Art imitates life

I got a bit of a shock from something a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me yesterday.

I was emailed a link to an article claiming that a 1950s television show had predicted the future -- because it featured a character named Trump, a snake-oil salesman who convinced a town that he knew how to prevent an invasion of aliens (and the collapse of civilization).  All they had to do, he said, was to build a wall around the town.

My immediate reaction was that it was going to turn out to be like the similar claims made a couple of years ago that Adam Sandler had repeatedly predicted future events.  In other words, entirely bogus, complete bullshit, and made up from the get-go (the Adam Sandler claims came from a satirical website called Clickhole that was up front that they'd invented the whole story, but thousands of conspiracy theorists evidently missed that part).

But the weird thing about the Trump television show is...

... it's true.

The show was called Trackdown, which was an obscure western series starring Robert Culp as Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman.  And in the episode called "The End of the World," a huckster named Trump -- at least it was Walter Trump, not Donald -- comes into town claiming that there's going to be a worldwide invasion and subsequent destruction of civilization, and the only way to prevent the town from being destroyed was to pay him money so that he could oversee the building of a wall around the town.

"I bring you a message, a message few of you will be able to believe," Trump tells the townspeople.  "A message of great importance.  A message I alone was able to read in the fires of the universe.  And at midnight tonight, without my help and knowledge, every one of you will be dead."

When he's challenged on whether he's telling the truth, he says to the doubter, "Be careful, son, I can sue you."

Walter Trump, who at least doesn't look like the President-elect [image courtesy of Snopes]

The doubter, of course, is shouted down, and the townspeople fall for Trump's lies.  Later in the episode, we hear the following:

Narrator: Hoby had checked the town.  The people were ready to believe.  Like sheep they ran to the slaughterhouse.  And waiting for them was the high priest of fraud. 

Trump: I am the only one.  Trust me.  I can build a wall around your homes that nothing can penetrate. 

Townperson: What do we do?  How can we save ourselves? 

Trump: You ask how do you build that wall.  You ask, and I'm here to tell you.

Fortunately for the town, Hoby Gilman unmasks Trump's duplicity, and the con man is arrested and jailed.

Weird, no?  The whole thing has been vetted by Snopes, and apparently is 100% true -- in fact, on the Snopes link you can watch a clip from the show.

So a lot of woo-woo types are claiming that the show was prescient, as if television acted as some kind of electronic version of the Magic 8 Ball that was popular with kids when I was young.  (E.g., "Is Donald Trump's Mexican wall idea a complete and utter boondoggle?"  Magic 8 Ball:  "It is decidedly so.")

Be that as it may, the race is on by the wingnut contingent to scour other obscure 1950s television shows to see what else might be in store for us.

Honestly, however, all we're seeing here is the law of large numbers, plus a heaping measure of dart-thrower's bias.  If you have a large enough sample size and no parameters for narrowing down what you're looking for, eventually you'll notice weird coincidences; and of course we're going to pay more attention to cases where there was a weird coincidence than the tens of thousands of times there wasn't.  (I, for one, am glad that most television shows don't predict reality.  I would prefer not to live in a world where The Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie, or (heaven forfend) Lost in Space was an accurate predictor of future events.)

But I won't deny that it's peculiar.  And if it is going to play out the way it did in Trackdown, I wonder who our version of the Hoby Gilman character will be?

Lurking under the ice

So once again I've been sent a link several times with either "Oh, lord, here we go again" or "Ha!  This is real!  You skeptics are so dumb!" notes appended.  The link is to a story in The New York Post about a "massive anomaly lurking in Antarctica."

My first thought was to wonder how an anomaly can lurk, whether in Antarctica or elsewhere, and of course this put me in mind of H. P. Lovecraft's seminal horror story "At the Mountains of Madness."  In this tale some explorers head out to the Frozen Continent after the discovery of certain artifacts of great age, and upon investigation they find a massive city (I believe it's described as "cyclopean" and "eldritch," two of Lovecraft's absolute favorite words), following which they're one by one picked off and eaten by Shoggoths, who apparently lurk quite effectively.

So the usual stuff.  But the particular anomaly referenced in the Post article was discovered not through direct exploration but by use of a magnetometer, and the conclusion was that there is a large metallic object hidden (or lurking, as the case may be) underneath the ice in Wilkes Land, a region of eastern Antarctica.  It's buried at a depth of 900 meters, and is 250 kilometers across.

