> For example, I believe in ESP, as a vague sort of premonition that may someday be explained by physics. While I don't know how it works, there is sufficient evidence, in my experience, to concede that it probably (not definitely) exists.
And of course, you have kept careful count of all the times you got a vague premonition but nothing happened, right? And those events are extremely rare in comparison to the number of times you get a vague premonition and something does happen, right? And the vagueness of the premonitions doesn't inflate the "hit" rate, right?
OK, maybe ESP really happens... but it's going to take more than a big pile of uncritical anecdotes to convince scientists that it's worth investigating closer.
> Nothing should be believed until subjected to a scientific method of proof. It might just be a scam. Example, global warming.
Yes, it's just a prognostic... though I think you go overboard in citing it as a scamp.
> It will be very hard to [prove] today, especially since we don't have any Earth-like planets sitting around to expirement with.
More to the point, we do have one Earth-like planet to experiment with - but only one. To the sensible, that recommends caution.
But since you don't believe in global warming, maybe you would like to reflect on something a bit shorter term. So what do you think of The Asian Brown Cloud? In particular, do you think we should conclude from it that we should be a bit more careful about what we dump into the atmosphere, or not? Give your reasoning, but limit your response to a single page.
> Corrolation does not prove a causal realtionship.
That's true. But it's not a very good excuse for throwing out a model that's built on solid science.
People can always find a mantra that lets them reject things they don't want to believe, no matter how well established those things are. (That observation kind of fits in with the whole point of the article, don't you think?)
> It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany.
Of course, Orwell was writing with the benefit of hindsight. The outcome of the war was not at all obvious at the time.
> I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
Of course, we've all heard similar silly rants from anti-intellectuals. Really: how many times did you hear that Clinton had signed an executive order that would let him set aside the constitution if X happened [X varied with the telling], and how many of those times did you hear it from someone in the intelligentsia.
Orwell's quoted statements should be viewed as a political rant rather than a penetrating insight into human nature.
> It's amazing how stupid some of the stuff the human brain comes up with when common sense is left behind in favor of over-rationalization.
> If a treatment doesn't involve a synthetically created compound or cutting someone open, it falls into the realm of "alternative medicine" regardless of how effective it may be.
Uhm... the single most frequent thing that I hear when I visit the doctor's office is "drink lots of water". The second and third most common things are "eat balanced meals" and "get regular exercise".
You again display your great talent for missing the point. It's creationists who offer the exponential population growth argument, not me. But if they paused for half a second they would see that their model makes ridiculous predictions. I brought it in as an analogy for your suggestion for an exponential rate of change in the speed of light, since it also makes ridiculous predictions. (Did you miss the part about claims having consequences? The example of E=mc^2, Adam, Eve, and suntan lotion? The example of creationists claiming an exponential population growth?)
The root of the problem - for both the speed of light and the population growth - is that creationists aren't trying to build a coherent model of nature. They're trying instead to patch over the observations that give the lie to their mythology. But they offer one patch at a time with a view to winning the current argument, and never pause to think about the implications of the claims they invoke in hopes of winning.
> So I don't think I shall respond to any of your posts anymore.
Should I be so lucky!
But I'll still point out the cluelessness in yours, to make sure you don't lead any lurkers astray.
> I've encountered you before, quoting out of date articles (mtDNA ring a bell?).
Actually, all we have is your assertion that the article on talkorigins.org is out of date. The fact is that it is still the view held by scientists, however much creationist Web sites may rant against it.
Who should I believe? You or the scientists, you or the scientists... tough decision, after seeing your brilliant performances on Slashdot.
> I don't understand, are you saying that the population of the world couldn't have arisen in 4,500 years from 8 people? Because that's certainly not true. From the Bible record it seems that people had a lot of children. The sons of Noah between them had 16 male children. Add to that, probably on average 16 females (give or take a few). That's double in one generation. It wouldn't take long for this to exceed thousands, then tens of thousands. The Bible records the number of male children they had for the first two generations I think. If you want to see if it's possible, go work it out for yourself.
