Thursday, November 12, 2009

In Search of the Mother Troll

I was reading an article at Smithsonian.com:


Of course these people are organized, either at their churches or at various sources around the internet, and all I need to do is search around until I dig some up. So I searched, and I found a likely candidate; a forum post titled Help! need help debating an evolutionist! at a site called Chistianforums.com. Just the sort of place where I might find a seething den of Creationist scheming to troll any public forum that dares to publish about science and evolution. The original poster (OP) asked for help ...

[outdoor_engineer] I have an ongoing debate with a kid at school about evolution.
He's presenting some pretty good arguments and he's kicking my butt, can anyone help?!

... and with a little prodding OP provided details of the argument:

It is a long, drawn out logic style argument, I'll go through it step by step:
First he said that there are two different types of claims:
faith claims: those which could not be falsified by observation or experiment even in principle.
(i.e. god exists)

-and-

science claims: those which can be falsified by observation or experiment
(i.e. the earth is roughly spherical in shape)
This seemed perfectly rational, so I agreed.

he asked if I would agree that only science claims should be taught in science class. After some hemming and hawwing I agreed.

then the argument went like this:

faith based claims are those that which cannot be falsified.
faith based claims should not be taught in science class.
Creationism / ID can incorporate any evidence by saying "God made it that way"
Therefore creationism / ID cannot be falsified
Therefore creationism / ID should not be taught in science class.

He got me, Where did I go wrong? where's the flaw in his logic that I can't see?

This OP kid is up against a good argument, but this is where things started to go wrong. I was expecting the first reply to an irrational screed, but what came next was this:

[Mallon] There is no flaw in his argument. He's right.

Why do you think creationism should be taught in science class?

Huh? What?! This was supposed to be an investigative post about where trolls come from - where they live, what they plan, how they organize. I wanted to blog about that. I intended to blog about that. WHAT'S GOING ON???  How can my seething den of rabid Creationism be filled with educated, thinking, rational people. This is horrible! My first attempt is an utter failure.

But what a wonderful way to fail.

If your read the thread you will see a number of rational people writing similar comments, but a real troll does finally show up on page 2, who writes ...

[Calypsis4] I'll give you some help, young person.

1. Evolution does not exist in the first place because if it did it would be a violation of natural law. (a) the law of Biogenesis...life must generate from life. It cannot generate from non-living matter and no one has ever observed such a thing occur in nature. (2) Entropy keeps non-living matter from developing into living organisms and entropy keeps living organisms from becoming a different kind of organism. (3) the fossil record reveals that living organisms began abruptly, highly complex and no transitional forms. [...]

2. God meant what He said through Moses and the creation in Genesis and there is no historical reason not to believe the account he gave us. Even the ten commandments affirm the six day creation account (Exodus 20:11). Secondly, the Lord Jesus Christ affirmed the six day creation account (Mark 10:6 & 13:19). All of His disciples taught that the creation was true and that Adam and Eve were real people.

3. Evolution is nowhere taught in the Bible. It is a fairy tale.
[emphasis added]

Pity this poor troll, for he is about to get body-slammed:

[pgp protector]
1) Evolution has nothing to do with Biogenesis, please learn what the theory states.

2) Genesis only works that way if you read it as 100% literal, and that also makes God a deceiver (God made the Earth look old, but told us it's young).

3) computers programing is nowhere taught in the Bible. Please stop using the internet.
[emphasis added]

I laughed. I howled. My wife wondered what the heck I found so funny. The troll introduces some fun and it turns into a rollicking good 8 flaming pages of Young Earth Creatroll versus Theistic Evolutionists. Darned sharp TE's too - I could learn something from them. I also learned that this forum has "darker" corners, which might be the lair of the trolls I seek. My search has just begun.
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods




Each element represents a different type of data visualization, and hovering the mouse-pointer over any of them will pop-up an example. "Hi" stands for Histogram as demonstrated in the captured pop-up below.



Very nicely done! See for yourself.

This happy accident occurred while I was searching for "element-pun" material in response to comments on a recent post at The Endeavor. Thanks John!
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

What's this? Faith AND Reason?!?

 Todd Wood, a Young Earth Creationist, has this to say:

Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.

Not the sort of thing you generally hear from YEC, and a pleasant surprise. I bestow upon Todd Wood the title of Scientia Causidicus, for demonstrating the capability to be honest, a rational thinker, and to maintain his faith. Thank God for that.
[Hat Tip Evolutionblog and Thoughts from Kansas]
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Sunday, November 1, 2009

This is fun ...

 I just discovered a nice blog tribute to ... oh ... but telling would spoil some of the fun. This series of posts at The Armchair Generalist is still fun, even if it is after Halloween.

Here, have some more fun:

How Superman Defeated the Ku Klux Klan

TV Shows Little Girls Watch

Monkey Business: Scientist Monkeys Around With The Economy

Internet Rules

Piano Stairs are fun too.

