Well, I hope this doesn't surprise anyone. I'm running under the assumption that people who use Foursquare and other such geolocation services are fully aware that they can be used to find out where they've been. If that assumption is false, I think I'm going to become a hermit.
* Coordinates when tweet was posted from mobile device [side note: is this feature 'enabled' by default on some mobile clients?]
* Place (geographical name) derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface. Place gets translated into coordinates using geonames.com
* Bounding Box derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface. The less accurate source, a corner of the bounding box is selected randomly.
although I share your hope that people would think more about the implications of their online actions, I'm way more pessimistic even if this is covered in popular main stream media. the numer of people really thinking about such things out of the very few actually reading this in the media, I sadly suppose, is/would be insignificantly low.
It's basically a full stop. Saying 'this is inconsistent, but I trust that it's fine' is basically akin to saying 'I don't want to analyse this any further'. Which, to the non-Christian, is akin to saying 'I think it might fall to pieces if I try to critically analyse it'.
Let me offer an analogy that (perhaps) paints Christian belief in a more charitable light. Indeed, there are many places where I, as a Christian, say, "I don't want to analyze this further".
There are many places too, as a programmer, where I say the same thing. I do most of my work in the application stack, and have only the vaguest understanding of what goes on in the guts of the operating system and kernel. I trust, though, that someone has spent time and energy thinking about how the operating system and its API work. I also suspect that if a fey mood ever took me, I could work my way through the kernel code of linux and understand what's going on. The reason I haven't is that I spend most of my time at a different level of abstraction.
The system of beliefs that underly Christian faith are similar. Many people work at a level of abstraction, if you will, that doesn't involve the sort of careful analysis that is, nevertheless, possible. Other Christian thinkers have explored the interplay of reason and faith with extraordinary detail. When someone says, "I'm happy to stop my analysis here", it might not mean that what underlies their belief is irrational, it might mean that they haven't had the time or the inclination to examine the layers of abstraction beneath it.
But science and the acquisition of knowledge is all about pushing deeper into the implementation. We can't look at something like gravity and say, 'yep, that seems to work fine, adheres to its interface, we don't really need to know how it works, just that it passes its tests (apples fall, helium balloons float above oxygen, etc)'. We can't leave it there, because we have to know the implementation. We'll never improve if we don't. And we still haven't nailed it, but that's no excuse to stop.
It's like a beginning programmer looking at a hash table object and hitting 'view source'. What kind of programmer would he be if he didn't want to see behind the curtain at least once? How could he be expected to excel?
I'd disagree that science is about "pushing deeper into the implementation". It turns out that Newtonian gravity doesn't adhere to the interface that Newton proposed (and Newton knew that it didn't; Mercury!). As a result, Einstein developed a mew interface, which supplanted Newton's interface. Neither of them speaks to, or even claims to speak to[1], something like implementation. To be sure, we do refine out conceptions of that interface, and I'd agree with you that that's a very valuable project.
Your example about a programmer peeking into the hash table is germane, because the hash table's "implementation" is, itself, composed of interfaces. Following your argument, how could a programmer be expected to excel if he didn't understand those interfaces? And it's turtles all the way down until you hit Feynman diagrams.
That's doesn't seem to be how people actually work. At some point, a layer of abstraction is leak-proof enough to satisfy curiosity and allow meaningful work to be built upon it. Where that point is will vary from person to person. Much as some people are content to work with a vague notion of Newtonian gravity, some Christians are content to live with a fairly abstract and vague understanding of theology. There's nothing wrong with that. We call people who wrestle with abstractions surrounding the natural world scientists, and we call people who wrestle with abstractions surrounding God and faith theologians.
[1] Well, Newton explicitly disclaims this. I haven't read Einstein recently enough to remember whether he disclaims it explicitly, but I think he certainly is no Aristotelian.
