It would be disingenuous to claim phenomena which will occur no matter what is somehow dependent on a particular theory.
What you are missing is that random variation is itself measurable and predictable.
Lets say you take daily temperature measurements from 274 cities every day for a year. 274*365 is almost exactly one hundred thousand temperature measurements. Based on normal random weather viability you'd expect something like one thousand of them to be a new local record high or a new local record low. (I'm calling it a thousand as a nice easy round figure.)
An increase in average global temperature may result in, lets say an extra 180 extra new record highs occurring each year. Changes in ocean or atmospheric circulation may also cause localized cooling in a few areas, resulting in an extra 20 records lows occurring each year.
The difference between 1000 record temperatures per year is clearly and measurably different from 1200 record temperatures per year.
You badly underestimated, or carelessly dismissed, scientists' ability to make reliable testable predictions.
A lot of research has been done about game-theoretic competition versus cooperation, and the benefit of having multiple models applied - even provably less correct ones. Having some nut-jobs actually increases society's fitness overall. Living with them, and even listening to them is actually good for you
Sure. I'm a big fan of diversity. However when 40-odd percent of the US public denies evolution, and another 20 percent or so answer "don't know", I'd say we've gone WAAAAAY beyond a useful minority of nutjobs for diversity's sake, and that they are being listened to WAAAAAY too much already.
Perhaps someone should imform the RIAA that her other website http://www.whenigrowupi.com/index.html has a player with Frank Sinatra's song Somethin' Stupid.
I tried to report it here, but for some reason the form is broken for me.
Of course there is. The effect of pornography is an obvious and common research subject. And yes, of course there is a well established a relationship between pornography and and sex crimes in general, and rape and pedophilia in particular, teen pregnancy, and abusive objectification of women.
Studies have shown this to be true both on the individual level of sexual predators, and on the level of health of a society overall in overall sex crime rates and teen pregnancy.
Individuals convicted of sexual crimes extremely disproportionately were raised in sexually repressive homes. Individuals convicted of sexual crimes have disproportionately little or no porn. Several countries in recent history have changed their laws to legalize porn or liberalize it's availability, and such social changes have consistently been followed by a drop in rape and other sex crimes. Countries that are are most sexually repressive and/or ban pornography consistently have the highest rates of sex crimes, rape, abuse of women, and teen pregnancy. In Denmark pornography is widely available in most convenience stores, it may be freely purchased at the age of 15, hardcore pornography is freely broadcast on public TV at night, prostitution is legal, the age of consent is 15, possession of pornography of consenting 15 year olds is perfectly legal, sexual experimentation (playing doctor) starts early and is socially accepted a normal part of development, and the problem of teen pregnancy is virtually nonexistent. Denmark and other sexually non-repressive countries have a teen pregnancy rate 98% lower than the US. Japan is quite famous for the prevalent pornographic depictions of bondage and (fictional)rape, yet the rate of actual rapes being committed in Japan is about sixteen times lower than the US rape rate.
I haven;t even begun to put a dent in the hundreds of statistics and scientific studies that exist on the subject of pornography. They paint a clear and consistent picture that it is the attempt to repress, deny, and conceal the fact of human sexuality which is psychologically damaging to individuals and morally unhealthy to societies.
This is exactly the same as the horribly misguided efforts to impose abstinence-only education. Case after case, school after school, the results of abstinence-only education are clear and consistent. Abstinence-only education consistently results in higher rates of teen pregnancy and STDs in our children. Abstinence education crusaders place ideology over facts and reality, they place ideology over the health of the children. The stubbornly ignore the result that they are increasing teen pregnancy and causing more children to be infected with sexually transmitted diseases. They place blind ideology of "protecting" children over the heath and the lives e children they are harming.
The exact same thing is happening with pornography. Anti-porn crusaders are playing their ideology that "porn is evil" and porn is harmful" above the lives and health of the people they are harming. Once you set aside all ideology of all sides and just look at the numbers, the fact is that societies that make porn legal and freely available reduce the occurrence of rape and other sex crimes, enjoy lower rates of teen pregnancy, have less violence against women in general, and higher rates of children raised in stable two-parent families.
The crusade against porn may be well intentioned, but the end result is the opposite of what was intended. Just like abstinence education, the actual result inflicts the very harm they wanted to prevent.
I'm just guessing how you might reply, but try not to toss out some ridiculous strawman about shoving porn in children's faces. Of course you don't park a child in front of some porno movie they have no understanding of and and no interest in. But nor do you traumatize a child by freaking out when they come across a breast (or more) somewhere in
In the 1930s, seismologists did find a "discontinuity" in the velocity of waves propagated through the center of the Earth, suggesting some sort of stratification of the core.
The problem, for 60 years now, is that those waves never carried the signature of a solid.
Quite easy to imagine how rational people would contend the planet is hollow, considering that for 60 years, by all scientific measurement, at least part of it was.
The discontinuity showed a higher density of the inner core. It showed either a solid or a higher density liquid. The only way a rational person could take that as evidence for a hollow earth is if they completely misunderstood what they were reading about it.
