The HP Way

Wrong again.

-- _____ _ _ |_ _| | | | | | | __ _ _ __ ___ | |__| | ___ _ __ ___ ___ _ __ | | / _` | '_ ` _ \\ | __ |/ _ \\| '_ ` _ \\ / _ \\ '__| _| |_ | (_| | | | | | | | | | | (_) | | | | | | __/ | |_____| \\__,_|_| |_| |_| |_| |_|\\___/|_| |_| |_|\\___|_| __ ____ / _| | _ \\ ___ | |_ | |_) | ___ _ __ __ _ / _ \\| _| | _ < / _ \\| '__/ _` | | (_) | | | |_) | (_) | | | (_| |_ \\___/|_| |____/ \\___/|_| \\__, (_) __/ | |___/

...

...

I don't have the expertise to be the principal investigator in such a case, as you would be aware if you had your wits about you. I wouldn't have much faith in an investigator who didn't know about those sorts of tools, though the odds are they would be necessary - old fraud is generally unsophisticated fraud.

The same bias as anyone would have who knew enough science to do the job, but I 'd expect them to be objective, as I would hope to be if I were placed in the same situation.

By which you mean Muslim., perhaps?

They certainly wouldn't take me seriously, and in any event, what have they got to gain from letting an infidel mess about with their excruciatingly valuable relic? The very idea is sacriligious - which is the church's catch-22.

The "list" of two fancy instruments consists of two instruments which I have worked on and which would seem to be capable of producing results relevant to the investigation.

Leave the word-play to John Woodgate - he grammar is sound, even if most f his word plays aren't all that funny. I'd had to have put that sentence in the plural for you to have a legitimate opening, and consciously avoided doing so.

Such bias does exist, and Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure pf Man" ISBN -0-14-0222501-3 shows how it can mislead very good scientists indeed.

The only antidote is to be conscious of it, and take the deveil's advocate position from time to time (perhaps angel's advocate in this context) to see if you can detect bias in your own position. I've done this in the past - though not when there was interested party as large and silly as the Vatican hanging on the result.

And what I meant was, how are you going to find one that looks neutral to both the religious and the scientific interests? A Muslim scientist could be at least a believer, without a vested interest in the aspect of belief being tested.

No track record in the area. As in the Turin Shroud exercise, the church would be looking for propositions from established labs with established reputations with access to all the right tools. Even you should have been able to work that out for yourself.

Eventually.

If you say so John.It doesn't happen to be my "excuse". as you'd realise if you had any realistic idea of the fatuity of your proposition.

I'm well aware of the fragility of my environment - rather more so than you - but I don't think that getting involved in some plot to shore up the fading credibility of the Roman Catholic branch of the Christian faith would much much difference to it, one way or another.

My claim to be a scientist - such as it is - rests on publishing a couple of papers in the refereed literature that other people have gone to the trouble of citing. Go to Google Scholar and search for A.W.Sloman. My father did better, but Scholar Google doesn't go back far enough to pick up more than one citation for him.

Your opinion on the subject is something less than decisive.

If you're getting tired of Bill, then say so. Bill's grammer is excellent, and you very well know that.

Well, if you LOL over a few obvious typo's, I think we have another not-so-very-good-judge-of-humor here.

Looks like you need a good night of sleep, or perhaps do some odd jobs around the house, instead of trying to be witty. Yawn.

"John Fields" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

So you LOL over a few obvious slips then. Must be a great party going on there, at the Fields residence.

It's been a rather boring day, that is true.

The tests wouldn't be worth anything, because the testers wouldn't know what they were testing for, but religious skew would be one of the babies being thrown out with the bathwater.

You are improving - not much and from a very low starting level, but I suppose that there is hope for you yet.

When were these books written? Could I actually have been first to think of it?

The first book in the Walter Jon Williams series was first printed in

The idea that our world is a computer simulation surfaced a lot earlier

- I remember reading a novel based on the idea while I was a graduate student, which is to say in the 1960's, and it has certainly come up since in a wide variety of forms, but idea of making a religion of the concept strikes me a relatively recent.