Water boils at 212 Degrees Fahrenheit at sea level.

Why is that important?

Ever think about why we learn things like this type of scientific truth in school?

If you desire to make some tea, you do not have to know the temperature at which water boils. You put water in a pan and put it on the burner and sooner or later, the water will boil and then you may pour it on your tea.

If you end up working in a number of different occupations, the temperature of water may be of import to your life.

If you work at Starbuck's or McDonalds or become a master chef, the exact temperature of the water will be of extreme importance.

The addition of salt, spices, and thousands of other elements to water as it heats has chemical consequences.

The fact that the boiling point for water changes the higher up you find yourself from sea level, is also an extremely important factor to consider.

If you work in any area involving manufacturing, the manufacturing of almost anything, the boiling point of water is an important consideration.  If you screw up with regard to this important scientific fact, you might end up blowing up an entire manufacturing plant.

Light is electromagnetic radiation, particularly radiation of a wavelength that is visible to the human eye (about 400-700 nm, or perhaps 380-750 nm[1]). In physics, the term light sometimes refers to electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength, whether visible or not.[2][3]

The speed of light in a vacuum is presently defined to be exactly 299,792,458 m/s (approximately 186,282 miles per second). This definition of the speed of light means that the metre is now defined in terms of the speed of light. Light always travels at a constant speed, even between particles of a substance through which it is shining. Photons excite the adjoining particles that in turn transfer the energy to the neighbor. This may appear to slow the beam down through its trajectory in realtime. The time lost between entry and exit accounts to the displacement of energy through the substance between each particle that is excited.

Like stating that water boils at 212 Degrees Fahrenheit, you must add another factor in the statement to purify it. You say that water boils at 212 at sea level. But there are also variables like humidity and relative humidity; atmospheric pressure; wind or movement of air around the test sample; dust and other components in the air; and  any other 'materials' dead or alive that are in the water at the time you are attempting to boil it.

You see, you must do what the Greeks did. You admit to discrepancies and then make those discrepancies into variables and then posit that if those discrepancies are taken away, you find the truth.

The speed of light is constant in a vacuum.

In everyday usage, vacuum is a volume of space that is essentially empty of matter, such that its gaseous pressure is much less than atmospheric pressure.[1] The word comes from the Latin term for "empty". Even putting aside the complexities of the quantum vacuum, the classical notion of a perfect vacuum with gaseous pressure of exactly zero is only a philosophical concept and never is observed in practice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum

So we are speaking about the speed of light in an environment that does not exist.

Now I have felt, as the American Catholic Bishops council for almost a century, that Genesis 1 & 2 contain allegories or metaphors. Let me just discuss three of my objections regarding any theories put forth by mental midgets that G 1 & 2 tell us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as to when and how the earth was created.

First, the earth was not created in six days or in a billion years.

Second, the earth and the universe were not created six thousand years ago.

Third, the earth was not the first thing created in the universe.

It seems so simple to me. I mean after all the reading I have done on many scientific studies as an amateur, I must attack all who would disagree with these three statements. They might as well tell me that Santa Claus leaves presents under a hundred million trees in this country every year eschewing Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. They are idiots.

But there is a political movement in this country which is pushing to paint these three statements as lies perpetrated by liberals (and really Jews if you want to get to underlying biases here).

Everybody knows about the Scopes trial Scopes v. State, 152 Tenn. 424, 278 S.W. 57 (Tenn. 1925), and how these three issues were at issue since they are assumed within any discussion of evolution.  Everybody knows that the trial was a 'set-up', that the kid teacher was never going to have to go to jail and that the hundred dollar fine would be paid by outside organizations that paid Clarence Darrow and crew.

Everybody knows that Inherit the Wind was a movie based upon this trial and is a classic of the American Cinema.

We had a second Scopes trial Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. (400 F. Supp. 2d 707, Docket no. 4cv2688), where the old creationists had begun using this intelligent design crap as a cover for what they really wanted to do. AND THIS CASE IS ONLY FIVE YEARS OLD.

Basically, the court found as a matter of law that the intelligent design theory was a cover for the old creationist theory and that the old creationist theory was in fact religion and that you cannot teach religion in public schools.  There are thousand page books written about this so enough of that.

But I must stress that there are salespeople out there attempting to work for intelligent design who attempt to sound all reasonable. Oh we are not saying the earth is 6,000 years old and we are not saying that god somehow stood on the earth and threw the stars into the heaven as an afterthought after he had thrown the moon and sun into orbit (remember, in the good old days the sun orbited the earth) Oh we are grown ups and we just would like you all to throw god into the equation and how about looking at the intricacies of the eye...and fuck you very much.

Do not believe this. This is a movement folks and its that old time religion, and its that earth that is created in 6 days along with the universe and it is the creationism of old.

What bothered me when I first heard about this inanity was that I was looking at some picture in National Geographic that printed a picture of a star that was more than a billion light years away from us. That is, the star system sent out light that took over a billion years to find us. So....

There are stars and star systems 7,000 light years from us, 7 million light years from us, and even 7 billion light years from us. The bible supposedly says (and it does not I assure you) that the earth and the universe were created 6,000 years ago so CREATIONISM IS WRONG, QED.

