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[smjjames]

Ouch, that's gotta be !!!FUN!!! at family gatherings.

We do have a religion thread though and I was going 'eehhh..... *bulldoze tangent*' because I felt like my ignorance about Islamic religious schools was showing. I mean, I don't know all that much about Islam based religious schools.

As for religion+politics discussion, it mainly only gets heated over abortion or LGBTQ+ stuff, but we've managed to not have an utter flameout over that. The religion thread rarely goes into politics though and is primarily theology and philosophy.

[Eschar]

Perhaps the receipt could print a hash code on it that corresponds to the digital entry, but is non-trivial to generate from the digital version making forgery difficult?

People usually respond negatively to any suggestion of the use of cryptography in voting for security reasons, but I think actually exposing that system to the public in that way, actually showing them hash codes, would create a huge backlash.

As a general rule, if you expose the American public to literally any number without a dollar sign in front of it, they will immediately assume the following:

1. It is or can be numerologically manipulated to be the Mark of the Beast.
2. It will be used to track them and herald a new age of government surveillance.
3. It marks the inception of Sharia law, otherwise why would they be (partly) in Arabic numerals? If English numbers were good enough for Jesus they should be good enough for us.
4. It is redeemable for fabulous prizes somewhere on the dark web.
5. It's how the reptilian Freemasons are guiding the chemtrails.
6. It proves strawman theory is correct so they don't need to pay taxes.
7. It is the revenge of math teachers on their lazy students.

So, you know, maybe we should find a way to prevent vote miscounts that doesn't involve Americans interacting with numbers.

This does remind me of the Pew scientific literacy study, where an alarming proportion of people don't know the Earth revolves around the Sun. Or other fairly basic scientific facts. Even doctorate holders were only getting 80% of the questions right. I'd be curious to see how other countries fare. The US gets a bad rap in this regard, but I suspect the issue is more widespread.

I think a lot of the problem might be the prevalence of religious schools here. I was lucky to go to an actual school. Yes, there are religious schools. I thought schools were supposed to be for learning. Churches already do the job of deceiving people. They don’t need to make “schools” to do the same. It is unfortunate that many Americans seem to not value knowledge.

I go to a religious school and so I'm curious about your school. Can you give me a general picture of some of the major differences - obviously, less religion, but what are some other effects?

I'm not defensive of them, just to make that clear. 
(I would have been a few years ago, probably.)

I haven't gone, but part of my family migrated from iran (I have israel+palestine direct family members, but some of my family originated from iran and elsewhere in middle east. kinda spread out) and they send their kids to mosques to learn. Its like a christian religious school, but for Allah. From what they told me its no different than any other religious school except its for their own religion. (edit: And they still learn things like any other school. They learn math, science, history and writing in both arabic and english. In some ways its far better than public schools from what they told me)

I hope Naturegirl isn't against that. I don't think racist bigots don't belong on this forum. That is something a trump supporter would be against, since they hate islam

I don't think Naturegirl is Islamophobic, and I don't think that's a valid conclusion to draw from her statement about religious schools: she wasn't criticising Islamic schools in particular, and her statement against religious schools in general did not appear bigoted.

As for religion+politics discussion, it mainly only gets heated over abortion or LGBTQ+ stuff, but we've managed to not have an utter flameout over that. The religion thread rarely goes into politics though and is primarily theology and philosophy.

Hooray for Bay12.

[Trolldefender99]

Ouch, that's gotta be !!!FUN!!! at family gatherings.

We do have a religion thread though and I was going 'eehhh..... *bulldoze tangent*' because I felt like my ignorance about Islamic religious schools was showing. I mean, I don't know all that much about Islam based religious schools.

As for religion+politics discussion, it mainly only gets heated over abortion or LGBTQ+ stuff, but we've managed to not have an utter flameout over that. The religion thread rarely goes into politics though and is primarily theology and philosophy.

