A Most Wonderful Thesis

I spent a small portion of last night and today reading what is allegedly a thesis. This particular thesis belongs to everyone's favourite tax evading creationist nutjob, Kent Hovind. At an astounding 102 pages, it robbed me of a good couple of hours or so of my life, but I don't begrudge it since it is one of the most amusing articles I have ever set my eyes upon. I do get the feeling, though, that Mr Hovind had no intention of launching his comic career with the submission of this particular document.

The thesis was submitted as a requirement to obtain the degree of philosophiae doctor, again, allegedly. It was handed out (and yes, that phrase does seem the most appropriate here) by the institution of academic excellence, Patriot University. Particularly amusing are the images of Learning HQ.

The thesis is reminiscent of a ten-year-old's book report. Of course, one would perhaps expect a higher standard of writing from a child nearing secondary school age. At the risk of breaching copyright, I must inform the reader of the first sentence that appears in the main body of text:

"Hello, my name is Kent Hovind."

Yes, that is right. It really does get you on the edge of your seat. There was no way I was going to put it down after that. The rest of the "thesis" is written in a similar manner. The sentences are short and sharp. Much of the thesis is concerned with giving information on historical figures whom Hovind feels have for some reason gone out of their way to reject the obvious existence of his God and in describing them he informs us of one thing per sentence in the form, "He was...". This gets rather tedious extremely quickly. The number of spelling errors is horrendous. The same applies to the grammatical errors that render this almost unreadable. He has also taken a liberty with the "information" that he has provided. One fairly amusing example was the lifespan of Voltaire (a man whose name got the joy of losing an 'e'). Voltaire lived to be eighty-three - a respectable age for a man in the eighteenth century. For some reason, Hovind let him live to be in the region of 104. Upon writing that down, I would personally double check my numbers since I know that in that time living past your centenary year was extremely rare.

Ignoring all the mistakes of this nature, the other stupidities present themselves rapidly. He repeatedly informs the reader that evolution is a religion, not a science, because there is no empirical evidence. What he really means is that he does not understand evolution and calling it a religion lowers it to the level of his belief system, allowing him to consider it an even playing ground. There are several attempts at demonstrating that the earth can be little over 6,000 years old. He has, of course, linked both fascism and communism to evolution. He has also gone out of his way to inform us that the term evolution (which in the context should mean biological evolution) is used by "evolutionists" to maintain that the universe started 13.72 billion years ago from nothing - an impossibility, surely! Of course, in reality the theory of evolution is only useful at looking at progress after abiogenesis. I'm rather quite surprised he did not take any time to complain about gravitationalists like me.

The mistakes are plentiful, and I certainly found myself chuckling away at the whole thing. The best part, though, is the one that appears both here and in all the talks he did:

"Evolution is a religious faith... What I am upset about is the fact that their faith is being taught as science in the public school system at my expense as a taxpayer. That upsets me greatly!"

 What is it you are in prison for again, Kent?

Progress

Sometimes it's nice to see some progress around the world. Following on from Sweden on April 1st, and Iowa on 3rd of April, Vermont is going to legalise same-sex marriage. It will be legal as of September 1st.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/7988549.stm

Hopefully more states will follow suit.

Peace, Love, Unity

The Approaching Curve

Again, it has been a fair amount of time since I last said anything (and after making the statement that I intended to update often, which has clearly been shrouded in doubt). In that amount of time I have finished another semester of physics-related fun. I managed to cover three experiments, and write a report and give a presentation on one of those (Crystal Identification using a Transmission Electron Microscope ;) ), as well as survive around 80 lectures.

Now, the time has come for me to study religiously. In retrospect, I should have done a hell of a lot more studying throughout the courses in order to relax a bit more now. Trying to cram 9 courses into a month is a ridiculous task, but one I will have to take on.

The title of this particular entry is loaded with allusions. The name itself is taken from a song by the band Rise Against. In my mind a curve has the image of - as well as a change in direction - a challenging obstacle that has to be passed to get to a destination i.e. the exams looming over this otherwise quite appealing springtime. It also alludes to the minimum (or maximum) of a parabola, which is etched in my mind at the moment as I study both time-independent and time-dependent perturbation theory, with my very good friend simple harmonic motion appearing all over the place as a powerful example.

It turns out that Advanced and Relatavistic Quantum Mechanics is a hard subject to master. The basic principles behind it are fairly straightforward, and I'm sure that anyone with a basic understanding of quantum mechanics could understand the ideas with ease. Using it is a completely different situation altogether, and one I fear I may not manage in time. And then there is General Relativity. That's somewhat easier for me, which is good, but it's still taking a lot of time to cover all the ground that I need to.

