TBT: Touring the Solar System in Rural Maine

I’ve been on an outer space kick lately, especially with all my posts about Saturn.  As such, it seemed like an excellent opportunity to look back at this little post from 2019—one of my favorites!

Surprisingly, I’d never bothered to reblog this one in the nearly four years since it was first published.  It’s about a model Solar System in the State of Maine, The Maine Solar System Model (the website for which has gotten a facelift since 2019).  It’s been on my traveling “to do list” ever since I learned about it on Quora.

With that, here is 24 September 2019’s “Touring the Solar System in Rural Maine“:

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TBT^2: Climate Hysteria Robs Us of Joy

Talk about a forgotten post:  I wrote this post way back in 2019, then reblogged it in 2020, and haven’t thought about it since.

When you’ve written and/or edited blog posts for going on 1430 consecutive days, it’s easy to forget some of the pieces you’ve written.  It’s one reason why it’s so foolish to crucify public intellectuals and other personalities for misguided tweets or ancient blog posts.  The nature of the medium is to produce, produce, produce—a constant churning of content.  That doesn’t mean we should be irresponsible with our words, but that it’s easy to forget old posts and arguments.

What brought this post to mind was a comment from the Quora contributor whose answer to a question inspired this post.  He commented over Thanksgiving and asked that I remove his name from the post, which I did.

Here was his comment in full:

I’m the one you’re quoting in this piece, and the connection you’re trying to make is utter nonsense. If you’d like me to explain the difference between trying to drink the ocean and altering the CO2 content of the atmosphere, I’d be happy to do so, but given the utter lack of scientific understanding displayed here, I’m guessing you wouldn’t care.

As a scientist, I’m offended that you’re peddling this kind of misinformation, and using my name to do it. As a Christian, I’m offended that you’re invoking the name of deity (and a diametrically wrong reading of scripture), to argue in favor of ignorance and lack of responsibility.

If you’re going to sell this kind of garbage, kindly leave my name out of it.

I respectfully disagree.  I think the poster missed the point of my piece.  Obviously, drinking from the ocean is not perfectly analogous to pumping carbon dioxide into the atrmosphere, but the two do seem related:  if we meaningfully affect sea levels by taking a collective drink from the ocean, it seems unlikely that we can meaningfully affect the ozone layer.

But the comment proves my point:  here’s a man so enslaved to the dogmatism of scientific materialism, he’s spending his Thanksgiving calling people stupid online.

I mean, I’m no scientist, and I probably am stupid about a lot of things, but I also didn’t shut down the global economy and civil society for two years and demand people trust my authority because I wear a lab coat.  My whole life I’ve heard that “science is our religion now” (probably true) and that “scientists are the new high priests of society.”

Well, they’re doing a pretty lousy job of it.  I wonder how many Westerners will freeze to death this winter because our priestly caste demands we bow obsequiously to Mother Gaia?  If questioning their dogmatic faith is “misinformation,” then I am proud spreader of the same.

With that, here is “TBT: Climate Hysteria Robs Us of Joy“:

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TBT: The Boogie Woogie Flu

In looking back at posts from March 2020, it’s wild how many of my posts were about two plagues on humanity:  the Democratic Party primaries and The Virus.  What’s particularly interesting is how those posts—including the one below—still assumed that life would begin returning to normal after two weeks; after all, we were all promised “two weeks to flatten the curve,” and now we’re living under perpetual public health tyranny.

Amidst all of that plague talk, I penned a short post about the Strasbourg “Dancing Plague” of 1518.  After being told to vegetate indoors for a year, I’m beginning to think a mystery plague that causes hysterical dancing might be preferable to the foolishness we’re enduring at present.

But I’ll keep the preamble brief and let the post do the talking.  Here is 23 March 2020’s “The Boogie Woogie Flu“:

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TBT: Climate Hysteria Robs Us of Joy

In casting about for a good TBT this week, I stumbled upon this post—which really should have ended up in one of my “Forgotten Posts” editions of Lazy Sunday—about the foolishness of climate hysteria, and the arrogance of thinking we can really have a concrete impact on the environment at the macro-level.

