Deny Scientific Lazyness

reply to post by docklands


Notice I said "good questions." "Proof?" in my opinion isn't one. That's an easy question and denotes laziness on the part of the questioner.

Originally posted by Beachcoma
reply to post by docklands

 

Notice I said "good questions." "Proof?" in my opinion isn't one. That's an easy question and denotes laziness on the part of the questioner.

The laziness of the one who asks the questions conventional and lazy minds won't ask depends on the post itself. Is it a trolling question? Or does she/he supplies it with as much info and proof as he can gather under the circumstances?

We are a creature of curiousity, let us all share in the burden of trying to see farther, beyond.

Don't turn ATS into two gangs of skeptics and those who believes in UFOs and ghosts. Let's try to uncover the mysteries together.

If in the end we find out that yeah, our life here has no real purpose other than that of the animals that are born in the wild, LIVE MAKE LOVE AND WORK THEN DIE then fine. If the planet earth is indeed the ONLY planet with life in this gianourmous universe, then fine.

But until we been to the edge of the universe and catalogue, every planet in there, don't say they don't exists.

Originally posted by docklands

Don't turn ATS into two gangs of skeptics and those who believes in UFOs and ghosts. Let's try to uncover the mysteries together.

A healthy amount of scepticism is good for discussion. But as it often happens, (especially in the UFO forums), those who are sceptical get labelled debunkers. And as for trying to uncover mysteries together, I tried that. I put in valid facts and post external links, in the hopes that eventually a common ground will be reached. I ask question that pertain to the thread and do so in the most tactful and polite manner possible. Instead I was met with sarcasm and put downs, and implied a debunker.

Hence you don't see me in many UFO related threads any more. Even when I was being polite I get responded to in a manner that discourages my participation in those threads. So I got bored of participating. If I bring in anything contrary to some people's believes there, they suddenly gang-up on me.

I'm guessing this is also the reason many people like me, who do believe aliens exist but at the same time are aware there are many hoax stories out there that a healthy dose of scepticism is needed, stay away from those threads. Not many people have the stamina to go back and forth in an argument that isn't going anywhere.

Originally posted by docklands
*Applause*
I only wish I had the OBJECTIVITY when I was in school to confront those who can only preaches what's in the textbooks. But I was like many others, listened and took it all in as FACT. It was a brain-washing of sorts. Science is becoming a witch-hunt for the unbelievers. Science has many holes and shortcomings that you would not believe. It's a one way street down a very stiff way to explaining the world, and even that way is faltering.

You must be sad...
Applause for what? That thousands of people have been killed for not believing in the bible? Brain-washing is religion...

So much for closed minded... only see one side to it. 1 person does not make up for the whole scientific world.

Originally posted by docklands
Where have current conventional science gotten us? A world filled with pollution. And how have we human advance from the people 3000 years ago? WHat internet has chnaged humanity so drastically? No, it only allows us to communicate. The earth is still the same, we still under the mercy of nature. A 10.0 earthquake that generates tsunami and we are all dead.

yeah I'm sure we'll be better off in the stone ages and the answer to everything is UFO or god...

Originally posted by docklands
Think outside the box, way outside, WAY outside. We humans are beyond what science can explain. Consciousness is a series of "electrical brain charges". OMG that's a genious explanation. WHat causes the electrical impulses? And what makes the electical have such impulses? Does electical impulses have impulses? Why do they have impulses?

The answer you will get in a laughter at your stupidity because they can't explain it and they will never.

Sorry science isn't just all in a book written some thousands years ago with all the answers. Science is a ever growing thing...

Originally posted by AncientVoid
There's lots of evidence for the Big Bang, etc. You probably never even looked at the evidence or stages which led to them.

You can find evidence for the most ludicrous of things and in the end there has to be some context and observation of how it fits into the 'bigger' picture.

IMO i'll tell you why these UFO theories are bs.
These advanced races wouldn't just travel lights years and light years just to have their photos taken, which conveniently is blurry, and off they go.

I don't think there is any telling what such advanced races might or might not do and i don't see why they can't all be equipped with 'stuff' that blurs our cameras. If you can find evidence that they are not equipped with such you may have a case.... I don't believe that many if any of the 'ufo's we see are all that unidentified and i do not see why we have to involve alien races just yet.

No race which are advanced enough to travel to other races are stupid enought to do that.

I happen to have it on good authority that rocket science really isn't. Having the most intelligent ship designers and scientist does NOT mean that the Alien politicians will not find a way to make their race look stupid as ours does for us!

Stellar

Originally posted by melatonin
Exactly where they are. That's what scientists use to test their theories.

What do they use given the fact that the science establishment always seems to pick the wrong answers at first? A random selection of 'truths' will probably work better and it may explain why the science mavericks do so much of the heavy lifting.

The fact that you question them has no consequence on the workings of the scientific method.

But since the science establishments seems to be preventing the scientific method from working we have EVERY right to question them and the methods they have chosen to employ instead.

I like how you say 'origin of life from nothing'. Since when were chemical compounds nothing?

There are vast unanswered questions when it comes to how life comes about 'coincidentally' and he has ever reason to ask.

This shows that you do not understand science.

We don't need to re-enact these events, we need to form testable theories that are consistent with the evidence.

So we do they seem so unable to follow your great advice? Why do they keep saddling humanity with so much nonsense despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? What possible reason did they have for denying Continental drift of powered flight for instance? Why do our science establishment seem so hell bent on protecting certain theories over others whatever the evidence may indicate?

Thus, when we find evidence of chromosome 2, endogenous retroviri, and pseudogenes, we can see that the molecular evidence is consistent with the idea that chimps and humans have a common ancestor.

And as far as i am concerned i can probably 'prove' that cows and humans have a common ancestor as indeed they have. It really is only a question of how farback you wish to and the evidence for the primate human connection is tenuous at best. How we would have 'evolved' from Chimps is not all that well understood but since scientist, but not regular people, are allowed to speculate as much as they like we keep hearing about this theory as if it's the only theory a science establishment could come up with. I don't really have a issue with human evolving from Chimps but at least i have read enough to understand why people with religious beliefs can justifiable, even if they generally don't do their convictions any justice, insist that they wish to see some actual undeniable evidence!

You see, it's not scientists sitting in their mother's basement being an internet warrior complaining about how they like to see evidence and form theories consistent with real-world evidence.

