My Laptop Finally Bit the Dust

Bummer...

Well, it looks like my blogging days have come to an end. The 'ol laptop took it's last dying breath late last night. A new one is just not in the budget at the moment, so Reasonable Kansans will be signing off indefinitely.

Hopefully one day I'll be back...

Thanks for reading, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the discussions and the comments. It's been a blast.

All the best....

~FtK

World Aids Day

December 1st has been designated as World Aids Day for bloggers. The badge on the right column of my blog provides tons of information about how you can get involved.

If you're a member of Second Life, a new island has been created where participants in the event will help educate the public about the disease in efforts to decrease the spread of AIDS/HIV. On the 1st, there will be an entire day of activities to attend.

Worldwide, an estimated 33 million people are living with HIV. In the United States, an estimated one million Americans are living with HIV.

Please join us in educating the public about AIDS/HIV on December 1st!!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into God's presence with singing! Know that the Lord is God! It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him, bless his name! For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures for ever, and his faithfulness to all generations.

~Psalm 100

Yeah....well, okay, this is kinda true....

He is hawt...I'll give him that. Let's just hope Mr. Hawt doesn't sink the ship.

Good grief...

What's Thanksgiving without Pilgrims and Indians. Ridiculous.

The Country is Screwed...

Read more.

Waaaaaahhhhhh!!!!! Is it a helpless feeling or what?

We're never going to sell that house we still have sitting on the market ravaging our finances. Our realtor told me that none of the comparable homes in our immediate area have sold in the last 6 months.

Just freaking great....

Here we walked the conservative walk for our entire lives....no debts (other than our house)...playing it safe, and now when we'd like to help our kids with a college education soon, we'll be in debt up to our asses.

UGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Christians and Gays Behaving Badly

This gal is spot on in regard to the fallout following the Prop8 vote...

Reportedly the Christians met once a week to pray and sing on the public corner. Whether they’re hoping to “straighten out” gays or simply trying to facilitate encounters with Christ is unclear, but their method is problematic; it’s not how Jesus would do it.

Jesus went to the people he wanted to meet and he ate with them — or served them. He fellowshipped and got to know the community in personal and intimate ways. He attracted them with his love and his stability. He didn’t stand around singing hymns and praying for them, which might have seemed both separatist and condescending — and therefore off-putting — to the very people he hoped to engage.

The Christians may have unintentionally come off as condescending. We may presume that they would not want a crowd of gays meeting on their curb each week to proselytize. As a Catholic I would take issue with other Christians, no matter how well-intentioned, standing at the curb praying for my redemption based solely upon their knowledge not of me, but of my habits or my religion. Their singing songs for my salvation would come off as sitting in judgment of me. Even if that’s not how they meant it.

You can read the author's views about the Gay community and their behavior at the same link. I'd rather focus on the Christian perspective for a moment...or at least my personal thoughts.

This issue creates such volatile responses that it's heart breaking at times, and extremely frustrating at others. There is also such hypocrisy boiling from both sides of the debate. One side cries intolerance never looking back to discern their own intolerance of other groups. Regardless, there are no easy answers in this decision.

My perspective is that God has allowed us free will to make the decision to follow his advice and live life according to the way He created us to live, or we can live according to our own will. I don't think He meant for Christians to coerce or force others to live according to God's plan.

That being said, I think it is everyone's right to vote in the way in which they feel they are lead in relationship to their worldview or religious beliefs. I don't think that the gay community should coerce Christians into voting for gay marriage by demanding that they are intolerant if they don't comply.

I don't have a problem with civil unions allowing homosexuals legal rights that married couples have, but I would vote against gay marriage because I believe marriage is reserved for a man and woman. Though I wouldn't picket, engage in a sing-in, or throw a raging hissy fit in attempt to coerce others to do the same.

Again, it's a matter of free will, IMHO.

