1. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172524 by sent2null on April 29, 2008 at 4:55 pm

Regarding the comment time outs.

I'd pull out my hair if I had any over this issue, in the early days I'd lose comments due to time outs more often than is acceptable, but I have since come into the reflexive habit of doing a "ctrl A , ctrl C" just before submitting the comment. The timeout on the session is amazingly (seems like 5 minutes) short and as someone mentioned, for this site (at least the commenting system) is not really needed.

2. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172520 by sent2null on April 29, 2008 at 4:50 pm

How any human being could accept this madness inspired by religious insanity any where in the world and explain it away as a part of "culture" that needs to be respected in any way is beyond me.

Stone age behavior based on misogyny, sexism, ignorance and stupidity rolled up into one. I am sitting here literally and viscerally enraged, but what can I do? What can we truly do to shake the disease that makes the actions taken by this "father" from the minds of future generations? It is a sad and pathetic story, a killing over nothing but the belief that some sick twisted religiously sourced concept of "honor" is being upheld...and a mother who refused to accept it in hiding for her own life after she divorced the "father" who killed her daughter.

3. Science Debate 2008

Comment #161149 by sent2null on April 15, 2008 at 12:37 am

Kintaro_crab

To use blockquotes the correct syntax is:

< blockquote> stuff here < / blockquote>

(remove spaces before "b" and it should render as)

stuff here

The start and close tags must match (in your example you had a typo on the "qoute" start tag..which is the wrong tag to boot!)

4. 'Expelled' ripped off Harvard's 'Inner Life of the Cell' animation

Comment #159249 by sent2null on April 11, 2008 at 6:36 pm

Oh I knew I was in for some fun reading when the email started with :

"To the anti-ID community which is giving XVIVO support in our ideological battle against the microcephalic apostates of "Intelligent Design""

I laughed uncontrollably at that bold section, the rest was just icing. The record of the ID-iots plagiarism is plain for all to see.

5. Commentary: Democrats finally getting religion on religion

Comment #157945 by sent2null on April 9, 2008 at 8:00 pm

RE: 23. Comment #157919 by Swedgin on April 9, 2008 at 6:27 pm

Swedgin Now that I see the image of Ian McShane playing the absolutely riveting antagononist from the HBO defunct drama Deadwood. Your name makes sense, may it be a reference to the characters name (Al Swerengen) as it was pronounced by the amiable but feisty Chinese pig keeper and periodic human body disposal technician, Woo?

If so, my hats off to you for having been a fan. I had considered it one of the two best dramas (the other being "The Wire") on HBO during its time until it was so abruptly canceled. I gather the musical and poetic delivery of the 18th century prose was simply far above the heads of most 21st century American audiences. An absolute shame.

6. Pastor attacks scientist's talk

Comment #154858 by sent2null on April 3, 2008 at 8:31 pm

babrock

I was convinced by my own enlightnement that the biggest barrier to people realizing that there are no gods is in their fear of the purposeless life they feel they will lead if there are no gods. Forget the fact that they are in fact atheists to belief in every other God or variant of a God that are believed to be real by Billions of other humans. Their fear is rooted in a personal despair that is summed up simply by what is the meaning of my life now?

Few people sit back to ask them this question when not buffeted by the context of a theistic belief system. For a theist, "knowing" that there is a cosmic puppet master in the sky is actually a comfort. It allows them to explain away the capricious acts of people and nature as part of "god's will" without probing deeper. It takes energy to probe these questions and you and I and many others who have prized rational thinking have realized. As with all forms of energy, the cost of expenditure retards the act...especially when the energy requires deep thought piecing together knowledge from seemingly disparate areas of human endeavor.

I can not say I would be an atheist/strict scientific agnostic today if it were not for my innate desire to seek knowledge in multiple areas. I was reading Encyclopedia's for fun at 7, I was programming in basic at 11, for me it was natural and normal to seek constant mental stimulation, but the cold fact is most people aren't like me or us in this hunger for knowledge.

Their ability then to synthesize a world view that is correlated more closely to "the truth" of what this all means is necessarily much reduced compared to us. This is true even if we as individuals have only a partial understanding of the many areas that we've investigated. I wrote a blog post that describes the importance of mastering multiple mountains that explains the advantage of acquiring multi-disciplinary data points. I think the only way to lead our friends and family who are steeped in the world of hocus pocus into the light is by slow careful exposure to the wonders of knowledge from the many different areas that we have acquired. Trying to point out the ridiculousness of their views directly doesn't work no matter how innocuously we present the argument (as Dawkin's IMO is such an expert at doing...most times. ;)), the shield of faith (and fear) is strong. I've embarked on the task with about a half dozen friends who are slowly coming around (I know because they now seek my out to ask questions and "debate") lucky for them I am a very patient teacher. ;)

As for the OP, oh well...

My blog post:
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2008/02/mastering-multiple-mountains.html

7. Beware the Believers

Comment #153405 by sent2null on April 1, 2008 at 12:59 pm

419. Comment #153350 by Steve Zara on April 1, 2008 at 12:12 pm
avatarComment #153115 by agg

That is actually rather beautiful. I want one!

I'll have to second Steve's opinion. The evolving "jesus fish" with bling does look good!

Unfortunately, all the actual jewelry that I could find with a google search returned items that were amazingly obnoxious, with a huge "darwin" spelled out in the core. As seen here...

http://www.prankplace.com/darwinfish.htm?KBID=1163

Not nearly as pleasing as agg's rendition. You could try getting http://www.jacobandcojewelry.com/">Jacob the Jeweler to craft one for you Steve, at a price. ;)

8. Beware the Believers

Comment #152999 by sent2null on March 31, 2008 at 8:21 pm

RE: 382. Comment #152769 by Spinoza on March 31, 2008 at 2:16 pm
avatar

It is demonstrated here among individuals who prize them selves as rationalist and empiricist.

Just noticed this little gem of an oxymoron. Not meaning to insult the person who said it, but that is a contradiction in terms.

That would be me Spinoza, and yes I was using the colloquial version ( I am an engineer not a philosopher!) of the term "empiricist" but you still couldn't help pushing the pedantry.

oh well!

9. Beware the Believers

Comment #152697 by sent2null on March 31, 2008 at 11:12 am

Re: 358. Comment #152472 by khafre78 on March 31, 2008 at 5:52 am

Wow this is still going on..Khafre78, I pointed out a few pages ago that the misunderstandings are due to different grasp of the grammatical and cultural devices of hip hop/rap but people still look for conspiracy theories. Rather than question their understanding of the art, they assume they "get it" and conclude that their interpretation must be right. Though it seems the views backing "pro rational" seem to be dominating the ID conspiracy views, it is ironic to an extreme that so many stick to convoluted explanations of out of context and misunderstood aspects of the video/rap to create their theories...just like what the religious do.

This brings a very interesting point to the for, that all it takes is the slightest out of context read of a bit of real data for the human imagination to run free beyond empirical evidence into the land of unrestrained hypothesis. It is demonstrated here among individuals who prize them selves as rationalist and empiricist. It should not surprise us one bit that so much of the world is steeped in religious belief if we rationalists find it so difficult to gain consensus on something as material as deciphering poetry. It would be nice for the author to come out and state their intent once and for all just to put this discussion to rest, but I gather they may not even be aware of the beast that they have stirred from its slumber!

