I regarded it more an irritating OO model shortcoming, since I'd not yet seen a language that allowed it.
Good to hear the feature is out there, and in a language that actually gets used.
Unfortunately in this regard, my next platform will be.net and I presume (possibly incorrectly) that that.net isn't flexible enough to grant any of its languages that ability.
You cannot harness heat as energy, you can only harness a difference in heat energy.
For example, you couldn't produce power from a 300 heat source if the surrounding temperature is also 300. But if the surrounding temperature was -40 then you could produce power from even a 0 heat source.
Personally, colder climates seem to have less bugs and disease, and air-conditioning works backwards too.
What's so special about these things having email on a phone? I've had this for years with a normal nokia (it just uses GPRS), and my phone isn't even a smartphone - the phone I had before that could do email too, and it didn't even come with a camera in it.
I presume Blackberrys must have some kind of value adding email interface, which is why I'm asking (cos my old phones just do vanilla pop/imap). Does it poll in the background (but I presume any old smartphone could do this), or the carrier pushes new mail notifications to it?
Actually it looks like he converted to christianity and then looked into the topic and starting writing these books.
So, as a book refuting evolution, writen in the United States by a christian with no scientific background or education beyond highschool, it's not quite what I had in mind.
However, the book holds my interest in that his credentials suggest the book may shine above the deliberate misrepresentations and outright lies that typify normal creationist tactics (Even in this thread for example, that anonymous coward posting about no transitional fossils when there are thousands, and then deliberately misquoting Darwin). So if the book is honest instead of agenda driven then it will be worth a look.
all the doctorate-level authorities that he picked happen to be Christian theists......if you really want to find out whether science confirms the "God theory", you don't only pick people that you know ahead of time are going to say "yes, Lee, that is exactly right." That's like saying, "I'm going to get to the bottom of this Buddhism stuff, I'm going to interview a bunch of Buddhist monks and see if they tell me that Buddhism is all its cracked up to be." I can tell that Strobel is smart enough to know this, so I can only conclude that his pretense of playing the skeptic is pure deception.
Of course, just because Strobel's experts are biased does not mean they are necessarily wrong. But, given the obvious bias, I do think that considering other sources for different points of view is warranted
Fortunately, someone has gone to the effort to source equally expert views on the topics the book covers to to provide the reader with the full story
I believe that when the arguments on both sides are compared, the arguments against Strobel's position are the stronger arguments. However, it is of course up to the reader to decide for themselves whose arguments are the better arguments
So I will be able to decide for myself whose arguments are better:)
I assume you got that quote from a creationist website rather than from Darwin himself, because if you got it from Darwin you would have known the context - Chapter 6 in Origin of the Species is "Difficulties on Theory" and is dedicated to addressing any preliminary difficulties the reader may have thought up while reading chapers 1 to 5.
It starts out
"Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader"
At which point he lists difficulties the reader may have thought of - one being that bit you quoted out of context, and he then proceeds to directly address those perceived difficulties.
Transitional forms are everywhere, not only in the fossile record, but in your backyard garden.
From chapter 2 "That varieties of this doubtful nature are far from uncommon cannot be disputed. Compare the several floras of Great Britain, of France, or of the United States, drawn up by different botanists, and see what a surprising number of forms have been ranked by one botanist as good species, and by another as mere variety"
Basically, because of all the transitional forms out there, there is no objective way to determine what is a species and what is a variety (for example that stuff you were taught in high school about viable offspring isn't always applicable, and even when it is applicable it doesn't always work). Of course, if life were a continual flow of often divergent change as suggested by evolution, it suddenly makes sense that attempts to box it up into artificial pigeonholes labelled "species" just don't work.
The number of transitional forms dug out of the ground is pretty much as expected, there's nothing suspicious about it.
But lets say you have two fossils, lets call them Betty-sue and Jim-bob, and you claim the skeletal evidence suggests Betty-sue decended from Jim-bob, but critics claim you have a missing link. So you go out and find the missing link, lets call it Mary-kate, now you're in a pickle because now your critics claim you have 2 missing links - one between Betty-sue and Mary-kate, and one between Mary-kate and Jim-bob. It's a trick you can't beat no matter how many intermediate forms you find.