Don’t get me wrong:  I enjoy God’s Creation, and I think stewardship of His Creation is incredibly important.  We shouldn’t go around adopting baby sea turtles.  But driving to work everyday isn’t going to affect the environment or the climate in any discernible way.

In fact, it’s funny—climate change doesn’t even seem like a serious issue anymore (who even remembers Greta Thunberg now?).  As soon as the elites went hard for The Virus hysteria, they immediately had us using disposable plastic crap and Styrofoam containers again.  Even the whole message of The Age of The Virus was “Consume”—stay home, eat takeout, watch trash TV.

That puts the lie to the climate change nonsense.  I’ll repeat my admonition from one year ago today:  “Eat, drink, and be merry—and have lots of babies.”

Here is 22 October 2019’s “Climate Hysteria Robs Us of Joy“:

Growing up, I received my fair share of public school climate indoctrination.  My generation cut its teeth on Captain Planet, the eco-propaganda cartoon that, among other things, scolded Americans for using too many resources and having too many babies.  Fast forward to today, and those arguments are mainstream.

In fact, I remember my dad telling me that Captain Planet was Ted Turner‘s ham-fisted attempt at indoctrinating kids—one of the first times I vividly remember learning that the elites were lying to us.  The finger-wagging, puritanical nagging of environmentalists further pushed me away from eco-hysteria.

Still, we were always taught that the oceans were dying, that fresh water was scarce, etc.  Well, thanks to Quora, some easy math shows us that God’s Creation is abundant enough.

Quora user posed the question (to paraphrase):  if everyone drank a glass of water from the ocean (let’s assume it’s been desalinated), how would it affect the sea level?

One poster’s answer goes through the math:  if everyone—including babies! (around 7.7 billion people)—took a twelve-ounce glass of water from the ocean simultaneously, “the water level would drop by 0.0000000075 meters, or about 7.5 nanometers. That’s about 1/1000 the size of a red blood cell.”  Another contributor, Vilmos Shepard, writes that this scenario “would lower the ocean by less than a wavelength of light.”

As the contributor writes in his response, “within a day or two, we’d all sweat, breathe and urinate that water back out, and it would eventually end up back in the oceans. The water cycle is a hard thing to beat.”  Indeed.

The more I learn about Creation, the more I appreciate that there’s not much we can do to affect or alter the macro-level environment.  We can make tweaks and marginal improvements—such as improving desalination of sea water, transporting water more efficiently, picking up trash, etc.—but it’s foolish to think we alone can break or fix the environment.  Creation is incredibly abundant and robust.

Barring massive nuclear warfare, our everyday actions are not going to destroy the planet.  I’m not saying we should casually throw our old tires into the river—we should be good stewards of Creation—but it’s wasted effort to agonize over our carbon footprint.  If the enviro-cultists and eco-hipsters really cared, they’d live in the country, instead of cramming themselves into energy-guzzling urban hellscapes.

Eat, drink, and be merry—and have lots of babies.  Don’t curtail your enjoyment of the bounty of God’s Creation just because Ted Turner and Greta Thunberg are insane and deluded.  Yes,  yes—dispose of your old electronics and used motor oil properly (we’re trying have a society here), but we shouldn’t lose sleep over eating a steak.

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Progressivism and Playing God

God Bless the weirdos at Quora for asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask.  Regular readers know that I relish Quora fodder, as questions range from the ridiculous to the thought-provoking, but usually fall into some kind of bizarre no-man’s land.

Such is the case with this question:  “Do humanzees (half-human, half-chimpanzee hybrids) exist, or have ones been recorded in the past?”  It’s the kind of question that’s both fascinating and lurid, like reading about a baby raised by wild animals.  Like allowing a human baby to be raised in the wild (what was once called “the forbidden experiment“), such a horrific, cross-species hybrid would be a disgusting mockery of Creation—so, like the terrible car wreck, we want to see more.

The top answer to the humanzee question is from Belinda Huntington, who explains how various species within the same genus can crossbreed, such as a horse and a zebra, or a lion and a tiger.  The more mundane example is the humble mule, the result of a male donkey and a female horse.

