You should visit the American West. There's lots and lots and lots of space in western Colorado, all of Wyoming, most of New Mexico, most of Utah (just make sure you're married if you think you might get caught -- and they might set you up the threesome.) Northern California, nearly all of Nevada and Arizona. Montana and Idaho if you don't mind how the bulletproof vests chafe... and if you go up to Alaska or Canada you can go a month without seeing another person. Watch for the bears. Rumor has it their sense of smell is particularly sensitive to certain scents.
My EMT friends say they're a *lot* more scared about trying to cut into a car that has possibly-unexploded side-impact airbags in the pillars, than about the (very remote) possibility of hitting a high-voltage line. 1: the airbags are explosives, 2: the HV line is metal and will short out across the hydraulic cutter blades, mangling the cutter, and 3: you very rarely try and cut across the body of a car compared to how often you cut off the top of the car where the airbag explosives are and the HV lines aren't.
Someone broke into my ex-girlfriend's shop the other day. She has big heavy locks on the big heavy solid-core doors at the front and back of the shop, since she sells Art (read 'expensive'). So the burglar broke into the store next door and punched through two layers of drywall. It probably took three minutes, and no tools needed at all (since the door on the adjacent store was hollowcore crap, since they're a service-oriented place without inventory.)
We applaud development of heuristic filter success. Many sophisticated algorithms go into recursive development of low-latency, high-bandwidth sieving systems. Ongoing procedural optimization with commensalism yields best signal/noise ratio. Additional funding needed!
Oh, I *know* it is. So is (to tie this to the original thread) politics: when you're competing for votes, you will, over time, take the most popular position, simply because that's what gets you elected. It's just that when I use the 'e' word I get my posts marked as 'troll' so these days I just lay the groundwork for the idea.
I capitalize Good Stuff partly because that's how I indicate it's generic Good Stuff -- whatever makes a person happy. There are a LOT of assumptions in that sentence. Some (freakish) people are thrilled with their jobs. Some are thrilled with spending time with their loved ones. Apparently some are happy watching TV. I don't have a TV. Some of my Good Stuff time is spent sitting on the couch with my dog and my girlfriend, reading books or playing Scrabble together, or going on bike rides together. That's fine and all, but I'm not sure that it's objectively better than going and buying a new HyperMonsterMegaCar.
So my mom is a weird Christian, by which I mean she isn't into creeds and mentalities and orthodoxy. Same with many of the other people in her church. Not too long ago, she was teaching the adult Sunday School class and got into a discussion -- well, knowing her church, argument -- about the Christian idea of Eternal Life, and they came to a sort of joint conclusion that Eternal Life doesn't mean going to Heaven. What it means, they claim, is that you do enough good in your life that you're remembered fondly when you've died, that your reputation is your afterlife. (Whether there is actually an afterlife is, according to her, unknowable, and therefore not worth spending time on. You should hear her views on The Devil some time, if you want to have your opinion of Christian thought rearranged severely.)
As an agnostic, I get really, seriously into that idea. That's an objective good -- or at least one for which I could argue at length. (like, say, this.)
But in general, you're right. People come home from work and collapse into a chair and turn on the TV and turn off the brain -- in part because they're so tired after work. Because they work long, hard hours, it has a footprint outside those working hours. They're not getting paid, but they're still, essentially, job-related, recovering from job. Now THAT sucks.
I'm entirely with you: work's what I do to finance the worthwhile part of my life. I live well within those finances, so I'd love to work fewer hours for the same pay. I'd work fewer hours for less pay, if I could.
This begs the question: why are so many Americans working themselves to death? Is it just because they're trying to pay off their debts from having bought so much stuff because they're unhappy with their lives? Or is it a lemming situation? If all your friends are going out and buying big SUV's, and then telling each other how happy they are that they could afford the 'crush small economy car' option package on their SUV's, you'll probably want to go do the same. But, if all your friends suddenly get shifted to 30 hour work schedules and have three-day weekends every week, I'll bet you'd do just about anything to get the same thing, and over the long term I'll bet more people would want that, than the SUV.
