Are you willing to tell a 13-year-old girl who's just been raped that she must carry the child to term?
One thing that's always annoyed me about the anti-abortion position is that so few of the believers have the courage of their convictions. The pro-life movement doesn't talk much about scenarios like these, although you'll see a few folks who are willing to stand up and say these girls must carry the child to term no matter how bad it messes her up. The rest hide behind "except in cases of rape and incest" phrases as if people born of rape are somehow less human than those of us conceived out of love.
Speaking as both a father of an adopted child and as someone who's pro-choice, I'm very aware of the consequences of abortion. It's a hideous act, but the reality of not having it available is worse in my opinion.
You can't write a proper lab report with Microsoft Word either. Try TeX.
Oh please. I may have written my PChem doctoral dissertation in TeX (TeXtures, to be precise), but I had lots of friends manage 200+ page dissertations loaded with equations, footnotes and figures within Word.
I think a simple lab report is well within Word's capabilities.
I've got a M392A2 105mm sabot round on my desk-one of the older spin stabilized warshots. Heavy as hell- I love handing it to people and watching the reaction. The penetrator is tungsten carbide, not DU, but I'm looking for one of those... It's next to the rotating despin ring from a practice HEAT round, but that's only aluminum.
Ah, the joys of keeping military hardware around a small, all-women liberal arts college:^)
It's actually higher, but what's considered overhead in education circles wouldn't be in a business setting.
Admissions? Education overhead, but sales&marketing for business folks.
Development/Alumni? Education overhead, but sales&marketing for business folks.
Communications? See above
The museum? Ok, but that's not something that a company normally has.
Most schools run very light on the "management" side. We've got 70 faculty here and one Dean for the faculty, who also teaches a course+ 3 administrative assistants to the Dean. Department head is just a position that nobody wants.
I've never understood why Bill doesn't just give Justice exactly what it wants.
"Here's the stripped copy of Windows. Doesn't include IE, WMP or anything that depends on it. It's for sale to both OEMs and to customers."
Now imagine what happens next when customers start trying to use it for day-to-day tasks.
"Hello, Microsoft Help Desk"
"Yes, I'm trying to get my new computer with XP Lite to upload pictures from my digital camera and it doesn't work."
"Sorry sir, XP Lite doesn't include the necessary functionality. Contact your camera maker and buy the needed software from them."
"I can't seem to see the Internet either"
"Yes, XP Lite doesn't include a web browser or any internet client such as FTP you can use to download one. You'll have to go back to the store and purchase a CD. Oh, it doesn't include a network stack either. Please contact Trumpet if they are still in business."
"But I can't even load or play a CD!"
"That's right sir. The drivers for your CD drive are not included with XP Lite. Contact your CD maker, or may we suggest the XP Pro update?"
In all seriousness, MS just has to put out a truly crippled product that nobody in their right mind would want. This would be trivial and would follow the letter of the law.
Sure, OEMs could buy XP Lite and spend a while trying to get it back, but then you'll have 50 seperate versions of Windows, all with different features. Software might or might not run on any given one, but if you just upgrade to XP Pro everything magically works! Imagine that!
Your post just irritates me. I get tired repeating myself to five people.
As do scientists to the ICR. We repeat and repeat and the knowledge just bounces off. The ICR repeats its lies. Let's take a look at an example
Radiocarbon dating has been demonstrated repeatedly in the Creation magazine to
be wildly inaccurate. They don't date the strata themselves, but send them off
to recognised and respected laboratories. I suggest you grab some Creation
magazines and read these examples for yourself.
I have. Let's, for example, look at their argument that radioactive decay rates aren't constant This is of course very important since a dozen different radioactive clocks date the earth and the universe to a lot older than 6K years, and the ICR cannot allow that since they must swear that they believe the 6K date.
First, we see that experimental decay rates have a 1% error bar on them. Yep they do: the article then goes on to state that this shows that the rates could vary tremendously since nobody has checked in the last 50 years. That's simply wrong: even without experiments directly checking, people operating nuclear power plants would know. So would biological researchers who work with short-lived isotopes daily.
