Actually, I think there is a simple solution. I am preparing to impliment, its just that it has some potential problems if it doesn't work right, so I want to be careful.
So I only have my cell phone. So I am thinking... I set unknown numbers to no ring at all. Then put the outgoing message on my voice mail "This number does not accept ANY calls from unknown numbers. It doesn't even ring. You may unblock caller ID and call back."
Then, if I do get any annoyance calls with numbers, just save them, and give them a custom ringtone of none.
Well then know this.... my policy... if an automated system calls me and tells me to hold. I hang up. If you can't be bothered to have a real person on the phone from the moment that I pick up, then you obviously don't need to talk to me that bad.
I find it absolutely infuriating to get a call like that. You ring my phone, thus interrupting whatever I am doing, and then... tell me to hold for you? Who the hell do you think I think you are?
yah but, chances are the mold can't really feed off anything in the electronics. It needs more than just water to grow. Really its all about washing off water deposits and residual mold spores.
You don't need to kill the mold, just get most of it off. There is plenty of mold in the air anyway.
and there are plenty of people in the world wondering why you are wasting such a perfectly good dog, when clearly its the dog that should be in the oven. I hear its quite tasty, been meaning to try it some day.
heh a 32" picturetel was in the way of a frined o fmine (had a warehouse to clear out and it wasn't even on the inventory sheets)... so it came home. He let me have it when he moved out....
Well it sat broken for a year on my floor.
Then I advertised on craigslist, said what was wrong with it, and somebody came and took it. In fact, I got rid of another TV left behind by another roomate the same day.
Washing machine leaked.... posted... some guy came and took the old one.
So take the whole load down, count the number of drives and the quantities, and sell them as a lot on ebay. Nobody is going to buy a 40 GB drive.... but a bin of 10 or 20 of them might be useful to someone.
Or at least, you only need one guy to convince himself its useful to rid yourself of them, whereas selling them individually...
Actually, We got a whole bunch of junk out of our basement a similar strategy. We would put everything on the curb, and then I would put up a free stuff post with the ad with the address and some of the more cool stuff.
Oddly some people would email the next day if I forgot to take the add down "Is X still there". I mean, I clearly stated that it was trash night, and you better come get it before morning.
BTW, anyone need a couple of what I think are crappy turntables? or a toaster oven? I can't start building my office down there until this shit is gone...
Now whats the value of the shelf space they are sitting on.
Whats the value of that shelf space over a year? two years? 3 years?
If you are never going to use the drives or sell them, then they are worthless. Worst, they prevent you from using the space you have, which could store things that are going to be used soon, or NEED to be retained.
At worst, taking home 10 or even the whole 100 32 gig disks, makes room for the retiring 250 GB disks as they come out of machines.
Actually, given that 2 years is more than 2 percent of a person's entire life. I would call it fairly harsh actually.
Though thats not all the facts. As many have commented, at $6 per peice, thats a lot of cheap equipment. He probably was taking stuff that he though nobody cared about. Given how low the values are, he was probably right about a lot of it.
All these are factors than can, should, and do influence punishment.
Let's not forget that he now has a conviction for stealing from his job. Its 2 years plus the time its going to take before that is no longer a factor in job applications.
Now if he was taking nearly new euqipment at full value and selling it, you can bet they would have adjusted his punishment accordingly.
Though, even if he stole 2 million in equipment, and sold it for 3/4 of a million. He would still do less time than many drug dealers.
To steal, something has to have value. When you throw something into the trash, you are declaring that it has no value to you. If an employee of the company has determined that it has no value and is in process of tossing it... then its fair game.
Same goes for your house trash. Once its on the curb in a bag, there is nothing to stop anyone from grabbing it, trash truck or not. Hell, I got 3 years of use out of a free couch that I saw on the curbside. We got my mother a beautiful wicker chair that was in rgeat condition just cuz we were driving by it on trash night.
No stealing involved.
