Slashdot Mirror
Bad Science Awards
KDan writes "The Bad Science Awards are out. These should put a smile on any science geek's face. Prize gems include: shrinking water molecules, anesthetic condoms, and a plan to send homeopathic AIDS remedies to Botswana."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
From the article:
However the winner was Space Tomato Number One, part of the Chinese government's "space breeding" project, where radiation in space is used to create comic book mutations and giant space plants, including tomatoes weighing almost a kilogram.
I fear we may have a new meme on our hands: In China, X is always positive.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Depends on what you mean by god or which god you are talking about. The Christian God can not evolve because he exists outside the natural world/universe.
Kind of like the South African president declaring that HIV does NOT lead to or cause AIDS.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
The problem is that lots of people have the mistaken assumption that science (and in general, what they learn in school) is "true". Science is simply a self-consistent closed system that models the real world. I agree that science and religion are separate, and neither belong in the other's place. But when we have the state forcing science education combined with a common assumption that the real world is the scientific model, we have a problem.
It might not give us the reason for the "big bang" occurring but as far as I know nor does it claim to.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The Big Bang, as I understand it, started out not as a theory, but as the result of extrapolation. Start out with the Universe as we observe it now, including expansion and run time backwards. Everything will end up in the same place at the same time. From that, you can deduce that everything started out there, resulting in the Big Bang.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
From the article...
he also states that your skull "contracts and expands a dozen times or so each minute to push the [cerebrospinal] fluid round" your brain, along with various other amusing misunderstandings of basic medicine.
This is actually a pretty controversial area of medicine-- known as cranial osteopathy, there have been numerous studies that claim to show that the skull does have movement due to cerebrospinal pressure. Actual doctors do believe this, although as I say, it's not commonly accepted.
If anyone's interested, I'll dig up some research..
No, the problem with creationism is that it attempts to dissuade people from using science, and to believe fairy tales in its place. In the process, it tries to destroy all scientific knowledge gained in the areas of geology, physics, history, etc.
Talk to a Creationist sometime: you'll find that person also believes that the earth is 6000 years old, dinosaurs either never existed, or were on Noah's ark, etc. Creationism isn't just a simple belief that God created the world; anyone could believe that and still have no problem with any part of science. Creationism is an entire belief system that attempts to explain the current state of the world using numerous assumptions that have been proven false by evidence. For instance, a geologist would have to be nuts to believe the earth is 6000 years old after examing fossil evidence, geological evidence, and looking at everything we now know about how the earth's geology works. But ask a Creationist, and he'll claim the Grand Canyon was made very quickly by the "great flood"! Astrophysicists could point out that there's lots of things we can see with telescopes that are so far away, the light has taken over 6000 years to get here. But ask a Creationist, and he'll come up with some crazy explanation for it, such as that God put that light in motion 6000 years ago to look like that.
The idea that a deity had some hand in creating the universe isn't a bad one. Science doesn't have the answers for that, and may never have them. Yes, there's a Big Bang theory, but what came before that (if it even happened that way)? This simply isn't a question for science, at least not before we evolve into some much more advanced race in the next million years. These are the kinds of things religion is supposed to investigate. But here in the US, religion isn't about investigating or contemplating the metaphysical; it's about making claims that fly in the face of physical evidence because it's unfathomable that an extremely literal and narrow interpretation of an old text could possibly be wrong, and in the process attempting to brainwash everyone into believing the same falsehood for no good reason.
I'd hardly call something where the evidence is inconclusive to be a fallacy. A fallacy is something that can be shown to be untrue.
A friend of mine used to tell me the reason he never runs stop lights or passes in no passing zones, it's because he said that if he never does those things, it will be impossible for him to be in an accident while running a red light or passing in a no pass zone.
In other words, if you avoid deviations from the norm, you also avoid the potential problems that lie outside the norm.
Maybe polluting the atmosphere to fuckall and back will have no serious long term consequences, but if you're going to go about demanding iron clad evidence of something before allowing action to take place, then that is where the burden of proof should lie.
And if it was just someone randomly making dire warnings that would be something else, but there is good experimental evidence that shows in the laboratory potential mechanisms for how these forms of pollution could result in catostrophic global climate change. Are they right?
Well let's just say that I'd feel a lot more comfortable avoiding crashing my volvo into a concrete barrier at 100mph to see if "she can take it." Maybe I would survive without injury, but sometimes learning the hardway is no way to learn at all.
I have a Master's in physics. I try to be careful to apply the scientific method when dealing with unknown subjects. Frankly, homeopathy works. Before you criticize, I am as baffled by it as you are. There is no reason it should work, but it does. And yes, there are studies. But because it is 'kooky', it is rejected out-of-hand.
If you have not experimented and studied it yourself, how can you dismiss it?
