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Creation arguments are very well founded in evidence.

Only if you read creationist websites.

Let's look at one evolutionary assumption:
prediction: Language began as simple grunts

Biological evolution has nothing to do with language.

Using these mutation rates, all women on the earth have a common ancestor around 6000 years ago. Shocked?

Wrong. The mitochondrial "Eve" lived somewhere around 200,000 years ago, according to archaeology.org. Shocked?

Ooh, here's a good evolutionary assumption:
prediction: since the moon is millions of years old, there should be a thick layer of dust on it (after all, there is no wind or erosion for the dust to settle).

Biological evolution has nothing to do with the age of the moon. But anyway, the old chestnut about depth of moon dust has been debunked quite thoroughly.

Now (are you listening carefully? I'm about to destroy a common evolutionists misunderstanding of evolution in action) the one that had all white fur genes would have a much better chance of surviving in a snowy environment.

Wrong. Learn something about dominant and recessive traits. (Are you listening carefully?)

Just so you know, I've barely touched on the surface of overwhelming evidence for creation and overwhelming evidence for the complete irrational nature of evolution

However, you've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt one of two things: 1) that you get all your information from creationist tracts, and outdated ones at that or 2) you are a troll.

Here's proof that it does matter too.

A search for "Lorm Ipsum" returns 6 results, but suggests "Lorem Ipsum" instead. That brings up "about" 38,100 results.

As I curiously searched for the meaning on this phrase, I stumbled across this explanation here. Essentially, it's an adaptation of some classic quote, but, it seems, no longer really makes any sense at all.

some quotes:
...Gemini V astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad were able to spot, among other things, a special checkerboard pattern that had been laid out in Texas, a rocket-sled test in New Mexico, and the aircraft carrier that would later pick them up in the Atlantic, along with a destroyer trailing in its wake...

Admittedly, it's speculation, but as far as anyone knows, Newton never had any romantic relationships -- get the Straight Dope here.

Consider this cogent point as well:
"As things stand in most of the country, no atheist, agnostic or polytheist can openly and honestly pledge their allegiance to the republic. No matter how much they yearn to do so, there is no officially sanctioned pledge that they can take.
The only congressionally approved pledge is reserved solely for the nation's monotheistic citizens. This wouldn't matter much if the pledge were just something you mumble every sunday like the lords prayer. Properly spoken, the pledge is taken, not recited. Taking it can be a privilege, an honor, or sometimes even a duty.
When congress passed their law limiting the pledge to members of certain religious groups, they took away this privilege, honor, and duty from everyone else. That's not right.

If an atheist, agnostic, or polytheist takes the pledge without saying "under God", they have not taken the official pledge of allegiance. If they do say "under God", they are knowingly making a statement that they believe to be false. I don't see how the rights of the monotheists extend to the point of forcing everyone else into an ethical dilemma. Even christianity takes a dim view of swearing false oaths. Surely it's unethical of these religious folk to force everyone else to either swear falsely, or forgo pledging allegiance entirely?
The words "under God" are not essential to the pledge, except by law, but they do ensure that only christians and other monotheists can take the oath honestly. IMHO, that's a heck of a special privilege."
-Squink

It has been thought of here. I recall a year or so back a story on the BBC about an experiment done and the results registering at earthquake monitoring sites but I can't seem to find it right now...

I don't know if this is what you would call a trend. But it certainly seems like a great way to get people of common interests together. Make friends, and possibly network for professional reasons (I can't believe how hard this economy has hit what I previously thought was the "unsinkable" geek community).There is only one other site that I have heard of doing such a thing, The Straight Dope . A good friend of mine attends their regular pub-crawls through Greenwhich Village and says he has a blast every time. StraightDopers are apt to discuss everything from world events, to censorship to the the various methodologies of wiping your ass.

Ever wonder why Greenland is called Greenland? Hint: it used to be a greener when they named it a few centuries back.

Bzzzzzt! Try again. Erik the Red called it Greenland in an attempt to make it sound more attractive to the settlers he was trying to convince to migrate there.

I have a much better and cost effective solution!
MahaLev: Maharishi Levitation, teach everybody
Transcendental Meditation - get a yogi to act as a conductor,
and have everyone onboard chant "aaoouuumm" as the train raises itself from the tracks.

And as a bonus for /. readers: You get karma!

From Cecil Adams.

It's not about pissing on yourself, it's about not spreading coliform.

It's hear hear.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

(Perhaps given us this)

The same guy has been used as a source by Cecil, for whatever its worth. His conclusions in the article above are pretty simillar to what he has said before, namely that toilet seats are pretty clean and everything else not so much.

Straight Dope article

Umm, while you have some salient points, I think this one is, well, wrong. Care to substantiate it?

