You're playing fast and loose with the evidence, making strawman characterizations of scientific theories and evidence and then you expect me to take your argument seriously. Sorry it doesn't work that way.
Strawman #1
One of the key evolutionary beliefs in interpreting the evidence of similarities in life forms and chemistries is the BELIEF that the more complex DESCENDED from the simpler.
This is not a belief, it is a confirmed prediction of evolutionary theory. Not only that, but you got the prediction wrong. Evolution theory predicts change by mutation. A mutation can lead to higher or lower level complexity, and we see evidence of both.
Strawman #2
The DNA data storage and coding system far exceeds in density, anything human designers have come up with. It is so flexible and robust the designer used it again and again, just as human programmers aim for re-useable code.
Then the designer is an idiot. Junk DNA, and long strings on non-functional DNA is not an efficiency that humans would replicate. Not only that, there is zero evidence that God designs things in the way that you want to assume. You have no evidence to support this other than your assumption, and it is a violation of Occam's razor. All you intelligent design types are supposed to be ok with that. Or are you lying?
We assume (believe) that we can extrapolate this short term constancy far into the past and future.
And how is this at all relevant? You're going into the "we can't make any logical inferences about anything" territory. And, as I've said (and you haven't refuted), you can't have it both ways. The scientific process is either useful or it is not, intelligent design proponents such as yourself claim that the scientific process is lacking, but you have yet to demonstrate that the process is lacking at all except through a lot of incoherent and thoroughly refuted arguments that don't amount to a hill of beans.
Anyone that claims that the assumptions of science bear any similarity to the assumptions of religion clearly doesn't understand the nature of either one, and you probably don't understand the difference between faith and reason either.
Who's refusing to engage in the debate? You are! You keep moving the goal posts. Stick to the point I called you on! Explain to me the difference between the logical inference involved in concluding things that happen in physics versus the inference used to conclude that evolution is correct. All you did was show your ignorance of the scientific process by spouting creationist claims that have been refuted more times than I can count. Then you accuse me of making a personal attack when in fact, I'm merely telling you how screwed up and self centered your thinking has become, and you didn't attempt to refute that either.
We do find similarities in the DNA between closely related modern animals as well as anatomical similarities in fossilized ancestors REPEATEDLY just as evolution predicts we should. *And* we are even finding fossils of animals that evolutionary theory predicts that we should find, repeatedly.
Fossils shmossils, we find remains in various states of fossilization all the time! At the bottom of bogs for example where the oxygen level is low, such things have been found. And in older fossils we often find cases where bones, etc are *still* in the process of mineralization.
There's your response, even though you haven't responded to my original point. Please explain why logical inference is ok in other branches of science but not in biology. Stick to the point, I will not respond to any more of your goal post moving.
That is precisely the point. By your reasoning, we can't make any logical inferences at all because you willfully misunderstand evolutionary theory such that it is impossible for any data to meet your standard of evidence. I can just as easily make the claim that because nobody has ever actually seen an atom split that the actual process that generates energy is completely different even though it happens to match the theory very well. That is precisely the argument you are making with respect to evolution and your willful ignorance of the theory is precisely what makes it possible for you to make such absurd arguments against it. Evolution doesn't predict that lizards turn into birds in a single generation, but using fossil and DNA evidence, the inference is every bit as tightly constrained as the inference that when atoms split they release energy.
The rest of your post is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to evade the issue of admitting that you do actually accept logical inference, but only when it doesn't conflict with your poorly constructed faith. For 1700 years theologians have warned against interpreting the Bible too narrowly in the face of reason, it makes Christians look like fools and ultimately destroys faith when the truth is revealed, just as your faith is being destroyed due to your idolatry of the Bible. You do not worship God nor do you have faith in God, you worship the Word as though it is the One, but it is not, and you have revealed yourself to be a fool.
In physics we can emulate with powerful particle accelerators, many of the conditions that are theorized to have existed at the "big bang". That gives us real science understanding of what likely took place way back then. Nothing similar has ever been done in the life sciences.
And yet, the fact is, nobody has ever actually seen a uranium atom split or hydrogen atoms fuse. We've never actually seen an electron tunnel across a barrier potential, but the evidence that they do is overwhelming. We infer that these things happen based on our models and the evidence collected from data. In other words, you're being terribly inconsistent. On the one hand, you accept inferences that come from physics, but you deny the very same kind of inferences made by biology. You can't have it both ways, you either deny or accept them both, otherwise you are nothing more than someone who selectively picks and chooses what they believe in to satisfy a personal agenda.
I think it's one thing to be tolerant of different people, their culture, and how they live their lives. But I think ideas are a different kind of beast. Not all ideas are equal, and are deserving of equal time. I don't think that tolerance for a person who believes differently from you needs to be equated with tolerance for their ideas. I have no problem with people who believe in creationism, but that doesn't mean that their beliefs should be given a free ride in the name of tolerance (or that questioning them necessarily means that you are being intolerant).
This is one of the biggest problems with the news media today. They've created a perception that both sides of any story deserve to be heard no matter what. In order to appear fair and unbiased, they try to find two sides to every story, but very often, one of those sides has no standing at all but it is still presented in an uncritical fashion, even though it doesn't deserve to be uttered in the same breath as the other. So we get left with a lot of tripe on the tv news that "lets the viewer decide" which side is right, all in the name of fairness, balance, and tolerance, which I personally think is complete BS.
