How do you know who is right and who is wrong, unless you examine them?
And that is why science is different from the things that are purely subjective. Science is based on evidence, not opinion. (There are some fields that are mislabeled science that aren't based on evidence...) If there are multiple viable theories in some field of science, you will see that in the peer-reviewed literature in the field. If one theory does a much better job of explaining the evidence(like the Standard Model in quantum physics, or Common Descent in evolutionary biology), you will see that as a consensus view in the peer-reviewed literature in the field.
If you have the time and energy to spend years educating yourself in each field where you want to make your own judgements about the validity of the theories in the field, go ahead. Knock yourself out. Short of that, your best bet is to see what the consensus in the field is, and assume that the thousands of people who are working in that field are generally keeping each other honest.
And if your preconceptions don't match what the people who actually know what's going on say, maybe you should just keep quiet until you understand.
If you're interested in some real life data, there are online performance statistics for a couple of 900KW Turbines in North Dakota.
They show "Capacity factors" between 22% and 43%, energy output per month ranging from 150MWh to 297MWh, and availability that looks like an average of about 95%.
And before you get busy defending McWane, read the rest of the story about ACIPO, that gets the same or better results without killing their employees.
There is no evidence outside of the old testament that anything like the Exodus ever occurred. Archeologists have found and excavated encampments of family groups from the purported timeframe of the Exodus in the Sinai. But, strangely enough, there is no trace of a half million people wandering for 40 years in the very same desert.
Also, there is no trace of Joseph, Moses, or any of the other figures in Exodus in the written records from that period in Egypt. The Egyptian have an exhaustive list of their kings back to the King Scorpion, but there is no trace of Joseph.
Another interesting thing about that timeframe is that Egypt had conquered and occupied Canaan. So, the refugees (if they existed) would have been escaping from Egypt to territory controlled by Egypt. (Not a smart move...)
And finally, there is no archeological evidence to support the Jewish conquest of Canaan. The latest information that I have read indicates the Hebrew people were natives of Canaan.
One of the most thought provoking shows I ever saw was a history of Easter Island. When the first humans arrived on the island, it was heavily forested. As the population on Easter Island grew to unsustainable levels they used up the forest. This destroyed their civlilization because they needed the trees to build the canoes that allowed them to fish, and to travel to other islands. Eventually they wound up eating each other, encouraged by the religious cults that sprang up.
The question that the narrator asked at the end of the program was haunting.
"What was going through the minds of the people on Easter Island, as they were cutting down the last tree?"
I have to wonder if we have cut down our "last tree". If we have, our answer to that question would have to be ---- "Oooo, look at the pretty bright thing"...
Theres an entire continuum of "life" to deal with, and science is and has been changing where the ends of that continuum lie.
You have to draw lines that define human life in that continuum someplace.
You've chosen to draw a line at conception, because of your beliefs. You have to live with the consequences of that choice. But, you're also insisting that your choice is the right choice for everyone. You've decided that everyone should live with the consequences of YOUR choice. I realize that you feel that it's not your choice, but your God's choice. But your feeling that doesn't alter the fact that it is YOUR choice. YOU decided that ONE particular interpretation of scripture was right, and everyone is obligated to go by those rules, since they are YOUR God's rules.
Why should that be?
Why shouldn't I be allowed to draw the lines that define a human life somewhere else? I accept the consequences of MY decision, just like you do (you do, don't you?)
Science is becoming capable of allowing any human cell to become a new, independent human being. Can I draw the line that defines a human life to include any cell that can become a new, indepedent human life? Now I have to protect any living cell of any human body, because with the proper care, it could become a new human being. Of course that's absurd. The point is "you have to draw the line somewhere".
For myself, I'd draw a line at the presence of brain tissue. There are other considerations for other circumstances, but avoiding responsiblity for your own decisions by making it "God's Will" is just cowardly.
As a side note, if you think declaring yourself to be a "Christian" makes you unpopular in the US. Go ahead and tell people you're an atheist and see what kind of reaction that gets you.
The proposal for preventing off-shoring is probably the weakest of the collection.
The most interesting piece is the health-care reinsurance proposal, where catastrophic care (starting at $50K/year?) would be handled by reinsurance of existing health care plans. A lot of the catastrophic cases are already handled by governments, but only after the insurance companies have spent who knows how much time and money fighting about it.
I worked on the space shuttle simulator (lo, these many years ago), and the shuttle computers are derivatives of the computers that IBM originally used in the B52's. They were called AP-101's, and if I remember correctly were Harvard Architecture systems with a separate instruction and data store memories. I think they had 128K (32 bit?) words for instructions and 64K (16 bit?)words for data.
