I'm not sure what fancy-pants sources these guys are using, but 'shirve' and 'smite' are definitely not low frequency verbs in my crowd. I say keep the 'mote' in smote. They will rue the day when 'smitted' crosses my lips!
Just look at them damned Chinese characters and the reform they underwent last century -- compare the characters used in Taiwan or Hong Kong, those in Japan (that were adopted after the Chinese simplified them once) and those that are used in China now (which were simplified gradually even more). The more them characters evolve, the more they look the same.
Probably in the end it'll all end up where Korea is -- they have more or less given up on characters and switched to alphabet. Which is where English was back then;)
Except that Chinese characters are stabilised as a (generally) non-phonetic script by being a common notation across many languages ('dialects,' if you prefer, but if these are dialects of the same language then Italian and Portuguese are, too). You will occasionally see our alphabet used to express Jamaica Patois or, say, Geordie, but the spellings must change and mutual intelligibility suffers.
But spelling reforms (and character revisions) are a different matter from change in spoken language, since they seem to be undertaken by committees of various sorts, who have to maintain a sensitivity to the breadth of their constituency, but at the same time can hope to undertake rational engineering projects. I suspect this is ultimately because very few people 'speak' written languages natively; they learn them, like foreign languages, in school.
Thanks - I do, in fact, usually try to be coherent.
Porpnorber is a gibberish word that was once bandied about on alt.stupidity (gibbering is a hobby of mine, of sorts). I use it as a nick here and there simply because it is (to me) memorable (remembering logins is a great trial for me) and it can be used as a more or less rigid pseudonym even in these latter days when (a) going by one's true name no longer seems wise and (b) everything sensible is highly contended. Perhaps not the wisest choice if I want to be taken seriously, but at least it's not, say, XXXm0r0n696969....
What makes you think people having health care gives you the right to start controlling what they do, simply because you also pay for health care? Not wearing a seatbelt is pretty dumb, or at best self destructive. But why don't people have the right to be dumb or self destructive?
Actually, the analysis of this is pretty subtle. It's to do with the fact that we have partial but not uniform or total socialism. If we had a system that did not make use of legacy structures (such as employers and the family) in order to assure public welfare, but just gave people an adequate level of support by right, then people could arguably go ahead and maim or kill themselves without burdening others; we might still want to levy idiot taxes on people with damaging but survivable hobbies like skydiving or living below sea level, assuming we indeed plan to patch up their boo-boos, but in principle, people's behaviour becomes their own business - it's just a question of the particular insurance model. Similarly, at the other end of the spectrum, when we decide we are pure libertarians and society makes no quality of life guarantees for its citizens, you can be free to kill yourself, because now we don't give a damn about you or your friends, coworkers, family, and you can mess with their lives as you see fit.
But where, as now, there's a half-assed system that coerces family and employers into looking after spouses and children, then responsible behaviour becomes a mandatable requirement, first because you yourself are an agent of the social welfare mechanism (and it is largely on those grounds that the state invests in you, to the extent that it does) and second because others, also clients of the state, are coerced into providing welfare, locally, differentially, and non-uniformly to you.
Sure, some people are radically unattached and this argument doesn't really apply to them, but various social forces (including an inadequate separation of church and state) have led to such people being marginalised as targets of policy; at a completely different level they are seen as not living their lives properly - they should settle down, get married, and, yes, assume their proper burden as components in the half-assed, decentralised, fundamentally amateur, welfare system.
In short: there is a serious imbalance in the notion that people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without providing a direct mechanism to create the circumstances necessary to attain and maintain them. It results, indirectly, in responsibilities that seem asymmetric and incommensurate with these rights.
(And if I can preempt those who are about to start flaming me as a communist, no, none of what I've just said is incompatible with market economics. It's all down to providing a stable virtual social environment in which the market can operate. Operating system design principles can be applied to politics, too.)
It's true, I was making assumptions about your beliefs, based almost entirely on your use of the phrase "the origin of the species," rather than "the origin of species." This is generally diagnostic of those who have heard FUD about Darwin's work and not done their own reading. My apologies.
My two points, however, remain. First, it doesn't matter if we are talking about engineering or biology, the same, provable, mathematics governs evolution in either context - which is why the notion is transferable. Both pigs and bridges are subject to gravity, sort of thing. But on the other hand, I don't think there can be any doubt that in the original use of the word 'proof,' to which you objected, it was basing used in the slightly archaic sense of 'trial' or 'demonstration' (as in the phrases 'to prove yourself,' 'proving ground' and things involving puddings) and not in the mathematical sense at all. After all, it is a core doctrine of the empirical method that experiment only succeeds or fails to defeat hypothesis. There can be no 'proof' in the modern sense, so only the archaic sense remains.
It has become very clear recently that in the modern world there are indeed two sides: there is the side consisting of the terrorist organisations and terrorist governments who want to fight, and there is the entire damn rest of the world, who want to get on with their lives in peace.
I leave it to your own judgment where the lines fall.
You can say "we don't go to war to fight -- we go to win," but that's on the assumption that life is a zero-sum game. Much effort goes into taking progress and converting it into destruction in order to simulate this constraint, it is true. But goodness we would be better off if your side stopped fretting about winning and losing and learned to enjoy playing the game of life by some plausible set of rules!
I would challenge the assertion that entering the design parameters and working out which is the best result isn't proof of the origin of the species suggested by Darwin.
