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On 1/7/2011 1:05 PM, Darren New wrote:
> I'm not sure why you have a job in IT instead of a job in teaching.
I taught computer literacy to fifteen-year-olds.
Teaching requires, in addition to subject matter competency, skill in
classroom management and lesson planning and presentation. I was hired
having a CIS degree, but with no training in the other areas. If you
don't know what to watch for, the kids will go crazy. Toss in the kids
who weren't raised right (for whatever reason), and the situation
becomes unmanageable.
Additionally, a typical school teacher takes an enormous amount of work
home. That takes its toll as well.
I quit after seven months. My replacement worked for less than two
years before moving on as well.
Regards,
John
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On 10/01/2011 04:01 PM, John VanSickle wrote:
> Teaching requires, in addition to subject matter competency, skill in
> classroom management and lesson planning and presentation. I was hired
> having a CIS degree, but with no training in the other areas. If you
> don't know what to watch for, the kids will go crazy. Toss in the kids
> who weren't raised right (for whatever reason), and the situation
> becomes unmanageable.
I would have thought the biggest problem is that kids don't want to
learn anything, don't give a damn what you're talking about, and will
basically go to any lengths to avoid being taught.
_That_ is why I'm not a teacher.
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> Mathematical theories exist independent of the physical world. For
> example, the Manhattan geometry surely doesn't describe any real-world
> situation (except something really abstract like network topology).
Err, you do realise why it's called Manhattan geometry?
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>> I've seen a lot of arguments for and against whether ID should be taught
>> in schools alongside evolution. For me, these all miss the main point:
>> ID is not a scientific theory. It may or may not be correct, but it's
>> not testable. Because it doesn't /predict/ anything.
>
> Actually, it does. It predicts, among other things, that the genetic
> code for organisms may have features of no present use, but which may be
> of use by descendant creatures. An intelligent designer, especially one
> of the intellect required to design a eukaryotic cell, would have some
> capacity for anticipating future changes to the environment and can
> front-load the genetic code in preparation for this.
ID asserts that "life was designed by an intelligent, concious entity".
That's all it says.
Now, if you mean "life was designed by an intelligent, concious entity
AT THE START OF EARTH'S HISTORY", then you start to be able to make some
predictions.
The first prediction is that the genome of every creature that has ever
existed and will ever exist must have been somehow encoded into the very
first lifeform(s) that the designer seeded the planet with.
By a trivial pigeon-hole argument this is laughably impossible.
It also pre-supposes that the designer knew exactly what habitats would
exist in 4 billion years' time, which is also absurdly impossible.
(The best human scientists, equipped with mountains of measurement data,
cannot even predict what the weather will do in 5 days' time, never mind
what it will do over geological time. And you're suggesting that the
designer /could/ predict all of this with /no measurement data at all/?
I think not.)
To see how severe the problem is, consider the video I watched the other
day. D. Attenborough visited an ancient lava flow in New Zealand. In one
place, it had cut off an area of forest about 300 yards across. And in
this one tiny island of green surrounded by barren rock, there lives an
entire ecosystem of plants and animals. There are species of fruit flies
there that live in this 300 square yard patch of ground, and live
nowhere else on the face of the Earth.
You seriously expect me to believe that some designer 4 billion years
ago could have predicted that the lava flow would move in this exact
direction to leave this specific patch of green free for colonisation?
Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
> Be that as it may, I am against the teaching of life's origins on the
> public dime, because it is a matter of public debate, and is therefore
> incompatible with the principles that underlie a free society.
Well, that's a nice idea, but do we not teach children about World War
II, because some lunatic claims that it didn't happen? Do we not tell
them that the world is round, because a few lone idiots claim that it's
flat?
Isn't part of the job of education to get the facts straight, so that
kids know what to believe?
Now, that's not always possible of course. There are cases where we
really aren't sure what the facts actually are. And IMHO that is a
useful lesson too. If you're talking about the /origin/ of life on
Earth, nobody has really conclusively figured that out yet. There's a
bunch of plausible theories, but nobody is really anywhere near sure.
But if you're talking about the /evolution/ of life... apart from a few
lone crackpots, everybody unanimously agrees on the matter. So that's
what we should teach.
Personally, I think they /should/ teach ID in schools. As an example of
how to tell the difference between scientific fact and crude falsehood.
(Apparently some people can't do this yet...)
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On 10/01/2011 03:59 PM, scott wrote:
>> Mathematical theories exist independent of the physical world. For
>> example, the Manhattan geometry surely doesn't describe any real-world
>> situation (except something really abstract like network topology).
>
> Err, you do realise why it's called Manhattan geometry?
Because it applies to the topology of the streets of Manhattan?