Not as "fun" (in a negative context) as one may think. Mostly rather accepting. Some family members I've never even seen because they strongly...well have strong opinions. I haven't even seen my grandparents on my mom's side, and my grandma passed away a couple years ago. Still haven't seen my granddad.

A lot of the family who migrated to america, some before I was born and some after, are rather accepting of my parents (edit: And of each other. The ones who are too set in their ways and I wish them no negativity and hope for the best for them, went their own path). A lot of jewish people in israel do actually want to see muslims treated better. And that part seems to be slowly changing, so we'll see.

The cool thing for me is my family combines and share religious holidays. So its like having two holidays at a time instead of one. Have gotten to experience two often completely different holidays and cultures.

Though I don't experience nearly as much bigotry as some of my family members have, since I look more "white" so racists don't tend to target me. I've been a target though but thats another story. I have however been with my cousins who got food thrown at them when they were protesting against trump, before he was elected. And the person who threw food at them had the nerve to tell me "why is a whitey hanging out with *racist word toward muslims*. Well lets just say one punch knockout and we left to another area, luckily nothing ever came of it either so didn't get charged or sit in a jail cell.

[Naturegirl1999]

Perhaps the receipt could print a hash code on it that corresponds to the digital entry, but is non-trivial to generate from the digital version making forgery difficult?

People usually respond negatively to any suggestion of the use of cryptography in voting for security reasons, but I think actually exposing that system to the public in that way, actually showing them hash codes, would create a huge backlash.

As a general rule, if you expose the American public to literally any number without a dollar sign in front of it, they will immediately assume the following:

1. It is or can be numerologically manipulated to be the Mark of the Beast.
2. It will be used to track them and herald a new age of government surveillance.
3. It marks the inception of Sharia law, otherwise why would they be (partly) in Arabic numerals? If English numbers were good enough for Jesus they should be good enough for us.
4. It is redeemable for fabulous prizes somewhere on the dark web.
5. It's how the reptilian Freemasons are guiding the chemtrails.
6. It proves strawman theory is correct so they don't need to pay taxes.
7. It is the revenge of math teachers on their lazy students.

So, you know, maybe we should find a way to prevent vote miscounts that doesn't involve Americans interacting with numbers.

This does remind me of the Pew scientific literacy study, where an alarming proportion of people don't know the Earth revolves around the Sun. Or other fairly basic scientific facts. Even doctorate holders were only getting 80% of the questions right. I'd be curious to see how other countries fare. The US gets a bad rap in this regard, but I suspect the issue is more widespread.

I think a lot of the problem might be the prevalence of religious schools here. I was lucky to go to an actual school. Yes, there are religious schools. I thought schools were supposed to be for learning. Churches already do the job of deceiving people. They don’t need to make “schools” to do the same. It is unfortunate that many Americans seem to not value knowledge.

I go to a religious school and so I'm curious about your school. Can you give me a general picture of some of the major differences - obviously, less religion, but what are some other effects?

I'm not defensive of them, just to make that clear. 
(I would have been a few years ago, probably.)

I haven't gone, but part of my family migrated from iran (I have israel+palestine direct family members, but some of my family originated from iran and elsewhere in middle east. kinda spread out) and they send their kids to mosques to learn. Its like a christian religious school, but for Allah. From what they told me its no different than any other religious school except its for their own religion. (edit: And they still learn things like any other school. They learn math, science, history and writing in both arabic and english. In some ways its far better than public schools from what they told me)

I hope Naturegirl isn't against that. I don't think racist bigots don't belong on this forum. That is something a trump supporter would be against, since they hate islam

I’m not against Islam, I’m against people spreading img orange, lies, and fact denial as truth. I’m against any religion that says such and such book is true, regardless of reality. I am fine with people that are religious as long as they don’t force their religion to others and/or deny facts and knowledge we have gained. The scientific method has led to every discovery we have made. Religion didn’t teach us about microbes, scientists did experiments and found them. Religion didn’t teach us how heredity worked, Scientists did experiments and figured it out. The scientific method; asking a question, doing background research about the subject of your question, make a hypothesis(educated guess based on your research), design an experiment to disprove your hypothesis, if your hypothesis doesn’t work, publish results and formulate a new hypothesis using what you learned from your experiment, continue refining your hypothesis and doing more experiments until the question is answered, and publish your results. This is science. Investigating the world. I am against anything that willfully ignores and gets other people to ignore what we have learned. To be clear, I am fine if people are religious, as long as they don’t use their religion to stifle progress.

