You are correct that I cannot list my source. Since I learned that as a fact before 1960, I've also learned that it was a rare grammatical rule that is only known because it was used a few (two?) places in the Bible. If you want to believe that, OK. I believe, however, that if you search through comparisons between the texts of Genesis and those of Babylonia you could probably turn up the source I mentioned, if it ever got put on the web.

If you're going to claim that the Mosaic Jews believed in the trinity, I'm just going to consider you an idiot.

Unfortunately, that's not true. It's often possible to create a consensus that's based on emotional drives, and no particular evidence at all. So the parent was correct in asserting that consensus is not necessarily a mark even of consistency with known and accepted facts.

My point was, in fact, that using the idea that something is accepted by a consensus (of a group) as evidence that it's correct is not a valid means of reasoning. It *is* a convenient short-hand that people often use, and it often works out "well-enough", but it's not a sound basis of argument. This is as true of "scientific consensus" as of any other. Usually, however, claims of "scientific consensus" are made by those who don't care to look carefully into the issues, or are explicitly arguing to people whom they presume would not be willing to look carefully at the evidence. You'll find that in blog posts more often than in popular science articles, and you'll just about never find "consensus" used as an argument in a serious scientific paper. It the people who look at the evidence agree, then many other people will be willing to take their word without looking into the evidence. E.g., I am quite willing to believe that a random line of code from the Linux kernel is doing it's job correctly, even though I'm certain that there are bugs present, and even that some people have identified some of them. And I *COULD*, in principle, study every line in the Linux kernel. Nobody does, not even Linus. Some people study proposed changes. Some people study apparent errors, etc. If you want to see what actual scientific discussion look like, look at the Linux kernel mailing list. It ends up with something that almost all people are willing to accept...but which some don't. You never get a real consensus in the strong meaning of the term. And that's true of science, too. The term consensus is used by those so distant from the actual work that they don't even know what's being done. And it's also a lie, even in the case of the most accepted principles. There are people who seriously deny the conservation of mattergy (matter + energy as related by E = mc^2). There are people who deny the big bang. There are people...well, name a believed rule and there are those who believe it isn't correct. And this is good, because very occasionally one of the wilder ones will be proven correct, but you can never predict ahead of time which one it will be.

That said, we badly need a high speed rail network in the U.S

No, we don't. We have aircraft.

-jcr

Air travel should be one of those novelty things that the lucky few can justify

Fuck you. I'll buy what I can afford, and your approval is neither sought nor required.

-jcr

It will be the language least suited to your task, but insisted upon by your managers.

The chunk appears to be lifted from a Babylonian source, and the Babylonians had more than one god. They just didn't have a good copy editor.

Have you seen any sign that the Roman Catholics don't believe in birth control? They may consider it a sin to practice it, but they believe in it as a fact.

You need to distinguish between what someone believes to be a fact and what they consider to be a moral or ethical good (or evil). The two can be nearly orthogonal. If the church didn't believe in birth control, they would probably be less active in arguing against it.

Thus, the Roman Catholic church not having the attitude towards the practice of birth control that you believe proper is not a sign that they have an unscientific disbelief in it. Until Ethics, Psychology, and Sociology become real sciences the church's current attitude is not unscientific. If they do, perhaps it will be able to adapt to them, also.

IIUC, there was a group in Egypt that used that as an act of worship, so this is a decree against that group. Is this the reason? That's hard to determine. Certainly the early Exodusees were reported to be willing to follow Apis, the golden calf god. Most of the other gods were less strictly suppressed, and in fact the rule against having an image of the god is probably to allow various sects that worshiped different gods to merge their beliefs.

Speaking as a statistician, that's not logic and certainly not statistics. It also doesn't fit elementary probability theory. You might be able to craft a plausible argument that had that as an element, but it would need to be encircled by rules of deduction that aren't validiateable. There's no valid rule of deduction that says "a lot of people believe this, therefore it's probably true". It's easy to come up with historical counter examples.

Having reread much of the series recently, I don't think it is truer than the Bible. You need to read them both as a certain metaphysical argument on which truth isn't even present. The problem with the Bible is that even as a metaphysical argument it's incoherent, much more so than the Dune series, even though in the Dune series the nature of the argument changes with each book.

You overstate your case. They may have been "ignorant, desert-dwelling sheep herders 20 centuries ago", but they knew a lot of practical biology, some botany, some meteorology and climatology, a bit of hydrodynamics, and a small amount of hygenics. O, and some geology. They may not have been academics, but their life required a lot of applied science knowledge. They theories may have been a combination of unintelligible and ludicrous, but they had a lot of practical matters down cold.

That's great news!

Could you please reply here with step by step instructions on how to accomplish this?

Thanks.

Whoever is designing such a system needs to remember to keep it client-side.

Given the ridiculous amount of processing power available on even low-end phones and tablets now there's really no excuse to rely on the horrible latency and dependence that comes with server based voice recognition.

Any voice processing that relies on server-side processing has already failed.

The United States should re-adopt the system of knighthoods just for this guy.

We could do with another Sir Ed.

I am miserable because I need to sign the same three letters in my username

No kid, that makes YOU miserable. I'm fine with it.

-jcr