Now... if you are the employee, and deciding that it has no value yourself in bad faith just so you can toss it in your bag. Thats actually rationalizing theft and not really the same thing.
Actually, the warehouse guys used to let us do that, at a previous job.
Of course, I doubt there was any official approval, the back two rows of the warehouse were just "junk" actually, they used to sell it as scrap to someone who bought it in bulk by the pound.
Overall, I don't think they cared, the shelf space was worth way more than the paltry income they got scrapping what was on it.
We had a few machines a couple of years ago that we had to "Dissapear".
I asked someone about them and he told me "They were supposed to go back to sun in one of those deals where you exchange old equipment for a discount on the new. I called them up, they said that at this point they don't even want them and we can keep them. However, since they were supposed to have been sent back, they arn't in asset management anymore, so we can't even generate an order to have them removed, without first making them exist again."
Yah, they pretty much went home with a few people. Somehow I doubt anyone cares about the fate of an Ultra 5 these days:). Frankly, I am not even sure why I grabbed one. I don't think I have even powered it.
I almost took home a microvax for similar reasons a few years back, but I was taking the T at the time and lugging it onto a shuttle and then the train was not my idea of a good time.
See this is my problem with a lot of things. Realize that I live in a town where the chief of police goes around defending the overnight parking ban by saying "well ambulances need to get down the narrow streets at night".... totally ignoring that there is ALREADY an ordinance on the books about how wide of a traffic lane MUST be left open at ALL times.
It just doesn't make sense to me to ban one thing, when your real problem is something else entirely. The problem is creation of hostile work environments NOT porn.
Now I know, there really is no reason you SHOULD be looking at porn at work. However, thats a whole different discussion. There are innumerable things that there is no good reason for you to do from work.
Certainly I have seen and heard of other hostile work environments, however, its always been, as you say, people without the social skills given to a mosquito that cause the problem. In fact, to be honest, as much porn as I have seen people look at "on the job", none of the actual examples of hostile work environments that I can think of even involved porn.
Unwanted sexual advances? yes. Hot heads picking fights? Yup. Porn? Never.
Just seems to me that porn gets WAY more attention than it really deserves.
All that aside, how was her overall work performance?
Did she do her job effectively? Was she being managed effectively?
I don't know about you, but I have had plenty of periods in my own jobs where there was just... downtime. In between projects, time waiting for other people to do things.
It all sounds bad in isolation, but I have certainly been in situations and known people in situations where whether they were off doing drugs and having sex over a lunch break wouldn't make one lick of difference.
Which is not to say its a good habbit to get into, but... as a one off, or an occasionaly thing.... really, it depends on the job.
One thing I have never understood... why does porn always get special consideration?
Why is it "bad but ok" if people spend a few minutes reading sports scores, or world news, but porn? well... thats a whole new ballgame.
Sure it can, in some specific circumstances, cause problems for the company in creating hostile work environments, but.... thats not really the porn itself, thats the attitude and behavior of the employees.
Frankly, as long as it doesn't involve creating a hostile environemnt, or unduely wasting time, then how is looking at porn any different from checking sports scores?
If I am alone, in an office, or other place where I am the only person capable of viewing my screen, AND neither doing company business nor sabotaging, how is there ANY difference at all?
I have to say, its the company laptop, and if they want to say no personal use, its absolutely within their right to say that and enforce that however they want. Period. The end.
I think though, that the law gives us a good guide in its definition of "theft". That is, to steal something, you have to take something that has value. If I put trash on the sidewalk for collection, it has no value to me, so you can't steal it from me. You can take it, but you can't steal it.
Essentially, the standard that I would take from that is that there has to be loss for them to have standing to take action. Its one thing to have all manner of policy against something, if the reality is that it has no bearing on the buisness one way or the other, then why care?
Installing unreal tournament and going to a lan party? Um so what? The company is losing, um... hard drive space? Maybe if you couldn't get your job done because the drive was full of personal files and you couldn't fit you work related stuff on there.