Any idea of a hollow earth has been completely non-viable for a long time now, for at least as long as we knew there was magma below the crust. Molten rock is a liquid and even if some sort of hollow chamber could survive at that temperature, it would intensely float. The buoyant force would be equal to the weight of an equal volume of solid rock. A hollow space the size of the inner core would have a buoyant force of 26,000,000 Trillion tons. The chamber would float up with such incredible force that it would lift up the earth's crust and violently burst through with the energy of trillions of nuclear bombs. It would turn an entire continent into slag and exterminate almost all life on earth.
The insistence on claiming the core is made of iron, when there is no direct evidence to prove it as a certainty
There is no such thing as absolute truth or absolute proof in science. The relevant standard in science is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And we have a multitude of evidence establishing beyond any reasonable doubt that the earth's core is iron. The list of substances with a density matching iron is a reasonably short list, centering on iron. The list of substances with a density matching iron, and capable of generating the observed magnetic field, is a very short list prominently featuring "iron". The list of substances with a density matching iron, and capable of generating a magnetic field, and which is even remotely plausible as the dominate composition of the core of the earth is pretty much "iron". I don't know much about this particular field of science, but I do know enough to know that scientists expert in the subject know far more than I can list off the top of my head. I have no doubt that there are a multitude of other scientifically established properties of the core, all of which converge on the same answer "iron". If they converged on a different answer, we would know *that* answer instead of iron. If they didn't converge on an answer, we would know that the field was in a big famous state of confusion on the subject. Just off the top of my head *I* know enough to fairly well establish that it has be iron, and what I know on the subject is diddlysquat compared to the experts.
The idea that a single event which appears to confirm the theory, confirms the theory.
The article I linked was merely the first result showing the earth's core was iron in a solid state, as opposed to iron in a liquid state. There is a vast body of other evidence and other experiments establishing beyond any reasonable doubt other aspects of the earth's interior. And it is not remotely compatible with any large hollow space anywhere below the crust.
In any modern well informed scientific context, "silly" is an entirely appropriate term to describe any sort of hollow earth theory.
Even in the US, places where there is debate over the teaching of evolution are rare enough to be newsworthy. It's an ever-shrinking pool of people
Oh how I wish that were true. A 2005 poll has acceptance and rejection of evolution in the US are pretty well tied. The only change over twenty years was a decline on both sides, with an increase in the "not sure" response. I think that indicates some margin of success in their "teach the controversy" tactic.
Note that out of 34 countries, the US came in SECOND TO LAST, ahead of only Turkey.
(If anyone happens to have more recent polling data hand I would be eager to see it, but I don't anticipate any large shift in the numbers)
So, these seismometers - they can send a signal to the alleged core, and it will bounce back in such a way that we can be certain the core is X miles deep, Y miles in diameter, and made up of Z?
Yes, pretty much. Except that the signals are either earthquakes or nukes.
Really? Sounds cool! Got a link?
Vacuum, gasses, liquids, and solids reveal different properties in how sound waves pass through them (with vacuum revealed by not transmitting sound at all of course). Sound waves can also be focused to create images, like the way dolphins can see with sonar. Where building a suitable lens is impractical you can use multiple sound sources and/or multiple listening points as a virtual lens to compute an image. Here's a good link explaining a 1998 confirmation of a solid inner core below the molten mantle and molten outer core: Earthquake Provides Proof That Earth's Innermost Core Is Solid.
Another link is: Evidence for Internal Earth Structure and Composition. That one gives more explanation on how seismic waves are used to see the inner earth, but mainly I'm linking it for this image which illustrates how seismic stations at different points on earth see seismic waves passing through different parts of the earth. Seismic stations at the bottom of the image see seismic waves which reveal the inner and outer core. Note that it takes something like a half hour or more for waves from an earthquake to arrive at the opposite side of the planet. Different kinds of waves travel at different speeds and arrive several minutes apart, with the difference in timing between different kinds of waves providing rich additional information of the composition of the earth along various paths. Different kinds of waves can be analyzed separately to compute images of different aspects of the inner earth.
I realize this is fanciful, and the odds are really high that this didn't happen, but who is to say that six thousand years ago something didn't just pop everything into existence fully formed, *including* all of the evidence?
Wow. It's really impressive seeing someone literally invoking Last_Thursdayism in defense of "merely circumstantial evidence" argument. Usually it's the atheist side that invokes Last Thursdayism to point out how unbelievably stupid it is to dismiss an entire planet of evidence as "merely" circumstantial.
Yea, that's great, we're getting better at understanding evolution. Okay. Nice. Why use that to try to tear down someone's beliefs?
*IF* that can indeed be used to tear down their beliefs, then these beliefs are in conflict with reality.
When someone acts based upon misinformation the outcome is at best random. Any benefit derived from acting on false beliefs is pot luck, and it is on average grossly outweighed by the harm that often results from acting on false information.
"Tearing down" falsehoods and misunderstandings is an altruistic social good. It makes it less likely for people to inadvertently cause harm with their well-intentioned acts.
Studying evolution isn't going to help anyone get over the loss of a child or family member
The study and understanding of evolution can potentially do something infinitely better. It may save that child or family member from dying in the first place. Either it may further the advancement of science in general leading to the cure or prevention of the cause of death, or it may keep someone from unwittingly acting in some way that causes or allows the death to happen.
