The probability to live in a universe that allows intelligent human life to exist under the condition that human life exists in the universe is exactly 1.
This completely ignores nearby probabilities. In other words, the statement is true but utterly useless.
The inherent danger in the ID ideas is that ID proponents somehow believe that because one their claims cannot be ultimately refuted (except by God), they somehow have the authority to declare the rest of science "bullshit".
I haven't yet seen any of them do that. Nor, for that matter, have I seen a Creationist do that. If you have a reference or two, that would be helpful.
I have seen Creationists call big slabs of a couple of branches of science into question, centering around geology, paleontology and astrophysics and including thin slices of biology, but I haven't seen an IDer do even that.
I have also seen both IDers and Creationists make your point, but in reverse: without direct observation, all statements about our past are no more than inference, therefore definitely ruling invisible pink unicorns, flying spaghetti monsters, patriarchal creators, alien experimenters or nebulous biology-tweakers out of the question, however counterintuitive that may be, is not reasonable. The best you can hope to do is define reasonable limits to their abilities. If, one day, we find a Macroscope-like way of accurately reconstructing the past, it may become reasonable to do more.
What I'm pointing out are that if you're picking among sets of essentially random parameters, the chances of a sentience being only just alive are enormously greater than a sentience living in relative luxury, as we are.
It's not reasonable that things should be so good. The conditions in which we live are literally too good to be true.
...of whether the situation is viewed through chaotic controls or more traditional parameterisation. For practical purposes, a few hundred orders of magnitude here or here isn't going to make any significant difference to the outcome.
Reading between the lines of what you said, I guess you'd expect chaotic effects to make the existing outcome even less likely than traditional views would expect?
"Aye Yam what aye Yam..." doesn't actually make any sense. Neither does "We're here because we're here". It's a tautology, circular reasoning.
We know that some physical properties can vary, we can even create altered physical conditions in the lab to a certain extent; there are viable theories that claim that the conditions we measure are local, in a very large sense -- that elsewhere in the universe, physical properties might be different.
Regardless of whether they're local or universal, the vast majority of sets of physical properties cannot possibly support life. Not just "life as we know it" but any life. The likelihood of us being alive to observe the universe, as we are, in any given universe are very, very low.
In point of fact, the likelihood of us being alive in this universe are ridiculously low, too (at least hundreds of orders of magnitude against). The short way of saying that is "impossible". But in most other potential universes, they're much lower. Much less than impossible.
Sadly, the optimists are right: this is the best of all possible worlds, or at least near enough as makes no difference in the grand scheme of things.
Why is it the best of all possible worlds? The numbers tell us that it shouldn't be, that we shouldn't exist in any form. Which brings us to the Anthropic Principle.
The Anthropic Principle, in layman's terms, says that we observe a relatively benign universe because if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here.
That sounds reasonable, but in practice it isn't. Within the breathtakingly narrow set of conditions under which our existence is merely impossible, the actual conditions we observe are still unreasonably good. There are many, many more sets of possible conditions (but stil vanishingly few overall) in which we exist, but in much less benign circumstances. It is extremely unlikely that our conditions should be so good. The fact that they actually are so good speaks strongly against the Anthropic Principle.
My point is that the current, widely accepted idea that we (people, as well as the universe we're in) are an accident doesn't make rational sense, so it needs to be discarded and alternatives sought. Unfortunately, at this point we start to break potentially religious ground -- to threaten established religions -- and that precious rationality all too often gets tossed aside in the heat of such debate.
...and name it Schrodinger. Then I can break physicists' brains (ie return the favour for what they usually do to me) by wearing this tee-shirt while out surfing with my cat:
The universe we live in (or anything remotely like it) is in many ways extremely improbable if viewed as the product of randomness, therefore it cannot reasonably be random, it cannot "just exist".
Now that this option has been eradicated, it's time to explore another one. However, there are many religious bigots who refuse to do this (and want to disallow anyone else to do this) for philosophical reasons.
2005 has been characterised by more blown sub-theories (e.g. string cosmology) and raise-eyebrows-and-shrug data (e.g. the Fountains of Enceladus) than any other year I can remember.
At long last, it's becoming socially acceptable to admit that a popular theory is more or less complete bollocks. It's difficult to overstate how valuable that is to the progress of science.
