Recheck your numbers. You're using 2737 kps, not meters per second. And at 2.08e-7 m/s^2, it would take a year just to change velocity by 6m/s. The answer you should be getting is dv/dt = (11.2kps - 2.737kps) / (3648sec *3600sec/hr) = 8463mps / 13,132,800s = 6.44e-4 m/s^2. You're off by 3 orders of magnitude.
Now, with that kind of acceleration, the first football field would be crossed in 531 seconds of acceleration, approximately 9 minutes. Slow by interstellar standards, but with constant acceleration each successive football field is crossed in 41% of the time. Each hour of thrust yields 2.3 m/s of delta-v in exchange for (on this craft) a lousy 10 grams of propellant. When your fuel is chump change payload, you can afford decent environmental systems to keep you alive until you arrive.
Orson Scott Card wrote a novel which had a cute Atlantis/Flood explanation. Pastwatch, it was called.
In essence. Atlantis was the first agricultural civilization, primitive in the extreme compared to even early Egypt, but quite advanced in its day. It resided in the, at the time, nearly empty Red Sea basin. As the ice age came to an end, water levels rose and eventually the Indian Ocean spilled over the Bab al Mandab and flooded the plains and wiped the Atlanteans out. Only one man, who later came to be known as Noah, saw the rising waters as the threat they really were and packed his immediate family and slaves into a small watertight vessel of his own design that could withstand the raging waters. However intelligent he may have been, he was still quite myth-besotten and took the events as a sign that the gods didn't want humans to congregate in cities, and as the myth spread, it helped stall the development of civilization for another 5000 years.
Re: Stonehenge. Just went there a few months ago, it was awesome. But it's important to qualify which part of it you're talking about. The bits dated to 3000BC are merely the earthwork enclosure (read: ditch) surrounding the thing. The stone part of stonehenge started around 2600BC and wasn't really finished until 1600BC.
Cool info about the stone-moving proof-of-concept. I don't suppose you have pics or a link or something?
Because you don't _have_ to get H2 from methane. It's simply the most efficient means we have right now (better than 100%, really; you get more H2 energy out than it took to convert the methane). With gasoline, you're pretty much limited to getting your fuel from crude oil. H2 can be derived from any number of sources, including water.
Yeah, H2 fuel cells kick ass in every respect except fuel storage. There's been some success in storing it in hydride form, binding it with polonium or some other reactive metal. I've not been able to find estimates on the energy density you can achieve with this method.
It's just engineering, though
Indeed! The beauty of the fuel cell is its separation of parts. The power usage is independent of the fuel cell is independent of the fuel storage and the fuel itself is independent of where you get it. So the same fuel cell could power an airplane, a car, a boat, or a building, and will work with H2 stored in liquid, compressed, or hydride form, and the H2 itself could be derived from fossil fuels, water electrolysis (with power from the grid or a standalone station running on solar or wind or whatever), refuse from agriculture, or some kind of H2-generating algae, whatever. Each component can be improved, modified, and swapped out more or less independently from the others.
Modern batteries tend to have very high charge-discharge efficiencies - I usually run into numbers between 80 and 99%
Bull crap. You'd seriously better back that claim up. I'm finding actual efficiencies of 30-40% for lead acid and maybe 60-70% for nickel metal hydride. The absolute best effective efficiencies you can get are ~80%. Most chemical batteries involve some pretty toxic materials, and on top of which, the number of charge/discharge cycles is strictly limited.
Oh, and you can really give the "try to ignite a pail full of gasoline" schtick a rest. Nobody ever drops a match into a car's gas tank. But you puncture a gasoline tank and watch it piddle around on the ground and _then_ light it, it'll catch fire very easily.
Let's see. If I had to order Schneier's characteristics, I would do so thus:
Accuracy - If you haven't got this, you haven't got anything.
Scalability - If you haven't got this, then you start to lose accuracy.
Anonymity - This is more of a necessity in rural districts, cities are safely anonymous to begin with.
Speed - We've gotten really spoiled here. If it took a month or a day to tabulate the votes, it wouldn't affect the results one bit. This one is entirely a matter of convenience.
Regardless of how the others might be ranked, I'd wager that Schneier and any other security expert would keep speed dead last. So the advantage we get from using computers, speed, is actually the characteristic we need the least from an election system.
He then goes on to talk about why forecasts go wrong.