Useful link: Straight Dope.

I love to state the obvious: http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbated.html

Heck, I always wondered why the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles couldn't breathe through their butts.

Better that than the assassination attempt that President Carter fended off from a bunny rabbit swimming in a river. We all know about those KGB trained attack rabbits of the mid-seventies.

Also, at least President Bush can spell pretzel . Can't say that about his critics. Enough said.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but after I big of Googling, I've found that while identical twins do not have identical fingerprints, their finger prints are often very similar, according to this site and this site. this site even states that the close similarity between the fingerprints of identical twins was used (before the advent of genetic testing) to distinguish between identical and fraternal twins at birth.

--
Evan

> The proper discussion is in any second
> semester college physics class, but I'm
> sure there are books out there that can
> provide a better explanation than a slashdot
> forum.

Haliday and Resnek have the definitive college-level text on physics, and I think it was called "Fundamentals of Physics" or something like that. If I remember correctly, look in the second half of the book for the chapters on modern physics.

Or, if you wish a nontechnical, but more entertaining answer, try the Straight Dope. Cecil Adams provides a pretty simple explanation of the answer.

They sent obnoxious mail. I taped it to cinder blocks with "addressee unknown, please return" on their mail. The US PS was happy to charge them $20 or so to return those.

Unlikely; the post office probably just threw it away.

Since Sir Issac apparently died a virgin, no wonder he was bitter.

Nope -- see the Straight Dope column answering that question.

You can stand them on end, too.

A brick won't work -- check out the Straight Dope

You don't know of enough tech sites to claim that "almost every tech site" banded together on something. No one does.

You might want to read The Straight Dope about speed reading...

Some tax evader arguments are really funny. They always start with something like a clerical error, then build up and up- and in the middle, you hear something like "...and therefore the entire federal government is illegitimate...". They all end the same way- nobody owes any taxes.
I especially like this one: Is U.S. income tax invalid because Ohio wasn't legally a state when the 16th amendment was ratified? On the 150th anniversary of Ohio's statehood, someone looked in the archives and realized that there had been an oversight, and that Ohio had never been formally admitted to the Union. (Statehood admission was handled much more casually back in 1803.) So in 1953 they introduced a bill making Ohio a state, retroactively until 1803. The tax evaders say that since Congress can't make laws ex post facto, Ohio wasn't a state all those years. The ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1911 was therefore invalid, because it was introduced to Congress by the Taft administration, and Taft couldn't legally be president since he was born in Cincinatti and was therefore not a citizen.
There's another rumor going around about how the IRS is paying reparations for slavery to anyone who can prove they're descended from slaves. And I remember hearing once about how "all taxes are voluntary", but I forget the details of how that one works.

That's a good question. In my experience, people who write "it is UNCONSTITUTIONAL" (in ALL-CAPS) are generally advancing some argument along the lines of "the income tax is illegal because Ohio was not properly admitted to the Union until 1953". (Really -- people actually say this.)

... This amazing phenomenon was first described in 1971 by researcher Martha McClintock, now with the University of Chicago. Having asked around a bit, I'd say it's common knowledge among women, but I'll bet not one male in 50 has ever heard of it. Women do have their little secrets....

...Later research has suggested that synchrony is caused by some sort of scent cue, or pheromone.

Scientists at the Sonoma State Hospital Brain Behavior Research Center in California identified several women who were believed to be menstrual pacesetters--they made other women conform to their cycles.

The scientists placed cotton pads under the dominant women's arms for a day, and then wiped the pads on the upper lips of five female subjects three times a week. (One wonders how much the subjects got paid for this.)

Within five months, four of the recipients were menstruating at the same time as their donors.

Interestingly, men also have an effect on women's menstrual cycles--and not just because they make women pregnant. Women who associate with males frequently find that their periods become shorter and more regular....

I have all of the information I could possibly need at my fingertips through a combination of Google, Lexis-Nexis and sites like Everything2 and the Guerilla News Network.

Let's net be mean and leave out the esteemed Cecil Adams. "Fighting Ignorance Since 1973." =)

Interesting story about the inventor of the Slinky, his instant success, his wealth, his joining a religious cult...

reference 1

reference 2

reference 3, mentioning your movie

Also see this Straight Dope column.

Keep reading. Verse 5 mentions the that the Sea (a huge bowl) had a rim shaped "like a lily blossom", implying (as seen in one diagram) that the top edge of the bowl, where the diameter would most naturally be measured (by a rod-like device), would be larger than the diameter towards the main part of the bowl, around which the circumference was most likely measured (by a cord or string). Those assumptions are then consistent with a much more accurate value of pi.

