There is no way to definitively prove one that either evolution has occured or that God created everything.
Right. But this is not at all what this is about. In a sense, this is trivial: scientific methods are not striving to "definitely prove" something (unlike mathematics, where you can definitely prove something given a formal framework) and religions invoking supernatural beings tend to call "blasphemy!" when you aks for a prove.
Be this as it may, there is generally quite some confusion in discussions about "Theory of Evolution". It often goes unnoticed that it is a completely different question whether evolution works or whether a known species evolved in a specific, reonstructable, way.
I dare to say that the mechanism of evolution is a very well established fact. Two pieces of evidence. Firstly, you can simulate it on a computer, showing that the frequency of replicators which undergo small random changes is indeed subject to "environmental" pressure you impose on their "phenotypes" and that this can yield complexity without design. Secondly, breeding: mankind has very successfully altered species by artifically selecting small variations of animals and plants. (Breeding is actually the example used to introduce the idea of natural selection of variations by Darwin in his "On the Origin of Species"). So the mechanism is very well established.
What one usually can not easily establish is how exactly a specific species evolved. One can invent some stories of why certain features of a phenotype helped to increase the frequency of the genes it carries. However, these always remain "just so stories", and the geological record is imperfect. Nevertheless we can observe evolution at work when it proceeds at a fast pace, for instance in the appearance of germs immune to antibiotics in hospitals.
You suggest that there is some symmetry between the concept of evolution and ID because neither can be proved definitively. In addition to my above argument, I think this gives ID far too much merit. The concept of evloution has greatly improved our understanding of how complexity can come about. It explains something. The invokation of a designer, on the other hand, explains nothing. It just raises the question where the designer came from in the first place.
My point is any evidence can be rationalized away if you really try
Actually, what you critise is anecdotal evidence, and here I am with you. However, I do not agree that any evidence can be rationalized away. I would like to argue that anecdotal evidence is in fact no evidence at all. Scientific evidence, at least, is something completely different from a reported sighting.
Let me give a simple example. I propose the following (maybe over-simplified) theory: Anywhere on the surface of the Earth a stone you hold in your hand will fall towards the surface of the Earth once you let it go. Now you can say "This is crazy, I don't believe in this silly idea!". Now we can conduct a series of experiments, traveling around and observing the direction in which the stones we drop are accelerated. I predict the outcome of these experiments will provide strong evidence supporting my theory. Furthermore we can describe the experiments in great detail and everybody sceptical of the results can do their own, independent, experiments.
Now this is evidence you can not seriously rationalize away. (And no, my theory is not trivial -- I claimed that something observed locally is true everywhere on the surface of the Earth.)
What about evidence in court? Isn't this often just anecdotal in the form of the testimony of eye witnesses? Yes, and if this is the only evidence it might actually be aproblem. Independent of that, this is different from reports of burning bushes talking to you. Namely because of the a priori probability of the reported event. If a corpse was found in an empty warehouse, peppered with bullet holes, a report of someone running away wielding a gun is very plausible.
No, you got that wrong. Certainly it interacts gravitationally, otherwise introducing the concept would be pointless. But that's the more obvious part.
Dark matter is not something mysterious at all. Particle physics theories provide several candidates for particles that could constitute dark matter. None of them was directly observed yet, but that might be around the corner with the upcoming experiments at the LHC at CERN. Be this is at it may, these particles do interact with other matter not only gravitationally but also via the weak force. And whether the proposed ones exist or not is something that can and will be checked experimentally soon.
Science is all about not setting stuff in stone.
Could not agree more, it will be intersting to see the outcome of this research. And keeping an open mind is surely always a good advice.
I think this is actually easy. The user does. But she will need administrator privileges to restore files from the backup. (Or, at least, the backup will simply not be writable by the user.)
Really? No complaints other than "I miss my games"? No training required? It just worked? I have a hard time believing this.
I am not saying that OpenBSD is a bad choice for this task from a purely technical point of view. But there must have been some problems during comissioning. It would be interesting to learn how you solved them.
You make a good point and I fully agree. In addition to possible applications there is something maybe even more important one could say in favour of fundamental research. It is part of human culture to ask fundamental questions and seek answers to them. Just as it is to create works of art or literature. There is more about human life than just doing business and building things useful for practical purposes.
