What many of these HR types look at as a first criterion for consideration is your GPA. When they run their filter on GPAs, a 2.3 will get you disqualified before they ever see your list of 15 publications
If you are a grad student and have 15 publications, just leave your GPA off the resume. If they really want it then you can provide it upon request. Treat your resume like an experienced worker in the field. If you've been publishing so much, you probably have other experience that wasn't published. Putting a clear weakness like GPA will remove the focusing from your strength, considerable experience in the field.
Something else important is experience that isn't purely theoretical. Working on a solar car, robots, or other "real-world" project that are cross-discipline will really stand out. It's one thing to program an AI for a research paper, it's quite another to make decisions designing one for a tangible application and interact with different types of engineers on a team.
My point is that a good manager will let the engineers make the technical decisions that they are better qualified to make, such as what programming languages, databases, or other software components to use for a given project.
Many times these technical decisions are made by the customer. It's the manager's responsibility to convince the customer to change their requirements, or to adequately resource the engineering team to allow them to deal with such boundary conditions. It is therefore essential for the manager to have a firm technical grasp and understand the consequences of customer requirements as well as their team's technical ability.
A good manager doesn't necessarily need to be knowledgeable about technology; they need to trust the engineers working for them to make correct decisions.
A manager isn't just somebody who rubber stamps what the people under them want. A good manager needs to understand technical and business concerns so they can make knowledgeable decisions and compromises; not to mention it helps them intelligently explain the reasoning behind decisions.
Management comes down to deciding the most efficient use of limited resources. Engineers are focused on accomplishing a goal, marketing is focused on sales, and accounting is focused on maximizing profits. Balancing those three sometimes conflicting interests is the responsibility of management.
If marketing says they need a product in 6 months, engineering says it will take 8 months, and accounting says no overtime - the management needs to figure out the best compromises. A good manager will not tell engineers to get it done in 6 months, they will negotiate with marketing to determine the critical requirements that can realistically be delivered in the time frame and/or work with accounting to allow overtime or spend extra money to accomplish the needs on schedule.
Understanding, clear communication, and decision making are essential to good management. Unfortunately, like any other job function, there are poor managers out there that don't understand what they are tasked with. At best this make everybody work harder, at worst they run the company into the ground.
Perhaps in my lifetime, it'll be politically feasible for an atheist to hold an elected office.
As an Agnostic, I am looking forward to the day when religious belief or non-belief is politically irrelavent
Re:Sorry, but I have to consider the source
on
UN Attacks Free Speech
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In other news, as I've been saying for years now, religion breeds terrorism. Being a peaceful, tolerant religious person doesn't negate that, or change it. And ignoring that fact simply lets it run rampant. Making laws to let religious intolerance run rampant is equivalent to committing violence in the name of religion.
In other news, any idealism breeds terrorism. Environmentalists, communists, capitalists, states rights, anti-slavery, unioinists, etc. etc. Whenever people believe in an idea strongly enough they will kill and destroy to protect it.
Most DRM'd data would be useless to future civilizations even if it didn't have DRM. Most information, especially commercial information, isn't that interesting from a historical perspective.
Multiplication tables are a technique The "rules" of writing are techniques The US Civil War dates are a trivial fact, more important is to understand the political and economic factors leading to the war (state's rights, agrarian south vs industrial north, etc) The sun is a star is a fact - but again it's pretty trivial. Astronomy should be part of a larger science class that teaches understanding of the scientific method, data gathering and analysis
One of the problems with US education is that it has become too focused on facts and not learning. Memorizing a huge set of facts is great for passing a standardized test, but it doesn't provide the foundation for gathering your own facts (other than having them drilled into you)
The other part is "What do you want?" If you have a family you'll probably want stability and time. Meanwhile some jobs attract younger employees because they require long hours at the office and travel. If you're 20 and single, you probably would jump at the chance if the boss asks you to fly out to India next weekend and stay for 3 weeks. Meanwhile somebody older with a family probably wouldn't appreciate such "opportunities."
While it may appear as ageism, often it's just a reflection of how people's needs change as they age. There are plenty of CS jobs for all ages and types of experience.
Unfortunately they overplayed the significance of "mitochondiral Eve" to set a time which doesn't make as much sense. There would likely be an older "Eve" from the earthling side of the family, not to mention Athena would be "Eve" if they found her remains.
Do school officials get to cherry pick which parts of the Constitution they can violate?