Interesting that you brought up Newton as that's pretty much where he spend his time at that time.

They are actually working hard and long hours every day to push back the boundaries of ignorance, mostly for measly rewards and intense competition.

That's what the mavericks are doing while the main stream scientist are doing what their grants dictates they do however stupid it may seem to them. Please don't confuse myth with scientific reality based on the grant and patronage system. There is a reason why those with little schooling seems to do so much to further our knowledge on this universe.

And you think it's courageous to scour the internet in your spare time for evidence of UFOs and other stuff...

When did he mention UFO's?

Maybe they aren't working on whatever your pet theory is, I'm sure they have better things to do.

There are very few scientist who are NOT working on the pet theory that their grants dictates for them.

I can see the discussion in the NASA meeting room now:

Scientist A: we only have so much money, because the government is cutting back quite hard, but the choice to either find out whether cydonia has actual real intelligently designed pyramids like some 'alternative' theorists believe, or study the surface of mars for the presence of water, laying the basis for a future manned mission, and maybe even the possible remnants of organisms.

They have known about the existence of liquid water on Mars since the start of the space age and have been busily covering it up since then. If they wanted to investigate Cydonia they could have kept working with the Saturn's and never got involved with the stupidly wasteful Shuttle.

Scientist B: Well, we did find that the face on mars was just a funny-looking mountain, why bother with the pyramids? We may as well look for that which is going to most likely to gain something useful. The chances are that these pyramids are just another natural feature of mars.

Well the face is in fact a face so maybe it's time for them to realise the closed up pictures of the pyramids!

Scientist C: No, we should check out the pyramids, I hear that docklands thinks scientists are wusses and should study his pet theory. Listen the millions of dollars are actual public funds, I'm sure people will want to know for certain that the pyramids are just mountains.

If only public funds were used in public interest we would have had people inspecting the face by now.

Scientist B: But it will almost certainly be a total waste of money and time, it takes bloody ages to get a probe out there.

Six months?

Better to study an area of mars that is likely to have water, it's our best chance to find a suitable place for a manned mission. We might even find the evidence of past microbial lifeforms.

They found life on Mars back in 1976, and water even earlier, so they could have spent the next thirty years doing some other and even more interesting science.

Scientist A: Well, lets just make a poll on ATS, that should ensure the mission is most buck effective...

Sounds like a good idea to me...

Stellar

[edit on 3-10-2007 by StellarX]

Originally posted by StellarX

And as far as i am concerned i can probably 'prove' that cows and humans have a common ancestor as indeed they have.

You can theorize, speculate, guess,...ect. You can shout it from the roof tops and belittle anyone that disagrees with you, but you cannot prove it.

PLease don't get offended by my use of the pronoun "You". I don't mean you personally, just a manner of speech.

Originally posted by StellarX
What do they use given the fact that the science establishment always seems to pick the wrong answers at first? A random selection of 'truths' will probably work better and it may explain why the science mavericks do so much of the heavy lifting.

I very much doubt a random set of made up *snip* would be comparable to what science produces. Even old erroneous bits of science, like Newtonian mechanics was very useful. We stand on the shoulders of giants, we add to and change the current foundations of scientific knowledge.

The reason why science tends to get better over time should be pretty obvious. We are studying really, really complex stuff. Not always, but often the first insights fail to fully understand the complexity of an issue or are restricted by our abilities to examine certain phenomena.

But since the science establishments seems to be preventing the scientific method from working we have EVERY right to question them and the methods they have chosen to employ instead.

I don't think science 'establishments' do prevent the scientific method from working. I've worked in science for over 20 years, and see nothing of the sort.

There are vast unanswered questions when it comes to how life comes about 'coincidentally' and he has ever reason to ask.

That is just moving the goalposts. The guy said that science needs to explain organisms from nothing. That's a strawman view of this area science. And you later think we should allow people who don't understand science to decide where science goes, heh.

Of course there are unanswered questions. Science thrives on them. When we don't have unanswered questions, science dies.

So we do they seem so unable to follow your great advice? Why do they keep saddling humanity with so much nonsense despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? What possible reason did they have for denying Continental drift of powered flight for instance? Why do our science establishment seem so hell bent on protecting certain theories over others whatever the evidence may indicate?

I don't think science does 'protect' them. I think science expects counter-theories to be able to explain the evidence we have.

Ideally, people will accept when they are clearly wrong. When they don't, they become pseudoscientists like YEC creationists. Science is undertaken by people, and in which case it is imperfect.

But it is only evidence that will show that people and their theories are wrong.

For example, no matter how much people want to squeel, the big-bang theory is the current best explanation of how the universe got from X to Y. This doesn't mean it is an objective truth, just that it is currently the best explanation.

and the evidence for the primate human connection is tenuous at best.

Obviously you do not understand what the molecular evidence shows. I think it is essentially undeniable evidence. It's still not 100% truth, but it is very clear and strong evidence that we have a common ancestor.

Interesting that you brought up Newton as that's pretty much where he spend his time at that time.

The beauty is that Newton would have been able to surf the net, and work in his mum's basement doing real science and attempting to answer real-world questions.

However, perhaps the time he spent in that basement might explain his pseudoscientific musings on alchemy and other mysticism.

That's what the mavericks are doing while the main stream scientist are doing what their grants dictates they do however stupid it may seem to them. Please don't confuse myth with scientific reality based on the grant and patronage system. There is a reason why those with little schooling seems to do so much to further our knowledge on this universe.

Their grants are based on their own research proposals. They ask for the funding, a peer-review panel assess the proposal. Good proposals acquire funding.

If you have an issue with the dissemination of research funding, lobby to increase the amount in the pot. Then more science will be done, maybe even more speculative science.

When did he mention UFO's?

Early in the post. He chided forum users for responding with 'deny ignorance' to ufo-based posts. In some sense I agree, there is a difference between constructive and destructive criticism/analysis.

There are very few scientist who are NOT working on the pet theory that their grants dictates for them.

I'm sorry, but you are repeating the same strawman as earlier. Scientists make their own proposals for funding. They dictate what their grants are funding. They create the proposal. If the didn't want to research a particular research question, they don't have to.

Sounds like a good idea to me...

That was a bit of joke. I do not think that science would work well by the democracy you suggest. Sorry. Maybe on simple questions like spending millions of tax dollars on searching for pyramids or basic research on mars it might appear simple. But much of the science around is not so easy to grasp.

