Author: Jason Thibeault

Happy Talk like a Pirate Day!

Jason Thibeault10 Comments

Avast me hearties, it be International Talk like a Pirate Day.  My webhost still has me barred from making port in me own hometown, so I be sending this message by carrier parrot.  If they don’t end this embargo soon, we’ll chum the waters with their entrails, we will!  Arrr!

I have many chores this weekend, not the least of which will be getting these sumbitches from unbanning me before I take my business elsewhere.  I don’t know how much I’ll be able to post.  Apologies to those of you who were expecting actual content.  If you’re looking for something to do, research the Large Hadron Collider and decide whether or not the doomsayers have a case, visit Something Awful and try to start a new internet meme, or maybe donate some money to me toward a Chevy Volt.

One of you lubbers fetch me a grog!  Smartly now!

Happy Talk like a Pirate Day!
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My rebuttal to JTankers

Jason Thibeault2 Comments

Sir, with respect, get a god damn life.

Five minutes of Googling has revealed to me that you are either a composite of dozens or hundreds of like-minded individuals building a body of work over the past year, in an effort to build a persona the likes of which has not been seen since Usenet, or you are easily the most dedicated forum troll in history.  You have posted almost literally everywhere there is the merest mention of the letters L, H and C together, as JTankers (5080 results), James Jr (363 results), James / James Jr / James Jr C Tankersley (362 results, though in fairness this overlaps somewhat with James Jr).

You even founded your very own site, whose very domain name is steeped in partisanship by proclaiming to host “facts” about the LHC, as though you were going to populate it with nothing but figures about the size and dimensions of the various parts — you know, actual facts.  And in every post you ignore rebuttals, post links to discredited articles repeatedly (including those that you have posted in my blog), and generally look like the very picture of someone nursing a serious anxiety disorder after having gotten your head rattled by an IED on your last tour.

Therefore, I have determined that rebutting you is impossible, as others have tried and failed, and I have neither the time nor the patience to try my hand at a Sisyphean task.  Jodi gave me some advice when I first started researching a real rebuttal — that is, to let it go.  And with this parting shot, I am.

You are a hypocrite and a bully, and I have no time for you or your ilk.  Any further posts by you will be summarily replaced with ridiculous nonsense and any attempts at linking your site to mine (which is the real reason you post on even backwater Canadian blogs with a readership of 5) will be removed.  Goodbye.

My rebuttal to JTankers

The downtime that was not downtime

Jason Thibeault2 Comments

It looks like my home internet connection is blocked somehow from connecting to this server (either my site or Jodi’s), but when I’m logged into my work VPN, I can connect to it fine.  I have to wonder about this — how many other home consumer-class cable or DSL accounts are blocked?  How many people out there tried to get to my site but couldn’t, because of this blacklisting?  And how would they, or I, know?

I’m on hold with Webserve’s technical support now, while waiting for supper to cook.  Hopefully the answer will be forthcoming.

The downtime that was not downtime

Ridiculous downtime, and my first troll

Jason Thibeault, 2 Comments

First up folks, my apologies for the ridiculous amount of downtime over the weekend, and this immediately after I close my Facebook account and direct people here.  Murphy’s law and all that.  Needless to say I’m irritated at my hosting provider, and while I’m only paying for the lowest package available, I could probably get more reliable uptime out of hosting on my own computer at home (if I weren’t so concerned about power usage, given that NS Power just jumped power costs another 9.4%).

Secondly, my last post,while it only peripherally involved mention of the Large Hadron Collider, somehow managed to attract one of those concern trolls that frequent internet forums and Wikipedia articles doomsaying about the LHC and pointing to mostly-discredited articles as their proof.  It got caught in the Akismet spam filter, but I’m rescuing it just for posterity.  I post it in its entirety below:

JTankers | [email protected] | shrillinternetklaxon.org | IP: <redacted>

Your prophecy is fullfilled.

Good blog jthibeault, you argue logically, but your Large Hadron Collider analogy relies on disputed “facts” from partisans.

You are correct that popular consensus among scientists with a similar level of understanding as your’s is to believe CERN’s and CERN’s friends’ arguments that danger is not possible.

But CERN did something similar to what the believers you reference do, start with the answer (in this case safety) and promise to prove their conclusion. Any talk of danger was heresy. According to news accounts, CERN even directed their employees not to represent risk as other than zero to the media, regardless of any concerns they might have.

Enough with the supposition. What do the experts who independently of CERN conclude in their respected papers?

