Thrice before there has been product placement within the Sims (Dont have Sims 2)
FYI your Sim can play EA's SSX Tricky or SSX 3 or one of those snowboarding games if you buy him/her a video game machine. It's entirely inconspicuous since it's only visible on his/her TV, if you're angled right, and only says SSX when it isn't showing snowboarding gameplay. Can't recall anything else. I guess that one instance makes Sims 2 a point worse than The Sims? Still, not nearly as obnoxious as the billboards in Need for Speed or Burnout.
Thanks for the further arguments. I will quietly depart soon, but sorry if my "If your 'dead-on accurate' experience" came off like a dig, I was trying to end on a lighter note.
I obviously can't come up with any landmark papers written by amateurs, certainly nothing rivaling Einstein's work, but I'll point to amateur art/music/film/video game criticism as an indication that people will engage in non-scientific analysis, and that those analyses have their own intrinsic worth. I also can't deny that common sense can be trumped by fashion or the academic overmind, but like science I believe only the most robust and illuminating interpretations will survive. For a basic example, a theological reading of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", while initially popular, failed to stand up to scrutiny; better interpretations have taken its place.
I don't think that anyone would argue science is too different though. As you say, it's easier (or clearer) to show what is 'correct' (or rather, disprove what isn't), but confabulation can rule just as easily: for all the molecular evidence, will chimpanzees and bonobos ever be folded into the Homo genus? Perhaps one day, but right now common sense is overruled by the taste Homo troglodytes leaves in a lot of people's mouths--to say nothing of the equally compelling (genetically speaking) Pan sapiens!
I guess I'm willing to give the humanities more credit than maybe they're ultimately worth. They are all, at the heart of it, about philosophy, there to pursue the questions science can't: they whys and whos beyond the hows and whens. But maybe! it happens that I just get aggravated when my Russian lit prof makes absurd arguments about the inherent dangers of science, when he means potential dangers of technology, and is ready to damn the whole enterprise because knowledge of fusion led (apparently inevitably) to nuclear weapons. Graham offered, to me, the flip side of that, and I just want to cry out Can't we all just get along? So now I will depart.
To put it yet another way, imagine how far you'd get in a physics program writing papers on the postmodern ennui of electrons.
That's a silly analogy as a paper on the postmodern ennui of electrons would be absurd. This isn't the last time you use a term like 'postmodern' though, which makes me wonder if you aren't just waving it around to really delineate the hard sciences from the humanities--one the empirical study of natural phenomena, the other a more amorphous maze of theory, if I'm reading you correctly.
Still, I have to disagree with you for the very reasons you use to support your argument. Having a much broader range of what can be considered 'correct' doesn't make something easier, because that's not the case. From my experience, nothing in literature is exactly correct, because unlike the hard sciences you aren't striving for the best explanation--where in the hard sciences there is one. Literature is about interpretation, and there is usually no 'correct' interpretation. There are, however, persuasive interpretations, but more importantly enlightening interpretations: those that reveal something new and important about the human condition etc. I'm an Arts student, but I'm terrible at interpretation: Celan's "Death Fugue", Keats' "Ode on Melancholy"... always flying over my head. But maybe that's just me.
So it seems to me that a student fueled by the drive to pursue the truth--or failing that impossible goal, the best explanation, singular--would be lost in a seeming mess of analysis. She will fail if she thinks she just has to find a 'correct' interpretation, even if there seem to be many. Interpretations don't survive because their, we'll say, predictions follow from clear formulae, but because their analyses stand up to argument and provide original illuminations. Of course that sounds like the scientific method, but the lit student is limited only by his intellectual imagination and analytical ability, with no contradictory natural phenomena involved.
Am I implying the opposite then? Of course not: I may not be very good at interpretation, but that's what I've been raised on. But I'm trying my hand at a minor in Biology, and I'm finding that as hard as I believe a dyed-in-the-wool Science student might find nineteenth-century Russian literature. Again though, maybe that's just me. But I don't find it as impossible as our French Lit grad might find physics: understanding the concepts comes with the same kind of intellectual determination, and after all I believe we're all ultimately trying to answer the same questions.
