Hardly. Consider the following, slightly unrelated tale. It demonstrates how LITTLE can happen in 13 billion years.
English prose uses 26 lower-case letters and 26 upper case letters. Throw in
10 digits, and the following 18 common pucntuation marks:.!?,;:'"$#%&()/-+*
and we get roughly 80 characters ( 26+26+10+18=80 ) that 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 (1/3^80).
In general, for N characters, the probability would be 1/N^80.
Now let's examine a longer sentence:
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back."
This sentence has 52 characters. So the probability of monkey typing
this in randomly is 1/52^80. Or, 1 chance in:
19066346913841944036898935159067571914007532772132 2538326368101913940\
54066195372127089220252400916515660459655214049797 8921601884724658176
That looks like a pretty big number. That's 138 digits. Or in
scientific notation, about 2 x 10^137.
Let's say our monkey could type one character per second (he's very
coordinated and very disciplined). How long would it take to type
19066346913841944036898935159067571914007532772132 2538326368101913940\
54066195372127089220252400916515660459655214049797 8921601884724658176
characters?
Well, there are 60 seconds per minute, so this would be:
31777244856403240061498225265112619856679221286887 089721061350318990\
09011032562021181536708733486085943409942535674966 315360031412077636
minutes. Or, with 60 minutes per hour:
52962074760672066769163708775187699761132035478145 149535102250531650\
15018387603368635894514555810143239016570892791610 5256000523534627
hours. Or, with 24 hours per day:
22067531150280027820484878656328208233805014782560 478972959271054854\
22924328168070264956047731587559682923571205329837 719000021813942
days. Ok, there are 365.25 days per year, so that's:
60417607529856339002011988107674765869418247180179 271657657141833960\
92879748577878891050096458829732191440304463599829 483915186348
years.
Now, the universe is about 13.7 billon years old (
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/map_discover y_030211.html ). That's
13,700,000,000
years. So how many ages of the universe would it take that monkey to enter
that many characters? Oh, only:
44100443452449882483220429275675011583516968744656 402669822731265664\
91153101151736416824887926153089190832339024525422 98
AGES OF THE UNIVERSE. That's a long time for one monkey to be
working on that one problem. So let's put more than one monkey to work.
Hmm, how about one monkey per atom in the universe (these are very small
monkeys). For our purposes, we can estimate the number of ATOMS IN THE
UNIVERSE to be 4 x 10^78 (
http://www.sunspot.noao.edu/sunspot/pr/answerbook/ universe.html#q70 ).
So, using 4 x 10^78 monkeys, how long would it take all of them?
Ok, this is getting better. Only:
110251108631124706208051073189187528958792
AGES OF THE UNIVERSE. That's still a big number, about 10^41.
Well, maybe the monkeys could work faster than one character per second.
Maybe a monkey could work as fast (or faster than) today's modern desktop
CPU. Let's be generous and say 10 GHz (10,000,000,000 operations per
second,
Yes, thank you. I will slightly revise my statement. Your link states:
"This review cited only four examples of speciation events."
Four data points does not constitute the basis for a Theory.
Mutations occur, and when they occur in parallel for members of the same species, and those mutations survive into succeeding generations, you achieve speciation. End of story. What am I missing?
What you are missing is that most mutations are fatal to the species. Every hear of the frog mutations in Minnesota? Funny how none of those mutations improved the species.
Every try to mate a donkey and a horse? You get a mule: which is STERILE. That's the other problem. Not only do you need to have beneficial mutations, but they need to occur in such a way that offspring with the same mutation. Again, very rare.
Ever hear of the Cambrian Explosion? In just a few tens of millions of years, more life forms appeared that can be explained by using your "mutation" mechanism.
The argument against life being created by random chance ignores the obvious fact that the improbable event has already happened.
Duh. The question is HOW did it happen. Those who accept the dogma of evolution often seem use circular logic: it happened, therefore it must have evolved. Quite unscientific thinking.
Science starts from the standpoint that everything that can be observed can be explained.
And who pronounced that everything that can be observed can be explained? Where did this idea come from? Has it been scientifically proven that everything that can be observed can be explained? I must have missed that scientific experiment. Which one was that again?
It's funny how scientists don't even know where their own unproven dogma begins. But they are quick to make accusations of others.
Certainly ID is falseifiable. ID asserts that certain configurations (of living creatures) are irreducibly complex. This means that certain "functionality" is not present unless all sub-components are present and functional. In most cases, the only value of the sub-component is in the context of the whole. So the question arises as to why a sub-component would get "selected" if it had not purpose (yet).
