Actually, it's the People's Republic of China that is not complying with their own laws. Their constitution talks about freedom of speech and that people are allowed to criticize the government.
I'm an avid user of Thunderbird, but unfortunately v1.5 still doesn't fix my pet peeve with the app: the enormo-attachment-list-you-can't-hide.
Mailing list digests have the separate messages included as attachments, and on my 1024x768 screen resolution the attachment list, which Thunderbird finds obligatory to show, takes up a huge area.
Dammit, how difficult can it be to put a little clickable arrow there so that I could minimize the attachment list??? Or have I missed an option somewhere?
So, now we have a video document of creation! However, whether the creation was performed by Intelligent Design, remains to be seen. Can test this software?
There is also a written record of the creation, where the creator is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Now, what makes JHWH the more likely creator? Every time you pull the 'written record' argument, you should be ready to defend your specific mode of creation and creator. I can't see anything special about the judeo-christian creation myth in comparison with the creation myths of other religions. Your faith in this specific creation myth is based on a cultural bias.
There is a record of evolution. It is in our genes. It is beneath our feet. It is everywhere around us in the biosphere.
Why is saying that God created the earth any less scientific than saying an explosion and billions of years did the same thing? Can you go into a laboratory and run tests on either one?
Science deals with natural phenomena that are somehow measurable and observable. The processes of evolution (which, BTW, don't include the Big Bang theory - that's astronomy) are such things. Possible deities are not. Also, the litmus test for something being or not being scientific is NOT whether you can do it in a lab or not. Seems like you still have a lot to learn about the scientific method, and what evolution actually is about. You can start here and here.
Because it's trying to pose as science. You can preach creationism all you want in a religious context, but when creationism starts to get forced down the throats of children in science classes, it gets Bad.
Creationism in its various forms is a religious idea, not science. This is the main point of the debate.
Thank you, I'm a paleontologist and I like formal terms.;) Taxonomically, dinosaurs are reptiles, and the scientific definition of a dinosaur is "a reptile of the order Ornitischia or Saurischia". People used to think of whales as fish, since whales aren't mammals in the sense most people thought of mammals (cats, dogs, horses etc.).
'Dinosaur' is an informal "vague catchall term" for laymen, who don't see a difference between a plesiosaur and a pterosaur, but let's stick to the scientific definition, shall we? What wouldn't make dinosaurs retiles is beyond me. And technically speaking birds are indeed dinosaurs and thus reptiles. Mammals, on the other hand, have such novel physiological (and one could even say psychological) characteristics that not even cladists claim them to be reptiles, although mammals certainly are descended from them.
Yes, dinosaurs are reptiles. Nobody has seriously proposed anything else. Rather, birds are dinosaurs and not the other way around. You don't classify earlier life forms on the basis of their descendants.
BTW, isn't "grass-grazing dinosaurs" quite a tautology? I mean, what else can you graze than grass?
You might also want to know what you are talking about.
Separation of religion and state is very strict in France, maybe even stricter than in the US. In both countries this derives from the time of enlightenment and the respective revolutions in these countries.
And I'm sure you know enough of recent history to understand why the Germans are a bit sensitive about hate speech and ideologies like Nazism. I wouldn't like to hear the screaming and whining if Germany suddenly started to ignore the problem called Nazism (which, unfortunately, is alive and well all over the world).
Sure, both of these examples are extreme cases, but perfectly understandable when you know where these nations are coming from. It's not like Europe is on the verge of collapsing into some dark age where free speech is suppressed. I'm starting to get really tired of Americans who cling onto their naive worldview where the only place with freedom is the US of A. Heck, you have your own restrictions, we have our own. In some cases you have more freedom, in some cases we Europeans are freer. Big deal, I can assure you both you and I would feel quite free in both places.
I'm sick of the pathological misspelling of Jurassic Park.
Talking about sick things, what the hell is a "sick-claw"? No wonder those Velociraptors couldn't disembowel anything, if your claw was sick you couldn't either!
