Can Nerds be Sexy?

Not sure how I want to do this...

I came across a book review for Idiot America, a book about America's fall from intellectual grace, about ignorance becoming prized, about the rise of easy never-question-authority lives. This might sadden the "Founding Fathers", a group much ballyhooed by both political parties, most were both land and slave owners and, let's not forget, pretty damn smart (who knows, in 250 years us having owned cars could be nearly as looked down upon). They decided to sever ties with their colonial masters and form a country based on an idea, and wrote the document outlining a form of governance by the people, a document that we still used today with which to do it. Maybe, the writer of the book mused, the "FF" could already see how the struggle for power would play out as the population grew, play out to the point where it seems like it is now, with Fact being reduced to what enough people believe and Truth dissolving into how fervently they believe it.

One thing that caught my attention in the review is discussion of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, a place the writer went to to get an idea of what's going on in the country. He saw this:

He thought it was rather funny, quite hilarious actually, until he noticed that he was the only one. That made him angry, which then quickly turned to sadness.

Of course there's got to heaps of data to support this, right, this new discovery? And I found several websites discussing "a dinosaur saddle has been discovered" somewhere in Utah, and digging further I saw lots of very religious websites citing a particular story as their source. Weird, I thought, I try to keep up on scientific things, surely I would've come across something as historically significant as people and dinosaurs living together, right? Not only living together, but in fact humans having somewhat domesticated dinosaurs, to the point of riding them like horses? Pretty crazy news...then I found the source article. It took two minutes really, and of course me being a pretty good skeptic, I never bought the story for a second, but the source article came from the Avant News website. The Avant News is basically the same thing as The Onion. A fake satirical news outlet for humorous entertainment purposes.

Some of the more overzealous websites had this as corroborating evidence:

(Sigh) A painting as corroborating evidence? I'm sure "Jesus" kept pet dinos as toy-Chihuahua like adornments and rode around on Brontosauri.

Okay, let me say that "Science" is not a bogeyman with frizzy hair and white labcoat out to destroy people's beliefs. "Science" is a method by which you make a guess about something you don't fully understand, and then test to see if what you thought has any validity. 

As far as the period of Earth's history when dinosaur's roamed and ruled, there are thousands and thousands of pages of data that summarize the years and years of research that, when understood even a tiny bit, show that they existed a very, very long time ago, far before any Homo sapiens were walking around, or for that matter, before any Homo erectus and Homo neandertalis, the other two species of humans.

But wait--I did find a cave painting link that might add some support to the dinosaur saddle "debate".