science
Creationists Rebutting Flat Earthers
Creationists are often accused of being in the same category as flat earthers. Here is an interesting article from Creation.com aiming to falsify one implication of the flat earth theory.
A direct test of the flat earth model: flight times
More data supporting a spherical earth
Published: 6 December 2016 (GMT+10)
Flat Earth Society, with annotations by RC
Figure 1: “Flat earth” map obtained from the Flat Earth Society website. The locations of the cities used in this study are marked (blue dots), as are the straight-line distances from Johannesburg to each city (red lines). I also added a black flag at the approximate position of the north pole. Originally, the city locations were marked in pen on a printed copy of this map, using various geographic hints from the map itself, but the data are recreated here for the sake of the reader.
After receiving such a surprising number of negative comments on our flat-earth rebuttal, I decided to perform a numerical analysis of the flat-earth model compared to the traditional spherical-earth model.
Science is about testing hypotheses, so let us set up an experiment to test these alternative views. For this, I enlisted the help of two of my children, ages 13 and 11. It made for a fun homeschoolproject.
The basic problem is the distance between longitude lines in the flat-earth model. In a spherical earth, the longitude lines start from one pole and converge on the other pole, and the distances get wider the closer they are to the equator. But in the northern-hemisphere–biased flat-earth model, the longitude lines start from the north pole and radiate outwards to the supposed ‘encircling southern polar ring’ like spokes on a wheel.
This means that the distances become greater the further south they go. This suggests an easy test of the two models: compare distances to travel times for distant places in the southern hemisphere.
The normalized data revealed a tight correlation between the spherical earth model and flight time.
The goal of this simple study was to compare reported airline flight time data with two distance measures, the ‘great circle’ distance of spherical-earth theory and the ‘straight-line’ distance of flat-earth theory.
The driving hypothesis is that the flat-earth map is distorted and so the flight times will not match the calculated distances. This, of course, assumes there is no great conspiracy among the millions of people working for the airline industry or the tens of millions of people who fly on their airplanes annually, which seems reasonable. I am also assuming airplanes on a flat earth would use the rule we all learned in geometry that ‘the shortest distance between any two points on a [standard, Euclidean] plane is a straight line’.
This assumption was in favor of the flat earth model for, as we will see, any curved line would only exacerbate the noticeable distortion with increasing flight time and distance from the source.
Read the rest here
Flat Land Disproves Flat Earth
Last week, one of the towns I visited on my Prayer Journey was Hay, located in the south west of NSW, in the beautiful Riverina District.
Hay Shire is one of the flattest regions in the world with just 17m of elevation between the highest and lowest points. I remember when we lived there an old farmer telling me that the land fell away to the west at a constant rate of an inch to the mile all the way to the South Australian border, about 400 km away.
As we approached the town we saw some very tall radio transmission towers, and just randomly I thought about how these towers actually prove that the earth is not flat.
That was a totally random thought although I do occasionally look at the crazy things these people post on the internet. In fact, just today I stumbled onto a conspiracy theory web-site that claims the Flat Earthers discredit the conspiracy theory movement.
So here was my thought in Hay. If the earth is flat and there is no physical horizon, they only need to build those towers to get line of sight which is basically a little taller than the tallest tree in the plain (of which there are not many). That also made me think that if the earth was flat I should have been able to see the Great Dividing Range from the roof of my house in Hay. And at night the lights from other towns such as the city of Griffith should have been visible.
People don’t build radio towers unnecessarily tall.
Ironically, one of the flattest places on the planet proves that the planet is not flat.
Science Says We Shouldn’t Be Here
For all the sophistication of modern science, and believe me I am a big fan of science done well, there is one massive blind spot.
Scientism or naturalism is the belief that science can explain everything without reference to God. There are many problems with that belief, one of which is that science can never really explain why there is anything. In fact science can only tell us that we shouldn’t be here. Yet here we are.
From the ABC:
The antimatter mystery: Annihilation and a universe that shouldn’t exist
Updated
Antimatter isn’t just a great plot device for sci-fi stories. It’s at the heart of one of the great mysteries in modern physics — why our universe has stuff in it.
Key points:
- Equal amounts of matter and antimatter were made in the Big Bang
- These should have destroyed each other
- But some how we ended up with left over matter
- Physicists are looking for the cause of this by smashing high speed particles together
But antimatter isn’t as exotic as it sounds.