For example, I wouldn't want you to make judgment calls on molecular biology, indeed, I do not feel qualified to do so. You would need to understand the intricacies of a particular area of research, in fact, you would need to be at its forefront.

There is only so much money given to science, I really wish there was more. I really wish that all qualified and able scientists could research their whims, but people who supply the funding are not so keen to give us a free-hand. They want 'value' for money.

In the past, science was the sport of the upper-classes. Those that had money, education, and the motivation could spend their time in mum's basement playing with prisms, but now science is big. It is expensive. It allows all people who are keen to play to have a go. I think that is good. But it is also in competition with other societal needs.

There is no bottomless wallet. I wish this wasn't a problem, but it is.

Mod Edit: Profanity/Circumvention Of Censors – Please Review This Link.


[edit on 8-10-2007 by Jbird]

Originally posted by melatonin
I very much doubt a random set of made up *snip* would be comparable to what science produces.

Actually i have a topical example that shows what can be 'accepted' as science given suitable media and political support.

The first mistake made by Mann et al. and copied by the UN in 2001 lay in the choice of proxy data.The UN’s 1996 report had recommended against reliance upon bristlecone pines as proxies for reconstructing temperature, because 20th-century carbon-dioxide fertilization accelerated annual growth and caused a false appearance of exceptional recent warming. Notwithstanding the warning against reliance upon bristlecones in UN 1996, Mann et al. had relied chiefly upon a series of bristlecone- pine datasets for their reconstruction of mediaeval temperatures. Worse, their statistical model had given the bristlecone-pine datasets 390 times more prominence than the other datasets they had used:

To McIntyre et al., it appeared possible that Mann et al. had given the tainted bristlecone data series
such exceptional prominence, effectively swamping all influence from the other datasets in their
calculations, because the bristlecone-pine dataset produced the pronounced 20th-century uptick (and a
corresponding suppression of evidence for mediaeval high temperatures), which would apparently
eradicate the mediaeval warm period. To test this possibility, McIntyre et al. ran the algorithm of Mann et al. 10,000 times, having replaced
all palaeoclimatological data with randomly-generated, electronic “red noise”. They found that – even
with this entirely random data, altogether unconnected with the temperature record – the model nearly
always constructed a “hockey-stick” curve similar to that in the UN’s 2001 report:

Page 8-10

I plan on getting back to the AGW discussion but i am swamped and it looks like your pretty well indoctrinated.

Even old erroneous bits of science, like Newtonian mechanics was very useful. We stand on the shoulders of giants, we add to and change the current foundations of scientific knowledge.

Sure but most scientist never add a thing while most of the rest do much to muddy the water for those who will follow observation wherever it leads them.

The reason why science tends to get better over time should be pretty obvious.

I am not suggesting that it's 'bad' but that the truth gets suppressed for the first few decades with the volume of evidence not even having substantially increased by the time it becomes widely accepted. It's not that the good science is not being done but that the bad science is getting such preferential treatment!

We are studying really, really complex stuff. Not always, but often the first insights fail to fully understand the complexity of an issue or are restricted by our abilities to examine certain phenomena.

Nature just 'is' and there is nothing 'really really' complex about it for those who simply observe it and start making deductions as to how to fits in , or does not, with what is known. It is frequently the case that the truth that is being suppressed happens to be far simpler than the lies and misrepresentations that are being propagated. There is after all far much funding in created complexity than there is in uncovering simplicity and moving on to the observations that results from prior understanding.

I don't think science 'establishments' do prevent the scientific method from working. I've worked in science for over 20 years, and see nothing of the sort.

That's quite funny but not unexpected given that people such as yourself are normally selected to specialize and have no understanding of wider realities.

*Arrhenius (ion chemistry)
* Alfven, Hans (galaxy-scale plasma dynamics)
* Baird, John L. (television camera)
* Bakker, Robert (fast, warm-blooded dinosaurs)
* Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (black holes in 1930)
* Chladni, Ernst (meteorites in 1800)
* Doppler (optical Doppler effect)
* Folk, Robert L. (existence and importance of nanobacteria)
* Galvani (bioelectricity)
* Harvey, William (circulation of blood, 1628)
* Krebs (ATP energy, Krebs cycle)
* Galileo (supported the Copernican viewpoint)
* Gauss, Karl F. (nonEuclidean geometery)
* Binning/Roher/Gimzewski (scanning-tunneling microscope)
* Goddard, Robert (rocket-powered space ships)
* Goethe (Land color theory)
* Gold, Thomas (deep non-biological petroleum deposits)
* Gold, Thomas (deep mine bacteria)
* Lister, J (sterilizing)
* Margulis, Lynn (endosymbiotic organelles)
* Mayer, Julius R. (The Law of Conservation of Energy)
* Marshall, B (ulcers caused by bacteria, helicobacter pylori)
* McClintlock, Barbara (mobile genetic elements, "jumping genes", transposons)
* Newlands, J. (pre-Mendeleev periodic table)
* Nottebohm, F. (neurogenesis: brains can grow neurons)
* Ohm, George S. (Ohm's Law)
* Ovshinsky, Stanford R. (amorphous semiconductor devices)
* Pasteur, Louis (germ theory of disease)
* Prusiner, Stanley (existence of prions, 1982)
* Rous, Peyton (viruses cause cancer)
* Semmelweis, I. (surgeons wash hands, puerperal fever )
* Tesla, Nikola (Earth electrical resonance, "Schumann" resonance)
* Tesla, Nikola (brushless AC motor)
* J H van't Hoff (molecules are 3D)
* Warren, Warren S (flaw in MRI theory)
* Wegener, Alfred (continental drift)
* Wright, Wilbur & Orville (flying machines)
* Zwicky, Fritz (existence of dark matter, 1933)
* Zweig, George (quark theory)

* Ball lightning (lacking a theory, it was long dismissed as retinal afterimages)
* Catastrophism (ridicule of rapid Earth changes, asteroid mass extinctions)
* Child abuse (before 1950, doctors were mystified by "spontaneous" childhood bruising)
* Cooperation or altruism between animals (versus Evolution's required competition)
* Instantaneous meteor noises (evidence rejected because sound should be delayed by distance)
* Mind-body connection (psychoneuroimmunology, doctors ridiculed any emotional basis for disease)
* Perceptrons (later vindicated as Neural Networks)
* Permanent magnet levitation ("Levitron" shouldn't have worked)

www.amasci.com...

