Tempt Destiny (Thanks, Samuel!)

Do you enjoy kitschy commemorative portraits of football guys? Do you also enjoy reading a bunch of boring words about how modern science is based on a lie? Well, you're in luck, because Tempt Destiny has both!

Back in 1987, artist and college professor Manuel Morales put up a billboard on the New Jersey Turnpike in support of the New York Giants, who went on to win the Super Bowl. The same thing happened just a few years later. Coincidence? Superdeterminism?? Who knows!

After a 10-year hiatus, Morales attempted to utilize his freakish prognostication powers to make a billboard for whichever NFL team got the most online votes (unfortunately, no billboard was made for the first seven seasons because almost none of the selected teams even made it to the playoffs). He called this the "Tempt Destiny" experimental model, a superior alternative to the "fundamentally flawed" scientific method:

Unlike the scientific method of predicting effects (guess) to validate a theory or hypothesis (another guess) in order to establish cause, the Tempt Destiny experimental model establishes cause first in order to correctly and without ambiguity align cause with its effects.

Yes, apparently Morales is not a big fan of "mainstream science" for some weird, extremely tedious reasons involving selection and causation. Somehow his dumb football billboards could bring down this "house of cards" and revolutionize science forever. Unfortunately the scientific community is hopelessly corrupt and refuses to give him the time of day:

The good thing out of all of this is that science is not dogma and so can adapt to new information and correct itself accordingly as it has done in the past. The question is, with so much money, ego, and reputations at stake, will it?

Chief among his perceived rivals are those frauds working on the Large Hadron Collider. In an ultimate turbonerd move, he tried to get their Nobel Prize revoked, to no avail:

The multibillion dollar Large Hadron Collider (LHC) built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) from 1998 to 2008 was constructed in such a way that empirical evidence obtained is unavoidably biased by the omission of which type of selection event (direct or indirect) caused which particle collision effect, an error that can only produce false positive data. This means that the LHC cannot be used to validate various theories of particle and high-energy physics for which it was designed. Yet somehow, the LHC data was used to validate the discovery of the Higgs boson (a.k.a. God Particle) in 2013 which also gained the Nobel Prize in physics in October that same year even though both CERN and the Nobel committee were notified of the omission error in the summer of 2012. In January 2013 after my peer-reviewed findings were published, I notified the Nobel committee once again of the unambiguous empirical evidence.

Anyway, during the 2011 season, the Giants declined to accept any more billboards, setting the stage for Tempt Destiny's ultimate test: Could the Giants win a Super Bowl without one of Morales's paintings?

To put this superstitious notion to the test, I made a prediction (hypothesis) that based on a false dichotomy of the team's decision to negate their fans support that it was unlikely the NYG would win SB XLVI. I used the mathematics of the Cartesian coordinate system in reverse order (commutative law) for this prediction. In other words, I used indirect correlation to predict a direct correlation of the outcome. This is no different than wearing your "lucky" football jersey to guarantee your team's victory or physicists using proton collisions to predict a 'discovery.'"

Uh, sure, whatever, dude.

RESULTS: As of February 5, 2012, the NYG won SB XLVI without the Tempt Destiny billboard for the first time. But there's a catch...

Oh boy, a catch!

The evidence has shown that superstition is nothing more than the entertainment of ignorance of first cause or inference of correlation without a direct causal relationship, i.e., conjecture. But there still remains this one crucial detail, a selection was still made to support the NY Giant's SB XLVI quest unlike what happen when they went to SB XXXV and lost. This means that in order to address all causal possibilities relating to this phenomenon, the NY Giants will need to win a SB without a billboard selection to remove the notion of indirect correlation (superstition). In other words, the billboards themselves and the events that followed, completion/non-completion of the artwork, would never have taken place without a selection first being made.

Congratulations, Manuel, your pseudo-scientific prose has ruined football.

– Adam "rubber cat" Jameson (@robbercat)