Sub Colorise()
For nRow = 1 To 10
For nColumn = 1 To 10
Worksheets("Sheet1").Cells(nRow, nColumn).Interior.Color = RGB(Worksheets("Sheet1").Cells(nRow, nColumn).Value, 0, 0)
Next nColumn
Next nRow
End Sub

The Standard Flat-Earth Model (SFEM) postulates an ice-wall to replace the controversial Spherical-Earth Hypothesis' (SEH) notion of "Antarctica". The Lello Hypothesis states that the universe is a series of flat earths stacked within a vast crystalline cylinder folded back on itself to form a never ending torus i.e. a cosmic, hollow, ice-donut. The Lea Modification, sometimes known as the Lello-Lea Hypothesis, states that interspersed with the crystalline solid phases of water (H2O) exists the abundance of naturally occurring granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles forming "deserts" similar to observable regions of SFEM/SEH models.

It should be noted that these hypotheses are not to be confused with the weaker and frankly implausible set of ideas that A. Hayes has expounded in which a series of flat earths are distributed across the inner surface of a torus of indeterminate extent. Hayes is also known for his Infinite Cylinder Hypothesis (ICH) that is perhaps even more unlikely than his inside-out donut.

The Society for the Lello-Lea Toroid Flat Earths Hypothesis and SETI@home come together to create the perfect union for the search for intelligent life on other flat-earths. Scientists are researching a mathematical proof for the minimum quantity of flat earths that must exist. However, first contact with other flat earths will provide the empirical evidence, and hence proof, of the Lello-Lea Hypothesis. It is not expected that the combined forces of flat earth scientists and SETI@home will be able to provide the actual number of flat earths in our toroidal universe but merely that:

1) We do indeed live in a multi-earth, toroidal universe.
2) There are at least 2 flat earths.

SETI@home is not the only avenue of investigation providing empirical proof of multiple flat earths. A. Hayes, and others, has proposed expeditions to the ice-wall to conduct experimental drilling and the sending of a small party to test the controversial SFEM speculation of going "beyond the ice-wall." Funding and applications for strategic/technical approaches is being sought.

A very good friend recommended The Gendered Atom, a book they read many years ago. Unfortunately, they were bitterly mistaken in their assessment of it. It is trash of the worst kind.

Apology: It is hard to criticise post-modernism. It is pseudo-scientific and rhetorical. A post-modernist believes they can have their cake and eat it too (that, by the way, is a stupid cliché, even if appropriate). By that I mean a post-modernist may use logic without the trappings of soundness, cogency, validity, nor truth values. They may be rhetorical but expect respect. They may criticise whatever they want from a position of absolute ignorance and think people should pay attention. Finally, they may speak utter gobbledegook and yet expect a response other than "shut-up." I realise in attempting to rip this utter dribble to shreds - clearly an impossible task - I am using logic, asking for evidence, and dismissing rhetoric, none of which is of any interest to a post-modernist, but I simply have no others tools. Therefore, I'll demand of Theodore Roszak something of what he cannot give.

The author states "One can try one's best to force the irrational out of mind, but that is repression, not objectivity. And to confuse repression with objectivity leads us to that ominous identity called the 'mad scientist' [...]" (pg 6) Okay, bold statements, but I'm prepared to hear him out. Got a good argument? Some evidence? Apparently not, the author moves on to talking about scientists. So, I'd do the work he's not prepared to undertake:

