Yes, human error due to different humans using different systems of measurement.
I'm not suggesting an instant transition, but I honestly don't see the costs of teaching children metric values making the whole venture ill-advised. Its worked for most of the rest of the world, are the people of America & the UK really so dumb/stubborn/proud that they can't eventually make the same transition? I'd certainly like to think not.
And by your argument, where forcing people to use a system that they're unfamiliar with causes just as many errors as using the old system, sounds to me like an argument for the switch. Their familiarity would improve with time, after all, while the old system would not.
I don't really see how the benefits would outweigh the costs of forcing people to switch over.
Uhm, Mars Climate Orbiter? That was $125M down the pan in 1999, due entirely to one group of US engineers using imperial/english units, and failing to successfully communicate this to the rest, who did not.
Surely the key driving force is the past 60 years of atrocities?
Religion, ethnicity, large walls, and other things that draw a clear dividing line between the peoples obviously intensify matters, but it seems to me that the key factor is that the two side hate each other passionately, because they have a history of hating each other passionately, and have in the past given each other many reasons to do so?
Also, don't assume religion is key as to why they fight over this particular patch of desert. The Israelies won't let the Palestinians leave, and I doubt anywhere else would take them anyway.
They've been "talking" since 1948? Thats a bizarre definition.
And lets be clear, every single day, rockets certainly do NOT rain down on Sderot. That's gross exaggeration. The latest cease fire certainl wasn't unanimously adhered to, but it was a significant improvement.
Its not my intention to attempt to justify any violence by Hamas et al, but after 60 years in what amounts to an oversized concentration camp, its understandable that people get more than a little mad.
Also, I'd debate that the overwhelming majority of americans are reasonable (the overwhelming majority of all people are not),
and that Turkey is the only Muslim country to have kept to any international treaty while under any pressure.
And lastly, you seem to be of the impression that Israel complies with international law? Ha!
I could have sworn I studied these at some point, but today I'm stuck with this one question:
Electromagnetism is conveyed by photons, which can't escape the singularity.
Electricity and magnetism are merely two aspects of electomagnetism, so electric & magnetic fields are (I can but presume) conveyed by photons themselves.
So how does the charge inside the singularity effect the outside? Its not gonna be skewing the charge of the Hawking radiation...
I appreciate that for the charge to be one of the 3 parameters for characterising a black hole, it has to be able to have an external effect... but hell if I can work out how.
Damn, this is what getting a job in software does to the mind...
Thats a bit much. I can't think of anything thats worth pursuing at all costs. Every decision has a cost, and only by careful weighing of all potential costs against any potential gains can a sensible opinion be formed.
In this case, I just happen think that the gain of saving a significant number of lives annually is well worth the cost of having to use seperate knives for poking & slicing large pieces of meat.
When travelling around mainland europe, some friends and I bashed out an idea along these lines, except that it would translate signs into your language of choice.
Ideally it would get its translations over the net, using Babelfish or whatever, and it could even use your current location to decide what default language it was translating from.
Any app I wrote would probably be slow as buggery for doing all that OCR stuff on an N95, but the biggest flaw in the plan was... roaming data charges/access.
Not much use being able to read a sign if going online for 30 seconds costs you more than your dinner.
I doubt Mr Ploppy would be in favor of banning darts, cable ties, etc, but regardless, are you honestly advocating that its ok for kids to go around stabbing each other, as long as cooks don't have to use a different knife for poking meat than they do for cutting it? If not, and you're against taking the knives off the streets, presumably we should legalize guns and hand them out to the "good" kids to defend themselves with?
Yes, a pointy-knife ban is no magic wand, but a lot of UK cities have a serious knife crime problem amongst teenagers, and such a ban seemingly wouldn't inconvenience anyone but a few celebrity chefs. Most people agree that something has to be done, so do you have a better suggestion for combating the knife crime problem? Or would you say it shouldn't be interfered with?
Indeed. They probably won't be able to get more than a few generations smaller before quantum fluctuations become too signficant.
By the time your transistor is on the scale of only a few dozen atoms, its going to stop being a transistor some of the time, and do its own damn thing.
True, I agree that this is the case in many situations, in particular among the less-than-experts such as myself (and those that make 'science' programs on TV). But wouldn't such flash-fossilisation be expected only to occur in volcanic rock, as it takes a massive eruption to cause it? Ergo fossils found in non-volcanic rock couldn't be easily attributed to this method.
