1. Al Gore on Reason

Comment #45640 by ao9news on May 28, 2007 at 4:16 pm

Hey everybody, pay attention. That blog post linked about Gore mentioning Adam and Eve has been pretty much discredited already. It was posted on Pharyngula and some commenters there did the job. Look it up.

The author didn't intend to lie, but it seems it was a misunderstanding and Gore was being a bit facetious. It's just ONE anecdote, how can you reach such conclusions as him being a freaking creationist by only going by that? The other articles just portray him as your run-of-the-mill politician trying to please everybody. He doesn't have to do that anymore and it seems he's liking it.

2. Atheism isn't the final word

Comment #32361 by ao9news on April 17, 2007 at 12:20 am

Half a world away, America has the highest weekly church attendance in the industrialized world, notwithstanding attacks on faith from Hollywood, academia and a judiciary seemingly intent on purging religious symbols from public spaces.

Hell yeah Bubba! Those damm 'cademics and smart-pants judgies are such a threat to us with them attacks on good, nice, church-goin', God-fearin' people. Hollywood is gay.

Them knowledge and reason are such angry bitches!

In the USA — the most science-oriented society in history —

Hmmm. Hmmmmm. Hhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Yeah... I think I'm OK. I think he said exactly that. I wonder how he would spin that comment. They use cellphones a lot? They buy plasma TVs? They put someone on the moon?

I wonder if this dumbass notices ALL these things have their roots on the kind of thinking he's attacking. Using science and knowing about it are so different things.

I always say that creationists (that goes for ID'ers) are hypocrites when they use their PCs and cellphones and watch satellite TV. Don't they know that the very scientific laws and theories (or "just theories", as they would put them) that allow them to do so perfectly agree and intermingle with other theories that say the universe is more than just thousands of years old? Moot point, I guess.

3. Einstein & Faith

Comment #31521 by ao9news on April 13, 2007 at 5:16 am

It would have been interesting if quantum mechanics came before general relativity. With all the furor QM brought upon, we might still be using Newton for gravity calculations, since all the brilliant minds would have been into quantum mechanics, which indeed happened. I wonder how our world would be different then, without the nuances of General Relativity.

I have heard and read physicists say that special relativity others may have come up with years after, but for General Relativity, more than intelligence, it required Einstein's imagination, and probably no one else could have come up with it.

4. Prophets of the new atheism

Comment #30396 by ao9news on April 8, 2007 at 1:50 am

Damn is this guy late for the atheist-bashing party. There is no excuse for repeating the same blabber now, especially by this guy, who:

(David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.)

All this was said months ago by other dummies and even not-so-dummies that are eager to misunderstand, and it was dealt with particular care preemptively by those very books they criticize. They are not responding to what was written on them, they are just repeating lies for those who won't bother to read the books.

Well, there is one excuse. He's just trying to keep the pointless talking points alive, maybe? Basing truth claims on statistics of how many people believe or not... yeah right.

5. The Most Hated Family in America

Comment #29628 by ao9news on April 3, 2007 at 4:58 pm

Well, I just finished watching the whole thing. It does a good job in portraying the family as a family, and nice (except for the leaders), but dumb, dumb, people. But there are so many missed opportunities, like asking the other documentary guy, who joined while making a documentary, and who said that before he was a "genius", what drove him to convert. At least ask the question, whatever answer you get however stupid or smart tells you something about his character.

And so many other missed opportunities with the lady, and with her niece, which was always nervously laughing. I think she was hiding so much, but at least he kind of got her uncomfortably serious at the end.

Also, I was expecting some talks with family members who resigned or were cast off. There were none. What's up with that?

6. The Most Hated Family in America

Comment #29601 by ao9news on April 3, 2007 at 2:36 pm

It is not a joke, they've been around for quite a while. I've only been living in the U.S. for some years and I've heard of them a couple of times. They've been in enough serious news outlets and internet websites to make me 98% sure that they're not joking. Those are real funerals too.

There are high-quality torrents, just in case you are interested. There is a super fast torrent right now at www.sonofshun.com. You need to register first (free). There is a lot of other very interesting content on that website too, you won't be disappointed. If you do download the torrent, please keep seeding (as if I had to say it).

7. Religion useless to Dawkins

Comment #29385 by ao9news on April 2, 2007 at 5:58 pm

I know a lady who writes articles for a local newspaper. She is into all kinds of new-age crap. She is also a very bad writer, and I guess has never taken a writing class. She is a nice person, but clueless and kind of dumb.

It is probably the same situation as this lady, the editor just pressures them to write whatever crap they can come up with that some other ladies like them read when they need a break from the sheer complexity and profoundness of this month's Reader's Digest.

And this is not something against women, it is just that there's a certain group, especially of older ladies, that had been raised in their time to be stupid. Something similar can be said of men but in a different way, so it doesn't apply here.

8. The Selfish Green

Comment #29352 by ao9news on April 2, 2007 at 3:55 pm

Just a little recommendation for the admin (or the person who posts these youtube videos):

I notice you are trying to post 320x240 videos, I assume it's because that is the native quality of youtube, and it doesn't make much sense to post bigger. But the thing is that the flash object size also has to account for the control bar on the foot of the video, so you need to add some 30 pixels to that, for your video to be truly 320 pixels wide, like finishing the HTML with "...transparent" width="320" height="270">"

See this video, and the next is the same size as those above in the original post, you can see the first one is considerably sharper, and it's because it's not resized for the whole object, including the control bar, to 240 pixels. The vertical size gives way for it and the horizontal size (320 pixels) is the limiting factor now, which is what I assume you want. Any resize from the original size, even if it's only a couple of pixels, it's gonna get the video softer, as you may know.





Just nitpicking, I just noticed how you're trying to size the videos to 320x240 and I assume that's what you had in mind.

9. 'The Evolution of Homer' Intro

Comment #28776 by ao9news on March 30, 2007 at 6:38 pm

I don't think The Simpsons compare to Family Guy, if only because they are vastly different. To me, Family Guy is better, but maybe not for others. The Simpsons tries to be too preachy and please everybody, and only a few jokes are really good.

The Evolution clip of Family Guy was better, and more to the point:



Family Guy, in contrast, tries to be as absurd as possible, and I love that, and that's what it's critics complain about, that there's no "plot". Screw plot, give us more stuff like this:

10. Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing

Comment #28319 by ao9news on March 28, 2007 at 6:02 pm

Mark R:

I don't know why you read The Universe in a Nutshell before A Brief History of Time, or if you read History of Time at all, but it is by far the better book. I couldn't even finish reading Nutshell because of the mess of it being printed like a text book with all the drawings and charts. I had the same feeling while reading America: the Book but that is a comedy book, and the textbook layout is part of the joke.

I also like Dawkins's writing of course. There is room for both. I am more fascinated by cosmology and extreme physics, though. Brian Greene's books especially were great for me, much better than Hawking's. I would say that The Fabric of the Cosmos is the most fascinating of those types of books that I've read. It is like A Brief History of Time on crack (there's even Simpsons references).

11. Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing

Comment #28170 by ao9news on March 28, 2007 at 7:43 am

I have heard about Goethe being the smartest person before. I don't believe in such rankings, but I am intrigued, now that you mention it again, such an unlikely character to be the top one. Where did you get that information?

Also, I think most scientists that understand Newton and Einstein agree that Newton was probably a higher genius. I like Einstein's stuff more, but I don't understand the mathematics, so I'll go by their word. And I don't think you could tell the genius of such people as Plato and Aristotle. They're too far back, who knows what other people could have been smarter than them.

12. Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing

Comment #28158 by ao9news on March 28, 2007 at 7:03 am

Yorker, I agree, for whatever I know, that Hawking's greatest achievement was discovering that black holes radiate, so to speak. But as far as I know, this hasn't been been detected. I guess it would be too difficult considering the circumstances. It's pretty much accepted though, I guess.

So I agree that he's not Newton, Einstein or Heisenberg, or even Bohr or Weinberg or Witten. But what has Roger Penrose done that gets him in those ranks? I'm just curious.

13. Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing

Comment #28126 by ao9news on March 28, 2007 at 5:14 am

Hawking's quoting Woody Allen now, hmm

I see now it seems to be his theory which he came up with some years ago already. It's not a new idea of his. And the "bubbles" are theorized by others too.

14. A Brief History of Disbelief

Comment #26542 by ao9news on March 20, 2007 at 7:54 am

Yes, this is excellent. This should be available on DVD here in the US. The Atheism Tapes figure great (about) half-hour interviews with Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, Arthur Miller, Colin McGinn, and Denys Turner.

And what do you know? The author, the biologist, the philosophers, and even the theoretical physicist all make very clear and clean, air-tight arguments, insightful comments, while the theologian does not for a minute try to be clear, and he succeeds gracefully.

15. Interview with Steven Pinker

Comment #26107 by ao9news on March 17, 2007 at 2:12 am

His interview with Brian Greene was good too.

16. Conservapedia v Wikipedia

Comment #24649 by ao9news on March 7, 2007 at 10:14 pm

Damn these people. It's a thing to mess with Clinton, but Einstein? Relativity? By the way, the text quoted is not there anymore, but they still try to pick and choose some details that seem plausible, and put Einstein down. I thought Einstein was the favorite scientist for religious idiots to misquote totally out of context. Why put him down? That's a rhetorical question, of course. It's bad enough that these idiots are idiots in power, they have to be vitriolic idiots too.

Oh man if only science like Einstein's and Darwin's work and such would be more in the general knowledge domain, and laypeople could say more than just "genius" about him (Einstein, regrettably Darwin is not recognized as such by most people), and actually know what his genius was, this world would be pretty devoid of these imbeciles.

So much for religion not clashing with science. I don't know how scientists, especially American ones, can say with a straight face that faith does not hurt science and vice versa.

17. Even Stephven: Islam vs. Christianity

Comment #24648 by ao9news on March 7, 2007 at 9:57 pm

I was becoming pretty depressed after looking at the http://www.conservapedia.com and http://creationwiki.org

Don't mean to get on your nerves, but have you checked out Godtube.com? It's actually pretty hilarious. It's as close as The Flying Spaghetti Monster as you can get on funny, but they actually mean it (I think).

18. Debate between Sam Harris and Reza Aslan

Comment #23996 by ao9news on March 4, 2007 at 4:08 am

One really has to admire Sam Harris' eloquence. It particularly shows at the Beyond Belief conference, session 9, where he singlehandedly put to shame those two guys. Especially the one that childishly mocked Harris's and Dawkins's book. Boy was that uncomfortable to watch... it seemed that the guy was about to cry or something.

19. Senator calls for answer on creation of universe

Comment #23980 by ao9news on March 3, 2007 at 11:44 pm

That's pretty funny. Have you checked out the link of the blog that references it? He (God) quotes Dawkins's description of him in The God Delusion and then proceeds to blog:

"Besides, since I'm God, I'm above the rules of morality. If anyone else endorses slavery, the stoning to death of gays, the selling of one's daughters into prostitution, racism, infanticide, filicide, or genocide, it's wrong. If I do it, I work in mysterious ways™.

There are some other funny bits.