No justice for the Prince of Panspermia

I’m unable to find out what happened to Rhawn Joseph’s Mars Jelly Donut Rock lawsuit against NASA, but on another front:

BREAKING BREAKING BREAKING - U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upholds the District Court’s dismissal of the lawsuit against Springer Nature:

Will this case be mushrooming out to the U.S. Supreme Court? Keep your antennae up and stay tuned.

Next you’ll all tell me that a monohull can only sail to one destination at a time, but a trimaran can visit three simultaneously. :laughing:

If you have three very small islands located very closely together, it might well be possible for a trimaran to visit the three of them simultaneously.

I’m not sure, but I think a trilogy must be when three people all talk at once. And a bilayer is a productive chicken.

Or one with a varied mating life.

With fungi sometimes having tens of thousands of sexes, you’d need a whole lot of more planets, though. Also, mushroom comedy must be fiendishly complex…

And then there’s the catamaran. I don’t know how many hulls it has, but ownership is restricted:

It is the very model of a modern major monograph.

Don’t laugh. In Germany I took a ferry that crossed a river only about 50% wider than the ferry was long.
Free at least.

Aside from the more entertaining bizarre stuff on his website, this caught my eye - this was his headline claim:

In May of 2016, Dr. Joseph provided evidence and reported that 40 experts in fungi and 30 experts in geomorphology, after examining photos of Martian specimens taken by NASA, formed a statistically significant consensus that there is a high probability of life on Mars.

Rhawn Joseph's Scientific Publications, Pictures, Biography

It sounds all sciency, but I’m trying to think about what on earth he’s saying.

He showed some experts (let’s allow that they were experts) low-resolution photos of some Martian rocks that look vaguely like mushrooms. What on earth does a “statistically significant consensus” mean in this context? What is the expected number of experts under the null hypothesis? Is it the number of experts who, when shown grainy photos of things that do NOT look AT ALL like mushrooms, nevertheless (for reasons best known to themselves, possibly involving mushrooms) still think they are mushrooms?

When limited to scientific publications appearing in journals indexed by the PubMed database, Dr. Joseph’s output appears limited to one co-authored article, “Nonlinguistic Knowledge, Hemispheric Laterality, and the Conservation of Inequality in Nonconserving Children”. This appears to be a legitimate if obscure field of inquiry centering around when children develop the ability to determine that amounts of something are the same despite variations in shape, size and the container that holds them (a valuable skill when grocery shopping).

There are numerous cases where highly respected and even Nobel Prize-winning scientists have gone astray after becoming obsessed with subjects outside their field of expertise (Linus Pauling for example, but there are many others who can be found if one searches under “Nobel Disease”). This may be one of those instances; alternately I could be so blinded by “violent opposition” that I can’t see the extraplanetary mushrooms that are plain as day, waiting to be sauteed into succulent dishes by bold space travelers.

You know, this is a really, really unfair website to show me when I’m trying to write a sensible essay on fungi…

“Secure Site Not Available”

I don’t trust any scientist who can’t even be bothered to set up his own website with https.

Mushrooms being extra-planetary was a plot point in the “Legends of Tomorrow” TV series, so you know it must be true.

Extraterrestrial life may be very different from anything we imagine. Those sentient Martian shrooms may behave very different from what we expect.

“On Mars, mushrooms sauté you

But since we all know this, the most difficult thing to imagine is that it turns out to be exactly the same. So I’m bringing garlic and olive oil, if it turns out to be genocide there’s probably another planet.

(This would be more convincing if I were wearing aviator shades with a backdrop of a huge galaxy.)

But alien life will still be different in the details. So it’s a crap-shoot as to who sautés who.

I remember some guy who used to always be finding blood vessels in photos of rocks on Mars. It might be this guy, and has moved on to meteorites.

“I like the Time Cube, but Dr. Gene Ray just doesn’t have enough pizzazz for me.”

Rhwan Joseph, Phd: “Hold my kefir spritzer!”

In modern academic publishing, IME, a monograph is a book-length work on a specialist subject that may have one or multiple authors. It’s in contrast to an “edited volume”, or book-length collection of separately authored chapters dealing with different aspects of a specialist subject, usually much less cohesive and comprehensive than the chapters of a monograph.