Pseudoscience

Stardestroyer.net ^ | 2000.11.18 | Michael Wong

[Junior]

I have a website devoted to an entire gaming system, complete with conversions of weapons and such from other gaming systems. I belong to mailing lists devoted to these games. It's a hobby. Hobbies are for folks who have imaginations and enjoy life. This is probably why most creos do not appear to have hobbies.

[Junior]

BTW, what the fellow at stardestroyer.net is doing is being a "gearhead." These folks are mostly engineer-types who enjoy, as a hobby, dissecting the gear found in movies, books, and games, and rating them using real-world science. These folks are typically "hard science fiction" fans, as opposed to fans of "science fantasy" (which Star Wars arguably is), though in some cases there are crossovers. They seldom accept that something just works, and want to know why it works (sounds a bit like your typical researcher, doesn't it? Same mindset, different genre).

You learn something new every day...

[Junior]

And this post has to do with the subject of the article how?

[gore3000]

what the fellow at stardestroyer.net is doing is being a "gearhead."

No, actually what he is doing is being a hypocrite:

13. Hothouse publication. Look for articles published outside of the world of scientific journals,

He is guilty of what he accusses his opponents of doing.

[gore3000]

In the John Travolta/Robert Duvall legal drama "A Civil Action", the Duvall character advises his law students on how to react to the appearance of new evidence.

Evolutionists keep ignoring the Evidence Disproving Evolution that has been found over the last 150 years. They are still living (and arguing) as if we were still in the 19th century.

[Junior]

Dear child, he isn't publishing a scientific paper. He's publishing an opinion piece. Whereas, for creationist literature there may be no difference, there is a world of difference when it comes to real science. The "hothouse publications" he's talking about are pseudo-scientific periodicals wherein creationists publish their "theories." Creationists do not dare publish their "theories" in real peer-reviewed journals for obvious reasons.

That you are unable to grasp even obvious nuances as the above distinction between an opinion piece and a scientific paper makes it obvious that you are either very young, somewhat illiterate or you are suffering some sort of cognitive dissonance. In any case, it does not speak well of your thinking processes to the folks who participate on these threads and the folks who simply lurk.

[AndrewC]

This is probably why most creos do not appear to have hobbies.

And how did you determine that? Did you use your hyperspace crystal gravfield trap sensor wormhole camera? ;^)

Our hobbies are doing good, like visiting the sick, helping the poor, you know those useless things.

[Junior]

And how did you determine that?

By the creos' disparaging of other folks' hobbies. And, by the way, it was an ætherometer mounted on a Cavorite platform.

[AndrewC]

By the creos' disparaging of other folks' hobbies.

That should be expected by those who disparage others.

[boris]

Somebody once wrote: "Why do we need a space program when we have Star Trek?"

[boris]

"I ,myself, was inspired to study Aerospace Engineering due to the likes of Star Trek and 2001."

Heinlein got me.

While an undergraduate in engineering, I "burned out" and spent a week missing classes and reading SF. I picked up Heinlein's "juvenile" Space Cadet and it reinspired me. I credit him with helping me get back to study and my degree.

Later, at M.I.T., I briefly dated Margaret Minsky (Marvin's daughter). I told her my story above and she looked at me with pity. Waving her hand broadly to indicate the entire Institute campus, she said, "Two-thirds of us are here because of Heinlein!"

--Boris

[AndrewC]

By His Bootstraps

[boris]

In general I hate time-travel stories but this RAH classic I except.

[AndrewC]

In general I hate time-travel stories but this RAH classic I except.

How about the "first"?

                       EPILOGUE

   One cannot choose but wonder.  Will he ever return?

It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among

the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished

Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the

grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic

times.  He may even now--if I may use the phrase--be

wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef,

or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age.  Or did

he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are

still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered

and its wearisome problems solved?  Into the manhood of the

race:  for I, for my own part cannot think that these latter

days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual

discord are indeed man's culminating time!  I say, for my own

part.  He, I know--for the question had been discussed among

us long before the Time Machine was made--thought but

cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the

growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must

inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.

If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not

so.  But to me the future is still black and blank--is a vast

ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story.

And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers

--shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle--to witness

that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and

a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

[boris]

Nope.

[Mr. K]

Or if they know what d/dx e^x = e^x means.

That always freaked me out.

[Junior]

The term "evolutionists" encompasses numerous branches of science -- and all of them agree than evolution has not been "disproven" (that one can never logically disprove anything notwithstanding). I've noticed you've not taken your campaign to the halls of science, because you know full well that once up against science's first string you'll be crushed like the little bug you are.

[PatrickHenry]

Two-thirds of us are here [MIT] because of Heinlein!

Back in the glory days of the space program, that was also true at Cape Canaveral.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Alan Sokal's articles, especially the one in "Social Text" shows that the Post-Modern-Deconstructionists are equally at a loss when confronted with pseudo science as their soul-mates, the Creationists.

Sokal

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

I've been in countless evolution/creationism debates, which never produce anything of value. Why? Because the creationist assumes his position as true and undeniable, so discussion is pointless.

I've also had the same argument...about the evolutionists.  They assume that their interpretation of available evidence is true and undeniable, so discussion is pointless.