It could be argued the school officials are acting in the capacity of a caregiver, so Constitutional protections could be significantly reduced.
They get to violate a student's free exercise of religion on the grounds that one cannot distinguish between congress making laws and school officials "permitting" references to Christian dieties.
Depends on the impact. Again school officials are charged with care of children, not just educating them. Individual exercise can be allowed, but disruptive religious demonstrations, just like a disruptive gang, or impromtu party can be stopped.
All that said, there should be a very clear school policy which grants protections as invasiveness escalates. Detention shouldn't require a review, suspensions should have some review process, something like a strip search begs to have guardian approval as well as the involvement of trained law enforcement officials.
The federal government of the US was not meant to represent the individual citizens. The electoral college gave power to elect the president to the state legislatures, and was not necessarily intended to have the average man vote. States could have the first X number of callers to 555-vote be the electors. The first presidential elections had a number of states appoint the electors without general voting. The electoral college system was notorious for inspiring shady backroom deals at both the federal and state legislature levels. Such corruption was not a completely unintended consequence, but rather some of the founders believed in the superiority of the wealthy elite over the common rabble.
The founders of the US were not a group of single-minded idealists; there was no clear "intention of the founders." They were an assortment of intelligent statesmen, white-collar criminals, military leaders, international playboys, and business men. Even immediately after being ratified there were arguments about what was and was not Constitutional - thus giving us the legacy of the two-party system It's important that we not just look at the words of the Constitution which represents the end state of their compromises, but also look at the philosophical debates from which the document was constructed. Too often today we have Constitutional fundamentalism, where people apply their own rigid meaning to the founding document without really investigating the ideas that went into it.
"Dirty Hands," "Black Market," and a couple other episodes in the series try to deal with the common man's problems, but they were aired so long ago they don't resonate to help make the leave-it-all-behind ending work.
So instead of continuing to bash aspects of something written over 200 years ago, that have provided more opportunities and freedoms than anything else from that time period, why don't you attack those that are trying to destroy it and take away those hard won freedoms?
The Constitution is a great document, but I think it's important that we don't forget the underlying special interests that were at play. To idealize a document and ignore its shortcomings means that we truly do not understand the principles which founded the nation.
We quickly bash anybody in government influenced by the RIAA agenda, but we hand wave away the influences of slave owners on the early country. I can ignore the morality of slavery as a part of the times, but the Constitution has provisions blatantly protecting the political and economic aspects of such practice. It would be akin to having lobbyists get a seat in house and including the DMCA in as part of the Constitution.
The same applies for the wealthy elite. Should we accept lobbyists and corporate campaign contributions as just "appropriate for the time." The electoral college delegates and senators were both appointed by the state legislatures. This almost always meant appointees were rich & influential citizens of the state. Today we would consider such a system as begging for corruption (just look at the filling of the Illinois senate seat)
Ahhh, Ron Paul believes the same things as the Founders believed, like individual liberty and a constitutionally-limited government, and the Founders were a bunch of nuts./end sarcasm
Ron Paul is like which founders? The ones who were against the Bill of Rights? Protected slavery? Believed that we needed a group of nobles to prevent the rabble from voting the wealth to themselves? The founders had a variety of views, not unlike politics today. Jefferson & Hamilton particularly demonstrated very different interpretations of Constitutional powers.
Hell...the founding fathers knew this. They had problems with corruption right at the start. That's why the constitution has so many limits on the power of government. Limits that are just blatantly ignored today. The constitution has been under non-stop assault for decades now as the jackals in DC chip away at the protections in it.
Hope you realize that the Constitution itself was designed in part by corruption. Importation of slaves & three-fifths rule for southern plantation owners, electoral college and senate for the wealthy aristocracy, and the Bill of Rights really only applied to white males. Corruption is the file-sharing of politics; doesn't matter how hard you try, you can't stop it.
These are all things that would be made infinitely more plausible with scrap metal to get them through the first couple years to self-sufficiency.
They were dropped off in areas sustaining earthling hunter/gatherers. Presumably these places had enough freely available food and stability in climate that things like pottery, farming, or any of those other basic techs would not be necessary for survival.
Everyone lives within their technological milieu. Let's presume Baltar has seeds -- and lets hope they're not hybrids as those are often sterile. His farming experience certainly involved tractors, tools, fertilizers, perhaps pesticides, soil characteristics of his home world.