Did you know that Darwin's book was called not 'The Origin of the Species' but 'The Origin of Species' (or 'On the Origin of Species by [blah blah blah]')? I don't think the book is about what you imagine it to be about, but then again, nor do I think the word 'proof' here is used in the way you imagine it to be used. Ironically enough, however, evolution (which I suspect does not mean what you imagine it to mean) is in fact a theorem, not merely a theory, and (although that is not what was meant here) is actually entirely susceptible to mathematical proof. It has the same kind of logical status as the calculus—which is why it is possible to apply it to software construction, and not just to making babies.
It is, however, logically possible for a theist to doubt evolution even after understanding it, though it does require the generation of quite perverse theories. The simplest I've been able to construct is perhaps that whenever evolution is about to happen, under the normal operation of mathematics and physical laws, a miracle occurs to set everything back the way it was. Further miracles are then of course required to make it look exactly as if the first miracle hadn't occurred, since the overall result needs to be identical to the evolutionary case, but at least the supposed theological requirements are met. (I believe this theological design pattern already appears in Roman Catholic doctrine regarding the scientific measurement of the holy sacrament, subsequent to transubstantiation, so clearly there are those to whom this should not appear to be transparent rubbish.)
All told, the hypothesis that the author of the book of Genesis was a smart poet and not a stupid biologist seems simpler, though, and less demeaning to the deity....
The world has become a terrible place when it is automatically assumed that everyone is a crook and that nobody has the emotional maturity required to deal with a conflict of interests. You will notice that the gentleman did not express a personal opinion as chairman. He expressed a personal opinion. At another time, he was the chairman. He made this distinction perfectly clear to everyone involved. This is exemplary behaviour.
What alternative do you propose? That the chairman not have an opinion? To accomplish this he would have to be absent, or brain-dead. He could not do his job. That he conceal his opinion? In what way does this benefit the work of the committee, or make him in any sense more trustworthy or visibly objective?
What this gentleman in fact did was make it very clear that he understood that his personal opinion should not influence his role as chairman, while at the same time underlining his commitment and attempting to maximise his contribution to the committee's work. To any rational observer, his actions reinforce his credibility. The world needs more such honest people.
And I can't help but feel that skepticism is, in any event, an appropriate viewpoint, particularly in coordinating roles like chairmen and editors.
Actually there is a lot of work to be done in playing out Goedel's work in different domains, I'm sure of it. The nature of consciousness, the free will issue, the rationality of theology—these all hinge on the same question of what happens when the system sets out to model itself. Thinking about the structure of the universe, or what it means to observe it, while living inside it is quite a dodgy proposition.
But it's worse than just just pushing through the maths, because mathematical logic itself doesn't appear to be uniquely determined, even from our local perspective.
It's all quite interesting to think about, but it's truly and provably metaphysics! I don't think there's a Nobel prize for metaphysics.
I think this is a terminological problem. In the sense that the universe of the past is not a different universe from the universe of the present, the universe of the left fork is not a different universe from the universe of the right fork; they both share the same past, and so are both in the same domain of conservation. Conversely, in the sense of 'different universe' that is meant by the model, the past is a different universe, too (albeit one that will evolve into the present, while it happens that a parallel present [in general] won't).
But as a matter of fact time is not so oriented anyway. Both relativistically and quantum mechanically you are allowed, in physical theory, to rotate things so that the line between 'past' and 'future' shifts (the reasons that this does not violate conservation laws are seemingly different in the two cases, though). What this means is that you can draw a sheet, as it were, across the evolving multiverse to select out a universe, and the conservation laws say that the overall statistics for each such sheet are the same. The many worlds hypothesis, at this level, just says that it takes more than a single parameter t to name such a sheet, which isn't such a big leap, to my way of thinking.
I was once woken up by someone (an army cadet, actually, who later explained that it was 'funny') poking me with a gun. I tried to kill him with my bare hands (nothing else being available). Had the gun been loaded, I would clearly now be dead; as it was, it took four people to subdue me, and it wasn't very pleasant, even though it was the first time since childhood that I had attempted to fight anyone. What was in my mind at the time was simple: "This is a mad animal. I am already dead. Maybe I can save some of my friends."
Pointing a gun at someone is not a move to stabilise a situation. It is the ultimate abuse: it is a move to remove all hope. A person who has a gun pointed at them has no options any more, and is no longer in a position to make rational compromises. In particular, even when dealing with armed criminals, it guarantees that the person who has a gun, or whose accomplice has a gun, will use it, because they are no longer thinking 'what will my jail term be?' but 'can we live to see tomorrow?'
Yes. Spreadsheet applications use floating point arithmetic, and are thus inappropriate for accounting. Does nobody go to school anymore? What is the entire damned world thinking?
Surely your (hopefully government mandated) accounting procedures tell you to do your calculations in cents, or mils, or something, do they not? Then, I would think, you should follow those procedures. You really should. Even if Excel is (a) sold by Microsoft and (b) pretty convenient.
Or is it me that's insane?
(A quick check at Wikipedia tells me, for example, that the US Coinage act of 1792 said "That the money of account of the United States shall be expressed in dollars or units, dismes or tenths, cents or hundredths, and milles or thousandths, a disme being the tenth part of a dollar, a cent the hundredth part of a dollar, a mille the thousandth part of a dollar, and that all accounts in the public offices and all proceedings in the courts of the United States shall be kept and had in conformity to this regulation." Have these sorts of regulations really all been overturned?)
But live performance is something different - I haven't contracted to have anything beyond that performance, and I don't feel I've paid for the right to make a copy.
