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.
This is a test of the new Bathroom Wall
bumping
bumping
More testing.
Dang; if only somebody had told me there wuz gonna be a test I could’a studied fer it… :p
Entries here show up on the main page’s Recent Comments panel. Should they? I’m thinking that perhaps all the bathroom wall traffic will drown out the main PT comments rendering the Recent Comments panel less than useful.
I may not be able to prevent comments on pages from showing up in the recent comments box, but I’ll look into it. Thanks for pointing that out.
BTW the Update function is really cool. I trust it will be featured on the main site soon?
Oops, ignore my last comment. The answer is implicit in your original post
This should be fun!
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/600991
Blog: Stages of denialism
Denialists never want to admit that they are wrong about anything, so they keep a debate going as long as possible to sooth their egos. Then, when their views are discredited by the mainstream scientific communities, they appeal to the prejudices of the general public instead.
Global Warming (GW) denialist stages:
“Global warming is not happening and may not happen. Why worry about it?”
“Global warming IS happening, but there is no evidence that humans are a factor in the problem.”
“Global warming is happening, humans are a factor, but there is nothing we can do to stop it anyway.”
‘Global warming is happening, humans are a factor, we can stop it, but the costs of trying to stop it would outweigh the benefits.”
Decades ago, most GW denialists were at stage one. Today, most of them are at stage two, with some already moving to stage three or four. Truly honest and fair people should have stopped at stage one.
Creationist (evolution denialist) stages:
“Species are eternal and unchanging, existing in their present form since Creation. There is no evidence for evolution.”
“Species do change, but only within the limits of created kinds. Evidence cited for evolution can also fit within Creationism.”
“Even if evolution occurs, an Intelligent Designer must have been involved, so complex are some biological forms.”
“Evolution is as unscientific as Creationism.”
The difference between a skeptic and a denialist, on any subject, is that a real skeptic knows in advance what evidence would convince him that something is real or that action of a certain kind is justified. A denialist has no such standards. His commitment to an ideology trumps any scientific standard. Gaps in scientific knowledge, which would motivate most scientists to look for more data, are wrongly used by denialists to reject completely a concept they do not like because of prejudice. This is dishonesty.
I’ve changed the panel size to ten to make it easier for y’all to play with it. We’ll eventually settle on a larger number.
Great idea.
Besides color (and tabbing the BW from the main page) I would suggest keeping or increasing PT default font size - no reason to humor trolls ranting off masses of texts.
With this PT has evolved as a dynamic site on the web. Kudos!
PS: In preview I get the default font size. Yet another reason to keep posted comments as default size.
‘Nuther thing: refreshed the 2nd page and got back to page 1. Saturday is cookie day, nom nom nom - but anyways.
There is cookie support, for the last viewed tab, but it may be iffy.
I’m not sure what you mean about font sizes. Are you asking for comments to have the same font size as the entries?
If you access the page normally via the url http://pandasthumb.org/bw/, then last page viewed will be properly retrieved. If you use the a link with a fragment ID, then it won’t try to cookie. I’ll try to patch the tabs library that we’re using to change that.
The tabs also understand links to specific comments and will load the proper panel. Try it out.
http://pandasthumb.org/bw/#comment-149706
It seems Sal Cordova has matriculated back to UcD. He is now holding forth on how Fisher’s Theorem is the death of Darwinism, on the back of Michael Lynch’s new book on genetic architecture.
If by Darwinism, Sal means the strawman pseudo-religion invented by creationists, great! Kick it down, Sal, just don’t erect Kimuraism in its place when you find that we haven’t all become YECs.
If, OTOH, Sal means a theory composed of strands assuming Deep Time, common descent, variability, and selection, then he should increase his dosage. Nothing in Lynch affects those things. As I understand Lynch’s work, the relatively small populations of eukaryotes and multicellular organisms coupled with neutral drift is the key source of variation upon which selection operates.
