The above video features models of perpetual motion machines that have been suggested over the centuries. I assume that the makers of the video resort to trickery to make it seem like the machines move without any energy input, since it is a fundamental claim of physics that a perpetual motion machine is impossible. (Physicists believe that energy is always conserved, and any machine like this would have to lose energy through friction.)
Indeed, the impossibility of perpetual motion machines has even been encoded in law, in that patents cannot be granted for such a machine unless a working model is provided.
Nevertheless, over the years various people have claimed to be able to get more energy out of such machines than they put in. Read some of the fascinating stories at this site on perpetual motion machines.
James Randi has for many years offered a $1,000,000 prize for anyone who could provide solid evidence of any "paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event." (See here.) To date, no one has claimed this prize.
So, Rand Paul plagiarized some passages from the Wikipedia entry on Gattaca (and earlier plagiarized some bits from the entry on Stand and Deliver). As sins of politicians go, this doesn't quite rank up there with warrantless wiretaps or torture, but it is still a sin -- the sort of sin that will get you an "F" in my course, and (if I have my way) get you expelled from the university.
Paul's response to questions about his little scandal seem to be the typical politician move of trying to say nothing that's completely false, and almost saying the truth, while trying to deflect the criticism by making it seem that the issue is about something else entirely.
On the one hand, Paul is (almost) admitting to plagiarizing when he says "We did . . .", and when he says that proper citations would be required if the speech were published. He also claims that Maddow et al. are making a mountain out of a molehill, which is an admission that there is at least a molehill there.
But on the other hand, his attempt to deflect criticism by saying that he "gave credit to the people who wrote the movie" is an example of a red herring. He plagiarized because he took someone else's words and presented them as his own. No one supposes he pretended to write the movie. This is a transparent attempt to misdirect, and it's not intellectually honest.
Further, when he says "Nothing I said was not given attribution to where it came from,” he steps over the line from evasion into falsehood. (Perhaps it was just slip in a live interview, but it's false nevertheless.) The words came from Wikipedia, and he did not attribute them to Wikipedia.
Is it making a mountain out of molehill? One could try to make the case, and Paul does, that a speech isn't quite the same thing as a published piece of writing. But it's not likely to be very convincing. In a speech you aren't going to cite page numbers and publishers, but it doesn't take much to say " . . . as wikipedia says . . . " and that's what intellectual honesty requires.
But bottom line is pretty simple: Don't plagiarize. Period.
Consider the following video of a master of chi who can knock opponents over without even touching them.
When I see something like this I usually wonder just how much of it is intentional fakery and how much is self delusion. In this case, it seems that Ryuken really did think he had magic chi powers, and was willing to put them to the test against someone who wasn't one of his students.
Dowsing is an ancient practice that used chiefly to try to find water, but people also use it to search for metals and various other objects.
It's easy to find YouTube demonstrations of dowsing. Here's one such lesson:
Here's someone who dowses for gold, for another example, and here is the page of a professional dowser (with links to news stories demonstrating his abilities).
Looks pretty impressive, no?
Does it actually work?
To find out, many scientists and skeptics have set up blinded trials to see if dowsers can find water (or metal) more frequently than they would if they were merely guessing by chance. Here is an example of such a study (note that it is double blind):
Keep in mind that if someone could reliably detect water or gold by dowsing, they could get a million dollars from the Randi Challenge. But the prize money remains unclaimed. (Here's an example of someone trying to dowse for metal on Randi's old TV show.)
One might think this is harmless enough when it's just some old folks wandering around with coat hangers looking for gold.
But it's much less amusing when one learns that a company in England is selling devices that are essentially elaborate dowsing rods and claiming that they can detect bombs. These dowsing rods cost up to $60,000. And, of course, there is no scientific evidence that they actually work.
And it's even more troubling that the Iraqi government has spent over $85 million buying these devices, and that they're being used at checkpoints to check for bombs. (New York Times story)
Almost a hundred million dollars to dowse for bombs. When the stakes are life and death. And no dowser has ever been able to pass a properly blinded test to show that dowsing works.
It seems that a real live dragon has been caught on video flying over Truro England. (Story here.)
It seems (to my eye) to fly rather oddly, but perhaps that's due to being filled with highly combustible gas of some sort. I suppose hydrogen is fairly likely. Do you suppose it has some sort of flint and steel mechanism in its mouth?
Question for final exam: is fire-breathing likely to be an adaptive trait of dragons? If so, in what way does it likely increase fitness? If not, are there other plausible evolutionary mechanisms that might explain its origin?
A new study shows that worrying about money taxes our brain, and makes it harder to think well.
When people are poor, they are “coping with not just a shortfall of money, but also with a concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources.” This means, for example, that poor people will score lower on IQ tests -- simply because they are more worried about coping with their lack of resources.
It's worth noting that the study is pushing a concept of "cognitive bandwidth" -- which is explicitly treated as something that can fluctuate in response to the environment. This is to be contrasted with popular notions of "intelligence" or "IQ" which are typically (if erroneously) considered to be largely permanent fixed features.
“When your bandwidth is loaded, in the case of the poor,” Shafir says, “you’re just more likely to not notice things, you’re more likely to not resist things you ought to resist, you’re more likely to forget things, you’re going to have less patience, less attention to devote to your children when they come back from school.”
It is noteworthy that the “continental displacement” (as Alfred Wegener labeled his view in 1912) was considered a crackpot theory for decades. It was only "in the mid-1960s, as older geologists died off and younger ones began to accumulate proof of seafloor spreading" that the theory gained popularity.
This example obviously fits well with Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions as shifts in a paradigm. It also provides food for thought when considering the question of whether there are intrinsic features that distinguish pseudoscience from revolutionary science, or whether the distinction can only be made in hindsight once we've decided whether the revolutionary theory was right.
Conservapedia bills itself as an avowedly conservative (and "trustworthy") alternative to Wikipedia. The entries there are more sympathetic to creationism and conservative Christian views -- and more hostile to climate change science and black holes -- than Wikipedia is. (Conservapedia attributes this to Wikipedia's "liberal bias.")
I'm particularly fascinated by Conservapedia's denialism about Einstein's theory of relativity. It seems that this might be partly due to a conflation of physical relativity (which says that the speed of light is constant, but mass, length, and time are relative to one's state of motion) with moral relativism (which says there are no objective moral facts).
It appears that the Conservapedian denial of relativity is distinct from the recent surge in defenders of geocentrism (that is, the view that the Earth is at rest in the center of the universe, and the sun revolves around us) -- which I've blogged about before.
You can find some discussion of Conservapedia's relativity denialism in this podcast by Phil Plait, and also at RationalWiki.
