@alan fraser said:

You misunderstand me, Rick, regarding personal faith driving scientists and artist alike. I have no problem with that. Michelangelo produced all his works quite literally "For the greater glory of God." and we might never have had them if not for that imperative. But that is personal faith driving personal achievement.

Okay, thanks for the clarification.

@alan fraser said:

What I object to...very strongly...is someone else's PERSONAL faith being delivered in schools as PUBLIC science.

And yet, evolution is some people's personal faith. I, for one, find the lack of evidence for macroevolution to be extremely serious (and yes, I've researched a lot of the arguments on both sides, including endogenous retroviruses, etc., so no need for anyone to start that argument either, since neither of us will convince the other). The available evidence fits a "God created basic types with the ability to adapt and change within set parameters" theory as well as it fits a macroevolution theory.

So, to me, macroevolution is as much person's personal faith as Creationism is to you. Thus, in a strange, rather backwards sort of way, we agree on disliking personal faith presented as public science.

With that said, I'm content to acknowledge we have differing beliefs. I'm all for letting people examine the evidence for both arguments and decide for themselves. That is why I would support ID alongside evolution in the classroom - provided each is presented honestly (and yes, I'm sure someone will want to say ID can't be presented honestly, but it can - just as much as evolution can be presented dishonestly: Piltdown Man, anyone?).

A toast to differences...

Kind regards,

A sloped roof doesn't lie in any of the 3 standard planes, so there's a quick exception, and was the kind of thing I was talking about. It is planar, but not orthogonal to the coordinate system. And a sloped roof on a wall at a 30 degree angle to the x axis compounds the issue...

@tomot said:

those that wrote the API didn't think a polar method was necessary.

True, because they provided vectors and transformations. Polar is simply a kind of transformation.

I could have had different versions, but I figured people who had used it in v5 would want to be able to import into v6 any scenes exported while using v5. That meant being able to read both versions of the data, so it was better to have just one .rb file.

I'm considering a revision that would simplify things for me in the long term, but would complicate things in the short term. No decision yet (plus I'm busy with Windowizer4)

Sorry, I forgot to say I already have volunteers for French, German, and Spanish, so I didn't include those on the list.

@tomsdesk said:

Rick, I believe you are reaching over all these recent morgage backed security shemes and scams that allowed outside individuals to skim off the capital that is needed now. I think you are ignoring the accompanying rut of fraudulant morgage qualifications, given to people who couldn't/shouldn't legally have been accepted into the programs you mentioned, in order to create more monopoly-money to play with.

I repeat: creed, fraud, and conspiracy! If you want to call the politicians stupid for not anticipating corruption...no argument from me. But this problem was caused by crooks!

Considering quite a bit of the fraud was occurring within Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (government entities), who were paying of dems like Frank to block oversight that would avert future fraud, then there's still political causes.

I agree with you that greed played a huge part. I'm not trying to sound like I disagree. But the origins of the problem are political. The crooks just took the situation to its inevitable conclusion.

@unknownuser said:

Gee ..that's pretty smart Rick. You got us on the spellin there. You might wanna review the grammer. I don't seem to need it to communicate either. Keep me posted will ya.

Easy there, friend. I wasn't trying to attack anyone's spelling, I was just having fun with our crazy language (I enjoy puns, what can I say?). As I said before, just trying to inject some humor amidst the seriousness.

@paris said:

The greatest artists of the time were the one's who rebelled against the church, so in that regard I suppose you are right.

Not necessarily, if you count musicians as artists - Bach didn't rebel, nor did Handel, and they are two of the greatest composers. Nor did Haydn. Others were unconventional, true, and may have bucked tradition, but were deeply spiritual and devout in their faith.

@alan fraser said:

The separation of faith and science is equally essential.

I must disagree, at least in part. As mentioned earlier, it was faith that informed men of science and spurred them to explore creation. They had no problems with their faith driving their science - and it is their science that we build on today. Similarly, about 10-15 years ago, atheistic scientists were hyping "junk DNA" as evidence of evolution - leftover stuff from a previous form. Theistic scientists didn't buy it (obviously), and researched the "junk" strands. Their research, spurred by their faith, led to a greater scientific understanding of DNA and how some chains previously considered "junk" actually do have a purpose.

I also disagree with the separation of faith and politics, but it's too late tonight (this morning?) to go there... [please note I did NOT say I disagreed with the separation of church and state, so no comments about that]

@kwistenbiebel said:

You're right.
But you got 2 things mixed up.
Being without a God doesn't necesarily means hating the ones with a God. That is the point.

I never claimed it did. I said I have personally witnessed some atheists who were extremely hateful. I did not claim that all were hateful.

What was the second thing?

@kwistenbiebel said:

@rickw said:

I'd have to say that, given the evidence, Christianity is less evil/dangerous than atheism.

Why do a lot of religious people categorise those who don't believe as 'atheists'?
As if you get an automatic subscription to the atheist club when you don't recognise a god.

In history, a war never was started by a group called 'the atheists'.

