I got a strange email the other day.

Dear Troller

Dear Dr Myers, I note that you are trolling our work Please find attached a copy of our SPIE paper which we gave in San Diego. I would welcome the opportunity to give a talk at you Institution so that you, with all your infinite wisdom, could shoot me down in flames and make a fool of me. However, I doubt that you have the balls ! Professor Milton Wainwright

“Trolling” their work? And who the heck is Milton Wainwright? And then I looked at the paper and realized…

Earlier this week, someone had told me that there was another loony “organisms from space” paper touted as proof that British scientists had discovered alien life published in that joke journal, the Journal of Cosmology by this guy Wainwright, and I admit it, I took a quick look at his goofy blog. But that’s it! All I did was read it! I didn’t comment or write about it here!

For a moment I had this terrible thought that maybe the crackpots have finally figured out how to read our minds.

But then I realized that these guys get so little attention paid to them that they probably carefully scrutinize their tiny little referer logs, and they noticed that someone from Morris, Minnesota stopped by, and obviously, since I’m the sole inhabitant of this eerily empty ghost town on the prairie, it must have been me.

So now merely reading their work is trolling.

Well, now I guess I’m obligated to follow through. I had read their paper and decided it was more of the same ol’, same ol’ and hadn’t said anything then, but I’m willing to summarize it.

It’s crap.

The data collection is fine. They’re lofting balloons into the stratosphere, and at a designated altitude, are opening a trap that allows dust, debris, small organisms, and so forth to settle and adhere to EM stubs. Then the trap is closed, the balloon descends, and they put the stubs on the electron microscope and see what is floating around in the atmosphere.

So far, so good. The problem lies in the interpretation. They’re then sorting the material observed into known vs. unknown, where “known” is clearly material from earth, and “unknown” is immediately categorized as Possible Signs of Extraterrestrial Life. The logic doesn’t work. It makes no sense. You’re looking at low density airborne particles in the atmosphere of a planet; it’s not as if we’ve come even close to categorizing all the particles of terrestrial origin, so you can’t play this game of assigning subsets to some other source outside our world.

The authors also have a bad case of apophenia. Almost every bit of unrecognizable garbage they spot is called “life”. Here is one of their examples.

So the sheet-like stuff to the left is not biological (how they know that, I don’t know and they don’t tell us — I think it’s “it doesn’t look like it to my untrained eye”), while the amorphous blob to the right may or may not be biological. In other words, the information content in this image is precisely zero. (By the way, that mess on the right doesn’t look at all bacterial to me.)

In other cases they flat out claim that the blob they see is biological.

Unequivocally biological, no less. How they know, I again don’t know. It seems to be that when they stare at it and do a little subjective pattern matching, they call something a “neck” and something else a “body” — that is, they slap labels on things that conform to their beliefs about the morphology of organisms.

The structure shown in Fig.3 however is unequivocally biological. Here we see a complex organism which has a segmented neck attached to a flask-shaped body which is ridged and has collapsed under the vacuum of the stratosphere or produced during E/M analysis. The top of the neck is fringed with what could be cilia or a fringe which formed the point of attachment of the neck to another biological entity. The complexity of this particle excludes the possibility that is of non-biological in origin.

Complexity does not exclude a non-biological source. Also, just saying that things have names similar to the names we’d give a life form does not support the claim that it is anything other than a subjective interpretation of some debris.

They have another example that demonstrates my point.

The structure shown in Fig.4 is also clearly biological in nature; here we see a somewhat phallic balloon-like structure which has presumably collapsed under low pressure. A “proboscis” is seen emerging from the left of the main cell which has two, nostril-like openings. At the top of the collapsed “balloon” is a sphincter-like opening. Again, this entity is clearly biological in nature, and is not an inorganic artefact. Although it is clearly not a bacterium it could well be an alga or a protozoan of some kind. The organisms shown in Figs. 3 and 4 are presumably clear enough for experts in the relevant branches of taxonomy to provide some kind of identification.

Why would an alga or a protist have a proboscis with nostrils? Do they have multiple samples that exhibit a similar shape? Isn’t it more likely to be a random scrap of material, rather than the patterned shape of an organism?

Oh, wait. They missed something: look at that wrinkle at the bottom right of the object. It looks like…a pointy ear. And then there’s the nose, alright, and a robust jaw beneath it. By golly, it’s the tiny decapitated head of a gnome that was less than a tenth of a millimeter tall in life! And its forehead has been bashed in, no doubt in a great battle between microcosmic fairy tribes waged by thrip-mounted cavalry in the skies!

I think that’s a more plausible explanation than the authors’ similarly evidence-free guess that unidentified particles are signs of extraplanetary life.

Also, I thought Journal of Cosmology was defunct — it was up for sale, complete with crude slymepit-style parting shots at me. I guess it’s still dribbling on, providing a forum for the worst and dumbest kinds of pseudoscience.