Hmmm, isn't that itself a forecast prediction, with an 8/9 chance of being wrong?
That said, it's funny how much stuff that was predicted never came to pass and how much stuff came to pass that was never predicted. At least it ensures that our future, no matter how many sci-fi novels are written, will be surprising.
Food in a pill? We could make it, I guess, but you'd have to eat a bowl full of them
I dunno about that. I imagine it is well within our capabilities to put a daily 1000-2000 calories, vitamins, carbs, and protein into something the size of a candy bar. To take it further, could a week's worth be so condensed into a package that resists digestion in stages for several days, essentially 150 hours of food in a tiny package? But really, apart from rations for soldiers, campers, survivialist nuts, and people vying for the 'perfect' diet, why would we? To me there's nothing better than a big, steaming plate of spaghetti and garlic bread. Dammit, now I've got a craving for some italian food.
These machines are a lot more reliable *and* tamper resistant than other machines
Half and half. Harder to get in, but once there you can do whatever you want. Particularly because Diebold says "it's too hard" to add a printer for a paper trail.
With all-physical votes, it's perhaps easier to do small-scale chicanery, but anything larger gets much harder to hide. You can hack a punch card reader, but could you do it invisibly? All-electronic voting fraud can conceivably be done on a huge scale by just a few people with the right know-how, if the software is insecure enough. And regarding the security of the code, it either is insecure, or we don't know enough about it to say it's not. The result is the same.
a modicum of fraud is alwas going to be part of American voting
I agree, but that doesn't mean we need to bend over and like it. It's been less than a week since the election and we've already spotted literally hundreds of thousands of votes that either disappeared into the void or were brought here from it. And these are just the ones we can find, god only knows how many more foulups are invisible due to the lack of a verifiable trail.
Open source voting machines, and verifiable proof of voting.
Well now we're getting somewhere! A system that can be tracked and watched and analyzed by interested parties. A system that is so transparent that deliberate fraud and foolish mistakes simply cannot happen without being noticed by someone. A system that lets me (and only me) look up what my vote was recorded as. None of this is new or even particularly difficult. I have nothing against electronic and machine-augmented voting, but it's gotta be done right! If "democracy dies behind closed doors", then why are so many of the companies and policitians involved in the voting process such big fans of secrecy?
Just because something is hackable doesnt mean it has been hacked.
True, but it does mean that we can't really trust the results.
But none of that changes the fact that all the evidence points to the fact that the Bush handily but still narrowily beat John Kerry.
That's just it! We don't know that! And we can't know because too many of the machines used to come to that conclusion can't be trusted. Too many of the mechanisms by which votes are counted and tabulated are shrouded in secrecy and all too often what glimpes we get are sickeningly insecure & untrustworthy and blatantly partisan.
Do you really want to give the presidency to a man based on the argument that "That there's a lot of screwups but I'd guess it wasn't enough to matter"? Hell, they had elections in the Soviet Union and in Hussein's Iraq. Nobody believed the results were remotely accurate, and that lack of trust showed in how their governments behaved.
you can't carbon date fossils from the 1950s onward
Yikes, where to begin. First, you can't carbon date fossils at all. A fossil only gets to be a fossil because it's so old there's nothing organic in it left. Second, you can't carbon date anything from the 1950's onward, true, but then you can't carbon date anything from the 1900's onward either, nor the 1800's, nor the 1500's. In fact, you have to go back to about 1000 AD before carbon dating becomes useful at all. Which is why archaeologists really despise creationists, because they keep doing carbon dating of living creatures and pointing to the nonsense results as 'proof' that it's a bogus dating technique.
So what you meant to say was that around the year 2945 AD, carbon dating will begin to become less useful for dating extremely recent artifacts.
For the rest, for every nuclear death and health problem and pound of radioactive material released into the atmosphere as a result of nuclear power (excluding testing and bombs), there's 100 deaths and 100 tons resulting from mining and burning fossil fuels (only counting the 20th century of course). It's not just a matter of "nuclear power is dangerous", but rather "nuclear power is less dangerous than anything involving fossil fuels". Heck, one could make a case of the World Trade Towers being casualties of our use of oil.
