how can we better communicate to individuals the importance of a balanced diet and taking care of themselves?
I think part of the problem is that we try to communicate the idea that "it's healthy to do XYZ", rather than giving people the basic information and letting them make their own decisions about how they want to manage their health. Telling everyone that X is bad and Y is good and you should avoid X and do Y instead just makes people resentful, because they like doing X and then feel guilty when they do it.
Instead, if we teach people what X and Y actually are, then they can decide on their own that they'll maybe limit their intake of X because they know what's in it and they know what that stuff does to your liver, for example. It's aiming for the same goal, but from a standpoint of encouraging personal responsibility, rather than believing that information handed down from an authority will have the desired effect. Sorry to abuse the cliché, but people have to want to change.
All of these things are contributing factors. But it's not just as simple as "kids eat too much junk food" or "kids don't get enough exercise", as if the solution is to simply STOP these things, like flipping a switch.
Let's look at one. Why do kids eat too much bad food? Because: 1. processed crap is cheaper per calorie (and gram) than healthier foods 2. freshly made food takes more time and energy to prepare than crappy food 3. people typically have a poor understanding of what exactly is in their food
Why are these things true? Partly because we didn't evolve to eat what we eat, and our bodies sometimes have trouble coping; partly because our diet isn't varied enough, and there's been a fair amount of research showing that more varied diets improve health; allergies/reactions to foods are higher in populations that eat a lot of those foods; and, among other things, decades of giant agribusinesses lobbying the government for laws and subsidies that support their business model of mass-producing cheap junk, and (sometimes) trying to suppress research that shows that cheap junk is unhealthy. Take "enriched flour". This is wheat flour that has had the husk removed (the husk contains almost all the fiber and other good nutrients; the germ contains basically nothing but carbohydrates), and then had artificially-produced versions of the nutrients in the husk added back in. What the hell? How about we just eat the whole grain instead (or flour therefrom) and cut out the middleman?
#3 really vexes me. My son has reactions to milk protein (irritability, rash around his butt), wheat (skin rash), canola (screaming hyperactivity), and artificial food coloring (more irritability and hypersensitivity to things going wrong); since my wife is still nursing him, she has to avoid those things too. And she's discovered that she reacts to milk protein (rashiness) and soy (body temperature drops by 1-2 degrees, cold sores develop on lip every couple of weeks, versus virtually never when she's off soy).
We still like to go out to eat, but it's a chore because we have to grill our waiters about what exactly they use to prepare the food. The question "What kind of cooking oil do you use to prepare X?" is usually met with either a blank stare (why should we expect someone who works in a restaurant to be informed about what's in the food? madness!), or the answer "Vegetable oil." Uh, yeah, pretty much ALL cooking oil is vegetable oil (animal fats are solid at room temperature, and are not "oil", culinarily speaking). WHICH VEGETABLE DID IT COME FROM? It matters! We eventually started saying "What kind of vegetable oil do you use," which frequently gets the answer "Regular vegetable oil", which lead to much headdesking frustration. Now we actually cue them by saying, "What kind of vegetable oil do you use, like, canola, corn, safflower, olive oil?" and most of the time that seems to get them to provide us with an actual answer (but sometimes they still say "regular").
Hell, one time we went to a very nice restaurant, and my wife expained that she couldn't have dairy or wheat. The waiter dutifully returned later and told us that he'd checked on the desserts and found one that wasn't made with dairy or wheat flour, "just white flour." We stared at him for a second and asked what plant white flour comes from. It was priceless watching the expression on his face as it dawned on him that white flour is also made from wheat. And this guy was a waiter at a well-known upscale restaurant in Los Angeles. And we've had this experience repeated numerous times, at restaurants all along the scale.
Anyway, rant over, but if you don't already, do yourself a favor -- find out what the hell you're eating. Learn about food. Read ingredient labels. (Did you know that "rapeseed" is another name for "canola"? Did you know that "casein" is milk protein? Did you know that virtually all soy sauce contains wheat, which is a pain in the ass for us because we love sushi?) Avoid proc
There is historical evidence to suggest Jesus did rise from the dead. Not 100% proof, but evidence.
Such as?