See where I am going with this? Sure technically it may be against policy. However, policy enforcement for its own sake is stupid. You always have to look at the negatives of enforcing the policy as much as the positives.
Essentially I would say... "No harm, no foul" should be policy number 1.
Well the thing is, there is no evidence whatsoever for anything but a natural process.
Thats the problem with the entire argument. I think Dawkins said it best. There might be a china tea pot in low orbit around the sun, somewhere beyond mercury. We have no way to detect something so small and far away. We probably never will. Even if we sent space craft there, the chances of comming close enough to detect it, infinitessimally small.
If there is a china teapot there, we will never know for sure.
However, does that mean that if I postulate that there is such a teapot that you are the crazy one for not believing me because you can't prove there isn't one?
No, there is no reason other than a few ridiculous stories that someone told.
I am in no way saying all of his facts are wrong, simply that he jumps to fantastical conclusions. From everything I have found his conclusions are thoroughly debunked, and the debunkers simply made a better evidence based case than he did.
If, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, you insist on believing the earth is only a couple o fthousand years old and formed in moments, then I highly suggest seeking psychiatric attention.
Frankly, it still smacks of intellectual dishonesty. Afterall, isn't he criticizing those same journals for not publishing him? Why would a peer reviewed journal publish a paper thats just well, a refutation of his ideas which also don't make the cut?
This guys arguments are just bad. He keeps saying things like "if granite formed naturally, then they should be able to replicate it in a lab". Really? Thats an utterly silly claim, much like many of his claims. Just because nobody has figured out how to entirely replicate a process in a lab doesn't mean that the process is entirely misunderstood.
This guy is either intellectually dishonest, or delusional. Possibly both.
If I am right, then you lose out big time, because all the time you have spent in this life, trying to buy yourself a personal pass to the afterlife, is for naught.
So you will have lost the only thing that I believe you have... time. Pretty big cost if you ask me. However, if you don't value this life, I guess thats up to you.
Good luck trying to buy the next one with your time in this one. Really, I hope that works out for you.
I was all of 11 years old at the time. I had just had an argument with my CCD Teacher and I was done. It had finally clicked, and I wasn't going to church on sunday anymore either.
Well my mother didn't like that, and she told me "but if you don't go to church thats a sin and you could go to hell".
It was an odd moment, it was kind of like the moment that I found out santa clause didn't exist. Except, I was really floored, because it wasn't that I realized there was no god, it was that I realized that my mother never figured that out, and I was floored. All I could say was "mom, you actually believe that?"
I mean, can you imagine coming to the realization that after all these years, after just all that life experience, imagine realizing that your mother still believes in Santa Clause, and you might begin to understand my bewilderment.
Interesting article. Though, as I read it, it seemed well.... no tvery well thought out. Actually, it wasn't very convincing. Mostly because it kept saying things like "could only have".... with no mention of why that could be, and essentially makes its arguments using very bad analogy.
That doesn't make him wrong though, so I figured maybe a little reading on just what are "polonium halos" from another source... oh wait... this theory has been roundly refuted and discredited: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/
but surely you knew that.
there is no good evidence they are the result of polonium decay as opposed to any other radioactive isotope, or even that they are caused by radioactivity at all. Gentry is taken to task for selective use of evidence, faulty experiment design, mistakes in geology and physics, and unscientific principles of investigation and argument style.
Its not scientific, but its not the the Halos article that passes my bullshit filter. The problem here is, lets say this was true, lets say polonium DID cause these rings (as highly unlikely as it is).... scientists start asking questions and asjusting their models to the new data.
This guy seems to just be taking his old idea (creationism) and finding the facts that fit it, and then calling it proof. Its not just unscientific, its intellectually dishonest.
Not science? well no, you are right, its not science. It was actually more like semantics, since my point was simply that "micro" vs "macro" evolution is an arbitrary distinction and why that is.
It includes, as needed to make the point, my own description of evolution and definitions from taxonomy. This isn't science, its english.