During the Great Depression, many companies offered reduced workweeks and many employees took them, gladly. Some of those reduced workweek systems lasted until the '70's. Given rising productivity, it makes no sense to me to have individuals making More Stuff, when they could be making the same stuff in less time and spending the rest of that time at home doing Good Stuff. I'm sure big companies don't think this way, though, and that's really the issue. It's to their advantage to maximise resource usage, and we bear the brunt of that.
I don't know that this is still the case but many economists in the '80's found that if given a choice between getting a raise, and having a reduced workweek, a significant majority of Americans would choose the reduced workweek. It's probably NOT still the case, since an increasing number of Americans are in financial crises. So one question might be: why are Americans increasingly in debt (and as a result self-required to work more?) Part of THAT might have to do with perception of relative affluence: people seem to think that they have to buy more to keep up with other people. (People in a static society with absolute poverty are, over time, shown to be happier than people who have less than median income/affluence in a society with lots of upwards mobility.)
You're entirely right, but if you're a political party proposing a platform, which are you going to propose, the pizza platform or the dead rat platform? Parties say what they think will get them elected, so they're under pressure to say popular things. Over time, in a stable two-party system, they'll be saying almost exactly the same thing as one another, because that's the most popular thing to say.
>What has six limbs, a prehensile tail, its brain in its chest, and reproductive organs in its mouth?
In other news, both Linda Lovelace and Monica Lewinsky have sued, claiming trademark infringement.
Yep. And if you buy a car with the expectation that it's better-constructed to survive a crash, you just might drive in a manner more liable to result in a crash -- even if it's *not* a better car for a crash. As the man says, if you think you're safe, you make yourself unsafe; if you think you're at risk you make yourself safer. Car manufacturers could game this system, but if they do, we don't buy their products (FSVO 'we'.)
His brilliant article about SUV's and minivans comparing their safety. It's not just that the SUV passenger has many times higher risk of getting injured once a crash has happened, it's that the SUV has a higher chance of getting in a crash. And it's not just that the SUV's crash more often, it's that, if you factor out the handling differences, people who choose to buy SUV's drive in a manner more likely to lead to a crash than people who choose to drive minivans.
This is a significantly complicated question. *IS* the current ABS system on the car in question actually four-channel, one for each wheel? They didn't used to be. Up until just a couple of years ago plenty of pickups were only supplied with ABS on the two front wheels. So it becomes a question of the implementation in each individual car: is the system fiddling with the hydraulic pressure on all four brakes when it sees a lockup on any one wheel, or does it have dedicated channels for each wheel? What sort of control does it use: a comparator driving an on/off controller on the hydraulic pressure, just doing pulse width modulation? Proportional control? A PID controller? A DSP? It's difficult to make a closed-loop servo system that has 100% duty cycle, and the further it is from 100%, the less close to the ideal it's going to be. What's the feedback lag? What's the sample rate? And, measured against that, what are the conditions? Where I live, there are a lot of times where I'm driving on a road that has a mix of perfectly dry pavement with random big ice patches all over it. I can't imagine any condition where any driver ever could outbrake an ABS system on conditions like that. But on straight dry pavement, with a highly trained driver, and an old ABS system -- well, what we did was as close as we could get to a double-blind test: I didn't know if the ABS was on, the driver didn't know (his girlfriend either placed or removed the ABS system fuse) so we'd drive along at a given speed, I'd say "brake!" and click a stopwatch, and time him to stop, then we'd measure the distance. Once he'd hit the brake, it was clear whether the ABS was on or not, but not for that first six tenths of a second or so, and like I said, he beat the ABS stopping distance about 20% of the time. Not great, especially considering that he'd spent two summers in France at some unbelievably expensive school learning how to drive million dollar racecars, and those were perfectly ideal conditions. But it's not like random chance can make you outbrake a system doing its level best: it can't be error. (Unless he was screwing around with the ABS and not saying anything, but he wanted to know, not show off.)
