From the article: 'Astronomers investigating 20 20 low redshift quasars, found that for 19 of them, they found, as expected, that these super massive black holes are surrounded by a host galaxy.
Well, it's nice to see Slashdot editors actually implementing one of the community's ideas. Some suggested that submitting test phrases to/. would be the way to get started; it's only been two days, and already the software seems to be going into production. Of course, it'll be awhile before the program gets out of beta, but still, kudos to the/. editors for acting so quickly.
Grammer checkers aren't half as useful as spellcheckers.
I'm going to (largely) ignore the fact that the parent differentiated between spelling and grammar errors only to suggest in what appeared to be a non-ironic way that he left "grammatical" errors in his post.
That aside, this argument ignores the group of people who would benefit most from a grammar checker: non-native speakers. Yes, native English speakers have built-in grammar rules that keep them from making egregious mistakes, but non-native speakers frequently make elementary errors because they have no such nearly-innate rules, and a grammar checker of this sort, if possible, would aid intercultural communication.
However, there's the fact that many different English grammars exist that can sound foreign to someone from a different region but are not necessarily incorrect - for example, the double modal ("might could") of the Southeast. In order to write a "grammar checker",* one would have to take such differences into account, either choosing one grammar to call "standard" or making different versions for different regions. It's for that reason that I agree with the overall gist of the parent post - that a "grammar checker" shouldn't be attempted in order to aid native speakers - I just disagree with the method used to reach that conclusion.
*Yes, commas are allowed outside of quotation marks in certain situations.
No offense intended if I'm wrong, but I'm going to assume the intent of this post (or at least the thought process represented) was a joke and blame the moderators for misrepresenting it. Funny, yes. Logical, no.
For those who took it seriously:
#1: How is evolution involved in "hardwiring" the brains of media consumers to prefer mindlessness to rationality? The adaptive aspects of evolution suggest that species improve. Brakdown in rational thought is a devolution.
#2: Even accepting the previous argument, how does evolution masking itself preclude the presence of intelligence? It seems rather crafty to me for a background process to disguise ittself.
true, but the performance and reliability benefits i get from my desktop are worth the tradeoff (especially during processor-intensive renders)...and i can always get a coffeemaker.
Some of the features common in most notebooks are longer-lasting batteries, CD burners and wireless capability.
Some of the features common in most desktops are the lack of need for a battery, cd burners that don't heat up to roughly the same temperature as the surface of the sun, and the ability to add wireless capability later if you want it.
How do you educate to get people who think for themselves?...teaching evolution is a bit of a statment that only knowledge that has passed the test of critical examination is worthy of being taught as science.
OK, but if you teach only evolution, there is no background to the application of that critical examination; thus, you resort to uncritical acceptance, the charge you made against pushers of ID. You seem to be equating including ID in a curriculum with unequivocally supporting it as an idea. Scientific thought as we know it today arose from people who questioned the uncritical thought supported by organized religion - if nothing of this background is taught, if no one learns to question their foundations, we may end up with ideas that are more quantifiable than before, but ideas that are nonetheless universally accepted for the very reason you mentioned earlier - people taught one thing will rarely question it. You're leaving them with no background for scientific revolution should the need or opportunity arise. It's just a more rational form of religion. In order to educate critical thinkers, we must show the methods by which unsupportable ideas are defeated.
If you teach creationism alongside evolution not only do you validate sloppy thinking, and not only do you create scientifically illiterate kids, but you abandon one of the very things that has a chance of creating a critically-thinking adult, the exposure to a real idea.
I don't see how you reached this conclusion. You're not limiting their exposure at all; you're still teaching the "real" idea of evolution. Shouldn't science courses provide the foundations of science along with the plain facts in the hopes that the principles will be used to uncover new facts? The foundations to scientific thought include the forms of reason that led some scientists to reject ideas such as ID. This, in turn, includes teaching the original idea that was rejected.
