They do two rounds of tests. In the preliminary test round, conditions are relaxed (including statistical thresholds) before the main challange. Nobody has reached the main challange (IIRC).
You calibrate your dowsing with conditions you're looking for. So you apparently can choose to be sensitive to or ignore variables like depth, volume, suitability for drinking, etc. Disclaimer: I've never tried it and have no knowledge beyond reading that link.
It's only a quite small percent and they can only see a tiny bit out of the normal range. Still quite interesting though. IIRC the ability faded and was lost with age.
Very valid points, something I didn't really address properly in my post.
I tend to define magic as "manipulating objects or events with the mind", obviously with the objects/events in question being ones that normally could not be changed, or would require physical intervention. I find our definitions to be quite compatible: i.e. the manipulation I describe is part of the laws of nature not yet addressed by mainstream science.
I look forward to a time when such things CAN be studied as science.
It's the same argument because it is addressing exactly the same topic. See my post in response to Paradise Pete, just above yours.
The link I provide goes into how it IS in fact possible to directly percieve the base of reality, uncertainty principle be damned. The instrument of "measurement" is consciousness/awareness, not a machine. (Although I agree with you that it holds in a scientific sense, i.e. for any instrument we build rather than doing our own investigation.)
The argument for "god" and "magic" has nothing to do with lack of understanding, although I don't mean those terms in the way you probably understand them.
Long post warning. I decided to write what will form (the core of) the first of my series of articles. I've been having a hard time figuring out where to start so thanks for throwing out a question that can be the start:)
I too asked the same question, many times, of many people and happily disregarded all of their responses with "BUT GIVE ME PROOF!". Now I'm on the other side of the fence. Having a perspective of both sides, the topic of how to explain such matters is a personal interest of mine.
The reason why it "can't" be explained is because the experience takes place in terms that do not exist in human language. The closest way to describe it, is the experience teaches you a different system of logic, a different way of thinking. Vague descriptions of the content are possible, but there is no amount of words that will be be useful and in many cases they would lead you further from understanding, due to gross imperfection of the description. The number one cause of ridicule towards assorted spiritual claims is the poor explanation given for them, or more specifically, the listener's perception that they have understood the provided explanation. (Note: the description just given, whilst hopefully helpful, can also be considered grossly inaccurate if you try to take it too literally. It could be more accurate to say that the required explanation necessitates the use of logical constructions which do not exist in everyday experience and cannot be learned in any ordinary way. Therefore it is a rather serious catch 22 that one cannot understand the experience until one has had it... i.e. "it can't be explained".)
The only thing to be done is to make the most rational case possible to convince people to do the hard work so they can experience it for themselves. I'm not going to attempt to do so here (I plan to write a series of articles and eventually a book on it) but one possible path to this is Buddhist meditation. I'm currently answering the question as to how the GP/I know he/I aren't mistaken.
Now the obvious first reaction to someone claiming "I had this crazy experience and now I understand everything!" is "congrats, you just went insane!". This is a perfectly natural skeptical response, especially given the scope of (and lack of evidence for) what people claim. There are a few responses to this:
1) That there are repeatable processes that can be undergone by a sufficiently dedicated individual to achieve the necessary experiences. The example given above was meditation. The path is consistent between individuals (i.e. a fairly concrete series of stages) although individual stages may manifest differently in each individual. Different amounts of time are required for each individual, and different aspects of personality will be the key roadblocks in each case. Nevertheless, it is the same process. Citation: this whole book: http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wiki/Main/MCTB?p_r_p_185834411_title=MCTB
2) That the new 'knowledge' gained is rational and coherent, which would not be expected to be the case for most coinsurance of random neural damage (etc). It greatly improves understanding of many aspects of life and the world. Many connections previously not seen are revealed. (It must be admitted that a great many people fail to produce a rational/coherent EXPLANATION - due to the extremely complexity demanded - but that does not mean they don't understand it to some degree.)
3) That everyone undergoing such experiences comes out on the other side with a remarkably similar understanding, even without any prior knowledge of what the 'expected' result is. Exact interpretations can vary (or even on the surface appear to be in violent disagreement) and individuals will tend to focus on different aspects. But it is clear that the same 'knowledge' is gained when you know what to look for.