Other things that have been going on in recent times include an interview with The King Blues and another with Justin Sane of Anti-Flag and Johnny 5 from The Flobots. The former is already up at the We Control Tomorrow website, and the latter should be up very soon - hopefully tomorrow. As soon as all this uni stuff is finished for another academic year I'm going to get cracking on making a website. It'll be a huge feat, considering I have done nothing of the sort before.

Other than that, there is a chance I'll be doing more research this year. Again it'll be with the Particle Physics Experimental Group at the University of Glasgow, although this time I'm hoping I'll be able to do a computer-based piece of research with aims of whittling down the mass of the Higgs Boson (~114GeV is the prediction by my potential supervisor), rather than more detector-based research, since there is too much solid state physics involved in that for my liking.

I may well increase the frequency of posts here by introducing more posts about the things that are pissing me off. For example, the recent ignorant claims of the much revered Pope Benedict XVI. The very suggestion that condoms are not only ineffective, but put you at a greater risk of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS, is one that should send a wave of disgust through the world. How anyone can let their superstitions bring potential disease and death on the world is beyond me. This problem is even worse when you realise that this imbecile actually influences many people around the world, especially in places like Africa where AIDS is rampant.

I'll keep my eyes peeled for this sort of nonsense and update accordingly. Until then...

Peace

First post this year....

Yep, it certainly is. I have been a little absent from posting in the last 4 weeks or so.

Christmas and New Year were fairly quiet affairs and for the majority of my time off university I was working. It wasn't all bad, and when I get my pay in a couple of weeks it'll really pay off.

I returned to university again on Monday. So far I'm more motivated than I was before Christmas, which may well be down to the fact that I feel these courses are more my style. They mainly oriented around relativity and nuclear/particle physics. The only additional course is Mathematical Methods II, which seems alright and gives me more of a foundation to deal with the maths in the other courses.

The exams, although not imminent, are not really all that far away. If my plans to get an A are to succeed then I really need to put all the work in now to keep on top of the current work and understand it as well as go over last semesters courses and understand them fully. It's really last semesters stuff that I'm most concerned about. I don't know any of them all that thoroughly, and I'll need to change that over the next few weeks. I have this weekend off so I might use that as a catch-up for last semester.

I'm feeling rather ambitious just now too. I want to write music and I want to have a band sorted out. I would also quite like to try my hand at writing this year perhaps, although that would probably best be left until after the exams in May.

On the band front I am a tad worried. I have some very good friends that want to start a band but their musical abilities are either very very limited or they have other priorities. I wouldn't want to disappoint them by forming a band elsewhere, but simultaneously I'm concerned about what I can achieve if constrained in such a way. I see a deadline of about 18 months down the line to get a band sorted out and get some touring in. Seems like quite an ambitious timescale, but near the end of this year I will likely be thinking about PhD positions in different institutions and may well actually be applying.

I also inadvertently said to two separate friends of mine that I would start a band with them at different times. Unfortunately both of them have intentions of playing (almost) the same instrument. This is a problem I'm not sure how to solve. I desperately dislike disappointing friends. Should maybe play it by ear - no pun intended.

In separate news, it's only 6 days until the new President of the USA is inaugurated. That may well bring a lot of news, and could prompt me to publish one of my rant blogs should I feel it's warranted. Although as stated in previous posts Obama was the man I thought was best for the job. Of course, he is still a politician so all eyes should be on him throughout his leadership.

I think I'll leave it at that for the time being and go do a little bit of studying. There's lots to learn and understand and so little time in which to achieve that.

Until next time,
Peace, Love and Unity.

Sometimes...

Does everything feel a tad futile? At this point in time I could really do with skipping forward a couple of months. Maybe by then I'll feel awesome again. I don't think that the terrible weather is helping matters either - just making things seem more miserable.

Biblical Mistranslation

I was talking at work today with a female colleague who is a Christian. She wasn't aware of the very famous biblical mistranslation - the one concerning a virgin bearing a child.

In the hope of enlightening a few more people in this issue, here is a brief overview of how this came about. You can get a better description if you do a little search online or in books, including information on the exact words in question. It also really helps if you can read both Hebrew and Greek, but of course it's not essential in order to understand.

Basically, there was an intermediate step between the Hebrew translation of the bible and the English translation - into Greek. In the process of being translated - from Isaiah - 'young woman' was translated to the word that usually does mean virgin. The gospel-maker Mark then used this translation for the book in the New Translation, and gave birth (no pun intended) to the virgin birth myth.

If you find a decent modern bible you'll find that in Isaiah it talks of a child being born of a young woman, whereas in Mark it talks about a virgin.

