Radioactive dating is not the only branch of science that assumes constancy over a long time.
Well, yes. But if you want to take that stance and question the well -evidenced assumptions in the 'God-wants-to-test-our faith' game, why not be properly scientific (as you seem to want to be) and test all your assumptions and not just some. For example, the assumption that the Bible is actually the word of God. I hear creationists go on and on about the minutiae of evolutionary science, but deafening silence about how to choose between the numerous holy books that claim to be the one and only.
Given the number of religions in the world (~2000) I can only come to the conclusion that not only did God plant fossils and such like to test us, but that he also planted the false holy books for the same reasons. How can you be so certain that you're following the right one?
Personally, I'd say that the Bible doesn't look so hot. Its got references to genocide, sexual deviancy and oppression of women (all sanctioned by God) and the 10 commandments are a very poor attempt at a universal moral code. Things like 'Thou shalt not keep slaves' or 'Thou shalt not abuse children' spring to mind as obvious oversights.
16 bit colour?
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
How can they spend £2.6 billion and have control screens that look like a ZX spectrum?
"No two countries that both had McDonald's ha[ve] fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's"
The theory has some counter examples now, but the principle of US and other aggression being directed against those countries without western-style free markets and/or much money is an interesting one.
The idea that neuroscience retreads the ground trod by cognitive scientists, psychologists and psyhcophysicists is essentially and profoundly true.
To be expected really. We have great difficulty measuring neural events because neurons are so damn small and tangled up with each other. On top of that, there is no unifying paradigm to explain concious experience - we still have no idea what gives rise to the fundamental 'I' that we experience all the time. Without it, Neuroscience is shooting in the dark, although there have been some interesting ideas thrown about.
'Addiction' is also a guilt-free term that transfers blame away from the individual and their personal/social circumstances and onto the game as the active agent which causes the problem. The real question, as with any addiction, is what is it about their life that makes the alternative state of mind so attractive.
They certianly do create them. I've known two people who have worked as journalists for British tabloids and both of them were quite happy to admit that on slow news days they would invent stuff (with encouragement from managers) to fill gaps. Admittedly, it was trivial things like "Woman with birthmark shaped like Gordon Brown taunted at swimming pool", but still.
Another freind used to have a job fabricating stories for a marketing company, which they would then give to a grateful press as similar filler content. "Baby named after Alcopop" was one, and "Man finds foot-shaped crisp in packet of Walkers" was another. People still buy the papers though, so either they don't notice or they don't care.
unless the NSA or magical imps are after you then complete anonymity can be gained by a few simple steps.
1: Find 3 or more VPN/proxy services located in different countries. Look for ones which claim to not keep any logs
Or, the NSA/magical imps are worth their salaries and have spent the last 10 years setting up VPN/proxy services and telling everyone that they 'keep no logs, honest!', so that a large part of the internet traffic that people consider worth anonymising already passes through servers that they control and log very carefully.
Anyway like you say apples and oranges, but at the end of the day its all fruit when it comes to causing suffering.
Agreed. I've never understood why killing 50,000 with a nuke is considered 'WMD', whereas the same number of deaths achieved using small arms isn't. Surely its the end result that is morally wrong, not the means.
others might come up with an alternate explanation that better fits the data Fair point, but explanations can be suggested without the original data, and with it, reinterpretation is a lot harder as the standard of statistical significance is always set much higher for explanations that were not initially proposed. Otherwise, you could start retro-fitting any data you find with whatever explanation seemed to fit and you'd get a fair number of bogus hits due to random chance.
I always argued that some of those would be good starting points for further research (how many inventions do we owe to serendipity?) but apparently its not good for funding, as you say.
At the end of my Psychology degree, during our last module, they told us about studies which were generally critical of Psychology, which included the scientific integrity issue. I forget whose study it was (Williams?), but someone had gone to the trouble of contacting a large number of authors of academic papers and had asked for their original data to review it. About half had 'lost' it, and of the rest about 1/3 had made at least one significant error.
I wondered at the time what could be done about this and whether it would help to write a small open source data-faking program, which would generate random results in line with the what the researcher wanted to find. By making it blatantly easy to massage/fake results (which was rife with the students writing their dissertations and faintly rumoured regarding certain staff), the problem would be hard to ignore as everyone would be under suspicion.
Obviously this won't make it possible to spot essentially undetectable faked results, but it might place more pressure on scientists to make their results truly verifiable and start a (possibly panicked) discussion about how to maintain credibility, which seeems to currently be based largely on the assumption of good character.
Or then again I may just be bitter about doing my research properly and not having taken the easy route like everyone else on the course.
people do take pride in certain things, such as plaques on their walls. This is effective only if there is a realistic prospect of the recognition being lost when an infraction occurs. This is not the same as losing recognition when you are caught, which is far less common.
which lets coffee-people fix your coffeemaker from afar. Snobbery reaches new heights. Not only can you spend $2000 on a coffee machine, but now you can pay extra to avoid having their grubby proletariat workmen sully your kitchen area when it needs fixing. Mind you, considering the 'coffee' that some people are drinking, this may be considered a victory for workers rights.
Who are the 'Coffee-people' anyway? Sounds like some lost tribe from Peru.
Slashdot Mirror
I teach Psychology and would love that link if you can find it (Google drew blank).
It may not be such a dramatic result though - surveys like that can be manipulated by the researchers, sometimes even accidentally.
Radioactive dating is not the only branch of science that assumes constancy over a long time.
