How is that an issue? With collision model isotope ratios in Earth and Moon SHOULD be the same - they started out as one body.
]]>OK, OK, one body and a time machine if you're going to get creative.
Anyway, it's not my hypothesis.
]]>(I get the dead tree version anyway.)
]]>Anyway, totally different subject. Since there's not a crib sheet for Charlie's A Colder War (sorry, I don't know if the online copies are pirated or approved, so no link here), I thought it worth posting here.
Anyway, great news: There's lots of life in Lake Vostok. For those who don't know, that's the frozen lake under a glacier in Antarctica. They claim over 3,000 separate taxa, including multicellular life and fungi. The bad news is, it's all Terran life, at least the ones they've talking about so far.
]]>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_of_humanity
For me, it's more of a working hypothesis.
As for TOE, I guess "Nova Atlantis" is not the best book to argue there that TOE has no religious roots; BTW, I always like it when "progressive" thinkers have their reactionary moments, or reactionaries, in their quest for ancient privileges, inadvertantly defend human freedom...
The Tirsan cometh forth with all his generation or linage, the males before him, and the females following him; and if there be a mother from whose body the whole linage is descended, there is a traverse placed in a loft above on the right hand of the chair, with a privy door, and a carved window of glass, leaded with gold and blue; where she sitteth, but is not seen.]]>
"belief in appliciability of the scientific method doesn't have to mean it's appliciable to everything in this universe"
"As for calling the belief in the appliciability of the scientific method "faith", I guess it depends somewhat on the practitioner, it might be in some people, and there are quite some secular religions that depend on "science" explaining everything, with debatable justification, DIAMAT is one example, but it seems Comte was subject to the braineater, too:"
]]>There; fixed that for you! ;-) Seriously, the only times I care about anyone else's views on the existence or otherwise of their imaginary friend, and the forms of "worship" of same is when they try and force their view down my throat.
]]>The central paradox I like tackling is whether one believes what's in a book, or whether one believes the evidence of one's own senses, trained or not. This leads to some tricky issues.
For instance, an atheist would say that someone who believes in the literal truth of the Bible is deluded, because they're believing a falsehood they've read.
But what do atheists do about the people who claim to have seen God? Worse, what do they do when those people teach others to use their methods, and the students also have mystical experiences? That's the essence of repeatability. In his latest book (Hallucinations) Oliver Sacks reports on precisely this kind of study, undertaken by an anthropologist who studied with a group of fundamentalist Christians in the best tradition of experiential anthropology, and who had some of their mystical experiences
This is where it gets tricky. Do you trust your experience, or do you trust a book that tells you such experiences are false? If you trust the book over your own experience, aren't you as doctrinaire as those you think are deluded for believing different books? What happens if you have no experience, but you choose to believe a book over what other people say they are experiencing?
Personally, I believe in the subjective existence of God. That seems strongly supportable by a mass of evidence, and it seems to be trainable and at least partially repeatable. To my knowledge, no one has produced objective, repeatable evidence for the existence of God, and there's no obvious place (other than in the dark matter) for such a being or beings to exist. This is for the great sky fairy version of God, and ignores those who believe that the biosphere or the sun qualify as life-giving, superhuman deities in a very concrete sense. Worshipping anything physical is, of course, not religion, just pagan nonsense.
]]>I really don't care what anyone's views are, as long as they lead by "being nice to other people because they can be", and if they "go to service" it's because they actually want to do so rather than because they "want to be seen to do so" if you see the distinction?
It was put that way because I find "evangelical atheism" every bit as annoying as "evangelical $religion". If you think your belief system is so great then show me by living it rather than by talking it at me!
]]>And I believe in the existence of hallucinations brought on by recreational drugs. To go from the existence of the hallucinations to the existence of the stuff the hallucinations are about isn't performing a repeatable experiment. It is misunderstanding the nature of reality and our interactions with same. Sorry, but I am starting to see why you think science and religion are both based on faith. And "not having a clue about science" is a big part of it.
"Worshipping anything physical is, of course, not religion, just pagan nonsense."
Aaaand we're done.
]]>/isotope-pedant
]]>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond_(ornithologist)
Come to think about it, names of famous ornithologists might be good as aliases for RPGs and like. Though you easily get into, err, strange territory, as with this German guy, author of the standard guide around WW2:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Günther_Niethammer
For those not fluent in German, Niethammer joined the NSDAP and the SS in 1937, which might indicate he was more into it for the connections and not for the ideology. In 1940, he joined the Waffen-SS which used him for guard duty. In one place called Auschwitz, 1940.
Now the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau only opened in 1941, so it seems likely this was Auschwitz I, which was not so much about gassing Jews, but about starving Poles and Russians, still, err, not a nice thing to have in your CV...
Actually, he didn't like it there, either, so he got the special job of looking after the birds in the neighbourhood. And a paper called "Observations on the birds of Auschwitz"...
http://www.landesmuseum.at/pdf_frei_remote/ANNA_52_0164-0199.pdf
]]>