Okay, you defenders of the non-telic dog-eat-dog Malthusian evolutionary world! Here's a great, heart-warming story from the UK's Daily Mail…

Pointer is Baby Kangaroo's Hero

in Torquay, Victoria, Australia a 10 year old German Shorthaired Pointer/Wirehaired Pointer mix, named Rex made quite a discovery while on a walk with his owner Leonie Allan. Early in the morning Rex and Leonie headed out on their usual walk and discovered that a female kangaroo had been struck and killed by a car. Later on in the afternoon Rex returned to the body and gently retrieved what no one knew was there - a 4 month old joey! Rex carried the baby by the neck in such a nurturing way that the little guy was unharmed.

"The joey was snuggling up to him, jumping up to him and Rex was sniffing and licking him - it was quite cute", said Allan.

Tired of fighting? Love movies? Have a FaceBook account? Then join our club!

This is a little unusual for TT, but I just saw this movie, and I highly recommend it. I haven't seen a truly scary movie for a long time, and I walked into the theater with low expectations. Although I've seen better, I have to say that this tops the list of Stephen King's greatest silver screen adaptations. I feel also that it touches upon issues that are often discussed here and on related blogs. I try not to spoil anything, but I do reveal some parts of the movie. You've been warned.

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The Religious Belief and Mental Health thread is too long to follow, yet keeps going on a lengthy tangent anyway. Obviously, the combatants aren't done yet. So this thread is for those who still want to carry on the conversation.

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Evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory of the University of Guleph in Canada has offered ID supporters an 8-Fold Path to scientific legitimacy in an entry at his blog 'Genomicron', entitled -
An opportunity for ID to be scientific.

Seems T. Ryan has his nose a bit bent out of shape by recent developments in genetics which have demonstrated "Junk DNA" to actually have functions. Well, it's not so much that the discoveries have angered him, it's that ID proponents predicted that much the so-called 'junk' would turn out to have functions. While avoiding the issue of why it was that mainstream evolutionary biologists considered non-coding DNA to be useless for so long, he does invite IDers to the table at last…

…provided, of course, they can jump through his eight flaming hoops. Below the fold are all of Gregory's demands - sans commentary from me - for your amusement and analysis:

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I was not going to acquiesce to keiths' request for a separate thread for the metaphysical magic poof "thought experiment" Raevmo first made in the Thinking about Allen MacNeill's Argument thread. It has since intruded on TP's retrocausality thread, and shows no signs of going away.

All keiths and Raevmo wanted to do was disrupt ongoing topical discussions with ridiculous assertions having nothing to do with the subjects. But since the disruption isn't going away, this is the place to put it.

Have fun, y'all!

I have mentioned in passing a background in physics, an interest in the many competing wannabe replacements for the good ol' Standard Model (and contestants for what qualifies as a 'Theory of Everything'), and a particular interest from investigations of the phenomenon of consciousness in an 8-dimensional model of reality both psychic and physical. As opposed to an 11, 22 or infinite dimensional reality per other theoretical models, that is.

ScienceDaily reports today that Mathematicians Map One Of The Most Complicated Structures, which is the symmetry Lie group E₈. The project took an international team of 18 mathematicians 4 years working on separate portions of the calculation, and 77 hours of supercomputer time to put them all together. They had to 'map' the symmetries of a 57-dimensional object (in 248-dimensional E₈) as representations in a matrix with 205,263,363,600 entries for 240 vectors in an 8-dimensional space. A rather impressive accomplishment.

I'd reproduce the computer generation of the Gosset polytope 4₂₁ drawn by Peter McMullen in the 1960s because it's so pretty, but it's right there on the ScienceDaily page, so do check it out for yourself!

I'd say this picture just begs for a good caption:

It would have been better with another furry mammal, but the cats b'jammin.