Given that poor posture seems, at least in my case, to be a lack of good habit, how did you address this part? The exercises are intentional and engage the mind actively. But bad posture is what I do when I'm not paying attention... this seems particularly important if the OP is correct in stating that exercise will improve already good posture and further degrade bad.
A genuine question based on the requirement you gave for something to be scientific: how is Darwinian natural selection and the theory of macro (inter-species) evolution disprovable?
If we were to observe that it does not happen in cases where we see it now?
Students can (and do) perform experiments on evolution+natural selection on bacteria in a lab in reasonable timeframes - put in bacteria, add feed, maybe add extra mutagens or radiation, and then observe the changes in bacteria when a stressor or a particular "poison" is added - the bacteria strain changes, evolving resistance. If one would see simply the strain suffering¬ changing, then it would disprove Darwinian selection.
Inter-species evolution for larger organisms is more time-consuming to study (since many generations are needed), but the existing "ring-species" such as some bird groups are a good example - if inter-species evolution would be false, then we'd expect to see distinct species that can successfully interbreed within a species, but not between species; instead, we observe a "ring" where everyone is "the same" as their neighbour, but the opposite sides of the ring are "different species".
For what it's worth, you weren't the only one with that initial reaction.
I remained woefully ignorant of DDG until Spring of this year (no clue how, I just missed it), but once discovering it, my definition of a good search tool has been forever changed by a single character.
The ! (bang).
!walmart, !netflix, !.net, !clojure, !java, ...
!weatherspark (huh, it's not there, I'll submit that, now anyone can !weatherspark)
The ! means DDG is my single-point search engine for almost any site imaginable. And it uses that site's search feature instead of a naive textual scrape (a la Google).
The Chrome Omnibox tends to fill that role for me. If I type "cloj" and hit the down arrow twice in Chrome, it takes me straight to clojure.org. And it's integrated with my history - once I've done it, if I type "cl" and hit return, I go straight back.
You forgot !g (google search). That is at least the shortcut I think is most important. With it, DDG is always at least as good as google, while it provides a better interface.
I'm a bit younger and the father of two little boys; I had a very similar reaction. "Cool, I wonder how I can talk my sons into long boarding in the parks nearby when they get a little older."
And yes, as someone who lives less than five miles from work, it is a VERY compelling product. The only problem is traffic. In normal suburban traffic a long board + a helmet would make a motorcycle look downright benign in the safety department.
> Any conversation that mentions evolution triggers it.
I've noticed the same trend. Even if no one questions or faults the point(s) being made re: evolution, a vitriolic jab at religion (particularly Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism) is quite common in the comments.
This is a loss. To quote Richard D. Alexander (professor of Zoology at Univ. of Michigan and an evolutionist):
"...indeed, at this moment creation is the only alternative to evolution. Not only is this worth mentioning, but a comparison of the two alternatives can be an excellent exercise in logic and reason."
As an ex-atheist who previously believed in evolution and is now a young earth creationist, such conversations have the potential to be very interesting. Sadly, they end up with subtle (if you're lucky) or less subtle jabs about how believers are all anti-science and uneducated and just want to brainwash people, especially children. And that is generally considered to be the ultimate slam on creationists from which no recovery is expected.
I have a comp.sci degree, spent much of my teens getting excited about meta-physics and still love science, especially astronomy and am loving the Mars missions ... how's that for anti-science? :-)
Unfortunately even if you are willing to debate evolution intelligently, almost nobody else describing themselves as a creationist is. This leads to a general feeling of, how shall I say, beating our heads against the wall when talking to these people, because they refuse to accept any evidence we offer.
As always, people holding the most extreme views color the perception of the whole community - even if most people who believe in creationism are perfectly willing to have an intelligent conversation and have no problem with their kids learning science, the vocal few that campaign ferociously against science in education make everyone on that side look bad.
Unfortunately nobody in the "sane" segment of the religious community seems to be speaking up against them or reining them in, which is why it is so frustrating.
I am sorry you had to deal with outbursts against your religion however - it can't have been too pleasant.
Back before I was a pastor (5'ish years ago) I used to blog regularly and often got into tussles with atheists, so fear not, these guys are just big ol' pussy cats compared to them.
I guess the emotion I want to express is sadness, because I expected better from thinking outside the box hackers and startup founders. No worries. I'm fine, the Lord still rules the universe and I'll be done with being bi-vocational at the end of this month. Life is good! :-)
> As an ex-atheist who previously believed in evolution and
> is now a young earth creationist
> loving the Mars missions
How on earth do you reconcile this? The mind boggles, although it might just be me missing a healthy dose of sarcasm here.
