(ANTI)-Scientific American Magazine

Rare Flare “It was the brightest cosmic explosion ever observed, and astronomers are still hotly debating its origin and implications. (gamma rays) Despite its distance of 50,000 light-years, the December flare was brighter than the full moon.”

[1. Gamma rays, from 10 exp –10 to 10exp –12 centimeters in wavelength, are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere. Their lower limit is about 60,000 feet in altitude.

2. By contrast, visible light is about 10 exp –5 centimeters. Gamma rays are invisible to the human eye, unlike “the full moon.” ]

“The December 27, 2004, flare – the brightest blast ever observed – originated on a relatively nearby neutron star, a small, superdense stellar corpse. Called SGR 1806-20, it sports a magnetic field a quadrillion times as strong as Earth’s, potent enough to rob your car keys from your pocket if the star were as close as the moon.”

[To repeat, it is terribly misleading to call gamma rays “bright” when brightness normally refers to the characteristic of light visible to the human eye. I have never heard anyone call a powerful x-ray “bright.” Keys are made of brass, an alloy of copper and zinc. A few are made of aluminum. Brass, copper, zinc, and aluminum are all diamagnetic, i.e. they are not susceptible to magnetic fields as are ferromagnetic elements and alloys.]

“In this 21st century, science and politics are intertwined to a greater degree than ever before. ... the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) – has been defunct. Scrapped in September 1995 to save a paltry $22 million.”

“And the Bush administration is hardly the first to spin scientific findings to its own ends; both political parties have been guilty. Although the OTA was killed by conservatives, today both conservatives and liberals support reestablishing it.”

[Who was president in 1995 again? Oh yes. Bill “Loathing the Military” Clinton. Scientific American is not only anti-intellectual and anti-scientific, but it is also anti-conservative. The left-wing political agenda so prevalent in academia is ever present in Scientific American.

Leftists roundly condemn budget cuts “by conservatives,” even when the president in question was a Democrat, and in the next breath, Leftists condemn deficit spending by the Bush administration. Furthermore, Leftists condemn defense spending, always suggesting alternatives for spending that money on education, the homeless, and the hungry. Such fiscal comparisons are never made by Leftist elitists when the subject is science grants, research, or other pet projects however dubious their merit. The word “science” is sacrosanct like no other wherever the intellectually arrogant congregate.]

“It was a relief to read Mirsky’s articulate and humorous response to the irrational individuals who would destroy our schools by claiming that biblical literature is equivalent to scientific evidence. The antievolution brushfires have disturbed, even frightened, me for several years.” – Len Finn, Needham, Mass

[Mr. Finn shouldn’t be such a scaredy-cat. Actually it is atheists of the Left wing who have murdered more of their own citizens than Christians ever have and by many orders of magnitude. Atheist China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and their godless brethren have butchered and starved 100,000,000 or so just in the 20th Century, and their killings and starvation continue today, notably in North Korea and Africa. The brilliant proponents of design are not moved by biblical literature, but rather by the inherent design in everything we see, from the submicroscopic, to the super-macroscopic. The further and harder we look, the more the horizon seems to recede on our efforts to understand and explain. To pretend that energy, matter, light, reliable laws, reversible reactions, cycles, and the countless other Profound Fortuitous Interdependencies all just “happened” requires a deep and biased faith of the most naive kind. It is faith in absolutely nothing – complete and absolute nihilism. We’re all here because of nothing, but it all worked out splendidly well.]

“Unregulated euthanasia has occurred under conditions akin to back-alley abortions.”

[More Left-wing rhetoric, attempting to justify the butchery of killing innocent, unborn babies, even including those that are viable and sentient. The author seems to suggest that we likewise legalize murder and rape to move them out of the “back-alley”.]

“In the grand scheme of things, our observable universe is thought to be a small part of a multiverse. Other regions could have values of the fine-structure constant different from ours. In principle, astronauts could venture into those realms, but they would encounter a surreal scene, where the laws of physics that enable their existence were pulled out from under their feet.”

[Astronauts could “venture into” other universes. What factual, falsifiable evidence is there for “multiverses”? How shall we get there when own solar system is 100,000 light-years across, and our universe is, shall we say, considerably larger than that? Bring plenty of cheeseburgers. And oxygen.]

Page 57: “And yet, remarkably, no one has ever successfully predicted or explained any of the constants. Physicists have no idea why they take the special numerical values that they do. In SI units, c is 299,792,458; G is 6.673 x 10-11; and me is 9.10938188 x 10 –31. The only thread running through the values is that if many of them were even slightly different, complex atomic structures such as living beings would not be possible.”

