Rorschach.net

Heroes is on this Monday night on NBC. I really dug the pilot at Comic-Con, and have high hopes for it. Written by actual comic superhero writes for goddness sakes!

Ah, Something Awful and Photoshop. Is there nothing you cannot make into “the funny”? A few gems a few stinkers, all around good stuff for a lunch break.

My seventh grade science teacher taught me that “science is a way of doing things.” There’s a method to science, a discipline if you will, that is consistant no matter what the subject:

1. Observe a phenomenon or group of phenomenon.
2. Form a hypothesis to explain the observation.
3. Perform experiments to confirm hypothesis.
4. Change hypothesis based on experimental results.

Repeat steps 3 and 4 until your hypothesis accounts for the observations and becomes a theory. This is what is being taught in science classes to get the scientific method into the formative brains of this world so they can approach new ideas and observations in a non-judgemental way.

Belief and it’s spritual cousin faith is not science and that’s the crux of many current culture war discussions especially around the origins of humanity. When the unobservable comes along, when things defy description we can rely on our faith in a higher power to try to come to terms with what is happening. To degrade something as personal as faith by dragging it down into the mundane is to change what faith is. Faith is not observable, you can’t experiment on the existance of a controlling all-powerful force. To present the idea of God’s creation of the universe on par with the sceintific process is a disservice to science and a disservice to faith.

But science and faith are not mutually exclusive. You can believe what you want to believe. Your faith is your own, but science is universal. Those experiments up in step 3 need to be repeatable and confirmed by others. Faith requires no such confirmation, just your own personal devotion. Thus a physicist can have their own faith that God created the universe while still following the discipline of science that shows what we know and can observe today.

Faith is taught in our families, our communities, and our places of worship. The discipline of science is taught in our schools. Don’t confuse the issue by putting the two together. Teach the discipline of science in our schools not faith. Teach our youth how to observe, hypothesize, experient, and theorize so they can continue to explain this wonderous place we all exist in. Then when school is done teach them also about faith and belief in the unknown, but keep discipline of science pure so we can all learn from science instead of only arguing about points of view in our beliefs and faith.

If you live in America SotS is available in stores. Best Buy has a nifty online inventory system that you can check stock. Just use this link and type in your ZIP code to see which stores have a copy. Should be in Wal-Mart, Target, and CompUSA as well. Tell your friends, tell your enemies! There’s also a patch available that is a must download. It adds some great features especially making the tactical combat easier to control.

If anyone want’s to try out a multiplayer game sometime over the 3-day weekend let me know and I’d be happy to host it.

The reviews for the game are okay, but they seem to be missing a lot of the features of the game. Half of them don’t even mention multiplayer. That’s to be expected for a first game from a new team that’s trying something different. I’ll probably post my own detailed review soon.
Patch mirror locations after the break if the link above doesn’t work for you.
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