Well, the effects of atmospheric turbulence is somewhat less, but we still have the weather to deal with, eg. dust storms, and during the winters of each respective hemisphere the high latitudes tend to be socked in with clouds, making imaging there pretty much impossible. In fact, there are some images in this release that suffer from clouds, fog, and/or haze. A few of them were so bad that we didn't even bother to fully process the images into a stitched mosaic and just released them "raw."
We looked into using torrents as a distribution mechanism, and ultimately abandoned it for exactly the reasons you suggest. It just didn't look like there would be enough peers for each image to make it viable. So we turned to the jpeg2000 jpip protocol, which actually works quite well, and so far, the jpip servers seem to be handling the load even better than we expected. Of course, the irritating part is the lack of ubiquitous and stable client software that knows how to speak the jpip protocol, but if you can find a good client for your platform, it works well.
We're hoping to provide better client software with more supported platforms in the future, but we're not there yet. The IAS viewer is ok, but it's OSX and Windows only right now (although a linux port may be out fairly soon), but even if this viewer was fully cross platform, it's not really geared towards the kinds of features that we are looking for in an image viewer for HiRISE data, so we're hoping to build something better.
You're the perfect example of why people like Sam Harris seem to have a such a dislike for religious moderates even though you are more or less on the same side, at least to some extent.
Part of the problem is the way in which you are couching your terms, eg:
Attacks on religion, religious thought, and religious people are, of course, perfectly acceptable. It doesn't matter if we offend Christians as long as no atheist feelings are hurt.
This statement completely misses the point, and only shows your inability to see where the other side is coming from. Atheists aren't offended by someone believing in God, and in fact, this protest has nothing whatever to do with that. It has everything to do with certain religious groups denial of reason and rationality, and the utter hypocrisy that goes with it. When reason and rationality is abandoned then there is no longer a check on religious dogma, and that's when bad things happen. You need look no further than Jim Jones, David Koresh or any number of other cults that abandoned reason and rationality to worship a charismatic leader. Creationism is nothing more than a less dangerous version of the same mistake. These statements are not an attack on religious belief, they are an attack on anti-rationalism. From my pespective, it is you who are being the arrogant (and hypocritical) jerk by not acknowledging that the spread of this kind of thinking is damaging.
By not speaking out, you are an unwitting enabler for extremist views. You are not doing yourself nor your faith any favors by playing games of equivocation while ignoring the dangers of pervasive ignorance.
It doesn't matter how much "water" you're observing coming off of the comets if you cannot identify the source. What's particularly striking is that in the single instance where we've been able to observe the inside of a comet (when Comet Linear disintegrated), there were no water traces whatsoever in the immediate debris.
An objective-minded person might infer from that that the traces of "water" you're seeing are in fact a byproduct of the comet's movements through space. The Electric Comet document explains in quite clear terms that the indicators of "water" you're observing is the result of a simple chemical reaction between the solar wind and negative oxygen ions being stripped off of the comet's surface:
Sorry, wrong again. We observe both OH ions and ionized water, and we have good models that predict the breakdown of water into OH and the expected distribution based on the lifetime of these molecules within the solar radiation field.
I'm curious how you expect these people to survive. Most of them receive no funding whatsoever. They're only available option is to generate materials that inform semi-technical people of what their theory is. By allowing as many people as possible to understand their theory, they maximize their reach amongst an audience that remains open-minded.
Clearly these folks are already making a living via other means. And you're not allowing as many people as possible to understand the theory, because you aren't presenting anything that looks even remotely like a theory. Where are the equations showing the ionic interaction between ionized particles and the solar wind? Where are the equations that show that electric fields must dominate over magnetic fields? Where is it? You're not giving any hint of that anywhere. You're just uttering a bunch of nonsense about how the distributions to conform to neutral distributions, but no astronomers argue that all the molecules in a comet are neutral, but you keep implying that this is something unexplained, but it's not.
You're not objectively analyzing the basis for mainstream astrophysical assumptions and speculations.
In what way? It's easy to accuse me of this, but again, you provide no evidence for this, and in fact, you have no evidence that I'm not being objective, or that I am biased in any way. In fact, my evaluation of these papers has absolutely nothing at all to do with any mainstrean astrophysical assumptions that I may have, and everything to do with your lack of providing any sort of remotely verifiable model that explains and reliably predicts anything. All you are doing is trying to shift the blame of your own failure to come up with the next big scientific theory to your detractors, and that is definitely the usual sort of invective that comes from people that believe in this nonsense.
So why shouldn't we call you a crack pot? You don't provide good evidence for your position (strike 1). You misrepresent accepted science by attempting to portray legitimate scientists as people who don't know what they are looking at, but you have all the answers (which is not how the scientific process has *ever* worked) (strike 2), and you trot out the canard that the burden of proof is on the skeptics (strike 3).
For the record I have looked over several of the documents on your website, and not a single one of them presented anything that wasn't patently false, misrepresented evidencial findings in place for many years as some new finding, or made unproven, unverifiable, predictions based on some model that is never presented in any coherent form.
It is not my job to prove you wrong, it is your job to prove to me that you are right. And you have failed miserably. Feel free to accuse me of not objectively evaluating your writings (that would be a false assumption, but I doubt that will stop you). The fact is, I have looked at the evidence that you claim is in your favor, and it doesn't measure up. Most of the time, I wouldn't even call what you present evidence, but more akin to the ramblings of a mind with delusions of granduer. Therefore, you are a crank.