Aren't the standards here intended for educating in science? Because an education in science is not what the Kansas board is delivering.
If I were teaching religious studies, and in the Christianity section I was teaching ideas as Christian* beliefs when the Christians* didn't actually belive or promote those ideas, I would think it a fair call for the Christians to refuse to let me distribute their copyright material to further my agenda, infact I would expect it.
* Insert whatever specific brand of Christianity here.
Here is why scientists are trying to purge ID from science classes...
There is no scientific controversy about whether or not evolution took place, none, it is as thoroughly demonstrated as the theory of relativity. The only contraversy on the topic is in the United States from religious/political arenas. So to even teach in science class that there is some sort of debate going on would be to give a poorer science education, a better place to teach about the debate would be social studies, and the best place to study ID itself (disproven already) would be philosophy or religious studies.
It's not inappropriate to teach ID, but it's certainly inappropriate to teach it in science class.
Note that the lack of controversy refers to evolution, not abiogenesis, which many people seem to confuse, and there are plenty of technical details inside evolution which could be called controversial, but none at the level taught at high school.
I was interested in your link to flaws in evolution, because everybody says "evolution has holes" but I've never been able to find any of these holes which are supposedly common knowledge in America (I have been looking, I honestly do want to know the holes the in theory). The site you link to is kooky, it's not that they demonstrate complete scientific ignorance on the topics they discuss, for example entropy, it's that they must honestly think that every scientist overlooked such a glaring inconsistency - they must be pretty special. (So if anybody reading this can point me to a scientific account of holes in evolution, drop a reply)
As to why can't scientists yet perform abiogenesis with all of our scientific knowledge? I imagine the same reason we can't make a fusion reactor yet with all our scientific knowledge, or why we can't cure cancer or AIDS yet, or why we can't make carbon nanotubes in the lengths we want - we just don't know enough to do it yet.
You point about the Alien spacecraft at Area51 makes me wonder if I'm replying to a troll.
By hight powered, I meant the reader is directing a lot of power in the direction of the RFID.
Based on that testing, the Department, in cooperation with the GPO, will include an anti-skimming material in the front cover and spine of the electronic passport that will mitigate the threat of skimming from distances beyond the ten centimeters prescribed by the ISO 14443 technology, as long as the passport book is closed or nearly closed.
Note they chose the word mitigate, my understanding is that electric fields and EM radiation such as RF have an inverse squared relationship with distance, so if it's readable by a normal reader at 10cm, then a reader supplying 100 times the watts will induce enough power from a meter away, and 400 times the watts will induce enough power from 2 meters away. Parabolic antennas and transmitters could aid this in certain applications.
On the bright side, any sort of land mine would need a power source, making them harder to hide (clipped onto power poles etc), parabolic antennas wouldn't be suitable for that application, and if it ever became a reality then americans would just start carrying their passports in little passport wallets that are a full faraday cage.
Not all nefarious uses of RFID tags in passports require being able to read the contents of it. Easy identification of Americans for kidnapping in foreign countries, landmines that go off when an American walks past etc.
The safety of this will come down to how effective a faraday cage the passport cover really is in the face of high-powered readers - it's not a complete enclosure.
I am aware of that, I've seen the mortality rate of spanish flu put as low as 1%, but at 2.5% it still managed to kill in months more people than AIDS has killed worldwide, ever.
As H5N1 mutates, its mortatality rate is expected to drop, and as the pandemic progresses it should drop off even further. I made reference to 1918 because the parent poster kept saying that because it was a birdflu we were all safe and had no reason to worry unless we worked with poultry.
People for the most part don't care that a few poultry workers have gotten sick, people are worried that a new flu virus our immune systems have never seen before, one with a 50% mortality rate on fit young people, is about to make the species jump and become human to human transmittable the same way the human flu is.
This is what happened in 1918, and as you said yourself "Most Flu's in fact come from Bird's".
pick a date on which the US root zone file will no longer be responsible for containing the look-up information for non US country domains such as.br and.tv. Starting this day the US root zone file would point to the UN zone file for look-ups for the domains
This leaving the US in control of the forwarding, so if for example the US decided to rough up Venezuala a little they can stop forwarding.ve requests to the UN and handle those themselves, allowing them to hijack.gov.ve etc
You don't need to reflect a frequency (difusely or otherwise) to filter it, your filter can just absorb that frequency of light.
