Coke is for creationist cretins

I don’t drink caffeinated beverages anymore (I gave them up when I converted to Mormonism1) so it’s easy for me to refuse to give Coca Cola any more of my business, but this news may cause more distress to others: Coca Cola is a corporate partner with the Creation “Museum”. Ken Ham can brag about this meaningless exploitation of his suckers “museum” attendees for profit, but I doubt that Coke wants to trumpet this news — it looks like they’re sponsoring stupidity.

I don’t know that there is much point to protesting the association anyway. If Coke pulled out, you know the local Pepsi distributors would jump in to offer a contract, and then Ken Ham would proudly point to their deal as somehow vindicating their existence.

At least now we self-sacrificing, noble, healthier deniers of sugary caffeinated toxins can add a new level of sanctimony to our denunciations of Coca Cola’s consumers by pointing out that they are stooges of creationism, as well.2

(via Bing McGhandi)

1Psych.

2It’s our only pleasure left. When my wife fixes her cup of coffee in the morning, the smell wafts my way and I just want to leap over and swallow her cup, hand, and forearm in one big gulp.

Want to complain to Coca Cola? Go here.

Heaven for sale

Now, for the low, low price of $12.79, you can reserve a spot in heaven for yourself. This is a real business selling tickets, certificates and ID cards that claims to give you a direct line to an afterlife in paradise, with a money-back guarantee. You might think it’s just a gag…but it’s the same thing as Catholic indulgences, so it’s a gag with a little bite.

Oh, and if you don’t like the prospect of eternity in heaven, you can also reserve a spot in hell. That one probably has a stronger seal of theological approval.

They aren’t honest enough to write this

This is an entirely fictional manifesto, but it could be the game plan for a lot of rather devious pro-religion people right now — I could almost imagine it as the mission statement for the Templeton Foundation, for instance.

It is the objective of we, the New Creationists, to undermine not simply evolutionary theory, but science as a whole. It is this form of inquiry which has caused the greatest damage to our version of events. It must be destroyed at all costs.

The primary method for attaining our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground. This means that we are to seek, purely in the eye of the layman public, a position which appears on the surface to be a reasonable compromise. To be sure, we want to tell the world we embrace evolution. We also want to tell the world we embrace a Creator.

We want to hide Our Creator in the nearly impossible to understand gaps of reality. Quantum mechanics will often be our realm, but much more can work. As stated, our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground with the layman public. We need not answer to scientists. Indeed, they are the enemy. What we are to do is wrench the very fruits of these enemies from their empirical hands. We are to show gaps in the understanding of the cell. We are to discuss unknowns in the molecular biology. We are to contort the flaws of physics, cosmology, and astronomy to assist our goals. It is in these places that Our Creator resides. If it’s science, it is imperfect. We shall exploit, even invent, imperfections. All is justified in our goal. Science deserves nothing but lip service; It is the enemy.

Our first step is to put forth an army of Christian scientists. They will not be the supporters of fringe creationism. They shall not espouse views which deny any modern science. However, they shall pure atop all modern science a sense of confusion and remote possibility. That remote possibility shall be where Our Creator resides.

Our goals at this point will rely upon American idiosyncrasies. Tired of divisive politics, Americans seek a Middle Ground. They crave a sense of wishy-washy – it sounds fair. We shall marginalize the New Atheists with paint brushes of extremism. While they full embrace science and all its evils, we shall embrace it only superficially – we shall not fall into the evil of the enemy. We shall appeal to the American sense of fair play. We are the New Creationists.

However, it does have one big problem, and it gets one important issue wrong. These people would never say they hate science or that science is the enemy: rather, they love the idea of science, they just want to redefine it so that their version of science includes Jesus doing miracles.

My new career

I am now a cover model for CDs.

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Look for me soon to be gyrating in a rock video, then comes the feature role in soft-core porn, then the drugs and parties, then the stint in rehab, and finally the special documentary on VH1. Oh, heck, I’m going all the way: I’m taking over for Ozzie once he retires.

This is all predicated on the album being a hit, of course. But how can it not? Not only do I grace the cover art, but it has songs like “The Ecstasy of Mallard” and “Going Gay for House”.

So…soap bubbles must be designed!

You’ve probably noticed that as a soap bubble thins, it acquires a rainbow of iridescent colors across its surface. Or perhaps you’ve noticed that a film of oil on a mud puddle shows beautiful colors. These are common physical properties of thin film interference.

The way it works is that light entering a material with a higher refractive index is both reflected and transmitted. Some of the light bounces back with a partial phase shift, and some of it passes through. In a thin film, it passes through but doesn’t travel far before it hits another boundary, for instance between the film and the water underneath it, and again, some of it is reflected and some transmitted. This second reflected beam of light, though, is out of phase with the first, by an amount that depends on the thickness of the film. What that means is that certain wavelengths will be shifted in such a way as to reinforce the first reflected beam, generating constructive interference that will make that wavelength brighter. Other wavelengths will be shifted the same amount, but they will be out of phase with light in the first reflected beam — there will be destructive interference, and that wavelength will be damped out.