To falsify ID, all you would have to do is show evidence that all of the sub-components could have evolved randomly and have been "naturally selected" independently of the whole.
For example, blood clotting requires the precise interaction of dozens of complex enzymes. To falsify ID, all you would have to do is show that all of the mechanisms for all of these complex enzymatic interactions were somehow "selected" to exist and just been lying around, unused, waiting. Waiting for what? Why, for blood clotting to be needed, of course, so that they could be put to work.
So far, no one has show why all of these enzymes would all be sitting around, unused. But if someone could show this, then this would disprove ID in this case.
Of course, if you subscribe to the dogma of evolution, you would have to assert that because these emzymes exist, they must have somehow been "selectd" through random evolution. Of course, that begs the question.
An intelligent designer would create intelligent designs, with each feature designed perfectly to fit its intended purpose.
Really? Please show me ANY design, human or otherwise, which is perfect.
Slashdot was designed. Therefore it is perfect, right? I think many would disagree.
All designs are trade-offs. The designer decides what his priorities are and designs to those. Some design characteristics will get more emphasis than others.
Next straw man, please.
Neither is "speciation" amenable to scientific investigation. If this experiment has actually captured speciation, then this is a FIRST. It has NEVER been recorded in a scientific experiment before. But somehow, this slight omission never kept anyone from asserting that Darwin's hypothesis of evolution is somehow unscientific.
Of course, the latest beta of Opera 8.0.2 has bittorrent built in -- primarily to releave its own server load when providing upgrades -- but it works great on any torrent file.
I just got an OGG player too. It can play MP3's WMA's and OGG's. It has an FM tuner, built-in mike, and line input. The dimensions are: 8.2 x 3.4 x 1.9. It only has 512MB, but then again, it was only $70. The manual says that there is a 1G model, too.
No. But since you brought it up, I will outline the steps I go through to create a mix.
1. I select the songs that I would like to be on the CD. I have a script which checks to make sure the song will fit on the CD, and if it overflows the CD, it suggests some songs to remove from the CD which would give the songs the best fit.
2. After step 1, I have a list of songs that will fit nicely on the CD. Then I use another script to identify the subset of songs that will best fit on one side of a cassette. After step 2, I have two lists: one list of songs that fits nicely on one side of a cassette, and another list of songs that will fill out the rest of the CD. (The second list does not usually fill the second side of the cassette, but I'm willing to live with that.)
3. Next I go through each list of songs and reorder them as I see fit. I find that the randomizing effect of my scripts sometimes produces delightful juxtopositions that I may not have thought of myself. At any rate, within the limits of the allocations of songs, I make the final decision of ordering on each side. In fact, sometimes I make a "beta" copy of the cassette and listen to it for a few days to make sure I am satified with the selection and ordering of the songs.
4. Before making the final copies, I adjust the volumes on each song so that there are not harsh transitions from one song to the next.
4. Finally, I can burn a CD. I keep the master CD in storage and make another copy for daily use. I also make a cassette from the CD. The songs on the cassette will be in the same order as on the CD. Since side one has been filled to the max, there is no long gap between the end of side one and the beginning of side two: an important part of maintaining the mood and flow.
I have been making mix tapes (and now CD's) for years. I have received many compliments on my mixes mainly in terms of flow and mood. I was a dance DJ at college and people told me that hands down I was the best DJ there -- exactly because I knew how to (or took the time to) pace the music so that it would interact with the crowd itself in a way that would take them through different moods and energy levels.
And when I give out my mixes, some people (certainly not all, but some) notice how well my mixes fit onto cassette and realize how much care and attention I put into my mixes. This is not so noticible with CD's -- although many of my CD's only have seconds to spare. In fact, sometimes I have had to reduce the spacing between songs to get all of them to fit on a CD.
So, yes. I know all about "mood and flow". I just happen to find it more challenging to add "fit" to the mix. And I end up with even more plesant results.
When I make a audio CD mix, I also make sure it fits on a C90 cassette. I have a tcl script which takes the songs which I have allocated for the CD, and determines that subset of songs which will most perfectly fit into a 45 miniute segment. That way my mix can fit perfectly on both CDs and cassettes.
Well, I just received my first OGG player. I've never had a music player before so I don't have anything to compare it with. But I'm pleased with it.
Plugging the USP plug into my Xandros Linux system caused the file manager to come up automatically. I could just drag.ogg files into the MUSIC folder and they became visible to the player.
