HillOBeans

Since I am conveniently unable to respond to Mr. Woodchuck's comment below his, I'll make it here. You assume I am a creationist because.... I point out evidence that questions the validity of historical climate research - that happens to also be used by creationists? You miss the point. As the article you linked to to "refute" me itself indicates, ice layer accumulation is inconsistent. Therefore, any conclusions regarding historical events drawn from such data would have to be questioned. The fact that they were pointing out differing conditions leading to the rapid ice accumulation in Greenland is tacit admission that accumulation is not consistent and uniform. Who is to say that any other ice structure has been formed by consistent and predictable processes anywhere, when you are dealing with historic weather patterns? The ONLY way to be sure of such things is with an actual HISTORIC record, recorded by intelligent beings. My original comment was in reply to an assertion that ice core samples are a reliable source of scientific data, and your attempt at invalidating my argument by appealing to disdain for religion ("oh he must be a Creationist! Don't listen to him") is insufficient. I may actually believe in God, but I find comments such as yours to be all the more religious in their fervor.

That's the problem with any method used to try and determine information about the distant past: you have to make assumptions about your information-gathering method that may turn out to be incorrect. In the case of ice core samples, many scientists ASSUME that x number of layers corresponds to y number of years. Which is fine and dandy until some example comes along which throws that assumption into question. Consider, for example, the "lost squadron" of WWII. These planes were discovered over 200 feet deep under many layers of ice. Therefore, they must be many thousands of years old, right? Now, this doesn't mean that ALL deep ice structures are that young, but it certainly throws into question any conclusions drawn from ice core data. Now, this is my opinion, but I for one feel like many (not all) scientists continue to assume such methods are reliable and accurate. Perhaps they need the grant money. Perhaps they have devoted so much to their research that they just can't accept that all the time they spent drilling ice cores may have been wasted. Or (again, this is my opinion), perhaps they are climate change zealots who feel that they must convince the population they are right, regardless of the cost of their scientific integrity.

For those who are interested, physicist John Hartnett has developed a model that does not require dark matter. His work builds on that of Moshe Carmeli, who published "Cosmological Special Relativity". Hartnett's book is "Starlight, Time, and the New Physics" ISBN 978-0-949906-68-7. Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, and the math is way over my head, so I cannot double-check it. Hartnett has not made much, if any, headway with mainstream scientific publications, probably because he is a Biblical Creationist.

I do some amateur blacksmithing, and I find the forge to make an excellent steak grill. I live in a wooded area, and use home-made charcoal to forge with instead of coal. With the blower running, the coals can become hot enough to melt steel - then it's simply a matter of turning off the blower (nobody wants ash on their steak), setting the grill grate on the forge, and cooking some meat! I don't generally go for the rare to medium rare, though.

I can't help but wonder where this might leave someone such as myself, who is over 40, but relatively new to professional software development. I've programmed for years as a hobby, but was educated in a different field and have only recently decided to pursue programming work for a living. Not only am I old, but I also have little experience compared to others my age.

This. The immutable nature of Clojure is what, IMHO, makes it such a better choice than Java for me. I frequently see discussions/debates around type safety on HN, but in my experience, it has been the mutable nature of Java systems that has created more bugs than anything else. Clojure being immutable by default has drastically reduced the pain caused by these bugs. Clojure's collections, FP style, and meta-programming (via macros) all make it a great choice for me, but I think being immutable by default is the biggest thing.

The changes you refer to are examples of the equivocation I was speaking of. One cannot simply point to "changes" in an organism, micro- or not, call that evolution, and then say it must be true. And just because there are similarities evident in different types of organisms, it does not necessarily follow that they are of common descent. If they were designed by the same designer, would you not expect to find some features in common? But this does not mean there is a natural mechanism to turn molecules into a genetic code that can in turn be read by a a decoding system (after all, what good is a code without the decoder?) which can then construct an organism. Even the simplest of organisms must have intricate, complex machinery inside for it to exist. I know of no method whereby this machinery can come into existence without intelligent direction. And even this simplest of organisms has no means of improving upon itself to create a "higher" organism. You say that the accumulation of minor changes (via mutations, perhaps?) is the mechanism whereby evolution works. I posit to you that such changes are examples of broken genetics whereby information is LOST, not gained, and are incapable of building a higher organism. See works such as Michael Behe's "The Edge of Evolution" for a more in-depth look at such changes.

To use your turn of phrase: Evolution is not based on evidence. It is not falsifiable. It is not a scientific theory. It is a quasi-theory-of-the-gaps based on the assumption that there is no higher intelligence that created anything, and all we see HAS to be the result of natural processes. It ignores the mountains of indirect evidence pointing to design.

My point is: we see cars, computers, planes, etc. around us all the time, but we would never dream of suggesting that they are the result of natural processes. They are the obvious result of SPECIFIED COMPLEXITY, which requires some intelligence for its existence. The more we learn about the inner workings of cells, even at the molecular level, the more obvious it is that we are dealing with a SPECIFIED COMPLEXITY.

