Will raspberry get ECC support?

I hadn't realised that the King James is their unshakable foundation, when there are so many versions to choose from. If you didn't listen to it, I can thoroughly recommend the Radio 4 mini series

"A History of the Bible" by John Barton.

I'm not of the religious persuasion, but I think that series is excellent and I learnt a lot from hearing it.

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--   
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

I'd like to hear your definition of "most."

Granted the "Newtonian" view of the universe is slightly different from the quantum view, but the difference is miniscule when dealing with things that aren't almost infinitesimally small (particle physics) or incredibly massive (black holes). In those two cases the classical view - the only thing available to Newton and the common man

- breaks down and the quantum view is required to explain things more exactly.

In any case, we can observe and predict the behavior of physical things - whether by Newton or quantum - infinitely better than we can say anything provable about things that have nothing but belief to back them.

I don't buy the *TOTAL* debunking of anything based only on "we can never know for sure and thus everything is only belief." This is little more than sophistry in my book. The smart money goes with widely accepted (among scientists) science as being correct at least as far as it goes. There always seems to be more that builds on what is already known. Rarely, at least in the last several centuries, does it throw everything we "know" into a cocked hat.

That last said, I'd guess the poor "string theory" or "M theory" folks were a little disturbed when the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics was proven to exist when the string or M theory model had no Higgs boson. Back to the drawing board. Not everything necessarily debunked, but it's a huge problem for a theory to deny the existence of thing that's proven to exist.

Now don't tell be we only "believe" Higgs bosons exist.

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Jim H

Utterly different in terms of the mathematics, but the result for objects observable by Newton is essentially unchanged. It's only at the infinitesimally small and incredibly massive scale that Newton, Einstein, and Quantum theory differ.

But assertions about God are essentially infinitely less provable than scientific assertions about physical objects.

I think you've stepped squarely into the arena of sophistry with this.

The Catholic church wasn't dealing in anything but belief and a fear that an unprovable religious view would be proven incorrect whether or not the view held by Galileo was perfect. It was close enough to throughly disprove the view of the church and thus Galileo had to be silenced.

It would be best if science left the unprovable beliefs of religion alone simply because belief by definition is unprovable one way or another. And for religion to leave the views of science that accurately describe the world we can observe alone... especially when they're thoroughly provable.

No problem, but don't shove him down the throat of those who don't care to believe... unless one can provide the same level of proof for the existence of such a supreme being as science can provide for its assertions.

Sophistry.

I know someone who is deeply religious and too often pushes his beliefs well past the point of being annoying. When I get tired of it I ask him to "prove it" at which point he goes off on a well prepared and rehearsed tangent involving the nature of absolute truth. I ask him to define some of the words he uses. The end result is that he goes in circles and can't prove anything... doesn't even try to prove anything just goes on about the nature of absolute truth... all of which doesn't mean that a God absolutely doesn't exist, but that it can't be proven and should be left in the realm of belief and those who don't believe should be spared from having it shoved down their throats. Science is built on demonstrably provable things with more recent theorys being subject to acceptable proof before being widely accepted.

Science and religion should stay out of each others arena despite the interesting and amusing debates that arise when they don't.

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Jim H

I've yet to see it not appear to be self consistent.

It is however the reality of the situation. We can never know for sure, we can only build the best models we can.

For sure - but that doesn't make it true, it just makes it a sensible belief.

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

The problem is deep and you are sweeping it under the carpet, and it goes to the heart of all 'knowledge' about the world, because all of it is ultimately *models* - inductive propositions that are more or less useful. Nowhere in any of it is there the solid testability that allows us to call it 'truth'.

The real point here is not to dismantle ordinary knowledge that works pretty well, but to make us aware that ordinary knowledge that works pretty well is not the only take we can have on the universe. It is the antidote to 'One True Stickiness' that forces people to believe that they have it right, and other people have it wrong.

Is Einstein truth, or just a model? - if truth then how come we believed in Newton?

Of course we only believe it. We only believe ANYTHING exists in *any particular way*.

It is simply another *explanation* for what is pretty tenth hand

*experience*.

I assume from your position that you are ultimately a materialist who believes something like 'consciousness is an emergent property of matter'.

I merely note that if you flip that and assume that the material world is, at least in part, an emergent property of consciousness, a lot of quantum stuff becomes a lot easier to model - and the 'problem of consciousness' vanishes.

Or better still try a model along the lines of Kant's transcendental idealism which is 'the objective world exists, but it isn't the world of our experience: That is modulated by our consciousness to create something we can relate to'.

Also, the further from inanimate objects we get, the more Idealism works. When explaining people's behaviour, what counts more, what the world *actually* is? Or what they *think* it is?

A multi-trillion global industry exists to ignore the former and control the latter.

Materialism works reasonably well for physics. Idealism rules social science. Everyone thinks they have the One Tue Stick.

That view needs to be transcended.

--
"What do you think about Gay Marriage?" 
"I don't." 
"Don't what?" 
"Think about Gay Marriage."

But that is not the point, you have changed ground Jim. Which is *true*? Flast space and time and forces, or bent space and relative tine?

No assertion is provably true. That is the problem of induction. The dog that didn't bark in the night didn't bark because.,...

