Posts by Pompous Git

Re: 400 billion? Try 1.5 trillion

I could be the weapons system that bankrupts the American Empire.

You're not cheap then... Or short on ego.

Re: frog becoming a giraffe

@ Vic

Well-known as The Paradox of the Stone; smoke enough weed and you'll believe anything :-)

Didn't geneticists also note that only a small fraction of our genetic code is actually in active use

Back in the days when The Git was in Big School studying genetics nearly 50 years ago, it was clear there were two types of DNA. Only a small fraction was used to generate RNA, the rest was labelled "junk" DNA because it appeared to have no such function. Later, it was discovered that the "junk" was far better conserved than the useful stuff, so it was renamed "silent". Unravelling what DNA and replicated genes do and don't do is a matter of ongoing research.

In the meantime, the movement of genes between unrelated organisms was discovered. It would appear that horizontal/lateral gene transfer (HGT/LGT) plays a far more important role than point mutation of genes in situ. As an example there's a cnidarian (jellyfish) with perfect lenses, but lacking the necessary retina and brain to process visual information. Dawkins' account in The Blind Watchmaker has the retina and brain come before perfect lenses, not after.

Re: Creationists ?

If it was written in 1615, that was probably written AFTER he was forced to repent before the Pope for writing Starry Messenger ...

IOW, that was likely written under duress.

Bellarmine advised Galileo to refer to the Copernican system as a mathematical theory only in 1616. This was the year that De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was temporarily placed on the list of prohibited books pending revision to the front matter. Why would Galileo have been forced to write condemning his friends Cardinals Bellarmine and Berberini (future Pope Urban) the year before the judgement? Galileo stated that they "determine in 'hypocritical zeal' to preserve at all costs what they believe, rather than admit what is obvious to their eyes."

Galileo's Letter to Christina: Some Rhetorical Considerations

Re: Most of the creationists I know also believe in evolution!

Anyone wanting to understand evolution should read 'Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene'. It sheds a very interesting light on the principle of the survival of the fittest.

Anyone who wants to understand the Received View of evolution. This is the account that Dawkins believes and he is at his best as a writer in this book. Dawkins takes too much for granted, however.

Quoting from the wiki-bloody-pedia:

Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to Darwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability according to evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles.[22] This led to the field of statistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergo irreversible processes. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future." All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Instability resists standard deterministic explanation. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability.

Prigogine's The End of Certainty: time, chaos, and the new laws of nature is a very rewarding and challenging read.

Re: Meh...

It's this kind of lazy shifting from one thing to another that I was crtiticising in my comment, because it makes it easier for the nut-jobs to make it look like scientists are shifty and slack with standards of evidence.

There's plenty of evidence that "scientists are shifty and slack with standards of evidence"; Richard Dawkins for example. In The God Delusion ascribes atheism to both Albert Einstein and Martin Gardner, both of whom professed to believe in God, without providing a shred of evidence.

The statement of his that infuriated me the most was: "I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts." IOW it's OK to look, but you're not allowed to ask pertinent questions.

As I understand it, it isn't that you can't observe some change with very small organisms, its that you have a big problem with small populations of large organisms producing enough beneficial mutations at the rate required.

That's a minor problem compared to the one identified by the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Susumu Ohno. In his classic book Evolution by Gene Duplication he pointed out that in order for a gene to evolve some new function, the gene would first need to be replicated lest the organism lose the gene's original function. The replicate gene can then mutate to generate the new function. But since that gene is no longer expressed, it is no longer subject to selection pressure and thus is likely to be lost. Natural Selection is an efficient mechanism for deleting "unnecessary" genes.

Especially when it comes to events like the Cambrian period when there was an explosion of new species.

Not just species, whole phyla arose at a rate an order of magnitude greater than theory would expect. Well worth reading: Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life and Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Conway Morris's work on the Burgess Shale fossils work inspired parts of Gould's masterpiece. Conway Morris is, shock! horror! a Christian. So it goes...

Re: Another nail in the coffin?

Lamarck's Acquired Characteristics (now deprecated)

Were deprecated; now renamed "epigenetics".