Tacitus
Tacitus wrote indirectly about Christ almost a hundred years after Christ supposedly died. This is not evidence that Christ existed, only that Tacitus believed it was so, and Christ (in the passage in which Tacitus mentions him) is only mentioned incidentally to begin with.
Josephus
Josephus's passage is unreliable at best, based on the quick research I've done, and in any event, he was writing sixtyish years after Christ's supposed death. What were Josephus's sources?
The existence of the gospel, which themselves have superior historical credentials.
I'm not sure what you mean by "superior historical credentials"; you mean the origins of the gospels themselves are well-established? I don't have any problem with that, but knowing who wrote them has zero bearing on whether what's in them is true. (If that's not what you mean, then disregard.) There's also the fact that, as far as I know, there are no contemporary accounts of Christ -- the earliest writings of him are decades after he supposedly died. Presumably the Romans kept records of executions ordered, and Jesus would be listed there if he had been so executed by crucifixion. And the guy made a pretty big splash in Judea according to the Gospels; it's very odd that there'd be no contemporary record of anything he supposedly did.
Also if he hadn't existed, it would have been pretty easy to crush the church at the beginning and the apostles certainly wouldn't have had any motivation to die proclaiming he had died and risen.
The idea that the apostles "wouldn't have had any motivation" unless Jesus actually existed is false. People die believing falsehoods all the time -- hell, how many Muslim suicide bombers die believing they'll get 72 virgins in heaven? By your logic, it must be true, otherwise they wouldn't die for it.
The Church surviving, again, has nothing to do with whether Christ actually lived and died and was resurrected -- only that people believed that it was the case. And it's a powerful story, and easy for people to believe when they're being oppressed by the Romans... it's hardly surprising the Church thrived, but again, that is not evidence that the story is true.
Agreed, though the more people who agreed on the authenticity of a document, the more likely it is to have been true, or at elast an accurate representation of what was believed to have taken place.
What was believed to have taken place. Not what actually took place. Also: argumentum ad numeram. The number of people who believe something has no bearing on whether it is true.
The early church took apostolic succession very seriously and was very eager to make sure that whatever it taught was in line with what they themselves had been taught by the apostles.
...according to writings created decades later. It would not have been at all difficult to have this story created by a small group of people, passed along for a few decades, and then written down as (no pun intended) gospel.
You've got things mixed up. I take the bits for which there is evidence and from them am able to trust in the bits for which there is no external evidence either way. When it comes to the theology of faith in God, there is evidence for God's actions in the past where he keeps his promises, leading me to believe that he will keep other promises, much like how other relationships work.
For each thing that the Bible claims God did (including promises kept), there is no evidence that it ever happened except for the Bible itself. That's not corroboration.
Sorry to use a simplistic example, but if I hand you a book about a character named Bob who claims, in chapter 1, that he will return from the dead, and then chapter 12 describes him returning from the dead, that's not evidence that it actually happened. Not even if there are hundreds of other claims he makes early in the book that are later borne out; it's all the same source.
If Jesus isn't the Son of God then, as you say, there is no reason to listen to him over anyone else (and arguably less reason because he's then a liar).
"Liar" isn't the only other option; he could have been insane, confused, mis-represented by those who wrote down what happened, or entirely fictional. (I'm not certain what evidence there is that Jesus even existed, aside from what's in the Bible.)
Most churches agreed on most books of the canon and had done so for some time. There was more than sufficient agreement to establish the core doctrines of Christianity
Both statements are true, however it's not as if the Bible itself was handed down by God; it was still written entirely by men and the parts we find in common Bibles today are the parts that other men, hundreds of years later, agreed should be there.
Christianity definitely has a set of core beliefs that almost everyone who self-identifies as a Christian agrees on; but that doesn't make any of it true, rational, or a good idea to follow.
but biblical faith is based on the evidence on past action: trust in the trustworthy.
I'm... not exactly sure what that means (it's not quite parseable), but... there's a lot of things written in the Bible for which there is no evidence other than the Bible. Claiming that this is sufficient evidence that they really did happen is unsound.
