Marcel Popescu

Here's the official version: In the first ten thousand years, people didn't do much of anything. In the second ten thousand years, people didn't do much of anything. In the third ten thousand years, people didn't do much of anything. In the fourth ten thousand years, people didn't do much of anything. ... repeat for several million years ... Finally, in the last ten thousand years people have started spreading out and inventing cars, airplanes and other interesting stuff.

Two hypotheticals: 1. You (common, everyday man) observe something occurring in nature. Every time it happens, you figure out that a specific something causes it. You emit the hypothesis that "A causes B" and devise a number of experiments to disprove it. You fail, and as far as you know everyone else also fails to disprove your theory. You tentatively accept the theory. 2. You observe something occurring in nature. It violates accepted dogma. You note that there is no known case where the alleged cause is known to actually produce the observed effect and, in fact, there is no actual proof that the cause even exists. You are told that you lack the inner grace that allows the high priests to verify that the cause does indeed exist; that there are secret rituals you're not privy to that they have used to confirm the truth of the dogma, and you're better off just accepting it as fact. The first paragraph describes, for example, the idea that complex information is overwh...

In one of the Miles Vorkosigan books, the main character has a device installed in his brain and a remote that can trigger a seizure - he needs that because otherwise he would get uncontrolled seizures, usually at moments of high stress (when that's the last thing he needs). One of his problems is having that remote triggered accidentally, so the doctors assure him they coded the connection - no random signal can trigger the seizure, only the remote. What are the possible dangers here? 1) Accidental signals that would match the frequency of the brain device, thus generating a false positive. How does one defend against this possibility? A small code of some sort is usually required for triggering the functionality - like the 4-digit code I have to enter when my Nokia cellphone locks the keys (to prevent me from accidentally dialing out when I keep the phone in my pocket). 2) Intentional signals from would-be hackers who want to trigger the device. In this case, one would need a muc...

This is in regards to the often-repeated saying "improbable events happen all the time" (even Dembski says that... which only serves to show that even people on "my" side can be idiots). I just read something that was so apropos of this: Heroic Law of Probabilities: One-in-a-million chances happen 9/10 (Look for it on this page , it makes more sense in context.) That is just too great for words, I will keep quoting that "law" every time the subject comes up. I have to read that story , even though I'm not a fan of Marvel stuff. (Plus, the main character has a Romanian name. Yay :P)

What would be true if creationism were true, but false if not? I don't mean "well, God would exist"; I mean what would we expect to happen differently? Well, there's the whole "the universe is comprehensible" thing, which has been discussed in other places (and I do believe it's a great argument). But I just had an idea: the universe is huge . It has either been created by impersonal natural laws, or by God. In the second case, we expect it to have been created for our use, just like the Earth, and therefore at some point we will develop / discover a practical way of faster-than-light travel - just as we developed a way of crossing the oceans. Such an expectation is not warranted in the first case, since it's irrational to expect impersonal laws to care for our wishes. So there. FTL technology. I can barely wait. grin

In Ultimate Resource II , Julian Simon argues against the doomsayers that claim that everything will go from bad to worse. The ultimate expression of this gloomy vision, he says, is the second law of thermodynamics - which he argues against, by saying (approx. quote): "Where have they seen this? If we look around us, we will discover that things have, on the contrary, evolved from the smallest micro-organism to life as it is now. What second law? What we know of the world should show the opposite of entropy." This is a classical example of reaching the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. There's no such thing as evolution. However, there is one thing that, each day, overcomes the second law: intelligence. Intelligence is the only known way of defeating entropy - of getting something more complex than what we put in.

A repeated accusation on the true origin list is that I incorrectly consider everything with a probability smaller than 10^-150 (but greater than zero) to be impossible. Well, I do, but is it incorrect? The analogy I want to make here is between "any event with a probability smaller than 10^-150 is impossible (in this universe)" and "any cube with a length smaller than 10^-40 cm is impossible (in this universe)". Why the second claim? Because the Planck limit, 10^-33 cm, dictates how small objects can be - nothing can be smaller than this, in our universe. The universe is discrete at this scale - you can find to points between which there is no other. So, saying "a cube with a length smaller than 10^-40 cm (or anything smaller than 10^-33 cm) is impossible" is not wrong; it is actually correct. By analogy, saying that "anything with a probability less than 10^-150 is impossible" is not wrong - it really is impossible in our universe.

Is the probability of obtaining a DNA sequence which codes for a human (ie, a living being capable of interbreeding with humans) by any combination of random processes and deterministic functions (like natural selection) less than 10^-150? Let's assume we already have the humans' alleged ancestor race, call it apes. Is it possible for random mutations to change an ape DNA into a human DNA? Let S = {A, C, G, T} the possible values for a codon, and S* a sequence s[1] ... s[n] where s[i] is in S . We define dist* (a, b) with a, b in S* = the number of point mutations needed to change a into b (or viceversa): dist* (a[1] ... a[n], b[1] ... b[m]) = sum (i = 1, n, dist (a[i], b[i])) + m - n , with m >= n >= 1 dist (a, b) = {0 if a = b, 1 otherwise} , with a, b in S In other words, if everything works out perfectly, it takes at least dist* (A, B) point mutations to convert one into the other, where A is a member of the ape DNA set, and B is a member of the human DNA set. How cl...

For me, the idea of a string having a probability is absurd - I can't parse it at all. Let me clarify this with an example: what is the probability of a chair? Both a chair and a string are objects. Ok, the string is an informational entity, not a physical object. What is the probability of an equation? Neither of these questions make any sense. Now, if we want it to make sense, we must start to expand the question. What is the probability that a 500-bit string will occur? Still not good enough - out of thin air? In my daily emails? So let's try again: what is the probability of a 500-bit string occuring in the following experiment: "write down 500 bits"? Well, 1 if you do it, 0 if you don't. In NO case is it going to be any other value. How do you fill the blanks so that "what is the probability of a 500-bit string ..." gives you any other result? Please email me if you found a way.

Statistics I met this gem on the TrueOrigin list: I asked her to pick a digit (0 through 9). Then do it again, and again, 53 times. You will have picked a number with 53 digits. The apriori probability that you would have picked that number is 1 chance in 10^53, but you did the impossible. Is it true that the chance of doing what is described above is indeed very small (10^-53)? Let's see. In my country, we have a lottery called "6 out of 49". You have a 7x7 grid, with numbers from 1 to 49, out of which you are supposed to pick the winning six. Let's say you bought a ticket and picked 6 numbers at random. What is the chance of winning the lottery? Well, the total number of combinations is C(49, 6), which is 49! / (6! x (49 - 6)!), where "n!" (read: n factorial ) means "1 x 2 x 3 x ... x n". Calculating it gives us 13,983,816 possibilities (if I made a mistake, please let me know). So, the probability of picking the right combination is approximat...