If, however, your "dead-on accurate" experience is a degree in physics and subsequent cinch degree in French literature, then more power to you.
nobody would write papers on gender bias in postmodern literature unless they were eyeing the carrot of tenure or some other extrinsic reward. On the other hand, plenty of people would still work on problems in number theory regardless of whether or not they were getting paid.
You did it again. Nobody would write papers on gender bias in postmodern literature, but plenty of people would still work on problems in number theory? Nobody at all? And plenty of which people? These are completely unfounded generalizations--maybe you wouldn't write papers on gender bias in postmodern literature in your spare time, and that's fine: neither would I. But I wouldn't want to work on problems in number theory. In fact I would rather, for example--and do--discuss gender bias in modern video games, for the intrinsic rewards of intellectual argument and, ideally, advancing the art. I can't see your assertion as anything but your own idea of what constitutes meaningful pursuits.
Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.
Graham has knocked the humanities before, implying they have less worth than the sciences (French literature being intrinsically easier than the hard sciences, IIRC)--which I find odd coming from him especially, whose personal selling points include a mixed background in computers and painting. I'm doing biological anthropology at school, which puts me right in between Arts and Sciences every day. I'm not big on the work involved in my lit courses, but they're required for a BA; but more importantly, I have no doubt that the lit majors and profs wouldn't qualify all of their work as "dreary". More to the point, I'm sure they can and do discuss things like gender and identity in the novels of Conrad in their 'spare time' for fun, much as the bioanth department can be so excited over masticatory apparatuses and early hominin cladistics.
I'm not going to defend English majors in particular, but Graham needs to cut out this veiled contempt, that each faculty seems to have for the other. Just in my Russian lit class the prof proclaimed how he couldn't understand Zamyatin's idea that everything could be expressed in numbers: "So they tell you that love is 86187129817--how is that supposed to mean anything?" Well even I could tell him that the 'numbers' wouldn't be isolated and so meaningless, but equations whose value would lie in showing relationships between other quantities. I didn't tell him that, but you get the idea.
So Graham: stop it. You're exacerbating my already chimeric undergrad.
What would make this noteworthy is if it was an animated series on cable television. From what I understand, it's just web-based, yes? I don't want to rain on the CAD parade, but making the transition from webcomic to animation isn't a celebratory milestone: Homestar Runner and Ninjai, for example, always have been animation. So there isn't some sort of ladder one has to climb to reach an animation height. Good for Buckley and good for CAD fans, but it's no event in the grand scheme of things. Now if/when Homestar Runner, Penny Arcade, or CAD show up on Adult Swim, that will be noteworthy.
Also, I'm pretty familiar with CAD, but the penguin and boob-grab/punch are a little Love Hina... not sure if Buckley wants to take it that way in the series...
That's easy, I'm homeless and have no friends. Maybe I'm not, but how are they going to know?
No address, no contacts, no email, no phone. Are you going to deny someone travel because they can't afford these things? Or choose not to have them?
Probably. The last time I booked a flight online with a credit card I voluntarily handed over quite a bit of the information the CDC would already like the airlines to keep on file (for a retention period of one year, according to TFA). So I'm not entirely sure what the problem is, vis-a-vis wanting to lie about one's personal information in this case but not the other. One day some hapless campaigner is going to ring one tinfoil hatters' doors and upon asking "How are you?" get a "I DON'T HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT!" and a slam.
I kid. But seriously, while it's not impossible that this information could be abused, from what I've understood, it's about as likely as an actual pandemic in the first place. SARS fizzled out, and the avian flu also failed to fulfilled any predictions of doom. In fact, if there's going to be any threat of a pandemic, I'd put my money on the re-created Spanish flu virus that the CDC has, samples of which it is sending out to certain labs in the mail!
It almost makes you want to say "Sceintists, stop with the global warming stuff, start working on the renewable energy already!".
Yeah, you silly scientists! Stop with the global warming stuff! Stop already! Wait, what are climatologists, marine biologists, ecologists, glaciologists, atmospheric scientists, and meteorologists, among others, supposed to contribute to renewable energy research?
