[youtube]JVRsWAjvQSg[/youtube]
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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This guy kicks creationalists’ ass.
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Most of what I know about velocity
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Hmmm…not sure what happened to that post….will try this
Flacco: Velocity
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1706246.htm
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Eeek what’s happening…I’ve got italics now on this thread…I didn’t do anything…honest!
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Jingles……HELP!
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Let’s see
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OK Jingles did this and it woked
@Jingles Apr 5th, 2007 at 5:25 am
“Score! I found the secret! For future reference, to close italics it’s /i in triangle brackets, spammed multiple times.
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Because every time you write it incorrectly, (ie i/ or i\ etc, it opens a new italic thingumajig, so you have to close each one.”
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Erm….I tried the first bit, but don’t know what he means by “spammed multiple times”
In one post or separate ones?
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It worked :)))
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@Wench Nikkiee
“Eeek what’s happening…I’ve got italics now on this thread…I didn’t do anything…honest!”
Relax Nikkiee, the thread was already messed up before your post. And while several have tried, none has found a way to undo it once it is messed up.
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No Jingles fixed the italics before….maybe not on your system but it was normal again on mine on mine. It’s ok again now :)
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On another note…..happy happy days…there had to be homologous genes between animals and plants and now they are increasingly being identified and isolated. I’m sure there’s plenty more stories like this one on the way…… too :)
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“Study shows humans and plants share common regulatory pathway”
http://richarddawkins.net/article,857,Study-shows-humans-and-plants-share-common-regulatory-pathway,PhysOrg
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What say all the YEC/IDiots to that? :)))
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something like: I aint related to no plant. Or : It’s all a vast conspiracy from the thousands of scientist out there, we have 200 here and they say it’s not true, can’t be true because it does’t say so in the bible.
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@Wench Nikkiee
You learn well young grasshopper.
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@Bill
“If you are that close to a black hole, the parts of your body near the black hole are pulled with more force than the parts further away from the hole, leading to serious discomfort.â€
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Apparently, if you aim yourself at a large enough black hole, the (gravitational force gradient? I dunno… sounds about right) is slight enough that you can approach comfortably most of the way to the singularity before tidal forces rip you to itty-bitty shreds. But then they do.
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Black holes are fun… :D
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@Rowdy Wench
“I’ve always thought that relative velocities had more to do with how fast you are traveling relative to the speed of light…I am having a hard time getting my head around this, but it’s very interesting! ”
The speed of light is the limit speed between two objects and often velocities are measured like 1/2 speed of light or 2/3 speed of light but it makes no sense to refer to how fast something is going without reference to some other object. In other words velocities are not absolute things but relative to other objects.
When kirk or pickard say they are stopped in space, they make a physics error, unless physics changes. The speed of light is the absolute limit for things approaching or departing from each other.
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@ bill – Thanks! That does make more sense. Hadn’t thought about the stopped in space thing (despite having seen all of the Star Treks! OK, not Deep Space Nine…).
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@DPG
“I can complicate things further by bringing in triplets of brothers.”
Wow, I’m sure that would be a messy equation. But I wanted to make sure you see the apparent paradox I was referring to. Since both twins have the same view of each other that each should get younger than the other from each perspective, unless you see that the main difference in brothers is that one is accellerating.
Another thing to consider is that the equations don’t just have to do with approach and depart. Consider, for instance, a line connecting Alpha Centauri and Sol. Through Alpha Centauri draw a line perpendicular to the first line and consider a traveller on that line going 86% the speed of light (enough to make time at 1/2 rate). Now he’s not approaching earth or going away from earth very fast as he passes near alpha centauri, but I assume that the time dilitation equation is the same. That is, if we see his clock, it will be going at half rate.
In the earlier relativity books, they always talked about this in terms of a train and it was always a train speeding by, not approaching or departing, so I assume this is correct. In the same way, if the distant traveller looks towards earth, he will see earth’s clocks going at 1/2 rate.
I don’t have the understanding to deal with the ‘3 body problem’, but it is interesting.
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@Bill
Sorry to have been away for abit.
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I see the paradox, but I don’t know the answer to it. I’m on a conference this week, maybe I’ll throw up the problem as a little thought excercise over lunch some day.
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I don’t know about the three body problem either. I just wanted to point out (not even sure if it was correct) that the 2*2/3 c > c problem cannot be simply undone by looking at it from the perspective of the brother whose ship turns around. From his perspective things may be ok, that doesn’t make the problem go away. From the perspective of someone who keeps on moving (i. e. a third brother whose ship doesn’t turn), the problem is still there.
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Hopefully there’ll be someone here who knows the stuff better.