Unfortunately, this point is not made very often recently. Probably because scientists fear that this argument is all too easily dismissed as weak or a lame excuse. I think it is not. Otherwise one could next argue that theatres and galleries are useless and that we should print nothing but text books and reference manuals.
I think that's because, with some rare exceptions, the day-to-day lives of people working in labs are honestly not something that you'd want to watch on TV.
I fully agree. On the other hand this is probably true for most professions. Yet there are tv series plots build around people working in some arbitrary cubicled office. It may be not so much about what kind of job the characters have but more about how they interact in whatever environment they are working. I think you can pull off some funny/interesting episodes rather independent of the environment, the character cast and a good script is much more important.
At the physics department where I did my PhD there were quite some characters. We used to have a lot of fun imagining episodes of a soap opera based on that cast. And no, the jokes that came to our mind where not of the silly-geeky-science kind.
But you are right, it will surely be hard to use such a thing to spark interest in science itself.
Hmm. The mass of the sun is about 10^3 the mass of Jupiter. The distance of Jupiter from the sun is about 5.2 AU (1 AU = 1.5x10^8 km). Given these numbers I did a quick calculation of the distance of the center of gravitiy of sun/Jupiter system from the center of the sun: about 7.8x10^5 km. The sun's radius is about 7x10^5 km. So even if we consider only Jupiter (which makes up for 70% of the planetary mass), the center of gravitiy is outside the sun. Where it actually is certainly depends of the distribution of the remaining 30% of planetary mass. But much of that is located beyond Jupiter orbit. My bet is the center of gravitiy is slightly outside the sun all the time, just as the parent said. So be careful with your guarantee!
since they're trained professionals, I won't argue with their methodology
Maybe you should be a little more sceptical. A specific training or authority does not strengthen any evidence or methodology per se. (Although it might serve as a rough first filter to avoid getting flooded).
According to Plato's writings, Socrates attempted to determine how well an uneducated slave in a Greek household understood geometry, and eventually concluded that the slave's soul "must have always possessed this knowledge."
I personally like IceWm very much, in fact it manages the firefox window in which I enter this very post.
But IceWm is not a destop environment, it's just a window manager (no problem for me it provides all I need, and fast). Concerning the look of it: you can make it look like whatever you want which is true of almost all contemporary window managers.
I think my main point was that dead wood books are not obsolete. There are good reasons some people prefer them and these reasons will remain valid (for them).
I could not agree more. The last thing I intended to suggest was that only big labels can do the job.
I merely wanted to point out that there are some important issues some artist are not prepared to cope with themselves. I fully agree with your analysis. Next time I will try to be more clear or include an appropriate disclaimer.
The point is the interface. The 'interface' of dead wood books is extremely humane: no menus, no modes, no unecessary choice of fonts and fit page to whatever. Instead, direct physical response, you know where you are. Furthermore, there is no problem with energy supply. You can fall asleep over your dead wood reading without any worries. The dead wood will be there tomorrow, no system to crash or similar. Also you do not have to perform strange tasks like locating a document in a hierachical filesystem.
One could argue that all that can be fixed (some time). Maybe so. But we are far away from this in many respects. Personally I prefer to curl up in an easy chair with a real book made from dead wood rather than performing init 'insert runlevel here' on whatever device.
That reminds me of my original plans for this evening, thanks.
Maybe a little. Depending on the style of music and their training, the artists might need some quite expensive equipment and trained personnel to come up with a production that you actually would enjoy listening to.
That does not mean your point is entirely wrong. But you might want to insert a producer in the production chain.
Slashdot Mirror
Show me the evidence that a frog became a horse.
You can not be serious.
yes.
There is no way to definitively prove one that either evolution has occured or that God created everything.
Right. But this is not at all what this is about. In a sense, this is trivial: scientific methods are not striving to "definitely prove" something (unlike mathematics, where you can definitely prove something given a formal framework) and religions invoking supernatural beings tend to call "blasphemy!" when you aks for a prove.
Be this as it may, there is generally quite some confusion in discussions about "Theory of Evolution". It often goes unnoticed that it is a completely different question whether evolution works or whether a known species evolved in a specific, reonstructable, way.
