Porter Moser to Loyola -- say what?? And how easy is it to debunk realy bad and arrogant science!

Hmmm.. are Loyola fans going to be happy?? Loyola is going to hire Porter Moser as their new head coach!
Those winning days at Arkansas-Little Rock are a distant memory -- as his most recent four years as head coach at Illinois State University went 10-19, 17-13, 9-19, and 15-16...

Porter also was interim head coach a couple games at Saint Louis when Majerus went down...
in Porter's 3 games coaching Saint Louis while Rick Majerus was gone..he went 0-3 with losses to Dayton, Temple, and Duquesne

so actually his total W-L record in all games he's been the guy at the helm is 105-104...and in the past eight years he's 51-70!!

So are Loyola fans going to be happy getting a guy who really hasn't shown the ability to win for a long, long time?? I get a snicker out of thinking what some Bradley fans would have thought!!



Now -- on to DEBUNKING BAD SCIENCE!!!!

Now a followup on a couple highly publicized stories...that were reported as fact and hyped as if it was comparable to the story about the discovery of penicillin!!


First -- surely you recall how NASA hyped and teased the media then held a ballyhooed news conference four months ago to claim they had discovered an "alien" organism that thrived on arsenic??

Remember how badly the whole thing was deceivingly promoted then how poorly and stupidly the press ran with it?? Geez -- is the media that stupid and gullible?? I guess so -- I even wrote on this media stupidity a couple times before and even predicted how bad-wrong they'd be yet never apologize-- but now we have even more followup to go on......

http://bubravesblogger.blogspot.com/2010/12/more-entertaining-bits-from-our-media.html

http://bubravesblogger.blogspot.com/2010/12/some-valley-results.html

http://bubravesblogger.blogspot.com/2010/12/andrew-warren-player-of-week-and-one-of.html


Funny how the entirety of the world's press have failed to cover the disappointing followup on this story...probably because it would make them look so bad the way they fell for the hype and ran with a phony story in the first place.

But here's the truth...once the news conference lights were turned off, and the teaser announcements had died down...the researcher at the heart of this whole sham, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, was forced to actually reveal her research and results...thus it finally was read and scrutinized by other scientists.

And guess what....almost universally, other scientists who saw or tried to study her findings have concluded her work was shoddy, poorly done, filled with assumptions and fabrications, and in short...was total baloney!!
Even Wolfe-Simon, NASA, and her supporters have been embarrassed into silence....now that others have proven this "arsenic eating bacteria" wasn't something from a strange world -- but was just an arsenic disabled organism that was no more a new creature than a purple dyed pair of underwear are a newly discovered life form because it differs from the white ones found at K-Mart!

If you are actually interested to read more and how NASA and this pseudo-scientist Wolfe-Simon have duped many people and almost all the media....

http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2011/03/arsenic_life_and_misunderstand.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/02/nasa-life-form-bacteria-arsenic

http://motherboard.tv/2010/12/7/nasa-s-arsenic-eating-alien-bacteria-is-more-like-science-fiction


I guess to me the funniest part of this whole story is how the lead author, Felisa Wolfe-Simon has responded to all the criticism and disproof of her years-long studies...
..at first she was completely silent, hoping the criticism would go away -- she didn't even read what her critics said! She remained arrogant and aloof as if her work (backed by taxpayer money) should stand unopposed as god-given truth.

Then when the sheer weight of the disproof and criticism forced her to respond...she brushed it all off and said that the NASA folks (the people whose salaries are paid by you and me) would back her up and that she didn't need to explain her faulty and sloppy science.

Then finally -- she branded all the criticism as personal attacks, and claimed her life is now a nightmare, having to defend the work she believes needs no defense, and how it's consumed all her time just reading all the claims of how her science was faulty.

Awwww...poor Felisa....she promoted a fairy tale as fact....took home a big government (NASA) paycheck for phony work (didn't even Patrick O'Bryant get hammered for this and have to pay it all back if he didn't actually do the work?), and now claims her poor life is ruined by evil people who dare to ask for evidence that her sloppy work wasn't just manufactured out of thin air in her lab.
Sadly this is how science seems to work nowadays...just make it up, invite the press, give a little sci-fi teaser, then ask the press to make your fairy tale into fact the way they have with monkeys-into-people, and the vast complexity of the galaxies just happening out of a bunch of dust that the media helps to promote.


