Perhaps you should read what I write and dont try to interprete some bullshit into it which I did not write.
I did. See: BTW: in theory you can not proof the non existing. So proofing Archimdes did NOT ignite with some mirrors (or however) some enemy ships, is impossible by definition...You can only do two things: repeating experiments until you either be successful or run out of funds. In the later case you only know you failed in doing it, but you still dont know anything about that event.
I'm a scientist, for fuck sake.
No offense, man, but so is Ken Ham. If you're a good scientists, you should be well aware that waiving the "I'm a scientist!" card doesn't automatically get you credibility. If you're making irrational statements, I'm going to call you on it, regardless of what your profession may be.
When I have tried a few dozen of times to repeat your claims THEN I can start concluding that you perhaps made a mistake (or lied to me).
See, that's much better. If you'd said that in the first place, I wouldn't have had to accuse you of being a 'psychic':p
Nevertheless that experiment was done often enough. And the MIT experiment was also only a wild guess: lets asume they used their shields. No one knows how archimedes did it.
Actually, nobody knows if he did it. It's a story that may or may not be based on a real event. The most popular version has the soldiers using shields to focus the suns rays and light the ships on fire. The Mythbusters tested that version and showed that it almost certainly didn't happen. If you change the criteria of the story, then we'd have to change the test, but that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with their methodology - they set out with a specific claim in mind, they tested it, and they arrived at a logical conclusion supported by evidence. That's science, no matter how you slice it. It may be very basic science, but it's still science.
The very best guess is very very simple: they used mirrors/shields to "blind" the ship crews and used standard burning arrows to ignite them.
Funny you should say that; I believe Adam Savage actually proposed that exact hypothesis after their second experiment:) I guess you only caught the first show.
At the LHC they try to find the Higgs Boson. All experiments to find it failed so far. According to your book we should conclude now: it does not exist.
Um, no. You're comparing apples to oranges. The Higgs Boson isn't just some story that's been passed down for thousands of years - it's a particle whose existence is predicted by the best model of particle physics that we currently have. If it DOESN'T exist, then it means that there's something very wrong with the model. Since we have less reason to think that the Standard Model is wrong than we do to think that our experiments haven't been good enough so far, it makes sense to keep looking.
Now, if I showed up at the LHC tomorrow and said "look, there's this Hyperbolemicthingamajigger Particle that I'm certain exists"... first, they'd probably laugh at me... and if I managed to convince them to look for it, they might do one or two experiments before saying "screw off you fucking crackpot". Not all claims are created equal. The Higgs Boson is worth spending large sums of money and hundreds of man-years of time to look for - my particle is not. This kind of selection is done by everyone on a daily basis - our world wouldn't function if we were unable to discriminate between different types of claims.
If you don't understand the simple concept: not finding anything is no proof that it does not exist... then you perhaps should
Yeah, as long as you use common sense, you're usually ok. I used windows starting in 96 up until middle of last year. I didn't use anti-virus software for most of that time, and still only got one virus unintentionally (the rest were intentional infections when I was testing various viruses / trojans). So yeah, common sense is the best prevention, but even so I eventually did start using AV software, "just to be safe", and no matter how careful I was I always ended up getting SOME crapware, so occasional spyware scans were a necessity.
Now that I'm only using linux, solaris, and BSD, I don't worry about spyware at all, and I don't bother with AV software either. Sure, there's some infinitesimally small chance that I'll run across malware that can infect one of my machines, but it's so low that it's really not worth thinking about, especially since I still use the same common sense approach as I did on windows. If the average user moves to linux, they WILL be safer, regardless of how little common sense they may have when it comes to computing.
I'm not talking here about repeating someone else EXPERIMENT I talked about "EVENTS". Especially they tried to "debunk" he Archimedes Syracuse burning mirror attack on ships, and failed in igniting their experimental ships. So they concluded that "EVENT" did not happen. OTOH other research teams had no problems to SET UP an EXPERIMENT that DID IGNITE the target.
I assume you're referring to the MIT experiment, and I have to fight the urge to insult your intelligence. The MIT team used statically positioned mirrors, spent hours trying to focus them on a static target, waited around for clouds to go away, and then eventually got ignition. This doesn't even come close to matching the myth, since a static rig made of modern mirrors carefully aimed at a static target is completely different than hundreds of soldiers shining bronze mirrors on a ship that's bobbing around in the water. If they set out to show that it's possible to use mirrors to start a fire, they succeeded - if their intent was to show that the Archimedes story is true, they failed. They are rightly non-committal in their FAQ since it's clear that the experiment wasn't designed to replicate the actual conditions.
Yes, everyone knows that sunlight can be focused in order to heat up or ignite objects - no, it's not practical to use hand-held mirrors to light an attacking enemy ship on fire. The MIT experiment further confirms the result which the Mythbusters achieved - they showed that it's impractical even under relatively ideal circumstances, let alone under battlefield conditions. The Mythbusters did what they set out to do - they showed that the myth was false. After much criticism they went back, tried the test with some modifications, and again showed that it was false. Clinging to the MIT test as "evidence" that the Archimedes myth might possibly be true is ludicrous.
Research is not about making one single experiment and when it fails concluding "it can't work". Research is about making LOTS of SIMILAR experiments... If you continuously fail, you try to figure WHY you fail first.
