Why not Nature? Their News and Views section explains the important papers at a layman's level, and the papers are, of course, the real science uncorrupted by journalism.
1. God was made up by an ancient people.
2. Ancient peoples were never right about anything, ever.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.
Or, alternatively:
1. The only people who believe in God are theists.
2. Every concrete prediction made by theists arguing from theism is wrong.
3. Correct theories lead to correct predictions.
4. Therefore, God does not exist.
In all seriousness, though, read the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and think about it, hard. Why is it that the only ridiculous claim people which people require proof against is the existence of God? God's nonexistence is not an extraordinary claim, and does not require proof. God's existence (the God claimed by most mainstream churches, mind you - don't reduce their claims to a hazy indescribable force like many do) _is_ an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary proof. There is no such proof - there's not even a weak suggestion. Belief in God is a lie and a waste of time.
Well, first, the universe was created in the Big Bang, which wasn't done by God, because he doesn't exist. 8x10^9 years or so later (and not zero as claimed in Genesis), the earth came into existence with the rest of the solar system in approximately its current form, which wasn't done by God, because he doesn't exist. 5x10^8 or so years later (and not a day as claimed in Genesis), the first self-replicating life-form came into existence, not because God created it like Genesis said, but because the rules of chemistry allow it to occur, and enough time had passed that the proper chemicals came together at the right time by chance. For the next 3.5x10^9 years or so (and not 5 days, as Genesis says), progressively more-complex life forms were created due to errors in the replication process, and the amplification of the more-successful errors, as described in progressively more detail by tens of thousands of biologists for the last century or so (but not by Genesis).
The end result of all this evolving was Christians. Through no fault of their own, the early and medieval Christians didn't know basic cosmology, geology, biology, or physics, so they didn't understand why their beliefs were wrong. That wasn't the problem. The problem was, about 500 years, ago, all the physical phenomena explained by "God" because the Christians didn't know any better started being explained by science in great and irrefutable detail and correctness. But the Christians, instead of realizing their beliefs were wrong, started scurrying backwards at a frantic rate - accepting the scientific explanation for everything science could explain at that moment, and desperately latching onto anything it couldn't, claiming science had failed and the unknown phenomena must be God. As time went on, science explained as near as makes no difference to every natural phenomenon in existence, often fighting religion along the way - but it didn't matter. Instead of accepting they were wrong, the Christians kept reducing the scope of God's power until he was nothing but a watchmaker, setting the initial conditions for human evolution, unable to create the world in a single week, never interfering in the world, only descending to the transubstantiation in a symbolic way - a weak, ineffectual deity that didn't threaten people except for the occasional random ban on birth control or profanity, which allowed people to go about their lives as long as they didn't think too hard about philosophical questions that might lead to him not existing.
So that's how it happened. Bit different than the Bible says, I think.
Obviously, certain parts of creation support certain parts of evolution, the problems are where one attempt to discredit the other.
No, the problems are where anyone thinks creation reflects reality in any way. Evolution doesn't prove creation and genesis aren't true; basic geology, cosmology, biology, and physics all do.
Science assumes, but can not prove (so far anyway) that supernatural things don't exist.
When you make an assumption, then start making endless numbers of predictions based on the assumption which are _all_ proven correct, at some point the probability of the assumption being true is high enough as to be indistinguishable from proof. Questions like "what is the meaning of life?" aren't unanswerable by science, they're unanswerable period. The answer, and the reasoning or lack thereof behind the answer, is different for every person.
And if questions of the form "how does (any natural phenomenon in existence) work?" aren't profound, I feel sorry for you. A life of hard science makes plenty of people happy. If being correct about the fundamental nature of everything in the world makes you unhappy, I feel even sorrier for you.
No, what they'll do is extract all the information available from the tooth, which is usually quite a bit unless the tooth was degraded before being fossilized, and they'll do their best to assign at least a familial or ordinal, if not a generic or specific classification. Then, they will assume that the dinosaur shares the characteristics common to other dinosaurs in the family or order they've felt confident in assigning to it. It's not too often you find a new order, or even a new family, these days.
This is even more true for mammals, by the way. Reptilian teeth are nice, but mammalian teeth might as well come with species names written on them in three different languages.
You didn't get the joke? Must be my sense of humor - see, I find the words "teeth" and "for" riotously funny, and putting them together in a single slashdot post is, to me, more hilarious than a fat chick trying to dance seductively. I'm glad to see at least one mod agrees!
