I will say this for our latest creationist visitor, medic0506: he’s persistent. His foolishness has bloated up another thread to over 1200 comments, so I’m starting the conversation anew with this post.
One reason it’s going on and on is that he is full of shit and refuses to recognize that his ideas are ridiculous. He’s still babbling about the nature of light; if it’s bright enough, light is instantly teleported to your eye. He has some very curious explanations for how telescopes work. In response to a comment that if light behaved as he says it does, you wouldn’t be able to see more stars with a telescope than with the naked eye, he says:
On the contrary, if you think that through, you have it backwards. A telescope makes no sense under your theory of light travel, and can only work if my ideas or something very similar is true.
Under your theory, starlight has to physically travel and c remains a constant, telescopes should not be able to change any part of the equation. Light photons still have to reach all the way to earth and physically enter your eye. Likewise they also have to physically reach the earth in order to enter the telescope lens. Telescopes cannot in any way change the speed or distance in the equation and thus would become a useless middle-man.
Telescopes magnify, and magnification can only work if vision is the primary active mechanism, and works from the ground up.
It’s rather obvious he doesn’t have the slightest idea how light behaves or how telescopes work. C is not constant — it varies with the medium. We can use this property to refract light with a lens, or reflect it with a mirror, changing the direction. Telescopes are light collectors that gather photons falling on a large surface area and focus them on a smaller point. We design telescopes — light has mathematical properties that are accurately described by theories that are a few hundred years old — and modeling lenses on the assumption that eyes actively emit some kind of mysterious sensory rays, or whatever the hell he’s trying to suggest, doesn’t work and makes no sense at all.
And then, on top of the godawful ignorance, there’s his incredible arrogance.
…I have done my homework over the past couple years, and continue to do so. I have been researching information from both sides. I’d be willing to bet that I’ve read at least as many, if not more, scholarly articles from secular research journals, than many of the people on this site. Most of the information that people here post is old hat to me, and after researching the actual scientific arguments, links like Wikipedia and talkorigins aren’t the least bit helpful in making the case for evolution.
Without having done the amount of research that I have, I could not be as convinced as I am that it is false. It is that research that shows me that this theory should have been deemed falsified, and scrapped long ago. Every basic tenet of the theory has been falsified, or proven not to be sufficient to show what evolutionists claim that it shows. All anti-evolutionists know that to be true, whether they are creationists or not. It’s no longer a matter of trying to falsify the theory, that’s done, it’s a matter of persuading people to accept what the evidence shows. Proof and persuasion are two different things.
My god. This is a guy who still believes that visual perception is a product of extramission, claiming that he is a scholar of science, and that evolutionary theory has been falsified by the scientific literature. The man is astonishingly full of bullshit, and completely divorced from reality.
I’m happy to have him going on and on here, though: what a wonderful demonstration of the intellectual bankruptcy of creationists.
As has been explained in the comments, C is a constant; it’s the propagation of light through media that is variable.
But…but…but PZ, you always ban anyone who disagrees with you.
Nah, he’s been civil, which is the only reason he hasn’t been banned. He’s also a great example of the irrelevance of tone — because, man, is he ever dumb.
medico 1217:
Yep, those rear legs totally aren’t used for normal walking in locust-like insects. Nosiree.
Did anyone read the article linked to by mediczero? ( Here ) At least THREE separate scholarly Christian apologists, all saying with certainty and no citation that locusts and other similar insects don’t “creep” using their hind legs! Am I missing something? Or is this just yet another of countless examples of Lying for Jesus?
What amuses me is that he is totally oblivious to the comic potential of his plodding through the comments at the rate of 30 a day – in a 1200 + comment thread.
What terrifies me is that he says he is a paramedic, and a grandfather. Such stubborn, blinkered, and wholly unfounded self-confidence in his rightness would be bad enough in someone who fills sacks of chicken-feed for a living.
Don’t you feel even a little bit sorry? So much headdesking, so much facepalming. Should FTB be insured? It’s just pure carnage out here. And for what? Won’t anybody think of the children?
Tigger
Creationists are immune to the human concept of futility. And changing to adapt to one’s circumstances. And being aware of one’s surroundings. And clarity. And math.
Still hilarious though.
I’m wondering what he’ll do when he gets to comment 230 (any day now, he was at 229 only an hour or so ago), tries to comment, and finds the thread locked.
Since he has shown a complete inability to click on links provided in comments, will he find his way here? Or will he be doomed forever to wander the tubes of the internet…
oops, PZ closed that thread while I was composing the following, so I will post it here, regardless:
Also, this reminds me: all of my irony meters are borked now. I’ve got bills to pay, man, and they’re not just going to fix themselves. I think it’s fair to say that some kind of reparations are in order.
*ahem* c is constant; the speed of light in a medium other than vacuum is different.
But that’s not what medic0506 has been arguing. He’s arguing that the speed of starlight (sorry, couldn’t resist) is infinite, and that it obeys some sort of inverse-square law of potential detection. Despite photomultipliers.
Hmm. If his theories worked, the lenses in my eyeglasses wouldn’t – and considering my eyesight is so bad I wouldn’t be able to effectively surf the net, let alone drive, two things I do daily…
PZ:
That’s the catch: He didn’t say what he researched! Just that it wasn’t talk origins or wikipedia (the latter of which we already he knows he dismisses because it is biased towards evolutionistismianity). I don’t think he is even pretending to be a scholar of science: Just a scholar. We all just supposed to overlook the fact that it is ridiculous that he considers himself to have an informed opinion from research that was most likely him reading the websites of IDiots and whatever apologist site that AIG might link to.
Basically, you do this crank a favor in assuming that they even meant “glance at scientific literature” when he mentioned doing research. Way too much credit. “I researched this” means jackshit on the internet in general, and translates into “googled it maybe more than once” or “read a few blog posts on it”. But when it is a creationist saying it, you know damn well that it is probably even LESS than that. Somehow.
Here is my theory. I think medic0506’s god is jilted him. Since his god not available for his regular obligatory ‘intercourse’ he is decided to take it out on the internet and he is found ‘the pharyngula’. Perhaps he is mistaken it for the pharynx. Someone ought to remind him that it is no real substitute for the actual intercourse… of course with his god.
Mediczero’s “flashlight ain’t happening” is particularly loony.
Let’s take our green photons from the other day with an energy of 4 x 10^-19 J apiece. Let’s say all the photons from your flashlight are the same, which is close enough because that’s about the middle of the visible range.
I’ll give you a nice big 6-cell flashlight—say 30 Watt-hours of energy. Will it stay lit for three hours? Probably not, but let’s say it does; so it’s drawing 10 Watts of power. The bulb is ~1% efficient, so that’s 1/10 W of visible light. So I get about 2.5 x 10^17 photons/sec.
This is a super-duper flashlight whose beam is 1/2 a degree wide (ridiculous of course) so its beam would take in the whole moon. If the retroreflector is 6″ across, you’d expect ~100 photons from your flashlight to bounce back at you. If you reverse the calculation to see what you’d get back, if you had a 6″ telescope, you’d expect one photon from your flashlight to enter your eye through the telescope about once every 80,000,000 years. You’re going to need a lot of batteries.
The difference with the laser is that it’s much more powerful—more photons/second. Its beam is much narrower, covering easily less than a millionth of the area at the distance of the moon, and the same goes for the return trip. So if the laser is 100 times as powerful, you can multiply your return rate by 10^14. That’s still only a few photons per second, so you’ll need instruments to detect them. The point is, all photons of the same wavelength are the same. They have the same energy. (And the visible spectrum doesn’t even cover an octave of the frequency range, so all visible photons are to a first approximation, the same.)
If you want to use an “LED” flashlight, just multiply its output by ~4. (IMO, calling these phosphor coated “LED” lights that is false advertising. Yes, they’re pumped by an LED instead of a mercury-vapor tube, but they’re still fluorescent lights—4% efficient at best and subject to phosphor aging.)
QFT. c is a constant of spacetime that can only be achieved by massless particles. it is not ‘the speed of light’, BUT light is the only massless particle we know of, so it is the only particle we know of that travels at that speed.
Light traveling through ‘mediums’ only appears to travel slower, BUT the space between each atom of any medium is absolute vacuum so photons still go at c velocity. The slower speed in a medium is only a “bulk effect”, the photon exiting the medium is not the same photon that entered the medium. The photon entering hits and is thus absorbed by the first atom of the medium it hits. That atom then discharges the energy it just absorbed by producing another photon, which then hits the next atom, and so on, and so on. This process is what appears to slow down the photon velocity. But each photon, while it exists, travels at c; all of them do so, regardless of the medium. /quibble
stevem @ #15:
Thanks for that explanation! It really clarified the concept for this middlebrow layman.
Probably gluons too, but we never get a gluon flying around by itself.
I predict that medic0506 will (should he find this thread ) continue to address comments from the old thread, one at a time.
And let’s not forget gravitons. We probably have those.
@PZ #0 – “C is not constant”
It is: photons must always be moving at the speed of light, never more and never less. Propagating is a different matter entirely.
You have a little robot that can walk and always — always — travels at the same speed. It is programmed so that when it runs into an object, it will veer off in another direction, again, moving at a constant and never changing speed. Let’s name it… Photon.
You have a large, empty field. Put Photon at one end, and it will reach the other end at exactly the speed it is moving.
Now, scatter a couple of large stones randomly around the field, big enough to trigger Photon’s veering protocols. Set it down again at one end of the field, and what happens? It meets a rock and heads off in another direction. How long does it take to leave the field? If there are only a few stones, it will take only a bit longer than it does in an empty field. The more stones, the longer it will take as it pings from one to another.
Now suppose you have 10 Photons. Photon-1 can cross a given distance in 1 step. Photon-2 needs two steps to cross the same distance, and will cross that distance in exactly the same amount of time as Photon-1. Photon-3 needs three steps, and so on. All travel at the same speed, but the higher energy ones (the ones that take smaller steps) have less time to turn before the next foot comes down. So Photon-10 will leave the field in a very different place than Photon-1, even if they are launched from exactly the same point.
That’s basically how light works, and why c is given as propagation through a vacuum.
This guy is an idiot. Like most religious zealots, he’s homophobic. He is the embodiment of the Dunning–Kruger effect. He is so deep in the deity bubble that reality is a distant memory.
In other words, he is the poster boy for religious idiocy, and doing more for pointing out the mental bankruptcy of religious beliefs than anyone has in a long time. He is a boon to atheism, even if he doesn’t realize it.
If this hasn’t been posted in any of the other threads, I believe that the following article warrants a quick post. It outlines a camera setup developed by MIT, allowing video to be captured at approximately 1 trillion frames per second – which allows us to see light particles move and interact with the environment.
Watch light particles crawl through a Coke bottle at a trillion frames per second
So I guess solar panels produce electricity by shooting eye-waves at the sun.
I assume a lot of you guys are familiar with the flat earth society forums? It’s a basically a collection of trolls with a few genuine crazies mixed in — this guy would fit right in. He’s probably a Poe or troll, and even if he’s not, what could you possibly gain through discourse with someone willing to deny some of the most basic concepts of reality?
Well, thanks to the horde I have gained a greater understanding of light and evolution than I had before!
This guy isn’t even worth your time, or ours. Even the word-salad on Dr. Brawner’s Pure Castille Soap labels are closer to reality than this idiot’s babblings. More uplifting too. Who are you going to waste time arguing with next, a Larouchie?
So much headdesking, so much facepalming. Should FTB be insured?
It is for that reason that NO ONE would insure PZ.
PS: the spellchecker on this particular PC tells me I’ve misspelled the “i” and “/i” tags. I’m such a loser…
If you were a marksman, and you clustered 60 bullets in a 1 inch square, that happens to be one mile left of your intended target, you were indeed very precise.
You’d still be a very inaccurate marksman.
Now if the bible had specifically said insects had four legs plus 2 that looked and functioned differently, that would be something else, but it doesn’t say that.
Let’s not even go into how many insects there are out there that are not like locusts at all and don’t “leap”…. (Just count the beetles….)
I engaged with a YECist once, who at least had the quasi-honesty to say, “Don’t look at it too closely. God’s plan isn’t for human understanding.” It didn’t matter to him what science and empiricism said. His steadfast belief in his Abrahamic god trumped everything, including the building blocks of reality.
“And changing to adapt to one’s circumstances.”
.
Hummmmm.
I think I read something about that somewhere…
.
Now let me see…..
Maybe it was in a thick book by some Englishman named “Chuck” or “Charlie” or something like that…
.
Oh!!! I remember now…
That change to “adapt to one’s circumstances” has a special name!!!
.
I think it starts with an “E”…
I wonder what it could be…
.
Perhaps it’s called….. EVOLUTION????
Let’s suppose we were students of medic0506.
So we have learned that light if generated with energy will traverse great distances instantly. This is our fundamental rule.
Now there are stars that are too dim to see with the naked eye yet we can see them with with a telescope. Now the telescope here on earth can not make the distant star burn with more energy, so it follows that a telescope makes our vision stronger and more aware. But it can not do this by providing us with more light as the light that has traversed here has already been set.
We can observe how optics work. We can see lenses and prisms bend light and curved lenses bend it so that the image is larger. The question we have is how? How do lenses make our vision more aware of light? We can actually not look through the lenses but use the lenses to push the light further to another spot much further away. Indeed we can shine it to another spot where it will illuminate a patch of ground where a person, with no adjustment to her naked eyes can view the illuminated spot and not look back toward the source of the light (and the lens). This observer, with a naked eye, views the spot of ground that is now more brightly illuminated than it would be without the lens.
What can we conclude as students? We can’t conclude that the star itself burns bright because someone billions of light years away has a lens. (For one it’s absurd. For two other spots not in the lens path are unchanged.) We can’t conclude that the lens itself creates light because it has no energy source at all. We can’t conclude that the lens improves our vision because the lens is not affecting or in contact with any part of our vision system. (Not to mention we have no explanation as to how glass lenses would affect our vision.)
All I can think of is that the lens gathers and moves light (but again we have no mechanics of how). But even this is impossible as the position of the light was determined by the energy source of the sun. The light of the path is determined instantaneously so it can’t simply be picked up and moved.
So what, dear teacher, can we make of that?
Note how he goes for the lazy “enlightened neutral” position when he says hes studied “both sides” of a scientific question, as though scientific truth is determined through debate.
On debate.org he did not claim to have studied science. He claimed he did not need to step in a cow pie to know it was nasty.
Since he comes from debate.org, he should know that in competitive debating, each team is required to debate BOTH sides of the issue.
I am very curious as to how he has prepared his pro-evolution debate strategy….
Al -Haytham proved extramission was bunkum 1,000 years ago and he was one of those dreaded Moozlems. Mind you he was also a very accomplished scientist unlike this creationist loon.
Assuming the fruitcake isn’t lying when he says he is a paramedic, then there are multiple lines of evidence — a concept which is alien to him — that he is also a (keen?) scuba diver (an “average diver” (his words)). As such, I would assume he has emprical experience with refraction and other optical phenomena on display underwater and at the air/water boundary.
It is also possible he is, or at one time was (again, his words), a “chem/premed major at [redacted]” (a perfectly respectable accredited college), which, if correct, is stunning given the idiocy on display. The college itself does indeed now offer degrees in Chemistry and several areas of Medicine, including, amusingly, “Medical Imaging” (which several specialties), as well as “Premedical … Preparation”. That particular premed program includes the following courses:
● Introductory Biology (I & II)
● General Chemistry (I & II)
● Organic Chemistry (I & II)
● General Physics (I & II)
Presupposing that is the program the “premed” is referring to (it need not be), I would suggest — assuming he isn’t trolling us — the fruitcake either failed (or is failing?) both the Biology and Physics courses; or is one of those people who can regurgitate what they are taught (sufficient to pass exams) whilst actually believing something completely contrary.
(I have not provided references and have redacted identifying information out of respect for the guy’s privacy, albeit everything quoted or paraphrased is publicly available on the Internet.)
On light, that loon medic0506 sounds like he once talked with someone who talked with someone who read Aristotle but had a pure Liberal Arts education that left him scientifically illiterate. Aristotle got some things right, like the foundations of formal logic, but he got a lot spectacularly wrong, and his theory of vision was one of them. I wonder how medic0506 (or Aristotle) would explain the redshift.
Hum… His profile at DDO is noticeably different in several respects (including where he is located) from the other profiles that seemed to be his. It is therefore possible some or all of the data presented by me@35 is for another individual who happens to have a number of “identifying” characteristics which are remarkably similar to what the fruitcake has claimed here at FtB.
Tigger_the_Wing, Back home =^_^=:
Oh my, maybe I was right not to read those threads (lack of energy). I imagine Sisyphus reading, and remarking “man, that poor guy”.
Ignore my comment @35. I’m now sufficiently uncertain that the “chem/premed” individual, who is also a paramedic and lives in (hand-waving) broadly the same area of USAlienstan, and has some similar (albeit not quite identical) self-declared interests, is the same as our fruitcake.
I do not care who our fruitcake is, I was trying to get some insight into his background / education; And, hopefully, some clews about his fruitloopiness. Unfortunately, I seem to have stumbled on another individual.
if light sources don’t emit light, but rather it’s the eye’s perception, how exactly do you square that with using a magnifying glass and sunlight to burn ants?
You aren’t looking at the sun. You could even do it while blind, if handed the lens and given general directions.
Similarly, we know lasers are a thing. You can buy them. They work. They emit light. If light isn’t being emitted, what alternate explanation do you propose for “that thing that makes my DVD player work?”
I needed to comment on this particular post of his.
@1175
Good news everyone!! Medic0506 is going to teach us the real nature of what we misguidedly call “mammals”. How many kinds are there? what are the dividing lines between those kinds? Could you please show us the true classification? I mean, i realise that you probably don’t have access to an official taxonomy elaborated by those hardworking creation scientists…they are way too bussy doing research and developing testable hypothesis, but since we are all friends here, it really doesn’t matter, an informal classification will be totally adequate, it doesn’t have to be perfect. I’m looking forward to benefiting from the accumulated wisdom of someone as learned as you, medic0506 :)
The tiny flying eye-dragons breath (fire) on the ants, silly.
The CD / DVD spins real fast, creating vibrations. Which is what we hear, silly. Videos make the eye-dragons dizzy — they have to fly around and around, real fast, above the spinning DVD to memorize it — before darting into your eye in-sync with (hopefully) the vibrations.
38, Moggie,
If you do find a spare spoon, do have a quick look at that thread; even if you just do a control+F/command+F search for Amphiox, and only read their comments, the amount of erudition on display will be worth spending that spoon on. The links supplied in many of those comments are worth following, too.
And there are so many more commenters that made equally impressive comments. It turned into quite the useful archive of information for debunking creationist nonsense.
Since the thread is now locked, there is no danger of getting left behind, either – so, should you feel up to it at some future date, reading it in full will still be a good idea.
Just make sure that your mouth is empty of beverages, especially when reading medic0506’s comments. I wouldn’t like to be held responsible for any keyboard damage. Oh, and make sure you have a cushion to hand to mitigate the results of the inevitable facepalmheaddeskbodyfloor.
And, lastly, it prompted (in the antepenultimate comment) this gem, from brianpansky:
=^_^=
Funny thing is that this guy was afraid he was going to get banned. Instead, he got three threads dedicated to him, giving him all the space to spout his idiotic nonsense and expose him by his own words as a liar, idiot, and terminal victim of Dunning-Kruger.
Maybe banning would have been more merciful.
Maybe our deluded medic thinks he can do laser surgery just by looking at his patient intently. Perhaps concurrently with a really heartfelt prayer.
If I may, I’d like to return to medic0506’s notion of “kinds.”
Firstly – bat signal to one of our Hebrew scholars – what did it say and what did it mean in the original?
Secondly, now addressed to you, medic0506 – in your work as a paramedic do you “believe in” the circulation of the blood? and use that knowledge in your treatment of trauma victims? Presumably yes.
So where does that knowledge come from? It comes from William Harvey who had read everyone from Galen onward musing about movement of blood without understanding it, then conducted a series of observations and experiments on chicken eggs, on shrimp, on frogs and various fish then confirmed his theory with the vivisection of a dog. So if an hypothesis about human blood circulation was confirmed by what was found in the dog – very definitely a different “kind” by your lights – does this not in itself suggest common ancestry as a distinct possibility? And that’s before we get to biochemistry and DNA print-outs and Dr Shubin’s work with transitional forms.
I have a brilliant video for you, so that you can see what I’m talking about. NOTA BENE: this is not wikipedia. This is the Royal College of Physicians brought to you by the Wellcome Foundation.
More importantly, this is the knowledge you use every day which was acquired by “our” way of doing things, in Harvey’s own words “by logical arguments and ocular demonstrations.”
http://www.wellcomecollection.org/explore/mind–body/topics/dissection/video.aspx?view=william-harvey
(This does contain reconstructions of Harvey’s experiments so if you’re squeamish don’t watch while eating your breakfast.)
Since when has the horde been merciful? And the squidly overlord, in his generosity, has decided to keep medic0506 around for sharpening teeth and getting coats sniny!
It is working admirably.
He’s like a whale shark, slowly, blithely and obliviously filtering out of the ocean of knowledge the tiniest fragments, whilst largely ignoring the dolphins swimming around him; except to admonish them for not knowing anything about anything.
‘Explaining’ what he thinks he knows is so far beyond his intellectual abilities that he thinks he has ‘explained’ whenever he has merely asserted. A fact that was evident when he posted this turd:
1104, medic0506
9 May 2014 at 12:32 pm (UTC -5)
*facepalmheaddeskbodyfloor*
His understanding of ‘explanation’ is so inadequate, there is no way to get any real knowledge into him.
(AJ Milne, on the other hand, managed to explain refraction to his nine-year-old in such a way that the child got it in around five minutes).
But, if it were possible to get medic0506 and explanations into the same universe, I wonder what he’d make of this.
46, Maureen Brian
Thank you for that link!
Firstly, because it was his work that led inexorably to modern cardiovascular medicine, which has not merely improved my quality of life in some ways, it is actually keeping me alive.
Secondly, for the memories; I worked at the Wellcome Research Laboratories in Langley Court when I left school in the 1970s. =^_^=
Glad I brought you a relevant and happy memories type of link, Tigger_the_Wing.
I have a friend who does a lot of science information work with Wellcome in London.
She’s also on BBC Radio 4 a lot in the genre of “science programmes which won’t hurt your brain.” See – http://www.timandraharkness.com/radio.html – and she’s been to the Large Hadron Collider TWICE, which is just not fair.
@ CJO
There were some fanciful story components that where utilised by both the Greeks and the Jews. The origins of which located particularly in the Levant, but included other lands around the Mediterranean. A prime example is the whole issue of Giants. The bible is replete with several examples of such beings. Not just Goliath (who was a “mere” 2.7 metres tall), but whole races of extremely tall people.
In Genesis (6:4):4
We also have the likes Og¹ (Deuteronomy 3:11), the Amorites (Amos 2:9) … etc etc.
Homer hints at Giants ( the “wild tribe” of Eurymedon) in the Odyssey, and they appear on greek pottery from about the sixth century BC. The unruly Giants, are displaced by the Gods. (As the Jews displaced the giant Amorites.) The Greeks learned tales of such Giants on their journeys eastwards. ²
These were impressed on their consciousness all the more through relics the Giants had left behind. These were generally fossils of whales, mammoths and the like. But it was, of course, only much later that we came to know the actually history of these creatures³ – as opposed to the ancient explications of fairytales.
