[extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings

[John K Clark]

Damien, I admit it took longer than it should have for the link between
Helicobacter pylori and ulcers to become common knowledge, and it's not
something the scientific community should be especially proud of; but you
can't compare it to cold fusion. Pro and anti Helicobacter pylori articles
appeared in scientific journals, real journals not pretend ones. Today you
can't even find anti cold fusion articles, the issue is dead, it would be
like a anti Viking article, or expecting to see in Nature a discussion about
who Tom Cruise is likely to date after his next divorce.

It just amazes me how such otherwise intelligent people can be so incredibly
gullible. Some jackass you've never heard of posts some data on the net
claiming to have found heat from cold fusion and that sequence of ASCII
characters gets everybody all excited.  The only thing it tells me is that
the man had enough money to buy a computer. No, I'm wrong, it doesn't even
tell me that, it could be a homeless man with BO who just wandered into a
public library and posted some shit.  Sometimes the crackpot even manages to
get his ASCII sequence printed on a dead tree, but his article is never
cited by real scientists, and even the "journal" he writes in is never 
cited.

  John K Clark