Who does have access to proper fossils to show speciation? If they existed, I would consider altering my beliefs. Unfortunately, sufficient fossil records do not exist to support major speciation. Small changes can be seen all over the place, but nothing big.
The Big Bang theory, though, does propound matter's eternality: otherwise matter all sprang into existence in a little teeny-tiny ball just for the Big Bang to happen.
Also, as you point out at the end of your comment, science has to remain mute on the subject of 'God'. That means that it also has to remain mute on the subject of 'not God'. Since most people who believe in evolution do not believe in a God who created them, they can't believe in a God who will save them, or in one who will punish them.
There is also a very interesting side issue at stake here, too. It's not just the 'fundamentalist Christians' who have taken up ID, or who shun evolution as the source of life. In this country alone, many prominent non-Christians have taken up ID's cause. Ther are also the millions upon millions of non-Christians in other countries who do not belive in evolution, but believe in a creation of some kind: Muslims, Hindus, tribal religions, etc, etc.
certainly god is too complex to have spontaneously sprung into existence
You're right, God is too complex to have 'sprung' into existence.
That being said, God didn't spring into existence. He has been Himself forever. There is no infinite regression problem if you have a supreme being who is capable of making time.
People can't wrap their heads around the concept of infinity. In mathematics, there are notions of positive and negative infinity, the infinite number of real numbers between any two real numbers, and the inifinite number of integer or whole numbers. If God is inifinite, as the Bible claims, and I believe, then it is perfectly rational to believe that He could have existed before He made time for us. People are finite beings, living only for a short period of time before dying.
The real problem people have with God, and why humanists love evolution and atheism, is that if God exists, He made us. And if He made us, then we have a duty to respond to Him. If we really did just appear from ooze, then life and death are meaningless. As the old saying goes: 'eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die'.
The 'prime mover' you seem to be claiming is that matter is eternal, and that it is why we are here. We're some big cosmic oops, and we only have a few years to do anything before we're gone.
Except that there are certain systems which are irreducibly complex.
Another point to be made is that everything we have observed in terms of evolutionary changes are all variations around a common theme. If you stick a whole posse of different dog breeds together, it won't take very many generations until you regress to the common state of 'dog'.
Intelligent Design posutlates that someone or something designed a big chunk of what we see on the earth today. It allows for minor changes to occur since. What it does not allow for, just as Theistic Evolution does not allow for in its pure form, is for sudden speciation. The IDer (for sake of argument call Him God) implemented all basic forms of life, including the parent species of everything we see now. some of these parent species have undergone minor changes, in multiple different places, giving us such things as Emus, Ostriches, and Cassowaries. God didn't give us primordial ooze and a spark for the amoeba to start life, and then let it go on its merry way.
In fact, ID and creationism do claim to be abionetic processes: life was created from non life, but it didn't do it on its own.
I would have a hard time believing you to be an "intelligent Christian". And it's not directly becuase you don't believe in a literal understanding of the creation account in Genesis.
Analytcally, the assumption in reading any text (be it from the Bible or not) is to assume that the authors meant precisely what they said. If there is no way that the text can be understood literally, then you move on to attempting to understand it in a figurative sense. This is basic hermeneutics. In many places in the Bible, the creation account is summarized and/or referenced as having been accurate - and literal (the 4th commandment springs to mind when God directly gives the reason for keeping the sabbath holy to Him: "For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day.")
When God comes out and says the account is correct, it's very dangerous ground to say that it is "NOT SUPPOSED TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY".
Many ID proponents (myself among them) do not throw out the baby of evolution with the bathwater of origins. God's having made the universe (ie, the Intelligent Design) does allow (and perhaps even demand) some evolution to occur. Repeatedly in the creation account God tells His creation to 'reproduce after their kind'. He tells Man (a special creation that did not come from 'lower' beings) to 'be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth'. He also tells Adam that he is in charge of the brids of the sky and beasts of the ground.
A great deal of man's dominion over nature has been shown in selective breeding. Now that we can experiement with genertic engineering (on a far more fine-grained scale than breeding alone allows), we have the opportunity to see all sorts of new variations of exiting plants and animals.
What evolution can not speak to, without getting into philosophy, is the actual origins of life. Eventually in the evolutionary timeline, yuo get back to a point where the question of 'where did the matter come from' pops up, and evolution comes alogn and says that matter is eternal: we've been in an unending cycle of compression and expansion of matter for eternity, and this time around humans popped up to figure it out.
