"The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact." - KURT GÖDEL
"According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".
A guiding principle for accepting claims of catastrophic global events, miracles, incredible healing, invisible friends, or fill in the blank is:
“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable." - H. L. Mencken
I would add irrational and highly delusional to the mix when faith requires one to accept magical violations of the well known, well tested or easily demonstrated laws of Nature. - PWL
"Science is Progress and the Future. Faith is regression to the Dark Ages." - PWL
“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” - Carl Sagan
"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
"Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." - Alfred Korzybski
"Science is a search for basic truths about the Universe, a search which develops statements that appear to describe how the Universe works, but which are subject to correction, revision, adjustment, or even outright rejection, upon the presentation of better or conflicting evidence." - James Randi
"Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch." - Novalis
"Nullius in verba. Take no one's word for it." - Motto of the Royal Society
"I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS." - Richard Feynman
"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." - Thomas Henry Huxley
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.” Albert Einstein
"Science is empirical. Knowing the answer means nothing. Testing your knowledge means everything." - Lawrence Krauss
"Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism - and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency." - Stephen Jay Gould
"Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work." - James Randi
“Religion puts your mind in a straight jacket.” – Dr Death aka Doctor Jack Kevorkian
“Creeds are a weakness of the will. All religions are to make you conform to a different way of thinking than you feel naturally.” – Doctor Death aka Doctor Jack Kevorkian in part quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“America fits all Fourteen Principles of fascism.” – Doctor Jack Kevorkian
The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism: here and here.
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause.
4. Supremacy of the Military..
5. Rampant Sexism.
6. Controlled Mass Media.
7. Obsession with National Security.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined.
9. Corporate Power is Protected.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption.
14. Fraudulent Elections.
This time the Math of Zombies tells us like it is: basically were all doomed to either be eaten alive for our brains (highly nutritious component of the Zombie Diet not to mention very addictive) or be converted into a zombie and eat the brains of the rest of us. Take your pick: be the food or the eater of the food.
“A zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often. “
“Zombies are … usually … brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions …. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.” – Math of Zombies (pdf paper)!
First off you should note that there is a fundamental flaw in the paper: it assumes that Zombie Attacks are not real but just in the movies! This is a way of keeping the secret while discussing this serious problem in academic papers! Zombies are as real as Jesus Christ! The more real you think Jesus Christ to be the more real Zombies are! Fantasies come alive in our brains and that is why Zombies of all kinds including Sweet Zombie Jesus want your brain! Don’t let them have it, remain belief and faith free by embracing Nature and Rational Thought and Science. May your brains survive the Zombie Attacks of religion, faith and belief in the supernatural and may you avoid having the delusion of an invisible friend in the sky who will save you from death with the false promise of an everlasting life! Obliterate faith and belief in delusions that can’t be proven since that is how they get your live brains and then control you sucking the independence and life out of you! Face it, the only way to exist is to not have your brains eaten by the Zombie Virus and other mind eaters!
An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.
Furthermore, these results assumed that the timescale of the outbreak was short, so that the natural birth and death rates could be ignored. If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilisation, with every human infected, or dead. This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert. Thus, if [WHEN] zombies arrive, we must act quickly and decisively to eradicate them before they eradicate us.
The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life.
In summary, a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often.
A giant mysterious blob is moving through Alaskan waters. The blob is made up of a gooey substance, and it has hair! Scientists don’t know what the blob is made up of, but the blob has already been found to have captured seabirds and jellyfish in its goo. Scientists have confirmed that the blob is neither algae nor oil.
Do you ever play with your food?
UPDATE: 20090722
“We got the results back from the lab today,” Ed Meggert of the state Department of Environmental Conservation told the Anchorage Daily News late last week. “It was marine algae.”
No one in the area — whether biologist, Inuit hunter or oil worker — had ever seen anything like the strange stuff, which moved slowly through the Chukchi Sea last week between the towns of Barrow and Wainwright.
It stank, trapped sea birds in its gooey mass and, perhaps most alarmingly, was pretty hairy. And most marine algae is green, yellow or red, not black.
Well, that’s too bad… the dreams of blobs sucking up people left right and center will have to await another day… however, the birds better be on the lookout!