Every particle that makes up matter — the electron, proton, neutron and their more-obscure cousins — has an almost-identical twin: its antiparticle.
They were both made together from cooling energy in really high-energy environments like the big bang.
Antiparticles are exactly the same as their particle “siblings”, except they have the opposite charge.
So there’s no way to tell particles and antiparticles apart, except for how they are affected by other charged particles.
An electron (negatively charged) will be attracted to a proton (positive), but an anti-electron (positive charge) will be repelled by it.
Anti-protons, anti-neutrons and anti-electrons can get together to form anti-atoms that act just like regular atoms. And anti-atoms can make anti-molecules that would behave just the same as regular molecules.
The only difference between them and a regular twin would be as soon as you shook anti-you’s hand, you’d both be destroyed in a massive flash of light, as your matter and antimatter converted back to the energy that they formed from.
This same thing happens whenever matching matter and antimatter particles get together — they annihilate each other, converting back to the energy they came from.
Which brings us to a fundamental problem with our understanding of the universe: we shouldn’t be here.
Full article here
Awesome Video- the Flash of Light At Conception
Scientists have captured a flash of light that occurs at the moment of conception
From Lifesitenews.com
Amazing new video captures the flash of light the moment life begins
CHICAGO, April 29, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Life begins with a spark – literally.
Researchers at Northwestern University have documented the striking event in a new video that accompanies a study published this week.
At the moment of conception, the egg releases massive amounts of zinc, which creates a spark that can be seen with the aid of a microscope.
“It was remarkable,” said Teresa Woodruff, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s medical school. “To see the zinc radiate out in a burst from each human egg was breathtaking.”
The research team had noted the zinc sparks before in mice eggs but had never observed the process in human beings.
“All of biology starts at the time of fertilization,” Woodruff said, “yet we know next to nothing about the events that occur in the human.”
One of the researchers, Northwestern chemistry professor Thomas O’Halloran, explained the science behind the process in 2014.
“The egg first has to stockpile zinc and then must release some of the zinc to successfully navigate maturation, fertilization and the start of embryogenesis,” he said. “On cue, at the time of fertilization, we see the egg release thousands of packages, each dumping a million zinc atoms, and then it’s quiet.”
“Each egg has four or five of these periodic sparks,” O’Halloran said. “It is beautiful to see, orchestrated much like a symphony.”
Since the amount of zinc in an egg correlates with successful implantation and birth, the Northwestern researchers are highlighting that their research may be used to assist in vitro fertilization.
But that raises concerns given the grave moral issues with IVF, which involves creating numerous embryos that are either killed or frozen. Moral theologians also emphasize that IVF is an injustice even for the children who are born as a result, as they are created in a lab rather than in the union of man and woman.
The study may have far-reaching consequences the research team did not intend, such as strengthening public belief in the longstanding scientific consensus that life begins at the moment of conception/fertilization.
Many of those who saw the Northwestern video said it testifies to the beauty of life and the shallow lies that buttress the argument of abortion-on-demand.
“I saw this, and I was blown away by it,” said Rush Limbaugh on his nationally syndicated radio program Thursday afternoon. “For anybody in the mainstream media to openly admit that life begins at conception” defies arguments that an unborn child is only “tissue mass.”
Evolution Must Be Believed
From Grace With Salt:
Not only killing the climate, we’re killing ourselves
That escalated quickly. We’ve gone from “we’re gonna fry the planet” to “we’re gonna be extinct.”
I suppose if you leave God right out of the picture and believe that life is totally random, then there is no hope for anybody
(literally).
Secular eschatology gone wild.
From the ABC:
Humans could be among the victims of sixth ‘mass extinction’, scientists warn
Posted
The world is embarking on its sixth mass extinction with animals disappearing about 100 times faster than they used to, scientists warn, and humans could be among the first victims of the next extinction event.
Not since the age of the dinosaurs ended 66 million years ago has the planet been losing species at this rapid a rate, a study led by experts at Stanford University, Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley said.
The study “shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event,” co-author and Stanford University professor of biology Paul Ehrlich said.
And the study, which was published in the journal Science Advances on Friday and described by its authors as “conservative”, said humans were likely to be among the species lost.
“If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover and our species itself would likely disappear early on,” lead author Gerardo Ceballos of the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico said.
Full article here
McDonalds Burgers Don’t Go Mouldy- Do They?
