Month: October 2015

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Twitter study on the astronautical audience for Gilmore Girls

Recently (aka just now) NASA, which was subject to many public embarrassments following the Edward Snowden links on The Guardian website, was doing some public imaging work, allowing for people to tweet into a panel discussion. Here was the announcement Tweet. In any case, much to my pleasures, they responded to one of my tweets, I’ll be it after the panel was over (but it was right after it was was over, so I’ll be it a little fewer than otherwise). Here was our exchange:

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NASA finally announces discovery of alien life

I reported along important lines a long time before this, that NASA was to announce the discovery of alien life/lives. My report? It is here. That was about NASA’s announcement of a future announcement. NASA’s announcement? It is here. Also see the revelations here. Well, it looks like it is finally happening IR Life, contrary to the consternations and constipation of Debbie Debs like philosopher-ergo-pseudo-scientist Pete Williams (who Tweeted his Debbie here).

I haven’t said this before: Aliens are out there and they are out there to say! I couldn’t find a very good picture online of the alien life but this is the closest thing I could find to the “power stations” the scientists are talking about:

alienstation

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PZ Myers responds to my critique of evolution, ignores current research by Klingenberg

As faithful readers have knowledge of, I am no friend of intelligent design. You would think that this alone would make PZ Myers, professor of evolutionary genetics at U of M, friendly to my research. But no one can do! Recently I politely asked Myers what he thought of my research on Evolution (or EvoDevo):

Unfortunately for him but fortunately for Honesty in Science, he proceeded to go on a Twant:

And:

And:

Now, in my original research into this question, I pointed out that the following conjunction

(1) Evolution happens via mutant descent;
and
(2) Mutants are negligibly likely to reproduce

are logically inconsistent. Because (2) is inconvertibly disputeless, (1) must be false, and hence evolution has serious holes (which E.O. Wilson has already shown, BTW). I have also discovered moral objection to evolution here.

Now it is worth noticing that Christianity “Peter” Klingenberg and his colleagues have shown in their work, “Morphological Integration and Developmental Modularity,” that the existence of mutants is doubly unlikely in the first places, because if there were mutants, than morphological integration would disintegrate into ashes. This is unsurprising in light of E.O. Wilson’s (I think?) “Convalescing Theory”, according to which mutated “alleles” break down or “convalesce” only when they share the same originating genomes, which is exceedingly (read: very) unlikely.

But what about PZ’s LOGIC? We can ignore his latter two Tweets, because they merely add hominem to insults. But he does say one thing of interest: “I’m a mutant, you’re a mutant, everyone is a mutant. I’ve got a wife & 3 kids. QED, you’re wrong.” First, the “QED” (sic): what follows from this is only that PZ’s wife and kids, and I/me, are/am mutants. But it does NOT follow that I’m wrong. Why not? Think about it! i never said that mutants themselves cannot meet other mutants and reproduce. It’s true that they can’t, but it’s not what I said. So it turns out that PZ has refuted a blog made of straw. I suspect this will damage his Twitter follow-rate, though in the days of Trump mania, one cannot be sure!

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Fighting the moderately good fight on probability

Recently I’ve been engaged in intense combat over probability theory (readers will remember my research in this area – here and here) at an unlikely venue, a blog called “Feminist Philosophers.” I’ve been debating views on probability with English professor David Wallace, who merely adds hominem to my criticisms.

This should encourage everyone! You need not be “officially” “expert” in “disciplines” in order to make discoveries in them. This applies to both Dave and me (though I obviously think I have the upper hand).