fiddled filter design

There is no way that a scientific explanation can be "right". Not yet falsified is as good as it gets.

But no scientific idea is ever "right". Not yet falsified is as good as it gets.

For a rather restricted range of "possible".

Only a million? The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurones

That's a 2012 article. Suzana Herculano-Houzel does seem to have got her hands on more human brains since then (as well as lot of other fairly large mammalian brains).

Whereas selling deliberately baroque products can let you tap a gullible and hopefully well-heeled market (though quite a few of them will be parted from all their money every year).

Complicated rules are helpful in deluding complicated people who can be seduced into buying over-complicated (and over-priced) solutions.

Your own preference for the complicated sophistry of climate change denial over the slightly less complicated science that demonstrates the reality of anthropogenic global warming might be a case in point.

No error-detection and -correction scheme is perfect. They just offer a mechanism for reducing the error rate in the output to something lower than the error rate you'd see if they weren't there.

It did.

Transposable elements are fairly long sequences of DNA.

Single nuclear polymorphisms mostly do nothing, and those that do anything mostly wreck the organism. Transposons can be whole genes, which can become incorporated in new functions.

The homeobox genes seem to have got duplicated four times on the path that that lead to the human genome.

It's still random noise.

Maybe, maybe not. Simple has its own rewards. OTOH, if your circuit isn't working, it's *USUALLY* a good idea to start with the simple explanations, like "is the damned thing plugged in"? Simple answers are always the best. Start there.

That's sorta silly. Everything we know _could_ be wrong but that doesn't make what we know useful. We don't put foot notes on every atom of knowledge we think we know. To do so would indeed be silly.

Limburger cheese stinks.

What about scientists who don't toe the party line on AGW?

More importantly, his boss.

Profitable, too, huh?

Not true; peer review is kind of mutual support, and 'brutal' criticism is the way we figure out what mistakes need erasing. Erasing the bad parts is not 'constraint', it's 'correction'.

Criticism is NOT attack, nor assult, nor opposition: it comes from colleagues, not enemies. Sometimes, a portrayal of science takes on the familiar dramatic form of storytelling, with introduction, conflict, resolution, but that's just a storytelling formula, not often how science happens.

Yeah, and how about mathematicians who don't agree 2 + 2 = 4 ?

Hint: there's no 'party line', just peer review, and the peers find flaws when they can. Human cause for global warming has been the best-of-show answer for decades now, no serious flaws in sight.

Only an idiot like you could confuse theory and definition.

That's they way it's supposed to work. It certainly doesn't work that way with AGW. Religion and politics have taken over the science.

I don't recall mentioning pixies or other mythical creatures. What I suggest, and expect, is that we don't yet understand how life really works so can expect astounding discoveries, and they are unlikely to be simple.

I have some speculations on the subject but there's no point in discussing them with people who are automatically hostile to speculation.

Only an idiot like krw could imagine that was a sensible response.

Actually it does. The climate change denial industry is paid by the fossil carbon extraction industry to spread confusion and doubt about the issue, b ut their output is aimed at the ill-informed and gullible (and krw and John Larkin are paid-up members of both groups).

Money has been spent to obscure the science, and influence politicians. Sci entific opinion has not been influenced by this expenditure. There are scie ntists - John Christy and Roy Spencer come to mind - whose religious convic tions interfere with their scientific opinions, but their sloppy work got c orrected anyway.

Krw is away in cloud-cuckoo-land, as usual.

You weren't at the meetings that I was. Brutality.

Your enthusiasm ins for an entirely imaginary intelligent designer - which might as well be a pixy or some other mythical creature - is entirely ridiculous, and we are ridiculing it.

Sadly, your level of understanding is remarkably poor, and your expectations about future astounding discoveries are correspondingly uninteresting.

You backed up your "speculations" by referring us to a book by a proponent of Intelligent Design

This makes your "speculations" deluded wittering. Nobody here is hostile to plausible speculations. Religion-inspired rubbish isn't remotely plausible, as you would be able to work out for yourself if you'd ever mastered critical thinking.

Granting the kind of twaddle you post here, you got the kind of criticism y ou deserved, and you experienced it as an attack on your somewhat inflated idea of you own expertise, rather than any kind of necessary correction. Sa dly, it doesn't seem to have cured you of putting forward really silly idea s.

bill sloman wrote

It is not so bad that *I* do not know what you are talking about, what is much worse is that *you* do not know it :-)

whit3rd wrote :

It is complete BS. Climate change is caused by orbital changes:

Ice ages will come, ice ages will go, there were tropical forests where now the north pole is, and likely will be again.

But taxing the weather .. will always ...

bill sloman wrote

Bill, if you just designed, build, tested, and posted ANY working electronics here, I would at least take you serious on that,

I have a theory ;-) that once you got exposed to some chemical and it changed the neural configuration, you scared and went into electronics, and with that neural network pattern got stuck in a baxandal thingy, and have been there ever since. You attack the people who really design and build stuff, to divert from your lack of doing so, preach from a high tower like an ... and have nothing on your desk. Cool it yes? Designing something makes you humble.

/You/ may not understand it, but people with an open and receptive mind do understand it.

I've given you an excellent reference that explains the simple mechanisms and subtle consequences in beautiful prose. Try reading it, if you are interested in understanding how the world works.

So, if you came across someone that didn't understand electromagnetism you would think it worthwhile to speculate about the existence of luminiferous aether?

So, if you came across someone that didn't understand basic chemistry you would think it worthwhile to speculate about the existence of phlogiston?

That's a fair comparison.

I would hope and expect they would be hostile toward someone that presumed the existence of N-rays or luminiferous aether.

Apart from that, people are people; physicists aren't immune to good/bad behaviour.

And academic rivalries are famously vicious, as immortalised in Sayre's Law, viz: "The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low"

He has, even if not here.

I don't post such things here because I did that in a different life, and I'm glad I don't need to wave my willie around any more!

Not necessarily. /Occasionally/ such creation is a good reason for a lack of humility.

It wasn't intended as an insult.

You chose to snip/ignore the counterpoint in the discussion (FSM observably being a grotty forgetful engineer), which supports my point!

No, way, any attempt to create life so far has failed, Clear indication we have no clue yet. All speculation and lots of evolution related based on a long ago dead Darwin.

It is all electrickety to me. Of course space is not empty, the 'photon' is just a mathematical concept, for example virtual particles pop in and out of existence in the 'vacuum' all the time or so I have read. So much for empty. Call it aether of cookies or whatever, still the wave model is the only thing that makes sense, like ripples in an ocean. And that does require a medium, in that case water. In that water , lemme put it that way, only things can flow with the stream and then there were fish (from somebody in sci.physics long ago). The fish seem to violate some laws here. And so do we,

It is fun 21th century fishsicks, would be fun to look back at it from the 42th century if we, our species are / were still around.