You're right of course, but I'm getting REALLY over the same guy spamming with the same post in so many threads. At SOME point, getting everything you post instantly modded to -1 (especially when the content is near identical) should incur some greater punishment.
Dissapointing. As someone with only one mobile device (i.e. the one I want to protect) this is not very useful. Would be a lot better with a security token similar to those used by banks. However I'll probably enable it anyway as in my particular case I'm more worried about someone I know getting into the account, which this DOES protect from even though it'll make me more vulnerable if my phone is stolen.
(Disclaimer: I only own an iPhone as I inherited it. I don't particually enjoy getting screwed by Apply constantly.)
I thought something like this too, but it doesn't seem to be correct. It was explained to me in terms of atomic particles but I'm assuming the same principle applies to gravity.
Basically, even thought the distance between particles may expand, the forces binding them are unchanged. Since their distance is based on the strength of the forces involved, the distance is fixed. Therefore the particles are kept at a fixed distance apart whilst space expands around them.
This makes sense when applied to forces with a limited range but seems a bit problematic when considering an infinite range force like gravity. I suppose that since the binding force of gravity acts proportionatly to range, the solar system will remain bound together at fairly fixed range (possibly increasing, but much slower than your calculations) whilst larger objects like galaxy clusters drift further apart.
I think GP is incorrect when he says clusters aren't gravitationally bound. They are, just weakly enough that the effect is negligable and it is possible that they can accelerate away from each other, since not enough gravitational breaking is applied.
The keyboard layout still sucks (like every other laptop keyboard out there). That said, looks like a pretty strong unit, so thanks for pointing it out. (There are a few other cons the reviews point out, but I can handle them and it has the pluses).
Seconding this. After a while of my standard album collection at work, I couldn't even force myself to pay attention to more than 10 seconds of a song. Waiting for the good part to kick in never happened. Once I was very familiar, they made an excellent background for improving concentration and getting stuff done (without noise isolation or cancelling). Unfamiliar/disliked music didn't do the same job.
There are still a ton of unanswered questions in the standard model. Later I'll take another look for the article I'm thinking of, which is a particle physicist discussing why this is the case. He partially agrees with what has been said ("the discovery is not that interesting") for an entirely different reason - because all the mysteries REMAIN! We just move a step closer to being able to properly reveal them.
Confirming the higg's presence in an experiment is step 1 to designing experiments that manipulate the higgs in an attempt to learn more about it and the higgs field, as in my OP. Sure its not paradigm shattering, but there's still plenty of new and arguably exciting work to be done.
I also aluded to the fact that excitment really isn't the point. It certainly is important in motivating people, but science would not be science if it was driven by what was exciting, as opposed to posing hypothesies and testing them.
Not sure if you're serious or trolling (like the religious AC that responded to you definitely is) - see my post above (first post) for some of the reasons why you're ludicrously wrong. The discovery of the higgs/the process of it's confirmation is a key milestone that will allow us to begin to make inroads on the investigation of gravity. Certainly there is a long way to go, but this is a necessary step before we can even fully understand what the standard model might be saying about gravity.
There are far more wasteful things to be spending money than fundamental science. (War being the most obvious example, although I'm not aware of the Euros being involved in much military activity recently.) Following your train of thought, we'd still be living in caves without the wheel or the ability to make fire ourselves. We can't say right now exactly what benefits the higgs boson specifically, and the extended thread of research in general will bring us - but history clearly demonstrates that theoretical research brings major quality of life improvements in the long run.
I would argue that dollar for dollar, research brings more long term benefit to society than welfare. Welfare can only address short term problems, and is LITERALLY just throwing money at the problem/down the drain. At least with infastructure, once it's built, the upkeep costs aren't quite as high. There needs to be a healthy balance of both, to address issues on both short and long timescales. Cutting one for the other is short sigted.
Finally, the LHC was built long before the financial chrisis came about. All the money was already spent. At best, only upgrade money could be diverted to help the troubled countries even if they wanted to (and I've discussed why that's a bad idea.) Note that the EU has thrown plenty of bailout money at them anyway, whilst still funding CERN.
