Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming.
All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
"In the ample space of 89 pages, the NAS manages to celebrate evolution as an unassailable truth, completely misrepresent intelligent design, and rehash the same standard Darwinist arguments which have been refuted by critical scientists time and again.... Instead of treating evolutionary theory as an area open to further scientific inquiry, the NAS report canonizes evolution as perfect and immutable, 'so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter it.' 'Under their definition, a theory is not a testable area of science but rather an unquestionable dogma,' said CSC program officer Casey Luskin.... this report does little more than reveal a tired and weary voice of an establishment unwilling to actually address the scientific claims or the thoughtful skepticism of a growing number of scientists who disagree."
"Most ironic was that, while the whole room fumed with animosity toward religious people and, one sensed, the "religious right," the NAS panelists sought to promote the view of the new booklet that science and religion do not conflict because the two ways of knowing do not overlap. As Richard Dawkins has noted, this is a blatant political and rhetorical strategy, believed by very few who advance this proposition."
Please go back to school and learn about the inverse-square and how it applies to physical laws in three dimensions.
Gravity does not work in three dimensions. There is no 'area' variable associated with the law of gravity. It deals with two points and the line between them. If you think that 'area' has something to do with gravity, you have a fertile imagination. Gravity has to do with two masses and the distance between them. The strength of gravity is inverse square to the distance. But there is nothing about the physics of gravity which requires it to be so. It just is so. Where in the law of gravity does a '2x2' piece of paper come in to play? What variables represent the area of the 'paper'? Guess what? There are none.
We choose the numbers.
Ah, so Newton chose the numbers and the universe instantly obeyed. Amazing!
Gravity is a function of mass. There are two masses, a and b, which attract each other and who are separated by distance r. Mass a attracts b and that attraction decreases with distance, which is r. Mass b attracts mass a and that attraction decreases with the distance which is r. You end up with two attractive forces (Fab and Fba).
What happened to the pieces of paper the 'area' you were talking about? I thought the inverse square has something to do with area? I see there is no area variable in the formulas you are presenting. Maybe you're the one that needs to go back to school.
Newton stated that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force... inversely proportional to the square of the separation of the two objects.
Why the square? Why not the cube? Or to the power 2.5? Or 2.1? Or 1.937591537?
Why would the universe choose a round whole number for its law of gravity? That's just way too weird.
For that matter, why would a human construct (the mathematics of inverse square proportion) even apply to anything in the universe? Human brains are merely the accumulation of random mutations.
There is no reason whatsoever that any product of random mutation should provide any coherent insight into the universe.
Unless, perhaps, the intelligence which formed the universe is the same intelligence which informs our consciousness. And that our brains are not merely the products of random mutations.
I look at a lot of software every day that is "shoddily designed". But guess what? It still was designed. And guess what else? It gets the job done. Design always consists of many trade offs, some of which include: is it worth any more time improving this design?
Your argument that "shoddy" design is NOT design is an insult to intelligence. Who says that designers are not allowed to use "Microsoft-style" hacks? I'm sure Microsoft would argue forcefully that their software is, in fact, designed.
You are unfortunately blinded by the fallacy that anything less than perfect design is not design.
Someone explain to me how those ring particles got compressed into such a solid-looking moon. If these particles are just gradually coalescing due to gravity, that would result in a "fluff ball" of particles, not a solidly packed mass. By what force are these particles packed together into a solid mass?
Can you point me to statements by "most" design theorists which state that homo sapiens and dinosaurs lived at the same period? I doubt you can. This misrepresentation of Intelligent Design is starting to get old.
For educational use only.
The use, distribution, or duplication
of this material for any commercial
purpose is strictly prohibited.
Gee. For educational use only. I guess by the definition of our submitter, a conference which includes a session led by a Ph.D. couldn't possibly be for educational use.
And did you know that the initial versions of this video only had a music sound track? The creator of this video talks, David Bolinsky, talks to an early version of this video here. And it is very possible that the sound track used at the Dembski presentation pre-dated the later soundtrack(s) added by Harvard. In any case, this would not have violated the "For educational use only" policy.
But don't let the facts interfere with your smear campaign.
Is wikipedia really only source for the lay person? I never thought so.
That's not the question. The question is whether Wikipedia is really only a source for experts. And apparently, in many cases, from a layman point of view, it is.
Well, science, for one. If there were no meaning to life, then science would be, well, meaningless. If all there is meaningless random chaos, then there would be no meaning to science. Science assumes meaning.
