“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”

Still following a previous post about the crucial importance of the lack of perfection in the universe it makes perfect sense to initiate this post by quoting the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel, A Tale of Two Cities, as an introductory note for a recent article in The Economist over a famous clash that unfolded a century ago, precisely on April 6th, 1922, between the 43-year-old Albert Einstein and the 63-year-old French philosopher (and ardent vegetarian) Henri Bergson regarding the nature of time.

The article recently published in The Economist offers a noteworthy insight from theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, who observes “Bergson correctly pointed out that experiential time has more features than the time the physicists were talking about”. It is important to bear in mind that Carlo Rovelli is the same scientist who declared back in 2019 that “You have to be a rebel to be a creative scientist” anticipating the findings of the paper “New directions in science emerge from disconnection and discord” published a few months ago in the Journal of Informetrics.  

PS – Ironically, but also tragically, time is the very commodity humanity lacks in its endeavors to combat climate change. Another article in the same edition of The Economist forewarns that we are entering a season of Darkness. Notably, the carbon intensity—indicative of the amount of carbon emitted for each unit of energy—should have seen an annual decline of 3.5% to curtail global warming to 2 ºC (7.7% for a 1.5 ºC goal) regrettably, it has only declined just 0.3% per year. Moreover, technological solutions for carbon sequestration are extremely expensive. Furthermore, the technological solutions for carbon sequestration prove exorbitantly expensive, with the two commercial entities offering to remove one tonne of carbon dioxide demanding fees between $300 and $1,000.” 

https://cnnportugal.iol.pt/geral/tvi-e-cnn-portugal-revelam-novos-relatos-e-mais-um-professor-envolvido-nos-casos-de-assedio-da-faculdade-de-direito-de-lisboa/20220418/625d1fa90cf26256cd1f1f16

Será que alguém se pode admirar que o tema do assédio sexual na FDUL continua a render manchetes na imprensa, como aquela no link acima sobre um docente daquela instituição, que quando as alunas rejeitavam os seus avanços as insultava inclusive com termos como “Cabra”, se nessa instituição até há (pasme-se) professoras que nem sequer sabem o que é assédio e a própria directora da FDUL, tem o supino desplante de dizer, sem lhe caírem imediatamente todos dentes, que naquela instituição há professores casados com alunas ? 

Nos EUA um Presidente de uma Universidade, Mark Schlissel, foi demitido há pouco tempo, por conta de ter assediado por email uma funcionária da mesma universidade. E quando é que em Portugal haverá também despedimento de um professor universitário por assédio sexual ? 

Essa é, a meu ver, a única forma de uma vez por todas, meter todos os professores assediadores na ordem. E enquanto isso não suceder, os mesmos vão continuar a julgar, que o seu estatuto de impunidade garantida ainda continua intacto e irão reiniciar o assédio assim que passar a presente fase de elevada “excitação” jornalistica.  

PS1 – Será possível que o supracitado docente da FDUL, não saiba que a justiça deste país (vide Acórdão do Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa Nº10790/2007-8) considera gravemente ofensiva da dignidade de qualquer mulher chamar-lhe “Cabra“ ?

PS2 – Na semana passada, um professor da FDUL acusou de assédio, a própria Directora daquela instituição e disse ainda ter sido vitima de uma burla amorosa por parte de uma ex-aluna https://sol.sapo.pt/artigo/768627/direito-de-resposta-de-francisco-aguilar

https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-role-of-academia-towards-type-1.html

Delving deeper into the discourse initiated by the aforementioned post, which highlighted Michio Kaku’s forward-looking projection of humanity potentially advancing to a type 1 civilization within the next 100 years, a recent publication presents a contrasting, less optimistic viewpoint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07070

The primary author, associated with Caltech, also penned a previous article that I previously commented on here https://pachecotorgal.com/2022/04/10/naive-scientists-driven-by-idealistic-suicidal-searches-or-deceitful-scientists/

PS – Regarding the trajectory of civilizational progress, it’s pertinent to reflect on the 8 principles of uncivilization, a concept that, while seemingly contradictory, offers valuable insights https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2020/06/this-civilization-is-finished-time-to.html

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2022/04/macon-portugues-com-fortes-ligacoes.html

O semanário Expresso desta semana dedicou nada menos do que duas das suas longas páginas ao tema mencionado no post acima.  Gostei particularmente da parte do artigo onde se pode ler o seguinte: 

“O Expresso sabe que uma testemunha relatou à PJ ter ouvido Francisco de Almeida Garrett dizer, repetidas vezes, que a tia Maria de Belém Roseira “trataria” da aprovação da alínea 7 do artigo 6º da Lei da Nacionalidade no Parlamento”

O artigo do Expresso confirma que afinal o negócio de legalização de judeus sefarditas envolveu mesmo pagamentos de dezenas de milhões de euros (e que muito em breve seriam centenas de milhões se o Governo não tivesse entretanto alterado a lei). O que o Expresso também informa é que aquela colossal quantia não pagou um único cêntimo de imposto às Finanças Portuguesas porque foi feita na modalidade de “donativo”.  

