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Excluding Intelligent Design Principles From the Search For Alien Life
KIdPanda writes "Prompted by pictures of man-made structures in the Utah desert, a SETI astronomer explains the sometimes-ambiguous difference between seeing the hand of God, alien intelligence, or nature. 'In my photographs, Shostak's SETI-trained eye — standing in for a pattern-crunching computer program — searched for an unexpected increase in visual order (or, in thermodynamic terms, a decrease in entropy caused by the rebellion of life against universal decay). A road or a tended field is mathematically simpler than a mountainous jumble or naturally varied vegetation. ... But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design."
"But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design." What? I don't understand how something not being simple enough for our limited intelligence to understand constitutes divine creation?
What? I know I should go read the op because the summary didn't make any sense at all.
They assume intelligent life on other worlds would be trying to reduce chaos. I wonder how they arrive at this conclusion, since the only known intelligent life we've found so far seems to rather enjoy creating it in great quantity.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
space is vastly more complex than a tended field, but we can only perceive bits at a time
If you create a sand castle it'll become a flat surface. If you have a clear blue sky and start up a coal plant it'll initially become patchy and black and then hazy gray. The evenness of our blue sky is an example of entropy in action.
Given nothing but erosional forces eventually the earth would be a flat sphere.
Disrupting patterns is the signal of counter-entropy entities such as life. We look for disruptions in the background 'blue sky' of the radio spectrum for something 'different'.
Different is the key word. Unsustainable is another. Perhaps that's the answer to the alien paradox. All alien species discovered that our recklessly ambitious fight against Entropy was being carried out too strongly and as a result have found ways to live as an advanced civilization who does not consume nearly as much energy as we do to conquer the natural entropic forces.
Perhaps Alien life is just discreet.
The "inky blackness of space" is only simple if interpreted by a spectrally-limited human eye seeing only a tiny part of it from a distance. Space is crammed with a chaotic mess of strange crap on the macroscale and a lot more weird junk on the micro. Quasars, dark matter, nebulae, dark energy, black holes, virtual particles, gluon soup, quarks....
I will, as they say on the Internets, fix that for you:
If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is in no way evidence of design.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Sometimes stuff that looks artificial can actually be natural. Telling the difference can be hard sometimes.
Throw in references to intelligent design to get a bunch of people in a tizzy and drive page hits.
Obviously, ID fails to impress us with its (lack of) logical hypotheses. I would like to see the ID crowd come up with an actual science that could predict whether something was created by an intelligence (and predict what "level" of intelligence created it). At least it would lend them some credence and provide a factual basis for their (and our) arguments.
Just keep watching for prime numbers and bad sitcoms with aliens in them.
All this is going to do is fan the fires of further ignorance.
I do not dismiss religion in and of itself. That being said, if it makes your day to think that order is a sign of God than feel free to take comfort in that, I have no real problem with it. But at the same time don't think that it's ultimate proof (as in science), there are enough explanations without needing to raise the name of a deity to defend what appears as order to you.
For me? I think things work well in their proper frame. I'd like to think that my morality and outlook on life would be relatively the same regardless of a God figure or not. That's good enough for me. I certainly don't lose any sleep over it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
will repel or dumb-by-design redneck republican wannabe overlords...
For reference that's called the anthropic principle
"There is nothing intelligently designed about our universe. Shit works because, well, if it didn't work, we wouldn't be standing her talking about it. It works because of the sheer necessity that if it didn't work, the universe would fail."
Wow... this was a coherent, solid scientific statement.
The Anthropic principle isn't that far from god, that's why scientists aren't very happy to just accept that "if it didn't work, we wouldn't be standing her talking about it" and would much rather test it.
What worries me is how little you have to know if your a creationist. How do they explain plastic, which is formed from oil, which takes hundreds of thousands of years to form, when the world is only ~4000 years old?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
The problem is that this article deals mainly with intelligent alien life. Take, for example, if you had a race of "goo" creatures on a seemingly barren planet consisting of an atmosphere of gas made up of sulfur, nitrogen, and ammonia.
From our viewpoint, it'd look like yet another barren planet with some sort of "liquid" on the surface that moves around. Now, aside from the fact that this would probably establish a unique entropy (different from a volcanic world and different from a completely dead ice world), this world would not be classified as having a large enough range between it's low chaos and high chaos values. There would be alien life, albeit non-intelligent and lacking and kind of structures besides maybe pools or caves.
Lol.. Tell us what you really thinks. And let all the anger out this time.
I don't know what christian pissed in your Wheaties and passed them off as coco puffs, but your letting your emotional anger cloud the conceptual message from the story. It isn't that intelligent design is real, it's that the logic behind it is real and the principles are being loosely used to determine the existance of life. At the basic level, they are saying based on the complexity of this, it couldn't be a natural occurance. An example of this might be a radio signal transmitting shakespear comming from inside the sun. There are other objective reasoning at issue too where we plant crops and build roads in generally straight lines, and so on. Nature doesn't do that quite often, take a river for instance, there are some that are straight but most of them have quite a bit of curves. Take a erosion line in a field that looks like a road or a fence line from a far distance. When water evacuated an area, it follows the path of least resistance and we know in nature that large amounts of earth (mars or whatever planet) are rarely uniform enough to create a straight line in the erosion on a scale large enough to be seen from space.
In other words, we are looking for things that wouldn't naturally occur by either stating the premise of nature isn't as prone to certain things or certain things or just too complex for it to happen naturally. In this story's context, the idea of intelligent design only refers to the context that some newly discovered thing is interpreted through or not. In other words, does this happen naturally or does it take some sort of intelligence to get it going. The principles that will convince you of it being a sign of alien life or a natural occurring will be the same that convinces a christian of ID. The article also looks at the impacts of that in how we bash on group (as you illustrated in your post) for using the very same techniques and basic thought processes that another uses. It is like telling a teen he can't get his drivers license because he will drink and drive or smoke while your holding a beer in one hand, the steering wheel in the other and have a cigarette hanging from your mouth.
Look at fractals. If you found a Madelbrot set sitting somwhere in space, had a bias toward ID, and didn't realize the pattern behind it wsa simple, you'd be tempted to conclude it was intelligently designed.
