But in Short, He’s all my Nightmares wrapped up in one disgusting cowardly person who’se level of insanity approaches and possibly exceeds that of a “Nephilimfree” or “VenomFangX”

What does one do when approached by such characters like Nephy or OFU? What do you do when someone simply dismisses all the Documentation and evidence i have provided to support my side as nothing more than “Zionist Propaganda”?

What does one do with someone who has an unhealthy obsession with the hair shaven from the victims before they went into the Gas Chambers. I explained Via quoting some Nazi Docs that the hair shaven off was used in the Textiles industry. One of those Docs mentions a usage of hair in the manufacturing of hair-yarn socks for U-boat crews. He picked that line up and tried to bastardize my broader point by now he’s demanding examples of, In his words “Jew Hair Socks”. What am i to do?

Well it turns out that i dont think there is not alot i can do. No matter how much evidence one puts forward to support my case, No matter how long and detailed my arguments are. [Im one of those rare people that doesn't see the 500 character limit on youtube as a limit.] It’s going to be ignored or distorted anyways, The best thing to do is argue not for the sake of winning my opponent over [I clearly do not think i can] but better to get the truth to a potential third party who may read the lies and distortions given by such loons. That is what i believe the essence of the public sphere and debate is. Winning others over.

There is a reason why i ask “what can i do?” here, on a Forum designed to promote Critical Thinking and whose members alot of them specialise in the rebuttial of creationist claims. It is because i believe Holocaust denial and Creationism have their similarities. Yes i know With one, are denying something which i, Like any other decent person considers to be a well demonstrated and well proven fact of Nature. With the other, You’re denying something which I any other decent person considers to be a well demonstrated and well proven fact of History. Both employ similar methods of denial. Ranging From Quote-mines to inserting things which really aren’t, and so on! Gleaning your info from ideological Hacks which is what both do doesn’t do you any favours

But is this superficial? Im hoping it isn’t. I have plenty of experience debating Beck-heads as anyone on the chat will verify. But my experience of debating pure fundamentalists like OFU is minimal. If anyone experienced with debating creationists can help me out with these questions, They are more than welcome, especialy as with regards to how to engage idiots like OFU

This strange claim is put forward by David Oates who runs an organisation called Reverse Speech Technologies. Reverse Speech is the idea that when we talk normally our subconscious minds encode messages into the words we choose that can only be identified by recording what we say and playing it backwards. These backwards messages are said to contain the true meaning of what we said as well as always speak the truth. Amongst the various uses for Reverse Speech Oates claims that Reverse Speech can be used to detect lies. Well them sound like fighting words to me and so I have put together a very simple experiment to test that claim. And that’s where you guys come in.

In order to test this claim I have put together a video, well technically two videos but who’s counting, that contains five statements, four of which are factual and one of which is a complete fabrication. After each statement is played you will hear it again only this time in reverse. If the claims of David Oates are accurate then you should be able to hear in the reverse versions of the five statements clues as to whether they are truthful or not. Once you have decided which of the five statements you believe is the false one then all you need to do is vote for that statement in the poll that you can access from a link in the information box below the second part of the video. Unlike my pervious experiment the results of how people have voted and the details of which statement is in fact the false one will be accessable immediately so you don’t have to sit around for ages waiting for me to make another video explaining how everything went.

Ok so it is not as sexy as testing psychic powers or debunking homeopathy, however as far as I can tell this is the very first time this specific pseudoscientific claim has been tested which means you will be a part of something no one has ever done before. To get involved, and I hope you will, go watch this video and simply follow the instructions you will find there. Sorry my video presentation is somewhat less than dynamic, that is really something I have to work on.

However, you develop an unfair bias of a newspaper when you peruse it mainly to find new nonsense to write about in your blog. You ignore all rational articles about politics\current affairs\crossbows to the face and concentrate only on articles that guarantee a spout of vitriol frothy enough to incur a transparent sense of self-righteousness. And as a result, your perception is that the chosen paper exists only to print stories about religion, druids and the supernatural. Unfair, since the Metro regularly dishes out reasonably informative articles about modern science and astronomy.

My last fodder was about druids fixing roads, and it’s hard to have sympathy for a publication that will indulge itself with such asinine balls. But almost the next day, indeed it could have been the next day, the Metro printed this. Our very own Phil Plait, who I have happily if briefly met (and who disillusioned me slightly by expressing a certain reserve for District 9, damn it Phil when will you see that guys in alien power armour are the next Casablanca) blogged about a photo of a lunar rock that had rolled into a crater. The Metro picked this up and wrote the small piece to which I just linked.

They could have taken Phil’s approach, which was “OMFG space is awesome and beautiful”. And they sort of did. But they also titled the article “Proof that golf-playing God shot a hole-in-one on the Moon?”

Facedesk.

Why, why would you do this? What manner of journalist would take a story about a lunar event of some rarity and make it into terrifyingly inept pun-based  pseudoscience? Am I only this annoyed because I loathe religion? No, I don’t think I am. The image itself deserved a tone of joyous solemnity (and sure, Phil played with a few golfing metaphors himself before getting into the science of it; I imagine the Metro stole the idea.) But that wouldn’t have been enough to make a prominent article; only invoking God could elevate the story into something worthy of News. Not content with printing stories about supernatural druidical assholery, they feel the need to take stories of astronomical wonder and create supernatural assholery. ” . . . this picture suggests that the Almighty could have had a round or two on the grey course – and even scored a hole-in-one.” What? You can almost hear the satisfied smirk as it drips off the journo’s face and congeals in the folds of his Armani tie.

You were so close to redeeming yourself, Metro. Now I hate you hate you hate you.

Print news, fine. Even if that means factually reporting on nonsense, fine. But taking science and jokingly inserting God? I will end you. With sticks.

[Item] or [practice] nullifies or negates the effects, presence, activity or consequences of [entity], [energy], or [phenomenon]. How can you tell? Because absolutely nothing is happening, and so the [item] or [practice] is a legitimate success. This stone keeps away bears. You can tell because you don’t see any bears around here . . . yes, this stone IS for sale. How expensive? Completely.

 This kind of non-logic is still happening today, and not only is it still happening but it’s actively endorsed by government bodies. Welcome to Austria, where a hitherto fatality-laden length of motorway near Salzburg has been fixed. By magic.

Druid Ilmar Tessman has blamed the high accident rate on a local mobile phone mast, which spreads “negative radiation over 120-200 miles.”

The accident rate has been reduced to zero in two years by the use of standing stones and magnets, apparently. Responding to scientific skeptics who say “Whatever can’t be measured does not exist” (Dr Georg Walach, Leoben University), Tessman says “If you ask me to give you a scientific explanation, I can’t. I just know it works, and even critics can’t argue with our success rate.”

Guess what? They can. I find it bogglingly, numbingly depressing that such nonsense is tolerated, let alone invested in as a valid solution. Instead of subjecting such findings to further research – and think about it, if you genuinely were sure that cheap edifices of stone, plastic and magnets could prevent car accidents surely you’d research the hell out of it, given that it represents a new stage of physics – this coincidental nonsense is simply allowed to continue. Drivers on these dangerous roads, whose risk factor has not been reduced in the slightest by these druidical interventions, will drive thinking they’re safe. I’ll tell you for free what reduced the rate of accidents – coincidence. People happened not to die for two years running, which is hardly surprising on a well known accident black spot. The more notorious the area becomes, the more careful drivers will be on it. Makes sense, I feel. But now? Drivers will think that elemental magic protects them from harm, and will quite possibly drive more dangerously as a result.

Grow up, world. If Tessman has truly stumbled on a new arena of scientific endeavour, don’t you think he should write a few papers on the subject?

You can find on the internet, today, people who genuinely think they have psychic or telekinetic powers. Imagine the new depths of Tessman’s delusion now that he’s been told he can fix road traffic fatalities. It’s cruel, when you think about it.

