Nonsense

While I've spent the week posting short notes on things I'm grateful for, I see this week has been one for the utterly inane and and mindless. First, via Drudge Report is an article by Telegraph writer Roger Highfield about two American cosmologists who claim "Mankind 'shortening the universe's life'. How?

The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end. "Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe," Prof Krauss tells New Scientist.

It's incredible alright, incredible that these two men bought into the nonsense of the Schrodinger's Cat experiment. This theory holds that states of existence are determined not by the nature of the things existing, but by the act of a consciousness perceiving them. The folly of that idea has been exposed before and doesn't need restating by me. Fools and unthinking intellectuals will always be with us but what is really amazing is that these gentlemen are collecting a paycheck and are being taken seriously by others in the so-called intellectual professions.

Paul at Noodle Food has posted on this also. Comments are interesting.
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Next is the report, also from Drudge, by Jeffrey Earl Warren of the San Fransisco Chronicle, that SF is considering banning all fireplaces. Mr Warren makes good practical arguments against such a ban but misses the moral argument. The closest he comes is:

Those of us in rural communities feel bullied by this sort of nanny state legislation. We'd like to believe that a man's home is indeed his castle. Most of us live in small towns or the country for a reason. We don't like cities. We don't like traffic. We don't like noise. We don't like the dirty air.

A good moral argument of course would be that 'a man's home is indeed his castle' by unalienable individual right, and not by permission of the state. The government has no right to ban anything in anyone's home so long as no one's rights are being violated.

BTW, if this goes through can backyard barbecue grills be far behind?