Spoon-Fed Criticism

Open Wide - Spoon-Fed at the Cineplex - NYTimes.com

Here's what I think: It's easy to lump movies together.

Part of the problem, really, is an economy that creates great uncertainty. Another issue is, that for many, even folks like me, the theatres have become a rarer place to see movies. Yes, Transformers 2 might be a big B.O. draw now, but so have countless crappy movies. And countless good ones, too.

So what's really going on? Well, to start with, let's examine Star Trek. The movie was a rather daring update of the original show. It packed a hell of a lot of emotion into its starting sequence. It went on to do some very audacious stuff, which I will not reveal, since it's not exactly Kosher to give away the plot. But in my estimation, the movie let the show update its style to better accomodate today's action and special effects expertise. But it doesn't hurt that the characters are pretty well known, updated with new actors as they have been, and that the general style of the universe, even with Abram's myriad touches, is familiar to folks.

What's with Up? Well, Pixar has developed a reputation, and reputations make it easier for people to invest. If you trust a certain filmmaker or a certain category of film, you will do repeat business. They can experiment, take risks, be creative, because the audience both expects it, and knows that they're good enough to follow through.

And Harry Potter? Well, again, the stories are well-regarded, well known, and people have been following the story for quite some time. But we should be wary of the reflexive reflection and consideration of Potter as being cinematic junk food. The story is layered, with all kinds of different themes and ideas at work. To say that it works because it's juvenile is to miss the maturing perspective at the story's heart.

What's the theme that's developing? Not spoon-feeding. Public Enemies' preview was a common sight. So was Terminator Salvation. But sometimes a movie just doesn't click. However, that's what DVD is for, and the value of that and other new channels of content delivery. Somebody talked about the long tail, the idea that on a long enough time-line, things can be profitable.

My sense is, quality for quality's sake is a good start, but we must remember that drawing people's interest and rewarding it is both an artistic and a business priority. It's nice to try and get that attention immediately, but you'll always have the fickle attentions of the audience to deal with, so the task is not merely attention now, but attention as people revisit, and as others in secondary markets are introduced. I have to confess, I see more films first on DVD now than I see in the theatres.

A.O. Scott attributes a infantilization to the Cinema, citing adventure plots and things like that, but to be honest, if you look at what we call the classics, if you look at the works that inspired and inform the serious theatre, cinema, and literature, you'll find that the non-serious work often functions as a feedstock, lending structure, lending imagination. More to the point, it doesn't hurt when juvenile and mature, serious and adventurous, real and unreal meet in the middle. In fact, if we really think about it, many of the classics, of our time and time past straddle this divide. They might have action elements, or be largely action themselves. Watching Blade Runner, we're caught right in the middle of that.

Here's what I think: Art is communication, and it helps to have something to say, and something to say it with. The art is not in following some classic forms, rather in understanding the relationship of that form and that content to each other, and then to the audience, a sort of triangle of interpretation of the art's meaning.

What do I mean? Well, what defines a good action sequence isn't just onscreen kinetics, or their photography and editing. It is those things, complementing and fleshing out a situation deeper on down. The anime that I like to watch is often heavy on character development. Even with formulaic fights that sometimes populate the shows, the quirks and turns of character can help generate additional interest, not to mention motivate the audience to cheer for the sympathetic figure in the battle (or at least watch those figures in interest)

And when the fights and their blocking are good? Then it's downright marvellous.

Now, I'm not saying you have to go with all action all the time. But good action, or at least good awareness of how something presents itself to the camera and the editor, and subsequently to the audience, can help contribute to the exemplary delivery of the story to the audience.

I think writers and filmmakers should embrace imagination and technique both, should recognize other things as well. I think I'm going to explore this in a later entry, so see you later.