Whenever possible, ideally, sure. It's certainly not an absolute requirement, though, and the number of trials will always be dictated by your budget / time constraints. The Mythbusters generally DO perform multiple trials, they use variations in their experiments to try and simulate different conditions, and they go back and retest some myths when there's cause to do so. On more than one occasion they've retested a myth which they previously "busted", and got positive results on the second run, so they're certainly not hesitant to challenge their previous conclusions and to admit their mistakes when they're identified. If that's not good enough for you... too damn bad. Make your own TV show if you think you can do better.
BTW: in theory you can not proof the non existing. So proofing Archimdes did NOT ignite with some mirrors (or however) some enemy ships, is impossible by definition...You can only do two things: repeating experiments until you either be successful or run out of funds. In the later case you only know you failed in doing it, but you still dont know anything about that event.
So by default we must accept that every claim is plausible.
Bullshit. You sound like a goddamn 'psychic'. What people like you don't seem to get is that, in the absence of affirmative evidence, the default rational position is always the rejection of the claim. Otherwise you run into the exact problem which you've detailed above - you waste all your time and money doing experiments, and never get anywhere. You may as well spend all your time jerking-off; it'll be just as productive, and it feels much better. Yes, you're right to the extent that I can never profess 100% certai
It's unfortunate that the mod type showing on this comment is 'Flamebait' rather than 'Insightful'. Mythbusters does a very good job of demonstrating that a 'myth' can be proven or disproved within a very specific set of circumstances on the one trial that they choose to represent their 'proof', but it only resembles science on an incredibly superficial level.
"Ideas are tested by experiment". That is the core of science. Everything else is bookkeeping.
- Zombie Feynman
They designed a launcher that could propel a bowling ball at a consistent speed, then drove the vehicle at that speed and started their trials. They showed four failed trials before they finally achieved one where the ball fell straight down. Their conclusion was that they proved that an object will fall straight down when launched at the speed of the vehicle--despite four of the five trials they showed (and who knows how many others that were cut) disproving their intended result. They didn't even mention the concept of wake turbulence affecting the ball's path.
And scientists never have failed trials, right? In science, the results are always consistent, and 100% accurate!
Please. There's nothing wrong with dismissing failed trials, as long as you can provide a valid justification for doing so. In their particular case, given the setup they were working with, it would be ludicrous to expect perfect results right from the start. This is like looking at the problems with the LHC and saying "well, it didn't work right the first time, so let's just toss the whole thing out and start over". It's silly.
As for wake turbulence... while it certainly would be a factor to consider if you cared about minute variations in the trajectory of the ball, it was quite obvious that the experiment wasn't designed to test for that kind of detail. They weren't doing ground breaking research or testing aerodynamic forces - they were answering a simple question which anyone who has a passing familiarity with Newtonian physics would have immediately known the answer to. You need to consider the scope of the experiment before you start formulating objections, or you end up sounding like a complete pedant. It's as if they were testing the claim that a feather and a bowling ball will fall at the same rate in a vacuum, and you jumped on them for not showing the picosecond difference in fall times caused by the gravitational force exerted by the bowling ball on the earth.
Just because they debunked some common urban legends does not make them scientists.
So what? I'm not a mechanic, but I can usually fix my car when there's something wrong with it. How does them not being scientists prevent them from doing science?
They also often falsely debunked stuff... especially if they try to repeat some historical "event" and fail to do it, and then conclude: it did not happen (every scientist knows that this is the wrong approach).
I think your understanding of science is a little screwy. If you conduct an experiment to verify the truth of a claim and repeatedly achieve negative results, your conclusion should be that the claim is false. Now, you might review other research that was done on the same topic in order to make sure you're not right out to lunch, and you would assign error bars in order to quantify your certainty about that conclusion, and you'd try to get published in a journal so that others could attempt to replicate your results or point out the errors in your methodology, but none of that prevents you from presenting a preliminary conclusion. In fact, the main reason peer review exists is so that false claims can be debunked - it gives others a chance to say "your experiment sucks because of X, therefore your conclusion is false". If scientists shied away from calling bullshit when they see it, we'd have no basis for ever dismissing any claims whatsoever.
They should stop calling themselves "editors". Another title like perhaps "reposters" would be more appropriate and would remove the expectation that they act like, well, editors.
Even "reporters" gives them too much credit. I think "copy-and-pasters" would be much more accurate.
I had a grandfather who invented cold fusion and anti-gravity propulsion, but the goddamn feds confiscated all his plans and then used their mind -control satellites to make him never speak of it again. The bastards!
Ok, I admit it, you had me going there. For the last few comments, I really thought you were serious. But now that I've noticed your username, I get it. Well done; yours is by far the best act I've ever seen on slashdot. Much more subtle than people like pizza-analogy-guy. I'm not sure what the point is, but the execution is fantastic! I'm just surprised I didn't get any serious responders to my first comment - I thought for sure some of the creationists would try to defend their idiotic beliefs.
Please explain what screwed up reasoning you have for thinking the commandments apply to the statement I made.
Are you drunk, or just unable to read? Scroll back up, and read my comment carefully. Sound it out if you have to. It's ok if your lips move - nobody can tell, online.
I'm sorry, that was English..
It most certainly was not. It was a collection of English words strung together using a drunken version of Italian, or possibly French grammar. Either way, it was completely incomprehensible.
So you are saying that no matter what the truth is, you are not going to accept it if it involved some supernatural being that did it.
