I think these people are old thinkers stuck in a new world where communication has changed and any seventy year old would tell you they find it hard to communicate with youth but no 20 year old ever will, and it's the 20 year olds who are the future. Always.
First it came from climate science, but now we have have wholesale abuse of the scientific method in other disciplines where we don't bother submitting research papers for even the limited review of scientific peers, let alone skeptical review, replication or empirical testing (which used to be the cornerstones of science).
Now we have the internet, we don't have to sweat the small stuff. We announce our results, get slashdotted, and behold! A new scientific paradigm is born!
The TFA mentions that this is a "noted physicist". Noted by whom? Was he noted for actually producing useful theory, a better mousetrap? Or was he simply noted by the article author?
This isn't science. This is a celebrity system based on spin, hype and wish fulfillment.
If I had a genuine solution to the "Pioneer Anomaly" for example, I would not dare announce the result like this, for fear that my scientific career would be permanently tarnished.
But then, I'm not a "noted physicist", am I?
Submission to Slashdot that Savain is a kook...
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
·
· Score: 1
In light of all the IP suits flying around, it would appear as though Microsoft is picking sides and it might be better to side with Goliath when facing a patent wielding David.
Erm, does anyone realise that David defeated Goliath, rather than the other way around?
I've sent Taco an e-mail and posted it as a submitted story, but what else can I do? Slashdot needs help. My only regret is that I didn't see this earlier, because as soon as I saw the website link, I knew it was Savain.
Some of the recent "science" stories have been incredibly bad, including ones on climate science ("Using Barges to Fight Global Warming"), string theory, cosmology ("Scientists Expand Knowledge of Dark Matter","Physicist claims time has a geometry").
CmdrTaco has been scammed by Usenet schizo
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Dear Rob
I'm sorry to have to tell you but you've been scammed by a well-known internet kook called Louis Savain into slashdotting his junk
If you google for "nothing moves in spacetime" and "rebelscience.org" you'll find lots of references to this particular paranoid schizophrenic (no, I'm not kidding)
He likes to spam sci.physics and sci.physics.relativity with his junk. One of his recent postings is fairly typical:
On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 16:59:17 +0000 (UTC),
glhan...@steel.ucs.indiana.edu (Gregory L. Hansen) wrote:
>In article,
>Traveler wrote:
>>On 22 Jan 2006 07:55:33 -0800, glhan...@indiana.edu wrote:
>>Repeat after me: NOTHING MOVES IN SPACETIME.
>World lines don't move in spacetime. When people talk about the motion of
>a particle they refer to a succession of points on the worldline, not the
>worldline in its entirety.
Repeat after me: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING MOVES IN SPACETIME!
NOTTHIINGGG!!!!
What this means is that there is NO CHANGE in spacetime (that's why it
was called Einstein's block universe by Karl Popper) and spacetime is
a fictitious math construct with no counterpart in reality. Now, isn't
it a tad weird that your idol Einstein agreed with his friend Kurt
"lunatic" Godel when he announced in 1949 that the spacetime of GR
allows time travel to the past via time-like loops?
Now hold on a southern cotton picking second! Aren't Kurt Godel and
Albert Einstein revered by physicists as two of the smartest men that
ever lived? Yep. ahahaha... One then wonders how they can be so stupid
as to believe in motion in spacetime. ahahaha...
ahahaha...
>>> Or that your alien-induced lattice that exists nowhere is
>>>also an abstract model of your invention?
>>Nope. My lattice is not made of abstract crap but of real particles.
>>You crackpots call them virtual photons. ahahaha...
>You have a model that describes a lattice that is not made of abstract
>crap. You're like the screen writer who writes a line like "This isn't a
>movie, you know."
Maybe in your imagination but I know one thing: I am not an ass
kisser. I do my own thinking, than you very much. ahahaha... And
that's the way I like it. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...
A sample of one from a database of half a million is not a demonstration of anything, and says nothing of any (statistical) significance. It's not even a random sample, but self-selected.
I can point to many examples of high quality work on Wikipedia. That does not excuse the rest of the content. I made the remark that the more controversial or political a subject matter, the more likely it is to be filled with false and inaccurate information.
But the high quality work that I know is because I have an expertise on the subjects, the same as your singular example. There are no guarantees of even minimal quality on critical articles, because ultimately the publisher takes no responsibility for that quality (unless there's some embarassing publicity and/or a threatened lawsuit).