Just as you can look at life and argue ID, when in fact some molecules, simple rules and a lot of time can in fact be responsible for the variety we see.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
What if the universe happened by chance or an error and God has no idea how to put it back in the box?
sky is blue because of a star and some leftover accumulations of what mostly became that star. So some order and organizing there, by gravity and the other forces, on both the formation and continuation of sun and earth. We're of the same origin as the blue sky.
If human beings could arrange clouds into neat squares. . .or align stars into pleasant rows. . .they would.
I agree with the troll tag.
There exists (in imagination land) a set of all things we (supposedly intelligent beings) would consider `intelligent'. This set does not (and cannot) include everything. In fact, it will not include -all- `intelligent' things that could exist---just ones we would consider intelligent.
We cannot escape this bias. It's not enough to spot intelligence... we also have to recognize it as intelligence.
(ie: is our planet intelligent? is jupiter intelligent? how about our sun? how about our solar system? is an electron intelligent?; consider that the universe may be playing out all the synapses of a brain on a much grander scale)
Right now, when we look for intelligent life, we are looking for signs of our intelligence set. Problem is, we do not know what this set is---which is why this question came up. Easiest way to answer it right now: If it looks intelligent (stuff looks like ``roads'' and ``cities''; no other reasonable explanation) then it is intelligence.
Very likely (I hope), one day, AI field may lead us to a definition of what this intelligence set is for us.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Hear, hear. So logically, anything that appears complicated does not show evidence of design? God is a simpleton? Eyeballs are complicated, so therefore they were not designed? What the hell does that statement mean?
I know I'm beating up on a bad summary, but this is just too trippy. Pass the bong.
This argument seems to get the Intelligent Design argument backwards. The ID people argue that complexity can't arise from simplicity, and thus complexity is the signature of design. This guy seems to be arguing that simplicity is the signature of design.
Neither one is particulary a good argument. Complex things can arise from simple ones-- a snowflake can arise from water vapor. And simple thing can arise from complex ones: water vapor can arise from a snowflake.
In either case entropy increases, and heat, ultimately, is dissipated into space.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Yawn.. The creationist use science to explain plastic.
And no, oil doesn't take hundreds of thousands of years to make, it can be made in small quantities from organic matter in labs in less then 6 months. It's not economical viable to mass produce in this way or anything but it can be made.
And no, there is nothing in the creation story making the claim that the world is 4000 years old. That is a number, and incorrect number at that, which was pulled from people outside the bible who were attempting to add the ages of the key players in the bible up and estimating the age of the earth. There are a few problems with it though. Your also confusing the point of a creator who creates things. If someone or something, lets call it a GOD could create the universe, create life, create weather, water, minerals and everything else, Why couldn't he create oil too? I mean seriously, even if is took billions of years for oil to naturally occur, why couldn't the creator just create?
Anyways, your perception of creation is a little off. You see, you don't need to know how plastic is made or what processes are involved to believe in evolution or any other science. In fact, you only need to know about oil and plastic if you are doing something with it that required you to know about it. I mean seriously, how much force is needed to cause a nuclear reaction in a non-controlled environment? Don't bother looking the answer up, it doesn't matter because neither of us are working with nuclear reactions and the answer is a lot more then we have to worry about. So you believing in creation, evolution, paganism, the church of Scientology, the Flying Spaghetti monster or whatever doesn't mean you have to be able to explain someone else' concepts, misconceptions, or general ideology nor would you have to involve yourself with some deep knowledge of science either.
No, the oil was placed there by god to test our faith, you see.
You mean problems apart from literally believing a book that's been through several translations from extinct languages and wasn't written down at all until many generations after the events allegedly happened?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
I would mod you offtopic, but I'll complain instead.
Yes there is. Take a look at your car, cellphone, coffee cup, or an aerial photograph of a city. Maybe now you see why the topic legitimately comes up in SETI: design is what SETI seeks. ID is merely useless within the realm of what happened to Earth's biology (until relatively recently, so that we exclude a purebred dog and a Monsanto potato). SETI is looking for designed things, whether they're irrigation canals on Mars, Shoggoths, or a pirated MP3 of a Disaster Area song.
...The Anthropic principle isn't that far from god, that's why scientists aren't very happy to just accept that ....
Why is it, that accepting God should make scientists unhappy? Just by studying the universe doesn't tell you much more about God than studying a building tells you about its architect. All of science works just fine, whether God enters the equations or not. Creationists believe that the Bible tells us a record of how this God did it. That is NOT intelligent design, which merely asserts that there is evidence that God may be behind the universe, but doesn't tell anything about how He did it or how long it took him to do or anything else.
There are scientists who believe that there is evidence of intelligence in nature, but in no way believe that this God, if you will, is the one we read of in any particular book. Creationism and intelligent design are not the same.
All theory is gray
The Forge of God
It's all there.
> If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design."
Wrong. There exist very rigorous standards for simpilicity and complexity, having to do with how complex the calculations necessary to describe the phenomenon being examined. But in keeping with the tone of TFA, we'll stick with the acceptable generalizations.
As in TFA, the SETI-d00d was standing in for software doing pattern matching. For there to be a pattern, there had to be something less than random presentation of components of the environment. The regularity of the man made artifacts stands as example of obvious patterns, ie. simplicity.
Space is a random distribution of points or spots of light, the intensity of which is also random. It is the opposite of simplicity. To describe this random/random distribution would require the phenomenon itself -- there is no computational short cut that can be used to describe it.
As to whether simplicity or complexity actually better represents ID remains a subjective assertion with no proof possible, until and unless as Hawking says, we can "know the mind of God." So far God seems intent on us discovering the rules or creation via our own intelligence rather than His/Hers/Its, being content to exhibit the best proof of Intelligent Intent by remaining entirely absent, providing us with the opportunity to proceed as if He/She/It did not exist. And since actually not existing would produce the same result, the logic behind the above 'evidence' falls apart.
Give me a God that can create a rock He/She/It can't lift and then toss it over the shoulder without a second thought. Such a God would create a universe of which could be said:
"Is an electron a particle? No.
It is a wave? No.
Is it both? No.
