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| In response to the movie Expelled, the NCSE created a website called Expelled Exposed which, as the title suggests, shows how the film pretty much lied to get their point of view across. I was reading it today and there two things that I thought were really impressive. First is this article. Many Id proponents have claimed a conspiracy in science has closed the door to them, but this article shows that even ideas that are viewed very negatively in the scientific community can come to be accepted if one actually does the research. There's a paragraph near the end that I think summarizes the entire debate very well:
"There is no reason why intelligent design proponents cannot follow in
the footsteps of these distinguished scientists who overcame sometimes
considerable opposition, sometimes for a very long time, before their
scientific views prevailed. Unlike ID advocates, these researchers
didn’t skip past the research phase to try to influence the public
before they had scientific support. None of them formed groups to lobby
school boards to teach their views in the public schools; they just
buckled down and did the work. None of them drafted model legislation
or penned op-eds in newspapers and magazines decrying the supposed
persecution they suffered at the hands of The Establishment; they just
buckled down and did the work. None of them hired former Nixon
speechwriters or game-show hosts to compare their opponents to Hitler;
they just buckled down and did the work."
The second thing that got me thinking was this video that they had on their website. I've heard almost everything in there before, but there was one statement that I thought was really interesting. She said that anything that can grow can evolve. By this she meant that anything that can form on an embryo could, by a similar process, evolve. I never thought of it like that. How could something in the human body be irreducibly complex if everybody developed in small incremental steps before they were born?
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| The racists that existed between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's confuse me. The idea that Blacks are subhuman and are fit only to serve the "master race" is at least self consistent. But to actively hate a member of another race only because they are of another race is not consistent at all. I can't find anything in the proposition "blacks are inferior" that would justify "we should hate all blacks". I tried to put myself in the racist's shoes and figure it out, but I was at a loss. The only thing I could think of was that they needed a group to hate.
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| Whenever I read some science thing, regardless of topic, I often think about creationists. I wonder what taking a creationist approach to this subject would be like. So, basically, taking the argument from incredulity to the extreme in regards to a certain science. To illustrate how somebody with just a little bit of knowledge in an area can make something look extremely improbable, I will try to do my best to make a case against the possibility of television.
The televisionists have claimed that is possible to make a television, a device that can show video and sound with an input of only radio waves or electrical current. This is clearly impossible, and there are several problems with just about every step. These problems are largely due to the amount of information that is able to be sent. As anybody who has ever downloaded music or movies from the internet knows, a good downloading speed would be 50 kb per second. These downloads use the same technology that would be used in televisions, and so the rates should be comparable. To give them the benefit of the doubt, we will say that they could transmit 500 kb per second. This is not nearly enough information, as will be shown.
A bad digital camera takes pictures with a resolution of 1.3 megapixels. For sake of argument we will say that televisions have even less than that, just one megapixel of resolution. For every pixel a color must be specified. In reality each pixel uses about 3 subpixels, each of which can be one of three colors (red, green, or blue). This means that each pixel requires about 5 bits of information to specify a color. Therefore, for each picture, a bare minimum of 625 kb. This by itself is more than what can be delivered in a second, but there is more information that needs to be delivered in that second.
A television would require at a minimum 20 frames per second. But the transmission rate already can't deliver enough information for one picture, let alone 30. There is also the problem that sound must also be transmitted. even with the most generous of assumptions, television is nowhere near possible.
Of course, televisions exist. But this is to illustrate how even taking something that everybody knows exists and doing some careful misleading you can convince somebody who knows nothing of the subject that the idea is false. And this is only what I came up with last night while struggling with insomnia. I'm sure if my entire life was centered around disproving television I could come up with more ingenious problems.
