brainwagon

What kind of blunt force trauma made someone stupid enough to actually publish this?

Math Proves Christ’s Resurrection?

[Via Good Math, Bad Math.]

Well, “gem” is perhaps not the right term. Perhaps I should start a new category: Gutenberg Coal.

I’ve been interested in (and have from time to time posted here about) the seemingly never ending conflict between science and creationism. I found this book to be an interesting glimpse 80 years into the past, to see how people argued against evolution even before the famous Scopes trial.

The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved by William A. Williams - Project Gutenberg

It contains gems like this exchange:

The population of the world, based upon the Berlin census reports of 1922, was found to be 1,804,187,000. The human race must double itself 30.75 times to make this number. This result may be approximately ascertained by the following computations:

At the beginning of the first period of doubling there would just be two human beings; the second, 4; the third, 8; the fourth, 16; the tenth, 1024; the twentieth 1,048,576, the thirtieth, 1,073,741,824; and the thirty-first, 2,147,483,648. In other words, if we raise two to the thirtieth power, we have 1,073,741,824; or to the thirty-first power, 2,147,483,648 Therefore, it is evident even to the school boy, that, to have the present population of the globe, the net population must be doubled more than thirty times and less than thirty-one times. By logarithms, we find it to be 30.75 times. After all allowances are made for natural deaths, wars, catastrophes, and losses of all kinds, if the human race would double its numbers 30.75 times, we would have the present population of the globe.

Now, according to the chronology of Hales, based on the Septuagint text, 5077 years have elapsed since the flood, and 5177 years since the ancestors of mankind numbered only two, Noah and his wife. By dividing 5177 by 30.75, we find it requires an average of 168.3 years for the human race to double its numbers, in order to make the present population. This is a reasonable average length of time.

Can you spot the problem? Let’s imagine that he’s right. 5077 years ago, there was only Noah and his wife. It takes them 168.3 years to produce two children, and double there numbers. If we allow for 3000 years to pass, bringing us roughly up to 2000 years ago, around the time of Christ, the world population would have almost 18 doublings, bringing the total world population to about 260,000. Worldwide.

Inappropriate extrapolation is one of the silly errors that creationists use to argue using mathematics. But as they say, creationists use mathematics like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, rather than illumination.

Read the entire thing, it’s really quite astounding.

The unholy lust of scientists / It may be time to curtail public financing of scientific research

I’ll only add that it might be time to curtail public financing of University philosophy departments.

Apple’s current TV ads apparently are not all that popular with Intel’s other customers. The voiceover apparently claims that Intel’s processors have been “trapped inside PCs — dull, little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks.”

If suppose if you are a PC maker, that has to sting a little bit. But let’s be fair, most of what Intel puts out is slapped in a cheap beige box and spends most of its life trying to run while carrying the bloat of Windows XP on its back. The criticism isn’t entirely unfair.

When freed from the shackles of trying to load Microsoft products and the history of a zillion bad decisions, Intel’s chips (and, frankly, AMD’s as well) are free to do what they really are designed to. From the quoted article:

…if Intel’s work with Apple inspires some PC makers to think more creatively, Intel wouldn’t complain.

Indeed. If you are a manufacturer who used Intel chips, I’d say it’s not a time to get mad: it’s time to get creative. Apple certainly will be.

Intel: Our other customers aren’t boring | News.blog | CNET News.com

[tags]Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Advertising[/tags]

I think Pat Robertson deserves a Dumbass Lifetime Achievement Award.

Robertson Links Sharon Stroke, God’s Wrath

I can’t imagine any God worth worshipping has Robertson as a spokesman.

Last night I watched the final episode of Survivor Guatamala (yeah, I know, reality television is the opiate of the masses, so sue me) and I spotted something that made me stop the TiVo, rewind, and note something to my wife.

The particular video shot is one of their classic “night vision” pictures of one of the Mayan pyramids, obviously meant to be a timelapse, with the Milky Way whizzing around and a lovely full moon. But there is one big problem:

The full moon and the stars weren’t moving in the same direction!.