You can pull the fuses that control the power electronics on both systems. At least that's what I've done when I wanted to experiment. Not advised, probably voids warranty, but works.
Most of my driving is on dry pavement but since I spend much of my time in mountainous Colorado terrain, I put in probably 3000 miles a year in snow, slush, ice, gravel, dirt, and combinations thereof. The ABS works surprisingly well, primarily because those roads are generally not straight and it's really nice to be able to hit the brake and still steer around big rocks and around axle-deep-mud/water corners. (Heavy silt river bottoms have not so much in the way of gravel to 'build up' in front of your wheel.) I spent a long time driving a jeep and a hopped-up subaru sans ABS in these conditions, and I've come to really like my current ABS. It's comforting, because it Just Works.
I agree that there's a huge difference in the sliding coefficient of friction between a smooth surface and a rough one. I don't think that changes the overall situation. Model it as a rolling object touching a solid surface, and graph the force applied to the rolling object to try and stop it, against the resultant force that's decelerating the wheel. As you increase the braking force, the deceleration force will increase linearly until some point, at which the wheel has stopped rotating. That's the transition from static to sliding friction, and from that point onwards, further increases in braking force have no effect on deceleration force.
To the best of my knowledge, while the surface characteristics of the wheel and the surface will have a big effect on the slope of the linear segment, and will affect the magnitude of the deceleration force, the sliding friction will always be lower than the maximum static friction, for any set of materials. If I'm wrong, I'd be interested in knowing more about it.
Another question than "have they all been fixed" would be "and are they still fixed?" What happens if the fuse blows on your ABS circuit and you ignore it and then expect that the car will behave like it always has? One of the big problems with passive safety devices -- by which I mean devices that automagically care for you, rather than ones that enhance your active response to a situation -- is that after they're introduced their safety effects are quite noticeable, but then people start taking them for granted, and use up all that new safety by adjusting their driving style accordingly. After a while, those new safety devices are just keeping things where they used to be, and if they don't work, you actually end up with a less safe driver/device combination, entirely the fault of the driver. People who only ever have driven ABS cars, probably really suck at driving standard cars. Which brings up the question: should a car's passive safety devices have active diagnostics, which prevent the car driving if they're diagnosed as unsafe? What happens if something fails while the car's driving: should it shut down immediately? What happens if the diagnostics system itself fails?
One of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, wrote about SUV's and driver safety concentrating on comparing accident evasion (by steering) in a Porsche and an Explorer. It's worth reading.
One plus of ABS is that, in the hands of an unskilled driver, it allows significant evasion capability that a standard car might/would not allow because side-loading combined with heavy braking would exceed the tire's roadholding. As such it becomes a significant safety aid for the vast majority of drivers.
Are you sure? I'm an avid bicyclist and I've watched many many times when I've seen a car hit the brakes to avoid a crash and the wheels distinctly stop rotating while the car's still moving. I agree that there's movement going on, since the soft wheel is being ground off by the pavement, but I'm unclear on why this is different than sliding.
Well... the absolute fastest way to stop is to hit the brake and hold it at the point just before the car starts to slide -- because sliding friction is (usually) much less than static friction, you don't want to slide, but you also want as much energy removed from the system per unit time as possible, so you want to hold the car *right* at the edge of the static->sliding transition. The way an ABS works is to modulate the force you're putting on the brake at some very high repetition rate, to approximate this maximum static friction case. So for most people (myself and 99% of all humans, excepting people who have extensive training under race conditions) the ABS approximates the ideal stopping distance but a few people can stop a car faster without ABS than with.
That's a technicality, though. The number of people who can do this probably is in the hundreds, worldwide. (I had a friend who drove Formula 1's professionally and he could only manage to outdo an ABS about 20% of the time when he tried it.) So for real-world conditions, you're right: an ABS approaches an ideal stopping force, and allows you to A: not have great skill while still getting this benefit, and B: try and steer the car without worrying about braking modulation.
I'm glad many cars have it, and I wish all cars had it.