I actually verified with a highly respected historian that several important articles on 20th Century history were filled with mistakes, crucial information being missing, and other information given was highly misleading. But what price expertise? On wikipedia, the experts drown in an ocean of sludge.
But wikipedia expends no effort at all checking with that information that people are informed with is correct. This leads to the result that "concerned and intelligent people" can be misinformed and make bad decisions based on information that is false - do I need to cite a big, long example or shall I just write "Iraq WMDs" and leave it at that?
You're not really going to blame Wikipedia for the Bush administration's intelligence shortcomings are you? I mean, I know the CIA has taken some lumps but it would be a heck of a scandal if it turned out they were relying upon Wikipedia for all of their information.
No. It's called an analogy. Look it up, preferably in a reliable encyclopedia.
If concerned and intelligent people are misinformed by a source, then mistakes happen. Big mistakes. It's not enough that people be concerned and intelligent, the information fed them must be correct.
Wikipedia does no fact checking, that is correct. Wikipedia is merely a posting place -- a place for people who wish to share information (correct or incorrect) to meet and post that information.
What you've described is intellectual cesspit. Not an encyclopedia. Yes, there may be useful material in there but you'll never know what you might catch if you dive in.
Correct. Which also means we're not subjected to biased opinions of who is or is not an expert. Ultimately truth or falsehood is determined by the community, some of whom are experts on the subject, and that community can discuss the matter openly.
Further I submit that often some of the most valuable content on Wikipedia can be found on the Discussion page instead of the article itself.
But in the bit you cut out (can't answer it?) I pointed out that expertise is always going to be outgunned and outresourced by ignorance. Ignorance is not a (neutral) point of view.
What you're espousing is a reckless optimism of human nature as an article of faith.
Since there are more lies than truths and more ignorance than expertise, it seems to me that there is only one result. And it ain't pretty.
It may seem that way to you but the reality is that the vast majority of the content on Wikipedia is accurate.
You have absolutely no basis for making that statement. It is empty rhetoric. You have already admitted that Wikipedia does no fact checking, and that some of its information may be inaccurate, and then you turn around with a BS statement like that? Nobody knows how much false, innaccurate or misleading information there is on wikipedia, least of all you.
What I'm actually saying is that no real researcher relies upon a single source of information. You cross-check your facts and your sources. This is the first day of high school science class stuff. The vast majority of the time the content in Wikipedia will be supported by other sources but it is incumbent upon the researcher to check those other sources anyhow.
The beauty of it is that when the other sources prove Wikipedia to be wrong...you can fix Wikipedia in mere moments.
And in mere moments it can be reverted, vandalised, trashed or twisted. Being factually correct carries no weight, the only things that do are popularity of ideas or the commonality of misconceptions, the persistence of trolls, propagandists and the ignorant, and stubbornness against insuperable odds by the person with the facts. The more controversial, or political the article the more likely it is that information is not simply altered by liars or the ignorant, but that key information may be missing.
It forces the person making the correct information of having to defend it against allcomers for an infinite time without compensation or even gratitude.
Back to making analogies, it doesn't matter how much sweet water you
Well, first of all I never said it was a democracy. I made an analogy intended to illustrate that Wikipedia, like a democracy, really only works if the constituency takes responsibility for making it work.
What you actually said was:
Just like democracy, it only works when informed, concerned and intelligent people step forward and take an active role
But wikipedia expends no effort at all checking with that information that people are informed with is correct. This leads to the result that "concerned and intelligent people" can be misinformed and make bad decisions based on information that is false - do I need to cite a big, long example or shall I just write "Iraq WMDs" and leave it at that?
Furthermore wikipedia makes no attempt to screen truth from falsehood or elevate expertise over ignorance. Since there are more lies than truths and more ignorance than expertise, it seems to me that there is only one result. And it ain't pretty.
What you're speaking of is representative democracy which is also known as a Republic.
But I live in a country that has a representative democracy which is NOT a republic. Can you parse that? You don't know the difference do you?
Is Wikipedia authoritative? No. But as one part of a larger research effort it is extremely valuable. (especially considering the price) Like any source it should be cross-checked and verified. I can assure you that printed encyclopedias contain errors too and they're a lot harder to fix.