The part of her article that really hit home with me is where she explains that Christ met, ate and communed with those whose worldviews were in conflict with his own. Actually, guys like Oleg, Rob and a few others take this approach when they come to my blog and chat in a respectful manner. Rather than scream and rant on and on about IDist views from the familiarity and comfort of their own side, they reach out and attempt to actually try to converse with me on my turf without being total jerks. Though we may never agree on anything, it certainly helps me learn to respect them if not their position. I just think that in so many of these controversial topics, there is too much preaching to the choir. Granted, there are times when you have to walk away, but if people can just *try* to understand each other better, it certainly helps ease the hatred and misunderstanding.

Just my 2 cents.

Actually it's Joy Behar who is "demented"

What a loon....she states that home schooled children are "demented".



Far from it, luv. I cannot tell you how impressed I am with some of the home school mothers who blog about what they are teaching their children. These gals have it going on! I ran across a whole slew of them about a year ago, and I just couldn't believe all the stuff they crammed into each day. Studies are showing that home schoolers are passing up their public school peers.

Side note: How in the bloody hell do you suppose Elisabeth Hasselbeck puts up with those other three far left liberal lunatics day in and day out???! Lord, I can't even watch them let alone imagine having to sit at that table with them everyday...gag.

To a good cause...

I just bought some more shoes. It looks like they're a little behind in their goal, so how about helping them out by donating another $5 or so??

Sigh.....

I really, really hope this is a fabrication. If anyone can provide more information about this incident, please do.

A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in college, to the anti-Christian book "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it.

"Three people told us he had taken a biology class and was doing well in it, but other students and the professor were really challenging my son, his faith. They didn't like him as a Republican, as a Christian, and as a conservative who believed in intelligent design," the grief-stricken father, Keith Kilgore, told WND about his son, Jesse.

"This professor either assigned him to read or challenged him to read a book, 'The God Delusion,' by Richard Dawkins," he said.

...


"He was pretty much an atheist, with no belief in the existence of God (in any form) or an afterlife or even in the concept of right or wrong," the relative wrote. "I remember him telling me that he thought that murder wasn't wrong per se, but he would never do it because of the social consequences - that was all there was - just social consequences.

"He mentioned the book he had been reading 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins and how it along with the science classes he had take[n] had eroded his faith. Jesse was always great about defending his beliefs, but somehow, the professors and the book had presented him information that he found to be irrefutable. He had not talked … about it because he was afraid of how you might react. ... and that he knew most of your defenses of Christianity because he himself used them often. Maybe he had used them against his professors and had the ideas shot down."

He then explained to Jesse his own personal journey of seeking "other explanations of God's existence" and told of his ultimate return.

"I told him it was my relationship with God, not my knowledge of Him that brought me back to my faith. No one convinced me with facts. ... it was a matter of the heart."

That last paragraph irritates me to no end. *This* is why it is so important for students to understand that there *are* apologetic arguments that support their religious faith and utterly demolish the BS being pushed on them by atheist evangelists like Dawkins.

"Academic freedom" in the secular universities means nothing. True academic freedom would mean that ID and arguments against the ridiculous claims made by naturalists would be allowed in the classrooms as well. The liberal bozos running our universities provide little balance these days when presenting evolutionary "facts". AND, if professors are going to suggest books like the God Delusion, they should also suggest books refuting that BS....like Vox's The Irrational Atheist or any number of other outstanding books along the same line.

Students are impressionable during their college years, and it's a shame that only one worldview is allowed in the classrooms of our college campuses.

HT: Vox

The Academic Freedom Petition

SIGN IT please!



Also, please note that while Darwin enthusiasts will be hallowing his name on his 200th birthday (Feb. 12, 2009), the rest of us will be celebrating Academic Freedom Day by speaking out against censorship and standing up for freedom of speech by defending the right to debate the evidence for and against evolution.

Students are encouraged to participate in the Academic Freedom on Evolution Video and Essay Contest with a grand prize of $500. Read more about what you can do to help with Academic Freedom Day!

The Undoing of my Man

OMG, I hope my husband never discovers that these little critters exist. They are the spit and image of a Furby!



