God saves the Loch Ness monster
WHAT can it be like inside the heads of creationists? They want to believe that their deity made all the species at once and kept them that way, yet Earth is teeming with fossils of extinct species. So what gives?
If the deity’s a trickster, the answer is easy: she, he or it put the fossils there to cause interminable arguments. But it appears that the authors of the US Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme, designed for parents who want their children to believe in a literal reading of the Bible, insist that their deity did not waste all that creative effort.
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According to Scotland-based newspaper The Herald on 24 June, the ACE textbook Biology 1099 asks “are dinosaurs alive today?” and claims that “scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence” (). It asks students whether they have heard of the “Loch Ness Monster” in Scotland. “Nessie,” it asserts, “has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses and photographed by others… Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.” (Yes, we know, plesiosaurs weren’t dinosaurs.)
Reader John Toner, who alerted us to the article in The Herald and who hails from Scotland himself, says: “The good citizens of Brigadoon remember dinosaurs very well.” But we are obliged to point out that was a Hollywood rendering of an utterly fictitious Scottish past.
Defying Feedback’s ban on nominative determinism, Guy Cox can’t resist pointing out that the director of the new movie The Amazing Spider-Man is Marc Webb
Ku Klux Klan: champions of morality?
RESEARCHING this Nessie nonsense, Feedback wondered why it has popped up again now. The story appeared in July 2009 in a Times Educational Supplement article about ACE materials being used in faith schools in the UK (). We found more in a video made in June 2011 by Rachel Tabachnick and Thomas Vinciguerra (). Then, even while we were drafting a sentence about this video, we saw the August issue of the San Francisco-based news magazine Mother Jones and a piece entitled “14 wacky ‘facts’ kids will learn in Louisiana’s voucher schools” (). It’s about fundamentalist school textbooks that Tabachnick and Vinciguerra “have thankfully pored over so the rest of world doesn’t have to”.
These books come from the and from a publisher called . They are used in faith schools, which Mother Jones says are funded from taxes under “voucher schemes” in several US states.
The Nessie weirdness, it seems, goes right through the curriculum. (BJU Press) gives us a flavour of the world view the books promote. Apparently, “the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality”. And, according to America: Land I Love, an A Beka Book: “God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ” – presumably the tears were mostly among the thousands who died on the long marches west.
Even mathematics has its ideology, it seems. An “traditional mathematics texts that are not burdened with modern theories such as set theory”. This, apparently, is because “the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute”.
It’s a sobering thought that faith schools are putting this kind of stuff into children’s heads.
Big bottle holds more than small bottle
YOU can’t accuse them of lying, but Peter James still thought there was something a bit off in the wording on the cone of cardboard fixed over the top of a bottle of Masterfoods sauce that he bought in Perth, Australia. The ad on the cone, which Peter scanned and emailed to Feedback, boasts: “Compare the value… Our 350ml bottle contains 40 per cent more sauce than other 250ml bottles.”
Peter phoned the company’s managing director and indicated that while he was very glad that Masterfoods was producing and filling sauce bottles of a size that compared favourably to smaller bottles, he was not convinced that the question of value was being addressed.
Shortly after, he is pleased to report, the promotion was discontinued.
Using your phone might be dangerous
ON A “Dial and Discover” walk at the Sustainability Centre near Petersfield in Hampshire, UK, Richard Jordan came across a series of notices at 10 “walk points” that told him when to stop and listen to a commentary on his phone. The last sentence of each notice left him bemused: “When using your mobile phone, please be discreet to ensure your safety.”
The only staff member Richard could find admitted he hadn’t a clue what this meant.
FINALLY, two insights into Olympian time: Stephen Battersby reports that on 6 August the organisers of the London Olympics sent an email to ticket buyers with the subject: “Day 10: Welcome to week two.”
The morning before, Jenny Narraway noted that the UK’s The Guardian website promised “minute by minute” coverage of Usain Bolt’s defence of his 100-metre sprint title later that day.