Dear readers - a roundabout rant on the ubiquity of BS.

Why I Howl at the Moon.

Willow Springs International Raceway circa 2005

Happy Wednesday everyone.

It’s been a long Indian summer here, but a touch of winter has finally arrived in the Intermountain West. It’s snowing outside right now. It’ll melt soon, but it’s really good to see. It’s a bummer that my 2024 ride across America training rides are about to get colder, but early snowpack after several years of scarcity is just fine with me.

Mostly this note is a head’s up that with the coming of winter (and less time outdoors) I’m about to post more content. I’ve written articles and columns for decades and a few of them, particularly portraits of musical artists and some science items, are about to find a new home here. You’ll get more frequent notices of new posts in the coming months. All of the archival stuff will be free to read.

I have been a writer most of my life. I had my first piece published when I was in 7th grade. I wrote and self-published a successful book that paid a big chunk of my college expenses. During my career as a physicist I participated in writing books and collaborated on scientific articles. I’ve worked for or developed content for climbing, motorcycle and pro sound magazines.

I’ve also been the subject of pieces in the media as a vociferous critic of pseudoscientific ideas like Bigfoot, flat earth nonsense, 9/11 conspiracy theories and general magical thinking. Not always in a flattering manner, I should add. After one particularly stunning rebuke on NPR over my criticism of Bigfoot as a serious “Science Friday” topic, sans any rebuttal from skeptics, I got hundreds of emails - almost none of them complementary. You have to love those “driveway moments” people

I actually found my way onto the front page of The New York Times about a decade ago in a piece on wide spread cheating in higher education by foreign students. That was another barn burner which weighed mightily on the side of the scale favoring the proposition that being right comes with no guarantee of coming out ahead. The truth, alas, does not always set you free. Except, perhaps, from your career.

Nonetheless, as a writer (and an occasional piñata) I’ve had a lot of fun with the written word through the decades. If I were to characterize my life as succinctly as possible, it would be “fun for a living.” I’ve worked as a climbing guide, a ski instructor, a motorcycle test editor/racer, a musician, an audio engineer, a photographer and as a consultant in acoustics, optics and educational software development. I’ve had the opportunity to write about all of it.

It’s all been mostly loads of fun. If it wasn’t, I moved on as soon as possible. Life’s too short for jobs that suck, general tedium and vehicles that don’t run like scalded cats. I did find some time, 25 years to be exact, for an actual professional career as a physicist. Mostly this was great fun as well - right up until the end, anyway.

The best thing my career as an academic was having a high profile platform to rebuke popular ideas and/or trends based almost entirely on bullshit. It was nearly a full-time job. My greatest disappointment is that in a quarter century of effort I moved the world not a single inch - despite a lot of effort. There’s currently more nonsense out there now than ever and fewer adults in the room to ameliorate and/or rebut most of it.

Academia is a big part of this iniquitous trend. No less that Silicon Valley tech magnate Peter Thiel claims that higher education is now as essentially corrupt as the Catholic Church was back in the days of the Reformation. Thiel cites the modern academic practices of shutting down debate, excommunicating heretics (who are almost always conservative) and hoodwinking students with empty promises of high paying careers while charging them through the nose for a product of declining value.

I would add to Thiel’s list academic administrative bloat - something that is almost always due to burgeoning layers of diversity, inclusion and equity bureaucracy, referred to by some wags as DIE.

The spectrum of DIE and other postmodern paradigms that have swept through academia like wildfire played no small part in my early retirement. In the end, academia was about the farthest thing from fun that one might imagine - and the deck is stacked.

When highly educated people, en masse, buy into loopy notions: that there is no objective truth, that hard facts and well established scientific theories may be bent to “ways of knowing,” that math is inherently racist because of some inequity of outcomes and other equally nonsensical ideas, there’s trouble afoot. This stuff would have been excoriated as nonsense until just a few years ago. Now it’s the unchallengeable status quo in many places.

It’s out of control. Feelings now trump established facts. Carping, whining and reducing to simple liberal dogma moral dilemmas which are difficult to resolve or require a nuanced view of the world are academia’s current raison d'être.

I don’t care how anyone feels, for instance, about the concept of gravity - which works the same way whether you like it or not. It matters not one iota that you feel that gravity is a) it’s racist by virtue of having been developed by white, male Europeans, b) possibly does not work the way we’ve observed for over 400 years due to different “ways of knowing,” c) doesn’t work due to the lack of exchange particles, i.e., gravitons.

OK, that last one was just to see if you are still paying attention. If gravitons are your issue, we should talk. I can be had for as little as a six pack of Pabst.

This is not a strawman argument. I’ve literally been told by colleagues that physics is just another “way of knowing.” And that wasn’t even from someone whose rationality could be otherwise judged via their name badge on which they self-identified as a cat.

No matter what “way of knowing” is involved, I maintain that if I conduct an experiment by dropping a basketball-sized rock on the head of some cat-identifying post modernist’s head from the second story of the science building every time they walk out the front door, gravity is verified. Furthermore I maintain that the furry is going to hate it 100% of the time because an acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 makes the outcome invariably unpleasant no matter what objection they may have to gravity over a lack of diversity in its origins.

Some things just are - and whether you like or not has got nothing to do with it. I have no idea why the physical world works the way that it does. I just know how to describe and quantify it.

Big Universe, small humans. Stings some, doesn’t it? Get in line.

That’s why I howl at the moon. Ideas over which people of good faith may reasonably disagree don’t bother me at all - even if we disagree a whole bunch. Some notions that people have about things that they hold dear are not based on facts or logic (one’s taste in music, for instance) and don’t need to be.

What bothers me is the degree to which important practices, ones essential to maintaining a prosperous and free society, have become informed by horrendous bullshit - and how rapidly this paradigm has become unchallenged in academia, government and business. Not without reason. If you push back on modern woke groupthink your reward is generally the goodbye look.

As much as I used to go after the pseudoscience crowd, never once did it occur to me that they should not have the right to say their piece. You don’t counter poor or inaccurate speech with suppression, you counter it with better speech. I used to look forward to this. In fact I still do when an opportunity presents itself.

One time, the University where I spent most of my career invited a speaker, a former TV weatherman, to talk about aircraft contrails - something he referred to as “chemtrails.” It was this speaker’s assertion that these were not a natural phenomenon involving the condensation of water vapor, but evidence of a vast conspiracy between humans and aliens. I kid you not. Google it.

I had no objection to this talk whatsoever. I think that college campuses should be a market for all kinds of ideas. The debate of ideas matters - even if some of them are prima facie absurd - because it’s the debate that establishes what’s good and what isn’t. It was my job as an academic with knowledge in this area to respond with better facts than his. But not to suppress the talk. If, as an academic, you don’t have the time, the skill or the patience for setting the record straight in your field, you probably need to find a different career.

This particular speaker was a loon: polychromatic laser beams (a chromatic aberration in a photograph), mislabeled graphs, and figures that made no sense. It wasn’t difficult to refute every point that he made. Some people in the audience didn’t like it, but too bad for them. Show up on a college campus with a physics department and talk about physical nonsense and you should expect a hammer to fall. So should your fans.

The 9/11 conspiracy guy was even better. I’ll post an old column about that when I can find it.

That’s it for now. Again, I thank you for being a part of this community. Hang in here, and we’ll all go slay some bullshit together.

Tomorrow: why free speech is now a radical concept.

Cheers