What do you believe is true?

The World Question Center has asked scientists and science minded people What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it. As Alan Kay writes in his answer, "Guessing in science is done all the time, and the difference between what is real and what is true is not a big factor in the guessing stage, but makes all the difference epistemologically later in the process."

Kay's answer talks about the guess he "made in 1966 about objects not that one could build everything from objects that could be proved mathematically but that using objects would be a much better way to represent most things. This is not very provable, but like the Internet, now has quite a body of evidence that suggests this was a good guess. Another guess [..] is that what is special about the computer is analogous to and an advance on what was special about writing and then printing. It's not about automating past forms that has the big impact, but as McLuhan pointed out, when you are able to change the nature of representation and argumentation, those who learn these new ways will wind up to be qualtitatively different and better thinkers, and this will (usually) help advance our limited conceptions of civilization."

Check out the answers from the 120 people surveyed. Esther Dyson answers " I think modern life has fundamentally and paradoxically changed our sense of time. Even as we live longer, we seem to think shorter. Is it because we cram more into each hour? Or because the next person over seems to cram more into each hour?"

Mathematician Keith Devlin answered "following Descartes, I can prove to myself that I exist, but I can't prove it to anyone else. Even to those who know me well there is always the possibility, however remote, that I am merely a figment of their imagination." As a recovering Mathematician, I think that Devlin has demonstrated something I know but can not prove: when you pose a perfectly reasonable question to a Mathematician they will tend to frame a response that is correct but responds to a question that interests them more than the one they were posed. After arguing "that proof is, in practical terms, an unachievable ideal," he concludes "you have to take a common sense approach to proof—in this case proof being, I suppose, an argument that would convince the intelligent, professionally skeptical, trained expert in the appropriate field."

Add your thoughts about what you believe is true in the talkback below.

Also featured in Also in Java Today , Tim O'Brien says "If you are not familiar with the Jakarta Commons you have likely reinvented a few wheels. Before you write any more generic frameworks or utilities, grok the Commons. It will save you serious time." In his article The Hidden Gems of Jakarta Commons, Part 1, he exposes some interesting and little noticed helpers in the commons, including more efficient means of parsing XML files with Digester, functors (like predicates, closures, and transformers) in the commons collections, and using XPath to query objects and collections.

Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart writes about The FI Project - An Open Source Implementation of a Binary XML Standard in today's Weblogs. He reports " Sun has released under Open Source its implementation of Fast Infoset, an in-progress standard for Binary XML. Fast Infoset is simple to use and to integrate; you can think of it as GZIP for XML. This implementation is intended to be a high quality implementation to be used in production artifacts and we hope it will encourage wide adoption of the standard."

Ken Ramirez blogs about his new Portlet tip. In This month's tip Ken points out that "Although this month's tip is entitled, 'Internalizing Your Portlets', you can use resource bundles for non-internalized portlets."

Jonathan Simon shares an adventure with how easily word meanings can get hijacked in Refactoring can be a dangerous word. His tale shows how refactoring came to mean rewriting.

In today's Forums, Eduardo launches the new Binary Web Services and XML forum saying "The Forum is intended to cover any and all topics regarding binary XML and binary WS, regardless of the implementation language (Java or not), and of whether the implementation project is at Java.Net or not."

In Projects and Communities, Ken Ramirez has published the tip Portlet Resource Bundles on Internationalizing your portlets in the java.net Portlet community.

The Java Web Services and XML community has launched a new forum for discussing Binary Web Services and XML.

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Apache DB/JDO Sub-Project Moving Forward
• RIFE 0.8.2 - Web App Dev. Framework
• delicious-java API 1.4
• Montag 0.7
• Initial Release AppserverUnit - Server-side JUnit-style Tests
• Visual Paradigm for UML 4.0

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