Earth's magnetic field 'boosts gravity'

Hi Ted.

There is no stated rule on FR against "spamming", nor any rule stating the maximum size of a post or the max times somebody can post the same thing.

However, continuing to post a thing after being asked not to by the moderators, is galactically stupid. Very stupid move, Ted. You should have known what was coming, and you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Say hi to Ted, everyone...

You would know, wouldn't you?

Man, you talk just like ol' Ted -- same syntax, same word choice, same insults. Do you do any other impersonations?

Reversing cause and effect there, aren't you ~~medved~~ piltdownpig? Those links are related to creationist misquotes and were posted in response to your deleted 193 on that thread, a quote spam so big that no light could escape from it. Rumor has it that the AM deleted it at once but the job took an hour and twenty minutes to run.

I don't know who, if anyone, hit "Abuse" on you. It wasn't me. My posts in response make less sense with your monster gone.

BTW, when are you ever going to get rid of Colin Patterson, John Woodromappe, and Heribert Nilsson for gosh sakes?

Hidden extra dimensions are causing measurements of the strength of gravity at different locations on Earth to be affected by the planet's magnetic field, French researchers say.

I suspect this has something to do with making my wife's butt look fat in jeans.

Not that her butt looks fat to me, no siree, it's the same size as when we married 25 years ago. Yep, she looks just fine in those jeans. In fact I think the French had something to do with that initial comment.

I have no problem with a little extra cushioning on the seat in a lady, either. Makes her gravitationally attractive.

The same butt that appears "fat" to a woman appears "perfect" to a man. Thus is the concept of "relativity" demonstrated.

You know who Medved was on these threads? You only signed up last Saturday. What a diligent researcher you must be!

You know who Medved was on these threads? You only signed up last Saturday. What a diligent researcher you must be!

Actually, his psychic parrott told him.

I thought Medved was a psychic parrot. It would explain the repetitive nature of his posts.

Thus is the concept of "relativity" demonstrated.

Or it may seem that way to you. ;)

Whether or not I'd say anything certainly depends on the relative.

I've just started it, great read.

John Woodromappe

John Woodmorappe. I keep making that spoonerism.

Review by Richard Milton
When, a dozen years ago, I first published my view that Darwinism is scientifically flawed, I immediately encountered a kind of opponent who was to become very familiar to me over the next decade. I mean the kind who (quite sincerely) believes that anyone who challenges the conventional Darwinist view must be someone who is simply ignorant of the scientific facts. Such an opponent thus sets out to cure the ignorance he meets by the simple expedient of rehashing over and over again the tenets of the received wisdom, as found in the pages of Nature and Scientific American.

These guardians of Darwinian truth find it literally impossible to believe that anyone could actually have conducted some research and analysis that has led them to conclude rationally that Darwinism is scientifically flawed and think that -- like an Englishman abroad -- if only they shout a little louder, the dimwit foreigner might finally get the Darwinist message.

Michael Brass is such an upholder of the received wisdom on Darwinism, and his book, The Antiquity of Man, is just such a rehashing of that received wisdom. There is nothing new here. No new facts, no new scientific discoveries, not even a new interpretation or new analysis, merely the repetition of all the same old stuff that anyone who has ever spent time in a dentist's waiting room, leafing through old copies of National Geographic, is already thoroughly familiar with.

But in his book, Brass is not merely sounding off about anti-Darwinists in general -- he has some specific targets in his sights. From the outset he attacks scientific creationists for their views and he singles out the book 'Forbidden Archaeology' by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson.

As I'm not a creationist, and I don't have any religious beliefs, I don't intend to try to speak for Cremo, Thompson or anyone else, and I'm sure they are well able to look after themselves. But I am concerned, as a secular critic of the scientific content of Darwinism, that writers like Brass are getting away with obscuring the real scientific issues under the guise of 'debunking' what they pretend is merely 'creationist propaganda', a pretext that enables them to continue to dodge engaging in real scientific debate.

I've read Cremo and Thomson's book. I didn't find any religious propaganda or creationist messages, but I did find a mountain of carefully compiled scientific observations and reports that uniformly tend to undermine the conventional view that people like Brass hold so tightly and are unwilling even to debate openly and honestly. Certainly there are a few geological and palaeontological observations in Forbidden Archaeology that I found weak or questionable. That is hardly surprising since the book is 1000 pages long and contains thousands of references.

What a book like Forbidden Archaeology shows, in my view, is that if even a half (or even a tenth) of the objections raised by its authors are valid scientific objections, then Darwinism is a theory that is in deep, irremediable trouble. And the best that Brass can do in the way of rebuttal is to question a handful of their cases as unproven or badly chosen. His preferred method of rebuttal in almost all cases is that described earlier: he simply recites again, more loudly, the accepted Darwinist view.

We get an early glimpse of Brass's fundamentalist stance on the evidence claimed to support Darwinism such as dating of fossils. On page 38 he presents a table of two kinds of fossil dating. He labels the first as 'relative dating' and the second, radiometric dating by the potassium-argon method, he calls 'absolute dating'. Now, as his degrees are in history and archaeology, it is perfectly possible that Brass is completely unaware of the important scientific error he is making in describing radiometric dating of fossils as 'absolute' dating, and is merely taking it on trust from his physicist colleagues that his belief is correct -- as most scientists do. But the fact remains that the words 'absolute dating' can never be used in connection with the radiometric dating of fossils of any kind. (For background to dating fossils, see 'Shattering the myths of Darwinism' chapters 3, 4, and 5.)

To be fair, I should add that Brass is far from being the only professional scientist who is confused about this question. Most Darwinists are. Even Gavin de Beer, director of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote in the museum's Guide to Evolution, first published in 1970, that the rocks forming the geological column and the fossils in them had been directly dated by radiometric methods -- a claim which is scientific nonsense and based solely on ignorance of the real facts.

In the same passage, Brass tries to make his claims for the potassium-argon method seem credible by pointing out that '0.01% of all natural potassium is radiopotassium.' To the uninitiated, this rarity must make the method seem special. But Brass forgets to mention that the substance this radioactive potassium turns into, the end product that is measured, is argon-40. Argon is the twelfth most abundant element on earth, and more than 99 per cent of it is argon-40. And there is no physical or chemical way to tell whether a given sample of argon-40 is the residue of radioactive potassium or was present in the rocks when they formed.

There are many other places where Brass shows he has swallowed Darwinist urban scientific myths hook, line and sinker. On the very first page of his introduction he repeats the commonly-made claim that Darwinian evolution is supported by observed speciation, when the true scientific facts are that there is not a single real case of observed Darwinian speciation (the cases listed in the talk-origin "FAQ" being entirely bogus [more information available here]).

Whenever he encounters scientific evidence that he is unable to rebut, Brass appeals to authorities who, in his mind, are so grand as to be unimpeachable. Yet these 'authorities' and their words often turn out on closer inspection to have no more substance than Brass himself.

For example, the work of zoologist Solly Zuckermann, has long been a thorn in the side of Darwinists because Zuckermann conducted a study which concluded that Australopithecines (like 'Lucy') were predominantly ape-like and not human-like creatures and thus not ancestral to humans. Brass dismisses the work of Zuckermann, one of Britain's most distinguished zoologists, by reference to a quote from Jim Foley. Who is Jim Foley? He is the author of the talk-origins "FAQ" on human origins, which is as badly-researched and bogus as the rest of the talk-origins "FAQs" [more information available here].

In writing this book, Michael Brass has put on his arms and armour, chosen a cause about which he feels passionately, selected a battleground and engaged those he perceives as the enemies of science. Unfortunately, his armour doesn't fit him, his weapons are blunt, his passionate cause is already lost and, worst of all, he has chosen the wrong battle. For instead of attacking the real enemies of science -- the brain-dead pedlars of urban scientific myths -- he is attacking the few people who are making an honest attempt to question a theory that is long past its sell-by date.

This book is designed to bring aid and comfort to the excrement-hurling howler monkeys that infest Internet groups such as talk-origins, by reaffirming once more the oft-told Darwinist tale of human origins. It does not advance the cause of scientific investigation nor, despite its title, does it shed any light on the antiquity of mankind.

Richard Milton is the author of Shattering the Myths of Darwinism and 'Alternative Science'.

The book... review!