Here is a 15-part breathtakingly fast-paced critique of “Creationist Science". So many people, especially in the USA but in certain communities here in the UK and elsewhere just have no idea how solid the proof for Darwin’s “theory” of evolution by natural selection actually is. This 150-minute long video spells it out. It goes at a cracking pace, and I found myself stopping it every now and then to check the references given (all those I checked, checked out OK).

The video also shows up some of the wilful liars out there. Even if you believe in God, you may need to ask yourself if God would want you to believe things that are demonstrably false. Is God a God of truth, or of lies? After all, who is it that is known as the Prince of Lies? So… who exactly are you worshipping if you prefer to stick to lies rather than truth? Amazingly many of the people quoted in this video state clearly that they would rather believe known untruths!

Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Scientist Enrico Fermi speculated in the 1960's that if alien intelligence was as common as their calculations suggested, then the aliens really should be here already. There are so many stars out there (some 100,000,000,000 in our galaxy alone, one of as many galaxies) that it seems almost inconceivable that we should be alone.

The space telescope Kepler is finding lots of planets too. So... Where are the aliens? I have revised my Area 51 web page to take the new figures into account and made some guesses as to what the new numbers should be, and it doesn't look good. I come to the conclusion that we can expect only one contactable civilization per 200,000 galaxies. Read that page and the Area 52 page for the full details. :'(

Well, what about the other side of the 9/11 conspiracy theories? What about the evidence that it was indeed just a bunch of “terrorists” and not a government-sponsored atrocity?

In this video Andrew Maxwell, a comedian, who believes in the findings of the official investigation, which claims the responsibility for the attack lies with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, takes five young Brits, who believe some of these conspiracy theories, on a road-trip from New York to Washington.

They visit Ground Zero where two planes hit the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, home of vast American defence HQ and Shanksville in Pennsylvania where United 93 crashed.

Conspiracy or not? What do you think?

9/11 Conspiracy Road Trip [57m]

Some questions weren’t answered by this video, I have to say. If nano-thermite was not responsible for the collapse of the twin towers, why was it found in the debris? Surely, it shouldn’t have been there at all? What were the explosions in the basement of the buildings apparently reported initially?

With the recent discovery of what may be water on Mars, the question of whether there may be intelligent alien life out there somewhere surfaces again. Water on a world something like Earth suggests that there may be lots of scope for it, as does the almost daily discoveries of more and more exoplanets.

And yet… I’ve been running the Seti@home program on my computer on and off for years - and it has found no aliens yet! And neither has anyone else’s. Of course, there could be lots of reasons for that, but with, certainly, hundreds of billions of stars and hundreds of billions of galaxies out there in the observable Universe, one would think that aliens (the ‘intelligent’ sort - like us I mean) would be out there somewhere. Furthermore, since there has been billions of years in which it could have evolved, it should not only be out there, it should be right here too: if even one civilization developed over the past, say, 5 billion years, and decided to colonise our galaxy, it would have done so by now.

So… no aliens around here, then. Unless we’re them, of course. But there is ample evidence that we evolved right here and are not, well, aliens. I’ve written about alien life before, and my arguments still apply, but some numbers can be updated a bit - the number of planets, for example, can be increased dramatically: it seems about one star in three, at least, has planets. So the probability of intelligent, space-faring life probably has to be reduced… almost to zero.

Probes are going to Mars, at some point. If they find life related to life on Earth, it could mean that the hypothesis that life on Earth began on Mars and got here by way of being splashed from Mars after collisions - or vice-versa - is possibly right. And it tells us nothing about how easy it is to evolve life elsewhere in the Universe. If there is life there, but it is not related to life on Earth (it uses a different chemical basis altogether), then primitive life is presumably easy to evolve and the entire Universe will probably be littered with various forms of it.

According to Nick Bostrom, this would be bad news. Because if life is easy to evolve, yet intelligent life is not out there, then intelligent life must be either a) almost impossible to evolve from primitive life; or b) almost certain not to survive long enough to colonise space.

In the case of b), which seems most likely of the two possibilities (because we are, after all, here - but then, we would be if we were asking this question), that means that there is a “Great Filter” in our future: something in our future waiting to exterminate us. Maybe some nuclear holocaust, super-military-disease, nanotech disaster, AI terminator doom… you name it, is waiting for us, and has waited for all other intelligent civilisations. Or hostile predatory aliens, I suppose. But if they exist, the odds are vastly on the side of them having colonised this planet millions of years ago, if colonising planets was their habit. And the point is, it would be somebody’s habit. Only one needs to do it, over billions of years. And they don’t seem to have done so. There is no sign of them anywhere: the Universe is full of white noise; no stars or galaxies seem to be having their energy mined in mysterious ways; vast resource fields of rock and gas are out there, apparently untouched. The place is pristine.

We are alone. And it is probably just as well, as we would be bacterium, almost certainly, in comparison to what could have evolved if the odds were in favour of it.

