[the question asked was "How many of you believe in evolution?"]
I mentioned the other day that the Chick tract Big Daddy has been updated; today I'll talk about the differences a little bit. It's rather interesting. The original Big Daddy was copyrighted 1992; the new rendition is from 2000. In it, a professor is about to teach evolution when a Christian student pipes up and voices dissent, and then uses classic creationist arguments (with the aid of charts and posters) to force the professor into agreeing with creationism. At the end, the Christian student tells the others how Jesus died on the cross for their sins - in the space of just two half-size panels the entire class decides to convert to fundamentalist Christianity.
Perhaps the most blatant change, though the least related to creationism, is
the change from portraying evolutionists as hippies to somewhat
liberal-looking students in ordinary dress:
They still do look a bit hippyish. The moral to be learned from this panel: evolution-believing students are hippies. Hippies are so liberal as to be ridiculous. No real Christians believe in evolution (yes, that was sarcasm. Get used to it).
Chick (or Hovind?) added an asterisk where the professor explodes at the mere mention of the Bible: "I could have you jailed for that!!* How dare you even mention the word bible in this school. ... *It has never been against the law to teach the Bible or creation in public schools." - rather interesting, especially since an exterior shot towards the end of the tract implies that the setting is not a public high school but an ivy-league college (note the ivy covering the building on the second-to-last page). The monster that is both Chick and Hovind (whatta combination!) is trying to show that Creationism should be taught in the schools, a point that wasn't explicitly addressed in the 1992 version.
The seventh panel is perhaps the most telling: where the 1992 version shows the Christian student confusing three phrases that contain the word "evolution" to prove that none can be correct, in 2000 the line "Are there not three basic concepts of evolution?" has been changed to "Are there not six basic concepts of evolution?" - italics in the original. The six concepts include four that aren't evolution at all (example: "big bang makes hydrogen") and two that no evolutionist considers to be separate beasts: "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution".
There has been a trend in creationism lately to give up the old tactic of calling creationism a science - that tactic has failed miserably in courts as well as school boards - and instead call evolution a religion. Rather than a silly semantic argument, the student refutes the six concepts of evolution by claiming that five of them have never been observed and thus are based on faith. (the survivor is "micro-evolution", which actually encompasses all of what biologists consider evolution to be - the other five are unrelated strawmen). Later on, where the 1992 tract had the student asking the professor what holds atoms together (professor's answer: I don't know; student's answer: JESUS!), the 2000 version allows the professor to answer "It's gluons!" so that the student can say "Wrong, sir! Gluons are a made-up dream. No one has seen or even measured them ... they don't exist!"
But Hovind has always had a weakness for the pseudo-scientific arguments, and must have been sad to throw out such gems from 1992 as the 'fact' that oil didn't need millions of years to form because oil can be created out of garbage in the lab in only 20 minutes. So he actually leaves out the bit about how paleoanthropologists use terms like "perhaps", "probably", and "may have" when discussing early hominids (an evolution-is-faith argument) in favor of a criticism of the dates assigned to hominid fossils (a pseudo-scientific argument).
And of course the lovely centerfold showing the march of progress from early to modern man has been kept, as have a few pages of hominid-related pseudoscience. The famous australopithecine Lucy has been added to the chart - apparently young budding creationist debaters were confused that Big Daddy didn't have refutations for her specifically - and otherwise leaves the chart alone. See an overview of who these hominids are on TalkOrigins.org.
Chick and Hovind continue with criticisms of paleontology, attacking the concept of a fossil record rather than radiometric dating or the concept that oil takes more than 20 minutes to form. Another gem that's been removed is the textbook classic of industrial melanism - when pollution killed the light-colored lichens that covered trees in industrial-age England, darker moths had a better chance of survival than lighter moths. The creationist student explains the situation (with only a few factual errors), which adheres perfectly to the standard definition of evolution: a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over time - no more, no less. He then claims that no evolution has occurred, just a change in the frequency of the alleles in the population. This argument is replaced with criticisms of embryology and vestigial organs, also horribly reasoned strawman attacks, but I've been blathering long enough already so I'll leave off on that for now (though feel free to email me personally).