I have to admit that maybe I'm digging a little too deep for pre-college educations. The funny thing about education as I remember it was that at each level you reach, you find that they flat out lied to you in the earlier levels just to make things simpler. For example, until I got to high school, there were three states of matter - solid, liquid, and gas. When I got to high school, all of a sudden there was plasma. I was frustrated to discover that this had been conveniently left out of all those previous years. I think that education of this sort should be a gradual introduction. No, you don't have time in 5th grade to go into the reasons that Da Vinci had to hide corpses in his closet to study them nor the thought that led him to do so, but you can at least lay a foundation. For early education (pre-high school and maybe even into high school), I'd have to argue that it's better to raise issues and leave children with questions that either later information or personal study can answer rather than offer them simplistic facts that they can accept completely without knowing why they're accepting them. I think this is what has caused the tendency that you mentioned to not question anything you're taught in school - you're not given anything to question.
...it seems to me that talking about the origin of life on this level would be a philosophical argument (because it seems to me that this only makes sense if you're talking about the origin of conciousness? ).
For this we'd have to, as you're alluding to, define "life". Turning this into a philosophical argument, and thus making it quantifiably unsolvable (except for perhaps taking an analytic philosopher's approach), would only be accomplished by accepting a philosophical definition for the term "life" itself. I think scientists would be loath to accept this, yet it's the only way any scientific theory can escape the burden of quantifiable proof for the origin of life.
If you teach it in the classroom, you give it status as "accepted".
I might have to concede this one, but my personal experience contradicts the assumption implicit here; namely, that anything that is taught as "accepted" is, in fact, genuinely accepted by the student. Which brings me to...
Few adults, even, question what's authoritatively told them in High School, much less elementary school.
I can speak from the experience of myself and that of friends and acquaintances and say that this is a generalization that does not always hold; "few" is an ambiguous term that needs to be quantified and more specifically defined before it can have force. Personally, many of my current beliefs challenge if not flatly contradict what I was taught as a child. However, I've seen plenty who support your argument - is teaching a rational view to those who refuse to be critically reflective to begin with going to help? Certainly it will make more people agree with you, but is not the goal of a rational society to promote criticism and challenge of popular belief in search of something better, more accurate? Thus, if your argument about few people challenging what they are told holds, society is a lost cause because, while we may have a decent start on a scientific answer now, it will never go any further because no one will question it...except for the minority that I mentioned who are willing to criticize foundational beliefs, whether they are brought up with them or not. This minority have always been the ones to promote positive change in science to begin with, and it won't matter what they're taught.
I'd also like to mention that your high school computer analogy is amusing but, I feel, inapplicable, since you threw together a wide mixture of information rather than different ideas on the same topic.
I have to say that I'm enjoying this discussion (I don't get the opportunity often, as I'm surrounded by a rather, err, conservative academic environment at the moment). If it gets old, let me know.
While it's true that we'll never actually witness the origin of human life, we can verify those pieces of it that we can figure out how to test, for example some aspects of the process of natural selection.
That's testing the progression of life, not the origin. I see a large difference between the two (but, once again, I might have to defer to someone with a more intimate knowledge of natural science - this is why I was trying to avoid speaking to the issue and taking a shot at the logic of the arguments involved instead). I've never heard the argument you mentioned promoted by creationists (and I've been around a lot), but it doesn't surprise me...though it does amuse me.
The scientific is our shared consensual belief.
That doesn't sit entirely well with me; partially because there are areas of wide disagreement among scientists about a variety of topics; partially because I feel the pure objectivity that scientists purport to have is nearly impossible for us, as humans, to attain; and partially because I don't feel that the average person knows enough about most of these topics to have formed what could properly be called a "belief" beyond the same kind of blind acceptance that you maintain as the main fault of Christians. That sentence was way too long.
The people who do that are not intereseted in consensus, they're interested only in forcing others to agree with them to lessen their own cognitive dissonance and make them feel better about their own beliefs (my view, of course). This is (again, in my view) intolerant, ignorant, and just plain wrong.
