Febble

Yeah, well I can't really talk. My first degree was in music, then I did an architecture degree, now I'm trying to finish a PhD in cognitive psychology (defence 3 weeks today!) so I consider myself a professional BSer on any topic. That's why I write theology for kids, and pontificate on the meaning of the 2004 US exit polls.

But that paper is interesting. You occasionally come across bad musicians who can't understand why they don't pass auditions, and you realise it's because they are not good enough musicians to hear that they are bad musicians I suppose Florence Foster Jenkins was the most famous example.

One of the things I'm working with now is error monitoring in pathological groups, and whether some attentional deficits may arise from deficits in online error monitoring. Being an ex-musician is proving relevant!

Sven

Interesting parallel!

I have no idea what you are talking about. :huh:
What is "error monitoring in pathological groups"?

Febble

Well, the groups are people with schizophrenia and ADHD, and other conditions. We give them a task called a "Go-No Go" task, in which they have to respond to a frequent stimulus (say an X) but withhold response to an infrequent stimulus. Or you could use another task. And we measure EEG. Then we look at the EEG wave that is associated with the response (response-locked Event Related Potential - ERP). There is a classic negative wave associated with a response that has a greater amplitude if the response is an error (Error Related Negativity - ERN). The interesting thing is that the increased amplitude is detectable in advance of the actual error - so it appears that you know, at some level, you are going to make an error before you actually made it. There is also an error-related positive wave after the response.

So the hypothesis is that the error -detecting networks may be disrupted in some conditions, leading to poor error-monitoring. In which case you might see late, or attenuated ERN those groups as compared with control participants. Hence the experiment.

Julian

That's an interesting point. I find that the more knowledge I acquire, the less certain I become about a great many things.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
Bertrand Russell

Patronus Potter

The word "haytah" is based on the root for the verb "to be". It is the third person female, singular, past tense of the verb. There is really no reason to translate it as anything other than "was".

In Biblical Hebrew, the letter Vav - referred to as Waw in the debate, but it has a V sound - can switch the tense of a verb between past and future. One phrase that occurs many times in the OT is

"Va-yomer YHWH El Moshe"
(And God said to Moses...)

The word "yomer" is the future tense of the verb "to speak", but in this case the attached Vav flips the tense.

But in Genesis 1:2 the hebrew reads "Ve-ha-aretz haytah ..." and as the Vav is not attached to the verb, it remains in the past tense.

CJD

I think the debate topic is silly. A literal, six day creation theory, a gap theory, a framework theory, a whatever-the-hell-you-want creation theory are all compatible with an "inerrantist" reading of the Scriptures.

One just needs to show that the "literal" reading of the text is whatever the theory proposes. And even just a cursory glance at the major theories and commentaries on the pericope show that a plausible case can be made for each from the text.

That said, I don't think the gap theory does the best job with what we have. Yet it is no way incompatibe with an "inerrantist" view of Scripture. The gap theorist, as well as the YEC, put undue constraints upon the ancient text by making it a virtual scientific textbook. But the text cannot hold this weight, nor was it intended to.

Best,

CJD

Tholzel

"Peanut Gallery"? You betray your age. (Howdy Doody?)

anthrosciguy

I had always thought that "peanut gallery" started with The Howdy Doody Show, but actually it's far older than that. Here's a source:

[Q] From Steve Klimback: “May I please ask what is the origin of the phrase peanut gallery in the context: ‘That is enough from the peanut gallery’. The only mildly plausible origin I could guess was in relation to a section of seats sold at plays.”
[A] It does have a theatrical origin, and goes back to America at the end of last century. The peanut gallery was the topmost tier of seats, the cheapest in the house, a long way from the stage. The same seats in British theatres were (and still are) often called “the gods” because you were so high you seemed to be halfway to heaven, up there with the allegorical figures that were often painted on the ceiling. On both sides of the Atlantic, these seats attracted an impecunious class of patron, with a strong sense of community, often highly irreverent and with a well-developed ability to heckle, hence the modern figurative meaning. A significant difference between the American and British theatres is that American patrons ate peanuts; these made wonderful missiles for showing their opinion of artistes they didn’t like.
Most Americans of a certain age will know the phrase because it was used in a slightly different sense in the fifties children’s television programme, the Howdy Doody Show. There it was the name for the ground-level seating for the kids, the “peanuts”, though the phrase was almost certainly derived from the older sense. They were just as noisy and irreverent as their theatrical forebears, or indeed the groundlings of Shakespeare’s time, with a liking for low humour and a total lack of sense or discrimination.

Dlx2

It should probably be pointed out that the Hebrew DfT posted in the text of his second response does not correlate at all with the transliteration he attributes to it. If he doesn't even know the alphabet, why should we trust him to know the intricacies of the language?

tdcanam

Are we talking about Dan. 9:27?

If so, it is compleatly obviouse to any unbias reader that there is no gap between the 69th and 70th week. I have more than a bit of knowledge on this topic.