Science makes top ten worst ideas of all time

The Washington Post, famous for its outside-of-the-box thinking on scientific matters, has published a list of the worst ideas of the last one hundred years (sorry for the hyperbolifics in the title). Not surprisingly, science shows up not one, not two, not four, but three times. First, medical science, then technology, then geography.

The sciences better start getting serious, or else they will be relegated to the same mystical voodoo cesspool as Astrology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, and the feisty offshoot of Cultural Studies, Wicca.

Here’s my list of the top ten worst ideas of the last one hundred years (considering not just science, but all ideas):

(1) NASA (QED, QED)
(2) Nuclear Physics (QED TBA)
(3) The Apollo Program (QED)
(4) Special Relativity (QED)
(5) Quantum Mechanics (QED TBA)
(6)  Bayes theorem (QED)
(7) [REDACTED FOR FALSITY AND IMMORALITY]
(8) Bombing the moon (QED)
(9) Micro-Evolution (QED, QED)
(10) Dark Matter/Anti-Matter (QED, QED)
(10) More-than-three dimensional space (QED)
(10) Brian Greene/Stephen Hawking (QED)

I don’t yet have QED links for all of these, but you can find additional expliceration of these ideas, such as Brian Greene, in my comprehensive Science and Math Defeated Glossary of Terms.

Technopoly and the New Animal Genocide

As any Berkeley professor can tell you, animals rights activists are getting more violent by the nanosecond. But, given certain recent events, I’m beginning to contemplate what President Obama once said: “[D]oing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence.” Perhaps animal rights activists are, for the first time in their angry lives, on to something.

The coming animal genocide is already being foreshadowed in zoology. And the justification appears to be tough economic times. This is known as the “starve the beast” tactic, pioneered by philosopher of rights Leo Strauss, later developed into its modern form by Richard Weaver. While politically it’s a Machiavellian brilliant move, it’s morally dispicable. But Zoology isn’t the only field where we can see that a storm is coming. Bird Studies has also issued some ominous omens, corroborated by everyone. But this is just where it starts to get interesting.

My more sophisticated readers will have read enough Neil Postman to know that our society is basically run by Technopolists. Professor Postman coined this term, and it refers to those whose primary modus of operandi is that technology not only be used, but more or less worshiped as mankind’s salvation. Sound silly? It may have back in the 1980’s when technology was largely fictional, but now it is a reality realer than realness itself. Combine the disturbing facts about birds with the recent development of flying cars, and you might begin to get the picture. Never mind the primitive out-of-date propaganda we’re sending out kids, innovations like flying cars are the wave of the future. And these innovations have a one-to-one correspondence with the animals they are replacing. Using Bayes’ Calculus a la cartes Richard Swinburne, it is enormously improbable that this is just coincidence.

Of course, as Professor Postman warned us, technopoly comes with a price. And the genocide against animal life has consequences both dire and ironic.

Looks like Postman’s “childhood” isn’t the only victim in this race to the technopological finish line; the entire animal kingdom is going down with it.

“0.9999…. = 1”

This is an essential assumption of Bayes’s Calculus. If you doubt that this is common, then just take a cursory look at the mathematical community here, here, here, and here.  And here and here. Do you know what this means? It means that Calculus, like probability (see my deconstruction of probability), is false. The argument goes something like this:

0.333… is 1/3, right? Well 1/3×3=1. But surely 0.333…x3=0.999…! Therefore, by one or another form of the transitive property, 0.999…=1!

In addition to being a near-blasphemous usage of the transitive property, it is just plain false. Think about it in the following manner. 0.1 is necessarily greater than 0.0X, where ‘X’ is any countable number. 0.1 is also necessarily greater than 0.0XX. And so on. No matter how many X’s you add to the series, it will never equal or be greater to 0.1. Therefore, by mathematical induction a la carte, no amount of repetition of 0.0XXX…. could ever equal 0.1, which is what is necessary to add to 0.9 in order to equal 1. Importantly, (0.9 x / x<0.1)≠1 Λ (0.9 x / x<0.1)<1. Therefore Calculus is false. A house built on sand cannot divide itself.

Notice that all I needed to disprove this foundation of calculus was mathematical induction.

Advice to all my readers: Don’t let “math wizards” intimidate you with technobabble. And note that I am not alone.