Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
Fair value probability of Megxit resulting in divorce is about 25% based on a payoff of 3 dollars for divorce and 1 dollar for no divorce ( 3/1 payoff/odds):
https://www.forbes.com/sites/guymartin/2020/01/15/the-megxit-fallout-day-7-what-the-british-bookmakers-are-telling-us-with-their-odds-on-a-divorce-for-prince-harry/#ce71b9a30185
I know it’s cynical to be betting on whether a couple would stick together….
The only time I was pretty sure a couple would break up Michael Jackson’s marriage to Lisa Marie Presley.
Was that just because Kobe was a Catholic?
Hahaha, a Darwin Award! I get it! That’s so funny. I think what you are saying is that because he did something dumb which killed him, he will not pass on his dumb genes, so we should give him an award, in honor of Charles Darwin? Right?
That’s hilarious. Sometimes I read the crazy things you say, and I think that makes me want to LAUGH! The reason why , is because its so funny, what you said. I know you enjoy science, because you said so, but boy, you should think about writing MORE funny things. Like the guy who writes for comedy shows, or like funny shows where they say many jokes.
I also saw there is a link, and it tells stories about other things people have done to receive a Charles Darwin Award nomination I guess. If others haven’t read that link, you should. At first I was like “What the heck?!” And then I was like “Oh my God!, hahaha. Roll on the floor! :)” No wonder you said that. But don’t drink coffee when you read those things, because I spit mine, ON MY COMPUTER!
Ha (not really, LOL).
Do you have a blog where you write some of these other funny things down that you say, for other people to read about? Like Mr. Bean or something, ha. I love him. He is SOOOO funny too, like you. That would be great. Salvador Bean…..No, no, Cordova beans(like the coffee bean, hehe), I just thought of that.
Charles Darwin Awards! ROTL LMAO (Laughing my ass OFF!)
I want to second your nomination! How do I do that? Let’s see if we can get someone to third it! :))))) Laugh emoji!
P.S. Do you ever watch The Big Bang Theory? You should if you want to see a funny show, you will laugh, MULTIPLE TIMES, HAHA! They are smart, not dumb like some other people!
Are there any Catholics here? Or former but good ones?
We are trying to figure out what the meaning of Ash Wednesday (also knows as Dusty Wednesday) is but especially of the ash.
Anybody knows the exact meaning?
I reckon it’s an allusion to the Christian funeral service, and to Job 42:6.
So Christ’s death, and your repentance…
Everyone’s morality as I recall. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It also identifies members of the tribe.
You meant “everyone’s mortality”, I hope…
😮
Correct ,thanks.
From the department of beating-JMac-to-the-punch:
Wormholes Reveal a Way to Manipulate Black Hole Information in the Lab
dazz,
Yes, even the greats can humble themselves to their Creator. He went to the airport directly from church. Such a different demeanor compared with many natural scientist-atheists nowadays, whose egos are clearly too tightly tied up with Science-made-to-worship as a religion-substitute worldview.
Kobe had his priorities right, remembering to put the Creator first, which is one of the things that made him such a legend, both on and off the court.
Gregory,
Are you an NBA fan? Laker fan perhaps? I am
Completely preventable tragedy. Too bad he didn’t excercise a modicum of common sense and refuse to fly in pretty much zero visibility conditions. I wouldn’t say he had his priorities right at all. Feeling a pressing need to get to a basketball game should not override safety considerations for all parties concerned.
The ‘Creator’ didn’t appear to be much help to him, his daughter, the other passengers, and all the families and friends touched by such a preventable accident.
Thanks Bruce!
“If these experiments can be done, it might become possible to create more and more complex entangled systems that could test more aspects of the emergence of space-time from quantum systems,” said Maldacena. Added Nezami: “A sophisticated experiment of this type could even provide an experimental probe of the mathematics of string theory.”
Big IF and strng theory?
It’s probably easier to levitate a man, or a frog using QM…😉
dazz,
Lakers? This year, yes. Last year, no. Cheered for Lakers vs. 3 teams in Finals 2000-2002. Then for Celtics vs. Lakers for rest of 2000s.
What changed since last season for you to jump bandwagons?
dazz,
A.D. & who they got rid of. Not a fan of Lonzo Ball (how does one actually get a shot like that in the first place?). Howard has been great (eta: better than expected). Same with Caruso as role player.
Gregory,
Agreed.
Glad Lonzo and his father are gone.
Debunked by Sabine H:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/02/quantum-gravity-in-lab-hype-is-on.html
“If you could, for example, put a billiard ball into a superposition of location you should be able to measure what happens to its gravitational field. This is unfeasible, but not because it involves high energies. It’s infeasible because decoherence kicks in too quickly to measure anything.”
Can you make any sense out of this, by Sabine?
Yes, that makes sense to me: you cannot measure the postulated quantum gravity effect for macro objects because the superposition it depends on disappears due to decoherence for those macro objects.
Is it the role of decoherence that bothers you? Or something else?
BruceS,
I could live with this, though lifesystems, much largere than billiard ball, are able to maintain coherence longer that initially thought…
Here is what bothers me:
“put a billiard ball into a superposition of location”
Bruce,
I need to pick your brain:
Read this paper, full text , and let me know what could be wrong with the assumption for the accelerating universe, can you?
https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.04597
Let me know if you need additional clues but the less the better…
There is nothing directly readable from the formalism of QM that prevents large systems like billiard balls from being put into coherent states like superpositions of position.
But the positional superpositions are never observable in practice for macro objects, because as soon as we allow environmental interaction or even large internal degrees of freedom as billiard balls have, then according to decoherence theory the superposition disappears and the ball is in a classical state*. Decoherence theory is a consequence of QM theory in these circumstances.
The difficulty in implementing large scale quantum computers, despite all the money being thrown at the problem, is one example of this situation.
Living systems are no different from any other macro system. It takes very special conditions to maintain coherence. There seem to be a few cases where that could happen and further the coherence contributes to some biological phenomenon.. But I suspect they are not as prevalent as you seem to believe based on your posts.
————————
* Technically, decoherence only results in a mixture of classical states. Getting to the one state we always observe is what decoherence does not solve in the measurement problem; you need an interpretation to solve that issue.
Agreed
So, it’s a self-refuting proposition for the experiment then…
That we know about…but
Here we go…phenomenon…for now…
One has to be both sceptical and optimistic at the same time, right?
Evolutionry biologists still claim photons can’t be in superposition…lol
“…photons are in superposition? Not in my cells pal…”😉
Maybe we’re looking at the issue in the wrong way? What if we eliminate space from the equations? 🤔
They are in a in a cell = the environment for those photons = decoherence unless something special is preventing that decoherence.
What if the moon were made of green cheese? Would variety would it be?
ETA: Flatland imagined creatures living in 2D (not zero D). Their mouth and anus had to be the same opening, since otherwise they would split into two.
So they, like certain posters, would be talking out of their ass.
How does this apply to photosynthesis, for example?
You didn’t get it, did you?
Oh, well, next time, perhaps…
You are not a 5 o’clocker, are you? You are a “true Canadian” with the legal pot available, right?
😉
From:
Time Frames: The Re-Thinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria
To:
Time Frames: The Evolution of Punctuated Equilibria
LoL
Ban all travel to US except for England. That’s the orange infants plan. Well, that ought to solve it!
Can there possibly be anyone worse in charge (not in charge) at a time of crisis than the the infant?
I think perhaps his goal is to make other world leaders look like geniuses by showing how bad it could be.
Quite a number of the folks that voted for him?
Ooh, just heard that an acquaintance of mine (good friends of good friends) – she lives perhaps 15 minutes away by road – has been diagnosed with Covid-19!
Any advance on Bacon number?
Aye, the parents of a kid in a local Primary tested positive. My main route of potential infection is via my wife, who works in a school.
My daughter – final year student nurse – has just heard that they are drafting in students to help. Her cohort started the year the bursary stopped – a bursary they reintroduced for next year onwards when EU applications dropped by 97% post Brexit! She feels her year has been a bit ‘picked on’.