It's authoritative about trivia, that's for sure. Printed encyclopedias do contain errors, but then if there is an error then the publisher takes responsibility to fix the error and to review procedure that prevent future errors. The publishers of real encyclopedias go to great lengths to protect their reputation for accuracy. Wikipedia does not. Proper encyclopedias have many layers of checking and expertise in order to avoid substantive errors of fact. Wikipedia has nothing other than (naive) faith in the goodness of humanity.
What you're actually saying is that Wikipedia is valuable as an unauthoritative source. Since we don't know whether we're getting shit or Shinola from Wikipedia, we have to check it with other sources, in which case what is Wikipedia for?
It appears to me that you have a real problem with Wikipedia - did they disparage your favorite Anime artist or fail to give the proper respect to the DEC PDP-10?
That is called an ad hominem attack. I won't quote Wikipedia as a source for what an ad hominem attack is because it might involve badgers by the time you read it.
Well, whatever it is, if you don't like Wikipedia that's fine. But let's not unfairly trash a valuable resource just because it's not perfect. Understanding its weaknesses will go a long way towards exploiting its strengths and getting the most from it.
No, let's trash it not because it's imperfect but because has no clue as to the status of a single piece of information at any time. It does not distinguish between true and false and puts all of the responsibility on the reader to know in advance whether what he or she is reading is factually correct. If that were the case, why come to Wikipedia in the first place?
There is a fundamental asymmetry between expertise and ignorance that will always be there. The truth is not somewhere in between.
Wikipedia has collected the history of our species and put it within the adulterating power of every kook, slimeball, ignoramus, psychopath, troll, propagandist and extremist. It's a first person shoot-em-up of the historical record.
Maybe the reason Wikipedia has got a bad press is because bad press give good press a bad name.
CNN does have a disclaimer, but if somebody screws up badly, then CNN's reputation will be compromised and they take that very seriously. On the other hand, Wikipedia abandons all responsibility for the accuracy of what is presented as fact, passing the buck to whoever wrote the rubbish or the rest of the "community" for not fixing the error.
There is a difference, but its lost on Wikipedians.
50 million editors is not democracy, it is mob rule.
There is no democracy of truth, no democracy of scholarship, no democracy of historical accuracy, no democracy of intelligence, no democracy of facts.
If Wikipedia were a democracy, then it would appoint people with genuine demonstrated expertise, it would appoint proper audit and proper review. Wikipedia does none of these things.
Wikipedia is a dictatorship, not a democracy. It's sole purpose is not accuracy, but volume of articles. There aren't 50 million people knowledgeable to encyclopedic standard on any given subject in the whole world. But there are millions of idiots who think they know better.
I fail to see what is "benevolent" about a dictatorship of a self-selected mob that cannot distinguish (and doesn't bother to distinguish) between truth and falsehood.
In point of fact, Wikipedia is an enemy of democracy, since democracy needs accurate and truthful information to be given to the people in order to inform their opinions about how they are governed, and Wikipedia couldn't give a shit about truth or accuracy when lies given in a neutral voice will do just as well.
Wikipedia as an experiment in collaboration is indeed a success. But as an authoritative factual resource it is a cumulative failure. Articles are changed moment by moment by people around the world with no particular knowledge or ability, citations are often missing or wrong, a substantial number of articles are incomplete, a growing number of important articles are written to a particular agenda, and there is a growing list of articles and subjects being reverted and/or captured by political ideologues or extremists from all sides of the political spectrum. Some of these people have been promoted to wiki admins.
Will you ever consider implementing proper expert review to filter articles and prevent this anarchistic intellectual entropy which fosters paranoia, bickering, bias and unscholarly edit wars? Will you ever recognize scholarly expertise above such things as time available to revert or edit articles, ignorance or psychotic mental disorders?
Or put it another way, would you buy a car that was built by wikiengineers, including a few, some, many or all contributors having no expertise in car engineering, including an unknown number who'd like to see people crash and die because they think it would be fun to watch?
In 1976, Stephen Schneider, then a leading proponent of the "Global Cooling" scare which was then the scientific consensus, published a book called "The Genesis Strategy" in which he advocated spraying black carbon soot on to the then expanding Arctic ice sheet in order to encourage it to melt, and thus forestall catastrophic global cooling which would slow down the Gulf Stream, increase the deserts, cause famine etc.
Now 30 years later we want to encourage the ice sheet to grow with yet another crackpot scheme to forestall catastrophic global warming which will slow down the Gulf Stream, increase the deserts, cause famine etc.
The key point being of course, the assumption that the Earth's climate system is in some unstable equilibrium, where any slight change (which of course must be man-made, the Earth's climate naturaly being completely stable) will cause a catastrophic something-or-other (ie we have reached a "tipping point", leading to massive calls for research money to use computers to find out how bad it'll get if current trends continue.
Nothing wrong with it, but you try too hard to debunk nonsense. Before Andrew Wiles had solved Fermat's Last Theorem, every mathematics professor usually had one or two fallacious "proofs" of FLT sent to them every month. One professor had some postcards printed which read:
Dear ________
Thank you for your submission on Fermat's Last Theorem.
Your first mistake is on page ___ line ___
This invalidates your proof
Professor XXXXXXX
He would then get his graduate students to fill in the blanks.
It's a waste of precious life energy to go through a fallacious proof when all you need to do is spot the first scientific howler and having satisfied yourself that it is a howler, then get on with life.
Usenet is filled with people who never accept that they made a mistake.
...of the Powerpoint presentation, you can pretty much forget the rest of it. Using the John Baez Crackpot Index, this guy scores pretty highly. His first thought experiment on "transverse red shift" is simply wrong, wrong, wrong.
Certainly the reference to how people "not too long ago" believing the Earth to be flat, therefore means that Einstein is wrong trips my bullshit meter.
Oh, and its Yet Another Paper that attempt to "explain the Pioneer Anomaly" in terms of the author's favorite theory. I'm starting to roll my eyes every time the Pioneer Anomaly comes up, because every time I see it, the actual anomaly is not correctly described, before launching into the most tortuous explanation of bizarre logic ever seen outside of Usenet.
This report is simply the conference notes for the Met Office/IPCC scarefest last year. It contains no new science (although lots of climate models, which aren't science but look like it) and lots of scary rhetoric.
In the 1970s exactly the same fun mix of lower crop yields, desertification, drought, plague, famine, pestilence and war was confidently predicted for "global cooling". Then, warming was seen as a good thing.
The Event Horizon marks the surface where Escape Velocity is lightspeed. Circular Orbital Velocity is only sqrt(0.5) times Escape Velocity, so orbital velocity at the Event Horizon is less than lightspeed.
Yes, but there's a big difference between escape velocity which is radial, and orbital speed which is tangential.
As my link above shows, above the critical limit for being able to orbit is outside the event horizon (actually its at 3MG/c^2 expressed in metres from the singularity, whereas the Event Horizon for a non-spinning black hole is at 2MG/c^2)
If you think about it, the vector sum of tangential and radial velocity cannot be greater than c, the speed of light.
Because there's a critical distance away from the black hole below which matter cannot orbit because the orbital speed would be greater than the speed of light. So anything orbiting that reaches the critical orbital radius (which depends on the black hole's mass) will be sucked in.
In that sense, it shows how differently General Relativity is compared to Newtonian Mechanics.
See this site for a visual demonstration and an explanation.
By the way, I've no idea where "the 200,000 years to hit the event horizon" comes from. According to GR, from our frame of reference it would take an infinite amount of time to hit the event horizon.
Slashdot Mirror
I think these people are old thinkers stuck in a new world where communication has changed and any seventy year old would tell you they find it hard to communicate with youth but no 20 year old ever will, and it's the 20 year olds who are the future. Always.
"Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc"
Maybe they're going to try and top 11C warming that they managed last time.
It should be "How I bombed the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and waited for the headlines"
First it came from climate science, but now we have have wholesale abuse of the scientific method in other disciplines where we don't bother submitting research papers for even the limited review of scientific peers, let alone skeptical review, replication or empirical testing (which used to be the cornerstones of science).
Now we have the internet, we don't have to sweat the small stuff. We announce our results, get slashdotted, and behold! A new scientific paradigm is born!
Only a few days ago, a schizophrenic got his anti-science drivel slashdotted, for which this loon was immensely grateful.
The TFA mentions that this is a "noted physicist". Noted by whom? Was he noted for actually producing useful theory, a better mousetrap? Or was he simply noted by the article author?
This isn't science. This is a celebrity system based on spin, hype and wish fulfillment.
If I had a genuine solution to the "Pioneer Anomaly" for example, I would not dare announce the result like this, for fear that my scientific career would be permanently tarnished.
