Museums not giving stolen artifacts and bodies back is bonkers. Like what if someone from China went into Arlington cemetery and dug up JFK’s dead body and took him and his eternal flame back to China and refused to give him back like that would be pretty messed up and kind of weird right like put John back that’s not where he goes but that’s basically what the British museum does every day
Imagine if somebody went into all the Catholic Churches in your area and cut out all of their stained glass windows to display in a sterile white room 5,000 miles away like that’s the level of ridiculousness we’re dealing with here. Those aren’t your windows, man. What the fuck.
The main justification, as I understand it, is that museums are better at preserving artifacts in part due to often having more money and tech to preserve it than its originating group, but also because said group might use the artifact for its intended purpose which obviously makes it age more quickly.
To be clear, I am not endorsing this view, just explaining it.
So most creationists aren't what you see in Arrested Development where they think dinosaur fossils are fakes planted by Jews. Those freaks do exist, but they're a wacky fringe even among creationists. The flat earth kind that other creationists write whole articles distancing themselves from.
The majority of creationists, the ones who sell books and open theme parks, love dinosaurs. It's an obsession. They see them everywhere. Weird vaguely described creature in the Bible? Dinosaur. Dragon legends around the world? Also dinosaurs. Grendel? Dinosaur. Any ambiguous literary reference or ancient carving that could conceivablly be compared to a dinosaur is taken as evidence that non-avian dinosaurs lived much more recently than They want you to believe. It's not uncommon for them to think they're still out there, in fact. Most dinosaur or pterosaur cryptids are perpetuated by creationists. They go on missions to Central Africa to spread the gospel and hunt for living sauropods. Missions plural. They keep doing this. They bring dinosaur books as well as Bibles and have the local villagers point out which ones they recognize.
Of course, there's a racist element to this part because an African villager pointing out a dinosaur is only remarkable if you assume they're ignorant of paleontology or the pop culture around it. But they're not. They have TV and internet. They've seen Jurassic Park. But they know the weird white people go apeshit when they draw a sauropod with a stick in the mud for their camera crew.
They've created a whole mythology for dinosaurs with entire museums devoted to their lore. I remember a traveling exhibit I saw as a kid that speculated about how dinosaurs were brought on Noah's ark as babies to save space. They had a replica based on supposed eyewitness accounts of the ark on Mt Ararat. How a wooden structure survived for thousands of years, I don't know, but that's the least of their worries.
That's nowhere near the most elaborate example either. There's a whole Ark Encounter theme park where you can go inside a life-sized model of the ark and see museum quality dinosaur models in pens accompanied by completely made-up info about how Noah cared for each animal. They also have dioramas of dinosaurs fighting giants in an arena because we all remember that part of the Bible.
The guy who created this masterpiece is Ken Ham, who was also responsible for Genesis 3D, which was, as the name suggests, going to be a 3D animated retelling of the book of Genesis. Whether or not they planned on including the story of Onan is unclear, but they had people crowdfund individual scenes, and one of them was "Adam meets the Apatosaurus."
Ken Ham is a rock star in the creationist world, most famous for debating Bill Nye. Other greats include Ray Comfort of "behold the atheist's nightmare" fame, Duane Gish after whom the "Gish gallop" debate tactic was named, and Kent Hovind, AKA "Dr Dino" who believes peach pits cure cancer and was arrested for tax evasion. I'm not as familiar with him, but @gailyinthedark could probably fill you in. All of these people have devoted most of their careers to imaginatively reconciling the existence of dinosaurs with young earth creationist ideology.
TL,DR: most homeschooled evangelical kids are allowed and even encouraged to have dinosaur phase, if not a lifelong dinosaur obsession, it's just going to be way weirder than most people's.
I forgot an important piece of lore: the Chinese fake fossil trade.
