Posts by B Jones
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Occam's Razor. People tell tall stories vs the souls of the dead exist independently of their neurons etc and can send text messages after they die.
Schrodinger's lolcat: In ur quantum box. Maybe. Personally, I like "I can has Heisenburger?" but that's a level of geekery well beyond that which is socially acceptable.
-
Einstein had theories that could be proved, and eventually were. The lag between the two events is nothing exceptional. In the intervening time, lots of people said "that's interesting, dunno if it's right, let's go test it," and did, with variable results. The hardcore maths page I linked to describes the story.
Things that can't be proved is a whole other story.
There's no way that science is infallible. It's premised on error-checking, and you have to recognise the possibility of making errors in order to investigate them and weed them out. It's limited in scope (you can't run an experiment to test whether Bismarck had a grand plan or was an opportunist) and applied by fallible human beings, but I can't think of a better approach to sorting the wheat from the chaff in human knowledge. Colonial?
-
Didn't Einstein have a couple of theories which weren't proven until decades later?
That sounds like an argument from authority. When you're thinking about bold claims like psychic abilities, it's more important than ever to hang onto the rules of sound argument.
Einstein and Newton are often invoked in support of pseudoscience - we all believed Newton for 300 years, but Einstein proved him wrong, therefore what we know today could be wrong. It could be. But. All of science is a big "don't know" box, but it's a box with lots of compartments - things we have lots of evidence for (sun will rise tomorrow - then again one day, it won't), graded through to things which are interesting ideas but the jury's still out. The contents of the box are constantly being sifted as things get proved, amended, kicked out again, and so on. It's the process for sorting that's important - what distinguishes science from other belief systems. Hence my pedanticism about logical fallacies.
Outside of the box are things that can't be proved one way or the other - the proposition that the universe is nothing but a figment of my imagination is one of these. Could be true. But. There's no possible way to test it, therefore it's a useless hypothesis. The existence of a creator who chooses not to reveal himself in any testable way is another.
Einstein was right about some spectacular things (hardcore maths here) and was less successful about others. One brilliant man's work in physics has little if any bearing on the plausibility of stage magicians, except to illustrate that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The discoveries of the last hundred years in physics have to a great extent provided that proof. Despite scientists since Newton exhaustively investigating the paranormal, anecdotes are still the best we can do when it comes to psychics, and that's not good enough.
-
Where are the people standing up and saying, no, this isn't a race issue; actually this is a gender issue.
On Te Kaea, last night. It's online here, with subtitles. The story's about halfway through.
Willie Jackson said on Morning Report this morning that there were plenty of young men out there who've done bad things - should they be therefore barred from higher office? I think he assumed the answer was "no".
-
But most of the orchestral stuff you hear in the song was written by Richard Ashcroft, and indeed that's what you hear in the music that was used in the old BNZ ad.
You learn something new every day - the Stones are a bit before my time. Perhaps the post-lawsuit owners weren't above spreading the intellectual property around as a bit of after the fact vengeance - wiki says Nike and Vauxhall had also used it.
-
The lyric sounded familiar to me, though I've never knowingly heard the song. I googled it, so it doesn't count, but having done so I realised I'd seen the episode in question and remembered it very well.
Speaking of political dramas, my first introduction to the concept of "soundalike" music came from the film Fallout, about the 84 campaign. I seem to recall one side (maybe the Nats) had tried for Chariots of Fire, couldn't get the licence, and had to settle for something that sounded a whole lot like it. It was less of a resemblance than the Clocks knockoff. A good example of soundalike is the McCain chips ad where the people on the porch eating the chips make such a noise they stampede the animals. It sounds like Peer Gynt, but it's not.
Some bank used Bittersweet Symphony recently, for reasons best known only to their ad agency.
-
TV3 and the Herald have the intimate search complaint.
They describe a complaint of women being intimately searched, with no reference as to who did the searching or their age. The 17 year old daughter of Tame Iti's partner was also searched "in full view of everyone" , but nothing about what sort of a search that was. I'd be absolutely staggered if that was any sort of public strip search, not to mention first in line to call for blood if that were the case. I just don't see it from the reporting, though.
-
Someone complaining to a lawyer of action x, is just as third hand and untested, if not more so, than police citing action y in an application for a search warrant.
The burden of proof, fortunately for the people charged, is on the accuser to prove their guilt, not for the accused to prove their innocence. I think we should be consistent in applying that rule to accused we don't happen to personally identify with.
Also, there's a world of difference between a pat-down over clothes, a strip search and a cavity search, all of which could be described as intimate.
-
For a contract to be legally binding the parties have to be equally empowered to negotiate the contract and not be under duress.
Tell that to my bank manager. Or my employer. Or real estate agent. Or power company. We sign contracts all the time with unequal bargaining power because we decide that having electricity is better than not, even if we're not thrilled about the terms in which it's provided. That doesn't void the contract.
-
Lions -> bible stories. Daniel and the thorn in the paw etc.
Rua Kenana has an excellent page on Wiki, which probably copies heavily from somewhere else. He also opposed conscription, predicted that the Germans would win WW1, and declared that if he had any money, he'd donate it to the Kaiser.