This is a funny question. Myself, I feel that people should have an explicitly articulated right to their own memories; in particular, I believe that they should have the right to a persistent record of anything they have perceived in person. I admit that this is something I can't claim to be entirely objective about; many people have excellent native memories, but I do not. I frequently have the experience of someone reminding me about something pleasant or interesting that happened to me - unless I took pictures, I'm unlikely to be able to retrieve it myself.
It's not a huge disability, as disabilities go, and it's not a discontinuous one - it's a faculty in which there is huge natural variation. But why is it seemingly so obvious to everyone that this is not something with which technology should be allowed to help? Why can I have eyeglasses and a wheelchair, but not a video recorder?
It's not even as if I'd end up with a usable copy of the source material; I'd only have a record of my own perspective - and, truly, I think that perspective is mine. I think that is what I paid for, and I do not think it is fair to suppose that experiences are only intended to be leased, and not sold.
They don't 'seed' or 'give birth to' each other. They are totally out of contact with each other. We wouldn't even know about other ones, if not for the math.
Are you sure about this? Temporal symmetry doesn't apply across forks? In particular, is there some mathematical reason to require that two universes that converged on the same state would somehow maintain their identity?
Where does the energy come from to give existence to this second universe? This whole splitting of the universe thing seems common in physics, so I'm sure I'm not interpreting this correctly. It seems like there's entire universes being created because of the uncertainty of a single particle.
I think you have the pieces inside-out. I might just as well ask 'where does the energy come from to create the past?' If I move into the future, the past is implicitly destroyed, and vice versa; energy is conserved, not summed, across changed in the time coordinate. Moving forwards into a universe fork is just moving into the future; energy is conserved, not summed, across the transition. Since any two universes in the same multiverse are connected by a series of forward and backward transitions, energy is conserved in exactly the expected way.
In fact, universes are behaving as the units of conservation, which makes sense, since they are the (maximal) units of observation.
(Having said that, I occasionally wake up in the middle of the night wondering, e.g., whether conservation laws between universes might not be responsible for entropy, by constraining the available time axes. But that's my own problem, not yours!)
Leaving aside the original incident, I must say I'm floored by your second story ("I've had guns drawn on me when I was drunk hiding in the bushes near the scene of what looked suspiciously top the cops like breaking into a car"). For this to be reasonable, as you seem to believe it is, I have to conclude that you consider a human life - specifically, your own life - to be less valuable than an automobile. Or am I not grasping something?
What use is your car, if you are dead?
The entire logic of arming the regular police frankly eludes me, because a policeman is someone who has volunteered to put themselves in harm's way, and is actually paid for this strange behaviour. A member of the general public, however, is not. Ergo, by an amortisation argument, a random citizen's life is worth more than a policeman's, and a policeman cannot reasonably go armed into a situation where they expect to do less than save two lives. This seems inescapable to me.
How is a policeman upholding the rule of law by killing?
Explosives, as in the article, are another matter, of course; but as others here have pointed out, threatening to shoot someone who already intends to die is dumb, dumb, dumb game theory.
Indeed. Witness the fact that in computing, our usual goal is perfect brittleness: we strive to write software so that it operates flawlessly on the anticipated inputs, and fails early, and utterly, on everything else. Fault tolerant computing? I won't say this is the only method, or the whole of the story, but one of the simplest ways to address (and therefore most straightforward to evaluate) it is to compose a system out of such highly brittle modules, which have the nice property that knowing whether they have failed or not, and hence what the fallback position is, is a relatively straightforward matter.
Half-failed components are dangerous.
There's a big difference between hardware and software engineering, which is largely due to the fact that the environment is better defined and the specifications are easier to write in software. But as our scientific knowledge advances I think we can expect to see more and more use of brittle materials and methods. Tight specifications are a good thing. Sure, you're no longer able to repair things with hammers and hand tools; sure, you can no longer operate them when they're bent and twisted and half rusted away. But the performance, reliability and safety returns are worth it.
(I'm old enough to remember when seeing people with their heads under the hoods of their cars was commonplace. "Give me half an hour and I'll have her running again! We can still get there before dark!" Is that the kind of 'reliability' we want to hold on to?)
Sadly, at least in the case of the passive ad, I arrived at this conclusion by asking myself how much I would actually pay to have the nuisance go away. I doubt you can have much fun with this.
I would give $150 for an iron-clad guarantee that I would never have to see Battlefield Earth again. I really would. I think about these things....
Read up on Kibo? It seems like just yesterday that I was chatting with him because it was New Year's Eve and there was nobody else posting on Usenet and we were lonely. I don't think you can be alone on the 'net anymore....
I'm not grasping something here. Every time I see your ad, I suffer perhaps between 0.1 cent and 20 cents of annoyance. The only reason I might tolerate this is that I want your money to go to Google. Your bead store? That's your affair, not mine. Except for your function in supporting Google so I don't have to, I'd prefer that you go away - not necessarily out of business, but at least out of sight and out of mind.
So why do I not click on your link? Not because I like you (people who like you either already know you or are the people you want to click the link); it is because if I actually saw your website, and it wasn't extremely funny, it would cause me an additional 10 cents to $2 worth of annoyance - if it is funny, rather more than that in time - and Google's cut (or rather Google's kickback to me on this cut, in services) is not big enough that I'm willing to suffer this!
You invade my life, in your small way, with your ad, so you can't really reason with me as with a friend, or even a disinterested stranger; you're starting our relationship a penny in the hole. And it seems to me that you jumped onto that slippery slope of economic compromise far more voluntarily than someone who just needed a search engine. If you're not getting a good deal, do something else.
I don't think this technology has the semantics that you think it has.
The trouble I have here is that the answer to where complexity comes from in nature is simple, but technical. They say 'entropy increases,' but in fact (a) entropy only increases globally; you are still allowed to borrow against it, if you pay the interest. Air conditioners are a beautiful example: the compressor is generating waste heat over and above the heat that's pumped out of your house, but through (in this case) careful engineering, the inside of your house still gets cool. (As to (b) there's a really nasty question in physics of where time gets its direction, and I have this nasty suspicion that 'forward' is quite precisely the direction of increasing entropy - but why? Is there a bounded amount of quantum state and a need to erase history?)
Evolution achieves the same effect without the planning, through massive parallelism. Organisms that don't die effectively achieve a near-infinite payoff in the game that they're playing, and that gives them huge leverage, enough to overcome the what were initially (I'm estimating) millions of billions or more trials that were required to get started. By now, of course, it's only millions of trials that go into a small change, but that's because DNA has evolved mechanisms to control the search space (check out the work on homeobox if you need to be persuaded (a) that this happens and (b) that it's evolvable).
Biologists will happily use the word 'why' when discussing how things work in the present time, but that's just verbal shorthand for an underlying question about how things fit together. It's similar to the way in which they may ask how an organism benefits from something, when on close analysis it turns out that the real question is how species survival is enhanced. Whenever you can find an example where the two wordings would mean different things, you will find that the professional biologist is actually concerned with the non-teleological variant.
Ok, I'm afraid this just seems like a massive confusion of levels to me. If god is omnipotent with respect to the universe, the theist/deist distinction falls away, because it is merely about the time at which an action takes place, and the omnipotent creator god stands outside of time - else how could time have been created?
Then you talk about the problem of evil. First of all, the entire debate smacks of hubris; I see no reason at all to suppose that the least energy solution for the universe wouldn't involve some inconvenience to me. Certainly in social situations I don't expect everything to be arranged to my unique satisfacton. To take one simple example: why is there death? To make evolution work, one might suppose, among many other reasons.
Secondly, you are confusing omnipotence with, if I may, meta-omnipotence. The idea that the universe was constructed to spec and could be 'any way at all' establishes omnipotence, but in no way that I can see entails that god, or the universe, lacks a purpose, and could serve that purpose equally well were matters otherwise. Nor does omniscience over everything in the universe entail prescience in whatever hypothetical meta-time-stream we might imagine god to be working in. Seriously, this is just routine mathematical reasoning (admittedly applied to an unusual domain). Try thinking about what happens when you are trying to formulate a formal proof. You can write anything you want, and you can see the consequences in front of you. If you write gibberish, do you still get a publication? But does the fact that you want that publication mean that you don't have particular techniques you want to use, or particular lemmas that you want to establish?
Now, of course I'm not claiming that everyone who claims to be a Christian has put a vast amount of thought into this; most are content with picture books and bake sales. And, frankly, past Popes (I think by 'Catholicism' you probably mean Roman Catholicism) have been quite a grab bag of personalities and intellects. My point is that the more you work on the pieces of the puzzle the better the fit you get, and if you talk to professional theologians, you'll get a much more coherent view of things than you're used to. (It won't be expressed in the same terms as I use, or have quite the same content, because my background is math and CS, not theology, of course; my point is merely that these issues are neither unaddressable nor unaddressed.)
Even on an analysis much less agrgressive than mine, the theism/deism divide is, or should be, no more of a barrier to cogent discussion than the deism/atheism one, because they are all metaphysical stances, not physical ones. The critics of religion are embarrassing themselves in this matter every bit as much as those who insist on the exact truth of what they learned at the age of six from a fifteen year old assistant teacher in a Sunday school. After all, it is physics if and only if it is observable. If (by some miracle) you observe a miracle, well, then, by definition, it is physics. I can see no possible issue.
Finally, the majority of people have below-average intellect, whether they call themselves christians or not. I understand that the majority of atheists believe that heavy things fall faster, and that the longer a tossed coin comes up heads, the more likely it is that next time it will be tails. Can't we all have the good grace to look at the highs as well as the lows?
I think perhaps you have only been exposed to primary-school versions of the notion of God, or have not found it worth the effort to think through the implications. An omnipotent creator who made time and selected the physics of the universe does not, from a purely logical standpoint, need to 'interfere' to get a desired effect, even (assuming he is smart) a surprising one. As a programmer, it is perfectly reasonable to fire up the simulation and step back. And this is in fact a standard viewpoint, in no way inconsistent with omnipotence, omniscience or benevolence. Of course, a competing viewpoint (relatively more common among the relatively less theologically educated, I believe) is that god is a little dumber, we're running under the debugger and, he occasionally patches some local variables for one reason or another. The notion of a petty minded idiot in the sky, in contrast, is at best an outmoded view of god, and has probably never been especially popular among thinking individuals - though clearly some of the writers of the bible were writing for political and not philosophical ends, with the results you see.
The interesting question in the viewpoint where god is actually clever is what leads the theist to trust their own reasoning, given that it is 'baked in' to the structure of reality as we perceive it. But in fact the same difficulty arises for the atheist: there is no basis on which to select your axioms other than your perceptions, and the origin of your perceptions is, ultimately, the very matter under debate. (This is where you get to in maybe the first year of college in philosophy or theology; in pure mathematics you get to it by the middle of a bachelor's degree, though it's couched in such different terms that you may not spot it. I assume that physicists talk about it too, but IANAP.)
