Obligatory Bertrand Russell quote (from memory, my bad if not word for word...)

All men are born ignorant, not stupid: education makes them stupid.

Massive Like on the current outcome, but massive Dislike on the expensive time-wasting process that is the current legal system.

I write in LaTeX, compiling from the command line, using bash and vim. This is easy with Linux and a pain in the butt with Windows. On the other hand, Linux doesn't run Ableton.

Nye's comments are just as irrational (it makes claims as to what science can show which can not be substantiated). Unfortunately not enough people read the philosophy of science and learn the lessons of faulty reasoning, and silly arguments like the evolution vs creation debate are the result.

You can't force someone to believe. I became atheist despite an evangelical upbringing. I am now back believing, though a little more mystical than in my youth, having thought everything through, but fifteen years of detailed thought will obviously not fit in this comment box.

How on earth can one say that creation is inconsistent with evidence? We have no evidence that was _observed_ two million years ago. We have observations from a few decades, and all else is extrapolation. Those who know the issues with extrapolating from data, and what can go wrong if ones assumptions as to the continuation of observed trends do not go as expected should be taught along with evolution. What should be taught is that, if everything always was as it is now, and our current theories of physics are exact, and there is no silly business going on that we cannot test experimentally (and this really is a big untestable assumption whose falsification opens a massive can of worms) then evolutionary origins give a theory that is consistent with evidence. But only consistency with evidence, and the past illustrated by the theory is only an apparent past, like the image of yourself in the mirror is an apparent 'you' that isn't really there. We do not, and cannot know conclusively where we came from, and there really are two possible approaches. One is the kind of creation story you see in Genesis or in other creation myths there, and there you have to assume that the universe did not, at creation time, look or work like it does now, but that it changed, either slowly or abruptly, in ways that may leave no material evidence, converge to the reality which we observe now (which is perfectly possible, and indeed is what happens in your Linux system every time you do a fresh install).

Science is, and should be, about what is happening in the here and now, and where they're going. Saying that things are consistent with an evolutionary origin tells us much about what is going on now and where it's going, which is why it's useful. It tells us nothing concrete about where we actually came from, since as explained above, that requires a massive extrapolation and hence a leap of faith as great as that of a hardcore Bible belter's belief in Genesis.

In short, teach philosophy of science, not just 'scientific facts', so that people understand scientific reasoning, its power and its limitations, and can decide for themselves. But please, please stop this pointless religion vs science war. Religion is about how you live in the here and now. The Bible is a guide to help you. Belief in it is part of a faith that allows your mind to get deeper in to the subtler aspects of the world around us, for those of a more mystical bent. The faith glues a community together, and the Biblical text gives innumerable powerful life lessons if read and taught properly. Get faith right, science right, philosophy right and there is no war between them. The science vs faith thing is as clueless as the protestant vs catholic thing: it misses the point, wastes time and gives the false impression that one is right and the other is wrong. The only antidote to this crap is true understanding. I did my PhD in mathematics, with a heavy amount of foundational stuff, read eastern, middle eastern and western spiritual texts, including the Bible, taught myself physics, psychology, economics and computer science from textbooks and find all inspiring and useful. Faith is a crucial part of how I live now, as is my grasp of physics, mathematics and model theory (which probably has a lot to do with how I can happily have multiple mutually incompatible worldviews in my head without issue). Anyway, I can't think how to conclude this little rant, just to note that level headed thinking that both sides respect is what is really needed.

As a thought experiment for those 'nix-heads present on /., consider a group of conscious processes running on a Linux system trying to figure out the distant past of their system. They would have no concept of a human outside the system turning up with an install CD, sticking it into a new computer, booting it up and running the install prior to the system behaving in the way that our conscious processes would now experience. (I grew up with Tron, hence why I find it easy to picture this in my mind and to consider the idea of scientists in the Tron world.)

Most likely such processes would theorise and conclude that every process came as a result of the C compiler compiling it, and that the C compiiler is just a fundamental process of the system that just happens without any need for it to happen. The problem is that install time represents a discontinuity in the timeline of the system, where things change in ways that cannot once the system is up and running. The assumption that the system always behaved on a basic level like it does now does not hold in this thought experiment, and to tie this post to the previous, we cannot be sure of such an assumption about our current reality. There is always the possibility that we may be being fooled by apparent evidence, so cannot rely solely upon it. (Just as on our hypothetical Linux system, our processes cannot necessarily assume that the logs have not been forged.)

