“Well, once again, my friend, we find that science is a two-headed beast. One head is nice, it gives us aspirin and other modern conveniences. But the other head of science is bad. Oh, beware the other head of science, Arthur. It bites.” – The Tick
It sucks being the youngest clone – all your genes are hand-me-downs.
One of the things that I am really fascinated about is the limit of human knowledge.
Imagine, only a few decades ago:
- We had no proof that there were planets around distant stars,
- We had no idea that Neanderthal DNA was a part of modern humans, and
- We thought Jimmy Kimmel was funny.
As time goes on, human knowledge keeps increasing. We learn a lot more, well, stuff. That’s not to say that we’re any the wiser.
A typical adult male on a homestead in 1880 could understand nearly any device on his farm. Beyond that, he could fix many of them. My Great-Grandpa McWilder was an example of just that. He had a shop that smelled of oil, wood, and leather. The tools were, by today’s standard, ancient.
Grandpa McWilder’s power drill was cordless – that meant it was a drill bit in a chuck that was hand-cranked. The power to run it entirely off of McWilder power. The faster Grandpa cranked the handle and the harder he pushed the drill bit into the wood, the faster it would drill.
What’s my favorite drill dance? DeWalts®.
There was a certain intimacy with the wood that kind of drill gives, that’s lacking with a power drill. Of course I noticed that when I was drilling into the trim around the door, and the floor, and the workbench.
When I had complained that I didn’t have a suitcase to visit Grandpa (as a five-year-old would), he took an old suitcase that he had in the closet and gave it to me. “This doesn’t have a handle,” I complained. Within twenty minutes, Great-Grandpa had selected an old leather belt and braided it into a handle that still graces that suitcase today.
Life was simpler then.
Now, not one person in a thousand could explain how an old tube television works. The Internet we use today? Very few people understand even the basics of how it works.
And yet, we’re bombarded on all sides with information about things we should passionately care about, even though we don’t understand them even a little bit. Net Neutrality? Sure, a blog written by someone from Netflix® or Comcast™ tells you, “Hey, care about this.”
In reality? Network Neutrality is a fight between billion-dollar companies about who gets the spoils of our Internet and streaming fees. If that were our only knowledge problem, well, that’s something we could easily conquer, I mean, if we cared.
But it’s not the only thing we don’t understand.
The very fundamental parts of the Universe we live in are still quite a puzzle.
Step off the Trump Train, and onto the No-Fly List.
General Relativity is one of the most successful theories in the history of science. When Relativity predicts something, often our observations prove that Relativity is correct to as close as we can measure. Without Relativity, we couldn’t explain why Mercury orbits like it does. GPS would be impossible without making relativistic corrections. And, good heavens, how would I ever convert matter into energy in my kitchen?
Quantum Mechanics (QM) is similarly successful. Every time we make a measurement based on this theory, it’s also as close to theory as our instruments can measure. Lasers and transistors depend on Quantum Mechanics – they are well explained by that theory.
But both theories can’t be correct. And we have no idea why. Scale Relativity down to the QM world? Nothing makes sense. Scale QM to the Relativity world?
It doesn’t work, either. So, our two best theories in physics don’t really mesh.
Women are like an open book, but it’s about Quantum Mechanics and it’s written in Chinese.
There’s a gulf there in human knowledge. Sure, you don’t have to know how beams and columns work in order to build a house – otherwise we would have lived in caves until 1700 or so. But we just have no idea how two theories that interact to form the cutting edge of technology could ever be compatible.
So, there’s that. Okay, physics is messy. Surely biology is better, I mean, we can dissect pandas and giant turtles to see how they tick.
Sadly, biology is a lot messier, and that’s even before you carve the panda into steaks. Richard Nixon declared a “War on Cancer” back in the 1970’s, and cancer appears to be just as successful as the Viet Cong. It’s winning. Sure, we’re better at fighting it, but I’ve read about a dozen “silver bullet” cures for cancer over the last decade.
Biology is much worse than physics, because we can’t do proper experiments. I’ve made the point in conversations with friends that if we conducted controlled experiments on people with cancer and let the researchers have immunity from prosecution (on pesky Nuremberg-level crimes) for five years to a decade? We’d have real silver bullet cures for cancer.
