Tag: Carver
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Birthday gift for Carver!
Today is Carver’s birthday.** Neurologists have given him a nice gift today: a newly found structure that redesigns our understanding of the circulatory system. = = = = = START QUOTE: The tissue is a thin membrane encasing the brain that keeps newly made cerebrospinal fluid – which circulates inside the brain – separate from…
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Wow! Wow! and Wow again!!!!!!
A perfectly GIANT contribution to our knowledge of the world! Bacterial spores have an extraordinary ability to evaluate their surrounding environment while remaining in a physiologically dead state. They found that spores use stored electrochemical energy, acting like a capacitor, to determine whether conditions are suitable for a return to normal functioning life. Spores were…
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Proper use of science
Here’s a nice example of Carverian science. Constant: Everyone knows that the mind shifts mode after age 40. Millions of words have been written about this change for thousands of years. We sometimes call it the midlife crisis, but most folks realize it’s not a crisis, just a change in our way of perceiving the…
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Avi does Carver
Avi makes a nice strong Carverian point in this piece. He’s discussing astronomical stuff like gravitational waves and spectral lines. In each case the theoreticians predicted that the signal would never be there, or at best would be ferociously hard to detect among the noise. In each case the signal was perfectly obvious after the…
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Carver wins again
Another victory for Carverian science. When you look more closely at a totally familiar object that couldn’t possibly be important, you sometimes realize it’s hugely important. Most cells have cilia, and many cells have one primary cilium. Bacteria and other microbes use this primary cilium to get around, but it was ‘obviously’ vestigial for cells…
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Yet another grandma was right
Every fucking thing we learned in school was criminally false and wrong. Our “science” books mercilessly mocked Schiaparelli’s canals, Lysenko’s acquired characteristics, the old wives tales about stress influencing genes, and phrenology. Now, unsurprisingly, we have proof that the phrenologists were right. The shape of a face and skull does tell you a lot about…
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Sharing is meaningless
At least Evolution News isn’t playing the fake surprise game. They acknowledge that the habits of academia are permanent. Scientific progress is being impeded by a culture in which scientists jealously guard their research instead of sharing it. Keas says the problem seems to have gotten worse in recent years but isn’t a new one.…
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Carver. Carver. Carver.
Listening to Nesbitt’s ‘Passing Parade’ episode on the development of the giant Palomar telescope. Hale was a rich heir who took up astronomy. He used up his father’s money on building bigger and bigger scopes, and then learned how to lobby other rich men and foundations and governments for more and more money to build…
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Talk to them. Let them talk to you.
Random thought, partly repetitive, returning to the subject of communicating with other planets. Before 1920 most professional scientists (including Darwin) were deists. They believed in purpose, even if Galileo had weakened the hold of purpose on physics. Most scientists were fascinated by the possibility of life elsewhere, and several (including Marconi and Tesla) tried to…
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Not free
My version of Santayana: Those who don’t know that history repeats are doomed to be ruined by the repeaters. Those who think academic cancelling is new and abnormal will waste their time fighting a permanent and natural tendency. Frank Edwards runs down the history of academic censorship on the subject of ET life. In 1880…
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Explicit tag
I’ve been using the Entertainment tag on the UFO and Fortean items lately. I should make the connection more explicit. The Forteans were trying to pull science back into the realm of entertainment and mystification and fascination. Their constant theme, starting with Charles Fort himself, was that Big Science is no longer observing Nature with…
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More Tur(k)ing test
A few weeks ago Eric Holloway set up a fiendishly clever machine vs human test, essentially proving that one of the major AI engines is partly or mostly human. Now he’s done it again. Here’s the sequence leading up to the crucial moment. 153 EMH: what is a belief? 154 GPT-3: A belief is a…
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Reprint from 2018
Especially germane on the subject of protests, media insanity, etc. = = = = = START REPRINT: Want to break the “cycle of violence”? Break the media. The press has been running this routine for at least a hundred years. It’s not mysterious or “unintended”. It’s an intrinsic part of their business model. Blood sells…
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Actions, not words
Listened again to Lindsay MacHarrie’s dramatization of the Cardiff Giant story. In 1869 George Hull, a skeptic with plenty of money, was arguing with a pastor about the Giants mentioned in the Bible. Hull hired a sculptor to make a huge gypsum man, carefully aged it, and buried it on his brother-in-law’s farm. Hull got…
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Only the media is worse.
A pair of CBS news broadcasts from June 1940 show that Repooflicans were just as cowardly then as now. The difference is in the media, which was REQUIRED BY LAW TO BE FAIR in 1940. Both parties were having their conventions, which were more genuine then. Real decisions were made IN the convention BY the…
Polistra's Mill 