Quite the contrary. I could take people back with me to the present to demonstrate the veracity of my claims.
Jesus ultimately demonstrated this by conquering our worst enemy -- death. So Jesus proved that he was God by doing something it's impossible to prove he did. Thank you for clearing that up.
For every single piece of evidence evolutionists bring up, a smart creationists can re-interpret that so called evidence to support what the Bible records. But this is not science. Of course any and all observations can be re-explained to any desired explanation. But when experimental evidence consistently affirms testable hypothesis after testable hypothesis produced by a scientific theory, that theory becomes the de facto explanation.
Attempting to provide alternate explanations without testable hypotheses are not good science. Just so we're clear, every single testable hypothesis produced by creationist scientists has been refuted by experiment.
NOBODY has ever demonstrated that information can come from *any* other source than a mind. Um, maybe not to your liking, or to your narrow definition of "information" and "mind". DNA is simply code triplets for amino acids. It could conceivably be called information, but in reality it's just a simple chemical isomorphism. Further. it has been shown experimentally that bacteria can easily re-evolve the lactase enzyme when that gene is removed.
A subtle but nuanced result of Godel's Incompleteness theorem is that what you call "minds" are no more powerful than sufficiently advanced computer programs. Creationists have produced zero evidence, beyond philosophical musings, that a mind needs anything to function other than the neural activity in the brain, and the fact that brain damage can effectively destroy a mind lends HUGE weight to the theory that a physical brain contains everything necessary to produce minds.
Further, it is quite easy to write computer programs that readily "discover" new information in mounds of raw data. This is called data mining. And spare me the creationist rhetoric about "who wrote the computer program" -- computer programs are NOT biological organisms, though it is known by computer scientists that selection over incremental changes to computer algorithms can produce more complex, adapted algorithms.
No, there is ZERO reason to even suggest that information can only be produced supernaturally. The hypothesis itself is totally unfalsifiable because we have no way of even knowing that the supernatural exists, let alone making absolutist truth-claims about it. This is pseudoscience of the worst kind.
And please stop using the term "evolutionist" if you want to be taken seriously. It's a baseless framing device used by creationists in order to try and place it on an "even keel" with creationism.
Jesus must be one of the following 3 things: the Lord, a liar, or a lunatic. This fallacy is so famous it has a name: the False Trilemma.
First of all, crazy people and people who tell lies sometimes tell the truth, and are sometimes generally good people. Second of all, Lewis intentionally omits the possibility that the gospel accounts are incorrect. Either the gospel authors could have lying to deceive, or they could have been genuinely mistaken.
Also, even conservative scholars grudgingly agree that the "woman caught in adultery" story is probably apocryphal.
Personally I just cannot take "the leap of faith" about the origins of life ; it seems so incredibly unlikely Argument from personal incredulity. It does nothing to derail scientific theories of origins.
that one day a cell just "plopped" into existence with the ability to procreate Straw man. Show me one theory of abiogenesis that assumes molecules just accidentally assembked to produce a simple single-celled organism.
Is it not perfectly sane to refuse a theory that has no PROOF about it's vital premises ? Begging the question. Science has mounds of evidence supporting evolution, but I suspect you'll just assume I'm under their hypnotic spell in saying so. Look, the reality is we can observe life forms readily changing their DNA to adapt to environmental changes. All the Theory of Evolution does is extrapolate this to account for the diversity of life as we see it. It's theory based on observation, like every other branch of science.
However, I will grant that it IS perfectly sane (though not necessarily correct) for a layperson to refuse to accept a scientific theory when he or she does not understand or trust the evidence.
The way I understand it, the longer dimension was typically the "long" dimension and the shorter one was considered the "wide" dimension. So I believe you, sir, are correct, and these so-called "scientists" are horribly, horribly wrong.
DC Transformers can't exist because transformers rely on the principle of electromagnetic induction, which requires a constantly changing magnetic field, which is a property DC does not exhibit by virtue of being constant.
Step-up DC transformers would require an inverter (to convert to AC), followed by an AC transformer, followed a full-wave rectifier (to convert back to DC). Want to calculate the minimum efficiency lost on each step? Yeah, me neither.
The problem is the "controversy" only exists where people feel their religious beliefs are threatened by biology. Certainly there is no controversy in the scientific community (as long as you consider that ID "science"... isn't).
Smartass. I meant the two separate automobile lines.
Except the Escalade. Don't get me wrong, I respect your right to own one, but I reserve the right to say "fucking Escalade" from within my Civic if I see you driving one.
In what could be a first Microsoft is working to create a special build of Windows What the hell was Windows CE? What's running on the XBox? Is OP being facetious or an idiot?
It's not a knock on photon mapping. It's an honest look at the feasibility "pure" raytracing, drawing on my knowledge both from having written my own limited raytracer and having used POV-Ray (among others) for well on 10 years now. In fact, I like the effects of photon mapping immensely, but it isn't raytracing.
The cheats that must be enabled for rasterization-based reflection and refraction can be overcome simply and elegantly using raytracing algorithms. So rather than argue for rendering method purism, which forces us to look at these solutions as "cheats", I think a multi-tiered approach augmenting known, well-tested rendering methods (like rasterization) with the strong suits of other methods (like raytracing and photon mapping) to overcome its weaknesses is the strongest solution.
Ummmm, yes it can. Yes, with a gargantuan performance hit. In other words, it is one of the "real-life" effects it can't do easily or well.
That's just not the way it went. Rasterization far more optimizable than raytracing, and yields very easily to increased-hardware solutions. Raytracing is impeded by serious fundamental scalability issues at the algorithmic level.
Personally, I'd love to see realtime raytracing see the light of day because I recognize the math behind it as more "pure" than rasterization. Of course there are several algorithmic hurdles preventing pure realtime raytracing from seeing the light of day, unless you start to hyperparallelize the operations in a dedicated GPU, and even then there are obstacles; in the worst cases, a ray can bounce along an infinite path, dividing into multiple segments as it goes, leading to infinitely branched recursion until some heuristic or another cuts it short. And as we all know, "heuristic" is a fancy word for "cheat".
Further, raytracing cannot handle advanced refraction and reflection effects, like the surface of water causing uneven illumination at the bottom of a pool, or a bright red ball casting a red spot on a white piece of paper, without preemptive "photon mapping", which is another cheat.
In short, we have not been able improve upon the original raytracing algorithms without "cheating reality". Modern raytracing that includes photon mapping is a hybrid anyway. So the raytracing purists really have nothing to stand on until there's enough hardware to accurately calculate the paths of quadrillions of photons at high resolution sixty times a second. I'm not saying we won't get there, I'm saying probably not within this decade.
The reality is, the only advantage raytracing has over rasterization is its ability to compute reflection, refraction, and some atmospheric effects (e.g. a spotlight or a laser causing a visible halo in its path) with "physical" accuracy. The capabilities of rasterization have grown leaps and bounds since the 1960s, roughly linearly in proportion to available hardware.
Purists be damned. A hybrid of each technique utilizing what it's good at (raytracing for reflection, refraction, and atmospheric halos, rasterization for drawing the physical objects, "photon mapping" for advanced reflection and refraction effects) is likely the best approach here.
Badmouthing people who disagree with you by calling them idiots and ignorant of science is called Ad Hominem, and isn't a great way to get taken seriously.
Here's the problem with the First Cause argument for the existence of God. First of all, we observe that Stuff Exists. Then we take as given the axiom "Nothing in this universe happens without something else happening to make it happen". We reason from there to say that God must exist, because only God can do things that are not bound by the laws of the universe. QED.
Now, ignoring the "Stuff Exists" observation -- which is only as true as our senses are reliable -- there are two assumptions here that are problematic.
1. Nothing happens without something else making it happen -- On a nanoscopic level we can observe particle-antiparticle pairs blipping in and out of existence for no reason all the time. It's entirely possible that a "first cause" is entirely natural and totally unremarkable.
2. Only God can do things that are not bound by the laws of the universe -- Why can't the Universe or some proto-event "causing" the universe be its own cause? Why can only God and nothing else exist without a cause?
No, the only thing the First Cause argument shows is that either (a) something exists that can exist without a cause or (b) infinite regress is possible. If (a) is true, there is no reason why that thing cannot be a non-god.
Some people try to get around this problem by defining the entity in (a) to be God. But in that case, you've effectively emasculated God to the point where there's virtually no way to connect that entity to the Triune God of Christianity.
A universe without God is not "magical" and "idiotic" just because you say it is. That's just more Ad Hominem bullshit.
Plenty of really really smart, intellectual people, people who have every reason to want God to exist, also spend a lot of time doing hard thinking, and eventually it dawns on them that we live in a universe that pretty much acts like either God isn't there, or just doesn't care.
That is just because there hasn't been any substantial changes in Linux in over 10 years. The hell?
So, all the current driver support so that it's now a piece of cake to install and configure Linux on just about any machine, the thousands of graphical apps that run natively and well in Linux, impeccable compatibility support for M$ documents... all that is... insubstantial?