10-year-old Lilly Badger and 7-year-old twins Grace and Sarah Badger are dead. And why are they dead? Because they believed Santa Clause was real. They are dead because some people allowed and encouraged them to believe Santa Clause was real. They are dead because there was not a single adult in their life to stand up and tell them the truth. The children were afraid Santa would be hurt by the burning embers in the fireplace. So the burning embers were hazardously removed from the fireplace, and they were trapped when the house turned into an inferno.
I have a radical proposal. My proposal is that they could have been told the truth, and the family could have still celebrated the holiday, and the children and the parents still could have enjoyed the presents and family time.
Santa-frigging-Claus. Something every adult knows is fiction. When adults believe in a fiction, and act based upon that fiction, the harmful results are infinitely more common and overall cause vastly more harm both large and small. I am not selectively singling out the most extreme results like, as you note yourself, enslavement and torture. I'm not ignoring any positives. I'm saying that in sum total, when people act based upon misinformation the result is at best random. That it is on average harmful. I'm saying the net result is harmful.
it's not going to help them find satisfaction in helping to feed and clothe the starving or serving mankind in other ways.
Nor does knowledge of evolution prevent people from finding satisfaction in helping to feed and clothe the starving or serving mankind in other ways.
And if we didn't waste so many resources building gold-clad temples to Athena and Zeus, perhaps there would be fewer people in desperate need of food and clothing. If we didn't waste some much time doing rain dances to water the crops, perhaps we could allocate even a tiny fraction of that time building irrigation for crops to feed and clothe people.
Any who came up with the idiotic idea that beliefs are inherently entitled to any respect?
If your neighbor has a belief that he's being anal probed by gay alien government agents, are you seriously suggesting that belief warrants any respect whatsoever? Does it warrant any more respect if someone believes in walking talking snakes? Does it warrant any more respect when someone believes God wrote, or divinely inspired, a book which (in part) orders parents to murder disrespectful children?
I respect people's freedom to believe stupid stuff. But that does not mean I have to respect the belief itself, nor does it mean I have to respect a person who believes stupid stuff.
Yeah but I also saw it "promoted" on MSNBC and CNN. I think you are confusing COVERAGE of a huge mass of people.
Did you even look at the link? It's a screenshot of Fox News' own headline stating "FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES", and if you check the dates you'll see that they began promoting their "Fox News Channel Tax Day Tea Parties" a week or more in advance.
Coverage is when you report on an what other other people are doing over there. When you run media campaign in an effort to get people to show up at your own event in the future, that's called promoting.
MSNBC, CNN, and every other legitimate News Agency provided coverage of the Tea Party events.
These 3 channels also "promoted" Occupy when people first started massing for the protests.
If you have a screen shot of a CNN headline advertizing a "CNN Occupy Events", especially if they start advertizing it a week in advance, then that would be promoting. All the legitimate news agencies, and part-time-news-agency FOX, provided coverage of Occupy. Fox took a break from their occasional news coverage to provide advance promotion for their own Tea Party Events.
Fox thought it would be a swell scheme to undermine the current administration.
You goofed. The only "Epic Fail" is that you never bothered to check the link.
This is a perfect illustration of how partisans on both sides can lose touch with reality. People have a bad habit of picking teams, and then mental shortcuts can fall into place short-circuiting reasoned consideration and logic. Mental filters can drop into place that block information from entering the brain at all, without even permitting any rational consideration of whether the information is true or valuable.
You saw MediaMatters on the link, and you instantly applied shortcircuit logic to deem whatever was there automatically biased and false. A mental filter dropped into place that kept whatever was there from making it into your brain, filtering it out without permitting any consideration of what it was and whether it was true information.
You went on an immediate rant against MediaMatters, and you goofed. It wouldn't matter even if everything in your rant were 100% true, because he wasn't citing Mediamatters. He was citing Fox News. And you would have known that if you bothered checking the link for 3 seconds. He was citing Fox News in a TV screen capture. The image is merely hosted on a MediaMatters webserver. The information in the image, the information he was citing, was 100% from Fox News, straight out of Fox News' mouth, straight out of Fox News' own headline.
No... it was COVERED by Fox news
False. Fox News did not "cover" the Tea Parties, Fox News created and promoted the events week or more in advance. And if you bothered to check the link you'd have seen Fox New's own headline stating that these were Fox News Channel Events.
Quoting Fox News' own headline: "FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES".
Fox News Channel Tax Day Tea Parties.
That's what Fox called them, while PROMOTING them. While promoting them a week in advance.
Fox News Channel Tax Day Tea Parties.
Amusingly, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like.
Wrong again. The GOP establishment detests the TEA party and is terrified by it.
His statement was completely correct. Fox News is a partisan political activism organization, and they figured it would be a swell idea to undermine the current administration by orchestrating these "FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES". And as he said, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like. It's turned into a bit of a Frankenstein monster, largely wrecking damage on the GOP. Yes, as you said the GOP has become rather afraid of the Tea Party.
A small number of Tea Party radicals have gotten elected, and their inability to function as legislators has disrupted the Republican Caucus from the inside, while a similar number of Tea Party radicals have won Republican primaries and in the general election handed those seats to the Democrats. The net effect on Democratic side is roughly zero, while the net effect for the Republicans is decidedly negative.
The "FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES" have largely backfired.
This technique yields the interesting result that you want to apply an optimal compression algorithm to your files before encrypting them. That way you are encrypting effectively random data, so that an attacker cannot use this sort of method to identify a successful decryption.
Except applying the corresponding decompression after decryption, of course.
You don't have the decryption yet. You need an algorithm to obtain a potential decryption. If P=NP then you can use an algorithm to (relatively quickly) find and give you the most compressible decryption. And the most compressible decryption is almost certainly the correct decryption. If the message is already compressed then you need some other way for an algorithm to pick out what potential decryption to give to you. For example if you know a specific name probably appears in the true text then you could try using an algorithm that returns decompressed potential decryptions that contain a specific name. You need to know or guess something about the text in order to write an algorithm which returns the correct decryption.
Still doesn't help at all to tell if the message was "Attack tomorrow 10:00" or "We should surrender!", which are both meaningful sentences.
If the message length is so short that it is comparable in length to the key, then yeah, you'd get a huge number of "meaningful sentence" possible decryptions with no way to pick the right one. However for any message significantly longer than the key, the probability of rapidly approaches zero that there would exist more than one meaningful proper-English decryption.
Look: generating all possible outputs from a one-time pad encrypted message
I obviously was not talking about one-time pads. The comments I was responding to were not about one time pads.
What kind of "cat scholar" are you? What cat ever uses an ümlaüt? No cat I've ever seen. Not even German cats. And I've spoken with plenty of German cats.
Hail Ada, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy mind, software. Holy Ada, Mother of God, pray for us programmers, now and at the hour of our compile. Make.
I have seen in my own life among people that I personally know that the God of the Bible is still working... they were true diagnosed serious medical problems that went away immediately with prayer and haven't returned after many years.
What about when a Muslim or Hindu prays, then their family member recovers? Do you claim that your evidence and your belief is superior to the same evidence and the same belief from a Native American?
I don't have any evidence of Zeus doing things today that I can observe. I don't have any evidence from anybody else of his actions today either
"Zeus" is obviously a generic stand-in representing the "god/being/power" of any other religion. Do you deny or doubt that plenty of Muslims, Hindus, and Native Americans will testify to the *exact* same evidence as you did?
isn't something that I have to even think about. The same is true of the other religions in the world today.
When you willfully ignore identical evidence from people of other religions you are failing to apply any analytical reasoning at all.
When you firmly leap to the conclusion that your family member recovered because of prayer, and you call that "evidence", you are failing to apply any analytical reasoning at all.
When you willfully ignore countless research showing that people who are prayed-for recover no more than people who are not prayed-for, showing that prayed-for people are just as likely to die as unprayed-for people, then you are failing to apply any analytical reasoning at all.
If all you have is "I feel it works" then you have nothing more than a Native American who says the same thing, you have nothing more than someone who credits a $100 lotto win as "evidence" for their astrological lucky numbers.
A simple search of the web turns up multitudes of personal experiences and anecdotal evidence. Simply because you reject it
I don't reject it at all. There are plenty of real cases of people recovering from all sorts of things after being prayed for.
There are also plenty of cases of people dying after being prayed for, and plenty of cases of people not-being-prayed-for and then recovering, and plenty of cases of people not-being-prayed-for and dying.
I don't reject cases of people recovering after prayer, however any number of such cases tells us *zero* about whether there was any connection at all between the prayer and the recovery. To determine that you need to count up the cases and compare prayer results against no-prayer results. That is reasonably easy to do, and of course plenty of prayer-believers have tried exactly that to demonstrate the real and positive power of prayer.
There have been plenty of studies that have shown that praying for oneself is no more effective than meditation. (Prayer and meditation can in themselves have a beneficial calming and stress reducing effect).
There have also been plenty of studies that have shown that prayer has zero effect when someone is prayed for by others. One memorable study involved heart attack patients. Lots of faithful people eagerly participated to pray for the health and recovery of heart attack patients. Patients who were prayed-for recovered no better than patients who were not prayed for, and if I recall correctly the number of patients who were prayed-for and *died* was slightly higher than the number of not-prayed-for patients who died. But of course a small difference is fully expected within normal random variation.
So as you said, there's tons of evidence. And that evidence clearly shows prayer does not have the claimed effect. If God exists, then answering prayers for healing simply isn't on the list of things he does. He either doesn't do it at all, or he does so so rarely that the number is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Slashdot Mirror
I may be a pretty sad case, but I don't write jokes in base 36!
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It would be disingenuous to claim phenomena which will occur no matter what is somehow dependent on a particular theory.
What you are missing is that random variation is itself measurable and predictable.
Lets say you take daily temperature measurements from 274 cities every day for a year. 274*365 is almost exactly one hundred thousand temperature measurements. Based on normal random weather viability you'd expect something like one thousand of them to be a new local record high or a new local record low. (I'm calling it a thousand as a nice easy round figure.)
An increase in average global temperature may result in, lets say an extra 180 extra new record highs occurring each year. Changes in ocean or atmospheric circulation may also cause localized cooling in a few areas, resulting in an extra 20 records lows occurring each year.
The difference between 1000 record temperatures per year is clearly and measurably different from 1200 record temperatures per year.