But even outside of my war-crimes-level thought experiment, biology is a basket case compared to physics. Biology can’t explain some really, really basic things, like why I should care what a woman thinks.
Or, like DNA.
DNA is the most miraculous (word choice consciously made) molecule ever. DNA information density is far beyond anything humans have created. 0.141 ounces of DNA (four of some communist unit called a “gram”) could hold all of the information all of human activity from ancient Egypt to 2011, including the useless information like what The Mrs. asked me to get at the store.
Four grams = two zettabytes of data, Marty!
I tried to mix killer whale DNA with human DNA. What did I get? Banned for life from Seaworld®.
The idea that biology professors try to support is: DNA is the result of an accident in slimy pools at the beginning of the Earth.
DNA is the greatest level of information density in the known Universe. Heck, DNA represents the greatest level of information density conceivable in our world today. It’s just a coincidence that it’s able to be read and written by squishy cells in squishy people.
An accident.
Sure. Anyone who believes that probably voted (D) all the way down the ballot in the last election. Some of those people, presumably, were even alive.
But that’s not a question scientists can approach today (either elections or the origin of DNA). A big problem with science today is that it is just a larger, more grey-haired version of Twitter®. The questions before science aren’t small:
- Don’t believe in Global Warming®? Heavens! Heretic! Cancel them! Even little Swedish girls know better.
- Think that Dark Matter is more properly spelled Dubious Matter? Is Dark Matter the physics equivalent of bloodletting and leeches?
- Why aren’t we seeing or hearing aliens? Is it because they didn’t pay their cell bill? Did they block us because we made T.?
- Why do we sleep? I mean, not me, because I blog. But why do humans have to sleep?
- How are space, time, and gravity connected? Heck, we don’t even know how dementia, the Presidency, stairs, and gravity are connected.
Biden tried to get off of stairs, but it was a multi-step program.
In the first paragraph, I noted that we’ve learned a lot of things recently that would have been incomprehensible to people 100 years ago. And I stand by that. But here’s the paradox:
Even as we’ve learned so much, science is currently broken, and hopelessly politicized. The vast sums of money and decades required to run experiments that will give us a glimmer of the next revelation of science require that the scientists who design and run the experiments are from the orthodoxy.
To be a part of orthodox science means you have to ignore inconvenient facts. There are entire fields of study that cannot be researched because people might have their feelings hurt. Actual people who claim to be scientists say that there is no difference between men and women.
In 2021, you have to be politically correct, and heaven help you if the Woke Left doesn’t like your shirt choice. Remember that poor guy who wore a silly Hawaiian shirt? You know, the guy who just helped land the Rosetta probe on a comet in frigging space in 2014? In 2021 they’d have just taken and immediately burned him at the stake, live on Facebook™.
See, there’s an answer to every difficult question.
Guilty admission: I really did email the guy and asked to buy the shirt. I figured it was at least worth a shot.
As we advance in science, it seems we learn more and more about less and less. Yet, as we’ve learned more we’ve created a world that’s increasingly alienating to the individual through a haze of increasingly impenetrable technology. Perhaps the future of the human race is a VCR clock, flash 12:00PM endlessly?
The world has also become increasingly hostile to simple variations in individual behavior that fall out of the current norms. In the case of people like Abraham Lincoln or Dr. Seuss, they can be charged and found guilty in the court of public opinion because the ideas of 100 years ago or 160 years ago don’t agree with today’s ideas.
That’s okay. I still have the suitcase that Grandpa McWilder fixed for me. The handle he made from the leather belt is still doing its duty, better than anything made today.
Bonus: Here’s the pattern on the material that the guy’s shirt was made from:
The only thing I understood was the cordless drill and was wishing recently I still had the one I used to see in the garage as a kid.
It was wonderful to watch him use it. Good times.
Yes, that hand-crank drill! But that one’s fancy, compared to the one that my old dad had in his garage. My dad’s drill had the gearing exposed. So, not only did you have to work, you were also in danger. Couldn’t have one like that today. A person of limited intelligence might catch his shirt-tail in those gears, and since he wouldn’t be smart enough to stop cranking, he’d pull his entire body in there and die a horrible death!
