Let's talk society - Australia Day or Invasion Day?

Buzzcuck OZ is trying to guilt trip everyone into thinking today was "invasion day," when all that happened was the original settlers arriving. The rest is quite a read and only scratches the tip of the iceberg.

Upon arrival and for a couple months after settling, Governor Phillip instructed his soldiers not to fire at the indigenous and instead wanted to assimilate them into British culture, and give them working opportunities within the British Empire.

It was only a few months after that the Indigenous of the 18th Century started hostilities with the British. Soon after this, the Indigenous started "resisting" i.e. attempting to murder everything by furthering hostilities against the British in Botany Bay. Forced by the circumstances, Phillip instructed his soldiers to fire at any Indigenous whom threatened the settlers.

From here on for the next 146 years (1788-1934), there were further clashes between the Indigenous and the British, only for it to end with the British being victorious. However, the British didn't cause the most deaths by direct influence. Much like the Indigenous Americans, it was disease that caused most of the lives lost amongst the "natives." Indigenous Australians aren't native to Australia, they're also settlers from overseas who came over during the Ice Age approx. 40,000 years ago, when the tides were extremely low.

Furthermore, disease didn't quite kill the percentage of Indigenous that it had in the U.S. Reportedly, disease killed upwards of 90% of the Indigenous American populace, whereas in Australian it's at least 50% of those that died during the Frontier Wars.

Whilst yes, some of the acts committed over 82 years ago were atrocious, and the acts committed by some peoples ancestors committed pre-1962 (when the Indigenous Australian's were given the vote) were deplorable as well, what's more immoral is to guilt trip those of whom aren't 53+ years old and did not partake in such atrocities. To guilt trip younger generations for events that are far out of their control is just as deplorable, and should be considered as such. Yes, by all means, teach the history of what happened, but don't go around calling it "Invasion Day" or "Genocide Day" as a tool to alienate younger generations of your cause, because it'll do just that.

Sources:

1. Australianmuseum.net.au,. "Indigenous Australia Timeline - 1500 To 1900 - Australian Museum". N.p., 2015. Web. 26 Jan. 2016.

2. Korff, Jens. "Aboriginal History Timeline (1770 - 1899)". Creative Spirits. N.p., 2015. Web. 26 Jan. 2016.

3. wiliam, Sydney Australia. "British-Aboriginal Relations, 1788-1820, Settlement, 1788-1850, First Australians And The European Arrivals, SOSE: History Year 9, QLD | Online Education Home Schooling Skwirk Australia". Skwirk.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 26 Jan. 2016.

Additional resources for more info:

-Bostock, Lester, 1990, The Greater Perspective, Special Broadcasting Service

-Fraser, Bryce, (ed), 1983, The Macquarie Book of Events, Weldon,

-Directorate of Special Programs, NSW Department of Education, 1982, Aboriginal Australia, a Preliminary Chronology

-Jonas, Bill and Langton, Marcia, 1994, The Little Red, Yellow and Black (and Green and Blue and White) Book, AIATSIS

-Horton, D (ed) 1994, Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press

-Butler, Kevin, Cameron, K & Percival, B., 1995, The Myth of Terra Nullius, Invasion and Resistance -the early years, Board of Studies

Third Wave feminism - A fight for equality or the spread of myths? Part 1 - Domestic Violence

You've probably seen it everywhere in the news these days, with the happenings of #gamergate, but feminism is a prominent feature in our news again, particularly the third wave. Third wave feminism originally fought for representation of minorities within feminism, claiming the second wave of feminism didn't do enough to address racial minorities.

However, this purpose has faded into obscurity, with no one clear goal of third wave feminism. There is, however, one clear narrative of third wave feminism and that is this; men and a cultural patriachy are to blame for the current issues women face.

How much of this is true, and are we to trust feminist rhetoric to solve these problems? This article will cover what feminists believe they are fighting for, addressing each issue and dissecting the feminist claim and provoke thought in the hopes to further discussion of feminist rhetoric.

What feminists fight for

While I was doing research for this, it seemed that feminists didn't even know what they were fighting for, with news source Huffington Post never being consistent and websites like Everydayfeminist and Feministing backpeddling claims every now and then. However, they all have somewhat common arguments and that's what we'll talk about.