It's like mirror-shades vs normal shades.
Cellophane for example comes in many colours, and absorbs colours/frequencies rather than reflect them. If red cellophane only allowed red light to pass through it by reflecting all the other colours, it would look cyan (from the same side as the light source), but red cellophane only ever looks red.
You could also make an IR filter with the frequency cancellation trick used to make those brightly coloured titanium keys - though that filter would be in the form of a mirror.
While IR filters in a camera might opt for IR reflective lense coatings for (I personally don't know what they use or why), this doesn't prevent you placing the camera behind a normal IR absorbing filter.
I've bothered to respond to this because I like to believe and take people at face value, so have a tendency to give the benifit of the doubt. Here is a breakdown of why I am so appalled at your wording that I started to percieve deception.
The "lightning zapped a glob of primordial ooze, thus forming the first proteins" idea is not only unnatural (life coming from non-life), but also unproven (why can't we reproduce this phenomena today?)
The "lightning zapped a glob of primordial ooze, thus forming the first proteins" idea This is what's called a strawman argument - misrepresenting the other side to make it sound silly, and to make it refutable.
There is no "lightning zapped a glob of primordial ooze, thus forming the first proteins" thoery, nobody suggested lightning creates proteins, and you knew this. Yet you took the fact that researchers used lightning to form some of the basic building blocks the abiogenesis theory will need if it's to be demonstrated, and painted the whole idea as some crackpot Frakenstein 'just add lightning' theory.
You knowingly omit that abiogenesis didn't necessarily start with proteins, while claiming that the theory is busted by a lack of proteins.
but also unproven (why can't we reproduce this phenomena today?)
Every bit of progress the research has made in this area was proven and is reproducable, but in this line you portray the whole field as being unscientific - unproven and not reproducable. Of course you are right because what you are really doing is...
You are soundly refuting the strawman misrepresentation you constructed in the first place. And soundly refutable it is.
We are reproducing much, if not most, of the phenomena today.
Basically you have taken research where they are trying to diligently reproduce, understand, explain and document, every aspect of the formation of an RNA or DNA entity via natural means, with the end goal of being able to demonstrate the entire process, and presented scientists as making some grossly unsubstantiated "lightning struck and magic happened" claim, as if everybody is trying to gloss over the fact we don't have it all figured out yet.
Having read that article, you should have known better, but that you can read that page, miss both its points about the role space may play, and come away thinking it concluded life probably came from Mars or something, makes me wonder if you really just skim read it.
is not only unnatural (life coming from non-life) They're trying to make complex molecules (RNA, DNA, proteins) from naturally occuring molecules using natural processes, and this is "unnatural"? I'm not sure what to make of this line, I'm currently putting it down to the word "life" meaning something different to you than the scientific definition, and assume you're referring to the gap between a primitive metabolising DNA entity and a modern cell, rather than refering to the chemical ambiogenisis research. But there is still no logical grounds to the statement "life from non-life is unnatural", unless you know something about the origin of life that we don't.
Yet you still point to it as the source for all life, when not only has NO life actually been created, but no proteins have yet been created! I think you misunderstand why I pointed to it...
I cited that page because you had made out that lab expirements in this area had failed or suggested it was a dead end, whereas in reality, lab experiments are showing it to be an increasingly promising line of investigation.
I point to it as strong evidence that ambiogenisis researchers are on the right track. What are the chances eh? We're trying to figure out how life appeared and the building blocks just start assembling themselves for us out of primordial ooze experime
The "lightning zapped a glob of primordial ooze, thus forming the first proteins" idea is not only unnatural (life coming from non-life), but also unproven (why can't we reproduce this phenomena today?)
After you had read that article?
Because if you did, to so misrepresent the idea and the research when you actually knew better would make you a person who argues by deception.
If you wrote that after having read the article, then damn, you've reinforced my Christian stereotype. I guess deception is what the game of getting ID in schools is all about.
I think you missed the bus, seriously, or are being deliberately deceptive.
