If a candidate were to say, "I don't think this stage in the development of the mammalian eye would be a survival advantage, I think it happened like this," or "Based on this particular fossil, I think the migration of this species happened differently, and perhaps it is not a direct descendant but a sibling of this other species," then of course they're not automatically a quack.
No candidate or layman would say that, though. Some might say "I don't see how evolution could create such complex things." I'm a bit suspect of them, because their view is based on personal incredulity, or perhaps deeply flawed analogies like "tornado plus junkyard equals jet". I would expect candidates to recognize when they don't know enough to make a good judgment, and to have critical thinking skills enough to recognize such misinformation.
I fear the candidates will not even bother with the above, and instead say something like "all viewpoints should be covered." When they say that, they mean "we should waste your money teaching your children to consider the idea that God created the world 6000 years ago in 7 days." That does make them quacks.
Well, if the creator wasn't supernatural, then who created him? If Roundup-ready corn was created by Monsanto, which was created by human scientists, who were created by aliens, who were created by other aliens, at some point you need a being who wasn't designed by another.
To avoid an infinite regress of designers, you either need a designer who exists outside of causality (and is thus supernatural), or a process by which inanimate material can become alive (abiogenesis) and eventually human (evolution).
Well, they taught me a hypothesis needed to be falsifiable, but I'll concede that for a moment.
The ID "hypothesis" lacks something else - predictive power. If God created life, what does that tell us about how life will change over time or react to it's environment?
Consider a three-year-old or prototype android who keeps repeating "why?". Eventually you'll give up and just say "because". Saying "God did it" is similar - it halts the line of inquiry. It's a dead end. It doesn't tell us anything useful.
When discussing gaps in the theory of evolution, it's important to distinguish between "does evolution happen" and "what evolved from what, when, and how fast." Science is unanimous that it happens, but the specifics are, and probably will forever be, still being researched, and so our understanding changes.
Here's a car analogy: suppose you're at the scene of an auto accident, and you point to some aspect that doesn't make sense. That's a gap in our understanding of how Newtonian physics led to the evidence we observe. And if scientists studied that crash, they would probably have different theories of how it happened, and those theories would change over time. But unless you were driving at a significant fraction of c, there won't be anything that contradicts Newtonian physics. Despite the gap you found, it's still appropriate to teach physics to our high-schoolers.
The same goes for evolution - the gaps are in the details, but the theory as a whole is very solid.
In a sense, the 16 bit instructions have been dropped, if only when running in 64-bit mode. Which is actually kind of annoying, because it means some of those old Windows 3 and DOS programs won't run without emulation.
Multiple pages are annoying, yes, but the biggest problem is the lack of links. When talking about technology, there's usually a relevant web site. Blogs will link to it, maybe adding some commentary of their own. But most journalism is written with the intent that you'll learn everything you want to know from the article itself, or other articles from the same source. Unfortunately I'm not sitting on a bench in the park in 1960 reading a newspaper, I'm on the internet, and if your site won't link to more information about the subject at hand, I'll go somewhere that will. And I don't just mean links to related stories - I want links to other sites. I know it's scary, but don't worry, if your story is interesting, I'll open it in another tab, and I'll continue ignoring your ads when I close it.
While allowing lossy compression might end up with way better AI, there's a logistics problem: how do you give an objective score to the precision of 100M (that's 4.76 uLoC) of paraphrased text?
Grandparent didn't say UBMs can do anything UTMs can't. Just that they're a more natural abstraction. It's like the difference between lambda calculus and Turing machines. One could say Lambda calculus is better because the concept of functions is not readily apparent in UTMs. You might snarkily reply that one's an idiot because lambda calculus and UTMs are equivalent in what problems they can solve. But that's not the point. The point is, choosing one over the other makes some proofs easier and some proofs harder. That's also the sense in which forgetting math may have been useful - it's not that what we have learned isn't true, it's that had we chosen a different abstraction, we might have learned other, more useful things.
It seems to me the real problem is that the cookie namespace is unnecessarily shared between multiple tabs/windows. Why not have different tabs run in a completely separate process? Clicking links or opening tabs to the same domain would be kept in the same process, but everything else (searching, typing in addresses, clicking bookmarks, etc.) would open tabs in a new process, with none of the session information of wherever you were before. I bet this would also decrease lock contention, help with memory fragmentation, and improve performance and robustness. Why don't we do it?
I say it's equally unlikely for Santa Claus, unicorns, the Tooth Fairy, God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or anything else like that to have created the universe. The only reason you hear so much about the ludicrousness of God having done it, is that He has a better marketing department than most other Disney characters.
"Unknown" is the most scientifically valid standpoint. None of the rest are testable. "Nobody" is the most elegant, and the rest are arbitrary. "God" is simply the one you choose if you want to get elected.
The Bible is a big book. No matter how well tested a theory is, I don't become less skeptical of others that are merely in the same book.