"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, and "one of the great engineering milestones of mankind".[1] It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) from 1998 to 2008, with the aim of allowing physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics and high-energy physics,..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
TFA is mainstream butt-hurt-ness that the progress of science isn't appropriately entertaining, and unsurprisingly misses a few key points. Sure an announcement of 'we are making progress and confirming what we expected" isn't as exciting as the original announcement, but is just as important (if not more so) to the scientific process.
When/if this particle is confirmed as the higgs, that does not remotely "[tie] up the Standard Model of physics in a pretty, neat, red quantum bow" (TFA) let alone "[remove] any doubt for more exotic physics beyond the Standard Model" (TFS). Both are patently false. A major reason for looking for the higgs in the first place (beyond confirming that part of the SM) is to being to actively investigate the higgs field, which is moderated by the higgs boson itself. The higgs does not impart mass to particles as is usually claimed (although it's not an unreasonable simplification). The higgs particles are what moderates the higgs field, the presence of which is what brings about mass in particles. (The higgs - and presumably all/most particles - are actually just field fluctuations. What we think of as a discrete particle is really then just the instantaneous average of the fluctuation [wave]).
I can't find my exact sources for this, but at least some of them were from the Higgs section of this site, which I highly recommend. Meanwhile, this article is quite interesting anyway:
I've never found a really tolerable automatic, although Mercadies make the process less painful... That said, it can be a huge pain to manage a manual (especially a sporty one) in peak hour traffic.
A clutchless car that could be set into auto or manual would be awesome. Not sure if such a thing exists.
Yeah, I realised that after I posted (my bad). Not sure I would want to do things that way still, but hey, I'm not going to complain that there are more options available.
Windows 7 does have something similar with winkey+[number] but that's by application so it doesn't help if you have multiple docs opened for a particular app. I did try to get Microsoft to have Windows do it the way linkkey does it, but they said their way is better, and before that I suggested it to GNOME and KDE (in 2006).
+1 internets to you sir, very handy. BTW pressing the win+[x] combo multple times cycles through the active windows of that app.
Although I don't quite follow how your way is better. When using such a combination, I'd want to know what I'm getting instantly before each keypress, without having to mentally track which order I've accessed windows in recently. If I do want to switch by order of use, there's always alt tab. Alt tab, tab lets you get the 2nd most recent window, etc. Sure you need to press tab an extra time, but how often do you really remember what the 9th most recently used window was? The MS way lets you know what you're getting always, whilst you still have pretty efficent access to recent windows (by order of access) via alt tab.
Of course it won't happen because these skills cannot be tested on a standardized test. The skills on this test are those that no one really needs for work. For example the test asks what is the error in this bit of code. I don't know. When I code the compiler gives me an error, then I look at the code and fixes it. That is the way real people code. Ask me about something real!
Totally agreed with you up to here. Being able to look at a block of code and have some idea what is wrong with it is really important. In many cases, compiler errors are only tangental to the actual cause of the error. E.g. a missing } or " is often going to produce some generic parsing failure for a line before or after the actual error line. (Forgetting to close a comment block can also be rather entertaining.) I've seen plenty of beginners get lost because they had a syntax error and the compiler message didn't help them.
Being able to (within reason) write a simple block that will run first time is also a huge efficency improvement - not that I don't also over rely on the compiler in my more zombie-like moments.
Being able to e.g. cite the exact error a compiler would produce for a given language is wrote learning of little value. Understanding the problem that would trigger such an error is important.
Yep, I woefully screwed up my definition of deflation. I guess my point was that is a different type of deflation, built into the design of the currency and not necessarily a bad thing.
I think he's onto something though. If each vote had a unique ID on it, with several independant parties counting and publishing the results, it would be easy to cross check that each party tallied vote x in the correct (same) way. Doesn't cover the whole voting process, but it certainly helps.
Slashdot Mirror
I would be interested in knowing what his demonstration of phychic surgery was? Showing a fake xray and then the real one or something?
They do two rounds of tests. In the preliminary test round, conditions are relaxed (including statistical thresholds) before the main challange. Nobody has reached the main challange (IIRC).
You can't disprove any of them, even though they're amost certainly untrue.