I remember a slightly later time when my dad bought his first electric drill. It was a Black and Decker, from back in the before times when “Black and Decker” didn’t mean “more cheap plastic crap.” As I recall, the trigger might have been Bakelite, but the rest of it was all metal. He let me use it, briefly, until the day when I put the chuck key down somewhere and then forgot where. It took a couple of days for it to turn up. This was before chuck keys came with that rubber-strap deal that let you secure it to the power cord. My dad could have solved the problem using the electrical-tape method. Instead, he solved it by limiting the use of the drill to personnel who could be relied upon to keep track of the chuck key (that is, himself). Probably just as well, because I likely wasn’t far from experimenting to see what a hole through my big toe would look like.
Good times!
I got Pa Wilder’s handmedown Black and Decker all-metal drill. Also noted it didn’t have a grounding plug . . . .
After an interesting few minutes searching the tubes of this Internet thing, I discovered that your favorite shirt print is an Alexander Henry brand fabric that was called “Fired Up”. If you wanna continue the belt-leather tradition of making what you want from what you got…
https://www.loomshowroom.com/shop/FABRIC/p/Rare-Out-of-Print-Alexander-Henry-Sold-by-the-Piece-fired-up-Pin-Up-Girl-Laser-Gun-Sexy-Woman-Galactic-Fighter-Cotton-Quilt-Fabric-RPAH13-x52499629.htm
Cheaper, er, more economical alternatives…
https://www.ebay.com/itm/YARD-Alexander-Henry-Nicole-De-Leon-Pinup-Girls-Galactica-Purple/233943311362?hash=item36781ba402:g:uCkAAOSw4IlewF0b
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=Alexander+Henry+girls&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_osacat=0&_odkw=Alexander+Henry+fabric
http://www.ahfabrics.com/collections/category/318-pinups
But back to the whole science thing. Agreed that science is politicized today by the common man / woman / whatever. But also by the scientists themselves, who ultimately need to break out and see things in a new way to further our understanding…
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.03040.pdf
https://www.chemistryviews.org/details/news/11166928/DNA_Might_Have_Evolved_Earlier_Than_Originally_Thought.html
And finally, my grandfather had one of those hand drills. My first exposure as a kid to the concept of gears. Well, along with grandma’s egg beater. When you package everything in molded plastic today, kids can’t be expected to understand the underlying technology. A real problem.
It would be dead easy, these days to get an artist to copy the design, and have it custom printed on the fabric of your choice.
https://www.contrado.com/fabrics
If it was a one-off, just for you… Write the original creator and ask permission + offer to pay a fee has worked for me.
Well, there’s so very much technology today, kids just assume everything is incomprehensible.
I suspect many of our scientists today are well educated to be well trained. They don’t need wisdom, they need to turn somersaults to impress those that provide the funding that demands they reach the goal provided by the narrative.
Yup – publish or perish was real, even back when I was in school. And those with the money, make the rules.
Look under the hood of an older car versus one made recently. New cars are so computer driven that the average person can’t fix stuff and even basic stuff like replacing headlights has been made intentionally more complex. We are at the mercy of “experts” like never before.
Very true, though I will say Pugsley managed to change The Mrs.’ oil tonight, without creating an oil slick . . .
Do they still teach calculus in college today? I can’t imagine our infantile 20 year olds grappling with anything more abstract than “this syrup is racist”. Goobermint-mandated regression to the mean implies that within a generation we’re all going to be busboys at Denny’s. Technological advance, at least in our rainbow-hued multi-culti utopia, will necessarily cease so that no one’s feelings are inadvertently hurt.
The chinese, when taking a break from infecting the world with their patented, man-made pox, manufacture literally everything our consumerist culture is hopelessly addicted to. Meanwhile, we produce nothing but snowflakes. Now that our chief export is butthurt, it won’t be long before the once-mighty USA assumes its rightful place alongside sclerotic Western Europe and forever “developing” sub-Saharan Africa on the worldwide sh!thole-o-meter.
