Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
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| Displayed name | Student of Trinity |
| Member number | 3431 |
| Title | Electric Sheep One |
| Postcount | 3335 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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| Slithzerkai Sighting! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 7 2006 12:07
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quote:Was too. I saw it. Gaelic tripped him, Welsh distracted passers by, and Norman French beaned him with a lead pipe. He screamed for help, but no-one understood him, because by then Middle English was already dying. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Slithzerkai Sighting! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, June 6 2006 22:22
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Well, I believe I at least got the whining part right. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Red Rain in India in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, June 6 2006 22:18
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quote:Getting all the toothpaste back in would be a bit tricky, but getting some back in is easy. If you squeeze the tube in the direction perpendicular to your previous squeeze, you make it more tubular, and less flat. This increases the tube's internal volume. If you do this while the tube mouth is in contact with some extruded toothpaste, the toothpaste will be sucked back into the tube. With practice, you can put back maybe an inch of toothpaste in this way. I use this trick whenever my daughter squeezes enough toothpaste for a mastodon onto her brush. The technique could in principle be made more efficient, perhaps enough to get a whole tubeful back in, by arranging to 'unsqueeze' the tube into a more uniform tubular shape. You could do this by sticking things to the outside of the tube and pulling it into shape, or by sealing the body of the tube (but not its opening) into a vessel from which you pumped out the air. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Slithzerkai Sighting! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, June 6 2006 11:11
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"Bismo: a game for three and a half players" "Shuffle and deal everyone six cards (for a total of 21). Take turns, clockwise, in whining for more cards from any source. First player to collect all six giant, intelligent, telekinetic samurai land cucumbers is allowed to meld them instantly, thus winning the game. The half player has an enormous advantage, but whether it is worth it is an unsolved problem in game theory." Cough up. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Red Rain in India in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, June 6 2006 11:04
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An infinity of space and time does not allow for all logically possible events to occur, because the space of possible events has much larger dimension than four. This is with even a very modest definition of "event". By embedding spacetime in event-space in some horrible, fractal way, one might perhaps be able to come arbitrarily close to any event, somewhere, sometime. But it is by no means necessary, and would seem highly unlikely, that the universe is in fact embedded in event space in this way. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, June 5 2006 00:41
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I don't know about OT in particular, but linguists put a lot more stock in conference presentations than physicists do, so circulation in the community for ten years before publication could well be a lot more formal than people passing notes to each other in brown paper envelopes. Typically in linguistics one has to submit abstracts and get them scored highly by peer reviewers just in order to make the conference program. This sometimes happens in physics, but not always. Smaller meetings are often by invitation anyway, and the biggest meeting in physics has a tradition of accepting all submitted contributions. So one of the many parallel sessions always has all the crackpot talks. They pay their registration fee, they're happy to be there, they do no harm. I've never gone to this particular meeting (too huge and not quite my field), but when I do get around to it I plan to go to the crackpot session just to see what happens when a bunch of people who each think they're the new Einstein meet one another. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Red Rain in India in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, June 5 2006 00:31
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quote:The idea is that the 'cells' are, having been shed into the atmosphere by a meteor. Dust floating in the atmosphere is likely to reach the Earth's surface in rain, because dust grains nucleate raindrops. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Refuge in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, June 5 2006 00:26
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They're awfully tough for what they have as loot. I figure if you can take them, you don't need what they have. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, June 3 2006 23:21