While I see the attraction of the "created to appear older" hypothesis, I feel the metaphysics become somewhat intellectually cumbersome, because if everything God does is perfect, then so must be this 'illusion' of being created to appear much older. And in order to get the appearance of being much older exactly right, God must have imagined / simulated / created elsewhere the much older universe in exact detail. And is that any less valid a state of 'existance' than the one we inhabit?
If not, then is there even a scientific distinction worth making between the world being created to appear older and actually being older?
I agree, as a Christian I believe that rationalism alone cannot explain all of existence. For the purposes of understanding the material universe, however, its the best we've got. I also believe that the bible cannot explain geology, cosmology, biology or quantum physics, for the simple reason that it doesn't try to. The authors had virtually no understanding of these things even by the standard of a modern lay person, and nor would they be relevant if they did. While religion and sociology clearly have a place in the application of science, I honestly believe they have very little to say about the underlying principles.
--
Yes indeed, there are many assumptions and uncertainties underlying all dating techniques, but that is why all such datings (like any other measurement of the physical world) include uncertainties, in the case of carbon dating these can range from decade to millenia. The techniques for combining uncertainties are extremely well understood, as are those for reducing uncertainties by repeated measurement.
I'm neither a geophysicist or an archaeologist, but this article seems somewhat confused. Firstly, it acknowledges that carbon dating is only useful for up to roughly 10 half-lives (roughly ~60000 years), but then the author claims that he expects carbon dating of dinosaur bones (which ought to be a minimum of 65 million years old), when revised, to prove them to be much younger than currently believed.
Some pretty fundamental mistakes here, not the least of which is that there are no dinosaur bones. There are only fossils, which are stones in the shape of the original bone, these contain no organic material at all. There is nothing in these bones to perform carbon dating on, and I know of no instance of anyone ever seriously attempting to do so.
If dinosaur fossils are, as claimed, merely several thousand years old, then those making the claim ought to explain quite why all bones from dinosaurs have turned to stone, but no other bones from "the same period" of several thousand years ago have done so. It may be argued that dinosaurs lived in a different place to all modern mammals, and were subject to radically different geological forces (including fossilisation a hundred times faster than is commonly accepted), but the evidence contradicts this (dinosaur and mammal fossils have been found on every continent).
Carbon dating is only applicable to organics, and only to those formed under certain circumstances in the relatively recent past. It is one of many different techniques used for dating ancient things (most apply to geological features, eg rock), and these agree well with each other for dating geological features.
Returning to the discussion of recent 6-day Creationism, the evidence really does suggest this was not the case. The only form that would seem to be consistent with the geological records would be that the earth was created to appear exactly as if it were many billions of years old, and as this is by definition indistinguishable from the earth actually being many billions of years old, there would be no point in questioning the results of modern radiometric dating techniques. It would simply be a matter of faith.
To study any modern discipline, yes, you can't begin by proving every first principle, and expect to catch up with the rest of the world in a single lifetime. But this doesn't mean that most, or even many of the underlying assumptions are completely wrong.
No one can prove that 1 + 1 will always equal 2, we can only try it many times and get the same result every time. A single differing result (when validated) would throw all of mathmatics into disarray, but most mathematicians don't lose much sleep worrying about this possibility.
I can only speak wrt physics, but it may suprise you just how often the most basic of assumptions are revisited during theoretical work - constantly!
Claims that much of modern science is based on error, lies and innapropriate supposition are quite exaggerated.
Yes, we assume that much remains constant, that the laws of physics on Earth today are the essentially the same as they were a few thousand years ago. Or a few billion. These assumptions are justified, however, by a wealth of observations. They have proven themselves worthy of being upheld. As far as we can measure, throughout the universe the laws of physics have been essentially constant for at least the last 10 billion years. Yes, there is a chance that some of the "universal constants" may change slightly over billions of years, but only negligibly. As far as we're concerned, everywhere we look within our galaxy and its immediate vicinity, the laws of physics are identical to those here.
The claim that all our methods of dating things older than a few thousand years should be so wrong as to be off by a factor of ~one million and no one in the trade has spotted this discrepancy (or that they're all part of a consipiricy, or anything else) requires justification. Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, and all that.
I'm afraid I have to disagree. I'm terrified of "We're all going to starve."
