Monsanto would most probably love it as an opportunity to introduce new sorts of GMO and also as a way of showing to the world that their GMO crops are harmless. So it's a pretty dual stance and I don't think Monsanto in particular gives much of a shit.
You are right, poor little BASF and Bayer... they were able to finance the Third Reich and survived restructuring after WWII and ban on a large list of chemicals including DDT... but now they will be devastated if we ban a single one of them. I can't but cry for them... Bwaaahhhhh!!
How will they survive, in Gods name, how? Not even the Greek masters could hav imagined a tragedy as huge as this!!
And BTW, why the heck to you lobby for a bunch German companies?
You fail to see that "the companies, bla, bla..." are not a small startup in a garage specialised in making neonicotinoids for the hobby gardner but BASF,Bayer, Dupont etc... for which changing to one or the other compound will hardly mean "end of business" for any of them.
Do you have any study about bumblebees not being affected? From what I have read and heard (and it's a mayor topic here in Holland) we jsut don't have any numbers on wildlife but only on domestic bees (for rather obvious reasons).
In fact there's a huge controversy about neonicotinoids ban. Not against, but it happens that despite the ban some national laws (like here in Holland) have found a gap in legislation that allows it's massive use. You can even find it in garden centres, no problem.
And most published studies also agree on pointing at a combination of factors with neonicotinoids as one of the most important.
From what I know it's not such a strange idea and if perfectly fits into the field of counter-information. I have read that the Soviets were real experts. I can actually still remember small scientific articles on magazines and newspapers claiming Soviet scientists to have discovered anything from dead rays to cold fusion... these articles were said to have been "planted" by the Soviets for several purposes, one of them trying to led the Western powers to waste money on useless research.
This hypothesis has in fact been a quite popular one and it make a lot of sense too.
And you can also recall the whole UFO thingy which after de-classifying the documents showed that the whole alien fairytale was encouraged by the Air Force as a measure of counter-intelligence quite convenient to cover up some secret projects like a giant surveillance balloon or (then) ultra-modern airplanes including an atomic powered one... yes, I agree, the balloon (Project Mogul) isn't quite as sexy as hot alien chicks from Venus but back then there were no spy sats and a huge helium filled condom packet with telemetry was the closed you could get back then to find out if Ivan had had a bad day and decided to press the Red Button.
More than an argument to authority this proves my point that ESP was not considered a nut idea back then but a perfectly sensible one. Implying that there were no reserves whatsoever on studying it and funding research.
Just that despite the good will and all the money spent the research's results were that there was no proof that ESP existed. So, what's wrong? What else do you need? Get it etched in stone slabs and delivered via heli to some guy in Sinai after setting a bush on fire?
Quantum mechanics started as an attempt of explaining a problem in classical physics: Black body radiation curves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation it therefore fits very nicely into your argument.
I was going to do it to as it is an excellent example;)
And of course... what can somebody do with $100.000.000 except honestly investing it in mediums, a deck of Zener cards and a few dice to generate randomness? Oh, of course, these Zener cards that my cousin Mikhael prints are very good and the best suited to concentrate the unknown energy and that's why they cost $10.000 a deck. And no, there is no relationship between me and the mediums, I swear that I don't know them, despite the fact that we all shar the same surnames and come from the same small village in Ukraine.
P.D.: Please do not forget the crate of Vodka and the strippers, they are fundamental parts of the experiment.
The big problem is that the "magic" that you cite have a more or less sound theoretical and mathematical backing a, it's far from just uttering the word "Dark Energy" and the go happily meditating.
Both concepts are also there to explain phenomena that are measurable, and not just the result of inferential statistics.
While none of the ESP has any mathematics backing or any serious theory behind it. And to make matters worse the experiments used to prove them are mostly extremely subjective tests prone to type I errors. And yet even adding a good amount of good will they failed.
