I think whether or not one gives the concept to the children, the curious ones will come up with the ultimate question of how did the big bang itself happen. Who is behind all.
But I think presenting this concept of an Intelligent Will behind evolution in a suggestive but not pedagogic manner could help them base their thinking on something.
True, it is nice to discover things on your own, but there's a lot more to discover. Why not let them advance on the hard work that we have done so that they can explore newere vistas!
If the Creator you fathom is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent then there arises no question of his creation. Coz that would be putting a restrain on his power.
Yes science revolves around what is detectable by the senses but what about people with special faculties? What about intuition? Think about this, the 'mind' had not developed sufficiently in the ape as in the brain was there but the logic, morality wasn't anywhere close to what it is in the humans now. So why can't the limitation of our senses be overcome with evolution too and higher senses come in? Like I said, there are reports of people with special faculties...these are known as exceptional people at this point, but why can't there be more of such in the future.
I think you will be very interested in a book by Sri Aurobindo, "The Life Divine".
I highly recommend it to you. If you are like me, you might not wanna read another book with philosophy since there's so many of them and all have some partial truth in them. But if u can, trust me, this is different.
I agree that ID's attitude, if it is so, of saying that, this always existed and there is no more to it is not right from the perspective of objective science. But I disagree that supernatural phenomenon is untestable. A vast number of people have had many experiences...sure there must be some nuts, some lunatics and some hallucinating people in those, but there have been many many people, and I dare say many of a solid scientific background and a very intelligent mind, who have had such experiences and admit the existence of something supernatural that science (or scientific instruments) haven't developed enough to explain yet (I am positive this would change in the future which would only broaden science and expand its limits).
Well..why can't you think of God (or any supreme being) as the designer? Then there has to be no middle man. The question is not only of the Supreme Being that always existed, but also of why he started this process of evolution...since he/she's omniscient, he/she must have a pretty damn good reason.
I am not a proponent of "ID" per se...but just I do believe in a conscious, intelligent, purposeful will that drives evolution.
I don't know what "ID" says or knows or explains or doesn't know.
But if you have to, sincerely without any hypocrisy, answer the VERY BASIC ULTIMATE question then you can't run away from the question...where did existence come from and what is its purpose.
Sure. What if it hasn't been proved yet? What is science anyway? That in which you come up first with that the sun revolves round the earth and a century later discover its the opposite?
Or the Newtonian Physics overwritten by Einstein's relativity?
Or that in which Cartesian Geometry belived to be 'THE GEOMETRY' is in fact only applicable in a small domain (domain being that with which we deal with currently for all practical purposes).
Science grows and discovers its own flaws... by evolution again...
But something not being proved currently doesn't make it untrue...it simply means that science will have to surpass it's narrow domain (which it has been doing since centuries).
Paranormal sciences may also be considered to be a scientific discipline... and I am sure there are many odd things that have been proved...or unproved.
Many people have had experiences that haven't had an explanation by science and science has (superciliously) discarded them as hallucinations ( a very convenient explanation to help science retain its narrow definition:))...
Yes I believe in Evolution. Probably much more than many others. So there are humans, who came from lower life forms, animals, plants, and it all began with the primordial soup and those giant self-replicating molecules that ended up being that way by chance...
Look at us today...from dust and gases to plants to animals to man to thinking man!!!!
Yes we have evolved...but where did those giant molecules come from??? Gases, water dust?? Where did those come from??? Air?? The Universe...where did that come from?? The Big Bang???? But then who planned the big bang??? Where did matter come from? Dark matter?? Nothingness? Where did "NOTHINGNESS" come from?????
It is an intelligent design of a conscious and intelligent will and EVOLUTION are its means!!!
There IS NO CONTRADICTION!
If you are really smart noone can make u look stupid, unless you are lacking in the power of communication (expressing yourself). Expressing oneself is, I realize an extremely important part, not to be underestimated. If you know something and are not able to convey your point clearly enough, than you should work on your communication skills. Many techies have this issue... once conquered it will complement the brains to give an enormous power.
Fighting is good and would prevail in a company based on fundamentally 'genuine' principles. But what of a company that is rotten in it's very guts with politics. How does a technical, genuine speaking individual prevail here? Or develop if you will (not develop in terms of inner development or technical skills, but in terms of cash and position). Coz if one doesn't develop in those areas, one would find oneself reporting to the same corporate speech experts but technical retards that one abhors. Seems to me that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to beat them in their own game. As impossible as it may sound, this is the REAL CHALLENGE. To not change from the inside but beat them in their own game, for which one may have to adopt corp speech but it would be means to a different end...an end one genuinely believes in.