Science and Technology Links for 8/3/09

Popular Science:

Leaked Conversation Suggests EEStor's Battery-Killing Ultracapacitor Is Nearly Complete

Experiment Looks to Bridge Classical Physics and Quantum Mechanics

Test Drive: Nissan's Leaf, The Electric Car's First Shot at the Mainstream

NASA Panel To Recommend Manned MIssions To Asteroids, Venus Fly-Bys

Clippy Enlists - I still say "Clippy must die."

Laser-Powered Lightcraft "At the Cusp of Commercial Reality" - Robert Heinlein actually referred to this in a story where a straight-talking black lady becomes president by a fluke of fate. This is one of the projects she pushes. Now what I'm interested in are the power requirements and relative noisiness of a pulsed detonation based system.

Discover Magazine:

Hail the Spleen: An Underappreciated Organ Gets the Credit It Deserves

Ripped From the Journals: The Biggest Discoveries of the Week

Comets Not So Likely to Smash Into Earth and Kill Us All - Good.

How Much of Your Memory Is True?

Scientific American:

Stuck Mars rover passing its time as an observatory

Global Warming Beliefs

Are Contaminants Silencing Our Genes?

Colorado power company wants to ratchet up fees on solar freeloaders- that is, people generating power of their own through solar panels on their roofs. I know, it's as dumb as it sounds.

Popular Mechanics

5 Extremely Dumb Military Designs from G.I. Joe

CSI Myths: The Shaky Science Behind Forensics

The Key to the Battery-Powered House

Collision Course: The Need for Better Space Junk Regulations

Technology Review

A Better Way to Rank Expertise Online

A New Approach to Fusion - Seems fascinating, but I'm conflicted about the whole moving (and colliding) parts element of the reactor.

Crowdsourcing Closer Government Scrutiny

How to Land Safely Back on the Moon

Nanotube-Powered X-Rays

Smoothing the Way for Light - computing using Plasmons, 2-Dimensional waves of light moving over a surface.

Solar Industry: No Breakthroughs Needed - Solar industry is arguing that solar power is cost efficient enough as it is now to compete with fossil fuel industries.

Five Futuristic Interfaces on Display at SIGGRAPH - The first and last seem to me to be the ones with greatest potential.

How Dragon Kings Could Trump Black Swans - Sounds like the setup for an anime series, but its really about something more interesting!

Ars Technica

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 release dates

The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world- I'm not quite as convinced as this guy of the poor prospects of word. What people are looking for in a format like words is some kind of permanence, and richness of content. As an editor of content who both writes prose and screenplay in the medium, it helps that Word can do all kinds of work in making discrete files of its kind. I find that inputs in wikis and other such media often lack the kind of editing tools that allow you to create good looking text and quality writing. So in my opinion, there's not much good in burying Word just yet.

Reports: US' best source of carbon-free energy is efficiency

Network neutrality in Congress, round 3: Fight!

Google reveals plans for Chrome cloud synchronization

Microsoft's Seadragon helps you share large images

My Kindle ate my homework: lawsuit filed over 1984 deletion

Super speed: a brief history of USB 3.0, 2007-2018

Science and Technology Links for the Week of 7/27/09

Can Bacteria Create a Cement Wall to Hold Back the Sahara?

Tiny Structures in Beetle's Shell Twist Light, Giving It a Green Sheen

Scientists Design Versatile Self-Assembling Nanogears

Surf Anywhere, Inside a Giant Wheel

First Ever Nanoscale Mass Spectrometer

Building the World's Wimpiest Space Thruster-Harder Than It Sounds

The Inspiring Boom in "Super-Earths"

Blue Food Dye Helps Rats With Spinal Injuries-But Also Turns Them Blue

The Satellite That Aims to Succeed Where Icarus Failed

The Violent, Mysterious Dynamics of Star Formation

Take This, Tom Cruise: Data Gloves for the People!

Firing Off Charged Nanoparticles Might Allow Spaceships to Move at Near-Light Speed

Antifreeze Might Allow for Oceans-and Life-on Enceladus

Metamaterial Revolution: The New Science of Making Anything Disappear

Top 100 Stories of 2008 #70: A Single Electron Is Caught on Film

Top 100 Stories of 2008 #69: Physicists Create a Perfect Place to Store Electricity

Programmable Matter Moves From Sci-Fi to Sci-Real- I actually have read the book (non-fiction) this guy wrote. The idea is certainly intriguing, that is, using quantum dots to artificially mimic different materials and their properties, but my science and technology instincts tell me that his predictions, like those of K. Eric Drexler of Nanotechnology fame before him, will be scaled back and modified as we confront the real world engineering challenges associated with them. That isn't to say, though, that I don't find the possibilities exciting, should even just a small fraction of them become reality.

Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts? - The title's theory is a bit dubious, but the discussion of how quantum behavior like tunneling and random walk wavefront collapses are intriguing.

Imaginary Friends- An article that talks about research indicating that social loneliness can be alleviated by watching television and following the lives of characters. Not that I do that too much. *sob* ;-)

Rewards, dopamine and the brain: Could pennies and pills help you learn better?

Metamaterial Improves Resolution of MRI Scans

Cheaper Solar Thermal Power - I saw a Stirling engine used on one of those 60 Symbols videos I told you about before. Strikes me as an intuitively brilliant idea. I just have to wonder what's being used to transfer the heat.

There is no WiFi allergy: newspapers misreport PR as science - Aren't we glad?

The Wii is born again: Ars reviews Wii Sports Resort

Physicalization looks for gold in the margins - Ars Technica

Which is better, running a lot of individual multiple chips, or fewer, more expensive multicore chips?

Disney puts toll on format shifting, rolls out microSD films - Ars Technica

You can now officially lose your movie in your couch cushions.

You'll also pay more for it, to boot!

Science Links #2, Week of July 20th

If there are too many links, just pick up on the ones that catch your eye, I won’t mind.

Could Exxon Go Green? Oil Giant Invests in Algae Biofuel Research

New Flu Treatment Outsmarts Mutations

New Material Could Cool Electronics 100 Times More Efficiently

Prompts Help Asperger's Patients Overcome Common Problem

This happens all too much, but I guess it’s better than it not happening at all, when you got my condition.

Digital Rat Brain Spontaneously Develops Organized Neuron Patterns

Ten Things You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Moon Landing

Fly to the Moon with Google Earth

Darpa's Self-Feeding Sentry Robot is Not a Man-Eater, Company Protests

But Soylent Green is still people.

Augmented Reality Subway Finder iPhone App Is Awesome

Invisible Flash Takes Night Photos Without the Burst of (Visible) Light

How It Works: ESPN's Ball Tracker Follows Home Runs With Doppler Radar

Automated Tabletop Cutter Brings Manufacturing Home

Scientific American video- Kamchatka’s Geothermal Vegetables

The Brain Adapts in a Blink to Compensate for Missing Information

Unlikely suns reveal improbable planets (video)

Does Dark Energy Really Exist?

Bibliospherical Orb of Doom Constructed in Germany

4 Innovations for Cleaner, Flat-Free, Gearless Rides

5 Useless Robots (And Why We Love Them)

Cesium atoms are able to take a "quantum walk"

Microsoft changing default browser setting in IE8

Next For Touchscreens: Temporary Pop-Up Buttons?

May Cool Heads Prevail: How to Save on Air Conditioning

Cagey Solution: Will Nano Traps Make Geothermal Power Earthquake-Safe?

Obama Favors Plug-in Hybrids over Hydrogen Vehicles

Why Music Moves Us - As a person whose got some training as a filmmaker, I’ve come to some of the same conclusions about film. Many people compare editing film to making music. I think that such higher-level artforms are capable of expressing complex ideas that straight speech and communication cannot.

What Will NASA's Next Spacesuit Look Like?

One Kindle Per Child?

