I found the recent contest in which an algorithm was able to successfully defeat four professional poker players in a particular version of poker to be very interesting.
What strikes me is not the fact that the algorithm was successful but the way in which it accomplished the task.
check this out it’s all interesting but pay close attention from about the 8 minute mark
I found this interview on the Website of Brandon Vogt, a Catholic blogger and speaker who’s the Content Director for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Allow me to quote from Vogt’s introduction:
A few months ago, a man named Dave Rubin reached out to us at Word on Fire to ask if Bishop Barron would be open to an interview. (Apparently lots of Dave’s Twitter followers suggested the idea.)
To be honest, we didn’t know much about Dave at the time. But after some Googling, we discovered he’s a well-known comedian and host of the super popular “Rubin Report”, a show that airs directly through YouTube. “The Rubin Report” has over 350,000 subscribers and 100 million views. It’s one of the most popular YouTube channels in the world…
Dave is an interesting guy. One website describes him as a “rising media star” and “the voice of liberals who were mugged by progressives.” It says he’s “a 39-year-old pro-choice, pro-pot, recently gay-married atheist with a strong allergy to organized religion.”
In other words, the anti-Bishop Barron…I encourage you to watch both parts of the interview. Bishop Barron did such a marvelous job. He was smart and eloquent, even when Dave pushed the discussion toward hot-button issues…
So, what do viewers think of this interview? Does anyone feel that the bishop made an interesting case for belief in God?
The British biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have remarked that the discovery of fossil rabbits in the Precambrian would falsify the theory of evolution. Over at Evolution News and Views, Dr. Cornelius Hunter has argued in a recent post that the sea anemone (whose genome turns out to be surprisingly similar to that of vertebrates) is “the genomic equivalent of Haldane’s Precambrian rabbit – a Precambrian genome had, err, all the complexity of species to come hundreds of millions of years later.” Apparently Dr. Hunter is under the impression that many of these ancestral genes would have been lying around unused for much of that time, for he goes on to triumphantly point out that “the idea of foresight is contradictory to evolutionary theory.” RIP, evolution? Not by a long shot.
An unfortunate misunderstanding
Dr. Hunter seems to have missed the whole point of the report that he linked to. A sentence toward the end of the report would have set him right, had he read it more carefully (emphases and square brackets are mine – VJT):
It’s surprising to find such a “high level of genomic complexity in a supposedly primitive animal such as the sea anemone,” [Dr. Eugene V.] Koonin [of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in Bethesda, Md.] told The Scientist. It implies that the ancestral animal “was already extremely highly complex, at least in terms of its genomic organization and regulatory and signal transduction circuits, if not necessarily morphologically.”
That’s right. Genomic complexity and morphological complexity are two completely different things. That was the take-home message of the report. It was also the message of the other report cited by Dr. Hunter:
I’m sure the name Jerry Falwell Jr means more to US members than it does to me. A friend passed on a link where I read:
Donald Trump appoints creationist college president to lead higher education reform taskforce
The focus will be on “overregulation and micromanagement of higher education,” according to university spokesman Len Stevens. This would be consistent with Falwell’s past positions, in which he has opposed federal regulations on funding and accreditation for American schools of higher learning.
Following the appointment of (Calvinist?) Betsy DeVos as Education secretary, should we be concerned for the future of public education in the US?
On another forum the claim was strongly put that the anatomy of theropod dinosaurs was so similiar to moderrn birdds that its excellent evidence for birds to have evolved from dinosaurs. So some evolutionists say birds today are really the end game of dinosaur evolution.
yEC say birds wewre created in their kinds on creation week and were on the ark in kinds. So were creatures we call dinosaurs and so these theropod ones.
So its impossible birds evolved from theropod dinos.
The only evidence they have is the anatomy of theropods . Some say they had feathers.
I have another hypothesis. That it is only a convergence of bone structures(anatamy) for the same needs. It is not that these dinos have bird bones but thart birds don’t have bird bones. they both only have bones to join body with physics. the theropods needed to be liught on their feet and the only answer is size and structure of bones to allow this. birds have the same need and so have the same bones. Yet its physics that determoines the bone structure and not a biological ancestry. there is no ancestry. they were created in whole right away. Perfect. its just the right and only conclusion .
In this provocative history of contemporary debates over evolution, veteran journalist Tom Bethell depicts Darwin’s theory as a nineteenth-century idea past its prime, propped up by logical fallacies, bogus claims, and empirical evidence that is all but disintegrating under an onslaught of new scientific discoveries. Bethell presents a concise yet wide-ranging tour of the flash points of modern evolutionary theory, investigating controversies over common descent, natural selection, the fossil record, biogeography, information theory, evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, and the growing intelligent design movement. Bethell’s account is enriched by his own personal encounters with of some our era’s leading scientists and thinkers, including Harvard biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin; British paleontologist Colin Patterson; and renowned philosopher of science Karl Popper.
Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates
Of course, no real skeptic will want to read this book.