50 x long-life DVDs @AUD$1 each including cover: $50 Labour @$10 an hour to feed these to a burner: $30 Controlled storage for 50 DVDs for 20 years: $200? Drive to read and copy the suckers after 20 years: $X? TOTAL: $280+X
vs
1 x 200GB IDE HDD @AUD$160: $160 1 x tray @AUD$10: $10 Labour @$10 an hour to plug it in and walk away: $1 Controlled storage for 20 years: $50? Functioning IDE buss to read and copy the suckers after 20 years: Z? TOTAL: $221+Z
If you mail it across Australia to the storage, the hard disk just won by a bit more. It fits in a 750g satchel for about $5, the DVDs won't fit in a 3kg satchel so they'll get "cubed" and probably be about $20-$25.
all you have done is basically respond to my claim:
Atheism is not a religion. with: "Yes it is."
I responded to your expansion, which if written out in full is:
Neither a lack of belief that God exists nor a positive belief that God does NOT exist are religious.
If the contradiction in that is not self-evident, then we're going to have to argue about something else while the bystanders laugh themselves hoarse.
Atheism does not claim any explanation for the universe.
Atheism makes the positive claim that the universe arose and continues without any form of God.
As for science. Sciences inability to explain all the mysteries of the universe does not prove that God exists. It merely proves that science is not complete.
You misinterpret my reasoning. Science doesn't have to prove everything. Science only has to show us a universe consistent with God and inconsistent with Atheism to settle the argument.
So far it has shown us features grossly inconsistent with any form of chemical or biological evolution. It has also shown us some features apparently inconsistent with a naive (ie non-Relativistic) view of a recent special creation. From this, we learn that either observation or both of the available sets of models are insufficient.
Since untold gazillions of dollars have so far been spent trying to prove evolution where none exists, and scientists who pipe up about the inconsistencies there are frequently persecuted, I would expect creationist theory to be embryonic and evolutionist theory to be mature.
Nevertheless, there are several creationist models of the universe that fit most (but not all) of the available data very well, and several evolutionist models of the universe (Big Bang, Steady State, Cyclinc) which fit most (but not all) of the available data very poorly, constantly requiring the insertion of fudge factors (dark matter/energy anyone?) here and there to make it all look reasonable.
If you don't have molecules-to-man, you don't have the rest. If evolution doesn't explain the origins of life (chemical evolution) then it has nowhere to begin. Working with development of life (biological evolution) is essentially pointless if there's nowhere to start.
As an Atheist, that's also foundational for you. No molecules-to-man equals no explanation for something as basic as how we got here, it equals no substantial basis for disclaiming God. That's what Richard Dawkins' "intellectually satisfied Atheist" soundbite was all about.
Microevolution is a bit of a misleading misnomer, but Evolutionists won't accept "variation within a kind" as a term so we're more or less stuck with it. Darwin's finches, ironically enough, are a striking example of this. Food became hard to find on the Canaries, so the finch populations there shifted towards longer beaks. Much jumping up and down about "evolution in action" ensued, but then when conditions improved, the birds normalised again. Not evolution, but a variation in kind already incorporated into the birdies' cute little genes.
Your original assertion was "evolution works", and neither chemical evolution nor biological evolution come within hailing distance of working.
I can understand you dismissing chemical evolution, since biological evolution looks so much more plausible at first glance. As with so many other things, the harder you look at it, the worse it gets. Darwin was only able to propose it by assuming that cells were just little blobs of jelly - if he'd known what we do today about the cell, he would have abandoned the whole idea immediately. Yes, it would have made Grandpa Erasmus with his e conchis omnia grumpy, but Charles was at least open and honest enough to know a lost cause when he could see one in all its glory. A pity so few of his fans would follow suit.
the mutation is *only* net-beneficial in areas where malaria is common
Is the mutation really nett-beneficial? When the mosquitos go away again, the population will be left with a 25% mortality rate from this "benefit" and two thirds of the survivors weakened. It may have reduced the death-rate temporarily (or not, we may have simply seen more Africans born instead), but in the long term, the toll (in deaths and less-productive members) from it is going to be humungous.