ID has brought this about in a way that Creationism couldn't, because ID is more "moderate" and reasonable, less polarised. Careless detractors can easily winding up looking like ranting idiots (many have and continue to). This was Dr Johnson's original plan, he made no bones about it then or now, and despite all of the kicking and screaming it's actually working. Its latest score has been a judge willing to overreact in a convincing fashion.
Now... here lies a dilemmma... trilemma, really: Naturalistic (with the implied "Atheistic") science needs to let approaches like ID get a foot in the door even if they're completely wrong. ID in turn needs Evolution to keep it honest as much as it keeps the Evolution team on their toes... and ID in turn needs Creationism. If nothing else, it needs something to be less extreme than. Creationism needs ID -- again, if for no other reason than to have a moderate cousin for the timid to stop at.
And so on. You can't pull up the weeds -- regardless of which you regard as weeds -- without also damaging the crop.
I'd expect PostgreSQL to utterly ace MySQL feature-for-feature. ibFirebird probably not, but it should still scare the "serious" databases on some points. Serious is not an accurate name. Perhaps "attitude-encumbered" or "reputation-enhanced" would be better.
Performance depends so much on what you're doing that it's easy to fudge up benchmarks to make your pet DB "the best". I'd like to see some real-world application benchmarks done by someone with no axe to grind, 'coz I reckon there'd be red faces all around. (-:
Ok, so I'm exaggerating a bit... but IRL, I'd guess something like 5%-30% of the call-out frequency, depending up on the application. By that I mean that if I'm supporting an MS-Windows server (rare), I'd average a problem requiring intervention maybe once a month on average; supporting anything else with a similar workload would be circa once a year, average. Some (like the few remaining OpenServer installations) are typically harder to fix than others, but nothing breaks as often as Microsoft stuff.
For workstations, the ratio is even worse.
First of all, because you can install random crap from the Internet on MS-Windows (unless the workstation is so locked-down that the users do stuff like bring in their own laptops to get stuff done, and cause call-outs with those)), people do. On Linux, you can just point them at a package manager and let them have at it from a list of thousands of safe packages if they have a driving need to install more stuff.
Second off, viruses and spyware for Linux are essentially nonexistent.
Third off is the background instability (avoided only by the most careful and dedicated and lucky installations) of MS-Windows.
Fourth off, MS-Windows suffers from a higher incidence of "experts" willing to "fix" things for free. I prefer to pronounce it like a New Zealander: "willing to fux things for free".
...continuing to abuse the language won't get you anywhere.
Until you believe (or "know", if you prefer to express it that way) that there is/are no divine being(s), you do not qualify as an Atheist, regardless of whether you think of yourself as an Atheist or not.
The closest in any of the authoritative literature that I've been able to find classes this as "Weak Atheism" (and who wants to be a weak Atheist?:-) and goes on to qualify this definition by explaining that many Strong Atheists, Agnostics and Theists reject the use of the term "Atheist" without an associated definite rejection of deity.
All of the other authorities use a definition along the lines of "someone who denies the existence of god".
I find it interesting that rarely is the "god" capitalised (which implies that the definition was not sourced from a Christian), and no definition that I could discover thought Polytheism worth dismissing -- only Monotheism. There is a further interesting parallel to this in Masonic ritual, if that's a topic which piques your curiosity.
Meanwhile, your invokation of a concensus of SlashDot posts to define a term is hardly scientific. Consider it rejected. (-:
You could go one step further, to Antitheism, which asserts basic Atheism ("there is/are no God(s)") as a stepping stone to "Believing in anything other than Atheism is dangerous". At that point, there is no practical difference between you and an Inquisitor (speaking of which, a College of the Inquisition was recently opened in Poland).
Viewing it from a static chemical perspective also squashes many insights into how digestion works, and cooking (most foods) does a lot more than zot a few nutrients and release others.
Contrast, for example, the cooking of rice, pumpkin or beans (good idea) with cooking rockmelon (cantaloupe), grapes, cucumber or lettuce (not so good).
Eating more raw food naturally pushes you towards eating more stuff which doesn't cook or preserve well; ie, fresh food. Unless it's been exceptionally badly raised (e.g. drenched in poisons or forced up by adding nitrates to otherwise infertile soil), fresh food is much better for you as a class than anything out of a packet or tin.
Also... you'd be surprised how much bacterial expsure you can get out of, say, radishes or mushrooms. But yes, in general veggies can't compare with meat in that, ahem, field.
Children with weak immune systems are susceptible to both colds and cancer?
William of Ockham would agree with me. (-:
Either way, don't feed them crap: breast-feed for as long as reasonably possible, then get them into eating their food as fresh, raw and un-tinkered-with as possible (a tactic which admittedly might not go down well amongst meat lovers).
...would be a great start. Most modern COTS CPU fans crap out in 2-3 years, tops, but I have a dual PentiumPro 200 box under my desk which is showing no sign of wearing out a fan after ~10 years of continuous service.
Let's not even discuss my underengineered AOpen laptop with its hopelessly inefficient (and now defunct) fan, other than to say that bypassing 75% of its heat generation would be -ing marvellous; the hard disks might also last more than a year, and the battery be worth something again (maybe with some help from white LEDs to replace the LCD screen's illuminating flouros).
Fixing much less glamorous issues might actually have more of an impact on power consumption than pushing the boundaries of physics, but I'm all in favour of doing that, too.
Oh, so you're advocating software piracy?
on
Debugging Microsoft.com
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I imagine that the price tag, the exposure to malware (one of the big reasons I don't use MS products myself), and possibly the lack of PPC and/or 64-bit versions of MS-Windows and/or the codecs might have something to do with it.
What your assertion basically amounts to is: "He should run x86/32 and use an illegal copy of MS-Windows rather than run a Free (and probably free) OS and player on the hardware of his choice."
Let's put this in modern, everyday terms. Imagine Sony's media companies releasing only DVDs that work only on Sony players. I own a Panasonic player. You're telling me that I should buy a Sony player at whatever price Sony asks rather than whining about Sony's exclusivity?
It's kind of like signing a temperance pledge because practically everybody else in my community has VD, and subsequently being told that if I want to watch a movie I have to have sex in the back row of it. Am I a whiner because I refuse?
This link shows you the last 7 days' worth of new images. They occasionally post some really cool (or interesting for other reasons, e.g. ultra high res) images that don't make it to the newsier sites.
Here is one of my favourites of Valles Marineris at 9002x3126 pixels. A good excuse for a second monitor: "now I can use this as wallpaper". (-:
...so I'm about 6 light-nanoseconds tall, the screen I'm facing is about one by one and a half light nanoseconds.
A light-second is about a billion feet or 300,000,000m, roughly the same as the distance to the Moon.
86400 seconds in a day, so a light-day is about 26,000,000,000,000m, or 4-5 times the distance to Pluto and Charon, or 170 times as far away as the Sun is from us.
A light year is 9,500,000,000,000 km; and Proxima Centauri (the nearest star) is about 4 of those away, and the Crab nebula is about 4,000 of those from us.
Putting all of that into scale is kind of difficult. Making the Sun as big as a basketball, gives you a barely-visible Earth about 30m away, Jupiter a squash (or golf) ball about 150m away, and pluto an infinitesimal speck over a kilometer out. A light-day from the basketball sun would be a circle 9km across, and if you put the basketball sun in the middle of the US, the next basketball would be in Greenland, northwest Alaska, or Brasil. If you put it in my home town (Perth, Western Australia), you'd be looking at the next basketball in South Africa, southern Russia, or the middle of the Pacific. And the Crab nebula twenty times as far away as the Moon.
The fastest manned spacecraft has travelled at ~40,000km/h, so it would take about 100,000 years (a thousand lifetimes, two and a half thousand generations) to get to the nearest star and 100,000,000 years to get to the Crab. I imagine that even the spectacular views as you approached would somewhat lose their appeal after a few generations.
Slashdot Mirror
Use FireFox as your window manager and set it to open absolutely everything in a new tab. Want a new window? Pfagh! "Let them use tabs!" (-:
OK, Leonidas, the jig's up. Nick off now, or I'll set Xerxes onto you. (-:
I have seen Creationists call big slabs of a couple of branches of science into question, centering around geology, paleontology and astrophysics and including thin slices of biology, but I haven't seen an IDer do even that.
