It's The End Of The World As We Know It

And I feel fine. (thank you REM)

Let's get serious, now. As of today, we only have 57 days left before the Rapture.

So I thought one thing we could do is look at the bible and see what it says about the Rapture, Armageddon and the End of the World.

The End of the World

The SAB does a great job of summing up what the bible says about the end of the world.

The most important thing is that Jesus said in Matthew (twice), Mark and Luke (twice) that people of that generation would still be alive to see the fulfillment of the Son of Man coming, and the Kingdom of God.

Then it was changed from the end coming during the lifetime of Jesus' followers to within the lifetime of the new testament authors.

This is found in 1 Corinthians (twice), Hebrews (twice), 1 Peter (twice), 1 John and a few other vague references.

Then, more vague references to the end of the world, with no mention of exactly when (but the language repeatedly says it will be 'soon'):

Philippians 4:5 The Lord is at hand.
James 5:8 For the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.
Hebrews 10:37 For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry.
Revelation 1:1 The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass.
Revelation 1:3 The time is at hand.
Revelation 3:11, 22:7, 22:12 Behold, I come quickly.
Revelation 22:20 Surely I come quickly.

The Rapture

The Rapture comes from the following verse by Paul:

What's Your 'Favorite' Pseudoscience?

First, what is pseudoscience? Pseudoscience: a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific methodology, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status. Pseudoscience Hallmarks:

• Experimental results are not reproducible or able to be verified by others, sometimes through lack of openness of data


• Lack of effective controls (not properly randomized or double blinded, as the case may be)


• The scientific method has not been rigorously adhered to


• Not falsifiable (the result can not be disproved)


• Not testable


• Often overturns established science and proven laws of nature


• Vague scientific claims, often lack specific measurements


• Failure to define the operational terms so that others can independently measure or test them


• Failure to use Occam's Razor (the explanation that requires the fewest possible additional assumptions is usually the most accurate)


• Technical jargon or obscure language meant to confuse and sound like an authority in science


• Lack of boundary conditions (real science specifies limits where the predicted phenomena do and do not apply)


• Heavy reliance on testimonial and anecdotal evidence or personal experience


• Argument from ignorance (just because a claim hasn't been proven false, they say it must be true)


• Selection Bias (cherry picking the results to only use the hits and suppress the misses)


• Evades peer review before publicizing results

Information IS Beautiful!

Stumbling around the interwebs, I found a site that I think you might love. It's called Information is Beautiful. David McCandless takes all kinds of data and ideas and visualizes it in appealing ways.

The one I found that I thought was amazing was Snake Oil?: Scientific evidence for popular health supplements. (That link takes you to the interactive version. See the static version here.) On the side is a show me button that flies out a list of  uses and types of supplements. Choose what you're interested in to filter the results. The bigger the bubble, the more popular the supplement is. The higher on the chart, the more evidence there is that it works. Notice how many bubbles are below the Worth It line. Remember, the supplements are only good for the conditions listed inside the bubble, which you can see by hovering over it.

What David says about the evidence:

We only considered large, human, randomized placebo-controlled trials in our data scrape – wherever possible. No animal trials. No cell studies. Many of the health claims made by the $23 billion supplements industry are based on non-human trials. We wanted to cut through that.

This piece was doggedly researched by myself, and researchers Pearl Doughty-White and Alexia Wdowski. We looked at the abstracts of over 1500 studies on PubMed (run by US National Library Of Medicine) and Cochrane.org (which hosts meta-studies of scientific research). It took us several months to seek out the evidence – or lack of.

The information is generated from a Google Doc, so when new research comes out it can be easily updated. Very cool indeed. The data has web addresses to the source of the research so you can see it for yourself. It's not just anecdotal evidence.

David also has a chart on caffeine and calories. He even shows how much exercise it will take to work off that large iced mocha you had for breakfast.

He does two interesting charts about politics. The Left vs the Right. A world version and an American version. These are chock full of information.

His 2012 chart is also great. The left describes the believers, the right describes the skeptics, with information refuting what the believers say. Sources are listed at the bottom, and are available in a Google Doc.

His climate change chart shows global warming deniers vs the scientific consensus.

He has many more on his site as well. That's just a few of my favorites.

A Happy Day For Lolcats

Hey everyone,

I really wanted to say hi today but it's my birthday and I am busy baking myself a cake and getting ready to go to dinner. So you will have to make do with some of my favorite recent lolcats and one 2012 comic. Enjoy!

"I only had room to go up to 2012."  .. "Ha! That'll freak somebody out someday."

Ceiling Kitteh decides ur fate

2012 Doomsday Fast Approaches!

OMG, yo! Hide the good silver! Run for your lives! The Mayans say the world will end December 21, 2012 and that's only 2 years and a month away! Whatever will we do?!

Of course the Mayans themselves didn't survive till 2012, so maybe they aren't the best group to ask about such things. :P

Recently a friend of mine mentioned the 2012 phenomenon as if it were true. Unfortunately I didn't have the hard facts at my disposal so I told him it's not going to happen and left it at that. But I thought I'd look up some more information so when your mother starts talking about the end of the world, you will have some facts to back you up.

Lucky for me, NASA and Wikipedia have pages to explain where the concept came from and what scientific basis there is for it (none, thank you very much).

Some people seem to love the idea of predicting cataclysmic events and the destruction of the world. Of course, since we're still here, so far they have been wrong every time. That's something in itself to consider.

NASA explains it all very succinctly in FAQ form:

Q: Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.
A: Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.