That is our lesson for today. Enjoy.

Looming Presidential Elections..

The US Presidential Elections are flying towards us. I'm not American so I will clearly not be voting, but this is actually important for the whole world. It could be potentially quite frightening, but that depends on the outcome really.

I would love to get inside the head of someone who votes Republican. I can only assume they have a screw loose. Let's face it - it's riddled with fascists, and there are certainly many fascist supporters. That is something I find rather alarming.

That's not to say that the Democrats are the perfect choice. They clearly have policies that I don't agree with, and I'm going to focus on one in particular in a minute, but they are the only reasonable choice for a safe world. I read a blog quite recently that was written by Justin Sane of the band Anti-Flag - a great inspiration to me - and he was talking about his decision back in 2000 to vote for Nader. To him that was the most reasonable choice and who could blame him? It probably was - Bush or Gore? That's wasn't a great choice it was felt, but he says he wishes he'd voted Gore. This time round he's not going to make that mistake, and will be voting for Obama. Again, not because it's the perfect choice, but because it's the only real choice any person with a brain has. By voting for Obama (regardless of whether you think he's the best choice, but always better than McCain) you counter the votes for McCain. Let's face it - it'll be one of them getting in and you are best off voting for the one who is far far less dangerous.

Who are these people that vote Republican? And exactly where is it that they store their brains? Must be in a jar in a freezer somewhere - put away in storage until a time when they think they can make use of it. Consider the policies. Against abortion - taking away the right for women to choose what happens to their bodies. There are certainly cases when abortion is the right option. And adoption is not a reasonable solution. I'm assuming Republican supporters are prepared to adopt shitloads of unwanted children. All children should be wanted children. Against homosexual marriage - take us back to an earlier time when people were so ridiculously backwards that they believed homosexuality was wrong and unnatural. Don't be an idiot - of course it's natural, of course it's not contageous, and of course it's not dangerous for the continuation of the human race.

Then we get the ridiculous religious right. First of all, take you're archaic superstitions briskly out of the 21st century. Next - stop trying to get momentum for your ideas for legislation. Laws should not be made to suit you and your crazy religious nonsense. Laws should be made in such a way that they benefit everyone. If it doesn't harm another person, then it shouldn't be illegal. Love is fucking love. Get over this nonsense that only a man and a woman can be in love, or have a loving relationship. It's clearly not true. If you are at all homophobic please do us all a favour and remove yourself from the gene pool. Don't have children, and do not try to indoctrinate people with your homophobic ideas.

So, yes, if you are a Republican voter then I will simply assume you are a twat. Plain and simple. There's no excuse for voting for fascists. We've experienced plenty of horrible leaders in many different nations across the globe at different times and we don't need it again. Let's not make the mistake again.

Now the one thing that springs directly to mind on the issue of Obama. He's the only reasonable choice for president of the United States next, but a couple of hours ago I read something that made me a little disappointed. On the section of his website dedicated to the issues that are of concern he mentions faith. He mentioned faith alongside the issue of science. He talked about science being important, but that faith too was important. Since when was faith important or a good thing to have? It's simply not. What is faith? It's generally believing in something that you have absolutely no reason to believe in otherwise. If there is a reason to believe something then it isn't faith we are dealing with. I feel, therefore, that it is not wise to encourage faith.

America needs a nation of clever, enlightened people. Not a nation of idiots. The fact that the polls show that the candidates are so close most of the time demonstrates outright that there clearly are a lot of idiots in the country already. Fortunately they seem to form in groups and certain parts of the country seem to house intelligent people, while others house those that struggle to compete with toilet seats for the highest IQ.

This has really been one big rant and has focussed on attacking the Republicans outright, without a lot of justification. I have justification and I may focus on individual issues of concern over the next three weeks in the run-up to the election. If anybody happens to come and read through this and leave any comments, I may focus on those things individually.

Until next time,
Peace

The Weekend Approaches

It took quite a long time, but my blog is now working properly again. No more annoying message telling me that it is suspected that I am running a spammer blog.

It's quite late and I don't have a great many things to ramble on about so I'll keep this entry fairly brief, and about nothing in particular my weekend plans.

I'm going to have to start writing a report tomorrow concerning the work I did during the summer. The work basically consisted of investigating the properties of Lithium-drifted Silicon semiconductor devices and trying to work out just how radiation hard they can be. The hope is that there are devices that are sufficiently radiation-hard so they can be used at the sLHC. For anyone unaware of what the sLHC is, it is an upgrade for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN - located near Geneva. Yes - that LHC: the one that was started up, and after 10 days leaked helium before any experimentation even began.

