I can take an educated guess. Your drill probably wastes a lot of power. If you run it at a slow speed, it probably still consumes a large fraction of the power it would consume running at full speed. That's fine for a small drill, but not always acceptable for a larger motor.
I'm assuming it's similar to the difference between an ordinary residential dimmer switch and a variac. The dimmer switch is small and cheap, but it wastes energy. If you turn the lights down you consume less power at the bulb, but you waste a lot in the dimmer switch (it heats up). A variac is much larger, but can reduce AC voltage with little waste. (There are of course other ways to do this.)
Am I missing something, or did AOL quietly fix the terms of service? The paragraph that people are complaining about here now seems to clearly spell out that it applies only to postings to public areas.
I'm no fan of AOL, but to be fair I suspect this whole fiasco was a mistake rather than some evil plan to 0wn everyone's private communications. Some lawyer wrote a paragraph without really thinking it through, and it ended up being broader than intended. Everyone else at AOL who reviewed the terms of service read it as applying to public postings (as intended), and it didn't occur to them that the text could be interpreted as applying to private conversations as well.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Unless you can prove that to be true, it must be false
This is a really stupid argument. It is simply not the case that anything you cannot prove to be true is automatically false. This line of argument has no merit whatsoever, and adds no insight to the question of whether or not the election was 'stolen'.
Personally, I don't really think the election was stolen, but I am very concerned about the potential for fraud in elections with the current generation of touch-screen machines. It is pretty much guaranteed that if we keep using such flawed machines, sooner or later there will be an election that is thrown by electoral fraud. I would like to see this problem fixed in advance.
Interesting. By law, they have to give you a free copy of your credit report anytime a lender turns you down for credit. I didn't know they would do it anytime a lender checks your credit.
I do know that what the credit card companies do to send out those offers doesn't count as a 'credit check'. It's important that it doesn't: every time a lender checks your credit, it lowers your credit score slightly. This is intended to prevent people from taking out too many loans, credit cards, etc., and also to discourage you from shopping around too much for the best deal on credit. When they send out prescreened offers, the credit card companies just get a list of people with 'good' credit, they don't get an actual credit report.
If you don't like getting 20 credit card offers per week, you can call 1-888-5-OPTOUT (567-8688). By going through the automated system at that number, you tell the major credit agencies to stop giving out your info for prescreened credit card offers. It works well. I get very few of these now. More info on the FTC website
The thing is, though, that EBay is doing the bidder a favor by allowing him/her to hold the high bid despite not being ahead of the next lower bid by at least a full bid increment. If their current policy is not acceptable, the obvious solution is to change the rules so that your maximum bid must be at least a full bid increment above the next lower bid for you to retain the 'high bid' position. If you entered a maximum of $111 it would be treated as a maximum of $110, because that is the highest on-increment bid you can make within your maximum.
Oops, yes, I missed the 'hybrid' part. Is that actually practical with today's technology? You would have to carry the weight of both the batteries needed to run the car, and the gas generator or fuel cell to provide backup power. It's hard to believe that such a vehicle could be as energy efficient as a Prius-type gas/electric hybrid.
...there appears to be little support for plug-in hybrids which could "refuel" on non-petroleum energy almost anywhere for little additional trouble or expense.
Well, yeah. If you're running low on 'juice', you have to find someplace to plug in your car and then wait, oh, about twelve hours. Not exactly convenient if you're on your way somewhere.
Also, the energy comes from fossil fuels anyway, at least in most parts of the U.S. Until we start building more nuclear plants electric vehicles are not exactly a fossil fuel-free solution.
I'm not sure the Bean counts as a 'useful article'. This paragraph doesn't cover (and isn't meant to cover) this case.
Note also that the Bean itself has not been 'offered for sale or other distribution to the public', despite possibly being owned by the city. If they sell souvenir copies of The Bean, you would be free to take photographs of those for advertisements or commentaries, but only if you can convince the Court that your souvenir copy of the Bean is a 'useful article'. You also have to be using the photo for an advertisement or commentary related to the distribution of the souvenir Beans, or in a news report.
That doesn't seem like such a big problem. I mean, if you are missing an arm and they could give you a brain-controlled robotic one to replace it, wouldn't you be willing to go for it? (Assuming of course, that this had been thoroughly researched and proven to be safe, first.)
Not really. You don't do any kind of experiment on humans unless you really have to. Even simple non-invasive experiments on humans require extensive preapproval through ethics committees, at many research institutions. Animal experiments are much easier to get approval for.
Well, I'm really glad I read about this on Amazon last week. I was about to buy Quicken, since it's almost free if you're buying Turbo Tax. I knew Intuit was Evil, but this was just too evil for me: they lost the sale and I'm sticking with Microsoft Money. It's a sad day when Microsoft is the lesser of two evils...
It seems to me that the Iliad might be a better example than the Odyssey. Like the gospels, it was passed down through an oral tradition before being recorded, and the story it tells is mythical. It's not unreasonable, though, to think that there actually was a war between the Greeks and the Trojans and that some of the characters in the story may have been based on real people, and some of the events described may have been based on real events. Which characters and events are real and which are made up, is of course something we will never know.
Where many of Gauvin's points seemed 'false' was through misdirection rather than outright falsehood. He frequently seems to sneer at things that cannot be proven, implying that anything that cannot be proven must be false (a logical error). He makes too much of discrepancies between the scriptures. I suspect his claim that the dates of the gospels have been made to be as early as possible is false, but I am not an expert on that. I believe his complaint about the gospels having been written in Greek rather than Aramaic is misguided, in that (I believe) Greek was the common language of scholarly writing at that time, much as Latin was for several centuries in Europe. A lot more people could read Greek than could read Aramaic, certainly. I found his skepticism about the Romans crucifying Jesus unconvincing: I think he has an overly rosy picture of the Roman empire at that time. His comments about the icon of the lamb on the cross seemed misplaced. Symbolism plays an important role in religious art. His points about the things Paul does not mention are very interesting. I'll have to reread the Letters and look for that. He errs though in repeatedly claiming that Paul did not know about anything he didn't mention in his letters. This just does not follow. He seems to misrepresent statements by religous scholars about Paul and about Nazareth by taking their comments out of context and by putting words into their mouths. (I'm not familiar with the original statements, but that's how it looks...) Finally, many of his points, if logically followed, do not really bear on the simple question of whether Jesus lived, in the sense of there having been a real person on whom the gospels were based. Rather, they bear on the question of whether Jesus existed as pictured by modern Christians. Personally, I am a Christian. I am also a scientist, and prefer to approach things rationally. I don't doubt that if we could go back in time and see Jesus, we would find him much different than we expect. The people of his day didn't get the Messiah they were expecting either. Such is life.
They are 'authentic' in the sense that they are genuinely the writings of ancient Christians, not necessarily 'authentic' in the sense of being true. The Christians who wrote these gospels belonged to various sects whose theologies differed from that of the larger church of their day, and of ours. One could call them 'heretics'. Their accounts of Jesus' life and teachings back up the accounts of the more familiar gospels in some respects and differ in others. The amount of support this provides for Jesus' existence is of course debatable. My point was just that you were incorrect when you said that there was no other evidence for the existence of Jesus outside of the [familiar] gospels.
The article you referred to is interesting. He makes some good points, and some that I think are false. Overall, it seems to me like he has an axe to grind: the tone of the article seems quite biased. In particular, he seems to assume that lack of proof that Jesus lived is proof that he didn't. Taking his approach to history, I think we would have to conclude that many historical figures from more than a millenium ago never existed. After all, all we know of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates comes from copies of copies of copies of works that were translated and transcribed by foreigners from originals that are now lost. I don't think Mr. Gauvin's reasoning leads to a viable, rational approach to ancient history. It's reasonable to suppose that a collection of ancient documents written around a hundred years after the events they describe may contain distortions of the facts, and probably even serious distortions in the case of religious texts. It doesn't seem very rational though to suggest that rather than just being a distorted account of what happened instead everything was just made up from scratch. The balance of probability seems to me to point more toward there being at least a kernal of truth in the stories.
I did a bit of googling on Gauvin (skimming mostly). It doesn't look like he has any academic credentials. There is an interesting biography of him at the University of Manitoba Library. It doesn't look to me like he is a good example of how to apply unbiased rational thought to an issue.
It probably is actually better for someone who is just learning to use a keyboard (by hunt and peck) for the first time. It's possible that with equivalent amounts of practice one could hunt and peck just as fast on this new keyboard as on a QWERTY keyboard. I don't think these are sufficient reason to replace the conventional keyboard, but it might actually be useful on a computer designed for small children, for example. The Fisher Price color scheme just adds to the overall effect.
It isn't documented in any historical texts outside the bible.
There are extant gospels according to Peter, Thomas, another guy named Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and a few others I don't know off the top of my head. These are all ancient documents, and in at least some cases multiple ancient copies have survived. From a scholarly point of view, of course, their existence is not evidence for the truth of Christian doctrine as a whole, but they are certainly good enough evidence of the existence of the teacher we know as Jesus. I think it's fair to say that we have about as much valid, historical evidence of the mere existence of Jesus as we do about any other historical figure from two millenia ago.
Actually, that's not true. There are at least half a dozen other ancient 'gospels' besides the ones that made it into the Bible. You're free of course to doubt their religious content and their accuracy, but from a historical perspective all of these documents need to be evaluated the same way a historian would evaluate any other set of ancient religious documents. While being skeptical about the details, if you have a bunch of religious documents that talk about a great religious leader, it's pretty reasonable to conclude that there actually was a religious leader at that time, even though you may think that the details of his life may have been exaggerated. I have no doubt, for example, that the person known as 'Buddha' actually existed. I doubt much of what has been written about him, but his teachings are too influential and too well documented to assume that he is a total fabrication.
Actually, probably not. The gospels weren't written in the language Jesus spoke, and his name got 'Latinized' when they wrote down his story. 'Joshua' is probably closer to what he was actually called, and yes Joshua was a common name in that part of the world at that time.
Actually, I don't believe we can currently see anything quite that far away. The estimates of the Universe's age are based on things much closer than that (but still perhaps a few billion light years away). The fact is that nearly everything we can see is moving away from us, except for stuff in our own galaxy of course.
It's more complicated than that. Space is not really 'nothing' in the sense that you might think, and we have really pretty good evidence that it can stretch and expand or contract. There's a lot in this area that is still not understood, but the best theory we have depends on distortion of space and that theory is backed up by extremely precise experimental data. We will probably come up with a better theory someday, but I guarantee that when we do it will be even wierder and not at all in accord with common-sense notions about space being 'nothing'. (The theory by the way is the General Theory of Relativity--Einstein's masterpiece.)
One example of the evidence, just off the top of my head: the Sun stretches the space around it. It is in fact this distortion of space that causes the Earth to go around the Sun (we call it 'gravity'). While there are other theories that can explain why the Earth goes around the Sun (such as Newton's now-abandoned Theory of Gravity), there is no other workable theory that can explain why the Sun bends light that passes by it. General Relativity not only predicts this, but shows us how to calculate exactly how much the light will be bent. The light, in fact, travels in a straight line but the space it travels through is stretched by the Sun and we perceive it as a slight bend in the light's path.
By the way, for other reasons it is well known in modern physics that no space is truly empty. Even a perfect vacuum is filled with a flux of so-called 'virtual' particles, which are spontaneously created and destroyed. These have a measurable effect on the properties of space.
In fairness, I think Josephus was writing several hundred years after Jesus. As a historian, he was reporting what the Christians of his day believed to be true, not necessarily what he himself (as a historian) believed to be historical fact.
That said, I don't think serious scholars doubt that the person we call 'Jesus' actually existed. From a historical point of view, the Bible shouldn't be given any more weight than any other religious document of similar age, but it shouldn't be given less weight either. While it's reasonable to doubt the religious claims made in the Bible, it provides sufficient evidence from a historical perspective to suggest that 'Jesus' actually existed. (His name of course has been romanized from the original Yeshua or Joshua, hence the quotes.)
I think they will find, when they finally get around to selling such a box, that there is a far bigger market for it than there is for Tivos with their expensive subscriptions.
I want a glorified VCR. I don't care if the box can go and find programs for me. I can pick which shows I want to record just fine on my own. All I want is a self-contained box that costs a couple hundred bucks, that will let me rewind and pause 'live' TV, and record shows at will without paying a subscription fee. Oh yeah, it should also replace my digital cable box (but I still don't want to pay a monthly rental/subscription fee for it.)
he sticker being discussed does nothing to establish any religion, nor does it prevent anyone from the free exercise of the religion of their choice. Thus, it falls well within constitutional limits, and certainly does not violate any fabricated "separation" requirement.
You might be right here. The court apparently felt otherwise, but of course you are arguing that the court was wrong.