Like I said, I'm sure there's lots of other, similarly abstract things
to which it also applies. It does /not/ however apply literally to the
three-dimensional space that we all see around us.
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On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:38:58 -0500, John VanSickle wrote:
> This claim does not come strictly from uninformed masses. It is also
> made by people more knowledgeable than you and I put together.
But in all the cases I've found, it comes from them when they reach the
limit of their knowledge - then they fall back on "God did it" because
they can't explain any further.
Jim
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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospam com> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:38:58 -0500, John VanSickle wrote:
> > This claim does not come strictly from uninformed masses. It is also
> > made by people more knowledgeable than you and I put together.
> But in all the cases I've found, it comes from them when they reach the
> limit of their knowledge - then they fall back on "God did it" because
> they can't explain any further.
While there most probably are such people in existence, I think it's
pretty rare for somebody to have the opinion "I have no idea how complex
life came into existence, but I don't think it was by natural processes"
without also believing that some kind of god or other intelligence did it
as a conscious and deliberate act. I have never heard of a hardcore atheist
proclaiming that he doesn't believe that life could have formed by natural
processes (although I'm pretty sure there a few of those as well, but as
said, the are probably are very small minority).
Attributing unexplained phenomena to a god (much less to the Christian
God of the Bible) is one of the oldest fallacies, and one which gets
narrowed down more and more as science progresses. Nobody in their right
mind, not even the most hardcore fundamentalist believers, would claim
nowadays that eg. the flu is caused by supernatural demons or that lighting
bolts are supernatural manifestations of a god. Why? Because nowadays we
know exactly what causes them, so there's no need for a supernatural
explanation. The "God did it" explanation recesses further and further to
the more basic elements of nature. Some hundreds of years ago almost
everything was caused by some supernatural phenomenon, but nowadays the
argument has had to recess so much that there's almost nothing left. The
only couple of things left are the tired old "where did the universe come
from" and "how did life from on Earth", and that's about it. About everything
else has already been explained by science so clearly that not even the
most fundamentalist of believers can resort to them anymore.
This is basically the "god of the gaps" argument, and it's getting pretty
flimsy.
--
- Warp
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >>> As for math, would you say that, for example, the branch of mathematics
> >>> called geometry studies how the real world works or not?
> >
> >> Which geometry? Euclidean geometry? Elliptic geometry? Hyperbolic
> >> geometry? Some sort of non-homogeneous geometry?
> >
> >> Pure mathematics studies these geometries purely for their own sake. One
> >> or other of them /may/ correspond to the real world.
> >
> > The very word "geometry" means "measuring land" (from ancient greek
> > geo = earth/land, metri = measurement).
> And the very word "atom" means "cannot be cut". Not without a particle
> accelerator, anyway...
So what you are implying with that sentence is that the concept of geometry
being used to measure and describe the real world is bogus?
(And if what you are implying is that geometry is not an accurate
representation of the real world, making it a non-science, then by the
same logic Newtonian mechanics is not science. Heck, General Relativity is
most probably not science by the same argument.)
--
- Warp
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On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:47:40 -0500, Warp wrote:
> About everything else has already been explained by science so clearly
> that not even the most fundamentalist of believers can resort to them
> anymore.
Except that they do, of course.
Heck, Bill O'Reilly (one of the FOX News guys) just recently tried to say
that nobody understands how tides work, and that's proof that God exists.
Of course, he's no astrophysicist (unlike Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who
answered that question for him on The Colbert Report last week <g>), but
even I know how tides work. And I understand how the sun goes up and
down every day, too (which O'Reilly didn't seem to know, either).
Jim
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John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Be that as it may, I am against the teaching of life's origins on the
> public dime,
The theory of evolution != the theory of life's origins.
The theory of evolution says nothing about how life first came into
existence on Earth. That would be abiogenesis.
Basically the only thing that the theory of evolution postulates is that
the genes of large populations change over time (something even the most
hardcore young-earth creationists don't deny) and that some changes get
preserved while others disappear due to natural selection (again, something
the creationists don't deny). That's about it.
> because it is a matter of public debate,
The public doesn't get to decide the truth. That's just silly.
> What
> invariably happens, when the government is allowed this power, is that
> the people who are in the wrong will go running to the government to
> have their view imposed by fiat, and all conflicting views suppressed to
> one degree or another.
So now teaching the theory of evolution is a government conspiracy. Right.
Guess what happened to your credibility just now.
> At the present moment a person who is skeptical
> that natural selection is sufficient to explain the entirety of
> observable living systems is subject to exclusion from participating in
> scientific and educational endeavors, even when the topic has no bearing
> on the origin of life.
Would you also allow holocaust-deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists and
anti-vaccinationists to teach at public schools, just for "balance"?
--
- Warp
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