dominik

She may analyze science and apply her moral reasoning and reach a conclusion that some scientists don't like -- but that's hardly ignoring science.

Catholics don't view the body as evil -- they view the body (and thus sex) as good. As for science, it doesn't make moral pronouncements, so it can't view the body as good or evil -- those are moral terms, not scientific terms.

I'm not sure I understand, so I want to make this clear. Are you saying that "If people do not wish to follow the Church's teaching, the Church should make sure they not-follow-the-teaching in the healthiest way possible?"

Suppose a friend wants to commit suicide. You say that suicide is bad, and she shouldn't commit it. But she says well, I'm not going to follow your advice -- so you should help me commit suicide in the healthiest way possible! How do you reply?

Dignitas Personae in full: http://www.usccb.org/comm/Dignitaspersonae/Dignitas_Personae...

How does Dr. Krauss argue the Church demonstrates its "outdated, pre-scientific understanding"?

"I refer not to the hot-button issues of abortion or stem cell research but to the Catholic church's continued opposition to a decidedly pro-life medical intervention: in vitro fertilisation."

Interesting that Dr. Krauss chose to say IVF is "decidedly pro-life." Is a medical intervention pro-life if it results in the birth of one child but the death of four to engineer that birth?

He goes on to say that the Church opposed IVF because "as I understand it, that a baby conceived by this method would not have a soul." Dr. Krauss understands incorrectly, as the Church did not advocate this position (it contradicts the Church's own teaching on the nature of body and soul).

Dr. Krauss wonders "whose dignity is enhanced by withholding medically viable methods that have allowed infertile couples, now numbering in the millions, to conceive and give birth to children they will love."

Dignitas Personae gives him his answer on page 6: "The Church, by expressing an ethical judgment on some developments of recent medical research concerning man and his beginnings, does not intervene in the area proper to medical science itself, but rather calls everyone to ethical and social responsibility for their actions. She reminds them that the ethical value of biomedical science is gauged in reference to both the unconditional respect owed to every human being at every moment of his or her existence."

In other words, the Church concerns itself with the dignity every human being deserves, no matter how small or how young, or how weak or how old. Performing a medically viable procedure that kills four children to implant one ... doesn't respect the dignity of those four now-dead children.

Page 8 of DP gets right to this point: "It should be recognized, however, that given the proportion between the total number of embryos produced and those eventually born, the number of embryos sacrificed is extremely high. [Footnote 27: Currently the number of embryos sacrificed, even in the most technically advanced centers of artificial fertilization, hovers above 80%.] These losses are accepted by the practitioners of in vitro fertilization as the price to be paid for positive results. In reality, it is deeply disturbing that research in this area aims principally at obtaining better results in terms of the percentage of babies born to women who begin the process, but does not manifest a concrete interest in the right to life of each individual embryo."

Dignitae Personae goes on to discuss IVF on the next page: " Embryos produced in vitro which have defects are directly discarded. Cases are becoming ever more prevalent in which couples who have no fertility problems are using artificial means of procreation in order to engage in genetic election of their offspring. In many countries, it is now common to stimulate ovulation so as to obtain a large number of oocytes which are then fertilized. Of these, some are transferred into the woman’s uterus, while the others are frozen for future use. The reason for multiple transfer is to increase the probability that at least one embryo will implant in the uterus. In this technique, therefore, the number of embryos transferred is greater than the single child desired, in the expectation that some embryos will be lost and multiple pregnancy may not occur. In this way, the practice of multiple embryo transfer implies a purely utilitarian treatment of embryos. One is struck by the fact that, in any other area of medicine, ordinary professional ethics and the healthcare authorities themselves would never allow a medical procedure which involved such a high number of failures and fatalities. In fact, techniques of in vitro fertilization are accepted based on the presupposition that the individual embryo is not deserving of full respect in the presence of the competing desire for offspring which must be satisfied."

