Yesterday, I asked “How can obvious fraud Avi Loeb continue to bamboozle?”, and of course lots of people were happy to answer. He has a sugar daddy named Charles Hoskinson.
Charles Hoskinson, the charismatic founder of Cardano, one of the foremost blockchain platforms, has embarked on an unprecedented expedition to investigate the mysteries of outer space. Hoskinson has taken his passion for exploration to new heights by searching for aliens and UFOs in uncharted regions of the universe. This audacious endeavor exemplifies Hoskinson’s daring and the insatiable human curiosity that compels us to explore uncharted territories.
Charles Hoskinson’s search for aliens includes examining claimed UFO encounters and anomalies and examining them from a scientific perspective. He works with specialists from various disciplines, such as astrophysics, astronomy, and data analysis, to learn more about these puzzling events. Hoskinson hopes to create data-driven approaches that can help discover trends or anomalies that might point to extraterrestrial activity by utilizing his knowledge of blockchain technology.
Oh. It’s a science fraud milking a crypto fraud for money. Parasites on parasites on parasites all the way down. Somehow, that’s less distressing than learning they’ve pulled shenanigans on legitimate scientific institutions, but still, at the root, they’re taking money from gullible investors and pouring it into a big magnet at the bottom of the ocean.
I also learn that Hoskinson is a backer of George Church’s pie-in-the-sky company Colossal, that plans on using biotechnology to resurrect mammoths and dodos and thylacines. They won’t. But they’ll all get lots of press and persuade non-scientists to cough up cash.
Hey, any rich people with a deficit in understanding and reason want to fund my research on comparative life histories of local spider populations? I could make it weirder by speculating that spider webs reveal linear seams between the polygons that make up our universe, and therefore could be a means to access outer dimensions of existence. I could do a lot with $1.5 million, the amount wasted on Loeb’s expedition.
This is very much in the spirit of late 19th – early 20th century adventure fiction of the mad industrialist funding expeditions with a scientist on board to journey to rare and exotic lands to search for whatever magical items, creatures, or cultures, and just as likely as those fictional portrayals to produce anything of substance.
It’s always interesting how much money you can find for cloning a mammoth, when the conservation of species which are currently on the verge of extinction goes wanting. How about bringing back a fraction of the thousands of species which have gone extinct in the last few decades? Nope, no interest from these sci-fi addled rich idiots.
Ian King @ 2, as I’ve long advised the young, “A fool and his money has a plenitude of friends on payday”.
And not a one during the workweek.
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
[Siphonaptera, Augustus De Morgan, 1872]
That’s quite the brown-nosing article that MSN has chosen, isn’t it? “Charismatic”, “his passion for exploration”, “audacious”, “daring”, “has always been at the forefront of innovation and is well known for his visionary leadership” … In reality, his “daring” has consisted of throwing money obtained through a borderline Ponzi scheme at unscientific, but to him fun, investigations. The article reads like it was written by a cult member, or the narcissist himself. If he had just paid for it, surely a writer would have had a little more self-respect than to put their name to that.
Okay, I don’t know much about “blockchain” beyond the basic principle, does anybody else have an idea how knowledge of “blockchain technology” would help in data analysis?
Of course I’d also be interested in what kind of data the wand to analyse. Astronomical observations? UFO sightings? Pyramid measurements?
…they want to analyse…
Damn I need more sleep!
Has he looked on the internet?
Everything is on the internet these days.
The UFO aliens did have Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts at one time.
They got kicked off of Facebook because the computer program didn’t believe their names were their real names.
They weren’t exactly kicked off of Twitter but decided they didn’t like Elon Musk or Nazis and left.
They do have a Myspace account they rarely use and nobody reads.
I’m not saying they lurk on Freethoughtblogs but then again, I’m not saying they don’t either.
This sounds good but doesn’t really seem to be the case. AFAICT, this just means he sits in front of a computer screen and surfs the internet.
Although he does fund some dubious Harvard scientists from time to time.
Both Loeb and Church are at Harvard.
While the vast majority of the universe is uncharted by us because we are stuck on one planet in its gravity well, that isn’t where he is looking.
Right now, Hoskinson is looking at a small area of sea floor off the coast of New Guinea.
And examining micrometeoritic dust which was discovered 150 years ago.
I found one source that said that 1% of the Abyssal plains sediments are meteoritic dust, a lot of which is metallic spherules.
mordred, @ #6:
I certainly can’t see any way… I’m also pretty sceptical of his claim to “knowledge of blockchain technology” in the first place, given that his roles have all been in management rather than development, and he’s got form for making dodgy claims… Per wiki:
I suspect that the important thing his alleged “knowledge of blockchain technology” has brought him is proficiency in fleecing rubes.
Polygonal dimensions of linear experience, you say? Intriguing. Count me in for at least a five-spot to start. Then let’s see the data, and I might go more, perhaps even five and a quarter. That’s USD mind you, so . . .
Isn’t owning “one of the foremost blockchain platforms” sort of the equivalent of owning one of the foremost steam powered car makers circa 1905? I’ve kind of got the impression in the past blockchain is sort of a technological dead end. You certainly don’t hear about it in investment company ads anymore, as they’re moving on to touting AI.
Ian King @ 2
Gregory Benford suggested creating a cryogenic library of frozen dead specimen* of every species – plant, fungi, mammal, bird, reptile etc. of all threatened species. Not just DNA, the specimen give more information (including commensal organisms).
It would help save diversity inside a species and make It possible to resurrect ut AD 2100 if we get the disaster capitalism future described by William Gibson in The Peripheral (a scorched Earth, where thr remnant humans climb back up thanks to biotech).
Benford’s suggestion seems perfectly doable.
*It would be necessary to freeze a lot of specimen for each species, I suspect at least 300 to capture a minimum of diversity.
@ 13
And if the species escape extinction, we can re-introduce genetic diversity thanks to the frozen specimen.
#11: you know, I’ve got this Patreon account that hasn’t attracted any billionaires yet, but is perfect for those kinds of donations. And all the money goes to supporting my lab!
It just dawned on me. If in all those time travel stories a human went back in time would they go before they could not thrive in that environment.
birgerjohansson@13:
I think the usual numbers are 50/500… 50 to have enough genetic diversity for short-term survival (a few generations), 500 for long-term.
(looks it up) The Wikipedia article for minimum viable population mentions the “50/500 rule”, but also notes that recent work suggests that’s not necessarily enough. And the Encyclopædia Britannica article goes into a bit more background, including recent work on computer modelling to allow per-species analyses of the numbers.
Do you want real astronomy science? Look no further.
“A Star named Earendel”
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-webb-telescope-reveals-earendel-distant.html
birgerjohansson@13
and perfectly done-able for crops
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
@birgerjohansson #13:
Taking 300 cheetahs in total from the wild (because you wouldn’t want any from narrow zoo-bred populations) would be almost certain to wipe out three of the four extant sub-species within two generations (in one case there’d be no generation at all).
El Cid @ 1
It reminds me of one of the lesser Jules Verne novels, where an industrialist pays for a project to alter the inclination of the Earth’s axis.
Presumably his contemporaries had a lot of crazy ideas.
One crazy megaproject suggested a century ago was to put a dam at the strait of Gibraltar to lower the surface of the Mediterranean and create more dry land.
Well I want my thylacine! ( throws tantrum) Oh well ( sigh) . Back to the real world.
mordred, the idea of blockchain knowledge being bitcoin mining being the magical source of all knowledge.
To which I simply respond, “Find my wife’s stolen wedding rings using your blockchain knowledge or I’ll kill and eat you”. Even with a knife to his throat, he’d be at a loss.
I’d go hungry, as I am not a coprophage.
astringer @ 19, I’m reminded of an ancient article written about why we shouldn’t cause any mass extinctions (at the time, concerns were from thermonuclear holocaust) and suggesting getting the full genome of a paramecium.
Guess it’s safe to nuke the world now.
Or something equally idiotic. Maybe update the article instead.
Rich Woods @ 20, we do now have the technology to record the full genomes, nuclear and mitochondrial for all cheetahs, we should do that. No destruction is needed, although, modest disruption of daily activities would be required.
What to do with it after, no clue, as their ecosystem was utterly disrupted and is so destabilized now as to likely be now unrecoverable before it’s irretrievable. Might as well try for T-Rex and hope it survives in Antarctica.