I have also seen both IDers and Creationists make your point, but in reverse: without direct observation, all statements about our past are no more than inference, therefore definitely ruling invisible pink unicorns, flying spaghetti monsters, patriarchal creators, alien experimenters or nebulous biology-tweakers out of the question, however counterintuitive that may be, is not reasonable. The best you can hope to do is define reasonable limits to their abilities. If, one day, we find a Macroscope-like way of accurately reconstructing the past, it may become reasonable to do more.
What I'm pointing out are that if you're picking among sets of essentially random parameters, the chances of a sentience being only just alive are enormously greater than a sentience living in relative luxury, as we are.
It's not reasonable that things should be so good. The conditions in which we live are literally too good to be true.
...of whether the situation is viewed through chaotic controls or more traditional parameterisation. For practical purposes, a few hundred orders of magnitude here or here isn't going to make any significant difference to the outcome.
Reading between the lines of what you said, I guess you'd expect chaotic effects to make the existing outcome even less likely than traditional views would expect?
"Aye Yam what aye Yam..." doesn't actually make any sense. Neither does "We're here because we're here". It's a tautology, circular reasoning.
We know that some physical properties can vary, we can even create altered physical conditions in the lab to a certain extent; there are viable theories that claim that the conditions we measure are local, in a very large sense -- that elsewhere in the universe, physical properties might be different.
Regardless of whether they're local or universal, the vast majority of sets of physical properties cannot possibly support life. Not just "life as we know it" but any life. The likelihood of us being alive to observe the universe, as we are, in any given universe are very, very low.
In point of fact, the likelihood of us being alive in this universe are ridiculously low, too (at least hundreds of orders of magnitude against). The short way of saying that is "impossible". But in most other potential universes, they're much lower. Much less than impossible.
Sadly, the optimists are right: this is the best of all possible worlds, or at least near enough as makes no difference in the grand scheme of things.
Why is it the best of all possible worlds? The numbers tell us that it shouldn't be, that we shouldn't exist in any form. Which brings us to the Anthropic Principle.
The Anthropic Principle, in layman's terms, says that we observe a relatively benign universe because if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here.
That sounds reasonable, but in practice it isn't. Within the breathtakingly narrow set of conditions under which our existence is merely impossible, the actual conditions we observe are still unreasonably good. There are many, many more sets of possible conditions (but stil vanishingly few overall) in which we exist, but in much less benign circumstances. It is extremely unlikely that our conditions should be so good. The fact that they actually are so good speaks strongly against the Anthropic Principle.
My point is that the current, widely accepted idea that we (people, as well as the universe we're in) are an accident doesn't make rational sense, so it needs to be discarded and alternatives sought. Unfortunately, at this point we start to break potentially religious ground -- to threaten established religions -- and that precious rationality all too often gets tossed aside in the heat of such debate.
...either cats or surfing.
From a logical perspective, it's not fine.
The universe we live in (or anything remotely like it) is in many ways extremely improbable if viewed as the product of randomness, therefore it cannot reasonably be random, it cannot "just exist".
Now that this option has been eradicated, it's time to explore another one. However, there are many religious bigots who refuse to do this (and want to disallow anyone else to do this) for philosophical reasons.
...depending on how you look at it. It's only two words on average. Which bugs me. (-:
2005 has been characterised by more blown sub-theories (e.g. string cosmology) and raise-eyebrows-and-shrug data (e.g. the Fountains of Enceladus) than any other year I can remember.
At long last, it's becoming socially acceptable to admit that a popular theory is more or less complete bollocks. It's difficult to overstate how valuable that is to the progress of science.
ID has brought this about in a way that Creationism couldn't, because ID is more "moderate" and reasonable, less polarised. Careless detractors can easily winding up looking like ranting idiots (many have and continue to). This was Dr Johnson's original plan, he made no bones about it then or now, and despite all of the kicking and screaming it's actually working. Its latest score has been a judge willing to overreact in a convincing fashion.