I agree. I'm not arguing in support of forced belief systems; I tried to emphasize that last time. What I see a lot of people doing, however, is promoting very incomplete theories as the only fact and screaming bloody murder if someone tries to tell anyone that there are other ideas out there. If an idea is ridiculous, it will, in a rational society, be supplanted by truth or the closest available alternative. Those who do not accept its replacement would not have accepted it whether or not forced acceptance was attempted. Teaching alternative ideas to children, adults, whomever does not equate to forcing them to accept them. The problem you mentioned is exactly the problem I see in this debate at large - people are trying to lessen their own discomfort by lambasting those who don't agree with them - their reactions make them seem frightened of an idea they consider childish, and it doesn't make sense. If they are confident that evolution is, in fact, the most rational choice available, what do they have to fear from it being taught side by side with ID, alien cross-fertilization, or anything else anyone can come up with?
Evolution, as a framework for understanding the world in a scientific and rational way, is always subject to proof or disproof by verification.
I probably should have been more specific, and my ambiguity was the result of an implicit assumption that I probably should not have made. I was speaking of the aspect of both evolution and ID as the origin of human life. Looked at in that way, evolution will never be proven nor disproven by verification (barring the invention of a time machine). Judged by your criteria, therefore, evolution as a theory of the origin of life is just as much religion as ID.
It's quite another thing to argue that your desire for trans-ratinal beliefs should be afforded the same status as rational ones.
To me, this seems like you're short-changing yourself. If you hold "trans-rational" beliefs because you feel rationality to come up short in the full and accurate description of life, why should your properly rational beliefs, though admittedly insufficient, hold an inherently higher status than trans-rational beliefs?
I recognize your point, but there are some things I'd like to note.
#1 - Carbon dating and MRI technology may be based on using similar properties of radioactivity, but to equate them in the sense of denouncing one use of the knowledge and accepting another is, in my opinion, a grave mistake roughly equivalent to dismissing a person as inconsistent who denounces using guns for killing people but uses one to defend his family from a bear. Same basic principle (granted, I'm not a scientist, so I could be slightly off, but I think my point still gets across).
#2 - No one will ever be able to prove religion. No one will ever be able to prove evolution. If, however, evolution is correct, and all the evidence on both sides is presented, people should be able to figure it out for themselves once given all the information. To exclude one side of the argument (a side that is still very much alive as far as scientific investigation goes) from the education system is to promote ignorance in the same way as teaching solely an "outdated" theory.
Basically, I'm saying that we shouldn't be teaching either side as "the right way" because - let's face it for once - no one knows. (And here I said I wasn't actually going to get into the issue.) Teach all available, accessible, and remotely plausible ideas; and let people grow up thinking critically about them and making up their own minds. Anything less is an insult.
Without making any claims on the issue at stake here, I'd just like to point out the irony involved in watching people who pride themselves on being liberal, open-minded, and tolerant lash out bitterly at people who want to be heard.
I'm not saying they can't be ignorant; I'm not even saying they're right. I'm just saying that, next time, before calling people "kooks," "nut jobs," and the like, while using grammar that would be contradicted by a proper third-grade education, ask yourself what your primary ideological grounding is.
If it's, "I'm always right," then, by all means, go on your merry way, continue violently attacking the beliefs of others, and enjoy dying alone.
If it's, "I like to keep an open mind because I know I don't have everything figured out," promote an intelligent without resorting to logically fallacious ad hominem attacks to give your argument more thrust. It's antics like these that give liberals a bad name.
I can't wait for M$ to realize their snide codename was too obvious, make the next codename "monopoly" in Arabic so fewer people will understand it...then get investigated by the FBI for possible terrorist ties.
Bellsouth is pretty much the Third Reich of phone/broadband service - at this point, any competition would have to be more fair than they are.
When a company that refuses to remove extraneous services from your account despite repeated requests cries foul, let them cry....I'm not bitter.
The tags weren't in the program files directory because I had uninstalled/reinstalled, but they were still in the application data folder. Removed them; now Firefox works fine. Thanks for the tip
Slashdot Mirror
Fear the Interwebs and their many denizens, for they hold your fate in the grasp of their noodly appendages.
Actually, some current thought interprets the frequent use of "like" as the language developing a sort of verbal opening quotation mark.
Well, it's nice to see Slashdot editors actually implementing one of the community's ideas. Some suggested that submitting test phrases to /. would be the way to get started; it's only been two days, and already the software seems to be going into production. Of course, it'll be awhile before the program gets out of beta, but still, kudos to the /. editors for acting so quickly.
Grammer checkers aren't half as useful as spellcheckers.
I'm going to (largely) ignore the fact that the parent differentiated between spelling and grammar errors only to suggest in what appeared to be a non-ironic way that he left "grammatical" errors in his post.
That aside, this argument ignores the group of people who would benefit most from a grammar checker: non-native speakers. Yes, native English speakers have built-in grammar rules that keep them from making egregious mistakes, but non-native speakers frequently make elementary errors because they have no such nearly-innate rules, and a grammar checker of this sort, if possible, would aid intercultural communication.
However, there's the fact that many different English grammars exist that can sound foreign to someone from a different region but are not necessarily incorrect - for example, the double modal ("might could") of the Southeast. In order to write a "grammar checker",* one would have to take such differences into account, either choosing one grammar to call "standard" or making different versions for different regions. It's for that reason that I agree with the overall gist of the parent post - that a "grammar checker" shouldn't be attempted in order to aid native speakers - I just disagree with the method used to reach that conclusion.
*Yes, commas are allowed outside of quotation marks in certain situations.
Why do men die earlier than women?
Because they want to.
I hear you can even send the mp3's through the e-mail these days.
Downright disturbing, it was.
Personally, I'd just settle for commas, not being put where they don't belong.
If evolution were only a theory about reproduction, there would have been a bit of a difficulty in getting from ape to man.
For those who took it seriously:
#1: How is evolution involved in "hardwiring" the brains of media consumers to prefer mindlessness to rationality? The adaptive aspects of evolution suggest that species improve. Brakdown in rational thought is a devolution.
#2: Even accepting the previous argument, how does evolution masking itself preclude the presence of intelligence? It seems rather crafty to me for a background process to disguise ittself.
true, but the performance and reliability benefits i get from my desktop are worth the tradeoff (especially during processor-intensive renders)...and i can always get a coffeemaker.
Some of the features common in most desktops are the lack of need for a battery, cd burners that don't heat up to roughly the same temperature as the surface of the sun, and the ability to add wireless capability later if you want it.
OK, but if you teach only evolution, there is no background to the application of that critical examination; thus, you resort to uncritical acceptance, the charge you made against pushers of ID. You seem to be equating including ID in a curriculum with unequivocally supporting it as an idea. Scientific thought as we know it today arose from people who questioned the uncritical thought supported by organized religion - if nothing of this background is taught, if no one learns to question their foundations, we may end up with ideas that are more quantifiable than before, but ideas that are nonetheless universally accepted for the very reason you mentioned earlier - people taught one thing will rarely question it. You're leaving them with no background for scientific revolution should the need or opportunity arise. It's just a more rational form of religion. In order to educate critical thinkers, we must show the methods by which unsupportable ideas are defeated.
If you teach creationism alongside evolution not only do you validate sloppy thinking, and not only do you create scientifically illiterate kids, but you abandon one of the very things that has a chance of creating a critically-thinking adult, the exposure to a real idea.
I don't see how you reached this conclusion. You're not limiting their exposure at all; you're still teaching the "real" idea of evolution. Shouldn't science courses provide the foundations of science along with the plain facts in the hopes that the principles will be used to uncover new facts? The foundations to scientific thought include the forms of reason that led some scientists to reject ideas such as ID. This, in turn, includes teaching the original idea that was rejected.
