I'm still a teenager, so I've got plenty of time. Who am I to say it's wrong or right? For the most part I believe everything here, but that's because of what I see with the media and everything. This is good. :)
No you whipper-snapper, it's not good.
Sweeping generalisation: I weep for the teenager of today.
Give it 20 years, they'll come around to your point of view eventually.
At least they're interested, that's a beginning.
Apathy is a much bigger problem than being still an uncritical consumer.
I remember the first time I had first hand knowledge of an event that was covered by the media, and how much my personal, eye-witness experience deviated from what I read in the newspaper and saw on TV the next day.
It was a moment of absolute amazement, and then I suddenly realized I'd probably been duped to a greater or lesser extent for years about any number of things.
Some of the first few comments are from evolution-denialists and climate-gaters. However, I have to agree with the point that the article places the church in a bad daylight for the first item. Galileo wasn't refused because what he said was against scripture (was it even?). The main argument from the church was that his theory was methodologically flawed.
First there was no good reason to assume that telescopes provided a good image of distant bodies, so observations made using them had no credibility and could thus not be counted as 'evidence' as the article states. Secondly, if the earth moved and we with it, why did an object that was dropped from a tower, land at the bottom of that tower and not a good distant away from it? Assuming that the earth and the tower moved with it, but not the object since it was touching the earth nor the tower.
Galileo had a lot of explaining to do: the observations he made simply could not be placed in the prevalent scientific model. The easy way out is was to refute the evidence because it did not fit, the long way out was to rebuild the model.
Dogma and religion go hand-in-hand, it's disturbing that this is still the case today.
For instance, the roman catholic churches stand on on condoms is absolutely irresponsible and causes a lot of trouble for a lot of people every year.
The only thing they'd have to do is to be able to admit they were wrong all along, wipe some of that dogmatic slate clean, but that's too high a price to pay for them, because it will lead people to wonder about what else they might be wrong about.
I'm pretty sure that's not why the Catholic church isn't going to promote condoms, Jacques. In the meantime: don't go to the Pope for medical advice. He's not a doctor.
It's not that he's not promoting them, he's actively condemning their use, besides that, there are large numbers of people that will follow his advice against the advice of their doctor.
The pope should not be handing out medical advice precisely because he is not a doctor, but that does not seem to stop him.
> it was dumb of me to take the bait, and now I regret doing so. Sorry.
An insult in an apology :)
Joke for you: Judge: John, what did you say? John: I said he was an asshole. Judge: Apologize for that! John: Ok. "George, I'm sorry you're an asshole".
It wasn't meant as bait, sorry you interpreted it as such. It's just that the way the church has dealt with scientific stuff (and medicine is science too) is really painful and problematic to me.
Lives are at stake here, millions of them, especially in Africa and one word from one guy could change this, and he chooses not to speak it.
Any proof of that? Everything I have read shows that the uptake in condoms in Africa hasn't caused a proportionate decline in AIDS. This makes me question the hypothesis that condoms are the answer to the problem.
from your links:
The Pope says>> believes marital fidelity and sexual abstinence are the best way to prevent the spread of HIV.
Scientist says >>The best way to avoid transmission of the virus is to abstain from sexual intercourse or have a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with an uninfected person.
Sounds like the old dude knows what he is talking about. From those links it looks like the best plan of attack is condoms for high risk people and partner reduction strategies for the general population. The condoms for everyone approach seems to spend time and materials ineffectively.
The old dude has been abstaining from sex as long as he's been celibate (so he says), and has no sense of reality on the ground, and uses his influence to discourage the use of condoms on the grounds that there are 'better solutions', which are wholly unrealistic in practice, but suit his agenda.
If you don't play the game don't mess with the rules.
The reality is: people will have sex, both inside and outside of their relationships.
'Marital Fidelity' as a concept is great, but it is about as mythical as the tooth fairy, contrary to popular belief.
The reality is: once a virus is present in a population it will spread, even if you are 'careful', for one because even if you are monogamous your partner that you are sure is too may not be, and they have possibly (make that probably) slept with others in the past.
To willfully ignore the reality on the ground is stupid at best and criminal at worst.