[smjjames]

Unfortunately, in Israel as in America, the loudest voices on the fringes often dominate. It looks like Israel will have a left wing-centrist PM, but they're still figuring things out.

Anyhoo, back to US politics, Looks like Gordon Sondland will be testifying next week after all. Plus, it's gonna be a busy week. I found it odd that they decided to block his testimony in the first place because on the surface, it looks like he is exonerating Trump. No idea whether any of them listed the will be closed doors or not, but given the sensitive diplomatic stuff, most likely not.

[Egan_BW]

That quote pyramid is a bit excessive. You guys mind cutting it down a little? I don't think they start getting fucky with the forum software until they're much bigger, but that thing kinda takes up a lot of screen space.

[Naturegirl1999]

Sorry, that might have been longer than it needed to be

[Trolldefender99]

I'm just gonna say, because it bothers me. But silencing religion is what many dictatorships and communism countries like china do with religions they don't like. First it starts as silencing them, then it doesn't stop there and develops further.

Or actually a better example that may hit closer to home is republicans wanting to silence the lgbtq community because they don't like what they have to say or who they are. They don't want them to spread their "disease" (their words) to children in schools. That goes into the bigotry line of thinking. They often say "I accept them for who they are. But they need to be silenced so they can't talk about who they are". That is no different than wanting those who preach religion from...not preaching religion.

[Bumber]

Religion didn’t teach us how heredity worked, Scientists did experiments and figured it out.

Kind of an ironic example, considering Gregor Mendel was a monk.

[Trekkin]

Religion didn’t teach us how heredity worked, Scientists did experiments and figured it out.

Kind of an ironic example, considering Gregor Mendel was a monk.

Which, incidentally, had a larger impact on Mendelian genetics than may be immediately apparent: Mendel wanted to work with mice, but his bishop objected to a monk rearing many breeding pairs of mice for sex-related purposes. Luckily for genetics, the bishop did not understand plant reproduction, but the traits Mendel chose to study in pea plants also happened to be monoallelic just like the vast majority of heritable traits aren't. Blending, the alternative hypothesis his work discredited, is actually a more reasonable macroscale model for many traits, including those that were most fashionable among the fancy mouse enthusiasts of the time and most readily available.

I'm not saying we would have gotten to modern genetics faster if Mendel's bishop had been cool with mice fucking, but it's interesting to ponder how things like the Meselson-Stahl experiment would have been integrated into a more cmprehensive understanding of genetics.

[Kagus]

Also, the criticism against religious schools in the US is generally against institutions that are allowed to base their curriculum on custom-made textbooks that have anything conflicting edited out of them, such as natural selection or sexual education.

Stuff like this, which published the infamous "Science 4 Christian Schools" that gave us this magnificent snippet:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yes, that's real. Yes, it's legal to use material like that in an educational establishment. Yes, this is the problem.

[Trekkin]

Also, the criticism against religious schools in the US is generally against institutions that are allowed to base their curriculum on custom-made textbooks that have anything conflicting edited out of them, such as natural selection or sexual education.

Stuff like this, which published the infamous "Science 4 Christian Schools" that gave us this magnificent snippet:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yes, that's real. Yes, it's legal to use material like that in an educational establishment. Yes, this is the problem.

