The ballet is highlighted in the sequence below.

Venus Jupiter conjunction of 2012 (click to enlarge)

A) t= 0.  Jupiter and Venus hang in the evening sky.  Venus, by far the brighter of the two lies below Jupiter, and the pair are separated by about 15 degrees.  For reference, the Moon and Sun are about half a degree in diameter, and your outstretched fingers at arms length are about 15 degrees in angular size.

B) t= 5days.  The moons orbit takes it out of the solar glare and by the 26th it resides between Venus and Jupiter.  This will be a spectacular sight for those who get to see it, with the 2nd, 3rd and 4th brightest objects so close together in the sky.  The angular distance between the two planets has now closed to about 10 degrees.  Most of this apparent motion of Jupiter is due to the Earth moving around the Sun, while with Venus, about half of the apparent motion comes from this planet orbiting the Sun.

C) t~21 days. The Venus, Jupiter conjunction of 2012.  The two most spectacularly bright planets appear at their closest  (~3 degrees).

D) t~33days.  The Moon has now made a complete orbit since it last visited these planets.  When it last did, Jupiter was the higher, and Venus the lower.  The second time the moon visits these planets the order is reversed!  Venus the beguiling bright is now the higher of the two objects!  The objects are again separated by about 10 degrees.

For those who want to see what this looks like in animation form, take a look!  Download the  free solar system visualization software Celestia (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/)

   Popular debates favor style over substance, which is why the ‘debate’ is an irrelevance in the acquisition of knowledge.  In areas of contention, you propose experiments capable of distinguishing the various proposed models.  You then go and perform said experiments and the knowledge of mankind moves forwards.   Notably Craig will NEVER makes any testable predictions, which is why his arguments never change and he never moves forward.

    In this sense you might as well ‘debate’ a recording of William Lane Craig as William Lane Craig himself, as intellectually the physical presence of the man adds nothing to the forum.  Incidentally, I can also tell you from personal experience that this is why watching William Lane Craig debates gets so terribly monotonous.  It really is ‘pull the draw string’ and watch the man espouse the rigorous gold standards of the virtues of logic immediately prior to remorselessly and unproductively sodomizing them with a large, rusty and particularly unpleasant looking metal pipe.

   Now none of that would actually be a problem if Craig was presenting some devastating argument that no one could address, but that’s simply not the case. Craig merely rattles off his ‘5 pillars’, conveniently forgetting to tell people that none of these arguments actually convinced him that god exists, they just form a conformational bias on his ‘personal interaction’ with god.  In that sense the only argument that actually needs to be addressed is the one that convinced Craig, and boy how simple it is to address!

   People all around the world have these personal interactions with different ‘Gods’.

   Now Craig will be the first to stand up and say ‘but that doesn’t logically prove my God doesn’t exist’.  Well yeah sure, but it does put Craigs personal relationship with ‘God’ into the exact same deeply unconvincing category that Craig puts everybody elses ‘God’s into.  Bizarrely it is this exact deeply unconvincing argument that is the very foundation of Craigs belief in ‘God’, and it is upon these foundation of sand he builds his pillars of conformational bias.

]]> http://thunderf00tdotorg.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/debating-william-lane-craig/feed/ 47 tf00t The religions of the world http://thunderf00tdotorg.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/reasonablefaith-org-scramble-to-hide-the-evidence/ http://thunderf00tdotorg.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/reasonablefaith-org-scramble-to-hide-the-evidence/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:14:55 +0000 Thunderf00t http://thunderf00tdotorg.wordpress.com/?p=622 ]]>   Well initially I was willing to give William Lane Craig the benefit of the doubt, but I have to admit, the charity of that position is evaporating faster than dew in the desert!

  So a thread was started on the ‘Reasonable Faith’ forum (forum of William Lane Craigs website).

  In this drcraigvideos was making posts suggesting that he was fully legally endorsed by William Lane Craig to file these DMCAs.