"The article ends up suggesting life came from Mars." No it doesn't, did you even read it? The article suggests that we don't just have primordial soup conditions to draw building blocks from, we can also also look at what building blocks are created naturally in outer-space conditions. It also points out that if life came from space that doesn't actually change the problem.
You are right that it doesn't claim to create proteins, you (deliberately?) neglect to mention it turns out we may not need to.
In principal, the minimal functions of life might have begun with RNA and only later did
proteins take over the catalytic machinery of metabolism and
DNA take over as the repository of the genetic code.
The idea of starting with RNA which has everything you need for evolutionary processes, and investigating where evolution can take RNA, is what I was talking about in one of the other posts.
So, so sum up... From simple primordial soup, and outerspace conditions we have so far managed to assemble nearly all of the building blocks - now that suggests to me that they're onto something. However it feels like your line of thinking (ie "but they haven't got a protein yet") would be that after they found the first amino acid that primordial soup could create, they should have said "yeah, but there's still 19 others we don't have, so this idea must be a dead end".
Science is a work in progress, and it looks like they're making a lot of progress in this area, I don't understand why you think they must be wrong just because the work is still underway. Yes, they could be wrong, but that the idea has gotten so far suggests to me it would be rather ignorant to dismiss out of hand at this point in time.
The "lightning zapped a glob of primordial ooze, thus forming the first proteins" idea is not only unnatural (life coming from non-life), but also unproven (why can't we reproduce this phenomena today?)
Regarding "not only unnatural (life coming from non-life)", for that statement to make any sense, I suspect you use the word 'life' to describe something different to what we are seeking as the origin of life.
As an interesting side topic, the theory of evolution may end up playing a part in solving the origin of life.
Traditionally evolution concerns what happens after the first single celled organism turns up on the scene, but I was using the phrase "first reproducing entity" because a single celled organism is still far too complex to just happen by random chance, so some people are looking into the line of thought that since evolution can produce extremely complex designs, and a single celled organism is an extremely complex design, perhaps we should start by looking at the non-living phenomina in nature that replicate, and see what mechanisms of selection those are being exposed to.
Yes, both statements you quoted are completely accurate and consistent with each other, so there must be misunderstanding somewhere.
How the first self-reproducing entity could have appeared has nothing to do with evolution, evolution is a theory demonstrating how a simple self-reproducing entity can lead to the diverse species we see today.
And just as evolution does not attempt to answer why planets orbit, or why the speed of light is constant, it does not attempt to answer where life came from.
As an analogy, big bang theory has nothing to do with how the universe could come to exist, instead, big bang is a theory figuring out what happened once the universe came into existence.
Evolution does not leave the origin of the species unanswered, you may be confusing the phrase "origin of the species" with the origin of life.
But evolution doesn't leave the origin of the species unanswered.
Are you suggesting that because we don't know the origin of life (an entirely different kettle of fish), we should teach the the origin of the species (which we do know) side by side with an unscientific alternate explaination of species in science classes?
Big bang theory concerns what happened once our universe came into existence, it does not address the issue of why our universe came into existence.
Since we don't know what caused the big bang either, does that mean we should teach creationism in astronomy classes too? This seems exactly analogous to your argument to me.
Why not just teach creationism and ID in theology classes, and leave the science classes to teach the scientific theories?
Evolution isn't just about selecting from genetic mutations, though I have no doubt it will do that whenever a mutation happens.
All the offspring of a plant or animal vary, in the same way you are different from your parents and different from your siblings - think how much your medical record differs from that of your siblings.
Evolution is selecting the best of these individual variations - the best activated gene combinations, not just gene mutations. Think of how much variance there is in domesticated dogs (eg dogs that fit in a teacup, hunting dogs, racing dogs), I don't think that variance is from random mutations as much as the right gene combinations, from successive human selection.
Plus I strongly suspect there are more causes of variation than new combinations of existing genes, and new mutations, but I haven't looked into it.
Due to things like sexual selection, the pool of genes that is combined to look for good combinations is not random, even though the combinations that are tried from that pool is believed to be.
But yeah, there is an element of randomness to the pool evolution draws from.
To say evolutionists have all the answers isn't true, is it?
