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The gullibility of the scientifically challenged media and buying public never ceases to amaze. Spurred perhaps by sharply higher gasoline prices, backyard inventors and shady promoters are pushing the latest wonder technology, “HHO gas,” otherwise known as water gas, Brown’s gas or Klein’s gas.
For a tidy investment of a few hundred dollars, one can adapt a car to run on HHO, or for a few thousand, one can buy a device to produce HHO at home for transportation or for welding. Cars apparently can run for miles on mere puffs of HHO, and torches can burn holes in seconds through most metals.
I would encourage anyone buying such devices to first watch videos of the Graf Hindenburg accident in 1937 or the Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986, to get an idea of the Promethean power of HHO gas.
Wait, 1937? Isn’t HHO supposed to be a new technology? you ask. Nope. In fact, the principles behind the production of HHO have been known and used for close to 200 years. If you were lucky, you might have even made some in middle school science class.
If you run electric current through water, you break water down into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen, both gases at standard temperature (20 C) and pressure (1 atmosphere). Very little current is required; a 6-volt lantern battery does the trick nicely, although quite slowly.
This is a preview of The latest “scientific breakthrough” scam — water gas . Read the full post (901 words, 4 images, estimated 3:36 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
Ed Brayton has an excellent essay on Dispatches from the Culture Wars explaining why intelligent design and creationism are not real sciences. If you know any creationists or ID supporters, refer them to this essay. It minces no words.
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In the wake of the Nevada graduation speech tempest, rightwing pundits, like Sean Hannity, are once again declaiming there is a “war on Christianity.” It’s just a lot of hot air.
Christians run afoul of the Constitution and the legal system, not because they are some kind of special group, but because they are simply the loudest and most obtrusive group. In other words, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the oil.
Suppose we take a sample of 100 individuals representative of the US population. According to the statistics at this site, of that sample, there would be 84 Christians, two Jews, two Muslims and one Buddhist. The rest would presumably be “other,” Hindus, wiccans, pagans, atheists and what have you.
Of the Christians, we could expect 52 to be Protestant, 24 to be Catholic and 2 to be Mormons. I’m not sure where eastern Orthodox would fit in.
Now, let’s analyze this population sample. Of these 100 individuals, who would be most likely to proselytize, insist their religious practices should be public events, and demand their beliefs achieve primacy in US law and US schools.
The Buddhist? Nope. Buddhists are pretty mellow. Ditto Hindus, if you make the possible exception of the Hare Krishnas.
Muslims, with the exception of the Nation of Islam, do not typically proselytize among non-believers, at least in the US. Given current global politics, trying to win converts to Islam would be unwise, to say the least. Nor do they insist that their children’s public schools call off school lunches during Ramadan.
This is a preview of Statistics tell the truth; there is no “war on Christians” . Read the full post (688 words, 1 image, estimated 2:45 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
This post contains just a few off-the-cuff observations. I hope to develop it into a more elaborate analysis after some more research.
Once upon a time, proponents of intelligent design (ID) argued that ID was scientifically based, and with sufficient maturation would develop into a scientific theory as robust as the theory of evolution. Their lobbying against the exclusive teaching of evolution in biology classrooms focused in part on what they called “teach the controversy” — that evolution (in their words) was a controversial theory and not accepted by all biologists.
Basically, their arguments centered around ID as science. That was before Dover.
US District Court John E. Jones III ruled in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District that ID was in fact not science, but in effect a religious belief. I quote, “The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.” (page 43)
That Jones was a Bush appointee — no wild liberal he — only rubbed salt in the IDists’ wounds.
Following Jones’ fairly detailed fisking of the “ID is science” contention, the ID crowd has adapted a different strategy: equate acceptance of evolution with religious belief or cultic faith. In other words, the new meme is “evolution isn’t science at all.”
Desperate, no?
Assisting in the spread of this latest argument is the rightwing polemicist Ann Coulter, who has devoted a significant section of her new book to blast evolution as a “discredited mystery religion of the 19th century.”
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The on-again, off-again evolution debate with Pennsylvania physics teacher Tom Ritter is apparently off indefinitely. It seems the organizers failed to arrange for a venue for the event.
I have this news from the opposing debater, Tony Whitson, who at the eleventh hour agreed to argue in favor of evolution as a science. Ritter was to argue that evolution is a faith. Whitson says the debate’s sponsor, the Constitution Party of Pennsylvania, asked several high schools to host the debate. There were no takers.
So the debate has been called off until further notice.
Now, it seems to me that, if you wish to hold a debate, it would be wise to arrange for a venue before advertising the event. Trying to find a high school to host it at the last minute near the end of the school year is just plain ludicrous.
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The big news this weekend is the earthquake in Indonesia, a big one which has killed 3,000 or more people.
Where were the great prognosticators? Did any of them predict such a catastrophe? Given their self-promotion, one would assume that they would have certainly sensed a 6.2 magnitude earthquake.
Eric Julien, the comet collision dude, sent out alarmist bulletins warning those living along the Atlantic Coast that a tsunami would occur on May 25. He mentioned nothing about catastrophes in the South Pacific.
Stan Deyo, who styles himself an earthquake predictor, suggests on his website that he in fact forecasted the quake. As if.
Deyo’s site includes a daily thermal map of the world. Circles on the map indicate likelihood of tectonic activity, he claims. Well, his map does in fact include a circle near the epicenter of the Indonesian quake. There are also scores of other circles all over the map, and AFAIK no quakes or temblors have been reported at all those sites.
Saying Deyo predicted the quake is like saying I can predict it will rain tomorrow. If I don’t mention a locality, I am bound to be correct, since at any given time it is raining somewhere on the planet. Deyo made no specific mention of Indonesia nor of a major quake anywhere in the world on that date, so he predicted nothing.
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Well, suffice it to say, a comet did not hit the earth, as self-described expert Eric Julien had predicted for May 25. As NASA and most other sane observers realized, the alleged perpetrator passed by the earth some six million miles away about ten days earlier, sending no rogue fragments toward the Atlantic Ocean, as Julien had warned.
Interestingly, Julien’s posse of supporters gradually abandoned him as the cometary impact date approached, perhaps put off by his near manic insistence of being to able to predict comet trajectories better than the world’s astronomers and his seeming ignorance of the laws of physics.
Exopolitics.org, which had championed Julien’s prognostications, distanced themselves from him with a lengthy open letter to site visitors, and George Noury of Coast to Coast AM also averred on air that perhaps Julien was a teeny bit wrong about this whole comet caper.
Julien, for his part, still seems conviced that something significant will happen sometime around the 25th of May, and his new site suggests that a fragment may have hit, but the impact is being kept hush-hush by the powers-that-be.
Whatever. Why can’t these psychics/channelers/astrologers/alienwatchers just admit they’re wrong?
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