Oh, Conservapedia

Posted on February 3, 2009 by Michael

It’s well known that Conservapedia is filled with a large contigent of dumb people. I mean, not just ignorant people. They’re outright stupid. Take this from their “news” section on the front page.

Conservapedia

For those who cannot see the text, it reads:

An overweight and over-the-hill Bruce Springsteen is performing songs from the 1980s at the Super Bowl halftime. Wonder why? He supports the liberal agenda hook, line and sinker. But he hasn’t yet performed his “Born in the U.S.A.” … perhaps Obama types wouldn’t like that one???

Apparently, Conservapedians believe “Born in the U.S.A.” is a patriotic song, or at least in someway anti-liberal. On an aside, they also believe multiple question marks make good writing. They are wrong on both counts.

The Springsteen classic is about a young man who goes from his small town to killing people in a foreign country. Upon return, the man is given the crap we all know (except the morons at Conservapedia) was common for returning war vets.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said “Son, don’t you understand”

The song goes on to deride the war for being so meaningless and costly. The cost in the case being human life.

I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now

Far from being a song about how crazy, awesome, cool the U.S.A. is, it’s about working-class people who lost their lives during a pointless war. Conservapedia is composed of idiots who are repeatedly shown as idiots. Nothing more.

Filed under: Misc, Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Misleading Science Articles

Posted on November 21, 2008 by Michael

French, German and Hungarian physicists have taken another step in supporting Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France’s Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world’s mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?

The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.

All that is fine. What is misleading is the title of the article:

    e=mc2: 103 years later, Einstein’s proven right

Nothing here has been proven. Science never does that. What is seeks to do is disprove. The hypothesis here is that energy and mass are equivalent. In order to discover this, scientists attempted an experiment that, if falsified, would weaken Einstein’s great discovery. That isn’t what happened. It turns out that energy and mass are equivalent – in this instance. That doesn’t mean that in every instance that that will be the case. We cannot possibly know for certain that if the experiment is run again or a new experiment is created that the results will be the same. This is precisely what occurs in all of science. Evolution is not proven in the scientific sense of the word. Gravity has never been proven. We could find a slew of rabbits and sharks in the pre-Cambrian whose fossils fall up tomorrow, disproving both theories, at the very least disproving them in part.

Of course, it should be noted that we know these events to be vanishingly unlikely because of the strength of both theories; neither (modern) one has been disproven in any way meaningful to their overall statements. Despite the constant attempts of scientists to show these (now) theories to be incorrect, they have failed. These constant failures – which manifest themselves as monumentally beautiful and elegant discoveries, quite unlike anything we should normally call “failures” – are what make hypotheses into theories; they are what enable us to refer to so many worthwhile ideas as facts, even if they are tentative by their very nature. They are the core of science – a way of knowing that never seeks to prove anything.

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