Top 5 Movies of the year

Everyone loves 'Top 5' lists, don't they?

Oh. Well I do, so I'm doing one. First off though, I have to say that I didn't get 'round to seeing the following films; The Hurt Locker, (500) Days of Summer, Public Enemies, Where the Wild Things Are or Fantastic Mr. Fox. From what I've seen, all of these stand a chance of breaking into the top 5 but I didn't see them so I can't rate them.

Notable mentions have to go to The Hangover, Star Trek and Coraline, all of which were enjoyable films that I'll definitely watch again. Here's the top 5;


#5 Avatar
I saw this in 3D and, if you're going to go see it, I urge you to see the 3D version as well. In the past (including Coraline and, to a lesser extent, Up) the 3D aspect of a film was a gimmick to make a given object come 'out' of the screen - usually to the surprise of the audience - it was a parlour trick. No more. In Avatar, James Cameron has managed to integrate 3D technology into the very fabric of the film and the results are spectacular. Everything has depth and texture, everything feels real. While this technology is going to be a lot of fun for action/adventure films, what I really want to see is someone do a single-camera Blair Witch/Paranormal Activity style film in this manner. The feeling of 'looking through a window' rather than at a screen really draws you in and, I think, documentary-style horror films are going to reap some major scares out of this stuff.

While the plot has come in for some serious criticism (it's Ferngully!) for its lack of originality, I don't necessarily see this as a fault. James Cameron is taking you on a ride and the visuals are a big part of that - there isn't that much else you can do once the protagonists are set up; the furrows of history are fairly well worn in these situations. So don't expect the story to blow you out of the water, it's merely the vehicle that takes you through the world that Jim built.

I really enjoyed this film. There are little treats scattered all the way through it, from noticing that they've finally got CG eyes 'right' to realizing that it took you an hour to figure this out because they look so damn real!


#4 Watchmen
Yes, the graphic novel is better. Let us get that out of the way right off the bat. Zack Snyder deserves some credit for the best attempt at faithfully rendering a graphic novel into a movie, but the drawback of this is that you really can directly compare the two because the film offers you nothing you haven't read in the book (except, perhaps, a better ending - there, I said it!).

If it hadn't been a comic first, Watchmen would have been hailed - quite rightly - as a groundbreaking work of cinematic genius, but it will never get that recognition because all it really is is a photocopy of the original.

That being said, it's an incredibly well made film and almost all the casting is note-perfect. Jackie Earle Haley as Rorsharch is one of my favourite performances of the year. I'm still not entirely sold on Leanard Cohen's Hallelujah being used during the mid-air Archie sex-scene, but I guess Watchmen is supposed to be idiosyncratic and, well, cheesy. That's why it works as superhero satire, after all!



#3 Inglourious Basterds
You just can't keep Quentin down, can you? Man I love this film!

The most notable thing about IB is how it's not about Brad Pitt's character. The trailer led us all to believe that it was going to be all about Brad and his Jewish buddies cutting a bloody swathe through the ranks of the Nazis in France - almost like the Bride in Kill Bill as she takes down the Crazy 88s (and everyone else in her path). But that's not how it works.

It's actually Christopher Waltz' who owns this film. As Hans Landa, the 'Jew-Hunter', Waltz manages to do what, to my mind, no other Tarantino villain has done. He is frightening. Most of QT's bad-guys are sadistic yes, but they're also normally pretty cool too (think of Bill, Marsellus Wallace, Stuntman Mike). Landa is more like Hannibal Lecter; cold, calculating, supremely intelligent and utterly ruthless.

The rest of the film's pretty bad-ass as well!


#2 Up
Total change of tone here! Up made me cry. For the first time in my adult life, I cried in the cinema (the only other time was when Optimus Prime died in Transformers: The Movie back in the late 80s) and I'm not ashamed to admit it. The emotional kick in the guts that comes in the first 10 minutes rivals any tear-jerker in cinematic history and it grounds the whole film, even when everything else is airborne.

I have no idea how Pixar keep making these gems but I hope they keep it up for many more years to come because they just keep on getting better and better. I may be slightly biased towards this film because it has a Rottweiler in it that reminds me of my dog, but leaving that aside it still has everything a good movie should have; thrills, spills, chase-scenes, comedy, great characters and, at it's heart, a lot of love.