Feminism claims to be a fight against the following;

• Gender violence, in particular reference to the female sex organ
• An inherent rape culture within first world society, wherein men are the perpetrator's almost 100% of the time
• Domestic violence, relating to physical abuse over the female partner in a relationship
• The glass ceiling and gender pay gap, where women only make 77 cents in contrast to men who work the same job for $1.00
• Male privilege i.e. men receive special privileges in life on the basis that they are men, specifically white males.

The claims behind feminist arguments - gender violence

Surprisingly, this takes many forms and isn't exclusive to just domestic violence. Gender violence covers the following;

• Domestic violence against women
• Female genital mutilation
• The use of tampons and OB/GYNs
• and finally General Assault

For this article, we'll be covering all of those beyond OB/GYN and tampon use (genital mutilation will be covered at the end). Before we can look at the feminist claims for gender violence, we need to know what domestic violence and the types of domestic violence. Since most feminist rhetoric uses U.S. statistics, we'll be using those in the rest of the article.

As defined by the department of justice, domestic violence is described as abusive behaviour in any relationship that is used by one of the partners to maintain power and control over the other, generally through physical and mental abuse.

Feminist rhetoric tackles physical abuse in a violent relationship, often leaving the mental abuse to the side. There are two different kinds of physical abuse, minor and severe.

Minor violence covers the following;

• An item was thrown
• Pushing/Grabbing and/or Shoving
• Slapping

Severe violence covers the following;

• Kicking/Biting or Punching
• Hitting or tried to hit with an object
• Beating up/choking
• Threatening with a knife or gun
• Using said kinfe or gun

As you can see, there is a massive difference between both kinds of violence. Feminists will use graphs like Figure 1 to try and assert the fact that women are victims of more serious violence than men are (which is statistically true, however the difference between severe violence against men and women is next to none).

Figure 1: Rate of intimate partner violence, by victim's sex, 1994-2011 (U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2014)

As can be seen in Figure 1, of all reported cases 5 per 1,000 women were victims of simple assaulst and approximately 2 per 1,000 were victim's of serious violence in 2011. Male simple assault and serious violence rates remained relatively unchanged trhoughout 15 years.

As soon as marital statistics are looked at the whole argument falls apart. In Figure 2, we can see the rates of Husband to Wife violence (on the left) and Wife to Husband violence (on the right).

Figure 2: Marital violence rates - Husband to Wife (left) and Wife to Husband (right) (Jouriles, E. .N., & O'Leary, K. D. (1985). Interpersonal reliabitlity reports of marital violence. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 53, 419-421)

The overall violence rates in 1975 and 1985 were fairly similar, with a small rise in Wife to Husband violence whereas a descrease was seen in Husband to Wife violence. In 1975, Husband to Wife severe violence was at a rate of 38 per 1,000 cases. In 1985 it dropped to 30 per 1,000 cases. This is a drop of 12% in Husband to Wife severe violence, with an overall drop in violence of  7%.

On the other hand, Wife to Husband severe violence in n1975 was at 61 per 1,000 cases. This is almost double the amount of Husband to Wife severe violence rate in 1975. In 1985, there wasn't much of a change. The Wife to Husband severe violence rate was at 58 per 1,000 cases. This is a drop of 5%. This is again, almsot double the Husband to Wife severe violence rate of 1985, which was again, only 30 per 1,000. The overall violence rate of Wife to Husband abuse however is the most interesting statistic. It rose from 116 per 1,000 in 1975 to 121 per 1,000 in 1985. This is a total increase of 5%. This means that Wife to Husband violence is more prevalent than Husband to Wife violence.

Furtheremore, in a study from Harvard University, it found that in a sample size of 11,000 men and women that almost 25% of people (28% of women and 19% of men) - said there was some kind of violence in their relationship. Women admitted to perpertrating more violence (a whopping 25% of women versus 11% of men) as well as being victimized more by violence (19% of women versus 16% of men).

The study found that approximately 50% of violence was reciprocal i.e. two-way violence. However, 70% of the non-reciprocal violence, it was found, was perpetrated by women. Women were more likely to be the instigators of violence than men were. The study also found that men were more likely to be injured in reciprocally violent relationships (25%) than were women when violence was one-sided (20%).

