Unsought Input

Interesting links we found today:

• radicalcartography »

Earlier we wrote about all the great job salary and pay data you can get at indeed.com. I noticed the cool web2.0 widget features they have so I thought I would add to the list, now with exciting graphs!

Where does he get those wonderful toys?

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I did a search to see how much Batman makes in Gotham City. It’s a good thing he’s got a trust fund, because $38K hardly puts spinners on the Batmobile and grills on the Boy Wonder.

Obviously waiting for his performance bonus

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I looked to see what the President makes in Washington, DC. Really this job is about the perks. Bush made much more money running oil companies into the ground and running baseball teams away from the pennant. But could he ignore the Geneva Conventions or invade a county for no particular reason? Nope.

But the cost of living is low, so…

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Did you know that Osama bin Laden is making about $32,000 in Northern Pakistan? That’s my best guess for where he’s employed, anyway - I also searched for him in Afghanistan and came up with the same number. You might think that’s a fairly low income for someone so famous, but keep in mind that prices are so much lower in tribal regions. At that wage he can afford a half-dozen posh caves and apparently evade the world’s only remaining superpower.

That’s not what she said last night

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Last but not least, here’s final proof that all those elementary-school insults were more than just childish taunts. According to the most scientific data available, your mom makes $41,000 per year working the street corner.

By now everyone has heard about Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright and the inflammatory speeches he gave. But before I go on, stop and ask yourself, what have you actually heard?

Did you hear the speeches, or did you just hear that the speeches were racist and proclaimed hatred for America?

Did see the video of the actual speeches or did you hear a bunch of speculation over whether or not Obama has distanced himself enough?

Did you get to read the full text of the sermons, or did you just see tiny, tiny pieces, quotes taken out of context?

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Interesting links we found today:

• Website Design - Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki »
• Building the new JoCoLibrary Web site - JoCoLibrary »

Interesting links we found today:

• Bad Neighborhood - Link Exchange Tool »
• Site Link Analyzer - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization »

• Newsletters »
• index »
• Feed43 (Feed For Free) : Convert any web page to news feed on the fly »
• yoktu.com :: feedmaker // turn any web page into an rss feed in a second! »

Interesting links we found today:

• Amazing nature: Most amazing place in Norway - …Pulpit Rock »
• Taking a swim in the Devil?s Pool »

• PLA 2008 National Conference - Virtual Conference »
• LTLS ILS Symposium - Agenda »
• E?vanced Solutions provides unique program and event management, room reservation management, and summer reading software for libraries. »
• Defrag Conference 2008 »
• Watch It! Tutorials - Library Services, Charles Sturt University »
• SourceForge.net: CrossRef Citation Plugin »
• Frederick County, MD - Official Website - Backyard Composting »

Interesting links we found today:

• Clientcopia : Stupid Client Quotes »

Interesting links we found today:

• SirsiDynixInstitute.com »
• Darkoogle »
• Speak Quietly: Ramblings About Libraries, Writing, and Everything in Between: Library-Themed Wedding »
• Newseum | Today’s Front Pages | List View »
• SeeqPod Playable Search - Find. Discover. Watch. Listen. Share. »
• Quiet your Home with Ambient Noise - O’Reilly Digital Media Blog »
• Dogcow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia »

Interesting links we found today:

• http://megamu.com/lastfm/ »

Toxins.  They are all around you, in the air, in your food, in your drinking water.  So how are you going to get rid of them?

One way would be to realize that “toxins” is so broad a term as to be useless and that in order to avoid exposure to specific health risks like mercury you need to do some research, analyze costs and benefits of approaches, and participate in a modern society with environmental, health, and food inspection.

But that’s too hard.  So instead, turn off your brain and watch this commercial:

So let’s check off all the reasons why this smells scammy.  Have you ever had any of the following symptoms:

• Headaches?
• Backaches?
• The dreaded…  fatigue?
• And many more?

These symptoms could mean that you are filled with toxins! or more likely, that you are a human being, since everyone has a headache once in a while.  In any event, products that claim to cure everything usually cure nothing.

The pads “work” by sticking to your feet at night and removing everything bad from your body.  Everything bad includes:

• Heavy Metals
• Metabolic Wastes
• Toxins
• Parasites
• Chemicals
• Cellulite

Yes, it turns out that cobalt, chiggers and chubbiness all follow the same metabolic processes.  This is point number two - claiming to work in several, completely unrelated ways.

Point number three is easy.  Too easy.  Isn’t it a bit suspicious that it does so much without any effort, pain, or discomfort on your part?

How was such an amazing products discovered?  Through the amazing, ancient art of oriental reflexology.  And acupuncture, or something and nature.  Did they mention homeopathy?  They should.  Misusing a lot of scientific-sounding or hippie nature-sounding terms is point four.