Since humans are hardly going to be the majority (by either numbers or mass) of mossie feeding stations in the area, you can't even say that having 2/3 of the survivors anaemic has reduced the mosquitos' range noticeably.
Also, 25% of your population is not expressive, and therefore vulnerable to malaria anyway. From this we learn that the mutation is not necessary to the survival of humans in that area.
Natural selection in action, a lovely example.
Absolutely true, but it has not improved the species, and neither of the two population groups look like dying out or speciating.
You could only imagine it being an improvement on a planet totally swamped in mossies, with nowhere to run - and even then it's still not really an improvement, only a destructive second-best coping mechanism which is revealed as a massive burden again if the mossies are ever removed from the equation.
There's more to say on the point, but that should get you started.
Any combination of the above producing an average improvement in a species (or indeed adding any constructive information at all) is not fine by Creationists.
You are going to have to explain this.
You accept that a random mutation can be an improvement, or could be an adaptation to a change in environment -- correct?
In the general sense, no. It's extremely unlikely that a mutation can be an improvement any more than putting a rifle shell through a Lego diorama is likely to make it more structured. It is conceivable that a mutation could improve things but in practice it doesn't happen.
Please don't bother bringing up Sickle Cell Anaemia, which is semi-lethal dysfunctional blood condition making you unattractive to a disease, calling that an improvement is kinda like claiming that the answer to robbery is to be poor.
You accept that this mutation is inheritable -- correct?
No again, at least in the general sense. Unless you believe in Darwin's "pangenes" or Lamarckianism, mutations are generally not heritable. Since all observed mutations are damaging, anything which was inherited is going to - on average - cripple or kill the organism rather than improve it.
Mutations are, however, reknowned for causing sterility - or to put it another way, for invoking a racially homeostatic mechanism.
But you assert that "an average improvement" is "not fine"?
That I do. Mutations destroy and disrupt, they do not build up, organise or create. This is their character.
You accept that the Earth is just one planet, among many, circling on star, among billions in our Galaxy, which is just one, not really different than any other?
No. The observations (or in many cases compilations of others' observations) of Halton Arp and co are showing with increasing definition that we are indeed in a special place in the universe.
I suspect that before you confront that point (and do go and confront it properly, don't dismiss it on the word of the maniacs at t.o), you should really be considering the ramifications of a special place existing at all.
You seemed to be accepting that species evolve, and go extinct.
They change, and go extinct. If by "evolve" you mean degenerate, then yes.
But you won't accept that life could arrive from a stew organic chemicals without divine intervention.
I won't accept either that life self-organised from organic stew, or that such a stew ever existed for it to self-organise from, divine intervention or not.
You would need divine intervention for either, since firstly the only stews that form by accident are simple, racemised and poisoned, and secondly even if you somehow against practically every observation of physics got an idealised protein soup, self-organsing that into enough DNA etc to make something self-reproducing is a very, very, very long uphill battle on loose shale. So long, in fact, that the universe doesn't contain anything like the required amount of ammunition.
Or do you think God created life, and a Universe with a forged date-stamp, all at the same time?
No. Neither. I think that the date-stamp is being badly misread.
To be more specific, the date stamps which are even legible are vague, yet often conflicting and nobody can show that the clocks that they all run by were either set right in the first place or ran smoothly since.
No? Well, then, there's your answer. The same device that does the deorbit burn can be a heat shield, and strap device on the other end to be drogue and later brakes.
I am not sure the payoff of killing Hubble in favor of manned missions to Mars are currently worth it
I think you got some of those words in the wrong order. Unless we seriously commit to some space infrastructure (and I'm talking about industry, not pork-barrel toys like fred) we're basically not going to see a good return. Better to spend ten times as much and get it all back than maybe 10 billion and get very little return.
Meanwhile, let's soft-land Hubble, have a good close look (as in, with electron microscopes and stuff) at what all that time in space did to the metal, optics and electronics aboard.
It would be great practice for missions to Mars, Titan, Venus, any planet with an atmosphere to practice aerobraking etc using Hubble. Spirit and Opportunity were an excellent trial, now how about dropping something weighing more than 11t into a real atmosphere?
The airforce could even have fun flying a StarLifter through the 'chute shrouds to pluck the sucker out of the air instead of letting it bonk or splash somewhere.
