Where is that magic memory hole button again?


Oh, no — DaveScot can’t find Gonzalez’s article that he published in 2001 on the Scientific American website! It’s a CONSPIRACY! The Darwinist Establishment is suppressing his publications and rewriting history!

Uh, wait … no, it was a “technical glitch” that also made a couple of other articles inaccessible, and the editors aren’t at all interested in losing the Gonzalez, Brownlee, and Ward article.

It’s particularly ironic that the gang at Uncommon Descent, which has a reputation for hiding their
gaffes in the amazing UD memory hole after they’ve been exposed, should accuse Scientific American of the kind of perfidious rewriting of their files that they do quite routinely.

Comments

  1. Christian Burnham says

    I learnt something interesting from following that link.

    Did you know that Richard Dawkins’ first name is actually Clinton?

  2. says

    that kind of behavior isn’t unusual, it’s typical for rightwing/fundamentalist crazies.
    i just finished reading “Cruel and Unsual”, can you tell?

  3. says

    Have you noticed how IDers don’t seem to want to actually search for this designer? Are they scared the best explanation might not be the Christian God?

    SA

  4. says

    It’s particularly ironic for the gang at Uncommon Descent, which has a reputation for hiding their gaffes in the amazing UD memory hole after they’ve been exposed, should accuse Scientific American of the kind of perfidious rewriting of their files that they do quite routinely.

    Ironic, yes. Surprising, no. I think this is what the head doctors call “projection” — the tendency to see in others the behaviors of which you yourself are guilty. Because they’re devious scoundrels, they think everyone else is a devious scoundrel. We should ask them why the Intelligent Designer did such a lousy job setting the specs for their consciences.

  5. llewelly says

    garth:

    does anyone else see some really weird formatting on my post at #2?

    It’s called ‘full justification’ – making both right and left margins ‘line up’ by spacing out the text in the middle. Atrociously ugly, isn’t it?

  6. jpf says

    My favorite part is this:

    Interestingly Scientific American does sell two of Professor Gonzalez’ books in the Science Bookstore; The Privileged Planet and Observational Astronomy. I wonder whether that’s a conspiratorial oversight or a case of money trumping principle? Speaking of oversights evidently they forgot to cull Refuges from this Scientific American Special Issue of “classic Scientific American articles” entitled Mysteries of the Milky Way.

    Somehow the fact that they still sell two of his books AND that the article in question is included in another archived issue is made into further nefarious evidence of a conspiracy to expunge him from their archives.

    When the Conspiracy isn’t conspiring against you, that just shows how truly devious the Conspiracy is!

  7. says

    Apparently Davey meant to fall off his bicycle, a la PeeWee Herman. Now he says:

    Okay, so maybe nothing nefarious is afoot. I was looking for an excuse to expose some of Guillermo’s work and who’s using it in academia.

    Yeah, that’s the ticket.

  8. Jason says

    Did anyone else see Dembski’s painfully ironic post today in which he claimed that a “friend” discovered that Richard Dawkins had only one peer reviewed paper with 0 citations?

    He later retracted the post when he discovered that Dawkins had published dozens of papers with thousands of citations (not including the tens of thousands of citations his books have received in scholarly journals).

    Unfortunately, it appears Dembski has now removed both the original post and the retraction.

  9. snex says

    whats really ironic is the fact that DaveScot made a design inference which turned out to be a false positive, and he doesnt see the problem in that at all.

  10. Ichthyic says

    Unfortunately, it appears Dembski has now removed both the original post and the retraction.

    well, Dembski has never lost track of his little “memory hole” button.

    wait…

    there was that one time he claimed it was all “street theatre” before he managed to hole a thread.

    but other than that, the man has been pretty much on the ball in pushing that history delete button on UD.

    he’s used it so often (on both he and master tard’s threads) he must have callouses on his button-pushing finger.

  11. says

    http://thoughtsfromarandomplace.blogspot.com/

    If your bored, check out the commenter I have caught on my blog. Not that the blog is anything special, but his/her views are … um…*well* articulated in gansta’ slang mode! I have grown tired of this person, have said my goodbye and continued speaking my pointed opinion re: religion and science. So if you feel the desire to rip in….more than welcome. It feels like I am arguing with a child with only one line to say…perhaps it is…the agony of the anonimity of posting.

  12. Dustin says

    Did anyone else see Dembski’s painfully ironic post today in which he claimed that a “friend” discovered that Richard Dawkins had only one peer reviewed paper with 0 citations?

    I first thought, “Wouldn’t that strike him as obviously wrong?” Then I remembered that this is Bill “Complex Specified Information Implies Design” Dembski.

    Under Bill Dembski’s definitions, here are some things that are designed: each and every last snowflake that falls from the sky, the polarized light of Eta Carinae, and obtaining zero on a random draw of certain partitions of the integers.

    So, no. It wouldn’t strike him as obviously wrong.

  13. Torbjörn Larsson, OM says

    Apparently Davey meant to fall off his bicycle

    Of course he did, “davescotdiddit” is perfectly supportable for all forms of postdiction.

    You don’t think creationists have new and creative flimflam tricks to choose between, do you?

    Speaking of choices, it seems flies can do one better than most creationists. Apparently they have the common search strategy capacity that could be the basis for free will:

    Specifically, their behavior seemed to match up with a mathematical algorithm called Levy’s distribution, commonly found in nature. Flies use this procedure to find meals , as do albatrosses, monkeys and deer. Scientists have found similar patterns in how emails, letters and money travel and “in the paintings of Pollock,” Brembs said.