We want there to be one.
No, we observe that there is ordered behavior in the universe. We observe that this ordered behavior is comprehensible. As Einstein said, the most uncomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility. There is no reason why the universe should be comprehensible. Anyone who thinks that it is "obvious" that the universe should be comprehensible is complacent and shallow and does not peer very deeply at the universe. The same type of person, for the same reason, would say that there is no meaning in the universe. That meaning exists only because we want it to be there.
Doesn't mean there is one.
Doesn't mean that there isn't. So there! I would really like to see you scientifically prove a negative.
The fundamental purpose in life can be summed up thusly: "Successfully reproduce before something eats you".
You are truely pathetic. You really believe that all that there is worth knowing can be known through science? What about love? What about justice? What about mercy? What can science tell us about these things? These existed before science existed. And they will exist long after science has exhausted it usefulness.
Science is a means of gaining knowledge. But it is a self-limiting means. The only things that science can teach us about are thing that are reproducible. But those things in the universe that are reproducible are just a tiny fragment of all things that can be known. Science boldly proclaims that all things that are not reproducible -- and falsifiable -- are outside of the realm of science. That does not mean that there are things outside of science that cannot be know with certainty.
For example, I know with certainly that 1 + 1 = 2. What scientific experiment proved that? There never has been one, and there never will be one.
Pure numbers are something invented out of the pure human imagination. On what grounds can one insist that numbers should have any relevance to anything in the physical universe? They are the pure invention of human folly.
But, lo and behold, numbers do apply to the universe around us. And this fact alone, means that there is meaning in the universe. That there is a connection between the human mind and the fundamental laws of the universe. And this implies meaning.
Do that and you've done what you are here for.
Wow. Someone on Slashdot thinks only of sex and eating. Now, that's a surprise. I am underwhelmed by its profundity.
Now, we as human beings can add more to that. We can, because of our intelligence, give our lives a "greater" purpose.
Are you sure about that? What is intelligence. Where did it come from. According to your theory, everything is just random mutations and natural selection, just atoms randomly bumping into each other. How does this produce intelligence? Becareful how you answer. The stronger you argument is in favor of real intelligence, the more you will undercut your own materialistic views.
What that purpose is is up to each of us as individuals.
How very relativistic of you. Is that all they teach you in school these days? Well guess what. Meaning is embedded in the fabric of the universe itself. It is not our job to invent meaning. It is our job to discover the meaning that is already there.
If you want your life to be spent helping those less fortunate than yourself do it.
Linux is 15 years old. Pretty much every line of code written during that 15 years is well documented.
For most of its life, Microsoft has had virtually no patents. Only recently has Microsoft started beefing up its patent portfolio at an astounding rate. Some are absurdly trivial, such as the notorious IsNot patent.
If Microsoft attempts to enforce any of its patents, it will need to overcome obviousness and prior art.
Let me correct your intuition about monkeys and Shakespeare.
English prose uses 26 lower-case letters and 26 upper case letters.
Throw in
10 digits, and some common punctuation marks:
.!?,;:'"$#%&()/-+*
and we get roughly 80 characters that we can say are used in
common
English prose. This is conservative considering that most modern
keyboards have 100+ keys.
For our purposes, we will say that one monkey pressing one key
will
therefore
have a chance of 1 in 80 of typing any particular letter, say T.
One monkey pressing two keys will have a chance of 1/80 times
1/80
of
typing any two particular letters, say Th. That is, a monkey has a
chance of 1 in 6400 of randomly typing "Th".
To type the word "The", the chances are 1 in 512000 (1/80^3).
In general, for N characters, the probability would be 1/80^N.
Now let's examine one sentence from one work of Shakespeare:
"But, soft!
What light through yonder
window breaks?"
This sentence has 51 characters. So the probability of monkey
typing
this in randomly is 1/80^51. Or, 1 chance in:
AGES OF THE UNIVERSE. That's a lot of ages of the universe for
that
little monkey to be working all by himself. We need more monkeys!
Now, there are about 10^67 atoms in the galaxy. If there were one
monkey
typingfor every atom in the galaxy, the time it would take
for any one of them to type a simple 51-character sentence would be:
2,640,978,114,968
AGES OF THE UNIVERSE
That's more than two trillion times the age of the universe.
Obviously our monkeys are too slow!
Let's make them faster! Let's say they could type as
fast as or faster than our current desktop CPUs -- call it 10 GHz.
Nope, not fast enough. How about 1,000 GHz.
