UPDATE(9/1): In a move that, frankly, astonished me, the author of the piece that I mocked in this post has withdrawn the article, because he’s recognized its errors. And he didn’t just withdraw it – he came back to this blog to explain the withdrawal. I’ve never seen a fundamentalist writer admit to errors this way. Most
authors of what I consider bad religion/science/math either ignore their errors, or silently pull the erroneous articles and pretend that they never existed. The way that
Mr. Bar-Cohn handled this is an excellent example of how honest people with genuine integrity behave. Mr. Bar-Cohn has earned a great deal of respect for me by doing this.)

Since I’ve been writing GM/BM, I’ve frequently mocked Christian
fundamentalists who make stupid arguments based on bad, or (even
worse) no math. I’ve also taken on some Muslim idiots a couple of
times. But I’ve frequently receieved emails asking why I’ve never done
the same thing to Jewish idiots. (Actually, it’s usually not really
asking, but more making accusations that I go easy on Jewish
arguments because I’m a Jew. Usually as a part of some nasty screed
about how I’m part of the Great Jewish Conspiracy to Take Over the
World.)

The real reason that I haven’t dealt with Jewish fundies before is
just because people don’t send me good links. Until now, I haven’t
known of any particularly good Jewish fundy nonsense to write about.
The only major bit of Jewish bad math that I knew about was the infamous “Torah
codes” or “skip codes”, which had been well and thoroughly done to
death long before I started blogging.

Then, a few weeks ago, someone sent me a great link to a
relativity denial thing, arguing that the Torah demonstrates the
falsehood of relativity using some really wretchedly bad
math. It managed to combine a bunch of my favorite kinds of lunacy,
all in one hysterical package: religious stupidity, horribly bad math,
relativity denial, gematria, bizzare interpretations passed off as
literalism – it hit pretty much all the buttons! It was glorious, the
kind of stupidity that I really relish! I didn’t immediately write
about it, because I wanted to wait until I had time to do it justice.
A quick off-the-cuff mocking wasn’t enough for such high-grade insanity.
And then, being an idiot, I lost the link!

Yes, I really am an idiot sometimes. I could have sworn that put
that link in my “crackpottery” folder in my Safari bookmarks. But no,
it’s not there. And I only keep one week of history in my browser, so
it’s not there either. I lost one of the best cranky links ever to
come my way! If anyone happens to come across an argument from
gematria on why relativity can’t possibly be true, please
forward it to me. I really want to find that gloriously idiotic
mess!

But fear not – all is not lost. (Looking at this as I’m doing a
final editing pass, I’ve got to say that I’m sounding like Orac lately. But hey,
he’s the guy who inspired me to start GM/BM, so how bad could that
be?) While googling to try to find it, I found something almost – not
quite, but almost – as good. It’s a website run by an organization
called the “Torah Technology Institute”, which features an article by
David Bar-Cohn, called Kehushah and Time
Dilation, which attempts to argue that there’s a connection
between relativity and the presence of God: they argue that a literal
reading of the Torah shows that the presence of God has a relativistic
time-dilation effect.

Continue reading →

Via several blogs, including the normally wonderful Making Light comes a link to an obnoxious Reuters’ story that once again demonstrates just how scientifically and mathematically illiterate reporters are.

We have yet another company basically claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine. From Reuters:

Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump? A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered, and environmentally friendly, car that it says runs solely on water.

Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka on Thursday, saying that a liter (2.1 pints) of any kind of water — rain, river or sea — was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km (50 miles).

“The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time,” Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told local broadcaster TV Tokyo.

“It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars,” he added.

Once the water is poured into the tank at the back of the car, the a generator breaks it down and uses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said.

Whether the car makes it into showrooms remains to be seen. Genepax said it had just applied for a patent and is hoping to collaborate with Japanese auto manufacturers in the future.

Most big automakers, meanwhile, are working on fuel-cell cars that run on hydrogen and emit — not consume — water.

There’s just one problem. This is completely impossible.

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A reader sent me a really wonderfully wacko link. It’s a fundamentalist islamic site, which tries to use relativity to argue for the divinity of the Koran. It’s remarkably silly. (I also recently got a link to something similar, but from a Jewish perspective – claiming that the Torah disproves relativity. Alas, I screwed up and lost the link; if whoever sent me that link could re-send it, I’d really appreciate it!)

The claim that relativity proves the Koran is true. See, they claim that the Koran tells you what the speed of light was, and that the real absolute speed of light as described by relativity is stated in the Koran, and that it’s tied to the muslim Koranic lunar calendar.