Mine works quite well in snow and mixed snow/ice/mud, even offroad. I'm really impressed by it.
To be precise, Matthew was beaten, chained to a fencepost, and left for 12 hours, and it took him about three days to actually die from having his face and skull smashed in.
About a year later, somebody, nobody seems to know quite whom, kidnapped the mother of one of the two guys who did this to Matt and left her to die in the middle of a field miles from the nearest road in a howling snowstorm.
Wyoming: where you gotta make your own fun (in Annie Proulx's words.)
You're right: this IS what creationists do and it IS annoying as hell.
But I just realized something: it's also not true for two reasons: evolution is a quantum process, and a species is a gaussian distribution.
First, the quantum process. There are roughly 200,000 ancestors between me and these fossils they just found. That's *it*. If we could find all 200,000, there would be no more gap for the creationists to point at. Obviously we're not going to, but that's the more stringent of the two reasons.
The less stringent one is that species have tremendous variation within themselves. Look at dogs. Stick a chihuahua beside a St. Bernard (and try not to laugh too hard.) Now compare those two to wolves and coyotes, who probably still look a lot like they did when the canids started to separate.
So here's my big realization: there is more variance within the species of domesticated dogs, than there is between them and their closest relatives. So it doesn't make sense to say there's a missing link, if their overlap encompasses their relatives. You can already show the continuum, so again, there is no missing link.
At some point, we may be able to statistically show that the variance within a species of fossil hominid is greater than the variation between it and its nearest known relative, and at that point there is no longer any meaningful gap between them -- we have shown a continuum of variance across a big chunk of time.
If we ever found that many fossils -- very doubtful, obviously -- we could then state, categorically, that there are no missing links (for a particular chain of evolution.)
It's possible we might manage to do that in some area, though -- there are a lot of fossils, and all we'd have to find is one series that goes from animal species A to animal species B. That would demonstrate macroevolution.
I'm sure the claim would then change to being "well that didn't happen with humans" or "well humans have souls that were created, even if their bodies evolved" or something else, but it's an interesting goal nonetheless.
>But there is no clear definition of porn at this time.
I can't claim I made this up but I read a great definition hereabouts, that I think is absolutely accurate: "if you lose interest in it once you've come, it's porn."
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You should visit the American West. There's lots and lots and lots of space in western Colorado, all of Wyoming, most of New Mexico, most of Utah (just make sure you're married if you think you might get caught -- and they might set you up the threesome.) Northern California, nearly all of Nevada and Arizona. Montana and Idaho if you don't mind how the bulletproof vests chafe... and if you go up to Alaska or Canada you can go a month without seeing another person. Watch for the bears. Rumor has it their sense of smell is particularly sensitive to certain scents.
And the hip kids just say "KD" as in "we havin' KD tonight, eh?"
(Yes, I have actually heard people say this.)
My EMT friends say they're a *lot* more scared about trying to cut into a car that has possibly-unexploded side-impact airbags in the pillars, than about the (very remote) possibility of hitting a high-voltage line. 1: the airbags are explosives, 2: the HV line is metal and will short out across the hydraulic cutter blades, mangling the cutter, and 3: you very rarely try and cut across the body of a car compared to how often you cut off the top of the car where the airbag explosives are and the HV lines aren't.
Someone broke into my ex-girlfriend's shop the other day. She has big heavy locks on the big heavy solid-core doors at the front and back of the shop, since she sells Art (read 'expensive'). So the burglar broke into the store next door and punched through two layers of drywall. It probably took three minutes, and no tools needed at all (since the door on the adjacent store was hollowcore crap, since they're a service-oriented place without inventory.)
We applaud development of heuristic filter success. Many sophisticated algorithms go into recursive development of low-latency, high-bandwidth sieving systems. Ongoing procedural optimization with commensalism yields best signal/noise ratio. Additional funding needed!
Oh, I *know* it is. So is (to tie this to the original thread) politics: when you're competing for votes, you will, over time, take the most popular position, simply because that's what gets you elected. It's just that when I use the 'e' word I get my posts marked as 'troll' so these days I just lay the groundwork for the idea.