Fixed it for you. :) I find it amusing that you understood so well and then went right ahead and contradicted yourself.
According to this: http://www.lettertorobin.org/RBN_pdf/RBN_10_4_English.pdf
You calibrate your dowsing with conditions you're looking for. So you apparently can choose to be sensitive to or ignore variables like depth, volume, suitability for drinking, etc. Disclaimer: I've never tried it and have no knowledge beyond reading that link.
It's only a quite small percent and they can only see a tiny bit out of the normal range. Still quite interesting though. IIRC the ability faded and was lost with age.
Very valid points, something I didn't really address properly in my post.
I tend to define magic as "manipulating objects or events with the mind", obviously with the objects/events in question being ones that normally could not be changed, or would require physical intervention. I find our definitions to be quite compatible: i.e. the manipulation I describe is part of the laws of nature not yet addressed by mainstream science.
I look forward to a time when such things CAN be studied as science.
It's the same argument because it is addressing exactly the same topic. See my post in response to Paradise Pete, just above yours.
The link I provide goes into how it IS in fact possible to directly percieve the base of reality, uncertainty principle be damned. The instrument of "measurement" is consciousness/awareness, not a machine. (Although I agree with you that it holds in a scientific sense, i.e. for any instrument we build rather than doing our own investigation.)
The argument for "god" and "magic" has nothing to do with lack of understanding, although I don't mean those terms in the way you probably understand them.
Long post warning. I decided to write what will form (the core of) the first of my series of articles. I've been having a hard time figuring out where to start so thanks for throwing out a question that can be the start :)
I too asked the same question, many times, of many people and happily disregarded all of their responses with "BUT GIVE ME PROOF!". Now I'm on the other side of the fence. Having a perspective of both sides, the topic of how to explain such matters is a personal interest of mine.
The reason why it "can't" be explained is because the experience takes place in terms that do not exist in human language. The closest way to describe it, is the experience teaches you a different system of logic, a different way of thinking. Vague descriptions of the content are possible, but there is no amount of words that will be be useful and in many cases they would lead you further from understanding, due to gross imperfection of the description. The number one cause of ridicule towards assorted spiritual claims is the poor explanation given for them, or more specifically, the listener's perception that they have understood the provided explanation. (Note: the description just given, whilst hopefully helpful, can also be considered grossly inaccurate if you try to take it too literally. It could be more accurate to say that the required explanation necessitates the use of logical constructions which do not exist in everyday experience and cannot be learned in any ordinary way. Therefore it is a rather serious catch 22 that one cannot understand the experience until one has had it... i.e. "it can't be explained".)
The only thing to be done is to make the most rational case possible to convince people to do the hard work so they can experience it for themselves. I'm not going to attempt to do so here (I plan to write a series of articles and eventually a book on it) but one possible path to this is Buddhist meditation. I'm currently answering the question as to how the GP/I know he/I aren't mistaken.
Now the obvious first reaction to someone claiming "I had this crazy experience and now I understand everything!" is "congrats, you just went insane!". This is a perfectly natural skeptical response, especially given the scope of (and lack of evidence for) what people claim. There are a few responses to this:
1) That there are repeatable processes that can be undergone by a sufficiently dedicated individual to achieve the necessary experiences. The example given above was meditation. The path is consistent between individuals (i.e. a fairly concrete series of stages) although individual stages may manifest differently in each individual. Different amounts of time are required for each individual, and different aspects of personality will be the key roadblocks in each case. Nevertheless, it is the same process. Citation: this whole book: http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wiki/Main/MCTB?p_r_p_185834411_title=MCTB
2) That the new 'knowledge' gained is rational and coherent, which would not be expected to be the case for most coinsurance of random neural damage (etc). It greatly improves understanding of many aspects of life and the world. Many connections previously not seen are revealed. (It must be admitted that a great many people fail to produce a rational/coherent EXPLANATION - due to the extremely complexity demanded - but that does not mean they don't understand it to some degree.)
3) That everyone undergoing such experiences comes out on the other side with a remarkably similar understanding, even without any prior knowledge of what the 'expected' result is. Exact interpretations can vary (or even on the surface appear to be in violent disagreement) and individuals will tend to focus on different aspects. But it is clear that the same 'knowledge' is gained when you know what to look for.