Now... here lies a dilemmma... trilemma, really: Naturalistic (with the implied "Atheistic") science needs to let approaches like ID get a foot in the door even if they're completely wrong. ID in turn needs Evolution to keep it honest as much as it keeps the Evolution team on their toes... and ID in turn needs Creationism. If nothing else, it needs something to be less extreme than. Creationism needs ID -- again, if for no other reason than to have a moderate cousin for the timid to stop at.
And so on. You can't pull up the weeds -- regardless of which you regard as weeds -- without also damaging the crop.
I can picture Arjen grinning as he rea dthat. (-:
.org domain (parent of SlashDot's domain, of course) is run on it.
OTOH, the same can be said of PostgreSQL, and nobody has yet. The
I'd expect PostgreSQL to utterly ace MySQL feature-for-feature. ibFirebird probably not, but it should still scare the "serious" databases on some points. Serious is not an accurate name. Perhaps "attitude-encumbered" or "reputation-enhanced" would be better.
Performance depends so much on what you're doing that it's easy to fudge up benchmarks to make your pet DB "the best". I'd like to see some real-world application benchmarks done by someone with no axe to grind, 'coz I reckon there'd be red faces all around. (-:
Ok, so I'm exaggerating a bit... but IRL, I'd guess something like 5%-30% of the call-out frequency, depending up on the application. By that I mean that if I'm supporting an MS-Windows server (rare), I'd average a problem requiring intervention maybe once a month on average; supporting anything else with a similar workload would be circa once a year, average. Some (like the few remaining OpenServer installations) are typically harder to fix than others, but nothing breaks as often as Microsoft stuff.
For workstations, the ratio is even worse.
First of all, because you can install random crap from the Internet on MS-Windows (unless the workstation is so locked-down that the users do stuff like bring in their own laptops to get stuff done, and cause call-outs with those)), people do. On Linux, you can just point them at a package manager and let them have at it from a list of thousands of safe packages if they have a driving need to install more stuff.
Second off, viruses and spyware for Linux are essentially nonexistent.
Third off is the background instability (avoided only by the most careful and dedicated and lucky installations) of MS-Windows.
Fourth off, MS-Windows suffers from a higher incidence of "experts" willing to "fix" things for free. I prefer to pronounce it like a New Zealander: "willing to fux things for free".
That was for a DEC Rainbow in 1981. My optical mouse probably has more storage today.
...continuing to abuse the language won't get you anywhere.
:-) and goes on to qualify this definition by explaining that many Strong Atheists, Agnostics and Theists reject the use of the term "Atheist" without an associated definite rejection of deity.
Until you believe (or "know", if you prefer to express it that way) that there is/are no divine being(s), you do not qualify as an Atheist, regardless of whether you think of yourself as an Atheist or not.
The closest in any of the authoritative literature that I've been able to find classes this as "Weak Atheism" (and who wants to be a weak Atheist?
All of the other authorities use a definition along the lines of "someone who denies the existence of god".
I find it interesting that rarely is the "god" capitalised (which implies that the definition was not sourced from a Christian), and no definition that I could discover thought Polytheism worth dismissing -- only Monotheism. There is a further interesting parallel to this in Masonic ritual, if that's a topic which piques your curiosity.
Meanwhile, your invokation of a concensus of SlashDot posts to define a term is hardly scientific. Consider it rejected. (-:
You could go one step further, to Antitheism, which asserts basic Atheism ("there is/are no God(s)") as a stepping stone to "Believing in anything other than Atheism is dangerous". At that point, there is no practical difference between you and an Inquisitor (speaking of which, a College of the Inquisition was recently opened in Poland).
Viewing it from a static chemical perspective also squashes many insights into how digestion works, and cooking (most foods) does a lot more than zot a few nutrients and release others.
Contrast, for example, the cooking of rice, pumpkin or beans (good idea) with cooking rockmelon (cantaloupe), grapes, cucumber or lettuce (not so good).
Eating more raw food naturally pushes you towards eating more stuff which doesn't cook or preserve well; ie, fresh food. Unless it's been exceptionally badly raised (e.g. drenched in poisons or forced up by adding nitrates to otherwise infertile soil), fresh food is much better for you as a class than anything out of a packet or tin.
Also... you'd be surprised how much bacterial expsure you can get out of, say, radishes or mushrooms. But yes, in general veggies can't compare with meat in that, ahem, field.