Sal also does a quick switch in his post between ‘biodiversity’ as used in a quote from Lynch, and ‘diversity’ as used in a discussion of Fisher’s Theorem. The two terms mean vastly different things.
Yup; both for hampering trolls and for editing breaks et cetera in fairly accurate previews.
Comment preview is going to become 2.0ified as well. The preview will be displayed on the entry page, probably under the update button.
On Wallace’s personal blog he whines
Such a lovely display of Christian ethics and morals… Not only is his foolish behavior undermining his own credibility (what little there is left of it) but Wallace seems perfectly content in dragging down Christianity with him.
Bump test:
http://pandasthumb.org/bw/#comment-149706
Okay, I changed the hue of the default color scheme to fit with our bluish color scheme.
[Crossposted from Good Math, Bad Math]
@ SC:
Oh, you are here now, kvetching over the same points. As the Panda’s Thumb thread that activated you is now closed due to your ranting, I will post my belated answer here instead. (Isn’t the ability to google crosslinks to get to the full picture wonderful?)
On PT:
The URL DiEb looked at and when skewered you, sparing me the analysis?
Here:
The thread here answered that already, but more detail is provided in the link above.
The continuing misunderstanding of how to make proper limits is clearly exhibited, demonstrating the shallowness that Mike Elzinga, DiEB and others have noted several times over now.
H fckng sshls. plgz t Dvsn NW bfr gt pssd ff nd strt fckng wth . dn’t wnt t mk m md. Trst m n ths. r scrt scks bg tm.
H fckng sshls. plgz t Dvsn NW bfr gt pssd ff nd strt fckng wth . dn’t wnt t mk m md. Trst m n ths. r scrt scks bg tm.
^ | | Oh good, it works.
Not only is his foolish behavior undermining his own credibility (what little there is left of it) but Wallace seems perfectly content in dragging down Christianity with him.
why oh why do you let people who are obviously not completely (or even partially) sane get to you so, Pim?
he certainly doesn’t speak for xianity, or ID, or creationism, or anything other than the random delusions flitting through his skull.
I hope you at least can confine your non-arguments with him in this new locale.
Frankly, i still say he’s not worth your effort.
What Ichthyic said. I made one final insult to whatever Wallace had been blubbering about, but he is not worth ANYONE’s time, save as a crashtest dummy.
So why post a mention of him at all? Well, I feel that creationists reveal the seabed of asshole-ish stupidity (as opposed to crackpot asshole-ish-ness and stupidity, though there are PLENTY of those, more mundane, types of creationists, of course!), but the thing that mimics a human personality sometimes takes on compellingly repulsive forms, unique in their awfulness. Anything unique is a treasure to be admired, at least for a very brief time. Or so I deeply believe. The wonder of the human mind, to this mere human, is that the most sickeningly ugly dross can be used to understand life (yes, and the UNiverse and everything.) Sal Cordova represents one of these bizarrely ugly mounds of dishonesty that move along sifting through the intellectual/moral/spiritual feces that covers the bare idiocy of standard creationism. I believe W. Wallace, like some self-poisoning pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the putrid floors of this silent poisoned sea represents another.
From a very, very distant point of view, William Wallace provides us all with a unique service, although thanking him for that service would be absurd: he provides it despite himself, and I would never wish his fate on the shittiest person I have ever met.
Booger!
Ben Stein pooped here.
Hi IBIG,
I’m not surprised you’re baffled. For someone who believes in a god, it must be disturbing to have to face the fact that that god is completely impotent, to the point of dismissal, in scientific and technical pubs.
I do notice that you don’t dispute the facts: there are no gods in Proceedings of Information Theory or the proceedings of the Astronomical Society - or your refrigerator manual.
Totally impotent - and that’s why gods are useless.
Your “point” is a load of bullshit, as usual.
But are you going to stick to THIS point? Or will you just jump to another distraction?
It’s been explained, multiple times, that the tree of life forks, unlike YOUR family tree. When one branch evolves a new feature, that does not magically cause every member of every other branch to vanish into thin air.
