Month: August 2016
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(Repost) Adventures in ACE VI: Vacuous About Volcanoes
People, it took me days to fact-check the 31 (thirty-one) pages of Science PACE 1086. I’m boggled. I have no idea how they manage to get so much wrong. It doesn’t even make sense – I mean, there are several creationist canards, and I know why those are there, but they fail at facts that even Answers in Genesis gets right. It’s like they got their information about rocks from a source translated from French, which was translated from Tagalog, which was translated from a paper written in Pig Latin by someone who’d never seen a rock in their life, but heard something about them once.
Take their inability to get famous volcanoes right. Not to mention their myths about medicine. Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in ACE VI: Vacuous About Volcanoes”
Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXIII: Wherein We See the Light
So. Physics.
Earth Science Fourth Edition and Science of the Physical Creation have a bit of crossover here, which we’ll eventually get to, but SPC covers the subject a lot more thoroughly. So, while we’re still bogged down in ES4’s interminable (and very, very wrong) chapters on Geology, we’ll see what the creationist textbook writers at A Beka have to say about physics.
We start with Chapter 14, “Light and Color.” I’m sure you can all guess which verse they use to get us going the godly way.
Supernatural S1 E12 Summary: “Faith”
We open with the Impala pulling up to a spooky, run-down house. The brothers dig into the trunk, and Dean pulls out two Tasers he’s amped to 100,000 volts. We find out the boys are hunting a raw-head. This is an interesting monster we haven’t seen so far, but alas, it’s only a brief set-up for our main conflict.
The boys go inside, find two children stored in a cupboard for later eating, and start to take them to safety. The raw-head grabs Sam’s ankle through the stairs, kids scream, Dean shoots his Taser and misses, and the raw-head takes off. Dean tells Sam to get the kids out, so Sam gives him his Taser and exits while Dean goes hunting. The raw-head ambushes him and punches him in the head, which knocks him onto the waterlogged floor of the basement. He’s not knocked out, but he’s clearly dazed, so I’m giving him one o’ these:
What Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy?
Dean: 5
Congratulations, Dean! You’ve caught up to your brother.
The raw-head comes after Dean, who shoots it with the Taser. The good news: it gets fried! The bad news: it’s standing in the same puddle, so Dean gets fried, too. Since Tasers do at least briefly impair cognitive functioning and he got hit with at least twice the normal amount of juice, rendering him unconscious, let’s give him another. Continue reading “Supernatural S1 E12 Summary: “Faith””
New at Rosetta Stones: The Geology Behind the Rio Olympics
At long last (and before the Games are over, even!), I have got the story about the geology behind (and beneath, and over) the Rio Olympics. Rio posed some interesting challenges to the engineers and architects tasked with making the Olympic Village come to life in time for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Go check it out!
(Repost) “Why Did You Kill Nurylon?” – Escape Chapter 9: Tragedy
Despite her terrible marriage, Carolyn has had a decent summer, finishing a summer session at college and exercising a modicum of control over her life. She goes home for a while in August, and tries to spend time at her parents’ home.* Her mother is having trouble caring for the nine youngest kids without Carolyn’s help.
But Carolyn can’t be there all the time, and so it’s 16 year-old Annette who piles 9 young siblings into the back of a pickup, along with Cousin Bonnie and 6 little cousins, and drives out for a picnic.
Content Note: child fatality, rollover accident, descriptions of serious injuries
Continue reading “(Repost) “Why Did You Kill Nurylon?” – Escape Chapter 9: Tragedy”
Protected: (Tier 1) “He Knew That He Was Dangerous” – Escape Chapter 25: Turning Point
Instant Peril: Flash Floods (and How to Survive Them)
I’m contacting various emergency management agencies to see if I can get a solid response on the car question, but in light of the fact that so many flash floods are going on in the United States over recent weeks (with more in the forecast), I’m going to go ahead and publish this here. An updated version will make an appearance on Rosetta Stones next week. If you have any safety tips to add, let me know!
The eleven European tourists exploring Antelope Canyon on a fine summer day in 1997 probably never considered drowning in a desert slot canyon to be a possibility. They may have known that water carved those sandstone walls into fantastical curves and angles. But it wouldn’t have seemed like an ongoing process. Why would anyone be thinking of water, standing on dry sand, with shafts of sunlight spearing through from the narrow opening above? Despite it being the height of the Arizona monsoon season, it wasn’t raining.
