Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Breakfast Tune: Steve Martin & Earl Scruggs – Foggy Mountain Breakdown
Today in History
Lindbergh baby kidnapped; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed caught in Pakistan; Bobby Sands begins hunger strike; JFK creates Peace Corps; Ron Howard born.
In Act I, Violetta, a notorious (c’mon fallen woman? Everyone knows women don’t like sex, it’s just something they tolerate because they like babies) courtesan, spurns Alfredo so she can live her life the way she wants (Sempre libera – Always Free)
In Act II Violetta is living in a country house with Alfredo, whom she’s decided she loves and has completely abandoned her former life. What? Did she get kidnapped by aliens? I swear, I just went to the lobby to visit the bathroom. Is this the same theater? The same Opera? Am I living some nightmarish Groundhog Day where I don’t even get to listen to I’ve Got You Babe at 6 am every morning for eternity?
Cher, I’m expecting your retweet. Not as funny as Kathy Griffin? I beg to differ.
Oh, and Alfredo’s Dad doesn’t like her because she’s a sex worker and he’s a hung up old jerk.
Soon enough.
So things are going to perdition in a pedicab. As it develops Violetta is liquidating her assets in Paris to support her suburban lifestyle. Alfredo sets off to correct this (us guys, always looking for solutions instead of simply listening and sympathizing) while his father Giorgio asks her to dump Alfredo because her tawdry past is tainting his daughter (Pura siccome un angelo – Pure as an angel, God gave a daughter) and ruining her marriage prospects.
Ah, Twew Wuve-
“He didn’t come.” It takes talent that, and a firm knowlege of Baseball statistics.
Of course by now I’m looking for a stout stick to bash Giorgio with before committing seppuku with my plastic yogurt spork (What? I visited the snack bar, OK?) and this is just the first Scene.
In the second Scene at a gambling party where Alfredo is trying to raise the money to satisfy Violleta’s debts (because how else are you going to get cash besides Powerball?) after a rousing chorus of Paradise by the Dashboard Light (in Italian Noi siamo zingarelle venute da lontano. Di Madride noi siam mattadori) Violetta coincidently appears with the Baron Douphol (Beauregard Burnside). And I’m a handsome Matador from Biscay. Anyway Alfredo insults Violetta by offering her the money he has won (yes, we’re back to Pretty Woman, did we ever actually leave? I want the fairy tale.).
Giorgio enters and denounces his son’s behavior (Di sprezzo degno sè stesso rende chi pur nell’ira la donna offende. – “A man, who even in anger, offends a woman renders himself deserving of contempt.”). Violetta turns to Alfredo: Alfredo, Alfredo, di questo core non puoi comprendere tutto l’amore… – “Alfredo, Alfredo, you can’t understand all the love in this heart…” (cough).
Ok, so the spork was only sufficient to gouge out my eyes and if I’m going to chop off my ears and eviscerate myself I’ll need something more substantial, like a plastic knife. Fortunately there is a break before Act 3.
Did I mention Violetta is dying of Tuberculosis? Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way. Tuberculosis is fortunately one of those ultimately fatal but lingering diseases that allow you to belt out a few Arias before you (cough) croak (Gran Dio!…morir sì giovane – “Great God!…to die so young”).
After singing a duet with Alfredo, Violetta suddenly revives, exclaiming that the pain and discomfort have left her. A moment later, she dies in Alfredo’s arms.
Now that’s entertainment. Pardon me while I dab my tears before descending from the box.
TMC swears she’s going to teach me to be less cynical (as if she were less cynical than I, I’m a warm cuddly Teddy Bear by comparison- ask anyone) and that I will learn to love Opera. Of course, just like I love children- par-boiled and chicken fried with a pan gravy. Tastes just like rattle snake.
Oh, so now you want to see La Traviata. Here it is at La Scala in Milan, all 2 hours and 25 minutes of it.
It has the virtue of French subtitles (Rule Number One). Now in fairness I didn’t want to be a barber anyway, except in Seville.
Did I mention natural tenor? Of course I played the Barber.
