A brief disclaimer before I start. I do not read Uncommon Descent. I didn't check it before writing my post yesterday. So I didn't know about the content of Dembski's…
Quick Critique: Dembski and Marks in IEEE Journal
As lots of you have heard, William Dembski and Robert Marks just had a
paper published in an IEEE journal. In the last couple of days, I’ve received about 30
copies of the paper in my email with requests to analyze it.
My biggest criticism of the paper is how utterly dull it is. It’s obvious
how they got it published – they removed anything that’s really interesting from it. It’s
a rehash of the stuff they’ve written before, stripped of any content that directly hints
at the anti-evolution part of their claims – which leaves a not-particularly-interesting
paper on search algorithms.
I’m not going to rehash my primary criticisms of Dembski’s approach here – I’ve done it lots of times before, most recently in this post, which critiques a very closely related paper by D&M. In fact, this paper
is really just an edited version of the one I critiqued in that post: it’s that paper with all of the intelligent-design speak removed.
Friday Random Ten, August 14
Peter Hamill, "The Unconscious Life": A track from an amazing live performance. In general, I'm not a big fan of live recordings - you really need to be there for…
Disco Goes Digital
It sometimes seems like every day, some “intelligent design” bozo comes out with
another book rehashing the same-old crap. I usually ignore it. But this time, I felt
like the promotional materials for one of the new books really stepped right into my
part of the world, rhetorically speaking, and so I figured I should give it a
quick smackdown.
The book in question is Stephen C. Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell”. Meyer’s argument
basically comes down to one that is seems like we’ve heard and dealt with a thousand times already. There’s stuff in the cell which looks kinda-sorta like a machine if you look at it in the right way, and since machines were designed, therefore so were cells.
If that’s all he said, I’d just ignore him. Why rehash the same old shit? But no. This time, the DI needed to add a youtube video, which makes some amazingly strong, unsupported claims.
The official description of this is “This animation shows how the digital information encoded in DNA directs protein synthesis inside the cell and provides a unique look at the evidence for intelligent design as described in Dr. Stephen C. Meyers book Signature in the Cell”. The soundtrack, if you pay attention to it, repeats that claim several times in several ways: that DNA is specifically digital information, and that therefore the processes that operate on DNA are effectively digital computations, and since everyone knows that a digital computer required intelligent humans to design it, it’s impossible that the “digital computer” in the cell evolved.
The Chevy Volt Gets 230 mpg? Only if you use bad math.
Here’s a quick bit of obnoxious bad math. I saw this myself in a link to an AP article via Salon.com, and a reader sent me a link
to the same story via CNN. It’s yet another example of what I call a metric error: that is, the use of a measurement in a way that makes it appear to mean something very different than what it really means.
Here’s the story. Chevy is coming out with a very cool new car, the Volt. It’s
a hybrid with massive batteries. It plugs in to your household electricity when you’re home to charge its batteries. It operates as an electric car until its batteries start to get low, and then it starts running a small gas motor to power a generator. It’s a very cool idea. I’m honestly excited about cars like the volt – and Google helped develop the technology behind it, which biases me even more in its favor. So you’d expect me to be very supportive of the hype around it, right? I wish I could. But GM has decided that the best way to promote it is to use bad math to tell lies to make it look even better than it really is.
Chevy has announced that for city driving, the Volt will get gas mileage of 230 miles per gallon.
That’s nonsense. Pure, utter rubbish.
I am the antichrist. No, really!
I normally try to ignore things like this, but this is just too funny.
In general, I find arguments like this to be extremely silly. This is, basically, like
playing with gematria – only instead of doing real gematria (which can be quite silly enough),
it’s like our friend “Gotcha” – mixing systems and screwing things up until you get the results
you want.
Lots of the particularly crazy strain of Christians really, desperately want to believe
that Barack Obama is the antichrist. They want an explanation for how this black man with
a muslim name could possible have actually been elected – they don’t believe it could possibly
have happened honestly. And their doctrine requires the antichrist to come soon. Combine
those two, and you’ve got what, for them, is a sort of perfect storm.
Which gives us things like this. For more mockery, see beneath the fold.
The Pentatonic is Fundamental: a Video Demo
As long-time readers know, I'm an amateur musician, from a very musical family. My sister is a music teacher, and my brother used to be a professional french horn player…