If ever you wanted a review of Kent Hovind’s more recent behavior (no, you don’t), here it is. If you ever doubted that Hovind was a horrible person — well, why would you be here? — this will straighten you out.
I think I poisoned my brain on Sunday reading these claims about different phases of water. Or, at least, I poisoned my Google algorithms because now this crap keeps gurgling up.
Here’s one that’s so over-the-top it was almost amusing, except that it’s a commercial site using ludicrous claims about biology to sell miracle water.
Dr. Gerald Pollack is a biomedical engineering research scientist from the University of Washington that discovered a new state of water beyond liquid, solid and vapor. H3O2, sometimes called gel water, structured water or exclusion zone water (EZ water), is in between a solid and a liquid. An extra hydrogen molecule and an extra oxygen molecule make it silkier than H2O. This matters because that 70 – 90% you’ve heard about in your body is actually H3O2. That’s why water doesn’t come gushing out of you like a hose if you get a cut. Your cells are full of the thicker, H3O2.
Oooh, silkier. How do they measure that? Also cool that they think I’d turn into a firehose if I only contained normal water.
Water in nature is naturally structured even though you can’t see any form in it. At a molecular level, under a microscope water has shapes that are organized in geometric patterns. Spring water, waterfalls and glaciers are structured. And the water in fruits and vegetables is naturally structured. What Dr. Gerald Pollack has revealed to us is that if we want to get our bodies into alignment with nature and health, we need to be thinking about hydration with structured water.
Yes. Put water under a microscope and you’ll be able to see the geometric patterns. I guess it’s supposed to look like this:
If your water looks nothing like that, you can buy a tube full of quartz crystals that will structure your tap water for the low, low, low price of only $1799.
Man, this is an amazing racket.
This chart is very pretty and colorful, but all it’s really doing is plotting a single variable, population size, against the arbitrary names of political subunits. It’s hard to read and difficult to extract any information about relationships from it. I think the creators need to go back and re-read (or read for the first time?) Edward Tufte.
This is what you get when someone is told to make some visual candy that really pops, rather than to transform information into a visual medium. My eyes are simultaneously stimulated and offended.
While I was digging into the question of who this Gilbert Ling character was, I ran into lots of sources that didn’t make the final cut. Unfortunately, most of those sources were from fringe or unsavory places — I did check my collection of textbooks, too, and nowhere does he get any mention. So it’s down into the sewers after all! Like this article on Less Wrong.
The Association-Induction hypothesis formulated by Gilbert Ling is an alternate view of cell function, which suggests a distinct functional role of energy within the cell. I won’t review it in detail here, but you can find an easy to understand and comprehensive introduction to this hypothesis in the book “Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life” by Gerald H. Pollack. This idea has a long history with considerable experimental evidence, which is too extensive to review in this article.
No, it has a 70 year history all centered on the long-winded writings of a single crackpot. There is no experimental evidence for any of it other than the willful distortions of one Gilbert Ling. Pollack is utterly batty, and not a credible source.
Worse still, this guy is using Ling’s theories as a starting point for discussing how we can use this information to potentially increase IQ.
So this suggests a ‘systems biology’ approach to cognitive enhancement. It’s necessary to consider how metabolism is regulated, and what substrates it requires. To raise intelligence in a safe and effective way, all of these substrates must have increased availability to the neuron, in appropriate ratios.
I am always leery of drawing analogies between brains and computers but this approach to cognitive enhancement is very loosely analogous to over-clocking a CPU. Over-clocking requires raising both the clock rate, and the energy availability (voltage). In the case of the brain, the effective ‘clock rate’ is controlled by hormones (primarily triiodothyronine aka T3), and energy availability is provided by glucose and other nutrients.
Oh god. Nerds discussing overly simplistic analogies between brains and computers always makes me leery, too, so just stop already. Especially when your ‘over-clocking’ idea is built on a bogus model of cellular metabolism that has been known to be wrong for the entirety of its “long history”.
I know I started this by dissing the Less Wrong forum, but I will say that, to their credit, most of the commenters were tearing that article apart.
At least this article focuses on the perspective of the students — they’re pissed off. But hey, I recognized a bunch of the students they highlighted!
I also think one student made a particularly good point. Paradoxically, with great diversity comes great isolation.
Mercedese Young Man said she often feels alone on the campus and in the western Minnesota town.
“I feel isolated,” said Young Man, who is in her first semester at Morris. “Before (Sviggum) said all of that I was going to my counselors and telling them I was having a hard time adjusting to being here.”
Young Man, who sat for nearly an hour by herself in the school café seating area, said she transferred to Morris because of its supposed diversity, but she said that’s not the case. Officially Morris can boast of a robustly diverse population – 41% students of color, of that 32% Native American of a total student population of 1,068 – but Young Man disputed those numbers.
“There are just a handful of Native students here and all from separate tribes,” said Young Man, who is from Oglala, South Dakota. “In several of my classes I’m the only person … maybe one other … person of color.”
