Posted by Reed on April 26, 2004 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

I have developed a revision of the MovableType plugin QuickCcode, named KwickCode, to suit the needs of our blog.  The syntax should be familiar to anyone used to posting on web bbses.  It comes in two flavors, one for posts and a restricted one for comments.

Continue reading  “KwickCode is Here”

Posted by perakh on April 15, 2004 | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

William Dembski (in Intelligent Design, 1999) suggested the so-called “Law of Conservation of Information (LCI). On page 170 he wrote about his own alleged new law: “LCI has profound implications for science.” In his later book No Free Lunch (2002) Dembski claimed that LCI is in fact not less than the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics. Since 1999, there is not a single reference to that alleged new law in scientific publications on information theory or physics.

Moreover, in publications specifically devoted to the discussion of Dembski’s work, this alleged law has been shown to make no sense - by mathematicians, information theorists, physicists, philosophers and biologists. However, ID advocates have praised this “law” in superlative terms. For example, Dembski’s colleague, another Fellow of the Discovery Institute Rob Koons wrote a blurb to Intelligent Design where referred to Dembski as “the Isaac Newton of information theory and one of the most important thinkers of our time.” Koons claimed that LCI is a “revolutionary breakthrough.”

Such exaggerated praises and self-aggrandizing claims are typical of the ID writing (as is documented in an essay by Elsberry and myself to be published shortly).

Continue reading  “Compare Dembski and Coulomb”

Posted by Timothy Sandefur on April 02, 2004 | Comments (10) | TrackBack (2)

Dr. Rosenhouse pointed out an absurd article on National Review Online which accuses the National Center for Science Education of "using federal tax dollars to insert religion into biology classrooms," because it has posted a website which says, in its entirety, that

The misconception that one has to choose between science and religion is divisive. Most Christian and Jewish religious groups have no conflict with the theory of evolution or other scientific findings. In fact, many religious people, including theologians, feel that a deeper understanding of nature actually enriches their faith. Moreover, in the scientific community there are thousands of scientists who are devoutly religious and also accept evolution.

According to Prof. West, this represents an "effort to use religion to endorse evolution [a]s part of a larger public-relations strategy...to defuse skepticism of neo-Darwinism." By which he means, it's part of an attempt to explain to people that they really can accept the fact of evolution without abandoning their religious faith. Whether NCSE is right about that or not isn't relevant to West's allegation that NCSE's use of government grants to create this website violates "Supreme Court precedents on the establishment clause of the First Amendment." He is wrong about this.

Continue reading  “NCSE violating the Constitution?”

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on March 28, 2004 | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

I'm in a reflective mood today, so you get something a bit different. I'm casting back some, oh, thirty-three years to my middle school days, trying to figure out how I ended up in science. It certainly wasn't a foregone conclusion. I'm sure that my parents would have been just as pleased if I'd been able to carve out a career in some form of money-grubbing, and probably would be more at ease about my financial future. I've come up with three unlikely factors that moved me in the direction of science: the Reader's Digest, a general education sixth-grade teacher, and a handbook on seashell collecting. I'll try to explain myself...

Continue reading  “The Unlikely Origins of My Career in Science”