Good question. You know, I actually saw two white, talking lab rats (or they might have been mice) the other day. The shorter one, with a big head, appeared to mumble something about taking over the world. Now, with these news and this sighting, I'm starting to get rather worried about the growing intelligence among the rodent fraction of our society. Or maybe not, all I heard the taller one say was just "narf". But we should definitely be wary of them.
Not to mention that Velociraptor is actually just a small fry - think of a dinosaurian jackal. (We all know the raptors of Jurassic Park were too big.) That thing would only disembowel small lizards and mammals.
Now, Deinonychus or Utahraptor on the other hand...
I've also read that they'll develop a taste for certain foods --- e.g. if they habitually eat spicy food, they'll want spicy food. Also, quite interestingly, they like the foods that humans like. E.g. macraronic and cheese, banannas and Pasta. They hate the foods that we hate: raw vegetables. Fried chicken and pizza they really like! They are very human in their tastes.
This has probably got something to do with the energy contained in the food. Vegetables are very low on energy, pasta, cheese, bananas etc. on the other hand and energy bombs (fat, carbohydrates, proteins) compared to veggies. That's the way evolution has 'taught' both humans and rats: favor high-energy food. (Mind you, both humans and rats are omnivores, so this applies to omnivores only. Horses, cows etc. are still mostly restricted to a 'bad-tasting' veggie diet.)
One argument against evolution that I have is you don't see all these half developed fossils being dug up. For example, you'd expect to see animals with 1 arm, 2 arms, 3 arms, 10 arms, no arms, half an arm, round arms, and so on for every part of the body while evolution is fine tuning this stuff. As far as I know, this isn't the case.
Well, you know what - organisms just don't develop that way. Evolution isn't about randomly growing an extra arm on your side and waiting for it to evolve into something useful. No, evolution always builds on something that is already a functional part of a functional entity. So when the basic tetrapod (four-legged) 'model' evolved, it got fine-tuned during the evolution of the basal tetrapod's descendants: the legs of an elephant are different from those of a newt. Evolution also does not plan anything ahead. It only happens here and now. The direction is decided by current conditions, which create a certain kind of selective pressure.
To finish with a funny fact: some early tetrapods like Ichthyostega actually had seven or eight digits on their feet!;)
If birds came from dinosaurs birds should have evolved at the end of the Cretaceous not at the begining of the Triassic as the earliest bird accestors seem to show up.
Not at all. Birds, capable of real powered flight, are known from lower Cretaceous already (even upper Jurassic, if you count Archaeopteryx, which might infact come from a relic island population). Check out what has been found and is still being found from Liaoning, China. I study vertebrate paleontology and I'm not aware of any earlier bird-like creatures than middle or upper Jurassic. Can you give a reference? Longisquama might have had feathers (many paleontologists don't agree), but otherwise it's not very bird-like. Feathers might even have been a trait that many reptiles of certain kind had in those times.
The evidence for birds evolving from dinosaurs (and actually being dinosaurs) is nowadays overwhelming. The anatomical similarities between birds and maniraptoran dinosaurs are as obvious as those of apes and humans. Genera like Buitreraptor (a dromaeosaur) are actually very strong candidates of being secondarily flightless creatures (meaning, their ancestors had the ability to fly but reverted to flightlessness). Also, this new find also makes it clear that an earlier find, Rahonavis from Madagascar, is actually a dromaeosaur, and Rahonavis is generally considered having been capable of flight. Thus, we have a flying dromaeosaur! These are fantastic finds, and our picture of the evolution of birds becomes clearer by every one of them. And it is a very controversial field of study, we are probably still in for quite many suprises in near future. But that's what makes all of this so interesting.
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Actually, it's the People's Republic of China that is not complying with their own laws. Their constitution talks about freedom of speech and that people are allowed to criticize the government.
Yeah, ideals often conflict with reality.
I actually first thought the topic was "Get booty for bounting XP..." Now there's a challenge for nerds!
A tremor in the Force there is. The Dark Side clouds everything!
They are distributing the plugin on their website for free, so this is a win-win situation.
What? I thought this is a Win-Mac situation!
I'm an avid user of Thunderbird, but unfortunately v1.5 still doesn't fix my pet peeve with the app: the enormo-attachment-list-you-can't-hide.