Well, yes. But if you want to take that stance and question the well -evidenced assumptions in the 'God-wants-to-test-our faith' game, why not be properly scientific (as you seem to want to be) and test all your assumptions and not just some. For example, the assumption that the Bible is actually the word of God. I hear creationists go on and on about the minutiae of evolutionary science, but deafening silence about how to choose between the numerous holy books that claim to be the one and only.
Given the number of religions in the world (~2000) I can only come to the conclusion that not only did God plant fossils and such like to test us, but that he also planted the false holy books for the same reasons. How can you be so certain that you're following the right one?
Personally, I'd say that the Bible doesn't look so hot. Its got references to genocide, sexual deviancy and oppression of women (all sanctioned by God) and the 10 commandments are a very poor attempt at a universal moral code. Things like 'Thou shalt not keep slaves' or 'Thou shalt not abuse children' spring to mind as obvious oversights.
How can they spend £2.6 billion and have control screens that look like a ZX spectrum?
Sounds familiar in many ways.
This is NOT a net win (pun intended)
Save me.
The US has never fought a shooting war with a nuclear armed neighbor.
Perhaps a symptom of a wider trend:
"No two countries that both had McDonald's ha[ve] fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's"
The theory has some counter examples now, but the principle of US and other aggression being directed against those countries without western-style free markets and/or much money is an interesting one.
Yeah, what's with this story?
I never get network timeouts whilst I'm pos
So, the probe has encountered a shiny metal asteroid. Has anyone informed Bender?
Fron Wikipedia:
M-type asteroids are asteroids of unknown composition
E-type (44 Nysa, 55 Pandora) differ from M-type mostly by high albedo (0.3 or better)
"Bite my moderatley-reflective mystery-material ass-teroid"?
(Score:2, Insightful)
I never go anywhere without a six-pack and a strap-on.
Insightful?? I shudder to think what that mod considers funny.
The idea that neuroscience retreads the ground trod by cognitive scientists, psychologists and psyhcophysicists is essentially and profoundly true.
To be expected really. We have great difficulty measuring neural events because neurons are so damn small and tangled up with each other. On top of that, there is no unifying paradigm to explain concious experience - we still have no idea what gives rise to the fundamental 'I' that we experience all the time. Without it, Neuroscience is shooting in the dark, although there have been some interesting ideas thrown about.
'Addiction' is also a guilt-free term that transfers blame away from the individual and their personal/social circumstances and onto the game as the active agent which causes the problem. The real question, as with any addiction, is what is it about their life that makes the alternative state of mind so attractive.
The US invented the Internet
The DMCA is warping your mind. You can't invent tubes!
They certianly do create them. I've known two people who have worked as journalists for British tabloids and both of them were quite happy to admit that on slow news days they would invent stuff (with encouragement from managers) to fill gaps. Admittedly, it was trivial things like "Woman with birthmark shaped like Gordon Brown taunted at swimming pool", but still.
Another freind used to have a job fabricating stories for a marketing company, which they would then give to a grateful press as similar filler content. "Baby named after Alcopop" was one, and "Man finds foot-shaped crisp in packet of Walkers" was another. People still buy the papers though, so either they don't notice or they don't care.
unless the NSA or magical imps are after you then complete anonymity can be gained by a few simple steps.
1: Find 3 or more VPN/proxy services located in different countries. Look for ones which claim to not keep any logs
Or, the NSA/magical imps are worth their salaries and have spent the last 10 years setting up VPN/proxy services and telling everyone that they 'keep no logs, honest!', so that a large part of the internet traffic that people consider worth anonymising already passes through servers that they control and log very carefully.
Google does this already. All the things you thought about all day long, recorded for posterity.
I'm confused - how does the copy belong to the original producer, other than via an artificial government-mandated monopoly?
Making a copy takes effort on the part of the copyer and none on the part of the original producer.
Is there anything left of so called "normalness"?
Was there ever a clear definition in the first place?
Anyway like you say apples and oranges, but at the end of the day its all fruit when it comes to causing suffering.
Agreed. I've never understood why killing 50,000 with a nuke is considered 'WMD', whereas the same number of deaths achieved using small arms isn't. Surely its the end result that is morally wrong, not the means.
KUNT!
Is that an acronym I'm not familiar with or are you German?
Now you're going to change it and I won't be able to ebay your spare socks anymore.
Loss of income and loss of entertainment. That's one bad-ass trojan.
I always argued that some of those would be good starting points for further research (how many inventions do we owe to serendipity?) but apparently its not good for funding, as you say.
At the end of my Psychology degree, during our last module, they told us about studies which were generally critical of Psychology, which included the scientific integrity issue. I forget whose study it was (Williams?), but someone had gone to the trouble of contacting a large number of authors of academic papers and had asked for their original data to review it. About half had 'lost' it, and of the rest about 1/3 had made at least one significant error.
I wondered at the time what could be done about this and whether it would help to write a small open source data-faking program, which would generate random results in line with the what the researcher wanted to find. By making it blatantly easy to massage/fake results (which was rife with the students writing their dissertations and faintly rumoured regarding certain staff), the problem would be hard to ignore as everyone would be under suspicion.
Obviously this won't make it possible to spot essentially undetectable faked results, but it might place more pressure on scientists to make their results truly verifiable and start a (possibly panicked) discussion about how to maintain credibility, which seeems to currently be based largely on the assumption of good character.
Or then again I may just be bitter about doing my research properly and not having taken the easy route like everyone else on the course.
Aargh! Damn Psychology!
[grasps head]
Can't...
stop...
analysing....
Gnnnh!
So what are the republicans if they're not conservatives?
Who are the 'Coffee-people' anyway? Sounds like some lost tribe from Peru.