#1 District 9
No contest. This was, not only my favourite, but the best film of the year. Everything about it shows endless ingenuity, creativity, innovation and courage I don't think I blinked more than fifty times during the entire screening.

Sharlto Copley puts in the only performance of the year to rival Christopher Waltz with his portayal of MNU employee Wikus van de Merwe, a performance which was totally improvised. I have never been taken on a journey like I was with Wikus. His casual racism (or xenocism, if you like) and likable demeanor at the start of the film makes for an interesting character and if they'd have left it there, I would have been satisfied. But throughout the film, Wikus transforms (in many ways) and you're never left feeling sold short at any stage - you're always with him, even when you don't like him.

Neill Blomkamp has done something thoroughly remarkable with District 9 that will see this film talked about alongside Alien, Blade Runner, 2001, Terminator and others as one of the seminal works of Science-fiction.



Well, there's my Top 5. I've tried to avoid doing the usual 'review' of the film that inevitably leads to spoilers and, at the very least, plants pre-conceived notions about the film in the readers mind. Instead, I've just tried to tell you how the movie made me feel and, if nothing else, encouraged you to seek out any of these films that you might not have seen yet. Trust me; they're all worth seeing.

Let me know if you agree/disagree!

Cheers,

End of the Decade

So, how were the noughties for you?

Coming to the end of this year and having a look back through this blog has made me decide to be a little more active in the future. I'm hoping to churn out at least 1 post/week from now on and some of them might even be of interest (this one isn't).

I'm also going to diversify a bit and talk about some of my other passions that aren't science or religiously connected; movies, music, politics, life, the universe and - you know - the like... we'll see how that goes.

For now, I'd just like to say that I hope everyone had a very, Merry Christmas and I wish you all the very best for the new year - roll on 2010!

Regards,

Matt

"Hello, my name is Kent Hovind..."

As you may have seen, Kent Hovind's 'dissertation' has been released online. The 101 page scribblings of the good 'Doctor' were made available from Wikileaks and you can read the masterpiece itself here.

Some highlights include;

• "Another man that is very important as we trace the history of evolution is Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. He was born in 1731 and died in 1802. He was an extremely fat person."

• "Darwin's book was just what the world needed to justify the cruel ruthless tactics of the industrial revolution. Darwin had a theology degree."

• "It was Shintoism, based on evolution, that was responsible for Japan's actions in World War II"

• "Evolution is not a scientific fact. It actually is not even a good theory. It is just a hypothesis Actually, evolution fits into the realm of religion. Webster's definition of religion says "belief in a divine or super-human power to be obeyed and worshiped as the creator and ruler of the universe."
  

• "Those canaries will never, given all the time you want, will never change into elephants, or dinosaurs, or trees, or tomatoes. If they did, that would be macro-evolution."

• "In Japan, the same thing was going on with the Shintu [sic] religion... Japan and Germany got together and we had an awful time in World War II."

• "The cosmic dust layer [on the Moon] was only six or seven thousand years old."

It goes on.

This guy still refers to himself as 'Dr.' Hovind, as do his fans. He has been one of the major contributors on the YEC side of the Evo-Creo debate for years and his 'ideas' are often quoted near-verbatum by those who think research is a dirty word.

It would be depressing, if it weren't so funny.

Let me know if there are any other quotes that should be included in the highlights reel.

Cheers,


Edit:

Thanks to BeamStalk for the TalkOrigins link that debunks every single thing that Hovind says (as if it were needed!). Nice.

Book Share

After some back-and-forth with Da Bomb over at his excellent Pilgrimage blog, it looks like we're going to be entering into a book-exchange in time for Christmas.

He'll be sending me a John Lennox book, and I'll return the favour by sending either The Greatest Show on Earth or Why Evolution is True (by Dawkins and Coyne, respectively).

It is my hope that I'll be able to do a chapter-by-chapter review of the Lennox book as I go and I welcome any input.

This is what the internet is all about, two people from different, countries (heck, continents...hemispheres!) from different backgrounds having a chat and sharing information - you've got to love it!

It's perfect timing too, I just finished being disappointed by Dune: Messiah (not as good as the original book) and I don't have another book lined up.


So, thank you to Da Bomb; I look forward to finalizing the details with you soon.