Oh, it's trivially easy if you just pick arbitrary parameters to an exponential curve in order to get n=8 at t=0 and n=6,000,000,000 at t=4500. The problem is that by doing so you have created a model, and you can test the model by looking at what it predicts for various other times and then comparing those predictions to history, and so far every proposed model has failed the test miserably.
The exact numbers depend on what numbers are plugged into the model, but here are a few examples that have come up in talk.origins at various times in the past:
Here is an analysis of some numbers actually published by a creationist (albeit way back in 1925, if that excuses the author's failure to consider the implications of his own claims):
World Population Date Event
17 2566 BC Construction of Great Pyramid
2,729 1332 BC Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten dies
5,000 1185 BC Trojan War
32,971 776 BC First Olympic games
87,507 490 BC Greek wars with Persia
133,744 387 BC Brennus' Sack of Rome
586,678 28 BC Augustus' census of Rome (70 to 100 million counted)
And here is another, though not based on published numbers. [Sorry, but the lame filter prevents me from quoting the table.]
Let us know if you'd like to try some different numbers.
> I can't be bothered.
Yes, that pretty well describes the creationist attitude toward doing real science. Any time they go past the handwaving and offer some actual numbers they are immediately shown to be wrong.
> I wouldn't be the grammar nazi if I didn't take point out that: "Is this striking any cords with anyone?" (line from original story) is incorrect.
"didn't take point out"???
Playing grammar nazi is a dangerous game: there seems to be a law of nature that increases the probability of grammatical errors in posts criticizing others' grammar. (I think they call it the "Second Law of Poetic Justice".)
> Entropy is a measurement of a microcosmic physical property. The generalized idea of "disorder" that led to the idea of information entropy is related but seperate.
As someone pointed out on talk.origins earlier this year, you can see it right away by looking at the units.
I.e., what is the conversion factor for Joules/Kelvin to bits?
> Given that any force that changes the entropy of any system in a predictable way is an 'intelligent' force.
The second law of thermodynamics is pretty predictable, but it has nothing to do with intelligence. Unless you consider randomly colliding molecules to be functionally intelligent.
No flame intended, but have you by any chance been listening to the proponents of "intelligent design theory", the latest reincarnation of creation 'science'?
> A case in point. Neural networks are weighted switches. They store their 'weights' in the neuron. The storage of these weights determines the networks ability to perform an intellectual task. Therefore studying the 'entropy' of these weights and what and how they change and the effects of these changes is to study the networks 'intelligence' directly?
You seem to be confusing the training of the network with its operations after it has been trained.
> Another case in point. Genetic algorithms can search a solution landscape and then select the 'best' solution as a seed to the next iteration. This 'best current solution' will have an entropy or measure of order or disorder. So, in these terms, the system is measuring the level of chaos in the system according to some rules and selecting the solution that produces the least chaos (most entropy)
Actually, depending what problem the GA is working working on and what exactly you measure for the entropy calculations, the entropy may either increase or decrease as it progresses. (I know this for a fact, because I've done it.)
> Is this striking any cords with anyone?
Yeah, the same kind Lister strikes when he plays his guitar on Red Dwarf.
There is certainly room for applications of entropy to the study of these things, but you don't seem to be off to a good start. For some basic applications of information theory to neural networks, see Haykin's textbook. There's surely lots more literature out there, if you care to track it down.
> I thought the same thing first time I saw Futurama. It was nothing special, sometimes just boring, and Simpsons seemed so much better. I never watched Futurama after the first few episodes. Then, a few years later I saw it and watched it, and for some reason I found it very funny and have watched it whenever I had the chance.
I guess I'm a sort of half convert. My initial reaction was the same as yours. I do watch it now and then now, but I would only rate it as "amusing" for most episodes, and I still find a few of them dull enough to turn off in the middle.
It's not bad considering the other crap that establishes par these days, but I can't see being a fan over it. The Jackie Chan Adventures cartoon series beats it hands down for humor, IMO.
> 1) The Internet was a cash cow that needed only to be milked.
So far as I can see, the vast majority of companies with a presence on the WWW still can't see much use for it beyond collecting marketing information about the page viewers.
And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that a sub-economy based on trading consumer information isn't going to generate much real profit for the parties involved.
> Many of us have seen the total waste of $$$ that an IT manager will sell to the higher ups - sometimes just to work with new technology, etc..
Or sucking up to the saleman. I've seen a lot of really shady salesman-driven purchasing decisions, and when someone asks the wrong question at a meeting to discuss those decisons, the Big Wheel from upper management just frowns at the embarassing silence and then continues as if nothing happened, to keep from having to veto some Golden Boy's pet waste of money.
I don't know how much should be spent on IT, but I'm quite sure that a lot of what is spent isn't spent well.
And though I don't have an ear to the ground for such things anymore, I remember ~10 years ago there was lots of talk about how many gazillion dollars the US economy had spent on IT over the previous decade or two, and how little measured improvement in employee productivity had been obtained as a result.
Of course, we do things now that couldn't have been done in 1980, so maybe instead of raw increases in productivity it's a matter of staying in the ring with all the competition that's offering new services and convenience to their customers.
And of course there's the Dark Side of IT. E-mail makes it easy to get a question answered without playing telephone tag, but it also makes it easy for someone to call Yet Another Pointless Meeting on short notice. And computer generated reports can put lots of information at decision makers' fingertips, but frankly some decision makers are morons who would do just as well flipping a coin for their decisions (as can be seen from some of the report forms they ask for - apples & oranges kind of things).
And finally an observation. Ever notice the difference in how people respond if (say) the lights go out in their building, vs. if the network or mainframe go down? In my experience the former results in a party and the latter results in a lynching.
My tentative conclusion from all this is that IT should be studied by sociologists rather than systems analysts.
> This may not be a popular opinion but I really don't think the majority of corporate users NEED a new pc very ofter.
As others have pointed out, this phenomenon seems to be the swing of a pendulum. Around 1990 I worked a couple of places where a department of 40 people would count itself lucky to get any new PCs in a given year, and those that were obtained usually went as perks to the upper echelon secretaries rather than to people who didn't have one at all and needed something.
And heaven forbid it you needed people to write or maintain software. Management would argue that "We're an XYZ company, not a sofware company!", but somehow that same logic didn't prevent them from keeping mechanics for the motor pool, etc.
Corporate spending is, was, and always will be very political.
Re: The great Windows return debacle part II?
on
Mega-Geek March?
·
· Score: 1
> While I hope that this demonstration goes well I am not expecting the turnout to be terribly large... and am not setting my hopes terribly high for their success.
Surely the mere sight of ESR dressed as Darth Vader will be enough to convince them?
> I'm not trying to claim that all drugs should be legalized (though I might)
I'll say it: drugs should be legalized.
Practical reasons:
1) Drug use actually drops in countries that legalize it, because it no longer serves as a protest, or a marker of membership in a counterculture.
2) As others have already pointed out, it's precisely the war on drugs that puts Columbia in the state it's in. If the US was smart enough to legalize dope and tax it up until it cost only 90% of what the smuggled stuff does, the Columbian gangsters would fold as fast as the IRA did after 9/11 when Irish-Americans decided it wasn't cool to fund terrorists anymore.
2b) Related to (2), it is the war on drugs that brought out violent gangs in the USA during the late 20th Century. (Not the "no pass, no play" academic rules that some spin doctors want to blame it on.)
Ethical reasons:
1) The war on drugs is the worst kind of class abusue. Look at the diffence in what happens when a senator's son gets busted, vs. an inner-city boy.