The "soil characteristics" is a good point, but I can suspend disbelief given that the native earthlings evolved so similarly that I would suspect all the life on earth would be similar to the colonies. Any one who is a farmer, and not just a tractor driver would have a deep knowledge of the fundamentals of farming. Tractors, fertilizers, pesticides - those are all efficiency technologies used to support huge populations. Somebody with farming knowledge would understand how to evaluate the soil, find plants to domesticate, use sticks to plow the land, use animal droppings to enhance the soil, etc. Again, it's important to note that the colonists (except the chief) were being dropped in fertile areas which were capable of sustaining hunter/gatherers. Rudimentary survival skills would be enough to sustain life.
I even built and fire a high temperature kiln based on 1500 year old technology: "anagama". The task would be incredibly daunting to find suitable clay and then dig it up.
You were building a high temperature kiln, while early tools could be made by smelting low temperature metals like copper with a well designed hole in the ground.
You people are underestimating the amazing amount of work we get from fossil fuel burning equipment, electrical equipment, or even simple human powered metal tools. Even if you manage to build the infrastructure, the energy requirements to smelt metal or make pottery are amazingly large. You only get to expend that energy after you have enough food to survive and have free time to work on other things. Knowledge is good, but without energy to put it to work and food to keep you alive, it is unlikely to prove of much value.
You underestimate the resources and time available to people. First, unless they were truly suicidal, they would have settled in fertile areas, good soil, climate, water, and trees. In such areas they would have been able to sustain themselves hunting, fishing and farming with wooden tools. This would give them plenty of time to do things like dig clay, and explore the rocks. There is a lot of free time when you don't have the internet to keep you entertained:)
Sorry for the second reply, but the more I think about it the less I like the 150,000 years and really wish it had been 10,000 years
Take the smartest most adept computer engineer in the world, put him/her out in the woods with a set of clothes, a tent, and a pocket knife. Call me when he returns with a functioning computer.
A good computer engineer would come up with something like an abacus, simple enough to make with his tech and useful for the types of problems they would face.
The more I think about what the colonials would have brought in their heads, the more I think early civilization would have made the perfect landing time. They would have brought the ideas of Farming, writing, math, building houses, organization, etc. all of which occur around the same time period. It also would have been easier for them to approach and interbreed with earthlings who were at nearly the same stage of technological development.
Take the smartest most adept metalurgical expert, put him/her out in the woods with a set of clothes, a tent, a pocket knife, and one friend. Call me when they manage to find enough ore, which they can dig out in sufficient quantity with sticks, to blast into metal which they can then work into a simple thing like a spoon.
A good metallurgist would have enough geology, pottery, & processing knowledge to do this. Metallurgy is an ancient practice.
The fact is, they needed the remnants to get a start on what they'd need to learn to survive. Throwing it away means most won't survive. In essence, it was a stupid and suicidal ending
Not necessarily. They could have pulled the simple tools like boxes, axes, shovels, etc, and been trained in basic survival, fishing, hunting, and farming before being loosed into the world.
Perhaps they should recall that our ancestors lived short, brutal lives, and they grew up with the skills to survive in that environment; our heroes have no idea how to hunt a buffalo with a spear, clean it, skin it, and preserve the meat for the winter. Just think of this little inconvenience: No salt, no pepper, no spices; no vitamins! When the first drought -- or the locusts, or neighboring tribe or a pack of baboons -- comes and they run out of food, and half of them die off, it won't seem like such a good idea. When people start dying from simple infections because there are no antibiotics, when women start dying in childbirth, when most children don't survive to adulthood, when the leading killer becomes starvation instead of obesity, they may remember the benefits of technology. Sure, we can close our eyes to all these problems, but couldn't the writers have made an effort to tell a story with some plausibility?
Remember the lives they lived aboard the ships. Almost half of the original survivors were dead. Civilians lived in castes tied to their ship and essentially powerless about their destiny. They lived as prisoners of technology. After a few years of that existence, many average people would like to return to a simpler life. To be truly free and farm, fish, feel the grass on their feet and warmth of the sun. Such rejection of technology is not unprecedented.
"You know it doesn't like that name" One of the themes of the show is that there is an invisible hand at work, and it's up to the viewer to decide whether it be God, the Gods, space monsters, or something else.
You make the mistake of thinking that "technology" means computers etc. Technology also includes shovels, food storage receptacles, cloth, etc. etc. They've gone and chucked everything.
