Rising food prices

It seems like yesterday, I was learning all about how there’s food shortages in various parts of the world because local crops were displaced by crops grown for cash that weren’t entirely suitable for the area. Food production was low due to low prices, so there wasn’t enough to go around and the little there was wasn’t too affordable since there was a lack of employment. There was a lack of employment because farmers were struggling. Farmers were struggling because food prices were low. Now I’ve talked myself into a complete circle.
In less global concerns, there was local talk about the death of the family farm. Agriculture had become generally unprofitable. One of the things being blamed were low prices, though we looked at the USA to take the blame for that since their subsidies drive down prices in neighbouring markets.
It feels ironic that we now have people lashing out at bio-fuels and trying to blame them for food shortages because they drive the price of food up. There’s something fishy going on here, but I think I’ll just keep going as I usually do.

Dumbest idea of the presidential campaign

I haven’t even read what most of the hopefuls want to do, but this has got to be the stupidest idea of the whole bunch. Otherwise something is seriously wrong.

By legalizing competing currencies, we can end the Federal Reserve’s stranglehold on our money supply and begin to restore value to the dollar.

What does he want to do here? Let the mexicans keep using the peso when they cross over and the canadians use their dollar as well? Have private companies start their own new currencies? I don’t think people will be too accepting of needing to price goods in a dozen different currencies or paying to convert when buying things. Having some border towns using the peso isn’t going to bolster the dollar. Having new private companies run competing currencies isn’t going to help what he considers a problem created by “[the] Federal Reserve, an unelected and unaccountable private organization.” Those too would be unelected, unaccountable and well, private. If anything the USA switching away from the US dollar should cause the currency to plummet dramatically instead of restoring any value.
Somehow, even without looking at any of the other ideas, I think I can safely declare this one the dumbest.

Homosexuality is bad…

There was a letter in the paper today that I got a real chuckle out of. It basically went, homosexuality is bad, sex addition does this that and the other things, so avoid homosexuality, stay godly. I looked at that and was like hmm, this is almost like saying, cola is bad, rum contains alcohol, which causes car crashes, so avoid cola. As much as people seem to go for rum and coke, we still aren’t talking about the same thing.
It just seems like arguments against homosexuality start off with one subject, explain why something else is bad or incorrect, then expect the reader to assume that they’re really just the same thing. It’s like there’s a propaganda machine skewing people’s preception of the world. Groups they wish to demonize become known only as most undesireable characteristics of the most extreme members and after being fed lies so many times, they can’t see the real world.
I can say almost the same thing about arguments against evolution. Nobody seems to argue against evolution, they seem to argue against some other theory, which they call evolution but nobody else does.

School shootings from a different perspective

I typically have a somewhat different perspective on things and here’s mine on school shootings. Before I tell you my ideas on reducing school shootings, consider this, how many shooters have we actually arrested and prosecuted? Very few of them. What happens to most of them? Most of them die before they can be arrested. How do they die? A fair number of them simply kill themselves once they’re cornered. Some of these shootings are political and have some sort of motivation behind them. This probably won’t stop. People will continue to get frustrated. Other shootings are a bit of a mystery. It is a violent lashing out at the world though. What happens at the end of a fair number of shootings though is a suicide.
So my idea is this, what if we simply made it more acceptable to simply kill yourself? Maybe if it was more acceptable, people who are suicidally depressed will be content staying suicidally depressed instead of making the leap to homicidally depressed. Let’s leave an alternative for frustrated depressed people. The worst thing we can do is limit options till society in general becomes the subject of one’s frustrations.

Fear and Hype

I find it totally understandable that people would think that costal property values would plumet if melting ice had the capacity to do what some of the global warming extremists claim that it can. However, I find it strange that this is used as an argument to down play the significance of global warming when property values in places like San Franscico and Shanghai are holding. San Franscico has a history of being decimated by earth quakes. There’s also a lack of emergency preparation there. Westerners typically aren’t as familiar with the issues around Shanghai, but the whole city is built on unstable ground. Some buildings have sunk almost an entire floor in the past hundred years or so. It’s also sinking unevenly. There’s buildings that you used to walk up a few steps to get into and since the building weighs more than the road, you now walk down a few steps to get into those buildings. Some of buildings are also starting to lean a bit because one side is heavier than the other. Knowing what we know about these areas now and knowing what sort of buildings will be built in a major city, I don’t think anybody in their right mind would want to start a city in those places. Property values remain high and despite all logic, the corellation between property value and risk doesn’t really seem that significant.

Where’s the Outrage?

I heard an on-star commercial on the radio and thought, gee, here’s a system that tracks the locations of cars as well as their operating status. It can also exert some amount of control over them. The locking and unlocking of doors seems to be the main thing. This all sounds fine and dandy. Where are all the usual privacy people jumping up and down worried about people knowing where cars are? People scream about all sorts of invasion of privacy issues and oppose all sorts of seemingly innocent things all the time. Why is nobody worked up about on-star?
Maybe it’s time that everyone just stepped back for a while and really thought about why certain things scare us. Tracking my car, not scary. Tracking my cell phone, not scary. Being able to get into my car, well, if someone really wanted to get in, I’m sure an ax would take out the window without difficulty. You can do that without an accomplis.

My Second Creation Science Talk

Since the first one wasn’t all that spectacular, I figured I’d give this creation science thing another try and found someone else to listen to for a while. This one was more about trying to prove the existance of god than to disprove evolution, none the less, some things about evolution were mentioned. The main theme of this talk was that things are so spectacular, there had to be a divine creator. There was talk about the number of stars that exist and how mind boggling it was. There was also talk of the number of grains of sand, now flakes, and large volumes of water. The smoothness of the earth was also admired a great deal. This particular talk was really not aimed towards skeptics, but rather aimed towards those who’re looking to reaffirm their faith. There was little talk about issues regarding creation and tried to create a sense of awe regarding the forces of nature. Issues regarding creation vs evolution were not explored and evolution was only mentioned in passing with the occational note of ridicule.
During the few times that evolution was mentioned, it was all during the talk of how wonderful certain creatures, parts of creatures or the food chain was. The most common thing that was said was, “How could this possibly be a product of blind chance?” As throughly discussed earlier, no serious evolutionist believes things came about through blind chance anyway, so I guess this is more of an attack on the flying speghetti monster than anything else. Maybe that should be the next origin story I research, I could use something a little lighter. There were also two instances where the speaker asked that if creatures did indeed evolve, what did they do before something developed. One of them was the thing that causes blood to clot, stopping leaks. The other time was regarding a spider and how it doesn’t get stuck to its own web because of some chemical on its feet. I think the intent was to suggest that evolution was a sequential process where one part develops at a time instead of multiple things being refined continously.
Lastly, there was a small section that specifically talked about Darwin’s work and how in his book there were roughly 800 instances of phrases like, “from this, it can be infered,” or “we can summise,” which do not indicate certainty, but rather hypothesizing. His critisim of Darwin stopped there and he continued on about the elegance of the biblical creation story and it’s concise brevity. There was also speculation on the large volumes of text it would take for man to describe creation as a bit of a joke.
Sometimes in science, the most elegant solution is the right one. One such instance that I can think of is the current model of the solar system with eliptical orbits. Prior to that, there was a model of the solar system with circular orbits, which did a somewhat decent job of predicting the positions of the planets. It did have a few flaws and corrections had to be made which occured in the form of the occational loop. The correction method was inspired by the previous model of the solar system which had the earth in the center and everything going around it in circular orbits. Certain motion patterns were explained by placing circular loops into the orbits. It didn’t do nearly as well and it was hard to predict when a loop should occur. The current model not only predicts the location of planets in the sky more accurately, but also doesn’t require these corrective loops.
There’s also times when the simplistic theory isn’t the correct one though. It was once believed that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones. Then we learnt about air and wind resistance as well as the balance between gravity and drag that results in a phenomenon called terminal velocity. There’s also one of Newton’s classic laws of motion, F=MA. In my experiences, it often comes up in discussions regarding evolution vs creation as a widely confirmed, testable and accepted theory. Most people without science degrees will accept this as do most of the people who discuss evolution vs creation. This is not meant as an attack on either side, but nothing could be further from the truth. Our knowledge of physics has grown sigificantly since the time of Newton and we now know that this is grossely inaccurate at very high speeds. Most people will recall that Albert Einstien said a few things about time slowing down as you go faster. Space and mass also distort and these are things we can measure. My knowledge of physics fizzles out around here, but I believe that we’ve also found that relativity isn’t entirely accurate either. Anyway, most scientists will tell you that F=MA is only a reasonable approximation which is more than good enough for most motion that we can achieve.
Anyway, I’m going to take a bit of a break on this subject, I’m starting to notice a few trends. Maybe I’ll actually research the materials a bit before selecting the next thing I go through. Thus far, the two that I picked out of blind chance really hasn’t been that satisfying. I ran into two groups of mormon missionaries today, maybe I should phone them up and ask them to suggest a decent resource that isn’t endless repeditive allegory and actually has a somewhat correct representation of evolution.