10. Beware the Believers

Comment #151974 by sent2null on March 29, 2008 at 8:12 pm

start PSA


Reading the reaction to this piece of rap satire brings a few things to mind. First, there seem to be several views on its purpose all correlated to the various levels of misunderstanding on the part of the viewer of the genre of rap.

I'd like to say to all who think this video is planted by a pro ID shill, that they are wrong. The only qualifications I can bring to back my assertion are that I was listening to rap before it was rap. (hip hop) It just so happens I was born and raised in NY where hip hop was invented during the late 70's to 80's, I experienced the full flowering of the genre. Having been the first of the MTV generation my musical tastes are expansive, from Liszt to LL Cool Jay. ;) I've also dabbled in putting together my own raps as a teen and college student, just for fun. I am sure many of the viewers who were raised during the same time as I can attest to having done the same. That said, this rap and video is quite clever in its presentation and I can see how the rapid delivery of the lyrics at some points could be cause of the misunderstandings of the uninitiated. However, there isn't a single area that can be even implied to back a pro ID view when analyzed in context with the rest of the song and video. The need to interpret the work in context is a hallmark of many forms of lyrical poetry, it was true of Shakespeare's poetry, it was true of Dante's poetry and is true of modern day rap today. It is easy to get the wrong meaning out of it if you miss the associated context and/or you aren't familiar with the common rap devices (grammatical styling..etc).

I suggest to all the confused, a study of the lyrical and symbolic(the chains with dollar signs have nothing to do with the scientific method representing dogma or having an agenda as TwiddleFlare stated earlier) devices commonly used in the genre, after that you can watch it again with the scales of ignorance pealed from your eyes and the result will leave no doubt as to which side it defends and which side it defames. If you understand it and you are a rationalist , you will find it funny. If you understand it and you are a creationist, you will hate it.

The few claims I've seen that this form of expression have no merit simply because some viewers lack understanding of its intent are unwise. Most of us had a hard time getting around Shakespearean prose the first time we came across it but the patient among us didn't call it rubbish and say it made no sense simply because we could not understand it. We learned the grammatical devices of the Bard and teased out the meaning of his prose. Though modern day rap is not Shakespeare it is similar in that complex elements are relayed using unfamiliar grammatical devices and clever metaphors, but like Shakespeare these devices have a stable structure that allows well written raps to be easily decoded by those that know how. ;)

end PSA

11. Contribute to science directly by volunteering some of your computer's processing power!

Comment #148364 by sent2null on March 22, 2008 at 6:31 pm

I had the client running for the SETI search since 2002 but I had to remove it from my laptop after the update to a new version which caused unwelcome instability in my system. I might install this new client and give it a go, hopefully the bugs are out. I'd probably contribute cycles to the pulsar search this time around rather than SETI.

12. Discussion on PZ Myers being expelled from Expelled

Comment #148343 by sent2null on March 22, 2008 at 5:13 pm

Steve Zara wrote:

I was disappointed. It is seriously weird at the molecular scale; it is certainly not mechanical, with myosin walking along actin fibres like Charlie Chaplin.

Wow you are hard to please! As I said the reality is certainly a lot more surreal than the animation but they need to get these ideas across in baby steps. How would it have looked had it been a mass of jiggling cloud like entities, it would have looked more like a painting by someone tripping off acid than an animation of cell interactions. ;)

In a world were most people are certain that some invisible sky God is controlling these things it is important to try and quantify these interactions in some physical way that can be absorbed before it is thrown out as rubbish, then we can refine the view to the more astonishing truth in time. Change by the inch, don't you agree?

13. Discussion on PZ Myers being expelled from Expelled

Comment #148328 by sent2null on March 22, 2008 at 4:31 pm

Steve Zara wrote: 63. Comment #148225 by Steve Zara on March 22, 2008 at 11:35

They are certainly "jerry-rigged", but they aren't clumsy. Many of the processes are amazingly efficient, as would be expected after billions of years of evolution.

The way things are shown in the video isn't really efficient or streamlined, as that is just not what happens on the scale of atoms. We really can't imagine what it is like, with molecules rushing around and spinning at incredible speeds. At room temperature, sound in water travels at around 1.5 km per second. That gives a guide as to how fast molecules are moving, and cells aren't kilometers in size, they are on a scale around 100 million times smaller.

Steve,

Which parts of the animation in particular do you think are dangerously inaccurate? I doubt that there is much inaccuracy in the process of transcription, or of protein synthesis. The shape of the generated polypepide chains constrain how they interact with other molecules in the system.

Sure, there isn't as much space in the real cell as shown in the animation and the creators admitted this, sure atoms are more like little magnets in sense, interacting through their fields (the electron clouds) than anything else and that is difficult to quantify with the ball like entities shown in the animation but how much abstraction of the imagery to get the gist of the process across to the viewer, is too much abstraction ?

The animators had to get a balance between trying to illustrate interactions and trying to show the probabilistic nature of the constituent molecules. It is difficult to do this, especially if you consider that to the laymen , the idea of little particles as atoms is still very popular. Sure you and I, and others who have studied areas of the fields in question realize it is a bit more complex but the facts remain that the processes do happen more often than not as illustrated, even if what is doing them are vibrating and oscillating entities of electron clouds and atomic nuclei that we can't hope to visualize. ;)

Maybe they should do another video where they try to be a bit more abstract in their presentation, it would look a lot more crazy (read: surreal) but at least it would give laymen a more accurate view of the chaos of energy and interaction that gives rise to cellular processes than this first video shows.

What do you think?

14. Discussion on PZ Myers being expelled from Expelled

Comment #148055 by sent2null on March 21, 2008 at 10:41 pm

What I find most egregious about these tactics to stifle the presentation of opposing views by the religious is that it indicates on their part a lack of faith. If it is true that their position is the correct one, then there would be no need to stack the deck to "win", their truth would naturally arise. However, over and over what we see , is that reason is presented, an appeal to the empirical results is made by advocates of reason and the advocates of religion must writhe and obfuscate in order to get their "truth" disingenuously presented before the data which without coercion by science, always points away from their views when objectively analyzed.

Quite ironic considering they are the ones supposedly with divine intervention on their side.

15. Discussion on PZ Myers being expelled from Expelled

Comment #148051 by sent2null on March 21, 2008 at 10:20 pm

11. Comment #148046 by BicycleRepairMan on March 21, 2008 at 9:52 pm wrote:

In other words, I assume the "walker" etc is actually more or less "pushed" around by chemical reactions.. in the video it moves like a large mammal or something.(But really, I'm just talking out of my ass here, I have no clue, it just seems a little far-fetched to me)

The second link I provided in the first post, mentioned this precise animation license taken by the creators.

http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/6850.html

Excerpt:
"The reality is that all that stuff that's going on in each cell is so tightly packed together that if we were to put every detail into every shot, you wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees or know what you were even looking at. One of the most common things we did, then, was to strip it apart and add space where there isn't really that much space."

