Peanut Gallery

Aw, come on. You liked that.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Why is my neighbor's new car Red? Because he likes that color, not because the paint used on the car makes my retinas perceive the car as colored Red. What my retinas do with the pigment of the paint on his car is a description of how things happen.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Of course I agree they are in common parlance, and I agree with Straggler they often are interchanged in casual parlance within the scientific community.But in this forum, given the types of people we get who argue from the creo side, I think it is best to stick to the actual difference in a formal way on a consistent basis, so as to avoid self-inflicted pitfalls with those types of debaters at a later date.In other words, we should be as precise as we can.So that is the why of it.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Sorry - here & I thought I was being pretty clear.Perhaps you can go into more detail over what it is that you seek from me, since I must have goofed and thought a simple example of an emotional reason being different from a boring scientific description would do. Ok:Think of a parent's lament "Why didn't God save my child?" "Why" seeks to find the intent behind things. The scientific "How" doesn't care about intent behind things, in fact any efforts to divine intent are usually overwhelmingly minimized during the investigation.For example, the issue of survival of the fittest organism is easy prey to this sloppy convolving of these 2 terms. That is how we get the whole incorrect notion that some organisms are better or "more highly evolved" or superior to other organisms, as if there was a progression from lesser to better species. There is no such thing. There is no such thing as "forward evolution" or "backward evolution". There is no preferred direction before the population is exposed. Organisms flourish or go extinct according to the cold, uncaring calculus of their ability to procreate future generations. Nature sheds no tears when a species goes extinct. There is no "why" of a species going extinct ("God musta got really pissed off at the Dodo, man!"), there is only the "how" of it happening. And this shows why I think we should be as precise & careful as we can in this forum.A small secretary's desk of furniture for Straggler:For me, one of the absolute worst folksongs is the one about the Unicorn. I hate it when I get roped into a group sing-along of that song. But I guess, for me, it's more of the anger of perpetuating the silliness of the Noah's Ark myth than the smarmy attempts to anthropomorphize the "why" of the Unicorn getting left behind.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

I wasn't confused. But, yes. Nice summation.I DO think it is important to stick to a known and established terminology in this forum. Especially when taking on the likes of some of these posters here, like RAZD. The word "why" should be avoided in our dissertations & ruminations, unless it cannot be avoided.

I think you meant pedanticalitudelinessificationisms.Maybe here is the soul of wit you seek from that RAZZleDAZZle: Consider trying to deal with that sad broken person, Dawn Bertot. We must be precise, no?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Can arachnophilia make even a little lightbulb go off in Dawn's head? Place your bets, ladies & gentlemen.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

...and now, in Message 426, Dawn is reduced to running around with his fingers jammed into his ears, yelling "La la la la la, I cannot hear you."It's really sad that such a broken brain has reached this far...It's as if Dawn's "World of Logic" is something like:GOD is all-powerful and all-knowing.
Therefore everything GOD says is TRUE.EVERYTHING in Dawn's Bible was written by GOD through the admittedly imperfect instruments of the various prophets through the ages. But it was essentially written by GOD in every word and therefore everything in Dawn's Bible is TRUE.Isaiah's OT story of the Assyrian future is TRUE as is Matthew's NT distortion of it. They are BOTH TRUE. 2 is less than 3 and 3 is less than 2. If it seems to be contradictory, it is only because human beings are imperfect at understanding the Word of GOD.This is what Logic to Dawn must mean. Consider the little bit about "Logos (Logic)". arachnophilia kindly makes a correction, "Word". In Dawn's little tiny misshapen world, they are the same thing. Logic == the Word of GOD, because "the Word is GOD", if I can paraphrase Charlton Heston.When confronted with an argument that the statement "3 is less than 2" is False, in Dawn's mind this is an ignorant thing to say. It goes against Logic. There is no evidence that that statement is False because Dawn's Bible does not says it's False anywhere.If it's in Dawn's Bible, it is the Word of God and therefore it is TRUE.
If it's not in Dawn's Bible, then it is not the Word of God and therefore it is FALSE.La la la la la indeed.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

arachnophilia in Message 562, responding to Dawn, makes another funny satire of Dawn's writing abilities:

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

My dear Panda:I'm afraid you may not have been looking at the RAZD line correctly. As you know, this whole impetus has had nothing to do with whether or not any imaginable supernatural beings or events are scientifically supported by objective evidence. Not a single off the cuff concoction by Straggler or bluegenes is addressing the issue. They are all arrows lost in the woods while the game is still out afoot in the open fields.No - it is instead about whether or not you can provide objective scientific evidence that various obvious entities, which have already been assigned to the category of made-up supernatural entities, have actually *been* made up. How were they made up? Science does not seek to find out Why, but rather How.We may agree, at the outset, that various obviously FICTIONAL supernatural beings are made up, such as Mighty Mouse or Superman.This has something to do with them, tangentially, and they certainly would have been an even easier opening volley to bluegenes. RAZD thought* he was was throwing up a softball of 9 inches in diameter that the IPU was fictional. Suppose, just for a moment that he had instead thrown up the challenge to show evidence that Jesus H. Christ himself was a fictional entity? The problem with immediately going to this step is that a lot of emotional baggage will get in the way of establishing procedures for scientific investigation to be used out in the field. Science is about collecting data. Data is meticulously collected by scientific constantly recalibrated measuring equipment. Data is not collected in a comfortable armchair with a good cigar and glass of cognac, using virtually impeccable logic. What would be the proper measuring equipment here?* OK - moving on to the IPU...and this is the Asterisk (a French comic character my brother RAZD is fond of)...for RAZD to pick the IPU in the beginning of their Great Debate was a bad trick (note that the use of the word "trick" is not meant to be a LIE or DECEPTION, but is instead here, of course, more like "a facilitating move", and, yes, i am talking about Climategate).Ah, but see? RAZD could not throw up the 2 foot diameter softball of Superman - no, no - he had to resurrect the infamous IPU. The infamous IPU that this forum has already spent so much time on.... Still should be easy to show the procedural "how" of it being made up, no? LOL clever. Indeed the other meaning of "trick" comes to mind!What is RAZD trying to do here? From my vantage point, it is simply this: he is trying to establish a baseline or rubric of the kind of scientific data analysis that you would start with. Measure the How. Can you demonstrate that Superman does not exist? Well, yeah - he is a fictional character, here are the guys that invented him, blah-de-blah. There are some in this group who want to argue from the Other Side - i.e. no one has ever seen Superman....His ability to fly violates all manner of physical rules....Again, none of his numerous superpowers have never been observed by the history of time....And again, the laws of today would make the odds on someone like him to actually exist so minuscule that we are best advised to believe that he does not exist. Compare that approach to these facts: He was made up by the guys who sold their idea the DC Comics. Boom, case closed.He might have started out with Superman, which is even more of a mickey-mouse (Hey him too) task for Bluegenes. Or The Flying Spaghetti Monster. No - he didn't start out that way - no, he started out only in the kind hopes that bluegenes would quickly realize that he had misstated his "theory". A bad trick of the trade, only because everybody in the world here immediately started talking about something completely else ("You have shown *NOTHING* to falsify his theory yet!!").RAZD was merely trying to establish the direct way we have of determining whether something is made up or not. It was about determining the methodology we would all agree upon to test bluegenes' theory. Remember, it was bluegenes who proposed the theory, not some RAZD who proposed the anti-theory!Superman was made up. "objective evidence showing authorship"
The FSM was made up. "objective evidence mentioned many posts before somewhere in this thread".The point of this approach was to quickly get to the point that - on a philosophical basis, using analysis such as described by Straggler and, obliquely, by Modulous - the problem with some of these very old things that may have been morphed up into phantasmagorical exaggerations is that, in the end, all of these discussions reduce down to the issue of the Ace of Spades being buried in a huge N-sized deck and we have drawn 8 gazillion cards so far and the experts among us are ready to conclude that no Ace of Spades is in the entire deck. Yet it might still be in there. Actually, I believe I later refined that to replace "the Ace of Spades" with the term "a card that does not belong in the deck". And this would lead to openings for the same kind of arguments. We all would readily accept that the Ace of Spades "belongs" in the deck. What would a card that "does not belong" in the deck look like? How would we go about describing it? Onifre has raised this issue many, many times in many threads. What would it look like? What is it? But...this is a distraction from the original point: We have drawn 8 gazillion cards so far and have yet to draw X, where X was originally the Ace of Spades, just to get you familiar with the idea, then became this weird thing, "a card that does not belong in the deck". 8 gazillion is a huge number and using probability theory akin to the way they use it to calculate Mean Time Between Failure, they can start bracketing the preliminary results with error bars and confidence levels of enormous unlikelyhood.But unlikely does not equal never. Certainly bluegenes was not asserting "never" at the truth, but he was saying that the unlikelyhood evidence he had seen was sufficient enough to propose his theory.bluegenes has a theory that has yet to be falsified, but it could be.
Of course. ButRAZD was not looking for a way to falsify the theory yet.He only wanted to see a specific example of the SUCCESS of the theory. bluegenes provided some examples, yes, but RAZD wanted bluegenes to address the IPU question specifically. Modulous was very eloquent in explaining why RAZD didn't have the right to pose that question.However! Yet I am still coming to my brother's defense because it still seems like it would eventually, inexorably, become a valid question, so let's cut to the chase, and also I'm coming to his defense because hardly anyone else understood the question he was asking in its proper context, and that goes quadruple for bluegenes and quintuple for Staggler.There was instead a lot of text pushed out on these two discussion group threads that had absolutely nothing to do with what he wanted to discuss.So then he finds himself besieged by these woodland arrows and makes some replies to those, both here and in the Great Debate thread. But, jeez, he would sure like to get back to Square 1 and get an agreement on the initial parameters of this "theory".A huge amount of progress could have been made had bluegenes just said "...IPU? - naw, no I cannot give you any of the kind of evidence you seek. I can't get any funding for that kind of shit from Washington yet."What's wrong with admitting that? It would make my brother's opening volley look a tad more foolish as it should be. Instead bluegenes comes up with a Republican evasion. tsk tsk tsk.But make no mistake - when RAZD is getting raked over the coals on a difficult misunderstanding of the general forum's part - i stand body & self-awareness entity animal, that shouldn't be "murdered" and "aborted", right next to him . . . as I hope I always have.Indeed, I feel that most of the EvC members are leaping to conclusions about my brother and are sometimes jumping over themselves to say what they already had pre-formulated in their minds about him before they read the post they were replying to.And to the EvC members at large, in the words I so dearly wish Gabby Giffords could say some day soon to the horribly mentally mangled Loughner behind bars, eye to eye:"You missed."

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Coyote finally words it: DUH!To establish the means by which the scientific specialists at hand can determine whether something is made up or not!It is a call for CLARIFICATION from the vault of bluegenes.It will not be forthcoming.He has a no truly scientific theory. He has no peer-reviewed reams of data printouts. He has no descriptions of the equipment he uses and how he calibrated it to remove bias.He has no theory.There was a movie, DOA, which stood for Dead On Arrival.Come on. We can do better than bluegenes did. I know we can.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

I've been enjoying your posts in EvC and was only trying to be polite...sorry you took it in a negative way. First off, it was bluegenes that proposed the theory. He is the one who should be addressing questions. What was wrong with the IPU?
And, anyway, does Pinhead have any supernatural powers or characteristics? Now his friend, Toad - a talking human-sized toad? Now that's supernatural.... This is in order to eliminate on-the-spot concoctions by Straggler & bluegenes of supernatural entities with tailored properties. RAZD was sort of hoping that bluegenes' "theory" would address supernatural beings that were believed in by more than 1 human being, because the set of all possible supernatural beings created by human armchair imagination is huge and increasing every time Straggler or bluegenes invents another, and they are not relevent to the importance of the "theory". They do not support the theory. They are a waste of time. We know we can imagine supernatural beings. We can do that all day. That's not what the theory asserted.If bluegenes only wants to talk about supernatural entities that he or Straggler can make up on the spot, then he can go ahead and do that, but I doubt anyone will care about it. None of those entities will address the "strength" of his "theory". He is a cartoon character invented by Bill Griffy with a skull drawn to exaggerate his pinheadedness, a huge jaw line to give us the impression that he isn't intelligent, and a preposterous mumu to further emphasize his outlandishness. This is a caricature. Very few characters in his strip are drawn without caricature, the way they are drawn in, say, the soap-opera comics, like Rex Morgan or Belle Starr, where, among other things, supernatural beings are not in the plot lines. If we cannot ask bluegenes to provide evidence that certain supernatural beings of our choice are made up, but instead can only look at his list he has accumulated so far, then he is not ready to publish.For example, we cannot yet ask: The theory that all supernatural beings are figments of human imagination is a pretty extraordinary claim. Millions of otherwise sane humans believe in Jesus, for example. Millions believe in Mohammad. Millions believe in Buddha. And so on...let's get to the Big Guns of the supernatural world. No one now seriously believes in Thor anymore. bluegenes made an extraordinary claim. What is it - ~90% of the humans in the whole world believe in a God of some kind?If his theory never addresses the Big Guns, what good is it? If it never even addresses certain Small Guns believed by many? The theory is essentially saying that ~90% of world population is Wrong. While I might agree with that personally, I wouldn't propose it as a scientific theory just yet.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Thank you, Modulous. Indeed, my caricature of bluegenes' theory wasn't on target. Evidence of a source being an actual source is the crux of the issue, I think.Of course we can't get into the Big Guns of the supernatural world yet, because the sources we have for them are imperfect and incomplete and thus not really "known".This will diminish the relative importance of the proposed theory in my eyes, of course.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Oni -Did you see RAZD's Yucatan Meteor Extinction example? No human being experienced it. No human being imagined it.So a third way is by scientific analysis of the evidence.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Succinctly, in a word, YES!!!To add a few more words, yes, you are wrong to ask that.It was bluegenes who stated his proposed theory. RAZD did not propose a theory in this Great Debate. bluegenes did. It is the responsibility of the person(s) proposing the theory to provide supporting scientific peer-reviewed objective evidence for his or her or their conclusion(s).He has to provide evidence that every single scientifically known source of supernatural beings is from human imagination.RAZD has to do *NOTHING* you speak of.Stop asking RAZD to do something he doesn't have to do. Address instead the points he is making about his view that bluegenes has not provided peer-reviewed evidence yet.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d