Tag: science

Not that you were ever in any doubt about Tony Fauci. It probably would have looked a little too suspicious if he had simply won the lottery after buying a ticket “as a joke”.

As they say, work hard and you may win an award.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top celebrity disease official, was just awarded a $1 million prize called the Dan David Prize. Fauci won this award — one no one ever heard of but is now deemed prestigious — for not only “defending science” but also for “speaking truth to power.”

“Fauci is the consummate model of leadership and impact in public health,” the awards committee said while giving Fauci $1 million. Well, there you have it, you too can be a Dan David winner if you master, to use Fauci’s word, guesstimating.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic unraveled, Fauci leveraged his considerable communication skills to address people gripped by fear and anxiety and worked relentlessly to inform individuals in the United States and elsewhere about the public health measures essential for containing the pandemic’s spread,” the committee goes on. “In addition, he has been widely praised for his courage in speaking truth to power in a highly charged political environment.”

Translation: Good doggy. Here’s a bone. Don’t worry, we only mentioned the videos to make sure you stayed on script.

Especially when he doesn’t trust someone.

How can dogs recognize bad people?

Dogs use their previous experience to understand if someone is unreliable.

The experiment was conducted with 34 Dogs and was divided into three parts. In the first part, dog owners pointed them towards food with containers and dogs ran towards it. In the second part, the owners pointed towards containers without food and tricked Dogs into running towards it. In the third part, it was discovered that Dogs would not follow the pointing hands. They used their judgment from previous experience to judge if the person was unreliable.

Science behind Dogs sensing bad people.

Dogs have highly evolved sixth sense and are also very receptive to intricacies of human behavior. When a person has bad intentions or is about to do something bad, his heart rate increases and there is a rush of certain chemicals like adrenaline that makes the person sweat more than usual. Since Dogs have a very keen sense of smell and they are hyper-alert every moment, they can pick up on these scents and changes in behavior within seconds and react to them. The Dog’s instincts are very sharp and they are more vigilant as they live totally in the present moment, they can sense danger and bad vibes, they react either by becoming fearful or become hyper-aggressive in their demeanor.

I always trust a dog person more than someone who isn’t. I mean, if you don’t like optimistic creatures who are happy, glad to see you, and won’t even hesitate to throw themselves in between you and potential danger, I have to seriously question what is wrong with you.

Spacebunny is clearly the exact opposite of a bad person. She had THREE dogs on the couch with her this morning, which is one more than will actually fit. But somehow, they made it work. Of course, if a Rhodesian Ridgeback decides that there is totally space for her in the seven square inches of available space, it’s virtually impossible to convince her otherwise.

 And, presumably, Creepy Joe Biden. Sidney Powell announces more genuine TESTIMONIAL EVIDENCE of vote fraud in Arizona:

It’s in your face everywhere. The statistical evidence is insurmountable. The mathematical evidence is to a mathematical impossibility. This is no way there was anything but widespread election fraud here. We’ve got one witness that says in Arizona at least there were 35,000 votes added to every Democratic candidate just to start their voting off. It’s like getting your $500 of Monopoly money to begin with when you haven’t done anything. And it was only for Democrats.

It pains me to have to point out to skeptical morons that mathematically-based statistical evidence is court-admissible DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE. Eyewitness testimony is court-admissible TESTIMONIAL EVIDENCE.

If you’re waiting for published peer-reviewed scientific “evidence”, then you are irredeemably stupid and don’t even understand what evidence is. Because scientific “evidence” is not only not legally considered evidence, it is not even directly admissible in court as such. It is only admissible as testimonial evidence through the expert testifying.

In other news, Team Trump continues to exude confidence.

We spoke with a top Trump associate tonight.  This is what we were told… repeatedly…  

“Trump is going to win.”

It’s going to be a good couple of weeks ahead.

Enjoy the ride. Because the ride never ends. 

 A new book debunks 35 commonly-held myths about intelligence, IQ, and heritability:

In the spirit of correcting misapprehensions quickly, here are some snap answers to the first 6 questions:

1. In fact, when the same people are given very different intelligence tests, including tests constructed in the belief that there is no general factor, the general factors extracted from the disparate tests correlate at above the .9 level.
2. Mental tasks correlate with each other, and it is easy to extract a general factor (and also some group factors) so it is not unwarranted to summarize people’s general level of ability with one number.
3. Brain size is weakly related .2 to .4 with intelligence, frontal lobes probably in the higher part of that range. Brighter people have more neurons in their brains, and those neurons are more densely packed together and, perhaps counter-intuitively, have fewer connections branching off each neurone. So, intelligence does have a relation to brain function, but research is at an early stage.
4. If intelligence really varies in character between different cultures, then it should be very difficult to extract the “Western” general factor, yet in 31 countries, and using a wide variety of tests, 94 of the 97 (96.9{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3}) samples produced g either immediately or after a second factor analysis. Moreover, the g factor is about as strong in the non-Western samples as it is in typical Western samples. Most countries find “Western” intelligence tests very useful, once they have been translated and some language and specific knowledge items altered or removed. To cap it all, dogs, rats, mice, donkey and primates show g factors. It looks like an evolutionary adaptation.
5. Everyone seems to want multiple intelligences, particularly educationalists. However, even when researchers attempt to measure these multiple intelligences, the result is a series of correlated variables that produce a general factor, which is exactly what should never occur, according to the theory. Moreover, the proposer of the theory did not think it necessary to make it testable.
6. If practical intelligence could be measured, American Football teams would find it extremely useful. Instead, they use the Wonderlic intelligence test, because it correlates with some of the more complicated playing abilities. The proposer of the theory does not specify what results will prove that practical intelligence differs from general intelligence.