Linux is to Microsoft what Alternative Medicine is to Conventional Medicine/AMA. Right now it is relatively a fringe movement, but beginning to make inroads that the establishment(s) can't stop. Sure, there are many things that are nonsense, but there is enough good stuff not to 'throw the baby out with the bathwater'. The beauty of it all, it that homeopathy is good at solving problems that conventional medicine isn't - and vice versa.
Perhaps you will say, "It is just the placebo effect". For you or for me, that could be true, but what about babies with colic? I have yet to see anything else that would work. I know many mothers who would swear by it. What about animals? People use it on pets too - though I have not.
I sound like a kook when I argue against accepted wisdom and what seems to be obvious theory, but I have seen too much success with it to laugh- and yes, I can tell when it is working and when it isn't. So, before you laugh too long, look into it. Revolutions never begin with the masses.
That said, I am far from convinced of an AIDS homeopathic, though I do know an excellent one for the flu.
This is the usual retarded logic that pollution apologists use.
FACTS:
1. The less we understand the environment the more cautious we should be. This should be obvious. If you are ice-skating, you check the thickness of the ice. If you HAVE to go on the ice without knowing how thick it is you don't say "it isn't PROVEN that the ice is thin, so I'll jump up and down and stomp around."
2. Science never proves anything. Ever. Not even once. 'Science' is the current theories that best stand up to criticism. If this seems wrong to you then you have no idea and should not pollute the world with your misinformed asshat ideas.
3. Right now the evidence says that global warming is happening and is caused by human activities. Can I make the case for this? Absolutely not. However, there are people who know alot about this sort of thing. They tell me that the evidence points to human activity and global warming. The only 'experts' which say otherwise are working for energy companies.
4. A majority of scientists can be wrong. Scientists believed in Newtonian physics until the beginning of this century, and many refused to buy into relativity even then. However, with our imperfect human knowledge we must make decisions based on the best information that we have available. Is the best information to base a decision on "it isn't PROVEN that global warming is real or cause by human actions" or "experts say that it is real and the evidence we do have agrees with this conclusion"?
*NOT* a troll I wouldn't believe it myself unless I'd seen it personally on numerous occasions.
Nothing new though - topical lidocaine has been available for this purpose since *ponder* the late nineteen fifties, I believe ( first in creams, then sprays ). Of course, if they didn't mention they were putting benzocaine in the lubricant, they should be pegged out in the sun on an anthill - benzocaine, while in pretty wide use ( even in teething gels and stuff for infants ) has been known to invoke a contact dermatitis in susceptible individuals!
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
You failed science class, didn't you? You don't assume things and then try to disprove them. You take the knowledge you have, produce a hypothesis that logically follows from that knowledge, and test it, thereby acquiring new knowledge. Just because it's impossible to disprove the existence of green hairy aliens on Alpha Centauri doesn't imply that you can claim they are there.
This is exactly his point: for "intelligent design" to be "proved" (or supported) scientifically, it must be possible to disprove it. That is, one must run tests which could have more than one outcome in order to give it scientific credibility. Of course, it could still have non-scientific credibility.
If you still want to argue, how about some classic mind-twisters: if some intelligent being created life, who created the intelligent being? How the hell did he become all-powerful?
You can make arguments like this against any cosmology. If there is no God, then what was the first event? What caused it? Why is there time? And space? Physics will never explain these. (Hint: explaining time and space as sections of or approximations to a 27-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold might (if superstring theory holds) explain why time and space look like they do, but then you're stuck explaining why the universe looks like such a manifold). The best physical explanation for a universe favorable to life is the Anthropic Principle, but even that makes rather large assumptions. Humans can't know everything, and this question is simply too big for us.
Similarly, no religion will ever explain why there is a god, or many gods.
Does this not violate the basic laws of physics as well as produce logical contradictions?
Are you suggesting that an omnipotent being would be bound by the laws of physics (or logic, for that matter) in a world it created?
What evidence do you have for the existence of such a being?
The bible. Doesn't seem to be entirely historically accurate (eg, location of the city of Ai), but it's not too far off on stuff that can be tested. Scores of prophets, most of which had pretty good prediction rates of specific events. Thousands of saints, and associated miracles (many with shady evidence surrounding them, eg the virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, but some are fairly well-documented, eg Joan of Arc). Many miracles have been submitted for testing to scientific groups, who are unable to explain the events within the bounds of science, and were convinced that something strange was going on (strange meaning supernatural, or natural but previously undocumented, as opposed to faked).
As a Christian, I'm obviously both biased toward and more knowledgeable about Christian miracles, but other religions have theirs. Nobody knows a natural explanation for tumo (Buddhist spiritual heating), although it is reasonable to believe that one exists.
Of course, one might argue that while many of these "miracles" lie outside of known science and/or probability theory, they don't constitute testable results. And most of them don't (however see tumo, studies of prayer, etc). But as I stated above, religion is not a scientific theory, and so has different standards of evidence.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
belief in god is as valid as belief in unicorns. You do believe in unicorns, right?