And if your picture is 300K, it's because you needed to use the flash!
Myself, I like to stream uncompressed HDTV, it's a bit over a 1.2Gb per second per channel. Six channels of that, boy, and the nets start to smoke! I guess I'd burn through my allocation before everyone finished saying hi.
...Actually, I'm not kidding, except for the smoke part. Sweet video, let me tell you. Wish I had an OC-192 to my home.
Slashdot Mirror
...Surely the correct form is 'smut'?
Except that Chinese characters are stabilised as a (generally) non-phonetic script by being a common notation across many languages ('dialects,' if you prefer, but if these are dialects of the same language then Italian and Portuguese are, too). You will occasionally see our alphabet used to express Jamaica Patois or, say, Geordie, but the spellings must change and mutual intelligibility suffers.
But spelling reforms (and character revisions) are a different matter from change in spoken language, since they seem to be undertaken by committees of various sorts, who have to maintain a sensitivity to the breadth of their constituency, but at the same time can hope to undertake rational engineering projects. I suspect this is ultimately because very few people 'speak' written languages natively; they learn them, like foreign languages, in school.
Thanks - I do, in fact, usually try to be coherent.
Porpnorber is a gibberish word that was once bandied about on alt.stupidity (gibbering is a hobby of mine, of sorts). I use it as a nick here and there simply because it is (to me) memorable (remembering logins is a great trial for me) and it can be used as a more or less rigid pseudonym even in these latter days when (a) going by one's true name no longer seems wise and (b) everything sensible is highly contended. Perhaps not the wisest choice if I want to be taken seriously, but at least it's not, say, XXXm0r0n696969....
Actually, the analysis of this is pretty subtle. It's to do with the fact that we have partial but not uniform or total socialism. If we had a system that did not make use of legacy structures (such as employers and the family) in order to assure public welfare, but just gave people an adequate level of support by right, then people could arguably go ahead and maim or kill themselves without burdening others; we might still want to levy idiot taxes on people with damaging but survivable hobbies like skydiving or living below sea level, assuming we indeed plan to patch up their boo-boos, but in principle, people's behaviour becomes their own business - it's just a question of the particular insurance model. Similarly, at the other end of the spectrum, when we decide we are pure libertarians and society makes no quality of life guarantees for its citizens, you can be free to kill yourself, because now we don't give a damn about you or your friends, coworkers, family, and you can mess with their lives as you see fit.
But where, as now, there's a half-assed system that coerces family and employers into looking after spouses and children, then responsible behaviour becomes a mandatable requirement, first because you yourself are an agent of the social welfare mechanism (and it is largely on those grounds that the state invests in you, to the extent that it does) and second because others, also clients of the state, are coerced into providing welfare, locally, differentially, and non-uniformly to you.
Sure, some people are radically unattached and this argument doesn't really apply to them, but various social forces (including an inadequate separation of church and state) have led to such people being marginalised as targets of policy; at a completely different level they are seen as not living their lives properly - they should settle down, get married, and, yes, assume their proper burden as components in the half-assed, decentralised, fundamentally amateur, welfare system.
In short: there is a serious imbalance in the notion that people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without providing a direct mechanism to create the circumstances necessary to attain and maintain them. It results, indirectly, in responsibilities that seem asymmetric and incommensurate with these rights.
(And if I can preempt those who are about to start flaming me as a communist, no, none of what I've just said is incompatible with market economics. It's all down to providing a stable virtual social environment in which the market can operate. Operating system design principles can be applied to politics, too.)
It's true, I was making assumptions about your beliefs, based almost entirely on your use of the phrase "the origin of the species," rather than "the origin of species." This is generally diagnostic of those who have heard FUD about Darwin's work and not done their own reading. My apologies.
My two points, however, remain. First, it doesn't matter if we are talking about engineering or biology, the same, provable, mathematics governs evolution in either context - which is why the notion is transferable. Both pigs and bridges are subject to gravity, sort of thing. But on the other hand, I don't think there can be any doubt that in the original use of the word 'proof,' to which you objected, it was basing used in the slightly archaic sense of 'trial' or 'demonstration' (as in the phrases 'to prove yourself,' 'proving ground' and things involving puddings) and not in the mathematical sense at all. After all, it is a core doctrine of the empirical method that experiment only succeeds or fails to defeat hypothesis. There can be no 'proof' in the modern sense, so only the archaic sense remains.
It has become very clear recently that in the modern world there are indeed two sides: there is the side consisting of the terrorist organisations and terrorist governments who want to fight, and there is the entire damn rest of the world, who want to get on with their lives in peace.
I leave it to your own judgment where the lines fall.
You can say "we don't go to war to fight -- we go to win," but that's on the assumption that life is a zero-sum game. Much effort goes into taking progress and converting it into destruction in order to simulate this constraint, it is true. But goodness we would be better off if your side stopped fretting about winning and losing and learned to enjoy playing the game of life by some plausible set of rules!
Did you know that Darwin's book was called not 'The Origin of the Species' but 'The Origin of Species' (or 'On the Origin of Species by [blah blah blah]')? I don't think the book is about what you imagine it to be about, but then again, nor do I think the word 'proof' here is used in the way you imagine it to be used. Ironically enough, however, evolution (which I suspect does not mean what you imagine it to mean) is in fact a theorem, not merely a theory, and (although that is not what was meant here) is actually entirely susceptible to mathematical proof. It has the same kind of logical status as the calculus—which is why it is possible to apply it to software construction, and not just to making babies.
