Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?

Amazing in an entertaining way ! - the pseudo-intellectuals express just as many overheated convictions about God as the pseudo-Christians, it may be a cartoon version of religious hierarchies but then again even the denominational Churches have moved away from Dante's journey through heaven and hell as physical entities and taken a softer and more human approach.

Maybe the empiricists will eventually outgrow Well's 'The Time Machine' but theorists are an obstinate bunch and can go their own way with a story that began before Isaac defined time and space for his followers.

Again, something charming about all this.

On Thu, 1 Nov 2018 05:18:42 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel
wrote:
On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 3:15:07 AM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter
wrote:
On Wed, 31 Oct 2018 14:59:57 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel
wrote:




Would an all-powerful God be unable to reveal himself in such a
way
that also skeptics became convinced?




He COULD, but why would you think that is His goal?




as a ridicule, but it caught on. But then the cosmic microwave
background radiation was discovered. Now Hoyle is dead but Big
Bang -
both the theory and the name of the theory - lives on.




Not forever.




Do you think I believe that we are slaves?




Of course you do! Why else would you write things like "You
require
evidence on YOUR terms, not God's"...




So you believe arrogancy is independence and humility is degrading.




I'm only trying to find out if your Christian belief is of
the Nicaea=
n
or the non-Nicaean kind. If you are Nicaean, you accept the
doctrines
from the church council of Nicaea in AD 325, and if you are
non-Nicae=
an
you reject them.

Some of it I agree with and some of it I don't.

Do you believe in the trinity?

Not in the sense of the creeds accepted by most Christian churches.

How does your belief differ from theirs?


Do you celebrate Christmas and Easter on the commonly accepted
dates?

Yes.

Do you think the current year is AD 2018?

Close to it, anyway.

All these things were decided in Nicaea in AD 325.

Decided by a bunch of apostates.

So why do you follow the dictates from these apostates and celebrate
Easter and Christmas? Why not instead stop celebrating these
apostatic holidays? Do you need help in doing so? Join the Jehovas
Witnesses... grin

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 6:26:58 AM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter wrote:

On Thu, 1 Nov 2018 04:38:42 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel
wrote:

There are thousands of incorrect statements and I'm not the internet
police

Nobody has asked that of you. But you could be a contributor to
Wikipedia, if you want to. But instead you prefer to whine...

I've never done it and don't propose starting. I have enough on my plate
trying to get a Raspberry Pi to read USB arduino data, building a counter
using a 74LV8154 on an Arduino shield, making Arrow of Light plaques for my
Webelos boys, and answering interminable puerile objections on this board.

Why don't YOU clean up your own false claims:

I'd be happy to, but only if they really are false, not just because
you dislike what I say.

I dislike dishonesty.

So you lie by quoting the wrong quotation. The lie is THIS:

"The experiment is widely regarded as flawed and unscientific due to the
small sample size, the methods used, as well as the fact only one f the
six subjects met the hypothesis."

There were FOUR, not one:

Three of those four had additional weight changes, not explainable by
a soul having weight leaving the body at death. If those additional
weight changes could occur without souls involved, why not those
weight changes at the moment of death?

Sudden vs. longer term, forgetful one.

Patient #3 lost 1/2 oz at the moment of death but a few minutes later
he lost even more, one full oz. How could that be?

It's called "evaporation." YOU were one of those babbling about that,
remember?

And you dismissed that explanation.

No, I didn't. I dismissed it for a SUDDEN change, puerile one.

Are you claiming that evaporation somehow ceases at the moment of death,
to be resumed shortly afterwards?

Why can't you understand that your objections are really foolish?

But why do you exclude the weight losses of an additional ONE FULL
OUNCE in two of the cases? And the weight gain a few minutes after
death in one of the cases...

More disingenuous babbling baloney.

But you have, implicitly, given a partial answer anyway. Your
method is called Cherry Picking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

Completely dishonest babbling baloney.

Nice try, but those cheap con artist tricks cannot hide the obvious
fact that you are cherry picking...

Your so-called "cherry picking" is separating sudden versus longer term
changes. That is dishonest of you.

So there you are - even the author himself says we cannot draw any
reliable conclusions from his measurements alone. And the original
paper says so.

And I admitted that right off the bat.

So why did you even bring it up if you knew from the start that this
study was unreliable?

Not "unreliable" dishonest one. You really do like to jump to straw man
baloney, don't you.

The problem is that you demand absolute scientific proof to five nines
confidence. Sorry, old bean, can only give you three nines.

FYI: "absolute scientific proof" does not exist.

FYI: More straw man baloney from you. NOTICE I followed that by five nines
confidence. You are getting really, really picky about irrelevant stuff.