...it was in another dimension at the time ...it was drugged and asleep ...it was gagged and tied up out of earshot ...pixies had stolen its bark ...it barked and there was no one there to hear it. ...it had a sore throat. ...it didn't like the horse (which had kicked it once, and because it was actually a hyper intelligent denizen of Xaragon V, it let the horse get what was coming to it.

...etc. Occam instructs us to pick the simplest not because its true, but because since we cannot know which one is true, we can at least be lazy and pick the easiest one to handle

Popper made the point. *Scientific* propositions must be provable to be

*false*, potentially.

We start with effects, we posit causes, if the posited causes cannot provide the required effects, we bin them, if they cannot be tested to see if they provide the required effects, they are metaphysical and not science. If they can be tested and don't fail the tests, they are science.

God theories cannot be tested. They are not science.

That just means you haven't understood it.

No that isn't what happened. The church was perfectly happy that Galileo teach the method as a way of calculating planetary orbits. What thy objected to was his insistence that it was 'true'

But they are *not* provable.

that's just your hand wavey way of being in denial. I am sad.

Science is not built on 'demonstrably provable things'. It is a set of consistent models that work, that's all.

Your insistence that they are provable is your sophistry, your One True Stick.

They are in the same arena. Both are areas of human knowledge, they have different attributes and purposes but like all knowledge, neither are demonstrably 'true' and only people who act on faith and belief would claim that either was.

--
There?s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons  
that sound good. 

Burton Hillis (William Vaughn, American columnist)

Newton's gravity did as good a job as could be measured against at the time. The anomaly pointed up by the precession of the axis of Mercury's orbit hadn't been noticed yet, and it was a *huge* advance on what went before.

Remember also that if you simplify Einstein's theory (presumably by setting speed of light to infinity), then AIUI Einstein's theory simplifies down to exactly Newton. So there's no real conflict.

--
Tim

Yes it is a model that delivers a *very* good approximation to observation.

For sure.

That is indeed true, and being in close agreement to Newton is a requirement for any model of dynamics because that is a very good approximation to observation.

However we can be quite certain that none of Newtonian Mechanics, Special Relativity, General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory ... are in fact accurate descriptions of how the universe really works because *all* of them fail to match observation under some conditions. So we do *not* have a handle on 'the truth' just some pretty good looking approximations.

The faith part in science comes in with the assumption that it is possible to construct ever more accurate models because we are modelling something that really does behave predictably. There is no way of knowing that the universe does behave predictably everywhere and at all times, but if it doesn't then we can't model it so that is a useful assumption that has so far not been invalidated.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

Id put that differently, the faith part of it consists in ascribing absolute real objective status to what is in fact a world *view*, namely that the world is a picture painted by matter/energy on a canvas of flat space time, according to strict laws of Causality and Natural Law, all of which can be precisely expressed by linear or in some cases non linear partial differential equations.

This grew out of a pre-enlightenment view that is more or less expressible as 'stuff happens, because...' by diminishing the role of 'spirit' from the 'creator of the material world' to that of 'the detached observer' .

400 years on, give or take, its taken us a long way and people are naturally reluctant to abandon it.

It's never been more than utter crap at explaining how people behave though.

--
Climate Change: Socialism wearing a lab coat.

I've seen comments that during the 911 flight shutdown the average temperature over the US rose a little. I have no reason to doubt either that observation or yours, it is just an indication of how difficult it is to test even that hypothesis - let alone ones like "It's a mix of i and ii proportions unknown". Personally I don't believe anything that ascribes a single cause to a complex phenomenon because I ain't seen one yet.

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

And it throws into question the whole notion of a 'cause' anyway. When you have negative feedback, time delayed, over enough delay paths you will get pseudoperiodic variations with no *external* 'cause' at all.

in short your dynamic system will wobble around some sort of attractor, or set of attractors, in a completely chaotic manner. All by itself.

But anyone not familiar with the depths of chaos mathematics will look at it and say 'what is *causing* that'?

And go looking for a nonexistent driver external to the system. Whilst other seek to find 'cycles' of constant frequency in what is a pseudorandom oscillation.

--
?It is hard to imagine a more stupid decision or more dangerous way of  
making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people  
who pay no price for being wrong.? 

Thomas Sowell

Its quite possible that both are true and that both are due to the same cause - the absence of jet transport contrails over the continental USA:

- daytime temperature rose and the skies looked clearer because there were no contrails reflecting sunlight back into space. NOAA reckon that average daytime temperatures rose by 3 degrees Fahrenheit during the air travel shutdown and many American glider pilots commented, in rec.aviation.soaring, on how much clearer the air had been.

- I assume the same happened at night, but it would work in reverse, with the lack of contrails at night allowing the ground to cool more because they weren't there to prevent heat from radiating out through the atmosphere. I don't remember seeing any comment about this though, or seeing any estimate of what the temperature drop was.

--
--   
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

in an effort to get a handle on the net effect I looked at the *average* temperatures in cloudy humid florida and in dry desert sahara on the same altitude.

They were pretty much the same...

--
?It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of  
intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on  
intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since...it is  
futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into,  
we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every  
criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a  
power-directed system of thought.? 
Sir Roger Scruton