Balta1701

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Aug 16, 2006 -> 10:56 AM) oh noooooooooo, he's not being punished for holding his view for the war, not at all... noooooooooooooo... /rolly Yeah, because everyone who doesn't hold the same opinion on the war is getting the same treatment, and it's not just because he's departed the Democratic Party for the Lieberman party. Nope, couldn't be that at all. In fact, I think the Republicans should give Jim Jeffords back all of his committee assignments. Sure he gave the Dems a brief majority in 2001 by stopping caucusing with the Republicans, and is now registered as an Independent, but the Republicans shouldn't punish people for leaving their party.

QUOTE(vandy125 @ Aug 16, 2006 -> 10:39 AM) FWIW, call me crazy, but after going through this thread, and doing some studying up on several things like ice layers, coral layers, tree rings, radio-metric dating, etc (when I run into things like these, I cannot let them go). I have been swayed to change my mind on what I think about things (like the age of the earth, etc). My religious convictions still stay firmly intact, only with a better understanding. There is a lot less of the mess from putting up defenses without thoroughly looking through what they were. Hopefully, other people also check what they believe and continue to form them. Sorry about the complete derailment. No problem on the derailment. If it's the worst one this hour, I'd be shocked. Anyway, I'm glad that I was able to be somewhat helpful in just illustrating the many techniques we have in Geology which lead towards the conclusions we get. And regardless of what I believe personally, I will say that there is plenty of room in a person's belief system for faith. I, for example, can give no explanation right now as to what the Hell the universe is actually doing here, or why certain constants fall as they do (i.e. why G was low enough that all matter didn't rapidly coalesce back into the center of the universe, and so forth.) And even if someday those questions are answered, that doesn't mean that the first 4 books of the New Testament didn't happen or anything like that. So, I'm at least glad we had an interesting discussion and people learned something. And to the person who said earlier "Why should I spend my time doing this...", well, if someone learns something useful, then there's the answer to that question.

QUOTE(BigSqwert @ Aug 16, 2006 -> 10:30 AM) To bad no one gave that memo to the Twins when they completed their 4 game sweep of the Royals recently. They only gave it to Boston during the Royals' sweep of the Carmines.

Keep it going Jose.

Thanks to Iranian oil dollars, Hezbollah has already started cleanup/rebuilding efforts. This is how Hezbollah is going to win its final victory in this conflict...they're going to wind up being the ones who rebuild that country.

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Aug 16, 2006 -> 09:03 AM) Yea, cause all those asteroids are now 'planets' if they're big enough. Actually, based on this standard, I don't think it covers any of the "asteroids' between Mars and Jupiter other than Ceres. Most of the ones he'd be talking about are KBO's/other Trans-Neptunian objects like Xena, Pluto, etc. QUOTE(Athomeboy_2000 @ Aug 16, 2006 -> 09:16 AM) What they need to do is devide the planets into "native" and "captured/irregular". Under the current understanding of planetary development, TRUE (or "native") planets form on the same orbital plan as the rotation of the sun and have a fairly circular orbit. All the others are either captured plants or massive bodys that were nocked off orbit. In my optinion, the 8 inner plannets are "native" while all these other crazy orbit ones are not. So where does that leave Ceres? It fits all of your criteria. Furthermore, what happens in other solar systems wehre we discover Jupiter-sized planets on highly eccentric orbits (something which has already happened repeatedly?)

QUOTE(Milkman delivers @ Aug 16, 2006 -> 08:38 AM) But he had that stellar game against Toronto, so we'll never hear the end of it. IT SHOWED HIS POTENTIAL! HE'S JUST ABOUT TO TURN IT AROUND As a fan who's hoping this team can still do something, do we really have any option other than hoping that will somehow happen?

QUOTE(fathom @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 05:35 PM) Show some patience! AJ no function swing well without.

That was useful.

Every ball was flying to RF...guess it was only a matter of time before one of them left.

Good start. Podsednik actually getting hits helps.

11 pitches, 9 strikes, 3 outs for Javy.

QUOTE(AbeFroman @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 04:55 PM) Mike Sweeney was on the pre-game show on 670... He's a class act. Talked about how he respected the white sox and all. We still need to walk him more.

QUOTE(Cuck the Fubs @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 03:59 PM) I read in his book that the year he threw 1 inning, he needed Tommy John Surgery. Is there any connection b/t the 2?? Yes, a Direct one. He hurt the arm that inning. The steroids probably didn't help though.

Jose Canseco to start minor league game....as a pitcher. He features a fastball and a knuckler. It's not April 1st, is it?

Tonight's Lineup Pods, LF; Iguchi, 2B; Thome, DH; PK, 1B; Dye, RF; AJ, C; Crede, 3B; Uribe, SS; Anderson, CF. Vazquez takes the mound. Edit: Brian Anderson will have, by my count, started each of the last 7 games if this is the correct lineup. He is hitting .368 with an OPS of 1.057 in that stretch. And interestingly enough, we've lost 1 game.