Is it neither? No." -- Neils Bohr
But again, a universe could exist with these characteristics independent of a purposeful creation.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The words "life" and "intelligence" are a like the word "planet". What seems obvious gets messy and debate-ridden once you have enough data to actually have to formalize the definition of where to draw the line.
Looking for unusual patterns in the entropy will tell you where to look for new things to explain, but it isn't going to magically cancel out all possible explanations short of civilization.
(by the way, could slashdot please, please cut back on the apparent quota of ID references - sure it's driving in debate traffic, but it's making this place feel like the Jerry Springer Show of blogging)
It's even simpler than that. Once you assume God, it trumps all. See very low levels of Carbon-14 in those fossils? God did that. Drill up what appears to be vegetation processed in the bowels of the earth for eons? God put it there. Infer design from the simplicity of empty space(quite the logical left turn btw)? It's gee-to-tha-oh-to-tha-dee.
It's the whole problem with intelligent design as science: it's not a search for causes, it's looking for an understanding gap(real or imagined) in order to insert ideology.
There's also Algorithmic Probability Theory.
You're wrong :
The point is that intelligence-made structures have high entropy, while nature-made structure have low entropy.
Now let's look at your examples :
-> a perfectly flat desert : LOW entropy. Perhaps a bit higher than a not-quite-flat-but-looking-flat desert, but defineately LOW entropy.
Therefore it is not made by an intelligence. (according to this measure)
-> The surface of most gas planets : LOW entropy (obviously). Compare it to earth's ocean floor. It is mostly very, very flat. When a robot is standing on the ocean floor, he will see kilometers of perfectly flat dark terrain. The only real features, like volcanoes or sunken ships, come from external activity with high entropy (though not necessarily intelligence) That terrain does not have instabilities. It has very, very LOW entropy.
Therefore you can conclude it not to be man-made. You'd conclude the ships to be intelligently-made, which is correct, but you'd also call the volcanoes intelligently-made which is not correct. Unless the zulus are right and we better start throwing women into volcanoes to placate the volcano god, that is.
Now let's take another example. A road network. This is not a stable structure (without maintenance it will dissappear). It is something of very high contrasts, which will release lots of energy during it's decomposition, parts of it can collapse violently at any time (e.g. bridges), and over time it would be buried, made to look exactly like it's surroundings.
Therefore it has high entropy (certainly higher than it's environment) and would therefore be man-made.
Of course there are non-intelligent very very high entropy structures, like the magnetic field or the corona of the sun. Especially the magnetic fields are high entropy, and presumably not the result of intelligent design. (which are somehow capable of heating earth by at least a few dozen degrees with little warning. Currently they are heating the earth quite a bit, and we don't understand them at all).
But if "anything with high entropy is designed by an intelligent being" is your assumption then, yes, you'd presume God to be real (not allah, not krishna, not buddha, since those ideologies are in direct conflict with scientific theory. They both claim that scientific experiments have no validity, and convey no truth. Therefore using an experiment to validate them is beyond stupid. The bible, otoh, even describes a few experiments and accepts their outcomes as "obviously true". Since for example muslims claim allah decides "intelligently" the outcome of every single experiment every time it's carried out, the result of any experiment would change over time. Therefore any experiment, no matter what it's about, doesn't represent any truth to any muslim. Otherwise you'd directly arrive at the claim that the quran must correctly follow mathematics, which is a claim the quran fails (e.g. fractions of the same quantity in the quran don't add up to 1 : islamic inheritance laws are mathematically flawed in a way any 3-year old learns in school : if you cut a pie, the pieces always add up to a whole pie, never to more, never to less). The bible does seem to follow mathematics by contrast, at least you might say it tries, and even acknowledges that better study can yield better results. E.g. the bible claims salomon measured pi to be "a bit more" than 3, and claims a few centuries later it was measured to be 22/7, which is quite accurate).
The problem with equating high entropy with intelligent design is simple. The universe as a whole most certainly (currently) has a very (very) high entropy. The further back in time we go (and so presumably the closer to the creator) the higher entropy we see. So if entropy is higher for intelligently designed things, then most certainly the universe is designed, since the entropy at the start was infinite (according to big bang theory). (insert remark about correlation-causation not being equal*)
Of course that's discounting the fact that high-entropy events
What the OP seems to be saying is that: a) they came up with a theory that they can find life by searching for simplicity in the midst of chaos. b) they then found out they were wrong.
Stunning, huh?
Perhaps what they mean is that they want to search for clear natural patterns. Except that they don't know how to define a clear natural pattern, so they're still as clueless as the rest of us.
If probability theory is a reasonable model of the existence of the ID and the outcome of observations, you can't have evidence for unless you allow evidence against.
See my proof at http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1045125&cid=25918745
Every electron in the universe has the same charge and mass as all the others. Is that design or pure chance? Why don't all particles have different properties? After all, the set of all possible particle properties is infinite. Intelligent design is a tempting hypothesis because an infinite number of universes is beyond the bounds of normal scientific falsifiability.
So that's why Nature abhors a vacuum. Proof of competition.
If SETI can detect patterns in the songs, then the aliens need a more efficient codec.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I thought the anthropic principle was basically an argument for a divine creator, but OP seems to be trying to dismiss it. The old "it doesn't matter what the odds are, we couldn't posit the question if we weren't here" kind of thing. I'm probably butchering the argument badly. :(
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
We can detect the modulation itself. "I see no pattern to these 1s and 0s, sir, but they're clearly transmitting at 9600bps."
However, it's also nearly a tautological statement. It's not deep.
It's just ~B -> ~A therefore A -> B. No shit. It means that the universe exists and works. The same is true of any potion of the universe, including the portions that we have designed. It neither precludes nor supports the theory of an intelligently designed universe.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Three cheers for ignorance!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
If you find out, make sure you get him to see a doctor, urine isn't supposed to be dark brown.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I find arguments from simplicity/complexity to be pointless. Both are relative in the scope of the universe, hence there's no way to truly define one or the other. Furthermore, the riddle "if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" can be applied to human observance of simplicity/complexity in the universe. If no one is here to observe it, are there any true simple/complex things? I don't think so. The universe just is the way it is and our limited, but increasing scope of it proves nothing in the realm of intelligent design, rather only continues to raise more questions.