I’m hoping to go to Bourg St Maurice on Saturday, by train from here. May get there, but who knows what the transport situation will be in a week!
Allan Miller,
Do they sell masks there?
I was there a few weeks ago, wasn’t so easy to find.
Doubtful – don’t think they can be had anywhere. Shelves round my way have been stripped of toilet roll, hand gels, pasta and baked beans. I love how we all pull together in a crisis…
Hopefully the train can find it!
Allan Miller,
I meant the masks weren’t easy to find. And this was before it had started much in Europe.
Allan Miller,
I still don’t understand how they managed to find some 10 million or so digital thermometers in China in a week or two. Pretty amazing. And I guess several billion face masks because every single person in the country has them pretty much without exception.
Yes, Asians with face masks have been a familiar sight for a while, even here. You hardly ever saw a ‘westerner’ with one. People are stealing them from hospitals, which is unbelievably crappy and selfish.
Allan Miller,
Well, most people here use the disposable kind that you can use for a couple of days, but on average people probably have anywhere from say 10-20 of them at any given time. In the stores you will see people buying up as many as they can find. So the numbers could even be as high as 15-25 billion masks sold here in the last month. Maybe even higher. Incredible.
I’ve been using this for info, though I don’t know how they’re collating their stats. The country breakdown is interesting, and shows how much of a reversal China has achieved – also how worrying Iran is.
France’s ‘recovered’ figure has been stuck on 12 for days, so I’m a bit wary of those stats. Serious/critical has gone down from 12% of Active to 10% over the last few days though, which could be good – unless the reason is death!
You are actually not allowed to be outside here without them, so everyone has them, even little babies.
I’ve heard that there are actually three places in Europe where travel is not banned. And, by some strange coincidence, there happens to be a Trump golf course at each of those three places.
President Dunning Kruger: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.
But you know what? What they’ve done is very incredible. I understand that whole world. I love that world. I really do. I love that world.”
My daughter is based in La Plagne this winter, so if you fancy yoga or snowboarding lessons…
Definitely under-reporting going on. Forgot that I shook hands with husband of
diagnoséediagnostiquée (prior to diagnosis) a few days ago at chance meeting at mutual friends. I’m reading now that people become infectious several days prior to displaying symptoms.ETA diagnostiquée not diagnosée (please ‘scuse franglais moment)
It’s too late to panic!
Will add this here since it’s not a Moderation topic & I’m not ready to start a thread on it, but it’s worth engaging & noting further.
To which Neil Rickert, who is a regular at PS, wrote in agreement:
This “hopes to weaken their influence” is what makes Swamidass’ voluntary self-isolation so stark; he indeed aims to weaken the influence of YECism, while at the same time encouraging YECists to believe in what they’ve always believed regarding real, historical A&E. He wants them to have their cake & eat it too, which symbolizes his most important contribution to the conversation.
To clarify Joe’s statement, I’d say he’s leaving evangelicals qua evangelicals almost entirely uncriticized, while at the same time criticizing YECists. Swamidass is as evangelicalistic as one has to try to stomach these days! His buddies are schismatics, even starting their own ‘non-denominational’ churches.
Swamidass saw at BioLogos that Kathryn Applegate and not a few others were not willing to give up their/our belief in real, historical A&E. Indeed, Swamidass himself accepts real, historical A&E, just without requiring a “young earth” scenario. So he’s really just anti-YECist, while being every bit as evangelicalistic as BioLogos. His sometimes-worship of “mainstream science” makes him into an activist against YECism.
When the real hero of this story Richard Buggs did the research that showed the lie of Venema & McKnight professing the impossibility of a bottleneck of two “human beings” (less than 10,000), Swamidass then jumped at the opportunity to become the activist-preacher-scientist he had apparently always dreamed of becoming. His role models: William Lane Craig & Ravi Zacharias. His opening: “confessing secular scientist” with Templeton funds & IVP support. This is a topic that SELLS BOOKS among USAmerican evangelicals & Swamidass knows that. The precedent at BioLogos was made by David Opderbeck, who has wisely withdrawn himself from the conversation.
It’s important here to distinguish non-mainline evangelical Protestants from YECists. There are far fewer YECists outside of US evangelicalism. Roman Catholics and Orthodox are rarely YECists. A real, historical Adam and Eve are and have been possible all along, without accepting the anti-scientific YECism. Swamidass’ TGAE is an outlier because it intentionally relativizes the conversation & does so with such unusual “me-scientist” braggadocio among usually humble & circumspect mature Christians.
Swamidass calls himself a “confessing scientist”. He is rather an activist evangelical scientist trying to build a new “origins organization” (to rival RTB, AiG, ICR, etc.) that he calls by the strange name “Peaceful Science” (as if there could or even should be no conflicts within the scientific community). Since he is actually promoting ideological scientism, elevating science above theology in several ways, this makes atheists, agnostics and even anti-religious scientists and pro-scientism proponents in a curious way thankful for Swamidass’ Peaceful Scientism approach. That is why Lents & Trischitta are fawning all over him. And Swamidass is lapping it up, even though it be the worse for discussion among mature theists who never did become YECists like he was raised to believe in his non-mainline covenant churches network.
This has turned into a sad spectacle of blowhard philosophistry, though some of Swamidass’ goodwill apparently remains pure & he seems like a decent enough guy at the end of the day. Lord have mercy on his ambitious worldly plans!
My name was mentioned there. But the post is mostly about internal fights and backstabbing within Christianity. I have nothing to do with that, and I mostly keep out of theological disputes.
I do think Gregory has done a pretty good job debunking Christianity. A religion that is so engaged with internal fights and back stabbing cannot possibly be considered the one true religion.
The original note said this:
As an apostate, anti-religious Moderator at TSZ who posts at PS, there is little or no expectation of charity coming from Neil Rickert. He’ll do what he thinks he must to antagonize believers, trying to wedge people apart. I’m not interested in his shenanigans or divisiveness hiding behind confusion about consciousness and the human spirit or soul.
Swamidass featured Rickert’s “thinking” over at PS in a thread titled just for him. But it wasn’t found to be that interesting to people at PS, and only BruceS really seemed to want to engage with him there. Obviously they could have done that just as easily here (oops, they spend lots of time here on that already! http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/consciousness-cannot-have-evolved/) https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/rickerts-ideas-on-consciousness/3684
It’s a bad misreading to speak of “backstabbing within Christianity”, just like how Patrick Trischitta doesn’t see the most meaningful conversations at PS, instead stuck in shallow atheism.
Again, don’t forget, Swamidass calls himself a “secular scientist.” What I’m interested in is collaborative science, philosophy, theology conversations. The true seekers of God in their lives aren’t interested in such “internal fights and back stabbing” or “debunking” as Neil is required now to presume, because he lost the faith of his youth.
I’m open as always if Neil starts asking sincere questions, which have yet to be seen from him. He could engage in those questions at PS too, if ever he were to have a change of heart & remember where he came from, instead of how he self-built into a philosophist of consciousness & lack of free will.
Swamidass is indeed aiming to “weaken the influence” of YECism, at least on that we can agree … & lightly applaud. = )
There is a new pro-Intelligent Design book on Origin of Life by Professor of Molecular Cell Biology CL Tan and Dr. Rob Stadler
Change Laura Tan is a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology a University of Missouri. She a graduate of Ivy League schools like UPenn and Harvard.
Similarly Dr. Rob Stadler is graduate of both MIT and Harvard. These are some brilliant people.
They just wrote the best book criticizing natural origins of life. It’s a tough read, but it’s written at the level that would engage their fellow professors and researchers.
paperback: The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check: Change Laura Tan, Rob Stadler: 9781734183702: Amazon.com: Books
kindle: The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check, Change Tan, Rob Stadler – Amazon.com
PS
If you get the book, you might notice how yours truly is in the Acknowledgements section of the book. :slight_smile:
Oh, cool! Finally a positive case for Intelligent Design!
Nevermind 😄
Congrats
We have a winner!
Congratulations to Entropy for passing the milestone of 500 likes appended to comments!