What is a scientific law?

Belicose Bill wrote: Please make a correction in your head if it you find it too difficult to admit making shit up. end quote

I hereby agree to not make shit up but, like you just made shit up. I made no shit up. Don’t shoot the messenger. I just plunked the first reference I found on the internet onto this thread. I wrote the word, “Cite?” and nothing more. Admit it, you looney. You made shit up about that fact, the word "cite." There are many other articles about Lindy’s Nazism and the Eugenics movement. I did not look for the more recent article (2015?) that I was thinking about when I mentioned Lindy’s pro Nazi views that were stifled when WWII broke out. Nazism went underground but it did not disappear with Hitler’s suicide.

Recently, the Aryan Brotherhood voted Taylor Swift as the best, white, obviously female, entertainer of the year. I find that funny and then, disturbing, but funny first. I don’t think she accepted the award. Nor will she barge into their bath, or shower rooms, with her female genitalia.  

Peter

In her column "Introducing Objectivism," Rand gave "the briefest summary" of her philosophy:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute--facts are facts, independent of man's feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. 2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses) is man's only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival . . . .

end quote

From: Ellen Moore To: Atlantis Subject: ATL: The Objectivist Revolution...

. . . . Barbara, in your last line I think you are describing what evasion IS. You wrote, " Rather, the evader creates a blur in his mind, a mental fog, so that he is not [fully] conscious of X nor that he is evading it.  Perhaps he is aware of it only in the sense of a vague uneasiness which he does not look at." [insert is added]

Of course!  That is the point. The evader lowers his conscious awareness when he does not want to face something that made him feel uneasy, and if he really ~looked~ at it and acknowledged it fully consciously, then he would have to deal with the facts. He does not want to, so he evades things that he "kinda" knows in some minimal awareness, but instead he avoids thinking about them.  This is evasion.

In Galt's speech, she wrote,  " ..., it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the ~blank out~ by which you attempt to evade them."

Peikoff, in his lectures [Rand authorized] and his book on Objectivism [OPAR, p. 61], he quotes AS, p. 944, in Galt's speech.   Peikoff makes three distinctions of conscious actions that exist by initiating levels of conscious awareness --  i.e., switching on [focusing] one's mental attention, leaving it at a level of passivity and mental fog, and evasion.

"Evasion is an active process aimed at a specific content. The evader does expend effort; he purposefully directs his attention away from a given fact.  He ~works not to see~ it; if he cannot banish it completely, he works not to let it become completely real to him.... the evader disintegrates [his mental contents] by struggling to disconnect a given item from everything that would give it clarity or significance in his own mind ... He expends energy to create a fog; he lowers his level of awareness"

That's evasion, and the actions require a volitionally conscious and deliberate effort.  This is the point that you and Bill do not acknowledge.  The logic of the action of evasion is this: *before one could evade X, one had to be aware of X.*   The action of evasion is specifically directed at some particular thing or event one refuses to see, pay focused attention to, and deal with honestly in reality. "Focus" is a metaphor that means to turn on, initiate, raise one's level of conscious awareness.  The opposite is "evasion" which really means to shut down one's conscious awareness so that specific things are not allowed into full consciousness. Ellen M. end quote

4 hours ago, JTM said:

Not to change the most recent subject matter posted, but my neighbor just earlier today stated that the very idea of human activity causing global warming is something that has been completely fabricated... that it's absurd & unrealistic...

By the tone of his voice, he was quite passionate about it.

I asked him if he thought global warming was even possible?     He said 'not by us'

I then asked him if he knew about the fact that Venus is hotter than Mercury, because of "runaway" global warming

He didn't know about it and did not care to hear that global warming on Venus is very real indeed.

I then told him that Venus was hot enough to melt lead, at night or daytime, whereas Mercury's daytime temperature wasn't even as hot as Venuses night temp - & that Mercury's night temperature was 1000 degrees colder than Venuses -- ALL DUE TO THE REALITY THAT VENUS HAS EXTREME "RUNAWAY" GLOBAL WARMING & CURRENTLY INHOSPITABLE HOT HOUSE CONDITIONS.

As for global human activity making any impact on global temperatures -- just consider the fact that since the very first motor was turned on (at the start of the industrial revolution) -- that in all that time (100+ years) - there has never been a moment that one or the others had not been running, continually, exhausting emissions into Earth's atmosphere.- NON STOP! for over a century!...

Well, that has to have had some kind of impact, considering a single car running inside of a closed garage, can kill us in how short of time?

