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NOVA needs a "logic editor" for its shows #186 Rockthrowing theory book
Posted:
Jan 11, 2013 1:50 AM
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Not often do I start a post off with a joke, but many NOVA shows are
becoming science jokes.
Recently I read a good joke in sci.math that went similar to this:
Physicist, mathematician, logician were travelling in a tour bus in
CERN countryside where the Higgs boson is pursued. And the
physicist notices a black cow on the hillside and says "all the cows
of CERN are black". The mathematician corrects the physicist by saying
"there exists one cow of all the CERN cows that is black". The
logician chimes into the conversation by saying, "There exists one cow
of all the CERN cows whose one side is solid black."
Now we laugh at that because the logician has it correct, even though
it seems a bit trite, but it points out the huge ways of mistakes that
the physicist and even the mathematician have opened up for
themselves. Because if we visit the other side of the cow and find out
it has white blotches with black, then the logician was the only
correct answer. And the above points out all the silly nonsense of
Higgs boson theory at CERN with its ten thousand assumptions hunting
down some ephemeral particle.
But let me talk about how NOVA science programs have become dreadfully
absent of logical reasoning. Can you even have science if logic is
poor or absent? I would say no. That if you have holes in logic, that
the performance is not science but perhaps art or drama, but not
science.
And this new NOVA show "Decoding Neanderthals" fails in logic. I say
that because the earlier shows of Neanderthals by NOVA some year or
two ago showed the facts that Neanderthal was not the same species as
Homo sapiens, that Paabo had found 3 mutations that signifies
Neanderthal was a different species. But in this program, Paabo and
Green deflect the earlier conclusion of different species and is
wanting us to take in the idea that Neanderthals were breeding left
and right with the incoming Homo sapiens. And where is the logic in
that? If you are different species, you cannot be doing this
interbreeding.
So in the earlier NOVA shows of Neanderthal, Paabo had determined they
were different species, and in this show they are saying Neanderthal
interbred with the Homo sapiens.
That cannot be true. Either the Neanderthals were of the same species
but a different race and thus could interbreed, or, Neanderthals were
a different species and interbreeding would not be viable.
So NOVA has serious problems of logic in these Neanderthal programs.
But the problems of logic run deeper through many of the NOVA programs
and suggests that they have no editor in charge of seeing whether the
programs are logically sound.
Perhaps the most silly logic of any NOVA show to date is the program
that wanted its viewers to believe that the Easter Island statues were
moved upright many kilometers away from the quarry.
Another silly logic NOVA show was a alpine lake in Colorado that was a
death trap for prehistoric animals, and instead of offering the
obvious scenario of too many animals on the ice and the ice broken
through that enmasse drowning, yet this NOVA show tried to foster this
quicksand collapse due to earthquakes.
If NOVA continues with these illogical shows, maybe they should change
their name to that of the Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes show.
--
Google's archives are top-heavy in hate-spew from search-engine-
bombing. Only Drexel's Math Forum has done a excellent, simple and
fair archiving of AP posts for the past 15 years as seen here:
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=499986
Archimedes Plutonium
?http://www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
?whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies
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