awwww..... grrrrrr...aawwww

Judy certainly tiltled this thread appropriately.

Their Own Version of a Big Bang

Those who believe in creationism -- children and adults -- are being taught to challenge evolution's tenets in an in-your-face way.
By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
February 11 2006


WAYNE, N.J. — Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"

The children roared their assent.

"Sometimes people will answer, 'No, but you weren't there either,' " Ham told them. "Then you say, 'No, I wasn't, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.' " He waved his Bible in the air.

"Who's the only one who's always been there?" Ham asked.

"God!" the boys and girls shouted.

"Who's the only one who knows everything?"

"God!"

"So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?"

The children answered with a thundering: "God!"

A former high-school biology teacher, Ham travels the nation training children as young as 5 to challenge science orthodoxy. He doesn't engage in the political and legal fights that have erupted over the teaching of evolution. His strategy is more subtle: He aims to give people who trust the biblical account of creation the confidence to defend their views — aggressively.

He urges students to offer creationist critiques of their textbooks, parents to take on science museum docents, professionals to raise the subject with colleagues. If Ham has done his job well, his acolytes will ask enough pointed questions — and set forth enough persuasive arguments — to shake the doctrine of Darwin.

"We're going to arm you with Christian Patriot missiles," Ham, 54, recently told the 1,200 adults gathered at Calvary Temple here in northern New Jersey. It was a Friday night, the kickoff of a heavily advertised weekend conference sponsored by Ham's ministry, Answers in Genesis.

To a burst of applause, Ham exhorted: "Get out and change the world!"

Over the last two decades, this type of "creation evangelism" has become a booming industry. Several hundred independent speakers promote biblical creation at churches, colleges, private schools, Rotary clubs. They lead tours to the Grand Canyon or the local museum to study the world through a creationist lens.

They churn out stacks of home-schooling material. A geology text devotes a chapter to Noah's flood; an astronomy book quotes Genesis on the origins of the universe; a science unit for second-graders features daily "evolution stumpers" that teach children to argue against the theory that is a cornerstone of modern science.

Answers in Genesis is the biggest of these ministries. Ham co-founded the nonprofit in his native Australia in 1979. The U.S. branch, funded mostly by donations, has an annual budget of $15 million and 160 employees who produce books and DVDs, maintain a comprehensive website, and arrange more than 500 speeches a year for Ham and four other full-time evangelists.

With pulpit-thumping passion, Ham insists the Bible be taken literally: God created the universe and all its creatures in six 24-hour days, roughly 6,000 years ago.

Hundreds of pastors will preach a different message Sunday, in honor of Charles Darwin's 197th birthday. In a national campaign, they will tell congregations that it's possible to be a Christian and accept evolution.

Ham considers that treason. When pastors dismiss the creation account as a fable, he says, they give their flock license to disregard the Bible's moral teachings as well. He shows his audiences a graphic that places the theory of evolution at the root of all social ills: abortion, divorce, racism, gay marriage, store clerks who say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/f...lines-frontpage

Liberating Science from Politics

The notion that science can be used to reconcile political disputes is fundamentally flawed
Daniel Sarewitz

Wouldn't it be wonderful if science—and scientists—were taken more seriously in the political process? Wouldn't democracy be better served? And wouldn't many difficult problems be more rationally resolved? Take the debates over protecting the environment. It certainly seems that, here, science should be able to cut through political controversy and enable beneficial action. Yet experience mostly shows the opposite: Controversies surrounding environmental problems as diverse as global climate change, genetically modified foods, nuclear energy, biodiversity, air and water pollution, and toxic wastes rarely seem to come to a satisfactory resolution. They are instead characterized by long-term intractability and periodic resurgence of bitter partisan dispute—all in the face of a continual expansion of scientific understanding.

Blame for this unsatisfactory state of affairs is usually assigned to the political process itself, especially to those who use science to advance particular ideological agendas. If only, the complaint goes, those conservatives, liberals, environmentalists, industrialists or ignorant members of the public would understand the facts, or stop manipulating the facts for their own political gain, we could arrive at rational solutions to the problems we face.

Yet this sort of complaint—which I have heard, in one form or another, from innumerable scientists—suffers from a profound misunderstanding of the relation between science and politics. The idea that a set of scientific facts can reconcile political differences and point the way toward a rational solution is fundamentally flawed. The reality is that when political controversy exists, the scientific enterprise is ideally suited to exacerbating disagreement, rather than resolving it.

Consider the contested 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Recall that the outcome hinged on Florida's 25 electoral votes and that the vote count was incredibly close, with a margin of victory of about 500 votes out of six million cast. The technical issues surrounding an election are entirely straightforward—count the votes for each candidate and see who has the higher number. The system is closed, the rules are clear, the technical aspects are trivial, and the correct answer is an integer. What could be more amenable to rational, fact-based analysis?

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose in the days immediately following the election we had assigned a team of disinterested experts to determine the correct result and declare the winner. Wouldn't this approach have quickly yielded the right answer, in a manner untainted by political shenanigans?

Given the many complexities and irregularities associated with the vote count (from "hanging chads" to poorly designed ballots), our team of experts would have had to draw on the strengths of numerous disciplines, perhaps including statistics, mechanical engineering, cognitive neuroscience, material science, physiology and psychology, each of which could contribute to the understanding of what actually went on during the voting and vote-counting. Of course, once the experts began to make their results known, other experts would need to review things, and disagreements over methods, data and conclusions would undoubtedly emerge. Crucially, any conclusion about actual vote tallies would have to be governed not just by technical analysis of the performance of voting technologies and voters, but also by rules about what constitutes a valid vote. For example, the Miami Herald's unofficial recount showed that either candidate could have been the winner depending on the criteria used to judge the validity of cast ballots.

Can we really imagine that our multidisciplinary team of experts would have achieved the consensus and legitimacy necessary to determine the "real winner" in a manner that allowed the nation to move forward rapidly with the business of democratic governance? Because it should be remembered that the political and judicial process did just that: It conferred a final decision in 36 days, not through a determination of technical fact (who won, and by how many votes), but through the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to accept the State of Florida's certification of a contested vote count that showed George W. Bush to be the winner.
In the 2000 election, our political process did not turn to technical experts to come up with an answer. In contrast, when environmental problems become mired in politics, we often call on scientists to break the gridlock. This approach is backwards. In seeking to address our environmental challenges, we should instead (and regardless of our political preferences) look to the lessons of the Florida vote count.

My central point is that scientific inquiry is inherently unsuitable for helping to resolve political disputes. Even when a disagreement seems to be amenable to technical analysis, the nature of science itself usually acts to inflame rather than quench debate. One reason for this outcome is what I would term an "excess of objectivity." Science seeks to come to grips with the richness and complexity of nature through numerous disciplinary approaches, each of which gives factual, yet always incomplete, views of reality.

Consider climate change, which may variously be understood as a problem of climate impacts, biodiversity, land use, energy use, water use, agricultural productivity, public health, economic development, demographics and so forth. Each of these concerns involves a variety of interests and values, of potential winners and losers, and each depends on a body of relevant knowledge to help define, understand, anticipate and respond to the problem. The very wealth of reliable scientific information becomes an obstacle to achieving any type of shared understanding of what climate change "means." That is, the problem is not a lack of scientific input so much as the contrary—a huge and evolving body of knowledge with components that can be legitimately assembled and interpreted in different ways to yield competing views of the issue at hand.

This result does not arise from the selective use of facts by partisan players to support a particular position. There is no way to "add up" all the information relevant to a complex problem like climate change to give a "complete" picture of what is going on. So choices must be made, and choices involve values. When an issue is both politically and scientifically contentious, one can usually support one's point of view with an array of legitimate facts that seem no less compelling than the facts assembled by those with a different perspective. Subjectivity and objectivity, it turns out, are not separate and immiscible realms, but opposite sides of the same coin. For every value, there is often a legitimate supporting set of scientific results.

(more below)

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/...id/49609/page/1

Red rain could prove that aliens have landed

Speaking of strange phenomenon. The minute I order dsl my computer blows up.

Luckily I have my old Win98 machine, but it's even slower than the XP on 56k. But as least I could find C-Span sucks.

What really sucks is win98.

That's a drag.

La Nina weather phenomenon is coming:

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said it saw unprecedented signs pointing to a looming La Nina, a phenomenon that originates off the western coast of South America but can disrupt weather patterns in many parts of the globe.

In a press release, the Geneva-based agency said temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific had been between 0.5 and 1.0 C (0.9 and 1.8 F) below normal since the start of the 2006.


"Combined with broader tropical Pacific ocean and atmosphere conditions, this is consistent with the early stages of a basin-wide La Nina event," it said.

"(...) It is unprecedented in the historical record for a La Nina of substantial intensity or duration to develop so early in the year."

La Nina, which has the opposite effects to the more notorious El Nino, last occurred from mid-1998 to early 2001.

Under La Nina, the sea-surface temperature in the central and eastern tropical Pacific falls below normal.

This typically brings far dryer weather to the southwestern United States, Florida and western Latin America and above-average rainfall to Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

But there can also be a knock-on much further afield, with an increase to monsoon rainfall in South Asia, unusual coolness in tropical West Africa, Southeast Africa, Japan and the Korean peninsula.

