Helium (2He4) is the second most common chemical element in the universe and also the second lightest. It is a Noble gas (i.e: It doesn't combine with other atoms, or even with itself above a fraction of a Kelvin). Young Earth believers use it in 2 mutually contradictory ways to…
Maybe I’m the last to find out, but I just today stumbled upon an incredibly . . . well . . . provocative . . . wiki site: uncyclopedia.org. How I got there I can’t actually recall. Perhaps I stepped into a space-time warp. The article I first encountered was an official-looking article about that well-known scientific theory, “malevolent design.” I hadn’t before encountered this theory, so I eagerly read the article:
Malevolent Design (or M.D.) is one of the leading theories in micro-miracology, the division of Creation Science which deals with the origin and development of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses and fungal parasites. Beginning with the fundamental insight of Creation Science that the complexity of life is such that it must be the result of divine intervention, and employing the micro-miracological observation that pathogenic organisms change rapidly in order to defeat or circumvent the human immune system, the theory of Malevolent Design posits that the adaptation of human pathogens is the result of malevolent actions taken by an intelligent designer. Put simply, the theory explains that humans continue to become sick because God hates us.
Quite interesting, I thought. I’ll have to tell mention this to grumpypilgrim, who thinks he is well read. But why stop there? I moved on to another topic that theory grumpy often does discuss, Intelligent Design:
…Intelligent Design, or as the French would say, L’Intelligent Design, is the absolutely true and totally scientific theory that the Universe is so gee-whizzy fantastic and
I was perusing a back issue of Physics Today, reading an article about events at the Large Hadron Collider, when I noticed the word, “femtobarn”. It was defined as 10-39 sq.cm. or a decimal followed by 38 zeros then a one. This is pretty small.
As a midwesterner, I thought I knew the size of a barn. So I multiplied out the femto (you know, milli-, micro-, nano-, pico-, femto-) to get the quadrillion times larger 10-24sq.cm. This is a barn? I had to Google this, and found a clear article at Stanford defining it for lay-folk.
In brief, physicists in the 1940’s were often discussing the cross-sectional area of the Uranium Nucleus. They thought of calling it the Oppenheimer (too many syllables) or the Bethe (too likely to be heard as Beta). Well, most of the research was being done in the midwest, and slamming protons into this target made them think of tossing tomatoes at a barn. The name “barn” was used in a reviewed article, accepted, and it stuck. Now, why femtobarns as the standard unit? It’s just practical for their purposes, like kilometers or megabytes.
By now, if you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering, “why should we care?” Sure, it’s fun to say “femtobarn”, but what use is it in everyday life?
This excellent website describes yet another flaw in the creationist argument. Creationists like to argue that evolution could not have created the enormous complexity we see today, because the odds are miniscule that all we see today could have happened by chance. That's true. However, it misstates the problem, because…
It’s in the September 11, 2006 issue of Newsweek. The article explores the issues presented by the following three books:
It is a good sign that Newsweek is acknowledging some of the basic points raised by these books. For example, Newsweek has this to say about the position of Harris on skepicism:
“Tell a devout Christian … that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible,” Harris writes, “and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.”
The Newsweek article presents the view of Dawkins regarding the basis for morality, as presented by many Christians:
“If there is no God, why be good?” he asks rhetorically, and responds: “Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up.”
Harris sharply questions the moral “lessons” of the Bible: