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If you are still interested in learning more, I've found a great collection of scientific research here! here!

Like what? Let me guess: black holes?

If a person never read any criticism of black holes, then they could be forgiven for not realizing that the theory of black holes has adjusted over time to reflect observations. For instance, it was once thought that black holes were so powerful that nothing could escape them. Then, black holes were observed to possess jets coming out of them that involved intense magnetic fields and particles moving at near the speed of light, and the theories had to be modified. There's a great critique of black hole theory on Wallace Thornhill's holoscience site (http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=tyybhrr8). If you can read that criticism and maintain a solid belief in black holes, then I'd have to at a minimum give you credit for actually challenging your own belief system.

While sciencists are only humans, like we are all, they should give predecence of observations over belief system, as you say. And I think they doing pretty good, weeding out mistakes and cheats.

It would certainly seem this way if you weren't paying close attention, at least. After all, how would you notice all of the people that are being blacklisted and outright dismissed? Have you seen this site?

http://www.crank.net/

If you do any history of science reading, you will find that it is inevitable that some ideas within the fringes of science today will eventually make their way into the mainstream, and become accepted fact. Sites like this prefer that scientists be dismissed for the sole reason that they advocate theories that are not currently conventional. I can guarantee you that some of the people being ridiculed on this site will one day be vindicated.

But I can get more specific on this point. Wallace Thornhill made numerous predictions regarding the 1995 Deep Impact Mission based upon the concept of the Electric Sun Hypothesis:

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050704predictions.htm [thunderbolts.info]
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050630deepimpact.htm [thunderbolts.info]

Interestingly, the predictions were Slashdotted:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/03/1246254 [slashdot.org]

Now, if you go through those forum postings from Slashdot, you will observe that Slashdot readers make absolutely no distinction whatsoever between ridiculing an astrophysical PREDICTION and ridiculing an astrophysical theory. This is a very serious problem because predictions are the most powerful tool that astrophysicists have for validating theories. When it was subsequently discovered that Wallace Thornhill was right in nearly every single aspect of his prediction, there was no retraction by any of those people and no announcement by the moderators at Slashdot. Mention of the successful prediction was also eventually completely sanitized from wikipedia many years later. Clearly, they did such a good job that you've never heard of the entire situation.

One of Thornhill's successful predictions was that there would be a pre-impact flash -- something which nobody else was actually predicting at the time. There were in fact two flashes at the time of impact. Furthermore, images of Tempel 1 just prior to impact demonstrate clear whiteouts (arguably from electrical arcing ... http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050705impression.htm [thunderbolts.info]).

What you learn when you look into these things is that scientists dismiss ideas that they consider absurd withou

From no story to totally stupid story. Look, your game is based on aliens at Area 51. If you don't know how to search the internet for all juicy conspiracy theories that kept the kooks enthralled for the 90s then you shouldn't be making this game.

Here's a good place to start: http://www.crank.net/usenet.html

Swi

for that link. It led me eventually to a wonderful web site.

That site, in turn, got me to Are You a Quack?.

Years ago, my being a Physics major qualified me as a crank magnet. I guess the Physics professors were too busy so I was dealing with the overflow.

142 out of 12,000, some of which aren't really a problem, and that's numbers generated by a critic?

And a very... dedicated critic, too.

I must admit there's a certain recursive appeal to the idea of someone being notable enough for a Wikipedia entry purely because of his vehement attempts to avoid being mentioned on Wikipedia.

As usual, the talk page has lots of entertaining dirt.

(Uncyclopedia has the real low-down, of course.)

...99% of whose writings would make a 5 year old's grasp of number theory seem advanced. People who have proved FLT (the easy way), that 0.999... recurring is less than 1, that there are countably many reals and so on. But the author of Divine Proportions is one of those unusual crackpots who's obsessed with an idea but hasn't allowed that to completely compromise their mathematics. These people don't deserve to be beaten down along with the others. I think that having no review of this book would have been better than this review.

1) "Hot" fusion works, but a practical solution is always 20 years away. (However, they then go on to say that the current target date for a workable solution is 2050 -- 44 years from now.)

Hasn't there been noise that fusion is about 20 away for the past 20 years?

2) "Cold" fusion is not quite dead yet. A small group of researchers claims fusion is taking place with a mechanism requiring "new physics", but the vast majority of physicists don't take them seriously.

And some people still believe in Autodynamics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodynamics ; It doesn't mean that its not crank science http://crank.net/ .

Where's James Harris when you need him?

Oh great, not more Nibiru crap. There's only so much Nibiru I can handle before I feel the need to request antipsychotics.

...Pseudoscience has now arrived on Slashdot. Of course, the convenient element of this I suppose is that when I want to laugh in future, I'll no longer need to visit both here *and* crank.net.

The commencement of covering American politics was in itself a major indication of the intellectual decline of this site, compared with times past...If stories like these begin making their appearance on a regular basis, I find myself wondering how long it will be before Slashdot becomes largely worthless. I suppose I could simply edit my settings to screen out submissions by Zonk, but that isn't really a solution...From what I'm seeing, he's only the latest symptom, rather than the disease itself. And yes, to those of you with modpoints at the moment who *shouldn't* have them on the grounds of your being groupthinking, conformist sheep, mod me troll with my blessing, as I know you will...as you always do when I or anyone else makes a post of this nature.

Well, we already have Kookle.

Jokubonis Square Wheel (from crank.net)

Seems there already is a crank hall of fame. Thisone didn't reach that site yet though.