I've been trying to sit this one out, but I've got to be blunt with YOU: how can anyone with a "sufficient understanding of the philosophy of science" draw the conclusion that evolution works?! Simply put, the scientific process is supposed to be: observe -> hypothesize -> test -> revise. If life is supposed to have arisen by purely natural processes, then the information-building, error-checking and correcting code system that is our DNA must have somehow constructed itself. I am not aware of any experiments following the scientific process that have demonstrated that such a thing is even remotely possible. Instead you have a bunch of "just so" stories about the distant past that are untestable ancient history that we are supposed to believe because we are told to do so by "people who are smarter than you". Smacks more of religion than "science" to me. And don't tell me about any experiments that demonstrate rapid speciation as evidence of evolution - that is NOT the same thing and is an equivocation I see proponents of evolution use all the time. They are instead examples of genetic isolation and information LOSS and are incapable of generating more complex, "higher" organisms. It is for this reason that some scientists have adopted the idea of intelligent design: information can only be created by an intelligent designer. I would expect a forum populated by people who write code to see that. I think that the idea of even a simple computer being able to construct AND program itself would be preposterous to most people here. And yet that is what the GTE proposes. Perhaps that points too much in the direction of a god for some people to accept, but the evidence seems to be clearly on the side of ID, IF you are truly following a "scientific" process.

Yes. This. This is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking...

Does anyone else here ever wonder if some of these "new" dinosaurs are really just re-discoveries of known dinosaurs? The article even mentions that the skeletal remains are incomplete. What if a number of these sauropods are really all the same species, albeit at different stages of their life? Is size alone enough to create a new classification? Perhaps growth continued throughout the life of a sauropod, and the largest ones were just the oldest?

This. Much of what Paul recounts is what I experienced in school, particularly in Junior High. The problem is, by the time I got to High School, my grades had begun to suffer because of my anxiety over the bullying, and I never really recovered my academic prowess until college. But that prevented me from getting some scholarships, and probably put me on a different career path that I'm still regretting today. When my focus shifted to popularity over academics, things did improve, and the bullying subsided. Part of me wishes I could put my adult self back into my adolescent body and redo those years with the perspective I have now.

I have noticed several comments mentioning prior art as a defense against absurd patents. With the recent passage of the America Invents Act, the United States is now a "first to file" country, not a "first to invent". If you do invent something new, you basically have only one year's time to get a patent application filed before running the risk of losing it to another filer (provided you have publicly demonstrated or sold your invention). Demonstrating that you invented the product first will do you no good. It is possible to extend this by a second year by filing a Provisional Patent Application (a much simpler, less expensive filing that only grants patent pending protection for a year until you file an official patent application). On the surface the AIA was intended to make obtaining patents easier for the layperson, but the expense of filing with the USPO actually makes it much more difficult for the lay inventor to defend themselves against a large entity with money and lawyers. It also encourages inventors to hide rather than demonstrate their ideas, lest someone else file a patent application first....

Reminds me of a "hack" I pulled years ago - I was developing desktop software that needed to retrieve information from a Palm OS application called Ultrasoft Brainforest Deluxe. This particular application was a general-purpose outlining/tree-structure data store. Basically I ended up searching for a description of the .PDB file format and using that to decode the tree structure from the synced back-ups. It took a bit of trial and error as well as some bitwise operations (my first experience with those). IIRC, the Palm data was stored as unsigned bytes, and I was using Java...

Notice also that in major keys, there is only a half-step between the 3rd and the 4th tones, meaning the diminished 4th interval will sound as a major 3rd. The augmented 4th (or diminished 5th - a.k.a tritone) perfectly splits the octave in this tuning system. You can go up or down by an augmented 4th or diminished 5th as many times as you want and only ever be playing the same two note-names.

I bought a MakerGear M2 in kit form back in August. Because of the complexities of owning and operating a home 3D printer, I actually recommend building from a kit. It will give you a level of familiarity with your hardware that will come in handy when you have to tweak or repair it (and you WILL have to). All in all, the MakerGear has been a solid printer that produces relatively high-quality prints consistently. Support from MakerGear is absolutely top-shelf, they are very quick to address and fix any issues you may have. Some things I have learned:

1) Not all plastic is created equal. Even plastic from a "good" supplier is sometimes suspect when your printer jams. You have to check filament diameter consistency. Melt temperatures will also vary even on the same "type" of plastic from different manufacturers.

2) Careful calibration and leveling is a must. Prints will fail frequently if you skimp on this step. It is imperative to check belts, drives, etc. frequently to make sure everything will run smoothly. There are also parts that must be kept lubricated.

I guess you could say that owning a 3D printer is more akin to owning a machine lathe than a traditional "printer".

From the software side of things, I use FreeCad for designing, Slic3r for slicing, and Pronterface for printer control with pretty good success. I have even been able to sell some products I have produced locally, and have a patent application in the works for one of them!

All has not been a bed of roses, though. One major problem I had took me weeks to track down. I kept having extruder jams during prints. None of the usual fixes seemed to help. I finally noticed that melted plastic was coming out from under the hot-end insulation! It turns out that the hot end assembly was unscrewing itself during the printing process. I had to disassemble it, clean it out, wrap the threads with several layers of teflon tape, and start again. It has been OK since then. I could replace the hot end with a new design MakerGear has now (they seem to iterate rather quickly), but don't want to shell out for it yet.