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I have a pet peeve: people complaining about food having “chemicals” in it.  Three of my co-workers have done this in the past few weeks.  I can’t really blame them, though–some foods are actually advertised as being “chemical-free”.  I wonder how that works.

See, everything is composed of chemicals. So having them in your food is not inherently good or bad. It really boils down to what the chemicals are, and how they interact with the chemicals naturally occurring in the human body.

Then I read about this lady named Vani Hari, who calls herself the “Food Babe“, and who has been blogging about the pernicious influence of chemicals in food.  She’s even succeeded in getting stores and restaurants to pull some from their shelves.

But there’s been a backlash against her–people saying she has no scientific basis for her claims.  She responds by saying these people are shills for the powerful food chemical industry.

What I know from skimming her blog is that she seems to equate ‘processed” with “bad for you”.  While it’s true that there are probably preservatives and such that are used in some foods that do have harmful effects, I also don’t think you can just say “oh, that food is processed! It’s not good.” Cooking food is processing it, and that’s been a major development in human evolution.

I think there are a lot of things wrong with some of the commonly-available foods, and some of Hari’s advice is good.  (Avoiding McDonald’s, for example–their food is dreadful.) But I think some of the other stuff she says is built more on irrational fears of “chemicals’ than on concrete issues.

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Via eurobrat, a study that I can only hope is a joke:

Researchers from Michigan Technological University hunting for evidence of time travel within social networks have failed to find any.

Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson explain in their paper, titled “Searching the Internet for evidence of time travellers”, how they scoured Google, Bing, Google+, Facebook and Twitter for a series of carefully-chosen terms.

They looked for terms like “Pope Francis” being used before there was a Pope Francis. But sadly, they were unable to find any instances that seemed to be relevant.

The cynical, practical part of my mind is amazed that they wasted their time on such nonsense.  The sci-fi enthusiast in me also thinks it’s silly for another reason: obviously, anybody who has conquered the fabric of space-time  could easily go back in time and remove any internet references that would give them away.

Probably, in the future, there will be some time-travelers’ code that prevents them from doing such things. Perhaps there will even be time-travel moderators, who, like Wikipedia editors, venture back to remove all suspect references.

This is the issue with the concept of time-travel: it instantly introduces mind-bending paradoxes that the humans cannot comprehend.  Try reading Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out Of Time, and count the plot holes.  I’m not really sure if you can apply the normal scientific method to learning about time travel.

But don’t listen to cynical old me.  We all know the U.S. Government, and particularly Donald Rumsfeld, has long been control of time travel technology.

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The Daily Mail reports that a study found “Men who are physically strong are more likely to have right wing political views”. Although, the article says that they used data on “bicep size, socio-economic status and support for economic redistribution”.  Bicep size doesn’t always correlate perfectly with strength–strength lifters who can lift more weight may not have biceps as large as bodybuilders who deliberately sculpt their arms. I actually wonder if this could skew their results, because it’s probably mostly rich guys who have time to body-build, as opposed to guys who just become strong working construction or something.  But whatever.

I haven’t actually read the study, just the press reports on it.  Maybe they misinterpreted it.  But I think people are too quick to assume that physically sculpted bodybuilders are “strong”, when they may not actually be that capable. Bodybuilding is a fine activity, but it’s not the same as achieving peak physical ability.

Also, none of the articles I read said anything about what other variables the researchers took into account.  I can only assume that they controlled for things like “age” as well.  Maybe I’ll try to find the study, although the whole thing seems kind of silly to me.

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This is your Solar System:

This is your Solar System on black holes:

Any questions?

It seems that a black hole was ejected from its galaxy by another black hole.  This gives some insight as to what happens when an immovable object meets another immovable object. That isn’t the important bit, though:

This discovery… implies that there may be supermassive black holes moving through the universe outside of galaxies. And we currently have no way of knowing that they’re there.

Does that mean we could all be sitting around, minding our own business, and suddenly we’re all crushed to a point of infinite density?  ‘Cause that’s enough to ruin my whole day.

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As if on cue, a guy named Rob Flickenger has invented a Tesla energy gun:

Cool. I like electricity. But notice that the thing’s range is apparently 12 inches. And it took only took a little over a hundred years to do it! To me, this somewhat long development time does explain why the armies of the world weren’t lining up to pay Tesla when he first talked about his energy weapon.

By the way, people keep calling it a “Tesla coil gun”. I believe there is also a “coil gun” that is a different thing altogether, invented by Carl Gauss–sometimes called a “Gauss gun”. And yes, I only know about this stuff from playing Fallout. With Science!

But, we can sleep soundly in our beds knowing that our best and brightest are devising new and better weapons. Hey, wait…

Nikola Tesla, via Wikipedia.

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For a long time, Thomas Edison was held up as a model of American ingenuity, an inspiring figure whose inventions changed life for everyone. But, relatively recently, Nikola Tesla has received more acclaim as the better inventor, and his works are considered to have been unfairly neglected in favor of Edison’s. lately, it seems like Tesla is more popular than Edison. Perhaps it’s just one of those fashions that goes back and forth. (You might even say it “alternates” which one is “current”.)

Freddie DeBoer linked to a comic that exemplifies the lately fashionable Tesla-worship. I agree with Freddie’s reaction; even though I’m disposed to be more sympathetic to Tesla, that comic made me feel kind of uneasy about it, so strident was its tone.

I know I’ve used this quote before in other contexts, and I hate to keep using the same things, but damn it if it isn’t completely appropriate for summing up Edison and Tesla:

“One of them is half-mad–and the other, wholly unscrupulous.”–Claude Rains, as Mr. Dryden in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Edison was a cutthroat businessman, there can be very little doubt. You don’t enjoy the kind of success he did without pulling some pretty mean stuff, I think. Tesla, meanwhile, was pretty clearly crazy. That was probably why he was such a great innovator.

For an example, it’s not clear to me whether Tesla’s “particle gun” was actually something real or just an idle thought he had. I sometimes think certain people–like the author of the above-mentioned comic–are too quick to credit Tesla with “inventing” stuff when actually it was just stuff he dreamed up in some of his less-rational moments.

Not that he wasn’t a great inventor. I’m just saying he’s a little over-celebrated. Of course, so was Edison when you look at all the rotten things he did, such as electrocuting animals for a PR campaign. I’m sure a lot of the admiration for Tesla comes as a direct result of people hearing in school about how wonderful Edison was.

There’s also an under-current of culture war to it, I think. Consider: the wily, Midwestern-born businessman/showman vs. the misunderstood, introverted immigrant. I don’t know if anyone has ever done a poll to look for correlation between political affiliation and support of Tesla or Edison, but I bet I know how it would come out.

I think part of it is the misrepresentation of Edison–like the author of the comic said, “he didn’t invent the light-bulb, he sold it.” Is that wrong?  Why, people greatly admire Steve Jobs, but if you think about it, a lot of what he did was selling what Jonathan Ive designed. That doesn’t make Jobs a phony; it makes him great at what he did: selling stuff.

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Somebody famous once asked “if time travel is possible, where are the time travelers?” Presumably they would disguise themselves to fit in, but you have to assume there would be lapses. Maybe the people we think are crazy are really time travelers. That might explain things. Or maybe the people who think they are time-travelers are crazy.

Thingy posted some musings of her own about Andrew Basiago’s story, and it set me thinking more about time travel. Personally, I’m quite confident that Basiago is either playing a hoax or else a bit touched in the head–I swear, “project Pegasus“. Really?– but I do wonder about it on a theoretical level.

The most plausible means of time travel was that I’ve read went something like this: if something could go into a black hole and not be destroyed, it could theoretically reappear at any point in the Universe and at any point in time. The problem is, nothing that we know of can survive going into a black hole. (Obviously, I’ve oversimplified a lot here, mostly because I don’t understand it too well myself. This might help.)

Then, of course, there are all the paradoxes that arise with time-travel. They make for good stories, but they also seem to suggest it’s impossible. Oh, well. It’s a question better minds than my own have had difficulty grappling with, I know that.

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So, in my last post, I expressed some disbelief about the claim this one dude made that the government has time-traveling capability. But he also said they have teleporters, which even though highly unlikely, is at least theoretically possible. Even though I don’t think it’s true, it is fun to think about. So, naturally, I read up on teleportation.

It’s all pretty interesting; especially the part about how if teleportation were made possible for humans, it would mean that when a person steps into the teleporter he effectively “dies” and a clone is created on the other end. All in all, I think I’d prefer to take the bus. Still, it would be useful for moving stuff from place to place.

On the other hand, one of the major life lessons I’ve learned from video games is that teleportation experiments inevitably lead to an invasion of evil monsters from another dimension.

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ThinkProgress has a good article about how global warming is causing the recent outbreaks of extreme weather. The article is worth reading in full,  and also includes this video, which does a pretty good job explaining things:

You know, my Republican friends often say: “What global warming? It’s nice and cool outside right now.” That’s why the term “climate change” was introduced; because “climate” is basically an averaging of what the weather is doing. So, global warming does not mean it will henceforth be warmer than previously all day, every day, but rather that the average trend is towards warming.

And moreover, slight changes in averages can have a major ripple effect throughout the whole system.

Well, I’m not a scientist, but the video features people who are. They explain everything pretty well.

(Hat Tip to Private Buffoon.)