I just saw on Facebook another round of the “McDonalds food doesn’t rot- if bugs don’t eat it, people certainly shouldn’t” myth. Rather than going “Chortle! Chortle! Stupid fast food” like a lot of people do, I actually took three minutes out of my life to do a bit of research. Maybe more people should, you know, use their brains instead of accepting every Facebook meme as gospel truth.
It turns out that many people have done all sorts of experiments aimed at finding out if it is true, and it it is why.
Here is one such experiment. Spoiler alert- it’s all aobut moisture content and how fast they dry out.
The Burger Lab: Revisiting the Myth of The 12-Year Old McDonald’s Burger That Just Won’t Rot (Testing Results!)
Nov 5, 2010 9:00AM
More tests, more results! Follow The Food Lab on Facebook or Twitter.
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
A few weeks back, I started an experiment designed to prove or disprove whether or not the magic, non-decomposing McDonald’s hamburgers that have been making their way around the internet are indeed worthy of disgust or even interest.
By way of introduction, allow myself to quote myself. This is from myprevious article:
Back in 2008, Karen Hanrahan, of the blogBest of Mother Earthposted apicture of a hamburgerthat she uses as a prop for a class she teaches on how to help parents keep their children away from junk food… The hamburger she’s been using as a prop is the same plain McDonald’s hamburger she’s been using for what’s now going on 14 years. It looks pretty much identical to how it did the day she bought it, and she’s not had to use any means of preservation. The burger travels with her, and sits at room temperature.
Now Karen is neither the first nor last to document this very same phenomenon. Artist Sally Davies photographs her 137 day-old hamburger every day for herHappy Meal Art Project. Nonna Joann has chosen tostore her happy meal for a yearon her blog rather than feed it to her kids. Dozens of other examples exist, and most of them come to the same conclusion: McDonald’s hamburgers don’t rot.
The problem with coming to that conclusion, of course, is that if you are a believer in science (and I certainly hope you are!), in order to make a conclusion, you must first start with a few observable premises as a starting point with which you form a theorem, followed by a reasonably rigorous experiment with controls built in place to verify the validity of that theorem.
Thus far, I haven’t located a single source that treats this McDonald’s hamburger phenomenon in this fashion. Instead, most rely on speculation, specious reasoning, and downright obtuseness to arrive at the conclusion that a McDonald’s burger “is a chemical food[, with] absolutely no nutrition.”
As I said before, that kind of conclusion is both sensationalistic and specious, and has no place in any of the respectable academic circles which A Hamburger Today would like to consider itself an upstanding member of.
Full article here
Amazing Numbers of Stone Tools in Africa
Creationists believe that evolution is fundamentally flawed. I tend to agree with them on that, especially on the issue of how life began.
But here is an article that shows that stone agers must have had factories for the mass production of tools if they were to fit into the Young Age timeline.
From godandscience.org
Trillions of Stone Age Artifacts: A Young Earth Anthropology Paradox
Introduction
Trillions of stone artifacts cover the surface of the African continent. The product of the manufacturing of stone tools by hunters and gathers over long periods of time, these stone artifacts literally carpet the ground in some places in Egypt and Libya.
Just how much Stone-Age produced rock could be strewn across the African continent?
Imagine a volume of rockequivalent to 42-84 million Great Pyramids of Giza.
The “million” isn’t a typo. That number sounds absolutely fantastic, doesn’t it? Let’s take a look at how these numbers were derived.
PLoS Study
The results of a study just published (seereferencesbelow) shows how incredibly dense stone artifacts can be in some places in Africa. Working in a remote location in southern Libya, researchers took surveys from hundreds of one or two-meter square plots. From the tens of thousands of artifacts found in them, they estimateda minimum density of 250,000 stone artifacts per square kilometeris present in this portion of Libya.
And this only included what was visible on the surface.
Figure C of the supplemental material from the paper by Foley RA, Lahr MM (2015) Lithic Landscapes: Early Human Impact from Stone Tool Production on the Central Saharan Environment. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0116482. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0116482. This shows the rocky landscape of southern Libya and the artifacts that are found in high abundance.The researchers surveyed other published estimates of stone-tool densities in other areas of Africa. For example, some parts of the Nubian Desert average 12 million artifacts per square kilometer. They also calculate expected stone production given certain assumptions about population size and stone tool use over time. Overall, the researchers estimate that stone tool production across the entire continent of Africa has resulted in an average of 500,000 to 5,000,000 artifacts per square kilometer.
