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If you're really worried about this, never eat bananas per your #1 or sleep with more than one person, based on the doses you'll get from the radioactive potassium found in both.

That's amusing, but debunked. Bananas do contain potassium, some of which is 40, but the body maintains homeostatic levels of potassium: you don't incorporate more potassium in your body if you eat bananas. Even the Wikipedia article points that out.

Why didn't you quote my preceding sentence:

Which in the eyes of the Greens is "deadly", since they take the fraudulent linear dose hypothesis as gospel, in contravention with real toxicology where "the dose makes the poison".

To those for whom the, per Wikipedia current Official Name of linear no-threshold model (LNT) is gospel, not debunked at all. It's all poison, and you should be flushing the radioactive potassium out of your body.

Current thinking is that diverting thorium-cycle production to bomb use is not practical.

Which is utter bullshit, since you can't fission thorium, you have to breed U-233 from it, and start up a plant with something that'll fission as well to get it going. And as you note, they're "are more theoretical than actual" because (from memory) there's a required "And then a miracle occurs" step where you in a constant process chemically muck with the contents to concentrate the U-233 and remove neutron poisons. Messy, messy, utterly messy, unless you can find a way to omit this step they'll never be practical, and through that process, through the simple fact that you've got useful and chemically isolateble U-233 will always be a proliferation hazard (as I recall, it's said India's first nuclear device was U-233 powered).

Just how unlikely are the myriad of teensy-tiny genetic mutations that must all occur and all line-up to get a particular change so macro that it's obvious to the naked eye? ...... and then just how insanely unlikely is it that, by pure random mutation, the right mutations would all occur to back-out the initial evolutionary step? Remember: Darwinian evolution is completely un-guided and goal-less (the genetic changes are purely random mutations, which are then re-enforced, or eliminated, by survival and reproduction - the mutations MUST be encountered by random mutation BEFORE survival and reproduction play any role in the game)

The answer always given: "yeah, but it's millions of tiny mutations accumulating over time" is exactly equivalent to the famous old cartoon with the guy in front of an black board with equations, and "then a miracle occurs" in the middle. If you have not observed or documented proof of those intermediate steps, you might as well simply say the flying spaghetti monster intervened with his noodley appendage. I'm sorry but "Lots of stuff had to happen just right over hundreds of thousands of years, and since we are all here, that's proof it happened" is absolutely as unsupportable as "invisible guy in the sky waved a wand, and since we are all here that's clearly what happened!"

Well it doesn't take shilling to know that it is better than java under most circumstances.

A little bit more quantification and qualification of these would be in order, not unless you have a tendency to pull one of these (courtesy of S. Harris) when building up arguments:

http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/gallery/math/math07.gif

Yeah, it's called the "scientific method" and it's what sets scientific "belief" apart from it's faith-based counterpart.

I may not have mastered all the necessary disciplines to *really* know that e=mc^2, but I know enough to follow along as a real expert explains it. Whereas with religion, you very quickly get to the "and then a miracle occurs" stage of discourse.

In a way, it's sorta like using Linux vs. MSWin, etc... I may not be a kernel guru, but if I have a problem that requires a bit of hacking, I know (from long experience) that I can usually find the answer to my problem if I put in the time to study it.

I guess you could say this is a "meta" version of the scientific method... meaning that my personal experimentation always tends to affirm the claims of science (or Linux) when I bother to test them. This in turn strengthens my trust in the scientific method. Whenever I bother to "test" science, science always proves itself. Whenever I "test" religious ideas, I rapidly bump into the wall of "miraculous" assertions.

It's one of these: http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/images/miracle3.gif

Sure we've seen "before" and "after" bugs that evolved new traits, but this guy mapped out 40000 generations of "during". No more worries about "Then a miracle occurs", now it's all on film.

Documentation of the random mutations piling up over time until a beneficial combination hits. This fills in the question mark from Step 2.

Absolut Vodka (or any other ) may be the answer!

As proposed here:

Ultimate HOT + COLD Answer!

Here you go.
And then a miracle occurs.

> Do you have that cartoon?

Well, not personally, until now, but a quick search finds:

http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/images/miracle3 .gif

Brilliant guy. I have loved his cartoons since I was a kid. Have most of his collections. If you want a true belly laugh, get a copy.

ID arguments are like disk heads and helicopter blades. They don't work so well if you spin anything up backwards.

This is why so many baptised and confirmed Atheists like the original author keep thinking that they've beaten ID, then get all shocked and surprised, again and again, when ID continues right along. They've beaten nothing but a straw man. They've destroyed the foundations of the wrong building.

ID's premise is not that there're things science can't explain, but that there're specific things which science has explained... are impossible. Nevertheless, they exist.

My own take is that both ID and popular Evolutionism fail miserably through not going far enough. If ID can tell that intervention happened, then surely they can tell us something about how? Or why? It's all a bit too ineffable for me. Likewise, popular Evolution is just laced with references to insensate bacteria "striving" toward this or that goal, or "developing" some feature or other -- that is, the bits of PE which aren't simply unadulterated fairy stories. There's no workable driving mechanism, either, random mutations just aren't cutting the mustard.

If not dogs, how about something more feline? http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/galnathi2.htm (flip through a few, you'll find the security guard).

Oh, wait... Do you mean "Makes a good toy for children," or "Makes a good toy OF children?"

It might have been S. Harris...

...what kind of emergence explains the transition from water and bare rock to self-contained, self-replicating organic assemblies?

Miller added a generous helping of structure and presumed initial conditions which geology says never happened, and still didn't get anything better than some of the amino acids - and those swimming in poisons. It turns out that you will never get beyond these acids randomly, since the chemistry of more complex molecules pushes everything the other way. How can emergence counter this?

It sounds far too much like "...then a miracle occurs..." to me.

Anyway: hogwash. If I have the copyright, I can distribute.

Unless you've entered into a contract and committed not to distribute it, which is what SCO is claiming IBM did. Of course, SCO's legal theory reminds me a lot of this cartoon.

"then a miracle occurs" was a refference to a rather famous science cartoon.

When reffering to someone else's work the phrase carries a specific implication that the final result is possibly correct or even probably correct. It just indicates there's an important gap in the middle. Even if the result happens to be correct, the calculation/logic is worthless until the gap is filled in.

When a teacher or expert uses the phrase themselves in an explanation to a student/non-expert the implication is that it really is correct. For example a math teacher might use the phrase to skip over an ugly calculus step when talking to pre-calculus students.

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Linky link.

You're thinking of the single most popular cartoon ever created by Sydney Harris. It's currently showcased on his gallery page. The line goes:

"I think you should be more explicit here in step two."

This isn't very deep, but when I first read the title of this story, what leapt to mind was a Sidney Harris cartoon from Einstein Simplified. Two scientists (you can tell they're scientists, they're wearing labcoats) are looking into a cage the size of a rabbit cage. One of them is saying, "Biggest damn virus I've ever seen!" Pity I can't find a copy of it at the moment.