If I may analyse this logically(!) from a theistic view, either God did, or did not, create time. If God did not create time, then time must have been created by someone else, so God is not God, contradiction. If God did create time, then it would seem to follow that the world was indeed created 6000 years ago. It was also created 3.6 minutes ago, 20 billion years ago, and (unless the apocalypse come) Tuesday next week. To insist otherwise is a bit like a dwarf saying, so, this builder, did he make the foundations or the roof? Because the roof is above the foundations, and he couldn't have made both!
Physics is (in present terms, by definition) exactly the study of the observable. Theology is (when once you have grasped the notion of omnipotence and its implications for your ability to reason) the study of things deep into the unobservable. They cannot possibly come into conflict - unless you have gone to a lot of extra effort to believe rubbish that conflicts with both sets of thought!;)
I have long suspected that the motivation for DRM on 'CDs' was to exploit people in your very situation (even a music exec cannot be so stupid as to imagine that you can prevent copying without preventing playback; even the most conservative recording industry insiders know about concepts like 'cables' and 'tapes'). The cost, to them, of selling coasters in CD boxes is that the third time this happens to you, you stop buying music on silver discs altogether. So why would their market analysts find this acceptable? Because they had been projecting that you, the individual consumer, would only be buying three or four more CDs, ever, anyway. Conclusion: MP3s have not taken off the way the music industry expected. They made the decision several years ago to cash out of the music retail market, and they made it too soon.
So now we're seeing backpedalling.
Myself, I used to spend $500/month on music, when CDs were consistently playable. Now? Zero. I don't download it, 'legally' or otherise; I just listen to the radio. I wonder if I'll ever buy music again? I'm a once-bitten-twice-shy type. I haven't bought Apple since they killed the Newton (maybe OS-X will be cancelled overnight, too?), so I doubt it.
In fact, I think there are multiple notions of 'truth' in play here. Science seeks natural explanations of natural phenomena by (among other methods) applying natural stimuli and observing natural results. It is not incoherent to believe in a 'supernatural truth', but this refers to a different idea entirely.
Suppose there is an interesting phenomenon with a 'supernatural explanation'. A scientist examines it. They apply natural stimuli and observe the natural results. Either the the results are consistent and interesting, in which case the stage is set for building a second, natural explanation of this phenomenon; or they aren't, in which case the scientist is quite justified in saying, well, statistically speaking, this supposed phenomenon is not observable (or, rather, not different from other phenomena), and therefore does not—in scientific terms—exist, and does not require or warrant an explanation.
You see? It is not logically or physically possible for science to generate a supernatural explanation. It is observable and reproducible, in which case it gets a scientific treatment (a shallow one at first, getting deeper as the mechanism is explored), or it is not, and (according to science's own rules) does not, because, speaking purely scientifically, it is not there.
I'm waving my hands in one small way: the matter of arithmetic. What really seems to set scientists apart from their social opponents in the current round of dispute is that scientists believe that adding up a really a lot of small numbers produces a big number. This is the point their opponents actually (though indirectly) dispute. The scientist says 'we observe that this piece of land moves a millimetre in a year. If it did this for a million years, it would move a thousand kilometres'; the opponent says 'no way! A thosand kilometres is too far!'—seemingly they truly believe that 1,000,000 * 1/1000 is around 10. Similarly, even the most rabid creationist does not seem to dispute the existence of variation, of sex or of (in the biological sense) death. What they dispute is that stochastically directed microchanges can sum to a macrochange—that the sum of small things can be big.
Once, this might even have been a cogent idea. Once, no one had real personal experience of numbers over a million, unless they were really compulsive about counting grains of sand. But today, anyone who owns a computer has the experience that, even though a gig is a big number and two is a small one, putting in a second stick of RAM really does double the amount of memory in the computer....
Not at all, not at all. There's nothing in the theory of evolution that outlaws time travel, for example, or mass deception by an alien intelligence - or the genetic reconstruction of tyrannosaurs from fossils by mediaeval monks, for that matter. What the 'theory' says is this: that variation, inheritance and selection combine to produce adaptation.
As such, it isn't actually a theory, in the accepted sense of the empirical sciences; it's a piece of mathematics. A slight generalisation of differential equations to (genetic) coding theory. It isn't falsifiable at all, because it's there in the maths for all to see - it couldn't be wrong if it tried.
And to says that evolution is 'about' humans and dinosaurs is like saying that metallurgy is 'about' your Toyota.
You might well disbelieve in its applicability to, say, the descent of man - assuming you don't believe in birth, or death, or that offspring take after their parents. This might be the world of the Matrix, after all, with a malevolent deity micromanaging 'causation' at every turn. But that's not Creationism, that's insanity - you have to posit a God who not only made everything, but got it all wrong, and to this day runs the whole Universe under a debugger.... But even then evolution would still be there in the maths, springing into play whenever God looked away.
I have no idea why scientists are so namby-pamby in defense of evolution; it's one of the most secure pieces of reasoning we have about the structure of reality, far more so than, say, optics, which visibly relies on as yet uncertain ideas about the fine structure of space-time - and about which we still have little to say at the 'well, d'uh' level of obviousness of the Theorem (sic) of Evolution.
Surely to have a phobia you have to be phobic reaction to something? As far as I know I have no phobias about my sexulaity or anyone else's - indeed, although I'm almost perfectly heterosexual, I find it actively sad that I don't have the trick of appreciating men; I figure I must be missing out on half the interest in life. Now that said, I agree with the comment: wrestling with women sounds like fun; showering with women sounds delightful. Wrestling with men sounds pointlessly uncomfortable physically; showering with men sounds pointlessly uncomfortable socially. So if the team sports behaviour is not motivated by sexuality it must be motivated by something else I don't have, and something that I don't know about, so I'd also be entirely comfortable saying that it seems kind of gay to me.
Seriously, if it's a 'herd' thing, not a sex thing, why is it always single-sex?
Or could it be - gasp - that you are a little homophobophobic?
The threat of quantum computing to conventional cryptography is twofold. First, it provides novel factoring algorithms that attack specific contemporary cryptosystems that rely on certain mathematical problems used for key exchange being 'hard'; in the future we defend against this by moving to new core problems that are hard int he new computational domain. The second (to simplify rather) is the potential to 'brute force' the key space of cryptosystems in general by trying exponentially many keys in parallel. One time pads remain secure, because they consume enough key bits to keep all decrypts equiprobable (up to length). Although for key distribution this property of equiprobable decrypts is essential (because the task is one of maintaining the size of the keyspace for an attack on subsequent stages in a protocol), for many tasks it suffices just to provide enough sufficiently probable alternatives that the correct candidate decryption cannot be recognised. For example, if I have as a front end to my cryptosystem a codebook that says '0 = sell the stock, 1 = meet me for lunch, 2 = I am having an affair with your wife, 3 = I think it may rain', then even a one-bit key should keep me safe from the SEC (though it now matters whether the recipient is, in the real world, married).
The point is this: the absolute mathematical defense against bruteforcing is a key space the size of the message space. But it also suffices to compress the message before encryption with sufficient competence that the full key space generates many plausible decrypts (where 'many' means specifically that the cost of verifying them exceeds the value of the message).
I suspect that since quantum computation is in principle limited by readout, increasing the difficulty of recognising a decrypt becomes the key defense to this attack.
This makes data compression very important to future security (and patents in the field a significant threat).
...Or perhaps it has served its purpose. By now an entire generation of mathematical and computational linguists have been diverted, through government control of funding and its indirect global effects, from looking at language structure and semantics (using verifiable models, unlike, I am sad to say, many 'theoretical' linguists) that might eventually lead to plausible natural language understanding, into surfacy statistical methods useful for scanning vast amounts of text efficiently.
Call me paranoid, but in my mind this serves a number of potential purposes:
it tightens government control of research in general
it shifts focus away from 'obscure' languages and promotes isolationism and (ironically) thereby supports cultural imperialism
likewise, it diverts effort away from tools that might be useful in translation
it diverts from work that could in principle radically improve text compression ratios (which is mathematically more important for secrecy than improved crypto algorithms, though this is rarely pointed out)
it helps refocus academia on providing short term benefits to military, intelligence and industrial applications and away from its own programme of building abstract and enabling knowledge.