But then, I'm not a "noted physicist", am I?
...was rejected.
Oh well.
In light of all the IP suits flying around, it would appear as though Microsoft is picking sides and it might be better to side with Goliath when facing a patent wielding David.
Erm, does anyone realise that David defeated Goliath, rather than the other way around?
I've sent Taco an e-mail and posted it as a submitted story, but what else can I do? Slashdot needs help. My only regret is that I didn't see this earlier, because as soon as I saw the website link, I knew it was Savain.
Some of the recent "science" stories have been incredibly bad, including ones on climate science ("Using Barges to Fight Global Warming"), string theory, cosmology ("Scientists Expand Knowledge of Dark Matter","Physicist claims time has a geometry").
Dear Rob
...@steel.ucs.indiana.edu (Gregory L. Hansen) wrote: , ...@indiana.edu wrote:
I'm sorry to have to tell you but you've been scammed by a well-known internet kook called Louis Savain into slashdotting his junk
If you google for "nothing moves in spacetime" and "rebelscience.org" you'll find lots of references to this particular paranoid schizophrenic (no, I'm not kidding)
He likes to spam sci.physics and sci.physics.relativity with his junk. One of his recent postings is fairly typical:
On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 16:59:17 +0000 (UTC),
glhan
>In article
>Traveler wrote:
>>On 22 Jan 2006 07:55:33 -0800, glhan
>>Repeat after me: NOTHING MOVES IN SPACETIME.
>World lines don't move in spacetime. When people talk about the motion of
>a particle they refer to a succession of points on the worldline, not the
>worldline in its entirety.
Repeat after me: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING MOVES IN SPACETIME!
NOTTHIINGGG!!!!
What this means is that there is NO CHANGE in spacetime (that's why it
was called Einstein's block universe by Karl Popper) and spacetime is
a fictitious math construct with no counterpart in reality. Now, isn't
it a tad weird that your idol Einstein agreed with his friend Kurt
"lunatic" Godel when he announced in 1949 that the spacetime of GR
allows time travel to the past via time-like loops?
Now hold on a southern cotton picking second! Aren't Kurt Godel and
Albert Einstein revered by physicists as two of the smartest men that
ever lived? Yep. ahahaha... One then wonders how they can be so stupid
as to believe in motion in spacetime. ahahaha...
http://www./ rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm#Einstein
ahahaha...
>>> Or that your alien-induced lattice that exists nowhere is
>>>also an abstract model of your invention?
>>Nope. My lattice is not made of abstract crap but of real particles.
>>You crackpots call them virtual photons. ahahaha...
>You have a model that describes a lattice that is not made of abstract
>crap. You're like the screen writer who writes a line like "This isn't a
>movie, you know."
Maybe in your imagination but I know one thing: I am not an ass
kisser. I do my own thinking, than you very much. ahahaha... And
that's the way I like it. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...
Physics is so much phucking phun! ahahaha...
Louis Savain
Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It:
http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/Reliability.htm
I would suggest you remove the story
A sample of one from a database of half a million is not a demonstration of anything, and says nothing of any (statistical) significance. It's not even a random sample, but self-selected.
I can point to many examples of high quality work on Wikipedia. That does not excuse the rest of the content. I made the remark that the more controversial or political a subject matter, the more likely it is to be filled with false and inaccurate information.
But the high quality work that I know is because I have an expertise on the subjects, the same as your singular example. There are no guarantees of even minimal quality on critical articles, because ultimately the publisher takes no responsibility for that quality (unless there's some embarassing publicity and/or a threatened lawsuit).
I actually verified with a highly respected historian that several important articles on 20th Century history were filled with mistakes, crucial information being missing, and other information given was highly misleading. But what price expertise? On wikipedia, the experts drown in an ocean of sludge.
No. It's called an analogy. Look it up, preferably in a reliable encyclopedia.
If concerned and intelligent people are misinformed by a source, then mistakes happen. Big mistakes. It's not enough that people be concerned and intelligent, the information fed them must be correct.
What you've described is intellectual cesspit. Not an encyclopedia. Yes, there may be useful material in there but you'll never know what you might catch if you dive in.
But in the bit you cut out (can't answer it?) I pointed out that expertise is always going to be outgunned and outresourced by ignorance. Ignorance is not a (neutral) point of view.
What you're espousing is a reckless optimism of human nature as an article of faith.
