Which Indecipherable Script Am I?
Egyptian hieroglyphics (3000 B.C.E.)
You are EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS. You, mysterious
and obscure? Hardly. You think that you are
so cool with your logo-phonetic system and
thousands of years of obscurity. Now? We can
read you like an open book (of the dead). But
if it makes you feel any better, it took
scholars more than twenty-five years with the
help of the Rosetta Stone to figure you out.
Which Indecipherable Script Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
Clenched Fist Salute: Pixy Misa and Suzy (who has been kind enough to keep my absurdly long reference on her blogroll)
The latest Creationist “study” that claims to prove that the Earth is only 6,000 years old was performed by Ross Humphreys and his colleagues. He uses the diffusion rates of helium, escaping from some ancient zircons to “prove” a Young Earth. In a highly technical paper, he compares the diffusion rate of helium to the rates predicted: 1) by his “creation model,” versus 2) what he calls the “uniformitarian model.” Unsurprisingly, he claims that the data matches his creation model, and that the two differ by a factor of 100,000. In other words, if the earth is billions of years old, the data would match the red line (the “uniformitarian” or “evolution” model) . If only 6,000 years old, then the data would match the green line.
Isn’t that an impressive chart?
But his paper is filled with errors and incorrect assumptions. It’s bogus.
It took me, an educated layman, not a scientist, a long weekend to unravel them, which I could only do with Kevin Henke’s detailed response. Following are the biggest problems with Humphreys’ helium rate diffusion paper. Note that while 100,000 seems like a big number to explain, five compounding errors of a factor of ten can account for it (10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 100,000) .
(more…)
The very moment John Kevin Hines jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, he knew he’d made a mistake. …
Plummeting head-first toward the churning waters 220 feet below, he tried to scream, but the force of the descent sucked the air from his lungs. He felt an odd euphoria as winds buffeted his body. But to survive, he knew he had to right himself before hitting the water. At last, the former high school wrestler and football nose tackle tipped his head back, plunging below the surface feet first. Pain raced through his legs as the impact fractured an ankle and shattered two vertebrae in his lower back. Hines opened his eyes to a murky netherworld, his broken body racked by fierce currents in the 50-degree water. Still, he could see diffuse light above and headed for the surface 40 feet away.
“I remember it like it was yesterday: At the top, I took this huge gasp of air,” he said. “It’s like I was reborn that day.”
Hines was just 19.
Its majestic orange arch spanning San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge holds a dubious distinction as one of the world’s most popular suicide spots. Since 1937, bridge officials say, more than 1,300 people have made the leap, not counting those who went unnoticed or whose bodies were quickly swept out to sea.
Only 16 have survived.
Ack! The article is full of morbidly fascinating details about jumper injuries, occupations, psychology, etc.
Next time my Religious Right readers want to threaten me with “Hilary in ‘08″ if I don’t shut up … try to work GGate bridge jumping in instead. It’s even more horrifying.
Clenched fist salute: Ramblings Journal
Just Say No … t-shirts and products
Clenched Fist Salute: Beth
Secular Conservatives, Libertarians, South Park Republicans, Small Government Conservatives, and GOP Deadheads welcome.
Bill Ardolino: “Everyone has their political tipping point, and Bush’s promised veto of the new stem-cell bill approaches mine.” I’m with Bill on this. One “HundredPercent.” Read the whole thing; it’s not very long.
In the same post, Ardolino links to Bill Quick’s question: “And what was the last big issue that secular, small government GOP’ers won “big” under GWB?”
The Main Stream Bloggers have wholly failed us on the filibuster deal. They are a disgrace. Malkin, Kos, Krempasky, Josh Marshall, Captain Ed, Atrios, Hewitt, Kevin Drum, Powerline, and the rest have reduced themselves to narrow, knee-jerk partisan rantings. They predictably stake out a position precisely skewed one standard deviation to the left or right of their respective Official Party Line on every single issue.
They are incapable of original thought. They are unsuccessful 21st Century Turing machines, imitating human imagination, but not quite achieving it.
Let’s look at the filibuster deal in perspective. While I hesitate to agree with constituent emails read into the record by Tom Harkin, I’ll ask the question — Is nomination of judges the country’s top priority? Numero uno? The big enchilada? More critical to our security than the war on terror? More important to our economic health than competing with China and India? What about social security reform? Energy policy? Energy prices?
Of course not.
As we, the so-called “United” States of America, confront those issues, do we want our leaders to spend any time on them at all? Or do we prefer they negotiate judgeships 24×7? And, if they DO manage to squeeze in a few minutes to deal with issues of national security, the economy, or the future, do we want them to do that from the narrowest, most partisan, most divisive posture possible?
These questions are fair; and the answers are obvious. Nor are these questiond the exclusive province of Moonbats and squishy-soft liberals. Anyone with an ounce of patriotism, anyone who aspires to the smallest thought-leadership role, any responsible person with any audience whatsoever, should be able to figure out what position to take on this issue.
The filibuster deal is a good thing; it may not be the “salvation of the Republic” as the Senatorial blowhards claimed last night, but it is a positive thing.
For the Main Stream Bloggers to rant on and on about sell-outs, disappointments, cowards, Party traitors, etc. etc. is shameful. And why do they indulge in such divisive nonsense? Because, in a Pavlovian-like reaction, they have learned over time that harshness and vitriol sells, or at least draws traffic. Thus, in the guise of thoughtful political commentary, they regularly churn out manufactured controversy. Even in a simple, easy-to-evalute case like the filibuster deal, they can’t stop themselves from pumping their Sitemeters. It’s beneath contempt.
Hang up your MT control panels, guys. Just shut them off.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq and one of Washington’s most wanted men, has been wounded, a web posting said on Tuesday in an announcement that could mark a breakthrough against the two-year insurgency. The statement, which U.S. officials said could be a ruse, was posted on an Islamist site that often publicizes Zarqawi’s group. It was released on another day of violence in Iraq, with three U.S. soldiers and two Iraqis killed in car bombings.
“O nation of Islam… Pray for the healing of our Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi from an injury he suffered in the path of God,” said the posting by al Qaeda Organization for Holy War in Iraq.
“You are the beloved of the mujahideen, and may God heal you and make you steadfast,” the statement said.
The announcement follows unconfirmed reports this month that Zarqawi, a Jordanian for whom the Americans have offered a $25 million bounty, was wounded in fighting in western Iraq and had sought treatment at a hospital in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. Those reports followed the capture of one of Zarqawi’s drivers, an aide and his laptop computer during raids in western Iraq, when the U.S. military said it almost also caught Zarqawi. Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s overall leader, are Washington’s two most-wanted man.
Tuesday’s web posting did not say how or where Zarqawi was wounded, but urged his followers to pray for his recovery. The language used indicated his injuries could be severe.
“The injury of our leader is an honor and an incentive to tighten the noose on the enemies
I’ll pray for him. … Of course, I needn’t say what I’d pray for him.
Creationists annoy me because they are dishonest. They don’t do science. They do propaganda.
Read this comment from MC: “My post was about elitist control of the science dialog that happens in the public square.”
The poor Intelligent Design theorists, (honest, forthright, non-agenda-driven, non-religious thinkers all) have been driven from free and open scientific debate by an obscure cabal of “evil-utionist atheists.”
No. This is a complete and total falsehood, a lie. Here are a few comparisons:
In 1980, a physicist named Walter Alvarez observed a surprising layer of iridium laid down about 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs went extinct. From that, he hypothesized that a huge asteroid had collided with the earth, triggering a global catastrophe and causing the mass extinction. The scientific community, including paleontologists and geologists, was very dubious. Here was a physicist intruding on THEIR turf! (Yes, folks, scientists are parochial, opinionated, defensive, obstinate, and imperfect.) Stephen J. Gould wrote an extremely skeptical column, noting among other problems that the dinosaurs already seemed to be in decline BEFORE the alleged collision. Anyone can read still this column in one of Gould’s early books. The Op-Ed page of the New York Times sniffed derisively that scientists would do better to look for answers right here on earth, rather than invoking the deus ex machina of extra-terrestrial objects slamming into the earth to explain things. Throughout the “intelligentsia,” (those elements that MC claims control debate) skepticism and derision abounded.
What happened? Did Alvarez take his ideas to the Kansas Board of Education? Did he wage a PR campaign? Did he sponsor state referenda to push his point of view? Did he demand that high school geology textbooks carry stickers highlighting his views? Did he gnash his teeth publicly and demand to “teach the controversy?”
No. He, and other scientists, both those who agreed with him and those who vehemently disagreed, examined the facts, ran more tests, looked again at old data, etc. They literally dug into the earth, all over the globe, down to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (the so-called K-T layer) to determine how much iridium was there.
The results are well-known. Today, 25 years later, the asteroid impact is widely accepted as the explanation for the mass extinctions that marked the end of the Cretaceous. No referenda needed. No book-labels required. No “asteriod collision” museums had to be built. Somehow or other, Alvarez defeated the Gould-NYTimes establishment, those omnipotent controllers of scientific dialog.
And this is not an isolated case. In the early part of the 20th Century a German scientist, Alfred Wegener first proposed continental plate tectonics. Contradicting received wisdom, it took time for plate tectonics to be widely accepted. “Wegener’s ideas were very controversial because he didn’t have an explanation for why the continents moved, just that there was observational evidence that they had.” Today plate tectonics is a fact.
Another example, from human evolution. In the 1960’s, paleontologists had focused on ramapithecus, an extinct orangutan-like creature, as a probable human ancestor. Molecular biologist, notably Vince Sarich, looked at primates’ blood and said “No way. Humans are much more closely related to chimps than orangutangs. Ramapithecus is NOT our ancestor.” A lot of people were embarrassed; many held on longer than they should have; but notwithstanding strong personalities, prejudices, and a host of human failings, the data prevailed, and after some time, ramapithecus was universally acknowledged as a non-hominid.
There is no cabal. There is no secret group of “evil-utionists.” There is no “elistist control of scientific dialog,” not in the public square, not in the lab, not in the field, not in academic publishing. If Dembski or Behe have a good idea, show us the data.
Oh wait … I am all wet. There were no dinosaurs. Nothing happened 63 million years ago. There is no plate tectonics. Continents do not move over millions of years. There was no ramapithecus that lived fifteen million years ago. God did it all in seven days about 6,000 years ago. Alvarez, Wegener, Sarich, and the rest (me too, I suppose) are all part of the cabal. All these so-called scientific debates that have raged over the past centuries were a sham, a performance, staged as a set-up for the real purpose of suppressing Creationism in our time. Damn, now the evil secret is out.
Live now on all the cable new networks. Byrd just finished speaking. Warner on now. Both very self-congratulatory. I assume that both party’s leaderships will go along. “Senators will not filibuster except in extraordinary circumstances.”
3 nominees (Brown, Pryor, Owen) will be confirmed; these have been considered the “most extreme, most activist.” 2 others will not be confirmed.
REACTION UPDATE: I agree with Beth and Stephen Bainbridge. Why do all the other Righties have their whitie-tighties in a bunch?
Short-term, three of the “most extreme” nominees will get votes and presumably will be confirmed. It all comes down to “extraordinary circumstances,” doesn’t it? Let’s also admit that this is largely about the likely Supreme Court nominations. If Bush nominates anyone more responsible than Judge Roy Bean, the Dems will be hard-pressed to call it an “extraordinary circumstance.” And if they do it once, can they immediately do it again to a replacement nominee?