I dare to say that the mechanism of evolution is a very well established fact. Two pieces of evidence. Firstly, you can simulate it on a computer, showing that the frequency of replicators which undergo small random changes is indeed subject to "environmental" pressure you impose on their "phenotypes" and that this can yield complexity without design. Secondly, breeding: mankind has very successfully altered species by artifically selecting small variations of animals and plants. (Breeding is actually the example used to introduce the idea of natural selection of variations by Darwin in his "On the Origin of Species"). So the mechanism is very well established.
What one usually can not easily establish is how exactly a specific species evolved. One can invent some stories of why certain features of a phenotype helped to increase the frequency of the genes it carries. However, these always remain "just so stories", and the geological record is imperfect. Nevertheless we can observe evolution at work when it proceeds at a fast pace, for instance in the appearance of germs immune to antibiotics in hospitals.
You suggest that there is some symmetry between the concept of evolution and ID because neither can be proved definitively. In addition to my above argument, I think this gives ID far too much merit. The concept of evloution has greatly improved our understanding of how complexity can come about. It explains something. The invokation of a designer, on the other hand, explains nothing. It just raises the question where the designer came from in the first place.
My point is any evidence can be rationalized away if you really try
Actually, what you critise is anecdotal evidence, and here I am with you. However, I do not agree that any evidence can be rationalized away. I would like to argue that anecdotal evidence is in fact no evidence at all. Scientific evidence, at least, is something completely different from a reported sighting.
Let me give a simple example. I propose the following (maybe over-simplified) theory: Anywhere on the surface of the Earth a stone you hold in your hand will fall towards the surface of the Earth once you let it go. Now you can say "This is crazy, I don't believe in this silly idea!". Now we can conduct a series of experiments, traveling around and observing the direction in which the stones we drop are accelerated. I predict the outcome of these experiments will provide strong evidence supporting my theory. Furthermore we can describe the experiments in great detail and everybody sceptical of the results can do their own, independent, experiments.
Now this is evidence you can not seriously rationalize away. (And no, my theory is not trivial -- I claimed that something observed locally is true everywhere on the surface of the Earth.)
What about evidence in court? Isn't this often just anecdotal in the form of the testimony of eye witnesses? Yes, and if this is the only evidence it might actually be aproblem. Independent of that, this is different from reports of burning bushes talking to you. Namely because of the a priori probability of the reported event. If a corpse was found in an empty warehouse, peppered with bullet holes, a report of someone running away wielding a gun is very plausible.
[...] Doesn't interact [...]
No, you got that wrong. Certainly it interacts gravitationally, otherwise introducing the concept would be pointless. But that's the more obvious part.
Dark matter is not something mysterious at all. Particle physics theories provide several candidates for particles that could constitute dark matter. None of them was directly observed yet, but that might be around the corner with the upcoming experiments at the LHC at CERN. Be this is at it may, these particles do interact with other matter not only gravitationally but also via the weak force. And whether the proposed ones exist or not is something that can and will be checked experimentally soon.
Science is all about not setting stuff in stone.
Could not agree more, it will be intersting to see the outcome of this research. And keeping an open mind is surely always a good advice.
It's defintely not his observation ;-), Einstein himself presented the famous formula in the for m = E/c^2.
There is a nice lecture by Frank Wilczek, http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/204/, elaborating on this subject.
Who determines what the emergency is?
I think this is actually easy. The user does. But she will need administrator privileges to restore files from the backup. (Or, at least, the backup will simply not be writable by the user.)
Really? No complaints other than "I miss my games"? No training required? It just worked? I have a hard time believing this.
I am not saying that OpenBSD is a bad choice for this task from a purely technical point of view. But there must have been some problems during comissioning. It would be interesting to learn how you solved them.
You make a good point and I fully agree. In addition to possible applications there is something maybe even more important one could say in favour of fundamental research. It is part of human culture to ask fundamental questions and seek answers to them. Just as it is to create works of art or literature. There is more about human life than just doing business and building things useful for practical purposes.
Unfortunately, this point is not made very often recently. Probably because scientists fear that this argument is all too easily dismissed as weak or a lame excuse. I think it is not. Otherwise one could next argue that theatres and galleries are useless and that we should print nothing but text books and reference manuals.
Some minor inconsistencies are also nicely pointed out in this nice rendition of the holy bible.
For instance here
.I think that's because, with some rare exceptions, the day-to-day lives of people working in labs are honestly not something that you'd want to watch on TV.
