And you get the bonus gasifier acid ash that you can use to destroy neighbors soil.

Please explain.

No way I'm gonna try one of these until they get the bugs out. Instead of a blue screen, I'll get a black hole and those Higgs bosons all over the carpet. My wife will kill me. Plus, they probably cost like over a thousand bucks.

But I bet GTA V runs like a banshee on it. No screen tearing, but possibly tearing in the fabric of space and time. As soon as Tiger Direct starts selling them, I'm in for one, but you best believe I'm gonna be wearing my lead codpiece when I sit in front of that thing.

The idea that all serious science is done by atheists

That's not what I said at all.

The reason Newton, Kepler, Copernicus believed the "world was made in 6 days" is because they lived before plate tectonics, Darwin and carbon dating.

There is nothing incompatible about religious faith and science. Lots of great science has been done by mystics. You mention Newton, and he was an alchemist and believer in scrying and other occult practices too. Nobody would mistake him for a circa 2013 American Christian Fundamentalist. In fact, Evangelicals would consider Newton a heretic and dangerous person. They'd be trying to pray the demons out of him.

Kepler was an astrologer. You know a lot of American Fundamentalist Christians who are into astrology?

Copernicus? Well, Copernicus was a faithful Catholic, and for his trouble had to delay publication of his work on heliocentrism out of fear of the Church. If you read the dedication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (to the Pope), you can see how delicately and carefully he had to present his case that the Earth was not the center of the Universe.

And did you know there is a movement in American Catholicism that still believes to this very day that the Earth is the center of the Universe?
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-07-04/news/ct-met-galileo-was-wrong-20110704_1_modern-church-universe-splinter-group

And I note that Charles Darwin's name is conspicuously absent from your list of great scientists who "think the world was made in 6 days". Is that maybe because the American Christian Fundamentalist group "The Discovery Center" believes in Creationism?

So don't you dare tell me that "most of modern science rests atop pillars" built by anyone resembling American Christian Fundamentalists in any way. It's just baloney.

Wait, I think we're talking past each other. Of course not every important new theory is a "eureka moment", but the margins happen to be where a lot of the work is being done. After all, is anyone doing groundbreaking work in the movement of the planets? In fact, nearly none of science is done by flash of insight. And that wasn't even the point I was trying to make. I'm saying that a lot of the groundbreaking work happens because there was something missing in a previous assumption. But most work in science is not groundbreaking. Most work is incremental, but even those increments come because someone looked at a problem differently - made some different assumptions.

The first-hand observation of "science at work" has been entirely in mathematics. While I pay attention to the history and cultural foundations of science in other fields, that's the one I can see done every day, at home. And there are damn few eureka moments, that's for sure.

Damned few scientific theories have been outright overthrown.

The theory is not in danger but the assumptions are.

For example, there was postulation of the existence of microtubules before their existence was proven. The overwhelming consensus was that they could not exist, and even after they were directly observed, the assumption was that it was an artifact of microscope slides. The existence of electronic activity in the brain has a similar origin story. Consensus was that such a thing could not be real, until an occultist who was trying to prove psi energy developed instruments to measure the activity.

The important assumptions in science are often the ones made at the margins. And those are the ones that most often end up being wrong. Understand, I'm not saying they are mostly wrong, but rather when there is an assumption proven to be wrong, it's usually one at the margins. But that's where the important work is to be done, no?

why we're supposed to keep sending money to Wikipedia in order to to prevent it from becoming an advertisement platform.

Because the reason these corporate PR scumbags can subvert Wikipedia is because they can outnumber the unpaid structure in place to prevent it.

The only solution is to make Wikipedia stronger, more able to pay people to keep order and prevent a bunch of thugs from engaging in these edit spam attacks.

Corporations do not have morals. They are unable to discern fairness or truth or even order. If they can achieve even a small gain via destruction, even destructive of valuable social institutions, they will do so without remorse and without hesitation. They are golems with only one directive: to gain via any means necessary.

This is ultimately the one flaw in the rule of corporate protection of personal liability. In a family-owned business, there are people - there is a guy - who can feel bad or have other people get in his face to make him feel bad. There is no such mechanism in the corporate entity.

And if you can see the damage done to a social institution like Wikipedia by corporate interests, can you really doubt that they are doing exactly the same thing to our most important social institutions, such as government, family and community?

Good luck with that. Latinos tend to be extremely christian

It depends on what you mean by "extremely". They are overwhelmingly Christian, but also very pragmatic.

It's possible, I have learned, to be a pragmatic mystic. It's one thing to believe that a god has his eye on every sparrow, but it's another thing altogether to believe He will catch you if you jump off a cliff.

Most important to your point, though, is that we may have reached "peak immigration" from Hispanic cultures. Last year, the US saw a net loss in Hispanic immigration, and even significant reverse immigration in that community. No such change has occurred in immigration from Asia and Eastern Europe.

a high degree of certainty. It strikes me that it is almost certain

"Almost" and a "high degree of certainty" are very different than the kind of certainty you find in certain circles.

Specifically, religious extremists and pop skeptics.

provisional truth.

But even that changes occasionally. Certainty is a trap.

You're lucky HK screwed up, or I'd have never seen this.

Who is "HK" and how did he screw up?

Bingo. The racial divide in Indian culture is not significantly less than in the United States.

Also, a surprising number of those who call themselves "skeptics" in the James Randi cult also resent science.

Simple rule: If science makes you certain, you're doing it wrong.

I never knew before reading Slashdot how many "tech nerds" really hate science.

I wonder how many of them are angry because they couldn't cut it.

Our best hope for scientific literacy for Americans is immigration reform.

Get enough people from places where they don't think the world was made in 6 days and it might raise the average some.

Either that or hope the South secedes.

Benghazi Jezebel.

You're only the third person I've ever encountered who has seen that BBC documentary. You, me, and the person who told me I needed to watch it back in the mid-2000s.

It really is indispensable if you want to understand society circa 2013.