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=A0 =A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

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John does enjoy his comforting delusions.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I'm in the reality business. You are in no business.

John

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I enjoy designing electronics. And since it works, and people keep buying more of it, there's no delusion involved.

What do you do? How do you know it's real?

John

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=A0 =A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

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There was a certain amount of self-delusion involved in your claim that you designed insanely good electronics.

I read some of the literature published in peer-reviewed journals. I've been doing it since I was a graduate student, and I'm pretty good at sorting out the real - and (from time to time) exploiting it - and writing off the unreal. You don't seem to have been as lucky.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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When you post about electronics, you do seem to be in contact with reality. Once you step outside that arena, your grip on reality is rather less than robust. The fact that I haven't got a thriving electronics business to boast about doesn't devalue my opinions, any more than it adds to your credibility when you pontificate about stuff that you don't deal with in the course of your daily business.

We know you are proud of the business you built up, but any credibility it might have given to your off-topic pontifications has been destroyed by your passion for touting half-baked ideas that you have poached from self-serving web-sites aimed at persuading the gullible.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

"right wing" and "thought". Has anybody else spotted the contradiction?

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Observation, dynamics, and causality are universal.

The fact that I haven't got a thriving

Of course it does.

John

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Or not as gullible. Nearly all non-experimental "science" is usually wrong. Lots of experimantal science is wrong, too; roughly half, maybe.

Have you read this yet?

or this?

Wrongology is a new science, with a great future!

John

6 of 170 of your posts in my trash use it in the body, instead of just ahead of your SIG

Cite something other than Larkin crap.

Fairy also means ignorant little twit who prances around pretending great knowledge... like Larkin and Obama :-)

I am nice. You were rude. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |

       The Ground Zero Mosque IS Appropriate When Renamed...
            The Obama Monument to American Impotence

[snip] [snip]

Indeed. Obama has been such an example for this country that we are going to be forever indebted... :-) ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 |

The Ground Zero Mosque IS Appropriate When Renamed... The Obama Monument to American Impotence

And 95% of all your statistical claims are made up on the spot with no link whatsoever to reality.

A rule of thumb for the defect rate in the peer reviewed literature for the hard sciences is roughly around 10% depending on how you count it. Things now counted as wrong were plausible interpretations of scarce or imperfect data when they were first published. Refinements always come later. Things once ignnored by journals as impossible have subsequently been shown to be correct. The B-Z reaction is one such.

And you can get the odd outlier even from highly respectable sources - most notably the electrochemists Fleishmann & Pons who claimed to have found cold fusion using heavy water and palladium electrodes in 1989.

By comparison the IBM high temperature superconductors were real and anyone could make up their slightly noxious ceramic recipe and see for themselves.

OTOH Market research whilst aiming high accuracy frequently results in product that are monumental disasters like for example new flavour Coke.

One of the more interesting historical ones is the speed of light with error bars as a function of time as different experimental techniques became available. On one notable occasion a top experimentalist applied a minor group vs phase velocity correction in an imperfect vacuum incorrectly and for a while at least everyone made the same mistake by following his procedure without noticing the systematic error.

Humans are fallible, but the scientific method is self correcting. It just takes time for someone to come along and find the errors.

Regards, Martin Brown

I referenced two books. Read them.

Hard sciences are better than fuzzy ones. But even in physics and chemistry, there have been some whoppers in recent peer-reviewed publications.

Climatology, nutrition, medicine, social sciences, economics... are not hard sciences.

C has never been in dispute by more than per cents. Some "sciences" can't even get the sign right.

Meanwhile, lots of stuff is wrong. So it's sensible to be skeptical, especially about stuff that doesn't have a lot of experimental verification, with very good statistics.

Google statistical errors in science

John

Cheers! Rich

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That' it --------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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What is this reverence you have for peer-reviewed lit? Today's biology is very different from the 10-year-ago PRL, and that's very different from that of ten years before that. Biology and genetics are punctuated by discoveries that everybody in the establishment agreed was impossible... until it happened.

I've had a lot of "crazy" opinions about biology and evolution over the years... until they turned out to be mostly correct. My working premise is merely that evolution is more efficient than most biologists are willing to imagine.

How dull it must be to just read the literature and imagine nothing.

How dull it must be to be a fathead in SED who doesn't design electronics.

John

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=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

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True, but your off-topic pontifications are based on the observation of self-serving web-sites, the dynamics of your fertile imagination (un-inhibited by published fact), and seem to be be caused by your desire to exercise your over-inflated ego.

The pub bore is always with us, but the universe would be a nicer place if he confined his observations to stuff he knew something about.

Well, you do like think that, don't you. It is just one more of your self-serving delusions.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I don't revere peer-reviewed literature. I've published a bunch of comments in the Review of Scientific Instruments that demonstrate that I've got reservations about the effectiveness of their system of peer- review.

I do think that the peer-reviewed literature is the most reliable resource we have for matters of scientific fact. Like democracy, it's an inadequate system, but much better than whatever is in second place.

In particular, it beats the hell out of your scheme which seems to be to ignore everything that has been published that disagrees with the product of your un-inhibited imagination.

You've made this claim before, and came up short when I asked you for examples. Prions seem to be the most recent example of a biological discovery that came out of left field, and that stopped being controversial back in 1982.

Unfortunately, your hypothesis depended on the idea that the evolving organism "knew" that it was a mutant, and had some idea of which nucleotide sequence it might usefully change. Any system engineer can spot the fatal flaw in that particular idea.

How would you know? You don't do it. In fact reading the literature activates the imagination of anybody who knows what they are reading, mostly with bad ideas ...

It would be - for fatheads.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I did, of course, and then responded to it inline in order to more
effectively make my point which, as usual, you missed.