Enjoying the posts above.
Before posting the following list of unpopular opinions of mine, I need to include a couple of things.
Doublethink and triplethink. Although I believe the opinion below, sometimes I also believe the opposite. Or in the case of alien life, two other different and incompatible views.
If you agree with any of these then it is not an unpopular opinion and should be removed from the list. If you can prove that I’m wrong (I’m looking at you Michael V about Pluto’s ocean) please let me know and I’ll delete it also.
Unpopular opinions.
1. Disaster is entertainment. Entertainment is disaster.
2. A killed virus vaccine can be made overnight. A vaccine can be manufactured in megadose quantities in 3 months. Using the internet to get feedback on side effects, the Covid vaccine should have been available in March 2020, and updated as soon as each new variant appeared.
3. Movies. “Titanic” would be a better movie if every scene containing Leonardo Decaprio was cut. “Waterworld” should have been released with a laughter track. Movies in cinemas sound better if you wear earmuffs.
4. CO2 isn’t “pollution”, CO2 is “plant food”.
5. There are two types of people – “climate skeptics” and “photosynthesis deniers”. Photosynthesis deniers refuse to accept that increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere makes every plant grow better.
6. The president of the USA doesn’t run the country any more than Zaphod Beeblebrox runs the Galaxy. Politicians are like fireflies. The two real powers in the USA are the permanent lobbyests (directly responsible for low wages, no unions, expensive healthcare, overpriced homes) and the DOD/FBI/Secret Service/CIA etc. power bloc.
7. There’s no such thing as a non-renewable resource. Mining moves resources from the lithosphere to the anthroposphere, and thereafter those resources stay in the anthroposphere forever. You don’t destroy a resource by using it, because of conservation of mass.
8. “Sustainability” is akin to “perpetual motion”. Don’t even try.
9. In mathematics, teach nonstandard analysis and throw standard analysis in the junk pile. In nonstandard analysis infinitesimals exist, dy/dx is literally dy divided by dx. Minus infinity is a number. Orders of magnitude exist. With the right definition of “limit”, every sequence and series converges and every function has a well defined value at infinity. Infinities cancel in renormalisation. There are many routes to nonstandard analysis: the transfer principle, surreal numbers, Hardy field, transseries, hyperreals, and Hahn series. The transfer principle is simple enough to teach in Primary School.
10. The most common DNA-based disease in human history is the plague, Yersinia pestis, also known as the Black Death. The plague is a sexually-transmitted disease, transmitted by pubic crabs. It’s still with us.
11. The radial distribution of Kepler planets (hot Jupiters) is identical to that of binary stars. All of the 2600 planets found by Kepler are failed stars, so were formed in a completely different way to our solar system planets, which formed by cold accretion. Neptune is the odd one out in our solar system. All the rest follow Bode’s law perfectly: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto, Eris. But Neptune is too big to have formed by cold accretion, so must be a failed star.
12. There are hundreds of published theories explaining ball lightning and all of them are wrong. Most can’t explain why it’s ball shaped, and the remainder can’t explain how it can pass through a window without leaving a hole. An analysis of a mark left by ball lightning in Canberra found that it was mostly made of iron and titanium.
13. “Denisovan” is a synonym of “Heidelberg Man”.
14. The Deccan traps killed the dinosaurs as shown by the high sulfur content of the K-Pg layer. The Chicxulub impactor was just coincidence. Almost all extinctions (>25 of the 34 main ones) were the result of sulfur dioxide (anoxia) from massive floods of basaltic lava.
15. T. rex was aquatic and had a similar diet to crocodiles.
16. The K-Pg extinction had no effect on mammal or bird diversification. Modern mammals and birds had already diversified before the dinosaurs went extinct. T. rex was a contemporary of early ducks and early primates.
17. “The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures” is a terrible translation. First, the translation has 17 words and the original Hebrew has 7 words. Second, of those 7 words, three are mistranslated. A better translation is “Nature is not evil. It makes crops grow”.
18. At the time of the abolition of slavery in Jamaica, fully half of all slaves were owned by legal firms, who were running them as “deceased estates”.
19. The last fullblood Victorian aborigine died before 1971. There are fullblood aborigines there now, but they’ve all migrated in from other states.
20. “Holy” means pure, “spirit” mean energy. “Holy spirit” means enthusiasm. In the Bible, Mary became pregnant outside marriage because of her enthusiasm.
21. Votes for women had zero effect in New South Wales. The balance of power in each electorate in the first election after the introduction of votes for women was exactly the same as the balance of power in the last election before the introduction of votes for women.
22. Nessie is a mating dance of more than 10,000 normal-sized eels.
23. “Homeopathy” and “vaccination” are synonyms. Vaccination is the most successful application of homeopathy.
