Archive for January, 2013

Ken Ham was doing an interview, and he was asked a difficult question: “How did men get the dinosaurs to not buck them off of their saddles when people rode then? Were the dinosaurs more domesticated and well behaved because there wasn’t as much sin back then?” Good one. The creationists do tend to smuggle in a lot of rather unbiblical stuff into their mythology while simultaneously claiming to be strict literalists, so I’d like to see how they came up with that story, too. Ham’s answer: Gosh, I don’t know. Where did you ever get that weird idea? I don’t know where people get the idea that people rode dinosaurs. I mean, there’s no evidence in the Bible that that is so. When Job was looking at Behemoth, the description there… there’s nothing to do with people riding dinosaurs. We don’t know how people interacted with dinosaurs. Go read the post, it’s hilarious. Where did people get that idea? From Ken Ham. He publishes books with illustrations of people riding dinosaurs, and he’s got a fiberglass dinosaur with a saddle on it in his “museum”. He also distributes powerpoint slides for educators, loosely defined, to use in the classroom. Like these: It’s rather disingenuous of him to declare that he doesn’t know where these wacky ideas come from, isn’t it?

Oh gob, the stupidity. The latest wave of anti-choice legislation is based on one trivial premise: it’s got a heartbeat! You can’t kill it if its heart is beating! So stupid bills have been flitting about in the Ohio, Mississippi, Wyoming, Arkansas, and North Dakota legislatures trying to redefine human life as beginning at the instant that a heartbeat can be detected. Here’s Wyoming’s story, for instance: About two weeks ago, state Rep. Kendell Kroeker (R) introduced a measure to supersede the medical definition of viability. Current state law says abortions are prohibited after a fetus has “reached viability,” and Kroeker sought to replace those words with “a detectable fetal heartbeat.” The Republican lawmaker said the idea for his heartbeat bill just came to him one day because “it became clear that if a baby had a heartbeat, that seemed simple to me that it’s wrong to kill it.” On Monday, a House panel struck down Kroeker’s bill because it was too medically vague. But if Ohio and Mississippi are any indication, this likely won’t be the last time that fetal heartbeat legislation shows up in Wyoming. It’s a step back from the inanity of declaring that life begins at conception — you can’t detect the heartbeat until 5-6 weeks of gestation — but still, it’s an arbitrary and ridiculous definition that relies entirely on folk knowledge about living things. If we’re going to do that, though, I propose that we go to the One True Source of knowledge and accept the Biblical definition of living creatures: they have breath in their nostrils. Therefore, abortion is legal right up to the instant that the baby draws its first breath. Don’t argue with me! It’s in the Bible! Do you want to go to hell? But the heart thing? Nonsense. Here’s what I routinely see: Zebrafish embryos have a heartbeat one day after fertilization. That one above is a two-day embryo, and...
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Islamic extremists have been destroying ancient manuscripts in an important library in Timbuktu. You know what that means? It’s time to chastise Richard Dawkins! The latest furore comes after Islamist extremists burned down a sacred library in Timbuktu, Mali, during the ongoing conflict there. Prof Dawkins tweeted "Like Alexandria, like Bamiyan, Timbuktu’s priceless manuscript heritage destroyed by Islamic barbarians." Cue much clutching of pearls and fainting. "He’s been mean about a religion!" The article makes a very good point: “if you burn down a library, ‘barbarian’ is probably the right term.” I’d also add that if libraries are burnt down, your priority ought not to be to wag a finger at the people protesting the vandalism, but to at least wag that finger in the right direction…at the vandals.

You youngsters may not recall the golden age of usenet kookdom, but back in the distant past (like, the 1990s) usenet was the medium of choice for internet chatter, and there was only the roughest of partitioning of ideas, so the usenet groups were these great egalitarian shouting matches of noise — and you could be a total nut and have just as much of a voice as the most cautious scientist. In fact, being loud and weird gave you an edge in being heard. It was a great time for some strange people, and Charles Stross just mentioned that Archimedes Plutonium is still around, and now he has a Science Website, sorta. It’s really just a wall of badly formatted text in which he talks about himself in the third person…but yeah, that’s Archie. One nice thing about it is that it does have the most succinct summary of the Plutonium Atom Totality Theory I’ve ever seen. Plutonium’s claims: In late 1990, Plutonium claims to have had the realization of his Plutonium Atom Totality Theory, a theory he claimed to be the most important breakthrough in scientific history. According to this theory, the Universe is a giant plutonium atom, and the part of the universe we are able to observe from Earth, including Earth itself, is somewhere in its outer electron shells, the 5f6, and where galaxies are pieces of the last electron of 231Pu. As Mr. Plutonium calls it: where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies. ::\ ::|:: /:: ::\::|::/:: _ _ (:Y:) - - ::/::|::\:: ::/ ::|:: \:: The above is the ascii art of the 5f6 electron orbital of plutonium where the dots are dots of the electron-dot-cloud and each dot represents a galaxy. Biographical notes In his autobiography (entitled at one point Ludwig Plutonium: the Chosen One, and claimed to be 2200 pages), Plutonium claims he started posting to...
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(via NatGeo)