Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
Good idea!
Right now there is an interesting debate going on about the future direction of the ID movement. I’d like to see our perspective. It’s easy to have a cynical view and make fun of them, but I’d like to see some serious discussion.
Aside from the drawback of providing UD and other Intelligent Design Creationist sites with more link traffic, I think this is an excellent idea. AtBC is fun, but straightforward refutations of IDC nonsense with references to sources for more detail would be valuable.
It’s easy to have a cynical view and make fun of them, but I’d like to see some serious discussion.
It would be nice to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of “intelligent design” theories, if only someone could set one out. All we get from ID proponents, from Behe and Dembski down, is variations on “ToE cannot explain X, therefore design!” I admire those who have the energy and commitment to continue to defend the ToE from ID/creationist attacks. I wonder if “do you have a better explanation?” might not be asked more often.
http://chzmemebase.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/internet-memes-theyre-cuddly.jpg
Oh the hypocrisy!
link
I see that William J Murray has two different avatars. I’m not suggesting that he’s doing anything wrong, but perhaps he’s being spoofed, or there is a software issue?
Thanks.
I haven’t seen WJM post in over a month.
Speaking of which, where’s Elizabeth? Her name is being taken in vain over at UD not that it matters.
She’s being accused of internet association with filthy-mouth pornography posting creeps.
Petrushka will get a kick out of this over at UD.
Then in comment 19 just below it, velikovskys says this:
And Joe is just keeping his head down and his mouth shut.
I just had to follow that link, and found out that since you posted it kairosfocus has insisted that the porn reference is directed at him and Joe has commented that what he posted here wasn’t porn.
That has the potential to be an epic thread.
Joe: Nope, I did not post any porn. Obviously you have no clue as to what porn is.
By vel’s “logic” Lizzie Liddle posted porn on her own blog.
Really?
And up pops WJM to shake his head, more in sorrow than in anger, at the inability of debaters here to be rational. More popcorn!
I think perhaps KF needs some educating (Joe posted it here, at AtBC and his own blog) and also needs to recalibrate his design detector.
Amused, perhaps. Mostly annoyed that an innocent and interesting poster is being accused of being a sock puppet. I guess having my own thread constitutes my 15 minutes of fame. I browsed through it, but except for things that affect others, I have no interest in what the UD regulars “think”.
With the possible exception of gpucio, none of them understand enough science to be interesting. and gp hasn’t posted in a while.
I imagine they would say the same about me posting on theology. But I don’t demand equal time in their churches. They are troubled by the findings of science, but lack the discipline to understand what is being said by science. Reading their stuff is simply painful.
And they have the oddest understanding of the history of science. They simply can’t understand why science expects regularity.
Indeed. Now velikovskys has challenged Joe to post the same link at UD and let them judge.
UB’s version:
Upright BiPedAugust 22, 2012 at 8:43 pm
Thanks very much, Mung.
And yes, I got a demonstration for sure.
Did you know that if I hand you a book, I have tranferred information? I bet you didn’t know that.
Then I got a scorned physicist with the personal disposition of Benito Mussolini. He didn’t realize that symbols and representations must have a material foundaion in a material universe. I suppose he thought it was all up in the aether or something.
Then there was another guy who was one tough customer. He asked me to lay out my definitions and premises. So I did – and he must have really hated them because he rewrote them and added all this other stuff. He then asked me if that was what I had meant all along. I had to tell him that none of his additions were in the material evidence, but that didn’t seem to matter much. Apparently it didn’t matter to a lot of them because they all kept repeating his question.
Then there was another guy who is certain that the world is out to get him and his family. Not acknowledging material evidence is apparently part of a larger plan to protect their intellectual welfare.
Anyway, in one of his last posts he informed me of the truth of the matter, he said “this isn’t about any material observations”, which is a statement I am forced to agree with. He then went on to scold me for not answering the other guy’s question.
And there was of course, Dr Liddle. After she conceded all my points, she then demanded I stop calling her “Dr” Liddle, and left. Thats probably understandable at some level.
One has to wonder how vicious their accusations would become if someone simply wrote down a mathematical equation that disproved a claim they had just made.
I think his comments reveal pretty clearly what we already know from something like fifty years of observation; none of these followers of ID/creationism have any clue about science beyond a rather poor middle school preparation. This, along with their habit of projecting their own internal emotional states onto their “enemies,” makes it nearly impossible to communicate with them.
Elizabeth’s heroic efforts to engage them simply results in her and her guests being demonized while people like Joe and his constant childish vulgarity are simply ignored. I seriously doubt there will be any follow-through over at UD on Joe’s behavior. They simply don’t know how to look at objective evidence.
Technical question. Is it in fact true that new people can register and post here? Do we have an acting moderator?
As far as I know, Elizabeth (last active 5 days ago) and BWE (last active 2 months ago) are the only two people with moderator capabilities.
Some other members have the ability to start threads, and have limited moderating ability within those threads.
Here is a cargo-cult analysis of modern physics from UBP over at UD.
What a howler. Even high school science students know better.
“Information” is used metaphorically in physics, if it is used at all. Physicists have a much better handle on concepts and how to express them concisely. I wonder if he has ever heard of mathematics.
Which is interesting. Because the fundamental ‘interactor’ in chemistry is the photon. Photons shuttle between positive and negative charges to bind electrons to nuclei, to bind multiple nuclei into molecules by bonds with varying degrees of ionic and covalent character, and to bind molecules by the weaker hydrogen bond due to the asymmetric photon-shuttling tussle between atoms over the charged components of an intervening hydrogen atom. eg base-pairing.
Photons can also travel over much greater distances, and interact with the atoms of our optical proteins to cause further conformational changes and transfer of ‘info’ via chemical and electrical interchange to the various processing centres. But it’s photons all the way down.
Base pairing ‘sees’ the outline of molecules. If photons are seen as the agents of information transfer, this is the role they play from (arbitrary) start to finish of the process. Adding this new level: ‘recorded’ information …. what’s that? A deliberate arrangement of atoms intentionally preserving information for another or the same intelligent entity? Not proven, in the case of DNA.
The process clearly runs itself, by transfer of energy down gradients. ‘Information’ is clearly ‘recorded’ by all manner of natural processes – fossilisation, meteorite strikes on the moon, etc. Natural Selection ‘records’ the strategies that worked in historic environments – in DNA. So … why is protein synthesis different? The system is complex, but that is a different argument.
The photon sees all, knows all, and tells all. Let there be light.
I was amused at his defense of reification. When I accused him of that I assumed he would be embarrassed. Or at least try to deny it.
timothya catches Sal “paraphrasing”, (putting words in someone else’s mouth)
Coyne talks about the *rank of an item in a sorted list* and Sal “paraphrases” it to mean the *quality of the item*.
Since someone from UD seems to read this site, perhaps they’d like to know that the UD home page is non-functional for anyone who is not logged in. It stopped showing new posts a week or so ago.
I imagine that impacts search engines and statistics, including those statistics that affect ad revenue.
Whether this is a mutation or a design feature, I do not know.
You are right. When I go into private browsing in firefox (hides the login cookie), I cannot see anything more recent than Sept 6th.
When I am logged in, I see a Sept 11 post, and a Sept 12 comment as the most recent.
Maybe there’s also a problem for people logged in. It is hard to imagine a whole day without ba77 posting a comment somewhere.
I’ll bet ba77 turns blue if he goes a whole day without spamming somebody.
I thought the dearth of new posts at UD was just because Denyse O’Leary was absent. If they have shut off access to recent posts as a deliberate policy, then it is the end of their site — their readership was none too large to begin with.
Their settings must be quite weird. If I look at “Home” at UD I can’t see any posts later than 9/6, but I do see comments added very recently to those posts. But if I go in through “News Desk” or “Archives” I see the more recent posts. By looking at the September 2012 entry in Archives I get what looks like all posts (I am not logged in and have never established a login account).
It is hard to imagine that anything like this is deliberate (but I’ve thought that about many posts and comments there in the past).
… furthermore it also says in Archives, with what I presume is a straight face, that
… but the list of posts just in the September archives is more than 9 posts! (And fear not, ba77 is not silent, he is dumping massive amounts of stuff, of the usual relevance, into the comments).
Curiouser and curiouser … if I start at UD’s “Home” page and take the latest post it shows (one from September 6), and look at the comments for that post, at the bottom after the comments there is a link to “ID and Indirect Measurements”. Following that I get a September 7 post (and its comments) with a link to the next post at the end of its comments. And so on, to all recent posts.
Is that intelligently designed?
Is Lizzie okay? She’s not bee around for weeks.
There was a comment on UD that noted that people were complaining about this problem (perhaps they saw the complaints here first?). They have now fixed it. So it may have been misconfiguration, not a deliberate policy.
I am certainly missing her input, though I always wondered how she found the time for the sheer quantity of thoughtful comments. It would be great just to hear it’s only pressure of work that is keeping her away.
Elizabeth
If you can spare a second to reassure us and restore discipline that would be great!
I’m afraid in her absence we have gone feral and started doing something she didn’t want to do, and that is become a proxy for comments at UD. I seem to be guilty of suggesting this.
Unfortunately, ID promoters seem to prefer the comfort and security of a site where anyone who disagrees with them can and eventually will be banned.
Because IDists don’t have the ability to censor, edit and modify “evo” comments on TSZ.
That’s why IDists prefer “Creationist” sites like UD.
Joe,
Do radio waves have mass?
I’ve answered so it’s your turn to show some “courage”. 🙂
Something I never thought I’d see, an IDist *asking* Barry to ban him!
Mung, is A = (~A)? 🙂
Joe,
Listen to BA77, and then go read up!
What you really mean is that you’re not sure of your answers and that they’ll hold up to scrutiny, like when BA77 “corrected” you on your “objects get heavier as they accelerate” miss.
Yes, and the car weighs more when the car is warmer.
With all respect to Mung for using the dreaded “w” word, ..right here on Earth, …where it’s applicable.
Photons reaching us from stars will have their trajectories altered by large masses like galaxies.
This observation is consistent with photons having mass.
To get back to your “non-material” designer, just what is he made of?
One thing at a time.
What is the “designer” made of?
How does he have form in a “non-material” universe?
Show some courage Joe and make a stand for your designer even if UB won’t.
I’m confused BA77.
How can we observe gravitational lensing if photons don’t have mass?
But it is the mass of a stellar object acting on another masses, .i.e. photons, that causes what you call, “warping space-time”.
If the photon had no mass, how could it be affected by a large mass?
Why is it that light cannot escape from a black hole with a large enough mass?
He means he can’t call us assfaces at UD.
I’m not sure why he feels the need to ‘pollute’ anywhere with responses, to be honest.
I think BA77 is right. (Did I just say that?!) This is down to the curvature of spacetime by mass. Traditional gravitational interaction involves bodies that each warp spacetime a little, and that mutual warping renders them more likely to move together than in any other direction. But with a huge mass and a photon, all the curvature comes from that mass. The photon travels its shortest path, which is curved – extremely so, in the black hole case.
(Disclaimer: IANAP!)
To understand Ba77’s arguments you must begin with the von Neumann interpretation of quantum mechanics as P1.
What I was objecting about BA77 is this: ” i.e. it is not bent because of any considerations of mass that may be imparted to the light “
The reason a photon’s path is affected by gravity is because the moving, (i.e. not at rest), photon itself has mass and is therefore attracted to a much larger mass like a star, galaxy or black hole.
If a moving photon had no mass of its own, another mass, regardless of its size, would have no affect on its path.
A great analogy is the tablecloth that is “warped” by a baseball showing how mass “warps” space time by changing the path of a golf ball on a tablecloth that now has a well.
What if the golf ball had no mass though?
Is there any reason why it would even sit on top of the tablecloth never mind follow any path?
Toronto,
A photon is a massless particle. It has energy and momentum, but it has no mass.
Mass is defined by the equation
The quantity on the right-hand side is a constant for a given type of particle. For a photon, it is zero. The popular version of this equation refers to the case of zero momentum, so it creates an impression that energy equals mass. That isn’t the case. The energy of a particle can vary, and so can its momentum. The mass, however, is an invariant characteristic, very much like length (a vector can change its x and y components depending on the orientation of the coordinate axes, but the length stays the same).