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By the way, Rawn Joseph, former(?) owner of the JoC, appears to have had a rather nasty falling out with Chandra Wickramasinghe, who he accuses of theft and plagiarism.

You know that Chibuihem Amalaha is a scientist because at the top of the article, his photo shows him wearing a lab coat and holding a flask of colored water. That’s enough for me! And he goes on to demonstrate his competence by citing his great discoveries.

He continued: “Ever since then I have been doing a lot of researches in the country. There are many discoveries and inventions I have made in science and technology. I have also been able to prove that the mathematical symbol pi which people thought of as 22 over 7 is not actually 22 over , but rather a transcendental number while 22 over 7 is a rational number. I also proved that watching television in the dark impacts negatively on one’s eyes and by God’s grace, I was the first person to use scientific instruments to prove it in the whole world. The Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) featured me on this in one of their programmes on January 12, 2013, where I demonstrated to millions of their viewers that watching television in the dark damages the eyes. Usually when it’s around 10pm, many families in Nigeria will switch off their surrounding lights to use the light from television or the light from computer alone thinking that they will see images brighter. But from experiments I found that it’s not true and experts both at the University of Lagos and elsewhere have found my work to be true. The reason for this is because there is a lot of difference in illuminants (brightness) between the television screen and the dark background in the room known as the periphery,” Amalaha said.

Okay. Well. We’re off to an interesting start, but that’s not the point of the article: Chibuihem Amalaha has proven that gay marriage is wrong, using Science. He is a true polymath who has used multiple disciplines to make his case.

Physics:

“To start with, physics is one of the most fundamentals of all the sciences and I used two bar magnets in my research. A bar magnet is a horizontal magnet that has the North Pole and the South Pole and when you bring two bar magnets and you bring the North Pole together you find that the two North Poles will not attract. They will repel, that is, they will push away themselves showing that a man should not attract a man. If you bring two South Poles together you find that the two South Poles will not attract indicating that same sex marriage should not hold. A female should not attract a female as South Pole of a magnet does not attract the South Pole of a magnet. But, when you bring a North Pole of a magnet and a South Pole of a magnet they will attract because they are not the same, indicating that a man will attract a woman because of the way nature has made a female. Even in physics when you study what is called electrostatics, you found that when you rub particles together they don’t attract each other but when you rub particle in another medium they will attract each other. For example, if you use your biro and rub it on your hair, after rubbing, try to bring small pieces of paper they will attract because one is charged while the other one is not charged. But if both of them are charged they don’t attract, which means that man cannot attract another man because they are the same, and a woman should not attract a woman because they are the same. That is how I used physics to prove gay marriage wrong.

Even more significantly, he has now proven that people are magnetic.

Chemistry:

“In chemistry, I used chemical reactions and we have different types of chemical reactions. We have double decomposition reaction, decomposition reaction, neutralisation reaction and reduction oxidation reaction. But in chemistry I used a simple one known as neutralisation reaction which is a reaction where an acid reacts with a base to give you salt and water. For example, when you bring surphuric acid and you reacts it with sodium hydroxide which is a base you are going to have salt and water. That tells you that the acid is a different body, the base is a different body and they will react. But if you bring an acid and you pour it on top of an acid chemistry there will be no reaction. If you bring water and pour it on top it shows that there will be no reaction. If you bring a base either sodium hydroxide and you pour it on top of a sodium hydroxide you find out that there will be reaction showing that a man on top of a man will have no reaction. A woman on top of a woman will have no reaction, that is what chemistry is showing. Even in chemistry when you also use a process called electrolysis, which is if you use electrolysis of acidilated water, that is water you drop some droplets of acid on it, you found that the negative ions will be attracted to the positive ones while the positive ions will be attracted to the negative ones. So the negative ones are not attracted to their peers, they are all attracted to the positive electrode and the positive ones are not attracted to the positive electrode. Instead, the negative ion is attracted to positive electrodes and why is it that the negative is attracted to the positive? It is because they are not the same. Likewise a man cannot be attracted to a man as negative ion is not attracted to the negative electrode instead negative ion is attracted to the positive electrode. That is what electrolysis is showing us that gay marriage is wrong in the area of chemistry.

I’ve noticed when I hug my wife that there is a tremendous exothermic reaction that produces big buckets of salt water. Oh, wait, no…I haven’t noticed that. I must have done the experiment wrong.