You have absolutely no basis for making that statement. It is empty rhetoric. You have already admitted that Wikipedia does no fact checking, and that some of its information may be inaccurate, and then you turn around with a BS statement like that? Nobody knows how much false, innaccurate or misleading information there is on wikipedia, least of all you.
And in mere moments it can be reverted, vandalised, trashed or twisted. Being factually correct carries no weight, the only things that do are popularity of ideas or the commonality of misconceptions, the persistence of trolls, propagandists and the ignorant, and stubbornness against insuperable odds by the person with the facts. The more controversial, or political the article the more likely it is that information is not simply altered by liars or the ignorant, but that key information may be missing.
It forces the person making the correct information of having to defend it against allcomers for an infinite time without compensation or even gratitude.
Back to making analogies, it doesn't matter how much sweet water you
What you actually said was:
But wikipedia expends no effort at all checking with that information that people are informed with is correct. This leads to the result that "concerned and intelligent people" can be misinformed and make bad decisions based on information that is false - do I need to cite a big, long example or shall I just write "Iraq WMDs" and leave it at that?
Furthermore wikipedia makes no attempt to screen truth from falsehood or elevate expertise over ignorance. Since there are more lies than truths and more ignorance than expertise, it seems to me that there is only one result. And it ain't pretty.
But I live in a country that has a representative democracy which is NOT a republic. Can you parse that? You don't know the difference do you?
It's authoritative about trivia, that's for sure. Printed encyclopedias do contain errors, but then if there is an error then the publisher takes responsibility to fix the error and to review procedure that prevent future errors. The publishers of real encyclopedias go to great lengths to protect their reputation for accuracy. Wikipedia does not. Proper encyclopedias have many layers of checking and expertise in order to avoid substantive errors of fact. Wikipedia has nothing other than (naive) faith in the goodness of humanity.
What you're actually saying is that Wikipedia is valuable as an unauthoritative source. Since we don't know whether we're getting shit or Shinola from Wikipedia, we have to check it with other sources, in which case what is Wikipedia for?
That is called an ad hominem attack. I won't quote Wikipedia as a source for what an ad hominem attack is because it might involve badgers by the time you read it.
No, let's trash it not because it's imperfect but because has no clue as to the status of a single piece of information at any time. It does not distinguish between true and false and puts all of the responsibility on the reader to know in advance whether what he or she is reading is factually correct. If that were the case, why come to Wikipedia in the first place?
There is a fundamental asymmetry between expertise and ignorance that will always be there. The truth is not somewhere in between.
Wikipedia has collected the history of our species and put it within the adulterating power of every kook, slimeball, ignoramus, psychopath, troll, propagandist and extremist. It's a first person shoot-em-up of the historical record.
It's the place where Winston Smith comes to work.
I don't live in a republic, but it is a democratic state. I do know the difference.
Maybe the reason Wikipedia has got a bad press is because bad press give good press a bad name.
CNN does have a disclaimer, but if somebody screws up badly, then CNN's reputation will be compromised and they take that very seriously. On the other hand, Wikipedia abandons all responsibility for the accuracy of what is presented as fact, passing the buck to whoever wrote the rubbish or the rest of the "community" for not fixing the error.
There is a difference, but its lost on Wikipedians.
50 million editors is not democracy, it is mob rule.
There is no democracy of truth, no democracy of scholarship, no democracy of historical accuracy, no democracy of intelligence, no democracy of facts.
If Wikipedia were a democracy, then it would appoint people with genuine demonstrated expertise, it would appoint proper audit and proper review. Wikipedia does none of these things.
Wikipedia is a dictatorship, not a democracy. It's sole purpose is not accuracy, but volume of articles. There aren't 50 million people knowledgeable to encyclopedic standard on any given subject in the whole world. But there are millions of idiots who think they know better.
I fail to see what is "benevolent" about a dictatorship of a self-selected mob that cannot distinguish (and doesn't bother to distinguish) between truth and falsehood.
In point of fact, Wikipedia is an enemy of democracy, since democracy needs accurate and truthful information to be given to the people in order to inform their opinions about how they are governed, and Wikipedia couldn't give a shit about truth or accuracy when lies given in a neutral voice will do just as well.