No matter how hard you try to make it look Desktopy it is still a server OS and it acts like such. I'm afraid you're going to have to explain that a bit more. Aside from running some legacy platform games, everything I did on my old windoze box, I can do in Debian, and more often than not, easier and faster too. I can also run Apache2 in the background and not have it negatively impact ANY of my twelve running GUI apps. Oh, and not only that but I'm more or less hacker- and virus-immune, and did I mention I've been up for 3 months now without needing a reboot? In the testing distro?
How does any of that make Linux "not a desktop OS"? Sounds like a "whatever you want OS" to me. Can't say the same for windoze.
That's their FIRST MO. Their other MO continues off 1 and 2:
3. Keep it on the air LONG after most of the original writers and/or actors have left the show or died and it stops being a quality show and becomes exhaustingly self-referential and formulaic. 4. Profit as long as the die-hard fans from #2 keep tuning in and telling themselves that it's still a good show.
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Attempting to provide alternate explanations without testable hypotheses are not good science. Just so we're clear, every single testable hypothesis produced by creationist scientists has been refuted by experiment. NOBODY has ever demonstrated that information can come from *any* other source than a mind. Um, maybe not to your liking, or to your narrow definition of "information" and "mind". DNA is simply code triplets for amino acids. It could conceivably be called information, but in reality it's just a simple chemical isomorphism. Further. it has been shown experimentally that bacteria can easily re-evolve the lactase enzyme when that gene is removed.
A subtle but nuanced result of Godel's Incompleteness theorem is that what you call "minds" are no more powerful than sufficiently advanced computer programs. Creationists have produced zero evidence, beyond philosophical musings, that a mind needs anything to function other than the neural activity in the brain, and the fact that brain damage can effectively destroy a mind lends HUGE weight to the theory that a physical brain contains everything necessary to produce minds.
Further, it is quite easy to write computer programs that readily "discover" new information in mounds of raw data. This is called data mining. And spare me the creationist rhetoric about "who wrote the computer program" -- computer programs are NOT biological organisms, though it is known by computer scientists that selection over incremental changes to computer algorithms can produce more complex, adapted algorithms.
No, there is ZERO reason to even suggest that information can only be produced supernaturally. The hypothesis itself is totally unfalsifiable because we have no way of even knowing that the supernatural exists, let alone making absolutist truth-claims about it. This is pseudoscience of the worst kind.
And please stop using the term "evolutionist" if you want to be taken seriously. It's a baseless framing device used by creationists in order to try and place it on an "even keel" with creationism.
First of all, crazy people and people who tell lies sometimes tell the truth, and are sometimes generally good people. Second of all, Lewis intentionally omits the possibility that the gospel accounts are incorrect. Either the gospel authors could have lying to deceive, or they could have been genuinely mistaken.
Also, even conservative scholars grudgingly agree that the "woman caught in adultery" story is probably apocryphal.
However, I will grant that it IS perfectly sane (though not necessarily correct) for a layperson to refuse to accept a scientific theory when he or she does not understand or trust the evidence.
Yes.
The way I understand it, the longer dimension was typically the "long" dimension and the shorter one was considered the "wide" dimension. So I believe you, sir, are correct, and these so-called "scientists" are horribly, horribly wrong.
And I can't think of a single application where a CMOS transistor is required, where a vacuum tube wouldn't do the trick.
DC Transformers can't exist because transformers rely on the principle of electromagnetic induction, which requires a constantly changing magnetic field, which is a property DC does not exhibit by virtue of being constant.
Step-up DC transformers would require an inverter (to convert to AC), followed by an AC transformer, followed a full-wave rectifier (to convert back to DC). Want to calculate the minimum efficiency lost on each step? Yeah, me neither.
The problem is the "controversy" only exists where people feel their religious beliefs are threatened by biology. Certainly there is no controversy in the scientific community (as long as you consider that ID "science"... isn't).
Smartass. I meant the two separate automobile lines.
Except the Escalade. Don't get me wrong, I respect your right to own one, but I reserve the right to say "fucking Escalade" from within my Civic if I see you driving one.
What's running on the XBox?
Is OP being facetious or an idiot?
It's not a knock on photon mapping. It's an honest look at the feasibility "pure" raytracing, drawing on my knowledge both from having written my own limited raytracer and having used POV-Ray (among others) for well on 10 years now. In fact, I like the effects of photon mapping immensely, but it isn't raytracing.
The cheats that must be enabled for rasterization-based reflection and refraction can be overcome simply and elegantly using raytracing algorithms. So rather than argue for rendering method purism, which forces us to look at these solutions as "cheats", I think a multi-tiered approach augmenting known, well-tested rendering methods (like rasterization) with the strong suits of other methods (like raytracing and photon mapping) to overcome its weaknesses is the strongest solution.
