"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
Ok this is bizarre. Somebody has already retouched the Newly Released Certificate of Life Birth that Obama released today. Heck it’s not even been a day and it’s been retouched.
Hold on, the PDF file is NOT just a bit map, the background pattern is just that with other images and items LAYERED on top of it. In other works it’s not one image it’s a composite set of images in the PDF document! For example there are multiple items making up the black parts of the image, the signature block at the bottom is clearly a bit map while the lines and labels seem to be text or other bit maps that highlight white while being drawn! This gets more interesting.
You can see this by saving the PDF and opening it in Adobe PDF Reader then resizing the window and watching it redraw, it redraws in layers a piece at a time quickly. Hmmm….
Could be just the way they do it in Hawaii… but it’s not just a scan of an image. This would also explain how they can easily get multiple different backgrounds, as that could easily be removed or changed with a PDF editing program!
Just the observed facts with questions. Please don’t shoot the messenger. I’m Canadian and really have no vested interest in this one way or the other, just curious about it.
What’s with the “green” background that looks so fake?
Thousands of awe-struck Norwegians bombarded the Meteorological Institute to ask what the incredible light — that could be seen in the pre-dawn sky for hundreds of miles — could possibly be.
The phenomenon has been dubbed ‘Star-Gate’ — as the world’s top scientists and the military lined up to admit they were baffled.
I gather a black hole escaped from the LHC!
Or, maybe it’s the Copenhagen Climate Conference Hypnosis Ray Satellite destructing with the Climategate confirmations of science fraud?
However, after a moment, I realized this must be a rocket, most likely spiraling out of control. I don’t understand all the details — I don’t have all the info yet — but a rocket fits what we’re seeing here. First, this was seen all over Norway, so it must have been at a high altitude to be so visible. Second, the blue spiral angling down to the right is clearly due to perspective. A rocket spiraling around, and coming up from the lower right, would appear to make tight spirals when it was far away and bigger ones as it got closer.
Following on the Watts Up With That article on Google Trends I was curious. Naturally.
Spending a few minutes with Google Trends I typed in “Monckton” and the graph of searches goes up with time while the new reports go down with time. They, the mainstream news, seems to be avoiding Christopher Monckton like the plague.
As this Google Trend (link at bottom) shows this trend graph is troubling for a number of possible reasons.
For starters it is obvious that Christopher Monckton is having an impact through Al Gore’s Intertubes and alternative sources.
It’s also clear that Monckton is being avoided by the mainstream press, at least those that are included in the Google Trends.
Could it be the “manufacturing of consent” that Noam Chomsky talks about at length where it is “shared values and beliefs” that creates the “conspiracy” to subvert certain ideas, thoughts, and people or groups, and not an explicit phone call such as Al Gore calling up his fellow board members at Google and other friends at news companies and saying “down with Monckton” in the news?
Alas it’s not a question that is likely to be answered, although we did think that before the revelations of the Climategate emails, data and programs were released which confirmed the long suspected criminal behavior of Jones, Mann, et. al. and of the fraudulent activities of AGW promoters such as Al Gore.
I do wonder though what it will take for Christopher Monckton to breakout into the mainstream news media. Maybe his attendance at the up coming Copenhagen Climate Conference (of global domination) will enable him access to the mainstream press in ways that they can’t ignore? We’ll see. It certainly will enable one to see the “shared values” of the mainstream news media in a new light.
We have seen Noam Chomsky’s principle of “Manufacturing Consent” working with the Climategate criminals Jones, Mann, et. al.. A conspiracy of “values and beliefs”, an elitist clique that thought that they were above the rest of the people they worked for, us. Other scientists have this “academic” elitist bias or shared value, that says that you need not just the “qualifications” but the “right attitude” otherwise you’re “outside the group”. Einstein broke the mold as have McIntyre and others, Einstein was a “patent clerk” when he worked on his famous breakthroughs.
But wait there more of interest at the Google Trends.
The problem with conspiracies is that there can be truth to them even while they are stitched together in paranoid delusions. How do you tell if they are really occurring or not? Hmmm…
“On 22-25 March 2009, the American Chemical Society held a four-day symposium on “New Energy Technology”, in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the announcement of cold fusion. At the conference, researchers with the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) reported detection of neutrons in a cold fusion cell using a CR-39 detector,[59] a result published months earlier in the peer-reviewed life sciences journal Die Naturwissenschaften. The findings were described by the researchers as “very significant”, although it was criticized by Paul Padley, one of the reviewers of Mosier-Boss’ work, because it doesn’t explain how could fusion could happen in the described conditions. Steven Krivit, editor of the cold fusion magazine New Energy Times, pointed out that the results could be caused by some other unknown nuclear process.” – Cold Fusion, Wikipedia
To try to persuade their fellow researchers of the reality of cold fusion, Pamela Boss and her colleagues decided to search for evidence of the presence of high-energy neutrons, which should be produced when two nuclei fuse. Dr Boss works for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Centre in San Diego, California, an organisation that develops communication systems for the American navy. The experiment that she thinks results in cold fusion uses an electrochemical technique in which two electrodes are plunged into an electrolyte made from a recipe that includes heavy water.
Heavy water gets its name because it contains deuterium, a form of hydrogen that has a neutron in its nucleus as well as the usual proton and thus weighs twice as much as the ordinary sort. Deuterium is easier to fuse than simple hydrogen, and so is favoured in these sorts of experiments. Dr Boss and her colleagues reported that one of the electrodes in their experiment got hot, an effect they attribute to fusion.
Most researchers in the field, though, do not accept that heat is sufficient evidence of fusion (if only because it was the basis of the Pons/Fleischmann claim). So to strengthen her case, Dr Boss placed a special plastic called CR-39 next to the hot electrode. If fusion was taking place, then neutrons flying through the plastic would cause protons within the material to recoil, leaving telltale tracks.
Studying CR-39 under a microscope and counting the number of tracks is a standard way to assess how many neutrons bowled past. Dr Boss and her colleagues reckon they have seen enough tracks to provide evidence for the emergence of high-energy neutrons from their experiment. They published the results earlier this year in Naturwissenschaften. Dr Boss told the meeting, “taking all the data together, we have compelling evidence that nuclear reactions are stimulated by electrochemical processes.”
A series of videos in a play list marketing the “EFIX Quantum Biofeedback” device. It does a “virus scan of the body”. Ok, yeah right.
Exercise for the Reader (that means you): Identify the assertions, facts, beliefs, proofs or lack there of – then report on them in the comments. How can you prove or falsify any of the statements? If you see a crucial flaw in the arguments do you also see how it flows throughout the conversation? If you see a crucial fact presented in the arguments do you also see how it flows throughout the conversation? Be detailed, cite references, no personal attacks, opinions must be substantiated. Please use time indexes (starting at, ending at, duration) when quoting or referring to material in the video so that others can see that clip.
Since the financial market’s own version of 9/11, the collective belief in free market capitalism has taken quite a hit. Not surprisingly, the professional absurdists have shown more common sense than the business press. “The stock market’s just a consensual mass delusion based on fictitious valuing of abstract assets,” noted fictional news reporter John Oliver on The Daily Show. Yet, even now, financial advisors and business press shills are still humming the same old tune, which might as well be Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. No matter how bad the financial news gets, the bull market will return one day, we’re told. Two years, say some. Three years, say others – seven years on the outside. Just have faith and buy low.
Paths To Knowledge (dot Science) 