Debate still rages among the ignorant

The LA Daily News posted an article about Darwin in which they immediately drew the fallacious parallel between evolution and atheism, basically right from the get-go. This is the very beginning of it:

Around Hollywood and the rest of the U.S., billboards carry the messages "Imagine No Religion" and "Praise Darwin - Evolve Beyond Belief."

Across the Atlantic, hundreds of buses traveling the roads of England are plastered with the sign "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

As scientists and organizations around the world prepare to mark Charles Darwin's 200th birthday on Feb. 12, his theory of natural selection presented in "On the Origin of Species" still arouses a tempest of controversy - mostly centered on the question of whether life is the result of chance and natural processes or divine design.

So immediately I got annoyed. I posted in the comments section, along with many others who took issue with the whole “raging debate” angle of the article, that implies the long-disproven ‘theory in crisis’ argument creationists often insist on making. To make up for the long time without any content, I’m going to go ahead and list my favorite comments with terrible arguments and/or insane statements in them, linking to appropriate responses within the comment, or reacting in red double brackets if a single link won’t really work.

1. Dale Z: “Let''s either 1) Some divinity created us...OR 2) The sun, shining on a rock spontaneiouly generated molecular life. Hmmmm, even if one were not religious....option "1" is more likely. I really don't see why there is a debate.” [[me neither, but it’s a shame you don’t understand why]]
2. simply: “James is simply "delusional" - as is any darwinist. they believe their world is flat, when the evidence contradicts their conclusions!!! [[irony overdose detected]] science is defended, but when one takes a look (which we all should) one realizes that it is just pseudo science that they believe in.”
3. Jonathan Razon: “It is my earnest prayer that God will enlighten the mind of those people advocating the rejection of God's existence and instead praising Darwin. "Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are saying......"”[[this is just amazingly condescending and arrogant]]
4. Danny: “It's actually nice to read an article that gives the Intelligent Design community a chance. I'm one of the "wackos" who believes the universe is far too complex to be accidental. Have you heard of irreducible complexity?”
5. M Bergeron: “The teaching of evolution in the states is all about the capitalist publishers who have made tons of money passing off a theory as if it were fact.” [[he then goes on to insist the story would be much different if creationists were allowed to indoctrinate in public school, as if church isn’t enough. Uh, yeah, it’d be different, as in more-people-brainwashed-into-rejecting-established-science different]]
6. lll: “darwin was an idiot.
   it is proven scientifically the time for selection process to turn the nearest creature of humans into human being is more than the scientific age of earth and solar system.” [[now we reached the ones who are just randomly making things up]]
7. Craig: “there is enough evidence that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead to stand up in a modern day court of law.” [[…what?]]
8. JBS: “Darwin does absolutely nothing to explain how any of these species that naturally select traits got here in the first place. Let me repeat that--ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.” [[Uh, firstly, Darwin’s dead. Secondly, species don’t “naturally select [their own] traits”. Nature (the environment) does that. Thirdly, evolution is part of biology. You know, biology: The study of living things. Any special reason you’re demanding for something within the study of living things to explain events that occurred prior to the origin of life?]]
9. garf: “There is a physics theory that says anything left on its own will fall into a state of randomness.
   In other words stars are burning out and mountains are falling down. How then would life achieve higher and higher levels of order when everything else in the universe is doing the opposite?”
10. Regulas: “The debate continues because the non believers and so called atheists do have a god, it's Darwin. [[These people are so simple-minded that they can’t see anything except through the lens of “competing religion”]] The tree huggers have a messiah, Al Gore and their cult is global warming. Both of these are lies but Darwinism is straight from Satan himself in his on going effort to destroy our faith in the the creator, God. [[see also]] The same science the darwinians praise so much has already shown that the simplest one celled organism is so complex the odds of it ever just coming into existence by chance is so large it is impossible. Darwin himself denounced his own theory, I repeat, theory of evolution as a falsehood before he died. [[Even Answers in Genesis is willing to admit this argument is nonsense]]
    I brush the dirt off my feet after trying to convince one of these non believers their is a creator and you will meet him one day unless you choose not to like they do. I feel sorry for them and their lack of faith. [[arrogant fool]]

Okay, ten is more than enough; I’d be here all day if I were to point out everything that was dumb in those comments. I did refute a lot more stuff than is written here in those comments, if you want to take a look there.

