How many planes crash on a yearly basis due to these non-human error failures? These seem to be all the same issues that airplanes would have to deal with also. Honestly, I'd like to know the statistics. I have a feeling it's a very, very low rate.
Computers can make decisions much faster than people with sensors that can't get distracted. Where a human is thinking "wow, look at that hot girl as I pass her by OH SHIT A KID IN THE ROAD!!!!!", the computer will easily sense the suddenly oncoming child and automatically respond safely rather than wildly swerve out of the way while locking up the brakes. I don't see why pedestrian traffic would be any more of a problem for autonomous vehicles than any other obstacle.
Obviously that's not to say that these accidents will NEVER happen, but I'm confident that the statistic will drop by multiple orders of magnitude.
No one said that we know it all and obviously we don't or that would be the end of science. However, your belittling of what we have accomplished through the scientific method is quite ironic considering your use of a computer to post that ignorant opinion.
The simple fact is: science works, bitches. We ARE smart, intelligent creatures and we have created many wonderful things through our method of improving, self-correcting knowledge. I don't think it arrogant at all to be in awe of the things we know that we know as well as the things we know we don't yet know.
It certainly is ok to not know it all, but it is certainly not ok to not strive to know more than we did yesterday.
If you think that our scientific knowledge is useless and "make belief", then kindly, please, put your money where your mouth is, get off the computer and move back into a cave.
To take it even further, unless you are a fundamentalist who believes in the literal word of Genesis and that it is word for word true and not just an allegory, then you have already taken out the need for Jesus to "save" us. If Genesis is only an allegory, then there never was a Fall because Eve never really ate from the tree of knowledge because it's just a story. So Biblical literallists are the only self-consistent ones. No literal Adam and Eve, no literal Fall, no need for a literal Savior.
... if the bill allows teachers to point out the arguments against evolution, and allows the students the freedom to argue against the teacher for those arguments freely...
The problem with this is that grade school kids aren't really equipped with the tools to counter these kinds of arguments. It's easy to ASK a hard question; answering that question is another matter. Grade school kids don't have the background, research, or knowledge to answer those kind of questions.
"Well, if evolution were true then how come X?" This question most likely has an answer, probably not an obvious one, but one that a biologist could give. Grade school kids aren't biologists. They see that difficult question, don't know the answer, and think "Gee, that's a tough one! Maybe this teacher is right and this evolution thing is a lot of bullshit!"
This is why what's included in school curricula shouldn't be determined by the teachers, parents, or school boards; they really don't know WTF they're talking about when it comes to high level concepts like this. This is why we have entire college courses, degrees, fields of research, and academies of science: they are the experts at these high level fields. Who are you going to trust to make the right decisions for your child's education: an organization of biologists whose lives' work has been doing this kind of research, or the 6 Bible thumpers that got elected to the local school board and whose exposure to evolutionary theory is their preacher saying "We didn't come from no monkeys!"?
I would vote for you, even if it meant sucking up for that socialist healthcare that I'm not down with. Your political ambitions were already dead at "atheist" though. An atheist wouldn't have a snowball's chance in anyone's hell in getting past step 1.
Aliquots are also parts on a piano that separate the speaking (struck) length of the string from the non-speaking portion (duplex scaling), or in some pianos are an extra 4th unstruck string that adds harmonics through sympathetic resonance.
As a piano player/retailer, that was my first thought, chemists be damned.:P
You instantly cease to have a tongue or anything else that might be attached to that tongue, and you will be gone too quickly to have any kind of feeling whatsoever, tingly or not. It would be an impressive visual though.
Or you could instantly be transformed into an energy being and make your way through the planet's electrical system and take over the world Lawnmower Man-style.
This assumes that continued colonization is something that an advanced civilization wants or requires.I can't imagine that space exploration would be something that any civilization would voluntarily give up (then again, how can you imagine the drives and desires of such an advanced species), but It could be that a break-even point is reached in a civilization's resource consumption that renders further colonization and expansion unnecessary.
