If the SCIENTISTS abandon science is it any wonder REGULAR PEOPLE don't have any idea how science works?

I know this comic 

  

is just a joke, but it's from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a comic that makes lots of jokes about science and which theoretically has its science correct (insofar as the author of the comic makes a point of saying how much he liked studying physics, I guess; he doesn't have much more formal scientific education than I do.) 

The "Rare Earth 'Hypothesis'" is supposed to be a rejoinder to "Drake's Equation," which isn't an equation at all; Drake's equation admittedly isn't intended to be mathematical or scientific in nature, but simply to "stimulate talk" on extraterrestrial life. Nonetheless, it was presented by scientists, including Carl Sagan, as an "actual equation." Did that help contribute to the dumbing-down of America? You'll have to decide for yourself. (Hint: Yes.)  

In Drake's Equation String of nonsensical variables 'scientists' make a series of assumptions about how many stars there are, how many planets those stars have on average (averages being the most useless measurement of statistics, but the most common), etc etc down to where they come up with 43,000,000,000 potential planets with life on them.  It is similar, in scientific rigor, to me doing my budget by saying

There are 100,000 different kinds of jobs in America; on average those jobs pay $200,000 per year, I have worked at 28 jobs in my lifetime, accordingly I have $1,000,000 in the bank.

And then being surprised when my mortgage check bounces.  But Drake's Equation was rebutted (!) by the "Rare Earth Hypothesis," which actually made it into a book. Here is the "Rare Earth String of Nonsensical Variables":

"N" is the number of stars in the Milky Way. Even poor excuses for scientists such as the authors of the book this set of assumptions was popularized in admit that the number of stars in the Milky Way is a complete guess; the Wikipedia entry on this 'equation' says the number could be anywhere from 100,000,000 to 500,000,000 -- but even that is a guess. 

"My best guess," I told my wife about how much I would earn at my new job, "Is somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000."

Anyway, from there the 'equation' goes on to make other guesses about things we don't know, all in the name of 'science', trying to point out ... something? Apparently it is to show that intelligent life is extremely rare, "intelligent" being defined apparently as "identical to us."

Here's the thing: the nearest earthlike planet we've found is 14 light years away. For that planet alone to have sent us a signal, it would have to have evolved life at or around the same time as us, or at a faster rate than us, because we only in the past 100 years have devised a way to say things to outer space.  That planet then would have had to aim its radio waves or light signal in such a way as to hit a tiny target 14 light years away and do so in an manner which we could interpret as a communication.

And those beings would have had to want to do that.

All of these "equations" assume that life on other planets evolved faster than us, or earlier than us, or better than us, and thus have some higher capabilities than us, and they thus ignore the only evidence they have, which is US: if scientists simply said "based on all the evidence we have, it takes about 6,000,000 years for intelligent life capable of sending radio signals to evolve," and then thought about how hard it's even been for us to find earthlike planets in the universe, and then took up the easily-calculable question of what sort of accuracy would be needed to target another planet with a radio wave --

-- something we already know: it wasn't until 1936 that any signal of ours could even get out of Earth's ionosphere, and it would take about 110,000,000 watts of power to get an intelligible signal to the nearest star. Most broadcasts are done at less than 5,000,000 watts, and as pointed out in that link, now that we are using digital TV, and the like, we are becoming less detectable --

if scientists just looked at what we do know and hypothesized from facts the way science is supposed to work, we might actually have made some progress towards communicating with other planets or detecting their communications.

Instead, we wallow around in fake equations and pop 'science' books designed to make money for people rather than be correct or scientific in any way.  It's virtually a guarantee that any scientist, doctor or other 'highly educated' person you see on TV or elsewhere in pop culture is about as scientifically rigorous as those charlatans who used to hold seances.  

Sh*T Stephen Hawking Says

Courtesy: XKCD

Andrew Leon's blog Strange Pegs features his review of The Theory Of Everything, which apparently tells pretty much nothing about Stephen Hawking and so is just about as boring as I imagined it would be.

I am not sure how I feel about Stephen Hawking; as I commented to Andrew, I read A Brief History of Time back when I used to read more science books, and I of course hear about Stephen Hawking doing stuff all the time because there are (judging by media coverage) only three scientists alive in the world today: Stephen Hawking, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye The Science Guy.

I (and you and nobody really) am not in a position to judge Stephen Hawking's intelligence. I take for granted that he's a smart guy. What I am in a position to judge, though, is whether Stephen Hawking is doing science anymore, or doing what most 'scientists' seem to do, which is mis-state scientific things for hype and publicity purposes.  While I am sure that many problems with 'scientific' reporting are that the reports are oversimplified or under-reported, without fact-checking, for example, I think at least part of the problem is when scientists play into that by saying things that have little to no scientific basis.

This isn't a new thing with me; my opposition to velociraptors (never existed!) and Drake's Equation, among other 'scientific' claims, are pretty well-known to anyone who has read this blog for more than a year.  (Here is where I talked about how Drake's equation isn't, at all, a long time ago.) This isn't just me being a curmudgeon or spoilsport (like Neil DeGrasse Tyson is. FOR GOD'S SAKE JUST LET PEOPLE HAVE FUN TYSON!), but me worrying that catering to the popular is reducing the science.

After commenting on Andrew's blog, I started thinking about the things I've heard Stephen Hawking has said over the years.  This is, after all, a scientist so revered that a movie about him was just made, and titled after what is the most profound quest science has right now.  Is Hawking deserving of such accolades?  To find out, I did a Google search for things Hawking has said recently. And here are those things:

Hawking warned that aliens with interstellar capabilities could possibly harness the entire energy of a star to make a wormhole in space, and then reach Earth, taking our resources and killing us all before moving on. That was on his TV show. It's not clear if Hawking discussed the science of wormholes or how circling a star with mirrors would work to capture and channel the energy, even theoretically, but he DID make people think about alien invasions, right?

Hawking also said we need to abandon Earth, or at least colonize other planets -- because we're definitely going to destroy this one and cannot sustain it at all.  Hawking said that events like the Cuban Missile Crisis are going to increase in frequency.  Remember how many nuclear showdowns there have been in the past 50 years? There's like one a day now, right?  Hawking also forgets that in the recent past it was predicted we would run out of oil and never be able to cultivate enough food to feed 7 billion people. I'm not saying we shouldn't work on colonizing other planets (if those aliens don't get there first!), but ignoring human scientific advances in every single field except space exploration seems... unscientific.