The Myosin motoring along is precisely that, the chemical cycle of the components do indeed mechanically activate. They may be bumping around with other cellular components while doing it , but they do indeed perform locomotion (along the bound actin filament). Here is a separate video (also from Harvard) that illustrates the myosin animation.

http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/anim_myosin.html

Ultimately, the cell is a big machine, where these bio molecules are the cogs and gears, binding an unbinding as dictated by the underlying chemical affinities.

Regards,

16. Discussion on PZ Myers being expelled from Expelled

Comment #148033 by sent2null on March 21, 2008 at 9:19 pm

The video mentioned straight from Harvard's site, it is awesome. The motor protein's walking gave me chills (in a completely non religious way) ;)




http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html

There is a version set to music (great) and a narrated version that describes the processes animated. (transcription, protein construction, motor proteins...etc.)

Edit:

For the CGI buffs among our number, the following link presents details of the creation of the animation.

http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/6850.html


Enjoy!

17. New Atheists Are Not Great

Comment #145633 by sent2null on March 17, 2008 at 8:40 pm

Funny how they take a pot shot at Hitchen's statement "religion poisons everything". They are simply playing a game of semantics, they leave out the context of that statement which clarifies and refines it. Taken by itself it is obviously controversial since it is presented without qualification...but there was qualification.

It was at this point in my reading the article that I could stomach no more and just had to stop reading. Disingenuous debate tactics make me livid, bold intellectual dishonesty to bolster a view over the facts. The religious have no argument so rather than refute the points of fact presented by atheists and agnostics (which can't be refuted since they are fact) they instead attack the presentation, or present a myriad of out of context quotes only to appear to win a debate as opposed to put forward the truth.

Sad people indeed.

18. Richard Dawkins on The Alan Colmes Show

Comment #144634 by sent2null on March 16, 2008 at 1:41 pm

Glad to see that the right wing bastion of twisted views , Faux News is at least allowing humanists a forum on their shows. I could have done without those immense commercial breaks but having Dawkin's really let his teeth out a bit when those callers started with their nonsense was a treat.

Alan Colmes plays Lou Costello to Sean Hannity's evil twisted, Bud Abbot on their television show and he's usually bulldozed in almost every argument when he tries to present centrist views (Hannity is so far to the right, to him centrist views are leftist!) In almost every Fox show, a strong right leaning demogogue is put against a weak centrist or leftist to ensure the right always comes out on top, if not in preponderance of facts but simply by the preponderance of rapid fire delivered bullshit. Good to see on the radio, Colmes has his own forum to provide the sane people in America something to listen to if they choose to listen to Faux News. (For the life of me I don't understand how any one could listen to such obvious right leaning propaganda journalism.)


Unbelievable that people are still boldly questioning (as that first lunatic did) if there are transitional fossils.

19. Bulldozers tear down giant religious teapot

Comment #138894 by sent2null on March 4, 2008 at 11:36 pm

Religious police raided the compound twice last month and nearly 50 of its members are due in an Islamic court this week, charged with deviation.

If this isn't proof that organized religion IS fascism I don't know what is.

Unbelievable. One set of crackpots going crackpot over another crackpots use of a (now cracked) pot!

20. The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required

Comment #134377 by sent2null on February 27, 2008 at 4:47 pm

It was working, they have been inundated by so many requests that the servers went down. This is a good and a bad thing, guess I'll have to wait a few more days yet to see it in action.

Thanks to the person that mentioned tolweb though, that also is quite an informative site.

21. The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required

Comment #133836 by sent2null on February 26, 2008 at 11:16 pm

26. Comment #133812 by ClemIsMe on February 26, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Have I mentioned lately that I love the internet, and I love being alive here and now?

so so true, I've stated this often in the last 10 years, we are living at a most revolutionary time in human history it behooves us to embrace the significance of this moment and enjoy it!

22. The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required

Comment #133827 by sent2null on February 26, 2008 at 11:04 pm

I stumbled across the EOL project some time early last year and was quite excited by what appeared to be an amazingly intuitive way to describe the relationship of all living things to all other living things. The use of animations is key to bringing the experience of exploring life coupled with a very well designed site could make this take off in a way that wikipedia pages on living creatures may not especially if experts take the time to update the pages with the latest information.

Though wikipedia has taken quite a few hits in the press recently due to the "many edit" feature of most pages, the technical articles are extremely refined and errors in them rarely last a few minutes let alone hours or days as they do in less technical subjects or subjects with less viewership. The last time I visited the EOL site about a month ago, it was still under construction so I am glad that the first 30,000 pages are going up in 2 days!!! woo hoo!...looks like I'll have yet another online destination where I can feed myself first rate knowledge.

Gotta love what this internet has wrought! To think that just 20 years ago I would have had to go to a library to get access to information as detailed as what will hopefully be in EOL, today you can get it at a keyboard at home, your laptop or your Iphone ...pretty much any where you can get net access. I vividly remember spending hours behind books in the libraries of my University as an undergrad, reading papers from mathematics journals , the ACM and Siigraph, the IEEE ..today my hard drive is filled with pdf's instead. ;) Will this pervasive access to factual information actually help us expedite the demise of mysticism and religious nonsense and help us avoid world calamity in the form of increased global warming???? It sure looks likely..hmmm.. Sounds like the source of another blog post. ;)

Regards,

23. Richard Dawkins on five of his favorite books

Comment #133819 by sent2null on February 26, 2008 at 10:07 pm

These late days working have me neglecting RD.net, and now we have a favorite books thread that I almost missed! I need a vacation!

My 5 favorites in non fiction and fiction respectively from most to least favorite:

1) Murray Gel Man: The Quark and the Jaguar
2) Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time
3) Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel (still reading but placing higher every day!)
4) Richard Feynman: QED
5) Stephen Rogers Peck: Drawing the Head and Hands

The Quark and the Jaguar does an excellent job of explaining complexity , how it is defined and measured and how it evolves. This book is most responsible for spurring a deep desire in me to read deeply into other areas of science. When I read it I was an undergraduate in electrical engineering and the experience led me to embrace the possibility of making novel and innovative realizations in my area by studying the results of other disciplines. This embrace of multi disciplinary studies quickly led to my disappearing faith in the mid 90's as I became convinced that religious belief was a man made band aid against the random fiat of a dispassionate world.

I read A Brief History of Time again as an early college undergraduate, one moment I remember reading vividly is the passage where Hawking explains that the sum total of energy density in the Universe is zero...it sent a chill up my spine (I was on the train going to school) the explanation opened my eyes to so much more possibility than I had up to that time come to.

Guns, Germs and Steel I am partly (first 100 pages) into (I've been reading it for over a year now so busy am I with work!) It is another grand synthesis, the weaving of ideas that I myself have had but put together in such a way that it must be the way it happened. It is turning out to be an excellent book, highly recommended.

Richard Feynman, the bongo playing, practical joke playing, lock picking genius..gave us QED, the book and the eponymous grand explanation of the quantum theory of light. The explanation of path integrals, sum over histories stays with me to this day and is a recurring mental structure in my understanding of other topics that have similar mathematical structure. I still vividly remember his simple explanation of the thin film refraction that we all have seen when looking at oil mixed puddles of water after a rainy day.

