Texas comes into the 21 century

Since evolution was discovered in the 19th century, and all the clinching evidence in the 20th century, this isn't really evidence that Texas has yet made it into the 21st century.

The Scopes monkey trial took place in Tennessee in 1925

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

ITYM enters the 20th Century. Darwin was widely accepted outside of America even before the discovery of DNA and modern genetic sequencing.

Here is what the British Medical Journal said about him in 1909 at a meeting to celebrate his first centenary.

When Darwins ideas were first put forward Lord Kelvin gave him a very hard time because no then known source of energy could keep the sun burning for sufficiently long geological and evolutionary time scales. Modern writers tend to claim that Lord Kelvin anticipated nuclear power, but the truth is much less flattering.

It was the bicentenary of Darwins birth in 2009 and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge put on a fine exhibition of original material.

And just to annoy the white supremacists in the Southern states it is now clear that the only pure species h*mo sapiens are Africans - all the rest of us have some trace of Neanderthal DNA at a level of 1-4%.

Regards, Martin Brown

Which will be used by some to argue that we (those of us with more or less of some Neanderthal genome in us) are better because we are mongrels. I've already read the quote from one researcher caught with his pants down saying as much, in fact. (I don't think he realized what he was implying, at the time. He was just speaking out of hand about how mixing like this can lead to more 'hardy' results, probably from some Mendelian perspective, and hadn't well considered how his words might be used by others.)

Jon

Mongrels (pets AND humans) tend to be smarter than inbred. :-) ...Jim Thompson

[On the Road, in New York]

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| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Sadly, all human beings are appreciably in-bred. There's more genetic diversity in chimpanzees than in humans, with humans having the diversity that you'd expect in a stable population of about 10,000 individuals, while chimpanzees come out closer to 35,000. Cheetahs are even worse off with an effective diversity corresponding to a stable population of about ten individuals, but seem to do pretty well despite this disadvantage.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

TI is.

John

I notice that there's mention of intelligent design on the sidebar.

There's something about intelligent design that really bugs me. If you take it at face value, and then go off and use your experience as a product designer to do a design review of the human race, you find that clinging to the notion that we are the best that God could do is an insult. To God.

If the fundies are right, then God is stupid, or cruel, or thoughtless, either in a 'don't care' sort of way or as an active practical joker. So to be a fundamentalist is to firmly believe some very bad things about God.

Hence, I'm not a fundamentalist.

--
Tim Wescott
Control system and signal processing consulting
www.wescottdesign.com

-Lasse

Maybe their integrated circuit technology, but their attitude to their customers seems distinctly rapacious, in the worst 19th century tradition. Since my contacts with TI were in Bedford in the UK and Cannes in France, I don't in any event see them as a particularly Texan company.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

So

People collect examples of "stupid design" in evolved structures. If mammals hadn't evolved but been designed, the routing of the brachial nerve would be evidence of an extremely casual designer.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

We get great support from TI. Their people visit us now and then, and leave their business cards. If we need help, or samples, or eval boards, they get it for us.

TI/Burr Brown make great stuff, and are good about making it for a long, long time. We recently did a bunch of replacement boards for a

25-year-old system, and I use the same 74LS02's to do the bus interface as I did back then. TI still sells them, for 20 cents each. On the other end, they make some stunning fast opamps, switchers, and data converters.

Maybe their attitude to you reflects your attitude to the world.

John

There are other possibilities for intelligent design than a classic personal God.

John

Intelligent Design is really Designed Intelligence.

The Fundies designed an argument that they thought was bullet proof.

But, as we have seen, people are not that stupid. Sane people saw right through the "design".

hamilton

Yup.

I can believe that there is something -- call it deity for lack of a better term -- that loves us one and all in some grand impersonal way. I just can't believe that said deity/thingie/whatever is man-shaped and wanted us to be shaped like 'him', nor that the 'us' that are loved are just Homo Sapiens, etc.

At best, we can hope for something that loves us and delights in us the way that a hiker might take delight in a bit of lichen on a tree, before they move on to being delighted by a bit of moss or the fall of the sunlight on a meadow.

(And I am so glad to be living in the 21st century America, and not in the Middle Ages or Norway just a couple of days ago, where I might be shot or burned at the stake for saying that!)

--
www.wescottdesign.com

When you look at the laws of physics that the Big Bang gave us, it's clear that evolution is the only intelligent way to design a Universe.

Hope This Helps! Rich

... and we all know nobody ever gets shot in the US of A. Such bliss.

Jeroen Belleman

You aren't the first one to notice that. So far from being a problem with theism, the failure of people to behave as we know we should is one of the observations that's basic to the theist view. It's the Fall that you're leaving out.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

If intelligent design didn't exist a few billions of years ago, evolution had lots of time to invent it.

John

Maybe someone there has worked out that you post a lot on sci.electronics.design

Burr-Brown always made great stuff, and being taken over by Texas Instruments doesn't seem to have messed them up too much. TI's linear CMOS is good, but I had my fingers burned by the TI datasheet that didn't mention the roughly 10pF input capacitance on the TLC2201. Today's 68-page data sheet

which wasn't all that easy to find on their web-site, does include this useful information, but only in the spice model of the amplifier, so it doesn't give any tolerance data, and isn't exactly easy to find.

The data sheet I was working with when I used the device was a lot shorter - since it had been written to be printed in one of their data books - and didn't mention that the input capacitance was unusually high.

Good for them. but they don't tell the customer anything that would make them think twice about buying the parts.

The TI people I ran into when we were collaborating on using electron microscopes for voltage contrast testing of working integrated circuits seemed pretty happy with what I did for them. At Bedford I asked what turned out to be just the right question about the Mulvey immersion lens in their prototype voltage contrast system, and at TI Cannes we installed our own voltage contrast electron microscope and got it to do exactly what marketing had foolishly promised.

The various Texas Instrument data sheets that formed my opinion of their business ethics were exactly the same data sheets as everybody else reads. If you haven't yet worked out where they fall short, you've got the problem, not me.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen