This weekend at Har Mar Mall, in Roseville, just north of the Minneapolis – Saint Paul border.
I’ve been watching this event every year for few years now, and a couple of years ago it got quite interesting when the organizers of the event discovered that I had caught them is a lie and provided photographic evidence on my blog. That prompted them to make a public statement that I was an “Atheist abusing children.” (See this.)
The pot. The kettle. Whatever.
If you are in the vicinity, go to the science fair and do the Lewis Black thing!!!! Don’t forget to bring a fossil.
Well at the time you wrote this post, My other and I were picking up a friend to go see it.
The Minneapolis Drinking Atheists had a browse by as well. I was really expecting some truly horrifying displaces of “the bible is true because my science project supports it.” I didn’t really see any of that except for a couple of really half assed ‘I didn’t really do my work’ projects. Most of the experiments had the bible quote slapped on to it because it was mandatory. One kid who was at an older level, had an experiment with sounds which he measured through an Ohms meter and split up the speakers to test the differences in quality. The quote “And god came down and with his voice booming bla bla bla” had no relevance to the project at all. After most of the kids left we went up and talked to the guy who had put the fair together. He of course was an IDer, but oddly enough said he supported biology. And obviously did not believe in evolution ‘because there was no proof’. (he said this RIGHT after “I believe in biology” it was just strange) Then we did get him to admit that big changes in animals did happen due to their environment, but he subjected that to “micro biology” because there was no animal jumping out becoming “a dog”. Then concluded that evolution was the definition of “something positive developed from a change” and since “all mutations are negative, it was therefor invalid” or some lame ass reasoning as such. We did get him to admit that the kindergartner down at the end knew more about science than he did. Funny how he was running the show then huh?
I didn’t really go through the accuracy of the fair projects because my school never had a science fair. I didn’t know what to expect and what level of expertise they had to know. All in all it was less horrible than I was expecting.
People on PZ’s blog were talking about a couple of projects that were the worst. One was about gravity. I didn’t look at it very close because there wasn’t much on the board. I do know that it got third place. Then another that was essentially: Animals are designed by god because humans designed aircraft based on animals. This was another project we didn’t look over. But this was because they were judging it when we got there. Listening to the judges and kid gloat over this project disturbed us out a little bit. We decided to wait until the judges left but we never managed to meander back that way to look through it ourselves.