Let’s poll the readers and see if it’s OK to kill children with neglect

It’s another of those horrible stories of an ignorant fundie family with a sick child who could be easily cured by modern medicines, but they chose to treat him with the uselessness of prayer…and guess what happens? They’re now the proud parents of a corpse.

The media doesn’t help. They give a voice to all the frauds saying things like, “Our teaching is to trust Almighty God for everything in life: for health, for healing, for protection, for provisions, for avenging of wrongs” and “The result was not what they wanted because our faith is imperfect at times. But God is perfect.” And then they go further and create a stupid poll for specious validation of the majority view.

Do you believe in the power of prayer to heal?

Yes 7.1%
Yes, but in conjunction with medicine 54.8%
No 38.1%
Don’t know 0%

That “Yes, but in conjunction with medicine” is such a common cop-out. This is what the apologists for religion do: let the stuff that works give cover for the lies they spew that do nothing and do harm. And they’re just as wicked as the ones who flatly say yes.

While we’re busy playing in the Creationist Theme Park…

…take a look at the depressing state of American education. This is the gloomiest article I’ve seen on the American future.

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

That hasn’t even gotten to the predictions yet. That’s a description of our current status.

You know, in ten years the Chinese tourists will be flocking to the bargains and sights of an economy in the toilet, and they will be booking tours to the Ark Encounter. And they will point and laugh and laugh and laugh. While proud Kentuckians will be scrabbling to sell them cheap plastic souvenirs in their new, low-paying jobs in the service industries.

I’m sure Ken Ham is grateful

Ken Ham is humbly appreciative of the coverage his Giant Wooden Box project is getting.

We were notified late this morning that AiG’s latest project, the Ark Encounter, will be featured tonight (Monday) on ABC-TV’s evening newscast, World News with Diane Sawyer. Check your local listings for the ABC affiliate station in your area and the time of broadcast. (See the ABC-TV news site.) Also, here is a link to the article about the Ark project that appears in the New York Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/us/06ark.html.

The website for the Ark Encounter is ArkEncounter.com.

We are grateful to God for all this media coverage.

And well he should be. I looked at the NY Times coverage, and was appalled.

I have to explain something to the Times. Some guy building a little theme park in Kentucky is not news. It’s something for the state and local news, sure, but not something that warrants a good-sized spread and a big image of the proposed park in the N freaking Y frackin’ Times.

So why is it given that much space and a purely vanilla description of the events and people involved, as if it is simultaneously a big deal deserving national attention and a weirdly blasé occurrence that requires no investigation — how can it be both controversial enough to warrant attention and so uncontroversial that the reporter can’t even be bothered to mention how ridiculous and anti-scientific this endeavor is?

It is an astonishingly insipid article. The only good (?) thing about it is that finally the NY Times breaks its bad habit of “he said, she said” journalism and didn’t even bother to contact a scientist to get the “other” side. You know, the rational, accurate, honest, scientific side.

I don’t have much hope for the Diane Sawyer story going on the air tonight, either. Anyone want to bet on whether Ham gets pitched some softballs and the park that encourages children to be stupid is treated as purely an economic development issue?

Vignette from the grading wars

I just finished off one big chunk of grading, and on this exam, as is my custom, I give students a few bonus points with an easy question at the end. It is also my custom every year to have one of those easy questions be, “Name a scientist, any scientist, who also happens to be a woman,” just to see if they’ve been paying attention.

About 10% of the class leave it blank. C’mon, it’s a free 2 points on a 100 point exam! Over half the time, I get the same mysterious answer: Marie Curie. We do not talk about Marie Curie in this class at all, and it’s always a bit strange that they have to cast their minds back over a century to come up with a woman scientist. Next year, I should change the question to “Name a scientist, any scientist, who also happens to be a woman, and isn’t named Marie Curie,” just to screw with their heads. They won’t be able to think of anyone but Marie Curie.

Second runner up is Jane Goodall. Again, we don’t talk about her, but I guess she is well known.

The one new answer this time around, though, and the one that made me laugh, was this: “Louise Pasteur.” Ah, the plight of the woman scientist…now students have to reach back into the 19th century and give a man a sex change in order to think of one.

Made me laugh. Didn’t get the student any points, though. I am so harsh.

OK, your turn: can you name ten female scientists off the top of your head?

Wait—I’m supposed to be on which side in this video?

Bigtime cognitive dissonance here. This is a promotional video for an organization opposing the current predatory banking system, and what do they use to represent the evil banks? “A great vampire squid, wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnell into anything that smells like money.”

I admire vampire squid, you know. Lovely creatures.

Also, vampire squid live in practically anoxic deep water environments, where metabolic activity is limited. They’re also very soft and fragile. They really get a bad rep, and are much, much nicer than bankers.

By the way, this is a British group, and if you’re of that persuasion, you should look into their proposals for banking reform.

It’s a strange phobia

The latest xkcd is an odd one. I know some people freak out a teeny tiny bit at the thought, but it never bothers me.

i-265ff94d9b1c3a33150c08dc475b011f-xkcd_parentsex.jpeg

I’m a first child, and I calculated back when I was conceived, and estimate that it was almost exactly the day of my parents’ wedding — which was an elopement. The two of them ran off at a young age to Idaho where they didn’t need to get parental permission to marry, and right away they had me. I find that wonderfully romantic and have always had the knowledge that my parents loved each other very much (and were also a bit crazy and impetuous and careless…well, and also loved kids a lot). The squeamishness about parental sex has always seemed a bit weird to me — don’t people want their parents to be happy?

