farmerman wrote:Your above articles arent anything like your posts rex. Theabove is an example of the marriage of the theoretical and applied. Both are sciences, they both operate on a basis of sound evidence, not mythology. To draw the comparison isnt fair to the scientists who are working on the AIDS app.Theyve taken the tedious work in determining retro patterns in virus DNA and applied the once exclusive tool of marketing statistics , data mining. Data mi9ning is also being used at USGS to come up with a universal stratigraphic key based upon specific and minute differences and similarities in regional stratigraphic structures. Without really fast number crunching, data mining would be impossibly slow
I have to agree with you FM for the most part. But there is that part of me that has some reserve. This is why I brought up the article because I had a motive.
I will also say that data mining is most likely being used or needed in many disciplines and this requires powerful computers. Disciplines like, atomic predictions, biological, viral, human, economic, militaristic strategies, I must also add spiritual, and of course computational expediency i.e. buffers caches and multi-threading logic...
My reservation is triggered with this thought:
Why not use data mining to figure out the possibilities of God's own fickle "mutations"...
The God algorithm... the one that can figure every possibility in any situation and arrive at the "best" one. To harmonize with another vastly unknown "being" and learn to know/predict it's ways... This is what all "researchers" are searching for.. the ability to "walk with the spirit" through realtime "revelation".
An example:
I may need to "not" walk down a certain alley way on a certain day when every other day it is just fine to do so. To preserve my safety "the spirt/God" tells me to break my habit pattern and not go such and such a way that day but down a different alley way...
This is something a law cannot teach... all life needs a dynamic floating pointer approach. An array of probabilities, possibilities and circumstances that mimic patterns of "foreknowledge" and wisdom.
About science and the fears of what science can do:
There is both rational and irrational fear. But it is hard to draw the line when nature has lovingly held the reins and preserved humans for millions of years and to think that scientists could develop a flu virus that could go in and change someone's DNA is more in the rational fears category... and nuclear science is in the same deck of cards.
Will they will not stop till we are being cooked by a constant stream of radiation that accelerates radical mutation and de-evolution on the whole planet? The same fate of Marie Curie... They are also searching for fusion that in itself has the power of a sun... Can our earth withstand that kind of localized reaction prolonged over time? I realize I am being like a chicken little and, I am generally for science... but, I am much more for life... I am not really sure if science will improve life over the next one hundred years or destroy it. Pushing ahead with science may only make us more dependant on it, enlarge population and accelerate the use of vital life prolonging nonrenewable resources of the earth..
Science is unfortunately walking a tight rope and playing God with humans and the earth this may be vital to our survival too... Any discussion about the ethical problems in religion and science must address this possibility that knowledge of this tree of science/God can bring both good and evil and what steps will we take to insure that we are guided as a race toward that outcome that will preserve our manifest destiny.
God's interface to humans is scientific... it can be measured, analyzed with great scrutiny, observed with the eyes, it can be tested and tried, weighed on a scale, charged with energy, operated, transformed.
God is pure math and the seed of all geometry, God has capacitors, resistors and inductors that work to form the grid that powers the human spirit and psyche. In understanding God humans should spare no known scientific process of scrutiny (including "data mining")...