It started with the sandy silt on the canyon floor leaping six inches into the air. Tour guide Pancho Quintana and his group heard a roar so loud it drowned out screams. The solid rock walls shook. They began running, trying to find a place to climb out. And then they were hit by a wall of water that filled the canyon to a depth of eleven feet. Bodies were thrown into the walls. People might find a grip for a few seconds before debris or other bodies hit them and tore them away, tumbling them down the canyon. Pancho was the lucky one: despite the water and rock tearing off his clothes and skin, he managed to get a foot wedged in a crevice. The rest of the people with him, his tour group and another, were swept out of the canyon and into Lake Powell. Some of their bodies have never been found.
How? How could water suddenly appear from nowhere and end almost a dozen lives in a few minutes?
People who grew up in the high deserts of Arizona were well aware of the potential for disaster. We were warned about flash floods from the time we were little. We knew that those dry washes and canyons could end up filled with water without warning. We knew that the sun could be shining and the ground bone dry where we were, while a thunderstorm dumping water a hundred miles away could be sending a sudden flood our way. We knew. That knowledge didn’t always save us.
Floods are the second deadliest weather hazard, and flash floods are the deadliest type of flood worldwide. In the United States, deaths by flash flood are increasing, while deaths by other hazards are decreasing. And they can happen in places you don’t expect. Desert denizens are well aware of the potential, but flash floods can happen in urban and suburban environments where more runoff is generated than the infrastructure can handle. They can happen in mountain valleys and streams, especially if rain falls on snow and causes unusually fast snow melt, or if rain falls on a recently-burned area, or where ice jams have backed up water. They can happen in areas that are perfectly flat, if a lot of water gets dumped with nowhere to go. They can happen downstream of dams that partially or completely fail. They can happen in any environment.
And they’re only going to get more frequent and more intense as global warming continues.
With the recent flash floods happening in Arizona, Utah, and Yemen, it’s time for us to discuss what to do. Flash floods are hard to prepare for and even harder to escape, considering they’re defined by the fact they happen quickly. But there are steps you can take that will minimize your chances of being caught in one, and will help you survive if you are. Continue reading “Instant Peril: Flash Floods (and How to Survive Them)”
(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIa: In Which A Certain Atmosphere is Created
After the absurdities of ACE and the travesty that is Bob Jones University’s idea of the earth sciences, it is almost with relief that I turn back to A Beka’s Science of the Physical Creation. Oh, granted, it is also full of creationist crap – but there were some useful, even educational, bits, and I hope to find more.
Alas, my hopes are dealt a blow by the introduction to Unit I: Meteorology and Oceanography. Beneath the facing photo of sailboats, Psalm 115:16 sez God gave humans the earth, and the first sentence of the chapter is, “God created the earth’s atmosphere…”
Let us pause here to observe just how such a statement can send you haring off in the wrong direction. Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIa: In Which A Certain Atmosphere is Created”
(Tier 1) Adventures in ACE XXIV: Cloudy With a 100% Chance of Fail
Welcome back to ACE Science PACE 1088! Last time, we saw the lengths God would go to in order to ruin a hot air balloon ride. Now we’re on to Section Two, where getting even the simplest facts right is completely beyond the ACE writers’ ability.
We start with vocabulary and cartoons! Oh, joy! Science words for this section include frisbee, hedge, and mare. You know, even if you grant some leeway and say that vocab in a science course can include other unfamiliar words, this is still ridiculous. These are the equivalent of eighth graders. They already know what a fucking frisbee is. And if ACE-educated students aren’t allowed to know what frisbees are until puberty, I think it’s time for the adults to sit down and think about where they went completely off the rails.
Now comes the cartoon, which, in the tradition of the other PACEs in this series so far, has bugger-all to do with anything. It’s just a way for the ACE people to showcase their remarkable lack of a sense of humor.
Whelp. At least they’re people of color. Don’t get too excited, though, cuz we’re spending the rest of the section with the white people.
A bunch of the fine upstanding white Christian families are having a Founder’s Day* picnic. Racer is, like, so good at Frisbee that he can make it “float through the air like the clouds in the sky.” This strained simile leads the boys to talk about clouds. ACE dialogue is uniformly terrible, but this is even worse than usual. The boys sound like pompous robots reciting pre-programmed prose. And they use the word “distinguish” three times in three sentences. Gah.
They also get the simplest fucking facts wrong. Continue reading “(Tier 1) Adventures in ACE XXIV: Cloudy With a 100% Chance of Fail”