Interesting astronomic observations
Offline I've been shown several interesting videos. I'm no expert, but either photoshop skills in population increase massively, or there are bird droppings on Hubble's telescope. Anyway, it should be interesting for astronomers. I'm curious what they have to say when they see things like this.
And finally, here's another fine piece, this time from SOHO sun telescope.
Whatever these photoshoppers are trying to edit into innocent blank videos, this time they've overdone it. Specially these reflective metallic spheres over the sun are, well, they're almost like specks in comparison. Which is I'd say at the very least Earth's size 
The distance is uncertain, but on the SOHO video in some cases the relative size approaches Jupiter. Holy shit. O M F... sometimes I wish there would be a real god, god of swearing. This is such a moment.
It looks like the video is trying to make an impression of UFO recharging it's batteries. Near sun there is tremendous electric field and huge electric potential for every kilometer of corona. So the objects lightly basking in outer solar flares get charged like capacitors. Or like freakin' cars at fuel station!
Fortunately I'm not hurried to worry, you guys surely have already had a good laugh after you've figured out who doctored these videos, using what software and who paid him how much. 
Ehm ehm, cough cough.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
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What I meant was, here's a conversation drawing to the conclusion it inevitably would. I missed the 'to' in the original post. What I was pointing out was that you are a staunch rationalist and Luminon, clever tho' he clearly is, harbours certain core ideas that seem to me very unusual indeed. So the conversation between you pair - the rationalist and Luminon - had a logical end point once your central positions were laid bare.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
Which is interesting, because I still don't have the slightest fucking clue what this thread has been about for the past 40+ posts.
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
Aliens have already landed, taken over Hollywood and are gradually preparing our minds through manipulation of pop culture for their ultimate revelation. Their leader is James Cameron and their sergeant at arms, Mel Gibson, a creature whose veneer seems to be eroding into a suspiciously reptilian visage. Look at Gibson's latest girlfriend. There's an alien in there.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
It's a goddamn historical fact that esoteric symbols must be interpreted, because this is what they were fucking made for.
Well, I haven't yet read the Occult Chemistry by Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant, so I don't know if it's full of garbled metaphors or not, but neither have you. And by my knowledge of other Besant's and Theosophic works, it's not full of garbled metaphors, but it's a textbook full of points and systematic explanations.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
I said nothing about instinct, and you're a human-centric moron if you think animals don't have intuition- some very small animals function almost entirely on instinct (which is programmed), such as certain insects; most others have intuition which forms naturally from the interraction of those instinctual processes and common activities; the hard-wiring of our brains that structures itself around repeated tasks, etc.
You are right that the statistical intuition comes from, vaguely, previously encountered experiences, such as coin tosses and many other uncertainties we frequently encounter, but without those it's complete cluelessness, not intuition. This is stuff we learn as the brain is wiring itself in our formative years.
Without higher order reason, our thoughts are based on mere intuition.
Without the primitive basis for intuition, our thoughts can be based only on instinct, which is more experience than thought.
That's not at all the context in which I studied, and you know nothing of my past or present mind-set on the matter.
It's blindly scribbling away, and then using rational faculties after to try to make sense of it. It's how creativity works, and it's a fine source for ideas to test (as fine as any random number or idea generator), but it has no basis as a means of determining objective reality.
The only amazing thing about esoterics from the perspective of statistics is that it seems to manage to get things wrong, and more completely, more often than chance. This is probably due to people retroactively reinterpreting things based on completely incorrect understandings of science- e.g. the sort Deepak Chopra and his like hold.
No, reason is sabotaged by the assumptions; intuition is precisely them.
You define intuition as magical woo-woo; that's not what it is. Your views of intuition are inconsistent with reality and with common usage. You should consider renaming your magical woo-woo sense to something else.
Retrospectively verified by facts? You mean retroactively 'interpreted' in order to force it to match the facts.
No, and I obviously can't expect you to be convinced by reason, because you have none- you have faith. As you've said before, the only thing that even might be able to convince you that you're delusional is waking up from a coma, and that was only a maybe in your book; you have no concept of the power of confirmation bias and the subjectivity of human perception, and you refuse to even accept it as a possibility.
You're not giving any weight to my claims that you're succumbing to confirmation bias, and you're completely ignoring how weak and subjective human perception is to such things. Quite frankly it's insulting.
For somebody who talks so high and mighty, how about you take the first step and admit you *might* just be succumbing to perception and confirmation biases and delusions, without some absurd suggestion such as your being in a coma and dreaming everything?
Respect goes both ways, and you have given my position absolutely none of it, while I have requested only affirmative evidence of dark matter (which I have admitted has a small chance of existing).
