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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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We at the AEL are revisionists. The whole world likes to think it's revisionist too but it’s always a certain kind of revisionism. Take this from those arch radical revisionists, the Guardian, puffing a new series from the BBC, who themselves like to think they're a bit cutting edge
Africa With Ade Adepitan
Former Paralympic athlete Adepitan explores the extremes in the continent’s cultures and climates in this upbeat travelogue. In a pleasing break from the condescending norm of most dispatches to Africa, he argues that the region will play a crucial global role in the century to come, as proved by a trip to Nigeria’s answer to Silicon Valley. |
Consider that phrase “in a pleasing break from the condescending norm of most dispatches to Africaâ€. Hands up anyone who has seen a condescending dispatch to or from Africa? Well, I have. Look at Life from the nineteen fifties. Maybe a Royal Tour from the sixties. That is the world the Guardian lives in, the world it is desperately doing battle against. Everyone else (one might say except the Guardian which is still in the patronising world of Oxfam) spends all their time searching for ways not to be condescending about Africa. How’s the BBC itself getting on in the patronising stakes?
| Former Paralympic athlete Adepitan... |
So, not a journalist then. Not a seasoned traveller, I would think. Not probably an African, though presumably a Brit of Nigerian stock. Well, that could be an advantage because at least he will have an English accent and speech rhythms – the BBC usually sends out a native (not just to Africa but to Italy or India or Venezuela) who speaks excellent English but is an absolute pain to have to listen to for fifty minutes. That's because the BBC (and the Guardian) would think it patronising sending out a Brit (other than a comedy turn).
| ... explores the extremes in the continent’s cultures and climates |
So we know what we’re in for. Except Africa has no such extremes. It has the usual diversity that exists in any continent. But no, we’re going to get the usual patronising assumptions featuring Tauregs, Ivorians, Bushmen, Nilotics etc etc. Why patronising? Because we’re going to emphasise the extreme nature of these cultures (in a sympathetic sort of way) rather than as ordinary cultures living in different places. Extremely different one from another but mostly extremely different from us.
| in this upbeat travelogue |
Wha-a-a? What is this, a production from the Africa Tourist Board? I’d much rather a truthful set of essays for my licence fee.
| he argues that the region will play a crucial global role in the century to come |
OK...
| as proved by a trip to Nigeria’s answer to Silicon Valley. |
If I were you, Africa, I'd ignore the globe, Nigeria, Silicon Valley, Oxfam and the BBC in order to seek my own salvation (while looking for tips, and even a bung, from all these sources). But then I'd be just another Westerner patronising you, I suppose.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Has anyone read the new book by Precocious Spoonbury? Can you put up a review?
I thought Augustus Longbottom had pretty much covered why the Early Medieval crotch was so itchy, but I hear Spoonbury has pretty much refuted Longbottom's idea that it was due to a lack of iron in the diet?
Spoonbury thinks that the first spinach imports arrived before the Normans. If so we might have to look for a different explanation for itchy crotch.
If Spoonbury is right we might need a radical rethink about the anus as well.
Anyway grateful for your thoughts.....
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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I wouldn't mind reading about 'Nazi occult'. Not sure if it's an AE-ist book.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Revisiting the "Nazi Occult":
I see I gave the same answer as Hatty.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Wiley was closest. It was Urban Bodies
| An essential guide to the realities of public health policies in medieval England, far from the insanitary filth of popular imagination. |
As Hatty acknowledged, and typically Ishmael did not, we are not here to enjoy ourselves, even though we wouldn’t be here unless we were enjoying ourselves. Is anybody here seriously going to find anything new about Nazi Occultism and if they did, so what? But hands up anyone who had the slightest premonition that medieval England even had a public health policy. Despite its not having one would break our own fundamental 'What is, is what was' rule. Everyone has an interest in public health and what we see as unrestrained filth (in for example Third World countries) is just down to technical factors. We should all be thoroughly ashamed of our purblindness.