There's also the problem that religious education, at least in America, is synonymous with (conservative) cultural indoctrination. Regular schools are bad enough for vulnerable kids; when these schools enshrine their dogma in operating protocols, there is an apparently irresistible urge to play up the most exclusionary parts of that dogma and inflict them with disproportionate strictness on those demographics that dogma views as lesser or abominate.

Yes, the lies on which their curricula are built are a massive problem. So are the results of putting kids through a theocracy.

[thompson]

...

I... find that dubious, in particular about doctorates. Could you link to a source? My guess is that Pew did conduct such a study, but it was misrepresented in some sensationalist news article or somesuch.

Google "Pew Research" and get your data straight from the horse's mouth. Going to a journalist for statistics is like going to a homeopath for medicine. Gallup have also run similar studies, with similar results.

Also, to clarify they didn't have a "Doctoral" category but rather "higher studies". They also provide a demographic breakdown that tells the usual story of socioeconomic disadvantage: Whites* do reasonably well, Hispanics and blacks very poorly. So, not so much "Americans are stupid" but rather "education in the US is woefully inconsistent and correlates strongly with socioeconomic status". Both Gallup and Pew websites are worth a visit. It's just a shame they don't do more international comparisons.

Regarding Mendel, I doubt early geneticists would have thrown out their blending theories after discovering a single new study about peas. Mendel discovered a new mechanism. It's overrepresented in public discourse about genetics simply because it's probably the only simple mechanism of heritability there is.

*I really hate the US "colour classification" of "race". My preference would be ethnicity, but that does become difficult to track after a few generations of cultural mixing. Mind you, I don't know where you'd draw the line between black and white either.

Edit: I could be wrong about the scientific judgement of early geneticists, of course. Given the crap psychiatrists believed I should probably expect it, actually. Still, genetics was never going to become a proper science until people recognised heritability was governed by discrete genes and that there was more than one way those genes can be expressed. Mendel's work definitely helped in that regard, as it showed that traits can skip a generation which helped validate the very concept of genetics itself.

[Trekkin]

Regarding Mendel, I doubt early geneticists would have thrown out their blending theories after discovering a single new study about peas. Mendel discovered a new mechanism. It's overrepresented in public discourse about genetics simply because it's probably the only simple mechanism of heritability there is.

It's not generally accurate to speak of scientists "throwing out" theories in any sense but the broadest historical compression-for-lay-audiences anyway, but quibbling aside, the mechanism Mendel discovered was one that Bateson happened to favor in his work with Garrod on alkaptonuria that went on to establish the idea of "inborn factors of disease" and chemical individuality; between them and Morgan, it's not inaccurate to say that everyone trying to establish heritability as a predictable phenomenon with respect to specific traits (and, in fact, call it genetics in the first place) was in favor of what was then called Mendelianism, and Mendel's Law of Independent Assortment helped define what people were looking for in the molecular mechanics of heredity -- which only came about because, apparently by chance, the seven traits in his pea study weren't linked enough to noticeably skew the results. (And, incidentally, both Cuenot and Castle were Mendelians, which I suspect is why they went with yellow coat in their mouse studies.) You can draw a direct line from Mendel to Hardy-Weinberg equilibria and most of the pre-DNA understanding of heredity, modulo McClintock. It goes some way toward explaining why people thought proteins carried genetic information, too, since it's easier to assume independent assortment with a lot of little molecules instead of one-ish gargantuan polymer.

[thompson]

The independence of the traits in Mendel's peas may not be as improbable as first seems. I recall reading a statistics study that shows the correlations Mendel found were actually significantly stronger than one might expect to find by chance. It's likely he "curated" his study by culling data points that didn't fit. It's also likely he looked at other traits but threw them out once they gave the "wrong" results.

Note I'm not accusing Mendel of misconduct here. He didn't have access to a modern understanding of statistics and likely had a genuine belief that excluding the data he did was valid for one reason or another.

Thank you for the primer on the history of genetics. It's definitely an interesting area. I'd be tempted to take up research in that area myself, but I find the smell of biology labs a little off-putting.