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Turtle Power! And going back even further, here’s an interesting bit on doing Nintendo ports before the days of 8-bit power.

Disenchanted ex-richarddawkins.netter Dominic Saltarelli draws our attention to a group of cosmologists who would appear to agree with my position on the need for science reform:

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed– inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory….

n open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that “science is the culture of doubt”, in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.

This letter was published four years ago, so I’m curious whether both Bad Astronomy and the signers of the letter are correct and that dark matter and dark energy have been observed in the intervening time, whether the signers are incorrect and they had been observed previously, or whether Bad Astronomy was incorrect and it has not been observed. I should appreciate it if anyone with the appropriate credentials would deign to explain this seeming dichotomy.

It’s interesting, too, to see that so many self-identified skeptics so readily abandon all skepticism whenever the magic word “science” is mentioned. The ironic reality is that doubt is usually honored by Christians, but it cannot be tolerated by scientists.

On a related note, the latest scientific charade is beginning to fall apart. Scientists and science fetishists may hate it that a part-time rebel scientist such as myself should so confidently express contempt for the current consensus, but you don’t need impressive scientific credentials or even to make use the scientific method to recognize when a group of people are attempting to BS everyone else, you simply need to keep your eyes open and possess sufficient experience with human nature.

After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming.

This inevitably attracted the kind of hysterical abuse that has become so familiar from warmist fanatics, tellingly contrasting with the measured arguments put forward by the scientists present. One was Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who last year famously forced Nasa’s Goddard Institute to correct a fundamental error in its data on US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.

As I have said from the very start, Global Warming is nothing more than another science fraud designed to foster greater central government power. It’s not the first, it won’t be the last. The first clue should have been that the greatest champion was a politician turned propagandist. I’m just surprised that it’s taken the real scientists so long to unmask the charlatans. Note that even as its scientific justification fails, the Fourth Reich is taking a page from both the warmingmongers and the New Atheists in trying to blame nonexistent Global Warming for imaginary wars.

Big Bill encapsulates the inevitable decline of secular society:

Bottom line, science roolz and y’all are going extinct. Why? You don’t make babies, and the Muslims and evil Christians and Jews do. “God” tells them to.

You manufacture and live in such a materialistic, mechanistic, consumerist world that your own women don’t want to bear your children, they would rather scr*w a vibrating battery-powered plastic stick if they want to come rather than take a risk at having more than 1.2 of your children, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 kids.

You are right in one respect: humans are just animals and have the moral significance in the Universe (sans God) of pond scum. Thing is, having established that, your women don’t want to collectively waste their lives squirting out and raising the moral equivalent of pond scum when the alternative is Having Sex, Eating Food, and Buying Fun Stuff.

Succinct. Vulgar. Accurate. In a word, brilliant. And speaking of succinct, Sam Harris has responded to my list of seven questions for him derived from TIA. I’ll post them once I have his permission to do so; his answers are candid and somewhat surprising. One thing that has been settled is that the man is not intellectually dishonest, he clearly didn’t know about the electoral data that turns his Red State argument on its head.

Not even a woman scorned is as upset as the would-be scientific expert who is ignored as irrelevant:

If the producers of Expelled are so confident that they can make a strong case of conspiracy against scientists, then before they start showing this to uninformed politicians, they ought to screen it before scientists and historians and philosophers of science, who will be able to judge it on its merits.

Because, PZ, as we’ve already seen with TIA, whenever someone does make a strong case against secular scientists or atheists, these self-proclaimed champions of intellectual discourse suddenly go silent and try to pretend they’ve never heard of it. Dawkins was happy to write posts about TIA being “a flea” before it was published, Harris was perfectly happy to answer questions via email before it was published, a number of richarddawkins.net atheists were announcing their intention of doing chapter by chapter rebuttals of this little flea book… some of them even started on them.

And then, upon discovering that they were confronted by a strong case that they didn’t have the means to credibly answer, they all fell silent. You yourself, PZ, were offered a copy of TIA for review, but you weren’t interested, you’d rather just complain about the Creation Museum, the employment practices of fourth-rate colleges, and not being offered pre-release screenings of documentaries than address a substantive and detailed refutation of your atheist icons. So, how in the name of St. Darwin of the Galapagos are the producers of Expelled not justified in doing likewise and ignoring you and your fellow scientists?