Here in the west, where farmers have access to crops with more than one form of resistance to the various important blights and diseases that would happily turn them to moosh. Throughout much of asia and africa, the farmers are less fortunate, using strains of wheat with only one or two resistances to stem rust... with disatrous consequences, now that it's bypassed those defenses. Unless big agri-biz (or anyone else) can come up with new resistances (and distribute them) soon, wheat's pretty much screwed.
Besides, even if we have enough food, which I'd debate, it costs someone to make it, and that someone generally doesn't want to give it away to the starving masses who have nothing left to buy it with...
Au contraire, when Griffin came on board, for a while it looked like MSL was going to launch reasonably on-time, despite Ares/Orion... so they needed to reform to get back to the tried & tested method of delays & ballooning expenses!
I won't be drawn on inter-denominational rivalries, there's enough of that sort of bickering in the world, and I don't believe its relevant.
I agree that ID is perceived as (and intended to be) 'Creationism evolved' (good pun!), but there is a fundamental difference: Literal biblical creationism (for some people) follows from belief in the existance of God. Of a specific, known God. ID does not. Even if accepted, it offers no clues as to who that designer is, whether they are omiscient and omnipotent or merely more advanced than us, and crucially, offers nothing to indicate that this designer is in any way interested in human affairs. Or even that they're still around.
If evolution is a result of materialistic philosophy, "X evolved from Y"; then ID is equally materialist, "We know of no Y from which X could have evolved from, and we cannot envisage what function component parts of X could play before being incorporated into X, ergo X cannot have evolved."
Creationism is clearly not a materialistic argument, but I hold that ID is. Furthermore, if used as a grounds for theology, that theology is based on a God-of-the-Gaps argument (we don't know how that works, so it must be God) which is always liable to crumble. Claiming that something has an irreducable complexity also requires faith (in a materialistic theory) that no scientific advance will ever refute such a claim. (For instance, claims that the bacterial phlagellum could not have evolved as its components could serve no useful purpose were significantly undermined when one of those components was found to play a role in one of the offensive mechanisms of Salmonella - reference here if you can stand the annoying tone)
Lastly, yes, I agree, evolution only makes sense if you take 6-day creationism off the table, as the timescales required for anything but the most basic speciation require significantly more than several thousand years. But what takes that off the table, I believe, is the evidence of our own eyes and minds. To paraphrase Galileo, "I do not feel compelled to believe that the same God who endowed me with reason and intellect, intended me to forego their use."
The reason for this failure rate is, at least in part, due to a lack of insight/foresight by those commisioning or selecting the software.
Unfair example: The Edinburgh Fringe (comedy festival) this year decided that instead of using a recognised ticket-booking system, they would hire a company at a few months notice to produce one from scratch for them. For indecipherable reasons, they chose a local start up with no background to speak of, or any previous clients or anything... and it failed completely.
Lets face it, even if we retrieved a sample and analysed it in a lab, we wouldn't be able to say with any real certainty where it came from. We could probably rule out a lot of places it didn't come from, but without sampling a variety of comets from a variety of local star systems, we won't have anything but speculation to compare it to.
Besides, its only speculation that suggests it didn't come from our own Kuiper belt in the first place - we don't know enough about that to be sure.
Modern 'Creationism' (of the traditionally American form of 'literally' interpreting Genesis) is precisely that, a modern phenomenon. In his 4th century writing, Augustine refuted those that would interpret the opening of Genesis as describing a 6-day process of creation, instead considering it to be a logical framework, rather than a chronology. [1]
Many Christians believe God created a universe of emergent complexity, designed to bring about modern humanity (and everything else) from base principles (or from nothing, from "dust" ala Genesis). Set against this worldview, ID appears nothing more than a God-of-the-Gaps argument, "God couldn't have created a universe where X evolved, thats too difficult!"
Perhaps my wording there is mildly flippant, but regardless of how it is phrased, I consider this argument divinely insulting. Which is a more glorious achievement: creating a world in the blink of an eye (or over 6 days) that will be used up and worthless after only a few thousand years, or designing a process that will, after many billions of years, slowly produce a world that will be continually reshaped over aeons until it produces life, and ultimately man? It is a mistake for any of us to assume that God is constrained to our understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, they're safe. They don't conduct (afaik). This is an issue for long wires and satellites, so your CDs are fine.
Two words: Food distribution
Yes, human error due to different humans using different systems of measurement.