When the images on a nerdy dork’s shirt matter more to a society than his scientific achievements, that society is circling the drain. What astonishes me is that we all see where we are headed, no one wants to go there, yet we are collectively powerless to stop our own swift descent.
Calculus yes. Any sense of gratitude to and appreciation for the men who created it? Not so much.
Very true. But their feelings don’t care about our facts.
Perhaps this coming June we will get a glimpse into how Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, String Theory and How Women Think all work incestually (Hunter BuyDem reference here…) to keep the entire Universe glued together.
Sitting on front of my seat on that one anxiously awaiting the UFO/UAP document declassification by Defense Dept and our national (somewhat) Intelligence agencies…..
Think of how embarrassed you would be if a space alien knocked on your door demanding that you “…take him to your leader.”
Kudos on properly classifying the guy on the stairs as to his real title. I do prefer other more alliterative monikers such as: Joe Demento, aka Xao BuyDem, aka Yo Bi-Dumb, aka Quid Pro Joe, aka Pedo Joe, aka Demon-nikRat Official.
John – – You have my permission to use any of these monikers as the situation demands….
Great choices, all. My personal favorite is President *.
“Dark Matter”
Woah, no need to be racist. The correct term is “Matter of Color.” Hustlers are already stepping up to represent the interests of MoC, so you might want to be careful with your language. After all, words are violence.
Some time ago I read a fascinating article warning of the dangers of giving too much value to current knowledge. It pointed out that knowledge in virtually every field would advance by a quantum leap due to some genius, then the regular scientists would catch up and slowly reach the limits of that leap. Then another genius would come along, create a paradigmatic shift in knowledge, then scientists would again struggle to catch up and slowly advance knowledge within the bounds of that shift. This holds true for almost all fields of knowledge, from physics to biology.
The author pointed out that it wasn’t a case of advancing in a straight line, that the greatest minds within the previous paradigms wouldn’t have went, “ah ha! that explains it!” if exposed to the new knowledge. Instead, every top minds of each paradigm would think the others were utterly insane. Newton would try to have Einstein locked up in an asylum, for example.
There is nothing to suggest that our current paradigms of knowledge are the end of the line. Which means that eventually a genius will figure out a new paradigm in most areas of knowledge, and then people will look back at what we believe now as rank superstition and ignorance.
You’re very correct, but if science is broken by politics, we just won’t get there.
Excellent post.
Seems Wilder forgot the big draw of a bikini science gal. Filling in his omission, I submit https://amazingstories.com/2014/12/science-fiction-bikini/
Sorry, it is science fiction, but then friction is sexier and simpler than truth.
Teaching science to a pig is a waste of time and annoys the pig. However what is really sad is a supposed science/tech expert that cannot explain something in their core field. Normally it indicates their depth of expertise is quite shallow, like Czar Fauci not being able to explain to Senator Paul why a face mask is needed after being fully vaccinated or recovering from Covid, like our experience for more than a century in other diseases.
https://nypost.com/2021/03/18/mask-face-off-rand-paul-spars-with-dr-fauci-at-senate-hearing/
In honesty, most of science can be explained to a child, since really we have barely moved past dragging a stick through the sand. We just found that pencil on paper is not washed away by the waves as quickly. People rely on computers way too much. Just my experience has found a long list of crap wrong in the output from them. Many times even after extensive review before me.
I’m also a fan of bikini fantasy, where the chicks are dressed in chainmail bikinis. I’m not sure how much protection against swords and arrows that provides, but it sure does increase the number of books sold amongst teenage boys.
Doesn’t it stop the swords and arrows from being aimed at the bikini-wearer, assuming said bikini is appropriately filled out?
How many things that were “true” when I was in kindergarten are now false? We know so very, very little.
Also, great article on bikinis.
Let me see if I understand your argument: ‘My brain’s firmware was created by the selection pressure of being chased by African big game animals, not the need to comprehend the statistical implications of random molecular interactions over a couple billion years. What my brain can emotionally comprehend is a genie in the sky. I am irrational about important subject matter. Therefore, I will make a completely emotional decision, based upon no evidence, that a genie did it. Harris 2024!’
