Virtual Ignore is your friend!
Posted on 07/24/2003 1:55:39 PM PDT by Mr.Atos
I was just lisening to Medved debating Creationism with Athiests on the air. I found it interesting that while Medved argued his side quite effectively from the standpoint of faith, his opponents resorted to condescension and beliitled him with statements like, "when it rains, is that God crying?" I was reminded of the best (at least most amusing)debate that I have ever heard on the subject of Creationism vs Evolution, albeit a fictional setting. It occurred on the show, Friends of all places between the characters Pheobe (The Hippy) and Ross (The Paleontologist). It went like this...
Pheebs: Okay...it's very faint, but I can still sense him in the building...GO INTO THE LIGHT MR. HECKLES!!
Ross: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What, uh, you don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: Nah. Not really. Ross: You don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: I don't know. It's just, ya know, monkeys, Darwin, ya know, it's a, it's a nice story. I just think it's a little too easy.
Ross: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact. Like, like, the air we breathe, like gravity... Pheebs: Uh, okay, don't get me started on gravity.
Ross: You uh, you don't believe in gravity? Pheebs: Well, it's not so much that ya know, like I don't *believe* in it, ya know. It's just...I don't know. Lately I get the feeling that I'm not so much being pulled down, as I am being pushed.
Ross: How can you NOT BELIEVE in evolution? Pheebs: [shrugs] I unh-huh...Look at this funky shirt!!
Ross: Well, there ya go. Pheebs: Huh. So now, the REAL question is: who put those fossils there, and why...?
Ross: OPPOSABLE THUMBS!! Without evolution, how do YOU explain OPPOSABLE THUMBS?!? Pheebs: Maybe the overlords needed them to steer their spacecrafts!
Pheebs: Uh-oh! Scary Scientist Man!
Pheebs: Okay, Ross? Could you just open your mind like, *this* much?? Okay? Now wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the Earth was flat? And up until what, like, fifty years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess o' crap came out! Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?!?
Pheebs: I can't believe you caved. Ross: What? Pheebs: You just ABANDONED your whole belief system! I mean, before, I didn't agree with you, but at least I respected you. Ross: But uh.. Pheebs: Yeah...how...how are you gonna go in to work tomorrow? How...how are you gonna face the other science guys? How...how are you gonna face yourself? Oh! [Ross runs away dejected] Pheebs: That was fun. So who's hungry?
Just in general, when you orbit the earth, your orbit is either in the plane of the ecliptic or has to cross the plane of the ecliptic. You're orbiting the earth's center of mass. The center of mass must by Kepler's (pick one from "First," "Second," or "Third") Law be at one of the foci of your ellipse and thus in the plane of the orbit.
Same problem if the center of the orbit is the sun. You're still in the plane of the ecliptic or crossing it. The center of mass about which you are orbiting is going to be in the plane of your orbit. There's no stable orbit about Earth or sun which tracks the earth and hovers over one pole.
If the closest clause in the FR forum rules you can find isn't all that close, you're wrong.
Now it seems pretty clear to me from the above that one should not post private e-mail.
"... Addresses."
That's what it says. Don't post people's private email addresses without permission.
Now, if we're buddies and--never mind the medium--you confide something to me that could be harmful to you, only to have me blab it all over town, I've betrayed a confidence.
If my dog dies, and you send me note gloating that you poisoned him, only to have me show said note to the police and all the neighbors, you were indiscreet.
GOTCHA!
We also used Newtonian dynamics to get to the Moon, notwithstanding that Newtonian dynamics was known at the time to be wrong! (I assume the computers then weren't powerful enough to do the relativistic calculations, and it wasn't necessary from a practical standpoint anyway.)
As Alamo-Girl will tell you, having read Popper, no number of confirmations or verifications of a theory will "prove" the theory -- that is establish it to be necessarily true. It is always possible that there is some other theory (possibly one that no one has thought up yet) which will will pass all those same verifications, as well as additional tests that the existing theory will fail to pass. What's more, that new, more successful theory has exactly the same status. It too stands to be falsified, or surpassed by some better theory.
Even if we did manage to formulate some theory that was completely true, there is no way we could know that.
We can "prove" things in mathematics and geometry (establish them to be necessarily true) precisely because we (humans) establish or define all the formalisms of the system, or because we know all the rules of the system, or because they follow the laws of logic, or the very same rules of inference that are used in formulating the proof.
We can only "prove" scientific theories if we know in advance all the formalisms of nature, but of course we do not know this. It is precisely to discover and investigate the formalisms or rules of nature that we create theories.
Here is my memory:
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"For what it's worth, I'm willing to sign on to this. If it works, great. If it fails, it's been worth the effort."
134 posted on 07/31/2003 11:46 AM PDT by PatrickHenry (Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.)
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"A-Girl, your newest draft is great. And I agree with jenny's most recent comments. Where do I sign?
369 posted on 08/03/2003 4:00 AM PDT by PatrickHenry (Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.)
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The 'troll' provision came later, as you said. But you were clearly acceptable prior.
My point is that from the outside, someone could just as easily see you as being devisive in your requirement for that provision, just as easily as you blame others who did the same from the other side.
It's all a matter of perspective.
Hummm, just change that to "car".
Dunno. "May the 'signal signifying a carrier car' poop on your head" just doesn't seem to have the right ring to it.
Other information Vade. People send personal mails because they do not want to make the contents public. It's pretty simple and we do not need to turn this matter into a thread, we just need to not do it again.
But once you send it, it's a matter of the recipient's discretion, not forum rules, what happens from there. This is the normal understanding and you'd better know this before you hit "send."
While Popper may have said some interesting things about science, I do not consider him the final answer on everything. While I like Popper's political views, I do not like or agree with his overall skepticism. To say that we really cannot know anything is silly. If we do not 'know' anything we would not be able to function. To me it is a denial of life. Even Hume, who really wanted to deny that anything was provable, did not dare go so far as to deny that science could not prove anything.
Further, I am not talking about theories, I am talking about facts. Scientists do not sit around thinking up stuff. They spend their time proving or disproving things by experimentation, observation, and any other way which can help them determine the truth of a situation. They often spend a large part of their lives trying to prove how something works. The Law of Gravity has not been disproven, the atom bomb proves E=Mc2, and there are thousands proofs out there to scientific statements. Are the theories behind bridge building fairy tales? If you think so then perhaps you should not ever cross a bridge. After all who wants to risk their life on a fairy tale?
Sorry but I cannot let you lawyer this. Private communications are private. The rule at FR clearly says that, logic clearly says that and I think ethics clearly says that also. If one wants to disclose something from a private communication one should ask the person for permission to do so first.
There's no law of nature that says all the truly vital issues have to be on the table from the beginning. It's not unusual for something to come up in the middle of negotiations, or right at the end, which hadn't been thought of earlier, and suddenly the parties realize that this new item really important. That's what happened in the case of "troll-calling." If you want to look at it your way, that's up to you.
Do you remember the post I made to you about the difference between Newton's Law of Gravity and Gravitational Theory?
Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation has a few problems. These were accounted for by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Just one of the problems with Newton's law is that it assumed that the gravitational attraction was an instantaneous force.
Geostationary. :-)
A geosynchronous orbit need not be over the equator.
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