What the Biblical creation account gives as the answer to that question is not that matter is eternal, but that there is a supreme being who is eternal, and He decided to make the world for His pleasure.
Intelligent Design is an alternative to the origins of life, not the continuing processes since that have shaped our world.
Yeah, like English. "I had my car fixed." - so, did you have it repaired, or made to not move? Determining the right definition from context is hard enough for people to do, let alone design a program to do it for us.
And does the word "wind" refer to womething twisting, or the air movements? Consider "the wind winded along." Heaven help you to figure out what pronunciation, and therefore definiton, you were trying to get.
'Natural language' is a really nasty set of rules, exceptions, adoptions, and wholesale rejections of logic.
We may not be in the 19th Century, but we are in America, where we still use miles. Americans like miles. We like pounds and gallons. We've grown up with them and don't need to think about them. Other countries may like the SI system because they've grown up with it.
In the US, we don't really care what kilometers are, unless we happen to visit Canada, and even then they're nice enough to give signs in both units.
I personally don't like the metric system because it's too easy to make mistakes in, having witnessed lots and lots of them in physics and chemistry classes, "Oh, woops, I meant 10^3 watts of power for that hair dryer, not 10^4." Those off-by-one errors in SI make a huge difference. Sliding the decimal point around is a nifty idea, but one that's way too easy to goof up on.
From what I understand, it comes down to differing ways of approaching the problem at hand. vi (and vim) was written in a moded fashion. All navigation, writing, and editing is just a key away. emacs is modeless, so accessing editing functionality is done through meta (esc) combos and ctrl sequences. I find it very natural to use the ctrl and meta sequences, since I came from the two-fisted world of Macs first, where everything is a Cmd or Option combination. I learned DOS well after I started using the Mac, and learned Unix/Linux later still.
I jokingly berate people for using anything other than the One True Editor(TM), but as long as you can get your work done, it doesn't really matter to me which you run.
And you're right, installing the Big Two along with a couple other of the smaller editors doesn't eat much disk space. And since it will invite more people to be happy when they're using your system, it's the better idea. We live in the era of dozens of gigabytes (on up) in hard drive space. There's no reason you can't have 5 editors installed. Most admins have more than one browser installed (in an X environment), so why not more than one editor? Most distribution include vim and emacs in the default install anyway.
People that are that die-hard about their systems are probably not good people to have as sysadmins. I use MacOS, Windows, and Linux. I find they each have reasons to exist, and I try to use them each to their individual strengths. The same should be true of editors, or any other tool where there is more than one option. I really dislike Internet Explorer, but I still use it (if for no other reason than to verify site designs). I also use Opera, Firefox, Lynx, and links.
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier by giving us tools to work with. Devolving into the religious wars between two equally good (though quite different) tools doesn't help.
apparently he doesn't believe in listing alphabetically, then:)
Yes, I'm an emacs user. I can also use pico when nothing else is available.
As religious as the emacs v. vim wars get, the real point is whether or not you can get the task done with a tool. I've met people who were really, really good at using pico, equal to my level of comfortability with emacs. I've met vim users who are really efficient. And I know lots of people, like myself, who are quite productive in emacs.
Whatever tool you use, if you can be productive, ie get the job done in the specified time-frame, I honestly don't care what editor you use. That's the cool thing about having lots of editors to choose from, you can pick the one that fits how you think.
I think in emacs. One of my best friends thinks in vim. We're equally productive in our environments, which is what really counts.
I use emacs, nvu, (not free) textpad, and homesite. I haven't had any rewrite issues with nvu, but I also haven't had to much tuning of what it generates. Homesite I have had to do a bunch of reformatting with to get the code to my level of comfort and readibility. Emacs, or any other straight-up text editor with syntax highliting is still my preferred way of creating pages and sites.
I can understand if the school has problems with the students posting to blogs while on school property, but once they are home, or at a public library, as long as they are not engaging in libel of the school, I don't see what the problem is with having a blog. This should be a case where the parents need to decide if they want their kids posting online or not.
I know several places that don't allow people to do certain things on their property (for example, not smoking, even if it's legal in the state, or McDonald's requiring you to have some form of footwear and shirt on to be in the store). But they don't have authority that extends beyong their property.