You're joking, right? "a-" = no, none, without; "theos" = god; "-ist" = person professing a belief system. So, yes, by the definition of the word, one who believes there is no god is an atheist. The membership cards are in the mail.

And has already been mentioned, the Communists in Russia, who were staunchly atheistic, killed over 20 million people in the past century. In the US, they were frequently referred to as "the godless Communists", which is the same as using the word "atheistic". In history, wars have been started by groups consisting of atheists. The word "atheist" in the group's name is unnecessary. Their ideology included atheism, and that is what they killed to spread - similar to how Islam was originally spread (and still is, in some places). In contrast, Christianity was not originally spread by violence (nor was it intended to be), but in the face of it.

@unknownuser said:

...it still takes a brave man to look past the ancient hyperbolas and stand on the side of reality.

I guess I'm not there yet. I can't even get past the ancient parabolas...

@alan fraser said:

With respect, Rick. Much of that argument is specious.

Really? I don't remember mentioning species in my post... (read on)

@remus said:

Talk about dodgy numbers! Your assuming that their was a constant change in the age of the earth (the theorised ages, that is) which is wrong.

Apparently my LOL smiley & channel-surfer joke didn't do their job of injecting the intended humorous tone into my post. The point was that science can only offer its best guess. In 10 years, that best guess may be different still. In which case, we still won't know for sure, so why be dogmatic about 4.6 billion years now?

@daniel said:

@rickw said:

Personally, I think there are plenty of good reasons for why the Founding Fathers shunned direct democracy in the US - and why we should continue to shun it: hysteria voting, ill-informed voting, directed/coerced voting, and more...

That's not entirely true. Although some favored limiting the vote to "gentlemen of means," there were others who saw this as forming an oligarchy and favored franchising all free men - the later won out.

There's a difference between direct democracy and universal suffrage, and I think some people confuse (or equate) the two.

We have universal suffrage: any legal citizen of age can vote, with the obvious exception of criminals, of course. You don't even have to be alive in Chicago to be able to vote.

We do NOT have a direct democracy: we do not directly vote on every issue under the sun. Instead, we elect representatives [council members, aldermen, commissioners, representatives, senators, mayors, and governors] who decide on most issues on our behalf. There are special occasions where a local issue is decided by referendum (direct vote), but that is out of the norm. I hear some folks complain about their elected leader not voting "the will of the people", but that's not necessarily what they should be doing. There are times when the "will of the people" is derived from misleading or incomplete information (sometimes thanks to the media and their agenda), and leaders must go against that collective will to make a more informed decision. It may not be popular, and it may not be understood, but if we have selected for ourselves leaders of strong moral character, we should be able to trust their decisions, even if we don't understand them.

The problem is finding people we can trust like that. Most people with such qualifications usually don't go into politics, leaving us with Barney "There's No Crisis" Frank, et al. (Yes, I picked on Frank, but there are those of his ilk on both sides of the aisle - men and women who have violated the public trust and are unfit to lead).

Personally, I think any bailout (which I generally oppose) should have as a requirement that any congressional member who supported expanding the subprime lending program resign from office immediately upon passage of the bailout bill.

One primary difference is that the polar method in AutoLISP assumes everything happens in the XY plane. That same assumption cannot be safely made in SketchUp. For example, given a point and an angle, in which plane should the angle be measured? And against what zero angle? The 3D nature of SketchUp increases the complexity of the situation a bit, but a coded solution is possible:

1. Create a vector of the desired length and orientation
2. Transform your points using the vector as the transformation

Through version 6, all scripts were generally forwards-compatible (meaning that scripts written for v4 would work in v5-6). There were a very few exceptions as options increased (ShadowInfo is one that I remember, as I had to rework PageExIm for the new options and still handle the old ones), but generally speaking, I would expect that scripts that worked in v6 will work in v7 (but we'll have to wait and see).

That's caused from "sketchup.rb" not being loaded. Didier should be able to fix that in no time.

@alan fraser said:

Cornel, the age of the earth has been verified in just about EVERY laboratory on earth. Maintaining that it is still a matter of debate is just ridiculous, You might as well try to argue that the earth is flat or there are fairies at the bottom of your garden.

A quick look at some historic science will show that the age of the earth has been changing faster than a TV at a channel-surfer's convention.

According to science:
In 1899, the earth was 100 million years old.
In 1905, the earth was 500 million years old.
Today, the earth is 4.6 billion years old.

At that rate, the earth will age 109,057 years in the next 24 hours; one year from now, the earth will be 39.8 million years older than it is today.

Sure glad science could confirm that for us

@sepo said:

Yeah right but also large number of scientest were killed by the Church in the name of God. I wonder how many of the ones survived were really Christians or where they just putting the act so that they could be left alone. I am afraid Religion ( I mean organized form ) was certainly beeing used to do pilage ,rape and murder.....and that is the case still today... Organised religion is just another mechanism to control humanity... Thank you very much ...not good for me....