So what did I miss?  What other ways does this seem ridiculous to you?

If you’ve been following along, you know that we’ve been discussing problems with Creationism.  In part one we looked at the Second Law of Thermodynamics and why it doesn’t invalidate evolution (or biology in general).  Despite what some wealthy political figures with delusions of persecution might tell you, we still haven’t found any empirical evidence or falsifiable claims in favor of creationism, but we’re going to look at the arguments provided in favor.

Our gracious commenter mentioned another perceived problem with evolution, the lack of direct observation of it.  Of course, we have plenty of direct observations of physical and genetic changes due to natural selection.  The adjusted claim was :

What I’m saying about evolution however is that since we have not observed the transition of one species to another, the fossils, rock strata and any other observations about the world as it is today, don’t make the case for the conjecture of transition from non-life to life and simple lifeforms to complex lifeforms. That transition is still an opinion which could only be confirmed by the scientific method through observation of the actual transition itself.

This is an interesting twist on what’s normally called the God of the Gaps argument against evolution.  Normally the argument is formulated this way:  Okay, sure we have all these fossils which scientists like to fit into a big family tree, but where are all the missing links?  You don’t have them, and that’s because God created the individual species.  Any time we don’t have a scientific explanation for something, God did it.

The biggest problem with the God of the Gaps argument is the tendency of the gaps to shrink over time.  Scientists are constantly discovering new fossils as well as better ways to examine relationships between species such as cladistics and genetics.  Some gaps in knowledge, like the exact method by which RNA or DNA originally formed from non-living molecules, might seem comfortable enough for God to fit in right now, but every day really interesting work is being done.

Now for the interesting twist:  our commenter is not just pointing out the gaps in the fossil evidence, genetic evidence, and explanatory models.  In addition, supposedly all this evidence must be thrown out - anything not based on direct observation of the actual transitions between species is just “an opinion.”  This causes a number of problems.
First, this causes serious problems if we ever want to study speciation, let alone evolution.  Based on what we know from radiometric dating the earth has been around for billions of years.  It’s quite possible that it takes tens of thousands of years before an ancestor and it’s descendant are different enough to be considered separate species, especially for large vertabrates with long gaps between generations.  Unfortunately we humans only live 100 years or so at most - not much time for direct observation of very gradual change.

This might look like a good argument from the creationist side until you realize that this poses a problem for anyone trying to observe some sort of “creationist speciation” as well.  We can cross our fingers and hope God turns a turnip into some kind of super turnip during our lifetimes, but given the geological scale the Lord works on, don’t hold your breath.

Second, this is an extremely high bar to set for evidence - so high that if applied consistently it invalidates entire fields of study.  Forensics, for example, would be completely thrown out the window.  No more collecting fingerprints and DNA in episodes of CSI.  We can’t even take the presence of a dead body too seriously anymore.  That murder is still an opinion which could only be confirmed by the scientific method through observation of the actual murder itself.

Archaeologists all over the world need to hang up their Indiana Jones hats and get real jobs, because all of their work is based on indirect observation.  Since we’re not accepting genetic evidence either we need to throw fields like Linguistics, which use similar methods.  What about all the apparatus used by quantum physicists?  No one has ever really seen a quark.  Don’t even mention geology.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to contemplate this bizarre notion any further, because we actually do have plenty of observations of speciation through selection, otherwise known as evolution.  Two organisms are considered different species if they don’t interbreed, and we’ve actually seen that happen through selection.

I can hear the objections already - “but those are all small changes, show me a monkey turning into a man!”  Now we come to the evidence that creationism is not science.  Let’s recap:

1. First the argument is that there are missing links.  But more transitional fossils are found every day.
2. Next the argument is that no one has ever actually observed evolution.  But it has been observed plenty of times.
3. Next the argument is that microevolution is possible, but no one has ever observed macroevolution or speciation.  But it has been observed as well.
4. Next the argument is that evolution might create different species, but what about different genera?  Or different families?  Or orders?  Or…

Once again we are trying to stick God into an ever-shrinking series of gaps.  We’ve already seen that creationists are willing to throw out perfectly valid observational evidence like fossils and genetics.  Do you get the impression that no amount of evidence will ever be enough to disprove creationism?  That smells fishy.

Part 3 will continue following this thread toward the notion of falsifiability.  In the mean time, we have seen some sophistic arguments, but no actual evidence to support creationism or divine intervention.  Please feel free to comment below.

Recently we had some interesting comments on a post about Ben Stein’s upcoming creationist propaganda film, Expelled.  Since the comments section was exceeding length of the original article, I thought it would be best to write a series of new posts and address each of “Seeker of Truth’s” objections to evolution one at a time.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics does NOT say evolution is impossible. 

