Col’s Rational World

New Year Updates

Hi all,

This is a brief New Year update to let you know about a few things that I’m working on, which will become available here soon.

Presentations – I’m working on a new presentation series called “Understanding Science”. The idea is to explain the process of science, starting by looking at what it means to “prove” something, and moving on to looking at evidence, Bayes’ Theorem, and some other fundamentally important issues. It’s aimed at non-experts, so should be understandable to all. I’ve made some progress on this recently, so I hope to get the first presentation out within the next month. Maybe sooner. 🙂

OldOnes2 – The new version of my galactic conquest game, completely rewritten with a new graphics engine in #, is almost ready for its first alpha release. I’ve been spending a huge amount of time on this game recently, and when it’s done I’ll have loads more time to spend on my presentations. More information about OldOnes2 on the OldOnes2 Project Website.

Memoriser – I wrote a small application to help me memorise Key-Value pairs (such as capital cities etc.). It’s very very basic, but you can get hold of it here: Memoriser.zip (14k)

Bunnies explain atheism

This is awesome.

If someone knows who made it please let me know, because I can’t find out.

This is exactly how philosophical debaters like William Lane Craig make me feel. It’s like they’re clinging on to some ridiculously tenuous deity-shaped corner within the entire philosophical space, and then claiming that this tiny sliver of uncertainty therefore justifies the much more specific, wide-ranging and disprovable beliefs that they chose to hold for entirely irrational reasons.

Fabulous.

Presentations Page Updated

I have updated the presentations page with links to the new YouTube presentations, and the PowerPoint slides and Rich Text versions of the transcripts. Please feel free to use them yourself, with proper acknowledgement of course.

The Final Presentation!

That’s it, I just posted the 25th and final presentation in my series on science and creationism, analysing the slide presentations of Young Earth Creationist Kent Hovind.

You can find it here:

Presentation 25 : Miscellaneous

It’s been a strange project – I originally started this because I wanted to update my slides and produce a really rigorous takedown of all of Hovind’s arguments, but after a few presentations it became so obvious to me that the arguments just didn’t deserve it – most of them were so obviously wrong, and could be shown to be wrong with just a cursory glance, that I almost felt like I was wasting my time and that I ought to instead spend more effort putting together really decent educational presentations on central topics from my own point of view.

But I’d set it as a goal to complete this series, so I persevered. And here we are. I’m going to update my Presentations page in the next few days to point at the new slides, and the transcripts that I’ve been preparing (sorry that it’s taken so long to do this!). And then I’m going to start planning my next presentation series. I think it’s going to be on the topic of scientific method. I’m beginning to realise that Creationism is just an unworthy target – those who believe it are so far away from rationality that they aren’t going to be swayed by any rational argument. As Sam Harris once said, “If someone doesn’t believe in evidence, what evidence can you give them to show them that they’re wrong?”

So my new presentations will be aimed at getting people thinking in a more scientific way. They’ll be attempting to put a stop to nonsense that lies much closer to the everyday world around us – absurdities like homeopathy and other ‘alternative’ medicines, and general antipathy towards scientific progress.

So I hope you enjoyed the presentations, and watch this space for more!

Presentation 24 done – almost there!

I’m so very nearly done with my presentation series on science and creationism.

Please take a look at Presentation 24 : Morality.

There’s only one left! I’m going to start covering topics in more detail (after a short break) so I’m taking suggestions for the first topics to cover. My current plans are:

• Logical fallacies
• Scientific method
• Bayes’ Theorem

Another presentation

I’ve just uploaded the 23rd presentation of my series on science and creationism.

Presentation 23 : Education

New Presentation Uploaded

I’ve got another presentation done, on the subject of Longevity. How did Noah live to 950 years old?

Presentation 22 : Longevity

Another presentation

Clearly I’m on some sort of a roll, as I’ve got another presentation done. Just four left to do…

Presentation 21 : The Flood

Three more presentations

I’ve just completed and uploaded three new presentations on my series criticising Kent Hovind’s creationist slides. These three are on the topics of Fish, Populations and Health.

Enjoy!

Presentation 18 : Fish
Presentation 19 : Populations
Presentation 20 : Health

Another presentation is live

I’ve just finished presentation number 17, on the subject of speciation.

Get it now on YouTube! Let me know what you think. I’m afraid I’m rather rushing these as I just don’t have enough spare time to work on them as much as I would like. But I think I’m at least covering the topics that need to be covered. My plan is to go back and revisit specific topics later in much more detail.

The presentation is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m956-iMkvGc