finknottle

I'm confused about these stats too. Are they supposed to be complete? Or just the leading passer on each team? JP is only the 4th rated qb on the Bills - scratch that, the 3rd as of todays cuts... I think they come from nfl.com. There are two interesting things to notice: 1. Half those guys are not the starters of their team. I don't know what criteria nfl.com is using - I suspect they are considering the pool qb's who are the passing yardage leaders of their team... 2. It is disturbing that everybody on that list has thrown for more yards than JP. In fact, he does not show up in the top 30, despite (I suspect) having had more game time than nearly every qb.

I still think he stinks, but I fear you are correct on the TD angle.

Not to reopen old debates, but there is a sizable number of people who, having actually watched Matthews play, thinks he flat-out stinks and should never have been signed in the first place. How his rep has now increased to where he is considered a wily old veteren and mentor to the up-and-coming is beyound me.

It's not clear from this thread whether you folks know that Pakistani's are not Arabs. They are not. Nor is Pakistan in the middle east. For the record, the first Arab country among those with the largest muslim populations is 7th: 1. Indonesia, 182.2m 2. Pakistan, 136.9m 3. Bangledesh, 115m 4. India, 108.6 5. Iran, 63.9m (Persian; only 3% are Arab) 6. Turkey, 61.1m (Turks are not Arabs) 7. Egypt, 51.6m But I suppose for the sake of the profile that we can take solice in the fact that those foreigners all probably look the same to us, and those are all middle east or north africa -type places...

It's about marketing. Jiffylube is not set up to change its prices every day like a gas station pump. Since most of what you are paying for is service anyway, and people don't like to see that price change, they will let the rising cost of oil eat into their margins a while longer, and look into re-pricing later.

Averaging 50 yards per completion at the half! (3/9, 150 yrds, 2-0)

I just flipped to the game and missed the carnage, but he seems to be playing better now (up to 10/15, 90 yds, 1-2). The amazing thing is the stats... with the half almost over, the Ravens ran 33 plays to the Eagles 16, but are down 7-17!

So that's Peters at LT, Gandy at LG, and Anderson at C?

It's hard to tell whether you are serious, just yanking chains, or just partisanly deluded. The US led force, IFOR (totalling about 40k?, with 20k US), ended its mission in 1996. It was replaced by the NATO-led SFOR, which scaled down to about 20k (5k US). It too ended, last year, and peacekeeping duties fall to the EU (7k troops). As of last summer, before the end of SFOR, there were only 700 US troops there. There are only 200 now, and their only duties are rebuilding assistance to the military, not peacekeeping. Lest we get into semantic arguments about whether the end of IFOR (and SFOR after that) signify an exit strategy, let me point out that we have troops all over the world in much higher numbers, and at greater risk. And in the 10 years since the Dayton Peace Accord, the total number US or NATO deaths to hostile action in Bosnia is 0. As far as I'm concerned, whatever the exit strategy was, it worked marvelously. Here's a list of interesting places with more troops (in '04) than Bosnia: 17,385 Alaska 3,221 Guam 43,232 In transit 36,365 Japan 40,840 Korea 1,474 Belgium 76,058 Germany 1,491 Iceland 12,606 Italy 701 Netherlands 1,006 Portugual 1,814 Serbia 2,012 Spain 11,469 UK 1,712 Bahrain 816 Diego Garcia 170,647 Iraq 20,000 Kuwait 1,762 Turkey 682 Guantanamo

I'm not sure I believe any of that. How do we decide who is the highest paid players? The other guys with 'higher contracts' are also never going to see their full deals either. So lets look at cash paid. If TO honored his contract this year that would have meant he collected to date (because of the bonus) $12 million over 2 years. That's not just top 10 money, it is (I heard on the radio, not sure what numbers they are using) #3.

I applaud you for providing a link, but I don't find it convincing. In fact, I was surprised not to find any arguments against God, and in particular no religious discussion at all among the evolution resources. The site seemed more a resource center for those committed to freedom from religion. In favor of your views on the way evolution is taught, the alliance does claim the goal "Atheist Alliance International (AAI) is an organization of independent religion-free groups and individuals in the United States and around the world. Our primary goals are to help democratic, atheistic societies become established and grow and to work in coalition with like-minded groups to advance rational thinking through educational processes." This could be consistent with a program of consciously using evolution education to generate athiests. However, when they expand on atheist educational goals they essentially only say "Atheist education begins with our own members learning about the struggle of courageous men and women who defied the superstitions of their day and advanced the culture of reason and science. The Alliance seeks to reclaim our heritage and provide the largely misunderstood facts of our history to the public in order to dispel ignorance about atheist contributions to civilization. Most atheists, entangled as we are in a religious culture, are only vaguely aware of its impact -- as when we are made to feel impolite for expressing doubt about the supernatural. Most atheists have never studied atheist history or learned the importance of atheism to science and social progress. Atheism is left out of discussions in schools." To summarize, what I got out of reading their 'about & why' page is a sense of their priorities, as captured by "Blind religious mania is a rising threat to society. It seeks to repeal the advances made in establishing civil rights and civil liberties for all citizens. It seeks to abolish our First Amendment right to freedom of and from religion. It encourages a global population explosion that is destroying the environment and creating immense human suffering. It is, through a heavily funded political machine, making a major effort to get organized prayers and religious observances into public schools and other public venues, and creationist doctrines into science classes. Schemes abound to acquire taxpayer funding for parochial schools. Religious zealots, not content with self-regulation, seek to censor the reading and viewing choices of all of us. An Inquisitional spirit infects everything from politics to the Boy Scouts -- and sometimes even the workplace. Because of these and other assaults on our civil liberties, there is an urgent need for a concerted rational atheist influence on society -- the application of reason and common sense to solving our problems." So I went to the 'Creationism vs Evolution' section. There was no AA position text, instead about 20 external links to various resources, each of which was itself typically a set of links. I skimmed much of it and nowhere found any 'proof of atheism,' or indeed any discussion of theological questions at all. Most were scientific expositions of aspects of evolution, some were devoted to debunking creationism. I found nothing anti-religious; the closest was a collection of links mocking creationist web-sites that made particularly goofball claims (Australian Aborigines killed off the dinosaurs 12,000 years ago, etc).