There is not even a single equation in that piece of crap that you are trying to pass off as a "scientific presentation." As someone that has done cometary spectroscopy, your claim that comets lack water is rediculous. I have spectra that shows literally thousands of kilograms of water being emitted from a comet's surface every second, and that's very typical. Further, the "revelation" in your paper about filaments in a comet's coma that can't be explained by neutral gas is no revelation at all. It's because UV radiation from the sun ionizes the neutrals, and that's something that's been known about and understood for over 100 years! You're presenting this information as though it's something new and undiscovered. But it's not.
As for your preimpact flash prediction. That's a load of BS as well. You don't know that the flash occurred prior to impact, and you provide no evidence to suggest that it did, and you can't prove that it did. And even if the flash did occur prior to impact, you don't provide any model at all that explains such a phenomenon, only that you have "predicted it." I'd be interested in knowing what journal that prediction was published in the first place.
Finally, and most telling, is that you have plenty of expensive books available for sale from your website, but not a single bit of relevent scientific information is presented that would allow an objective person to make a judgement about your supposed theories. You operate like a con artist offering unseen answers to the gullible and line your own pockets with their ignorance.
In short, you're going to have to do a lot better than that lame electric comet document.
I object to your claims because they are misrepresentation of what astronomers are saying. And the evidence that you site (google news of all things) to support your contention shows a complete lack of knowledge of the scientific process and a complete inability to get information from the original sources to back up your claims. (or is that on purpose?)
Finally, you portray the accepted models as a sacred cow for scientists that would do anything to protect that sacred cow. Except that the history of science has shown repeatedly that such portrayals are completely and totally false. Which means that you are either ignorant or lying or both. It doesn't matter whether the universe is nearly 100% plasma or nearly 100% swiss cheese, you aren't presenting anything worthy of consideration. It's all too obvious that you have an axe to grind against the "scientific establishment" and because of it, you are incapable of being impartial about your own pet theory or your presumed opponents. And that's before we even get into the questionable credentials of the people supporting your theory.
Whether or not astronomers have a "pretty clear notion of what they are researching," does not excuse you from claiming that your claim is right just because you think the astronomers are wrong.
And how many of those google news postings are overhyped misunderstandings of press releases? Science reporting sucks in general, and I haven't seen a science story in the press that didn't overstate, overhype, or get something flat-out wrong for the sake of sensationalism in over 25 years. The evidence you site of astronomer's supposed bafflement is rediculous, pedestrian, and unworthy of any consideration what so ever. Try again when you have some hard experimental data that both disproves current cosmological theory and supports your own. Until then, you're either a genius or a quack, and I'm betting very strongly on the latter since you seem to be completely incapable of providing a rationale for your position.
I wouldn't put any stock in that documentary. The guy that produced it is a known fraud, and it's been shown definitively that he altered graphs and data in this documentary as well as others that he has produced. He also quoted a number of climate scientists out of context, and those scientists are now on record as stating that their statements were selectively edited to make them look like they said something very different from what they said in their interviews. See here. There's also more information about Martin Durkin's (the documentary producer) dubious track record if you google it.
Please don't insult my intelligence. If you really and truly have faith that the deity of your choice exists, more power to you. I don't share your faith, but I don't have any problem with you believing whatever you want.
However, claiming that you have hard, reproducible evidence for your belief and then claiming that others just aren't open to it insults the intelligence of everyone who has ever considered the subject carefully and drawn conclusions different from yours. The fact is, evidence isn't the issue at all. I'm willing to accept any evidence you provide, it is the veracity of that evidence, your interpretation of that evidence, and the conclusions that you draw from it that I will quible over. The fact is, you either have such evidence and it is not and can not be interpreted in any other, more plausible way or you have a load of fuzzy logic and wishful thinking masquerading as faith that is doomed to be proven false sooner or later. Sidenote: I heard this exact argument from the pastor of a church I once attended in a sermon about the nature of faith, so you can't dismiss this as coming from some random athiest that doesn't understand faith. this is from a devout theologian (One of the smartest and possibly the only intellectually honest one I have ever met).
Claiming that people who don't see things the way you do just aren't "open" to it, is just flat out BS. Such statements make you sound more like some psychic charlatan than someone who has "reproducible evidence."
I think the one of Victoria Crater is probably about right. The stereo anaglyphs that were made are exagerated because the convergence angles were larger than the angles for human eyes. This fly over using the DEM looks about right though. I'm less certain about the Columbia Hills flyover, it looks a little exagerated to me, but I saw a presentation of Randy Kirk's a couple of weeks ago, and I got the impression that the height field has not been expanded in any of the movies that he has done, they are all straight from the DEM.
Oh, please. So if your candidate (Democrat, naturally) loses, the election's automatically stolen?
No, IMHO, a lot of the issues pointed out in the documentary are problems, but in many respects, I don't think they matter. The relationship between the D's and the R's has become too incestuous for any sort of really fair election to occur. They work to intentionally polarize all issues beyond any hope of sanity to the point that neither party provides good choices. If you don't have good choices to begin with, does it really matter if the election is fair or not? You're screwed either way.