Hawking has also said that artificial intelligence will end humanity, when robots end up learning to self-replicate, which he feared they would be able to do faster and more efficiently than we can.  Granted, it takes about 13-18 years to 'manufacture' a human who can fight reasonably effectively, but where are the robots going to get all the resources to build an army of robots that quickly? Last time I checked, metal bodies weren't growing on trees.  Hawking's claims on this subject more or less were paraphrases of The Matrix, only 10 years later (he warned robots might block out the sun, which of course is what we tried to do to stop The Matrix.)

Just before a new book of his came out, Hawking announced that efforts to discover the "God Particle," the Higgs Boson, could destroy the universe! As described in his upcoming book! And then in said book you learn that the possibility of this actually happening is exceedingly small and not worth worrying about! And by "exceedingly small" he meant that in order to create a Higgs Boson which would destroy the universe you'd actually need a particle accelerator bigger than the entire planet Earth! Which of course doesn't exist! But still, read his book!

It is possible of course that even scientists get drawn by the allure of popularity and money, and abandon pure science for headline-grabbing (and movie biopic-generating) statements that favor hyperbole over nuance.  Possible, and sad, for people who actually favor science, and who think real science is more than just NOMADIC ALIENS JOIN FORCES WITH SUPERINTELLIGENT MACHINES TO DESTROY EARTH WITH HIGGS BOSONS.

HEY IF YOU ARE INTERESTED this is the topic of a short story called Quantum Everything, which is available in my book Just Exactly How Life Looks.  There's also a story about cowboys in there. 

AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAH I AM THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE ENTIRE WORLD TAKE THAT SCIENCE ME 3 SCIENCE STILL ZERO SUCK IT SCIENCE!

I am so smart
I am so smart
S-M-R-T - D'oh!

-- Homer Simpson.

All geniuses - geniusi? - start all their longwinded discourses relaying their lofty intellectualizations with quotes from other great thinkers, and I am no different.

So I was sitting and eating my toasted raisin bagel -- I'm told that's what Aristotle ate before he invented light bulbs-- and skimming through headlines on HuffPo this morning when I come across THIS:

Scientists Raise Doubts About Higgs Boson Discovery, Say It Could Be Another Particle

The more astute among you may remember that I have a long-running stance about "science," which boils down to "they made up velociraptors and also the Higgs Boson," and that I have said for a long time there is no Higgs Boson, basing that on empirical evidence including "Remember the brontosaurus? Never existed either."

SCIENCE!

Anyway, I read the article, mostly, and got to this amazing part where a consumer lawyer's theoretical physics knowledge proved more dead on than Stephen Hawkings.  Hawking, remember, was wrong about black holes but does believe in the Higgs Boson (he said it might destroy the universe).

Here is the part just after the blah blah stuff about how the evidence of the Higgs Boson is circumstantial and could also prove other, none Higgs Boson-y, stuff:

The new research seems to piggyback on previous research suggesting that the Higgs boson is actually made up of smaller particles, UPI reported.

Which would mean THE HIGGS BOSON DOES NOT EXIST which then recalls a day in the halcyon years of my youth, March 9, 2010, to be exact, when I posted the following on one of my other blogs:

The Best Way To Prove "Scientists" Are Making It Up

Which do you think is more "scientific:" hobbits, or dark matter?

That's a fair question, and a timely one, as both fictional creations were in the news this week, and both help demonstrate that scientists haven't advance one whit from the dark ages -- the time when "science" first felt that it could describe the natural world through the process of "just making things up."

Human history is full of "scientists" just making stuff up to explain natural phenomena, and human history is full of people buying into it because, you know, it sounds about right. "It sounds about right" is, by now, an unwritten but paradigmatic law of "science" -- and, so far as I can tell, it's about the only law that any "scientists" follow.

Maybe "scientists" follow The Law Of Sounding About Right because it's been around so long: One of the earliest examples of that "scientific" law is retrograde motion. "Retrograde motion" was the explanation early "scientists" used to explain the movements of the planets. Those early "scientists" noticed that the stars rarely moved, while the planets moved all over the place, relatively speaking. Those early "scientists" also noticed that the planets did not appear to move in normal, forward motion -- something they were at a loss to explain, because early "scientists" believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that the planets and stars orbited the earth.

If that was the case, then, the planets should move in a straight, or at least constant, direction around the earth. But they didn't move the way theories predicted they should: The "scientists" had a theory about the Earth's position vis a vis the rest of the Universe, and then they tested that theory by observing the universe, and noticed that their observations didn't match the theory.

But did they scrap the theory? Heck no: That's not the "scientific" way, because that would violate The Law Of Sounding About Right. Instead of scrapping the Earth-Centric Theory, "scientists" came up with retrograde motion, which is, in a nutshell, the belief that the planets sometimes backed up a little.


The movement that a planet makes in the sky -- the apparent motion of the planet -- is dependent not just on that planet's motion, but on the observer's motion. So as the Earth moves, and as Mars moves, it creates the appearance that Mars has moved forward and backward in the sky.

The appearance -- because that's not really happening. That appearance posed problems for early "scientists" who were unwilling to abandon their theory about Earth's place, so the scientists simply said: Well, Mars, and the other planets, must back up from time to time. They go this way for a while, and then that way for a while, and then head forward again.

This new theory, The Indecisive Planet Theory, worked great for "scientists" because it explained the entire universe in a way they were comfortable with.

That's an important qualifier: in a way they were comfortable with. Because The Indecisive Planet Theory, from a truly scientific standpoint, did not work great... or at all, as it didn't explain the actual universe. It explained the universe the way "scientists" wanted it to be.

(You'll note, throughout this post, that when I talk of science, I'll phrase it one of two ways: there's science, without quotes, which signifies actual scientific thought, demonstrating a logical and non-magical application of observations to theories, and then there's "science" with quotes, which is what every single "scientist" these days practices -- and "science" is not much different than "creative writing," only there is a lesser emphasis on gerunds in science.)

So again, from a "scientific" standpoint, The Indecisive Planet Theory worked great, because it meant that "scientists" had explained things the way they wanted them to be, and could go back to doing whatever it is "scientists" do all day long. Read magazines, or something. Play Gnip Gnop.

Ultimately, as we know, "scientists" were forced to abandon The Indecisive Planet Theory, as well as The Earth-Centric Theory, leaving "science" as a whole free to go on to start making up other things, like cool dinosaurs and cool stories about dinosaurs.

