These People are Scientists?

I was watching this show called "Sports Science", and one segment was supposed to "debunk" the "myth" that hitting a baseball pitch is the hardest thing to do in professional sports. They brought on some pretty blond softball player who says she begs to differ. (I can smell the PC grrl power BS from here, but let's check the methodology.) 

So, this is how this bunch of scientists decide to "disprove" the myth.

1. The more force a pitch generates, the harder it is to hit, so they compare the impact force of some college dude's baseball pitch and blondie's softball pitch. The 95 mph baseball pitch, thrown from 63 feet with a single forward step motion, generates 2,400 lbs of force. The 70 mph "bowling motion" softball pitch (accompanied by a short hop forward) thrown from 40 feet away shatters the plate. Therefore, softball pitch harder to hit.

2. A baseball prospect who usually hits .310 had a harder time hitting the softball pitch than he did the baseball pitch.

3. They confirmed the finding of the second step by studying the motions of either pitcher. A baseball pitcher throws high to low from a further distance, so the baseball hitter's eye is able to adjust. The baseball hitter had a harder time adjusting to the rising trajectory of a softball pitch.

Ergo, softball pitches are harder to hit than pitches of pro baseball pitchers.

Any amateur philosopher can see the holes in the argument put forth by the "scientists".

First, the force impact of a pitch is not the most important aspect in making a pitch hittable. If that were true, then every pitch would be a fastball and all you'll need is a strong arm. No, it is unpredictability that makes a pitch hard to hit, which eplains the need for the pitcher to throw a variety of pitches in a game. In fact, a pitch that generates greater impact is easier to hit out of the ball park if hit solidly. So, the first method cannot contribute to proving the thesis. All it proves is that an object travelling at 70 mph covering a shorter distance will generate more impact force than an object travelling further at 95 mph. The conclusion does not prove the thesis.

Second, the baseball hitter had a hard time hitting the softball pitch precisely because it was unpredictable for him. A baseball hitter is used to hitting baseball pitches, which is why he adjusts better from high to low than low to high and has a reaction time geared towards the length of time it takes a baseball pitch to cross the plate. The premise of the question is that hitting a baseball pitch is the hardest thing to do in pro-sports. It assumes that the baseball hitter's job is the hardest in all of sports, and his job is to hit baseball pitches By using a baseball hitter to hit a softball pitch, you skew the experiment because you have a baseball hitter not doing his job, which is to hit baseball pitches. This point is proven inadvertedly by these scientists by their display of how different a softball pitch is to a baseball pitch. It's like asking a tennis player to hit a cricket throw, or asking a bowler to hit a three-pointer. By using an experiment design that is tantamount to comparing an apple with an orange, the experiment's results are useless to the thesis. The science has been used to prove,,,nothing.

A more sensible experiment design would have been to have a person with no eperience hitting a baseball or a softball and having him try to hit either pitch.

After the segment, these amateur hour clowns have the gall to say that "science" proved their point, where nothing they did could even remotely be tantamount to well-thought science. (Don't get me started on their stupid experiment design for debunking the "myth" that athletes shouldn't have sex before a competition.) One of the most important aspects of science is determining the means by which a hypothesis could be derived and tested, and for this, the scientist needs some philosophy. I find it sad seeing the philosophical dunderheads of "Sports Science" wield science like four year old swinging a wiffle bat.

Next time, leave the science to actual scientists. 

More Egg on Al Gore's Face

Al Gore claimed in "The Inconvenient Truth" that man-made "global warming" will result in the oceans swallowing up several tiny Pacific nations. One of the "poster nations" of this claim was  a tiny atoll nation called Tuvalu.

Unfortunately for Mr. Gore (and fortunately for Tuvalu), the island is nowhere near vanishing beneath the waves of capitalistic greed. In fact, the island is rising further up from the sea.

Gore: Why is that thing still there? Maybe its because of... Man-Bear-Pig!!!

I Should Marry a Pretty Woman

So says the Journal of Family Psychology.

