"The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact." - KURT GÖDEL
"According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".
A guiding principle for accepting claims of catastrophic global events, miracles, incredible healing, invisible friends, or fill in the blank is:
“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable." - H. L. Mencken
I would add irrational and highly delusional to the mix when faith requires one to accept magical violations of the well known, well tested or easily demonstrated laws of Nature. - PWL
"Science is Progress and the Future. Faith is regression to the Dark Ages." - PWL
“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” - Carl Sagan
"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
"Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." - Alfred Korzybski
"Science is a search for basic truths about the Universe, a search which develops statements that appear to describe how the Universe works, but which are subject to correction, revision, adjustment, or even outright rejection, upon the presentation of better or conflicting evidence." - James Randi
"Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch." - Novalis
"Nullius in verba. Take no one's word for it." - Motto of the Royal Society
"I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS." - Richard Feynman
"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." - Thomas Henry Huxley
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.” Albert Einstein
"Science is empirical. Knowing the answer means nothing. Testing your knowledge means everything." - Lawrence Krauss
"Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism - and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency." - Stephen Jay Gould
"Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work." - James Randi
The unseen world of science that some computer scientists have an advantage seeing the objective reality of Nature through the Matrix of Design.
“Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” – Alfred Korzybski
It must be noted that Information Science is at the very heart of the objective reality of Nature, the fabric of spacetime itself distinguishes information into discrete quantum packets of particles and components of energy at the smallest level of Plank time and length (Plank Spacetime). Existence would not exist without distinction of information, this from that, that from this, here from there, there from here, now from then, etc… in a (seemingly) never ending continuum and volume.
In a very real way information science is more fundamental than even physics. Without information existence would not exist. Is it even possible to have existence without information? Only in a singularity of the pre-big bang instant when there is nothing, I’d assert.
“There is a considerable difference between a mathematician’s view of the world and a computer scientist’s. To a mathematician all structures are static: they have always been and will always be; the only time dependence is that we just have not discovered them all yet. The computer scientist is concerned with (and fascinated by) the continuous creation, combination, separation and destruction of structures: time is of the essence. Read the rest of this entry »
The Constitutional Meaning Of “Natural Born Citizen”
by Alan Lovejoy
The Constitution requires that the President of the United States must be a natural born citizen:
Article II, section 1, clause 5: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
If “natural born citizen” is a synonym for “citizen,” then there is no reason for adding the exception “or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution.” None at all. Being a citizen is not sufficient, unless you happened to be alive when the Constitution was adopted.
So what, then, is a “natural born citizen”? To answer that question definitively will require a full examination of the concepts and history of citizenship.
We need to start asking those making the wild claims what they actually mean by “climate change”. What constitutes “climate change”? What defines “climate”? Is it just the range of limits of weather during some period of time? What the heck do they actually mean?
What are they actually freaked out about? 1c warmer?
If one looks at climate as being the range of weather over the last ~10,000 years then it’s clear that not much has changed at all and in fact it’s a wee bit cooler by something like -2c to -3c or there abouts. Damn the Romans had it warmer. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s explore this by way of two very interesting conversations, one from philosopher and physicist Paul Davies and the other from Stephen Wolfram.
Philosopher and physicist Paul Davies give a fascinating and thought-provoking talk on the possibility of an ultimate explanation for our universe. Dismissing the multiverse and God, he outlines an idea for finding an explanation for the universe and physical laws within the universe itself.
“Bad explanations are easy to vary while good explanations are hard to vary.” – David Deutsch
The key issue with an theory whether it’s a myth or a scientific theory is that not only must it have testable predictions but more importantly it’s “explanation” of objective reality must be hard to vary; in other words, there can’t be many or any variations of the explanation. The narrower the explanation that has success making predictions the closer that hypothesis (theory) is to objective reality. The more variants to the hypothesis (theory) that have as accurate (or inaccurate as the case may be) predictive power the less likely those hypotheses (or theories) have to do with objective reality.
For example, Newton’s Gravitation Theory is very accurate and has tremendous success with predictions however it was long known that it failed in some cases. Einstein came along and filled in that gap with a more accurate theory, General and Special Relativity.
Slice and dice, Occam’s Razor now has a corollary in “bad explanations are easy to vary while good explanations are hard to vary”.