You badly underestimated, or carelessly dismissed, scientists' ability to make reliable testable predictions.
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I think you mist the point.
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A lot of research has been done about game-theoretic competition versus cooperation, and the benefit of having multiple models applied - even provably less correct ones. Having some nut-jobs actually increases society's fitness overall. Living with them, and even listening to them is actually good for you
Sure. I'm a big fan of diversity. However when 40-odd percent of the US public denies evolution, and another 20 percent or so answer "don't know", I'd say we've gone WAAAAAY beyond a useful minority of nutjobs for diversity's sake, and that they are being listened to WAAAAAY too much already.
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Perhaps someone should imform the RIAA that her other website http://www.whenigrowupi.com/index.html has a player with Frank Sinatra's song Somethin' Stupid.
I tried to report it here, but for some reason the form is broken for me.
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There is no evidence either way.
Of course there is. The effect of pornography is an obvious and common research subject. And yes, of course there is a well established a relationship between pornography and and sex crimes in general, and rape and pedophilia in particular, teen pregnancy, and abusive objectification of women.
Studies have shown this to be true both on the individual level of sexual predators, and on the level of health of a society overall in overall sex crime rates and teen pregnancy.
Individuals convicted of sexual crimes extremely disproportionately were raised in sexually repressive homes. Individuals convicted of sexual crimes have disproportionately little or no porn. Several countries in recent history have changed their laws to legalize porn or liberalize it's availability, and such social changes have consistently been followed by a drop in rape and other sex crimes. Countries that are are most sexually repressive and/or ban pornography consistently have the highest rates of sex crimes, rape, abuse of women, and teen pregnancy. In Denmark pornography is widely available in most convenience stores, it may be freely purchased at the age of 15, hardcore pornography is freely broadcast on public TV at night, prostitution is legal, the age of consent is 15, possession of pornography of consenting 15 year olds is perfectly legal, sexual experimentation (playing doctor) starts early and is socially accepted a normal part of development, and the problem of teen pregnancy is virtually nonexistent. Denmark and other sexually non-repressive countries have a teen pregnancy rate 98% lower than the US. Japan is quite famous for the prevalent pornographic depictions of bondage and (fictional)rape, yet the rate of actual rapes being committed in Japan is about sixteen times lower than the US rape rate.
I haven;t even begun to put a dent in the hundreds of statistics and scientific studies that exist on the subject of pornography. They paint a clear and consistent picture that it is the attempt to repress, deny, and conceal the fact of human sexuality which is psychologically damaging to individuals and morally unhealthy to societies.
This is exactly the same as the horribly misguided efforts to impose abstinence-only education. Case after case, school after school, the results of abstinence-only education are clear and consistent. Abstinence-only education consistently results in higher rates of teen pregnancy and STDs in our children. Abstinence education crusaders place ideology over facts and reality, they place ideology over the health of the children. The stubbornly ignore the result that they are increasing teen pregnancy and causing more children to be infected with sexually transmitted diseases. They place blind ideology of "protecting" children over the heath and the lives e children they are harming.
The exact same thing is happening with pornography. Anti-porn crusaders are playing their ideology that "porn is evil" and porn is harmful" above the lives and health of the people they are harming. Once you set aside all ideology of all sides and just look at the numbers, the fact is that societies that make porn legal and freely available reduce the occurrence of rape and other sex crimes, enjoy lower rates of teen pregnancy, have less violence against women in general, and higher rates of children raised in stable two-parent families.
The crusade against porn may be well intentioned, but the end result is the opposite of what was intended. Just like abstinence education, the actual result inflicts the very harm they wanted to prevent.
I'm just guessing how you might reply, but try not to toss out some ridiculous strawman about shoving porn in children's faces. Of course you don't park a child in front of some porno movie they have no understanding of and and no interest in. But nor do you traumatize a child by freaking out when they come across a breast (or more) somewhere in
What Should We Do About Wikipedia's Porn Problem?
I didn't realize Wikipedia had a porn problem, but if the demand really is that high I guess I could volunteer to help add more.
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In the 1930s, seismologists did find a "discontinuity" in the velocity of waves propagated through the center of the Earth, suggesting some sort of stratification of the core.
The problem, for 60 years now, is that those waves never carried the signature of a solid.
Quite easy to imagine how rational people would contend the planet is hollow, considering that for 60 years, by all scientific measurement, at least part of it was.
The discontinuity showed a higher density of the inner core. It showed either a solid or a higher density liquid. The only way a rational person could take that as evidence for a hollow earth is if they completely misunderstood what they were reading about it.
Any idea of a hollow earth has been completely non-viable for a long time now, for at least as long as we knew there was magma below the crust. Molten rock is a liquid and even if some sort of hollow chamber could survive at that temperature, it would intensely float. The buoyant force would be equal to the weight of an equal volume of solid rock. A hollow space the size of the inner core would have a buoyant force of 26,000,000 Trillion tons. The chamber would float up with such incredible force that it would lift up the earth's crust and violently burst through with the energy of trillions of nuclear bombs. It would turn an entire continent into slag and exterminate almost all life on earth.
