Balking Someone

Up on The Procrustean we see a piece on Roger Penrose's new aeons of time cosmology, which I alluded to in Georg Cantor's Infinities Part Two. Basically here's what aeons of time is:



"after all the matter in the universe is swallowed up by black holes, and after they evapourate leaving behind nothing but photons, everything gets bigger and somehow the universe starts over again, forever."



Using data from sophisticated equipment, Penrose has claimed to have found irregularities in the CMB (cosmic microwave background) that could only be produced if his aeons of time cosmology were correct. However, the supporters of the various inflationary models also claim the data corresponds to precisely what would be expected if inflation occurred. Since the aeons of time and cosmic inflation are incompatable one or both of them has to be wrong (about the data found in the CMB and in general).



After reporting this, Rob at The Procrustean then makes a conclusion about Penrose, inflation, and intelligent design. He says (this whole issue is a bit of a head scratcher for me so I'll just point you in the right direction and let you figure this out for yourself):



"Neither Sir Roger nor the conventional inflationary models have made solid predictions. At best, they can be tweaked to some, but not all aspects of the data. They possess far too many adjustable parameters drawn from some sort of metaphysical repository of models that is itself questionable. Sir Roger attempts to address the metaphysical problem with Creation, and inflationary models address the metaphysical problem of contingency. Neither is particularly convincing. (And a closer look at CCC theory raise more questions about the infinite pressure of dark energy, the rescaling time, the supposed decay of protons and electrons, etc.)



"Which may mean that it is time to assess the situation. Some of the best minds of two generations have addressed cosmology since the discovery of the 3-degree blackbody CMB radiation and not found solutions to the twin problems of a necessary Creator and a necessary Design. Given their failure, and I do mean abject failure to find anything beyond a metaphysical black box with lots of dials, I would suggest that we claim support for the contrary. All of them have put the cart before the horse, trying to create a no-beginning-no-design theory by massaging the data, post-dicting their data to support their theory, and still have not succeeded, thereby proving the very thing they did not want to prove."



I'm not so sure I would jump from Penrose and inflation being wrong to the alternative being correct, but it does give one something to think about.



-Dee

A House of Cards Built in Midair

The pseudoscience of psychiatry is practically the seventh topic I investigate, though I rarely say anything, except to the radio. Every time someone on the radio tries to sell drugs, or the "central dogma" of psychiatry, that mental disorder = brain disorder and that chemical imbalances in the brain are the cause instead of the effect blood shoots out of my eyes and I start yelling at the radio. I have admonished friends to throw their drugs away and stop listening to these quacks who want to steal their money and ruin their lives. Psychiatry is a complete fraud, fueled by drug companies, and is a $2 trillion a year industry. Psychiatry is not based on science and has, to date, never cured a single person, although it has killed millions. Psychiatry is based on voting and concensus, which is the complet opposite of real science, which is based on gathering evidence and testing hypotheses (sound familiar? Climate change (hide the decline) is also based on concensus). Here are four videos where psychiatrists break the bond of silence and reveal the lies of psychiatry.

The Human Brain

From cnet news comes a story about the human brain. Well, it's really a mouse brain that was experimented on, and not even a real mouse, a chimera created by combining DNA from a mouse and a jelly fish.



In the story we learn that "A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies."



Not only are there hundreds of trillions of synapses, but each synapse has around 1,000 "molecular-scale switches," more than all the computers on earth. Once again we are shown how the human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and that the ideas certain people ("transhumanists" and such) entertain regarding the possibility, or certainty, of artificial intelligence, or of downloading minds onto computers, are patently absurd.



The story also included a video where some scientists used new imaging technology to view the workings of the chimera neurons.

Unstoppable

I've recently seen the film Unstoppable, about a runaway train and inspired by actual events. Directed by Tony Scott, who has a thing for films about trains, Unstoppable is the story of a jackass mistake that sets a rather long train carrying several tanks of deadly poison speeding down the tracks in rural Pennsylvania with no one at the controls. The train is going so fast that it won't be able to make a sharp turn in a major city. The train will derail and release the toxic chemicals, killing tens of thousands of people. The railroad people throw everything they've got at it and nothing works, so a veteran engineer and a rookie conductor, whose families happen to live in the target city, come up with a dramatic plan to stop the train or die trying, just like REAL heroes (not anti-heroes, vigilantes, or some sort of grey area villains).



This is the best film I've seen in a long time (and the only one I've seen in 2010; the last time I went out to see a film was 1 November 2009, Law Abiding Citizen, which was the only one I saw in 2009). I highly recommend seeing Unstoppable.






Unstoppable Trailer



Unstoppable is based on the real life incident involving the CSX 8888 "Crazy Eights," which was carrying poisonous phenol (though not nearly as much), and did travel under power with no one at the controls in rural Ohio in 2001. Crazy Eights chugged along for three hours before a similar plan was used to bring it to a stop before the train derailed. Like in the film, all the other attempts, such as using a portable derailer and police shooting at the fuel shut release valve, failed. While elements of the story are exaggerated for dramatic effect, Unstoppalble is not a documentary. It does, however, portray the actual events closely enough to merrit the "Inspired by True Events" tag proudly displayed on the poster and at the beginning of the film.





News Footage of The Real Train




-Dee

I'm A Skeptic

From Entangled Minds (from Xtranormal.com) comes a five minute video in which a self-proclaimed skeptic from the 1980s approaches an attractive scientist (as attractive as a computer generated image can be I guess) and they have a discussion about what is and is not science. The self-proclaimed skeptic (skep-dick as they are referred to on The Urban Mystic) talks about how folks like him make proclamations from preconcieved beliefs about what is and is not real. The scientist, like Ken Wilber did in his deep science video, explains that there is a scientific method and that experiments need to be conducted and theories revised. Science, unlike skep-dick-ism (or fundamaterialism), does not start with the conclusion and work its way back using circular reasoning. Science is open-ended and willing to change based on new data.


