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Be Careful!

Entry 299, on 2006-03-14 at 15:21:07 (Rating 3, Comments)

I've got a couple of comments to make about how careful you need to be before making a statement in the public record on any subject. The public record could include an Internet posting, such as a blog, or a court case. If you are going to make a pronouncement of some sort, which can be checked later, its good practice to check the alternatives you might not have considered carefully enough.

Enough generalities. The first incident arises from my blog entry of yesterday. In that I blamed our service provider for causing an outage in our Internet services which lasted for about 8 hours and caused a lot of problems for those of us who rely on using the 'net. Well, it turns out, I may be partly to blame for the problem!

The outage was caused by a DoS attack against a computer at our University. Now we have about 15,000 devices on our network, but whose server was chosen? That's right, one of mine. It wasn't my fault that my machine was attacked, but it wasn't Telecom's either, so on this occasion I apologise for falsely accusing them. My criticisms of their business practices remain.

The second incident is of more general public interest. It involves attempts by religion to stifle scientific discoveries when they contradict the current religious dogma. I'm currently reading a book by simon Singh, called Big Bang. Its primarily about the Big Bang (as you might have surmised from the title) but it also discusses the history of belief and discovery related to our understanding of how the Universe works.

The bit that intrigued me was a preface added to Copernicus' book, De Revolutionibus, where the book's major purpose, advancing the Sun centered model for the Solar System, was effectively negated by stating it was only a model for simplifying calculations, and not a real description of reality. The preface was added without Copernicus knowing, and he only saw it in the published book on the day he died - maybe it even contributed to his demise!

It was a classic case of the Church's influence stifling the truth. The parallel I saw was with the Intelligent Designer's wish to have a preface of similar intent added to evolution text books. If they knew anything about the history of science they might see what a bunch of fools they look like by trying this. I presume they accept the heliocentric theory, why can't they accept evolution which has much more evidence for it than Copernicus' theory did in its day?

So there is my warning. Be sure of your facts before distributing your opinion widely, or you might lose a certain amount of credibility; either in a small way such as happened to me, or totally as happened with the ID supporters!

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