Some of the better known and diligently suppressed scientific breakthroughs. There are very many more but since your not going to look at these examples in any detail( god forbid you might discover that suppression does in fact happen) i will save them for later when you will probably insist that it's all just coincidental, accidental, 'spite', 'human nature' or other some such nonsense.

That is just moving the goalposts. The guy said that science needs to explain organisms from nothing. That's a strawman view of this area science.

I have destroyed a few strawmen in my time but i think i will presume that he meant explain life from organic to life as we observed it's formation 4.1 ( or is it 4.1 and then 3.9) billion years ago...

And you later think we should allow people who don't understand science to decide where science goes, heh.

Much better to let the ignorant speculate, they might start researching the issue without much of a bias as so many mavericks have, than allow those who were indoctrinated from birth to do it.

Of course there are unanswered questions. Science thrives on them. When we don't have unanswered questions, science dies.

The problem is not that there are unaswered questions but how how circumspectly they are treated by the so called professionals? Why are there such gaping holes in even our most basic theories and why are they being left unaddressed while whole skyscrapers of theory continues to be built on those sand foundations? I am not arguing what we know can not be applied but you don't have to understand WHY and how physics works to employ it machinery either...

I don't think science does 'protect' them. I think science expects counter-theories to be able to explain the evidence we have.

Sure they do as the counter theory to continental drift was that it was 'ludicrous' and not worthy of investigation; powered flight was clearly impossible so why bother with tests? That's not science but that is what famous journals were saying a year AFTER the first flights happened!

Ideally, people will accept when they are clearly wrong.

Ideally yes but given proper establishment indoctrination they take their misrepresentations to their graves.

When they don't, they become pseudoscientists like YEC creationists. Science is undertaken by people, and in which case it is imperfect.

But many of the people who were involved in dying many of these later accepted breaktroughs were 'good' scientist who at one time or another did contribute? How can they be so intelligent yet so 'dumb'? This is quite the paradox and i think it's best explained by presuming that certain considerations are just being denied those who wish to continue having standing in their various establishments. Why are creationist pseudo scientist btw? Do you really wish to claim something you just can not prove?

But it is only evidence that will show that people and their theories are wrong.

Right but evidence is frequently ( that long list) disregarded when it does not fit in with the line taken by the establishment of the day.

For example, no matter how much people want to squeel, the big-bang theory is the current best explanation of how the universe got from X to Y.

Since when do we go with 'best' explanations when most of the 'evidence' can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways?

Continued


[edit on 6-10-2007 by StellarX]

[edit on 8-10-2007 by Jbird]

metaresearch.org...

www.wired.com...

Although widely accepted by astrophysicists and cosmologists as the best theory for the creation of the universe, the big bang model has come under increasingly vocal criticism from scientists concerned about inconsistencies between the theory and astronomical observations, or by concepts that have been used to "fix" the theory so it agrees with those observations.

These fixes include theories which say the nascent universe expanded at speeds faster than the speed of light for an unknown period of time after the big bang; dark matter, which was used to explain how galaxies and clusters of galaxies keep from flying apart even though there seems to be too little matter to provide the gravity needed to hold them together; and dark energy, an unseen, unmeasured and unexplained force that is apparently causing the universe not only to expand, but to accelerate as it goes.

In research published April 10 in the "Astrophysical Journal, Letters," Lieu and Mittaz found that evidence provided by WMAP point to a slightly "super critical" universe, where there is more matter (and gravity) than what the standard interpretation of the WMAP data says. This posed serious problems to the inflationary paradigm.

Recent observations by NASA's new Spitzer space telescope found "old" stars and galaxies so far away that the light we are seeing now left those stars when (according to big bang theory) the universe was between 600 million and one billion years old -- much too young to have galaxies with red giant stars that have burned off all of their hydrogen.

Other observations found clusters and super clusters of galaxies at those great distances, when the universe was supposed to have been so young that there had not been enough time for those monstrous intergalactic structures to form.

universe.nasa.gov...

This doesn't mean it is an objective truth, just that it is currently the best explanation.

There is far more evidence for a type of steady state or open universe than there is for a 14 billion year old big bang type.

Obviously you do not understand what the molecular evidence shows. I think it is essentially undeniable evidence. It's still not 100% truth, but it is very clear and strong evidence that we have a common ancestor.

We have common ancestors with cows as well! What is proven by similarities when there ARE alternative not so natural explanations? Do we not have to presume evolution as sole agent in our origin to believe that we come or must have evolved from such a common ancestor? Why can we find human artifacts and footprints in geological strata that is clearly older than the Primate order?

The beauty is that Newton would have been able to surf the net, and work in his mum's basement doing real science and attempting to answer real-world questions.

Yeah and that's what the person you seem to be attacking is doing!

However, perhaps the time he spent in that basement might explain his pseudoscientific musings on alchemy and other mysticism.

Well it turns out he was right about the alchemy ( LENR or better known as Cold Fusion) and since i am not sure about his exact mystic inclinations i wont point too many fingers.

Their grants are based on their own research proposals. They ask for the funding, a peer-review panel assess the proposal. Good proposals acquire funding.

That is how it USED to work if you are going to get serious funding from major institutions you either 'bid' for the research proposals that are on offer or structure your own to be adhere closely to what you know is likely to get funded. You do not propose to find a 'solution' but basically try to prove what they wish to be proved in the way they proposed.

If you have an issue with the dissemination of research funding, lobby to increase the amount in the pot. Then more science will be done, maybe even more speculative science.

But the problem is that the absolutely massive majority of research funds comes from governmental , and thus establishment, sources who are run by people assigned by politicians with political agenda's to carry out. It's simply not a free for all where the 'best' ( according to observation) theory 'wins'.

Early in the post. He chided forum users for responding with 'deny ignorance' to ufo-based posts. In some sense I agree, there is a difference between constructive and destructive criticism/analysis.

And the fact that there are are in fact easily observable and observed UFO's!

I'm sorry, but you are repeating the same strawman as earlier. Scientists make their own proposals for funding.

Some do but if you think that's how CERN and high energy fusion and the like gets funded your outa your mind.! Even if such a system still existed it's still easy to manipulate given the origin of the funding.

