Showing posts with label pseudoscience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pseudoscience. Show all posts

Saturday, May 09, 2009

Less laughing and more thinking
Greenpeace FAIL

I would quite like to be a Green, but this sort of rampant stupidity is quite off putting:

 
Yesterday we brought you the fantastical tale of the Brazilian government announcing their ambition to build 50 new nuclear reactors by 2050. No sooner had the disbelieving laughter died down here at Nuclear Reaction, along came the World Nuclear Association (WNA) with an amazing fantasy of its own. Wait until you see this – it’s amazing. There are comedians who would kill for this ability to make people laugh…

In its Nuclear Century Outlook report, the WNA has an upper ‘outlook projection’ of 11,000 new nuclear reactors being built by the end of the century.

Read that again. The WNA can envisage a scenario in which 11,000 nuclear reactors will be built in the next 92 years.

That means starting to build this October 120 reactors a year…

…which is 10 reactors every month

…which is one reactor every three days.


I suppose that's why washing lines are an impossible technology: after all, if a sweater takes two hours to dry, all my laundry will take weeks... 

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Fantastic
It's coming to get you

Via Chris Applegate, this is the Daily Mail's artistic impression of a solar storm:

Sun
We should also brace ourselves for an attack, not only of The Red Sun Of Death, but also of arguments that look like this:

It's the sun wot dun it! This means that we can keep on releasing CO_2 without any consequences whatsoever. Silly warmenists - they would have got away with it if it hadn't been for we meddling bloggers. Isn't it remarkable how someone with an O Level physics can totally pwn an entire scientific community? 


Thank GOD I'm not a climate scientist - there no well-funded lobby, and no well-meaning half-wits, trying to pretend that gallium arsenide is a con to raise funding and that lasers are a liberal myth.


Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Quantum theory disproves GOD!!!!??!!
The Physics Delusions of a science groupie

Unity offers a disproof of Christianity through the medium of, so help me, the uncertainty principle:

The NeoDarwinian synthesis, alone, may not absolutely rule out the existence of such a hypothetical supernatural agent but the combination of evolution and quantum mechanic, specifically Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle does.

The uncertainty principle precludes the possibility of any entity that is not ubiquitous in its knowledge, understanding and control of the universe right down to the sub atomic level generating the precise arrangement of random events necessary to arrive, after the space of either 14 billion or 4.5 billion years depending, on your preferred starting point, at the existence of a small blue-green planet orbiting a yellow star on which, at this precise moment, a human being is explaining precisely why the idea of  non-interventionist god who takes a direct interest in the human race is entirely meaningless.

The uncertainty principle is the clincher in the sense that it places a clear limit on the nature of ‘god’ if one wishes to believe that such an supernatural entity exists. If we reject the creationist view that the earth, the universe and everything in it was created out of nothing in its more or less present state, give or take 6,000 years or so of wear and tear, then incredibly complex sequence of events necessary to get from the ‘creation’ of the universe via the Big Bang to where we are now can only have come about via either, from our point of view, an entirely fortuitous sequence of random events any one of which, had it spawned a different outcome, might mean that I wouldn’t be here to write this, and you wouldn’t be here to read it or because the entire universe and everything in it, to a subatomic level, is being directed but a truly omnipotent and omniscient supernatural agency.

Thanks to Heisenberg, there is no middle ground and no room for compromise. We must either have the god of Calvin and a universe in which nothing occurs but by the will of god, in which case we might as well forget all about any ideas of free will, moral agency and, if you believe in such things, salvation…

When we attribute prescience to God, we mean that all things always were, and ever continue, under his eye; that to his knowledge there is no past or future, but all things are present, and indeed so present, that it is not merely the idea of them that is before him (as those objects are which we retain in our memory), but that he truly sees and contemplates them as actually under his immediate inspection. This prescience extends to the whole circuit of the world, and to all creatures. By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.

Institutes of Religion, Book III, Chapter XXI

…or we can, at best, argue for a wholly non-interventionist deist ‘god’ who takes no active role and, for all we can sure of, no interest in our tiny little corner of the universe, and if that is all there is by way of a supernatural agency moving on the face of the universe then why should we be the slightest bit concerned as to their motives, purpose or opinions.

Who knew? 

The article is worth reading through, if only for this rather daring claim regarding Biblical manuscripts:

"They, on the other hand, have only a 1700 year old collection of Indo-European folk tales on which to base their belief in a universal supernatural agency, absolute morality and the suggestion both that the universe - all 4.2 x 10e69 cubic miles of it - has a defined purpose and that ourselves and miniscule area of it we occupy are somehow of central importance to this alleged purpose  - a set of stories for which there is no more substantive corroborating evidence for the historical existence of almost all of its main protagonists, including Jesus, Moses and Abraham, than there is for the existence of Gandalf, Tom Sawyer and Luke Skywalker."

Fans of Unity's somewhat heterodox grasp of physics might also enjoy this further disproof of the existence of the GOD:

If god created the universe, who created god?

This is a question that run entirely contrary to theological belief but logically, it remains an entirely valid question to which there are only two possible answers.

The theological answer is, of course, no one - god simply exists; but then god must have come into being from nothing and that violates the first law of thermodynamics in its universal form as the law of conservation of energy. So as were seeking rational arguments here, that answer must be excluded.


It's easy to mock this stuff, but there should be Bonus Points awarded for the originality: after all, I don't think anyone has ever come up with an atheistic equivalent to Intelligent Design before. 




Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Sodding 'memes'
A rant
Quick questions:

1) Are there any occasions when the word "meme" must be used, such that "idea", "model", "hope", "aspiration", "belief", "dream" and similar words cannot express the same notion,only  with greater precision?

2) "Meme" rhymes with "gene", which makes it sound almost scientific. If memes were referred to as "magic idea fairies" or "midichlorians", would this make them any less believable? 

and finally,
3) [The 'homeopathy' question] What evidence would lead you to reject the meme hypothesis?