Conclusion of my First Creation Science Experience

Well, I finally came to the end of my first batch of listening material on judeo-christian creationism. Thus far, I must say that I completely agree with the main points of the talk, life couldn’t have come about by random processes, and information is a vital ingredient to the creation and advancement of life. To the best of my knowledge though, there’s no belief system that says everything came about randomly. The speaker seems to be under the impression that evolution is a completely random process involving no information, which degrades everything to noise.
If I were to draw another analogy to information in evolution, I’d use the google search engine. The mechanism by which it operates was explained to me some time ago. First, the database is polled for all websites bringing up the key word in the search. This is one layer of information. A lot of earlier search engines kept track of the number of hits going to pages and simply assuming that the pages with the most hits had the best information. Unfortunately, the pages cannot be reviewed before viewing and simply trying to find the desired information skews the ratings adding a layer of noise. Secondly, the results are further skewed by the fact that the first results always get the most attention making it diffcult for irrelevant information to go away and new information to come forward.
The difference between google and the search engines before it is all in the ranking of the webpages. As I was told, google checks the pages pulled and assumes that the most relevant ones are the ones that have been linked to the most by the other pages containing similar information. In essence, every webpage functions as a peer review of all the other webpages in the search results. Bringing this back to evolution, according to my understanding, the underlying premise behind evolution can be summed up by saying that every time the lions go hunting information is added to the system.
The speaker also told a little story that I feel like repeating. Briefly stated, it amounted to Jesus going out and healing the sick. The speaker concluded that if evolution really was the mechanism by which higher life forms arise, Jesus would have simply killed the sick and removed them from the gene pool. This is not the only way that this behavior can be examined. As far as we can tell, all mamals have emotions as do many other forms of life. There’s a sense of security in knowing that you’ll be ok if something bad happens. It could be that populations exhibiting compassion are more successful than populations that do not and the cost of carrying the less fortunate, both in terms of hereditary effects and immediate resources are more than worth the burden. Of course, this action is largely going to influence environment and not so much genetics.
Since there was much alegory in the talk, which is why it stretched on for so many hours, I suppose I’ll tell a little alegory of my own. A person is walking along through the woods and slips. He looses his balance and goes tumbling down a hill. As luck would have it, there’s a little bear cub at the bottom and he happens to hit the cub as he’s tumbling down. While trying to figure out if he’s hurt badly, he notices the mother is around and decides that it’s best to leave right away since there’s a screaming cub next to him. Later on, while he’s treated, he tells the story of how he got hurt, screaming cub and mother bear there scaring him away. One person says, “Well, it’s like I told you all along, those bears are smart enough to know an accident when they see one.” Someone else frowns and says, “No, you’ve got it all wrong, those bears are clearly stupid, the mother doesn’t even recognize that something has harmed her cub so she doesn’t take steps to protect her young.” Then another person shrugs and points out, “Maybe these things aren’t really smarter or stupider than most people think. They kill things from time to time, so they should have a sense of when something is hurt and when something is trying to get away. Maybe the mother could clearly tell that this man was hurt and see that he was leaving anyway so decided to tend to the cub instead of risking herself attacking something that wasn’t a threat.” The man looks at the others around him and chuckles before adding, “If it helps the arguement in anyway, I was scared and didn’t know what to do, so while I was crawling away, I told the bear I was sorry and explained that this was all a big accident.”
The facts in this story are that the man tumbled down a hill, hurt a bear cub as a result and didn’t get attacked by the mother. The result is that drastically different view points can all claim that it’s supporting evidence for their opinion. An objective observer can see that we haven’t really proven anything. After a little over 17.5 hours of listening to this guy speak, I’ve been presented with little evidence that supports some form of divine creation, and I haven’t heard a single argument against evolution that doesn’t fall into the category of reading a predecided conclusion into the evidence.

