(Tier 1) Adventures in ACE XXV: The Grass Ain’t Greener

After getting almost every single detail of a spy plane wrong, plus screwing up science facts at almost every turn, the ACE writers continue our atmospheric miseducation. As per usual, the fail is in the details. They get the temperature of the thermosphere wrong by almost 1000°F. They also fail to mention that, due to the gas molecules being so sparse, you’d actually feel cold even in the 3,600+°F temperatures: there simply isn’t a great enough density of air to transfer that heat to our skin.

Leave it to ACE to miss the really fascinating facts.

They have a surprisingly good explanation of what ions are and how they’re formed. But any pleasure we may take in that is quickly ruined by the horribly unfunny comic strip on the following page:

Image is a comic strip. The first panel shows a boy in a green long-sleeve shirt, adjusting his round-rimmed glasses, as he says to a boy in a yellow shirt, "Pudge, do you know what an aurora is?" The next panel shows Pudge saying, "...au·rō'ra... an Italian lion?" as he imagines a lion saying "a·roar·a". The final panel shows the boy in green rolling his eyes, and saying to Pudge, who is standing in the background, "Oh, Pudge! An aurora is a colorfully lighted night sky."
Cartoon from ACE PACE 1088, page 18.

Racer says the weatherman he was listening to on the radio “said that the aurora borealis, the northern lights, were particularly brilliant at night this week.” Either the ACE people have never heard children talking, or Racer has been programmed to be a particularly tedious know-it-all. Kids don’t generally talk like that. It’s annoying, but not half so annoying as Reginald cutting in just as Bill finishes explaining to a clueless Sandy why they can’t see the aurora from where they’re at. He’s just dying for them to know what a pious prick he is. Continue reading “(Tier 1) Adventures in ACE XXV: The Grass Ain’t Greener”

(Tier 1) Adventures in ACE XXV: The Grass Ain’t Greener
{advertisement}

(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIb: In Which BJU Goes Yellow-Green

After A Beka’s nonsense about humans being able to do anything they want to the earth’s atmosphere because God will save it, it’s a bit of a shock to open to the Earth’s Atmosphere chapter of our BJU Earth Science 4th Edition textbook and see, before anything else, a bit about “Killer Air.” Sure, they talk about how God wants to fill the earth right up with people. But they admit air pollution is a problem. They even admit it kills people. And they want their readers to join in fixing it. They don’t leave the whole thing up to God.

Image is a gray cat looking very shocked. Caption says, "I am not often shocked. Right now I am totally flabbergasted."

ZOMG. Is BJU full of environmentalists? (Answer’s “not really,” but we’ll get to that). Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIb: In Which BJU Goes Yellow-Green”

(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIb: In Which BJU Goes Yellow-Green

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXIV: Wherein Dog Whistles Abound

Oh, goody. We’re back to young earth creationists trying to tell us what we icky secular types think of geology. This time, the authors of Earth Science Fourth Edition are on about changes over the course of the earth’s existence. Let’s see how much fail they pack into the topic, eh?

Our section objectives tell us that we’ll be able to show how the earth has changed over time. Everybody agrees it has, so that’s lovely.

Then they’ll want us to “compare and contrast the old-earth and young-earth histories, emphasizing when changes happened and how long they took to occur.” Fabulous! We’ll be able to stick science and myth in two columns and see how badly the myth mangles reality.

Then we’re to “evaluate the scientific problems with the old-earth view of the earth’s history.” Ha ha ha no. No, because they won’t be addressing actual problems, like the bits in our theories that still need improving (fer instance: we really don’t quite understand hot spots yet, although we’ve got some good leads). What they’ll be doing is more like complaining that guides to King’s Cross Station are wrong because they don’t include Platform 9¾. Continue reading “(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXIV: Wherein Dog Whistles Abound”

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXIV: Wherein Dog Whistles Abound

(Repost) Adventures in ACE VI: Vacuous About Volcanoes

People, it took me days to fact-check the 31 (thirty-one) pages of Science PACE 1086. I’m boggled. I have no idea how they manage to get so much wrong. It doesn’t even make sense – I mean, there are several creationist canards, and I know why those are there, but they fail at facts that even Answers in Genesis gets right. It’s like they got their information about rocks from a source translated from French, which was translated from Tagalog, which was translated from a paper written in Pig Latin by someone who’d never seen a rock in their life, but heard something about them once.

Take their inability to get famous volcanoes right. Not to mention their myths about medicine. Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in ACE VI: Vacuous About Volcanoes”

(Repost) Adventures in ACE VI: Vacuous About Volcanoes

Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXIII: Wherein We See the Light

So. Physics.

Earth Science Fourth Edition and Science of the Physical Creation have a bit of crossover here, which we’ll eventually get to, but SPC covers the subject a lot more thoroughly. So, while we’re still bogged down in ES4’s interminable (and very, very wrong) chapters on Geology, we’ll see what the creationist textbook writers at A Beka have to say about physics.

We start with Chapter 14, “Light and Color.” I’m sure you can all guess which verse they use to get us going the godly way.

Of course. Continue reading “Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXIII: Wherein We See the Light”

Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXIII: Wherein We See the Light

(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIa: In Which A Certain Atmosphere is Created

After the absurdities of ACE and the travesty that is Bob Jones University’s idea of the earth sciences, it is almost with relief that I turn back to A Beka’s Science of the Physical Creation. Oh, granted, it is also full of creationist crap – but there were some useful, even educational, bits, and I hope to find more.

