Science

This news story talks about new theories behind the mass extinctions that have occurred in Earth’s past. Very interesting reading.

The mass extinction that most people are familiar with is the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, which is when the dinosaurs were wiped out. But there have been others, some of them much worse.

The new theories propose the idea that these extinctions could have been caused by vast clouds of interstellar matter. These clouds might have blocked some of the sunlight reaching the Earth, causing an ice age. Or they could have stripped some of the ozone from the upper atmosphere, increasing the amount of ultraviolet radiation that would reach the surface.

I was educated as a biologist and evolutionary theory remains an intellectual interest of mine. I spent many hours in my youth arguing with “scientific” creationists. These hours were largely spent educating the creationists on the actual theory they were criticizing, or debating the finer philosophical points of scientific methodology. I eventually gave up due to pure frustration because in the end creationists believe what they believe as a matter of faith. You can’t argue somebody out of his faith.

So this post over at Powerline pointing to a biology professor who is denouncing the Powerline guys for being idiots because one of them doesn’t believe in evolution grabbed my attention .

Creationists are exasperating because they never study evolutionary theory in any detail. Since they start with the unshakable presumption that the theory is wrong, they can never actually honestly analyze the theory and therefore can never understand it in any depth. They just skim over the theory looking for points that confuse them and then pronounce the misunderstood points as fatal flaws within the theory itself.

Frankly, most creationists’ knowledge of evolutionary theory boils down to, “them scientist fellas what says we alls comes from monkeys!”

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So via Slashdot comes a news story about a study done at the University of Utah that purports to show that a person on a cell phone drives like someone who is drunk. I don’t think this is actually the case. I think there are very common-sense grounds for questioning the study.

Caveat: I can’t seem to find the actual study online, just an abstract. So, I am working from a second hand assessment of the study. However, the abstract and the news stories seem to agree.

The study claims that talking on a cell phone, even with a hands-free unit, causes one to have the same problems driving as someone with a blood alcohol of 0.08%. Everybody’s first reaction to this observation is, “those darn cell phone drivers,” but our second reaction should be, “wait a minute.”

If cell phone use is so dangerous then where are all the dead people?

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The graph below is what’s got everyone talking about global warming. It’s a graph of the change in average global temperature since the beginning of the industrial era.

Average Global Temperatures Since 1861

It shows, quite conclusively you’ll agree, that making steel, using a leaf blower and driving your SUV is raising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere. And because CO2 is a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide raises the average temperature of the Earth. So, when Kansas turns into a desert and Florida disappears under the ocean, it’s your American gas-guzzling fault. Correct?

Not so fast, my media propagandized reader. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) has been doing extensive research on the question of global warming and have begun to weigh in with their results. Their verdict can be summed up in one sentence: The earth has been warming and cooling in regular cycles for hundreds of thousands of years. At least.

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I first became interested in Albert Einstein and relativity when I was a child. I remember my father telling me about Einstein’s claim that time goes by at different rates and that objects change size for people travelling at different speeds. “That’s ridiculous,” I remember thinking. “It doesn’t make any sense. How could that possibly be true?”

Well, it is true. And one of my pet hobbies throughout my life has been reading popular physics books in an attempt to answer my childhood questions. Coming to an understanding of it – OK, understanding is too grand a word. Let’s say I now accept it. – has not been an easy journey for me. It’s been about 35 years in the making.

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