Plus, Global dimming effects haven't even been considered here. Without this opposite phenomenon occurring alongside global warming -- then temperatures today would be MUCH HOTTER! 

There are much more facts that all together -suggests that human caused global warming is most certainly very REAL.

JTM

What has caused Venus's temperatures aside from the sun? Venus is its atmosphere, not just the rocks. Is Venus getting hotter? Do you imagine it was cooler 100 million years ago? If you don't, then where's the "RUNAWAY"? Or are you suggesting there used to be intelligent life down there that destroyed itself by injecting CO2 into the atmosphere? All your off the world "facts" are bogus because they're not AGW. As for what is going on on Earth--back to earth, down on earth, of the earth--increased CO2 is causing the increased flourishing of flora and fauna.

What's global dimming?

"Suggests" is suggests to you.

The Earth is not a running car in a closed garage. The atmosphere is not a shell. We don't have the earth, its atmosphere and a shell above that. The atmosphere is part and parcel of the planet itself. But let's go back to the car in the garage. First. Do not run its motor. Instead take this little motor so small you need a powerful microscope to see it. Turn it on. It emits only CO2 proportionally to the size of the car's motor if it were idling. Now use that  for your analogy.

--Brant

1 hour ago, Peter said:

I hereby agree to not make shit up but, like you just made shit up. I made no shit up. \

That is a dishonest dodge. Your claim was that before war was declared (in 1939 or perhaps you meant 1941), 'selected' NAZI ladies were popping out the little Lindys. Wrong on all counts, Peter.  Not NAZIs. Not before war was declared. Not selected.

Are you so incorrigible that you can't see my objection for what it was, Peter?  Asking for a cite was asking for you to provide warrants for your three claims.  The very podge you next podged here showed that your claims were WRONG.

I am thinking that you are incorrigible, content to leave misinformation droppings at OL.  As a House of Reason, OL has had some basic standards. One of those standards is that epistemological fudge and bullschmutz claims will be criticized.

Quote

Don’t shoot the messenger.

Means "Don't Criticize My Claims." Means:  "I podged a podge of text proving my claims wrong. Look, a squirrel!"

No one is shooting a squirrel, Peter, except for you. Tend to your foot-wounds as appropriate. My bottom line: If you want to be considered an honest and informed discussant, don't post bullschmutz and then deny having done so.  Fudge and dodges and unwarranted claims are worth repudiation.  Is your epistemology so suffused with amour-propre -- that you can't admit you have been caught with your pants down?

OK. Block is more efficient.  Checking your premises is a job for a full time intern.  You have self-sorted your past and future claims under Unreliable/Incorrigible/Careless.

Next on "OL's Most Incorrigible" we revisit the scene of previous crimes in the Great Cognitive Swamp. Tentative title: Shooting Fish In A Barrel

-- if you are not incorrigible, Peter, you will acknowledge that No Nazi Women Were Selected Pre-War for Lindy ... you will say "I went waaaay beyond the data."

Ork to William, Ork to William.

Yes, Mulder?

SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial . . .

Shut up Mulder, I know what it means. Are you insinuating . . .

Oh, come on William. I do not choose to search for the three German babies Lindy fathered and prove the article was factual.

Liar!

William? What do you say to a person who is about to snap??? Smile! If I should come across the article? but in the mean time, type in “charles lindbergh and nazi babies’ for some creepy photos.

From Wikipedia: Before the United States formally entered World War II, some accused Lindbergh of being a fascist sympathizer. He supported the isolationist America First movement, which advocated that America remain neutral during the war, as had his father, Congressman Charles August Lindbergh, during World War I. This conflicted with the Franklin Roosevelt administration's official policy, which sought to protect Britain from a German takeover. Lindbergh subsequently resigned his commission as a colonel in the United States Army Air Forces in April 1941 after being publicly rebuked by President Roosevelt for his isolationist views. Nevertheless, Lindbergh publicly supported the war effort after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific Theater of World War II as a civilian consultant, though President Roosevelt had refused to reinstate his Army Air Corps colonel's commission. In his later years, Lindbergh became a prolific prize-winning author, international explorer, inventor, and environmentalist . . . . Lindbergh elucidated his beliefs about the white race in an article he published in Reader's Digest in 1939: We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.^[160]

Lindbergh's speeches and writings reflected his adoption of Nazi views on race and religion. He wrote in his memoirs that all of the Germans he met thought the country would be better off without its Jews.^[161]

Because of his trips to Nazi Germany, combined with a belief in eugenics,^[162] Lindbergh was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer.