My experience thus far is that a woman invested in astrology – for example – is perfectly capable of using it to inform decisions concerning whether or not she wants to continue speaking to me based on my birthdate. So a tactful modicum of outright lies and grit-toothed hypocricy is required for me to continue in any sort of relationship. Admittedly my last girlfriend went from being Catholic to atheist within a year, although that was probably because I knew I didn’t have to lie in order for her to go out with me.

If a man mentions astrology or another irrational belief, I’m again likely to refrain if this seems to be the course of action most likely to benefit myself. So, the menial lackey I worked with at Vodafone who mentioned God got a whole faceful of rebuttal; the music producer who mentioned astrology got merely a quietly tactful smile. I am not especially altruistic, and my failure to offer intellectual refutation is entirely selfish in nature. Of course, there are or have been people with whom I was happy to argue without fear of losing their respect/ladygap, but generally I play safe.

So my motivation is what best serves me, almost entirely. If I decide not to tangle with someone’s beliefs you can be assured that it’s not out of any kind of respect or desire to leave them in peace.

However, very recently one of my work colleagues mentioned how his tattoo reminded him of his Grandfather and how he’ll “see him again.” I opened my mouth, and then shut it again. The cynical among you might read a selfish urge into this, of course, because trying to convince someone that they’ll never see a dead relative again is a thankless and often messy task. However, what was foremost in my mind was the knowledge that I had to leave this one alone, however much I might want to hack the belief to pieces. Because I knew he cared and he needed his horribly misguided delusion. Could it be that I tasted altruism? A desire to leave someone alone with their comfort? Unthinkable!

Still, I was tempted.

The most common complaint about the original program was that it took too long to run. Even sped up to run at around a generation a second it could still take a number of minutes to get anything approaching a definitive result. As such when I started writing this new program I put considerable thought into this issue and, well how can I put this, decided to ignore it completely. This new program is, I am afraid to say, a good bit slower than the last one. In fact it can at times take several hours to run, which believe me makes bug testing it a real pain. On top of that both selection and reproduction work differently in this program and as such there is no simulated predation or mating in this one. Yes people that’s right. I have written a sequel that is vastly longer than the original and which contains no sex or violence. Clearly I must be mad!

Well yes, yes I am, completely bonkers in fact but that has nothing to do with why I choose to do it this way. Though all the comments and suggestions from people who understand and accept evolutionary theory were helpful it was the comments I got from creationists, not on this blog but elsewhere, that were more so. In fact one of the Leagues moderators Squawk summed it up perfectly when he joked that the program only demonstrated micro evolution. This is the same response I got from a creationist when, during a discussion about natural selection, I, probably mistakenly, got him to check out my program to illustrate the point I was making. He immediately came back with that old creationist canard of “Ah but they are still bugs, this is only micro evolution, which I accept,” he then added the words that would form the basis of this new program, “creatures can adapt to their environment but evolution can’t add new information to their DNA and so macro evolution can’t happen.“

Now we all know that is completely poppycock. Evolution can, and does, increase the amount of information stored in the genome. The process is so simple it amazes me that we even have to have this argument. Some mutations can duplicate genes or nucleotides, which means that the creature then has two copies of the same gene. One copy carries on doing what ever it is it does while the other copy is free to mutate again, in one way or another, leading to the development of new genes and new information that was not found in the genome of the parent creature. It really is that simple and we know this to be the case, we are not just guessing here. Why creationists continue to deny this incredibly easy to understand fact is beyond me.

Anyway I am really starting to ramble here. Basically this new program, that I call SHAPES, sets out to demonstrate how the dual processes of mutation and natural selection can, and do, increase the amount of information stored in the genome. In order to make it as authentic as possible the selection pressure in this one is a lot more fluid and involves a higher contingent of luck than in the original program and it is this that makes it take a lot longer to run. That said I also feel that this program is more realistic as a result and better demonstrates the principles at work than the previous one. It also makes a nice screen saver that you can leave running if you are not really using your computer and just come back later to see the results.