I'm not convinced they chucked absolutely everything; they got rid of the "ships, equipment, etc." but did keep things like language, farming and hunting techniques (Baltar, Helo), organization - all the "best" parts of colonial. Likely the colonists would have had basic provisions like shovels to live a simple agrarian existence.
This is one of the reasons it would have made more sense for them to land 10,000 years ago. It would have fit better in terms of the neolithic revolution and emergence of civilization around the world - and played a nice homage to the original series which mentions the Egyptians, Mayans, pyramid building, etc. Even Atlantis could have been a sect that didn't completely give up technology.
And the pieces of the ships would have immense value while figuring out how to survive. They could act as shelter while they learn how to build things from wood and grass.
The "throw it all in the sun" bit was suicide, not a wise or reasoned choice.
While reasonable they could use the ships as shelters, they would always serve as symbols and temptation to return to the old ways. Sending the ships into the sun meant there was no way back (ala Cortes). Symbolism often trumps reason. Again, they probably grabbed the usable simple scraps like boxes, cots, and metal tubing from the ships before sending the pinnacles of their technology into the sun.
Yeah. But why would one willingly choose a short, dirty, uncomfortable existence in which you play immune system roulette?
Because the alternative was a short, dirty, uncomfortable, powerless existence inside a tin can where you play jump roulette. The common civilian spent their lives huddled on cots, and served as slaves to the technology that kept them alive. There would be a great sense of freedom to make your own life apart from the caste of fixing computers, processing fuel, and eating algae all day.
It is clear that they all died out without reproducing if Hera is considered M. Eve.
No, Hera is just the only one with a direct maternal linage. Other human/human-cylon bloodlines could exist
To my mind, the really interesting question is why the universe is so damn mathematical. It's not just that we can measure things, but that things follow mathematical laws so exactly.
The universe isn't "mathematical," it's just consistent. A consistent system can be modeled mathematically.
I agree with a previous poster, Agnosticism makes the most sense. Given the possibility of infinite parallel universes, some which may not follow the same laws of physics; there is a possibility that a god-like being (at least with such power over our universe) would arise. Of course it begs the question on the definition of "God." Would a being that has total knowledge and power over our universe qualify; or does "God" also need to control the superset in which it exists?
Slashdot Mirror
If you are a grad student and have 15 publications, just leave your GPA off the resume. If they really want it then you can provide it upon request.
Treat your resume like an experienced worker in the field. If you've been publishing so much, you probably have other experience that wasn't published. Putting a clear weakness like GPA will remove the focusing from your strength, considerable experience in the field.
Something else important is experience that isn't purely theoretical. Working on a solar car, robots, or other "real-world" project that are cross-discipline will really stand out. It's one thing to program an AI for a research paper, it's quite another to make decisions designing one for a tangible application and interact with different types of engineers on a team.
Many times these technical decisions are made by the customer. It's the manager's responsibility to convince the customer to change their requirements, or to adequately resource the engineering team to allow them to deal with such boundary conditions. It is therefore essential for the manager to have a firm technical grasp and understand the consequences of customer requirements as well as their team's technical ability.
A manager isn't just somebody who rubber stamps what the people under them want. A good manager needs to understand technical and business concerns so they can make knowledgeable decisions and compromises; not to mention it helps them intelligently explain the reasoning behind decisions.
Management comes down to deciding the most efficient use of limited resources. Engineers are focused on accomplishing a goal, marketing is focused on sales, and accounting is focused on maximizing profits. Balancing those three sometimes conflicting interests is the responsibility of management.
If marketing says they need a product in 6 months, engineering says it will take 8 months, and accounting says no overtime - the management needs to figure out the best compromises. A good manager will not tell engineers to get it done in 6 months, they will negotiate with marketing to determine the critical requirements that can realistically be delivered in the time frame and/or work with accounting to allow overtime or spend extra money to accomplish the needs on schedule.
Understanding, clear communication, and decision making are essential to good management. Unfortunately, like any other job function, there are poor managers out there that don't understand what they are tasked with. At best this make everybody work harder, at worst they run the company into the ground.
As an Agnostic, I am looking forward to the day when religious belief or non-belief is politically irrelavent
In other news, any idealism breeds terrorism.
Environmentalists, communists, capitalists, states rights, anti-slavery, unioinists, etc. etc.
Whenever people believe in an idea strongly enough they will kill and destroy to protect it.