Any scientific conclusion is open for modification, if and when reliable
evidence for that appears.

But the new evidence must have greater confidence than the old.

Your monumental skepticism leads you to the point of dishonesty,
particularly when you ignore sudden versus longer term changes.
Why don't you apply this skepticism to AGW? :-))

Back in the days of Svante Arrhenius, who in the 1800's was the first
person to point out the future risk of AGW, being skeptical about AGW
would have been a reasonable point of view. Today the situation is
very different. Being skeptical of AGW today is much like being
skeptical about the Earth being round and not flat.

Aren't you one who has played with the modstar program that shows that
doubling the CO2 level has a minor greenhouse effect? Have you tried
doubling the water vapor level and observe what happens with that?

It's obvious that your beliefs are NOT based on the evidence.

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 12:26:58 PM UTC, Paul Schlyter wrote:


Back in the days of Svante Arrhenius, who in the 1800's was the first
person to point out the future risk of AGW, being skeptical about AGW
would have been a reasonable point of view. Today the situation is
very different. Being skeptical of AGW today is much like being
skeptical about the Earth being round and not flat.

You mean empirical blasphemy - the new rage out there.

You shouldn't be worried about carbon dioxide levels, you should, however, be concerned that neither you nor the pseudo-Christian here can express the most basic fact of a round and rotating Earth.

I have to shake my head sometimes at the train wreck when it comes to the Equatorial speed as to arrive at the proper value requires a lot of careful observations and assertions such as 'the 'average' rotation rate is also the 'constant' rotation rate using a clock and the calendar framework -

"Multiplying the value in rad/s by Earth's equatorial radius of 6,378,137 m (WGS84 ellipsoid) (factors of 2Ï€ radians needed by both cancel) yields an equatorial speed of 465.1 m/s (1,526 ft/s), or 1,674.4 km/h (1,040.4 mph).Some sources state that Earth's equatorial speed is slightly less, or 1,669.8 km/h. This is obtained by dividing Earth's equatorial circumference by 24 hours. However, the use of only one circumference unwittingly implies only one rotation in inertial space, so the corresponding time unit must be a sidereal hour. This is confirmed by multiplying by the number of sidereal days in one mean solar day, 1.002 737 909 350 795,[33] which yields the equatorial speed in mean solar hours given above of 1,674.4 km/h." The Train Wreck, Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation

I really wish people would come to their senses and enjoy the Lat/Long system and 24 hour system for a round and rotating Earth with an Equatorial speed of 1037.5 miles per hour or a rate of rotation of 15 degrees per hour.

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 6:39:22 AM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter wrote:

On Thu, 1 Nov 2018 05:18:42 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel
wrote:

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 3:15:07 AM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter wrote:

Would an all-powerful God be unable to reveal himself in such a way
that also skeptics became convinced?

He COULD, but why would you think that is His goal?

as a ridicule, but it caught on. But then the cosmic microwave
background radiation was discovered. Now Hoyle is dead but Big
Bang - both the theory and the name of the theory - lives on.

Not forever.

Do you think I believe that we are slaves?

Of course you do! Why else would you write things like "You require
evidence on YOUR terms, not God's"...

So you believe arrogancy is independence and humility is degrading.

Do you believe in the trinity?

Not in the sense of the creeds accepted by most Christian churches.

How does your belief differ from theirs?

The Nicean creed says the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are "one substance"
(whatever that means). The Athanasian creed is even even worse double-talk.

Do you celebrate Christmas and Easter on the commonly accepted dates?

Yes.

Do you think the current year is AD 2018?

Close to it, anyway.

All these things were decided in Nicaea in AD 325.

Decided by a bunch of apostates.

So why do you follow the dictates from these apostates and celebrate
Easter and Christmas?

"Tradition!" -- Tevye

Anyway, I don't see any doctrinal requirement that Christmas and Easter be
celebrated at all, let alone on particular dates.

Why not instead stop celebrating these apostatic holidays? Do you need
help in doing so? Join the Jehova[h[s Witnesses... grin

I believe many conventional churches are much closer to the first-century
church than Jehovah's Witnesses are.

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 7:04:44 AM UTC-6, Gary Harnagel wrote:

Why can't you understand that your objections are really foolish?

He pointed out that the experiment you're citing showed weight loss in some, but
not all cases, at the moment of death, and it also showed similar sudden losses
of weight at other times after death in some cases.

This would seem to point to a natural phenomenon like evaporation being
measured, rather than something that only happens at the moment of death.

