Don't Back Down

It seems like a number of people are talking about the Maxthon browser in the last couple of days. At a glance, the features look to be okay. So naturally, I decided to try it out.

The download, installation, startup and even browsing speed are good. Very quick in every respect. Probably even better than Firefox in most. So I moved on to usability.

I like the tab browsing. In fact, the default tab controls in Maxthon appear to be even better than those in Firefox. Not that those in Firefox are bad - just that the controls in Maxthon are... impressive. Would I use them? I don't think so. But it's a big list, nonetheless, and some people like having something bigger than the other guy.

In fact, that's the impression I'm left with after trying Maxthon for a bit. This thing has options like you would not believe, and it also appears to support a form of extension with add-ons. That's really cool, and I may look at it in more detail. But for now, there is just so much to it that I find it overwhelming.

Especially because I didn't care for the basic browsing experience. I think their implementation is decent, but there were so many things that I couldn't figure out, and the options that might control what I need to do are so huge, I just decided to leave it be for right now.

A couple of peeves did come to light immediately. I was unable to drag and drop anything - even from the address bar to the bookmark bar within Maxthon. I can understand (perhaps) not being able to drag from Firefox, but within the browser itself?

I also was unable to figure out how to have as much tab control as with Firefox. I like being able to middle-click and open new links in a new tab. I can turn on all links to open in new tabs in Maxthon, but then they open in the background and I have to select them.

Finally, the popup blocking doesn't work as well as it does with Firefox. The very first page I visited had a popup that was not blocked by Maxthon, even though I had turned on all the popup-blocking functions that I could find.

In the end, it just didn't feel as comfortable as Firefox. But I'll keep my eyes on it. The browser does hold promise - it just strikes me that perhaps they are trying to do too much, to be all things to all people. Maybe I'm in the minority, but Firefox fits the bill for me just fine.

Update: On a related note, the only thing that bugs me about Firefox is that it doesn't do a particularly good job about blocking "floater" ads. The ones that walk, drop or slide across the screen. I think these are Flash-based, but I'm not certain. And I don't know that Maxthon blocks them either. But if I could get Firefox to do that, I'd be joyous. Anyone know of anything that will work against these bad boys?

Update: At least some are Javascript-based, and disabling Javascript will take care of the problem. The issue with that is that some Javascript is okay. The formatting buttons I use while composing this entry, for example. Perhaps just disabling the window.onload event would do it.

Even if accurate, radiocarbon dating has existed for - at most! - 1% of the life of the earth. That's not a very big sample. Consider my life. 1% of my life is about 130 days. Do you think you could look at 130 days of my life - contiguous or not - and accurately determine the rest with any degree of accuracy? I think it's unlikely, but what do I know?

I do realize that radiocarbon dating isn't trying to determine all the details - only one. That's fine. I still don't think, for reasons outlined previously, that it can be particularly accurate past even a relatively short period of time.

And as the age of the earth increases across various theories, that becomes more and more of an issue. If the earth is indeed about 6000 years old, and we've been using radiocarbon dating for 1% of that time, it might be a reasonable sample. Many polls - particularly presidential polls - are taken with a sample much smaller than that, and we mostly accept those results.

The fact is, 6000 years is by far at the low end of the scale, and those wanting us to believe that they can accurately measure things millions of years old are not the people who subscribe to the earth being only 6000 years old.

So let's assume that the earth is instead 4.55 billion years old, as mentioned in this article. That's a really long time. In fact, 55 years (the length of time we've been dating things with radiocarbon tests) is just 12-billionths of that time. I hope I counted those places correctly. Let me know if I didn't.

When applying that to my own lifespan thus far, that would be equivalent to roughly 42-hundred-millionths of a year, which in turn is about 15-hundred-thousandths of a day, also known as 36-ten-thousandths of an hour, making just 22-hundredths of a minute, or about 13 seconds. I've spent (far) more than 13 seconds writing this entry. And that is going to somehow tell you about the rest of my life, or even anything - just one thing - about the rest of my life? That I'm a male, okay, you got one. But that fact, generally speaking, won't change over time.

Monitoring 13 seconds of my life may be able to give you a general idea of how old I am, but that's also because you have an idea of how long a person can live. It's measured. It's recorded. Every day we have more evidence of this time window, and experience in what happens during that window. THe same can't be said for an earth that is even 6000 years old, much less one that is billions of years old. As time goes on, I'm having more and more trouble buying that explanation.

This solution is a miniscule percentage, it isn't particularly accurate and it is terribly limited even if we forego the other problems with it. Maybe one of the reasons that we can't measure that far is that there is simply no way to measure that far, because nothing has existed that long. There simply isn't anything there, because there was nothing there (nothing that we can measure, anyway). We've seen that measuring methods are imprecise, and that the yardstick used (namely, carbon-14 in this case) decays at a variable rate, one which we can only verify back a few thousand years. By extension, anything beyond that is just a guess. A well-educated guess perhaps, but still a guess.

It's also widely acknowledged that things like the advent of the nuclear bomb will alter the elements. We don't always know reliably what happened on the other side of the world today - how are we going to have any chance of knowing that some alien lifeform wasn't doing nuclear testing in the greater Washington DC metro area ten thousand years ago? That would skew the heck out of any numbers.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no less uncertainty in looking at The Creation in scientific (evolutionary) terms than there is in looking at it from a creationist perspective. We simply have no way of knowing what happened. We can guess. We can look at evidence. But there is just no way to know what happened with any degree of certainity. Even if we travel back in time, we are upsetting the time that already happened, therefore skewing it for the future, which causes all sorts of repurcussions.

So if there are simply differing degrees of uncertainty, which do you choose? I'm leaning more and more towards choosing the answers presented in the Bible. If I remain honest with myself there is no way that I can say that I don't think about the other possibilities. But as the thought process continues and you see uncertainity from every direction, it becomes less and less difficult to make that leap of faith. Proof? No more than that of science. But there's also no less proof than that of science. Remember that. I am quite a fan of science. But science has proven only one thing: That after you find an answer, you know you have (at least) one more question. That isn't an option in the Bible. Of course, this all depends on whether you believe in the Bible. But we'll talk about that another time.

Just a few minutes after we left Bonaire, we found ourselves landing on Curacao. This airport was easily the busiest that we saw on the whole trip - including the one in Charlotte! This is not to say that there was the same amount of traffic, pedestrian or vehicular. Just that the place was packed. Part of this was because of construction and remodeling going on. Part of it was that the poor little airport was simply overwhelmed.

Read "Curacao, Netherlands Antilles" »