In recent years, scientists have discovered that epigenetic changes–heritable changes that do not alter the sequence of DNA itself–play a major role in development, allowing genetically identical cells to develop different characteristics; epigenetic changes also play a role in cancer and other diseases.

The Australian molecular immunologist Ted Steele was dismissed from Wollongong Uni for research "supporting the theory of reverse transcription from the somatic (body) cells to the germline (reproductive) cells. This reverse transcription process enables characteristics or bodily changes acquired during a lifetime to be written back into the DNA and passed on to subsequent generations."

Re: Creationists ?

Copernicus proved creationism was all wrong, so did Galileo

Citation please. You may not be aware that in his day Galileo was more famous for his sermons than his physics. He was pious almost to a fault.

for the holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost and the latter as the observant executrix of God's commands.

From Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, 1615.

Re: Why try to 'convince' creationists?

When London's sooty atmosphere was at its worst they were much darker, to provide camouflage against blackened buildings.

Much like Kettlewell's famed peppered moths? Most of us probably can recall from biology class being taught how peppered moths developed a dark form in response to industrial pollution to protect themselves against predation by birds. Dark moths being harder to see against the blackened tree trunks.

Unfortunately, Kettlewell made it all up. Peppered moths are nocturnal and spend their days hidden in crevices on the underside of tree branches. The picture of the two forms, light and dark made a wonderful cover for Scientific American, but it was posed. Both forms, light and dark, existed before the industrial revolution. But it's good "story".

I believe the main predators are bats and owls.

Re: Its not just the creationists ...intelligent design, my arse.

if genitalia had been designed with intelligence they'd surely be somewhere more convenient.

I once saw a play where Satan claimed to have invented sex. Satan said that God had intended to make everyone by hand until he came up with the idea of reproduction.

Re: dogs cannot become cats

You might as well try to train a cat to bark

To turn a cat into a dog, soak in petrol and set fire: woof!

To turn a dog into a cat, put dog in deep freeze until well-frozen. Put dog through bandsaw: meeeow!

Re: Its not just the creationists ...intelligent design, my arse.

I think, with Darwin and Dawkins and all the others in between, we have a good, solid road to reason as far as Evolution goes.

From Dawkins' The River Out of Eden 1995 pp 7-8

There are now perhaps thirty million branches to the river of DNA, for that is an estimate of the number of species on earth… Today’s thirty million rivers are irrevocably separate.

Emphasis mine. If species are irrevocably separate as Dawkins states, then there is no possibility of horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or hybridisation for that matter.

Re: Another strawman argument

No doubt one of the Greek speculation enthusiasts had some concept that could be stretched to fit requirement 2 millennia ago.

Aristotle was a marine biologist, and a very good one. He gave us the term species in biology. Somewhat oddly, he saw evolution in an opposite sense to current thinking. For example, he thought that the great apes were descended from humans.

Re: Another strawman argument

Article shows usual faulty argument that shuffling existing information is the same as generating new information.

Wish I could upvote that more!

Re: Another nail in the coffin?

So no, there is no circular reasoning. Evolution is a fact and a theory. Anyone in disagreement is ignorant and/or a fool.

Fact = Something that has really occurred or is actually the case (OED)

Theory = A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts (OED)

Your schema that "fact = theory" would appear to be self-referential (circular reasoning).

Re: Creates more problems than it solves?

Yes, estimated. But in km/s? That was clever :-)

Hopefully the smiley means you are just being a smart-arse :-)

Roemer never made the estimate in Earth-based measure; the conversion to km/s is so the modern reader can comprehend and compare. Huygens' estimate for example was a value of 110,000,000 toises per second, an amount incomprehensible to most people today (possibly when it was made, too). At El Reg it really should be percentage of maximum velocity of sheep in a vacuum, but I couldn't be arsed to work it out.

Re: Death and taxes are still constant...

I thought Trump had shown that taxes aren't either.

While taxes are always there, they're never constant. During the election campaign, taxes are going to decrease. After the campaign is over, they increase. I believe some call it Pompous Git's Law ;-)

Re: Creates more problems than it solves?

now I'll want to know where the mass and/or energy WENT to (or CAME from) when it changed over a zillion years' time.

