2008

…then check out this: www.hybridmedicalanimation.com/demoReel.html

This just posted on the Catholic League’s website: MINNESOTA PROF PLEDGES TO DESECRATE EUCHARIST July 10, 2008 Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is responding to what happened recently at the University of Central Florida when a student walked out of Mass with the Host, holding it hostage for several days. Myers was angry at the Catholic League for criticizing the student. His post can be accessed from his faculty page on the university’s website. Here is an excerpt of his July 8 post, “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker!”: “Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” Myers continued by saying, “if any of you would be Read More ›

Lubitz, Reijerse & Messinger have published a fascinating review into the intricacies of photosystem II and hydrogenases that produce hydrogen – Note the marvels within Darwn’s blob of “protoplasm”. It is most interesting that Lubitz et al. address the design principles that we can learn from “nature” and apply to creating synthetic photochemical biosynthetic water splitting systems.Though attributed to “nature”, recognizing design principles and applying them are easily understood at the Max Planck Institut für Bioanorganische Chemie. I wonder when No. America will catch up? From the very detailed complexity described, I highly expect some “irreducibly complex” systems are present. Any candidates? Following are a few extracts from this excellent review.
—————————–

Solar water-splitting into H₂ and O₂: design principles of photosystem II and hydrogenases

Wolfgang Lubitz, Edward J. Reijerse and Johannes Messinger
Max Planck Institut für Bioanorganische Chemie, Germany.

Energy Environ. Sci., 2008 DOI: 10.1039/b808792j

This review aims at presenting the principles of water-oxidation in photosystem II and of hydrogen production by the two major classes of hydrogenases in order to facilitate application for the design of artificial catalysts for solar fuel production. . . .

. . .A promising way for light-driven water splitting would be to mimic the molecular and supramolecular organization of the natural photosynthetic system, i.e. artificial photosynthesis.^{12,13 . . .} Read More ›

So Louisiana has a new law allowing science teachers to teach the weaknesses of time & chance evolutionary theory. What’s the big deal? Evolution by time and chance is as well tested as gravity for Pete’s sake. How long does take to convince a kid that when he throws a baseball into the air gravity will pull it back to earth? According to the theophobic evolutionists there are no weaknesses in their theory. So the teacher will quickly present just a small fraction of the “overwhelming evidence” that time & chance turned mud into Mozart, he’ll have a list of zero things to present to argue against it, and all will be well with nothing lost. The biology teacher can Read More ›

Published online 9 July 2008 | Nature 454, 150 (2008) A former Texas official is suing the state’s education agency, saying that its policies passively endorse creationism. In a complaint filed with a district court on 1 July, Christina Comer, a former director of state science education, alleged that officials tacitly condone the teaching of creationism through a policy of neutrality. Comer oversaw Texas’s science curriculum until last November, when she was forced to resign for circulating a notice of a talk entitled “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse”. In her termination notice, Comer was told that the education agency endeavoured to “remain neutral” on the issue of creationism. Comer’s complaint argues that board neutrality violates the separation of church and state. Read More ›

Psychiatrists in Australia have identified “Climate Change Delusion” as the latest mental disorder sure to make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). That’s the head shrinker’s bible if you don’t know.

Doomed to a fatal delusion over climate change

Andrew Bolt
July 09, 2008 12:00am
For The Herald Sun

PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of “climate change delusion” – and they haven’t even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”.

“A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events.”

(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)

“The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”

But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What’s scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this “climate change delusion”, too.

Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: “If we do not begin reducing the nation’s levels of carbon pollution, Australia’s economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands.”

And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd’s guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: “Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . .”

Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd’s next campaign slogan?

Of course, we can laugh at this — and must — but the price for such folly may soon be your job, or at least your cash.

Read More ›

Can’t sleep? Thinking of trying that leftover spicy dip again?

Mmmmmm, can’t comment on that but, as you munch ….

As if to prove that modernization and secularization are not the same thing – as sociologist Peter Berger maintains – long-deceased cultural icons are “appearing” again. Darwin’s face has been discovered in a tree and Turkish secularist Kemal Ataturk’s face in a hillside shadow in a remote Turkish village. All the more interesting because Darwin is the icon of North American atheists and Atatürk was a devout secularist.

Apparently, the silhouette of Turkey’s revered founder appears on the shadow that falls on these heights between June 15 and July 5. And thousands of Atatürk lovers, including military officers, bureaucrats and urban professionals, visit the region in order to observe this fascinating solstice.

Mr. Gülcemal Fidan, the mayor of Damal and a member of the ultra-secular People’s Republican Party, or CHP, recently announced that the “Damal Festival in the Shade of Atatürk” will be observed every year, and his office has spared YTL 200,000 (about $163,000) for this year’s organization — which is quite an amount for a tiny and poor area like his. Mr. Fidan also added that they expected Turkey’s Chief of Staff Gen. Yasar Büyükanit to attend the celebrations.

Did Atatürk get “time off for good behavior” to come back and get his devotees favours from the government?

Now, I ask you, reasonable folk, does this – or does it not – beat the “Virgin Mary on a piece of toast“?

Toronto hack’s view: Devotees – of Darwin, Ataturk, or kitsch Catholicism – “see” things.

The Florida toast cult claims that their piece of bread has mystical power. It never went bad in a whole decade – or anyway, no one ate it and got sick. No one ate it at all. It was offered for sale.

Match THAT< Darwin and Ataturk!

(Note: The Catholic Church thinks that Jesus’s mother Mary has sometimes appeared to help people. But read this for qualifying details. Do not try to phone the Pope about your toast. If you have not been living a really holy life, Mary prays for you. But if you are not listening to usual sources of good advice – why not start by listening to them, instead of waiting for a visit from her?)