Now, I was using my model of evolution to describe how the current state of things came to be. Your right, thats not science. Science would be taking this model, and devising tests which could disprove those statements (then doing the tests and publishing the results).
Now, Steven J Gould probably has more information than I do. As such, it sounds like he has come to use a rather different model than I use. I can't speak as to this, as I don't know his model.
The reason its not religion is precisely because I am willing to say that new data can modify the theory. Maybe it wasn't many millions of years, Well, we can ask what the implications of that are, and we can devise a test to see if the new model works.
Thats why I hesitate to guess that you arn't too familiar with Science. There is no proof of anything in science. Only models of how we can explain to eachother how things work, and the never ending desire to know where our model fails. No theory is ever "proven". At best a theory isn't ruled out by any currently known data.
Creationists regularly take advantage of this precision of the language of science, because science is not a relm of certainty, however, its often the relm of many "nines" of certainty.
Well, you can't really take articles for the lay person and expect them to get everything right.
Science doesn't look for proof as much as disproof. The goal is to find the mental model that most simply fits the most observations (the holy grail, of course, being one that describes everything).
Notice I said "most simply" thats in the "Occam's Razor" sense. Sure "God did it" is very simple, but requires just too many assumptions. (He exists, he is all powerful etc etc) Furthermore, it must be disprovable. You have to be able to say "Well if this explanation is correct, then it predicts this must be the case", then you can test. If the prediction is right, then the theory works and you havn't done much of interest (unless its something nobody has been able to test before.) If the prediction is wrong, then you have to adjust your model (assuming your test isn't flawed).
The situation that we are in now, is that we have a couple of models that have trouble jiving. We have different models that make different predictions, and we find that both of them have merrit, even though neither leaves room for the other to be true.
So basically, we have multiple flawed models, each that explains part of the story. String theory is merely an attempt at a model that can reconcile the predictions of the other theories.
It doesn't need "proof" Proof has nothing to do with theory. A theory either makes reliable predictions or it doesn't.
The best analogy I have heard is to think of a pocketwatch someone gave you that you can't ever open. You can observe it, you can watch the hands move around, you can measure its movements, describe the accelerations involved with each tick....
Once you did that, you could design a mechanism that would do the same thing. It can tick the same way, at the same rate, etc. Your proposed mechanism is a scientific theory. Its "this is a model for how it works".
Maybe more observations will be found that require changes to you rmechanism. In any case, its a mistake to think of your model mechanism as the watch itself. You don't know how it works inside, you "can't know".... all you can do is describe what you can measure, and predict what will happen in various cases.
"macroevolution" is really just an arbitrary type of evolution that arises from mapping between the line of organisms and taxonomy.
What is a "dog" vs "non-dog". As far as I know the definition of a species is that members of that species can breed with eachother and create fertile offspring. A new species exists when there is a group that can has these properties and cannot produce fertile offspring with the other group. (I am open to correction here, admittedly I was in the bio class in HS that skipped taxonomy entirely and focused mostly on molecular biology... we talked a lot more about the crebs and citric acid cycles than evolution or taxonomy)
Anyway, its a fairly arbitrary concept. Its easy to develop taxonomies today but... thats after millions and millions of years of evolution. dogs and cats are quite different. However, at what point do you declare something a new species?
Its merely the accumulation of gradual changes over time. It doesn't happen that a "dog has a non-dog". It happens that mother has child who has child, and over time, one group ends up becoming too different from the other for breeding to work. Traits stop moving between the groups, and they continue to diverge.
The distinction between micro and macro evolution is ephemeral. What we might term "macroevolution" is simply the accumulation of smaller changes.
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Actually, I think there is a simple solution. I am preparing to impliment, its just that it has some potential problems if it doesn't work right, so I want to be careful.
So I only have my cell phone. So I am thinking... I set unknown numbers to no ring at all. Then put the outgoing message on my voice mail "This number does not accept ANY calls from unknown numbers. It doesn't even ring. You may unblock caller ID and call back."