They dictate what their grants are funding. They create the proposal. If the didn't want to research a particular research question, they don't have to.

I know the propaganda line but i don't buy it and neither should you!

That was a bit of joke. I do not think that science would work well by the democracy you suggest.

So the people who's money is being spent should not be trusted to know what to spend it on? Nice! Not so hard to spot a elitist upbringing...

Sorry. Maybe on simple questions like spending millions of tax dollars on searching for pyramids or basic research on mars it might appear simple.

It's the peoples money after all so why not do what they like? Since the pyramids are in fact real and the people never asked NASA to send that probe one may wonder if the people ever would have been able to ask questions if their money was not being so lavishly wasted.

But much of the science around is not so easy to grasp.

Speak for yourself please as i have found those things worth knowing not very hard to understand.

For example, I wouldn't want you to make judgment calls on molecular biology, indeed, I do not feel qualified to do so. You would need to understand the intricacies of a particular area of research, in fact, you would need to be at its forefront.

What has molecular biology or biologist done for use lately beside making WOMD that makes nuclear weapons look like toys? Given the way those people are generally being employed we would probably not be a whole lot worse off without them and i am pretty sure we could have saved orders of magnitudes more people by simply building houses and providing people with clean running water.

There is only so much money given to science, I really wish there was more.

There is PLENTY of money but it's being distributed to it can do humanity the least good; have the tens ( or hundreds?) of billions of dollars worth of Fusion research given us a single watt?

I really wish that all qualified and able scientists could research their whims, but people who supply the funding are not so keen to give us a free-hand. They want 'value' for money.

The people who supply the funding are mostly states so given the fact that they are spending tax money who better to decide than the tax payers? Sure the corporations wants value for OUR money ( nice system) but that normally entails suppression of all technologies that could upset their business model. They do get value for OUR money and i am not sure why they do but we can't?

In the past, science was the sport of the upper-classes. Those that had money, education, and the motivation could spend their time in mum's basement playing with prisms, but now science is big. It is expensive.

The important stuff, for you and me anyways, is a cheap as ever but designing new fusion reactors and space vehicles is obviously as expensive as useless.

It allows all people who are keen to play to have a go. I think that is good. But it is also in competition with other societal needs.

Where only the societal needs of corporations seems to be important. Fascinating how you admit that societal needs are important but refuse to consider giving
'average' people input.

There is no bottomless wallet. I wish this wasn't a problem, but it is.

There is plenty of money in the pentagon research budgets that results in programs that just kills marines ( Osprey is like to keep killing more Americans than it saves) and i am quite convinced that at least some interesting, but entirely useless for us, research got done with the two trillion odd USD the Pentagon can not account for.

In conclusion there is no shortage of money but there is a very real process by which useless research gets done that serves all but the average human being.

Stellar

Originally posted by Sparky63
You can theorize, speculate, guess,...ect. You can shout it from the roof tops and belittle anyone that disagrees with you, but you cannot prove it.

Bah!

Cattle and sheep are extremely close evolutionary relatives. They belong to the family Bovidae, and share a common ancestor that lived probably no more than 20 million years ago. So it is no surprise -- in hindsight -- that cattle could contract a prion disease when fed with offal from sheep contaminated with scrapie, a spongiform encephalopathy endemic to sheep. That hundreds of thousands of cattle have been slaughtered since the initial contamination shows just how easy it is for prion proteins to be transmitted from sheep to cattle.

But human beings are extremely distant relatives of bovids such as cattle and sheep. Our most recent common ancestor was alive around 70 million years ago, when mammals all looked like rats, and dinosaurs still ruled the Earth. Because of this evolutionary separation, human prions are unlikely to be similar to those of either sheep or cattle. This distance seems to be borne out by experience -- sheep have had scrapie for more than 200 years, and yet there is no known association between scrapie in sheep and CJD in humans. Given these arguments, there seems no compelling reason why humans should contract CJD from beef, either.

www.mad-cow.org...

You may now consider yourself to be a less ignorant person than you were yesterday. Well done.

PLease don't get offended by my use of the pronoun "You". I don't mean you personally, just a manner of speech.

Don't be offended by my usage of the word 'ignorant', we are all ignorant of most things with some just doing more to advertise theirs.

Stellar

Originally posted by StellarX
Actually i have a topical example that shows what can be 'accepted' as science given suitable media and political support.

I plan on getting back to the AGW discussion but i am swamped and it looks like your pretty well indoctrinated.

The Mann study has been validated by the NAS, NRC, a dozen other studies, and even using other statistical approaches on the same data.

I think when you are turning to the disingenuous Monckton, I can generally ignore your complaints. This is the guy who talked about the chinese navy navigating the arctic, heh.

Sure but most scientist never add a thing while most of the rest do much to muddy the water for those who will follow observation wherever it leads them.

I am not suggesting that it's 'bad' but that the truth gets suppressed for the first few decades with the volume of evidence not even having substantially increased by the time it becomes widely accepted. It's not that the good science is not being done but that the bad science is getting such preferential treatment!

If you say so. In academia, generally you are expected to be able to produce research.

You seem to fall into the 'truth' hole here. I guess you think that the science that is being produced in academia is far from truth, but some random pseudoscientist 'alternative' scientist, even good old Monckton, produces teh Troof (TM).

Nature just 'is' and there is nothing 'really really' complex about it for those who simply observe it and start making deductions as to how to fits in , or does not, with what is known. It is frequently the case that the truth that is being suppressed happens to be far simpler than the lies and misrepresentations that are being propagated. There is after all far much funding in created complexity than there is in uncovering simplicity and moving on to the observations that results from prior understanding.

Of course. If you say so. I'm sure you have never even formed and tested an experimental hypothesis, and then been required to explain a set of data.

That's quite funny but not unexpected given that people such as yourself are normally selected to specialize and have no understanding of wider realities.

What the hell is a 'wider' reality? How is that going to help me understand the neuroscientific basis of racial bias?

Some of the better known and diligently suppressed scientific breakthroughs. There are very many more but since your not going to look at these examples in any detail( god forbid you might discover that suppression does in fact happen)

None of these show that the scientific method failed, or that the establishment hindered research. Just that people need to produce evidence, and sometimes you need to really support them.

Lets take one I do know about from familial experience.

Helicobacter Pylori.