Currently theta testing the prototype "Event Horizon" server-scaled desktop box with a 50 Gigameg of Ram.
...is that *we* are the "intelligent designers", who are constantly, 24/7, unconsciously creating the world we're facing (as in "what you think becomes what happens to you"). At least my own experience seems to prove that to me. Sadly, it's something that is virtually impossible to objectively measure -- assuming the theory to be true, when you want it to be false, it would turn up to you to be false (and a paradox -- that would prove it to be true for that certain circumstance).
What keeps bothering me, is that again and again, it actually turns out to be true for me.
The problem is that humans are hard-wired to see patterns in the world around us, even where there is nothing but chaos. So the whole question of finding intelligence in the patterns around us is moot.
The intelligence is more in the mind of the perceiver than in the design itself. There's no one out there, they're not coming.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
doesn't matter because it's the word of god. if you were talking about a textbook you'd have a point.
Simplicity and complexity is not as important as the idea that these patterns (whether simple or complex, and whether in ID arguments or among ETs) are statistical aberrations.
Quick example -- you see a bunch of kids walking around with a jar of assorted colored marbles. A while later, you come back to the same place and find these colored marbles apparently spilled on the ground. But, the more you look, the more you wonder whether the kids actually arranged the marbles that way. How do you know?
Well, you could see patterns of high complexity or patterns of statistically unusual simplicity. For example, if the marbles were very clearly placed in the likeness of an animal, that may be evidence that they weren't randomly spilled. Or, if the marbles were neatly sorted into color groups -- a very simple thing, but nonetheless far from a random distribution -- that might also be evidence that they were arranged. Either would potentially point to some sort of "design."
The fact is that although the ID people are often a front for Christian agendas, the problem of sorting out design from random occurrence is a very real one, whether it is in looking at potential "artifacts" at an archeological dig or sorting out whether something was "intentional" in a work of art (or, for that matter, artistic attributions, which has now become a part of forensic science). What is important is the unusual anomalies in the distribution of the "data" in any of these cases, which could be evidence for complex design or a reduction to simplicity to streamline things. Either one can be evidence of intervention, *once* other natural causes can be dismissed.
This article thus strikes me as missing the point and trying to create a false dichotomy, obviously due to discomfort with the right-wing ID agenda. Just because questions of design are often invoked with a political agenda doesn't mean that they don't exist in other contexts and can't take similar forms. The answer is just being more careful to consider all aspects of your data set, something ID proponents don't do because they have an agenda. (Overzealous evolutionary theorists sometimes overstate their case and do the same.)
Statistics, of course, are only the first step -- the interpretation of the anomalies is where the tough questions begin, and those questions that come up are the same for ID as they are for ET life... and no simple statistical test can answer them.
One word: cancer.
The human body is clear proof that God is an idiot.
I piss off bigots.
ID is young earth. They created it and they use it as a tool to get creationism in the classroom. Specifically that the earth was created ~6000 years ago.
While the logical term does not imply bible literalism, that is how it is used, and for all practical purposes that is what it means.
This is becasue zealots are using an incorrect term to push there agenda.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If the bible is exempt from criticism that can be levied upon textbooks, then why does it get used as a textbook in so many schools?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
The principles that will convince you of it being a sign of alien life or a natural occurring will be the same that convinces a christian of ID.
If the principles were the same everyone involved in SETI would claim 50% of signals from the sky are ET. (And the rest are ET's evil arch nemesis.)
...The Anthropic principle isn't that far from god, that's why scientists aren't very happy to just accept that ....
Uh...
1) Scientists reject the anthropic principle as a justification for God, because it isn't a logically sound argument.
2) Most scientists in the USA *do* believe in God.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
In some cases, yes, in others, no. Many things in nature are mathematically simple: the smooth contours of bubbles, the regular patterns of crystal, the conic sections of planetary orbits, the shapes of large astronomical bodies. And many things that appear complex are actually the result of algorithmically simple chaotic dynamics.
Basically, we distinguish between the products of non-intelligent natural processes and the products of intelligence based upon our knowledge of the specific processes involved and our experience with their characteristic products. For example, we know very well what sort of landscape patterns are produced by natural processes of geology and erosion, so we can readily distinguish them from human constructions, at least most of the time. We also understand what typical goals of human beings are likely to be, and technology humans have available to them, so we can often recognize the products of human design. But even this can fail as we move away from the familiar. There are many examples of objects produced by natural processes that would be hard to distinguish from some nonrepresentational sculptures.
Once we get away from the familiar, our ability to distinguish between natural design and intelligent design starts to fail. When it comes to the question of nonhuman intelligence, all bets are off. Pulsar signals were originally thought to be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, until theorists came up with ideas of natural mechanisms capable of producing such regularity. Suppose we found an extraterrestrial signal that followed the Fibonacci series. We'd probably suspect extraterrestrial intelligence, because we don't yet know of any astronomical process that generates a Fibonacci series. Yet there is nothing specifically intelligent about that series--some branching patterns in plants follow a Fibonacci series.
Like someone stated before, many have an anthrocentric view point. When trying to challenge intelligent design, you're limited to the 2 factors. 1, you're assuming humans are the highest level of intelligence and 2, you're assuming the issue is understandable by the current level of human intelligence.
The universe is full of order and science helps us with that with logic. The universe is also full of chaos and chaos isn't 100% predictable or repeatable.
Yawn.. The creationist use science to explain plastic. And no, oil doesn't take hundreds of thousands of years to make, it can be made in small quantities from organic matter in labs in less then 6 months. It's not economical viable to mass produce in this way or anything but it can be made.
Not exactly. We can make substances that are close to coal or oil but the precise chemical make ups are not identical. Moreover, there's no reasonable mechanism that such events could occur in the natural world.
And no, there is nothing in the creation story making the claim that the world is 4000 years old. That is a number, and incorrect number at that, which was pulled from people outside the bible who were attempting to add the ages of the key players in the bible up and estimating the age of the earth.
You actually get doing this method accurately about 5400 to 6500 years old depending on how exactly you are counting. For example that the traditional Jewish count gives 5768 where as Usher's count (which many Young Earth Christians are fond of) gives 6012.