Ok, so check out the About page in the program for more information on what it is doing and if you have any questions on how it works, what my pseudo-DNA does or what exactly is going on then feel free to ask and I will be happy to shed some more light on the issue. You’d never guess that I enjoy talking about this stuff would you. So without further ado I give you:

SHAPES

UPDATE – I just found this cartoon that seems strangely appropriate so I thought I would share it with you:

Panspermia describes the possibility that life on Earth was seeded, catalysed or in some way influenced by material entering its ecosystem from space. And what with various organic compounds being discovered in the chilly depths of space, far beyond the reach of human hands, it’s a hypothesis that is, at the very least, plausible.

However it’s not particularly the scientific aspect of panspermia I was thinking about. Did you miss my blogtv show last night? Of course you did. You were outside, discussing politics with impossibly handsome people whilst eating fine wines dipped in caviar. Or maybe you were making frantic love as the police stormed the house, or having a quiet drink, or just generally not sitting in front of your computer for 3 hours watching me chat with AndromedasWake, cavorting for the amusement of Internet and its blind, insatiable eye. Anyway, that was where I thought of the following nugget of pseudophilosophical claptrap.

At what point can the introduction of material from space be called panspermia? The earth was roundly trounced with debris for, oh, ages once it had coalesced. It would seem likely that some of the elements introduced or events created by such a bombardment might affect, directly or indirectly, the process of abiogenesis; it could even be argued that Earth itself is a product of panspermia since it’s made up of a lot of different spacebound bits, and continued accreting long into its life.

To me, panspermia suggests a scale. On the one end, we have a rock with some stuff on it that falls to earth and is, eventually, abiogenesised. Or however you’d phrase it. On the other end of the scale you have a fully-formed sentient creature that crash lands and then does something inarguably direct, like throw a few hundred seeds around the place.

So at what point does matter from space affecting the process of abiogenesis take on the loftier mantle of panspermia? What if three of the four bases of DNA were sitting about (I’m aware this is a gross oversimplification) and the fourth one arrived on a comet? What if it was a few simple amino acids and sugars that fell to earth? Where is the cutoff in this grey area?

Clearly, I’m not contesting the workability of the panspermia hypothesis at all, I just like thinking about stuff like this. Perhaps you do too. And panspermia isn’t really an explanation for the origins of life in as direct a way as abiogenesis, just an additional variable that needs to be taken into consideration. After all, if an alien had landed on earth and created us from protein bars and, well, sperm in a pan . . . that would explain where WE came from, but it wouldn’t explain the processes behind the evolution of the alien and its penchant for soiling newborn worlds. And if comet dust and attending organic molecules were instrumental in abiogenesis, it means we’re even less likely to be alone then we were before. It’s highly likely that, given the vast size of the universe, life is existing right now, beginning right now, dying right now. It’s an awe-inspiring thought, and maybe it will encourage you to visit my BlogTV show next time I advertise YOU VULTURES

Now of course your immediate reaction is to lie through your teeth. You love it, it is just what you were looking for, you have always wanted one. Anything but tell your loved one that, not only have they got you something that you don’t like, they have been taken in by a steaming pile of horse hockey. You can only hope it didn’t cost them too much money.

But of course the problem doesn’t end there. Once you have convinced them that you do actually like your vouchers of a free Reiki session what do you do then? Do you just throw it out or try and pass it off to someone else? But what happens when your relative turns up and asks how you are getting on with it? Maybe they have got you something that they expect you to display in some way, what then? Do you hang the unicorn power mural on the wall to show your relative that your do in fact like it? Or do you make up some excuse as to why you can’t do so?

Or are you all just completely honest and just tell them the truth from the start? I’d be interested in your thoughts, not that I got a present like this, no sir.

Secondly I have to acknowledge that there is a very good chance, judging from the reactions of people I know, that no one else is going to find this as remotely cool, interesting or hypnotic as I do. I completely expect that many of the comments on this one will be along the lines of “erm ok then” or the ever popular “WTF!”

So a while back, inspired by similar things from the likes of CDK007 and Thunderf00t, I decided to try and write a little program that would visually demonstrate the principles of evolution by natural selection. I know, my life really is that exciting. I decided to create a little population of computerised bugs and by simply applying selection pressure to them show how they could evolve over the generations to be better suited to their environment. The main difference, between my program and those of the afore mentioned YouTubers, is that I wanted to make my version interactive so that people could play around with it to their hearts content. With that in mind I made a whole host of changes to the original version of the program I had written before so that it is now possible to play around with a number of different selection pressures and change the environment in which the bugs live at will. Finally I made the decision to share it with the rabid horde here at the League of Reason. So with no further ado, and with some trepidation, I give you:

Bug Evolver 2.0

For more details of exactly what is going on in this program check below the fold.

Ok so the Bug Evolver program works by utilizing basic evolutionary principles. None of the outcomes are hard coded and you will get a different specific, though similar general, result every time the program runs. I’ll say that bit again in case there are any creationists reading this. The outcomes in this program are not coded into it. The program simply applies the principles of mutation and selection to reach a result that appear, and I can’t resist putting it this way, designed.

The program starts by generating 40 random bugs. All the bugs are given a randomly generated colour, randomly sized body parts and a random sex (see pictures 1 and 2). Though the number of size combinations is more limited the colour values are based on the standard RGB colour model, which means that there are 16,777,216 possible colours available to the bugs. The environment is also assigned a completely random RGB colour.

Now comes the selection bit. The program identifies the five bugs the least match the background colour, or in other words are the least fit to survive in that environment, and kills them off (picture 4). It also identifies the bug the is best suited to the environment (picture 3) though this has no really effect on how the program works and is just a little something I wanted to put in there.

Once the five bugs that are least suited to the environment are removed the program then kills off a further five bugs completely at random (picture 5). From the remaining 30 bugs a random male and a random female bug is selected and the values that make them up, their genes if you will, are mixed to produce a new bug (picture 6). At this point five genes, four related to size and one related to colour, are picked at random from the 14 genes that makes up the bug and are assigned a random value mutaion, either increasing or decreasing their current value by a small amount. This is repeated ten times until the bug population is brought back up to the full 40 again, at which point the process repeats itself.

And that is pretty much all there is to the program. By simply selecting and removing the worst bugs and randomly mating the remaining bugs the overall bug population evolves over the generations to better fit the environment. Now yes I know the creationists will point out that this is only “Microevolution” and not “Macroevolution” but the exact same principles apply no matter what level you are talking about. Evolution is real, get over it.

Now there are a couple of other options that you can turn on and which change the way the program works slightly. The most dramatic is the sexual selection option. What this does is change the way in which the parent bugs are selected to produce the next generation. The female bug is still selected completely at random but instead of just selecting one male bug the program now picks two. These two bugs then compete for the right to mate with the female. The program uses a very simple equation to work out which of the two bugs is the biggest and strongest and that one gets to mate. Also when sexual selection is switched on certain genes are transferred to the offspring from the male bug for male children and from the female bug for female children. This allows the program to simulate the effects of sexual dimorphism.

There is an option that allows you to select by size as well as colour and results in bugs getting smaller. This, when combined with the sexual selection, can result in very large male bugs and small female bugs. It also can result in the entire male population being killed off and is, if you will excuse the pun, one of the unwanted bugs in the program. Lastly there is the option to apply frame shift mutations. The frame shift mutations, currently, only apply to the colour of the bug and allow for rare instances of dramatic change to the colour of the bug. Rather than just changing the value of a single gene slightly these frame shift mutations shift the various values of the colour genes one way or the other. For example the red gene gets the value of the blue gene, the green gene gets the value of the red gene and the blue gene the value of the green gene. All the values are shifted either to the right or the left, again completely at random. This can add much needed variation to a population where the gene pool has become limited.

