• Abandoning hope for the survival of the USA
    I'd like to chat about Spain, if you'd like to share your reasons why you think there is such scorn for sicence there, when you've had a chance to decide what to say. For now I'd just say, I was just editing the above comment to say, if you want to say I'm stupid, the MOST STUPID thing I ever did was not foreseeing the consequences of Twitter. I was rather battered out of even having the time to say that, but I should have anyway.

    This week, Supreme Court Justice Thomas said he's open to arguments that banning Trump from Twitter was a violation of free speech.

    My stupidity just gets worse all the time.
  • Abandoning hope for the survival of the USA
    Hi. I actually don't know much about Spain, and I am sorry to hear it is a problem there too. By this stage of the post-information era, there really shouldn't have been an issue with this kind of thing, but much of the world has gone in a vastly different direction. Many years ago, I mentioned to Oracle's president Larry Ellison an idea for a new social communications protocol based on birdsong, for which Twitter is now named. Right at the beginning, I objected to limiting conversations to such short statements. I said it should require communications LONGER than a minimum, rather than shorter than a maximum, to assure more reasoned communication. But they figured out, from my own flipping data, that would result in less profit, and I couldn't argue with that being the prima facia reason for Oracle's existence. They were paying me well, how could I object? MY stupidity was not foreseeing the consequences as being as horrifying as they would be, having lived through Trump tweets for five years, lol, if you want to say I'm stupid, conceiving of the network now called Twitter was the most stupid thing I did in my life, and perhaps why I have felt such a strong social obligation to try and do something about it.

    I find it deeply disturbing, and you have my greatest compassion in having to live with it.
  • Weight is observable, mass is imagined, and a call to action

    If you cant understand the 'transformation' the way Ive described it already, its not my problem to educate you on the basics of mathematics, especially as you call it a transformation and therefore should know its possible. You would also know there is more than one possible alternative, and the speed of light would not be represented by a constant in the resulting equation.

    It's not particularly original either, people have been saying it since George Gamow. I feel very bad for him, as the USA decided Einstein's representation was 'fact,' and he was not accorded the respect he was due for his contributions to science either. And its not limited to Einsteinian theory. Here is another example from Gamow:

    In his 1961 book The Atom and its Nucleus, Gamow proposed representing the periodic system of the chemical elements as a continuous tape, with the elements in order of atomic number wound round in a three-dimensional helix whose diameter increased stepwise (corresponding to the longer rows of the conventional periodic table).

    So much for the periodic table as 'fact.' It's not. It's a representational model. But now the AAAS says it is 'factual reality.'

    As to your last criticism, I find it very ironic that scientists in the USA are so intent on wreaking their own destruction, and that a board administrator is snide about my point based on easily falsifiable observation. It was not people who decided science defines factual reality that 'revealed' global warming, it was a Swedish scientist in 1896--which you didnt bother looking up before criticizing me for being hypocritical. It was just too delicious for you wasnt it. And that's it for me. Im off. I shared the thought. That was the extent of my obligation. You have yourself a nice day there.
  • Weight is observable, mass is imagined, and a call to action
    I explained the problem I see, but as people can't imagine a universe with a fixed Euclidean geometry and varying size matter here, it's not something that is going to change the fate of humanity. I'm just glad Im almost dead. Have a great day )
  • Love and sacrifice


    There are two ways around to it. There are those who think of love as something for themselves, like a feeling they want to 'have.' And there are those that think of love as giving yourself to others, although it doesn't need to go so far as 'sacrifice.'

    I dont have anything to say on which is 'more true',' but I do observe, what tends to happen is that those with the former perspective get broken hearts they blame others for, and get cynical.
  • Weight is observable, mass is imagined, and a call to action
    well, not according to the AAAS. Please write them and ask to change their definition of scientific theory, lol.
  • Weight is observable, mass is imagined, and a call to action
    If they balk at what I say about mass being imagined, and that the absolute nature of matter is actually indeterminate, then no, they will have no reason to complain about the AAAS stating scientific theory is fact.
  • Weight is observable, mass is imagined, and a call to action
    but whatever the case on that, with regard to science being a model, I hope you will write the AAAS and ask it to modify its definition of scientific theory on the Wikipedia :)
  • Weight is observable, mass is imagined, and a call to action
    how is it questionnable? its just shifting equations around to a different representation. This already happened, incidentally, in the postulation of 'ether' as a fixed framework behind space, and after many misguided experiments, it became generally accepted the existence of 'ether' or not was also indeterminate.
  • A response to the argument that scepticism is self-refuting/selfcontradictory
    well, in that case, he should have defined what is different about his view that doesn't make it propaganda, but he didn't, he just complained all the time. But I agree, how much should one care whether the opinions of populist philosophers are coherent. I just stated that it is a natural tendency to think that skepticism is self-falsifying, because many skeptics are similarly hypocritical, but it doesn't seem to me to need much more than to say skeptics just believe more conclusions are false, and there's nothing wrong with that.
  • A response to the argument that scepticism is self-refuting/selfcontradictory
    to Chomsky what he said was true. To others he should be a propagandist by his own definition. lol.
  • A response to the argument that scepticism is self-refuting/selfcontradictory

    I can understand there being concern about it, because there are obvious cases when skeptics are hypocritical. For example, Chomsky was a prolific user of media in saying that media deliberately falsifies explanations as propaganda, making himself a propagandist. But I dont think there should be any doubt that logic would reach the conclusion that skepticism does not refute its own existence, because it's predicated on the existence of negation in the first place, lol. Skeptics just feel there are more cases where conclusions are false.
  • Double-slit Experiment, The Sequel

    Hi ) Physicists certainly enjoy trying to construct unified theories to explain observed phenomena, and there's nothing wrong with doing so in the philosophy of science. But from a metaphysical perspective there really is no requirement that reality should behave in a way that is rationally explicable by any single model, so being Popperian, to me it's quite reasonable to say light behaves like a particle in some cases and like a wave in others. That is to say, trying to construct a particle-theory explanation is unnecessary, and when the required theory reaches a certain level of complexity, counterproductive, but it' still great fun ) It should be mentioned though, the need to define models which for example 'explain light as a particle or a wave because it can't be both' has led to awfully misguided debates on some topics, as for example natural selection as a disproof of the necessity of a Creator. take care.
  • A Law is a Law is a Law


    Well, it's typically been said legal positivism is a restatement of utilitarianism in legal terms,. However true that is, it's the same in that it doesn't attempt to what 'right or wrong; is, it just makes statements about enforcing it.

    In the USA legal positivism has kind of wallowed along with the supreme court trying to use the will of the founding fathers as guidance in new situations, but as the world becomes increasingly unlike it was in the 18th century, there are limits to how much they can say on that, and they end up falling back on truth by convention and Rousseau's social contract to stop revolution. In a few cases it has human rights conventions from the UN but those haven't been doing very well.

    Different countries have different laws, and the USA has changed its mind about two major issues, slavery and alcohol. So I dont think there is anything special or honorific about law itself. Its more 'a law is a law' than 'The Law is the Law.'