Unlike religion, science is not about having all the answers, science is about finding the answers, it's a work in progress.
We've found out about evolution, but are still looking into how the first self-reproducing entity could have appeared.
If you need something to have "all the answers" before you will consider any answers it does have, then science isn't for you, and it's what gets taught in *science* class that is what the debate is about.
Evolution doesn't have any real answer for how life originated because evolution doesn't have anything to do with how life originated, evolution concerns what happened after there was life.
Nobody educated has claimed that evolution is the answer to the origin of life, that's an entirely different puzzle that science is still cracking.
So my question to you, is if IDists are OK with evolution after life originated (since no high school science class is teaching evolution as the origin of life), why are they positioning ID as an alternative to evolution?
It honestly sounds like you're trying to make them sound reasonable by putting words in their mouths that they wouldn't agree with.
FWIW "speciation" can be a misleading concept, it's not an 'event' that happens, two groups of organisms (for example) slowly become more distinct over time and when we want to call them a different species is an entirely subjective decision on our part, all that stuff you hear about producing viable offspring is over simplified.
I think you miss the point of evolution, it's not random dumb luck that it happened upon a fantastic design - evolution isn't random selection, it's natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, and probably other selection mechanisms we haven't discovered yet. Evolution is in a sense guided - there are demonstratable mechanisms at work selecting the very best variations in offspring and discarding the rest.
The universe does not appear to be infinite, nor does the time it has existing for. Evolution isn't an example of infinite monkeys on typewriters coming up with shakespear.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn!
.net and I presume (possibly incorrectly) that that .net isn't flexible enough to grant any of its languages that ability.
;)
That's been a wish of mine for a while.
I regarded it more an irritating OO model shortcoming, since I'd not yet seen a language that allowed it.
Good to hear the feature is out there, and in a language that actually gets used.
Unfortunately in this regard, my next platform will be
You get a +1 Educational virtual mod from me
You cannot harness heat as energy, you can only harness a difference in heat energy.
For example, you couldn't produce power from a 300 heat source if the surrounding temperature is also 300. But if the surrounding temperature was -40 then you could produce power from even a 0 heat source.
Personally, colder climates seem to have less bugs and disease, and air-conditioning works backwards too.
You seem to be the one to ask...
What's so special about these things having email on a phone? I've had this for years with a normal nokia (it just uses GPRS), and my phone isn't even a smartphone - the phone I had before that could do email too, and it didn't even come with a camera in it.
I presume Blackberrys must have some kind of value adding email interface, which is why I'm asking (cos my old phones just do vanilla pop/imap). Does it poll in the background (but I presume any old smartphone could do this), or the carrier pushes new mail notifications to it?
So, as a book refuting evolution, writen in the United States by a christian with no scientific background or education beyond highschool, it's not quite what I had in mind.
However, the book holds my interest in that his credentials suggest the book may shine above the deliberate misrepresentations and outright lies that typify normal creationist tactics (Even in this thread for example, that anonymous coward posting about no transitional fossils when there are thousands, and then deliberately misquoting Darwin). So if the book is honest instead of agenda driven then it will be worth a look.
However, digging deeper, "The Case For A Creator" does not appear to be a genuine investigation, for example:
Fortunately, someone has gone to the effort to source equally expert views on the topics the book covers to to provide the reader with the full story
So I will be able to decide for myself whose arguments are better
I assume you got that quote from a creationist website rather than from Darwin himself, because if you got it from Darwin you would have known the context - Chapter 6 in Origin of the Species is "Difficulties on Theory" and is dedicated to addressing any preliminary difficulties the reader may have thought up while reading chapers 1 to 5.
It starts out
"Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader"
At which point he lists difficulties the reader may have thought of - one being that bit you quoted out of context, and he then proceeds to directly address those perceived difficulties.
Transitional forms are everywhere, not only in the fossile record, but in your backyard garden.
From chapter 2
"That varieties of this doubtful nature are far from uncommon cannot be disputed. Compare the several floras of Great Britain, of France, or of the United States, drawn up by different botanists, and see what a surprising number of forms have been ranked by one botanist as good species, and by another as mere variety"
Basically, because of all the transitional forms out there, there is no objective way to determine what is a species and what is a variety (for example that stuff you were taught in high school about viable offspring isn't always applicable, and even when it is applicable it doesn't always work). Of course, if life were a continual flow of often divergent change as suggested by evolution, it suddenly makes sense that attempts to box it up into artificial pigeonholes labelled "species" just don't work.