Alas, my hopes are dealt a blow by the introduction to Unit I: Meteorology and Oceanography. Beneath the facing photo of sailboats, Psalm 115:16 sez God gave humans the earth, and the first sentence of the chapter is, “God created the earth’s atmosphere…”

Let us pause here to observe just how such a statement can send you haring off in the wrong direction. Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIa: In Which A Certain Atmosphere is Created”

(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIa: In Which A Certain Atmosphere is Created

(Tier 1) Adventures in ACE XXIV: Cloudy With a 100% Chance of Fail

Welcome back to ACE Science PACE 1088! Last time, we saw the lengths God would go to in order to ruin a hot air balloon ride. Now we’re on to Section Two, where getting even the simplest facts right is completely beyond the ACE writers’ ability.

We start with vocabulary and cartoons! Oh, joy! Science words for this section include frisbee, hedge, and mare. You know, even if you grant some leeway and say that vocab in a science course can include other unfamiliar words, this is still ridiculous. These are the equivalent of eighth graders. They already know what a fucking frisbee is. And if ACE-educated students aren’t allowed to know what frisbees are until puberty, I think it’s time for the adults to sit down and think about where they went completely off the rails.

Now comes the cartoon, which, in the tradition of the other PACEs in this series so far, has bugger-all to do with anything. It’s just a way for the ACE people to showcase their remarkable lack of a sense of humor.

Image shows a boy and a girl, both African-American, standing and talking against an orange background. The girl is giving the boy some serious side-eye in the first panel. The boy is holding a blue-covered book, and is saying, "Miriam, this book says the former rulers of Russia were called Tsars and their wives were called Tsarinas. I wonder what the Tsar's children were called?" The next panel shows Miriam and the boy have switched places. Miriam is saying, "I don't know, J. Michael, maybe Tsardines?"
Cartoon from the beginning of Section Two of ACE PACE 1088.

Whelp. At least they’re people of color. Don’t get too excited, though, cuz we’re spending the rest of the section with the white people.

A bunch of the fine upstanding white Christian families are having a Founder’s Day* picnic. Racer is, like, so good at Frisbee that he can make it “float through the air like the clouds in the sky.” This strained simile leads the boys to talk about clouds. ACE dialogue is uniformly terrible, but this is even worse than usual. The boys sound like pompous robots reciting pre-programmed prose. And they use the word “distinguish” three times in three sentences. Gah.

They also get the simplest fucking facts wrong. Continue reading “(Tier 1) Adventures in ACE XXIV: Cloudy With a 100% Chance of Fail”

(Tier 1) Adventures in ACE XXIV: Cloudy With a 100% Chance of Fail

(Repost) Adventures in ACE V: Senseless About St. Helens

We have arrived at the section of ACE Science PACE 1086 wherein someone who knows bugger-all about rocks will proceed to explain rock types. There is so much wrong we’ll have to split it into groups, and even then, I’m not sure the posts will be short enough to prevent acute creationist crap poisoning. I do know I just spent the better part of five hours dealing with just the errors in the opening paragraphs.

I recommend padding all hard surfaces within a 12-block radius before we begin.

Mr. Wheeler, the ocean floor driller, is the narrator. It is apparent the instant he opens his mouth that the writer is not competent to write from the POV of a supposed expert, even a creationist one. “Igneous rock,” he pontificates, “is formed by heat.”

Um.

Actually.

Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in ACE V: Senseless About St. Helens”

(Repost) Adventures in ACE V: Senseless About St. Helens

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXII: Wherein We Experience Cosmic Fail

At the end of our last edition, the Earth Science Fourth Edition authors promised us the Bible explains all about why the universe is the way it is. I don’t know about that, but okay. Lay it on us! Surely the fine folks at BJU Press can now explain all that stuff the nebular hypothesis was supposedly helpless to explain (although it mostly can). Tell us why Uranus is on its side, and Venus spins backwards, and why Uranus and Neptune exist, and why the earth doesn’t wobble!

What’s your explanatory cross-box got to say about it, ES4?

The existence of most of the strange things observed in our solar system, like the tilted planets, weird magnetic fields, and planets that give off more energy than they absorb from the sun, can be explained by biblical Creation.

Yes? Great! Let’s get on with it, then.

Even when secular theories fail to account for these features, scientists will criticize biblical creationists for falling back on a “God-of-the-gaps,” or seeking a supernatural explanation where a natural one cannot be found. But such an approach isn’t necessary if one believes that everything, including the scientific laws that govern the universe, ultimately came from God.

Well, okay, fine. So explain! Explain why God made some stuff all wonky, rather than create the solar system all orderly-like. Why does Venus rotate backward? Why did God tip Uranus on its side? Why did he bother with Neptune at all, since we couldn’t see it before the invention of the telescope? Why did he bother with wee little moons around other planets which he never put human life on? Did he intend Pluto to be a planet or not? He made the scientific laws – so what are the scientific laws he made that cause those things to happen? And what are his reasons? How does your model explain the things you were picking on us for (supposedly) not being able to explain?

I turn the page, and…. Continue reading “(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXII: Wherein We Experience Cosmic Fail”

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXII: Wherein We Experience Cosmic Fail

(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIb-2: In Which We Reclaim Earth Science for God’s Glory

Remember how awful the first half of this ES4 introductory chapter was? It gets worse. Find something to clench while screaming, “Dana, you did this to me!”

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But this is what kids in Christianist schools and homeschools are getting taught.

We’ve reached 1B, “A Christian Approach to Earth Science,” and I believe it is a measure of the trauma caused by the previous section that I am hopeful that a section with a title such as this will contain some actual science, even if by accident. But the beginning is not encouraging, as it states it’s not what we look at, but how we look at it, that’s important. Ken Ham said it best when he said

Image shows Ken Ham holding a Bible and looking towards the right. Caption says, "We're putting on biblical glasses!"

Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIb-2: In Which We Reclaim Earth Science for God’s Glory”

(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIb-2: In Which We Reclaim Earth Science for God’s Glory