This argument stems from the interpretation of a single Hebrew word found in the old testament... יום (yom). The definition of yom is 'a defined period of time'. Whereas the common use of yom is 'day', it could also be translated as 'epoch', 'age', 'year' etc.
Genesis reads that God created the heavens and the earth in 'six defined periods of time'. It's unfortunate that the original translators back in the 1600s used the word 'day', and even more unfortunate that so many cling so strongly to what was probably a single person's translation.
Not really. That claim fails trivially to the "evening and morning" of each day.
The argument fundamentally stems from the Protestant belief in "Sola Scripture": that all Christian doctrine and belief derives from scripture. Since many protestants prefer a literal interpretation of scripture, they insist on a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 for consistency.
You can see this backed up if you watch any of the material from Answers in Genesis, as I watched at my church from elementary school onward.
You can also see this reinforced by the fact that young earth creationism literally did not exist as a phenomenon in the early church, or the medieval church, or in modern Catholic and Orthodox churches.
Many early church fathers (and before that, Jewish scholars) long wondered whether Genesis 1 recorded literal history, or if it was a literary story. In particular, they took note of the chronology and found it strange that God created day and night (the first day) before he created the sun (the fourth day).
The strongest argument against literal interpretation, I'm, is that the literary structure of Genesis 1 is so clear: God performance three acts of separation (day from night, waters above from waters below, and waters below from themselves with land) followed by three acts of decoration, where he decorates the previously separated things: sun and moon and stars in the sky, birds in the air and fish in water, and then land animals and man.
If you dig a little deeper you'll discover that there are many folks (especially in the US) who think that the KJV was divinely inspired. So, alas, your argument, which also applies to many other important parts of the Bible, is well known and is unlikely to convince anyone from that camp.
Yeah, same thought while reading this. I come from a generation where bagging your friends was common and played a large role in building character. Now if you honk at somebody to prevent an accident, you're flipped the bird. Even mild constructive criticism comes across as a massive assault against one's pride.
Spent a few years developing a bot with similar features to Alexa, called LFReD back in 1998. Was possible to carry on a conversation with LFReD via cordless phone, control lights, look up wikipedia articles etc.
Idealabs approach me at one point offering to buy my botsinc.com dom.
Two things killed development. The first was the quality of the speech recognition. 85% accuracy sounds impressive, but in real life, it's terrible, especially combined with background noise. (I had a love bird that would squawk every time i tried to train the recognizer :) The SR has only recently caught up enough to be acceptable (just). The other was the AI. Every 'rule' had to be hand coded. eg: "if SR = 'hello world' then tts 'hello'". I don't think they'll get past that last issue anytime soon, and I believe the Loebner prize is still very safe.
Let's see. Using current tech to get to our closest neighbour, Alpha Centauri, if you leave this afternoon, you should be arriving sometime in the year 102,016.
How about we skip this dream, along with world peace, and make baby steps, like everybody using their indicators while driving?
AC is only 4.5 years away. If we really wanted to go there we could most definitely build something that can travel at 0.5c and get there at, say, 6 to 7 years. It's not hard to keep accelerating and decelerating for 1m/s for 15 years with current tech.
> It's not hard to keep accelerating and decelerating for 1m/s for 15 years with current tech.
Just to put some numbers to this, I went to my go-to quick reference for these types of problems is the Usenet Physics FAQ article on the equations for relativistic rockets:
The key numbers are the trip time T according to the ship's clocks, the trip time t according to clocks on Earth or Alpha Centauri, the maximum velocity v achieved by the ship, and the mass ratio M, or kg of fuel needed per kg of payload. Assuming that we accelerate for half the distance and then turn around and decelerate for the other half, and that we use an ideal rocket that converts fuel to energy at 100% efficiency and exhausts all that energy out the back with perfect collimation (so it all goes into changing the rocket's momentum and not into heat or some other waste product), the formulas for these are:
T = 2 (c/a) arccosh (ad/2c^2 + 1),
t = sqrt((d/c)^2 + 2d/a),
v = at/2 sqrt(1 + (at/2c)^2)
MR = exp(aT/c) - 1,
where a is the acceleration, d is the total distance traveled, and c is the speed of light. The equation for T, assuming that we accelerate halfway, then turn around and decelerate to arrive at the destination at rest, is
Plugging in a = 1m/s^2, d = the distance to Alpha Centauri, or about 4 x 10^16 meters, and c = 3 x 10^8 m/s, we get
T = 3.9 x 10^8 s, or about 12.7 years,
t = 4.2 x 10^8 s, or about 13.6 years,
v = 1.7 x 10^8 m/s, or about 0.57 c,
MR = 2.7
This is a pretty small mass ratio, but of course it was derived using highly idealized assumptions. More realistic assumptions would result in a much larger mass ratio. Also, a maximum speed of more than half the speed of light would create huge radiation issues requiring heavy shielding, so the payload mass would be very large.