I capitalize Good Stuff partly because that's how I indicate it's generic Good Stuff -- whatever makes a person happy. There are a LOT of assumptions in that sentence. Some (freakish) people are thrilled with their jobs. Some are thrilled with spending time with their loved ones. Apparently some are happy watching TV. I don't have a TV. Some of my Good Stuff time is spent sitting on the couch with my dog and my girlfriend, reading books or playing Scrabble together, or going on bike rides together. That's fine and all, but I'm not sure that it's objectively better than going and buying a new HyperMonsterMegaCar.
So my mom is a weird Christian, by which I mean she isn't into creeds and mentalities and orthodoxy. Same with many of the other people in her church. Not too long ago, she was teaching the adult Sunday School class and got into a discussion -- well, knowing her church, argument -- about the Christian idea of Eternal Life, and they came to a sort of joint conclusion that Eternal Life doesn't mean going to Heaven. What it means, they claim, is that you do enough good in your life that you're remembered fondly when you've died, that your reputation is your afterlife. (Whether there is actually an afterlife is, according to her, unknowable, and therefore not worth spending time on. You should hear her views on The Devil some time, if you want to have your opinion of Christian thought rearranged severely.)
As an agnostic, I get really, seriously into that idea. That's an objective good -- or at least one for which I could argue at length. (like, say, this.)
But in general, you're right. People come home from work and collapse into a chair and turn on the TV and turn off the brain -- in part because they're so tired after work. Because they work long, hard hours, it has a footprint outside those working hours. They're not getting paid, but they're still, essentially, job-related, recovering from job. Now THAT sucks.
I'm entirely with you: work's what I do to finance the worthwhile part of my life. I live well within those finances, so I'd love to work fewer hours for the same pay. I'd work fewer hours for less pay, if I could.
This begs the question: why are so many Americans working themselves to death? Is it just because they're trying to pay off their debts from having bought so much stuff because they're unhappy with their lives? Or is it a lemming situation? If all your friends are going out and buying big SUV's, and then telling each other how happy they are that they could afford the 'crush small economy car' option package on their SUV's, you'll probably want to go do the same. But, if all your friends suddenly get shifted to 30 hour work schedules and have three-day weekends every week, I'll bet you'd do just about anything to get the same thing, and over the long term I'll bet more people would want that, than the SUV.
During the Great Depression, many companies offered reduced workweeks and many employees took them, gladly. Some of those reduced workweek systems lasted until the '70's. Given rising productivity, it makes no sense to me to have individuals making More Stuff, when they could be making the same stuff in less time and spending the rest of that time at home doing Good Stuff. I'm sure big companies don't think this way, though, and that's really the issue. It's to their advantage to maximise resource usage, and we bear the brunt of that.
I don't know that this is still the case but many economists in the '80's found that if given a choice between getting a raise, and having a reduced workweek, a significant majority of Americans would choose the reduced workweek. It's probably NOT still the case, since an increasing number of Americans are in financial crises. So one question might be: why are Americans increasingly in debt (and as a result self-required to work more?) Part of THAT might have to do with perception of relative affluence: people seem to think that they have to buy more to keep up with other people. (People in a static society with absolute poverty are, over time, shown to be happier than people who have less than median income/affluence in a society with lots of upwards mobility.)
You're entirely right, but if you're a political party proposing a platform, which are you going to propose, the pizza platform or the dead rat platform? Parties say what they think will get them elected, so they're under pressure to say popular things. Over time, in a stable two-party system, they'll be saying almost exactly the same thing as one another, because that's the most popular thing to say.
>What has six limbs, a prehensile tail, its brain in its chest, and reproductive organs in its mouth? In other news, both Linda Lovelace and Monica Lewinsky have sued, claiming trademark infringement.