In some countries in Africa there is a 20%+ rate of sero-positivity:
> Everything I have read shows that the uptake in condoms in Africa hasn't caused a proportionate decline in AIDS.
On another note, your expectations are wholly without merit, the use of condoms can only halt the spreading of aids, but not its prevalence, and hence will never cause a decline.
Once you show that the church has in the past allowed their dogmatic stance overcome reason which led to hardship for the parties involved I think it is fair to show that the same thing is still happening today, and that even if the church has come around on some of their mistakes in the past they have a long way to go with respect to the present.
I also note that it is the second word that makes the argument, you could have simply let it go, instead you decided to answer in a flippant manner.
Don't blame me for your choices, half this conversation is kept up by you (even now) ;)
Personally I find Godel incompleteness to be a far more disturbing discovery than any of the things listed in the article. Something about a fundamental limitation on deductive systems just scares the hell
out of me.
The idea that there is a fundamental limit to how far you can get when starting from something declared true by fiat has always struck me as kind of obvious. Though that's probably at least partly because I grew up well after the invention of science and the work of people like Godel.
Godel's theorem implies that in a consistent system there are unprovable truths. I've always wondered if those truths could be things no one would care about anyway. Are statements like "this statement is unprovable" useful for anything other than proving the Incompleteness theorem?
The halting problem seems kind of important. Also, at least two of Hilbert's problems -- the continuum hypothesis and solving general Diophantine equations -- turned out to be undecidable (the latter because it reduces to the halting problem.)
Edit: Er, actually, the Diophantine equation question would be uncomputable (like the halting problem), not undecidable. The ideas are closely related, though.
I remember Keats and the whole truth is beauty, beauty truth thing. I feel like it's actually, truth is ugly, always. I mean, have you ever found out the truth and not been disappointed?
Well, to begin with, it's set theory, which is notable for driving at least one person mad, and further, it's one of the more unsettling parts of set theory. And I mean actually working through it, not just knowing about it. But reading it over, "mindbreaker" is clumsy; perhaps "disturbing" or, better yet, "unsettling" would be better.
Yes, seriously. Realize that most of the doubt about climate change is engineered by astroturfing campaigns and financed by oil companies.
Among the actual scientists, the overwhelming consensus is that climate change is happening on a scale that is threatening, and to a significant extent caused by humans.
That is great! But the point is that this a prediction into the future and is not a fact. A fact is something that you can prove, and you can not prove the future. If you can, come talk to me we can start a business :)
We are the extinction-level event, but many people don't grasp that. Society is what's at stake. Humans can migrate and adapt as they have in the past.
If anyone finds that list disturbing then they really need to get out more.
Personally, I find what people capable of in our darker moments disturbing, but science is essentially the antidote for that. Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" being strongly recommended:
It tells people that (because it's such a huge number) "a little" mass contains "a lot" of energy. The actual number and unit isn't really important to get that point across.
The point was that as mph is quite arbitrary unit it is practically impossible to see the amount of energy. If the speed of light was given in m/s then the amount of energy would have been easy to see. ie E = mc². c = 300 × 10^6 m/s, c² = 9 × 10^16 (m/s)², so with that equation 1kg of mass actually contains approximately 9 × 10^16 joules of energy which is a lot.
What would the equivalent thought process be in imperial units? Lets say you have 1 lb of mass and want to figure out the amount of energy contained in it with the equation E = mc² and c² being 3.47 × 10^10 miles per second, just to know the scale of things (which was kinda the point in the article imho). How would you do that?
edit: Another point of view: velocity and kinetic energy. E = 0.5mv², that should be familiar to anyone familiar to physics. So with a velocity of 5.5 × 10^9 inches per year you don't need a lot of mass to have a lot of energy, because the multiplier is so huge, right?
The point was that the text is intended to be understandable by people who are not necessarily familiar with physics, who don't have the faintest idea what a joule is and who wouldn't even understand scientific notation.
Again: the number is big by most people's standard, and that gets the point across. It doesn't need to be any more meaningful, and it most definitely does not matter that one could convey a false impression by choosing an even larger unit.
