This is an awesome coincidence. The availablity of all those quantifiable metrics extracted by Google Books has fueled the establishment of a Science Hall of Fame, which lists scientists by an objective measure of their fame, the frequency with which they are cited in books. It was announced in Science, where they also introduced a new unit of measure, the milli-Darwin.

To be able to compare scientists to one another, it is helpful to have a standard unit of fame. I proposed one that would make this kind of fame easy to comprehend: the Darwin. It is defined as the average annual frequency that “Charles Darwin” appears in English-language books from the year when he was 30 years old (1839) until 2000. Because it is such a big unit of fame, it has proved more convenient to use one-thousandth of that frequency: the milli-Darwin, abbreviated as mD.

Here’s the list of over 4,000 famous scientists. Some of them aren’t famous for science — Lewis Carroll, for instance — but all are notable people.

So where’s the coincidence? It turns out that on the same day the Science Hall of Fame was announced, a small gang of loons announced the Creation Science Hall of Fame, “Honoring those who honored God’s Word as literally written in Genesis.” There are a few differences between the two halls. The creation science group, unsurprisingly, is begging for money: they want $4 million in donations. Why? They want to build a physical monument somewhere in the neighborhood of the Creation “Museum,” which sounds like a horrible idea to me. It would create a black hole of concentrated stupidity in the heart of Kentucky that might destroy the world!

Another difference is that they aren’t using any kind of objective metric to identify famous creationists — apparently, they just look around and pick someone from the godly pantheon. So far, they’ve got two: Henry Morris and Duane Gish. Two against the 4,000+ in the Science Hall of Fame. Sounds about right, although zero would be a better number.

Also, opening up the door to scrutiny like that just means the scientists will use the Google microscope to examine the creationist nominees. It doesn’t look good. Creationists like to compare Gish to TH Huxley — “Gish has been called ‘creationism’s T.H. Huxley,” says Wikipedia — but now we can actually compare Gish and Huxley. Huxley gets 102mD. Gish gets 5.

No contest. It was very nice of the creationists to step into the arena and get such a drubbing, though.

Ken Ham is complaining bitterly about the newspaper article that showed his attendance estimates for the Ark Park are unlikely. He’s reduced to nonsensical whines about persecution, and acts as if he’s baffled about the criticisms.

The article raises a question: why is the Courier-Journal even concerned with possible attendance at the Ark? If the attraction does not meet its projected figures, the state government and its citizens are not impacted—except positively, in that the attraction will still produce state sales tax to benefit Kentucky and its citizens regardless of the attendance. So why the paper’s concern? Where is the story? Ultimately, what is the article’s author, an “investigative” reporter, supposedly investigating here? If backers of a tourist attraction like an amusement park with thrill rides would also want to locate in Kentucky and its feasibility study showed 1.6 million guests the first year, would the paper also “investigate”?

Poor dumb Ken. I’ll try to explain.

Even without considering the finances, people are right to be concerned about the construction of another exhibit dedicated to ignorance in the state. It harms their reputation, it is bad for education, and it can have long-term consequences for the economy that are not good. Do you really want to be known as the state with the really stupid workforce?

This is not an automatic win situation for the state, no matter how Ham tries to spin it. The state will be investing resources in this project, and while Ken Ham seems unconcerned if the actual attendance is much less than the estimate, the state should be: that affects the economic viability of the project. Granting millions of dollars in incentives to a big theme park that flops is not good for the state.

If Answers in Genesis were not looking for state money and expecting the state to expand the highways and other infrastructure projects, and was the sole contributor to the expenses, there wouldn’t be as much concern about the funny numbers in their feasibility study…but they aren’t alone. They’re looking to drag down other investors with a scheme built on unreliable numbers.

And yes, if a non-religious group showed up in the state and asked for a $50 million handout to build their theme park, I’m sure the paper would investigate. Dodgy schemes with a poor record of success are always ripe for investigative reporting.

Ham ought to read this opinion piece. It lays out the facts very clearly.

In the latest shoe to drop, Courier-Journal reporter Andrew Wolfson wrote in Sunday’s editions that a half-dozen theme-park experts find that the developers’ estimates of 1.6 million annual visitors to the Ark park are wildly optimistic.

They note that Kentucky Kingdom, which is now closed but hopes to reopen in 2012, and Holiday World in Southern Indiana have never attracted that many people, despite being long-standing institutions and offering a broader appeal. Ark Encounter would actually be less of an amusement park than an outdoor museum to a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the belief that the world was created in six days as recently as 6,000 years ago and that humans co-existed with dinosaurs.

To attract 1.6 million visitors, the park — again, absent significant tourist facilities — would have to attract four times as many visitors as the nearby Creation Museum.

The record elsewhere is not encouraging. Bible Park USA, whose two proposals to build biblical-story parks in Tennessee were rejected, is exploring Southern Kentucky sites, also with state tax incentives. Holy Land USA, which opened in Virginia in 1972, closed in 2009. Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Fla., struggled with declining attendance and rising costs and debt until it was sold to the nation’s largest religious broadcaster. It gets a little over 200,000 visitors a year.

Indeed, the saturated theme-park market and the depressed economy make times tough for any new park. The most recent large amusement park, the Hard Rock Park in Myrtle Beach, S.C., closed five months after opening in 2008 and failed again the following year under new management, leaving investors, contractors and vendors in the lurch.

That’s reality. It says that the extravagant expectations of the feasibility study Ken Ham’s pal scribbled up (and which they are still keeping secret) are unlikely to be met, and yet another theme park with a very narrow focus is a poor investment. I know he’s not used to dealing with facts, but other people are.

Of course, I don’t care much about the economics. I’m more concerned that this is yet another effort to put together a giant exercise in miseducation for the state, where a small group of ignorant people are the recipients of large amounts of money that they use to lie to the public. The Ark story is nonsense, it never happened and couldn’t happened, and building expensive monuments to fairy tales sends a cracked and damaging message to the citizenry.

Ken “The Squealing Piglet” Ham is irate again. The Louisville Courier-Journal ran an article today (a print-only exclusive, so I haven’t been able to read it) in which they had independent experts review Ham’s claims about prospective attendance at his silly theme park. The headline is “Ark park attendance claims exaggerated, theme-park experts say”, so I can guess at the gist of the analysis.

Ham is complaining about how the newspapers dare to question his estimates.

Mark Looy, our CCO, has sent me a report on how the two state newspapers have been misrepresenting the project and are determined, apparently, to move it out of the state and take millions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs with it. How is that for responsible journalism when they not only horribly misrepresent the Ark Encounter, but do so in a time with a shaky economy and so many people unemployed?

And then he accuses the newspapers of being on a vendetta.

Today a terrible anti-Ark Encounter article (actually, a “non-story”) has appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper, Kentucky’s largest-circulation paper. They just don’t let up in their anti-Christian agenda driven vendetta against this phenomenal project. We are preparing a response that will be our lead article on the www.AnswersInGenesis.org website. As we are composing the rebuttal now, we’ll take my blog item from Saturday and update and adapt it as our response to a newspaper that seems to want to have the Ark be built in another state — and apparently doesn’t care about the thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars that would end up elsewhere. Not very pro-Kentucky, is it, for a Kentucky paper?

He keeps insisting that the people who oppose his theme park are doing it because they’re anti-Kentucky. They aren’t. The writers at the Courier-Journal are pro-Kentucky. I’m pro-Kentucky. I’ll even agree that Ken “The Squealing Piglet” Ham is probably pro-Kentucky. Where we differ is that we think ideas about economic improvement for the state ought to be based on sound, objective financial estimates rather than surveys of dubious value authored by a close friend of the benificiary and relying entirely on conflating pro-religion values with the likelihood of attending his folly, and that maybe a putative educational and entertainment attraction build around the disproven premise that the earth was destroyed by a god 4,000 years ago isn’t the best use of state money, even if it were profitable.

If anyone has read that newspaper today, a brief summary in the comments would be appreciated!

If you’ve been following Richard Hoppe’s coverage of the John Freshwater trial on the Panda’s Thumb, you know this event has been dragging along like the OJ trial, only with less media pandemonium and now, at last, a less unsatisfying outcome. Freshwater, you may recall, is the bible-thumping public school science teacher who was more interested in promoting Christianity than science in the classroom, and whose most egregious error was using a gadget to burn crosses into students’ arms.

He’ll be getting his sadistic Christian jollies at the expense of students no more: John Freshwater has been officially terminated from employment by the Mount Vernon school district.

It’s a win-win situation. Now the students will (we hope) get decent science educations and no longer be afflicted with an evangelical freak, and Freshwater can now move on to his lucrative new career as martyr.

There is one loser, though: the taxpayers of Mount Vernon, Ohio. They get to pay the $900,000 bill. That’s a message that every school district should take to heart—if you’ve got a teacher who uses the public school classroom to proselytize, to peddle religion or creationism, you’ve got a major liability on your hands.

David Menton, Andrew Snelling and Georgia Purdom, three creationists working at the Creation “Museum”, have written an outraged op-ed correcting some misconceptions about them. I read this far before I had to stop:

For one, the guest columnist, Roger Guffey, claimed there were no “serious” scientists who are creationists. We are full-time Ph.D. researchers with the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis in Northern Kentucky, and we will be helping to design the full-scale Noah’s Ark and other attractions to be built north of Lexington.

There are thousands of serious scientists who doubt evolution. At the Creation Museum, we have full-time staff with earned doctorates (one from an Ivy League school) in astrophysics, geology, cell biology, genetics, medicine and the history of geology, plus several adjunct speakers and researchers who hold doctorate degrees.

Our intrepid three claim to be scientists, part of a body of real, genuine, credentialed scientists who support the claims of Answers in Genesis. Let’s stop right there. There’s something you have to understand about the staff of the Creation “Museum”: they all have to sign a testimonial that asserts, among other things, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. These are self-proclaimed scientists who flout the evidence to argue for an absurd conclusion. I’m not talking about “interpreting the same facts” differently, as they like to claim, but ignoring and denying the evidence that refutes their dogma.

That’s all you need to know. David Menton, Andrew Snelling and Georgia Purdom are all absolutely certain that the creation of the earth is an event that occurred somewhere near the end of human prehistory, which was itself a very late, geologically recent event in the history of the universe. How absurd is that claim?

The city of Jericho — it’s in the Bible, look it up — is 11,000 years old. Isn’t it remarkable that a city with a population of zero sprang up on a planet that didn’t exist at the time? The chthonic dingleberries of Answers in Genesis would apparently have you believe one of our oldest urban centers must have been floating in the primordial chaos, waiting for Jehovah to conjure up the Jordan river and the West Bank and the Middle East and the Mediterranean and the firmament and the sun and stars.

Six thousand years ago, the Plano culture was hunting bison on the Great Plains. The predynastic Egyptians of the Naqada period were colonzing the Nile. The precursors to the Indus River civilization were making copper tools and growing barley. The Mesopotamians were building city states. The people of the Hongshan culture were carving jade dragons in northeastern China; the Yangshao were producing silk along the Yangtze river; the Majiabang people were cultivating rice and pigs. The ancient Britons were building tombs and erecting wooden posts on Salisbury plain, precursors to Stonehenge. The Funnelbeaker people were trading pottery across northern Europe, while the Chasséen people were living in a village near the site of modern Paris. All this at a time when the human population of planet Earth, according to this risible trio, was two. What did Adam and Eve do? Commute a lot?

People were manipulating the precursors to modern wheat, rice, barley, taro, and soy at least 9000 years ago; Sumerians had invented irrigation 7000 years ago; and Mesoamericans began to tweak teosinte by artificial selection about 6000 years ago. The crops we grow are the product of millennia of selection and cultivation, and show the marks of our ancient biotechnology. The bread that God casually commanded Adam to sweat over and eat for all the days of his life after the Fall was already the product of thousands of years of development.

A middle-aged woman in northern Israel died and was buried with her puppy dog…twelve thousand years ago. We know the first dogs with skeletal indications of domestication appeared over 30,000 years ago. What kind of crazy cosmology do the loons of AiG have when they have to account for a world they claim is 24,000 years younger than Fido and Rover?

There is a colonial colony of shrubs in Tasmania called King’s Lomatia that is probably over 40,000 years old. They can’t produce sexually, so they’ve just been propagating vegatively, clone after clone after clone, right through the whole creation of the world, according to a certain small dismal clan of meretricians. In fact, those plants were well into late middle age when the god of the Hebrews purportedly decided to create real estate.