Wikipedia as an experiment in collaboration is indeed a success. But as an authoritative factual resource it is a cumulative failure. Articles are changed moment by moment by people around the world with no particular knowledge or ability, citations are often missing or wrong, a substantial number of articles are incomplete, a growing number of important articles are written to a particular agenda, and there is a growing list of articles and subjects being reverted and/or captured by political ideologues or extremists from all sides of the political spectrum. Some of these people have been promoted to wiki admins.
Will you ever consider implementing proper expert review to filter articles and prevent this anarchistic intellectual entropy which fosters paranoia, bickering, bias and unscholarly edit wars? Will you ever recognize scholarly expertise above such things as time available to revert or edit articles, ignorance or psychotic mental disorders?
Or put it another way, would you buy a car that was built by wikiengineers, including a few, some, many or all contributors having no expertise in car engineering, including an unknown number who'd like to see people crash and die because they think it would be fun to watch?
In 1976, Stephen Schneider, then a leading proponent of the "Global Cooling" scare which was then the scientific consensus, published a book called "The Genesis Strategy" in which he advocated spraying black carbon soot on to the then expanding Arctic ice sheet in order to encourage it to melt, and thus forestall catastrophic global cooling which would slow down the Gulf Stream, increase the deserts, cause famine etc.
Now 30 years later we want to encourage the ice sheet to grow with yet another crackpot scheme to forestall catastrophic global warming which will slow down the Gulf Stream, increase the deserts, cause famine etc.
The key point being of course, the assumption that the Earth's climate system is in some unstable equilibrium, where any slight change (which of course must be man-made, the Earth's climate naturaly being completely stable) will cause a catastrophic something-or-other (ie we have reached a "tipping point", leading to massive calls for research money to use computers to find out how bad it'll get if current trends continue.
He would then get his graduate students to fill in the blanks.
It's a waste of precious life energy to go through a fallacious proof when all you need to do is spot the first scientific howler and having satisfied yourself that it is a howler, then get on with life.
Usenet is filled with people who never accept that they made a mistake.
...of the Powerpoint presentation, you can pretty much forget the rest of it. Using the John Baez Crackpot Index, this guy scores pretty highly. His first thought experiment on "transverse red shift" is simply wrong, wrong, wrong.
Certainly the reference to how people "not too long ago" believing the Earth to be flat, therefore means that Einstein is wrong trips my bullshit meter.
Oh, and its Yet Another Paper that attempt to "explain the Pioneer Anomaly" in terms of the author's favorite theory. I'm starting to roll my eyes every time the Pioneer Anomaly comes up, because every time I see it, the actual anomaly is not correctly described, before launching into the most tortuous explanation of bizarre logic ever seen outside of Usenet.
Will it censor any words out like "37289 blocks fr**" for the Chinese version?
Perhaps it should be called G**buntu....
This report is simply the conference notes for the Met Office/IPCC scarefest last year. It contains no new science (although lots of climate models, which aren't science but look like it) and lots of scary rhetoric.
See this eyewitness report on what this "scientific conference" was really about
In the 1970s exactly the same fun mix of lower crop yields, desertification, drought, plague, famine, pestilence and war was confidently predicted for "global cooling". Then, warming was seen as a good thing.
Plus ça change...
...sightings of glowing red orbs that crashed into the deep ocean? That sea level rise might not be global warming after all....
I'd mock but the moment has gone.
Gravity is not a force at all. That's where pretty much all amateur theorists fall down.
...they want their environmental/industrial pollution/population bomb/fossil fuel depletion/Malthusian nightmare scare stories back.
Yes, but there's a big difference between escape velocity which is radial, and orbital speed which is tangential.
As my link above shows, above the critical limit for being able to orbit is outside the event horizon (actually its at 3MG/c^2 expressed in metres from the singularity, whereas the Event Horizon for a non-spinning black hole is at 2MG/c^2)
If you think about it, the vector sum of tangential and radial velocity cannot be greater than c, the speed of light.
Because there's a critical distance away from the black hole below which matter cannot orbit because the orbital speed would be greater than the speed of light. So anything orbiting that reaches the critical orbital radius (which depends on the black hole's mass) will be sucked in.
In that sense, it shows how differently General Relativity is compared to Newtonian Mechanics.
See this site for a visual demonstration and an explanation.
By the way, I've no idea where "the 200,000 years to hit the event horizon" comes from. According to GR, from our frame of reference it would take an infinite amount of time to hit the event horizon.
because I missed some quotation marks, that should be Wordpress 2.0