It is, however, logically possible for a theist to doubt evolution even after understanding it, though it does require the generation of quite perverse theories. The simplest I've been able to construct is perhaps that whenever evolution is about to happen, under the normal operation of mathematics and physical laws, a miracle occurs to set everything back the way it was. Further miracles are then of course required to make it look exactly as if the first miracle hadn't occurred, since the overall result needs to be identical to the evolutionary case, but at least the supposed theological requirements are met. (I believe this theological design pattern already appears in Roman Catholic doctrine regarding the scientific measurement of the holy sacrament, subsequent to transubstantiation, so clearly there are those to whom this should not appear to be transparent rubbish.)
All told, the hypothesis that the author of the book of Genesis was a smart poet and not a stupid biologist seems simpler, though, and less demeaning to the deity....
The world has become a terrible place when it is automatically assumed that everyone is a crook and that nobody has the emotional maturity required to deal with a conflict of interests. You will notice that the gentleman did not express a personal opinion as chairman. He expressed a personal opinion. At another time, he was the chairman. He made this distinction perfectly clear to everyone involved. This is exemplary behaviour.
What alternative do you propose? That the chairman not have an opinion? To accomplish this he would have to be absent, or brain-dead. He could not do his job. That he conceal his opinion? In what way does this benefit the work of the committee, or make him in any sense more trustworthy or visibly objective?
What this gentleman in fact did was make it very clear that he understood that his personal opinion should not influence his role as chairman, while at the same time underlining his commitment and attempting to maximise his contribution to the committee's work. To any rational observer, his actions reinforce his credibility. The world needs more such honest people.
And I can't help but feel that skepticism is, in any event, an appropriate viewpoint, particularly in coordinating roles like chairmen and editors.
Actually there is a lot of work to be done in playing out Goedel's work in different domains, I'm sure of it. The nature of consciousness, the free will issue, the rationality of theology—these all hinge on the same question of what happens when the system sets out to model itself. Thinking about the structure of the universe, or what it means to observe it, while living inside it is quite a dodgy proposition.
But it's worse than just just pushing through the maths, because mathematical logic itself doesn't appear to be uniquely determined, even from our local perspective.
It's all quite interesting to think about, but it's truly and provably metaphysics! I don't think there's a Nobel prize for metaphysics.
I think this is a terminological problem. In the sense that the universe of the past is not a different universe from the universe of the present, the universe of the left fork is not a different universe from the universe of the right fork; they both share the same past, and so are both in the same domain of conservation. Conversely, in the sense of 'different universe' that is meant by the model, the past is a different universe, too (albeit one that will evolve into the present, while it happens that a parallel present [in general] won't).
But as a matter of fact time is not so oriented anyway. Both relativistically and quantum mechanically you are allowed, in physical theory, to rotate things so that the line between 'past' and 'future' shifts (the reasons that this does not violate conservation laws are seemingly different in the two cases, though). What this means is that you can draw a sheet, as it were, across the evolving multiverse to select out a universe, and the conservation laws say that the overall statistics for each such sheet are the same. The many worlds hypothesis, at this level, just says that it takes more than a single parameter t to name such a sheet, which isn't such a big leap, to my way of thinking.
I was once woken up by someone (an army cadet, actually, who later explained that it was 'funny') poking me with a gun. I tried to kill him with my bare hands (nothing else being available). Had the gun been loaded, I would clearly now be dead; as it was, it took four people to subdue me, and it wasn't very pleasant, even though it was the first time since childhood that I had attempted to fight anyone. What was in my mind at the time was simple: "This is a mad animal. I am already dead. Maybe I can save some of my friends."
Pointing a gun at someone is not a move to stabilise a situation. It is the ultimate abuse: it is a move to remove all hope. A person who has a gun pointed at them has no options any more, and is no longer in a position to make rational compromises. In particular, even when dealing with armed criminals, it guarantees that the person who has a gun, or whose accomplice has a gun, will use it, because they are no longer thinking 'what will my jail term be?' but 'can we live to see tomorrow?'
Yes. Spreadsheet applications use floating point arithmetic, and are thus inappropriate for accounting. Does nobody go to school anymore? What is the entire damned world thinking?
Surely your (hopefully government mandated) accounting procedures tell you to do your calculations in cents, or mils, or something, do they not? Then, I would think, you should follow those procedures. You really should. Even if Excel is (a) sold by Microsoft and (b) pretty convenient.
Or is it me that's insane?
(A quick check at Wikipedia tells me, for example, that the US Coinage act of 1792 said "That the money of account of the United States shall be expressed in dollars or units, dismes or tenths, cents or hundredths, and milles or thousandths, a disme being the tenth part of a dollar, a cent the hundredth part of a dollar, a mille the thousandth part of a dollar, and that all accounts in the public offices and all proceedings in the courts of the United States shall be kept and had in conformity to this regulation." Have these sorts of regulations really all been overturned?)
This is a funny question. Myself, I feel that people should have an explicitly articulated right to their own memories; in particular, I believe that they should have the right to a persistent record of anything they have perceived in person. I admit that this is something I can't claim to be entirely objective about; many people have excellent native memories, but I do not. I frequently have the experience of someone reminding me about something pleasant or interesting that happened to me - unless I took pictures, I'm unlikely to be able to retrieve it myself.