Looking back on this, I think we're talking past each other. Yes, there have been accidents in the past and there will certainly be more in the future. But on the whole it hasn't been bad and nuclear power concentrates the risky bits you mentioned into smaller, fewer packages that are easier to keep an eye on. And nuclear cores themselves these days can be made as foolproof and failsafe as anything else we are capable of. I would sooner have a small pebble bed reactor right under my house than keep a couple of tanks of heating oil and stove gas around. Of course, since my dream home is a dome home, I could probably survive without either and live on wind and solar.
Napster's servers were aware of the filenames xeing traded. A lot of trackers have plausable deniability, i.e., they never know what it is they're tracking. It's up to the users to associate names to the hash.
I think you'll have to admit that an _awful_ lot of these are related to problems with bombs and fallout from testing. Of what's left, less than half are from the US. And most of the remainder are extremely limited in scope. Some of them are simply accidents that merely happened at a nuclear facility and had nothing to do with the nuclear material itself, like stuff involving heavy water.
This is not to say that deaths listed here aren't tragic, but it would be good to perhaps compare it to a similar list from other power sources. More than a few people (96) died during the construction of the Hoover Dam, for instance.
Two things came to mind from this list. One, Three Mile Island, named the _worst_ accident in the US to date, also listed no casualties and no detectable increase in radiological diseases in the surrounding populace; compare that to being downwind of a nice coal smokestack. Two, France had not one single docmunted case on here, and they get more of their power from nukes than anyone else. So it would probably behoove us to go see what they seem to be doing right.
The PATRIOT Act also allows _any_ judge anywhere in the country to authorize a search of your house, no matter where you live. In other words, the feds need only find one single judge to rubber stamp their warrants and they have essentially unlimited power of searches in every state of the union. So just what good is the requirement of a warrant?
What are we supposed to do, wait until a few million people _are_ affected by bad laws before suggesting they are not in our best interests? That sort of thinking got us the War on Drugs and millions of citizens spending time in prison and law enforcement constantly expanding its scope to try to enforce fundamentally unenforcable laws. Most americans weren't affected by the Alien and Seditions Acts. Most americans in the north weren't affected by slavery laws. Most germans weren't affected by the Nuremburg laws. Just because it doesn't screw over >50% of the population in the first 3 years of its existence doesn't mean that it shouldn't be fought. Particularly when the law itself demands that any uses and abuses be kept hidden from the public.
Evolutionary processes yield really wierd results sometimes. Ever hear about this one? This guy set up a electronically modifiable circuit board that could change it's architecture by loading a logic gate schema into it and let loose a genetic algorithm to turn it into a voice recognition program (distinguish between "Stop" and "Go"). Not only did it generate an impossibly small program from random numbers extremely quickly (one that no human could possibly have written), they can't figure out how it works. It apparently uses some physical property of the gates on that particular board. And then there was the one that simulated a walking humanoid and went from random flopping to a confident stride in less than 20 generations. Along the way, it also produced programs that moved by doing somersaults and rolling around.
So it really is not necessary to invoke god into genetics and natural selection. They are tools far powerful beyond what they appear to be.
Indeed it is. Especially since carbon-13 has never been used in dating mechanisms. Carbon-14 is used all the time, and when used properly (i.e., not on things lt 1000 or gt 50000 years old like creationists love to do) it yields very accurate results. And I cannot fathom what bullshit Hovind fed you about radioactive dating of rocks.
The creationists theory holds that there was a world flood
Great flood, eh? Was this about 4500 years ago? Might want to talk to the Egyptians and Chinese about that. They have an unbroken record of civilization going right through that period.
As for the non terrestrial evidence, no one ever claimed to know the age of the universe
WTF? How does all astronomical evidence pointing to an expanding universe billions of years old not 'add anything to the debate'? It kinda craps all over the entirety of Genesis.
read up on how the 2nd law of thermodynamics disproves the big bang and "celestial evolution"
Creationists misuse the laws of thermodynamics so much it's insulting. Aren't you also going to tell me that since entropy is always increasing on earth complexity in life forms can't increase everywhere for extended periods of time? That's the usual creationist line. I then have to patiently explain that it also mentions closed systems, which earth most definitely is not, what with the sun raining down a nice, reliable 1kW/hr per sq meter of sunlight for 12 hours every day, and that we buy our complexity at the cost of the sun radiating out all that concentrated energy into deep space, creating a net entropic gain. But this celestial wrinkle is a new one. Lemme guess, you're claiming that organized systems of planets, stars, galaxies, and superclusters cannot arise in a universe with increasing entropy? Well then, here's where I point out that for every ton of fusable stellar matter in stars, there's just as much unusable crap floating in the void, a ratio that only gets worse as time goes on. And that while 15 or even 100 billion years of visible anti-entropic activity seems like a lot to you, to an open-ended universe it is a brief moment of gloriously unevenly distrubted energy before an eternal heat death and entropy's triumph. An expanding universe that could maintain what we see today forever would violate the 2nd law (and the 1st to boot), but then nobody is making that claim.