Stephen Rogers Peck wrote a technical art instruction text that was my bible for over 5 years. As a self taught illustrator it taught me the hard details of human anatomy and provided the ability for morphing those anatomical insights into the drawing of other animals and fantastic creatures which I still possess (but rarely practice) today.


1) Dante Aligieri: The Inferno
2) Alex Haley: Roots
3) Issac Azimov: The Foundation Series
4) George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
5) Stephen King: The Stand

Fiction comments:

The most marked up book in my library is Dante's Inferno. The triple line rhymes of the prose bring me extreme delight reciting. (to the chagrin of friends who aren't nearly as much a fan of the book as am I)The concept of hell as designed (yes designed) by dark and middle aged Christianity is made manifest in this book, a curiosity of the book is the discretization of the punishments for evil. It seems that God and the Devil are very much bureaucrats, employing a work force (angels/demons) and segregating sins based on percieve severity (matching up perfectly with dark and middle aged cultural norms of course) I always found the bureaucratic segmentation of hell in the book incredibly ironic.

Alex Haley's Roots was a book I didn't intend to read, I had noticed it for some time before I decided to read the first few pages..before I knew it I was rapt, the writing is brilliant and vivid describing the horrors of American slavery as it ravaged the lives of generations. A must read book for anyone who wishes to experience the depths of human despair stoked occasionally by the dull coals of hope.

Issac Azimov's Foundation series has sci-fi in it that is a bit dated by today's standards (personal nuclear devices???) but the grand vision is absolutely brilliant. The concept of psycho history is one that resonates deeply with my current non fiction book Guns, Germs and Steel (3 on the non fiction list so far) I wonder if it is possible to synthesize a mathematical description of such complex phenomena??? Prognostications aside, the books were amazing and inspired a flood of creativity in my drawings at the time.

The last 8 years have had me thinking about George Orwell's vision of a totalitarian future dominated by thought police more and more. As an American citizen I watched my country go from the wild exuberance of the late 90's, to the utter shock of 9/11, to the resolute and rightly placed anger in Afghanistan to being duped by the obvious lies of an administration that cared more about crony ism than lives (Iraqi and American lives) The amazing use of words by the right wing media during this propaganda hype was taken directly from the play book of Big Brother. Use words to manipulate, to control, to misdirect...new speak was mastered by the republican administration and used artfully to get even democrats to bow in unison to the illegal horrible crimes of the Bush II administration.

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

That wraps up the last 7 years in the US as commanded by the republicans.

Finally, Steven King's The Stand sticks in my memory as a well paced mix of magic and science fiction. I always enjoyed King's ability to mix the two genre's , sometimes brilliantly (The Darktower Series, The Deadzone ) sometimes only so so (Thinner,The Dark Half). The Stand is one of the brilliant ones in my book, a giant book I stuffed into my backback (along with my quantum mechanics, electronics and calculus texts) to take on my trip into and out of the city as an undergrad. I devoured the book in little over a week this way, I look forward to reading it again when I get some time.


In other news, I've recently started a blog. Currently it is heavy on my musing regarding my current software engineering tasks but I'll be adding more general posts as I move into business mode. Feel free to stop by and comment, my erudite and always sagacious friends at RD.net have an exclusive invite.

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/

Regards,

24. Pakistan blocks YouTube over blasphemous video

Comment #133218 by sent2null on February 25, 2008 at 10:27 pm

The funny thing about site "blocking" to IT geeks like myself is that it is rarely ever done properly. If you want to block a site to an entire region you have to do it at *every* inbound facing router port (ie filter the offending incoming IP address responses). Since many countries have dozens to hundreds to thousands of router lines into their countries this is impractical to do. The fastest way to block is to remove the DNS name to IP address mapping in their incoming DNS servers ( a much smaller set of machines that are usually governed in a known location) this is effective in masking access to the site but doesn't truly "block" it. Simply running a ping on the DNS name (or having someone outside your country do it for you) can get you the IP address of the source server, this will allow immediate access for "blocking" that only involves DNS. (unless again every incoming router has that single IP on a block list which never happens) Funny thing is even the IP route blocking trick is not as effective as it was in the past when one IP did indeed map back to a site, these days multiple public IP's can map back to a site hosted on a distributed cluster, so getting any one of the IP addresses allows access.

So, enterprising users in those countries can get to pretty much any "blocked" site if they use the right tricks (IP not DNS)...you lose the user friendly domain name "youtube" and replace it by the universal: 208.65.153.253 which should route into pretty much every large country in multiple locations. ;)

25. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #133215 by sent2null on February 25, 2008 at 10:02 pm

that line about evangelical atheism nearly knocked me out my chair with laughter.

and that's all I have to say about that!

26. Cutting Edge: Baby Bible Bashers

Comment #130558 by sent2null on February 20, 2008 at 9:02 pm

As I listen to these people speak with the horribly contorted drawl that they call the English language, I wonder if there is some correlation between proper enunciation of words and intelligence.

I am pretty much convinced that there is some correlation to be divined which will reveal that those lacking a facility for plastic verbal enunciation or mimicry of regional or individual accents in their mother tongue are mentally deprived in some way.

I don't mean to go all ad hominem on the subjects of the video but it amazes me that the people that tend to most vociferously promulgate the conservative or religious views speak as if they have balls of wax secured in their jowls. This is not just because they are from the South which in many ways is about 50 years behind the rest of the country as far as cultural evolution is concerned. Even the so called smart folks who stand up for "intelligent design" and other fact devoid and faith inspired nonsense tend to speak as if they barely mastered the art of producing word from tongue in an eloquent manner. There must be something behind it...

(Tongue firmly planted in cheek)

;)

27. Potentially Habitable Planets Are Common, Study Says

Comment #129944 by sent2null on February 19, 2008 at 7:48 pm

As I read this article I thought of an old idea I had concerning the evolution of planetary systems. We know that the stuff of which we and our planet are made is composed of mostly heavy elements fused into existence in the cores of the first few generation of stars that went Nova prior to the formation of our system 5 billion years ago.

This tells us that the chemistry of our system is intimately tied to the composition and organization of the previous star clusters and molecular clouds that existed in the region where our system was given birth. It should be possible to calculate probabilities for the percentage composition of various elements based on assumptions of what existed in the previous generation of stars and how those stars gave birth to the "dust" from which latter generation systems like ours formed.

It should be possible to study the many billions of stages of star formation we see (and through spectroscopy are able to make detailed measures of elemental composition) in clusters all over our galaxy to determine a measure of the generated "seed" matter that will result once the stars in the chosen system evolve. We know a great deal about the fusion of heavy elements in star cores, I think enough to come up with estimates of how much stuff is spewed into the surrounding space. By combining these measures with the knowledge of the existing surrounding stars mass and nebular composition we should be able to make a better approximation of the composition of any planets that will form in the vicinity of a selected star in a chosen cluster. Knowing the composition we should also be able to determine the type (rocky or gaseous) of planets most likely to evolve in a given region from the previous elemental composition. It sounds like a mountain of a problem but it seems to me the seeds for a solution lie all around us at various stages of development. It will just take some diligent investigation and correlation to divine out the patterns.