There's a lot you can take away from the Bible besides "what's written in there really happened, as written"; a lot of the Jesus parables are intended as moral guidance and whatnot, for example, and that's just dandy, but it's no more or less inherently valid than any other moral guidance -- the Bible was written, in its entirety, by men, some of whom no doubt truly thought they were inspired by God, and some of whom knew that they were writing thinly veiled attacks on the Romans (e.g. Revelation). (Also keep in mind that "the Bible" was settled on by the Church hundreds of years after Christ supposedly existed, and they decided to exclude certain books which many of their members had until that point considered entirely valid holy texts.)
The retro trends of listening to record albums and tube amps.
Er, I don't think more than a tiny, tiny fraction of people engage in those activities. That's not really an indicator that people as a whole are finding more value in analog than digital.
Film and real fiber prints will become prized possessions.
If that's the case, it'll only be because of their rarity, and only because for some reason there are people who will pay a lot for a rare item even if it has no functional or useful (or even particular aesthetic) value.
Nostalgia's all warm and fuzzy, sure, but eventually people who can't help clinging to the past get old and die, and the rest of us can move on.
Calling someone "glib" is generally an indication that you don't have any substantial way to attack their claim, so you attack the way they said it.:)
At any rate, you guys were using the terms "justification by faith" to mean different things. He meant it the way I meant it: "justifying something by taking on faith that it's true", whereas you took it to mean the thing about Jesus and sin and blah blah blah fishcakes. He didn't know about the Jesus/sin angle and you thought that's what he meant. Now that that's been clarified, let's restate:
1. Justifying something by taking it on faith is oxymoronic (and also moronic). - this is the one we can argue about 2. The Christian doctrine of "justification by faith" is just another silly component of the religion. - this is the one we can't
I agree that maths is science, but I don't agree that moral philosophies are "self-contained logical systems" in the sense that you seem to mean it.
Well, they are, however in practical fact few people ever devise a rigorous, thorough moral system and uniformly apply it to real-life situations. We take a lot of shortcuts to save time. But this doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing better; it just means we cheat most of the time.
In other words, just because I do approximate calculations in my head when doing math, that doesn't mean math isn't fundamentally a rigorous system. One other major difference is that pretty much everyone agrees on what system of mathematical assumptions we should use; moral systems are a lot more numerous:)
Moral philosophers do indeed use logic, but it's usually not the kind of mathematical logic that I (with an extremely thorough academic grounding in formal logic and logic programming) am used to.
It's not nearly as precise or formalized in practice, but there's no theoretical reason it can't be. The practical reason is that it would take too long; we need to be able to apply moral judgements relatively quickly (due to external constraints, e.g. Person A is sitting in a jail cell waiting to find out if he's guilty), which isn't the case for mathematics (no one's life is really depending on whether you we can rigorously prove Fermat's Last Theorem).
Another example is "justice". What is that, exactly? And how would you test for it?
Just like anything else in a moral (or ethical) framework, you define it as precisely as you can, and then test a situation to see if it meets those criteria. However justness is defined by the people in the society; if enough people believe something is just, then it's just by definition (or rather, by their definition). Nothing is inherently "just" or "right" or "wrong"; these terms only apply to moral systems (whether they be devised by man, or devised by man who claim they're provided by God).
Morals and ethics are (in theory, anyway) self-contained logical systems, which makes them exactly as scientific as mathematics. They consist of axioms and logical extensions from those axioms. You can take a given action and, based on the axioms and logic of your moral system, determine in an entirely scientific manner whether the action is right or wrong.
So, yes, there is a scientific test for whether murder is wrong, given a specific moral framework. It's a logical test as opposed to an experimental verification, but again, if you think math isn't science, then I don't know what to say.:)
(In practice, almost all moral frameworks define murder as wrong by definition, so it's a bad example; homicide is a better one, since there are obvious cases where homicide is widely considered the right thing to do, e.g. self-defense against someone who is trying to kill you.)
No, but if plenty of smart people have believed it for thousands of years, it's rather glib and arrogant to assume that you can deal with all the issues and be irrefutably correct with a one sentence statement.
He may be glib and arrogant, but I don't hear you saying he's wrong. (Don't bother; he's right.)
Justification by faith is the Christian doctrine which says...