Of course, I don’t want to know the details, OK? That’s personal and private and should remain between the participants, no voyeurs allowed.

And I definitely don’t want to know about my kids’ sex life. I just want them to have a happy one, and that’s enough knowledge for me.

Hmmm…maybe that’s the root of the fastidiousness—a concern for the privacy of the individuals involved?

Meltdown imminent

This will be an anxious week. It’s the last week of classes, I have piles of stuff to finish grading and get back to the students, and the students themselves are looking more than a little stressed. The last labs in my development course are falling apart thanks to animal intransigence and the incompetence of shippers. We have two job candidates visiting this week, and I’m on the search committee. And the end of my book writing project is in sight, with just the last little bits of polish and duct tape needed to make it all hang together. As usual, the universe has converged on this one little moment of time to maximize my personal tension.

So expect long periods of silence here, punctuated by brief eruptions of tooth-grindiness and fury. Trolls, lie low if persistence is a goal. Outbreaks of drama in the threads will be met with a combination of neglect and exasperation (oh, so nothing will change there, at least). Goats may spontaneously combust.

I am seriously looking forward to finals week when my tasks will be reduced to administering the last few bits of classes that got off to a bad start, and nothing else. But first I have to make it through this one.

Such blithe liars

I’m not getting a good opinion of people in New Jersey. They’ve got the awful George Berkin, a cretin who rants on NJ Online, and has a reputation as one of the dumbest jerks in the state. And he has commenters. I want to talk about one of them, Terry Hurlbut, who is a marvelous example of creationist pseudoscience and dishonesty. He’s commenting on a Berkin article that is characteristically crazy (it’s a defense of Christianity against atheism that cites CS Lewis’s trilemma), but Hurlbut goes beyond mere inanity to lie about science.

Take a look at this. Creationists only rarely get this arrogant in writing; usually they reserve this kind of total pseudoscientific BS for when they’ve got you one-on-one.

“Did people really live for hundreds of years?” Yes. Pre-Flood, carbon-14 was not present in the vast quantities that pervade our atmosphere today, and cosmogenic C-14 was very rare. During the Flood, the earth’s crust, wracked with magnitude-10-to-12 earthquakes and rich in quartz (which generates electricity when deformed), acted as a gigantic fast-breeding nuclear reactor and produced all of the radionuclides (up to uranium and arguably plutonium) known to man today. That included C-14, produced in tremendous quantities through cluster decay. And when C-14 gets into your system, and then decays, it can wreck whatever molecule (including DNA) of which it became a part. So the reason we *don’t* live hundreds of years today is that we are all suffering from radiation poisoning (or isotopic substitutional poisoning) and have forgotten what it was like not to be subject to such poisoning.

Wow. Breathtaking. So breaking quartz generates electricity (true so far), which with a little prestidigitation is equivalent to turning into a nuclear reactor, which produced all the radioactive elements present on earth in less than a year, and also distributed and mixed them throughout the earth’s crust and mantle. And somehow eight people in a wooden boat survived this remarkable upheaval. (I know, that part was a miracle. The rest was science. Right.)

And the reason we get old is that C-14 decomposes and breaks our DNA. This is a contributing factor, I’m sure, but this fantasy world where all carbon is C-12 never existed: most of the C-14 we’re breathing in is produced in the atmosphere, not some magical giant nuclear reactor beneath our feet, and the only way it wouldn’t happen is if the sun didn’t exist.

Then someone points out that tree ring data contradicts his claims, and Hurlbut ups the ante.

Tree rings are not necessarily annual. And the point is that the Flood, and the associated nuclear reactions in the earth’s crust, released virtually all of the C-14 present in the atmosphere today. Do you know of any experiment in an atmosphere totally free of C-14? I thought not. Isn’t it amazing, how we get used to something as “the new normal” and never consider that it’s the result of a serious health hazard introduced 4400 years ago?

See? His story must be true, because look — the atmosphere contains C14 today! Let’s all ignore the fact that we know how C14 is produced, and that it’s being constantly replenished.

And then he rants some more about the ferocity of his god’s wrath.

And hel-lo-ooooo! The Flood knocked down all the trees that were growing at the time! All the trees that grow today, sprouted after the Flood, not before. You have no concept of how violent an event the Flood was. Magnitude-10-to-12 earthquakes; a water jet powerful enough to throw 1 percent of the earth’s mass, as water, mud, and rock, into outer space; killer hailstorms that froze the mammoths (many of them standing up); and the formation of a protuberance (the Himalaya Range and the Tibetan Plateau) heavy enough to pull the earth off-balance and move the poles. (Which is what the mammoths were doing in the Arctic region in the first place; that used to be a lush tropical jungle.) Not to mention the big rocks that slammed into the Moon, mostly on one side of it, forming the “seas” and causing the Moon to turn one face toward earth and lock in place.

And all that is right there, in the Bible! I repeat: Eight people. Wooden boat. There’s kind of a low limit on how catastrophic the flood event could have been.

I do rather like the argument about the heavy Himalayas making the earth topple over and shift the poles. So why aren’t the Himalayas at the South Pole then, smart guy? Huh? (I know, that argument makes no sense, either.) I’m also struggling to imagine what his pre-flood geography was like…so where was Palestine before this big shift? And what was the orientation of the Earth’s axis of rotation prior to the big wobble?

I’m not seriously asking those questions, because I know how Hurlbut would respond: with more pseudoscience shouted very loudly and with complete and absolutely incompetent confidence. That’s the knack these creationists have; they don’t know anything, but they’re really, really good at making nonsense up, and expressing it with sublime certainty. That must be the training the Bible gives them.