At my college, there are lots of things we're not allowed to do on-campus, like play paintball. Nor can any college-recognized group sponsor a paintball event off-campus, since it in effect is saying the college endorses what they are doing. However, nowhere in the college regulations is there a stipulation that I and some of my friends (who might even go to the school) can't go on our own and play.
This is definitely a parents-need-to-be-involved, not a we're-the-school-and-we'll-protect-your-kids-for-y ou situation.
Updates done from within Firefox don't count against the download count. Additionally, it doesn't track people who may download the installers from mirrors.
THat being said, I agree that it would be a more helpful stat to know how many unique installed copies there are out there (I've downloaded it multiple times on a couple computers due to reformats).
new modes of play
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I enjoy Civilization a great deal, and find myself playing very differently from everyone else I've played with or against, as there are multiple valid paths to victory, or at least satisfaction: conquest, cultural, scientific, etc, and they have some overlap depending on the civilization being played, but they tend to be pretty distinct modes of playing.
Recently, there have been a couple stories about World of Warcraft having a virtual plague outbreak, which apparently has evolved a new method of gameplay.
Have you found any modes of gameplay in anything you've designed appear in 'the wild'? Not just different ways of using the existing, 'accepted' paths, but entirely new ways of playing, and winning, that you didn't envision in the design and implementation of the game.
I certainly hope you can come up with a better reason for women in engineering than the invention of a silly gadget of dubious value.
True, women should be in engineering, but (and this is not sexist) many don't want to be there. They find other careers more interesting. engineering tends to be a guy-dominated environment, nto because guys are necessarily better at it, but they're the ones who go into the field. I've met lots of girls (I go to a 65/35 girl/guy college) in school who are very bright, and even like doing the kidns of analytical problems that CS and engineering have. But they pick other fields to go into because they're more attracted to them personally.
I think there's a good reason that there aren't more females in the sciences, and it has nothing to do with inferiority, or bad recruiting: they want to do something else. Likewise, certain fields tend to have a lot fewer guys in them, like early childhood development, and elementary education (to name just two). Guys aren't incapable of teaching those classes/age groups, but they don't (often) want to.
As to the gadget's 'dubious' value, if this came in a briefcase variant, I can think of loads of guys who would buy one (me included).
ok, trying to be serious for just a moment...
wouldn't they have to run out of ammo pretty fast... I mean, unless they have their own dolphin-run ammo dump or something. Those first 20 or 100 divers are just collateral damage... but then the buggers'll be out of darts.
I did a quick search on newegg and fry's this morning, and the cost for the box as described in the article is around $325 for the MB and case, add in some RAM, hard drive (unless you want to go flash), cd (temporarily... should only need it to install the OS), and a keyboard/mouse/monitor... the total's around $575-$700 (512M or 1024M, 80G or 160G, 17" CRT, std mouse & keyboard; LCD will add $50-100)
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Who does have access to proper fossils to show speciation? If they existed, I would consider altering my beliefs. Unfortunately, sufficient fossil records do not exist to support major speciation. Small changes can be seen all over the place, but nothing big.
Also, as you point out at the end of your comment, science has to remain mute on the subject of 'God'. That means that it also has to remain mute on the subject of 'not God'. Since most people who believe in evolution do not believe in a God who created them, they can't believe in a God who will save them, or in one who will punish them.
There is also a very interesting side issue at stake here, too. It's not just the 'fundamentalist Christians' who have taken up ID, or who shun evolution as the source of life. In this country alone, many prominent non-Christians have taken up ID's cause. Ther are also the millions upon millions of non-Christians in other countries who do not belive in evolution, but believe in a creation of some kind: Muslims, Hindus, tribal religions, etc, etc.
You're right, God is too complex to have 'sprung' into existence.
That being said, God didn't spring into existence. He has been Himself forever. There is no infinite regression problem if you have a supreme being who is capable of making time.
People can't wrap their heads around the concept of infinity. In mathematics, there are notions of positive and negative infinity, the infinite number of real numbers between any two real numbers, and the inifinite number of integer or whole numbers. If God is inifinite, as the Bible claims, and I believe, then it is perfectly rational to believe that He could have existed before He made time for us. People are finite beings, living only for a short period of time before dying.
The real problem people have with God, and why humanists love evolution and atheism, is that if God exists, He made us. And if He made us, then we have a duty to respond to Him. If we really did just appear from ooze, then life and death are meaningless. As the old saying goes: 'eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die'.
