Category: Science

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Freeman Dyson – how I miss him

“Now it has become a scandal that so many people are telling lies.”

“The models are being  contradicted by observations”.

“A computer model is essentially just fluid dynamics.”

Interviewer “Are you saying the whole history of global warming is based on fluid models, computer models and less on  observations? FD “Yes that is true”.

And more. The warmists “live by scaring the public.” (at 7:37)

Interviewer; “Are we saving the world or missing the point?” FD “I would say missing the point”. (at 9:00}

 

 

If you imagine a world in which nothing is real

If you imagine a world in which nothing is real, then you can imagine that nothing matters except racial, sexual and other quotas. Listen to Brett Weinstein at 1:14:30.

 

 

Bridges and planes will have to fall out of the sky before this problem is fixed. My observation from life is that the Left are all nominalists: they think that relabelling things changes their nature. The world is not actually real to these people. Like Wile E. Coyote,  you only fall when you recognize that you are in mid-air and that the force of gravity actually operates. Not so. They believe but do not actually say that,  if I can control all the means of communication, and prevent anything contrary from being said, I can prevent the law of gravity from working. It is that absurd.

Greatness is before us

The most difficult part of building the Tesla car company was reaching volume production without going bankrupt. Tesla was the first company to do this since Chrysler in the 1920s. More than this, Elon admits that he and his team made every mistake possible to make. The result, as Musk admits, is that he “knows more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth.” (at minute 38:35)

He spent three years on the factory floor working out problems. It was vital for the workers to see the boss was not in a remote office.

I am skeptical of Musk’s attempts to convert the world from fossil fuels to electrical energy, but if anyone is going to show the way, it will be engineer/scientist/businessmen like Musk, and not climate ideologues like Steven Guilbeault, the federal minister in charge of wrecking the  Canadian energy industry and driving up energy prices through taxation.

I cannot resist comparing Musk with Bill Gates, the vaccine apologist and WEF apostle. Musk seems alive with wit and self awareness, by contrast to Gates, who seems increasingly like an earnest plodder with authoritarian tendencies. The more I see of Gates, the less impressed I become. The more I see of Musk, the more impressed with him I am.

In his youth Musk read a lot of books, and gradually learned that not everything is to be taken literally. With Asperger’s syndrome, “or whatever condition I had”,  he was not intuitively connected to other humans. His childhood was not happy, he admits. Understanding ambiguity and implicit meaning were beyond his reach, He found it rewarding to spend all night programming computers. He was “obsessed with truth”, and turned to physics in consequence. (at minute 47:46) His motivating philosophy is “to find what questions to ask of the answer that is the universe” and “to expand the scope and scale of consciousness so that we may be able to better understand the nature of the universe”. (at minute 51:00)

This is no small mind. This is greatness. I am glad that he has so much money: he will go farther still.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A (relatively honest) global warming debate, until the end

Veritassium host Derek Muller  interviews himself on the subject of global warming, and for a few minutes there is a relatively honest discussion of the issues. Until,  that is, until minute 5:50. when the host, in his guise as good guy, speculates that it would probably be cheaper for us and better for the planet if we abated out emissions of CO2 now rather than later. To which his bad side, replies “no thanks”.

Here is the rub. The advocates of doing something to abate CO2 production engage in many suppositions

  • that abatement of CO2 production can be achieved on a global scale
  • that measures taken will in fact achieve the results set out for them
  • that it will be more affordable than adapting to the projected,  increased consequences of global warming that would otherwise occur
  • and, perhaps most importantly, that humans can be transitioned from their dependence of fossil fuels in a democratic way.

Just as the debate really could have engaged, good guy Veritassium asked the bad guy alter ego why he was wearing sunglasses. And so the principal non-scientific questions were conveniently ducked. Happens all the time.

This is not to disparage Veritassium, which is a solid science show. But it is a critique of the global warmists for consistently assuming away the practical problems.

 

I much prefer the approach adopted by Bjorn Lomborg which is that, if humans had a hundred problems to solve, global warming through CO2 increases would be the hundredth priority, behind the other 99.

Try to be more virtuous today

The scientific accomplishments of white culture exceed the entire rest of the world not just qualitatively but in kind. The difference is absolute . Indeed, until the time in the 19th or 20th ceturies when these cultures adopted the scientific method and the mental habits and assumptions that made it possible, they did not possess “science” as we undertand the term. Many have written about Arab, Chinese and Hindu “science”. These civilizations, each for its own intrinsic reasons,  did not reach what today is recognized as the form of rational inquiry known as “science”. Some historian of science said that the achievements of Faraday and Maxwell in their work on electromagnetism exceeded the wntire corpus of Arabic civilization’s contributions to knowledge, Al-Khwarizmi and Al-Ghazali notwithstanding.

