Kooks

[fanf]

I note that the prolifically incompetent "mathematician" Eugene Terrell has recently submitted a couple of new Inernet-Drafts on the topic of being able to fit more than 128 bits of numbers into 32 bits of space. Go to http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/index-t.html and look at draft-terrell-* ...

Comments

[senji.livejournal.com]

Wow, those drafts are not merely laughable, they're incomprehensible.

[vatine]

Gosh! Whatever that man is smoking, I think EVERYONE should have some. Then the world would be a much more, ahem, interesting place. Like, erm, a Möbius strip or something.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Boggle.

A true demonstration of the proverb 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing'. Like most kooks, his inability to produce comprehensible English is the biggest defense for his ideas — before you can begin to disprove them, you have to try to work out what he's actually saying.

[simont]

I looked at this one and could believe he was just incomprehensible and/or incompetent (it was hard to really judge the latter owing to the former). But this one was just over the top; at the point where Fermat's Last Theorem was namechecked half way through the Introduction I decided he couldn't possibly be serious and had to be an excessively verbose troll.

[dave holland (from livejournal.com)]

Bah, I decided that anyone who couldn't get principle/principal right wasn't going to have produced anything worth reading later on. ;-)

[vatine]

Oh, it's even better... such as the '^' Carrot sign. Uh, yeah, be careful, so you don't use too many carets when cooking. (could, of course, be a spell-checker artefact)

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Both of those rely on a wilful and systematic misunderstanding of zero. The Fermat namechecking one is a particularly fine example of kookery; he quotes pages upon pages of sensible maths, then finally makes a flying leap to the very last table where he miscounts the number of rows and tries to claim that 2^0 is different from 0^0.

[simont]

*blinks* Well, they are different; 2⁰ is defined and 0⁰ isn't!

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

There's an absolutely classic Note: in the second one where he digresses onto chemistry and biology - it's completely barking.

[arnhem.livejournal.com]

I wonder what he rates on the crackpot index?

I hadn't seen that before...

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

The crackpot index... This is a revolutionary contribution to *ahem* freeform scientific debate. Shame there's no metric for spelling errors and innovative grammar.

[mad-tigger.livejournal.com]

Well, having tried to read the absurdidty todo with a 'New Binary', i'm fairly convinced he's barking, he can go chat to the author of www.timecube.com and the people who continue to refute the Michelson-Morely experiment more than a century on. I love the way these nutters crawl out of the woodwork to carp on usenet/random websites.

[dwmalone.livejournal.com]

I guess if they ever build one of these space-based laser interferometers for detecting gravity waves, they'll be able to do the ultimate Michelson-Morely experiment and put to bed the idea that the aether is being dragged around by the earth. (Or maybe someone has already done this? You can't help feel that if as much money had been spent on Michelson-Morely as people are using to look for gravity waves, then someone might have found the aether ;-)

[dwmalone.livejournal.com]

Physics world once had a good article on cranks, where one test for spotting a physics crank was that cranks can't do calculus. I wonder what the equivelent test for Internet Drafts would be.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, Xah Lee has disovered LJ