About 200 BC. Eratosthenes, a Greek astronomer, discovered a way to measure the circumference of the Earth. He had heard reports from the city of Syene Egypt, which was on the equator, that the Sun shown directly down vertical wells on the first day of summer. Eratoshtenes did not observe such phenonmenon at his home, thus he concluded that the Sun never reaches Zenith at his home in Alexandria, north of Syene.
Eratosthenes measured the Sun to be about 7 south of his local zenith on the first day of summer (the summer solstice). Based upon this observation is concluded that distance from Alexandria and Syene must be 7/360 or 1/50 that of Earth's circumference since 360 make up a complete circle.
At the time the standard unit of measurement was called a stade and is thought to be about 1 1/6 of a kilometer. The distance from Syene to Alexandria was about 5000 stades. Thus, Eratosthenes estimated the Earth's circumference to be about
50 x 5000 = 25,000 stades = 42,000 km.
The modern value for the circumference of the Earth is 40,000 km. So Eratosthenes was correct to within 5% of the actual value.
There's a better one. That philosophy is commonly called The Church of Last Thursday. Because, after all, if god could fake a 15-billion year old universe 6000 years ago, he could just as easily fake one that was created last thursday. Next to counterfeiting fossil records, radioactive decay evidence, ancient astronomical phenomena, and the genetic history tying together every organism on the planet, whipping up a few human memories and relics of civilizations should be child's play.
Slashdot Mirror
Recheck your numbers. You're using 2737 kps, not meters per second. And at 2.08e-7 m/s^2, it would take a year just to change velocity by 6m/s. The answer you should be getting is dv/dt = (11.2kps - 2.737kps) / (3648sec *3600sec/hr) = 8463mps / 13,132,800s = 6.44e-4 m/s^2. You're off by 3 orders of magnitude.
Now, with that kind of acceleration, the first football field would be crossed in 531 seconds of acceleration, approximately 9 minutes. Slow by interstellar standards, but with constant acceleration each successive football field is crossed in 41% of the time. Each hour of thrust yields 2.3 m/s of delta-v in exchange for (on this craft) a lousy 10 grams of propellant. When your fuel is chump change payload, you can afford decent environmental systems to keep you alive until you arrive.
Orson Scott Card wrote a novel which had a cute Atlantis/Flood explanation. Pastwatch, it was called.
In essence. Atlantis was the first agricultural civilization, primitive in the extreme compared to even early Egypt, but quite advanced in its day. It resided in the, at the time, nearly empty Red Sea basin. As the ice age came to an end, water levels rose and eventually the Indian Ocean spilled over the Bab al Mandab and flooded the plains and wiped the Atlanteans out. Only one man, who later came to be known as Noah, saw the rising waters as the threat they really were and packed his immediate family and slaves into a small watertight vessel of his own design that could withstand the raging waters. However intelligent he may have been, he was still quite myth-besotten and took the events as a sign that the gods didn't want humans to congregate in cities, and as the myth spread, it helped stall the development of civilization for another 5000 years.
Re: Stonehenge. Just went there a few months ago, it was awesome. But it's important to qualify which part of it you're talking about. The bits dated to 3000BC are merely the earthwork enclosure (read: ditch) surrounding the thing. The stone part of stonehenge started around 2600BC and wasn't really finished until 1600BC.
Cool info about the stone-moving proof-of-concept. I don't suppose you have pics or a link or something?
Because you don't _have_ to get H2 from methane. It's simply the most efficient means we have right now (better than 100%, really; you get more H2 energy out than it took to convert the methane). With gasoline, you're pretty much limited to getting your fuel from crude oil. H2 can be derived from any number of sources, including water.
Yeah, H2 fuel cells kick ass in every respect except fuel storage. There's been some success in storing it in hydride form, binding it with polonium or some other reactive metal. I've not been able to find estimates on the energy density you can achieve with this method.