Our galaxy's a lot bigger than we thought and more interesting discoveries

(via Bad Astronomy)

In case you didn't know, the center of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole. Here's some perspective: this black hole is 4 million times the mass of our sun, but since there are about 200 billion stars in our galaxy, the mass of this black hole is actually 0.002% of the mass of the galaxy. In other words, if the entire population of Earth represented the total mass of our galaxy, the mass of the black hole would be smaller than the population of Kansas City.

Using a bunch of telescopes around the Earth, astronomers have discovered that our sun orbits this black hole a lot faster than originally thought. Instead of 220 km/s, it actually orbits at 270 km/s. That's over a hundred thousand miles per hour faster!

So what does this mean? Well, since it is the combined gravity of everything in the galaxy between the sun and that black hole that determines that speed, this difference in speed indicates that our galaxy is a full 50% bigger than we originally thought! We used to think that the Andromeda galaxy was the biggest 'in town', but with this new discovery, we're apparently about the same size.

Oh, and also, we also discovered that the Milky Way actually has four spiral arms and not two like we used to think. So we're a lot bigger and we just discovered two more arms. We're ready to take on the world universe.

Microsoft patents subscriber PC plan

In an astonishing move, Microsoft patented what they call a "Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience" (oh, Marketing had fun with that one), which is verbal sleight-of-hand (sleight-of-mouth, if you will) for charging you for the amount of hardware resources that you use, as opposed to you paying one price when you take a computer home, and then, you know...owning it.

I know a lot of companies are realizing they can make more money this way, but this is really going too far. People want to own the stuff they buy. Without even mentioning the ethical and privacy implications the 'phone-home' infrastructure required to even make something like this possible would have, nobody is going to want to pay by the cycle for using their computer. Microsoft still has a sizable market share, and if they were to switch over to this in a big way, it would have a massive chilling effect on innovation of new technologies. After all, this is a system that penalizes power users, similar to the ridiculous bandwidth cap that Comcast imposed on its subscribers with the scarcest of prior notice.

The people who come up with the great ideas are going to be a lot less likely to do so with the technologies of companies whose message to them seems to be "Hey, take it easy there." Keep it up, guys. The USA is already practically in the third world of Internet access, why not do the same to the hardware end of things, right?

Surprise, surprise: speed cameras easily fooled

Maryland high-schoolers have been messing with teachers/classmates they don't like by creating fake license plates, sticking them onto their cars, and then deliberately speeding through spots where speeding cameras are set up, getting tickets sent to the victim as if they were speeding. The fake plates are obvious to personal inspection, but indiscernable to the cameras.

While this is ultimately hilarious, the more serious message here is that impersonal eye-in-the-sky surveillance being used to catch crimes is doomed to failure. Until the machines are good enough to outsmart thirteen year-olds, we probably shouldn't be ticketing people based on their judgment. In the meantime, we have this gem.

The Montgomery County Police said they have not seen or heard of this prank occurring but said they will keep an eye out for people committing the crime.

Well, alright then! I don't know about you, but I'm put at ease. By the way, officers, how exactly do you plan on distinguishing between the average speeder and someone who is deliberately and maliciously speeding in order to get some unsuspecting third party a ticket?

RIAA gives up on suing music downloaders

After several years of futility, the Recording Industry Association of America has finally realized that they're not going to scare everyone away from downloading music by hunting down and suing individual people (35,000 since 2003, apparently). So are they going to just chill out and find something more worthwhile to focus their time and energy on? Well, not quite.

Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

This is kind of like trying to get the people who fill potholes to be the same guys who give out speeding tickets. Not only that, but how exactly does the RIAA expect ISPs to detect this? There is no way for an ISP to pull this off in any way that isn't easily-defeated by users. Yet another waste of time. This is how you eliminate illegal music downloading, by the way.