Hm. The laptop I spoke of earlier this month has miraculously recovered - I turned it on today and it booted up properly. A minor victory...
Super-fundamentalist Jack Chick has updated Big Daddy, his cartoon tract on evolution - with the help of his lovely assistant, Kent Hovind. "Dr." Hovind has made the strawman evolutionist argument even more ridiculous, and the chart of hominids in the middle of the book has been changed as well. The full-color poster based on this chart hasn't been changed yet, which is a pity, as I've got the original hanging on my wall and am eagerly waiting for the sequel.
As this is the first time I've mentioned either Creationism or Jack Chick here, I'll give a little bit of background. Evolution is the basis for all of modern biology (and there are many pithy quotes to that effect). That evolution is fact has been recognized since before Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species was published in 1859, btw; Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin is noted for being one of the first to write about evolution.
I'm skipping a bit here for the sake of brevity - evolution is definitely mainstream and not at all hypothetical. Anyway, fundamentalist Christians dispute evolution on the grounds that everything in the Bible is absolute literal truth (the English-language King James Version is the rendition usually read from) and that Genesis speaks of God literally creating Man and the animals, with no mention of evolution, so evolution must be a lie.
Here is where the most interesting characters enter the picture. "Dr." Kent Hovind is one of many Creationists who have made a living giving talks, writing books, and selling videotapes that explain that evolution is a lie. Creationist arguments differ wildly in their scope and subject matter - I have debated many amateur-league (compared to the likes of Hovind) creationists over the internet, mostly a few years ago when I was in high school, and have seen arguments ranging from "evolution can't explain why we are here or give us moral guidance, so we must reject it and return to the Bible" to "footprints of humans and dinosaurs have been found together, indicating that they lived together before the flood".
"Dr." Kent Hovind, like "Dr." Carl Baugh and many of their colleagues, have no actual scientific degrees; this is why I quote their titles. Both believe that before the Noahic flood, the earth was contained by a canopy of water vapor, or ice, or something of the sort, and that the canopy caused conditions on earth to be particularly good for all living things, thus allowing animals to grow bigger and people to live longer. During the flood, layers of sediment were deposited that contained the bones of all the living creatures that perished, thus creating fossils. Vertebrates are at the top of the stack because they were able to run to the hills to save themselves whereas animals like trilobytes could not. By the same reasoning angiosperms (flowering plants) must have been able to run faster than gymnosperms (pine trees and the like). :-)
For more information on the utterly bizarre arguments of creationists and their equally bizarre conceptions of what evolution is, visit talkorigins.org, an evolutionist site with some great FAQs. As for Jack Chick ... ah, Jack Chick. What a guy.
Jack Chick has been writing cartoon tracts (nearly all of them viewable on chick.com) for about 40 years now, on a multitude of subjects - how homosexuality is evil, halloween is evil, rock music is evil (every cassette is accompanied by a demon sent by Satan), and so on. The Catholic church, Chick has learned - most of the juicy bits here are from his full-color comics - started Islam; assassinated Lincoln; worship the "death cookie" (the communion host) and the Pope, who actually is the Antichrist mentioned in Revelation; study poisoning and other deadly techniques to use on true bible-believing fundamentalists; and much, much more. According to Chick, every non-Christian god is Satan (from Allah to Osiris to the Wiccan Goddess). <sarcasm>Ah, an afternoon at Chick.com can be so enlightening.</sarcasm>
These baby guppies are really starting to grow up. We've got a few dozen
that were born in my tank; some of them are just specks but others are
getting to the age where they're showing their coloration and their
gonopodium, if appropriate. Cute little guys.
Here's an interesting email (excerpts provided for your amusement):
"Learn the secret of Transparent Viewing. Detect the presence of dark flowing streams of consciousness energy in individuals and groups of people who are oppressed by invisible tendrils of fear, anxiety, guilt control, exhaustion, confusion, forgetfulness, stress, bad habits and negative thought patterns, so you can AVOID having your own vitality drained."
"Discover the properties of the 'Artifact', an easily made device that allows you to liquefy the effects of bad intent from other presence's, examine motives, create intimate connections with the right people, neutralize unwanted admirers in seconds, avoid dangerous scenarios and gain uncanny perspectives on your own life."
