BartHumphries

The ellipse (curve) that the Earth makes around the Sun is exactly the same as the ellipse that the Sun would make around the Earth, if the Sun rotated around the Earth, from our perspective. In fact, from our viewpoint on Earth, we cannot tell, strictly from looking at the Sun, which rotates around which. It's the planets that really give it away. If the Earth rotates around the Sun, then everything is easily explainable. If the Sun rotates around the Earth, then you have planets regularly stopping and going backwards for a while for some inexplicable reason (perhaps as harbingers of bad times or something).

So, yeah, the whole "bicycle on a set" thing is a decent thought experiment as far as it goes, but if the fly were as intelligent and as equipped with telescopes to look out and see the human being grabbing the pedal and the wires and the walls, etc., as we are to be able to observe the space immediately around our planet, then he would soon be able to figure out what was going on.

So, we can come up with several thought experiments which suggest that we don't have a clue about what's going on around us in the world. We're actually pretty certain about a lot of things. This doesn't mean that things are proved beyond a shadow of a doubt -- even when scientists are pretty darn sure that he knows what's going on, as Feynman said, he is still in some doubt.

Well, miles/kilometers and how those are defined would probably change, but basic formulas wouldn't really change. Well, they might be described "wonkily" until people rediscovered that disregarding air resistance things fall at the same rate, etc., but eventually they'd look basically the same.

That's one of the things I loved about physics with calculus. Up to that point, math was just about moving numbers around. Interesting, something that I was decent at, but I didn't really see a point to it. Basic physics was amazing and a lot of fun as we went into how the world worked and worked on deriving simple formulas from experimental evidence produced during the lab sessions. Then I got into physics with calculus and we started really deriving the formulas -- starting with thought experiments to create diagrams and such as to how we thought things worked, then going out and experimenting and seeing whether our results backed up our theories.

That was the most amazing class as I suddenly discovered that there's a point to math, that it's not just pushing numbers around or doing quaint little tricks with numbers, you really can basically describe the world with math.

I still haven't seen anything in math, physics, or any of the "hard" sciences that contradicts my religion (my religion says that the evolution/creation argument is unimportant, that the central aspect of religion is Jesus Christ and that the church isn't going to bother dictating exactly where Adam came from -- ex nihilo, evolution guided by God, the church doesn't care).

Now, sociology, psychology, those "soft" sciences, there's a lot I disagree with there. I'm not saying that "hard" science has all the answers -- there's still gobs and gobs that we can't quite figure out and that we disagree with, but basically I think "hard" science is pretty solid (if you'll pardon the pun).

jblake47, I don't think it can be said that atheists do believe in a "God". If I can make a somewhat hackneyed analogy for a moment, I think there's a difference between most religions which say things like, "God is red light" or "God is blue light" or "God is white light" or "God is yellow-polka-dots on cyan and magenta stripes light", and an atheist who says "there is no light at all."

To use a common analogy, there's a vast ideological gulf between describing the elephant in the room as "like a snake", "like a spear", "like a tree", etc., and saying that there is no elephant at all in the room.

I agree. I never saw the point of a serrated edge, given my typical activities. I suppose if I was using the knife to stalk, pounce onto, then kill game with just my wits, human muscles, and the knife, or if I was trying to cut down trees with just the knife, then in either of those cases a serrated edge would be handy, but otherwise it's just a waste of space.

The cheapest I'm seeing online is about $2k/person just for the plane tickets. Do you know of another way to get there?

Of course there's always that one guy with never ending war stories and wisdom he has to share about everything and anything. Eyes roll every time he opens his pie-hole for the umpteenth time to tell his way (the best way) to do whatever is at hand. But he means well and we can appreciate the good will and energy he devotes to scouting.

I am not that guy. But I could listen to him all night long.

I have no problem giving a youth a BB gun (with their parent's permission, of course) -- I had one. Granted, my dad had a 22 when he was young and once made his own blanks and shot them at school with his pistol while he and his classmates reenacted a Cowboys vs Indians thing for some class. Attitudes towards guns have changed over time.

I can easily see that some parents might feel that their child will shoot their eye out and thus shouldn't be given a gun. (Since it's Christmas and that story is likely more on people's minds at this time of year.)

Snopes doesn't agree with the 12 Days of Christmas having a hidden meaning: http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/music/12days.asp

I thought Jesus was born in the spring because that's when the shepherds would have been "out with their flocks by night", i.e. during lambing season.

"If the Bethlehem star was in the East, why did the Magi travel west."

Perhaps the star was in the East because the Magi were traveling West:

B...s...M

x = Bethlehem

s = star, in the East from Bethlehem's point of view

M = Magi, traveling towards the star which is West from their point of view (but then they weren't the ones writing the Bible stories).