Just barely: we'll divide our result by
1,000,000,000,000.
So if
there were one
monkey
for every atom in the galaxy, each of them typinga trillion keys per
second it would still take:
2.6
AGES OF THE UNIVERSE
for
any one of them to accidentally type this simple 51-character sentence
fromShakespeare:
"But, soft! What light through
yonder
window breaks?"
OK, I'm willing to call this roughly even odds.
Now, about the rest of those works of Shakespeare...
Information can be stored in material media, such as hard disks or DNA, and can be propogated using material media, such as electomagnetic waves, but it never originates from material sources alone.
The true Christian stance on DNA is: "render unto the material realm, that which is of the material realm. Render unto the non-material realm, that which of the non-material realm."
The information in the DNA is not of the material realm. Just try answering this question: how did the information in the first cell get encoded? This information, which represents a serialized version of three-dimensional constructs which makes up the living stuff of the a cell, was not passed down from previous cells, since this was the first cell. This is one (of many) show stopping problems that current evolutionary theory hardly even attempts to answer.
Science has a very poor understanding of how this serialized information gets properly folded into its functional three-dimensional form. This is a very difficult problem. If you would like to help in solving this difficult problem, visit: http://folding.stanford.edu/
BTW, the Bible's distinctive and definitive reference to man is that he is: "created in the image God." Not that he is "flesh" and "blood" (duh).
Slashdot Mirror
Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming.
All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
National Academy of Sciences Report on Evolution is Long on Assertion, Short on Evidence
"In the ample space of 89 pages, the NAS manages to celebrate evolution as an unassailable truth, completely misrepresent intelligent design, and rehash the same standard Darwinist arguments which have been refuted by critical scientists time and again. ... Instead of treating evolutionary theory as an area open to further scientific inquiry, the NAS report canonizes evolution as perfect and immutable, 'so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter it.' 'Under their definition, a theory is not a testable area of science but rather an unquestionable dogma,' said CSC program officer Casey Luskin. ... this report does little more than reveal a tired and weary voice of an establishment unwilling to actually address the scientific claims or the thoughtful skepticism of a growing number of scientists who disagree."
Report from the NAS Book Release
"Most ironic was that, while the whole room fumed with animosity toward religious people and, one sensed, the "religious right," the NAS panelists sought to promote the view of the new booklet that science and religion do not conflict because the two ways of knowing do not overlap. As Richard Dawkins has noted, this is a blatant political and rhetorical strategy, believed by very few who advance this proposition."
SETI is attempting to find patterns suggesting intelligence in electro-magnetic signals received from outer space.
Intelligent Design theorists are also attempting to find patterns suggesting intelligence in the molecular structures of living things.
But apparently (according to many on Slashdot), ID is in reality a secret creationist scheme to create a world theocracy.
So, why isn't SETI also a secret creationist scheme? Their methods are identical.
Gravity does not work in three dimensions. There is no 'area' variable associated with the law of gravity. It deals with two points and the line between them. If you think that 'area' has something to do with gravity, you have a fertile imagination. Gravity has to do with two masses and the distance between them. The strength of gravity is inverse square to the distance. But there is nothing about the physics of gravity which requires it to be so. It just is so. Where in the law of gravity does a '2x2' piece of paper come in to play? What variables represent the area of the 'paper'? Guess what? There are none.
We choose the numbers.
Ah, so Newton chose the numbers and the universe instantly obeyed. Amazing!
Gravity is a function of mass. There are two masses, a and b, which attract each other and who are separated by distance r. Mass a attracts b and that attraction decreases with distance, which is r. Mass b attracts mass a and that attraction decreases with the distance which is r. You end up with two attractive forces (Fab and Fba).
What happened to the pieces of paper the 'area' you were talking about? I thought the inverse square has something to do with area? I see there is no area variable in the formulas you are presenting. Maybe you're the one that needs to go back to school.
The two are mutually exclusive. "Quantitative laws" are a human construct. Why would the universe follow the dictates of a human construct?
Newton stated that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force ... inversely proportional to the square of the separation of the two objects.
Why the square? Why not the cube? Or to the power 2.5? Or 2.1? Or 1.937591537?
Why would the universe choose a round whole number for its law of gravity? That's just way too weird.
For that matter, why would a human construct (the mathematics of inverse square proportion) even apply to anything in the universe? Human brains are merely the accumulation of random mutations.
There is no reason whatsoever that any product of random mutation should provide any coherent insight into the universe.
Unless, perhaps, the intelligence which formed the universe is the same intelligence which informs our consciousness. And that our brains are not merely the products of random mutations.
I look at a lot of software every day that is "shoddily designed". But guess what? It still was designed. And guess what else? It gets the job done. Design always consists of many trade offs, some of which include: is it worth any more time improving this design?
Your argument that "shoddy" design is NOT design is an insult to intelligence. Who says that designers are not allowed to use "Microsoft-style" hacks? I'm sure Microsoft would argue forcefully that their software is, in fact, designed.
You are unfortunately blinded by the fallacy that anything less than perfect design is not design.
Someone explain to me how those ring particles got compressed into such a solid-looking moon. If these particles are just gradually coalescing due to gravity, that would result in a "fluff ball" of particles, not a solidly packed mass. By what force are these particles packed together into a solid mass?
Can you point me to statements by "most" design theorists which state that homo sapiens and dinosaurs lived at the same period? I doubt you can. This misrepresentation of Intelligent Design is starting to get old.
Modding the Asus 701 (Eee) - Bluetooth
to allow you to have built-in bluetooth.
Sweet!!!
Oh, btw, if you go directly to Harvard to view this video, you will see this notice:
Gee. For educational use only. I guess by the definition of our submitter, a conference which includes a session led by a Ph.D. couldn't possibly be for educational use.
And did you know that the initial versions of this video only had a music sound track? The creator of this video talks, David Bolinsky, talks to an early version of this video here. And it is very possible that the sound track used at the Dembski presentation pre-dated the later soundtrack(s) added by Harvard. In any case, this would not have violated the "For educational use only" policy.
But don't let the facts interfere with your smear campaign.
That's not the question. The question is whether Wikipedia is really only a source for experts. And apparently, in many cases, from a layman point of view, it is.
Well, science, for one. If there were no meaning to life, then science would be, well, meaningless. If all there is meaningless random chaos, then there would be no meaning to science. Science assumes meaning.
No, we observe that there is ordered behavior in the universe. We observe that this ordered behavior is comprehensible. As Einstein said, the most uncomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility. There is no reason why the universe should be comprehensible. Anyone who thinks that it is "obvious" that the universe should be comprehensible is complacent and shallow and does not peer very deeply at the universe. The same type of person, for the same reason, would say that there is no meaning in the universe. That meaning exists only because we want it to be there.
Doesn't mean that there isn't. So there! I would really like to see you scientifically prove a negative.
You are truely pathetic. You really believe that all that there is worth knowing can be known through science? What about love? What about justice? What about mercy? What can science tell us about these things? These existed before science existed. And they will exist long after science has exhausted it usefulness.
Science is a means of gaining knowledge. But it is a self-limiting means. The only things that science can teach us about are thing that are reproducible. But those things in the universe that are reproducible are just a tiny fragment of all things that can be known. Science boldly proclaims that all things that are not reproducible -- and falsifiable -- are outside of the realm of science. That does not mean that there are things outside of science that cannot be know with certainty.
For example, I know with certainly that 1 + 1 = 2. What scientific experiment proved that? There never has been one, and there never will be one.
Pure numbers are something invented out of the pure human imagination. On what grounds can one insist that numbers should have any relevance to anything in the physical universe? They are the pure invention of human folly.
But, lo and behold, numbers do apply to the universe around us. And this fact alone, means that there is meaning in the universe. That there is a connection between the human mind and the fundamental laws of the universe. And this implies meaning.
Wow. Someone on Slashdot thinks only of sex and eating. Now, that's a surprise. I am underwhelmed by its profundity.
Are you sure about that? What is intelligence. Where did it come from. According to your theory, everything is just random mutations and natural selection, just atoms randomly bumping into each other. How does this produce intelligence? Becareful how you answer. The stronger you argument is in favor of real intelligence, the more you will undercut your own materialistic views.
How very relativistic of you. Is that all they teach you in school these days? Well guess what. Meaning is embedded in the fabric of the universe itself. It is not our job to invent meaning. It is our job to discover the meaning that is already there.
Have you ever thought of finding a moun
Scientific theories are falsifiable.
Tell me, exactly how could this "shard" theory be falsified?
For most of its life, Microsoft has had virtually no patents. Only recently has Microsoft started beefing up its patent portfolio at an astounding rate. Some are absurdly trivial, such as the notorious IsNot patent.
If Microsoft attempts to enforce any of its patents, it will need to overcome obviousness and prior art.
Oh yeah, and IBM.