Atheist == A + Theist == NonTheist == definitely no God(s).
Agnostic == A + Gnostic == NonGnostic == definitely not able to know if there is (a) God(s).
Atheists and Theists are both Gnostics. They both have a definite belief about God(s), whether positive or negative.
The set looks like this (ASCII art warning):...yet you are trying to redefine it like this......which might make you a legend in your own mind, but doesn't help with clarity at all.
An Atheist definitely believes that there is no God or Gods.
An Agnostic does not believe in God or Gods, but will not definitively say that there is no God or Gods.
The distinction is: an Atheist has a belief in no God(s); an Agnostic has no belief in God(s).
Your position is "I have seen no God or Gods, but will be interested in them if they turn up", which is clearly Agnostic.
Children with weak immune systems are susceptible to both colds and cancer?
William of Ockham would agree with me. (-:
Either way, don't feed them crap: breast-feed for as long as reasonably possible, then get them into eating their food as fresh, raw and un-tinkered-with as possible (a tactic which admittedly might not go down well amongst meat lovers).
...would be a great start. Most modern COTS CPU fans crap out in 2-3 years, tops, but I have a dual PentiumPro 200 box under my desk which is showing no sign of wearing out a fan after ~10 years of continuous service.
Let's not even discuss my underengineered AOpen laptop with its hopelessly inefficient (and now defunct) fan, other than to say that bypassing 75% of its heat generation would be -ing marvellous; the hard disks might also last more than a year, and the battery be worth something again (maybe with some help from white LEDs to replace the LCD screen's illuminating flouros).
Fixing much less glamorous issues might actually have more of an impact on power consumption than pushing the boundaries of physics, but I'm all in favour of doing that, too.
I imagine that the price tag, the exposure to malware (one of the big reasons I don't use MS products myself), and possibly the lack of PPC and/or 64-bit versions of MS-Windows and/or the codecs might have something to do with it.
What your assertion basically amounts to is: "He should run x86/32 and use an illegal copy of MS-Windows rather than run a Free (and probably free) OS and player on the hardware of his choice."
Let's put this in modern, everyday terms. Imagine Sony's media companies releasing only DVDs that work only on Sony players. I own a Panasonic player. You're telling me that I should buy a Sony player at whatever price Sony asks rather than whining about Sony's exclusivity?
It's kind of like signing a temperance pledge because practically everybody else in my community has VD, and subsequently being told that if I want to watch a movie I have to have sex in the back row of it. Am I a whiner because I refuse?
And how about you?
This link shows you the last 7 days' worth of new images. They occasionally post some really cool (or interesting for other reasons, e.g. ultra high res) images that don't make it to the newsier sites.
Here is one of my favourites of Valles Marineris at 9002x3126 pixels. A good excuse for a second monitor: "now I can use this as wallpaper". (-:
...so I'm about 6 light-nanoseconds tall, the screen I'm facing is about one by one and a half light nanoseconds.
A light-second is about a billion feet or 300,000,000m, roughly the same as the distance to the Moon.
86400 seconds in a day, so a light-day is about 26,000,000,000,000m, or 4-5 times the distance to Pluto and Charon, or 170 times as far away as the Sun is from us.
A light year is 9,500,000,000,000 km; and Proxima Centauri (the nearest star) is about 4 of those away, and the Crab nebula is about 4,000 of those from us.
Putting all of that into scale is kind of difficult. Making the Sun as big as a basketball, gives you a barely-visible Earth about 30m away, Jupiter a squash (or golf) ball about 150m away, and pluto an infinitesimal speck over a kilometer out. A light-day from the basketball sun would be a circle 9km across, and if you put the basketball sun in the middle of the US, the next basketball would be in Greenland, northwest Alaska, or Brasil. If you put it in my home town (Perth, Western Australia), you'd be looking at the next basketball in South Africa, southern Russia, or the middle of the Pacific. And the Crab nebula twenty times as far away as the Moon.
The fastest manned spacecraft has travelled at ~40,000km/h, so it would take about 100,000 years (a thousand lifetimes, two and a half thousand generations) to get to the nearest star and 100,000,000 years to get to the Crab. I imagine that even the spectacular views as you approached would somewhat lose their appeal after a few generations.