Feeling Cranky?

crank |kraNGk|

noun

an eccentric person, esp. one who is obsessed by a particular subject or theory [New Oxford American Dictionary]

I present three people I have come across in my journey through the World Wide Web. I'll let you be the judge as to their eccentricity.

1. John Stojanowski

Back in February, I wrote a post about former Oakland A star Jose Canseco and his musings on the strength of gravity and the size of the dinosaurs. One month later, someone left a comment:

Mr. Canseco apparently has read my theory, 'The Gravity Theory of Mass Extinction', which explains how surface gravity changed. The theory posits that when a supercontinent such as Pangea moves latitudinally, the core elements move off-center to maintain the Earth's conservation of angular momentum.

Therefore, Mr. Canseco cannot claim that this is his theory.

If interested, visit a summary of the theory: http://www.dinoextinct.com/page13.pdf.

While I can't be sure Mr. Stojanowski left the comment, the person does write "my theory."

Let's examine his speculations.

The Gravity Theory of Mass Extinction (GTME) [1] is a theory that explains the causation of mass extinction events throughout the history of the Earth. It also posits the reason for dinosaur gigantism, flood basalt volcanism, rapid changes in marine eustatic sea level, the Earth’s geomagnetic reversals and geomagnetic secular variation. The theory asserts that all of these phenomena are linked together. The foundation of the theory is the assertion that the Earth’s core elements (i.e., inner core, outer core and the densest part of the lower mantle), under certain conditions, can be displaced from their current Earth-centric position. [emphasis in the original]

CREDIT: John Stojanowski

Here's the crux of his thoughts.  As Pangaea split, the core of the core shifted from a off-center position to where it is today - at the center of the Earth.  The initial displacement of the core, he claims, would result in a smaller gravitational field on the supercontinent and allowing the evolution of gigantism among certain reptilian species. He further posits that the motion of the core to the center with the resulting increase in the gravitational field is the major cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

How does Mr. Stojanowski explain the core shift? He thinks that it was produced by the accumulation of the continental crust on one side of the planet. I won't go into all the gory details, but this situation is why your car tires must be balanced.  If the mass of the tire and wheel is not uniformly distributed, the tire will wobble. Your mechanic adds small weights to the rim to prevent this. I'll omit the physical and the mathematical details, and simply state that the largest possible change to the gravitation field is about 1%.  On a side note, the astronauts in the International Space Station orbit 200 miles above the Earth and experience a gravitation field that is only 2.5% smaller.

2. Steven Christ

Oh, where do I begin with Steven Christ. He is a proponent of the Hollow Earth. The Earth is hollow, and we live on the inside. You have to see for yourselves.

The Earth You Live IN...prt 1

If this video is not enough, just go to YouTube and search for his name. Want more after that. Visit his website missteribabylonestar.

3. Louis Savain

I ran across Louis on the creationist website Darwin's God. I commented on Photosynthesis Relies on Quantum Coherence: When Will They Cry Uncle?

Louis replied with typical creationist flair.

So I became intrigued.  A quick Google and I found his blog Rebel Science. Wow!  Louis is some sort of computer guy who has dreams of revolutionizing computer science.  In his ebook How to Solve the Parallel Program Crisis, he claims the the problem with the computer industry is using "the Turing Machine as the de facto computing model in the last century." His answer is "to switch to a non-threaded, non-algorithmic, synchronous (deterministic), reactive and implicitly parallel model."

However, I am not going to take issue with his programming; it's his physics that is… Hmmm, how do I put this politely? Oh, yes. Eccentric.

Louis takes issue with Newton's 1st law of motion, "an object at rest stays at rest and an object traveling in a straight line at a constant speed will continue in that uniform motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced, external force." Newton's 1st law is superstition according to Louis. 

Then he takes on the entire physics community. "I claimed that the physics community’s understanding of motion is fundamentally flawed, on a par with the flat earth hypothesis."

What truly lifts Louis above the rest is his insistence that motion is impossible, and he proves it.

Why is motion in spacetime impossible? It has to do with the definitions of space and time and the equation of velocity v = dx/dt. What the equation is saying is that, if an object moves over any distance d x, there is an elapsed time d t. Since time is defined in physics as a parameter for denoting change (evolution), the equation for velocity along the time axis must be given as v = dt/dt which is self-referential. The self-reference comes from having to divide dt by itself. dt/dt always equals 1 because the units cancel out. This is of course meaningless as far as velocity is concerned.

