The Miracle of the 747.

A common creationist argument against evolution is that order doesn't come from disorder - that a tornado cannot come through a junkyard and create a 747.

On its face, this sounds so unreasonable it is a reasonable argument. There are a number of factors we are missing here -

Point 1) If a Tornado DID create a 747, that wouldn't be considered a miracle of science by the same people making this argument, but rather divine intervention by a higher power. It would be called a miracle, largely because it seems so impossible.

I say "seems" because of the fact is that it isn't impossible, it's just VERY improbable. For example - there is absolutely nothing keeping all of the air molecules in the room into my coffee cup except probability. It is very improbable that air would collect in one space, but it doesn't keep it from happening (and if it did happen, the next moment it'd be at a different area of the room anyway).

Likewise, there is nothing stopping a tornado putting a 747 together, save probability. There's a lot more work to do there - rivetting steel, getting a perfect airfoil, arranging the seats - but, again, it's merely improbable.

That being said, it is also highly improbable that anyone would ever design and build a 747. Most anything one can point to today is highly improbable to happen - I'll go there later.

Point 2) The tornado itself is an example of disorder coming from order and vice versa. High air pressure mixes with high winds and voila - a vortex tunnel. How? Entropy spirals out of control, exponentially adding more and more force until the vortex dissipates its energy and all is "orderly" again.

"Order" spontaneously comes from disorder all of the time. Even at its most entropic, everything appears to head toward stability - from a chemical level to the macrolevel (the exception is the quantum level, but no one I know lives in that level day to day so it's not applicable here). However, the reason we're not all perfect squares is because of the randomness.

Another common argument by creationists is that life is "irreducibly complex". A good designer knows that simplicity is always the most efficient. If we were intelligently designed, we would be a poor design for humanity. Still, we have all of the parts, and those parts work moderately well. We have some unnecessary parts, and parts that show up from generation to generation - such as webbed toes, tails, and the like. We got poor plumbing, poor wiring, and, some of the time, break down early. The reason? We were either designed by a poor designer, or we are the amalgamation of random mutation.

Point 3) - The tornado has no method for "selection".

If mutation is a driver in evolutionary theory, selection is the road. As stated before, the 747 itself is a pretty improbable design. However, it is here. Why? Well, someone designed it. Someone selected the parts and figured out how it would work together to fly and transport large amounts of cargo and people. Why? He was asked to.

Life and creation have no such directions.

The 747 represents not only the original blueprint, but all the designs before. Each one scrapped for inefficiency or improved upon for better efficiency. An Engineer is given specs and a budget, and from these limiting pressures, he comes up with the best design for it. Limiting pressure would be the borders of the road of Evolution.

Furthering that, the 747 is based on centuries of human design and innovation. It has a history. The first jet engines. The biplane. The Wright Brothers. The concept of the "airfoil". The internal combustion engine. The steam engine. The engine. The wheel. Fire. All of these other innovations had to happen BEFORE the 747.

Considering how many different possible flying machines showed up around the time the Wright brothers finally flew in Kitty Hawk also demonstrates how competition plays a factor in limiting pressures.

The truth is, everything, scaling the factor of time back far enough, is improbable, including nature. The very fact that I exist took generations and generations of humans (even by young earth standards) to produce a dark haired, dark eyed, half caucasian half asian 6' tall human being. In a different timeline, the probability that I'm not here is quite large.

And finally, Point 4) Improbable things happening are heralded as miracles.

While Evolution is an attempt to explain speciation, it demonstrates how improbable our existence is. However, selective pressures and competition really did create the 747 from random chance.

The 747, therefore, is indeed a miracle.

Direction Away from Media

All in all, I'm going to move a bit away from media on this blog. I'll be starting up a website soon, all about the evolution nature of Media.

This will turn both personal and political, a place for specific ideas to disseminate.

Some of the media criticism on the coming blog will come here, and vice versa.

New Yorker on Magic

Interesting piece in the New Yorker about Magic and Magicians.

Back in the Saddle Again

I'm about to do something very different, very dramatic. It's something so drastic that it has me lying awake at night in excitement.

In a couple of weeks, I'll be living in New York City.

I've accepted a position at the New York Film Academy, which, believe it or not, is actually headquartered in New York. They have programs all over the world, including one in Princeton, New Jersey which I attended a little over a decade ago. And now I'm back.