The first two reasons why to believe in changing decay rates aren't worthy of discussion. Backed by experimental data both would win Nobel prizes when shown true. (There can be slight alterations in some decay rates, most commonly those with k-capture in certain molecules since k-capture involves the electron density around the nucleus, but these don't affect most radioactive clocks.) Why not publish and win fame and fortune?
Radiohaloes: I assume they are talking about Po halos. Old argument
Speed of light changing? Didn't you claim in another post that ICR had given up on this one? Given that c is a fundamental constant, the universe itself wouldn't exist with a large change in c.
Observed values of half lives. He's somehow amazed that thay have such different values for different isotopes. This is such a bizarre comment that I don't even know what to make of it. Is he also amazed at the difference in the strength of gravity and the strong nuclear force?
He now goes on to do some curve fitting. His math is correct, but he gives no reason *why* we should believe alpha and beta are changing: he simply plugs in random numbers until he gets the answer he wants. That's not how science is done.
Now, let's see if there's any good evidence that alpha doesn't change. Oh, here we go. SN1987a happened 170,000 years ago and the isotopes created by the supernova decay at exactly the same rate they do on earth today. Or perhaps the evidence from a natural atomic reactor that atomic physics was the same ~1.7 billion years ago as it is today?
This is pretty typical creationist stuff. The arguments presented make little sense, extrapolate from experimental error into something huge, make up numbers where appropriate and finally don't agree with what we see in the real world.
I'm going to stop here. There's no real point
in further discussion: you've decided that the world is 6K years old and that evolution is a sham. If you want to believe that I won't further disabuse you.
You forgot to mention the fact that the guy was already very rich and semi-retired. Nowhere in the article does it mention making a profit on the devices- in fact, it's not even clear if he actually makes them or just hands the blueprints over. Looking up one of the wineries using the device the wording seems to indicate they built it themselves.
It's easy to give away inventions when you can still have lobster and caviar (and good wine) for every meal.
You're so confused about these issues that conversation is difficult.
Evolutionary theory:
The earth was created around 4 billion years ago.
Is this scientific? Is it testable?
Evolutionary theory says nothing about the age of the earth. It requires an old earth, but we get the data from geology.
Testable? Of course. There are literally dozens of different tracks of evidence that show an old earth: radioactive dating, sedimentation rates, magnetic field reversals, glaciation evidence, etc.
Creation science has it at 6k years. Testable? Yes. All evidence shows that this is not the case. Every bit of it. Not a *single* piece of evidence shows otherwise. You are welcome to troll the creationist web sites looking for something, but what they claim as evidence is laughable.
Ergo, creation theory is *wrong*. You can dance around the issue as much as you want, but you simply can't ignore the facts. (Well, it appears that you and other creationists can, but people living in the real world can't.)
Besides, dating method is flawed and impossible to argue with since it is so unscientific. What would happen if a flower was found blooming in a cambrian strata? The "scientists" would simply say, evolution of flowering plants began earlier than we thought!
Again, there are so many misconceptions in here that it's clear you do not understand science. Dating methods are *not* flawed. You are quite welcome to present any evidence you think proves this. Unlike some of the tricky bio that I have to rely on experts in that field for info, as a physical chemist I can blow them out of the water by myself.
Second, a flowering plant in Cambrian strata would certainly prove evolution wrong. *Land* plants hadn't evolved by the Cambrian, much less flowering ones. They're a quite recent invention. Finding a fossil 300MY before any precursors appeared would be a disproof of evolution. You're quite welcome to look for one.
As for the nylon example - there was a stream of germs that was found in a hospital completely immune to all antibiotics.
You're babbling here. Nylon is not an antibiotic. You clearly don't understand the premise here. Nylon did not exist before 1940. Why would an organism be able to eat the waste products before nylon existed? Hint: they couldn't: a *new* enzyme was created by a favorable mutation to do this.
Ditto vancomycin resistance. Please read the detailsNone of that existed until quite recently.
Give me an example of added information that is the beginning of the process to evolution.
I've given you several: nylon eating, antibiotic resistance, tetrachromaticity. You choose to simply ignore them.
What more do you want from Creationists?
I want them to present a scientific, testable, non-falsified theory of creationism or get the fuck out of science classrooms. Teach your fairy tales in Sunday school.
Please explain the testable, scientific creation
theory. The folks on talk.origins have been asking for
*years* and have never gotten one.
This does not sound like a very fair request, given two facts:
No, it is the *absolute crux* of the matter. "Scientific" creationists want evolution and SC
taught side by side as if they were equal theories. They are not: SC is *not* a theory, it is not scientific.
Both macro-evolution (the process by which all life began from a small organism to the complex lifeforms we see today) and creation are areas of philosophy. As such, neither fit the requirements for being science
WRONG! Evolution is science. It is testable. It is falsifiable. It is both a fact (we've seen it in a lab, we've seen fossil records that show very clearly how one animal came from another) and a theory.
The mere fact that you differentiate between micro and macroevolution shows that you don't understand evolution: they are the same thing. It's like saying that an inch and a mile aren't both measures of distance since once is so much larger than the other.
Finding a fossil of a flowering plant in a Cambrian strata would instantly disprove evolution. That's what makes evolution science.
I have also read up on creation theory, and have come to understand it. If you (or the guys at talk.origins) can't put in the effort to do the same for creation theory, why should I have to type it up for you?
We *have* put in the effort. It's garbage. There is *no* evidence for creationism. None. The few "facts" presented by creationists to support their theory are simply wrong. My personal bugaboo, being a physical chemist, is the classic "2nd Law of Thermodynamics prevents evolution". It's wrong. Scientists have explained to creationists like Gish and Ham many times why it's wrong. Guess what: it's still up at answersingenesis.
You claim that you understand the theory of creation. Present it. You've dodged once. If it's truly scientific, we can see how it stacks up against the evidence, just like we can with evolution. If it's just philosophy, then teach it in Sunday school and don't bother the rest of the world with it anymore.
On the second point, I'm not sure what you are saying. Nylon didn't exist?
Yes. Nylon didn't exist prior to 1940. It's man made. Yet bacteria have evolved to eat the (man-made) waste products. This ability arose from a change in a totally unrelated enzyme due to a beneficial mutation.
This is how creation natural selection works - an existing set of genetic variety present in the parent
See above nylon example: trivially falsified. The ability to eat nylon was not present in the genetic code of any organism prior to 1940. Antibiotic resistance is another good example: vancomycin resistance didn't exist until very recently.
1. Genetic mutations are almost always harmful/harmless, never beneficial (in the sense of different fur). The ratio of harmful mutations is much, much higher than neutral ones. I'm not sure if any beneficial mutations have been observed, but I could be wrong.
You are wrong. We have indeed seen beneficial mutations, including antibiotic resistance in bacteria and bacterial digestion of nylon precusors. One of my personal favorites is
tetrachromaticity, as this is a *human* mutation that offers a distinct advantage to a few lucky women.
2. We find the genetic code for the variety of species is present in the parent. With current data we are quite clearly dealing with genetic code that already existed, not through fresh mutations.
Again, wrong. We've seen new mutations appear: nylon didn't exist in nature before the 1940s. Now bacteria can eat it. Other types of mutations scramble existing code and generate new: you can claim that rearranging all the letters in a/. post doesn't introduce new information, but I can take the words in your post above and make it say most anything.
I can't argue your latter bit: I'm a chemist rather than a biologist, so I see a different set of wrong arguments against evolution.
This problem is perfectly consistent with Creation theory though,
Here's the real crux of your problem. What is "Creation Theory"? Is it scientific? Is it testable? Is it falsifiable? "God did it" is none of these.
Please explain the testable, scientific creation theory. The folks on talk.origins have been asking for *years* and have never gotten one.
A similar system for slashdot could be a very interesting snapshot of the geek/nerd community.
Perhaps too interesting? A few offhanded comments in the past by/. editors have indicated that the majority of the hits on/. are from Windows machines running MSIE. Would disclosing the true numbers be traumatic to the/. community?
Even more fun: have a plum for showing the OS/browser for posters. How many of the "L1NUX R00L5!" folks are posting from their parents Win98 box running AOL?
Actually, if you read The Difference Engine by Doron Swade (not Sterling+Gibson) you'll find that the drawings were not enough to actually build the device.