The word "tools" does not appear in the print Guide to Safe Scouting. The words "power" and "tool" do appear, but not in contexts which would ban Scouts from using power tools.

Remind the kids, they are not to start any fires anywhere, even for practice, unless they have their parents permission. I think his mom was right to be upset with someone who first taught her son to start fires, then encouraged her son to "build, maintain, and put out fires".

It's kind of like the Totin' Chip. Just because they have a Totin' Chip card, they should *not* be taking their knife to school. There is no such thing as the "Take your knife to school day", it doesn't exist. Totin' Chip only applies within the Scout troop and other people may or may not respect it or pay any attention to it (they probably don't care whether a boy has it).

Just because a boy has his Firem'n Chit, doesn't mean he's allowed to start fires on his own outside of the Scout meetings -- he always needs his parents permission first. If he starts a fire at school, they will not care whether or not he has his Firem'n Chit just like they will not care whether he has his Totin' Chip. There is no "Take your lighter to school day".

I think you add in some Leave No Trace which suggests (in point 5) that you cannot build a fire unless you either build it on a proper fire mound or you build it in a pre-established fire pit (or something like that) and in all cases you must have the permission of the land manager (the ranger for a national park, the parents for the backyard, etc.) to build that fire. If that's driven home, then perhaps she won't have any further reasons to be upset.

Jet skis and ATV's are allowed only at Council-run summer camps, if the particular camp has applied and been accepted to the National program, etc.

It's like chainsaws. To some people they're incredibly dangerous and no youth should ever use them (to be fair, they are incredibly dangerous). To some other people, when the family needs firewood, it might be expected of a youth that he goes and cuts some wood. This is fine and you can even have multiple youth cutting wood together as long as it's clear that it's not a Scout activity -- this is families doing this on their own time and it has nothing to do with Scouts.

Some people think jet skis and ATV's are incredibly dangerous and no youth should ever use them (to be fair, etc.). To some other people, we might live sandwiched between a large recreational lake and the national forest and using those might be a normal part of life.

In my opinion, I would rather see people "properly trained" before they were turned loose on chainsaws and jet skis and ATV's, but because some people view these things as "too dangerous for youth, ever" we basically can't properly train our youth, it's just parents teaching things the way those parents were taught (which may or may not be the safe way of doing things). For instance, eye protection while using a chainsaw. I can't hold a Boy Scout "chainsaw safety" class and teach the boys that the Boy Scouts say they need to be wearing protection, the way I can teach what's safe and what's not safe with the Totin' Chip cards. And if it's not something that the Boy Scouts are demanding of the kid, and it's not something that the parents are demanding of the kid, why would a kid listen to me?

Anyway, I should get off my soapbox now and just say that jet skis and ATV's are only allowed at Council-run summer camps if those camps have gone through all of National's hoops.

Well, I can see the point that some people have made about it putting more work on the Scoutmasters. Take my troop, for instance. We're a small troop. We have plenty of adult leaders. Roughly half the boys, though, don't live with their father. Either the parents are divorced and the father lives elsewhere or the father was deported a couple years ago, or something else. The single mothers work hard -- darn hard -- too hard to be driving kids out to some event (I live in a rural area, it's at least 30 minutes to an hour to get anywhere, depending on how many people you have to pick up/drop off). Since youth cannot drive other youth around without a parent of the driver in the car until 17 at least (15.5 you can apply for a learner's permit, which you have to have for six months before you can apply for your license which you must have for a year before you can drive other youth under 18 without your parent present), this basically means at least half the youth basically aren't going to be driving other youth to any OA event until they're about to leave the troop. The roughly other half of the troop couldn't drive because of how many cars their family has.

This basically means that, for any activity, one of the normal adult leaders has to drive. This isn't a problem for events that we schedule within the troop, since we schedule them around our lives so that they aren't problems. Events scheduled by other people are typically more problematic. Don't forget the extra 30 minutes to an hour just to get to a "nearby" event at the Council office. If we go to the typical Council camp that they use for events, add on another hour just to get there. Then there's the "two-deep leadership" thing. We can't just go with a single non-parent adult leader to drive boys down, we need two adults. That sort of commitment starts to add up fairly quickly.

When someone earlier angrily said that some Scoutmasters were "denying their boys an opportunity to serve" I kind of looked askance at that statement. I mean, in my (former) Rotary chapter during Christmas 2010 (I'm no longer in Rotary as they moved the weekly meeting night to the same evening/time as the Scout toop, although I still volunteer to work with them occasionally like this past Thanksgiving), we teamed up with some other service organizations on the mountain. It turns out there are quite literally dozens of service organizations within 15 minutes drive time, all of which do really good work. It's not difficult to find more opportunities to serve. If one organization conflicts with its scheduled times (like Rotary), or if one is going to require regular commitments of hours long driving time on the part of two adult leaders in the troop for the boys to get there, then perhaps a different service organization would be better.

