Does Science Leave Room for Faith?

I wrote the following essay for a scholarship a few years ago. The subject was "Does Science Leave Room for Faith (or vice-versa)?" I don't think the people granting the scholarship liked it because they didn't even bother letting me know that I didn't get the money.



To begin with, "science" suggests a fact or series of facts leading to a conclusion, while "faith" is typically used when an unobservable event happens (i.e. the origin of life) that is explained by the existence of a supreme being.

The question "Does science leave room for faith" (or vice-versa) suggests that everything we, as humans, know allows for a dichotomous existence. With a lack of hard facts, many people have filled in the scientific gaps with divine influence, and over the years, a schism formed between religion and science.

A Brief History of Time provides a description, in relatively plain English, of what we currently know about the origin of the universe and life within. However it is also an example of how science requires faith in its facts. Stephen Hawking, was not at the quantum singularity that the universe was created from, but based on the evidence given, we should "believe" that he is correct in his findings.

As far as faith leaving room for science, any religion should allow for humanity's gathering of knowledge. As humans have overcome intellectual hurdles, it is natural for us to take what we have learned, expand on it, and work toward the next goal. During this process, many items originally explained by religion are reevaluated in scientific terms.

For example, Galileo professed that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. Since this went against the Catholic Church's doctrine, he was imprisoned for his beliefs despite overwhelming evidence supporting his findings.

Another example is the discovery by the ancient Greeks that the Earth is round simply by noting that the mast of an approaching ship is visible before the hull. If the Earth were flat, the entire ship would be equally visible. Despite this, the Earth was believed to be flat and surrounded by demons for another 1500 years.

In conclusion, science doesn't eliminate faith, it simply attempts to provide answers based on given evidence, and many of those answers require a certain level of faith themselves. In contrast, religious faith doesn't eliminate science, but it can be used to provide answers to questions that science hasn't been able to explain. For us to grow beyond a choice between faith or science, we must realize that what we know and what we believe are not absolutes, and as we grow, we will find that some parts of science AND religion were wrong. When that happens, we must relinquish our old beliefs and embrace the new facts.

Military memories

Every now and then I'll read, hear, or see something that reminds me of a past experience. I was reading a comment thread on Digg.com about how Bush's approval rating had dropped to 26% and the posters were arguing about how/why people in the military voted in the last presidential election. One commenter stated that most of the people in the military voted for Bush because they (at one time) legitimately believed he had some sort of plan in Iraq and that it had nothing to do with how Republicans increase military budgets.

This caused a spark or two to go off in my weak brain and I remembered one time when I was stationed at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama and we were FORCED to go to church one Sunday (I'm an Atheist, so you can imagine how upset I was), and the guest speaker was some Sergeant Major that talked about how "God says it's o.k. to kill if it's for the right reason" and "there's no such thing as a [politically] liberal soldier on the battlefield". This was right after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991 under Bush Sr. (the last successful Bush family member to be elected to office) and they were going full force with the whole brainwashing thing before a single U.S. soldier stepped foot on the sands of the middle east. They were expecting a horribly bloody ground war (much worse than we are currently experiencing in Iraq) and wanted to stretch out the time between a lot of soldiers dying and the living soldiers becoming disgruntled with the war.

/End of flashback

More Second Life observations

One of the first things I noticed about SL was that, just like in real life (RL) or 1st life, men get much less attention than really good looking women. I created a really good looking female avatar and people go out of their way to answer questions, or just say "hi". My male avatar could have exploded in a huge mushroom cloud (I'm sure it's possible to do in SL) and no one would have noticed.

The next thing I discovered is that people have virtual relationships in SL. Boyfriends, girlfriends, life partners, slave, whatever. They apparently treat it as if it were completely real by building a house and just hanging out staring at a fireplace and spooning on the sofa.

Further, the 1st life gender of the avatar doesn't seem to be important any more. The first 10-15 years of cyber sex held the stigma of "dude, that was probably a guy you were talking dirty to. What are the odds it was a hot 19 year old girl?" Apparently, SL has given people such a huge suspension of disbelief that they no longer care of who is sitting at the keyboard on the other end.

Of course, only SOME people are able to let go of their inhibitions there. Some people are just as big of a jerk in SL as they are in RL, or their avatar is a very close replica of their RL body and all of their phobias go with it.

There is apparently something for everyone in there. . .

Stay tuned.

