Undiscovering Flight 447

Brazilian officials have just released this astonishing news; the debris identified as the wreckage of missing Air France Flight 477 did not belong to the Airbus 330 as reported earlier.

"Searchers are back to square one," France's Transportation Minister, Dominique Bussereau, admitted to RTL. "Our planes and naval ships have seen nothing."

Two items had tipped Brazilians officials into announcing that they'd 'discovered' the missing aircraft - a wooden cargo pallet and a large slick of engine oil. French officials developed doubts when they confirms that the Air France flight didn't use wooden pallets - and there was more oil on the surface of the water than could possibly have come from the engines of an Airbus 330.

So the question still remains - what happened to Flight 447? And, more importantly, where is it? In this instance, no evidence is more puzzling than some.

Equally puzzling - just where did the pallet and oil that Brazilian officials recovered actually come from?

Science for Idiots (Idiots like me...)

Over on Coffee Bean's brilliant 'An Uneducated Housewife's Guide to Politics' there is all sorts of angry debate going on, encompassing many topics, including the perennial discussion about creationism versus evolution.

One of the angriest voices has been mine - simply because the whole existence of 'creationist doctrine' continues to astonish me.

Living in America, I'm often astonished at how similar things are to life in Britain. Oh, sure, the accent and the weather is different, but things are largely the same, aren't they?

Well, it stuff like creationism (and maple syrup on bacon, but I digress) that throws into sharp relief how different things in America actually are.

Here in the United States, people - and I'm talking about a lot of people - actually believe that the world was created in six days, exactly as it's written in the Bible.

This truly astonishes me.

For the most part, I like to think I'm fairly open minded and slip quite effortlessly into the conventions of different cultures. However, I find this particular one very difficult to swallow.

Over on Coffee Bean's blog, I haven't been altogether gentlemanly in my discussions. The words 'religious nutjob' and 'idiot' have passed my (virtual) lips more than once. This really isn't very mature of me. I should simply accept that other people have opinions different to my own (and then I should take the time to explain to them, in very simple terms, why they're wrong.)

Which is the point of the next few posts. I'm not a scientist - but I am a reasonably literate human being. I'm going to explain what I believe and why I believe it.

Now, as arrogant and opinionated as I am, I'm not always right. In fact, I'm not even often right! So there may be typos and errors in the next few posts that people should be more than willing to point out (for example, in a previous post I described the Earth as being 150 million years old. In fact, it's more like 5 billion years old.)

However, everything I write is going to be based in fact and science. I'm sorry, but evidence I can see and touch with my own two hands will always trump what's written in a two thousand year old religious text - no matter how 'inerrant' irrational people claim it to be.

Let the fun begin...

Whatever happened to the facts?

I realise I've been ragging on conservatives for quite a while - but the problem is they drive me crazy! Especially trying to debate something with one.

Because conservative logic is blissfully free of fact. Opinions and decisions are not reached through an objective appraisal of the evidence, but through sheer, pig-ignorant gut feeling. "This is the way I feel," a conservative will argue, "and nothing you tell me or show me will make me feel any different."

It's a condition comedian Stephen Colbert characterised as 'Truthiness.' "We're not talking about truth," he explained, "we're talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist."

"It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts," he continues, "but that's not the case anymore."

Colbert managed to hit the nail right on the head with his definition of the word 'truthiness.' Because we live in a world now that's moving further and further away from rationality, straight into the lap of blissful ignorance.

And there, facts are totally redundant.

A conservative doesn't base his or her opinions on facts. Instead, they're based on a more nourishing mixture of gut feeling and assumptions. Assumption always comes before fact - whereas a rational person examines the facts first and makes assumptions based on them afterwards.

Take creationism, for example. A creationist makes the assumption that the Bible contains an 100% accurate account of the creation of the world - 7,000 years ago when God made Adam from the clay of the earth and Eve from one of his ribs. He examines the evidence afterwards and interprets it in a way that will match his assumption.

A rational person, on the other hand, examines the evidence first and uses that as a basis for his assumptions. Learning that every tree grows a 'ring' during each year of it's life, he could cut down the oldest tree in the world, count the rings and assume (based on the facts) that the world is 4,000 years old (the age of the oldest tree on earth.) Or he could learn that there's a new layer of ice grown in the North Pole every year, so he could drill through the ice and count the layers to discover that the 'world' (or, at least, ice) was 420,000 years old. Similarly, examining geological evidence suggests the world is half a billion years old. All assumptions are based on physical evidence.

That same physical evidence is open to interpretation - which means a rational person might come to one conclusion, but be forced to change their mind should further evidence disprove their original hypothosis. The problem with conservative is that their assumptions are set in stone - often before they've even examined the facts.

Once those assumptions have been made, a true conservative is incapable of changing their mind - no matter what the 'facts' say. That's my major problem with them.

You can't debate with somebody who's incapable of changing their mind. You might as well argue with a brick wall.

Who's Evolved?

Brazil finds fossil of "missing link" to crocodile
Thu Jan 31, 12:30 PM ET

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Brazilian paleontologists said on Thursday they had found the fossil of a new species of prehistoric predator that represented a "missing link" to modern-day crocodiles.

The well-preserved fossil of Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi, a medium-sized lizard-like predator measuring about 5 1/2 feet (1.7 meters) from head to tail, dates back about 80 million years to the Late Cretaceous period.

"This is scientifically important because the specimen literally is the link between more primitive crocodiles that lived in the era of the dinosaurs 80-85 million years ago and modern species."

And yet creationists are still insisting the world is only 7,000 years old. Presumably this Brazilian behemoth was just a normal crocodile that ate too much.

Really, in the face of a daily onslaught of credible evidence, a refusal to even consider the scientific facts proves that fundementalist Christians aren't evolving at all.

Which doesn't bode well for them. Look what happened to homo neanderthalensis.