Further, in contrast to the importance of matched attractiveness to new relationships, similarity in attractiveness was unrelated to spouses' satisfaction and behavior. Instead, the relative difference between partners' levels of attractiveness appeared to be most important in predicting marital behavior, such that both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives. These results highlight the importance of dyadic examinations of the effects of spouses' qualities on their marriages.

And you know what? I'm not about to disagree.

PS
Of course, there is more to marriage than the pretty, which fades with age. But if her being more attractive than me helps, then I'm wholeheartedly for it! Hehehehe....

Of course, the bar's not very high anyway.

Because Scientists Don't Do Philosophy # 2

Highly mis-educated science worshipper (I don't know if he actually practices it) thinks free will is an illusion.

His current hypothesis is that what man thinks is free will is actually determined by his environment, which is an argument as old as philosophy itself. But, he reaches this conclusion by way off the phenomenon of captives cooperating with their captors, the so-called "Stockholm syndrome".

Yet their behaviour is more understandable when you consider that they suffered solitary confinement and the threat of long imprisonment or even execution. What?s clear is that the Iranian authorities knew very well the power of environment over individual behaviour and used it effectively. Armies the world over do the same. So do terrorist groups. So, in a different context, do marketing companies, political parties and religious cults.

How do you think you would behave in such a situation? The truth is, none of us knows. Or do you disagree?

Never mind the flawed concept of causality operating behind his murky assumptions. (More reason to take philosophy classes outside of critical theory....) What I find remarkable is that he ignores basic falsifiability. (As Karl Popper would say, if there is a white swan, then the statement "all swans are black" is false.) Has he never heard of John McCain? Or the French Resistance? Has he even seen Rambo II? We've made icons out of people who have successfully defied the "power of environment over individual behavior". That alone debunks his chain of causation. Free will cannot be an illusion if there are people who do exercise their free will.*

What is frightening is that morons like these will soon be in charge of making laws and policies for us.

As for the cheap rheotrical question in the end, the answer is, no, we cannot tell what we will do in the same situation. But we can choose.

*This is giving consideration to their very limited notion that free will is only evident when exercised against a predictable course of action.

Because Scientists Don't Do Philosophy

The problem with the modern scientist, I think, is the same problem that plagued the 19th century scientist: by the authority they believe is vested in them by the explanatory power of science, they believe they can shape the world at the snap of a peer-reviewed paper.

The modern scientist is far worse, however, because he is more philosophically deficient than his 19th century counterpart. Thank you, Ford, Dewey, and modern education!

Case in point:

Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.

"So long! And thanks for all the fish!"

Do they even know the implications of "personhood"? Do these fools basking in their PhD's even realize the extent of their overreach? Only the most intelligent kind of moron can indulge is such grandiloquent stupidity.

Is intelligence the only criteria for "personhood"? My laptop can kick my ass in math and chess, but never in a million years will it be a person. The world's most highly advanced super-computer can fool a scientist by passing the Turing test, but a simple child can tell that the super-computer is but a machine, never a person.

This is the problem of the modern hubristic scientist: he has foolishly set aside the soul and metaphysics, so the only word he can ascribe to "rationality" is "intelligence". There is a severe defect in his education (just listen to Dr. Richard Dawkins prognosticate), and for the most part, his pride and the sanctimonious crown the gullible public has placed on his head has prevented him from seeing it.

Only a highly educated moron can conclude that personhood can be measured by the contours of a brain.

For the Climate Change Enthusiast in Your Life

Here's a long, but fairly simple explanation of the extent of the manipulation the current klack of climate scientists have subjected the climate data to in order to create the current man-made climate change scare. 

My Problem With "Man-Made Climate Change"

It's hard to choose one problem really. That it is a panic produced by fudging and falsely manipulating scientific data is one. That it has become an almost cultish cause, complete with court prophets, is another.

Gore 3:16 says...CARBON FOOTPRINT! WORLD ENDING!

