I was pretty aware of the art of the day. I don't know exactly what Kemeny and Kurtz were thinking when they first made BASIC, but after that it was used a lot for working code. (If they didn't intend it for working code, why the array operators?) Most software for the earliest home computers, such as the Apple II, Commodore Pet, and TRS-80, was written in BASIC. The main alternative was assembly language, and I assure you BASIC was a heck of a lot easier to write and debug than Z80 assembly (I never did write 6502 assembly code).

Try pulling that on somebody who didn't get one of the first TRS-80s or didn't play with it extensively. That person might actually believe you.

I think you're still missing what I'm trying to say.

Let's consider people who think the laws of physics are really more like guidelines. Tell them that this guy was walking on water. Their reaction: "Okay, I guess surface tension was funny that day." The guy walking on water out there is only a miracle if you know darn well that it's impossible. Jesus rising after three days of death is only impressive if you know that people just don't do that.

Now, people can't normally walk on water, but there was a nice little scene in Bruce Almighty where Bruce and God were walking and talking. Doors don't open just because somebody orders them, but nowadays that'd be easy to set up. You can't just make magical gestures and have things happen unless there's a Kinect or something involved.

Therefore, if you believe that God is omnipotent, or at least has supernatural powers, then God can make the water support people. You know that's impossible, except that God has the cheat codes to the laws of physics. A miracle is a sign that God is above the laws of physics. It doesn't mean the laws of physics are wrong.

Really? The scientific consensus seems to be to retract the papers.

Since we're talking about peer-reviewed journals here, all papers have been peer-reviewed. The papers I've seen have usually had some discussion on what's come before, so you can tell if it reproduces or relies on previous work. (For seeing if it's been reproduced later, use a citation index.) They also list the credentials of the authors. I don't know what your problem is there.

However, these papers aren't progress reports, and aren't meant to be. They are findings of sufficient significance that it's worth keeping them around for later reference. This means that, if you don't get a significant result, you don't get published. If you get a lot of barely significant results, you get a big publication list.

This is a fine method to advance science, but it is also used to judge scientists, and that's where the problem lies. You think scientists should submit progress reports, which I think everybody agrees with, but even useful progress reports don't help the scientist's career unless they result in a finding worthy of a peer-reviewed publication. The difference between these things is where I think you're wrong.

You're advocating one specific quantitative performance metric: the length of the publication list. If I can get into a realm I'm more familiar with, people have been trying for years to come up with quantitative metrics to tell how good programmers are. It doesn't work. First, any such metric I'm familiar with fails to reward the right things. Second, any such metric gets gamed.

What you want a scientist to do is come up with good, innovative, science. The publication list penalizes innovation, since innovations don't always pan out, and rewards scientists who only undertake things they're pretty sure will work. A scientist simply may not be able to afford to investigate something that will take time and might not produce a positive result.

In this case, we saw the system get gamed by outright cheating. There are ways to game it that don't involve actual cheating. I haven't seen anybody suffer from the "least publishable unit" approach, and I remember one paper that left me awestruck at the precision in which the authors pulled out one result from a research program and got a peer-reviewed journal to publish the paper. It was an interesting result, but it was being precisely 1.000 LPU.

In my brief journey through academia, it seemed that the pub list was used a whole lot. There are variations, such as the citation list and journal impact factors, but these are closely related to the list length. This isn't healthy.

We're talking about a whole lot of highly intelligent and creative people here. Why aren't there other measures? Why are you expecting a non-scientist to come up with one?

But as is made clear here, simply publishing and getting it through peer review is clearly not good enough.

I thought they weren't good enough anyway, that a paper in a peer-reviewed journal didn't prove anything by itself. There's been plenty that turned out to be wrong.

After the publication, people are likely to want to build on that work (if it's interesting), and they'll wind up replicating parts of it. If it isn't solid, for whatever reasons, it'll get found then. If it holds up, there will soon be other corroborating papers.