In conclusion to part 1, domestic violence is a 2-way street and men are actually more likely to be victims of not only severe violence, but one-sided violence and are more likely to be injured by domestic violence.

There will be more articles about third wave feminist rhetoric, the next article will tackle the rape culture argument and possibly the glass ceiling.

What did you think of the article? Have any issues, arguments or burning questions? Leave them in the comments below and I'll try to address them.

Let's review video games - World of Warcraft, the most successful MMO since 2001. Part I

Platform: PC - Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X
Title: World of Warcraft
Developer/Development team: Blizzard studios
Release date: November 23, 2004
Genre: MMORPG
No. of Players: Single Player/Multiplayer
Where to buy it: Battle.net or your closest games retailer
R.R.P.: $60 USD for the battle box

Where do I even begin? How about with this; this review will be of the base product before any expansions were released. World of Warcraft was announced to be released shortly after the success of Warcraft 3, one of the better RTS games of the time. WoW went into Alpha stage in 2001 and only an exclusive few were allowed to participate in it. Then in 2003 it went into a beta stage, which was also a closed beta. Looking back at it now it seems so long ago since it released, but it finally made the market in 2004 and by god are there some interesting stories about that.

When it finally hit store shelves physical copies kept selling out and the servers crashed from the traffic. Ghostcrawler, one of the most prominent GM’s in WoW history, came out and said that they hadn’t expected the millions of players they got, and instead they only anticipated 500,000 or so players. In between server time and mass amount of players in zones, it was hard to play let alone log in. This would just be the start of WoW’s journey though, as it was set to be one of the most successful MMO’s of all time.

So what was good with the game? Well, almost everything. First let’s start with the aesthetics. At the time, Blizzard used one of the best engine’s for MMO’s they could and the game looked amazing. The starting zone’s really set the tone and atmosphere for each race, with the Forsaken having a dark and gritty zone and the Night Elves being one with nature in their zone. The environments were fantastic and the dungeon’s looked pretty good as well. Blizzard’s art team went all-out when it came to making Azeroth look big and vast and they did a wonderful job with it. The raids though, they were massive dungeons and again, the art team went all-out. They did a more than brilliant job with the designs, giving that feel of an epic dungeon.

Figure 1: A part of the Forsaken starting zone. The Forsaken are the undead unbound from the Lich King.

The soundtrack is something that WoW to this day is renowned for. Blizzard have always done an amazing job with their soundtrack’s, as is evident in their Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchises. They held nothing back here, as they had to make a soundtrack specific to each zone and a soundtrack for every dungeon and raid. This is a total of 39 zones, not including the massive dungeons and epic raids. One of the soundtrack’s from Vanilla that stands out, for me, is the one for Stormwind. I remember going there for the first time, albeit in Wrath, and the soundtrack was very impressive. It really gave a good representation about what the human race was like and how structured the Alliance is.

Figure 2: Stormwind, the human capital city and the city of the Alliance Leader, King Varian Wrynn.

Now the gameplay. If you chose a class that was actually playable (I’ll talk about this in a little while) then the gameplay was great for an MMO. The Global Cooldown and burst cooldown’s idea was something that was fleshed out and perfected by Blizzard. DPS roles in vanilla was something like this; use all of your abilities and facesmash as much as possible. Healing roles were this; USE EVERYTHING TO HEAL. Tanking was this; Just hit something really really fast. Yeah nobody knew what they were doing back in Vanilla. It was a game of learn as you go, and you better learn fast.

The end-game content… epic. The raids were massive and there were so many of them. Some of the 5-man dungeons of today were massive 40 man raids, including the Sunken Temple and Blackrock Spire. Molten Core is the most memorable, housing the first Tier of epic raiding gear. The instance was made of massive caverns and giant mobs which took 4 tanks, 8 healers and 28 dps. That would be the theme for all WoW raids until Burning Crusade (I think, don’t quite me on that). The soundtrack, aesthetic appeal and just how massive these raids were gave them an epic feeling, but they took way too long to finish. Just like PvP in WoW - which was a tacked on feature and never meant to be in the game in the first place - it could take 6+ hours or even days to finish a raid. This was far too long for most players, but teenagers could play and raid to their heart’s content. It’s really interesting to see the dynamic shift between what raiding used to be and what it is now.

