Paint like an Egyptian

I knew that ancient sculptors would paint their statues, rather than leaving them as plain stone, as we usually see them — the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for instance, is adorned on the outside with classical-style sculptures painted in lifelike colors, and they are amazing. It’s too bad the colors of winged Nike and Venus de Milo and all those statuary busts aren’t restored as well.

Pediment_Philly_Art_Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing something interesting, though. Egyptian art was also painted in bright colors, so what the Met is doing with the Temple of Dendur is painting it with light, using projection mapping, to hint at what it looked like in its glory days.

Gorgeous. I want to see it. I want a time machine so I can really see what it was like, too.

It’s too early in the morning to peek at the ugly underbelly of the internet

Thanks, Dave Futrelle! Now I’m sleepy and nauseated!

It seems that Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulous (and an army of unmentioned, unpaid interns), those darlings of the discredited ‘news’ site, breitbart.com, have churned out a defense of the alternative right. It’s tedious and stupid and tries very hard to gloss over reality, but here’s Shorter Breitbart:

We aren’t racists, we’re just frustrated intellectuals who enjoy shit-posting!

Hilariously, the Daily Stormer has responded. Shorter Stormer:

We are too racists, and we hate you degenerate gay jew-boys and mud people! Heil Hitler!

A pox on you both.

I’d go back to bed, but now I’m wide awake and disgusted.

Louisiana, where even the Democrats are science denialists

Watch State Sen. John Milkovich make his case for creationism before the Louisiana legislature. He’s a Democrat. I’m so embarrassed.

This guy just sits there and lies his ass off, supremely confident that the truth doesn’t matter in the least.

Scientific research and developments and advances in the last 100 years — particularly the last 15, 20, 10 years — have validated the biblical story of creation by archaeological discovery of civilizations in the middle east that seculars said did not exist …

No, science has not validated Genesis. The Earth is not just a few thousand years old, there was no global flood, all animals were not created in a single week. Finding evidence of a civilization mentioned in the Bible that “seculars” never heard of is not evidence for all the miraculous poofing described in the book.

And what civilization is that? It seems entirely reasonable to me that the authors of the Bible would have good knowledge of contemporary cultures, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some obscure people mentioned in the Bible were confirmed by trustworthy evidence. On the other hand, some of the treasured stories of the Bible are being found incredible and lacking in evidence. The Exodus almost certainly didn’t happen, for instance.

there is some published research that a large boat or ark was found on top of Mt Ararat …

Published…where? On the web pages of Ron Wyatt? Because no, there is no credible evidence of a 4000 year old big boat sitting on a mountaintop in Turkey.

But hang on, here comes my favorite part of his argument.

the notion of instantaneous creation has been validated by the scientific study of heliocentric circles in rocks which is consistent with an instantaneous…I guess I’m asking this. Are you aware that there’s an abundance of recent science that actually confirms the Genesis account of creation?

He doesn’t say instantanous what — he just lurches off into more assertions. But still, I’m amazed at heliocentric circles in rocks. What does that even mean? Is he saying something in the rocks circles around the sun? Or is this some strangely garbled version of Gentry’s bogus polonium halos claim, which, even if you believed it, does not say anything about instantaneous anything — he uses them to claim that the earth is young.

I think he’s just pompously pleased at being able to seem wise by babbling out a 5-syllable word. Incorrectly. Which makes him look like a world-class fool.

And no, there is no recent science that actually confirms the Genesis account of creation. All of the science says that the literal interpretation contradicts the evidence.

Friday Cephalopod: Squid in Spaaaaace!

The Squid Scientists take a photo of their baby animals, and unwittingly reveal what they’re actually doing.

spacesquid

Look behind the squid — I know it’s hard, why would you want to look past cephalopods? — and what do you see? That blurry poster in the background? It’s a space shuttle launch.

