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not all the writing does a good job
Sunday, March 11 2007
Due to her continued battle with a new strain of influenza virus, Gretchen remained bedridden (or, actually, couch-ridden, the better for watching teevee when she had the strength). Meanwhile I busied myself stringing together a lamp designed to hang from one of the living room's collar ties (the room has a cathedral ceiling and two collar ties keep the walls from being pushed outward by the diagonal force of the roof). The support system for the lamp was a series of half inch copper tubing, interrupted here and there by 90 degree elbows and union fittings, my newly-preferred way to create a moveable joint. It proved difficult, however, to get a union fitting to stay in place with the leverage of six feet of copper pipe torquing it. Either I'd have to tighten it down to the point of immobility, or I'd have to leave it so loose that gravity forbade repositioning. A couple pieces of steel wire run through each joint didn't have the intended effect, that is, to keep it stiff but flexible.
At some point today I came upon the remarkable website known as OverwhelmingEvidence.com, a place where teenagers can get together online and advance the science of Intelligent Design. From the look of things, they're running circles around accredited biologists in explaining how it is we came to be, although some of them seem to be a bit bogged down with the subject of whether or not geologic formations might or might not be best explained using Intelligent Design.
One of the most unusual things about OverwhelmingEvidence is that anyone can join and write anything they like, and if their writing is rated high enough, it ends up on the front page of the site, right there beneath a Flash game where you can make fun of Judge Jones, the Bush appointee who ruled Intelligent Design to just be a dressed-up version of our old friend Creation Science. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, not all the writing on the site does a good job of supporting Intelligent Design. Of course, this might only be a reflection of the fact that advanced biological subjects are being discussed by, well, teenagers. (Very little of the writing actually looks to be coming from teenagers, judging from the quality of the grammar and the absence of LOLs and :)s.)
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