Which is pretty big.  Cyclopean, even.

Wilkes Land, also known as "Not My Idea of a Vacation Spot" [image courtesy of NASA/JPL and the Wikimedia Commons]

Some scientists have suggested that the anomaly is the remains of a huge asteroid -- perhaps twice as large as the one that created the Chicxulub Crater in what is now the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, and in the process did in most of the species of dinosaurs.  If so, the Wilkes Land Magnetic Anomaly is a good candidate for the smoking gun of the Permian-Triassic Extinction, which occurred 252 million years ago and is estimated to have wiped out 96% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial life in one fell swoop.  The timing certainly seems right, as do the characteristics of the site.

But of course, far be it from your average New York Post reader to accept something like the results of scientific study.  No, the lurking anomaly has to be something more mysterious.  Some of the suggestions have been:

• it's a massive UFO base
• it's an underground (or underice, as the case may be) city where the Nazis escaped to after their defeat in World War II
• it's where they moved HAARP after they decommissioned the one in Alaska.  (Yes, I know that HAARP studies the atmosphere, so it wouldn't do you much good buried 900 meters deep in ice.  Stop asking questions.)
• it's a portal to the inside of the Hollow Earth

Then there's the "UFO-hunting crew" that calls itself "Secure Team 10," which basically combined all of the above into one all-purpose loony explanation.  The Post explains their claim as follows:

Secure Team 10 suggested the Nazis built secret bases in Antarctica during World War II, which were designed to be used by flying saucers. 

The UFO hunters added: “There is some evidence of this coming to light in recent years, with images purporting to show various entrances built into the side of mountains, with a saucer shape and at a very high altitude.” 

“This begs the question: how would you enter these entrances without something that could fly and was the same shape as the hole itself?”

My general opinion is that it begs a great many more questions than that one, but do go on.

Secure Team also suggested the US Navy led a mission to investigate the mysterious continent. 

This expedition was called Operation High Jump, which conspiracy theorists believe was an attempt to find the entrance to a secret world hidden underneath Earth.

Have I emphasized strongly enough that this magnetic anomaly, whatever it is, is covered by a 900-meter-thick sheet of ice?

Anyhow.  Once again we have the woo-woos coming up with bizarre ideas, which of course is what woo-woos do, and tabloid clickbait like The New York Post enthusiastically jumping on the bandwagon to induce readers to provide them with ad revenue by clicking on the link.

And, as a side effect, inducing my readers to send it to me, which they've done (at the time of this writing) six times and counting.  So thanks to all of my loyal readers for keeping me informed on the latest missives from the wingnuts.  As for me, I think I'm going to lurk my way up to the kitchen and get another cup of coffee.

Standardized failure

Over the last few days in my Critical Thinking class we've been critiquing the educational system.  After all, who better to ask than a class full of people who've been immersed in it, been the beneficiaries of the successes and the victims of the failures, for ten or more years?  I find that most of them are reasonable and fair about the assessment -- neither lashing out without justification nor telling me what I think they want to hear.  Their criticisms are reasoned, well supported, and usually spot-on.

But nothing riled them up more than the documentary I showed them on the school systems in Finland.  (The link is to part 1, but you can access it all from there -- the entire thing is an hour long but is well worth the time.)  The documentary was the brainchild of Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who went to Finland to see if he could find out why Finnish schools routinely rank at the top of any measure you want to apply to them -- whether it's test scores, rigor, success of students in college or career after graduation, innovation, breadth, or depth -- and why we, in a word, don't.

Finnish students at an outdoor celebration in Helsinki [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wagner interviewed teachers, principals, education professors, students, and parents, and came up with the following rather surprising characteristics of Finnish schools:

• little to no homework
• few tests; the only major exam is the exit exam administered before graduation, which is highly rigorous
• long class periods, and fewer classes per day than typical American schools
• work centering on projects, application, and synthesis rather than memorization of facts
• a lot of projects that require meaningful collaboration (not just the much-hated "group projects" often found in American schools, where typically one or two members of the group do all the work)
• small class size
• informality (teachers are called by their first names)
• an intense and rigorous vocational track that students can enter in tenth grade
• flexibility of choice; students in the vocational track can take classes in the academic track, and vice versa -- and high school can take either three or four years depending on student choice
• a huge amount of trust.  Administrators trust teachers to do their jobs, and rarely do formal evaluations; teachers trust students to do their work, whether supervised or not

Of course, I immediately noticed the stark contrast between the Finnish schools and my own.  And I must emphasize that I am lucky to work in the school I do -- we have great students, few problems, and (I believe) a pretty good success rate (again, however you want to measure it).  But of the characteristics I listed above, virtually every one is the opposite of how we approach things here in the United States.

