Carl Sagan and Charles Darwin were wrong about just about everything and yet both men continue to be worshipped by the scientific community. Sagan was a great showman; charismatic and committed. He was perhaps most famous for how he spoke passionately about the “billions and billions” of stars and the inevitability of millions of earth-like planets – many that must contain intelligent life. For Sagan, we live in an ordinary galaxy, a non-descript solar system, and a hum-drum planet. It was called The Principle of Mediocrity. Evolution of life on earth was just an accident, but an accident that must have been repeated in some form on many other hum-drum planets. Continue Reading
Category : Environmental Issues, Forestry, Global Warming, Science
Category : Economic Issues, Politics, Science, Spending Issues, Subsidies
President Obama’s commitment to socialism is, by this time, not in doubt. His consistent pattern of appointing individuals with socialist views (really closer to purely communist views) to key government posts is remarkable. John Holdren, Obama’s new Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will feel very comfortable fitting in with previous appointments. Read the CNS News report here.
First off, he fully satisfies that Obama arrogance requirement. A CNS news reporter when asking for an interview mentioned that he had read some of Holdren’s work and had questions. Holdren’s response was that, “If you read it and have a problem, you’re misreading it”. Continue Reading
Meltdown: Why Ice Ages Don’t Last Forever, reviews new scientific evidence on the subject. There is still much more to learn about these cycles, and the scope of this review is also less than complete. Prior to ice age cycles of 41,000 years, and then more recently 100,000 year cycles, there were “snowball earth” events that put the Earth into a deep freeze. See here. Continue Reading
Category : Science
Just for fun, three fascinating areas in which science is making headway can be found here. A review of the two items I found most fun and interesting follow.
Cool Discovery #1: Energizing batteries
Electronics companies continually pursue better ways to power the myriad portable electronic devices on the market such as iPods, cell phones, and PDAs. Longer lasting, more efficient batteries certainly help, but they also require regular recharging. Recharging a device is typically nothing more than an inconvenience. But during prolonged power outages Continue Reading
Category : Global Warming, Science
The title academic study comes courtesy of the University of California-Berkeley, one of the most prestegious Universities in our country. Offhand, I don’t know how many of our tax dollars go to this University, or this professor, but it is way too much. I have a barely controllable disdain for academia, regardless of the country. This little study will give you an example of how this attitude came about. Just for fun, read about the “academic” work of Professor George Lakoff here.
A teaser passage follows. Remember, all this academic work is peer reviewed, so this is not just one lone lunatic running amok.
“It relates directly (to global warming) because conservatives tend to feel that the free market should be unregulated and (that) environmental regulations are immoral and wrong,” Lakoff said.
“And what they try to do is show that the science is wrong and that the argument is wrong, based on the science. So when it comes back to science, they try to debunk the science,” Lakoff said.
On the other hand, he added, liberals’ cognitive process allows them to be “open-minded.”
“Liberals say, ‘Look seriously at the science and look at whether people are going to be harmed or not and whether the world is going to be harmed,’” Lakoff said.
As part of our on-going effort to expand the interests of all you paper people, we are promoting our weekly strange-but-true item as a post today. You can find new strange-but-true items each week on the sidebar. Previous weekly s-b-t’s are also archived in the navigator bar.
Many of you are not going to believe the claim that follows, it seems too impossible. The amazing fine-tuning of the universe is accepted, however, by the entire scientific community. Why the universe is so fine-tuned is debated, but not the fine-tuning itself. There are at least 30 different physical or cosmological parameters that must be precisely fine-tuned to build a Universe capable of sustaining life. This strange-but-true item covers just one of those parameters. The next two paragraphs are from…Why the Universe is the Way It Is, by Hugh Ross.
While stars and planets account for only about 1 percent of the total matter (hence mass) of the universe, even that small percentage must be extraordinarily fine-tuned for life to exist…
Right after the universe’s beginning, the possibility of life within it would have been destroyed by subtracting the mass of a single dime from the whole of the observable universe or by adding a single dime’s mass to it.
Biological design, or apparent design, depending on your worldview, is vastly superior (contains more information and more complexity) than anything man has ever contemplated. Scientists do not question the amazing complexity of biological organisms, or the “appearance of design”. For example, Francis Crick, of DNA fame, cautioned, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” And from Darwinist A.G. Cairns-Smith, “…what impresses us about a living thing is its in-built ingenuity, its appearance of having been designed, thought out – of having been put together with a purpose…” For leaders in the scientific community, this apparent design demonstrates the remarkable power of “selection” within the evolutionary process. Evolution is, by definition, accidental and random (undirected). Continue Reading