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Putting aside the arrogance of trying to diagnose me from the other side of your monitor screen...

you are gifted after all)

Actually, I just said I was a nerd. That doesn't really imply gifted.

We all think we are the ugliest kid, we all think everyone hates us.

Well, in my case I'd call it empirically true. The only ugly thing was my teeth, but they were pretty bad. Nearly the only time I ever swung a softball bat, I took my thumbnail off with a hit from the ball. (Literally, though it took about a week. Had to grow a new one. Didn't even know that was possible. Scored a few "gross-out" points for pulling my thumbnail off in the middle of class; no one was more surprised then me. ;-) ) I could play T-Ball but only because the ball wasn't moving.

Once I got glasses in high school, it all changed. I could hit baseballs. I could sink baskets. (I consider myself lucky I was close enough to normal vision to develop depth perception at all; some people don't. I must have had normal vision when I was young.) So I can state with confidence the fact that I was unusually bad at sports. (Last one chosen for anything, even basketball, even as the tallest kid in class.)

As for your introversion, I recommend taking the full Myers Briggs to find out your personality type (you may be an extrovert after all).

INT(split)... but what does that prove? (And what would reading like a biography prove? Half of the Meyers Briggs profiles have an element of truth for me... and everyone else.) Myers Briggs can only measure what you are now. It's not even possible to measure what I "could have been" under some other set of circumstances, it doesn't even make sense to talk about it in a psychological sense. Best put the pop-psychology books down, OK?

One of the first things you learn in psychology is never "diagnose" someone at a distance, certainly not from a screenful of text. In this case, you merely insulted and annoyed me, albiet not much. You can do worse. (Check for a reply to the score 5 post on Asberger's.)

can't believe nobody has mentioned Velikovsky s theories yet.

1. It's not a known broken OS. It's an OS that doesn't have any failsafe to protect against running out of storage, and user error caused it to allocate too many files. The people who were keeping track of old files from a failed transfer weren't talking to the guys that allocated new files, so nobody knew how many files were actually allocated and they ran out.

2. That's not what "begs the question" means. http://skepdic.com/begging.html

3. Based on 1 and 2, it is proved by example that you=monkey puppet.

Generally a contrived answer that is self-consistant is better than a simple answer that begs more questions.

This really begs the question. Why would you want to download it???

No, that raises the question. Begging the question is something entirely different.

>I'd personally like to thank Nissan for coming up with yet another way to fck up the natural processes on this planet.

Natural, like a bearded pope, or pedophilia?

Sorry to break it to you, but daily we change natural processes on this planet. Chaging hail to snow or water sounds like a great idea to me.

If mathematics are not universal, then the mathematical reasoning that can be conducted to deduce the laws of nature is also not universal.

You're assuming a relationship between mathematics and the "laws of nature" that isn't there. As Einstein put it, As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

Mathematics is as socially constructed as any other form of language. It is based on axioms and defintions, not observation of reality. We select those axioms and definitions in a way to be useful to us, just as we select for those lingustic constructs that are useful. But this selection is based on our desire to communicate with others - it is a social construct. Once upon a time if you asked mathematicians what nubmer, when squared, gave negative one, they'd say there was no such number; now, any bright middle school kids know it's i.

"Reality" is also to a large degree socially constructed, since all can ever speak of is our observations, which are socially conditioned. You see what you expect to see or are trained to see. (You don't see the fnords, or Sombody Else's Problem, while the hypothetical planet Vulcan (the one inside the orbit of Mercury, not Mr. Spock's home) was observed several times, as were Blondlot's N-rays.) This is why double-blind protocols are used - though if everyone involved has an expectation, that doesn't help.

What we think of as "reality" is just a model that we mostly share. The electron, for example, is not a component of human experience but a component of a model that unifies and predicts many observations. That is a very good and useful model, but it is entirely conceivable that some extra-terrestrial civilization has (or some future human civilization will have) a model that is just as useful but doesn't contain anything like electrons. (Just like Chinese Medicine has a "patterne-thinking" model of the human being that is radically different than and incompatible with the reductionist model, yet is extremely useful.) What would such an electron-free model look like? I can't tell you, I'm too conditioned by the electron model.

Remember: for any set of observations, there are an infinite number of hypothesis to fit them. There's no end to the curves you can plot through any finite set of data points. We see the points and call them a line, but it ain't necessarily so. The best we can do is eliminate lines that don't go anywhere near the points.

With all due respect, but last time I was in the US - I think the SUVs, Hummers and things equally as hideous outnumbered Accords 100 to 1.