The raw statistics tends to lump all these students into one mass — “students of color” and “Native American” — but they all see themselves as something far more specific. I’ve known students who are Navajo and Delaware, as well as the regional Lakota and Dakota peoples. There are also Hmong and Somali and Nigerian and Latino and Filipino students here, and just sweeping them into a pile and calling them our diverse brown students is insulting and inadequate.
Bugger Sviggum, we should just listen to the students and follow their suggestions.
To the point of UMN Morris’ declining enrollment, Strukel and Kadlec may have unintentionally offered up a marketing campaign for the university.
“We’re unique here because we’re so separated from the fast-paced world. Here it’s who’s around you; that’s who you got,” said Kadlec. “There’s no Target or Walmart here to take my money so I’m forced to be here on campus with my friends; and that’s not bad at all.”
If you’re wondering where I was this weekend, I was husbanding my strength by taking some time off. This is the time in the semester when everything comes pouring in — we’re past the halfway point, students have enough information to know where their grade stands, and some are panicking. The first midterms are well over, but another exam is looming on the horizon. We’re soon going to be handling spring term registration, and students have already been coming by my office for academic advising. The administrative duties are gathering — I’ve got two major evening committee meetings coming up this week, our review of our colleagues for tenure and promotion, which is no fun at all. Yay, meetings all day long followed by meetings in the evening!
Only about 6 weeks of the accelerating chaos to go. I can make it.
I’m also committing myself to getting some daily exercise, because I can tell my decrepitude is also increasing, and I have to start getting ready now for next summer’s spider season. Waiting until the last minute to try and get back in shape is always disastrous and leads to something breaking.
I know we should wait until the PM is actually appointed yet, or even be betting on who it will be (apparently, Rishi Sunak is the favorite), but I wanted to get in early on the betting for how long this one lasts before being discarded. I’d like to place a dollar on 69 days. I think Sunak is a little smarter than Truss, so he’ll hang on longer, but he’s a BoJo-adjacent Tory, so I’m pretty sure some scandal or stupidity will scuttle him eventually.
I guess he already has a head start.
I was intrigued by a question I was asked on my last livestream, and I decided to track it down. The question:
Who is Gilbert Ling?
Don’t be put off by the howling winds at the beginning — I went into a nice quiet room for the rest of it. If even that is too annoying for you, just read my rough script, below the fold.
Here’s a story that had me hopelessly confused: according to this one woman in the UK, she was denied essential surgery because the hospital wanted to pander to the transeses. It sounded unlikely to me, but hey, I don’t trust hospital administrators myself. Here, though, is an article that explains it all, using the woman’s own words.
It turns out she made a whole bunch of unreasonable demands, triggered by seeing someone she thought was a trans woman looking at her. So she insisted that no men be allowed anywhere near her, that she get a private room that allowed no men to enter, and that she would not agree to use pronouns or otherwise engage with such manifestations of gender ideology
. She also accused men in general of having mobile phones that they use to look at sick, perverted pornography. The hospital told her that they could not meet her demands and told her to go elsewhere.
It’s all there at the link, but be warned: the complaining woman is a retired solicitor, and her complaints are lengthy and outrageous.
There was a big debate between the candidates for governor of Minnesota last night. Did I watch it? No, I’ve already made up my mind that Jensen is an evil poop-flinging ape with regressive views on just about everything. I also knew what was coming after the debate: Jensen is throwing Twitter hysterics and is sounding rather desperate. He did say one thing I appreciate, though.
Tim Walz is weak on the southern border, has emboldened the fentanyl crisis, and did NOTHING about the feeding our future fraud. He broke the LAW.
— Scott Jensen (@drscottjensen) October 19, 2022
Minnesota’s southern border is with Iowa, and I think building a wall might be a very good idea. Perhaps an eastern wall as well, to defend against Wisconsinites. And then maybe a western wall to protect us from Dakotans.
But wait! I just remembered that winter is coming. Maybe Minnesota can instead be like a scrotum in the cold, and just contract and pull up into Canada. Cheaper all around. Never mind, I’ll cast my vote for Walz again.
By the way, the Feeding Our Future scandal has nothing to do with Walz or the Minnesota state government at all. Some grifters set up shop here, taking advantage of a federal program to provide food for families during the pandemic, sending in false invoices and getting reimbursed to the tune of $250 million. Minnesota investigators turned them over to the FBI, so blaming on Walz is just flailing.
There were two things Jensen isn’t talking about, though. One is his abortion policy: he wants to ban it altogether, but knows that won’t fly in this state, so he’s evasive about it now.
The other is that he’s an election-denier, one of a number of people running for office in this state, including these rascals:
Fischbach is my representative, and she’s probably going to coast to re-election because this region is largely populated with red-hatted gomers. None of those people should be elected to anything, though. That’s my great fear about the November election, that a swarm of anti-democratic Trumpkins get into office and begin playing games with election laws and triggering unwarranted doubts about every election, but especially ones where Democrats got elected.
It has the potential to be a colossal shit-show, thanks to those kinds of people who should be in jail rather than running for office. But, you know, we have to compete with the UK for the most spectacular political collapse ever, and we’ve got a shot at it.
