exchemist

It's not me who has had his thread closed down, after 11 months of posting stuff that the resident experts here can't make any sense of.

Reported, for reinserting a hijack sent to Trash.

I don't think that's true. My son hated history at his first school but at secondary school there was a charismatic teacher that brought it alive. He ended up studying Ancient History and Archaeology at university - he graduated this summer. So much depends on how a subject is taught. I had a chemistry teacher who inspired me in the 6th form - and there were some beautiful girls I think I was trying to impress. And on the issue of maths, I didn't much enjoy it until the 6th form, at which point it started to get interesting. I suppose calculus was the first breakthrough. It seemed both quite easy and tremendously powerful. And then complex numbers suddenly struck me as cool: I loved the idea that you can just invent a square root of -1, even though there isn't a real one, and build a whole extra dimension (literally) of "imaginary" maths on that invention. And conic sections were also cool: the connection between a circle, an ellipse, a parabola and a hyperbola, all in rather beautiful curves. So in fact, from doubtful beginnings I really quite liked maths by the time I got to uni - at least, enough to get by in physical science. But you are right that seeing where to apply it helps. I was delighted that complex numbers suddenly cropped up in physics, in AC theory. So there was an immediate application in the science block for what I was learning over in the maths dept. My strong advice would be to hang in there with maths. There is a theory that the human brain only gets comfortable with such abstractions in the mid-late teens for a lot of people. Part of the problem may be trying to force it before the brain is ready.

It can, in principle, but it's tough going. Generally you need someone to check your understanding is good at intervals and ways to test your knowledge. It also requires great commitment to do it all without the chance to discuss issues with other students. That's a big part of the learning process for most people: having to re-explain something to another person is the best way to check you understand it yourself. Also the excitement of discussion and argument helps a lot with motivating you to continue. And with mathematical science you need to work through a lot of problems to make sure you can manipulate the maths confidently without screwing it up. Hard to do that all on your own. In chemistry at uni those of us doing the quantum chemistry option had a maths tutor throughout the 3 years, in addition to tutors in the 3 branches of chemistry themselves.

Almost invariably what we get with these guys is a lot of fancy talk about "Christoffel symbols", "Riemann geometry" and all the other sexy buzzwords, but with without an understanding of even 1st yr undergrad physics. (That hogwash about Planck's constant and virtual particles is one example.) What they miss, with their grandiose ideas about pushing forward the frontiers, is that the real innovators in science first master the current science, before embarking on new thinking. Trying to criticise or replace something you yourself don't properly understand is an idiot's approach, doomed to failure. The unpalatable fact is there are no short cuts. You have to learn the stuff and be good enough at the associated maths used in the modelling before you can contribute. (I'm not, by the way. I can just about hack the maths of quantum chemistry but that's my limit. In fact, one of the insights I got from quantum chemistry was to start thinking in maths rather than in pictures. That gave me a glimpse of how people at that level of physics have to operate.) My great fear today is that, with the advent of chatbots that are programmed to tell the user how brilliant they are in order to keep the chat going, a new generation of cranks will be spawned, implacably convinced they are all geniuses and thus impervious to reality. Ballocks will reign supreme, if we are not careful.

His thread got closed, after running for 11 months and 8 pages.

Ah yes but first you have to share knowledge. Not ballocks. There is a distinction. These science forums (I've been a member of several for some years now) attract posts by cranks and nutters, writing ballocks while thinking they are the next Einstein. Some of these can be quite instructive: I have learnt quite a lot from reading some of them - usually where the writer has got wrong some piece of science I did not previously know about. But in the end moderation has to close them, once it has become clear they are going nowhere, otherwise the forum becomes full of angry people arguing repetitively against nonsense. You've been given a very good run for your money, it seems to me. There is a relevant aphorism attributed to Carl Sagan: "Sure, they laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown". Everyone putting forward a new theory should ask himself at intervals which of the two he is, just as a reality check. (I say "he" because women are generally not so egocentric as to fool themselves they are more brilliant than they actually are.🙂)

You are not paying attention to the earlier responses in this thread. Who is going to arrest Trump? The judge himself? No, it is the marshals. And they are controlled by……the Dept of Justice, which is headed by……a Trump appointee. Now do you understand the problem?

