Intelligent Design in a Nutshell

If you read and listen to enough information and testimony by proponents of Intelligent Design, you’ll discover that the basic premise is: “If I don’t understand exactly how something happens, then it must have been done by a supernatural agent.”

This telling phrase is rarely used by Design Proponents, who evolved from Creationists via the missing link “CDesign proponentsists” that was excavated from a draft of their textbook during discovery for the Dover Trial (click to watch the Nova Documentary of the trial).

One Intelligent Design website has an article it calls Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. Anyone with an understanding of science or information theory will find the unsupported and largely disproved assertions laughable. However, by mis-stating the scientific method, and claiming as supporting proof scientific conclusions that have long been discarded, it makes a convincing case.

Former child actor, and aging teen heartthrob Kirk Cameron is a visible proponent of this odd IDea (sic). Here’s a short video of a Fox News report interviewing him after he taped a debate against Richard Dawkins. There are some annotations placed by the video editor, but the interview itself is untouched. Watch it and see that my initial assertion is correct. Kirk actually says to the unapologetically supportive Creationist (“unbiased”) interviewer, that if he doesn’t understand how it could have formed, then we must accept that it was obviously designed.

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Content-aware image resizing

Check out this video. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg[/youtube] Isn't this exciting? This new technique is called seam carving. Seam carving is an image resizing algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. This algorithm alters the dimensions of an image not by scaling or cropping, but rather by intelligently removing pixels from (or…

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Scientists: humans recently evolved rapidly

As reported by Scientific American, Researchers have concluded that only 10,000 years ago, the human transition from living off the land to actively raising crops and domesticated animals was accompanied by an accelerated rate of evolutionary change. The pressure for this change occcurred because populations became highly concentrated compared to hunter/gatherer…

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How the Internet has changed political campaigning

On Bill Moyers' Journal, Bill Moyers discussed this multifaceted issue with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.  This video is well worth watching for many reasons.  The introduction includes a clip of John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech to Southern Baptist…

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Coral reef photo safari at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium

I’m in Chicago with my nine-year old daughter and Shedd Aquarium was an important destination for us.  We spent much of our Aquarium time at the Wild Reef exhibit. 

The coral reefs of the world support about a quarter of our sea life, so they are immensely important, yet humans are destroying them in a wide variety of ways. 

                Shedd at Night.jpg

As important as the reefs are to world ecology, reef life is also stunningly beautiful.  You can see these communities up close at Shedd.  The irony is hard to ignore whenever you can view warm water life in Chicago while it’s bitterly cold outside. 

Shedd Aquarium does a wonderful job displaying its marine life.  It’s difficult to stop taking photos, if you have a digital camera. I took more than 100 photos, then deleted many of them, leaving about a dozen photos I liked.  The challenge is not finding beautiful scenes to photograph.  The Aquarium is full of such opportunities.  The challenges are the low light conditions (no flash photography allowed, for the protection of the animals), combined with the quick movements of some of the creatures.  Note:  I took all of these photos with a Canon A700, a modest consumer-grade digital camera that is about 2-years old.  Also, these photos are only minimally retouched.  Comparable scenes await anyone interested in traveling to Chicago to visit Shedd Aquarium.

Many of the organisms living at a reef look like underwater plants, but they are actually animals.  Those animals include the corals themselves…

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