I think you spotted the fatal flaw. Although it's "merely" an assumption that mass/energy is conserved, if it's not then there's a whole HEAP of physics out the window. Holy shit, Bob. I seem to have CAUGHT whatever it is YOU'VE got... ;-)

Re: "wouldn't the charges involved modify the trajectory"

I have this miraculous device called a 'mirror' that seems to do the job pretty well...

Trajectory: "The path of any body moving under the action of given forces; by many modern writers restricted to that of a body not known to be moving, like a planet, in a closed curve or orbit; esp. the curve described by a projectile in its flight through the air."

If you have any evidence that the path of photons from your "miraculous" mirror are travelling in curves, please present it. You could be in for a Nobel prize!

Re: Escalators

Just re-number the floors and call the old ground floor the "super-basement."

The term "lower ground floor" comes to mind. Needs less paint for the new signage :-)

Well, not since Atlantis, you can find the original engineer's report and planning permission buried in soft peat at the local planning office.

OTOH if you're frightened of leopards Tall building foundations: design methods and applications from Innovative Infrastructure Solutions December 2016.

Re: The City _allowed_ them to only sink piles 80 feet????? They will be sued as well.

Both the developers and the city are in deep doo doo. And should be.

The city I can understand, but why the developers? Because they engaged Handel Architects, DeSimone Consulting Engineers and Webcor Builders? Perhaps they should have engaged Gary Bickford, but I have no idea why.

Re: Not the developer's fault.

a structural design change was made for aesthetics. So in that case yes you cane blame the engineers for no recalculation load strength.

Aesthetics is the province of the knarchitects*, not the engineers. If the knarchitects never passed the revised drawings to the structural engineers, why would you blame the engineers for failing to anticipate those changes? Makes more sense to blame the Building Surveyors who accepted the design change without revised engineers' drawings.

* knarchitect is an engineer's term for them that make pretty pictures.

Re: Friction Piles

Sounds painful.

Wouldn't really know as I never suffered from them. But I thought they were itchy rather than painful. Perhaps we should be inspecting the builders' purchase orders for large quantities of AnuSol. This apparently shrinks piles through "scientifically proven" 3-way action! Speculating whether the "scientific proof" was supplied by Stephen Fry ;-)

clearly in hindsight building a massive concrete stiletto on deep soils might not have been the best plan up front.

Yes, a skyhook would have worked much better!

I think you will find that the reason for building from concrete rather than steel and curtain walls is the Great God "energy-efficiency" because of thermal mass.

Re: Friction Piles

The columns of the central crossing of York Minster was built above Roman remains. The original builders hadn't gone down deep enough to remove them.

It's quite common to find churches and cathedrals being built on the foundations of a prior building; usually a church rather than a Roman building.

I seem to recall Basil Spence being castigated for his replacement for Coventry Cathedral which isn't built on the remains of either St Mary's or St Michael's. Fond memories of seeing the new cathedral shortly after it was completed (1962?) and sniggering at the sight of Satan's exposed dick. Doubt I will ever see York Minster as I find travel more than tedious these days. Sad really as I do enjoy looking at old buildings...

Re: OT: Ryanair

You do realize that there are many twats out there that expect to be treated like royalty on a 30 minute flight...

While true, and I know less than nothing about Ryanair, I do know about the Australian equivalent: Tigerline. Friends were returned to Geelong rather than Tullamarine because inconvenient. The taxi fares home and then to Tullamarine airport the following morning more than ate up any cost savings made by flying Tigerline rather than Qantas or Virgin.

I have learnt over time to fly on Tuesday or Wednesday mid-mornings. The cost savings are not great; accommodation tends to be the biggie. Never travel on Fridays, Sundays or Mondays unless it's Christmas Day or New Year's.

Re: Sandwich filler?

Hypersonic fish is one thing but an entire house!

Fuck the house! I want to catch me some of them hypersonic fish!

Re: Low casualties ....

not much sense staying on a planet that doesn't care for you...

The Cation Exchange Capacity (a measure of soil fertility) of NZ's soils are to die for. And my very beautiful daughter lives there so it's a place very close to my heart.

Re: Low casualties ....

Worse for Wellington where I am, were the floods on the Tuesday

You had floods on those slopes? Holy Batfish, Catman! That was one helluva lot of rain then!