re: #459 Decatur Deb

Pharyngula has a story up about a little wasteful research funded by NCAR and the Office of Naval Research:

A bad paper has been published in PLoS One. It’s competently executed within its narrow scope, as near as I can tell, but its premise is simply to reach for more pretense of a scientific basis for biblical fairy tales by an old earth creationist. It should have been rejected for asking an imaginary question and answering it with a fantasy scenario.
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The paper itself is a weird combination of transparency and disingenuousness. The title and the introduction are all about the dynamics of wind setdown, this phenomenon in which wind pressure can cause a drop in water level, but then throughout, the author describes the work exclusively in terms of explaining “a possible hydrodynamic explanation for Moses crossing the Red Sea”. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/09/inventing_excuses_for_a_bible.php