Regards,

Disturbing video

Hi,

If you haven't already, you should be subscribed to Personal Failure's excellent blog; Forever in Hell - it's seriously badass.

However, I'm going to link to it specifically today because the story that she talks about gave me a knot in my stomach and I feel like I have to do something or I'll punch the next person I see.


In Which I Interrupt the Previous Post for Human Rights

Do not follow this link unless you have a strong stomach. The embedded video shows a savage assault on a gay man being beaten half to death outside his own home by two thugs.


What you can do...

Hate Crime Bill - if you are able, please support this bill. This is where prejudice, ignorance and bigotry lead to and it needs to stop. Right now.


Thanks,

Evolution: Stealing examples from Dawkins

I've been reading Richard Dawkins' new book 'The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution' and, I have to say, it is an excellent piece of popular science writing.

Evolution is both simple and complex at the same time - when you understand its complexity, the elegant simplicity shines through, When you misunderstand the simplicity, the complexity seems absurd. A tricky concept to get across.

What Dawkins does so well is to lead the reader through the thought-processes that are necessary to view evolution in the right context and you can tell that he's being very careful to minimize the quote-mine opportunities throughout the book.


A particular example, that I'd like to borrow and adapt, from the book is in dealing with 'transitional forms' in the fossil record; a creationist favourite!

Imagine a country where the voting age, drinking age, driving age and age at which you are tried as an adult in court are all 18. That will be our assumption.

So under-18s are kids and over-18s are adults. That's the best way we have for drawing a distinction between the two, and we have to draw a line somewhere because otherwise you'd have 4-year-olds behind the wheel and 40-year-olds being charged as a minor for crimes.

Now, does this mean that we actually think that kids magically turn into grownups at the stroke of midnight on their 18th birthday? No, of course not. We appreciate that they go through an adolescent phase that can run from 14 - 24, or 17-19 or, in some cases, from 21- 91! But we have to make that distinction for categorical purposes.

So, when creationists demand to see a transitional form in the fossil record, what they are asking for is our 'adolescent'. However, because of our need to categorize, any fossil we find will always fit into one category or another (unless it is distinct enough to form a new category of its own and then we just have two new 'adolescent' positions in the fossil record).

What creationists don't realize (or do realize, but lie about it) is that what they are actually demanding is that we provide them with the 'stroke of midnight' fossil as child-->adult. Of course, this fossil cannot exist; all we can provide is forms that straddle the line.

. . . . . . . l . . . . . . .

Let's say the dots to the far left is Species A and the far right is Species B. Scientists have drawn an imaginary line between the two which is, for all intents and purposes, arbitrary.

Now, a creationist comes along and says; 'where's the transitional form?' Scientists go looking and find the three specimens shown in purple, below;

. . . . . . . l . . . . . . .

The one to the left of the line has more in common with Species A and the two to the right of the line have more in common with Species B. These are transitional forms between Species A and Species B and we have these, in droves, for multiple lines of evolution covering almost every group of organisms know to have existed.

We could, if we looked long and hard enough, find all the 'missing' dots for this particular sequence...

Now here's the kicker.

These dots do not represent individuals, they represent populations of organisms, existing for tens of thousands of years, that can be said to be distinct enough from their neighbouring dots to be recognized as different. Each can just about inter-breed with the one next to it for a relatively short period of time (indeed, they must as that is the period where the one group diverges from the parent group) until speciation occurs and the two populations can no longer interbreed.

Even representing it like this is false because we have arbitrarily separated the populations into dots when, really, it should be a continuous line that gradually changes colour. Like the years of our child-->adult's life, we put an imaginary break at their birthday and say 'now you are 12' but they are almost no different to how they were yesterday and they will be almost no different tomorrow to how they are today. Yet, at some point, they stop being 'child' and become 'adult'. Can you point to the transitional age for a given person going from child-->adult?



The creationist's insistence on 'transitional forms' is founded in a misunderstanding of what the term means and how the process works. It is dishonest either way; to demand evidence for something you don't understand is ignorant, to demand evidence for something you willfully don't understand and have no intention of understanding is a flat-out lie.

I highly recommend Dawkins' book - he puts this stuff far more eloquently than I can.

Any questions, comments or clarifications are welcome.


Cheers,

A Question from Lissie Darcy

(That's right, you got your very own blog posting dedicated to you!)

