Max

It is Gerrit (or "Gerard") Dou. Here another painting by Dou: "old woman reading"

I think that "doctors" in advertisements seldom are real doctors, that in most cases they are just actors/models.

That man is a crackpot. He doesn't seem to understand the difference between rest mass and relativistic mass. Relativistic mass is a somewhat outmoded concept. It is related to the total energy E of a particle, (mrel = E / c2 )and therefore dependent on the velocity with regard to the observer. If the particle approaches the speed of light the energy and therefore also the relativistic mass increase without bound. Today we prefer to use the rest mass (the energy of the particle at rest, divided by c2), which does not increase with its velocity. It is just a different definition, the calculated effects remain exactly the same. He also seems to think that the neutrino doesn't exist, claims that it has no mass and no spin. Well neutrino's do exist, do have mass (even if it's very small) and certainly do have spin, and they can also be detected. So listening further to this man is wasting your time if you want to learn something meaningful, because he really has no clue.

I can read the article without subscribing (following the link given above), no problem.

I haven't posted for some time here, because most discussions are now about American politics and conspiracy theories, neither of which interest me. In most cases I don't know the people concerned, or have only a vague notion who they are. I prefer to discuss things I know something about.

Thank you, everything is ok here!

Especially when they have those horrible silicone tits.

I suppose it is this Doris Gordon: https://humanlifereview.com/pro-life-movement-loses-doris-gordon-libertarians-life-founder/

I just give some possible alternatives to Ellen's notion that "not being able to handle criticism" would automatically imply "banning your opponent", that's all. I myself don't continue a discussion if I've clearly stated my viewpoint and the other side is just going to resort to personal attacks. In such cases I let the other have the last word, I'm not interested in some endless ping pong game that doesn't solve anything.

"Not being able to handle criticism" doesn't necessary imply banning the other person. It could also mean "always insisting on having the last word", or "not being able to say 'lets agree to disagree'" for example.

The ten climate commandments: Among the worshiping public, Pope Franciscus, German Chancellor Merkel and President Steinmeier (the owl). April 2019. Of course, today many other politicians could be added...

Here a video of Greta without a script to read from:

23 minutes ago, Jon Letendre said: Sorry, I took you for meaning the dumb ones’ failures are ignored, but you surely meant the fails, period, are ignored. Do have experience with cats? Allowed outdoors? You’ve watched them while they are outdoors? In my experience the intelligence depicted in the video just scratches the surface of cats’ abilities. Almost my whole life I've lived with cats. Only when the last one died, 18 years old, we've decided not to take another cat, as that one would probably survive us, and that is an unbearable idea to us, as we've no idea what would become of it then. And yes, they can be clever. When it suits them.

It wouldn't affect that proposition, but neither would it prove it. The file drawer effect or publication bias is a serious problem in many research fields, like psychology or medicine, not ot mention more dubious fields (it's the way to "prove" with spurious significance values desired theories.) If the skill is genuine, I think the cat uses a different strategy. In the video you can see that the cat sometimes doesn't look at all at the cups, so it wouldn't have been able to keep track of the right one. I think a more likely explanation is that it reacts to the sound of the ball. No need to keep track of the relevant cup, it just hears under which cup the ball is still rolling a bit at the end, That said, I think that a perfect score as in the video is unlikely, so there probably has been some cherry picking for the end result.

Very funny and charming, but of course cheating is very easy. Just don't publish the articles that don't confirm your thesis, um... I mean. don't show the videos that don't contain the desired result. That's called the file drawer effect.

I think it's highly unlikely that any sophisticated form of life that is not carbon based can evolve anywhere in the universe. It's the carbon chemistry that is at the basis of the enormously complex and sophisticated machinery that makes such life possible.

You could just shrink the map to a smaller size and project it back onto a smaller globe. After all, you can buy globes in all sizes... Cutting away some pieces will of course not conserve the number of "pixels". The result of reattaching your cut halves wouldn't be an ellipsoid, but a "globe" with a discontinuity in its tangent planes at the "new equator". You could deform this thing to a new spherical globe, that is however missing the pixels around the original equator. Too bad for the people who lived there, they've disappeared.

