I predict that when I flip this coin, it will land on heads. Or tails. I also predict that it will get temporarily dark tonight, but the light will return by morning.
If I want predictions on these days – I refer to Revelations and other prophetic predictions sprinkled throughout the “Good Book”. I also depend on my own discernment, knowledge of history repeating itself. At 84, it’s getting easier. Perhaps I should get a column and run my thoughts – since people fall for anyone/anything.
For current events and expert analysis, I recommend checking reputable news sources.
What is it called when you believe in God but not religion? A belief in God but not religion falls under the category of agnostic theism. The belief in God exists, but there may be a rejection of the institutional orthodoxy and orthopraxy of the religion.
According to the most recent surveys of religion in America, somewhere between a fourth and a third of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”
Many of my friends identify this way. Their beliefs fall on a wide spectrum from “I believe in a higher power with whom I communicate and pray to,” to “I think I believe in God but why would I bother going to church?” Some even admire and follow many of Jesus’ teachings specifically but don’t claim membership in any particular faith community or tradition.
When we’ve talked about their skepticism regarding organized religion, they often express sentiments along the lines of:
“Religion just seems like a lot of rules;”
“The people are self-righteous and hypocritical;”
“I don’t like what the Church teaches regarding politics, money, or moral issues;”
“How do I pick just one religion? There’s so many, which is the right one? And if I pick one, am I then saying that I think all the other religions are wrong or going to hell?”
Yet despite all these reservations, my friends tell me they sense within their heart they belong to something bigger than themselves. As a high school teacher of theology and religious studies, I’ve walked with many teens and young adults as they’ve struggled to reconcile their desire for God with the shortcomings of religion and the humans who comprise them. Here are some lessons I’ve learned from those conversations.
While working on the 1985 book “Habits of the Heart,” the late sociologist Robert N. Bellah met “Sheila,” who described her faith in words that researchers have quoted ever since.
“I can’t remember the last time I went to church,” she said. “My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” The goal was to “love yourself and be gentle with yourself. … I think God would want us to take care of each other.”
A decade later, during the so-called “New Age” era, researchers described a similar faith approach with this mantra – “spiritual but not religious.”
Then in the 21st Century’s first decade, the Pew Research Center began charting a surge of religiously unaffiliated Americans, describing this cohort in a 2012 report with this newsy label – “nones.”
Scientists have discovered a mysterious object at the center of our Milky Way that does not fit the criteria of anything else in the galaxy.
The team found the object emits microwaves, which suggests it contains dust and fast-moving gas that is traveling nearly 112,000 miles per hour from a very small area in the heart of our galaxy.
Astronomers have considered a range of options for what the object could be, from a black hole to a collapsing cloud and evolved star, but found ‘its features do not match well with those of any known type of astronomical body.’
‘The center of our Galaxy contains billions of stars, tens of millions of solar masses of gas, a supermassive black hole, a tenth of our Galaxy’s ongoing star formation, and an extensive graveyard of stellar remnants,’ researchers shared in the study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
‘It is therefore the likeliest place to find new classes of objects. We present one such object in this work.
f looking at this Mars vista conjures up childhood memories of the song, “One of these things is not like the others,” NASA scientists are right there with you.
Perseverance, a car-size lab on six wheels, traveled into the Red Planet’s Neretva Vallis last week. Though this region may look like a barren desert, it was once an ancient river channel that fed into the Jezero crater billions of years ago.
As Perseverance traversed the inlet, the rover came upon a hill covered in boulders, with one in particular attracting the science team’s attention: a light speckled rock amid a sea of dark lumps.
“Every once in a while, you’ll just see some strange thing in the Martian landscape, and the team is like, ‘Oh, let’s go over there,'” Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, told Mashable. “This was like the textbook definition of (chasing) the bright, shiny thing because it was so bright and white.”
The boulder is so exceptional, scientists have said it’s in a league of its own. Closer analysis with the rover’s instruments shows it is likely an anorthosite, a rock type never seen before while exploring Mars, Stack Morgan said, though there have been signs such rocks should exist. Not even the Curiosity rover, which has observed more variety in Gale Crater, has seen one quite like this.
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Humans have long imagined life on Mars, though our understanding of the planet has changed a lot.
Some of the US’s earliest plans assumed humans could reach the Red Planet by the 1980s.
Over the decades, technology and funding challenges have hampered the nation’s hopes of crewed flights.
Earlier this month, NASA announced it was funding a revolutionary high-thrust rocket — called a Pulsed Plasma Rocket — that could make crewed missions to Mars in just two months.
That’s seven months faster than it’d take with current technology, and it would drastically reduce the risk and cost of a crewed Mars mission, according to Howe Industries, which is developing the concept. It “holds the potential to revolutionize space exploration,” NASA said in a statement.
The PPR is just one of the latest developments in the US’s decadeslong discussion to send humans to Mars. In the early ’60s, for example, nuclear-bomb-powered spaceships were proposed for the trip.
Since well before NASA landed the first humans on the moon, the US has poured money and time into proposals for a crewed Mars mission, only to see its attempts never leave the ground. But technology isn’t the only thing standing in the way. Politics also plays a big role.
“That’s kind of like a joke within the space community or the Mars community,” Matthew Shindell, a curator with the National Air and Space Museum, told Business Insider. “Putting humans on Mars is always 20 years away.”
He said it was short enough to seem tangible but long enough that the political situation would change before it could be realized.
To fully understand why the US hasn’t sent humans to Mars despite sending more robots there than any other country, it just takes a trip down memory lane. Here’s a history of the US’s most promising crewed Martian missions that never were.
Donald Trump’s legal team have selected classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago estate that they want to use at trial.
On Monday, June 18, they notified Judge Aileen Cannon that they have made their first selection and notified a government classified information officer in Fort Pierce, Florida.
There are several definitions for data mining with respect to business as well as for academics. Data mining is a practice that will automatically search a large volume of data to discover behaviors, patterns, and trends that are not possible with the simple analysis. Data Mining should allow businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions that will make the place better ahead of their competitors.
Data warehouse, from its mandate to store a large volume of data including the last years of data. The data warehouse is used for descriptive analysis (What happened) and diagnostic analysis (Why it happened). However, business needs to do analysis beyond that. Data mining can be utilized for Predictive Analysis (What will happen) and Prescriptive Analysis (How can we make it happen).
There are a few tasks used to solve business problems. Those tasks are Classify, Estimate, Cluster, forecast, Sequence, and Associate. SQL Server Data Mining has nine data mining algorithms that can be used to solve the aforementioned business problems. The following are the list of algorithms that are categorized into different problems.
Classify: Categorized depending on the various attributes. For example, whether a customer is a prospect customer depending on other data such as Age, Gender, Marital Status, Occupation, Education Qualification, etc.
Estimate: Estimation will be done using the parameters. For example, house prices will be predicted depending on the house location, house size, etc.
Cluster: also named as segmentation. Depending on the various attribute natural grouping is done. Customer Segmentation is the classical business example for the clustering.
Forecast: Predict continuous variable for with the time. Predicting sales volume for the next couple of years is a very common scenario in the industry.
Associate: Finding common items or groups in one transaction. The transaction can be a supermarket sales, or medicine or online sales.
Sequence: Predicting the Sequence of events. Decision Trees, Naive Bayes, Neural Network, Logistics Regression