Any astronomers know if any such programs are in progress? It would be really cool if one day we had a planet formation calculator that could be used to evolve systems given an initial state of molecular hydrogen , forming stars and matter from previous generation stars. Maybe some enterprising graduate student reading this will answer the call!

28. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #129129 by sent2null on February 18, 2008 at 4:35 pm

Re: 127. Comment #129078 by Steve Zara

.. I wonder if there is any research into if or how neural nets could be simulated in a quantum computer?

This is a vibrant area of research in quantum computers now, the problem is that we can get the solutions if only we knew how to precisely control the set of qubits needed to "process" the problem. The difficulties bubble down to:

a) feeding the problem to the computer without disrupting the computation.

b) insulating the computation from outside polluting signals that may modify the solution mid calculation

c) extracting the solution without disrupting the final state

d) doing a, b, c, for collections of qubits formed from 10's, hundreds or millions of atoms.

A neural network is a collection of connected memory nodes so the difficulties of building one with quantum bit storage elements (electron states in atoms) will necessarily involve solving the issues mentioned above. Certain elements of neural networks may be solved "for free" in quantum computations (like back propagation effects) which in electronic neural networks require active feedback loops being designed into the circuitry.

http://www.cic.unb.br/~weigang/qc/aci.html (scroll to section 4 many papers cited and a very nice summary of the results explained)

I love arXiv!

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0401127 (download the full pdf! )

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/8672/27487/01224069.pdf (requires purchase..shucks!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_neural_network

The wiki article I linked before provides a basic primer on quantum computation in general, but for more details see:

http://www.quantiki.org/wiki/index.php/Open_Problems

which displays a list of open problems.

and:

("recent papers" on right navigation)
http://www.quantiki.org/events_calendar

(basic intro tutorials)
http://www.quantiki.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Introductory_Tutorials

(extremely technical, headache inducing at least for me)
http://www.imaph.tu-bs.de/qi/entanglement.html

29. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #129076 by sent2null on February 18, 2008 at 3:41 pm

RE: 117. Comment #128916 by Teratornis on February 18, 2008 at 9:48 am

Building an encyclopedia is different than building an AI, but the same mass collaboration that works well for an encyclopedia might also work well for building an AI. It's just a matter of figuring out how to break up the large task into little pieces that people can massively collaborate on.

It just turns out that a recently launched site employs novel algorithms to try and intelligently build a collection of related knowledge to allow the system to precisely answer complex questions. The name of the site is trueknowledge.com I recently received a beta account to the site and the technology is interesting though the requirement of training means it will be a while before its intelligence is built up to cover large areas of knowledge but it seems promising. I spent a few minutes playing around with it after I got my beta login , it seemed a bit too difficult to train the system but we should hope to see those issues worked out as the program proceeds.

Here is the available demo video:
http://www.trueknowledge.com/technology/video/

Here is the main site:
http://www.trueknowledge.com/

I am not sure if they are still giving out beta accounts.

Regards,

30. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #129070 by sent2null on February 18, 2008 at 3:32 pm

Re 124 by Steve :

This was an exciting idea (I thought so when I first heard of it). Unfortunately, biological material just won't support quantum mechanical effects at the scale required.

Ah I see, I figured this could be what you were referring to after I typed my last response. I'd like to read the details do you know which of Krauss's writings contain the relevant details?

Though it may be useful toward allowing us to simulate aspects of human creativity if it were mirrored biologically, the fact that we can solve some very tricky problems with cleverly designed quantum computers still opens the way for clever engineering to do the rest of the work required to simulate say intuition in an artificial mind. Well possibly anyway, if our minds are NOT using entanglement to make those problems more tractable, to me it makes the simulation of AI easier as it means the solution is a matter of the right wiring as opposed to some innate effect (entanglement between sets of bit values) of the wired nodes(neurons).

31. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #129055 by sent2null on February 18, 2008 at 3:11 pm

RE: 121. Comment #129006

Steve wrote:

My impression is that although vast parallelism is possible with quantum computing, it is really only useful for a very specific set of algorithms, and may turn out to have no advantage for AI.

Quite true, the subset of problems quantum computers are useful for is small but some are broad (cryptography relies on difficulties calculating large primes for instance which is widely used for security online today) but they may be precisely the type of problems that reveal the key to instant or fast computation in humans. If we can tie those abilities together in an appropriately designed machine there would be no need to try the messy and difficult (from a logistical point of view) method of meshing our biology with crudely developed nanotechnology.

Also, it looks like the entanglement argument (favoured by people like Roger Penrose) is wrong - it seems to have been clearly dismissed by Lawrence Krauss (sadly!)

What aspect of entanglement are you referring to here as having been shown to be wrong? The problem solving efficiency of linked quibit states due to entanglement arises precisely because the sum over the history of possibilities is explored simultaneously for a given problem. Larger problem spaces are probed simply by adding more quibits to the computation.

I just looked up Krauss (who I'd not been aware of prior to your mention of him here) I've seen him on popular series regarding physics and science series on the Science channel and Discovery channel here in the US but I couldn't find anything technical regarding his views on the lack of scalability (assuming this is the con argument as it is a real one currently) for quantum computations (which use entanglement to do their magic). Though I am only going on an assumption on what you meant by "the entanglement argument", so clarification would be welcome.

Regards,

32. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #128999 by sent2null on February 18, 2008 at 1:14 pm

Kurzweil, definitely one of the people I looked up to as an undergraduate and a definite mind in the field of AI but I think his ignorance of other areas of science is showing through this prediction. To understand this we have to ask the question, why would we want to be integrated with machines at a time where our mastery of our own biology will be far more advanced than our mastery of nanotechnology?

We are only in the infancy of developing efficient manufacturing methods for nano machines, moreover the inherent mechanical nature of such devices makes them subject to effects (undesired quantum tunneling effects) that we are fighting against quite strongly in our attempt to build smaller and denser logic components on microprocessors.

At the same time, other researchers are making slow but steady advances in the area of quantum computation which could on its own obsolete any desire to merge biology with technology for the simple reason that if we get the machines to "think" like us, then we don't have to do the thinking. Quantum computation employing the beauty of entanglement is so powerful it could render the entire field of modern cryptography obsolete while at the same time opening up our computers to computations that currently would take thousands of years for the most powerful supercomputers of the world to solve. Some researchers theorize that the human brain possibly employs entanglement in some aspects of our intuition and computational speed in the minds of synesthetes and other savants. The developing technology could allow us to simulate this entirely artificially and then expand the number of computational nodes far beyond the number of discrete neurons enmeshed in even the biggest of human brains.

My prediction is that by 2029 we will have had practical quantum computers about 5-10 years solving instantaneously problems that a mere 5 years earlier were deemed impractical for all the traditional computers on the world combined.

At the same time, the advances that we are rapidly making in figuring out how to manipulate and synthesize biology will allow us to enhance the efficiency of our brains without requiring the invasive and tricky tactic of attempting to merge millions or billions of these foreign agents with your neurons to hopefully enhance their performance. No, I posit this method will be seen as far too difficult a path to pursue in a world where intimate knowledge of genetic methods for expressing neuron growth say in desired regions of the brain will very likely be available.

