Now That I Have Some Free Time...

I find that free time to spend at EE is hard to find these days. One of my goals is to "tie up some loose ends" here that have been bugging me.

One of them is an apology to comments of Full Disclosure. One of these days, I will learn to shut down comments on specific threads.

I am also introducing two more blogs to the blogroll. I find Allen MacNeill to be one of the more engaging critics over at TT. Thus, I am re-including "The Evolution List" to the Blog Roll.

The second one is for the "truly brave" to dare to lurk/comment (for the dense, I'm joking). After lurking around "The Swamp"/"After the Bar Closes", I don't see what the big deal is about foul-mouthed adult men and women. After all, I've been to Fort McMurray! ;) So in a continuing effort to provide balance to EE, I'm including AtBC in the Blog Roll.

To close, I'm still alive. I'm thankful to be working and I am busy at home with family and home projects. But I also hope to still contribute to EE every now and then.

UPDATE (5-Apr-2009): AtBC, being a forum not a blog, is being moved to the FYI section.

New Addition To The Blog Roll

It is always flattering to find out you have a following. EE has two followers, one of which I don't ever recall having the pleasure of discussing issues with on EE or elsewhere. (If we have, please refresh my memory).

Checking out Alaninnont's blog, Logically Wondering About Existence, he strikes me as an honest seeker of knowledge. So I will be listing his blog in my Blog Roll for now so EE visitors can check it out too.

Note: I dropped Darwinian Fundamentalism from the Blog Roll due to lack of posting (no posts since end of October).

Free Time? What's That?? (Oh, And Don't Forget The 2 New Blogs In The Blogroll)

Techne, a new contributer to Telic Thoughts, has an interesting blog called The Teleomechanist. I say interesting loosely because I've only had a chance to skim through it briefly; I need some free time to give it the attention it deserves.

Anyhoo, The Teleomechanist has been added to my blog roll, and it is getting long! I may have to do a re-organisation of my blogroll closet soon (again, need free time which I do not have much of).

Oh, and I also added the Dilbert blog, too. Can't be an engineering blog without it! ;)

UPDATE 02 December 2008: 2nd attempt of re-organising done. I'm probably going to piss off everyone with this, but keep in mind this is not final, especially with all the distractions going on around the house.

Outside the Box, Back in the Blogroll

I once had the blog, Outside the Box (OtB), on my blogroll to the right, but removed it due to lack of updates. I can see now that was a mistake on my part. That is an error that is quickly corrected. OtB has made its return to the EE blogroll (which is getting quite large actually!).

With that done, I found several interesting posts @ OtB regarding the reasons for his belief (parts four and five to come). I encourage you all to read them and post comments, should you feel the need, just keep them clean.

Here are some excerpts I found interesting...

"...the arguments from fine-tuning, no matter how intuitively they point to a Creator, can never prove the existence of God. For me and many others, however, Occam’s razor (the logical construct which says, “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best”) leads us to a strong likelihood of a “superintellect” First Cause. The alternate explanations, while plausible, are complex and lack evidence. It is my view that the simplest solution is to credit fine tuning to the hand of the Designer, Planner, and Creator of the universe."
-Cliff Martin, "Reasons: I. Finely-Tuned Cosmos"

"Well, a priori [reasoning from cause to effect] one should expect that the world would be rendered lawful [obedient to law and order] only to the extent that we [human beings] intervene with our ordering intelligence... [But instead we find] in the objective world a high degree of order that we were a priori in no way authorized to expect. This is the ‘miracle’ that is strengthened more and more with the development of our knowledge."
-quote from Albert Einstein as posted by Cliff Martin, "Reasons: II. Ordered Universe"

"Denton uses the term “directed evolution” to help answer the inevitable questions about how complexity of such staggering proportions could ever come to self-organize. Mike Gene suggests another term, which I prefer: front loaded evolution. Both of these theorists have proposed that the incredibly elaborate machinery inside the cell, machinery composed of variously shaped protein molecules specified by RNA blueprints, demand a designer. Not the designer of the Intelligent Design theorists who propose a designer for complex organisms. Rather, the designer of the DNA process which is capable of building such organisms over time through the processes Darwin described."
-Cliff Martin, "Reasons: III. Markers of Intelligence"

Free Plug For AcademicFreedomBlog

I like the blog AcademicFreedomBlog so much that it is part of my blog roll at the right. Like Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian (another free plug!), I find Dr. Mc's commentary to be even-handed and level-headed.

In the latest post, Baraminology and Pseudoscience, Dr. Mc made some, what I will call, in-your-face comments; direct and brutally honest (IMHO):

"The current classification structure of genus (meaning general) and species (meaning specific) is bankrupt.I don’t think that’s too strong a statement, since after hundreds of years of use a clear definition of what a "species" is has not emerged. Take for instance the coyote ( Canis latrans), the gray wolf (Canis lupus), and the black backed jackal (Canis mesomelas). They are classified as three different species in the genus Canis, yet domesticated dogs of any description are all considered to be the same species (Canis familiaris). The term virtually has no meaning. So why haven’t scientists abandoned this antiquated classification system, developed by an 18th century creationist, in favor of a more precise one? Because fuzzy boundaries serve evolution theory well. If clear boundaries are discovered between classifications of organisms, then that lends support to creationism and undermines evolution. So science is not allowed to advance in that direction! In order to keep baraminology as pseudoscience, we must live with pseudospecies."

I would encourage you to make any comments you feel are necessary over at AcademicFreedomBlog. I am too busy at work to follow the comments at EE (with the exception of this one).