The origin of everything

I did it.

Oh great! Another IDiot! Their only answer is "God did it" (pronounced "goddidit!" in a single syllable). The only variation is that when God is an IDiot, then he says "I did it."

 
In the late 70's PBS aired the series, I, Claudius, in which Patrick Stewart played a curly-haired Sejanus (it took us a while to figure out where we had seen CAPT Picard before) and John Hurt played Caligula.

After recovering from his brain-fever illness, Caligula believed himself to be a literal living god, none other than Jupiter! His dialogue would be peppered with exclamations of "By Jove! ... which of course is to say, by myself." Not unlike Mel Brook's running joke of Hitler's response to "Heil Hitler!" being "Heil myself!"

Back in times BC (Before COVID) a popular OLLI lecture class was a retired judge presenting the history of the Roman emperors. In his slides he used a lot of graphics from "I, Claudius."

Welcome to EvC, "Real God." Lest we get out of line, I shall, if I may, refer to you as The All-Smitey. (Long i sound)

It would sound much more old-folksy as "Old Smitey."

How many times have people here at EvC pointed out that unexplained stuff gets put in the "UNEXPLAINED" box.

AKA the to-do list!

Question: What's the difference between science and "goddidit"? Science has a to-do list.

There's no need to be "careful" about leaving "god stuff" out of any explanation, since there has never been an explanation that needed "god stuff." Not once.

Why not try to evaluate the "god stuff" of an explanation for how anything in this physical universe works? For example:

1. Perform the same experiment or procedure multiple times, half of them with and the other half without adding "god stuff."

2. Compare the results of both batches for patterns looking for any evidence of statistically significant difference between their results:
   1. First, note that there will always be some variation in experimental results ("noise"), so we need to employ statistical analysis on multiple performances of that experiment to detect a meaningful difference ("signal"). Such a detection of "signal" would be a statistically significant difference.

      And for non-scientists and non-engineers here: a basic task in experiments and tests is to determine whether something you find is statistically significant, basically winnowing the kernels of "signal" from the mountains of chaff "noise".

   2. If there is a statistically significant difference then that would indicate that that "god stuff" had an effect.

   3. If there is no statistically significant difference then that would indicate that that "god stuff" had no effect.
      
   
   
3. Conduct that experiment multiple times, preferably with multiple independent teams, for more data to feed your statistical analysis. Also branch out by applying this test to other experiments/procedures/tests.

4. A variation would be to take an experiment that was constructed to include "god stuff" from the beginning, then remove that "god stuff" and see if that new lack of "god stuff" affects the results in any way.
   

In the end, I predict that you will find that including "god stuff" does nothing signficant: adding "god stuff" or omitting "god stuff" has no effect.

Mathematically, we are working with some function (f()) which does not include any "god stuff" and to which we can add some "god stuff" (g()):

y = f(x₁,x₂,x₃, ... x_n)

y₁ = f(x₁,x₂,x₃, ... x_n) + g()

y₁ == y

Therefore: g() == zero -- AKA NULL

Adding "god stuff" or leaving it out has no effect. Starting your car has no difference whether you say certain prayers or not, whether you are Protestant, "true Christian", Muslim, Catholic, Mormon, Hindu, Buddhist, pagan, atheist, whatever. In TOS Spock was once given the line: "A difference which makes no difference is no difference." Science and the Universe works the same and completely independent of our religious beliefs.

Though an interesting side-effect is that those who insist that "god stuff" must be added to science et al. are effectively demonstrating that "god stuff" is insignificant and basically zero, such that adding or deleting it has exactly the same effect: none whatsoever.

Thus they prove that God is meaningless. Apologist, meet petard; now hoist!

Edited by dwise1, : slight notational cleanup

Edited by dwise1, : Changed "removing 'god stuff'" to "omitting", since that's the actual issue: Do we add "God" to science et al. or continue to not include such extraneous and superfluous "factors"?

Poe-try.

POE try this. POE try that.

I reference the U.S. eastern time zone, and so should everybody else.

Silly ethnocentric, don't you know that NYC (and the eastern seaboard along with it) is not the center of the world?

 
The International Time Bureau (BIH, "Bureau International de l'Heure") establishes and maintains Universal Time (UT) from which we derive the international time standard, Coordinated Universal Time ("Temps Universel Coordonné", UTC (so that neither the French nor the Americans could get their way -- "Fine! Neither of you can be happy!") ).

Like its predecessor, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), UTC is tied to the IERS Reference Meridian (IERS = "International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service" which retained its legacy abbreviation from its previous name, "International Earth Rotation Service"), which is associated with the traditional Prime Meridian (Greenwich) -- though differing by a 5.3 arcsecond offset due to local gravity. My work exposed me to all that; it seems that precise time keeping is never simple, especially as maintained by BIH, National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST), and US Naval Observatory (USNO) (AKA "The Time Lords"). My work with GPS-based time keeping brought me into contact with all that.

The time zone for UTC is Z (pronounced "Zulu") which has a UTC offset of zero (0). The US eastern time zone is R with offset of -5 and the US Pacific time zone is U with an offset of -8. When referencing UTC time, you give it as Zulu (eg, To convert from Z to U it's PST = Z - 8 and to convert from U to Z it's Z = PST + 8. Hence 0518U is 1300Z.

To my knowledge all US military message traffic keeps its timestamps in Zulu, thus eliminating ambiguity and the need for time zone conversions (an entire Navy course, NAVEDTRA 14252) in correlating reports.

The issue complicated by Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the US and Summer Time in Europe. When either is in effect (during a range of dates centering on the Northern Hemisphere's summer season), an hour is added to the local standard time (or two hours during "Double Summer Time"). Therefore, during DST the UTC offset for Pacific DS Time (PDT -- U+1) changes from -8 to -7 and for Eastern DS Time (EDT -- R+1) changes from -5 to -4. NOTE: DST never changes Zulu Time!

This year, DST went into effect on 13 Mar 2022 and Summer Time two weeks later on 27 Mar 2022. Therefore, both were in effect on 01 April 2022.

 
My own time stamp for Message 1 read "01-Apr-2022 5:46 PM", that being 1746 PDT (2022APR011746U -- I'm not sure how to indicate DST being in effect) which in reality was 0046Z of the next day (2022APR020046Z). You being stuck in the eastern time zone, your time stamp should read (assuming you use proper date format and not something weird like mm/dd/yy) "01-Apr-2022 8:46 PM", that being 2046 EDT of 01 Apr (2022APR012046R).

However, Tangle is in the UK, in Time Zone Z (UTC offset +0) but with Summer Time in effect which adds one hour to UTC giving him a local standard time of 0146. Thus the timestamp for your OP (Message 1) should read on Tangle's screen as 02-Apr-2022 1:46 AM (also note that dates in the UK are normal and not turned around).

Therefore, your OP was posted on 02 April for our members in the UK. QED

 
Simple.

On the subject of bad moves:

quote:

---

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

---

 
"I never could get the hang of Thursdays." -- Dent, Arthur Dent

Trump = Vogon???

When it comes to bureaucracy, not even close. Trump is as completely and utterly incompetent as anyone could possibly be. Trump would dismiss the Deep State without a thought, without any hint of the ability to comprehend it, whereas the Vogons are the Deep State.

But when it comes to poetry ... . Trump's poetry could very well be far worse than Vogon poetry, so he might be able give the Vogons a run for their money there. Not that either Vogons or Trump would ever do any kind of running.

I might be willing to pay to be present for the moment when, while Trump is reading his latest poem out loud, his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaps straight up through his neck and throttles his brain.

Edited by dwise1, : "without any hint of the ability to comprehend it"