Figure 3: Casuality taking on Vaelastrasz the Corrupt from Black Wing Lair, the Tier 2 raid of Vanilla after Ahn’Qiraj got released.

Now, the negatives of WoW that got fixed in Burning Crusade. Like I mentioned before, not every class was playable. Hell, most classes weren’t playable. Most Mages, Fury Warriors, Enhancement Shaman, Shadow Priests and even more were never seen in raids since they were barely playable. They weren’t pulling the numbers needed and were thusly pushed out of raiding spots for better classes. Stats were all over the place. You would get plate gear with Strength and Intellect on the same item, namely for Paladin’s since they used Intellect in Vanilla. You’d also see Agility on the gear as well, but this is back when Agility boosted Dodge rating and Critical Strike rating for plate users. The same travesty also happened to other classes, including Hunters who at the time used mana (which would be changed to Energy/Focus in Wrath of the Lich King).

Levelling was a nightmare. For an MMO Blizzard did an excellent job at deterring people from their game. For the entirety of Vanilla, the exp system was hated upon because of one reason; exhaustion. If you were levelling too much or playing for too long, a debuff called exhaustion was applied to you, reducing all of your exp gained by 50%. People were leaving and not playing for something like 4 hours because of this debuff. When I said people hated it, they really hated it. The forums were overrun with how much hate it was getting.

Lastly, the server issues. As I explained, the servers crashed on the first day. This seems to be a running trend with Blizzard (see: Mists of Pandaria and Diablo 3). In their defence, they didn’t expect so many fans of the game. Just like what Nintendo said last year when their servers crashed, and Sony and Microsoft said this year on Christmas. As you can tell, this isn’t a valid excuse for fans.

All in all, Vanilla WoW is remembered as being the first epic entry into WoW’s dynamic journey is oft thought of in a nostalgic bliss, even if the issues would have pissed off most gamer’s today. It got a few things wrong, but it got a hell of a lot more right and is still one of the most successful franchises to this day. If you want to check out Vanilla WoW and the issues or hit’s that it had, look for a private server as Vanilla WoW is no longer playable on the official servers.

If I had to rate Vanilla WoW, I’d give it an 8/10. Great, but not perfect.

My personal drawings - Einstein the quantum visionary

Einstein is quite possibly the most well known if not the most well known scientist in all of conceivable history. His calculation's of mass-energy equivalence and his three laws of relativity changed our way of thinking and are the grandfather principle's in quantum mechanic's and physics. He was one of the greatest minds of his time and contrary to popular conception, he had no belief in a personal god like the religious of today. Rather, he believed in an all-powerful deity. This aside, Einstein's quest in life would be to learn as much of the world as possible, just like all great scientist's. Ironically enough, his greatest theory*¹, mass-energy equivalence would become his most misquoted and terribly recognized scientific law ever.

Mass-energy equivalence at its core means this, as you add energy in any form to any object, the object will increase in mass and thus its inertia and weight accordingly, even though no matter has been observably added. A physical system has two properties, those being energy and mass respectively. The two properties are equivalent in a way in that they are always both present in a constant proportion to one another. Mass-energy equivalence was a theory put forward by Einstein which originated from one of his theories on special relativity. This simple form of equivalence is represented by the most common formula to date;

Figure 1: A full explanation of mass-energy equivalence and the standard units for each value in the formula.

Not only was he a great scientist, but he was nationally recognized as one by receiving a Nobel Prize for his theory of the Photoelectric Effect. Whilst it's one of his lesser known theories, the Photoelectric Effect further revolutionized the concept and actualization of Quantum mechanics. The Photoelectric Effect is the observation and theory that states that many metals can and will emit electrons when light shines upon them. Electrons emitted in this fashion are often referred to as photoelectrons. 