The Bible has some historical truth, and contains (on selective reading) reasonable guidelines for living your life. You can demonstrate these truths, but doing so lends no credence to any particular creation myth, even the one in the introduction. And I bet if you'll look deeper, you'll see that the existence of God is also orthogonal to whatever truths you've found in the Bible.
At this point you can argue from Faith. But I said some of the Bible's guidelines are reasonable, not all. Not the ones that demand unconditional belief in themselves.
Hmm, even with direct evidence, abiogenesis would still be a theory. Science doesn't prove things, it makes models. However, there are many plausible theories for abiogenesis.
I'm not even going to ask you to show me examples of your god creating life in a test tube. But show me some evidence that he's affected our universe, in any way, ever, and I will lend some credence to your 'religion'.
The constancy of the laws of physics is not an assumption. Scientists believe it for the same reason they believe everything else: it's the theory that best explains the facts. Science does tend towards fixed models, but only because if the model changes, we try to make a new, more general, fixed model. So far that's always worked.
It's a difference in quantity, not in kind. Basically we had a critical mass of intelligence. We became just barely smart and social enough to gain knowledge faster than we lost it. So even though our society has attained far greater things than any other animal's, we're not really that much better. It's unlikely we're the only animals that aspire to be more than they are. We're just the only ones who could.
Well chickens don't have the tools to do those things. Would you really be surprised to see a chicken help another injured chicken? If you saw that, you might call it instinct, just a meaningless programmed behavior. But I say it's compassion. There's really no difference.
Why is it so horrible to be grouped with animals? Are they really such an abomination? Why must we invent a god to create us above them, and to deny the similarity? Being animals doesn't make our humanity any less great.
If all three SSMEs fail in the first 90 seconds, the aerodynamic drag of the orbiter might tear it away from the tank, where it would disintegrate from the high angle of attack and the backwash from the SRBs. You really don't want to interfere with the fuel flow. And that flow can drain a swimming pool in 25 seconds, so it can probably suck bits of foam through a mesh. Cryogenic tank design is one of those areas where it's pretty unlikely that people like us will have good ideas that the rocket scientists haven't already excluded.
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If a candidate were to say, "I don't think this stage in the development of the mammalian eye would be a survival advantage, I think it happened like this," or "Based on this particular fossil, I think the migration of this species happened differently, and perhaps it is not a direct descendant but a sibling of this other species," then of course they're not automatically a quack.
No candidate or layman would say that, though. Some might say "I don't see how evolution could create such complex things." I'm a bit suspect of them, because their view is based on personal incredulity, or perhaps deeply flawed analogies like "tornado plus junkyard equals jet". I would expect candidates to recognize when they don't know enough to make a good judgment, and to have critical thinking skills enough to recognize such misinformation.
I fear the candidates will not even bother with the above, and instead say something like "all viewpoints should be covered." When they say that, they mean "we should waste your money teaching your children to consider the idea that God created the world 6000 years ago in 7 days." That does make them quacks.
Well, if the creator wasn't supernatural, then who created him? If Roundup-ready corn was created by Monsanto, which was created by human scientists, who were created by aliens, who were created by other aliens, at some point you need a being who wasn't designed by another.
To avoid an infinite regress of designers, you either need a designer who exists outside of causality (and is thus supernatural), or a process by which inanimate material can become alive (abiogenesis) and eventually human (evolution).
Well, they taught me a hypothesis needed to be falsifiable, but I'll concede that for a moment.
The ID "hypothesis" lacks something else - predictive power. If God created life, what does that tell us about how life will change over time or react to it's environment?
Consider a three-year-old or prototype android who keeps repeating "why?". Eventually you'll give up and just say "because". Saying "God did it" is similar - it halts the line of inquiry. It's a dead end. It doesn't tell us anything useful.
When discussing gaps in the theory of evolution, it's important to distinguish between "does evolution happen" and "what evolved from what, when, and how fast." Science is unanimous that it happens, but the specifics are, and probably will forever be, still being researched, and so our understanding changes.
Here's a car analogy: suppose you're at the scene of an auto accident, and you point to some aspect that doesn't make sense. That's a gap in our understanding of how Newtonian physics led to the evidence we observe. And if scientists studied that crash, they would probably have different theories of how it happened, and those theories would change over time. But unless you were driving at a significant fraction of c, there won't be anything that contradicts Newtonian physics. Despite the gap you found, it's still appropriate to teach physics to our high-schoolers.
The same goes for evolution - the gaps are in the details, but the theory as a whole is very solid.
In a sense, the 16 bit instructions have been dropped, if only when running in 64-bit mode. Which is actually kind of annoying, because it means some of those old Windows 3 and DOS programs won't run without emulation.
Only 3% of Slashdot users haven't heard that joke, and only 2% of those who have still think it's funny for the (on average) 36.4th time.
Out of curiosity, how do they dig it then?