It has a built-in microphone so you can directly record audio (in MP3 format). It also has a line input so that you can record audio from another source. It even has an FM receiver that works very well.
I was impressed with the complement of cables that came with it: USB extender cable, line input cable, ear buds, and also a lanyard and belt adapter.
I have a 512M model. According to the manual, there is also a 1G model, but I didn't know about it before I ordered.
Plugging it into the USB port charges the batteries. I haven't used it enough to have a sense of how long the built-in battery lasts. I used it for several hours today without any problems.
So far I'm very pleased with this unit and I am very happy to support companies which support OGG.
If you even ask the question "What created God?", then you are not using the word "God" in the way that it has been used by the Judeo-Christian (and even Islamic?) tradition for the last 5000 years.
If you don't believe that God exists, that's fine. But that assertion is only meaningful if you define what the term "God" means. And it traditionally means the supreme being that existed outside of creation and is himself uncreated.
By that definition, the question, "What created God?" makes no sense.
Lastly, if every event requires a cause, and God caused the first event, what caused God?
Why is it that everyone brings up this question? Somehow they think it is profound.
Everyone pay attention. Here is the answer:
God was not "caused". By definition, he is uncreated. He is the "prime mover". The "prime" here means that he is unmoved but can cause other things to move. He is uncreated but bring creation into existence. He is beyond space and time but can bring space and time into existence.
If you are talking about something that was created, then you are not talking about God. If you are talking about something that exists in time and had a starting point in time, you are not talking about God. If you are talking about something that can be located in space, then you are not talking about God.
This is by DEFINITION. God, by definition, is uncreated, absolute, unmanifest, before all relativity, space and time. Everyone got that? Good.
So let's get over the "what created God" questions, ok? They are meaningless.
I think you're completely missing the point.
Does anyone remember Phantom Edit, the edited version of Phantom Menace that tried to make it tolerable?
Now, Phantom Edit was probably boarderline legal.
With open source media, raw materials will be created that will be accessible to anyone who wants to build upon it.
So if you don't like the version that was created, you can start with that and create something that you like.
I'm sure that with open media, there will be a lot more forking. But that, I think, is a good thing.
The whole point is that a new collaberative, forkable method of media creation is being explored. And this, I'm sure, will have new and surprising benefits for everyone
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. Consider the following tale which demonstrates how LITTLE can happen in 13 billon years:
Hardly. Consider the following, slightly unrelated tale. It demonstrates how LITTLE can happen in 13 billion years. English prose uses 26 lower-case letters and 26 upper case letters. Throw in 10 digits, and the following 18 common pucntuation marks: .!?,;:'"$#%&()/-+*
and we get roughly 80 characters ( 26+26+10+18=80 ) that 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 (1/3^80).
In general, for N characters, the probability would be 1/N^80.
Now let's examine a longer sentence:
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back."
This sentence has 52 characters. So the probability of monkey typing
this in randomly is 1/52^80. Or, 1 chance in:
19066346913841944036898935159067571914007532772132 2538326368101913940\
54066195372127089220252400916515660459655214049797 8921601884724658176
That looks like a pretty big number. That's 138 digits. Or in
scientific notation, about 2 x 10^137.
Let's say our monkey could type one character per second (he's very
coordinated and very disciplined). How long would it take to type
19066346913841944036898935159067571914007532772132 2538326368101913940\
54066195372127089220252400916515660459655214049797 8921601884724658176
characters?
Well, there are 60 seconds per minute, so this would be:
31777244856403240061498225265112619856679221286887 089721061350318990\
09011032562021181536708733486085943409942535674966 315360031412077636
minutes. Or, with 60 minutes per hour:
52962074760672066769163708775187699761132035478145 149535102250531650\
15018387603368635894514555810143239016570892791610 5256000523534627
hours. Or, with 24 hours per day:
22067531150280027820484878656328208233805014782560 478972959271054854\
22924328168070264956047731587559682923571205329837 719000021813942
days. Ok, there are 365.25 days per year, so that's:
60417607529856339002011988107674765869418247180179 271657657141833960\
92879748577878891050096458829732191440304463599829 483915186348
years.
Now, the universe is about 13.7 billon years old (
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/map_discover y_030211.html ). That's
13,700,000,000
years. So how many ages of the universe would it take that monkey to enter
that many characters? Oh, only:
44100443452449882483220429275675011583516968744656 402669822731265664\
91153101151736416824887926153089190832339024525422 98
AGES OF THE UNIVERSE. That's a long time for one monkey to be
working on that one problem. So let's put more than one monkey to work.
