Add Homonym Attacks! #17
Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)
BUT FIRST!
With the passing of the Vernal Equinox, some of you may have encountered one of my favorite misconceptions: the egg balancing thing. This weird pseudo-fact has been told to me over and over again by teachers, news organizations, random homeless people, and it has never once made a damn bit of sense to me.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, there is a popular misconception that says “Only on the day of the Vernal (spring) Equinox, can you stand a raw egg on its end.”
I would go on and on about the silliness of this whole idea, but I don’t have to. Dr Phil has already done this thing for me. No not Oprah’s Dr. Phil, Dr. Phil Plait of one BADASTRONOMY.COM
Although that is merely how one sees the address when one’s caps lock is stuck in the on position. Plait does a better job on the egg thing that I could do as he is a real astronomer, whereas I am just a fake astrologer. No wait, all astrologers are fake. Huh.
Get on with it!
Easy answers to common questions!
Part 1: Those people in robes.
Who are the druids anyway?
They were Celtic wise men. (I should probably put “wise men” in quotes too.) We know little about them for certain, apart from the fact that they were highly regarded in Celtic society. They had lots of money and were afforded a personal body guard of thirty.
You see, they didn’t have big fancy temples, and didn’t write much of anything down. Anything else anybody tells you is most likely made up. And anybody claiming to be a druid is most likely a crystal wearing idiot who thinks he can heal people with Wiccan charms.
Why did the druids build Stonehenge?
They didn’t. Stonehenge predates the arrival of the Celts by quite a bit. Whoever did build the big damn thing probably did it as a calendar, as it aligns with the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of the winter solstice. Any other Stonehenge questions can be answered by NOVA.
What the f*ck do these Wiccans believe anyway?
Different Wiccans seem to believe vastly different things. It is kinda like defining “goth.” Most of ’em are harmless pansies. Don’t try to burn them though (unless they are as heavy as a duck).
What is a warlock? Somebody told me it was a male witch, and somebody else told me that it wasn’t this thing, but instead a hex.
War’lock is derived from Anglo-saxon, meaning “one who breaks his word.” It is used to describe “a wandering evil spirit” according to Brewer.
All’s I know is that a Uncle Arthur on “Bewitched” was called a warlock.
PART 2: Fanboys and Tin-Foil hats:
What the f*ck is AREA 51?
It is a section of an off-limits military base near Groom Dry Lake in Nevada. According to the crazies, that is where we keep the aliens. According to others, relatively sane folks, we are doing other bad things there, including possibly dumping toxic waste.
If there are any aliens there, they are probably just Mexicans.
I like Star Trek. When can I travel to the nearest solar system?
The good news? The fastest thing we’ve built so far is the Voyager which can travel at 40,000 MPH.
The bad news? Well, alongside numerous other problems, the closest star is Alpha Centauri is roughly 24,000,000,000,000 miles away. (That’s 24 trillion for those paying attention.) Assuming instantaneous acceleration (which would kill you) and going top speed the entire trip, you are still looking at 600,000,000 hours worth of travel. Let’s see, 24 hours per day, 365.25 days per year, that’s 7,566 hours per year. (I’m doing this by head, so tell me if I f*ck up.)
Not factoring in Zorgon invasions and potty breaks, that leaves us with 79,302 years and some change. With good traffic, my dad could probably do it in 78,000 years.
Provided you survive the trip, you’d experience a bit of delay in your radio communication. You see, 24 trillion miles is about 4 light years away. So you radio in, saying “I got here” and you’d have to wait around 8 years before getting the response of “dude cool!” Of course it will be 80,000 years after you left, so I’m not sure who it is that you are talking to on your space phone.
I also doubt that “dude” will still be part of the vernacular, but so it goes. Such are the problems with having a large space empire. You send out some orders to your subjects, and by the time you get around to checking up on them evolution has made cows the dominant species on the planet.
So no. You stay here.
The only space travel available to you would be the Virgin-Rebel Billionaire commercial spaceflights. Those things will cost about 100k a ticket, and they travel as near to the ground as one can be and still be called space.
But you will get to be weightless. Although you get the same feeling by going over a hill really fast in your Hyundai.
Why isn’t there gravity in space?
There is gravity in space. It’s pretty much holding everything together. In fact, every two pieces of matter share a gravitational force. There are forces of gravity pulling your wristwatch towards your underpants and vice versa. What’s missing is weight. I talk all about in the Endor to Peoria issue of AHA!
Would a yoyo work in space?
Yes. They’ve already taken yo-yos into space. They work like gangbusters.
So, that scene in that Superman/Spider-man crossover where Spidey’s web-shooters won’t fire straight in space…
Utter bullshit. A lack of gravity, does not equate the appearance of levity. Spidey’s web-shooters would shoot straighter than ever in a zero G environment.
While we’re on the subject of super-heroes, what super-hero has the most impossible super-powers?
Most superpowers are fairly impossible and inconsistent with the laws of physics, at least in some regard. You can find a copy of The Physics of Super-heroes at your local library.
If you want me to single out one though, let’s look at Cyclops. First off, there is some bad physics of light, i.e. he uses a red filter to stop red light, which is precisely the opposite of what it would do. There is some bad geology with the ruby quartz deal; I won’t get into that topic though. There is also bad action-reaction with Cyclops. You see, Cyclops’s eye beams pack quite a punch on their targets. Action-reaction says that they should also snap his neck backwards as he fires. There are also biological questions such as, how does Cyclops harvest the solar energy for his eye beams, how does he store said energy, how does he transform the solar energy into whatever the f*ck his eye-beams are, etc. All of that reeks of bad “conservation of energy” as well. How much soar energy could he possibly collect?
Outro
I’m tired. We’ll focus on one specific topic in the next issue. I haven’t decided which yet, but these last couple have been too random. If you have a particular belief, misconception, or scam you want me to look into, feel free to shoot off an e-mail.
I’ll be back with issue 18 in two weeks.