4) (Rewinding back to the accusati
Sledgehammer random components until it works?
You're right of course, but I'm getting REALLY over the same guy spamming with the same post in so many threads. At SOME point, getting everything you post instantly modded to -1 (especially when the content is near identical) should incur some greater punishment.
Dissapointing. As someone with only one mobile device (i.e. the one I want to protect) this is not very useful. Would be a lot better with a security token similar to those used by banks. However I'll probably enable it anyway as in my particular case I'm more worried about someone I know getting into the account, which this DOES protect from even though it'll make me more vulnerable if my phone is stolen.
(Disclaimer: I only own an iPhone as I inherited it. I don't particually enjoy getting screwed by Apply constantly.)
I thought something like this too, but it doesn't seem to be correct. It was explained to me in terms of atomic particles but I'm assuming the same principle applies to gravity.
Basically, even thought the distance between particles may expand, the forces binding them are unchanged. Since their distance is based on the strength of the forces involved, the distance is fixed. Therefore the particles are kept at a fixed distance apart whilst space expands around them.
This makes sense when applied to forces with a limited range but seems a bit problematic when considering an infinite range force like gravity. I suppose that since the binding force of gravity acts proportionatly to range, the solar system will remain bound together at fairly fixed range (possibly increasing, but much slower than your calculations) whilst larger objects like galaxy clusters drift further apart.
I think GP is incorrect when he says clusters aren't gravitationally bound. They are, just weakly enough that the effect is negligable and it is possible that they can accelerate away from each other, since not enough gravitational breaking is applied.
It has a huge effect on our ability to communicate with Voyager...
The keyboard layout still sucks (like every other laptop keyboard out there). That said, looks like a pretty strong unit, so thanks for pointing it out. (There are a few other cons the reviews point out, but I can handle them and it has the pluses).
Seconding this. After a while of my standard album collection at work, I couldn't even force myself to pay attention to more than 10 seconds of a song. Waiting for the good part to kick in never happened. Once I was very familiar, they made an excellent background for improving concentration and getting stuff done (without noise isolation or cancelling). Unfamiliar/disliked music didn't do the same job.
Disclaimer: No ADHD.
There are still a ton of unanswered questions in the standard model. Later I'll take another look for the article I'm thinking of, which is a particle physicist discussing why this is the case. He partially agrees with what has been said ("the discovery is not that interesting") for an entirely different reason - because all the mysteries REMAIN! We just move a step closer to being able to properly reveal them.
Confirming the higg's presence in an experiment is step 1 to designing experiments that manipulate the higgs in an attempt to learn more about it and the higgs field, as in my OP. Sure its not paradigm shattering, but there's still plenty of new and arguably exciting work to be done.
I also aluded to the fact that excitment really isn't the point. It certainly is important in motivating people, but science would not be science if it was driven by what was exciting, as opposed to posing hypothesies and testing them.
Not sure if you're serious or trolling (like the religious AC that responded to you definitely is) - see my post above (first post) for some of the reasons why you're ludicrously wrong. The discovery of the higgs/the process of it's confirmation is a key milestone that will allow us to begin to make inroads on the investigation of gravity. Certainly there is a long way to go, but this is a necessary step before we can even fully understand what the standard model might be saying about gravity.
There are far more wasteful things to be spending money than fundamental science. (War being the most obvious example, although I'm not aware of the Euros being involved in much military activity recently.) Following your train of thought, we'd still be living in caves without the wheel or the ability to make fire ourselves. We can't say right now exactly what benefits the higgs boson specifically, and the extended thread of research in general will bring us - but history clearly demonstrates that theoretical research brings major quality of life improvements in the long run.
I would argue that dollar for dollar, research brings more long term benefit to society than welfare. Welfare can only address short term problems, and is LITERALLY just throwing money at the problem/down the drain. At least with infastructure, once it's built, the upkeep costs aren't quite as high. There needs to be a healthy balance of both, to address issues on both short and long timescales. Cutting one for the other is short sigted.