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@DPG & Everyone
I see what you mean.
I forget where the thread was where we were talking about the wizard of oz and dark side of the moon, but I got both and I played them. I even made a DVD with the DSOTM sound in place of the original. It is a lot of fun, not because Pink Floyd intended it but because he didn’t. The coincidences are even more interesting because they are accidental.
There are things I cannot talk about here. If you want to know about them, email me at billtomlinson@mac.com
Title your email so I’ll know. I get a lot of junk mail and delete a lot by subject alone.
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I saw Ken’s talk when he was here in Davis a couple of weeks ago. I’ll assume it was the same talk he gave at Case Western and which is shown in the video.
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The talk he gave here had basically two parts. The first part dealt with ID and he did a wonderful job reviewing the destruction of that toxic crap. I really liked the part where he answered ID’s criticisms of gaps in the fossil record that did not support theories of evolution, such as the evoluion of a cow-like animal to whales. Indeed there were gaps, big ones, but once someone finally did find a fossil of a transition species everyone suddenly knew where to look for these fossils and they eventually found 24 more species. Nice!
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Ken broadened the scope of the science-religion issue a bit by offering examples of how when interviewd by school boards who were considering adopting this biology text books, where when asked if he didn’t think evolution wasn’t a just theory and not a fact. He replied saying that everything in the book was a theory, noting that theories explain the facts. Nicely done. He also reviewed the “stickers” issue, where stickers stating that evolution was just a theory… was inserted into the text but later removed after winning a law suit.
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Then, tragically, he jumped the tracks in a big way. The second part of his talk was basically an attempt to patch things up between science and religion. The problem for me was, he completely abandoned any hint of an evidence-based critical-thinking approach to the question of god and religion, plus he clearly was thinking of his own Christian faith and not religion in general. Ken’s primary thrust was the god-in-the-cracks argument. He basically said that evolution was god’s way of doing creation, that t(his) god was obviously superior to the conventional Christian god, and even went on to site a recent book that says that knowledge of god was probably in encoded in our genes. Proof? Every human society in existance has essentially the same god myth. I call BS on that, but I do like the idea of honey bee societies having little honey bee gods, slime molds having little slime mold gods, and maybe even millions of doomed cows in those mega-farms praying (Mooing?) to their cow gods asking for deliverance from the slaughter house. I can imagine the cow creation and initial sin myths the cows would use to explain their destiny. Anyway, he basically says that just because science gave us evolution and all sorts of other theories to explain the universe, doesn’t mean god isn’t in there with us. In other words, science does not disprove god. (He takes issue with Dawkin’s stand on the matter.) On the contrary, science probably proves god by finally revealing how the creation was accomplished. Some other examples used, even if science could prove love is purely biological, would it be any less wonderful? Anyway, that was the jist of the second part of his talk.
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I listened very carefully to his talk, especially the second half, so as to hear what he was actually saying before I compared it to what I knew/believed. (Difficult to do. Head was spinning for a while.) The second part was really really disappointing. Bad bad science. How could someone so intelligent and well-informed just roll over like that and get all uncritical? He obviously loves science and does it well, but sadly he still hasn’t shed his mystical leanings when it comes to his religion. It’s like that Jesus Seminar thing of a few years ago where a bunch of theologians got together to really study the bible to learn all they could about the real Jesus. One thing they concluded was that 80% of what the bible says Jesus said, he didn’t. Wow! But, the one question they were not allowed to ask was, was Jesus actually a real person? Big blind spot. About as big as the one Ken has.
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@Bill
Didn’t gety around to asking anyone at the conference about relativity. Sorry, I’m out for now as far as insight is concerned
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The Collapse of Intelligents was when this stupid shit was made up.
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Bill, the answer lies in Lorentz transformation!! That tells you to move your point of reference with one of the moving entities and gives an equation on how to determine the velocity of the other. Unlike in Newtonian mechanics, it’s obviously not just adding the vectors. I haven’t worked out an example yet, but I will. To be continued.
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Mike Meier,
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It is a shame when good scientists try and shoe-horn their God in to their theories and lose all objectivity.
One of the key thrusts of FSM is that if the ‘there is a God because you haven’t proved there isn’t a God’ argument stands up the ‘there is a Flying Spaghetti Monster because you haven’t proved there isn’t’ argument is just as good. Actually better.
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It’s the little flip they do (that you noticed) where their ‘profound’(!?) argument that there is a God becomes a profound argument that it is their God!
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Sad really.
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Ok, did not follow you all the way there but I guess it’s good.
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I keep that one in mind :). Thanks for a great blog!
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