And now I’m really going, I’ve done what I can do. So why don’t you get going?
Well. I haven’t actually inflicted the damage I intended. “The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.”
Polly, meanwhile, buys a bank, and runs it with Macheath’s henchmen, making him a bank director, and she then arranges surety for Macheath to leave prison. This causes a change of heart by her parents – her father tries to stop the protest march but fails.
Jenny visits the prison, and aids Macheath’s escape: he makes his way to the bank, where he discovers his new status. Brown, whose police career is ruined by the demonstration, and Peachum, also come to the bank and agree to link up.
Now that sounds more like the real world where a pimp and beggar-master, a corrupt politician, and an assassin hook up to loot the people who love them and think they’re heros.
Well, when Johnny was first starting out, he was signed to a personal services contract with this big-band leader. And as his career got better and better, he wanted to get out of it. But the band leader wouldn’t let him. Now, Johnny is my father’s godson. So my father went to see this bandleader and offered him $10,000 to let Johnny go, but the bandleader said no. So the next day, my father went back, only this time with Luca Brasi. Within an hour, he had a signed release for a certified check of $1000.
I have the same thing in French where it’s worth a penny more and I can arbitrage the spread.
And that my friends is Opera. I don’t really hope I’ve ruined it for you so much as made your existence a spiraling hell where all emotion is sucked into a black hole of despair before you are torn apart by tidal forces you can barely comprehend and debates about black and blue or gold and white.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Germany’s Reichstag burns, giving the Nazis under Adolf Hitler a pretext to seize absolute power; A cease-fire ends the Persian Gulf War; Actress Elizabeth Taylor born; Children’s TV host Fred Rogers dies.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
The real problem with physics is the difference between a wave and a particle.
Hey, hey, hey, calm down, you two. New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping! Here, I’ll spray some on your mop and some on your butterscotch pudding.
Mmmmm, tastes terrific!
And just look at that shine!
So imagine a BB (you’ll put your eye out), if you shoot it through a hole you’ll get a mark in your target (there’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza (who “emulates a Rogerian psychotherapist“).
ELIZA has almost no intelligence whatsoever, only tricks like string substitution and canned responses based on keywords. Yet when the original ELIZA first appeared in the 60’s, some people actually mistook her for human. The illusion of intelligence works best, however, if you limit your conversation to talking about yourself and your life.
…
* hello eliza. I am feeling sad about moonlight kingdom
> Did you come to me because you are feeling sad about moonlight kingdom?
* no, I came to you because I’m researching rogerianism.
> Did you come to me because you are researching rogerianism?
* Yes
> Are you Sure?
* I’ve told you that twice now
> Oh… that twice now?
* wow
> OK… “I’ve told me that twice now”. Tell me more.
These marks tend to cluster kind of fuzzily around the hole because BBs only travel in straight lines (ok, ballistic curves but for the purposes of this experiment we can discount the influence of gravity until later when it becomes relevent or not). Even if you move around the BB gun you get this clustering because at certain angles of attack the BB is larger than the hole you’re trying to shoot through.
Master this technique and you can become a world class goalie.
If Democritus is right does the world behave this way? I mean anyone Plato, the proto-Neolib that advocated man (women? hah!) was so stupid that democracy is an unworkable farce and the only political state with a chance to succeed is a dictatorship of elite philosopher-kings (got to love Plato, especially The Republic if you’re one of the chosen few morons with the right credentials) hated so much he wanted to burn their books can’t be all bad, can they?
Like many questions the answer is in how you measure the cat.
Because you see, in the real world, on certain scales, if you take a small enough BB and fire it through a hole you don’t get a clump, you get a wave. How small is small enough? Go down to the beach. On the scale of an ocean a drop of water is small enough.
What is interesting about waves is that they transfer energy from one place to another without disturbing the particles (or non-particles) between them. In the most commonly observable kind of wave (water in a test tank) this energy is transmitted in an up and down kinetic force so the apparently two dimensional surface in fact oscillates in a third dimension that is not usually measured.