Ah, I didn't know there was a specific Christian connotation to the phrase "justification by faith". But now I do. And it's still silly nonsense, no matter how many wise men have believed it for however long. Sorry.:)
*sigh* "If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby." - Someone (can't recall who, and can't find a reliable citation online)
You're confused, alas. Atheism in its simplest form means "without god". There are two main forms: weak atheism and strong atheism. Weak atheism says that I don't hold a belief in any gods, the same way I don't hold a belief in invisible pink unicorns or alien clones of Bob Dole. I'm not asserting that they don't or can't exist, I'm just saying I don't currently have a belief that they do. (Another way to put it is that I'm also an atheist about gods I've never heard of; I can't very well assert that God XYZ doesn't exist if no one has claimed to me that God XYZ does exist.)
Strong atheism says that there cannot be gods, and anyone who claims gods can or do exist is wrong.
I'm both a weak atheist and an agnostic: I do not hold a belief in any god, and I also think that the question of whether gods exist cannot be answered. (Separately, I also think it's a meaningless question, since "gods" can be defined any way we want.)
That's a rather glib comment that flies in the face of thousands of years of wise, intelligent and educated people advocating just such a belief and their opponents disagreeing, but not calling it an oxymoron.
Just because something has been done for thousands of years does not mean it's a correct or useful thing to do. And he's right: justification by faith means justification without evidence, which is literally a contradiction in terms. Justification means providing evidence to support the rightness of something, and with no evidence, you have no justification.
Colloquially, any nonsense can be used as a justification for something, but that doesn't mean it's a valid justification.
Uh, you do realize that menus on DVDs are "runnable code" "in a VIDEO disc", right? (For the sake of argument, I'm assuming you have no problem with DVD menus.) Having "runnable code" in a media format isn't the problem, the problem is when that code is used to restrict the usefulness of the disc to people who paid for it legally.
But it's sobering to realize that much of what the rovers have done in the past four years could be accomplished by humans in a few hours.
Not really, once you consider that the cost to put a couple of humans on Mars would be anywhere from ten to a hundred times what it cost to put Spirit and Opportunity there. And the risk would be much greater -- it's a lot harder to get a human to Mars alive than it is to get a machine to Mars intact, so even if we did spend ten times as much, it's probably more than ten times as likely they'd die on the way, on site, or on the way back.
Plus, getting back from Mars is harder than getting back from the Moon; Mars has twice the escape velocity of the Moon (and less than half the escape velocity of the Earth; Earth is 11.19 km/s, Mars is 5.03 km/s, Moon is 2.38 km/s) so whatever rocket/lander the astronauts would have, would need a lot more fuel than Eagle (for example).
I wonder if they accounted for people who downloaded it for free, liked it, and came back and paid the $5 for it. (Or if they accounted for people who downloaded it multiple times, for some reason.)
Not that I think we have a good health care system here in the US, but you're a fool if you think that the relative death statistics for a single cause in any way prove that one system is better than another:)
Ha ha, except, the current Wikipedia page on tuberculosis has no flagging boxes, has no links to articles about musicians, the talk page is only about 23% longer (which is actually to be expected, since talk pages typically are accumulative for all the discussion about that page, whereas the page itself only contains the actual topic information), and the talk page doesn't once mention Ayn Rand.:)
I realize you were joking, but it probably would have been funnier if the tuberculosis page didn't yet exist, or actually WAS like you described. Nice attempt, though.
Even if you are right, we'd still actually have to find ETI in order for that to even have a chance of occurring, and the chance of finding ETI is, I believe, infinitesimal. It's really not even worth the effort.
Yes, I should know, it was my computer that discovered the candidate object for SETI@home back in 2004. Got on TV and weekly reader for that. What have YOU done with your spare CPU cycles?
Congratulations! You accomplished nothing and yet managed to get on TV for it. You're right up there with Paris Hilton.
We're obviously each free to choose whatever project we want to donate our spare CPU cycles to (or none at all, if we so choose). Nonetheless, I would encourage people to support projects like Folding@Home over projects like SETI@home, mostly because even if we do discover the existence of ETI, the consequences are unpredictable; assuming they're not close enough to visit or communicate with in a reasonable timeframe, then the sole effect of the discovery would be to cause chaos amongst humanity (how many religions would go berserk apeshit if they discovered that Earth isn't God's special place after all? -- on the other hand, maybe a lot of religion would go away once people realize that We're Not Special, and that'd be a nice side benefit -- but still, very unpredictable).
