It won’t work

Saint Gasoline speculates about a common idea: using a time machine to travel far in the future to reap the benefits of compound interest. It won’t work!

  1. Lots of bank accounts get abandoned — forgotten, the owner dies, etc., but you don’t have a lot of bankers sitting around fretting, “Uh-oh, Marcus Junius Glabrius deposited 15 denarii in 61 BC, and never closed his account. I sure hope he doesn’t come strolling in tomorrow, or we’ll have to give him Switzerland, France, and a couple of small African nations to cover the interest.” No. That’s because the bankers sit around watching their accounts, and when Marcus doesn’t stop by for a century they say, “Oh ho! That money is mine, now!” Either that or the next regime sweeps in, confiscates all the money and sets fire to the records, and uses the bank building to quarter their horses or mistresses.

  2. St. G regrets that his plan has the unfortunate glitch that while he is a billionaire, he has to live under the tentacles of the giant squid overlords. This is of no concern. When the squid overlords see St. G, they don’t see a banking customer: they see a pleasing sample of mushi (it’s like sushi, only it’s from the future, and it uses mammal meat and doesn’t bother with the rice and seaweed. Or the little cups of sake. Or table manners.)

Thursday is going to be a busy day

Hey, University of Missouri-Columbia readers: Elliot Sober is coming your way. At 4:00 on the 20th (this week!), Elliot Sober will be speaking on Evolution versus Intelligent Design. It should be fun; somebody report back to me, OK?

Closer to my home, Steve Pinker will be speaking at the Minneapolis Public Library at 7:00 on the same day on ‘The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature.’ I might be able to make it to that one.

Carnivalia, and an open thread

It’s late, I’m going to be unconscious in my bed, those of you with insomnia or living in distant time zones need something to chat about — so here, just for you, it’s a Pharyngula Late Night open thread, primed with a few fun carnivals.

What’s that? It’s not enough? Late night chats need something really weird to keep them lively? OK, here, how about Creation Ministries International. Be sure to read their “What we believe” page — this is the Christianity everybody assures me doesn’t really exist.

Still not enough? How about the Hovindite efforts to suppress free speech on the web? Yeah, I know, just annoying and creepy.

Hindus riot over blasphemy! Bridge built by army of monkeys saved!

Hmmm. Tough crowd. How about “Priest defrauds congregation! Lives in luxury on proceeds from promises never kept!” Dang. But they all do that.

Sorry, gang. I’ve got nothing. You’ll have to entertain yourselves for a while.

Hallelujah! The GOP presidential train wreck has been SAVED!!

By the addition of a new candidate who actually believes in God. Yes, everyone, Alan Keyes has entered the race.

Dear jebus, why is the race for the election of the president of the most militarily powerful country on earth such a ludicrous joke? Shouldn’t this be an office for serious people with serious plans and serious expertise, and shouldn’t certifiable lunatics like Keyes be given the cold shoulder? (Oh, right: they can’t do that, because if sanity were a prerequisite, the entire Republican slate would evaporate.)

R. Josiah Magnuson

Take note of that name, just in case. This ambitious young zealot might just be a future president of the Christian States of America (in which case, look for me at my new home in Australia).

More likely, though, he’ll be one of those desperate men in shabby suits handing out bizarre political pamphlets at the mall, wondering why his life is such a sad sack of futility. But you never know! Maybe he’ll be incredibly successful, and instead end up cowering in a bunker with a pistol, wondering why his life is such a sad sack of futility.

Marine invertebrate temptations

People, don’t do this to me. I’ve got all this work I’ve got to get done so that I’m free to go on a date this evening, and you keep sending me these distractions. Like, for instance, this link to a collection of Marine Invertebrate Video and Film Stock Footage. Cephalopods and nudibranchs and crustaceans and salps, all categorized (there’s even an invertebrate mating category! With 421 clips! It’s free porn!) and with thousands of high resolution videos. The previews are all free, but you can also license HD video of these beautiful action shots.

I will be disciplined, though. I’m closing the web page. I will get my writing done. I will put these links here though, so I can later return to “Brain coral spawning” and “Moray tears arms from octopus” and “Flamboyant cuttlefish feeding” and “Siphonophore With Extending Tenacles”.

Back to work.

Maybe there’s time for “Pelagic Tunicate In The Twilight Zone”?

No. Work. Get things done.

Oh, but I want…!

If you’ve ever been tempted to visit the Big Valley Creation Science Museum…

…don’t bother.

i-efb25d25b855d1584009ff6643ce1bab-big_valley.jpg

A reader sent me a link to his photo set from the BVCSM, and I’m afraid all you’ll find there is the Wall O’ Text approach to instruction. You know what that is: print out a page from Answers in Genesis, blow it up real big, and slap it on a wall … instant museum!

There is one amusing revelation — creationists sometimes have the wackiest ideas — and it made me laugh.

Did you know that ALL dinosaur footprint fossils found are pointing in the same direction?! This is IRREFUTABLE PROOF of the dinosaurs running from a global flood!

Creation Logic 101: you don’t need any! And now that you know everything that’s entertaining about the place, you won’t need to pay out $5 to some nut in a small town in Alberta, Canada to see it. Go to the Royal Tyrrell instead.

Actually, the funniest comment I’ve seen in a while is a testimonial proudly displayed at the top of the BVCSM website:

“I spent more time in this museum than I did in the Smithsonian”

The picture at the top of this article is the Big Valley Creation Science Museum: a small remodeled ranch house. This is the Smithsonian Institution: 19 museums and 9 research institutions, and over 100 million objects in their collections. That statement above is a testimonial to the delusions of the creationists, nothing more.

Ladders and cranes everywhere!

There is a painful assumption of progress in many interpretations of evolution — and sometimes it’s by people who ought to know better. T. Ryan Gregory finds a ghastly example of a figure that, by cherry-picking the data and doing a little suggestive ordering of the presentation, makes it look like there’s a correlation between the amount of non-coding DNA and organismal complexity. Fortunately, he counters it with a much more useful chart (that I’m definitely stealing for the next time I teach genetics) with no such bias.

And then Larry Moran tops Gregory with an even worse figure. I don’t quite understand it; maybe this distortion of the evidence to support progress, increasing molecular complexity, and the superiority of humans has roots in misunderstandings before my time, because my genetics and cell biology instructors in the 1970s sure didn’t promote this nonsense then. We were told even in those ancient days that the C-value paradox wasn’t a problem if you didn’t try to shoehorn mammals into a position at the pinnacle of evolution.

Maybe I just had really good professors. Thanks, Arthur Whiteley and Larry Sandler!