brainrow

What do you do when the facts don’t support your conclusions?

You get new facts, of course!

Ladies and gentlemen, the Conservapedia.

On unicorns:

The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times, which provides an unimpeachable de facto argument for their once having been in existence.

On kangaroos:

After the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land — as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart — or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.

On the cactus:

Cacti are known for their high content of alkaloids, and have often been used in the sacramental rights of the Native Americans. Because of this, the early Catholic missionaries in the west thought the plants to be the work of Satan, and this is perhaps a preferable view to that of materialistic evolution since it is difficult to imagine how something like mescaline could have evolved by natural selection. Besides that, the psychoactive content of many cacti have inspired the writings of such ungodly men as Aldous Huxley and Albert Hoffman.

The entire entry on the Stone Age:

The Stone age is the prehistoric time before the Age of Metal. It is divided into two parts; Paleolithic and Neolithic. During the Paleolithic age, man harvested wild plants and animals for food. Agriculture began in the Neolithic age. The dates of the Stone age are debated. Biased historians often give older dates than can be proven by archaeology.

An early entry on the Theory of Relativity:

This theory rejects Isaac Newton’s God-given theory of gravitation and replaces it with a concept that there is a continuum of space and time, and that large masses (like the sun) bend space in a manner similar to how a finger can depress an area of a balloon. From this proposed bending of space the expression arose that “space is curved.” But experiments later proved that space is flat overall.

Nothing useful has even been built based on the theory of relativity. Scientists claim that this is because relativity only applies to extremely heavy or fast objects and rely on future scientists to finally come up with the proof that will vindicate their life’s work. Most conservatives are skeptical since science is supposed to be about finding proof before a theory becomes a fact, not after.

I found Conservapedia via a lot of blogs at ScienceBlogs, and found links to specific entries on many different blogs.

Thrilling Wonder has collected some interesting signs. (They have more here and here.)

Also at Thrilling Wonder, a sequence of photos shows one way you might be cheated out of your card and your secret PIN code at an automated teller machine (ATM). Be careful out there.

Iran rushes over the cliff:

Iran has no brake and no reverse gear in its nuclear program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday, while a deputy foreign minister vowed Tehran was prepared for any eventuality, “even for war.”

No brake? No reverse gear? Listen, Mahmoud — George W. Bush is not a good role model.

I don’t think we can eradicate the influence of stupidity in any human endeavor. But isn’t it about time we all stopped making it the core of every plan?

Does it ever end?

At times, it seems the world’s supply of ignorance and pettiness is inexhaustible:

Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.

“I sensed the disrespect with which this was to be carried out and got fed up,” Ms. Holloway added. “I didn’t have room in my life for these women to come in and tell my sisters of three years that they weren’t needed.”

At times, we find ourselves once again in old battles we thought had been fought and won years ago.

This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join, provoking accusations of racial discrimination.

Are we in a rut?

The trouble is that prejudice and ignorance and pettiness are not enemies that can be overthrown once and for all. They are like stones that must be eroded over a long, long time — worn down, and worn down, and worn away, slowly, steadily, ceaselessly, by every breath we take.

It never ends.

A mix of genres that gives me chills: the great Irish folk band The Chieftains, and Ziggy Marley:

Political cartoonist Ward Sutton illustrates the new way forward in Iraq and a handy White House guide to Troop Morale. Among the things that hurt morale:

American lawmakers debating the Iraq War. Or talking about it. Or even thinking about it…

The Dixie Chicks opting not to shut up and still winning five Grammy Awards.

Among the things that strengthen troop morale:

Not babying them with things like body armor….

The record profits of oil companies.

Totally cool new styles of prosthetic limbs.

And finally, Sutton on Bush, Iraq, and something about a corner.

King Midas turned everything he touched into gold. It wasn’t as much of a blessing as you might think.

I don’t want to tell you what King George turns everything he touches into.

Dick Cheney on the reduction of British forces in Iraq:

I look at it, and what I see is an affirmation of the fact that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well.

Sure, only the parts of Iraq controlled by Bush, Cheney and Co. are a total disaster.

It’s like their super-power.

Via Crooks and Liars, Conan O’Brien shows us Meet the Press for Idiots:

I took an economics class many years ago. I didn’t learn much.

One thing I do remember is the concept of opportunity costs. The cost of any economic decision can be measured not only in dollars and cents, but in the things you must forego to pay for that choice: buying the giant-screen plasma TV means you can’t remodel the bathroom — and vice versa. Every choice is a trade-off.

Via Daily Kos, Matt Taibbi takes note of some Bush administration trade-offs (Warning: strong profanity in the linked article):

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush’s proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush’s tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what’s interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders’s office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family — the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune — would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Oh, we definitely need a better Decider.

On the forty-fifth anniversary of his Mercury space flight, John Glenn talked about that flight in a crowded auditorium at COSI here in Columbus, Ohio.

Ohio governor Ted Strickland introduced Glenn with lavish praise. That prompted Glenn to recall an earlier occasion, when he had been introduced by someone who said, “There are very few authentic heroes in the world today, but our speaker tonight is one of them.”