And after the autopsy, you'd have a genuine museum piece.
Do you all see MS saying: "we see Office as our core product"?
I do. They held a conference recently on MS-Office technologies and said outright that their aim was to get as many developers as possible trapped into basing stuff on MS-Office so that it would become effectively impossible for them to change out.
If that's not monopolism, leveraging an existing dominance to entrap more customers, I don't know what is.
If I was supervising them, they would immediately lose every patent and trademark that they have in MS-Office to the public domain and be given a year in which to provide the first cut at migration tools to materially help customers transit away from such a solution. If the patents in question had been cross-licensed, they'd have to find something else to trade for it.
If they kicked and squealed about that, they would be given one year to GPL MS-Office and would be required to demonstrate that it was truly GPL by having twenty randomly selected non-affiliated developers compile a working version from scratch.
And if they kicked and squealed about that, then in 2007 we'd start in on technologies MS-Office is tied to, like MS-Windows, MS-Exchange, MS-Outlook, MSN-Messenger MS-Internet-Explorer and MS-SQL-Server.
Well, yes, I'm in Perth, but it's nearly midnight. The odds are good that you're a Victorian, specifically from Glen Waverly - my goodness, I can see your house from up here, a couple of blocks from the river - meaning it's nearing 3AM for you. Go to sleep, Julian!
WRT the THC, some of the theories I've seen about how coral reefs work have evidently been devised by marine biologists who store the stuff in their air tanks.
"Warm" is defined here relative to roughly -100 to -200degC ambient. "Warm" might freeze you to death in ten minutes instead of eight. "Cold" might freeze you to death in seconds.
At a trade show last year, we gave away 500 free OO CDs and took down another 200 or so names to have CDs mailed out. We also gave away about 200 free Linux CDs and took down about 50 additional names for those. Linux supposedly (based on stupidly non-representative sales figures) has about 2% of the desktop share and realistically has somewhere between 5% and 10%. Our experience there hints that OO has significantly more marketshare than Linux. If you were to take the ratio as representative (not wise, but nevertheless), OO has somewhere in the vicinity of 15-25% of the market.
Or even in the Gascoyne. Plonk yourself down 10km from any road up there and not under any major air routes, and nobody will ever know you're around.
Keeping yourself supplied with food and water will soon become an issue, however. In some places rain happens two or more years apart on average. In some places out in the middle of the desert proper it basically never happens.
Oh, one more big tip: don't plonk yourself down on a flood plain or worse still in a creek bed. When it does rain up there, it really rains. None of the sissy stuff that other people call "a torrential downpour". A parched creekbed can become Niagara in about ten seconds and with no warning if it rains upstream.
Dr Ian Macreadie, who admits in an interview published on a creationist website that he is ridiculed by other scientists for his beliefs in regards to evolution.
Well, duh? What do you expect? He's kicking the props out from under their beliefs, they're gonna welcome him with open arms?
And if you think he was ridiculed, try this dude, or perhaps the classic example of scientific orthodoxy turning on their own, only 40 years later to realise that they botched it big time. The punishment for academic heresy isn't burning at the stake any more, that kind of thing is too open, rasies bad press and gets frowned upon. Nowadays they're a little more subtle: they only burn your career and reputation at the stake - and then say, behold, for there are no reputable Creationist scientists. Again I say: well, duh? What do you expect?
Dr. John R. Meyer, who directly profits from sales of books and materials to people trying to push the creationist agenda
OK, you go around and cross off any evolutionist who makes money from the sales of books and like materials and we'll call it quits.
Dr. Carl B Fliermans, a biol[ogi]st who specializes in soil microbiology and works primarily for the government, a job (like many) made more secure by registering as a "creationist,"
Like hell it does. Back up that assertion with a shred of evidence, go on!
Dr Raymond G. Bohlin, who (from the link you posted) has a direct personal financial interest in pushing creationism over evolution.
No worries, cross off every scientist with a direct financial interest (e.g. job security) in pushing or at least shutting up about evolution and we'll call it fair again.
Mr. Gary Parker, who has based his professional carreer and personal financial stability largely on writing books and lecturing on creationism to people who already support creationism.
He certainly has - and that's exactly what was originally asked for. So here it is, why are you complaining? And why should I provide any other examples if you're just going to define them out of existence?
You're given Creationist Biologists, but you immediately disqualify any who aren't Evolutionists, because they're not Evolutionists. Tap, tap, is this thing on? Earth to Walkingshark, come in Walkingshark, is there anybody in there? Halloooo? <waves>
People who do this kind of thing all the time specified the USD$150M launch vehicle to get 12t up to 750km. Maybe the Russkies could do it for even less?
It is not firm belief in something for which there is no proof, as there is definiter evidence that evolutionary principles are at play in the natural world.
If you define evolution as "change over time", then no argument. If you define it as a process whereby a primitive cell or several of same can develop into petunias, pigeons and physicists then just plain "no". Call them little-e evolution and big-E Evolution.
Forex the Darwin Finches of the Galapagos vary over time and in response to environmental pressure - and back again. This is evolution in the first sense, but speaks strongly against Evolution in the second sense. It speaks of animals designed to vary. If they were going to Evolve, species would branch off from the variants and become even more extreme rather than returning to morphological home base when the selective pressure eased. They don't. And you can save a lot of time here by reading this or something like it before bringing up sickle cell anaemia, peppered moths, Archaeopterxy or any of the many other canonical failures in Evolutionary reasoning.
...and not just better reliability: cheaper, too. The USSR has had some (often rapidly censored if possible) spectacular engineering misses, but many of their more interesting engineering accomplishments have also gone unsung.
Slashdot Mirror
50 x long-life DVDs @AUD$1 each including cover: $50
Labour @$10 an hour to feed these to a burner: $30
Controlled storage for 50 DVDs for 20 years: $200?
Drive to read and copy the suckers after 20 years: $X?
TOTAL: $280+X
vs
1 x 200GB IDE HDD @AUD$160: $160
1 x tray @AUD$10: $10
Labour @$10 an hour to plug it in and walk away: $1
Controlled storage for 20 years: $50?
Functioning IDE buss to read and copy the suckers after 20 years: Z?
TOTAL: $221+Z
If you mail it across Australia to the storage, the hard disk just won by a bit more. It fits in a 750g satchel for about $5, the DVDs won't fit in a 3kg satchel so they'll get "cubed" and probably be about $20-$25.
So far it has shown us features grossly inconsistent with any form of chemical or biological evolution. It has also shown us some features apparently inconsistent with a naive (ie non-Relativistic) view of a recent special creation. From this, we learn that either observation or both of the available sets of models are insufficient.
Since untold gazillions of dollars have so far been spent trying to prove evolution where none exists, and scientists who pipe up about the inconsistencies there are frequently persecuted, I would expect creationist theory to be embryonic and evolutionist theory to be mature.
Nevertheless, there are several creationist models of the universe that fit most (but not all) of the available data very well, and several evolutionist models of the universe (Big Bang, Steady State, Cyclinc) which fit most (but not all) of the available data very poorly, constantly requiring the insertion of fudge factors (dark matter/energy anyone?) here and there to make it all look reasonable.
If you don't have molecules-to-man, you don't have the rest. If evolution doesn't explain the origins of life (chemical evolution) then it has nowhere to begin. Working with development of life (biological evolution) is essentially pointless if there's nowhere to start.
As an Atheist, that's also foundational for you. No molecules-to-man equals no explanation for something as basic as how we got here, it equals no substantial basis for disclaiming God. That's what Richard Dawkins' "intellectually satisfied Atheist" soundbite was all about.
Microevolution is a bit of a misleading misnomer, but Evolutionists won't accept "variation within a kind" as a term so we're more or less stuck with it. Darwin's finches, ironically enough, are a striking example of this. Food became hard to find on the Canaries, so the finch populations there shifted towards longer beaks. Much jumping up and down about "evolution in action" ensued, but then when conditions improved, the birds normalised again. Not evolution, but a variation in kind already incorporated into the birdies' cute little genes.
Your original assertion was "evolution works", and neither chemical evolution nor biological evolution come within hailing distance of working.