I Love the Internet

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Friday, October 30, 2009

Diesel Exhaust is a Weighty Matter

Scientific American has this online article -



- the point of which is to point out the enormous amounts of pollutants produced by idling truck engines, and that New York City has a law regarding this that really ought to be enforced. I have little doubt that this really is a significant source of pollutions, but this statement made me raise my eyebrows:

"Idling buses, cars and trucks may not seem like a big deal, but in New York City they spew out as much pollution as nine million diesel trucks driving from the Bronx to Staten Island, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. That’s roughly 130,000 tons of carbon dioxide, 940 tons of nitrogen oxide, 24 tons of soot particles, and 6,400 tons of carbon monoxide each year"

Can that be right? That's a lot of trucks making the trip. I'm a statistician, and I wonder about such things like the accuracy of statistics like this. Watching TV on a Friday night, I started doing so some Googling and back-of-the-envelope calculations during the commercials.

The claim of the article: 130,000 + 940 + 24 + 6,400 = 137364 of pollutants released each year, that's 274,728,000 pounds. The distance between the Bronx and Staten Island is 33.9 miles (so says Google Maps), and in 9 million trips that works out to 305,100,000 miles. 274,728,000 pounds divided by 305,100,000 miles is 0.9 pounds of pollutants per mile.

The Economy of Diesel trucks: The average big diesel truck pulling a load gets about 5.5 miles per gallon of fuel (so says Wiki Answers), or 0.182 gallons of diesel per mile. Diesel weighs about 7.2 pounds per gallon (in cold weather yet, so says faqs.org), so 0.182 gallons/mile times 7.2 lbs/gallon is about 1.31 pounds of diesel per mile driven.

Now 0.9 lbs/mile of pollutants divided by 1.31 ponds per mile of diesel work out to 0.6873, or about 70% of the total mass of the diesel fuel converted to pollution. At this point, I ran into difficulty finding a source for the actual composition of diesel exhaust. 70% might be reasonable; after all, the mass of the fuel has to go somewhere.

But wait, I've made a mistake - most of the 130,000 tons of carbon dioxide is oxygen, without looking up the molecular weights of carbon and oxygen, AT LEAST two-thirds of that mass is coming from the atmosphere and not the diesel fuel. 70% now seems more reasonable.

There is another possible error, which I don't know how to resolve. In my reading I discovered (lost the link, sorry) that idling diesel engines are relatively clean, but produce heavy pollution when under a load (you see this on the road all the time). Therefore the number of idling vehicles must be really huge to make of this difference. This is also quite possible; NYC is a BIG place, the the article does not offer any information about how many vehicles this might be.

I would assume that if NYC has a law that trucks should not idle for more than a minute, there must be some good evidence somewhere to back this up. The original claim seems to come from the Environmental Defense Fund, but I'm too tired for more digging tonight. This has been an interesting bit of fact checking, except that I ran into a wall with limited knowledge of chemistry. Maybe I should ask a Chemist?

[UPDATE, 11/01/2009]
I received this response to my question at About.Chemistry, Sean writes:
the average chemical formula for diesel is C12H23. with that said, the mass of a carbon atom is 12.01 g, and hydrogen is 1.008. so, mathematically, diesel has the molecular weight, on average of 167.304 grams per mole of fuel.
the weight of the oxygen atom is 15.99g (mostly rounded to 16g), so carbon dioxide is 44.01 grams per mole.
in general, this relates to something of the sort:
2 moles of C12H23 +  O2 gas in excess -makes-> 12moles CO2+ 12moles CO+ 23moles H2O. as the formula for the burning of the diesel, if it was a very complete and clean reaction, however, we all know that's never the case. ;.;
as for the 130,000 tons of CO2, that comes to
 117 934 016 200g of CO2

and of that gram mass, 27% is carbon, while 73% is oxygen. that's what...
31842184374 grams of carbon and 86091831826 grams of oxygen.
however, diesel is more of a blend of things and not just the carbon and hydrogen, which pretty much takes all that I have written and makes it almost useless. In my research, though, I've seen more about the fact that sulfur is present in the fuel than the carbon emissions, as that will inhibit the use of catalytic filters to scrub the exhaust clean, as in most vehicles.
also, in response to your lost link, I dug this up
http://busbuilding.com/bus-conversion/diesel-engine-idling-from-an-authority-detroit-diesel/
which says that idling is bad for diesel because it produces more exhaust via incomplete combustion.
anywho, I'm not too advanced in chemistry, so forgive me if I supplied you with random nonsense, I was trying to think of a way to equate the mass of fuel to pollutants produced, but as I can't find an exact formula for what the reactions are this is the best I think I can do. I'm hoping someone else can chime in from here and make more sense of things, and of anything, I wish you luck with your search.
Thanks Sean!

After some more digging I turned up an abstract and a paper on wind tunnel experiments (Part 1, Part 2) that are related, but none seem to be the origin of the original statistics. I might have more luck searching from work tomorrow.
-- OR --
I could ask the author of the SciAm article, Mr Brett Israel. Would that make it too easy?

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Monday, October 26, 2009

Creation Museum Claims Proven

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature Proof positive the Man and Dinosaur co-existed!

FOR NO PARTICULAR
REASON OUR STORY IS LAID
IN THE "STONE AGE" - MILLIONS
AND BILLIONS AND TRILLIONS
OF YEARS AGO - PROBABLY
BEFORE ANY OF YOU PEOPLE
WERE EVEN BORN



Check out the video for the full story:



The Real story being Chuck Jones 1939 debut as the director of Daffy Duck - and so history was made. Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature

Friday, October 23, 2009

Anti-Vax Debate

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature Its Rationality Vs. Moronity over at Mike's Weekly Skeptic Rant. Mike would seem to be a very patient man.
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