Yep. And if you buy a car with the expectation that it's better-constructed to survive a crash, you just might drive in a manner more liable to result in a crash -- even if it's *not* a better car for a crash. As the man says, if you think you're safe, you make yourself unsafe; if you think you're at risk you make yourself safer. Car manufacturers could game this system, but if they do, we don't buy their products (FSVO 'we'.)
His brilliant article about SUV's and minivans comparing their safety. It's not just that the SUV passenger has many times higher risk of getting injured once a crash has happened, it's that the SUV has a higher chance of getting in a crash. And it's not just that the SUV's crash more often, it's that, if you factor out the handling differences, people who choose to buy SUV's drive in a manner more likely to lead to a crash than people who choose to drive minivans.
What you're talking about makes sense: I'll read more about it.
This is a significantly complicated question. *IS* the current ABS system on the car in question actually four-channel, one for each wheel? They didn't used to be. Up until just a couple of years ago plenty of pickups were only supplied with ABS on the two front wheels. So it becomes a question of the implementation in each individual car: is the system fiddling with the hydraulic pressure on all four brakes when it sees a lockup on any one wheel, or does it have dedicated channels for each wheel? What sort of control does it use: a comparator driving an on/off controller on the hydraulic pressure, just doing pulse width modulation? Proportional control? A PID controller? A DSP? It's difficult to make a closed-loop servo system that has 100% duty cycle, and the further it is from 100%, the less close to the ideal it's going to be. What's the feedback lag? What's the sample rate? And, measured against that, what are the conditions? Where I live, there are a lot of times where I'm driving on a road that has a mix of perfectly dry pavement with random big ice patches all over it. I can't imagine any condition where any driver ever could outbrake an ABS system on conditions like that. But on straight dry pavement, with a highly trained driver, and an old ABS system -- well, what we did was as close as we could get to a double-blind test: I didn't know if the ABS was on, the driver didn't know (his girlfriend either placed or removed the ABS system fuse) so we'd drive along at a given speed, I'd say "brake!" and click a stopwatch, and time him to stop, then we'd measure the distance. Once he'd hit the brake, it was clear whether the ABS was on or not, but not for that first six tenths of a second or so, and like I said, he beat the ABS stopping distance about 20% of the time. Not great, especially considering that he'd spent two summers in France at some unbelievably expensive school learning how to drive million dollar racecars, and those were perfectly ideal conditions. But it's not like random chance can make you outbrake a system doing its level best: it can't be error. (Unless he was screwing around with the ABS and not saying anything, but he wanted to know, not show off.)
You can pull the fuses that control the power electronics on both systems. At least that's what I've done when I wanted to experiment. Not advised, probably voids warranty, but works.
Most of my driving is on dry pavement but since I spend much of my time in mountainous Colorado terrain, I put in probably 3000 miles a year in snow, slush, ice, gravel, dirt, and combinations thereof. The ABS works surprisingly well, primarily because those roads are generally not straight and it's really nice to be able to hit the brake and still steer around big rocks and around axle-deep-mud/water corners. (Heavy silt river bottoms have not so much in the way of gravel to 'build up' in front of your wheel.) I spent a long time driving a jeep and a hopped-up subaru sans ABS in these conditions, and I've come to really like my current ABS. It's comforting, because it Just Works.
To the best of my knowledge, while the surface characteristics of the wheel and the surface will have a big effect on the slope of the linear segment, and will affect the magnitude of the deceleration force, the sliding friction will always be lower than the maximum static friction, for any set of materials. If I'm wrong, I'd be interested in knowing more about it.
Another question than "have they all been fixed" would be "and are they still fixed?" What happens if the fuse blows on your ABS circuit and you ignore it and then expect that the car will behave like it always has? One of the big problems with passive safety devices -- by which I mean devices that automagically care for you, rather than ones that enhance your active response to a situation -- is that after they're introduced their safety effects are quite noticeable, but then people start taking them for granted, and use up all that new safety by adjusting their driving style accordingly. After a while, those new safety devices are just keeping things where they used to be, and if they don't work, you actually end up with a less safe driver/device combination, entirely the fault of the driver. People who only ever have driven ABS cars, probably really suck at driving standard cars. Which brings up the question: should a car's passive safety devices have active diagnostics, which prevent the car driving if they're diagnosed as unsafe? What happens if something fails while the car's driving: should it shut down immediately? What happens if the diagnostics system itself fails?