But we all know you aren’t interested in the truth, on this subject or any other. We all know you’ll just throw up another smokescreen and pretend you never mentioned this topic as soon as the refutations pile up too much. So from now on, every time you change the subject, that will count as your admission that evolution is real, science works, and your cult’s dogma is nothing more than a load of bullshit.
So let’s see how long it takes you to admit you’re full of shit. Address the reality of this topic, instead of dodging as you always do. Because every time you dodge you just make it more and more obvious that you’ve got nothing.
So. At least a few feathered dinosaurs lived at a point in time after primitive birds first appeared.
Why, exactly, would the apperence of birds somewhere, in some contemporaneous environment mean that suddenly every featherd dinosaur had to die off all over the planet?
As you yourself noted, small early creatures like archeopteryx exploited a different niche than that filled by the small raptors of the day.
Modern amphibians descended from primitive lobe-finned fishes - but there are still lobe-finned fishes living in their little niches to this very day.
Similarly, North America was populated largely by Europeans. Yet, somehow, there are still Europeans! Why? Just because a new habitat (North America) with new resources to exploit opens up it doesn’t mean the old one will be magically vacated. It also still makes sense for an ancestral population to keep living in Europe, ergo, somebody does.
Dinosaurs are little different, since their habitat ended, and the birds and mammals went on. But for a while, there was absolutely no reason they couldn’t all live together.
I think his current complaint is about the lack of feathered dinosaurs older than the oldest bird fossils, not the presence of feathered dinosaurs after that time. That’s why I mentioned the rarity of fossilization for many (perhaps most?) species-environment combinations.
That’s an apt assessment of the comments I read by your fellow Pharyngulites over at the Intersection:
Should Sheril Kirshenbaum seek the same treatment too, in light of posting her comment critical of that absurd threat that was posted at Pharyngula?
I think not. Maybe it’s you who’s in dire need of help, not Sheril or myself.
This comment has been moved to The Bathroom Wall.
This comment has been moved to The Bathroom Wall.
Too bad you can’t accept as credible, the comments of Sheril Kirshenbaum and Disturbed and Disgusted.
Someone at Pharyngula posted a threat to rape and to kill Sheril, Chris Mooney and their supporters at the Intersection (presumably including me, though I do admit that I haven’t agreed with them, especially with large sections of their book “Unscientific America”):
IMHO this was the best comment posted over at the Intersection regarding the absurd tribal mentality which you are now displaying. I think you and Ichthyic need to read it again:
218. Disturbed and Disgusted Says: March 12th, 2010 at 9:22 am Like several others who have posted to this thread, I’m a longtime Pharyngula reader who doesn’t like Chris or Sheril. I even used to be a pretty frequent poster on Pharyngula a couple of years ago….until this trend of using violent imagery and even rape to describe dissenting commenters began en masse. I still read Pharyngula (and love it!), but I’ve stopped commenting altogether, like, as I’ve noticed, several others who have posted to this thread. It’s good to know I’m not alone.
Unfortunately, the commenting community at Pharyngula has been dragged down into the depths of uselessness by the actions of a few, hateful ideologues who frequently quash discussion threads by the use of rape imagery, references to sexual violence, and yes – even death, occasionally. The rote defense is always “I was just kidding!”, as if that wishes away the violent rhetoric.
The problem is that there those of us on Pharyngula who enjoy being able to deconstruct the arguments of creationists, apologists, and even Chris and Sheril using logic and reason, while these few have decided to let rhetoric reign over reason and substance. They ruin the site and turn it into (I can’t believe I’m quoting McCarthy…) “frat boy bonding.” This example of “stu” directing rape imagery at a narrowly-defined group (including Sheril, an advocate for women’s rights) is just another example in a long history of such junk on Pharyngula, but this goes farther by crossing a personal line that was, really, inevitable once this language became a trend. It’s sickening.