The extremely high dilutions in homeopathy have been a main point of criticism. Homeopaths believe that the methodical dilution of a substance, beginning with a 10% or lower solution and working downwards, with shaking after each dilution, produces a therapeutically active “remedy”, in contrast to therapeutically inert water. However, homeopathic remedies are usually diluted to the point where there are no molecules from the original solution left in a dose of the final remedy.[81] Since even the longest-lived noncovalent structures in liquid water at room temperature are only stable for a few picoseconds,[87] critics have concluded that any effect that might have been present from the original substance can no longer exist.[88] No evidence of stable clusters of water molecules was found when homeopathic remedies were studied using NMR.[89]
Furthermore, since water will have been in contact with millions of different substances throughout its history, critics point out that any glass of water is therefore an extreme dilution of almost any conceivable substance, and so by drinking water one would, according to homeopathic principles, receive treatment for every imaginable condition.[90]
Practitioners of homeopathy contend that higher dilutions (fewer potential molecules in each dose) result in stronger medicinal effects. This idea is inconsistent with the observed dose-response relationships of conventional drugs, where the effects are dependent on the concentration of the active ingredient in the body.[82] This dose-response relationship has been confirmed in multitudinous experiments on organisms as diverse as nematodes,[91] rats,[92] and humans.[93]
Physicist Robert L. Park, former executive director of the American Physical Society, has noted that
“since the least amount of a substance in a solution is one molecule, a 30C solution would have to have at least one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a minimum of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water. This would require a container more than 30,000,000,000 times the size of the Earth.”
Park has also noted that “to expect to get even one molecule of the ‘medicinal’ substance allegedly present in 30X pills, it would be necessary to take some two billion of them, which would total about a thousand tons of lactose plus whatever impurities the lactose contained“.
The laws of chemistry state that there is a limit to the dilution that can be made without losing the original substance altogether. This limit, which is related to Avogadro’s number, is roughly equal to homeopathic potencies of 12C or 24X (1 part in 1024).
Killing your child with the delusional beliefs of Homeopathy:
Going to jail for killing your child with the delusional beliefs of Homeopathy:
On August 7, 1974, shortly after 7:15 a.m., Petit stepped off the South Tower and onto his 3/4″ 6×19 IWRC (independent wire rope core [3]) steel cable. The 24-year-old Petit made eight crossings between the mostly finished towers, a quarter mile above the sidewalks of Manhattan, in an event that lasted about 45 minutes. During that time, in addition to walking, he sat on the wire, gave knee salute and, while lying on the wire, spoke with a gull circling above his head.
Port Authority Police Department Sgt. Charles Daniels, who was dispatched to the roof to bring Petit down, later reported his experience:
I observed the tightrope ‘dancer’—because you couldn’t call him a ‘walker’—approximately halfway between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire….And when he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle….He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again….Unbelievable really….[E]verybody was spellbound in the watching of it.[4]
Petit was warned by his friend on the South Tower that a police helicopter would come to pick him off the wire unless he got off. Rain had begun to fall, and Petit decided he had taken enough risks, so he decided to give himself up to the police waiting for him on the South Tower. He was arrested once he stepped off the wire. Provoked by his taunting behaviour while on the wire, police handcuffed him behind his back and roughly pushed him down a flight of stairs. This he later described as the most dangerous part of the stunt.[5]
His audacious high wire performance made headlines around the world. When asked why he did the stunt, Petit would say “When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.”
He crossed EIGHT TIMES and danced while doing it!!! You’re kidding right? Nope…
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TXrMLKDu5g]
Very amazing. Beyond words amazing. Indelible WOW!
A true tribute.
Man on Wire is an Academy Award-winning 2008 documentary film directed by James Marsh. The film chronicles Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. It is based on Philippe Petit’s book, To Reach the Clouds, recently released in paperback with the new title Man on Wire. The title of the movie is taken from the police report that led to the arrest (and later release) of Petit, whose performance had lasted for almost one hour. The film is crafted like a heist film, presenting rare footage of the preparations for the event and still photographs of the walk, alongside reenactments (with Paul McGill as the young Petit) and present-day interviews with the participants.
What in your life gets you to take risks and get to your edge of peak performance?
Philippe Petit (born August 13, 1949) is a French high wire artist who gained fame for his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers (WTC) in New York City on August 7, 1974.[1] For his feat (that he referred to as “le coup” [2]), he used a 450-pound (200 kg) cable and a custom-made 26-foot (7.9 m) long, 55-pound (25 kg) balancing pole.
Tight-rope walker, unicyclist, magician and pantomime artist, Petit was also one of the earliest modern day street jugglers in Paris, having begun his career in 1968. He juggled and worked on a slack rope with regularity in Washington Square Park in New York City in the early 1970s. Other famous structures he has used for tightrope walks include Notre Dame de Paris, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Louisiana Superdome, the Hennepin County Government Center, and between the Palais de Chaillot and the Eiffel Tower.
The documentary film Man on Wire by UK director James Marsh, about Petit’s 1974 WTC performance, won both the World Cinema Jury and Audience awards at the Sundance Film Festival 2008. The film also won awards at the 2008 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C. and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Petit is one of the Artists-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. He currently lives in Woodstock, New York.
Learning to tight rope walk. Not as easy as Petit makes it look.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N estimated to be twice the size of Texas. The patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of suspended plastic and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. Despite its size and density, however, the patch is not visible from satellite photography.
Vessel KAISEI is a brigantine, a two-masted vessel square rigged on the foremast, with fore-and-aft sails on the mainmast Over the years she has visited 15 nations with crews from 26 countries and covered 40,000 nautical miles (around 80,000 km) Purchased and operated in 1991 by the Sail Training Association of Japan and renamed KAISEI, which means “Ocean Planet”.
In 1992 sailed with the Columbus fleet, flying the UN flag. KAISEI’s maiden voyage lasted 16 months throughout Europe, East Coast US, Caribbean, Panama Canal, West Coast US and Pacific Islands covering 57,000km. During this time period, the vessel flew the United Nations flag. Under Japanese flag she traveled throughout the Pacific and Asia. Carried over 10,000 trainees during the 14 year period.
OCEAN VOYAGES INSTITUTE Currently operated by Ocean Voyages Institute (Sausalito, Calif.) a non-profit 501(c)3 organization formed in 1979 by a group of international sailors, educators and conservationists whose mission is to teach maritime arts and sciences through the researching and preservation of the world’s oceans.
KAISEI has been operated to promote the preservation of the world’s oceans and maritime arts and sciences and has been involved in variety of educational and awareness projects over the past years which has seen her sailing in British Columbia, Canada, along the West Coast of the United States and Mexico.
Project Kaisei will utilize the vessel Kaisei as the figurehead and focal point in an innovative research expedition to the North Pacific Gyre.
Ocean Voyages Institute in conjunction with a team of international innovators, ocean lovers, sailors,scientists and environmentalists collaborated to launch Project Kaisei. Project Kaisei is seeking viable solutions for the problems associated with plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean’s “Plastic Vortex”, in area estimated to be twice the size of Texas.
This initial expedition will document and systematically examine refuse materials for identification while testing the best catch methods which can be utilized in collecting the waste in the Plastic Vortex for future reprocessing while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the ocean environment and without endangering sea life.
Project Kaisei has been Recognized by the United Nations – Environment Program and recently selected as one of less than ten global “Climate Heroes” in the lead up to the Copenhagen talks on climate change this December. Project Kaisei also has been endorsed by National Geographic who will be collaborating on the distribution of the documentary film. Project Kaisei is currently looking to continue the ground swell of support from individual donations, family foundations and corporations to further this necessary goal.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in humans the symptoms of the 2009 “swine flu” H1N1 virus are similar to those of influenza and of influenza-like illness in general. Symptoms include fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. The 2009 outbreak has shown an increased percentage of patients reporting diarrhea and vomiting. The 2009 H1N1 virus is not zoonotic swine flu, as it is not transmitted from pigs to humans, but from person to person.
Because these symptoms are not specific to swine flu, a differential diagnosis of probable swine flu requires not only symptoms but also a high likelihood of swine flu due to the person’s recent history. For example, during the 2009 swine flu outbreak in the United States, CDC advised physicians to “consider swine influenza infection in the differential diagnosis of patients with acute febrile respiratory illness who have either been in contact with persons with confirmed swine flu, or who were in one of the five U.S. states that have reported swine flu cases or in Mexico during the 7 days preceding their illness onset.” A diagnosis of confirmed swine flu requires laboratory testing of a respiratory sample (a simple nose and throat swab).
The term differential derives from the word difference: careful differential diagnosis involves first making a list of possible diagnoses, then attempting to remove diagnoses from the list until at most one diagnosis remains. In some cases, there will remain no diagnosis; this suggests the physician has made an error, or that the true diagnosis is unknown to medicine. Removing diagnoses from the list is done by making observations and using tests that should have different results, depending on which diagnosis is correct.
Influenza A virus subtype H1N1, aka swine flu, also known as A(H1N1) or simply H1N1, is a subtype of influenzavirus A and the most common cause of influenza in humans. Some strains of H1N1 are endemic in humans, including the strain(s) responsible for the 1918 flu pandemic which killed 50–100 million people worldwide. Less virulent H1N1 strains still exist in the wild today, causing roughly half of all flu infections in 2006.[1] Other strains of H1N1 are endemic in pigs and in birds.
Caring about the earth to their deaths? Wouldn’t the earth be better served without their sacrifice of toes, limbs, and lives (should it come to that)? They are supposedly highly trained scientists after all, aren’t they? No point throwing away their lives for an unproven belief, is there?
Isn’t fear mongering fun? Let’s have at their fear mongering then… here we go.
Oops… it’s getting cold again, how inconvenient…
Oh, there is the latest satellite phone interview with the Survey from Earth Day.
Graphic pictures of almost lost toes follow… ick… very gorey… really ick… plus more videos…
As anyone who knows anything about biology will tell you, dead bodies can’t rise from the dead once they have experienced brain death or their heart stops and their organs die. Sure in a modern medical hospital or with CPR a heart can sometimes be restarted, not as frequently as TV lets us believe, but ~2008 years ago they didn’t know about CPR or have emergency rooms anywhere on the planet!
Nature is a harsh mistress which is to say that not even a man named Jesus can rise from the dead once his brain stopped it’s biological processes, once his heart stopped, once his organs stopped. Also, three days of rotting would also prevent him from looking good.
So enjoy your myth with the sure and certain knowledge backed up by the biological sciences of cold hard objective reality, Jesus’s resurrection is a myth and nothing more.
The purpose of the myth is to get you to suspend your rational thinking process so that you can be a good member of the flock and bow down to the cult of the church or congregation. The purpose of the myth is to compromise your thinking process so much so that you can be controlled by the leaders of the cult who desire to take advantage of your gullibility.
The purpose of the Resurrection of Jesus Myth is to suck you into their death after life cult and all that it entails.
“A neutron bomb, technically referred to as an enhanced radiation weapon (ERW), is a type of tactical nuclear weapon formerly built mainly by the United States specifically to release a large portion of its energy as energetic neutron radiation. This contrasts with standard thermonuclear weapons, which are designed to capture this intense neutron radiation to increase its overall explosive yield. In terms of yield, ERWs typically produce about one-tenth that of most fission-type atomic weapons.[1] Even with their significantly lower explosive power, ERWs are still capable of much greater destruction than any conventional bomb. Meanwhile, relative to other nuclear weapons, damage is more focused on biological material than on material infrastructure (though extreme blast and heat effects are not eliminated …).” – Wikipedia on Neutron Bombs.
Then there is this monster of all nukes so far.
Yes, all forms of nukes are evil no matter who sets them off.
Americans destroyed Hiroshima with a Tiny Nuke Bomb.
Americans destroyed Nagasaki with a Tiny Nuke Bomb.
As a woman passed her daughter’s closed bedroom door, she heard a strange buzzing noise coming from within. Opening the door, she observed her daughter with a vibrator.
Shocked, she asked: ‘what in the world are you doing?’
The daughter replied: ‘mom, I’m thirty-five years old, unmarried, and this thing is about as close as I’ll ever get to a husband. Please, go away and leave me alone.’
The next day, the girl’s father heard the same buzz coming from the other side of the closed bedroom door. Upon entering the room, he observed his daughter making passionate love to her vibrator.
To his query as to what she was doing, the daughter said: ‘dad I’m thirty-five, unmarried, and this thing is about as close as I’ll ever get to a husband. Please, go away and leave me alone.’
A couple days later, the wife came home from a shopping trip, placed the groceries on the kitchen counter, and heard that buzzing noise coming from, of all places, the living room. She entered that area and observed her husband sitting on the couch, downing a cold beer, and staring at the TV.
The vibrator was next to him on the couch, buzzing like crazy.
Matt Amsden has quickly established himself as one of the premier raw food chefs in southern California and the world. Matt’s company, RAWvolution, is the first of its kind, delivering gourmet raw food meals throughout the United States. Originally from Ontario, Canada, Matt began eating a diet of 100 percent raw foods virtually overnight after hearing an interview with author/lecturer David Wolfe on the Howard Stern Show. Matt’s desire to learn more about raw food preparation led him to Santa Monica, California, the heart of the raw food movement, where he soon began to share his talent with hundreds of people, including celebrities such as Margaret Cho, Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love, and Alicia Silverstone.
RAWvolution – More than a cookbook, RAWvolution is the indispensable, all-inclusive guide to the many powerful benefits of raw food.
David Wolfe is the author of the bestselling books Eating for Beauty, The Sunfood Diet Success System and Naked Chocolate . David is the co-founder and the leading voice on the continuously evolving online magazine www.thebestdayever.com where subscribers are motivated and brought up to speed on all the leading insights and strategies available in many fields including health, success, beauty, fitness, maximum joy, sensuality, wealth generation and peak performance. Additionally, David Wolfe is the President of The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation ( www.ftpf.org), a non-profit organization, whose mission is to plant 18 billion fruit trees on planet Earth. When time allows, David plays the drums with the rock and roll group, The Healing Waters Band.
The scary bit is that if you loan out your phone to someone you can catch whatever they have: their cold, their herpies outbreak, their cuddies!!! Yikes! Double Yikes!!
New Pesos Issued
As a woman passed her daughter’s closed bedroom door, she heard a strange buzzing noise coming from within. Opening the door, she observed her daughter with a vibrator.
The next day, the girl’s father heard the same buzz coming from the other side of the closed bedroom door. Upon entering the room, he observed his daughter making passionate love to her vibrator.
A couple days later, the wife came home from a shopping trip, placed the groceries on the kitchen counter, and heard that buzzing noise coming from, of all places, the living room. She entered that area and observed her husband sitting on the couch, downing a cold beer, and staring at the TV.