Newly Discovered Element 112 Named "Copernicum"

Paperclips Dance for Tips on Japanese Subway, Powered By Electromagnetic Fields

The Prism Is Part Laser Synth, Part Guitar, Pure Fun

Biking Downtown Could Help Power The Bus That Gives You A Ride Home

Coffee Drinkers, Say Hello to Scald-Proof Nanofabric

Electric Gullwing: Mercedes Previews a Shockingly Awesome Sports Car

Pneumatic Grappling Hook to Enable Robot Locomotion

Windpower Could Provide 40 Times Earth's Power Needs

India to Issue Biometric ID Cards to All 1.2 Billion Citizens

40 Years After Moon Landing, a Question Remains: What Next?

Key Brain Section Never Multitasks—It Just Switches Very Fast

Light Repels Light

Terahertz Transistor Could Usher in Era of Cheap Surveillance Video Cameras

Helping Robots Get a Grip

Dow to Test Algae Ethanol

Catching Spammers in the Act

Week in Microsoft: Windows 7 and Office 2010 leaks galore

Science Links Digest #1

For some time now, I've been pulling together some science and technology links to send to my boss about science and technology. I've been thinking it might be nice to publish some of these in a blog entry, so other readers can have a glimpse at some of the amazing, fascinating and interesting things going on in the world.

A word on my technique: This is essentially my digest of highlights, mostly of applied and practical science from Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, Technology review, and now Ars Technica. I might include others as time goes on, but I'm mainly working on those few core websites, to keep things simple.

In the meantime, here's my collection of links:

SpaceX Successfully Delivers First Payload to Space

NASA to De-Orbit International Space Station In 2016

Cambridge Physicists Devise Working Scientific Model for Successful Revolutions

Ever Wonder What Those Science Symbols Really Mean?

Video: Antares DLR-H2 Becomes the First 100% Fuel-Cell Powered Plane

Researchers Work Towards a Shirt That Can Take Pictures

Behind the Scenes & Under the Hood: Virtuality's Antimatter Spacecraft Engine

To Cope with Cold Winters, Polar Dinosaurs Burrowed Beneath the Ground

Did Galileo Spot Neptune Two Centuries Before Its "Discovery"?

10 Wind Turbines That Push the Limits of Design

Why New Chrome OS Won't Turn Google Into a Monopoly: Analysis

A Costly and Unnecessary New Electricity Grid

Econophysicist Predicts Date of Chinese Stock Market Collapse

How Features Graduate from Gmail Labs

Hints of How Google's OS Will Work

Pink Silicon Is the New Black

Office 2010: Tech Preview now, free Web apps in August

Windows 7 coming to Volume Licensing in September

GE brings smart grids to life as appliances gain support

Better router tech: Mind the flows, not the packets

Goodbye, CompuServe! (We thought you already died)

From string theory mathematics to high-T superconductivity

Report: 20% of online video fans watch less TV

The Incredible Shrinking Sheep of Scotland

This will probably get a lot of letters from evolutionary biologists.

The explicit assumption of the article is right here:

On Soay Island, off the western coast of Scotland, wild sheep are apparently defying the theory of evolution and progressively getting smaller.

The Reporter, Bryan Walsh, is incorrect. Though growth in size is typically encouraged by evolution, it is by no means a law of evolution that things can't go either way.

I recently saw a science program, I forget what it's called, which talked about the case of a Mammoth species on an island off California, which shrank after its population became trapped on it when the end of the ice age cut it off from the mainland. Not only was there not enough food to manage the larger size, but the smaller size gave the dwarf mammoths an advantage in the angle of slopes they could climb.

Or to put it plainly, the advantages and disadvantages of the size pressured the size of the Mammoth to go down, to reach a new point of equilibrium.

Same thing with the sheep.

Now for some species, that new equilibrium might not come fast enough. And basically those species are screwed.

But shrinking sheep? That's consistent with the laws of evolution, because those laws speak not to the promotion of idealized traits, but the adaptation of a species to an environment. Nothing law-breaking about that.

What do slot machines have in common with Elections?

According to Discover Magazine, they look pretty suspicious when you see seven too many times.