I kid. But seriously, "Doom and gloom" can also be viewed as awareness. Informing the public through the media about issues like these can get the public interested. An interested, and concerned, public will demand more research into alternative energy sources. If a galvanized public can put a man on the moon for nationalistic pride, I'm sure they can work up the interest for better reasons.
This was deemed Interesting?
The issue here is that they redefine science. Truly a sad day.
Well it ain't getting any cheerier. That's an Associated Press article, and it's running verbatim in a lot of papers and news sites. Defending evolution, AP quotes:
a paleontologist who is does not work for Harvard so much as is dead (would adding "the late" have killed them?);
Bill Nye who himself is harebrained and nutty; and
a columist's fantasy story.
Is that the best they could have done? Our defending scientist is dead and the God quote is fictional, so our camp is now, apparently, led by "The Science Guy"? So, uh, did we show up the ID side or what?
Front Row is still working on this 10.4.3 mini too, but the Fkey openfrontrow.app trick isn't working for me anymore. A swift press of F13 will switch to Front Row but won't bring up the FR menu as in my salad days of yesterday, without hitting Esc first. Spoooooky!
I was wondering what all the fuss was about, so I recently purchased a book of Dembski's on Intelligent Design. It's fascinating to read, and is based in large part on number theory.
Reading through the various posts on this topic, I have yet to read one that appears to even really know the various arguments ID makes.
That's funny because I was wondering why Dembski's "mathematics" aren't addressed in the mainstream media either. Could it be that it's heady stuff, befitting a scientific mind with degrees in math, philosophy and theology--more the solid foundation the theory is based on, unnecessary to understand for most people? Like the solid foundations of genetics, geology and paleontology, whose details (mutation, stratigraphy, the molecular clock etc) aren't necessary for understanding the basics of evolution? And so easily ignored by their opponents?
Well you're in luck because in the latest issue of Skeptic, Mark Perakh takes Dembski's science to task, and finds it thoroughly lacking. I don't want to give away the ending so I'll quote from the introduction:
"Dembski's many degrees and scores of published books and papers cannot conceal, however, that he has never conducted real scientific research. Moreover, Dembski's literary production contains no real mathematics but instead a lot of philosophizing, often saturated with unnecessary mathematical symbolism. . . . In this article I shall concentrate on the most salient features of Dembski's prolific literary output, almost all of which turns out to be poorly substantiated, contradictory, and often self-aggrandizing."
Maybe that's why the tireless arguments of the mousetrap, the eye and the flagellum are endlessly repeated, and Dembski's work largely ignored, or unpromoted: because Dembski's work simply won't hold up. Maybe not. But it's worth noting what Perakh goes on to say:
"Dembski is selective in deciding which critique to respond to and which to ignore. For example, his (mis)use of the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems . . . was subjected to a strong critique by Wein and Wolpert. In two lengthy rebuttals Dembski spared no effort to reply to Wein, but he never uttered a word in response to Wolpert. It is not hard to understand why. Wein, as Dembski stresses in his posts, has only a bachelor's degree in statistics. This irrelevant factoid, according to Dembski, makes Wein insufficiently qualified to dispute Dembski's work. . . . Dembski could not use such silly arguments against Wolpert, because Wolpert is a highly respected mathematician and a co-author of the very NFL theorems Dembski misuses."
Instead, the posts generally just rant about creationism. Intelligent posts would take the ID arguments and actually debate them one by one.
Imagine all of your molecules being transported from place to place in a little nanocar caravan. Now that would be a sight, indeed!
Teleportation? Transportation? I could avoid the complexity of putting my disassembled molecules into a caravan of little nanocars and just continue putting all my molecules in a macrocar--er, regular car... Nissan Micra?
So, it's a slightly (3%) taller and 2/3rds the thickness of a monolith.
It's not 2/3rds the thickness of a monolith. It's <Steve Jobs> sixty-three percent smaller than the alien monolith--that's two thirds smaller--isn't that amazing? </Steve Jobs>
But if you want to get pedantic about it, the monolith is 5 feet deep, making the nano over 99.5% smaller--impossibly small!
As the nytimes article showed, professional ID proponents are actually careful never to make that leap when going about their business. You can look backwards at their prior espoused beliefs, but they are nonspecific about the Designer's identity in their official propaganda.