Just guessing but something to do with undeclared use of AI text, perhaps? It's not me though, as I don't read your posts.

You need neither photos nor videos to comply with moderation’s request.

It’s not rocket science, Professor. You can just copy a link and paste it into your text. If your source is not available on line, all you need do is provide details of it in normal text.

Yes, I note the sugary, ingratiating style of the chatbot, designed to lure you and me into further conversation by giving us compliments. I'm reminded of the absurd "excellent choice" that comes up when I order a pair of underpants from Marks and Spencer online.😆

OK, sorry for the rant, but it is a subject that worries me quite a lot at the moment. These things are being hyped to the skies and they look impressive, even seductive, but the content they produce....not so much. he other aspect that is worrying is the appallingly high electricity consumption of the damned things. People are now using them for what could be simple search queries but the power consumption is thousands of times higher than for a simple search. They are putting under strain the electricity grids of entire nations and risking the use of more fossil fuel to satisfy the extra demand.

This illustrates one of the problems with chatbots, wich is why I will have nothing to do with them. They are programmed to ingratiate themselves with the user so that he or she comes, to use your words, to "trust" them, in spite of knowing - knowing - they are untrustworthy, and to think they are having some sort of "relationship". With a fucking machine! Moreover a machine controlled by some giant corporation with the ability to influence the responses of the chatbot. Exhibit A is Musk and Grok, but do we really think Sam Alt-Right or Google will be able to resist the temptation over time? This delusion of a trusting "relationship" has the potential to poison human thought and wreck society. We are already seeing signs here on this forum. Poster after poster is outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot (chatbots' formatting and their ingratiating, verbose style are often obvious) and posting garbage as a result, having opted out of exercising editorial control of what they put out in their own name. We can easily become a society of gullible idiots. And in fact bored gullible idiots, because chatbots seem incapable of answering a question succinctly or displaying any flair in their writing style to command attention.

A relationship? With a chatbot? Is this a joke, or have you drunk the kool-aid? I’ll treat the chatbot’s explanation as a no more than a plausible possibility, pending more direct information on the subject.

Hmm, the only question is whether I can trust this response!

I can see difficulties with anything resonant rather than random. Resonance implies defined frequencies are favoured, which should lead to detectable effects.

It may not be relevant but I read in the Financial Times a couple of days ago that Google is starting to catch up, after being left behind in the AI race. I can't recall what it was the article says they are doing to catch up, but I wonder if this centralisation of search enquiries is in some way connected to a push to provide more advanced AI.

Are you suggesting the electromagnetic fluctuations of the vacuum should be treated as torsional vibrations rather than random?

So it was the Browse Tool that "decided" to pretend it was accessing the web?

Interesting. Did it "decide" to simulate web access - in effect to lie to you - or was that somehow in the programming, do you think?

And a good job too! Was he prosecuted?

Too bloody true, Squire! 👍

But Harrop represented himself as an individual down on his luck, living in his car and "sentenced to a slow death" due to lack of timely access to FMT to fix his CFS. Whereas in fact he has been running a dangerous business trading stool samples without appropriate medical oversight and promoting excessive claims for the utility of this largely unproven therapy. And he wants us all to join in his crusade. As for donor quality, to judge by the comments of @SFBayFMT5 Harrop does not have much idea of what constitutes an appropriate donor for a particular case - unsurprising as he has no medical training. If he wants to go about this the right way, he should team up with a gastroenterologist with a research interest in this area and do some proper scientific work, with a professional safety net for the participants in any trials.

Thanks again, I appreciate the clarity you are bringing to the background to this thread subject. Everything you have said here reinforces my view that Harrop has not been straight with us about his background and motives, that he has an evangelising agenda not supported by the science and that he has been doing things he should not be doing without, at the very least, oversight from a gastroenterologist. But as so often I've learned something here: that there is an unregulated trade in stool samples going on, among people who are medically unqualified.