It's the distinction between "evolution occurs", and "only evolution occurs"--the former is a testable scientific hypothesis with extensive corroboration; the latter, although Needed Really Badly for an atheistic worldview, is simply untestable and thereby unscientific, and no amount of wishing the former case can be verbally morphed to the latter case will make this non-sequitur anything other than logically and scientifically invalid.
Is the statement 'only evolution occurs' really 'untestable'? Its true that it cannot be proven, but the same is true of *any* scientific theorem - the concept of proof only exists in the world of mathematics. We can however seek to *disprove* the theory - this is perfectly scientific, and thus puts the question within the realms of testability.
Consider a flock of sheep. In many cases one might observe that all sheep in the flock are white. It is then perfectly scientific and correct to postulate that all sheep are white. Of course by increasing the sample size we will eventually discover that some sheep are not white, which would invalidate that theory and force the scientist to formulate a framework that allows for the possibility of non-white sheep.
From your post it is clear that you do not accept the postulate that evolution can explain the origins of life, claiming that this is unscientific. I ask what is unscientific about it? We have observed a process that appears to be a good candidate for explaining the origins of life. Although we cannot build a time machine to go back and directly observe the formation of life, there are still plenty of ways to attempt to duplicate the conditions of the early Earth in labs or in simulations to test this. We can attempt to create life ourselves. We can study speciation in the wild. If it fails, then we need to refine our theories, fine, so what? We found a black sheep - good job. This is still science.
Perhaps you find disagreeable the 'faith' (by which I mean absolute conviction) that many atheists place in this postulate? In this case I agree - faith is not scientific.
Would the "temperature" really be a problem? The machines are going to be in vacuum, so the only way they can lose heat (apart from conduction via the soil) is by radiation. Here being constantly in shadow is probably a benefit, as then you can wrap the machine in enough reflective foil to maintain whatever your desired operating temperature is without having to worry about the sun spoiling your calculations.
I disagree. Harvard, Yale, Stanford are among the best universities in the world, if you are clever enough you should be able to go there regardless of your financial background. Also, regarding the choice of degree, as another poster pointed out, many of the great thinkers of our time did degrees such as philosophy, which tend not to bring in the big bucks. If we lived in a world in which people went to university only to increase their prospect of getting a highly paid job we would lose out on so much. There is more to education than money.
BMW, 4000 sq ft home, iPad; all *luxuries*. Education is *not* a luxury, it is a necessity. Without it you get nowhere. Americans should feel entitled to a good university, in the same way that they should feel entitled to a decent fire service and police presence.
What's wrong with reading hard copies? People did manage to write theses before the invention of the internet and computers.
This is true. I could also have written my thesis on a typewriter and had to rewrite every page if I found a spelling mistake. Or perhaps I could have had a nice scholarly monk sit by my side and pen my thesis:)
When searching for relevant papers on a research topic, one typically has to skim-read sections of a large number of papers. It is far more convenient after finding a paper on a google or Spires search to just click a link and bring up the paper than having to go down to the library and delve through the stacks to find the article, only then to find that it was not relevant. Of course I could have lived in the library for 8 months while I was writing, but I find the silence oppressive - the slightest sound of a cough or shuffling of feet or papers breaks my concentration. Personally I would much rather they drop the subscription to the physical journal and just pay for the online version. I suspect very few people actually read the printed edition.
Very few institutes can afford to pay for back issues of all journals - they are ridiculously expensive. Back when I was doing my PhD thesis at an old and respected institute in the UK I needed access to early (1980s era) papers in Physical Review D. Unfortunately the university did not subscribe to the pre-1990 online archives for this journal due to lack of funding (they had paper copies). IIRC I downloaded it free from some Russian archive!
Looking at the list, most of the corporations are banks. Banks don't contribute to the economy - they produce nothing, they just move money around, increasing fluidity at the expense of stability. They also leverage their wealth to change the law in their favour - witness the profound changes to financial legislation brought about since the 1980s.
'Gub'mint tryin' t' take mah hard earned money! They can pry it from mah col' dead hands!'
Grow up. Seriously. The government aren't trying to rob you. They don't take your money from spite. They need your money to be able to fulfill their mandate to provide the infrastructure and security, not just physical but health and job security, that allows you to 'pursue your true measure of happiness'. Would you truly be happy in the barbaric selfish world that you seem to desire?