2) It's hypocrisy of the first rank, since we pack people off to prison for growing some drugs and subsidize the growers of other drugs with taxpayers' money.
> Meanwhile, the evil CEOs that have looted companies at the expense of their employees' livelihoods and 401K's continue to walk around free.
Actually, several of them have "walked the walk" over the past few weeks......though people are starting to notice that oil execs aren't getting the same treatment. One suspects that the sudden interest in prosecuting execs has more to do with elections in three monts than with cleaning house.
> And so I am vindicated for quoting from one source only, from the mouth of an evolutionis - creationscience.com "is specifically intended to serve as a clearinghouse to dispense information about the most common" evolutionist arguments.
Your problem isn't so much that you use a single source, it's that you use a source of bullshit.
> The scientific method is really bad at proving things. It's good at disproving things however.
And cutting to the chase, it disproved any literal interpretation of Genesis something like 200 years ago - before anyone had ever heard of the theory of evolution. In the unlikely event that anyone ever disproves the theory of evolution, creationists will merely be back where they were in 1858: already disproven by basic geology. Since then we've added disproofs from biology, cosmology, planetology, archaeology, and probably several other independent fields of enquiry.
The biggest sign of the rampant ignorance in the creationist camp is that they think it would actually help their position even if they refuted evolution honestly.
> Evolution teaches that life increases in complexity, and therefore defies the second law.
Actually, the 2LoT doesn't say anything about complexity at all. Look up the units used in the formula that expresses the 2LoT, and let us know if you can explain how a quantity with those units is relevant to biological evolution. (Or about complexity, for that matter.)
Also, for a purely intuitive notion of complexity like you're working with, genetic algorithms produce it all the time. I know people who produce amazing things with genetic algorithms, turning piles or random numbers into the controllers for intelligent agents. The 2LoT doesn't interfere in the least.
Slashdot Mirror
> For example, I believe in ESP, as a vague sort of premonition that may someday be explained by physics. While I don't know how it works, there is sufficient evidence, in my experience, to concede that it probably (not definitely) exists.
And of course, you have kept careful count of all the times you got a vague premonition but nothing happened, right? And those events are extremely rare in comparison to the number of times you get a vague premonition and something does happen, right? And the vagueness of the premonitions doesn't inflate the "hit" rate, right?
OK, maybe ESP really happens... but it's going to take more than a big pile of uncritical anecdotes to convince scientists that it's worth investigating closer.
> Nothing should be believed until subjected to a scientific method of proof. It might just be a scam. Example, global warming.
Yes, it's just a prognostic... though I think you go overboard in citing it as a scamp.
> It will be very hard to [prove] today, especially since we don't have any Earth-like planets sitting around to expirement with.
More to the point, we do have one Earth-like planet to experiment with - but only one. To the sensible, that recommends caution.
But since you don't believe in global warming, maybe you would like to reflect on something a bit shorter term. So what do you think of The Asian Brown Cloud? In particular, do you think we should conclude from it that we should be a bit more careful about what we dump into the atmosphere, or not? Give your reasoning, but limit your response to a single page.
> Corrolation does not prove a causal realtionship.
That's true. But it's not a very good excuse for throwing out a model that's built on solid science.
People can always find a mantra that lets them reject things they don't want to believe, no matter how well established those things are. (That observation kind of fits in with the whole point of the article, don't you think?)
> It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany.
Of course, Orwell was writing with the benefit of hindsight. The outcome of the war was not at all obvious at the time.
> I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
Of course, we've all heard similar silly rants from anti-intellectuals. Really: how many times did you hear that Clinton had signed an executive order that would let him set aside the constitution if X happened [X varied with the telling], and how many of those times did you hear it from someone in the intelligentsia.
Orwell's quoted statements should be viewed as a political rant rather than a penetrating insight into human nature.
