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Mar 052016
 

Last episode of “Mythbusters” just aired. While a whole lot of the show was simply blowing stuff up (not that there’s anything wrong with that), a good fraction of it was actually pretty good at presenting a skeptical approach to commonly held beliefs – and then blowing them up.

In a world of innumerable crap shows about horrible vacuous celebrities, or brain damaged “paranormal investigators,” or inbred “bigfoot hunters” or insane gibberers about “ancient aliens,” “Mythbusters” was a bit of a rarity… a show about the scientific method and skepticism.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of science shows on television:

  1. Shows like “Cosmos” and “How The Universe Works,” which show, well, how the universe works, generally describing Big Things that your average viewer probably didn’t know too much about (black holes, atomic structure, cosmology, etc.)
  2. Shows like “Mythbusters” (and “Bullshit!” and “Adam Ruins Everything”) that deal with the everyday… and shows that What You Know May be Wrong.

The former type of show is reasonably well represented. In general, that type gets through an hour of television by just telling you how it is, and generally fairly uncontroversially. The second type of show, however, is a much rarer thing, and it is by definition controversial… because it tells a lot of people that their beliefs are *wrong.* In the case of Mythbusters, those beliefs were usually pretty shallowly believed… stuff people saw on the internet, or other such urban legends. But shows the “The Truth Behind” and “Bullshit!” dealt with a lot of stuff that your average newage aficionados took greatly to heart, and “Bullshit!” and “Adam Ruins Everything” dealt with a lot of things that people take as received political truth. And given how entertaining these shows have been, their rarity can’t be due to low ratings… and it’s not like they’re likely all that expensive. I imagine  it’s the sheer skeptical nature of the shows that make them unpopular with certain groups… including studio heads and the like.

So, now that Mythbusters is gone… what’s left? “Bullshit!” is long gone. “The Truth Behind” was only a few episodes. Season One of “Adam Ruins Everything” ended some months ago; season two won’t start until August 2016. TV seems kinda empty, abandoned to the “monster hunters.” So… what we got?

 Posted by at 8:05 pm
Mar 052016
 

I managed to finagle a complete full-color scan of an original copy of Eugen Sanger’s 1944 report, Uber einen Raketenantrieb fur Fernbomber (A Rocket Drive for Long Range Bombers). A “meh” quality B&W PDF of an English-language translation of the report has been available online for a while, but it seems to me that the world needs a proper high-rez version of the original, in color where appropriate.

One of the pages I’ve cleaned up from the new scan shows the statistical damage potential if New York City was regularly targeted by a very large number of bombs. This image, at least a black-and-white English-translated version, several generations removed from the original, is reasonably well-known and commonly reproduced… and as described a few years back, is generally described wrong.

Sanger (1) S2 (101)

 Posted by at 6:03 pm
Mar 042016
 

A bit over a year ago I asked if anyone knew of a larger version of a tiny image of early nuke RV’s that I found online. I finally found a much better version, and because I’m a hell of a guy, here it is:

feb-29-60-missilesrockets6196unse_0452 feb-29-60-missilesrockets6196unse_0453

 

Oh for the days when companies would proudly show off their latest development in nuclear delivery system. Oh for the days when there actually were recent developments in nuclear delivery systems…

 Posted by at 9:42 pm
Mar 042016
 

SpaceX finally got their latest rocket into the sky, but it looks like it didn’t survive landing on the barge. As this one was pretty much expected to fail – due to being a very high energy mission, with the barge much further out to sea – it’s not really considered a failure.

 Posted by at 7:46 pm
Mar 042016
 

Artwork depicting the Surveyor lunar probe as of June, 1962. Reasonably close to the final product, but some differences are visible. The subsurface probe  I believe was not employed; neither was the SNAP-11 nuclear power source. That was intended to power the lander through the lunar night.

missilesrockets1011unse_0270

 Posted by at 11:03 am
Mar 022016
 

Language, people:

Scientists Are Still Arguing About That Chopra Bullshit Study

The “study” mentioned in the post linked above is the amazingly titled “Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit.” The study in question showed that many people were not able to differentiate computer-generated gibberish from actual Deepak Chopra tweets (such as “Attention and intention are the mechanics of
manifestation.”). The compu-babbler was programmed to spit out grammatically correct, but logically vacuous, statements; they were designed to seem “profound” but were, instead, what the authors describe as “bullshit.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that the less skeptical a person was (short form: the more religious, superstitious or accepting of “alternate medicine” and the like), the more likely they were to find the gibberish to be “profound.”

The authors of the original study tried to determine just what it was about some people that they would see nonsense as “deep,” what they called “bullshit receptivity.”

The point of the Gizmodo article linked above is that there are those who take issue with the original studies methodology. In short, the argument  is that not all statements that are devoid of logic yet seem to be profound are in fact bullshit. Zen koans are given as examples of logically-lacking statements that still inspire “meaning” (“what is the sound of one hand clapping,” that sort of thing). But the response to *that* is… just because you get a sense of meaning out of something doesn’t mean it’s not still pure bullshit. If a statement can be analyzed objectively and is found lacking… well, there ya go.

This sort of thing seems to be what keeps a lot of philosophy majors busy, but engineers, scientists, mathematicians have a different take on it. Engineers *have* to. A statement that talks but says nothing might give you a warm fuzzy, but it doesn’t tell you where to drill the hole.

I suspect there’s a lot more to “bullshit receptivity” variability levels than purely education or major. Because I’ve known well-educated successful engineers who nevertheless glom onto statements that mean absolutely *nothing* to me.  The words don’t even make sense together, yet to them, they are of vital importance. I’ve seen people go into a state not far from ecstasy when contemplating the phrase “I am.” I’ve seen people lose their damned minds when they hear or say “He is risen!” This latter one always flummoxes me. I know what it means, I know what it refers to (Jesus woke up and wandered off after being crucified), but the reaction to the statement just doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. Why so excited? You’ve heard it before. You’ve heard it all your life; the religion has been yapping on about it for going on two thousand years now. So why is it so exciting the bajillionth time you hear it? Then there’s the newage nonsense about “energy fields” and “vortexes” and whatnot. What do these even *mean?* Sure, a lot of the people spouting this are just makin’ it up as part of the scam. But the scam wouldn’t work if so many people didn’t believe it. And then there’s just about all of modern political “thought,” especially Marxist-based claptrap that loves the long drawn out nonsensical rhetoric that throws out a whole bunch of words that, taken as a whole, don’t mean a whole lot. Virtually everything written about “critical race theory” and the like is just so much word salad.

I often wonder if there might be not a spectrum of acceptance of bullshit, but sometimes a gulf. Because while I’m sure there’s some utter bullshit that I’ll see and nod my head at, there is a *lot* of it that makes me think I’m seeing an alien language being employed. A language that has taken words from English and then completely revised the meaning of the words to mean something entirely different from what I understand them to mean.

 Posted by at 5:10 pm
Mar 022016
 

A  Star Trek convention held in Denver in 1976. A lot of this sure looks familiar… the same sense of nerd-comraderie, similar sorts of cosplay, etc. But… DAYum, the reporter is just *painful* to watch (note: this is not TV news, but instead Just Some Guy with a Super 8 camera and a microphone… think *really* early cameraphones & selfies).

And because this blog is all about the anti-PC… the young lady done up as a Vulcan? Doin’ it right.

And because Why The Hell Not, here is a 1977 Shatner-narrated documentary about ancient alien astronauts and suchforth. Seems like every 20 years this humbug comes back… people going buggo for flying saucers in the 50’s, van Dannikens BS (and a *whole* lot of other BS) in the 70’s, Area 51/Roswell in the 90’s, Ancient Aliens and the mere existence of a Donald Trump candidacy in the 2010’s.

 Posted by at 1:00 pm