According to classical electromagnetic theory (classical being contemporary physics i.e. the common sense stuff that day to day people think about, before the evolution of quantum mechanics), this effect can be attributed to the transfer of energy from the light to an electron in the metal. At this perspective,  a slight change in wavelength or amplitude of light would cause changes in the rate of emission of electrons from the metal. Even further, according to this line of thinking, a sufficiently dim light would be expected to show a lag time between the initial shining of its light and the subsequent emission of an electron. The experiment results however did not correlate with either of the two predictions from this theory.

In actuality, electrons only become dislodged by the photoelectric effect if light reaches or exceeds a threshold frequency, below which no electron will be emitted regardless of the temporal length of exposure or amplitude of the light. To properly make sense of the this and explain it clearly, Einstein proposed that a beam of light is not a wave propagating through space, but rather a collection of discrete wave packets (photons), each with energy hf. This shed light on Max Planck's precious discovery of the Planck reaction (E = hf), linking energy (E) and frequency (f) as rising from quanization of energy. The factor h is known as the Planck constant.

Figure 2: The photoelectric effect as proposed by Einstein.

As great as these theories are, they're not the reason I made this post. Instead, it was to talk about why he's my idol and inspiration in the pursuit of knowledge. Einstein was a man of science, plain and simple. Even the second world war didn't stop him from looking even further into quantum science. He always stood by his theories and never doubted himself. He beseeched others to look forward and question everything they knew about the observable universe and more. He was a visionary and a forward thinker. He never put down anyone for their intelligence levels, as noted in his most overused quote in modern media "Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing it is stupid." He is the kind of man I myself wish to be and someday may even become a similar man. 

Glossary

Theory*¹ - A theory in a scientific context is an idea that has been proven through observation, verifiable and repeatable results, ruthless peer review, accurate measurement, taking into account of all new and old discoveries, and willingness to change with new evidence. Most theories, like gravity and evolution, are scientific law. There is absolute evidence in the matter of those theories and thus haven't needed to change over the centuries (Gravity being a 400 year-old theory and Evolution being a 200 year-old theory).

Let's Talk Science - The mad scientist, Nikola Tesla

Who lived life eccentrically and did whatever the hell they wanted whilst being a madman? Nikola Tesla, the Russian genius who happened to be medically classed crazy.

Born in 1856 in what is now Croatia, at a young age he could memorise calculus and recite entire books. He wanted to be an engineer when he grew up but his father, who was a priest, wanted him to be a priest. At 18 Nikola contracted cholera. On his deathbed he said to his father "I'll try not to do if you send me to Engineering school." As you can guess, being on his deathbed and all, his father agreed. I shit you not he made a miraculous recovery, and in 1884 Tesla went to New York to start with only 4 cents and a letter of recommendation addressed to none other than Thosmas Eddison. When he arrived he noticed that everyone was using incandescent lights powered by Eddison's DC (Direct Current). Because DC is a direct current that loses voltage and power over long distances, Eddison was building power plants every 2 miles along the Eastern Seaboard. With all these powerlines New Yorkers were frying all over the place.

With all of this in mind, Tesla put forward his theory of AC (Alternating Current) to Eddison. AC works by periodically reversing the current of electricity, thus continually stepping up the voltage, allowing the electricity to travel further without losing energy. Eddison told Tesla that he would pay him $50,000 if Tesla could build him a fully functioning motor that is safer than DC. A few months later Tesla came back with a fully functional Induction Motor that ran on AC power. When Tesla asked for his money, Eddison then told him that he was joking. After that Tesla and Eddison became life-long enemies, hating each so much that when they were nominated to both recieve a Nobel prize together Tesla said he wouldn't accept it if Eddison was there.

Figure 1 - DC current vs an AC current

In the end Tesla won the DC versus AC war, where he proceeded to sell his patent to George Westinghouse for $60,000 and they went on to make the first hydro-electric powerplant using Tesla's technology. After this happened Tesla had a compulsion to start transmitting electricity wirelessly. This is about the time when he invented what is known as the Tesla Coil. This is also when he discovered shortly thereafter that he could recieve and transmit radio signals if they resonated at the same frequency. With wireless technology he also invented wireless toys, like boats and cars and what not.

