Messages

I can understand them being illegal.  e-cigs are like the tobacco equivalent of hashish.  I'm not in favor of them being illegal, but I can see why legislators might choose to make that decision.

In what way are they "like the tobacco equivalent of hashish"? 

They're a device that you use to vaporize the distilled essence of tobacco.  I guess more of a hashpipe than hash itself.

I can understand them being illegal.  e-cigs are like the tobacco equivalent of hashish.  I'm not in favor of them being illegal, but I can see why legislators might choose to make that decision.

Okay, what this is telling me is that lithium chloride and sodium chloride can be detected in water despite their dilution beyond the Avogadro number.

This implies that for some reason, those two chemicals are now part of the actual water, which means that you're not looking at proper H₂O anymore, since any detectability below the Avogadro constant means that the original chemical in question simply isn't there (or rather, that the number of atoms in a mol are too low to be measured).

(LMNO, am I getting this right?  It's been a long time.)

It's interesting, but as you say, it doesn't support homeopathy in the slightest.

That's about the same as what I got from the write up.

As I say, interesting (in that it's not water anymore), but still not quite the same as we were talking about (Holist's weird beliefs in homeopathy and other things that imply a subjective universe that operates based on "what I want").

It does validate one of the pillars of homeopathy.  The idea that a substance can effect a solution even when it is dissolved into it at an extremely low concentration.  The less is more part of homeopathy I have yet to see addressed in a rigourous scientific way.

Except that this work doesn't imply a "solution".  The water isn't water anymore.  It can't be, by definition.

That seems like a distinction of semantics rather than a real practical distinction.  The water is different than it was without the salts dissolved into it.

As far as the farts, ass sweat, and ham sammich, probably not much, since anyone who wants to can have that just by turning on their tap.

I'm pretty sure distillation gets that stuff out though, although I don't know that there is an experiment on that either.  It would have been nice if Louis Rey had distilled his magical glowing water and seen if the distillate still glowed.

As far as the effect of drinking the water, Homeopathists claim Sodium Chloride cures migraines and nervous tension.  It seems like it would be easy to do double blind experiments to determine if this claim is accurate.  So far this has not occured.  Although if you accept that the water also contains Hitler farts, the presence or absence of those might effect the results...

Okay, what this is telling me is that lithium chloride and sodium chloride can be detected in water despite their dilution beyond the Avogadro number.

This implies that for some reason, those two chemicals are now part of the actual water, which means that you're not looking at proper H₂O anymore, since any detectability below the Avogadro constant means that the original chemical in question simply isn't there (or rather, that the number of atoms in a mol are too low to be measured).

(LMNO, am I getting this right?  It's been a long time.)

It's interesting, but as you say, it doesn't support homeopathy in the slightest.

That's about the same as what I got from the write up.

As I say, interesting (in that it's not water anymore), but still not quite the same as we were talking about (Holist's weird beliefs in homeopathy and other things that imply a subjective universe that operates based on "what I want").

It does validate one of the pillars of homeopathy.  The idea that a substance can effect a solution even when it is dissolved into it at an extremely low concentration.  The less is more part of homeopathy I have yet to see addressed in a rigourous scientific way.

Okay, what this is telling me is that lithium chloride and sodium chloride can be detected in water despite their dilution beyond the Avogadro number.

This implies that for some reason, those two chemicals are now part of the actual water, which means that you're not looking at proper H₂O anymore, since any detectability below the Avogadro constant means that the original chemical in question simply isn't there (or rather, that the number of atoms in a mol are too low to be measured).

(LMNO, am I getting this right?  It's been a long time.)

It's interesting, but as you say, it doesn't support homeopathy in the slightest.

That's about the same as what I got from the write up.

ok, fixed it.

That's weird,  That link goes somewhere else now than it did when I first went there.  Let me see if I can fix that.

The false assumption behind that being that you know how the universe really operates. Also, the concept of "evidence" is somewhat problematic. Structure of Scientific Revolutions bla-bla-bla. It's okay to feel that straightforward naive scientistic materialism is just common sense, but it's good bear in mind that people around the world have felt the same way about an astonishin variety of world-views. It is also good to bear in mind that people who seemed to share the world-view of naive scientistic materialism have disagreed wildly about how the universe works (in fact, there are competing scientific theories about that right now) and also about what constitutes evidence.