Still, it's implicit, as the official ID proponents do have a particular agenda, right? I think so.
Ha! No karma for you!
I know! One OT and one Redundant, and now I'm stuck down here with the plebs. Ah well.
I have some time to kill and an already low karma, so I'll chime in too.
So you say that for anyone to have a discussion of evolution they must use your conventions of naming?
I'm afraid so. This is one of the first things one should have learned about debate in high school: everyone has to agree on the terms, otherwise nothing will make any sense. So you do have to learn the conventions--they didn't become conventions for nothing, after all. In the scientific sense, a "theory" as we generally know it is called a "hypothesis". Facts, based on observation, lead to hypotheses, which are proposed and tested--that's basically the scientific method. A hypothesis that survives tests to falsify it can become a theory. (If anybody can correct any errors here, please do.)
A theory describes how something works, based on the facts. It is not a suggestion (layman's theory), but our explanation, and as someone else pointed out, it's the best it gets. Since Einstein showed that Newton's Law of Gravity doesn't always work (gravity acts differently around large masses), nobody has had the hubris to propose anymore "laws". Thus: gravity is a fact (you can verify its existence yourself if you wish, and observe it working with common household items); how it works is described in the Theory of Gravity. The Theory of Gravity is not a suggestion or view of how it might work, it's how we describe it to the best of our knowledge.
So it is with the Theory of Evolution. Evolution itself is a fact. There are mountains of evidence, and you can even observe it yourself--if we're recommending books, I think you would learn a lot from "The Beak of the Finch" by Jonathan Weiner, a short, highly readable and personable explanation of evolution, with numerous examples of its occurence everywhere and at all times (even your backyard). Now the Theory of Evolution explains how it works to the best of our knowledge, and accounting for all of the facts.
Intelligent Design is not, I'm afraid, a theory. In fact, it is not a theory in even the popular sense--or if it is, it is an amazingly weak one. Initially, ID's speculative explanation (there must be a designer) does not compare to evolution's compelling evidence that shows it's not inconceivable that everything could have evolved from a single source, given enough time (and 3.5 billion years is that). But on closer examination, that becomes irrelevant. ID cannot be argued in a scientific arena because it is anything but. At its core is a glaring lack of logic: even if there must be a designer, why the Christian God? There is a leap made there in ID that reveals the movememt for what it is: Creationism, wrapped in pseudo-scientific language. (This was addressed in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago in a three-day special.)
So we have two problems: the minor one of your refusal to argue with shared terminonology, using "dubious semantics", as someone said above; and the major one of not arguing against evolution with anything suitable. The Theory of Evolution is incredibly robust is at the core of modern biology. Intelligent Design is no kind of opposition, but deception and wishful thinking. Where facts are concerned, Intelligent Design is off-topic.
Well, you probably didn't even read this. That's fine. But maybe someone else did, and maybe I helped someone else out. Or maybe I'll get a mod point. I could use a mod point.
Which isn't to suggest that researchers themselves don't play their own emotions and biases into their articles in the quest to fit their findings to their worldviews. I don't mean the article you linked is specifically a victim of this, or all researchers are especially guilty, but it's wise to be aware that no source is completely trustworthy for the "facts" (particularly on a perpetually hot topic like race and intelligence).
I turned on the "Display new mail notifications" option in my Google Talk account preferences in Adium, and tried e-mailing that account, but no notification was forthcoming. Has anyone else tried this in Adium or another client? Or does it only work with MSN/Hotmail? It would be handy to be able to lose GmailStatus/Gmail Notifier and let the IM client handle that--if Gmail is going to be that integrated.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't wait for Britannica's reply to Nature's reply about Britannica's criticism of the Nature Britannica-Wikipedia comparison !
I can't wait to update that Wikipedia article!
Give students the option to engrave their names and a phone number in large, friendly letters on the cover. . . . Think of every possable problem.
Problem: the Apple owners won't want to engrave anything on their laptops.