Lissie would like to know;

"Ps. A question for all of you, (Bath Tub, and Mr. Matt, and you Zilch (Is that your name or your blogging name..? Sorry, just had to ask.) Were you atheists ever since you were old enough to decide that for yourself? And what made you come to the conclusion that you are at now? (*hem* God doesn't exist..)"

I will answer for myself (which is all any of us can ever do) and say the following;

I was raised in a 'Christian' home. I phrase it like that because, although we were nominally Church of England, it was not a major part of daily life. Likewise, my school was a 'Christian' school because we had daily assembly and prayer in the church next door, but we were not instructed to believe in God during lesson-time.

From this 'cultural Christian' background I was familiar enough with all the classic Bible tales and would have said that I knew enough to think that maybe there was a God (the Christian God seemed the only likely one at the time), but I had no idea what He wanted from me or how I should go about being True Christian beyond trying to be a good person etc, the typical False Convert thing basically.

I went through a phase of total apathy towards all things spiritual/religious during my mid teens because there were far more important things at hand; football, girls, music, alcohol & drugs (probably in about that order too!) but by the time I went to university I had started to think more honestly about the whole 'religion thing'.

I joined the Christian Fellowship at my university and spent many a long evening discussing scripture and doctrine with some good friends of mine (two of them are in South America as Missionaries now) although I remained skeptical, despite how attractive the whole deal sounded (eternal life, spiritual security, certainty, a relationship with the Creator, etc).

There was a time when I was fully convinced that God was real and was waiting for me to come to Him. I got down on my knees one Friday night and prayed. I spent hours recounting all my sins, both real and perceived, I delved into the darkest aspects of myself and asked God to bring the light. I acknowledged my need for a saviour and believed that Jesus Christ had borne the weight of my sins on His shoulders when He gave His life for us all and I humbly asked that the Holy Spirit transform my heart and bring me under God's grace.
.
.
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Nothing happened. I was on my knees for three days, taking only water and sleeping only when I passed out from exhaustion. Now, I wasn't expecting lightening bolts or the voice of James Earl Jones ringing in my ears, but by the third day I was wondering why nothing seemed to be any different.

I continued to live as if something had happened, I knew it took faith and commitment to make any relationship work, so I assumed that this was normal. However, other Christians spoke of the powerful nature of their conversion and talked about how God 'spoke' to them through the Bible, or how the Bible 'came alive' when they were born again.

To make a long story short, it didn't take me long realize that I was deluding myself out of a fear of death and a desire for security. The thing was, my fear of death and need for security weren't that strong to start with, so there was no compelling reason for me to delude myself.

In the years since I have read the Bible multiple times and I see nothing but a collection of Jewish mythology and Middle Eastern superstitions. No doubt there was a man called Jesus who was a great spiritual leader, but the Son of God? I think not.

I have also been convinced by the many arguments against there being a god(s) from an intellectual and naturalistic position. I understand mankind to be a species of ape and that we are no better than any other evolved form of life on this planet. This makes us no less important, nor our deeds no less heroic/monstrous, but it puts us in our rightful place amongst nature.

My conclusion that there is no god(s) is based on the lack of any evidence to suggest that there is a god(s). No other conclusion would be rational, based on the experience that I have.

I hope this answers some of your questions, Lissie, and don't be afraid to ask some more.

BathTub, Zilch; care to join the confessional?


Cheers,

Happy Blasphemy Day!

Hello All!

Today is the day where Blasphemy is encouraged and promoted throughout the evil, atheistic, heathen community (and, I guess, amongst theists who don't mind being blasphemous about some other god).

So I'll do my part with some jokes I found;

Moses and God are walking through Heaven, and God complains of being bored. Moses suggests a vacation.
"That's a great idea," says God, "but where?"
"How about Jupiter?" Moses asks. "Impressive scenery."
"Yeah, but the gravity gives me a backache."
"What about Pluto then?"
"Too cold -- and too boring. I need excitement."
"Well, if it's excitement you want, what about Earth? It's the happening place to be."
"Earth?" God says in disgust. "Oh, no, not Earth. Last time I was there I got some bitch pregnant and I haven't heard the end of it for two thousand years."



Two female suicide bombers are out shopping. One turns to the other and says;
"Does my bomb look big in this?"


