Chance or design: Nature creates precise patterns of rock and soil. Evidently the freeze-thaw cycle in places like Norway and Alaska causes rocks and soil to separate, forming neat, regular piles of soil and precise rings of small stones. The results look like some ritual monument. A geologist has come up with a mathematical model that explains how they are formed, and says “You can measure the stones moving across the surface at about a millimeter per year or so.” It reminds me of a large-scale, very slow version of how magnetic moments in iron spontaneously orient themselves in concert to create a net magnietic field (in fact they arrange themselves in a regular pattern of local magnetic "cells").

   “WHEN PEOPLE see these, their first impression is ‘Wow! Who did that?’” said Mark A. Kessler, a geologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “We are just not used to such dramatic self-organization of stones and soil.” But in a study in the journal Science, Kessler said the arrangement of the rocks is the work of nature, using long seasons of deep cold and the heaving and contraction of water-logged, frozen soil. He and B.T. Warner of the University of California at San Diego, present a mathematical model that explains how Mother Nature builds such bizarre shapes in the Arctic soils.

Okay, Mr. Geologist, you can call it a "slow natural process" all you want, but I'm skeptical. I think those are God droppings out there, and we need to get William Dembski out there to prove it. Those fields of circles have all the earmarks of design, which we know (thanks to Dembski) we can detect with mathematical certainty. Dembski could no doubt head out to that field, take some relevant measurements, plug them into his trusty CSI Field Calculator™ and when the little light flashes, we know this was the work of God. Scientists may find this approach a bit quirky: design is always detected (God is the creator of all things, therefore all things are a product of his Design). Scientists don't often trust a test that always comes out positive, but the discovery of Design in all things is clear evidence that all things were created by God in accordance with his Grand Master Plan®. I'm having fun with the character map today.