rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 28, 2016 13:34:18 GMT -8
Fixing winter boredom? My wife and I are heading out of this frigid Albuquerque in a few minutes to spend a couple weeks in one of those southern tropical paradises. We'll be collecting bugs day and night! Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 27, 2016 5:33:57 GMT -8
Oh my. I can't do math anymore and I can't get names right. Getting old- it sucks.
This is the golden age of nonsense. There should have been no evolution in the human brain in the last 1000 years and there is no evidence for us being smarter. I think there is probably as much or more wrong belief now than lots of centuries ago.
Today science contains an immense quantity of (almost) correct knowledge but this is ignored by almost everyone. Our incredible advance in communication makes knowledge available to almost everyone all the time. Still the nonsense and wrong ideas available on the internet is awesome and seems to be growing.
I appreciate Bluemoth’s candid explanation of how she interprets her experience as proving Bigfoot exists. Someone has been throwing stones at her- it is bigfoot. Someone has been making strange noises- it is bigfoot. Cameras never photograph bigfoot clearly because bigfoot is very shy and very perceptive and avoids all cameras. Stick structures are put up by someone- it must be bigfoot. She has also shown that the internet is loaded with videos of bigfoot.
She thinks the scientists are blind for not admitting this as great evidence. Science works because it has very high standards of evidence. Also as a scientist, if you publish something wrong, your reputation is seriously hurt. If you are caught publishing something fraudulent, you are dead as a scientist. This is in sharp contrast to our politicians and news media. Our new president who lost the popular vote by the biggest margin in history feels comfortable tweeting lies saying (by some convoluted logic) that he won by a landslide. Trump ( or Clinton) can get caught (recorded telling blatant lies) and maybe get elected president because lying is expected of a Trump or a Clinton.
All those people faking Bigfoot have nothing to lose by their entertaining mischief. Any scientist publishing that Bigfoot exists had better show very good, solid data. Meanwhile what does it hurt if anyone believes in Bigfoot. Or ghosts ... or denies global warming. Those scientists are just blind or liars trying to get funding or whatever.
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 26, 2016 18:40:47 GMT -8
I think it's so wierd people would believe in a "Big Foot"? This isn't the 1800's? If there was abig foot, by now it would be in a cage. Well not if you believe bigfoot has ESP and superhuman abilities to stay out of sight. In the other long discussion on this forum, we saw that Bluemoon has explanations why Bigfoot is very active in her area but is never caught or documented by camera. People can believe anything they want to believe. Belief in spirits and ghosts and bigfoot and gods is still rampant and not likely to go away soon.
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 24, 2016 19:43:17 GMT -8
Bluemoon is in good company with about 3 million Americans who believe in Bigfoot! US population is 319 million; 13.5% is over 43 million. 66 million voted for Hillary Clinton. Right about the number. I used the number of adults only because children weren't part of the study so 30 million not 3 which was a typo. Thanks for noticing.
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Dec 22, 2016 16:36:30 GMT -8
There is a yearly US survey- one of the sciency kind that actually tries hard to do it right and get good numbers. You can get details here: blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2016/10/11/paranormal-beliefs/They do a lot of surveys, but one of them checks out so-called paranormal beliefs. That means a belief that has no science support. Paranormal Belief---------------------------------------------Percent Agree or Strongly Agree Places can be haunted by spirits------------------------------------------46.6% Ancient, advanced civilizations, such as Atlantis, once existed---------39.6% Aliens visited Earth in our ancient past----------------------------------27.0% Aliens have come to Earth in modern times-------------------------------24.7% Some people can move objects with their mind---------------------------19.1% Fortune tellers and psychics can foresee the future---------------------14.1% Bigfoot is a real creature-----------------------------------------------13.5% Bluemoon is in good company with about 3 million Americans who believe in Bigfoot! So you can give her a hard time if it makes you feel good, but she is not alone. I wonder how many here believe in a lot of those not-very-sciency things above.
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Nov 24, 2016 7:33:32 GMT -8
I’m thankful to all the people who worked to give and preserve our freedoms. Economic freedom. Freedom of speech and press. Freedom of religion. Freedom to pursue our passions as long as we don’t hurt others.