Marshall and Warren first started studying it around 1979. They published their first paper proposing a link in 1983. But they had no evidence at that point. It was speculation. Over the next ten years and lots of work, even infecting one of themselves (heh), they produced the evidence. Then it was accepted widely. It took ten years from speculation to widespread acceptance.

That's about normal. And notice that they were scientists. Not pseudoscientists. They were funded throughout. They were publishing papers. They provided evidence. They eventually got a Nobel.

Good stuff. Science in action. I see no issue with this.

i will save them for later when you will probably insist that it's all just coincidental, accidental, 'spite', 'human nature' or other some such nonsense.

Nope, mostly it's just a case that you don't understand how science works. If a scientist comes up with a theory, they are expected to be able to support it with evidence. If scientists just followed any old speculation because someone says they should, we'd never be able to focus.

I have destroyed a few strawmen in my time but i think i will presume that he meant explain life from organic to life as we observed it's formation 4.1 ( or is it 4.1 and then 3.9) billion years ago...

That's still not life from nothing. You need to do better.

Much better to let the ignorant speculate, they might start researching the issue without much of a bias as so many mavericks have, than allow those who were indoctrinated from birth to do it.

Heh, mavericks. You like the idea. But it is just a part of science. YOu can speculate away, that's not science. You need to support it with evidence. Historically, when the evidence is provided, the speculation becomes theory/fact.

The problem is not that there are unaswered questions but how how circumspectly they are treated by the so called professionals? Why are there such gaping holes in even our most basic theories and why are they being left unaddressed while whole skyscrapers of theory continues to be built on those sand foundations? I am not arguing what we know can not be applied but you don't have to understand WHY and how physics works to employ it machinery either...

Oh, sheesh. Who says the stuff is not being addressed? We know that, for example, the big-bang is not perfect. Physicists and cosmologists are working on all kinds of snazzy stuff.

Eventually, I'm very sure, big-bang cosmology will be shown to be part of a bigger and better explanation. At this point, we just don't have the evidence to push the science to this point. Lost of hypotheses and speculation, but no hard evidence.

Sure they do as the counter theory to continental drift was that it was 'ludicrous' and not worthy of investigation; powered flight was clearly impossible so why bother with tests? That's not science but that is what famous journals were saying a year AFTER the first flights happened!

Yes, and people said bumble-bees couldn't fly...

It doesn't matter if people say X can't happen, the scientific method is there for people to use to gain evidence to support theories. Just because it takes 10 years or whatever for a theory to gain enough evidence to fully move science on, is not a problem.

All you are criticising here is people. You see you mentioned earlier that I would use it as an excuse, but all you keep showing is that a few people said X cannot happen or that it took 10 years or so for these 'mavericks' to gain the evidence to suitably support their theories.

Ideally yes but given proper establishment indoctrination they take their misrepresentations to their graves.

I think in some cases, scientists, even Einstein, will do this

That's why rather than depending on one man, or one group, as authority, science is best as a community. Doesn't matter that someone as special as Einstein says that X is not true, the evidence will win the day every time.

That's all you are showing here. None of it supports pseudoscientific BS. Much of this was conventional scientists working at the forefront of research who found that with enough evidence they could change major parts of science. Sometimes it was more difficult that others, but every time the science and evidence won through.

But many of the people who were involved in dying many of these later accepted breaktroughs were 'good' scientist who at one time or another did contribute? How can they be so intelligent yet so 'dumb'? This is quite the paradox and i think it's best explained by presuming that certain considerations are just being denied those who wish to continue having standing in their various establishments. Why are creationist pseudo scientist btw? Do you really wish to claim something you just can not prove?

YEC creationists are pseudoscientists because they do not follow the scientific method. They have the conclusion before the evidence. YEC creationism was falsified over a hundred years ago.

Right but evidence is frequently ( that long list) disregarded when it does not fit in with the line taken by the establishment of the day.

I don't think any of your examples show that. Indeed, they show that evidence wins the day. It kight take 10 years or so, but it doesn't matter, scientists doing real science, collecting real evidence can push science onwards.

Since when do we go with 'best' explanations when most of the 'evidence' can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways?

You're starting to sound like a YEC creationist, heh.

BB theory can explain much more of the evidence than any other explanation. It is, however, not perfect. It does have issues. This is similar to the Newtonian mechanics situation. With time it will be superseded by a better theory.

I'll answer the rest later. I have real science to do. You wouldn't want my science to take an extra ten years in making an impact would you?

[edit on 6-10-2007 by melatonin]

reply to post by StellarX


It is interesting, that in your mention of Mad Cow, you chose to select a portion of the document, that did not express the findings. The portion you chose, was poising a query that the article later explained. If you had chosen instead to read further and understand the article, you would have seen that the Sheep/Cow/Human connection was indeed covered.

From the source article you used, but a bit further down:

The evolutionary 'family tree' (above) seems, at first glance, to support this view. Prions from cattle (Bos taurus) and sheep (Ovis aries) are similar to each other, and to prions from other ungulates such as goats (Capra hircus) and deer (Odocoileus hemionus). They are quite different from those found humans (Homo), gorillas (Gorilla), chimpanzees (Pan) and a wide range of monkeys.

But this family tree was based on general features of the prions -- an overall consensus of similarity. It does not account for the significance of any particular detailed similarity or difference. Therein lies the interest of the similarities between human (and ape) prions and the prion of cattle -- similarities which occur nowhere else in the family tree, and significantly, not in sheep.

That the chance of these two similarities being shared by cattle and humans is extremely remote, should give scientists and politicians pause for thought. That these two unlikely similarities happen to occur in a part of the prion thought to be connected with disease transmission -- presumably, the conversion of normal prions into rogues -- can only be interpreted as worrying..

There is indeed an aspect of prion related disease that can cause cross species contamination. It merely required you to take a closer look and not to simply gloss over the subject, or to skip the important point of the entire article. The GENERAL features of prions is one thing, but when you take a close look at the specific details, the evidence shows the connection in part of the prion.

That is the problem with arm chair science. Far too often, people overlook the details. This does happen with scientists also, but that is where peer review steps in and looks for correction.

Originally posted by StellarX

In research published April 10 in the "Astrophysical Journal, Letters," Lieu and Mittaz

Or maybe their data doesn't support such a conclusion. They even accept this.

Afshordi, the Harvard astrophysicist, suggested that a more likely explanation for Lieu's findings is that there is something about galaxy clusters scientists don't yet understand.