One boy, who's now in college, was going around with Rotaract, the youth-high-school version of Rotary just before he left to go to college, doing some great service projects with them. He choose not to join the Order of the Arrow -- that's his choice. I don't think he was denied a service opportunity, I think he found a magnificent service opportunity right in his own backyard.

I'm not saying that nobody from my troop will join the Order of the Arrow -- someone might join. We'll have to see over this next year as some of the younger boys start to meet the entry requirements. I'm just saying, I understand where some Scoutmasters are coming from when they say that they're just too busy. Understanding does not necessarily mean acceptance, but I do understand where they're coming from and I'm not going to knock them for it.

"It's missing reproducibility..."

Go "experiment" for yourself. Have you?

"... and peer review..."

I'd say there plenty of people who criticize this and who have commented on such things over the past few millenia. You may or may not believe yourself to be my peer.

"...results don't converge since different people end up finding different gods, and different numbers of gods."

I can only report my own experience -- anything else in this regard is hearsay. I guess we can only say that the experiment, performed time and time again for thousands of years by various people, needs more looking into. As an example of something else that needs more looking into, there's that double slit experiment with and without observation. Something that seems to give such different results needs more looking into to figure out just what's happening.

Well, some people believe that God still responds to prayers. That people who feel "called" to minister/preach/whatever really are called, because the heavens are not closed and God is still an active parent. Bearing that in mind, some people believe that if they pray to God and ask Him if he's really real, He will respond. From this point of view, it can be said that faith is like science. You start with the hypothesis that God is real, you experiment by continually praying, you see whether the hypothesis is validated and God is real or not. There are plenty of people out there who say that this "worked" for them.

Then of course there's the possibility that the heavens are closed and that anyone who feels "called" to minister/preach/whatever is just making it all up, but I prefer to believe them because I've prayed a lot over the years and I feel that God has answered some of my prayers, which "proves" to me personally that he does exist or I would never have seen his presence in my life and I have seen that. That's my personal opinion, what I personally believe. This is why I personally don't see that much difference between faith and science. You may believe differently and that's ok.

johnponz, I recommend you watch a little movie that came out recently called "Tucker & Dale vs Evil". Here's the trailer: http://www.magnetreleasing.com/tuckeranddalevsevil/

packsaddle, yeah -- like I said, Wikipedia is a tertiary source and while it's a great start for looking into something, it is not the final arbiter of truth. Ockham/Occam did, though, do some excellent scholastic work while also having a strong personal belief in God, which is sort of the point of that list. (This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

How many "experimental tests" does anyone conduct in economics? Actually, quite a lot. Large scale economic tests are rather difficult to conduct in a "laboratory" setting, so generally the idea is to dream up something that a person would like to test (for instance, is there a correlation between abortion and the crime rate, and what sort of economic impact does prostitution have), figure out how that could be tested, then go look for real life data that can be parsed to suggest that's really happening and whether there's a causal connection or a correlation. In my opinion, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the guys behind Freakonomics are really doing this right.

As far as religion and science, let me introduce you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Catholic_cleric%E2%80%93scientists -- note that Wikipedia ia s tertiary source and while it's a great start for looking into something, it is not the final arbiter of truth. That being said, let me quote from that article. I should probably interject that while I am not Catholic I do have a lot of respect for that religion:

Many Roman Catholic clerics throughout history have made significant contributions to science. These cleric-scientists include such illustrious names as Nicolaus Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lematre, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Roger Joseph Boscovich, Marin Mersenne, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, Robert Grosseteste, Christopher Clavius, Nicolas Steno, Athanasius Kircher, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, William of Ockham, and many others. Hundreds of others have made important contributions to science from the Middle Ages through the present day.

The Church has also produced thousands of lay scientists and mathematicians, many of whom were the intellectual giants of their day. These scientists include Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, Louis Pasteur, Blaise Pascal, Andr-Marie Ampre, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Pierre de Fermat, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Alessandro Volta, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Pierre Duhem, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Georgius Agricola and countless others.

While some people may decry science and state that science is antithetical to religion, that the two cannot coexist, a majority of Nobel laureates over the centuries would beg to differ.

"But what about Galileo?" Well, without telescopes, people couldn't see a stellar parallax. The main reason that Galileo was arrested was that his Dialogue book sort of castigated the Pope -- at least that's how it was interpreted. Also, the main focus of the book was on trying to use the motion of the tides to prove the motion of the Earth, and that part didn't hold together scientifically. Imagine if Stephen Hawking had mixed in "My boss is stupid for not agreeing with me" statements with a treatise whose main focus turned out to be scientifically inaccurate. It would have put something of a damper on his long-term employment prospects. Anyway, Galileo's Dialogue book was when other religious scientists sort of backed away from him and left him on his own. In modern terms, Galileo got in a flame war on an internet discussion board like this one, insulted everyone else and especially the owners of the discussion board and was asked to leave. I'm not saying that what the Catholic church did was right, but it is understandable to me -- noting that understanding does not imply acceptance.