See, the earliest known examples of feathered dinosaurs (except Archaeopteryx but we'll circle back to that) were discovered in China, hence their names like Sinosauropteryx, Sinornithosaurus, Dilong, etc. So creationists don't like that because they've been cheerfully maintaining for years that there is no connection between dinosaurs and birds because no dinosaur fossil up to that point has preserved any trace of a feather. So naturally, they deny these fossils are genuine. Conveniently for them, there are shady fossil peddlers in China who have sold fakes. In reality, paleontologists are very aware of this and are highly skeptical of any Chinese fossil that wasn't directly dug out of the ground. But that ambiguity is enough for the creationists to spin a narrative that the "evolutionists" are conspiring with the evil Chinese fake fossil mafia, like how they use the Piltdown man (another famous hoax that was never widely accepted) against human evolution but probably more racist. I'm not sure how this narrative developed after feathered dinosaurs started turning up elsewhere like in Madagascar and North America. In any case, they still deny dinosaurs had feathers and the Ark Encounter's dromaeosaurids are notably naked.
They have two schools of thought regarding Archaeopteryx: one holds that it's a fake made by adding feathers to a Compsognathus fossil (despite the only superficial resemblance between the two), while the other accepts its existence but denies any relation to dinosaurs and chalks all saurian characteristics up to coincidence. It's a just a bird, guys. God gave it a recognizably deinonychosaurian skeleton for the aesthetic.
Given the blatant contradictory nature of these two "theories," this is a highly divisive issue within the creationists community with some online creationist book stores refusing to carry books that perpetuate the hoax model. I haven't followed creationist theory in some time by now, but I'm curious as to how they're handling the dinosaur-bird thing in light of more recent evidence.
Yeah, I was a homeschooled evangelical Christian kid and I absolutely had a dinosaur phase, which was encouraged by my parents. Ken Ham came to our church and did a presentation. I hung on every word at 6 years old.
On some level, creationist kids get an awesomer dinosaur phase than evolution-belivers; I thought I could maybe see a dinosaur in person some day!
This solar jack-o-lantern, captured by our Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in October 2014, gets its ghoulish grin from active regions on the Sun, which emit more light and energy than the surrounding dark areas. Active regions are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere.
The SDO has kept an unblinking eye on the Sun since 2010, recording phenomena like solar flares and coronal loops. It measures the Sun’s interior, atmosphere, magnetic field, and energy output, helping us understand our nearest star.
Grab the high-resolution version here.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
What’s It Like to Work in NASA’s Mission Control Center?
In the latest installment of our First Woman graphic novel series, we see Commander Callie Rodriguez embark on the next phase of her trailblazing journey, as she leaves the Moon to take the helm at Mission Control.
Flight directors work in Mission Control to oversee operations of the International Space Station and Artemis missions to the Moon. They have a unique, overarching perspective focused on integration between all the systems that make a mission a success – flight directors have to learn a little about a lot.
Diane Dailey and Chloe Mehring were selected as flight directors in 2021. They’ll be taking your questions about what it’s like to lead teams of flight controllers, engineers, and countless professionals, both agencywide and internationally, in an Answer Time session on Nov. 28, 2023, from noon to 1 p.m. EST (9-10 a.m. PST) here on our Tumblr!
Like Callie, how did their unique backgrounds and previous experience, prepare them for this role? What are they excited about as we return to the Moon?
🚨 Ask your questions now by visiting https://nasa.tumblr.com/ask.
Diane Dailey started her career at NASA in 2006 in the space station Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS) group. As an ECLSS flight controller, she logged more than 1,700 hours of console time, supported 10 space shuttle missions, and led the ECLSS team. She transitioned to the Integration and System Engineering (ISE) group, where she was the lead flight controller for the 10th and 21st Commercial Resupply Services missions for SpaceX. In addition, she was the ISE lead for NASA’s SpaceX Demo-1 and Demo-2 crew spacecraft test flights. Dailey was also a capsule communicator (Capcom) controller and instructor.
She was selected as a flight director in 2021 and chose her call sign of “Horizon Flight” during her first shift in November of that year. She has since served as the Lead Flight director for the ISS Expedition 68, led the development of a contingency spacewalk, and led a spacewalk in June to install a new solar array on the space station. She is currently working on development of the upcoming Artemis II mission and the Human Lander Systems which will return humanity to the moon. Dailey was raised in Lubbock, Texas, and graduated from Texas A&M University in College Station with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering. She is married and a mother of two. She enjoys cooking, traveling, and spending time outdoors.
