Physical Sciences

Take a look at the following movie (quicktime required). The movie will alternately flash a picture of a desk and a patterned block. Your job is to see if anything about the picture of the desk changes each time it flashes. Don't replay the movie when you get to the end; just stop. Did you notice any changes? Most people won't spot any changes at all when they watch this movie the first time. But watch the image as you press play again, and you'll see that the desk has changed significantly from the beginning to the end of the movie. I actually rotated it by two degrees at each point along…
Last week Kyoto came into effect. Apparently that was the signal for columns by a whole bunch of pundits who have two features in common: 1. they are manifestly ill-equipped to understand the science and 2. they are utterly certain that there is no such thing as global warming. Our first pundit is Michael Duffy in the Daily Telegraph informs us: The truth is we have no control over global warming, and in any case it's not a problem at all. The myth holds that carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is increasing, due mainly to industrial activities, and this…
Welcome to the 2004 Deltoid awards. Today we are giving out the Golden Rake Award, named in honour of Sideshow Bob and the rakes in the Simpsons Cape Feare episode: How many other series would waste valuable prime-time real estate by showing a man whacking himself in the face with a garden rake not once, not twice, but NINE TIMES?!? If ever there was a gag genius in its repetitive stupidity (progressing from funny to not so funny to the funniest thing ever), this is it---merely the sharpest cut in an entire episode that just plain kills. The award…
Casey Luskin, one of the folks behind the IDEA center, has written what is surely the most absurdly misaimed criticisms I have ever seen with his article, A Holiday Truce: A Holocaust Survivor Speaks Out. The purpose of his article is to point the finger at those of us who have compared those who deny the validity of evolution to those who deny the truth of the holocaust and say "shame, shame". Says Luskin: As the debate over intelligent design and Darwinian evolution has become increasingly publicized, some have unfortunately resorted to rhetoric which stirs hateful passions rather than…
Lavoisier group member Louis Hissink has a response to my post and John Quiggin's on the Lavoisier group. A summary cannot do it justice, so I will quote extensively: A quick scan of the blogosphere reporting on William Kininmonth's recent book launch on Monday 22 November by the Lavoisier Society showed many still retain a belief in man-made global warming. So let's get a little more scientific about this issue. As far as the earth is concerned, and from a geological perspective, 99% of the earth's mass is hotter than 1000 degrees Celsius, and 1% of the earth's mass cooler than 100…
Sometimes I think that there must be a qualifying exam in order to write for Tech Central Station. Fail the exam and you're in. They seem to have exams in at least physics, economics, statistics, and epidemiology. Tim Worstall, the author of today's article seems to have failed both the statistics and epidemiology exams. Worstall is criticizing a recent study published in the Lancet that found very roughly 100,000 excess deaths in Iraq after the invasion, almost all of which were violent. He writes: At the very least one would have to add The Lancet to that list of mainstream…
Rusty has posted another response on Junk DNA. It's a few days old but I'm just now getting around to answering it. If you're following along, you'll find Rusty's original post here and my response here. The basic assertion up for dispute is Rusty's test for creationism: Further research will reveal function for so-called Junk-DNA sequences. Although considered by evolutionists to be a closed case, the Creation Model predicts that currently held scientific opinion on this issue will eventually concede that function is inherent in the Junk-DNA sequence. The failure of this test would be a…