Simple, right?
Not really, scientists still have a problem with spooky action at a distance so they keep junking up a nice clean vacuum with cat hair, and dark matter and energy (the good, the bad, it’s all the same)…
and extra dimensions (you can never have enough, I personally favor 26 dimensional Bosonic string theory because it goes all the way to 26)-
Feeling entangled yet? You can’t be objective about Nixon.
In Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon,” a samurai has been murdered, but it’s not clear why or by whom. Various characters involved tell their versions of the events, but their accounts contradict one another. You can’t help wondering: Which story is true?
But the film also makes you consider a deeper question: Is there a true story, or is our belief in a definite, objective, observer-independent reality an illusion?
This very question, brought into sharper, scientific focus, has long been the subject of debate in quantum physics. Is there a fixed reality apart from our various observations of it? Or is reality nothing more than a kaleidoscope of infinite possibilities?
This month, a paper published online in the journal Nature Physics presents experimental research that supports the latter scenario – that there is a “Rashomon effect” not just in our descriptions of nature, but in nature itself.
Over the past hundred years, numerous experiments on elementary particles have upended the classical paradigm of a causal, deterministic universe. Consider, for example, the so-called double-slit experiment. We shoot a bunch of elementary particles – say, electrons – at a screen that can register their impact. But in front of the screen, we place a partial obstruction: a wall with two thin parallel vertical slits. We look at the resulting pattern of electrons on the screen. What do we see?
If the electrons were like little pellets (which is what classical physics would lead us to believe), then each of them would go through one slit or the other, and we would see a pattern of two distinct lumps on the screen, one lump behind each slit. But in fact we observe something entirely different: an interference pattern, as if two waves are colliding, creating ripples.
Astonishingly, this happens even if we shoot the electrons one by one, meaning that each electron somehow acts like a wave interfering with itself, as if it is simultaneously passing through both slits at once.
So an electron is a wave, not a particle? Not so fast. For if we place devices at the slits that “tag” the electrons according to which slit they go through (thus allowing us to know their whereabouts), there is no interference pattern. Instead, we see two lumps on the screen, as if the electrons, suddenly aware of being observed, decided to act like little pellets.
To test their commitment to being particles, we can tag them as they pass through the slits – but then, using another device, erase the tags before they hit the screen. If we do that, the electrons go back to their wavelike behavior, and the interference pattern miraculously reappears.
There is no end to the practical jokes we can pull on the poor electron! But with a weary smile, it always shows that the joke is on us. The electron appears to be a strange hybrid of a wave and a particle that’s neither here and there nor here or there. Like a well-trained actor, it plays the role it’s been called to perform. It’s as though it has resolved to prove the famous Bishop Berkeley maxim “to be is to be perceived.”
…
The answer depends on how you interpret the equations of quantum mechanics, the mathematical theory that has been developed to describe the interactions of elementary particles. The success of this theory is unparalleled: Its predictions, no matter how “spooky,” have been observed and verified with stunning precision. It has also been the basis of remarkable technological advances. So it is a powerful tool. But is it also a picture of reality?
Here, one of the biggest issues is the interpretation of the so-called wave function, which describes the state of a quantum system. For an individual particle like an electron, for example, the wave function provides information about the probabilities that the particle can be observed at particular locations, as well as the probabilities of the results of other measurements of the particle that you can make, such as measuring its momentum.
Does the wave function directly correspond to an objective, observer-independent physical reality, or does it simply represent an observer’s partial knowledge of it?
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Open the Pod Bay doors HAL.
I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Ferdinand Marcos flees the Philippines; Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounces Josef Stalin; Samuel Colt patents the revolver; Muhammad Ali becomes world boxing champ; Musician George Harrison born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Republicans LOVE to hate the poor. They see them as inferior, lazy moochers who just bask in their poorness and enjoy all of the happiness being poor brings them. They tell America that poor people could stop being poor if they just work hard enough.