The insistence on claiming the core is made of iron, when there is no direct evidence to prove it as a certainty
There is no such thing as absolute truth or absolute proof in science. The relevant standard in science is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And we have a multitude of evidence establishing beyond any reasonable doubt that the earth's core is iron. The list of substances with a density matching iron is a reasonably short list, centering on iron. The list of substances with a density matching iron, and capable of generating the observed magnetic field, is a very short list prominently featuring "iron". The list of substances with a density matching iron, and capable of generating a magnetic field, and which is even remotely plausible as the dominate composition of the core of the earth is pretty much "iron". I don't know much about this particular field of science, but I do know enough to know that scientists expert in the subject know far more than I can list off the top of my head. I have no doubt that there are a multitude of other scientifically established properties of the core, all of which converge on the same answer "iron". If they converged on a different answer, we would know *that* answer instead of iron. If they didn't converge on an answer, we would know that the field was in a big famous state of confusion on the subject. Just off the top of my head *I* know enough to fairly well establish that it has be iron, and what I know on the subject is diddlysquat compared to the experts.
The idea that a single event which appears to confirm the theory, confirms the theory.
The article I linked was merely the first result showing the earth's core was iron in a solid state, as opposed to iron in a liquid state. There is a vast body of other evidence and other experiments establishing beyond any reasonable doubt other aspects of the earth's interior. And it is not remotely compatible with any large hollow space anywhere below the crust.
In any modern well informed scientific context, "silly" is an entirely appropriate term to describe any sort of hollow earth theory.
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Even in the US, places where there is debate over the teaching of evolution are rare enough to be newsworthy. It's an ever-shrinking pool of people
Oh how I wish that were true. A 2005 poll has acceptance and rejection of evolution in the US are pretty well tied. The only change over twenty years was a decline on both sides, with an increase in the "not sure" response. I think that indicates some margin of success in their "teach the controversy" tactic.
Note that out of 34 countries, the US came in SECOND TO LAST, ahead of only Turkey.
(If anyone happens to have more recent polling data hand I would be eager to see it, but I don't anticipate any large shift in the numbers)
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So, these seismometers - they can send a signal to the alleged core, and it will bounce back in such a way that we can be certain the core is X miles deep, Y miles in diameter, and made up of Z?
Yes, pretty much. Except that the signals are either earthquakes or nukes.
Really? Sounds cool! Got a link?
Vacuum, gasses, liquids, and solids reveal different properties in how sound waves pass through them (with vacuum revealed by not transmitting sound at all of course). Sound waves can also be focused to create images, like the way dolphins can see with sonar. Where building a suitable lens is impractical you can use multiple sound sources and/or multiple listening points as a virtual lens to compute an image. Here's a good link explaining a 1998 confirmation of a solid inner core below the molten mantle and molten outer core: Earthquake Provides Proof That Earth's Innermost Core Is Solid.
Another link is: Evidence for Internal Earth Structure and Composition. That one gives more explanation on how seismic waves are used to see the inner earth, but mainly I'm linking it for this image which illustrates how seismic stations at different points on earth see seismic waves passing through different parts of the earth. Seismic stations at the bottom of the image see seismic waves which reveal the inner and outer core. Note that it takes something like a half hour or more for waves from an earthquake to arrive at the opposite side of the planet. Different kinds of waves travel at different speeds and arrive several minutes apart, with the difference in timing between different kinds of waves providing rich additional information of the composition of the earth along various paths. Different kinds of waves can be analyzed separately to compute images of different aspects of the inner earth.
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I realize this is fanciful, and the odds are really high that this didn't happen, but who is to say that six thousand years ago something didn't just pop everything into existence fully formed, *including* all of the evidence?
Wow. It's really impressive seeing someone literally invoking Last_Thursdayism in defense of "merely circumstantial evidence" argument. Usually it's the atheist side that invokes Last Thursdayism to point out how unbelievably stupid it is to dismiss an entire planet of evidence as "merely" circumstantial.
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Yea, that's great, we're getting better at understanding evolution. Okay. Nice. Why use that to try to tear down someone's beliefs?
*IF* that can indeed be used to tear down their beliefs, then these beliefs are in conflict with reality.
When someone acts based upon misinformation the outcome is at best random. Any benefit derived from acting on false beliefs is pot luck, and it is on average grossly outweighed by the harm that often results from acting on false information.
"Tearing down" falsehoods and misunderstandings is an altruistic social good. It makes it less likely for people to inadvertently cause harm with their well-intentioned acts.
Studying evolution isn't going to help anyone get over the loss of a child or family member
The study and understanding of evolution can potentially do something infinitely better. It may save that child or family member from dying in the first place. Either it may further the advancement of science in general leading to the cure or prevention of the cause of death, or it may keep someone from unwittingly acting in some way that causes or allows the death to happen.
10-year-old Lilly Badger and 7-year-old twins Grace and Sarah Badger are dead. And why are they dead? Because they believed Santa Clause was real. They are dead because some people allowed and encouraged them to believe Santa Clause was real. They are dead because there was not a single adult in their life to stand up and tell them the truth. The children were afraid Santa would be hurt by the burning embers in the fireplace. So the burning embers were hazardously removed from the fireplace, and they were trapped when the house turned into an inferno.
I have a radical proposal. My proposal is that they could have been told the truth, and the family could have still celebrated the holiday, and the children and the parents still could have enjoyed the presents and family time.