It's just engineering, though
Indeed! The beauty of the fuel cell is its separation of parts. The power usage is independent of the fuel cell is independent of the fuel storage and the fuel itself is independent of where you get it. So the same fuel cell could power an airplane, a car, a boat, or a building, and will work with H2 stored in liquid, compressed, or hydride form, and the H2 itself could be derived from fossil fuels, water electrolysis (with power from the grid or a standalone station running on solar or wind or whatever), refuse from agriculture, or some kind of H2-generating algae, whatever. Each component can be improved, modified, and swapped out more or less independently from the others.
Do you contend that this could have happened with helium inside?
With a skin made of thermite? You betcha.
Modern batteries tend to have very high charge-discharge efficiencies - I usually run into numbers between 80 and 99% Bull crap. You'd seriously better back that claim up. I'm finding actual efficiencies of 30-40% for lead acid and maybe 60-70% for nickel metal hydride. The absolute best effective efficiencies you can get are ~80%. Most chemical batteries involve some pretty toxic materials, and on top of which, the number of charge/discharge cycles is strictly limited. Oh, and you can really give the "try to ignite a pail full of gasoline" schtick a rest. Nobody ever drops a match into a car's gas tank. But you puncture a gasoline tank and watch it piddle around on the ground and _then_ light it, it'll catch fire very easily.
Accuracy - If you haven't got this, you haven't got anything.
Scalability - If you haven't got this, then you start to lose accuracy.
Anonymity - This is more of a necessity in rural districts, cities are safely anonymous to begin with.
Speed - We've gotten really spoiled here. If it took a month or a day to tabulate the votes, it wouldn't affect the results one bit. This one is entirely a matter of convenience.
Regardless of how the others might be ranked, I'd wager that Schneier and any other security expert would keep speed dead last. So the advantage we get from using computers, speed, is actually the characteristic we need the least from an election system.
He then goes on to talk about why forecasts go wrong.
Hmmm, isn't that itself a forecast prediction, with an 8/9 chance of being wrong?
That said, it's funny how much stuff that was predicted never came to pass and how much stuff came to pass that was never predicted. At least it ensures that our future, no matter how many sci-fi novels are written, will be surprising.
Food in a pill? We could make it, I guess, but you'd have to eat a bowl full of them
I dunno about that. I imagine it is well within our capabilities to put a daily 1000-2000 calories, vitamins, carbs, and protein into something the size of a candy bar. To take it further, could a week's worth be so condensed into a package that resists digestion in stages for several days, essentially 150 hours of food in a tiny package? But really, apart from rations for soldiers, campers, survivialist nuts, and people vying for the 'perfect' diet, why would we? To me there's nothing better than a big, steaming plate of spaghetti and garlic bread. Dammit, now I've got a craving for some italian food.
Half and half. Harder to get in, but once there you can do whatever you want. Particularly because Diebold says "it's too hard" to add a printer for a paper trail. With all-physical votes, it's perhaps easier to do small-scale chicanery, but anything larger gets much harder to hide. You can hack a punch card reader, but could you do it invisibly? All-electronic voting fraud can conceivably be done on a huge scale by just a few people with the right know-how, if the software is insecure enough. And regarding the security of the code, it either is insecure, or we don't know enough about it to say it's not. The result is the same. a modicum of fraud is alwas going to be part of American voting I agree, but that doesn't mean we need to bend over and like it. It's been less than a week since the election and we've already spotted literally hundreds of thousands of votes that either disappeared into the void or were brought here from it. And these are just the ones we can find, god only knows how many more foulups are invisible due to the lack of a verifiable trail. Open source voting machines, and verifiable proof of voting. Well now we're getting somewhere! A system that can be tracked and watched and analyzed by interested parties. A system that is so transparent that deliberate fraud and foolish mistakes simply cannot happen without being noticed by someone. A system that lets me (and only me) look up what my vote was recorded as. None of this is new or even particularly difficult. I have nothing against electronic and machine-augmented voting, but it's gotta be done right! If "democracy dies behind closed doors", then why are so many of the companies and policitians involved in the voting process such big fans of secrecy?
Just because something is hackable doesnt mean it has been hacked.
True, but it does mean that we can't really trust the results.
But none of that changes the fact that all the evidence points to the fact that the Bush handily but still narrowily beat John Kerry.
