This is true, so forgive me if I have a problem with people presenting their beliefs (or disbeliefs) as scientific certainties. Especially when their grounds for doing so is that "they started it".
So I suppose the existence of a million dollar challenge for irrefutably disproving the existence of paranormal phenomena and the subsequent failure of all attempts to win it would prove that all paranormal phenomena are real?
The amazing Randi practises pseudoscience, please don't attempt to use his work in a rational scientific discussion.
Could this also be the explanation for the falling/dead birds this week?"
This is a falsifiable hypothesis. Birds use the earths magnetic field for navigation, so if it were the cause of their deaths one would expect them to be in the wrong place, either having migrated to somewhere with the wrong temperatures or not enough food or some similar condition in which they are unable to survive. Bird scientists have records about the normal migration patterns of bird populations and where they normally are at various times of the year. A simple comparison of data will answer the question "did these birds die in a place where they normally wouldn't be found at that time of year" and if the answer is no then the hypothesis is refuted. If the answer is yes then we may have something worth investigating. Anyone up for it?
someone who chooses the default (disbelief) until sufficient proof has been gathered. This, in case you are unsure, is what your physicists actually do - "I don't know", "Not enough data".
You have contradicted yourself here, choosing the default belief or disbelief is the opposite of saying "I don't know, not enough data." Either ghosts don't exist, or you don't have enough data to ascertain their existence. Which is it? It is also worth pointing out that choosing the default belief and then sticking to it is exactly the position which causes science to stagnate and no further investigation to be undertaken. Whereas 'I don't know' leads to the search for further data.
Actually "it isn't" is a highly suspect comment scientifically. There was no evidence presented and no logical justification. Given that sqldr has suggested this as a scientific fact this makes him guilty of pseudoscience, in that he puts forward a supposedly scientific opinion without rigorous evidence. I personally don't believe in ghosts either, but I at least have enough confidence in the scientific method that I can support this persons efforts to investigate the phenomenon without fear that the dogma I cling to to understand my life might be shattered.
To the thread: No one knows how to look for ghosts, no one has any kind of coherent hypothesis (as far as I know) that explains what they would even be if they exist. There is no experiment that can be devised that would detect something that one knows nothing about. One can of course throw out wild guesses as to what instruments might show activity and for my part I would like to wildly guess that sensitive electromagnetic equipment might be your best bet. The wiki article on ghost hunting has a list of methods, if you didn't already check this you should have before posting here. I am also a big fan of cellulose film photography and taking wierd arty pictures so if I was on a mission to find ghosts I would probably try that, with the hope that if (when) I fail to find ghosts, I still have some nice pics to show for it.
It was trialled, and it did work, it failed a peer review in which the therapy component was left out and the reviewers just tested the effects of LSD on addicts in isolation. This was felt to be grounds for stopping research. I should have said that in my first post as well, that there was a therapy component to the treatment. If you are an alcoholic and just take LSD it WILL NOT CURE YOU. I don't want people to go out and start self medicating. The research was picked up decades later on another drug Ibogaine and is now considered to be a real treatment but the fact is it works for most hallucinogens and Ibogaine is only used because it has less of a stigma.
In fact there was a clinical study in the 1960s that showed that hallucinogenic drugs could be used to cure junkies of their addictions, especially alcohol.
The headline should read new study show reindeer take hallucinogens. It is not news that animals take drugs, the has been known for a long time. Many herbivorous mammals will overindulge in rotten fruit on the ground getting drunk off the alcohol fermenting in them. Studies on monkey alcoholism have been done that show that their behaviour is almost identical to ours except that their alcoholics remain respected members of the social group rather than outcasts (the monkeys in the study were stealng alcohol from tourist resorts). Panthers in south america take Ayahuasca, cats take catnip, lemurs use poisonous millipedes to kill pests on their skin, and also trip the hell out from the chemicals. The list goes on. Everybody likes drugs, drugs are good, hmmmkaaay?
Given the mentality of New Zelanders with regard to these sorts of things, ie diy projects, flying, checking with the authorities first etc. This is highly probable. Stuff like this has been going on for a long time. The strangest thing I ever saw in the sky were three red lights in a large triangle at night in Berlin. Given the distance apart, speed, lack of sound and perfect synchronisation the most likely explanation I could come up with was 3 stealth helecopters flying in formation. While this seems like a highly unlikely explanation, it seems more probable than alien spaceship by several orders of magnitude. Not that I discount the possibilty entirely.
correct me if I am wrong here but a UFO is a pedestrian phenomenon. I am able to identify a great many things in the sky to some degree, but there will always be things i cant identify. In the widest sense of the word unidentified one could even say that every flying object is unidentified by someone. Even by the strictest definition there are numerous species of insect that are not know to science and are able to fly, and if that is not strict enough then there are occasionally strange objects in the sky that no one really knows what they are. What I am getting at here is that UFO DOES NOT MEAN ALIEN SPACESHIP. In fact if you saw an alien spaceship, and you were 100% sure that it was an alien spaceship, it would not be a UFO as you have identified it. Now that that is out of the way I think it is great that these reports are being made public, I don't even know why they would ever need to be secret. I find flying objects, unidentified or otherwise highly interesting and think that attempting to identify them is interesting and worthwhile.
I think it is bizarre how people speak of regulation by government as though it infringes on personal freedoms, Perhaps if you have a really corrupt government and unfair regulations this may be the case but the original reason for government regulation as it was first envisioned was to protect the public interest against powerful private interests. The idea that lack of regulation equates in some way to freedom is absurd. Regulations limit the use of power in society. WIthout them we would have a despotic system where wealthy private interests controlled the police and the judiciary, and people were merely slaves.
is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go? Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
Regardless of corruption and ineptitude the population at least has a modicum of power over the government, it would be lovely if the internet could remain free but if it isn't regulated it will be controlled by corporate interests, they are behind the curve but they will catch up eventually.
As a DF/Roguelike purist I have to say you are both wrong. All this shiny bling pre atari 2600 graphics are way too shiny and pretty and detract from the pure gameplay aspect. Yes I am half joking. Only half.
For me this game will always be just dwarf fortress fan art. The breath people are wasting on complaining about bugs for this game would be better spent chattering excitedly about the upcoming world wide real time trade and item tracking that is planned for the next DF release. Mind you minecraft works well for those without the patience or inclination for DF's vertical learning curve. For those who have climbed it however minecraft is a dim shadow cast by one of the greatest leaps (long treks?) forward in gaming history. Oh and DF is free.
He is right in a way. To me the solution is not to stop pirating however. The solution is to use the pirate and geek networks that are forming to produce our own sci fi. I even have an idea of how to do it on a shoestring budget: My idea was to film a sci fi tv series purely from frame captures of sci fi games. Then all you would need are voice actors. You then release the film under pseudonyms so you cant get done for copyright infringement by the game companies (they would be smarter to be proud you used their engines and use it as free advertising but I wouldn't count on that). The quality would be low and it would clearly be an amateur production, but with a decent storyline and and a deep immersive world one could still produce a great show. I have been in the planning stages of such a project for some time and would welcome any offers of collboration, just pm me. The other genre that game engines could be used to film is world war two. I would love to recreate some of the great untold stories of soldiers especially in the non US armed forces as there is a vast untapped well of jaw dropping stories there that no one has heard.
The bottom line is that while a distributed shared system of entertainment is working really well for geeks at the moment, eventually we are going to have to integrate the production side of things into this model. Then we will get the tv shows that the genre deserves.
While you may be right that the article is hugely biased, I myself have seen fox news on several occasions and
The conclusion is inescapable. Fox News is deliberately misinforming its viewers and it is doing so for a reason.
There is not even enough doubt about this for it to be worth writing an article, and the failure of this article to conclusively prove this fact is laughable and somewhat sad. Fox news is known around the world to be deliberate misinformation. I think it is also silly to simply shout correlation != causation as the first post did, as though correlation proves the complete absence of causation. We learn from and gain our understanding of the world from the news sources we read. To say that a news source that so blatantly disregards even the basics of journalistic integrity has no effect on it's viewers' level of informedness about the world is absurd and untenable.
The next generation will hopefully be removing this piece of junk and choosing a better way of detecting terrorists which does not involve making normal travellers irritated.
I know of a better way of detecting terrorists. Get a pair of binoculars and sit outside the government buildings of any of a majority of western countries. It's like bird watching, cheap and easy. But don't get to close you don't want to scare them.
