inside the mind of a very angry crank

Pseudoscience and fact-free manifestos, now with anger management issues...





His name is Louis and he’s very, very, very angry. Don’t rush to condemn him though, he has a reason for his pent up fury and a rather good one at that. You see, those freaking morons in physics and computer science, those elitist, ivory towered academics who write nothing but bullshit in their journals will not see his brilliance in these fields. But that’s fine, it’s ok. He knows he won’t reach these brain damaged idiots, he’ll just take his paradigm-shifting insights straight to the people, avoiding the trap of peer reviewed journals which exist only as an obstacle to those as gifted as he is. Behold his series on why motion is impossible, the only speed of any object is the speed of light, and how all of space is on a 4D lattice. Don’t ask him what this lattice has to be or what it’s called because you will force him to reveal his elaborate, long term plans which apparently just have to be hidden from those nasty physicists. Tremble as he finally explains those mental midgets in comp sci how to make bug free software by having the computer handle all the testing, while demonstrating his utter lack of familiarity with how to test corner and boundary cases or for what environmental variables to look with a fervor that has him rabidly clawing at the keyboard. In short, the man is an ignoramus with issues.

When Loius presents his personal framework for physics, it’s difficult to debate his points, but not because of any cunning numerology or complex concepts involved. It’s because his arguments consist of declaring what does or does not happen in the universe and how, calling physicists stupid and too politicized to see that he’s inarguably correct, then meeting any critique or request for actual proof in the comments with a noxious mix of derision and anger. There’s simply nothing to argue about because he gives you no evidence or reason as to how he arrived at his conclusions. Just like all physics cranks, he’s afflicted with pathological arrogance and sees any attempt to question him or his methods as a nefarious scheme of an establishment which refuses to acknowledge his groundbreaking ideas. In his universe, everything travels at the speed of light without any motion whatsoever, just jumping between points on a lattice, there’s no general reality or time dilation, and all other ideas are just a display of physicists’ mental deficiencies over the centuries. Don’t even try to ask why or how he incorporates experiments showing the effects of all the things he denies exist very much existing into his train of thought. You may as well plunge your hand into the maw of a rabid bulldog. Now, as he goes on to bash computer scientists for their inability to design perfect software, he actually does give us some fodder to chew on, and by chew on, I mean demonstrate his complete lack of knowledge in the area.

His big problem is the notion that it’s impossible to write 100% bug free code because we can’t account for all the possible use cases, failures, and environmental variables over time. After spending his customary two or three posts calling anyone who agrees with this idiots (really, it’s impossible for me to understate just how full of rage this fellow really is), Louis announces that we can just let the computer calculate all conceivable tests and test cases. Is there a limit on what values can be entered into the program? Just make sure no one could proceed with a value below the minimum or above the maximum. Because apparently, no one thought of that and there aren’t about three dozen packages that make sure you test every line of code, every conditional, and every data model which come by default with most modern IDEs, or can be freely downloaded. As if I use one of those every day when writing code. Oh and we can also program the applications to monitor hardware and alert us when something goes wrong. Again, no one has thought of this and there certainly aren’t companies which made hardware monitoring applications for decades on end. But seriously, does this guy really think IT is too stupid to adopt these widely available tools and sabotages their clients’ software for a quick buck as if a client today won’t have new problems to solve tomorrow as his or her business changes over time?

And here’s something our self-proclaimed rebel scientist should start considering if he ever manages to free his head from the region where he firmly wedged it. Piling up automated tests and monitoring systems, then monitoring systems to watch those monitoring systems, then add more monitors to watch the systems that’ll monitor the monitoring systems, and so on, won’t work. You’ll be left with a hobbled monstrosity that takes far too much time and memory to run, and the tiniest modifications will be Herculean efforts because you need to reconfigure a ridiculously overcomplicated and overstuffed system. But none of this even seems to come into play with Louis because he’s the archetypical crank, a textbook victim of the Dunning-Krueger effect, seething with rage that those supposed experts dare not see his brilliance. Across the web, thousands of Louises yell into the digital darkness and pound their chests as they declare entire fields of science to be utterly wrong, far beyond anyone but their abilities to fix. The haunt comment threads and search results, demanding attention, reverence, acceptance, and above all praise. Who knows, maybe Louis and others like him have careers that made them experts in something I wouldn’t know a thing about. Maybe he’s a chemist extraordinaire or one of the best car mechanics you’ll ever meet and perhaps, knowledge in one area gave him the idea that he could also be a visionary in another and failing to grasp his new obsession, he chose crankhood over study…