That's just it! We don't know that! And we can't know because too many of the machines used to come to that conclusion can't be trusted. Too many of the mechanisms by which votes are counted and tabulated are shrouded in secrecy and all too often what glimpes we get are sickeningly insecure & untrustworthy and blatantly partisan.
Do you really want to give the presidency to a man based on the argument that "That there's a lot of screwups but I'd guess it wasn't enough to matter"? Hell, they had elections in the Soviet Union and in Hussein's Iraq. Nobody believed the results were remotely accurate, and that lack of trust showed in how their governments behaved.
Inconceivable!
And actually, he said "I am legally required to say no".
you can't carbon date fossils from the 1950s onward
Yikes, where to begin. First, you can't carbon date fossils at all. A fossil only gets to be a fossil because it's so old there's nothing organic in it left. Second, you can't carbon date anything from the 1950's onward, true, but then you can't carbon date anything from the 1900's onward either, nor the 1800's, nor the 1500's. In fact, you have to go back to about 1000 AD before carbon dating becomes useful at all. Which is why archaeologists really despise creationists, because they keep doing carbon dating of living creatures and pointing to the nonsense results as 'proof' that it's a bogus dating technique.
So what you meant to say was that around the year 2945 AD, carbon dating will begin to become less useful for dating extremely recent artifacts.
For the rest, for every nuclear death and health problem and pound of radioactive material released into the atmosphere as a result of nuclear power (excluding testing and bombs), there's 100 deaths and 100 tons resulting from mining and burning fossil fuels (only counting the 20th century of course). It's not just a matter of "nuclear power is dangerous", but rather "nuclear power is less dangerous than anything involving fossil fuels". Heck, one could make a case of the World Trade Towers being casualties of our use of oil.
Looking back on this, I think we're talking past each other. Yes, there have been accidents in the past and there will certainly be more in the future. But on the whole it hasn't been bad and nuclear power concentrates the risky bits you mentioned into smaller, fewer packages that are easier to keep an eye on. And nuclear cores themselves these days can be made as foolproof and failsafe as anything else we are capable of. I would sooner have a small pebble bed reactor right under my house than keep a couple of tanks of heating oil and stove gas around. Of course, since my dream home is a dome home, I could probably survive without either and live on wind and solar.
Since I started using it, Azureus tells me I've downloaded almost 3GB a day every day for the past 2 months.
However! I would happily trade the ability to pull down 200kBps torrents for one that does maybe 10kBps but guarantees anonymity.
Napster's servers were aware of the filenames xeing traded. A lot of trackers have plausable deniability, i.e., they never know what it is they're tracking. It's up to the users to associate names to the hash.
I think you'll have to admit that an _awful_ lot of these are related to problems with bombs and fallout from testing. Of what's left, less than half are from the US. And most of the remainder are extremely limited in scope. Some of them are simply accidents that merely happened at a nuclear facility and had nothing to do with the nuclear material itself, like stuff involving heavy water. This is not to say that deaths listed here aren't tragic, but it would be good to perhaps compare it to a similar list from other power sources. More than a few people (96) died during the construction of the Hoover Dam, for instance. Two things came to mind from this list. One, Three Mile Island, named the _worst_ accident in the US to date, also listed no casualties and no detectable increase in radiological diseases in the surrounding populace; compare that to being downwind of a nice coal smokestack. Two, France had not one single docmunted case on here, and they get more of their power from nukes than anyone else. So it would probably behoove us to go see what they seem to be doing right.
With friggin laser beams maybe?
The PATRIOT Act also allows _any_ judge anywhere in the country to authorize a search of your house, no matter where you live. In other words, the feds need only find one single judge to rubber stamp their warrants and they have essentially unlimited power of searches in every state of the union. So just what good is the requirement of a warrant?
When is the last time YOU voted on a new law? Oddly enough, I did exactly that today.
What are we supposed to do, wait until a few million people _are_ affected by bad laws before suggesting they are not in our best interests? That sort of thinking got us the War on Drugs and millions of citizens spending time in prison and law enforcement constantly expanding its scope to try to enforce fundamentally unenforcable laws. Most americans weren't affected by the Alien and Seditions Acts. Most americans in the north weren't affected by slavery laws. Most germans weren't affected by the Nuremburg laws. Just because it doesn't screw over >50% of the population in the first 3 years of its existence doesn't mean that it shouldn't be fought. Particularly when the law itself demands that any uses and abuses be kept hidden from the public.