PS – Será que doravante os profissionais liberais deste país, deixarão de emitir recibos verdes e irão antes passar a pedir aos seus clientes a caridade de um donativo que os isente de pagar IRS ? E será que os funcionários públicos irão também solicitar que Estado Português lhes passe a “ofertar” donativos com a periodicidade suficiente, que permita não infringir o limite legal dos donativos, para assim também não terem de pagar IRS ? 

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2022/03/um-corajoso-catedratico-coimbrao-que.html

Still following the post above and the academic boycott mentioned there, it is very positive to see that the scientific production of Russian institutions, indexed in the Scopus database, in the first 4.5 months of 2022, had a drop of more than 30% when compared to the production average over the same period of the previous two years. And that percentage would have been higher if Scopus allowed its users to be able to analyze only the period since February 24th, when the Orc Bloodymir Putin started its criminal military aggression against Ukraine.

This drop could increase even more significantly if more scientists refuse to edit or review articles by authors affiliated with institutions of the country ruled by a notorious psychopath, which, according to Patriarch Kirill, also known as Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev (another Russian scoundrel who worked for the KGB and who has a passion for luxury watches) will save Humanity from the terrible threat of the homosexual Anti-Christ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-patriarch-says-orthodox-faithful-are-holding-back-antichrist-2022-04-07/

PS – Freezing the publications of researchers affiliated with Russian institutions, for a few months, will not bring great harm to world science, because it is known that Russia is a scientific dwarf ravaged by academic inbreeding having dozens (more than 60) of Rectors who have plagiarized their own dissertations. It’s a country with a low publication rate and with publications of little relevance, not deserving to be cited. And that is why its SHCS (Scopus Highly Cited Scientists) ratio per million inhabitants is only 6 (six), a value that is far below the ratio of many countries https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/11/switzerland-denmark-and-sweden-has.html

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2022/04/5-mulheres-que-tem-uma-relacao-especial.html

When will Mr. Olaf have the courage to behave much more like Sanna, Kaja, Magdalena, and Ingrida and much less like “La Putain de La République“ ?

Its true that German Economic Minister Robert Habeck just said Germans should save energy to reduce the dependency on Russian energy “I ask everyone to make a contribution to saving energy right now“. Unfortunately, the German government is still “reluctant to resort to mandatory energy-saving measures, such as a highway speed limit“. This means that the German hypocrisy knows no bounds, and also that the selfish “pleasure” of driving without speed limits is worth much more than the lives of Ukrainians, otherwise, the German Government should have enforced highway speed limits in the very same week that Russia invaded Ukraine. https://pachecotorgal.com/2022/04/02/the-comfort-of-europeans-is-being-paid-for-with-the-blood-of-ukrainian-children/

PS – A few days ago Covid-19 did a favor to the world by killing a Russian whom Orc Putin praised as “a patriot who always defended the interests of Russia“. It’s the same patriot that once said Russia should invade Finland and Poland and who also predicted the invasion of Ukraine https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61008292 The worst part, however, was when he ran for president and six million Russians voted for him which means there are at least six million Russians who love his warmongering ideas and the sadistic possibility of seeing Russian Orcs raping Finnish and Polish women. Probably they are grandchildren of the soldiers who raped almost two million German women. And in fact, that´s not just a wild hypothesis, because in a recent article in The Economist it is possible to read the following statement by a Russian soldier that appeared on Russian state television: “My great grandfather went through second world war…I´m a glorious successor of this tradition. Now my time has come…and I will go all the way”

Afinal não fui o único, que ficou incrédulo ao ver uma instituição como o IST a publicitar um deplorável ranking de cientistas da treta tripla, pelos vistos também ficaram igualmente incrédulos, aqueles muitos, que acharam boa ideia visualizar o referido post, e em número tal, que em pouco tempo aquele já está quase a tornar-se o 3º mais visto de sempre neste blogue.

Declaração de interesses – Declaro que sou culpado de anteriormente ter publicado alguns posts pouco positivos sobre o Técnico e também sobre alguns dos seus catedráticos, como por exemplo sobre aquele catedrático, que muito embora pertencesse à área científica de engenharia civil devia ser um famoso expert em Botânica. Muito embora seja igualmente verdade que em posts anteriores também não tive qualquer problema em elogiar vários corajosos catedráticos da mesma instituição, que ao contrário de outros, muito a honram, como o Tito Mendonça, antigo Presidente do Departamento de Física, o Orlando M. Lourenço e o Jorge Calado.

https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-most-infectious-pandemic-in-history.html

Still following the post above check the recent paper below which advocates the sending of new messages to deep space to try to reach advanced alien civilizations https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2203/2203.04288.pdf 

The hypothesis underlying this endeavor raises a poignant question: Is it naivety or sheer folly to assume that extraterrestrial recipients of these messages would universally embody pacifism, devoid of humanity’s penchant for conquest and supremacy? 

Even the esteemed physicist Stephen Hawking, in his seminal work “A Brief History of Time,” cautioned against broadcasting our presence to potential extraterrestrial intelligence, deeming it not just unwise, but perilous. Have the proponents of these transmissions overlooked the wisdom of the precautionary principle? 

Alternatively, could it be that Stephen Hawking is the naive one and in fact, messaging extraterrestrial intelligence (METI) is just how a deceitful and gargantuan (Human civilization) “spider” is trying to charm/mesmerize naive “flies” (alien civilizations) into its sticky web ? 

PS – Personally, I find the messages dispatched aboard the Voyager spacecraft emblematic of hypocrisy and concealment. They portray humanity as a bastion of peace and creativity, accompanied by 90 minutes of diverse musical compositions, yet glaringly omit our self-destructive tendencies, as noted by Freud. https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/pdf/freud_beyond_the_pleasure_principle.pdf They mask humanity’s role as a potent force of destruction, poised on the precipice of driving countless species to extinction. Moreover, these messages obscure the reality that humanity stands as one of the most proficient agents of destruction, poised to potentially drive a million species to extinction. They mask humanity’s role in the depletion of our planet’s resources and the stark truth that we have become a blight upon the Earth. Why such deliberate obfuscation?

It was bad enough that the status quo came to be epitomized in the enlightening sentence “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”. It was already bad enough that we had to see a US university asking its professors to volunteer for dining halls a the same time it paid $95 million to hire a football coach. And now the future of higher education in US seems to be teaching jobs without any salary whatsoever https://www.science.org/content/article/university-teaching-job-without-salary-no-thanks

Considering that we are increasingly moving away from a future where Ulrich Betz’s important question would be a normal one “Why should a superstar scientist be celebrated less than a superstar football player?” then should young people all choose to pursue a career in football coaching?

Declaration of competing interests – As i wrote several years ago I´m not very fond of competitive sports.

PS – Back in 2017 Richard Klavans and Kevin W. Boyack authored an interesting paper about how different countries perform in what concerns economic and altruistic research motivations. Still, they should had include a third and important category, stupidity research motivations, in order to try to find out which countries are most concerned that their own population may be getting more stupid and more superficial. This is a worrying pandemic-like problem that interestingly does not seem to occur in a certain European country that has “no private schools or private educational institutions, meaning all educational services are publicly funded and free of charge, including universities”

https://tecnico.ulisboa.pt/pt/noticias/ciencia-tecnologia/cientistas-do-tecnico-destacados-no-ranking-publicado-pelo-portal-research-com/

É muito difícil acabar com rankings pouco rigorosos (leia-se rankings da treta) se há instituições, como o Técnico, que não se importam de lhes fazer publicidade gratuita, vide link supra ! 

Será que no Instituto Superior Técnico não sabem que um ranking de investigadores minimamente rigoroso tem de atender a três aspectos fundamentais:

​1​- Ser baseado na Scopus ou na Web of Science, para assim permitir a desambiguação de publicações (existem milhares de perfis “contaminados” no Scholar Google com publicações de outros autores) e evitar também o lixo “científico” de citações em publicações não revistas por pares, cujo número explodiu nos últimos anos, e que existem em abundância/excesso nessa plataforma, que é conhecida por aceitar tudo.

​2​- Ser capaz de remover o efeito da terrível praga das auto-citações, em que muitos cientistas se tornaram verdadeiros especialistas​ ​https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02479-7

​3​- Ser capaz de anular a vantagem perniciosa das citações em publicações com centenas ou milhares de co-autores, utilizando para esse efeito a contagem fraccionada, sugerida pela primeira vez em 2008 pelo Alemão Schreiber e mais recentemente por Koltun e outros. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/11/evaluating-researchers-in-fast-and.html

O tal ranking supra, a que o Técnico agora achou boa ideia fazer publicidade gratuita, consegue o espantoso milagre de não conseguir cumprir nenhuma das referidas condições. É o que se pode designar por um ranking de tripla treta.

Note-se que o conhecido ranking da Clarivate Analytics não cumpre a terceira condição (e nem sequer consegue passar no teste do número de prémios Nobel) e o único ranking de investigadores a nível mundial, que consegue cumprir as três condições e além disso ainda inclui quase uma centena de prémios Nobel é este aqui https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/11/switzerland-denmark-and-sweden-has.html