Sunday, February 25, 2007

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Can there be any doubt? By far the biggest Weird Thing to cross my radar screen this week as Conservapedia. Nothing else even came close, and nothing else to date has so perfectly illustrated for me the tendency of much of the Right in this country to wall itself off from reality in as complete a way as possible. People who think this is a good idea truly live in a dream world.

UPDATE: From their entry on the Moon:

Throughout man's existence, the Moon has had the same size as the Sun when viewed from Earth. This creates a beautiful symmetry and permits phenomenal eclipses to occur. The odds of that symmetry occurring by chance are too small to be considered possible. That symmetry will not last forever.

...

There is no plausible non-creation theory of origin for the Moon at this time.

...

Our solar system is one of the few that has only one sun. Only one sun and only one moon: this uniqueness may reflect the existence of only one God.


On unicorns:

The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times,[1] which provides an unimpeachable de facto argument for their once having been in existence.


And compare the Conservapedia entry on algebra to the Wikipedia entry on the same topic. One of these contains interesting and helpful information, with sources; the other reads like Coach from Cheers when he had to learn facts about Albania for a night class:

Albania!
Albania!
You border on the Adriatic!
Your land is mostly mountainous,
and your chief export is coal!

(to the tune of "When the Saints Go Marching In")


What an absolute joke.

UPDATE II: God, I can't stop. From their entry on Albert Einstein:

Nothing useful has even been built based on the theory of relativity. Only one Nobel Prize (in 1993 and not to Einstein) has ever been given that even remotely relates to the theory of relativity. Many things predicted by the theory of relativity, such as gravitons, have never been found despite much searching for them. Many observed phenomenon, such as the bending of light passing near the sun or the advance of the perihelion in the orbit of Mercury, can be also predicted by Newton's theory.


(I suppose I should note that the nature of a wiki-based site like this means that the text of entries can change, and that therefore some of the quotes above may in time disappear from the linked entries. I could go to the trouble of creating screen shots, but I hope you'll all take my word for it. I'm just cutting and pasting.)

UPDATE III: On second thought, here are screenshots of the current state of the articles linked above:









Read 'em and weep.

UPDATE IV: Ach, wouldn't you know it. All these years, and I've had Coach's "Albania" song in my head wrong. The chief export isn't coal, but chrome. Watch the clip here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought Albania's chief export was grain...

olli said...

Albania's chief export is people.

Anonymous said...

It's like Stephen Colbert said; reality does have noticable Liberal bias...

LC Scotty said...

The Einstein article has already been severely redacted.