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General interest

Uncommon Descent ranked well within the top 1% of web sites

A few days ago, frequent commenter Dionisio noted: >>http://www.ranking.com/ Web Rank Biblegateway.com 168 MIT.edu 7,280 HARVARD.edu 7,246 Nature.com 7,449 Desiringgod.org 10,105 Answersingenesis.org 11,865 Gty.org 15,018 Icr.org 19,037 Religionnews.com 22,188 Rzim.org 35,858 Samaritanspurse.org 40,274 Truthforlife.org 49,862 Royalsociety.org 53,686 Evolutionnews.org 58,755 Jamesmacdonald.com 60,164 Reasons.org 65,259 Uncommondescent.com 80,763 Pandasthumb.org 106,377 Kodugamelab.com 668,032>> I took a look, especially at the question of how many web sites are out there. That is a hard question, but the reasonable and somewhat conservative number looks like about the billion, with 75% inactive in one way or another, i.e. the active web overall is 250 million sites or so, maybe up to several times more depending on how you count and when. I then responded: “[T]here are over Read More ›

An Unhappy New Year for computers and smart devices: the Meltdown & Spectre flaws in Intel, AMD and ARM processors

On Wednesday, January 3rd, there has been an announcement of two security flaws that affect Intel, AMD and ARM micro-chips, thus potentially affecting PC’s, telephones and a great many appliances alike. As a Yahoo News article reports: “Phones, PCs, everything are going to have some impact, but it’ll vary from product to product,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in an interview with CNBC Wednesday afternoon. This is of course of direct interest to everyone, and it will be of more direct interest to many readers of UD, as many of us work with information technology. As well, it is illustrative of features of information and probability that will be of significant interest to design thinkers (and critics) as the case Read More ›

UD Community: New Year greetings and thoughts

One wishes as happy a new year as possible to one and all. It falls to insomnia power to open the innings for 2018 for UD. Let us use this open thread to share new year’s day thoughts. END PS: My own general thought is one of grave concern for our civilisation (per Machiavelli of all people), but not entirely without hope: And, like unto it, here is a generic form of Lance Wallnau’s seven mountain framework:Let us ponder: Whence have we come? What are we? Whither are we going? Why? Let’s add the famous painting: Let’s clip Wiki: >>Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is a painting by French artist Paul Gauguin. Gauguin Read More ›

Merry Christmas: A celebration of hope, and a cherishing of Children

The morrow is Christmas, in this, the year of Our Lord 2017. My thoughts have been stirred by exchanges on a sad incident at a Walmart in California, and so let me clip from a comment in that thread: KF, 8:>>observe how Christmas comes out in say the Harry Potter books, pointing to the issue that Christmas is also a time for kids to be celebrated and cherished. Makes a lot of sense as a child embodies a world of hope, echoing the hopes of Divine breakthrough and rescue centred on the Christ child that are to be found in the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke.>> In the F/N following, I added: “if Christmas is in material part a Read More ›

It’s not just science. Stanford lied for years to MBAs

A reader sends this: From EditorFrancis at Slashdot: 14 terabytes of “highly confidential” data about 5,120 financial aid applications over seven years were exposed in a breach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business — proving that the school “misled thousands of applicants and donors about the way it distributes fellowship aid and financial assistance to its MBA students,” reports Poets&Quants. … Half the school’s students are awarded financial aid, and though Stanford always insisted it was awarded based only on need, the report concluded the school had been “lying to their faces” for more than a decade, also identifying evidece of “systemic biases against international students.” More. So the people who insist that there are systemic biases, like these, are Read More ›

The eighth continent?

No, not Atlantis, which has contributed so much to world fantasy literature. There is, in fact, a sort of lost continent, Zealandia. From Tia Ghose at LiveScience: The lost continent, which is mostly submerged, with all of New Zealand and a few islands peeking out from the water, is about half the size of Australia. By drilling deep into its crust or upper layer, the new scientific expedition could provide clues about how the diving of one of Earth’s plates beneath another, a process called subduction, fueled the growth of a volcano chain and this lost continent in the Pacific Ocean 50 million years ago. The new expedition could also reveal how that Earth-altering event changed ocean currents and the Read More ›

Design Disquisitions: Updated YouTube Playlists

For the last year or so I have been accumulating quite a number of YouTube playlists. Recently I’ve been trying to get it a little more organised and cleaned up, so I thought I would point readers to it as a resource. At the moment I have just under 40 individual playlists. I have created playlists for the key individuals in the ID debate (pro and anti-ID) and also have playlists for different issues that come up (e.g. Irreducible complexity, methodological naturalism etc). There’s also one covering the Dover trial, and any lectures and debates on the subject. For any other videos that don’t readily fit into other categories, I have a playlist of miscellaneous videos: ID YouTube Playlists I’ll Read More ›