    These strategies in flies appear to arise spontaneously and not result from outside cues, findings detailed in the May 16 issue of the journal PLoS ONE. This makes their behavior seem to lie somewhere between completely random and purely determined, “and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will,” Sugihara added.

    ( http://www.livescience.com/animals/070515_fruitfly_freewill.html )



    It’s called ‘full justification’ – making both right and left margins ‘line up’ by spacing out the text in the middle. Atrociously ugly, isn’t it?

    Magazines uses that, and since this is a magazine blog it could explain its ugly existence. :-|

    It is based on magazine text, i.e. itty bitty teeny weeny sound bites.

    Not internetusers grammatico-textural proficiencies and need for alternative/transmutative/contextsensitive inventions, or at least some real, you know, words.

    It is also one of those umpteen format options that can unnecessarily slow down reading until you get used to it. Though IIRC, dyslectics can’t efficiently compensate since they have enough recognition problems as it is. I wouldn’t use it outside glittery promo material where nobody reads the text anyway but only flips through the nice layouts – I don’t feel it is, ehrm, ‘fully justified’.

    Hmm, first comment, and today’s rant is already done. :-)

  14. Torbjörn Larsson, OM says

    Apparently Davey meant to fall off his bicycle

    Of course he did, “davescotdiddit” is perfectly supportable for all forms of postdiction.

    You don’t think creationists have new and creative flimflam tricks to choose between, do you?

    Speaking of choices, it seems flies can do one better than most creationists. Apparently they have the common search strategy capacity that could be the basis for free will:

    Specifically, their behavior seemed to match up with a mathematical algorithm called Levy’s distribution, commonly found in nature. Flies use this procedure to find meals , as do albatrosses, monkeys and deer. Scientists have found similar patterns in how emails, letters and money travel and “in the paintings of Pollock,” Brembs said.

    These strategies in flies appear to arise spontaneously and not result from outside cues, findings detailed in the May 16 issue of the journal PLoS ONE. This makes their behavior seem to lie somewhere between completely random and purely determined, “and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will,” Sugihara added.

    ( http://www.livescience.com/animals/070515_fruitfly_freewill.html )



    It’s called ‘full justification’ – making both right and left margins ‘line up’ by spacing out the text in the middle. Atrociously ugly, isn’t it?

    Magazines uses that, and since this is a magazine blog it could explain its ugly existence. :-|

    It is based on magazine text, i.e. itty bitty teeny weeny sound bites.

    Not internetusers grammatico-textural proficiencies and need for alternative/transmutative/contextsensitive inventions, or at least some real, you know, words.

    It is also one of those umpteen format options that can unnecessarily slow down reading until you get used to it. Though IIRC, dyslectics can’t efficiently compensate since they have enough recognition problems as it is. I wouldn’t use it outside glittery promo material where nobody reads the text anyway but only flips through the nice layouts – I don’t feel it is, ehrm, ‘fully justified’.

    Hmm, first comment, and today’s rant is already done. :-)

  15. Ex-drone says

    Apparently, the Darwinists also made him misplace his car keys this morning.

  16. xebecs says

    It’s called ‘full justification’ – making both right and left margins ‘line up’ by spacing out the text in the middle. Atrociously ugly, isn’t it?

    At least it’s better than justification sola fide.

  17. Graculus says

    Full justification looks metric buttloads better than left justification, all you haters. As a “format option” it predates typesetting by however long writing has been in existance. Obviously our ancestors were stupid, making their text unreadable like that. [/snark]

    There are historical reasons why word-processors do not justify elegantly, unlike scribes, typesetters and typesetting software. As for dyslexics, word-processing justification is the least of their issues, unfortunately.

  18. commissarjs says

    whats really ironic is the fact that DaveScot made a design inference which turned out to be a false positive, and he doesnt see the problem in that at all.

    My coworkers are now wondering why I’m giggling.

  19. jpf says

    The main problem with full justification on web documents is that browsers aren’t smart enough to hyphenate long words that fall at the end of a line on their own, resulting in lines where the words have excessively wide spaces between them.

    There is a not very elegant way around this though. If you have a long word you think will be a problem, use soft hyphens (­) between the syllables. example: su­per­cal­i­frag­a­list­ic­ex­pe­ala­do­cious.

    This works in IE and Opera but not Firefox.

  20. jpf says

    That example would have been more impressive if the word su­per­cal­i­frag­a­list­ic­ex­pe­ala­do­cious had actually straddled the end of the line. Oh well, even if you can’t see them, the soft hypens are there in the word su­per­cal­i­frag­a­list­ic­ex­pe­ala­do­cious. (Maybe one of the above instances of su­per­cal­i­frag­a­list­ic­ex­pe­ala­do­cious will do it…)

  21. says

    I managed to read Demsbki’s post before it was removed and even make a short blog post about it. The most interesting part, I thought, was that rather do some work himself, he asked his his readers to do it for him (how incrediby lazy). I did so. I found heaps of Dawkins’ papers. I found one by Dembski. No wonder that his little attempt at character assasination was quickly (attempted to be) removed from the annals of internet history.

  22. Torbjörn Larsson, OM says

    As for dyslexics, word-processing justification is the least of their issues, unfortunately.

    Nobody, I say nboody, is giving dyslectics a break.

  23. Torbjörn Larsson, OM says

    As for dyslexics, word-processing justification is the least of their issues, unfortunately.

    Nobody, I say nboody, is giving dyslectics a break.