Somebody pointed this out and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. After sweeping winning game 2 against the White Sox in the opening series, Murphy said:
>Mark my words right now: That Chicago White Sox team will be something to be reckoned with in that division.
An incredible prediction in hindsight. The dude has a 6th sense when it comes to baseball.
Edit: It happened after game 2, not 3
For example, I know that creationists never respond well to too much science jargon. They need simple material that can be easily explained without any background in biology. I know the temptation to flex on uneducated people is there, but the moment you start talking like
> alteration in the nucleotide sequence of a genome, driven by transitions/transversions, indels, and chromosomal aberrations
you instantly lose their focus.
On the other hand, it is useful is to ask them what would convince them they are wrong. They could respond in a multitude of ways, but usually it has a fatal flaw. They will sometimes admit nothing will, or their required evidence isn’t expected if evolution is true, or their requirements are arbitrarily and unfairly strict for evolution, but completely normal for most other fields of science. Or my favorite, the evidence exists and you guide them to it. From my experience, this question causes a lot of introspection. Sometimes hypotheticals can help, such as if they would be convinced if you built a time machine and got to see the evolutionary path from LUCA to modern day humans first hand.
What tips do you guys have?
I have a 1200 sqft home, almost all hardwood floor, without any steps, and no pets. The biggest obstacles are just a few rugs. My budget is ~$1000. My priorities are for it to be as hands off as possible. I want to just lay in bed and control it with my phone.
My favorite topic to bring up whenever I talk to a creationist is ring species. I always start off by making sure they know the biological definitions for species and speciation events, and then I ask if speciation events are possible. Usually the answer is no. Then, I carefully explain what a ring species is using an extremely simple example. I ask them to imagine a population of organisms called “middle” that encounter an obstacle such as a mountain. The middle population breaks into the “left” and “right” populations. Over time, left and right migrate around the mountain and meet on the other side after many years. Left and right are no longer capable of interbreeding, but they can still interbreed with middle. I explain how our definition of species breaks in this example. I also mention that if the middle population goes extinct, we would have no way of knowing if they were originally the same species (Edit: that is, without using anatomical similarities or phylogenetics). I then guide them to the wikipedia page on ring species and the documented examples. By this point, they are usually rambling on about incoherent nonsense. One recently was complaining about how I needed to “justify the definition of species” or whatever. I did however encounter one creationist who, after being presented this evidence, finally admitted he was wrong (and with pointing out that his denomination of Christianity doesn’t reject evolutionary theory). I think that ring species are so useful because they cannot deny their existence and they are extremely easy to explain in just a minute without any background in biology. This is the only time I’ve ever managed to convince a creationist they are wrong entirely about evolution.
I’m interested in getting as many examples of series that are currently open problems as to whether or not they converge, or if they converge, to which value, or if they know the value, what the closed form expression of the answer is. I’m familiar with the idea that you can encode another open problem into a series, such as the summation of all the twin primes, but those aren’t as interesting to me. I’m looking more for series like zeta(3) or the flint hill series. Beyond these, I haven’t found any interesting examples, but I’m sure they are out there.
Edit: I’m looking for the modern day equivalent of the Basel problem