Apparently not so much.
Go back to before where you bootstrapped yourself forward in time to the plains of Africa, and big game animals, and start with everything exploding and resulting in DNA from the get-go, then work forward until you get to “being chased by African big game animals”.
Show all work from 0 -> x.
Much like your argument, the tricky part about hitting an inside-the-park home run is that you don’t get to start halfway from third base to home plate before the pitch is even thrown. You have to get there the hard way.
Nota bene that once one is being chased by big game animals across the plains of Africa, the DNA in question is already there, long since, and doing its thing. That’s little “e” evolution, i.e. within a species. So not only no home run, but a fastball strike right over the plate, and now sitting in the catcher’s mitt.
Alternatively, one could be scientific, and simply admit that Darwin was an under-educated serial bad guesser with God issues whose Large “E” evolutionary theories, overall, are wholly unscientific philosophizing on things far beyond his most advanced grasp of even the basic sciences, massively unsupported by evidentiary data, and generally recockulous, no matter how much latitude they’re given, hence the need to re-interpret them every time the latest guess re-imagining by later-day Darwinists turns out to be “um, well…not so much”.
The human genome is 2.9GB of data. The DNA of a single cell contains so much information that if it were represented in printed words, simply listing the first letter of each base would require over 1.5 million pages of text. (That’s a bookshelf 500 feet long. The federal code of all US laws and regulations is only 59 feet long, for comparison.) If laid end-to-end, the DNA in a single human cell measures 3 1/3 feet or 1 meter. The adult human body has roughly 30,000,000,000,000 cells. So, you look at a human being, comprising more data storage capacity in his body than 12 trillion Western Digital 5TB external hard drives (that would be a mound of 5TB drives 1 mile square, and over half a mile – 2900 feet, in fact – tall, for reference), yet this data storage device is only about 190 pounds, and around 5’9″, and it walks, talks, sings, dances, eats, burps, farts, and even contains the ability to self-replicate; and you conclude it was burped out by random dice throws times forever.
One may as well postulate that if tornados hit a junkyard and trailer park an infinite number of times, it would eventually assemble a flyable 747, fully fueled, and ready for takeoff, containing the entire London Symphony Orchestra, with instruments, the Bolshoi Ballet, the cast of Riverdance, the ’72 Miami Dolphins, and the New York Yankees of 1927. Well-played.
So perhaps you can understand why anyone truly rational and logical would think it far less silly to postulate that something a wee bit more intentional was at work in that development pipeline. That’s really far less of a stretch, scientifically and philosophically, than “First there was nothing, then it exploded. And now everything.”
Most people, after moving the goalposts for the 10,000th time on that version, would simply abandon the idea that the planets move through phlogiston, or that the stars revolve in crystal spheres, or that everything spontaneously evolved from nothing, and go looking for a better, simpler, and vastly more logical explanation. Starting with a razor from William of Occam.
And when nothing disproves one’s contention, it is a religion, not a scientific theory.
Much like anthropogenic global warming.
Sorry my karma ran over your dogma.
Recently PBS showed that simple cell membranes self-assemble from soap. Simple, with none of the embedded pumping mechanisms in modern cells. But the point is that this substantial intermediate step is supplied by chemistry, without needing unrealistic dice rolling success.
There is a flavor of fallacy in which a person asks for a fossil intermediate between two fossils. Eventually an intermediate is found, but then the person moves the goalposts and demands an intermediate in the new smaller gap.
Furthermore, PBS showed the fossils of the dinosaur with feathers on arms, but which didn’t fly.
And Tuesday is greater than 10/8ths, because ice cream has no elbows.
You still have that mound of terabytes just sitting there, and the best you can do is change the subject?
While you were up, did PBS also happen to explain where the soap in that experiment came from billions of years ago?
I’m just spitballing, but last time I looked, there weren’t any supermarkets that far back, and I’m pretty sure saponification isn’t generally something that springs up randomly before you have anything to saponify.
BTW, the fossil “record” is an open joke joke. It’s only missing about as many pieces as that bridge across the Grand Canyon is. First, they imagine entire creatures with just a tooth. Next, “Why bother with the tooth?”