I have never had any experiences involving unicorns. To be honest, I cannot disbelieve in unicorns, since I cannot disprove their hypothetical existence. However, a unicorn is a claim for a specific type of equine within this world. A god is a supernatural entity. There's an important difference.
to risk pressing a point a little too far, have you ever considered the idea that your 'religious experiences' are little more than a firing of neurotransmitters in a particular way, caused by perhaps a particular mental and physical state?
Yeah. But why did our brain bother to create neurotransmitters that do this in response to religion? You yourself admit this is "strange". I prefer to rationalize this as the work of the Holy Spirit.
"Center for Consumer Freedom" just screamed "industry front group", and sure enough, that's what it is. It's apparently run by a lobyist named Rick Berman to spread propaganda on behalf of his clients, in this case tobacco companies. He has another such group, the Employment Policies Institute, which opposes minimum wage increases on behalf of the restaurant industry, and yet another to oppose lowering DUI standards, backed by the beverage industry. So be careful who you accuse of having dubious credentials.
In the book Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition the author describes a study where chickens were raised in a high-gravity environment (I think using something like a centrifuge). The resulting chickens ended up having huge, super-strong leg muscles.
I don't think you're understanding my point. Perhaps it's my fault for using "physical law" in a (potentially) non-standard way. I thought my comment, "That's not to say that we have stated the laws correctly," would make clear the definition I was using.
I know full well that the laws we write about in text books and journal articles are only approximations; good heavens, I had that pounded into me while I was earning my degree in physics and math. I rather doubt we will ever be able to make a single statement of "natural law" that fully describes its subject matter with complete precision and accuracy.
In short, you just said, "Physics laws provide a useful approximation." Approximation of what? Of the actual patterns in which matter/energy behaves, patterns which flow out of the nature of the universe. The physical laws I'm talking about are the principles which determine those patterns, principles which are indeed objective.
That's fine; that's in complete agreement with what I said. The existence of unpredictable, chaotic, random events is consistent with the existence of real, rational, understandable[1] physical laws.
Still, I'm actually not aware of anything unpredictable in an unpredictable way. That is, an electron acts randomly, but it does so according to its wave function (whether we have that function quite right or not); it does not behave randomly random, if you catch my meaning.
Wrong. I'm not making that assumption. I haven't said or implied that I'm any kind of theist; I actually am a Christian, and do believe everything was made by the biblical God for a particular purpose, but those conclusions have nothing to do with the argument I'm making.
I respectfully submit that you've completely begged the question. That statement contains a massive--and to my knowledge unsupportable--assumption. What's worse, you're trying to use that assumption as a response to my efforts to point out that assumption.[2]
By what metric do you measure the simplicity of matter, and on what basis do you state that it is simple enough just to be?
I think you're making more unjustified assumptions. We don't know the princples by which matter can exist; we don't know either how it was formed or how it just is; even if true, quantum theory's guess of a big vacuum fluctuation doesn't tell us how or why quantum theory is valid.
So...the explanation for our complex universe is an even more complex universe that contains it? How does that help? And how *do* you test for that, by the way?
It seems to me that if you really want to take Intelligent Design seriously as a scientific hypothesis, you must first do away with scripture that is factually incorrect and contradictory even when interpreted abstractly on favourable terms that are hardly justified. You also would do well to study some other religions, Zen Buddhism for example, that have delved even deaper into meaning and spirituality than Christianity has.
For example, you asked rhetorically Was it purposeless and uncaused, or designed?
There's an interesting psychology experiment (read here on slashdot) where they put you in a room with two strings dangling from the ceiling. You're asked to tie the strings together. Holding one sting, you can't reach the other one. With out cutting or taking down the strings, how do you do it? All you have to work with is a pair of pliars. (BTW, even with extended reach of the pliars, you still can't reach the other string.)
Play Command HQ online
You are trying to scientifically analyze God using the realm of standard space-time. Isn't it possible that God exists outside our universe, or perhaps our universe is a cross section of a multi-dimensional superspace? What if matter has properties that manifest only outside our 4-dimensional (or if you prefer string theory, 11-dimensional) space? What if there are energies that travel multi-dimensionally but are virtually undetectable in our puny universe?
If you can accept that there may be more physical, temporal, and maybe other unknown dimensions, you should accept that we may be incapable of describing (or even comprehending) them because of the limitation of our senses.
I also disagree with your claim that matter is 'simple.' Just because you can count the number of properties on your hand? Each particle has forces associated with it that we've identified, but can give no good explanation for how they do what they do or how they were 'assigned' to the particle. I don't know about you, but I couldn't make a particle myself. Not that easy.
However, if you were to go along with your argument that simple things can just be, but complex things cannot (such as God), could there not be an undetected non-matter particle, say a "Theon", that is simple, like matter, has some forces, and when lots of them come together, abiding by simple rules, can form a complex entity, such as a God?
Not trying to claim that any of this accurate, but it's a worthy mind exercise.