Why I love science:

It's stuff like this that makes science so amazing and beautiful.



Thanks to @godlessgirl for finding this and tweeting about it!

For those of you who were out of the loop on this one:

Being in Alcoholics Anonymous involves you admitting defeat to your alcoholism and embracing a higher power to help you through it.

I can only assume that Narcotics Anonymous works much the same way.

You would think that giving up personal control in this situation would be a terrible idea. Shows what we know...

In related news, there is an alternative called The Sinclair Method which uses an opiate antagonist in conjunction with continued drinking to reverse the endorphin conditioning that causes the addiction in the first place.

Cool! So a scientific-based method of quitting versus a religious method of quitting.

Guess which one I think is probably better for you!

Walking tour of the Creation Museum Part II: The Quickening

I apologize for the various and terrible quality of the pictures you are about to see. Enjoy!


This picture is likely highly indicative of the rest of the museum. Let's see what happens, shall we?


Those sharp claws on his feet are for slicing lettuce. There is a salad spinner behind the sign.


Mel Brooks decided to make a special guest appearance. He was displaying the fifteen ten commandments.


Maybe there IS hope for this museum after all! *shifty eyes*


"Om nom nom nom nom"


This lamb looks like he's scared of being raped.


"Really? Vegetables?"


Did I mention that these wax dummies look way too eerily realistic? If they spent as much time actually providing substance to their exhibits as they did trying to make eerie, lifelike dummies, they'd give the Smithsonian a run for its money.


There was not enough room to finish the sentence. It should have read, "The world's not safe anymore for people with IQs above 10 with museums like this still being funded!"



Here we see two people particularly angered by the paparazzi. Apparently they weren't willing to sign the release and their pictures were used anyway!


After killing his brother, Abel, Cain has to sneeze like a motherfucker. Abel's first invention, pepper spray, doesn't work anywhere near as well as he'd have liked.


Completely undecided as to what this was telling us not to touch, we hands-on Atheists decided to begin investigating. It turned out that nobody cared...except maybe the one guy. You'll see him.


Discovered by one of the members of the party with which I was touring the Museum, we come to the real heart of the issue. There is nothing on Earth besides the United States and, perhaps, part of Canada and Mexico. It is a stunningly accurate commentary on the educational system of many religious areas of Kentucky.


The museum was kind enough to embolden some of the more important words of this quote from one of the books of Peter. I think we could do without all the rest of the empty text. "Willingly ignorant word of god" seems to be good enough for me.



Here we have what I can only imagine is Hebrew...sort of.
It's time for a quick Hebrew lesson.

*HEBREW LESSON TIME!*

Let's begin, if you will humor me, from the right side. Hebrew is written right to left. Let us begin with the awkward blob of letter that looks like a K who has seen better days. THIS IS NOT A HEBREW LETTER. Awesome. If it is supposed to be a tsadi or an aleph, it is a tsadi or aleph made exclusively of fail.

Next, we come to the letter Resh. The only problem with this letter is that it has been flipped 180 degrees.

Thirdly, we hit the Hebrew letter Vov which is both correctly oriented and in the proper proportion. Let's move on. Nothing to see here.

Fourthly, we have what is called "Fey." Besides the fact that the letter is the mirror image of how it was supposed to be, it is fine...except for one thing:

This is Fey in it's so called "Final" form. This letter, if it is to be in the sentence AT ALL, should be switched with the letter farthest on the left...which is funny because that letter is a Fey also! It is also flipped over itself.

So, creation museum...whatever you were going for here...it didn't quite work.

EDIT: Jen got the video of me explaining this at the creation museum. I am aware I pointed the wrong way when I mention the end of the word...It had been a long day. Spare me please. =P

Walking tour of the Creation Museum Part I

As you all know, today was the infamous visit to the Creation Museum. I'm going to try to, as best I can, give you a small sampling of the many wondrous exhibits that were to be found.

Let us begin with the main foyer.


Here we can see what I can only assume is a brief reenactment of that ever-so-famous scene from The Dark Crystal. Here we can see a young Gelfling child who is trying to hide, with little success, from two Skeksis. Or maybe not...I honestly can't tell.
Remember, people, Skeksis are armed and considered dangerous. Do not pet the Skeksis.





Following the Jim Henson memorial, we find God's ode to linguistics. I always knew he loved alliteration. This just proves it.Following the English department, we move into geology. It seems that there are two uh...*conflicting* theories on how fossil layers were formed. Of course, we know that God's Word must be correct. I mean, seriously now, look at how much more efficient God is than those silly processes. Who can argue with those numbers!? WHO, I TELL YOU?!?!

I'll continue this later.

Proving Infinity

I'm going to put on my pedant hat again today and talk about a concept that we all know and love...or maybe not so much love depending on your math skills.

Let's have some personal background to this logical exercise first:

A year ago this September 19th, the Society of Non-Theists at Purdue University SONTAPU, lol held a sort of mock-evangelical rally for the Flying Spaghetti Monster* to try to convey a message. This message was: "Unverifiable claims aren't true just because you cannot disprove them.