"I think that even if Lieu were correct, it would teach us about clusters rather than the Big Bang theory," Afshordi said in a telephone interview. "Clusters are complicated things and there's still a lot to learn about them."

Lieu concedes this is a possibility. "That I do buy," he said. "I myself am not at this point prepared to accept that the CMB is noncosmological and that there was no Big Bang. That would be doomsday."

You're so desperate to support the 'mavericks' that you're just being contrary just for the sake of it methinks. What happens if the new steady-state theory becomes the consensus? Remember it was the case before BB was supported by lots of evidence. Do you then support the new mavericks who support the inflationary theory?

Heh. Science just moves with the evidence. I think I've pointed out numerous times that BB cosmology is not perfect, there are very few perfect theories, I'm sure those who can link to 'wider' realities can do a better job though...

There is far more evidence for a type of steady state or open universe than there is for a 14 billion year old big bang type.

Aye, that's why it's so widely accepted...

You're talking from your wider reality here. There are issues with the new steady-state model, Hoyle and dudes are producing new models every few years to overcome the issues in the last.

BB made good predictions that have been confirmed. That's why it is the foremost theory.

We have common ancestors with cows as well!

Aye, that's because we are mammals.

Do you think this is meant to be profound or something? The difference is that molecular studies will show that we have a more recent ancestor with other apes.

What is proven by similarities when there ARE alternative not so natural explanations? Do we not have to presume evolution as sole agent in our origin to believe that we come or must have evolved from such a common ancestor?

Not at all. Some think that sky-fairies may have created the very first organisms and that evolution then took over, others that they played with genomes over time in some teleogical effort to produce an intelligent ape. None of which is science, of course.

Why can we find human artifacts and footprints in geological strata that is clearly older than the Primate order?

I'm sure if you look harder enough in the work of those who use 'wider' realities, you could find anything you wanted to.

There is no reliable and valid evidence that human artifacts or footprints are present before primates. I'm sure you have some pseudoscientific source for this sort of BS, but do me favour, keep it to yourself, I've seen it all before.

Yeah and that's what the person you seem to be attacking is doing!

No, he's not. IMHO, he's basically trolling.

To even compare him to Newton is quite silly.

Well it turns out he was right about the alchemy ( LENR or better known as Cold Fusion)

Heh, yeah. Newton's alchemy is comparable to cold fusion.

That is how it USED to work if you are going to get serious funding from major institutions you either 'bid' for the research proposals

Have you ever applied for funding to a scientific funding agency?

I'm sure you have little idea of what you are talking about. I think it is best to apply for funding for stuff that is likely to work and advance current knowledge, yes. If I want to study the neuroscience of racism, it is best to not come from a position of 'wider' realities.

About 5% of proposals get funded in some areas. I have issues with the funding process, I think more work should be funded. But that's not due to scientists.

But the problem is that the absolutely massive majority of research funds comes from governmental

It does.

And I wish there were more sources of funding, I really do. A close colleague of mine gets funding from various sources. I think government agencies are less likely to fund risky and speculative research. That's not scientists, lobby for more funding. Get the likes of Gates to fund more research. There's lots of scientists out there desperate for more funding, they are real scientists though, and may not use 'wider' realities in their studies.

And the fact that there are are in fact easily observable and observed UFO's!

Good shift of goalposts. Well done.

There may well be UFOs. I wasn't even criticising him for it really. I keep out of the more speculative discussion here, it doesn't bother me if people think that pyramids are evidence of alien civilisations, just don't blame scientists for not falling in line.

Some do but if you think that's how CERN

I think CERN is a different issue. CERN will give us good information, where would political interference alter the findings from CERN? Do you think Gordon Brown cares about quarks?

However, you do brush on some good points. I wish more basic research was funded. That industrials had less influence on research. But, as I said, scientists are desperate for funding, and like we find in the AGW debate, some disingenuous scientists can be shills.

I know the propaganda line but i don't buy it and neither should you!

Listen, I have two proposals submitted right now. I know how it generally works. If I don't want to study my topics, I don't have to, I could study another area.

So the people who's money is being spent should not be trusted to know what to spend it on? Nice! Not so hard to spot a elitist upbringing...

It's the peoples money after all so why not do what they like? Since the pyramids are in fact real and the people never asked NASA to send that probe one may wonder if the people ever would have been able to ask questions if their money was not being so lavishly wasted.

No, they pay taxes. They are not funding the research directly. If you want to fund research, I currenly require about £100,000 for a 3 year project. I hope to gain a greater understanding of the neurobiological basis of racial prejudice, including the formation and amelioration. You can decide whether to give me the money.

Elitist? Don't make me laugh. I was brought up on UK council estate by a docker and factory working mother.

Speak for yourself please as i have found those things worth knowing not very hard to understand.

Aye, I guess you're an autodidact. Amazing. The hubris is quite stunning. I don't feel qualified to make such judgments outside my own area, but you can, I suppose the 'wider' realities will guide you...

What has molecular biology or biologist done for use lately beside making WOMD that makes nuclear weapons look like toys?

Errm. OK.

i am pretty sure we could have saved orders of magnitudes more people by simply building houses and providing people with clean running water.

So now you want to restrict funding and improve social conditions. OK. I think you may be starting to understand the funding issue.

There is PLENTY of money but it's being distributed to it can do humanity the least good; have the tens ( or hundreds?) of billions of dollars worth of Fusion research given us a single watt?

That was speculative research. Are you now criticising the funding of such research? You need to make you mind up here. Wouldn't they have been the new mavericks?

The people who supply the funding are mostly states so given the fact that they are spending tax money who better to decide than the tax payers?

No, I don't think that is true. I know you think you can make these type of decisions, but I doubt you could do it properly.

The important stuff, for you and me anyways, is a cheap as ever but designing new fusion reactors and space vehicles is obviously as expensive as useless.

Eh? Again, you appear to be criticising the funding of speculative research.

Where only the societal needs of corporations seems to be important. Fascinating how you admit that societal needs are important but refuse to consider giving 'average' people input.

I don't think the average person is capable. Sorry.

To fully understand a proposal, a person would need to be, firstly, scientifically literate. Given that about only 1/3 of people in the US know that DNA underpins heredity, and 1/5 think the sun still revolves the earth, I don't think it would be a good idea.

