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Submission + - Kate Mulgrew, aka Captain Janeway, Thinks Sun Revolves Around Earth. (rawstory.com) 3

Submitted by synaptik
synaptik writes: A new documentary film, narrated by a former Star Trek actress, promotes the long-ago disproven idea that the sun revolves around the Earth. 'Everything we think we know about our universe is wrong,” says actress Kate Mulgrew as she narrates the trailer for “The Principle.' The film, which is set to be released sometime this spring, was bankrolled in part by the ultra-conservative and anti-Semitic Robert Sungenis, who maintains the blog 'Galileo Was Wrong.'

Comment Re:Knowledge (Score 1) 1037

by quantaman (#46690143) Attached to: How the Internet Is Taking Away America's Religion

Only fragments of the original papyri have survived. The only part of the papyri that are reproduced directly in the Book of Abraham are two drawings, only one of which survives in part, and the most interesting and controversial parts are not among the scraps that have survived. Egyptologists have argued that the drawings are "wrong,*" but that's actually kind of the point. The author used a variation on the Egyptian funerary drawing to illustrate a story. As for the text itself, that may have come from a separate papyrus that did not survive, or Joseph may have received it as a direct revelation as he did many other passages of scripture. To me, how Joseph got from the papyri to the extant text is not so interesting as the text itself, which I have found to be extremely valuable.

So the explanation for the translating being completely wrong is the author wasn't actually writing Egyptian?

About how you would deal with it if I laid out to you my theory for how I have disproved the existence of trees. You'd look at it and think, "That's interesting, but I know there are trees, because I've seen them. So I suspect there is something missing in your argument."

Except for some reason we can't actually see the trees (I'm not sure what you mean by seeing them).

So instead we ask what would we expect if there were trees? Well there would be leaves on the ground. Why aren't there leaves? The wind must have blown them away.

Ok, there would be wooden furniture and houses. But then we look and all the houses are brick and the furniture metal and plastic. So you say they must not like to build with wood.

Ok, then there would be fruit in the markets, but there isn't any. You say they must not like fruit.

The problem is that every time there's a test that could endorse the Mormon narrative you end up finding an excuse to explain away the difference.

Joseph Smith claimed there was a sword with the golden plates. Assume we had some fancy sonar that could identify the type any material underground, and, starting at Cumorah Hill, we scanned the earth 100m deep for a 20 km radius.

Would you expect them to find any swords or other metalwork from the 4th century?

Comment Re:Knowledge (Score 1) 1037

by quantaman (#46690059) Attached to: How the Internet Is Taking Away America's Religion

Others are biting on the other topics so I'll just mention the genetics bit.

What about the claim that Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israelites, something proven false.

That's too big of an issue to get into here, but suffice it to say that your statement of the claim is an oversimplification (the original and current editions of the Book of Mormon state that the peoples of the Book are descended of Joseph of Egypt, and among the ancestors of Native Americans), and the 'evidence' that has been posited against is does not stand up to scrutiny.

Weren't the people described be Semitic? In that case there would be signs of Semitic DNA in the Native American population, if the genes have spread through the genepool then genetic drift won't eliminate all traces. And the things they describe aren't population bottlenecks, for a bottleneck you really have to reduce the population to a small portion of their overall numbers. If a Semitic population had been there for several centuries the DNA would have spread throughout North America. To wipe out that DNA you'd have to drive the Native American to the brink of actual extinction.

Apropos, the answers to all of your questions and the cure to your misconceptions are readily found on the internet. Whether the internet makes some people into atheists, I do not know, but one this is for sure: knowledge, even readily available knowledge, does not by itself make one more informed. One has to know how to seek it out, filter the truth from the noise, and then judiciously apply it.

It's not about knowledge it's about evaluating evidence and arguments. Mormonism isn't just claiming a couple Semites showed up in North America, it is claiming four major kingdoms surviving for almost 1000 years. The problem isn't that there aren't ways you can explain away the evidence, it's that every time there's a way to test the claims of Mormonism you end up having to explain something away.

Why couldn't the plates be investigated by an impartial authority, or the original text transcribed? Well the angel didn't want that.

Why does the little we've seen of the scrolls from book of Abraham have nothing to do with the described text of the book of Abraham? Well it was written by a Jew who wasn't writing proper Egyptian.

Why is there no evidence, genetic or archaeological, of these four huge middle eastern kingdoms that lasted a millenia or more? Apparently Moroni wasn't talking about the Native Americans after all.