Thrice before there has been product placement within the Sims (Dont have Sims 2)
FYI your Sim can play EA's SSX Tricky or SSX 3 or one of those snowboarding games if you buy him/her a video game machine. It's entirely inconspicuous since it's only visible on his/her TV, if you're angled right, and only says SSX when it isn't showing snowboarding gameplay. Can't recall anything else. I guess that one instance makes Sims 2 a point worse than The Sims? Still, not nearly as obnoxious as the billboards in Need for Speed or Burnout.
Thanks for the further arguments. I will quietly depart soon, but sorry if my "If your 'dead-on accurate' experience" came off like a dig, I was trying to end on a lighter note.
I obviously can't come up with any landmark papers written by amateurs, certainly nothing rivaling Einstein's work, but I'll point to amateur art/music/film/video game criticism as an indication that people will engage in non-scientific analysis, and that those analyses have their own intrinsic worth. I also can't deny that common sense can be trumped by fashion or the academic overmind, but like science I believe only the most robust and illuminating interpretations will survive. For a basic example, a theological reading of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", while initially popular, failed to stand up to scrutiny; better interpretations have taken its place.
I don't think that anyone would argue science is too different though. As you say, it's easier (or clearer) to show what is 'correct' (or rather, disprove what isn't), but confabulation can rule just as easily: for all the molecular evidence, will chimpanzees and bonobos ever be folded into the Homo genus? Perhaps one day, but right now common sense is overruled by the taste Homo troglodytes leaves in a lot of people's mouths--to say nothing of the equally compelling (genetically speaking) Pan sapiens!
I guess I'm willing to give the humanities more credit than maybe they're ultimately worth. They are all, at the heart of it, about philosophy, there to pursue the questions science can't: they whys and whos beyond the hows and whens. But maybe! it happens that I just get aggravated when my Russian lit prof makes absurd arguments about the inherent dangers of science, when he means potential dangers of technology, and is ready to damn the whole enterprise because knowledge of fusion led (apparently inevitably) to nuclear weapons. Graham offered, to me, the flip side of that, and I just want to cry out Can't we all just get along? So now I will depart.
To put it yet another way, imagine how far you'd get in a physics program writing papers on the postmodern ennui of electrons.
That's a silly analogy as a paper on the postmodern ennui of electrons would be absurd. This isn't the last time you use a term like 'postmodern' though, which makes me wonder if you aren't just waving it around to really delineate the hard sciences from the humanities--one the empirical study of natural phenomena, the other a more amorphous maze of theory, if I'm reading you correctly.
Still, I have to disagree with you for the very reasons you use to support your argument. Having a much broader range of what can be considered 'correct' doesn't make something easier, because that's not the case. From my experience, nothing in literature is exactly correct, because unlike the hard sciences you aren't striving for the best explanation--where in the hard sciences there is one. Literature is about interpretation, and there is usually no 'correct' interpretation. There are, however, persuasive interpretations, but more importantly enlightening interpretations: those that reveal something new and important about the human condition etc. I'm an Arts student, but I'm terrible at interpretation: Celan's "Death Fugue", Keats' "Ode on Melancholy"... always flying over my head. But maybe that's just me.
So it seems to me that a student fueled by the drive to pursue the truth--or failing that impossible goal, the best explanation, singular--would be lost in a seeming mess of analysis. She will fail if she thinks she just has to find a 'correct' interpretation, even if there seem to be many. Interpretations don't survive because their, we'll say, predictions follow from clear formulae, but because their analyses stand up to argument and provide original illuminations. Of course that sounds like the scientific method, but the lit student is limited only by his intellectual imagination and analytical ability, with no contradictory natural phenomena involved.
Am I implying the opposite then? Of course not: I may not be very good at interpretation, but that's what I've been raised on. But I'm trying my hand at a minor in Biology, and I'm finding that as hard as I believe a dyed-in-the-wool Science student might find nineteenth-century Russian literature. Again though, maybe that's just me. But I don't find it as impossible as our French Lit grad might find physics: understanding the concepts comes with the same kind of intellectual determination, and after all I believe we're all ultimately trying to answer the same questions.
If, however, your "dead-on accurate" experience is a degree in physics and subsequent cinch degree in French literature, then more power to you.
nobody would write papers on gender bias in postmodern literature unless they were eyeing the carrot of tenure or some other extrinsic reward. On the other hand, plenty of people would still work on problems in number theory regardless of whether or not they were getting paid.