I will admit that I will vote democrat in this election, although it's not because I particularly like them, I would rather vote for a Barry Goldwater style republican to be honest. But they don't exist anymore. The trotskyite neocons have taken over the party and they aren't conservative, and even worse, lying is a standard part of their play book. That's not to say that the democrats are really that much better, because they are not, but at least they aren't followers of Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol.
No, you misunderstand. You want to claim that the basis for feng shui is some sort of common sense building code that is wrapped up in some sort of "spiritual" narrative. Ok, fair enough, I'll buy that.
However, if your claims are true at some level, then different feng shui practitioners should be able to independently come up with similar arrangements for a given room (after all they are all using the same common sense building codes right?). Penn and Teller showed that this is not the case. In their tests, there was not a single point of common design between any of the people they tested. So, no matter what you want to claim about the "common sense" foundations of feng shui, it is fully apparent that the "mystical" interpretations are completely subjective and have nothing to do with any of the common sense they are supposed to be based on. The only truth, value, and wisdom associated with feng shui is what is subjectively attached to it by the people who have been tricked into thinking that there is really something to it.
No, dark matter is a prediction based on observed and well established facts. We have observations that indicate that galaxies and galactic clusters appear to contain more matter than can be accounted for by the visible mass. We, therefore, predict that there is more mass there than we can see through conventional means.
These predictions could be false, or superceded by modifications to gravitational theory. That is why dark matter is not a a religion. The dark matter prediction could be proven false based on new evidence or new theory, that is a standard part of the scientific process. Attempting to explain what we don't understand within a testable and theoretical framework is what science does! To claim that dark matter is a "religious" notion only shows that you don't understand the nature of both science and religion. Or you are being intentionally obtuse.
Uhh, frankly. if you are willing to go to this much trouble in the first place... Wouldn't it be easier just to build your own PVR using off the shelf hardware? I mean really, why bother? If you've already got the hardware, then maybe it's worth it to hack it, but otherwise, I fail to see how this is going to "flood the market" with cheap hardware, when the market is already flooded with cheap hardware that you can use to build your own PVR system if you want.
You are glossing over some very important points here. First, the work *has* been done and *is* being done. The work just isn't being done in the USA. So far, there has been very little of promise according to the threads that have been posted here. Why continue researching a topic that is not turning anything up?
True, the research is being done elsewhere, however, my understanding of what's been accomplished so far is that there are difficulties, but to say that this line of research is a dead end is still very premature, and you don't have to look far to find evidence supporting that shows pretty unequivocally that there is something to be gained there.
And I have every right to judge that Bush's reasoning is invalid. We are discussing the same thing fundamentally, but thanks to bad theology based on poor logic and a complete misunderstanding of the nature of faith, we get bozos who attach significance to things that have none. I have evidence supporting my position, Bush does not. What is the difference between my assertion that silicon atoms are potentially sentient and represent another being, and the assertion that a fertilized egg is another being? Since the is no evidence to support either position, they are equivalent. Only bad theology can lead one to a conclusion that there is a difference.
Such an article is not politizing anything. And to claim that it is only shows ignorance. The fact is: Nobody knows how broadly and to what diseases stem cells could be successfully applied to. Why? Because we haven't done the work. And we will never know until the work is done. That is not politics, that is a fact. It is also the case that, given what we already know about stem cells, the case is very strong from them to be successfully used in many treatments, if the research can be done that will develop them into proper treatments. Now you can bitch and moan about potential patients coming out in favor of stem cell research, but calling that political is bullshit as well. If you knew that there might be a cure on the horizon for a disease you are suffering from, you would be doing the same thing. Calling it politics is just an easy way for you to dismiss the suffering of those you disagree with.
Asserting that Bush's "reasoning could be sane," is like saying that research into new and better computer chips should be stopped because we are violating the rights of silicon atoms. No, it is most definitely not a sane argument.
Now, we can go around and around about whether or not the government should be providing funding for research, and there are reasonable arguments to be made there. However, the position being taken by the Bush administration is not a reasoned one. It is nothing more than cynical pandering to the ignorant that have been fed unjustifiably bad science and theology by people that should know better.
Ok, I admit to misreading the post. However, in what way did I disprove my own implication? I didn't say anything about anyone needing to lack faith. What I was implying is that faith can be wrong and those very same great minds were able to recognize it when their own churches could not.
If a church promotes a brand of faith at odds with evidence and logic, such faith is ultimately self destructive, even Aquinas with all of his mental gymnastics figured that one out. One of the major issues in the "war" between science and religion, is the ability of science to self correct and change in light of new evidence. This is a very difficult thing to deal with in the realm of faith, because there is no mechanism for self correction other than revelation. And at that point, it comes down to who's revelation are you going to believe? You can't test it, you can't replicate it, or even verify the veracity of a revelation, which makes changing or modifying one's religious faith a very difficult thing to do. And that's before we even begin to open the can of worms that is the interpretation of scripture.
Many of the greatest minds in the history of science have belonged to men/women of faith.
Nonsequitor. Having a "great mind" does not preclude one from having faith. However, it does not follow that these people had great minds because of their faith.... which is what you are implying. In addition, your implication leaves out one subtle and very important point: Many of these same great minds frequently disagreed with church dogma. In other words, they maintained their faith in spite of the church. Which really can't be construed as a vote of confidence in the way that churches promote and interpret their religion.
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You're playing fast and loose with the evidence, making strawman characterizations of scientific theories and evidence and then you expect me to take your argument seriously. Sorry it doesn't work that way.
Strawman #1
One of the key evolutionary beliefs in interpreting the evidence of similarities in life forms and chemistries is the BELIEF that the more complex DESCENDED from the simpler.
This is not a belief, it is a confirmed prediction of evolutionary theory. Not only that, but you got the prediction wrong. Evolution theory predicts change by mutation. A mutation can lead to higher or lower level complexity, and we see evidence of both.
Strawman #2
The DNA data storage and coding system far exceeds in density, anything human designers have come up with. It is so flexible and robust the designer used it again and again, just as human programmers aim for re-useable code.
Then the designer is an idiot. Junk DNA, and long strings on non-functional DNA is not an efficiency that humans would replicate. Not only that, there is zero evidence that God designs things in the way that you want to assume. You have no evidence to support this other than your assumption, and it is a violation of Occam's razor. All you intelligent design types are supposed to be ok with that. Or are you lying?
We assume (believe) that we can extrapolate this short term constancy far into the past and future.
And how is this at all relevant? You're going into the "we can't make any logical inferences about anything" territory. And, as I've said (and you haven't refuted), you can't have it both ways. The scientific process is either useful or it is not, intelligent design proponents such as yourself claim that the scientific process is lacking, but you have yet to demonstrate that the process is lacking at all except through a lot of incoherent and thoroughly refuted arguments that don't amount to a hill of beans.
Anyone that claims that the assumptions of science bear any similarity to the assumptions of religion clearly doesn't understand the nature of either one, and you probably don't understand the difference between faith and reason either.
Who's refusing to engage in the debate? You are! You keep moving the goal posts. Stick to the point I called you on! Explain to me the difference between the logical inference involved in concluding things that happen in physics versus the inference used to conclude that evolution is correct. All you did was show your ignorance of the scientific process by spouting creationist claims that have been refuted more times than I can count. Then you accuse me of making a personal attack when in fact, I'm merely telling you how screwed up and self centered your thinking has become, and you didn't attempt to refute that either.
We do find similarities in the DNA between closely related modern animals as well as anatomical similarities in fossilized ancestors REPEATEDLY just as evolution predicts we should. *And* we are even finding fossils of animals that evolutionary theory predicts that we should find, repeatedly.
Fossils shmossils, we find remains in various states of fossilization all the time! At the bottom of bogs for example where the oxygen level is low, such things have been found. And in older fossils we often find cases where bones, etc are *still* in the process of mineralization.
There's your response, even though you haven't responded to my original point. Please explain why logical inference is ok in other branches of science but not in biology. Stick to the point, I will not respond to any more of your goal post moving.
What is your definition of "seen"?
That is precisely the point. By your reasoning, we can't make any logical inferences at all because you willfully misunderstand evolutionary theory such that it is impossible for any data to meet your standard of evidence. I can just as easily make the claim that because nobody has ever actually seen an atom split that the actual process that generates energy is completely different even though it happens to match the theory very well. That is precisely the argument you are making with respect to evolution and your willful ignorance of the theory is precisely what makes it possible for you to make such absurd arguments against it. Evolution doesn't predict that lizards turn into birds in a single generation, but using fossil and DNA evidence, the inference is every bit as tightly constrained as the inference that when atoms split they release energy.
The rest of your post is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to evade the issue of admitting that you do actually accept logical inference, but only when it doesn't conflict with your poorly constructed faith. For 1700 years theologians have warned against interpreting the Bible too narrowly in the face of reason, it makes Christians look like fools and ultimately destroys faith when the truth is revealed, just as your faith is being destroyed due to your idolatry of the Bible. You do not worship God nor do you have faith in God, you worship the Word as though it is the One, but it is not, and you have revealed yourself to be a fool.
In physics we can emulate with powerful particle accelerators, many of the conditions that are theorized to have existed at the "big bang". That gives us real science understanding of what likely took place way back then. Nothing similar has ever been done in the life sciences.
And yet, the fact is, nobody has ever actually seen a uranium atom split or hydrogen atoms fuse. We've never actually seen an electron tunnel across a barrier potential, but the evidence that they do is overwhelming. We infer that these things happen based on our models and the evidence collected from data. In other words, you're being terribly inconsistent. On the one hand, you accept inferences that come from physics, but you deny the very same kind of inferences made by biology. You can't have it both ways, you either deny or accept them both, otherwise you are nothing more than someone who selectively picks and chooses what they believe in to satisfy a personal agenda.
I think it's one thing to be tolerant of different people, their culture, and how they live their lives. But I think ideas are a different kind of beast. Not all ideas are equal, and are deserving of equal time. I don't think that tolerance for a person who believes differently from you needs to be equated with tolerance for their ideas. I have no problem with people who believe in creationism, but that doesn't mean that their beliefs should be given a free ride in the name of tolerance (or that questioning them necessarily means that you are being intolerant).
This is one of the biggest problems with the news media today. They've created a perception that both sides of any story deserve to be heard no matter what. In order to appear fair and unbiased, they try to find two sides to every story, but very often, one of those sides has no standing at all but it is still presented in an uncritical fashion, even though it doesn't deserve to be uttered in the same breath as the other. So we get left with a lot of tripe on the tv news that "lets the viewer decide" which side is right, all in the name of fairness, balance, and tolerance, which I personally think is complete BS.