Furthermore, it’s generally not left to the condemned to judge the case against him on its merits.

UPDATE – Since he’s not busy watching movies, it seems PZ has the time to weigh in on the matter of dark matter.

The amusing thing about some of the atheist potshots at TIA is the way it shows that they’re afraid to quote the very bits they’re complaining about. I’ve seen several complaints that I call Christopher Hitchens a drunk, but they never provide the quote because that would demonstrate that it’s not Hitchens’s drinking that is the relevant aspect of the quote, but rather his reliable, verifiable and factual wrongness.

In the The Irrational Atheist, Day employs some truly beautiful insults along with scathing rhetoric and his usual razor-sharp logic, factual analysis, and wit, to disarm, mock, and bludgeon his “Unholy Trinity” of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett, as well as others. Read Joe Carter’s 60 second review at the Evangelical Outpost, where he quotes what is quite possibly the best insult I’ve ever heard:

On a totally trivial note, it might interest you to know that TIA is now paired by Amazon with the very book for which Crown Forum rejected it. I’m pleased with how it all worked out, but I can’t help but wonder if a bigger publisher would have made it more difficult for the Unholy Trinity to maintain the pretense that it doesn’t exist. Probably not.

But as I’ve said before, while they can avoid the book, they won’t be able to ignore the arguments it contains much longer. It’s been interesting to note that while the downloads have continued at about the same rate, the percentage of LIT and PDB downloads have increased in the last week. To me, that appears to indicate that those outside the blogosphere are beginning to hear about the book.

One of the few coherent commenters at Bad Astronomy shows genuine insight:

“American Religious Right == another Taliban” is the most apt and precise way of describing the situation. They sound sooooooooooooo similar. How I wish some of the fence-sitters listened to that line of reason.

No, it’s an utterly retarded way to put it, and does much harm to the cause of reason and skepticism. Not to mention it demonstrates a near complete ignorance of what the Taliban was really about. Will you people ever [bleeping] learn that the name calling and hyperbolic comparisons do nothing more than cause the other side (and many of the fence sitters) to circle the wagons? Will you EVER learn this? It happens every time.

You claim to be scientific, but you keep making the same error over and over.

He sounds exactly like an Alliance battleground leader cursing at the idiots who keep trying to burn Tower Point before Iceblood turns. This is a very good example of an influence that was a factor in causing my thinking to adjust significantly over the years. When I was young, I was a dinosaur-enthusiast, I was totally convinced that science was the only means of establishing truth, I was certain that scientists were objective seekers after the truth, and I was ruthlessly committed to the use of reason uber alles. While I was skeptical about evolution, this was more the result of my fifth-grade teachers inability to provide reasonable answers to some of the obvious questions that arose from our textbook than any religious influences. My Dad had a few Young Earth Creationist books that I recall but I didn’t subscribe to it as a kid and I don’t subscribe to it now. To this day, I remain utterly agnostic on the precise mechanisms and timing utilized by the Creator God in constructing this particular creation.

College changed everything for me, although not in the usual manner. The great benefit of studying economics was the dawning realization that not even the world’s greatest experts knew what the hell they were talking about. The beauty and the challenge of economics is that it is both incredibly complex and astoundingly fast-moving. Economists don’t have the luxury of building a crude theoretical model, then sitting around admiring it for fifty years while arrogantly demanding to know if you’ve got anything better because events will usually destroy their latest and greatest within weeks no matter how painstakingly it has been designed, tested and backtested. It’s a fascinating field, and one either has to be a committed ideologue (Karl Marx, Paul Krugman, Larry Kudlow) or have a puckish sense of humor (Josef Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, the Freakonomics guy), to make any useful sense of it. Indeed, had I stuck with economics, I would have pursued a career in econometrics, as in economics and game design alike, the primary factor is probability.

