Daimonie's Blog

It's time for a longer response, yet again.  This article  has popped up a few times on IFLS. It's starts out with this: In June 1936 Max Hahn and his wife Emma were on a walk beside a waterfall near to London, Texas, when they noticed a rock with wood protruding from its core. They decided to take the oddity home and later cracked it open with a hammer and a chisel. What they found within shocked the archaeological and scientific community. Embedded in the rock was what appeared to be some type of ancient man made hammer. Alarm bells are already ringing - as they always do when something shocks the "archaeological and scientific community". A quick search tells us that stone tools were used starting about 2.6 million years ago .   A team of archaeologists analysed and dated it. The rock encasing the hammer was dated to more than 400 million years old. The hammer itself turned out to be more than 500 million years old. Additionally, a section of the wooden h...

Update:  I originally wrote this script after learning that a lot of undergraduate students - as I was, at the time - thought that, because over the three years the B.Sc. lasts - they had always neglected air resistance, so it must be negligible, right? Of course it wasn't - it just indicated a model that was more difficult to solve. This is a simulation of a very simple air resistance on a sphere; you see how much the trajectories are *not* parabolas. These are simply the calculated trajectories when you include simple air resistance. The simple air resistance is just 1/2 rho v^2 A c_d. Everything in there is estimated, with the exception of the velocity v, which is calculated. You can also see why, at one point, projectile trajectories were thought to be triangular. In common day terms, it was thought that the energy given made an artificial movement, after which the energy would slowly be used, then the natural movement would kick in and it'd fall straight down. Yes,...

I've taken the liberty of writing a WOT about this video. You may have shared this because you believed in this. Or because you found it amusing. It doesn't matter. This video has been shared a great many times, and apparently people think that's a good thing. So enjoy. ------ Let's listen for a bit. So he has some anecdote with an arrogant atheist. I disagree, it doesn't take much faith to believe in a magical unicorn that created everything. (I) Let's start with his first straw man ; it's the claim that the theory of evolution (henceforth, TOE) doesn't fit the "parameters of parentheses of science" because it "has not been observed". The scientific method wants a hypothesis that is then evaluated with a number of secondary hypotheses; if the experiment is positive, then it is likely the hypothesis, and possibly the underlying explanation, is true. If not, then the intersection of the hypothesis and the secondary ...