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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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funny thing, jan, i kinda went through the same process after i got interested in things paranormal. i followed the newspaper horoscopes and found they pertained to me 0 percent of the time. worse than random there--a total flunk-out.
on the other hand, i was born in november and have been called a classical scorpio, whatever that is. i do consider a subtler possibility, especially having grown up in the upper midwest, where each season has a dramatic presence. perhaps there is a profound imprinting of the mood of nature when an infant comes into the world. when the year comes around to that point again, this first impression is revived, and the child feels somehow at home there. that could affect personality.
ever notice how this hartouni character won't answer a single scientific question posed to him politely by people who seem to respect his knowledge? instead he talks about the gravitational effects of alpha centauri. that's a strong indication he doesn't know much about anything else.
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Captain...or Skully
Big Wall climber
Transporter Room 2
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I'm wit' D-Know. Boo!
(Hey, he's a FunkMaster. He knows things, Cool things, to which you may relate).
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Sir loin of leisure...
Trad climber
I'm from Idaho..bitch
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I had a dream that leb was gone...so disapointed am I...
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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thanks for making my point Tony
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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you don't know how to talk, think or use words, ed. all you can do is act above it all. that's called poseurship.
you've gone back and deleted all your posts and promised to go away, and then you return to the thread you love to hate, like a dog to its own vomit--kinda proves my point, don't you think?
--
and LEB, since you've stirred up all these flies, i'm personally kinda curious about what, if anything, you've ever had to do with climbing. i'm relatively new to ST and have no problem with nonclimbers hanging out here, but i know the reason is that climbers are just plain more intense and more interesting than other people, especially surfers. if you really like it here, why don't you quit your job, let the husband manage the farm and pack off to yosemite with that bear of yours?
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GBrown
Trad climber
Los Angeles, California
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LEB,
I dragged the text below out a post I made in July to the "... believe in God?" thread.
I had 2 dogs for awhile. They were tight pals and they had a game they would play where one would guard 1/2 of the yard from the other while the other tried to get past the "line" before being intercepted. Then they would trade places and play some more. One evening while I was outside reading a book, they were sniffing around real bored in the yard - Ruff was sniffing around the gate about 30 feet away with his butt toward Moonshine. I was looking at Moonshine and I saw her look at the "half-way-line" and get the idea of playing the game. She looked over at Ruff and her head tensed sharply in Ruff's direction. Ruff's head came up instantly from the bottom of the gate as if he'd been slapped and he looked over his shoulder to Moonshine. She was standing right at "the line" and she pointed her nose down to it and turning her head to the left and then to the right she traced the line across the yard, looked back at him and only then moved the rest of her body - into the crouched, ready position of the "defender of the line." Ruff "smiled" and the game was on.
What I saw at the time was a direct dog-to-dog communication that did not involve visual or sonic perceptions but had the effect of one dog practically shouting at the other with an instant response. It was extra-ordinary. As I've experienced (and subsequently confirmed) perception of my daughter being in extreme fear over a distance of about 600 miles, I have no doubt that communication, at least an elementary level, can occur over a distance of 30 feet without ordinary mechanics.
 - - - - - - -
Ed, there's no justification for you damn bad manners. People are important and deserve respect. There's no importance in this damn universe that isn't evaluated by living entities. The only value science has is the value it has to life, their survival and the quality thereof. If you can't be decent people, then whatever alphabet soup you carry after you name spells "I screw you". You're a respectable and admirable person so act like it.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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ed is a physicist, and physicists generally have a hard time refraining from snobbishness. no one can argue that they tangle with some pretty sophisticated stuff. i've been fortunate to know enough physicists personally to get past the preliminary awe most people experience with them.
one of the big problems is the very devotion required to become a physicist. the mathematics is so demanding that most of them generally leave their way with words at the starting gate. doesn't mean they don't have anything to say--they just don't know how to say it. i hope i'm getting your goat with this, ed--you deserve it.
ed seems to be involved in high energy physics which is perhaps the cuttingest edge of the whole field and, as he posts, quite sadly underfunded because it happens to be pure research and probably not that directly related to the "strategic" (read world domination) objectives of the people who spend our tax money. he has my sympathy for that. i've read some of what gordon kane has written in this field and the man has the rare gift of telling it to the layperson without talking down. i recommend kane for ed's reading list.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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TB: ever notice how this hartouni character won't answer a single scientific question posed to him politely by people who seem to respect his knowledge? Quite the opposite. Ed spends a lot of time here discussing scientific questions with lay people, as far as possible in language that's understandable. Whether he should bother is another matter. Too often the other person(s) clearly have their minds made up, whatever the facts and science may say.