In any case: No, not all discussions of this type are in fact potentially interesting, enlightening, or fostering a culture of whatever. Telling yourself that is feel-good nonsense. Sometimes, debating the merits of creationism simply means lowering the level of discourse. Debating the merits of current evolutionary science is, of course, both admissible and valuable; considering creationism (esp. of the wildly implausible kind) a viable alternative is simply misguided.
Don't waste time when there are actual problems to be solved.
No sarcasm on my part. There is no problem reconciling any part of my statement. Why does it seem strange to you for a Christian to be interested in Mars? The scriptures teach that God created the heavens and the earth and the stars and by inference the planets. I find them very interesting, as apparently do the good folks at NASA and their sponsors the U.S. government.
The rest of your comment then wanders off further into the very attitude that I was commenting on, so thank you for illustrating my point. Discussing creationism does not lower the level of discourse, rather, dismissive attitudes such as yours, stifles intelligent discussion. You could have asked how I came to transition from professing evolution to embracing creationism, but instead you use words like misguided. I don't see any evidence that you'll care, but it was a thoughtful process and we could have discussed it. Looks like my personal policy of silence is the less misguided one.
Outside of my day job, I am a pastor (check my HN profile), so I also work on solving actual problems in my community and my congregation.
Can you recommend any good literature discussing Galileo and Kepler and their "faith and reason" view of the cosmos? I do not ask contentiously but with genuine curiosity. In the (post) modern era there seems to be much noise about faith (Christianity in particular) and science being irreconcilable.
What little I do know about many founders of the major fields of science seems to indicate that the founding men and women saw no such dichotomy. Or at the least were willing to struggle with the questions rather than throw the entire matter out as "unscientific."
Lord Kelvin and Michael Faraday seem to have both Christians and creationists. Newton was a Christian and claimed that "all my discoveries have been made in answer to prayer." Joule (the unit's namesake) was at least a theist. Then we have Louis Pasteur, Christopher Columbus, George Washington Carver, Samuel Morse, and Blaise Pascal - each "men of faith."
Not that the above list should be taken as an argument by authority for faith. Certainly not. However, it does leave me wondering how these great thinkers saw the world so differently.
R. Hooykaas, Christian Faith and the Freedom of Science, 17. Encyclopedia Brittanica article: Kepler, Johannes.
Further, it's interesting that Kepler was schooled by a protege of Melanchthon, who was himself a key reformer with Luther and a contemporary of Tyndale. These men, together with Erasmus, were of the finest minds of their day, giants of the past, and giants still today.
"What little I do know about many founders of the major fields of science seems to indicate that the founding men and women saw no such dichotomy."
Yes, certainly "blind faith" and science are irreconcilable. Blind faith is a straw man. Men have wasted breath on it for years. Faith is quite different from blind faith. The two (faith and blind faith) are equally irreconcilable. Faith is simply acting today in the light of that which by reason one is fully persuaded of. It need not surprise that great men of reason and action are also men of deep, often Christian convictions about God.
"However, it does leave me wondering how these great thinkers saw the world so differently."
As John Newton wrote, "I once was blind but now I see". As Philip said to Nathanael, "come and see".
The Christian of the 1st century would convert from Judaism either after seeing the risen Jesus, as at least five hundred on one occasion in Jerusalem did at the time, or after hearing of him from those who had. Their witness, at pain of death, was based on what they had seen and heard. Former persecutors such as Saul of Tarsus, a protege of Gamaliel, converted after seeing the risen Christ for themselves. [1][2][3][4]
It is notable that at least two members of the Jewish ruling council, which tried Jesus, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, did not consent to the actions of the council and followed Christ. These men had education and wealth. They had access to Jesus and they believed, at great personal cost. Proclaiming a crucified criminal as Sovereign King, "God with us", would have been unthinkable for men such as these, were they not fully persuaded of God's raising him up, and of the entirety of the Old Testament Scriptures, one example being Isaiah 53, which pointed to a suffering and triumphant Messiah. "Oh death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?" To a naturalistic worldview which claims the name of science whilst being far from it, the gospel is hard to accept. Is it true? Did it happen? In our ignorance, we think of God as silent, unyielding. God is not silent, he has spoken and revealed himself in history. Those with ears to hear, let them hear.