It is not only not right, it is not even wrong.*

The velocity is defined to be the rate of change of an object's position, but Louis makes a mistake here that I have never seen a student make in my 24 years as a professional physicist. He is seriously confused about what a variable is and what an axis on a graph represents. The equation for velocity along the time axis? Louis doesn't seem to realize that motion along the time axis is simply an object at rest at the origin, that is dx = 0.  0/dt = 0. 

I bet if Louis runs across this blog, he'll call me stupid. Or worse.

Reply to stereox112.
CREDIT: Louis Savain

*For an interesting physics anecdote, see the Wikipedia entry.

Good Bye University

This is a YouTube video of a student, ABillyRock, saying goodbye to the University of Utah.  I don't understand her.  She complains that the university "bills itself to be a world-class university," yet she has presumably spent the last four years there.  She derides her Theatre department as "third world class."  She spent four years there despite it being "waste of my time and a waste of my money."  She whines, "I'm so sick of paying for it."

Here's how I see it.  ABillyRock may have wasted her money, but she wasted mine, too.  The University of Utah uses both state and federal taxes to subsidize her education.  She seems that she didn't take advantage of opportunities afforded her nor did she appreciate them. 

I really don't get people of this ilk.  They complain about the American education system all the while being a part of it.  ABillyRock had other choices.  There are plenty of private institutions - why didn't she choose NYU, Northwestern, Stanford, USC, Tufts, or Yale.  All highly rated theatre departments.  Later in the video, she reveals her politics.  Once she did, I wondered why she didn't attend a for-profit institution such as the University of Phoenix.  [For the record, Phoenix don't offer a theatre degree.]

Courtesy of the University of Utah

She goes on to "commiserate with any of you who have ever gone to or are currently attending public university."

"Public education from primary all the way through university - for the most part, in my opinion - is complete bullshit."

"It is a factory turns out statists by the millions."

Did you see/hear that?  Statists.  Simply put, a statist is a believer in a government that has substantial centralized control like a federal style government.  Like the United States of America.

The only people I have ever heard use the term statist are right-wingers.  If I remember my US history courses correctly, we tried a non-federal system.  Remember learning about the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union?  It states "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated." The US's first government was so weak, the founders knew they had to replace it with a much stronger, more centralized, federal one.  I would ask her if she would prefer going back to the confederation, but her history courses were probably a waste of her time, too.

Then we get her philosophy of education.  "I favor how we used to learn trade.  Apprenticeships, that sort of thing.  How you actually learn a trade.  Not sitting in a class hearing about how Karl Marx is Jesus."

She means neither apprenticeships nor trades.  Usually a trade refers to a job requiring expert manual skills.  Examples of trades include electrician, plumbing, and carpentry.  In many trades, aspects of the apprentice program has been replaced by on-the-job training and vocational programs at community colleges or for-profit institutions like DeVry.  Theatre has never been considered a trade; it is an art.

She may be referring to mentoring.  The mentor relationship, an experienced person counseling and training someone new, is important in academia, the arts, and business.   Unfortunately, ABillyRock probably never tried to develop a relationship with one of her professors and so deprived herself of the very thing she desired, a mentor.

"Karl Marx is Jesus." I'll give her the benefit of the doubt here.  I assume somewhere, sometime in her 16 years of public education a teacher explained hyperbole. 

A Trillion YouTube Hits

I was listening to KPCC last night, and they reported that YouTube had one trillion hits this year.  One freaking' trillion! There's only 300 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Let me put this into perspective.  If someone were to give you $1,000,000 (one million) with the requirement that you had to spend $1000 a day, it would take you 1000 days.  2 years, 38 weeks, and 4 days.

Let's suppose then that someone gives you $1,000,000,000 (a billion) with the same stipulation.  You won't be done shopping for 2,739 years, 37 weeks, and 6 days.

So low long would it take to spend a $1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion)? Over 2.7 million years.

So people of the world spent so much time on the Internet that they watched one trillion YouTube videos?  I have no idea how long an average video lasts, but let me assume the average one is three minutes long.  That means people were watching 5.7 million years worth of videos just this year.

KPCC also reported what the most watched video was this year.  Rebecca Black's Friday.  

"It's Friday, Friday, get-en down on Friday. Everybody's looking' forward to the weekend.  Partyin, partying, yah!  Partyin, partying, yah! Fun, fun, fun, fun…"

13,901,677 views.  Each lasting 3 minutes 38 seconds.  A freaking' eternity.