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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Wiley wrote: | | This is the period |
Where?
| Augustus (the State imperial cult) |
What imperial cult? There is someone called Augustus who was a Roman emperor, indeed the first one. I wasn't aware he had a cult (though he was deified).Unless you mean the generalised emperor-worship of the Roman Empire.
How long after?
| what is thought of by ortho as his date of death |
14 A.D.
| (they have miscaculated his date of death) |
Who are 'they'? The Romans, Roman historians, medieval historians, modern historians? And what is the correct date?
| was replaced by Augustine of Canterbury. |
A Roman emperor was replaced by an Archbishop of Canterbury? Seems a bit of a leap.
| Augustus was replaced as a god and became a saint. |
By whom?
| Augustine of Canterbury was a Norman invention. |
OK, I'm with you there.
| Bede was a Norman invention. |
That is a bit early in my book, but OK
| The Normans also invented Caesar's early invasions as part of this process of doing away with the worship of Augustus |
Yes, I can understand that. Though Julius Caesar was Augustus's uncle (or something) and the real invasion was by Claudius (Augustus's great nephew... or something) so it doesn't seem much of a change.
| statues of Augustus were defaced and destroyed, Roman buildings were replaced by Romanesque. |
OK, I can get behind that.
| A successful Norman Crusade took place in Britain. |
I'd rather you didn't use such a technical term without further elucidation, but OK.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| A Roman emperor was replaced by an Archbishop of Canterbury? Seems a bit of a leap. |
Not to me. How else do you get from polytheism to montheism, gods end up as angels and saints.
| statues of Augustus were defaced and destroyed, Roman buildings were replaced by Romanesque. |
Thats where the stratiography helps.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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In the Pub With Semmelweis
The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms.
The term derives from the name of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician who discovered in 1847 that childbed fever mortality rates fell ten-fold when doctors disinfected their hands with a chlorine solution before moving from one patient to another, or, most particularly, after an autopsy. (At one of the two maternity wards at the university hospital where Semmelweis worked, physicians performed autopsies on every deceased patient.) Semmelweis's procedure saved many lives by stopping the ongoing contamination of patients (mostly pregnant women) with what he termed "cadaverous particles", twenty years before germ theory was discovered. Despite the overwhelming empirical evidence, his fellow doctors rejected his hand-washing suggestions, often for non-medical reasons. For instance, some doctors refused to believe that a gentleman's hands could transmit disease. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Another example of applied epistemology in action. Allegedly.
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Putting Out Californian Fires… January 10, 2025
…for good. Or at least back to normal.
The southern California wildfires have a personal interest for me. Not because I have any Californian connections to speak of but because
| I have access to a theory that accounts for the present ones. |
It is uncontested the root cause of the fires is the lack of rainfall over several years in the Los Angeles catchment area. It is also uncontested the root cause of the lack of rain is a combination of global warming (general), El Niño (cyclical) and happenstance (űbercyclical).
| Uncontested by everyone apart from applied epistemologists. |
We point out the orthodox explanations are unlikely to be correct:
1. Global warming has been around long enough — and has been gradual enough — to discount global warming, insofar as we understand it.
2. Californian weather records have been around long enough to be able to say it cannot be cyclical unless present day southern Californians are truly unlucky.
| Applied epistemologists are the only people around permitted to say “We don’t know” |
Which is not as negative as it sounds because it allows us to argue: If we don’t know, and if everyone else is wrong, that can only mean a paradigm error is present i.e. some basic assumption about the causes of rainfall is being treated as ‘self-evidently true’ when actually it is false. So, there you have it
| Our present understanding of the hydrological cycle is fundamentally flawed. |
Just to thoroughly frighten the horses, we argue that rain does not come from where you thought it did, the evaporation of seawater, but somewhere else. You can’t get much more fundamental than that. We have a new model which may be right or it may be wrong but it stacks up better than the current one. That at least we can guarantee because we are in a position to compare old with new.
| And it isn’t, I promise you, even close. |
It is all handily set out in a YouTube. You’ll have to excuse the production values (it was made some time ago and funded from maxed-out credit cards) and you’ll have risk an hour of your time on what might turn out to be a will o’ the wisp, but you can’t say you weren’t told, California. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=5uNQIMcKNTM
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Continuing efforts to launch paradigm challenges on an unsuspecting Medium audience. This one is unanswerable, but I can't get an earth scientist to hang around long enough to answer it despite being related to several.
