Not Surprised

Has anyone noticed that gasoline prices went down before the November elections? 

Has anyone noticed that now, less than a month after those elections, gasoline prices are rising again? Is anyone surprised by that?

I'm not. I predicted it.

Amusing Moments

My wife and I take care of each other, which is what old people (which we are) do when they love each other (which we do). That sometimes can get a little comical, which we won't go into, and sometimes involves our own private language.

Such as when I'm taking medication for back pain and she doesn't trust me to remember to take it as instructed, which results in her asking her recovering alcoholic husband, "Did you take some more drugs?"  Yes, I did, but I appreciated her asking.

Oh yes, and Russia ran out of missiles again last week, then fired 120 more missiles again yesterday. I have lost count of how many times Russia has run out of missiles. It's at least a couple of dozen times.

Football Highlight and Lowlight

The Chiefs have just taken the lead, 30-27, and there are 31 seconds left. The Chargers have one time out left. The Chiefs are going to line up with four players 25 yards deep, four players 15 yards deep, and will engage in a three-man pass rush, enabling the Chargers to complete a fifty yard pass.

But no! What's this? The Chiefs have 11 players on the line of scrimmage! It's a jailbreak! And they sack the Chargers quarterback!!!

Time for one more play, and they do it again!!! Interception!! Who knew? Eleven men on the line of scrimmage is actually a "prevent defense."

Update, Dec 17, 2022: Last week against Miami, the Chargers have 3rd and goal at the 17-yard line, which is less than a sterling accomplishment in itself. The Dolphins defensive alignment consists of three men at the line of scrimmage, three on the goal line, and the remaining five men in the end zone. Eight players 17 or more yards away from the line of scrimmage.

Oddly, the Chargers did not score! With the Dolphins giving them 17 yards of empty grass between them and the end zone, they did not score.

A completed pass was carried out of bounds 18" short of the goal line. The Chargers went for it on fourth down and scored a touchdown.

Artificial Reasoning

I am most certainly not a scientist, but I grew up in an era when students were taught to think rationally, along the lines of, “regardless of who says it, if it doesn’t make any sense it isn’t true.” I therefor do not subscribe to the modern religion of blindly accepting as gospel anything that is spoken by a government official, journalist or putative scientist.

So when I read an article in Quantum Magazine which tells me that physicists have detected a stunning new, heretofore unknown “feature of the fundamental laws that operated during the Big Bang,” I am not necessarily or automatically awestruck by the genius of the parties involved. (Especially given that the Big Bang itself is an unproven theory, so discovering "features of fundamental laws" that operated during an unproven event is more than a bit questionable.)

The discovery has to do, the article tells us, with “a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky.” Why anyone would expect the galaxies in the universe to be symmetrically distributed escapes me, as it’s rather like expecting trees in a natural forest to be in nice neat rows like an apple orchard.

Given that the Big Bang Theory says that the universe was created when something exploded, scattering material in all directions, why did they think that the material would be scattered symmetrically? 

Well, let’s move on to how they discovered this asymmetry.
 
The article reports that, “…the researchers drew lines between sets of four galaxies, constructing four-cornered shapes called tetrahedra. When they had built every possible tetrahedron from a catalog of 1 million galaxies, they found that tetrahedra oriented one way outnumber their mirror images.”

You have to be kidding me. How long did it take these “researchers,” and how much did they get paid, to play “connect the dots” with one million fucking galaxies? Why did they choose to connect in sets of four? Why not three and make triangles? Or five and make pentagons?

How do they know that they started with the right four galaxies? What if they started with three of those four and included a different one as the fourth in the initial group? What if they stared with two of those four and included a different two? How did they determine how to select the other sets of four?

“If the observation withstands scrutiny,” the article goes on to say, using the term “observation” rather generously, “physicists think it must reflect an unknown, parity-violating ingredient in the primordial process,” which would rather seriously disparage the thinking capacity of physicists.

They do, finally, caution that with “such a blockbuster finding” that “experts say caution is warranted.” I would suggest that a little more than mere caution is warranted.

This is what “science” has deteriorated into; “researchers” playing connect the dots with star maps.