Tag: science

A Praying Mantis Matinee?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

This mantis was waiting in line outside a theater where they were having a Heaven’s Gate revival.

Here’s  an awesome scientific experiment you could probably do yourself, if you had the patience and the manual dexterity for it.

Scientists have been showing 3-D movies to praying mantises, to find out whether the insects can see in three dimensions ( http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-praying-mantis-3d-glasses-20160108-story.html ), reports the Los Angeles Times. The purpose, supposedly, is to find some way to build robots that can see in three dimensions.

So far they have only shown the mantises little film clips of potentially edible bugs. But what would happen if you showed a mantis Gigli? Or Star Wars: The Force Awakens? How about a whole theater full of mantises?

And what if you could find out whether the insects liked the movie, or not?

The movie industry needs help. The average feature film costs over $100 million to make, and the makers lose their shirts on a fair number of them.

But in insects Hollywood has a potential audience hundreds of times greater than all of the people in the world. One swarm of locusts, or a couple of attics full of Chinese shield bugs, and you’ve made your money back!

Maybe we could even wind up with movies made for insects and watched by robots.

How much worse could they be than some of the movies we avoid now?

 

Zillionaire to Build Robo-Nanny

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Mark Zuckerberg, the grand panjandrum of Facebook, has vowed to build a robot “to look after his house and keep tabs on his newborn daughter,” The Independent has reported ( http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/mark-zuckerberg-to-build-robot-butler-to-look-after-his-child-as-part-of-2016-new-years-resolution-a6795376.html ).

I’m old-fashioned. I thought your wife did those things. Or you could do them together.

This is a milestone–or will be, if it works out all right and the robot doesn’t wind up shoving assorted Zuckerbergs into the microwave–in the quest to create true Artificial Intelligence: an enterprise that is not even logical, much less potentially successful.

Sinful, fallible, psychologically vulnerable, misinformed, under-informed or even ignorant, wishful-thinking human beings cannot create any kind of intelligence superior to their own. We can build computers that can do certain simple things–like playing chess, for instance–without making bonehead moves of the kind that human players make because they’re tired, distracted, or whatever. But we can’t build a computer that can use chess as a way of thinking about love.

We cannot build robots that are wise.

We cannot build robots that are better than we are.

“Artificial Intelligence” can never be anything but artificial. It is not true intelligence, but an unthinking simulation of intelligence.

But hey, who listens? Go ahead and let the bot mind the baby. How much worse can it be than public school, or television?

Hooray! ‘Gay Caveman’ Discovered!

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Why are Fred and Barney sitting together in the car? Science has the answer!

Scientists have been breaking their butts and their hearts, trying to find the “gay gene” (“It’s gotta be there! It’s just gotta!”), and just not getting anywhere–despite their perpetual willingness to say or do anything, to get the results they want.

But now they’ve got something almost as good: the archaeological remains of some poor devil who is being billed as the world’s oldest sodomite ( http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/archaeologists-unearth-5000-year-old-third-gender-caveman ).

Some thousands of years ago, it seems, this guy got buried as a woman instead of a man. Obviously that means he was “gay.” Maybe even a “transvestite” (you get double points if you discover that). It can’t possibly mean he was buried this way to shame or curse him, or as a token of the community’s low esteem. The fact is, nobody knows what it means.

We have a comment, however, from Prof. Stephen “Tiffany” Hormad, chair-being of the Dept. of Gender Studies at Bilgewater University. He is sure he knows exactly what it means.

“It goes to show you that human beings were originally all Gay or Lesbian,” said Dr. Hormad, “and heterosexuality didn’t come along until much, much later in history, as a result of Income Inequality and Global Warming.”

“Happily,” he added, “we are returning to that original condition. And it’s about time, too.”

First They’ve Got to Get Rid of the Real God

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Some readers thought I was joshing the other day, when I posted a report of British scientists claiming they were able to delete (or dramatically reduce) a person’s religious beliefs by bombarding his brain with powerful magnetic stimuli ( http://leeduigon.com/2015/10/14/uk-scientists-claim-they-can-use-magnets-to-erase-belief-in-god/ ).

Well, it’s no hoax. In fact, we’ve got an update for you ( https://stream.org/scientists-claim-zapping-brains-with-magnets-can-treat-belief-in-god/ ) from The Stream.