Anyway go have a play with the program and let me know what you think. Also if you are interested here are some other videos that demonstrate these principles in action and explain them a lot better than I just did:

Why Intelligent Design is Wrong part 2

Evolution for ID-iots

Evolution for ID-iots (version 2.0)

You’re not protected by law, as many people seem to think – but police do tend to steer clear, so as long as you don’t try to wash the colour off a black man or anything similarly importunate you’re probably ok.

I visited briefly a few weeks ago, and noticed that most speakers ignored dissent. Hardly surprising, but there was something distressing about watching a guy on a stepladder spouting nonsense whilst onlookers literally tugged at his sleeves in an attempt to elicit acknowledgement.

I told a friend about this, and he told his friend, and because his friend is all about freedom of speech we decided to redress the balance somewhat. The practical upshot is that I ended up at Speaker’s Corner last Sunday, with a sign, querulously demanding enquiry and questioning on the principle that no-one else would invite such a thing. And bits of it got filmed. And we’re going to edit it into a proper thing.

It was a slightly stressful and entirely awesome experience. I got many dozens of people crowded round, maybe up to a 100 or more, and non-stop questioning for maybe 3 hours. All the old chestnuts came up, along with some new ones that forced me to answer more carefully – it’s certainly not as if I instantly refuted everything, although that was the trend. Sadly, without a formalised debate system, I got overwhelmed from time to time – maybe half a dozen believers all firing questions and not allowing me to respond. But it was all rigorous stuff, and the kind of thing that’s useful to submit yourself to. I’ve debated many people online and a couple in person, but never thrown open my intellectual legs in such a manner before.

The best conversations came from people who partially agreed (My sign read “I’m atheist. There’s no proof for God. And I don’t dodge questions. Go on, ask”). Fundamentalists weren’t interested in arguments, so I had a lady saying she took the bible literally despite the contradictions. A few good eggs took my side entirely, which is fun but somewhat unsatisfying. But a lot of people saw my point but also couldn’t see how the complexity of life existed without God, for example, and those discussions were the best.

Even better, literally seconds after I’d set up a group of people arrived bearing a sign saying “Ask an atheist”. Good people. They had cakes. I didn’t have any, but cake was there, and that’s all that matters.

And the most common question . . . ”Can you prove God doesn’t exist?” You can only imagine the fun I had with that.

If all goes well, I’ll have a video made of the day pretty soon. I wasn’t confident about my performance initially, but from the outside I apparently handled myself well. Can’t wait to see how it comes out.

Of course you have! You chose to visit the League today. And for this, I salute you. Except that, by visiting the League today . . . maybe you’ve killed us all. You bastard.

When you actually think about the choices, decisions and actions you’ve taken that led to your current life, many of them will probably seem unbelievably haphazard. I got to know one of my closest friends because, on my first evening at uni, I happened to go to the student bar and hang around. Crippling isolation compelled me to strike up hesitant conversation with a couple of people. I nearly didn’t go to the bar and there were dozens of other people I might have talked to instead. The last 5 or so years of my life could have been entirely different if I’d taken a second more or less to think about what I was going to do that evening.

Likewise, I got to know my other closest friend through a series of more or less random happenstances, but again things would have been very different had I not been looking to stay around for another year and he hadn’t been looking for a housemate (and I hadn’t happened to see his advert for a vacant room.) For a start, I very likely wouldn’t be here writing this.

The relationships you hold with your closest friends and loved ones are probably all based on tenuous interconnecting circumstance. Go out, or stay in? Go here or there? And maybe you meet someone pretty randomly and it becomes something special. But all the events, the choices that led to you being where you are at that moment discovering that you both love Bon Jovi, become so fractured and multiplying as you go back in time . . . it’s odd to think about.