Honestly, it is mind-boggling the way Republicans throw up a wall of lies when faced with criticism. Do you really believe that repeating your lie enough will make it true?
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
In other news, the bottom %99 decide the top %1 should pay for their government services. This is the downfall of democracy.
Democracy is a form of government in which all people have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. The 99% imposing something upon the 1% is very democratic.
I can only imagine the shock and awe when it only generates %1 of the revenue they expect as the flood of shell companies and offshore activity spikes.
You are probably right. Unfortunately I doubt the partisan government will make any headway in closing the loopholes that allow such tactics.
It seems like no one cares about freedom anymore.
So freedom is the luxury to swim in a pool of money while the country collapses around your ears? Or perhaps you don't care?
Yeah, I have always been able to hear when CRT televisions are on, even behind closed doors. Most people didn't believe me until I wore a blindfold and went out of the room while they turned the TV on or off. The high-pitched squealing gives me a headache. I can also hear those devices that send out high-frequency chirps to keep cats of people's yards.
There was one pub in Edinburgh that I could not go into, as they had an aging CRT television that drove me mad.
Now that I live in the city and CRT televisions and monitors have entered the history books I have a much higher quality of living.
Perhaps a flat value-added tax across all states, as in the UK, would be a much better approach. It vastly simplifies the collection process and removes any of these difficulties associated with internet vendors and whatnot. The state governments can still manipulate the income tax rates to generate revenue so there is no reason for them to complain.
I feel like I need to defend myself against your assumptions that I was the person who signed the statement. I don't and never have owned a TV and always read things before I sign them. In this case the friend really was a friend; a house-mate of my ex-girlfriend in fact.
Much as I love the BBC, I find the TV Licensing Fee to be a particularly obnoxious way of collecting the money.
As soon as you start living away from home, in college dorms for example, you start getting bombarded with threatening letters stating that you have not paid your TV Licensing Fee, and that their officers regularly make sweeps with their equipment to check for unlicensed viewing. I never owned a TV, but I kept receiving these letters, which kept getting more and more threatening, promising exorbitant fines and more.
Sometimes they resort to very dirty tactics. I had a friend who tried to skip paying the fee. One day one of their agents comes to the door and gives her the spiel about unlicensed TV viewing. He says that if she does not own a TV she should sign the document he is holding. She foolishly signs without reading the document fully. It later turns out that she was signing a document stating that she did own a TV, and got slapped with a fine. Personally I would have taken the bastards to court over that, but she decided the fine was not large enough to warrant the hassle of going through the courts. Smells to me like the tactics the MAFIAA would use!
These bullying tactics quickly soured me towards the whole public television idea.
Personally I am on the fence about capital punishment. I agree that it might be justifiable if the criminal is a real danger to society and is broken beyond all recovery. However Manning and Assange don't fall under this category. They just pissed off the wrong people, which was dumb perhaps although I sympathise with their reasons. They certainly do not deserve to be killed for it.
You shot a bank teller during a robbery. You're guilty of murder.
You shot an intruder in your house. You're guilty of murder.
You ran over a man crossing the freeway at night. You're guilty of murder. ...Or maybe it's not so black-and-white.
Not all of those scenarios are murder, I agree. They may be considered as manslaughter depending on the motivation of the killer, and the second may be justified as self defense.
It *would* be murder if any of those were premeditated killings. Killing Manning or Assange would fall under this category. It scares the crap out of me that some people consider this justice.
Killing someone is killing someone, whether 'lawfully' or not. Do you think it is right to kill someone because they embarrassed you? No? Then why should those in power be able to do so?
Well market forces have yet to do so and time is running out. Part of the reason is the large R&D hurdle that must be overcome - for most investors this is a big turn off. This is where subsidies come into play.
Personally I don't think we can put a price on the future of the species, and quibbling over a mere 500 million dollars to a good cause seems rather pathetic considering that you guys will have shelled out almost 1.3 *trillion* dollars on your wars in the middle-east (arguably to protect your oil supplies) by the end of this year!
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It's the distinction between "evolution occurs", and "only evolution occurs"--the former is a testable scientific hypothesis with extensive corroboration; the latter, although Needed Really Badly for an atheistic worldview, is simply untestable and thereby unscientific, and no amount of wishing the former case can be verbally morphed to the latter case will make this non-sequitur anything other than logically and scientifically invalid.