The moon will visibly move against the background of stars since the moon take about an hour longer to go around the earth each day than the stars do, but the difference is pretty small (about 45 in rate) so in a shot like this, the moon will mostly look like it tracks the background stars. This shot was assembled from at least two different and possibly three different video layers.

For shame!

The people of Dover, Pennsylvania recently had an election for their local schoolboard. In a fairly close election, every member of the school board that supported the addition of intelligent design to their school curriculum was voted out, all eight of them. What did Pat Robertson have to say about the free exercise of people’s rights to hold elections?

I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.”

I… just… am speechless.

Microsoft announced “Windows Live” yesterday. What is it? Well, that seems to be the question of the hour. Apparently lots of Robert Scoble’s readers are asking the very same question. I’m not sure how live.com differs from the other beta portal project that Microsoft was touting. To me, they both seem like crude Ajax-ware which duplicate functionality done better elsewhere.

What it seems to really be about is Microsoft’s rush to convert their business model for web services into a Google one: support yourself by advertising. I’ll probably make that the subject of a future podcast rant (I’m not thrilled of the world where I need to view ads everytime I wish to use my computer. I pay lots of money to buy DVDs and Tivos just because the 20 minutes an hour that broadcast television steals from me annoys me… but I digresss).

But what’s really fascinating about the posting that I linked are all the comments. Microsoft, are you listening? You are doing a terrible job of explaining yourself. You are holding press conferences announcing products which aren’t ready, and then telling people that “don’t get it” that they should be patient. “The really cool stuff is coming.” I can’t think of a company that does product announcements worse than Microsoft.

Look at these comments:

• It does seem typical though “We are Microsoft, we are all smart, we know better than you do. If you can’t see why you should buy our stuff, you’re just stupid.”
• You enbarrased yourself with this *launch* (without actually launching anything)
• What’s the difference between this and start.com?
• It’s … err… a new PLATFORM! that’s it!!! It’s the new Web DNA!
• I thought this Joe Wilcox post would explain what Live was, but it looks like he’s wondering what the rest of us are: what the hell is Live?

I think there are some positive signs in this announcement. It seems to be saying that they will support multiple platforms, including Firefox. But think about it: for other companies, this decision was made a long time ago. The marketplace made that decision. Firefox is winning marketshare, and if you want to reach the maximum number of users, even ones that run Microsoft Windows products, you need to support Firefox. It’s just a given for other companies. They don’t spend a lot of time considering not doing it, because they don’t want to piss off the significant minority of people who’ve moved from IE to Firefox.

Microsoft, in the meantime, is left with what they perceive to be as a dilemma. At the risk of presenting an overly dramatic metaphor, it’s like those idiots who are trying to keep young women from being immunized against the the virus that causes cervical cancer. They think “oh, gee, without the threat of cancer, young women will go out and have sex.” Of course, women will die as result of their indignation, but you have to crack a few eggs…

Microsoft in the meantime has been slow to deploy technologies which are browser agnostic because of the fear that without browser lock-in, nobody will buy their stuff. But what they are trying to do is to get their customers to serve them. They want their customers to say, “we need this product, and I’m running Microsoft stuff, so you should use Microsoft stuff too, for that extra baked in flavor!” That would work if Microsoft was the only game in town, but other companies (Google, Yahoo!…) are delivering better stuff for the customer, on platforms which are at least as attractive for the consumer. Microsoft is slowly awakening to the notion that lock-in is a poor strategy, and has been for a while. That they are only figuring this out in 2006 is somewhat surprising, given that pretty much everyone else has already figured it out.

Addendum: Oh dear lord. Twice in one day. More “launches” that actually don’t launch anything..

Charles Petzold has some interesting thoughts in his essay Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?, but for me, it’s really this which illustrates why Microsoft is sapping all the allure out of programming:

Today we are ready for the official release of the .NET Framework 2.0. Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System, we have over 5,000 public classes that include over 45,000 public methods and 15,000 public properties, not counting those methods and properties that are inherited and not overridden. A book that simply listed the names, return values, and arguments of these methods and properties, one per line, would be about a thousand pages long.

If you wrote each of those 60,000 properties and methods on a 3-by-5 index card with a little description of what it did, you%u2019d have a stack that totaled 40 feet.7 These 60,000 cards, laid out end to end %u2014 the five inch end, not the three inch end %u2014 can encircle Central Park (almost), and I hear this will actually be a public art project next summer.