You did it again. Nobody would write papers on gender bias in postmodern literature, but plenty of people would still work on problems in number theory? Nobody at all? And plenty of which people? These are completely unfounded generalizations--maybe you wouldn't write papers on gender bias in postmodern literature in your spare time, and that's fine: neither would I. But I wouldn't want to work on problems in number theory. In fact I would rather, for example--and do--discuss gender bias in modern video games, for the intrinsic rewards of intellectual argument and, ideally, advancing the art. I can't see your assertion as anything but your own idea of what constitutes meaningful pursuits.
Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.
Graham has knocked the humanities before, implying they have less worth than the sciences (French literature being intrinsically easier than the hard sciences, IIRC)--which I find odd coming from him especially, whose personal selling points include a mixed background in computers and painting. I'm doing biological anthropology at school, which puts me right in between Arts and Sciences every day. I'm not big on the work involved in my lit courses, but they're required for a BA; but more importantly, I have no doubt that the lit majors and profs wouldn't qualify all of their work as "dreary". More to the point, I'm sure they can and do discuss things like gender and identity in the novels of Conrad in their 'spare time' for fun, much as the bioanth department can be so excited over masticatory apparatuses and early hominin cladistics.
I'm not going to defend English majors in particular, but Graham needs to cut out this veiled contempt, that each faculty seems to have for the other. Just in my Russian lit class the prof proclaimed how he couldn't understand Zamyatin's idea that everything could be expressed in numbers: "So they tell you that love is 86187129817--how is that supposed to mean anything?" Well even I could tell him that the 'numbers' wouldn't be isolated and so meaningless, but equations whose value would lie in showing relationships between other quantities. I didn't tell him that, but you get the idea.
So Graham: stop it. You're exacerbating my already chimeric undergrad.
Give us a show that goes beyond mainstream.
Give the decision-makers a large enough, dependable audience to guarantee advertisers keeping that show afloat. Sorry.
What would make this noteworthy is if it was an animated series on cable television. From what I understand, it's just web-based, yes? I don't want to rain on the CAD parade, but making the transition from webcomic to animation isn't a celebratory milestone: Homestar Runner and Ninjai, for example, always have been animation. So there isn't some sort of ladder one has to climb to reach an animation height. Good for Buckley and good for CAD fans, but it's no event in the grand scheme of things. Now if/when Homestar Runner, Penny Arcade, or CAD show up on Adult Swim, that will be noteworthy.
Also, I'm pretty familiar with CAD, but the penguin and boob-grab/punch are a little Love Hina... not sure if Buckley wants to take it that way in the series...
That's easy, I'm homeless and have no friends. Maybe I'm not, but how are they going to know? No address, no contacts, no email, no phone. Are you going to deny someone travel because they can't afford these things? Or choose not to have them?
Probably. The last time I booked a flight online with a credit card I voluntarily handed over quite a bit of the information the CDC would already like the airlines to keep on file (for a retention period of one year, according to TFA). So I'm not entirely sure what the problem is, vis-a-vis wanting to lie about one's personal information in this case but not the other. One day some hapless campaigner is going to ring one tinfoil hatters' doors and upon asking "How are you?" get a "I DON'T HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT!" and a slam.
I kid. But seriously, while it's not impossible that this information could be abused, from what I've understood, it's about as likely as an actual pandemic in the first place. SARS fizzled out, and the avian flu also failed to fulfilled any predictions of doom. In fact, if there's going to be any threat of a pandemic, I'd put my money on the re-created Spanish flu virus that the CDC has, samples of which it is sending out to certain labs in the mail!
This was deemed Interesting?
Oops! That was from my first draft, before I rethought what the parent said. Should've been removed, sorry.
It almost makes you want to say "Sceintists, stop with the global warming stuff, start working on the renewable energy already!".
Yeah, you silly scientists! Stop with the global warming stuff! Stop already! Wait, what are climatologists, marine biologists, ecologists, glaciologists, atmospheric scientists, and meteorologists, among others, supposed to contribute to renewable energy research?
