“Screw you, Einstein!” say nutbags.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Conservapedia, allow me to ruin your day. It’s basically Wikipedia, but re-written to appeal to conservatives who’d rather not be exposed to Wikipedia’s “liberal bias”.

To give you some idea of how un-biased Conservapedia is, here’s a random sample of text taken from today’s featured article.

Unlike Christianity, which is supported by a large body of sound evidence, atheism has no proof and evidence supporting its ideology.

Counterexamples to the Bible: 0 
Counterexamples to Evolution: 60 
IQ of Atheists: 0 divided by 60

I’m no longer shocked when someone insists that evolution is “just a theory” - I’ve heard it so many times that now I just tune it out. But it does surprise me when somebody accuses Einstein’s theory of relativity (yes, E=MC²) as being the product of a left-wing conspiracy.

According to Conservapedia:

“The theory of relativity… is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world. Here is a list of 28 counterexamples: any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect.”

The examples given range from the blatantly untrue:

“It is impossible to perform an experiment to determine whether Einstein’s theory of relativity is correct.”

To the ridiculous:

“The theory of relativity states that it is impossible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light. But when Jesus said “Your son lives” to the government official (John 4:50), his son was cured instantaneously, even though he was miles away! Therefore the cure travelled faster than the speed of light, therefore the theory of relativity is false.”

For the record, you can actually prove relativity in your living room, assuming you have two atomic clocks and either A: a living room that is several kilometres high or B: a thousand years to spare.

“Sure! I guess I can spare a few centuries to watch two clocks slowly go out of sync.”

Why is Conservapedia making such a big deal out of this? Because they believe - mistakenly - that the theory of relativity, which is a purely scientific concept, has something to do with relativism, which is a philosophical one.

If only the authors of the relativity article on Conservapedia had glanced at the relativism page on Wikipedia. The very first line is this:

For the physics theory, see Theory of relativity.

But why am I making such a big deal out of this? Conservapedia is just a bunch of nutbags, right? Surely no-one’s actually reading this crap, therefore no-one is being harmed. In the words of Homer Simpson, “Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen.”

Well, according to the front page, they’ve had 175 million hits. For all our sakes, I hope that number is like everything else on Conservapedia: inaccurate.



MITIFOTIT:
Most Interesting Thing I Found On The Internet Today

After the obnoxiously funny star of 27bslash6.com went on chat roulette, he wrote an article about the experience. He called it Twenty five minutes on Chatroulette.com is like a drill to the head.