Of course I am just brain spouting here based on my own limited knowledge base, but from the rate at which we are making gains in understanding and manipulating biology independent of our advancing skills in quantum computation I see the idea of a mixed human /nanotech symbiote as being an idea that looks good now but will be deemed irrelevant later once these two technologies have reached maturity.

Some interesting wiki articles for the interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology

Regards,

33. Defying Gravity in Science Class

Comment #128757 by sent2null on February 17, 2008 at 10:30 pm

(After having read dkv's last post)

Steve,

Why do I get the sudden memory of the sense of astonishment I had reading the adventures of Alice after she went down the rabbit hole?

34. Defying Gravity in Science Class

Comment #128733 by sent2null on February 17, 2008 at 8:46 pm

Some necessary pedant ism at the risk that you were entirely serious concerning the statements made in your post.

In quantum mechanics the gravity doesnt work the way it works on large scale..

Really? how is it different?

Black holes emit energy.In other words the ball of energy defies gravity due to the uncertainity principle.

This smacks of doubletalk, black holes emit radiation precisely because they have strong gravitational effects near their event horizons.

Monster tides in the oceans also tend to defy gravity.. They rise 20-25 meters high.

That would depend on what you mean by defy. Gravity can be described as a spacial and temporal vector towards which massive objects move in order to conserve energy. In the context of the earth moon system, the net effect of "gravity" as defined above varies with space and time this is why the tides "rise". They are behaving precisely in accordance with predictions of gravity for the combined Earth Moon system, your description of "defy" implies you are only including the effects from the perspective of the Earth without account to the distortion caused by the presence of the moon, this is a critical error.

And all this happens in a real world..
The exact nature of Garvity is not yet known...

What exactly do you mean by "exact"? That said, you happened to pick on one of the most accurately verified areas of human investigation ever. The workings of gravity have been tested to astounding levels of accuracy. Are you referring to inaccuracy in the 14 significant bit which may very well be a result of instrumentation rather than theory?

The apple from tree doesn't "always" fall on the Earth. If a supernova explodes in near vicinity then the apple might get effected in strange ways.

Well let's play this game, the nearest star that could possibly go "super nova" would have to possess stellar mass in accordance with Chandrasakhar's limit, which would necessitate a mass of about 8-9 sol...the nearest such star is several hundred light years away. If it went nova today it would take several hundred years for us to even know about it (through light) but so far as gravitational effects any gravitational wave disturbances (an effect of gravitation that is still unverified) would be exceedingly small indeed...far too small to cause macroscopically observable changes to gravity locally on Earth.

The formation of Galaxy defies any Gravitational equation...

More gobbledygook, models of gravitational formation operate so long as we make the right accounting for missing factors (unseen mass) in the form of dark matter. You add the mass into the equations and poof you get our galaxies ...but you then have to find the dark matter ...that is what the LHC hopefully will do when it comes online late this year;)

Gotta love the fact, that there are a lot of fantastic, weird and bizarre events in this universe but through it all... there is no magic, no where.

There is an inherent anomaly in Randomness.

huh???!?!?!?!

35. Exploding black holes could expose hidden dimensions

Comment #128254 by sent2null on February 16, 2008 at 4:01 pm

For those that might find this interesting. A friend sent this to me a few days after my last post to this thread in which I stated it would be virtually impossible for us to empirically test hypothesis made from string theory.

Well looks like that may be a partially incorrect statement now:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-02/ns-llc021308.php

Though the use of the term "event horizon" is made in reference to this experiment it is important to note that certain critical effects that occur at real event horizons couldn't possibly be replicated in this experiment (as it is described here). Chief among them being the need for highly non linear and incredibly strong gravitational tidal forces that contribute to the temperature gradient between virtual particles created near the EH that are the source of Hawking radiation. This experiment may simulate well what light does but that is a long way from probing the possibly more novel and significant effects of gravity (without which Hawking radiation simply would not exist) on virtual particle pairs spontaneously created near the EH boundary.

That article subject line was definitely chosen for sensational effect. Still, it will be interesting to see what conclusions/predictions can be drawn from this experiment if any.

36. Hitchens and Boteach Debate on God

Comment #125487 by sent2null on February 11, 2008 at 12:41 pm

A perfect exposition by Hitchen's on what i call the Pre revelation problem when presented as Hitchens does here it is guaranteed to inspire big questions in the mind of any theist willing to accept the idea. Unfortunately some are so inculcated to their method of belief that even considering an alternative view is considered heretical by the belief system...a most unfortunate rigging of the game by the religious institutions indeed. "If any one says anything to oppose this , don't listen to them they are being guided by the devil!!" It is this type of thing that worries me most about trying to bring enlightenment to the sea of believers of one or many imaginary cosmic puppet masters (ie. Gods).

37. Sprinting down the evolutionary highway

Comment #123645 by sent2null on February 7, 2008 at 12:39 pm

Comment #122195 by babrock on February 4, 2008 at 10:37 pm

So where is the presure coming from for us to evolve from any particular unfitnes traits?

A common misunderstanding is being displayed in many of the posts here. Evolution occurs as a consequence of a combination of two factors, inborn mutation and external selection..note the word combination it is not saying that in all cases or at all times both must be present. We do know that mutation is always present but selection can vary significantly. Now it is hard for us to imagine non selection in a general sense but in particular characteristics we can (eg. controlling environment by building homes, ensuring consistent access to food by performing agriculture...etc.) that said, our "selection" methods vary and it is this variation that modifies the effects of the mutation on succeeding generations.

Ultimately what our biology does is take cues from the "environment" in which we find ourselves where I am using "environment" to cover more than just a particular biome in which we might live but to include our access to the resources such as food and water. Also by "cues" I don't mean that mutations are contingent on environment, indeed they just happen but some types can be precipitated by changes in the environment. As we have spread across the globe and found ourselves in particular environmental niches our biology and the inborn mutations we possess was selected on a local level for each of these areas, as we in these areas continued to expand in population , mutations that were in common and arose in the population in response to local selection processes spread. This continued until the time that we started to seriously migrate. Note the confluence of the estimates for the evolutionary changes with the precise period that large human civilizations began to flourish, this is not a simple coincidence.

As human cultures which had , up to that time evolved in their little bubbles started to cross pollinate as it were, the ability for hybridization of genetic traits between the populations went up significantly and that is why evolution seemed to speed up. Biologically the clocks were all running at the same rate but each clock had different sets of genetic data to mix as cultures encountered one another. An unrelated analogy that I think is instructive is that of a palette of paints. The dabs of paint have homogeneous color until they are mixed, the more distinct dabs used to mix a color the greater variation in hue that is possible in the output. Locally adapted populations of humans over the last 100,000 years have provided the "dabs" of paint over which the last 5 - 7,000 have been "mixed" through the process of cultural migration and technological advance.

That said, today the pressure to avoid "unfitness" traits is mostly inborn. Individuals that are birthed with severely unfit conditions are a drain both on themselves (in the case of debilitating disease conditions) and on their local family groups (simply from a perspective of resource utilization!!). In the past, humanity was not at all kind when it came to the fate of these individuals and they were often expunged from the genetic line through neglect or out right cultural practices. Today, the latter reason is much less of an issue (though it is in many third world countries still) but the former (of inborn drain) still is. Such individuals still face amazing levels of ostracism from human societies, they are less likely to interact socially and less likely to take a mate and reproduce. Though they are no longer subject to being the source of myths or derision they still have a reduced ability to propagate their "unfit" genes and are still subject to the drain (think various congenital diseases that are correlated with reduced life span) on resources that their "unfitness" leaves them with, this also reduced the chances that they will live long enough to reproduce.

Regards,

38. Exploding black holes could expose hidden dimensions

Comment #122750 by sent2null on February 6, 2008 at 12:13 am

My feeling is that this may have been justifiable before the appearance of the "String Landscape". The incorporation of something that seems to be a graviton (the force transmitter of gravity) was encouraging, until the inability to predict the physical constants of our universe. That was the promise of String Theory - that a clear, mathematical framework, with nothing added, would inevitably lead to our reality.

It has failed.

It is way to early to declare string theory a failure. I am not a physicists (engineer) but I have studied a small amount of mathematical physics (GR, tensor calculus) and there are several promising avenues from which testable hypothesis from the theory may soon be made. I agree that the long time since its inception lack of any concrete tests is troubling but that is a testament to just how difficult the work in this area is, not a signal that it is a dead end. The work of Ed Witten for example in explaining (partially) the relationships between the various "types" of String theories has led to a flood of research in the last 10 years. I think it shouldn't be surprising that as we get closer to "the answer" that it takes us a bit longer to figure it all out and that will include forming testable hypothesis. Given that the string theory solutions evolve entire universes it makes sense that tests of its validity will be necessarily found at the edges (either at its beginning or at its end) of our universe and what lies beyond. Even if falsifiable tests were to be conjectured we probably would never be able to practically test them since we are far from the edges of our universe or objects (like the singularities in black holes) that may allow us to test them.

39. Math Religion Trouble

Comment #122509 by sent2null on February 5, 2008 at 11:15 am

I am seriously peeved at this new comment system. It is even more erratic than before. I get through writing long posts only to have them disappear into the void upon hitting submit. Am I the only one who is having cookie time outs everytime he writes a long post? I have to get back in the habit of doing a "ctrl C" before hitting that button!

Anyway I just wanted to respond to MPhil.

Yes, I think we did get into a semantic issue though it stemmed from my imprecise use of the term mathematics. I agree that the conceptualization of what we percieve in the world that can be modeled by mathematics and logic is a subset of what the latter contains. Assuming I didn't just miss your point again. ;)

40. Are Darwin's Theories Fact or Faith Issues?

Comment #122426 by sent2null on February 5, 2008 at 8:51 am

266. Comment #122403 by Geoff on February 5, 2008 at 8:31 am

"One scientist cannot create a theory; he can only create a hypothesis."

Does that mean that, originally, Einstein proposed a "general (and a special) hypothesis of relativity"? I've never really looked at the development of the theory of relativity in that sense, I always, perhaps naively, thought of the whole thing as Einstein's from the start.

And you would be quite correct in that conclusion Geoff. A theory makes a set of testable hypothesis from some empirical basis. Einstein's theory of Relativity both special and general provided several hypothesis (time dilation/space dilation/frame draggin/black holes..etc.) that could be and have been verified/ tested to astonishing accuracy. (only QM has been verified to a higher degree of certainty)

41. Are Darwin's Theories Fact or Faith Issues?

Comment #122190 by sent2null on February 4, 2008 at 10:18 pm

PZ took the flame thrower to everyone including the radio show, loved it.

"Biology IS..."

I said something similar about mathematics (oops Logic) in my last post.

This is great stuff.

42. Math Religion Trouble

Comment #122131 by sent2null on February 4, 2008 at 7:39 pm

Comment #117446 by MPhil on January

I'm not sure you are entirely aware of the ontological implications of what you're saying.

The veracity of this statement aside, I hope you didn't intend to raise my hackles by starting with this sentence but you must see that starting (prefacing your exposition with a conclusion) with it might be taken as confrontational to some! yes?

That is, you just implicitly denied materialism... of course you may be aware of that and actually hold the position that metaphysical universals exist as entities - but as for me, that position seems untenable.

I don't deny materialism, as an engineer certain aspects of reality are simply too self evident for me to waste my time thinking over the minutia of the implications behind them...this may seem anathema to a philosopher whose area of joyful mental play is to me akin to a desert. ;)

Let me address each point on its own: I think it entirely possible that other civilizations (should there have been such things) have come up with something functionally equivalent to our mathematics. In fact, if those hypothetical civilizations deserve that name, I'd pretty much say they would have had to. But this does not mean that mathematics is not a conceptual construct!

My point only is that mathematics or to use your correction , logic contains what is, our conceptions are simple mappings of what relations there are to what we have found useful to make relations for or find structures for and represent formerly as mathematical structures. I will accept that based on the definitions of Logic and mathematics that I was actually inadvertently making a category mistake. I should have said

Logic is

That is why I said that mathematics (and more so: logic (including set theory), as mathematics is an extension thereof) is such an extremely powerful tool, more powerful probably than we can imagine.

Well if you include logic as a tool you again raise my ire, as I don't think there is anything about the results derived from logic that makes it uniquely ours. The relationships would exist if we could conceive them or not, so for that reason I don't see them as tools (in the hammer and saw sense). I see them as inherent truths that we discover and give labels too.

There is simply nothing in the human mind more powerful than logic (I don't mean motivationally, just in case anyone was tempted to mention emotions), and its most powerful expansion, mathematics.

Agreed 100%

I also think (correct me if I'm wrong) that you might be thinking that without mathematics itself being something "more" than conceptual, we couldn't account for the success we had in applying it.

Why would you think that? No, I recognize mathematics usefulness as independent from our ability to conceptualize the logical foundations of which a small subset (mathematics) we are able to conceptualize and use. At least so far as the broader base of logical "truths" from which mathematics is derived is concerned.

I think it is pretty much natural that a species evolving in an environment (universe) where the entities behave in a certain way will find a way to model that way things behave conceptually, given enough time. Also, an account of "truth" of a statement can be given within such a naturalistic account (note: what is meant is the truth of a proposition, not 'knowing that a proposition is true'): truth can be described as a systematic and largely uniformity between the structure of the neuronal activation-pattern and the (structure of the) state-of-affairs described by the proposition. It is also natural to assume that a species evolving in a world where things behave according to certain patterns would have a means representation of the structure of these patterns, whether conscious or not.

Agreed.

I really do think you confuse the way things behave and the systematicity of relations among things with our way to model these ways-of-behaving, these relations and their systematicity.

Well, yes I was confusing the use of the words logic and mathematics as previously indicated. I am an engineer and not a philosopher after all.;)

Concerning your apology for the length of the response, Never apologize when the task of elucidation demands a rigorous if necessarily verbose detail. Your patience allowed the response to be quickly digested and not taken as an attack of my original post...eh save for the opening mildly confrontational salvo that is. *wink*

Regards,

43. Math Religion Trouble

Comment #117378 by sent2null on January 28, 2008 at 5:40 pm

Jeepjay,

With that statement regarding Hilbert Spaces you really spoke beyond your ken. There is much practical hard science that has developed from exploring them.