Fighting is good and would prevail in a company based on fundamentally 'genuine' principles. But what of a company that is rotten in it's very guts with politics. How does a technical, genuine speaking individual prevail here? Or develop if you will (not develop in terms of inner development or technical skills, but in terms of cash and position). Coz if one doesn't develop in those areas, one would find oneself reporting to the same corporate speech experts but technical retards that one abhors.
Seems to me that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to beat them in their own game. As impossible as it may sound, this is the REAL CHALLENGE. To not change from the inside but beat them in their own game, for which one may have to adopt corp speech but it would be means to a different end...an end one genuinely believes in.
Maybe it can be looked upon as a positive thing in terms of self-control. It being so easy to browse the web at work, espc for pleasure, demands a higher level of self-control from you. One who is able to exhibit that level of self-control would enjoy a higher satisfaction resulting from a higher level of self-mastery/mind-control.
Sure, you can get addicted to information. You can get addicted to anything for that matter. You may turn back and call it being a positive thing, that aids your mental development, but if you can't stay without it, it's an addiction nonetheless. Reading the same amount of information voluntarily, being in control, is very different from having a desire to get that information or not being able to live without it.
It's about mental control.
How do people deal with pure getters-setters in terms of commenting them. I mostly just leave them out, if they exist simply for the purpose of accessing/mutating (without any error checking or validation). I mean the dumbest form of a getter or setter.
Some purists may want to comment every method of a class, but I don't see the point of it. Maybe it makes them more amenable to being commented in the future?
Commenting code...more than just best practice.
on
How to Write Comments
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Commenting code in a good way is as important as writing good code. Think from the perspective of the poor maintenance programmer. How much time would be saved if code was properly commented? Isn't it after all about not wasting energy, ours and the other person's too? It's so much easier to comment code while one is writing it, or has recently written it since its fresh in the memory. The further you comment it from the point of writing, the more the chances of the comments not being accurate. And I would rather have no comments than wrong comments:)
Commenting code in a useful way, thinking about a maintenance programmer who knows nothing about this code, is not just a 'best practice', it is the duty of any programmer who takes pride in his/her work.
It has already happened. You just don't realize it since you are not meant to. You have been put in a cyber-world and it looks real to you. Yes, you are in a kind of matrix now!!
That's a pretty interesting thesis topic. Are you addressing version management issues? I found them to be by far the most annoying and difficult beasts. Even after using tools like CVS, finding a coherent methodology is still a challenge to me.
Although I haven't sincerely brooded well enough on the issue.
I use xemacs. Works well for me although I have some peeves. Never used vi very much. On windows I like Textpad which doesn't do a lot but whatever it does, it does pretty well.
So this new collaborative development environment, isn't it going to be as bulky, loaded and lacking in a basic concept as all other MS products? Take for example Visio. Some of the errors it gives me simply don't make any sense and get fixed by restarting it.
Or MS Word, that hasn't been able to figure out yet, how to do numbering. Or maybe its way too advanced for us backward users, so it takes control and numbers my document on its own!
I think Eclipse is a very well thought over IDE and the I would be happy with being provided something extremely lightweight for starts for which people would develop plugins that I could download install on a need-basis.
Yeah doesn't add up very well in my book either. I think there're many people out there who would be happy with a 100 songs on their cellphone, if it can save them the trouble of having to carry an extra device (the iPod), myself being one of them. I'd happily trade my current cellphone for ROKR instead of buying a iPod.
So I think there's definitely a target audience for cellphones with a smaller number of songs as oppossed to a full-fledged iPod.
Very insightful. Only that it doesn't explain the plethora of spyware that installs itself on my Windows Professional Partition but not on my RH Linux system. Also it gives me no explanation of why my Windows (almost on a daily basis) quits in the midst of things showing me a blue screen (and to top that, this morning a disk read error).
Also it beats me why all these fancy things don't happen on my Linux system. Missing features??
But isn't that true for any system, and not only software? That if it is used other than for what it was designed for, it could fail. Suppose I need to make a simple function for generating prime numbers from 1000 to 500000, then tht would be my interface and then I could verify its correctness using a formal method verification system (or an automatic verifier).
Of course this is making it extremely simplistic...but I think there are occassions where formal verification can, if not eliminate, highly reduce the number of bugs. Although, at the state that I had read about it, it would probably take years to write a system of medium complexity using such a method!
