Intelligent Design, Inschmelligent Design: my first encounter with uncyclopedia.org

Maybe I’m the last to find out, but I just today stumbled upon an incredibly . . . well . . . provocative . . . wiki site: uncyclopedia.org.  How I got there I can’t actually recall.  Perhaps I stepped into a space-time warp. The article I first encountered was an official-looking article about that well-known scientific theory, “malevolent design.”  I hadn’t before encountered this theory, so I eagerly read the article:

Malevolent Design (or M.D.) is one of the leading theories in micro-miracology, the division of Creation Science which deals with the origin and development of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses and fungal parasites. Beginning with the fundamental insight of Creation Science that the complexity of life is such that it must be the result of divine intervention, and employing the micro-miracological observation that pathogenic organisms change rapidly in order to defeat or circumvent the human immune system, the theory of Malevolent Design posits that the adaptation of human pathogens is the result of malevolent actions taken by an intelligent designer. Put simply, the theory explains that humans continue to become sick because God hates us.

Quite interesting, I thought.  I’ll have to tell mention this to grumpypilgrim, who thinks he is well read.  But why stop there?  I moved on to another topic that theory grumpy often does discuss, Intelligent Design: 

Intelligent Design, or as the French would say, L’Intelligent Design, is the absolutely true and totally scientific theory that the Universe is so gee-whizzy fantastic and

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Can You Have a Barn Without Uranium?

I was perusing a back issue of Physics Today, reading an article about events at the Large Hadron Collider, when I noticed the word, “femtobarn”. It was defined as 10-39 sq.cm. or a decimal followed by 38 zeros then a one. This is pretty small.

As a midwesterner, I thought I knew the size of a barn. So I multiplied out the femto (you know, milli-, micro-, nano-, pico-, femto-) to get the quadrillion times larger 10-24sq.cm. This is a barn? I had to Google this, and found a clear article at Stanford defining it for lay-folk.

In brief, physicists in the 1940’s were often discussing the cross-sectional area of the Uranium Nucleus. They thought of calling it the Oppenheimer (too many syllables) or the Bethe (too likely to be heard as Beta). Well, most of the research was being done in the midwest, and slamming protons into this target made them think of tossing tomatoes at a barn. The name “barn” was used in a reviewed article, accepted, and it stuck. Now, why femtobarns as the standard unit? It’s just practical for their purposes, like kilometers or megabytes.

By now, if you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering, “why should we care?” Sure, it’s fun to say “femtobarn”, but what use is it in everyday life?

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You May Have It Cockeyed If…

Science cannot disprove the existence of god. I have heard this claim made so often and by such a broad spectrum of people that I rarely really think about it. But is that the end of it? Science is concerned with materialism ( in a philosophic sense) and does best…

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Humorous proofs for the existence of God

I know that many of you are philosophically running on empty.  You've already dabbled with all of the traditional so-called proofs for the existence of God.  You crave more proofs and it's got you down.  Well, cheer up!  I have the site for you! Exchristian.net has 300 (did someone say 300?) "Over…

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Yet another flaw in the creationist argument

This excellent website describes yet another flaw in the creationist argument.  Creationists like to argue that evolution could not have created the enormous complexity we see today, because the odds are miniscule that all we see today could have happened by chance.  That's true.  However, it misstates the problem, because…

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