The Bathroom Wall
With any tavern, one can expect that certain things that get said are out-of-place. But there is one place where almost any saying or scribble can find a home: the bathroom wall. This is where random thoughts and oddments that don’t follow the other entries at the Panda’s Thumb wind up. As with most bathroom walls, expect to sort through a lot of oyster guts before you locate any pearls of wisdom.
Previous Wall
test
There is a God!
And he is a plumber. The Bathroom has been flushed.
Thank you Reed.
Great!
Course, that still leaves what happens when the new plumbing acquires a big drip…
Wait, what am I saying?
Spammer alert!
To make one point about the previous thread. John Kwok wrote:
“Sorry Jim, but your invocation of the Ground Zero Mosque controversy is not helpful here. Incidentally there are many Muslims and Muslim Americans who oppose its construction, simply because they recognize that building it near Ground Zero is needlessly offensive to the families of the victims and the survivors of the 9/11 attack. Some of the most prominent critics - who are Muslim Americans - include Wall Street businessman Mansoor Ijaz (who tried to assist the Clinton administration in extraditing Osama bin Laden from the Sudan) and former United States Navy officer Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser.
[…]
If you are going to call Miss USA, a Muslim American, Rima Fakih, a bigot, then be my guest. Same is true for those two prominent Muslim Americans I had mentioned. Or other Muslim Americans who, like them, have spoken out against building the “Cordoba House” Islamic Center (Of course I am also against it, but am definitely not a bigot.).”
Unless YOU are a practicing Muslim your opposition to this cultural center is pure bigotry, so your saying that you’re “definitely not a bigot” is false. Your ruse of hiding behind the Muslim-Americans’ backs is the same as of the racists who think that using the n-word is OK because so many African-Americans use it. If you are a Muslim, well then, I find your views on the issue just silly, not bigoted.
Kris,
You can’t possibly know what I know.
We already tried that on Kris. You can only call someone an @$$hole, a bastard and crazy so many times before it gets tiresome. What’s the point of bashing me?
Kris has called me a liar for stating the obvious facts about him. We can all see what he has done, so why would he deny the stunts he has pulled? He is the one who invaded our space to attack the cause of the blog, yet he expects us to be tolerant and respectful of him no matter what he says? There is no law or principle I know that demands any such thing.
I haven’t lied about anything, you jackass! The simple fact is that you have invaded Panda’s Thumb and have been a disruptive force from the beginning and have played us like suckers. I’m not fooled by you and no one else is. Even if you were insulted by one or two people in the beginning, you could have ignored it and just responded to the ones who were being positive to you, like flowersfriend has been, but instead you started throwing shit at everyone who dared to reject your tactics. We insulted you because that seemed to be what you liked, but I get tired of that after a while. You don’t, appearantly.
If you seriously think you have made ANY positive contributions to this community here, you are even more delusional than most Creationists!
None whatsoever, but since any comments to a troll are going to produce nothing but bashing in response, that leads to what the point of the comments was.
John often fails to read for comprehension. A poor highschool education , no doubt.
Oh Bob, I can hear the howls now: “Set phasers to SLAUGHTER!”
Your “profile” is a person who needs attention and does not even try to get it by behaving in any consistent or coherent fashion. You are a manipulative jerk who takes ANY response from others and uses it as an excuse to attack. You bash us for not being tolerant enough of Creationists, while stating Creationist fallacies yourself. Then you turn around and deny being religious and question why certain others who are Creationist take their religion so seriously. Such strange behavior is pathological in the extreme.
Gee, this website seems VERY important to you, considering how much time you spend here.
You are either crazy or a fraud, Kris.
The fun thing about the BW is that the trolls either have to cave in and respond on the BW – which they don’t want to do – or pass up responding – which they REALLY don’t want to do.
Your track record is too well known here for us to consider that you are sincere about anything. You are even WORSE than the average Creationist troll because you keep going back and forth between acting non-religious and acting like a Creationist. You cannot be both, so you must be bullshitting us. Nobody here can take that seriously.