“Sciencism” strikes again.
did PBS also happen to explain where the soap in that experiment came from billions of years ago? […] I’m pretty sure saponification isn’t generally something that springs up randomly before you have anything to saponify.
Yes, PBS said the existence of soap and fats and saponification sprung up “randomly”, without the direct personal super-natural intervention of a creator. That’s why the result was interesting. It was a major intermediate step that could be replicated on a tabletop, and didn’t require ridiculous amounts of very specific complexity that has to all appear at once without coordination.
I agree we still don’t have any guesses about what happened prior to the big bang. But when I make a sea chart, I don’t draw sea monsters in the corners I haven’t visited yet. Those corners are blank. What super-God made your God? It’s equally invalid for you to assume ridiculous amounts of uncoordinated very specific complexity to produce your god. You can posit either an infinite regress of gods or a finite number of gods, but either way there’s no first cause. That answer isn’t internally consistent.
Cleverly, I didn’t have to “assume ridiculous amounts of uncoordinated very specific complexity to produce” an intelligent creator.
Trying to straw man that into any sort of god argument is where the slipcover comes off your atheism. I suggested no such thing, at any point, so all your flailing at something never mentioned is in vain, and all you’ve done is amaze yourself with your own shadow-boxing skills.
As you’re evidently as uninformed about biology as about evolutionary theory (let alone basic forensic logic), the problem of the former for the latter is that such exact very specific complexity already exists in nature, as it cannot if General Evolution is operable, and its mere existence makes Darwin’s simplistic suppositions look like exactly the bumbling ham-fisted belch of ignorance they are, except with a bank of 800,000,000CP spotlights pointed at them.
To make what has manifestly escaped your grasp obvious to you: you can’t evolve a biological mechanism requiring hundreds of steps in an exact order before there’s any gain of function, any more than babies are spontaneously born with pipe organs imbedded in their heads. EVER. It’s simply not possible, and suggesting otherwise is exactly the infinite time x tornadoes x trailer park and junkyard = full 747 problem I laid out earlier. You keep glossing over that as if by sticking your fingers in your ears and shutting your eyes, the logical impossibility of General Evolution magically doesn’t exist. Real life doesn’t work like that. When your theory rocket launches off a cliff, gravity always kicks in.
As any 50 Wile E. Coyote cartoon ACME schemes should have informed you.
When you try to attribute that which is known to exist, by common biologic knowledge, as something “assumed” in order to make a point, rather than an accepted fact of basic biology, you’re really not tall enough for this argument.
And when everyone possesses the gear in question, in fact must needs do so to even read this post, and the process to do so requires the possession of a biochemical process of even 50 steps, the odds of it spontaneously generating are 1 chance in 1,000,000,000,000,000. At even 1 year per generation, the time required for that combination alone to happen is hundreds of times more time than has existed since the universe exploded into existence. And that’s just one mechanism in one species.
The point of intelligent design isn’t to tell you whom you should worship, or even if, which kneejerk mischaracterization reveals the bias of the critic who argues against it.
It’s to highlight that Darwinian theories are a sack of manure, except even less useful, and that people following them are like high priests of a dime store religion coined into existence by a mental retard.
Darwin’s colossal mental malfunction is evident in about two minutes’ time and thought, by any average middle school student.
you can’t evolve a biological mechanism requiring hundreds of steps in an exact order before there’s any gain of function
Right, which is why cell membrane behavior self-assembled from soap film and non-flying dinosaurs with feathers on their arms are so interesting. Those examples a) eliminate one example of a need for hundreds of steps in an exact order, and b) demonstrate a gain of function which might reinforce the change.
You’re sweeping all the unjustified self-assembling complexity into the portion of the mechanism you’ve named “God”, which you merely assume exists.
Anonymous: Interesting that no one has shown soaps and fats spontaneously producing cell walls. Even more, our world is awash in DNA and RNA, both intact and fragmented, but no one has shown these existing complex structures creating a cell. On the contrary, it was considered a big deal 2 decades ago to show that DNA transplanted into a living cell work functions, even at a low probability.