See, it’s not that they’re going to erase religious belief. No, no–they’re going to treat it, like treating a disease, to make it go away. It’s all in a scientific paper entitled, “Neuromodulation of group prejudice and religious belief.” Note how “group prejudice” and “religious belief” are lumped in together. What does that tell you about their mind-set?

Or does it just tell you that atheism and political liberalism are evidence of brain damage?

As an added bonus, they say they’re also able to make you feel better about hordes of immigrants streaming into your country.

Some questions arise.

*Given that they were conducting their little science project in Britain, where did they find “volunteers” who had Christian religious beliefs in the first place? (You can take it for granted that they never tried to erase anyone’s Muslim or humanist beliefs. That would’ve been unscientific.)

*Now that they’ve deleted or reduced their volunteers’ religious belief, what happens next? Can they put it back, or do these poor souls have to spend the rest of their lives as artificially-produced atheists? What will happen if one of these persons sues to have his religious belief restored?

*If they can take beliefs out of your brain, can they also put beliefs in? Can they turn you into anything they want?

A Progressive dream come true!

I leave it to you to judge who is more respectful of our freedom, individuality, and dignity–Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, or a bunch of squirming little science vermin who want to mold your mind like Play-Doh?

UK Scientists Claim They Can Use Magnets to Erase Belief in God

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This just in–British scientists say that by wacking your brain with very powerful magnets, they can make Christians stop believing in God and also make you feel real good about Muslim immigrants flooding into your country ( http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/611992/Scientists-experiment-magnets-immigrants-God-magnetic-waves ).

You could probably get the same results with a baseball bat, or by not allowing the subject to sleep, and it’d be cheaper.

It might be said that it really doesn’t take much to get a Brit to reject Christianity. Millions of ’em have already done so without any help from scientists.

But isn’t it nice to know that governments will soon have another weapon in their arsenal to use against faith, truth, and sanity?

So break out the Nobel Prize, they’ve finally found a way to destroy anyone’s religious faith!

And replace it with faith in… what?

I’m not sure I want to know.

‘97% of Scientists Say…’

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I had a hard time at the YMCA yesterday: a debate, as it were, on the subject of Global Warming, featuring me vs. everybody else in the locker room.

If I heard it once yesterday, I heard it 50 times: “But 97% of scientists believe in Global Warming!” That makes it true, of course.

You can’t get through. The 97% is carved in stone. You can poke holes in it till you’re blue in the face, and nothing happens. What about the hundreds of scientists who don’t believe in Global Warming, and have said so publicly? Did they ask all scientists, or just the ones who’d be sure to give them the answer that they wanted? And who, by the way, did the asking? And how did they decide who is a “scientist”?

All my opponents need to know is “Science says.” That makes it infallible. That the scientists themselves are all fallible human beings, born into sin, and that their science is strained through a filter of incomplete and often inaccurate information, wishful thinking, prejudice, fear, and desire for advancement is completely irrelevant to them. You just can’t get through.

Is this not idolatry? Science is the work of human minds, and human hands. To worship it is to worship human beings. And we laugh at the ancient Egyptians for worshiping animals.

And they try to convince us that humanism is not a religion.

What the World Needs Now! Smarter Mice

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Defenders of Planned Parenthood, your friendly neighborhood baby-butchers, say it’s okay for PP to sell off baby parts because they’ll be used in “medical research” that will benefit the entire human race.

How do they propose to benefit us? What kind of research are they doing?

Well, one of their little science experiments is to inject brain cells from aborted babies into mice. This is being doing by scientists, if we may call them that, at the University of Rochester ( http://www.lifenews.com/2015/08/05/where-do-the-body-parts-of-aborted-babies-end-up-scientists-transplant-their-brain-tissue-into-mice/ ). Supposedly it makes the mice smarter by “improving the efficiency” of their brains.

I thought this story was a hoax at first, but apparently it’s true.

Speaking as someone who has had many a pet mouse, it’s been my experience that mice are already plenty smart. The average mouse only lives about a year and a half; and you’d be amazed by how much they can learn, and how fast they can learn it, in that little time. A year-old mouse is much smarter than a year-old human. In fact, it’s smarter than some high school kids I’ve known.

Mice are limited by their short life-spans. If a mouse could live ten years, it would learn to read and write and probably wind up in Congress.

“Scientific research” to make mice smarter–well, really, how good an idea is that?

Reepicheep lives.