But if that’s so, what are we to make of this? Credible-seeming witnesses who are all cranks, liars and dupes? Surely not… [90m]

Just a few of today’s choice cosmic bulletins. First, some astronomers speculate that Earth’s technology may be too primitive to detect advanced ET life. They may be using gravitational waves, neutrinos, or other communication media that we have no concept of. They could be all around us, undetected. Another bunch of astro’s postulate that some black holes may actually be survivors from *before* the Big Bang. They may also be the source of the mysterious gamma-ray bursters detected every now and then. And how about the largest black hole in the Universe? 18 billion Suns enough for you?

These are all from one source today… got no time! I’m a busy Sim. :(

Or at least, Googling and general surfing: that’s what my boss wants to do at the office. He’s convinced people spend too much time cyberloafing, and then they moan that their computers are too slow. He has a point: the computers are *very* low spec, but they were OK when they were new: why are they so slow now?

Well, it is a well-known phenomenon that computers slow down over time, with Windows as an operating system anyway. I imagine the same thing happens with other OS’s too. Many IT people just wipe their machines every few months: a clean reinstall fixes a lot of nonsense. There’s no doubt that Windows becomes corrupt over time and there are various cleaning tools that can help fix it (and sometimes break it). Why does Windows get corrupt over time? Well, junk gets left from crashes, from installed software, from inefficiently uninstalled software, from orphaned temporary files, and more. No doubt Trojans and viruses lurking contribute on a lot of machines.

Then there’s all those security updates to beat the viruses and hackers. They all add bloat, and not just to Windows: applications have updates too.

And then… programmers, I suspect, write their updates with the assumption that people are using the latest whizz-bank hardware, when in reality people are trying to hang on to some cobweb-ridden old crank-box to save a few pennies for their retirement. Some people may have shares in hardware companies, but most of us don’t.

So what can one do? Use a crap cleaner like ccleaner and also defragment your hard drive. But even that won’t help all machines: new software and new websites are just not written with antiques in mind. Furthermore as we add more and more programs to them, even if they are uninstalled later, the junk piles up.

I’ve found one other factor that may apply more in a working environment: when a PC has multiple users and each user has their own profile on the PC, the registry expands massively for each user as it records that user’s preferences, their programs, their programs’ options, and more. Windows has to read the entire registry to do anything much on a PC, so it knows what to do when you click on things. A PC that has had 10 or 15 different users over the years has a huge registry, and it takes time for Windows to scan it every time you want to do something. If the PC only has a small amount of RAM, then Windows will be caching the registry on the hard drive and reading it back from there all the time, rather than storing it in working memory. This will slow the machine down enormously over time. What can you do about it? I don’t know. Wipe the machine and start again, I suppose. Adding more RAM will certainly help in some cases, however.

So science is finally beginning to catch up with what I found years ago in my Diet & Exercise page: avoiding fat is a waste of time. Exercise doesn’t help much (I found it helped, but I had to do a lot). Avoiding sugar and fructose (and high-fructose corn syrup) is the key.

Coulda told ‘em that… well, technically, I suppose I did, but no-one was listening, of course. Got 26 minutes to listen?

He says it again here, with one or two extra interesting tidbits thrown in.

We all know, I suppose, that the world is getting over-populated; that we’re depleting the world’s resources and exterminating species at an alarming rate… and that there’s nothing much you and I can seem to do about it. Sure, I can recycle a piece of paper and a tin can, but when the local Council at at the same time leaves lamp-posts lit all night, heats council buildings day and night, summer and winter, when shops leave their lights on all night for security and advertising, the little bit I can do, frankly, looks stupid. Think global, act local: yes… but is this really getting to the root of the problem? I don’t think so. What exactly is the problem? Overpopulation?

Well, the conspiracy theorists would have us believe that the powers-that-be want to reduce the world’s population to below 500 million people, and maybe they do. But that, I think, is a negative solution, and only partial at best. Certainly, if we extinguish humanity entirely, our problems will indeed be solved. But partial/total extinction is the solution of the unimaginative.

Instead, I think we have to look at what is driving the problem in the first place - and it isn’t just humanity’s propensity to breed like crazy. After all, wealthy humans typically have far fewer children than those in poverty, since they can be sure their offspring stand a good chance of survival into adulthood. So we need to look at wealth and poverty. And, we need to go one step further than simply looking at abolishing poverty as such, because that is probably impossible with our current economic system. Instead, we need to look at the economic system itself.

The economic system of the world can be summed up under the name, ‘capitalism’. I know we’re all supposed to say that capitalism is good, and maybe it is indeed better than some of the dire systems that have been tried before, at least when it is coupled with democracy and personal freedom, but it is also extremely wasteful. Capitalist production, and the full-on ‘free-market’ system, in fact require massive overproduction in almost every area of production. We have a name for this: it is called, ‘built-in obsolescence’.