Of course, it IS a compromise, but that noted, it should work out fairly well.
Footnote: The Dem commenters at Kevin Drum’s blog are pissed. So are the Kossacks.
I don’t mean to get all Rodney King-ish, but why must ALL commentary, from both politcal parties consist of “We won and they lost. Yay!” or “We lost and they won. Boo!” ??? Is that it? Has there been a new civil war? Do we now have the Red States of America locked in a twisted, hateful, unfortunate geographically-required embrace with the rival Blue States of America? Is that how it works? Is there no possibility that (whatever your views, or whoever might have gotten a 51% advantage), perhaps a compromise is a good idea, you know, strictly from a ‘civil war avoidance’ perspective?
All the ranting and raving bloggers can go impale themselves on the anticipated spikes in their Sitemeters they hope to get from all their over-the-top rhetoric. Take a pill, guys.
Omar at Iraq the Model summarizes al-Iraqiyah TV’s report on the Wolf Brigade’s sweep of western Baghdad.
One of the Creationists’ favorite claims is that “there are no transitional fossils” between one species and another.
Not true. False. A lie. Here is the obligatory list of hundreds of transitional forms at talkorigins.org.
A careful reader might note that in the title and the first two sentences I seem to have been hopelessly imprecise, shifting from transitional “species,” to “fossils,” to “forms.” Sorry, it was quite intentional.
What is a species? Among living organisms, a species is a group of individuals that breed exclusively with each other. While perhaps a little too general, that definition is roughly correct and generally agreed upon — for animals that are still around.
This post is about the evolution of species in the past, their fossil remains, and whether or not “transitions” have been found. As I noted, the Creationists like to make statements like “there is no fossil evidence of transitional forms between one species and another.” That is a precisely worded statement. If you point out to a Creationist extinct fossil species A, B, and C, in which fossil B is obviously transitional between A and C, the Creationist replies, “Ah, but A is one species, B is another species, and C is a third species. What about the transitions between them?”
Interesting question. Not a good question, but interesting.
You need to think about fossils (which are dug out of the ground without any helpful labels on them) and how they are identified by paleontologists. First, no fossils of any sort, even of the same species, have sex with each other. Fossils are mineralized remains of hard body parts like teeth and bones (and once-in-great-while some soft parts). Fossils do not interbreed. All kidding aside, it is quite impossible to tell which fossil forms could have interbred.
Let’s return briefly to living species. Many species differ from each other only reproductively, or in behaviors, or in exterior appearance. There are dozens of species of warblers in North America, distinguished only in these ways. If you examined the skeletal remains of different warblers, you could not tell them apart (absent DNA testing). The only point being that multiple species can have what we can call “one skeleton.” But animals with different skeletons are surely different species. In other words, distinctions between species occur within the same form (or bony form, at any rate), but different bony forms are SURELY different species.
Back to fossils. Since they are dug out of the ground without labels, and they can’t have sex with each other, how can paleontologists assign them to “species?” It may seem obvious, but only according to “how they look.” There’s no choice. And it is not all bad. If two skeletal remains are visibly different, then the two creatures that occupied those skeletons were SURELY different species. So we are stuck with a “paleontological (or morphological) species,” which, if anything, may be too broad, but not too narrow.
As fossils are dug up, they are thus identified as “species” based on their characteristics. If you have 10 fossils of extinct bears, for example, and those fossils are invariably incomplete, you might group three into species A, another four into species B, and the last three into species C. We’ll presume that the A species are the most primitive and that “C” are most derived (not “most advanced,” please). Let’s say that the four “B” specimens appear intermediate between “A” and “C.” Now, if scientific names were designed to win internet arguments, species B would surely be called “A-to-C-transitionus shut-the-f*ck-uppus,” but that’s not how names are assigned. So the Cretinists howl that “There are no transitional fossils between A and B, nor between B and C.”