It’s true that IQ is an imperfect proxy for whatever multiplicity of genes happens to produce the observable differences in what we generally call intelligence. But even given the limited current state of scientage on the subject, what would have to be denied in order to completely reject intelligence and IQ, as well as their heritability, would also require the abandonment of virtually everything we believe we know on a statistical basis, as well as a considerable portion of the entire scientific knowledge base.

This is why I don’t pay much attention to IQ critics, even when they happen to be legitimately brilliant men who are otherwise well worth listening to. While their criticisms of this or that particular may be relevant, they don’t even begin to shake the foundations of what has been reliably observed to be true as well as solidly supported by scientody.

Richard Dawkins is discovering that the postchristian society he helped bring about isn’t necessarily to his liking:

The College Historical Society (the Hist) has tonight rescinded its invitation to Richard Dawkins to address the society next year.

Auditor of the Hist Bríd O’Donnell announced the cancellation in a statement on her Instagram page, saying that she had been “unaware of Richard Dawkins’ opinions on Islam and sexual assault until this evening”, adding that the society “will not be moving ahead with his address as we value our members comfort above all else”.

“The invitation to Richard Dawkins to speak at the society was made by my predecessor and I followed up the invitation with limited knowledge of Mr. Dawkins”, O’Donnell said. “I had read his Wikipedia page and researched him briefly. Regretfully I didn’t look further into him before moving forward with the invitation.”

“I want to thank everyone who pointed out this valuable information to me”, O’Donnell added. “I truthfully hope we didn’t cause too much discomfort and if so, I apologise and will rectify it.”

No Christianity, no inquiry, no science. Dawkins’s central thesis was not only wrong, it was backward. Christianity and science are not only NOT at war, Christianity is a necessary condition for science, logically, historically, and observably. 

UPDATE: Bruce Charleton notes that Richard Dawkins simply lacks the intellectual courage to question his godless convictions, or even to contemplate the relevant evidence.

A few years ago I met Richard Dawkins at a small, relaxed party.

I had a question I wanted to put to him.

At the time I was not a Christian, but I was interested in religions and was (for example) studying religiosity and atheism in relation to personality.

I had discovered that over the same period of the twentieth century that the US had risen to scientific eminence it had undergone a significant Christian revival.

The point I put to Dawkins was that the USA was simultaneously by-far the most dominant scientific nation in the world (I knew this from various scientometic studies I was doing at the time) and by-far the most religious (Christian) nation in the world.

How, I asked, could this be – if Christianity was culturally inimical to science?

Dawkins simply shook off this point, with a literal shake of his head looking downwards, and the comment to the effect that the scientists and Christians were two entirely different groups of people.

Sooner or later, the physicists are bound to follow the philosophers in gradually coming to recognize the need to choose between Christianity and nihilism.

Futurism: Your paper argues that the universe might fundamentally be a neural network. How would you explain your reasoning to someone who didn’t know very much about neural networks or physics?

Vitaly Vanchurin: There are two ways to answer your question.

The first way is to start with a precise model of neural networks and then to study the behavior of the network in the limit of a large number of neurons. What I have shown is that equations of quantum mechanics describe pretty well the behavior of the system near equilibrium and equations of classical mechanics describes pretty well how the system further away from the equilibrium. Coincidence? May be, but as far as we know quantum and classical mechanics is exactly how the physical world works.

The second way is to start from physics. We know that quantum mechanics works pretty well on small scales and general relativity works pretty well on large scales, but so far we were not able to reconcile the two theories in a unified framework. This is known as the problem of quantum gravity. Clearly, we are missing something big, but to make matters worse we do not even know how to handle observers. This is known as the measurement problem in context of quantum mechanics and the measure problem in context of cosmology.

Then one might argue that there are not two, but three phenomena that need to be unified: quantum mechanics, general relativity and observers. 99{5274a41d3bd2aa3d5829764fe19e8a7ecbc79c108731aad5f1ff2d292e60e2b4} of physicists would tell you that quantum mechanics is the main one and everything else should somehow emerge from it, but nobody knows exactly how that can be done. In this paper I consider another possibility that a microscopic neural network is the fundamental structure and everything else, i.e. quantum mechanics, general relativity and macroscopic observers, emerges from it. So far things look rather promising.