Jesus walks into a pub with three nails. The barman asks what he'd like. Jesus replies: 'Can you put me up for the night?'



Happy Blasphemy Day!

The Theory of Evolution

I haven't actually watched this video yet, but I trust my man Zilch to have a good eye for these things and I actually want to see if I can figure out how to embed a video, so, here's some clarification about what the ToE does and does not have to say about the world;



Let me know what you think.


Cheers,

Back to Normal

Hello!

Ok, I'm back from being my (not very successful) satirical alter-ego and I'll be posting as myself from now on.

Apparently Chris isn't a big fan of a few things that would have made the satire interesting, things like;

reality
honesty
humour
logic

Whatever. If the guy wants to say that circular reasoning's fine then more power to him; he'll just never convince anyone that his message is worth listening to, that's all.



In other news, Ray Comfort is handing out a copy of Origin of Species to college kids. He has replaced Darwin's introduction with one of his own (the usual stuff; Darwin was a smelly racist, Piltdown Man! Piltdown Man!11eleventy!, Christ is a parachute, nothing made everything. Like I said; the usual stuff) and removed a few key chapters. Oh, and there's no mention on the cover that any of this has happened.

Apparently Christians are fine with this. Tony The Lawman sees no problem with it because 'paleontologists made up hoaxes years ago' and Wayne Dawg's ok with it because, well, I'm not sure why he thinks it's ok yet.

Oh, and as I've used wearesmrt.com to scrounge for sponsorship, I might as well do it here too;

Sponsorship Page

I'm doing a 5km run for the Children's Aid Foundation on the 27th of September down at the Toronto Waterfront and any support is most welcome. Unless, of course, you hate children....

Cheers,

Observations (with my eyes shut)

I really examined my heart this morning and, after discovering that it is an organ that pumps blood around my body and nothing more, I wandered what it would be like to be a Christian trying to throw out Science from Religion.

I realized I would have to be a very arrogant person. I would have to make myself ignorant of Reality and forget everything I ever mindlessly-parroted, though I would have to claim that I knew the truth about the universe without ever looking at the opposing side of the Bible and creationism which is Science and Reality.

I would have to be biased beyond belief and have faith in an old book that contains nothing of use and dogmatically sticks to out-dated mythologies and voodoo and can't be interpreted in the light of new information.

I would be among people who claim to be tolerant but hate Science without bothering to learn anything about it by reading entry-level books. I would have to be so foolish and arrogant (and smelly).

I hate that wrong path and people should flee far from that path and turn to Reality because Christianity is a Lie.

5 More Reasons Why Christianity is Wrong

1. It is

2. If it wasn't then evolution would be wrong and we know (via Dawkins) that evolution is true so yeah.

3. One time I saw a 'Christian' picking his nose in church

4. If Christianity was real then everyone would be a Christian. They're not, so it isn't

5. If Christianity was true then it wouldn't be so easy for me to disprove it with these lists.


Please give up on the idiotic lie of Christianity. Pastors and ministers lie to children and tell them that if they believe in Jesus then they'll be able to fly and so the kids fall for it and get trapped in the Christian cult.


Give up Jesus and worship Darwin instead - his beard is bigger and he was definitely real!111!

Tribute to Chris Geiser

5 Reasons why Christianity is wrong


1. Jesus said there were pillows in the earth, but pillows are made in factories, not in the earth so that must be wrong!

2. Most Christians are abandoning their faith because they've realized that it's all a lie.

3. Richard Dawkins said Christianity is wrong and he is reliable so therefore it's wrong.

4. If God was real, how come we can't see Heaven when we look through telescopes?

5. Christians have bad personal hygiene and often smell really bad.


So, now we've proven beyond all doubt that Christianity is false, Evolution must be true.

Checkmate!

Flood / Age of the Earth

In my last couple of posts I tried to present an opportunity for people to talk about the scientific evidences for and against an old or young earth.

What I found was that not one person was able to refute any of the evidences for an old earth and nobody was able present any valid evidence for a young earth.

I'm trying to be objective here, so if you disagree with what I've said, above, please let me know. Given the opportunity, not one person was able to make a basic case as to why people should consider a young earth over an old one.

Now, if the earth really were young, don't you think it would be the other way around?