There are a few problems with it though. Your also confusing the point of a creator who creates things. If someone or something, lets call it a GOD could create the universe, create life, create weather, water, minerals and everything else, Why couldn't he create oil too? I mean seriously, even if is took billions of years for oil to naturally occur, why couldn't the creator just create?
This leads to omphalism (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalism ). Omphalism has a variety of problems. First, it is a complete unfalsifiable, and hence unscientific hypothesis. If one wants to claim one is doing science one needs testable hypotheses. As long as YECs and ID proponents claim to be doing science they cannot adopt any form of omphalism. Second, omphalism in almost any form mandates an incredibly deceptive deity who has made the entire universe in a form to deceive humanity. I suspect that most people would be theologically uncomfortable with such a deity.
Anyways, your perception of creation is a little off. You see, you don't need to know how plastic is made or what processes are involved to believe in evolution or any other science. In fact, you only need to know about oil and plastic if you are doing something with it that required you to know about it.
You'r criticism of the earlier poster is incorrect. If one is making a claim that is wildly at odds with the prevailing evidence and scientific consensus you've got a problem. And if one cannot explain even minimally so why one's fringe idea is somehow valid then there's really no good reason to pay any attention to the individual.
It may not be deep, but it is sufficiently non-obvious that many people have made the error of arguing that because this particular planet/solar system/universe seems particularly well suited to us, then it must have been designed for our benefit.
And yet nature does produce straight lines in many other contexts--crystal planes, for example. So we only see it as evidence of intelligence when we see it in the landscape because we happen to know from experience that the physical processes of geology and erosion operative here on earth do not normally do that. One could not, however, draw the general conclusion that straight lines are evidence of intelligence.
The benchmark of design is not simplicity. The benchmark is probably better described as specified complexity. A good way of spotting design is perhaps to observe an irreducibly complex mechanism that efficiently achieves a purpose. A field may be cleared intentionally, but a clearing in a forest may also naturally occur, so this is not a good example of spotting design.
The classic example is a mousetrap. None of the parts of the mousetrap are particularly useful on their own, but if you obtain them all seperately, then arrange them in a very specific way, the result is a very efficient mouse catching device.
This device is complicated, but not random. The complexity that makes it functional is specified by the person who intentionally assembled the mousetrap, but such a device would not naturally occur. It is irreducibly complex because taking away any of the parts it is composed of would cause it to cease functioning. This means that its function was intentional and had to be conceived as a whole rather than arrived at by gradual steps (since no step along the way would be any closer to the purpose, until the whole mousetrap is built).
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.
Well, no, it isn't like the translations changed the meanings on a scale large enough to change the message. You see, the bible isn't just one book that hides in a shelve and someone takes it out, creates a new version in a different language and then puts it on their shelve waiting for someone to do it again independent of the other versions like a game of telephone. Translations are/were given to people who had studied the other versions and also studied this new version. When it is read, it isn't always read by one individual person, it is read in front of the entire congregation and if the story is wrong or the meanings were different, people spoke up and said something. It was then corrected or destroyed.
You also have concordances that are created by scholars. Doctor Strong's concordance is one of the more exhaustive and complete concordances but you have others that are in agreement too. You also have concordances for the books of other faiths too. The tora and the Koran match the bible in it's old testament content and you have about two thirds of the world participating in this effort to keep the messages the same.
It is read aloud and in quiet and when something isn't how they learned it before, it is checked and corrected. There are little chances of it being incorrect based on a translation. Verbal stories were kept accurate this way too. You had 40 people who know the story well enough to tell it while plus the congregations who know it well enough to remember it, and quite a few of both of them were present when someone told it. If something was wrong or inaccurate, it was brought up and corrected.
So you see, while there might be a few slightly different things, for the most part the King James version is the same as the original stories being told which are about the same as most other versions of the bibles.
We think straight lines on the ground are man-made because we know man-made processes that can produce them, but not natural ones. If a geologist discovered a natural method for producing straight lines wed rethink our interpretation of straight lines visible from a plane. Simplicity has nothing to do with it. Of course if youre the kind of person who likes to reduce things to a single axis this is all very confusing, but most people arent that stupid. The smart SETI people arent looking for simplicity, theyre looking for signals that cant be produced by any known natural process.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
If the bible is exempt from criticism that can be levied upon textbooks, then why does it get used as a textbook in so many schools?
Of course the Bible is a textbook!
1. It had countless contributors (some authors even took credit for other authors' work without crediting them!).
2. It went through multiple editions (some parts had to be cut or reimagined through the ages).
3. Like the college textbook business, it has a stranglehold on a captive market. Don't like it? Tough. You pick up that Koran and you're a TERRORIST!
About the criticism thing, I always figured that was covered somewhere in the EULA. "By picking up this book, you agree to forfeit all independent reasoning skills, blah blah." Fortunately nobody ever takes those things seriously.
I didn't realize Hebrew and Greek were extinct languages. I also didn't realize being written 10-30 years after the events could be considered "many generations".
The Christian bible claims a lot of things that have been interpreted in numerous ways. The old earth interpretation has been a minority position historically and is the minority position currently amongst those who take the bible literally.
Oil presents a problem for this worldview because it normally takes a duration of time longer to develop than is allowed by young earth creationists. If you don't wish to defend that position, fine, but don't pretend its a straw man position, or fringe position amongst creationists that can't be legitimately mocked.
...ID is young earth.....
You are flat out wrong about that. ID is about one thing and one thing ONLY. That is that there is an intelligence behind the origin and operation of the universe. Life science is only a part of that. There are theistic implications in this, just as there are atheistic implications in random evolution over time. ID in and of itself makes no statements concerning what the nature or methodology of this intelligence might be. Creationists have and do use some of the same arguments as those who see intelligence operating behind the universe. Some evolutionists believe in God and others don't, and that is equally true of those who theorize an intelligence rather than time and chance. Putting scientists who interpret the observed data as pointing to intelligence into the same camp as creationists is plain ignorant of what the ID theory really is.