On top of that I'll need to do a fair bit of studying. I even need to do a bit of reading up on electromagnetism - it's been that long since I've done it that the problems relating to it that I'm attempting to tackle successfully are not as clear as they should be. Also need to get a proper grip on the maths needed in order to really appreciate General Relativity & Gravitation.

Finally, I'll need to make sure I'm completely happy with the questions that the first years will be tackling at the tutorial on Monday. I had a skim over them earlier tonight and they seemed to be straight forward enough, but I don't want to be caught out by not being prepared for questions relating to them. Don't really want to look like the idiot who can't tutor people on the first year courses that I've done and passed three ages ago.

If I'm really lucky I'll try to fit in some time to write some music or simply sit and watch a DVD, considering I have 10 new DVDs to watch now. Tomorrow or sometime soon I may take a bit of time to discuss the upcoming US Presidental election. I may not be American, but this is a big deal for the whole world, and unfortunately a very large percentage of the US population are idiots. Fortunately, it doesn't look like the idiots will be taking over for another 4 years, but there are still three weeks or so to go, and things could certainly change for the worst in that time period.

Until then, peace.
xxxx

The Controversial Topic: Religious Scientists

This has been my topic of frustration this week. Maybe I'm being a little bit unreasonable but I would like to clarify and justify my position on this.

I find it really frustrating when a scientist has a religious belief. This is maybe not quite accurate. What I should probably say is that I find it really frustrating when a scientist has any silly superstitions. That covers more bases and explains what I mean a little bit better.

By this, I really mean that it's ridiculous for any scientist (or anyone that has to think rationally about a given subject) to believe in anything at all without a reason to do so. No reason to believe something is a perfectly valid reason not to believe it.

It's a strange notion that Monday to Friday a scientist can be sitting at a computer, simulating models of particle interactions and attempting to unlock the secrets of the universe and then when it comes to Sunday morning, go to a church service and believe that some megalomanical dictator in the sky was actually responsible for the things they were investigating through the week. This is a notion that is clearly beyond my way of thinking. In a way, it seems like you must have a way of separating your life into two distinct areas, chaning the way you think in each.

There seems to be no way to justify simultaneously requiring mountains of evidence in order to understand and believe a given natural phenomena, and also understanding and believing one particular things without that requirement. Why not extend it to all areas of your life? Why can't you be rational in all areas of your life? Demand that in order to be convinced that something is true you be shown the evidence.

I'm concerned at this point someone may suggest things like multiverses or Hawking Radiation, or wormholes as being such things that people believe in without coming across concrete proof of their existence. You would first have to appreciate that, unlike the archaic belief in deities, there are actually reasons to at least believe these phenomena are possible. Don't be fooled into thinking that it demonstrates that simply because the mathematics works out in the favour of such things, they must exist, and scientists must believe they exist. This simply isn't true. In fact, it's plausable that these suggestions are nonsense. We haven't even established how many dimensions exist in the universe we're in - this kind of thing could affect the above examples. It can be seen, however, that these are possible explanations for the goings-on of the universe - hypotheses.

This is very distinct from the notion that one particular deity - who cannot be seen, heard, felt, or even questioned - exists beyond all certainty. Apart, that is, from a select few, who have the dual ability of being one of God's chosen people to spread the word on this earth, and of not being of sound mind. They have counterparts who have managed to get themselves abducted by aliens, probed, and then discarded onto earth again. Why aliens haven't attempted to probe our most influential intellectuals we may never know.

There is absolutely no reason to believe in a deity. There is no evidence anywhere that suggests the existence of such an elusive being, even though, according to Abrahamic religious beliefs, that very same said being wants us all to know that he cares deeply for us and does not want us to perish eternally for not believing in him. Fresh eyes on this sort of description would be throwing up red flags left, right and centre. People should be looking at this and thinking, "This is silly, clearly just an old fashioned campfire story". For some reason that doesn't always happen. Why is this? To be honest, I'm as confused as anybody else that questions religious belief.

You cannot justify rational thought in one area, and abandon it in another. There is reason to believe that the big bang happened, that the earth is 4.6 billion years old and that our species has evolved from very simply organisms over millions upon millions of years. There is no evidence that a supreme being designed, developed, patented and watched over this universe for 13.72 billion years (or 10,000 years if you are so inclined), and therefore it should not be thought by any scientist that this is what happened. No - it didn't. We can actually assert with a high degree of certainty that the God of the Abrahamic religions did not exist. It's very simply to see why, which I may cover another time, and certainly will if there are requests for my justification.

