And I’m with you. College football needs a playoff. I’m a little more conservative and would go with a 5 or 6 six “playoff”. This way rankings would still mean something (although they could be phased out eventually, but not likely), and it would include the Super Mountain West and ACC/Big East champion too.

I have to admit to a sick perversion in enjoying the chaos (probably because it ain’t Michigan’s conference getting blown up)

Good luck with that.

Ironically, a likely outcome of all this is going to be a true bowl playoff system. There’s no way that the new landscape will make it feasible to honestly assess teams and leagues. The rankings as we know them now will be meaningless. And as long as the SEC keeps beating up the pretenders, this will mean only one championship slot for the rest of D-I football. The only way to democratize things is to institute a true playoff, say, between the top one or two teams from each league.

I can’t see Texas wanting to go through the SEC grinder of Alabama, LSU, Auburn (and possibly Florida) every year. The Pac-10 makes more football (even basketball) sense. That A&M has had discussions with the SEC is surprising, which goes to show the unpredictable nature of this expansion chaos.

I would never have predicted Colorado would have started the dominoes falling, but it makes sense to cut off Baylor. Simple rule Baylor didn’t figure out: you snooze, you lose. The other shoe should drop today with Nebraska bolting for the Pac-10. My Scenario 2 is looking better all the time (without the Texas bolting first thing, that is)

One longshot scenario – Texas and A&M move to the SEC west, along with some other schools to round things out. A&M is talking to the SEC, and I have heard something (maybe not reliable) to the effect that Texas and A&M are a package.

Add in Oklahoma and that would be a real football league. Better than the CFL or the AFC West.

Freelurker: I don’t think that Brent is claiming that engineering design is a mechanical process.

From Brent’s opening comment at Amazon (click on “Show post anyway” to view and scroll down to about 6th paragraph):

The mechanism of Intelligent Design is “design.” Design is the means by which engineers build sophisticated systems. Design is a tool in the toolkit of the designer.

IMHO, Brent’s view that engineering design is a mechanism is quite clear.

I agree with you that, in general, design cannot be treated as mechanistic. It is only in simple cases that engineers can derive, per se, a design from the requirements. An act of invention is usually involved.

IMO, we know so little about the creative process at this point that creativity is effectively magic. I hope and trust that we will learn more about it in the future.

But it seems to me that this issue is different from the one Brent is addressing. I don’t think that Brent is claiming that engineering design is a mechanical process.

One first has to understand that, as defined by IDists, the term “design” means intention/purposefullness/goal-directedness. This is what they claim to have detected when they claim to have detected design.

When ID critics point out that the design argument offers no mechanism, they are saying that IDists won’t/can’t say how these intentions took effect in the world we experience. They want to know something mechanistic about what happened, along the lines of “this physical thing did such-and-such to this other physical thing.”

Brent says:

Design is the means by which engineers build sophisticated systems.

But the product of engineering design is not a system; it’s a model of a system that is yet to be built. This gets back to the point; IDists can’t/won’t address how the things we see in the world came to be actualized.

Scientists want to know what happened; for IDists it is sufficient to give credit to a designer.

JJS: I’m not clear as to how you connected the dots from thoughts-not-mechanical to design-not-mechanical.

Rock: It’s not clear to me either how you made the connection between non-mechanical thoughts and mechanical actions:

The connection is/are the human engineer(s). Both conceptual thought and rational analysis/mechanical actions reside in either the form of a single engineer or the collective body of engineers. Call it an overly simplistic answer, yet it is one that works every day in the real world and not the lab.

Non-mechanical thoughts, conceptions, are critical to science.

…and by extension, engineering. I’m with you so far.

And can be tested.

Conceptual thoughts can be subjected to testing. How much that testing will actually say about them depends on your assumptions.

The problem is that they fail every test, because to test is to act and to act is to act mechanically.

Specifically how do thoughts fail every scientific test? And what is meant by “failure” in this case?

See the problem, the dilemma?

Sort of. IMHO, thoughts cannot be 100% explained by science. The same is true for the existence/non-existence of God. It would appear to me that while some aspects of thought can be explained by science, science on its own cannot give a fully satisfying explanation.

It’s not clear to me either how you made the connection between non-mechanical thoughts and mechanical actions:

“Since one aspect of design cannot be reduced to mechanical processes, it stands to reason that design as a whole is not 100% mechanical, and thus not a mechanism (as a whole).”

Non-mechanical thoughts, conceptions, are critical to science. And can be tested. The problem is that they fail every test, because to test is to act and to act is to act mechanically.

See the problem, the dilemma?