I saw something on this sort of human failure to be truly random regarding the "cold fusion" fiasco a while back. When they faked their research, their numbers showed patterns that wouldn't naturally occur. Artificial results reflect the selective, biased nature of the human mind. We have preferences, we make choices, and our choices are not random.

Is that what that's called? #1: Welcome to the Real World Edition

The Eyes of Truth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A good song, generally, but listen to the last part on this video to hear what may be a very familiar piece of music to martial arts fans.

The music in question, as the article says was sampled, not used in its entirety, but what a sample!

Yay! Buses win!

Trucks Fail

Knead the Dough, Preheat the Oven, and WTF?

This was so bad it just cracked me up.

How bread was made in the 80’s…

Oh, what the hell, here's the video:

A little perspective is need, but more from their side.

CNN.com: "Commentary: Will innocents at AIG pay the price?"

Yes, your company is hated. Why shouldn't it be? Because you know it to better? Of course you do. You worked there. And you might think it unfair.

But stop a moment and think: Your company is being helped to tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and the only reason nobody's let it drop is fear of a larger meltdown. And then some of your friends, and yes, you, suddenly get millions of dollars to stick around. Suddenly the folks who, from the public, unfamiliar perspective, seem least qualified in the world to be rewarded and retained, get paid millions of dollars for the "good work", millions of dollars to stick around.

If you didn't have the benefit of familiarity with all the nice people of your company, just what would there be to justify something of this kind?

Not much.

Do you feel unfairly painted with a broad brush? Well, I'm afraid that's what happens with corporate identity in these times, especially in the financial world. It takes quite a few more seconds for people to process an explanation as to how AIG was this otherwise good insurance company with a hideous boil of a financial division on its back, but it doesn't take so long to explain that AIG is asking for yet more money to cover it. You can try and pretend that they are other people, over there, and everybody else is untouched, but that's not what the balance sheet says.

Understand this: your company made decisions regarding this subsidiary which put the national economy at risk. It was one of many companies that pushed for the greater mingling of finance, insurance, and stockbrokering, and which either consolidated such companies after the deregulation, or created them wholesale. As a corporation, AIG doesn't get to act like it's not responsible for the mess of one subsidiary; it's a collective enterprise. And why was this division allowed to run amok? Probably because it made lots and lots of money for your company.

I feel for the people who are threatened with violence because of this, and I would hate to learn that not every step was being taken to safeguard those who's association with the company has brought a nation's anger to their door. Fortunately, as of today, I have heard of nobody being hurt over this. But there will always be those whose impulse control is as bad as their judgment, and they deserve to be stopped before their idiocy does anybody harm.

But is America not allowed to feel anger of the normal, non-psychotic kind? Is it not allowed to wonder how all their jobs and fortunes and retirement could come to depend on one company, which though perhaps irresponsible with just one little division, let that one little division help create a worldwide economic crisis? What about all the innocent people out there in America, whose fortunes are in the process of being sacrificed to keep this company propped up?

I'm sorry, but your bad experience compares nothing to the pain and suffering that your company's problems dangle over American's heads. Should you expect the people angry at you to abide by the law, and not seek extra-legal methods of retribution? Of course you should. Should you expect everybody to rationally come to the conclusion that since AIG is filled mostly by nice, hardworking people, that they shouldn't feel anger, feel bitter and betrayed?

I don't think you should. I don't think that is a reasonable thing to expect of people who will never know the company the way you do, whose only experience of the company will be of it being a corporate Sword of Damocles. It would be better if folks like you did not come to the American people expecting apologies for our fears, anxieties, and the anger that accompanies them. It would be better if you took a more humble approach, a more understanding approach, and asked for understanding for those individuals who just happen to work for one of history's most notorious companies. It would be better for those on Wall Street to beg forgiveness, and consent to stricter regulation so that the likelihood of this kind of event recurring is as low as it is possible.

The alternative is that Wall Street pushes its luck until it has none left. Now is not the time for folks to push their luck any further, because the distance between this backlash and a stronger one still may not be as far as some folks might pretend to think.