The simulator originally ran on IBM System 360 mod 75's (serial numbers 1, 4, and 5). When I was working on it, the simulator was running on a IBM 3033 (370 architecture) machine running MVS, and had a hardware interface that attached 3 AP101's to the system IO channels. The shuttle hardware outside of the AP101's and environment were modelled in the 3033, even including the "slosh dynamics" of the fuel in the external tank. The simulator was written in 370 Assembler with macros for the programming control structures.
One of the funniest things about running the simulator came out of the major failure tests. The simulator had a distinct "abend" that indicated that the vehicle had a position that was below the surface of the earth.
I overstated my position when I said that I'd seen no signs. I saw the story about the Democratic convention too. And I think that's wrong too. I can understand why it's being done. When you've daemonized any group in the minds of another group, the next logical step is to start killing.
Ok, I accept your warning. Now what? The solution you propose for this "disease" is exactly what?
Most of the libertarian scenarios are fundamentally pipe-dreams, that fall apart as soon as you have a situation where one pig-headed, ignorant person thinks that their "rights" are more important than the "rights" of everyone else.
What you want is a peaceful cooperative society, not one where a hefty percentage of the population is sitting around, heavily armed, planning their revenge for the last confrontation. A representative sample of that situation would be Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, (you remember those, warlords, tribes,... don't you).
Remember the only thing allowing you to be anything but a subsistence farmer is the rest of the world.
Strange, I have no traces of ANY campaign to remove the right to privacy, speech, religion, anonymity, association by anyone except the folks on the ultra right.
Privacy? Ask John Ashcroft why he needs individual medical records to argue a federal case. Speech? ask the people banned to the "First Amendment Areas" that are out of sight and the people who were arrested for wearing the wrong T-Shirts at a Bush rally. Anonymity? ask the guy from Nevada who just lost at the case at the Supreme court about whether he was required to present ID to a police officer. Association? ask the Fresno Peace movement or the Association of Friends (Quakers) who were infiltrated by anti-terrorist agents.
There are a lot of people who seem to be mentally in a Bizarro world, and physically in the real world.
I think the argument is in the same class as the argument that we should ignore all the benefits of using fixed or rotary wings to fly, and only use ornithopters, 'cause that's the way the "real world" works. Or wheels are a bad mental model, and all land transportation should use legs. I'm using the power of the computer to increase my ability to organize information. Why should I limit myself to "real world" models, when I can do so much better by stepping outside the limits of the "real world"?
And Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are making 10's of millions off their "Left Behind" fantasy and using that money to fund his political organization, the Council for National Policy.
That organization scares the bejabbers out of me, especially when its executive director, Steve Baldwin brags that "we control everything in the world". Any group that is as obsessed with punishment as the people the current admininstration fronts for, needs to be de-fanged, de-clawed, and neutered as soon as possible.
I'm hoping that starts to happen in November. If it doesn't, I'm going to be spending a lot more time trying to pick someplace to emigrate to.
Slashdot Mirror
And that is why science is different from the things that are purely subjective. Science is based on evidence, not opinion. (There are some fields that are mislabeled science that aren't based on evidence...) If there are multiple viable theories in some field of science, you will see that in the peer-reviewed literature in the field. If one theory does a much better job of explaining the evidence(like the Standard Model in quantum physics, or Common Descent in evolutionary biology), you will see that as a consensus view in the peer-reviewed literature in the field.
If you have the time and energy to spend years educating yourself in each field where you want to make your own judgements about the validity of the theories in the field, go ahead. Knock yourself out. Short of that, your best bet is to see what the consensus in the field is, and assume that the thousands of people who are working in that field are generally keeping each other honest.
And if your preconceptions don't match what the people who actually know what's going on say, maybe you should just keep quiet until you understand.
They show "Capacity factors" between 22% and 43%, energy output per month ranging from 150MWh to 297MWh, and availability that looks like an average of about 95%.
For those of you not allergic to data, only!
And before you get busy defending McWane, read the rest of the story about ACIPO, that gets the same or better results without killing their employees.
Now watch who is complimented by this, and who is outraged......
Also, there is no trace of Joseph, Moses, or any of the other figures in Exodus in the written records from that period in Egypt. The Egyptian have an exhaustive list of their kings back to the King Scorpion, but there is no trace of Joseph.
Another interesting thing about that timeframe is that Egypt had conquered and occupied Canaan. So, the refugees (if they existed) would have been escaping from Egypt to territory controlled by Egypt. (Not a smart move...)