QUOTE(vandy125 @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 02:18 PM) I do not mean to say that we cannot learn anything from the evidence that we have. I just have a different viewpoint that the time scale may be different. In which case, if I am wrong, then take this opportunity to give me a lesson in how you come upon the assertions that you make that such and such took place millions or billions of years ago. I actually do want to understand this better. How do we know that it was such a large scale that it took for these geological events to take place? Is it all based upon radio-carbon dating? How do we know that radio-carbon dating works now in exactly the same way that it worked thousands of years ago? If I remember correctly, that dating comes from isotopes losing protons? at a certain rate. How do we know that the rate is the same now as it was thousands of years ago? This is a very detailed, but I think very interesting question, that gets at the heart of a lot of how Geology works. First, to make one thign clear...it is not "radio-carbon" dating that is used by most geologists working on the age of the earth. A better word would be "Radio-metric" dating. Radiocarbon dating refers to one specific type of radiometric dating, using Carbon-14's decay to Nitrogen 14 as the radioactive isotope. Radiometric dating uses one of any number of isotopic systems. Basically, the principles of radiometric dating are this: you take a radioactive isotope with a known decay constant that you can measure in the laboratory today. You measure the amount of that isotope, you measure the amount of its daughter products, you deal with the few occasional other problems that come up which can cause difficulties in making a measurement, and then do a little math, and it produces an age. Now, I'm standing there with an age on a rock calculated with radiometric dating. How exactly can I have confidence in this age is the question we're going for. Well, there are a vast number of things one should look at to see if an age makes sense. First, I mentionned a second ago that there are a non-trivial number of isotopic systems available to geologists. This is quite true. 2 isotopes of Uranium, Thorium, Samarium, Strontium, Potassium, Tungsten, and some others I'm forgetting all have radioactive isotopes that decay a measureable amount during geologic time. And, each of them has a different decay constant, so they will decay by different amounts in the same amount of time. Some of them are orders of magnitude apart, but still usable. So, if I want more confidence in that date, one simple procedure is to test more than one system. In fact, for determining the ages of the oldest rocks on earth and many meteorites, this is exactly what is done, as the Uranium-thorium-lead system had 3 independent chronometers all working - Uranium 235, Uranium 238, and Thorium 232, all of which decay at different rates. So, if I were to test all 3 of these molecular clocks, and come up with the same age, and maybe some other research group does one of the other systems on the same rocks, and they come up with the same age, then there are 2 possibilities: either the ages are representing the age of the rocks, or the decay constants of those isotopes, which seemingly have no relationship to each other, are all changing in an exact and uniform way. So, can I make an argument that the decay constants do not change? Yes I can, because in addition to these very long lived isotopes, there are also many short lived isotopes which will decay completely on human timescales. If I got the same age on these rocks through different systems but the decay constants were changing to screw me up, then the decay constants on an isotope that lives short enough should change within timescales that are measureable in the laboratory. There are isotopes that if you put a block of the stuff on your lab table will completely disappear within seconds, minutes, hours, years, decades, centuries, millenia, and so on. And on all of these, when they've been measured, the decay constant has actually been a constant. The decay rates vary between isotopes, but there has been no variation witnessed in any decay constant, and certainly not a variation that could somehow completely confuse different chronometers in an ordinary way. But, I would also say that this is still not enough. If I want these clocks to be useful, they also have to tell me something that fits in with information I can gather from other sources. For example, if I'm looking through a large rock outcrop of sedimentary layers, and I can tell that nothing has happened to them in terms of deformation, if the rocks span a large enough time, I should be able to look at the rocks on the top of the sequence and find them younger than those on the bottom. I should be able to take rocks from the top of the Grand Canyon and find that they are much younger than those at the bottom of the canyon. I should date meteorites and find that they're younger than the earth. I should be able to establish a consistent story. Geologists can in fact do a lot of work without a specific timeline; that's how things were done in geology for a century, just taking the timeline as it is set in the rocks without knowing exactly how long each period lasted. When radiometric dating came along, all of a sudden, the numbers it produced fit quite well with the story that the rocks themselves told. In many cases it illuminated new facts, but it did not completely overturn everything that had been done in geology previously. Rocks that looked very old through field methods turned out to be very old through other methods. Give you a great example here...through looking at fossils, we can trace roughly the evolution of many lineages throughout geologic history. We can say roughly at what time the first fish appeared, the first land plants, the first reptiles, etc. With radiometric dating, we can then put an exact age on the dates of those boundaries. So, let's say that I'm a scientists and I want to look for evidence of when fish first started to develop legs and colonize the land. I go and I learn when we see the first fish fossils, I see when we find the first amphibian fossils, and I say to myself "hmm, there's a few million years in here where this transition would have to happen." So what do I do? I try to find a unit somewhere on earth which gives radiometric dates in that gap where I think the fossil should be. I go there, take some samples, and what happens? I find a fishapod fossil...a fossil with some fish characteristics, and some amphibian characteristics, right where it should be based on every chronometer, geologic tool, and so forth. There are many other details I'm leaving out here, of course, as this question basically covers all of geology. But I think you get the idea...the datings make sense, the predictions of those datings make sense, and the whole thing fits together as a package. We have tools to calculate what temperature volcanic eruptions took place at, we look at older rocks, and we find things that erupted several hundred degrees hotter than any current eruption on earth, exactly as we'd predict as the earth cools off. We figure that the Earth and moon should have formed from meteorites and should give younger dates, and they do. And so on. That's basically the story. We're not just doing this or making claims based on one single line of evidence, but we're in fact telling a story. It's a story based on centuries of evidence of a great many types, with each step built on top of the work of others. It is science done exactly the way chemists do it, biologists do it, physicists do it.