• I'll rephrase to get a negative out: "To be rational, one needs to be repressive." But repressive against whom? Oneself? Are individual humans two and yet one? The author presumes the notion of self-repression. Interesting, some sort of universal schizophrenia perhaps? It may be true, consciousness is a difficult thing to understand and I'm not claiming to understand it, I'd just like some evidence to support the author's claim. I didn't find any.
• On "self-repression to get rid of irrationality": Why need changing one's thought processes be self-repressive? Or at least, how is this partcular thought process self-repressive? How is taking action to bring about a desired result repressive? People go running to build up their muscles. Is running some sort of self-repression too? Maybe. The point is you need evidence. A simple desire to change attitude or take action (same thing), one's own or another's, is not necessilary repressive in and of itself, is it? If the author is suggesting that, well, that's a pretty big claim. If not, what makes forcing out irrationality different from going for a run?
• Who is suggesting that to "force out the irrational" is to be objective? Perhaps I take a simplistic view on the matter, but I see rational and irrational to be opposites, objectivity is a different issue altogether. If you want to talk about objectivity and rationality I don't have a problem with that, there may be some overlap. But one has to demonstrate the relationship not just presume the relationship. Furthermore, I don't understand how anyone can suggest they are objective, and if a scientist (or anyone) suggested they were I'd question them on it. But that doesn't mean that one cannot come up with a theory that predicts the movement of objects that can be proven by observation. That theory would an example of objectivity, surely? But that's not the same thing as rational. People are being rational (or at least using rational thought processes) when they state a logical argument that is valid, sound, cogent, and they provide evidence for demonstrating that the premises are true, leading to the truth value of the conclusion. What is the relationship here between rationality and objectivity?
• Who is confusing repression with objectivity? A 'mad scientist' I presume, but surely if someone is mad they'd be confused by a hell of a lot more than that of the relationship between repression and objectivity. The fact of them being a scientist is irrelevant. And as they are mad, does it even matter what thoughts they have on these matters? The mad scientist may be interesting and perhaps funny, but we need not ask of them (ir)rationality, refusal/embracing of repression, or even subjectivity/objectivity. Perhaps the author meant to say the confusion leads to the ominous identity called the 'scientist'. Nevertheless, I'm more concerned about the author's confusion of rationality with objectivity than any of this talk about "mad scientists".

All that from merely two sentences of this slobber. So, here is some more drool:

"Scientists like to think of their field as "self-correcting." That is a comforting belief. It amounts to saying scientists can never be wrong – except temporarily. But in truth there is no such thing as self-correcting field of knowledge. People make mistakes; and people correct those mistakes." (pg 14)

Yeah, I know, I know, it's true. Not only did someone write that, people printed it, and what's worse, you and I have had to read it!!!!

"Turing, one of the founders of computer science, once proposed a "test" that would measure how close artificial intelligence had come to the real thing. He wondered what one might ask in a structured conversation to decide if one's interlocutor was a human being or a computer. The question is still debated, but the ultimate Turing test might be to pose the question "How would a guilt-stricken homosexual commit suicide?" Would a computer ever conceive of eating an apple laced with cyanide? Probably not, but Turing, the consummate logician, chose just that bizarre way to end his life." (pg 8-9)

To the author: Roszak, you are a nasty, uncompassonate and ignorant piece of shit. It's people like you who make me truly ashamed to know that I share most of my genes with you.

The author seems unable to distinguish a scientist from science or its application as technology (from someone who has supposedly read Frankenstein you'd think he'd recognise the distinction as he might often need to point out the classic mistake regarding that book). He does not know what an atom is. I wonder if his wife needs to help him tie his shoes as he clearly has cognitive impairment. I'm not trying to be nasty or disrespectful, it's an observation made from reading his book. Admittedly, I only read the first third of the book. Perhaps the remaining two thirds is good. By that I mean to say, perhaps the remaining two thirds is written by somebody else. I don't think I'll ever know.

I feel a little empty after finishing The Ancestor's Tale. Perhaps partly because it took me so long to finish, partly because it was an epic tale of strange yet inter-related stories; the history of life (on Earth). What I learnt at the beginning and what I understand now is starkly different.

Some interesting quotes:

On the fossil gap: “If every fossil were magicked away, the comparative study of modern organisms, of how their patterns of resemblances, especially of their genetic sequences, are distributed among species, and of how species are distributed among continents and islands, would still demonstrate, beyond all sane doubt, that our history is evolutionary, and that all living creatures are cousins. Fossils are a bonus.” (pg 13)

On the extended phenotype: “Under favourable conditions the lake of a beaver can span several miles, which may make it the largest phenotype of any gene in the world.” (pg 198)