Africa is roughly 30 million square kilometers in area, so that would put the total number of stone artifacts between 15 and 150 trillion. Yes, that is trillion with a T—an astounding number.
The authors of this paper turn their estimate of stone production into a volumetric estimate and reach the following equally amazing conclusion:
“Taking the maximum figures, this yields … 2.1 x 10 14 cubic meters of rock. This is the equivalent of 84 million Great Pyramids of Giza… or 42 million taking into account the uneven hominid occupation suggested above. To extend the comparison further, it would be the equivalent of finding between 1.2 and 2.7 Great Pyramids per square kilometer throughout Africa.”Lithic Landscapes: Early Human Impact from Stone Tool Production on the Central Saharan Environment.
A few months ago I wrote (How Rare Are Stone Age Artifacts? A Visit to a Stone Tool-Making Factory in South America) about a dense stone artifact site in South Africa and stated that in just a few acres there had to be billions upon billions of artifacts. As well, in South America alone, there must be hundreds of billions of artifacts.
But this new analysis shows that my estimates were far too conservative.
Full article here
Major Problems With Climate Models
Do you ever wonder why there is such a big gap between the predictions of climate models and reality? Part of the reason is that they are fundamentally flawed, like disobeying the laws of thermodynamics and underestimating the incoming solar radiation for starters.
From WUWT
Whoops! Study shows huge basic errors found in CMIP5 climate models
Incoming solar radiation at the Top of the Atmosphere (TOA)
It was just yesterday that we highlighted this unrealistic claim from CMIP5 models: Laughable modeling study claims: in the middle of ‘the pause’, ‘climate is starting to change faster’. Now it seems that there is a major flaw in how the CMIP5 models treat incoming solar radiation, causing up to 30 Watts per square meter of spurious variations. To give you an idea of just how much of an error that is, the radiative forcing claimed to exist from carbon dioxide increases is said to be about 1.68 watts per square meter, a value about 18 times smaller than the error in the CMIP5 models!
The HockeySchtick writes:
New paper finds large calculation errors of solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere in climate models
A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters finds astonishingly large errors in the most widely used ‘state of the art’ climate models due to incorrect calculation of solar radiation and the solar zenith angle at the top of the atmosphere.
According to the authors,
Annual incident solar radiation at the top of atmosphere (TOA) should be independent of longitudes. However, in many Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) models, we find that the incident radiation exhibited zonal oscillations, with up to 30 W/m2 of spurious variations. This feature can affect the interpretation of regional climate and diurnal variation of CMIP5 results.
The alleged radiative forcing from all man-made CO2 generated since 1750 is claimed by the IPCC to be 1.68 W/m2. By way of comparison, the up to 30 W/m2 of “spurious variations” from incorrect calculation of solar zenith angle discovered by the authors is up to 18 times larger than the total alleged CO2 forcing since 1750.
Why wasn’t this astonishing, large error of basic astrophysical calculations caught billions of dollars ago, and how much has this error affected the results of all modeling studies in the past?
The paper adds to hundreds of others demonstrating major errors of basic physics inherent in the so-called ‘state of the art’ climate models, including violations of the second law of thermodynamics. In addition, even if the “parameterizations” (a fancy word for fudge factors) in the models were correct (and they are not), the grid size resolution of the models would have to be 1mm or less to properly simulate turbulent interactions and climate (the IPCC uses grid sizes of 50-100 kilometers, 6 orders of magnitude larger). As Dr. Chris Essex points out, a supercomputer would require longer than the age of the universe to run a single 10 year climate simulation at the required 1mm grid scale necessary to properly model the physics of climate.
The paper: On the Incident Solar Radiation in CMIP5 Models
Linjiong Zhou, Minghua Zhang, Qing Bao, and Yimin Liu1
Annual incident solar radiation at the top of atmosphere (TOA) should be independent of longitudes.However, in many Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) models, we find that the incident radiation exhibited zonal oscillations, with up to 30 W/m2 of spurious variations. This feature can affect the interpretation of regional climate and diurnal variation of CMIP5 results. This oscillation is also found in the Community Earth System Model (CESM). We show that this feature is caused by temporal sampling errors in the calculation of the solar zenith angle. The sampling error can cause zonal oscillations of surface clear-sky net shortwave radiation of about 3 W/m2 when an hourly radiation time step is used, and 24 W/m2 when a 3-hour radiation time step is used.
New Life Narrabri 