Imagine that tomorrow someone discovered the book of Abraham scrolls hadn't been destroyed in fire, and were found intact in some forgotten collection, or some expedition on Cumorah found a bag containing some golden plates and the bag was carbon dated to the 1830s.

They items in question were then scanned and put online. My prediction is that the plates would turn out to be gibberish and the book of Abraham would have nothing to do with Joseph Smith's translation. What do you think the result would be?

Submission + - Snowden's purloined documents are now available online (aclu.org)

Submitted by Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: The ACLU and others have long suspected that the National Security Agency has gone far beyond its mandate of gathering information for counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence purposes. Many Those suspicions were confirmed when, on June 5, 2013, The Guardian released the first in a series of documents provided by Edward Snowden detailing the NSA's unlawful spying activities. All of the documents released since that day, both by the media and the government, are housed in a database maintained by the ACLU and accessible by the public on-line.

Submission + - Heartbleed: Serious OpenSSL zero day vulnerability revealed (heartbleed.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ZDNet reports: New security holes are always showing up. The latest one, the so-called Heartbleed Bug in the OpenSSL cryptographic library, is an especially bad one. The flaw can potentially be used to reveal not just the contents of a secured-message, such as a credit-card transaction over HTTPS, but the primary and secondary SSL keys themselves. This data could then, in theory, be used as a skeleton keys to bypass secure servers without leaving a trace that a site had been hacked.

Submission + - Toyota is becoming more efficient - replacing robots with humans (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by bricko
bricko writes: Toyota is becoming more efficient by replacing robots with humans
Inside Toyota Motor Corp.’s oldest plant, there’s a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai’s vision of the future.

“We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything.”

Submission + - Crypto Wars .. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the 1970s, a group of quirky academics and scientists came up with a means of providing encryption to the masses. America’s National Security Agency went to war with them – doing its best to suppress the emerging technology of public encryption. In the 1990s the US government pushed to have every computer and phone installed with something called a ‘clipper’ chip which would allow the government to break encryption if needed – effectively a back door for the state. They lost that battle and so what we have learnt from the Snowden leaks is how they tried to work round encryption by hacking into companies and other spy-type methods to retain their edge.

Submission + - Online Skim Reading Is Taking Over The Human Brain

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Michael S. Rosenwald reports in the Washington Post that according to cognitive neuroscientists humans seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online at the expense of traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. Maryanne Wolf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the Web and hundreds of e-mails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse’s challenging novel “The Glass Bead Game.” “I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it,” says Wolf. “It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.”

The brain was not designed for reading and there are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read. For example, at the neuronal level, a person who learns to read in Chinese uses a very particular set of neuronal connections that differ in significant ways from the pathways used in reading English. Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies.

Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade our ability to deal with other mediums. “We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scrolling and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you,” says Andrew Dillon. Wolf points out that she’s no Luddite but she is now training her own brain to be bi-literate. She went back to the Hesse novel the next night, giving herself distance, both in time and space, from her screens. “I put everything aside. I said to myself, ‘I have to do this,’” she said. “It was really hard the second night. It was really hard the third night. It took me two weeks, but by the end of the second week I had pretty much recovered myself so I could enjoy and finish the book.”

Submission + - Qualcomm Announces Next-Gen Snapdragon 808 And 810 SoCs (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Qualcomm has announced two fundamentally new chips today with updated CPU cores as well as Qualcomm's new Adreno 400-class GPU. The Snapdragon 808 and the Snapdragon 810 have been unveiled with a host of new architectural enhancements. The Snapdragon 810 will be the highest-end solution, with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 paired alongside four Cortex-53 CPUs. The Snapdragon 808 will also use a big.Little design, but the core layouts will be asymmetric — two Cortex-A57's paired with four Cortex-A53's. The Cortex-A57 is, by all accounts, an extremely capable processor — which means a pair of them in a dual-core configuration should be more than capable of driving a high-end smartphone. Both SoC's will use a 20nm radio and a 28nm RF transceiver. That's a major step forward for Qualcomm (most RF today is built on 40nm). RF circuits typically lag behind digital logic by at least one process node. Given that RF currently accounts for some 15% of the total area and 30-40% of the PCB, the benefits of moving to a smaller manufacturing process for the RF circuit are significant.