Most DRM'd data would be useless to future civilizations even if it didn't have DRM. Most information, especially commercial information, isn't that interesting from a historical perspective.
Multiplication tables are a technique
The "rules" of writing are techniques
The US Civil War dates are a trivial fact, more important is to understand the political and economic factors leading to the war (state's rights, agrarian south vs industrial north, etc)
The sun is a star is a fact - but again it's pretty trivial. Astronomy should be part of a larger science class that teaches understanding of the scientific method, data gathering and analysis
One of the problems with US education is that it has become too focused on facts and not learning. Memorizing a huge set of facts is great for passing a standardized test, but it doesn't provide the foundation for gathering your own facts (other than having them drilled into you)
The other part is "What do you want?"
If you have a family you'll probably want stability and time. Meanwhile some jobs attract younger employees because they require long hours at the office and travel.
If you're 20 and single, you probably would jump at the chance if the boss asks you to fly out to India next weekend and stay for 3 weeks. Meanwhile somebody older with a family probably wouldn't appreciate such "opportunities."
While it may appear as ageism, often it's just a reflection of how people's needs change as they age. There are plenty of CS jobs for all ages and types of experience.
Unfortunately they overplayed the significance of "mitochondiral Eve" to set a time which doesn't make as much sense.
There would likely be an older "Eve" from the earthling side of the family, not to mention Athena would be "Eve" if they found her remains.
It could be argued the school officials are acting in the capacity of a caregiver, so Constitutional protections could be significantly reduced.
Depends on the impact. Again school officials are charged with care of children, not just educating them. Individual exercise can be allowed, but disruptive religious demonstrations, just like a disruptive gang, or impromtu party can be stopped.
All that said, there should be a very clear school policy which grants protections as invasiveness escalates. Detention shouldn't require a review, suspensions should have some review process, something like a strip search begs to have guardian approval as well as the involvement of trained law enforcement officials.
The federal government of the US was not meant to represent the individual citizens. The electoral college gave power to elect the president to the state legislatures, and was not necessarily intended to have the average man vote. States could have the first X number of callers to 555-vote be the electors. The first presidential elections had a number of states appoint the electors without general voting.
The electoral college system was notorious for inspiring shady backroom deals at both the federal and state legislature levels. Such corruption was not a completely unintended consequence, but rather some of the founders believed in the superiority of the wealthy elite over the common rabble.
The founders of the US were not a group of single-minded idealists; there was no clear "intention of the founders." They were an assortment of intelligent statesmen, white-collar criminals, military leaders, international playboys, and business men. Even immediately after being ratified there were arguments about what was and was not Constitutional - thus giving us the legacy of the two-party system
It's important that we not just look at the words of the Constitution which represents the end state of their compromises, but also look at the philosophical debates from which the document was constructed. Too often today we have Constitutional fundamentalism, where people apply their own rigid meaning to the founding document without really investigating the ideas that went into it.
"Dirty Hands," "Black Market," and a couple other episodes in the series try to deal with the common man's problems, but they were aired so long ago they don't resonate to help make the leave-it-all-behind ending work.
The Constitution is a great document, but I think it's important that we don't forget the underlying special interests that were at play. To idealize a document and ignore its shortcomings means that we truly do not understand the principles which founded the nation.
We quickly bash anybody in government influenced by the RIAA agenda, but we hand wave away the influences of slave owners on the early country. I can ignore the morality of slavery as a part of the times, but the Constitution has provisions blatantly protecting the political and economic aspects of such practice. It would be akin to having lobbyists get a seat in house and including the DMCA in as part of the Constitution.
The same applies for the wealthy elite. Should we accept lobbyists and corporate campaign contributions as just "appropriate for the time." The electoral college delegates and senators were both appointed by the state legislatures. This almost always meant appointees were rich & influential citizens of the state. Today we would consider such a system as begging for corruption (just look at the filling of the Illinois senate seat)
Ron Paul is like which founders? The ones who were against the Bill of Rights? Protected slavery? Believed that we needed a group of nobles to prevent the rabble from voting the wealth to themselves?
The founders had a variety of views, not unlike politics today. Jefferson & Hamilton particularly demonstrated very different interpretations of Constitutional powers.
Hope you realize that the Constitution itself was designed in part by corruption. Importation of slaves & three-fifths rule for southern plantation owners, electoral college and senate for the wealthy aristocracy, and the Bill of Rights really only applied to white males.