Wrong again!
And no, it's not a hypothesis, I am not making a statement of fact, I asked you a short and simple question, what if God or a god actually did do it.
Wow. Ok, you're either drunk or epically incompetent. Please, go over to the Miriam-Webster website and look up the word "hypothesis".
I won't bother with the rest of your nonsense. This feels too much like mocking handicapped children.
And I agree that it isn't worth wasting much time on it, but alas, when I see idiots using religions or anti religious rants to support or deconstruct another, I feel compelled to call out the biggest idiot of the bunch.
I think you must have been reading a different set of comments then. Regardless, I can waste a couple minutes on you.
There is no genetic record that include genetic evidence only that points to this. There is however, a record that included non-genetic evidence to lead people to believe this.
Speak English, please.
Short and simple, what if God or a god dun it?
Then provide some evidence to support that hypothesis. What if Santa Claus dun it? What if Bigfoot dun it? What if Yo Mama dun it? The time to believe a claim is when it is sufficiently supported by evidence. Until that time it's all bullshit, and what-if scenarios don't make it any more credible. If your "explanation" is indistinguishable from something I just made up, then it's fucking useless.
You do not know at all if the religious answer was right or wrong.
Yes, I do. But if you want to keep believing that lightning happens because god is angry, and that lightning-rods are the tool of the devil, you go right ahead.
The guy you're responding to is wrong, but nowhere near as wrong as you. If you're stupid enough to say things like "evolution is a theory which has yet to be proven", you're probably not worth wasting time on, but what the hell:
First of all, evolution and intelligent design aren't mutually exclusive. It's quite possible that some type of "creator" - whether it be a guy with a beard, or a black monolith - created life on earth. However, that in no way contradicts the fact that all life on earth is related, and that both the geological and genetic record prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that all present-day species are descended from common ancestors. As long as your idea of "intelligent design" doesn't posit a magic-man who's constantly tweaking things, there's nothing contradictory between intelligent design and evolution.
Where intelligent design fails is a whole different issue. For starters, it posits no testable hypothesis. It offers no evidence. It attempts to put an end to further discussion and discovery, rather than opening new avenues of exploration. The phrase "god dun it" is not an answer - it's an appeal to ignorance. The same 'answer' has been used for tens of thousands of years to explain anything that we as a species couldn't understand. Why do we have lightning? God dun it. Why does the earth shake? God dun it. Why is there a flood? God dun it. In EVERY SINGLE PAST CASE, it was scientific scrutiny and the curiosity of man which eventually gave us a real answer, while the religious troglodytes continued to pound their holy books and point at their invisible dude in the sky. In every single case, the religious 'answer' was wrong. What possible combination of neural misfiring could convince you that, in this case, your answer happens to be right? And why would you EVER be satisfied with an answer that doesn't lead you to new questions?
I know I probably shouldn't waste my time, but I'll give you one more chance to be rational.
My original argument was that it's worth investigating
Then fucking go and investigate it! I disagree with your conclusion. I know that we've already wasted way too much time and effort on this bullshit. If you think it's worth investigating, then you can go and waste all the time and money you want on it! Come back when you have REAL RESULTS and maybe we'll have something to talk about; until then I don't give a shit what you think. The bigfoot morons, the loch-ness fans, the homeopaths and acupuncturists, the conspiracy theorists, various cults and religions... all of you try to pull the exact same bullshit, and all of you fail miserably. I don't want to hear what ANY of you assholes think until you have some evidence for me to look at. And when I say evidence, I mean evidence; I don't give a flying fuck if you cousins third roommate from college knew a guy in the airforce who brought coffee to a colonel who once saw a UFO - I want DATA.
Well, that's not entirely true, I did make a claim - that the Beligan Army released hard sensor data from two separate F-16's that tracked craft that are faster and more maneuverable than anything humans know how to build, and this was almost 25 years ago. But I mentioned that already and you had no response. Too inconvenient a data set?
I ignored it because it's just as laughable as the rest of your claims. The Belgian Army did no such thing. The Belgian Air Force released a report, but it didn't contain any "sensor data". You're either intentionally lying, or you're a shitty researcher. But, please, if I'm wrong, go ahead and direct me to this "sensor data". It sure would be nice to have something real to look at for a change, instead of dealing with the lies and obfuscations of UFO fanatics.
I realize that it's a hard subject to approach
No, it's not - it's a very easy subject to approach. Since nobody has provided any data, we can dismiss the whole thing out of hand. Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence; it doesn't matter whether we're talking about god, big-foot, santa claus, or your little green men.
And that covers all that needs to be said. If you can point me to Belgian F-16 sensor data, we can continue the discussion. Otherwise just accept the fact that rational people think you're an idiot, and go away.
What if you fight in order to oppose an oppressive theocracy, but you do target civilians (who maybe are connected to the oppressive theocracy but not actually part of their military forces)? That's not an idle question, because US aerial drone attacks have done precisely that in Pakistan and Yemen.
I said "generally". Even during the American war of independence, some Brit civilians were killed by the separatists. While I don't like such exceptions, I understand that they are sometimes necessary. In this particular case, it could be avoided if Pakistan could control their own tribal areas, or if they'd allow foreign troops to operate in the borderlands unimpeded, but their need to "safe face" is, apparently, worth a bunch of civilian lives. Still, that's a far cry from executing entire families and terrorizing entire villages as a matter of policy, in order to intimidate the rest into obeying you.
