Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 28

Rebel science, even on the weekend, is not the same as false or pseudo-science.

Pseudo-science has often been the mainstream science time and again.

That is, official "scientific" dogma has been batshit crazy from time to time (What Is Pseudo Science?).

I am not talking about some of the religious influence over science at times (flat Earth, Sun and stars orbit the Earth, etc.), no, I am talking about mainstream, establishment, official scientists feverishly advocating utterly false and bogus dogma (The Criminally Insane Epoch Arises - 2).

Another example surfaced this week, which shows that most often this perversion of science takes place due to external corrupting forces:

Egypt's military leaders have come under ridicule after the chief army engineer unveiled what he described as a "miraculous" set of devices that detect and cure Aids, hepatitis and other viruses.

The claim, dismissed by experts and called "shocking to scientists" by the president's science adviser, strikes a blow to the army's carefully managed image as the saviour of the nation. It also comes as General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, who toppled Mohammed Morsi in July after the Islamist leader ignored mass protests calling for him to step down, is expected to announce he will run for president.
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Abdullah said two of the devices named C-Fast and I-Fast used electromagnetism to detect Aids, hepatitis and other viruses without taking blood samples while the third, named Complete Cure Device, acted as a dialysis unit to purify the blood. He also said the C-Fast, which looks like an antenna affixed to the handle of a blender, detected patients infected with viruses that cause hepatitis and Aids with a high success rate.
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(Egypt's Military Leaders Unveil Devices to Cure AIDS). I am reminded of suggestions in the U.S. that advocated dropping nuclear bombs on hurricanes and on the BP Gulf Oil Spill as solutions to those problems.

That is deliberate fraud, however, other fraudulent "scientific" material is engendered by negligence or laziness:

Like all the best hoaxes, there was a serious point to be made. Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees.

It took only a handful of days. The students wrote a simple computer program that churned out gobbledegook and presented it as an academic paper. They put their names on one of the papers, sent it to a conference, and promptly had it accepted. The sting, in 2005, revealed a farce that lay at the heart of science.

But this is the hoax that keeps on giving. The creators of the automatic nonsense generator, Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, have made the SCIgen program free to download. And scientists have been using it in their droves. This week, Nature reported, French researcher Cyril Labbé revealed that 16 gobbledegook papers created by SCIgen had been used by German academic publisher Springer. More than 100 more fake SCIgen papers were published by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Both organisations have now taken steps to remove the papers.

(How Computer-generated Fake Papers Are Flooding Academia). Possibly the most famous hoax papers recently are those which some scientists and politicians pass around and quote which deny the science that tells us that we have damaged our Global Climate System.

Not so easy to remember, but equally unscientific, is a NIST paper which said office fires for the first time in history brought down three skyscrapers, but those official papers were not persuasive enough to change building codes (Are Millions of Business People At Risk of ... Collapsing Buildings?).

As a follow up to that one, some architects and engineers are trying to get the paper corrected, or the building codes changed (William Pepper, Attorney at Law, Pursuing NIST via OIG Re: Fraudulent WTC 7 Report).

Even what were once considered elite scientific journals have turned out to have been utter long-winded bullshit (The Eugenics Review Vols. 1 to 60; 1909 to 1968).

Nevertheless, various states passed laws based on the pseudo-science, Eugenics, and such laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, causing thousands to be castrated and such, and eventually the American attitude towards that pseudo-science eventually convinced Adolf Hitler:

And yet in Bruinius’ telling American eugenicists don’t look nearly so inconsequential. Importantly, Bruinius points out, we were the first to pick up the eugenics bug. Galton, a Brit, provided the intellectual basis for eugenics, but Americans, who fancied themselves a chosen people and whose blood has always run hot on matters of utopia, actually implemented the plans. In 1907, Indiana passed “the first sterilization law in human history,” Bruinius writes, and “in the next two decades, the United States became the pioneer in state-sanctioned programs to rid society of the ‘unfit.’” At least 30 states enacted similar laws, and sterilization became routine. California, which ran the most aggressive program, sterilized more than 2,500 people in a 10-year period; in all, more than 65,000 Americans were rendered infertile.

More astonishing than the number of people sterilized is the long list of famous Americans who supported and sanctioned such programs. Bruinius takes his book’s title from the 1927 Supreme Court majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, which ruled that the Constitution did not prohibit Virginia — and, consequently, other states — from sterilizing its citizens. The opinion, by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., is Bruinius’ trump card, and he repeats bits of it often; if you have trouble believing that anyone with half a brain might have bought the arguments of eugenicists, the [Supreme Court Opinion] settles the matter.
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The American enthusiasm for purifying the populace did not go unnoticed beyond our borders. After the Supreme Court approved the process, “the American technique of social engineering became the model for ... Hitler’s Germany, where the sterilization laws were consciously modeled on and supported by the American efforts.

(Progressive Genocide, emphasis added). I could go on and on, but the weekend approaches, so I will leave the remainder for another time:

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein

"That depends on the quality of both the science and the religion." - Dredd

(Dredd Blog Quotes, cf. Science and Religion, by Albert Einstein).

Have a good scientific weekend.