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This is a very interesting discussion on the subject of Intelligent Design by Brown University’s Kenneth Miller. It’s just under two hours long, and if you have the time I highly recommend watching it. There is even a mention of Pastafarianism at around 90 minutes.
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An elaborate spoof on Intelligent Design, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is neither too elaborate nor too spoofy to succeed in nailing the fallacies of ID. It's even wackier than Jonathan Swift's suggestion that the Irish eat their children as a way to keep them from being a burden, and it may offend just as many people, but Henderson, described elsewhere as a 25-year-old "out-of-work physics major," puts satire to the same serious use that Swift did. Oh, yes, it is very funny. -- Scientific American
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Sounds noisy? Have you got some Dandelions you could perhaps share with him? :))
What I have is better than dandelions. My husband makes WAY more noise than my neighbor, and I’m sure the condition of our house and yard drive him crazy. We’ve been completely renovating the house and land since the mesozoic era. I’ve been driven insane, so why shouldn’t we share our joy with our neighbors?
After some time in the wilderness I have returned… It’s good to see that this site is somewhat like Neighbours (or some other culturally relevant soap opera) in that you can leave for a few months and come back and catch up on the story in a couple of threads. The Wenches are still here and Thumper is still spouting on about a theoretical girlfriend that was a model once. It is apparently love, in fact he is so infatuated with her that he spends the best part of his day away from her so that he can post on this website. It leads me to believe that by model he means the mannequin variety…
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I’d like to agree with Lisa and John Phillips who posted right up the top of this thread. Kenneth Miller is my hero too and he is a class act as a lecturer. He made an interesting point, which was that scientists are very poor promoters of their work, and it is frowned upon if they are. I don’t know if I entirely agree with him on this point, but I will concede that scientific discovery plays a very minor role in the media. This is disappointing I think.
Oh Saucy if only you could here my neighbors at the moment. The drunken football crowd sound :))
They sometimes annoy me, especially when I have early mornings, but tonight I think they sound hilarious. I tried to go to bed 5 hours ago, then decided not to fight against the noise. I have some rather loud implements for a 5am wake up call, ( depending on what time they fall over…must make sure they have transversed from pass out to sleeping mode) if they really piss me off though. Power tools and loud clanging iron are both good…then there’s the mower :))
@Coleoptera Apr 7th, 2007 at 8:58 am
Oh that’s right this is CoFSM isn’t it :))
Hahahahaha…
Hi Coleoptera :))
Long time no see
@Coleoptera
“I don’t know if I entirely agree with him on this point, but I will concede that scientific discovery plays a very minor role in the media.”
I think the IDiots and YECs also put much more effort and money into their advertising spin doctoring.
“you can leave for a few months and come back and catch up on the story in a couple of threads.”
Ahh… but different flavours Coleoptera :))
I’m out!
@Wench Nikkiee Apr 7th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Hi Coleoptera :))
Long time no see
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Yeah, I have been spending a bit of time on the CoFSM forums. I felt it was time to check back in. I see that the debate with Leucine petered out… Where did the good doctor go? And that other guy with the name I can’t remember, Science wonder or something?
Hi Coleoptera!
What you may have missed is that Thumper was pretending to be a troll, he is now “one of us”, and his link does show a real life girlfriend.
There has been some dispute over whether his trolling was funny or not though, so some sparks are still flying.
We haven’t had any real fundies for a while - mostly hit and runs.
@Wench Nikkiee Apr 7th, 2007 at 9:22 am
I think the IDiots and YECs also put much more effort and money into their advertising spin doctoring.
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They have, I think that was part of what Kenneth Miller was arguing. ID is presented in a fasion that is more accesible to the layperson. They still use the irreducibly complex bacterial flagellum argument even though it was disproved over 8 years ago. People are probably more familiar with the irreducible complexity argument than the compelling evidence to the contrary. He used the example of the 46 chromosomes in humans versus 48 in our close ancestors. You would expect that if evolutionary theory was true that the 46 chromosomes in humans would be a result of chromosomal fusion. This was demonstrated almost 2 years ago but few people, myself formally included, have heard of this result despite its implications for ID.
@Booty Apr 7th, 2007 at 9:45 am
There has been some dispute over whether his trolling was funny or not though, so some sparks are still flying.
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I can see both sides of that argument…
everyone, we may have a new fundie. It’s been thin on that lately. It may be another drive-by but check out the responses of Kansas school board thread. It’s is ‘A firm believer in god’. Sounds potentially promising.
