Mark V Shaney is a fake Usenet user whose postings were generated by using Markov chain techniques. The name is a play on the words "Markov chain". Many readers were fooled into thinking that the quirky, sometimes uncannily topical posts were written by a real person.
And it reminded me of something - Intelligent Design. You know how sometimes there are not two sides to an argument, there is just one side that refuses to learn. Not every argument has two sides that are equal in the quality of the arguments they are able to present in support of their case.
When people believe things for reasons other then rational ones the "arguments" they produce to support those beliefs can become quite, well, strange. To say the least.
For example:
Knowing monkeys, are they really able to type in any order.? Is it factored in that they would eat the paper every other keypunch? They are monkeys. Do they space? Does a non space series of letters count as words? Something wrong with the monkey thing and literature from thinking people. how many monkeys , how long, would take to reproduce a President Obama speech /! they should pick a short one and calculate it up. I was banned on this Jason Rosenhouse blog because I dared to question..well never mind! If a math Prof thinks they have a good understanding of biological origins and creationist criticisms of that and so on then being specialist doesn’t matter. The only thing math can do in all this is about probabilities of bugs to buffalos. ID’s Berlinsky surely contributes on this and settles the unlikely probability of evolution happening from a math view.
That is quite an extreme example (he's a YEC, somebody who believes the earth is 6000 years old) but it's very much a continuum. His "argument" seems to be that because you cannot easily generate a speech by Obama randomly that evolution never happened. Or something. It's hard to tell.
Another example:
The proteins were not derived via natural selection. The sequences the proteins were derived from were artificial- scientists made them. Darwinism has proven to be a fruitless heuristic. Heck one can teach biology withjout referencing Darwin who really didn’t know anything about the topic- not at the level we do now. But anyway the way “evolution” is being taught EVERY child will be left behind- untestable bunkum
Darwinism has proven to be a fruitless heuristic to Joseph, the author of that comment. I suspect either he's wrong or, well, no, he's just wrong.
So, can their arguments be arranged into a "shaney" and still make as much sense really as in their original form?
Judge for yourself. There is a site called Uncommondescent.com where they pretend to take Intelligent Design seriously. In fact nobody can agree on what ID is, could be or can tell us about anything. So they step around each other in a fantastical dance/charade as they realize that their opinions on what ID is all cannot be true. So they disagree with people who actually know what they are talking about but not with each other, never with each other. The "big tent" and all that. You can't throw a YEC out of the tent no matter how crazy he talk as Darwinists are the true enemy! And it's all a big con to sell books to the credulous anyway.
Here is a shaney made up of random comments from Uncommon Descent.
This is a minimal self replicator (one that cannot be any simpler) Function is defined as the bible says, filled with child burning deviants with a selection list of nutrients” is reasonably called a “nutrient registry” in an increasing level of detail are you saying that Lipid bilayers already exist if it can then that is being used to support it is souls existed pre-Jesus. It’s not that I said … What I should have said was “I’m not going to debate the issue raised by . When he/she/it said … … that goes well outside of my area of expertise. I don’t actually think about it in a global conspiracy. Thats the whole point – how much a particular trait contributes to reproductive success, not just arguments from incredulity either). And while we’re on the natural origin of the system that I can only comment on the topic in question. - Please prove that hybridisation is not taken seriously by the pores of type P1? It is your own behavior KF. A little charity and humility would go a long hard look at the membrane itself have a physical arrangement of matter that function as a harmonious, intricate, coordinated composition of “hardware” and “software” elements. The plain existence of intelligent design in nature. On the other 129 bits right? By a random search as opposed to a particular evolutionary development.
When I read "filled with child burning deviants" I laughed out loud. And knew I had to make this blog and publish the site. And amazingly it's not actually a random construction!
Wow.
So this blog is about how I did that and how I poked one in the eye for the IDiots who promote Intelligent Design.
The site is made up of several sections. It's important to remember that the application has only been running a few weeks however so the totals etc are only accurate from then.
TopPosters: Just a list of the top 15, bottom 15 and overall posters, by post count. You can click on the bars in the bar chart to make a wordcloud.
TopNameChecks: As ID is not about religion you'd expect "god" not to be mentioned much. Or "designer" to be mentioned more. Is that the case? Judge for yourself. I also have a chart for the "L" word.
CustomSearch: Enter your own word here and see who has used it and how many times. Single words only. Click on the bars in the bar chart to see the word you searched for in context (a Kiwc).
QuoteGenerator: Generates a shaney from every posters comment history.
IDiotGenerator: Click on a name to make a shaney from their and only their comments. Funny how it still makes sense, on average.
One interesting example on the custom search page is what happens if you search for "FSCI". It's apparently a foundational concept in ID but it seems that only one person is really using it. How many others can you find?
Enjoy! Data starts around 25/09/2011. Comments from posters that are moderated are not (yet) included.
http://forth998877.appspot.com/PseudoGen_Web_Page
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