If you don’t like being called a liar, stop being one. At least I have ALWAYS told the truth about YOU.
DH, a very minor issue here: the first part you cited above was addressed to me, and personally I find it amusing to watch such comments fall into a hole of resounding silence.
However, as far as the rest goes, carry on.
Oh, did you want to answer him here first? Be my guest. But I figured I’d just make a note of ANY inappropriate thing Kris says elsewhere and post it here, answer it here, and wait for Kris to take the hint and stop attacking us everywhere else and just slam people here.
Why would I want to do that? But if my own rejoinder is indifference, I can at least politely ask that the effect not be spoiled.
Kris threatens: “I would thoroughly enjoy kicking your ass and the asses of anyone else who has called me a liar,…”
Lotsa bluster; everybody’s collective asses are exposed right here.
AARGH! I am so outa here!
Whew! Glad I never called Kris a liar. I only called him a coward and a bully.
So it’s like “one of these days Alice, POW! To the mooning”?
Another collection of Kris’ delusional rants.
Panda’s Thumb is a blog made for defending evolution and promoting proper science education, and since Kris was the one who invaded the blog to spew both Creationist arguments that we were expected to “tolerate” (like we are supposed to tolerate falsehoods?) and then claim to be non-religious at other times, why shouldn’t we regard him as unwelcome, inconsistent and disruptive? Why shouldn’t we treat him like he is the enemy, when that’s all he has ever acted like since he arrived here?
An example of hypocrisy would be us invading and attacking ID promoters on Uncommon Descent. I’ve never done that, and never will. Maybe Kris can go over there and drive the ID people crazy for a while, to prove to us once and for all that he is an equal-opportunity critic, and not a bigoted Creationist concern troll.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/
Kris the creationist wrote:
“If, however, “descent with modification” is defined as showing that speciation (evolution) occurs and/or occurred, then that’s a different ballgame, and requires greater evidence. While a lot of evidence points to a persuasive probability that descent with modification, including divergence/speciation, occurred throughout(?) the history of life, there’s a lot more work to do to before it can reasonably be said that it has been established close to 100%, and I’m not sure it can be reasonably said that it can be established ‘empirically’. Many inferences have been and have to be made, and inferences are a matter of opinion.”
This is of course incorrect. I already posted a link to a web page entitled:
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution
If Kris wants to discuss the point, he can do so here. Maybe someone will want to discuss it with him. Unless of course he is just plain chicken shit.
Here’s the link again:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
You might just leave a short bland note on the original thread to invite him to come to the BW for discussion. He’ll ignore it, of course, but that works too.
Yawn.
(Bored.)
All the spamming at The Immune System Cross-examination Still Burns, and other forums, is very unChristlike, don’t you think?
Makes you wonder if these anti-science creation-supporters are Christians? (Never known a real creationist who wasn’t.)
It’s funny how trolls stubbornly resist being prodded to direct their comments to the BW. They know that once they do, they don’t have any real nuisance value any more: “What’s the point of trolling, then?”
Kris huffs and puffs and squeaks “What are you afraid of?” hiding behind his mommy’s apron. Afraid to mix it up on the big kid’s playground, he’ll sit in the sandbox and cry.
Poor widdle Kwis! Mean old scientists call you out on your stupid shit? Maybe if we ignore the little wanker he’ll go back into the closet and play with himself.
Geeze, I’m beginning to miss FL! I tell you, the neighborhood is going to hell.
I knew the asshole was chicken shit. All he haas to do is come here and provide a better explanation for the 29 different independent data sets that are all consistent with common descent. Until he does, I guess he will just be someone who believes in evolution but not in common descent. Yea right.
Everyone should remember, he had his chance to discuss science, he chose to quote mine and insult instead. He can cry all he wants to now, but everyone is wise to his crap.
Then why is legalizing gay marriage unethical?
Why is it ethical to deny equal rights solely for the sake of some religious bigots’ personal interpretation of the Bible?
Because Jesus said so?