If only that were all...

The Denver Post: "Horsing around"

If hard work were all it took to make $250,000, more than 19 out of 20 people would manage it. Education doesn't come free, and it gets further away from free for people like me every moment.

If you work hard, you can get somewhere. But ambition alone doesn't determine things. It never has. Hard work alone doesn't determine things. It never has.

It helps to have a good start.

What's at work now is not envy. Oh that envy was the worst thing we felt. How about resentment? How about betrayal? How about a complete lack of patience with an agenda that has continually rewarded hard work less and less, with the promise that one day things would turn around and we'd prosper more. It's a mark of the two-faced nature of such "conservative" policies that even in the best of recent times, people were again and again on the receiving end of pink slips, even while executive compensation skyrocketed. If there is envy, it's generated by a system that seems purpose built to put more and more distance between the average person and the top.

These brilliant people, who earn every dollar, somehow managed to destroy the financial industry. Despite everything they promised, their leadership, their guidance led us down the garden path to ruin. It's not envy, it's anger. We've got our own interests, just as the rich do, and while they've been pissed off, with Limbaugh's help, at how terribly high the taxes are today (look in a history book folks, it's been much, much worse.), and how much regulation they suffer under, they've been transgressing against those interests time and time again, supposedly for our own good. And yet, the eventual result, the sum total of years worth of our sacrifice to them has been economic disaster. After all the chances we gave them to make their brand of laissez faire capitalism work, they've utterly failed to deliver to us the real returns on our investment that we worked our asses off for them to get.

This is not about envy, or not earning our way up in life. Quite the opposite. This about looking after our own interests, rather than sticking with a system where envy is all you've got, that and an empty stomach. We don't want what they have half as much as we want what we've earned, what we deserve from business and government alike.

The folks at AIG didn't earn those bonuses, not in any real sense of the term. They failed, and that failure would have been punished with the loss of their jobs, if we, the people they transgressed against, time and again, hadn't stepped in. If it weren't for our generosity, they'd be out of work. And now, they repay our generosity, by rewarding themselves for a nonexistent success.

Rush, your people have worn our patience down considerably, to the point where we stopped buying into your party's platforms. People have gone back to liberalism because they see no profit in continuing to support an agenda where the primary direction of envy is of the top for the resources we on the bottom still have.

Putting more "Africa" in Your Computer

This seems to be a very promising kind of technology. What he's talking about in terms of the protein gates might not be 100% correct, but what's actually happening is that the transistors are getting so small that electrons can take quantum leaps (the literal, not Scott Bakula kind) across the transistor's setup, which essentially defeats the purpose of the device, which is supposed to act like a gate for current (sort of like people jumping over your fencegate defeats that devices purpose).

The Backbone of Modern Civilization.

Popular Science: "Who Protects The Internet?"

A good article on the Physical infrastructure that supports the internet (with photos of the intertubez to boot!).

They're not confronting it...

Creationist Students Take Trip to Evolution Headquarters: The Smithsonian - washingtonpost.com: "The Genesis of a Debate"

They think they're confronting what evolution says, but they're not. They believe one thing, and will not be persuaded- at least that's what they hope.

The question we deal with in science is whether what we imagine to be true is supportable by what can be demonstrated to be true. If we move past scientific answers to the question of origins, as a matter of natural philosophy, we end up dealing with a world where anything arguable can be held to be true, where Hindus, Japanese Animists, and others have equal claim, along with everybody else, including the advocates of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The question of whose hand, essence, or noodle is in creation becomes a matter for a debate that no human being has the capability to successfully conclude.

Science's usefulness comes from its ability to draw different scholars into more symmetric debates about what's going on. Better yet, much of that symmetry is based on a mapping, a pegging of the premises of that debate to reliable information and theory about the world itself. The solution of the puzzle, too is based upon these shared premises.

So there are two important parts here to what's going on: there are convergence encouraging standards at work here, and those standards are based upon the interpretation of reality, as we are able to sense and perceive it. There is resolution to such arguments, or at least turns on the path of theory that can lead it to better approximation of reality.