I'm not suggesting an instant transition, but I honestly don't see the costs of teaching children metric values making the whole venture ill-advised. Its worked for most of the rest of the world, are the people of America & the UK really so dumb/stubborn/proud that they can't eventually make the same transition? I'd certainly like to think not.
And by your argument, where forcing people to use a system that they're unfamiliar with causes just as many errors as using the old system, sounds to me like an argument for the switch. Their familiarity would improve with time, after all, while the old system would not.
I don't really see how the benefits would outweigh the costs of forcing people to switch over.
Uhm, Mars Climate Orbiter? That was $125M down the pan in 1999, due entirely to one group of US engineers using imperial/english units, and failing to successfully communicate this to the rest, who did not.
Surely the key driving force is the past 60 years of atrocities?
Religion, ethnicity, large walls, and other things that draw a clear dividing line between the peoples obviously intensify matters, but it seems to me that the key factor is that the two side hate each other passionately, because they have a history of hating each other passionately, and have in the past given each other many reasons to do so?
Also, don't assume religion is key as to why they fight over this particular patch of desert. The Israelies won't let the Palestinians leave, and I doubt anywhere else would take them anyway.
It is obvious that the Israelis are not intentionally attacking the civilian population.
Ha
They've been "talking" since 1948? Thats a bizarre definition.
And lets be clear, every single day, rockets certainly do NOT rain down on Sderot. That's gross exaggeration. The latest cease fire certainl wasn't unanimously adhered to, but it was a significant improvement.
Its not my intention to attempt to justify any violence by Hamas et al, but after 60 years in what amounts to an oversized concentration camp, its understandable that people get more than a little mad.
Also, I'd debate that the overwhelming majority of americans are reasonable (the overwhelming majority of all people are not),
and that Turkey is the only Muslim country to have kept to any international treaty while under any pressure.
And lastly, you seem to be of the impression that Israel complies with international law? Ha!
I could have sworn I studied these at some point, but today I'm stuck with this one question:
Electromagnetism is conveyed by photons, which can't escape the singularity.
Electricity and magnetism are merely two aspects of electomagnetism, so electric & magnetic fields are (I can but presume) conveyed by photons themselves.
So how does the charge inside the singularity effect the outside? Its not gonna be skewing the charge of the Hawking radiation...
I appreciate that for the charge to be one of the 3 parameters for characterising a black hole, it has to be able to have an external effect... but hell if I can work out how.
Damn, this is what getting a job in software does to the mind...
Thats a bit much. I can't think of anything thats worth pursuing at all costs. Every decision has a cost, and only by careful weighing of all potential costs against any potential gains can a sensible opinion be formed.
In this case, I just happen think that the gain of saving a significant number of lives annually is well worth the cost of having to use seperate knives for poking & slicing large pieces of meat.
When travelling around mainland europe, some friends and I bashed out an idea along these lines, except that it would translate signs into your language of choice. Ideally it would get its translations over the net, using Babelfish or whatever, and it could even use your current location to decide what default language it was translating from. Any app I wrote would probably be slow as buggery for doing all that OCR stuff on an N95, but the biggest flaw in the plan was ... roaming data charges/access.
Not much use being able to read a sign if going online for 30 seconds costs you more than your dinner.
But presumably chefs should be consulted on issues of stab wounds?
I doubt Mr Ploppy would be in favor of banning darts, cable ties, etc, but regardless, are you honestly advocating that its ok for kids to go around stabbing each other, as long as cooks don't have to use a different knife for poking meat than they do for cutting it? If not, and you're against taking the knives off the streets, presumably we should legalize guns and hand them out to the "good" kids to defend themselves with?
Yes, a pointy-knife ban is no magic wand, but a lot of UK cities have a serious knife crime problem amongst teenagers, and such a ban seemingly wouldn't inconvenience anyone but a few celebrity chefs. Most people agree that something has to be done, so do you have a better suggestion for combating the knife crime problem? Or would you say it shouldn't be interfered with?
Of course it was. Its not sexism if its males being bashed! sigh...
Indeed. They probably won't be able to get more than a few generations smaller before quantum fluctuations become too signficant. By the time your transistor is on the scale of only a few dozen atoms, its going to stop being a transistor some of the time, and do its own damn thing.
True, I agree that this is the case in many situations, in particular among the less-than-experts such as myself (and those that make 'science' programs on TV). But wouldn't such flash-fossilisation be expected only to occur in volcanic rock, as it takes a massive eruption to cause it? Ergo fossils found in non-volcanic rock couldn't be easily attributed to this method.