Submission + - Seagate releases 6TB Hard Drive Sans Helium (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Seagate has released what it said is the industry's fastest hard drive and it has up to 6TB capacity, matching one released by WD last year. WD's 6TB Ultrastar He6 was hermetically sealed with helium inside, something the company said was critical to reducing friction for additional platters, while also increasing power savings and reliability. Seagate, however, said it doesn't yet need to rely on Helium to achieve the 50% increase in capacity over it's last 4TB drive. The company used the same perpendicular magnetic recording technology that it has on previous models, but it was able to increase areal density from 831 bits per square inch to 1,000. The new drive also comes in 2TB, 4TB and 5TB capacities and with either 12Gbps SAS or 6Gbps SATA connectivity. The six-platter, enterprise-class drive is rated to sustain about 550TB of writes per year — 10X that of a typical desk top drive.

Comment Re:Knowledge (Score 1) 1037

by quantaman (#46679167) Attached to: How the Internet Is Taking Away America's Religion

Let me give you the view of a non Mormon: Mormonism is bonkers!

That's a compelling counter-argument.

It's a little pithy but he did follow with some actual arguments.

How do you rationalize Smith's behaviour with the gold plates that nobody but him ever saw, and when the transcriber "lost" the translations (to see if Smith actually did have a source document from which he could reproduce the same translation) Smith then provided a different translation. How he translated some Egyptian scrolls into the Book of Abraham, but the scrolls in question have nothing in common with what Joseph Smith translated. What about the claim that Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israelites, something proven false.

I'm just curious, I'm sure you're aware of these counterarguments, how do you deal with them?

Comment Re:Why should I be outraged? (Score 1) 90

by quantaman (#46673037) Attached to: More On the "Cuban Twitter" Scam

The US is supposedly selling Democracy, free speech, and freedom of the press.

Government propaganda, particularly covert government propaganda, has no place in Democracy. By using these methods to influence foreign populations not only is the US is undercutting its own message, they're doing through the agency (USAID) that is supposed to be spreading that message.

This is why sunlight is essential, because without it governments fall victim to group think and short sighted objectives and lose the ability to plan for the long term by standing on principal.

Comment Re:The Religious Right will have your head on a pl (Score 1) 470

by quantaman (#46671941) Attached to: It's Time To Bring Pseudoscience Into the Science Classroom

I don't think that's the issue precisely, but I think the idea of debunking actual pseudoscience is really dicey.

When you teach evolution you're teaching something the parents think is wrong. They fight it but you can do it.

But if you debunk creationism you're teaching that the parents are wrong. They're going to fight that a lot harder.

Similarly with "Roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception,"

So if you use those as examples of pseudoscience you're saying that 1/3 of parents are wrong.

Even if you could manage it politically I don't like it from an ethical perspective.

It's better to concentrate on teaching good critical thinking skills. The Texas GOP notwithstanding the idea of making kids better critical thinkers is something everyone can get behind, I doubt you can find a single creationist, astrologer, or antivaxxer who doesn't attribute their belief to superior critical thinking skills. Everyone can agree with making the kids better critical thinkers because everyone thinks that they're right and smarter kids will agree with them.

If you want to attack the pseudoscience directly you might be able to get away with inventing some ridiculous fictional pseudoscience and debunk that just so they understand the existence of cargo cult science. But even you'd probably get in trouble as it would be pretty obvious you were "shilling for big science" or something similar.

Comment Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer (Score 1) 233

by quantaman (#46667539) Attached to: Most Expensive Aviation Search: $53 Million To Find Flight MH370

now here is the mystery. Let's say it was a fire. The captain and crew are incapacitated from carbon monoxide. The fire would take down the whole aircraft. It would burn through the wires for the computer auto pilot and crash the plane well before 7 hours. Or the structure would fail as it would burn through the luggage and explode the fuel compartment.

I'm not convinced this was the case, the fire could run out of oxygen, run out of things to burn (depending where it started), or they could have put it out before succumbing.

Also the path is changed again in the final arc. Why? Wouldn't it logically be on the same new path and be half way between Australia and Africa if the crew did die? That is west of perth alright but WAAY farther west. What in the mathematically geometry that says it is in the search area? Distance wise why wouldn't it be on the other side of the arc southwest instead of southeast?

Also if the plane is flying lower you have more friction if it still was at 12,000 feet. So wouldn't it logically be farther north as it would run out of fuel quicker too?

If it turned later on couldn't that be the result of the autopilot? I'm envisioning a scenario where the pilot tried to program in a return course but was very confused due to oxygen deprivation and wrote in some bizarre flight instructions instead. Soon after the fire everyone was dead and the fire was out but the plane continued flying with weird instructions entered.

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