Now we’ve got Gypsy Creationists

It’s good to know that in the ecosystem of inanity, we have village idiots, like Ken Ham, and itinerant idiots, like Sean Meek. Meek has created something called The Traveling Creation Museum as part of his life’s work of making people stupider.

The Traveling Creation Museum is available to come to your location. It has exhibits on the days of Creation, the Flood, the Ice Age, dinosaurs and much more. It shows how the real scientific and historical information supports the Genesis account of Creation.The Museum includes many authentic antiquities from the ancient world and reveals in a dramatic and visual manner the grandeur of God’s creation.

That’s all the detail I’ve been able to find on this thing. There doesn’t seem to be a formal schedule for it, I haven’t found any photographs, I’m a little disappointed. I suspect that what it actually is is that if you give him a call, a creepy Christian guy in a safari suit will show up in his van (or maybe, if I indulge in a flight of grandiose fantasy, it’s something as elegant as a Winnebago) and hector kids about how the Bible is completely and literally true in every word. He’s one of those guys, the ones who insist that the Bible must be accepted as the ultimate authority on everything, which means that the Earth must be 6000 years old, something the Bible doesn’t say.

Attempting to compromise the Bible is like pulling a thread on a cheap sweater; it all begins to unravel. Suddenly all the verses that speak of God’s mercy and forgiveness begin to look self-serving and manipulative. All of the Bible would be built on lies and deception. As important as the question of Creation is, it is not the central question. The central is, and always has been, is the Bible really God’s Word?

No.

Wow, that was easy.

Anyway, if anyone wants to check this thing out, we do have a confirmed destination: it will be in Gastonia, NC, in the First Wesleyan Church, across the street from the Dairy Queen. That’s good news — it’s not like someone would have to travel to this obscure little place to see a craptacular display of a god-wallopers ignorance, you could also get yourself an ice cream cone.

Proud Canadians have written in to tell me that they beat us: they have their own ignorant ass with plans for a traveling museum.

OK, OK, you beat us at hockey. Do you have to get so danged competitive about everything now?

Homeopathists should just hide their polls and lie low

It’s pointless for these loons to try and make their case with a goofy online poll, since we’ll just smack it down. Here’s another one.

Do you believe homeopathy is an effective form of treatment?

51%Yes
49%No

The evidence is all against it, and reason suggests there is no mechanism. Perhaps they ought to correct those deficiencies before playing poll games.

I hope this resolves the whole mess

Richard Dawkins has posted a clarification and apology. The key points are that he stands by Josh Timonen (and really, the vituperation against him that I saw was just absurdly excessive), the old forums will definitely be retained as a read-only archive, and the new forums are going to still allow free discussion, but the changes have the intent of focusing any new threads on topics relevant to the RDF.

Everyone moves on now, right?

Pat Robertson hasn’t said anything about the Chilean earthquake

There was a natural disaster somewhere, so I opened my mailbox to find lots of links to Pat Robertson saying stupid things about the Chilean earthquake, like this one and this one and this one and this one.

Sorry, gang, I don’t believe it. Not only do I expect that nowadays, when his staff at the radio and television stations hear about a disaster, the first thought in their heads is how to stifle Pat, but some of those accounts are clearly satire, and they all say something different. It’s become the obvious expectation that Robertson will blame something stupid for natural events, and everyone is jumping the gun. Write to me when you’ve got video straight from the 700 Club, and not before.

Climate change denialists = climate change liars

The denialists are at it again in the comments, parroting the latest lie.

UEA CRU’s Dr Phil Jones agrees there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.

Wow. You’d think they’d realize that twisting the words of a scientist around 180° from what they actually said is a very bad strategy — it would be like trying to claim that I’d decided evolution was false. This is no exception. Deltoid has a wonderfully clear quote:

This led to a Daily Mail headline reading: “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995.”

Since I’ve advocated a more explicit use of the word “lie”, I’ll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie. Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995. However, over that time frame, he could not quite rule out at the traditional 95% confidence level that the warming since 1995 had not been a random fluke.

Anyone who has even a passing high-school familiarity with statistics should understand the difference between these two statements. At a longer time interval, say 30 or 50 or 100 years, Mr Jones could obviously demonstrate that global warming is a statistically significant trend. In the interview he stated that the warming since 1975 is statistically significant. Everyone, even climate-change sceptics, agrees that the earth has experienced a warming trend since the late 19th century. But if you take any short sample out of that trend (say, 1930-45 or 1960-75), you might not be able to guarantee that the particular warming observed in those years was not a statistical fluke. This is a simple truth about statistics: if you measure just ten children, the relationship between age and height might be a fluke. But obviously the fact remains that older children tend to be taller than younger ones, and if you measure 100 of them, you’ll find the relationship quite statistically significant indeed.

What’s truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.

Bad, bad Webkit

I’ve been going insane this morning, thinking I might have mysteriously lost my ability to type, or even recognize valid HTML…and I’ve been seeing really weird stuff everywhere I type on the web.

It looks like the problem is Webkit, the browser I usually use. I updated it this morning, and it seems to have decided that normal spaces aren’t good enough anymore, and is inserting non-breaking spaces instead. It’s been an infuriatingly difficult problem to track down, because I do most of my composing offline in a text-editor that isn’t afflicted with this bug, and it’s just when I edit that I end up inserting invalid garbage into my stuff.

Anyway, it looks like I’m giving up Webkit and switching to Firefox.