The claim:

“…referring to the universe as the system in question, not just the earth. The law of entropy as far as science can tell applies to the entire universe. Thus intervention from outside the universe would have been needed to inject order into it, or at least temporarily violate the law of entropy to produce the higher degree of order.”

The claim was buttressed by a quote from Duane Gish, a Ph.D. in biochemistry who works at the Institute for Creation Research:

“Of all the statements that have been made with respect to theories on the origin of life, the statement that the Second Law of Thermodynamics poses no problem for an evolutionary origin of life is the most absurd… The operation of natural processes on which the Second Law of Thermodynamics is based is alone sufficient, therefore, to preclude the spontaneous evolutionary origin of the immense biological order required for the origin of life.”

So, our commentor concluded:

“…for every transition from low order to high order system such as a single embryo growing in complexity into a human with fully developed organs, we see the effect of the external intervention of this transcendent agent who programmed the system through the genetic code to overcome the law of thermodynamics. Without this intervention natural laws could not have produced the precise complexity we see. Long periods of time would only increase the disorder of such system.”

This claim is based on a poor understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a couple of flaws in logic.  The law can be stated in a few equivalent ways:

In an isolated system, a process can occur only if it increases the total entropy of the system.

Heat cannot spontaneously flow from a material at lower temperature to a material at higher temperature.

It is impossible to convert heat completely into work.

So first off, notice that the Second Law does NOT say that no order can arise, ever.  It also does NOT say that heat can not be converted into work.

To apply thermodynamics to evolution, we first have to look at a reasonably closed system.  The Earth is obviously not a closed system, since the sun is constantly inputting huge amounts of energy.  The solar system as a whole, though, is pretty far away from any other stars so we can say it’s reasonably isolated.  The sun is constantly fusing hydrogen into helium, pouring out energy in the process.  This energy is lost as far as the sun is concerned, and only a tiny, tiny fraction of that energy even hits a planet where it could be used to do some sort of work.

So at this point all is well with the Second Law.  The vast, vast majority of the energetic processes in the solar system occur inside the sun and the vast, vast majority of the heat generated is radiated off where it spreads thinner and thinner as it travels outward.

The teeniest fraction of a fraction of that energy hits the Earth.  Now, the Earth itself is already radiating waste heat from processes like volcanism but those are so small (and also Second Law friendly) that we can ignore them for now.  We know for a fact that the energy from the sun hitting the earth causes some spontaneous order to appear - uneven heating of different surfaces causes weather, for example.  But those are big huge systems that require a lot of energy - the formation of proteins or RNA from simpler molecules would require a ridiculously small fraction of the energy it takes to create a hurricane.  All of these processes are inefficient, never converting 100 percent of the incoming solar energy into work.

The claim of the creationist is:  in a system where the vast majority of heat is radiated into space (high entropy, no work is done), the tiny fraction of energy that hits a planet which CAN cause the spontaneous generation of hurricanes CAN NOT contribute an even smaller fraction to inefficiently cause the spontaneous generation of proteins, RNA, etc. and then life.  Not even over billions of years.

Stepping back for a moment, let’s look at the Second Law from a historical perspective.  The first person to begin to figure out the Second Law was Sadi Carnot.  He was trying to figure out how to convert heat into useful work, and he discovered that the efficiency depends on the heat differential.  The Second Law is depressing for perfectionists because it tells us that you can never be 100 percent efficient.  But it is not so depressing as Duane Gish and our commenter would have us believe - it is entirely possible for work to be done at a lower efficiency.  If this were not true, Carnot would have given up on engines and we’d all be still be riding horses.

How does the Second Law really apply to evolution?  Well, it tells us that evolution can not, say, fill the volume of the solar system with algae.  It leaves plenty of room for the creation of a thin layer of diverse species on the surface of one little planet.  Looking at the system as a whole, entropy and disorder is always increasing - evolution on Earth is a mind-bogglingly minuscule sideshow of localized, temporary order, not a violation.

Now for the flaw in logic.  In our commenter’s second quote, we see the claim that the genetic code was programmed (by the creator) to overcome the Second Law. The genetic code is all over the place (you are shedding millions of copies right now through dead skin cells), so this means that violations of the Second Law can be found all over the place - amazingly common.  With this many violations, we can’t really call it a law anymore, can we?  This whole argument rests on the Second Law being absolute, and then posits that we are surrounded (and made up of) billions of instances of violations of that law!