I'm not saying all dinosaurs are made-up -- I'm pretty sure that at some point, there were dinosaurs, and I'm pretty sure that Adam and Eve rode those dinosaurs out of the Garden of Eden. (I may be confusing Sunday School and "Real" School a bit, but, as "science" teaches us, facts are entirely unimportant.)


But some dinosaurs have been made up, and some facts about dinosaurs have been made up -- because "scientists" decided, at some point, that it wasn't cool or interesting enough to have giant flesh-eating lizards fighting it out on sun-scrubbed plains. No, dinosaurs had to be more gianter, and more flesh-eating-er, and more smarter and do all kinds of cool things that stopped just shy of building rocket ships to flee the asteroid that "scientists" believe wiped them out.

(In fact, has there ever been any proof that dinosaurs didn't build rocket ships to escape the planet? Rockets that left the Earth wouldn't leave a fossil record behind... and the fossil record is, tellingly, completely devoid of evidence of rockets. That seems to me to be "scientific" proof that dinosaurs were able to build rockets and escape the earth.)

(It was probably all those dinosaurs stomping around on Mars and Venus that made the planets back up from time to time.)

(That, my readers, is the beginning of what someday will be recognized as the true Theory of Everything.)

"Scientists" began making up dinosaurs with the brontosaurus -- a dinosaur created by "scientists" in their quest for fame and glory around the turn of the century. The discoverer of the "brontosaurus," a "scientist" named O.C. Marsh, found a bunch of bones, but couldn't find a head. So he used a head from a find four (or 400) miles away, and just tacked it on, calling the resulting creation a brontosaurus.

(O.C. March, whose real names was Othniel, made up brontosaurus in part to outdo his rival, Edward Drinker Cope. In the 1800s, it apparently was in vogue to name your kid after socially-acceptable habits... at least judging from Cope and his other contemporary, Nathaniel OpiumHookahSmoker Johnston.)

The fakery (excuse me, ... "science") was discovered almost immediately, but that didn't stop "science" from going on claiming the brontosaurus existed... for nearly a century. In fact, when the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of dinosaur stamps that included the brontosaurus, not only did "scientists" not stop them from promoting a dinosaur that "science" had simply made up, but "scientists" in fact defended the Post Office. Stephen "Jay" Gould minimized the controversy -- a "scientist" saying it's no big deal that "science" made something up -- and Robert Bakker, who is described as a "celebrated" "paleontologist" apparently to this day continues to use the name brontosaurus to describe things that are not, technically speaking, brontosauri.

"Scientists" didn't stop with making up dinosaurs -- as they did with not only brontosaurus, the but also the velociraptor, a "dinosaur" that never existed until Michael Crichton dreamed them up for his book Jurassic Park, but which thereafter scientists pretended did exist. (I won't get into that debate again. The first time I proved that velociraptors never existed, in the essay Velociraptors, My Butt, is available in this book, and the second time is posted here.) No, "scientists" also made up how dinosaurs acted, based on a complete misunderstanding of how things work in the natural world.(I.e., "science.")

"Scientists" have long presented theories of dinosaur behavior based on fossil records of how animals' bones were found embedded in rock. They will find, say, a pterodactyl skeleton lying across an apatosaurus' skeleton, and they will conclude that the pterodactyl must have tried to eat the apatosaurus, and they will then publish "scientific" papers entitled Omnivorous Habits Of The Pteranodon In The Late Jurassic Period, in which they will "conclude" that pterodactyls, previously believed to be only poor flyers with little leg strength, must in fact have been mighty soaring dinosaurs able to use their grasping claws to first strangle, then carry back, an entire apatosaurus to feed their young. And they will become famous for that.

That conclusion I just wrote, specious as it is, will (a) be published in a major "scientific" journal within a year, and (b) rests on the assumption that a pterodactyl dove down on an apatosaurus -- and then both were suddenly killed, right on the spot, and not moved at all by any natural force until enough sediment had covered them up and then fossilize the bones in the exact manner they originally fell in.


Do this: Take a chicken bone, and a pork spare rib. Drive out to South Dakota, and when nobody's looking, drop them on the ground, one across the other. Then come back in a year and see if they've been moved at all. If they have, that tells you how likely it is that the Pterodactyl-Apatosaurus Battle occurred. (If they haven't, leave them there, and one day "scientists" will tell future generations of the mighty Chick-Hen which battled the Pork Monster into submission in the deserts of South Dakota.)

Isn't it more likely that the bones ended up there either by accident, or because other forces (scavengers, wind, water) moved them there, resulting in a coincidental array of bones?

Don't ask "scientists" that, because coincidence doesn't get tenure.

Dinosaurs aren't the only place that "science" makes things up, and popular "scientists" like Stephen "Jay" Gould are not the only ones who fall into that trap. Even Einstein did it -- creating the cosmological constant.

The "cosmological constant" was a number Einstein invented for one purpose: To make his theories work. Unlike, say, pi, the cosmological constant had no place in the real world or in science. Its sole purpose in life, as it were, was to make the universe be what Einstein wanted it to be.

Einstein wanted the universe to be static -- not expanding, not contracting, but always the same, in a state of equilibrium. Einstein believed the universe was static, and then he came up with his theory of relativity... which, unfortunately for him, did not work with a static universe.

Einstein discovered -- in the scientific equivalent of duct-taping a car bumper back on -- that if he plugged in a certain number, then general relativity would work, and the universe would be static.

It's important to note that this number was entirely made up. It was used to balance the equation. In a simplified explanation, imagine that you are going over your budget. You see that you make $500 per month, and that you have expenses of $100 on food, $50 on gas, $400 on rent, and $50 on entertainment. That doesn't balance out, as you add it up: you've got $600 on one side and $500 on the other, so your savings will contract.

But, if you simply add $100 to the other side, then your equation balances perfectly.

You wouldn't do that in a budget, of course, because "making up a number" doesn't actually do anything (unless you're in Washington D.C., in which case "making up a number" is called a "budget projection" and it lets you claim that one side or the other is wrong) to help you.

But in "science," things are different -- making up a number in "science" is generally as accepted as making up dinosaurs, or anything else: It's considered good, solid "science."

I'm not being facetious -- Einstein, whose name is synonymous with both "genius" and "science" -- made up a number so that the universe would match his equation, instead of making an equation that matched his universe. Einstein later realized he was wrong, and called his "cosmological constant" the "biggest blunder" of his life.