I have not issue that evolution happens in nature in the here and now. I have no problem that it happened in the near past, when the observations that gave birth to Darwin's theory were made. I've no problem with physics as an explanation about how the material world of the here and now works. But I do have a problem with any attempt to scientifically explain out distant origins based on present evidence (which is what many evolution theorists are trying to do.) The problem is that to conclude that our origins are evolutionary (and that there is nothing else involved, such as a 'Divine Hand', or anything else) is that one effectively presupposes:

1) That our distant past can be accurately inferred from present day evidence given a sufficient amount of it;
2) That there sufficient evidence is effectively available;
3) That we have found such a sufficient amount of evidence;
4) That an extrapolation a few million years or so outside of a data set that spans at most a small number of decades (maybe 20 or so decades) is valid, when in almost every case a straightforward extrapolation out of a data set that amounts to a few million percent of the width of the dataset results in garbage results.
5) That archeological and paleontological evidence dug up today was present in reality yesterday, the day before and all the days going back to the time said evidence came to rest where we found it. (I know this is pedantic, but self-generating dungeon examples from the early days of computer adventure games make me wonder whether or not reality in fact works the same way, generating history on demand from the requirements of consistency with already remembered experience... what I can't find a way to do from available evidence is to rule out such possibilities and thus one cannot safely assume to the contrary.)

I just do not believe that our actual distant past is within the reach of science. The only thing that the predictions of our apparent past based on extrapolation from present and near-past data give us is a way to test the internal consistency of our current theories and their compatibility with present day evidence. Trying to say where we came from millions of years ago by scientific means is like sampling the trajectory of a plane over maybe a couple of metres of its flight and then trying to work out mathematically where said plane came from, concluding that since the plane hasn't changed trajectory during those couple of metres over which it was sampled, it never was. The fact is that the distant past is inaccessible to us, since eventually if we try to logically infer what reality was like in the distant past we end up standing on a house of cards of unverifiable assumption after unverifiable assumption, which is no better than the faith-in-Genesis of the Bible-belters.

Actually, if you take the view that mind is fundamental, love and emotions of mind are fundamental and that matter is a by-product of experience, as a completely alternative metaphysical foundation to conventional science, then the account of a world created by the postulation of a mind described in Genesis can actually make sense. But whatever you do in terms of deducing what things were like anywhere but the here and now, you need to be careful as to what metaphysical foundations you are standing on.

"People don't want to use a 'social' service in which their social circle has to pay in order to interact with each other."
This happens all the time -- it's called going to the pub for a beer. Beer cost money, and people gladly pay it for the social time that comes with it, along with the taste.

It's reasonably well known that, in the case of clinical trials of psychiatric medications, that there are often positive correlations between the success of a drug in a trial and the corporation funding the trial. And the funding body in these cases has a veto on the trial. (See Moncrieff's books for more and the actual references... I've lent my copies to friends so don't have them to hand.) Most likely this goes on all the time in medical science due to the amount of money at stake. In the case of other sciences, one would expect evolutionary pressures to promote what the funding bodies want to see, regardless of explicit intent. The funding bodies' pressure to publish, and the need for academics to conform to a certain extent in order to preserve their career path is what has caused this bias to build up over the years.

Is a loose demonstration of plausibility of the Mach. theory.

The 192 is the red-herring. 44/24 would be fine (we don't need more than 44kHz sampling once processing has been done, but having the recording mastered to a 24bit format would change the requirements for compressing the dynamic range. Also, in the case of hi-hats being tapped, they are quite quiet, and so don't use all of the 16bit dynamic range of CD. You'd be lucky to be hearing 9bits of it unless the mastering engineer has overdone the compression. The effect, then is one of bitcrushing to 8-9bits (vs 16-17bits dynamic range left in a 24bit recording) which one can learn to hear even when subtle.

The problem with modern marketing, and the skinny model thing is but one example of this, is that it is easier to sell something to someone who is dissatisfied with what they already have. Thus much marketing aims to induce this kind of dissatisfaction with the status quo in the hope that you'll plump for their 'fix'. The real solution is to change how you view yourself and the world, but this is not easy, and not easy to educate about when the media and marketing people have a vested interest in spreading the opposite. What's needed is satisfaction, joy with life and general responsibility rather then dissatisfaction, greed and selfishness, which is alas the norm for the modern world.

Doing what you suggest tends to fall in to the remit of theologians, and we have plenty of them. It's just that churches tend not to listen to them when they don't come out with the same conclusions that come down from the pulpit each Sunday morning.

As for the Council of Nicea, you appear to be confusing reality with DanBrownLand -- the council did the creed and a few other things, but not standardising the bible.

There's no one perfect way to translate the Bible. Compromises always have to be made in making translation choices, and different translations make different decisions based on the intended audience etc. of the translation. Take a look at Dao de jing translations and you'll see that there are plenty again, each with different aims for translation and thus slightly different results.