The creationists (fuck this intelligent design crap, call these idiots creationists, always. I mean they say I belong to the democrat party so I feel it's only fair to call the mental midgets creationists) have come up with explanations...I kid you not...for why there are stars and star systems billions of light years away from us and that that is why we know the universe is 6,000 years old.

If you ever come across a conundrum like this, I mean attempting to understand how people who can read and write can be so stupid, go to fascistpedia.  Here are their arguments:

First, The Big Bang theory contains its own conundrums. In fact it is posited by some experts that following the Big Bang, energy and light and matter traveled at a speed faster than the speed of light, citing the work of Dr. Charles W. Misner.

 Second, some idiot back in 1981 'proved' that the speed of light was faster 300 years ago.

One early explanation was that of creationist Barry Setterfield, who proposed that the speed of light was faster in the past.[52]. Critics objected to Setterfield's proposal, including on the grounds that the constancy of the speed of light is one of science's most fundamental laws.[53] Yet in 1999, John Webb, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues reported astronomical observations suggesting that the value of the fine-structure constant (which is related to the speed of light) may have changed (although the size of the change was much smaller than proposed by Setterfield). They subsequently published this in 2001 in Physical Review Letters.[54][53] However, other problems with the proposal has led most creationists to abandon the idea.[55]

Third, and this really floored me since most creationists are Anti-Semitic, they will use Einstein to basically say:  Hell it's all relative anyway. It may seem like 13 billion years out there but here only 6,000 years have passed.

Creationary physicist Dr. Russell Humphreys proposed a model based on Einstein's law of relativity (as the Big Bang model is), but with a different starting assumption, a bounded universe. Humphreys's model proposes that God created the universe much smaller than it is now, then expanded it, quoting the Bible saying that God "stretched out the heavens". In such a scenario, time would pass at different rates on Earth and in outer parts of the universe, so that while 6,000 years went by on Earth, billions of years passed on the outer edge of the universe. This model is also based on the Genesis account recording the days of creation according to time on Earth, rather than elsewhere.

Finally, it gets worse than this. These bible thumpers have come up with theories that would not work in a pulp science fiction novel:

Young earth creationist scientist Dr. John Hartnett proposes a model similar to Humphreys, wherein the Earth was trapped in a time-dilation field caused by extremely strong gravitation during the first few days of creation, from Earth's point of view, while billions of years passed for the rest of the universe. He attributes the field, its removal and the continued balance in our solar system (after the field was removed) to divine intervention. [57] Whilst Humphreys' model has time dilation caused only by gravity (per Einstein's General Theory of Relativity), Hartnett's model also takes into account time dilation caused by motion (God's expansion of the universe) (per Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity).

The starlight problem, or starlight travel-time problem concerns the placement of stars at distances so far from Earth that starlight could not traverse that distance, at its current velocity, in less than the age of the universe. Yet the light has reached Earth anyway. This raises a question under any creation-based theory, including the Big Bang theory: how did this starlight reach Earth so quickly?

There is no conflict with the description in Genesis, which says, "let there be light, and there was light." It doesn't say, "let there be light, and there was darkness that light later reached."

Other possible explanations include the possibility that light traveled faster at higher energies in the past, and/or space has expanded at a rate faster than the speed of light   http://conservapedia.com/Starlight_problem

WE HAVE ALL BEEN TRAPPED IN A JESUS TIME WARP.

So who gives a damn about all this? What possible relevance does this have to our lives?

The Texas Board of Education has approved a new school curriculum that will put a stamp on history and economics textbooks that will horrify some and be questioned by others...

 

Last month, the NY Times Magazine published an article by Russell Shorto about the influence of the Texas school board. It included an interview with the leader of the board's conservative faction, Dr. Don McLeroy. "I'm a dentist, not a historian," Dr. McLeroy told Mr. Shorto. "But I'm fascinated by history, so I've read a lot."

   Here's how Shorto described the beginning of his interview last year with Dr. McLeroy at his dental office in Bryan, TX:

"I consider myself a Christian fundamentalist," he announced almost as soon as we sat down. He also identifies himself as a young-earth creationist who believes that the earth was created in six days, as the book of Genesis has it, less than 10,000 years ago. He went on to explain how his Christian perspective both governs his work on the state board and guides him in the current effort to adjust American history textbooks to highlight the role of Christianity. "Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they're written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict," he said. "But Christianity has had a deep impact on our system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles."

   For McLeroy, separation of church and state is a myth perpetrated by secular liberals. "There are two basic facts about man," he said. "He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can't appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society. That's why to me this is a huge thing."

 

McLeroy offered a similar refrain in an interview with the Washington Monthly late last year:

"I don't care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say," he declared at one point. "Evolution is hooey." This bled into a rant about American history. "The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation," McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. "But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan--he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes."

http://www.examiner.com/x-15870-Populist-Examiner~y2010m3d14-Texas-school-board-revising-curriculum-creating-controversy

The date of this article is March 14, 2010.