Pfun with Pseudoscience
Lots of odd nonsense supposedly happening over the past few weeks:
*The Georgia Gorilla, briefly trumpeted by some sources as, finally, A Real Bigfoot Body. This was all over the Fox Mulder corners of the Net; the site I've linked to was receiving three million hits a minute at one point. The "body" doesn't look particularly real to me, although I can't give you any clear reasons why I feel that way. One comment I read somewhere claimed that the guts don't look right for a large hominid and seem to have been dropped onto the "corpse" rather than protruding from it. I don't quite see what the angle is here; saying they have a body is an awfully bold and extremely falsifiable claim, so if it is a hoax I'm wondering how the heck it's going to unfold and what they expect to get out of it. Press conference tomorrow, apparently.
*Evilution disproved by overlapping dino and human tracks which will "change all the pale-ethnological principles," whatever those are. This one does look blatantly fake, not least because the dino track resembles a five-year-old's idea of what a dinosaur track should look like. It doesn't help that this is being put forward by the notorious Carl Baugh. Baugh claims CT scans revealed compression layers which prove the tracks were not carved, but as anyone with real credentials knows, it's garbage in, garbage out with high-tech equipment. If you don't know how to use it properly, or don't know how to deal with geological specimens (the scans were performed at a medical center), or don't know how to properly interpret the output, you can wind up with utterly spurious results even if the equipment is in perfect working order. Skeptics have argued that the "compression layers" are artifacts of the CT process. Gary Hurd's blog has some interesting commentary. This one is going to become a creationist classic, I'm sure, but I'm not ready to turn YEC just yet.
*Numerology: On 8/8/08, on the advice of a waitress who was impressed by the convergence of 8s, I bought some lottery tickets. At the convenience store, I decided that I obviously had to buy 8 tickets. All of them were losers except the 8th one, which netted me $44, and of course 4+4=8. Later I realized that I had bought the tickets at or around 8:00. I also did a psych experiment at the U a few weeks back. I just received the $8 check for my participation. It was issued on 8/8/08. Obviously this all proves something, but I've no idea what.
*Bonehead geology: The guy who wrote the Swift Boat book, Jerome Corsi, is back with a doubtlessly fair and balanced book about Obama. He's openly announced that his goal is to prevent Obama's election. Corsi has written many other books, including one about how oil is abiogenic and there's plenty of it out there, and how the high price and alleged scarcity of oil are all a big scam. I haven't read the book, but according to the comments on Amazon, one of Corsi's arguments is that oil couldn't be a fossil fuel because there weren't enough dinosaurs to make that much oil. Apparently his research on standard theories of petroleum generation consisted of driving past a Sinclair station and noting the dinosaur out front. (For those who don't know, no, dinosaurs are not thought to be a major component of any fossil fuels; plankton and plant matter are the primary sources.) Yet he thought himself qualified to write a book arguing that most of the experts on the subject are wrong. I wonder how he researched Obama? Probably just ran "Barack Obama" through an anagram generator. "Oh, shit! 'Maraca Kabob'! That sounds Middle Eastern! He's a terrorist!"
*The Georgia Gorilla, briefly trumpeted by some sources as, finally, A Real Bigfoot Body. This was all over the Fox Mulder corners of the Net; the site I've linked to was receiving three million hits a minute at one point. The "body" doesn't look particularly real to me, although I can't give you any clear reasons why I feel that way. One comment I read somewhere claimed that the guts don't look right for a large hominid and seem to have been dropped onto the "corpse" rather than protruding from it. I don't quite see what the angle is here; saying they have a body is an awfully bold and extremely falsifiable claim, so if it is a hoax I'm wondering how the heck it's going to unfold and what they expect to get out of it. Press conference tomorrow, apparently.
*Evilution disproved by overlapping dino and human tracks which will "change all the pale-ethnological principles," whatever those are. This one does look blatantly fake, not least because the dino track resembles a five-year-old's idea of what a dinosaur track should look like. It doesn't help that this is being put forward by the notorious Carl Baugh. Baugh claims CT scans revealed compression layers which prove the tracks were not carved, but as anyone with real credentials knows, it's garbage in, garbage out with high-tech equipment. If you don't know how to use it properly, or don't know how to deal with geological specimens (the scans were performed at a medical center), or don't know how to properly interpret the output, you can wind up with utterly spurious results even if the equipment is in perfect working order. Skeptics have argued that the "compression layers" are artifacts of the CT process. Gary Hurd's blog has some interesting commentary. This one is going to become a creationist classic, I'm sure, but I'm not ready to turn YEC just yet.
*Numerology: On 8/8/08, on the advice of a waitress who was impressed by the convergence of 8s, I bought some lottery tickets. At the convenience store, I decided that I obviously had to buy 8 tickets. All of them were losers except the 8th one, which netted me $44, and of course 4+4=8. Later I realized that I had bought the tickets at or around 8:00. I also did a psych experiment at the U a few weeks back. I just received the $8 check for my participation. It was issued on 8/8/08. Obviously this all proves something, but I've no idea what.
*Bonehead geology: The guy who wrote the Swift Boat book, Jerome Corsi, is back with a doubtlessly fair and balanced book about Obama. He's openly announced that his goal is to prevent Obama's election. Corsi has written many other books, including one about how oil is abiogenic and there's plenty of it out there, and how the high price and alleged scarcity of oil are all a big scam. I haven't read the book, but according to the comments on Amazon, one of Corsi's arguments is that oil couldn't be a fossil fuel because there weren't enough dinosaurs to make that much oil. Apparently his research on standard theories of petroleum generation consisted of driving past a Sinclair station and noting the dinosaur out front. (For those who don't know, no, dinosaurs are not thought to be a major component of any fossil fuels; plankton and plant matter are the primary sources.) Yet he thought himself qualified to write a book arguing that most of the experts on the subject are wrong. I wonder how he researched Obama? Probably just ran "Barack Obama" through an anagram generator. "Oh, shit! 'Maraca Kabob'! That sounds Middle Eastern! He's a terrorist!"