Slashdot Mirror
ha ha ha ha your post is actually pretty funny since I haven't undergone american education :)
I think whether or not one gives the concept to the children, the curious ones will come up with the ultimate question of how did the big bang itself happen. Who is behind all. But I think presenting this concept of an Intelligent Will behind evolution in a suggestive but not pedagogic manner could help them base their thinking on something. True, it is nice to discover things on your own, but there's a lot more to discover. Why not let them advance on the hard work that we have done so that they can explore newere vistas!
If the Creator you fathom is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent then there arises no question of his creation. Coz that would be putting a restrain on his power.
Yes science revolves around what is detectable by the senses but what about people with special faculties? What about intuition? Think about this, the 'mind' had not developed sufficiently in the ape as in the brain was there but the logic, morality wasn't anywhere close to what it is in the humans now. So why can't the limitation of our senses be overcome with evolution too and higher senses come in? Like I said, there are reports of people with special faculties...these are known as exceptional people at this point, but why can't there be more of such in the future. I think you will be very interested in a book by Sri Aurobindo, "The Life Divine". I highly recommend it to you. If you are like me, you might not wanna read another book with philosophy since there's so many of them and all have some partial truth in them. But if u can, trust me, this is different.
I agree that ID's attitude, if it is so, of saying that, this always existed and there is no more to it is not right from the perspective of objective science. But I disagree that supernatural phenomenon is untestable. A vast number of people have had many experiences...sure there must be some nuts, some lunatics and some hallucinating people in those, but there have been many many people, and I dare say many of a solid scientific background and a very intelligent mind, who have had such experiences and admit the existence of something supernatural that science (or scientific instruments) haven't developed enough to explain yet (I am positive this would change in the future which would only broaden science and expand its limits).
Well..why can't you think of God (or any supreme being) as the designer? Then there has to be no middle man. The question is not only of the Supreme Being that always existed, but also of why he started this process of evolution...since he/she's omniscient, he/she must have a pretty damn good reason.
Yes your post shows how much you can think :)
I am not a proponent of "ID" per se...but just I do believe in a conscious, intelligent, purposeful will that drives evolution. I don't know what "ID" says or knows or explains or doesn't know. But if you have to, sincerely without any hypocrisy, answer the VERY BASIC ULTIMATE question then you can't run away from the question...where did existence come from and what is its purpose.
Sure. What if it hasn't been proved yet? What is science anyway? That in which you come up first with that the sun revolves round the earth and a century later discover its the opposite? Or the Newtonian Physics overwritten by Einstein's relativity? Or that in which Cartesian Geometry belived to be 'THE GEOMETRY' is in fact only applicable in a small domain (domain being that with which we deal with currently for all practical purposes). Science grows and discovers its own flaws ... by evolution again...
But something not being proved currently doesn't make it untrue...it simply means that science will have to surpass it's narrow domain (which it has been doing since centuries).
Paranormal sciences may also be considered to be a scientific discipline ... and I am sure there are many odd things that have been proved...or unproved.
Many people have had experiences that haven't had an explanation by science and science has (superciliously) discarded them as hallucinations ( a very convenient explanation to help science retain its narrow definition :))...
Yes I believe in Evolution. Probably much more than many others. So there are humans, who came from lower life forms, animals, plants, and it all began with the primordial soup and those giant self-replicating molecules that ended up being that way by chance... Look at us today...from dust and gases to plants to animals to man to thinking man!!!! Yes we have evolved...but where did those giant molecules come from??? Gases, water dust?? Where did those come from??? Air?? The Universe...where did that come from?? The Big Bang???? But then who planned the big bang??? Where did matter come from? Dark matter?? Nothingness? Where did "NOTHINGNESS" come from????? It is an intelligent design of a conscious and intelligent will and EVOLUTION are its means!!! There IS NO CONTRADICTION!
If you are really smart noone can make u look stupid, unless you are lacking in the power of communication (expressing yourself). Expressing oneself is, I realize an extremely important part, not to be underestimated. If you know something and are not able to convey your point clearly enough, than you should work on your communication skills. Many techies have this issue ... once conquered it will complement the brains to give an enormous power.
Fighting is good and would prevail in a company based on fundamentally 'genuine' principles. But what of a company that is rotten in it's very guts with politics. How does a technical, genuine speaking individual prevail here? Or develop if you will (not develop in terms of inner development or technical skills, but in terms of cash and position). Coz if one doesn't develop in those areas, one would find oneself reporting to the same corporate speech experts but technical retards that one abhors. Seems to me that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to beat them in their own game. As impossible as it may sound, this is the REAL CHALLENGE. To not change from the inside but beat them in their own game, for which one may have to adopt corp speech but it would be means to a different end...an end one genuinely believes in.
