sholsinger.com

There has been some recent 'buzz' lately stating that PZ Myers has outright called Stuart Pivar a "crackpot." I have read as much of PZ's writing on Pivar that I can find. I am unable to say confidently that he did in fact call Mr. Pivar a "crackpot." It may be implied by Mr. Meyers that Mr. Pivar's work is completely unfounded by any standards. By he never outright called the man a crackpot. I for one believe that the lawsuit is absolutely ludicrous.

Allow me to point out a passage on Mr. Pivar's publisher's website.

"Axiom House publishes works of fiction. In these novels, names, characters, businesses, places, and incidents are products of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Opinions expressed therein do not necessarily represent the opinions of either Axiom House or the respective authors." quoted from here</a>.</blockquote> Am I to understand that Mr. Pivar's "book" was published by a company that only</em> publishes works of fiction? If that is true would it not also imply that Mr. Pivar's work is that of fiction? Certainly we can all agree on that by reading PZ's summarization without even noting the passage above.

Regardless of that, it seems that Mr. Pivar's work is completely unsupported by the publisher. I would regard this is a smart move for them to make. It seems that Mr. Pivar has been mis-quoting and downright making things up and listing it as a quote from several respected members of the scientific community. An example which I will quote below can be found here</a>.

"Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson Another possibility is that life has encoding that has nothing to do with DNA. That would be more important for biology than finding other life with DNA, because it would be a way to encode life that no one has dreamt of before No mere mathematical curiosity, this physically plausible model should be investigated seriously by biologists. Neil de Grasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium"</em></blockquote> The quote above which was attributed to Mr. Tyson was taken from an interview three years ago.

As you can probably tell by the URL of the link to that page, this was taken down. There is another page that was removed from view which can be found here</a>.

Someone mentioned that Mr. Pivar must have access to some high-grade Marijuana. I have done some digging and I found an old photo of Mr. Pivar with Andy Warhol "packing a bowl."^1,2</sup>

¹ "Packing a bowl" is a common term used by "potheads" to refer to the placing of marijuana into a glass pipe which is commonly known as a "bowl." 2</sup> Disclaimer: This image was borrowed from pittsburghlive.com and can be found</sup> here</a>. I do not claim ownership to the rights of this image and use it only for satirical (parody) purposes.