Alright, alright, I'm back. You haven't missed much. The semester has begun
here at beautiful Alfred and
I'm busy procrastinating with a lot of work. My courseload includes a
class (Population Genetics) with only two people in it. Yeah, the brochures
were right when they said Alfred has small class sizes.
Anyway, Small Linux didn't work out after all, so I ended up going with the Debian base install (get it here by ftp), 11 floppies by itself and requiring boot, root, and driver disks - thus putting it only one floppy over the size of a Win95(a) install. Pretty cool. Of course, I got some software I don't want and vice versa. Not a problem, as I've got plenty more floppies, but then the laptop died on me. Not fun. It still boots up, it just boots up in Cyrillic (and other upper-ascii characters). Argh.
Chris has come to visit. I'm forgetting about the outside world for a few days now, check back next week.
[And speaking of Chris, he encountered all three of my biggest problems with the Giant Eagle checkouts, plus one: (1) he didn't know when to start (an employee told him); (2) he couldn't find his change and started looking around for a printed change voucher (which some other grocery-store machines have); (3) he didn't see his receipt either; and my favorite, the new one, (4): the belt is monitored somehow, so when he had scanned his one item and stood looking quizzically at the screen, the machine noticed that nothing was on the belt, deleted the item he'd just scanned, and asked him to start over. Chris later mentioned that he'd eaten his lone purchase, a pack of sushi, in less time than it had taken him to figure out how to buy it. ]
The New York Times has statistics to show what you could have guessed: that even in the midst of vigorous marketing, people prefer to use the web for finding information and talking to each other than for giving money to "e-tailers" or whatever they're called this week.
2.4.0 is out, and stable.
So I've got a small-spec laptop that I want to install Linux on. (well, after I finagle myself a battery or other power source). It has 8 megs of RAM, a >200MB hard drive, and no CD-ROM drive. And because it's a laptop hard drive, I can't hook it up to a box with a CD-ROM nor can I hook a CD-ROM up to the laptop. So what do I do?
Armed with Appendix A of the 4MB-Laptop HOWTO, I go to linux2order and pick out what I want - in my case, a one- or two-floppy distro like Small Linux 0.7.2 to get an OS on the machine, TinyX to get a graphical interface, and then a bunch of lightweight apps according to my needs.
After all, if a graphical Linux can run on a PDA, why not on an early-'90's laptop?
Major upside to the movie What Women Want (for those realists among us): women often looked at him funny or asked "why are you just standing there?!" as he stared at them reading their thoughts.
I got to use Giant Eagle [the grocery store]'s self-checkout last night; the interface is part touchscreen and part (robotic, polite, female) voice. Fair enough. But the most important part of the instructions, how to begin, was omitted, and the peripheral stuff - where your change comes out, for instance, and your receipt - were put in the weirdest places. My father had used the same checkout earlier in the day, and apparently needed assistance to figure out where his change had been ejected. He also very nearly left without finding his receipt. And my dad is no idiot.
I'd love to hear from others who have used automated checkouts - what was the interface like, and what did you think?
I got this message while trying to find batteries at batteries.com; I had to wait as thre very long columns of manufacturer names loaded (this was after the entire top and side navbars had loaded): "error 'ASP 0113' Script timed out /drilldown.asp The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeOut or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools." Thank you very much, but you forgot to give me the root password so I can go fix it.
The appearance of a black steel monolith in Seattle confirms that it really is 2001.
Xawtv and the new 2.4.0-prerelease kernel have joined Netscape 4 as the only programs or combinations thereof to have hung my computer to the point of requiring a reboot. Congratulations, I hate you!
It seems to be xawtv's fault, though. 2.4.0 is cool.
In other news, it turns out that having people rate things on a scale of 1 to 10 isn't the most objective measurement in the world.
Happy new year, and welcome to the new design. Rotating picture will be here later, I'm enjoying this design right now. This site's new year's resolution is to update itself more frequently, thus freeing up some of my time. :-)
All CSS. No tables. One tiny browser-sniffing line, done in XSSI to remove the main content div's background color (Netscape 4 users see this as black). Non-CSS browsers see my picture and the semi-permanent links underneath the text instead of to its left.
Why? Because I like it this way.
(2000-01-01)