While I see the attraction of the "created to appear older" hypothesis, I feel the metaphysics become somewhat intellectually cumbersome, because if everything God does is perfect, then so must be this 'illusion' of being created to appear much older. And in order to get the appearance of being much older exactly right, God must have imagined / simulated / created elsewhere the much older universe in exact detail. And is that any less valid a state of 'existance' than the one we inhabit?
If not, then is there even a scientific distinction worth making between the world being created to appear older and actually being older?
I agree, as a Christian I believe that rationalism alone cannot explain all of existence. For the purposes of understanding the material universe, however, its the best we've got. I also believe that the bible cannot explain geology, cosmology, biology or quantum physics, for the simple reason that it doesn't try to. The authors had virtually no understanding of these things even by the standard of a modern lay person, and nor would they be relevant if they did. While religion and sociology clearly have a place in the application of science, I honestly believe they have very little to say about the underlying principles.
--
Yes indeed, there are many assumptions and uncertainties underlying all dating techniques, but that is why all such datings (like any other measurement of the physical world) include uncertainties, in the case of carbon dating these can range from decade to millenia. The techniques for combining uncertainties are extremely well understood, as are those for reducing uncertainties by repeated measurement.
I'm neither a geophysicist or an archaeologist, but this article seems somewhat confused. Firstly, it acknowledges that carbon dating is only useful for up to roughly 10 half-lives (roughly ~60000 years), but then the author claims that he expects carbon dating of dinosaur bones (which ought to be a minimum of 65 million years old), when revised, to prove them to be much younger than currently believed.
Some pretty fundamental mistakes here, not the least of which is that there are no dinosaur bones. There are only fossils, which are stones in the shape of the original bone, these contain no organic material at all. There is nothing in these bones to perform carbon dating on, and I know of no instance of anyone ever seriously attempting to do so.
If dinosaur fossils are, as claimed, merely several thousand years old, then those making the claim ought to explain quite why all bones from dinosaurs have turned to stone, but no other bones from "the same period" of several thousand years ago have done so. It may be argued that dinosaurs lived in a different place to all modern mammals, and were subject to radically different geological forces (including fossilisation a hundred times faster than is commonly accepted), but the evidence contradicts this (dinosaur and mammal fossils have been found on every continent).
Carbon dating is only applicable to organics, and only to those formed under certain circumstances in the relatively recent past. It is one of many different techniques used for dating ancient things (most apply to geological features, eg rock), and these agree well with each other for dating geological features.
Returning to the discussion of recent 6-day Creationism, the evidence really does suggest this was not the case. The only form that would seem to be consistent with the geological records would be that the earth was created to appear exactly as if it were many billions of years old, and as this is by definition indistinguishable from the earth actually being many billions of years old, there would be no point in questioning the results of modern radiometric dating techniques. It would simply be a matter of faith.
To study any modern discipline, yes, you can't begin by proving every first principle, and expect to catch up with the rest of the world in a single lifetime. But this doesn't mean that most, or even many of the underlying assumptions are completely wrong.
No one can prove that 1 + 1 will always equal 2, we can only try it many times and get the same result every time. A single differing result (when validated) would throw all of mathmatics into disarray, but most mathematicians don't lose much sleep worrying about this possibility.
I can only speak wrt physics, but it may suprise you just how often the most basic of assumptions are revisited during theoretical work - constantly!
Claims that much of modern science is based on error, lies and innapropriate supposition are quite exaggerated.
Yes, we assume that much remains constant, that the laws of physics on Earth today are the essentially the same as they were a few thousand years ago. Or a few billion. These assumptions are justified, however, by a wealth of observations. They have proven themselves worthy of being upheld. As far as we can measure, throughout the universe the laws of physics have been essentially constant for at least the last 10 billion years. Yes, there is a chance that some of the "universal constants" may change slightly over billions of years, but only negligibly. As far as we're concerned, everywhere we look within our galaxy and its immediate vicinity, the laws of physics are identical to those here.
The claim that all our methods of dating things older than a few thousand years should be so wrong as to be off by a factor of ~one million and no one in the trade has spotted this discrepancy (or that they're all part of a consipiricy, or anything else) requires justification. Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, and all that.
Indeed, its an excellent, if heavy-going read.