All theory is gray
"Irreducibly complex" is Intelligent Design jargon for "something that couldn't have evolved because its individual components are individually without value to the organism except as components of the complete structure." So far, there is no evidence that anything in biology is irreducibly complex, and all of the suggested examples of irreducible complexity in biology (e.g. the bacterial flagella, the immune system cascade) have been shown not to be irreducibly complex (i.e. partial structures have been identified that have useful biological functions).
"Specified complexity" is another bit of Intelligent Design jargon, but they've never managed to come up with a coherent definition, probably because it is an oxymoron. A "specification" generally means a concise description of something, and truly complex things have no more concise description.
Well, even with the GOD did that, there is the how and why he did that so it isn't like no one would look for knowledge or at how things work. With the alternative to ID, there is just as much guessing and interpreting going on.
Hip Hip Hurray for the lunatics!
Seriously, you don't need to know and accept every last word of science just to be not ignorant. If you would have paid attention to the rest of what I said, you probably would have realized that.
Shit... Dammit I mean shit not piss. Oh well, at least we got a laugh out of it. (I'm chuckling anyways).
Where do I sign up for that?
Neither did I. What book are you talking about? We were discussing the Christian Bible.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
"a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space" isn't simple, it's *void*.
I guess I'll go vacuum my room and put more intelligent design into it.
But of course, the use of just such a text led to the discovery of the ancient city of Troy. 8-)
your examples would seem to be consistent with what I said...
But the examples are completely interchangeable.
Instead of a blue sky of many colors, make it monochrome. It now has an entropy of 0.
Make the face on mars have many different shades of red. Maybe you can't crank the entropy up to 16 or so, but I imagine you can use 256 different shades of red (that's only 6 to 7 different values per color component), for an entropy of up to 8.
And I know that Shannon entropy isn't thermodynamic entropy. If we're talking about thermodynamic entropy, it isn't math but physics that tells us what we want to know.
And then I'm blank; that's not part of my physics training, and if I do any physics I'd rather do something applicable in my life: electronics, sound or Newtonian mechanics---in my tetris clone, blocks should fall at almost 10 m/s/s ;)
only one out of an infinite number of possibilities involves a deity.
I don't make that assumption. Take your infinite set of possibilities. Then "d" is the subset where there is a god (god \equiv designer), and "!d" is the complement.
that existence of evidence has a direct involvement with the existence of a deity.
I'm not claiming it does. What I'm saying that if there's no evidence against, then there's also no evidence for.
Your math is incorrect somewhere
No. Or at least, show me where and why.
Your conclusion would disprove any possible outcome of any possible hypothesis about anything unless there was evidence that everything we know is false.
Please show me how that follows.
My theorem doesn't say which statements about the world are true or false. It only states that there can't be evidence for unless there can also be evidence against.
Evidently, you have to give me a bunch of money and goto this site
No, you don't have to give me money but that site has all the info you should need.
It's close enough to make plastics from. But I think your forgetting about the yeast that secrete crude oil as it's waste. This stuff is moving fast, it used to be thought that dimonds were a natural wonder, then we started making crude ons in a lab, now they can't be distinguished from the real thing and people are actually getting their cremated relatives turned into Cremation Diamonds and having jewelry fashioned out of them.
If it isn't there right now, it will be soon.
Yep, 6,000 is the round number I always heard. But then again, this only gets us to the beginning of man- more specifically Adam. As we know, there were other people when they left the garden. There are other problems like the word used for day also means heat and period of time. I should caution that someone's understanding of something doesn't make it true, not does it make it false. I'm not going to say that we are right or wrong on the lenght of time for a day but if you look at the sequence between the two books of genesis that walk about the creation, you can see the differences can be distinguished by two sets of creation, on with the world, and one with the garden of Eden for God's elect.
Again, I'm not pushing that theory but it is there.
The problem here is that if it isn't scientific, then science can't make a statement about it. So why is it doing so? Why is it saying that is wrong when at the most, they can say it isn't scientific? You don't need to know the theoretical process of the creation of oil to know that you can make plastic from it. That provess is independent of how oil is formed. So where does Plastic confuse a creationist? Well, it doesn't just like not knowing how inhumane your animals raised and are slaughtered has no bearing on your tastes for different foods. You can still season soups and salads with bacon only knowing that you get it from the store and someone grows it for the store.
I think your confusing hypothesis with evidence. There is no evidence that it takes hundreds of thousands of years to make oil. There is only the loose theory that it does based on assumptions we brought in from other areas. But if you take something like Diamonds which was once thought to take longer and realize that can be made in a couple of weeks, then you have evidence that those theories can be wrong. Here is something for you to remember, scientific consensus doesn't mean it is true, and it
The anthropic principle is nothing like God, and many atheist scientists are perfectly happy to accept it. We exist, and the universe is capable of supporting our existence, by random chance. It's very unlikely, given what we can figure out about the initial conditions of the universe, but if it hadn't happened we wouldn't be around to wonder about it. No God in there anywhere.
The anthropic principle is nothing like God, and many atheist scientists are perfectly happy to accept it.
Notice that I said we reject it as an argument for the existence of God, not that we reject it outright.
As an argument for the existence of God, it's just plain silly.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
ID says in effect, that it is not possible for God to design a universe that is indistinguishable from random. And since so far, that is the sort of universe in which we live, it looks to me that ID, if it weren't nonsense, would actually constitute proof that God doesn't exist...
The christian bibles are written in Hebrew and Greek. They are also written in Latin and English and even arranged in different orders. The chapter verse book thing came about when the original books started becoming packaged as one and the chapter verse were left overs from the transcription processes where the new versions were checked for errors. You will find that before the invent of the printing press, each and every bible would have notes in the side of them where the transcriber would reference things like transliteration or words with multiple meanings and such in which they wanted to make sure the original context was kept. This has inspired concordances like the one from Doctor Strong and such like it.
They have concordances for the Torah, Koran and other books too. You can bet that the versions your seeing today is about as accurate as it was 3000 years ago.
The problem is that patterns emerge from any random system. If you have enough desert, eventually you'll find structures that look artificial to an observer (Face on mars anyone?), these would have emerged entirely by chance.