Is the statement 'only evolution occurs' really 'untestable'? Its true that it cannot be proven, but the same is true of *any* scientific theorem - the concept of proof only exists in the world of mathematics. We can however seek to *disprove* the theory - this is perfectly scientific, and thus puts the question within the realms of testability.
Consider a flock of sheep. In many cases one might observe that all sheep in the flock are white. It is then perfectly scientific and correct to postulate that all sheep are white. Of course by increasing the sample size we will eventually discover that some sheep are not white, which would invalidate that theory and force the scientist to formulate a framework that allows for the possibility of non-white sheep.
From your post it is clear that you do not accept the postulate that evolution can explain the origins of life, claiming that this is unscientific. I ask what is unscientific about it? We have observed a process that appears to be a good candidate for explaining the origins of life. Although we cannot build a time machine to go back and directly observe the formation of life, there are still plenty of ways to attempt to duplicate the conditions of the early Earth in labs or in simulations to test this. We can attempt to create life ourselves. We can study speciation in the wild. If it fails, then we need to refine our theories, fine, so what? We found a black sheep - good job. This is still science.
Perhaps you find disagreeable the 'faith' (by which I mean absolute conviction) that many atheists place in this postulate? In this case I agree - faith is not scientific.
Would the "temperature" really be a problem? The machines are going to be in vacuum, so the only way they can lose heat (apart from conduction via the soil) is by radiation. Here being constantly in shadow is probably a benefit, as then you can wrap the machine in enough reflective foil to maintain whatever your desired operating temperature is without having to worry about the sun spoiling your calculations.
Historians take note: here we see the formation of the new Hitler Youth. Sieg Heil!
I disagree. Harvard, Yale, Stanford are among the best universities in the world, if you are clever enough you should be able to go there regardless of your financial background. Also, regarding the choice of degree, as another poster pointed out, many of the great thinkers of our time did degrees such as philosophy, which tend not to bring in the big bucks. If we lived in a world in which people went to university only to increase their prospect of getting a highly paid job we would lose out on so much. There is more to education than money.
BMW, 4000 sq ft home, iPad; all *luxuries*. Education is *not* a luxury, it is a necessity. Without it you get nowhere. Americans should feel entitled to a good university, in the same way that they should feel entitled to a decent fire service and police presence.
What's wrong with reading hard copies? People did manage to write theses before the invention of the internet and computers.
This is true. I could also have written my thesis on a typewriter and had to rewrite every page if I found a spelling mistake. Or perhaps I could have had a nice scholarly monk sit by my side and pen my thesis :)
When searching for relevant papers on a research topic, one typically has to skim-read sections of a large number of papers. It is far more convenient after finding a paper on a google or Spires search to just click a link and bring up the paper than having to go down to the library and delve through the stacks to find the article, only then to find that it was not relevant. Of course I could have lived in the library for 8 months while I was writing, but I find the silence oppressive - the slightest sound of a cough or shuffling of feet or papers breaks my concentration. Personally I would much rather they drop the subscription to the physical journal and just pay for the online version. I suspect very few people actually read the printed edition.
Very few institutes can afford to pay for back issues of all journals - they are ridiculously expensive. Back when I was doing my PhD thesis at an old and respected institute in the UK I needed access to early (1980s era) papers in Physical Review D. Unfortunately the university did not subscribe to the pre-1990 online archives for this journal due to lack of funding (they had paper copies). IIRC I downloaded it free from some Russian archive!
Looking at the list, most of the corporations are banks. Banks don't contribute to the economy - they produce nothing, they just move money around, increasing fluidity at the expense of stability. They also leverage their wealth to change the law in their favour - witness the profound changes to financial legislation brought about since the 1980s.
'Gub'mint tryin' t' take mah hard earned money! They can pry it from mah col' dead hands!'
Grow up. Seriously. The government aren't trying to rob you. They don't take your money from spite. They need your money to be able to fulfill their mandate to provide the infrastructure and security, not just physical but health and job security, that allows you to 'pursue your true measure of happiness'. Would you truly be happy in the barbaric selfish world that you seem to desire?
Honestly, it is mind-boggling the way Republicans throw up a wall of lies when faced with criticism. Do you really believe that repeating your lie enough will make it true?