I can understand you dismissing chemical evolution, since biological evolution looks so much more plausible at first glance. As with so many other things, the harder you look at it, the worse it gets. Darwin was only able to propose it by assuming that cells were just little blobs of jelly - if he'd known what we do today about the cell, he would have abandoned the whole idea immediately. Yes, it would have made Grandpa Erasmus with his e conchis omnia grumpy, but Charles was at least open and honest enough to know a lost cause when he could see one in all its glory. A pity so few of his fans would follow suit.
Since humans are hardly going to be the majority (by either numbers or mass) of mossie feeding stations in the area, you can't even say that having 2/3 of the survivors anaemic has reduced the mosquitos' range noticeably.
Also, 25% of your population is not expressive, and therefore vulnerable to malaria anyway. From this we learn that the mutation is not necessary to the survival of humans in that area.Absolutely true, but it has not improved the species, and neither of the two population groups look like dying out or speciating.
You could only imagine it being an improvement on a planet totally swamped in mossies, with nowhere to run - and even then it's still not really an improvement, only a destructive second-best coping mechanism which is revealed as a massive burden again if the mossies are ever removed from the equation.
There's more to say on the point, but that should get you started.
Please don't bother bringing up Sickle Cell Anaemia, which is semi-lethal dysfunctional blood condition making you unattractive to a disease, calling that an improvement is kinda like claiming that the answer to robbery is to be poor.
No again, at least in the general sense. Unless you believe in Darwin's "pangenes" or Lamarckianism, mutations are generally not heritable. Since all observed mutations are damaging, anything which was inherited is going to - on average - cripple or kill the organism rather than improve it.Mutations are, however, reknowned for causing sterility - or to put it another way, for invoking a racially homeostatic mechanism.
That I do. Mutations destroy and disrupt, they do not build up, organise or create. This is their character.No. The observations (or in many cases compilations of others' observations) of Halton Arp and co are showing with increasing definition that we are indeed in a special place in the universe.I suspect that before you confront that point (and do go and confront it properly, don't dismiss it on the word of the maniacs at t.o), you should really be considering the ramifications of a special place existing at all.
They change, and go extinct. If by "evolve" you mean degenerate, then yes.I won't accept either that life self-organised from organic stew, or that such a stew ever existed for it to self-organise from, divine intervention or not.You would need divine intervention for either, since firstly the only stews that form by accident are simple, racemised and poisoned, and secondly even if you somehow against practically every observation of physics got an idealised protein soup, self-organsing that into enough DNA etc to make something self-reproducing is a very, very, very long uphill battle on loose shale. So long, in fact, that the universe doesn't contain anything like the required amount of ammunition.
No. Neither. I think that the date-stamp is being badly misread.To be more specific, the date stamps which are even legible are vague, yet often conflicting and nobody can show that the clocks that they all run by were either set right in the first place or ran smoothly since.
No? Well, then, there's your answer. The same device that does the deorbit burn can be a heat shield, and strap device on the other end to be drogue and later brakes.
...this time, aim it better.
I put in incendiary posts constantly and my karma's been jammed against the stops for years. Go figure.
The whole idea is a good one, and there's no company nickel-and-diming it to death.
Meanwhile, let's soft-land Hubble, have a good close look (as in, with electron microscopes and stuff) at what all that time in space did to the metal, optics and electronics aboard.
It would be great practice for missions to Mars, Titan, Venus, any planet with an atmosphere to practice aerobraking etc using Hubble. Spirit and Opportunity were an excellent trial, now how about dropping something weighing more than 11t into a real atmosphere?
The airforce could even have fun flying a StarLifter through the 'chute shrouds to pluck the sucker out of the air instead of letting it bonk or splash somewhere.
And after the autopsy, you'd have a genuine museum piece.
If that's not monopolism, leveraging an existing dominance to entrap more customers, I don't know what is.
If I was supervising them, they would immediately lose every patent and trademark that they have in MS-Office to the public domain and be given a year in which to provide the first cut at migration tools to materially help customers transit away from such a solution. If the patents in question had been cross-licensed, they'd have to find something else to trade for it.
If they kicked and squealed about that, they would be given one year to GPL MS-Office and would be required to demonstrate that it was truly GPL by having twenty randomly selected non-affiliated developers compile a working version from scratch.
