Jump to content

kisai

Senior Members
  • Posts

    128
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by kisai

  1. I never really believed.  But my parents were Catholic.  I was a voracious reader and my parents bought me a copy of The Children's Bible.

    Now, I do read mythology, so no I didn't turn my nose up at the creation story or Noah's Ark or the Tower of Babel.  But while I was getting through Exodus and more to the part where the Israelites settle into Canaan, I noticed that they couldn't get along with anybody.  It just started to sicken me how much killing was in this book.

    Then I get to the 10 Commandments.  And one of them is "Thou shalt not kill."  "Finally", I thought, "there will be a change!"

    Very next chapter was God assisting Moses in killing the Midianites by having the battle be successful if Moses can keep his hands up.

    I stopped reading.

     

  2. Don't confuse ability and talent with rationality. Rationality is, well, several qualities, but one of these qualities is realizing causal links between events and asking for evidence that these events (or a version thereof) occurred.

     

    To be a great neurosurgeon, you do not need to be rational. The brain is (more or less) a closed system. You can know everything about its structure, as well as how to perform surgery upon it, without caring about how it evolved, or its similarity to other species' brains. I daresay we'll have electronic neurosurgeons in the future, and they'll be superior to human neurosurgeons, and they won't be particularly caring about the evolution of the brain either.

  3.  

     

    Read like more of a personnel opinion that evidence. Census of Quirinius took place a decade after Herod's death.

     

    If information is cited on Wikipedia, I generally don't provide a reference. Herod the Great died in 4 BCE. The census could not have taken place until the Romans took direct rule of Judea in 6 AD.

  4.  

    To my understand both Matthew and Luke read that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. So I am not sure what you are referencing. Can you elaborate?

     

    The census of Quirinius which Luke claims to have been the reason for Jesus' birth in Bethlehem actually took place 10 years earlier. Its placement in the gospels is a fabrication in order to align Jesus' post-mortem deification with prophecies. There is no reason to take an expectant mother on a four day walk on a highway.

     

    However, the fabrication does point to the actual existence of Jesus. Had he been wholly fictional, it would have been simpler just to have him born and live in Bethlehem.

  5. No I'm not. I have no knowledge of the statistics on this matter. I'm not even sure what statistics you are talking about.

     

     

    Let me refer you to your original post. When you use terms such as "religiosity" and "intelligence metric", you are referring not to individuals, but how religious (or intelligent) people are in groups. If I wanted to measure the religiosity of my town, I would ideally ask everyone in the town to fill out a survey, or interview them regarding their religious behaviors. If I didn't have time to survey everyone, then I'd try to randomly sample proportionally from different neighborhoods. Either way, I'd get an average number. That average number would be an indication of the religiosity of my town.

     

    The point being, when you use the word religiosity, you're referring to a group of people. If you're comparing a trend in religiosity to intelligence, that's also referring to a group of people. Whenever you're looking at groups of people for trends, you're using statistics.

     

    The mistake you're making is that you're taking information from groups of people and trying to apply it to individuals. This is wrong. I can show a definite correlation between lung cancer and smoking heavily. This does not mean your Uncle Frank who smokes two packs a day is going to die of lung cancer. Uncle Frank may not even have a hint of any cancer and live to the ripe age of 102, smoking like a chimney. This doesn't mean the statistics are wrong, or Uncle Frank is wrong.

  6. Then why say he probably did?

     

    Because there's things about him that don't fit into his follower's supposed prophecies. For instance, he was actually born in Nazareth, but the prophecies call for Bethlehem. So his followers had to make up a story that there was a census that forced the birth to be in Bethlehem. If Jesus was fictional, it would have been easier just to say he was born in Bethlehem.

  7. I experience the same cognitive shift as well with my poor sleep habits.. Let us say I'm watching a movie in bed and I'm nodding off. I will have a thought about the movie, or what the characters are about to do next, and fabricate something that is imaginative but always false. For instance, if it is Lord of the Rings and the characters are in the Mines of Moira, I might shut my eyes and suddenly imagine that they are going downstairs to check rental prices in the goblin warrens. And it is a thought, not a whole tableau of visual fantasy.

  8. You'll probably have to do more math and physics with astrophysics than EE. Electrical Engineering classes nowadays mostly are half or less Computing Engineering degrees. Yes, having both would be cool, but I would switch to astrophysics if your love is astrophysics. There is nothing that prevents you from continuing your education once you finish university. I also think you might change your mind again when you get exposed to more ideas.

  9. EEG devices (and other medical devices) are expensive because they cannot be slapped together by regular, off-the-shelf electronics, but highly tuned components. The devices are also insured by the maker in case of liability. Imagine the lawsuit that happens when your EEG tells a doctor that you're brain-dead when you're still very much not.

     

    It would be much cheaper and much more educational to build your own if this is for amateur work. The DIY websites should help you.

  10. C and C++ code is compiled into executable files. That is, the original program goes through several passes where it is basically changed to assembly code, then into machine level code. Once it is transformed into a bunch of ones and zeroes, it is impossible to go back to the original code (although you could reverse engineer it back to the assembly code). You cannot casually see how a software application is running in C without the original code.

  11. Sir Francis Bacon is often credited for introducing a more rigorous standard to science, but its possible that he was inspired by other breaking scientists in his peer group.

     

     

     

    If science is maintained with philosophy, how do we ask scientific questions, and answer them, with integrity, without reference to ethos, pathos and logos?

     

    We look to nature and discard unnecessary entities.

  12. In the Book of the New Sun, the protagonist Severian possesses a cloak which is the color of fuligin, or blacker than black. The material is so dark you cannot see the folds of the material.

  13. Your mesh circuit is reporting every amperage as positive. The sum of the currents entering a node is equal to the sum of the currents leaving. Some quick adding shows me that this holds for the center line.

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.