And in the next paragraph, Dignitas Personae directly responds to Dr. Krauss' view that IVF is a "decidedly pro-life": "This sad reality, which often goes unmentioned, is truly deplorable: the "various techniques of artificial reproduction, which would seem to be at the service of life and which are frequently used with this intention, actually open the door to new threats against life"."

There's much more.

The Church certainly understands the "biomedical understanding of human conception." But yes, the Church is guilty of "allow[ing] the foundations of its morality to be fixed in the past" -- moral foundations don't seem like something that ought to change -- Thou shalt not kill seems as if it should be true today and tomorrow, just as it was yesterday. But Dr. Krauss is incorrect to claim that the Church is "ignoring advances based on changing knowledge." She isn't. She's engaging with scientific advances and understanding them, and analyzing them from a moral and ethical perspective. Then, on the basis of her moral authority, she says what she sees -- that morality doesn't change just because science does, if it was wrong to kill a man with a sword it's still wrong to kill him with a gun.

Incorrect. If it were up to the Catholic Church, which it is not, the AIDS epidemic would be far smaller than it is. Why? Because if everyone adhered to the teachings of the Catholic Church, no one would have sex outside of marriage, which means HIV simply could not spread. It'd be gone within a generation.

But people don't want to not have sex outside of marriage, because that requires self-control, and that's hard.

As Chesterton put it: The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

As for deflation: Isn't there a cost to not reshingling your house? You don't have a reshingled house, something you presumably want. You shouldn't just look at the price of labor, you also have to look at the value of what the labor does: the house, reshingled. Compare that to the cost of reshingling the house. (Opportunity cost, in so many words).

I still fail to see the point of offering folks money to do something pointless, nor how it helps stop deflationary deadlock. If there's a deadlock then they'll just sit on that money as before, no?

I'm not sure I understand the deflationary deadlock -- you posit a situation where everyone sits on their cash and their labor, waiting -- waiting for what? Eventually someone is going to stop waiting and start working, eventually the gap between desired state and existing state will loom larger than the value of sitting on that money. In the house-shingling example, eventually you will value someone shingling your house for $X/hr today more than you will value having a not-reshingled house until the price drops to $Y/hr in Z days. When that point comes, you'll stop sitting on your money and hire someone to reshingle your house. Wouldn't a series of such events unlock the deflationary deadlock as the market reaches the new price point?

Also, how could money "be withdrawn quickly enough"? Who would withdraw it and how?

But why should that be a main goal? Why have money changing hands for the sake of changing hands? Isn't money just a medium of exchange -- a go-between, a currency -- used to convert one type of good into another? We don't just want money to circulate, we want money to circulate purposefully -- in transactions on the free market.

I still don't see how burying money and having miners dig it up helps anything. It doesn't create value. Those miners could do other, more productive things instead.

Can someone explain how such an action would help the economy?

I answer: Yes.

Ye Olde List o' Annoyances:

#1: I could only view one list at a time. I like having a 'big picture' view. Plus, the default-in-Gmail view was tiny. I could pop it out, but then it was in an orphan browser window -- which would sometimes disappear because it still technically tied into Gmail (e.g. adding a Labs extension to Gmail made Tasks go poof).

#2: They positioned the delete button between the "Add Task" and "Switch List" buttons. I nuked a few tasks accidentally, without evening know what I deleted.

#3: There's no undo and no history. If I wanted to hide completed tasks, I had to delete them, which meant losing them forever. If I accidentally deleted a task thanks to the positioning of the delete button, well, too bad.

#4: I couldn't select multiple tasks and move them around.

I couldn't take the annoyances.

I've since switched to a homebrew todolist solution that lets me see everything at once, switch between contexts, edit multiple items at once, and keep a full history. I complement this with a Moleskine notebook as a collection input. For stuff that has a hard due date, I use Google Calendar.

As for paper vs. iPhone -- I don't have an iPhone so I'm quite happy with paper. My notebook fits comfortably in my pocket and goes with me everywhere, and Moleskine thought through the design so its pages don't wrinkle and it stays nice and neat while remaining easy to write in. I've only used it for two weeks, but I've found it well worth its price compared to el cheapo pocket notebooks (which I used for several months, until I gave up in frustrating at having them wrinkle after living in my pocket).