And if they kicked and squealed about that, then in 2007 we'd start in on technologies MS-Office is tied to, like MS-Windows, MS-Exchange, MS-Outlook, MSN-Messenger MS-Internet-Explorer and MS-SQL-Server.
...aggravating too many other websites. (-:
Michael Davies set this one up, and he's a top organiser plus up to the eyeballs in fairness and integrity so I'm expecting it to go well.
(-:
Well, yes, I'm in Perth, but it's nearly midnight. The odds are good that you're a Victorian, specifically from Glen Waverly - my goodness, I can see your house from up here, a couple of blocks from the river - meaning it's nearing 3AM for you. Go to sleep, Julian!
WRT the THC, some of the theories I've seen about how coral reefs work have evidently been devised by marine biologists who store the stuff in their air tanks.
"Warm" is defined here relative to roughly -100 to -200degC ambient. "Warm" might freeze you to death in ten minutes instead of eight. "Cold" might freeze you to death in seconds.
By Thai standards, Filipino dress is almost drab. If a colour doesn't grab you by the eyeballs and wrestle you to the ground, it's not worth wearing.
At a trade show last year, we gave away 500 free OO CDs and took down another 200 or so names to have CDs mailed out. We also gave away about 200 free Linux CDs and took down about 50 additional names for those. Linux supposedly (based on stupidly non-representative sales figures) has about 2% of the desktop share and realistically has somewhere between 5% and 10%. Our experience there hints that OO has significantly more marketshare than Linux. If you were to take the ratio as representative (not wise, but nevertheless), OO has somewhere in the vicinity of 15-25% of the market.
Or even in the Gascoyne. Plonk yourself down 10km from any road up there and not under any major air routes, and nobody will ever know you're around.
Keeping yourself supplied with food and water will soon become an issue, however. In some places rain happens two or more years apart on average. In some places out in the middle of the desert proper it basically never happens.
Oh, one more big tip: don't plonk yourself down on a flood plain or worse still in a creek bed. When it does rain up there, it really rains. None of the sissy stuff that other people call "a torrential downpour". A parched creekbed can become Niagara in about ten seconds and with no warning if it rains upstream.
I wonder how many other substances they tried out in their little internal planning rooms before settling on DMS?
And if you think he was ridiculed, try this dude, or perhaps the classic example of scientific orthodoxy turning on their own, only 40 years later to realise that they botched it big time. The punishment for academic heresy isn't burning at the stake any more, that kind of thing is too open, rasies bad press and gets frowned upon. Nowadays they're a little more subtle: they only burn your career and reputation at the stake - and then say, behold, for there are no reputable Creationist scientists. Again I say: well, duh? What do you expect?OK, you go around and cross off any evolutionist who makes money from the sales of books and like materials and we'll call it quits.Like hell it does. Back up that assertion with a shred of evidence, go on!No worries, cross off every scientist with a direct financial interest (e.g. job security) in pushing or at least shutting up about evolution and we'll call it fair again.He certainly has - and that's exactly what was originally asked for. So here it is, why are you complaining? And why should I provide any other examples if you're just going to define them out of existence?
You're given Creationist Biologists, but you immediately disqualify any who aren't Evolutionists, because they're not Evolutionists. Tap, tap, is this thing on? Earth to Walkingshark, come in Walkingshark, is there anybody in there? Halloooo? <waves>
You picked up on Dawkins and dropped everything else.
PS, since you disparage him so much, perhaps you'll prefer this link.
...doesn't mean it actually is easier.
People who do this kind of thing all the time specified the USD$150M launch vehicle to get 12t up to 750km. Maybe the Russkies could do it for even less?
Forex the Darwin Finches of the Galapagos vary over time and in response to environmental pressure - and back again. This is evolution in the first sense, but speaks strongly against Evolution in the second sense. It speaks of animals designed to vary. If they were going to Evolve, species would branch off from the variants and become even more extreme rather than returning to morphological home base when the selective pressure eased. They don't. And you can save a lot of time here by reading this or something like it before bringing up sickle cell anaemia, peppered moths, Archaeopterxy or any of the many other canonical failures in Evolutionary reasoning.
...and not just better reliability: cheaper, too. The USSR has had some (often rapidly censored if possible) spectacular engineering misses, but many of their more interesting engineering accomplishments have also gone unsung.