Perhaps the report is saying that those without the extra money required to participate in extracurricular activities (extra gas to drive back and forth instead of riding the bus with everyone else, extra time to pick up/drop off, extra money for supplies/uniforms, etc.) are surprise, less likely to be participating in extracurricular activites (such as sports, community organizations), less likely to be eating three square meals a day, and are otherwise impacted by their lack of money.

Speaking of bacteria and parasitic forms of life, back around 1000 AD (or CE, if you prefer) the people of England, under thelred were pro-parasite for the most part. Worms (tapeworms and other such organisms) were seen as an example of how people were able to be more Christ-like -- when people donated their bodies these "harmless" creatures who would otherwise perish were offered the chance to live. Flies, on the other hand, were universally derided. Maggots were believed to spontaneously generate from "dead" meat and were seen as direct evidence of Lucifer's ability to touch the world. Hosting a parasite offered a chance to personally fight Lucifer's influence. This really has little bearing on current discussion, I was just trotting it out as an example of how much cultural/societal views on such forms of life can change over time.

I would argue that the mere act of killing an animal for food is a far cry from abuse. It is true that a large number of commercial slaughterhouses today do engage in what I personally view as abuse. That being said, not all commercial food is raised in abusive environments. Abuse is separate from killing.

Take Tyson chicken, for instance: http://www.tyson.com/ It's usually raised by Hmong people in the US somewhere who view the chicken as somewhat sacred -- chickens feature in a number of their cultural ceremonies and Hmong people are thus more likely to be excited to be able to be a chicken farmer (which doesn't mean they don't eat chicken -- for instance, a traditional post-pregnancy diet calls for the woman to eat nothing but chicken for some time). I think you would be hard pressed to go to these people and tell them that they're committing animal abuse.

Chickens are routinely killed in these modern times by extremely humane methods. They're basically put through an "electric chair" -- although since a chicken head/brain is so small you don't run into all the problems that you do trying to electrocute a human to death -- no need for wet sponges, for instance, there's no fire, no smell, because the required voltage is far smaller. We're talking car batteries that would just give you or me a slight shock. Go watch and see how it's done. There's no bones broken, the chickens aren't "distressed", they're just alive one moment and then suddenly they're dead. One guy will drive around with his little trailer and run through a flock, perhaps 5-10 at a time.

Chicken killing isn't like it was in my dad's time, when their heads were chopped off and the chickens (who have very basic nervous systems and often take a while to realize they're dead because they don't need regular signals from their brain to keep their body alive and functioning like we do) would be spraying blood all over while they ran around occasionally clucking (if their head was taken off above their voice box).

Humans, on the other hand, cannot survive having their head cut off -- even if everything is surgically cut off and immediately reattached and a pacemaker is installed for the heart, the brain won't be able to regulate the endocrine system and a person will quickly become basically diabetic and all sorts of other things will happen to a human being, who has a much more advanced (meaning complicated) body than a chicken.

I think it's impossible to hunt for food and not feel any joy. Wait, don't misunderstand me, I'm not talking about some sort of sociopathic joy in the death of something else. I just think it's impossible to do something well and not feel some joy/pride in having done it well. That being said, I haven't actually gone hunting, but I still feel that it would be pretty much impossible to not feel any joy, simply because hunting is a difficult, time consuming and usually expensive hobby and doing it well enough to complete the desired task (bagging the desired prey) would seem to be something that would generate some measure of joy and or pride.

This may not be true if a person has gone hunting for food enough times that it's become merely a chore. However, even if hunting had become a chore and brought no "pride in one's workmanship", no joy in doing something well, I think a person hunting for food would still feel some joy that the chore was now basically done, that it was about to be feast time.

I'm pretty sure, from talking to hunters, that virtually every hunter tries to eat what they kill. The hunters I've spoken with who were unable to eat what they killed were pretty uniformly bitter about not being able to eat what they killed and blamed various rules/laws.

For adults or Cub Scouts?

Hunters seem to be more dedicated (some might say fanatical) about going hunting. Rain or shine, no matter what else is happening, they seem to always go. Campers seem to be more lackadaisical -- massive numbers on Labor Day and Memorial Day, presuming the weather is good, not so many the rest of the year. I could see why some land management agencies might want to cater to hunters equally as much as campers (instead of catering to campers more as has historically been the case in most places).

I'll probably get one in April, 2012.

Isn't that when the world is supposed to end or something?

I wonder if that person changed their phone number. My family has had phones that will still accept messages a month or two after we've stopped using them. "Oh, that's my old phone number, I can't check those messages any more, let me give you my new number." Just a possibility.