I have no idea why many still try to recycle these things. It's like trying to recycle Cold Fusion. I wasn't because there were no studies, it wasn't because they were against public opinion, much to the contrary: Most religious people would have LOVED it as it would have proven (or at least increased the possibilities of a transcendent spirit/soul). And people, even scientists, WANTED to believe, it was chick and hip.
It's just that there is nothing else that can be tested, period, end of the story. Just like Ether or Caloric, ESP does not exist.
Dismissing an idea without proofing it is pseudo-science... BUT, it that's exactly what they did, proof it. Again and again, US and USSR and the British and teh French and the German and the Argentinians. Universities did it, private persons did it, the Army did it, the Navy did it, the CIA did it, the KGB did it.
The results were negative, end of the story.
What else do you want to proof? Start over again? Yes, now we have EM Scanners but, what are we supposed to proof (again)? How a bunch of guys fail to give any positive results in predicting a deck of Zener cards? How they fail beyond the reasonable in finding out what others think? How they utterly fail in "seeing" remotely what's on another part of the world?
Proofing what has already been disproven is not pseudoscience, it's just utterly stupid.
And he got sponsorship from the Spanish crown because they understood what his aim was: To navigate to East Asia. And these guys were far from being the brightest, mind you.
Even the Roman had it as an established fact. And anybody who has lived at the sea has a direct experience of the earth's curvature.
This is a nice example in regard to the main topic of this article on how (in good faith) many are trying to argument on assumptions that they thing are common while they happen to be be exactly the contrary (such as the uncertainty principle, for instance).
I remember when quantum tunneling was only implied by the maths
Well, I don't think you will remember because this was during the beginning of the XX century, before the transistor.
And you yourself have writing it there "...implied by the maths"
Well, there are no maths implying anything ESP-ish, none.
Your argumentation is actually only that there are things that YOU personally can't explain because YOU personally have not enough information about them, but this doesn't mean that other people do not know them either... or can make a quick search in Google (it's almost 2014, recall?)
Can you provide a single example of ESP that is still "open to question" in 2013? We already have had the opportunity to read the 2 last significant studies on this regard and we have had several decades of studies on the matter and the results have been as clear as Cold Fusion.
And I would kindly recall you that while "humans" are prone to bias, our instruments are NOT, neither are mathematics nor statistics, yes you can produce wrong results but any can question them and this is not relative nor prone to bias.
And BTW, "trained researchers" are perfectly able to explain how Geller bent spoons or how Dynamo levitates people, it's called "illusionism".
And we know that simply observing an experiment can change the outcome
This is as vague as saying that "Einstein said that everything is relative".
What are you talking about, the "Observer effect" ? or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? And if you are talking about the latter: There are several explanations to it but none involve any mechanisms that could be related to consciousness, being able to view anything far beyond, reading the mind of others or knowing in advance what will happen in the future. In fact certain interpretation of this same principle make precognition rather improbable...
Furthermore, the relation of "mental state" and health / physiology is not related to any "ESPing" or "Psy-Energy-Prana-Karma-Hurling" but on known physical effects that just are related in a complicated way. For instance: Is a depression causing you a bad general health or is a deficit in nutrients and ergo a bad general health causing you a depression? Recall that most of our moods depend on chemical balances and extremely complex mixes of hormones, neurotransmitters etc. Yes, it's complcaited, but neither ESP nor "misterious".
There is finally no single effect of consciousness and much less of "attention" that has an effect on the physical world that we do not know. If you knew of any please enlighten me.
Well, the experiments were performed. And in a time when ESP had the favours of public and governments and scepticism was at it's lowest. Being the best part of it that you didn't even need huge resources to investigate it: A few guys with "special powers" or without, a bunch of stacks of Zener cards, optionally a random number generator and place to relax and if you feel very generous an EEG. No particle accelerators needed, not even microscopes.
The potential future value was enormous, eventually as big as atomic energy or computers while the initial investment was negligible. And it was hip too: there were many universities with studies in ESP in Britain, France and the rest of the developed Capitalist countries and the Eastern Block. Why not? It was potentially beneficial and it didn't cost a dime.
Had they managed to produce any result none of these projects would have stopped. But they were. And recall that we are talking about two separate worlds, the Capitalist and the Soviet blocks, meaning that they were not influenced by each other and the possibilities of success would have meant a strategic advantage of capital importance. Just imagine what a successful application of Remote Viewers would have meant in terms of savings compared to spy-planes and satellites.
But, not one single project, neither the secret ones, the public funded ones or the private ones have yielded ANY positive result AT ALL.
Well, I read it. It basically says there only is a slight significant effect, the suggest stopping with the experiments and point at a few possible flaws in the design of the experiments. I pointed out a few more such as the limited population, the absence of control group, the fact that some of the "effects" the experiments were designed to test were unknown and not understood and the fact that many of them involved a strong subjective component.
Add a bit of "good will" and a dash of wishful thinking and I really wonder why the scores are so low.
"In fact, the more effort goes into researching psychic powers, the more evidence we have in favour of mind control"
That's a very well known issue with basic statistics: The reduction of standard error with the increase in the number of samples.
I saw this in a very basic "for-dummies" level introductory statistics course, so basic it's thought to marketing people... but yet some "scientists" fall time and time again in this fault.
When not directly screwing up with their numbers like assuming that a variable is independent when in fact it's not or providing tampered data.
I sincerely doubt the Bratwurst part as only Bavarians can live only of Bratwurst and beer. And as it is a well established scientific fact Bavarians are not part of the Human species, thus chances of interbreeding are nil.
Slashdot Mirror
That first photo makes me think they are coming back with tablets and commandments...
Damn Apple! They did it again!!!
I got a Guru Meditation!
Oh, Bayer has a large tradition of such issues... now it's neonitcotinoids and in the past it was Zyklon-B.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer)
Our restrictions don't mean anything. We aren't applying them.
Monsanto would most probably love it as an opportunity to introduce new sorts of GMO and also as a way of showing to the world that their GMO crops are harmless. So it's a pretty dual stance and I don't think Monsanto in particular gives much of a shit.
You are right, poor little BASF and Bayer... they were able to finance the Third Reich and survived restructuring after WWII and ban on a large list of chemicals including DDT... but now they will be devastated if we ban a single one of them. I can't but cry for them... Bwaaahhhhh!!
How will they survive, in Gods name, how? Not even the Greek masters could hav imagined a tragedy as huge as this!!
And BTW, why the heck to you lobby for a bunch German companies?
You fail to see that "the companies, bla, bla..." are not a small startup in a garage specialised in making neonicotinoids for the hobby gardner but BASF,Bayer, Dupont etc... for which changing to one or the other compound will hardly mean "end of business" for any of them.
Do you have any study about bumblebees not being affected? From what I have read and heard (and it's a mayor topic here in Holland) we jsut don't have any numbers on wildlife but only on domestic bees (for rather obvious reasons).
In fact there's a huge controversy about neonicotinoids ban. Not against, but it happens that despite the ban some national laws (like here in Holland) have found a gap in legislation that allows it's massive use. You can even find it in garden centres, no problem.
And most published studies also agree on pointing at a combination of factors with neonicotinoids as one of the most important.
From what I know it's not such a strange idea and if perfectly fits into the field of counter-information.
I have read that the Soviets were real experts. I can actually still remember small scientific articles on magazines and newspapers claiming Soviet scientists to have discovered anything from dead rays to cold fusion... these articles were said to have been "planted" by the Soviets for several purposes, one of them trying to led the Western powers to waste money on useless research.
This hypothesis has in fact been a quite popular one and it make a lot of sense too.
And you can also recall the whole UFO thingy which after de-classifying the documents showed that the whole alien fairytale was encouraged by the Air Force as a measure of counter-intelligence quite convenient to cover up some secret projects like a giant surveillance balloon or (then) ultra-modern airplanes including an atomic powered one... yes, I agree, the balloon (Project Mogul) isn't quite as sexy as hot alien chicks from Venus but back then there were no spy sats and a huge helium filled condom packet with telemetry was the closed you could get back then to find out if Ivan had had a bad day and decided to press the Red Button.
More than an argument to authority this proves my point that ESP was not considered a nut idea back then but a perfectly sensible one.
Implying that there were no reserves whatsoever on studying it and funding research.
Just that despite the good will and all the money spent the research's results were that there was no proof that ESP existed. So, what's wrong? What else do you need? Get it etched in stone slabs and delivered via heli to some guy in Sinai after setting a bush on fire?
Quantum mechanics started as an attempt of explaining a problem in classical physics: Black body radiation curves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation it therefore fits very nicely into your argument.
AAah, I see you cited Lysenko!
I was going to do it to as it is an excellent example ;)
And of course... what can somebody do with $100.000.000 except honestly investing it in mediums, a deck of Zener cards and a few dice to generate randomness? Oh, of course, these Zener cards that my cousin Mikhael prints are very good and the best suited to concentrate the unknown energy and that's why they cost $10.000 a deck. And no, there is no relationship between me and the mediums, I swear that I don't know them, despite the fact that we all shar the same surnames and come from the same small village in Ukraine.
P.D.: Please do not forget the crate of Vodka and the strippers, they are fundamental parts of the experiment.
The big problem is that the "magic" that you cite have a more or less sound theoretical and mathematical backing a, it's far from just uttering the word "Dark Energy" and the go happily meditating.
Both concepts are also there to explain phenomena that are measurable, and not just the result of inferential statistics.
While none of the ESP has any mathematics backing or any serious theory behind it. And to make matters worse the experiments used to prove them are mostly extremely subjective tests prone to type I errors. And yet even adding a good amount of good will they failed.
I have no idea why many still try to recycle these things. It's like trying to recycle Cold Fusion. I wasn't because there were no studies, it wasn't because they were against public opinion, much to the contrary: Most religious people would have LOVED it as it would have proven (or at least increased the possibilities of a transcendent spirit/soul). And people, even scientists, WANTED to believe, it was chick and hip.
It's just that there is nothing else that can be tested, period, end of the story. Just like Ether or Caloric, ESP does not exist.
Dismissing an idea without proofing it is pseudo-science... BUT, it that's exactly what they did, proof it. Again and again, US and USSR and the British and teh French and the German and the Argentinians. Universities did it, private persons did it, the Army did it, the Navy did it, the CIA did it, the KGB did it.
The results were negative, end of the story.
What else do you want to proof? Start over again?
Yes, now we have EM Scanners but, what are we supposed to proof (again)? How a bunch of guys fail to give any positive results in predicting a deck of Zener cards? How they fail beyond the reasonable in finding out what others think? How they utterly fail in "seeing" remotely what's on another part of the world?
Proofing what has already been disproven is not pseudoscience, it's just utterly stupid.
Indeed.
And he got sponsorship from the Spanish crown because they understood what his aim was: To navigate to East Asia. And these guys were far from being the brightest, mind you.
Even the Roman had it as an established fact. And anybody who has lived at the sea has a direct experience of the earth's curvature.
This is a nice example in regard to the main topic of this article on how (in good faith) many are trying to argument on assumptions that they thing are common while they happen to be be exactly the contrary (such as the uncertainty principle, for instance).
I remember when quantum tunneling was only implied by the maths
Well, I don't think you will remember because this was during the beginning of the XX century, before the transistor.
And you yourself have writing it there "...implied by the maths"
Well, there are no maths implying anything ESP-ish, none.
Your argumentation is actually only that there are things that YOU personally can't explain because YOU personally have not enough information about them, but this doesn't mean that other people do not know them either... or can make a quick search in Google (it's almost 2014, recall?)