Personally, I'd love to see realtime raytracing see the light of day because I recognize the math behind it as more "pure" than rasterization. Of course there are several algorithmic hurdles preventing pure realtime raytracing from seeing the light of day, unless you start to hyperparallelize the operations in a dedicated GPU, and even then there are obstacles; in the worst cases, a ray can bounce along an infinite path, dividing into multiple segments as it goes, leading to infinitely branched recursion until some heuristic or another cuts it short. And as we all know, "heuristic" is a fancy word for "cheat".
Further, raytracing cannot handle advanced refraction and reflection effects, like the surface of water causing uneven illumination at the bottom of a pool, or a bright red ball casting a red spot on a white piece of paper, without preemptive "photon mapping", which is another cheat.
In short, we have not been able improve upon the original raytracing algorithms without "cheating reality". Modern raytracing that includes photon mapping is a hybrid anyway. So the raytracing purists really have nothing to stand on until there's enough hardware to accurately calculate the paths of quadrillions of photons at high resolution sixty times a second. I'm not saying we won't get there, I'm saying probably not within this decade.
The reality is, the only advantage raytracing has over rasterization is its ability to compute reflection, refraction, and some atmospheric effects (e.g. a spotlight or a laser causing a visible halo in its path) with "physical" accuracy. The capabilities of rasterization have grown leaps and bounds since the 1960s, roughly linearly in proportion to available hardware.
Purists be damned. A hybrid of each technique utilizing what it's good at (raytracing for reflection, refraction, and atmospheric halos, rasterization for drawing the physical objects, "photon mapping" for advanced reflection and refraction effects) is likely the best approach here.
Badmouthing people who disagree with you by calling them idiots and ignorant of science is called Ad Hominem, and isn't a great way to get taken seriously.
Here's the problem with the First Cause argument for the existence of God. First of all, we observe that Stuff Exists. Then we take as given the axiom "Nothing in this universe happens without something else happening to make it happen". We reason from there to say that God must exist, because only God can do things that are not bound by the laws of the universe. QED.
Now, ignoring the "Stuff Exists" observation -- which is only as true as our senses are reliable -- there are two assumptions here that are problematic.
1. Nothing happens without something else making it happen -- On a nanoscopic level we can observe particle-antiparticle pairs blipping in and out of existence for no reason all the time. It's entirely possible that a "first cause" is entirely natural and totally unremarkable.
2. Only God can do things that are not bound by the laws of the universe -- Why can't the Universe or some proto-event "causing" the universe be its own cause? Why can only God and nothing else exist without a cause?
No, the only thing the First Cause argument shows is that either (a) something exists that can exist without a cause or (b) infinite regress is possible. If (a) is true, there is no reason why that thing cannot be a non-god.
Some people try to get around this problem by defining the entity in (a) to be God. But in that case, you've effectively emasculated God to the point where there's virtually no way to connect that entity to the Triune God of Christianity.
A universe without God is not "magical" and "idiotic" just because you say it is. That's just more Ad Hominem bullshit.
Plenty of really really smart, intellectual people, people who have every reason to want God to exist, also spend a lot of time doing hard thinking, and eventually it dawns on them that we live in a universe that pretty much acts like either God isn't there, or just doesn't care.
Unless you're a Deist, which is, for all practical purposes, an Atheist.
So, all the current driver support so that it's now a piece of cake to install and configure Linux on just about any machine, the thousands of graphical apps that run natively and well in Linux, impeccable compatibility support for M$ documents... all that is... insubstantial? No matter how hard you try to make it look Desktopy it is still a server OS and it acts like such. I'm afraid you're going to have to explain that a bit more. Aside from running some legacy platform games, everything I did on my old windoze box, I can do in Debian, and more often than not, easier and faster too. I can also run Apache2 in the background and not have it negatively impact ANY of my twelve running GUI apps. Oh, and not only that but I'm more or less hacker- and virus-immune, and did I mention I've been up for 3 months now without needing a reboot? In the testing distro?
How does any of that make Linux "not a desktop OS"? Sounds like a "whatever you want OS" to me. Can't say the same for windoze.
Any anti-stem cell activist that is not also anti-IVF is a hypocrite.
Three guesses as to where this pearl of wisdom is from:
"No one, after having tasted old wine, wishes for new, for he says the old is better."
That's their FIRST MO. Their other MO continues off 1 and 2:
3. Keep it on the air LONG after most of the original writers and/or actors have left the show or died and it stops being a quality show and becomes exhaustingly self-referential and formulaic.
4. Profit as long as the die-hard fans from #2 keep tuning in and telling themselves that it's still a good show.
Comedy central *IS* picking up BBS and airing it, one episode at a time. That was part of the plan all along.
And his name was Lars, not Art.
The Internet doesn't count, silly.