Hmm, how about one monkey per atom in the universe (these are very small
monkeys). For our purposes, we can estimate the number of ATOMS IN THE
UNIVERSE to be 4 x 10^78 (
http://www.sunspot.noao.edu/sunspot/pr/answerbook/ universe.html#q70 ).
So, using 4 x 10^78 monkeys, how long would it take all of them?
Ok, this is getting better. Only:
110251108631124706208051073189187528958792
AGES OF THE UNIVERSE. That's still a big number, about 10^41.
Well, maybe the monkeys could work faster than one character per second.
Maybe a monkey could work as fast (or faster than) today's modern desktop
CPU. Let's be generous and say 10 GHz (10,000,000,000 operations per
second,
Yes, thank you. I will slightly revise my statement. Your link states: "This review cited only four examples of speciation events." Four data points does not constitute the basis for a Theory.
What you are missing is that most mutations are fatal to the species. Every hear of the frog mutations in Minnesota? Funny how none of those mutations improved the species.
Every try to mate a donkey and a horse? You get a mule: which is STERILE. That's the other problem. Not only do you need to have beneficial mutations, but they need to occur in such a way that offspring with the same mutation. Again, very rare.
Ever hear of the Cambrian Explosion? In just a few tens of millions of years, more life forms appeared that can be explained by using your "mutation" mechanism.
Duh. The question is HOW did it happen. Those who accept the dogma of evolution often seem use circular logic: it happened, therefore it must have evolved. Quite unscientific thinking.
And who pronounced that everything that can be observed can be explained? Where did this idea come from? Has it been scientifically proven that everything that can be observed can be explained? I must have missed that scientific experiment. Which one was that again?
It's funny how scientists don't even know where their own unproven dogma begins. But they are quick to make accusations of others.
To falsify ID, all you would have to do is show evidence that all of the sub-components could have evolved randomly and have been "naturally selected" independently of the whole.
For example, blood clotting requires the precise interaction of dozens of complex enzymes. To falsify ID, all you would have to do is show that all of the mechanisms for all of these complex enzymatic interactions were somehow "selected" to exist and just been lying around, unused, waiting. Waiting for what? Why, for blood clotting to be needed, of course, so that they could be put to work.
So far, no one has show why all of these enzymes would all be sitting around, unused. But if someone could show this, then this would disprove ID in this case.
Of course, if you subscribe to the dogma of evolution, you would have to assert that because these emzymes exist, they must have somehow been "selectd" through random evolution. Of course, that begs the question.
An intelligent designer would create intelligent designs, with each feature designed perfectly to fit its intended purpose. Really? Please show me ANY design, human or otherwise, which is perfect. Slashdot was designed. Therefore it is perfect, right? I think many would disagree. All designs are trade-offs. The designer decides what his priorities are and designs to those. Some design characteristics will get more emphasis than others. Next straw man, please.
Then I would love to hear how an eye, any eye, evolved through random mutations. Please give evidence for the exact mechanics that you propose.
Neither is "speciation" amenable to scientific investigation. If this experiment has actually captured speciation, then this is a FIRST. It has NEVER been recorded in a scientific experiment before. But somehow, this slight omission never kept anyone from asserting that Darwin's hypothesis of evolution is somehow unscientific.
Unless God leaves some evidence that "natural" law was not used to accomplish this feat. And then it would be in the realm of science.
Of course, the latest beta of Opera 8.0.2 has bittorrent built in -- primarily to releave its own server load when providing upgrades -- but it works great on any torrent file.
BeOS was POSIX compliant, duh.
You mean like the LGPL which is used by JBOSS?
When a computer can write a software program that plays chess as well as a human, then I'll be impressed.
This is the first time I've used the new Azureus. The 'swarm' view it totally cool.
See my review here:
http://forums.xandros.com/viewtopic.php?t=16248&hi ghlight=
No. But since you brought it up, I will outline the steps I go through to create a mix.
1. I select the songs that I would like to be on the CD. I have a script which checks to make sure the song will fit on the CD, and if it overflows the CD, it suggests some songs to remove from the CD which would give the songs the best fit.
2. After step 1, I have a list of songs that will fit nicely on the CD. Then I use another script to identify the subset of songs that will best fit on one side of a cassette. After step 2, I have two lists: one list of songs that fits nicely on one side of a cassette, and another list of songs that will fill out the rest of the CD. (The second list does not usually fill the second side of the cassette, but I'm willing to live with that.)
