To be fair, if the following sort of thing is actually going on, I'm with him that it must be stopped:
They are successfully selling you an ancient looking coins minted yesterday with tails inscription "coined in 2000 B.C." and head with portrait of Jesus Christ.
But it's got math in it. That makes it scientific.
I wish I still had a my photocopy of a hand-written five-page paper (with charts and diagrams), in marvelously bad English, that someone submitted to the classics journal I work for many years ago. The author argued that God = Space, and began something like "The Space and Time as discrete phenomena of themselves are don't existing."
Naturally, I used it as a Call of Cthulhu prop.
I'm not sure why the author felt our journal was a suitable venue for publication. A year later, faced by our not having published it, he sent a postcard accusing us of religious persecution.
Is he serious? I never know when people like this (this dumb, that is) are kidding or not. I'd really like to believe he's actually some card-carrying ACL member who got bored and made up the whole thing as a joke, but... ugh.
I read a similarly bogus "scientific" analysis a while back. Edo Nyland (http://www.islandnet.com/~edonon/linguist.htm) has some very... creative... ideas about the origin of language.
Hmm. Never occurred to me to doubt he was. Maybe because I just read a book (Stephen Williams' Fantastic Archaeology) which was chock-full of people believing the most astonishing things.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-16 10:58 am (UTC)They are successfully selling you an ancient looking coins minted yesterday with tails inscription "coined in 2000 B.C." and head with portrait of Jesus Christ.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-16 10:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-16 07:36 pm (UTC)...poooh!
Well, in the face of arguments like that, I quit!
no subject
Date: 2004-04-17 05:55 am (UTC)I wish I still had a my photocopy of a hand-written five-page paper (with charts and diagrams), in marvelously bad English, that someone submitted to the classics journal I work for many years ago. The author argued that God = Space, and began something like "The Space and Time as discrete phenomena of themselves are don't existing."
Naturally, I used it as a Call of Cthulhu prop.
I'm not sure why the author felt our journal was a suitable venue for publication. A year later, faced by our not having published it, he sent a postcard accusing us of religious persecution.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-17 09:52 pm (UTC)I read a similarly bogus "scientific" analysis a while back. Edo Nyland (http://www.islandnet.com/~edonon/linguist.htm) has some very... creative... ideas about the origin of language.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-18 07:30 am (UTC)Hmm. Never occurred to me to doubt he was. Maybe because I just read a book (Stephen Williams' Fantastic Archaeology) which was chock-full of people believing the most astonishing things.