For those of you who are unfamiliar with my husband's dire fear of Furbies, you can read about it here.

Your "God View"...it drives everything

Our Pastor has engaged us in a thought provoking sermon series for the past three weeks. The title of the series is "God View", and he's been lecturing on why our view of God affects how we live our lives and the decisions we make. It's been an interesting series for me because it touches on so many things that I've discussed with theists, atheists and agnostics on line.

The first week of the series covered how our view of God affects our lives regardless of whether we believe or don't believe in an ultimate creator. The second week's lecture was on the resurrection of Christ and it's importance to the Christian belief system. This past Sunday's message was on the topic of exclusivity and Christianity.

I think this message also relates to ID in a way....it's my belief that our philosophical or religious worldview affects how we reason through the design concept as well as the evolutionary paradigm. Both the philosophical naturalist and the theist come to the table with a priori assumptions about the OOL, and it affects how they look at the scientific evidence. Both views rely on faith to a degree. I highly recommend listening to this series if you can find some spare time to do so.

We've been attending this particular church for the past few years, and from the start I knew it was the place for us. It's a non denominational church, which I think is becoming more attractive to many folks. The divisive nature of various Christian denominations is a turn off at times, and much of it could be so easily avoided, IMHO. Our Pastor is very well read, and he takes an intellectual approach to the Christian faith. He also stresses how important it is to strive to live an *authentic* Christian lifestyle. Difficult to do for sure, but it's a well sought goal.

The series of messages can be found at this link...weeks 11/2, 11/9, and 11/16.

He did mistakenly attribute the wrong author to a book he mentioned in yesterday's message...see if you can catch it! It's a book *all* of my readers should be familiar with.

*Love* Dave Matthews

Atheist Bus Campaign

Fox news seems to get a kick out of it....

Excellent Review of "The Irrational Atheist"

Thanks to Old Coot, you can read this review of Vox Day's, The Irrational Atheist.

In The Irrational Atheist, WorldNetDaily.com columnist Vox Day uses logic and facts (not theology) to refute the "unholy trinity" of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. What makes Day's book entertaining is his exuberant language -- the rhetorical fireworks with which he takes on the new atheists. High spirits and clever phrasing provoke continual chuckles, as for example when he remarks that not since the craze for Marx and Freud "has there been so much enthusiasm about the non-existence of God," and that this new evangelism is directed at "atheists whose lack of faith is weak." He employs mock praise, too, as in, "Hitchens and Dawkins became atheists after long and exhaustive rational inquiries into the existence of God, both at the age of nine." Yet the humor doesn't get in the way of subtle analysis, for he lays bare Dawkins's "incessant shell games," Harris's "exercises in self-parody," and Hitchens's "epic feat of intellectual self-evisceration."

Day divides atheists into high-church and low-church varieties. The "unholy trinity" belong to the high-church type -- i.e., they are university men who hate religion and demand that others enlist in their "anti-theist jihads." The low-church atheists describe themselves simply as of "no religion." In reply to the high-church boast that atheists are more moral than theists, Day points out that, while it is true that high-church atheists comprised only two-tenths of one percent of the criminals imprisoned in England and Wales in the year 2000, the low-church type made up 31.6 percent. Measured against their ratio in the overall population, this meant that atheists were four times more likely to go to jail for crimes than Christians. This is a sample of how Day explodes the false claims of the new atheists.

Perhaps the most engaging chapters in this book are those about war. The high-church atheists assert that religion causes war, but Day proves otherwise. He shows that over the past 232 years, 671,070 American soldiers have died in 17 wars, of which only one-half of one percent can reasonably be attributed to religion. This amounts to the deaths of 14 soldiers per year. Turning next to the Encyclopedia of Wars compiled by C. Phillips and A. Axelrod, Day examines 1,763 wars fought from 2325 B.C. to modern times. Of these wars, only 123 can reasonably be attributed to religion -- 6.92 percent of those recorded. Since half of these religious wars were waged by Muslims, this means that, apart from Islam, the world's religions are responsible for only 3.35 percent of all wars. "The historical evidence is conclusive," Day concludes. "Religion is not a primary cause of war."