Today we see the Lord through the eyes of history, through the accounts of those who saw him. Our distance from the events need not be a hindrance, only the distance of the accounts from the events, and that is, in terms of history, a comparatively short span of only 20 to 60 years at most for the various accounts, today collectively known as the New Testament, the letters of Luke (a physician and meticulous historian in his own right by standards of ancient history), Peter, Paul, John, Matthew, Mark, James and Jude (brothers of Jesus) and outside of that, Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Clement, Polycarp etc.
Concerning textual criticism of the New Testament documents, see:
F.F. Bruce, various works.
Paul Barnett, various works.
Sir Frederic Kenyon, director of the British Museum for 22 years, various works.
Note that the Wikipedia pages on these subjects are for once a poor source, they suffer from speculation, superstition, tradition, "sainthood", and the old school of form criticism ("Today it is no exaggeration to claim that a whole spectrum of main assumptions underlying Bultmann's Synoptic Tradition must be considered suspect." - Kelber, W.H.).
It is interesting that polemicists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens tend to avoid confronting the historicity of Christ, and Christ himself head on. They refuse to get into the ring, preferring easier prey. It is ironic that the brother of Christopher Hitchens, Peter Hitchens, a renowned journalist, would be an atheist who converted to Christ and has since written on the subject of "the rage against God".
[1] - "Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught." - Luke, Luke 1
[2] - "I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve. After that, he was seen by more than 500 of his followers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles. Last of all, as though I had been born at the wrong time, I also saw him. For I am the least of all the apostles. In fact, I'm not even worthy to be called an apostle after the way I persecuted God's church." - Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:3-9
[3] - "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. […] But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep." - Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:20
[4] - "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched — this we proclaim concerning the Word [the Logos, light, reason] of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete." - John, 1 John 1
> However, few practical applications benefit from persistence in practice so this is often not advantageous.
This statement is questionable.
What is true is this: many professional software developers are comfortable with imperative/OOP/mutability. This is easier (not simpler) because it's familiar. The benefits of immutability are not obvious/familiar.
Persistent data structures enable immutable data with cheap(ish) operations that can produce updated versions of that data. This means I can expose data to multiple threads, calling functions, etc... without worrying about that data being placed into an inconsistent state or viewed in an inconsistent state by callers.
Back when much of our profession malloc'ed their memory, we always had to answer the question "who is going to free() this chunk of the heap?" And when we answered wrong, or forgot to answer, we leaked memory. Garbage collectors, while imperfect from a controlability and performance standpoint, are much better at this than humans.
An excellent analogy exists with mutable data. When I expose a piece of mutable data via any public interface, I have to ask the question "who can change this data and how will consistency be enforced?" I'm left with the answer "I don't know, I hope no one gets it wrong" or even worse: "they better lock the right semaphore(s) in the correct order". Immutable data (implemented via persistent data structures) enables me to instead say "here's the data, if any caller would like to update, they can a) pass me an updated version which I can validate, or b) call into some part of my public interface and instruct me what update to make"
Or, in the case of Clojure (my blub at the moment), put the runtime in charge of maintaining consistency during mutation using refs and the STM.
There are many benefits to immutability. However, there are only a few smaller additional benefits of functional purity after we're already able to enforce mutability and immutability. Sometimes I really do want to modify some data internally before returning it, and baked-in purity keeps me from "cooking" my data properly.
When you expose a piece of mutable data, usually it's wrapped up in an interface that enforces the access and consistence of that piece of data so that you have control rather than let it up to the callers. If you don't want to have the synchronization wrapper, it's ok. Just document it clearly and let the callers deal with it.
Well, roughly and someone may have a better answer. Data is collected in a structured, systematic way, and the sample is carefully chosen. Anecdotes are not structured or collected in a systematic way, but worst of all the sample you've taken is the people who've chosen to speak up.
Acid-State for haskell (http://acid-state.seize.it/) is based on a similar ideology and in the public domain. (Oh, but minus the time dimension I'm afraid.)
Acid-State is quite different, it persists representations of operations to disk (to make it durable) and keeps the data structure in memory.
I'm working on a project to bring persistent data-structures to disk ( https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/Siege ). It's currently undergoing a rethink, hence the lack of recent activity, but it's still in development.
I can see "just a suggestion box" from the submitter perspective being really nice if it is really simple. I'm talking "e-mail your suggestions to box@getvetter.com" simple.
Perhaps some sort of analysis/aggregation on the backend for the person(s) who review the submitted suggestions. An interesting idea is using Bayesian spam filtering techniques to filter out "whiny" suggestions...
Aye the backend could certainly use some additional processing. We're just working out the best way to approach this now. For the time being we just offer some simple sorting, tagging and categorization options, but we're working on locking down the next iteration. Thanks