Yeah, hard is clearly an understatement. However, if it were critical to the human race, and the top 20 economies put a trillion dollars and some of their best scientists behind it starting today, there is absolutely zero question that a ship capable of that could be built and launched within 20 or 30 years.
Alternatively, Bezos will probably have $100 billion to play with in the next 12 to 24 months or so ($61 billion today, most projections have Amazon climbing quite a bit higher yet, new price targets have it at $1,000 per share; whether it takes a year or six years, it'll very likely get there). He just sold off $671 million worth of shares the other day, I'd expect his sales will continue as the price climbs. So maybe he'll fund it by himself in the coming two decades.
It gets easier year by year. Now we have ion drives. Maybe in 100 years we will stumble upon a breakthrough technology that allows us to build antimatter rockets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_rocket
That would be a direct invitation to other stars in a lifetime.
I cancelled the plan as well, but ended up getting charged at renewal time. The effort required on my part to fix that mistake was unacceptable (submitting screen shots of my Nest account details, required to send photo of the serial number on the camera, weeks of communication delays), and they STILL owe me some money, and have ignored further requests.
A common myth. The bible doesn't say the world was created in 6 days, but in 6 'yoms'. A yom in Hebrew means 'a defined period of time'. Like an epoch, or a year, a day or a minute etc.
The bible was translated into English in the middle ages.
Wikipedia has a definition as 'A long, but finite span of time', among others.
It's interesting that the similar "stretch of lifetime" is seen in Japanese ancient document (Kojiki), and probably in other cultures, too. Those ancient tales were inherited orally before recorded. Could it be that the storytellers tend to exaggerate? Or maybe counting the number of years wasn't that objective but had more subjective significance?
There is a theory that the age of Biblical patriarchs were originally recorded in months (969 months = 80 years and 9 months, which is quite reasonable) and somehow got mistranslated into years sometime later. This, however, doesn't quite work with Enoch who is said to have had a son at age 65.
So, maybe he had been married very young to an older female and had a, for him at the age of 5 a half years surprising, pregnancy attributed to him. His age of 365 days is still rather symbolic. His father's 81 years at that time are rather a lot. I'm not even sure that kind of arranged marriage was common. He was said to be living amongst sinners, anyhow, while his father was said to have had many children. The Grandfather of the family would have reached fatherhood at the same 65 (yoms, then), so, whatever.
I don't know, if yoms has a different meaning, maybe father has, too.
I propose, children would be given responsibilities early on, they had to start soon. So, maybe being a father at figure 65 months means teaching a brother or cousin or other newborn and leaving the adults care for the food. They would form trust for one another while the resentment from biological parents towards their children, as shown with gods fury over adam and eve, would be mutual. "Alter" (older) in german can mean big brother, or father, but generally any subjectively old one.
Of course I mainly agree to the story aspect, but I don't know any other mysticism about the mentioned figures.
As far as I can tell, the only reason people are saying he wasn't convicted of murder for hire is because the top-level charge is "conspiracy" or somesuch, with "murder for hire" as one of the specific conspiracy items, and they haven't dug down.
Its astounding that anybody here would defend this guy. Are Hacker News readers left leaning in general, or just is it just a handful of loud anarchists?
Not talking on society level but I watched porn from maybe 12 onwards. Have problems with that? Know how I should have lived better than I?
You can't restrict anything anyway. Any filter is porous and everything gets thru. One hardcore image is enough.
The only thing you really achieve is humiliating the teenager, make him feel not in control of his life.
I know that you try to restrain me like I'm a parrot instead of taking to me; you are explicit in trying to conceal from me something that you point me at by this attempt.
Nice moving of the goalposts there. An authoritarian intrusion into private behaviour is an example of an activity done by a fascist state, hence the GP's adjective. But your comment converts that into the entire ideology of facism.
Also, nice job inserting 'teenagers' into a comment that made no mention of any age group.
Porn magazines? How quaint. Speaking of moving the goalposts again, the porn control in the article is a mandated smartphone app.
And no, my country does not require minors to install state-mandated applications on their smartphones. For any reason, porn or otherwise.
Also, pornography isn't degenerate. It's just sex. Exploitative pornagraphy is bad, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it. But we generally prevent minors from accessing it because they're not emotionally equipped to deal with sex stuff - same reason we have age of consent laws. Or do you also think that sex itself is degenerate, and that's why there are laws around teenagers and who they can have sex with?
sooheon, who suggested that he/she lives in Korea, made no such stipulation. Of note, distribution (and maybe possession -- I am not sure) of porn is illegal in Korea in general -- not just for those under 18.
"The new introspectiveness announced the demise of an established set of traditional faiths centred on work and the postponement of gratification, and the emergence of a consumption-oriented lifestyle ethic centred on lived experience and the immediacy of daily lifestyle choices."
If my generation was called the "me" generation, how would you describe this generation?