La Nina usually lasts nine to 12 months, although "some episodes may persist for as long as two years," the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says on its website.

The WMO sounded a note of caution.

The buildup of this La Nina was so exceptionally swift and intense that it was impossible at the moment to infer what the impact would be, and how long the phenomenon would last, it warned.

"Most models and expert interpretations favour the event dissipating quite rapidly over the next three to six months," the UN's weather agency said.

"Nonetheless, neither a continuation of La Nina beyond mid-year, nor the development of El Nino in the second half of 2006, can be ruled out as possible outcomes from the current prevailing situation."

El Nino, which last ran from 2002-3, occurs when warm water builds up in the western tropical Pacific and creeps eastwards, again causing huge disruption to classic patterns of rainfall and wind.

Both El Nino and La Nina are naturally occurring cycles, although there is much speculation among climate scientists that man-made global warming may make them more frequent and more vicious and that this trend may have already started.

El Nino means "the little boy" in Spanish. Its name is attributed to fishermen off the coast of South America who noted the appearance of warmer water, often around Christmas. La Nina means "the little girl."

Click Here

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A new computer model suggests that the next solar cycle will be more active than the previous one, potentially spawning magnetic storms that will be more severe and disruptive to communication systems.

The next sunspot cycle will be between 30 percent to 50 percent more intense than the last one, scientists said Monday.

The cycle will also begin a year later than expected, in late 2007 or early 2008, and peak around 2012, said Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

The new prediction is at odds with previous forecasts, which suggested that the intensity of the next solar cycle would be measurably smaller.

Accurately predicting the intensity of the sunspot cycle, which occurs about every 11 years, allows scientists to anticipate solar storms, which are caused by solar flares, or the giant eruptions that burst out from the surface of the sun.

Solar storms, which eject billions of tons of plasma and charged particles into space, can produce dazzling northern lights, but also disrupt power lines, radio transmissions and satellite communication.

The last time the solar cycle peaked was in 2001. During the last cycle, solar storms caused extreme radio blackouts in the Pacific, but the storms were not as severe as the ones that occurred in the late 1950s.

''This prediction, if it's accurate, suggests we're potentially looking at more communication and navigation disruption,'' said Richard Behnke of the National Science Foundation, which funded the research.

For decades, scientists have tracked the solar cycle and appearance of sunspots, but they have been unable to accurately predict the intensity or timing of solar storms, which increase as the number of sunspots increases.

Dikpati, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said her team tested the new computer model using previous solar cycle data and had a 98 percent accuracy.

David Hathaway, a solar astronomer with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, does not doubt that the next sunspot cycle will be stronger than the previous one.

But Hathaway said his own research suggests that the next cycle will occur late this year -- earlier than what Dikpati predicted....

The 1780 Atlantic hurricane season was unique in that it had 3 hurricanes that caused at least 1,000 deaths each; all three were in October.

Sunspots reached a record peak about 1780, the highest level for a period of several centuries. The supermaximal solar cycle, ca 1775-1785, included an unusually high number of fatal hurricanes - 3 of the top 10, 6 of the top 25 most fatal hurricanes recorded in the past four centuries. Solar activity subsequently only yielded greater numbers of sunspots, in the cycles peaking in 1958, 2000-2002, the highest general level of solar activity for several thousand years.

That post is old, now I have dsl, a little over 100 times as fast as my old dialup for downloads, even got to play football online, though I sucked without any practice.

Hello... helllloooo... is anybody out there?...

Sheese... it seems I've chased off everyone...

That's a strange phenominon... isn't it?...

Hellllloooo...

*

Well poop!...

Good knight all.

The Garbage Pick up was today. They left with the garbage mouthed posters.

Cactus Dying... no Baby Animals or Birds


RECORD DROUGHT

PHOENIX, March 9 — Thursday began like the 141 days before it, sunny and crisp, dust settling everywhere except on the record — set again — for the number of days without rain.

Phoenix knows all about dry weather. It is a place where children are drilled throughout elementary school to conserve water, where hotels boast of covered parking areas not to protect from rain, but to offer a bit of shade.

The Garbage Pick up was today. They left with the garbage mouthed posters.

Then why were you here?

"It shows a new example of independent evolutionary adaptation in the frogs for life in habitats filled with loud background noise," said Albert Feng, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.



(That ought to discount the evolutionary theory)

Volcanos, Tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides, tornados, heat waves, cold waves, dry spells, wet spells, rogue waves, even the animal kingdom is experiencing changes. What is going on?