  Now up till this point, I was happy to believe that, “well these ‘reasonable faith’ people, they’re not crazy creationists, they must be able to see the writing on the wall here”.  So, after one of the admins  (Philos, who lists his profession as ‘In academia’ (wlc?)) had locked the thread earlier this evening, I wrote him a personal message telling him of the shit that they were in.  How drcraigvideos claim to be legally acting on William Lane Craigs behalf made him legally culpable, and that drcraigvideos actions had a ring of truth about them given that:

1) drcraigvideos blog is directly linked on the reasonablefaith website.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer?pagename=links

2) drcraigvideos videos are directly linked to the reasonablefaith website.  Damn, you only have to click the links in the scrolling banner to find this out!

  I also gave him some brief background on why what drcraigvideos was doing was illegal, and why it was in their favor to take action on this themselves.  Lets be real, it is at this point unthinkable given the number of emails reasonablefaith must have received that they are not aware of the situation (I also left them a voice message and asked this admin, Philos, to pass on this message to WLC).  If William Lane Craig chooses to do nothing while someone acting in his name, and claiming with his permission is filing bogus DMCA claims against WLC critics, it is VERY challenging to find an academically charitable way to interpret William Lane Craigs behavior.

  So I come back an hour or so later, and what do I find?

1) I’ve been banned.  Cute! Being banned without a SINGLE post!

2) the ENTIRE thread of ‘Thunderf00t DMCAed in William Lane Craigs name’ has been deleted.

Can’t really screen cap something that’s not there, but look for this post yourself!

  I blame myself.  I had assumed that when dealing with ‘Professional Academic Philosophers’ that you might get some integrity.  Instead all I’ve seen is reasonablefaith using EXACTLY and VERBATIM the methods used by PCS those many moons ago.  Dig a hole, then try to delete everything incriminating as soon as possible, then claim it never happened.  Shit, I’ve not seem someone scramble to delete the damning data this quickly since a creationist first donned Joker make-up! Oh yes WLC, I have EVERYTHING recorded

    That is the future of mankind relies on an increase level of knowledge.  When the rate that knowledge is being lost, or polluted by pseudo-science equal that where it is being gained,  to a first degree approximation, equilibrium is reached and mankind stagnates.

    Combating such disinformation will at some point therefore become as important as research.

    Sadly as we get to know more and more, it becomes easier and easier for bullshit merchants posing as scientists to go undetected or unchallenged, and the harder it becomes for Joe Public to distinguish real scientists from increasingly slick impostors.  Arguably there is no field where this is more true than in climate change, where a small and very well funded group of ‘climate change deniers’/ pseudo-scientists seek to dis-inform society about the impact of the anthroporgenic release of carbon dioxide.

    Thankfully, the National Center for Science and Education (The NCSE), who have done such sterling work in keeping creationism out of the class room are now moving to keep such disinformation on climate change from being dissemination in schools.

http://ncse.com/climate-change/why-is-ncse-now-concerned-with-climate-change

IF I had put up a video as ‘a professional scientist’ saying how Craig MIGHT be a good philosopher, but is merely a layman when it comes to science, and that as a professional scientist I find his arguments  very unsophisticated and frankly embarrassing. (all in an insipidly smug patronizing tone)

   Who seriously believes that these exact same people would have NOT gone absolutely ballistic highlighting the exact same problems with the vacuous nature of these arguments that I did.  Damn, I’m almost tempted to do it, yknow as one of those ‘Double-Check and Mate, sucker’ type moves.

   Anyways, it clearly got under the skin of these people to have it highlighted that their ‘leading academic’ has a pathetic citaion record. Nothing bites like the truth eh boys!.. Which leads to the obvious question:

    Firstly you need to understand the orders of magnitude of energy.  Imagine a kilogram of explosive.  Blow it up and you get a lot of energy.  In fact that energy actually comes in the form of accelerated atoms/ molecular fragments, and the pressure and temperature from these is what causes damage.  Okay, so when you blow up explosive you are releasing chemical bond type energy, and that’s typically in the eV (electron volt) range per nuclei.

     Now imagine a fusion type event.  This typically releases MeV (a million times as much energy) per nuclei.  This is why 10kg warhead, when releasing its energy all at once, can give kilotons of chemical explosive equivalent energy.  Bear in mind that for chemical explosive, you have eV type amounts of energy per nuclei (about the energy of a chemical bond), while with fusion you have a million times that.  So you fragments from fusion type events typically have a million time chemical bond energy, and this is why they are so dangerous.  That can make a mess of your DNA and kill your cells.  The bottom line is it really doesn’t matter if your fusion takes place at room temperature or millions of Kelvin, the products still have CRAZY amounts of energy.