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There isn't necessarily anything wrong with holding up publication until more citations are included, because citations are important parts of a scientific paper. The reason you can say anything useful in 4 pages (or 40 for that matter) is that you cite references to all the relevant prior work. Leaving out a reference denies the reader useful relevant information; it also gives an unfair impression that your own work is more novel than it really is. And since referees are supposed to be experts on the paper's topic, you can expect that some of their own work will be stuff that ought to be cited. That having been said, some referees do seem to take a pretty broad interpretation of "relevant" when demanding that their papers get cited. Once or twice I have successfully resisted such demands. As to delaying to establish priority, this is tricky. Journals record (and print right under the title) when the article was first submitted, as well as when it was finally published. So if a paper is eventually published, no reviewer could hide the fact that it was submitted before something else. But this leaves it open to guess, if there is a long delay between the two dates, whether the paper was crap when first submitted and took a great deal of work to render publishable, or whether it was held up unfairly by slow reviewers. (And reviewers can certainly be appallingly slow just from procrastination and overwork, without any malice. In physics, with its short papers, a reviewing time of months is typical, though it can be as short as a few days or as long as a couple of years. In linguistics, at least a year is normal.) This is where an e-print archive can be very helpful, because people can look at the full text as of the submission date, and see whether the final published version differs significantly. [ Saturday, June 03, 2006 23:24: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Red Rain in India in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, June 3 2006 12:47
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It seems that it is far from clear that these are really alien cells from space, but that the hypothesis is a serious one being seriously advanced. The paper has appeared in a solid journal, published by Springer, and the author has presented the work at a conference at NORDITA in Copenhagen, which is a fine institution. The general reaction among experts seems to be that the author is probably wrong, but by no means a flake. And so far everybody admits that it's hard to say what these particle are, and that they look quite like thick-walled cells under an electron microscope. So this is probably not, but could be, our first contact with extraterrestrial life. Cool! -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| In this topic, I celebrate my inability to shut up. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, June 3 2006 11:02
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The fighting 437th are apparently so tough, their version of the Ghurkas' ritual sacrifice with a kukri is to decapitate a tiger with a magic marker. A unit to respect. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, June 3 2006 10:51
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quote:That's an important point that I missed: the changes that get made to papers in the review process are often big improvements. My own papers are all exceptions to this, of course, but in a fair world I would have received some kind of credit for the miracles of transformation I have often worked as referee. And so no doubt it seems to everyone. Probably these kinds of improvements would not get made if authors weren't forced to make them. I can send an e-mail to a colleague saying, Loved your paper but it would have been even better if you had just done thus and so; and the response will be, You're probably right but we don't have time. It's true that there is rarely much money riding on physics e-prints these days, but I don't see why people couldn't use ArXiv for establishing priority. It certainly is publication, in the sense of distribution to the public, though one doesn't call it that. I guess that might be precisely the problem Drakefyre Senior is getting at, though. I can imagine that researchers with limited scruples might post all kinds of premature claims on an e-print server, without really having done the work needed to establish their results, and then people in the field would end up having to adjudicate in a way that amounted to peer review, but in the heated atmosphere of retrospect. So doing the peer review before publication would be better in such cases. It's also true that most physics papers are short, rarely more than ten pages and often under 4 (or rather, exactly four to the very line, because that's the page limit for Physical Review Letters). This makes it more appealing to download an e-print and quickly get the scoop; if I were going to invest the time to pore through a 40 page treatise, I would probably wait until referees had ironed some bugs out first. [ Saturday, June 03, 2006 11:34: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| ADV Shaping (Battle Gamma & Co.) in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, June 3 2006 02:24
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Plated Bugs are cool because they get 10 AP. That makes them such a pain as opponents, because they can run so far and still attack you and because it's hard to stun them enough that they can't hit once. So in principle it ought to make them good on your team. But I've just never been able to get much use out of melee creations, except for Glaahks, with their good stunning and decent health. Melee creations are fine as enemies, because those are supposed to die, and there are lots more where they came from. But on your side, ranged attacks are just too important. They compete fine for total damage with melee attacks, and they are much more flexible. So how could you beef up melee creatures on your team? Maybe give them some regeneration, like your enemies, so they don't get ground down so much. But the idea I like best is just adding the 'locked in combat' feature of A4 (the AP penalty for stepping away from an adjacent enemy). This would let you use melee creatures to tie up enemies, especially if it were extended to making it harder to launch a missile attack when an enemy is adjacent. Getting your melee creations (or your melee Guardian) to grips with your enemies would then dominate the battle. Even better, if the engine could possibly swing it, would be for adjacent allies to be able to mitigate the effects of an adjacent enemy. Then if a rogue Battle Alpha had your Vlish in a grapple, you could bring up your own Battle Alpha to bust the Vlish out. You would use melee creations to lock down your enemies, and to prevent enemy melee creations from locking you down. It should still be possible to get by without melee creations, but employing them should become a very attractive option. There could also be a pumpable skill that would boost creation melee ability: some sort of combat leadership, not implausible. And maybe just lowering the essence cost, so that it was cost-efficient to make melee dudes, and to evolve them up in order to keep replacement melee dudes up to par with experienced missile-launching survivors. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, June 3 2006 01:37