There were some omissions (what materials to use for each part), unclarity (How was the device oiled?) and just plain errors (The "handedness" of the carry mechanism was exactly backwards and would not have worked in reality. Swade offers that it might have a deliberate error to prevent copying.)
It didn't exactly work the first time either: he goes into some detail over the build process, which basically was "Add part, try to move the linkage, listen to a part go 'ping' as it breaks, find broken pieces, repeat until done."
Still an amazing device- Babbage was way ahead of his time.
The folks flying corporate jets certainly don't. Fuel costs alone for a low-end jet run ~$300/hour, not counting maintenance, pilot fees and the like.
If you'd rather fly something like a Citation X you're up to $600/hour or so for the JetA. Don't even ask what it costs for the whole package.
Re:An Argument For No Other Life
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 2
There are a lot of other possibilites
d) Intelligent life is common but interstellar travel is very, very hard, as in "No level of technology allows it."
e) Intelligent life is common but they quarantine developing planets to prevent interference.
f) Intelligent life is common but civilizations burn out/transcend after limited times.
g) Intelligent life is common but they haven't had time to respond to us yet.
h) Intelligent life is common but we're located in a designated ecological preserve.
i) Intelligent life is common but they're waiting until there are enough of us to feed Rigel 4.
The only pieces of data we have are that they aren't here now and we haven't found any radio signals close by. Occam's Razor would seem to indicate a) in that case, but we haven't been around anywhere near long enough to call it.
Assume you make an incredibly good mirror: it's 99.999999% reflective. (How you're going to manage to do this while still pumping light in from the outside is unclear- 1/2 silvered mirrors are exactly that.) No mirror is even close to this value, BTW- the best around can do about 99.99% or so.
Assume you have a 1 m diameter ball.
Light travels 300,000 km/sec: 3e8 m/s. Thus, you get 3e8 collisions with the mirror every second. Total saved light= 0.99999999^3e8 ~= 0.05. In other words, after 1 second only 5% of the light remains.
"Photon torpedoes" supposedly use matter-antimatter as a power source: pure mass-> energy conversion- why bother with light at all?
The one thing he didn't say they did was beat on the screen. I was wondering that myself, since you can make it tougher, but I can't imagine a baseball bat to the screen wouldn't do serious damage.
The rest of the tests actually weren't all that bad: the baseball bat and the keyboard jump were the toughies. Hell, normal laptops can survive being driven over- the ground pressure of a typical car is pretty low.
NPR this morning had a report on Mil-spec laptops. The reporter got one and lacking any kind of test facility, turned it over to four kids ranging from 5-11.
In short, they couldn't break it, despite pouring ketchup over it, jumping up and down on the keyboard, throwing it at a tree, hitting it with a baseball bat and running a car over it multiple times. (The latter done by the parents.)
Once, long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, we used these little things called APPLICATIONS to manipulate downloaded data.
And more recently, mammals evolved and so did USER INTERFACES. I can create buttons to run certain scripts against the display. I can wrap text around those buttons and embeds. How do I do this with an application?
Let's see: with a plugin
Install plugin
Click on link
Click on button. See pretty pictures and hopefully learn some chemistry
With an application
Install app
Click on link
Flip back and forth between app and web page
Give users detailed instructions like
Ok, now highlight atoms 1-50, make them green and size 10
Next, highlight atoms 51-100 and make them blue and size 5
Set ribbon mode to alpha helix
set display mode to ball+stick
Watch users give up in frustration
Do you honestly think that stand alone applications are better in this case? There is one very similar to Chime: most people don't use it for web stuff anymore since Chime is so vastly better.
The data you want "Free, unfettered access" to is perfectly available: you can save the data files if you really want-just right-click and choose "Save". They may be ASCII, but they aren't something you can edit by hand or even understand for all but the simplest cases.
Not my plugin, but older versions of Chime have issues with IE5.0 and beyond. It's always worked better in Netscape. (See the MDLChime site for some of their comments.)
No idea why, but it's a very complex plugin and perhaps MS changing the plugin format under them every few months has finally taken it's toll. They claim the newer version will finally fix the problems.
