Interestingly, there is a conference this summer dealing with humans and their abilities to perform computation. It's titled Engineering and Metaphysics, and deals with the relationship between humans, physics, and reality.

Quite true - you might be interested in my article Why Food is NOT a Basic Human Right

Well, the problem is that landfills are actually *made* to handle toxic substances, so filling them up with things that don't belong there wastes *lots* of money and time. They usually put landfills in empty rock quarries, so that the waste doesn't leach into the soil and water system. In addition, they are usually treated in such a way as to encourage it *not* to break down, and therefore it is less of a hazard. If you spend all of that landfill area on stuff that *could* be composted away, you are just wasting valuable space.

Why do you think we must go to expensive doctors for healthcare? They haven't even existed for most of humanity. The problem is that government regulations *prevent* people from offering healthcare at reasonable prices. They don't allow nurses to operate without the supervision of doctors, they are trying to push herbalists out, and if you were to make a splint for your neighbor's broken arm... God help you.

The problem isn't that we lack healthcare, it's that the government has mandated that all health care be done by expensive doctors, rather than by each other.

On top of that, we have developed a societal expectation that we should have everything just because we want it. Why should you be guaranteed dental care by a specialist after drinking cokes for decades?

There are many people who would and could help, but we demand that our help comes only from experts and specialists, and then we demand that someone else pay for it.

The person Coyne was debating was an evolutionist, not a creationist.

Actually, just to be clear, a large number of Catholics, especially those in the upper hierarchy, are ID-oriented evolutionists. Most people don't realize that there is a large contingent of ID who agree with common ancestry, but doubt the mechanism of natural selection. This is the position of many in the Catholic church.

Also with regard to the Galileo affair, Feyerabend argued quite persuasively that a fair assessment of the evidence available to observers at the time of Galileo actually point to Galileo being wrong. In fact, Galileo's "clenching" argument that the Earth moves is the tides, which Galileo thought occurred by the sloshing of the waters as the Earth moves in space. Galileo thought that the geocentric idea that the moon caused the tides was rediculous nonsense.

Anyway, just to point out that the way knowledge progresses is always much more messy than the stories that get told.

Actually, Catholicism isn't nearly as single-minded as your post implies. There are many parts of the Catholic church with many different perspectives. There are YEC groups and evolutionary groups and everything in-between. The Catholic church is quite a diverse place, and the idea that it is a singular unity is basically a myth. The "orders" of the catholic church have about as much variance as the Protestant denominations.

In anything, you can get people to work around the clock. What made Apple tick was that Jobs organized that work towards a common, definable goal. It is great to have a great crew. But there are a very small number of crews, no matter how great the individuals, who will work in a unified effort without the strong efforts of a leader to provide direction.

I think this is completely silly. Don't even understand the point. If, instead, he had limited the string to single-characters, he would have been finished in at most a few minutes. So it looks like he is taking an impossible problem, cheating, and then covering for it by making the string long enough to require real work.