All-Blog

ID is still developing it's scientific framework but many of you evolutionists are like hypocritical people who want to kill a new born baby on the basis of the argument that the baby does not talk and does not run even though you know it is a new born baby.

Ahhh! Where did my cake go?

I don’t have any idea how different species got their internal organs. I DO know how they didn’t. Take a look at the fossil record. It shows the appearance and extinction of millions of different species, a small percentage surviving today. Not a phylo-tree, not one species morphing into another, no species growing legs, eyes, arms, fingers, toes, wings. THAT is what the fossils show. They don’t support evolution at all, in any way. How did they all initiate? I have no idea. You think you know because someone told you, and you are willing to believe them for some strange reason. I did as well, but no longer.

I swear I put my cake down here somewhere...

Now ask yourself, once these processes resulted in Atomic Particles with valences, and s/p/d/f shells that fill in a certain order, and isotopes that decay, and on and on, did the Atoms HAVE ANY CHOICE IN HOW THEY INTERACTED? WAS INORGANIC CHEMISTRY ALWAYS DETERMINISTIC? I think most would agree it always was.

Was it cake gnomes? Cake just doesn't disappear like that!

I hate to spoil your Christmas Ritchie but just recently they found platypus fossils dating back over 112 million years ago, more than twice the previous fossil age of 64 million years ago…
Findings…NO transitional modifications were evident but exact “stasis” as exist today!

Hey, there is now but a puddle of liquid where my ice cream cake was, and the modern platypus has no molars!

No mutations have occurred in 300 million years among beetles. None!

AGH! NOT THE MUFFINS!

That is the fucking living end.

To whomeverso left their fucking tires against our fence.

FUCK YOU. JUST - FUCK - YOU.

Other little bits of garbage, we could chalk up to the wind, but not the suddenly-appearing fucking little chair from some old school desk, and YOU fucking human pieces of shit decided that you didn't want to bother yourself with taking the time out of your shitty little day running your three fucking tires over to the landfill and paying the fucking disposal fee, so you SNUCK OVER and LEFT THEM ON OUR FUCKING DOORSTEP.

Between that and other weirdness in our back alley, I'm off to investigate by-laws re: surveillance, because I just don't want to let you fuckers get away with this shit ever again.

So thanks. Thanks ever so fucking much.

Russian [1 - see footnote]:

Alphabet

Difficulty: Medium

Much of the issue with the Russian alphabet is that there are distracting similarities to the English alphabet. The letter that looks like a C (с) is pronounced like an S. The 'P' (р) is pronounced as an R, etc.

That said, knowledge of the Greek alphabet really helps, because it is similar in spots. The Russian 'P' sound looks like a π (pi), for example.

Pronunciation

Difficulty: Medium-hard

There are streams of consonants in Russian. A polite greeting, здравствуйте, is pronounce z-d-r-a-v-s-t-v-oo-ee-ty-ih.

There is also a similar concept to narrow and broad sounds in Irish, called soft and hard consonants. Soft consonants are pronounced like you are trying to say a 'y': your mouth would be wider and your tongue tenser and closer to the front roof of your mouth or even in contact. The difference is pretty important in Russian.

There is also a 'kh' sound (х) which sounds like a really rough 'h'. Scottish, Arabic, German and Hebrew speakers will recognize the sound.

Many Russian speakers will use this sound in English words that have 'h' in them because Russian has no plain 'h', and that can make their English pretty distinctive, on top of making consonants 'soft' where they would not be in English (e.g. okay -> okyay or okyiy).

Keep your jaw loose, your face loose and your tongue tense. It is a little hard to smile while speaking it - something I've experienced from speakers and from trying to speak it.

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I must admit, a few months ago, we were bandying about the idea of changing our phone number.

Why?

The incessant barrage of telemarketers and scammers was getting to be too much. They outpaced our actual calls from friends and family by about a 4:1 ratio.

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What I want to know is... how do they get their ingredients so cheaply?

[Other parts of the review]

No book by a creationist would be complete without an obligatory reference to Michael Denton's infamous book, Evolution, a Theory in Crisis:

Michael Denton points out that 97.7 percent of living orders of land vertebrates are represented as fossils and 79.1 percent of living families of land vertebrates - 87.8 percent if birds are excluded, as they are less likely to become fossilized.

This is meant to imply that the fossil record is "pretty much complete", and thus any ideas of transitional fossils would be laughable.

It relies on the reader not knowing a great deal about fossils and taxonomy, though, and that is sneaky and disingenuous.

For example, you can find transitional whale fossils classified in the order Cetacea. Modern whales are also classified under this order, so *bing*, their order is represented in the fossil record.

What about [taxonomic] families, then? Well, transitional whale fossils have a whole set of their own families. Ambulocetus natans is under the family Ambulocetidae. If there were living members of Ambulocetidae, they would be actually be counted towards Denton's percentage. There are not, so they do not count either for or against.

The only things that could detract from Denton's family percentage are really new or hard-to-fossilize families. Is it unreasonable for 12-20% of all families to be classified this way?

