Albany -

I'm taking the liberty of reposting something that Derby 1592 posted last September (9/2/04) and that seems relevant to your comments:

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This whole thread (and several recent related threads) is starting to sound a lot like a philosophical debate.

One camp echoes Peter Berstein's lament, "Our lives teem with numbers, but numbers are only tools; they have no soul... The result is a culture that threatens to become so complex and frequently so arcane as to constitute a new religion."

While the other camp resonates with Lord Kelvin who once stated, "When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it into numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: It may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science."

Unfortunately, as R. J. Heuer of the CIA astutely observed, "It is a common experience to discover that most available evidence really is not very helpful, as it can be reconciled with all the hypotheses" and as Bart Kosko depressingly summarized, "If you can prove a statement 100% true, it does not describe the world. If it describes the world, you cannot prove it."

So I think some of as are going to just have to "agree to disagree" on this topic and move on to more pragmatic tasks such as dodging yet another hurricane (hope Catalin and all the rest of you in Florida make it through the big storm with no major damage) or figuring out who will win tomorrow’s feature...

Chris

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick