…I am quite conscious that my speculations run beyond the bounds of true science….
"This [linear friction] is a somewhat hopeful view of the world"
"If you study friction, your life is just sad"
"Question: How can we use this to find the output for an arbitrary input?
Answer: Convolution!
Convolution: noun
Convolve: verb
Not to be confused with:
Convolute (v) to make unnecessarily complicated
Convulsion (n) uncontrollable shaking"
"your ear hears logarhythmically"
Anyway. On to more random things.
This weekend has been amazingly productive - not everything's done that I'd like to be done, but along with the 5 hours staring at microfilm, I got my engineering & hebrew problems done, part of the lab worked out, studying for my engin midterm, and I'm about to get my journaling for my ed class over with. Part of it I may steal from here, actually.
Visited the swim team as they were getting drunk(er), learned the first part of a jig, saw my ceramics student trim 3 bowls and start to articulate what she did and didn't like (and got to use a blue rib that I bought while at home, yay! Just wish I could get my hands on a red rib...), went to church this morning, where instead of a message, they had an orchestra and the choir do Mozart's Requiem -- gorgeous -- and went to a contra tonight.
My feet are killing me. But it was great fun - we actually did some square dances, as well as a ceili, and the normal contras. The caller really amused me while he called the squares - he had a little song that went along with each one, one of which was about an auction. Also... he wrote one of the dances, and it was called Naked in California. (Yes. You all needed to know that. The story behind it wasn't as good as it could have been, though.)
13th_einherjar (Nick) came down in the midst of and after Pericles... Still can't believe how much time that play is eating out of people's schedules. Anyway. Had a very nice conversation about the Future and the Real World and the Philosophy of Robots (or ethics? sentience, at least)
Evolution. Meh. I want intelligent design. Pretty badly, actually.
And no, I don't have any special secret of the universe that's cluing me in and giving me irrefutable evidence. I just don't always find evolution convincing - at all.
Will I sit here and tell you that nothing evolves ever? No, not at all. I'll give you Darwin's finches, the in-between states you sometimes see. Mutations of all kinds. But I really don't think it's all of the story. Some days, sure, I won't have this discussion, because it's easier to just go along with the pervading scientific facts. It's Science, after all. Doesn't that mean that it's rigorously tested and they're pretty much sure that something's true before they proclaim it to the world?
Laws anyway. But evolution has only ever been a theory, and a mostly-untestable one at that. Sure - it's going to be difficult to make an experiment that'll last a few hundred years for infinitesimal changes. But they have tested it at the most basic - the first level that it would have to go through to be viable.
(The 2nd grade version of evolution:)
In the beginning, evolutionists say, there was pea soup. Now this was very special pea soup, containing all of the building blocks of life. And like winning the lottery, these blocks started to assemble themselves, brushing up against each other and becoming little photosynthetic globs. These globs then mutated, had baby globs, and some of the globs became carnivorous. They ran around gobbling up the other globs, and continued to grow, mutate, etc, while some of the first ones stuck around and started to make the atmosphere breathable. Etc.
So unless this has changed from Jr year AP Bio, scientists can get the little globs to form in experiments - but they can't get them to turn photosynthetic, or to reproduce.
If you can't reproduce, you've got issues if the theory's based on reproduction, yes?
And no, my entire world-view wouldn't collapse if evolution was someday proven to be true. But I want there to be a designer, a God starting the process, even if it's just a clockwork universe that He winds up and lets go. I feel like He's a lot closer than that - but if He worked by the 'hands off, all the time' policy, I'd be rather flummoxed.
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my
mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully
made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not
hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven
together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of
them came to be
Psalm 139 13-16.
And was David (the psalmist) a bio major? No, not at all. But his words resound so much more with me than anything I've read about evolution... or about sex ed, for that matter 0,o
So my grand theory of evolution can probably be summed up to 'maybe, but.' Any thoughts?
Hugs,
Allison
p.s. bonus points to whoever can tell me who wrote the title :)