For all the complexity of life on earth, it is a tiny tiny pocket of entropy fighting life which has been granted by a terrific increase in entropy in our sun which has been burning for billions of years. I'm sorry but I don't see intelligent design anywhere. That we emerged entirely by accident is entirely plausible and doesn't violate any natural laws. Thus any alternative theory has a hell of alot to account for.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It's close enough to make plastics from.
That's actually saying very little. I'm not a chemist but as I understand it you can make plastic out of almost any organic substance with long chains. Oil is easier but that's partially because we've focused our research on making plastics out of oil.
But I think your forgetting about the yeast that secrete crude oil as it's waste. This stuff is moving fast, it used to be thought that dimonds were a natural wonder, then we started making crude ons in a lab, now they can't be distinguished from the real thing and people are actually getting their cremated relatives turned into Cremation Diamonds and having jewelry fashioned out of them.
But none of these look in situ like the natural versions. An artificial diamond taken completely out of context compared to a natural diamond will look identical for all purposes but there's no way to duplicate a diamond and make it look natural in some set of surrounding rock. And even if there were, the ability to make such duplication by using highly sophisticated and detailed techniques doesn't mean that it is remotely plausible that some completely unknown natural process could do the same thing and then have all the surrounding rock and other material look exactly like what we'd expect if it had taken the necessary time to make it by the understood processes.
Yep, 6,000 is the round number I always heard. But then again, this only gets us to the beginning of man- more specifically Adam. As we know, there were other people when they left the garden.
There aren't other people when he left the garden. Other people do seem to show up shortly thereafter with Cain but there's nothing immediately after the garden in the text.
There are other problems like the word used for day also means heat and period of time.
First of all, the Hebrew word in question "yom" (spelled yud vav mem. Slashdot apparently isn't happy with adding in Hebrew characters) is not at the same as Hebrew word for "heat" which is "chom" (chet vav mem). The roots and etymology are different. This would be like saying in English that the words "bat" and "cat" meant the same thing. Second of all, even if the word did mean heat that would be completely irrelevant because in context it obviously isn't counting heats (whatever that would mean). Third of all, yom almost never means period of time. Almost invariably it means a day. Fourth of all, the interpretation that it is talking about a period of time fails to deal with the simple description of the verse which says (translating now) "it was evening and it was morning, the nth day" for various n. Now does that make any sense to say "it was evening and it was morning, the first period of time"? No, not really.
I should caution that someone's understanding of something doesn't make it true, not does it make it false.
No but when discussing any statement you can also discuss an interpretation or set of interpretations of it. There may be some hypothetical interpretation of The Call of Cthulhu which makes it true but that's not relevant if neither of us have any idea what the heck that is and if it has no connection to any reasonable meaning of the text.
I'm not going to say that we are right or wrong on the lenght of time for a day but if you look at the sequence between the two books of genesis that walk about the creation, you can see the differences can be distinguished by two sets of creation, on with the world, and one with the garden of Eden for God's elect. Again, I'm not pushing that theory but it is there.
Theory does not mean wild-ass guess. Nor does theory mean attempted apologetics to make up for a story which is clearly spliced together. It has a specific set of meanings in science. This isn't a theory. This is theology. I (and I suspect almost everyone) has little objection to someo
Completely OT, but why can't God be both eternal matter or eternal spirit-or-whatever-one-would-say. If God is omnipotent and/or omnipresent, then Reality = God because it follows that the force or group of forces in control of Reality is Reality. And who can argue with Reality* and get the last word ;)
* i.e. everything which is real. It's an interesting trick of our perception to be able to think of falsities as they are completely missing from nature. And there really is no arguing that there is anything more powerful than the totality of what exists seen and unseen.
The interesting point of the article is not just another rehash of ID nonsense, but rather the observation that we live in a world filled with designed objects. We believe we can discern design by looking at - say - a plasma TV. Why then resist the Watchmaker argument when applied to the Universe as a whole?
Why? It's all in the word "belief". ID arguments (lucid or not) are predicated on an assertion of probabilities so vanishingly small that the likelihood of the structure in question arising by "random" chance is impossible. Typical counter arguments center on pointing out that space is vast, that time is long, and that natural selection is anything but random.
But probability arguments are not all there is to statistics. In particular, Bayesian statistics focuses on explaining our (rational) belief in an outcome, not on seeking likelihoods among some Platonic ideal of a probability distribution somehow divorced from the point of view of the observer.
In short, our belief in the "unnatural" genesis of a plasma TV (or the complex network of the interstate highway system visible from space) is dependent not only on entropy arguments of the TV's design, but also on our knowledge that a technologically skilled species occupies the planet where the TV is found. Contrarily, one big reason we don't infer intelligence from the often bizarre geological features of other bodies in the solar system (features that can resemble the U.S. interstate highways, for instance) is that we have no independent evidence to suggest such a species exists on those orbs.
Any argument about (or with) God is a circular one.
Several translations? What's your point? We still have a whole wealth of manuscript texts written in the original languages which any scholar can consult. From these we can directly translate these texts into English, so I'm not sure what you mean by "through".
Extinct languages? How about English? Is it "extinct"? Beowulf was written in English, Old English sure, but English nonetheless. People still speak and use Hebrew and Greek today. Just because the Bible was written in older variants doesn't mean it's not impossible to understand it today. There's tons of scholars in Biblical Hebrew and Greek.
"Many generations"? How about 10-60 years? If you're talking about Genesis, then sure. Most of the events in Genesis took place many generations before they were recorded by Moses. What he may have been basing that record on (other than the claim of supernatural inspiration) is a matter of speculation. But for the matter of other books like those in the New Testament? The Gospel narratives (excluding perhaps John) are generally dated within the first century, well within the same generation the "events allegedly happened" written by men who claimed to have been eyewitnesses to those events (Matthew, Mark, John) or who directly consulted with the eyewitnesses themselves (i.e. Luke). Compared to other works of the period, the New Testament as a whole is the definitively the most historically reliable work of Greek literature in terms of amount of manuscript copies and the amount of time between when those copies were written and the events they purport to record.
It's up to you whether you want to believe the miraculous claims made in the Bible, but if you're going to accept the claims of any historical record (and the Bible isn't the only historical work that includes elements of the supernatural) then there's more than enough reason to trust the Bible.