Which makes me wonder if the success we do have is mostly due to the resilience of the students, the dedication of the teachers to rise above adverse circumstances, and a heaping measure of dumb luck.

The one that struck me the most was trust.  Dr. Wagner was talking to one of the teachers over lunch, and walked back with him to his class -- and was astonished to find out that the teacher was twenty minutes late to his own class.  The teacher, for his part, was a little surprised at Wagner's reaction.  "They know what they have to do," the teacher said.  "I don't have to stand over them and force them."

And sure enough, he walked back into the room -- and everyone was busily working.

In American schools, one of the first things that will jump out at you is the lack of trust.  Rules and regulations abound for what you can and can't do, every minute of the day.  Teachers are of the opinion that as soon as they turn their backs, students will stop working.  Administrators feel like they have to micromanage the teachers to make sure they're doing their job.  The state education departments increasingly add evaluations and observations and "quantitative measures" of principals and teachers, so that everything they do is turned into numbers and used as a tool for reward or censure.  The implication is that no one can be trusted, and the more you watch, the more you control, the better the results will be.

It's been long established, of course, that no one works well while being micromanaged -- not children, not adults.  Dan Pink and others who analyze the corporate world have found incontrovertible evidence that when our every move is scrutinized, when it is evident that there is no trust, our productivity decreases -- as does our job satisfaction.

Why, then, do we think that children would thrive in such an environment?

The Finnish administrators whom Wagner interviewed were adamant that the most important piece in their success was trust -- but that it wasn't easy to achieve, because it meant letting go of the fear that when you stop watching, people will stop working.  But if you couple that letting go with making sure that what you are expecting students to do is meaningful, engaging, and interesting, the results are nothing short of spectacular.

The students in my Critical Thinking classes spoke with one voice after watching this documentary: Why on earth do we not try this here?  I didn't have a good answer for that except that we've all become so suspicious of each other -- teachers of students, principals of teachers, state and federal oversight administration of everyone -- that we've become locked into the system even though it demonstrably doesn't work.  Instead of decreasing testing, we've increased it -- and not in any kind of meaningful way.  Just last week poet Sara Holbrook found out that some of her poems were used on the Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, and when she read the questions, she couldn't answer them.

You read that right.  The students were being presented with questions about her poems and expected to select one right answer when the poet herself had no idea how to determine what the right answer was.  We have become so stuck on a linear, one-right-answer mode that we now do everything that way -- even though it clearly kills creativity, destroys enthusiasm, and (as Holbrook's example shows) isn't reflective of anything meaningful or even real.

It's easy to come up with excuses.  "Finland is wealthier than we are."  "Finns are a more homogeneous society than we are."  The documentary dismisses those out of hand -- actually, we spend more per capita on students than Finland does, and 16% of Finnish students learn Finnish as a second language.

But even if those were true -- even if the hurdles we face are higher than the Finns faced in reconstructing their schools back in the 1970s -- so what?  What, exactly, do we have  to lose?  What we have now is only marginally successful, and in many inner cities is a demonstrable failure.  Our dropout rates are on the rise, and our increasing reliance on trivia-dense "quantitative assessments" do nothing but alienate students and further convince them that school is boring, pointless, and has no connection to real life.

It's time to try something different.

And, after all, the Finns have demonstrated that what they do is successful.  Why not try their model?  Okay, maybe it won't work exactly as it's done in Finland, maybe it'll need some fine tuning and adjustment to meet the different needs of students in our country.  But why not try -- and why wait?  As the adage goes, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got."

The lying game

It's become almost axiomatic that politicians lie, but what I absolutely fail to understand is why we not only cast our votes for proven liars, but give them a pass when they're caught at it.

For the best example of this, we have to look no further than our President-elect.  I'm probably going to be accused of being partisan, here, but I don't care.  Donald Trump's record of telling outright lies goes back far before the election, and honestly, has nothing to do with whether he's a Republican or Democrat.  Here's a sample of the complete, egregious untruths he was guilty of before the citizenry of the United States chose him as their next president:

• He stated that "violent crime is higher than it ever has been before," when in fact violent crime peaked in 1991 and has been declining ever since.  In the U.S. you are half as likely to be a victim of violent crime as you were in 1991.
• He claimed that global warming was "a hoax created by the Chinese," and then when Hillary Clinton called him on it in a debate, said, and I quote, "I did not say that" despite the fact that the tweet was still in his Twitter feed.
• In an interview, he called pregnancy an "inconvenience," and then later lied and said he'd never said that.
• He denied using the words "pigs," "slobs," and "dogs" to describe women, and said "no one has more respect for women than I do," when in fact he did use those words, more than once.
• He claimed that the U.S. jobless rate was 42%, and didn't back down when he was challenged.  It's actually 5%.
• He was asked, under oath, if he had ever associated with people associated with organized crime, and responded, "No.  Not that I know of."  Two years before that, he was interviewed by journalist Timothy O'Brien, and was asked about his connection to Danny Sullivan, who has ties to the Philadelphia mob, and he bragged about it. "They were tough guys," Trump said. "In fact, they say that Dan Sullivan was the guy that killed Jimmy Hoffa.  I don't know if you ever heard that."  (And in fact, Trump threw a New Year's Eve party last week and invited Gambino family "business associate" Joey "No-Socks" Cinque.  Cinque runs a sham business called the "American Academy of Hospitality Sciences" -- which bestowed a five-star award on Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, and at the New Year's Eve party gave Trump a "lifetime achievement award.")

Had enough?  I haven't even considered the campaign promises he's broken already -- and we're still almost two weeks from the inauguration, for fuck's sake:

• Trump fired up his audiences before the election by pledging to jail Hillary Clinton -- "Lock her up!" was chanted at most of his rallies.  After the election, he said, and I quote: "That plays great before the election -- now we don't care, right?"
• This past summer, Trump proposed stopping illegal immigration by building a wall along the U.S./Mexico border.  "I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively," Trump said.  "I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.  And I will have Mexico pay for that wall."  Just two days ago, he announced that he was going to ask Congress to fund the building of the wall, at an estimated cost of $10 billion to taxpayers.  Confronted about this apparent breaking of a campaign promise, Trump (of course) responded by tweeting about it.  "The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!"
• Another of his big campaign promises was to "drain the swamp" -- by which he meant removing the corrupting influence of lobbyists, big money, corporations, and Wall Street from the government.  His cabinet picks include billionaires who donated to the Trump campaign, the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, and a hedge fund manager from Goldman-Sachs.

And almost no one who voted for him is objecting to this bill of goods they were sold.  I don't care how much I supported someone -- if a candidate I voted for blatantly broke campaign promises before they'd even taken office, I would be pissed.

On the other hand, the one thing you hear his followers yelping about is his following through on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" -- something that is now appearing to be a near-certainty.  Sarah Kliff interviewed Trump voters and asked them about how the repeal was going to affect them, and uniformly they said it was going to be terrible.  When she asked them why they had supported Trump, given his unequivocal position on the subject, their responses can be summarized by what one woman told Kliff:  "I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many people's lives.  I mean, what are you to do then if you cannot pay for insurance?"

So wait just a minute here.  He lies outright, makes campaign promises and breaks them before he's even been inaugurated, but then he actually does something he promised he's gonna do, and that's what you object to?

Okay, look, I'm not saying other politicians haven't been guilty of hypocrisy, or haven't waffled, evaded, or lied outright:

But you know what?  "He does it too!" is not a defense. It's absolutely baffling why we, as citizens, accept such behavior, and more importantly, keep voting these same clowns in.  You hear people complain all the time about how corrupt politicians are, how awful Congress is, how you can't trust any of 'em -- and yet, overwhelmingly, incumbents were voted back in.  In 2016 90% of Senate races went to the incumbent, and 97% of House races -- even though Congress's overall approval rating was 13%.

Can someone please, please explain this to me?

But as far as Trump goes, I can say it no other way: he is a compulsive liar, a con man, who will say anything or do anything to get what he wants.  He is also dangerously impulsive, and already -- again, before taking office -- has endangered our role on the world stage and inflamed tensions with China, Russia, and the Middle East with his incessant loose-cannon tweeting.  We are all going to have to live through what all this will cause, and try as hard as we can to do damage control.  But I'm wondering when the Trump voters are going to realize that he has never had any intent to follow through on anything other than impulse.

To put it succinctly: you've been had.

