Perceptual "Funny" link thread

[davieddy]

Originally Posted by 99.94

http://au.news.yahoo.com/080110/15/15hn7.html
The question is: could you expect as much from a Norwegian Blue?

Stuns easy, the Norwegian Blue.

[99.94]

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/t.../YE_foot_mouth

[petrw1]

Just looking at the dishes would be enough to have anyone swear off food:

http://www.candyboots.com/wwcards.html

[petrw1]

http://www.theodoregray.com/periodictable/

[petrw1]

Maybe after the election this gallery will be enlarged:
http://www.worth1000.com/galleries.a...toshop&id=9196

[davieddy]

See the discussion of "weights and measures" in the
Whisky thread in "Science and Technology" if you are
wondering why Ernst finds this humorous

[m_f_h]

this is hilarious:
http://www.thefinaltheory.com/scienceflaws.html

especially the idea of a light beam "loosing its speed" and then "accelerating up to the speed of light"

also the search for the mysterious energy source a magnet uses to remain in place, while "It certainly takes tremendous energy to cling to the side of a cliff, supporting our own weight against gravity, and before long we would tire and fall."

oh well, there are so many others...
"...yet do not actually add the speed of light back at all, but only the meaningless letter C from the alphabet. Any letter from A to Z could have been chosen, showing how
meaningless and arbitrary it was to choose the letter C, ..."

[m_f_h]

Originally Posted by petrw1

http://www.theodoregray.com/periodictable/

Ha! Another colleague of Eric Weisstein! I should try to joind their business.
Maybe I could credibly pretend that I prefer typing
Series[Exp[x], {x, 0, 6}] rather than series(sin(x),x=0)
and {...} /. x -> 3 rather than subs(x=3,[...])
... but I fear I'd be trapped somehow. I'm so much used to write functions in lowercase with parentheses, {...} for sets etc...

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by m_f_h

this is hilarious:
http://www.thefinaltheory.com/scienceflaws.html

especially the idea of a light beam "loosing its speed" and then "accelerating up to the speed of light"

also the search for the mysterious energy source a magnet uses to remain in place, while "It certainly takes tremendous energy to cling to the side of a cliff, supporting our own weight against gravity, and before long we would tire and fall."

oh well, there are so many others...
"...yet do not actually add the speed of light back at all, but only the meaningless letter C from the alphabet. Any letter from A to Z could have been chosen, showing how
meaningless and arbitrary it was to choose the letter C, ..."

I work with a man with a Phd in Physics ... his thesis had something to do with stars. He has actually talked to the Author, though not read his book for obvious reasons. Anyway here is a quote from him:

Actually I go one further, I know the author, and have had several conversations with him.

I haven't actually read his book ... but I do know that he struggled with understanding basic physics ideas. For example for a long while, he thought that there must be an enormous energy source keeping the planets in orbit. He had difficulty getting through his first year physics classes ....
Mark is a lively character, a good debater, and passionate about what he does. I'm sure the book has an entertainment value.

Overall, I'm pretty sure that 95% of this book is pseudo science. (Even made the http://www.crank.net/index.html)

Lets take Mark's argument that holding a 100 pound weight takes energy. He says it obvious, you sweat you can feel the effort of fighting against gravity to hold the weight -- but conventional physics says there is no work done. ( no distance through which force worked). If we replace Mark holding the weight with a table holding the weight, it obvious that the table has no source of energy, it sits there year after year, century after century and 100 pound weight can sit it on, and there no mechanism by which the table could be producing energy. So how come the table can hold the weight and not expend energy and yet we have to? Obviously, we do need to expend energy to produce the force to hold the weight. Biochemical reactions produce muscle contraction that provides the tension that lets us retain our shape and hold the weight. The table has intermolecular forces that hold the tables shape. The table rather like a huge pile of very rigid springs. These tiny springs want to be neither compressed or stretched. Putting a book (or 100 weight) on the table, compresses the springs ever so slightly so that springs that then push back on the book with enough force to balance gravity. However, those spring forces aren't doing any work holding the book. If we tried putting the book on pile of jelly the jelly just flatten out under the pressure of the book but if the jelly had some kind of energy source by which it could generate tension amongst its parts then it could retain it shape and hold the book. We are sort of like that pile of jelly without muscle power we just collapse into a jumble of floppy arms and legs not able to hold anything. Now if we could place the weight on our head, and use rigidity of our body to support the weight we discover that the effort to hold the weight drops. It still not zero but it considerably less than when we had to provide muscle power in our arms to hold the weight.

On positive side, Mark is actually a pretty smart fellow, and their are a large number of top rated scientists today ( Lee Smolin , Micheal Kau, etc.) that are raising the issue that many of our theories ( string theory, dark matter, etc. ) are increasingly becoming non-measurable and non-refutable. In short, if you have theories that don't predict anything or have so many undetermined constants that the could be made to fit any observation -- is it really science? However replacing them with Mark's bubble theory of gravity - that doesn't have any of the mathematics worked out -- it seems unlikely to me to be a real improvement. Can his theory reproduce the known successes of say Newtonian physics? Probably not. Where are the proposed scientific tests of his new theory? None. What anomalies with existing theories does his theory explain? No real ones. Not much here of substance in this new book I'm afraid.

Mark has a way of looking at the world that is different than most people..... and that is a strength. His book probably worth a read even if he is a crackpot.
Give him one for originality. But score him zero on his science. If only he gone into philosophy he been considered a genius instead of a crackpot.

[petrw1]

Bet you can recognize many of these.

http://www.moviecliches.com/

Quite a good list on Computers, one of dozens of topics

[99.94]

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/stor...80-948,00.html