> It's amazing how stupid some of the stuff the human brain comes up with when common sense is left behind in favor of over-rationalization.
I'll gladly grant you that, though.
> If a treatment doesn't involve a synthetically created compound or cutting someone open, it falls into the realm of "alternative medicine" regardless of how effective it may be.
Uhm... the single most frequent thing that I hear when I visit the doctor's office is "drink lots of water". The second and third most common things are "eat balanced meals" and "get regular exercise".
In other news, God is suing Toho for for appropriating his name into the name of their monster.
You again display your great talent for missing the point. It's creationists who offer the exponential population growth argument, not me. But if they paused for half a second they would see that their model makes ridiculous predictions. I brought it in as an analogy for your suggestion for an exponential rate of change in the speed of light, since it also makes ridiculous predictions. (Did you miss the part about claims having consequences? The example of E=mc^2, Adam, Eve, and suntan lotion? The example of creationists claiming an exponential population growth?)
The root of the problem - for both the speed of light and the population growth - is that creationists aren't trying to build a coherent model of nature. They're trying instead to patch over the observations that give the lie to their mythology. But they offer one patch at a time with a view to winning the current argument, and never pause to think about the implications of the claims they invoke in hopes of winning.
> So I don't think I shall respond to any of your posts anymore.
Should I be so lucky!
But I'll still point out the cluelessness in yours, to make sure you don't lead any lurkers astray.
> I've encountered you before, quoting out of date articles (mtDNA ring a bell?).
Actually, all we have is your assertion that the article on talkorigins.org is out of date. The fact is that it is still the view held by scientists, however much creationist Web sites may rant against it.
Who should I believe? You or the scientists, you or the scientists... tough decision, after seeing your brilliant performances on Slashdot.
And here is another, though not based on published numbers. [Sorry, but the lame filter prevents me from quoting the table.]> I don't understand, are you saying that the population of the world couldn't have arisen in 4,500 years from 8 people? Because that's certainly not true. From the Bible record it seems that people had a lot of children. The sons of Noah between them had 16 male children. Add to that, probably on average 16 females (give or take a few). That's double in one generation. It wouldn't take long for this to exceed thousands, then tens of thousands. The Bible records the number of male children they had for the first two generations I think. If you want to see if it's possible, go work it out for yourself.
Oh, it's trivially easy if you just pick arbitrary parameters to an exponential curve in order to get n=8 at t=0 and n=6,000,000,000 at t=4500. The problem is that by doing so you have created a model, and you can test the model by looking at what it predicts for various other times and then comparing those predictions to history, and so far every proposed model has failed the test miserably.
The exact numbers depend on what numbers are plugged into the model, but here are a few examples that have come up in talk.origins at various times in the past:
Here is an analysis of some numbers actually published by a creationist (albeit way back in 1925, if that excuses the author's failure to consider the implications of his own claims):
And here is a simple take on the whole thing.
Let us know if you'd like to try some different numbers.
> I can't be bothered.
Yes, that pretty well describes the creationist attitude toward doing real science. Any time they go past the handwaving and offer some actual numbers they are immediately shown to be wrong.
> I wouldn't be the grammar nazi if I didn't take point out that: "Is this striking any cords with anyone?" (line from original story) is incorrect.
"didn't take point out"???
Playing grammar nazi is a dangerous game: there seems to be a law of nature that increases the probability of grammatical errors in posts criticizing others' grammar. (I think they call it the "Second Law of Poetic Justice".)
> Entropy is a measurement of a microcosmic physical property. The generalized idea of "disorder" that led to the idea of information entropy is related but seperate.
As someone pointed out on talk.origins earlier this year, you can see it right away by looking at the units.
I.e., what is the conversion factor for Joules/Kelvin to bits?
> Given that any force that changes the entropy of any system in a predictable way is an 'intelligent' force.
The second law of thermodynamics is pretty predictable, but it has nothing to do with intelligence. Unless you consider randomly colliding molecules to be functionally intelligent.
