19th May 2008
The crazies are everywhere
I was chatting with a couple engineers today, and one of them mentioned that a guy he knows has a PhD, but doesn’t seem to be all that smart. “I mean, obviously he’s smart enough,” he added, “but he seems to be lacking a lot of common sense, that really surprises me.”
Somehow — and I seriously don’t know how — this morphed into “people without degrees who operate on the fringes of science have incredible, revolutionary theories which are quashed by Institutional Knowledge who don’t want things to get out.” The example one engineer gave was that everything has a natural frequency (true) which can be used to cure disease (uhhh… not true).
I mean, take the Rife Machine. The guy who invented it, he got an award for how well it worked, he could cure cancer. It was the solution, just find the right vibration and the cancer was gone. Just amazing! They paid him tons of money to buy the rights, and then they destroyed it. The medical community didn’t want that getting out!
No mention of what that award he won was. I guess that happened at the same time the pharmaceutical companies bought off the inventor of the cure for diabetes, while staging the moon landing and blowing up the World Trade Center, because big corporations will kill people for fun and profit and leave no traces of their mischief.
I can’t even get away from these people at work. I thought engineers were supposed to be clever and rational. (That’s my own version of Lab Coat Awe.) We work at a big corporation, for fuck’s sake — we know first-hand that it is nothing more than a conglomeration of dumbfuckery. They can’t figure out how to stay in business, and this is the sort of setup that can conspire to hide medical revolutions?
This has nothing to do with your otherwise excellent post, but I thought you might be interested in a book I’m currently reading: Elephants on Acid. The author treats you to a variety of past experiments which are - let’s just say “unusual”. I thought it would be appropriate for this blog since it does evoke that nostalgic feel about lab coated scientists working in the dark. A sample of experiments: How long can you keep the severed head of a dog alive, the first measurements of heart rate during sex, the effects of LSD on elephants, sustaining your baby in a box…it goes on and on.
It may provide some good fodder here.
Ohhh yeah, I love that book. I bought it for my husband and then read most of it before he finished it
And you’re right, it DOES have lots of good material for this blog!