It's also exceedingly unlikely that SETI will ever find an ETI, regardless of whether there are any ETIs out there. F@H, on the other hand, has already provided us with a lot of useful information about biology, and is clearly advancing the cause of science toward the specific goal of curing diseases. As a result it seems like a much better investment in MY long-term health for me to be spending my cycles on F@H.
I'm actually reasonably okay with civilians carrying firearms, as long as they're required to do so responsibly. What makes you assume I'm not okay with citizen self-defense just because I think we should also have professional law enforcement?
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, if we teach people what X and Y actually are, then they can decide on their own that they'll maybe limit their intake of X because they know what's in it and they know what that stuff does to your liver, for example. It's aiming for the same goal, but from a standpoint of encouraging personal responsibility, rather than believing that information handed down from an authority will have the desired effect. Sorry to abuse the cliché, but people have to want to change.
All of these things are contributing factors. But it's not just as simple as "kids eat too much junk food" or "kids don't get enough exercise", as if the solution is to simply STOP these things, like flipping a switch.
Let's look at one. Why do kids eat too much bad food? Because:
1. processed crap is cheaper per calorie (and gram) than healthier foods
2. freshly made food takes more time and energy to prepare than crappy food
3. people typically have a poor understanding of what exactly is in their food
Why are these things true? Partly because we didn't evolve to eat what we eat, and our bodies sometimes have trouble coping; partly because our diet isn't varied enough, and there's been a fair amount of research showing that more varied diets improve health; allergies/reactions to foods are higher in populations that eat a lot of those foods; and, among other things, decades of giant agribusinesses lobbying the government for laws and subsidies that support their business model of mass-producing cheap junk, and (sometimes) trying to suppress research that shows that cheap junk is unhealthy. Take "enriched flour". This is wheat flour that has had the husk removed (the husk contains almost all the fiber and other good nutrients; the germ contains basically nothing but carbohydrates), and then had artificially-produced versions of the nutrients in the husk added back in. What the hell? How about we just eat the whole grain instead (or flour therefrom) and cut out the middleman?
#3 really vexes me. My son has reactions to milk protein (irritability, rash around his butt), wheat (skin rash), canola (screaming hyperactivity), and artificial food coloring (more irritability and hypersensitivity to things going wrong); since my wife is still nursing him, she has to avoid those things too. And she's discovered that she reacts to milk protein (rashiness) and soy (body temperature drops by 1-2 degrees, cold sores develop on lip every couple of weeks, versus virtually never when she's off soy).
We still like to go out to eat, but it's a chore because we have to grill our waiters about what exactly they use to prepare the food. The question "What kind of cooking oil do you use to prepare X?" is usually met with either a blank stare (why should we expect someone who works in a restaurant to be informed about what's in the food? madness!), or the answer "Vegetable oil." Uh, yeah, pretty much ALL cooking oil is vegetable oil (animal fats are solid at room temperature, and are not "oil", culinarily speaking). WHICH VEGETABLE DID IT COME FROM? It matters! We eventually started saying "What kind of vegetable oil do you use," which frequently gets the answer "Regular vegetable oil", which lead to much headdesking frustration. Now we actually cue them by saying, "What kind of vegetable oil do you use, like, canola, corn, safflower, olive oil?" and most of the time that seems to get them to provide us with an actual answer (but sometimes they still say "regular").
Hell, one time we went to a very nice restaurant, and my wife expained that she couldn't have dairy or wheat. The waiter dutifully returned later and told us that he'd checked on the desserts and found one that wasn't made with dairy or wheat flour, "just white flour." We stared at him for a second and asked what plant white flour comes from. It was priceless watching the expression on his face as it dawned on him that white flour is also made from wheat. And this guy was a waiter at a well-known upscale restaurant in Los Angeles. And we've had this experience repeated numerous times, at restaurants all along the scale.
Anyway, rant over, but if you don't already, do yourself a favor -- find out what the hell you're eating. Learn about food. Read ingredient labels. (Did you know that "rapeseed" is another name for "canola"? Did you know that "casein" is milk protein? Did you know that virtually all soy sauce contains wheat, which is a pain in the ass for us because we love sushi?) Avoid proc
60% more capable? What's the metric unit of capability measurement? How many flights of stairs you can climb?