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In case people wonder what "peer review" really means, here's the scoop at great length. It's an interesting institution. Actually peer review isn't trying to prove that the submitted results are correct, only to check that they are not obviously wrong (to an expert) or too horribly presented or too uninteresting (perhaps because they are already known) to deserve journal space. Articles that get published are not thereby established as true; they are established as probably worth reading. And "peer review" just means that the editors send the manuscripts out to between one and three busy people like me, who may or may not take time to do their reviewing job very thoroughly. Good papers sometimes get unfairly rejected, and (in my experience, much more often) bad papers do get published. Getting good referees to send manuscripts to is not trivial for journal editors. Nobody wants to do it, though most people acknowledge it as a duty and do their best when the dreaded e-mail comes from an editor. Generally a journal finds you when you publish a paper in it yourself; or perhaps someone else says they're too busy to referee a paper and suggests you as a substitute. Authors are also often asked to suggest possible referees for their work, and the editors often take them up. Anyway, once they have nailed you as a potential donor of reviewing time, the editors ask you what topics you consider yourself qualified to review in, and start sending you papers on those topics. Who reviews the reviewers themselves? The editors do assess their reviewers, and the leading journals cajole world-renowned researchers into serving as associate editors for particular topic areas, to act as a court of appeal. A reviewer has to send a report explaining their recommendation for acceptance (possibly after stipulated improvements) or rejection, and this report is transmitted to the paper authors for their response. The authors can then resubmit their manuscript, either by claiming to have fixed the problems identified by the referee(s), or by rebutting the referee criticisms. A reviewer who habitually sends lame reports that bring cogent rebuttals from authors will soon be dropped from the process. A reviewer who succinctly nails flaws can become a go-to person. Usually even negative reports are polite -- the editors will delete comments such as "this paper should be killed and buried" anyway; and positive reports are rarely enthusiastic. I used to go too far in trying to let authors down lightly when I rejected them, and I found I had too many resubmittals that didn't actually address my criticisms, so I started including a final polite but firm "this means you!" paragraph, and that saves me a lot of time. But I have still been through quite a few multi-round arguments with authors over papers I thought were bad, and a couple of times a big-shot author has just gone over my head with an e-mail to the editor and gotten his lousy paper in. The degree of anonymity of the process varies from journal to journal, or at least from field to field. In physics referees are anonymous, and most even try to purge their reports of any clues to their identity. (Once a journal inadvertently outed me to the authors of a paper I reviewed, and once I declared my identity in a report (because I was encouraging the author to emphasize how his work improved on some of mine, and I wanted to remove any fear of offending me).) But in physics the manuscript authors are generally not hidden unless they request it, which is not usual. Getting by peer review is a relatively low bar to jump over, for professional researchers. The world's leading journals do reject most papers submitted, but mostly for being insufficiently spectacular, not for being wrong. If you don't get into Science or Nature, you sigh and resubmit at the next notch down; not all peer-reviewed journals are equal by any means, and some are basically worthless as credentials (to the point where you know that if they could only publish it there, it must be pretty bad). With solid but less high-profile peer-reviewed journals you can generally count on getting your paper published with nothing more than some hassling from a referee who will want you to re-write parts and include more references to related work. Manuscripts from researchers without established reputations tend not to get sent to the world's top scientists for peer review. And using the approved conventions of style can make a big difference to your chances of acceptance. So it can be an uphill struggle to break into refereed journals. Lucid writing is absolutely key; if you are clear, referees are surprisingly willing to accept unconventional approaches. But picking through a confusingly-written article that makes a remarkable claim, trying to see whether it could possibly right or to identify its error, can take days of valuable time. Most often a referee faced with such a task will seize on the first flaw they can find as an excuse for rejection, even if it isn't really important. And you know, they're probably not wrong to do that. A person who can't or won't write clearly is unlikely to have the intelligence and self-discipline to do good science. A published article that makes a significant claim will then be checked out independently by other researchers, who will eventually submit other articles which either confirm or disagree with the original report. Scientific journals also regularly publish "comment" articles, which amount to claims that in