The net result: the light reflecting off the film will be colored, and the color will depend on the thickness of the film. It’s a simple physical process. Cephalopods use it to generate their colors — just by shifting thin reflecting membranes by a tiny distance of a fraction of a wavelength of light, they shift which wavelengths constructively and destructively interfere with each other, and thus change their color. Now engineers are exploiting the same principle to build television screens: they use a thin film that can be expanded by fractions of a wavelength of light by applying a voltage to build reflective color screens. This will be very cool. If you’ve got a Kindle or one of the other e-book readers, you know they use a reflective screen with no backlight that depends on ambient lighting to be visible…and that right now you only get shades of gray. With this technology, we’ll be able to have color electronic paper. I’ll be looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, we’ll also enable incomprehending gomers. Case in point: Casey Luskin thinks that thin-film interference patterns implies design. Well, actually, it’s stupider than that — he actually thinks that because TVs are being designed to use thin-film interference, and because cephalopod skin uses thin-film interference to generate color, that implies that cephalopod skin is also designed. I kid you not.

So we may soon have affordable, energy-efficient, cuttlefish inspired flat screen TVs and computer monitors everywhere. But of course, there’s no design overtones to see here folks. None whatsoever.

Right. And because trebuchets were designed to use gravity to generate force, and because rocks on mountains will tumble down due to gravity, avalanches are therefore designed. We make fire by design to produce the release of energy by rapid oxidation of carbon compounds; cells also oxidize carbon-containing compounds to produce energy; therefore, cells must have been set on fire on purpose. This is what the IDiots are reduced to: if something designed and something evolved make use of the same properties of our common physical universe, that means the evolved object must be designed, too. It’s ridiculous, but it’s all they’ve got.

Star Trek gets retconned

I finally saw the new Star Trek movie — I really do live way out in the boondocks, you know, and we only have one theater, with a single screen, and we had to wait for the Hannah Montana movie to run its course before we could bring in something interesting. Although, I’m afraid, it ultimately wasn’t that interesting.

There were some good elements to the movie. Star Trek was and is character driven, with these now-familiar personalities bouncing off of each other while resolving some esoteric skiffy crisis. That’s always been the fun part of a Trek movie, and this one preserves that and even turns it up to 11…so while I was in the theater, I was able to sit back with a bag of popcorn and enjoy myself. It’s definitely not a bad movie, and it even taps into fond old memories very effectively.

But here’s the problem: the plot was crap. The plot was mostly irrelevant to the movie, but even there, it was a series of semi-random events strung together by a need to reassemble the Trek cast of characters. The bad guy was just a madman with a great big spaceship and a doomsday weapon out to demolish the Federation of Planets because he thought he’d been wronged, and the starship Enterprise ping-pongs about chasing him down, picking up members of the cast, getting fresh Star Fleet Academy graduate James T. Kirk promoted, etc., etc., etc. Beating the evil villain seemed secondary to showing how Kirk met Spock, how Scotty got his job as engineer, and how uncannily Karl Urban channels the ghost of DeForest Kelley.

And then the real purpose of the movie emerged: it’s a retcon, a retroactive continuity adjustment, in which time travel is used to create an alternative history timeline for the characters. It’s plainly an attempt to restart the franchise, and this movie felt like a preliminary scene-setting effort, where the story didn’t so much matter and the important thing was to reconcile the fan base to new actors and variations from Trek canon.

That would be fine, except…this show has been going on for 43 years. I watched it avidly in its very first incarnation, and fondly remember pleading with my parents to stay up late on a school night so I could watch it. But there is a time to move on. I found myself wondering why actors would want to risk the fate of settling into comfortable archetypes — the original actors were pretty much type-cast after the show, and they at least had the advantage of being the people who forged those personalities. I thought about another series of movies with Kirk and Spock and Bones and Scotty and all those others, and many more plots with planet-destroying space villains, and yet more resolutions via deus ex Jefferies tube, deus ex particle polarity reversal, deus ex warp in the space-time continuum, and I just felt tired. Very tired. What I like in my science fiction is the new, not the familiar, and I don’t think this franchise is going to deliver what I desire.

I shall fan the flames and point out a couple of other things that bugged me.

  • Miniskirts. Uhura was one good flounce away from a major wardrobe malfunction. If it’s a matter of weird future fashion, they should go all the way and put the guys in g-strings and tube tops.

  • Did anyone notice the interior design of the Romulan ship? Funky weird platforms with no guardrails suspended over a huge empty space. Only the Mario Brothers could like that layout.

  • Somehow, all the familiar characters of the old show get themselves instantly put in charge of the bridge of the flagship of the Federation fleet. This does not compute.

  • People seemed to like the action sequences in space. I didn’t. In particular, there’s one scene where the Enterprise comes out of warp into a field of wreckage, all closely packed, and Sulu maneuvers his way through it all, bumping into a few bits here and there. That only makes sense if the velocity of a starship is like something under 20 miles an hour. (By the way, Firefly also did this. Hated it there, too.)

Duh.

The US 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that display of ten commandments monuments violates the establishment clause. Well, yeah. When the first commandment is basically “No way but JHWH!”, it should be basically impossible to argue otherwise. Although it is fun to watch the crazy people twist themselves to argue that Moses was a secular dude.

Speaking of twisted, ex-Judge Ray Moore is running for Alabama governor in 2010. If you enjoy the occasional video of squirrelly wingnuts denouncing all that is evil in the world, he’s got several there. I like the one where he announces that he will protect Alabamians from all the immorality from California and Massachusetts.

Desecration for sale

Now you can all do it: an archbishop of the Open Episcopal Church is selling consecrated crackers by mail, payable with paypal. The guy sounds like a bit of a kook; he’s doing this because he believes people will sincerely appreciate receiving a scrap of Jesus’ holy meat in the mail, and will use them to carry out informal masses whenever they feel like it.

Unfortunately for the desired effect of desecration, he has been excommunicated from the Anglican church, and the Catholics say his consecrations aren’t real, so the only people who might be offended by any cracker abuse are these fringey street preachers, who probably are casual about it all, anyway.