I have a bunch of sites devoted to molecular visualization. Students can load 3-d models of atomic orbitals, proteins, crystals and the like, then rotate/zoom to look at them from different angles. Simple buttons allow them to modify the views: for example, They can show alpha helix areas in a protein while also highlighting an inhibitor. Others let you quickly switch between spacefilled and wireframe views to show the differences between graphite and carbon or color code the layers in FCC vs. HCP crystals to show how the stacking changes. Sure, I can show a bunch of JPGs, but it's not the same.
Now, how do I do that without a plugin? Java? Don't make me laugh: Chime has features that would take me years to code in Java- no remotely close equivalent exists.
I try to make plugin free sites whenever possible, but limiting yourself to never using plugins gives up so much capability that you'd be silly to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that's always annoyed me about the anti-abortion position is that so few of the believers have the courage of their convictions. The pro-life movement doesn't talk much about scenarios like these, although you'll see a few folks who are willing to stand up and say these girls must carry the child to term no matter how bad it messes her up. The rest hide behind "except in cases of rape and incest" phrases as if people born of rape are somehow less human than those of us conceived out of love.
Speaking as both a father of an adopted child and as someone who's pro-choice, I'm very aware of the consequences of abortion. It's a hideous act, but the reality of not having it available is worse in my opinion.
You can't write a proper lab report with Microsoft Word either. Try TeX.
Oh please. I may have written my PChem doctoral dissertation in TeX (TeXtures, to be precise), but I had lots of friends manage 200+ page dissertations loaded with equations, footnotes and figures within Word.
I think a simple lab report is well within Word's capabilities.
Ah, the joys of keeping military hardware around a small, all-women liberal arts college :^)
Eric
Educational institutions run about 50% overhead
It's actually higher, but what's considered overhead in education circles wouldn't be in a business setting.
Admissions? Education overhead, but sales&marketing for business folks.
Development/Alumni? Education overhead, but sales&marketing for business folks.
Communications? See above
The museum? Ok, but that's not something that a company normally has.
Most schools run very light on the "management" side. We've got 70 faculty here and one Dean for the faculty, who also teaches a course+ 3 administrative assistants to the Dean. Department head is just a position that nobody wants.
"Here's the stripped copy of Windows. Doesn't include IE, WMP or anything that depends on it. It's for sale to both OEMs and to customers."
Now imagine what happens next when customers start trying to use it for day-to-day tasks.
"Hello, Microsoft Help Desk"
"Yes, I'm trying to get my new computer with XP Lite to upload pictures from my digital camera and it doesn't work."
"Sorry sir, XP Lite doesn't include the necessary functionality. Contact your camera maker and buy the needed software from them."
"I can't seem to see the Internet either"
"Yes, XP Lite doesn't include a web browser or any internet client such as FTP you can use to download one. You'll have to go back to the store and purchase a CD. Oh, it doesn't include a network stack either. Please contact Trumpet if they are still in business."
"But I can't even load or play a CD!"
"That's right sir. The drivers for your CD drive are not included with XP Lite. Contact your CD maker, or may we suggest the XP Pro update?"
In all seriousness, MS just has to put out a truly crippled product that nobody in their right mind would want. This would be trivial and would follow the letter of the law.
Sure, OEMs could buy XP Lite and spend a while trying to get it back, but then you'll have 50 seperate versions of Windows, all with different features. Software might or might not run on any given one, but if you just upgrade to XP Pro everything magically works! Imagine that!
Eric
Your post just irritates me. I get tired repeating myself to five people.
As do scientists to the ICR. We repeat and repeat and the knowledge just bounces off. The ICR repeats its lies. Let's take a look at an example
Radiocarbon dating has been demonstrated repeatedly in the Creation magazine to be wildly inaccurate. They don't date the strata themselves, but send them off to recognised and respected laboratories. I suggest you grab some Creation magazines and read these examples for yourself.
I have. Let's, for example, look at their argument that radioactive decay rates aren't constant This is of course very important since a dozen different radioactive clocks date the earth and the universe to a lot older than 6K years, and the ICR cannot allow that since they must swear that they believe the 6K date.