the case of some recently published article the referees blew it because the article is crap -- or is a duplication (through ignorance, not plagiarism) of results previously published by the comment writer. It is not clear whether the peer-reviewed scientific journal system will last forever. It didn't really get going until after WWII; it used to be more that if you were in the club of recognized researchers you could publish whatever you liked, and if it was wrong the egg was on your face. The first time Albert Einstein got a referee report, he was outraged and never published in that journal again. And for about twenty years now in physics there has been a parallel institution to the refereed journals, the ArXiv e-print archive (originally at Los Alamos, now at Cornell with mirrors around the world). There is generally no review on ArXiv, and junk papers do get posted, though surprisingly few. In almost all cases the e-prints do get published in some traditional forum, but in fast-moving fields no-one may ever read these 'official' versions, because they have already based work of their own on the much earlier e-print versions. It's a little unclear what purpose physics journals now serve, and perhaps they may one day die out. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| ADV Shaping (Battle Gamma & Co.) in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 2 2006 12:18
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Why do I think of a Battle Epsilon as being extremely tiny? And why am I so sure that they always travel in a pair with a Battle Delta? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 2 2006 12:13
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Hmm, I feel like the Awakened here. I guess I'll get left out of G3. What makes "designed" different from "ratvka" is indeed arbitrary human convention; IDers are aware of this, and to them it is the whole crux of their argument, that some forms or senses of information seem to imply a consciousness capable of making arbitrary conventions. To me, they are far too quick to identify information in nature with that kind of information; that does not follow at all. But it is not only IDers who invoke suspiciously subjective notions of information. Physicists who think they understand the "arrow of time" do too. These are the guys who patiently explain that glasses tend to fall off tables and shatter into heaps of shards, while heaps of shards never leap onto tables and join into glasses, by saying that there are many more ways for the pieces of glass to form a pattern we call "a heap of shards" than for them to form a pattern we call "a glass". That's quite true; but it makes the Second Law of Thermodynamics out to be an artifact of human perception. Yet perhaps something can be salvaged from this, because human perception is not really arbitrary. Maybe humans ignore differences between different heaps of shards, but recognize such particularly regular patterns as drinking glasses, because there is some objective difference between the cases. If we could reverse engineer human perception enough to identify an objective basis for the way it defines its categories, well, um, I'd be happy. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Tweaking G3 in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 2 2006 03:55
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Encumbrance is a good way to force tactical choices, but I agree that it is merely tedious when all it really does is force you to trudge through an area again in order to pick up all the loot. What I'd suggest is keeping encumbrance, but allowing the player to Fedex loot to towns, by means of a variant of A4's portal technology. Have a mode or a button or something that makes it so that you can click on things, and designate them to be carried away by creations when you leave the zone. The items thus designated will arrive at a specific spot in any friendly town that you have explored. So I guess you'd have to have some way to choose the destinations from among known friendly towns. This seems to me to be plausible for Shapers, much easier to implement than pack mules, and wonderfully convenient for the player. And while it would make carrying treasure very easy, it would not help at all with carrying items that you need to actually use. The encumbrance limits for those could even be lowered, now that the PC doesn't need to carry any treasure. A nice added feature would be the ability to sell items directly from their arrival point, without the need to go and pick them up and carry them to the merchants. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G3 Dialog options and plot line in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
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written Friday, June 2 2006 03:38
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Hmm, maybe I've just been too brutalized to notice these details. I'll have to pay more attention next time I do G3. The Servant Mind analogy is a good point, MagmaDragoon. The technology for less deranged creators would seem to exist. [ Friday, June 02, 2006 03:39: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Guardians need help in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 2 2006 03:33
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Yeh. I'm using Submissions and Reapers now, and new skills aren't so easy to come by when you're not gaining xp very fast, but at least the Barzite areas have lots of canisters. My hopes are pinned on the Drayks Phariton taught me to make before his accident. If they don't cut it, my next chance for a big boost will probably be the Emerald Chestguard. EDIT: Drayks are good. I cashed in the Vlish. [ Friday, June 02, 2006 12:23: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, June 2 2006 02:08