Similarly, what if you aren't targeting civilians, but are fighting for the imposition of an oppressive theocracy? Again, not an idle question, when you consider that many of the Iraqi insurgent attacks on US troops fall into this category.
How is this difficult to understand? I already answered this earlier, and I honestly don't see how you could be confused about what I said.
It's not that I have no morals at all, it's that I judge actions in a way that doesn't neatly divide the world into "good guys" and "bad guys", and don't assume that everything that good guys do is good and everything that bad guys do is bad.
Who said anything about neatly dividing the world?
It's as if you were claiming that there's no difference between fish and mammals because the real world isn't simple, and you like to file them into more categories. The fact that good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things is completely irrelevant to the question of whether a person or a group of people are "good" or "bad". Hitler was immoral (aka "bad") regardless of how nice he may have been that one time when he returned a lost puppy. Gandhi was moral (aka "good") despite the fact that he viewed blacks as undeserving of the same rights that he spent his life fighting for. You're dismissing an entire classification because of the existence of anomalies; foolish, at best, and immoral at worst.
I don't care what you mentioned - you're talking out of your ass, and I have no problem lumping you in with the rest of the lunatics. You don't get to use the ol' "I'm less crazy because I don't believe ALL of this stuff" escape clause. I've explained that your claims are being dismissed because you're relying entirely on anecdotes and appeals to authority, yet in your latest post you once again whip out anecdotes and appeals to authority. You are either too stupid to understand what I am saying to you, or you're intentionally ignoring it. Either way, I have no intention of humoring you any longer. If you have evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, then let's see it. Put up, or shut up. LGM or GTFO.
Yes, and I'm sure a pedophile would consider himself "friendly with children", and a serial-killer would consider himself "the path to Heaven". Just because some assholes insist on misusing terms doesn't mean that the terms themselves have no meaning. If you fight in order to bring about the imposition of an oppressive theocracy, you are not a freedom fighter. If you generally avoid targeting civilians, you are not a terrorist. Not only is it completely absurd to take a relativist position on the issue, it's inherently immoral as well.
The only difference between a "freedom fighter" and a "terrorist" is that a freedom fighter is on the same side as the speaker, while a terrorist is on the other side.
If you have no morals at all, sure, I can see why you would view the issue that way. I would also say you're a despicable human being who should be ostracized at every opportunity. If, on the other hand, you care about the political goals of the group and the methods they use in order to achieve them, you have a much more tangible method for differentiating between freedom fighters and terrorists.
In that case, how would you go about getting funding for building a near-earth sensor network to test the hypothesis?
This is akin to a theist saying "how do you propose we observe Heaven" as "proof" that their god exists.
That's not my problem. If you're foolish enough to think that aliens are traveling across lightyears of space in order to mutilate cattle and ass-rape rednecks, that's your problem. I have no intention of wasting time or money trying to figure out how to test your claims - you need to work out an experiment, gather some data, and present it for review. If it's convincing enough, you'll have no problem getting future funding; until then, your claims are indistinguishable from millions of other asinine ideas which have been put forward over the millenia.
Nobody is asking here for anything that can't be falsified.
Yes, they are. When the vast majority of UFO sightings have turned out to have prosaic, natural explanations, only a fool would stand there and continue to insist that the remaining "unexplained" incidents are actually little green men in flying saucers. It's no different than any other pseudo-science or religion; the beliefs of the people making the claims cannot be changed because they do not rely on evidence - they rely on faith. As such, they are by definition unfalsifiable.
The best example of this is the crop-circles; the people who came up with the idea have come forward and admitted it was a hoax. They've shown us how it's done. They've even been commissioned by corporations and governments to create advertisements using the same method. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, there's no shortage of idiots who continue to claim that some crop-circles are actually signs of a UFO landing. How is that not "asking for anything that can't be falsified"?
Okay, so you've decided that some questions aren't worth asking, fair enough. Where do you draw the line, though, since the asking of questions is absolutely vital to human growth? You only approve of questions within the boundaries of established science?
No; I've decided that trying to refute the same shit over and over again until the end of time is wasteful and pointless. I've also decided that the burden of proof lays squarely with the people making the claim. Now, as a curious human being, if I hear a claim which I am not familiar with, I will gladly do some basic research into it, just to sate my own curiosity. However, if I find that it appears to violate the laws of physics, or is incredibly unlikely to be true, or is a new iteration of previously refuted garbage, or is made up whole-cloth without a shred of confirmatory evidence, I will dismiss it until such a time as new evidence becomes available. I certainly will NOT waste my own time or money on something which I have no reason to believe is true, nor will I support efforts to get the government to do the same. We have to have some selection criteria, otherwise we'd have to try and answer the "questions" of every fool, lunatic, and charlatan in the world - an impossible task which would leave us without the resources to do anything productive.
Sometimes real discoveries are made entirely by accident, flying in from the wings, a phenomenon also known as serendipity.
Sure, but what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?
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Perhaps you should read what I write and dont try to interprete some bullshit into it which I did not write.
I did. See: ...You can only do two things: repeating experiments until you either be successful or run out of funds. In the later case you only know you failed in doing it, but you still dont know anything about that event.
BTW: in theory you can not proof the non existing. So proofing Archimdes did NOT ignite with some mirrors (or however) some enemy ships, is impossible by definition
I'm a scientist, for fuck sake.