Then, if I do get any annoyance calls with numbers, just save them, and give them a custom ringtone of none.
I can't see any problems with the plan. Can you?
-Steve
Well then know this.... my policy... if an automated system calls me and tells me to hold. I hang up. If you can't be bothered to have a real person on the phone from the moment that I pick up, then you obviously don't need to talk to me that bad.
I find it absolutely infuriating to get a call like that. You ring my phone, thus interrupting whatever I am doing, and then... tell me to hold for you? Who the hell do you think I think you are?
-Steve
yah but, chances are the mold can't really feed off anything in the electronics. It needs more than just water to grow. Really its all about washing off water deposits and residual mold spores.
You don't need to kill the mold, just get most of it off. There is plenty of mold in the air anyway.
-Steve
and there are plenty of people in the world wondering why you are wasting such a perfectly good dog, when clearly its the dog that should be in the oven. I hear its quite tasty, been meaning to try it some day.
-Steve
heh a 32" picturetel was in the way of a frined o fmine (had a warehouse to clear out and it wasn't even on the inventory sheets)... so it came home. He let me have it when he moved out....
Well it sat broken for a year on my floor.
Then I advertised on craigslist, said what was wrong with it, and somebody came and took it. In fact, I got rid of another TV left behind by another roomate the same day.
Washing machine leaked.... posted... some guy came and took the old one.
One mans trash....
-Steve
So take the whole load down, count the number of drives and the quantities, and sell them as a lot on ebay. Nobody is going to buy a 40 GB drive.... but a bin of 10 or 20 of them might be useful to someone.
Or at least, you only need one guy to convince himself its useful to rid yourself of them, whereas selling them individually...
-Steve
Actually, We got a whole bunch of junk out of our basement a similar strategy. We would put everything on the curb, and then I would put up a free stuff post with the ad with the address and some of the more cool stuff.
Oddly some people would email the next day if I forgot to take the add down "Is X still there". I mean, I clearly stated that it was trash night, and you better come get it before morning.
BTW, anyone need a couple of what I think are crappy turntables? or a toaster oven? I can't start building my office down there until this shit is gone...
-Steve
Worst....
Whats the value of 100 32 gig disks?
Now whats the value of the shelf space they are sitting on.
Whats the value of that shelf space over a year? two years? 3 years?
If you are never going to use the drives or sell them, then they are worthless. Worst, they prevent you from using the space you have, which could store things that are going to be used soon, or NEED to be retained.
At worst, taking home 10 or even the whole 100 32 gig disks, makes room for the retiring 250 GB disks as they come out of machines.
-Steve
Actually, given that 2 years is more than 2 percent of a person's entire life. I would call it fairly harsh actually.
Though thats not all the facts. As many have commented, at $6 per peice, thats a lot of cheap equipment. He probably was taking stuff that he though nobody cared about. Given how low the values are, he was probably right about a lot of it.
All these are factors than can, should, and do influence punishment.
Let's not forget that he now has a conviction for stealing from his job. Its 2 years plus the time its going to take before that is no longer a factor in job applications.
Now if he was taking nearly new euqipment at full value and selling it, you can bet they would have adjusted his punishment accordingly.
Though, even if he stole 2 million in equipment, and sold it for 3/4 of a million. He would still do less time than many drug dealers.
-Steve
Actually, that isn't stealing.
To steal, something has to have value. When you throw something into the trash, you are declaring that it has no value to you. If an employee of the company has determined that it has no value and is in process of tossing it... then its fair game.
Same goes for your house trash. Once its on the curb in a bag, there is nothing to stop anyone from grabbing it, trash truck or not. Hell, I got 3 years of use out of a free couch that I saw on the curbside. We got my mother a beautiful wicker chair that was in rgeat condition just cuz we were driving by it on trash night.
No stealing involved.
Now... if you are the employee, and deciding that it has no value yourself in bad faith just so you can toss it in your bag. Thats actually rationalizing theft and not really the same thing.