@ Coleoptera
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“I can see both sides of that argument…”
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Ya - so can I! I’m one of the guilty ones who trots off and plays silly buggers. I don’t tend to trade personal insults, truth be said. I don’t seem to have to! I get banned quickly without that :(
Yes I’ve been banned from another bloody site - I was only trying to find out which words were wrong! Hell, if you can’t say shitehawk then what can you say :))
This was on a so called “Chaos/madness deity site - Cthulhu!” _ come on! What’s wrong with bringing a bit of madness to a site that worships madness?
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So far; xtians, Nazis, Aryan Nation (they were less than impressed!) face sucker etc - and still I get no points for my answers on Yahoo groups! I’m going to get a complex!
@DutchPastaGuy
“That would not exclude the possibility of moving forward in time. ”
True, we do that all the time. And Einstein’s “twin paradox” makes it clear we can speed our travel into the future to any rate greater than normal, in principle anyway. Interestingly there doesn’t seem to be a way to slow our progress into the future where the world is moving slowly compared to our rate, at least with the Einstein Equations. (We can’t accelerate everything else, can we?)
I just saw that you are in physics, so I know this is nothing new to you, but maybe someone else will find it interesting. Meanwhile feel free to correct me if I am in error.
I read an article in discover a few years back that examined what it would be like to go far into the future, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions or brazilians of years into the future. The article was written before the discovery of accelerated expansion, I believe. At one point each matter particle is so far away from the next that they are to be considered the only particle in their universe, for they could not send a signal by light to the next particle, even if they had light.
“Bang” vs “whimper”? I guess it’s whimper.
If there’s something we don’t know here, it’s possible, I suppose, for the accelerated expansion to stop or reverse. Maybe even leading to the big crunch. I’m not familiar with the reasons why accelerated expansion began. It wasn’t supposed to be here all the time. Any thoughts?
Hi Bill,
Sorry for that little mixup about joining the disciples list on the other thread. Your change of forum poster name made me confuse things.
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I know little about some of the things you ask about. Relativity does not play a big role in materials science:). One thing your wrote made me wonder though:
“Interestingly there doesn’t seem to be a way to slow our progress into the future where the world is moving slowly compared to our rate, at least with the Einstein Equations. (We can’t accelerate everything else, can we?)”
If you could accelerate everything else away, the effect would be the opposite of when the earth etc stood still and only you accelerated away in the other direction. How does relativity know for which one time should slow down? I mean, if we take the earth surface as reference, the person in the rocket would accelerate. But taking the rocket as reference is just as valid. So then the earth accelerates. Both are arbitrary I guess. So who wins, what determines that? Or are concepts like velocity and acceleration just too Newtonian? The equation I wrote down and the one you added are part of relativity that can still be seen in a classical way. I know little about it, but there is also a part to relativity in which there are now equivalents in classical physics. Maybe my question above is invalidated by that. Do you know?
I’m afraid I also have few ideas about the future of the universe. Stars will deplete their fuel and if the expansion continues, the place will become pretty empty, dark and cold I guess. Maybe the unverse will turn into a giant Bose-Einstein condensate if it expands and cools far enough?
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@DutchPastaGuy
I have had occasion to wrestle with some of these notions. Initially i regarded the twin paradox as a problem. Usually presented there are twins on earth and one is shot into space at a high velocity, returning many years later to find his brother much older than he. One might ask, if all velocity is relative, why shouldn’t we consider the earth brother as departing from the brother shot into space, and thus the conclusion should be symmetric? A paradox, because it cannot be that a is younger than b and at the same time b be younger than a.
But, accelaration is not relative. Who accelerated away from who, is agreed to by those of either framework.
In special relativity, this is not a concern because the objects in consideration never get together to compare their clocks. It takes acceleration for objects of different speeds to get together again and compare. The twin paradox requires a turn around at some point for the twin brother to get home and match speeds.
I read a book by herman bondi on this paradox at one time and he was able to convince me at the time, although I do not remember the proof , that einstein’s time equations were generateable from two assumptions: that the speed of light was constant and that here was no medium (like an aeither) (like sound is to air) for them to go through. I wish I could remember those derivations, but remember they were not difficult (said by a guy who has trouble with double intregrations)
@Bill
Thanks for an interesting reply, but I’m afraid I’ll need another class.