Einstein's realization that there was no cosmological constant, and calling it a blunder would, you'd think, cause other "scientists" to stop talking about the cosmological constant and get back to, you know, science, instead of "science," but if you thought that, then you've already forgotten the example of the brontosaurus: Of course "scientists" didn't abandon the cosmological constant -- they still use it:

Scientists at UCLA refer to the "cosmological constant" as something that "still exists as a possibility." To examine the "scientific" rigor that UCLA applies to studying the possible cosmological constant, consider this sentence:

"In larger systems we cannot make part per million verifications of the standard model."

That means, to you and me, that UCLA's "scientists" cannot verify their equations outside of the solar system. Does that stop them from equating? It does not:

In the case of the Sun's orbit around the Milky Way, we only say that the vacuum energy density is less than half of the average matter density in a sphere centered at the Galactic Center that extends out to the Sun's distance from the center. If the vacuum energy density were more than this, there would be no centripetal acceleration of the Sun toward the Galactic Center. But we compute the average matter density assuming that the vacuum energy density is zero, so to be conservative I will drop the "half" and just say

rho(vacuum) < (3/(4*pi*G))(v/R)2 = 3*10-24 gm/cc
for a circular velocity v = 220 km/sec and a distance R = 8.5 kpc.

Did you get that? UCLA "scientists" have equations that don't work outside the solar system, so they assume things to be true, and then make adjustments to their equations to be conservative.

That's fine, being conservative, if you're trying to estimate, say, how much cash you'll need to stop at McDonald's and pick up some Happy Meals. "I'm not sure how much they cost, so I'll be conservative and assume $5 each..." because if you're wrong about the price of Happy Meals, spaceships don't accelerate improperly and crash... but if you're not practicing actual science and you try to land a radio-controlled car on Mars, you're going to botch it.

Which brings me to hobbits and dark matter. "Hobbits," as you may have heard if you read the paper this weekend, have now been "scientifically" verified to have existed, in a "scientific" discovery that just goes to show that "science" is now freely plundering from the world of literature. I expect that by April, we'll be reading headlines announcing that there really were zombies in Victorian England.

Back in 2004, "scientists" announced the discovery of "hobbits," human pygmy ancestors who grew no larger than a 3-year-old child. The timing of that discovery was just months after the release of the third installment of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, something that would have been coincidental except, remember, coincidence doesn't get tenure. So "scientists" who discovered some tiny human bones, in early 2004, couldn't have discovered tiny human bones, but had to have discovered hobbits.

When just discovering hobbits wasn't enough, this past week, "scientists" had to announce that not only were there really hobbits, but that the hobbits disproved the Theory of Evolution! Remarking on the find of a tiny skeleton, a skeleton that would have no significance whatsoever absent a fantastic hypothesis, one "scientist" suggested that previous theories of evolution occuring in Africa and then spreading over the continents were wrong -- and that instead, pre-evolved hominids might have left Africa, evolved like crazy all over the place... and then walked back to Africa to lay a new fossil record!

You might find that unlikely, but have you considered the fact that there's absolutely no evidence to support that theory? Said the "scientist:"

"We'd have to say something got out earlier than that and we don't have any record of its evolution in the whole of Asia.... That means there is a complete missing chapter of the story of human evolution in Asia if that is correct. That would be very interesting and important if true."

Note that it's not clear what the precedent is for the word That in the last sentence. It would be interesting and important if what is "true?" The "scientist" doesn't say -- but he does rely on the complete absence of proof to prove his "theories."

(Do you see why I'm so convinced, now, that the New Theory of Everything is correct, and spaceship-building dinosaurs are living on the moons of Jupiter? Like the HobbitVolution, we have no record of it, anywhere... so it must be true.)

A complete lack of proof is now the new standard for proving something exists, in fact -- judging by the latest proof that "dark matter" exists.

"Dark matter," if you don't know, is what the Universe is mostly made of, according to "scientists." It's matter that cannot be seen, touched, felt, smelled, heard, or sensed in any way, but it's there. We know it's there because... it has to be there, or our equations don't work.

(If you just said cosmological constant!, then pat yourself on the head, then get back to digging a bunker to hide out in when the Spaceship Dinosaurs return.)

Dark matter is a creation of "scientists" who have theories about how our universe works -- theories that don't... um... actually describe how our universe works. These "scientists" came up with the theories, then matched them to the observations they made ("observations" being science-y language for "looking at how the world works"), and noted that the equations didn't actually describe the universe they observed.

Instead of making up new equations -- that's hard! -- the "scientists" made up a universe they wanted to exist, a universe made up of dark matter, that stuff that we can't see, hear, taste, or feel, etc. etc. By filling our universe with dark matter, the "scientists" made their equations work, and the solution was perfect because who could criticize it? The dark matter was out there, somewhere, untouchable, unknowable, but balancing those equations like mad -- so everyone was happy and nobody had to do any real work or think or anything like that.

Plus, dark matter followed the only "scientific" principle we have, The Law Of Sounding About Right: It sounded right -- after all, space is mostly dark, isn't it? When I look up at the sky, at night, it's pretty dark, so there must be a lot of dark matter up there.

But, as with the hobbits, "scientists" couldn't leave well enough alone -- "well enough" being a corollary of The Law Of Sounding About Right: if things work but we can't explain why, don't rock the boat.

"Scientists" rocked the boat. They weren't content with dark matter -- about which, a "scientist" had this to say:

"We don't know what dark matter is."

(That's a direct quote from Rolf-Dieter Heuer, whose ignorance should concern you because he's the Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research.)

Not content with dark matter, "scientists" went on to invent "dark energy," which together with dark matter they say makes up 95% of the universe (the other 5% being "Happy Meals," I think. Or velociraptors.)

NASA -- whose mission these days appears to be to crash-land stuff onto other stuff-- has this to say about dark energy: "It is a complete mystery." That doesn't stop NASA from declaring that the universe is 70% dark energy -- a "scientific" thought process that explains why they keep crashing stuff into other stuff.

Even then, "scientists" wouldn't quit pushing the ridiculousness of dark matter and dark energy, leading to this week's Big Important Announcement which, not coincidentally, is not only Big and Important but which also is The Best Way To Prove "Scientists" Are (Still) Just Making It All Up.

The Big and Important Announcment is this: "Scientists" now say they will prove dark matter exists.

(Which, sharp thinkers will note, they already had supposedly proved -- don't their equations prove that?)

"Scientists" will prove that dark matter exists by crashing things into other things, in this case using the CERN particle accelerator to smash tiny hypothetical things into other tiny hypothetical things to create even tinier hypothetical things, in a quest to find the Higgs Boson.

The Higgs Boson is an interesting thought experiment: It is, in theory, a particle that, upon coming into existence, created and gave mass to everything in the universe -- including, weirdly, itself. That is, the Higgs Boson created the entire universe, including the Higgs Boson.

That's a neat trick -- one that earned the Higgs Boson the appellation "God Particle." ("Scientists" prefer that you call it the "the champagne bottle boson," although that article also suggests that the Higgs Boson doesn't exist.) The Higgs Boson is also a trick that can be performed only in thought, since in reality something can't create itself, as you and I (but not "scientists") know and understand.

The Higgs Boson was named after its creator, Peter Higgs, who came up with the idea in 1964. The particle was necessary because theories about the Standard Model -- a description of the universe didn't work:

"The Standard Model would predict that the probability of two particles having very high energies colliding with one another would be greater than one, a physical impossibility!) To fix this problem, there must be additional particles. The simplest models that explain the masses of the W and Z have only one such particle: the Higgs boson."

The Higgs Boson isn't the only particle that theoretically could fix the equations-- it's just the one that "scientists" like best, in part because, again, there's no proof that it ever existed.

Says Heur-- him again-- about the Higgs Boson: "We know everything about this particle. The only thing we don't know is if it exists."

But he's not dismayed at the possibility that the foundation of most physics today might not exist: "...if it does not exist, we are bound to find something that is very much like it."

He said, without a hint of irony... or proof.

The CERN particle accelerator -- so large that it actually is twice the size of the universe -- (prove me wrong!) is going to, in part, try to prove that the Higgs Boson exists. But that alone isn't enough for Heur and the CERN people -- they had to lump in dark matter, as well, and announce this week that the CERN experiments could prove dark matter exists: "Our Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be the first machine to give us insight into the dark universe" Heur said in talking to the press this week.

And that's it: the final straw on real science's back: It's treated as news that, in searching for the existence of a thought experiment, a machine could prove the existence of something else.

Could.

Heur doesn't say how "dark matter" could be proven to exist -- just that it could. Heur doesn't explain the mechanism that would show that dark matter -- the latest brontosaurus to come out of "science" -- actually exists. He just says it could, and the press, and "scientific" sources, report that as news, and as a conclusion, and as a fact. Heur called a news conference to say that a hypothesis could, hypothetically, be proven, sometime in the future, maybe...

... and that was treated as science.

The Higgs Boson's presumptive ability to prove the existence of dark matter through some unknown hypothetical mechanism is, in the end, The Best Way To Prove "Scientists" Are (Still) Just Making It All Up.

Well, rational thought, you had a good run. Logic, you gave it a shot. Scientific method, you left it all out there on the field. But I'm sorry, boys: your time is done. We have no call for you anymore; we've got things to crash into other things, and press conferences to hold, and hypotheses to invent, and retrogrades to motion, and we can't be bothered with logic and proof and facts, because there's very little time to get this all done.

After all, those dinosaurs may come back any day now.



Want to see proof that I'm right? Click here to find out about Triceratops being a fake, too.

________________________________________________________________


So my larger point in all this is not just that I am obviously the greatest mind of our, or any, generation (take THAT Harvey Kennedy, purported inventor of the shoelace). The real point is that scientists increasingly are forgetting about the "science" part of "science" and going for headlines rather than evidence.  I am a huge supporter of science, unlike Neil DeGrasse Tyson among others, but I would rather they quit making attention-grabbing, headline-generating statements and focus on just getting things done.  Those jetpacks aren't going to invent themselves, guys.  Unless they have a Jetpack Higgs Boson.

Updates on ME. (Thinking The Lions)

If you are following the news this morning, and you probably aren't, but if you are, then you know that the news is all about me, provided that in following the news you also follow me and keep detailed track of what I think and do and say and feel, which, if you're not, why am I even bothering with this blog? I'm trying here, people.  I'm trying.  The least you could do is put forth some effort.

And frankly, I'm trying not to be outraged, because there is a scam being perpetrated, and it's one I could and will blow wide open.  In a second.  But first, this word from People Who Hate Brominated Vegetable Oil.

Brominated Vegetable Oil is vegetable oil that has had bromine atoms bonded to it, like they all went to camp as kids or something.  It's considered "safe" by the FDA except that it's not, unless by safe you mean

In one case, a man who drank eight liters of Ruby-Red Squirt daily had a reaction that caused his skin color to turn red and produced lesions diagnosed as bromoderma. The excessive quantities together with the fact that the man had a higher than normal sensitivity to bromine made this an unusual case.

An unusual case except that it happened again in the very next sentence:

A similar case reported that a man who consumed two to four liters of a cola containing BVO on a daily basis experienced memory loss, tremors, fatigue, loss of muscle coordination, headache, and ptosis of the right eyelid, as well as elevated serum chloride.

I mean, okay, headache, ptosis of the right eyelid, small price to pay for drinking Squirt soda, right?

In the two months it took to correctly diagnose the problem, the patient also lost the ability to walk.

 *spits soda out, scrubs mouth vigorously with steel wool, goes right on eating "Hot Pocket."*

So anyway, all over the news today is that some guy somewhere got some 200,000 signatures on a petition to get Pepsi to remove BVO from Gatorade, which means now professional athletes will only have 2,000,000 other chemicals in their system and that's not even counting Ryan Braun's magic urine (WARNING: DO NOT REFRIGERATE) but here is where I come into the picture:

I started all this.

SERIOUSLY PEOPLE LISTEN TO ME.  I started this.  Me.

This petition, of which there are many but the main one seems to be from "a Mississippi teenager" (true fact: I can spell Mississippi backwards by memory ippississiM) is getting all sorts of hype now, but where was the media when I tweeted this all the way back on August 28, 2012:

BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD... except it's too late because I already am that change.

You can thank me with 10s and 20s, sent to my home, and I will accept them with all the grace of a man burning with the intensity of SN2012aw, which we all know is the newest-discovered supernova and one that is getting brighter, not dimmer, which is how mad I am at this obvious hoax that made it onto legitimate news sites (HuffPo is that now, right?)

Longtime reader(s?) of this blog will instantly realize why I am so mad and so sure that this is a hoax, but for you new reader(s?) let me bring you up to speed, by recalling the halcyon days of yore when I let a Twinkie sit out for 100 days and then ate it:




EVERY STEP of Twinkie Watch was documented by SCIENCE and then I ate it, so I proved then that Twinkies cannot spoil.