-Steve
Actually, the warehouse guys used to let us do that, at a previous job.
Of course, I doubt there was any official approval, the back two rows of the warehouse were just "junk" actually, they used to sell it as scrap to someone who bought it in bulk by the pound.
Overall, I don't think they cared, the shelf space was worth way more than the paltry income they got scrapping what was on it.
-Steve
We had a few machines a couple of years ago that we had to "Dissapear".
I asked someone about them and he told me "They were supposed to go back to sun in one of those deals where you exchange old equipment for a discount on the new. I called them up, they said that at this point they don't even want them and we can keep them. However, since they were supposed to have been sent back, they arn't in asset management anymore, so we can't even generate an order to have them removed, without first making them exist again."
Yah, they pretty much went home with a few people. Somehow I doubt anyone cares about the fate of an Ultra 5 these days :). Frankly, I am not even sure why I grabbed one. I don't think I have even powered it.
I almost took home a microvax for similar reasons a few years back, but I was taking the T at the time and lugging it onto a shuttle and then the train was not my idea of a good time.
-Steve
Letting what slide?
See this is my problem with a lot of things. Realize that I live in a town where the chief of police goes around defending the overnight parking ban by saying "well ambulances need to get down the narrow streets at night".... totally ignoring that there is ALREADY an ordinance on the books about how wide of a traffic lane MUST be left open at ALL times.
It just doesn't make sense to me to ban one thing, when your real problem is something else entirely. The problem is creation of hostile work environments NOT porn.
Now I know, there really is no reason you SHOULD be looking at porn at work. However, thats a whole different discussion. There are innumerable things that there is no good reason for you to do from work.
Certainly I have seen and heard of other hostile work environments, however, its always been, as you say, people without the social skills given to a mosquito that cause the problem. In fact, to be honest, as much porn as I have seen people look at "on the job", none of the actual examples of hostile work environments that I can think of even involved porn.
Unwanted sexual advances? yes. Hot heads picking fights? Yup. Porn? Never.
Just seems to me that porn gets WAY more attention than it really deserves.
-Steve
All that aside, how was her overall work performance?
Did she do her job effectively? Was she being managed effectively?
I don't know about you, but I have had plenty of periods in my own jobs where there was just... downtime. In between projects, time waiting for other people to do things.
It all sounds bad in isolation, but I have certainly been in situations and known people in situations where whether they were off doing drugs and having sex over a lunch break wouldn't make one lick of difference.
Which is not to say its a good habbit to get into, but... as a one off, or an occasionaly thing.... really, it depends on the job.
-Steve
One thing I have never understood... why does porn always get special consideration?
Why is it "bad but ok" if people spend a few minutes reading sports scores, or world news, but porn? well... thats a whole new ballgame.
Sure it can, in some specific circumstances, cause problems for the company in creating hostile work environments, but.... thats not really the porn itself, thats the attitude and behavior of the employees.
Frankly, as long as it doesn't involve creating a hostile environemnt, or unduely wasting time, then how is looking at porn any different from checking sports scores?
If I am alone, in an office, or other place where I am the only person capable of viewing my screen, AND neither doing company business nor sabotaging, how is there ANY difference at all?
-Steve
I think this brings up an important point...
Rights vs Practicality.
I have to say, its the company laptop, and if they want to say no personal use, its absolutely within their right to say that and enforce that however they want. Period. The end.
I think though, that the law gives us a good guide in its definition of "theft". That is, to steal something, you have to take something that has value. If I put trash on the sidewalk for collection, it has no value to me, so you can't steal it from me. You can take it, but you can't steal it.
Essentially, the standard that I would take from that is that there has to be loss for them to have standing to take action. Its one thing to have all manner of policy against something, if the reality is that it has no bearing on the buisness one way or the other, then why care?
Installing unreal tournament and going to a lan party? Um so what? The company is losing, um... hard drive space? Maybe if you couldn't get your job done because the drive was full of personal files and you couldn't fit you work related stuff on there.