And thinking that the naive normative notions of how science should operate actually describe (by and large, with a few deviations, of course!) the way that science as a social phenomenon works, or that other considerations (economic ones, ideological ones) can be disregarded is also a bit silly.

Babble all you like.  Water molecules don't have memory.

Here's a study that suggests that they do...

http://www.apothekerkammer.at/Internet/OEAK/NewsPresse_1_0_0a.nsf/79a88168b63a62f1c125697d004f0ee0/4e34a515fe5ad12fc1256df3002dae1c/$FILE/Hom%C3%B6opathie%20Thermoluminescence%20Rey%20Physica.pdf

For those that feel the article looks like gobbledegook basically the experimenter dissolved florescent salts in water, below the level where there should have been any florescense, and there still was.  Doesn't address the homeopathic claim that tiny amounts of something do the opposite of large amounts, but it does suggest that water has memory.

For those prone to dismissing the article, it was published in Physica A, which is a respected, peer reviewed scientific journal.

Also, they're all pretentious douche bags and often pedantic.

Don't forget passive aggressive.

The Wicca Forum? No, I don't think so. Why do you think so?

They also believe in shit that isn't real.

But not the shit that isn't real that I believe in, sadly.

I fail to see a functional difference.

It depends on how your beliefs cause you to act.

Charlie Stross asks "why are there so many stupid people"?

I have a speculative answer:

We are hominids. One of the things that makes us different from other primates is that we have language. Language enables us to communicate about our environment and to communicate our interior states. This is a very powerful tool; it means that if, for example, you have figured out a better way to peel a banana, you can tell me about it, and I can acquire that trait.

Our ability to exchange extended phenotypic traits without genetic exchange (thank you, language faculty!) makes us, as Dawkins pointed out in the 1990s, exceptional.

Because of this ability, we don't have to invent everything for ourselves, individually; we can borrow one anothers' good ideas. So we only need to be smart enough to understand and use the cognitive tools created by our most intelligent outliers.

Let me re-formulate that hypothesis: The evolutionary pressure selecting for general intelligence (to the extent that general intelligence exists) breaks once a species develops language.

And a logical corollary of this hypothesis is that we are only just smart enough, on average, to be capable of horizontal transfer of memes. Once language and culture arrived (note specialized usage of term 'culture'), we didn't need to get any smarter: we could "borrow" from one another. Therefore we're only just smart enough to do this.

(I call this Charlie's Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis.)

Steve Hynd suggests that this could explain the trajectory of the Republican Party at the moment:

My analogy is this: the Republican Party has lost the minimum intelligence to listen to its outliers because it has lost the minimum intelligence to realize that its outliers are now on its left-moderate wing.

[...]

To borrow from Charlie, the Republican Party – a memetic entity – has become too stupid for horizontal transfer of new memes which would fit it for survival in a cultural environment which is rapidly changing in demographics and in its attitudes to bigotry of various stripes. It can change that and evolve or it can stay the same and become extinct.

One of the things that's amusingly contradictory of this is that in America, the average IQ has risen 27 points over the last 60 years, which, in context of the correlation of socioeconomic improvements over that span, would seem to indicate that when you lighten survival stresses upon the general population, intelligence rises.

Or that without survival stress  you are able to devote more resources to focusing on the sort of abstract knowledge that IQ tests test for.

What you want is this

http://community.e2conf.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/1090-5-1190/OSS%20Simple%20Sabotage%20Manual.pdf

Thank you.

A princess that just quit smoking.  I'm scared.

A viking princess, yeah, that makes it even scarier.

Early to rise and early to bed
Makes a man underpaid, overworked and DEAD

My favorite so far.

Today's little bit of hilarious horror:

http://m24digital.com/en/2013/01/29/pastor-claimed-his-penis-had-been-anointed-with-the-holy-spirit-divine-semen-and-raped-his-faithful/

Sobrino Valdeci Picanto, 59, was arrested in Apore, Goiás, Brazil, for raping several women attending his church. He gave as an excuse that his penis had been consecrated with "divine semen of the Holy Spirit."
A 23-year-old young woman, who prefers to remain anonymous said, "He has convinced us that only God could come into our lives through the mouth."
"Often, after worship, Pastor Valdecir take us to some of the funds back to the church and asked us to do oral sex on him until the Holy Spirit comes through ejaculation".

Is that rape?  I mean, as far as we can tell he wasn't even lying about his holy penis, since he believed it, and they chose to take communion.