In fact, I'd say that the sticker is mandatory, to help prevent the establishment of the religion known as Evolution -- which is not just "species change" as someone else wrote, but that "species change into other species and that is how humans came to exist". Yes, the latter "evolution" is just as much a religion as anything else, since nobody saw how humans came to exist and thus "faith in things not seen" is exactly what "evolutionists" have.
Here I have to disagree. Evolution is simply not a religion so your argument does not apply. Besides this, though, a science textbook should explain currently accepted scientific theories, and nothing else. At present, evolution is the only scientific theory for the development of life on Earth, and therefore it is the only theory which should appear in a book which is to be used in a science classroom.
Science does not necessarily depend on someone personally observing the effect described by the theory. We depend on all kinds of indirect evidence of things that we can never personally see. You can't see electricity flowing in a wire, but you can see the evidence that it is doing so when your light turns on. You can't 'see' gravity, but you can see its effect on a falling object and infer that it is the same force that compels the planets to move in their orbits. In the same way, we can observe the distributions of species in the natural world, the details of their genetic codes, and the fossil evidence of past species, and infer with some certainty that new species have evolved from previous ones. We also have observed several instances of new species appearing through evolution. The fact that species evolve from other species is not really disputable by any honest and intelligent person at this point. The details of how this occurs, of course, are still open to debate.
Slashdot Mirror
At least, I hope not.
I'm assuming it's similar to the difference between an ordinary residential dimmer switch and a variac. The dimmer switch is small and cheap, but it wastes energy. If you turn the lights down you consume less power at the bulb, but you waste a lot in the dimmer switch (it heats up). A variac is much larger, but can reduce AC voltage with little waste. (There are of course other ways to do this.)
I'm no fan of AOL, but to be fair I suspect this whole fiasco was a mistake rather than some evil plan to 0wn everyone's private communications. Some lawyer wrote a paragraph without really thinking it through, and it ended up being broader than intended. Everyone else at AOL who reviewed the terms of service read it as applying to public postings (as intended), and it didn't occur to them that the text could be interpreted as applying to private conversations as well.
This is a really stupid argument. It is simply not the case that anything you cannot prove to be true is automatically false. This line of argument has no merit whatsoever, and adds no insight to the question of whether or not the election was 'stolen'.
Personally, I don't really think the election was stolen, but I am very concerned about the potential for fraud in elections with the current generation of touch-screen machines. It is pretty much guaranteed that if we keep using such flawed machines, sooner or later there will be an election that is thrown by electoral fraud. I would like to see this problem fixed in advance.
I do know that what the credit card companies do to send out those offers doesn't count as a 'credit check'. It's important that it doesn't: every time a lender checks your credit, it lowers your credit score slightly. This is intended to prevent people from taking out too many loans, credit cards, etc., and also to discourage you from shopping around too much for the best deal on credit. When they send out prescreened offers, the credit card companies just get a list of people with 'good' credit, they don't get an actual credit report.
If you don't like getting 20 credit card offers per week, you can call 1-888-5-OPTOUT (567-8688). By going through the automated system at that number, you tell the major credit agencies to stop giving out your info for prescreened credit card offers. It works well. I get very few of these now. More info on the FTC website
Of course, you have to pay the credit agency if you want to check your report twice a year. Quite a scam.
The thing is, though, that EBay is doing the bidder a favor by allowing him/her to hold the high bid despite not being ahead of the next lower bid by at least a full bid increment. If their current policy is not acceptable, the obvious solution is to change the rules so that your maximum bid must be at least a full bid increment above the next lower bid for you to retain the 'high bid' position. If you entered a maximum of $111 it would be treated as a maximum of $110, because that is the highest on-increment bid you can make within your maximum.
Oops, yes, I missed the 'hybrid' part. Is that actually practical with today's technology? You would have to carry the weight of both the batteries needed to run the car, and the gas generator or fuel cell to provide backup power. It's hard to believe that such a vehicle could be as energy efficient as a Prius-type gas/electric hybrid.
Well, yeah. If you're running low on 'juice', you have to find someplace to plug in your car and then wait, oh, about twelve hours. Not exactly convenient if you're on your way somewhere.
Also, the energy comes from fossil fuels anyway, at least in most parts of the U.S. Until we start building more nuclear plants electric vehicles are not exactly a fossil fuel-free solution.