It's not a huge disability, as disabilities go, and it's not a discontinuous one - it's a faculty in which there is huge natural variation. But why is it seemingly so obvious to everyone that this is not something with which technology should be allowed to help? Why can I have eyeglasses and a wheelchair, but not a video recorder?
It's not even as if I'd end up with a usable copy of the source material; I'd only have a record of my own perspective - and, truly, I think that perspective is mine. I think that is what I paid for, and I do not think it is fair to suppose that experiences are only intended to be leased, and not sold.
Are you sure about this? Temporal symmetry doesn't apply across forks? In particular, is there some mathematical reason to require that two universes that converged on the same state would somehow maintain their identity?
Because Wherever you go, there you are.
Seriously.
I think you have the pieces inside-out. I might just as well ask 'where does the energy come from to create the past?' If I move into the future, the past is implicitly destroyed, and vice versa; energy is conserved, not summed, across changed in the time coordinate. Moving forwards into a universe fork is just moving into the future; energy is conserved, not summed, across the transition. Since any two universes in the same multiverse are connected by a series of forward and backward transitions, energy is conserved in exactly the expected way.
In fact, universes are behaving as the units of conservation, which makes sense, since they are the (maximal) units of observation.
(Having said that, I occasionally wake up in the middle of the night wondering, e.g., whether conservation laws between universes might not be responsible for entropy, by constraining the available time axes. But that's my own problem, not yours!)
Leaving aside the original incident, I must say I'm floored by your second story ("I've had guns drawn on me when I was drunk hiding in the bushes near the scene of what looked suspiciously top the cops like breaking into a car"). For this to be reasonable, as you seem to believe it is, I have to conclude that you consider a human life - specifically, your own life - to be less valuable than an automobile. Or am I not grasping something?
What use is your car, if you are dead?
The entire logic of arming the regular police frankly eludes me, because a policeman is someone who has volunteered to put themselves in harm's way, and is actually paid for this strange behaviour. A member of the general public, however, is not. Ergo, by an amortisation argument, a random citizen's life is worth more than a policeman's, and a policeman cannot reasonably go armed into a situation where they expect to do less than save two lives. This seems inescapable to me.
How is a policeman upholding the rule of law by killing?
Explosives, as in the article, are another matter, of course; but as others here have pointed out, threatening to shoot someone who already intends to die is dumb, dumb, dumb game theory.
Indeed. Witness the fact that in computing, our usual goal is perfect brittleness: we strive to write software so that it operates flawlessly on the anticipated inputs, and fails early, and utterly, on everything else. Fault tolerant computing? I won't say this is the only method, or the whole of the story, but one of the simplest ways to address (and therefore most straightforward to evaluate) it is to compose a system out of such highly brittle modules, which have the nice property that knowing whether they have failed or not, and hence what the fallback position is, is a relatively straightforward matter.
Half-failed components are dangerous.
There's a big difference between hardware and software engineering, which is largely due to the fact that the environment is better defined and the specifications are easier to write in software. But as our scientific knowledge advances I think we can expect to see more and more use of brittle materials and methods. Tight specifications are a good thing. Sure, you're no longer able to repair things with hammers and hand tools; sure, you can no longer operate them when they're bent and twisted and half rusted away. But the performance, reliability and safety returns are worth it.
(I'm old enough to remember when seeing people with their heads under the hoods of their cars was commonplace. "Give me half an hour and I'll have her running again! We can still get there before dark!" Is that the kind of 'reliability' we want to hold on to?)
Sadly, at least in the case of the passive ad, I arrived at this conclusion by asking myself how much I would actually pay to have the nuisance go away. I doubt you can have much fun with this.
I would give $150 for an iron-clad guarantee that I would never have to see Battlefield Earth again. I really would. I think about these things....
Read up on Kibo? It seems like just yesterday that I was chatting with him because it was New Year's Eve and there was nobody else posting on Usenet and we were lonely. I don't think you can be alone on the 'net anymore....
I'm not grasping something here. Every time I see your ad, I suffer perhaps between 0.1 cent and 20 cents of annoyance. The only reason I might tolerate this is that I want your money to go to Google. Your bead store? That's your affair, not mine. Except for your function in supporting Google so I don't have to, I'd prefer that you go away - not necessarily out of business, but at least out of sight and out of mind.
So why do I not click on your link? Not because I like you (people who like you either already know you or are the people you want to click the link); it is because if I actually saw your website, and it wasn't extremely funny, it would cause me an additional 10 cents to $2 worth of annoyance - if it is funny, rather more than that in time - and Google's cut (or rather Google's kickback to me on this cut, in services) is not big enough that I'm willing to suffer this!
You invade my life, in your small way, with your ad, so you can't really reason with me as with a friend, or even a disinterested stranger; you're starting our relationship a penny in the hole. And it seems to me that you jumped onto that slippery slope of economic compromise far more voluntarily than someone who just needed a search engine. If you're not getting a good deal, do something else.
I don't think this technology has the semantics that you think it has.
The trouble I have here is that the answer to where complexity comes from in nature is simple, but technical. They say 'entropy increases,' but in fact (a) entropy only increases globally; you are still allowed to borrow against it, if you pay the interest. Air conditioners are a beautiful example: the compressor is generating waste heat over and above the heat that's pumped out of your house, but through (in this case) careful engineering, the inside of your house still gets cool. (As to (b) there's a really nasty question in physics of where time gets its direction, and I have this nasty suspicion that 'forward' is quite precisely the direction of increasing entropy - but why? Is there a bounded amount of quantum state and a need to erase history?)