But back to bones:
The missing link is a popular and not a scientific concept
The number of transitional forms dug out of the ground is pretty much as expected, there's nothing suspicious about it.
But lets say you have two fossils, lets call them Betty-sue and Jim-bob, and you claim the skeletal evidence suggests Betty-sue decended from Jim-bob, but critics claim you have a missing link. So you go out and find the missing link, lets call it Mary-kate, now you're in a pickle because now your critics claim you have 2 missing links - one between Betty-sue and Mary-kate, and one between Mary-kate and Jim-bob. It's a trick you can't beat no matter how many intermediate forms you find.
Aren't the standards here intended for educating in science? Because an education in science is not what the Kansas board is delivering.
If I were teaching religious studies, and in the Christianity section I was teaching ideas as Christian* beliefs when the Christians* didn't actually belive or promote those ideas, I would think it a fair call for the Christians to refuse to let me distribute their copyright material to further my agenda, infact I would expect it.
* Insert whatever specific brand of Christianity here.
Here is why scientists are trying to purge ID from science classes...
There is no scientific controversy about whether or not evolution took place, none, it is as thoroughly demonstrated as the theory of relativity. The only contraversy on the topic is in the United States from religious/political arenas. So to even teach in science class that there is some sort of debate going on would be to give a poorer science education, a better place to teach about the debate would be social studies, and the best place to study ID itself (disproven already) would be philosophy or religious studies.
It's not inappropriate to teach ID, but it's certainly inappropriate to teach it in science class.
Note that the lack of controversy refers to evolution, not abiogenesis, which many people seem to confuse, and there are plenty of technical details inside evolution which could be called controversial, but none at the level taught at high school.
I was interested in your link to flaws in evolution, because everybody says "evolution has holes" but I've never been able to find any of these holes which are supposedly common knowledge in America (I have been looking, I honestly do want to know the holes the in theory). The site you link to is kooky, it's not that they demonstrate complete scientific ignorance on the topics they discuss, for example entropy, it's that they must honestly think that every scientist overlooked such a glaring inconsistency - they must be pretty special. (So if anybody reading this can point me to a scientific account of holes in evolution, drop a reply)
As to why can't scientists yet perform abiogenesis with all of our scientific knowledge? I imagine the same reason we can't make a fusion reactor yet with all our scientific knowledge, or why we can't cure cancer or AIDS yet, or why we can't make carbon nanotubes in the lengths we want - we just don't know enough to do it yet.
You point about the Alien spacecraft at Area51 makes me wonder if I'm replying to a troll.
Note they chose the word mitigate, my understanding is that electric fields and EM radiation such as RF have an inverse squared relationship with distance, so if it's readable by a normal reader at 10cm, then a reader supplying 100 times the watts will induce enough power from a meter away, and 400 times the watts will induce enough power from 2 meters away. Parabolic antennas and transmitters could aid this in certain applications.
On the bright side, any sort of land mine would need a power source, making them harder to hide (clipped onto power poles etc), parabolic antennas wouldn't be suitable for that application, and if it ever became a reality then americans would just start carrying their passports in little passport wallets that are a full faraday cage.
Not all nefarious uses of RFID tags in passports require being able to read the contents of it. Easy identification of Americans for kidnapping in foreign countries, landmines that go off when an American walks past etc.
The safety of this will come down to how effective a faraday cage the passport cover really is in the face of high-powered readers - it's not a complete enclosure.
I am aware of that, I've seen the mortality rate of spanish flu put as low as 1%, but at 2.5% it still managed to kill in months more people than AIDS has killed worldwide, ever.
As H5N1 mutates, its mortatality rate is expected to drop, and as the pandemic progresses it should drop off even further. I made reference to 1918 because the parent poster kept saying that because it was a birdflu we were all safe and had no reason to worry unless we worked with poultry.
I think you've missed the point.