And now you know. This is a top secret program to train Euprymna scolopes to pilot spacecraft. They’d probably be better at 3-dimensional thinking than us, so it’s only natural. Quick, reboot Star Trek with a more appropriate cast!

Oh, I think it’s been done–the Thermians from the Klaatu Nebula in Galaxy Quest. Man, that was a prescient movie.

If I’m really good, in my next life I get to be a librarian

Librarians noticed something about their clientele.

Of the 5,000 people who visit the San Francisco Public Library every day, about 15 percent of them are homeless, PBS reported. After years of watching this underserved demographic float through to get Internet access, a restroom and often, just refuge from the cold, the library realized…

Wait. Before we go on, allow me to channel my inner Libertarian/Republican.

THEY REALIZED THESE PARASITES WERE LEECHING OFF THE TAXPAYER, SO THEY INSTALLED UNCOMFORTABLE CHAIRS TO PREVENT NAPPING AND REDUCED THE HEAT TO 50°F AND REQUIRED PROOF OF HOME OWNERSHIP TO USE THE WIFI AND PUT IN PAY TOILETS AND HIRED SECURITY GUARDS TO ROUST THE RIFF-RAFF.

Actually, that wasn’t their response. They realized…

it was in an auspicious position to stage effective interventions.

So, in 2009, the library hired Leah Esguerra, who is believed to be the nation’s first psychiatric social worker to be employed full time at a library, SFGate reported. Since the program started, about 150 homeless people have received permanent housing, and another 800 have enrolled in social and mental health services, according to PBS.

The success is due in part to the fact that the library has become a hub for homeless people, and that those involved in the program approach homeless patrons with empathy.

Holy christ, Jesus has returned to Earth as a swarm of librarians.

That is so awesome. That is exactly how a community should respond to the underprivileged and needy, by helping them.

Do you have to take a test for basic humanity in order to become a librarian? I’m not sure I’m angelic enough to ever meet the requirements.

And if that tingled your feels, you are now required to read this Superman comic.

Every day is April Fool’s Day for fools

I guess Ken Ham is feeling the sting of all those comments about the absurdity of his efforts to build a “life size” ark — he’s got cranes and steel reinforcements and concrete and a swarm of construction crews laboring to assemble his boondoggle, yet somehow, this giant imaginary boat was supposed to have been built by one guy and his sons 4000 years ago, out of wood. How to reconcile the contemporary tech of his construct with the basic woodworking skills of a Mesopotamian carpenter? Easy! Imagine they had super-scientific engineering technology that has been lost to us! You want proof? He’s not joking: archaeologists found non-stick frying pans in Roman sites, therefore, Noah might have had diesel trucks.

The truth is that we don’t know what kind of technologies Noah had—details are not given in the Bible. But we do know that all people are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), and man was intelligent, resourceful, creative, and innovative from the beginning. We also know people were already working with metals such as bronze and iron and were playing musical instruments (Genesis 4:21–22) long before Noah was born. People were also living over 900 years—imagine what geniuses like Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, or Thomas Edison could’ve accomplished if they’d lived that long! By the time of Noah, they may have had technology we would envy today.

And we find evidence that this might be the case. In the generations after the Flood, Noah’s descendants built pyramids in Egypt and ziggurats in South America that engineers have been trying to explain for years. Since much of their technology disappeared with these civilizations, we still don’t know how they accomplished these architectural feats. But we’re continually getting glimpses of the genius of ancient man.

A recent discovery made in Italy sheds more light on the intelligence of our ancestors. If you cook, you probably know the frustration of everything sticking to your frying pan. Well, people 2,000 years ago did too! So they invented non-stick frying pans. Found in a garbage dump near Naples, the high-quality pottery pans featured a “red-slip coating” to keep food from sticking.

That is, they had pans made with really fine-grained clay, to give a particularly smooth surface. Yeah, I’m convinced. Maybe Noah did have CAD and giant cranes, because Roman pottery.

cranes

And for all that, his damned boat still won’t float.