No offense, man, but so is Ken Ham. If you're a good scientists, you should be well aware that waiving the "I'm a scientist!" card doesn't automatically get you credibility. If you're making irrational statements, I'm going to call you on it, regardless of what your profession may be.
When I have tried a few dozen of times to repeat your claims THEN I can start concluding that you perhaps made a mistake (or lied to me).
See, that's much better. If you'd said that in the first place, I wouldn't have had to accuse you of being a 'psychic' :p
Nevertheless that experiment was done often enough. And the MIT experiment was also only a wild guess: lets asume they used their shields. No one knows how archimedes did it.
Actually, nobody knows if he did it. It's a story that may or may not be based on a real event. The most popular version has the soldiers using shields to focus the suns rays and light the ships on fire. The Mythbusters tested that version and showed that it almost certainly didn't happen. If you change the criteria of the story, then we'd have to change the test, but that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with their methodology - they set out with a specific claim in mind, they tested it, and they arrived at a logical conclusion supported by evidence. That's science, no matter how you slice it. It may be very basic science, but it's still science.
The very best guess is very very simple: they used mirrors/shields to "blind" the ship crews and used standard burning arrows to ignite them.
Funny you should say that; I believe Adam Savage actually proposed that exact hypothesis after their second experiment :) I guess you only caught the first show.
At the LHC they try to find the Higgs Boson. All experiments to find it failed so far. According to your book we should conclude now: it does not exist.
Um, no. You're comparing apples to oranges. The Higgs Boson isn't just some story that's been passed down for thousands of years - it's a particle whose existence is predicted by the best model of particle physics that we currently have. If it DOESN'T exist, then it means that there's something very wrong with the model. Since we have less reason to think that the Standard Model is wrong than we do to think that our experiments haven't been good enough so far, it makes sense to keep looking.
Now, if I showed up at the LHC tomorrow and said "look, there's this Hyperbolemicthingamajigger Particle that I'm certain exists" ... first, they'd probably laugh at me ... and if I managed to convince them to look for it, they might do one or two experiments before saying "screw off you fucking crackpot". Not all claims are created equal. The Higgs Boson is worth spending large sums of money and hundreds of man-years of time to look for - my particle is not. This kind of selection is done by everyone on a daily basis - our world wouldn't function if we were unable to discriminate between different types of claims.
If you don't understand the simple concept: not finding anything is no proof that it does not exist ... then you perhaps should
Yeah, as long as you use common sense, you're usually ok. I used windows starting in 96 up until middle of last year. I didn't use anti-virus software for most of that time, and still only got one virus unintentionally (the rest were intentional infections when I was testing various viruses / trojans). So yeah, common sense is the best prevention, but even so I eventually did start using AV software, "just to be safe", and no matter how careful I was I always ended up getting SOME crapware, so occasional spyware scans were a necessity.
Now that I'm only using linux, solaris, and BSD, I don't worry about spyware at all, and I don't bother with AV software either. Sure, there's some infinitesimally small chance that I'll run across malware that can infect one of my machines, but it's so low that it's really not worth thinking about, especially since I still use the same common sense approach as I did on windows. If the average user moves to linux, they WILL be safer, regardless of how little common sense they may have when it comes to computing.
I'm not talking here about repeating someone else EXPERIMENT I talked about "EVENTS". Especially they tried to "debunk" he Archimedes Syracuse burning mirror attack on ships, and failed in igniting their experimental ships. So they concluded that "EVENT" did not happen. OTOH other research teams had no problems to SET UP an EXPERIMENT that DID IGNITE the target.
I assume you're referring to the MIT experiment, and I have to fight the urge to insult your intelligence. The MIT team used statically positioned mirrors, spent hours trying to focus them on a static target, waited around for clouds to go away, and then eventually got ignition. This doesn't even come close to matching the myth, since a static rig made of modern mirrors carefully aimed at a static target is completely different than hundreds of soldiers shining bronze mirrors on a ship that's bobbing around in the water. If they set out to show that it's possible to use mirrors to start a fire, they succeeded - if their intent was to show that the Archimedes story is true, they failed. They are rightly non-committal in their FAQ since it's clear that the experiment wasn't designed to replicate the actual conditions.
Yes, everyone knows that sunlight can be focused in order to heat up or ignite objects - no, it's not practical to use hand-held mirrors to light an attacking enemy ship on fire. The MIT experiment further confirms the result which the Mythbusters achieved - they showed that it's impractical even under relatively ideal circumstances, let alone under battlefield conditions. The Mythbusters did what they set out to do - they showed that the myth was false. After much criticism they went back, tried the test with some modifications, and again showed that it was false. Clinging to the MIT test as "evidence" that the Archimedes myth might possibly be true is ludicrous.
Research is not about making one single experiment and when it fails concluding "it can't work". Research is about making LOTS of SIMILAR experiments ... If you continuously fail, you try to figure WHY you fail first.
Whenever possible, ideally, sure. It's certainly not an absolute requirement, though, and the number of trials will always be dictated by your budget / time constraints. The Mythbusters generally DO perform multiple trials, they use variations in their experiments to try and simulate different conditions, and they go back and retest some myths when there's cause to do so. On more than one occasion they've retested a myth which they previously "busted", and got positive results on the second run, so they're certainly not hesitant to challenge their previous conclusions and to admit their mistakes when they're identified. If that's not good enough for you ... too damn bad. Make your own TV show if you think you can do better.
