Okay, thanks. Checked it out. "Steganalysis," "Steganography," etc. will require some further investigation on my part.
This seems to be something that needs to be spelled out in laymen's terms. First step, in my opinion, is at least agreeing there are "designed things" present in the universe.
Am I wrong in assuming there are only two possibilities? 1.) designed things exist, or 2.) designed things do not exist? Perhaps a third: All of existence is a figment of my imagination, but I don't think those kind of skeptics inhabit this place.
Indeed, the first step is to get agreement that designed things exist. IMHO, that should be axiomatic. After all, everyone lurking has at some point or another surely composed a sentence.
The algorithms and information content discovered throughout nature, to me, are prima facie evidence of design. Conversely, randomness would have been prima facie evidence against design.
With regard to figments of imagination, I agree with Descartes that that is the cleanest of all starting points, and that "God is" and "I think therefore I am" are the first determinations. BTW, in his book Relativity, Einstein notes how close Descartes was in the concept that neither space nor time pre-exist.
Hiding messages in unrelated media by bit twiddling. The most obvious example commercially extant is hiding watermarks in the noise in photographs so that the casual observer cannot detect the changes made. Check out the company "Digimarc".
Am I wrong in assuming there are only two possibilities? 1.) designed things exist, or 2.) designed things do not exist?
You exclude the counterargument. Not playing fair. Things that give the appearance of design exist, snowflakes and diamonds for example, the assumption that a designer therefore must exist, however, omits some important common steps in critical analysis of evidence you'd never get away with in a decently run courtroom.
Perhaps a third: All of existence is a figment of my imagination, but I don't think those kind of skeptics inhabit this place.
Yes they do I've argued with several. I myself hold that it is inherently impossible to disprove this notion, only to disapprove of it.
I suspect that's not the sort of model you want to use for determining if something exhibits design or not. One possibility: there ARE fractal-math based tests for artificiality which are used to detect man-made things out in deserts and what not and algorithms which are used to detect tanks and other targets out in the sands. Something like that might provide a basis for determining of living things are "designed" or just sort of happened.