Evolution achieves the same effect without the planning, through massive parallelism. Organisms that don't die effectively achieve a near-infinite payoff in the game that they're playing, and that gives them huge leverage, enough to overcome the what were initially (I'm estimating) millions of billions or more trials that were required to get started. By now, of course, it's only millions of trials that go into a small change, but that's because DNA has evolved mechanisms to control the search space (check out the work on homeobox if you need to be persuaded (a) that this happens and (b) that it's evolvable).
Biologists will happily use the word 'why' when discussing how things work in the present time, but that's just verbal shorthand for an underlying question about how things fit together. It's similar to the way in which they may ask how an organism benefits from something, when on close analysis it turns out that the real question is how species survival is enhanced. Whenever you can find an example where the two wordings would mean different things, you will find that the professional biologist is actually concerned with the non-teleological variant.
Ok, I'm afraid this just seems like a massive confusion of levels to me. If god is omnipotent with respect to the universe, the theist/deist distinction falls away, because it is merely about the time at which an action takes place, and the omnipotent creator god stands outside of time - else how could time have been created?
Then you talk about the problem of evil. First of all, the entire debate smacks of hubris; I see no reason at all to suppose that the least energy solution for the universe wouldn't involve some inconvenience to me. Certainly in social situations I don't expect everything to be arranged to my unique satisfacton. To take one simple example: why is there death? To make evolution work, one might suppose, among many other reasons.
Secondly, you are confusing omnipotence with, if I may, meta-omnipotence. The idea that the universe was constructed to spec and could be 'any way at all' establishes omnipotence, but in no way that I can see entails that god, or the universe, lacks a purpose, and could serve that purpose equally well were matters otherwise. Nor does omniscience over everything in the universe entail prescience in whatever hypothetical meta-time-stream we might imagine god to be working in. Seriously, this is just routine mathematical reasoning (admittedly applied to an unusual domain). Try thinking about what happens when you are trying to formulate a formal proof. You can write anything you want, and you can see the consequences in front of you. If you write gibberish, do you still get a publication? But does the fact that you want that publication mean that you don't have particular techniques you want to use, or particular lemmas that you want to establish?
Now, of course I'm not claiming that everyone who claims to be a Christian has put a vast amount of thought into this; most are content with picture books and bake sales. And, frankly, past Popes (I think by 'Catholicism' you probably mean Roman Catholicism) have been quite a grab bag of personalities and intellects. My point is that the more you work on the pieces of the puzzle the better the fit you get, and if you talk to professional theologians, you'll get a much more coherent view of things than you're used to. (It won't be expressed in the same terms as I use, or have quite the same content, because my background is math and CS, not theology, of course; my point is merely that these issues are neither unaddressable nor unaddressed.)
Even on an analysis much less agrgressive than mine, the theism/deism divide is, or should be, no more of a barrier to cogent discussion than the deism/atheism one, because they are all metaphysical stances, not physical ones. The critics of religion are embarrassing themselves in this matter every bit as much as those who insist on the exact truth of what they learned at the age of six from a fifteen year old assistant teacher in a Sunday school. After all, it is physics if and only if it is observable. If (by some miracle) you observe a miracle, well, then, by definition, it is physics. I can see no possible issue.
Finally, the majority of people have below-average intellect, whether they call themselves christians or not. I understand that the majority of atheists believe that heavy things fall faster, and that the longer a tossed coin comes up heads, the more likely it is that next time it will be tails. Can't we all have the good grace to look at the highs as well as the lows?
I think perhaps you have only been exposed to primary-school versions of the notion of God, or have not found it worth the effort to think through the implications. An omnipotent creator who made time and selected the physics of the universe does not, from a purely logical standpoint, need to 'interfere' to get a desired effect, even (assuming he is smart) a surprising one. As a programmer, it is perfectly reasonable to fire up the simulation and step back. And this is in fact a standard viewpoint, in no way inconsistent with omnipotence, omniscience or benevolence. Of course, a competing viewpoint (relatively more common among the relatively less theologically educated, I believe) is that god is a little dumber, we're running under the debugger and, he occasionally patches some local variables for one reason or another. The notion of a petty minded idiot in the sky, in contrast, is at best an outmoded view of god, and has probably never been especially popular among thinking individuals - though clearly some of the writers of the bible were writing for political and not philosophical ends, with the results you see.
The interesting question in the viewpoint where god is actually clever is what leads the theist to trust their own reasoning, given that it is 'baked in' to the structure of reality as we perceive it. But in fact the same difficulty arises for the atheist: there is no basis on which to select your axioms other than your perceptions, and the origin of your perceptions is, ultimately, the very matter under debate. (This is where you get to in maybe the first year of college in philosophy or theology; in pure mathematics you get to it by the middle of a bachelor's degree, though it's couched in such different terms that you may not spot it. I assume that physicists talk about it too, but IANAP.)
And if your picture is 300K, it's because you needed to use the flash!
Myself, I like to stream uncompressed HDTV, it's a bit over a 1.2Gb per second per channel. Six channels of that, boy, and the nets start to smoke! I guess I'd burn through my allocation before everyone finished saying hi.
...Actually, I'm not kidding, except for the smoke part. Sweet video, let me tell you. Wish I had an OC-192 to my home.