As the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 draws near, it's startling to imagine there are still creationists, faith healers, climate change deniers, and yes, even moon landing hoaxers aplenty in the US. In a few days the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter might be able to snap a timely pic of the first lunar landing site showing the lonely first stage of the Eagle and other debris. Will that shut them up?
No. Sitting there, in their bedroom or basement, surrounded by old pizza boxes, posters of Gillian Anderson and Xena and piles of musty smelling X-Files t-shirts, HBs’ minds are totally and completely closed, so closed, in fact, that if you picked them up, flew them to the Moon and actually dropped them onto Eagle’s dusty descent stage they’d STILL insist it was just a prop ...
One of the unfortunate spinoffs of antiscience crusades fueled by fundamentalism or ideology, or money, is that when contempt for science becomes a partisan badge of honor and rite of passage, members of the clan strike out into new, increasingly bizarre directions the creationists or global warming deniers did not intend. It's somewhere between funny and sad, until some of them hijack a major political party and inject their delusions into every facet of US policy, at which point it can turn deadly serious.
- Speaking of threats, positive reviews are coming out on Unscientific America (Along with some disagreement on at least one point). I've already posted a Q & A with the authors here and both will be available in comments on my review tomorrow morning.
- The public perception of science and its findings in the US may be poor, and it's no surprise that only 6% of scientists now identify themselves as Republicans, but the poll numbers on evolution for both the public and scientists in that article look suspiciously low to me.
- Geez Ed, when taking a fun shot at a state Senator who says the earth is 6,000 years old, on national television no less, it’s pretty damn important you get the age right, too.
- Gov. Rick Perry strikes again: The Texas Board of Education will be led by yet another die hard socially conservative lunatic with long history of foisting personal religious and political delusions on the K-12 students now at her mercy.
- Is it really possible that Galileo saw Neptune in his crude telescope, a whopping 234 years before it was officially discovered? Hard to believe, but given the material listed above, it's nice to have an actual science topic to ponder.