So, how does television work if all this above is true? The biggest problem with my reasoning above is the rate at which information can be transfered. For somebody who downloads music 500 kb per second would be a blessing, but it is only because a very small amount of the bandwidth is going towards your download.When I check how much information my computer is receiving total, it is actually 54 Mb per second. But internet connections are not as fast as television connects I would imagine. The modem for the internet must handle outgoing information along with the incoming information, and often has to split time with multiple computers. So a television set is able to get far more information than 500 kb in a second.
Televisions are also able to use the information more efficiently than I have described. I'm no expert in this, but I know one method is to say what color several pixels are in a row. For example, if there was a row of 30 blues, instead of specifying each one to be blue, you would simply say that the next 30 pixels are blue. I'm sure that there are many tricks like this to use the information more efficiently.
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| There's a video on CNN.com that is titled "Sexting". It's obviously about kids sending naked photos of each other on their cell phones, but I was for some strange reason surprised to see that CNN put this is a negative tone. They introduce the idea of sexting by saying it's a "new dangerous trend". Yet they never explain how it's dangerous. They then talk about how it has led to charges against the kids. I fail to understand why taking a picture of yourself and sending it to somebody is illegal. Do they think they are protecting somebody from harm when they arrest innocent kids? I also noticed how at the end the 17-year-old girl that said it was "terrible" was really ugly. Maybe she's jealous because she knows that no guy would want to get a picture of her naked. All in all this "news" video made me wonder why people are so concerned about harmless things like this when there are way more serious problems with society, like religion.
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| Sorry for the lack of interesting posts, but my mind has been elsewhere. This is due to several reasons. Firstly, track is nearly over, and bad weather is coming in just at the wrong time. I'm continually frustrated by a freshman who is some sort of freak at everything. He's about 5' 8", and he can high jump 6'. This makes me look bad since I'm a junior, taller (slightly), and can only get 5' 7".
Secondly, and more importantly, I'm taking three AP exams in on May 6, 9, and 13. Interestingly, my confidence in my abilities decreases as they progress. May 6 is AP Probability and Statistics, which I should be able to dominate. May 9 is AP US History, which I believe I'll get a 4 or 5 on. I'm not too concerned about getting a 4, since I figure I'm going into the sciences and Caltech won't give a damn if I know about history as long as I can do science. Which leads to my biggest worry by far, AP Chemistry. We took a practice multiple choice AP exam, and I got half of the problems right. this would get me between a 3 and a 4 usually. Again, because i want to get into an excellent college in science, nothing less than a 5 will be acceptable. There are two additional problems. Firstly, AP Chemistry is just about the hardest AP test, since only the select of the select take it (according to this book I have). Secondly, my teacher, who has been teaching for over a dozen years, has never had a student get a 5. Then again, he usually has far smaller than average class sizes, but it's still not a good streak. To counter this I bought an AP Chemistry study book and plan on spending most of my free time until May 13 going through it. A minor point on this is that I have a "rival" in school in math and science, and he's taking AP Chemistry too, so that puts a little additional pressure on me to do well. and, to put a even more pressure on me, my teacher this year won't be teaching the AP class next year because the school hired a new teacher to teach it. It seems stupid to me that they would give the AP classes to a completely new teacher, especially when the two kids who took the test last year got 4's, and this teacher is really a nice guy (even though he's a YEC), so I feel like I should get a 5 to help vindicate his teaching ability.
The third thing is more positive than the previous two, and is more of a curiosity than a concern. About a week ago a girl asked me to prom for next year. This is surprising for a number of reasons:
1. She's attractive.
2. This is a girl asking me, and not vice verse.
3. This a year in advance.
4. Here is one of the more famous pictures of me:
Clearly this turn of events is more surprising than the Giants winning the Super Bowl. But this one is somewhat of a negative, since I now have to worry about her getting a boyfriend since we're not dating. If she gets a boyfriend close to prom than I might be left in the dust.
So, these are the reasons why my blogging has been rather lack-luster recently. Hopefully that photo makes up for it. If you want to see some more...interesting photos, you can see here (you must have Facebook to see it).
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