Thursday, March 12, 2009

Noah Art or Carnival Cruise Myth




I always had trouble with Noah's Ark since I was a kid because the whole thing sounded stupid to me. Like how did he keep the carnivores away from the herbivores? And wouldn't you have had to butcher some gazelles to feed the lions and tigers so which gazelles go for food and which two get a free cruise? Is there like a competition like Noah's Idol, the prettiest sheep in the room? And all those bugs? And where are the unicorns and the dinosaurs? Since they are not in the bible they must have been excluded from the main list. I know I am being facetious on the last two but come on. Seems so stupid. And you can't tell me after 40 days of rice and beans that a good pork chop wouldn't have been nice. But apparently some Dutch guy has replicated an ark according to biblical dimensions 300 cubits by fifty cubits (as Bill Cosby would say in his famous bit..."What’s a cubit?") However, the picture below that purports to show the last resting plate on Mr Ararat only set people up for a huge let down. Those are just shadows. I totally would be cheering if they found any kind of physical proof but it will never happen. So guys that dedicate their whole lives to finding such proof just seem like they enjoy being let down time and time again. Good word for Geraldo. He might be opening one of Al Capone's vaults sometime again soon.

Is this Noah's Ark? This image of Mt. Ararat in Turkey was captured in 2003 by a commercial remote sensing satellite flown by DigitalGlobe. The image was recently released to the public, much to the excitement of Noah's Ark researcher Porcher Taylor who has spent thirteen years trying to determine whether the "Ararat anomaly" that has shown up in other satellite images could actually be Noah's Ark. Of course, it could also be shadows and/or a strange rock formation. But that would be far less interesting. From Space.com:"Image interpretation is an art," said Farouk El-Baz, Director of the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing.

"One has to be familiar with Sun lighting effects on the shape of observed features," El-Baz said. "Very slight changes in slope modify shadow shapes that affect the interpretations. Up to this time, all the images I have seen can be interpreted as natural landforms. The feature that has been interpreted as the 'Ararat Anomaly' is to me a ledge of rock in partial shadow, with varied thickness of snow and ice cover.



Now I loves me my playmobile and I actually bought this as a gift for a friend who was having a baby because she is a huge animal lover. Her child to be would be an animal lover too but unfortunately my friend is now a Calvin hater so I am stuck with my least favorite playmobile playset. Since it floats I should take it to the river and like PADDLE TO THE SEA (the most awesome NFB short film ever that they made all of us watch a hundred times in elementary school) send it adrift to see where it ends up. That would be very cleansing.

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