So... the study and definition of the placebo effect is not scienctific?

"However, it may be that much of the placebo effect is not a matter of mind over molecules, but of mind over behavior. A part of the behavior of a "sick" person is learned. So is part of the behavior of a person in pain. In short, there is a certain amount of role-playing by ill or hurt people. Role-playing is not the same as faking or malingering. The behavior of sick or injured persons is socially and culturally based to some extent. The placebo effect may be a measurement of changed behavior affected by a belief in the treatment. The changed behavior includes a change in attitude, in what one says about how one feels, and how one acts. It may also affect one's body chemistry."

This is why Sheeley required the patient's spouse to attend the program as well. He taught the spouse how to not reward pain behavior by providing sympathy or doing things for the patient that the patient could do just fine if they MADE themselves do it.

This is the basis of Holistic medicine -- treat the patient, not the "disease". Sometimes the "disease" itself is a symptom of something else. As for advancing science, I think you'll find Sheeley had quite an impact.

Try explaining away Khaled Sheikh Mohammad's interview on Al Jazeera where he, with Ramzi bin al-shibh, confessed to planning 9/11 and talked about how the targets were chosen.

One thing I've noticed is that people who blame Israel or America for 9/11 seem to be disproportionately Muslim or from the Middle East. Not to defend Israel's human rights record, but I always despised people who believed their government's propaganda - to repeat it uncritically shows a real lack of spirit.

Freudian bullshit. It amazes me that people still say such nonsense, many years after Freud's pseudoscientific crap has been completely disproved.

Here are a couple of good places to start: 1 2.

Drosnin once said, "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby-Dick, I'll believe them." McKay promptly produced an ELS analysis of Moby-Dick predicting not only Indira Ghandi's assassination, but the assassinations of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Yitzhak Rabin, as well as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Mathematician David Thomas did an ELS on Genesis and found the words "code" and "bogus" close together not once but 60 times. What are the odds of that happening? Thomas also did an ELS analysis on Drosnin's Bible Code II: The Countdown (2002) and found the message "The Bible Code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax."* Does this mean that God put in a code to reveal that there is no code?

Intelligent Design is a "scientific" front for creationists to advance their anti-evolution agenda.

to summarize the skepdic's analysis:

Intelligent design (ID) refers to the theory that intelligent causes are responsible for the origin of the universe and of life in all its diversity. Advocates of ID maintain that their theory is scientific and provides empirical proof for the existence of God or superintelligent aliens. They believe that design is empirically detectable in nature and in living systems. They claim that intelligent design should be taught in the science classroom because it is an alternative to the scientific theory of natural selection.

The main proponent of Intelligent Design is the Discovery Institute, a Seattle research institute funded largely by Christian foundations. Their arguments are attractive because they are couched in scientific terms and backed by scientific competence. However, their arguments are identical in function to the creationists: rather than provide positive evidence for their own position, they mainly try to find weaknesses in natural selection.

(by the way, the quote in the subject line is taken from Leonard Krishtalka, the director of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum.)

Phil Plait's page linked to the Skeptic's Dictionary, which in turn linked to this cool site:

Miracles of Islam:
* Does this tomato carry a message from God?
* Second Miracle Tomato
* Miracle stone
* Name of 'Allah' on eggs and beans
* Miracle Melon
* Holy Message on Eggshell

This is strangely comforting to me, as a Christian myself. I had thought that visions of Christ in pond scum and the Virgin Mary on tortillas were God's way of helping us laugh at ourselves, but I wondered why He would have everyone else giggling as well. Turn out He's being a divine Prankster to the rest of his children as well.

As for us Methodists, I don't think we tend to make a big deal about religious signs in fruit, stones, and tortillas. Perhaps this is due in part to the Protestant reluctance to worship iconic figures. Note that at your local Baptist or Methodist church, the cross is empty... symbolically, that's an important distinction from our Catholic brethren.

But if that tortilla is what it takes to strengthen your faith... "God works in mysterious ways," indeed.

And incorrectly several dozen times reported apple portables, product end of lifings that never happened, and tons of other things. Most of the time they're duped by hoaxers, sometimes ones with no credibility whatsoever.

The occasional success does not make up for these stupid mistakes. Like all prophets, Think Secret is guilty of retroactive clairvoyance, confirmational bias, and shoehorning. Such as when the 3G ipod came out...they had "mock ups" of it which they claimed to be development samples, but a month later were shown to have the buttons in the wrong place. Or when they finally released the new 15" PowerBook...something they had been predicting would be out "next month, they're all made up and ready to ship!" for close to 6 months. And the specs on the released models were, of course, completely different from the ones that were "boxed."