What they forget to mention when they paint this fictional portrait of happy poor people are the struggles the roughly 50 million Americans who live below the poverty line face. Normal, everyday things that cause someone with little or no money to weep in frustration.
Because of the ruling, there is an opportunity for people to try to find out if their communications were among those shared by NSA with GCHQ. Intelligence agencies use information like ip addresses and email addresses as “selectors” when sifting through the massive quantities of data they collect. GCHQ will comply with the IPT’s ruling by searching “selectors” it received from the NSA prior to December 2014.
But this won’t happen automatically. People need to actually file requests with the IPT. To help people do so, PI is collecting people’s names, numbers, and emails in order to assist them in asserting their rights and finding out whether those selectors were subject to unlawful sharing. If they were, PI will help individuals seek a declaration that that person’s privacy rights have been violated under Article 8 and Article 10 of the UK Human Rights Act, the law that codified the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. Once the IPT issues a declaration for an individual, that individual can also request that their records be deleted. There’s no need to be a UK citizen-anyone can participate.
So instead of what I should have been doing, which was writing a kick ass Breakfast Club, I spent last night watching a movie called Moonrise Kingdom with my family and a few friends.
I think their intention was that I should like this movie, which I do. It’s a coming of age love story between two quirky misfits set in the Penobscot Islands, just about the best place on the planet as far as I’m concerned. It features Bill Murray, one of my favorite actors, and Bruce Willis, in one of his less objectionable roles.
Things work out well in the end, most of the jerks come to the realization that they are being jerks and stop it and become inspired to aid the course of true love.
If it’s still available on YouTube I’ll put it up tonight as a Sunday Movie Spectacular, but I’ll warn you in advance that unless you want to spend between .99 and $2.99 for an Amazon stream or a month or two rooting around the remainder bin, you’ll want to install this tool (Free YouTube Downloader) and grab a copy for yourself. It comes with the usual load of bloatware, so choose ‘custom install’ and decline where possible. View on YouTube, Share, copy the http:// code and paste it in the downloader, hit the downward pointing arrow on the right.
The rest of the audience felt it was terrifically uplifting and funny, but it left me kind of sad and depressed.
I haven’t quite worked that out yet which is why I’ll have to watch it again, but I think a part of it is that I am 120+ years old and no longer have the innocence and enthusiasm of youth and true belief. Instead I am trapped in the ashes of past decisions, mostly good but some bad, along with the awful certainty that things never really change for the better and the best and most heroic you can hope to do is keep sticking your fingers in the dike until the tide overwhelms you. The closest thing to actual excitement I can muster is a rather cynical and insincere quote from a better known Bill Murray movie-
Excuse me Egon? You said crossing the streams was bad! You’re going to endanger us, you’re going to endanger our client – the nice lady, who paid us in advance before she became a dog…
Not necessarily. There’s definitely a very slim chance we’ll survive.
…
I like this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it! Let’s do it!
But how does this relate to Art Music?
Well, most of the music in the movie comes from the pen of Benjamin Britten, a central figure of mid-20th Century British Art Music which the female lead plays incessantly on a battery powered record player she stole borrowed from her brother.
This is not surprising, among the works he’s best known for is The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra which if you are of a certain age and cultural background will fill you with instant nostalgia.
But he wrote other, more serious, things too and while he has a resume that proves his mastery of all the conventional forms, he’s best known by older students for his vocal compositions which include many popular Operas (“according to Operabase, they are performed worldwide more than those of any other composer born in the 20th century, and only Puccini and Richard Strauss come ahead of him if the list is extended to all operas composed after 1900.”) and many, many complicated and difficult a cappella pieces sadistic Choirmasters use to torture their Choruses and expose their vocal weakness in front of the public (have I mentioned I spent 5 years in purgatory Choir and am a natural, but very bad, Tenor?). I suppose this is only to be expected given his Edwardian, Public School education.