Another example. I’ve been with my girlfriend for about a year. We met because I went into a salon where she worked. I courted her, won her and then BROKE DOWN HER FAITH. If another salon had been cheaper, I’d have gone there. Would I have met someone else? If I hadn’t been fired from my previous job, I’d never have met my girlfriend at all. And me even being in London in the first place directly results from a decision\action I took some years ago (I won’t give details) that, had I taken it 30 seconds later, would have affected nothing. I’d have never known, of course. I might still have come here, but it would have been very different.

The thing that gets me is that, if you can so easily form a complex and meaningful relationship with someone through a chance meeting informed by countless decisions (by both parties involved, who have in themselves been affected by countless decisions of countless other people) then how many relationships are we missing? If I decided to strike up more conversations with a customer, who would they turn out to be? Is that girl there, the one who sort of smiled at me as I got off the tube, is she the One? Is she another One? How many people are there walking around that have the potential to deeply change my life that I never met thanks to some tiny choice that I probably wasn’t consciously aware of?

It’s enough to drive a man insane. Maybe my decision to write this blog will cause something to happen. Maybe Patrick Stewart will read it, be impressed, and adopt me as his son and protege.

Anyone who’s seen “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” will know that it’s not a great film – but it’s one of the only films I’ve seen that actually spends time trying to grapple with the headwrenching concept of cause and effect. A lengthy sequence details all the countless tiny interconnected things that, had just one been different, would have resulted in a character not getting hit by a car. When your future can be decided by something a complete stranger does or doesn’t do, on a whim in the space of a second, that can affect many other people and events sequentially and exponentially, doesn’t life seem a bit shaky?

Since we have the glory of retrospect, it’s tempting to look at the consequences of all the things we do and think how easily different everything could have been – and to extrapolate from that all the potential pathways we can lead ourselves down. Such thinking can drive you mad, of course, because while we may have the power to make our own choices it is ONLY in retrospect that we can see the full effect of them. I could engage every one of my customers in detailed conversation today, but it was a more or less desultory comment to a customer recently that revealed him as a fairly successful award-winning musician. Do we really have any choice if we only know what we did after the event? Sure, I could do a great many things today, and all of them are possible – but it only becomes real when I DO them. All the previous branching chances collapse as soon as you do anything at all.

And it’s thinking like this that tends to lead to speculations on parallel universes, where everything gets played out, that every choice or non-choice sends the universe spinning down some different route. I personally reject such thinking, unsupported as it is by anything other than wishful thinking. My adopted philosopy is Didactylos’ “Things just happen. What the hell.” I recommend this stance to everyone.

The glories of space.

You’ll presumably forgive my idealistic ramblings, but the moon was out when I was walking to work this morning and something occurred to me that hadn’t before. As I’ve said in a previous blog, we don’t really look at the moon and sun as anything other than constants in the sky, purely because they’re as ubiquitous as the oceans or the clouds. If we want to look at the wonders of space, we’re trained into thinking that we must seek out photos and videos  - that this is the only way we can see into the universe.

There’s something utterly haunting about a moon in orbit round a distant planet. I did my best to collect the finest space photography I could find in the video, but of course we don’t need to go anywhere near that far.

The half-shadowed moon, in the early morning light in a pale blue sky, looked every bit as beautiful and tantalising as Titan behind Saturn’s rings, or Io transiting Jupiter. It’s up there now. A whole world. Get you outside.

His posts range from misrepresenting concepts of evolution to discussing the “missing link” and dredging up the critically flawed, and really very silly Grand Canyon argument.

Oh, and don’t expect to be able to correct him. This is, after all, a creationist blog. We all know that free speech, open criticism and scientific citations are kryptonite to the Hovind clan, and commenters are widely known to be the minions of Satan himself.

The Overlord, PZ, has already blogged about this, so for my contribution, I thought I’d give you guys a little motivator to throw around the tubes. It wasn’t hard to find inspiration, because even when he was attempting to honestly represent the scientific method with a picture of “how it’s supposed to work”, Eric’s rotting brain said no.

“In 100 words or less, what was it that convinced you that evolution is a scientific fact?”

I’ve carefully cut down my response to exactly 100 words for you Ray.

Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence. Evidence.