It could be that most civilizations end up in some kind of Matrix-like singularity situation where they transcend biology and thus the need for such resources as we need as biological beings. As long as they have a star to power their LifeServers(tm), expansion and exploration could be done with nano-sized Von Neumann probes.
The options you laid out are certainly plausible, but I have to disagree that they are the only ones. I guess my above explanation would fit comfortably in your c).:)
There are any number of reasons why they might not want to come here or why we might not notice them. For sure the Fermi Paradox has some interesting arguments, but I don't believe that just because we haven't seen them coming here (or recognized them, maybe they're already here and we just don't see it!) doesn't mean they aren't out there.
“Any people at the destination,” the team’s paper concludes, “would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for [forward] region particles.”
So maybe that's exactly what we have been seeing!:D
Unless those aliens that have space-warping technology have already also solved the problem of particle/radiation collection and burst release. If they can travel faster than light, is it really much of a stretch to imagine they might have figured this out too?
The problem is you are leaving a critical step out of your analogy. All you're simulating is one generation of random mutation on one single "organism". You're leaving out several crucial steps. Try the same thing with hundreds of the same component. After your "mutation", try "killing off" all the bad designs that come about through outcomes 1 and 2, then creating copies of the ones that survive through 3 and 4, then repeating the process over and over again. If you did, you would find that the overall process will tend towards #4 of improved function, because those are going to be the ones that survive to be copied. If you were a computer programmer, you would call this a "genetic algorithm". Many interesting, functional designs have come about this very trial and error process that you think is impossible.
Your problem is that all you see is random mutation, but conveniently leave out the natural selection half.
And the universe still hasn't changed to accommodate those 2 billion people's wishful thinking. Or does the number of believers in a particular cult really have any bearing on how true it is? McDonald's has served billions and billions too, but it's certainly not due to the high quality of its products.
I always find it amazing that religious people believe in a supposed 2000 year old book as the revealed word of God, and that God speaks to them, but that the woman who says that God told her to kill her kids is just crazy, and then they reject my claim that I'm God and that they should worship me and give me all their money! I mean, why should they not? I'm God and I say they should worship me, who are they to doubt the word of God? And yes, thou shalt still not put God to the test, just take my word on it, dammit.
That doesn't make it any less stupid; in fact, my opinion is that it's even stupider for basing your health practices on superstition and woo woo instead of modern medicine and science.
Jehovah's Witnesses do accept medical treatment, but not blood transfusions. Christian Scientists are the ones that don't accept any medical treatment, AFAIK.
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Yes, and it was such a rare occurrence that it made national news. What are the yearly statistics on these kind of events? I really want to know.
How many planes crash on a yearly basis due to these non-human error failures? These seem to be all the same issues that airplanes would have to deal with also. Honestly, I'd like to know the statistics. I have a feeling it's a very, very low rate.
Admit it, you just want a hot Cortana to talk to. :P
Maybe we should have our governments hiring coders to produce spelling/grammar checkers also. ;)
[citation needed]
Obviously that's not to say that these accidents will NEVER happen, but I'm confident that the statistic will drop by multiple orders of magnitude.
The simple fact is: science works, bitches. We ARE smart, intelligent creatures and we have created many wonderful things through our method of improving, self-correcting knowledge. I don't think it arrogant at all to be in awe of the things we know that we know as well as the things we know we don't yet know.
It certainly is ok to not know it all, but it is certainly not ok to not strive to know more than we did yesterday.
If you think that our scientific knowledge is useless and "make belief", then kindly, please, put your money where your mouth is, get off the computer and move back into a cave.
To take it even further, unless you are a fundamentalist who believes in the literal word of Genesis and that it is word for word true and not just an allegory, then you have already taken out the need for Jesus to "save" us. If Genesis is only an allegory, then there never was a Fall because Eve never really ate from the tree of knowledge because it's just a story. So Biblical literallists are the only self-consistent ones. No literal Adam and Eve, no literal Fall, no need for a literal Savior.