I'm afraid you're going to waste your life in delusion.
I'm afraid of the loss of potentially good minds (the the progress they could make towards real science) to this woo- in fact, there but for the grace of critical thinking would have gone I (I didn't explain to you when I studied this, and I won't go into it- suffice it to say some people here are ex-Christians...)
I'm afraid of the literal loss of life, at least a little, of people who believe in crystals, aliens, and esoteric healing processes.
I'm afraid of a resurgence of viral epidemics, and the mutations of those viruses that may even affect me (though vaccinated), due to related magical thinking (I know not all esotericists completely reject modern medicine, but one kind of irrationality often begets another)
I'm not really afraid of a resurgence of the dark ages- even a viral epidemic probably would not set us back that far- and I know that this stuff will never fully go away.
Yeah, perhaps I am a little humanocentric, after all, so is esotericism. But only a little.
Retrospective verification by facts is what it is - evidence for or against it. This intuition is diffcult to pin down, often we mistake it's voice for our own judgement, second thoughts, and so on. Evidence is important to distinguish, which one of the thoughts was correct, and was therefore this potentially infallible intuition. With me the voice of intuition is weaker, it's actually the least convincing thought at the first moment. So I have to be very careful to not trump it by rationalizing or imagining things.
I typically neglect to pay attention to observations that weren't conclusive, because there is just too much of them. My solid certainity was formed by these very conclusive observations, these very impressive and these 100% repeatable.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
I'm curious, I have been using 'empiricism' in this sense, from Wikipedia:
From my online dictionary:
Your usage seems to correspond to the last reference, flagged as 'dated'.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
You've been using it correctly. I'm a rationalist. Any rationalist will recognize that observation of reality can be flawed and can not reveal certain truth- unlike rational deduction/logic.
Most Christians are empiricists: they "experience" god, as per a delusion, and as such believe that it is certain truth without acknowledging that they may be experiencing delusion- an empiricist believes what he or she sees, and can do so with certainty regardless of logic.
There are also atheist empiricists (many, if not most), but they merely lack belief in any gods due to not having experienced them (and usually will not assert that there is no god, as they could not experience everything in the universe to exclude the 'possibility').
A rationalist rejects experience as a source of ultimate knowledge, and only tentatively believes what he or she sees unless contradicted by logic and reason- but can never be certain of perception.
There is a distinction between scientific empiricism and superstitious empiricism; the former aspires to eliminate human bias and as such is the only observational source of information about our world (though it has a small, while diminishingly so, chance of being mistaken), and the latter is human bias distilled and canonized through the positive feedback of faith (which could only manage to be right by way of dumb luck).
A rationalist understands that the only certain source of knowledge is logic and deduction; though this can tell us only very little without premises derived from empiricism. A rationalist, unlike an empiricist, may be certain that any particular god does not exist due to ontological contradiction.
There are Christian rationalists, though they are profoundly rare- they come in two forms; one which will express the probability of their god existing in terms of empiricism (accepting that they may be wrong), and the other which will demonstrate 'proofs' that a given god exists by way of glaring mistakes in logic and reasoning, which can be corrected (which result in said people usually spending inordinate amounts of time trying to construct another proof)- the proofs all have the quality of being so complicated that they manage to confuse the prover into believing them; they amount to similar constructions to the proofs that 0 =1.
Being an empiricist, Luminon believes that he (and some other people), have an additional sense that taps directly into ultimate and infallible knowledge. With astronomically rare exception, scientists are not empiricists, but rationalists, which is why they reject superstitious empiricism in favor of scientific empiricism as a tentative foundation for premises.
To Luminon:
You've still fully missed my point. No empirical observation is completely certain due to the potential of human delusion; which is far more powerful than you realize. As long as you persist in your total faith in your few observations which you believe to be conclusive (but which could not have been), then you remain in complete lack of understanding or respect for my argument, and there's no possible way to continue this discussion.
In other words: this discussion is over until such a point as you admit potential fallibility in your observations, however small.
Of course, no empirical observation is certain, but they're far from being unreliable. Delusion is the omnipotent and omnipresent god of rationalists. It's power to create hallucinations can be only matched by a tornado that sucked in LSD factory. Even the most staunch rationalists trust their empirical observations when they look at their measuring devices or stand at traffic lights. Of course, if they don't trust their eyes, they repeat the observation or let someone else repeat it, but so do I whenever I have opportunity. Nobody is pure rationalist or pure empiricist, only some people dead or locked up in asylum.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5DwFtFhyM
How long was that thing up there, actually? It's filmed both in day and night... It's strange how differently it looks in day and night. And I've never heard of a missile that would have two jets.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.