Here is yet another glimpse of how Day uses facts to confute the "unholy trinity." Whereas Dawkins declares that atheists have the highest regard for works of art and architecture and not one of them in the world who would "bulldoze" places like Mecca, Chartres, or York Min­ster, Day replies with staggering evidence that atheists are far more likely than theists to destroy the landmarks of civilization, as when they razed 41,000 of the 48,000 churches in Russia, and 7,000 of the monasteries in Tibet.

Although Day is an evangelical, he is remarkably sympathetic to Catholics, who are usually the chief targets of atheists. Day scoffs at the way Dawkins, in the space of a couple of pages, dismisses the 3,000-page Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas: He says that Dawkins waved "a dead chicken over the keyboard" and tried to make readers believe he had "seriously considered" the Sum­ma and found it "wanting." Day also thinks it unfair that the Spanish Inquisition is ballyhooed as the high point of human wickedness. He points out that the Great Leap Forward and the Holocaust, both caused by atheists, resulted in 43 million and 6 million deaths respectively, whereas the Spanish Inquisition resulted in 3,230 deaths in three and a half centuries. And then, in the single year of 1936, Spanish atheists murdered 6,832 members of the Catholic clergy -- "more than twice the number of the victims of 345 years of inquisition." Summing up, Day reveals that 52 atheist rulers in the 20th century, from 1917 to 2007, were responsible for a body count of around 148 million dead -- "three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war and individual crime in the entire 20th century." And so it turns out that "the average atheist crime against humanity" is "18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians." To support these powerful refutations, Day offers footnotes on virtually every page.

The "unholy trinity" are fond of saying that religion and science are incompatible, but Day shows that they have been compatible for centuries, both before and after the Galileo incident, which he sees as exaggerated by the Church's enemies. The enemies of religion prefer to forget that, in 1794, revolutionary atheists inspired by the Enlightenment beheaded Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry.

Today, atheists are raising fears that mankind faces extinction unless religion is abolished, but Day replies that it is science that has put mankind in such danger. Men thrived with religion for 12,000 years, but they "may not survive four hundred years of science." Though science has been around for only three percent of the time that religion has, it has produced a "panoply of mortal dangers," including designer diseases and weapons of mass destruction.

Ironically, for all their supposed reliance on reason, the new atheists believe in improbable things like "multiple universes." Day observes that this is "an utterly non-scientific theory invented solely to get around the problem of the anthropic principle." Faced with the unwelcome fact that there are 128 fortuitous coincidences in the fundamental constants of physics, which suggests that the existence of life is no accident, atheists postulate "a potentially infinite number of universes" just so "our wildly improbable universe" can be found to be "mathematically probable." Here again, they use a double standard -- the multiverse theory is just as "un­falsifiable" as the "God Hypothesis," and far "more improbable."

Vox Day wisely concludes that there is no proof at all that a society can be established and survive on "an atheist foundation," while there is "a fair amount of evidence to the contrary."

If you don't want to go out and purchase the book, you can read it in it's entirety at this link. Vox put the book on-line as soon as it hit the book stores....very nice of him, IMHO.

Five Questions for Atheists

Silence to Be Deafening as Left Stops Yelling

Now that the far left has taken virtually everything in this election, they won't be left with much to bitch about. This article is too funny...

Conservatives for reasons too numerous to mention are depressed, but there are some bright spots.

Consider:

Will there be protests now at the White House? Against whom will college students spill their venom? Will they become well-mannered now and proceed to the White House respectfully, like ladies and gentlemen?

And what about their professors? How will they invigorate their class discussions centered on the eternal verities regarding race-class-gender without the jumping-off point about the Bush regime? What about training teachers in social justice? How will education schools train teachers to make their charges aware of the social injustice poisoning this country that emanates straight from the Capitol? Toward what power will students be taught to apply their “critical thinking” skills? Will the hegemony be dissolved, thereby ending 95% of the scholarship now produced?