Mailing list digests have the separate messages included as attachments, and on my 1024x768 screen resolution the attachment list, which Thunderbird finds obligatory to show, takes up a huge area.
Dammit, how difficult can it be to put a little clickable arrow there so that I could minimize the attachment list??? Or have I missed an option somewhere?
So, now we have a video document of creation! However, whether the creation was performed by Intelligent Design, remains to be seen. Can test this software?
Any scientific theory has to conform to the scientific method. It's that simple. And yes, this excludes religious explanations as scientific theories.
There is also a written record of the creation, where the creator is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Now, what makes JHWH the more likely creator? Every time you pull the 'written record' argument, you should be ready to defend your specific mode of creation and creator. I can't see anything special about the judeo-christian creation myth in comparison with the creation myths of other religions. Your faith in this specific creation myth is based on a cultural bias.
There is a record of evolution. It is in our genes. It is beneath our feet. It is everywhere around us in the biosphere.
Why is saying that God created the earth any less scientific than saying an explosion and billions of years did the same thing? Can you go into a laboratory and run tests on either one?
Science deals with natural phenomena that are somehow measurable and observable. The processes of evolution (which, BTW, don't include the Big Bang theory - that's astronomy) are such things. Possible deities are not. Also, the litmus test for something being or not being scientific is NOT whether you can do it in a lab or not. Seems like you still have a lot to learn about the scientific method, and what evolution actually is about. You can start here and here.
Because it's trying to pose as science. You can preach creationism all you want in a religious context, but when creationism starts to get forced down the throats of children in science classes, it gets Bad.
Creationism in its various forms is a religious idea, not science. This is the main point of the debate.
Thank you, I'm a paleontologist and I like formal terms. ;) Taxonomically, dinosaurs are reptiles, and the scientific definition of a dinosaur is "a reptile of the order Ornitischia or Saurischia". People used to think of whales as fish, since whales aren't mammals in the sense most people thought of mammals (cats, dogs, horses etc.).
'Dinosaur' is an informal "vague catchall term" for laymen, who don't see a difference between a plesiosaur and a pterosaur, but let's stick to the scientific definition, shall we? What wouldn't make dinosaurs retiles is beyond me. And technically speaking birds are indeed dinosaurs and thus reptiles. Mammals, on the other hand, have such novel physiological (and one could even say psychological) characteristics that not even cladists claim them to be reptiles, although mammals certainly are descended from them.
A plesiosaur is a plesiosaur and a dinosaur is a dinosaur. Just like a primate is a primate and a rodent is a rodent.
To enlighten your creationist mind: there were no aquatic dinosaurs.
Biblical accounts on fabled creatures are as valid information as old tales about unicorns and such.
Yes, dinosaurs are reptiles. Nobody has seriously proposed anything else. Rather, birds are dinosaurs and not the other way around. You don't classify earlier life forms on the basis of their descendants.
BTW, isn't "grass-grazing dinosaurs" quite a tautology? I mean, what else can you graze than grass?
Didn't Apple already develop things like this?
"They're laboratory mice, their fears have been sliced..."
Billion as in 1000 000 000? You see, I'm European, you insensitive clod!
BTW, imagine a Beowulf cluster of HAARPs... Could it jam the electronics of a Beowulf cluster of Russian and Chinese nukes?
Darknets - the Dark Side of the Internets!
...with a chair?
You might also want to know what you are talking about.
Separation of religion and state is very strict in France, maybe even stricter than in the US. In both countries this derives from the time of enlightenment and the respective revolutions in these countries.
And I'm sure you know enough of recent history to understand why the Germans are a bit sensitive about hate speech and ideologies like Nazism. I wouldn't like to hear the screaming and whining if Germany suddenly started to ignore the problem called Nazism (which, unfortunately, is alive and well all over the world).
Sure, both of these examples are extreme cases, but perfectly understandable when you know where these nations are coming from. It's not like Europe is on the verge of collapsing into some dark age where free speech is suppressed. I'm starting to get really tired of Americans who cling onto their naive worldview where the only place with freedom is the US of A. Heck, you have your own restrictions, we have our own. In some cases you have more freedom, in some cases we Europeans are freer. Big deal, I can assure you both you and I would feel quite free in both places.