But the biggest problem that I see in all the hype surrounding man-made climate change ("global warming" has lost its charm, what with a great cooling now in play) is that it has become the latest Trojan Horse by which to foster idiotic Malthusian ideas upon the world.

The countries that will inevitably be hit hardest by neo-Malthusian measures that put man as the center of every problematic thing are the poor countries.

From Zenit:

According to Vidal, the trust's calculations show that the 10 metric tons of carbon emitted by a return flight from London to Sydney could be offset by preventing the birth of one child in a country such as Kenya.

The sheer arrogance of these moneyed fools allows them to think that their return flight from London to Sydney is more valuable than one Kenyan child. Not only is this maliciously racist, it reflects that long standing corruption at the heart of the rich: the problem of the world is poor people. Just enough of us in here, but way too much of you.

So, if you can, say no to this climate change fear-mongering. No to neo-Malthusianism!

Hey, if even a moron like John Lennon can see it...  

Maybe It Wasn't All That Far-Fetched

A few weeks ago, I was laughing at the notion that Nature would send ripples back through time to stop the re-creation of the God particle by the Large Hadron Collider.

Then, this happens.

Come on! A bird dropping a baguette can shut down this doomsday device? Who designed this thing? Dr. Evil?

Events like this are what the term "epic fail" was invented for.

The theory is beginning to sound more and more plausible...

Back to the Future

Due to the curse-like string of bad luck surrounding the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), two leading physicists have come up with a rather strange theory: that something in the future always comes back to sabotage the replication of the Higgs boson, a hidden particle that would supposedly explain the origins of matter. One of the physicists likens it to a man traveling back in time to kill his own grandfather. As the headline to the article suggests, God may not want us nosing around the Higgs boson.

Considering all the fun stuff people come up with regarding LHC disaster theories, this one's a hoot. Kinda like a terminator being sent to the past to kill off the terminators by killing the very first one. Looks like the LHC is a world killer after all. And, its trying to warn us. lol!!

Doc: Marty,you have to destroy that Higgs boson!
Marty: Higgs what?

We Are Not Born of Apes!

A discovery in Ethiopia just turned several decades of indoctrinated conventional wisdom on its head. Man did not descend from chimps, or any sort of great ape for that matter.

Rather, man and ape branched off from a common ancestor, and whatever is unique in human beings evolved separately from the great apes, who have evolved in their own line. 

The skeleton of an early human who lived 4.4 million years ago shows that humans did not evolve from chimpanzee-like ancestors, researchers reported on Thursday.

Instead, the missing link -- the common ancestor of both humans and modern apes -- was different from both, and apes have evolved just as much as humans have from that common ancestor, they said.

This discovery puts to rest the notion that, through dumb evolutionary luck (or "random natural selection", if you're a jargon-chewing neo-Darwinist), some chimp grew up to be Mozart.

"Ardi" is clearly a human ancestor and her descendants did not grow up to be chimpanzees or other apes, the researchers report in the journal Science.

She had an ape-like head and opposable toes that allowed her to climb trees easily, but her hands, wrists and pelvis show she strode like a modern human and did not knuckle-walk like a chimp or a gorilla.

"People have sort of assumed that modern chimpanzees haven't evolved very much, that the last common ancestor was more or less like a chimpanzee and that it's been ... the human lineage ... that's done all the evolving," White said.

But "Ardi" is "even more primitive than a chimpanzee," White said.

So, whatever man is, he is a creation unique in all the world, clearly distinct from the great apes or any other creature. The ape is not, and never will be, our equal. The implications of this discovery are tremendous, not least of which is that it puts to rest this absurd notion of apes being our "forefathers" and deserving of equal rights. Those Spanish retards parliamentarians (and I apologize to retards for the odious comparison) who foolishly gave "rights" to primates on a whim of philosophical and moral stupidity must all get egg baths in the morning.

So, stand proud, and know that God never intended any of your ancestors to develop the lovely habit of throwing shit at passersby for lulz.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Gen. 2: 7)

Human exceptionalism rides again! Oh, and another thing...

**** you! You're not my father!