Would it be ethical to criminalize the consumption of shellfish, pork and cheeseburgers because the Bible specifically states all non-Kosher food products are abominations before the eyes of God?
Scott, I contend that random events have no “cause”, otherwise they wouldn’t be random. (By which I mean, their randomness is “uncaused.”)
When I rotate the key in the ignition of my car (my old-style car), the engine starts. If I don’t rotate the key, it doesn’t start.
If I don’t rotate the key, the engine doesn’t start some random time later. When the engine starts it is not a random event. (I wish! But never mind, I’m speaking of hypothetically perfect cars.)
So my contention is that random events have no “cause.”
I also contend that the entire field of Statistics is predicated upon random events.
Statistics, as a branch of Mathematics, is demonstrably useful.
My bold assertion is that the usefulness of Statistics is evidence of the genuine existence of random events.
If random events didn’t exist, then Statistics should be useless in the real world.
Indeed, we know that Statistics are very useful in practice.
I offer this as a third counter example to IBIG, the third prong of my attack against his argument. Unfortunately I don’t think he’s up to it. Certainly not on your level of understanding.
Morals are standards of behavior for what is and is not acceptable. Gay marriage is moral because a very great many people accept that it may be done. It is ethical in the sense it has become morally acceptable.
Some Christians reject this aspect of reality. They assert that everyone must have the same morals, namely the very ones they have. Why? Because gods, that’s why.
Random events don’t have a cause?
How about tornadoes? Tornadoes only form because the conditions are right, but many times even when the perfect conditions exist for tornadoes they still don’t form, so are you saying that tornadoes are uncaused???
The point is, you can’t have quantum fluctuations without the right conditions, therefore the conditions are one of the causes, but I would point out that there could be other causes as well, that just haven’t been discovered yet. So, where did those conditions come from?
What are those conditions?
What are those conditions?
You can’t say. No one can say. Quantum fluctuations have no cause. They just are.
I know you are unable to accept that anything can happen without a cause, eppur si muove. There are things that happen without any cause.
NO, initial conditions are not a “cause.”
They may be a prerequisite, they may be necessary, but they are not the “cause.”
If they were indeed the cause then all U-235 atoms would immediately decay.
But that is not what we observe. The time until any particular U-235 atom decays is a random variable.
So if there is a “cause” it’s something other than the mere existence of the U-235 atom.
Indeed the decay has no cause, because it is a random event in time.
That helps define what “cause” means. The fact that you won’t accept it puts you squarely in the 12th Century.
If you want to insist the “cause” for the time of decay of each and every U-235 atom is your god, then fine. Then your god becomes the cause for EVERTHING that happens in the Universe since t = 0. In which case your god is a useless concept.
See?
How’s it going with all this, Poofster?
The Perfect Example - “but many times even when the perfect conditions exist for tornadoes they still don’t form,”
IBIG, with you own words you’ve hit the nail on the head.
Why will a tornado form sometimes under the perfect conditions and other times not form with precisely the same perfect conditions?
The answer is that perfect conditions are a prerequisite, they are necessary, but they are not the cause.
The cause is something else. What is it? (Hint - there isn’t one, it’s random atmospherics.)
Interesting point, that. “Can a truly random event be said to have a cause?”
Well, that would involve a consideration of whether there is any such thing as a truly random event. The concatenation of causes that trigger the event may be unpredictable, true enough, and the event is then an emergent effect of several or many of them coming together by chance. But is that fact enough to make the event truly random? Determinism, anyone? Seriously, I’m going to have to crack the books on that one. Thanks for that. As someone once said, “Oh, jeez, not another learning experience!”
And so to the ethics of same-sex marriage.
Biggy will tell you that the ethics of this are determined by his interpretation of two or so specific Bible quotes: Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:26-27, for starters. Biggy will tell you that this interpretation is completely authoritative; that it defines the only true ethical position. Period.
Only for most citizens of Western democracies, it isn’t and doesn’t. Western democracies are predicated on different ethical principles than that the Bible is the only arbiter of behaviour.