It is hard to think of exceptions to the rule of built-in obsolescence, actually. What the rule is, is that any product has to be made so that it wears out, deteriorates, or otherwise becomes obsolete, in as short a time as the market allows. Why? So that the producer can sell you another one. Think about it. If every light bulb lasted a lifetime, once every house had a dozen or so, what would the manufacturer do? Go out of business. This is why light bulbs these days are only guaranteed for 1,000 hours of use (it used to be 2,000). This is why people are encouraged to trade-in perfectly good cars every two or three years to get the latest whizz-bang model with nicer hubcaps or to show off how clever or rich they are. This is why people are encouraged to buy all-new clothes every season. Well-made clothes could last a decade. But it is hard to find well-made anything, in any area of production, in fact. Why? Because it is not profitable in the long run.

So, every person in capitalist society is busy purchasing, over and over again, products that could (in theory) have been made to last some 10 times longer (say). Instead of struggling to support some 7 billion people, the planet could be supporting 70 billion. Not that that is necessarily such a great idea either, of course, but it emphasises the wastefulness of our economic system.

I don’t know if there’s enough farmland to support 70 billion people. I have read that, well-managed, the Earth could probably support 20 billion. But we are not managing it well.

Capitalism is so-called because it is based on the notion of making a profit: of accumulating ‘capital’ (a large collection of spare dosh). The profit motive is, we are told, the best way we can think of for motivating people to work together productively. Well… is it? According to one study that I can’t locate at the moment, even in the ultra-capitalist USA, some 50% of the population in fact help out with some of their time on charity work at least occasionally. And being a parent is not exactly a capitalist enterprise either, is it? Yes, people have a profit motive; but they also have a community motive: a motivation to help one another to build a better society for ourselves and our children. This too is part of human nature. We are social animals. Even in the anonymous big cities, most people obey the rules most of the time to keep the system running as smoothly as it can. So other systems are a possibility. This may seem like a remote possibility at the moment, but we have grown up in a society brainwashed by aspirational advertising seeking to part us from our money and our common-sense. It is hard to peek beyond the boundaries; to see beyond the ‘matrix’.

How can the psychopathic plutocrats who control our world be persuaded to give up their seemingly endless thirst for money and power to save the planet? Well, I don’t know. Sorry. But being aware of the nature of the problem has to be the first step. And purchasing based on quality and necessity rather than fashion or the need to show-off may help a bit too.

One area where individuals can make a difference, perhaps, is in farming, strangely enough. The world’s farming system tends to transform land from fertile natural environment to exhausted monoculture to desert. According to Bill Mollison, one of the founders of ‘permaculture‘, this doesn’t have to be so. It is possible to farm sustainably, and even city dwellers can sometimes contribute to this. His book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements started a bit of a movement on this subject, and in the video “In Grave Danger of Falling Food” below he shows how it can be done. I haven’t started growing tomatoes in my bedroom just yet… but it is not impossible that I might, either…

Authorities in the US have admitted that vaccination can be harmful. A court has awarded massive compensation to the family of a child who became autistic after being given multiple vaccines. CBS has the story:

Family to Receive $1.5Min First Ever Vaccine-Autism Court Award

I guess we all know something of the cruel way that animals are treated by people, because we need them for food, clothing and so on. But that ‘because’ is perhaps a mistake. Maybe we need them for these things (I eat meat, use animal products, etc.,), but do they really have to be treated so badly? The video below is perhaps one of the most depressing, horrific videos ever made, but it is also based firmly in reality. Prepare to feel guilty… Oh - and I should probably warn you it includes lots of images of animals being maltreated (putting it mildly). So if you think you can prepare yourself for the sights of kittens being tortured, foxes being skinned alive and so on, then get ready and press that play button.

On my enlightenment page I talk about how to achieve that state. This lecture (1h 40m long) discusses it from the point of view of the way the brain works and I think it provides further insight into the process, and how to achieve it.

Enlightenment, Self and The Brain by Todd Murphy:

I’ve called this entry ‘No Topic’ as I don’t have any particular topic to write about: I’m in a non-write-about-it frame of mind lately - hence the lack of entries for the last few days. Nevertheless, some more writing has been accomplished.

And some surfing… Did you know some people are trying to build a time machine? And not using a black hole - that method is old hat:

On a totally different slant, have you ever tried hurling yourself down a 1:1 slope (that’s 45 degrees - I don’t know what it is in percentage units: 50% of vertical, I suppose)? Well, at Cooper’s Hill in Brockworth, Gloucestershire, people do it every year in a stupid old festival that allows grazing rights on common land or some such. It is a race in which the contestants chase after… a piece of cheese. Yes. Cheese. Double Gloucester, to be exact. I was actually present one year. A woman was knocked unconscious by the aforementioned cheese as it bounced into the crowd. This video shows the 2007 event:

Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling

After all that excitement, how about a bit of cyberwar? It seems somebody is attacking the government of Estonia - they suspect the Kremlin. Alternatively, how about a bit of art? [Link no longer working.]It takes a few moments to load (it is a flash drawing), but it is worth the wait. Click and drag up or down with your mouse to move in or out.