Years go by, and more fossils are unearthed. Let’s say we now have dug up 50 fossils from this group of bears. Within the description of the original “A” species are, let’s say, twelve fossils, but seven are clearly distinctive and different from the other five. Some bright paleontologist publishes a paper denoting a “new” species, called “A1,” which (by the way) includes two of the original “A” fossils. In the ursine paleontology community, this is big news; the guy in question gets kudos from his peers, but the Cretinists howl: “They don’t know what they are doing!!!! Are those two specimens A, or are they A1? Those silly scientists keep changing their tune. Huh? huh? huh?”
Similarly, the other 38 fossils now available are examined, and regrouped into species B, B1, C, and D. Through careful examination, paleontologists determine that fossils from species B represent a side-branch, and that the main line of descent follows B1-C-D. Of course, the Cretinists misquote some scientist who says, “I do not now believe that C is descended from B.”
They also continue to say: “There are no transitional forms between A, A1, B, B1, C, and D. Those are all DIFFERENT species.” And so it goes. Of course, species “B1″ are intermediate between the the previously recognized “B” and “C.” And so forth. But it gets even better. If you look at the detailed literature, what are paleontologists arguing about? You’ll find that they are debating whether specimens 45, 66, and 87, (now categorized as “D”) are perhaps distinguishable from the other “D” specimens because they are TRANSITIONAL WITH C, and perhaps deserve a new species, called “C1.”
The so-called “lack of transitional fossils” is a wholly misleading, intentionally deceptive and dishonest claim. The process that I have summarized above does take several paragraphs to describe. It doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker or in a sound bite. It could surely be described more eloquently and more precisely. But it is not rocket science. Any fair-minded person with normal intelligence and a high scholl education can understand what I am describing. It is not terribly difficult; it is not a secret; it is not evil. Yet, creationists do not and cannot respond in any thoughtful manner. They just keep repeating “There are no transitional fossils.”
Ken Ham has spent 11 years working on a museum that poses the big question when and how did life begin? Ham hopes to soon offer an answer to that question in his still-unfinished Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. The $25 million monument to creationism offers Ham’s view that God created the world in six, 24-hour days on a planet just 6,000 years old. The largest museum of its kind in the world, it hopes to draw 600,000 people from the Midwest and beyond in its first year. Ham, 53, isn’t bothered that his literal interpretation of the Bible runs counter to accepted scientific theory, which says Earth and its life forms evolved over billions of years.
Ham said the museum is a way of reaching more people along with the Answers in Genesis Web site, which claims to get 10 million page views per month and his “Answers … with Ken Ham” radio show, carried by more than 725 stations worldwide.
“People will get saved here,” Ham said of the museum. “It’s going to fire people up. If nothing else, it’s going to get them to question their own position of what they believe.”
Ham is ready for a fight over his beliefs based on a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament.
“It’s a foundational battle,” said Ham, a native of Australia who still speaks with an accent. “You’ve got to get people believing the right history - and believing that you can trust the Bible.”
Among Ham’s beliefs are that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, a figure arrived at by tracing the biblical genealogies, and not 4.5 billion years, as mainstream scientists say; the Grand Canyon was formed not by erosion over millions of years, but by floodwaters in a matter of days or weeks and that dinosaurs and man once coexisted, and dozens of the creatures including Tyrannosaurus Rex were passengers on the ark built by Noah, who was a real man, not a myth.
I can’t wait to visit.
New Bloc in Iraq Ends Boycott of Government
More than 1,000 Sunni Arab clerics, political leaders and tribal heads ended their two-year boycott of politics in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq on Saturday, uniting in a Sunni bloc that they said would help draft the country’s new constitution and compete in elections.
Formation of the group comes during escalating violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that has raised the threat of sectarian war. The bloc represents moderate and hard-line members of the Association of Muslim Scholars, the Iraqi Islamic Party and other main groups of the disgruntled Sunni minority toppled from dominance when U.S.-led troops routed Hussein in April 2003.