See where I am going with this? Sure technically it may be against policy. However, policy enforcement for its own sake is stupid. You always have to look at the negatives of enforcing the policy as much as the positives.
Essentially I would say... "No harm, no foul" should be policy number 1.
-Steve
Well the thing is, there is no evidence whatsoever for anything but a natural process.
Thats the problem with the entire argument. I think Dawkins said it best. There might be a china tea pot in low orbit around the sun, somewhere beyond mercury. We have no way to detect something so small and far away. We probably never will. Even if we sent space craft there, the chances of comming close enough to detect it, infinitessimally small.
If there is a china teapot there, we will never know for sure.
However, does that mean that if I postulate that there is such a teapot that you are the crazy one for not believing me because you can't prove there isn't one?
No, there is no reason other than a few ridiculous stories that someone told.
I am in no way saying all of his facts are wrong, simply that he jumps to fantastical conclusions. From everything I have found his conclusions are thoroughly debunked, and the debunkers simply made a better evidence based case than he did.
If, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, you insist on believing the earth is only a couple o fthousand years old and formed in moments, then I highly suggest seeking psychiatric attention.
-Steve
Yes I read much of that right on his website.
Frankly, it still smacks of intellectual dishonesty. Afterall, isn't he criticizing those same journals for not publishing him? Why would a peer reviewed journal publish a paper thats just well, a refutation of his ideas which also don't make the cut?
This guys arguments are just bad. He keeps saying things like "if granite formed naturally, then they should be able to replicate it in a lab". Really? Thats an utterly silly claim, much like many of his claims. Just because nobody has figured out how to entirely replicate a process in a lab doesn't mean that the process is entirely misunderstood.
This guy is either intellectually dishonest, or delusional. Possibly both.
-Steve
Oh and you are wrong:
If I am right, then you lose out big time, because all the time you have spent in this life, trying to buy yourself a personal pass to the afterlife, is for naught.
So you will have lost the only thing that I believe you have... time. Pretty big cost if you ask me. However, if you don't value this life, I guess thats up to you.
Good luck trying to buy the next one with your time in this one. Really, I hope that works out for you.
-Steve
Actually no, you could be right, or I could be right... or we could both be wrong.
What if the Dali Lama is right? What if the one who is right is an imam? How about the Sikhs? Or even the Greeks?
At least if its the greeks you wont have to remember how silly you were in life while you exist in the river lethe!
Yours isn't the only god I am an Atheist for, I just don't discriminate... I am an atheist for everyones god.
-Steve
You remind me of a moment I will never forget.
I was all of 11 years old at the time. I had just had an argument with my CCD Teacher and I was done. It had finally clicked, and I wasn't going to church on sunday anymore either.
Well my mother didn't like that, and she told me "but if you don't go to church thats a sin and you could go to hell".
It was an odd moment, it was kind of like the moment that I found out santa clause didn't exist. Except, I was really floored, because it wasn't that I realized there was no god, it was that I realized that my mother never figured that out, and I was floored. All I could say was "mom, you actually believe that?"
I mean, can you imagine coming to the realization that after all these years, after just all that life experience, imagine realizing that your mother still believes in Santa Clause, and you might begin to understand my bewilderment.
-Steve
Interesting article. Though, as I read it, it seemed well.... no tvery well thought out. Actually, it wasn't very convincing. Mostly because it kept saying things like "could only have".... with no mention of why that could be, and essentially makes its arguments using very bad analogy.
That doesn't make him wrong though, so I figured maybe a little reading on just what are "polonium halos" from another source... oh wait... this theory has been roundly refuted and discredited: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/
but surely you knew that.
Its not scientific, but its not the the Halos article that passes my bullshit filter. The problem here is, lets say this was true, lets say polonium DID cause these rings (as highly unlikely as it is).... scientists start asking questions and asjusting their models to the new data.
This guy seems to just be taking his old idea (creationism) and finding the facts that fit it, and then calling it proof. Its not just unscientific, its intellectually dishonest.