Nathaniel Branden in "Who is Ayn Rand" (p.92):

There is nothing moral in Roark's blowing op that building. He made a serious error of judgment by surreptitiously helping Keating in designing that building, and therefore he would have had to bear the consequences when that went wrong. In spite of all the noble excuses for a "morally perfect hero", this was just an unwarranted act of scorched earth.

Insecurities? Psychobabble framing. I'll tell you what my intent in this discussion was: to show that your arguments for implying tampering with the picture were false. Reread our discussion on that matter. You'll see that I quite neutrally, without any personal remark, told you why your argument was fallacious. You return with new arguments, which I also show to be false. Then you start with personal remarks: Observe the condescending tone, and the start of psychologizing: I would have no experience in such matters. How do you know? Because I disagree with you? Further I'm a "believer" who "cannot think outside the box", and therefore explaining it to me will probably be "wasted effort". Don't you see that you're now exactly doing what you are reproaching me for? Not that it bothers me, but your double standard does. Yes, and you are a great shutter down of discussions. When I wrote (about the beard of the statue): "Curious, I just see a beard, an ear and hair on top. No, it's not very clear, but that is due to the fact that the image of the white statue is rather bleached out by overexposure, and it isn't very sharp anyway. That seems to me to be a more likely explanation of what you see, than the notion that some evil conspirator has painted an extra beard on the statue or has removed some embarrassing details of the statue", your reply is: Escalating again, after a quite normal remark of mine. Probably because you think with your all-knowing psychologizing mind that this must be what I'm really thinking. Well, even if that were the case, I didn't say that, and it is nowhere implied in what I really said. Talk about thin-skinned. You seem to be describing yourself. Getting power, bullying, silencing dissenters, you must have a big social standing fear.

Why? Suppose you can identify the position of one of the lamps. Then you can draw lines from that position to the head of the person (light ray, shadow margin). But where the ray hits the wall, will depend on the distance of that person to the wall. What from the current perspective is one single line, may, seen from above, be a series of diverging lines, resulting in different positions of the shadow on the wall, depending on the position of that person. And that is known in only one dimension, the second coordinate is unknown. We don't know where his feet are, nor how tall he is. You're right, I had confused the right shadow of the tall man with the left shadow of the small woman.

I was just talking about the picture with the red and green circles. In that message it was claimed that a shadow was "missing" and that that would be evidence of tampering. That picture (I didn't know then it was a still of a video) does not contain enough information to predict where the shadows of the walking people would fall on the wall behind.them. For that you should have to know where on the floor their feet are (what their x-y position is), and that information is missing. When I later saw the video and other photos, it became clear that the tall man (whose shadow was supposedly "missing") was walking farther away from the wall than for example the small woman who followed him, just as I had expected.

At least I showed how you were lying, you just utter wild accusations without substantiation.

You don't understand the importance of the second photo, although I've told you that already. When you compare (enlargements of) both statues, you see that the viewing angle is slightly different (can best be seen in the shadows), but on the face of the statue the difference is practically imperceptible. However, there is an important difference: the resolution. Compare the light distribution on both photos, then you'll see that they are completely in agreement, only is the first picture far less detailed. But there is nothing in the first picture that you cannot find back, in much greater detail of course, in the second picture, so there isn't any artifact in the first picture, it's just a rough, overexposed picture that may stimulate the imagination, like clouds in the sky may do. There is a nice example in astronomy of this effect: the "face on Mars". In a first, low resoluton picture, it did resemble (with a bit of fantasy) a face. But later photos showed that this was just accidental in a noisy picture, the "face" disappeared, no artifact, no sculpting Martians.

Oh, now you are also a clairvoyant? You "know" that I haven't even looked at the picture correctly before I gave my reaction? Well, for your information: I dowloaded the picture first, and opened in my photo editor, tried different settings of brightness and contrast to enhance the details. So you're just lying to dismiss my criticism. If my technical explanations show that there is no evidence that your arguments are valid, that is enough to dismiss those. No, your views are not valid: motion blur in walking persons is no evidence for tampering, sharpness artefacts are no evidence for tampering (except for using a sharpness filter, which may be a default option of the camera), equal fuzziness before and after a walking person is no evidence for tampering, and neither is lack of detail due to overexposure. I can understand that you dont want to spend long hours, delving into this, yours is a lost cause, and I suspect that deep down, you know that.