I particularly enjoyed Mr. Falkenstein's review of Mr. Taleb's Black Swan. http://www.efalken.com/papers/Taleb2.html http://www.efalken.com/papers/Taleb2.html

I particularly enjoyed Mr. Falkenstein's review of Mr. Taleb's Black Swan. http://www.efalken.com/papers/Taleb2.html http://www.efalken.com/papers/Taleb2.html It's a long but illuminating read: ---- Martin Gardner wrote a popular column for Scientific American, and in the process received a lot of mail from ‘cranks’ telling him about perpetual motion machines and the like. So he wrote a book called Fads and Fallacies. In the book he describes "cranks" as having five invariable characteristics: 1. They have a profound intellectual superiority complex. 2. They regard other researchers as idiotic, and always operate outside the peer review. 3. They believe there is a campaign against their ideas, a campaign compared with the persecution of Galileo or Pasteur. 4. They attack only the biggest theories and scientific figures. 5. They coin neologisms.