The Phoenix devil

At present I've been sent a link five times to a claim that someone near Phoenix, Arizona took a photograph of Satan.

Without further ado, let's take a look at the photo:

A couple of the people who sent it to me appended messages along the lines of, "Hoo boy.  Look at what people are claiming now."  Two, however, had more noteworthy commentary, which I reproduce in toto below.

Photo submitter #1:

You like to scoff about the evil in the world, and claim that our souls aren't in peril.  Satan walks among us.  Unbelievers like you will be the first to be dragged to Hell.

Photo submitter #2:

People like Mr. Skeptic doubt evidence for the supernatural when its [sic] right in front of your face.  I wonder what would happen if you saw this with your own eyes.  Would you keep doubting then?  It's easy for Armchair Skeptics to sit in their living rooms and say no, but as soon as you go out in the world you learn that its [sic] not that simple.

Well, predictably, I'm not impressed.  To paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson (who in the original quote was talking about UFOs) there probably is an "add demon" function on Photoshop.  My general opinion is pretty consistent with the following:

However, the bigger question is why I'm a Scoffing Armchair Skeptic about such matters more has to do with Ockham's Razor.  Ockham's Razor is rightly called a rule of thumb -- something which isn't 100% true but is still a pretty damn good guide to understanding.  The original formulation comes from William of Ockham, a 14th century monk and philosopher, who phrased it as "Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate" (Don't multiply entities without necessity), but a more modern phrasing is "All other things being equal, of competing hypotheses, choose the one that requires the least assumptions."  (It must be pointed out that Ockham himself was hardly a scientific rationalist; he's also the one who said, "Only faith gives us access to theological truths.  The ways of God are not open to reason, for God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation within it apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover."  So while Ockham's Razor is a great idea, I doubt I'd have agreed with him on much else.)

In any case, the Demon of Phoenix certainly is more easily explainable as a hoax than it is that Satan for some reason descended upon southern Arizona, posed for a blurry snapshot, and then disappeared without doing anything else or being seen by anyone else.  So the second submitter is, in a sense, quite right; I would be much more likely to believe that it was real if I did see it with my own eyes.  Just looking at the photograph, here in my Comfortable Armchair, I'm still saying "Nah."

Of course, being dragged to hell would do it, too.  Nothing like a little fire and brimstone to convince one of the reality of a situation.  But until that happens, you can still put me in the "Mr. Skeptic" column.

The monster in the mist

I thought that after writing this blog for six years, I'd have run into every cryptid out there.  But just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about one I'd never heard of, which is especially interesting given that the thing supposedly lives in Scotland.

I've had something of a fascination with Scotland and all things Scottish for a long time, partly because of the fact that my dad's family is half Scottish (he used to describe his kin as "French enough to like to drink and Scottish enough not to know when to stop").  My grandma, whose Hamilton and Lyell ancestry came from Fifeshire north of Edinburgh, knew lots of cheerful Scottish stories and folk songs, 95% of which were about a guy named Johnny who was smitten with a girl named Jenny, but she spurned him, so he stabbed her to death with his wee pen-knife.

Big believers in happy endings, the Scots.

Anyhow, none of my grandma's stories were about the "Am Fear Liath Mòr," which roughly translates to "Big Gray Dude," who supposedly lopes about in the Cairngorms, the massive mountain range in the eastern Highlands.  He is described as extremely tall and covered with gray hair, and his presence is said to "create uneasy feelings."  Which seems to me to be putting it mildly.  If I was hiking through some lonely, rock-strewn mountains and came upon a huge hair-covered proto-hominid, my uneasy feelings would include pissing my pants and then having a stroke.  But maybe the Scots are tougher-spirited than that, and upon seeing the Am Fear Liath Mòr simply report feeling a little unsettled about the whole thing.

A couple of Scottish hikers being made to feel uneasy

The Big Gray Dude has been seen by a number of people, most notably the famous mountain climber J. Norman Collie, who in 1925 had reported the following encounter on the summit of Ben MacDhui, the highest peak in the Cairngorms:

I was returning from the cairn on the summit in the mist when I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps.  For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.  I said to myself, this is all nonsense. I listened and heard it again, but could see nothing in the mist.  As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest.  Whatever you make of it I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben MacDhui and I will not go back there myself I know.