Chloe Mehring started her NASA career in 2008 in the Flight Operations’ propulsion systems group and supported 11 space shuttle missions. She served as propulsion support officer for Exploration Flight Test-1, the first test flight of the Orion spacecraft that will be used for Artemis missions to the Moon. Mehring was also a lead NASA propulsion officer for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and served as backup lead for the Boeing Starliner spacecraft.
She was accepted into the 2021 Flight Director class and worked her first shift in February 2022, taking on the call sign “Lion Flight”. Since becoming certified, she has worked over 100 shifts, lead the NG-17 cargo resupply mission team, and executed two United States spacewalks within 10 days of each other. She became certified as a Boeing Starliner Flight Director, sat console for the unmanned test flight in May 2022 (OFT-2) and will be leading the undock team for the first crewed mission on Starliner in the spring of next year. She originally is from Mifflinville, Pennsylvania, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in State College. She is a wife, a mom to one boy, and she enjoys fitness, cooking and gardening.
I've noticed that people have started spreading the 1992 Good Omens script around. Please don't. If you've got it up, please take it down. There's a mess of serious and real legalities involved, and I don't want to have to start being a dick and asking for copyright takedowns and all of that, and I don't want to have to regret letting it out into the world. Just take it down, unshare, delete links. Thank you.
I can try. Because the moment you stop living you don't get a chance to fix anything any more, because the sun can never come out, because nobody can smile at you and you can't smile at them. Because deciding to stop living is a very permanent solution to what are sometimes, especially in retrospect, very temporary problems. Because, often, time heals and things get better.
As a person who spent his teens ideating suicide and adulthood despising himself for every failure, for being worthless, for not being good enough for everyone else, for not being sporty, for not being quick-witted, for doing all the wrong things, I spent hours at the lowest, loneliest point in my life shredding my psyche with every malignant thought my self-destructive loathing could create.
Then I ended it all ...
with one simple fact:
“None of that is true.”
Then I began to live.
Truly live instead of just existing.
I grasp reality with both hands and I held on tight. I make mistakes and I learn and I laugh. I build my self-worth in me, not what I think others think of me. Instead of right-and-wrong thinking, I think about how I can be and do better. I don’t lament the years lost to self-doubt and low self-esteem, I learn from them.
The solution is not all saccharine thoughts and quick fixes, it’s on-going thoughtful examination leading to active choices, learning from the good and the bad, and forgiving yourself the mistakes you have made and will make.
Time is not an issue. You’re always building yourself, the difference is in the material you use.
Your life is worth living. Carpe diem.
Recommended reading:
Unf*ckology
7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The Courage to be Disliked
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe
I’m too tired to be clever enough to add anything.
But this does remind me of a skit (possibly by Dana Carvey in SNL) talking about how politicians give inspiring speeches without saying anything (paraphrasing):
“Now is the time for all citizens to stand up for our great nation against this atrocity ... We will not stand by while this is going on ...”
I’m having trouble finding it, but it was an amazing speech about nothing.
...what is the "sex is just rock climbing" category
It was kind of a joke between me and a friend ("you wouldn't judge someone for having gone rock climbing with a bunch of different people") but honestly the more I thought about it the more I bought into it unironically because:
It is a physical activity done with one or more partners
You should only go rock climbing with people you trust to not let you fall
You should not go rock climbing with someone who is drunk or currently incapable of rational decision-making
Some people get super super super into rock climbing and do not shut up about all the places they have climbed and how many are left on their bucket list and these people are usually men between the ages of 20 and 35 and like it's fine dude I'm glad you're happy but I don't know what most of those mountains even are
While many consider it a fun activity, pressuring someone into climbing when they don't want to (or ignoring their feelings and just dangling them off a cliff,) could cause both psychological and physical trauma
There is no moral value to it whatsoever. Who you have gone rock climbing with (or whether you have rock climbed at all) has no bearing on who you are as a person. Imagine telling someone "it's not that heights make you nauseous, it's just that you haven't found the right person to belay you!" or "you need to save your first time rock climbing for someone special." That would be absurd.
historically I have not asked myself "will this aggravate my hip flexer injury" before participating when perhaps I should have 😔
