I watched the debate Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig held on Friday, February 21, 2014 on the topic of god and cosmology. I thought it was a good one and I will spend a few posts exploring some of the issues for the benefit of those people without a physics background who may have been a little fogged by some of the technical issues that came up.
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The remote rocky outpost in the Pacific Ocean known as Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is the source of several mysteries that puzzle people to this day. One is how what began as a lush place with dense tropical forests became almost completely denuded of all its trees, transforming it into a dusty wasteland that is now home to about 5,000 residents.
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That journals can sometimes be fooled into publishing nonsense papers has been well established in some high-profile cases but these tended to be seen as isolated instances that were done deliberately, with the papers carefully constructed to prove a point.
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Via Maggie Koerth-Baker I learned something quite surprising, that there exists a type of bacteria called Pseudomonas syringae that causes disease in plants but can also help turn cold water rapidly into ice. And by rapidly, I mean really rapidly, in seconds. Watch what happens as the bacteria are inserted into a bottle of cold water.
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Carroll gives both short and much longer versions of his recollections of the debate and that the recorded version should be available online shortly. (Reader cafink was physically present and you can read his reflections here.)
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Many people are unable to speak, either from birth or due to something that happened later in life. Thanks to modern technology, we now have voice synthesizers that enable them to translate their written words into sounds. Stephen Hawking is perhaps the person whom we are most familiar with who uses this.
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There were several commenters who disagreed with my assertion in an earlier post that belief in both god and evolution by natural selection are incompatible and forces one to choose one or the other. They pointed out that there were large numbers of people who believed in both god and evolution or that the tremendous suffering that occurs in nature was incompatible with only a loving omnipotent god or that I was being parochial and equating all religious people with the young Earth Christians in the US.
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Via Machines Like Us, I came across this video of a crow (named 007) solving an extremely difficult puzzle. According to this article: [Read more…]
Someone I know said that a friend of his had spoken of penguins as being frightening creatures. He was puzzled by this and upon questioning him realized that he thought that penguins were large animals, roughly the size of an adult human. [Read more…]