Simon Paynton

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Occam’s Razor is not dead. It has been demoted. It is no longer the supreme judge of scientific truth as Nature may not owe us humans a simple explanation.

I would say that Nature is elegant but not necessarily simple.  I don’t believe the most simple explanation is the right one.

jakelafort wrote:
This gal got slammed by lefties. It was sexual harassment she committed!

Yes, I use “woke” to mean “ludicrous decisions taken in the name of equality”.  Progressive, I like.  Woke is ridiculous.

I knew of a school in the Washington DC area.  Many of the Black kids used to come in with their hoods up.  The teachers, inc…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Why Iran continues to choose war over peace.

Until then, the IRGC will pursue its “forever war,” threatening regional stability, the global economy, and U.S. national security.

I knew it – neither side wants to back down.  Trump doesn’t know how to cooperate, the IRGC just wants to keep doing its thing.

But surely the point is, even if we don’t move in space, we still move past the time coordinates (at the speed of light).  What makes this happen?

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
What physics gets wrong about the idea of “fundamental”.

Yes, I think a model should be “thorough” as well as “fundamental”.  Some fundamental elements are not just individisible particles – they’re also structural factors, for example, that form the fabric of reality.  So, the fundamental constants of the unive…[Read more]

I think @fullermingjr is a really nice guy and a gentleman.

Unseen wrote:
Don’t honeybees tell each other (reporting information) where to find newly-discovered nectar-hunting grounds, which then send other bees (behavior) to exploit them?

Apparently, when a bee goes to a flower, it leaves sweaty footprints on the petals.  Another bee can come along and smell the footprints and determine how long ago th…[Read more]

@strega – that’s a fantastic story.  The thing about pre-industrial people is their strong community ethos.  It shows how good it is for us.

Enco: the buzz is now snoring.

According to my studies, one of the big differences between chimps (and the other great apes) and humans, is that we are “domesticated” (compared with them, our society is not structured around male-male dominance relations).  That means that we are able to cooperate and share.  Chimps can’t share, and therefore there’s no point cooperating.

We t…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Why humans are not clever chimps. (interesting site)

Theophilus Painter was not a very rigorous thinker, he kept making mistakes, of assuming things when he didn’t know, sometimes rooted in racial bias it is probably true.

New data from the National Institutes of Health show the human genome varies from the chimp…

[Read more]

But it has to be facilitated to some extent – someone has to be there to interpret and read out loud what someone is pointing to.

If somebody’s pushing somebody’s elbow as they type at a keyboard, or point to letters, then obviously that’s a pointless exercise.  But if they’re doing it themselves, it opens up communication to an otherwise non-verbal person.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
World of Woo: Facilitated communication.

Facilitated communication may possibly be woo sometimes, but it’s not always, and it provides a communication lifeline for people who can’t talk but can use their fingers.

I have a nephew who is severely autistic and non-verbal, and he now communicates on an i-pad.  He has…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
i did not notice anything about Islamic terorism.

Based on government and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.

Illustrative cases include the 2015 Charleston church…

[Read more]

Jake,
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/right-wing-extremist-violence-is-more-frequent-and-deadly-than-left-wing-violence-data-shows

I would miss Sunday School, I read a lot of the articles.

I really like this oldie.