Evolutionary processes yield really wierd results sometimes. Ever hear about this one? This guy set up a electronically modifiable circuit board that could change it's architecture by loading a logic gate schema into it and let loose a genetic algorithm to turn it into a voice recognition program (distinguish between "Stop" and "Go"). Not only did it generate an impossibly small program from random numbers extremely quickly (one that no human could possibly have written), they can't figure out how it works. It apparently uses some physical property of the gates on that particular board. And then there was the one that simulated a walking humanoid and went from random flopping to a confident stride in less than 20 generations. Along the way, it also produced programs that moved by doing somersaults and rolling around. So it really is not necessary to invoke god into genetics and natural selection. They are tools far powerful beyond what they appear to be.
carbon13 dating is unreliable
Indeed it is. Especially since carbon-13 has never been used in dating mechanisms. Carbon-14 is used all the time, and when used properly (i.e., not on things lt 1000 or gt 50000 years old like creationists love to do) it yields very accurate results. And I cannot fathom what bullshit Hovind fed you about radioactive dating of rocks.
The creationists theory holds that there was a world flood
Great flood, eh? Was this about 4500 years ago? Might want to talk to the Egyptians and Chinese about that. They have an unbroken record of civilization going right through that period.
As for the non terrestrial evidence, no one ever claimed to know the age of the universe
WTF? How does all astronomical evidence pointing to an expanding universe billions of years old not 'add anything to the debate'? It kinda craps all over the entirety of Genesis.
read up on how the 2nd law of thermodynamics disproves the big bang and "celestial evolution"
Creationists misuse the laws of thermodynamics so much it's insulting. Aren't you also going to tell me that since entropy is always increasing on earth complexity in life forms can't increase everywhere for extended periods of time? That's the usual creationist line. I then have to patiently explain that it also mentions closed systems, which earth most definitely is not, what with the sun raining down a nice, reliable 1kW/hr per sq meter of sunlight for 12 hours every day, and that we buy our complexity at the cost of the sun radiating out all that concentrated energy into deep space, creating a net entropic gain. But this celestial wrinkle is a new one. Lemme guess, you're claiming that organized systems of planets, stars, galaxies, and superclusters cannot arise in a universe with increasing entropy? Well then, here's where I point out that for every ton of fusable stellar matter in stars, there's just as much unusable crap floating in the void, a ratio that only gets worse as time goes on. And that while 15 or even 100 billion years of visible anti-entropic activity seems like a lot to you, to an open-ended universe it is a brief moment of gloriously unevenly distrubted energy before an eternal heat death and entropy's triumph. An expanding universe that could maintain what we see today forever would violate the 2nd law (and the 1st to boot), but then nobody is making that claim.
About 200 BC. Eratosthenes, a Greek astronomer, discovered a way to measure the circumference of the Earth. He had heard reports from the city of Syene Egypt, which was on the equator, that the Sun shown directly down vertical wells on the first day of summer. Eratoshtenes did not observe such phenonmenon at his home, thus he concluded that the Sun never reaches Zenith at his home in Alexandria, north of Syene.
Eratosthenes measured the Sun to be about 7 south of his local zenith on the first day of summer (the summer solstice). Based upon this observation is concluded that distance from Alexandria and Syene must be 7/360 or 1/50 that of Earth's circumference since 360 make up a complete circle.
At the time the standard unit of measurement was called a stade and is thought to be about 1 1/6 of a kilometer. The distance from Syene to Alexandria was about 5000 stades. Thus, Eratosthenes estimated the Earth's circumference to be about
50 x 5000 = 25,000 stades = 42,000 km.
The modern value for the circumference of the Earth is 40,000 km. So Eratosthenes was correct to within 5% of the actual value.
(Shamelessy copied from http://inkido.indiana.edu/a100/earthmoon7.html)
There's a better one. That philosophy is commonly called The Church of Last Thursday. Because, after all, if god could fake a 15-billion year old universe 6000 years ago, he could just as easily fake one that was created last thursday. Next to counterfeiting fossil records, radioactive decay evidence, ancient astronomical phenomena, and the genetic history tying together every organism on the planet, whipping up a few human memories and relics of civilizations should be child's play.