I look forward to it.

How Not to Conduct an Interview

From Jack.

Internet Rumors on the Daily Show

I love the Daily Show's commentary on the media, and this is definitely a good one. I'm tired of receiving the odd email forward, and hearing people taking such as actual fact. Few people question them.

The fact that such rumors end up on the news media really doesn't help.

Most of the work I do is for an educational institution (see Math2Success, and a lot of the time, even as an editor, I check the math. I'm not a math expert. I could easily just put pieces together based on what we're given, but no - I fix it in graphics. I make sure what we put out there is real math, and 2 + 2 doesn't add up to 5.



This being said, there are several internet rumors against McCain (my personal favorite being that one spread in 2000, about McCain's lack of environmental policy - no not the illegitimate black child - that rumor was just cheap).

Memes have a way of spreading influence:



Which is to call a spade a spade, really.

Gossip and rumor have been elevated to a new state with the internet, and it requires better discernment, and education in critical thinking.

Sending Doritos to space

Cut and posted from Warren Ellis's Livejournal on 6/13/08

Given the choice, how would you prefer to announce the presence of your species in local space? Imagine all the ways you could describe the emergence of a digital-age society on this planet. All the ways you could explain our species and our environment and biosphere, and explain that, no, we’re not perfect, we’re still fighting, we still haven’t resolved our relationship with nature, there are still hungry people and sick people. But we’re trying, and in some places we’re winning, and although we can’t reach you, we could really use a friend. All the ways in which you could hope to open up a conversation with the Other, wherever it may lie.

Or you could just send them a Doritos ad.

Because, yes, on the morning of June 12 2008, the EISCAT high-powered space transmitter station on Svalbard used its array of radars to beam a Doritos ad at a solar system 42 light years from here.

For six hours, the MPEG video file was repeatedly pulsed at system 47 UMa, in the Ursa Minor constellation, which was chosen because it seems to have a circumstellar habitable zone. 47 UMa does have two Jupiter-class planets outside the HZ, although one of them is so massive that it very probably does weird gravity things to the outside edge of the HZ. This means that, if there are Earth-like rocky planets inside the habitable zone that we just can’t see yet, there’s a fair chance they’ll be small, lumpy, thirsty and ugly. Like a man in a Foster’s commercial. Or, presumably, a Doritos one.

EISCAT, which has had funding problems, has received an undisclosed but presumably substantial donation from Doritos in return for the broadcast, which will help them meet their actual aims of performing radar astronomy experiments. The director of EISCAT is quoted as saying: ""Some years in the future, the money that comes from this kind of commercial service could be used to fund pure research."

This would seem to open the door to polluting local space with the grottiest capitalistic artifacts conceivable in return for being able to do a bit of science. That’s a pretty high cost — of a piece with the recurring nightmare in fiction of the Coca-Cola logo being permanently sprayed on the surface of the moon. Others will champion this as private enterprise giving science the boost it needs, which is usually where I’m told to wave my hands in glee that Richard Branson and his mates have created a zippy goshwow 21st Century space business on the same kind of suborbital lob Alan Shepherd managed in 1961 (and a fair distance short of the full orbital flight Yuri Gagarin made).

Fuck that. I don’t care. Attempting to announce our presence to any intelligence that can get in front of the signal by sending them something made by a company that sells crunchy shit in bags is not the way to the maturity of the species.

According to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence’s Permanent Study Group, it’s been argued that "a civilization which hopes to detect radio evidence of other civilizations in the cosmos is obligated to reveal its own presence. Others maintain that it is suicidal to shout in the jungle." There is, therefore, a San Marino Scale measuring risk in these matters. You can play with an online calculator, if you know a few specifics, to work out whether or not a signal broadcast into space will in fact bring down the alien hordes ov chewy doooom. And if it does, you know damn well that their first words will be "Sponsored by Doritos?"

Amazingly (to me), it’s not the first time we’ve fired signals at 47 UMa. Notional lifeforms in-system will also one day be privy to The 1st Theremin Concern For Aliens. They’re due to get that in the summer of 2047. The funny thing about that, of course, is that the theremin was usually used to announce the presence of spooky space aliens in 1950s science fiction films…

We’re just asking for it, really.