The 'prime mover' you seem to be claiming is that matter is eternal, and that it is why we are here. We're some big cosmic oops, and we only have a few years to do anything before we're gone.
Another point to be made is that everything we have observed in terms of evolutionary changes are all variations around a common theme. If you stick a whole posse of different dog breeds together, it won't take very many generations until you regress to the common state of 'dog'.
Intelligent Design posutlates that someone or something designed a big chunk of what we see on the earth today. It allows for minor changes to occur since. What it does not allow for, just as Theistic Evolution does not allow for in its pure form, is for sudden speciation. The IDer (for sake of argument call Him God) implemented all basic forms of life, including the parent species of everything we see now. some of these parent species have undergone minor changes, in multiple different places, giving us such things as Emus, Ostriches, and Cassowaries. God didn't give us primordial ooze and a spark for the amoeba to start life, and then let it go on its merry way.
In fact, ID and creationism do claim to be abionetic processes: life was created from non life, but it didn't do it on its own.
Analytcally, the assumption in reading any text (be it from the Bible or not) is to assume that the authors meant precisely what they said. If there is no way that the text can be understood literally, then you move on to attempting to understand it in a figurative sense. This is basic hermeneutics. In many places in the Bible, the creation account is summarized and/or referenced as having been accurate - and literal (the 4th commandment springs to mind when God directly gives the reason for keeping the sabbath holy to Him: "For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day.")
When God comes out and says the account is correct, it's very dangerous ground to say that it is "NOT SUPPOSED TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY".
A great deal of man's dominion over nature has been shown in selective breeding. Now that we can experiement with genertic engineering (on a far more fine-grained scale than breeding alone allows), we have the opportunity to see all sorts of new variations of exiting plants and animals.
What evolution can not speak to, without getting into philosophy, is the actual origins of life. Eventually in the evolutionary timeline, yuo get back to a point where the question of 'where did the matter come from' pops up, and evolution comes alogn and says that matter is eternal: we've been in an unending cycle of compression and expansion of matter for eternity, and this time around humans popped up to figure it out.
What the Biblical creation account gives as the answer to that question is not that matter is eternal, but that there is a supreme being who is eternal, and He decided to make the world for His pleasure.
Intelligent Design is an alternative to the origins of life, not the continuing processes since that have shaped our world.
Yeah, like English. "I had my car fixed." - so, did you have it repaired, or made to not move? Determining the right definition from context is hard enough for people to do, let alone design a program to do it for us.
And does the word "wind" refer to womething twisting, or the air movements? Consider "the wind winded along." Heaven help you to figure out what pronunciation, and therefore definiton, you were trying to get.
'Natural language' is a really nasty set of rules, exceptions, adoptions, and wholesale rejections of logic.
All over the place near the borders in Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick.
In the US, we don't really care what kilometers are, unless we happen to visit Canada, and even then they're nice enough to give signs in both units.
I personally don't like the metric system because it's too easy to make mistakes in, having witnessed lots and lots of them in physics and chemistry classes, "Oh, woops, I meant 10^3 watts of power for that hair dryer, not 10^4." Those off-by-one errors in SI make a huge difference. Sliding the decimal point around is a nifty idea, but one that's way too easy to goof up on.
To -80 degrees? Ouch! How cold were you before that?
From what I understand, it comes down to differing ways of approaching the problem at hand. vi (and vim) was written in a moded fashion. All navigation, writing, and editing is just a key away. emacs is modeless, so accessing editing functionality is done through meta (esc) combos and ctrl sequences. I find it very natural to use the ctrl and meta sequences, since I came from the two-fisted world of Macs first, where everything is a Cmd or Option combination. I learned DOS well after I started using the Mac, and learned Unix/Linux later still.
I jokingly berate people for using anything other than the One True Editor(TM), but as long as you can get your work done, it doesn't really matter to me which you run.
And you're right, installing the Big Two along with a couple other of the smaller editors doesn't eat much disk space. And since it will invite more people to be happy when they're using your system, it's the better idea. We live in the era of dozens of gigabytes (on up) in hard drive space. There's no reason you can't have 5 editors installed. Most admins have more than one browser installed (in an X environment), so why not more than one editor? Most distribution include vim and emacs in the default install anyway.