With a more impressive data set, of course, one could perhaps start talking
about natural weight loss by things like evaporation happening gradually, and
this other phenomenon always happening at the precise moment of death - so that
the weight of the soul was indeed being observed. But the measurements here
don't approach the kind of precision needed to do that.

John Savard

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 7:04:44 AM UTC-6, Gary Harnagel wrote:

Aren't you one who has played with the modstar program that shows that
doubling the CO2 level has a minor greenhouse effect? Have you tried
doubling the water vapor level and observe what happens with that?

It's obvious that your beliefs are NOT based on the evidence.

We can increase the carbon dioxide level by burning fossil fuels.

Nothing we do *directly* raises or lowers the water vapor level. But guess what
*does* raise the water vapor level - *rising temperatures*.

So the net result of that is that _ultimately_ raising the carbon dioxide level
has a bigger impact than it does directly, because it causes a little warming,
that causes a higher water vapor level, and that causes a little more warming,
which causes a still higher water vapor level...

Thus, water vapor being more of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is *not* an
argument against dealing with global warming by reducing carbon dioxide
emissions.

John Savard

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 8:12:41 AM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 7:04:44 AM UTC-6, Gary Harnagel wrote:

Why can't you understand that your objections are really foolish?

He pointed out that the experiment you're citing showed weight loss
in some, but not all cases, at the moment of death,

All four cases showed sudden weight loss at or near the time of death.

and it also showed similar sudden losses of weight at other times after
death in some cases.

They were not "sudden" since these weight changes were were measured
MINUTES after death, not seconds.

This would seem to point to a natural phenomenon like evaporation being
measured, rather than something that only happens at the moment of death.

There was a distinctly different time frame between the weight loss at
the time of death and other weight changes.

With a more impressive data set, of course, one could perhaps start talking
about natural weight loss by things like evaporation happening gradually,

MacDougall reported evaporation weight losses.

and this other phenomenon always happening at the precise moment of death
- so that the weight of the soul was indeed being observed. But the
measurements here don't approach the kind of precision needed to do that.

John Savard

The sudden weight losses at the time of death seem quite dramatic. Perhaps
with more patients the cause of the weight changes on the order of minutes
could be determined, but that's of secondary importance and does not
invalidate the observation of SUDDEN weight loss.

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 8:17:48 AM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 7:04:44 AM UTC-6, Gary Harnagel wrote:

Aren't you one who has played with the modstar program that shows that
doubling the CO2 level has a minor greenhouse effect? Have you tried
doubling the water vapor level and observe what happens with that?

It's obvious that your beliefs are NOT based on the evidence.

We can increase the carbon dioxide level by burning fossil fuels.

Nothing we do *directly* raises or lowers the water vapor level. But guess
what *does* raise the water vapor level - *rising temperatures*.

Which modtran shows isn't caused by CO2 greenhouse effect.

So the net result of that is that _ultimately_ raising the carbon dioxide
level has a bigger impact than it does directly, because it causes a little
warming, that causes a higher water vapor level, and that causes a little
more warming, which causes a still higher water vapor level...

Thus, water vapor being more of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is
*not* an argument against dealing with global warming by reducing carbon
dioxide emissions.

John Savard

Well, let's delve into this. Here's the output for standard conditions:

Tground = 299.7 K Heat Flux = 298.52 W/m^2

for inputs of CO2 = 400 ppm.

Double CO2 to 800 ppm:

Tground = 299.7 K Heat Flux = 295.19 W/m^2

Raise ground temperature to return heat flux to original value:

Tground = 300.46 K Heat Flux = 298.52 W/m^2

This result includes the effect of water vapor. So DOUBLING the CO2 level
results in a temperature rise of 0.76 K, a far cry from what AGW advocates
claim.

To your claim that water vapor increases with temperature, this makes sense
provided that relative humidity stays the same. We increase the standard
water vapor sale by the water vapor pressure ratio between 299.7 K and the
new ground temperature and iterate to approach a heat flux of 298.52 W/m2.

The final numbers are 300.81 K and water vapor scale of 1.07. So we have
a temperature rise of 1.11 K for a doubling of CO2 levels. Without the
effect of water vapor, the rise was 0.76 K, so the amplification factor
is 46% (Climate models use 100% now and they used several hundred percent
before it became obvious they were completely wrong). CO2 levels are
projected to increase by 40 ppm over the next decade, so we won't double
CO2 levels for another century at the present rate.

Don't worry. Be happy.

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 1:34:21 PM UTC-6, Gary Harnagel wrote:

They were not "sudden" since these weight changes were were measured
MINUTES after death, not seconds.

Yes, but I didn't recall you saying that the weight change, when it occurred, took
longer to happen. Something that happens hours after someone dies can still happen
in only a few seconds.

John Savard