On design: “A skate is a flat fish that might have been designed on a drawing board to be flat, resting on the belly, with wide 'wings' reaching symmetrically out to both sides. Teleost flatfish do it in a different way. They rest on one side, either the left (e.g. plaice) or the right (e.g. turbot and flounder). Whichever the side, the shape of the whole skull is distorted so that the eye on the lower side moves over to the upper side, where it can see. Picasso would have loved them. But, by the standards of any drawing board, they are revealingly imperfect. They have precisely the kind of imperfection you would expect from being evolved rather than designed.” (pg 358-359)

On sex: “Darwinism, in its modern form, expects that individuals will strive to pass on as many of their genes as possible. So isn't it just daft to throw half your genes away with every egg or sperm you make, in order to mix the other half with the genes of somebody else? Wouldn't a mutant female who behaves like a bdelloid rotifer, and passes on 100 per cent of her genes to every offspring instead of 50 per cent, do twice as well?” (pg 443)

One of the stunning sections was on reproduction; asexual, isogamy, and gendered. I don’t realise asexual lifeforms don’t have a gene pool nor that different types cannot be considered a species through any normal measure (except phenotype). Freaky.

So, all in all, one of the best books I’ve ever read.

"But, why aren't they already here?" This is the obvious response to the statement that there is almost certainly extraterrestrial life and probably a hell of a lot of extraterrestrial intelligence also. This question has already been answered, such as:

1) Maybe they already are here.
2) 70 sextillion stars is rather a lot, maybe they haven't managed to get here yet.
3) Such beings are out and about, but the chance of them turning up in this arm of the spiral is like the chance of a powerful/rich (same thing) person jumping on a plane to a country like Brasil simply to hunt out a little worm beneath the undergrowth in the densest forests of the Amazon. It could happen, it just isn't very likely.

or, maybe, just maybe:

4) We're nothing special. Maybe life is everywhere. Therefore, maybe good ETI scientists can be assured that there is life on Earth but the Sun hasn't being burning long enough for even a moderate probability that anything interesting has developed (yet) for them to warrant turning up. Maybe no space going intelligence is even slightly interested in a bunch of almost exclusively stupid and petty reptiles such as ourselves. Maybe they'd rather wait until something interesting is likely to evolve.

All these possibilities are more likely than there being no other life in the universe. Only the arrogance of faith would make someone believe otherwise.

But what about other creatures - like us - that cannot escape their own planet and are confined to throwing electro-magnetic radiation around in the hope of getting noticed? Answer: SETI.

In the early 90s the K Foundation's earnings from selling their songs (as the KLF and The Timelords) totalled one million pounds sterling. They took it all out of the bank in the form of fifty pound notes and burnt them. A documentary was made about it, Burn a Million Quid. They did an interview later where they were criticised by a rock star, an artist, the host, and pretty much the entire audience. To listen to their reasons it doesn't sound they understood the significance, let alone anyone else. I'm not sure I fully understand it either, though I am pretty sure it has something to do with denying the final denial.

Over the last few months my amateuristic investigations into genetics, evolution and astronomy have led me to a rather weird conclusion that - other than through frequent diversions into science-fiction - I have never really considered seriously. That conclusion is: there really might be other life in the universe, and very possibly, intelligent life.

I might be quite at odds with the mass of opinion but I think the probability of life on other worlds is looking, weirdly enough, to be something along the lines of the inverse proportional probability of god (not that they are any way connected). That is, I'd give the probability of god of something of the order of < 1% chance. Such a thing as god is extremely unlikely, yet billions of people believe in the idea absolutely. On the other hand, given that there are lots of galaxies (100 billion plus), stars (70 sextillion plus), and planets, life seems, well, almost certain to exist elsewhere. And yet only scientists and crackpots are allowed to suggest such things, and both groups are laughed at by the wise peoples of this planet.

To this end, I've finally signed up with SETI@home, as well as with a bunch of other projects such as Climateprediction.net.

A question I have been considering is "Would the discovery of life on other planets be the final nail in the coffin of religion?" Carl Sagan seems to imply so in his Cosmos documentary. Unfortunately, I think he is bitterly wrong. The evidence against god, religion, and faith is already in, and it is overwhelming. Yet evidence often doesn't seem work on faith heads. Or perhaps I'm being a little pessimistic, maybe it just takes a long time and many a stupid argument.

