New Scientist is a publication out of the UK that has an interesting take on current events here in the US and around the world. The Oct. 8-14 issue has a special report on religious fundamentalism -- a topic that they admit is outside their normal purview. Their coverage is quite clear-eyed, and I believe their motivation borders on panic at what they see happening across the pond in the US. As they put it, "the irony of a science magazine reporting on a movement that would ultimately destroy science has not been lost on us". Know thy enemy, right?

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There have been some recent articles here on K5 about Intelligent Design (1), (2), (3), (4). None of them have presented a formal logical approach to the question.

(This article was originally published at http://www.berteig.org/mishkin/IrreducibleComplexity.html - it is much nicer to look at there due to the limits of the html allowed here on K5.)

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The latest foray into the continuing destruction of public education in the United States has taken the form of Intelligent Design, or ID for short. If you are one of the tens of people who genuinely believe in ID, that's fine. If you believe in creationism, good for you. But if you believe that ID is anything other than a stalking horse for christian fanatics to insert their agendas into the public schools, we have a problem.

So why is the title of this piece "The Great Thing About Intelligent Design" you ask? Simple: This is the next step in expanding the power of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

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In this article four fundamental principles are presented: relativity, uncertainty, incompleteness and undecidability. They were studied by, respectively, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. This is a very simple explanation without the technical details, but which tries to show at least the general idea behind each principle.

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It is time to closely and rigorously examine the prevailing ideas about gravity and force, its limitations and its failures. Our abilities to observe and record the very workings of the universe have improved astonishingly over the last hundred years. We now have space based telescopes, vast radio telescopes, and a stunning array of other equipment for astronomical observation. We also have at our disposal huge and expensive particle accelerators and other equipment to detect and observe interactions at the smallest possible scale. With these tools at our disposal, new observations comes an ever mounting weight of evidence that our very conceptions of gravity and force are deeply flawed.

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I hope this article should help people over the age of 50 to make the wise decision to obtain a colonoscopy test. Early detection of colon cancer is a "good idea".

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A genetics paper published in the Journal of Biosocial Science in June, “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” makes the following claims about Ashkenazi European Jews:

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*Disclaimer*  Murder is against the law. Do not commit murder. Do not construe this article as encouraging you to commit murder. This is for educational purposes only.  *Disclaimer*

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Fractals are well-known in rave art, popular culture and even the occasional movie. But what are they, where do they come from and what are we going to do with them now they are here?

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In between shark attacks, missing persons, Michael Jackson, and who knows what else, you might have missed a few important stories. On the 4th of July, a power plant in Grati, on Indonesia's island of Java, was shut down after it just plain ran out of its stored fuel oil. Another power plant on the island is going to close next. This should not be all that surprising. Oil is now trading at $60 a barrel, and the first to suffer from this are those who can't cough up that kind of dough. But this is just the beginning. The price won't come back down, and soon enough you will begin to feel the pinch. Grab a cup of coffee and read on.

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