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This has been mentioned elsewhere – like on the Machinist blog on Salon (where I first saw it) – but I can’t resist saying something about it myself. And I’ll also chip in a little bit of originality, by also criticizing some of the people that I’ve seen criticizing it.

The story is, there’s a scammy company that sells a rather expensive device that allegedly increases your gas mileage. The way that it (supposedly) works
is that it uses electricity from the alternator to get hydrogen by splitting
water, and then adding that hydrogen to the air that gets mixed in the engine. The argument is that the hydrogen causes the gasoline to burn more completely and more cleanly, thus increasing the efficiently of the engine, which allows it to go further on a gallon of gasoline.

A local TV station in Florida claims to have tested the device. They tested the mileage of their news van using a dynamometer; then they mounted the device on the engine of their news van, and after giving it time to break in, put the
van back on the dynamometer, and tested its mileage again.

Here’s where the pathetic part comes in. They reported that before mounting the hydrogen generator on their van, they got an average mileage of 9.4 miles per gallon. After mounting it, they claim that they got 23.2 miles per gallon. Ok so far? Now, they go on to say that increasing their mileage from 9.4 to 23.2 mpg is a 61% improvement in mileage.

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You might have heard the story that’s been going round about the asteroid
Apophis. This is an asteroid that was, briefly, considered by NASA to be a collision risk with earth. But after more observations to gather enough data to compute its orbit more precisely, the result was that it’s not a significant risk. The current NASA estimates are that it’s a collision risk of about one in 45,000.

The news around it is that some German kid claims to have figured out that
NASA got it wrong, and that the real risk is 1 in 450. What was NASA’s big
mistake, according to the kid?

He says that if the asteroid were to hit a satellite, that it would change the satellite’s trajectory enough to make it hit the earth.

This has been reported with ridiculous credulity. Anyone with the least
bit of mathematical literacy should know, pretty much without even needing to
think about it, that this is absolutely silly.

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I was asked by a reader to take a look at yet another crackpot theory of everything. This time, it’s the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe. This one is as cranky as any, but it’s actually got some interestingly silly math to it.

Stripped down to its basics, the CTMU is just yet another postmodern
“perception defines the universe” idea. Nothing unusual about it on that
level. What makes it interesting is that it tries to take a set-theoretic
approach to doing it.

The real universe has always been theoretically treated as an object, and specifically as the composite type of object known as a set. But an object or set exists in space and time, and reality does not. Because the real universe by definition contains all that is real, there is no “external reality” (or space, or time) in which it can exist or have been “created”. We can talk about lesser regions of the real universe in such a light, but not about the real universe as a whole. Nor, for identical reasons, can we think of the universe as the sum of its parts, for these parts exist solely within a spacetime manifold identified with the whole and cannot explain the manifold itself. This rules out pluralistic explanations of reality, forcing us to seek an explanation at once monic (because nonpluralistic) and holistic (because the basic conditions for existence are embodied in the manifold, which equals the whole). Obviously, the first step towards such an explanation is to bring monism and holism into coincidence.

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I managed to trash yet another laptop – the city commute through the subways seems to be pretty hard on computers! – so while I’m sitting and slowly restoring my backups, I was looking through the folder where I keep links to crankpots that I’d like to mock someday. I noticed one that I found quite a long time ago – and to my surprise, I realized that I never wrote about it! And given that I’ve been mocking relativity-haters lately, it’s particularly appropriate to cover it now.

The site is called “The Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics”. It takes quite a different approach to criticizing relativity. As we’ve seen in past posts, most anti-relativity rants dislike relativity because it implies that there is no fixed reference frame – that there’s no such thing as an absolute velocity, no distinguished point at the unmoving center of the universe. That’s not this guys tack; no, he’s much smarter than that. His argument is that if you accept the idea of spacetime as defined by relativity, that
it logically implies that motion is impossible – and since we can clearly move, than means
that relativity is wrong!

Some of the most famous physicists in the world are not telling the truth about one of the most taken for granted concepts in scientific history. They are not telling us how they can come up with their fanciful time travel theories (wormholes, advanced and retarded waves traveling in spacetime, etc…) using a model of the universe that precludes the possibility of motion. Nothing can move in spacetime or in a time dimension-axis by definition. This is because motion in time is self-referential. It is for this reason that Sir Karl Popper compared Einstein’s spacetime to Parmenide’s unchanging block universe[*], in which nothing ever happens.

…

Before I continue, less I be immediately branded as an anti-relativity crank, let me make it perfectly clear that I agree with the mathematical and predictive correctness of both the Special and the General Theory of Relativity.

Now that is some primo crackpottery! You’ve got to love it when the crackpot starts off his argument by both denying that he’s a crackpot, and refuting his own argument!

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