(At the risk of antagonising the community here I should also point out that Carnivore and its successors probably share with slashdot a huge problem that is widely perceived as a feature: that it actively reinforces its user community's notions of relevance. Surfacy, automated filtering is of course even more likely than human moderation to classify material by its rhetorical style than its actual content. In politics, indeed in support of any culture or subculture, this is perhaps a wonderful thing; in intelligence, a two edged sword of the worst kind - one that may explain how a number of things manage to slip under the radar.)
But I can only leave you to judge.
Slashdot Mirror
Physics is (in present terms, by definition) exactly the study of the observable. Theology is (when once you have grasped the notion of omnipotence and its implications for your ability to reason) the study of things deep into the unobservable. They cannot possibly come into conflict - unless you have gone to a lot of extra effort to believe rubbish that conflicts with both sets of thought! ;)
I have long suspected that the motivation for DRM on 'CDs' was to exploit people in your very situation (even a music exec cannot be so stupid as to imagine that you can prevent copying without preventing playback; even the most conservative recording industry insiders know about concepts like 'cables' and 'tapes'). The cost, to them, of selling coasters in CD boxes is that the third time this happens to you, you stop buying music on silver discs altogether. So why would their market analysts find this acceptable? Because they had been projecting that you, the individual consumer, would only be buying three or four more CDs, ever, anyway. Conclusion: MP3s have not taken off the way the music industry expected. They made the decision several years ago to cash out of the music retail market, and they made it too soon.
So now we're seeing backpedalling.
Myself, I used to spend $500/month on music, when CDs were consistently playable. Now? Zero. I don't download it, 'legally' or otherise; I just listen to the radio. I wonder if I'll ever buy music again? I'm a once-bitten-twice-shy type. I haven't bought Apple since they killed the Newton (maybe OS-X will be cancelled overnight, too?), so I doubt it.
Suppose there is an interesting phenomenon with a 'supernatural explanation'. A scientist examines it. They apply natural stimuli and observe the natural results. Either the the results are consistent and interesting, in which case the stage is set for building a second, natural explanation of this phenomenon; or they aren't, in which case the scientist is quite justified in saying, well, statistically speaking, this supposed phenomenon is not observable (or, rather, not different from other phenomena), and therefore does not—in scientific terms—exist, and does not require or warrant an explanation.
You see? It is not logically or physically possible for science to generate a supernatural explanation. It is observable and reproducible, in which case it gets a scientific treatment (a shallow one at first, getting deeper as the mechanism is explored), or it is not, and (according to science's own rules) does not, because, speaking purely scientifically, it is not there.
I'm waving my hands in one small way: the matter of arithmetic. What really seems to set scientists apart from their social opponents in the current round of dispute is that scientists believe that adding up a really a lot of small numbers produces a big number. This is the point their opponents actually (though indirectly) dispute. The scientist says 'we observe that this piece of land moves a millimetre in a year. If it did this for a million years, it would move a thousand kilometres'; the opponent says 'no way! A thosand kilometres is too far!'—seemingly they truly believe that 1,000,000 * 1/1000 is around 10. Similarly, even the most rabid creationist does not seem to dispute the existence of variation, of sex or of (in the biological sense) death. What they dispute is that stochastically directed microchanges can sum to a macrochange—that the sum of small things can be big.
Once, this might even have been a cogent idea. Once, no one had real personal experience of numbers over a million, unless they were really compulsive about counting grains of sand. But today, anyone who owns a computer has the experience that, even though a gig is a big number and two is a small one, putting in a second stick of RAM really does double the amount of memory in the computer....