I'm sick of the pathological misspelling of Jurassic Park.
Talking about sick things, what the hell is a "sick-claw"? No wonder those Velociraptors couldn't disembowel anything, if your claw was sick you couldn't either!
Good question. You know, I actually saw two white, talking lab rats (or they might have been mice) the other day. The shorter one, with a big head, appeared to mumble something about taking over the world. Now, with these news and this sighting, I'm starting to get rather worried about the growing intelligence among the rodent fraction of our society. Or maybe not, all I heard the taller one say was just "narf". But we should definitely be wary of them.
Not to mention that Velociraptor is actually just a small fry - think of a dinosaurian jackal. (We all know the raptors of Jurassic Park were too big.) That thing would only disembowel small lizards and mammals.
Now, Deinonychus or Utahraptor on the other hand...
I've also read that they'll develop a taste for certain foods --- e.g. if they habitually eat spicy food, they'll want spicy food. Also, quite interestingly, they like the foods that humans like. E.g. macraronic and cheese, banannas and Pasta. They hate the foods that we hate: raw vegetables. Fried chicken and pizza they really like! They are very human in their tastes.
This has probably got something to do with the energy contained in the food. Vegetables are very low on energy, pasta, cheese, bananas etc. on the other hand and energy bombs (fat, carbohydrates, proteins) compared to veggies. That's the way evolution has 'taught' both humans and rats: favor high-energy food. (Mind you, both humans and rats are omnivores, so this applies to omnivores only. Horses, cows etc. are still mostly restricted to a 'bad-tasting' veggie diet.)
One argument against evolution that I have is you don't see all these half developed fossils being dug up. For example, you'd expect to see animals with 1 arm, 2 arms, 3 arms, 10 arms, no arms, half an arm, round arms, and so on for every part of the body while evolution is fine tuning this stuff. As far as I know, this isn't the case.
;)
Well, you know what - organisms just don't develop that way. Evolution isn't about randomly growing an extra arm on your side and waiting for it to evolve into something useful. No, evolution always builds on something that is already a functional part of a functional entity. So when the basic tetrapod (four-legged) 'model' evolved, it got fine-tuned during the evolution of the basal tetrapod's descendants: the legs of an elephant are different from those of a newt. Evolution also does not plan anything ahead. It only happens here and now. The direction is decided by current conditions, which create a certain kind of selective pressure.
To finish with a funny fact: some early tetrapods like Ichthyostega actually had seven or eight digits on their feet!
If birds came from dinosaurs birds should have evolved at the end of the Cretaceous not at the begining of the Triassic as the earliest bird accestors seem to show up.
Not at all. Birds, capable of real powered flight, are known from lower Cretaceous already (even upper Jurassic, if you count Archaeopteryx, which might infact come from a relic island population). Check out what has been found and is still being found from Liaoning, China. I study vertebrate paleontology and I'm not aware of any earlier bird-like creatures than middle or upper Jurassic. Can you give a reference? Longisquama might have had feathers (many paleontologists don't agree), but otherwise it's not very bird-like. Feathers might even have been a trait that many reptiles of certain kind had in those times.
The evidence for birds evolving from dinosaurs (and actually being dinosaurs) is nowadays overwhelming. The anatomical similarities between birds and maniraptoran dinosaurs are as obvious as those of apes and humans. Genera like Buitreraptor (a dromaeosaur) are actually very strong candidates of being secondarily flightless creatures (meaning, their ancestors had the ability to fly but reverted to flightlessness). Also, this new find also makes it clear that an earlier find, Rahonavis from Madagascar, is actually a dromaeosaur, and Rahonavis is generally considered having been capable of flight. Thus, we have a flying dromaeosaur! These are fantastic finds, and our picture of the evolution of birds becomes clearer by every one of them. And it is a very controversial field of study, we are probably still in for quite many suprises in near future. But that's what makes all of this so interesting.