I’ve long been under the impression that whether it is the Big Bang, the need for a quantum observer, or a universal neural network, modern physics has relentlessly pointed towards the existence of God for those with the intelligence required to understand the evidence. I suspect that is why string theory, which is little more than the usual retreat from science that points in directions that atheists and Prometheans fear, has been holding on despite the fact that there is absolutely zero evidence to support the theoretical framework.

These are fascinating times. Darwin is all but dead, Einstein is being exposed, Ricardo has been destroyed, and postmodernism is fooling no one as it clowns about like a naked emperor in drag.

This suddenly explains so much of the weirdness of the last few years.

The boffins at the Catalina Sky Survey have stumbled upon an amazing and slightly goofy discovery, apparently Earth has had a second moon for the past three years and nobody noticed. This ‘mini-moon’ is actually an asteroid, measuring between 1.9 and 3.5 metres (6.2 and 11.5 feet) in diameter, that was temporarily captured by our planet’s gravity. Named 2020 CD3, we picked up our second moon some time in 2017 but, given how vast the sky is and how dark the moon is, it never caught anyone’s attention, until now.

“Ho ho,” says the keeper of the beat.

Now the Moon is 85 million years younger than it was yesterday.

Planetary geophysicists have used a new numerical model to determine that the moon is in fact 85 million years younger than previously thought, having formed from the extremely violent and unlikely collision of two protoplanets.

The boffins at the German Aerospace Center, led by Maxime Maurice, produced a model to more accurately calculate what exactly happened when the protoplanet Theia smashed into a nascent, and still-forming, Earth about 4.425 billion years ago.

Previous estimations had suggested the moon formed around 4.51 billion years ago – that is, about 85 million years earlier. The new model suggests, however, that it was millions of years later when the molten Earth was still in the process of taking shape and covered in a vast ocean of liquid magma, that the collision took place.

Whatever. I’m not going to even pretend to be interested until scientists announce their discovery that dinosaurs landed on the Moon using nuclear fusion technology developed by black scientists during the Jurassic Era 33,000 years ago.

At a certain point, one has to stop simply attributing to incompetence what was clearly done with evil intent.

As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed.

The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and—because testing is crucial for containment efforts—it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic.

The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that “a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents” had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control—that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall.

It’s gradually becoming more apparent that neither China nor the USA was to blame for the pandemic, but rather, Deep State elements in academia, media, the DNC, the CDC, and the State Department. It increasingly appears to have been, like impeachment, a desperate attempt to derail the Trump administration.

And I suspect we all know the reason for the desperation.

Martin van Creveld writes about the limits of human knowledge:

At the heart of relativity lies the belief that, in the entire physical universe, the only absolute is the speed of light apart. Taken separately, both quantum mechanics and relativity are marvels of human wisdom and ingenuity. The problem is that, since they directly contradict one another, in some ways they leave us less certain of the way the world works than we were before they were first put on paper. The uncertainty principle means that, even as we do our best to observe nature as closely as we can, we inevitably cause some of the observed things to change. And even that time and space are themselves illusions, mental constructs we have created in an effort to impose order on our surroundings but having no reality outside our own minds. The incompleteness theorem put an end to the age-old dream—it goes back at least as far as Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE—of one day building an unassailable mathematical foundation on which to base our understanding of reality. Finally, chaos theory explains why, even if we assume the universe to be deterministic, predicting its future development may not be possible in a great many cases. Including, to cite but one well-known example, whether a butterfly flapping wings in Beijing will or will not cause a hurricane in Texas.

So far, the tendency of post-1900 science to become, not more deterministic but less so. As a result, no longer do we ask the responsible person(s) to tell us what the future will bring and whether to go ahead and follow this or that course. Instead, all they can do is calculate the probability of X taking place and, by turning the equation around, the risk we take in doing (or not doing) so. However, knowledge also presents additional problems of its own. Like a robe that is too long for us, the more of it we have the greater the likelihood that it will trip us up….

Furthermore, surely no one in his right mind, looking around, would suggest that the number of glitches we all experience in everyday life has been declining. Nor is this simply a minor matter, e.g. a punctured tire that causes us to arrive late at a meeting. Some glitches, known as black swans, are so huge that they can have a catastrophic effect not just on individuals but on entire societies: as, for example, happened in 2008, when the world was struck by the worst economic crisis in eighty years, and as coronavirus is causing right now. All this reminds me of the time when, as a university professor, my young students repeatedly asked me how they could ever hope to match my knowledge of the fields we were studying. In response, I used to point to the blackboard, quite a large one, and say: “imagine this is the sum of all available knowledge. In that case, your knowledge could be represented by this tiny little square I’ve drawn here in the corner. And mine, by this slightly—but only slightly—larger one right next to it.” “My job,” I would add, “is to help you first to assimilate my square and then to transcend it.” They got the message.

Read the whole thing. It is a master class on the importance of understanding that what you know, and what you think you know, are merely a momentary glimpse of a fragment of the whole.