What god created God: There was nothing but God. BTW: what created the super big-bang for your big-bang? The big-bang is believed to have been a singularity that exploded out of nothing to produce everything we have — quite the leap in imagination for that one. There’s no physics to explain that one, but it is just “believed”, although it does provide a rough framework for what we observe in the telescopes. Quite remarkable that Genesis explains it so well that leftist physicists are questioning the big-bang because it is too close.
A common great error is thinking that science explains away religion, and vice-versa. That is entirely and naively incorrect. Sticking with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the Bible is not trying to explain the universe’s existence. Genesis starts at the beginning of the story to build the document and to provide the authority for the document. Science tries to provide a generalized explanation of how something works. Science cannot prove that God does not exist. Even you wrap the magic of the self-assembling cell as identical to God’s actions. This is an especially glaring flaw in self-assembly since no one can demonstrate self-assembling happening. Hum, isn’t that a primary requirement in science; to actually show it can happen, and repeatedly, and without contamination from another source?
Relativity: Science has mathematical singularities, which are also present in engineering. In engineering, we are smart enough to figure out that the singularity is not real; just the equations lack the complexity to describe the behavior correctly. An interesting point was raised a decade ago that Dark Matter’s effects could be explained by just adding another 2 higher-order terms to Newton’s law. Since dark matter theories have built into them the impossibility of directly sensing them, the solution cannot be resolved. And there’s money in researching dark matter but not modifying Newton’s laws. Sounds similar to the global warming “science,” huh?
Dinosaurs with non-flying feathers in their arms is a mere curiosity.
Which you manifestly lack, because vision represents dinosaurs with Pratt & Whitney F135 engines on their arms, except vision being something entirely non-theoretical but instead actually extant, and about which you exhibit the most deafeningly speechless total lack of curiosity.
The silence of your utter inability to deal with the obvious, nor come to terms with the farcical basic nature of Darwin’s witless eructations, speaks volumes.
A simple mousetrap consists of precisely 9 wholly uncomplicated parts, yet despite billions and billions of years of supposed opportunity, not a single one has self-assembled, and it therefore stands as the most basic proof of the theorem that the existence of a watch necessarily requires a watchmaker.
Yet you look at a system of vision, a lock requiring hundreds of perfectly designed processes, none of which could evolve without all all the others simultaneously, and think it spontaneously self-generated, as though a Ferrari, a battleship, or a space shuttle, all of them far less complicated, could ever do any such thing.
Even with the gift of such a magnificent and expressly designed system, you are deliberately and willfully blind to the reality of what it is, and of what it bespeaks, necessarily and inarguably.
And then you try mumbo-jumbo handwaving and attempt to couch your ignorance by confusing a designer with a deity, which was neither stated here, nor necessary, as though that strawman was sufficient excuse for your multitudinous logical errors and defects of basic reasoning.
You have something which not only isn’t explained by General Evolution, but something which cannot be, and in point of fact actually runs a sword through its insipid heart, time after time after time, until the last twitch is gone, and you keep trying to tie copper kite strings to it and pray for a lightning storm, as if such voltage could ever re-animate the molecules of a horse so dead it’s been beaten to dust.
You ought to walk away.
Punching after the bell means you’re embarrassing yourself to no other purpose than displaying your own hindquarters, without the merest hope of ever changing the final verdict.
I do not know if I have mentioned this heretofore, but your mode of invective is a thing of beauty, Mr. Aesop.
Even when I disagree, I am charmed.
“About noontime, Elijah began mocking them.
“You’ll have to shout louder than that,” he scoffed, “to catch the attention of your god! Perhaps he is talking to someone, or is out sitting on the toilet, or maybe he is away on a trip, or is asleep and needs to be wakened!” – I Kings 18:27
Some talents one learns from the masters.
heh heh heh
Not so much. If you look at what humanity has created, it’s far beyond any required capacity to run from lions and tigers and hippos.
Oh my.
I like rationality. It requires admitting what we don’t know, what we might know, and what we may never know. And that the world may be larger than either of us believes.
Any wise student in college will at some point realize; ‘The more they learn, the more they find how little they know.’
