Damn Hippies

I went out geocaching in the wonderful weather today. First stop was to check on caches I have placed, in response to a couple of emails from people who couldn’t find them. Sure enough, they had been muggled. One cache almost completely gone — only the lid and the logbook could be found. The second one was a multi-stage cache, and only stage one was missing. So it’s likely that these were discovered by accident and taken. Immature little … hippies.

Take the Creationism Challenge

An online colleague at my blog-host, SFN, makes the following observation:

Wouldn’t it be amusing if science groups started leading tours of the Creation Museum, lead by archeologists pointing out the flaws in their reasoning and why evolution really does answer those questions?

It would be a great response to that story out of Colorado about creationists leading tours of a natural history museum out there.

I say go for it. It would be great.

But I expect such a group would likely be EXPELLED from the museum. A normal tour (of at least, say, a dozen people), with no stealth or rambunctiousness (i.e. normal speaking voices and doing a reasonable debunking, not trying to get kicked out), touring the whole museum, even without PZ Myers hosting it. I’ll even pony up 20 bucks as a reward for the first such tour that is allowed to finish, just as incentive (such as it is) to be on one’s best behavior. Documentation shouldn’t be too difficult in this, the digital age.

Infrared Swan

Infrared Swan

The temperature range in these images (and others on the site) mean that these were taken with a thermal imaging camera; 300-310K blackbody spectra peak somewhere between 9 – 10 microns, rather than a regular ol’ digital camera with the IR filter disabled.

Frankly, though, most of the other birds and mammals in the menagerie have more interesting IR spectra associated with them, like yappy dog.