I am not anti-science, I am pro-science reform. But the haughty language and baseless arrogance of the would-be secular priesthood has caused me to conclude that not only is there a massive difference between scientody and scientistry, but that science would be very well served by a significant culling of a scientific community that has gotten well above itself. The absurd figure of the secular scientist evangelist pontificating on matters having little or nothing to do with science proper, and making no use of either reason or scientody to do so, should be as egregiously offensive to scientists truly devoted to the scientific method as the behavior of the Borgia Pope is to devout Catholic Christians today.

So, if I am considered an enemy of science today, it is only because scientists and science fetishists have chosen to view me that way. But when you elect to create an enemy ex nihilo, you should not be terribly surprised when that newly fabricated enemy responds by behaving in a manner very similar to that of a self-declared enemy.

The OC writes the only episode of Star Trek I would ever watch:

Okay Gene, here’s the outline. Returning from a mission dirtside, the Away Team discovers that a freak malfunction of the transporter contrast control has turned them all black. Piccard retires to the executive conference room (I understand we’re contractually obligated to use the conference room set for at least five minutes in each show, right?), opens the executive safe, and reads the Enterprise warranty, only to discover that the transporter is covered by a carry-in service contract and the nearest XEROX service center is 200 light-years away.

Troi gets a “bad feeling” about this.

I liked the original Star Trek when I was a kid. I didn’t like it as an adult, however, and I loathed ST:TNG and all the subsequent Treks. (I really liked Galaxy Quest, though, and not because it poked fun at Trekkies. Go figure.) I only saw part of a few episodes, but ST:TNG was one of the most derivative shows I’ve ever seen. By way of example, I once freaked out a Trekkie by telling him the plot of a show he was watching after seeing the first few minutes.

I didn’t stick around to watch it unfold, so around an hour later, the guy came out and demanded to know how I could have possibly known what was going to happen. It was simple, the whole story was ripped off from Ann Rice’s Lasher.

No scientist should even open his mouth about other scientific disciplines, nine times out of ten, he merely discredits the entire profession:

evolutionary biology does in fact explain our concepts of justice, equality, and freedom. Just because you say it doesn’t doesn’t mean it doesn’t. We evolved these concepts as prehistoric humans and the species we evolved from developed into tribal cultures. Those concepts helped ensure our survival, so we adapted to include them in our daily lives.

I’m definitely going to nail an evolutionary biologist to the wall with this one during the next discussion of evolution. I so love how scientists in one discipline make outrageous, nonsensical claims for other disciplines, which are then completely disavowed by the scientists in that discipline. Scott Hatfield, I should very much like to know your opinion on the matter….

Now, do provide the scientific evidence for this evolution of justice, equality and freedom, BA. What was the mechanism of this “evolution”? How fast did these concepts evolve, and from what? At what museum may we view the memetic fossil evidence? And given the clear empirical evidence that a belief in God is hugely beneficial for the rate of human propagation, aren’t you really offering a proof of God here?

This is the best part:

It’s clear to me that you don’t really understand anything at all about science, the scientific method, and how successful it is in understanding the world and universe around us.

This is pretty amusing coming from someone who genuinely believes there is scientific evidence for the evolution of abstract concepts. This is especially ironic when that same someone claims conclusive proof of what he also declares cannot be seen, tasted, heard, touched or sensed in any way. This is a particularly interesting statement in light of the way in which scientists reliably insist that science is not in the “proof” business at all.

The idea that science is successful in understanding the world around us is also amusing. Whether one looks at an individual, a family or a society, the one thing you can absolutely count on to rapidly destroy it is following the advice of the scientists interested in the matter. Assuming, of course, that the entire planet isn’t destroyed first by a few of the more deadly gifts that scientists have so kindly given humanity. Thanks, science!

You may now make your historically ignorant statement attempting to give science credit for that which either predates science, was created by non-scientists, or should more rightly be credited to entrepeneurial activity.

And FYI, libertarian!=ultraconservative.

The Bad Astronomer doesn’t realize that science is undermining the basis for materialism:

The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

In other words, even by its own lights, science and rational materialist philosophy is only relevant to five percent of what we currently consider to be all known Creation. Combined with its complete inapplicability to abstract concepts such as justice, equality and freedom, this shows that even attempting to build a social order on a secular basis is not only doomed to failure, but is quite arguably insane.