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Your Country Is Disappearing January 25, 2025
I don’t know what country you live in but it will be roughly the same as mine
so you can apply the same lessons.
I live in Britain, the Thames Valley to be exact. Every time it rains at my end of the country, topsoil gets removed, is washed off into a tributary of the Thames, makes its way along the river proper before eventually being deposited on a mudbank in the Thames estuary.
The topsoil is being constantly eroded into the sea but there is no way to get it back. It never rains soil. So, for example, the Chiltern Hills north of London can only go one way: down. They cannot stay the same because of erosion and they cannot go up. (They might via tectonic forces but that is a process measured in millions of years and can be ignored for present purposes.)
| This is a slow/fast process. |
Slow in the sense that it is imperceptible to observers, fast in the sense that the whole Thames Valley is barely ten thousand years old, having been formed by the ice sheets that covered England down to the Thames until the end of the last Ice Age.
| But it is an inexorable process. |
The headwaters of all the tributaries of the Thames are cutting back bit by bit thanks to erosion, hence the Thames Valley as a whole is constantly on the move
Until the Thames Valley catchment area reaches the neighbouring river’s catchment area — in its case, the Severn’s. In the not too distant future the ‘continental divide’ between the two rivers will be reduced to a sliver of land. The two systems will have nothing but a low bank separating them. Which is being constantly eroded until, in the fullness of time, it will be quite eroded away leaving the two rivers to decide what happens next.
| This is called ‘river capture’. |
The Severn, being the more dynamic of the two, will presumably capture the Thames but it doesn’t matter which way round it is because the upshot is the same: one great river catchment area covering the whole of southern Britain (most of Wales is involved too).
| Where now will the rain falling on the Chiltern Hills go? |
Will it go south then east into the North Sea as before or will it go south then west into the Bristol Channel via the new augmented, all-conquering Severn? This is difficult to say because
| there won’t be either a North Sea or a Bristol Channel. |
Continuous water between one side of southern England and the other could be described as a ‘combined river system’ but since rivers cannot flow in two directions at once it is better to call this situation by its proper name, a coastline.
| England will now be two islands. |
It won’t look like that at first but what it will look like I cannot say because geographers never run models of river captures across continental divides. They always keep safely to captures in which both rivers flow into the same sea. They understand that, so they learn that, teach that and think that.
Everything I have described so far is entirely orthodox, no geographer would disagree with any of it in detail, but if you asked them about it in toto they will grow vague. They never face the fact that
| physical geography is a one-way process. |
The land is always eroding into the sea, the sea is never giving anything back to the land. At most, the mudbanks in the estuaries will form land of a sort, but that will in turn erode away. Inexorably. Hence, according to the current canons of physical geography
| We are all doomed to live on mudflats just below sea level. |
Unless the Earth Sciences have got their entire Prime Mover theory of geomorphology wrong. The reason why they never face the logic of their position is because it would force them to question fundamentals and academics are congenitally disqualified from doing any such thing. The poor lambs.
However. Beware. Academics are not nice people when their souls are imperilled. Don’t worry they never get that far. You’ll see.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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I remember that one at its premiere. I might have screenshot'd it and sent it around to a bunch of people. This probably is against the spirit of medium
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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But you didn't get any responses, did you? Careful ignoral applies whether you are an earth scientist or just did geography at school.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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I did not. Careful ignoral is undefeated
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Bringing another applied epistemological technique to an uncaring world
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It’s a World Record! January 28, 2025
Applied epistemologists lurve world records.
This is because world records just are. They are not chosen. So if a particular world record has some other, unrelated, peculiarity we know it will be worth examining. The odds against being both a world record and something else are so astronomical we can anticipate there will be something untoward going on there or thereabouts. You’d be surprised how often there is.
Of course most world records just are, and are of no interest to us. Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world and does not, as far as I know, have any peculiarity attached to it. Just another mountain in the highest mountain range in the world. One of them is going to be the highest.
When it comes to Mount Everest, AE-ists would probably content themselves musing about things other people tend not to muse over, like for instance
1. There is no such thing as the lowest mountain in the world
2. The highest point in the world doesn’t have to be a mountain
3. The lowest point in the world is the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean or, if you want to be technical about it, the lowest point in the world is the centre of the earth.
Some world records aren’t world records. There is, for example, no ‘longest river in the world’ despite people always claiming there is, and usually the candidate nearest to themselves or their heart. Rivers are fractals and cannot be measured (don’t ask). If you want to be technical about it, all rivers are the same length, infinitely long. The river nearest me, the Thames, is the joint longest river in the world. Makes me proud.