-Steve
Not science? well no, you are right, its not science. It was actually more like semantics, since my point was simply that "micro" vs "macro" evolution is an arbitrary distinction and why that is.
It includes, as needed to make the point, my own description of evolution and definitions from taxonomy. This isn't science, its english.
Now, I was using my model of evolution to describe how the current state of things came to be. Your right, thats not science. Science would be taking this model, and devising tests which could disprove those statements (then doing the tests and publishing the results).
Now, Steven J Gould probably has more information than I do. As such, it sounds like he has come to use a rather different model than I use. I can't speak as to this, as I don't know his model.
The reason its not religion is precisely because I am willing to say that new data can modify the theory. Maybe it wasn't many millions of years, Well, we can ask what the implications of that are, and we can devise a test to see if the new model works.
Thats why I hesitate to guess that you arn't too familiar with Science. There is no proof of anything in science. Only models of how we can explain to eachother how things work, and the never ending desire to know where our model fails. No theory is ever "proven". At best a theory isn't ruled out by any currently known data.
Creationists regularly take advantage of this precision of the language of science, because science is not a relm of certainty, however, its often the relm of many "nines" of certainty.
-Steve
Well, you can't really take articles for the lay person and expect them to get everything right.
Science doesn't look for proof as much as disproof. The goal is to find the mental model that most simply fits the most observations (the holy grail, of course, being one that describes everything).
Notice I said "most simply" thats in the "Occam's Razor" sense. Sure "God did it" is very simple, but requires just too many assumptions. (He exists, he is all powerful etc etc) Furthermore, it must be disprovable. You have to be able to say "Well if this explanation is correct, then it predicts this must be the case", then you can test. If the prediction is right, then the theory works and you havn't done much of interest (unless its something nobody has been able to test before.) If the prediction is wrong, then you have to adjust your model (assuming your test isn't flawed).
The situation that we are in now, is that we have a couple of models that have trouble jiving. We have different models that make different predictions, and we find that both of them have merrit, even though neither leaves room for the other to be true.
So basically, we have multiple flawed models, each that explains part of the story. String theory is merely an attempt at a model that can reconcile the predictions of the other theories.
It doesn't need "proof" Proof has nothing to do with theory. A theory either makes reliable predictions or it doesn't.
The best analogy I have heard is to think of a pocketwatch someone gave you that you can't ever open. You can observe it, you can watch the hands move around, you can measure its movements, describe the accelerations involved with each tick....
Once you did that, you could design a mechanism that would do the same thing. It can tick the same way, at the same rate, etc. Your proposed mechanism is a scientific theory. Its "this is a model for how it works".
Maybe more observations will be found that require changes to you rmechanism. In any case, its a mistake to think of your model mechanism as the watch itself. You don't know how it works inside, you "can't know".... all you can do is describe what you can measure, and predict what will happen in various cases.
-Steve
I would say that they are really the same thing.
"macroevolution" is really just an arbitrary type of evolution that arises from mapping between the line of organisms and taxonomy.
What is a "dog" vs "non-dog". As far as I know the definition of a species is that members of that species can breed with eachother and create fertile offspring. A new species exists when there is a group that can has these properties and cannot produce fertile offspring with the other group. (I am open to correction here, admittedly I was in the bio class in HS that skipped taxonomy entirely and focused mostly on molecular biology... we talked a lot more about the crebs and citric acid cycles than evolution or taxonomy)
Anyway, its a fairly arbitrary concept. Its easy to develop taxonomies today but... thats after millions and millions of years of evolution. dogs and cats are quite different. However, at what point do you declare something a new species?
Its merely the accumulation of gradual changes over time. It doesn't happen that a "dog has a non-dog". It happens that mother has child who has child, and over time, one group ends up becoming too different from the other for breeding to work. Traits stop moving between the groups, and they continue to diverge.
The distinction between micro and macro evolution is ephemeral. What we might term "macroevolution" is simply the accumulation of smaller changes.
-Steve