Can you provide a single example of ESP that is still "open to question" in 2013?
We already have had the opportunity to read the 2 last significant studies on this regard and we have had several decades of studies on the matter and the results have been as clear as Cold Fusion.
And I would kindly recall you that while "humans" are prone to bias, our instruments are NOT, neither are mathematics nor statistics, yes you can produce wrong results but any can question them and this is not relative nor prone to bias.
And BTW, "trained researchers" are perfectly able to explain how Geller bent spoons or how Dynamo levitates people, it's called "illusionism".
What has consciousness to do with ESP?
This is as vague as saying that "Einstein said that everything is relative".
What are you talking about, the "Observer effect" ? or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?
And if you are talking about the latter: There are several explanations to it but none involve any mechanisms that could be related to consciousness, being able to view anything far beyond, reading the mind of others or knowing in advance what will happen in the future. In fact certain interpretation of this same principle make precognition rather improbable...
Furthermore, the relation of "mental state" and health / physiology is not related to any "ESPing" or "Psy-Energy-Prana-Karma-Hurling" but on known physical effects that just are related in a complicated way.
For instance: Is a depression causing you a bad general health or is a deficit in nutrients and ergo a bad general health causing you a depression? Recall that most of our moods depend on chemical balances and extremely complex mixes of hormones, neurotransmitters etc. Yes, it's complcaited, but neither ESP nor "misterious".
There is finally no single effect of consciousness and much less of "attention" that has an effect on the physical world that we do not know. If you knew of any please enlighten me.
Well, the experiments were performed. And in a time when ESP had the favours of public and governments and scepticism was at it's lowest.
Being the best part of it that you didn't even need huge resources to investigate it: A few guys with "special powers" or without, a bunch of stacks of Zener cards, optionally a random number generator and place to relax and if you feel very generous an EEG. No particle accelerators needed, not even microscopes.
The potential future value was enormous, eventually as big as atomic energy or computers while the initial investment was negligible. And it was hip too: there were many universities with studies in ESP in Britain, France and the rest of the developed Capitalist countries and the Eastern Block. Why not? It was potentially beneficial and it didn't cost a dime.
Had they managed to produce any result none of these projects would have stopped. But they were. And recall that we are talking about two separate worlds, the Capitalist and the Soviet blocks, meaning that they were not influenced by each other and the possibilities of success would have meant a strategic advantage of capital importance. Just imagine what a successful application of Remote Viewers would have meant in terms of savings compared to spy-planes and satellites.
But, not one single project, neither the secret ones, the public funded ones or the private ones have yielded ANY positive result AT ALL.
Well, I read it. It basically says there only is a slight significant effect, the suggest stopping with the experiments and point at a few possible flaws in the design of the experiments. I pointed out a few more such as the limited population, the absence of control group, the fact that some of the "effects" the experiments were designed to test were unknown and not understood and the fact that many of them involved a strong subjective component.
Add a bit of "good will" and a dash of wishful thinking and I really wonder why the scores are so low.
"In fact, the more effort goes into researching psychic powers, the more evidence we have in favour of mind control"
That's a very well known issue with basic statistics: The reduction of standard error with the increase in the number of samples.
I saw this in a very basic "for-dummies" level introductory statistics course, so basic it's thought to marketing people... but yet some "scientists" fall time and time again in this fault.
When not directly screwing up with their numbers like assuming that a variable is independent when in fact it's not or providing tampered data.
This will be difficult as Germans use Euros. And being them Bavarians they will surely waste the money in beer and bratwurst.
What's wrong with your second sentence?
Why would that be negative?
Hell, that would be a hit in Porntube!!!
I sincerely doubt the Bratwurst part as only Bavarians can live only of Bratwurst and beer. And as it is a well established scientific fact Bavarians are not part of the Human species, thus chances of interbreeding are nil.