According to these “scientists,” all of modern geology, from the Himalayas to the ocean trenches, was formed in one immense cataclysmic event that occurred over the course of a single year, four thousand years ago; an event that essentially sterilized all multicellular life on Earth except for one small family and their livestock who weathered the catastrophe in a wooden boat. That was some disaster, and that must have been some boat.

Now the people who believe this unscientific nonsense claim to be “serious scientists.” I don’t think so. They haven’t demonstrated that their superstitions are serious science at all; all they’ve shown is that some few people who are totally nuts can graduate with doctorates. Which is not a surprise, and is actually a far more parsimonious conclusion than their bizarre idea that all of physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and biology are completely wrong.

The Lexington Herald-Leader has posted a copy of the executive summary. Just in case it goes away, here is a pdf of the 18-page executive summary; it’s a strangely fact-free document, relying on surveys and opinion polls to make estimates about economic impact. I’m serious: in the section that justifies the claim that it will bring in 1.2 million visitors a year, the sole source of information given is the results of a nationwide survey in which people were asked whether they’d take a family vacation to see Noah’s Ark, and 3 in 5 said they would.

I am reminded of surveys that evaluate how many Americans go to church — many more say they do than show up in church parking lots. This is not a reliable way to make attendance projections. A better way would be to make estimates from known, similar attractions in that part of the country, but they probably didn’t want to mention the bankrupt Heritage USA.

The most hilarious bit in their justification, though, is this:

CBS’ 60 Minutes news program, in conjunction with Vanity Fair magazine, recently conducted a survey asking which archaeological discovery would people want to be made next. The response: Noah’s Ark (43%), Atlantis (18%), Amelia Earhart’s plane (16%), Nixon’s lost tapes (13%), and Cleopatra’s barg (5%). Noah’s Ark continues to capture the imagination of the general public, and this interest spans all social, religious, and economic segments. The Ark and the Flood is one of the few historical events which are well known in the worldwide global circle.

That sort of says it all about the foundation of their “research”. A public opinion poll about what discovery ought to be made next (as if it’s a matter of choice) is irrelevant; the Ark Park is not going to be an archaeological discovery, and the most damning thing about the top two items is that they’re both mythological, and neither the Ark nor Atlantis ever existed. The claim that interest in the Ark spans all segments of society is clearly hyperbole — I don’t see much interest on the part of atheists or scientists, ever.

The ark and the flood are not historical events.

It’s a lot of fluff and wishful thinking. Sorry, Kentucky, you’re being taken for a ride.

Ken Ham is not happy with the Pope. If the Pope claims that his god started the Big Bang, that is an acknowledgment that the Big Bang, which is not in the Bible, actually happened, and you know what that leads to? Madness!

Now, if the book of Genesis is an allegory, then sin is an allegory, the Fall is an allegory, the need for a Savior is an allegory, and Adam is an allegory—but if we are all descendants of an allegory, where does that leave us? It destroys the foundation of all Christian doctrine—it destroys the foundation of the gospel.

Yes! Exactly!

If Genesis is an allegory then the first marriage is just an allegory, so marriage can be anything one wants to define it as!

QED!

Yay! Ken Ham has demolished Christianity! I think I’ll go have some tea to celebrate. Maybe take a nap, or read a comic book.

This brief exchange captures it all.

Just to put it in text: creationist ignoramus posts amazing “fact” in his status:

** Fact- if the earth was 10 ft closer to the sun we would all burn up and if it was 10 ft further we would freeze to death… God is amazing!

Someone politely replies, stating the actual astronomical facts.

to anyone wondering, that’s not true. 1) Earth’s orbit is elliptical and the distance from the sun varies from around 147 million kilometers to 152 million kilometers on any given year. 2) Every star has a habitable zone that is affected by the size of the star and its intensity. The Sun’s habitable zone is about 0.95 AU to 1.37 AU. An AU is the Earth’s average distance from the sun, 93 million miles, so Earth’s orbit could decrease by 4,500,000 miles or increase by 34,000,000 mises and still be in the habitable zone. 3) If your claim was true any moderately sized earthquake could take us out of the habitable zone. sorry.

The facebook status was hilarious enough, but his reply is simply perfect.

Okay thats cool and alll but dont ever comment on my status telling me that i am wrong everrrr again. I didnt ask you did i? Answer: NO

LALALALALA — I CAN’T HEAR YOU!