10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Automation Improves Safety
The airports with their self-check-in kiosks and restaurants full of iPads are staffed by thousands of human workers (most using mano machine can do? Or, like operating an elevator and driving a car, is it because at first we don't trust machines to do a job where lives are at risk? Elevators became much safer as soon as the human operators were replaced. The human-hating Skynet from the Terminator movies could hardly do a better job of killing people than we do killing ourselves with cars. H...Folksonomies: automation
Folksonomies: automation
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notes24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Religion or Science, Our Purpose is the Same
Though much has been written foolishly about the antagonism of science and religion, there is indeed no such antagonism. What all these world religions declare by inspiration and insight, history as it grows clearer and science as its range extends display, as a reasonable and demonstrable fact, that men form one universal brotherhood, that they spring from one common origin, that their individual lives, their nations and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at last in one com... 1 notes
notes21 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Science Overthrowing Religion
The claims of certain so-called scientific men as to 'science overthrowing religion' are as baseless as the fears of certain sincerely religious men on the same subject. The establishment of the doctrine of evolution in out time offers no more justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith sufficiently robust to stand the—surely very slight—strain of admitting that the world is not flat and does not ... 1 notes
notesTeddy Roosevelt makes important points about accepting the theory of evolution and how that does not impact religious faith.
28 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
The Virtue of Courage
Kids need to know that nonconformity requires courage. There are plenty of nonconformists to draw upon as examples, secular and religious people alike, from Socrates to Martin Luther King to Michael Newdow—people whose strength of conviction led them to face with dignity and courage the consequences of stepping outside of the norm in the name of heartfelt principles. It isn’t easy, but doing what’s right can be well worth it.
The second reason is even more daunting. As noted above, rel... 1 notes
notesNonconformity requires courage. So does accepting non-existence after death.
13 FEB 2012 by ideonexus
Information is the Power to Control
Information is a
part of all systems of power. Top bureaucrats try to control
information as part of their control over subordinates and clients.
Corporations try to control information through trade secrets
and patents. Militaries try to control information using the
rationale of “national security.” So-called freedom of information—
namely, public access to documents produced in
bureaucracies—is a threat to top bureaucrats.
In a society where not everyone can read and write, litera...
1 Where people can read, publish to media, and speak out against their employers, they have power.
14 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Difference Between Vegetable and Animal
Thus it might be said, that the vegetable is only the sketch, nor rather the ground-work of the animal; that for the formation of the latter, it has only been requisite to clothe the former with an apparatus of external organs, by which it might be connected with external objects.
From hence it follows, that the functions of the animal are of two very different classes. By the one (which is composed of an habitual succession of assimilation and excretion) it lives within itself, transforms i... 1 notes
notesA lovely description.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
William Lawrence on the Need for Free Science
Lawrence eventually went on to broaden his attack. Science, he argued, had an autonomous right to express its views fearlessly and objectively, without interference from Church or state. It must avoid ‘clouds of fears and hopes, desires and aversions’. It must ‘discern objects clearly’ and shun ‘intellectual mist’. It must dispel myth and dissipate ‘absurd fables’.19 The world of scientific research was wholly independent. ‘The theological doctrine of the soul, and its separ...Folksonomies: freedom scientific integrity
Folksonomies: freedom scientific integrity
1 notes
notesScience must operate without fear of oppression or reaction from authorities.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Message Aboard Pioneer 10 as a "Cosmic Rorschach Test"
The message aboard Pioneer 10 has been good fun. But it has been more than
that. It is a kind of cosmic Rorschach test, in which many people see reflected
their hopes and fears, their aspirations and defeats – the darkest and the most
luminous aspects of the human spirit. 1 notes
notesIn which people see what they want to see, hopes and fears.
21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Man is Noble...
Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it... 1 notes
notes...but still "bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." A quote from Charles Darwin.
23 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Principle of Religious Diversity
As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government, to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith, Let a man throw aside that narrowness of soul, that selfishness of principle, which the niggards of all professions are so unwilling to part with, and he will be at delivered of his fears on that head. Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. For myself, I fully and c... 1 notes
notesPaine argues that a plurality of religious beliefs with strengthen the country.