Design Disquisitions: William Dembski Moves on From ID: Some Reflections

There’s a new article posted at my blog. I know this one is old news now, but my blog wasn’t around in 2015 and didn’t see any coverage on it here or at ENV. I wanted to take note of Dembski’s decision, and some of the reaction to it. Everyone who has taken part in the intelligent design debate will know of William Dembski. For those who aren’t familiar, Dembski is the primary architect with regard to the theoretical underpinnings of ID. Since his involvement with the movement, he has published extensively in books, papers, and blogs, and has vigorously championed his ideas in many public lectures and debates.(1) Back in 2005, Dembski wrote a sarcastic blog post on Uncommon Descent, Read More ›

Design Disquisitions: Giving the Critics a Fair Hearing

This is a short post explaining a little feature I’ll be doing on my blog called ‘Critic’s Corner’. Hopefully it will turn out to be a useful resource. It goes without saying that ID isn’t the most popular idea in the world. Since its development and increased prominence in western culture, it has been widely derided and criticised. It has many, many critics. Among those critics are people from a wide range of disciplines including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, philosophy, theology, and journalism. ID also has the misfortune of being disliked not only by atheists and naturalists (as one might expect), but also many theistic evolutionists, and even more surprisingly, many young-earth Creationists. There are of course many within those Read More ›

Design Disquisitions: Why the Question of Biological Origins Really Matters

Finally, I’ve managed to publish my first blog article! It’s been a rocky start as I had some technical difficulties. Nevertheless, it feels good to get the ball rolling. In this first article, I’ve chosen to take a step back and reflect upon whether or not intelligent design is an important problem to consider in the first place. I outline what I consider to be five strong reasons why this is a matter of great significance.   In the foreword to the intelligent design text, The Design of Life, biochemist William S. Harris notes: The scientific community continues to wrestle with the deep and fundamental questions: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How did a coded language (i.e., DNA) Read More ›

Coming Soon-‘Design Disquisitions’ A New ID Blog

Despite being an ID advocate for several years now (and having an authors account on this forum), I haven’t really taken the time to put pen to paper and write about it, apart from a few lengthy exchanges I had with a close friend and critic of ID. He has since stepped away from the online world, and so the exchange has ended. You can still view my responses to him here, here, here, here, and here. I also published one article where I highlighted various atheists and agnostics who are critical of neo-Darwinism and supportive of ID here. The last thing I wrote on the subject was two years ago now, however this last year I’ve been wishing to start up a Read More ›

Why is Wonder Alien to Social Psychology?

A recent article tries to tackle some important and often-missed points of social psychology. [Unbridled skepticism] has given rise to a belief that what we think about ourselves and our lives together cannot be held with any confidence until objective, scientific insight into these problems is obtained. The result of taking such a stance on our knowledge in this realm is that we become thoroughly unsure of the only seat of experience available to us: ourselves. Doubt penetrates to the deepest level such that we begin to wonder if we are merely mirages, and the scientific method is seen as the sole means of reassurance that this is not the case. In consequence, the prospect of making genuine discoveries, ones Read More ›

Trump goes nuke:

” . . . you would be in jail.” Clip: [youtube qwe34MIYYEk] (To make certainty on non endorsement etc clear, snip. KF) The pivotal issue relevant to UD here, is not whether either major candidate is of any great promise ([again to be utterly clear, snip. KF]), but instead, the revelation of utter media bias and manipulation. The issue, then becomes, how do we stand against the tide of a civilisational march of folly, complete with agit prop agendas dressed up in lab coats? How does this speak to preserving a modicum of sanity and respect for facts and logic in discussion of serious issues; often in the face of all sorts of agit prop or trollish distractions, with the Read More ›

US Pres. George W Bush’s 9/11-01 interview (as food for thought)

Video: [youtube ke_OgE_V6tQ] (Please understand this i/l/o the context of complacency, attack and the lesson of Jan Sobieski. Ask yourself, in your heart is our civilisation worth fighting for given the likely alternatives (or, does it deserve to die . . . or be utterly “transformed”), and why or why not?) Ponder, our geostrategic challenges, and how our underlying worldviews . . . whether or not dressed up in a lab coat . . . and deep-rooted perceptions shape how we act, whilst geostrategic realities (and some pretty ruthless operators out there) shape consequences: Where do we go from here? What is the likely consequence? END

Miserable Creatures

Imagine if atheistic materialism was actually true and humans are nothing more than biological automatons – complexly programmed and reactive robots that behave and think in whatever manner happenstance chemical interactions dictates at any given time.  Let’s think about what would actually mean. There would be no way for a biological automaton to determine whether or not any statement was in fact true or not since all conclusions are driven by chemistry and not metaphysical “truth” values; indeed, a biological automaton reaches conclusion X for exactly the same reason any other reaches conclusion Y; chemistry.  If chemistry dictates that 1+1=banana, that is what a “person” will conclude. If chemistry dictates they defend that view to the death and see themselves Read More ›