I do not thank those who work to take away these freedoms. Their religion says abortions are murder? Then they work to get the government to impose their religious belief on everyone. No thanks for that!
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Nov 18, 2016 19:47:01 GMT -8
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Oct 27, 2016 18:43:19 GMT -8
As I was saying, I've followed Bigfoot for 40 years. I was reacting to Bluemoth's insulting scientists for ignoring tons of evidence for fear of losing their jobs. I have read Meldrum and Dennett and followed the story in Skeptical Inquirer. As others including Meldrum have said, any hard physical evidence would solve this question immediately and a tiny bit of sasquatch DNA would really answer lots of questions, like are we talking primate and is it homo and when did it diverge from humans? But the tons of evidence are sadly missing. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Oct 27, 2016 6:04:25 GMT -8
... Stubborn scientists just do not want to believe in the tons of evidence for fear of ridicule or loosing their jobs. Bluemoth: That's a little unfair to scientists. Most scientists I know are driven by curiosity and would love to get hard evidence for a new cryptobiotic species. The DNA study was a good example of scientists struggling and failing to get hard evidence for bigfoot. It sounds like you have become a "true believer" in bigfoot and are reading all the bigfoot-believer sites. The reality is that the dna study on all suspected bigfoot artifacts concluded rather clearly that there is no bigfoot. Scientists have repeatedly inspected the bigfoot observations for decades and they continue to find the data are too weak to even hint there might be a bigfoot. What you and others say is "tons of data" is not much. The argument that - "so many have seen something there must be something there" - is very wrong. These type of false reports are extremely contagious to other humans. When someone reports anything weird like bigfoot or a UFO, hundreds of other sightings will follow because people are the way they are. Some deceive themselves, some make things up for the attention, some engage in fraud because it amuses them. Eye-witness evidence is one of the weakest and most unreliable types of data. Recently I heard a scientist speaking on mapping mosquito occurrence here in NM. To explain her mapping technique she showed a map of bigfoot sightings in North America. She showed how nicely this overlaps with the map of bear sightings. This was good for a chuckle in the audience. Scientists have been checking the bigfoot reports for all the time I have been watching, about 40 years. They don't just dismiss the data- they search for any believable observation that could be published as confirming bigfoot existence... Nothing. I was just doing some mammal research in Peru in the Madre de Dios area of the Amazon. Our camera traps caught puma, agoutis, tapir and lot of other stuff including "researchers walking by". It is OK for you to say bigfoot is wary of camera traps and avoids them, but you are making things up. Jaguars and puma are very wary and humans try but fail to avoid camera traps. You may as well say bigfoot can become invisible at will since you are just making up bigfoot abilities. A better explanation is that the camera traps of the scientists and hunters don't see bigfoot because there is no bigfoot. Oh and an insect note, the beetles in the Amazon were great, found about 1000 by eye without traps in a couple of weeks. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Oct 16, 2016 18:11:56 GMT -8
I have said this before and I will clarify it now. 65% of American voters are Evangelical Christains, this includes African Americans and Hispanics as well as White Europeans. If the Evangelical Christains vote their conscience, Trump gets elected. This really makes me laugh. I am essentially certain that Evangelical Christians do not all have consciences identical to your own. Many Christians I know are appalled with Trump and do not think he is fit to be president. You have probably imagined that Trump will do lots of conservative things to reverse lots of liberal things that you think are bad. Many of us doubt that Trump would do anything he has suggested. Listen to him and you conclude that he is a typical lying politician even if he does not have a political history. He has made so many outrageous statements, blatantly false, sometimes reversing himself but usually denying he said it or making up some new lie. Why you think this behavior will result in good things for the evangelicals is beyond me. I have relatives who are evangelicals (local cousins who helped found an evangelical school), also Church of Christ, a unitarian minister, Catholics, and even Buddhist and Jewish (no Hindu or Muslim but some friends are). They all have well-developed moral consciences as far as I can tell. It is a mix of some liking Trump and some preferring Clinton. Moral conscience does not direct this vote. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Oct 15, 2016 14:16:41 GMT -8
Beetlehorn: No need to apologize! Relative to most of the web we were being quite civilized. Our perceptions differ a lot though. I have a strong math background, but it doesn’t take much of a brain to see that the number one biggest problem is over-population. Too Many People. If you rank the top problems, they are all basically too many people. Climate change, growing violence, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity- habitat destruction. This was obvious when I was in high school. My wife and I married >30 years ago and agreed not to have children- we both had science careers. Many people say- you can’t solve over-population that way, but those who see the problem should do what they can.
