Posts by giovanni tiso
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The thought of the national side whose coaches danced with joy for holding Iraq to a goalless draw making it to the World Cup (sorry George: the Mens World Cup) is a little depressing.
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It's a surplus of weirdness: she was spotted by a nine year old, I cannot think of a scenario in which they worked out who it was based on that description and yet have been unable to speak to her. The article is completely unhelpful at any rate.
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Meanwhile, the Asian woman who is yet isn't a product of subconscious racism in our society has apparently been identified, and the police wants to speak to her.
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Did he do something?
Brilliant.
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I can imagine that if you start thinking that all your guesses that turn out to be true are divinely guided, whereas the others are just your own weak thoughts, you could end up where Webber is quite innocently.
I find that a lot easier to believe in the mediums who engage in conversation with people and divine things about them, or their loved ones, often quite successfully. They might pick up on all sorts of subtle clues and be actually talented in that regard, then if their belief system allows them to consider this talent a supernatural gift, that's fine by me. (I feel the same way about tarot readers, I've met a couple of brilliant ones - a conversation mediated by symbols is not a million miles from Freudian psychology after all.) People who divine things at a distance, without any connection with the subject, and things of this nature... I find it really hard to believe that they might do it with honesty.
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Surely you know that psychics are ethical people who would never do anything so venal and wrong as use their skills to cheat in a wager. They only exercise them in upright ways like charging money for tickets and television appearances.
Actually, I've seen plenty of 'psychics' do their thing for free, or for a modest expense reimbursment. Many of them appear to be in it for the attention and validation, and I suspect may genuinely be convinced of being gifted. I wouldn't judge the whole category on the few who do it to turn a buck.
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What are you guys so fearful about?
Not so much fearful as angry. And "psychics" constitute absolutely no challenge to the status quo and to power hierarchies, quite the opposite in fact. Exploitation of pain and weakness is perfectly consistent with how society operates as a whole.
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That's a pretty polite way of describing what this person does. I'd like to predict a future where somebody at Breakfast gets the sack, but my magic eight ball says not a chance.
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You don't need Heisenberg for that; one can imagine a perfectly happy empiricist who admits that one can't observe things that happen infinitely far away in an infinitely large universe
Sure, but Heisenberg says there's a precise limit in what you can see in yourself, or the ground you sit on. The implications are rather different.
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Because in fact particle physics was not characterised by insights followed by confirmation at all; it was characterised by insights followed by both confirmation and disproof.
Well, duh! Otherwise it'd be enough to postulate the existence of a particle for it to exist. Have you been reading too much Greg Egan?
And I can't see how this suggests the limits of empiricism.
If Heisenberg doesn't suggest there are limits to what can be observed, than I don't know what does.