vandy125

JD!

QUOTE(CYGarland @ Aug 17, 2006 -> 01:25 PM) Another wasted DP opportunity What happened?

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Aug 17, 2006 -> 11:09 AM) The most strict definition of evolution would be any change in the frequency of alleles in a population. This can happen through random chance even (i.e. you go from 51% of a population being blonde to 52% just through the number of children conceived in a generation or something like that) or it can happen due to selective pressures. Shouldn't that definition also include a gain of information? For example, to evolve from a single-celled organism to a multi-celled organism would require a gain in information. I agree about the distinction between micro and macro evolution, and I know that we have several examples of micro evolution taking place, but have you heard of any good, solid examples of macro-evolution being observed? Or, is that something that cannot be observed today because of different things like it taking too long to occur?

I am curious about what people think of the distinction between macro-evolution and micro-evolution. An example of micro-evolution would be moths changing their wing color to live in a darkening forest, or the birds on an island changing their beak size based upon different environmental influences. An example of macro-evolution would be the jump from ape to man. Do you make that distinction or not? As for Global Warming, it is interesting to note that when we started releasing CO2 into the atmosphere by burning up oil, etc that had been undisturbed for millions of years that it corresponds with an increase in temperature. I do not know if the increase in temperature is caused by what we are doing (I suspect it might), or if the earth is just naturally doing its thing. But, we should note that we are seeing the increase in temperature at the same time that we started adding more CO2 into the atmosphere.

I had co-workers who did the same thing to me when I started my new job. They claimed that I became a fan after the White Sox started winning in 2005. I just pulled up soxtalk.com and pointed to my profile and showed them the start date. Seemed like the easiest way for me to throw an earlier date at them.

FWIW, call me crazy, but after going through this thread, and doing some studying up on several things like ice layers, coral layers, tree rings, radio-metric dating, etc (when I run into things like these, I cannot let them go). I have been swayed to change my mind on what I think about things (like the age of the earth, etc). My religious convictions still stay firmly intact, only with a better understanding. There is a lot less of the mess from putting up defenses without thoroughly looking through what they were. Hopefully, other people also check what they believe and continue to form them. Sorry about the complete derailment.

QUOTE(JackTalkThai @ Aug 16, 2006 -> 09:26 AM) Infante didn't leave the game due to injury. He was replaced by Inge at third for defensive purposes. The Polanco injury is huge though. Obviously he was a defensive stalwort but he was also the #1 steadying influence on the team when he came up to bat. He never struck out, he would almost always put the ball in play (and in the direction that the situation demanded) and he was one of the best hitters with RISP in the entire leauge. The degree of his shoulder separation is not yet known. Out for the year according to Rodriguez. Linkage