Some useful material for those investigating the validity of claims about the secret services.

Second of all, special relativity isn't *based* on electrodynamics at all

Right. Just as a reminder to anyone reading this thread, the three axioms from which special relativity can be derived are:

1. The laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers.
2. The speed of light in vacuum is a constant.
3. Causality always applies.

The third is often not stated, as it's implicit in most of physics anyway. I wish I could remember the entire proof, but it's been a few years. It's not especially arcane or incomprehensible, though, and you don't need a degree in physics to understand it.

The fact that special relativity has so few dependencies, and is relatively simple, is part of its brilliance. It's also why theories that special relativity is flawed tend to be treated with extreme skepticism--it's hard to think of a theory that's more solid.

Maxwell's theory of electrodynamics supports the idea that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant, but it's not the only evidence; there's the Michelson-Morley experiment, for starters. So Maxwell's theory falling over would not prove that the speed of light wasn't constant, and would not knock down special relativity.

If you want to knock down special relativity in favor of your own masterpiece, though, axiom #2 is certainly the one to go for... Throwing out either of the others tends to be a bit self-defeating. That's why most aether-theory crackpots claim that the Michelson-Morley experiment is flawed in some bizarre way.

Structure? We don't need no steenking structure.

Anything beyond an AI Army of One will be unable to come up with a sufficiently complex Concept-Fiber Theory of Mind to start coding True AI or Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) in JavaScript for teaching AI and in Forth for robots.

A minor problem with the sole-source, lone-inventor Organizational Model for Open Source is that funding is almost impossible to obtain, unless you get your project listed in the Free Software Donation Directory or you write a book about your Open Source software. Even then, the sheeple will hound you as a crackpot, a 'Net-loon or a crank, with the result that even here on SlashDot the vicious malcontents will take up the cry and none of the world-famous Slashdot book reviewers will dare to write a reasonable, mind-opening review of your book, with the result that you will fall off the edge of the Open Source world into oblivion, but it won't matter what has happened to your Army of One, because your Open Source software will have advanced the State of the Art.

lets all talk about how it's a dupe because that is so much more important and entertaining just like picking at pimples on my ass. Jeez, you'd think people take personal offense to a dupe story. It is a friggin website not a goddamn way of life... calm down, have some dip and enjoy the stories.... or go somewhere else.

One of the results of your suggested search was a section of a website called "Crank Dot Net."

'nuff said.

"A small, but vocal, contingent even argues that tin is superior, but they are held by most to be the lunatic fringe of Foil Deflector Beanie science. I would advise people wishing to build a Deflector Beanie to stick with aluminum whenever possible since it is a proven technology."

Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie: An Effective, Low-Cost Solution To Combating Mind-Control.

That is an amazing link! Someone who is a good writer has put a huge amount of time into documenting nonsense. And it says that the site is rated Cranky by Crank.net

The internet is an amazing virtual place where every comedian can be heard: Zapato Productions intradimensional -- "Serving the Paranoid Since 1997". It says this web site is a member of the (no doubt prestigious) "Yes, there really IS a VAST Right Wing Conspiracy!" web ring.

I wonder why there is no suspected scam site on the Internet? Maybe the legal risks would be too great...

Here's a good one for you:

www.crank.net

Ah yes... my all-time favourite crank website. :-)= It has the rare combination of both being completely and utterly off its rocker, and yet being in coherent grammatical English! Generally the craziest ones are also incomprehensible.

For a great list of crackpot websites, take a look at crank.net.

[TMB]

For your amusement, this is the gallery of the 'barking mad'...

The definitive list can be found on crank.net. If you ever want a good laugh, try reading through the sites listed as "illucid". ;-)

Why do cranks always pick on either cosmology or the moon? I want to see a crank theory of horizontal branch morphology or AGB stars! :-)=

[TMB]

My favorite quote from the early days:

"In cyberspace, *everyone* can hear you scream."
(regarding the great net.kook Serdar Argic)

AI in VB? *Chuckle*

Surely of all the cranks in the world, you could have picked a more interesting one.

www.crank.net
www.searleffect.com
www.tesla.org
Bill Beaty's Wierd Science page

Some people (crackpots? geniuses? nutcases? take your pick) are working on the alternative energy problem. There are tons listed on www.crank.net. The one I've been most interested in is one about the Searle Effect.

Basically the premise of Searle consists of a motor made of impressed AC magnetic fields, which achieve their lowest energy state while rotating. (Check out the link, he does a better job of explaining it...) I don't know if it's true or not, but if it works, it would be a welcome advance.

IIRC, much of the "smog" produced in larger cities comes from the power plants in the area (as well as other industries, I'm sure, but indulge me a minute...). IF the device Searle proposes works, and can be manufactured to be large enough, then power plants could shift from coal burning infernos to magnetic generators, thereby reducing pollution, and improving (well, less destructive to) the environment.

Those interested can head over to http://www.spiritweb.org. This is a fairly extensive center of many religions and beliefs. If you think religion is all about Mary, Jesus and lambs, you're sadly mistaken. There are many sound religions out there, but also many crackpots or confused people.

- Steeltoe

Shoot the moon? Hell, says Prof. Alexander Abian, why not just blow it up?

Sadly, Crank.net says he died of a heart attack. His homepage is still up at at Iowa U., and a fan has archived THE ABIAN LIST. See the gumption of a man who named the mass of the Cosmos at the big bang after himself (scroll down a bit). Finally, see the greatness of the man reflected in his exchanges with James "Kibo" Parry and Archimedes Plutonium.