Not that knowing it now is going to tempt me to read the book. Knowing it is sufficient and I can afford to wait until the inevitable TV doc tells me all I'll need to know about how it was done. I might read Hatty's copy of the Nazi Occult book though, if she recommends it.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Is it about time that AE moved away from the old fashioned Fuhrer Princep and adopted indicative voting?
I just ask.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Your suggestion has been adopted. Now what?
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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More research needed. Can I have an extension?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Of course you can. As long as it takes. These things are harder than they look. And tell your little band of unindicted co-conspirators while you're about it. Yes, we know who you are.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The AEL has personal links with both Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock so I was amazed to come across this (sorry, it’s very old news – 2013 -- but very up to date nevertheless)
After due diligence, including a survey of published scientific research and recommendations from our Science Board and our community, we have decided that Graham Hancock’s and Rupert Sheldrake’s talks from TEDxWhitechapel should be removed from distribution on the TEDx YouTube channel.
We’re not censoring the talks. Instead we’re placing them here, where they can be framed to highlight both their provocative ideas and the factual problems with their arguments. See both talks after the jump. All talks on the TEDxTalks channel represent the opinion of the speaker, not of TED or TEDx, but we feel a responsibility not to provide a platform for talks which appear to have crossed the line into pseudoscience. https://blog.ted.com/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/ |
Sheldrake's TED talk can be viewed here, and it will make your puzzlement even stronger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TerTgDEgUE
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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While orthodox biologists were busy trying to trash Rupert's ideas on Morphic Resonance, it was the late great David Bohm (quantum physicist) who suggested that Sheldrake's hypothesis was in keeping with his own quantum ideas on implicate and explicate order, and his work on the Holonomic Theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory
One of Rupert Sheldrake's many talents is finding scientific evidence that "consensus"-minded Science Boards are too dogmatic to look at (despite being called Scientists).
He's had a similar experience with Richard Dawkins.
It's worth quoting extensively from "Richard Dawkins comes to call" - by Rupert Sheldrake (published in Network Review, the Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network)
Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. He believes that science should be based on reason and evidence. So do I. But I also believe it is important to start from people’s experiences, rather than dismissing what they say as superstitious. For example, many dog owners claim that their animals know when a member of the household is coming home; the dogs go and wait at a door or window while the returning person is still miles away. Is this just a matter of routine, or of dogs hearing car engines at a great distance? In controlled experiments in which the animals’ behaviour was filmed continuously, I found that some dogs still seemed to know when their owners were returning at unusual times, in unfamiliar vehicles, and when no one at home knew when they would arrive.
I was reluctant to take part in this programme because I expected that it would be as one-sided as Dawkins’ previous series. But the production team’s representative assured me that they were actually interested in facts, and that “ this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was.†She added, “We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiryâ€. So I agreed to meet Richard and we fixed a date.
I was still not sure what to expect. Was he going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?
The Director asked us to stand facing each other; we were filmed with a hand-held camera. Richard began by saying that he thought we probably agreed about many things, “But what worries me about you is that you are prepared to believe almost anything. Science should be based on the minimum number of beliefs.â€
I agreed that we had a lot in common, “But what worries me about you is that you come across as dogmatic, giving people a bad impression of science, and putting them off.â€
He then said that in a romantic spirit he himself would like to believe in telepathy, but there just wasn’t any evidence for it. He dismissed all research on the subject out of hand, without going into any details. He compared the lack of acceptance of telepathy by scientists such as himself with the way in which the echo-location system had been discovered in bats, followed by its rapid acceptance within the scientific community in the 1940s. In fact, as I later discovered, Lazzaro Spallanzani had shown in 1793 that bats rely on hearing to find their way around, but sceptical opponents dismissed his experiments as flawed, and helped set back research for over a century. However, Richard recognized that telepathy posed a more radical challenge than echo-location. He said that if it really occurred, it would “turn the laws of physics upside down,†and added, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.â€
“This depends on what you regard as extraordinaryâ€, I replied. “The majority of the population say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?â€
He could not produce any evidence at all, apart from generic arguments about the fallibility of human judgement. He also took it for granted that people want to believe in “the paranormal†because of wishful thinking.