Meanwhile, at The Mindful Hack, if you still haven’t gone to sleep … Read More ›

Man, this guy makes PZ Myers look calm, cool, and collected. Click here to read this hilarious exchange between David Heddle and John Kwok on a typical “science” blog. It’s funny until Kwok starts throwing ill-advised libels about. I wonder if Abbie “Potty Mouth” Smith will do him a big favor and flush this down the memory hole (in the words of Jerry Pournelle) “Real Soon Now”. Smithers, release the hounds. And will someone PLEASE do Kwok a huge favor and give him an Amazon gift certificate redeemable for a thesaurus of his choice. I’ve never read anyone who needs one more than this raving lunatic.

As DaveScott has pointed out in this space on several occasions, increased levels of atmospheric CO2 is, in at least some very important respects, a good thing.  Now Nature reports scientists are reaching the same conclusion here (sub required). Barley, beets (for those who like food that tastes like dirt) and wheat production increased by 10% when exposed to the year 2050 CO2 levels predicted by some climate models.

As I was catching up on reading back issues of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact I noted, for the first time in nearly 40 years of reading the magazine, not one but a pair of articles (one fact, one fiction) addressed the Intelligent Design controversy.

Both articles were written by physicist Carl Frederick.

The first (non-fiction) titled The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe is about the so-far fruitless quest by physicists to find an explanation for the fine tuning of the universe (basis of Cosmological ID) that doesn’t involve intelligent design. The article begins:

In the early 1990’s, a creeping realization swept through the theoretical physics community that the probability for the universe to even exist was vanishingly small. Indeed, the only “theory” around that seemed able to explain the universe’s existence was Intelligent Design. This was not something physicists and cosmologists liked to talk about.

Later on, after describing the “problem” in detail, he quotes what Lee Smolin considers the four possible solutions:

Which Way Out?

Lee Smolin considers that there are four solutions to the problem, schemas if you will.

[below are truncated for brevity -ds]

1) God tuned the parameters for our benefit.
2) There are a very large number of universes each of which has random parameters.
3) There is a “unique mathematically consistent theory of the whole universe”.
4) The parameters evolve in time – in the Darwinian sense.

[end truncation -ds]

A good number of very intelligent people have argued for schemas two, three, and four above. At the moment there is nothing resembling a consensus among physicists.

Interesting that Frederick fails to mention very intelligent people arguing for schema one. Maybe that’s so self-evident it hurts him to repeat it. 🙂

Read More ›

Dichloroacetate (DCA) Promising for Endometrial Cancer DCA virtually disappeared from the news about a year ago when it was forced off the open market by the FDA and all research into its efficacy as a cancer therapeutic had to go through officially sanctioned channels. I’ve kept track of it all this time through Google Email Alerts. This is the first bit of news on it in relation to cancer in a long time. To see the history check out the list of articles I wrote here under the sidebar category DCA. I became interested in it because it’s another example of the science establishment exerting undue control over things they believe they “own” including science education in public schools and Read More ›

John Templeton died today in the Bahamas. He was 95. I had long one-on-one conversations* with him over consecutive dinners back in 1999 during a conference titled “Complexity, Information, Design: A Critical Appraisal,” convened by Charles Harper and Paul Davies. Sir John impressed me as a good and sincere man who cared deeply about the misuse of science to marginalize religion and spirituality. On balance, his impact in facilitating conversation between science and religion has been enormously beneficial. Would that his advisors and administrators at the Templeton Foundation were as broadminded as he. ———— *He shared with me regarding his initial investments at the end of the Great Depression and how they paid off big time: he chose 100 stocks Read More ›

A reader of The Spiritual Brain asks,

… , you write that evolution (i.e., macro-evolution, descent by a common ancestor) is a fact, given the fossil record. Do you really believe this, or this is simply a concession to the scientific establishment, in other words, a disclaimer of sorts that is making sure that your ideas in this book can be taken seriously …

Well that was grounds for a gourmet cup of coffee!

The Spiritual Brain was an enormous amount of work. Mario and I risked much to maintain what we think the evidence supports about the non-material nature of the human mind. 

Anyone who thinks we would complicate our lives by also maintaining positions we do not support … has a future in writing afternoon soaps, where life is the art of the impossible.

So I wrote back and said,

I am intrigued by the way you put your question, “Do you really believe this?”

It reminds me of the day I was received into the Catholic Church (as an adult).

But I am not sure that a question about common descent should remind me of my reception into the Church. Let me explain why: Read More ›

Congratulations to Roddy Bullock for having his first column, Judge says creationism for the birds, published in Worldnet Daily. Roddy is head of the Intelligent Design Network in Ohio. Roddy references Bill Dembski’s Immodest Proposal But there is another option, a brilliant solution if evolution’s defenders have any integrity. Put forth by author William Dembski, “Teaching the Non-Controversy – An Immodest Proposal” sets out an ACLU-proof way to teach evolution honestly. Because the AAAS, the NCSE and other champions of Darwin-only education claim there is no scientific controversy (evolution, they claim, is as well established as gravity!), why not let students simply explain why evolutionary theory is one of the few areas in science where no controversy exists? To further Read More ›

You know the old saying “If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas”. It seems Massachusetts has itself a case of sand fleas. I found this article from the Boston Herald linked on the Drudge Report. It’s way off topic but I’m so sure most of our readers will appreciate it I just had to give y’all a heads up. Be sure to read the comments, they’re the best part. 😆