exchemist

It looks as if the Americans on the forum have addressed the points you raise, so there is no need for me to respond.

You seem to have a rather naïve religious faith. There is no conflict between the science of Big Bang cosmology and Christianity. In fact the Big Bang was first put forward by a Christian priest, Mgr. Lemaître! It is only those fundamentalists who believe in biblical literalism - a small minority within Christianity - who struggle with accommodating science to their beliefs. By the sound of it you may be one of those. The Big Bang theory, like all theories in science, is based not on proof but on observational evidence. There is evidence, in the form of the observed cosmological red shift and in the observed Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). So yes, based on the evidence, scientists have a degree of faith in the Big Bang model for the expansion of the cosmos from a very small early state just under 14bn years ago. Please note by the way that this is not a theory of how the cosmos came to be. We have no evidence of that. It is a theory of how it initially expanded, because that is what the observations indicate. The faith science has in its theories is not religious faith, though. You need to understand that in science all theories are provisional. They represent the current best model we have. As such, they may be subject to future change in the light of new evidence. So scientists are not committed to a belief system as eternal truth, in the way that many religions demand of their adherents. Your postulate is therefore misconceived, due to your lack of understanding of the nature of science. That's OK, it's common for people outside science to have only a hazy grasp of what it really is. And in a way you are right that scientists are philosophers, though day to day they may not be aware of it, since what I have been laying out here in simple terms is the underlying philosophy of science.

Yes, seems to be a load of spherules indeed. 😆 It seems to me some of these guys get seduced by media interest to their detriment of their science (Brian Cox and De Arse Tyson spring to mind). Tegmark/Shapiro, of "mathematical universe" fame, or notoriety, depending on your point of view, is another Cambridge, Mass man (MIT) who seems to have decided to go the showmanship route and milk his enfant terrible status. But he's a lot less nutty than Full Frontal Loeb.

Trump has certainly ignored or delayed complying with court rulings. Not so far the Supreme Court, it is true, but then he has not had to. Yet. However Trump has got to work wrecking the other moving parts in US democracy: administration of justice, freedom of the media, academic freedom, ease of voting, and has deliberately chosen unqualified people who owe their position solely to his patronage to run major departments of government. He has inserted underqualified justices into the Supreme Court on the same principle. He has also grossly exceeded his powers, relying on a supine Congress not to pull him up for it. So he’s doing a pretty good job of dismantling US democracy, considering he has only been in office less than a year.

This guy seems to be either going nuts or to have decided to become an entertainer rather than a serious scientist. Is the lure of the bright lights of the TV studio and the fun he can have as a public enfant terrible, in the mould of Tegmark/Shapiro or Yuval Noah Harari? Or does he really believe in 50 billion ton spacecraft that give off a mixture of gases in the form of a cometary tail? Perhaps the truth is more mundane: he set off asserting it could be alien technology and now finds it too embarrassing to withdraw.

Yes, thank you, Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, this is the third time you have told us.

Thanks. This would seem not exclude the possibility that Rationalwiki may be under some sort of attack, then.

Haha. It’s just a possibility that I don’t rule out. As I say, there may be a perfectly innocent, banal explanation. But tell me, as I’m not an IT whizz like you, what would be the typical reasons for a 503 error?

Maybe I should try early morning GMT and see if it works.

But this p.m. (in Europe) it’s down again, now that the US is awake….. My suspicions of enemy action are reawakened.

Yes, that’s the thing about Stalin. He was not just a totalitarian dictator intent on securing absolute personal power. He actually seems to have believed this shit, fanatically.

Rationalwiki seems to be accessible once more.

Well, Stalin did train as an orthodox priest, so perhaps it was to be expected that his dictatorship might extend to philosophical doctrines.

You have just demonstrated you don't understand the difference between gravitation and the electromagnetic interaction. It's funny, but there is beginning to be a familiar smell about this tosh of yours.

I think one has to be careful about lumping all AI together. It is LLMs that feed you botshit. My somewhat limited understanding is that LLMs (at least the simpler ones) have cleverly learnt how to use language, but that's all. Importantly, they are not equipped to reason or draw conclusions from the text they have encountered - they are mere "stochastic parrots". Whereas the AI applications used in engineering and medicine are totally different, being purpose-built for the field in which they are applied. I'd have a lot more confidence in those.

As I understand it the problem is poor neighbourhoods where supermarkets, which forced most smaller food shops out of business decades ago, don’t find it profitable to put a store. This tends to leave the field for convenience stores and fast food outlets only, which in turn leads, over decades, to loss of a culture of cooking, and thence to obesity, Type 2 diabetes and other health conditions in the local population. Small greengrocers, butchers etc can only get enough footfall when they cluster together to create a “high street” type shopping destination, which is very hard to re-establish once it has gone, or which may not even have been thought about at all in the case of many poorer modern housing developments.

To make you feel more at home, you mean?

😆

Hoho, don't worry, I haven't. Just reported it. But indeed they are trying new methods to get round the anti-spam measures.

And now I've just been sent a private message, by some new shitbot calling itself @ArzuOzoguz123 , saying just "Hello".

By the way, right on cue, here is an example of the kind of semi-plausible, but borderline necro, pointlessly content-free and thus suspicious, post from a new joiner (last one in the thread):https://scienceforums.net/topic/126922-url-shorteners/ Pound to a penny this entity will post a link with spam in it within the next few days. I suppose one could argue that this type of probable spammer could in fact be weeded out by moderation asking, by email, for more information but it would be a lot of extra work, I should think.

Yes I’ve had it return a 503 error as well, though I don’t know what that signifies. But I did wonder if there was a DDOS attack in progress to shut them down. If they were kaput because of the lawsuit I’d expect their Wikipedia entry to mention it. I was however pleased to see Kennedy has an entry in the Encyclopedia of American Loons: https://americanloons.blogspot.com/search?q=Kennedy. So dissent is still alive and kicking in some corners of the internet. And, as I say, Snopes is still working.

Because that does not stop them spamming in their second post. How can a moderator tell, from an initial post, what the intentions of the new member are? You can already see that some of these spammers start off with plausible or semi-plausible "sciency" posts, wait a few days and then come back with the spam. It's tricky. But this is all being discussed on the other thread anyway. Best not to duplicate it here I suspect.

You are descending into woo, by the look of it, with this "invisible threads" stuff. Where is the evidence for this idea and what does it explain? In science, you cannot just make shit up. Your theories have to be testable by observation of nature. As to your question about creating life just by mixing molecules together, the answer is almost certainly not. Life requires a whole set of structures as well as biochemical reactions. There are a lot of sub-assemblies. The goal of research into the origin of life is to understand how it may have occurred, not to try to replicate it.

Yes, I reported one too - but then recalled that we were told not to do that as it made more stuff for the mods to wade through, the spam posts themselves being fairly obvious. Oops. 🫢 I see there has been more discussion about countermeasures.