Sunnis have remained on the sidelines of the Iraqi government since then. Most Sunnis boycotted national elections in January that put the long-suppressed Shiite majority in charge. Meanwhile, a Sunni-led insurgency appears to have become increasingly unpopular among ordinary Iraqis as the death toll from bombings and other attacks climbs.
“The country needs Sunnis to join politics,” Adnand Dulaimi, a government-appointed overseer of Sunni religious sites and a leader of the drive to draw Sunnis into the rebuilding of Iraq, declared at the conference Saturday where the bloc was assembled. “The Sunnis are now ready to participate.”
“The last elections brought a major turnaround in the political representation of Sunnis,'’ Dulaimi said. “We think it’s time to take steps to save Iraq’s identity, and its unity and independence. . . . Iraq is for all, and Iraq is not sectarian.'’
“I call on Sunnis to unite their voices and get ready to take part in the next election,'’ said Ahmed Abdul Ghafur Samarrai, a moderate in the Association of Muslim Scholars, the most vocal Sunni opposition group.
U.S. officials and leaders of the new Iraqi government have said that including Sunnis in the political process is essential to ending the insurgency.
The most loved and feared of Iraqi security forces
One of the most encouraging reports from Iraq I’ve read in recent months. If the war there is to be won, it will be the Wolf Brigade and similar Iraqi forces that win it.
Abul Waleed rifled through a pile of papers, considering the latest accusations against the elite brigade of Iraqi police commandos he leads from a dusty fortress.
The complaints against the Wolf Brigade were the usual: excessive force, renegade patrols, kidnapping, murder. The charges came from Iraq’s most powerful Sunni Muslim leaders, and Abul Waleed clearly relished reading them. It’s precisely this take-no-prisoners reputation that’s made his Wolf Brigade the most feared and revered of all of Iraq’s nascent security forces.
“The Muslim Scholars Association? They’re infidels,” Abul Waleed said, tossing his detractors’ complaints into the wastebasket. “The Islamic Party? Humph. More like the Fascist Party.”
No matter how many complaints about heavy-handedness pile up on Abul Waleed’s desk, there’s no changing the fact that the Wolf Brigade rules public opinion in a country desperate for Iraqi heroes. With their televised humiliation of terror suspects and their dapper uniforms, the Wolf Brigade restores some of the national pride stripped away by war and foreign occupation.
While the nation’s fledgling police and armed forces are derided as corrupt or incompetent, the Wolf Brigade is the exception. Their logo is a snarling wolf, and their TV show, “Terrorists in the Grip of Justice,” is the most watched program in the country. Harassed parents silence noisy children with threats to call the Wolves. Housewives swoon over their “broad shoulders” and “toughness.”
“Every time I see them in the street, I feel safe,” said Ahmed Kanan, 25, who works at a menswear shop in Baghdad. “I feel that we have a country with a government.”
…
Standing outside their ramshackle barracks one recent day, members of the Wolf Brigade preferred to focus on their adoring public. With pride, they described the reaction they get when they don ski masks and zip through Baghdad streets with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and machine guns in the backs of their trademark blue-and-white pickups.One time, an old woman came over and started to kiss us,” said Mustafa Mohsin, a cherub-faced 18-year-old commando.
“Yeah, he was mad because she wasn’t younger,” cracked one his commanders.
Even when Iraqis first shrink in fear at the sight of armed men tooling around the city, there is a palpable change when they notice the unique logo of the Wolf Brigade. Drivers honk, children cheer and street vendors ply them with falafel and bottles of water.
A 35-year-old commando named Majed Bilal put it simply: “Because we love them, they love us.”
I can’t wait for Riverbend and Raed Jarrar to start complaining about them.
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pol·it·bu·ro n. The chief political and executive committee of a Communist party.
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