Common Core Teaches Only “Science” is True

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http://www.writeonnewjersey.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Mad-Scientist.jpg

If you read nothing else today, read the New York Times article by philosophy professor Justin McBrayer, “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts” ( http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/ ).

Professor McBrayer discovered that, as part of Common Core–control of public education curriculum, nationwide, by the federal government–children are being taught that something is either a Fact or an Opinion. A fact, said a poster in his son’s second-grade classroom is something that is true about a subject and can be proven. An opinion is what someone thinks, feels, or believes.

So what’s wrong with that?

First, says the professor, the teaching is that “truth” and “proof” are the same thing–when, of course, they aren’t. “It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives).”

Second, he explains, the teaching is that any claim is either a fact or an opinion–never both. “Value claims,” therefore–claims that an act is right or wrong, good or evil, “are not facts.”

Yup, everything but mainline “science” is just a fantasy in someone’s individual mind, and can only be ignored.  So there’s no such thing as “truth”: it’s either “your truth” or “my truth.” Thank you, Pontius Pilate.

The professor is right on target, as far as he goes. But his article does not explain why the same moral illiterates who teach children that the only claims that are “true” are those “facts” established by Science, fly into a frenzy at the slightest suggestion that, for instance, marriage consists of a man and a woman. There is no “scientific proof” that it does. There is no “scientific proof” that it doesn’t. But just say the magic words, and that whole “your truth, my truth” thing goes out the window and the Diversity crowd wants to destroy you.

Prof. McBrayer does suggest that there is a certain element of Doublethink involved in this whole enterprise. That’s putting it mildly.

So what do you get when you have “scientific truth” without any concept of moral truth?

You get Frankenstein. Every single time.

Michael Crichton’s Dark Night of the Soul

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I’ve just finished reading Michael Crichton’s The Lost World, his sequel to Jurassic Park.

Listen to this, written by a man who spent his entire adult life intimately involved with what we call Science.

“I wouldn’t take any of it too seriously. It’s just theories. Human beings can’t help making them, but the fact is that theories are just fantasies. And they change. Back when America was a new country, people believed in something called phlogiston. You know what that is? No? Well, it doesn’t matter because it wasn’t real anyway. They also believed that four humors controlled behavior. And they believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old. Now we believe the earth is four billion years old, and we believe in photons and electrons, and we think human behavior is controlled by things like ego and self-esteem. We think those beliefs are more scientific, and better…

“They’re still just fantasies. They’re not real. Have you ever seen a self-esteem? Can you bring me one on a plate? How about a photon? Can you bring me one of those?…

“And you never will, because those things don’t exist. No matter how seriously people take them. A hundred years from now, people will look back at us and laugh. They’ll say, ‘You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?’ They’ll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer and better fantasies.”

Crichton never came around to belief in God, so where did his rejection of Science leave him? Pretty much in limbo. He died before he could find truth. That’s what makes it tragic. But at least he had the integrity, and the courage, to admit that those things he believed in, up to that point in his life, were fantasies.

I write fantasies. But mine, with God’s help, are only parables–a roundabout way of approaching truth from a new direction, in hope that this will enable us to see it afresh.

The Left turned against Michael Crichton and rejoiced when he died.

To that extent, he served the Lord in spite of himself.

Scientist Says Chimps Mated With Pigs to Produce Humans (Not a Satire)

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Sometime in the distant past, according to a hot-shot scientist who is billed as “a leading geneticist,” chimpanzees had sex with pigs–uh, why?–and produced hybrid offspring that were the origin of the human race. See the report in The Daily Mail, Dec. 2, 2013, ‘Humans evolved after a female chimpanzee mated with a pig’: Extraordinary claim made by American geneticist.

Dr. Eugene McCarthy–no relation to the hippy-dippy 60s politician of the same name–is a former professor in the Dept. of Genetics at the University of Georgia and currently the director of Macroevolution.net. He has also suggested that the duck-billed platypus arose as a bird+mammal hybrid.

I have become radically skeptical of Science.

But, hey, let’s do some science! Let’s get a female chimpanzee to mate with a pig and see what happens. What? The chimp doesn’t find the pig attractive? Well, send her to public school for a while. If all else fails, we can try artificial insemination. Go ahead, do it.

What a nice guy I am. I have resisted the temptation to indulge in all the obvious wisecracks. But of course I can’t be responsible for any comments made by readers.

Y’know, we believe a great many things because Scientists have told us that they’re true.

What if a lot of them aren’t?