People for the most part don't care that a few poultry workers have gotten sick, people are worried that a new flu virus our immune systems have never seen before, one with a 50% mortality rate on fit young people, is about to make the species jump and become human to human transmittable the same way the human flu is.
This is what happened in 1918, and as you said yourself "Most Flu's in fact come from Bird's".
This leaving the US in control of the forwarding, so if for example the US decided to rough up Venezuala a little they can stop forwarding
You don't need to reflect a frequency (difusely or otherwise) to filter it, your filter can just absorb that frequency of light.
It's like mirror-shades vs normal shades.
Cellophane for example comes in many colours, and absorbs colours/frequencies rather than reflect them. If red cellophane only allowed red light to pass through it by reflecting all the other colours, it would look cyan (from the same side as the light source), but red cellophane only ever looks red.
You could also make an IR filter with the frequency cancellation trick used to make those brightly coloured titanium keys - though that filter would be in the form of a mirror.
While IR filters in a camera might opt for IR reflective lense coatings for (I personally don't know what they use or why), this doesn't prevent you placing the camera behind a normal IR absorbing filter.
I use normal $2 ear plugs (which drop the noise by ~30dB), and have my headphones over top of them (with the volume wound up ~30dB).
Of course if you're on the go and need earphones instead of headphones then those newfandangled Etymotic ER-6 earplugs sound like just the thing.
The "lightning zapped a glob of primordial ooze, thus forming the first proteins" idea
This is what's called a strawman argument - misrepresenting the other side to make it sound silly, and to make it refutable.
but also unproven (why can't we reproduce this phenomena today?)
Basically you have taken research where they are trying to diligently reproduce, understand, explain and document, every aspect of the formation of an RNA or DNA entity via natural means, with the end goal of being able to demonstrate the entire process, and presented scientists as making some grossly unsubstantiated "lightning struck and magic happened" claim, as if everybody is trying to gloss over the fact we don't have it all figured out yet.
Having read that article, you should have known better, but that you can read that page, miss both its points about the role space may play, and come away thinking it concluded life probably came from Mars or something, makes me wonder if you really just skim read it.
is not only unnatural (life coming from non-life)
They're trying to make complex molecules (RNA, DNA, proteins) from naturally occuring molecules using natural processes, and this is "unnatural"? I'm not sure what to make of this line, I'm currently putting it down to the word "life" meaning something different to you than the scientific definition, and assume you're referring to the gap between a primitive metabolising DNA entity and a modern cell, rather than refering to the chemical ambiogenisis research. But there is still no logical grounds to the statement "life from non-life is unnatural", unless you know something about the origin of life that we don't.
Yet you still point to it as the source for all life, when not only has NO life actually been created, but no proteins have yet been created!
I think you misunderstand why I pointed to it...
After you had read that article?
Because if you did, to so misrepresent the idea and the research when you actually knew better would make you a person who argues by deception.
If you wrote that after having read the article, then damn, you've reinforced my Christian stereotype. I guess deception is what the game of getting ID in schools is all about.
"The article ends up suggesting life came from Mars." No it doesn't, did you even read it? The article suggests that we don't just have primordial soup conditions to draw building blocks from, we can also also look at what building blocks are created naturally in outer-space conditions. It also points out that if life came from space that doesn't actually change the problem.
You are right that it doesn't claim to create proteins, you (deliberately?) neglect to mention it turns out we may not need to.
The idea of starting with RNA which has everything you need for evolutionary processes, and investigating where evolution can take RNA, is what I was talking about in one of the other posts.
So, so sum up...
From simple primordial soup, and outerspace conditions we have so far managed to assemble nearly all of the building blocks - now that suggests to me that they're onto something. However it feels like your line of thinking (ie "but they haven't got a protein yet") would be that after they found the first amino acid that primordial soup could create, they should have said "yeah, but there's still 19 others we don't have, so this idea must be a dead end".
Science is a work in progress, and it looks like they're making a lot of progress in this area, I don't understand why you think they must be wrong just because the work is still underway. Yes, they could be wrong, but that the idea has gotten so far suggests to me it would be rather ignorant to dismiss out of hand at this point in time.
We are reproducing this phenomena today and are most of the way there.