And finally, there is no archeological evidence to support the Jewish conquest of Canaan. The latest information that I have read indicates the Hebrew people were natives of Canaan.
The question that the narrator asked at the end of the program was haunting.
"What was going through the minds of the people on Easter Island, as they were cutting down the last tree?"
I have to wonder if we have cut down our "last tree". If we have, our answer to that question would have to be ---- "Oooo, look at the pretty bright thing"...
You have to draw lines that define human life in that continuum someplace.
You've chosen to draw a line at conception, because of your beliefs. You have to live with the consequences of that choice. But, you're also insisting that your choice is the right choice for everyone. You've decided that everyone should live with the consequences of YOUR choice. I realize that you feel that it's not your choice, but your God's choice. But your feeling that doesn't alter the fact that it is YOUR choice. YOU decided that ONE particular interpretation of scripture was right, and everyone is obligated to go by those rules, since they are YOUR God's rules.
Why should that be?
Why shouldn't I be allowed to draw the lines that define a human life somewhere else? I accept the consequences of MY decision, just like you do (you do, don't you?)
Science is becoming capable of allowing any human cell to become a new, independent human being. Can I draw the line that defines a human life to include any cell that can become a new, indepedent human life? Now I have to protect any living cell of any human body, because with the proper care, it could become a new human being. Of course that's absurd. The point is "you have to draw the line somewhere".
For myself, I'd draw a line at the presence of brain tissue. There are other considerations for other circumstances, but avoiding responsiblity for your own decisions by making it "God's Will" is just cowardly.
As a side note, if you think declaring yourself to be a "Christian" makes you unpopular in the US. Go ahead and tell people you're an atheist and see what kind of reaction that gets you.
The proposal for preventing off-shoring is probably the weakest of the collection.
The most interesting piece is the health-care reinsurance proposal, where catastrophic care (starting at $50K/year?) would be handled by reinsurance of existing health care plans. A lot of the catastrophic cases are already handled by governments, but only after the insurance companies have spent who knows how much time and money fighting about it.
The simulator originally ran on IBM System 360 mod 75's (serial numbers 1, 4, and 5). When I was working on it, the simulator was running on a IBM 3033 (370 architecture) machine running MVS, and had a hardware interface that attached 3 AP101's to the system IO channels. The shuttle hardware outside of the AP101's and environment were modelled in the 3033, even including the "slosh dynamics" of the fuel in the external tank. The simulator was written in 370 Assembler with macros for the programming control structures.
One of the funniest things about running the simulator came out of the major failure tests. The simulator had a distinct "abend" that indicated that the vehicle had a position that was below the surface of the earth.
Ok, I accept your warning. Now what? The solution you propose for this "disease" is exactly what?
Most of the libertarian scenarios are fundamentally pipe-dreams, that fall apart as soon as you have a situation where one pig-headed, ignorant person thinks that their "rights" are more important than the "rights" of everyone else.
What you want is a peaceful cooperative society, not one where a hefty percentage of the population is sitting around, heavily armed, planning their revenge for the last confrontation. A representative sample of that situation would be Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, (you remember those, warlords, tribes,... don't you).
Remember the only thing allowing you to be anything but a subsistence farmer is the rest of the world.
Strange, I have no traces of ANY campaign to remove the right to privacy, speech, religion, anonymity, association by anyone except the folks on the ultra right. Privacy? Ask John Ashcroft why he needs individual medical records to argue a federal case. Speech? ask the people banned to the "First Amendment Areas" that are out of sight and the people who were arrested for wearing the wrong T-Shirts at a Bush rally. Anonymity? ask the guy from Nevada who just lost at the case at the Supreme court about whether he was required to present ID to a police officer. Association? ask the Fresno Peace movement or the Association of Friends (Quakers) who were infiltrated by anti-terrorist agents. There are a lot of people who seem to be mentally in a Bizarro world, and physically in the real world.
I think the argument is in the same class as the argument that we should ignore all the benefits of using fixed or rotary wings to fly, and only use ornithopters, 'cause that's the way the "real world" works. Or wheels are a bad mental model, and all land transportation should use legs. I'm using the power of the computer to increase my ability to organize information. Why should I limit myself to "real world" models, when I can do so much better by stepping outside the limits of the "real world"?
That organization scares the bejabbers out of me, especially when its executive director, Steve Baldwin brags that "we control everything in the world". Any group that is as obsessed with punishment as the people the current admininstration fronts for, needs to be de-fanged, de-clawed, and neutered as soon as possible.
I'm hoping that starts to happen in November. If it doesn't, I'm going to be spending a lot more time trying to pick someplace to emigrate to.