First, we see that experimental decay rates have a 1% error bar on them. Yep they do: the article then goes on to state that this shows that the rates could vary tremendously since nobody has checked in the last 50 years. That's simply wrong: even without experiments directly checking, people operating nuclear power plants would know. So would biological researchers who work with short-lived isotopes daily.
The first two reasons why to believe in changing decay rates aren't worthy of discussion. Backed by experimental data both would win Nobel prizes when shown true. (There can be slight alterations in some decay rates, most commonly those with k-capture in certain molecules since k-capture involves the electron density around the nucleus, but these don't affect most radioactive clocks.) Why not publish and win fame and fortune?
Radiohaloes: I assume they are talking about Po halos. Old argument
Speed of light changing? Didn't you claim in another post that ICR had given up on this one? Given that c is a fundamental constant, the universe itself wouldn't exist with a large change in c.
Observed values of half lives. He's somehow amazed that thay have such different values for different isotopes. This is such a bizarre comment that I don't even know what to make of it. Is he also amazed at the difference in the strength of gravity and the strong nuclear force?
He now goes on to do some curve fitting. His math is correct, but he gives no reason *why* we should believe alpha and beta are changing: he simply plugs in random numbers until he gets the answer he wants. That's not how science is done.
Now, let's see if there's any good evidence that alpha doesn't change. Oh, here we go. SN1987a happened 170,000 years ago and the isotopes created by the supernova decay at exactly the same rate they do on earth today. Or perhaps the evidence from a natural atomic reactor that atomic physics was the same ~1.7 billion years ago as it is today?
This is pretty typical creationist stuff. The arguments presented make little sense, extrapolate from experimental error into something huge, make up numbers where appropriate and finally don't agree with what we see in the real world.
I'm going to stop here. There's no real point in further discussion: you've decided that the world is 6K years old and that evolution is a sham. If you want to believe that I won't further disabuse you.
It's easy to give away inventions when you can still have lobster and caviar (and good wine) for every meal.
You're so confused about these issues that conversation is difficult.
Evolutionary theory: The earth was created around 4 billion years ago. Is this scientific? Is it testable?
Ergo, creation theory is *wrong*. You can dance around the issue as much as you want, but you simply can't ignore the facts. (Well, it appears that you and other creationists can, but people living in the real world can't.)
Besides, dating method is flawed and impossible to argue with since it is so unscientific. What would happen if a flower was found blooming in a cambrian strata? The "scientists" would simply say, evolution of flowering plants began earlier than we thought!
Again, there are so many misconceptions in here that it's clear you do not understand science. Dating methods are *not* flawed. You are quite welcome to present any evidence you think proves this. Unlike some of the tricky bio that I have to rely on experts in that field for info, as a physical chemist I can blow them out of the water by myself.
Second, a flowering plant in Cambrian strata would certainly prove evolution wrong. *Land* plants hadn't evolved by the Cambrian, much less flowering ones. They're a quite recent invention. Finding a fossil 300MY before any precursors appeared would be a disproof of evolution. You're quite welcome to look for one.
As for the nylon example - there was a stream of germs that was found in a hospital completely immune to all antibiotics.
You're babbling here. Nylon is not an antibiotic. You clearly don't understand the premise here. Nylon did not exist before 1940. Why would an organism be able to eat the waste products before nylon existed? Hint: they couldn't: a *new* enzyme was created by a favorable mutation to do this.
Ditto vancomycin resistance. Please read the details None of that existed until quite recently.
Give me an example of added information that is the beginning of the process to evolution.
I've given you several: nylon eating, antibiotic resistance, tetrachromaticity. You choose to simply ignore them.
What more do you want from Creationists?
I want them to present a scientific, testable, non-falsified theory of creationism or get the fuck out of science classrooms . Teach your fairy tales in Sunday school.
This does not sound like a very fair request, given two facts:
No, it is the *absolute crux* of the matter. "Scientific" creationists want evolution and SC taught side by side as if they were equal theories. They are not: SC is *not* a theory, it is not scientific.