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quote:Whose name is whose is hardly important. I am sorry if I confuse the two gentlemen, but such errors on my part do not affect the discussion. I hope you are not suggesting that they do; that would reduce a potentially useful discussion to the pitiful intellectual level of a debating contest, in which any error by an opponent will serve as a missile, regardless of how irrelevant it is to substantial issues. Whoever produced which, I have identified one class of information arguments which are dead wrong, in that they simply confuse entropy with some more sophisticated measure of complexity, and another class of arguments which seem to use information correctly, but use it only in standard ways, and only use it to formulate a new version of the standard observation that macroevolution has not been observed. I am interested in new ideas about information, so if there are any proposals that don't fall into these classes, I'd like to know of them. If you can only acknowledge that you don't know of any such proposals, I'd be grateful for the admission, since it would save me from a probable waste of time in going through literature with which you are more familiar than I. It is true that I am awfully picky, and I may well reject bushels of ideas that claim to be new insights into information, by finding that to me they fail either to be new or to be insights. That's life: a really new insight about information would be a landmark in intellectual history, and those kinds of things aren't easy. But it seems to me that if ID has any prospects for delivering new science, they probably lie in this direction. I repeat, the problem is hard. It is one thing to insist that there is some important distinction between "abababa", "akjkl9kjkl", and "designed". Practically everyone would agree, and lots of people have considered the point very important. It is quite another thing to imagine that a few lines of prose could possibly clarify, to scientific standards of clarity, what this important distinction really is. In reading some of these ID discussions, I get the maddening feeling of hearing someone speak evocatively about the dizzy height of Everest, but then just as I'm beginning to hope that they have some vision of a route towards the summit, they jump over a chair and announce proudly, "See, I've just climbed it!". [ Friday, June 02, 2006 02:22: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
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written Friday, June 2 2006 00:11
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Sure, but see my last edit above. (People unfamiliar with John Conway's "Game of Life" should google it. It is totally awesome.) The problem with the Life analogy from a physics point of view is that Conway's Life is explicitly entropic in its fundamental laws -- you can deduce the entire future from any present, but you can't deduce the past because there could have been isolated cells anywhere -- whereas physics as it currently stands is not. But that's our problem; for biologists, I suppose Life's explicitly entropic nature just shows that even with a much more obvious Second Law than exists in reality, remarkably organized structures can appear spontaneously. And yet. The biggest thing I've ever gotten out of Life from random initial conditions is a 'beehive'; whereas enormously complicated Life structures have been built by design. I have no trouble imagining that these too could emerge randomly, with a big enough board and a long enough run. But I'm not entirely sure of this; there are a lot of theorems about Life, and I don't find it inconceivable that someone could prove that the probability would scale with size in a disappointing way. And an ID advocate could well point out that even in the artificial example of Life, modest structures like "glider guns" have only been produced so far by intelligent design. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 1 2006 23:43
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That's the doggoned thing about entropy: if the universe develops deterministically, then there's no objective sense in which anything is more organized than anything else. At least, no really rigorously objective sense yet identified, to my knowledge. Boltzmann told us to carve phase space up into cubic cells of abritrary size (as long as the size was not too large). Okay, cubic cells is at least not too suspiciously a particularly special case. But why cubic? Why not incredibly complex squiggly shapes, which could potentially follow exactly the actual motion of the system, so that entropy never changed at all? That's not a very aesthetically pleasing proposal, but we don't have any convincing axioms to exclude it. There is no general theory of how to "coarsen the grain" (lower the resolution of one's description). As to developmental biology: sure, there is no 'homuncular' plan which each cell locally consults. But I think the brighter ID people would simply say that the plan is present globally. Of course, to me this sort of distinction is a slippery slope that slides right down to my view of a plan so global as to be locally invisible, where 'locally' may mean on any scale less than that of the entire universe. But maybe there is some ID belay that will stop them before that point. [ Thursday, June 01, 2006 23:53: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
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written Thursday, June 1 2006 23:19