Second Life

Ok, I never thought I'd do it, but I created an avatar in Second Life. At first I thought I'd get bored with it right away and abandon it, but I've been having fun meeting new people, having virtual sex (not quite as good as the real thing), dancing, etc. Basically everything I don't do in real life. as you can see from my picture, I'm very suave looking and can dance better than John Travolta (before he started believing in Xenu and gained 200 pounds).

The pic was taken at Club Cristi which is a pretty cool place. Cristi (the owner) and most of the patrons are pretty nice, so if you are in SL, drop by.

Trojan in fake monster.com e-mail

The other day I received an e-mail that looked and "acted" like it was from monster.com. In the e-mail it said that to keep access to my account after Dec. 18th, I had to download a program. A few years ago, it might have seemed like a legitimate thing for a company to create a stand-alone application to provide their customers with the latest data and a wide range of features.

It didn't take very much for me to realize that this was probably a phishing e-mail. After all, I'm a web developer and I know first-hand that anything that monster.com would have someone do with a stand-alone app could easily be achieved in a web browser. Not to mention that the application they wanted me to download wasn't being hosted at monster.com, it was something like "resume-monster.com".

I contacted monster's tech support via a live chat session (with someone in India, of course) and he/she confirmed that it was truly a phishing e-mail. More than likely, the app was created by some jerk that would get people to install it and it would (most-likely) capture log in information, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.

I hope the creator of the e-mail gets a big boil on the head of his tiny manhood.

2 College Student's Sue Over Book Prices

In a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that could affect thousands of college students who think they are overcharged for textbooks, two Daytona Beach Community College students have sued the nation's largest collegiate-bookstore chain and their school.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/volusia/orl-collegebooks2506nov25,0,954603.story

Not that I condone copyright violations or anything, there were some less-than-scrupulous people that I knew in college that would chip in $10 to one guy that would go to the bookstore, buy a textbook, scan every single page in, save it as a PDF, return the book, then give a copy of the book to anyone that paid him. If you weren't in the "Pre-pay" group, it would cost you $20 for a copy of the PDF. Apparently it was a pretty daunting task requiring 8-12 hours for some books (including beer and bathroom breaks, of course. That being said, it should be more than obvious that if someone is willing to put in that much time to avoid paying $100-$300 for a book that will possibly see little to no use, there's a big problem in the bookstore system.

An open letter to the suits at NASCAR

Some people are reporting dramatically decreased attendance at NASCAR races for the 2007 season. Of course the NASCAR P.R. people will be out in force trying to distract or confuse everyone about this fact, one can't deny that the series is getting even more boring as time goes on. I'm not talking about to the people that see NASCAR as a bunch of rednecks driving in circles, I'm talking about to the people that, in past seasons have watched every race and attended more than one, are now not even watching the races when NOTHING else is on.

The high that NASCAR has been riding on for the last few years as they increased the fan base was bound to eventually stop, if not come crashing down. As former fans find other interests or move to the more interesting, versatile, and exciting open wheel series (Formula 1, Champ Car, IRL), NASCAR needs to make some changes over the next few years that will slowly but dramatically change the series to attract new fans. Here are a few places to start:

1) There are too many races in a season. Most tracks don't warrant a second race (some don't even deserve a single race). Having a race almost ever single weekend takes away from the uniqueness of a race. F1, Champ Car, and IRL have known this for many years and restrict their seasons to around 15 races a year. Each race is a special event every season instead of a repeat of something that happened a few weeks ago.

2) Drivers should not be able to score points in both the Nextel Cup and Busch series. The Busch series is designed to hone the driving skills of up-and-coming drivers, not a 250 mile practice run for the big race the next day. The top drivers from the Busch series are almost always drivers that have been in Winston/Nextel Cup for years. Let them race, but they aren't given any final position in the race standings and they don't score points.

3) Reduce the maximum number of cars per team to two. Team owners like Roush can participate in new teams by providing engines, chassis, and technical support, but cannot be more than 25% direct financial partners. This would encourage new startup teams by still allowing Jack Roush to receive testing and race data while decreasing the cost of owning and operating a race team.

4) Fewer cautions!!! Don't throw a caution for every piece of debris or spin. If a driver spins without hitting anything, there's no reason to stop the race!! The races are already too long (see my next comment), cautions only drag out the races to four hours or more. It also encourages the drivers to throw out a water bottle if they are in trouble and need a pit stop. If there is debris on the course, throw a yellow, get the debris, and start the race again. If someone wants to pit, they might be caught by the green flag.