Also, I'm not entirely sure how my own research helps corporations. It's more about social ills, but whatever.

There is plenty of money in the pentagon research budgets that results in programs that just kills marines ( Osprey is like to keep killing more Americans than it saves)

I agree. Lets take money out of the military to fund science. I agree completely.

Time to move on

We seem to be getting sucked into a kind of vortex.

I have a question for docklands.

If you dismantle the scientific 'establishment', would you still wish to preserve the scientific method? And if you choose to discard it, what alternative instrument would you use in your search for truth?

I await your answer with great curiosity.

Hello Docklands.

Lets say you go on a camping retreat with a number of people. Wouldnt you want and expect different types of people to be there, sitting around the campfire? And wouldnt that be one of the joys of being there, sitting there in appreciation of the differences?

In fact, wouldnt you start getting annyoed and rebellious if everyone had the same opinion? If everyone sitting there would be a self-styled UFOlogist....I bet you would start playing the skeptic...just to be different, just to represent an alternative to the consensus.

It is true that the view of the debunker/skeptic is the consesus "out there" in the "real world". So we create an alternative and call it ATS. Now the UFOlogist and conspiracy-theorist becomes the consensus at this forum and so we need an alternative viewpoint...the skeptic/debunker.

The skeptic/debunker has thereby become the alternative viewpoint! strange, isnt it?

reply to post by squiz


you're going to like the following thread www.abovetopsecret.com...

what i find sad is that people now seem to believe that getting a consensus of sort means working the scientific method.

let's stay with cosmolgy, they found redshift, attributed it to the Doppler effect and never ever looked back. from there, they deduced that, since no significant blueshift seems to occur, that all galaxies are receding from us.

now, if their assumption is wrong the 'expanding universe' falls flat on its face, which can't be so they palnt absurd 'walls' in space instead of admitting that redshift might just be - intrinsic, and favoring discrete values to boot. nature helps us by showing bridges between normal galaxies and quasars, but ideology is currently far stronger than reason.

www.haltonarp.com/articles/research_with_Fred

Originally posted by Terapin
It is interesting, that in your mention of Mad Cow, you chose to select a portion of the document, that did not express the findings.

Mainly due to the fact that i found the facts that i needed. The original question where if humans and cows had common ancestors; the discussion i employed the fact for had absolutely nothing to do with prions.

The portion you chose, was poising a query that the article later explained. If you had chosen instead to read further and understand the article, you would have seen that the Sheep/Cow/Human connection was indeed covered.

I am glad you go as far as to read some sourced claims but in the future i suggest you concentrate on context and do not, in your haste to attack my credibility ,( which you failed to do in our earlier 'meetings') simply pick the first 'opening' that presents itself.

There is indeed an aspect of prion related disease that can cause cross species contamination. It merely required you to take a closer look and not to simply gloss over the subject,

I was not interested in the article itself but wished to supply a earlier poster with evidence for my claim that ALL life on this planet has a common ancestor if you go back far enough. Please involve context when you wish to address me or the sources i employ.

or to skip the important point of the entire article. The GENERAL features of prions is one thing, but when you take a close look at the specific details, the evidence shows the connection in part of the prion.

Thanks but that's the impression i were left with after reading the article and if the discussion were related to prions or mad cow disease i would not have used it as a source.

That is the problem with arm chair science.

That people do not read threads or notice context in their haste to attack anyone who questions the establishment'consensus'?

Far too often, people overlook the details.

Such as missing the fact that the corrections you are attempting to do is entirely unrelated to the original question or discussion?

This does happen with scientists also, but that is where peer review steps in and looks for correction.

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong.

Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye.

Stung by frauds in physics, biology and medicine, research journals recently adopted more stringent safeguards to protect at least against deliberate fabrication of data. But it is hard to admit even honest error. Last month, the Chinese government proposed a new law to allow its scientists to admit failures without penalty. Next week, the first world conference on research integrity convenes in Lisbon.

Overall, technical reviewers are hard-pressed to detect every anomaly. On average, researchers submit about 12,000 papers annually just to the weekly peer-reviewed journal Science. Last year, four papers in Science were retracted. A dozen others were corrected.

online.wsj.com...

Establishment scientist are far worse at admitting their mistakes than even the worse 'pseudo-scientist' , meaning anyone who questions the establishment 'consensus' who come under intense attack and are frequently forced to admit mistakes or at least retire from public life to escape the onslaught of lies and naked hostility.

To suggest that people like me get away with much if anything at all is ludicrous and this is easily observed when people far better educated than myself at first attempted to publish what later become 'the law'.

In the future i suggest you find proper grounds to point fingers as mine are long and many of your arguments are full of holes.

Stellar

A follow-up:


Source

At turnaround, our ideal grouping approaches constant redshift as all the objects momentarily have zero radial velocity with respect to the core. As the cluster finally decouples from the Hubble flow, collapses, and eventually becomes dynamically relaxed, we get the familiar "finger-of-God" effect in which the internal velocities become very large, much larger than the differential Hubble flow across the cluster since the depth of the potential well is significant.

'Fingers of God' pointing right at our location...


Source#2

We investigate a distortion in redshift space that causes galaxies to appear to lie in walls concentric about the observer, forming a rough bull's-eye pattern. We simulate what an observer would see in a thin slice of redshift space, including a magnitude limit and constant slice angle. The result is an enhanced ring of galaxies encircling the observer at a distance roughly corresponding to the peak of the selection function. This ring is an artificial enhancement of weak features in real space. This may explain visually prominent features such as the Great Wall and periodicity found in deep narrow fields.

Oh No, now we're in god's bullseye, even.

I think enough is enough, these people ought to release all the data they ever acquired, uncensored of course, the taxpayer is usually footing the bill anyway and more people taking a look at raw data can only be a good thing.


[edit on 8.10.2007 by Long Lance]

Originally posted by Astyanax
Time to move on

We seem to be getting sucked into a kind of vortex.

Feel free to move on then.

I have a question for docklands.
If you dismantle the scientific 'establishment', would you still wish to preserve the scientific method?

I think i can answer for him and ask you instead what you think is wrong with the scientific method? Isn't it clear that good science is still being done but then suppressed by those who decide what should be heard and what not?

And if you choose to discard it, what alternative instrument would you use in your search for truth?

I await your answer with great curiosity.

I have a hard time believing that you do but i suppose i am slightly biased.

Stellar