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It may not exactly be an irrelevant digression, but if all that Gitt uses information for is to say that formation of a certain class of enzyme has not been observed, then his discussion of information is merely an uninteresting piling up of different versions of the same old argument. Evolution of giraffes has not been observed, either. I see no new principles involved in Gitt's information arguments. This disappoints me. I do hope that the numerous articles trying to rebut evolution from thermodynamics are duly recognized as worthless. I do not mean to tar all of ID with the same brush, but where the tar rightly sticks, the article cannot continue to be counted as weight on the side of ID. Even a large number of such articles would be more counter-evidence than evidence, because it would reinforce the suspicion that the appeal of ID is too largely based on ignorance. A genuine supporter of ID should be a fierce crusader against thermodynamic arguments, because they undermine the cause badly. As to organization versus order: I agree that there is some fascinating and important difference between the order in a human body and the order in a snowflake or a hurricane. This is a point that has received some study from physicists. But I don't buy for a moment that ID people have put their finger on what this difference is. To define organization as being the product of design is an obvious begging of the question. It is true that in some respects the complexity of living organisms resembles the complexity of artificial machines more closely than it resembles that of snowflakes. But in other respects the complexity of living organisms is quite different. For instance, living organisms are often appallingly inefficient, from a design point of view. They include superfluous parts, or they use what look like awkward adaptations of structures that serve other purposes in other organisms. As design elegance, this is below the standard of Apple Computer, let alone of the God in whom I believe. On the other hand, the design of artificial machines is sharply limited in another way: zoom in closely enough, and design disappears. A watch may have tiny intricate gears, but the microscopic structure of the metal composing the gears shows no marks of design at all. Whereas living organisms maintain pretty much their same kind of complex functionality right down to molecular scales. Indeed, as Golem XIV pointed out, at the molecular scale life suddenly does become elegantly efficient. Both of these differences between life and machines fit naturally with the evolutionary account. Evolution would be pretty much discredited, in fact, if these features were not observed. They are also, of course, consistent with special creation. But so is anything whatever. ID has to answer why a God who could do anything whatever should choose to mimic so closely the patterns one would expect from evolution, even when these patterns are awkward from a design point of view. Just so another viewpoint is on record, I will state that I believe in a creator God, but in one whose intelligence is on such a vastly transhuman scale that design as we conceive it is quite irrelevant. A child finds Tic-tac-toe an absorbing game; an adult is more interested in chess. A being comfortably able to follow the behavior of every particle in the universe simultaneously, while fully appreciating all the patterns they make on every scale, is not going to be interested in building watches. The designs of God are surely purposeful, but they will not look like design to humans, and so efforts to find evidence of design in creation seem to me to be bad theology. Finally, an important and interesting point about thermodynamics on cosmic scales: the specific heat of self-gravitating systems is negative. A self-gravitating system means a system whose internal gravitational potential energy is free to change significantly; for instance, a cloud of dust or gas or asteroids, or a cluster of stars. Having negative specific heat means that if it loses energy, for instance by emitting light or by bouncing a few fast members out of the system, the system's temperature increases. This is the opposite behavior to everything we are used to on earth, where things cool down by losing energy and heat up by absorbing it. Negative specific heat is no contradiction to thermodynamics, but rather is a consequence of thermodynamics when gravity is involved. Yet it means that something which on earth would be a violation of the Second Law routinely occurs in astrophysics: small regions spontaneously become hotter than their surroundings. And this is REALLY important; if it is not the key to the existence of life, it is at least an essential key. Spontaneous heating under gravitational contraction is why stars form, and the existence of stars that provide a steady source of heat and light is clearly vital to life. Without it, the only life one can imagine is the sort of stuff that clings to hot deep sea vents. But that stuff is also powered by the negative specific heat of self-gravitating systems, because this is why the center of the Earth is so hot. (Natural radioactivity also heats the Earth, as well as the Earth's own gravitational contraction; but the existence of heavy unstable elements is due to the first generation of stars in the universe.) -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 1 2006 14:47
Profile
IDers will point out that language is a product of intelligence. Well, arguably intelligence is just as much a product of language. But either way, they're too close for comfort. Yeah, I did read Johnson's stuff on information, and as I recall it was pretty bad. I've also read part of some ID book where the author pointed out happily, and at painstaking length, that much of the evidence cited in favor of evolution is also consistent with special creation. The dude seemed to have forgotten, really, that absolutely anything whatever would be consistent with special creation. Which is just another way of saying that special creation theory makes no predictions at all. The winsomedia.org site in Lenar's link offers links to books on Amazon, but no articles I could find. [ Thursday, June 01, 2006 14:53: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Guardians need help in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 1 2006 11:38
Profile
Hmmph. My squad leader missile Guardian in G2 is bogging down a bit in the Barzite lands. I lost an old Fyora to clawbugs in the Guarded Groves, and although recruiting two more Vlish afterwards was a good move, I have the distinct feeling that my creations and I have slipped relative to our enemies. I haven't been gaining experience very fast, so my skills haven't been climbing much. This may be partly because I'm nonaligned. Maybe everybody stalls a bit in this part of the game. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |