fayfreethinkers.com

tmiller51 wrote:I'm thinking that the cat really just wants to lay on something sort of warm that doesn't move around a lot, like someone who's dying.

... and is exhibiting a fever as the body makes a last-ditch effort to fight off problems.

Do we have anyone here who is well versed on the whole vaccination/autism issue? I am in the middle of an exchange that has been mostly retarded substance free roastification however, out of the blue, this lady has actually addressed a few challengeable points. I would like to seek input from someone more educated on the matter if possible to assure I don't lie to the lady... despite the fact she is referring to me as a liar, baby killer, and retarded...I am, for some reason, concerned about being accurate;)

Kevin

kwlyon wrote:Do we have anyone here who is well versed on the whole vaccination/autism issue?

DAR
Of course. First off, any exchange with one of these religious zealots is going to have a very high noise ratio. They are fervent believers and they are on a mission and they don't have the facts on their side. That makes for a lot stamping of feet and moaning and wailing. Due to reality intruding via further testing they are now at the point in their religion where they should really be eating buckets of crow and admitting they were wrong about all of the lies they spread a decade ago (like GW deniers). But for emotional reasons they would rather not do that. So they keep digging and making the whoppers even bigger. History repeating.

Skeptical Inquirer had THE definitive summary of this issue (Harriet Hall). So concise, so definitive, a true piece of skeptical art. I was almost going to read it at a meeting. But then I found Harriet covering most of this at a conference (youtube vid). So we played that instead. Six minutes well spent. Watch this first.

This article hits all of the main points and then some:

http://www.skepdic.com/antivaccination.html

Here is another very good article from Skeptic magazine (anything by Harriet Hall on this is excellent. I met her and had a picture with her at the Skeptic conference last month).

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/09-09-23/

With the above in stock it is not possible for you to lose an exchange with an anti-vaxer nut. They will get slaughtered or run. Do not get invested in the hope that you will change their beliefs. Humans don't like to do that.

D.

Thank you so much Darrel! I will look over and read over this material before responding further. I also need to address a few specific issues she raised (finally) with a study I provided her. Is there a thread appropriate to post this exchange? That way I can be corrected if I get something wrong...and perhaps even invite my little anti-vax warrior princess...youtube is a hard medium on which to have an exchange.

Kevin

kwlyon wrote: I will look over and read over this material before responding further.

DAR
Excellent. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad." --Aldous Huxley (Huxley)

Is there a thread appropriate to post this exchange?

DAR
Perhaps but it's probably old. Just start a new one.

youtube is a hard medium on which to have an exchange.

DAR
Yes it is. I've had a couple exchanges on Huff Po. We've got these guys on the run now. Years ago, as with GW warming, the data wasn't in and they were able to spin their little stories based upon fear and ignorance. Now the data is in and all they can do is spin and distort. And some of the people doing the most spinning should know better, such as Robert Kennedy Jr (no one expects Jenny McCarthy to know better).

D.

Darrel taught me something today. One of my favorite things to bring up when I discuss relativity with people, is it's application for GPS (or really any communication satellite). The issue is with the discrepancy in the rate of the precession of time on earth relative to on the satellite. Turns out that, due to relativistic considerations, the clocks will not stay synchronized unless one accounts for for said considerations. I have been making an incorrect assumption for as long as I have been using this example.

First it is important to note that there are two considerations to keeping communications synchronized between earth and it's satellites.

Special Relativity: The faster an object is moving relative to us, the slower time appears to be proceeding for the object as observed by us. Thus, clocks on board a moving satellite will be slowed due to their relative velocity.

General Relativity: Clocks on objects within a gravitational well (or which are accelerating) will tend to run slower as well. As a satellite in orbit is at a greater gravitational potential than we are on the surface, this effect will cause the clocks on the satellite to seem to run faster than those on earth.

My mistake? I have always ASSUMED that, as the gravitational field of earth is rather moderate, that the predominant effect would be due to a satellites motion (despite the fact that they are not moving anywhere near what one would consider "relativistic speeds") and thus clocks onboard satellites would, as observed from earth, tend to run slower. I was assuming the effect due to special relativity would slow the clocks however the effect would be slightly diminished by the opposing effect of general relativity (the difference in gravitational potential). It appears it may be, in fact, the other way around. Looks like clocks onboard satellites, actually GAIN time throughout the day as the general relativistic effect is predominant. I will have to check this out however it seems perfectly reasonable as I really am not sure why I assumed the opposite. Here is a link to the source: http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/6253

kwlyon wrote:Is there a thread appropriate to post this exchange?

This one will do.

Savonarola wrote:

kwlyon wrote:Is there a thread appropriate to post this exchange?

This one will do.

Um...yea:) The thread I started:)

Sobering, not so optimistic bit on getting power from windmills:

Calculation of the power produced by a windmill

And a more in depth look here

*windmill

The UK government report on homeopathic remedies.

Zoologger: Live birth, evolving before our eyes

Species: Saiphos equalis

Habitat: south-east Australia, caught in the act of evolving

Travel abroad and you are bound to see people doing things a bit differently. If the yellow-bellied three-toed skink were to go wandering, though, it would find members of its own species giving birth in a completely different way.

Skinks from the northern highlands of New South Wales give birth to live young, but those living in the coastal regions near Sydney lay eggs.

The skink is one of only three reptiles in the world that have different reproductive habits in this way. We are seeing them at a halfway stage in their evolution, and that means we can see the evolution of live-bearing in action.

At first glance, the skink looks like a tiny snake, but it has legs – albeit very small ones. It grows to a length of 18 centimetres, if you include the tail, and has a brown back and an orange belly (despite their yellow moniker). It is mostly active at night, and feeds on insects.

Reinventing birth

Although the skinks are almost unique today in being halfway through their evolution towards live birth, in historical terms they are almost ordinary. Live birth has evolved 132 times among backboned animals, and 98 of those occasions were in reptiles.

The rest at New Scientist

Mass extinctions have served as huge reset buttons that dramatically changed the diversity of species found in oceans all over the world, according to a comprehensive study of fossil records. The findings suggest humans will live in a very different future if they drive animals to extinction, because the loss of each species can alter entire ecosystems.

Some scientists have speculated that effects of humans - from hunting to climate change - are fueling another great mass extinction. A few go so far as to say we are entering a new geologic epoch, leaving the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch behind and entering the Anthropocene Epoch, marked by major changes to global temperatures and ocean chemistry, increased sediment erosion, and changes in biology that range from altered flowering times to shifts in migration patterns of birds and mammals and potential die-offs of tiny organisms that support the entire marine food chain.

Scientists had once thought species diversity could help buffer a group of animals from such die-offs, either keeping them from heading toward extinction or helping them to bounce back. But having many diverse species also proved no guarantee of future success for any one group of animals, given that mass extinctions more or less wiped the slate clean, according to studies such as the latest one.

See here.

No, this is not a joke:

http://www.galileowaswrong.com/galileowaswrong/



It's on Amazon.

Conference is in November.

NOTE: The image above is gone because the bandwidth of their site has been exceeded.

For a church that preaches unity the way they do they certainly are skilled at being divisive.

"In publicity material for the launch of his book on the theory of evolution, Mr May accused “Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C Dennett, et al” of having “sacrificed reason on the altar of Chance, Mutations, Randomness . . .” Mr May called on “the world’s atheists, scientists, evolutionists plus tens of millions of their duped followers” to stop pretending they had “any facts whatsoever to support the greatest deceit in the history of science”. LINK

Read the article.

Really neat building:

Nine Storey Apartment Built Of Wood in Nine Weeks By Four Workers



"The building is made from prefabricated cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels, made in Austria from sustainably harvested lumber. They are strong; Craig says they can go up to fifteen stories. They are fire resistant; unlike steel, it doesn't lose its strength when it gets hot. In a fire, the char that forms on it is actually an insulator."

Where's that fellow going on about how special our earth is?

Could 'Goldilocks' planet be just right for life?

WASHINGTON – Astronomers say they have for the first time spotted a planet beyond our own in what is sometimes called the Goldilocks zone for life: Not too hot, not too cold. Juuuust right.

Not too far from its star, not too close. So it could contain liquid water. The planet itself is neither too big nor too small for the proper surface, gravity and atmosphere.

It's just right. Just like Earth.

"This really is the first Goldilocks planet," said co-discoverer R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

The new planet sits smack in the middle of what astronomers refer to as the habitable zone, unlike any of the nearly 500 other planets astronomers have found outside our solar system. And it is in our galactic neighborhood, suggesting that plenty of Earth-like planets circle other stars.

It is about three times the mass of Earth, slightly larger in width and much closer to its star — 14 million miles away versus 93 million. It's so close to its version of the sun that it orbits every 37 days. And it doesn't rotate much, so one side is almost always bright, the other dark.

Temperatures can be as hot as 160 degrees or as frigid as 25 degrees below zero, but in between — in the land of constant sunrise — it would be "shirt-sleeve weather," said co-discoverer Steven Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

It's unknown whether water actually exists on the planet, and what kind of atmosphere it has. But because conditions are ideal for liquid water, and because there always seems to be life on Earth where there is water, Vogt believes "that chances for life on this planet are 100 percent."

The astronomers' findings are being published in Astrophysical Journal and were announced by the National Science Foundation on Wednesday.

The planet circles a star called Gliese 581. It's about 120 trillion miles away, so it would take several generations for a spaceship to get there. It may seem like a long distance, but in the scheme of the vast universe, this planet is "like right in our face, right next door to us," Vogt said in an interview.

That close proximity and the way it was found so early in astronomers' search for habitable planets hints to scientists that planets like Earth are probably not that rare.

Vogt and Butler ran some calculations, with giant fudge factors built in, and figured that as much as one out of five to 10 stars in the universe have planets that are Earth-sized and in the habitable zone.

With an estimated 200 billion stars in the universe, that means maybe 40 billion planets that have the potential for life, Vogt said. However, Ohio State University's Scott Gaudi cautioned that is too speculative about how common these planets are."

LINK

Vogt believes "that chances for life on this planet are 100 percent."

Hey, scientist are guilty of employing creationist statistics from time to time as well!

Discovery of an Earth-like planet in a habitable zone was found after looking at just nine nearby stars. Such a small sampling implies that worlds like Earth are extremely common.

http://news.discovery.com/space/earth-l ... -life.html

Bob Park adds:

WHAT'S NEW Robert L Park Friday, 1 Oct 2010 Washington, DC

1. GLEISE 581G: GREAT PLACE TO VISIT, BUT I WOULDN’T WANT TO LIVE THERE.
The excitement was palpable; "This really is the first Goldilocks planet,"
gushed R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, co-
discoverer along with Stephen Vogt of UC Santa Cruz. "Goldilocks" is a
reference to the planet’s orbit, smack in the middle of the habitable zone
of the star, Gliese 581. The planet, Gliese 581g is neither too hot nor
too cold. The NASA and NSF press releases came complete with an artist’s
rendering of a lovely planet with patches of blue suggesting the presence
of water. Of course, water would not appear blue in the red glow of Gleise
581, a red dwarf. How could scientifically unsophisticated viewers, the
vast majority of the billions around the world who saw the press conference
in high definition, be expected to understand that the information content
of this image, coming from the top science agencies of the world's leading
space power, was less than zero? Alas, the planet is tide-locked, always
exposing the same face to its red-dwarf sun; Goldilocks must eat her
porridge straddling the Terminator separating the too-cold dark side of
GL581g and the too-hot illuminated side. The sad part is there was no need
for the hype; everyone felt the tingle. Homo sapiens is a tiny step closer
to finding an answer to the most profound question humans can ask: Why?