"I'm A Skeptic" video




Ken Wilber on deep science





Also, Daniel Drasin's "Zen and the Art of Debunkery" has just been updated for 2010. The link on the official Irked-Confusion site will have to be changed now.

Georg Cantor's Infinities (Part Two)

Continuing the last post on Cantor and how he overturned the entire world, this story comes from UD and is called "Infinitely Wrong."



Cantor demonstrated that some infinities are bigger than others (infinitely so). Robert Sheldon, in the post linked above, attempts to demonstrate that cardinality can be used to show how the multiverse can't save Darwinism.



As Roger Penrose pointed out, in order to avoid conflicting with the second law of thermodynamics, the Big Bang had to be insanely precise. According to Penrose (who now believes that after all the matter in the universe is swallowed up by black holes, and after they evapourate leaving behind nothing but photons, everything gets bigger and somehow the universe starts over again, forever, but that's a different story), the force causing the expansion of the universe has to match the force of gravity to at least one part in 10^(10^123) or the universe would have either exploded into nothing or collapsed back right after it banged. I'm not sure just how many zeroes are in that number, but think of it like this: if the universe had one more or one less proton (or probably less mass than that) at the Big Bang it wouldn't be here right now for us to talk about (or me to bore you about). Hawking, who was balked in September, places the ratio at a more reasonable one part in 10^60.



The Hawking solution to this seemingly fine-tuned feature? Infinite time + infinite space. Hawking et al. propose universes popping into existence all the time in their bubble multiverse. With infinite universes being created in a process that has infinite duration anything that can happen will happen, no matter how improbable, including gravity matching the expansion of the universe to that whole stack of tens. However, at least one part in 10^(10^123) does not mean that the fine-tuning is exactly that precise, just that that is the minimum precision of the fine-tuning. It could be more. It could even be infinite.



To deal with this, according to Sheldon, the anti-design folks ask Hugh Everett for help with creating infinitely more universes. Doing some fancy mathematics, if I'm reading it right, the anti-design folks can get an Aleph-naught infinite number of universes out of their quantum fudgery to solve a design problem with an Aleph-one cardinality, something that is impossible because the fine-tuning is now infinitely larger than the attempts at explaining it away by chance.



So, if all that made sense to you, it should have clearly been demonstrated that an infinite multiverse cannot solve the problem caused by the fine-tuning of the physical constants.



-Dee

Bush and Kanye West

Remember how for eight years Bush was the enemy, and Hitler, and the Devil? Now, folks like Oprah and gay fish Kanye West are getting chummy with him? It's more than a little bit suspicious. It's almost as if that whole Bush was evil thing was an act, like someone is ordering us to dance and we gladly play along with this game. Who do you think that is, pulling the strings, making us dance, telling us to hate Bush, and making us elect a president who continues all of his bad policies?

Wonderful Story from France

From AFP comes a wonderful piece about a toddler who fell out a window in France and survived.



The story begins:
"An 18-month-old boy survived after falling seven floors and bouncing off a Paris cafe awning into the arms of a passer-by, witnesses said Tuesday."



The man, Philippe Bensignor, caught the boy who fell out the window!



After the several negative posts and the seemingly endless parade of bad news this story, that was sitting in my in box for quite some time before I read it, and then read it again, really moved me. There's a lot of crap in the world, and I mean a whole lot, but there are events like this that make it all worth it. Enjoy this story.



-Dee

Why The Multiverse Is A Disaster For Atheists

Vjtorley, UD contributor, has written an enormous thing about an article that explains how it is consistant to be a young earth creationist and still have millions of years old stars. In it he says that invoking a multiverse, a scenario in which there are an infinite number of "universes" in which everything that can happen does happen, does not disprove the existence of God. The number of universes where everything was created in 6,000 years is infinitely greater than the number of 13.7 billion year old universes. When you're dealing with infinities, the number of nonparsimonious universes is infinitely larger than the number of parsimonious universes, so the likely hood that we inhabit a nonparsimonious universe, like say one that's 6,000 years old yet has seemingly billion year old stars, is infinitely greater than the likelihood we inhabit a parsimonious universe. When you deal with infinities you have to throw parsimony out the window. Also, having a multiverse that's been around for 6,000 years yet still has infinitely many universes that were all created 6,000 years ago still has that pesky infinity problem to get around.



The whole UD piece is monstrously long and involves many more points than I could possibly add to this summary, so I'll just skip to the end: "I conclude that a skeptic who wishes to deny the reality of God by positing a multiverse containing an infinite number of universes is engaging in scientific and intellectual suicide. Such a skeptic no longer has a reason to believe in a 13.7 billion-year-old universe which unfolded in an orderly fashion, without any changes in either the laws of Nature or the constants of Nature. Indeed, the multiverse destroys the skeptic’s arguments against a 6,000-year-old universe. And finally, the multiverse fails to rule out God anyway – for you could always say that God created it." (bold and italics in original)



-Dee

Georg Cantor's Infinities (Part One)

From Uncommon Descent comes a wonderful video linked to by a poster bornagain77 (the one known for posting many thousands of words in the comments section). In the video very British people explain the history of infinity, Georg Cantor, and how he overturned the world.

Georg Cantor - The Mathematics Of Infinity - Funny video clips are a click away