Well, the effects of atmospheric turbulence is somewhat less, but we still have the weather to deal with, eg. dust storms, and during the winters of each respective hemisphere the high latitudes tend to be socked in with clouds, making imaging there pretty much impossible. In fact, there are some images in this release that suffer from clouds, fog, and/or haze. A few of them were so bad that we didn't even bother to fully process the images into a stitched mosaic and just released them "raw."
We looked into using torrents as a distribution mechanism, and ultimately abandoned it for exactly the reasons you suggest. It just didn't look like there would be enough peers for each image to make it viable. So we turned to the jpeg2000 jpip protocol, which actually works quite well, and so far, the jpip servers seem to be handling the load even better than we expected. Of course, the irritating part is the lack of ubiquitous and stable client software that knows how to speak the jpip protocol, but if you can find a good client for your platform, it works well.
We're hoping to provide better client software with more supported platforms in the future, but we're not there yet. The IAS viewer is ok, but it's OSX and Windows only right now (although a linux port may be out fairly soon), but even if this viewer was fully cross platform, it's not really geared towards the kinds of features that we are looking for in an image viewer for HiRISE data, so we're hoping to build something better.
You're the perfect example of why people like Sam Harris seem to have a such a dislike for religious moderates even though you are more or less on the same side, at least to some extent.
Part of the problem is the way in which you are couching your terms, eg:
Attacks on religion, religious thought, and religious people are, of course, perfectly acceptable. It doesn't matter if we offend Christians as long as no atheist feelings are hurt.
This statement completely misses the point, and only shows your inability to see where the other side is coming from. Atheists aren't offended by someone believing in God, and in fact, this protest has nothing whatever to do with that. It has everything to do with certain religious groups denial of reason and rationality, and the utter hypocrisy that goes with it. When reason and rationality is abandoned then there is no longer a check on religious dogma, and that's when bad things happen. You need look no further than Jim Jones, David Koresh or any number of other cults that abandoned reason and rationality to worship a charismatic leader. Creationism is nothing more than a less dangerous version of the same mistake. These statements are not an attack on religious belief, they are an attack on anti-rationalism. From my pespective, it is you who are being the arrogant (and hypocritical) jerk by not acknowledging that the spread of this kind of thinking is damaging.
By not speaking out, you are an unwitting enabler for extremist views. You are not doing yourself nor your faith any favors by playing games of equivocation while ignoring the dangers of pervasive ignorance.
It doesn't matter how much "water" you're observing coming off of the comets if you cannot identify the source. What's particularly striking is that in the single instance where we've been able to observe the inside of a comet (when Comet Linear disintegrated), there were no water traces whatsoever in the immediate debris.
false
An objective-minded person might infer from that that the traces of "water" you're seeing are in fact a byproduct of the comet's movements through space. The Electric Comet document explains in quite clear terms that the indicators of "water" you're observing is the result of a simple chemical reaction between the solar wind and negative oxygen ions being stripped off of the comet's surface:
Sorry, wrong again. We observe both OH ions and ionized water, and we have good models that predict the breakdown of water into OH and the expected distribution based on the lifetime of these molecules within the solar radiation field.
I'm curious how you expect these people to survive. Most of them receive no funding whatsoever. They're only available option is to generate materials that inform semi-technical people of what their theory is. By allowing as many people as possible to understand their theory, they maximize their reach amongst an audience that remains open-minded.
Clearly these folks are already making a living via other means. And you're not allowing as many people as possible to understand the theory, because you aren't presenting anything that looks even remotely like a theory. Where are the equations showing the ionic interaction between ionized particles and the solar wind? Where are the equations that show that electric fields must dominate over magnetic fields? Where is it? You're not giving any hint of that anywhere. You're just uttering a bunch of nonsense about how the distributions to conform to neutral distributions, but no astronomers argue that all the molecules in a comet are neutral, but you keep implying that this is something unexplained, but it's not.
Good bye, I've wasted enough time on you.
You're not objectively analyzing the basis for mainstream astrophysical assumptions and speculations.
In what way? It's easy to accuse me of this, but again, you provide no evidence for this, and in fact, you have no evidence that I'm not being objective, or that I am biased in any way. In fact, my evaluation of these papers has absolutely nothing at all to do with any mainstrean astrophysical assumptions that I may have, and everything to do with your lack of providing any sort of remotely verifiable model that explains and reliably predicts anything. All you are doing is trying to shift the blame of your own failure to come up with the next big scientific theory to your detractors, and that is definitely the usual sort of invective that comes from people that believe in this nonsense.
So why shouldn't we call you a crack pot? You don't provide good evidence for your position (strike 1). You misrepresent accepted science by attempting to portray legitimate scientists as people who don't know what they are looking at, but you have all the answers (which is not how the scientific process has *ever* worked) (strike 2), and you trot out the canard that the burden of proof is on the skeptics (strike 3).
For the record I have looked over several of the documents on your website, and not a single one of them presented anything that wasn't patently false, misrepresented evidencial findings in place for many years as some new finding, or made unproven, unverifiable, predictions based on some model that is never presented in any coherent form.
It is not my job to prove you wrong, it is your job to prove to me that you are right. And you have failed miserably. Feel free to accuse me of not objectively evaluating your writings (that would be a false assumption, but I doubt that will stop you). The fact is, I have looked at the evidence that you claim is in your favor, and it doesn't measure up. Most of the time, I wouldn't even call what you present evidence, but more akin to the ramblings of a mind with delusions of granduer. Therefore, you are a crank.
There is not even a single equation in that piece of crap that you are trying to pass off as a "scientific presentation." As someone that has done cometary spectroscopy, your claim that comets lack water is rediculous. I have spectra that shows literally thousands of kilograms of water being emitted from a comet's surface every second, and that's very typical. Further, the "revelation" in your paper about filaments in a comet's coma that can't be explained by neutral gas is no revelation at all. It's because UV radiation from the sun ionizes the neutrals, and that's something that's been known about and understood for over 100 years! You're presenting this information as though it's something new and undiscovered. But it's not.
As for your preimpact flash prediction. That's a load of BS as well. You don't know that the flash occurred prior to impact, and you provide no evidence to suggest that it did, and you can't prove that it did. And even if the flash did occur prior to impact, you don't provide any model at all that explains such a phenomenon, only that you have "predicted it." I'd be interested in knowing what journal that prediction was published in the first place.
Finally, and most telling, is that you have plenty of expensive books available for sale from your website, but not a single bit of relevent scientific information is presented that would allow an objective person to make a judgement about your supposed theories. You operate like a con artist offering unseen answers to the gullible and line your own pockets with their ignorance.
In short, you're going to have to do a lot better than that lame electric comet document.
Yeah, thanks for making my point for me.
I object to your claims because they are misrepresentation of what astronomers are saying. And the evidence that you site (google news of all things) to support your contention shows a complete lack of knowledge of the scientific process and a complete inability to get information from the original sources to back up your claims. (or is that on purpose?)
Finally, you portray the accepted models as a sacred cow for scientists that would do anything to protect that sacred cow. Except that the history of science has shown repeatedly that such portrayals are completely and totally false. Which means that you are either ignorant or lying or both. It doesn't matter whether the universe is nearly 100% plasma or nearly 100% swiss cheese, you aren't presenting anything worthy of consideration. It's all too obvious that you have an axe to grind against the "scientific establishment" and because of it, you are incapable of being impartial about your own pet theory or your presumed opponents. And that's before we even get into the questionable credentials of the people supporting your theory.
Whether or not astronomers have a "pretty clear notion of what they are researching," does not excuse you from claiming that your claim is right just because you think the astronomers are wrong.
And how many of those google news postings are overhyped misunderstandings of press releases? Science reporting sucks in general, and I haven't seen a science story in the press that didn't overstate, overhype, or get something flat-out wrong for the sake of sensationalism in over 25 years. The evidence you site of astronomer's supposed bafflement is rediculous, pedestrian, and unworthy of any consideration what so ever. Try again when you have some hard experimental data that both disproves current cosmological theory and supports your own. Until then, you're either a genius or a quack, and I'm betting very strongly on the latter since you seem to be completely incapable of providing a rationale for your position.
I wouldn't put any stock in that documentary. The guy that produced it is a known fraud, and it's been shown definitively that he altered graphs and data in this documentary as well as others that he has produced. He also quoted a number of climate scientists out of context, and those scientists are now on record as stating that their statements were selectively edited to make them look like they said something very different from what they said in their interviews. See here. There's also more information about Martin Durkin's (the documentary producer) dubious track record if you google it.
Please don't insult my intelligence. If you really and truly have faith that the deity of your choice exists, more power to you. I don't share your faith, but I don't have any problem with you believing whatever you want.
However, claiming that you have hard, reproducible evidence for your belief and then claiming that others just aren't open to it insults the intelligence of everyone who has ever considered the subject carefully and drawn conclusions different from yours. The fact is, evidence isn't the issue at all. I'm willing to accept any evidence you provide, it is the veracity of that evidence, your interpretation of that evidence, and the conclusions that you draw from it that I will quible over. The fact is, you either have such evidence and it is not and can not be interpreted in any other, more plausible way or you have a load of fuzzy logic and wishful thinking masquerading as faith that is doomed to be proven false sooner or later. Sidenote: I heard this exact argument from the pastor of a church I once attended in a sermon about the nature of faith, so you can't dismiss this as coming from some random athiest that doesn't understand faith. this is from a devout theologian (One of the smartest and possibly the only intellectually honest one I have ever met).
Claiming that people who don't see things the way you do just aren't "open" to it, is just flat out BS. Such statements make you sound more like some psychic charlatan than someone who has "reproducible evidence."
I think the one of Victoria Crater is probably about right. The stereo anaglyphs that were made are exagerated because the convergence angles were larger than the angles for human eyes. This fly over using the DEM looks about right though. I'm less certain about the Columbia Hills flyover, it looks a little exagerated to me, but I saw a presentation of Randy Kirk's a couple of weeks ago, and I got the impression that the height field has not been expanded in any of the movies that he has done, they are all straight from the DEM.
Oh, please. So if your candidate (Democrat, naturally) loses, the election's automatically stolen?
No, IMHO, a lot of the issues pointed out in the documentary are problems, but in many respects, I don't think they matter. The relationship between the D's and the R's has become too incestuous for any sort of really fair election to occur. They work to intentionally polarize all issues beyond any hope of sanity to the point that neither party provides good choices. If you don't have good choices to begin with, does it really matter if the election is fair or not? You're screwed either way.