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
In other news, the bottom %99 decide the top %1 should pay for their government services. This is the downfall of democracy.
Democracy is a form of government in which all people have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. The 99% imposing something upon the 1% is very democratic.
I can only imagine the shock and awe when it only generates %1 of the revenue they expect as the flood of shell companies and offshore activity spikes.
You are probably right. Unfortunately I doubt the partisan government will make any headway in closing the loopholes that allow such tactics.
It seems like no one cares about freedom anymore.
So freedom is the luxury to swim in a pool of money while the country collapses around your ears? Or perhaps you don't care?
Yeah, I have always been able to hear when CRT televisions are on, even behind closed doors. Most people didn't believe me until I wore a blindfold and went out of the room while they turned the TV on or off. The high-pitched squealing gives me a headache. I can also hear those devices that send out high-frequency chirps to keep cats of people's yards.
There was one pub in Edinburgh that I could not go into, as they had an aging CRT television that drove me mad.
Now that I live in the city and CRT televisions and monitors have entered the history books I have a much higher quality of living.
Was the 'kneed' intentional? I for one would love to knee a few lobbyists.
Yeah, it means they have lots of friends in high places they can leverage in the political arena in order to line their own pockets.
...doth not a smart user make.
Perhaps a flat value-added tax across all states, as in the UK, would be a much better approach. It vastly simplifies the collection process and removes any of these difficulties associated with internet vendors and whatnot. The state governments can still manipulate the income tax rates to generate revenue so there is no reason for them to complain.
You could argue the same thing for any form of tax, but then where would the money come from to pay for services?
I feel like I need to defend myself against your assumptions that I was the person who signed the statement. I don't and never have owned a TV and always read things before I sign them. In this case the friend really was a friend; a house-mate of my ex-girlfriend in fact.
Much as I love the BBC, I find the TV Licensing Fee to be a particularly obnoxious way of collecting the money.
As soon as you start living away from home, in college dorms for example, you start getting bombarded with threatening letters stating that you have not paid your TV Licensing Fee, and that their officers regularly make sweeps with their equipment to check for unlicensed viewing. I never owned a TV, but I kept receiving these letters, which kept getting more and more threatening, promising exorbitant fines and more.
Sometimes they resort to very dirty tactics. I had a friend who tried to skip paying the fee. One day one of their agents comes to the door and gives her the spiel about unlicensed TV viewing. He says that if she does not own a TV she should sign the document he is holding. She foolishly signs without reading the document fully. It later turns out that she was signing a document stating that she did own a TV, and got slapped with a fine. Personally I would have taken the bastards to court over that, but she decided the fine was not large enough to warrant the hassle of going through the courts. Smells to me like the tactics the MAFIAA would use!
These bullying tactics quickly soured me towards the whole public television idea.
Personally I am on the fence about capital punishment. I agree that it might be justifiable if the criminal is a real danger to society and is broken beyond all recovery. However Manning and Assange don't fall under this category. They just pissed off the wrong people, which was dumb perhaps although I sympathise with their reasons. They certainly do not deserve to be killed for it.
You shot a bank teller during a robbery. You're guilty of murder.
...Or maybe it's not so black-and-white.
You shot an intruder in your house. You're guilty of murder.
You ran over a man crossing the freeway at night. You're guilty of murder.
Not all of those scenarios are murder, I agree. They may be considered as manslaughter depending on the motivation of the killer, and the second may be justified as self defense.
It *would* be murder if any of those were premeditated killings. Killing Manning or Assange would fall under this category. It scares the crap out of me that some people consider this justice.
Killing someone is killing someone, whether 'lawfully' or not. Do you think it is right to kill someone because they embarrassed you? No? Then why should those in power be able to do so?
Assassinating Manning and Assange would prove what exactly? That the US govt is as corrupt and morally bankrupt as everyone already thinks they are?
They probably changed the names on Gizmodo - Luke Loeser doesn't look like a real name either!
Well market forces have yet to do so and time is running out. Part of the reason is the large R&D hurdle that must be overcome - for most investors this is a big turn off. This is where subsidies come into play.
Personally I don't think we can put a price on the future of the species, and quibbling over a mere 500 million dollars to a good cause seems rather pathetic considering that you guys will have shelled out almost 1.3 *trillion* dollars on your wars in the middle-east (arguably to protect your oil supplies) by the end of this year!