24. Quantum field theory contains Special relativity. Special relativity tells us that there is no such thing as simultaneous because it depends on the observer. So how can the spooky action at a distance in quantum field theory be instantaneous if there’s no such thing as simultaneous?
25. Temperature is more fundamental than you think. The universe had a temperature before it contained even one particle.
26. “Respect” is a synonym of “fear”.
27. “Sacred” is a synonym of “deadly”.
28. In the Old Testament, “priest” is a synonym of “chef”.
29. White asbestos, Chrysotile, is at least a hundred times less dangerous than blue asbestos. It’s so safe that nobody can calculate whether it poses any health risk at all. It accounts for 95% of all asbestos in the United States. Asbestos was banned partway through the construction of the Twin Towers. There was no asbestos heat proofing on the floors where the aeroplanes hit. Which is why they collapsed. The banning of asbestos may have killed nearly 3,000 people.
30. Very few chemical poisons are deadly when ingested by people who are aware that they might be poisoned and take appropriate precautions.
31. “Intelligence” and “stupidity” are not opposites. They are actually uncorrelated.
32. The Queen authorised the murder of Princess Di. But played no part in the murder of her grandfather, King George V.
33. I call “emotional intelligence” the “psychopath test”. It’s a way to ensure that your company is run by a sociopath.
34. “Immaturity” is a necessary prerequisite for marriage.
35. The true message of Christmas is that believing in a lie is financially rewarding.
36. The true message of the New Testament is that “No matter how divine, charismatic, intelligent, gifted and lucky you are, if you upset the wealthy then you will suffer a premature and painful death”. In other words, “Don’t be like Jesus”.
37. Every generation has its pet mental illness that is massively over-diagnosed. We’ve had schizophrenia, neurosis, and now autism. Most people who claim to have autism, don’t. I call the opposite of autism “social butterfy syndrome”. We’re not in an epidemic of autism, we’re in an epidemic of “social butterfy syndrome”.
38. You only use 15% of your brain.
39. Humans have a long-standing and irrational distrust of those who speak a different language. Racism has nothing to do with appearance and everything to do with language. In the USA particularly the language AAVE.
40. Recessive mutations are building up slowly but inexorably in the world population. At a rate of one or two per generation. Within the next 1,000 years this will lead to a massive worldwide increase in child mortality.
41. Geographic isolation, even undersea, creates new species. By exporting plant species and by increasing the geographic isolation of animals, humans are creating more new species than they destroy.
42. Street lighting, house lighting, and human noise is a much greater threat to wildlife than you imagine. A greater threat than climate change for example.
43. In the battle in the early 20th century over whether pure maths should be governed by proof or by usefulness, the wrong side won.
44. No animal navigates using the Earth’s magnetic field.
45. Pluto contains an ocean of liquid water that’s the same size as Earth’s global ocean. The “goldilocks zone” is a myth.
46. Miller-Urey got it right. Which means that life began on Earth much earlier than you think, when the atmosphere was still full of hydrogen.
47. Not only has SETI@home not ruled out alien life in our galaxy, it has confirmed it. But that’s useless to us because we don’t have the technology to read any of the signals. They seldom if ever come from the same direction twice so could be spaceship communications.
48. Thoretical physics died in the 1970s, only one new prediction in theoretical physics made after the year 1980 has come true.
49. Astronomy has now reached a point where it can be abandoned without loss.
50. The stepped pyramids of Africa, meso-America and SE Asia are the ultimate military defensive structures. It gives the defending force an ability to strike downwards at the attackers, and if the attacking force gains one step then the defending force just retreats one step and the attacking force will have gained nothing.
51. The Nazca lines are footrace tracks. With smaller twisted tracks for the kids and long straight tracks for the adults. The Easter Island statues may be raised seating for watching a race, the advantage of raised seating is that you can charge a fee for a boost into the seat.
52. Everything points to Stonehenge being a wrestling arena: the calendar by the front gate, the raised seating, the blood in the arena, and the buried bodies of fit young men.
53. Jealousy is the root of all anger. Own the jealousy and the anger disappears.
54. Anger is the root of all action.
55. Everything we need can be counted on the fingers of one hand: air, water, sleep, happiness, food. The absense of some a**hole trying to kill you helps, too.
56. The safest chemicals in the whole world are microplastics.
57. Dental tools. You need four. A hard bristled toothbrush. Floss in a plastic holder. An interdental brush. And a dental pick, preferably of metal.
58. Practice makes better. Talent makes good. Only genius makes perfect, genius with performance enhancing drugs.
59. In order for passive smoking to be dangerous, you have to be in a smoke-filled room every day for at least 20 years, and even then it only increases your risk of lung cancer over non-smoking by 25%.
60. Do feed the ducks.