The few posters that I’ve been referencing are, no surprise, some of the same ones commenting here and trying so desperately to defend the use of such language. They are tribal groupthink at its unthinking worst. I offer whatever apology is needed to Sheril and others from those of us in the Pharyngula community who do not align ourselves with this petty lunacy – there are those of us who don’t agree with you, but also don’t need to tap into hate and primitive emotion to do so.
I used to laugh when I heard Chris, Sheril, and others describe “New Atheists” as tribal groupthinkers. Now, seeing the ones that represent us here, their characterization was right on the mark. I’m sorry for doubting you.
I think the point IBIBS was trying to make was that if we let him decide what is a dinosaur and what is a bird, then there can be no intermediates and the chronology can get all mixed up so that it would be impossible to explain how birds evolved. Of course, if we don’t let IBIBS just decide what is what for no reason at all, then all of the supposed problems go away. Imagine that.
Remember, this is the same guy that tried to claim that Neanderthals were apes! I can’t wait to see which whale intermediates he claims are really hippos. I wonder if he will ever SINE off on any real evidence? Probably not.
The hilarious part is that the arguments over what is a dinosaur and what is a bird are exactly what evolution predicts. Is Archeopteryx a bird? No bird has jaws and teeth, no bird has a bony tail, no bird has an unretroverted hallux, and so on. This is a small dinosaur with wings and feathers. If the feathered impressions hadn’t been preserved, it would have been classified as a dinosaur.
So the question of whether it’s a bird or a dinosaur is really the same as “what is a bird?” That is, it’s a purely human construction, a description in words. The words don’t affect what it is. We look at it, and we think, “bird”, that being the nearest concept we have. But what it really is has no name in any human language, because no human has ever seen one of these things alive. It is what it is: Archeopteryx, an intermediate form between reptiles and birds.
IBIG says it’s a bird. That’s because he isn’t capable - as he demonstrated when he trashed the US Constitution - of telling the difference between a word and reality. For him, a word has the magical property of being real in itself.
Thus, in his book the State may certainly establish a religion by favouring it, so long as the word “establish” is not used to describe this action; and the State itself is a word, real, but divorced from the reality of its actions and agencies. Calling Archeopteryx a bird means he has a word, and that allows him to ignore the reality of the physical object it stands for. Calling Genesis “the Word of God” allows him to ignore the reality of what it actually says. Words are more real than reality itself, to IBIG.
Words. For scientists, for rational human beings, words are labels, attached to real things, useful insofar as they describe them. For IBIG, words are the things themselves, and are used not to describe reality, but to manipulate it.
It’s a tribute to the power of language that IBIG can function at all. Words often do describe reality accurately, so he manages to get along, mostly. But where words fail to achieve an accurate correspondence with reality, then he fails to do it, too, and at that point he becomes non-functional. Which is to say, at that point, he’s actually insane.
I have never encountered a creationist or a fundamentalist who did not engage in contorted word games. They grow up in an atmosphere of exegesis, hermeneutics, etymology, and slippery word games; and they think they are being scholarly.
Every fundamentalist preacher we see on the religion channels on TV in this country plays this game routinely.
It allows all sorts of conflations and emotional associations in the minds of their flock so that they can be lead into beliefs that have no basis in any kind of reality, but which are held tenaciously with extreme emotion and fear and with no thinking.
This troll is one of those unthinking rube followers.
So, even though the evidence of the fossil records currently shows that birds are older then so-called feathered dinosaurs, it’s okay because fossilization is not an automatic process?
Isn’t that because these are all based on naturalism? But just because God is not mentioned in a refrigerator manual, which I don’t really know why He should be, doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist. He just doesn’t exist in your little mind!!! Some day He will!!!
So are you saying that so-called feathered dinosaurs are intermediates? Either they are or they aren’t! If they came after birds then how could they be intermediates? You see we have been discussing intermediates in so-called dinosaur to bird evolution.
The problem is that none of them have been shown to live before birds! How could so-called feathered dinosaurs have evolved into birds, if they didn’t exist until after birds? Isn’t this evidence, or do you just gloss over the evidence when it points in another direction?