QUOTE(santo=dorf @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 04:53 PM) Bulls***. I'm hoping I'm not too ignorant here, but why are you so strong to form an opinion on something when you are clearly clueless on the subject? Why should Balta take you by the hand and explain everything to you? You know, I just came out here and put my beliefs on the line to see how they stood up and to see what someone else's perspective was on that. I would expect to get some respect for at least trying to grow in my understanding of this. Balta is a geologist. Why would I not try to take advantage of that knowledge to further my own understanding? Would you rather that I just sat back in "ignorance"? Do you think that is what others should do who do not have your opinions, or have not learned the same things as you? Why don't we all just sit back and have our opinions with out trying to learn anything? That way we can all spew the same things out time again without progressing any further. I think that some very interesting things have come out in this thread that deal with what I think are very important questions. I have actually read quite a bit about these things to form my "clueless" opinion on, and I do know a claim like that can and probably should be taken with a grain of salt on the internet (I am going to make it anyhow) . If you do not feel the same way, that is fine. Stay out of it and let others discuss. I do have several more questions about what he has posted, but if this is going to turn into a bash the guy with a different viewpoint thread, I would rather not continue, and I will get my answers elsewhere.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 03:48 PM) Forgive me for launching into this debate, but at some level, I feel I'm fighting for my life, but I guess since I am a geologist, on some level that makes sense. :-) No, we don't have every detail sorted out yet, and we don't understand every little nuance. But what you seem to be arguing is that because we don't understand every single detail, we can learn nothing from the evidence we do have, or that we shouldn't trust the things that we can learn, and I would argue that those lines of thought just are not true. I do not mean to say that we cannot learn anything from the evidence that we have. I just have a different viewpoint that the time scale may be different. In which case, if I am wrong, then take this opportunity to give me a lesson in how you come upon the assertions that you make that such and such took place millions or billions of years ago. I actually do want to understand this better. How do we know that it was such a large scale that it took for these geological events to take place? Is it all based upon radio-carbon dating? How do we know that radio-carbon dating works now in exactly the same way that it worked thousands of years ago? If I remember correctly, that dating comes from isotopes losing protons? at a certain rate. How do we know that the rate is the same now as it was thousands of years ago? You will not get me to say that dinosaurs did not exist like a certain baseball player. The evidence is overwhelming for that. I am not sure about what you are saying about vulcanism or about glaciation. Maybe you can give a good explanation on those. Or, if you do not have the patience to explain all of these things to me and prefer to direct me to a good source about all of this, that is fine as well. We have already gone through the second law of thermodynamics in this thread. I wonder what else we can bring up.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 03:06 PM) Now, I can't go backwards in time or forwards in time either and see for certain that 30 years from now Gravity won't just decide to triple in intensity. But I can say that if you accept the principle of inductive reasoning, that one can learn general truths about the universe from observing more limited cases, and that those general truths are always applicable, then I have no reason to conclude that there will be an unexpected defiation...So if a person then says that in this specific case, he feels that inductive reasoning is wrong, and that there is no reason to believe it, then why is he qualified to speak on scientific issues in general? If a person throws out the entire foundation of science in one case, why should anyone accept that person's opinion on science in other cases? Here is were we differ. I think that the accuracy of the predictions grow less and less like fact the farther back you go, and become more and more theories and guesses. Kind of like say you look at a set of ballplayers who played from 2006. From there, you project back to what you think an average ballplayers batting average would have been back in 1900 without knowing a whole lot about 1900 (including everyone's BA). You may know of a few examples of some ballplayers from back then, but it is sufficiently far enough back that you have limited data. My point is that you are projecting current environments (ballparks, strength of players, etc) back in time to something that you do not have much knowledge of (again you may have a few remnants). A much more accurate case would be made if you projected only back to 2005. I'm not sure if I made that too clear or not, but it is easy to say that something that works one way at the current time in the current environment and under its current circumstances probably worked that way a few years ago. I do not think that you can project your reasoning (which may be sound at the current time) back millions or billions of years, IMO. What I am saying is not throwing out science, it is saying that the projections way back into the past are not as accurate as they are in the most recent past because we do not know what the circumstances could have been back then well enough to recreate the environment. If the universe is really billions of years old, we are basing our thoughts on what happened billions of years ago on what is an incredibly small set of observations from hundreds of years.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 01:28 PM) First, let me apologize if you think I meant to call you any of those things. I did not. I am specifically referring to science and religion as a balance. You can believe anything you want, and further, I have no particular reason to say those beliefs are wrong or in valid in any way. The ignorance I refer to come into play when those BELIEFS are taught as scientific FACTS. That is ignorant and small minded. And that is what I was refering to. Science does not have all the answers. Your statement that "unnatural explanations of history do not belong in a naturalistic study of the world like modern science" is perfect. I agree completely. One of the things that got me going along that way was the following statement from the article: It is with statements like this that make people with my beliefs out to be ignorant or stupid, etc. Apparently, if you believe in a young earth (something that we cannot go back in time and check), you believe that cars and planes work by magic. There are some people who believe that science can tell us an incredible amount about how things work, and it can even give theories and glimpses into the past of a naturalistic way that things may have occurred in the past. That does not mean that we believe that is the only explanation. Dr. Abram's is being told that he cannot hold a certain public position because of what he believes even if he is able to separate his beliefs from what is taught. To me that is very wrong.

One other thing that I have never gotten. Where did all of this energy come from in the first place? I don't think that I have heard a good explanation for the Big Bang. If you want to just go to PM about this, let me know since I have several questions, and this is completely derailing the topic.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 01:07 PM) You're fundamentally misinterpreting the second law of thermodynamics. The second law says that an isolated system will move towards an equilibrium by maximizing its disorder, or entropy. The Universe can theoretically be treated as an isolated system, if one assumes that all energy/mass in the universe is constant from the creation of the universe (probably a safe assumption, but I for one sure can't prove it.) However, the Earth is by no means a closed system. The earth through time has had a massive input of energy, mainly from the sun. When you input energy into that system, some of that energy is used in the formation of complexity, just in the same way that cleaning up and ordering a messy bedroom takes energy. If one were to treat the entire solar system as an isolated system, which is a much better approximation but is still not entirely true, then because of the massive expenditure of energy by the sun, the solar system itself is moving towards a minimum energy/maximum entropy equilibrium state. The growth of complexity on Earth is just one way of releasing/using the energy pumped into the Earth by the sun and a few other sources. Very good point on that. That was something in my head that never made sense, and it is why I sometimes enjoy talking about what I think/believe in order to get a better understanding. Thank you for the good explanation. The learning continues.