Fighting is good and would prevail in a company based on fundamentally 'genuine' principles. But what of a company that is rotten in it's very guts with politics. How does a technical, genuine speaking individual prevail here? Or develop if you will (not develop in terms of inner development or technical skills, but in terms of cash and position). Coz if one doesn't develop in those areas, one would find oneself reporting to the same corporate speech experts but technical retards that one abhors. Seems to me that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to beat them in their own game. As impossible as it may sound, this is the REAL CHALLENGE. To not change from the inside but beat them in their own game, for which one may have to adopt corp speech but it would be means to a different end...an end one genuinely believes in.
Maybe it can be looked upon as a positive thing in terms of self-control. It being so easy to browse the web at work, espc for pleasure, demands a higher level of self-control from you. One who is able to exhibit that level of self-control would enjoy a higher satisfaction resulting from a higher level of self-mastery/mind-control.
Sure, you can get addicted to information. You can get addicted to anything for that matter. You may turn back and call it being a positive thing, that aids your mental development, but if you can't stay without it, it's an addiction nonetheless. Reading the same amount of information voluntarily, being in control, is very different from having a desire to get that information or not being able to live without it. It's about mental control.
How do people deal with pure getters-setters in terms of commenting them. I mostly just leave them out, if they exist simply for the purpose of accessing/mutating (without any error checking or validation). I mean the dumbest form of a getter or setter. Some purists may want to comment every method of a class, but I don't see the point of it. Maybe it makes them more amenable to being commented in the future?
Commenting code in a good way is as important as writing good code. Think from the perspective of the poor maintenance programmer. How much time would be saved if code was properly commented? Isn't it after all about not wasting energy, ours and the other person's too? It's so much easier to comment code while one is writing it, or has recently written it since its fresh in the memory. The further you comment it from the point of writing, the more the chances of the comments not being accurate. And I would rather have no comments than wrong comments :)
Commenting code in a useful way, thinking about a maintenance programmer who knows nothing about this code, is not just a 'best practice', it is the duty of any programmer who takes pride in his/her work.
It has already happened. You just don't realize it since you are not meant to. You have been put in a cyber-world and it looks real to you. Yes, you are in a kind of matrix now!!
Happy Thanksgiving to you too :)
Cheers, Sid.
That's a pretty interesting thesis topic. Are you addressing version management issues? I found them to be by far the most annoying and difficult beasts. Even after using tools like CVS, finding a coherent methodology is still a challenge to me. Although I haven't sincerely brooded well enough on the issue.
I use xemacs. Works well for me although I have some peeves. Never used vi very much. On windows I like Textpad which doesn't do a lot but whatever it does, it does pretty well.
So this new collaborative development environment, isn't it going to be as bulky, loaded and lacking in a basic concept as all other MS products? Take for example Visio. Some of the errors it gives me simply don't make any sense and get fixed by restarting it. Or MS Word, that hasn't been able to figure out yet, how to do numbering. Or maybe its way too advanced for us backward users, so it takes control and numbers my document on its own! I think Eclipse is a very well thought over IDE and the I would be happy with being provided something extremely lightweight for starts for which people would develop plugins that I could download install on a need-basis.
Yeah doesn't add up very well in my book either. I think there're many people out there who would be happy with a 100 songs on their cellphone, if it can save them the trouble of having to carry an extra device (the iPod), myself being one of them. I'd happily trade my current cellphone for ROKR instead of buying a iPod. So I think there's definitely a target audience for cellphones with a smaller number of songs as oppossed to a full-fledged iPod.
Very insightful. Only that it doesn't explain the plethora of spyware that installs itself on my Windows Professional Partition but not on my RH Linux system. Also it gives me no explanation of why my Windows (almost on a daily basis) quits in the midst of things showing me a blue screen (and to top that, this morning a disk read error). Also it beats me why all these fancy things don't happen on my Linux system. Missing features??
But isn't that true for any system, and not only software? That if it is used other than for what it was designed for, it could fail. Suppose I need to make a simple function for generating prime numbers from 1000 to 500000, then tht would be my interface and then I could verify its correctness using a formal method verification system (or an automatic verifier). Of course this is making it extremely simplistic...but I think there are occassions where formal verification can, if not eliminate, highly reduce the number of bugs. Although, at the state that I had read about it, it would probably take years to write a system of medium complexity using such a method!