Indeed, stylistically there are major differences in the texts. But for such as the above, there are many aspects that are drawn from the very same beliefs .. and the very same misunderstandings.
…
¹ AFAIK, no relation of our own Og.
² These are described in Robin Lane Fox’s Travelling Hero’s: Greeks and their myths in the epic age of Homer.
³ See also Adrienne Mayor: The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times
Frankly, I am not even convinced the guy is a creationist. He could simply be a “debater” assuming the personae of a creobot. He certainly exhibits all the tactics of a debater given a losing position–never concede a point; always turn the argument against your opponent; argue against your opponent’s strengths; always pretend you are kicking his arse, etc. And he doesn’t seem to have any passion for the position. He just trots out the same old tired arguments. Given the long pauses between bursts of replies, he could be off researching arguments.
Regardless, he’s not very good, be he sincere or not.
That’s wrong. you know nothing about telescopes.
That’s wrong.
Lenses work precisely because the effective speed of light is different in materials, as can be easily measured. This is absolute beginners stuff, how embarassing for you.
Yes….
You say it like that was somehow controversial or problematic :-D
The speed of light is different inside the lenses, thus changing the path of the light to focus it. duh. There is no need to change
the speed of light while it travels to earth.
See above
No, that’s wrong. Magnification (which telescopes do, besides collecting light, by the way) works because lenses can change the path of
photons due to the modified speed of light in the material. As I said, this is almost kindergarten physics, you are embarassing yourself here.
Why don’t you try the following strategy: ask us actual questions about how optics work. You might even learn something about physics for the first time in your life.
@blf:39
Damn, I didn’t check his DDO profile. You’re right, there do seem to be two medic0506s out there. I thought it was was a specific enough string that the odds of that were unlikely.
Rule 1: Don’t assume.
Rule 2: See rule 1.
To the medic0506 out there in Rhode Island, I’m sorry for connecting you in any way to the idiot who has commented in this forum.
Cherenkov radiation shows that the light doesn’t move at C when in something other than a vacuum.
To shut up anyone who thinks our concept of light is fundamentally wrong, all it takes are four magic words:
electron anomalous magnetic moment
The most precise scientific prediction in the history of ever, based on our quantum theory of light, QED. It’s not just somewhat correct, it’s 10 digits precision correct.
For fuck’s sake! It’s lower-case c, italic. Not upper-case. Not bold. Not roman.
To c or not to C, that is the question.
No, no! Does C = \—that is the question!
Well, that didn’t work! No, no! Does C = aleph-one—that is the question!
TVRBoK,
I intuotively feel that anything else would be perverse. So yes.
Alex @55: There’s the accuracy and the power, and there’s the sheer beauty and elegance. Never mind Chapman’s Homer, there should be a poem ‘On First Looking into the QED Lagrangian‘.
blockquote>I wonder how medic0506 (or Aristotle) would explain the redshift.
I alluded to a possible explanation from him in my transplanted reply @8, where I wrote,”“…with enough energy to make the trip”, implies that photons get tired on the way …” The red shift is the lightwaves getting tired from traveling such a long distance, sagging their wavelength longer, into the red direction.
So that’s my bet as to how medic would explain red-shift. Medic! do I win? What’s your. oh so precise, explanation for those lazy red-shifted light we see coming from distant stars.
.
re Cherenkov radiation:
My understanding of Cherenkov Rad. was that some particles move so fast through some mediums that it can exceed lightspeed (in that medium, not the c in vacuum) And those hyperfast particles spew out photons while zipping around. It is Those photons from the zippies that Cherenkov noticed and have since been labelled eponymous. This quasi-explanation comes from my “interest” in the concept of Tachyons. Particles that are on the other side of the light barrier. Adding energy to a tachyon slows it down. infinite energy slows it to lightspeed, zero energy lets it travel infinite speed. IF they exist, we should see Cherenkov radiation as they zip past. So, we just need to stare at a volume of vacuum until we see a burst of Cherenkov from the vacuum.
re CD/DVDs:
[time warp] Back to the late 70’s with the introduction of those LP killers: CDs. At that time, I was constantly amused by the contrarian attitude about CD’s. “Digital doesn’t have the ‘warmth’ of Analog”, “Analog LPs reproduce the music in exactitude, while Digital CD’s only sample the music and Approximate the real music.”
I could go on and on recreating the wacky objections those contrarians had back then, and all the FLAWS they saw in the CD concept…but moving along: I even saw a High-End CD player that flaunted its “Wow and Flutter” numbers [remember those, from turntables?] being better than any other CD player, and had the CD lying on a granite puck for the stability and the entire cabinet had padded feet to isolate it from outside vibrations. pffft… All stuff that was necessary for LP turntables using tiny needles to read the groove, but CD’s are a totally different process to playback whatever was recorded on it.
I know my frustration is my own, but if anyone else tries to write something like that on this forum:
If I type the letter aleph using the Hebrew keyboard, it changes the direction of writing, and any subscript would wind up on the left. I can’t find the mathematical aleph numbers in my Character Palette, apparently the Unicode symbols for the Hebrew letter and the mathematical symbol are different, and the <sub> tags don’t work here, and neither does &&sub1;;. Anybody else got any ideas for Aleph-Null and Aleph-One and so forth?
Oi! :(
TVRBoK @63: ampersand #8501; gives aleph without changing direction. Don’t know about subscripts.
ℵabcd…
It’s easier to remember this one:
ℵ ⇒ ℵ
ℵ₀
& alefsym ; & #x2080 ;
@Rob Grigjanis
Tell me about it. This elegance is the main reason why I went to work in particle theory. The fact that its structure is almost entirely governed by symmetries, the global SO(1,3) and the local U(1), is just pure poetry.
—
ℵℶℷ
Fascinating…
ℵ₁
ℵ₂
ℵ₃
ℵ₁
Thanks, everybody!
David Chapman @64: As a Leeds United supporter, I have nothing but nice things to say about Lee Chapman. Better?
My apologies for I’m only at comment 21 of this thread but medic made me think of the following video.
It is the famous “The Character of Physical Law” lecture by Richard Feynman.
Now, this series should be watched by anyone interested in physics or how nature works for even if some parts of it are a bit old, Feynman is such a wonderful —and funny— communicator that watching it are hours well spent.
But people like medic should especially watch part 7, “Seeking New Laws”. And, relevant to this conversation, this part:
http://youtu.be/MIN_-Flswy0?t=28m18s
I know I’ve watched lectures by Feynman many times, often not understanding what he was saying but just absorbing and loving it.
“It’s just coppa’!“
:( You’re a Leeds supporter as well!!??
Actually, Aristotle argued against extramission. Which, to my knowledge, seems to be just about the only thing he got right.
Uhh…. you mean concerning vision? Or everything?
You have a problem with his logic? Poetics? Not even a bit of Nicomachean Ethics? Nothing?
Yeah, he certainly got some things wrong, but there’s probably a lot more that you just take for granted without knowing it came from Aristotle, and maybe you don’t even think of it as “philosophy.”
David Chapman @73:
I get that a lot. I’m just grateful I wasn’t born in Manchester, or London (although I do have soft spots for Spurs and West Ham).
Aloha medic0506:
First, a small disclaimer. I work for a world class astronomical observatory in Hawaii. Our primary mirror is over 26 feet in diameter.
You stated this:
> Telescopes magnify, and magnification can only work if vision is the primary active mechanism, and works from the ground up.
This may come as a surprise to you, but it is impossible to ‘peer’ through a telescope with a mirror that is 26 feet in diameter.
So how do we use such a massive telescope to discover objects that are invisible to the naked eye?
Instead of humans observing, we have detectors and computers. All observation is done electronically and stored digitally.
Observation exposure times of a single target can range from seconds to many many hours. When we look at a very faint object over the course of 6 or more hours, we can use computers to combine those photos to make something very very very faint become bright enough for us to observe.
So ‘eyes’ never come into the picture here, until many days after the data is acquired – when researchers again use advanced computer algorithms to tease out the details from the data.
It is possible (we do it all the time) to NEVER see the image and merely examine it in numerical detail. (Generally we will only produce an image if the results are terribly exciting or beautiful, otherwise the data stays digital.)
Our particular observatory views in visible light and IR light (and we can do both at the same time). Our detectors are incredibly sophisticated and are cooled to 10 K to avoid noise. We sit at 13,796 feet above sea level to get above most of atmosphere and thermal effects.
We use advanced adaptive optics to remove any remaining atmospheric distortion (and also to provide for guide stars when suitable guide stars are not available).
If ANY of what you say is in the LEAST bit true – then NOTHING in our observatory would work. Period.
For you to state that your theory of light is right, and millions of scientists who use photons (of any wavelength) are wrong – even though we are using state of the art technology… is just… well, I have no word for it. Lunacy is as close as I can get.
You should also consider that photons are not ‘just’ light. IR, UV, XRAYS, Radio, are all photons and all behave in the same way, just at different frequencies (we just have different names for them based on the frequency).
In fact, if even a bit of your theory was true… lasers wouldn’t work. Your computer wouldn’t work. Your television wouldn’t work. But I guess your own mental distortions raise you above that reality.
I do have to thank you though, for some of the most entertaining and face-palming experiences I’ve had in a while.
> As has been explained in the comments, C is a constant; it’s the propagation of light through media that is variable.
This is accurate only from the classical view.
Light always moves at C, regardless of the medium. When photons hit a medium (say, water), the photons are absorbed and new ones are released – it is the time between absorption and release that makes light ‘appear’ to slow down.
This also gives refraction, frequency shift, etc. The newly released photons are released at the refraction angle of the medium. They may be identical to the original photons in frequency, phase, polarization, etc, or the medium may have shifted them (such as frequency shifting crystals, tinted sunglasses, etc).
But the bottom line is photons ALWAYS move at C, regardless of medium (except for, of course, when the are absorbed and cease to exist as photons).
I figured out how vision worked when I was a little kid. I can’t remember my age, but I recall wondering if something came out of my eyes, then working out that it had to be light coming in.
medic0506, on the other hand, doesn’t put any thought into his drivel. He just ups with some quick refutation of reality, types it out, and takes offense at any disagreement. A good analysis and hypothesis takes some real brainwork–you have to try to refute your own ideas. You can’t just put them out and get mad at other people who do refute them.
—–
Telescopes do two things. They gather the light, and they magnify the image. They also come in two general categories, terrestrial and astronomical.
Your typical pirate-captain telescope is a terrestrial, even if it is used on a ship. Binoculars, spotting scopes, rifle scopes and such are too, and they don’t need to gather much light, as they are used in daylight. Mostly they magnify the image. But that magnified image is spread out, so the light in it covers more area, so each bit is dimmer. The front end is designed to gather in roughly enough extra light to brighten-up the magnified bit to match the surroundings, just for the viewer’s convenience. (You can’t have a pirate captain putting his head in a black box and waiting for his eyes to adjust, now, can you?)
Astronomical telescopes, on the other hand, gather much more light. Stars are dim, and a big front end captures more light. But more light isn’t all you need—a full moon can ruin your night vision even without a scope, and brightening up Saturn into a searing dot is just going to blow a hole in your retina. So a magnifier is needed, which dims the image by spreading it out, so you need a bigger front end …
There are some rich field astro-telescopes that don’t magnify much, and there are night-vision goggles that don’t magnify at all.
This is just to help clear up some confusion about what telescopes do, and to help show that medic0506 hasn’t a clue.
Any lens works in a way that medic0 doesn’t, and the people who make all the different kinds of telescopes, and use them, surely know more than some troll.
medic0506, if you are so smart, why aren’t you rich? Seriously, go build a demonstrator device that proves your concept, and the world will buy it. We, here, aren’t buying it on your sayso.
I was hoping my use of the words “just about” would give me enough room for my hyperbole. I dislike Aristotle very much and find him one of the more useless of classical philosophers and as such I dismissed him with broad sweeping insult but with the qualifier “just about” to allow me the wiggle room that I am not being literal. Yes, of course he got some things right.
His system of logic is the one thing I have to grudgingly give him the most appreciation for. However even their I think his role and observations are over-rated. (Or maybe I’m just being grumpy. I’m probably just being grumpy.) Nichomachean ethics? Yes, I *do* despise Nichomachean ethics and think it is completely off base.
But again I’m being sweepingly dismissive for the sake of rhetoric. Obveiously nobody is wrong and worthless all the time. Even medic0506 probably knows how to tie his shoes and I’m sure he’s a talented scuba diver.
Probably not: That self-reported interest was for the other individual (“chem/premed”), not our fruitcake. I am unaware of any statement which can be traced back to the fruitcake about being a scuba driver, albeit he does have a self-reported interest in somewhat related but less-demanding areas. My@35 claim the fruitcake is a self-reported scuba driver I now consider to be an error.
I love learning about the physics of light. I remember learning the basics of EMR when I was in elementary school, and then demonstrating the central observations that light, heat, radio and television were all different wavelengths or frequencies of the same thing.
Maybe medic has never used a prism to break light into a spectrum and then measured the temperatures of the different colors? Never built a crystal radio? Never used photo paper to make cool art?
Never had to use his brain at all to comprehend that there are many wondrous and invisible to the human-eye phenomena occurring all around him at all times? So sad, tsk.
This medic quote is especially silly.
Words, what do they mean! Mammal is Latin for an animal with mammary glands/mammae. It is a defining characteristic, unique to all members of the clade Mammalia along with hair, three inner ear bones, and the ability to regulate their body temperature.
The clade is divided into placental mammals (Eutheria) and marsupial mammals (Metatheria)
We can trace the ancestral relationships, confirm plate tectonics, and demonstrate island effect evolution by observing that the marsupials are found almost exclusively in Australia, with a few in South America and North America.
Kangaroos, echidnas, and platypus aren’t mentioned in the bible at all. If they were created by a god, its clear evidence that god was smoking some of those herbs of the field.
Thank you all for the education; the lurkers such as me really are reading along, enjoying the evisceration of the creationist. I’ve learned a lot, added to my understanding of light and optics quite a bit, and have delighted in the occasional bursts of Not Even Wrong from medic.
The lurkers ARE reading. We thank you. :)
Photons are a myth. What actually exists are “darkons”, particles of dark. And so called “light bulbs” are actually darkon absorbers.
As well, there is no “speed of light”. What we have is the speed of dark.
How do we know that darkons exist? Because when that huge darkon absorber in the sky goes behind the Earth, the darkons come out.
medic0506 says:
Yes, you would have something, there. See, only a certain group of organisms have what we call hair—the mammals have hair. And not all organisms have eyes—you’d be well out of the single-celled, the corals and the oysters, for instance—mammals do have eyes. So your whacked-out arbitrary group is actually fairly tight, and your random characteristics actully fit groups.
Sure, you meant to focus on the color brown. So which mammals are brown-haired? Well, what they used to call the prey animals, rabbits and deer and such, mostly vegetarians, and most vegetarian animals are brown (zebras being the only exception that pops to mind). And that bunch usually has brownish eyes, too. The wee, sleekit, cowering, timorous beasties, then, not the green-eyed golden tigers.
See, the brownies you scoffed about actually have something in common. They are mostly herbivore mammals of the hiding type, and most of them. They do all have a common ancestor, but not one that has no other descendants, so I’d not group them.
But you did, medic0506, you couldn’t avoid grouping them, because animals do fall into groups. Some groups, like mammals, have a common ancestor. Some groups, like your brownies, are convergent upon a lifestyle, within divisions among their larger group.
Since melanin is the primary pigment in mammals, and medico’s terminology allows of shades of brown, and does not indicate that it has to be all brown, or even mostly brown, and similarly does not indicate that it has to be the whole species being brown rather than just some individuals, and if we allow for the oranges and reds to be composite colors that include within them shades of brown (which in the reality of how the pigments work in the mammals with those colors, they are), and we accept that what appears to be black is actually very dark brown (again the reality of how the mammals actually produce those colors with their pigments), then “brown hair and brown eyes” will actually include nearly all of the known mammals, if not flat out all of them.
medic0506
medic0506
medic0506
Amphiox @86
Brown hair may be predominant among mammals (although polar bears, laboratory rats and ermines might disagree) but eye color comes in shades which are definitely unbrown. My father had gray eyes and my cat has green eyes.
@chigau
Are you from Rama or what
I think that as long as some members of a species have brown eyes/fur/hair, then Amphiox is correct.
Certainly, the majority of humans have black hair and brown eyes; those who, like me, have blue eyes and those specially-bred animals with albinism, are an anomaly. Ermines are only white in winter; they are brown the rest of the year. Polar bears are closely related to brown bears.
“Brown hair and brown eyes” describes the vast majority of mammals, and the ancestors (and sometimes the young offspring) of those which are no longer brown-haired or brown-eyed.
In other words, in his now familiar inept way, medic0506 has so little knowledge of reality that he couldn’t even construct a fictitious grouping which proved his point that species groupings are entirely random and subjective.
Now, had he chosen ‘green things that can detect light’ – that would be a grouping that couldn’t have a recent common ancestor!
Alex #89
It worked in that movie…
Evidently Medic0506 doesn’t understand the concept of links. When PZ closed the previous thread, he left a link to this one. Medic0506 appears to be MIA.
Nerd #93
Yeah.
Sad.
Sorta.
However there are humans with brown eyes and cats with brown eyes. I suspect that there are very few mammalian species that do not have at least some individuals with brown eyes of some shade…
Medic’s recent (on some scale… hard to know what counts, since I can’t remember what universal constant we’re bending at the moment) reference to David Berlinski triggered something for me.
This, from Richard Dawkins (which can be fact checked), is the initial:
When Colbert does his version of this, we laugh. But the level of calculation for video / audio replay, or simply for gullible and sympathetic audience members is both cold and stunning.
And it struck me that the combination of two persons to whom Medic has respectfully referred as sources for his own validity – Berlinsky and William Lane Craig – give a map of his approach to “discussion.” Bear in mind Craig’s purely rhetorical, win-at-any-cost, evidence-agnostic, technique-driven (…style? approach? Nothing really fits here, because his tactics appear to have become part of his personality…), and add Berlinski’s popular acceptance as a “mathematician” (close to magic and wizardry in popular American culture) and more blatant, free-form grandstanding, and twisting of other’s statements…
… and I think some of the puppet’s strings are exposed. As if they weren’t obvious in and of themselves.
I had hypothesized earlier that links don’t work for medico if the signal has to traverse a fiber-optic cable somewhere between the various internet hubs, because that requires photons to move and photons don’t move for medico.
Has my hypothesis been proven true?
Or maybe as he advances one by one through the posts, he will finally get to the last one, see the link, and come here, in 2016.
Or perhaps he can’t come here because his worldview holds that missing links can never be found.
Poor Tiktaalik, it wasn’t a missing link, the missing links are on each side of it…*snicker*
I was nice enough to tell mediczero in one of my posts that the blue text represented a “hyperlink” which would take him to a different webpage, and I even linked to a page explaining hyperlinks—but it was on Wikipedia, so maybe it was too “biased”, I dunno.
He’s never replied to any of my posts anyway, so maybe he never read it. I’m heartbroken!
It occurs to me that we are violating the Rule concerning commenting about other commenters in the third person.
so
medic0506
Are you still a dumb-ass?
I think we need to ask the eight ball….
An new review on “junk” DNA.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/05/09/the-case-for-junk-dna/http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351
The above, of course, is still in the hypothesis stage, and requires further testing.
Nerd
That eight-ball thingy is a smart-ass,
I asked: “Why me?”.
The answer: “Most likely”.
or maybe it’s a Zen Master.
Tethys @ 82
Hey, what about the Monotrema (sometimes classed as the Prototheria)? Especially considering you named them in later in your post. The platypus and the four species of echidna are neither plancental mammal not marsupial, they’re egg-layers (yet still mammals since they lactate, have hair, three inner ear bones, single lower jaw-bone etc).
medic0506’s ‘nym reminds me of an argument that I need to work up. It sounds like a science-fiction name for a cloned person, sorta—the 506th decanting of the gene-engineered ideal doctor, maybe.
But in the real world, without cloning, we don’t get repetitions of the same gene combinations, over and over. Each and every one of us humans is unique. (Yeah, there are identical twins.) The gene mixer churns us and our siblings in the pool. Each of us is different.
On deeper level, we are not even just a fresh, new mix of our parents’s genes, we are mutants. The ten or fifteen copying errors that we all have are pretty much lost in the long genome, but we cannot go home again. We are different.
If those differences accumulate, we get evolution. If medic0506 cannot show something that will prevent those differences from accumulating over the generations, he has to concede that evolution occurs.
I asked the eight-ball chigau’s question:
It answered “Most likely”
Chigau, you are right. It’s a smart-arse.
I asked it “when”
It answered “Ask again later”
=^_^=
Menyambal
it’s
medic zero five zero six
and there are indications that he is a medic of some kind.
Is that not horrifying?
Tigger
I asked a couple of questions in Japanese and the responses lead me to think that it’s not really answering my questions.
Just some random response generator.
On the internet.
Is that possible?
Chigau, that would be unthinkable! =ô.Ô=
I just asked it “will medic0506 find this thread”
and it answered “Very doubtful”
Tigger
And that is an example of why telephone psychics can make a living.
*sigh*
If I knew then what I know now…
I am deeply, deeply disappointed that in medic0506’s tedious crawl through the comments, they didn’t bother to address my question about how to distinguish “valid evidence” from “invalid evidence”.
Not surprised, but disappointed.
Amphiox @102
So on the one hand we have theoretical arguments why a significant proportion of the human genome should be junk and on the other hand we have empirical observation saying that a large proportion of the human genome is associated with a number of dynamic biochemical reactions. Either one or more of the assumptions of the theoretical arguments are flawed or most of that biochemical activity doesn’t translate into a biologically significant function. Lots of experiments to do!
A response from the previous thread…
319. Mykroft:
That’s not entirely accurate. The bible does indeed make numerous predictions that can be addressed by materialistic science, and are falsifiable.
You’ve set up a false dilemma in this example but, for the sake of argument, let’s just go with that and say that those were the only answers that Christians were able to give. What makes them automatically and necessarily wrong?? Unless you have an a priori belief that they are wrong, then how can it be that a potentially correct answer is unscientific?? IOW, in your understanding of the meaning of the word “science”, is it possible for a correct and true answer to be unscientific??
If it is possible for a true answer to be unscientific to you, then your understanding and definition of the word is flawed and meaningless, because science and knowledge mean two different things to you. If it is not possible for a correct answer to be unscientific, then that is inconsistent with your a priori belief that science has to be materialistic. You can’t logically defend a self-contradictory proposal such as that. What you would be saying is, “ANY answer that is true is scientific, but truth is irrelevant to me unless it’s materialistic”.
And the problem with material causes, on the issue of origins, is that they aren’t even logically or rationally plausible, much less testable. They cannot explain our origins.
-Why does something exist rather than nothing??
-The big bang
-What went bang??
-A singularity that was smaller than a period on this page that contained all time, space, matter, and energy.
-If the singularity contained all space, then “where” was the singularity??
