Well….you’d know, wouldn’t you Acci?

*holds his ear trumpet closer*

Eh?  What’s that you say, kiddo?  Quit mumbling!

Charybdis - 31 May 2007 03:35 PM

[quote author=“Beasjt

Madmouse - 01 June 2007 09:07 PM

What, no kiss from you?  Even your sister managed it, and she’s mean.

Charybdis - 01 June 2007 09:23 PM

Madmouse - 01 June 2007 09:07 PM

What, no kiss from you?  Even your sister managed it, and she’s mean.

Depends. If you send me something nice I might…

I don’t think customs would allow it through.

Charybdis - 29 May 2007 08:54 PM

We believe modern physics to be true because modern physics WORKS.  Psychic powers DO NOT WORK.  This computer you’re using is a product of modern physics.  Until such time as you can create something even 1/100 as concrete and real using your psychic powers we’ll continue to dismiss them as a fantasy.  All the wishful thinking in the world won’t make your delusion any more real.

as with all skeptics - your assumptions are mostly wrong and you are only superficially informed (and probably not very intelligent too - and this is a statement of probability, not meant impolite)

1) very modern physics mostly does not work -  its latest incarnation superstring or brane theory makes no predictions - it is elegant but worthless - books have been written about this - read them and we talk.
what works is older physics (newton et al) - even with einstein (not so new anymore) there are mounting problems - physics today has to make all kinds of ESOTERIC assumptions like dark matter and since the fall of the expansion theory because red-shift proved to be wrong they are left hanging - books and tv-shows still talk about the big bang while insiders and people who are up to date know it to be a wrong model.

2) as good as all technology we use today only uses physics that was known 80 years ago - what happened to the application of the rest?

3) although classical darwinismn is 90% wrong (and i leave 10% for microbes and the like) it has not been replaced by anything sensible and is RELIGIOUSLY taught in schools. unfortunately the most verbal opponents are fundamentalist christians who are even more stupid that those who believe in darwin. 90% of the decoded DNA is junk and the remainder is not nearly enough to explain the complexity of life - what happened to the one-gene-one-protein theory still taught at school but debunked in 2001 when the HGP finished? - so much for biology (which I studied too)

4) psychic phenomena have been proven STATISTICALLY beyond any reasonable doubt - over an over again - so much so the CIA and NSA use it as a matter of course (and books have been written about that too - maybe you should read a bit more?)

5) Randi is a crook who has evaded paying out numerous times and lawsuits have been had because of that - and guess what - books have been written about it.

6) UFOs have been debunked numerous times - in fact any skeptic worth its salt has raved against UFOs - today 400 government witnesses have come forward ready to testfy under oath before congress that they have worked with UFOs and ETBs (disclosureproject.org) and the French government has finaly made its UFO related files public (in french) and the british consider doing likewise.

what in fact is the difference between a skeptic and a fundamentalist? none it appears - both have a closed loop they call mind. no new info enters there that possibly conflicts with in-loop-info.
we can only wait until the last one has died. someone has said that before me and written in a book about it.

samvado - 02 June 2007 12:55 PM

Charybdis - 29 May 2007 08:54 PM

We believe modern physics to be true because modern physics WORKS.  Psychic powers DO NOT WORK.  This computer you’re using is a product of modern physics.  Until such time as you can create something even 1/100 as concrete and real using your psychic powers we’ll continue to dismiss them as a fantasy.  All the wishful thinking in the world won’t make your delusion any more real.

as with all skeptics - your assumptions are mostly wrong and you are only superficially informed (and probably not very intelligent too - and this is a statement of probability, not meant impolite)

1) very modern physics mostly does not work -  its latest incarnation superstring or brane theory makes no predictions - it is elegant but worthless - books have been written about this - read them and we talk.
what works is older physics (newton et al) - even with einstein (not so new anymore) there are mounting problems - physics today has to make all kinds of ESOTERIC assumptions like dark matter and since the fall of the expansion theory because red-shift proved to be wrong they are left hanging - books and tv-shows still talk about the big bang while insiders and people who are up to date know it to be a wrong model.

2) as good as all technology we use today only uses physics that was known 80 years ago - what happened to the application of the rest?

3) although classical darwinismn is 90% wrong (and i leave 10% for microbes and the like) it has not been replaced by anything sensible and is RELIGIOUSLY taught in schools. unfortunately the most verbal opponents are fundamentalist christians who are even more stupid that those who believe in darwin. 90% of the decoded DNA is junk and the remainder is not nearly enough to explain the complexity of life - what happened to the one-gene-one-protein theory still taught at school but debunked in 2001 when the HGP finished? - so much for biology (which I studied too)

4) psychic phenomena have been proven STATISTICALLY beyond any reasonable doubt - over an over again - so much so the CIA and NSA use it as a matter of course (and books have been written about that too - maybe you should read a bit more?)

5) Randi is a crook who has evaded paying out numerous times and lawsuits have been had because of that - and guess what - books have been written about it.

6) UFOs have been debunked numerous times - in fact any skeptic worth its salt has raved against UFOs - today 400 government witnesses have come forward ready to testfy under oath before congress that they have worked with UFOs and ETBs (disclosureproject.org) and the French government has finaly made its UFO related files public (in french) and the british consider doing likewise.

what in fact is the difference between a skeptic and a fundamentalist? none it appears - both have a closed loop they call mind. no new info enters there that possibly conflicts with in-loop-info.
we can only wait until the last one has died. someone has said that before me and written in a book about it.

‘Books have been written about it’. ‘Someone has said that before me and written a book about it’.

Yeah, and books have been written about the Pyramids being alien constructs, but I’d still point and laugh at Von Danniken if I saw him. Books mean precisely two thing- Jack and S**t. And Jack’s left town. I’ll write a book about how pyschics are a bunch of fraudsters, con artists and charlatans. Guess what? There’s loads of books about that, so it must be true!

And you don’t believe in evolution? Oh hell here we go again . You believe in reading minds and controlling other people but you don’t believe in Darwin’s theories? Riiiight.

I

I’m STILL trying to wrap my mind around the idea of activating ‘unactivated dna’. 

I suppose I’m thinking along the lines of:  unactivated DNA is put out of commission because it’s no longer needed, or desired in the completed, present physiological system? 

I might be wrong about this though since DNA is hardly my forte and I’m sure that some mutations or illnesses do cause parts of normal DNA to de-activate.  But my first thoughts are that as each species evolved, wouldn’t specific DNA become unactivated?  And, if it WAS reactivated, might that not cause a de-evolutionary condition or mutation to occur?

Oh, who knows, I’ve been de-volved forever anyway…....

samvado - 02 June 2007 12:55 PM

as with all skeptics - your assumptions are mostly wrong and you are only superficially informed (and probably not very intelligent too - and this is a statement of probability, not meant impolite)

You don’t even make it to superficially informed.

1) very modern physics mostly does not work -  its latest incarnation superstring or brane theory makes no predictions - it is elegant but worthless - books have been written about this - read them and we talk.

It would be pointless as you have clearly not understood them. For example, Woit’s Not Even Wrong is not arguing against string theory per se but at it’s undeserved dominance in modern physics research, while Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics is more critical of string theory, but then it is written by the principle advocate of the competing theory of loop quantum gravity, so this is only to be expected. Nor is it correct that string theory makes no predictions, it has very specific things to say about the scattering of W bosons, and these predictions will be tested when the LHC comes on line in late 2007 - early 2008. Also, the Eot-Walsh experiments conducted at Washington University are rapidly approaching the sensitivity needed to detect the extra dimensions predicted by string theory, should they not show up, string theory in its current form would be effectively falsified.

String theory itself is an offshoot of the ‘standard model’ of quantum mechanics, acknowledged by both Smolin and Woit as one of the most successful scientific theories ever.

what works is older physics (newton et al) - even with einstein (not so new anymore) there are mounting problems - physics today has to make all kinds of ESOTERIC assumptions like dark matter and since the fall of the expansion theory because red-shift proved to be wrong they are left hanging - books and tv-shows still talk about the big bang while insiders and people who are up to date know it to be a wrong model.

Newtonian physics does not explain the motions of the planets (particularly mercury), atomic or sub-atomic forces, the motion of light nor its propagation through systems where there are other dimensions approaching that of the wavelength of light used.

Red shift has not been proved wrong, it is an observed fact. And the ‘insiders’ would be people like Krauss, Scherrer, Hawkins et al who are still publishing papers on aspects of the Big Bang today. Like all woo-woos, you apparently ‘channel’ your information from mysterious sources, because you sure as hell can’t provide the evidence when asked to.

2) as good as all technology we use today only uses physics that was known 80 years ago - what happened to the application of the rest?

(a) Because the answers to the questions most physicists are asking now require ever higher energies to answer. I can’t think of a specific use about the home for a superconducting particle accelerator, can you?

(b) This is not true; see LCD screens, LEDs, lasers, microelectronics, microwave ovens, birth-control, jet engines, modern glassmaking, satellites, genetic engineering, high-yield crops, CCDs, velcro, kevlar, optical fibres, MRI, DNA, the fuel cell…

3) although classical darwinismn is 90% wrong (and i leave 10% for microbes and the like) it has not been replaced by anything sensible and is RELIGIOUSLY taught in schools. unfortunately the most verbal opponents are fundamentalist christians who are even more stupid that those who believe in darwin. 90% of the decoded DNA is junk and the remainder is not nearly enough to explain the complexity of life - what happened to the one-gene-one-protein theory still taught at school but debunked in 2001 when the HGP finished? - so much for biology (which I studied too)

Wrong again. OGOP means that a gene codes for at most one polypeptide (it has been known since at least the 50s that some proteins - such as haemoglobin - are made of multiple polypeptides), not that every gene codes for one. This was apparent even before Beadle and Tatum’s work in 1941. That 90% of DNA is ‘junk’ does not invalidate this relationship (although one gene coding for two polypeptides would).

Nor does junk DNA invalidate Darwinism. The fitness function of a gene is not the same as the fitness function of its carrier and if it pays the gene to be selfish, that’s what it’ll be. I’m sure there’s a book about that, but I can’t remember the title.