Note also that the Bean itself has not been 'offered for sale or other distribution to the public', despite possibly being owned by the city. If they sell souvenir copies of The Bean, you would be free to take photographs of those for advertisements or commentaries, but only if you can convince the Court that your souvenir copy of the Bean is a 'useful article'. You also have to be using the photo for an advertisement or commentary related to the distribution of the souvenir Beans, or in a news report.
That doesn't seem like such a big problem. I mean, if you are missing an arm and they could give you a brain-controlled robotic one to replace it, wouldn't you be willing to go for it? (Assuming of course, that this had been thoroughly researched and proven to be safe, first.)
Not really. You don't do any kind of experiment on humans unless you really have to. Even simple non-invasive experiments on humans require extensive preapproval through ethics committees, at many research institutions. Animal experiments are much easier to get approval for.
Well, I'm really glad I read about this on Amazon last week. I was about to buy Quicken, since it's almost free if you're buying Turbo Tax. I knew Intuit was Evil, but this was just too evil for me: they lost the sale and I'm sticking with Microsoft Money. It's a sad day when Microsoft is the lesser of two evils...
Where many of Gauvin's points seemed 'false' was through misdirection rather than outright falsehood. He frequently seems to sneer at things that cannot be proven, implying that anything that cannot be proven must be false (a logical error). He makes too much of discrepancies between the scriptures. I suspect his claim that the dates of the gospels have been made to be as early as possible is false, but I am not an expert on that. I believe his complaint about the gospels having been written in Greek rather than Aramaic is misguided, in that (I believe) Greek was the common language of scholarly writing at that time, much as Latin was for several centuries in Europe. A lot more people could read Greek than could read Aramaic, certainly. I found his skepticism about the Romans crucifying Jesus unconvincing: I think he has an overly rosy picture of the Roman empire at that time. His comments about the icon of the lamb on the cross seemed misplaced. Symbolism plays an important role in religious art. His points about the things Paul does not mention are very interesting. I'll have to reread the Letters and look for that. He errs though in repeatedly claiming that Paul did not know about anything he didn't mention in his letters. This just does not follow. He seems to misrepresent statements by religous scholars about Paul and about Nazareth by taking their comments out of context and by putting words into their mouths. (I'm not familiar with the original statements, but that's how it looks...) Finally, many of his points, if logically followed, do not really bear on the simple question of whether Jesus lived, in the sense of there having been a real person on whom the gospels were based. Rather, they bear on the question of whether Jesus existed as pictured by modern Christians. Personally, I am a Christian. I am also a scientist, and prefer to approach things rationally. I don't doubt that if we could go back in time and see Jesus, we would find him much different than we expect. The people of his day didn't get the Messiah they were expecting either. Such is life.
The article you referred to is interesting. He makes some good points, and some that I think are false. Overall, it seems to me like he has an axe to grind: the tone of the article seems quite biased. In particular, he seems to assume that lack of proof that Jesus lived is proof that he didn't. Taking his approach to history, I think we would have to conclude that many historical figures from more than a millenium ago never existed. After all, all we know of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates comes from copies of copies of copies of works that were translated and transcribed by foreigners from originals that are now lost. I don't think Mr. Gauvin's reasoning leads to a viable, rational approach to ancient history. It's reasonable to suppose that a collection of ancient documents written around a hundred years after the events they describe may contain distortions of the facts, and probably even serious distortions in the case of religious texts. It doesn't seem very rational though to suggest that rather than just being a distorted account of what happened instead everything was just made up from scratch. The balance of probability seems to me to point more toward there being at least a kernal of truth in the stories.
I did a bit of googling on Gauvin (skimming mostly). It doesn't look like he has any academic credentials. There is an interesting biography of him at the University of Manitoba Library. It doesn't look to me like he is a good example of how to apply unbiased rational thought to an issue.
It probably is actually better for someone who is just learning to use a keyboard (by hunt and peck) for the first time. It's possible that with equivalent amounts of practice one could hunt and peck just as fast on this new keyboard as on a QWERTY keyboard. I don't think these are sufficient reason to replace the conventional keyboard, but it might actually be useful on a computer designed for small children, for example. The Fisher Price color scheme just adds to the overall effect.
There are extant gospels according to Peter, Thomas, another guy named Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and a few others I don't know off the top of my head. These are all ancient documents, and in at least some cases multiple ancient copies have survived. From a scholarly point of view, of course, their existence is not evidence for the truth of Christian doctrine as a whole, but they are certainly good enough evidence of the existence of the teacher we know as Jesus. I think it's fair to say that we have about as much valid, historical evidence of the mere existence of Jesus as we do about any other historical figure from two millenia ago.