We have a pretty good understand of the genetic code, and we’re learning more bout it every day.  No one studying genetics or microbiology has ever uncovered any cases that violate the Second Law - it would be huge news!  We have absolutely no evidence that the genetic code overcomes entropy.  Every single chemical reaction that occurs within the cell results in the entropy of the system as a whole increasing.

So again, we come to my challenge to creationists from the previous article:  give me evidence.  You can’t just posit that DNA violates entropy without citing evidence that it actually does.  You can’t just invoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics without showing specifically how it is violated.  I’m sorry that this is hard work, but that’s just how science is.

Think I’m off base?  Please tell me how in the comments below.

Ron Paul has been adopted by the internet masses. Just look at the home page of Reddit or even worse, Digg. Go ahead and look, I’ll wait. How many stories about Ron Paul did you see? Paul has even set an online fundraising record, raising $4.2 million dollars in one day.

It’s not surprising that he’s turned a lot of heads, especially considering the Republican debates so far - while Rudy Guliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and company fought over who could bury their heads furthest in the sand, Paul showed actual knowledge of how the world works and why the U.S. was attacked.

Ron Paul is a great candidate. Without him, the most pithy statement about the war you would hear would be Guliani saying “9/11″ every 60 seconds. He’s also the only one trying to remind the conservative party that they are supposed to be financially conservative.

That said, it’s important to note that Ron Paul would make a terrible president.

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Interesting links we found today:

• Holiday gift list worksheet »
• Riskometer »

Recently I received the worst job inquiry I have ever seen. I’ve had my resume floating around on job sites like Dice and Monster.com since the last time I was actively looking, more than three years ago, so I periodically get emails from keyword-searching recruiters. But nothing like this. This is a masterpiece:

HI, GREETINGS!!! WE ARE LOOKING FOR UI DEVELOPER SPECIALIST WITH BELOW SKILLS TITLE: UI DEVELOPER SPECIALIST Ø LOCATION: CULVER CITY, CA Ø TAX TERM: CON_CORP CON_IND CON_W2 Ø PAY RATE: ALL INCL Ø LENGTH: 12 MONTHS SKILLS: AJAX CSS PHOTOSHOP JSP HTML JOB DESCRIPTION: A MINIMUM OF 5 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE WORKING IN A TEAM ON A COMPLEX-PHASED NEW TECHNOLOGY MEDIUM SIZED WEB PROJECTS UNDERSTAND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY (PREFERABLY RUP) ABILITY/DESIRE TO UNDERSTAND BUSINESS PROBLEM THAT THE APPLICATION IS TRYING TO FIX/SOLVE RESPONSIBLE FOR DEVELOPING THE USER INTERFACE FOR A COMPLEX WEB APPLICATION WITH A LOT OF DATA ENTRY SCREENS, WORKFLOWS, VIEWS AND REPORTS EXPERIENCE USING TOOLS SUCH AS PHOTOSHOP OR ILLUSTRATOR TO PRESENT DESIGN COMPS, UI OPTIONS PARTICIPATED ON PROJECT WITH EXTENSIVE UI REVIEW PROCESSES AND CHANGES CAN PRESENT AND IDENTIFY USABILITY CHALLENGES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT. CAN DESIGN PAGES WITH USABILITY IN MIND EXPERIENCE USING TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT AND XML EXPERIENCE WITH BLEEDING EDGE TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS AJAX AND FLEX (ACTION SCRIPT) EXPERIENCE WORKING ON SITES THAT HAVE A JAVA BACK-END; WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF JSP EXPERIENCE WORKING ON PORTAL BASED SITES (NICE TO HAVE) EXPERIENCE ON PROJECTS WHERE SLICK UI**S AND HIGH PERFORMANCE PAGES ARE A KEY CAN UNDERSTAND AND EXPLAIN CROSS BROWSER CHALLENGES, PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES BASED ON UI DECISIONS ETC. MUST BE ABLE TO PROVIDE EXAMPLES DELIVERABLES WILL INCLUDE: LOW-TECH MOCKUPS USING PHOTOSHOP, ILLUSTRATOR, EXCEL OR VISIO HTML PROTOTYPES WITH FUNCTIONING JAVASCRIPT AND DATA INTERACTIONS FLEX APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT THE BACK-END DEVELOPMENT TEAM JSP DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT THE BACK-END DEVELOPMENT TEAM .PLEASE RESPONDS WITH YOUR UPDATED RESUME AND THE FOLLOWING DETAILS RATE EXPECTATIONS | IMMIGRATION | AVAILABILITY | CURRENT LOCATION| CONTACT NUMBER ——————————————————————————– WARM REGARDS, JOHN ADAMS | SIERRA INFOSYS | [ed: removed] PHONE: [ed: removed] (OR) [ed: removed] | [ed: removed] ——————————————————————————–
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