I hear a lot of creationists talking about design and 'fine-tuning' these days, which I find ironic. Almost all of the derived values for universal constants and laws have been found through the process of methodological naturalism, the same process that tells us that the world is very old. Now, if you want to claim that the universe is 'fine-tuned' for life (us) then you have to acknowledge that the information you're basing this on is correct, right? Well, that information is how we know that the world is ancient. So you have two choices;

Either you accept that the universe is almost 14 billion years old and that the science that tells us this also provides data that you consider to be evidence of 'fine-tuning' (presumably by a Designer),

Or, you disregard the scientific age of the universe and all the associated data that goes with it and cling to you belief that the world was specially created, in the recent past, by way of a process that we can never understand through science (ie, chaos) 

It's your choice.

Regards,

Evidence for a Young Earth?

Following on from the 'Evidence for an Old Earth' post, I thought I'd give the opposing side a chance (teach the controversy and all that).
.
..
...
....tumbleweed...


Ok, here are 7 evidences that, I think, would back up the idea that the whole earth was flooded by the Deluge of Noah's day.

We should be able to find;

* a single, gigantic sedimentary layer containing the fossilized remains of all the animals killed in the flood along with a mix of human artifacts from pre-history right the way up to the day the first raindrop fell.

* Many, if not all, of these animals should show signs of either drowning and/or suffocating through ingesting mud.

* The animals should be found in no discernible grouping or order because they've been swirling around in muddy flood-waters for weeks. You would not expect any mother/infant fossil finds, for instance.

* If any order is to be found, we would expect to see the heavier animals near the bottom of this sedimentary layer as they would be more likely to sink sooner. Conversely, the lighter animals could be expected to survive longer by holding on to floating vegetation. This goes for high-altitude animals versus lowland 'kinds' too.

* We should not find, throughout the layer of sediment, any evidence of burrows, nests, droppings or other easily-destroyed remnants of life. These should all be washed away by the intense pressures and currents

* The sedimentary layer should be found globally. Sediment would have been carried, globally, for a long time before settling so we should see a fairly consistent sedimentary layer around the earth

* There should be no evidence of human societies that existed before and after the Flood event, that show no signs of being flooded.

These are by no means exhaustive, so if you have any others that are relevant, please include them. But, be honest about it - present hypothetical evidence that you would expect to see if you were going out into the field as the world's first geologist, don't just say; "I'd expect to see the Grand Canyon - yup, there it is!"

And feel free to refute the evidences I've presented if you don't think they're appropriate; explain why though.


I hope I'm being fair here, so let's see what you have to say.

Regards,

Matt

Evidence for an Old Earth

Vagon submitted this awesome list over at AJ's blog (Pevensie15) and I thought it was worth reproducing here.

This is how we know the Earth is old;




Amino acid racemization - which is a technique that is used to date fossilized objects up to several millions of years in age.

Coral - whose formations take a long time to grow

Continental Drift - Tectonic drift is an incredibly slow process, the separation of landmasses would have taken millions of years. This is verified by satellite measurement.

Cosmogenic nuclide dating - The influx of cosmic rays onto the earth continually produces a stream of cosmogenic nuclides in the atmosphere that will fall to the ground.

Dendochronology - which is a method of scientific dating based on annual tree growth patterns called tree rings.

Distant starlight - Because the speed of light is finite, when you look at an object, what you are actually seeing is how the object was in the past. If the universe is only 6,000 years old how can objects billions of light years away — and therefore billions of years old — be seen?

Erosion - Many places on earth show evidence of erosion taking place over very long time periods, not drastic, as would have been caused by a worldwide flood.

Fission track dating - which is a radiometric dating technique that can be used to determine the age of uranium containing crystalline minerals.

Geomagnetic reversal - which is a change in the polarity of the earth's magnetic field. Around 171 reversals are geologically documented, which would make the earth at least several millions of years old.

Helioseismology - The composition of the sun changes as it ages.

Human Y-chromosomal ancestry - Analysis has shown that man lived around 60,000 years ago.

Ice Layering - Currently the greatest number of layers found in a single ice sheet is over 700,000, which clearly contradicts the idea of an earth less than 10,000 years old.

Impact craters - Asteroid impacts as big those that have been discovered would have led to the extinction of all medium to large size species (an event that is seen in the fossil record).

Length of the prehistoric day - as measured by evidence in coral.

