__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
Being that climate change is one of my favorite topics, and you can't talk climate change without talking ice age cycles, a major mindfuck has been removed from my catalogue of mindfucks.
I have puzzled over Milankovitch cycles, comparing charts of historical data and astronomical movements, and always felt really frustrated, cuz it's like, crap!, this almost works, but why is it sort of off? Seemed like temperature should have been more of a direct function of insolation, but there were significant divergences from the results one would expect. Makes sense conceptually, but doesn't quite mesh the theory with the historical record. Guess what? Guess! They figgered it out! YAY!!!!!!
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Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
Ice cycles are not very practical in a warm climate. The wheels tend to melt. Just saying.
__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
This week the group announced the $2 million Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE, which aims to develop cheap and accurate ocean pH sensors that will allow scientists to track acidification in real time. “Acidification is a paramount threat to ocean health, and it’s one that often been ignored,” says Paul Bunje, the senior director of oceans, XPRIZE. “This is a challenge on a global scale, and it fits exactly what a prize should do.”
That's right, nature has taken your silly little foundation of modern industrialization and said, "meh, it's good for teaching the kiddies but this just won't due for real adult jumping!"
Creationists love to insist that "order" cannot arise spontaneously, and so this is "proof" that evolution does not and cannot occur. This is, of course, ridiculous, because self-organizing systems are actually quite common.
Here's a really neat example. Because the metronomes are placed on a movable surface, they can exchange energy, and this ultimately causes all of them to synchronize themselves. It's really fun to watch. I kept waiting for that one near the lower right to finally get with the program.
Yeah, but, you see, what your SCIENCE (more like LIEnce, amirite) doesn't allow you to admit is that GOD is the First and Prime Mover, aka The One Who Started the Metrognomes Moving in the first place! QED, CHEKCMATE.
Creationists love to insist that "order" cannot arise spontaneously, and so this is "proof" that evolution does not and cannot occur. This is, of course, ridiculous, because self-organizing systems are actually quite common.
Here's a really neat example. Because the metronomes are placed on a movable surface, they can exchange energy, and this ultimately causes all of them to synchronize themselves. It's really fun to watch. I kept waiting for that one near the lower right to finally get with the program.
I liked the metronomes video, But I don't think that evolution ever claimed that complex order ever came to be spontaneously, but random combinations could allow simple order to arise and then to become more complex over time. I used to watch Origins on Cornerstone TV but now I can watch it on YouTube. Their favorite tactic was to present some complex structure of animal or plant and then just ask "How could this arise by chance?" without giving any real refutation. The demonstrations were sometimes quite educational but the conclusions were quite comical.
__________________ The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. Wayne Dyer
Creationists often claim that "order" can never arise spontaneously, that it always requires some sort of "intelligent direction" -- and that undirected processes can never lead to increased complexity.
This, they like to argue, "proves" that evolution cannot occur. They often use this reasoning to claim that biological evolution would necessarily violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Isaac Asimov used to refer to this argument as the "Kindergartener's Argument Against Evolution." Because only someone with a kindergartener's understanding of the 2nd law could possibly take it seriously. After all, if we were to take the Creationists seriously, there would be no snowflakes, acorns could not grow into oaks, etc., etc.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.
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Unitarity says the quantum mechanical probabilities of all possible outcomes of a particle interaction must sum to one. To prove it, one would have to observe the same interaction over and over and count the frequencies of the different outcomes. Doing this to perfect accuracy would require an infinite number of observations using an infinitely large measuring apparatus, but the latter would again cause gravitational collapse into a black hole. In finite regions of the universe, unitarity can therefore only be approximately known.
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Physicists must also prove that the new geometric formulation applies to the exact particles that are known to exist in the universe, rather than to the idealized quantum field theory they used to develop it, called maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory.
Does anyone know how to do that? I don't know much about maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, I'm afraid.