Comments on: Red rag http://riabacon.com/2007/01/16/red-rag/ First they came for the verbs and I said nothing, for verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns and I speech nothing, for I no verbs. Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:19:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= By: grannyp http://riabacon.com/2007/01/16/red-rag/comment-page-1/#comment-21030 grannyp Wed, 31 Jan 2007 10:12:37 +0000 http://riabacon.com/2007/01/16/red-rag/#comment-21030 The physical world: yes, You should see my local Canarian mud flats - birds, sea, etc etc. (And the odd surfer.) More than enough, On the other hand.... pure reason gets hard going sometimes, if you're living with a scientist. Liked your letter just the same. The physical world: yes, You should see my local Canarian mud flats – birds, sea, etc etc. (And the odd surfer.) More than enough, On the other hand…. pure reason gets hard going sometimes, if you’re living with a scientist. Liked your letter just the same.

]]> By: Mathieu http://riabacon.com/2007/01/16/red-rag/comment-page-1/#comment-19623 Mathieu Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:53:36 +0000 http://riabacon.com/2007/01/16/red-rag/#comment-19623 I've always liked those video animations where you go from the very tiny (sub atomic nucleus scale, a few 10<sup>-15</sup> meters, where you can clearly see the various bits inside the nucleus and the electrons whizzing around are too far to see) to the very huge (entire visible universe, i.e. the distance light, the fastest thing possible, has had a change to travel since the universe became transparent, shortly after the start of time: 45 billion lightyears or a few 10<sup>26</sup> meters), in a series of pictures zooming out, with a short sequence in the middle at our scale quickly zooming out to satellite view of the Earth, then the moon pops in, and out, out to the Solar System, the galaxy, etc, etc... a gamut of 41 orders of magnitude. If once the entire sequence has run, you are reminded that the total number of those tiniest scale things in the entire large scale object (quarks in the visible universe) is somewhere around 10<sup>81</sup>... i.e. a movie twice as long still zooming out just as fast... then you realize there's just no way to hold these images in your brain in any meaningful way. Only math works, and pretending otherwise is what makes it so easy for creationists to claim that even in a few billion years, there is no time for evolution to do its job... because we don't have sufficient respect for our inability to grasp what a billion is. I’ve always liked those video animations where you go from the very tiny (sub atomic nucleus scale, a few 10-15 meters, where you can clearly see the various bits inside the nucleus and the electrons whizzing around are too far to see) to the very huge (entire visible universe, i.e. the distance light, the fastest thing possible, has had a change to travel since the universe became transparent, shortly after the start of time: 45 billion lightyears or a few 1026 meters), in a series of pictures zooming out, with a short sequence in the middle at our scale quickly zooming out to satellite view of the Earth, then the moon pops in, and out, out to the Solar System, the galaxy, etc, etc… a gamut of 41 orders of magnitude.

If once the entire sequence has run, you are reminded that the total number of those tiniest scale things in the entire large scale object (quarks in the visible universe) is somewhere around 1081… i.e. a movie twice as long still zooming out just as fast… then you realize there’s just no way to hold these images in your brain in any meaningful way. Only math works, and pretending otherwise is what makes it so easy for creationists to claim that even in a few billion years, there is no time for evolution to do its job… because we don’t have sufficient respect for our inability to grasp what a billion is.

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