(Actually, in the article, it said "60% more powerful", so why did the submitter change it to "capable"?)
The Church surviving, again, has nothing to do with whether Christ actually lived and died and was resurrected -- only that people believed that it was the case. And it's a powerful story, and easy for people to believe when they're being oppressed by the Romans... it's hardly surprising the Church thrived, but again, that is not evidence that the story is true.What was believed to have taken place. Not what actually took place. Also: argumentum ad numeram. The number of people who believe something has no bearing on whether it is true....according to writings created decades later. It would not have been at all difficult to have this story created by a small group of people, passed along for a few decades, and then written down as (no pun intended) gospel.
Sorry to use a simplistic example, but if I hand you a book about a character named Bob who claims, in chapter 1, that he will return from the dead, and then chapter 12 describes him returning from the dead, that's not evidence that it actually happened. Not even if there are hundreds of other claims he makes early in the book that are later borne out; it's all the same source."Liar" isn't the only other option; he could have been insane, confused, mis-represented by those who wrote down what happened, or entirely fictional. (I'm not certain what evidence there is that Jesus even existed, aside from what's in the Bible.)Both statements are true, however it's not as if the Bible itself was handed down by God; it was still written entirely by men and the parts we find in common Bibles today are the parts that other men, hundreds of years later, agreed should be there.
Christianity definitely has a set of core beliefs that almost everyone who self-identifies as a Christian agrees on; but that doesn't make any of it true, rational, or a good idea to follow.
There's a lot you can take away from the Bible besides "what's written in there really happened, as written"; a lot of the Jesus parables are intended as moral guidance and whatnot, for example, and that's just dandy, but it's no more or less inherently valid than any other moral guidance -- the Bible was written, in its entirety, by men, some of whom no doubt truly thought they were inspired by God, and some of whom knew that they were writing thinly veiled attacks on the Romans (e.g. Revelation). (Also keep in mind that "the Bible" was settled on by the Church hundreds of years after Christ supposedly existed, and they decided to exclude certain books which many of their members had until that point considered entirely valid holy texts.)
Nostalgia's all warm and fuzzy, sure, but eventually people who can't help clinging to the past get old and die, and the rest of us can move on.
So... in Soviet Russia, I guess that means you DO clean ammonia spills?
Calling someone "glib" is generally an indication that you don't have any substantial way to attack their claim, so you attack the way they said it. :)
At any rate, you guys were using the terms "justification by faith" to mean different things. He meant it the way I meant it: "justifying something by taking on faith that it's true", whereas you took it to mean the thing about Jesus and sin and blah blah blah fishcakes. He didn't know about the Jesus/sin angle and you thought that's what he meant. Now that that's been clarified, let's restate:
1. Justifying something by taking it on faith is oxymoronic (and also moronic). - this is the one we can argue about
2. The Christian doctrine of "justification by faith" is just another silly component of the religion. - this is the one we can't
In other words, just because I do approximate calculations in my head when doing math, that doesn't mean math isn't fundamentally a rigorous system. One other major difference is that pretty much everyone agrees on what system of mathematical assumptions we should use; moral systems are a lot more numerous
Morals and ethics are (in theory, anyway) self-contained logical systems, which makes them exactly as scientific as mathematics. They consist of axioms and logical extensions from those axioms. You can take a given action and, based on the axioms and logic of your moral system, determine in an entirely scientific manner whether the action is right or wrong.
:)
So, yes, there is a scientific test for whether murder is wrong, given a specific moral framework. It's a logical test as opposed to an experimental verification, but again, if you think math isn't science, then I don't know what to say.
(In practice, almost all moral frameworks define murder as wrong by definition, so it's a bad example; homicide is a better one, since there are obvious cases where homicide is widely considered the right thing to do, e.g. self-defense against someone who is trying to kill you.)
Could you give some examples of "things" which are not "phenomena"?
*sigh* "If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby." - Someone (can't recall who, and can't find a reliable citation online)
You're confused, alas. Atheism in its simplest form means "without god". There are two main forms: weak atheism and strong atheism. Weak atheism says that I don't hold a belief in any gods, the same way I don't hold a belief in invisible pink unicorns or alien clones of Bob Dole. I'm not asserting that they don't or can't exist, I'm just saying I don't currently have a belief that they do. (Another way to put it is that I'm also an atheist about gods I've never heard of; I can't very well assert that God XYZ doesn't exist if no one has claimed to me that God XYZ does exist.)