And incorrectly several dozen times reported apple portables, product end of lifings that never happened, and tons of other things. Most of the time they're duped by hoaxers, sometimes ones with no credibility whatsoever.

The occasional success does not make up for these stupid mistakes. Like all prophets, Think Secret is guilty of retroactive clairvoyance, confirmational bias, and shoehorning. Such as when the 3G ipod came out...they had "mock ups" of it which they claimed to be development samples, but a month later were shown to have the buttons in the wrong place. Or when they finally released the new 15" PowerBook...something they had been predicting would be out "next month, they're all made up and ready to ship!" for close to 6 months. And the specs on the released models were, of course, completely different from the ones that were "boxed."

And incorrectly several dozen times reported apple portables, product end of lifings that never happened, and tons of other things. Most of the time they're duped by hoaxers, sometimes ones with no credibility whatsoever.

The occasional success does not make up for these stupid mistakes. Like all prophets, Think Secret is guilty of retroactive clairvoyance, confirmational bias, and shoehorning. Such as when the 3G ipod came out...they had "mock ups" of it which they claimed to be development samples, but a month later were shown to have the buttons in the wrong place. Or when they finally released the new 15" PowerBook...something they had been predicting would be out "next month, they're all made up and ready to ship!" for close to 6 months. And the specs on the released models were, of course, completely different from the ones that were "boxed."

Sorry, but FAIRs standards of truthfulness are sadly lacking. They were, for instance, behind the infamous Super Bowl battering hoax. It's organizations like FAIR - not just corporations - that need to be kept honest.

How did Neo do it in the real world? Mind over matter. Spoon bending. Telepathy. Jungle consciousness. Healing by prayer. Knowing who telephoned you before you pick up the receiver. Stuff that might exist but no one has conclusively proven one way or the other.

All that junk has been pretty well proven not to exist for quite some time. The fact is, in normal reality (which the moves state that the 'Real World' is), these things DON'T HAPPEN. Period.

It makes sense within the context of the story, at least.

No, it doesn't. Since the bleak world outside the Matrix is supposed to be our reality only in the future, it makes NO sense whatsoever. Things like that just simply don't happen in reality, ever.

Seriously, the methane angle has already been proposed a long time ago. And anytime you hear something fantasitical, you should at least consult the skepdic site to see what rational people are thinking. Here's the link for Bermuda Triangle accidents. Most skeptics think pirates are the real cause of disappearances.

GMD

It's probably not even that interesting.

Next time, use Google properly ;-)

--

J. Javier Maestro

Anyway, here's another thing about prayer and whether there's anything in it.

That, my friend, is either sheer hypocracy, or stupidity and ignorance.

This isn't flamebait, it's the truth.

Psychologist B.R. Forer found that people tend to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realizing that the same description could be applied to just about anyone. Consider the following as if it were given to you as an evaluation of your personality.

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student the above evaluation. He asked them to evaluate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good." The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2.

Mine was surprisingly accurate

This is also known as the Forer effect aka. subjective validation.

Nope, I just checked with the universe (it took a minute to consult its Big Book Of Phisical Laws) and it said "No, I still don't care. Foolish people are everywhere even in the U.S. Government"(I know!! I couldn't believe it either!)

N.B.: just one example of idiocy in high places; the CIA has wasted much taxpayer money on psychic remote viewing.

Keep in mind that writing and releasing a virus/worm/trojan requires a bit of skill and time and has the nasty side-effect of carrying significant jail time. Spammers don't have skill (or they'd be engineers), spammers don't have time (they have to work around filters all the time) and several years of jail time might not be too appealing to spammers either. Piggybacking on SoBig's backdoor for the purpose of spamming is guaranteed to have some nice FBI folks knocking on your door, confiscating all your equipment and looking for evidence of virus creation. Just a matter of time until you're read your rights from there on.

I know people make a lot out of the fact that SoBig carries its own SMTP client engine. So what though? That feature enables SoBig to also use non-Outlook machines as staging areas. Simple.

