saturn return to sender

I’m sometimes startled at how confused and confusing the world is. Sometimes, I’m confused by how stunningly confused people are.

As one example, I was rubbernecking the articles at The Institute for Creation Research for something like two hours last weekend. It’s just so hard to look away! So magnificently twisted and grotesquely broken it all is!* ICR.org is a train wreck of straw men, misrepresentations and uncited claims. But that almost doesn’t matter; the whole discussion is moot immediately anyway because the basic claim of a “supernatural” explanation is perforce unscientific.

I know it’s a waste of time to poke around in the wreckage, and I won’t be saying anything here I haven’t probably said before, but … There’s this spectacularly warped bit where they insist that what they’re doing is “real” science, and that the secular scientific world is inventing fanciful magical forces to explain away the obvious. In this article, an organic chemist raises the homochirality problem in biological chemistry: how do proteins in organisms “know” the “right” form to take, if two equally likely forms emerge normally, outside of an organism? The answer, of course, is that God made it that way. Apparently, to say “we don’t know” is to be unscientific:

I find it interesting that when creationists start talking about God’s supernatural creation, evolutionists usually counter by saying that everything must be explained by natural science and divine intervention is not science. I find this remark extremely amusing. When we show them that the laws of natural science cannot explain the existence of chirality, evolutionists say that the process happened a long time ago by some unknown method that they cannot explain. Now who’s relying on a supernatural explanation? Although they would never call it divine intervention, they certainly are relying on faith and not on scientific facts. Evolution just hopes you don’t know chemistry.

*goggle*

Seriously, every time I read that, I have to put my eyes back in my head. Does the English language work differently for this guy? What part of “as secular scientists, we cannot explain this” means “we are relying on a supernatural explanation”? And which part of “as a Creationist, I believe that a supernatural being designed it this way” means “this is scientific fact”?** This fellow is apparently writing from the inside of a fun house mirror.

(more…)

I had an idea for a little visualizer toy and started playing with Quartz Composer over the weekend. I’m always blown away at the power of that tool whenever I dip into it.

That said, I spent hours and hours trying to convince QC to do what I wanted. The macro I came up with for one part of the idea looked like this:

And after trying several variations, it actually—mysteriously—didn’t work in a critical way. I imagine it’s due to some lack of understanding of how QC’s pipeline works. But eventually I broke down and wrote the logic I wanted in Javascript using a single Javascript patch instead of that macro, and it looked like this:

Er. Yeah. You know how they like to say “and you can do all this without writing a single line of code”? Sometimes that’s only a good thing if you can also just write the damn code.

I also want to play with Processing sometime soon.

Such a geek.

This is an rss feed of stars within my personal lightcone*. That is, the stars with which I could possibly have any causal relationship, since my birth.

12 Ophiuchi is only 2 weeks away! It would be physically impossible for the good denizens of 12 Ophiuchi to have any idea what’s on its way right now.** In two weeks, though: a sudden onslaught of geeky causality, baby!

OK, actually my birth probably didn’t make much of a dent in the fabric of geek spacetime.

Here, put in your birthdate (as, eg, 1981-12-09) to get your own lightcone feed:

(w/kudos to interconnected.org.)

Another historic moment: I woke up around 6 with an insect in my mouth.

Box elder bugs taste weirdly like apple.

Eewww.