5) The races are too long. Some races can stay at 500 miles like Daytona and Bristol, but cut the rest of them to below 300 miles. In fact, the races should be kept under 2.5 hours from Green to Checker with some allowance for a lot of cautions (see previous comment) or a red flag for a bad accident/rain.

6) Increase the diversity of the tracks. California, Texas, Atlanta, Charlotte, even Daytona are cookie cutter tracks. You can argue with me that the banking and length of these tracks are different, but be realistic and admit that they are very similar. With multiple races at a lot of the cookie cutter tracks, it definitely makes for a boring season. In addition to getting rid of most of the duplicate races, replace some of the remaining races with road course races, and possibly a temporary road course in the streets of a city. CASCAR has had quite a few of these, and I can't imagine that you haven't noticed that.

7) Cut down on the number of scoring opportunities in a race. The top 20 cars should be the only ones allowed to score a point with a possible bonus point for pole position. This will keep the barely running cars off the track and, combined with a dramatically reduced season, make every point that much more valuable.

Well, that's my 2 cents. I'm sure there are a lot more things that can happen to maybe make the series worth watching, but this is a start.

Howard Stern On-Demand

I keep hearing callers to the Howard Stern show ask the question "Why can't I get Howard TV (Howard Stern's On-Demand channel) on satellite?" Once and for all, here's the answer:

1) The channel is not Pay Per View, it's "On Demand" which means that when I click Play on my remote, the show starts. Howard TV is not like most of the other channels on your cable box where you flip to it and watch whatever is scheduled to be on. You go to the channel and there are dozens of shows to choose from that will start exactly when you want it. Pay per view on satellite requires you to wait until the "top of the hour" or "bottom of the hour" to start the show, so you are still on their schedule.

2) Satellite transmissions do not have enough bandwidth to stream different shows to millions of houses (which is called "Multi-casting"). They transmit all channels at the same time to everyone. Your set-top box filters out all the channels you aren't watching. That's called broadcasting. Just like your local TV station can be picked up with a rooftop antenna because it is sending out one signal to everyone that is within receiving distance. If they (Satellite or local channels) were to try On Demand channels, it means that (theoretically) everyone that can receive a signal can watch a completely different show at any time.

That being said, technology is moving pretty quickly. Compression and wireless bandwidth improvements may soon make On Demand viable over satellite, but not necessarily in the near future.

As a side note, Howard's show is better than ever since he moved to Sirius Satellite radio (not XM), so you should check it out if you can.

Linking to someone's web site

This image shows what happens when you link to images on someone's web site without getting their permission first. It is from the ISS Locator Yahoo/Konfabulator widget.

There have been other instances of image owners changing an image without the linker's knowledge and putting stuff like gay porn instead of a car or something like that. It can certainly make someone's eBay ad more interesting

Ind. woman gets 110 years in kids' death

A woman who bludgeoned her two young sons to death with a 10-pound weight because she said she wanted them to be safe in heaven was sentenced Tuesday to 110 years in prison. I knew that there was such a thing as "too much religion."

read more | digg story

life sux

"Come on, we'll go out for drinks and have a great time. I'll find a woman for you at the bar"

I go, nothing happens, I drink, nothing happens, I stay for hours, nothing happens, I go home feeling the effects of a little alcohol, tired, depressed, alone.

What a great way to spend an evening.

A followup to the "The dealership stole my car" story

If you didn't read it on digg earlier, Bill Heard Chevrolet in Nashville sold a guy a truck and then stole it that night and told him that he could have it back if he paid them more money. First it was $10,000, then it was $11,000. The plot thickens. . .

Bill Heard Chevrolet in Sanford, FL (North of Orlando) has done some nasty shit too. When someone would take a car out for a test drive, they would take the keys of the car they were trading in so the dealership could figure out its value. If the customer decided they didn't want the new car, the dealership would refuse to give them the keys to their old car back. One woman (stupidly) panicked and bought the new car, but another one called the cops and reported her car had been stolen. The cops showed up forced them to give them her keys back.

GM was so embarrassed that they threatened to make the dealership pay for the thousands of cars on their lot (if you didn't know, dealerships make payments on their new cars, they don't buy them outright) which would have cost them millions of dollars as well as losing the right to be an authorized GM dealer. Too bad it never happened.

read more | digg story

Specter prepping bill to sue Bush

(Republican) Senator Arlen Specter is going to try to stop Bush's "Signing Statements," which is are yet another violation of the "checks and balances" system that the U.S. Government is supposed to have.