Religion, though, always has been, and always remains about things beyond that reality, beyond provability, beyond comprehension. The bible itself says God is out of our league, and it must be true if we're talking about a God capable of setting in motion, much less understanding the complexity of the world we're struggling to only begin to understand, and which single persons can spend careers, lifetimes even, studying one aspect of. The folks on this trip scoff at science, but I think of science as a sort of humility, in terms of scholarship.

Let's say they're right, and divine fingerprints can be seen, and the bible can be used as a basis for paleontology, and other deep-time related fields. What keeps somebody from attributing the explained phenomena to events or concepts in the Buddhist Sutras, the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, or the Norse Legends of a slaughtered, primal Ice Giant? Nothing really. Everybody's free to interpret, because nothing symmetrically observable or testable exists binds those interpretations, proves it false or true in any way. Some want that freedom, but it's not really useful for coming up with and refining dependable theories about the way the world works. A theory of that kind, to be most valid, must be lead to conform to the shape of the real world. The less the distinctions of the observable, testable real world matter, the more unanchored, out to sea, the theories a person will be able to come up with.

Awesome Beyond Comprehension

Why compressive sensing will change the world

How about this: Compressive sensing takes a couple of lenses, a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), and a single Photodiode, and resolves an image that would otherwise require hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pixels to resolve. I don't pretend to understand the math, but this has the potential to vastly increase the resolution of just about anything you could think of, and even revolutionize the way we deal with security, medicine, and Astronomy.

That, or be a very interesting curiosity. You know how science goes.

Not a God of the Gaps, But Man in the Valley of the Knowable

Quantum Physicist Wins $1.4M Templeton Prize For Work on “Veiled Reality”

This was my comment on that Blog:

I think if you think about it for a moment, there’s some value in his approach, because it puts the emphasis on the limitations of the human mind and human methods, which is really what science is all about dealing with.

If we were perfect at dealing cognitively with the environment, we would not need scientific methods to to clear away potential explanations. We’d just get it right the first time.

Intelligent Design advocates take an approach that tries to push God into the framework by saying we can puzzle out what was just randomly allowed to happen, and what is so improbable that it requires God’s hand. But their primary error is that it’s difficult to establish what is likely or unlikely if you do not know all things. Worse, they insist upon the notion that God’s design itself, created by a being able to perfectly understand all the complexities individuals struggle to understand just parts of imperfectly, is distinguishable from nature to folks like us.

If you believe in a Christian-Style God who created everything, you run into what can only be termed a figure-ground problem: how do you tell one creation from another. Furthermore, if we’re dealing with a perfect God, why the need for the do-over? A perfect God, we can reason, would be capable of engineering the world so that these things would come about spontaneously from the complex processes of nature itself.

To get around such questions, ID advocates take the position that the scientific doctrine of natural materialism, that is trying to explain nature without positing supernatural explanations, is somehow wrong, and needs to be superceded by ID theory’s supernatural framework.

But why do we stick with natural materialism in the first place?

There’s one simple reason: it’s what we’re competent to deal with. I can philosophize about God’s role in the universe, but I’m not capable of creating an experiment that can distinguish the right or wrong of my position in any fashion beyond that of oh-so fallible rhetoric. Real scientists, dealing with what they deal with can design observations and experiments to look for the signs of whether one theory approximates reality or diverges from it. They can say “this means that A must be true, rather than B.”, and others can cross check this position.

We deal with the world we can deal with, and leave the rest to priests and philosophers.

Essentially, I believe in God, and that he is responsible for the design of the world. However, I don't believe looking at the world in terms of human notions of design is appropriate, and I don't think we're competent to analyze design that takes place on levels that far beyond ours. So, at the end of the day, we should use scientific methods out of humility for our own limited understanding of the world.

Not a bad idea....

Being a budding Science Fiction/Fantasy Author, I might have to steal this idea.