I kid. But seriously, "Doom and gloom" can also be viewed as awareness. Informing the public through the media about issues like these can get the public interested. An interested, and concerned, public will demand more research into alternative energy sources. If a galvanized public can put a man on the moon for nationalistic pride, I'm sure they can work up the interest for better reasons. This was deemed Interesting?
In case anyone despairs, the first response in the original thread to what the parent quotes is this:
I guess you love raping grammar.
Succinct, and hopeful.
The issue here is that they redefine science. Truly a sad day.
Well it ain't getting any cheerier. That's an Associated Press article, and it's running verbatim in a lot of papers and news sites. Defending evolution, AP quotes:
Is that the best they could have done? Our defending scientist is dead and the God quote is fictional, so our camp is now, apparently, led by "The Science Guy"? So, uh, did we show up the ID side or what?
Front Row is still working on this 10.4.3 mini too, but the Fkey openfrontrow.app trick isn't working for me anymore. A swift press of F13 will switch to Front Row but won't bring up the FR menu as in my salad days of yesterday, without hitting Esc first. Spoooooky!
I was wondering what all the fuss was about, so I recently purchased a book of Dembski's on Intelligent Design. It's fascinating to read, and is based in large part on number theory.
Reading through the various posts on this topic, I have yet to read one that appears to even really know the various arguments ID makes.
That's funny because I was wondering why Dembski's "mathematics" aren't addressed in the mainstream media either. Could it be that it's heady stuff, befitting a scientific mind with degrees in math, philosophy and theology--more the solid foundation the theory is based on, unnecessary to understand for most people? Like the solid foundations of genetics, geology and paleontology, whose details (mutation, stratigraphy, the molecular clock etc) aren't necessary for understanding the basics of evolution? And so easily ignored by their opponents?
Well you're in luck because in the latest issue of Skeptic, Mark Perakh takes Dembski's science to task, and finds it thoroughly lacking. I don't want to give away the ending so I'll quote from the introduction:
"Dembski's many degrees and scores of published books and papers cannot conceal, however, that he has never conducted real scientific research. Moreover, Dembski's literary production contains no real mathematics but instead a lot of philosophizing, often saturated with unnecessary mathematical symbolism. . . . In this article I shall concentrate on the most salient features of Dembski's prolific literary output, almost all of which turns out to be poorly substantiated, contradictory, and often self-aggrandizing."
Maybe that's why the tireless arguments of the mousetrap, the eye and the flagellum are endlessly repeated, and Dembski's work largely ignored, or unpromoted: because Dembski's work simply won't hold up. Maybe not. But it's worth noting what Perakh goes on to say:
"Dembski is selective in deciding which critique to respond to and which to ignore. For example, his (mis)use of the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems . . . was subjected to a strong critique by Wein and Wolpert. In two lengthy rebuttals Dembski spared no effort to reply to Wein, but he never uttered a word in response to Wolpert. It is not hard to understand why. Wein, as Dembski stresses in his posts, has only a bachelor's degree in statistics. This irrelevant factoid, according to Dembski, makes Wein insufficiently qualified to dispute Dembski's work. . . . Dembski could not use such silly arguments against Wolpert, because Wolpert is a highly respected mathematician and a co-author of the very NFL theorems Dembski misuses."
Instead, the posts generally just rant about creationism. Intelligent posts would take the ID arguments and actually debate them one by one.
Perakh does that very thing. If you want to save US$5.95, you can find the whole article here: The Dream World of William Dembski's Creationism.
Imagine all of your molecules being transported from place to place in a little nanocar caravan. Now that would be a sight, indeed!
Teleportation? Transportation? I could avoid the complexity of putting my disassembled molecules into a caravan of little nanocars and just continue putting all my molecules in a macrocar--er, regular car... Nissan Micra?
Just don't use whitenening toothpaste on your black nano.
I didn't read your post because you have no value to me.
Yes! Yes! That was exactly his point! You poor Nietzschian! But Nietzsche went mad, so there may be hope for you yet.
So, it's a slightly (3%) taller and 2/3rds the thickness of a monolith.