Here's the 2nd example......
......moving on to one other recent scientific discovery that needs a little followup...
Recall the news release about the Goldilocks planet that someone claims they had discovered that almost certainly has life on it?
Seriously -- one top researcher says he is 100% sure this newly discovered planet that's dozens of light years from here -- has life!
He has NO POSSIBLE WAY of knowing yet defies all of scientific reason and says he's still 1005 sure. This is more like a fanatical religious belief than science!!
http://www.apologeticspress.ws/articles/240448

Given we know of NO accepted evidence of life anywhere but earth -- this guy's claim is more wild and unbelievable than those who claim people rise from the dead or walk on water -- yet those people are scoffed at by the scientific community!
Those "scientists" claim surely there's millions of other planets out there like earth and they would surely all have life on them...
But is this true?? Are there lots of planets like earth -- how about we actually examine the FACTS???

Anyway -- here's the latest on this Goldilocks stuff...now the actual FACTS!!!
The Kepler (deep space telescope that's in earth orbit) has actually discovered evidence of the existence of more than 1,200 exo-planets -- planets of other systems far from earth.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler_data_release.html

Of the 1235 exo-planets that they have found evidence for...(planets outside of our solar system)
only 68 are "near earth-sized".....
so just using that data -- we have 68 that they sort into a category they call "near earth-sized"...only about 5%.
BUT --- only FIVE of those are in the "habitable zone" -- or not too close to the star as to be thousands of degrees...
(now we're down to only 5/1235 = 0.4%)

BUT even of those five -- the researchers admit they are highly likely to be mostly gaseous, only partly solid and contain little or no water...read for yourself!

Here are the NASA release's words...and remember how erroneous the other NASA release about the arsenic bug was deliberately made...
"The earth-sized planets are........mixtures of rock and gases, possibly including water. The rocky material accounts for most of the planets' mass, while the gas takes up most of their volume."

So now...
.. it's even a longer shot than 0.4% are earth-like -- NONE, in truth, are actually earth-like, only earth-sized!!
Hmmm..that's a bit of a deception....so after you actually read all the NASA data that is made known....
of the 1235 planets found -- all of them -- 100% of them differ from earth...
some are about earth-sized, some are about as close to the star they revolve around as earth...but in fact NONE of them are orbiting a similar star to the one earth orbits, and is similar in enough regard to actually call earth-like..NONE...
and no evidence exists any of them have water.........

Hmm...so just maybe earth doesn't have gobs of similar-planets out there like it....just maybe earth is a pretty special and unique place!!
Someone else once said that...and it ties in to our next topic........


Then the last bit of science to rebut is the long held argument from lots of scientists on how water came to be on earth when there's clearly not much water anywhere else - not on the Moon, nor in our solar system, nor anywhere...and no other planet has much if any.
Most scientists hold one of two beliefs....the almost silly one that water on earth made its way here from all the comets that hit the earth and deposited their water here (silly because of the sheer number of comets that would have been needed to do this would have left undeniable other evidence..)..
then there are those who claim some special chemical thing happened long ago that we know nothing of and left water behind...(this is pretty much a fairy tale, too!)

Now get this........
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827853.800-earth-may-have-had-water-from-day-one.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

You kinda get a little laugh from this....here we have a scientist who must have just finished reading the first chapter of the Book of Genesis!!
He looks at the data and the evidence we have about water on earth.
Then he looks at how much water we have and contemplates all the possibilities...
Then he basically agrees it had to have been put there on earth right from "DAY ONE"!!!
And thenhe published this as if it a BRAND NEW CONCEPT that nobody has ever thought of!!!!

He's saying the water literally fell out of the thin air or outer space---- even thought the existence of free blobs of water out there in space is virtually unheard of -- there aren't any!! So where did they come from???

This guy is a scientist -- the kind of person that mocks and ridicules the stuff in the Bible, and yet he's plagiarizing the very concept of how water got here on earth right from the first book of the Bible and claiming credit as he thought of this first...like it's his own original idea!!!
The only thing he leaves out is that he fails to give the proper credit to where the water came from when it suddenly appeared on earth "in the beginning".

Seriously -- if the top, most respected, most intelligent scientists in the WORLD -- keep coming up with this kind of stuff...it does make all of us feel smarter...after all we kinda figured out most of this stuff way before those guys did -- and we haven't made the ridiculous and blatant mistakes they made in their hurry to get their faces in front of the camera and get the government backing and money that comes from the hype they create with their false info and pseudoscience.

Oh well........in some sense it makes me feel a whole lot better -- smarter -- like maybe I actually can lead my own life and do OK without these experts and governments telling me what to do.....I guess I am just fine after all without them. AND -- that there were "experts" eons ago who obviously knew all this and knew it even better than they do.