Whenever I try to use Visual Studio and code any significant applications for Microsoft, I’m always shocked by all the bits of code that seem to have to be constructed which have nothing to do with my application whatsoever. Such programs are what I refer to as “densely annoying” and “sparsely intelligent”. It is actually an intensely bad thing that Microsoft has this “friendly” environment to write all this code for you, to try to remind you of the sixteenth argument to version two of some class that will probably be obsoleted with the next release of Windows: it prevents them from having to actually think about just how poorly the overall system is designed and actually going through the labor of fixing it. Streamlining it. Making it something that a programmer doesn’t get a headache from just thinking about, and muscle aches from carrying the books and manuals around.

Oh, and just in case you Linux guys get to feeling smug, you are marching down this path too. Microsoft just has a decade or so head start in becoming a bloated behemoth. There may be hope for you, but only if you turn back from the dark side now.

Thanks Dan for bringing this one to my attention.

You can download the torrent of last night’s episode of Nightline which discusses Intelligent Design here. I’ll review and let you know what I think.

I began reading Paul Phillips’ blog when Wil Wheaton mentioned that he was a poker player and a regular blogger. I’ve since found out that he seems to share one of my hot button topics: “evolution versus creationism intelligent design”.

Intelligent design is creationism dressed for court: no more, no less. It attempts to circumvent the findings of the Supreme Court in cases such as Edwards v. Aguillard and to gut the so-called Lemon test, established in the case of Lemon v. Kurtzman. This would be clear, even without the published admissions of some of its principal proponents. Intelligent design is merely an attempt to blur the separation between church and state, and the line between science and religion.

The fact that it seems to enjoy some measure of success should give us all pause.

It’s worth reviewing the decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, including audio of the oral arguments before the court.

I snapped a picture of my Pac Man t-shirt using my Motorola MPx220 cell phone in its “self portrait” mode: where the viewfinder is echoed onto the screen that is on the outside of the flip phone. Thinking about it for a second, I had a moment’s inspiration and took another picture.

This error apparently only occurs in the mode where you use the phone when closed, but for God’s sake man. Doesn’t anyone test these things at all?

Addendum: Oh, the phone doesn’t seem to have any way to flip the image left and right either.

This story of a Florida man arrested for using an open WiFi router has been making the rounds, and I’ve been holding off on posting about it because on the face of it, it seems completely absurd.

And yet, if I were charged with a third-degree felony, I might take it more seriously.

Articles like this one go on and on about how unsecured wireless networks can be used by all sorts of criminals and pedophiles. All of that is probably true, but they can also be used by people like you and me to check our email, get our latest baseball scores, or check our blogs for new comments. Because WiFi is so useful, many people set up access points without passwords as a courtesy: to build a better wireless community. On such systems, nobody needs authorization: they just use DHCP to request a new IP and the gateway information , et voila!

This guy was using a wifi connection from the street. As far as anyone can tell, he wasn’t sending email threats, or engaging in trafficking of kiddy porn, or doing anything at all. He was just using a WiFi connection that someone (either through carelessness or largess) left open and accessible to passers by. If anyone is guilty of anything, it would probably be the homeowner who is breaking his customer usage agreement by providing passers by with free internet.

Honestly, just how stupid have we become? Don’t our police have anything better to do? If this guy really objected to having a guy use his WiFi, why not just add a password? The guy would almost certainly take it as a hint that he shouldn’t use the connection and would move on.

Pathetic.

Check out this blogger’s report about theferrett: The Weirdest Book I Ever Got, his exposure to The Creationist’s View of the DINOSAURS and the Theory of Evolution.

The pictures are priceless.

Addendum: Here is the author’s website where you can order a copy of your own.

Periodically Slashdot runs a story to punch the creation versus evolution button. I must admit, it’s one of my hot button topics. I’d could rant substantially about it, but instead I’ll just ask that you read the comments and see how many of its proponents seem to be unable to spell the word “intelligent”.

A brief list:

• intelegant
• intellegent
• integgegant

They also can’t seem to spell the word “atheist”, or apply it correctly.