Peanut Gallery for the Keys/RAZD Debate

Yes, but I think that others just a few IQ points smarter and less arrogant than simple could use an even more step by step approach than even RASD is taking. He can use simple's "rebuttals" as a guide to making it even clearer.Convincing simple isn't possible since he can't/won't read what is supplied.

Not sure why RAZD did not reply directly to Simple here and answer this question, which I thought was a reasonable question (or maybe he did but I missed it earlier on).So I did my own research and found this on a Forest Service sitehttp://www.fs.fed.us/...ase/feis/plants/tree/pinlon/all.htmlFrom this source I find this quote with references to papers to back it up... Emphasis mine. Also, interesting to note that they have retrieved old downed trees with over 5k of countable rings.Doesn't this pretty much flush Simple's arguement right there! Not much reason to move on to other evidence if this one cannot be explained away. If this does not satisfy the most ardent "old earth skeptic" then not much ever would.BTW Simple's arguement of different growing conditions "before the split" with references to scripture detailing trees bearing fruit all twelve months is nonsense. Such conditions would result in tree wood production with *no rings*. I believe there are samples of fossilized wood without tree rings from the Jurassic when the earth was warmer and conditions were such that there were not dominate seasons.

I've been holding off adding more comments to this thread because I haven't been able to make sense out of most of what Simple has been saying. I find RAZD's most recent post to be the culmination of increasingly intemperate comments, though who could blame him. Simple doesn't understand the implications of the concordance of evidence that RAZD has presented and so is blissfully unaware that his position has been shot dead, and so he marches confidently on as if nothing is amiss. Bloody weird to watch.The goal was never to convince Simple. That's probably not possible. The goal was to present the two positions side-by-side so that people find it easy to assess their validity. With the apparent exception of Simple, anyone would have no trouble understanding RAZD's evidence and arguments, whether they agreed with them or not. But other than the part about "Things were different before the flood," I'm not sure even Simple understands what his position is. I don't think he's presented a coherent position, and even those who agree with him about pre-flood conditions would be unable to find any evidence or derive any rationale from what Simple has posted so far.--Percy

One problem that has been continuing as long as simple has been posting here is to get him to specify when the "Split" happened.A second is to get him to provide the Biblical support for any such "Split".As long as he is free to play games with the "Split" there is little point in discussions with him.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Note that the 1974 date is a typo, it should be 1964 (this date is given on other sources). See reference 33, published in 1965. Hard to do that for a 1974 cutting... Information is already covered a couple of times: he just keeps repeating his mistaken impressions. Keeps saying stuff is not given when it is. Keeps mixing up occasional missing rings (as a known source of error in dendrochronology) with the rings missing at the beginning of the Prometheus growth.As Percy notes this kind of denial of reality is frustrating in it's completeness: anything that contradicts his fantasy does not occur in his dream world. He will also flip and flop on position without any concern that what he says contradicts what he said earlier. He is shameless.ThanksEnjoy.

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What a trickster God that simple believes in!He/She creates a universe where trees grow extrodinarly fast just to suddenly stop one day and yet leave evidence exactly the same way they do when they grow slowly.Levels of carbon changing around the globe drastically that all of a sudden slow down to match the evidence.Messing with the constants of the universe to create everything exactly so that it LOOKS old but really is young.Simple's God will even go as far as to create civilizations wholesale that keep time and build huge temples to other Gods all around the world!Even if the world really was 6000 years old and that the way we see things now is because of the effects of "the split", I would not wish to prostrate myself in front of a God who lies, decieves, and tricks us with false appearances. Such a God is more pagan and petty then anything simple could ever want and certainly is beyond even what the God described in the Old Testament can be characterized by.Simple's "godlet" if he/she were actually real deserves our scorn and dismay. And if it upsets him/her that we should refuse to worship a liar, then he/she could simply change reality once more; making disdain and pity into love.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

Yes you did present the data a couple of times (I went and checked), but i think he was looking for the words "countable rings" and was genuinely confused on whether you were relying on the extrapolated missing rings.I just don't know what the point would be to go on any further if Simple is unwilling to accept the documented and unequivocal fact that countable and observable tree rings extend centuries beyond the magical 4400 ya threshold.Tree rings are perhaps the simplest and most straightforward method for counting years past hence; while radiometric dating is something a bit more removed from everyday experience. Since radiometric dating and physical constants are more complex in nature, they therefore provide more rabbit holes for the disingenuous and dishonest to seek refuge and create confusion.I think it is checkmate, no need to chase down every last pawn.

I think it might be worthwhile to the lurkers, to spend some time discussing just how tree rings are counted. It is not just the difference between lighter and darker segments, but also the relative width and the patterns that makes.Trees grow differently each season based on rainfall, temperature, the amount of sunlight and other factors. These create patterns across multiple years, a series of broad wider rings during good years followed by a series of more narrow rings during worse years.These patterns can be matched between trees so that it is possible to correlate the rings from one tree with another, almost like using bar codes.There is also another technique used to correlate the rings between trees, and that is fire scars. When a fire sweeps through an area of forest, it marks all the trees with a fire scar. These fire scars act as a separate and independent method of correlating the tree ring data.All in all, the tree ring data is devastating to the YEC position and another of the many, many, many independent methodologies that conclusively prove there was never a world-wide flood as described in the Bible and that the Earth is far older than 6-10,000 years.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

An approach like what I'm suggesting here would probably be completely lost on simple, but I think it's a great way of explaining dendrochronology to a newcomer.This is a pretty simple operation that shouldn't take more then a few minutes to complete, but demonstrates how you can assemble a much longer chronology from a series of shorter ones, even with errors in the individual segments.- PROBLEM -
Given the following 14 lines of text and knowledge that the top two lines are the start of the quote, assemble the entire sequence.If a civil word or two will render a man happy, he
If a civil word or too will render a
loses nine of its brilliancy by what the other gains.
render a man happy, he must be a wretch indeed who
happy, he must be a wretch indeed who wall
two will render a man hippy, he must
of its brilliancy buy what the other gains.
like lighting another man's candle by one's own, which loses
a civil word or two will render a man happy, he must be a
gave them to him. Such a disposition is lake lighting
man's candle by one's own, which loses none of its brilliancy by what
a wretch indeed who will not give them to him. Such a
not give them to him. Such a disposition is
two him. Such a disposition is like lighting another man's candle

Expanding on my previous problem, you can also show how carbon dating fits into the equation. I would approach it like so.There is an additional property of letters that we have not discussed yet, and that is that each letter has a particular color. Ranging from white to black. We know that whenever we look a letter at the start of a quote it is white, and the further down the quote you go, the darker the letters get.For example:
If a civil word or two will render a man happy, he
Now lets say you find a new scrap of paper with a new segment on it.

render a man happy, he must be a wretch
Now, not only do we have words that match, but the colors match also, giving us a really good idea of where the segment goes in the overall quote.

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Using this info, we can then answer questions like this:
I found a scrap of paper, but it only has 1 letter on it. Where does it go?
Well, if it looks like this: 'a'
we can be pretty sure we know where it goes.

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It's all about the correlating data. I hope this makes some kind of sense.

I think part of the problem is an inability to deal with uncertainties (a common problem for non-scientists). The fact that there may occassionally be missing or multiple rings is interpreted that ring-counting tells us nothing at all. There is an inability to deal with probabilities or fuzzy data. So in his own mind, the critic completely dismisses tree ring evidence, simply because it MIGHT be wrong. (For some, this may be an honest inability to deal with uncertainty; for others, it may just be an excuse.)Maybe trying to communicate the concept of "error bars" or probability distributions would help. (As I recall, Bristlecone Pine and Irish Oak were chosen for dendochronology specifically because they have pronounced annual rings and almost never have multiple rings in a year. I don't know the error bars, but I'm sure they are quite small.) Even though ring-counting MAY be off by a few years, there is essentially no chance that it can be off by hundreds of years.

I'm sure RAZD will address this when he responds to Simple's latest post, Message 56, but in the meantime here's what the article ('Sterile neutrinos' laid to rest - for now) is really saying.A set of experiments performed at Los Alamos between 1993 and 1998 appeared to indicate that muon antineutrinos could flip into electron antineutrinos after traveling about 30 meters. For this to happen would require the existence of something they termed the "sterile neutrino", which doesn't fit the standard model.They dismantled the experiment and set up a more accurate one which detected no such neutrino flipping even after 500 meters. The need for a "sterile neutrino" went away, and the standard model remained intact (for now).Simple's misinterpretation was in thinking that this has anything to do with some neutrinos from the Sun flipping on their way to the earth. The finding that some neutrinos can flip while traveling 93 million miles was never in doubt. This fact had been established by a completely different set of experiments.The lack of sufficient numbers of neutrinos from the sun used to be cited by creationists as indicating that scientists didn't really understand the nuclear processes taking place in the sun. The missing neutrinos were found a few years ago when it was discovered that some of the neutrinos generated by the sun's nuclear processes can flip to a different neutrino type on their way to the earth, and this other neutrino type wasn't one that our instruments were set up to detect. Once we modified the instrumentation, there the missing neutrinos were. And once again, this finding was never cast into doubt by any of the work related to the hypothetical "sterile neutrino".--Percy

I was looking for some cite on this. Wikipedia was not helpful, although it addressed part of the issue. Do you have a link I can use?

RAZD:
Science 22 June 2001: Vol. 292. no. 5525, pp. 2227 - 2229 is online and free.Q. R. Ahmad et al., "Measurement of the Rate of e + d p + p + e- Interactions Produced by 8B Solar Neutrinos at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory," Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 071301 (2001) is the discovery paper and is probably unintelligible to non-particle-physicists.Oh: terrible web design but good summary -
http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/sno/neutrino.htmlEdited by Coragyps, : add link

Thanks. Found enough in wiki for simple.