Not at all, not at all. There's nothing in the theory of evolution that outlaws time travel, for example, or mass deception by an alien intelligence - or the genetic reconstruction of tyrannosaurs from fossils by mediaeval monks, for that matter. What the 'theory' says is this: that variation, inheritance and selection combine to produce adaptation. As such, it isn't actually a theory, in the accepted sense of the empirical sciences; it's a piece of mathematics. A slight generalisation of differential equations to (genetic) coding theory. It isn't falsifiable at all, because it's there in the maths for all to see - it couldn't be wrong if it tried. And to says that evolution is 'about' humans and dinosaurs is like saying that metallurgy is 'about' your Toyota. You might well disbelieve in its applicability to, say, the descent of man - assuming you don't believe in birth, or death, or that offspring take after their parents. This might be the world of the Matrix, after all, with a malevolent deity micromanaging 'causation' at every turn. But that's not Creationism, that's insanity - you have to posit a God who not only made everything, but got it all wrong, and to this day runs the whole Universe under a debugger.... But even then evolution would still be there in the maths, springing into play whenever God looked away. I have no idea why scientists are so namby-pamby in defense of evolution; it's one of the most secure pieces of reasoning we have about the structure of reality, far more so than, say, optics, which visibly relies on as yet uncertain ideas about the fine structure of space-time - and about which we still have little to say at the 'well, d'uh' level of obviousness of the Theorem (sic) of Evolution.
Surely to have a phobia you have to be phobic reaction to something? As far as I know I have no phobias about my sexulaity or anyone else's - indeed, although I'm almost perfectly heterosexual, I find it actively sad that I don't have the trick of appreciating men; I figure I must be missing out on half the interest in life. Now that said, I agree with the comment: wrestling with women sounds like fun; showering with women sounds delightful. Wrestling with men sounds pointlessly uncomfortable physically; showering with men sounds pointlessly uncomfortable socially. So if the team sports behaviour is not motivated by sexuality it must be motivated by something else I don't have, and something that I don't know about, so I'd also be entirely comfortable saying that it seems kind of gay to me. Seriously, if it's a 'herd' thing, not a sex thing, why is it always single-sex? Or could it be - gasp - that you are a little homophobophobic?
The threat of quantum computing to conventional cryptography is twofold. First, it provides novel factoring algorithms that attack specific contemporary cryptosystems that rely on certain mathematical problems used for key exchange being 'hard'; in the future we defend against this by moving to new core problems that are hard int he new computational domain. The second (to simplify rather) is the potential to 'brute force' the key space of cryptosystems in general by trying exponentially many keys in parallel. One time pads remain secure, because they consume enough key bits to keep all decrypts equiprobable (up to length). Although for key distribution this property of equiprobable decrypts is essential (because the task is one of maintaining the size of the keyspace for an attack on subsequent stages in a protocol), for many tasks it suffices just to provide enough sufficiently probable alternatives that the correct candidate decryption cannot be recognised. For example, if I have as a front end to my cryptosystem a codebook that says '0 = sell the stock, 1 = meet me for lunch, 2 = I am having an affair with your wife, 3 = I think it may rain', then even a one-bit key should keep me safe from the SEC (though it now matters whether the recipient is, in the real world, married).
The point is this: the absolute mathematical defense against bruteforcing is a key space the size of the message space. But it also suffices to compress the message before encryption with sufficient competence that the full key space generates many plausible decrypts (where 'many' means specifically that the cost of verifying them exceeds the value of the message).
I suspect that since quantum computation is in principle limited by readout, increasing the difficulty of recognising a decrypt becomes the key defense to this attack.
This makes data compression very important to future security (and patents in the field a significant threat).
- it tightens government control of research in general
- it shifts focus away from 'obscure' languages and promotes isolationism and (ironically) thereby supports cultural imperialism
- likewise, it diverts effort away from tools that might be useful in translation
- it diverts from work that could in principle radically improve text compression ratios (which is mathematically more important for secrecy than improved crypto algorithms, though this is rarely pointed out)
- it helps refocus academia on providing short term benefits to military, intelligence and industrial applications and away from its own programme of building abstract and enabling knowledge.
(At the risk of antagonising the community here I should also point out that Carnivore and its successors probably share with slashdot a huge problem that is widely perceived as a feature: that it actively reinforces its user community's notions of relevance. Surfacy, automated filtering is of course even more likely than human moderation to classify material by its rhetorical style than its actual content. In politics, indeed in support of any culture or subculture, this is perhaps a wonderful thing; in intelligence, a two edged sword of the worst kind - one that may explain how a number of things manage to slip under the radar.) But I can only leave you to judge.