The ICR’s That’s a Fact video series returns after a brief hiatus, with a video that differs slightly from normal in appearance, if not content. This video has a dark background, has animated pictures rather than the usual word soup and stock images for visual entertainment, and is even shorter than the usual. The first two, at least, represent a slight improvement over the norm, but as the colour is likely to do with this video’s theme, Night Sky, it’s unlikely to last:
Posts Tagged ‘Astronomy’
22 Mar
The Faint Young Sun Paradox
If our Sun is, as we believe, a perfectly normal 4.5 billion-year-old main sequence star, we would expect that, say 3 billion years ago it would be largely the same as another main sequence star of that age. And, 3 billion years ago, we would thus expect that the sun would output around 70% of the energy it does today. Unfortunately, this is too little to sustain liquid water on the surface of the Earth. And yet, we know that there was.
This, then, is the faint young Sun paradox.
17 Dec
Kepler-22 b
When news of the newly discovered exoplanet Kepler-22 b broke around the 5th of December, a DpSU titled something like “Another ‘Goldilocks’ Planet Stirs ET Hopes” was inevitable. Unlike what we saw in Planetary Evolution, Mr Thomas is at least not denying that the planet itself exists – merely trying to argue that it’s unlikely that there’s life on it, which he claims is the primary reason that people are interested in it and exoplanets in general.
9 Dec
The Magnetic Field… of the Moon
Planetary magnetic fields – particularly that of mercury – are a recurring topic for DpSUs. Thursday’s article, when it eventually appeared, was called What Magnetized the Moon? In mid November in Nature there were two papers discussing possible causes of the Moon’s long-decayed magnetic field, along with another article about both papers. Curiously, Brian Thomas [...]
30 Nov
Some More Distant Galaxies
It’s a reasonably common DpSU topic – Brian Thomas finds a report of some galaxy at the edge of the universe (in time, if not in space) that looks a little older than would be expected according to Big Bang related models, and concludes that we must ditch it altogether and that we should thus [...]
4 Nov
IEE: The Kingdom, The Power, The Glory
It began with a post called God’s Power on Display, in which Dr Forlow asked her readers how they would show God’s power. She uses the example of her “favorite Olympic sport” – gymnastics. I’m currently rewriting RationalWiki’s article on the Institute for Creation Research. I described their “Evidence from Nature” section (which I haven’t [...]
3 Nov
Planetary Evolution
Creationists, especially those at the Institute for Creation Research, just love tarring every science that they don’t like as ‘evolution.’ They have successfully made much of the American public distrustful of the word, so it’s unsurprising that they would try to exploit this else-ware. I’m sure, if you asked them, few people would have trouble [...]
27 Oct
Mercury III
The journal Science apparently ran a whole series on Mercury and the data sent back from the MESSENGER spacecraft. A few days ago I posted MESSENGER Is Back, on the subject of a DpSU arguing on the basis of one of those papers that “Mercury’s Surface Looks young.” MESSENGER and Mercury have turned up once [...]
24 Oct
MESSENGER Is Back
Due perhaps to the fact that the spacecraft MESSENGER – which Mr Thomas refuses to capitalise – is currently orbiting the planet, something that has never happened before, the folk at the, ah, Icr, are very keen on Mercury. They – mostly the ICR’s “science writer,” Brian Thomas – seem to believe that the MESSENGER [...]
20 Oct
We Don’t Know, Therefore God
The latest DpSU from guess-who at the Institute for Creation Research - Scientists Don’t Know How Universe Works, Started – is a giant Argument from Ignorance. Specifically his ignorance, as you might expect. The article consists of a list of things that science allegedly can’t explain. Warning: May cause even more brain damage than usual. Perhaps [...]