It's not 2/3rds the thickness of a monolith. It's <Steve Jobs> sixty-three percent smaller than the alien monolith--that's two thirds smaller--isn't that amazing? </Steve Jobs>
But if you want to get pedantic about it, the monolith is 5 feet deep, making the nano over 99.5% smaller--impossibly small!
"I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that is what makes me more of a selective human, than someone who doesn't believe anything."
As the nytimes article showed, professional ID proponents are actually careful never to make that leap when going about their business. You can look backwards at their prior espoused beliefs, but they are nonspecific about the Designer's identity in their official propaganda.
Still, it's implicit, as the official ID proponents do have a particular agenda, right? I think so.
Ha! No karma for you!
I know! One OT and one Redundant, and now I'm stuck down here with the plebs. Ah well.
I have some time to kill and an already low karma, so I'll chime in too.
So you say that for anyone to have a discussion of evolution they must use your conventions of naming?
I'm afraid so. This is one of the first things one should have learned about debate in high school: everyone has to agree on the terms, otherwise nothing will make any sense. So you do have to learn the conventions--they didn't become conventions for nothing, after all. In the scientific sense, a "theory" as we generally know it is called a "hypothesis". Facts, based on observation, lead to hypotheses, which are proposed and tested--that's basically the scientific method. A hypothesis that survives tests to falsify it can become a theory. (If anybody can correct any errors here, please do.)
A theory describes how something works, based on the facts. It is not a suggestion (layman's theory), but our explanation, and as someone else pointed out, it's the best it gets. Since Einstein showed that Newton's Law of Gravity doesn't always work (gravity acts differently around large masses), nobody has had the hubris to propose anymore "laws". Thus: gravity is a fact (you can verify its existence yourself if you wish, and observe it working with common household items); how it works is described in the Theory of Gravity. The Theory of Gravity is not a suggestion or view of how it might work, it's how we describe it to the best of our knowledge.
So it is with the Theory of Evolution. Evolution itself is a fact. There are mountains of evidence, and you can even observe it yourself--if we're recommending books, I think you would learn a lot from "The Beak of the Finch" by Jonathan Weiner, a short, highly readable and personable explanation of evolution, with numerous examples of its occurence everywhere and at all times (even your backyard). Now the Theory of Evolution explains how it works to the best of our knowledge, and accounting for all of the facts.
Intelligent Design is not, I'm afraid, a theory. In fact, it is not a theory in even the popular sense--or if it is, it is an amazingly weak one. Initially, ID's speculative explanation (there must be a designer) does not compare to evolution's compelling evidence that shows it's not inconceivable that everything could have evolved from a single source, given enough time (and 3.5 billion years is that). But on closer examination, that becomes irrelevant. ID cannot be argued in a scientific arena because it is anything but. At its core is a glaring lack of logic: even if there must be a designer, why the Christian God? There is a leap made there in ID that reveals the movememt for what it is: Creationism, wrapped in pseudo-scientific language. (This was addressed in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago in a three-day special.)
So we have two problems: the minor one of your refusal to argue with shared terminonology, using "dubious semantics", as someone said above; and the major one of not arguing against evolution with anything suitable. The Theory of Evolution is incredibly robust is at the core of modern biology. Intelligent Design is no kind of opposition, but deception and wishful thinking. Where facts are concerned, Intelligent Design is off-topic.
Well, you probably didn't even read this. That's fine. But maybe someone else did, and maybe I helped someone else out. Or maybe I'll get a mod point. I could use a mod point.
Which isn't to suggest that researchers themselves don't play their own emotions and biases into their articles in the quest to fit their findings to their worldviews. I don't mean the article you linked is specifically a victim of this, or all researchers are especially guilty, but it's wise to be aware that no source is completely trustworthy for the "facts" (particularly on a perpetually hot topic like race and intelligence).
I turned on the "Display new mail notifications" option in my Google Talk account preferences in Adium, and tried e-mailing that account, but no notification was forthcoming. Has anyone else tried this in Adium or another client? Or does it only work with MSN/Hotmail? It would be handy to be able to lose GmailStatus/Gmail Notifier and let the IM client handle that--if Gmail is going to be that integrated.