Strong atheism says that there cannot be gods, and anyone who claims gods can or do exist is wrong.
I'm both a weak atheist and an agnostic: I do not hold a belief in any god, and I also think that the question of whether gods exist cannot be answered. (Separately, I also think it's a meaningless question, since "gods" can be defined any way we want.)
Just because something has been done for thousands of years does not mean it's a correct or useful thing to do. And he's right: justification by faith means justification without evidence, which is literally a contradiction in terms. Justification means providing evidence to support the rightness of something, and with no evidence, you have no justification.
Colloquially, any nonsense can be used as a justification for something, but that doesn't mean it's a valid justification.
Uh, you do realize that menus on DVDs are "runnable code" "in a VIDEO disc", right? (For the sake of argument, I'm assuming you have no problem with DVD menus.) Having "runnable code" in a media format isn't the problem, the problem is when that code is used to restrict the usefulness of the disc to people who paid for it legally.
I'm not sure I'm going to trust the analysis of someone who says that the movie theater companies are the ones behind Blu-Ray...
Not really, once you consider that the cost to put a couple of humans on Mars would be anywhere from ten to a hundred times what it cost to put Spirit and Opportunity there. And the risk would be much greater -- it's a lot harder to get a human to Mars alive than it is to get a machine to Mars intact, so even if we did spend ten times as much, it's probably more than ten times as likely they'd die on the way, on site, or on the way back.
Plus, getting back from Mars is harder than getting back from the Moon; Mars has twice the escape velocity of the Moon (and less than half the escape velocity of the Earth; Earth is 11.19 km/s, Mars is 5.03 km/s, Moon is 2.38 km/s) so whatever rocket/lander the astronauts would have, would need a lot more fuel than Eagle (for example).
I wonder if they accounted for people who downloaded it for free, liked it, and came back and paid the $5 for it. (Or if they accounted for people who downloaded it multiple times, for some reason.)
Not that I think we have a good health care system here in the US, but you're a fool if you think that the relative death statistics for a single cause in any way prove that one system is better than another :)
Ha ha, except, the current Wikipedia page on tuberculosis has no flagging boxes, has no links to articles about musicians, the talk page is only about 23% longer (which is actually to be expected, since talk pages typically are accumulative for all the discussion about that page, whereas the page itself only contains the actual topic information), and the talk page doesn't once mention Ayn Rand. :)
I realize you were joking, but it probably would have been funnier if the tuberculosis page didn't yet exist, or actually WAS like you described. Nice attempt, though.
Even if you are right, we'd still actually have to find ETI in order for that to even have a chance of occurring, and the chance of finding ETI is, I believe, infinitesimal. It's really not even worth the effort.
Congratulations! You accomplished nothing and yet managed to get on TV for it. You're right up there with Paris Hilton.
We're obviously each free to choose whatever project we want to donate our spare CPU cycles to (or none at all, if we so choose). Nonetheless, I would encourage people to support projects like Folding@Home over projects like SETI@home, mostly because even if we do discover the existence of ETI, the consequences are unpredictable; assuming they're not close enough to visit or communicate with in a reasonable timeframe, then the sole effect of the discovery would be to cause chaos amongst humanity (how many religions would go berserk apeshit if they discovered that Earth isn't God's special place after all? -- on the other hand, maybe a lot of religion would go away once people realize that We're Not Special, and that'd be a nice side benefit -- but still, very unpredictable).
It's also exceedingly unlikely that SETI will ever find an ETI, regardless of whether there are any ETIs out there. F@H, on the other hand, has already provided us with a lot of useful information about biology, and is clearly advancing the cause of science toward the specific goal of curing diseases. As a result it seems like a much better investment in MY long-term health for me to be spending my cycles on F@H.
Yeah, but 63% of the time that statistic is quoted, it's incorrect.
I'm actually reasonably okay with civilians carrying firearms, as long as they're required to do so responsibly. What makes you assume I'm not okay with citizen self-defense just because I think we should also have professional law enforcement?