I love Apple products. I am a Mac convert – first the Iphone, then a Macbook, and now a big beautiful Imac. I’m done with PCs for personal computering.
I also appreciate the engineering and design of the Ipad. What a lovely toy or gadget or whatever. I just don’t plan on having one right now.
If they sold them for $100 I might buy one. That will not happen any time soon.
There’s nothing I don’t like about it. My reason for not wanting one is I don’t need one. Apple has done a great job of making everything I do need.
I have a 13″ unibody Macbook. I take this thing everywhere – literally. I have a computer everywhere I go. And when even the Macbook is too big, I have my Iphone – web, email, programs, web apps, etc.
I watched the big speech. I see things opposite the way he does. Ipad takes the best things about Macbooks and Iphones and gets rid of it and leaves a gizmo with nothing but the limitations and a portion of the pros.
I need to be able to type easily on nearly all the pages I visit. If I need small and portable, I need small and portable. If I want to read books I want something designed for reading books. (That would be my Kindle.)
Dogma or Science?
Emmanuel Episcopal Church, La Grange, Illinois (Interior), originally uploaded by Cornell University Library.
I was discussing something with a friend yesterday – a friend who prides herself as sort of a “science first” type. Anything science has not proven – if it is not observable and reproducible under controlled conditions, etc, it is suspect as hogwash.
Some challenges with this kind of thinking:
Science is not a “source” of truth but there’s a danger in treating it this way, or as the title of this post says, as dogma. I’m no scientist myself, but I see science as more of a method – sort of a structure of a process. The goal is observing, discovering, and learning the truth that is already there, not to “lay down the incontrovertible truth.”
Careful scientists know their own limitations. Honest scientists say “I have no friggin’ clue” much more often than “this is how it likely is,” at least outside their given discipline, and even within their field of study “I don’t know” is much more “truthier” than offering an accepted theory. Productive scientists are curious – and I mean really curious, openly curious.
To observe something, you have to be in the right place to observe it and observing it in the appropriate context. When there isn’t enough care about knowing the limitations of the context of observation, the conditions, etc, scientists can establish the truth of all sorts of things – like spontaneous generation. I mean hey, you leave food out, you start seeing flies – obviously the flies are coming from the food right? Duh!
Like countless other times in the history of science, science itself admitted to its error. Methods of experimentation and observation evolved and more information became available and the truth of where those maggot came from was had.
“Yeah, but that was then, this is now….that was a couple hundred years ago.” A few hundred years is a speck on the timeline of human existence – especially if you listen to the scientists and not the religionists! There’s a real danger (in my mind anyway) in believing we’ve suddenly reached the pinnacle in our generation. I suggest there is an infinite amount more truth to uncover and if there isn’t we should be acting as if there is.
A little of this truth may lay in the bottom of the deepest oceans, a little more in the farther reaches of space, and much more as we explore the irreducible complexity of the stuff we’re made of and what makes everything tick and hum.