I apologise for singling out the God of the Judeo-Christian and Muslim beliefs but that being is the one that is most in contact with my day to day existence (oh, the irony), although the same thing extends to all deities, and indeed to all superstitious beliefs, be they ghosts, goblins, witchcraft, unicorns, walking under ladders or astrology.

I feel I've rambled on quite enough. I apologise also if there are many spelling and grammatical mistakes. Should I notice any I will edit to weed them out. Comments on this would be much appreciated - opinions, and hatemail is always enjoyed.

Locked

I received a disturbing email today informing me that it was suspected that I had a spammer account on here. It could be the case, therefore, that this is not published immediately. I had to type in an annoying hard-to-read series of letters (I'm not sure the term that blogger uses for it, but it was more difficult to read than others that I've come across).

That aside, I've felt rather busy. I've been concentrating on understanding tensors for the purpose of then understanding General Relativity & Gravitation. The amount I've spent on text books has increased since the last time. I've spent at least another £60, but cannot quite recall at what stage of purchasing I was at in the last entry, so it may well exceed that by about £50.

In other news I got another lip piercing yesterday - ring on the left side. I rather like it. I was asked by the attractive woman who pierced my lip if I was going to be getting the other side done, but I had to explain that I was in enough trouble as it was with this one and would have to wait a little bit before being able to embark on that idea. May well do so one day soon though. I'll need to make plans for tattoos now.

Last night - as well as two pairs of jeans, one black, and one tartan - I signed up to the organ donation register. I'm trying to find out how to get signed up to donate my whole body in the event of my death. A bit morbid to post this in a blog, but it's really important than medical research can be carried out with cadavers and they have to come from somewhere. Besides, I'm not going to be using it afterwards.

Final piece of information: I bought Box of the Dead, The Omen pentology, and "The '59 Sound" by The Gaslight anthem. It is a terrific album. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

I have a topic of discussion - and no doubt controversy - on my mind, and I'll post it in another blog shortly. For now I'm going to do a little bit of reading.

Books...

I've spent a fair amount of money on books. Who knew they could be so expensive? Three academic books cost more than £120 in total, and I'm not quite finished at this point. I've purchased a fourth and a fifth is possibly on the horizon. It takes the grand total to around £190. It's just a good job that they are fairly interesting.

In other news, I'm considering getting another piercing done tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then sometime in the very near future.

Just a short blog entry at the moment, simply to remind me that I need to make more posts, and have to come up with some interesting issues. With Christmas and the inevitable consumer period approaching, it shouldn't be a problem to cover some more important topics. What can be more interesting than physics though, eh?

First Things First

It's strange making the decision to try my hand at blogging. I may very well fail miserably. I may succeed - if that's even a reasonble possibility in the first instance. Time will tell.

I can't even be entirely sure at this point whether I have enough interesting incidents in my life to make this at all enjoyable for myself or any one else to read - although I fully intend to include much more than the daily events that take place in my own personal experience.

The name of this blog is something I feel I may live to regret. It does, in essence, capture an immediate interest of mine in science. It also covers an interest in life - although not my life precisely. An interest in how other people live and how we can develop ways to build a better world.

I don't really feel like I should stick to one particular subject area in this to be honest. Although it would perhaps attract some regular readers - which would be nice - there are far too many things in life to consider. There will probably be three or four main themes that appear generally. Obviously those will be the things that seem to interest me to the greatest degree in life - Physics (and many things based on scientific findings and knowledge in general), music (which, I'm afraid to say, does not cover a very broad spectrum, but I'm progressing slightly with that) and some political interests and motivations.

The political side of things is still in its infancy with me really. My interest in this sort of thing has accelerated rapidly in the last couple of years but there are so many things I would like to say I understand although I currently don't. I'll get there with that as well in the end.

I've missed out on more than 21 years of documentation of my thoughts and there is no way I'm going to catch up on them now. This should fill in enough information, however, for an understanding of where I am at this particular point.

The first piece of information that should be noted down here that had me overjoyed the other day was the news that in March, two of my favourite bands will be playing on the same stage on the same night - Anti-Flag and Rise Against. This is something I am desperately looking forward to.

It's currently after 2am. I'll go do a little bit of reading - The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which has taken me far too long to read - at this point and then head to sleep. Need to be up early to make sure I get "An Introduction to General Relativity" if it's delivered. Really could do with it before the next lecture on Friday. The first lecture was simply enough and I understand the idea of a non-Euclidean geometry in the presence of a gravitational field, but word on the street is that Einstein was clever, so this will not be a walk in the park. It's likely that I'll put my first "proper" post up tomorrow - assuming there is some interesting topic that can be covered.