The price of oil - a raw material - is one factor in the price of the finished product, gasoline. It is not the only one. The price of oil effectively sets a floor price for gas. Problems in the production and distribution of the finished product (such as not enough capacity) can drive it higher. More refining capacity only ensures that the price is pushed towards the floor price.

On the flip-side, it is worth examining trends in public views towards evolution. I don't have any stats, but there is an interesting article in the April issue of 'The Smithsonian' recalling the Scopes trial. Here's a noteworthy passage: 'Bryan and the creationists claimed victory because the jury in Dayton upheld the state's ban against teaching evolution and, by implication, the right of parents to control what their children learned. Darrow and the evolutionists, on the other hand, believed that in exposing the ignorance behind creationism they had stymied its threat to academic freedom. Time has proved both sides wrong. "As a result of the Scopes trial, evolution largely disappeared in public school science classrooms," says historian Edward J. Larson, a professor at the University of Georgia and author of 'Summer for the Gods,' a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the trial and its aftermath. Larson acknowledges that there is "more mandated teaching of evolution now than ever before." But that doesn't translate into actual teaching. According to a recent report in the New York Times, many teachers simply ignore evolution or play it down to duck controversy.' As I think back on my own AP Biology class in the otherwise excellent KenTon district circa 1980, it occurs to me that while we did study genetics I can not recall having been exposed to a single thing about evolution or human origins.

I agree. It doesn't reflect a swelling movement so much as pent-up protest.

I've heard this claimed by evangelicals, but I've never heard a scientist say this. Frankly, it sounds like they a strawman argument. Can you give an example? A single reference will do.

It does work if you train them as kittens, and it's not too hard either. I was thinking of doing it, but the problem is that cats won't flush. It's a question of whether or not you want your guests to be surprised to find a floater in the bathroom.... (Athough I suppose that is better than them seeing that your dog left you a present on the kitchen linoleum floor...)

Nowhere more so than in business. A thousand years from now when central planning communists run the world their economic historians will revive the theory of Intelligent Design. They'll look at the bricks-and-morter businesses of the 80's and 90's, and notice the sudden appearance of huge cyber-only businesses in the 00's like amazon, ebay, yahoo, and google. Where are the transitional businesses, they'll ask? (History will show that Borders.com, like the missing link, didn't stick around long enough to leave much in the fossil record.) And how could Google possibly have survived untill there was 'enough' internet to make it a viable business? Simple. Al Gore - the Intelligent Designer of the new millenium.

I probably didn't make my point clear. A bunch of people feel the integrity of this science is under organized assualt by organized religion. They flail about with a variety of responses - writing rebuttals in academic journals, writing op-ed pieces and letters to the editor, speaking at school boards, calling their congressman, talking to their preachers... but these responses are personally unsatisfying because they take effort and have not seemed to work. Then one day somebody sticks feet on a Jesus fish and slaps it on his car. As a protest it isn't any more effective than the other things, but it doesn't take any work, it is amusing, and it is a way of voicing protest against what is going on. In short, it is a more satisfying form of personal protest. And before you know it, lots of people are doing it. (How's that for Natural Selection?) So the point is that it has nothing to do with the meaning of the fish. Rather, the fish is a visible symbol of grass-roots religion, the evangelical movement seen to be the power behind if not identical with the organized assault (that's loaded language, I know...). To ridicule and use a movements own symbols against it as a protest is an everyday technique; when I chant 'Squish the Fish' at a Dolphins game it is a way of voicing my protest of the efforts of the Dolphin franchise against the Bills. It is not my zoological ideology.

See you at 'The Drones.'

What's with the injuries and U. Miami players? Is that what they mean by the 'Canes?'

With reference to my previous post, nobody sees a religious assault on string theory. If preachers started to insist that it was wrong based on a creationist reading of the Bible, and then began a political campaign for equal time in the schools, you might start to see some string fish.

I see the darwin fish phenomena as something else: many people who believe in evolution feel that science -specifically evolution - is under assault by organized religion. And under organized assault. The darwin fish phenomona is their way of fighting back as a group. They are not saying no to God as much as they are saying (to what they see as organized activist religion) "stay out of science." I'm guessing that the way to test this would be to survey those who had the darwin fish to find out whether they were primarily motivated by athiesm or the integrity of science.

I used to have a cartoon titled "The Kid who learned Math on the Streets." It showed this teenage troublemaker leaning against an alley wall and smoking, saying things like "If you divide 2 by 0, you'll die!" and "This kid my sister knows tried to take the square root of negative one and his eyeballs turned black!"

I think that you are correct. But in practice, I think most athiests will say they are agnostic. Saying you are an athiest carries a stigma in public life - even in Hollywood you are better off being a scientologist, 'spiritualist', essentially anything short of a clear break. So people who don't want it to be a issue mumble something about there being a higher power but not subscribing to any particular church, being agnostic, anything but athiest. You can't run for president if you've got that on your record.

It is as likely that I have misunderstood, as I have never been entirely sure. In practical terms, and independent of their actual meanings, I always thought of them as essentially the same, the difference being that agnostic is the less-controversial label you choose when you don't want to be shunned for your non-beliefs.