I have to admit that maybe I'm digging a little too deep for pre-college educations. The funny thing about education as I remember it was that at each level you reach, you find that they flat out lied to you in the earlier levels just to make things simpler. For example, until I got to high school, there were three states of matter - solid, liquid, and gas. When I got to high school, all of a sudden there was plasma. I was frustrated to discover that this had been conveniently left out of all those previous years. I think that education of this sort should be a gradual introduction. No, you don't have time in 5th grade to go into the reasons that Da Vinci had to hide corpses in his closet to study them nor the thought that led him to do so, but you can at least lay a foundation. For early education (pre-high school and maybe even into high school), I'd have to argue that it's better to raise issues and leave children with questions that either later information or personal study can answer rather than offer them simplistic facts that they can accept completely without knowing why they're accepting them. I think this is what has caused the tendency that you mentioned to not question anything you're taught in school - you're not given anything to question.
For this we'd have to, as you're alluding to, define "life". Turning this into a philosophical argument, and thus making it quantifiably unsolvable (except for perhaps taking an analytic philosopher's approach), would only be accomplished by accepting a philosophical definition for the term "life" itself. I think scientists would be loath to accept this, yet it's the only way any scientific theory can escape the burden of quantifiable proof for the origin of life.
If you teach it in the classroom, you give it status as "accepted".
I might have to concede this one, but my personal experience contradicts the assumption implicit here; namely, that anything that is taught as "accepted" is, in fact, genuinely accepted by the student. Which brings me to...
Few adults, even, question what's authoritatively told them in High School, much less elementary school.
I can speak from the experience of myself and that of friends and acquaintances and say that this is a generalization that does not always hold; "few" is an ambiguous term that needs to be quantified and more specifically defined before it can have force. Personally, many of my current beliefs challenge if not flatly contradict what I was taught as a child. However, I've seen plenty who support your argument - is teaching a rational view to those who refuse to be critically reflective to begin with going to help? Certainly it will make more people agree with you, but is not the goal of a rational society to promote criticism and challenge of popular belief in search of something better, more accurate? Thus, if your argument about few people challenging what they are told holds, society is a lost cause because, while we may have a decent start on a scientific answer now, it will never go any further because no one will question it...except for the minority that I mentioned who are willing to criticize foundational beliefs, whether they are brought up with them or not. This minority have always been the ones to promote positive change in science to begin with, and it won't matter what they're taught.
I'd also like to mention that your high school computer analogy is amusing but, I feel, inapplicable, since you threw together a wide mixture of information rather than different ideas on the same topic.
I have to say that I'm enjoying this discussion (I don't get the opportunity often, as I'm surrounded by a rather, err, conservative academic environment at the moment). If it gets old, let me know.
That's testing the progression of life, not the origin. I see a large difference between the two (but, once again, I might have to defer to someone with a more intimate knowledge of natural science - this is why I was trying to avoid speaking to the issue and taking a shot at the logic of the arguments involved instead). I've never heard the argument you mentioned promoted by creationists (and I've been around a lot), but it doesn't surprise me...though it does amuse me.
The scientific is our shared consensual belief.
That doesn't sit entirely well with me; partially because there are areas of wide disagreement among scientists about a variety of topics; partially because I feel the pure objectivity that scientists purport to have is nearly impossible for us, as humans, to attain; and partially because I don't feel that the average person knows enough about most of these topics to have formed what could properly be called a "belief" beyond the same kind of blind acceptance that you maintain as the main fault of Christians. That sentence was way too long.
The people who do that are not intereseted in consensus, they're interested only in forcing others to agree with them to lessen their own cognitive dissonance and make them feel better about their own beliefs (my view, of course). This is (again, in my view) intolerant, ignorant, and just plain wrong.
I agree. I'm not arguing in support of forced belief systems; I tried to emphasize that last time. What I see a lot of people doing, however, is promoting very incomplete theories as the only fact and screaming bloody murder if someone tries to tell anyone that there are other ideas out there. If an idea is ridiculous, it will, in a rational society, be supplanted by truth or the closest available alternative. Those who do not accept its replacement would not have accepted it whether or not forced acceptance was attempted. Teaching alternative ideas to children, adults, whomever does not equate to forcing them to accept them. The problem you mentioned is exactly the problem I see in this debate at large - people are trying to lessen their own discomfort by lambasting those who don't agree with them - their reactions make them seem frightened of an idea they consider childish, and it doesn't make sense. If they are confident that evolution is, in fact, the most rational choice available, what do they have to fear from it being taught side by side with ID, alien cross-fertilization, or anything else anyone can come up with?
I probably should have been more specific, and my ambiguity was the result of an implicit assumption that I probably should not have made. I was speaking of the aspect of both evolution and ID as the origin of human life. Looked at in that way, evolution will never be proven nor disproven by verification (barring the invention of a time machine). Judged by your criteria, therefore, evolution as a theory of the origin of life is just as much religion as ID.
It's quite another thing to argue that your desire for trans-ratinal beliefs should be afforded the same status as rational ones.
To me, this seems like you're short-changing yourself. If you hold "trans-rational" beliefs because you feel rationality to come up short in the full and accurate description of life, why should your properly rational beliefs, though admittedly insufficient, hold an inherently higher status than trans-rational beliefs?
#1 - Carbon dating and MRI technology may be based on using similar properties of radioactivity, but to equate them in the sense of denouncing one use of the knowledge and accepting another is, in my opinion, a grave mistake roughly equivalent to dismissing a person as inconsistent who denounces using guns for killing people but uses one to defend his family from a bear. Same basic principle (granted, I'm not a scientist, so I could be slightly off, but I think my point still gets across).
#2 - No one will ever be able to prove religion. No one will ever be able to prove evolution. If, however, evolution is correct, and all the evidence on both sides is presented, people should be able to figure it out for themselves once given all the information. To exclude one side of the argument (a side that is still very much alive as far as scientific investigation goes) from the education system is to promote ignorance in the same way as teaching solely an "outdated" theory.
Basically, I'm saying that we shouldn't be teaching either side as "the right way" because - let's face it for once - no one knows. (And here I said I wasn't actually going to get into the issue.) Teach all available, accessible, and remotely plausible ideas; and let people grow up thinking critically about them and making up their own minds. Anything less is an insult.
I'm not saying they can't be ignorant; I'm not even saying they're right. I'm just saying that, next time, before calling people "kooks," "nut jobs," and the like, while using grammar that would be contradicted by a proper third-grade education, ask yourself what your primary ideological grounding is.
If it's, "I'm always right," then, by all means, go on your merry way, continue violently attacking the beliefs of others, and enjoy dying alone.
If it's, "I like to keep an open mind because I know I don't have everything figured out," promote an intelligent without resorting to logically fallacious ad hominem attacks to give your argument more thrust. It's antics like these that give liberals a bad name.
InputExceptionError: line 8: unexpected adverb - "therefore"
Please tell me the word with which you were planning to follow "therefore" wasn't "clear."
I can't wait for M$ to realize their snide codename was too obvious, make the next codename "monopoly" in Arabic so fewer people will understand it...then get investigated by the FBI for possible terrorist ties.
In Soviet Russia, proper spelling bastardizes you!
In other news, redundancy and saying the same thing twice will not be tolerated or put up with.
Bellsouth is pretty much the Third Reich of phone/broadband service - at this point, any competition would have to be more fair than they are. When a company that refuses to remove extraneous services from your account despite repeated requests cries foul, let them cry. ...I'm not bitter.
The tags weren't in the program files directory because I had uninstalled/reinstalled, but they were still in the application data folder. Removed them; now Firefox works fine. Thanks for the tip