For comparison, if you've been on the "Gravitron" (aka "Starship 2000") amusement park ride, that's 4 Gs.
Multiple pages are annoying, yes, but the biggest problem is the lack of links. When talking about technology, there's usually a relevant web site. Blogs will link to it, maybe adding some commentary of their own. But most journalism is written with the intent that you'll learn everything you want to know from the article itself, or other articles from the same source. Unfortunately I'm not sitting on a bench in the park in 1960 reading a newspaper, I'm on the internet, and if your site won't link to more information about the subject at hand, I'll go somewhere that will. And I don't just mean links to related stories - I want links to other sites. I know it's scary, but don't worry, if your story is interesting, I'll open it in another tab, and I'll continue ignoring your ads when I close it.
Because life's not fair.
While allowing lossy compression might end up with way better AI, there's a logistics problem: how do you give an objective score to the precision of 100M (that's 4.76 uLoC) of paraphrased text?
Grandparent didn't say UBMs can do anything UTMs can't. Just that they're a more natural abstraction. It's like the difference between lambda calculus and Turing machines. One could say Lambda calculus is better because the concept of functions is not readily apparent in UTMs. You might snarkily reply that one's an idiot because lambda calculus and UTMs are equivalent in what problems they can solve. But that's not the point. The point is, choosing one over the other makes some proofs easier and some proofs harder. That's also the sense in which forgetting math may have been useful - it's not that what we have learned isn't true, it's that had we chosen a different abstraction, we might have learned other, more useful things.
It seems to me the real problem is that the cookie namespace is unnecessarily shared between multiple tabs/windows. Why not have different tabs run in a completely separate process? Clicking links or opening tabs to the same domain would be kept in the same process, but everything else (searching, typing in addresses, clicking bookmarks, etc.) would open tabs in a new process, with none of the session information of wherever you were before. I bet this would also decrease lock contention, help with memory fragmentation, and improve performance and robustness. Why don't we do it?
I say it's equally unlikely for Santa Claus, unicorns, the Tooth Fairy, God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or anything else like that to have created the universe. The only reason you hear so much about the ludicrousness of God having done it, is that He has a better marketing department than most other Disney characters.
"Unknown" is the most scientifically valid standpoint. None of the rest are testable. "Nobody" is the most elegant, and the rest are arbitrary. "God" is simply the one you choose if you want to get elected.
The Bible is a big book. No matter how well tested a theory is, I don't become less skeptical of others that are merely in the same book.
The Bible has some historical truth, and contains (on selective reading) reasonable guidelines for living your life. You can demonstrate these truths, but doing so lends no credence to any particular creation myth, even the one in the introduction. And I bet if you'll look deeper, you'll see that the existence of God is also orthogonal to whatever truths you've found in the Bible.
At this point you can argue from Faith. But I said some of the Bible's guidelines are reasonable, not all. Not the ones that demand unconditional belief in themselves.
Hmm, even with direct evidence, abiogenesis would still be a theory. Science doesn't prove things, it makes models. However, there are many plausible theories for abiogenesis.
I'm not even going to ask you to show me examples of your god creating life in a test tube. But show me some evidence that he's affected our universe, in any way, ever, and I will lend some credence to your 'religion'.
Until then it's still - well, nothing.
Nah, it's turtles all the way down.
The constancy of the laws of physics is not an assumption. Scientists believe it for the same reason they believe everything else: it's the theory that best explains the facts. Science does tend towards fixed models, but only because if the model changes, we try to make a new, more general, fixed model. So far that's always worked.
It's a difference in quantity, not in kind. Basically we had a critical mass of intelligence. We became just barely smart and social enough to gain knowledge faster than we lost it. So even though our society has attained far greater things than any other animal's, we're not really that much better. It's unlikely we're the only animals that aspire to be more than they are. We're just the only ones who could.
Well chickens don't have the tools to do those things. Would you really be surprised to see a chicken help another injured chicken? If you saw that, you might call it instinct, just a meaningless programmed behavior. But I say it's compassion. There's really no difference.
Why is it so horrible to be grouped with animals? Are they really such an abomination? Why must we invent a god to create us above them, and to deny the similarity? Being animals doesn't make our humanity any less great.
So, um, if the continued survival of the human race is not a worthy goal, then what is?
Can you give any evidence that software companies would not innovate without patents?
I propose we not base legislation on Mythbusters. Yes, it's entertaining. No, it's not good science.
If all three SSMEs fail in the first 90 seconds, the aerodynamic drag of the orbiter might tear it away from the tank, where it would disintegrate from the high angle of attack and the backwash from the SRBs. You really don't want to interfere with the fuel flow. And that flow can drain a swimming pool in 25 seconds, so it can probably suck bits of foam through a mesh. Cryogenic tank design is one of those areas where it's pretty unlikely that people like us will have good ideas that the rocket scientists haven't already excluded.