![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack"A proof of the Riemann hypothesis"
Linked from God plays dice blog, a putative paper on the Riemann hypothesis. I can't read it, I never was plugged into the mathematical grapevine. But it would feel remiss in the extreme not to pass on the comment.
For non-mathematicians, the Riemann hypothesis refers to a simple formula f(z), where z is a complex number. It is zero at z=-2, z=-4, z=-6, etc. It is also zero for many complex numbers z=0.5+it, ie. with real part 1/2, and some imaginary part. The hypothesis is that these are the only complex numbers with f(z)=0.
This is explained in more detail in the comments below, directly after "unnecessarily confusing, you should have..." and before "not entirely accurate because...".
The Riemann hypothesis is interesting because it ties into all sorts of different maths (eg. primes), and everyone's sure it's true, and people have had computers checking millions of solutions and seeing that they do conform, and there's lots of maths proved on the assumption that it's true. If it were proved, it would be the most famous result in maths in the last, um, ten years :)
ETA: The result is from a stable that does work on the Riemann Hypothesis, but has had several flawed proofs published before. This was flawed, and maybe patched already.
Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab
Evolution , with the magic of stop-motion fridges. (Also: Dumbasses put hands over their ears and say "la la la, can't hear you". Original scientist sends long, thoughtful reply saying "Pull your fucking heads out of your asses, already. Duh.") Disclaimer: people who believe in the absence of any sort of evolution are not automatically dumbasses. Really.
God hates FAQs
A friend recently linked to a service which, when you're raptured, can send a last message to a loved one. There are two basic approaches. You've been left behind .com is run by Christians, and employs an ingenious dead-man's-handle.
Post Rapture Post .com is run by atheists. Post Rapture Post is a lot funnier.
Q. How Do We Know that You Will Not Ascend To Heaven with Us?
A. The Bible says that only those that repent of their sins and accept Jesus as the True Son of God will be saved. We do neither. Some of our personal sins include: drunkenness, heresy, sacrilige/blasphemy, gluttony, laciviousness, and sloth. There is no way we are going to disappear into Heaven any time soon.
Q. Aren't You Afraid of God's Wrath?
A. We don't believe in God, remember? In the event that the Rapture actually occurs, we will go to Plan B: "Lifetime of Sin Followed by Deathbed Repentance."
FWIW, I think both sites, whatever their personal beliefs, genuinely offer the service, but don't hold me to that.
Linked from God plays dice blog, a putative paper on the Riemann hypothesis. I can't read it, I never was plugged into the mathematical grapevine. But it would feel remiss in the extreme not to pass on the comment.
For non-mathematicians, the Riemann hypothesis refers to a simple formula f(z), where z is a complex number. It is zero at z=-2, z=-4, z=-6, etc. It is also zero for many complex numbers z=0.5+it, ie. with real part 1/2, and some imaginary part. The hypothesis is that these are the only complex numbers with f(z)=0.
This is explained in more detail in the comments below, directly after "unnecessarily confusing, you should have..." and before "not entirely accurate because...".
The Riemann hypothesis is interesting because it ties into all sorts of different maths (eg. primes), and everyone's sure it's true, and people have had computers checking millions of solutions and seeing that they do conform, and there's lots of maths proved on the assumption that it's true. If it were proved, it would be the most famous result in maths in the last, um, ten years :)
ETA: The result is from a stable that does work on the Riemann Hypothesis, but has had several flawed proofs published before. This was flawed, and maybe patched already.
Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab
Evolution , with the magic of stop-motion fridges. (Also: Dumbasses put hands over their ears and say "la la la, can't hear you". Original scientist sends long, thoughtful reply saying "Pull your fucking heads out of your asses, already. Duh.") Disclaimer: people who believe in the absence of any sort of evolution are not automatically dumbasses. Really.
God hates FAQs
A friend recently linked to a service which, when you're raptured, can send a last message to a loved one. There are two basic approaches. You've been left behind .com is run by Christians, and employs an ingenious dead-man's-handle.
Post Rapture Post .com is run by atheists. Post Rapture Post is a lot funnier.
Q. How Do We Know that You Will Not Ascend To Heaven with Us?
A. The Bible says that only those that repent of their sins and accept Jesus as the True Son of God will be saved. We do neither. Some of our personal sins include: drunkenness, heresy, sacrilige/blasphemy, gluttony, laciviousness, and sloth. There is no way we are going to disappear into Heaven any time soon.
Q. Aren't You Afraid of God's Wrath?
A. We don't believe in God, remember? In the event that the Rapture actually occurs, we will go to Plan B: "Lifetime of Sin Followed by Deathbed Repentance."
FWIW, I think both sites, whatever their personal beliefs, genuinely offer the service, but don't hold me to that.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-03 02:35 pm (UTC)Literally, if people run off and run experiments on it :)
Although they'd surely be wrong: it'd be disappointing that this experiment wasn't an interesting example of evolution, but there's things that aren't interesting examples of evolution all over the place, the claim is that species evolve sometimes :)
the creator intentionally put this capability in to E.coli, but for some unknown reason it hasn't been active anymore. ha
That would make more sense for the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria: Here are the species of the world, but when you invent antibiotic, you'll discover you haven't solved biblical plagues after all...