BTW: in theory you can not proof the non existing. So proofing Archimdes did NOT ignite with some mirrors (or however) some enemy ships, is impossible by definition ...You can only do two things: repeating experiments until you either be successful or run out of funds. In the later case you only know you failed in doing it, but you still dont know anything about that event.
So by default we must accept that every claim is plausible.
Bullshit. You sound like a goddamn 'psychic'. What people like you don't seem to get is that, in the absence of affirmative evidence, the default rational position is always the rejection of the claim. Otherwise you run into the exact problem which you've detailed above - you waste all your time and money doing experiments, and never get anywhere. You may as well spend all your time jerking-off; it'll be just as productive, and it feels much better. Yes, you're right to the extent that I can never profess 100% certai
It's unfortunate that the mod type showing on this comment is 'Flamebait' rather than 'Insightful'. Mythbusters does a very good job of demonstrating that a 'myth' can be proven or disproved within a very specific set of circumstances on the one trial that they choose to represent their 'proof', but it only resembles science on an incredibly superficial level.
"Ideas are tested by experiment". That is the core of science. Everything else is bookkeeping.
- Zombie Feynman
They designed a launcher that could propel a bowling ball at a consistent speed, then drove the vehicle at that speed and started their trials. They showed four failed trials before they finally achieved one where the ball fell straight down. Their conclusion was that they proved that an object will fall straight down when launched at the speed of the vehicle--despite four of the five trials they showed (and who knows how many others that were cut) disproving their intended result. They didn't even mention the concept of wake turbulence affecting the ball's path.
And scientists never have failed trials, right? In science, the results are always consistent, and 100% accurate!
Please. There's nothing wrong with dismissing failed trials, as long as you can provide a valid justification for doing so. In their particular case, given the setup they were working with, it would be ludicrous to expect perfect results right from the start. This is like looking at the problems with the LHC and saying "well, it didn't work right the first time, so let's just toss the whole thing out and start over". It's silly.
As for wake turbulence ... while it certainly would be a factor to consider if you cared about minute variations in the trajectory of the ball, it was quite obvious that the experiment wasn't designed to test for that kind of detail. They weren't doing ground breaking research or testing aerodynamic forces - they were answering a simple question which anyone who has a passing familiarity with Newtonian physics would have immediately known the answer to. You need to consider the scope of the experiment before you start formulating objections, or you end up sounding like a complete pedant. It's as if they were testing the claim that a feather and a bowling ball will fall at the same rate in a vacuum, and you jumped on them for not showing the picosecond difference in fall times caused by the gravitational force exerted by the bowling ball on the earth.
Just because they debunked some common urban legends does not make them scientists.
So what? I'm not a mechanic, but I can usually fix my car when there's something wrong with it. How does them not being scientists prevent them from doing science?
They also often falsely debunked stuff ... especially if they try to repeat some historical "event" and fail to do it, and then conclude: it did not happen (every scientist knows that this is the wrong approach).
I think your understanding of science is a little screwy. If you conduct an experiment to verify the truth of a claim and repeatedly achieve negative results, your conclusion should be that the claim is false. Now, you might review other research that was done on the same topic in order to make sure you're not right out to lunch, and you would assign error bars in order to quantify your certainty about that conclusion, and you'd try to get published in a journal so that others could attempt to replicate your results or point out the errors in your methodology, but none of that prevents you from presenting a preliminary conclusion. In fact, the main reason peer review exists is so that false claims can be debunked - it gives others a chance to say "your experiment sucks because of X, therefore your conclusion is false". If scientists shied away from calling bullshit when they see it, we'd have no basis for ever dismissing any claims whatsoever.
If your book is anywhere near as entertaining as that comment was, I think I'll have to grab a copy.
I think you've just invented a new extreme-sport.
You start paying me to comment, I can guarantee a massive improvement.
They should stop calling themselves "editors". Another title like perhaps "reposters" would be more appropriate and would remove the expectation that they act like, well, editors.
Even "reporters" gives them too much credit. I think "copy-and-pasters" would be much more accurate.
I had a grandfather who invented cold fusion and anti-gravity propulsion, but the goddamn feds confiscated all his plans and then used their mind -control satellites to make him never speak of it again. The bastards!
Ok, I admit it, you had me going there. For the last few comments, I really thought you were serious. But now that I've noticed your username, I get it. Well done; yours is by far the best act I've ever seen on slashdot. Much more subtle than people like pizza-analogy-guy. I'm not sure what the point is, but the execution is fantastic! I'm just surprised I didn't get any serious responders to my first comment - I thought for sure some of the creationists would try to defend their idiotic beliefs.
Please explain what screwed up reasoning you have for thinking the commandments apply to the statement I made.
Are you drunk, or just unable to read? Scroll back up, and read my comment carefully. Sound it out if you have to. It's ok if your lips move - nobody can tell, online.
I'm sorry, that was English..
It most certainly was not. It was a collection of English words strung together using a drunken version of Italian, or possibly French grammar. Either way, it was completely incomprehensible.
So you are saying that no matter what the truth is, you are not going to accept it if it involved some supernatural being that did it.
Wrong again!
And no, it's not a hypothesis, I am not making a statement of fact, I asked you a short and simple question, what if God or a god actually did do it.
Wow. Ok, you're either drunk or epically incompetent. Please, go over to the Miriam-Webster website and look up the word "hypothesis".
I won't bother with the rest of your nonsense. This feels too much like mocking handicapped children.
And I agree that it isn't worth wasting much time on it, but alas, when I see idiots using religions or anti religious rants to support or deconstruct another, I feel compelled to call out the biggest idiot of the bunch.
I think you must have been reading a different set of comments then. Regardless, I can waste a couple minutes on you.
There is no genetic record that include genetic evidence only that points to this. There is however, a record that included non-genetic evidence to lead people to believe this.
Speak English, please.
Short and simple, what if God or a god dun it?
Then provide some evidence to support that hypothesis. What if Santa Claus dun it? What if Bigfoot dun it? What if Yo Mama dun it? The time to believe a claim is when it is sufficiently supported by evidence. Until that time it's all bullshit, and what-if scenarios don't make it any more credible. If your "explanation" is indistinguishable from something I just made up, then it's fucking useless.
You do not know at all if the religious answer was right or wrong.
Yes, I do. But if you want to keep believing that lightning happens because god is angry, and that lightning-rods are the tool of the devil, you go right ahead.
The guy you're responding to is wrong, but nowhere near as wrong as you. If you're stupid enough to say things like "evolution is a theory which has yet to be proven", you're probably not worth wasting time on, but what the hell:
First of all, evolution and intelligent design aren't mutually exclusive. It's quite possible that some type of "creator" - whether it be a guy with a beard, or a black monolith - created life on earth. However, that in no way contradicts the fact that all life on earth is related, and that both the geological and genetic record prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that all present-day species are descended from common ancestors. As long as your idea of "intelligent design" doesn't posit a magic-man who's constantly tweaking things, there's nothing contradictory between intelligent design and evolution.
Where intelligent design fails is a whole different issue. For starters, it posits no testable hypothesis. It offers no evidence. It attempts to put an end to further discussion and discovery, rather than opening new avenues of exploration. The phrase "god dun it" is not an answer - it's an appeal to ignorance. The same 'answer' has been used for tens of thousands of years to explain anything that we as a species couldn't understand. Why do we have lightning? God dun it. Why does the earth shake? God dun it. Why is there a flood? God dun it. In EVERY SINGLE PAST CASE, it was scientific scrutiny and the curiosity of man which eventually gave us a real answer, while the religious troglodytes continued to pound their holy books and point at their invisible dude in the sky. In every single case, the religious 'answer' was wrong. What possible combination of neural misfiring could convince you that, in this case, your answer happens to be right? And why would you EVER be satisfied with an answer that doesn't lead you to new questions?
I know I probably shouldn't waste my time, but I'll give you one more chance to be rational.
My original argument was that it's worth investigating
Then fucking go and investigate it! I disagree with your conclusion. I know that we've already wasted way too much time and effort on this bullshit. If you think it's worth investigating, then you can go and waste all the time and money you want on it! Come back when you have REAL RESULTS and maybe we'll have something to talk about; until then I don't give a shit what you think. The bigfoot morons, the loch-ness fans, the homeopaths and acupuncturists, the conspiracy theorists, various cults and religions ... all of you try to pull the exact same bullshit, and all of you fail miserably. I don't want to hear what ANY of you assholes think until you have some evidence for me to look at. And when I say evidence, I mean evidence; I don't give a flying fuck if you cousins third roommate from college knew a guy in the airforce who brought coffee to a colonel who once saw a UFO - I want DATA.
Well, that's not entirely true, I did make a claim - that the Beligan Army released hard sensor data from two separate F-16's that tracked craft that are faster and more maneuverable than anything humans know how to build, and this was almost 25 years ago. But I mentioned that already and you had no response. Too inconvenient a data set?
I ignored it because it's just as laughable as the rest of your claims. The Belgian Army did no such thing. The Belgian Air Force released a report, but it didn't contain any "sensor data". You're either intentionally lying, or you're a shitty researcher. But, please, if I'm wrong, go ahead and direct me to this "sensor data". It sure would be nice to have something real to look at for a change, instead of dealing with the lies and obfuscations of UFO fanatics.
I realize that it's a hard subject to approach
No, it's not - it's a very easy subject to approach. Since nobody has provided any data, we can dismiss the whole thing out of hand. Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence; it doesn't matter whether we're talking about god, big-foot, santa claus, or your little green men.
And that covers all that needs to be said. If you can point me to Belgian F-16 sensor data, we can continue the discussion. Otherwise just accept the fact that rational people think you're an idiot, and go away.
Everything in the universe is subjective, if you're willing to take the claims of lunatics at face value.
What if you fight in order to oppose an oppressive theocracy, but you do target civilians (who maybe are connected to the oppressive theocracy but not actually part of their military forces)? That's not an idle question, because US aerial drone attacks have done precisely that in Pakistan and Yemen.
I said "generally". Even during the American war of independence, some Brit civilians were killed by the separatists. While I don't like such exceptions, I understand that they are sometimes necessary. In this particular case, it could be avoided if Pakistan could control their own tribal areas, or if they'd allow foreign troops to operate in the borderlands unimpeded, but their need to "safe face" is, apparently, worth a bunch of civilian lives. Still, that's a far cry from executing entire families and terrorizing entire villages as a matter of policy, in order to intimidate the rest into obeying you.