It seems to me that things are working well here. Some people use underhanded techniques to get published, their papers are retracted when they're found out. The net result seems to be pretty much what you want.

I've never perceived scientists as all that well-paid, given their education and the amount of work that they appear to be put in. If somebody is smart enough to become a scientist, there's got to be more lucrative things they could do.

It may well be the case, but that's precisely why it makes sense to let private companies hash it out. If it's not just magical thinking, and they succeed, then everyone benefits from the development of the technology necessary to do it. If it is, then, well, a private company goes bankrupt.

How do you "rape" an asteroid?

If someone can set up a viable asteroid mining company in near future, I honestly don't care if they are forced to pay taxes. The benefits to be had long-term from development of the associated tech are much more important.

Thing is, the plan is to bring the first stage back in and land it on the launch pad. That makes the 395 million acres less relevant.

So you're saying I didn't really miss out on anything by not going South for spring break? Good to know.

While I generally agree with your pattern, I disagree with (e).

A religion begins with the guy with the revelation, as you say. These revelations can partly, but not completely, passed on to other people. Therefore, we have the real holy person, and a circle of other people directly affected. At this point, there's no real point in hierarchy, aside from the prophet/follower one. Then the guy with the revelation dies, and leaves a legacy based on what he or she said, as well as followers who carry part of the mystical vision. The religion either dies out fast or it forms into something structured, and then a hierarchy. So far, we agree.

I claim, however, that the elite don't actually have that revelation, since it can't be passed that far. They have the records of the original guy and followers, and some of them have their own revelations that are similar to the original guy's one. Not all of these are going to make it into the elite, who will generally be selected politically. There are no mystical exercises to a revelation that significant. The foundation of knowledge, which can be passed along, is not the revelation. (In fact, it's likely to have picked up all sorts of extraneous stuff over time, as the revelation guy didn't talk just about the revelation.) Therefore, it's immaterial whether the masses have the ability to understand a revelation, since there's nobody there to give them one.

If the religion actually has political power, it pretty well ensures that lots of the elite do not really believe the religion, but use it as a way to gain power. It also encourages religious schisms for political reasons. Nationalism wasn't really important as an ideology until fairly recently, so a group that wanted independence would often coalesce around a sufficiently different branch of the religion, which would be labeled a heresy by the people whose power was threatened.

In Christianity, people still go to the source material in translation. Most of what we've got on Jesus comes from the four Gospels in the New Testament, which were written well after his death (there's other fragments out there about him old enough to be similar source material, but not much). Lots of people read them who I'd classify as "ardently stuck in the petty intellectual framework that their parents give them". About the only way to get closer is to learn the appropriate version of Greek, and I don't think that is going to be that much of an improvement over a good translation.

The big problem I have with this is the "ground of being" idea. In one case you're describing it as laws of physics, and that's not really "the foundation from which all of existence springs". It's more of a description of what things do when there are things. Unless future physics takes a turn I really don't expect, it won't explain why there is a Universe (anthropic principles are not laws of physics). It isn't clear to me that "why is there a Universe?" is actually a real question instead of a confusion of ideas.

This doesn't seem to me at all similar to even a basic idea of God, even a very mechanistic version. I don't see that it's worth applying the same name to the concepts.

Moreover, it's perfectly possible to come up with something that really resembles most ideas of God that isn't a ground of being. To give one, suppose that God is the Universe (Sundays are my days to be a solipsist, and solipsism is logically equivalent to pantheism). In that case, the laws of physics and the laws of mysticism run the Universe, and neither may say why anything exists.

Religions often say nothing that is falsifiable, and in that case can't disagree with science. Lots of religious people (probably most) are happy to believe things about the world we exist in when given the evidence.

Look up the Nicene Creed and try to disprove any part of it. None of it is actually falsifiable, which means it's completely compatible with science.

Religious belief also depends on experience. Scientifically, we know some things about these experiences, but there's no scientific way to tell if they're artifacts of evolution in the human brain or actual divine perception.