Disclaimer: I am a Christian, but not a stupid one or a creationist (which certainly overlaps with stupid), and I work at a premier bioinformatics institute but I am not a biologist.
:)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-03 03:32 pm (UTC)The problem is (if we want to point out to them that they're wrong) that the average creationists (which I used to be!) have swallowed various ideas that are pseudo-scientific like information theory... but not actual information theory, the creationist versions that are suitably redefined so that they think certain things are impossible.
It's also important to point out that modern creationists would say something like this "We believe in micro-evolution, but not macro-evolution. Micro-evolution is change within a kind while macro-evolution is change from one kind to another kind". When they say kind they're referring to a word used in Genesis.
Generally they mean that a dog can micro-evolve in to another type of dog, but that it can't gain any new properties that dogs didn't have (like wings or something). Of course 'kind' isn't the same as species, it's defined so poorly it's hard to argue against when using their language.
Their other idea is that 'no new information can be created, it can only be lost through evolution'. So they see that everything started perfect - so all modern dogs are derivatives of some earlier 'super dog' that was in some sense genetically perfect. It fits in to various theological ideas to see the universe (and genetics) to be in a downward state of decay, so they assume that when something evolves say anti-bacterial resistance it's because some bit of the bacterium stopped working. While their general idea is wrong AFAIUT the common case for anti-bacterial resistance (which is the most common example people throw back at them) does work like that. Some anti-bacterial stuff sticks to some binding site on the bacteria, but bacteria that don't have that binding site (due to some copying error or mutation) can't be bound to by the agent, and so it has resistance - but generally the bit that is missing off the bacteria did something so compared to the non-resistant strain it isn't as fit (if for the moment we compare their fitness in an environment without the anti-bacterial agent). I don't doubt that there are other ways in which resistance evolves, but AFAIK that is by far the most common way.
A similar example at the moment is HIV resistance in humans. Humans with a mutated CCR5 gene have CCR5 less expressed on the surface of their T cell proteins. HIV needs a working CCR5 receptor to infect the T-cells. So people who have a mutated CCR5 gene have immunity to HIV (which is clearly very good), but AFAIUI CCR5 does actually do something, so there is some negative side effect of it not being expressed properly (which may be better than getting HIV of course). Interestingly some researchers have just discovered a way to modify the expression of CCR5 in people who do not have this mutation (and so do not have immunity), which if it works safely in humans (of which there is a reasonably high chance given that people with CCR5 mutations already exist in the population) then we'll have another powerful weapon in our armory against HIV.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-03 03:54 pm (UTC)They don't think that anti-biotic resistance falsifies creationism because they think is it an example of 'information being lost'.
If it is proven that 'information is gained' they'll either argue that the capability was hidden in there somewhere but is only now expressed, or they'll fall back to the next line of sandbags where they say "aha, but it's still bacteria, it hasn't become multicellular or anything like that, it's still of the same kind".
I feel sorry for creationists, and I'm not sure what can be done about reeducating them. I don't think they're completely lost though (although no doubt some are - the ones at the top), some of the smarter ones can be persuaded with actual science (this could have happened to me in the past, but I didn't know any smart biologists at the time), others may be persuaded by those of us inside the church using theological arguments. In the long term getting rid of creationism is going to require a concerted theological push from inside the church, and good science education of kids (which is why all this 'teach the controversy in science classes' stuff must be stopped at all costs), then in a few generations there'll be far fewer creationists (which is what happened in the UK AFAICT).
no subject
Date: 2008-07-04 01:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-04 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-04 01:36 pm (UTC)There's generally a conversation like:
A: But... that'd only be possible if some external source was pouring energy into the system!
B: LOOK UP! IT'S THE SUN! IT'S A BALL OF NUCLEAR FLAMING GAS 300,000 TIMES BIGGER THAN THE EARTH, HOW HAVE YOU NOT NOTICES THIS?
:)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-04 01:39 pm (UTC)See also: http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp
no subject
Date: 2008-07-04 01:48 pm (UTC)It's also nice to see them state that Einstein did not believe in God. It really annoys me when people claim that he did.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-04 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-03 03:36 pm (UTC)I think a more serious question is why the creator (in their 6,000 year old world model) would intentionally put such features in to viruses and bacteria at all. They assume that these things originally served some useful purpose, but that a consequence of the fall was that as the world was corrupted by sin, all these things that had a good purpose before now do bad things.
I can kind of see how that would work for some things, but not everything, and it's a very hand wavy explanation that works if you already believe in creationism and have no scientific background, but if you understand something of biology it's a lot harder to swallow. Of course it could be that the world is like that, I just don't see that the empirical evidence really supports statements like that, and I don't see that the Bible requires one to believe them either.