No, gamers are still using PCs. It would be ok to call these people gamers if the word were qualified by saying "console gamers" or "causal gamers" but even these are inaccurate. The most correct term would be "DS, PSP users"
We all know that the US government is hypocritical and immoral, the parent is therefore both off topic and redundant. This article is about china. In threads about the US I love to remind people of all the evil they do but doing so here is detracting from all the evil china does. Please furnish us all with a similar 9 point list of some of chinas worst transgressions or you are just playing favourites. For the record the UK, Germany, France, Russia, and North Korea have also done many horrific things. If you really care about human rights and justice you have to fight for it everywhere, not just the place that is most famous.
Are you guys doing an elaborate practical joke to prove a point? You are both making the same point that politicians are always disagreeing with each other for no good reason. Then you go ahead and disagree with each other about it.
Someone give these guys a +1 funny, it's subtle and quite clever. They even got everyone else in the thread disagreeing over something completely irrelevant to the topic. Point taken and noted.
A man was found in a the remote jungle of New Guinea who actually cared what Palin had to say. Scientists are studying this hitherto unknown phenomenon and hope to soon discover why the world media views him as their central audience, as he doesn't have a television and can't read.
if you give the foreign enemy details about your placements, logistics, tactics, and weaknesses then this is a bad thing.
This would be a valid argument if such an enemy existed. The current foreign enemies to the US are mostly imaginary, except for a few rogue nations with little power to harm the US, and some random groups of angry peasants with absolutely none. Would you care to enlighten the rest of us as to what enemy you were referring to specifically?
The entirely depends on how many. Some internet activism organisations most notably avaaz have demonstrated in the last year or so that mass letter writing can give a website the power to change government policy.
The reality is that while individuals with extremely high IQ's might have a slightly higher incidence of mental disorders, the vast majority are just normal human beings with an abnormal propensity for solving problems.
The reality is, closed mindedness and anti intellectualism combined with absurdly wide definitions for mental illness to create jobs in the mental health industry mean that in most people's minds those exact traits that define genius are a form of insanity.
you forgot to say "in 1908" no rant about the wonders of Tesla is complete without those 6(7?) characters. Of course it doesn't have to be exactly that year. It is just that talking about a mad scientist with death rays and wireless electricity is much more impressive to people who don't know him if they are aware he was doing it back when steam engines were still considered state of the art technology.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true, so forgive me if I have a problem with people presenting their beliefs (or disbeliefs) as scientific certainties. Especially when their grounds for doing so is that "they started it".
So I suppose the existence of a million dollar challenge for irrefutably disproving the existence of paranormal phenomena and the subsequent failure of all attempts to win it would prove that all paranormal phenomena are real?
The amazing Randi practises pseudoscience, please don't attempt to use his work in a rational scientific discussion.
Could this also be the explanation for the falling/dead birds this week?"
This is a falsifiable hypothesis. Birds use the earths magnetic field for navigation, so if it were the cause of their deaths one would expect them to be in the wrong place, either having migrated to somewhere with the wrong temperatures or not enough food or some similar condition in which they are unable to survive. Bird scientists have records about the normal migration patterns of bird populations and where they normally are at various times of the year. A simple comparison of data will answer the question "did these birds die in a place where they normally wouldn't be found at that time of year" and if the answer is no then the hypothesis is refuted. If the answer is yes then we may have something worth investigating. Anyone up for it?
someone who chooses the default (disbelief) until sufficient proof has been gathered. This, in case you are unsure, is what your physicists actually do - "I don't know", "Not enough data".
You have contradicted yourself here, choosing the default belief or disbelief is the opposite of saying "I don't know, not enough data." Either ghosts don't exist, or you don't have enough data to ascertain their existence. Which is it? It is also worth pointing out that choosing the default belief and then sticking to it is exactly the position which causes science to stagnate and no further investigation to be undertaken. Whereas 'I don't know' leads to the search for further data.
Actually "it isn't" is a highly suspect comment scientifically. There was no evidence presented and no logical justification. Given that sqldr has suggested this as a scientific fact this makes him guilty of pseudoscience, in that he puts forward a supposedly scientific opinion without rigorous evidence. I personally don't believe in ghosts either, but I at least have enough confidence in the scientific method that I can support this persons efforts to investigate the phenomenon without fear that the dogma I cling to to understand my life might be shattered.
To the thread: No one knows how to look for ghosts, no one has any kind of coherent hypothesis (as far as I know) that explains what they would even be if they exist. There is no experiment that can be devised that would detect something that one knows nothing about. One can of course throw out wild guesses as to what instruments might show activity and for my part I would like to wildly guess that sensitive electromagnetic equipment might be your best bet. The wiki article on ghost hunting has a list of methods, if you didn't already check this you should have before posting here. I am also a big fan of cellulose film photography and taking wierd arty pictures so if I was on a mission to find ghosts I would probably try that, with the hope that if (when) I fail to find ghosts, I still have some nice pics to show for it.
It was trialled, and it did work, it failed a peer review in which the therapy component was left out and the reviewers just tested the effects of LSD on addicts in isolation. This was felt to be grounds for stopping research. I should have said that in my first post as well, that there was a therapy component to the treatment. If you are an alcoholic and just take LSD it WILL NOT CURE YOU. I don't want people to go out and start self medicating. The research was picked up decades later on another drug Ibogaine and is now considered to be a real treatment but the fact is it works for most hallucinogens and Ibogaine is only used because it has less of a stigma.
In fact there was a clinical study in the 1960s that showed that hallucinogenic drugs could be used to cure junkies of their addictions, especially alcohol.
The headline should read new study show reindeer take hallucinogens. It is not news that animals take drugs, the has been known for a long time. Many herbivorous mammals will overindulge in rotten fruit on the ground getting drunk off the alcohol fermenting in them. Studies on monkey alcoholism have been done that show that their behaviour is almost identical to ours except that their alcoholics remain respected members of the social group rather than outcasts (the monkeys in the study were stealng alcohol from tourist resorts). Panthers in south america take Ayahuasca, cats take catnip, lemurs use poisonous millipedes to kill pests on their skin, and also trip the hell out from the chemicals. The list goes on. Everybody likes drugs, drugs are good, hmmmkaaay?
Animal drug habits documentary.
Given the mentality of New Zelanders with regard to these sorts of things, ie diy projects, flying, checking with the authorities first etc. This is highly probable. Stuff like this has been going on for a long time. The strangest thing I ever saw in the sky were three red lights in a large triangle at night in Berlin. Given the distance apart, speed, lack of sound and perfect synchronisation the most likely explanation I could come up with was 3 stealth helecopters flying in formation. While this seems like a highly unlikely explanation, it seems more probable than alien spaceship by several orders of magnitude. Not that I discount the possibilty entirely.
correct me if I am wrong here but a UFO is a pedestrian phenomenon. I am able to identify a great many things in the sky to some degree, but there will always be things i cant identify. In the widest sense of the word unidentified one could even say that every flying object is unidentified by someone. Even by the strictest definition there are numerous species of insect that are not know to science and are able to fly, and if that is not strict enough then there are occasionally strange objects in the sky that no one really knows what they are. What I am getting at here is that UFO DOES NOT MEAN ALIEN SPACESHIP. In fact if you saw an alien spaceship, and you were 100% sure that it was an alien spaceship, it would not be a UFO as you have identified it. Now that that is out of the way I think it is great that these reports are being made public, I don't even know why they would ever need to be secret. I find flying objects, unidentified or otherwise highly interesting and think that attempting to identify them is interesting and worthwhile.
is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go? Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
Regardless of corruption and ineptitude the population at least has a modicum of power over the government, it would be lovely if the internet could remain free but if it isn't regulated it will be controlled by corporate interests, they are behind the curve but they will catch up eventually.
As a DF/Roguelike purist I have to say you are both wrong. All this shiny bling pre atari 2600 graphics are way too shiny and pretty and detract from the pure gameplay aspect. Yes I am half joking. Only half.
For me this game will always be just dwarf fortress fan art. The breath people are wasting on complaining about bugs for this game would be better spent chattering excitedly about the upcoming world wide real time trade and item tracking that is planned for the next DF release. Mind you minecraft works well for those without the patience or inclination for DF's vertical learning curve. For those who have climbed it however minecraft is a dim shadow cast by one of the greatest leaps (long treks?) forward in gaming history. Oh and DF is free.