No flame intended, but have you by any chance been listening to the proponents of "intelligent design theory", the latest reincarnation of creation 'science'?
> A case in point. Neural networks are weighted switches. They store their 'weights' in the neuron. The storage of these weights determines the networks ability to perform an intellectual task. Therefore studying the 'entropy' of these weights and what and how they change and the effects of these changes is to study the networks 'intelligence' directly?
You seem to be confusing the training of the network with its operations after it has been trained.
> Another case in point. Genetic algorithms can search a solution landscape and then select the 'best' solution as a seed to the next iteration. This 'best current solution' will have an entropy or measure of order or disorder. So, in these terms, the system is measuring the level of chaos in the system according to some rules and selecting the solution that produces the least chaos (most entropy)
Actually, depending what problem the GA is working working on and what exactly you measure for the entropy calculations, the entropy may either increase or decrease as it progresses. (I know this for a fact, because I've done it.)
> Is this striking any cords with anyone?
Yeah, the same kind Lister strikes when he plays his guitar on Red Dwarf.
There is certainly room for applications of entropy to the study of these things, but you don't seem to be off to a good start. For some basic applications of information theory to neural networks, see Haykin's textbook. There's surely lots more literature out there, if you care to track it down.
> I thought the same thing first time I saw Futurama. It was nothing special, sometimes just boring, and Simpsons seemed so much better. I never watched Futurama after the first few episodes. Then, a few years later I saw it and watched it, and for some reason I found it very funny and have watched it whenever I had the chance.
I guess I'm a sort of half convert. My initial reaction was the same as yours. I do watch it now and then now, but I would only rate it as "amusing" for most episodes, and I still find a few of them dull enough to turn off in the middle.
It's not bad considering the other crap that establishes par these days, but I can't see being a fan over it. The Jackie Chan Adventures cartoon series beats it hands down for humor, IMO.
> 1) The Internet was a cash cow that needed only to be milked.
So far as I can see, the vast majority of companies with a presence on the WWW still can't see much use for it beyond collecting marketing information about the page viewers.
And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that a sub-economy based on trading consumer information isn't going to generate much real profit for the parties involved.
> Many of us have seen the total waste of $$$ that an IT manager will sell to the higher ups - sometimes just to work with new technology, etc..
Or sucking up to the saleman. I've seen a lot of really shady salesman-driven purchasing decisions, and when someone asks the wrong question at a meeting to discuss those decisons, the Big Wheel from upper management just frowns at the embarassing silence and then continues as if nothing happened, to keep from having to veto some Golden Boy's pet waste of money.
I don't know how much should be spent on IT, but I'm quite sure that a lot of what is spent isn't spent well.
And though I don't have an ear to the ground for such things anymore, I remember ~10 years ago there was lots of talk about how many gazillion dollars the US economy had spent on IT over the previous decade or two, and how little measured improvement in employee productivity had been obtained as a result.
Of course, we do things now that couldn't have been done in 1980, so maybe instead of raw increases in productivity it's a matter of staying in the ring with all the competition that's offering new services and convenience to their customers.
And of course there's the Dark Side of IT. E-mail makes it easy to get a question answered without playing telephone tag, but it also makes it easy for someone to call Yet Another Pointless Meeting on short notice. And computer generated reports can put lots of information at decision makers' fingertips, but frankly some decision makers are morons who would do just as well flipping a coin for their decisions (as can be seen from some of the report forms they ask for - apples & oranges kind of things).
And finally an observation. Ever notice the difference in how people respond if (say) the lights go out in their building, vs. if the network or mainframe go down? In my experience the former results in a party and the latter results in a lynching.
My tentative conclusion from all this is that IT should be studied by sociologists rather than systems analysts.
> This may not be a popular opinion but I really don't think the majority of corporate users NEED a new pc very ofter.