As an aside, Wikipedia has an interesting criticism of the Drake Equation (xkcd): 'In a 2003 lecture at Caltech, Michael Crichton, a science fiction author, stated that, "Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion."' Interesting that one reports the views of an author of fiction on what is or is not science.

I watched a few scenes from the 1966 Batman film today. Not only is it a very funny satire, it's a superb lesson in applied logic.

Commissioner Gordon: It could be any one of them… But which one? Which ones?
Batman: Pretty fishy what happened to me on that ladder…
Commissioner Gordon: You mean where there’s a fish there could be a penguin?
Robin: But wait! It happened at sea… Sea. C for Catwoman!
Batman: Yet, an exploding shark was pulling my leg…
Commissioner Gordon: The Joker!
Chief O’Hara: All adds up to a sinister riddle… Riddle-R. Riddler!
Commissioner Gordon: A thought strikes me… So dreadful I scarcely dare give it utterance…
Batman: The four of them… Their forces combined…
Robin: Holy nightmare!

I doubt the creators ever considered that anyone might need be shown the operations of logic at such a fundamentally absurd level but with Post-Modernists (subtitle: the final deniers of intelligence) I now feel otherwise.

Batman: Listen to these riddles. Tell me if you interpret them as I do. One: What has yellow skin and writes?
Robin: A ball-point banana.
Batman: Right. Two: What people are always in a hurry?
Robin: Rushin' people. Russians!
Batman: Right again. Now what would you say they mean?
Robin: Banana. Russian. I've got it! Someone Russian is going to slip on a banana and break their neck.
Batman: Precisely Robin. The only possible meaning.

I have struggled through the new series of Doctor Who. To be fair, almost all of the stories have been crap. Utter crap. Some have been good, those written by Steven Moffat. The main writer, Russell T Davies, has used and re-used deus ex machina until the point of despair. Any new story of his I have been in dread to watch. Midnight, however, was superb. Certainly the best of Davies' contributions, and possibly the best new DW episode. Scary, confusing, and almost terrifying. No worthless special-effects, no godlike Doctor, no annoying companions (though Donna is about the only good thing about the latest series), no impossible situations, no ends to universes. It's like Davies just suddenly decided "actually, I will write a good episode for a change" as though it were the easiest thing in the world and the only reason he hadn't done so before was because he simply couldn't be bothered. It's disappointing that this story has been exceptional.

Sound argument

An argument that is valid and all of whose premises are true.

All mammals are animals.
Some mammals are carnivores.
Therefore, some carnivores are animals.

Facts about sound arguments:

Valid, unsound argument:

All animals are mammals. (false)
Some animals are carnivores.
Therefore, some carnivores are mammals.

Inductive Arguments

Two classifications of inductive arguments:

a. strong inductive argument — an argument for which the truth of premises makes the conclusion probably (>50%) true
b. weak inductive argument — an argument for which the truth of premises does not make the conclusion probably true.

a. cogent inductive argument — an argument that is strong and all of whose premises are true and, collectively, do not leave out countervailing evidence
b. uncogent inductive argument — an argument that is either weak or whose premises either include an untrue statement or, collectively, leave out countervailing evidence

Cogent argument

Houghton has gotten at least 120 inches of snow each winter for the past 20 years.
Therefore, (probably) Houghton will get at least 120 inches of snow this winter.

Uncogent argument

Houghton got over 300 inches of snow last winter.
Therefore, (probably) Houghton will get 300 inches of snow this winter.

Argument Form

All chemists are scientists.
Some doctors are chemists.
Therefore, some doctors are scientists.

All A are B.
Some C are A.
Therefore, some C are B.

If Joe studies, he will ace the exam.
If Joe aces the exam, he will get an A in the course.
Therefore, if Joe studies, he will get an A in the course.

If P then Q.
If Q then R.
Therefore, if P then R.

Counterexample method

No creationists are evolutionists.
Some people who believe in the Bible are not creationists.
Therefore, some evolutionists are not persons who believe in the Bible.

No A are B.
Some C are not A.
Therefore, some B are not C.

No dogs are cats.
Some carnivores are not dogs.
Therefore, some cats are not carnivores.

Therefore, by the counterexample method, the original argument (about creationists and evolutionists) is invalid.