Seems strong, doesn’t it? Yet it is true.

Is this racism? Is this cultural chauvinism?  I hardly know and I care not. The attacks on white people and “whiteness” -which is a stand-in for cultural habits that made the modern world, are relentless. How soon before bridges fall down? How soon before this magnificent and complex apparatus that keeps us alive and warm (it is -10C outside as a I write) falls to peices because not enough order-creators are available to prevail against the disorder creators? Kind of like a table full of squabbling children and no adult supervison, only worse because the adults have resiled from their educative duties, refuse to cook, refuse to set an example, refuse to enlighten, refuse to think straight, refuse to do any hard work and bang the table for someone to serve them. They have low impulse control and they are armed with AK-47s. I have seen the future, brethren, and it’s murder.

 

Here’s my formula for Coca-Cola and other anti-white personnel training programs. Try to be less black today, for starters. Try to be less superstitious, undeducated, lazy, presumptuous, aggressive, ill-disciplined and ignorant. It would be a good start.

Whites are not inherently superior to anyone. Their cultures allowed them to attain superiority for a time in world affairs. Whether they keep it, or not, is up to them. At the moment they seem intent on destroying themselves with self-loathing, assisted by the doltish ideologies of half educated black professors who could not think clearly if they tried.

Try to be more virtuous today. It is a good start. If you interpret that as trying to be more white, you won’t go far wrong. But stick to virtue, and you will see the issue more clearly than the miseducators at Coca Cola.

 

Amuse yourself greatly with David Berlinksi

I don’t have anything to say today, or this year, better than what David Berlinski said two years ago in a speech introducing The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions. The wit, the precision, and the audacity is amazing. “Most of science is not falsifiable. I never understood Karl Popper“. Wow! Disputing Karl Popper?!! Listen to the impassioned young man arguing against him during the Q and A. Berlinski  says falisifiability is”simply too simple a concept to treat of the delicacy and interconnectredness  or the articulation of a scientific theory”. Is the young man right? Is Berlinksi playing Artful Dodger? Is he being serious?

Amuse yourself. Listen and discuss.

 

The origin of Life

Watch this man, Dr. James Tour. The origin of life: we haven’t a clue. We have no idea how to build the simplest bacterium. So all the stories you have hear about early experiments putting an electric charge through simple chemicals in a flask are total bullshit (the Miller-Urey experiement in 1952) in that nothing further has flowed from those experiments. And there exists a collaboration between bullshit science and the media that leads other scientists who do not know what they are talking about to assume that “science” has answered the question of the origin of life when it has not.

 

From Wikipedia:

Tour has written extensively on his viewpoint that all scientific studies to date are wholly inadequate to account for life. In multiple essays in the Inference: International Review of Science, Tour argues from a chemical perspective that the molecules needed for life – nucleotides, carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids – are too complex to have been formed by probabilistic chance and the methods to assemble those structures into a cell are unknown. Ultimately, he believes that on matters of life’s origin, which is the genesis for all evolution, that scientists are “utterly clueless”.[62][63][64][65] Though he remains open to the possibility that future research will afford an explanation.[58]

Follow the science! That’s an order!

A hodge-podge entry today.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German nuclear physicist who bears a distinct relationship to a dominatrix. I am strangely attracted to her. I feel the need for domination and discipline. She stars in a stand-up physics blog called Backreation. In this episode, she takes exception to those who think science is a kind of Ten Commandments. She draws a very sharp distinction between faith or belief on the one hand, and what science can ever show. I wish more people abided by this distinction. Normally her language is more polite than in this episode. Science is a matter of fact. It does not tell us what to do. Science does not know the direction in which we should go.

 

Manhattan Contrarian profiles one of the most dreadful fanatics I have ever met, John Holdren, Obama’s science advisor. I was once subjected to his presence in a room of thirty people. I can assure you that he is as close to an exterminationist as you can get, though it is couched in suitably ecological terms of overpopulation. Co-author with the Ehrlichs of anti-human drivel.

 

The point is, in the new Biden/Harris administration, “Science is back”, so shut your trap and fall into line, skeptics. As the Manhattan Contrarian ends his piece:

“Or, to put it another way, “science is back”! De-develop the United States? Forced population control? A “planetary regime” to control all “resources”? The “science” requires it! All the “smart” people from Harvard know that. You can understand why Holdren is excited about a Biden presidency. Are you?”

Conrad Black was right when he said the US population will have a bad case of buyer’s remorse, quickly, in the new regime.