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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.)
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.