Lindbergh's reaction to Kristallnacht was entrusted to his diary: "I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans," he wrote. "It seems so contrary to their sense of order and intelligence. They have undoubtedly had a difficult 'Jewish problem', but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?"^[163] Lindbergh had planned to move to Berlin for the winter of 1938–39, after Kristallnacht, a time when many Americans reacted with revulsion at Nazi barbarism.^{[citation needed]} He had provisionally found a house in Wannsee, but after Nazi friends discouraged him from leasing it because it had been formerly owned by Jews,^[164] it was recommended that he contact Albert Speer, who said he would build the Lindberghs a house anywhere they wanted. On the advice of his close friend, the eugenicist Alexis Carrel, he cancelled the trip.^[164]

In his diaries, he wrote: "We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence ... Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country."  end quote 

How people generally thought about Jews, Japs, et al. in the 1930s became much different after the war. Nazis weren't so bad. The Japs were pretty bad because they were Japs. Blacks? Keep them in their place. Sadly, Lindbergh's views were common. I am pretty sure they were my father's views too. These views were not innocent, they simply had more room to run and The Ship of Fools nowhere to dock.

--Brant

don't worry--in a hundred years people will be glad they aren't living a hundred years ago

Prejudice IS anti evidential, Brant. Times were different then and will be in a hundred years, so I agree . . . base your thinking on facts.

I have read the book, “The Martian” and now I have seen the movie. I liked both a lot but I would say the movie was better. Some of the descriptions of events in the book were hard for me to visualize.   

I won’t do any more spoilers but the facts may generate more discussions at NASA (which stands for sodium suspended in the altitudes or salt spray. joke) I think we need to send unmanned supply ships to Mars, with more supplies and better housing before humans attempt to stay there. And I think I read that the housing should be placed sub surface and near some of the ice cap. And I have read of methods to “terra-form” the red planet but that would take thousands of years with tomorrow/s technology.

Peter  

From Wikipedia: More than five million cubic kilometers of ice have been identified at or near the surface of modern Mars, enough to cover the whole planet to a depth of 35 meters (115 ft).^[9] Even more ice is likely to be locked away in the deep subsurface.^[10]

Some liquid water may occur transiently on the Martian surface today, but only under certain conditions.^{[3][11][12][13]} No large standing bodies of liquid water exist, because the atmospheric pressure at the surface averages just 600 pascals (0.087 psi)—about 0.6% of Earth's mean sea level pressure—and because the global average temperature is far too low (210 K (−63 °C; −82 °F)), leading to either rapid evaporation (sublimation) or rapid freezing. Before about 3.8 billion years ago, Mars may have had a denser atmosphere and higher surface temperatures,^[14][15] allowing vast amounts of liquid water on the surface,^{[16][17] [18]} possibly including a large ocean^{[19][20][21][22]} that may have covered one-third of the planet.^[23][24][25] Water has also apparently flowed across the surface for short periods at various intervals more recently in Mars' history.^[26][27][28] On December 9, 2013, NASA reported that, based on evidence from the Curiosity rover studying Aeolis Palus, Gale Crater contained an ancient freshwater lake that could have been a hospitable environment for microbial life.^[29][30]

7 hours ago, william.scherk said:

-- if you are not incorrigible, Peter, you will acknowledge that No Nazi Women Were Selected Pre-War for Lindy ... you will say "I went waaaay beyond the data."

Tap tap. What time does this bus come, usually?

6 hours ago, Creature from the Black Lagoon of Bullschmutz said:

William? What do you say to a person who is about to snap??? Smile! If I should come across the article? but in the mean time, type in “charles lindbergh and nazi babies’ for some creepy photos.

I don't come to OL to be bullshitted about Nazi-bred Lindy Babies -- followed by lax and incorrigible attenuations on the original craptastic claim,  and I prefer to spend my time with honest argument and disagreement -- in a House of Reason.  Block is thus indicated.  If you could be taught to make links and post photos, the Lindy Nazi Babies trope could be posted and laughed at. Instead, the laugh is on you. 

For those who don't give a flying fox about shoddy warrants here, a spatter of applause.  The insidious nature of bad epistemology can rot OL precincts from within.  It's just too bad. Like the site of a pool party where successive brown rings tell a sad story. 