Finally, the LHC was built long before the financial chrisis came about. All the money was already spent. At best, only upgrade money could be diverted to help the troubled countries even if they wanted to (and I've discussed why that's a bad idea.) Note that the EU has thrown plenty of bailout money at them anyway, whilst still funding CERN.
"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, and "one of the great engineering milestones of mankind".[1] It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) from 1998 to 2008, with the aim of allowing physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics and high-energy physics, ..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
TFA is mainstream butt-hurt-ness that the progress of science isn't appropriately entertaining, and unsurprisingly misses a few key points. Sure an announcement of 'we are making progress and confirming what we expected" isn't as exciting as the original announcement, but is just as important (if not more so) to the scientific process.
When/if this particle is confirmed as the higgs, that does not remotely "[tie] up the Standard Model of physics in a pretty, neat, red quantum bow" (TFA) let alone "[remove] any doubt for more exotic physics beyond the Standard Model" (TFS). Both are patently false. A major reason for looking for the higgs in the first place (beyond confirming that part of the SM) is to being to actively investigate the higgs field, which is moderated by the higgs boson itself. The higgs does not impart mass to particles as is usually claimed (although it's not an unreasonable simplification). The higgs particles are what moderates the higgs field, the presence of which is what brings about mass in particles. (The higgs - and presumably all/most particles - are actually just field fluctuations. What we think of as a discrete particle is really then just the instantaneous average of the fluctuation [wave]).
I can't find my exact sources for this, but at least some of them were from the Higgs section of this site, which I highly recommend. Meanwhile, this article is quite interesting anyway:
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-known-apparently-elementary-particles/the-known-particles-if-the-higgs-field-were-zero/
THIS. So much this.
I've never found a really tolerable automatic, although Mercadies make the process less painful... That said, it can be a huge pain to manage a manual (especially a sporty one) in peak hour traffic.
A clutchless car that could be set into auto or manual would be awesome. Not sure if such a thing exists.
The assigned windows don't keep changing.
Yeah, I realised that after I posted (my bad). Not sure I would want to do things that way still, but hey, I'm not going to complain that there are more options available.
Windows 7 does have something similar with winkey+[number] but that's by application so it doesn't help if you have multiple docs opened for a particular app. I did try to get Microsoft to have Windows do it the way linkkey does it, but they said their way is better, and before that I suggested it to GNOME and KDE (in 2006).
+1 internets to you sir, very handy. BTW pressing the win+[x] combo multple times cycles through the active windows of that app.
Although I don't quite follow how your way is better. When using such a combination, I'd want to know what I'm getting instantly before each keypress, without having to mentally track which order I've accessed windows in recently. If I do want to switch by order of use, there's always alt tab. Alt tab, tab lets you get the 2nd most recent window, etc. Sure you need to press tab an extra time, but how often do you really remember what the 9th most recently used window was? The MS way lets you know what you're getting always, whilst you still have pretty efficent access to recent windows (by order of access) via alt tab.
Of course it won't happen because these skills cannot be tested on a standardized test. The skills on this test are those that no one really needs for work. For example the test asks what is the error in this bit of code. I don't know. When I code the compiler gives me an error, then I look at the code and fixes it. That is the way real people code. Ask me about something real!
Totally agreed with you up to here. Being able to look at a block of code and have some idea what is wrong with it is really important. In many cases, compiler errors are only tangental to the actual cause of the error. E.g. a missing } or " is often going to produce some generic parsing failure for a line before or after the actual error line. (Forgetting to close a comment block can also be rather entertaining.) I've seen plenty of beginners get lost because they had a syntax error and the compiler message didn't help them.
Being able to (within reason) write a simple block that will run first time is also a huge efficency improvement - not that I don't also over rely on the compiler in my more zombie-like moments.
Being able to e.g. cite the exact error a compiler would produce for a given language is wrote learning of little value. Understanding the problem that would trigger such an error is important.
Yep, I woefully screwed up my definition of deflation. I guess my point was that is a different type of deflation, built into the design of the currency and not necessarily a bad thing.
I think he's onto something though. If each vote had a unique ID on it, with several independant parties counting and publishing the results, it would be easy to cross check that each party tallied vote x in the correct (same) way. Doesn't cover the whole voting process, but it certainly helps.