The New York Times has published a study by Dr. Gary Gutting, PhD, that shows that most science is pretty much inaccurate and misleading. Readers of this blog already know this, but it’s good to see it in a (slightly) more mainstream venue.
Gary also links to excellent work by Pub Med.
Readers know quite well that I have carefully deconstructed the pseudo-scientific belief in dark matter timeless time after timeless time again (here and here).
It is important to remember that I am not the only one who is capable of doing this. I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other giants, e.i. Columbia’s flagship mathematician, Peter Woit, who destroys dark matter here. Peter himself links to two others, Jester and Matt Strassler.
I have officially lost count of the nails in the seas of coffins of dark matter, like finding a needle in the sands on the seashore.
Nature reports that physicists can’t seem to get straight what the measurements are of the invisible objects they invented. I’ve disproved the existence of subatomic particles here, and I demonstrated the desperate dishonesty of the scientific establishment here. Unfortunately the latter link no longer contains a working video; it’s very likely that Harvard ordered it taken down due to my bringing attention to the scandal.
Notice that, on the assumption that my thesis is correct, there is no longer any mystery about the measurement of protons, because there are no protons to measure.
We should be very grateful for the work of Ingo Sick and John Arrington, the whistle-blowers cited in the Nature piece.
Update: Hamish Johnston has written a nice piece on how the Nature report radically undermines quantum mechanics.
Just yesterday the New York Times published a study about a species of animal that has achieved immortality. Or, we should say, inertial immortality. Inertial immortality is defined by me as follows: an object is inertially immortal if but only if it exists and will continue to exist unless another object destroys it. Many non-living objects have inertial immortality, e.g. plastic bottles, plastic bins, nuclear missiles, and so on. However, very few living objects have inertial immortality. Alex Chiu claims that he is one such object, but these claims have yet to be reviewed by the FDA or NASA.
Unfortunately, the author of the study, professional tweeter Nathanial Rich, falsely claims that this discovery has “barely registered outside the academic world.” Yet I, who am (proudly) outside the academic world, clearly registered the discovery back when Nathan was in diapers. It would have been nice to receive credit in Rich’s article.
I will end with a striking quote from the leading jellyfish scientist, Shin Kubota, who triples as a professional web designer and singer-songwriter.
Turritopsis application for human beings is the most wonderful dream of mankind. … Once we determine how the jellyfish rejuvenates itself, we should achieve very great things. My opinion is that we will evolve and become immortal ourselves.
Strike that. I will in fact end with an emotional video (different from the one in the singer-songwriter link) of Dr. Kubota presenting his research lyrically.
Today Google is celebrating the 155th birthday of Heinrich Hertz. Never mind that the poor fellow is dead (!).
According to the Christian Scientist Monitor, Hertz (no relation to Heinrich Himmler, who did not like Hertz very much) is responsible for revealing the “invisible world.” Devoted (really devoted) readers of this blog will recall that I’ve taken on this so-called invisible world here, and blown the lid off Harvard’s covering up its unreality here. Recently, of course, Tulane professor John Armstrong has shown that advocates of the invisible world (under the technobabble “electromagnetism”) use phony math. In that post’s comment thread, mathematician Greg Friedman agrees, going further in saying that “the entire subject is a fiction.”
So – why are we celebrating this Hertz character? He has done more damage to science education in the English-speaking world than I care to imagine.
In fact, it hertz me to imagine.
Indiana University cognitive scientist Colin Allen and CUNY consultant Robert Lurz have conducted several studies on how animals perceive the minds of others.
In the autobiographical essay, Allen notes what in Animal Studies has been called the “logical problem”: brain reading is logically equivalent to body reading. This is a mystery for “scientists,” who are theologically devoted to a brain/body distinction (=dualism). At their Brooklyn College Neuroscience lab, Allen and Lurz have desperately attempted to construct experiments to separate the two, but Allen concedes in the article, first, that the experiments are so complex that it is “not possible” for humans to fully comprehend them; and second, that even if humans could fully comprehend them, the experiments wouldn’t “eliminate… every alternative [body] reading hypothesis.”
I am the first to say: No kidding! But of course, as I’ve been saying for literally years (click on the “brains studies tag, below), your brain is everywhere, e.i. it is your body. Recall the diagram in my original post.
In light of the recent failure of fringe research, however, I’ll diagram how this is supposed to work, then diagram my explanatorily superior model.
Exhibit A: Medieval mind/body dualist view of animal perception (Allen, Lurz, Laura Sanders)
Exhibit B: Correct “Trans-brain” view of animal perception (CTBVoAP) (me, Godfrey-Smith, Reid, Loftus, New York Times)
As you can see, the second diagram posits the more elegant theory. For one thing, it follows Occam’s Razor in only positing one type of thing (what I call “singlism”). Second, and more importantly, it doesn’t posit mysterious, occult faculties by which perception can pass through certain parts of the body. Also, I’ve taken account of the fact that, in dogs at least, there is more than one perceptual mechanism – both eyes and nose, the latter of which seems curiously absent in Allen and Lurz’s work.
I have recently commented on the paradox of alleged electricity in water-based babies here.
Well, an attack on electricity has come from another – and unlikely! – source. Tulane professor John Armstrong, who is already noted for making scientists own up to their deceptions, has recently pointed out the abject state of science education on electricity and magnets.
Be sure to also note in the comment thread the insightful remark of Texan Christian University mathematics professor Greg Friedman, who points out that the “entire subject is a fiction.” I’ve been saying this for what will – by mathematical induction – eventually be a decade.
I’ve been away from blogging for a while, but it’s good to see that my work has begun to reverberate even in academia.
Recently, the Orwellian think tank “Science News” has hosted a series of essays on so-called “consciousness” by Laura Sanders, whose Brain Studies credentials consist in nothing more than degrees in earth and library sciences. The series threatens to have three parts, the first two already vomited – here and here.
The essence of Sander’s view is that all thinking goes on within the skull; furthermore, the thinking is fostered and constituted by electricity. On the medieval skull-centric view, note that I offered a refutation back in 2008. If you recall, my thesis (a distant cousin of the “Extended Brain” thesis of neuro-physicist David Chalmers) is that your brain is “everywhere.” Recall that my primary evidence came from the nature of pain, with a healthy dose of Occam’s Razor. Since then, of course, my “trans-brain” view has been endorsed by the New York Times, has enjoyed historical precedent, and has been empirically verified in other mammals.
So much for Sanders’ antiquated view of the brain’s location. Now what about the electricity allegedly surging throughout our bodies? Given what we otherwise know about the human body, this is actually impossible. Small children, as is well known, have the mushiest of skulls. This is because, as Europeans have shown, their bodies are mostly water. Now consider the fact that, among people who drop electric appliances into their bathtubs, the leading cause of death is electrocution. Since babies are so full of water – and since they generally have more active brains than adults, which is why they are so good at learning languages – then if they were full of electricity, they would be perpetually self-electrocuting. However, to the chagrin of the Social Security Administration, babies live to adulthood (and beyond) with alarming frequency. If Sanders doesn’t address this in part 3, then her charlatanism will be all the more apparent.
Experimental zoologist and philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has shown that, in octopi, the brain is everywhere, including but not limited to the arms. HT: Three Quarks Daily, the blog for the e-intelligentsia.
Godfrey-Smith isn’t the only neurophilosopher to endorse my thesis. John Loftus did so here.
If you want to explore the full public record on this, see my initial publication here, and my discussion of the NYT study here. I give some crucial historical perspective here.
UPDATE: I have joined Google+! See my profile here.
Science and Math Defeated Victorious!
You may recall several Internet trolls and haters doubting me here. That was almost exactly three years ago. Well, just a few days ago the scholars at LAX and Time pointed out that, in fact, these trolls and haters should have been trolling and hating themselves, because, according to the scholars cited, Einstein was wrong.
An obscure source claims that scientists at “MIT” are dogmatically defending Einstein. Even if this is the case, I would just point out that “MIT” is the place that hired Noam Chomsky, whose major contribution to science is that it is possible to destroy mice testicles. Need I say more?
Unlike the Church of Scientology and the U.S. Government, NASA is one cult yet to be breached by WikiLeaks. But it looks like NASA will be revealing one of its own secrets, this Thursday.
Readers may recall my trenchant criticism of NASA, here and here, which led to the Obama administration’s (wise) capitulation to my demands, here.
Well, if NASA demonstrates the existence of aliens, as indicated by the aforelinked link, then maybe the Outer Space program, virtually non-existent these days, can be redeemed. This also might finally give the SETI people something to do other than make movies.
When scientists aren’t indulging in their weird fetish conferences, they are busy giving bad advice to young people.
This time around, scientists have given people even more incentive to become moderately intoxicated. Inebriation, they argue, will “lower” the risk of certain kinds of diseases. By the same logic, because drunkenness lowers inhibitions, and confidence raises attractiveness, and romantic partnerships increase lifespan, moderate drunkenness will “lower” the risk of death. But that is clearly nonsense!
And in any case, as anyone paying attention will know, buzzed driving is drunk driving. See for example this study.
You might be saying to yourself, “Wait a minute how can we reduce the risk of disease, when this guy Kevin says we are disease?” To this I say: Just because some lowly grad student named “Kevin” says something, doesn’t mean it’s true. After all, which is more likely: (1) That you are a person with free will, thoughts, feelings, and a body or (2) that some grad student on the Internet named Kevin has made an original contribution to science?
I have recently discovered, just now in fact, that there is another scientist who, like me, addresses topics that polite society chooses to ignore. In the case of the fittingly named Alex Wild, the topic is very, very small animals, derogatorily called bugs by scientists who choose to ignore the uncomfortable. See his daring blog here. I have added it to my links. I should say, by the way, that my links are a little stagnant. I am very, very tired these days, especially after having completed the move to Cambridge. Were it not for Cafe Pamplona, I would not know how to spend my time.
So, what is more creepy than bugs? Even I have trouble focusing my mind on them without beginning to plan for suicide. I just don’t know if there is anything as absolutely horrifying as this, this, this, this, this, this, or for Heaven’s sake this. There is maybe one thing more horrifying than insects.
I leave you with this nightmare:
"A Disgusting Instance of Nature," titled by me, photographed by Alex Wild
Several of you are familiar with the bestiality controversy surrounding Marc Hauser, right here in Cambridge.
Less reported by the media is the embarrassing revelation, now viral on over 100,000 Youtubes, that Harvard has been using video games, spliced with scenes from the more recent installments of the Star Wars franchise, to teach its students subatomic biology. See the offending video here, leaked by the Swedish watchdog organization Ardalan Biology:
This shameful behavior is indicative of the increasingly hot water in which subatomic scientists find themselves drowning. Believing in non-observational objects is one thing; believing in video games and Star Wars is another.
So says this new research done by Science Daily. Thus we are now beginning to see the fruits of Sam Harris, who says that science can answer moral questions.
Well here’s an answer of science – eliminate the birthrate.
But if you eliminate the birthrate, then modus ponens you eliminate childhood, but then fortiori you eliminate adults! And what are we, if not adults?
Yet wellbeing is part of the fabric of the universe, as Brian Greene has vomited.* So you can’t have wellbeing without having the universe, and you can’t have the universe without adults.
The Vienna University of Technology should have its accreditation revoked by NIH.
*Yes, I know. A rare instance of my agreement with this Melchizedek of nonsense.