Both macro-evolution (the process by which all life began from a small organism to the complex lifeforms we see today) and creation are areas of philosophy. As such, neither fit the requirements for being science
WRONG! Evolution is science. It is testable. It is falsifiable. It is both a fact (we've seen it in a lab, we've seen fossil records that show very clearly how one animal came from another) and a theory.
The mere fact that you differentiate between micro and macroevolution shows that you don't understand evolution: they are the same thing. It's like saying that an inch and a mile aren't both measures of distance since once is so much larger than the other.
Finding a fossil of a flowering plant in a Cambrian strata would instantly disprove evolution. That's what makes evolution science.
I have also read up on creation theory, and have come to understand it. If you (or the guys at talk.origins) can't put in the effort to do the same for creation theory, why should I have to type it up for you?
We *have* put in the effort. It's garbage. There is *no* evidence for creationism. None. The few "facts" presented by creationists to support their theory are simply wrong. My personal bugaboo, being a physical chemist, is the classic "2nd Law of Thermodynamics prevents evolution". It's wrong. Scientists have explained to creationists like Gish and Ham many times why it's wrong. Guess what: it's still up at answersingenesis.
You claim that you understand the theory of creation. Present it. You've dodged once. If it's truly scientific, we can see how it stacks up against the evidence, just like we can with evolution. If it's just philosophy, then teach it in Sunday school and don't bother the rest of the world with it anymore.
On the second point, I'm not sure what you are saying. Nylon didn't exist?
Yes. Nylon didn't exist prior to 1940. It's man made. Yet bacteria have evolved to eat the (man-made) waste products. This ability arose from a change in a totally unrelated enzyme due to a beneficial mutation.
This is how creation natural selection works - an existing set of genetic variety present in the parent
See above nylon example: trivially falsified. The ability to eat nylon was not present in the genetic code of any organism prior to 1940. Antibiotic resistance is another good example: vancomycin resistance didn't exist until very recently.
1. Genetic mutations are almost always harmful/harmless, never beneficial (in the sense of different fur). The ratio of harmful mutations is much, much higher than neutral ones. I'm not sure if any beneficial mutations have been observed, but I could be wrong.
You are wrong. We have indeed seen beneficial mutations, including antibiotic resistance in bacteria and bacterial digestion of nylon precusors. One of my personal favorites is tetrachromaticity, as this is a *human* mutation that offers a distinct advantage to a few lucky women.
2. We find the genetic code for the variety of species is present in the parent. With current data we are quite clearly dealing with genetic code that already existed, not through fresh mutations.
Again, wrong. We've seen new mutations appear: nylon didn't exist in nature before the 1940s. Now bacteria can eat it. Other types of mutations scramble existing code and generate new: you can claim that rearranging all the letters in a /. post doesn't introduce new information, but I can take the words in your post above and make it say most anything.
I can't argue your latter bit: I'm a chemist rather than a biologist, so I see a different set of wrong arguments against evolution.
This problem is perfectly consistent with Creation theory though,
Here's the real crux of your problem. What is "Creation Theory"? Is it scientific? Is it testable? Is it falsifiable? "God did it" is none of these.
Please explain the testable, scientific creation theory. The folks on talk.origins have been asking for *years* and have never gotten one.
Eric
Posting now from MSIE6
A similar system for slashdot could be a very interesting snapshot of the geek/nerd community.
Perhaps too interesting? A few offhanded comments in the past by /. editors have indicated that the majority of the hits on /. are from Windows machines running MSIE. Would disclosing the true numbers be traumatic to the /. community?
Even more fun: have a plum for showing the OS/browser for posters. How many of the "L1NUX R00L5!" folks are posting from their parents Win98 box running AOL?
Eric, posting from Mozilla 0.99 on W2K.
Cryptonomicon notwithstanding, does anyone have some links to these myriad of investor lawsuits that everyone in Silicon Valley is so terrified of?
Here you go Lerach and his copycats file hundreds of them a year.
Amusing note for /. Lerach wants to copyright his lawsuit filings, since he claims people are taking them, replacing the names and refiling them. Heh.
There were some omissions (what materials to use for each part), unclarity (How was the device oiled?) and just plain errors (The "handedness" of the carry mechanism was exactly backwards and would not have worked in reality. Swade offers that it might have a deliberate error to prevent copying.)