I once had a course in vacuum tubes… in 1981. No really… 1981, vacuum tubes.
If facebutt and twatter are the current technological advances, then I’d prefer to simply be the ‘village sandwich maker’.*
* guess the reference.
Ahh, good Mr. Adams. He is missed.
Now you’ve thrown down the gauntlet!
What’s your shirt size?
I know what you’re getting for Christmas.
_____
As to the rest, DNA, like the biochemistry behind vision, merely underlines how ignorant of basic biology someone like Darwin had to be in order to concoct his fabulist tales of General Evolution. (Birds’ beaks becoming more specialized is not the same thing as theorizing the equivalent of houseflies becoming houses.)
The religion which has sprung up around it has concluded that if we found a Cray Supercomputer sitting in the desert, calculating away, we must logically assume that it had evolved there, because time. After 6000 years of recorded history, and diligent efforts of our most brilliant scientists and engineers, by the millions, we have thumb drives up to 256GB, which is a pale imitation of the DNA in every cell of every body.
I don’t have that much blind religious faith contrary to all reasoning ability.
But the moral implications of that don’t trouble me nearly as much as do those of the people who swallow it hook, line, and sinker.
The proof of their pudding has been in the eating, particularly in the last one and a half centuries. Including the gold, silver, and bronze for offing their own populations.
By their works you shall know them.
People sometimes ask me “is there a Machine Learning approach to solving that problem?” To which I usually reply “Not that I know of, but we can apply Intelligent Design. We’re trained in Engineering. It’s what we do.”
On a different forum I’ve reduced 2 liberals who believe in SCIENCE to gibbering, foam at the mouth idiots by arguing that evolution applies to humans just like it does with animals. Apparently 50,000+ years in very different environments should have resulted in no differences in behavior or looks other than the color of skin…
Funny how they can stop believing in 1 aspect of their religion so easily if it contradicts another aspect of their religion. I wonder if they’ve written down any interpretive guides as to what takes precedence, like how the later something appears in the Koran the more correct it is.
Does my shirt have to completely cover my ego?
No. The bolts usually only hold 10 yards of material.
But it you don’t want to look like Chris Farley in David Spade’s shirt, or vice versa, you should probably specify an actual common letter-size.
XXL. For the arms, you know.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. 😉
I actually own one of those Craftsman hand drill which I inherited from my father and I have the end cap with mine so I can store bits in it. I still use it to drill out very small holes in small delicate things that my cordless would shatter at the higher speeds.
Very nice. I remember how smooth it spun. Good memories.
There is some debate about Einstein making the quote that technology will raise a generation of idiots.
Questioning muh science is heresy in the Branch Covidian Jonestown Kool-Aid cult world.
The burning down of the world by the “lasting curses” of comrade Marx is well underway and there is nothing left to save or any way out but through.
At least we’ll all be equal living in a hand to mouth rolling shootout law of the jungle world.
How about that evolved enlightened being utopia? Yes we can, forward.
You are right – no way out but through. It will be, sadly, pretty eventful.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of QM has ruined 90 years of scientists so far. It’s bunk. Schroedinger proposed his cat as a takedown, not as support. (The fact that the average scientist is a bottle washing button counter doesn’t help.)
Relativity is ridiculously simple in concept. Special relativity is literally nothing more than the careful application of the Pythagorean theorem. (It’s the math of general relativity that is brutal. As is trying to account for everything – you simply can’t. (And while you were figuring, everything moved and changed.)
Here’s the trick to relativity – spacetime is a field of enormous energy, from which all other fields draw their energy. Thus, the total energy at any point is constant. Gravity doesn’t really attract to heavy objects so much as repel from empty space. (It takes energy to go up a gradient, but going down provides energy.)
What scientists really need to research is the nature of motion. What is velocity? Until they figure that out, everything else is rather pointless.
If you want to annoy a physicist, ask him what “spin” really is.
Very much so. Also: consider a photon’s viewpoint. What happens to time there?
Photons must experience time in some way, else how would they change polarization, phase or wavelength?
Exactly! I break my brain everytime I pretend to be a photon. I should stop that.