The problem with this is that grade school kids aren't really equipped with the tools to counter these kinds of arguments. It's easy to ASK a hard question; answering that question is another matter. Grade school kids don't have the background, research, or knowledge to answer those kind of questions.
"Well, if evolution were true then how come X?" This question most likely has an answer, probably not an obvious one, but one that a biologist could give. Grade school kids aren't biologists. They see that difficult question, don't know the answer, and think "Gee, that's a tough one! Maybe this teacher is right and this evolution thing is a lot of bullshit!"
This is why what's included in school curricula shouldn't be determined by the teachers, parents, or school boards; they really don't know WTF they're talking about when it comes to high level concepts like this. This is why we have entire college courses, degrees, fields of research, and academies of science: they are the experts at these high level fields. Who are you going to trust to make the right decisions for your child's education: an organization of biologists whose lives' work has been doing this kind of research, or the 6 Bible thumpers that got elected to the local school board and whose exposure to evolutionary theory is their preacher saying "We didn't come from no monkeys!"?
On the recruitment contract/posters/flyers.
LOL
I would vote for you, even if it meant sucking up for that socialist healthcare that I'm not down with. Your political ambitions were already dead at "atheist" though. An atheist wouldn't have a snowball's chance in anyone's hell in getting past step 1.
As a piano player/retailer, that was my first thought, chemists be damned. :P
No, it's different clocks, but they got a deal on the connecting cables from LHC...
Or you could instantly be transformed into an energy being and make your way through the planet's electrical system and take over the world Lawnmower Man-style.
It could be that most civilizations end up in some kind of Matrix-like singularity situation where they transcend biology and thus the need for such resources as we need as biological beings. As long as they have a star to power their LifeServers(tm), expansion and exploration could be done with nano-sized Von Neumann probes.
The options you laid out are certainly plausible, but I have to disagree that they are the only ones. I guess my above explanation would fit comfortably in your c). :)
Gene Roddenberry was right again!
There are any number of reasons why they might not want to come here or why we might not notice them. For sure the Fermi Paradox has some interesting arguments, but I don't believe that just because we haven't seen them coming here (or recognized them, maybe they're already here and we just don't see it!) doesn't mean they aren't out there.
So maybe that's exactly what we have been seeing! :D
Unless those aliens that have space-warping technology have already also solved the problem of particle/radiation collection and burst release. If they can travel faster than light, is it really much of a stretch to imagine they might have figured this out too?
The problem is you are leaving a critical step out of your analogy. All you're simulating is one generation of random mutation on one single "organism". You're leaving out several crucial steps. Try the same thing with hundreds of the same component. After your "mutation", try "killing off" all the bad designs that come about through outcomes 1 and 2, then creating copies of the ones that survive through 3 and 4, then repeating the process over and over again. If you did, you would find that the overall process will tend towards #4 of improved function, because those are going to be the ones that survive to be copied. If you were a computer programmer, you would call this a "genetic algorithm". Many interesting, functional designs have come about this very trial and error process that you think is impossible.
Your problem is that all you see is random mutation, but conveniently leave out the natural selection half.
Happily, wikipedia provides a great list of GA applications, and one of them looks like it does exactly what you say is impossible.
Besides your unfounded doubt in evolution, what is some evidence that specifically points to design and some information about this proposed designer?
And the universe still hasn't changed to accommodate those 2 billion people's wishful thinking. Or does the number of believers in a particular cult really have any bearing on how true it is? McDonald's has served billions and billions too, but it's certainly not due to the high quality of its products.
I always find it amazing that religious people believe in a supposed 2000 year old book as the revealed word of God, and that God speaks to them, but that the woman who says that God told her to kill her kids is just crazy, and then they reject my claim that I'm God and that they should worship me and give me all their money! I mean, why should they not? I'm God and I say they should worship me, who are they to doubt the word of God? And yes, thou shalt still not put God to the test, just take my word on it, dammit.
Jehovah's Witnesses do accept medical treatment, but not blood transfusions. Christian Scientists are the ones that don't accept any medical treatment, AFAIK.