It didn't exactly work the first time either: he goes into some detail over the build process, which basically was "Add part, try to move the linkage, listen to a part go 'ping' as it breaks, find broken pieces, repeat until done."
Still an amazing device- Babbage was way ahead of his time.
Eric
The folks flying corporate jets certainly don't. Fuel costs alone for a low-end jet run ~$300/hour, not counting maintenance, pilot fees and the like.
If you'd rather fly something like a Citation X you're up to $600/hour or so for the JetA. Don't even ask what it costs for the whole package.
d) Intelligent life is common but interstellar travel is very, very hard, as in "No level of technology allows it."
e) Intelligent life is common but they quarantine developing planets to prevent interference.
f) Intelligent life is common but civilizations burn out/transcend after limited times.
g) Intelligent life is common but they haven't had time to respond to us yet.
h) Intelligent life is common but we're located in a designated ecological preserve.
i) Intelligent life is common but they're waiting until there are enough of us to feed Rigel 4.
The only pieces of data we have are that they aren't here now and we haven't found any radio signals close by. Occam's Razor would seem to indicate a) in that case, but we haven't been around anywhere near long enough to call it.
Hell, Nethack runs on PocketPC devices like the iPaq as well, with graphical tileset to boot. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Palm port.
Assume you make an incredibly good mirror: it's 99.999999% reflective. (How you're going to manage to do this while still pumping light in from the outside is unclear- 1/2 silvered mirrors are exactly that.) No mirror is even close to this value, BTW- the best around can do about 99.99% or so.
Assume you have a 1 m diameter ball. Light travels 300,000 km/sec: 3e8 m/s. Thus, you get 3e8 collisions with the mirror every second. Total saved light= 0.99999999^3e8 ~= 0.05. In other words, after 1 second only 5% of the light remains.
"Photon torpedoes" supposedly use matter-antimatter as a power source: pure mass-> energy conversion- why bother with light at all?
Eric
The rest of the tests actually weren't all that bad: the baseball bat and the keyboard jump were the toughies. Hell, normal laptops can survive being driven over- the ground pressure of a typical car is pretty low.
In short, they couldn't break it, despite pouring ketchup over it, jumping up and down on the keyboard, throwing it at a tree, hitting it with a baseball bat and running a car over it multiple times. (The latter done by the parents.)
Color me impressed.
Microsoft trying to talk to students about "the source" is like your dad wanting to "rap" with you about drugs.
Hmm, what about those of us who have dads who design drugs?
Basically, the implosion of services like Iridium killed the market for small, low earth orbit satellites, the only things that a Roton could carry.
Once, long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, we used these little things called APPLICATIONS to manipulate downloaded data.
And more recently, mammals evolved and so did USER INTERFACES. I can create buttons to run certain scripts against the display. I can wrap text around those buttons and embeds. How do I do this with an application?
Let's see: with a plugin
With an application
Do you honestly think that stand alone applications are better in this case? There is one very similar to Chime: most people don't use it for web stuff anymore since Chime is so vastly better.
The data you want "Free, unfettered access" to is perfectly available: you can save the data files if you really want-just right-click and choose "Save". They may be ASCII, but they aren't something you can edit by hand or even understand for all but the simplest cases.
No idea why, but it's a very complex plugin and perhaps MS changing the plugin format under them every few months has finally taken it's toll. They claim the newer version will finally fix the problems.
I have a bunch of sites devoted to molecular visualization. Students can load 3-d models of atomic orbitals, proteins, crystals and the like, then rotate/zoom to look at them from different angles. Simple buttons allow them to modify the views: for example, They can show alpha helix areas in a protein while also highlighting an inhibitor. Others let you quickly switch between spacefilled and wireframe views to show the differences between graphite and carbon or color code the layers in FCC vs. HCP crystals to show how the stacking changes. Sure, I can show a bunch of JPGs, but it's not the same.
Now, how do I do that without a plugin? Java? Don't make me laugh: Chime has features that would take me years to code in Java- no remotely close equivalent exists.
I try to make plugin free sites whenever possible, but limiting yourself to never using plugins gives up so much capability that you'd be silly to do that.
Eric