What about creative writing forums? What will be the subject of poetry now? Can the resident long-haired creative writing professor introducing the poets at a reading say only good things about the president without getting boring? How will students prop up their self-esteem without asserting their intellectual superiority to the president of the United States? What outrages will students dramatize in plays? What about interpretive dances? How will over-mascara-ed, banjo-playing girl bands gain their creds of bravery without saying from a foreign stage that they are “ashamed” to be from the same state as their president?

What will happen to calendar manufacturers who rely on secretaries in humanities departments to display their keen wit by positioning the “Bushism-A-Day” calendars toward every student seeking a drop/add slip? What will professors post outside their office doors? Can they keep their “U.S. Out of Iraq Now” posters up? And what will they write their scholarly papers on? Once wealth is redistributed by a black president who is a favorite of feminists, what will be the focus of their papers? What will happen to the scholarly publishing industry? What about the bumper sticker business? What kinds of stickers will replace those festooning bumpers in faculty parking lots across the nation about a village in Texas missing its “idiot”?

What about the pundits? We all know that agreeable copy does not sell. So where will they get their raw material?

I'm sure they'll find something to moan about....

Of Ice Fish and Pocket Mice

Looks like Sean Carroll is still going strong with his ice fish lecture. I attended a similar lecture of his at Kansas State University back in March of '07. My review of the lecture can be found at this link.

This recent reviewer seems to have come away with thoughts similar to my own...

Carroll's argument against design eschewed the real question of how genes came into existence through natural processes. There are no grounds for assuming that the processes through which genes might degrade are the same processes through which they could be built up (Ref 1). In simple terms, genes are long stretches of DNA that carry the information necessary to code for the production of functional proteins. Intelligent design theorists claim that a piece-meal assembly of information-rich genes using the basic building blocks of DNA exceeds the capacities of Darwinian selection and is better explained by appealing to the activity of an intelligent agent (Refs 3,4). If anything, this very principle should have been Carroll's first point of contention if he was to say anything against ID. From a philosophical perspective the possibility remains that a designer may have supplied an organism with more genetic information than may have been needed for life- what one may call an "all the options, all the bells and whistles" approach. Such a designer could have been interested in placing non-functional genes in the genome for a future role in his or her design. We all install software into our computers that may not be operational until some later date when we finally choose to use it. Computers can now be accurately scheduled to start a process at a specified instant in the future, similarly to the programming of a recording on a video-recorder.

One may rightly ask what evidence Carroll could furnish to support the premise that non-functional genes were necessarily derived from functional counterparts found elsewhere in nature. Indeed empirical evidence in support of an evolutionary continuum was severely lacking throughout the presentation.

Ice Fish and Pocket Mice seem to be the best examples Darwinist can come up with for evolution as their lectures never seem to evolve past micro evolutionary examples for the theory. Eugenie Scott uses the simplistic example of the pocket mouse as well...lecture review can be found here.

Their theory (at the macro level) is based primarily on historical inference, which basically means they come in with a priori assumptions and are hardened against the concept of design. They simply cannot accept that there are *no* significant examples of empirical evidence supporting the macro evolutionary changes they claim are fact beyond question.

More about these micro/macro evolutionary changes at this link.

50,000 Pairs of Shoes in 50 Days challenge

Maci told me about a great way to give poverty a swift kick by helping with a charity drive to raise money for 50,000 pairs of shoes for the needy. Soles4Souls is launching this new campaign.

What a great idea!!

The challenge is to raise enough money to purchase 50,000 pairs of shoes in 50 days.

Only $5 buys 2 pairs of shoes!

Anyone who donates will be entered to win a trip to Mexico to personally deliver their shoes to someone who has never had shoes before, tying together the virtual world with the real world.

So, please donate $5 (or more!) to help with this campaign. You can do so at this site. It's super easy to do...only took me about a minute.

Even you folks who read my blog and cringe at my every word can help with this one. We can work together for once!!

No reason really...

...just another of my favorites.