One plus of ABS is that, in the hands of an unskilled driver, it allows significant evasion capability that a standard car might/would not allow because side-loading combined with heavy braking would exceed the tire's roadholding. As such it becomes a significant safety aid for the vast majority of drivers.
Are you sure? I'm an avid bicyclist and I've watched many many times when I've seen a car hit the brakes to avoid a crash and the wheels distinctly stop rotating while the car's still moving. I agree that there's movement going on, since the soft wheel is being ground off by the pavement, but I'm unclear on why this is different than sliding.
Well... the absolute fastest way to stop is to hit the brake and hold it at the point just before the car starts to slide -- because sliding friction is (usually) much less than static friction, you don't want to slide, but you also want as much energy removed from the system per unit time as possible, so you want to hold the car *right* at the edge of the static->sliding transition. The way an ABS works is to modulate the force you're putting on the brake at some very high repetition rate, to approximate this maximum static friction case. So for most people (myself and 99% of all humans, excepting people who have extensive training under race conditions) the ABS approximates the ideal stopping distance but a few people can stop a car faster without ABS than with.
That's a technicality, though. The number of people who can do this probably is in the hundreds, worldwide. (I had a friend who drove Formula 1's professionally and he could only manage to outdo an ABS about 20% of the time when he tried it.) So for real-world conditions, you're right: an ABS approaches an ideal stopping force, and allows you to A: not have great skill while still getting this benefit, and B: try and steer the car without worrying about braking modulation.
I'm glad many cars have it, and I wish all cars had it.
Mine works quite well in snow and mixed snow/ice/mud, even offroad. I'm really impressed by it.
To be precise, Matthew was beaten, chained to a fencepost, and left for 12 hours, and it took him about three days to actually die from having his face and skull smashed in.
About a year later, somebody, nobody seems to know quite whom, kidnapped the mother of one of the two guys who did this to Matt and left her to die in the middle of a field miles from the nearest road in a howling snowstorm.
Wyoming: where you gotta make your own fun (in Annie Proulx's words.)
You're right: this IS what creationists do and it IS annoying as hell.
But I just realized something: it's also not true for two reasons: evolution is a quantum process, and a species is a gaussian distribution.
First, the quantum process. There are roughly 200,000 ancestors between me and these fossils they just found. That's *it*. If we could find all 200,000, there would be no more gap for the creationists to point at. Obviously we're not going to, but that's the more stringent of the two reasons.
The less stringent one is that species have tremendous variation within themselves. Look at dogs. Stick a chihuahua beside a St. Bernard (and try not to laugh too hard.) Now compare those two to wolves and coyotes, who probably still look a lot like they did when the canids started to separate.
So here's my big realization: there is more variance within the species of domesticated dogs, than there is between them and their closest relatives. So it doesn't make sense to say there's a missing link, if their overlap encompasses their relatives. You can already show the continuum, so again, there is no missing link.
At some point, we may be able to statistically show that the variance within a species of fossil hominid is greater than the variation between it and its nearest known relative, and at that point there is no longer any meaningful gap between them -- we have shown a continuum of variance across a big chunk of time.
If we ever found that many fossils -- very doubtful, obviously -- we could then state, categorically, that there are no missing links (for a particular chain of evolution.)
It's possible we might manage to do that in some area, though -- there are a lot of fossils, and all we'd have to find is one series that goes from animal species A to animal species B. That would demonstrate macroevolution.
I'm sure the claim would then change to being "well that didn't happen with humans" or "well humans have souls that were created, even if their bodies evolved" or something else, but it's an interesting goal nonetheless.
Comments?
>But there is no clear definition of porn at this time.
I can't claim I made this up but I read a great definition hereabouts, that I think is absolutely accurate: "if you lose interest in it once you've come, it's porn."