3. Next I go through each list of songs and reorder them as I see fit. I find that the randomizing effect of my scripts sometimes produces delightful juxtopositions that I may not have thought of myself. At any rate, within the limits of the allocations of songs, I make the final decision of ordering on each side. In fact, sometimes I make a "beta" copy of the cassette and listen to it for a few days to make sure I am satified with the selection and ordering of the songs.
4. Before making the final copies, I adjust the volumes on each song so that there are not harsh transitions from one song to the next.
4. Finally, I can burn a CD. I keep the master CD in storage and make another copy for daily use. I also make a cassette from the CD. The songs on the cassette will be in the same order as on the CD. Since side one has been filled to the max, there is no long gap between the end of side one and the beginning of side two: an important part of maintaining the mood and flow.
I have been making mix tapes (and now CD's) for years. I have received many compliments on my mixes mainly in terms of flow and mood. I was a dance DJ at college and people told me that hands down I was the best DJ there -- exactly because I knew how to (or took the time to) pace the music so that it would interact with the crowd itself in a way that would take them through different moods and energy levels.
And when I give out my mixes, some people (certainly not all, but some) notice how well my mixes fit onto cassette and realize how much care and attention I put into my mixes. This is not so noticible with CD's -- although many of my CD's only have seconds to spare. In fact, sometimes I have had to reduce the spacing between songs to get all of them to fit on a CD.
So, yes. I know all about "mood and flow". I just happen to find it more challenging to add "fit" to the mix. And I end up with even more plesant results.
When I make a audio CD mix, I also make sure it fits on a C90 cassette. I have a tcl script which takes the songs which I have allocated for the CD, and determines that subset of songs which will most perfectly fit into a 45 miniute segment. That way my mix can fit perfectly on both CDs and cassettes.
Why didn't they chose AMD? As in 64 bits. That would have made me a lot more inclined to be interested in getting one of the new Macs.
Plugging the USP plug into my Xandros Linux system caused the file manager to come up automatically. I could just drag .ogg files into the MUSIC folder and they became visible to the player.
It has a built-in microphone so you can directly record audio (in MP3 format). It also has a line input so that you can record audio from another source. It even has an FM receiver that works very well.
I was impressed with the complement of cables that came with it: USB extender cable, line input cable, ear buds, and also a lanyard and belt adapter.
I have a 512M model. According to the manual, there is also a 1G model, but I didn't know about it before I ordered.
Plugging it into the USB port charges the batteries. I haven't used it enough to have a sense of how long the built-in battery lasts. I used it for several hours today without any problems.
So far I'm very pleased with this unit and I am very happy to support companies which support OGG.
FYI: iOPS F350 512MB MP3/FM Digital Audio Player
So when does a Google version of FlightGear come out? Instead of driving directions, you could get flying directions. And then fly there!
I was simply clarifying the definition of "God".
If you even ask the question "What created God?", then you are not using the word "God" in the way that it has been used by the Judeo-Christian (and even Islamic?) tradition for the last 5000 years.
If you don't believe that God exists, that's fine. But that assertion is only meaningful if you define what the term "God" means. And it traditionally means the supreme being that existed outside of creation and is himself uncreated.
By that definition, the question, "What created God?" makes no sense.
Why is it that everyone brings up this question? Somehow they think it is profound.
Everyone pay attention. Here is the answer:
God was not "caused". By definition, he is uncreated. He is the "prime mover". The "prime" here means that he is unmoved but can cause other things to move. He is uncreated but bring creation into existence. He is beyond space and time but can bring space and time into existence.
If you are talking about something that was created, then you are not talking about God. If you are talking about something that exists in time and had a starting point in time, you are not talking about God. If you are talking about something that can be located in space, then you are not talking about God.
This is by DEFINITION. God, by definition, is uncreated, absolute, unmanifest, before all relativity, space and time. Everyone got that? Good.
So let's get over the "what created God" questions, ok? They are meaningless.
I think you're completely missing the point. Does anyone remember Phantom Edit, the edited version of Phantom Menace that tried to make it tolerable? Now, Phantom Edit was probably boarderline legal. With open source media, raw materials will be created that will be accessible to anyone who wants to build upon it. So if you don't like the version that was created, you can start with that and create something that you like. I'm sure that with open media, there will be a lot more forking. But that, I think, is a good thing. The whole point is that a new collaberative, forkable method of media creation is being explored. And this, I'm sure, will have new and surprising benefits for everyone