Figure 2 - A fully functional, modern Tesla Coil

In 1899 he went out to Colorado to experiment on wireless energy transmission. He used scrap metal to invent a machine which could do this, and reportedly powered 200 lightbulbs from a power source from 26 Miles away. Where are the plans for such a device? Locked away in his head. He very rarely wrote down his findings and rarely drafted any plans for his devices. To put this into perspective a group of scientists back in 2007 managed to wirelessly transmit energy over a span of 7 feet through the air. In 1900 he was approached by J.P. Morgan to build a massive fancied up version of his device to provide the world with free power, all from a wireless tesla coil. When the stock market crashed and he was asking for more and more money, the project was cancelled.

As a result, he suffered from a nervous breakdown, and as a result, he went crazy. He rescued pigeons and spoke of one particular pigeon rather fondly to a biographer, saying that "He loved it like a man would love a woman." After this the world started to ignore him.

He passed away with 700 patents under his belt and the world knowing him as that one crazy super genius. So yeah, essentially he is the grandfather of all of our modern energy. What a legend.

Sources:

1. Nikola Tesla: Great Minds - Scishowhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPnGvjmIgZA

2. Nikola Tesla - Wikipedia*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

3. Tesla's Biography - Tesla Memorial Society of New Yorkhttp://www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm

4. Electrical pioneer Tesla Honoured - BBC Newshttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5167054.stm

*Note: If using Wikipedia, remember to look at the reference list like I did, you get more accurate information that way.

Let's talk religion: The magical Ark vs the tragic Titanic

Ah Noah's Ark, in the U.S. there is a staggering number of people who believe the story to be true. What's weird about this is that so many people say that the Bible can't be taken seriously for its fantastical stories. If people believe in Noah's Ark, but can't believe in a majority of the Bible, how can they assert that they are a Christian/Catholic with full knowledge that they have turned their objective religion into a subjective one? I digress, the point of this article is Noah's Ark, not picking apart the modern Christian ideology and whether it's subjective or not. Now, let's have a discussion and take a look at the facts and mathematics behind the whole thing. Then I shall compare it to superstition, are you all ready?

First we'll talk about the biblical scriptures of the story. The Bible states that Noah was commissioned by an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent and all-knowing being (take a few moments to see how ridiculous that sounds) to build a great ark to hold 2 of every animal since he plans on killing all humans with a great flood, except for Noah's family. Noah, being roughly 30 - 50 years old, asks his first and only son (churches insist on teaching that he had 3 sons when he did this, please read the Bible) to give him a hand with this.

It took them both 20 years to build this ark, which was 200 metres long, 150 metres high, and 50 metres wide. It then took them 7 days to load the ark with two of every species. The flood then lasts 98 years. Then Noah and his family repopulate the Earth by partaking in incestuous sex for hundreds of years. Noah dies at the ripe between 600-750 years old (different copies of the bible print different things). At this time, according to your precious Bible, the Earth was populated by about 1,000,000 humans and BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS of animals from every species collectively. Do you know how ridiculous this whole thing sounds? Go on, read it out loud, be prepared to sound like a moron.

Now let's take a look at the facts. Let's compare this great ark to the Titanic. Now the Titanic wasn't much larger that the ark itself, being approximately 268 metres long, 30 metres wide and just as high (there are all estimates), could only hold roughly 3-4000 people and could hold roughly 5000 tonnes in weight. It was also made completely out of steel, iron, cast iron and aluminium, with 6 layers of tempered steel protecting the hull and the entire casing of the build of the ship.

With thousands of workers it still took 4 years, being started on March 31 1901 and being completed with outfitting on March 31 1912. Let's take this data and see how long it should have taken Noah and his only son to build this ark. 3000 men over 4 years, take this figure of progression and you can find that only 25% of progress was made each year (on average, relative stats say otherwise). It took 2 people to make the ark. 2 people divided by 3000 is 6.66^e^-4, which is 0.00066.... Let's multiply this by the many of years it took to fully construct and outfit the Titanic. This is 0.0024. Therefore they made 0.24% of progress on the ark each year. Therefore it took 500 years to build the ark. This is humanly impossible, as it factors in working on Sundays (remembering that the Old and New Testament's alike stated that working on Sundays is punishable by death, hell it was enforced). Add an extra 1/7 of time onto those 500 years. This would extend the time by approximately 72 years. According to the mathematics and Christian logic, these guys should have died by the age of 40 - 50, well before construction on the Ark was finished (remembering that in these time, life spans were incredibly short, roughly 20-30 years). Sounding ridiculous yet? No? Need more evidence? Here's some for you.

