(no subject)

[maradydd]

By way of Pharyngula, apparently the creationists are starting to abuse information theory, not just physics, in their tortured attempts to justify their doctrine.

Of course, you understand, this means war.

ETA: /me reads the comments. Oh. Apparently creationists reject Claude Shannon's work on information theory. Infidels. They shall be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

One thing that I will never understand is why creationists believe that an omniscient God is bad at math.

Comments

[tdj.livejournal.com]

For (much) more on this subject: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/bad_math/debunking_creationism/

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I'm going to go to bed angry tonight, aren't I.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Hoboy. From MarkCC's first two posts, all I can say is that I hope Dembski never learns about Chaitin's omega, or I'm going to have to go bury an axe in his skull. I am personally offended.

I guess I understand how real biologists feel now.

[graydon.livejournal.com]

Oh Chaitin, swoon. Did you read Exploring Randomness? If not, do! It's a short, sweet, delightfully lucid and fun book. All the theorems are demonstrated with executable code in a little micro-lisp.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Ooh, not yet. I've read a bunch of his papers and his lecture notes from the Estonian Winter School that he taught at a few years ago, and have been slogging my way slowly through Algorithmic Information Theory, which has a lot of executable code in a micro-lisp that he doesn't spend a whole lot of time explaining. Exploring Randomness sounds like a good first course before tackling AIT again; I'll look for it, thanks!

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

I have a copy, of course. :)

[tdj.livejournal.com]

I know of someone who worked in a lab where there was a grad student secretly getting a cell bio PhD so he could have credentials to write an anti-evolution book. The Moonies supported his family while he was in school.

I'm not that up on information theory - I only touched upon it as it applied to chemical engineering's version of entropy in grad school. Dembski strikes me as an excellent warning to mathematical modelers: "At every step, make sure your model for reality has something to do with reality."