I apologize for the extended ranting, and for paying too much attention to  sewage in the cement pond.  To the OT, I'd just say that I gather from the armchair that  a scientific law is an observed regularity in nature, and generally restricted to the What part of explication.  A Regularity obtains in all such situations X, within the field and scope of Z.   The what can be made mathematical, but as a rendering of the regularity  -- a scaffold that lets us 'see' the underlying regularities in a systematic fashion.  The whys and the hows  of the XYA regularities and the intersection with other laws are I think the work of scientific theory. And from there to engineering.  And pool parties like CERN.

We owe so much of modern industrial civilization to the extent individual humans understand scientific laws. That's my story and I could be wrong.

I'll hang up and listen.

So, Will-I-Am denies the existence of any Lindberg babies other than the one that was stolen? Sheesh. And I thought the internet was full of truthiness. I have seen two articles so far that claim the opposite . . .  but yes, it is possible some guys were trying to sell stories or get their books to sell, and stretched the truth or lied about it or changed the time frames, etc. But that picture of Lindy giving the Nazi salute? That sticks in my mind. His Nazi friends, his stays in Nazi Germany?

Back to basic human psychology and physiology. How far fetched is it, that an egomaniac like that, would not cheat on his wife after being separated for weeks or months?  I am not asking anyone to prove a negative but I neither accuse him, or absolve him of infidelity with der frauleins. I am simply saying the truth is out there and I am more than willing to believe ill of a Nazi totalitarian Witch doctor like Der Lindy. Did he not hop, mein heir? (The LIndy Hop dance craze, get it?)

Hearsay? Proof? Epistemology denied? Nah. As Trump says, "I'm just sayin'" I wonder if his relatives know anything? I will send my Israeli PI to have a chat with them and then on to those Nazi enclaves in South America. I see a book in this.

Peter

What's that a pic of from the flying boat, William?

--Brant

William wrote: I don't come to OL to be bullshitted about Nazi-bred Lindy Babies. end quote

Wellllll . . .  as long as I get to read your stuff, ignore me.

Lindy denier, William wrote: The whys and the hows of the XYA regularities and the intersection with other laws are I think the work of scientific theory. end quote

You scoundrel. You are teasing me! What is that photograph of? I would assume it’s taken from Lindy’s plane showing a picture of the Cern Super Collider which was completed in 1944 and allowed the German’s to win the war. I guess those Lindy babies could have been immaculately conceived.

Oh. I get it. This is mind washing occurring. Rand thought that the political spectrum had the Progressives and the Commies next to each other on the left and the Capitalist / Libertarians were on the right. So what should we call a Canadian Progressive? Minced RED's? No! I prefer they be known as Lilacs.

Peter     

3 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

What's that a pic of from the flying boat, William?

It is of Fordlandia. Click the picture to go to linked story.

Thx. An American businessman seeing WWII coming ordered his buyers to buy all the natural rubber they could and ship it to his warehouses in the US, all on his own dime. The reason gas was rationed in WWII wasn't because of any gas shortage--there was plenty of gas--it was because of shortage of rubber. Ford was on to something beyond his understanding--and competence.

--Brant

10 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

Thx. An American businessman seeing WWII coming ordered his buyers to buy all the natural rubber they could and ship it to his warehouses in the US, all on his own dime. The reason gas was rationed in WWII wasn't because of any gas shortage--there was plenty of gas--it was because of shortage of rubber. Ford was on to something beyond his understanding--and competence.

--Brant

And then synthetic rubber happened....

On 4/15/2016 at 11:32 AM, Peter said:

Why does Ba’al have a minus one by his logo? I would rate him at least as a “pi.”

I think there have been human *start up* super clans and civilizations, living, dying – all leaving few traces for perhaps a million years. Not the Aztecs, Romans and Egyptians of course. They knew how to leave a trace! There certainly could have been non human civilizations before the last extinction level event that killed most of the dino’s. Who knows, when traces can be wiped clean by hydrogen bombs, asteroids, tsunami’s and the lowly vegetable and microbiological life?

I think humans have seeded the planet with a sentient gene pool and now we need to colonize and seed the galaxy.

Peter 

There is no indication that we will ever travel to other stars.  They are too far away.;   

To seed the galaxy we would have to increase our life spans by several orders of magnitude, or learn to travel near light speed (very unlikely).

On 4/14/2016 at 4:00 PM, Peter said:

 

And no matter the catastrophe, we must leave a discoverable record of what we know, for future humans. A smart, past method of keeping knowledge was to write it in stone. And that would still be good insurance.      

Richard Feynman wrote in Vol I of his famous 3 volume work on physics  that if  civilization disappeared we should make sure one idea is left for our successors: Things are made of atoms.