Lunar retreat - which can't corelate with a 6,000 year old earth

Naica megacrystals - Based on classical crystal growth theory these crystals are older than one million years.

Oxidizable Carbon Ratio dating - is a method for determining the absolute age of charcoal samples with relative accuracy. One can determine ages of over 20,000 years ago with a standard error under 3%.

Permafrost - The formation of permafrost (frozen ground) is a slow process.

Petrified wood - The process in which wood is preserved by permineralization, commonly known as petrification, takes extensive amounts of time.

Radiometric decay - is the constant predictable decay of unstable atoms into more stable isotopes or elements. Measurements of atomic decay are generally considered to be one of the most accurate ways of measuring the age of an object, and these measurements form the basis for the scientifically accepted age of the earth. There are many different variations of the radiometric dating technique such as radiocarbon, argon-argon, iodine-xenon, lanthanum-barium, lead-lead, lutetium-hafnium, neon-neon, potassium-argon, rhenium-osmium, rubidium-strontium, samarium-neodymium, uranium-lead, uranium-lead-helium, uranium-thorium, and uranium-uranium, of which every single one will date objects far older than 10,000 years.
Relativistic jetsare jets of plasma that gets ejected from some quasars and galaxy centers that have powerful magnetic fields.

Rock Varnish - is a coating that will form on exposed surface rocks. The varnish is formed as airborn dust acumulates on rock surfaces. This process is extremely slow.

Space weathering - is an effect that is observed on most asteroids. This dating technique exceed millions of years.

Sedimentary varves - are laminated layers of sedimentary rock that are most commonly laid down in glacial lakes. The Green River formation in easter Utah is home to an estimated twenty million years worth of sedimentary layers.

Stalactites - These formations take extremely lengthy periods to form; the average growth rate is not much more than 0.1 mm per year.

Thermoluninescence dating - is a method for determining the age of objects containing crystalline minerals such as ceramics or lava.

Weathering rinds - are layers of weathered material that develop on glacial rocks. Certain weathering rinds on basalt and andesite rocks in the eastern United States appear to have taken over 300,000 years to form."

Earth-like planet found

Thanks to Happy Humanist for posting this article to the SMRT forums;

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090421/ap_on_sc/eu_britain_new_planet


How awesome would it be to discover that there was life on another planet? It doesn't have to be intelligent, or even complex - just life, in all it's beauty, existing out there in the cosmos; it's enough to give me goosebumps!


Next week: Scientists discover smudge on telescope lens....


Regards,

Just three little questions...

Hey all,

In this post, the Living Waters staffer Trish Ramos gives us a series of mock-ups in the style of the crocoduck. Now, this can be seen a bit of fun, nothing serious, satire.

However, the lead-in to the post says this;

"What Evolutionists would have you believe..."

This changes the tone of the post. Now she's presenting a collection of images that are supposed to bear resemblance to something to do with the theory of evolution.

Trish gets called on this;

Logic Lad: "Please explain which part of evolutionary theory supports these supposed hybrids"

Reynold: "If you actually care to learn about what evolution really is, and what "evolutionists" really figure about it, you'd do well to actually look at what they actually say."

Whateverman: "No, this is what Creationists would have you believe. The theory of evolution makes no such claims."


Trish responds with the cop-out;

"Satire friends...just satire."

A bunch of theists then go on to demonstrate that they don't actually understand the first thing about evolution, what else is new?


I decided to put Trish's role in the Great Commission to the test;

"Trish,

I will seriously bend my knee and accept the gift of salvation that Jesus offers if you can demonstrate the following;

a) how this post qualifies as 'satire'

b) why the images in this post misrepresent evolution, and

c) what evolution actually states with regards to transitional forms.



Ball's in your court, how much do your really care about my salvation?"

This was posted on April 17th and, as of today (April 21st), Trish has not even acknowledged the existence of my comment.


Will Trish answer?
Will I accept her answer and Christ's salvation?

Find out soon (in about 3 months at my current blogging rate!)

Regards,

Matt

New Post

I just thought I'd put up a new post to say hi to my new, online, theists friends and provide a place where they don't have to post under a title that might be kind of offensive to them.


Knock yourselves out.


Matt

Oh, and Carefulwhatyousay, please check in if you can - we miss your blogging presence.