It was also Meghan McCain's final campaign song of the day. She did a wonderful job with her blog throughout the campaign. It was great to see all the up close and personal photos of their journey. She's a bright kid with a promising future.

Media finally asking questions??? LOL!

"We don't know much about Barack Obama." lol...do tell.



I guess we'll be finding out real soon now....

*eyes rolling*

And, he picks Rahmbo for chief of staff...

Way to go there, Obama....sheesh.

It should be a *very* interesting four years...

Humans are inherently religious beings...

...we were created that way.

Michael Critchon passed away recently. One of his thought provoking articles can be found here:

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.

"Humans are inherently religious beings, created to be in relationship with God - and if they reject God, they don't stop being religious; they simply find some other ultimate principle upon which to base their lives."

~Nancy Pearcey


HT: Davescot

So much for Bipartianship

They're ready to can Lieberman for not walking the party line.

My guess is that all this talk about bipartianship coming from Obama is probably a load of bull.

Not a good start...

Buck up McCain supporters...

Thought it was a good day to resurrect this one...



That's right...go out and hug an Obama supporter today....*wink*

It's all good....

...let's just hope he is who he says he is. He'll have his work cut out for him in gaining my trust. I would love for the US to be less divided, which he says is his goal, so I hope he will be able to achieve it. That will be no small task...

Congratulations President Obama, and God bless.

Go Vote!!!

See ya at the polls!

Ummm.....

"I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car, I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage."

?????

Yikes. Hopefully, those sentiments were merely due to overexposure to the Messiah. After she comes down from her little encounter with the Obonga, perhaps she should try a few hits of reality.

The probability of life appearing spontaneously ...

...is nearly infintesimal.

A generation or more ago a profound disservice was done to popular thought by the notion that a horde of monkeys thumping away on typewriters could eventually arrive at the plays of Shakespeare. This idea is wrong, so wrong that one has to wonder how it came to be broadcast so widely. The answer I think is that scientists wanted to believe that anything at all, even the origin of life, could happen by chance, if only chance operated on a big enough scale. This is the obvious error, for the whole Universe observed by astronomers would not be remotely large enough to hold the horde of monkeys needed to write even one scene from one Shakespeare play, or to hold their typewriters, and certainly not the wastepaper baskets needed for throwing out the volumes of rubbish which the monkeys would type. The striking point is that the only practicable way for the Universe to produce the plays of Shakespeare was through the existence of life producing Shakespeare himself.

Despite this, the entire structure of orthodox biology still holds that life arose at random. Yet as biochemists discover more and more about the awesome complexity of life, it is apparent that the chances of it originating by accident are so minute that they can be completely ruled out. Life cannot have arisen by chance.

....

The probability of life appearing spontaneously on Earth is so small that it is very
difficult to grasp without comparing it with something more familiar. Imagine a
blindfolded person trying to solve the recently fashionable Rubik cube. Since he can't see the results of his moves, they must all be at random. He has no way of knowing whether he is getting nearer the solution or whether he is scrambling the cube still further. One would be inclined to say that moving the faces at random would "never" achieve a solution. Strictly speaking, "never" is wrong, however. If our blindfolded subject were to make one random move every second, it would take him on average three hundred times the age of the Earth, 1,350 billion years, to solve the cube. The chance against each move producing perfect colour matching for all the cube's faces is about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.

These odds are roughly the same as you could give to the idea of just one of our body's proteins having evolved randomly, by chance. However, we use about 200,000 types of protein in our cells. If the odds against the random creation of one protein are the same as those against a random solution of the Rubik cube, then the odds against the random creation of all 200,000 are almost unimaginably vast.

Much more to consider at this link.

Related: The Anthropic Principle

Obama's grandmother dies...

This has to seriously suck. It's too bad she wasn't able to hang on just a bit longer to see her grandson become President.

Keep his family in your prayers, please.

SNL and McCain

So long Democrats

Wendy Button, speechwriter for Obama, Edwards and Clinton, turns her back on the Democrats.