If you aren't familiar with what a signing statement is, when Bush signs a bill into law, he puts a note like "I don't have to comply with this law." So, Bush doesn't agree with a law, he signs it with a signing statement thereby altering the actual letter of the law and preventing any sort of veto override by Congress.

You know, It's kind of like crossing your fingers when you tell a lie.

For those of you that say "other presidents have done this before". Sure, but to compare the last successful U.S. President with Bush, Clinton only used it around 80 times while Bush is already over 110.

I've also read that there are more than 800 specific items that he has put into signing statements while all other Presidents combined have only used about 600. I'll try to find a link. . .
[UPDATE]
Here's more info:
The American Bar Association has denounced the signing statements.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/15106725.htm

It also compares the volume of statements as I mentioned before

read more | digg story

Honda Formula 1 car hits 400 Kph

They set an unofficial record of 400 KM/hour, but it wasn't official because they couldn't make the run twice. They did, however set a few records on the way.

Even more amazing than that was back in 2001, Gil De Ferran set a closed course speed record of 241.428 mph (388.540703 kph) during a qualifying lap at the California motor speedway for what is now known as the Champ Car World Series (cart.com). He was racing for Penske Motor Sports and guess what type of engine he had. . .yep, a Honda.

An article about the race can be found here:
http://www.motorsport.com/news/article.asp?ID=81115&FS=CHAMPCAR

read more | digg story

Fuel price set to reach £1 per liter

Once you do the conversion to USD, that is about $8.30 per gallon. Now you have to remember that one of the reasons the Axis of Lies (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) invaded Iraq was to secure the oil supply there to keep prices low and thereby keep the global economy stable.

read more | digg story

Skilled-worker shortage: fact or fiction?

This article in Network World discusses the skilled-worker shortage that we keep hearing about. As a Comp. Sci. degree holder, a few years experience with multiple platforms and languages, this is a subject I've had to deal with on more than one occasion. Most companies with job postings never even call me back even though I meet (at a minimum) most of the requirements.

read more | digg story

Net Neutrality: Senator Shows EXTREME Lack of Knowledge

Senator Ted Stevens shows just how much of a moron he really is. He is a worthless person taking up space (as well as taxpayer money) in the Senate. All he does is have some corporate lobbyist say "vote against this" and he does without even knowing what the heck he's voting against.

read more | digg story

Democrats lose political map case

US state lawmakers can redraw electoral maps to favor their own parties at any time, the Supreme Court has ruled. Lets see if Democrats can get away with this any time soon.

read more | digg story

Flashback

I just remembered something that happened in 5th grade. Since I was nearly a year younger than everyone else in my class, I was pretty much the shortest one in the room. My 5th grade teacher had the entire class sing the Randy Newman song "Short People" to me. If you aren't familiar with the lyrics, they go "Short people got no reason to live."

By the way, the same teacher went to the church I was forced to go to as a kid and would always preach to us.

BlueFrog = Anti-Spam

In case you haven't heard, spam (unsolicited e-mail) is a major problem that no-one seems to be able to solve. American politicians, most of which have probably never sent an e-mail themselves, passed a law (called CAN-SPAM) stating that if you send out solicited or unsolicited e-mail, you must allow the person to opt-out of receiving any further messages from you. Of course I'm summarizing, but you get the point.

That all seems fine, but the major problem is that the people sending out spam know that they are difficult to track down, and they feel that it's their right to consume more than 50% of e-mail traffic with promises of larger genitalia.

Why am I talking about this? There is a company called Blue Security that is attempting to offer a way to force the spammers to stop sending messages to people that don't want them. Apparently a few of the larger spammers are complying with the requests, but during the last week, it seems that a bunch of the leeches have joined forces and are currently initiating a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) that basically kills all traffic going to the web sites of Blue Security. It seems that the spammers don't like receiving approximately 500,000 messages requesting that a user be removed (one message for each e-mail account registered with Blue Security).

The second phase of the attack is (apparently) the people that are registered with Blue Security are being targeted with more spam, but that would only generate MORE traffic back to the spammers requesting opt-outs on behalf of the end-users.

Why would they do this? Greed and laziness are good motivators. Spammers get paid a lot of money for flooding the Internet with crap (greed), and it doesn't take a lot of effort on the spammers part to actually send out the messages (laziness). Asking them to stay out of my inbox and spamfolder by finding a real job would apparently be too much to ask, so until then we will need to use tools like Blue Security to keep them in check. Therefore, I ask that anyone reading this go to http://www.bluesecurity.com, download the software, register your e-mail accounts, and fight back. Sticking your head in the sand will only make matters worse.