One of the four strands of reality inThe Fabric of Realityis the strand of “Karl Popper’s epistemology, especially its anti-inductivism and its requiring a realist (non-instrumental) interpretation of scientific theories, and its emphasis on taking seriously those bold conjectures that resist falsification.“
An amazing editorial by the CBC’s Rex Murphy. Stunning in it’s clarity. Absolutely stunning. Breathtaking in it’s scope. A video that everyone interested in their planet must see.
Here is the Rex Murphy transcript interspersed with memorable quotes including an expanded quote from Clive Crook.
“When Jon Stewart the bantum rooster of conventional wisdom makes jokes about it you know Climategate has reached critical mass. Said Stewart: ‘Poor Al Gore, Global Warming completely debunked via the very internet he [you] invented.‘.
Now is the only moment of time that actually exists in reality. The past is but a memory. The future an illusion. Tomorrow never comes for when it does it is today and there is always another tomorrow. Now is the Time! This moment, now! Now. Now. Now. The Time is Now and never any other!
That time is NOW! Save us from Mann Caused Global Warming Climate Change Alarmists and their Soothsaying Hysteria! Save US NOW and bring Justice to Science so that Science can Prevail over Soothsaying Alarmist Propaganda!
So it’s fine for the endangered human caused global warming climate change alarmists to yell “look it’s Ida, extreme weather” caused by human caused global warming climate change yet when it’s pointed out that October 2009 is the 3rd coldest in 115 years on record it’s just weather and not climate? Double standards on the “it’s weather no it’s climate vs. it’s climate no it’s just weather”?
Climate extremes cause weather extremes! Is that a fair statement? Or is it that weather extremes cause climate extremes?
Climate is weather averaged over decade long times scales… extreme climate depends on your time window and your statistical prowess poker face.
Climate is weather. Without weather there would be no climate. Two sides of the same coin flipping about with randomness generated internally within the system. (See Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, chapter 2 for how this newly discovered form of randomness operates for even very simple systems to show highly complex and extremely unpredictable behaviors).
Climate is weather. Extremes in weather are just the planet going about it’s business. As such extremes in weather mathematically show up in the decade long time scales to varying amounts.
How do we really know where each change in climate really comes from? Assigning this fraction of a degree to that cause and that fraction of a degree to this other cause ad infinitum makes no sense as that isn’t how Nature plans it out not that Nature plans it out.
Now it seems that it’s a heat budget thing with heat into a system (the planet) and heat out (of the planet) by various means. We have various forms of light and electromagnetic radiation touching and being absorbed by the planet with some reflecting off or changing and reflecting off. We have movement of the planet in it’s ever changing always unique orbit of Sol, not to mention other gravitational influences such as the moon and even other planetary bodies. We have cosmic rays and other high energy particle streams impacting the planet or going right on through. Cosmic rays from near and distant stars as we orbit the galaxy so close. We have chemical reactions and volcanoes and oceans mixing and moving and we have the hot and molten inner layers plus the rotating core providing our magnetic fields fluctuating always churning and interacting. Not to mention the bizarre lumpy gravity fields that distort the seemingly squashed spheroid of the planet into what can best be described as a total gravity mess beaten up all bent out of it’s idealized shape we can see from space. We’ve got so many processes and forces at work that we think we can apportion a fraction of a degree to this or that.
It would be really funny if it wasn’t so serious a conversation about doom and gloom. The climate change soothsayers have taking a bite out of sanity and are running a con game that has at it’s core irrational correlations that are weak at best and fraudulent at worse and outright lies in the extreme.
I would love to see an article by one of the major scientists on ALL the elements impacting the climate summarized, glossarized and indexed by the various “fractions of degrees” that they allegedly contribute and how to the climate and to the all important weather.
Climate is a mathematical abstraction. Weather is real and is happening now, the only moment in time that actually exists. The past gone. The future is an illusion and never exists. Tomorrow never comes as there is always another tomorrow when today shows up now. It’s an important aspect of comprehending time that now is all that is real. All there ever is is now and that means weather rules the climate not the other way around.
This is what we really need to be protecting against: The Real Threat to Humanity – other than ourselves – are Asteroid Impacts! We missed being hit two days ago and a month ago our atmosphere protected us from an asteroid with enough punch to product an 50 Kiloton detonation high up in the atmosphere. Ouch!
Actually it would be more like this but the above video has a better sound track!
This one is the bomb, literally an Extinction Level Event (ELE)!
“[Henk] Tennekes, more than any other individual, challenged the models that climate scientists were constructing, saying models could never replicate the complexity of the real world. What was needed was a different approach to science, one that recognized inherent limits in such scientific tools and aimed less to regulate the environment.”
In a landmark speech to the American Meteorological Society in 1986, [Tennekes] argued that meteorology was poised to be the first of the post- Newtonian sciences because it was “at odds with the mainstream of the scientific enterprise of the last 300 years. One goal of science is to control nature, but we know we cannot control the weather. The goal of science is prediction, but we stand in front of the limits of predictability.”
“The Maunder Minimum is the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time. It is named after the solar astronomer Edward W. Maunder (1851–1928) who discovered the dearth of sunspots during that period by studying records from those years. During one 30-year period within the Maunder Minimum, for example, astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots, as opposed to a more typical 40,000–50,000 spots.”
Given this graph it sure looks like temperatures are driven by the Sun, that huge ball of fusion going crazy at the center of our solar system that has 98+% of the mass of said system. A long slow bumpy progression trending upwards.
The National Science Teachers Association [NSTA] recognizes and encourages the development of sustained links between the informal institutions and schools. Informal science education generally refers to programs and experiences developed outside the classroom by institutions and organizations that include:
* children’s and natural history museums, science-technology centers, planetariums, zoos and aquaria, botanical gardens and arboreta, parks, nature centers and environmental education centers, and scientific research laboratories
* media, involving print, film, broadcast, and electronic forms [such as blogs and science oriented web sites]
“Those who resist, fear, avoid or ignore questions of their science are no longer scientists, they are activists, politicians or religious demagogues who want their science to be accepted on belief and faith just because they say it’s so – they are the worst kind of high tech priest especially if their science turns out to be correct or partially correct. This is a sign to question their science even more intensely! People committed to science and science education embrace questions as questions from others are a tool and opportunity for sharpening and improving their science and a way of teaching it to the ignorant masses which at first even includes other experts in their field! Question Authority! The worst that can happen is that some or all of their science is falsified which simply makes them better scientists. Either way the scientists learn something or the ignorant have an opportunity to move from ignorance to knowledge and eliminate the enemy of knowledge and us all, belief and faith. Question Authority! Question Science, Scientists and Science Educators!” – pwl
Many thanks to the endearing Associate Professor PZ Myers and his wonderful group of true believers at pharyngula for inspiring this quote with their endarkened policy towards the ignorant masses known as “Open Season on Fresh Meat”.
“A soothsayer is a person who claims to speak sooth: specifically one who predicts the future based upon personal, political, spiritual, mental or religious beliefs rather than scientific facts.” – Wikepedia
We are of course “Living in the Shadows of Soothsayers”. Waiting till the future arrives is sometimes the only way to predict the future, especially with Natural Systems! Stephen Wolfram proved that in his book, “A New Kind of Science”, Chapter 2.
One of my favorite mythological characters, Asterix, has a entire book devoted to the wonderful topic of soothsayers: “Asterix and the Soothsayer“. The story is quite involved but here is a bit of it that relates to our current crisis in climate science.
If only politically we could learn, but then most political leaders accept the notion of, and take advice from people who have, invisible friends, so it really should come as no surprise that they are unequipped critically and rationally evaluate the organized “consensus”.
Heck, as someone who has been emerged in science for his whole life I’m finding it a challenge to understand let alone properly evaluate the extreme claims of “global warming alarmists”. The Carl Sagan Principle applies: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof by those making the claims”.
“One stormy day, the Gauls — with the exception of Getafix, who is at his annual druid meeting — are huddled in the chief’s hut, fearing for their lives. But then, a man enters the hut in a burst of lightning – it is a soothsayer, who promptly proceeds to see the future for our superstitious Gauls. He predicts that “when the storm is over, the weather will improve.” But not all are impressed; Asterix alone dares question the qualities of this soothsayer, who is in fact a fraud.” Read the rest of this entry »
“The 
Paths To Knowledge (dot Science) 