Use Occam's Razor and some common sense and see SoBig as what it is: a plain old worm somebody wrote to show off to his friends that has nothing to do with spam. Somebody as skilled as the worm writer probably hates spam as much as the rest of us. Not that I'm justifying SoBig in any way, I just removed 570 copies of SoBig.F from my inbox. :-(

jovlinger makes a joke, although for those who don't know, he's referring to the Gambler's Fallacy. At least, I think he is. :)

From a page about the Truster Voice Stress Analyzer:

What is a voice stress analyzer, you might wonder? It is a machine that measures components of the human voice--frequency modulations--that are correlated with stress. No machine can detect stress directly, much less distinguish whether the stress is due to lying, guilt, stutter, fear, constipation, or some other emotion or physical condition. The frequency modulations, called "micro tremors" by those who measure them, must be interpreted by a human being. The machine doesn't do the analysis, the examiner does.

Unfortunately the meaning appears to be changing, gidds and I (and probably others) are familiar with with the original usage and the new form grates. See The Skeptics Dictionary and The alt.usage.english Home Page for explanation of the original (and correct!) usage, while World Wide Words for a discussion on the changing meaning.

They don't mention if the study was double blind, they don't mention how the judges evaluated the performances...

It sounds compelling, but they certainly don't give me reason to believe it from the article. Of course, just like every other news story like this (such as the mozart effect), we won't see a follow up article if it proves to be bullsh!t and people are going to be repeating this "fact" for many years to come.

Why yes, I am in a bad mood today :)

But maybe I'm being too much INTJ on this ;-)

Since we're all talking about bullshit, I feel I have to mention that those personality types are bullshit as well. See here.

That said, geeks aren't always cold-minded individuals that want everything to make sense. Love is essentially a chemical reaction; a lie. But I have no problem living that lie and I don't waste my time questioning it. Sure it's not what it seems, but it's a nice experience, so that works for me.

In any case, i've met a lot of geeks that will believe any old bullshit (atkins has really taken hold in the geek community for some reason, for example), and plenty of non-geeks are brights as well.

This comes as no surprise - a lot of scientists have been taken in by quackery over the years, often because they are too trusting (the scientific community is built on honesty) or because they believe their powers of observation are infallible.

Also here's the skepdic entry for electronic voice phenomenon.

If anyone is really interested in PKD (on of my favorite authors) they can check out this great PKD fan site.

If you like what you see, get a copy of "A Scanner Darkly," you won't regret it.

Begging the question is a form of logical fallacy. The phrase "begs the question" is not equivalent to the phrase "raises the question."

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html
http://skepdic.com/begging.html
http://www.roomours.co.uk/ryder3.htm
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-t he-question.html

Next time you choose to assume an indignant and self-righteous tone, please make sure you know something about the subject in question. Thank you.

Love,
AC

I think a lot of so called diseases or disorders have a psychological basis to them. The Placebo Effect seems to corroborate this.

In my experience, if you don't know you have a disease, you tend to worry less about it (mind you, I'm not saying this may be the best thing). What I'm saying is, in a developed society like the US, where access to good medical facilities is easy and widespread, people tend to, in some cases (over)use it (and again, I'm not saying that's a bad thing).

In lesser developed countries, you would never hear of a person suffering from a common allergy. They generally tend to treat it as a common cold. I have seen many adult non-americans being diagnosed with various kinds of allergies after they arrived in the US after spending a significant portion of their adult life in another country.

Similarly, a larger number of American children are diagnosed (and treated) for learning disabilities and other disorders than those in other countries. It may be a better idea to see if the "patient" can learn to get around it, or even outgrow it if he is unaware of the problem rather than prescribing drugs.

Sounds like argument from design

"Hacker" politics range widely, from left to right, from intensely political to completely uninterested in political issues.
There, under 77 words. And a hell of a lot more accurate.

That depends on what you mean by "accurate." I would say that there's a Forer effect in your definition that isn't present in the JF entry. Your definition doesn't describe tendencies or characteristics whereby "hacker politics" is distinguishable from the politics of a random sampling of the population.

Now, it may be the case that "hacker politics" is indistinguishable from that of the population as a whole, in which case it would be equally accurate, and more concise, to say so. But in my (limited) experience, ESR's description is spot-on.

Logic cant explain logic. We are "contained" in a logical world. Logic will never allow us to get out of it. We have to be un-logical to get out of the matrix. Un-logic cant be explained by words. Words are a logic thing. Take a look at Salvia divinorum and Carlos Castaneda

Einstien's handwriting is very interesting. Notice how he dots his i's and how small his writing is. This means that he has an exceptional eye for detail, and he has an unreal imgination.

I don't think anyone would draw this sort of conclusions from his handwriting if they didn't know beforehand that it was Einstein's. Handwriting analysis is about as scientific as astrology if you ask me. See also this article in the Skeptic's Dictionary.