Isn't that sneaky?

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Review of Jonathan Sarfati's Refuting Evolution:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

As any (by now) periodic reader has noticed, blogging's gone way down on my side of the Nimblebrain site. The reason is relatively simple. I was finding that most of the stuff I was commenting on was really "Oh, this is interesting" which required very little further analysis or discussion. Fun to share but not really in need of a full-blown article. I've therefore moved pretty much all of what I have to say over to Twitter which with the abbreviated URLs and 140 character limit allows -- nay, requires -- me to be succinct and pithy. I'll still post longer items here but truly there's not been much recently that's motivated me to write them. Sure, I'm no fan of proroguing Parliament but better writers than I have already tackled that one.

Anyway, as part of my attempting to not leave trivially easy-to-follow trails on the internet, I'm not referencing my Twitter username here; if you know who I am anyway, it'll be easy enough to find my Twitter feed. See you there!

We got a call from a person wanting to buy a Jeep from us a couple of days back. That seemed pretty odd, but hey, wrong numbers happen.

Then it kept happening.

No huge influx, but 3-4 calls per day.

I was home for one today, and decided to ask them where they found the ad, because someone has obviously screwed up.

They said it was in the Bargain Finder, and though they seemed a bit confused about my questions, they gave me enough to go on. I went to the root of buysell.com and entered our phone number.

Lo and behold, an ad came up:

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Our second son has joined us on the outside and been with us now for about three weeks. It has been a little bit of an adventure so far!

He was supposed to be born on November 15. Why so sure? Well, we had a scheduled Cesarean section booked. We went into the Rockyview General Hospital early that Sunday as one of the only two scheduled C-sections that day. Sundays are pretty sedate there, and the parking is good. There are, however, very few doctors on site on Sundays and this was to play an important role in how the rest of the day went.

In advance of any surgery, they do not want you eating or drinking anything 8+ hours beforehand, due to the possibility of general anaesthesia, under which you cannot prevent vomitus from entering your lungs. If you only have to make due for 8 hours or a bit more, that's just fine.

The gal next to us was scheduled for 9:00 am, us for 11:00 am. I had a bit of a fun double-take, as it looked like she just got up, got dressed and walked out for a while - it turned out that she had an identical twin sister as one of her support people.

The day started wearing on. We knew that our roommate was scheduled to go first, so we keep watching for people coming to talk to her.

There were emergencies that day. That's fair - if we were ever in an emergency position, we would be pretty grateful that we would pre-empt any regular patients that day. We weren't getting many updates, though, and the hours were ticking away.

When we finally managed to get some information, it sounded like both doctors were actually performing surgery on one lady... and it was taking hours. There must have been some profound complications, because the updates kept on being of the 'they're still not done' variety. Meanwhile, Dena is starving, the bed is applying bad pressure, and everyone in the room is getting anxious.

Finally, at around 9:00 PM, they came to us and said that the anaesthetologist, due to the amount of time the staff had been in surgery, was vetoing doing our C-section that late. On the plus side, that meant a sleep at home, food (Dena said that was some of the best spaghetti she ever tasted that night!) and a fresh start. We were assured that we wouldn't lose our place.

We actually got sent home before our 'roomie', since she still had the possibility of getting a C-section done that night. We saw some deer by the road on our way home, to make a frustrating day a little more special.

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HP needed to do an update of my printing software. Apparently, they have an issue with spurious "installation cancelled" errors cropping up.

I don't think they handled this quite right:

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There are people out there who can out-kitsch Thomas Kinkade.

When they do, I dearly hope that they will be as lovingly annotated as this lovely picture of Jesus holding the Constitution, surrounded by a plethora of faces, many familiar.

Mousing over the faces, and in some cases, the buildings and pieces of paper, will familiarize you with many of them, like Benjamin Franklin:

Benjamin Franklin

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." A leading Founding Father, statesmen, and lady lover. He has his hand on his heart because he's swearing before a judge that he totally didn't bone those whores. (SPOILER: he did)

...and some of the pieces of paper:

Marbury v. Madison (1803)

This horrible piece of paper allowed activist judges free reign to declare just about anything unconstitutional! Slavery, discrimination, you name it! What fools we were.

Nice.

[Other parts of the review]

Sarfati spends quite some time on transitional fossils. It is in fact one of the main rallying cries of creationism that there are no transitional fossils.

It is not difficult to see why this would be a sticking point with creationists. Genesis has the animals paraded before Adam in Genesis 2:19-20 thusly:

Gen 2:19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

Gen 2:20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

(I can't help finding this story particularly odd, since it implies that Adam would have ended up with one of the beasts if he weren't so picky)

The "formed out of the ground" bit is key here. Creatures can't have evolved, certainly not from a common ancestor, if they were formed out of the ground.

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My good internet friend, Ari Jokimäki from Finland, now has a blog!

His main focuses on the blog are discordant redshift systems - that is, galaxies, quasars, etc. where the objects do not seem to be at their redshift distance - and the history of cosmology.

There are even pictures, so it's a lot prettier than this place.