The width of the brim, mentioned in verse 5 as being a "handsbreadth in thickness", may also be relevant. If the circumference was measured around the inner rim, and the diameter was measured from outer rim to outer rim, one gets a value of value for pi within a couple percentage points due to the thickness of the 'bowl', something a Jewish rabbi named Nehemiah pointed out around 150 AD.

Not that the bible is a mathematics text. Personally, I suspect they rounded some of those cubit figures off a bit. In science we call that "significant figures", right?

--LP

Dont you know tinfoil hats dont protect against Agents who walk around with hand-held mind control devices? Tinfoil HOODS are the way to go now!

Have you ever heard of the glock? it's not exactly made of any metalic content

You sir, are an ignorant fool. The Glock 17 (the so-called plastic gun the media had a fit over back in the 80's) had over a pound of steel in it. There is, nor has there ever been, no such thing as a plastic gun. Ceramic, maybe but that is highly unlikely.

Not sure what any of that has to do with Apollo since velcro was developed by a Swiss engineer during the 1950s and Mylar was invented by Dupont in 1952.

just look at biological species to see that a process of evolution rarely results in the optimal design, and is unable to take U-turns or back out of dead ends...

In effect, evolution can make a U-turn by branching further back on the tree. Notice that bats and birds both have wings, but they each evolved them by completely different paths, because each started from a different branch point on the tree...

Where you're failing to see the point is that evolution works by being a massively parallel, highly branching gigantic tree. If a branch of the tree goes down a dead-end, no worries -- another branch will make it around the dead-end.

As for no optimal design? Whose to say that our appendix won't mutate into something useful again down the road when climatic or other changes tilt the survivability rules once more? The "extra baggage" we carry around and can afford to support biologically is what allows us to have non-advantageous mutations that eventually morph into something that is advantageous.

and on the other hand, a horse cannot evolve wheels, because the intermediate steps between a legged horse and a wheeled horse would not be able to move. pity because a wheeled horse could be faster...

Cecil Adams actually covered animals evolving wheels. You might find it interesting. He doesn't tackle the intermediate state problem, though. At any rate, there's the purely biological problem of "How would you keep those wheels 'fed'?" Even if they were made of calcium, you'd need to deposit the calcium to begin with, and then replenish it as it wears. (Wheels will go through a lot more wear than teeth.)

If you take your data from the wrong couple of years and you find if your full moons occur disproportionaltely on weekends, is it that surprising that there are more hospital visits? Drunks and partiers are always doing wierd stuff on weekends. Since there are only a dozen or so full moons in a year, it is hard to get sufficient data to even out statistical effects such as this.

Cecil Adams has a couple articles on some of these things such as crazies and full moons and for a discussion of blue moons. Anyway, the study sighted took place over two years, which is about 24 months. No mention was made about the effect of day of the week which is probably only the first effect to control for. Do people go out hunting more often when the moon is full due to the better lighting? Are more people outside at night on those dates? Are people more likely to go to the hospital on these dates for some reason even if the biting rate doesn't change on these dates?

The fact that the author makes statemets like "Human behaviour is altered during the full moon period" after saying that the studies are contradictory and then goes on to say that their study adds "Animals have an increased propensity to bite humans during the full moon periods" (at best they have shown that more people come to the hospital with animal bites in these periods). These types of conclusions do not fill me with confidence in any of the other work.

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OK, that's enough. You can probably find more yourself. Bottom line: Lots of people would love to believe it works, but despite many years of investigation, the evidence that it works is scant. One would think that if acupuncture was as effective as its proponents claim, the evidence would fall solidly in favor of acupuncture. The fact that it does not ought to tell you something.

Actually, they did try to decimalize time (sort of); check out Cecil's account.

A dodgy looking page on earthlink, with no real references to back up its claims does not a mythbuster make...

The Straight Dope also addressed this story back in 1981. Cecil initially confirmed it, but then reversed himself when a reader sent in a well-researched article which showed that the QWERTY design was indeed intended to increase typing speed, not decrease it.

It also has a bit to say about the supposed advantages of Dvorak keyboards.

A dodgy looking page on earthlink, with no real references to back up its claims does not a mythbuster make...

The Straight Dope also addressed this story back in 1981. Cecil initially confirmed it, but then reversed himself when a reader sent in a well-researched article which showed that the QWERTY design was indeed intended to increase typing speed, not decrease it.

It also has a bit to say about the supposed advantages of Dvorak keyboards.

And the link is here.

This text here to avoid lameness filter. Blah blah blah vote SSSCA supporters out of office blah blah blah...

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_155.html

The article mentioned 13 different intelligence agencies in the US, which I didn't know about. I looked some more and found this. Hmm.. maybe this is off topic :)