-
You can think of the earth's surface in New Mexico as subject to two superimposed sinusoidal periodic heat pulses. One has a period of 24 hours and corresponds to the heat rising and falling over the day/night cycle. The other has a period of 1 year and corresponds to the average heat changing through the seasons. Clearly this approximation is quite rough, but we can take it as a starting point for some mathematical spelunking of our own.
-
"Slacktivist is dead right about Maher. That a non-theist of Maher's caliber can be subject to the same sort of looney-tunes science denial we see from creationists should tell us something about whether eliminating religion would really eliminate threats to science. "
-
"[W]hen I'm addressing the "science" aspects of "scientific creationism" I find I'm unable to communicate with them -- not just because I'm less fluent in the language of science, but because when they start talking about science then words no longer seem to mean what they mean for the rest of us. They use familiar-sounding words, but you quickly realize that they're using these familiar words in unfamiliar ways, using them to communicate vastly, irreconcilably different things."
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Slacktivist is talking sense. He notes a common problem in dealing with creationists:
I find I'm unable to communicate with them -- not just because I'm less fluent in the language of science, but because when they start talking about science then words no longer seem to mean what they mean for…
The deserts of New Mexico can get blazingly hot and bone-chillingly cold, extremes of temperature familiar to the outdoorsman in that kind of terrain. A few hundred feet below the ground in Carlsbad Caverns, the temperature is essentially stable in the mid-50s no matter how scorching or frigid the…
slacktivist: L'affaire Waltke
"This is a story about control. It is about, in the unintentionally candid terms of one of the main actors, "absolute authority" and the desire to wield that authority over a text so that the text, in turn, may be used to wield absolute authority over others.
It is a…
slacktivist: In the belly of the fish
"My fundie Bible teachers considered this the main, or even the only, point of this story worth considering. Their task, as they saw it, was to defend the story as being "literally" true, and so they'd share legends (see Bartley, James) of sailors swallowed by…