The Spine-Tailed Swift is the fastest flying bird in the world, flying at 170 km/h. According to Biblical scriptures, this "vessel" was built in Egypt. Let's assume it was built in Cairo, just for the sake of argument. The distance from Australia (where the Spine-Tailed Swift migrates to during the Winter) to Cairo is approximately 8800 kilometres. It would take 51 hours for the bird to fly from here to Cairo non-stop, we all know that this is impossible. But say for example a polar bear were to try to get to Egypt, it's maximum velocity is 60 mph (96 km/h) whilst swimming and only 20 mph (32 km/h) whilst running. I'll save you all the maths and tell you that it would take a lot longer for the Polar Bear to reach Cairo, but it would die long before it would reach there due to overheating and being outside of its usual environment.

In conclusion,. the story of Noah's Ark is nothing more than a myth, superstition, it should not be taken seriously nor should you use it to indoctrinate your children or friends, because you never know when someone educated comes along and tears it all down.

Creationism versus Evolution: Which has more scientific credence?

I've made my position clear, I'm an Atheist, I don't believe that religion has a place in Science nor does it have a place in government. However, there is an overwhelming amount of people who believe that the Earth was created in 6 days, 6000 years ago and that we were placed here under the image of one or more gods. In this post I'll talk about the arguments from both sides and take a look at the evidence given from the scientific standpoint and the creationist standpoint, all while trying to be unbiased in my argument.

Creationism, the belief that the entirety of the Universe and the Earth was created in just 6 days by the Catholic/Christian/Jewish God. In Genesis, the sequence goes like this; God first created the heavens, then God created Light, then he made a round ball of pure water, then he created the Earth, then he put foliage and animals on the Earth, and lastly he created man (Adam) in his own image using the dirt on Earth. Wait, what? He made animals out of thin air, he created the entire universe using nothing, but had to create man using dirt? Why? From a logical standpoint this makes no sense. Whatever, let's keep going. He created a perfect safe haven for man where there was no disease, no need to eat (thanks to having immortality) and no danger whatsoever. Wait, this also makes no sense. All of the animals were placed in this safe haven known as Eden, even the ones that are inherently carnivorous, including snakes, wolves and crocodiles. You mean to tell me that none of these animals looked at Adam and thought that he might be appetizing? Another thing, according to the Bible we didn't change when we got thrown out of Eden, meaning we were made with an immune system. Why? This makes no sense, especially considering that Eden was a place of happy sunshine's and immunity to DEATH. Fuck it, let's keep going. About a week later, according to Genesis, Adam asked God for a partner because he was lonely, and God said "Sure bro, I'll be right down to make you one." We'd all assume he'd make her out of dirt right? Apparently not so, because God took one of Adam's ribs to make a female partner, Eve. I'm not even going to question this, there are enough holes in the story already. That's creationism in its simplest and most direct form.

That's the story, what evidence do we have that supports this story? The Bible. Yeah, the only "historical" literature we have that claims creationism to be true is the Bible, the good book, the Holy word you get the idea. The Bible was written approximately 80 years after the supposed death of Christ, so most if not all of it is stories that were passed down through generations. We inscribed hearsay into tablets and wrote a book based on the words of the elders. There are many stories in the Bible which are just plain wrong but that's for another day/post.

The most common argument against evolution from the creationist standpoint is that evolution is just a 'theory' and therefor, beyond all evidence, doesn't deserve scientific credence because, according to creationists, it requires a lot of faith to believe that our current developed and evolved species originated from a single cell organism. Another argument is intelligent design. The phrase intelligent design is defined as "the belief that the universe and living things were designed and created by a purposeful action of an intelligent agent." Finally, the last common argument is that both sides of the argument should be taught in school so that children and teenagers alike can make a choice on what to believe.