Creation Science Continued

I continued listening to this particular creation scientist speak. Today can be summarized in one statement, “This is so increadible that it couldn’t have occured randomly.” He brought up the various senses as well as discussed echo location in bats and dolphins. These are pretty advanced systems and I have to agree, they didn’t arrive by random chance. Evolution though does have an intelligent input, the environment. Some things wind up more successful than others and spawn more offspring, eventually becoming dominant. There is continous input. This is somewhat akin to the free market economy, everything contributes somewhat.
Thus far, I see a fixation on one detail, which has led to a sort of tunnel vision. Instead of investigating things further, attempts to understand have ground to a halt. Maybe after this, I should find someone else to listen to. There’s got to be more to this phenomenon than this though.

My First Creation Science Experience

Today, I took some time to listen to a self proclaimed creation scientist speak. It was a prerecorded lecture which proved very facinating. I’ve heard many generalizations about creationists and evolutionists coming from both sides. Watching the discussion has been a rather facinating study of human behavior. Anyway, this particular creationist seemed convinced that Darwin worked on the origins of life and speculated that it was caused by a random process. This is just a misconception about Darwin’s work. His famous book is titled The Origin of Species, which details a mechanism by which lifeforms transform. He never produced a book called The Origins of Life, speculating on the method by which life is created from inorganic matter. Most of this prerecorded lecture was about the likelihood of life originating by chance. The actual theory of evolution was never touched and nothing was really said about the spontaneous creation of humans from a divine source.
Misattributions aside, one of the things repeated constantly during the talk was the need for information in the origin of lifeforms. This reminds me of John Conway’s Game of Life. Provided no initial data, nothing will happen. With small amounts of data, complex patterns will form based on a few simple guidelines. Evolution, as I know it, is not about the creation of life information, but rather the transformation of the data. It felt a little strange listening to this part of the discussion, the neccesity for information was hammered through with repetition, alegory and simplistic examples. This portion made me feel like I was in grade school again.
There was also a more complex portion of the talk about amino acids and L-D enantiomers, I hope my spelling is right. As a bit of a side note, I’m sick of hearing people describe aspartame as two amino acids. In organic chemistry, preceeding numbers indicate which atom something is bonded to. For instance 2-2-4 tri-methyl-pentane has three methyl groups which are bonded two on the second atom and one on the fourth atom of a pentane molecule. There’s only one molecule. Anyway, ranting aside, there was a long discussion about the formation of L and D enantiomers and the importance of being able to distinguish between the two in order to form the compact, twisting DNA molecule. The problem of sorting between L and D enantiomers is indeed a legitimate problem to creating life by chance. However, I have to disagree with the attitude of the speaker that our failure to chemically seperate the two thus far doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.
One of my favorite movie quotes comes from the movie The Core, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, and what if the core is made of cheese? This is all best guess commander. That’s all science is, is best guess.” Basically in science, we observe phenomenon and make a guess. Never does science ever prove something right. Eventually, theories are proven incorrect and give way to other theories. In order to scientifically prove that L-D enantiomers cannot be seperated by a chemical process, all possible methods must first be exaughsted. The lack of firm proof is why things like gravity, and magnetism are refered to as theories. There’s the possibility of some other phenomenon causing these, which will one day prove our existing best guess to be incorrect. This feels like it could be a case of chasing Poisson’s bright spot.
Anyway, time to try to make a point out of this. To say that something is impossible because we haven’t figured it out yet is not a very scientific attitude. To say that life couldn’t happen by chance doesn’t mean that different species cannot be created if life already exists. It also helps to learn about something before seeking to disprove it. The question of the origin of life is indeed a difficult question. Endless feasability studies about various methods of creating human beings from various potential origins of life doesn’t really seem like it’s going to get anywhere. Obviously, one of them works. What’ll do it for me is seeing evidence supporting a theory, which this talk really didn’t do much of.
I’m going to keep searching for material to try to understand this and to simply observe the way beliefs are formed. Oh and all this organic chemistry stuff at the end felt a little strange, a couple minutes before, I felt like I was in elementry and then I was back in the land of grown-ups again.