Once upon a time there was a prep-school boy. … He was quite an ordinary little boy … he loved cricket, only quite liked football (although he kicked a pretty “corner”); he adored mathematics, got on all right with history, was scared by Latin Unseen; he behaved fairly well, only ragged the recognised amount, so that his contacts with the cane or the slipper were happily rare (although one nocturnal expedition to stalk ghosts left its marks behind); he worked his way up the school slowly and steadily, until at the age of thirteen he reached that pinnacle of importance and grandeur never to be quite equalled in later days: the head of the Sixth, head-prefect, and Victor Ludorum. But – there was one curious thing about this boy: he wrote music. His friends bore with it, his enemies kicked a bit but not for long (he was quite tough), the staff couldn’t object if his work and games didn’t suffer. He wrote lots of it, reams and reams of it.
He was very conscious of the tenuous hold Art Music had on the public and did many film scores and live appearances as a featured performer (pianist) or conductor to pay the bills. Many of his pieces dealt with alienation, existential angst, and the corruption of innocence.
He was an out homosexual in a long term relationship with his protégé and partner Peter Pears and because of his orientation and his interest in educating young people (as well as his habit, unfortunately common among people of a personality type I share, of simply writing off relationships that don’t work) was the subject of many scurrilous rumors about pedophilia which extensive historical analysis has shown to be no more justified in his case than that of Charles Dodgson, and a secret syphilis infection that was dismissed as “complete rubbish” by his Doctor and the Hospital where he died in 1973 of complications after cardiac surgery.
Rather than the overplayed Young Person’s Guide, today I offer Gloriana, an Opera in 3 Acts written in celebration of Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953. It’s one of a few works of his that was not a critical success, probably because Elizabeth I (Gloriana) is portrayed “as a sympathetic, but flawed, character motivated largely by vanity and desire.”
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Breakfast Tune: Old Time Religion (Arlo Guthrie/Pete Seeger – Precioius Friend)
Today in History
This day in history: Malcolm X assassinated; President Richard Nixon visits China; Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart makes a tearful confession; Steve Fossett is the first to fly across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.
So this is a story I’ve toldbefore but not with such detail and outrage.
The essence of the scientific method is that theories are disprovable (by contradictory experimental results) and that experiments are replicable. The reason I call Economics no more than Shamen dancing around a corpse shaking rattles is that the theories are not disprovable (for the most part, since like all social sciences experiments to test the conclusion are impossible to arrange and only observation is feasable) and when examining the results of natural experiments (oh, say austerity in Greece) they are shown to be in direct contradiction of the predicted results.
It’s worse than that he’s dead Jim, Dead Jim, DEAD!
Not that this keeps the Shamen from shaking their rattles and dancing. It’s FAITH you see and when we’re talking about WASP Christianity the firm belief that the elect, favored by God and predestined before birth to sit at his side on the big rock candy mountain in the sky by and by, display the benefits of God’s grace even in this mortal coil.
That’s why the rich are rich you know. They deserve it. And all you all expecting divine justice like some kind of after-life lottery don’t really understand that ‘so above as it is below’ and the opiate of justice is merely to numb your pain as you suffer and die for the benefit of your betters.
You think God wants to hang with you? You wouldn’t know a pickle fork (two tines) from a dessert fork (three) unless a servant laid them out in the correct order (always good to wait until you can see what your host uses).
Which brings us to the Chicken Heart. This is why I’m conflicted about Cosby.
My dear readers, you may disagree with my opinions, object to my theories, but when I talk about science I insist that my experiments are reproducible and consistent.
The man in the middle of it all was Alexis Carrel, a brilliant and rather dapper Frenchman working at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Carrel discovered that, if you remove some cells from the body, sit them in a nutritious broth and handle them correctly, they can not only survive, but thrive and multiply. Also, if you take some cells from one culture, you can start a new one and, with that, a third, and so on. The importance of this technique – know as cell “passaging” – can’t be overstated. With it, Carrel literally opened a new era in cell research. Unfortunately, he did so with an experiment that, while earning him international superstardom, proved to be a complete and utter train wreck.