People that are that die-hard about their systems are probably not good people to have as sysadmins. I use MacOS, Windows, and Linux. I find they each have reasons to exist, and I try to use them each to their individual strengths. The same should be true of editors, or any other tool where there is more than one option. I really dislike Internet Explorer, but I still use it (if for no other reason than to verify site designs). I also use Opera, Firefox, Lynx, and links.
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier by giving us tools to work with. Devolving into the religious wars between two equally good (though quite different) tools doesn't help.
Yes, I'm an emacs user. I can also use pico when nothing else is available.
As religious as the emacs v. vim wars get, the real point is whether or not you can get the task done with a tool. I've met people who were really, really good at using pico, equal to my level of comfortability with emacs. I've met vim users who are really efficient. And I know lots of people, like myself, who are quite productive in emacs.
Whatever tool you use, if you can be productive, ie get the job done in the specified time-frame, I honestly don't care what editor you use. That's the cool thing about having lots of editors to choose from, you can pick the one that fits how you think.
I think in emacs. One of my best friends thinks in vim. We're equally productive in our environments, which is what really counts.
that's why the parent said that for complex numbers, matrices, etc, operator overloading is the right thing to do.
I use emacs, nvu, (not free) textpad, and homesite. I haven't had any rewrite issues with nvu, but I also haven't had to much tuning of what it generates. Homesite I have had to do a bunch of reformatting with to get the code to my level of comfort and readibility. Emacs, or any other straight-up text editor with syntax highliting is still my preferred way of creating pages and sites.
I know several places that don't allow people to do certain things on their property (for example, not smoking, even if it's legal in the state, or McDonald's requiring you to have some form of footwear and shirt on to be in the store). But they don't have authority that extends beyong their property.
At my college, there are lots of things we're not allowed to do on-campus, like play paintball. Nor can any college-recognized group sponsor a paintball event off-campus, since it in effect is saying the college endorses what they are doing. However, nowhere in the college regulations is there a stipulation that I and some of my friends (who might even go to the school) can't go on our own and play.
This is definitely a parents-need-to-be-involved, not a we're-the-school-and-we'll-protect-your-kids-for-y ou situation.
Yeah, the original Pentiums did require you to remove the side first. :)
Kinda makes you wonder about the whole 'low-power' thing that supposedly attracted Apple, though, doesn't it?
THat being said, I agree that it would be a more helpful stat to know how many unique installed copies there are out there (I've downloaded it multiple times on a couple computers due to reformats).
O Woops! That was supposed to go to my therapist.
Recently, there have been a couple stories about World of Warcraft having a virtual plague outbreak, which apparently has evolved a new method of gameplay.
Have you found any modes of gameplay in anything you've designed appear in 'the wild'? Not just different ways of using the existing, 'accepted' paths, but entirely new ways of playing, and winning, that you didn't envision in the design and implementation of the game.
but if they only have dart guns, the katana-wielding scuba divers will prevail!
(Ok, so I don't know any scuba divers that carry katanas.)
True, women should be in engineering, but (and this is not sexist) many don't want to be there. They find other careers more interesting. engineering tends to be a guy-dominated environment, nto because guys are necessarily better at it, but they're the ones who go into the field. I've met lots of girls (I go to a 65/35 girl/guy college) in school who are very bright, and even like doing the kidns of analytical problems that CS and engineering have. But they pick other fields to go into because they're more attracted to them personally.
I think there's a good reason that there aren't more females in the sciences, and it has nothing to do with inferiority, or bad recruiting: they want to do something else. Likewise, certain fields tend to have a lot fewer guys in them, like early childhood development, and elementary education (to name just two). Guys aren't incapable of teaching those classes/age groups, but they don't (often) want to.
As to the gadget's 'dubious' value, if this came in a briefcase variant, I can think of loads of guys who would buy one (me included).
ok, trying to be serious for just a moment...
wouldn't they have to run out of ammo pretty fast... I mean, unless they have their own dolphin-run ammo dump or something. Those first 20 or 100 divers are just collateral damage... but then the buggers'll be out of darts.
And yet.. you reply to the story...
..step 3: profit!
I did a quick search on newegg and fry's this morning, and the cost for the box as described in the article is around $325 for the MB and case, add in some RAM, hard drive (unless you want to go flash), cd (temporarily... should only need it to install the OS), and a keyboard/mouse/monitor... the total's around $575-$700 (512M or 1024M, 80G or 160G, 17" CRT, std mouse & keyboard; LCD will add $50-100)