Regarding "not only unnatural (life coming from non-life)", for that statement to make any sense, I suspect you use the word 'life' to describe something different to what we are seeking as the origin of life.
Yup,
As an interesting side topic, the theory of evolution may end up playing a part in solving the origin of life.
Traditionally evolution concerns what happens after the first single celled organism turns up on the scene, but I was using the phrase "first reproducing entity" because a single celled organism is still far too complex to just happen by random chance, so some people are looking into the line of thought that since evolution can produce extremely complex designs, and a single celled organism is an extremely complex design, perhaps we should start by looking at the non-living phenomina in nature that replicate, and see what mechanisms of selection those are being exposed to.
Yes, both statements you quoted are completely accurate and consistent with each other, so there must be misunderstanding somewhere.
How the first self-reproducing entity could have appeared has nothing to do with evolution, evolution is a theory demonstrating how a simple self-reproducing entity can lead to the diverse species we see today.
And just as evolution does not attempt to answer why planets orbit, or why the speed of light is constant, it does not attempt to answer where life came from.
As an analogy, big bang theory has nothing to do with how the universe could come to exist, instead, big bang is a theory figuring out what happened once the universe came into existence.
Evolution does not leave the origin of the species unanswered, you may be confusing the phrase "origin of the species" with the origin of life.
But evolution doesn't leave the origin of the species unanswered.
Are you suggesting that because we don't know the origin of life (an entirely different kettle of fish), we should teach the the origin of the species (which we do know) side by side with an unscientific alternate explaination of species in science classes?
Big bang theory concerns what happened once our universe came into existence, it does not address the issue of why our universe came into existence.
Since we don't know what caused the big bang either, does that mean we should teach creationism in astronomy classes too? This seems exactly analogous to your argument to me.
Why not just teach creationism and ID in theology classes, and leave the science classes to teach the scientific theories?
Evolution isn't just about selecting from genetic mutations, though I have no doubt it will do that whenever a mutation happens.
All the offspring of a plant or animal vary, in the same way you are different from your parents and different from your siblings - think how much your medical record differs from that of your siblings.
Evolution is selecting the best of these individual variations - the best activated gene combinations, not just gene mutations. Think of how much variance there is in domesticated dogs (eg dogs that fit in a teacup, hunting dogs, racing dogs), I don't think that variance is from random mutations as much as the right gene combinations, from successive human selection.
Plus I strongly suspect there are more causes of variation than new combinations of existing genes, and new mutations, but I haven't looked into it.
Due to things like sexual selection, the pool of genes that is combined to look for good combinations is not random, even though the combinations that are tried from that pool is believed to be.
But yeah, there is an element of randomness to the pool evolution draws from.
Unlike religion, science is not about having all the answers, science is about finding the answers, it's a work in progress.
We've found out about evolution, but are still looking into how the first self-reproducing entity could have appeared.
If you need something to have "all the answers" before you will consider any answers it does have, then science isn't for you, and it's what gets taught in *science* class that is what the debate is about.
(By "you", I don't mean you personally)
Evolution doesn't have any real answer for how life originated because evolution doesn't have anything to do with how life originated, evolution concerns what happened after there was life.
Nobody educated has claimed that evolution is the answer to the origin of life, that's an entirely different puzzle that science is still cracking.
So my question to you, is if IDists are OK with evolution after life originated (since no high school science class is teaching evolution as the origin of life), why are they positioning ID as an alternative to evolution?
It honestly sounds like you're trying to make them sound reasonable by putting words in their mouths that they wouldn't agree with.
FWIW "speciation" can be a misleading concept, it's not an 'event' that happens, two groups of organisms (for example) slowly become more distinct over time and when we want to call them a different species is an entirely subjective decision on our part, all that stuff you hear about producing viable offspring is over simplified.
I think you miss the point of evolution, it's not random dumb luck that it happened upon a fantastic design - evolution isn't random selection, it's natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, and probably other selection mechanisms we haven't discovered yet. Evolution is in a sense guided - there are demonstratable mechanisms at work selecting the very best variations in offspring and discarding the rest.
The universe does not appear to be infinite, nor does the time it has existing for. Evolution isn't an example of infinite monkeys on typewriters coming up with shakespear.