Throughout the day, we drew larger and larger crowds. The various people were eliciting emotions ranging the gamut from "lol" to "Alright!" to "What on Earth are they doing?" to "OH LAWD BABEH JEEBUS HELP ME!!!1!1!eleven"

In the corner, however stood two people. One was holding a video camera and the other was talking, perhaps if narrating.

After I read a chapter of the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in my best "Preacher Voice" I went to go get some water and was stopped by these guys to talk.

It became clear very quickly that these people were not here to get the poop on what we were doing and why we were doing it, but I talked to them civilly. They asked me how I felt about God and what I, myself believed.

I told them. As a scientist and, much more specifically, a Math major, education classes be damned, I had very specific ideas of what I would need to be persuaded to the side of the believers. That is to say, PROOF. Logic. In order for me to stand up and say "There exists a higher power." I need to see a written proof with QED at the end (although now, I think I'd also accept the heavens parting and having God himself send me on a quest a-la Monty Python).

"How about infinity?" was the response. "Can you prove infinity?"

"Well...prove infinity itself? Hmm...I'm not sure I, myself know how to do that. I suppose you could go through the route proving that the integers have no upper bound and are therefore infinite."

This, of course, didn't help. Eventually, they moved away from Math onto subjects that they were more properly coached on and that I didn't have enough real training in to properly bullshit mine their arguments. I made eye contact with other people from our group in the traditional, "Shit, shit, help me! They won't stop throwing bullshit at me!" fashion, allowed someone else to get caught up in the argument and then bowed out claiming various excuses.

But, it got to me. Infinity. What does infinity mean? We use it in math all the time, don't we? Calculus is basically built around the concept of infinity, isn't it? Differentials...integrals, Reimann sums...The infinite and the infinitesmal are all around...well...sort of.

Infinity is a somewhat wooly concept...and by somewhat wooly, I mean completely incomprehensible. To have an infinite quantity of something is physically impossible. It's a contradiction of terms, really. If you have a quantity, you have quantified it. How can you quantify something that is, by definition, inquantifiable? Well, that's precisely it. You can't.

Infinity is not a thing. It is not a measurement. It is not, really, even a state of mind.

Infinity is, in all senses, the impossible we can never and WERE NEVER MEANT TO reach simply by the very nature of the concept! It's not even a benchmark that is merely set too high.

"But, Mark," You say. "There are so many other concepts that we can't actually see that we use all the time, too!"

"Well, yeah. Sorta."

"I mean, you have imaginary numbers, transendental numbers, even, perhaps, NEGATIVE numbers are also abstract concepts that we are surrounded by in math that we don't actually argue with."

This is very true. You probably couldn't find -1 apple, or 2i dollars in your wallet...and I'd love to see someone come up with exactly pi of something.

However, in each of these situations, regardless of their abstractness, we use them because they appear in nature. Even imaginary numbers have a very useful practical application that translates into something tangible. Just ask your friendly neighborhood electrical engineer. I'm sure he'd be glad to point you in the right direction.**

The point is that infinity is really the only one of these that doesn't get a real, practical analog because it doesn't exist on its own.

Infinity is a tool, certainly, but not something that can be proven.

*Yes, they're bowing down to me. It seems that, on the same day, there was a flash mob. They were going through and taking showers and brushing their teeth in all the fountains on campus. There is a small fountain right by where we were holding our event.

**Just make sure he's bathed recently.***

***I'm just kidding. I love you all. Please don't kill me with your trebuchets.

I just got God-Rolled.

I'm trolling Reddit to find some sort of goings on around the Interblag to talk about and I stumble upon a youtube video called "How Big is the Universe?"

"Awesome!" I think.

I've always been an astronomy nerd. The cosmos are awesome and I enjoy nothing more than looking up into the sky at night and thinking about what awesomeness lies beyond this solar system and how Kepler's Laws apply to them. *cough* Sorry...when a math geek is simultaneously an astronomy geek, you occasionally lie awake at night wondering if you could represent the gravity sink of a black hole with a differential equation.

Simultaneously, when you have a math geek who is a music geek, you try to graph sinusoid functions of the music you play.

It's a hazard. I'll say that much.

AT ANY RATE

The video basically goes through and (on a log scale) gives you an idea how long it would take to be able to see the entire universe out of the side of the cockpit and provides you with a tour along the way as various milestones of visibility hit.

This is cool. I'm alright with it so far. There's the occasional grammar mistake; but, whatever, the person is obviously not American (Or so I hope) so I am very tolerant. It provides cool pictures, at any rate. Finally, we have traveled outward for about 10 billion years and we can now see a theoretical view of the entire universe with entire galaxies as mere specks of light.

And just as I'm looking at this wonderful view of the universe and all the things in it, I get a gigantic kick in the balls as the caption on the screen appears:


Great.

If you also watched the video, here's another to cleanse your palate.

Thank you and goodnight.