Biology:

“In biology, I used simple experiments and I came down to a lay man. We have seen that the female of a fowl is called hen and the male of a fowl is called a cock. We have never seen where a cock is having sex with a cock and we have never seen where a hen is having sex with another. Even among lions when you go to the zoo you find out that lion does not mate with a lion instead a lion will mate with a lioness showing that a lion being a male will mate with lioness being a female. Now if animals that are of even lower creature understand so much, how come human being made in the higher image of God that is even of higher creature will be thinking of a man having sex with another and woman having sex with another woman? That shows that it’s a misnomer and when you come to real biological standard, when you see a lady you love there is what is called the follicle stimulating hormone. The follicle stimulating hormone in a man triggers what is called spermatogenesis through your brain which is called hypothalamus. It will send message to your brain when you see a lady you love and through the hypothalamus you will go after the lady. And it will trigger your spermatogenesis and the lady’s host follicles stimulating hormone will be triggered by the hypothalamus and it will stimulate her ovarian follicle. So in the man is the spermatogenesis, in female it’s the ovarian follicle. You find out that the sperm alone does not produce a child and the ovary alone in the female does not produce a child. They need each other for reproduction to occur and the follicle stimulating hormone in the man and that of the female promote different things. The sperm in the man alone doesn’t produce a child and ovary in the female alone does not produce a child, they need each other for reproduction to occur. So that shows how biology proves that gay marriage is wrong.

Gay penguins don’t count?

Math:

In mathematics which is another core area of science, I used what is called the principle of commutativity and idepotency. Commutativity in mathematics is simply the arrangement of numbers or arrangement of letters in which the way you arrange them don’t matter. For example, if you say A + B in mathematics you are going to have B + A. For example, if I say two plus three it will give five. If I start from three, I say three plus two it also give you five showing that two plus three and three plus two are commutative because they gave the same results. That shows that A + B will give you B + A, you see that there is a change. In A + B, A started the journey while in B + A, B started the journey. If we use A as a man and use B as a woman we are going to have B + A that is woman and man showing that there is a reaction. A + B reacted, they interchanged and gave us B + A showing that commutativity obeys that a man should not marry a man and a woman should not marry a woman. If you use idempotency, it’s a reaction in mathematics where A + A = A. Actually in abstract algebra, A + A =2A but we are less concerned with the numerical value two. We are more less concerned with the symbols A, you find out that A + A will give you A showing that the whole thing goes unchanged. It didn’t change unlike commutativity A + B give B + A there is a change. A started the journey in commutativity and A + B gave us B + A and B started the journey after the equality sign. But in the case of idempotency A + A will give you A showing that it goes unreacted. You started with A and you meet A ,the final result is A. Showing that a man meeting a man A + A will produce a man there is no reaction, it goes unreacted and in chemical engineering you have to send the material back to the reactor for the action to be carried out again showing that it goes unreacted. That is how mathematics has shown that gay marriage is wrong because commutativity proves that gay marriage is wrong. Idempotency also proves that gay marriage is wrong. So these are the principles I have used to prove gay marriage wrong in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and by the grace of God I am the only one that has proved this in the whole world.

Gosh. Math is hard.

And his work is unique! Google it; no one else is making these arguments, therefore he must be right.

“If you go on the Internet to check whether there is anybody who has used physics to prove gay marriage wrong, you find out there is none. You go to Google or youtube check whether there is anybody that has used chemistry to find same sex marriage wrong, you find out there is none and the same applies to biology and mathematics.

“In general, same sex marriage is evil. It should be stopped by those practicing it. Now they are saying that they will go and adopt a child, the question is that if everybody shows interest in same sex marriage where would the child they are adopting come from?”

So now he dreams of winning a Nobel prize. For what? I don’t know. He doesn’t say, either.

And now his works have earned him the respect in the world of science. He said: “At the University of Lagos where I currently study as a student you will find my publication on the notice board there. When you go to the Senate Building of the university you will see the same notice there and even recently my lecturer at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Profesor D.S.Aribuike pointedly told me that I will win Nobel prize one day, because he found that my works are real and nobody has done it in any part of the world. You know Nobel Prize is the highest award anyone could ever win and no African has won Nobel Prize in science. So I am aspiring to win Nobel Prize for Africa. Other universities have seen my work and sent me commendations. I have a professor friend who has seen the work I did and he sent me congratulatory message because of the originality of the work.”

Oh, so “originality” is now a synonym for “bug-eating frothing mad” now?

I have reached other echelons in the science and technology world like Professor V.O. Ife Olunyolo a well-known engineer in Nigeria. He brought the first system engineering known in Sub-Sahara Africa at the University of Lagos. I have given him a copy of my work and he didn’t find it wrong. I have never seen anybody who condemned my work.”

Oh, we can fix that. I’m a biologist. I condemn your work. Worse, it’s the dumbest pile of barely literate shit I’ve seen in ages; the argument from analogy has no force at all, and relying on comparing people to magnets, solutions of different pH, or algebraic rules is simply idiotic. The biology used is selective examples backed by a childishly avid adoption of the naturalistic fallacy and the crudest mechanical view of how the brain works. Shame on your professors for praising a pathetic collection of superficial and often wrong observations; shame on the media for pretending an ignorant fool is a respectable scientist.