I fully agree. On the other hand this is probably true for most professions. Yet there are tv series plots build around people working in some arbitrary cubicled office. It may be not so much about what kind of job the characters have but more about how they interact in whatever environment they are working. I think you can pull off some funny/interesting episodes rather independent of the environment, the character cast and a good script is much more important.
At the physics department where I did my PhD there were quite some characters. We used to have a lot of fun imagining episodes of a soap opera based on that cast. And no, the jokes that came to our mind where not of the silly-geeky-science kind.
But you are right, it will surely be hard to use such a thing to spark interest in science itself.
Hmm. The mass of the sun is about 10^3 the mass of Jupiter. The distance of Jupiter from the sun is about 5.2 AU (1 AU = 1.5x10^8 km). Given these numbers I did a quick calculation of the distance of the center of gravitiy of sun/Jupiter system from the center of the sun: about 7.8x10^5 km. The sun's radius is about 7x10^5 km. So even if we consider only Jupiter (which makes up for 70% of the planetary mass), the center of gravitiy is outside the sun. Where it actually is certainly depends of the distribution of the remaining 30% of planetary mass. But much of that is located beyond Jupiter orbit. My bet is the center of gravitiy is slightly outside the sun all the time, just as the parent said. So be careful with your guarantee!
since they're trained professionals, I won't argue with their methodology
Maybe you should be a little more sceptical. A specific training or authority does not strengthen any evidence or methodology per se. (Although it might serve as a rough first filter to avoid getting flooded).
From TFA:
According to Plato's writings, Socrates attempted to determine how well an uneducated slave in a Greek household understood geometry, and eventually concluded that the slave's soul "must have always possessed this knowledge."
So it seems like you actually read it!
if I break something, nobody cares if I did it through inompetence or because I thought it would be a good idea to do so
Isn't that actually the same?
It may be time to move beyond the Turing test as the rule for artificial intelligence.
Especially since there is a considerable number of humans that would not pass the Turing Test.
This is space- and we've got a nice big heat source less than 9 light seconds away.
What would that be? In case you are refering to the sun, it is about 8 light minutes away. (Sorry, could not resist.)
It was very nice when I was on holiday recently to be able to check up on home and see that nothing whatsoever happened in my house when I was away.
If that server of yours is also located in the house, I would not be so sure about that...
I personally like IceWm very much, in fact it manages the firefox window in which I enter this very post.
But IceWm is not a destop environment, it's just a window manager (no problem for me it provides all I need, and fast). Concerning the look of it: you can make it look like whatever you want which is true of almost all contemporary window managers.
there is no force that can make them collapse back
There is one, namely gravity. Gas clouds collapsing due to gravity are actually the first step in star formation.
Then again, I have to admit that some TIE Fighter debris is more likely to crash into some other object before it re-collapses gravitationally.
You have a different taste, fine with me, enjoy.
I think my main point was that dead wood books are not obsolete. There are good reasons some people prefer them and these reasons will remain valid (for them).
I could not agree more. The last thing I intended to suggest was that only big labels can do the job.
I merely wanted to point out that there are some important issues some artist are not prepared to cope with themselves. I fully agree with your analysis. Next time I will try to be more clear or include an appropriate disclaimer.
"I like the feel and smell of pages."
That one could have been by me.
The point is the interface. The 'interface' of dead wood books is extremely humane: no menus, no modes, no unecessary choice of fonts and fit page to whatever. Instead, direct physical response, you know where you are. Furthermore, there is no problem with energy supply. You can fall asleep over your dead wood reading without any worries. The dead wood will be there tomorrow, no system to crash or similar. Also you do not have to perform strange tasks like locating a document in a hierachical filesystem.
One could argue that all that can be fixed (some time). Maybe so. But we are far away from this in many respects. Personally I prefer to curl up in an easy chair with a real book made from dead wood rather than performing init 'insert runlevel here' on whatever device.
That reminds me of my original plans for this evening, thanks.
Maybe so. I do not know him too well.
Then again he represents a company that has an interest in increasing profit and market share.
Maybe naive
Maybe a little. Depending on the style of music and their training, the artists might need some quite expensive equipment and trained personnel to come up with a production that you actually would enjoy listening to.
That does not mean your point is entirely wrong. But you might want to insert a producer in the production chain.