But now along comes some Internet Huckster, trying to sell a molded Twinkie (he claims this

is a real picture of it) and frankly SCIENCE will not stand for this, and as the living embodiment of SCIENCE, it is up to me to debunk this horrible person's attempt to grab fame by disproving a law of nature.

I will begin by using Dan Savage's rules for detecting fake letters on his advice column, and I will (SPOILER ALERT! PUN INTENDED!) end by announcing a new SCIENCE!

First, the obviously fake explanation.  This is verbatim from Fraudster's Ebay sales site:

Up for sale today is one (1) semiunwrapped authentic Hostess Twinkie, rotten as hell.
I've never seen one, and neither have you! I really did believe that these things and cockroaches would be the only thing to survive a nuclear war, but I was wrong.
Easiest way to do this is to explain my story. I have impulse control issues, and one of them concerns (concerned) Twinkies. To put it bluntly, I love them. Like a dog, I eat them (ate) until I got sick.

So, my wife rarely buys a box for me because she knows what will happen.
Well, last year she took pity on me one movie night, and brought home a box of the creamy goodness in addition to something out of redbox. We pop the corn, dim the lights, and I bust into my box. I inhale the first one, and crack open the second one while watching the movie. Something catches my attention out of the corner of my eye. Inches from my mouth, I actually stop to look at the golden wonder for a second. It is GREEN. Not yellow, green. I turn the lights on to make sure my eyes aren't playing a trick on me.
They aren't. That sumbitch is GREEN. With streaks. My mouth starts tingling. I don't feel so well.
So, I survived, but I wrapped the green twinkie in clingwrap, and then decided I'd write Hostess. Obviously, they wanted it but I said no. They sent me a few weeks later a letter saying hey, guess what. It's not kryptonite, and surprise, they do go bad. Then, they gave me two coupons for free boxes of twinkies.
It was suggested I toss the Twinkie, but I was fascinated. So, like a biology experiment, I've kept it in my completely environmentally controlled top of my refrigerator, where I occasionally check on it to see what it's gonna morph into.
Then, Hostess went tits up.
Maybe someone will start making them again, maybe not. You will never be able to get this Twinkie, from the original recipe, original machinery, and original plant conditions again. Who knows what this thing will turn into? And, who knows why this thing went bad in the wrapper. Bad QA/QC at the end? Intentional infection of the supply by a striker??
I will NOT sell this to any country or nation state with an active biological weapons program, because I don't want them to weaponize whatever bug is capable of taking out a Twinkie. Nor do I want to release a Twinkie virus into the wild, ruining future supplies, so you have to promise to treat this thing responsibly.
Also, I guess I need to explain to some people, that although at one time this might have been considered food, IT IS NOT FOOD NOW. DO NOT EAT. DO NOT EAT. DO NOT EAT. It is a scientific and historical curiosity only!
I added some pics so that you can see how it originally looked.

 Dan Savage's rules begin with "the piling on of unnecessary details."  As my old law school roommate used to say, it's the details that get a person to believe.  Piling on unnecessary details shows a story to be a lie.

Here, Fraudster, who got the attention he wanted, notes that he has a junk food problem, then really loads it on when he tells how he discovered this:

Well, last year

This was a year ago? Interesting. And hard to prove you wrong since you can always say "I don't remember the exact details."  Why'd you wait a year to bring this up? A whole year to put it on eBay? YOU ARE A PATIENT MAN. 

 she took pity on me one movie night, and brought home a box of the creamy goodness in addition to something out of redbox.

It's not important to the story to know where he rents movies. But it is important to a liar to add details.

  We pop the corn, 

Wait, what? Did your wife -- who is soooo controlling that you only get Twinkies when she allows it-- also approve the popcorn? Or was that for her?

dim the lights, and I bust into my box. I inhale the first one, and crack open the second one while watching the movie. 

So: They popped the corn, but took the unopened box of Twinkies -- the entire unopened box -- into whatever room they were going to watch the movie in.  Controlling Wife did not have an issue about him intending, apparently, to eat the entire box while they watched the movie, and it's important to the story that the box not have been opened in the light.

 Remember the lights were dimmed in the room.  That's important, as is the fact that this is the second one.

 Something catches my attention out of the corner of my eye. Inches from my mouth, I actually stop to look at the golden wonder for a second. It is GREEN. Not yellow, green. I turn the lights on to make sure my eyes aren't playing a trick on me.

BAM! It was a surprise!  he was as surprised as you are!  IF ONLY HE HAD OPENED THE PACKAGE IN THE LIGHT, but that would have been anticlimactic: "So I bought some Twinkies and one was rotten," his story would have been.  NOT A GRABBER.  He needs your attention:  "I NEARLY ATE A TWINKIE OF DEATH!"

As for his eyes, they must have been playing a trick on you, but WHAT A TRICK! because in low light, only the rods of your eyes are active and while they are hypersensitive to light, they only see in black and white, so you did NOT see green or yellow. 

Also, the corner of your eye would not be looking at a Twinkie directly in front of your face. And if it was, it's even less likely you'd see color because we only see black and white out of peripheral vision, as our brain blocks colors from the side.

 It is strongly implied that Fraudster felt sick then -- so maybe he ATE a bad Twinkie? But he didn't notice anything wrong until he saw (?) the green -- so what are we to assume? That the Twinkie was so rotten it could activate his Spider-Sense... only after he saw it?  SO: "I NEARLY ATE A TWINKIE OF DEATH AND MIGHT HAVE ACTUALLY EATEN ONE TOO WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING IT BECAUSE IT TOOK SO LONG FOR MY EYES TO ADJUST TO THE LIGHT AND MOLDY TWINKIES TASTE EXACTLY LIKE REAL TWINKIES OH IF ONLY I HAD OPENED THE BOX IN THE LIGHT WHILE POPPIN' THE CORN! WHY MUST I HAVE SUCH A JUNK FOOD PROBLEM?"

Here's something else: He ate them "until [he] got sick." Sick with what? Twinkie disease? Diabetes? Chronic fabricationitis? If he got so sick eating them, why'd Controlling Wife break down and get him some? Was she planning on cashing in his life insurance?  Or do you mean that in the past you would just eat them until you got so full of them you'd barf, in which case, it was okay with your wife on this occasion that you take the entire box into the room to watch the movie?  "Here you go, honey, and if you have to barf at least do not interrupt the part where Ryan Gosling takes his shirt off."