Actually, stage6 was awesome because nobody used it for that. It was all trailers, promotional videos, movies, and TV show episodes, from what I saw. With the magic of wget I got the 9th series of Top Gear from stage6 in VERY nice quality.
find a tooth fragment and say that they have found something from a dinosaur that would have been 25 ft long and run at 40 mph. What bullshit.
Not a paleontologist, are you? Teeth are very diagnostic, and very often well-preserved and documented. If you find a tooth dead center in a Kimmeridgian-stage formation which perfectly matches a tooth from the holotype specimen of Stegosaurus armatus, for example, it's not bullshit to say the tooth came from a dinosaur with 17 armored plates on its back - even if it sounds like it.
Being gay is a _sexual_ attraction to the same sex. Anal sex is the closest to normal sex gay men can have with people they're attracted to. It's not a false connection.
That's the whole point of digital. You can store data on an analog medium (the individual pits can have continuous variation of reflectivity, and are themselves continuous in space), such that any data you extract is an exact copy of the original. With digital, you get an exact signal or nothing. The CD drives are designed such that the jitter, track spiral, and all the other sources of error are too small to fatally corrupt the reading - and if they do, you'll get nothing instead of degraded audio.
I don't usually like to take sides in this debate, because it doesn't affect me either way, but your position is just stupid. With regards to children, women *are* incubators. To argue otherwise is foolish.
All right then, you've made your claim. Now follow the procedure outlined in my post, and give me a sound file of those high and low frequencies, that I may feel the warmth, or at least see a Fourier transform of it. I look forward to receiving your file.
You can settle this once and for all. Smart guy like you, I'm sure you have a bitching sound card and A-D converter (if not, find someone with a Lunatec V3 you can borrow). Get your turntable and your best-sounding record and record it in 24/192 (at which setting even audiophiles can't claim to hear the difference), then downsample, upsample back to 24/192, put them both in audacity, reverse the phase of one, and whatever results is the difference between them. If it's a significant amount of data (personally, I'd be surprised if it were audible), then congratulations! You win, and you can show any doubters exactly what sound is in the "warmth" that CDs can't produce.
More and more, I see SF as putting out the message "scientists as a group are stupid, shortsighted, and dangerous, only the lone researcher who disagrees with the group knows what is actually going on, and the pitchfork/torch wielding crowd have the right idea on how to fix things."
Problem is, scientists are people, and that description does describe most people. Science is easy to romanticize; heroically smart men and women using the powers of reason and rigorously-designed experimentation and detailed mathematical analysis to throw off the curtains of doubt, uncertainty, and ignorance - who could distrust it? In reality, science is mostly bored grad students and tenured professors doing the latest buzzword research to get grants, building incrementally on laboratory techniques they only mostly understand and don't care about in the least, making up P-values along the way and telling their computers to draw some error bars on the graphs to represent their rigorous mathematical analysis. It works, but you shouldn't believe the propaganda of either side of the science wars.
No, it's a bit like posting pictures to a website which denies access to the pictures for anyone who isn't a list of people you trust to see them.
I agree it's not the smartest thing in the world to trust such a website, but to speak like it's impossible to do is more pessimistic than even I'm willing to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not Nature? Their News and Views section explains the important papers at a layman's level, and the papers are, of course, the real science uncorrupted by journalism.
1. God was made up by an ancient people.
2. Ancient peoples were never right about anything, ever.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.
Or, alternatively:
1. The only people who believe in God are theists.
2. Every concrete prediction made by theists arguing from theism is wrong.
3. Correct theories lead to correct predictions.
4. Therefore, God does not exist.
In all seriousness, though, read the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and think about it, hard. Why is it that the only ridiculous claim people which people require proof against is the existence of God? God's nonexistence is not an extraordinary claim, and does not require proof. God's existence (the God claimed by most mainstream churches, mind you - don't reduce their claims to a hazy indescribable force like many do) _is_ an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary proof. There is no such proof - there's not even a weak suggestion. Belief in God is a lie and a waste of time.
Well, first, the universe was created in the Big Bang, which wasn't done by God, because he doesn't exist. 8x10^9 years or so later (and not zero as claimed in Genesis), the earth came into existence with the rest of the solar system in approximately its current form, which wasn't done by God, because he doesn't exist. 5x10^8 or so years later (and not a day as claimed in Genesis), the first self-replicating life-form came into existence, not because God created it like Genesis said, but because the rules of chemistry allow it to occur, and enough time had passed that the proper chemicals came together at the right time by chance. For the next 3.5x10^9 years or so (and not 5 days, as Genesis says), progressively more-complex life forms were created due to errors in the replication process, and the amplification of the more-successful errors, as described in progressively more detail by tens of thousands of biologists for the last century or so (but not by Genesis).