Three of those principles are set out as the basic rights of citizens in the United States: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Another is found in the great words at the start of their founding document: “We, the people…”
Life: the right to live without fear or coercion, provided that right be as cherished for others as it is for oneself.
Liberty: Freedom to live as one wills, to enjoy one’s own property and the fruits of one’s labour, to advocate, to assemble, to go about one’s lawful business, provided that the same rights be as cherished for others as for oneself.
The pursuit of happiness: Freedom to live without restraint except respect for the same right for others, in that way and by what principles seem best able to conduce to happiness, on the sole judgement of the free citizen.
Those ethical principles establish for all time the right of citizens of a free democracy to make between themselves such civil contracts as seem best to them, provided the same rights are not compromised for others. More and more of the people of the major democracies are coming to recognise that fact. I think that this will become overwhelmingly the judgement of “we, the people”, in the future, and the principle will become enacted into the law. And this in accordance with the actual ethical principles established by the people, for the people, whatever some of them may say the Bible requires.
That’s why same-sex marriage is ethical.
It’s been a long time since I took statistics, and I don’t recall this particular discussion, but it still doesn’t feel right.
In this context, I think I see a subtle distinction. In the domain of “Random Events” with which Statistics can deal, I see (at least) two kinds of things: 1) Truly “Random” “Events” (such as radioactive decay and quantum fluctuations) that really do have no “cause”, and 2) Deterministic Events that do have a cause, but that happen “randomly”. An example of the latter might be eye color in a human population. The color of eyes is completely deterministic within a given individual, but is relatively random within a sample of the population.
Ah! I think maybe that’s it. It isn’t necessary that the Deterministic Events happen randomly, but that they are sampled randomly. Pick a person “at random” from a crowd of people, and that person’s eye color is “random”. The actual random variable may have a particular “non-uniform” distribution in a given population (this is, it may not be a “uniform” distribution), but the eye color is still random. That is, given the eye color of the first “N” people, no matter how large “N” is you will not be able to predict with 100% accuracy what the eye color of person “N+1” is going to be.
Now, the “Truly Random Events” (like radioactive decay) will (IIRC) have a “Uniform” probability distribution. But that doesn’t mean that Statistics can’t also deal with non-uniform probability distributions.
So, while Statistics can describe “Truly Random Events”, Statistics does not require that the events themselves be random. Just because Geometry can describe how billiard balls interact on a table, Geometry isn’t a “cause” of the balls interacting on the table. Similarly, I don’t think that the “usefulness” of Statistics can be used as a (separate) counter to the argument that “every event has a cause”.
(That may be a poorly formed description of the problem, but I hope it gets the notion across.)
Great observations, as always. OTOH, I might organize those definitions a bit differently, as below: Deletions Additions
I can say a little about what randomness means in the context of computer science.
Ideally, a computer program is a deterministic process. That is, given exactly the same input for run after run, a program must produce exactly the same output for each run.
Suppose you are given a sequence of numbers and a program which has produced the sequence. For each run the program takes as input a natural number (1,2,3…) and produces a pseudorandom number as output. We say “pseudo” because the program is not really random. It is deterministic. The sequence it produces, however, must “look” random.
So what does it mean to look random? It means that, given the sequence for inputs (1,2,3,…,n), you cannot predict the output of the program for input n+1, no matter how large n is allowed to be.
Without loss of generality, we can constrain the output of our pseudorandom generator to the digits (0,1). If we pair inputs with outputs, the sequence might look like this:
1:0, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:0, 6:0, 7:1 …
A paradigmatic example of a (truly) random process is the flip of a fair coin. Each flip results in heads (0) or tails (1). If the coin is fair - if the pseudorandom sequence “looks” random - no one can predict what the next flip will bring, no matter how many previous flips one is allowed to study.
In short, to look random, a sequence of ones and zeros must contain no detectable pattern. There must be no information in the sequence that can be exploited to predict the next output.
That doesn’t mean that there IS no such pattern. It only means that nobody can find one. In the absence of any such pattern, we say the sequence looks random.
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