Ahem.

Second on Dan Savage's tips are needlessly elaborate stories:  he wrote to Hostess, got a letter back, got a coupon for some free Twinkies (no photos of any of this, of course), the possibility of the Hostess strike being involved, the overly-broad warnings not to eat the spoiled food. 

Finally, Dan Savage's third factor is the attention-seeking nature of the letter-writer.  Note THOSE details: The guy has a problem with junk food, and a controlling wife!  But he got attention from a massive corporation, and not only that, he has the only original spoiled Twinkie!

Maybe someone will start making them again, maybe not. You will never be able to get this Twinkie, from the original recipe, original machinery, and original plant conditions again. 

The bid on the Twinkie went from 0 to $46 between when HuffPo wrote that story and when I looked at the site, and it appears that Fraudster has sold other items on the site and could no doubt use the attention.


In short, this is a scam.  This Twinkie did not spoil.  It did not arrive in the package green from mold.  Not a single thing that Fraudster wrote in support of this sale is true.  Unless maybe he's married.  That might be true.

Well, I'm not taking this.  I'm not putting up with some stupid scam artist getting publicity trying to claim a fake spoiled Twinkie is real.  I am PUTTING MY FOOT DOWN, and GETTING A NEW TWINKIE.

THAT'S RIGHT.  SCIENCE is back, and this time, it's serious.  Or personal.  Or whatever.  I have directed Sweetie to get me a Twinkie today.  And beginning tomorrow, that Twinkie is going to be exposed to the world forever, to see if it ever ever rots.

You don't mess with me, man.  I'll take you down like yesterday's news.  Or whatever.

UPDATE on SCIENCE 2: (Thinking The Lions)

That headline makes it sound like this is the SECOND update on SCIENCE, but it's not; it's the FIRST update on "SCIENCE 2", which is the name of my experiment in which I will attempt to grow a beautiful

Poinsettia...

In A Can...

OF SCIENCE!!!?!!

from a can of what appears to be a mixture of wood chips and off-brand pet food that I got at the Dollar Store, which, if it appears that 98% of my life revolves around the Dollar Store, is an incorrect percentage. Only about 83%, to be exact, of my life involves the Dollar Store. The other 17% is made up of equal parts "trying to remember what Sweetie told me to do today" and "wondering where Mr F has gotten off to."

Plus snacks. So, so many snacks.

Anyway, the UPDATE on SCIENCE 2 is this: There has been a TRAUMATIC EVENT OF SCIENCE, and by "traumatic event" I mean this guy:




Longtime readers will recognize Mr F, and will also recognize that he looks a little guilty there, doesn't he?

He does. Take it from me.

Mr F looks guilty because of this:






which occurred when I brought Mr F and Mr Bunches into the office with me last Sunday, and then, having brought them into the office, I unwisely (in my opinion) opted to try to do some work, which distracted me from the far more important role I usually occupy, that of "guy who keeps Mr F from finding out that there's a can of dirt in a drawer in his desk and then subsequently spilling that can of dirt to see what happens."

Which is why he looks guilty in that picture above.

I knew immediately that something was wrong, of course -- I was reviewing some emails and otherwise doing things that seemed important at the time and I heard the drawer opening, but I thought it was safe because there's that Mr Yuck sticker on it, and everyone's afraid of Mr Yuck, right?

Wrong. So as I turned around, Mr F had the

Poinsettia...

In A Can...

OF SCIENCE!!!?!!

In his hand and he's already dumped some of it in the drawer where I keep time-sheets and, for some reason, a spiral notebook that I didn't realize was in there until I looked at this picture:


And then had dumped the rest of the

Poinsettia...

In A Can...

OF SCIENCE!!!?!!

on the floor of my office, which, I'm no herpetologist, but I'm reasonably sure is not good for any kind of flower.

Also, I know that a herpetologist studies snakes, but don't you think they'd probably know more about plants than a lawyer? It would be hard to know less about plants than most lawyers do, because lawyers only know about things they sue, and while once I learned a lot about classifying tomatoes because I represented a guy who was suing a tomato grower over the tomato grower's guarantee...

... that's a true story: Our client, who ran a produce business, claimed the tomatoes were guaranteed to be good and that they weren't, so he wanted his money back, but the tomato grower claimed the tomatoes weren't guaranteed, even though his company's slogan was "The only tomato with a guarantee," a slogan that was on a t-shirt from his company and that is the strange-but-true story about how I once marked a t-shirt as evidence at a deposition...

... where was I?

So: SCIENCE! Acting quickly, because I assume you are supposed to act quickly in an emergency, because people are always saying stuff like stat on shows about emergencies, I gathered up the Can of SCIENCE, and then carefully dumped the "let's-just-call-it-dirt" of SCIENCE from my time-sheets-box to the can:






And then scraped up as much of the rest of the dirt as I could, being careful to try to keep an eye out for the Poinsettia Seeds Of SCIENCE, which was difficult in that, remember, they are TINY, and also Mr F I think might have had them stuck to his bare feet, because lately Mr F has been taking his shoes and socks off once we get to the office.

Don't tell my staff.

This is as clean as I could get it:


And I had it all back in the drawer and cleaned up and then I went to brush off my hands and find Mr Bunches, only to come back and realize that Mr F had dumped it all out again.

I would show you pictures of the Great Dumping Out Of Science 2, 2, but trust me, it looked exactly like the Great Dumping Out Of Science 2, 1.

So I went through the same process, again, and this time put the

Poinsettia...

In A Can...

OF SCIENCE!!!?!!

Into a different drawer:




But I did not move the note, to throw Mr F off the track, because for some reason Mr F hates SCIENCE!

Now, it's this week, not last week, and I checked the

Poinsettia...

In A Can...

OF SCIENCE!!!?!!

And it appears to have not changed at all, although it's not moist anymore and so I'll have to water it I think. But things are not looking good for this experiment, and now I wish I had written that proposal for the billion-dollar research grant earlier, because this is going to be hard to put a positive spin on.

Still, SCIENCE marches on, and, as you know from Science 1, a/k/a, The Mummified Twinkie, it is important to make Observations, so here are my Observations of SCIENCE 2, so far:

1. I probably should have a lock on that drawer. It's kind of cool to have a locking drawer, now that I think of it. People in my office would be all "What do you suppose he's got in that locked drawer?" and I would drop a rumor (without them knowing I was spreading the rumor) that what was in the drawer was, say, Vince Lombardi's hand in a jar, which is probably a thing.