Creationists tend to throw around the word theory as if it means nothing. Contextually it has different meanings, but in the context that matters in the argument, the scientific medium, a theory is an accepted viewpoint that has been peer-reviewed and has solid evidence behind it. Take gravity for example, it's a commonly accepted law of Physics, but it's still a theory because it's got a withstanding amount of evidence to back it up and scientists everywhere agree with it. Intelligent design, where do I start? It's nothing but creationism with a scientific sounding name slapped onto it. This is commonly referred to by creationists as a solid theory, but as we just learnt from the definition of a theory, there needs to be outstanding evidence for it and peer reviewed documents. There are no scientists, credible scientists, that will tell you that creationism is a solid theory, there are no peer-reviewed documents in the scientific community that agree with the creationist "theory" and there is no evidence to support this theory outside of the Bible, there really isn't. As for the argument that it should be taught in schools alongside evolution, yeah there's no point in discussing this, it doesn't have a place in the classroom.

Now for the other side of the coin, evolution. The Theory of Evolution explains that a series of changes or mutations occurred form one generation that are transmitted on toward the next generation, such that these changes accumulate over time and the successive waves of generations differ considerably from their ancestors (origins). Over the course of millions of years, humans have evolved from being an ape-like creature, to being a bipedal ape-like creature, to a less ape-like creature, and eventually into the 'homo' genus, like homo erectus, homo neanderthalis and homo sapien. The process of evolution is as follows;

1. A series of chemical reactions occurred in the sky and in the sea (this happened almost 4 billion years ago)
2. They met and formed amino acids (approximately 3.5 billion years ago)
3. The amino acids developed ways to propagate themselves.
4. They became proteins - and then the first cells
5. The cells eventually united with each other forming an organism.
6. The organism, a water dweller, eventually adapts to land because of a change in the atmosphere and in the salt content of the seawater.
7. The land dweller eventually through millions of eons, became the primitive ancestor of the majority of present-day oxygen breathing animals.
8. This primitive ancestor had lots of offspring - some eventually became a dog, some a cat, others a rat, and a few, an ape
9. This ape, according to scientists, eventually became us.

We have overwhelming amounts of evidence to support this theory, including fossils, early hand paintings, carbon dating procedures, the very cells we have in our bodies, most of the things around us. Charles Darwin, the father of the Theory of Evolution came to the conclusion of Natural Selection and this very Theory after years upon years of research and experimentation. Evolution explains why we have our tailbones, why we're bipedal when most animals are not, and why homo sapien had a much better chance of survival over homo neanderthalis.

So with the overwhelming amount of evidence we have, what are the common disputes that creationists have with the Theory of Evolution? The missing link argument, the banana argument (this is an odd argument and I'll explain it) and the most common of them all, "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" All of these arguments have been debunked by scientists time and time again. The missing link argument is benign as there really aren't any missing links anymore. The missing link people are talking about is a link between being a bipedal ape-like creature and evolving from some fish man(?). This was and has continued to be debunked by the scientific community, as the only missing links that exist are discrepancies caused by evolution itself. The banana theory is an odd one and requires a lot of faith in God to fully believe. Essentially it's the hypothesis that bananas are a perfect fit in a human hand, thus we must have been made by God's divine intervention. Yeah this is such a weird and stupid argument that I'm not going to address. The last argument; "We evolved from monkeys, but why are there still monkeys?" The answer is simple, we didn't evolve from monkeys, we evolved from an ape-like creature whose common ancestry is shared by monkeys, and more prominently so, apes. Both our species evolved for different survival based reasons as well, monkeys for survival in the Jungle and in trees, we evolved for survival on the ground. It's as simple as that.

So after all of the points and arguments provided, which deserves more scientific credence? Well, personally I think evolution does since Science isn't a debate, you can't choose what you want and don't want to believe. That and evolution has an overwhelming amount of evidence behind it as opposed to creationism which does not. Evolution has been refined and peer-reviewed to death, as opposed to creationism which has remained rigid and hasn't adapted to fit any kind of evidence whatsoever. In conclusion, evolution takes more precedence in a scientific context and thus should be the only theory of our origin's taught in school unless something that has evidence and peer-reviewed papers and documents behind it shows up.