-a)It existed in a vacuum
-A vacuum is not “nothing” so where did the vacuum exist, and why did it exist?? This vacuum is simply an ad hoc attempt.
-b)It is part of multi-verses
-Again you’re just arguing ad hoc ideas as if they have some scientific merit, but in reality you’re just pushing the question back a step and starting it all over. Why do the multi-verses exist, how did they get there, and where are they??
Another option that some use is to just say, “I don’t know”, and that is absolutely fine. There is nothing at all wrong, scientifically or logically, with saying that you don’t have an answer. Where “I don’t know” becomes a problem is when it gets turned into, “I don’t know, but I know your answer is wrong”, as it often does in this kind of discussion.
Feel free to correct any part of that if it’s wrong, but as you can see, materialism doesn’t really provide any kind of logical, rational explanation that also adheres to your own requirement that it be materialistic and scientifically testable. You can’t test these ad hoc explanations. You can’t even, in any meaningful way, test the equations and principles that lead you to the big bang theory, since you can’t recreate the event to make sure they are accurate. All you can say with any degree of credibility is that things are “consistent with” the idea of a big bang (even that is questionable but that’s for another discussion).
The problem you encounter with the “consistent with” argument, is that you haven’t actually given an explanation that is wholely and entirely both materialistic and materialistically testable, as per your previous requirements. Nor does your idea mean that there are no other ideas that are also consistent with what we see. If there is another explanation that is consistent with our universe, you can’t rationally argue that being “consistent with” is good enough for your explanation, but not also good enough for another explanation. That’s special pleading, so are you going to accept ALL possible explanations?? Of course not, you’re going to try and find a way to rationalize ruling out the explanations that don’t fit with your worldview. But what if the method that you claim to use as a litmus test, materialistic science, is not equipped to rule out, or fails at trying to rule out other possible explanations??
Now you’re in a conundrum because your crutch, materialism, can neither provide you with a sure explanation, nor rule out other possible explanations. Your only option at this point is to turn to philosophy and try to justify philosophically, why your answer is better. That tact though, is self-defeating. Your philosophical justification is neither materialistic, objective, empirical, or scientific, which was the initial requirements that you had for any explanation that you would be willing to accept.
Long story short, materialism can’t explain our origins rationally, and you can only explain our origins rationally and with an explanation that is true, by abandoning materialism.
Trying to use materialism to explain our origins is like trying to explain the origins of a computer, using only the parts, processes, and information contained within that computer. I think you’d agree that any answer you can come up with, using those parts and processes, would be logically absurd because you know that humans are responsible for the existence of that computer. The only way for you to find a truthful answer to the origin of that computer, using the material found within, is if you find that someone had encrypted a file into the hard-drive, explaining how it was created. The bible is our encrypted file (surely you had to see that one coming). Once you have that knowledge in mind, you then know to interpret the parts, and processes that you find inside, and can go about tearing it down and rebuilding it, but you can never truthfully explain its origins using materialism.
I think that is perfectly analogous to the discussion, and is a perfect example of how materialism/scientism are irrational and illogical as ideological positions, when it comes to explaining our origins. They too, come full circle and end up relying on faith, just as theists do.
I can think of numerous ways to attack this statement.
-Who says you are meant to know everything?? Is it conceivable that man might not have access to the ability to know everything there is to know about everything?? Please don’t falsely turn that into me saying that we should stop looking for materialistic answers, because we can never know how much we have the ability to know until we try to know it. Christians believe that scientific knowledge can only lead us closer to God, so no Christian is going to say that we should stop the scientific pursuit of knowledge.
-If you can’t find explanatory power in the truth unless it’s materialistic then you aren’t doing something right.
-If truth has no explanatory power to you unless it is materialistic, then you’re deceiving yourself with the importance of explanatory power, putting that ahead of truth. This goes back to what I said earlier about materialists using philosophical justification to find reasons to believe their preferred explanation.
-If materialistic science cannot address or rule out non-materialistic causes that provide an explanation, nor prove its own explanation conclusively, then it is irrational to argue that the explanation HAS to be materialistic.
-If your argument is going to be that science, as you see it, doesn’t deal in truths, then I don’t trust your kind of science to answer questions for me, about things like origins. I trust it to make discoveries about the material world, create technology, save lives, etc., and do the things that we all know and agree that it’s very good at doing.
Feel free to dissect this post because I really like arguing this aspect of the cre-evo debate.
I am stunned that medic0506 actually found this thread.
I am not surprised that we are back to a thousand comments late.
Why bother? At the current rate, you won’t actually read it until some time next year.
And you won’t ever understand it.
Soooo…Now we know the answer to the question asked by the previous thread title, “What happens to a creationist who dares step into the den of evil??”
Answer: When the minions can’t scare him off and get him to “retreat”, PZ closes the thread because he doesn’t want a creationist breaking his record for post counts!!!!!!!!!!!!
BAAAAHAAAAHAAAAHAAAHAAAAHAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry PZ, just busting your chops. You had to know there would be gloating involved after you made that crack about me retreating.
Isamaknight
Yes, you are entirely correct. I blame the allergy meds for my omission that Monotremes are another example of a different kind of mammal found only in Australia and its near neighbors.
The wiki on Monotremes has this fantastic video of platypus at the Sydney aquarium.
They look like soft, furry, four footed ducks.
medic@0506
Uh… no, he closed the thread because excessively long comment threads _break the server_.
(Else Thunderdome would be over a hundred pages long.)
117. Snoof:
That’s why I use message boards rather than Skype or live chat. Sometimes real life happens and I don’t have time to sit in front of the computer all day every day, reading and responding to 50 people bombarding me. Or 10 people each with 5 alternate accounts, whichever the case may be.
Wait… there’s something familiar about all this…
Extramission… eye beams… evolution denial… claims to be a medic… claims to have “researched both sides”…
Supersport?
Supersport from the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry forums?
Is that you?
Tethys #119
Your link doesn’t link on my iPad.
chigau
Maybe it will work for you on the wiki page on Monotremes?
Scroll down to find the link.
medic0506 @115
You continue to demonstrate that you misunderstand science. Science is a process, not a body of knowledge and so yes, science and knowledge may be different. Science and ‘truth’ may be different. The hypothetical answer to why a god might have made a 6000 year universe look older to test a Christian’s faith is ‘wrong’ from a scientific perspective because it isn’t falsifiable. It makes no useful predictions that would further our understanding of the universe.
Um, you *do* realize that before he closed the thread he opened this new one just for you and specifically said we could continue posting here, don’t you?
Now do try to keep up we have a lot of work to get through.
Starting with:
1. Refraction: What is the mechanism if light doesn’t travel?
2. Moon Lasers: Why is there a time delay between sending a laser beam to the moon and the time it takes to return?
3. “vision is a primary mechanism”: What does that mean? (What does it imply and how does that differ from the traditional light travel mechanism? Does it mean the act of vision affects light?)
@118 medic0506
Finally! I’ve been waiting for this since, well, 1440 posts AM (Anno Medici).
This is what the technique is about. Keep babbling regardless of content, never let up, scatter responses, and when exasperation or some kind of change or termination due to sheer volume/BS overload, declare victory… or at least some point of moral vindication.
Oh… and…
@115 Medi0506
The fun is just exponential around here these days.
There is no record for post counts. And if there were, you’d be nowhere close.
Did you notice that I specifically opened a new thread to continue the discussion, and left a link to it at the end of the old thread?
You keep demonstrating what an idiot you are. Keep it up.
Great job, woozy.
More questions that aren’t going to be answered until before after the sun goes red giant. Assuming medic0506 doesn’t just decide they’re too hard and pretend they don’t exist.
And that should be “shortly before”, not “before after”. I really should put off posting until after I’ve had my dosage of socially-acceptable stimulant.
– One other thing… it would be good to remember that in meaning in these threads (which, I believe, exists, as long as it doesn’t eat into more productive pursuits) has precisely nothing to do with Medico0506. He can go on like this forever, NONE of the intellectual cost falls on him. The pool of ignorance, intransigence and impaired knowledge of personal incompetence is broad and deep; it can pour endlessly with virtually no investment, while there are a multitude of costs related to considered, disciplined, ethical responses.
– But if we cease to produce the kind of lastingly meaningful responses we’ve seen in the previous threads cease, or if it becomes clear that they’ve become invisible in the wash, Medico really does need to be left to howl in the bizarre darkness of his mind.
Aghhh. Typos galore there. Sorry.
@121 medic0506
Simply: Olympian self-importance and baseless accusation.
medic0506 said:
medic0506, why do you keep suggesting that we are sockpuppeting? You have fierce amounts of projection going, so is sockpuppeting something that you do? Can you not imagine people being honest?
Why do you want us to be running alternate accounts? Is it better for you if only 10 people think you are a creoloon, instead of 50? It’s a big world, and most people are going to find you ridiculous. Knocking it down to 10 isn’t really going to help.
And what indication is there that anyone has an alternate account? Which people write alike?
Now, which makes more sense? Ten people who have so little to do that they can post five people’s worth of comments and who all want to lie for whatever reason you imagine, or fifty people who wander through in their spare time and comment honestly?
Keep in mind that PZ forbids sockpuppets. Do you imagine that he is lying? That he can’t detect alternate accounts?
medic0506, your comments read like someone trying to seduce a pig, and this fixation on alternate accounts is part of the bafflement. What reason do you have to think that anyone is a sockpuppet?
Yes, everything here is a deceitful conspiracy out to specifically persecute you.
Here’s a pro-tip, by the way: Rather than spending a ton of time responding to each individual post, how about you READ EVERYTHING and then think up a reply? Instead of saying the same thing over and over, one post for one post, find all of the comments that relate to one specific topic, and respond to the concerns expressed by those comments, on that topic. Repeat with each topic you give a damn about. “Real life happens” or “I prefer Skype or message boards” doesn’t change how slow your method of response is. You will not be able to ever catch up at the rate you are going if you keep doing what you are doing. It is impossible unless we get bored and go away. This is due to your desire to thoroughly respond to every single post, in order. You need to change your approach or continue to be irrelevant. Fair warning, you will still warrant massive amounts of mockery either way.
anteprepro @ 135
medic0506 specifically stated that xe wouldn’t be responding to every post, merely “certain” ones. (Does this make it better? Worse? Who knows? I certainly don’t.)
This way, medic0506 can give the impression of thoroughness and rigorousness while still avoiding answering hard questions, like how lenses work. Or what kinds are. Or what standards xe uses to judge the truth of a proposition.
It’s more complicated than that: there’s eumelanin, which is more or less black, and phaeomelanin, which is reddish to brownish. Red hair is the absence of eumelanin.
…where only means that the transcription machinery, or part of it, sometimes binds to it.
Eukaryotic cells are awash in useless RNA that is made and promptly destroyed again. Google for encode site:freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/.
Dude, you’re a thousand comments behind. Stop this nonsense. Read the whole thread, and then reply.
As long as you can’t manage to do this, there’s no point talking to you! That’s why I’m not even trying to catch up with the previous thread.
But you’re not arguing. You’re replying to week-old comments with no regard for anything that has been written since!
Is anybody else interested in me dissecting comment 115? Otherwise I’m not going to do it until medic0506 has caught up with this thread – with wherever that thread will then be, not where it’s now.
That’s one more reason to catch up with this thread first and then reply to it, instead of only replying to some point of its ancient history.
We can wait!
medic0506 #121
You are not being bombarded.
PZ’s blog is being bombarded.
If you don’t like this, you can just go away.
120. Snoof:
Just having a little sport with him.
medic0506 @ 139
I’m sure that’s how you’re rationalising it.
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Worse. Much worse. One reason is the one you mention.
medic0506 #139
That sounds bannable.
@Medic: Please explain your understanding of how light would work if the quantum model (photons, particle/wave duality, etc) were true. Put another way, how would light have to behave to make you believe it is actually photons emitted by an object?
@136 Snoof
This, at least, is no mystery. The bible. As interpreted by him. It’s that simple.
Ken Ham clarified this stance in the debate with Nye, in response to being asked “What would change your mind.” The response was “Nothing.”
The single most vile and virulent lie these people use is the simplest: “I/we want a meaningful discussion.”
Demeisen @ 143
I think we’ve already seen medic0506’s thoughts on that. If light was made of photons which are packets of energy, then absorbing all that energy should make people’s heads explode, or get blasted off. And you should be able to trap those packets in a box and mail it to someone.
It’s like the “if evolution is true, we should see crocoducks” we see from other creationists. Their basic understanding of the theory is so skewed (whether from genuine or wilful ignorance) that they will necessarily make ridiculous arguments like that.
More questions? These are the same old questions. I believe this is the 20th time or so I asked the refraction question and most other people have asked it as well. I’m sure it’s been asked at liast 200 times.
It’s his single most frequent M.O. He accuses evolutionist of all the attributes creationists are often accused of. cherry-picking arguments to fit assumptions, evading questions, ignoring evidence, etc. And so sock puppetry. Why not?
@137 David Marjanović
– I’d love to see a dissection of @115, but you must understand that this is purely selfish on my part, because I don’t have the quality of mind nor the education that is required to accurately pierce such a mass of crap without a gargantuan investment of time.
– But verily I say unto you, thine own work shall have naught upon the glare of Medic, nor shall he wane, like worms out of a hot cheese log, for he hath the breastplate of self-righteousness. Or a pale horse. Or something.
Short version of medic0506 @115:
I don’t understand the concepts of the big bang or abiogensis therefore materialistic science is wrong because I say so.
@medic0506:
OK medic0506, non-material causes are valid and the Bible gives us the cause. Now prove it. Prove that I should believe in your Bible, and not the Quran, the Mormon Bible, the Hindu vedas, etc.
No religion has any verifiable proof that they are the one true religion. If it were otherwise, there would only be one religion. If no religion can conclusively validate their holy texts, how does one differentiate between their “non-material causes”? Can you give me a verifiable reason your Bible is it? Can you give me a reason why I should believe what you believe, an explanation that doesn’t ultimately boil down to “that was the religion I was raised on”? Every major religion is replete with believers thankful they were fortunate enough to be raised under the one true faith. Prove your worldview is correct. So far you’ve been failing at that miserably.
This is the problem with attributing things to non-material causes like God. No proof. None, nada, zip. Your non-material cause is a bronze age fairy tale that gained gravitas in the retelling.
@Snoof #145
We’ve seen bits and pieces, but I’m curious how deep this rabbit hole goes.
It’s turtles all the way down….
Could y’all please decide if it’s turtles or rabbits?
’cause they’re different
y’know?
Medic0 is responding precisely the way I would expect someone to respond in order to make YEC’s look like bumbling fools. More than they already appear to be, for measure.
medic0506 @ 115
An interesting thing about encryption:
For any given ciphertext, you can extract every single plaintext containing the same number of symbols, depending on which key you use.
For example, the ciphertext IPMEHFNVKOEQHSSPAI decrypts as THEMOONISMADEOFWAX (a false statement) with one key, and PIISTRANSCENDENTAL (a true statement) with another, and without external context, you have no way of knowing which message was intended by the encrypter.
(Application of this information to medic0506’s analogy is left as an exercise for the reader.)
And yet again, I must ask… Supersport, is that you?
It’s a rabbit hole full of turtles.
125. Chris:
You’re very confused. Do you even know the etymology of the word “science”??
If science isn’t the same as either knowledge or truth, and even if given the truth about its origins, it can’t help you further your knowledge of the universe, then your view of what science is, is totally and completely worthless. It has no value. It is science falsely so-called, which not surprisingly, the bible warns us to be wary of.
Sadly, this is the kind of absurdity that materialism/scientism leads to.
medic0506, #115:
They are automatically and necessarily non-answers.
Pay close attention here: It’s true that “maybe God made it look that way to test our faith.” That is a true statement, because it is possible. There’s no (apparent) contradiction, therefore it’s possible. This gets us nowhere. We want to know whether it’s right, not whether it could be right. Remove the “maybe” and suddenly we have something we can actually ask interesting questions about. What is this supposed to explain? What’s a god? What’s the evidence that a god did something, and in particular that what it did was deceive us to test our faith? What if we didn’t have any faith to begin with — what happens if we somehow fail the test? Isn’t that line of reason going to give us a prediction? If I’m going to burn in hell (or whatever) because I don’t have “faith” in this god, where’s the evidence of that? When are we going to see whether this prediction amounts to anything?
Why not? Now you’re telling me this “cannot” happen. You’re saying it’s impossible: there is some contradiction. What exactly is that contradiction? You don’t say. It’s just an assertion, with no justification.
Because there is nothing impossible about “something” existing. If there were nothing, and there’s nothing impossible about that either, then that state of affairs wouldn’t have any objects or law-like properties (other than possibly logical truths which must “exist”, like 2+2=4) preventing the existence of something.
Space-time itself. It’s possible an “inflaton field” is (or became) unstable in some way and settled into a state with ordinary matter and radiation. From there, the physics as we already know it takes over. But at this point, nobody really can fully explain the conditions leading up to the big bang. So we have to keep testing which ideas work and which don’t. All we do know is the big bang and everything that came after it.
So your beliefs, in a “young earth” and that the Bible is inerrant, are in contradiction with the facts. Not speculations about explanations of facts — just the plain old, real, true, actual facts about reality. You can’t even account for something as simple as a physical constant, like the speed of light. Instead, we get the pants-on-head stupidity that you’ve been displaying here.
There probably was no such “singularity.” This is an outdated theory, which basically nobody who knows the science (including people like Hawking, who originally defended it) still takes as a serious proposal. It’s not an explanation. It is extrapolating relativity to a regime where we know the evidence and the math no longer support the claim.
This is nonsensical and question-begging and a strawman. The answers you give don’t even resemble what any advocate of a “singularity” would actually say. They would say this is like asking “what’s north of the north pole?” They’re wrong because of the physics itself, which is exactly why it’s counterproductive to strawman them with these pointless absurdities. All you’re demonstrating here is that you can’t even refute somebody who is obviously wrong, because (for one thing) you can’t accept general relativity or quantum physics.
The multiverse isn’t ad hoc, and it isn’t about that. It’s derivable from the physics as we know it. It’s a prediction, not an explanation of “where the singularity (which isn’t real) is or where it came from.” It can give reasonable answers to other coherent questions, but that is not one of them.
Materialism (or naturalism, as I call it) is philosophy. It isn’t science. And that’s not a problem. You seem to think we only do “science,” completely without philosophy. That isn’t true.
My only requirement is that your explanations are coherent and agree with what we already know about reality. Because we do know things about reality and we can be coherent. You can’t even do that. Your problem is not that theism isn’t “materialistic” or “non-scientific.” Your problem is that theism isn’t true, and your version in particular can’t account for the facts.
Let’s put it another way: I have no particular issues with mathematical Platonism. If mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics can give a coherent account of how (and in what sense) abstract mathematical objects “exist,” this does not in any way bother me. I’m honestly open to that possibility, but I don’t know the issues well enough to make a very informed judgment about it. And it should not bother any naturalist, because a coherent account of abstract objects doesn’t need to be supernaturalistic. Mathematical Platonists (nowadays, at least) aren’t saying a “mind” exists, independent of a physical body, which must “think” mathematical concepts in order to “bring them into existence.” They don’t tend to say that, because it isn’t coherent, and they have better actual reasons for making the claims they’re making. Abstract concepts just are, and not because of a mind, because at best that’s a cheap rhetorical trick, not a good (or necessary) part of such an explanation.
On the other hand, I think it is a problem when Platonists of this sort make a claim to the effect that mathematical existence implies physical existence, or that physical existence simply is mathematical existence, or that “everything is information” or some such thing. You get that with people like Max Tegmark. I don’t think they have good reason to believe that. If they’re going to make this move, they need a good account of what “existence” means, as well as how they got from A to B; but as far as I can tell, they haven’t done that. They’ll toss out concepts like the “principle of plenitude,” and if it gives them anything at all, it doesn’t seem to be doing anything to bridge that gap.
So I’d say that generally, I don’t have a problem with that line of thought, but some of the implications people draw from it are simply incoherent. Those aren’t necessary in a formulation of a non-“materialistic” metaphysics. We can drop that shit, and see if there’s any useful stuff remaining. There might be.
The moral of the story here is that this dogmatic, ideological opposition to any such thing from “materialists” is a figment of your imagination, invented apparently so that you can avoid confronting the incoherence and general inadequacy of your own views. This is why you like arguing about it. Because it is bullshitting. Because it is a distraction from the absurdities you keep spewing.
You’re confused if you think etymology somehow forces “science” to mean the same thing to people as “scientia” did a thousand years ago in an entirely different culture, in which modern science (in our terms) didn’t exist.
medic0506 @158
Sure. It’s from the proto-Indo-European root *skei- meaning “to cut, to split”.
Do you know what “science” means today when scientists use the word?
@medic0506:
Your response regarding non-material causes essentially boils down to the Courtier’s Reply.
Information content = zero.
medic0506:
medic0506 seems to think he’s a wit.
I’ll admit that he’s half right.
medic0506
Do you understand that if you continue as you are, that you will probably be banned?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/rules/
medic0506 said:
medic0506, I looked up the etymology of the word, and have no problems. What are you getting at?
Words can shift in meaning. Do you always insist on staying far behind the times?
Why does your meaning of the word take priority over the meaning used by the people of science?
By your god, you are snottily patronizing. Like an immature with nothing to back up a big ego. All snark, no science.
The false science is your creationism, obviously, and that is yet another way you ignore your own god.
No, you are the one bringing the absurd. Try some facts, evidence or science, sometime.
—–
Notice, please, that medic0506 can’t attack science except by making it a religion, and accusing people of being zealots.
Notice also that he quotes his holy book to atheists, and manages to misunderstand it himself.
The latest in the series of medico’s dishonesty and hypocrisy.
The one feature all three of the above share is they are ASSUMPTIONS, for which no empirical evidence exists to support (and for which there is no way to envision even getting empirical evidence for or against).
So what was medico’s big, big, big, repeated line against universal common ancestry, with which he polluted the entirety of two threads already?
That it is an assumption, without any direct empirical evidence demonstrating it (or at least no empirical evidence that medico is willing to acknowledge with his dishonest redefinition of that word….)
And yet!
If it is in support of HIS worldview, any and all assumptions are just hunky-dory.
Pathetic hypocrisy all the way down.
Everywhere.
It contains all space, remember?
Poor medico must be running out of lies, as his excuses are getting ever more transparent.
This one above is a flat out admission that his arguments depend entirely on dishonest redefinition of terms to versions that are not the generally accepted modern understanding, but obsolescent, or even wholly imaginary, versions that specifically favor his arguments.
Pitiful.
It used to be turtles.
But due to a unfortunate mistranslation of ancient texts, it turns out it was CHOCOLATE turtles.
And then the rabbits came and ate them.
So now it’s rabbits.
Scientific method. Observe things. Make a hypothesis to explain things you have observed. Use hypothesis to predict something that wasn’t in observations. (something that can be tested for, where if the result of the test is different to prediction it indicates hypothesis wrong – this is what falsifiable means). Test for prediction controlling as many variables as possible. Adjust hypothesis if necessary based on new results. Think of more tests that might prove it wrong. Keep doing tests until you run out of ways to test. If hypothesis still stands up then provisionally accept it for now (with proviso that if new data related to it comes up then retesting should occur). Publish so that others can see.
This is science. It is a process, not a bundle of facts from on high. The various theories and laws (using the scientific definitions of those words) exist because they have gone through this process and so far they have no evidence against them. Some we use that are simplifications of the full theories because within a limited scope the difference between the simplifications and the more specific versions are negligible. (Newton’s laws of motion when not near relativistic speeds) but we know they are simplifications.
True, but when medico is participating in a thread, the generous spirit seeks to simply things for his benefit.
And the combination of eumelanin and phaeomelanin produce shades of brown, from reddish to blackish. And if you take this range, plus white (absence of pigments) and you basically get the entire range of mammalian hair colours.
Mammalian body coloration is actually kind of impoverished compared to most other tetrapods. Just look at the riot of colors that the birds and lizards and frogs and salamanders get up to….
Well, it is a theoretical assumption from a different direction that “associated with a number of dynamic biochemical reactions”, (and remember that the experimental parameters were such that simple binding counted as a “dynamic biochemical reaction”) equates to biologically significant function.
So in all directions it boils down to figuring out which theoretical assumptions are flawed and which ones are not.
Or more likely, which ones are less flawed and which ones are more flawed, as it is unlikely that any of the theoretical assumptions are completely unflawed.
Hey, medico, newsflash for you.
Addition exists.
It is a real thing.
An actual technique.
And post count records can be and are assembled from multiple threads on the same topic.
Here, I’ll show you.
1+0=1.
1+1=2.
1+1+1=3.
1+1+1+1=4.
(Also, notice how the sequence never ends, and can continue on to infinity? This is exactly how the accumulation of variation over time works. It does not stop unless an external mechanism intervenes to actively stop it.)
And the unofficial record dating back to the old Endless Thread/Zombie Thread or whatever it was called back then is over 4000, so you ain’t even close, bud.
medic0506 @ 158
That is the point medic0506. Science has helped further our knowledge of the universe by making testable predictions. Creationism fails to do that which is why it isn’t science.
amphiox @172
Agreed!
How nice of medico to admit that creationism is worthless!
MedIc0506 Medic0506 Medic0506
– You’ve studied the original science for years, been through the flawed texts, and thoroughly, such that you are convinced of your findings, and, per you, without which study you would not have been convinced…
— SO. Why not make it easy on yourself while simultaneously throwing us a bone, and write up a bibliography of your studies? You don’t even need to clarify HOW you’ve disproven anything, merely the WHAT of the specific sources that you used.
– Honest, forthright, Simple as pie, righteous even, and everyone on the same page.
– Please?
@165 Menyambal
He can’t help it. It’s at the core of this kind of mind; more often heard in arguments that start with some variation of “without God, what is the source of objective morality,” usually followed by stating that if there is such an absence, why not kill, date goats, and eat the neighbor’s children. (To which my gut response has always been: “If you It comes down to you not doing those things ONLY because you have been coerced, then my neighborhood is off limits to you.) It’s fear in the face of doubt, the latter of which is anarchy.
Similarly, as there are no morals but received morals, there is no “truth” but received “truth.” And since “science” kinda sorta works, it must, in it’s true form (as untouched by “scient-ISTS”) be in some sense proximate to what is received, AND must be in agreement with whatever received source provides “objective morals” and “spiritual truth.” Anything that falls outside these walls is, in the end, unworthy of consideration, by definition.
Odd though, that ALL kinds of bizarre and dark doubt and unknowing can be casually cast toward whatever deity one chooses… as in “We’re not meant to know everything,” or, more alarmingly the idea that if God did intentionally plant all this misleading stuff about nature and time (ie, Last Thursdayism), that’s all good, because God. I’m not nearly smart enough to trace the circles, spirals and paisley in all of that. But it is supported by the bible, and clearly in Paul, who sees God as the potter and humans as clay. He reasons that the potter has the right to visit whatever form of insanity he wishes on his medium. Which I suppose follows, because God.
But every known “truth” must be absolute and complete, and anything that seems to “work” must be somehow within that greater “truth,” anything else is inconsequential, and any remaining unknowns are just stuff God left laying around, for reasons that don’t matter.
So, yeah. That’s how he’s going to see “science,” as corollary to his religion, because his cell phone works.
Good to know that you consider lying to just be good fun. It explains so much about the utter paucity of your intellect.
Here lemme highlight Mykroft’s post from 150 because I’d like you to answer it.
I just beat Super Robot Wars Z3 a few minutes ago, I’d like you to give me a reason to believe in your mythology over the mythology presented in that game. In that game we learn that a vastly powerful godlike will created the universe to run on a 12000 year cycle, each cycle ending in an apocalyptic conflict that shatters the universe, but a select few can ascend to become gods and watch over the next universe.
Explain to me why I shouldn’t believe this account of creation and destruction. Why should I pay the Christian Bible any more mind than a Japanese fanfic game of giant robot action? Is it because more people believe in Christianity than Z3ism? Well you yourself long ago said that it only takes one person to be correct, the rest are all gravy. The bible says its true? Well taking your stupid encryption analogy I have the proper knowledge of the game and I say it’s an accurate prophecy of the future and the true model of existence. Is the bible somehow “moral”? Well the heroes of Z3 actively fight against this apocalypse and see this cyclical mass genocide of life as a bad thing so they’re already better than mean old YHVH. Have you got any evidence? Because there’s as much evidence of Z3’s expanded last Thursdayism than the Genesis account of creation.
And I could use literally ANY piece of media I consume, Z3 is just the thing most immediately on my mind. These fictional media are exactly as truthful as your bible is Medic0506.
Part of my reaction is that, if there were some such absence, then nothing is preventing us from doing all sorts of good things too. It’s a completely trivial point. And since this just seems to be about insinuating that atheist just want to be bad, evil, sinners; we don’t even need to take it that seriously.
But this gets us closer to another point: it’s about the idea behind asking “why is there something rather than nothing?” You might think that existence needs to be sustained constantly by an outside (hence nonexistent? self-sustaining?) force or entity. Without some other thing “making existence” or constituting a “ground of being, existence by itself just can’t be. And you hear that there is a “principle of sufficient reason,” which is taken to mean that there is no explanation unless there is some other thing which “makes existence” or “sustains” it (except when it isn’t some other thing, because you’ve called that god, because you don’t care about consistency, because you just wanted to be patted on the head and reassured that everything you say is right).
Where the hell did this idea even come from? Let’s talk about the concept of momentum for a moment. One of the many things Aristotle certainly did get spectacularly wrong is that things can’t move without a constant source of “propulsion” (as medic0506 would call it), to drive it from one place to the next. (Of course, this isn’t just about particular things, and it’s where the language about a “prime mover” comes from.) There was no concept of momentum, that things will keep moving as they were unless something else prevents that motion. No, the “sufficient reason” which was thought to be required was that something else “propelled” an arrow along (or you could say the same of a photon on its path, or anything else) — the reason had to come in the form of it sustaining motion or even being the ultimate “source” of motion. The idea of preventing motion that would otherwise “sustain” itself apparently wasn’t even on the radar.
The mistake is exactly in thinking that the one dumbass reason you’ve come up with to explain the phemeonon happens to be the only possible one. And if reality doesn’t fit your particular criteria, we’re all supposed to be very sad about that along with you. As soon as we have any reason that’s “sufficient,” it must be right. And we can stop thinking. The end. If you think otherwise, shut up. Or if you think otherwise, it’s “impossible” (which, once you start asking questions, doesn’t actually turn out to mean impossible).
That is not how reality or finding our way to the truth actually works. We’re pretty bad at thinking most of the time. It takes a lot of effort. And it takes a sort of humility and creativity and imagination to recognize that our ideas don’t always and necessarily “carve nature at its joints.” And it evidently takes some education, to not waste your time repeating bullshit arguments that were summarily refuted centuries ago.
And that is why we need more funding for public education. ;)
Sometimes when I like to fuck with creotards and other like minded folks, I’ll make an argument along the lines of – since nobody really knows what underlies reality – I’ll grant there is some sort of god behind reality if you want to call it that. I may even grant there is some sort of morality designator who objectifies morality behind it all. But then I’ll ask, is there any evidence that the stone age genocidal tribal old testament god is the god, or more evidence that this is a man made book. Is there any evidence that this god, his behavior or decrees could evidence some sort of authority about objective morality. The answer to both of course is no. So we are left with a god and an objective morality determiner, but no way of identifying this being with any thing in this world, especially a book written by stone age barbarians. There may be a god but it is not represented by an error ridden book of human and not divine origins. This really fucks with them because it shows one can posit a god rationally and even use all the standard proofs for the existence of god and yet clearly show that the bible god and its genocidal sexist cultic arbitrary tales don’t cut it.
Turtles or rabbits? Why, they’re just two facets of the one fundamental particle of crocoduck physics, namely the turbit.(Also spelt as turbot, a kind of fish.) (see also, babelfish.)
So, I fall asleep in the middle of an amusing exchange about magic 8 balls with Chigau (sorry, Chigau!); and by the time I get back online, the thread has nearly doubled in length!
Does that mean our favourite chew-toy found this thread?! =ô.Ô=
*Goes off to read*
consciousness razor @ 179:
Because the thinker is the smartest person in the whole world. Or at least a “humble” practitioner of the right religion, which they chose because they are smart. The egotism and the fake humility get confusing, but it is mostly about being one of God’s chosen, and knowing the right things rather than knowing much.
Egotism, narcissism, or just look-at-me-ism, these guys have it.
Other people have addressed your nonsense about science, so I only have one more question:
118, medic0506
I’ve no idea where this phrase comes from, or what it means. I’ve never heard it spoken, and I’ve read it in precisely two places – Animal Crossing (where it is attributed to a weasel with all the personality traits of the kind of sneaky, two-faced, lying and conniving human often described as ‘a weasel’), and now here. By you. Could you please enlighten me?
Medic0506 not learning
Assertion made without evidence, dismissed as fuckwittery. Third party evidence is your friend. Claims without evidence are dismissed.
Science is a methodology to find the truth. It is based on evidence, not revealed knowledge. Your babble is a book of mythology/fiction. That is what applying the scientific method to its claims shows. The knowledge gained by using the scientific method is also called science. It isn’t and never will be the TRUTH. But it keeps trying to get close to the truth, and getting 99% there is better than the 5% bullshit from revealed truth sources like your babble.
Ah, yes.
115, medi0506
Please list the falsifiable predictions that have not been falsified.
*Crickets*
It basically means “giving you a hard time,” or something like that. And by that, I mean it’s supposed to be a friendly gesture, kidding around or joking, not actually making life hard in any significant way. It’s not mean-spirited or malevolent. There’s some kind of shared understanding between the two people, so that the other person doesn’t look like a complete ass. (That’s definitely lacking in this case.)
I don’t know where it comes from. Maybe somebody had some chops (?), those got busted by someone else (?), and then they had a good laugh about it. That’s the best I can do without looking it up.
#158
I guess we can add epistemology to the list of subjects that medic doesn’t understand.
Ok, I looked it up, and I apparently guessed correctly. You have “chops” on your face, if you have a certain sort of facial hair. Someone “busts” them by hitting you in the face. This is a gentlemanly sort of thing to do. We’ll just punch each other, and then our dispute will be over, so we can go have a beer or something.
I really hate the English language sometimes.
Thanks, CR. I had tried to work it out from context, but seeing as up until today the only data point I had was a computer game, I had assumed it was a literal translation of a Japanese phrase, which was why the elements made no sense.
Although I did find it rather a fascinating exercise to compare the apparent personalities (apparent from the text associated with them, that is) of the only two characters that I’ve ever read to use the phrase.
I’ve been thinking about how medic0506 has been proceeding through the comments at a glacial pace, and I think it ties into the discussions we’ve had here about the wisdom of debating a creationist. They win debates by throwing out all kinds of nonsense, and his/her opponent has to struggle to provide factual and reasoned responses within the allowed time frame.
medic0506 is trying to debate us, but instead of the one on one debates he’s used to he is debating the horde, and there is no time limit. He only is capable of one mode however, so he is trying to win in the same manner as in the one on one contests, even though he is up against a huge collective pool of knowledge. This is why he thinks we are sockpuppeting the discussion, this one on many thing is outside his experience.
I enjoy these discussions, but this is getting to the point where I truly feel sorry for this guy. He is limited (we all are in our own ways), but he is totally clueless about his mental and educational limitations. They are hidden from him by the arrogance that comes from knowing the TRUTH©.
There are none so blind, as he who will not see.
re medic0506:
Wrong. That is NOT how science works, nor has ANYONE here given that impression. Science ALWAYS accepts sufficient answers as _sufficient_. NEVER is it “must” be right. Science is ALWAYS looking for flaws in theories. I mentioned earlier (in the other thread) but I will mention it again: look at the history of Einstein vs. Newton. Newton’s theory of gravity was always “good enough”, but Einstein found some limitations in it. And astronomers always objected to Newton’s version not being able to account for the wobble of Mercury.
It is very different to dismiss poor assertions that have no evidence, than to declare “sufficient” as “must be right”. You seem to do the exact opposite, you dismiss assertions that have lots of evidence while declaring poor hypotheses that have no evidence as “must be right”.
Time to check your arrogance, no matter how much you’ve read (on ~both sides), listen to what is said here. The participants here are well spoken and very coherent. Consider what they say, find flaws _in_what_they_said_, don’t just spout back something else you think is related. Don’t automatically think that you are smarter than everybody here, have read more, and everything you say has no mistakes at all.
192, mykroft,
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, there, given what I’ve seen of his debates on Debate.org (DDO, as he referred to it), and the fact that he said that, if he lost his ‘challenge’ about the photons-inna-box thing, he would declare he was ignorant on light travel on here and DDO (why?!).
DDO seem to have strict rules about what can be addressed in each round (he declared one of his challenges forfeit at the beginning of the third round, using as an excuse that he’d failed to say something in the first); rules which don’t apply here – but he behaves as if they do.
It would seem that he thinks that PZ closing the first thread for reasons of length are tantamount to PZ declaring medic0506 the ‘winner’ of that ’round’.
Whereas the horde has been summarising the discussion so far, and responding to all the points raised, he has been methodically responding to individual posts in chronological order; and when he answered one ‘out of order’ (835, responding to Amphiox at 807) which showed that he had, in fact, been reading the whole thread in real time, he practically apologised for doing so (“I saw this and just can’t help but comment even though it’s out of order.”).
re medic@158:
excuse me, etymology is interesting, about the origins of a word, but not is not the DEFINITION of a word. The important thing about word definitions is how they are USED, not the origina of the word. Even the Oxford English Dictionary has stated that, “Dictionaries are _Descriptive_ not Prescriptive.” That is, a dictionary is compiled to list all the ways a word is used, not to establish rules for how that word must be used.
That is pretty much how Science works. (the noun form) Science is a compilation of the equations that are used to calculate stuff and how to manipulate those equations. That list of equations is always able to be edited and added to [not set in stone]. (the verb form) Science is a process of using those equations, testing them to verify their accuracy, and postulating new forms that may be more accurate.
notice that the definition of science crept into my definition of “Dictionary”: “That is, a dictionary is compiled to list all the ways a word is used, not to establish rules for how that word must be used.” Dismiss me as a “utilitarian”, not “materialist”, nor “scientism-ist”. Knowledge (ie, a list of abstract facts) is pointless if it doesn’t tell you how to DO something.
Something like the biblical “Theory of Giants”?
If the babble / Word of YHWH is correct, then we should find the bones of ( human¹) Giants. Not just people suffering from giantism … we are talking BIG here.
At the time of writing the babble, many such bones were found. Not just by Jewish priestly types with an agenda, but also many early Pagan palaeontologists.
It was only many centuries later that the evidence could be properly analysed: EVERYONE at the time was wrong. There are no Giants. There were no Giants. The infallible bible, the TRUE ™ WORD of YHWH got it wrong. The “Theory of Giants” proved to be incorrect. They were not the teeth of Giants that were found, but of Hippopotamus amphibius. Not the ribcages of Giants, but of a whole range of completely unrelated creatures . Creatures that actually did (and in some cases still do) exist.
This whole embarrassing misunderstanding was resolved, that is, it was resolved for everyone except people like you, medic0506, who still cling stubbornly to the “Theory of Giants”, even as this has been falsified centuries ago.
Your holy book fucked up. But that is OK. Pretty much everyone in those times failed to account for the real origins of the bones. The problem, medic0506, is that your babble never went back and corrected its mistakes. That is the real fuckup.
…
¹ The same Kind ™ as us, Homo sapiens sapiens. The babble explicitly endorses this twaddle.
126. Woozy:
I thought my previous posts, in the other thread would explain questions like this but I’ll try again.
As I stated in previous posts about this issue, we are bathed in light that is being constantly emitted from our sun. Likewise, if you’re inside a lit room, you are using artificial light that is being emitted from an energy source, thus refraction still works the same way that you think it does. So in the sense that it is emitted, meaning sent forth or discharged from an energy source, it can be said that light “moves”. I never said that light stayed totally still right where it was created, that would indeed be silly and wouldn’t even be consistent with my own views. What I said was that starlight doesn’t exist independent of its source, it doesn’t “travel” as if it has its own energy. It is dependent on its energy source to propel it outward, and how far it is propelled is dependent on the amount of energy being produced by the source. It doesn’t travel infinitely and indefinitely, totally and completely independent of any source, as many seem to believe.
Starlight, including the light from our own sun, is similar to the energy from a bomb explosion. An explosion sends out waves of energy in all directions, but that energy dissipates as you get further away from the initial blast zone, so it is with a star and its light. You can say that a star produces a continuous explosion through its nuclear reactions, emitting the light that bathes the solar system, thus shadows in space. As you get further away there is less and less light, but you can still see the original source of all that light because that’s where the highest amount of energy is centralized by the continuous nuclear reaction. If you could travel outside the solar system, you would not find shadows produced by natural light because you would not be within the range of a source where light is being produced and emitted.
Because you are using an artificial energy source to “send” a highly focused beam of light to hit a reflector which, like a mirror, essentially acts as a secondary energy source for the return trip. That is not however, analogous to our ability to view distant starlight.
It means that, rather than being dependent on traveling photons floating around through space, vision works from the inside out. Yes, light has to exist outside the eye, but whether we can see it, or not, is dependent on the structure of the eye and the neurology behind it. Any problems within that system will have an adverse effect on your ability to view anything correctly, even though what is outside the eye is perfectly normal. Vision doesn’t affect the light itself, it affects our ability to view it correctly.
As an example to illustrate what I mean, in my line of work I frequently have patients who have neurological problems, and have visual and auditory hallucinations, as a result. These people really do “see” these things, even though they obviously don’t exist in reality. You can often see the fear on their faces because many times hallucinations are accompanied by paranoia, these things or people are “out to get them”. One of the most combative patients I’ve ever had was seeing and feeling big spiders crawling up his legs and he was freaking out, trying to swat them off. He could actually see them on his legs. Now we all know that the spiders weren’t really there, they were inside his head, but I don’t think that anyone who has ever witnessed such an episode would argue that the patient wasn’t actually seeing them.
That may not seem like it has much to do with this discussion, but it does because it speaks to the power of vision, and vision as a mechanism. Obviously, that patient was exposed to exactly the same “photons” that I was exposed to, and exactly the same number, coming from exactly the same angle, at exactly the same distance away. The photons that would have been present were not different for him than they were for me, yet he was actually seeing something completely different than what I was seeing. Even though his perception was obviously flawed, it was nonetheless real to him, he was actually seeing and feeling the spiders. What we see comes from the inside out, that’s what I mean when I refer to vision as the primary mechanism.
197, medic0506,
You do realise that you have effectively contradicted yourself by changing the way you use the word ‘travel’ in that comment, compared to how you described light in your previous comments in the last thread?
What we see is entirely the product of photons hitting our retina.
However, nobody disputes that what we perceive is created by our brains, and that brains frequently make mistakes – especially under the influence of chemicals that interfere with normal brain function or because of natural defects causing similar interference, like (as in my case) migraine.
So, given that you now seem to accept the existence of photons, what do you think they are?
Such as?
Observations are not predictions. So predictions such as “Animals exist” or “Raw pork makes you sick” or “Water erodes land” or “Locusts walk on four legs” (which they don’t) or “Man, there sure are a lot of stars!” are not predictions.
Falsifiable predictions that are then actually falsified do not count (because, duh they have been found to be false). Admittedly the bible has many of these. The flood predicts that there are only several hundred species of animals, that the middle east is the most zoologically diverse place on earth containing every species of animal or fossils of thereof, and that species of animals that exist outside the middle east (say kangaroos) will be found in points between (say asia– no kangaroo or kangaroo fossils have ever been found in asia), and there would be no Wallace lines. The creation story predicts that the world is under 10,000 years old which has been falsified by every bit of geology evidence ever found anywhere and that we wouldn’t see light from stars more than 10,000 light years away.
So show us these several falsifiable yet un-falsified predictions the bible has made.
What mechanism? You haven’t explained one, just presupposed one, and pretend it has been shown to be true, without supplying the evidence (your testament isn’t evidence) to show it works as you claim it does. Same with your imaginary deity. You presuppose it, pretend it exists, and avoid showing any evidence that is certainly required by science to substantiate its existence. Therefore, science ignores your fallacious presuppositions, and goes about its business of describing reality and laughing at your pretentious attempts to claim you are scientific.
@ medic0506
Be warned, photons are not as simplistic as your peurile analogies suggest. But worse for you: I think you fail to understand how ballistics works either. Do you really want to engage us in another topic you are ignorant of?
How the Everlovingfuck can anyone be quite as fractally wrong as you are, and still remember to breathe? Do you ever actually read the total crap that you write before posting?
Let me ask you a simple question on your own simplistic level: Have you ever thrown a ball against a wall?
…
@ woozy
I cannot think of a single one. There might ever have been, but those days are long gone. No wonder creationists long for the good-ol’ jeebus-times.
medic0506 #197
And how is that? Stop dodging and give a clear answer already. Your clear tendency to always say as little as you think you can get away with is getting tiring.
Why does light change angles when it moves through another medium? Why do different colors shift in different degrees, like when a prism produces a rainbow?
Is this specific for starlight or does it apply to all light? Because the moon reflector demonstrates that there’s a delay between impulse and return signal; at the time the return signal is received, the emitting laser is off.
So, you’re saying that the delay occurs between the points at which the reflector receives the impulse and when it sends it back? Is that what you’re saying?
If so, why is the delay caused by the reflection always exactly proportional to the distance between emitter and reflector?
For that matter, how does a mirror act as a secondary energy source when it clearly doesn’t take any energy for a mirror to work?
@ Tigger_the_Wing
{John Clease voice} ” Little itty-bits of exploding projectile … shrapnel if you wish. That is the particle nature of light.
But … don’t forget this is sofistimigated theology … the explosion also creates shock waves, through compressing the air. This is called the wave nature of light.
Air, like outer space, is a fluid, so it will dampen the little itty-bits and the waves. So photons cannot travel very far. And stuff.”
[/gumby]
medic0506 @197
No, that’s incorrect. Photons are massless. When they are created they move at the speed of light (3×10^8 mps or c) and continue to move at that speed until they are absorbed by matter or are slowed down by a medium. The amount of energy involved in photon creation determines the frequency of the radiation but has nothing to do with the speed. Extremely low frequency radio (ELF, wavelengths of 10,000 to 100,000 km with corresponding frequencies of 3 to 30 Hz) travels at exactly the same speed as gamma rays (γ, wavelengths less than 10 picometers or 1×10^−12 m with frequencies above 10 exahertz or >10^19 Hz).
Electromagnetic radiation will travel as long as there’s nothing to stop it. Light doesn’t get tired or quit after going a certain distance. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (HXDF) is a photograph of photons some of which have been traveling for billions of years because, until they hit the telescope’s CCD, there was nothing to stop them.
Another concept Medic0506 is devoid of knowledge of: Black Body Radiation. Which is why steel glows red or yellow, when heated sufficiently, and even white when melted. All stars, which are fusion reactors, give off black body radiation based on the surface temperature.
medic0506,
From your comments, it would seem that you have admitted to being a young-Earth creationist.
I understand that it is therefore important to you to show why it is that we can see stars more than 10,000 light-years away without admitting the possibility that it is because the universe is older than 10,000 years old.
But you have so far failed to come up with an alternative explanation for what we actually see; and you have so little understanding of the depth and breadth of scientific studies and understanding of light that you keep making laughable errors.
Your comments here put you on the same level as a toddler who has just discovered that there is such a thing as light, and now thinks that they know everything there is to know on the subject. Scientists are laughing at your comments, because they are so naïve.
If you don’t understand why, think of a possible scenario from your own area of employment.
Would you take seriously a small toddler, who has just discovered what bandaids are for, telling you that you should fix your patients’ heart attacks with bandaids? No? Why not? Because the gulf in understanding between that toddler and reality is the same gulf you are displaying, whilst expecting to be taken seriously.
re medic:
WRONG. Photons don’t have energy, they are energy. “Energy packets” is a common term for describing photons.
No, the energy source produces an electron (or many of them. It doesn’t “propel” them (they are not solid objects like marbles), once produced a photon just goes, being of zero mass, it is required to move at the velocity of c.
wrong again, Photons travel. Period. The only bound to the distance they can travel is the distance of free space. They only stop when they “hit” something (i.e. transfer the energy of the photon to something else (usually an electron)). There is no inherent limit to the distance a photon can travel. The energy of the photon is not drained away by its movement through space, it is not a material object sliding on a material surface.
There is a valid REASON for them to THINK that, with shitons of evidence to verify it. We are always open to hearing any EVIDENCE you have to the contrary. Bring it forth. Empty assertions without evidence are given infinitesimal value. Assertions WITH evidence are highly valued (NOBEL worthy).
Mediczero, even if your Aristotelian physics was correct, and objects like the debris from that explosion needed to be pushed along until they run out of energy and then stop (of course it’s not, Galileo dealt with that 400 years ago), how does this apply to photons? Remember they’re traveling at the speed of light! The interval between the event where they’re emitted and the event where they’re absorbed is lightlike, i.e.: Zero! There is no such thing as the passage of time for a photon, no time for it to be “pushed along”. It is emitted and absorbed simultaneously from the point of view of the photon.
errata @207:
“No, the energy source produces
an electrona photon (or many of them. It doesn’t “propel” them (they are not solid objects like marbles), once produced; a photon just goes, being of zero mass, it is required to move at the velocity of c.”@ Al Dente
The same is true for shrapnel. (Though, having mass, this is not a situation we are likely to encounter indefinitely. Gravitational forces will ensure it will get Hoovered up by some celestial body prior to eternity. In theory at least, in otherwise empty space, it will just go on forever too.)
medic0506 seems to confuse ballistics in outer space with his limited, parochial knowledge of ballistics on earth.
Starlight and sunlight refract as well. Refraction, as I described it, requires that the light has a speed. That is, that light takes time to travel. That is a requirement for refraction. So, no, if light doesn’t travel than refraction does *not* work the same way as I think it does. You are obligated to explain how refraction can work without speed and you have repeatedly failed to do so.
No, you said it wasn’t something that took time to travel between points. You said that it was something that is seen instantaneously at the same moment as it was created at its source great distance away. You said that light is not something that has a finite speed. I am *not* going to let you slide away from that.
If light doesn’t have speed than the explanation of refraction is invalid and you must provide an alternative.
The not traveling on “its own energy” is also false but I’ll let Amphiox respond to that. Hint though: *nothing* travels “as if it has its own energy”. Newton’s first law of motion say “Bodies in motion stay in motion”. Light, and everything else for that matter, does not require any energy source to “travel”. You are !!325!! years behind the times, dude! (And I am *not* the first to point this out.)
Waves have finite speed.
Huh? You will not be able to see the sun from alpha centuri? Or are you saying the stars don’t cast shadows? Both are ludicrous.
So you are saying that starlight and artificial light are different things? Well, thank you for finally clearing that up.
Okay, the Jupiter parallax. The phases of the moon on Jupiter are out of synch depending upon how for away jupiter is. The was first observed by Galileo (did I say you were 325 years behind the times? make that 403). This corresponds to the calculated speed of light. But this is natural sunlight. Explain that.
But, wait a minute! Starlight and artificial light are different things? So maxwells equations and all physics of the last 150 years do not apply to natural light? So we are back to star-light and heck-light? If natural light and star-light are fundamentally different and starlight is a completely new substance new physicist in the last 150 years predicted, what precisely is your model for it?
We have observed sunlight and it behaves *exactly like artificial light with a finite speed. Does sunlight have both natural light that is instantaneous and artificial light that has a finite speed? If so then why don’t we have time-delayed double vision looking at the sun? Or at the moon? Or the moons of jupiter?
So the fuck what?
So the fuck what?
So the fuck what, and who the fuck ever said otherwise?
?!?SO THE FUCK WHAT?!?
Gee! Ya *THINK?
You know, my cat likes to lie in beams of sunlight and experience the energy of the light from the belly out. That has fuck-all to do with whether light travels at a finite speed or the mechanics of light.
I wonder if medic0506 is aware that some Muslims are eager to assure everyone that — SURPRISE — the Qur’an is chock-full of scientific facts that the Prophet could not have possibly known unless the Angel Jibra’il had told them to him. The examples I’ve seen are all crap; but it would be enlightening if he were to take a look at some of these and compare them with the Bible’s performance in this regard for us, just for fun.
***Thread Derail Alert***
Tigger_the_Wing, Back home =^_^=
Do you indeed live on the south coast of Ireland? Me, too! :)
Also, sorry to hear about the migraine.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge @208
Oh no, now you’ve done it. You’ve gone all quantum on mediczero’s dumb ass. Xe doesn’t even understand Newtonian physics, let alone any physics dating after 1900.
re “refraction” by medic0506@197:
Nice try, you wrote about your concept of Light, but you did not address the question of “refraction” at all. Refraction is the change in the angle of travel of a photon when it enters a different medium. Why does that happen? That is the question about “Please explain refraction, medic.” You did not do that, you went off on a tangent. Try again.
I see how this works…You people can’t engage or win based on argumentation and evidence so you start looking for personally identifying information with which to try and discredit that person. You don’t even mind posting information that you say is about that person, but is untrue. I would never dream of trying to find personal information on some person who posts things I don’t like on an internet message board. Only a warped and demented individual would stoop to that kind of tactic, and spread false information about a poster, to other people. You’ve taken this far beyond what any rational person would do and made it personal. Those of you who weren’t involved are guilty by association. By continuing to associate with that kind of behavior, you effectively endorse and enable it. I have no desire to be associated with such demented individuals, in any way shape or form. When you preach “free thought”, but really practice censorship by any means that you can find available, clearly you are not capable of rational discourse.
So is this what happens when you exercise free thought that doesn’t agree with what the free thinkers think?? Is this the moral code that atheists choose when left to make up their own??
Nah, it isn’t the norm for atheists, it’s unique to small groups such as this one. People like you give atheists a bad name, and fully explains why this blog has such a bad reputation, even among atheists and evolutionists.
If PZ had a pair, and some scruples, he would immediately ban anyone engaged in such activity, but it’s his blog and his credibility. To each his own.
Peace out.
***Thread Derail Response***
David Chapman,
I do indeed! If you’d like to make contact, my electronic mailbox is my ‘nym (with all capitals reduced to lower case) at the hotmail place.
The migraines were pretty horrible, and landed me in hospital frequently until, on my GP’s orders, I started taking migraine meds prophylactically; I now take one Migraleve pink morning and evening, and get, on average, one migraine a month instead of three or more a week.
medic0506 @215
Translation: You guys know too much and rebut my bullshit too well so I’ll pretend you’re being mean to me.
medic0506 was saying in another thread that he has read both sides of the creation/evolution issue, without, of course, saying what he has read from the pro-evolution side. He just mentions “scholarly articles from secular research journals”. Erm, there are no scholarly articles on the creationism issue, are there? I mean the kook squad doesn’t publish, and the serious scientists don’t take creationism seriously enough to address it in a scholarly research journal.
So I have been reading my favorite Ken Ham book for the 8 or 9th time, and I can tell you that he seems to address science and scholarly articles, with references and all, and to refute them neatly … on first reading. But a careful, scholarly reading of the book, without even going to the sources that he quotes from, shows cherry-picking, quote-mining and blatant distortion. And a good many of the references are to other creationist articles, not to serious science on the issue. Reading the book gives the impression that evolution and the secular sciences have been addressed seriously and refuted by scholars, often by admissions of their own proponents, but it’s all crock.
Someone like medic0506 will be impressed, of course, and may even go look up an article and read it with creationist eyes. It’s a common-enough pattern. It happens in all conspiracy theories. They get persuaded by the rhetoric, and God help us all. But to quote medic0506 himself, “Proof and persuasion are two different things.”
The projection is strong in this one.
=======
In my Ken Ham book, I am at the Ice Age part. The plants that survived the year in salt water, and the ice age, are re-rooting and growing, and pumping large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This greenhouse effect is ending the ice age after its hundreds of years. Peat bogs, which are exceptionally good at putting carbon dioxide into the air, are a large factor in the greenhouse process, and grow at the edge of glaciers. There are some verses in Job that mention ice, proving that the ice age set in suddenly, snap-freezing the mammoths.
For medic0506, let me explain that any plants at all surviving the flood would have been a miracle, peat plants especially. Plants don’t put CO2 into the air, they take it out, with peat bogs being good at sequestering, but very, very slow. Peat bogs grow all over the world. The ice ages took many thousands of years to show the effects we see. The mammoths were not snap-frozen, and would not have had time to build up in population after getting off the ark. The verses in Job just mention ice, as in winter, and say nothing about speed at all, as quoted by Ham, but to him that is proof.
Proof and persuasion are indeed two different things.
Science doesn’t deal in proof, but in evidence. The cranks get persuaded, and believe that they have proof.
re woozy@211:
woozy, don’t ya SEE? medic was talking about “the eye being the primary source for vision” Light is just the incidental mechanism that the eye responds to. Vision is our brain’s reaction to the light hitting our eyes. That’s what I finally got from rereading medic’s posting:
Vision of reality requires the eye, vision without the eye is just an hallucination, not real at all.
true enough, I haven’t seen a single note here disputing that concept. We are asking about Light hitting that “primary source of vision”.
medic, you got the eyes->vision thing right, but you still have the nature of light wrong. Tell us the mistakes we are making in our description of light. Eyes are just the detector we use to measure the effects of light on other things. Leave eyes out of it, tell us about light.
I am simply stunned that anyone can be this stoooopid.
Then, about the Apollo laser reflectors on the moon:
Oh for feck’s sake. This isn’t weapons grade stoooooopidy, this is Wrap Drive Stoooopity.
Broadly summarizing the above, the fruitcake hasn’t a clew what a shadow is, and apparently thinks “artificial” light is not the same as starlight. He’s also confused about mirrors (and by extension, other reflective surfaces, such as a still lake), and reflection itself. Finally, he thinks light has a “range” (which does sort-of tie-in with his previous nonsense about “brightness”), and seems to think the Sun cannot be seen outside the Solar System. (His assertion actually implies no star can be seen outside the Solar System…)
… Ah. Quelle surprise. He’s still going, huh?
Speaking of, re Ssport/Guzman: I’d briefly wondered the same. Writing level was similar, some of the same general ‘tactical’ (quotes, as I use the term, generally, in such cases, with bemusement) approach. I also recall catching him and seeing him caught trying rhetorically to ‘replay’ some of his opponents’ stuff on occasion, too, similar to the cargo culting Amphiox noticed earlier. Mebbe, mind, it’s all pretty standard for creos, and fringe/conspiracy/pseudoscience types in general, but anyway…
… anyway, brief apologies I haven’t been around. It’s a sunny, beautiful weekend, so, y’know, tennis with kids. Besides cleaning (a house you’re not really in that much in the weekends in winter, it gets, umm, interesting) attending to Mother’s Day rituals, pre-planting gardening, so on…
… anyway, what actually sent me briefly back in here: last I’d been around, there’d been some pretty silly stuff from our font o’ fallacies on mammalian evolution, and this popped up in my browser, just now:
… whale dissection….
(Funny story, if you’ve been following. Yes, a dead blue whale is kinda a nice thing to have around, for museums; less thrilling, if you’re a small fishing village, and you’ve no facilities to get rid of it, and children from the village (and, I dunno, rumours were: also some none-too-bright not-quite-children) are actually playing on the thing, when it’s in the ‘dangerously bloated and may collapse or suddenly pop’ stage… anyway…)
… anyway, there’s mention in the dissection description herein of whales’ vestigial hind limbs. Which yes, many of them do have.
Got to thinking, I might drop this in for the reading audience: the plodding one’s naive prose about the mammalian traits around which we classify notwithstanding, yes, whales are fitted into mammals, and specifically the placental mammals; for it ain’t just about obvious stuff like fur or no fur. And yes, whales do, indeed, have these odd little bones about where you’d find a pelvic girdle and hind limbs on things that still have some use for those. Interesting, that. But, I dunno, perhaps the creos would like to argue these are for ballast or something…
… anyway, back in the real world, I believe this puts us at a score of: evolution five billion something, creation still… ummm (counts on fingers), let’s see, zero, plus zero… oh, look, another zero…
(/Right. So. Still at five billion something to zero. As you were.)
@ medic0506
You came to a public forum to have an open debate. You openly and publicly posted information about yourself on the internet. If you have a case against anyone here state it openly. What underhand tactics did they employ? You are angry for people reading what you publicly shared to the whole fucking internet? Or are you just trying to pretend at moral superiority as you cut your losses and run away.
Who’s doing that? I seem to have missed it.
After a quick scan, the closest I can find is NateHevens asking you whether you were known by another ‘nym at another board. Of course, that was asking, not asserting, and it was about another ‘nym, not any personal identifying information. Hardly anything to get upset about.
If someone has really revealed personal information about you, you may well have a genuine complaint, so please point it out. What was revealed, who did it and where? Post a link to it.
Refraction relying upon light having a finite speed isn’t an argument? Genome analysis isn’t evidence? History and philosophy of science isn’t argument? Newtonian, Relativity, quantum and energy physics, and comparative and molecular biology isn’t argument and evidence?
When it was found out that it was untrue that you like scuba, we retracted that discrediting and unfair bit of slander.
Medic0506 lying and bullshitting:
You have a misconception going on. This isn’t a philosophical debate, where your testament is all you have. This is a scientific argument, which requires you to produce evidence, not argumentation, to back up your claims. Philosophy can’t refute science, any more than theology or religion can. Only more evidence based science can refute the present day accepted theories of science. You came to this unprepared for what you got into. Your complaints are dismissed as whinging and whining of somebody losing big time.
@ LykeX
Woah! Now that is really MEAN! Actually expecting medic0506 to post evidence of anything, at all, ever … HAVE YOU NO SCRUPLES???
[/snark]
Medic0506: In #215, you make an accusation that people are trying to disclose personal information about you.
That is a bannable offense here, and yes, people have been banned over it; I also personally redact any attempt to post contact information about anyone. It is a serious offense. Yet scanning through the entire thread, I see no comments from anyone trying to do that. In fact, mostly what I see is argumentation and evidence (especially after your comment at #197, which is utterly bugfuck nuts). We don’t need to get proof that you kick puppies to discredit you, really — your understanding of the physics of light is agonizingly stupid.
Either cite specific cases of your privacy being invaded, or shut the fuck up about it. You’re clearly just making up excuses to run away.
I figured Mediczero would find some reason to flounce when he saw how out unprepared he was to deal with…you know…facts! But I have to say, this excuse is truly pathetic.
Well, I’ve really enjoyed reading the responses to his idiocy, and while he’s incapable of learning anything, I’m not. So: Thanks, everybody!
1900 BCE or 1900 kya?
I ASSUME Medic0506 is bearing false witness about people looking up their DDO account and seeing what personal information was posted there. IE the information they posted about themselves. And it eventually lead to the realization that the “Medic0506” profile people were pulling information on wasn’t this doofus and an apology.
Possibly they’re also talking about the couple of debates that were linked as being done by this Medic0506 including one where they were transphobic. Of course since Medic0506 talked about DDO and coming from DDO in their earliest posts, and even claimed they’d admit to the obvious fact they know nothing about light and photons if we passed their challenge which demonstrated they knew nothing about light and photons this recent posting is complete bullshit.
Medic as long as you’re more interested in “Winning” the debate than anything else you won’t learn anything and you won’t win this debate. This is incredibly stupid and obvious chaff, yet another example of the way you do everything in your power to never make a substantive claim on anything ever. This is good if you want to win a debate as you never have to be shown wrong, but it’s craven, intellectually cowardly, and proves you have no desire to actually learn.
PZ, I think he flounced because of my comment @21. I had googled his ‘nym, and basically told him that he really should go back and learn some science because he was embarrassing himself, and that his other posts on the Internet were not that hard to find.
Unfortunately it appears there is another medic0506 out there, and I may have pointed to someone else’s posts in error.
I didn’t do any deep research to find out who he was, or to reveal his identity. It was Google 101. Unfortunately I assumed his ‘nym was unique enough to rule out other users. blf was the one who realized the ‘nym was not unique.
I apologize if I crossed the line.
In my opinion, it were those wild and savage Giants that finally got to him.
re medic0506 @197:
Okay… so, is this story an implication that Scientists were hallucinating all their measurements of the behavior of Light? If so, then explain the follow-up question: How did they all hallucinate exactly the same stuff? Have you seen two patients hallucinate exactly the same image at the exact same time? The fact that there are so many independent scientists reporting exactly the same hallucinations is our reason for dismissing the hallucination theory, that they are reporting actual events, OUTSIDE of their brains.
Yes, because accusing someone of being a scuba diver is such damnable offensive slander.
re @230:
I’d like to pile on:
I can see medic…’s point: that we were trying to discredit him by pointing at that other medic… on DDO and laughing at the DDO “medic…” (which did happen here), and transferring it over here to make everyone here just dismiss anything by medic without even reading all his arguments (doubtful that actually took place). He just got carried away by accusing us of also posting personal info about him (which never happened here).
medic, I do not care anything about that DDO person, at all. EVERYTHING about my opinion of you is based solely on what you write on this blogspace. Don’t runaway, defend your writings here. Attack my arguments.
Greetings,
I’m honoured, and humbled, that a response to one of my posts in the earlier discussion has inspired a new discussion at Pharyngula.
Thank you, Professor Myers!
Others have answered Medic0506 but, as the – dare I say? – inspiration for this thread, I am duty-bound to give my own answer.
The above answer has to be read in the context of his most recent reply in this thread (197):
Although he appears to accept the existence of light, per se, he is still confusing brightness and Aristotelian concepts regarding kinetic energy.
Firstly, there are two types of “brightness” used in astronomy:
1) Apparent magnitude – this is how bright a stellar object appears to the naked eye;
2) Absolute magnitude – this is actually how bright the stellar object would appear if it were at a specific distance of 10 parsecs or 32.6 light years (1 parsec is 3.26 light years).
For all intents and purposes the brightness to which you’re referring is the first – apparent magnitude.
For humans, the limit of the naked eye is an apparent magnitude of -6.5. Anything less than this apparent magnitude is “invisible” to human eyes – without some form of artifical enhancement (telescopes, binoculars, etc).
This, however, has nothing to do with actually how bright is the stellar object.
A star that appears brighter than another may appear so only because it is closer to us – the farther star may in fact be the brighter (absolute magnitude) but, due to distance, appears dimmer (apparent magnitude).
There are basically two ways to improve our ability to see:
1) Increase aperture (in life-forms with sight, the diameter of the pupil);
2) Increase photo-receptors (in life-forms with sight, the number of rods (mono-chromatic) and/or cones (chromatic).
(A third option is, of course, combining both.)
Since the human eye is limited in what it can do with regard to the diameter of the pupil and we can’t increase the retina’s rods and cones, the only way we can improve our sight is to use a telescope, binoculars, etc, with a greater aperture to gather more light than can our eyes.
(Birds of prey, in contrast, use the second method – they have far more photo-receptors than humans, allowing them to see things in greater detail.)
This is how telescopes, etc, increase our ability to see stellar objects and other things at a distance – gathering more light enabling us to see greater detail.
The wider aperture of the telescope allows more light (photons) from the stellar object to be gathered and focussed into our eyes.
Imagine that you’re looking at a star with the naked eye – you see a small disc of light where the disc is “filled-in” with photons from the star.
If, as you say, a telescope only “magnifies” the disc, then this would mean that the diameter of the disc is increased – but there would only be the same number of photons “filling-in” the disc. As they spread out – through the diameter being increased – what would happen?
If your idea were correct, we would see gaps in the star’s disc between the photon’s our eyes see.
This is not what we observe!
The reason we don’t is because the telescope gathers more photons due to the larger aperture – allowing us to see more detail in the star’s disc. Thus there are no “gaps” in the star’s disc.
Secondly, and more importantly, you’re still using Aristotelian physics – quite possibly as part of a Thomistic theological worldview.
I’ve already addressed this error in a later post in the previous discussion (788):
And Thomism is similarly wrong.
Kindest regards,
James
Just an etiquette question, with no bearing on Medic’s made-up offense:
On another thread I referred to the genocidal maniac colnago80 by the ‘nym under which he was banned from the old site, slc1. Was that crossing the line?
Here we see again medico trying to twist meanings around to strengthen his ludicrously weak arguments.
Most honest people do not consider hallucinating to equate to “seeing” or “feeling”.
The man described here was IMAGINING seeing and feeling something that was not real, not actually seeing or feeling it.
Of course this argument is the same as Last Thursdayism. Everything any of us experience could all be a personal hallucination, and we are all just brains in a vat, or Boltzman Brains in some gas cloud somewhere.
This of course includes medico admitting that his belief in his god is also just as likely to be a hallucination as everything else.
But of course even here vision is NOT primary. Vision is SECONDARY, in this case, to thought.
215 medic0506
– This the saddest, most childish, spoiled, arrogant whining I have heard since… I can’t even remember. No one was trying to discredit you. No one NEEDED to. You did that yourself by spouting endless trails of nonsense, backing nothing up in any meaningful sense, pretending your “responses” settled issues, while offering nothing in terms of actual explanation, imposing a format on an existing blog (this is NOT a “debate” forum), there is no contest to “win” (it supposed to be a discussion, which requires actual comprehension of interactions, in which you have no interest due to preconceived and intransigently held ideas), imposing a methodology contrary to anything ever used here (this ridiculous and insanely repetitive step-by-step non-responding to every post, rather than reading through and addressing the issues as they stand at any given time), insisting on redefining virtually all the concepts in use here in toto without attempting to understand anything addressed to you, creating an impenetrable wall of nonsense without any meaningful explanation and complaining that no one is penetrating it, while failing to reply to current questions, quoting others completely out of context to your own ends and their detriment… etc…
– As to looking for identifying information… if what you were doing and why had made ANY sense, and if you had appeared to be doing anything other than creating a mountain of bafflegab “for the win,” continuing in the stated hope of banishment for proof of your persecution and righteousness, and misquoting and endlessly restating your previous statements no one would have wondered what your motivations were, and would not have felt the need to figure out if your actions tended on this direction. I have heard virtually everyone on this forum admit to the limitations of their understanding at one time or another, regardless of the years of education, sweat and discipline… and yet you came in with ideas pulled out of your nose and expect to be viewed as unassailable. Who wouldn’t want to know what kind of a person would do this? Plus, the “personal” nature of what was sought is massively overstated by you, it was a question of your motivations in general. You apparently have NO idea of the depth of what can be found on the net if malice is the intent, and NONE of that was done here. And when the information regarding your actions turned out to be incorrect or was doubtful, it was recanted.
Again, you really have no clue what “personal information” is on the net, do you?
After the accusations and misquotes you have presented, you say this? This is the effect your faith has on you?
The Christian persecution complex in action. It’s as though you’d been chained and thrown to the lions. I will tell you this, I have been informed of my the stupidity of my actions in firmer and more concise terms than this by people who loved me, and been thankful for it. At no point – NOT ONCE – have you noticed how much time and effort went into attempts to engage you in some meaningful way.
No. This is what happens when you continue to talk with your fingers in your ears.,
A pair. This from a person unwilling to consider their own limits. This from a person who hides behind storms of undigested terminology. This from a person who hasn’t got the courage or the discipline to understand what he’s arguing against. This from a person who expects respect without attempting to earn it. This from a person who does not care enough about his own positions to exert any form of discipline in defending it. This from a person who cries for his persecution when only words have been exchanged.
Pharisee.
A scuba diver is a creature whose kind was explicitly created to creep on the ground but which, through the use of unnatural and unholy mechanisms and materials, chooses to swim in the sea, in direct mockery of the one who made him.
It is an abomination unto the Lord!
No wonder poor medico was offended!
And the dishonest walk-back continues apace.
Let us not forget where the starlight thing began – with medico’s lame attempts to deny the evidence for an old universe as demonstrated by the light from distant objects being observable here on earth.
ALL that requires is that light moves at a speed that is less than infinite. It does not require the light to “travel with its own energy”, it does not require light to “exist independent of its source”, it does not even require that the speed be constant! It simply requires the light to MOVE.
IF light MOVES, regardless how how it got its energy, irrespective of what the source is, irrelevant of what our eyes do to it after it gets to them, unrelated to how our brain calculates/interprets the pattern of what the eyes convey to it, if light MOVES, then the distant objects from which the light came from are OLD, and the universe that contains them is also OLD.
Thank you, medico, for finally, FINALLY, admitting that the astronomical evidence points to an OLD universe.
Medic0506
– One more thing… Have you noticed, even in the last few comments, that people are still addressing, responding to, and trying to engage your ideas?
– IE, after all this crap, still acting as though you are a person, and even given your misdirections, misquotes, misrepresentations and accusations, not claiming that you are persecuting anyone?
– If you want to be hated in order to have a story to tell, you could do better.
More lies and bullshit by Medic0506
Ah, the old misunderstanding of what a “free thinker” is. The term is Freethinker, and at one time it meant an agnostic/atheist, but the present term is a little different:
For empiricism read evidence based.
Actually, I think what stung his ears was to be called homophobic. I’m pretty sure it was him however, because the web page in question is for issues in the same city he gives as his location in DDO.
Still, it was irrelevant to the debate. It was more of an observation of his creationist worldview, but was unnecessary.
Greetings,
I appear to have missed a end blockquote and and start blockquote in the last post, so a couple of paragraphs appear together when, in fact, they are from separate posts by medic0506.
Apologies to all concerned.
Kindest regards,
James
So.
Why shine a light to the moon and it bounces back.
Our theory:
— the light takes 1.28 seconds to go to the moon.
— it reflects off a mirror.
— it takes 1.28 seconds to return.
— we observe it 2.56 seconds after we sent it.
Medic0’s theory:
— the light instantaneously goes to the mirror.
— the mirror builds up energy to return the light. This takes 2.56 seconds.
— the light instantaneously returns to the earth.
— we observe it 2.56 seconds after we sent it.
So, we can verify which of these theories by having an astronaut or a lunar rover go to the mirror and see what it does. Does light hit and bounce off immediately or does the light hit, get absorbed, and emit 2.56 seconds later? Would you put money on this, medic0?
Then there is that parallax of jupiter. Jupiter is sometimes close (relatively) to the earth. Jupiter is sometimes far from the earth. But Jupiter is always (within negligible differences) the same distance from the sun. Thus the time it takes for the sunlight to build up and bounce off the moons of Jupiter will always be the same. Thus the time delay for observing the phases of the moon will always be off by the same amount of time. They are not.
Then there is the earth itself. It’s sitting here in sunlight. This sun light will be bounced off the earth eventually. So we should be able to watch and measure how much energy the earth builds up and uses when it shoots off the reflected light.
=====
Amphiox:
Assuming there *is* an argument. He seems to be saying “vision happens” to which … well, cats curling in the sun happens too. It’s just …. not relevant.
Threadrupt after #130…
@consciousnessrazor, #9:
I used to have that problem. You’re on 10, all the way up, all the way up…Where can you go from there? Nowhere. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff…Eleven. Mine goes to 11.
@medic0506
That would be logically absurd, trying to use the stamped “made in taiwan” on some pieces, “made in Korea” on others, and “creation process patent #X” on still others to try to find out something about how a computer was made! How ridiculous!
That’s why I contend that the patent stamps clearly visible on our cell walls are the only concrete proof of creation that we need.
Which is why, once we had the bible, it was so easy to go about cloning life, designing synthetic life, and creating whole baby universes – and all without doing a lick of science! I can see now how the tests we’ve done in using the text of the bible to recreate the miracles that turn sticks to snakes and cause food to fall from the sky and cause adult fish carcasses to appear fully formed from other adult fish carcasses clearly validates the bible as the “encrypted file” that shows how everything is created! Me, I’m going to use the knowledge in the bible to magically create a cute octopus butt-plug cozy. But not of mixed fibers, of course! One wouldn’t want one’s butt plug to wear mixed fibers.
Exactly. If humans were meant to fly, we’d be born with wings. Obviously the science of aerodynamics is misguided and false.
What? But you just said in your analogy that you find so apt:
If ANY answer it is possible to propose would be logically absurd, we should keep on looking for materialistic answers?
How can you maintain that this analogy is apt and that you believe we should keep looking for materialistic answers…unless you believe wasting money is a good thing and/or keeping scientists busy unproductively coming up with bullshit is a net positive?
I don’t have to falsely turn anything into anything. You’ve already said any answer it is possible to propose is logically absurd. You can claim you want people to do the logically absurd (and we would believe you, and respect the fact that you’re leading the way) but don’t be surprised when we decline.
<blockquote Christians believe that scientific knowledge can only lead us closer to God, so no Christian is going to say that we should stop the scientific pursuit of knowledge.
No. We’ll just get some (too many!) christians saying that government should not support research, however promising the data and hypothesis testing, that leads to conclusions other than “god did it”. We’ve seen it over and over again. So, yeah, stop the scientific pursuit of knowledge? No. Of course not. A True Christian™ would never dream of such a thing…because a True Christian™ would never dream of an answer other than god did it. Stopping all scientific pursuits of knowledge that might lead to answers other than “god did it”? Sure. That too many christians would do.
Right. And we don’t. What we claim is that since science cannot address or rule out non-existent causes, since it deals only in the extant, we won’t bother wasting time on the non-existent causes. Moreover, we also argue that although the explanation doesn’t *have* to relate to causes and forces and laws that exist within the universe, every time humans have successfully determined a cause for a phenomenon, it has turned out to relate to causes and forces and laws that exist within the universe.
This important set of Bayesian priors leads us to believe that it is irrational to *expect* any future satisfactory explanation to confirm a non-existent cause, even if we can’t rule out infinite strings of immaterial leprechauns materially pulling massive bodies together to simulate a consistent gravity on a lark.
Demeisen @ 143 & snoof @145:
Ah, yes. The “Theodore John ‘Ted’ Kaczynski proves Extramission Theory” school of thought. You can see how utterly convincing it is. With your eyes. If they’re still extramitting after you open Ted’s package.
I think medic0506 believes that the true reality lies within. This is where born again Christians have their subjective religious experiences, and that is what counts. This is why he used the argument of the hallucinations, treating them as real even though he couldn’t see it. Since it is subjective scientists dismiss it, therefore science is wrong.
Since reality lies within, the physics of light is irrelevant. Their eyes enable the soul to peer out, and their souls perceive stars as they are, not as they were when the light left them.
Basically, he and others like him think we’re all Muggles, unaware of the magic around us.
Medico’s “vision is primary” thing has been going on for some time, and he has always been cagey about describing it in more detail.
Now that he has finally slipped up and dropped a reference to hallucinations, we can clearly see why.
IF “vision is primary” per medico’s (dishonest) definition of the phrase, then there is no such thing as empirical evidence. All occurs in our brains. The same realworld phenomenon can be perceived in completely different ways by different people. No observation made by anyone can be used as an argument about reality, because after all it is all in his or her brain (or eyes).
And yet!
How many times has medico tried to claim that his own ideas were based on EMPIRICAL evidence? How many times has he pretended that evolution and common descent did not have empirical evidence to support it?
So, on the one hand, when attacking evolution and common descent, he demands empirical evidence. When attacking the age of the universe, he demands empirical evidence. And when such empirical evidence is given to him, he dismisses it with an argument that basically boils down to “empirical evidence does not exist”.
Breathtaking hypocrisy.
Nope. You only perceive medic0506 took your breath.
Debating science when you think mirrors are a fucking ‘sort of’ energy source?
Forget about bringing a knife to a gunfight, this is someone bringing a pacifier to a nuclear arms race.
Surely, if the laser light travels instantaneously, and the delay is caused by the mirror’s “charging” time, we can prove it without even leaving Earth. Just put a mirror across the beam to focus at a nearby point, and send a pulse. If the pulse reaches the nearby point 2.56 seconds later, we know that the mirror caused the delay; if it appears virtually instantaneously, then somebody needs to work on their theory…
Or the little gobs of soldering material found all over the motherboards. Or the tiny screw holes and the matching screws, or the cable connectors and matching cables, or all the little labels and pictograms for ports, like “i/o”, “usb”, “keyboard”, “monitor”. Or the odd holes in weird places in the case where a hole has no functional consequence to the computer, but through which a screwdriver could be passed to affix a screw to a component sitting on the other side that could not be reached by any other way (that is a piece of empirical evidence for design and manufacture and no equivalent exists in any living organism)…
It seems that medico knows as much about how computers are assembled as he does about the nature of light.
He also appears to know about as much about privacy and personal information on the internet as he does about the nature of light….
Oh, for the love of mud. I googled “medic0506”, and got a home city on the first results page, without even tapping the link. I did go there, and there was the right profession, voluntarily given, and a damned dumb question that showed the trademark lack of thought. This is not secret info, it was not hard to find. Posting it here would not be a crime.
medic0506, you have accused us all of a serious crime. It was not any sort of criminal act, and most of us had nothing to do with the action, non-criminal as it was. You owe us all a sincere apology. Legal action against you is being considered. False accusations can be serious matters.
I am goddamned serious, medic0506. If you want post another thing here it, it had best start with an apology. You should come back here just to apologize, whether you post anything else here again or not.
====
Back to the Bible: The first prediction, by God himself, turned up false. “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Adam ate it, Adam lived another 930 years.
Incidentally, Adam had no knowledge of good and evil, so had no idea that disobeying would be bad. God shouldn’t have punished him, but the prediction was there.
The Genesis account describes the setting for Eden, listing lands and river in the present tense. Some of the names are of places that still exist. But Ken Ham, that great creation scientist, says that the flood utterly destroyed the pre-flood world, geology and features.
The thing I found most frustrating about mediczero was hir insistence that xe had studied evolution and physics extensively by reading scientific journals while making it plain xe didn’t have a clue about what modern biology says about evolution or what modern physics says about light and optics.
2Peter 3:8
Check mate, athiest!
I think that anyone who came to the conclusion that the medic0506 on here was the same as the medic0506 on debate.org was led there by medic0506. Anyone who mentioned his job as a paramedic was given that information here. His flounce is exactly the same as the toddler-whine “I hate you! It’s all your fault!” after they’ve failed to win an argument about reality with a whole load of adults who are now laughing at them for being so cute, and so spectacularly wrong.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thunderdome:
258, medic0506
430, medic0506
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Old thread:
530, medic0506
603, medic0506
1224, medic0506
~~~~~~~~~~~~
This thread:
197, medic0506
Genesis 3
Checkmate, non-followers of the serpent.
Medic said earlier that a lot of what was written in the Bible is metaphorical, that one has to understand that most of the Bible was written using “sayings” (as in “raining cats and dogs” is just a “saying”). So God was just telling Adam, “If you disobey my command, to not eat the fruit of this tree, you will die. Period!” But Adam was so perfectly formed that it took a long long time for him to actually die of old age. God did not say “…die instantly”, did not tell what he would die of. So the Bible has no lies; we, the readers, just have to know which parts are metaphors and which parts are literal. Medic seems to know which are which. Tell us medic, where did you learn such knowledge, we’ve been looking all over for it. Still can’t find it. Help us find it.
Tigger #26
You are on a roll.
262, twas brillig, I was raised Roman Catholic, but went to a non-Catholic secondary school. So I went with a friend to a summer school at a convent every year. The nuns were big on which parts were to be taken literally (the New Testament and all prophecies about Jesus from the OT), and which metaphorically; basically, the latter was anything that appeared to contradict reality in such a way that it couldn’t be hand-waved away. So, the ‘begats’ which were so important to YECs? They weren’t supposed to be an un-broken family tree, just the most important people in the lineage. So they could easily be made to span hundreds of thousands of years of humanity. Those extra-ordinary lifespans? Were because someone had thought that ‘months’ were ‘years’. As for creation, Genesis obviously took place over billions of years. ‘Days’ could be as long as necessary for the bible to fit reality (in so far as it could be made to fit, of course).
When you have a version of Christianity that worships the Trinity and venerates the saints, you don’t need to worship the book. There’s quite enough to keep your attention without it! Besides, through most of history Roman Catholic laity weren’t encouraged (to say the least) to have any contact with the bible except through the priest, who could ‘interpret’ it for them.
Which was as close as anyone in the church was ever going to get to saying that the book is bunkum, and the only way to keep it in any way relevant is not to take any of it literally. Metaphors can always be twisted to fit the facts; there is no way to fit Genesis into an ancient universe, or reconcile it with the variety and facts of life on this planet, if any part of it is taken literally.
And the nuns would point to the ever-splintering non-Catholic Christian sects and explain that it was because the poor people had no idea how to read the bible, being un-guided by priests, so were being led astray by the devil.
I have more respect for people who say the whole thing is metaphor, but the mind of God is so far beyond us that we have yet to discern the true meaning behind it, than for people who claim that some bits are fact and others are metaphor and won’t say which up front. Heck, even the people who say the whole thing is literally true, contradictions and all, have more integrity – even if it does mean that they have to hide away from reality and create their own to fit with the book.
Wasn’t #215 a flounce?
Thank you, Chigau; I was really angry when he made those false accusations of cyber-stalking at 215. The false accusations of sock-puppetry had been bad enough, but that?! And what is it with his baseless accusations of censorship? Where?!
His DDO profile is set to public – anyone can read anything he has posted to it. No-one has tried to find out his real name, or address, or any contact details. All the information about him that has been posted here is public knowledge and most of it was posted by him!
I would definitely support a motion to sue him for defamation if he hadn’t cannily failed to name any names – I’m not sure that it is actionable as it is, but then I’m not a lawyer, let alone in the USA.
chigau (違う) @265
Probably so, since xe hasn’t been back in almost six hours.
Could be. But probably xe finally figured out xe had misjudged that xis presuppositional theological musing (testament) was being dismissed, and that we were clamoring for the one item xe could not supply, real third party evidence to back up xis claims. That it took xim days to figure that out is a testament to his utter inability to read, and xis overweening self-confidence in xis inane arguments sounding reasonable….
re Tigger_the_Wing, Back home =^_^= @264:
Yes, I too, was raised Catholic, and was often taught that the particular section under discussion (at the time) was just metaphorical, Never heard them claim which parts were actual facts (other than most of the New Testament, excepting Jesus’ parables as obviously fables)
In fact, that is what I remember from CCD, New Testament is historical fact, Old Testament is metaphors; Jesus came to tell us how to rewrite the Bible; that’s why we kept the old testament as just “background material”, for the New Testament. All that fall-der-awl led me to the conclusion that the whole Bible is metaphor, with occasional stories about ethics that can be educational, similar to Aesop’s Fables. To read it as factual history is a big mistake (Old and New Testament included). Even Jefferson approached the Bible that way, trying to publish his own version with all the “miracles” edited out, leaving in only what Jesus said, and actually what actions are described. Never got published; still working on it when he passed away. (to speak to God directly, the priests tell us). Nice you shared your history with us, but where did medic go? Medic, is that the same experience that told you which parts are metaphors?
Other websites you use with same username =/= Personally identifying information
No one cares about your personally identifying information. You are not that interesting. Whatever credentials we can confirm you having and other stupid shit we can determine that you have said, though, might add to our amusement.
Serious Business. How have you defamed you more, with information we have found elsewhere, than you have defamed yourself here,with your own idiotic words?
Guilt by association is something you think should be a thing? Wow. One someone says “guilt by association” it is usually to MOCK someone for using “guilt by association” accusations. Because it is illogical bullshit.
You know, if you spent more time actually explaining what exactly you were taking offense to, it would make your self-righteous outraged rant a little more effective.
Overdramatic much?
What is this thing that is “unique to small groups?” And how exactly do we give atheists a bad name? Our “bad reputation” is from being rude, being feminist, being non-accomodationist, and being “too political”. What, exactly, is your gripe? You weren’t outed. You weren’t libeled. You were just mocked. Whether some of that mockery might not have been well aimed, that is up for you to argue and make the case for. Not to just stomp your feet and play the victim.
“Such activity” remains to be vague and unspecified.
Blf’s comment at 35 (which blf later wanted to withdraw a few comments later, btw) is the closest I can see to the shit that our creationist cupcake is whining about.
Here:
Elsewhere on another website, blf found and was cautiously only willing to mention over here:
1. Major
2. Courses in that major
3. That this medic0506 was a diver.
They intentionally left out institution name, respecting privacy even though this was just found by fucking googling the fucking username. And they even acknowledged that this might not be the right person and withdrew the comment for that reason, just a few comments later.
medic0506 went from ignorant halfwit to ignorant, self-righteous halfwit. But whatever. If that is the excuse he needed to bravely run away, let him have it.
In the last couple of hours, he’s removed ‘About Me’, ‘Activities’, and ‘Education’.
(The Wayback Machine remembers, of course.)
He’s also apparently moved to Hawaii, presumably to study innovative telescope physics.
Wow. I guess the only thing he actually learned in this interchange is something about how the Internet works.
Meh. I don’t care. I have a moon halo to look at.
So basically mediczero’s flounce amounts to “You’re all being meanies!!!” ???
Suggestion for the medic, don’t “debate” science with the scientifically literate.
I’m a scientist, and I won’t let you get away with an etymological fallacy (click here to learn what this means!) about the English language (and not all that many others).
Yeeeees, science comes from the Latin word for “knowledge” (scientia), and that’s what it first meant when it began to show up in the English language. But, in a process that is actually pretty similar to evolution, the meanings of words change. Nowadays, science is the technical term for a process of which knowledge is the result; science is a method – the method that allows you to answer the question “if I were wrong, how would I know?” all the way down.
Speaking of evolution, that originally meant “unwrapping”, “rolling out”, “unfolding”. When that word first began to be used as a technical term, it was used for the development of an embryo, which was thought to be the mere growth and unfolding of a completely formed body inside a sperm cell. When embryology became a science, this idea quickly turned out to be bunk, and the term stopped being applied to ontogeny – but it came to be used for similar predictable processes, like stellar evolution. Lamarckists and/or similar people believed that biodiversity came from a predictable process, so they used the same word.
Darwin resisted it a long time and wrote of transformation instead. Alas, that was to no avail; the term evolution was too deeply entrenched to be abandoned, even though the process it describes nowadays is by no means predictable, let alone an “unfolding” of something that already exists (Star Trek notwithstanding).
TSIB.
No, the Bible wasn’t written in English. The English translation done under King James uses science in that verse, because that was simply the fancy word for “knowledge” in 1611. “Knowledge” is what the original Greek word means – science didn’t even exist back then. You will not find Wissenschaft (science) in a German translation of the Bible, only Wissen (knowledge).
I guess the idea that mathematical existence is physical existence is induction: there are many cases, like antimatter or indeed electromagnetic waves, where something that came out as a mathematically possible solution of the equations of a theory was later discovered by observation.
The closest thing to plenitude I know of, though, is the fact that everything that is possible in quantum physics happens at some nonzero probability.
*lightbulb moment*
Shed! It’s related to shed! How fitting – science sheds sense from nonsense like a watershed separates two drainage basins. :-)
Folderol is a word with 270,000 ghits.
Now that was a flounce.
÷÷÷÷÷
Ken Ham addresses old starlight, but didn’t teach a firm conclusion back in 1992 (the date of the book that I have). A couple of his:
He contemplates that the spreading of the heavens in Genesis means that the stars were closer when the light that we see started out, but that sounds backward to me. The light would have stretched, too, and if not, would look like a compact heaven. Maybe.
Ham really went into an argument that the speed of light had been changing. He says that all earlier measurements show a slowing trend, which ended back in the 1960s. Something about asymptotic curves. Such a change would help with his version of carbon dating, he said, but he balked at the idea of God’s symbol, light, changing. (I assume the measurers started high and kept splitting the difference between their measurements and the last guy’s. I know that happened in something else, once. If Ham wasn’t just taking someone else’s paper in vain.)
Ham had real trouble with light being sent with information already in it. He doesn’t like the thought that something far away might not be connected to reality. That would be bad theologically and scientifically, he says. Me, I saw no problem with everything out there being in the mind of God, and giggled at him having any regard for reality.
Me, I say that God made it clear that the heavens were a dome, and that the lights in it are just lights. The sun isn’t even the cause of the day, it’s just a light to rule the day. Everything discovered since Galileo has shit all over Genesis, and it is bizarre to hear creationists even discuss anything outside atmo.
Very well. Several people have already addressed most of it, most notably consciousness razor in comment 159, so here’s the rest:
It does! My favorite is Ezekiel 26:21, quoted below (from the KJV) with some context:
<blockquote class="creationist"26:15 Thus saith the Lord GOD to Tyrus; Shall not the isles shake at the sound of thy fall, when the wounded cry, when the slaughter is made in the midst of thee?
26:16 Then all the princes of the sea shall come down from their thrones, and lay away their robes, and put off their broidered garments: they shall clothe themselves with trembling; they shall sit upon the ground, and shall tremble at every moment, and be astonished at thee.
26:17 And they shall take up a lamentation for thee, and say to thee, How art thou destroyed, that wast inhabited of seafaring men, the renowned city, which wast strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants, which cause their terror to be on all that haunt it!
26:18 Now shall the isles tremble in the day of thy fall; yea, the isles that are in the sea shall be troubled at thy departure.
26:19 For thus saith the Lord GOD; When I shall make thee a desolate city, like the cities that are not inhabited; when I shall bring up the deep upon thee, and great waters shall cover thee;
26:20 When I shall bring thee down with them that descend into the pit, with the people of old time, and shall set thee in the low parts of the earth, in places desolate of old, with them that go down to the pit, that thou be not inhabited; and I shall set glory in the land of the living;
26:21 I will make thee a terror, and thou shalt be no more: though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou never be found again, saith the Lord GOD.
Tyre was indeed destroyed, but soon rebuilt on the original spot (as archeology confirms way beyond reasonable doubt). Today it is the fourth largest city in Lebanon.
Oopsie.
There’s only one way for there to be nothing. There are lots and lots of ways for there to be something. Maybe probability kicks in.
We could also have lots of fun with the definition of “nothing”. Is that even a coherent concept? Can nothing exist?
I haven’t read this in a long while. But I remember it as good. :-)
The universe.
The question is wrong. The universe was the “singularity”; the “singularity” wasn’t in the universe.
Eternal inflation makes sense, and cosmological natural selection is an intriguing idea.
Sounds intuitively right, but is completely wrong. To be able to say “this idea fails to account for the observed facts” does not require that there be an idea that does account for them all.
That should be obvious.
The principle of parsimony was promoted by Aristotle and plenty of medieval theologians and is an important constituent part of the scientific method. Just saying.
*sigh* 2350 years behind the times.
For once, Aristotle gets something right, and medic0506 doesn’t even know it!!!
All of them attack “materialism” on the false premise that “materialism” is a part of the scientific method. It’s not. It’s a finding of the scientific method: to assume a spiritual cause for anything, you first have to make a whole dungheap of assumptions, for instance that a mind can exist without anything doing the thinking – dualism and spiritualism (advaita *toothy grin*) are massively unparsimonious, so Ockham’s Razor cuts them away.
Wow. I previewed that and still overlooked the missing >. Well, it should be obvious which is the word of me and which is the Word of God. :-)
Based on the writings of medic0507 here (and here only), both from my recollection and from the summary at #260, I observe:
1. medic0507@FTB is familiar with, and participates at, DDO.
2. There is a medic0507@DDO.
3. medic0507@FTB denies being the same person as medic0507@DDO.
From just these observations, I see that medic0507@FTB claims to be impersonating medic0507@DDO. Whether this self-proclaimed impersonation is benign or malignant, I have no information.
However, it is now reported that medic0507@DDO has hidden or removed personal information, and did so approximately simultaneously with medico@FTB’s denial.
This leads to the conjecture that either
a. the impersonation was malignant, and medic0507@DDO was frightened by the implications of the impersonation, or
b. the denial (3 above) was false, medic0507@FTB is the same person as medic0507@DDO, and is trying to hide the dishonesty perpetrated here.
Should medic0507@FTB not stick the flounce, the explanation should be interesting. I’m not betting on the stickiness, myself, either way.
Question just offers the “rather than nothing” to bamboozle the questioned. The question being asked is “Why do we exist?” Obviously, if nothing existed we wouldn’t exist to ask, so there is no alternative. The only thing in the original question that is reasonable to ask is the “why” part. Okay, medic got us there, no scientist can even begin to sensibly answer the “why” part; they can only answer “how” questions.
But, before the SingularityBang, there WAS nothing, no spacetime, no matter, no energy, nuthin. WHY the singularity happened is a mystery.
@twas brillig:
Singularities are like zombies, they’re there for the branes
The theory is that a collision between these multi-dimensional surfaces can provide the impetus for a big bang.
That’s not induction. There’s no observation of any mathematical entity. So what you’re not doing is generalizing (which is what the math does) from an observation (because it’s math, not a physical event). And what you’re not doing here is saying that if there is some mathematical entity, then it is the very same thing as a physical entity. That’s a category mistake. We use math to represent the world. It isn’t the world. The map is not the territory.
You’re just saying that “ah, well, there are times when math has been helpful in coming up with hypotheses, which once they were tested physically, they were successful, so they seem to be true about physics. Maybe we should try to use math to generate hypotheses again sometime.” And that’s fine. It’s not a mistake (not of the kind I’m talking about, at any rate). I don’t really care how you come up with hypotheses. Once you get to the part about testing it in the physical world, you have to start telling some kind of story about physics, with real physical stuff in it that you’ve measured or observed or experimented with somehow.
I hope Medic comes back. I’m a long-time lurker, and xe’s the first troll I’ve seen in a while who’s amusing enough to get me to decloak.
@Medic:
You haven’t fully answered the questions posted upthread regarding what you mean by vision being a “primary active mechanism.” Are you claiming that eyes function like little radar dishes, sending out some sort of detection field that can pick up light from object within a certain maximum range, and that telescopes amplify this field?
You also seem to believe that, if eyes and vision were in actuality a passive detection system, then any form of defect in the system could not affect the resulting image quality. That’s so wrong I can’t even begin to describe it in ways you’ll fully understand, given the mental acuity you’ve displayed so far, but here goes: A sail on a boat is also a passive mechanism, but you have to make sure it’s trimmed properly and in good condition to get maximum thrust out of it. Being passive doesn’t make something immune to physical defects.
@115 medic0506
(Note that this is really just a trill on material from Crip Dyke @248.)
it’s xkcd!
“Space-time is like some simple and familiar system which is both intuitively understandable and precisely analogous, and if I were Richard Feynman I’d be able to come up with it.”
The quote above and its intended effect is an example of a problem with analogy that appears over and over again… like a fruit fly that won’t go away, can’t be caught, and continues to interrupt one’s work. This is why we assert that problem analogies have tiny wings, breed like mad, and can be used to refute erroneous assumptions regarding genetics (or, more popularly, refute sound findings).
In creationist thought, and, sadly, in much science journalism, analogies bear a heavy burden. They are used to convince in vacuo rather than serving as a means to clarify a rigorously developed or researched idea, theory, principle (etc).
The point is that the analogy is NOT the point. It’s only purpose is to give purchase on a concept, usually because the concept is difficult to grasp in the initial stages of understanding. An obvious example is the tidy little circles a that show us where an atom’s electrons are, and how they jump about. Practicing scientists make the limits of analogy very clear – Feynman being a swell example, on a multitude of levels.
The problem when dealing with much creationist/ID thinking is that the analogy itself tends to be the limit of both investigation and rigor of any kind. Entire arguments tend to be based on an analogy, or worse, nested analogies. I’m not saying this is always the case; only that it appears to be the most common method.
And someone’s going to need to help with the particulars of this, but it seems to me that reliance on analogy as some sort of proof not only supports – if not causes – a great deal of sloppy thinking, but that reliance without the necessary caveat and caution ALSO tends to lock thinking into a little semantic jail, the borders of which are defined by the assumptions preexistent to the analogy, or even the specific wording. (As I said, I’d need help fleshing that out, but it seems to fallible me that the effects can be traced to a tangle of the nature of rhetoric, human suggestibility, familiarity with the concepts employed, metaphors within the analogy, and just plain selection of terminology to engage bias.)
I think we’re experiencing that here. I think we will continue to experience it, forever and ever, amen. Or at least as long as emulation of William Lane Craig et al remains fashionable.
And the question is, if any of the above is valid, how does one work with it, since rebuttal via analogy appears only to deepen the pit?
=============================== add extra stuff here =========
As Crip Dyke wrote, the particular analogy is intended to “prove” something. If it were an attempt to clarify another thought it might be fine. Maybe. But to serve the purpose to which it’s been set, in and of itself, we’d need a LOT more data. Like… Who are we (the beings investigating the computer), and what do we know about electronics? What do we know about the origins of the machine? What do we know about the culture that created the machine? What do we investigative tools do we have available? Can we power it up? At what level does is our own technology? Do we know anything about methods of manufacture similar to those used to build the machine? Do we have a written language, and does it use phonetic characters in any way similar to those on the keyboard?
– BECAUSE as it stands, the quoted analogy is a TRICK. It implies that material investigation is fruitless, because the investigation in the analogy is assumed to be fruitless. And that might fly if you’ve never investigated anything.
– Simply, it’s hiding a metaphor, based on an assumption, inside an analogy. It’s lazy, and deceptive. Maybe not intentional on the latter, but my guess is it’s that, as well.
I just finished watching Cosmos. ***SPOILER ALERT****
It delved into the discoveries of Faraday and of Maxwell’s equations. A beautiful description of the process of science in relation to magnetism and light, and far, far beyond the limitations of medic0506’s view of the world.
se habla espol, 279
Where did our chewtoy deny being from DDO? I recall him saying he was not biasevolution and was directed to the dome for ‘debate with scientists’ while David Marjanović was alerting those at debate.org of the plagiarism. I am pretty sure the chewtoy medic0506 was only annoyed at being linked (I think quite accurately) to the topix.net vote on gay marriage and erroneously linked to a scuba-diving college student. There was also a debate on gender identity and biology involving medic0506@DDO that someone suggested might indicate transphobia, but I don’t remember any specific evidence being presented.
mykroft, 244 & 245
The specifics of the profiles on debate.org and topix.net make the link pretty solid: both love ‘debating/arguing’; ‘The Eagles’ and classic rock; ‘The Bible’, ‘The case for christ’; the Chicago Cubs and Bears; etc. So, I would not be the least bit surprised if our chewtoy medic0506 started spewing ‘traditional marriage’ and slippery slope rhetoric.
One nice thing about medic0506 from his debate.org profile: he is against the death penalty. Bravo. Beneath all those lies and denials, there actually is the tiniest smidgen of decency.
@286 MattP (must mock his crappy brain)
Probably more than that. He’s a medic. Nothing easy in that, and very often no insulation from other people’s pain. I’m pretty sure there are people in his area that have been, and remain, happy to remember him. There are people who go into “service” for reasons of power and pride. I’ve known some. But I personally haven’t known any that, once the edges were peeled back, didn’t care about the well being of others.
That doesn’t excuse any of the BS, it doesn’t excuse the intellectual duplicity, it doesn’t excuse the attempt to spread it, and it doesn’t make the pushback against it any less important. But it isn’t uncommon (especially given our educational system and religious demographics) for otherwise decent people to see anything involving thought as an abstraction with limited direct effects on the world.
And this isn’t sympathy for anything that happened here.
@ David Marjanović
In increasing order of Godliness: YHWH —->FSM —-> DDFM
#286, MattP (must mock his crappy brain), 11 May 2014 at 10:22 pm (UTC -5):
I understood medic0507@FTB’s flounce notice as saying that the lookup of medico0507@DDO found a different person. He did not deny being from DDO, just that he wasn’t medic0507 there. Of course, I may have been mistaken.
medic0507 ¡ medic0506 !
FIFM:
medic0507¡ medic0506 !Medic0506 , not medic0507.
Interesting note of that, Cosmos made a point to bring up that Faraday was raised in a Fundamentalist religious household, and drew strength form his faith all his life, but that did not lead him to dishonestly reject reality as medico does.
Well, I suspect medic0 would say the 2.56 seconds charge time was required to charge the mirror to go the distance back to earth. To go the distance from across a hall would be a lot less energy and thus a lot less time.
In fact, I imagine medic0 would respond to my get-an-astronaut-to-look-at-it challenge by claiming that it took 1.28 seconds for the laser on earth to get enough energy to go to the moon, then the laser immediately started sending light back but only for short distances at first and it took another 1.28 seconds for the mirror to charge enough energy to make it to earth.
So experiment time: On earth we shine a laser at the reflector on the moon for 1 second and shut it off. If we see the reflected light at any time after we shut it off, medic0’s model fails as he claims light can not exist without it’s source. Supposedly the laser hasn’t built up enough energy to project to the moon[*] and thus the light will never reach the moon in the first place. Unless we were wrong about how bright a laser needs to be. At any rate once the light is shut off the reflector will shut of and the light will end on both the moon and the earth instantly.
Or, perhaps a mirror absorbs light and creates it’s own energy and provides new light but this takes longer and the reflector is shining with its own source after the earth source is shut off. (Never mind that we’ve *never* seen a mirror shine on its own but maybe that do that if the original light is from far away.) Well, in that case we can have lunar module look and see if the mirror was reflecting light at any time the light from earth was shut off.
In any event what *will* be impossible by medic0’s model is this: On earth; We shine a light for 1 second and turn it off. 1.58 seconds later we see a light return and last for 1 second. On the moon; the lunar module sees a light from the earth. It hits the reflector and reflects back imemdiately. Both the light on earth and the reflected light last for one second at the same time.
Medic0, want to bet that that is precisely what you will *not* see?
====
[*]Now note: If medic0’s model is correct, and if every observation of physics in the last 150 years and longer is accurate, it’d have to be that the amount of time for a body to charge up energy would have to be equal to its light distance. This would have to be no matter how bright the light source. All that would matter would be have far away the projected target is. (That is assuming both 150 years of physics *and* medic0 are both correct.)
1) COSMOS didn’t mention anything that would have challenged fundamentalist beliefs this week. (Faraday studied neither biology or geology and the COSMOS show never showed anything that would have challenged Farradays view.) But I’m pretty sure that though COSMOS didn’t show it, Faraday must have seen and accepted an earth older than 10,000 years. (Well, maybe not.)
2) Biblical literalism and YEC, even among fundamentalists, is a very new and modern phenomenon. It’s a reactionary response to scientific advancement and not an actual belief on its own merits.
My personal impression was that Faraday and Maxwell were just so *beautiful* and enjoyable compared to the whacko post-hoc retrofittings of medic0.
They have a particular view of their babble – one that I suspect is true: That if they allow for doubt in one aspect of the entire edifice, they shall soon be forced to concede another. By a process of induction, there will come a time that there is very little left¹.
They are so reactionary (whatever their own private doubts of biblical veracity) because they know they are living in a house of cards. It can be maintained only if glued together by lies.
…
¹ Dr Kurt Wise conducted this experiment by methodically excising from his babble (with a scissor) all detail that contradicted modern science. There was so little left of the pages that it fell apart in his hands.
@MattP:286
I actually warned him that he was spouting some extremely stupid stuff, and that it is not hard to connect the dots with his on-line persona. I would not want to be associated with the weapons’ grade stupidity medic0506 persisted in spewing, which he persisted in doing even after people with far more expertise in science explained where he was wrong. I’m not brilliant (despite the ‘nym), but I am trainable.
We all leave bread crumbs on the Internet, some more than others. If he really wanted to be paranoid, he should try to get his hands on the data Google, Amazon, and many other Internet companies have collected on him. It would make the NSA envious.
Note to lurkers: Rule of thumb, don’t post anything out there that would go on a credit application. DON’T post your birthday on line. Coupled with the state you grew up in, a smart hacker could greatly narrow down the possibilities for the social security number you were issued. The Internet is an ecosystem, and there are predators.
Hmm, the link didn’t take. Here it is.
Good grief. Did the fruitcake really flounce because of a self-invented lie?
There is some speculation on what, other than stooopidty, caused him to apparently flounce. As per anteprepro@270, one possibility is a severe misinterpretation of both the contents and purpose of my comment@35, which was retracted by me at @37, @39, and @81, and by mykroft@53 (all in this thread).
As anteprepro points out, I was careful to redact / not-supply identifying details, and to only include publicly-available information of direct relevance to the fruitcake’s positions expressed in this and previous FtB threads. As explained by me @39 (emphasis in original, emboldening added):
One small but important correction to anteprepro’s analysis: I have never stated how I found the other (“chem/premed”) individual. The claim this was done only by username is of anteprepro’s own invention. All I have ever said (from @39) is:
Again, notice I am being very careful to explicitly not provide any identifying information about either individual — in direct contrast to what medic0506‘s BLATANT LIE claims (albeit only about himself)@215.
Whether or not my series of comments has anything to do with the lying fruitcake’s apparent flounce remains unknown, since he — yet again — fails to provide evidence or references. That inappropriate vagueness caused poopyhead (PZ@227), anteprepro, and others extra and mostly unnecessary work to try and work out if the lying fruitcake had a real complaint, or if it is what it very much now appears to be, a BLATANT LIE.
Let’s hear medic0 screw himself a bit more and get him to talk about his ideas concerning medicine.
For example, how does blood circulation work? Let me guess, blood does not circulate, because that would make no sense and is completely unintuitive. Also, electrocardiograms don’t work because there is no such thing as electricity, right?
@blf:299
To be charitable, I’m not sure it was a lie in his mind. With his limited understanding of science and technology, I think he seriously believed that what he posted in other public venues was private.
He has shown again and again that he lives in a bubble, insulated against reality. This may be just one more facet of that.
mykroft@301, I’m not convinced. Starting with at least the two assumptions (1) He really did read something here at FtB which he interpreted as an attempted invasion of privacy, and (2) That my comment@35 was all that he read, then one or more of the following is very probably true::
● He did not read all of @35.
● Has extremely poor reading comprehension,
● Assumes everybody does the same thing as he does: Lie.
He would have had to have failed to read the end my comment@35 (i.e., about repeating privacy and doing some redactions), or Read it and failed to comprehend it, or Read it and assumed it was false. Technological / computer knowledge, or lack thereof, is not involved.
However, that conclusion is based on at least two assumptions only the known liar can confirm or deny: That he really read something, and that essentially all he read was me@35.
@300
Why would a creationist deny blood circulation?
Now, in this “debate” would it be “fair” to ask medic0 to explain how he thinks evolutionists believe science work?
I’m really tired of his say “refraction works the same way in my model as yours” when my model relies upon light traveling at a finite speed.
How refraction works is *still* on the table. Why is light in a medium bent? For that matter, why does light project in lines at all if it has no phase velocity?
(Dang! Conservapedia is lame! Here is wikipedia’s entry on phase velocity, snell’s law, and refraction if you are willing to put up with Wikipedia’s obvious bias in the classic physics pages. If not, you can use the linked conservapedia pages listed above. The conservapedia pages don’t have any actual errors but, dang, or they short and skimpy!)
(But then again Conservapedia does have a “light travels” bias.)
PSA
medic0506 flounced in comment #215.
*Gasp, Shocked, Swoons Dramatically onto the extra-heavy duty fainting couch, throwing some grog soak corn to the judges, getting a perfect 10*
chigau:
I find it amusing that it took this long given what he said in one of his earliest comments in the Thunderdome:
Given his past rate of responding to comments, we really can’t be certain of this until this comment thread exceeds 900….
True, but it most certainly DID mention quite a lot in direct contradiction to medico’s stated beliefs, what with it being all about light and electromagnetism.
And, again, the episode explicitly mentioned that young Faraday grew up in a fundamentalist religious home, and took comfort from his religion.
If light doesn’t travel, how come I can still see when I get to Grandma’s house?
Yes, but medic0’s is surprisingly ignorant even by creationists’ standards.
Evolution might make religious models … odd. But Magnetism and light really don’t. (Okay the “starlight problem” might give the 6,000 year old universe a bit of a shake-down but it’s a bit indirect.) Although heretic burning was common in the past (dangerous believes are dangerous and must be suppressed), creationism with it’s paranoia we-will-cede-nothing-so-we-will-twist-logic-to-make-it-literal is relatively new and even newer is this Kan Ham (and medic0’s “locusts walk on four legs”) method that *everything* is literal (not merely the irreconcilable young earth and spontaneous full formed generation but the bizarre and obviously metaphorical as well; it’s not merely enough that we say the bible is compatible, we must say it is better so while we could tap dance and ignore and relegate dinosaurs to obscure anomalies, we must embrace and say the t. rex was a vegetarian because we need the bible to be *stronger* than science) tactic.
In Faraday’s day, if magnetism seemed at odd with scripture. Well, he’d try to work reflect on the philosophy of his religion and reflect that the world is vast and accept reality as it is.
Conservadepia‘s page on light is fun reading. It shows he creationists aren’t actually interested in knowing how reality works but are trying to invoke a philosophy that bible statements must be fundamental in all thoughts. The very first thing to say about light, very first sentence is “Light was the first creation of God” and then it goes into the scientific and physical properties of light.
But as I said, medic0 is ignorant even by creationist standards. Conservapedia knows light travels and basically is aware of the physics of light. (And interestingly the make the absurd statement that medic0 rejects that as light was God’s first creation it can exist without a source.) Conservapedia, of course, goes on to the “starlight problems” and the usual stupid explanations (time dilution fields!? Really?) that stupid though the are, seem brilliant compared to medic0’s light doesn’t move.
One thing I *do* like about medic0 is that he doesn’t just parrot the Ham doctrines and tenets (he hasn’t claimed dinosaurs were on the ark yet). Or he didn’t. He seems to be slipping into that territory.
woozy:
I’m not surprised at all. No YEC can deal with the physics. It’s just that some may not know it (yet). Christian YEC’s especially prefer to talk about their bizarre distortions of evolutionary biology, because they think it has something to do with their silly myths in the book of Genesis. But notice: all this is saying is that perhaps they don’t know the extent to which physics is a problem for them. Ignorance strikes again. It doesn’t mean that, if you presented this problem to them, they’d have anything more coherent or honest or rational to say than medic — because, in fact, they wouldn’t. Having evidence of a young earth just isn’t a thing they can do. I disagree that the Conservapdia people are somehow being “less stupid” about this. They’re every bit as dishonest and willfully ignorant as anybody else who’s peddling any other brand of YEC nonsense.
Well, it does depend on what their religious beliefs are. When you say evolution is a problem, you’re talking mostly about theists in the Abrahamic religions, not religion generally. You could have a religion where evolution isn’t really an issue at all. Buddhism or Hinduism, for example, shouldn’t have much of a problem with it — of course, when it comes to people having souls, then it always goes off the rails somehow, but I’d treat that as a problem with psychology (and physics of course), not really with evolution.
But as I said, it’s a question of which of their religious beliefs specifically are in conflict with reality. If they think the universe is less than 13.8 billion years old, no matter what myths they might have in place of it, they’re simply wrong. Electromagnetism is one manifestation of the evidence for that, and I just don’t think of it as “indirect” or understand why you’d put it that way. It not relevant to every religious person, because they don’t all have beliefs contradicting it. If you’re talking about the ones who are believing in some sort of young universe (or an extremely old one), I’d say that’s about as direct as it gets.
I was, of course, referring specifically to medico in my original comment about the COSMOS episode.
@312
All very good points.
I did mean ignorant rather than stupid. Creationists want their ideas to be reality so they want science to actually agree with them. That’s why very few creationists will, say, deny that atoms exist for example. They know science says atoms exist and to claim atoms don’t exist would be …. well, ignorant. But, of course, the study of atoms will eventually lead to an old earth and common descent although perhaps not in absolutely direct ways. So they fuss and tinker and look for loopholes. In a way, they’d be better of denying *all* science as we know it, as that’s the only framework creationism could exist.
Medic0’s “light doesn’t move” is as flabergastingly radical as “atoms don’t exist” but he just didn’t realize it. Conservapedia knows they can’t get away with denying the nature of light so they look for other loopholes they hope they can obfuscate. Speed of light was faster, Riemannian geometry (Really? That would have been fun), time fields (do they really think that is the most popular?), and created light in transit (I actually think that is the most popular and it abuses the least science– however it’s the one that *sounds* the most like they were looking for a deliberate loophole).
I’ll admit I’m not seeing direct conflict with magnetism and young earth.
@313.
Yes. I’m just pointing out the difference between a fundamentalist like Faraday (do we know anything about his later adult religious beliefs?) and a creationist like medic0. A fundamentalist will probably run head to head with reality eventually but a creationist is preemptively denying reality from the start.
And, of course, it doesn’t matter if creationist can make up a loophole or two. The real issue is not can this reality and/or this text be interpreted to be compatible. It’s why should one base reality on an interpretation of a holy book. And “because we can” is not a valid reason.
Faraday and Medic0506 are not in the same league.
(How many understatements of that caliber have you read today?)
Conservapedia is funny. Here is the entirety of their article on Michael Faraday:
Conservapedia really has skewed priorities.
@303 woozy
OK, I’ve seen a number of instances in which Wikipedia is either silly or just plain wrong (which is to be expected), but what is the nature of the bias on the classical physics pages. Can’t make figure out it, because education myself don’t, or much anyway, kinda, you know?
I see medic0506 actually made it here. *slow clap*
From mykroft’s link at #21
Medico, I would like to see you attempt to reconcile that belief with all of these. Please note that the numbered points are a relevant summary of the passage, clicking on the blue numbers at the end will take you too the relavant Babble passage.
In particular, I draw your attention to Genesis 3:16, the third in the list, in which God specifically says that man “rules over” woman; which rather challenges your peculiar notion that Christiantiy teaches that men and women are separate but equal. In fact, it says several times that one sex is owned by the other, and ownership implies seniority.
@ Thumper
Let me add to your comment: This is the most coherent definition of Apartheid, as given by fucking Hendrik Verwoerd.
He should know, he designed that shit like that. I wonder how that little ruse panned out, goddists?
@Theophontes
Feel free :)
I wonder if Medic0 will now attempt to argue that a system of racial apartheid does not oppress blacks, but simply recognises that each race “has it’s strengths and weaknesses”?
Earlier medic0 said we shouldn’t link to talkorigins and wikipedia because they have an obvious bias. I think it’s amusing that a wikipedia page on classical physics would have an “obvious bias” as basically there is nothing to say except “this is what physics does”. But to humor him I chose pages from conservapedia. After all, their pages would have nothing to say except “this is what physics does” and unless conservapedia outright lies the physics will have to be true. I was a bit mistaken. Conservapedia, to my amusement, frames *everything* as “god did this and this” and then states the physics which, although not incorrect, is extremely minimal. Conservapedia is a poor source for science in the old-fashioned sense that they simply do go into detail or explain that much. But what physics is there, is not untrue (if you simply ignore the “Light was the first of God’s creations” nonsense).
So, I was joking when I referred to the “obvious bias” of wikipedia’s physics page.
I wanted a basic page about light’s speed and its necessary role in refraction but conservapedia didn’t have anything at all on phase velocity. This isn’t because refraction disproves YEC (although as consciousness razor pointed out *everything* disproves YEC). That’s a particular weirdness of medic0. It’s because conservapedia is simply incomplete.
Anyway. Refraction (and straight line of vision even) is *still* on the table. “The same way” relies upon snell’s law which relies upon light’s phase velocity. If light doesn’t move it doesn’t have phase velocity. So refraction works “the same as before” does not cut it.
Medic0, HOW DOES REFRACTION WORK?
Sea floor magnetic striping…
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/do63ma.html
When the last pole reversal was almost a million years ago and we have a record set in stone of many, many, many reversals, magnetism proves that YEC are quite wrong.
All of science conflicts with a YEC worldview.
@woozy #320
Fuck refraction. I’m still puzzled as to why, given medic0’s theory of how eyes and light work, I can’t see in the dark.
Or, now I think about it, why darkness exists at all.
It’s essential in Gods plan. Otherwise there would be no Sound of Silence.
@ Christopher
;)
It’s your fault. You are just not pushing your eyebeams hard enough. This is because of Original Sin.
@Gnumann+
Ah, but what sound does silence make when there’s no one around to hear it?
Checkmate, Light Lovers!
@consciousness razor
I thought that only applied to teh ladeez, with the childbirthing and whatnot? Is there a male equivalent?
Perhaps the male equivalent is iPod headphones?
That is approximately equal to 0*(0-0). It’s similar to the sound that is heard from a distance r, when you are screaming as your head explodes in a vacuum. (Do not try this at home!)
Possibly. I’m sure cdesign proponentsists would say that more research is needed.
One would think that the very fact that the bible failed to mention electricity or magnetism would be a good hint that it is far from being the inspired source of all knowledge that bible worshipers seem to think it is. I mean, God has time to come to earth to help ‘his people’ kill their neighbors and cares enough to tell everyone what they should and shouldn’t do with their genitals, but never bothers to tell his favorite goat herders about electromagnetism? But then again, if God told his favorite goat herders how to make a compass (thus beating the Chinese by a few centuries), they wouldn’t be lost in the Sinai for four decades. Maybe the God of the Hebrews is just dumber than a clever chinese person….
… or is just an ass.
Well, here is one direct contrast between Faraday and medico.
While Faraday’s own work may or may not have conflicted with his religious beliefs, the fact that light travels through space, is composed of something that has the properties of a wave, and has a finite speed was all established science by Faraday’s time, demonstrated empirically by other scientists before Faraday, and Faraday accepted that existing empirical evidence discovered and described by others, unlike medico.
Another point of contrast is in Faraday’s seminal work with fields. Faraday understood and accepted that empirical evidence can infer the existence of things that cannot be seen, or directly observed, and that the observed effects of a phenomenon count as empirical evidence for that phenomenon even if the phenomenon itself cannot be directly observed, very unlike medico with his dishonestly restricted version of what the word “empirical” means.
@woozy
My point exactly.
That’s something I hadn’t considered. I can’t even picture what that would look like in my head, and quite frankly trying to is giving me a headache. X-|
I agree that refraction is a good thing to pin Medico down on, since it clearly requires light to travel in order to even be a thing. I hope I didn’t come across as dismissive; I was just taking the piss out of medico by pointing out his “model” fails on an even more basic level.
@consciousness razor
Don’t worry, even if I wanted to, I don’t have the means to be in one place and also in another, no matter how small a distance r may be.
Could we see a collaboration in the future between crea-er, I mean design proponentists and PUAs?
Oh dear lord… what have we done!?
Oh, I get medic0’s light point now (I think…)
Genesis 3:
Genesis 16:
I note that 16 is later than 3, so Light was created before the Sun and Stars. So Light is everywhere, without stars being necessary at all. Scientists are such “materialists”, assuming that the light they see when looking at a star actually traveled all the way from that star. That’s the point medic was trying to make with that impossible challenge; “Prove to me that the photon, you claim to be from that star, actually came from that star with a little identifying mark on it that could only be produced by that very star (I know you can’t do it, so I win)”, my translation of it into “our” language.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
re-reading Genesis again, to get those quotes, reminded me again that Gen says the Earth was created before the Sun and Stars. And the Moon is another light in the sky. I think I heard a wackaloon recently, proclaiming the Moon as a light source and not just a reflector of the Sun’s light, … but, moving on… The Gen just can’t be any more wrong than possible; it has achieved a “greatness” in that regard ^_^
Christopher @ 329:
I imagine the explanation for why YHWH is helpless against iron chariots has something to do with electromagnetism. You wouldn’t expect him to be to explicit on that score.
Yes… The thing is if you reject a branch of science you must provide an alternative explanation to the empirical data. Creationists do a fair (well, poor, actually) job explaining biology in terms that deny evolution. Medic0 is denying light bites off a *huge* chunk requiring going *way* *way* *way* back and he has a *lot* of work cut out for him. He seems to want to dismiss it as “well, light is still the same but with a minor detail of travel so I don’t need to explain much” without realizing just how fundamentally radical instantaneous light is. For reasons unknown (I suspect ignorance but it could be a religious philosophical point— although I seriously doubt it; I think he is simply ignorant at the level “If the world were round the oceans would have humps in them” ignorant) he seems equally dismissive of newtonian physics and seems to want to hold onto the idea that things in motion need energy to keep them in motion. He has literally three centuries of physics to rewrite.
Okay, I ‘m kicking myself but I can’t resist…. This could be seen as an interpretation of God. (Unseen or directly observed but with observable effects.) Of course, upon discovering magnetic fields the natural response is “Hey, cool! Let’s figure out just what this thing is and how it works” and the response from the scientific authorities is “Go for it!”. In response to an act of God (hypothetical), if one were to say “Hey, cool! Let’s figure this God guy out and see just what He is” the response from the authorities would be “don’t you fucking dare!”.
That is a fundamental flaw in the philosophy of creationism. Even the rabbinical scholars of two millenia ago and the heretic-burning popes realized that obviously the bible wasn’t exhaustive.
Also no reason you wouldn’t see the insides of things. I imagine it be like view 3-D for an elevated point in 4-D space. … oh …. Now I just realized something that you (and everyone else) probably had been considering all along. As objects that we see for the most part have no light source and all the light we see is reflected, as light not traveling would have no natural path of reflection we wouldn’t see anything *except* stars and light bulbs. d’oh!!!! (Sorry I was so slow on that particular uptake.)
HOW DOES VISION WORK?
a) Planar Projection: Why does light manifest in straight lines and therefore images appear as planar projections?
b) Reflection: How do we see anything that isn’t itself a light source as non-traveling light will not reflect?
b2) The energy of reflection: Medic0 claimed reflectors build up energy and emit lit. This would be true for all visible non-light-generating objects. Medic0 claims light doesn’t carry energy with it. So when I look at, say, a tuna sandwich where is the tuna sandwich getting energy to create the light it will project to my eye?
b3) The mechanics of reflection as medic0 has described them are very different from classical physics. What the heck are the actual mechanics of reflection?
c) Refraction: How the fuck does it work?
I keep coming back here to see what has happened. I hope Mediocre50something comes back. It’s been a hoot!
336, eyeroll, I concur with everything you said!
I have learned so much from the various threads dedicated to him. I used to be told that it was good to learn from my mistakes. Over the years, I came to realise that the best way to learn is from other people’s mistakes.
Speaking of mistakes, mediculous said something about crossing a horse and a frog. I can kind of see “horse” as a kind that came off the ark, but “frog”? Seriously, have you looked at all the kinds of frogs and where they are? And toads are really frogs (I just learned that!), so there are all kinds of frogs.
I mean, horses, yeah. We took those from the Old World to the New, and we breed them, and they are domesticated and all, so fine, they might have come off tne ark. But frogs!?!?
My point was that if we can say “frog” and have people know we mean anything out of that wild range of critters, it has to be common ancestry. Either evolution is true, or frogs got off the ark and went travelling and changing and
Damn touchscreen.
… mutated all to fit their environment, then quit before the scientists showed up. Sneaky little amphibians, them.
@ Christopher
Let us stop for a minute and consider just how fucked up is the fairytale of ” wandering 40 years in the desert”. This image shows the range of Cliff Young’s race in the Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon. You notice that he could run all the way to frikkin’ Ankara in about the space of a week. In his old farm boots. At the age of 61.
re @333;
You have just pointed out a very salient factoid.
Per medico’s bible, light is the FIRST thing god created. Genesis 1 does not say “Let there be an energy source from which light shall be emitted”, it says “Let there be light.”
This means medico’s insistence that light cannot exist independently of a discrete energy source is a belief in direct contradiction to the dictates of his bible.
Genesis 1 also does not say “Let there be the sense of vision, through which all things shall perceive light”.
This means that medico’s insistence that vision is primary is also a direct contradiction of the dictates of his bible.
The bible clearly states that god created light first, before anything else. Light is the very first created thing. Thus it CANNOT be reliant or dependent upon any other created thing. It cannot depend on some other physical energy source. It cannot be dependent of the perception through vision. It came first, before all those other things.
Which means, of course, that medico, in addition to be guilty of utter scientific illiteracy, is also guilty of heresy.
Ah, but the source of the first created light can be God Himself. Or so argue a few creationists. Seriously.
(And actually, light *wasn’t* the first thing. He created the heavens and the earth but the earth was without form and void. Which may mean it wasn’t created yet. Or it may mean it was. It was full of dark water after all.)
(The bit about the sky [or firmament] separating the two bodies of water still seems weird to me. Seriously, The six days of creation *really* do not make any sense and can not be reconciled with any modern model of science at all. One could argue that models and rules changed but at that point one simply can not claim any longer that the bible gives reliable observation of the modern world at all.)
(It’s interesting to note that when creating the sea creatures and the birds God is not quoted as saying they should be produced “according to their kind” as he did for the land animals and the plants. So we have evolution-creation synthesis. The fish may produce outside their kind. The evolved like crazy and eventually evolved to land where they replaced the original land animals which had a distinct disadvantage as they could never produce outside their kind.)
(Okay, this doesn’t allow for the evolution of plants but plants are boring and don’t make for children’s picture books so no-one cares about plants.)
Well, not from the point of view of modern science. If taken as a myth, evolved from a long line of earlier myths, the overall conception here is not all that different from several other creation myths and cosmologies, which had water above the vault of the sky (hence blue sky, mirages, the source of rain, and if your people have any seafaring experience you know that in really really bad weather the waters of the sky and the waters of the seas can blur together and be nearly indistinguishable…)
And Yahweh, in the original polytheistic tradition from which he originally sprang, was some kind of water god (river or rain god or some such)…
woozy @ 327,
The standard reason against this is that in a flat Minkowskian space-time, light follows light-like geodesics which are more or less straight lines. However in the presence of profoundly large gravitational fields light no longer moves in straight lines but the curved geodesic paths. To bend light sufficiently that you can begin to see the reverse side of an object from photons which are being deflected by well over 90°, you need to start with something approaching the density of a neutron star, which would also result in the photons being substantially red-shifted by losing energy in their escape from the gravitational well.
@337 Tigger
Not necessarily due to quality or gravitas, but because it greatly expands the effective pool, when approached properly. (As in, that could have been mine.)
And I wish I could remember who it was that said “the important thing in science is to make as many mistakes as fast as possible” … which is only meaningful and/or humorous if one knows the important, disciplined, and responsible tacits, and the slanted rungs on which knowledge climbs.
Yes, but if light doesn’t travel nor have any finite speed but is rather something instantaneous then there is no reason it to “follow” geodesics. And with no mass or energy it will not be affected by gravity.
Meanwhile Medico has denied gravity lenses. He has claimed even if photons did u-turns and landed directly in our eyes, we wouldn’t see anything unless the source itself were actually in our field of vision.
Historical curiosity; even classical mechanics predicts bending of light by gravity, and black holes, if light is seen as particular. The bending is exactly half that predicted by general relativity, and the black hole proof is presented in an appendix of Hawking and Ellis’ The Large Scale Structure of Space-time. It’s a translation of an essay written by Laplace, published in 1799.
Oh, I’m aware that mediocre’s “theory” — if he’d ever fronted up with a definition — could have had all sorts of strange peculiarities; I was just pointing out that there are special circumstances in reality where unlikely things such as seeing the reverse side of an object are possible directly, without the aid of a mirror. The object in question has to be a neutron star, of course, which doesn’t make it terribly practical as an observation…
Gravity certainly can act on massless photons, so I suppose mediocre would deny that there is a quantized de Broglie energy associated with the frequency of the light. Seeing as he’s flounced we’ll just have to be content without an answer on that.
Rob, thanks for that observation; a chap called Michell had also theorised about what we now call black holes surprisingly early in the 18th century IIRC, who may have duplicated some of the results of Laplace.
Medic0506’s theory on breathing?
As an example to illustrate what I mean, in my line of work I frequently have patients who have pulmonary problems; he was having problems breathing & hallucinating as a result. These people really do “see” these things, even though they obviously don’t exist in reality. You can often see the fear on their faces because many times hallucinations are accompanied by paranoia
That may not seem like it has much to do with this discussion, but it does because it speaks to the power of breathing, and breathing as a mechanism. Obviously, that patient was exposed to exactly the same “air” that I was exposed to, and exactly the same amount, coming from exactly the same angle, at exactly the same distance away. The air that would have been present was not different for him than they were for me, yet he was actually experiencing something completely different than what I was. Even though his perception was obviously flawed, it was nonetheless real to him, he was actually struggling to breath and seeing things as a result. What we breathe comes from the inside out, that’s what I mean when I refer to breathing as the primary mechanism.
No… no. All “why” questions are in fact “how” or “what” questions. “Everything is the way it is because it got that way” (D’Arcy W. Thompson, 1917). How did it get that way? What influences occurred in which ways? What else could have happened, and what prevented that from happening?
We don’t know that.
I’ve already linked to eternal inflation and cosmological natural selection, two hypotheses among many that don’t posit there was nothing “before” the Big Bang.
Easy: everything would be transparent. Unless, that is, eyebeams are interrupted by the very same things that are impermeable to light.
Welllll… There was nothing before the BigBang because there was no “before”, before the Big Bang. English is so lame… “before the big bang” is equivalent to “north of the north pole”, i.e.: meaningless. So if there is no “before” the Big Bang, there was Nothing, no things, no space, no time, no timespace, no existence, period. Ain’t that what the word “nothing” means. However, I do agree that we do not Know that nothing existed, that the B.B. was T=0 absolute, but it is a very good model of what probably happened. It currently fits very well, compared to every measurement we make, so let’s go with it. Nothin’ will blow up if we’re wrong, it’s “good enough”.
Just one small problem with that…
Wow! Rob Grigjanis and Xanthë made me look it up. I knew John Michell—the Reverend John Michell, Medic0—was the first to hypothesize what we call black holes, in 1783. What I didn’t know was that he suggested what we call the Cavendish experiment to measure the Gravitational Constant, and built the torsion balance to carry it out. When he didn’t live long enough to do the experiment, Henry Cavendish inherited and used it in the experiment that we credit him with today.
Michell also tried to measure radiation pressure by focusing sunlight on a compass needle, but the needle melted. He determined the focus and epicenter of the Lisbon earthquake, and may have been the first to suggest that tsunamis were caused by submarine earthquakes. A real polymath, and a man of the cloth to boot. It really shows how far today’s fundies have devolved.
Well, that didn’t work. Here’s the Wiki page on Michell.
Quite a number of early scientists and contributors to science were clergy. This is not a big surprise.
Being clergy gave them a few benefits, such as:
1) Free education in at least reading and writing
2) Access to stores of books
3) Their immediate needs for clothing, food, and shelter met
4) Free time
How many polymaths have been born, whose contributions to the world were never realized or known, because they had to spend all their time in backbreaking labor just to earn their next meal?
355, Amphiox
The vast majority, I would wager, given that half the human race wasn’t given the chance from the outset, and most of the other half never made it either.
@Amphiox #343
I thought the contemporary view was that he was a warrior-god before he was brought to Israel and merged with El?
Although there is no archeological or historical evidence for it, I’ve always liked the idea that Yahweh was a child god.
@woozy
Then you’ll like this article:
http://www.georgeleonard.com/articles/is-yahweh-a-boy.htm
Christopher @ 359:
So my contention has been that if YHWH actually existed, he was like Ardra, but in reality, he was more like The Squire of Gothos?
How pitiful, medic0506 made noise about how they would stand against the Pharyngulite horde and preach
truthfalsehood to power until they were banned. It appears that the false witnessing they bore about being terribly troubled by publicly available information from another forum was indeed a full-on flounce. How pathetic that medic0506 should need to find some excuse to quite while they were behind. Fare the well foolish one, someday may you look at the stars and comprehend how they could possibly work.medic0506 wasn’t banned.
chigau,
I think you might have mis-read what omnicrom wrote; I read it as:
How pitiful, medic0506 made noise about ‘how they would stand against the Pharyngulite horde and preach
truthfalsehood to power until they were banned’. But flounced, instead.Tigger
You’re probably right.
He probably would have gotten banned eventually if the discussion had wandered a little farther afield. Isn’t his reason for flouncing a persistent MRA theme? It’s perfectly OK for them to disseminate the email address—and sometimes the actual address and phone number—of anyone that disagrees with them, but quote something they said on another site—frequently under the same ‘nym—and you’ve “doxxed” them: The most heinous sin in the calendar! I think his true colors would have shown through eventually.
Ah, thank you. That was the article where I first came across the idea but for the life of me I couldn’t seem to be able to google it this morning.
=======
Why do we ban whackaloons? If they aren’t derailing otherwise worthwhile discussions (this isn’t one), and they aren’t being abusive and offensive (being completely wrong and delusional on a post about being wrong and delusional is neither abusive nor offensive [we certainly can handle it, can’t we?]) and they are amusing to us, I don’t see why they need banning.
I mean, I see banning when we’re trying to have a serious conversation about somebody and one guy is just completely off-track and yammers about something stupid and we’re all to sheeple to see it. Or if they argue “I insist that you, Dr. PZ waste your hours and time educating me and if you don’t I’ll assume I’ve won”. But when we respond to a person “gee, you’re really unbelievably stupid and people like you are a real pain in the ass”, we don’t actually mean “your presence here offends me”; we usually mean “ha– you’re an amusing bit of chum-wit for my to make fun of. I find your idiocy funny and amusing to me.”
Up to PZ, of course. But frankly, I just figure as soon as he stops being amusing we’ll all just get tired of him and stop participating in a thread that was only a “laugh at the creationist” diversion anyway.
In other words, please don’t ban my chum-wit. At least not yet.
Once they start drifting into open MRA territory that’s pretty much only a matter of time.
Um.
1. MRAs flounce.
2. Medic0 flounced.
Therefore
3. Medic0 is an MRA.
Okay, I admit I was the one who bad-mouthed Aristotle but that doesn’t mean we can abuse modus ponens.
Wrong syllogism.
1)MRA’s will invariably become abusive and/or offensive beyond the rules of pharyngula.
2)They will then be banned.
3)Medic0 was showing signs of being an MRA
Therefore:
4)If Medic0 had not flounced, there is a very strong likelihood that he would have done something to attract the banhammer in fairly short order.
re: banning
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/rules/
Meh… I think you are overestimating #3 and thus over-concluding the likelihood of #4. Maybe. Maybe not.
MRAs argue from a sense of self-righteousness. Medic0’s M.O. has always been the “but gee-whiz, I’m a rational creationist”. It’s an act but one which abusive MRAism wouldn’t serve. Maybe. He isn’t very smart or consistent so who knows.
I think m0’s methods, though, have always been to try to drag out our assumptions of how creations should behave and then he could tsk-tsk “you evolutionist sure are presumptuous; just goes to show my view is the only rational one”. I think “m0 argued against gay marriage on another board and therefore it’s just a matter of time that he’ll become obnoxious and be banned” only serves to play into that.