Similarly, what if you aren't targeting civilians, but are fighting for the imposition of an oppressive theocracy? Again, not an idle question, when you consider that many of the Iraqi insurgent attacks on US troops fall into this category.
How is this difficult to understand? I already answered this earlier, and I honestly don't see how you could be confused about what I said.
It's not that I have no morals at all, it's that I judge actions in a way that doesn't neatly divide the world into "good guys" and "bad guys", and don't assume that everything that good guys do is good and everything that bad guys do is bad.
Who said anything about neatly dividing the world?
It's as if you were claiming that there's no difference between fish and mammals because the real world isn't simple, and you like to file them into more categories. The fact that good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things is completely irrelevant to the question of whether a person or a group of people are "good" or "bad". Hitler was immoral (aka "bad") regardless of how nice he may have been that one time when he returned a lost puppy. Gandhi was moral (aka "good") despite the fact that he viewed blacks as undeserving of the same rights that he spent his life fighting for. You're dismissing an entire classification because of the existence of anomalies; foolish, at best, and immoral at worst.
We can have ... blah blah blah
Appeal to authority fallacy.
I don't think I ever mentioned this
I don't care what you mentioned - you're talking out of your ass, and I have no problem lumping you in with the rest of the lunatics. You don't get to use the ol' "I'm less crazy because I don't believe ALL of this stuff" escape clause. I've explained that your claims are being dismissed because you're relying entirely on anecdotes and appeals to authority, yet in your latest post you once again whip out anecdotes and appeals to authority. You are either too stupid to understand what I am saying to you, or you're intentionally ignoring it. Either way, I have no intention of humoring you any longer. If you have evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, then let's see it. Put up, or shut up. LGM or GTFO.
Yes, and I'm sure a pedophile would consider himself "friendly with children", and a serial-killer would consider himself "the path to Heaven". Just because some assholes insist on misusing terms doesn't mean that the terms themselves have no meaning. If you fight in order to bring about the imposition of an oppressive theocracy, you are not a freedom fighter. If you generally avoid targeting civilians, you are not a terrorist. Not only is it completely absurd to take a relativist position on the issue, it's inherently immoral as well.
The only difference between a "freedom fighter" and a "terrorist" is that a freedom fighter is on the same side as the speaker, while a terrorist is on the other side.
If you have no morals at all, sure, I can see why you would view the issue that way. I would also say you're a despicable human being who should be ostracized at every opportunity. If, on the other hand, you care about the political goals of the group and the methods they use in order to achieve them, you have a much more tangible method for differentiating between freedom fighters and terrorists.
You must be talking about Germany, Japan, and Korea, right?
If you were able to self-identify it, it wasn't unidentified.
But if he had picked up the phone instead of his binoculars, it would have been.
In that case, how would you go about getting funding for building a near-earth sensor network to test the hypothesis?
This is akin to a theist saying "how do you propose we observe Heaven" as "proof" that their god exists.
That's not my problem. If you're foolish enough to think that aliens are traveling across lightyears of space in order to mutilate cattle and ass-rape rednecks, that's your problem. I have no intention of wasting time or money trying to figure out how to test your claims - you need to work out an experiment, gather some data, and present it for review. If it's convincing enough, you'll have no problem getting future funding; until then, your claims are indistinguishable from millions of other asinine ideas which have been put forward over the millenia.
Nobody is asking here for anything that can't be falsified.
Yes, they are. When the vast majority of UFO sightings have turned out to have prosaic, natural explanations, only a fool would stand there and continue to insist that the remaining "unexplained" incidents are actually little green men in flying saucers. It's no different than any other pseudo-science or religion; the beliefs of the people making the claims cannot be changed because they do not rely on evidence - they rely on faith. As such, they are by definition unfalsifiable.
The best example of this is the crop-circles; the people who came up with the idea have come forward and admitted it was a hoax. They've shown us how it's done. They've even been commissioned by corporations and governments to create advertisements using the same method. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, there's no shortage of idiots who continue to claim that some crop-circles are actually signs of a UFO landing. How is that not "asking for anything that can't be falsified"?
Okay, so you've decided that some questions aren't worth asking, fair enough. Where do you draw the line, though, since the asking of questions is absolutely vital to human growth? You only approve of questions within the boundaries of established science?
No; I've decided that trying to refute the same shit over and over again until the end of time is wasteful and pointless. I've also decided that the burden of proof lays squarely with the people making the claim. Now, as a curious human being, if I hear a claim which I am not familiar with, I will gladly do some basic research into it, just to sate my own curiosity. However, if I find that it appears to violate the laws of physics, or is incredibly unlikely to be true, or is a new iteration of previously refuted garbage, or is made up whole-cloth without a shred of confirmatory evidence, I will dismiss it until such a time as new evidence becomes available. I certainly will NOT waste my own time or money on something which I have no reason to believe is true, nor will I support efforts to get the government to do the same. We have to have some selection criteria, otherwise we'd have to try and answer the "questions" of every fool, lunatic, and charlatan in the world - an impossible task which would leave us without the resources to do anything productive.
Sometimes real discoveries are made entirely by accident, flying in from the wings, a phenomenon also known as serendipity.
Sure, but what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?
The knee-jerk anti-religious sentiment on Slashdot is always amusing.
Satanism is a religion. The only anti-religious sentiment here is coming straight from the Vatican.