He is right in a way. To me the solution is not to stop pirating however. The solution is to use the pirate and geek networks that are forming to produce our own sci fi. I even have an idea of how to do it on a shoestring budget: My idea was to film a sci fi tv series purely from frame captures of sci fi games. Then all you would need are voice actors. You then release the film under pseudonyms so you cant get done for copyright infringement by the game companies (they would be smarter to be proud you used their engines and use it as free advertising but I wouldn't count on that). The quality would be low and it would clearly be an amateur production, but with a decent storyline and and a deep immersive world one could still produce a great show. I have been in the planning stages of such a project for some time and would welcome any offers of collboration, just pm me. The other genre that game engines could be used to film is world war two. I would love to recreate some of the great untold stories of soldiers especially in the non US armed forces as there is a vast untapped well of jaw dropping stories there that no one has heard.
The bottom line is that while a distributed shared system of entertainment is working really well for geeks at the moment, eventually we are going to have to integrate the production side of things into this model. Then we will get the tv shows that the genre deserves.
The conclusion is inescapable. Fox News is deliberately misinforming its viewers and it is doing so for a reason.
There is not even enough doubt about this for it to be worth writing an article, and the failure of this article to conclusively prove this fact is laughable and somewhat sad. Fox news is known around the world to be deliberate misinformation. I think it is also silly to simply shout correlation != causation as the first post did, as though correlation proves the complete absence of causation. We learn from and gain our understanding of the world from the news sources we read. To say that a news source that so blatantly disregards even the basics of journalistic integrity has no effect on it's viewers' level of informedness about the world is absurd and untenable.
Because cars just aren't dangerous enough anymore.
The next generation will hopefully be removing this piece of junk and choosing a better way of detecting terrorists which does not involve making normal travellers irritated.
I know of a better way of detecting terrorists. Get a pair of binoculars and sit outside the government buildings of any of a majority of western countries. It's like bird watching, cheap and easy. But don't get to close you don't want to scare them.
No, gamers are still using PCs. It would be ok to call these people gamers if the word were qualified by saying "console gamers" or "causal gamers" but even these are inaccurate. The most correct term would be "DS, PSP users"
We all know that the US government is hypocritical and immoral, the parent is therefore both off topic and redundant. This article is about china. In threads about the US I love to remind people of all the evil they do but doing so here is detracting from all the evil china does. Please furnish us all with a similar 9 point list of some of chinas worst transgressions or you are just playing favourites. For the record the UK, Germany, France, Russia, and North Korea have also done many horrific things. If you really care about human rights and justice you have to fight for it everywhere, not just the place that is most famous.
Are you guys doing an elaborate practical joke to prove a point? You are both making the same point that politicians are always disagreeing with each other for no good reason. Then you go ahead and disagree with each other about it.
Someone give these guys a +1 funny, it's subtle and quite clever. They even got everyone else in the thread disagreeing over something completely irrelevant to the topic. Point taken and noted.
A man was found in a the remote jungle of New Guinea who actually cared what Palin had to say. Scientists are studying this hitherto unknown phenomenon and hope to soon discover why the world media views him as their central audience, as he doesn't have a television and can't read.
Here's Tom with the weather
if you give the foreign enemy details about your placements, logistics, tactics, and weaknesses then this is a bad thing.
This would be a valid argument if such an enemy existed. The current foreign enemies to the US are mostly imaginary, except for a few rogue nations with little power to harm the US, and some random groups of angry peasants with absolutely none. Would you care to enlighten the rest of us as to what enemy you were referring to specifically?
The entirely depends on how many. Some internet activism organisations most notably avaaz have demonstrated in the last year or so that mass letter writing can give a website the power to change government policy.
The reality is that while individuals with extremely high IQ's might have a slightly higher incidence of mental disorders, the vast majority are just normal human beings with an abnormal propensity for solving problems.
The reality is, closed mindedness and anti intellectualism combined with absurdly wide definitions for mental illness to create jobs in the mental health industry mean that in most people's minds those exact traits that define genius are a form of insanity.
you forgot to say "in 1908" no rant about the wonders of Tesla is complete without those 6(7?) characters. Of course it doesn't have to be exactly that year. It is just that talking about a mad scientist with death rays and wireless electricity is much more impressive to people who don't know him if they are aware he was doing it back when steam engines were still considered state of the art technology.