We then agreed that controlled experiments were necessary. I said that this is why I had actually been doing such experiments, including tests to find out if people really could tell who was calling them on the telephone when the caller was selected at random. The results were far above the chance level. The previous week, I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, so that he could look at some of the data before we met.
At this stage Richard looked uneasy and said, “I’m don’t want to discuss evidenceâ€. “Why not?†I asked. He replied, “There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.†The camera stopped. The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.
I said to Russell, “If you’re treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it’s not irrational to believe in it. I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn’t interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise.â€
Richard said, “It’s not a low grade debunking exercise; it’s a high grade debunking exercise.â€
I said that in that case there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been assured that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong.
The team packed up and left. | |
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Rupert Sheldrake was curious about the changes in the constant speed of light.
| I went to see the head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Metrology is the science in which people measure constants, I asked him about this, I said "what do you make of this drop in the speed of light between 1928 and 1945?" And he said "Oh dear, you've uncovered the most embarrasing episode in the history of our science". So I said "could the speed of light actually have dropped, and that would have amazing implications if so". He said, "Oh no, of course it couldn't actually have dropped, it's a constant". "Oh, well then, how do you explain that fact that everyone was finding it was going slower during that period? Is it because they were fudging their results to get what they thought other people should be getting and the whole thing was just produced in the minds of physicists?" - "We don't like to use the word fudge" - "Oh what do you prefer?". He said "Well, we prefer to call it Intellectual Phase Locking". |
It looks like the TED board that banned Sheldrake have no self-awareness (of their own Intellectual Phase Locking) and have no idea how correct Sheldrake is. In 1912 Einstein concluded that:
“Das Prinzip der Konstanz der Lichtgeschwindigkeit kann nur insofern aufrechterhalten werden, als man sich auf für Raum-Zeitliche-Gebiete mit konstantem Gravitationspotential beschränkt.“
(“The principle of the constancy of the speed of light can be kept only when one restricts oneself to space-time regions of constant gravitational potential.â€)
A calculation of alpha (α) follows equation 107 and makes an unambiguous use of variable scalar light velocity (L) both as the argument of a partial differential function (proving a variable) and as the denominator in a fraction (proving not a vector) both in the same integrated quantity. Division by a vector is not defined, so there is no other way to interpret the velocity of light in this usage except as a variable scalar speed.
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Max Born agreed with Einstein and stated both speed and direction of light change in a gravity field
Richard Tolman also agreed with Einstein and expressed the radial speed of light as dr/dt in a gravity field.
Ref : The variable speed of light
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light
My conclusions?
1) Einstein himself defined the speed of light as a slowly-moving variable
2) the speed of light is only a constant when the gravitational potential doesn't change.(or)
3) the speed of light must change if the gravitational potential changes.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Dawkins' greatest sin is his claim that
| “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence†|
Not only do extraordinary claims require exactly the same level of evidence as any other claim but worse, much worse, is that ordinary claims require extraordinary vigilance on account of their ordinariness leading to the assumption that they do not require evidence because they are self-evident.
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Alfred Wegener
In: Newcastle upon Tyne
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As a new contributor I have tried to read across the library in various topics to familiarise myself with the culture, rules and mores of the group.
As a result, I find myself with a question, with which I hope you can assist.
I have read that AEL is an attempt to challenge lazy thinking and received wisdom, which may be wrong. As Churchill said 'A lie can be half-way across the world before the truth has its boots on.' However, is it the case that we are at times positing contrarianism to orthodoxy rather than a genuine new heterodoxy?
I am genuinely interested to hear your views. Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere in the library, I have not stumbled across an answer in my random sampling.
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