Dan McKinley
Math, Programming, and Minority Reports

@mcfunley.com

Dvorak at it Again
September 14th, 2005

John Dvorak recently posted this plug for what appears to be a pseudoscience site, holoscience.com. Quote:

This site is devoted to looking at space science in a holistic, interdisciplinary manner. It also has some exceptionally cool images.

The comments on his blog appear to be either disabled or not working, so I will post a reply here.

This site appears to be yet another “theory of everything, the scientific establishment is against me” kind of site. Example quote:

“The Big Bang is already dead! The unheralded “Galileo of the 20th century”, Halton Arp, has proven that the universe is not expanding.”

Everything written in the News area of the site appears to be self published and not peer-reviewed. There seems to be a war going on at Wikipedia over another apparently self-published article about the “Electric Universe” theory espoused on the site. View the discussion here.

Hi William, please refer to the list of papers on the article page going back to 1930 to show serious study in this field. A Google search will reveal 6,240 pages returned on a search for “‘electric universe’ + plasma” …. . —Bongani 19:38, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

No, thats a long list of papers which have something to do with electricity in space, and have nothing to do with EUM. One of the characteristics of pet/psuedo science [sic] is appropriating irrelevant papers that have the right-looking words in them. Any article that states That the Sun and stars are powered by an external electric current is (to be frank for just a moment) wacko nonsense. Any article that makes such a controversial statement, and then fails to back it up with a peer-reviewed paper, is unsuitable for wiki as “original research”. … William M. Connolley 20:05:57, 2005-07-09 (UTC).

And as you can see the neutrality of the original article is disputed.

I can’t believe Dvorak posted this, frankly. But it fits with the horoscope ad displayed prominently on his site. Holoscience does have “purty pictures,” though.

Update - It appears that Dvorak might have posters on his site other than himself. Not sure why or who they are, but I thought I should mention that the opinion I quoted above may not be directly attributable to the popular PC Magazine columnist.

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