What if we leave most of the acceleration out of it? One brother blasts of in a rocket that propells him to great velocity in a short time, then the engine stops. So the brothers live at different but constant velocities for a few years, therefore aging at different paces. Then there is another short burst of the engines to return the one in the rocket back to earth, again at constant speed after the rocket has turned around. So almost all of the accumulated time difference between the brothers arises from a situation without acceleration. Then we get the previous question again: who ages quicker?
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Also: I see a problem in determining the time difference after the one brother gets back to earth. If the reference was the earth, the brother in the rocket moved at velocity v and then returned with velocity -v. If the reference system was moving at velocity v, then the brother in the rocket first stood still from that point of view, then moved at speed -2v while the brother on earth was moving at -v the whole time. The square roots in the equations we came up with are not linear operators, so I guess they won’t happen to yield the same answer (too lazy to do the actual calculation for an example case) for the two scenarios?
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Or is the pace at which time difference accumulates not determined just by a single snapshot in time (our two equations do seem to suggest so), does the history of previous acceleration etc. play into it? In that case concentrating the acceleration into short time intervals would make no difference I guess?
If the situation is not determined by a single snapshot, is it perhaps similar to entropy? That is also not a property of a system of atoms at one particular time, but rather of a time-averaged ensemble. Which makes it much more difficult to handle. Is the twin paradox governed by a similarly messy situation?
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Finally: relax about double integrals. I’m sure you retained more from your math classes than me. Never use those standard integrals and mathematical tricks anymore, so practically all of it faded away in just a couple of years after learning it.
@ anyone who cares - I was reading back and there was some question about me being a Wiccan. Although I certainly say very Wiccan-like things, I am not a Wiccan. While I fully respect anyone who chooses to practice Wicca, it’s not for me. I went to the U.U. Church for my childrens’ sake. I needed them to be exposed to other religious schools of thought besides the drivel (fundamentalist Christianity), that their father (my ex) was trying to instill in them. Now I don’t go to any church except right here. If there was a physical CoFSM nearby, I’d be there! That being said, I love nature and the Cosmos, and find my Creator there.
The impression I get, living in DC, is that Bush has confused the rest of the politicians by being a better manipulator then they are and playing to a crazier audiance. I don’t think they are used to feeling gamed by the system and its definately lit a fire under the career congressmen to have the GOP idealogy swing hard right without allowing for dissent from people playing the moderate game. (IE Tom Delay’s “the hammer” act in which he twisted arms to get the votes he wanted).
A lot of the noise you hear are people who don’t like feeling gamed yelling and screaming about it, which doesn’t mean they’re wrong. The religeous stuff is supposed to be largely symbolic but the social conservatives seem to be getting tired of just receiving pep rallies and tried to get the big prize. So they overstepped their bounds, they are breaking up the GOP alliance which is GOOD as the Jesus-Republican alliance was annoying the crap out of me, as they actaully were getting a lot more stuff accomplished then people thought they were.
To: Wench Beth
Mar 26th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
“To St. Jimmy… then please come over and slap some freakin’ sense into the Democrats, too! I don’t think they’re all like that, but unfortunately everything you see on the news caters to the Bible-thumpers.”
I see this view a lot but it is important to remember that this is the case because christian conservatives are very reliable voters and are organized, moreso then any underlying tendancies present in the government and they are also organized consumers too so threaten to withhold money and influence from dissenters. Washington DC is a lot more secular then the rest of the country, and no one really cares about what religion someone is if they aren’t a political appointee (ie participating in state sponsored theatre). I’ve heard lifestyle doesn’t necessessarily preclude you from a security clearance as long as you are honest as they are concerned only with blackmail. I know married swingers who work in defense contracting.
If people who are more liberal start voting more frequently, then we’ll move away from the bible dogma. Its just the politicians have little faith that university educated middle class people are at all reliable voters. I didn’t make the system but it’s not going to change until there are compromises between the political actors and the voters and that means statistical voting results, such as voters between the age of 18-30 would be a start, need to increase and we need to punish politicians who take stances that are coded for fundamentalists.
The 2006 elections seemed to go off a lot more smoothly then in 2004 but there was also a lot of groundwork that happened before the midterms. The opposition took their job a lot more seriously then in 2004, as during the first election none of the democratic and left’s leadership seemed to care much and had already ceeded the election the the republicans and I felt really bad for Kerry as I think he tried but my god his support team??!!! (All the efforts seemed to have been made by students which is rediculous as what were the consultants doing?)