Glenn said he’d been embarrassed by such praise, but on the way home he mused to his wife Annie, “You know, there really aren’t many real heroes in the world today.”

Annie replied, “You’re right, and I’ll tell you something: there’s one less than you think there is.”

He discussed his Mercury flight in some detail. He showed slides, including the first hand-held photo taken from earth orbit. At the time of Glenn’s flight, NASA didn’t have a photography department. They thought taking pictures would distract the astronaut from his other tasks. Glenn found a $45 Minolta camera with automatic film advance and persuaded NASA brass to let him take it along and take some pictures during his flight. (The photo shown here may not be the photo shown during the slide show. It was the closest match I found.)

He said several times that he felt fortunate to have had the opportunities to do the things he had done. He said he wasn’t the type of person to feel envious of others, but he might make an exception for Neil Armstrong.

Glenn was the oldest of the original seven Mercury astronauts. He became the oldest person to go into orbit in 1998 when he flew on Space Shuttle Discovery, when he was 77 years old. Now he is 85, and he still has the Right Stuff.

Via Corpus Callosum, how we do it in America:

It’s different in England:

[Prince] Harry, third in line to the throne behind father Prince Charles and older brother Prince William, graduated from the prestigious Sandhurst military academy last year and is expected to accompany his troops to Iraq in April or May, an unidentified military source told CNN….

Prince Harry, known as Troop Leader Wales, has trained to command 11 soldiers and four Scimitar tanks. The Daily Mail claimed Harry threatened to quit the army if he was prevented from joining his men on operations. …

Harry’s military service continues a royal family tradition….

His father, Prince Charles, was a pilot with the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. Harry’s grandfather, Prince Philip, had a distinguished career in the Royal Navy. Harry’s uncle, Prince Andrew, was a Royal Navy pilot and served in the Falklands War against Argentina 25 years ago.

Let’s be fair here. If American leaders sent their own kids into battle, how many of these delightful wars of choice do you suppose we’d have? Why, we’d probably only go to war when we had to, and macho politicians can’t survive in an environment like that.

The Questionable Authority quotes M*A*S*H:

Frank: Well, everybody knows war is hell.

BJ: Remember, you heard it here last.

Hawkeye: War isn’t hell. War is war and hell is hell, and of the two war is a lot worse.

Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?

Hawkeye: Simple, father. Tell me, who goes to hell?

Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.

Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in hell. But war is chock full of them. Little kids, cripples, old ladies, in fact, except for a few of the brass almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.

M*A*S*H was a situation comedy about a mobile hospital unit during the Korean War.

Via The Frontal Cortex, an NPR story about growing smarter:

A new study in the scientific journal Child Development shows that if you teach students that their intelligence can grow and increase, they do better in school.

All children develop a belief about their own intelligence, according to research psychologist Carol Dweck from Stanford University.

“Some students start thinking of their intelligence as something fixed, as carved in stone,” Dweck says. “They worry about, ‘Do I have enough? Don’t I have enough?'”

…

So, about 100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the expanding nature of intelligence and the brain.

The students in the latter group “learned that the brain actually forms new connections every time you learn something new, and that over time, this makes you smarter.”

Basically, the students were given a mini-neuroscience course on how the brain works. By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter, had significantly better math grades than the other group.

“When they studied, they thought about those neurons forming new connections,” Dweck says. “When they worked hard in school, they actually visualized how their brain was growing.”

This is better than the old rubber band analogy of the mind stretching to hold more and more knowledge. I always worried that my mind would snap, which is … uh, never mind.

Read Shakespeare. Listen to Beethoven. Study Michelangelo’s Pieta. Can these be the works of mortal human beings?

What are the limits of the mind’s power? How is it tapped? Might genius exist, suppressed, in every one of us? The depth, breadth and convolutions of the human mind are endlessly astonishing.

Via Neurontic:

I’ve spent a good chunk of time reading about autistics with peculiar gifts, but I’ve never seen a savant in action. (No. Rain Man doesn’t count.) And let me tell you, it’s enough to make you wonder if “normal” intelligence is all it’s cracked up to be. According to the voiceover, after just 45 minutes of surveying Rome from a helicopter, Wiltshire was able to faithfully recreate virtually everything he saw. His completed panorama stretched across 5 and half yards of paper. Even more impressive, Steven’s masterpiece required no preliminary sketching, or “roughing out of space.” “It [was as] if the panorama already [existed] in his head, with all the proportions, all the roads, all the details.”

Via Boing Boing, Colin Purrington offers some stickers for your textbooks.

Wording for the first disclaimer (top left) is taken verbatim from the sticker designed by the Cobb County School District (“A community with a passion for learning”) in Georgia, which actually plagiarized Alabama’s evolution disclaimer… Really, I’m not making any of this up. The other 14 are mildly educational variants that demonstrate the real meaning of a scientific “theory” as well as the true motivations of the School Board members and their creationist supporters.

There’s more — visit the site.