The fable of attempting to teach pigs to dance comes to mind.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Ed-
I think I was somewhat unclear so I have gone back and added this phrase to what I wrote.
"It therefore seems more appropriate to concentrate on figuring out the obvious first, such as DNA and child raising practices on the outcome of the human personality, rather than much more subtle possibilities like the electricity, magnetism, chemistry and biology of the place and time when we were born which may or may not be a factor".
Otherwise, I think you are being hypersensitive and are just burned out with being ST's "Mr. Science" which is understandable. I mentioned particle physics because that is the only branch of physics that I am even remotely aware of. It had nothing to do with you personally. In fact I have defended spending on basic research including accelerators, on other threads.
Meanwhile, please be aware that I do not necessarily believe everything I've been exposed to in Asia. However, I give it all respect and I am always curious as to whether there is something there that western culture doesn't understand. I would be a lousy anthropologist if I went around making judgements about other people's cultures and beliefs because they didn't agree with mine. I also have had the experience that western people and cultures don't know everything and the culture is always deeper here than first meets the eye.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Tony and G Brown-
No need to insult Ed just because he had a bad day and got a little irritable. I agree with Mighty Hiker that Ed has been more than generous in explaining science on various threads. I know that many of us have benefited from those explanations.
Even when we don't always agree with him our thinking is often refined on the subject because of his input. He'll never convert me to a purely materialist viewpoint but I understand that materialist viewpoint a lot better now and also the weaknesses of my own arguments and why they don't convince him either.
THANKS TO ED FOR ALL THAT HE HAS DONE TO MAKE SCIENCE UNDERSTANDABLE !!!
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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i've only been in this blogsville a couple months and have encountered nothing but unpleasant ed, who will just have to get used to an equally unpleasant tony. pate and huffcuss are easily handled because they're less knowledgeable about everything except their respective misogynies. ed is starting to look like fun. let's invite him to stick around in all this paranormal vomit.
ed's knowledge of science is quite narrow, as it often gets in the high energy field, and oblivious to--and on this thread emotionally threatened by--areas in which he is not familiar. i've tangled with physicists before on the subject of the paranormal. it's surprising what you find when they finally let their guard down. at first they fight like banshees.
a good scientist is collegial. ed is defending his ego, a medium-sized trout among the scientific minnows here. the more you act like a minnow, the more he'll love you. do a little reading in his area, difficult but accessible if you have the motivation, and you'll lose your sense of awe. not only that, but he'll be scared to death because then he'll have to communicate instead of blustering as he did calculating the gravitational effects of alpha centauri or trying to send me to the library to read fred hoyle's old books. he could easily have addressed the triple alpha process if he knows anything about it. one of the fellas i ski with, professor of physics, phd yale--i had to explain it to him. as i said on another thread, yale can be a surprisingly lightweight institution. my son just graduated there and i've become painfully aware of the gaping holes in an ivy league education.
the bluster is ed's last line of defense. behind that is dumb ed. he's the product of an academic process which is basically a knowledge bashing contest. to survive, you stay in your own bailiwick and make lots of noise, knowing more and more about less and less.
------
LEB hasn't answered my questions about climbing. perhaps there's something pleasant for her in the abuse she gets from pate and wade, so i won't interfere in what may be an enjoyable, dare i suggest erotic, dynamic for all involved.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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LEB-
Well I agree that it would be better to be straightforward if a personality problem is at the root of this. One of the problems of trying to be rational all the time, is that it then becomes difficult to deal with the messier aspects of life, like personality conflicts.
Rationalists have a hard time with their irrational emotions and religionists have a hard time with their unspiritual emotions. I try to play it down the middle after exploring either end of the spectrum, but I have been accused of copping out and alternately believing in nothing or everything.
Meanwhile, you have to realize that what you are proposing is very similar to, though on a much subtler scale, the now discounted idea of the "ether" around us as one of the elements. One of the easiest ways to get a scientist to lose it is to talk about something that resembles this discredited notion. You couldn't have pushed a more reactive button.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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i've only been in this blogsville a couple months and have encountered nothing but unpleasant ed
Tony you seem to specialize in not knowing what the f*#k you're talking about. I knew I recognized you. You're that guy at the Deli giving Bachar beta for the Nutcracker.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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hey Tony, perhaps a light weight education from Yale is better than none at all... but after all, your idea of a person as a vessel to be filled with knowledge is rather outdated...
... you also characterize yourself as a "critic" not a scientist, so I wonder where you get you strange ideas of what "good science" is...
...you seem to have to have me be some sort of egoist... my point on the budgets was that there is a lot more spent on NIH R&D than anything else, Jan's point was that we should spend less on arcane areas of knowledge and more on what matters to people, we already do that.
LEB - I find you needing answers to your questions... you're theory is that somehow there are very faint "signals" that the body "detects" which are not detectable by our instruments. It is a very simple theory, and one that does not take into account all of the consequences, all of the other things that would observable were it to be true. I offer the astrology example to show that there is a very weak "signal" from distant stars, a force which is not measurable on earth by our instrumentation, and yet if you assume that it has any effect, then the objects in the room have equal or larger effect, at least in terms of the force which transmits the star's presence. So even if we cannot measure the star, we know that it is not at all likely to mean anything in terms of determining something as complex as personality and fate.
Jan - Indian Astrology determine the influences from the heavens in sixteen varga or divisions. Interestingly, I doubt that anyone posting on this thread believes that something as complex as a human personality can be described in such a small number of divisions.... certainly various tests of personalities are even more complex, and come to highly contentious conclusions.
But what would you have to do in order to study the distribution of human populations and the correlations with the position of stars in the heavens for this 12-dimensional space?
Lets take roughly 100 divisions in each of the dimensions, that is, probably the limit to the determination of the positions by non-aided means. That is a volume of 10^24 possible combinations, currently there are only 10^9 people, which means that the full space represented by that astrological system is "unpopulated" or sparse... most of the space has no observational data. I haven't added in the additional divisions of each object, roughly 1000, the vast majority of which are correlated, perhaps this number is only 10 if you include the stars as only one object...
My point here is that there is no empirical support to the astrological conjecture even if you consider it to be simply a complex clock, first the model of personality is overly simplistic, secondly most of the range of the model cannot be tested because there are not enough people who have ever existed to test it... by large factors.
Further, one could test the differences of personalities, fates, etc, by location and time in a survey of individuals born close in time and location... no such strong correlation exists, which is an assertion that I make based on common human observation over hundreds of thousands of years, yet now is the best time to test such things as there are more humans alive now than ever before.
The problem of building such systems of knowledge is much more difficult when the numbers of people in ancient times is taken into account... estimated in 5000 BCE to be 5 million, total, a dauntingly small number to make any such systemic study possible...
This has little to do with the strength of the force, but calls into question the veracity of "ancient wisdom" which is limited, especially when it comes to making conclusions that are unsupportable based on the small number of ancients that existed.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Ed, why do you visit this thread when it's chockfull of ignorance and superstition? As if all this stuff hasn't been throroughly debunked (a) decades ago (b) over many exhaustive studies.
And when the paranormalist or supernaturalist says otherwise, they're just trying to get traction off a dead subject no more worthy of astrology.
re: astrology. The link having to do with the months is not tied to the stars as astrology idiots think but to the seasons. There should be a field of study perhaps called seasonology. I knew about it even before graduating high school. Analytic scientific types, e.g., tend to be born in winter months (which might mean they were conceived by the alpha males the previous spring, first in line, first dibs, something like that). Stars, no; seasons, yes.
As far as Tony goes, he's just one more attention-seeking misinformationist not worth any self-respecting poster's time. Just like Klimmer.
...........
Jan wrote-
"So far nobody knows by what mechanism they occur. Either it's so subtle that science hasn't discovered it yet or its by a means so beyond our current understanding, we will have to develop a whole new paradigm for it."
Careful, you're sounding here like a mechanist.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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well he got off his high horse and answered the questions. i hope you gals find it helpful--mathematical fantasies applied to his own fantasy of what we're trying to talk about here. you see, the idea of a person as a vessel to be filled with knowledge is way out of date. a person is a vessel to be filled with numbers.
LEB, this is all coming back to you. you won't talk about your climbing, which is really the primary function of ST. anything on the side is like a conversation you have climbing. even if you're cranking 12s, you talk. if you're really good, you talk and crank at the same time. wade here can only talk in pictures, a bit of a learning disability, but we've learned to be tolerant.
but LEB, really--are there forces we can't detect? ed gets paid to detect things. he goes hunting for them with huge, expensive machines. he also understands that detecting, or the effort to detect, can destroy or alter the subject, so it gets real tricky. he's going to have a hard time with a ghost cat that gets shy when you go for your binoculars.
huffcuss, ed is here for the same reason you are--to act superior. it's what people do in order to prove things to themselves. you'd die without the opportunity.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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I visit (1) for entertainment, (2) to keep an eye out on what the other side is up to you, you irresponsible misinformationist.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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HFCS= you're giving too much credit...Never engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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" So far nobody knows by what mechanism they occur. Either it's so subtle that science hasn't discovered it yet or its by a means so beyond our current understanding, we will have to develop a whole new paradigm for it."
Careful, you're sounding here like a mechanist.
Fructose-
Who's to say the new paradigm has to be a physical mechanism?
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