Collie's not the only one who's had an encounter.  Mountain climber Alexander Tewnion says he was on the Coire Etchachan path on Ben MacDhui, and the thing actually "loomed up out of the mist and then charged."  Tewnion fired his revolver at it, but whether he hit it or not he couldn't say.  In any case, it didn't harm him, although it did give him a serious scare.

Periodic sightings still occur today, mostly hikers who catch a glimpse of it or find large footprints that don't seem human.  Many report feelings of "morbidity, menace, and depression" when the Am Fear Liath Mòr is nearby -- one reports suddenly being "overwhelmed by either a feeling of utter panic or a downward turning of my thoughts which made me incredibly depressed."  Scariest of all, one person driving through the Cairngorms toward Aberdeen said that the creature chased their car, keeping up with it on the twisty roads until finally they hit a straight bit and were able to speed up sufficiently to lose it.  After it gave up the chase, they said, "it stood there in the middle of the road watching us as we drove away."

So that's our cryptozoological inquiry for today.  I've been to Scotland once, but never made it out of Edinburgh -- I hope to go back and visit the ancestral turf some day.  When I do, I'll be sure to get up into the Cairngorms and see if I can catch a glimpse of the Big Gray Dude.  I'll report back on how uneasy I feel afterwards.

Dinosaurs, the Flood, and attempted murder

I have some friends who are currently trying to kill me.

At least, that's the only interpretation I can put on the fact that their Christmas gift to me was a copy of Dinosaurs for Kids by Ken Ham.  According to the back, amongst other things, we can learn from this book "the truth behind museum exhibits and flawed evolutionary timelines."

So my conclusion is that these friends were hoping that I would read this book and have an aneurysm, or possibly burst into flames.  Or both simultaneously.

But I'm pleased to say that their nefarious little plot did not succeed, which is why I'm here today to tell you about it, and to quote for you a paragraph from the final page of the book, to wit:

Follow the Truth!  While the Bible helps us to understand how and when dinosaurs lived, and even why they died, the Bible doesn't give us highly descriptive details about each and every one.  It gives us the big picture of history so we can develop a general understanding of these creatures.  Then we can use observational science to help us fill in some of the details and increase our understanding -- all the while knowing that nothing in real science can or will contradict God's Holy Word.

In other words, we can accept everything that science says about anything unless it tells us something different than what we want to hear.

But I decided to write about this today in Skeptophilia not only to celebrate my escaping a near brush with death, but because Ken Ham and dinosaurs are in the news for a different reason. Apparently Ham is pissed off at The Washington Post because they claimed that he thinks that dinosaurs were wiped out by the Great Flood.  So he dealt with this the way any reasonable, intelligent adult would; he posted a snarky comment about it on Twitter.

"Hey @washingtonpost," Ken tweeted, "we at @ArkEncounter have NEVER said Dinosaurs were wiped out during Flood-get your facts right!"

In fact he went on to elaborate that the dinosaurs didn't die in the Great Flood; they actually made it onto the Ark along with two (or seven, depending on which biblical account you believe) of each of the six billion-odd species on Earth, where they lived in cages until the waters magically went somewhere and Noah let them all go on the side of Mount Ararat, and became extinct afterwards because of other stuff, possibly because humans liked the taste of T. rex steaks too much.

Because that's ever so much more believable.

Just remember, children: Velociraptors used those nasty claws to peel oranges.

Note some other interesting features about the above illustration.  First, the Deinonychus appears to be levitating.  Maybe the Law of Gravity was also optional in the Garden of Eden.  Second, isn't it funny how Adam and Eve are always shown as naked, but there with strategically placed bushes to hide their naughty bits?

Like in the following photograph of foreplay with a voyeur dinosaur:

And the following, in which the lamb is clearly thinking, "Dude.  Find a different animal to block the view of your penis next time."

Implying all of the naked fun we could be having if the whole Apple Incident hadn't intervened.  But, after all, this is the kind of lunacy we've come to expect from Ken Ham et al., who think that a miscopied and mistranslated bunch of archaic manuscripts written by some Bronze-Age sheep herders are the best tool we have for understanding biology and interpreting human behavior.

So that's our dip in the deep end for today.  Me, I'm going to go have a second cup of coffee, and plot revenge against the friends who gave me the dinosaur book.  I think I'm going to have to work pretty hard to come up with anything near as clever, and that's assuming that reading Ham's book doesn't have some kind of delayed reaction side effects.  If you see a headline in tomorrow's news that says, "Upstate NY Man Bursts Into Flame, Dies," you'll know what happened.