Recommended Blogs section revamped and Add This button added

I just realized today that Blogger has a built-in 'gadget' for a list of blogs that includes a fun little icon, and the title of the most recent post to it, dynamically-displayed. So I quickly replaced my generic link list with that gadget, and I think it looks great.

In addition, I grabbed a versatile sharing button from Add This and plopped it into the Other Links section, while also spacing out the list items in that list a bit and removing some CSS that apparently was completely unnecessary. Oh well, looks good to me.

A few new aliases for this blog

I recently noticed that tinyURL now allows you to choose the string of characters and the end of the shortcut URL (provided they aren't taken, of course). So, I jumped at the chance and created a few 'shortcuts' to this blog that take a bit less time to type out than this full URL:

1. www.tinyurl.com/clarusvisum
2. www.tinyurl.com/cvblog

That's all for now.

Who originally came up with the "War on Christmas" nonsense? The answer may surprise you

It wasn't any group of insecure religious nuts who first started talking about this, no sir. It was in fact a group of insecure racist nuts.

Back during the culture wars of the 1990s, Peter Brimelow, then a Fortune magazine editor, grew incensed with the increasing use of the phrase “Happy Holidays” by retailers like Amazon.com. “I just got real interested in the issue,” Brimelow told The Daily Beast, “because I noticed over the years there was this social shift taking place where people no longer said ‘Merry Christmas.’”

In his 1995 book, Alien Nation, Brimelow argued that the influx of “weird aliens with dubious habits” from developing nations was eroding America’s white Christian “ethnic core,” and in turn, sullying its cultural underpinnings. The War on Christmas was, in his view, a particularly pernicious iteration of the multicultural “struggle to abolish America.”

But hey, is there really that much of a difference these days? Xenophobia is xenophobia. Only someone who is very insecure would care about their proprietary holiday greeting being replaced with a greeting that includes everyone celebrating something this time of year. I mean, just think about the kind of mental state it takes to get so inflamed at the notion of a custom being changed to be more inclusive. Some people would just rather we be divided, I suppose.

Swedish body-snatchers...sort of

A group of neuroscientists in Sweden have achieved the illusion of "body-swapping". It's not quite as sci-fi as it sounds; basically, these guys have succeeded in completely fooling people into thinking that inanimate 'bodies', like those of mannequins, were in fact their own bodies.

In one experiment, the team fitted the head of a mannequin with two cameras connected to two small screens placed in front of volunteers' eyes, so that they had the same view as the mannequin.

When the mannequin's camera eyes and a participant's head were directed downwards, the participant saw the mannequin's body where the person would normally have seen their own body.

The researchers created the illusion of body-swapping by touching the stomach of both the mannequin and the volunteer with sticks. The person saw the mannequin's stomach being touched while feeling (but not seeing) a similar sensation on their own stomach. As a result, the person developed a strong belief that the mannequin's body was actually their own.

Poking people in the stomach with sticks...for science! How many people can say they made a breakthrough, and got paid, for poking people with sticks?

Even more interestingly:

This illusion worked even when two people looked different or were of different sexes.

I can't help but wonder how many male subjects instinctively reached for their chests upon being 'swapped' into a female body.

And then there's this:

It did not work when a non-humanoid object -- such as a chair or large block -- was used.

Now this makes me wonder where the 'stomach' on a chair is. Is it on the cushion, or maybe the lower part of the back, but the front side of the back? You know, where it's technically still the back, but it's the forward-facing part, so it's more like the front?

I'm weird.

A crappy reindeer game

A zoo in Illinois is selling, from its gift shop, "christmas ornaments handcrafted out of reindeer dung". Now, I know what you're thinking: "How do I know it's really reindeer dung? They aren't going to shortchange me with inferior dung, are they?

Well, don't you worry about that; they will provide a certificate of authenticity with each all-natural ornament. You can either have your dried chunk of reindeer feces clear-coated or "rolled in glitter". Imagine, for only five dollars you can have a ball of glittery reindeer turds!

The newspaper said Friday that while reindeer are not small animals, their waste products come out in small chunks suitable for the branches of a tree.

Hey, thanks for letting me know, nameless newspaper. I was thinking of just putting it where the star goes until I got that tip.