2. Can you prove that they did not cut of Vince Lombardi's hand and pickle it?

3. I didn't think so.

4. Why does Mr F hate SCIENCE?

5. Number 4 isn't really an observation at all. -2 points.

6. I probably should have tried harder to find the Chicken.

Welcome to: SCIENCE 2: The Re-Sciencing!

Also known as "Science 2: Electric Boogaloo."


That, as you no doubt guessed, is a "Poinsettia In A Can." And it is also...

THE RETURN OF....

SCIENCE!!!!!!

Man, I really need to learn how to do graphics. Imagine how great that would have been if it had been flashing and glowing, as it was in my mind.

But, then, I don't need a lot of "hype" and "glitz" and "knowledge" and "facts" to introduce what will be easily my most amazing Adventure In Science since I ate that Twinkie, a SCIENTIFIC Experiment I am calling:

Poinsettia...

In A Can...

OF SCIENCE!!!?!!

Okay, maybe that needed a little bit of glitz.

Yesterday, as is our usual routine, Mr Bunches and Mr F and I stopped off at the Dollar Store to get some necessaries like "A ceramic house" (Mr Bunches has 9, now), a "Roo" Pez Dispenser (Mr F likes the dispensers, I get the candy) and the like, and on our way to the checkout, we stumbled across a shelf containing little rows of cans.

The first can I saw said "Real Snow In A Can," which (a) seemed doubtful and (b) was likely to be just water by this point, so I passed on it, but I was immediately enthralled with the idea of a Poinsettia In A Can and bought it because there's really no way that phrase can turn out to be anything but awesome.

I didn't even read the directions until we were in the car, at which point I'd realized it was more than just awesome, it was awexome, a word I'm trying to get to catch on so if you'd kindly use it once or twice and pay me a nominal fee I'd appreciate it.

It turns out that Poinsettia In A Can is pretty much the only product left in the world that is exactly what it purports to be, more or less. It's a can... with poinsettias in it.

Only problem is, you have to grow them. Which is actually no problem for me because as you know, I'm pretty much the best gardener ever provided that you judge me based not on effort or results but on what I imagined the garden would be.*

*Mr Bunches' Victory Garden, by the way, as yet has produced no sunflowers, no pumpkins, no carrots, and no watermelons. But in terms of success, I'm counting it as a win because I don't think we even planted watermelons.

As always, I do not perform SCIENCE at home, because home also contains Mr F and Mr Bunches, who are extremely hard on SCIENCE, or I imagine they would be because yesterday I also fixed our kitchen sink, which had a pipe that was leaking, and Mr Bunches at first helped me fix the kitchen sink by laying on my head before deciding he was going to work on his own pipes, and while I fixed the leak that existed I'm not entirely sure that there's not now three other leaks.

So I brought the

Poinsettia...

In A Can...

OF SCIENCE!!!?!!

to work with me today, where, heedless of the 10,000 things I need to do, I immediately sat down and read through all of the instructions on the can, instructions which referred me to the more detailed instructions hidden inside the lower lid of the can. So I took off the plastic bottom and retrieved the instructions, and also what I immediately hypothesized**

** actual SCIENCE term!

were seeds:





Then, because this is SCIENCE, I read all of the instructions on the sheet, even the one in box 1 at the bottom that reads "open the lid and read the instruction sheet," which also has a diagram showing one opening the lid. There is no diagram for reading the instruction sheet; you're on your own with that one.

The instructions first told me to pop the top and peel the lid back, and I immediately popped the wrong tab because why wouldn't there be two pull tabs on your

Poinsettia...

In A Can...

OF SCIENCE!!!?!!

I realized my mistake almost immediately and pulled the OTHER tab off and peeled the top back, so my

Poinsettia...

In A Can...

OF SCIENCE!!!?!!

Has an open top and a hole in the bottom, but what could possibly go wrong with that?

Then, I was instructed to get 3-4 ounces of water, which was problematic because (a) I am not entirely sure how much an ounce is; I think it's about a hectare, but I've never been able to keep those straight in my mind, and (b) this is a law office, where we do not have graduated cylinders**

** Actual SCIENCE term!

to measure out ounces and dekameters, so I had to improvise by using a glass from our kitchen.

I chose the one with the decorative forest scene:



And, as you can see, my Improvisation of SCIENCE also included measuring my hectare of water up against a handy reference, the handy reference being in this case a "Crayons Sports Drink" that one of my staffers bought for me to give to Mr Bunches because (and I quote) "You said he likes red crayons."

Crayons Sports Drink, as you can see, contains no high fructose corn syrup but does contain electrolytes.

I don't know what electrolytes are. My sole experience with them was the time that Charlie Brown's baseball team began drinking "a balanced electrolyte solution"



And then lost the game because they were all too full of electrolytes to play. Let that be a lesson to you.

Anyway, having measured out the appropriate acreage of water, I then had to pour it into what the directions assured me was "soil":



That's the "soil" after I watered it and sprinkled the seeds on it. For comparison's sake, I left one seed on the desk; you can see it as the tiny black speck in the lower left part of the picture.

The directions then said "Sunlight is not required for germination" which is how you know this is truly advanced science, in that about the only thing I remember from science class is that sunlight is what makes plants grow, because they convert it into energy.

But the

Poinsettia...

In A Can...

OF SCIENCE!!!?!!

does not require sunlight. Instead, I was told to "Keep [it] in a dark room or covered loosely with an inverted paper bag." There were no directions on how to obtain a paper bag or invert it, and I do not have the option of sealing off my office from all light and intrusion, much as I would like to do that, so I did the next best thing:

I put it in my desk:






That alone would not be nearly secure enough, though, and I can't find the wind-up chicken I ordinarily post as a guard for these things, so instead, I took other precautionary measures:





You'll note that the symbol is intended to be "Mr Yuck." If you are my generation, then you have an irrational fear of Mr Yuck, because

Mr Yuck is mean.
Mr Yuck is green!

And he denotes poison. And if you think that jingle isn't scary, see it in action:






With that done, I promptly threw out all the rest of SCIENCE, and then just as promptly remembered that I didn't recall the schedule by which poinsettias need to be exposed to the light in order to bloom by Christmas, so I pulled the directions back out of the garbage. They were none the worse for the wear:





I'll keep you updated on how this is going, and whether I decide to eat any of it.