Actually, that's not true. There are at least half a dozen other ancient 'gospels' besides the ones that made it into the Bible. You're free of course to doubt their religious content and their accuracy, but from a historical perspective all of these documents need to be evaluated the same way a historian would evaluate any other set of ancient religious documents. While being skeptical about the details, if you have a bunch of religious documents that talk about a great religious leader, it's pretty reasonable to conclude that there actually was a religious leader at that time, even though you may think that the details of his life may have been exaggerated. I have no doubt, for example, that the person known as 'Buddha' actually existed. I doubt much of what has been written about him, but his teachings are too influential and too well documented to assume that he is a total fabrication.
Actually, probably not. The gospels weren't written in the language Jesus spoke, and his name got 'Latinized' when they wrote down his story. 'Joshua' is probably closer to what he was actually called, and yes Joshua was a common name in that part of the world at that time.
Actually, I don't believe we can currently see anything quite that far away. The estimates of the Universe's age are based on things much closer than that (but still perhaps a few billion light years away). The fact is that nearly everything we can see is moving away from us, except for stuff in our own galaxy of course.
One example of the evidence, just off the top of my head: the Sun stretches the space around it. It is in fact this distortion of space that causes the Earth to go around the Sun (we call it 'gravity'). While there are other theories that can explain why the Earth goes around the Sun (such as Newton's now-abandoned Theory of Gravity), there is no other workable theory that can explain why the Sun bends light that passes by it. General Relativity not only predicts this, but shows us how to calculate exactly how much the light will be bent. The light, in fact, travels in a straight line but the space it travels through is stretched by the Sun and we perceive it as a slight bend in the light's path.
By the way, for other reasons it is well known in modern physics that no space is truly empty. Even a perfect vacuum is filled with a flux of so-called 'virtual' particles, which are spontaneously created and destroyed. These have a measurable effect on the properties of space.
That said, I don't think serious scholars doubt that the person we call 'Jesus' actually existed. From a historical point of view, the Bible shouldn't be given any more weight than any other religious document of similar age, but it shouldn't be given less weight either. While it's reasonable to doubt the religious claims made in the Bible, it provides sufficient evidence from a historical perspective to suggest that 'Jesus' actually existed. (His name of course has been romanized from the original Yeshua or Joshua, hence the quotes.)
I think they will find, when they finally get around to selling such a box, that there is a far bigger market for it than there is for Tivos with their expensive subscriptions.
I want a glorified VCR. I don't care if the box can go and find programs for me. I can pick which shows I want to record just fine on my own. All I want is a self-contained box that costs a couple hundred bucks, that will let me rewind and pause 'live' TV, and record shows at will without paying a subscription fee. Oh yeah, it should also replace my digital cable box (but I still don't want to pay a monthly rental/subscription fee for it.)
You might be right here. The court apparently felt otherwise, but of course you are arguing that the court was wrong.
In fact, I'd say that the sticker is mandatory, to help prevent the establishment of the religion known as Evolution -- which is not just "species change" as someone else wrote, but that "species change into other species and that is how humans came to exist". Yes, the latter "evolution" is just as much a religion as anything else, since nobody saw how humans came to exist and thus "faith in things not seen" is exactly what "evolutionists" have.
Here I have to disagree. Evolution is simply not a religion so your argument does not apply. Besides this, though, a science textbook should explain currently accepted scientific theories, and nothing else. At present, evolution is the only scientific theory for the development of life on Earth, and therefore it is the only theory which should appear in a book which is to be used in a science classroom.
Science does not necessarily depend on someone personally observing the effect described by the theory. We depend on all kinds of indirect evidence of things that we can never personally see. You can't see electricity flowing in a wire, but you can see the evidence that it is doing so when your light turns on. You can't 'see' gravity, but you can see its effect on a falling object and infer that it is the same force that compels the planets to move in their orbits. In the same way, we can observe the distributions of species in the natural world, the details of their genetic codes, and the fossil evidence of past species, and infer with some certainty that new species have evolved from previous ones. We also have observed several instances of new species appearing through evolution. The fact that species evolve from other species is not really disputable by any honest and intelligent person at this point. The details of how this occurs, of course, are still open to debate.