Scientists predict possible creation of micro black holes possibly at a rate of 1 per second.[1]

Steven Hawking estimates a 1% chance[2] and evaporation is disputed by multiple papers[3][4]. (Dr. Hawking’s scientific credibility was also recently disputed by Professor Higgs[5]).

Cosmic ray safety arguments are disputed by multiple papers by PHD’ed theoretical scientists[6][7].

Senior German Astrophysicist PHD Dr. Rainer Plaga politely attempted to correct CERN’s apparent possible theoretical flaws in the field of astrophysics which CERN was delving into, but he was ignored apparently.[6]

Inventor of Chaos Theory’s Rössler Attractor and founder of Endophysics Professor Dr. Otto Rössler also theorizes that micro black hole creation would likely be catastrophic, he calculates exponential growth of micro black holes in years, decades or centuries.[7]

If micro black holes are created by Head-On particle colliders some will travel too slowly to escape Earth’s gravity.
CERN’s LHC Safety Assessment Group believed in March of 2008 that micro black holes created by cosmic rays would all travel through Earth at nearly the speed of light[8].

Large Hadron Collider safety is currently under challenge and review in American and European courts.[9][10]. CERN is also alleged to censor information on risks involved.[11]

[1] cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/29199 The case for mini black holes, CERN Courier (2004)

[2] http://www.photonics.com/content/news/2008/September/9/93181.aspx Threats Won’t Stop Collider, photonics.com Sep 9, 2008

[3] xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0304042 Do black holes radiate?. Dr. Adam Helfer (2003)

[4] arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0607137, On the existence of black hole evaporationyet again, Prof. VA Belinski (2006)

[5] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4727894.ece Peter Higgs launches attack against Nobel rival Stephen Hawking, TimesOnLine, Sep 11, 2008

[6] arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.1415v1.pdf On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders – Rainer Plaga Rebuttal (2008)

[7] http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/OTTOROESSLERMINIBLACKHOLE.pdf Abraham-Solution to Schwarzschild Metric Implies That CERN Miniblack Holes Pose a Planetary Risk, Prof. Dr. Otto Rossler (2008)

[8] http://www.lhcconcerns.com/LHCConcerns/Forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=10 LHC Safety Assessment Group, 16 Mar 2008

[9] http://www.lhcdefense.org/lhc_legal.php US Federal Lawsuit Filings – Walter L. Wagner (2008)

[10] lhc-concern.info/?page_id=28 European Legal Action (2008)

[11] http://www.lhcdefense.org/pdf/Sancho%20v%20Doe%20-%20Affidavit%20of%20Luis%20Sancho.pdf AFFIDAVIT OF LUIS SANCHO IN UPPORT OF TRO AND PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION

I will need time to prepare an adequate rebuttal to this, and while I understand his legitimate concerns (I mean, it would really really suck if the world were destroyed, because, you know, that’s where I keep all my stuff too!), I don’t think there’s any cause for fearmongering at all here, because as Professor Brian Cox so eloquently stated, “anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”  There are people who think the turning on of the LHC will also mark year zero for time travellers but there’s nothing that says that every wild-eyed crazy needs to get equal airtime.  This blog does not act as anything remotely resembling Fox News (or at least what they claim to be — “fair and balanced”) — I do not report both the sane and insane sides of the story as though they have equal weight.  Go sell crazy someplace else.

I don’t have a lot of time today, as I just found out my counterpart at a nearby centre has walked out of the job (yes, the one who was just hired), so I’m right back in Shoulders-of-Atlas mode.  For now, enjoy this fantastic talk by Brian Cox.

Ridiculous downtime, and my first troll

Critical thinking, evolution, and how to not be dismissed as a total idiot

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 6 Comments

As you’ll likely recall, I had planned a post about Darwin pareidolia.  I have about twenty tabs open in my Firefox right now, most of which having something or other to do with this, but the remainder are actually sort-of related to this, to pareidolia in general, and to the creationism v. evolution debate.  To make matters worse for my ability to focus on this topic, the other day, a co-worker and potential lurker messaged me on instant messenger regarding the Large Hadron Collider.  The gist of this conversation went something like:

<him> hey, have you heard of the LHC?  sounds like a bad idea to me.

<me> *rants for 30 mins about how stupid people are for thinking it’s a bad idea, barely letting him get a word in edgewise*

There’s definitely going to be another blog post in the future about the LHC, especially specifically about the doomsday sayers and the impossibility of their hypothesized scenarios (none of which have any basis in science outside of the fact that the doomsday scenarios themselves have a kernel of scientific truth — like, say, making a black hole, which the LHC is completely incapable of doing outside of micro black holes that evaporate instantly).  But for now, I’m going to point out that the funny thing about this is that there’s a common thread in these topics — people’s inability to perform simple feats of critical thinking.

Continue reading “Critical thinking, evolution, and how to not be dismissed as a total idiot” →

Critical thinking, evolution, and how to not be dismissed as a total idiot

News roundup

Jason Thibeault, , , 9 Comments

Hurricanes galore have been hitting the Caribbean and around the Gulf of Mexico, over and over again.  The newest is a Cat-4 hurricane named Ike, and it’s going to ravage all those already-rocked spots that the last two just did (they’re coming so fast and furious I can’t even remember their damn names!).  This will probably get Bob talking about the IPCC, but rest assured folks, just because climate change is definitely happening, and lots of scientists predicted it a long time ago, nobody could ever have predicted it and should it turn out that it was anthropogenic, nobody could have predicted that either.  Sigh.  Just suck it up and weather it.  The human race will live through this, undoubtedly, and any massive shift in climate will likely spur evolution in a number of ways through a number of species, even our own.

In a nice bit of justice, Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto, just won the presidency of Pakistan, after the tin-pot asshat Musharraf (does this mean his ass is a tin pot?) resigned to avoid an impeachment in much the same way as Nixon dodged that particular bullet.  There is a modicum of decency left in the world.

In the meantime, John McTimebomb chose Sarah Palin as his veep pick, without evidently first vetting her at all.  Their campaign is being rocked by her incessant lying to the point where they’ve decided to curtail her access to the press in much the same way that McCain’s been restricted in his press access and cell phone use, to keep them from going off-message (read: making “gaffes”), and to keep people from possibly discovering what they, and pretty much this generation of Republicans, are all about.  Not that media access would really matter, given that right now (and for the past good while) McCain’s down in the polls so all the talking heads are all but bending over backward to fellate the man in an effort to tighten up this race.

On the homefront, I had a debate with someone (at work, no less — shame on me) involving abortion.  I of course took the position that pro-life is anti-women, and that nobody who holds the pro-life position is truly pro-life.  I say “of course” because I can’t rightly think of any other way to argue this point, given that my views are roughly that a human life is not truly viable as a potential human being until they’re at least two years old (not that I’d ever advocate “aborting” after childbirth, but I definitely don’t personally consider a 1-year-old child any more viable than a three-cell blastocyst).  Once they escape the spectre of SIDS, then they’re potentially going to be an adult.  And I’m sure this is going to spark some controversy, so feel free to call me a monster in the comments.

Oh, and finally, as any good conservative knows, welfare for the poor is abhorrent, but welfare for the rich who go bankrupt is apparently perfectly justified.  Far as I’m concerned, if you want to live by the sword, you should die by the sword.  Don’t make it seem like helping those that are less fortunate is robbing them of the opportunity to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and without missing a beat immediately turn around and give a failing business a golden parachute.  If life is supposed to be hard and hard work is the only virtue, then let life be hard equally for those that have power once in a goddamn while.

I’ve got two posts planned, one for the Canadian election that’s coming up (and you can probably guess what I’ve got to say about Harper’s massive ad campaigns and massive last-second spending on military), and another hopefully relatively funny one about Darwin pareidolia, which has been covered recently by Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy and The Onion recently.

News roundup

Papa Don’t Preach

Jason Thibeault8 Comments

This is just too funny.  For those of you who think Guitar Hero is too heathenistic, there’s Guitar Praise, wherein you get to rock out… FOR THE LORD.

How long do you guys think it’ll be before they get sued by either Electronic Arts, or Gibson (bear in mind there’s still a lawsuit going on where Gibson patented the idea of a guitar video game in 1999, despite never having even tried to make a prototype)?  And if they don’t get sued, is it because the companies are afraid of looking like they’re bashing religion?

Papa Don’t Preach

Open source really and truly rocks.

Jason Thibeault, 11 Comments

If you didn’t believe me before, check this out.  This was done with Blender, which was a commercial app until 2002 when the company who created it went under.  They then offered anyone to buy the source code, and the open source community ponied up — to the tune of $147,000 US.  Six years later, the code is improved to the point where it can create stuff like this.  And I dare you to tell me this is any less than Pixar quality.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Open source really and truly rocks.