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CHANGSHA, HUNAN — Since China likes its foreign guests to be healthy, returning to work at Jishou University is contingent on passing a series of fairly minimal health tests that must be done here, in the provincial capital, at a testing center for all travelers coming from or going abroad.
So, the university’s tiny compliment of returning foreign teachers — four Americans, one Ukrainian and one Japanese — came together for an overnight stay here. Tanya, the voice teacher from Ukraine, and I work at the Jishou campus; the others at the Zhangjiajie campus. Although the two campuses are just 90 minutes apart, we teachers seldom have a chance to meet.
The health tests include a blood test, electrocardiogram, vision (colorblindness only, for some reason), height, weight, blood pressure and rest pulse, chest X-ray and abdominal ultrasound for both genders. We all passed, so it means we can all stay here to teach another year.
[One year, a Canadian woman failed the EKG -- some kind of irregularity in her rhythm -- and had to return home. No one is sure what happened to her, as she didn't return to China.]
There’s also a long list of questions about your medical history, listing the usual suspects of communicable and non-communicable diseases, mental illness, pregnancies, operations, and so on — all of which I could mark “no” to. My medical history is really very boring: one trip to hospital for a kidney stone, a badly sprained ankle, and a bout of pneumonia when I was in the first grade.
This is a preview of Contract renewal time #4: time for health tests and reflection . Read the full post (1002 words, estimated 4:00 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — Back in the old days (2008), some very noisy people got the addlepated notion that Barack Obama, even after he was elected fair and square as president, could not possibly have been born in the USA.
First, there was his name. Then his Kenyan father, who was (ohnoz!) raised Muslim. Then his schooling as a boy in Indonesia, where the future pres would learn more stuff about Islam … and eating dogmeat.
Nevermind that he was born in Hawai’i in 1961, with a birth certificate and all. And his mother was American. And his eligibility to even run for president was undoubtedly checked and rechecked by the Secret Service, FBI and who knows what else alphabet agency. The doubting Thomases still kept on a-doubting.
It’s now 2012, another election year, and damn if the same addlepated nonsense is still in circulation. The freaking Arizona Secretary of State recently badgered the State of Hawai’i to cough up proof of Obama’s birth there, before the (Republican) SoS would allow ballots to be printed with Obama’s name on them.
SadlyNo! sums it up quite nicely:
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JISHOU, HUNAN — For the last few posts, I have been critiquing just one entry in the bizarro-world online encyclopedia called Conservapedia, where relativity is liberal claptrap and physical science is just politics with a different name. Now, I want to address an even deeper issue: Con-pedia’s sloppy scholarship.
No self-respecting teacher accepts even Wikipedia as a primary source in a term paper, but Wikipedia’s scholarship shines compared to Con-pedia’s reliance on proof by assertion and shaky, non-scholarly reference materials. I will use the present entry under examination, E=mc2, as a prime example.
In the first four paragraphs previously fisked, there have been four notes. The first was to a strange footnote about how E=mc2 only works when metric units are used. No outside reference is mentioned. The second is to a likewise odd statement that “Many leading scientists (including Lord Rutherford and Princeton Physics Professor Robert Dicke) rejected the Theory of Relativity,” which to some extent was true in, say, 1905, but not so much now. This note has links to Con-pedia articles about Dicke and relativity.
Note three follows the weird statement that the equation is “liberal claptrap,” and offers no basis in fact for the allegation. It merely says, “Citation not needed. See here, point 14,” which link takes us to Con-pedia’s rules and regulations page.
This is a preview of Fisking Conservapedia: A paragon of lazy scholarship . Read the full post (2604 words, estimated 10:25 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — After a suitable recovery period, and some time devoted to my day job, I am returning to the cognitive black hole that is Conservapedia’s explication of the equation E=mc2.
My paragraph-by-paragraph fisking is, alas, necessary, since the entry is so wrong on a fractal level. The closer you look, the wrongness continues to even finer levels.
The entry begins by claiming E=mc2 is meaningless, liberal claptrap, and an attempt to unify matter and light. (It isn’t, and doesn’t.) Then, the principal author, Con-pedia founder Andy Schlafly, veers into the murky realm of Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge in an attempt to show that E=mc2 is simply impossawobble.
In the third paragraph, Con-pedia completely mangles the definitions of mass and energy, which any engineering graduate like Andy Schlafly should have internalized just to pass Physics 103/104 (or whatever freshman course EE majors had to take at Princeton), and shows a pretty weak understanding of even basic physics.
(Advice to Con-pedia writers: one should at least brush up enough on basic physics so as not to look like a complete blithering idiot.)