I'm afraid I have to disagree. I'm terrified of "We're all going to starve." Here in the west, where farmers have access to crops with more than one form of resistance to the various important blights and diseases that would happily turn them to moosh. Throughout much of asia and africa, the farmers are less fortunate, using strains of wheat with only one or two resistances to stem rust ... with disatrous consequences, now that it's bypassed those defenses. Unless big agri-biz (or anyone else) can come up with new resistances (and distribute them) soon, wheat's pretty much screwed.
Besides, even if we have enough food, which I'd debate, it costs someone to make it, and that someone generally doesn't want to give it away to the starving masses who have nothing left to buy it with...
Definition of scientist? Someone who calls themself a scientist...
Au contraire, when Griffin came on board, for a while it looked like MSL was going to launch reasonably on-time, despite Ares/Orion ... so they needed to reform to get back to the tried & tested method of delays & ballooning expenses!
I won't be drawn on inter-denominational rivalries, there's enough of that sort of bickering in the world, and I don't believe its relevant.
I agree that ID is perceived as (and intended to be) 'Creationism evolved' (good pun!), but there is a fundamental difference: Literal biblical creationism (for some people) follows from belief in the existance of God. Of a specific, known God. ID does not. Even if accepted, it offers no clues as to who that designer is, whether they are omiscient and omnipotent or merely more advanced than us, and crucially, offers nothing to indicate that this designer is in any way interested in human affairs. Or even that they're still around.
If evolution is a result of materialistic philosophy, "X evolved from Y"; then ID is equally materialist, "We know of no Y from which X could have evolved from, and we cannot envisage what function component parts of X could play before being incorporated into X, ergo X cannot have evolved."
Creationism is clearly not a materialistic argument, but I hold that ID is. Furthermore, if used as a grounds for theology, that theology is based on a God-of-the-Gaps argument (we don't know how that works, so it must be God) which is always liable to crumble. Claiming that something has an irreducable complexity also requires faith (in a materialistic theory) that no scientific advance will ever refute such a claim. (For instance, claims that the bacterial phlagellum could not have evolved as its components could serve no useful purpose were significantly undermined when one of those components was found to play a role in one of the offensive mechanisms of Salmonella - reference here if you can stand the annoying tone) Lastly, yes, I agree, evolution only makes sense if you take 6-day creationism off the table, as the timescales required for anything but the most basic speciation require significantly more than several thousand years. But what takes that off the table, I believe, is the evidence of our own eyes and minds. To paraphrase Galileo, "I do not feel compelled to believe that the same God who endowed me with reason and intellect, intended me to forego their use."
The reason for this failure rate is, at least in part, due to a lack of insight/foresight by those commisioning or selecting the software.
... and it failed completely.
Unfair example: The Edinburgh Fringe (comedy festival) this year decided that instead of using a recognised ticket-booking system, they would hire a company at a few months notice to produce one from scratch for them. For indecipherable reasons, they chose a local start up with no background to speak of, or any previous clients or anything
Lets face it, even if we retrieved a sample and analysed it in a lab, we wouldn't be able to say with any real certainty where it came from. We could probably rule out a lot of places it didn't come from, but without sampling a variety of comets from a variety of local star systems, we won't have anything but speculation to compare it to.
Besides, its only speculation that suggests it didn't come from our own Kuiper belt in the first place - we don't know enough about that to be sure.
Actually, my counter-argument would be:
Modern 'Creationism' (of the traditionally American form of 'literally' interpreting Genesis) is precisely that, a modern phenomenon. In his 4th century writing, Augustine refuted those that would interpret the opening of Genesis as describing a 6-day process of creation, instead considering it to be a logical framework, rather than a chronology. [1]
Many Christians believe God created a universe of emergent complexity, designed to bring about modern humanity (and everything else) from base principles (or from nothing, from "dust" ala Genesis). Set against this worldview, ID appears nothing more than a God-of-the-Gaps argument, "God couldn't have created a universe where X evolved, thats too difficult!"
Perhaps my wording there is mildly flippant, but regardless of how it is phrased, I consider this argument divinely insulting. Which is a more glorious achievement: creating a world in the blink of an eye (or over 6 days) that will be used up and worthless after only a few thousand years, or designing a process that will, after many billions of years, slowly produce a world that will be continually reshaped over aeons until it produces life, and ultimately man? It is a mistake for any of us to assume that God is constrained to our understanding.