As others have pointed out, this phenomenon seems to be the swing of a pendulum. Around 1990 I worked a couple of places where a department of 40 people would count itself lucky to get any new PCs in a given year, and those that were obtained usually went as perks to the upper echelon secretaries rather than to people who didn't have one at all and needed something.
And heaven forbid it you needed people to write or maintain software. Management would argue that "We're an XYZ company, not a sofware company!", but somehow that same logic didn't prevent them from keeping mechanics for the motor pool, etc.
Corporate spending is, was, and always will be very political.
> While I hope that this demonstration goes well I am not expecting the turnout to be terribly large
Surely the mere sight of ESR dressed as Darth Vader will be enough to convince them?
> Why do conspiracy theroies abound?
Surely it's part of some kind of conspiracy.
> I'm not trying to claim that all drugs should be legalized (though I might)
I'll say it: drugs should be legalized.
Practical reasons:
1) Drug use actually drops in countries that legalize it, because it no longer serves as a protest, or a marker of membership in a counterculture.
2) As others have already pointed out, it's precisely the war on drugs that puts Columbia in the state it's in. If the US was smart enough to legalize dope and tax it up until it cost only 90% of what the smuggled stuff does, the Columbian gangsters would fold as fast as the IRA did after 9/11 when Irish-Americans decided it wasn't cool to fund terrorists anymore.
2b) Related to (2), it is the war on drugs that brought out violent gangs in the USA during the late 20th Century. (Not the "no pass, no play" academic rules that some spin doctors want to blame it on.)
Ethical reasons:
1) The war on drugs is the worst kind of class abusue. Look at the diffence in what happens when a senator's son gets busted, vs. an inner-city boy.
2) It's hypocrisy of the first rank, since we pack people off to prison for growing some drugs and subsidize the growers of other drugs with taxpayers' money.
> Meanwhile, the evil CEOs that have looted companies at the expense of their employees' livelihoods and 401K's continue to walk around free.
Actually, several of them have "walked the walk" over the past few weeks...
> When I saw the headline I thought that they finaly decided to implement my idea of useing the police to deliver pizzas.
Wonder how many apartment maintenance men are undercover cops.
> Gold dragons have been able to fly without wings since 1st edition AD&D.
Yes, but what about Balrogs?
> And so I am vindicated for quoting from one source only, from the mouth of an evolutionis - creationscience.com "is specifically intended to serve as a clearinghouse to dispense information about the most common" evolutionist arguments.
Your problem isn't so much that you use a single source, it's that you use a source of bullshit.
> While Dubya may be a doofus, he at least knows how to put his finger to the wind
Is that where he puts it!
> "today's issue of nature"
> should be: "today's issue of Nature". Nature is a science magazine.
I dunno 'bout that. After all, today is Thursday, and according to the tenants of Last Thursdayism we're due a new issue of nature today.
> The scientific method is really bad at proving things. It's good at disproving things however.
And cutting to the chase, it disproved any literal interpretation of Genesis something like 200 years ago - before anyone had ever heard of the theory of evolution. In the unlikely event that anyone ever disproves the theory of evolution, creationists will merely be back where they were in 1858: already disproven by basic geology. Since then we've added disproofs from biology, cosmology, planetology, archaeology, and probably several other independent fields of enquiry.
The biggest sign of the rampant ignorance in the creationist camp is that they think it would actually help their position even if they refuted evolution honestly.
> Evolution teaches that life increases in complexity, and therefore defies the second law.
Actually, the 2LoT doesn't say anything about complexity at all. Look up the units used in the formula that expresses the 2LoT, and let us know if you can explain how a quantity with those units is relevant to biological evolution. (Or about complexity, for that matter.)
Also, for a purely intuitive notion of complexity like you're working with, genetic algorithms produce it all the time. I know people who produce amazing things with genetic algorithms, turning piles or random numbers into the controllers for intelligent agents. The 2LoT doesn't interfere in the least.