JP

Actually, a better reference for handwriting analysis is right here

The placebo effect is the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health not attributable to treatment. This effect is believed by many people to be due to the placebo itself in some mysterious way. A placebo (Latin for "I shall please") is a medication or treatment believed by the administrator of the treatment to be inert or innocuous. Placebos may be sugar pills or starch pills. Even "fake" surgery and "fake" psychotherapy are considered placebos.

The original poster claimed to have one installed, and claimed that it was pulling dust out of the air. You state that he's wrong because some magazine said so? ... Calling someone's personal observations "wrong" because they have a claim that disagrees with what you've read about is an interesting tactic.

The magazine in question does actual scientific studies with equipment, such as dispersing a measurable amount of air pollution (dust) and then measuring the quantity remaining after a period of time: In the end there is simple scientific fact derived by experimentation.

An individual person, making a subjective observation, is widely acknowledged as having flawed perception and a hearty "placebo effect": People are certain that the magic marker around the outside of their CD makes it sound better, and putting a spoiler on their 89 Civic makes it go faster. There are numerous legendary examples I could give of people simply believing something works and convincing themselves of the same, and that seems to be what you're advocating.

You can't tell us we're wrong, because Consumer Reports said so, and expect to be believed by any reasonable human being.

What's with the CR hate? It's a non-profit organization just looking at avoiding "belief", but instead judging products based upon scientific experimentation. Question the method used to evaluate the product, but questioning the evaulation itself seems rather flawed.

Just because the expected number of failures is 2.26 per 113 doesn't mean that every 50th flight will be a failure (i.e. 49 ok flights, 1 disaster, 49 ok flights, 1 disaster, etc.). 2 out of 100 will fail, but it could be the first two, the last two, the fifteenth and forty-eighth, etc. Nobody "should have expected to lose a shuttle around this time". This is also known as the gambler's fallacy.

At least, from what you wrote, it sounds like you're making this mistake. I could be misunderstanding what you mean.

Well if Velikovsky was correct we don't need to worry about the 60,000 year problem... as Venus swings by and causes havoc on a much shorter time scale.

Well, if Velikovsky was correct, we might not have to worry about it in 60,000 years. Since Venus swings by us and messes things up on a much shorter time period.

I posted a link to this in my previous post, but here it is again -

Concorde(sunk-cost) fallacy

"When one makes a hopeless investment, one sometimes reasons: I can't stop now, otherwise what I've invested so far will be lost. This is true, of course, but irrelevant to whether one should continue to invest in the project. Everything one has invested is lost regardless. ....

This fallacy is also sometimes referred to as the Concorde fallacy, after the method of funding the supersonic transport jet jointly created by the governments of France and Britain. Despite the fact that the Concorde is beautiful and as safe as any other jet transport, it was very costly to produce and suffered some major marketing problems. There weren't many orders for the plane. Even though it was apparent there was no way this machine would make anybody any money, France and England kept investing deeper and deeper, much to the dismay of taxpayers in both countries."

This mumbo jumbo was never going to fly from the beginning.(pardon the pun)
Concorde (sunk-cost) fallacy

Now, it's unfortunte that the Hollywood stars are going to have to go down a level and fly first-class like the rest of ... err like some people.

Strictly speaking, this single problem constitutes a refutation of the purist libertarian position; purist positions are like mathematical hypotheses, in that a single counterexample demolishes them. The purist must address this issue even if the evidence is (in my opinion, foolishly) interpreted to mean there is no serious greenhouse problem, and fails to support the position by finding a demonstration that there is no greenhouse problem.

The purist must demonstrate that even if there were such a global environmental issue, individuals optimizing for their own best interests would find a way to resolve it. No serious libertarian argument can proceed without considering the tragedy of the commons.

I can think of numerous other ways in which the purist libertarian argument falls flat. Money, for instance, cannot exist without extensive and complex regulation, and money is core to the libertarian view. And what good are cars without public roads, and houses without public water and sewage? All these require some sort of "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon".

Where to draw the line between the collective and the private interest is a problem that is not going away. Pure anarchist libertarianism is as doomed to failure as pure communism. Competition without regulation is at least as incapable of producing a thriving, complex economy as regulation without competition. Calling this "injustice" begs the question yet again.

The domains where libertarian prinicples suffice for social organization are quite obviously limited. Finding the appropriate limits shows no signs of being an easy problem. Trying to pretend that these alone are sufficient to design a society simply ignores some very basic evidence.

Perhaps if you stopped congratulating yourself for your naive good intentions for a moment, some sense might sink in to your immature brain.

Indeed.