Corruption is the file-sharing of politics; doesn't matter how hard you try, you can't stop it.
They were dropped off in areas sustaining earthling hunter/gatherers.
Presumably these places had enough freely available food and stability in climate that things like pottery, farming, or any of those other basic techs would not be necessary for survival.
The "soil characteristics" is a good point, but I can suspend disbelief given that the native earthlings evolved so similarly that I would suspect all the life on earth would be similar to the colonies.
Any one who is a farmer, and not just a tractor driver would have a deep knowledge of the fundamentals of farming. Tractors, fertilizers, pesticides - those are all efficiency technologies used to support huge populations.
Somebody with farming knowledge would understand how to evaluate the soil, find plants to domesticate, use sticks to plow the land, use animal droppings to enhance the soil, etc.
Again, it's important to note that the colonists (except the chief) were being dropped in fertile areas which were capable of sustaining hunter/gatherers. Rudimentary survival skills would be enough to sustain life.
You were building a high temperature kiln, while early tools could be made by smelting low temperature metals like copper with a well designed hole in the ground.
You underestimate the resources and time available to people. :)
First, unless they were truly suicidal, they would have settled in fertile areas, good soil, climate, water, and trees. In such areas they would have been able to sustain themselves hunting, fishing and farming with wooden tools. This would give them plenty of time to do things like dig clay, and explore the rocks. There is a lot of free time when you don't have the internet to keep you entertained
A good computer engineer would come up with something like an abacus, simple enough to make with his tech and useful for the types of problems they would face.
The more I think about what the colonials would have brought in their heads, the more I think early civilization would have made the perfect landing time.
They would have brought the ideas of Farming, writing, math, building houses, organization, etc. all of which occur around the same time period.
It also would have been easier for them to approach and interbreed with earthlings who were at nearly the same stage of technological development.
A good metallurgist would have enough geology, pottery, & processing knowledge to do this. Metallurgy is an ancient practice.
Not necessarily. They could have pulled the simple tools like boxes, axes, shovels, etc, and been trained in basic survival, fishing, hunting, and farming before being loosed into the world.
Remember the lives they lived aboard the ships. Almost half of the original survivors were dead. Civilians lived in castes tied to their ship and essentially powerless about their destiny. They lived as prisoners of technology. After a few years of that existence, many average people would like to return to a simpler life. To be truly free and farm, fish, feel the grass on their feet and warmth of the sun.
Such rejection of technology is not unprecedented.
"You know it doesn't like that name"
One of the themes of the show is that there is an invisible hand at work, and it's up to the viewer to decide whether it be God, the Gods, space monsters, or something else.
I'm not convinced they chucked absolutely everything; they got rid of the "ships, equipment, etc." but did keep things like language, farming and hunting techniques (Baltar, Helo), organization - all the "best" parts of colonial. Likely the colonists would have had basic provisions like shovels to live a simple agrarian existence.
This is one of the reasons it would have made more sense for them to land 10,000 years ago. It would have fit better in terms of the neolithic revolution and emergence of civilization around the world - and played a nice homage to the original series which mentions the Egyptians, Mayans, pyramid building, etc. Even Atlantis could have been a sect that didn't completely give up technology.
While reasonable they could use the ships as shelters, they would always serve as symbols and temptation to return to the old ways. Sending the ships into the sun meant there was no way back (ala Cortes). Symbolism often trumps reason. Again, they probably grabbed the usable simple scraps like boxes, cots, and metal tubing from the ships before sending the pinnacles of their technology into the sun.
Because the alternative was a short, dirty, uncomfortable, powerless existence inside a tin can where you play jump roulette.
The common civilian spent their lives huddled on cots, and served as slaves to the technology that kept them alive. There would be a great sense of freedom to make your own life apart from the caste of fixing computers, processing fuel, and eating algae all day.
No, Hera is just the only one with a direct maternal linage. Other human/human-cylon bloodlines could exist
The universe isn't "mathematical," it's just consistent. A consistent system can be modeled mathematically.
I agree with a previous poster, Agnosticism makes the most sense. Given the possibility of infinite parallel universes, some which may not follow the same laws of physics; there is a possibility that a god-like being (at least with such power over our universe) would arise. Of course it begs the question on the definition of "God." Would a being that has total knowledge and power over our universe qualify; or does "God" also need to control the superset in which it exists?