User talk:Ryan Prior/EasyStreet

It makes me sad that people use Wikipedia to preach pseudo-science.

Easy Street
Well, maybe I wasted time - I wanted to make a "disambiguation page" and don't know how - but Easy Street as a Chaplin movie should have both words capitalised. I used to play noontime soccer on a pitch off the street in CA, and I thought it was a "gas" - that name. After all, there are articles on Route 66, episodes in "Star Trek", a character in another fantasy "Siuan Sanche is a character of the Wheel of Time fantasy series by Robert Jordan.", Njj and other semi-trivia that are not moved to the dictionary - but what the heck - it was just a stab.Pdn 04:07, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment. Actually, I just have fun at odd hours finding missing items and fixing bad English in Wikipedia and I hope you will go ahead with a disambiguation page etc. I work on more serious items in the field of the sciences (astrophysics, physics, relativity,) and I watch some pseudoscience entries at times, which make me want to give up on Wikipedia, and maybe on reason itself, but I just move on to real science or random links - not much that I feel I can do with ESP, Scientology, flying saucers, or "intelligent design." (hope not to tread on toes) Pdn 21:53, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your message, Ryan. In response to your comment: ''Does that ever make you step back for a second and say, "There is no way this all just happened randomly!" I'm not a proponent of intelligent design and I wouldn't mix creationism and science, but if science one day finds out that some god-like creator really did make everything, I wouldn't be too surprised.''

I always say I am not an atheist or even an agnostic - I say I am taking a "wait and see" position on various items like the existence of a Supreme Being. I never looked, however, at what the Intelligent Design and related people are doing until I got into Wikipedia. I saw an article on "liquefaction" that dealt only with soil liquefaction, dangerous in earthquakes, and not with the liquefaction of gases - dear to chemists and physicists and the cause of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes' Nobel Prize. Innocently, I put in a little remark on the liquefaction of gases (I am lazy on doing disambiguation pages), and put the page on my watchlist. Lo and behold, I discovered a mighty and acrimonious debate in progress; the "liquefaction" page was written by a fundamentalist User:Ungtss who put in a link to "Creationism" and had apparently written the whole thing as a way to lead the lambs to the slaughter on the altar of fundamentalism. Ungtss knows not how to turn the other cheek - he rises in fury like Smaug the dragon when one of his dust-laden jewels was accidentally disturbed by a passer-by. He has apparently read a lot of science, but not quite understood it (according to people like User:Zeizmic and User:Vsmith who appear to be geologists). I am not sure on the details any more, but apparently Ungtss ascribed major destruction, as in the collapse of liquified soil, to the upwelling of water rather than to the shaking of already-wet clayey soil. And this was seemingly to support some story in the Bible. His latest sally seems to be User talk; Ungtss/Rapid bending granite, which "looks" like science, but I doubt it any more - Ungtss speaks, always, with forked tongue, one fork pointing to the Scriptures. What is happening is that a phalanx, or perhaps a mob, of wild-eyed fundamentalists have been studying the scientific literature as a medieval monk would study the Book of Jonah. Like the lilies of the field, these guys "toil not, neither do they spin" in the sense of doing research with a laboratory, a telescope, a computer, or a field study. They read and read. When they find an idea that will support Creationism they note it; when they find one inconsistent with Creationism they search for weaknesses, statements that disagree, or ways to twist the result to their ends. They are perhaps not a mob - they are too well organized - they are a Crusade Against Reason. They are hard to argue with because they have so thoroughly done what I said they do: pick through scientific results, keeping some, twisting others (even my papers have been cited). Peter. Pdn 01:45, 29 May 2005 (UTC)