Tuesday's Salute to Small 'h' heroism

1) Yesterday Jerid Kurtz of Buckeye State Blog posted an MP3 of his interview with presidential candidate Senator Chris Dodd. My question didn't make it into the 15 minute chat (that's not as long as it might sound), but you'll be interested in some that did. Like I said before, strippers drive traffic. I'm guesing that Jerid will parlay this into more and more interviews with candidates and other key campaign figures. For several hours, Jerid was my hero.

2) But then he got smacked soundly out of the top hero slot by a man named Thomas F. Van Horne. Mr. Van Horne read a letter to the editor in the Dispatch that I had also shown to a colleague at work. In part, that letter by H. Jack Taylor read:

The first law (of thermodynamics) says that the total amount of energy and matter in the universe is fixed. It can change forms but can't be created or destroyed. Einstein's E = MC{+2} is a part of this law. The second law says that the energy and matter in the universe are going toward disorder and randomness. If the evolutionary theory is true, then there had to be a time in the past when these two laws weren't true...

What I pointed out was that this argument relied on someone fundamentally misunderstanding both evolution and thermodynamics simultaneously. My colleague suggested I write a letter. I did not. Mr. Van Horne did. I cannot do it justice without going beyond fair use, So I'll throw out a tease and direct you to go read the whole thing:

...Too many "scientific" people refuse to give Jack Frost the credit for the extraordinary beauty he spreads every winter...