Huntington then goes on to detail the many differences between humans and chimpanzees physiologically, and how such differences would make any offspring, if possible, extremely vulnerable and fragile—differences in spinal structure, arm and leg length, cranial capacity, etc.

She doesn’t get into the more interesting metaphysical questions, much less the moral ones—should we interbreed humans and chimps (answer:  no)—but she does link to a piece about Soviet experiments to interbreed humans and chimps.

Leave it to a dangerously progressive, atheistic ideology to play God.

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The Boogie Woogie Flu

Don’t let the title of today’s post fool you:  I’m not going to write about the coronavirus today.  I’m actually enjoying the relative freedom and flexibility of distance education, sipping car dealership coffee while I wait for my 2017 Nissan Versa Note to get a transmission flush and a belt and some wheel bearings replaced, all with appropriate social distance between me and the other people getting their cars fixed.

But in these plague-riddled times, I couldn’t resist this charming little Quora post about another, funkier plague:  the Strasbourg “Dancing Plague” of 1518.  Not that there’s anything charming about dancing yourself to hell, but it sounds a lot more fun than cloistering alone in your house for two weeks.

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Galaxy Quest

Our universe is massive—the adverb “unfathomably” usually modifies that descriptor.  It’s an apt adverb—we can’t conceive—fathom—how vast it is.

That said, we manage to possess some picture of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and our neighboring galaxies, even though we will likely never visit them, much less probe them.  So how do we know what the Milky Way looks like, when we’re in it?

Once again, Quora comes to the rescue.  There’s no way to photograph the Milky Way from the outside looking in, because we haven’t put any probes out that far (the pictures of galaxies we see is usually the Andromeda Galaxy, a spiral galaxy like our own).  Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, exited the Solar System in 2011; astronomically speaking, that’s like getting to the end of the block on your way to the edge of the country.

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Climate Hysteria Robs Us of Joy

Growing up, I received my fair share of public school climate indoctrination.  My generation cut its teeth on Captain Planet, the eco-propaganda cartoon that, among other things, scolded Americans for using too many resources and having too many babies.  Fast forward to today, and those arguments are mainstream.

In fact, I remember my dad telling me that Captain Planet was Ted Turner‘s ham-fisted attempt at indoctrinating kids—one of the first times I vividly remember learning that the elites were lying to us.  The finger-wagging, puritanical nagging of environmentalists further pushed me away from eco-hysteria.

Still, we were always taught that the oceans were dying, that fresh water was scarce, etc.  Well, thanks to Quora, some easy math shows us that God’s Creation is abundant enough.

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Why (Online) Scientists are Annoying

Today’s post won’t exactly reach the commanding heights of culture, but, hey, I wrote nearly a thousand words about a dweeb’s belt yesterday, so let’s keep the low expectations a-rollin’.

Readers know that I’ve been on a bit of a Quora kick lately (see here and here). Quora allows users to submit questions, and for pretty much anyone to provide answers. I can’t remember how I got signed up for it, but I get a daily digest pertaining to areas in which I have expressed an interest.

Usually I get strange questions related to evolution. The first response is always a snarky atheist attacking the questioner’s underlying premise or motives. “Uh, well, actually, there is no evidence against evolution, because we can just shoe-horn every inconsistency into this amorphous, nineteenth-century theory based on the localized observations of one zoologist on a self-contained island ecosystem.”

Those don’t bother me too much, because I just assume anyone who believes in evolution loudly online is an Internet atheist that hates God because his parents got divorced. What bugs me the most are the armchair astronomers.

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Touring the Solar System in Rural Maine

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Regular readers know that I love localism, and communities coming together to solve problems—or even just to throw fun festivals.  I also enjoy learning about space and our Solar System.

So I was thrilled to read an interesting Quora answer to a question about the scale of the Solar System that combined easily digestible math with a statewide Solar System project.  The question, paraphrased, is thus:  if Earth were the size of a golf ball, how big would the Solar System, etc., be?

The answer, from contributor Jennifer George, a self-described “Bibliomaniac” and “Information Omnivore,” also paraphrased, is simple:  travel up Highway 1 in the State of Maine.

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