Would you have said the same thing in the early 18th century when the idea of imaginary numbers was being fleshed out? Imaginary numbers are pivotal to the foundations of electrical and electronic analysis upon which the modern technological world is built! And that is just an easy example.

I however don't see Mathematics as something we constructed, though many patterns and structures have been created utilizing the basic truths of mathematical theory it is a bit arrogant of us to think that we are the first to have discovered these patterns. I give good odds, that a billion years ago civilizations across 10,000 galaxies long dead came across the same patterns we've stumbled into and "invented" the same structures, to me math is the truth of what can be (and not just in the physical sense)...it is the analysis of all possibility. This is far far more grand than what I consider a dismissal by calling it "a tool", it is not a tool it is everything... and our current success with exploring it are akin to a baby's first words vocalized before a long life of more complex speech to come.

Mathematics is, we just happen to have discovered its usefulness and given names to the tiny fraction of relationships that it contains that we have been unblinded enough to see(thanks to their being used by systems in the physical world that we find important to understand). I think the idea that math is some how tied to our mode of conception is pure rubbish, it could be true that our mental processes constrain the type of structures we have success in finding in Mathematics but that says nothing of all that it contains..which in my view are every structure conceivable by us or not.

44. Gigantic fossil rodent discovered

Comment #113377 by sent2null on January 19, 2008 at 1:13 pm

Re comment 32

TMNT?

Don't see the relevance though...

Regarding the article, this discovery is more elegant confirmation that evolution has very predictable patterns on the flora and fauna in an environment. In the case of South America prior to the connection of the Isthmus the development of large mammals went hand in hand with what we know about the fauna that existed there at the time. South America is not known for any large land based non avian carnivores. (it does have some reptiles but they are mostly restricted to wet habitats) The Carnivorous mammals dominated the Northern continent with large populations of Smilodon, Dire Wolves and Bear ancestors and related species enacting a very "Savanah" like existence in the North American content while hunting proto horses, proto Bison and Mastodon's as well as other large herding herbivorous creatures. The connection of the land bridge opened the flood gates on the large rodents of the Southern continent, which got so large precisely because a) the flora accommodated it by being plentiful and b) the lack of predation on "big and slow" individuals. The connection allowed the carnivorous mammals of the north that had evolved with herding herbivores free reign into the territory of the Southern herbivores and that surely expedited the end of many species, that despite their size were no match for the Smilodon and wolves that evolved to take large herbivores down in the north and the pressures they placed on the existing species through their predation. No doubt the emergence of the ice age cycles around this time also led to great turmoil for species world wide leading to the extinction or adaptation of many of them.


I would love to see a video made that in say an hour span, provides an illustrated look at ancient history as we know it going back oh 65 million years. I've seen clips like it on countless series, "Blue Planet", "The Planets", "Walking with Dinosaurs"..but I'd like to see a full length animation, without the interruptions for narration..simply letting the video do all the talking. The video would chronicle the rise of mammals around the demise of the dinosaurs and the camera would flow freely as a ticker clocks time from the past to the present , slowing and speeding where necessary to illustrate key events. The camera would freely fly across oceans as it observes evolutionary responses to changes in the Earth's climate and geography in accelerated time. Ice ages, plate tectonics, creation and removal of evolutionary niches..such a show in one artistic movement could do what no amount of words on the subject ever could. I imagine it playing with no narration only a sound track, it's a thought anyway...maybe someone will come along and do something like it.

45. Huckabee Wants A 'Faith-based' Constitution

Comment #113111 by sent2null on January 18, 2008 at 3:07 pm

9. Comment #111898 by alfonso on January 16, 2008 at 1:11 am

No no, you don't understand, that god is the *REAL* one.

Is the whole of US so deluded or are there still places that can be considered havens against these tides of irrationality?

Here in NYC we tend to be a bit more progressive (ie: educated) than most. Huckabee followers are essentially non existent here. I am trying my best to fight the good fight friends, we're not all raving lunatics!

46. Huckabee Wants A 'Faith-based' Constitution

Comment #113108 by sent2null on January 18, 2008 at 2:59 pm

Yes , yes I saw a piece on his statement last night on CNN and couldn't believe my ears. I am glad though, he just single handedly destroyed any chance of him getting the nomination of his party let alone win the general election.

Good for you Huckadummy!

47. Ben Stein Bribing Schools to See His Anti-Evolution Movie 'Expelled'

Comment #113018 by sent2null on January 18, 2008 at 12:55 pm

Ben Stein is a perfect example of many of the types I (and many of you) met in university. You know the sort, they were very good at getting excellent grades in their courses, but pin them down to relate one piece of data learned in one course to another learned years earlier and mostly you got a dumb stare in response. He is a fact collector, a person with a good memory for bits of information but little machinery to put all that data together and analyze it for deeper truths. This is the difference between "knowing stuff" and having true intelligence. It is a shame that to the laymen, people that display the former with recounting facts often equate that to intelligence.

This theory however, is quite dashed to the rocks when we look at the details of how Stein puts together all those facts that he's acquired through the years. To assert that science (or by proxy evolutionary theory) is not self challenging is quite shocking and to me a personally egregious claim. Yet he doesn't stop there, he goes on to disregard one of the most tested pillars of modern science (behind what GR and QM?) as "new age" nonsense. Okay Stein, what ever you say, we all know you wouldn't have the platform you do today had it not been for a bit part in an mid 80's movie for the hormonally driven teens of the time. Oh well... I would be interested to see Stein debate Sam Harris, that would be great fun. Stein would come out (very Dinesh D'Souza-ish) with a machine gun attack of false "facts" , depending on the debate format...Harris would be able to interject and chop Stein's logic to shreds or he may be inundated by the quickly rising tide of bull$hit and appear in distress.

Hypothetical stage pugilisim aside, Stein will continue to do his reputation for knowledgeable quips great damage by publicizing these weird causes...I say let him rail.

No idiot is more quickly identified, then when he is given a podium to spout his ridiculous views.

Ra on Ben..Rail on...

48. The Moral Instinct

Comment #110733 by sent2null on January 12, 2008 at 8:20 am

This sounds dangerously close to the slippery slope of moral objectivity.

I thought the same at the point but he righted the view later in the passage and article. He is definitely a moral relativist from what I read in that article, he just seems concerned that a full embrace of the meaning of moral relativism may lead to social issues. Issues , not in the sense that a theist believes it would lead to amoral behaviors (as they constantly assert) but in a different sense of "our morals versus their morals" knowing the human penchant for out group versus in group fights, it is not beyond reason that some idiots will come along to do just that even in a world where objective morality has been made obsolete.

Regards,

49. The Moral Instinct

Comment #110731 by sent2null on January 12, 2008 at 8:12 am

Excellent article on the nuances behind moral choices and views.

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago.

I had to chuckle at that sentence, to bad more theists aren't aware of its truth.

50. New attempt to end blasphemy law

Comment #110069 by sent2null on January 10, 2008 at 12:45 pm

Great news, hope the law is rescinded as it deserves. I am sure that there are similar antiques written in to the law books of several American states that probably also need to be purged.