On 17 January 1912, Carrel removed a chick embryo from its egg and cut out a small fragment of its still-beating heart with the aim of keeping it alive as long as possible. He had hardly begun this experiment when he announced to the world that his chicken heart culture was immortal, that immortality belonged potentially to all cells, and that death was only the consequence of how cells are organised in the body. In other words, the secret of eternal life is within us all, an attribute of our basic biological building blocks. It captured the public’s imagination and was soon accepted by the scientific community.
Carrel and his assistants kept – or claimed they had kept – that culture alive for 34 years, which is five times longer than the average chicken. For many years, around 17 January, journalists wrote birthday stories on the chicken heart and wondered how large it would have grown had Carrel nurtured every one of its ever-multiplying cells. (According to calculations, it swiftly dwarfed the Earth and filled up the entire solar system.)
The problem was, no one else could keep a cell culture alive indefinitely. Lab after lab tried and failed, decade after decade. Because Carrel was a giant in the field of cell research and a Nobel Prize winner, few dared to doubt him. Scientists blamed themselves when their cells died. They assumed that they lacked the master’s skill, that his lab had higher standards than they could reach, that they had somehow exposed their cells to infection or failed to keep them properly nourished. We now know that the reverse was true. Other researchers probably couldn’t duplicate Carrel’s results because they weren’t incompetent or dishonest enough.
It was only in the mid-60s – half a century after Carrel established his chicken heart culture – that the dogma of cell immortality came crashing down. That’s when Leonard Hayflick, an ambitious young researcher at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, discovered that ordinary body cells have a finite life span – or, more precisely, an average number of times they can multiply in vitro. This is their Hayflick number. For chickens, it is 35. In other words, a population of chicken cells can double about 35 times before they die, which usually takes several months.
By the time Hayflick proved this, Carrel was long dead and his “immortal” chicken cells discarded. Which means that we know Carrel’s most famous experiment was a sham, but not why. If it was fraud, it was one of the most outrageous cases in the history of science. However, the cause may have been carelessness rather than dishonesty. Carrel and his staff used “embryonic juice” as a culture medium and, if they prepared it badly, it might have contained live chick cells. In that case, instead of just feeding their culture, they re-seeded it. It’s an easy enough mistake, but to make it consistently enough to keep their chicken heart cells alive for 34 years suggests an astonishing degree of negligence.
Reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of modern science. Unless an experiment can be repeated again and again by different researchers, each time yielding similar results, it can’t be said to prove anything much. At least that’s the theory. Carrel’s chicken heart experiment shows how far science can stray from the scientific method. And the fault doesn’t just lie with Carrel and his laboratory. The entire scientific community shares some of the blame because it upheld the dogma of cell immortality for more than 50 years despite the fact that it was based on a single, sensational, irreproducible experiment.
Tha-thump. Tha-Thump! THA-THUMP!
So why is credibility so important to you ek?
I write pseudonymously. I don’t delude myself that it protects me from various initialed government agencies, that’s not the point. What it has done (so far) is keep my mail relatively spam free and save me from random strangers who want me to help them and people who fiercely disagree with me and would like to burn a cross on my lawn (kerosene just ruins the grass, you have to re-sod).
I can not expect you to accept my assertions merely on the basis of my expertise and reputation. Test them yourself!
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
Rear Adm. Jonathan White, the Navy’s chief oceanographer and head of its climate-change task force, is one of the most knowledgeable people in the military about what’s actually happening on our rapidly heating planet. Whenever another officer or a congressperson corners White and presses him about why he spends so much time thinking about climate change, he doesn’t even try to explain thermal expansion of the oceans or ice dynamics in the Arctic. “I just take them down to Norfolk,” White says. “When you see what’s going on down there, it gives you a sense of what climate change means to the Navy – and to America. And you can see why we’re concerned.”
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer gets life in prison; House lawmakers pick a president; Garry Kasparov beats IBM’s Deep Blue at chess; NBA star Michael Jordan born; The Eagles release their greatest hits.
Of course by now I’m looking for a stout stick to bash Giorgio with before committing seppuku with my plastic yogurt spork (What? I visited the snack bar, OK?) and this is just the first Scene.