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Pensacola News Journal => Evangelist arrested on federal charges

While it might be amusing, it isn’t my policy to bring notice about every evangelical to be arrested, but this one is particularly satisfying. (It’s too much to hope that they’d all be put in jail.)

Kent Hovind has been running Dinosaur Adventure Land in Florida, an “amusement park” designed to undermine science and reason and tries to present “young Earth” creationism as anything other than a delusion of seriously impaired minds. I was going to compare them to Flat-Earthers but why insult the Flat-Earthers? They get enough of that already.

A Pensacola evangelist who owns the defunct Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola was arrested Thursday on 58 federal charges, including failing to pay $473,818 in employee-related taxes and making threats against investigators.

Of the 58 charges, 44 were filed against Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo, for evading bank reporting requirements as they withdrew $430,500 from AmSouth Bank between July 20, 2001, and Aug. 9, 2002.

At the couple’s first court appearance Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Miles Davis, Kent Hovind professed not to understand why he is being prosecuted.

Check out his Wikipedia Entry, the “Hovind Theory” is particularly a hoot – if it weren’t such a terrifying indictment against our education system that people can still believe this stuff.

(And no, I’m not actually talking about the debate of teaching Evolution vs Creationism (or it’s poorly disguised avatar, Intelligent Design.) It’s about teaching Critical Thinking skills.

No one believes that they don’t think critically because the implication is that you’re stupid. This isn’t true, critical thinking isn’t specifically a function of being “smart” or “stupid”, it’s a skill that everyone needs to be taught.

Some of my favorite Hovind ideas:

• Dinosaurs lived contemporaneous to humans 6,400 years ago
• The grand canyon was formed from the receding flood waters from God’s flooding genocide (sometimes called Noah’s flood)
• The Loch Ness monster (and Bigfoot) are both examples of “dinosaurs” that survived the flood
• The “flood” was caused by a gigantic ice meteor (presumably aimed by god) which froze mammoths in Siberia standing up and broke upon subterranean water deposits which flooded the planet.
• The ice comment also formed the rings around the other planets

I also understand that not only did he object to his guns being taken away by the court, (“They aren’t my guns, they’re god’s property.”) but he’s also claiming that he’s not subject to federal law because, “… I’m a citizen of heaven and I answer to a higher authority.” I guess that’s ok if you’re just slaughtering cows to make hot dogs, but not when you’re up on a Federal indictment.

Technorati Tags: Archaeology, Bigfoot, Blog, Commentary, Cryptid, Dinosaur, Dinosaurs

No, this isn’t a blatant attempt to drive traffic towards my eBay auction, but it is an interesting experiment.

Two weeks ago, I put these speakers up for auction. They’re a really nice, used pair of Bose 901s, and they sold for about $583, which I consider to be a low figure, but, hey, you get what ya get. Except in this case where the guy who bought them welshed out because he didn’t understand what he was buying.

So, this time I put them back, same pictures, virtually the same ad copy, but I added a couple “listing upgrades” and WOW, what a difference. I’m seeing 3 times the daily traffic on the auction. Who knew? I guess the eBay pros did.

If you’re interested (before July 30, that is) you can see the auction here: Bose 901 Speakers

BBC News => How Warm is your Dinosaur

Dinosaurs were long considered to be cold-blooded reptiles.

More recently, some researchers have proposed that the extinct creatures actively regulated their body temperature like mammals.

A study in the journal Plos Biology now suggests this is not the case, but that bigger dinosaurs may have lost heat so slowly that they stayed warm anyway

Happiness is a warm dinosaur.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Dinosaur, Dinosaurs, Natural Sciences, Paleontology, Science

MSNBC => Physicist touches upon God and science

World-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God.

You see? Science and blinkered superstition can get along just fine, as long as you don’t question the church’s cash cow.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Commentary, Loonies, Science

TimesDispatch.com => Train stuck in time

Locomotive 231 may finally finish its long-delayed run, nearly 81 years after it was trapped under the rubble of a Church Hill tunnel cave-in.

How cool is this? (Unless you were on this train, that is.) 81 years ago this train is stuck in the collapse of a tunnel and now they might dig it out. Perhaps they’ll finally be able to deliver those old letters that were bound to be in the mail car?

Technorati Tags: Archaeology, Blog

I just haven’t had much time lately, so have I got a backlog of stuff… guess I’m going to post it in condensed form, otherwise, I’d be typing all month.

Technorati Tags: Blog

ABC News => Drunken Jackie Chan Disrupts Show

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but really, perhaps Jackie Chan needs to consider stopping drinking?

