Domain: s8int.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to s8int.com.
Comments · 13
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Re: Political tax
Oil stopped NYC from literally drowning in horse shit
http://www.s8int.com/crichton....
Stepping back, I have to say the arrogance of the model-makers is breathtaking. There have been, in every century, scientists who say they know it all. Since climate may be a chaotic system-no one is sure-these predictions are inherently doubtful, to be polite. But more to the point, even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd.
Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?
Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horse****?
Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses? But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport.
Now, apart from Bill de Blasio virtue signalling antics, NYC generates very little horsehit.
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Feynman and Crichton
Feynman talked about this fairly often, most notably in Cargo Cult Science. The problem seems to be most common in soft sciences, such as the rat running example he gives from psychology. See also his commentary on science education in Brazil.
The Brazil report appears to be unrelated, but hear me out.
Brazil's problem was cultural. Their textbooks included all of the right information, but it wasn't presented as things that the student could learn about the real world, just as facts to be memorized. Scientists without the culture of science will make lousy experiments because they don't understand what they want to do or why, or how or why they need to keep themselves honest.
The culture of physics in the US was very good, but they were unable to export that culture to Brazil when they tried.
In the same way, other branches of science were unable to duplicate the physics culture. The rat runners in the example given didn't understand what they were trying to do, so they didn't pay attention to Young's work, which would have helped keep them honest.
Crichton's Aliens Cause Global Warming lecture was given nearly 30 years after Feynman's Cargo Cult Science, and it shows a creeping degeneration of the culture of science.
I go a step further, and say that the decline of the science culture has been part of a general cultural decline. There has been no great art or literature or music in decades.
The good news is that people are waking up. The internet is connecting people to each other, to science, and to culture. We are pissed about the decline of the past century, the decline that we've allowed, or at least failed to prevent, and are steeling our resolve to do the hard work to restore our greatness.
Articles like this show the stirring of the cultural revival. Keep them coming, please.
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Re:This seems incredibly backward
That's at best speculative. We have a better knowledge of extinction rates today then we can possibly extrapolate from the fossil record. Not all species for example are captured in the fossil record and even if they were we haven't found them all.
So you don't know with great accuracy how great the background excintinction rate is until you look at this period in the fossil record of a few million years in the future. Then you can compare the detectable species from the record that no longer exist with previous eras.
The other issue with your theory is that it is based on Drake Equation.
This is drake's equation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...The basic concept is that you take take the you take the current number of stars in your area of the galaxy and extrapolate that by comparing density and volume to the rest of the galaxy to get the number of stars.
Then you assume a probability for planets
Then you assume probability for the number of planets.
Then you assume a probability for the number of worlds with liquid water.
Then you assume a probability of the right chemistry for life.
Then you assume a probability for whether life will evolve.
Then you assume a probability for whether that life will become complex.
Then you assume a probability for if the life will be intelligent.
Then you assume a probability for if the intelligent life will form some kind of civilization.
Then you assume a probability for the life to form a starfaring interstellar civilization.
Did you see what happened about a million times in there?
Anyway, Drake's equation is not valid science but it is frequently used by environmental activists. What they'll do is they'll pick an acre of land... often one under development... they're building a parking lot on it or something. And then they'll cite every species that doesn't live there anymore after the parking lot to be extinct IN THAT AREA. Then they'll assume how much of that happens, then they'll assume how many species die out because of X Y and Z, etc. It's Drake's equation and its bullshit.
Because I'm sure you're going to call bullshit on me... allow me to name drop someone respectable that agrees with me:
http://www.s8int.com/crichton....Its a fun speech. Whether you agree or not you should be entertained.
The point is that you're relying largely on the opinion of lobbyists and activists for your information. They're not reliable because they're inherently biased.
So the whole extinction thing is one I don't especially buy. Are some species going extinct? Sure, welcome to planet earth. That's what the world calls Tuesday. It happens all the time. Niches close and open and species either adapt or die.
There are a lot of species that are interacting with humanity for example because we create a lot of niches. Our cities are full of pigeons and rats and various insects that feed upon our leavings. And while you probably don't think these species are cute and cuddly, they are adaptable. Don't see nature the way a child sees it. Look at nature the way that NATURE looks at it. All nature cares about is whether you propagate your genes. The dodo was a loser. The spectrum of pathogens that are the common cold are winners.
Now maybe you'll say "I don't like the kinds of life that are adapting and I'd like to make them less gross, filthy, and generally nasty. Okay. How do we do that?
The first thing we have to appreciate is that these are species that WANT to integrate with humanity. These guys as unwanted as they are... are the animals that wish to sign on with humanity. They want into our supply network. Okay, lets make that symbiotic instead of parasitic. Just as people integrated dogs, cats, cows, chickens, etc into our world we can integrate pigeons, rats, crows, cockroaches, etc into the system as well. And in some cases that might mean some genet
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Re:It's the orbit, stupid
You also have great areas in Alaska of jumbled up, blasted fauna caracases, many of them torn apart.
If you're trying to make a credible argument then linking to a site that talks about evidence of Noah's Flood and finding ancient Nuclear reactors is a BAD idea.