1. Before class, Prof gives students an outline of the reading (a 'notesheet'), highlighting key points

2. Students do reading with guidance from the outline

3. Prof uses class time not to lecture but to answer questions and go into important details, rather than spend time outlining on the board

I thought about returning to Facebook, as many friends are on it. But reading this article has confirmed I was right to leave. Thanks :)

That way I get last.fm's recommendation to provide seed songs/artists for new Pandora stations.

There's also a small section on practical daily exercises that can be done quickly, without need for equipment. I'll link directly to that: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html

The key to both diet and exercise, however, lies in consistency -- you have to apply yourself every day.

A micro-summary to illustrate:

1. I love strings.

2. You don't want to concatenate strings in (large) loops.

3. You already knew that, at least if you're a decent programmer.

4. Analysis of various methods of concatenating strings in loops.

5. Reveal that the methods don't matter.

6. It's bad to worry about micro-optimizations like the best way to concatenate strings in a loop.

7. Just avoid obvious mistakes like concatenating strings in loops.

8. Otherwise, don't worry about micro-optimization. Instead, focus on your real goal: writing better code.

Maybe it's me, but this article felt disjointed.

And how do they prevent people buying virtual goods from feeling as if they're "cheating"? Perhaps it's an old-style complaint, but virtual goods feel against the "purity of the game" -- imagine playing chess online and being able to drop $5 to get an extra move -- sure that "speeds up" time, but it also (to me at least) breaks the game... I'm not sure yet how to design compelling virtual goods that don't kill gameplay but yet remain compelling.

Fortunately, social status remains a powerful motivator, but it seems that for social status to work players have to feel invested in the community, else they won't care what the community thinks (and thus won't buy anything to increase social status).

Usually. I'm sure conditions exist where such a statement evaluates to true.

Caveat: And don't infringe on any of the nuclear arsenal the big leagues have. And don't get bogged down in litigation to defend against infringement. Fortunately it's usually much cheaper for the big leagues to license a patent or buy a start-up outright than it is to try to bury them through litigation.

But much of the "deep web" isn't indexed because indexing either involves ignoring robots.txt or explicitly going against a site's Terms of Use. For example, take Amazon, which Pipl holds up as an example of a site that has "deep web" content. Amazon's Terms of Use, available here http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=5... say: license does not include ... any use of data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools.

How does Pipl index the deep web then? Have they gotten permission from all these companies? The TechCrunch article notes "[t]he folks at Pipl were hesitant to discuss their “secret sauce” with me" and only provides vague details, but even those details seem to point towards some sort of automated crawling of parts of sites that those sites' Terms of Use usually forbid automated crawling of.

Review-wise: It's not immediately evident -- from just reading the front page -- what the gameplay consists of. I get that it's about taxis and on real world maps. But what do I do? How do I win? Or at least rack up some sort of higher score than my friends? What's my goal? Or is this purely a sandbox?

The page tells me that I can "Build things," "Run [my] company with friends," and even "drive on a real map" but it doesn't make it clear how do I any of these things or why they'd be fun apart from any initial novelty...

The article, unfortunately, sensationalizes a bit and looks to the specifications to show how Palm designed around Apple's patents. But Palm didn't need to design around the specification. Palm only needed to design around the claims. They did this as well, it turns out, but the article doesn't highlight that.

Once upon a time, the same sort of idea existed in the West, in the lost art of modesty (buried alongside chivalry nowadays). The idea that not everyone need be exposed to everything. That some things are better saved and not sold.

How many times in the United States do men look at women not as persons but as objects? Seeing not the woman as she is, but merely as she appears -- not respecting her as a person but instead consuming her as a visual image.

Whether in Saudi Arabia or in the United States, the first principle to keep in mind involves respect for the human person as such -- man or woman.