The end result of all this evolving was Christians. Through no fault of their own, the early and medieval Christians didn't know basic cosmology, geology, biology, or physics, so they didn't understand why their beliefs were wrong. That wasn't the problem. The problem was, about 500 years, ago, all the physical phenomena explained by "God" because the Christians didn't know any better started being explained by science in great and irrefutable detail and correctness. But the Christians, instead of realizing their beliefs were wrong, started scurrying backwards at a frantic rate - accepting the scientific explanation for everything science could explain at that moment, and desperately latching onto anything it couldn't, claiming science had failed and the unknown phenomena must be God. As time went on, science explained as near as makes no difference to every natural phenomenon in existence, often fighting religion along the way - but it didn't matter. Instead of accepting they were wrong, the Christians kept reducing the scope of God's power until he was nothing but a watchmaker, setting the initial conditions for human evolution, unable to create the world in a single week, never interfering in the world, only descending to the transubstantiation in a symbolic way - a weak, ineffectual deity that didn't threaten people except for the occasional random ban on birth control or profanity, which allowed people to go about their lives as long as they didn't think too hard about philosophical questions that might lead to him not existing.
So that's how it happened. Bit different than the Bible says, I think.
I bet he'll write "". Same as he has almost every day since he retired.
And if questions of the form "how does (any natural phenomenon in existence) work?" aren't profound, I feel sorry for you. A life of hard science makes plenty of people happy. If being correct about the fundamental nature of everything in the world makes you unhappy, I feel even sorrier for you.
No, what they'll do is extract all the information available from the tooth, which is usually quite a bit unless the tooth was degraded before being fossilized, and they'll do their best to assign at least a familial or ordinal, if not a generic or specific classification. Then, they will assume that the dinosaur shares the characteristics common to other dinosaurs in the family or order they've felt confident in assigning to it. It's not too often you find a new order, or even a new family, these days.
This is even more true for mammals, by the way. Reptilian teeth are nice, but mammalian teeth might as well come with species names written on them in three different languages.
That's a strong candidate for the worst rebuttal I've ever heard.
You didn't get the joke? Must be my sense of humor - see, I find the words "teeth" and "for" riotously funny, and putting them together in a single slashdot post is, to me, more hilarious than a fat chick trying to dance seductively. I'm glad to see at least one mod agrees!
Actually, stage6 was awesome because nobody used it for that. It was all trailers, promotional videos, movies, and TV show episodes, from what I saw. With the magic of wget I got the 9th series of Top Gear from stage6 in VERY nice quality.
It doesn't fix the bug, it just does the workaround without requiring recompilation of the kernel.
Downloading sends the message "We want your product and don't need you at all". It puts them in a powerless position, not a powerful one.
Football a "nerd sport"? You have no clue what a nerd is, do you?
Being gay is a _sexual_ attraction to the same sex. Anal sex is the closest to normal sex gay men can have with people they're attracted to. It's not a false connection.
That's the whole point of digital. You can store data on an analog medium (the individual pits can have continuous variation of reflectivity, and are themselves continuous in space), such that any data you extract is an exact copy of the original. With digital, you get an exact signal or nothing. The CD drives are designed such that the jitter, track spiral, and all the other sources of error are too small to fatally corrupt the reading - and if they do, you'll get nothing instead of degraded audio.
I don't usually like to take sides in this debate, because it doesn't affect me either way, but your position is just stupid. With regards to children, women *are* incubators. To argue otherwise is foolish.
All right then, you've made your claim. Now follow the procedure outlined in my post, and give me a sound file of those high and low frequencies, that I may feel the warmth, or at least see a Fourier transform of it. I look forward to receiving your file.
You can settle this once and for all. Smart guy like you, I'm sure you have a bitching sound card and A-D converter (if not, find someone with a Lunatec V3 you can borrow). Get your turntable and your best-sounding record and record it in 24/192 (at which setting even audiophiles can't claim to hear the difference), then downsample, upsample back to 24/192, put them both in audacity, reverse the phase of one, and whatever results is the difference between them. If it's a significant amount of data (personally, I'd be surprised if it were audible), then congratulations! You win, and you can show any doubters exactly what sound is in the "warmth" that CDs can't produce.
No, it's a bit like posting pictures to a website which denies access to the pictures for anyone who isn't a list of people you trust to see them.
I agree it's not the smartest thing in the world to trust such a website, but to speak like it's impossible to do is more pessimistic than even I'm willing to be.
Right, but the set of people that cares is the union of those two.
I, on the other hand, am guessing you're pretty optimistic about people's desire for and ability to protect their privacy.