My last class for the semester is over as of this minute. All that’s left is to proctor one final exam, and then…the horror of grading. Exams and more exams and term papers and lab reports, all to be done next week.
I guess I can’t quite celebrate freedom just yet. But I will soon enough. I’ll probably get wild and read a book or something.
Put a couple of illustrators together to draw superheroes, each one able to defeat the previous one, and what do you get? Weirdness. Especially when one of the superheroes is…The Creationist.
The ability to make evidence disappear sounds powerful, until you realize that all it really is is the ability to close his eyes very tightly.
And the outcome is pretty ugly for Christianity. The lesson from this story is that when people set aside their religious beliefs, they can be decent to one another; when they use them to provoke violence, well, they look rather stupid.
My university is making a big push for the environment, with an environmental studies curriculum being added, an ongoing effort for energy independence with wind and biomass power, and conservation in the construction of a new green dorm, so this holiday project for everyone is particularly appropriate: apply sustainable building design practices to a gingerbread house. Get to work, you’ve got until 31 December to submit photos.
I’m thinking we need to take all that sugar and convert it to alcohol…
Hector Avalos sent me his response to the Discovery Institute’s ‘shocking’ revelation that people had been discussing Guillermo Gonzalez’s affiliation with Intelligent Design creationism before they denied him tenure. It’s a classic pointless objection: of course they were, and of course his openly expressed, unscientific beliefs which were stated as a representative of ISU were a serious consideration. It does not speak well of the Discovery Institute that they had to cobble together quote-mines from the email to try and make a non-case for a non-issue.
All right, this comic convinces me that the tactics of godless rationalism and saintly religion are indistinguishable.
(I’ll also be curious to see how many creationists overlook the sarcasm and accuse me of wanting to torture them on the rack…)
This exercise in false equivalence, Duelity, is beautifully animated but promotes a poor idea. It’s basically two videos, one telling the Christian creation myth inaccurately and in the style of a scientific explanation, and another that inaccurately summarizes the evolution story as if it were holy writ. There’s a pretense that these are equally valid descriptions of the history of the world that is completely wrong, and that amplifies the errors throughout the individual stories from mere irritations to dishonest propaganda.
The comments there are largely positive. All I can assume from that is that a lot of people are easily swayed by good production values.
I have to consider this a rather dispiriting story:
In 1818, a whale oil dealer refused to pay a fish-product fine on whale oil, because a whale isn’t a fish. The inspector insisted on the tax, and a spirited court and public battle played out.
It’s dispiriting because you’d think the weight of scientific evidence (and if you prefer it, the testimony of no less an authority than Aristotle) would have settled this case easily, but no…the whale lost and was declared a fish.
In a field of nightmares, it takes a special person to elevate themselves to the position of the worst of the worst…and Huckabee is that special person.
