Monday, January 12, 2009

Intellectual Dishonesty

First, courtesy of Kiriska: Flying Car! So far this year is off to a pretty good start.

On one of the other blogs I read, they recently linked to the following video. Watch it if you want, and try to spot the mathematical error.

Edit: So apparently the video is protected now, d'oh. I'll just summarize it. The person basically claims that the Bible predicts the speed of light. Their evidence is that, if you take the bit that says "for God ten thousand years is like a day", and calculate what speed God would have to be traveling for that to be true (based on relativistic time dilation) you end up with something which is pretty close to the speed of light.

What I really want to know is this. To anybody who could actually work out the math in the video, the error they've made is trivial. So, who made this video, and why? Is it somebody who is well-intentioned, but incredibly dense? Are they actively trying to fool people? Is this just some kind of elaborate meta-troll?

I want to believe the third one, but sometimes I wonder.

1 comment:

Kiriska said...

We all like to believe in the meta-trolls don't we. :3