Santa-frigging-Claus. Something every adult knows is fiction. When adults believe in a fiction, and act based upon that fiction, the harmful results are infinitely more common and overall cause vastly more harm both large and small. I am not selectively singling out the most extreme results like, as you note yourself, enslavement and torture. I'm not ignoring any positives. I'm saying that in sum total, when people act based upon misinformation the result is at best random. That it is on average harmful. I'm saying the net result is harmful.
it's not going to help them find satisfaction in helping to feed and clothe the starving or serving mankind in other ways.
Nor does knowledge of evolution prevent people from finding satisfaction in helping to feed and clothe the starving or serving mankind in other ways.
And if we didn't waste so many resources building gold-clad temples to Athena and Zeus, perhaps there would be fewer people in desperate need of food and clothing. If we didn't waste some much time doing rain dances to water the crops, perhaps we could allocate even a tiny fraction of that time building irrigation for crops to feed and clothe people.
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congrats on not respecting other people's beliefs
Any who came up with the idiotic idea that beliefs are inherently entitled to any respect?
If your neighbor has a belief that he's being anal probed by gay alien government agents, are you seriously suggesting that belief warrants any respect whatsoever? Does it warrant any more respect if someone believes in walking talking snakes? Does it warrant any more respect when someone believes God wrote, or divinely inspired, a book which (in part) orders parents to murder disrespectful children?
I respect people's freedom to believe stupid stuff. But that does not mean I have to respect the belief itself, nor does it mean I have to respect a person who believes stupid stuff.
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there is no way for the English language to be specific enough that a 1 page document can provide an exact to every political problem.
True, but perhaps the English language could be specific enough provide a to every sentence.
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>>>and promoted relentlessly by Fox News
Yeah but I also saw it "promoted" on MSNBC and CNN. I think you are confusing COVERAGE of a huge mass of people.
Did you even look at the link? It's a screenshot of Fox News' own headline stating "FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES", and if you check the dates you'll see that they began promoting their "Fox News Channel Tax Day Tea Parties" a week or more in advance.
Coverage is when you report on an what other other people are doing over there.
When you run media campaign in an effort to get people to show up at your own event in the future, that's called promoting.
MSNBC, CNN, and every other legitimate News Agency provided coverage of the Tea Party events.
These 3 channels also "promoted" Occupy when people first started massing for the protests.
If you have a screen shot of a CNN headline advertizing a "CNN Occupy Events", especially if they start advertizing it a week in advance, then that would be promoting. All the legitimate news agencies, and part-time-news-agency FOX, provided coverage of Occupy. Fox took a break from their occasional news coverage to provide advance promotion for their own Tea Party Events.
Fox thought it would be a swell scheme to undermine the current administration.
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Epic Fail.
You goofed.
The only "Epic Fail" is that you never bothered to check the link.
This is a perfect illustration of how partisans on both sides can lose touch with reality. People have a bad habit of picking teams, and then mental shortcuts can fall into place short-circuiting reasoned consideration and logic. Mental filters can drop into place that block information from entering the brain at all, without even permitting any rational consideration of whether the information is true or valuable.
You saw MediaMatters on the link, and you instantly applied shortcircuit logic to deem whatever was there automatically biased and false. A mental filter dropped into place that kept whatever was there from making it into your brain, filtering it out without permitting any consideration of what it was and whether it was true information.
You went on an immediate rant against MediaMatters, and you goofed. It wouldn't matter even if everything in your rant were 100% true, because he wasn't citing Mediamatters. He was citing Fox News. And you would have known that if you bothered checking the link for 3 seconds. He was citing Fox News in a TV screen capture. The image is merely hosted on a MediaMatters webserver. The information in the image, the information he was citing, was 100% from Fox News, straight out of Fox News' mouth, straight out of Fox News' own headline.
No... it was COVERED by Fox news
False. Fox News did not "cover" the Tea Parties, Fox News created and promoted the events week or more in advance. And if you bothered to check the link you'd have seen Fox New's own headline stating that these were Fox News Channel Events.
Quoting Fox News' own headline: "FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES".
Fox News Channel Tax Day Tea Parties.
That's what Fox called them, while PROMOTING them. While promoting them a week in advance.
Fox News Channel Tax Day Tea Parties.
Amusingly, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like.
Wrong again. The GOP establishment detests the TEA party and is terrified by it.
His statement was completely correct. Fox News is a partisan political activism organization, and they figured it would be a swell idea to undermine the current administration by orchestrating these "FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES". And as he said, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like. It's turned into a bit of a Frankenstein monster, largely wrecking damage on the GOP. Yes, as you said the GOP has become rather afraid of the Tea Party.
A small number of Tea Party radicals have gotten elected, and their inability to function as legislators has disrupted the Republican Caucus from the inside, while a similar number of Tea Party radicals have won Republican primaries and in the general election handed those seats to the Democrats. The net effect on Democratic side is roughly zero, while the net effect for the Republicans is decidedly negative.
The "FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES" have largely backfired.
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Products that explode when left in the sun
That would be an awesome brand of Popcorn!
Pardon me while I go file a Solar Popcorn patent.