Gee, I wonder why no real biologist has ever considered protoavis to be a problem for evolution? FOr an interesting discussion of this look at the following link:
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsi[…]/birdfr.html
Simply calling protoavis a bird and claiming that that disproves evolution is pure nonsense. Once again IBIBS grasps at any straw in order to avoid the obvious conclusion. Once again, he think his uninformed opinion somehow trumps the experts.
Look, even if protoavis were a real bird, it is intermediate between dinosaurs and birds for many features. That demonstrates that IBIBS lied when he claimed that there are no intermediate forms. It also shows that the evolution of bird characteristics occurred many times in evolution. This is somehow a problem for evolution?
IBIBS can quote mine creationist bullshit all he wants to, but that won’t change the facts. Maybe someday he will actually find a creationist who is willing to take on the SINE data. Maybe not.
Oh yea, I almost forgot. Isn’t this the guy who claimed that we could not know anything about the past based on evidence? But the minute he gets some evidence that he thinks supports his position, then all of a sudden we can learn something about the past based on evidence!
I will leave it to your dear reader to determine whether this guy is just a hypocrite, a liar, a charlatan or a fraud. You know I think he is just a poe, but that’s just my opinion. At least he provides a convenient excuse for presenting evidence for evolution. At least he is segregated from decent society.
Then how come you refuse to explain why God must be mentioned repeatedly in a refrigerator manual?
The only problem here is that nobody has yet found and reported finding any fossils of the common ancestor of bipedal dinosaurs and early birds (which presumably caught all the worms they wanted). But with the rarity of fossilization, this does not imply that they didn’t exist.
This is the misconception propagated among ID/creationists about how the fossil record is used in science.
ID/creationists have always argued that nobody can PROVE that a given fossil is a direct link in a chain from an earlier organism to a current organism. This is direct link idea another fundamental misconception in ID/creationism, especially among YECs.
This troll has every ID/creationist misconception; and they cannot be changed without removing and replacing its brain.
Hell, even when we do show a chain of species, they still refuse to accept evolution.
Their standard of evidence is that you’d have to show them every single progression from one species to another that has ever existed with a multitude of fossils for each point of evolution. It’s easy to think in such absolute terms when you are sure that you already have all the answers to the universe. Suggest otherwise and you are suggesting that they get outside of their intellectual comfort zone. Do that and they rationalize via Morton’s Daemon or simply by making some shit up. (Yeah yeah, most people spell it demon, but I prefer the archaic/*nix spelling. It fits when you consider the function of something like a mailer daemon.)
Oh IBIG, it’s not just my mind - it’s the mind of everyone who writes technical and scientific publications. You try to ignore this, but many of those authors are believers themselves. Yet nobody EVER invokes gods or the supernatural in such contexts. It isn’t because of naturalism, it’s because such invocations are worse than useless. They gain no traction. They produce no results. They are impotent.
And since you mention it, if gods and the supernatural exist, then why are they so useless to science and technology? Either they exist and are impotent, or they don’t exist. Do you have an alternative explanation?
phhht,
You forget that IBIBS witnessed his mother come back from the dead. Therefore, god must exist. Too bad about all the other people who have died. I guess they just weren’t important enough for god to save. And anyway, some astronauts believe in god, so she must be real.
I guess IBIBS hasn’t read the bible. You know, the part where it says that you are saved by faith. No evidence is required or desired. So why is he arguing about evidence on a science blog? Who knows, who cares?
Hey, IBIG, I forgot to ask, did any of these men you mention, men who actually flew around and walked on the moon, ever mention how it glows with it’s own light, as described in Genesis?
Or did they instead maybe talk about investigating a dead geology stretching back billions of years, in direct refutation of the story of Genesis?
I wonder if Viagra would help the gods’ situation?
IBelieveInGod doesn’t care crap what they believe in, just so long as he can manipulate what they said into thinly supporting his own inane and dishonest claims.
Stanton,
Agreed
Update