Many of our cultures and religions still want their people to breed like rats. They do not care about numbers- just do it the way it has always been done. God will take care of the problem.
We disagree on immigrants. I have spent time in Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and lots of Indonesia and Malaysia. Their religion is no worse than christianity. The people are great. If we allow in 100,000 or more a year and they don’t want to assimilate I am not worried. My wife’s parents were both chinese immigrants and they believed in full assimilation and it worked. All their kids are very well off. Here in NM, many of the hispanic immigrants are assimilating very slowly and it shows economically. Their mistake, but it is their choice.
I hate the violence in Syria, but I strongly disagee that Trump would be better than Clinton regardless of what his friend Putin tells us. Best wishes for your grandchildren, may you have many more! Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Oct 14, 2016 18:43:34 GMT -8
Beetlehorn, Well, our opinions differ and I am sure we cannot resolve them here ... and it surely doesn't matter.
If you look more deeply into the situation of scientists and global warming it is possible that you would conclude that something like 75,000 scientists (involved in studies of earth's climate) think anthropogenic global warming is happening, is important, and needs to be addressed soon or the consequences will be quite severe. Against this 75,000, there were 3 scientists who disagreed. There are many approaches to solving this but deciding the best approach is not so much science as people, economics and societal needs. That requires the political parties in the US to fight it out. One party refuses to think about it. They are denying the science. That is an idiotic position. Rick
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Oct 13, 2016 17:48:40 GMT -8
Beetlehorn: What you accuse Clinton of doing may be correct or not. It is typical of what has been going on as long as I have been watching. International politics is like that. Any suggestion that a jerk like Trump would behave better because he is non-establishment is very naive. Everything about Trump suggests he is power-hungry, abusive and hateful. I suppose we don't discuss global warming here but the entire republican party is in denial. This is a far bigger issue than the squabbling of countries. Action is needed now, not after stalling for a couple more decades. How could anyone vote for a candidate that says all the science is wrong? Well I won't. Also, I'm not against immigrants. All my relatives were immigrants many generations ago.
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Oct 13, 2016 6:53:04 GMT -8
It is clear to me, and I think most people, that the news media is siding with Clinton. If the wikileaks emails would get the kind of attention as Trump's latest indiscretion, and people realized how truly corrupt not only Hillary has been, but also the Obama administration in their dealings with events such as Bengazi and the Iran ransom payment (which is truly what it was), most folks would reconsider who they would cast their vote for. They don't want this to get out, so they try very hard to keep us from hearing or seeing it being exposed. I don't see it that way at all. First the news media isn't siding with Clinton. Trump is getting a lot of bad press because of the way he is acting. Second, if Benghazi and Iran-ransom is the worst you can say about Clinton, then lets elect her now! This stuff has been hashed over by the republicans for years and it is really low-level scandal. Boring boring. How does it compare to Bush invading Iraq, or Bush crashing our economy- that is a real scandal. Trump is a very scary and disgusting candidate. Clinton is boring and lots of people who don't like her say that they don't think she is honest. A politician is not scrupulously honest? Oh my! Let's only elect the truly honest politicians. I'll vote for Clinton gladly. The Clinton years were some of the best economically that we have had in my lifetime. The US didn't do much war-mongering or bullying in those years either.
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rjb
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Post by rjb on Jul 5, 2016 14:19:55 GMT -8
Last night there were phenomenal numbers of illegal fireworks all over Albuquerque. The police cited something like 20 offenders out of 800 complaints. This morning at the museum, while having coffee, we discussed this. The consensus seemed to be that it was un-American for the city to make firecrackers illegal. The city was irresponsible for passing this law. A nation of law-breakers for sure.
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