As I was preparing this post, I noticed that I had earlier posted two other pictures of painted turtles. In 2015, I displayed a handful sunbathing on a log. The 2010 picture of the underside of the turtle, which shows why they are called “painted,” must have disappeared during the Great Server Crash. I allowed someone to post it in Wikipedia, and you can see it here if you are so inclined.
Today is World Pinhole Camera Day, a fact I just learned on NPR yesterday morning. Which is somewhat surprising, because years ago I did some original research on the pinhole camera. Below the fold,…
Photograph by Pierce Dayton.
Today, April 1, the Discovery Institute’s “Science and Culture Today” site will host a number of debates between leading figures in the Intelligent Design movement, highlighting their diverse perspectives, filling in the missing steps in their previous arguments, and giving an opportunity for readers of that site to leave comments on those posts, comments that will be as lively, instructive and stimulating as comments there usually are:
William Dembski, Winston Ewert, Robert Marks, and George Montañez will explain how having a large value of their Algorithmically Specified Complexity measure cannot have happened by natural selection making the value gradually larger. And why high functional information requires that the “description” of the phenotype (or is it genotype?) needs to be short.
Eric Hedin and Granville Sewell will explain what law of physics prevents any favorable mutation that improves functional information from increasing in frequency in any population.
Casey Luskin and Michael Behe will debate whether or not there is good evidence for common ancestry of primates, common ancestry of cercopithecoid monkeys, and common ancestry of apes (including humans).
John West and David Klinghoffer will explain why any scientific result that seems to them to make organisms behave immorally must therefore be scientifically invalid.
These discussions will be accompanied, as usual, by comments supplied by the enthusiastic and knowledgable S&CT readers, who appreciate the lively, honest and informative back-and-forth that signals the intellectual vitality of the “cdesign proponensist” movement.
Explanation here:
Photograph by Vivian Dullien.