    This is why if you really did have cold fusion on your desktop, you would be a gold plated idiot to be in the room while the reactor was running.  This is apparently what our Italian scientists are doing while running their ‘cold fusion reactor’.  However for some strange reason our Italians don’t find any high energy radiation.  This was also the problem with Pons and Fleischmanns claims of cold fusion.  They were claiming to get enough energy out to boil water.  Hmmm well if they had had that sort of fusion energy flux, everyone in the room would have died from the radiation.

Cold Fusion, normally turns out to be a poorly calibration thermocouple.

     This is where the whole thing goes into the category of bullshit.  Fusion is great ‘cos you generate MeV per reaction.  If you don’t have those high energy particles, then whatever you are doing is not fusion!  Even more perculiar is if you wanted to work out what sort of fusion you had going on, the first thing you would measure would be the energies and fluxes of the radiation coming off the sample.  Not only have our Italians not tried the obvious analysis (well how can they when they have no high energy radiation) but instead they focus on the bloody silly metric of ‘excess energy’.  That is they claim to put X energy in, get Y energy out and ascribe the difference to fusion, even though it’s bloody obviously from the lack of high energy particles that its not fusion.  The nearest analogy I can think of its like lighting a firework, watching it generate more energy than was put in, then concluding that the ‘excess energy’ must have been cold fusion.

This time a decade ago, no one had even heard of youtube, nor did the bandwidth really exist for the project.  The emergence of Youtube was unforeseen by, well lets be real, everyone.  Microsoft was left standing, as was Google.  The access of users to cheap video editing equipment, and further simultaneously given access to the vast array of various uploaded media clips led to an explosion of creativity.

     However as time progressed, expectedly those who did well acquired a disproportionate amount of the traffic.  Now, I don’t have the figures, but a comparative handful of users provide the significant lions share of the traffic.  This has had two detrimental effects on youtube.

1)      The forum has lost a significant portion of its vibrancy, in that it used to be that you could come back to youtube in a week or twos time and everything would be different.  This is not true anymore.  You come back in months time and it’s pretty much the exact same people doing exactly the same thing.  It’s no longer really youtube, but the ‘same old-same old’tube.

2)      The barriers to entry are now essentially prohibitively high.  As a few get a large amount of the traffic, the barriers to entry are huge compared to what they were when youtube was relatively a flat and fair forum.  Indeed almost the only way to now establish yourself on youtube is with the help of someone who is already established, or to have an existing audience for whom you start making videos, or to simply have a truck full of cash to throw at the problem.

    So is there a solution to this?  Is there a way that youtube can regain it’s vibrancy?  Well that’s where many minds are better than one and I ask for your take on this.

    The following is my suggestion:  One way to do this which is arguably dead before it starts is by biasing the YT search algorithms against established players.  Now YT will not want to do that on several levels.  Firstly ‘established players’ are the ‘cash cows’, they are the ‘known commodities’ that people come to youtube for.  Secondly of course, those partner would be pretty unhappy having put all that work into establishing a channel merely for YT to come along and decide ‘bad luck fellas, but YT needs more variety’.   It would also send a lousy message about the relationship between media producers and youtube.  Finally of course, who is likely to fill this gap?  Lamentably imitation is easier than innovation and for every youtube ‘celebrity’ there are probably 10 wannabe clones.  Even if youtube were to tweak its search engine, would it really help?

     Maybe a more viable alternative is to create a second ‘pool’ of users.  A ‘youtube hatchery’ so to speak that allows small channels to grow free of the competition of the bigger players (a different front page).  Limit the hatchery to users with less than 10k subscribers or so, and have a separate front page for them.  The environment would allow people to establish themselves on a smaller forum before competing in the full YT forum where currently they get almost no attention.

     Other than that, it looks to me like youtube has matured and hardened into its adult form, never to see significant changes again, or if it does, it will be more akin to glacial speeds!

