ScienceBlogs recently branched out and opened up a German-language edition of ScienceBlogs in cooperation with a German media firm. Over at the in-house blog Page 3.14, our blogging goddess, Ginny,…
Sal Strikes Again! Fourier Transforms and Advanced Creation Science
Astute readers will remember a couple of encounters I had with Sal Cordova from Uncommon Descent a few months ago (here, in the comments, and here). Not too long after that, Sal made a fairly big deal about the fact that he was returning to grad school, and had to stop blogging at UD because the dastardly darwinists would damage his academic prospects if he continued. He played the standard creationist-martyr role, poor guy, persecuted by
all the horrible non-believers. Naturally, it didn’t last long. He’s got his own blog now, called “Young Cosmos”, where he writes his usually pathetic quote-mining, plus what he calls “Advanced creation science”. Naturally, advanced creation science involves doing very, very bad math. In fact, so far, he’s doing the worst math – which, as you’ll of course recall, is no math. To be specific, he’s spouting off about math, without actually doing any.
Groups and Symmetry
In the last post, I talked about what symmetry means. A symmetry is an immunity to some kind of transformation. But I left the idea of transformation informal and intuitive. In this post, I’m going
to move towards formalizing it.
Friday Recipe: Beef Chili
I recently started eating beef again, after 18 years of abstaining. Last weekend, I made a big batch of Chili using beef, and it was fantastic. So I thought that…
Newton? Einstein? Morons!
Isaac Newton was a total nutjob. Did you know that he tried to pop his own eyeball out with a knitting needle as a part of an experiment? That he nearly blinded himself staring into the sun? That he was an avid alchemist?
Why do we pay so much respect to a person who was clearly mentally IMBALANCED? Why would anyone take such a total lunatic seriously? It can’t be because of science – his science was a sloppy mess that he had a hard time explaining to anyone else.
The only reason we look on him as such a figure of respect is because we’re told to. Scientists and mathematicians are fascinated by this figure of lunacy, and placed him on a pedestal. The rest of us accept what they tell us because they’re scientists, right? They know who was really smart. But is that good science? Or is it just insane hero worship?
The way to tell is to look at the science. Newton’s science was a mess – a hodge-podge of never-before-seen mathematics, mixed with sloppy experiments performed between his alchemical studies.
Look at Newton’s so-called “law of universal gravitation”. It ASSUMES that the LAWS OF MATHEMATICS can accurately describe the LAWS OF NATURE, and that the LAWS OF NATURE are the same everywhere. I won’t go into detail about it, but it should be clear that anyone who actually takes the time to think about it that the whole “law of gravity” is full of basic flaws in both the assumptions and the methodology used to devise this so-called law.
What is Symmetry?
As I said in the last post, in group theory, you strip things down to a simple collection of values and one operation, with four required properties. The result is a simple structure, which completely captures the concept of symmetry. But mathematically, what is symmetry? And how can something as simple and abstract as a group have anything to do with it?
From Sets to Groups: Deep Meaning in Simple Constructs
The point of set theory isn’t just to sit around and twiddle our thumbs about
the various definitions we can heap together. It’s to create a basis on which we
can build and study interesting things. A great example of that is something
called a group. Once we’ve built up sets enough to be able to understand a set of values and an operator, we’re able to build an amazing deep and interesting construction, called a group.
Back when I started this blog, one of the first topics that I
wrote about was group theory. I was just looking back over that
series of posts, and frankly, they sort of stink. I’ve leaned a lot about
how to write for a blog in the time since then, and so I’d like to go back
and rewrite it. I’ve never reposted any of the group theory material, so
it should also be new to most readers.
IP: Real or Bogus?
There’s been some talk among the sciencebloggers about the idea of intellectual property, and Bora over at “A Blog Around the Clock” asked me to convert
my thoughts into a post. It’s a serious topic, which is worth giving some deep consideration, and it’s
something that I’ve given a lot of thought to. Back when I was at IBM, I worked on some projects that were
internal and confidential, and also spent several years working on open-source. I’ve got two software
patents to my name. I didn’t do any of that lightly; I spent a lot of time thinking through the morality
of what I was doing, and I’ve been careful to stick with what I think is right.
From Sets to Numbers: Climbing Up to the Rationals
When last we left off, I’d used set theory to show how to construct the natural numbers; and then from the natural numbers, I showed how to construct the integers. Now, we can take the next step in building
up the full tower of numbers, showing how if we’ve got the natural numbers defined in sets, we can define
the rational numbers using sets and our constructed integers.
Billy's Best Buddy Billy: Order isn't order unless Billy or Billy say it's order!
An alert reader pointed out that William Brookfield posted a response to
my two part debunking of his argument for design based on a mangling of the second law of thermodynamics. I debated whether it was worth responding to; Mr. Brookfield’s got so little readership that I never noticed his response in my referals, even though it was posted on July 3rd! I check my referals regularly (I’m obsessive about seeing who is linking to my blog), and I’ve never seen ICON-RIDS show up.
But, today, I’m sitting in the hospital while my mother has knee surgery; I’m bored; and I have a throbbing headache. So I’m not up to doing much that requires any serious exercise of my brain. So mocking a moron seems right up my alley this afternoon.