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This technique yields the interesting result that you want to apply an optimal compression algorithm to your files before encrypting them. That way you are encrypting effectively random data, so that an attacker cannot use this sort of method to identify a successful decryption.
Except applying the corresponding decompression after decryption, of course.
You don't have the decryption yet. You need an algorithm to obtain a potential decryption. If P=NP then you can use an algorithm to (relatively quickly) find and give you the most compressible decryption. And the most compressible decryption is almost certainly the correct decryption. If the message is already compressed then you need some other way for an algorithm to pick out what potential decryption to give to you. For example if you know a specific name probably appears in the true text then you could try using an algorithm that returns decompressed potential decryptions that contain a specific name. You need to know or guess something about the text in order to write an algorithm which returns the correct decryption.
Still doesn't help at all to tell if the message was "Attack tomorrow 10:00" or "We should surrender!", which are both meaningful sentences.
If the message length is so short that it is comparable in length to the key, then yeah, you'd get a huge number of "meaningful sentence" possible decryptions with no way to pick the right one. However for any message significantly longer than the key, the probability of rapidly approaches zero that there would exist more than one meaningful proper-English decryption.
Look: generating all possible outputs from a one-time pad encrypted message
I obviously was not talking about one-time pads. The comments I was responding to were not about one time pads.
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No, need füdz, hoomanz is made of bad füdz.
What kind of "cat scholar" are you? What cat ever uses an ümlaüt? No cat I've ever seen.
Not even German cats. And I've spoken with plenty of German cats.
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trying to learn from the town idiot is just trying to be another town idiot
<zen>
A fool learns nothing, even from the wisest of men.
A wise man learns much, even from the greatest of fools.
</zen>
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It's possible to be an open-minded atheist, you know; a talking, burning bush might change my mind, at least in principle.
I too consider myself an open minded atheist, and changing my mind about God would likely be the *second* thought to pop into my head.
The first thought would be, of course, which of my idiot friends might think it funny to dose my soda with LSD.
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Hail Ada, full of grace.
Our Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy mind,
software.
Holy Ada, Mother of God,
pray for us programmers,
now and at the hour of our compile.
Make.
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Funny thing is, not once in the gospels does Jesus claim that he is the Lord (i.e. God). He only ever refers to himself as Son of God
Too bad we don't have first-hand writings from him, rather than extremely unreliable hear-say compiled decades after his death.
I suspect the "Son of God" thing is an out-of-context or distorted version of what was probably a "We are all children of god" message.
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I have seen in my own life among people that I personally know that the God of the Bible is still working... they were true diagnosed serious medical problems that went away immediately with prayer and haven't returned after many years.
What about when a Muslim or Hindu prays, then their family member recovers? Do you claim that your evidence and your belief is superior to the same evidence and the same belief from a Native American?
I don't have any evidence of Zeus doing things today that I can observe. I don't have any evidence from anybody else of his actions today either
"Zeus" is obviously a generic stand-in representing the "god/being/power" of any other religion. Do you deny or doubt that plenty of Muslims, Hindus, and Native Americans will testify to the *exact* same evidence as you did?
isn't something that I have to even think about. The same is true of the other religions in the world today.
When you willfully ignore identical evidence from people of other religions you are failing to apply any analytical reasoning at all.
When you firmly leap to the conclusion that your family member recovered because of prayer, and you call that "evidence", you are failing to apply any analytical reasoning at all.
When you willfully ignore countless research showing that people who are prayed-for recover no more than people who are not prayed-for, showing that prayed-for people are just as likely to die as unprayed-for people, then you are failing to apply any analytical reasoning at all.
If all you have is "I feel it works" then you have nothing more than a Native American who says the same thing, you have nothing more than someone who credits a $100 lotto win as "evidence" for their astrological lucky numbers.
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A simple search of the web turns up multitudes of personal experiences and anecdotal evidence. Simply because you reject it
I don't reject it at all. There are plenty of real cases of people recovering from all sorts of things after being prayed for.
There are also plenty of cases of people dying after being prayed for, and plenty of cases of people not-being-prayed-for and then recovering, and plenty of cases of people not-being-prayed-for and dying.
I don't reject cases of people recovering after prayer, however any number of such cases tells us *zero* about whether there was any connection at all between the prayer and the recovery. To determine that you need to count up the cases and compare prayer results against no-prayer results. That is reasonably easy to do, and of course plenty of prayer-believers have tried exactly that to demonstrate the real and positive power of prayer.
There have been plenty of studies that have shown that praying for oneself is no more effective than meditation. (Prayer and meditation can in themselves have a beneficial calming and stress reducing effect).
There have also been plenty of studies that have shown that prayer has zero effect when someone is prayed for by others. One memorable study involved heart attack patients. Lots of faithful people eagerly participated to pray for the health and recovery of heart attack patients. Patients who were prayed-for recovered no better than patients who were not prayed for, and if I recall correctly the number of patients who were prayed-for and *died* was slightly higher than the number of not-prayed-for patients who died. But of course a small difference is fully expected within normal random variation.
So as you said, there's tons of evidence. And that evidence clearly shows prayer does not have the claimed effect. If God exists, then answering prayers for healing simply isn't on the list of things he does. He either doesn't do it at all, or he does so so rarely that the number is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
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