ID people are stupid not because they are tring to prove the existance of God, but because they are trying to prove their own fiction about God. The idea of God becomes much more reasonable when you devorce it from any 'Prior Art'.
Its not about whether you can or cant derive complexity from simplicity, or simplicity from complexity. Whatever. The question is can you derive purposefulness from purposelessness.
It is the Anthropic principle. If the answer is no, then there is a God. If the answer is yes, then there is no music, no love, no reason, and we are all meat robots.
So Pinoccio, are you a real boy?
They should not be the same, except for the people supporting the theory. If ID could shed its Bible thumper background and get some serious and skeptical minds on the subject, it might get traction. As of now, it is a shill for people who want evolution out of school.
Any real serious attempt at ID would not work so hard to be 'agnostic' on issues of real science like evolution. Any real legitimate theory of Intelligent Design would account for what science has already established, and be able to show why ID theory not only coexists with such information but actually shows how an ID interpretation of existing science actually suggests the existance of God.
ID must do more than not go into how God created the Universe, because we already know alot about how. ID must explian why what we know about the development of the Universe and Life suggests creation, and further, it must predict things about the universe that we would not otherwise know but can test.
Until then, ID fails. Just like String theory fails... only worse.
Then the point still stands, you don't need hundreds of thousands of years to make plastic.
That's only true is you assume that the theories on it's creation is also the only true way. However, seeing how it can and has been made in labs, we know that it can happen in other ways, barring a time machine and someone who can live long enough and be exposed to the same forces, we don't know the real ways that crude oil or Diamonds are made in nature, we have some good ideas but nothing empirical. And yes, that means there is a change that our idea is wrong, it means that there could be other ways and processes too. I remember reading an article a while back where they were drilling monitoring wells in old landfills and found small pockets of crude oil. The first reaction was that someone dumped oil there, then when they realized that something with the time line of the fill and whatever made that highly unlikely so they assumed it seeped into it from surrounding pockets in the land. There is also the possibility that the garbage breaking down had something to do with it too. Of course it didn't have hundreds of thousands of years to happen. You see, since science only shows that it is possible this way, it doesn't mean it is the only way nor does it mean that it has to be that way. When people make that mistake, they have turned science into a religion and pretty much ended the needs to study it or perform science on it.
lol.. There were people while they were in the garden. Just because the bible doesn't speak of them directly doesn't mean they aren't there. If you look at genesis 1, you will see where GOD created the people and told them to multiply an have domain over all the animals of the earth. Gen 1:26. Then in Genesis 2, he creates the garden of Eden and fills it. Some people like to claim that Earth was the garden and genesis 1 and 2 are the same chapters but they you run into problems with leaving the garden as well as the orders of creation being different. Logically, you can conclude that there was two creations, one of the world and one of God's elect which play a large role later in the bible.
You mean problems apart from literally believing a book that's been through several translations from extinct languages and wasn't written down at all until many generations after the events allegedly happened?
You mean like The Iliad and The Odyssey? There are far more original manuscipts in existence of the Bible than there are of Homer's works, yet academics consider Homer's works reliable...
Then the point still stands, you don't need hundreds of thousands of years to make plastic.
You seem to be missing the point made by both the earlier poster and me. It may be that you are interpreting this in an overly literal fashion: the point that he was making (and that I am making) is that the oil we have based on the geology and other data almost certainly has been here for a very long time.
There aren't other people when he left the garden. Other people do seem to show up shortly thereafter with Cain but there's nothing immediately after the garden in the text.
lol.. There were people while they were in the garden. Just because the bible doesn't speak of them directly doesn't mean they aren't there. If you look at genesis 1, you will see where GOD created the people and told them to multiply an have domain over all the animals of the earth. Gen 1:26. Then in Genesis 2, he creates the garden of Eden and fills it. Some people like to claim that Earth was the garden and genesis 1 and 2 are the same chapters but they you run into problems with leaving the garden as well as the orders of creation being different. Logically, you can conclude that there was two creations, one of the world and one of God's elect which play a large role later in the bible.
That's not logic. That's apologetics. Moreover, the most logical conclusion by Biblical scholars is that the two Genesis accounts are distinct texts that were added together by a later writer. Please read up on the Documentary Hypothesis. Furthermore, the claim that there were other people running around that aren't mentioned or that Adam was supposed to be one of the "elect" is nowhere in the text at all. And moreover, if you accept this reading, does that mean people descended from the others aren't really people? Can they never go to heaven no matter what they do? This is both textually unsound and to almost any individual not nice theology.
That's only true is you assume that the theories on it's creation is also the only true way. However, seeing how it can and has been made in labs, we know that it can happen in other ways, barring a time machine and someone who can live long enough and be exposed to the same forces, we don't know the real ways that crude oil or Diamonds are made in nature, we have some good ideas but nothing empirical.
You seem to be a bit confused here. We have massive amounts of empirical data backing up the standard understanding. You seem to be confusing "seeing with our own eyes" and "having empirical data". If we used your notion of what sort of evidence was useful you wouldn't be able to convict someone of murder if they literally held a smoking gun in their hand with power burns on the hand.
You see, since science only shows that it is possible this way, it doesn't mean it is the only way nor does it mean that it has to be that way. When people make that mistake, they have turned science into a religion and pretty much ended the needs to study it or perform science on it.
You seem to not understand both how science works and the point in question. No one is claiming that there might not be not understood ways that diamonds could form in situ and look just like they do. But that is fantastically unlikely. All of the data we have, all the geology is completely consistent with the well-understood processes. It is extremely unlikely that our understanding is incorrect. No one is claiming that it is definitely correct. Obviously not, that would be stupid. The point is that it is very very likely correct. Moving onwards, I'm not going to address all of your linguistic claims because they aren't terribly relevant. I will however stick a massive (citation needed) tag next to the claim that Genesis was written in Aramaic and then translated to Hebrew. That claim as far as I'm aware is extremely incorrect. Moreover, the point about the heat of the day an
Modern Greek != Ancient Greek. Nobody speaks Ancient Greek as a mother tongue. It has run up the curtain...
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.