Recent trends in some academic circles have called into question conventional notions of truth and reality. The claim is made in these circles that all statements, whether in science or literature, are simply narratives -- stories and myths that do nothing more than articulate the cultural prejudices of the narrator. In this view, one narrative is as good as another, since each is expressed in the language of its particular culture and thus contains all the assumptions about truth and reality embedded in that culture. Texts have no intrinsic meaning. Rather, their meanings are created by the reader. The conclusions are then drawn that no narrative can have universal validity and that "Western" science is no exception..
Today's college students, in the United States and elsewhere, hear this line of reasoning from many of their social science and humanities professors. "Alternative medicine" proponents often use similar arguments to reject science as a method of determining health-related truths.
The assertion that "Western" science is unexceptional begins with a plausible, though ultimately misleading, notion that we humans lack access to any mechanism by which we can learn the truth about an objective reality that exists independent of human thought processes. Certainly, science relies on thought processes and does not always follow a clear, logical path to the conclusions it makes about reality. True, it never proves the correctness of these conclusions. Science knows nothing for certain about the world and must always couch its results in terms of probabilities or likelihoods. Often the choice between competitive scientific theories is based on taste, fashion, or subjective notions of simplicity or aesthetic appeal.
Agreed. Scientists can never be certain of the "truth" of their theories. Nevertheless, the predictions of scientific theories are very often sufficiently close to certainty that we all bet our life on them, such as when we are in an airliner or on an operating table. When predictions are that reliable, we can rationally conclude, if not prove, that the concepts on which they are based must have some universal validity. That is, they must somehow be connected to the way things really are.
For example, we cannot predict with complete certainty what will happen if we jump off a tall building. It is always possible that we might land in a crate of feathers that, by luck, just happens to protrude from a window on the floor below. However, based on the law of gravity, we can predict with high likelihood that we will pass that floor and hit the ground with an unhealthy splat. The law of gravity has been tested with enough experiments to safely conclude that the concept of gravity is "real."
Reality acts to constrain our observations about the world, preventing at least some of those observations from being completely random, arbitrary, or what we might simply like them to be. Although much of what we do in fact observe is random -- far more than most people realize -- not everything is. And while we humans can exert a certain amount of control over reality, that reality is not merely the creation of our thought processes. In a dream about jumping off a building, we might float to the ground unharmed. In thinking about jumping off the building, we can imagine whatever we want about the outcome. Superman can fly by and rescue us, in our fantasies. An airplane with a mattress on its wings can appear just in time. But, in reality, we fall to the ground no matter how we might wish otherwise.
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so i ditched my blackberry which i'm very loyal to, and got a nexus one. it's really indescribably awesome and does stuff like makes a wireless network you can tether to over it's HSDPA connection. so you can turn tether on, and multiple computers can connect to it to share it's bandwidth. i think android has gotten to a place in the past few months that has put it above everything else. 5MP camera, i can download torrents at 400k/sec, wifi, really gorgeous screen, i can run emulators, nes, snes, genesis, gba, etc, their marketplace is huge, and it does push gmail. battery life isn't spectacular but i can pull about 12 hours of decent use out of it, which is dramatically better than my blackberry but the screen is mostly to blame there.
I read that the new iPhone is made out of glass and generally doesn't work.
Val:
>After a terrible experience waiting 10 hours in line to buy 2 new iphone 4's, the signal issue is a real problem on both of my phones regadless of how they are held. The two phones only get signal strentgh laying down untouched for regardless how they are held, the signal goes away. There is a serious issue with the conductivity of the antenna. Also the flash is making the picture blurry or rather non existent at all on both phones. I also have 5 Jawbone bluetooth devices and they keep getting disconnected all the time. Were these phones designed to be used or hung on the "right" wall of my living room ? Will they fall down if I hang them on the left wall ? I'm returning both of these devices and I'm a dedicated Apple consumer having previously bought about 16 iPhones, 2 iPads, 8 Mac Books, 4 Mac Airs and countless Ipods. Very dissapointed.
http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-4-problem-2010-6#comment-4c26118a7f8b9a107fae0000#ixzz0ryGPwhn1
I've never had any problems with AT&T really with calls or data. Not really. It's a bit slow for internets outside a 3G area, but that makes sense. I've never had an iPhone though.
Maybe, the iPhone is, and always was, a piece of shit made by child psychologist?
People love that smoothly animated, graphically 'rich' kind of GUI that probably was introduced to people through that horrible, badly programmed, Mac crashing, security risk known as Flash. You know, the reason any run of the mill dullard even ever used the internet. It wasn't because there's words on here. I guess, really... porn and/or gore... Flash porn and/or gore animations.
Any phone that can run Flash should advertise that. Like, "This phone plays all your favorite porn and/or gore Flash animations and games."
If the new way firefox handles tabs annoys you, as in opening in the middle instead of the end (like it used to) here is an easy fix.
Go to the address: about:config
In the filter text box, enter: browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent
It should come up with only one entry in the list below. Just double click on it to set it to false.