    Now I know there will be a lot of ‘atheists’ out there who will simply say ‘well why does God need this pointless and sick loyalty test if he’s omnipotent?’.  Well, that’s why you’re going to spend eternity burning in Hell, BECAUSE IT’S A TEST OF FAITH!

   And thats why every year some of the followers of the Abrahams God celebrate his faith by the festival of Eid al-Adha.

   Here at Eid al-Adha child-care, divinely inspired by Abrahams example, we will NEVER disobey God.

   It’s the next best thing to trusting Abraham with your children!

many thx to Emily @ Emilyhasbooks on twitter/FB for making the piccie

-Damn straight! If you are going to do open n accessible science, make it interesting! Shining the magic light of knowledge on the hidden origin of life seems to be a pretty entertaining place to start

The first footstep on the journey of discovery

   Further, now that many know my real name, I can openly link up with other high profile groups promoting science education (to be announced) to publish this work in the peer review literature.  And sure, why not, let’s be bold and set a goal of getting this work published in one of the top research journals like Science or Nature.

   How does this work start? Why with a good drink of bacardi of course!

And I can fully assure you that by this time next year, you will see SOO much more than an amber, highly volatile liquid that is well know for its intoxicating properties on many carbon based life forms!

DON'T PANIC, IT'S ONLY SCIENCE!

   ….and yeah, if anyone’s got a wizard name for this epic endeavor, I’d love to hear it it the comments section below

Delusional enough to believe in Islam? Why hold back? Why not claim to have won the game even while everything is proceeding exactly as it was before.

     So I find myself at a lose end for a few minutes flicking through his comments on his video, just for chuckles (and believe me there are plenty of them!), and what do I find, but yeah, apparently Da-Waaaah-films actually enjoys taking part in lynch parties with his muslim friends!

Don't like someone, why bother with law and order when you can take part in and enjoy a good old fashioned Islamic lynching!.

    Thats right, Da-wahhhh-films happily displaying the skills he’s learning at his muslim university which describes itself as ‘a garden of knowledge and virtue’.  Of course why would you waste your time with law, order and a judicial process when you have yourself an Islamic education and a lynch mob!

Islamic gardens of knowledge and virtue, known by the fruits of the lynch parties 'liked' by their students :-p

  Even more funny is the fact that Da-wahhhhh, the wannabe ‘Islamic scholar’ (similar to Toothpixie scholar) has found a new word to describe me and everyone who disagrees with him ‘sociopath’.

Losing the argument and shouting 'Bigot' not working? Try calling someone a sociopath, and hope no-one notices the projection!

Comically enough, wikipedia’s line one item for sociopathic behavior is:

‘failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest’ -wikis line one item on sociopathic behavior

   Hmmm, now I wonder how I would describe someone who says he ‘likes’ being part of a lynch mob.

Yeah Da-wahhhhhhhh, I’ve got another word for you to look up, PRO-JECT-SHUUUNNNNNNN

    However while I must admit it’s been great fun watching dawahfilms puff himself up like a ‘big man’ in the delusion that, given the public forum, youtube, and the legal arena all thought he was a whiney little pussy, that somehow an Ivy League University would come to an ENTIRELY different conclusion, I really should try to draw a line under this.  Not so much because he doesn’t deserve it, as his actions have shown him to be a petty, spiteful and capricious man (probably from eating all that fruit from his Islamic ‘garden of knowledge and virtue’), but for pity.

     But regrettably, while there are a billion or so muslims in the world, the number stupid enough to 1) believe in this non-sense (things like ‘Mohammad was a perfect man and that god wanted him to have sex with this 9 year old girl, so it was all okay then’, and YES Dawahfilms is stupid enough to actually believe, and try to justify this),

When the best excuse you can think of for sleeping with a 9 year old girl is that, 'Allah told me to do it', your ass is going to jail! Well unless you are living among v. dumb and v. gullible camel herders!

and 2) try to defend it on a public and open forum, is comically small.  So yup, if Dawahfilms and Amenakin are dumb enough to try to promote such comically stupid ideas on a public forum, they can fully expect to get called on it, especially if they intend to profit of the institutional subjugation of women by islam, as is the case with Amenakin.