The fourth paragraph is the focus of this latest installment. It states, with jaw-dropping conviction:
For more than a century, the claim that E=mc² has never yielded anything of value. Often it seems to be used as a redefinition of “energy” for pseudo-scientific purposes, as by the lamestream media. There have been attempts to find some justification for the equation in already understood processes involved in nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons, and in the speculation about antimatter.[4]
This is a preview of Fisking Conservapedia: ‘Nothing of value’, for sure . Read the full post (991 words, 1 image, estimated 3:58 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — This is the third installment of my critique of Conservapedia’s blatantly stupid entry on E=mc2. In the previous posts, I fisked the entry’s opening paragraph, which calls the famous equation “liberal claptrap“, and looked into the entry’s reliance on some nonsense called Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge (a Conservapedia exclusive!), which supposedly shows that E=mc2 is just plain impossible.
Eppur si muove.
Up to this point, it is already clear that the principal author of the entry, Andy Schlafly (the mastermind of Conservapedia), really has no idea what he is talking about. High school students could have done a better job.
While few sensible people would consider Con-pedia a reliable source of anything useful, other than a chuckle or two, some naive, overly religious homeschoolers (or politicians!) might indeed be using Con-pedia as a credible resource. It is far from it.
Instead of a straightforward, factual, accurate explanation of a physical law, Con-pedia instead gets the physics all wrong, falsely claims only liberal politics ensures the equation’s persistence, and conflates religious belief with scientific discovery. Multiple levels of fail.
So, let’s see what else the entry gets wrong.
Paragraph 3 says:
Mass is a measure of an object’s inertia, in other words its resistance to acceleration. In contrast, the intrinsic energy of an object (such as an atom) is a function of electrostatic charge and other non-inertial forces, having nothing to do with gravity. Declaring the object’s energy to be a function of inertia rather than electrostatics is an absurd and impossible attempt to unify the forces of nature, contrary to Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — I began my commentary on Conservapedia’s ludicrous entry on E=mc2 by fisking its opening paragraph. Beginning with the false premise that the equation “purports to relate all matter to light,” the entry then introduces the principle of “Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge” and how BSF makes it clear that any unification theory is doomed to fail.
As I explained in the last post, E=mc2 does not purport to relate all matter to light — in fact, light does come from matter — but it suggests that matter and energy are essentially the same thing. The author of the Conservapedia entry, Andy Schlafly, clearly does not understand this basic fact of physics. I’m not sure he really understands Scriptural analysis, either, as we shall see.
Paragraph 2 of the E=mc2 entry goes like this:
Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge predicts that a unified theory of all the laws of physics is impossible, because light and matter were created at different times, in different ways, as described in the Book of Genesis.
Before I analyze this statement, which incidentally is offered with no further explanation, I need to introduce some terms.
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Cherry picking: selecting only that evidence which apparently supports one’s argument, while ignoring all contradictory evidence.
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Quote mining: selecting quotations from a source, usually out of context, so as to support one’s argument, or to denigrate the opponent’s argument by creating a “straw man” position.
This is a preview of Fisking Conservapedia: Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge . Read the full post (2447 words, estimated 9:47 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — Nincompoop is a word little used nowadays, but it’s appropriate for the likes of an Ivy League educated engineer who calls E = mc2 “liberal claptrap.”
Here is what Conservapedia’s Andy Schlafly has to say about Einstein’s famous equation, an equation which I hasten to add has been verified repeatedly in the last century.
E=mc² is a meaningless, almost nonsensical, statement that purports to relate all matter to light.[1] In fact, no theory has successfully unified the laws governing mass (i.e., gravity) with the laws governing light (i.e., electromagnetism), and numerous attempts to derive E=mc² in general from first principles have failed.[2] Political pressure, however, has since made it impossible for anyone pursuing an academic career in science to even question the validity of this nonsensical equation. Simply put, E=mc² is liberal claptrap[3] .
When an encyclopedia article begins with such breathtaking, mindnumbing stupidity, it’s hard to know where to start writing a critique of it. It’s fractally wrong, as the poster above says. At first, I thought I’d just let it slide, since no halfway intelligent human would bother using Conservapedia as a resource, but it’s been nagging at me for several days. So, I’m going to give fisking it a go, and try to exercise my physics muscles after four years of disuse.
E=mc² is a meaningless, almost nonsensical, statement that purports to relate all matter to light.[1]
This is a preview of Fisking Conservapedia: is E=mc2 really ‘liberal claptrap?’ . Read the full post (1217 words, 1 image, estimated 4:52 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
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