Jackie Chan disrupted a concert by Taiwanese singer-songwriter Jonathan Lee and exchanged insults with the audience, a news report said Tuesday.

Ming Pao Daily News quoted the 52-year-old action star as saying onstage that he was drunk.

Chan suddenly jumped on the stage Monday night and demanded a duet with Lee. He then tried to conduct the band but stopped and restarted the music several times, the newspaper reported.

Technorati Tags: Blog

We actually took the kids to Steele Indian School Park for the Fourth of July show this year.

For many years, the big fireworks show was held downtown, and, by coincidence, we have a friend who owns a house within a couple blocks, so every years we used to go to his front yard.

Then, a couple years ago, they moved the show to the new park, which is 2 miles from our house. We thought we’d get a great vantage point, but there’s just enough big trees in the way that, unless you get on the roof, it’s not very good.

Even though it is only two miles, of course, all the streets are closed off and it’s too darned hot to walk (especially with a 4 year-old and a 1 year-old in tow.) So, this year we drove to one of the designated park and rides where special shuttle buses were running for free to the park. The ride (up Central Avenue) wasn’t too bad. People had been arriving for hours and so there was just a small but steady stream of people looking to catch the shuttle.

The ride back was a nightmare.

Apparently there was a car accident right in the intersection of the one street that was allowed to cross Central. (How do you have an accident in an intersection crossing a closed road?!)

What that meant was, not only did you have everyone leaving the park all at once to catch the busses, but the busses couldn’t get from the parking lot to the park, so the streets just jammed with people waiting for the busses to arrive.

When we finally did get on the buses, they were absolutely standing room, rush hour Tokyo packed, and the ride back was taken in 6 foot increments. It wasn’t pleasant. One of the reasons it was so messed up was that the route travelled right down Central in the midst of the light rail construction. (You see, there really is a tie-in to the light rail in this post.)

Anyway, the upstart of this was that some dumb SOB, standing on the other end of the bus was complaining long and loud about the light rail. He’d clearly drank all the anti-light rail kool-aid and was talking out his ass. (In exactly the same way the anti-light rail people do.)

“Blah, blah, blah… the train only travels 15 mph… blah blah blah… no one will use it… blah blah blah.”

Unfortunately, since he was at the other end of the bus and I didn’t feel like shouting at him, I just gritted my teeth and let him ramble on.

In any case, to set the record straight, I suggest that you go to The Valley Metro Rail Page and read up about it yourself. (Of course, you can argue that their information will be – obviously – biased, but the facts aren’t too hard to check.)

Basically, the light rail can travel at 55mph; however, because it travels along city street in traffic, the train will be programmed to operated at the designated, legal speed limit for the street it is traveling along. Combine that with the fact that it makes limited stops (too few in my opinion, as they dropped a few stations in the planning phase) and the lights will be synchronized to allow it to pass means that it will travel at near the speed limit.

I realize that no one drives at the speed limit in this town, but it is unrealistic to argue that the train should “speed” down the streets, and, if you’ve every travelled those roads during high volume times, no one actually even approaches the speed limit, so the train should be a faster alternative.

His other gripe was that no one will ride it. Well, obviously, that remains to be seen. Considering how awful this city’s bus system is, I’d argue that no one would ever ride the bus, either, but they do. if I hop on even the earliest Indian School bus traveling towards Central, it’s standing room only until it reaches Central and then almost everyone gets off and hops on a Central bus. Those people will absolutely be riding the light rail when it is operational.

The light rail route doesn’t really go much of anywhere that I want to go, but I have to believe that the route chosen, while it may have been a compromise, covers some of the most heavily trafficked bus routes.

This morning, the Arizona Republic ran an article on the light rail showing some pictures of the construction process. I was very pleased to see that each car can hold 8 bicycles, and with 3 cars per train, that’s a 24 bicycle capacity. I quite like that, that makes it viable for me to bike the 1 mile to the nearest stop, then bike the 2 miles to my office from the stop near work.

One thing I don’t like from these pictures – those seats look just as awful as the seats on the Phoenix bus. Every time I return from Taiwan, where I ride the bus a lot, I think, “It’s not so bad riding a bus, I must do that more often.” But, once or twice on those horrible, narrow, plastic, butt-numbing buckets and I decide to go back to riding my car.

I suppose if they put upholstered seats in the busses, some fourth-grade reject jackass with a finger up his butt would cut them up and generally vandalize them.

Hmm, guess this post constitutes a rant, now.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Rant