I am tired of being called ignorant because of my beliefs. Now, I too agree that the science classroom is not the place to throw in personal religious beliefs that cannot be proven because they are studying what science can tell us. Science can only give natural explanations about our environment because it is a study of natural phenomenon. It can project back into the past on what it thinks has happened based only upon what is happening and can be tested today. There is no way to test a direct intervention by a diety at some point in time through natural phenomenon. The two occurences are mutually exclusive. One is natural, and the other is not natural. However, I still do believe that the universe was created thousands of years ago and not millions of years ago. I do not think that we can take a strictly uniformitarianistic view of history. I do not believe that the way things are happening now is exactly the same as they behaved years and years ago. How is it that one of the main rules of nature is that things tend to move toward disorder, except for this one case, evolution? The universe expands, we and everything around us age and decay, but somehow life has bucked that trend? These are my beliefs which I do agree do not belong in the science classroom. However, because of them I am labelled as ignorant, stupid, uneducated, far right, simple, etc. Can we get past the labelling and just state the claim that unnatural explanations of history do not belong in a naturalistic study of the world like modern science? Some people have absolute belief and faith in science being able to tell us everything. I do not. Does that make me part of a cult? What about naturalistic science? Why is blindly saying that there can only be natural explanations for everything not considered a cult? I am not saying that we should stop searching for scientific answers, I just think that we should be able to say that this is what science says, and here is why they say it. This is what someone else says, and here is why they say it. Believe in what you think is true.

I will definitely be cheering for Boston. I want to see that bad momentum continue for Detroit. Maybe it can carry them right out of the Division lead within a couple of weeks. I'm hoping that we can take it from them on their home field on the 21st through the 24th.

QUOTE(CanOfCorn @ Aug 7, 2006 -> 10:29 AM) We also have to keep in mind the history of these two groups. On the one hand, we have Israel, who was given land after WWII. They have been attacked more than once and beaten back their opponents. They are constantly on alert for another attack/invasion. On the other hand, you have a people who don't have a land and aren't accepted within the countries in and around Israel. Which would include Muslim countries like Jordan and Syria...and Iran. The Palestinians want their own land and won't take no for an answer, but no land around them want them either. So, you have one group that is constant jumpy and one group that is homeless, for the most part. This is going to breed hatred and violence until it either blows up into WWIII or all sides decide that this is ridiculous, sit down at a table and don't leave until they figure it out. In the history of the world, how many times has the latter happened? It's not the Israelis fault and it's not the Palestinians fault. It's EVERYONE'S fault, but no one will admit it first. I thought that this was a discussion on Israel and Hezbollah, not on the Palestinians. I'm just not sure I see how your point correlates with Hezbollah. Is there a connection between the two that I am missing?

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Aug 11, 2006 -> 09:12 AM) Last night marked the White Sox 15 straight sell out of US Cellular Field, and 35th sell out of the 2006 season. The Sox have all 3 games with the Tigers sold out already, meaning we are looking at having at least 18 straight sellouts on the Southside, as the push for 3 million fans continues I love seeing the stands full of fans! It makes it a lot of fun to watch and see everyone go nuts.

No surprise at all on what their solution is. Here is something else to add to what Iran has possibly been doing. We all know that there are claims that Iran is supplying Hezbollah, but just how much is Iran involved in? Iran working with N. Korea to develop long range missiles. A note on this link is that it is from a South Korea source. So, I don't know how trustworthy something like that is.

QUOTE(Milkman delivers @ Jul 31, 2006 -> 09:24 PM) Well, if he hates himself, then his wife and mother are the last two people on Earch who don't. Wow, that is pretty harsh right there. Count me in as one who does not hate him and still hopes that he can straighten things out.

Love it!

Who would you rather have (these are ESPN projections based upon what they have done this year)? ______G______AB_______R_______H______2B______3B______HR_____RBI______SB______BA_____OBP_____SLG _____154_____590_____113_____161______38______10_______5______63______50___0.272___0.349___0.397 _____161_____656_____120_____189______41_______3______51_____102______41___0.288___0.361___0.594

QUOTE(S720 @ Jul 25, 2006 -> 03:39 PM) You as well as I do NOT know that! Since the Allstar game, our offense has been so terrible and inconsistent. Adding more woes to that, our pitching starters haven't fared too well either. If the pitching is not doing good, BA with his great defensive skills will not be able to do anything! If getting Soriano is to ignite whatever underneath the team to fire them up, so be it! Of course, if I have a choice, I will MUCH prefer to have Soriano AND BA, but if we have to give up BA in order to get Soriano, I will DO it. What then happens to our pitching when they realize that they have no defense behind them? I think that defense definitely affects the confidence of a pitcher to be able to throw their game.

One more thing, if Soriano comes here with no one from the 25 man roster being traded, who gets left out from our current 25 man roster? Would that mean goodbye to Gload?

QUOTE(witesoxfan @ Jul 25, 2006 -> 01:52 PM) You're not going to find disagreement with me there He'd be a perfect fit for USCF. Much smaller area to cover, so his mediocre defense(if it is mediocre...I haven't been able to watch Soriano in LF at all this year) is hidden by Anderson and the smaller field, plus his quick wrists would allow for quite a few flyballs turning into homers. We keep talking about LF with Soriano, but he can also be used to give Iguchi a rest. Just have him play at 2nd, and have Pods out in LF when you want to give Iguchi a rest. He adds a lot more flexibility to the lineup.

I love that video!