Comments on: and now for something completely ridiculous

By: Uncle Al

Uncle Al — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:40:14 +0000

Vote with the stupid! How can so many people be wrong? The University of Michigan has more than 80 diversity programs,

http://www.diversity.umich.edu/programs/

As for the Gifted…

http://www.giftedstudy.com/residential/michigan/index.asp
“The Summer Institute for the Gifted is not associated with the University of Michigan.”

OTOH, if you are a paternalistic historic White Protestant oppressor of Peoples of Colour… Charlene Werner is the confluence of overwhelming ignorance with overweening arrogance. We lack rigorous characterization of the topology and function of cluelessness. An idiot is not half way to being an idiot-savant.

God save us from the congenitally inconsequential.

By: Waddell Robey

Waddell Robey — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:56:07 +0000

I became violently nauseated when it was presented that the entire mass of the Universe could be compacted into a bowling ball. Good grief this lady better never meet a neutron star. She callously disassembles Einstein’s energy equation with total abandon leaving me in a disoriented state. How on Earth did this lady get loose?

Good job debunking and warning us about bad cosmology/science. I elect to give her a free trip to the event horizon of the nearest black hole.

By: Victor

Victor — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 06:57:26 +0000

Is it so bad to watch these videos purely for the sake of its comedic values?

Because they really are funny, if you can tolerate that kind of humour. But your brain explodes a little inside.

Great read.

By: Rock

Rock — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:42:50 +0000

Actually I took a class at CalTech from the late great astronomy Jesse Greenstein where he may well have been the biggest mistake ever made (notwithstanding the cheap and common spectacle of someone dividing by zero.) Dr. Greenstein was calculating the number of stellar collisions in our galaxy at the blackboard. He roughed out the equation and popped in reasonable estimates for the various terms and arrived at a result of 10**9 collisions per second. To his credit he realized his error right away. “Oops!” I put that 10**100 in the numerator instead of the denominator.”

Everyone else in the class hardly noticed the brief misstep, but I realized that I had just witnessed an error of 10**200!!! I have been telling this story for almost 30 years and no one has ever put forward a calculation with a “bigger” error than that one.

By: Dave Romeo

Dave Romeo — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:14:16 +0000

Fantastic article! I must admit, I didn’t even make the 2 minute mark in her video before my brain rebelled in a fit of self-preservation. I’ve never before encountered stupid so intense it engaged my fight-or-flight mechanism before.

By: gfish

gfish — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:51:52 +0000

“Compressing mass into a tiny space doesn’t mean there’s less mass.”

That’s actually a great point I forgot to mention. Even if you destroy the matter itself by compressing it with the force of a collapsing hypernova and trap all of its energy in a self-gravitating object, i.e. a black hole, the mass is still very much there.

By: tmso

tmso — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:18:08 +0000

I thought she was great. I watched it a few days ago and thought, wow, even to a very sympathetic audience that must have sounded just plain confusing. I mean, even if you were trying really, really hard to follow her, you just can’t. I’m sure everyone in that room left thinking, what did she just say? She should be the homeopathic industry’s spoke-person! :)

By: ColonelFazackerley

ColonelFazackerley — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:59:42 +0000

Ha Ha. Nice work.

I am impressed with your ability to watch it and still have enough wit left to analyse. I went limp and had a small dribble string coming from the corner of my mouth. My wife had to shout at me to snap me out of it.

By: reggie

reggie — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:27:01 +0000

Nicely done, Greg. I must admit that parts of my brain shut down while I watched her in that video. I think it was some fail safe mechanism to protect my mind from damage due to excessive stupid. At any rate, I couldn’t and dared not try to wrap my head around some of the things she was saying. A case of “fractal wrongness”, if ever there was one.

By: musubk

musubk — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:32:27 +0000

As far as degrees of wrong go, I’m pretty sure this may be some sort of a record.

Bah, a mere 0.229 Dmb’s :P

Though I’ll give you the honorable mention, since this is the first person I’ve seen whose error can sensibly be measured in Dmb’s.

Someone should teach that lady about density. Compressing mass into a tiny space doesn’t mean there’s less mass. Or at least teach her the difference between multiplying by one, what she wants to do by ‘crossing out mass’, and multiplying by zero*, what we get if there’s an ‘infinitesimal amount of mass’.

*I’m afraid the concept of limits would go right over her head.