I'm busily tied up for the most of the day at the Twin Cities branch of the University of Minnesota — Skatje is taking the new student tour because she plans to transfer here in a year — but I also took advantage of this visit to get my own copy of Haryun Yahya's Atlas of Creation. My thanks to Aaron Barnes, who rescued a copy from a recycling bin here, It's a behemoth!
As everyone has said, it's full of pretty pictures, but the content … well, it leaves much to be desired. It's mostly a collection of pictures of fossils and animals that asserts a non-existent contradiction between them and what evolution predicts, followed by text that claims most of the fossils we have are fakes.
I haven't had a chance to look closely, though. Skatje won't let me have it — she's leafing through it and giggling.
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Psst. PZ! Close your HTML tag! Your external link is dangling!
Eeek! Runaway link! Save the lobsters and fetch the booze!
The only more appropriate thing to do with that book [than laugh at it] is to, well, place it in the recycling bin. Let's hope it ends back where this little adventure started.
Actually, it's going on my bookshelf, right next to Behe's Edge of Evolution.
Look for "Atlas of Creation" listings on eBay...you can get
both volumes...and some kids books...CRAZY!
Lucky academics, it's 800 pages.
They won't have to shop
For loo roll for ages.
A number of people have mentioned the impressive artwork in Yahya's book. Creationists have learned the advantages of educating (or at least propagandizing) with attractive graphics that attract attention and engage people.
We often talk about needing better science education as a cure for religious nonsense, and by coincidence, this morning I received a brand new physical geology text, called "Exploring Geology", which is absolutely chock-full of beautiful graphics, organized into focussed two-page spreads that ask and answer a series of important questions (basically most of the things you'd want an intro physical geology student to know).
College-level intro texts often suffer from the problem of being encyclopedic, which many students find soul-crushing. The usual alternative is to be overly generalized and simplistic. This book seems to walk that tight-rope nicely. It seems very enticing, and invites students to keep flipping pages to look for topics that they always wondered about. It is full of information, without being crowded or unliftable. It does not mention the whole religious / young earth thing (so far as I noticed in a quick skim, anyway), but it lays out geology as a broad mature science that offers a solid understanding of the earth and the way it works. Broader and better education with attractive textbooks like this is, I think, part of the answer.
If you'll excuse a more extended plug, let me say that I've never seen a textbook quite like this one - it's really quite wonderful. Congratulations go to authors Stephen J. Reynolds et al., and to the publisher, McGraw-Hill. So if anyone wants to get a great book with great graphics, I'd recommend this one instead of Yahya's pile of compost. (I have no connection with this book in any way: I just like it.)
The paper in this book is thick and glossy -- it's not going to be at all absorbent, and it would be like wiping with crumpled cardboard.
Here's a link to get you frothing at the mouth:
Questions Answered on Catholic Sex Abuse Settlement
By Father Jonathan Morris
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,289828,00.html?sPage=fnc.foxfan/blo…
See- abusing children is a win-win situation for the Catholic church and God.
Someone mentioned that the Atlas was available for free download, but for some reason, my company firewall blocks harunyaya.com. I wonder why? It's a creationist site, but I have no problem getting to answersingenesis, or the DI site, or icr.org.
However, I figured out a workaround. If anyone else has problems - the download files are not hosted on harunyaya. The 33MB zip containing three PDF files can be downloaded from here. There's also a 300K zip file of just the text in RTF format, (just change the five digits at the end of the above URL to 28916), although I don't know what the point of it without the pictures would be.
Forget the lobsters and booze - the only way to catch a runaway Link is to kidnap Zelda. Link'll come crawling back to save her in no time. Or, you know, after 8 or so dungeons which make him strong enough to defeat you...
Just for that, stogoe, I think I love you.
But how could anyone tell which pages have already been used to wipe? Sounds like they're all full of crap to begin with.
Christian, I read that piece and your right, it does get one frothing. Notice the oh so subtle attempts to blame the victim, society, or anyone else but the church and the guilty priests. Or to try and mitigate it somehow by repeatedly suggesting that 'not all' of the allegations might be true. Similarly, almost dismissing the church's culpability in a couple of throwaway lines and the final P.S. blaming the lawyers. Rome will be proud of him, wonder if he is a jesuit, as that is politicking worthy of one. The only thing left unsaid was to condemn the victims for bringing the church into disrepute by letting it happen to them.
John: Hear, hear!