I will admit that I will vote democrat in this election, although it's not because I particularly like them, I would rather vote for a Barry Goldwater style republican to be honest. But they don't exist anymore. The trotskyite neocons have taken over the party and they aren't conservative, and even worse, lying is a standard part of their play book. That's not to say that the democrats are really that much better, because they are not, but at least they aren't followers of Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol.
No, you misunderstand. You want to claim that the basis for feng shui is some sort of common sense building code that is wrapped up in some sort of "spiritual" narrative. Ok, fair enough, I'll buy that.
However, if your claims are true at some level, then different feng shui practitioners should be able to independently come up with similar arrangements for a given room (after all they are all using the same common sense building codes right?). Penn and Teller showed that this is not the case. In their tests, there was not a single point of common design between any of the people they tested. So, no matter what you want to claim about the "common sense" foundations of feng shui, it is fully apparent that the "mystical" interpretations are completely subjective and have nothing to do with any of the common sense they are supposed to be based on. The only truth, value, and wisdom associated with feng shui is what is subjectively attached to it by the people who have been tricked into thinking that there is really something to it.
No, dark matter is a prediction based on observed and well established facts. We have observations that indicate that galaxies and galactic clusters appear to contain more matter than can be accounted for by the visible mass. We, therefore, predict that there is more mass there than we can see through conventional means.
These predictions could be false, or superceded by modifications to gravitational theory. That is why dark matter is not a a religion. The dark matter prediction could be proven false based on new evidence or new theory, that is a standard part of the scientific process. Attempting to explain what we don't understand within a testable and theoretical framework is what science does! To claim that dark matter is a "religious" notion only shows that you don't understand the nature of both science and religion. Or you are being intentionally obtuse.
Uhh, frankly. if you are willing to go to this much trouble in the first place... Wouldn't it be easier just to build your own PVR using off the shelf hardware? I mean really, why bother? If you've already got the hardware, then maybe it's worth it to hack it, but otherwise, I fail to see how this is going to "flood the market" with cheap hardware, when the market is already flooded with cheap hardware that you can use to build your own PVR system if you want.
You are glossing over some very important points here. First, the work *has* been done and *is* being done. The work just isn't being done in the USA. So far, there has been very little of promise according to the threads that have been posted here. Why continue researching a topic that is not turning anything up?
True, the research is being done elsewhere, however, my understanding of what's been accomplished so far is that there are difficulties, but to say that this line of research is a dead end is still very premature, and you don't have to look far to find evidence supporting that shows pretty unequivocally that there is something to be gained there.
And I have every right to judge that Bush's reasoning is invalid. We are discussing the same thing fundamentally, but thanks to bad theology based on poor logic and a complete misunderstanding of the nature of faith, we get bozos who attach significance to things that have none. I have evidence supporting my position, Bush does not. What is the difference between my assertion that silicon atoms are potentially sentient and represent another being, and the assertion that a fertilized egg is another being? Since the is no evidence to support either position, they are equivalent. Only bad theology can lead one to a conclusion that there is a difference.
Such an article is not politizing anything. And to claim that it is only shows ignorance. The fact is: Nobody knows how broadly and to what diseases stem cells could be successfully applied to. Why? Because we haven't done the work. And we will never know until the work is done. That is not politics, that is a fact. It is also the case that, given what we already know about stem cells, the case is very strong from them to be successfully used in many treatments, if the research can be done that will develop them into proper treatments. Now you can bitch and moan about potential patients coming out in favor of stem cell research, but calling that political is bullshit as well. If you knew that there might be a cure on the horizon for a disease you are suffering from, you would be doing the same thing. Calling it politics is just an easy way for you to dismiss the suffering of those you disagree with.
Asserting that Bush's "reasoning could be sane," is like saying that research into new and better computer chips should be stopped because we are violating the rights of silicon atoms. No, it is most definitely not a sane argument.
Now, we can go around and around about whether or not the government should be providing funding for research, and there are reasonable arguments to be made there. However, the position being taken by the Bush administration is not a reasoned one. It is nothing more than cynical pandering to the ignorant that have been fed unjustifiably bad science and theology by people that should know better.
Ok, I admit to misreading the post. However, in what way did I disprove my own implication? I didn't say anything about anyone needing to lack faith. What I was implying is that faith can be wrong and those very same great minds were able to recognize it when their own churches could not.
If a church promotes a brand of faith at odds with evidence and logic, such faith is ultimately self destructive, even Aquinas with all of his mental gymnastics figured that one out. One of the major issues in the "war" between science and religion, is the ability of science to self correct and change in light of new evidence. This is a very difficult thing to deal with in the realm of faith, because there is no mechanism for self correction other than revelation. And at that point, it comes down to who's revelation are you going to believe? You can't test it, you can't replicate it, or even verify the veracity of a revelation, which makes changing or modifying one's religious faith a very difficult thing to do. And that's before we even begin to open the can of worms that is the interpretation of scripture.
Many of the greatest minds in the history of science have belonged to men/women of faith.
Nonsequitor. Having a "great mind" does not preclude one from having faith. However, it does not follow that these people had great minds because of their faith.... which is what you are implying. In addition, your implication leaves out one subtle and very important point: Many of these same great minds frequently disagreed with church dogma. In other words, they maintained their faith in spite of the church. Which really can't be construed as a vote of confidence in the way that churches promote and interpret their religion.