Forgive me for launching into this debate, but at some level, I feel I'm fighting for my life, but I guess since I am a geologist, on some level that makes sense. :-) You are fully correct that as you go back in time, you're going to understand less, and the margins of error are going to go up (at least on most measurements). If I date a rock that is 4.2 billion years old and a rock that is 1 billion years old, the rock that is 4.2 billion years old is likely to have a higher margin of error on the measurement, because in 4.2 billiion years there are more things that can have affected the measurement. However, just because the margin of error goes up on many measurements, and because we don't have as many rocks from the Precambrian as we do from the more recent epochs, I don't think we should just throw up our hands and say "oh, it's all just garbage." We can't tell every single thing that happened on every single day throughout Earth history, but there is an enormous amount of data in what we do have available. We just have to know where to look, and learn correctly how to look. Yes, as things change, environments get different, and modern analogs don't work as well. However, there is also knowledge to be gained from learning why modern analogs don't work for certain events in the past. For example, until about 2.5 billion years ago (give or take a few hundred million years, the people on my floor can tell you better numbers), there was virtually no oxygen in the earth's atmosphere. We know this, because we can see the time that significant changes happen in the rock record, and we can interpret what caused those changes based on, again inductive reasoning (in this case, you go from having anoxic sediments to oxygenic sediments in places, isotopic systems shift worldwide, there may be a snowball earth event, etc.). So even when one of those massive shifts happens, we can learn about when the shift happened, why it happened, and what it changed on earth, by looking at the various lines of evidence which we do have. No, we don't have every detail sorted out yet, and we don't understand every little nuance. But what you seem to be arguing is that because we don't understand every single detail, we can learn nothing from the evidence we do have, or that we shouldn't trust the things that we can learn, and I would argue that those lines of thought just are not true.

QUOTE(vandy125 @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 12:48 PM) It is with statements like this that make people with my beliefs out to be ignorant or stupid, etc. Apparently, if you believe in a young earth (something that we cannot go back in time and check), you believe that cars and planes work by magic. There are some people who believe that science can tell us an incredible amount about how things work, and it can even give theories and glimpses into the past of a naturalistic way that things may have occurred in the past. That does not mean that we believe that is the only explanation. Dr. Abram's is being told that he cannot hold a certain public position because of what he believes even if he is able to separate his beliefs from what is taught. To me that is very wrong. To try to avoid the insult above...here's the real key point. All of science is based on inductive reasoning. You see one thing happen over and over, and eventually you generalize from that specific case to say that this is what happens under all circumstances. For example, if I press with a certain amount of force on a known mass, I produce a known amount of acceleration. Or if 2 bodies have known masses, they attract each other with a known force. And so on. Now, I can't go backwards in time or forwards in time either and see for certain that 30 years from now Gravity won't just decide to triple in intensity. But I can say that if you accept the principle of inductive reasoning, that one can learn general truths about the universe from observing more limited cases, and that those general truths are always applicable, then I have no reason to conclude that there will be an unexpected defiation. Biology and geology work the same way as all of the other varieties of inductive reasoning in science. For example, with something like radioactive dating, one of the main tools of determining the age of the earth: I go into a lab, and I can take radioactive elements and measure their decay rate. I can see how many atoms of Uranium decay into daughter products in one timespan, and I can see how much of those daughter products I wind up with. I can do this over and over and over and get the same result, whether it's in 1945, it's a Tuesday, it's a hot day, etc. I can then generalize this into a set of rules...based on the amount of radioactive decay that has happened, I can tell how long something has been sitting there decaying. So, when I go out to the field and find a hundred meteorites, and use the same technique on them, they all give ages of around 4.5 billion years. When I look at very old rocks on earth, I find they're slightly younger, a little over 4.2 billion years, which is what one would sort of expect to see as the earth takes time to join together and cool. So now, here's the point of all of this...you've accepted that your car goes because you put gas in it and every time that gas undergoes a chemical reaction to give off a finite amount of energy. You've accepted that the Earth orbits the sun because there is a defined law that explains that behavoir and you can see it with your own eyes. The principle of inductive reasoning is one of, if not the single foundation block of modern science. But when, in this specific case, every single scrap of evidence conflicts with what is written in a piece of religious text, the entire set of evidence, all the rules, and everything else is discounted. Inductive reasoning, and in other words, every single principle of scientific inquiry, is thrown away. So if a person then says that in this specific case, he feels that inductive reasoning is wrong, and that there is no reason to believe it, then why is he qualified to speak on scientific issues in general? If a person throws out the entire foundation of science in one case, why should anyone accept that person's opinion on science in other cases?