[Whenever I have expressed such amazement at this Anthropic Principle, the Left has consistently ridiculed me as being ignorant. These values HAD to be what they are, they respond. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here,” they say. This circular reasoning is positively Darwinian. Animals are fit because they survive, and they survive because they’re fit.]

A bar chart shows that for the past fifty years, women have consistently been more obese than men by prevalences of 33% for women to 28% for men.

[These horrific sexist data are deeply offensive to anyone brainwashed by “feminist” (sic) studies. Everyone knows that women are superior to men in most respects, and completely equal in all the rest. Female inferiority in any domain is scientifically unacceptable. Ask any female feminist/scientist, preferably from the Feminist Studies Department of All Knowing Science Research.]

“When the universe began in the big bang, the energy released should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. How could such a universe evolve to what we see today, where almost everything is mate of matter?”

[1. Science consists of observing our surroundings, and trying to understand and explain them. It is profoundly anti-scientific to suggest how things ought to be.

2. How can anyone suggest that “almost everything is made of matter” when there is no possible way to know this? Volumes have been written on the nebulous “dark matter.”]

“A new regulatory paradigm is needed, but the Bush administration is heading in the WRONG DIRECTION.”

[Whether the subject is abortion, funding, regulations, global warming, pollution, defense spending – you name it – scientists, academics, intellectuals, ivory tower elitists consistently show themselves to be highly politicized liberals. These liberals will of course tell you that science SHOULD be apolitical, but their own biases belie their pretensions. George Bush? Stupid. Ronald Reagan? Doofus. Bill Clinton? Well, he was “human,” but gosh was he “intelligent.” And that’s what really counts, even if you broke your campaign promise to cut taxes, were impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice, raped Juanita Broaddrick, refused Sudan’s offer to turn Osama bin Laden over to us, and turned a blind eye to the Rwandan Genocide of 800,000 unarmed civilians.]

Page 112: The Editors RECOMMEND Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos by Michio Kaku, Doubleday, 2005 In the end, as our universe is dying, will civilization be able to move to another universe? / Moving to another universe is one possibility cited by Kaku. / A third is that “an entire civilization may inject its seed through a dimensional gateway and reestablish itself, in its full glory.”

[When Leftist scientists are not lamenting mankind’s horrors, including “global warming” and “pollution” and “overpopulation,” they’re planning absurd ways to expand our evil ways throughout the Multiverse. Imagine the pollution Homo Pollutus will create in those crowded wormholes. You would think that the Leftist scientists would be ecstatic that there will be an end to our pollution and global warming, but then again, you would be wrong. Leftists are nothing if not inconsistent.]

“Wayne Brightly was a social studies teacher at the John Philip Sousa School in New York City, with a conspicuous record of nonachievement that included multiple failures of his teaching certification exam. Rubin Leitner had spent part of his life homeless.. / Brightly allegedly intimidated Leitner into taking the exam in his place last summer. Brightly reportedly paid Leitner two dollars for his services, which would cover a one-way subway trip to the test site.”

[Despite an almost fourfold increase in real dollar spending for education over the past five decades, there has been no improvement in educational achievement. For this, we can thank the Left, which has for that entire period dominated public education. Wayne Brightly is obviously an ignorant incompetent and a cheater, who has no business in any classroom. On average, teachers graduated in the bottom third of their college classes, and education majors consistently score at the bottom of SAT test takers. If throwing more money at this problem has not helped in fifty years, it certainly will not in the years ahead.]

Ibid: The author goes on to admit having cheated by taking the SAT for someone else. He admits that he “scored much higher on the math side than on the verbal exam, which could explain why these columns may be forgettable, but they almost always exactly meet the assigned count of 650 words. Seriously, they do.”

[So Scientific (sic) American (sic) concludes with an article by an author who cheated on the SAT just as the incompetent New York City teacher did. If Mr. Mirsky does not write well on an important subject, at least he counts his words carefully. And of that, this math man is justifiably proud.]

Two observations off the cuff:

...the December [gamma ray] flare was brighter than the full moon...

This is common language in physics; for example, the intensity of a particle beam coursing through a particle accelerator is referred to as the 'brightness' of the beam. No doubt, in the present context, the meaning is something like this: the gamma ray intensity of the flare as measured by a gamma ray telescope was greater than the light intensity of the full moon as measured by a light-gathering telescope.

How shall we get there when [our?] own solar system is 100,000 light-years across...

Our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across; our solar system is only about 7.336 billion miles across (about 0.0012 of a light year).

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