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Re:It's the orbit, stupid
That bit about continents *is* a standard theory... but it has nothing on 11k years ago. Same thing goes for the orbit. So no, it isn't the orbit, and it isn't the landmasses.
Let's see... you have the North American Clovis Point people going extinct at the same time. So it isn't *who* killed them either. If the Clovis people had killed them off, you wouldn't have had them going extinct.
Also, at the same time, you have wildfires throughout North America. That soot contains microdiamonds.
You also have mammoths in Siberia at that time, flash frozen (Alaska Science Forum November 1, 1976. Mystery of the Mammoth and the Buttercups Article #122 by J. Holland).
You also have great areas in Alaska of jumbled up, blasted fauna caracases, many of them torn apart.
Now, all told, I'm going to posit -- and I doubt I'm the first to do so -- that an asteroid hit a glacier up against the south side of a mountain in Northern Alaska. The first thing it did, was melt/throw the ice of the glacier in a great parabolic trajectory. The water of the glacier went into near space, froze to extremely low temperatures, and came down. But meanwhile, the asteroid impacted the south side of the mountain, and vaporized, causing a fireball to project back into North America.
Thus the soot, thus the extinctions (animal and Clovis culture), thus the flash-frozen mammoth, thus the tectites, thus the great boneyards.
And no, for those creationists here, I extremely doubt that ANY of this had to do with Noah's flood. Noah's flood dates to about 5000 ya, and seems to match the Madagascar chevrons and 8' of river mud, pretty well. This is something different.
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Aliens cause Global Warming
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Re:It's unclear why this is a bad thing
Such as what? You mean the ancient cultures like the Aztecs who have dinosaurs on their garments and pottery and jewelry despite being thousands of years older then our current understanding of dinosaurs or what they look like.
That's retarded. The only reference to anything like this that I can find is this page which makes the argument that a certain piece of aztec art bears a resemblance to a tyrannosaurus skull. So yeah... hardly pervasive and hardly convincing to anyone who doesn't already desperately want to believe.
Anyways, we have seen with flash flooding and dam bursting that much of the geological formations like the Grand Cannon, the dead sea, and the badlands can be caused over extremely short periods of time in like days and weeks.
No we haven't. The young earth grand canyon meme is debunked nicely here. It also doesn't stand up to some basic critical thinking skills, like if flash flooding carved the grand canyon, how come it left relatively fragile islands of rock standing up in the middle of the canyon in places?
You should really look into it. It's not exactly going to say the earth is 6000 years old, but it will force you to keep an open mind on the millions being claimed.
In order to believe young earth creationism, or ANY kind of age for the earth that's not in the millions or billions of years, you essentially have to throw away a ton of accepted knowledge, like how radioactive isotopes work, how sedimentation happens, plate tectonics, and so on. This includes things that are not only accepted but practically acted upon.
Basically science and technology are like a giant pyramid with the coolest crap on top. You can't accept the stuff on top, like say the GPS in your car or a radioisotope powered pacemaker, without implicitly allowing for the fact that all or most of the stuff beneath it is true, like the age of the earth.
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Re:Welcome back!
That isn't so different from what creative evolutionary biologists do already when they spin why things exist in the "wrong" periods already?
http://s8int.com/page8.html -
Re:That list is clearly missing one
'nuclear winter' for long enough to wipe out over 50% of their own population in weeks from cold and starvation.
Nuclear winter is a myth. -
Re:Another giant step backward...
I actually have the creationist answer to that. Back in the time of Noah, the continents were linked to form the super-continent Gwandanaland. When God sent the Flood, the amount of water held in the thick, cloud covered super oxygenated atmosphere (Think Venus, but liveable, and with tons of oxygen that for some reason enabled people to live for hundreds of years) could not provide enough water to cover the world, so the extra water had to come from somewhere. This secondary source was a vast underground aquifer, or an underground ocean as it were.
The water also sprang forth from the ground, ripping the contentents apart and washing them to their current locations. The mid-Atlantic ridge is scar left from this ripping. So you see, just like the Grand Canyon, the mid-Atlantic ridge was actually formed in a matter of hours, not millions of years.
They also went on to say that rain never fell until the Deluge. As proof they pointed out that most dinosaur tracks don't have imprints from raindrops in them. However one set of tracks does, which proves that it was formed during the Deluge.
If dinosaurs existed as antediluvidian creatures, as opposed to be merely bones placed to test our faith, then the question begs to be asked, "Why did Noah think that 'Gather two of every animal' didn't apply to dinosaurs?"
Honestly, I saw this on TCT a few years ago. It was quite entertaining. -
Re:Good!
Creationist website warning. However, it does have fossil screws, hammers and a couple of other fossil artifacts. the link
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Re:More on sinks
I strongly suggest you read this speech before you start making accusatory remarks about those that disagree with you.
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Aliens Cause Global Warming: A Caltech Lecture bySo, all of the models are now useless based on new data? Hmm.
"To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models." ( Michael Crichton)
Read his excellent lecture entitled Aliens Cause Global Warming