QUOTE(Steff @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 11:34 AM) Short period could be from a year to 5. The pros and cons depend on his financial situation. I don't understand why you guys are trying to scare him from an interest only loan Spider, sit down with your potential lender and go over all the options. IOL's are not as bad as they are being made out to be here. Also, WF for a repeat customer is in the low 5% range right now - being a repeat get's you somewhere between .5 to .8 of a point off prime so the rates you quoted do seem a bit high - though I am basing it someone with a high 700 credit score. An interest-only loan makes sense, IMO, if you can expect one of 2 conditions to be prevalent over the term of the loan. 1. Housing prices will increase. If this happens while you're holding the loan, you pay a limited amount in interest, but you sell the house for more than you paid for it after a few years, and thus you pocket the difference between what you paid in interest and the price of the house. And 2. interest rates must stay relatively low, as increasing interest rates would increase the amount of interest you'd pay overall. If you took out an interest only loan in about the year 2000-2001, you'd be in excellent shape right now, as the interest rates at the time were going down rapidly, and housing prices were going through the roof accordingly. However, right now, at least to my eyes, both of those situation are reversing. Right now there is a glut of housing on the market, and that glut may in fact get worse as people who purchased real estate for speculation in the last few years get nervous. Likewise, interest rates are on their way up to counteract inflation. If the price of the town house were to decline, and you were only on an interest-only loan, if you went to sell the house in a few years, you wouldn't have any equity at all built up in order to cover the decrease in price. So if you didn't have extra cash around, you'd be in pretty bad shape, and you'd be out all of the money you spent in interest. An interest only loan is a gamble. In the right circumstances it can be a profitable one. But I think the others who have said that a fixed-rate right now is a good idea are completely correct...build up some equity, lock in rates while they're still relatively low, and if a storm does come in the next few years in the housing market, you'll be in a much better position to weather it.

QUOTE(vandy125 @ Aug 15, 2006 -> 10:59 AM) However, I still do believe that the universe was created thousands of years ago and not millions of years ago. I do not think that we can take a strictly uniformitarianistic view of history. I do not believe that the way things are happening now is exactly the same as they behaved years and years ago. How is it that one of the main rules of nature is that things tend to move toward disorder, except for this one case, evolution? The universe expands, we and everything around us age and decay, but somehow life has bucked that trend? You're fundamentally misinterpreting the second law of thermodynamics. The second law says that an isolated system will move towards an equilibrium by maximizing its disorder, or entropy. The Universe can theoretically be treated as an isolated system, if one assumes that all energy/mass in the universe is constant from the creation of the universe (probably a safe assumption, but I for one sure can't prove it.) However, the Earth is by no means a closed system. The earth through time has had a massive input of energy, mainly from the sun. When you input energy into that system, some of that energy is used in the formation of complexity, just in the same way that cleaning up and ordering a messy bedroom takes energy. If one were to treat the entire solar system as an isolated system, which is a much better approximation but is still not entirely true, then because of the massive expenditure of energy by the sun, the solar system itself is moving towards a minimum energy/maximum entropy equilibrium state. The growth of complexity on Earth is just one way of releasing/using the energy pumped into the Earth by the sun and a few other sources.

The pitching staff is starting to get on a roll. Javy, keep that going.

Sitting down the right field line in the mid-90's, bout half way up. Lined drive shot into the seats off of the bat of Craig Grabeck. I'm ready to catch the thing, then the ball nails the beer in the hand of a guy like 5 rows in front of me. The beer goes all over me, blinds me, and somehow my dad winds up catching the ball before it knocks me unconscious.

Another nice thing tonight? We found a way to give the big 3 in the bullpen a much needed day off after a tough series over the weekend. They needed what the offense and Garland put together last night.

Hopefully Cotts will come around before the end of the year. If he does find some sort of groove again...then I don't know how anyone's going to score on our bullpen. The additions KW has made to it this year are just beautiful.