Scientists killed? Really? Which ones? Actually, atheists killed more people in the last century than religious people killed in the previous 20 centuries. I've looked at atheistic blogs and forums, and the pure hatred and vitriol I've seen spewed there against Christians in general stands in stark contrast to the care and concern I've seen expressed for atheists on Christian sites. Even in this thread, how many times has Cornel been attacked and ridiculed? How many times has he attacked or retaliated? I'd have to say that, given the evidence, Christianity is less evil/dangerous than atheism.

@andyc said:

@chango70 said:

The man that more than any other credited with kick starting the scientific revolution was 15th Century theologeon Thomas Aquinas. He posited a thesis in which God as a creator set in motion the laws of nature and do not interfere (no freakin' miracles). Sounds familier? Because it is a scientic view of nature.

Sorry chango, we'll have to agree to disagree on this. Any thesis which begins with God as creator cannot be described as scientific.

A.

I can certainly agree to disagree. Just thought you might be interested to know you're also disagreeing with Bacon, Boyle, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Huygens, Faraday, Newton, Mendel, Descartes, Pascal, Joule, Kelvin, Huggins, and others.

These scientists believed that God created the universe with an underlying order, that He created humans with the ability to discover that order, and that by discovering that order, we could be better stewards of the earth. That belief led them to discover and/or develop ideas on the scientific method, gas laws, acids/bases and the litmus test, heliocentric solar system, planetary motion, pendulum motion, electricity, gravity, motion, calculus, genetics, developments in chemistry, differential mathematics, astrophysics, and more.

Surely their discoveries were not implausible because the discoverers were religious, and their faith informed their science. Surely these scientists were not irrational because of their belief in a rational creation. On the contrary, their belief caused them to explore, test, observe, research, and discover what they considered to be rational.

Anyway, as was said earlier - this has been hashed to death many times before, and will be many times in the future. Let's just respect each other's different opinion and get on to other things.

I'll have to do some digging on this.

Banks aren't stupid (generally). There were reasons why they had to be coerced by the government into lending to high-risk borrowers, and that is they didn't want to lose money. Surely you've heard the old adage, "the bank won't lend you money unless you don't need it."

But having been coerced into making more high-risk loans, their only recourse was to do the best business they could to cover their potential losses. The problem is that their best wasn't good enough - especially for those who decided to specialize in those high-risk instruments/borrowers, and didn't have enough legitimate investments to cover their risk.

I will say this, though, that in Carter's case, I have no doubt that he had nothing but good intentions when he signed the "Community Reinvestment Act", even though the banking community vehemently opposed it (so much for the corporate greed theory). And even then, there wasn't the level of potential disaster there was in the '90s when it was expanded by Clinton.

The irony is that the libs who opposed (and defeated) the 2003 proposal for stricter oversight over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac claimed they were protecting the ability of people to get "affordable housing" - while their policies were forcing housing prices up and out of reach, causing more people to be high-risk borrowers.

All in all, considering a government program opposed by the banking sector started this process of failure, I'd say political responsibility is valid. No stretching necessary, and it certainly lacks lameness - it has the weight of history behind it.

@unknownuser said:

"These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis," said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

"I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing," Mr. Watt said.

• from the New York Times, 11 Sept 2003

Personally, I think there are plenty of good reasons for why the Founding Fathers shunned direct democracy in the US - and why we should continue to shun it: hysteria voting, ill-informed voting, directed/coerced voting, and more...

With one or more faces selected, try this in the ruby console:

Sketchup.active_model.selection.each{|e| e.back_material=e.material if e.typename=="Face"}

I suggest you start with 1 or 2 faces to see if it works as expected, since I don't have one of your models to test. If that works for you, let me know and I'll "put some skin on the bones".

@chango70 said:

Come on Pete, give religion a break eh? I mean all these stupid people out there who don't understand science need something to make them feel good about themselves.

Wow, I didn't realize I was stupid, didn't understand science, and needed something to make me feel good about myself. Thanks for enlightening me.

@solo said:

If that were imposed we would never have a conservative government

I was under the opposite impression, considering that - according to Pew - university attendees/graduates are more likely to be conservatives, while those with a high school education (or less) are considerably more likely to be liberals (and while I acknowledge that education does not necessarily equate to IQ, I don't think the bottom 30% of IQ scorers typically attend university).

@solo said:

However that would also mean we would no longer be a democracy, mind you we don't actually have one today as the 'electoral college' vote diminishes the equal vote anyway.... hmmm.

That is as it should be. The Founding Fathers did not intend for the US to be a democracy, but a representative republic. Democracy (as understood by the Founders) is basically mob rule, and the mob is swayed by emotion (just look at the latest "crisis du jour", whatever it may be, and observe the public's at-large reaction to it). A representative republic (generally) adds a necessary layer of insulation between the emotion and the policymaking.

The electoral college is a paramount example of balancing the interests of large and small (population) states, being the commingling of the proportional representation of the House of Representatives and the equal representation of the Senate. In this way, the regional differences in opinion and self-interest inherent in such a large nation are somewhat equalized - a candidate can't simply appeal to the voters of just a few very populous states and win election.