English prose uses 26 lower-case letters and 26 upper case letters. Throw in 10 digits, and some common punctuation marks:
and we get roughly 80 characters that we can say are used in common English prose. This is conservative considering that most modern keyboards have 100+ keys.
For our purposes, we will say that one monkey pressing one key will therefore have a chance of 1 in 80 of typing any particular letter, say T.
One monkey pressing two keys will have a chance of 1/80 times 1/80 of typing any two particular letters, say Th. That is, a monkey has a chance of 1 in 6400 of randomly typing "Th".
To type the word "The", the chances are 1 in 512000 (1/80^3).
In general, for N characters, the probability would be 1/80^N.
Now let's examine one sentence from one work of Shakespeare:
"But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?"
This sentence has 51 characters. So the probability of monkey typing this in randomly is 1/80^51. Or, 1 chance in:
114179815416476790484662877555959610910619729920 00000000000000000000\
000000000000000000000000000000
That looks like a pretty big number. That's 98 digits. Or in scientific notation, about 1 x 10^97.
Let's say our monkey could type one character per second. How long would it take to type
114179815416476790484662877555959610910619729920 00000000000000000000\
000000000000000000000000000000
characters?
Well, there are 60 seconds per minute, so this would be:
190299692360794650807771462593266018184366216533 33333333333333333333\
3333333333333333333333333333
minutes. Or, with 60 minutes per hour:
317166153934657751346285770988776696973943694222 22222222222222222222\
22222222222222222222222222
hours. Or, with 24 hours per day:
132152564139440729727619071245323623739143205925 92592592592592592592\
5925925925925925925925925
days. Ok, there are 365.25 days per year, so that's:
361814001750693305209087121821556806951795224985 42347960554668289096\
7627449489188024437853
years, or about 10^89 years.
The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. That would make this time span
264097811496856427159917607169019567118098704368 92224788726035247515\
885215291181
AGES OF THE UNIVERSE. That's a lot of ages of the universe for that little monkey to be working all by himself. We need more monkeys!
Now, there are about 10^67 atoms in the galaxy. If there were one monkey typingfor every atom in the galaxy, the time it would take for any one of them to type a simple 51-character sentence would be:
2,640,978,114,968 AGES OF THE UNIVERSE
That's more than two trillion times the age of the universe. Obviously our monkeys are too slow!
Let's make them faster! Let's say they could type as fast as or faster than our current desktop CPUs -- call it 10 GHz. Nope, not fast enough. How about 1,000 GHz. Just barely: we'll divide our result by 1,000,000,000,000.
So if there were one monkey for every atom in the galaxy, each of them typinga trillion keys per second it would still take:
2.6 AGES OF THE UNIVERSE
for any one of them to accidentally type this simple 51-character sentence fromShakespeare:"But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?"
OK, I'm willing to call this roughly even odds.
Now, about the rest of those works of Shakespeare...
-1 Redundant
Slashdot readers are already known to be incapable of digesting an argument based on its merits.
They need to be told, using emotionally charged terms, which is the politically correct side of the fence that they should be sitting on.
(Are you sure you just didn't come from a KKK meeting yourself? You are using the very same tactics that they themselves use.)
Information is non-material.
Information can be stored in material media, such as hard disks or DNA, and can be propogated using material media, such as electomagnetic waves, but it never originates from material sources alone.
The true Christian stance on DNA is: "render unto the material realm, that which is of the material realm. Render unto the non-material realm, that which of the non-material realm."
The information in the DNA is not of the material realm. Just try answering this question: how did the information in the first cell get encoded? This information, which represents a serialized version of three-dimensional constructs which makes up the living stuff of the a cell, was not passed down from previous cells, since this was the first cell. This is one (of many) show stopping problems that current evolutionary theory hardly even attempts to answer.
Science has a very poor understanding of how this serialized information gets properly folded into its functional three-dimensional form. This is a very difficult problem. If you would like to help in solving this difficult problem, visit: http://folding.stanford.edu/
BTW, the Bible's distinctive and definitive reference to man is that he is: "created in the image God." Not that he is "flesh" and "blood" (duh).
Opera handles these use cases quite well.
I think there is also a bit of a falsifiability problem.
Rest in Peace, Geir Ivarsoy.
Or you could use JSCTP, which is just as easy as openining two sockets.
"Operating system is not included"
So the command line works! Awesome!
You mean you've created another ls/bash/sed/awk/perl/tcl/python heaven??
I can die now.
I just think it is very bad science.