But how about an ‘out of the world’ world record? What, for example, is the largest solid body in the Solar System? Solid meaning ‘not gaseous’. As it happens, all the gaseous bodies of the Solar System are larger than all the solid bodies. You didn’t know that, did you? Well, you did but you hadn’t quite got round to realising it. So now you have, take a moment to think about why that should be.
Nobody else has so if you come up with something, you could be in line for a Nobel Prize. That’s nine hundred grand in your bin, better than the screw you’re on now. (By the by, while applied epistemologists despise Nobel Prizes and wouldn’t accept one even if it was offered to them, they are not averse to taking a ten per cent finder’s fee of someone else’s. If you wouldn’t mind.)
But back to the largest solid body in the Solar System. What is it? Go on, have a think about it. Take your time because there is an infinite number of them — or anyway an uncountable number of them. Being the largest of an infinitely large category would certainly be a record and a half.
No? Nothing springs to mind? Well, it’s the earth. Now, does that have any peculiarities attached to it?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Pete Jones wrote: | But you didn't get any responses, did you? Careful ignoral applies whether you are an earth scientist or just did geography at school.
I did not. Careful ignoral is undefeated |
I did what you did and sent it out to a few earth scientists of my acquaintance. One response so far
Suggested reading: Wikipedia entries on Ancestral Thames and London Clay et seq.
Knowledge is power Regards |
A classic!
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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Knowledge is power? Imagine how powerful you would be if you simply weren't so lacking in knowledge. Is there an AE principle (was it #176.3?) that says Knowledge is Useless?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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That's one of Ishmael's. Officially it is the Tyranny of Knowledge i.e. the brain can't get past what it already knows.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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I've always felt that a lifetime of reading has mainly served to convince me of how little I know
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | That's one of Ishmael's. Officially it is the Tyranny of Knowledge i.e. the brain can't get past what it already knows. |
Ignorance should be guarded like virginity.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Back to the theme of how AE-ists communicate with experts
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Darwinian Evolution is a Crock February 6, 2025
Evolution is supposed to be driven by a genetic mutation occurring in a single organism conferring a competitive advantage, allowing that individual to have more offspring than other members of the species.
This advantage, being heritable, allows the offspring of the offspring to gradually displace non-mutated individuals until either (a) the whole species possesses it or (b) two populations are established, one with and one without the mutation. It depends on whether the original species formed a single breeding group or were separated by geographical factors.
This does not, in itself, lead to speciation. By definition the two groups are still one species, they can breed with one another. Further genetic mutations, further ‘survival of the fittest’ stages, are necessary before this is achieved. Since genes were unknown in Darwin’s time, this theory is called ‘neo-Darwinism’ and is taught by and believed by all educated people other than daft twats in the American Bible Belt.
And me. I like evidence before believing things. As they say, “He won’t be taught, that M J Harper.” So I have devised my customary ten-point plan to try out on any passing neo-Darwinist. This one goes like this:
1. Dear Passing Neo-Darwinist: According to neo-Darwinist theory all species must experience a period of time when they co-exist with the species that gave rise to them. That period might be short, it might be indefinitely long.
“Yes, sir.”
2. Dear Passing Neo-Darwinist: At any one time then, the species of the world must be divided into two types: those whose ancestral species still walks the earth (‘extant’) and those whose ancestral species has been entirely replaced (‘extinct’).
“Yes, sir.”
3. Dear Passing Neo-Darwinist: The one time for which we have good evidence is right now. There are reckoned to be several million species in the world today and, as you say, they will be divided between those with a still extant ancestral species and those whose ancestral species has gone extinct.
“Yes, sir.”
4. Dear Passing Neo-Darwinist: Could you give me an estimate of how many million, hundreds of thousand, tens of thousands, whatever approximate number of species that fall into the ‘still extant ancestor’ category (ignoring any species that might have been affected by human domestication).
“Can’t, sorry.”
5. Dear Passing Neo-Darwinist: Failing that, a short list will suffice.
“Can’t, sorry.”
6. Dear Passing Neo-Darwinist: Failing that, a single example will do.
“Can’t, sorry.”
7. Dear Passing Neo-Darwinist: So some better explanation would appear to be indicated, wouldn’t you say?
“I’m listening.”
8. Dear Passing Neo-Darwinist: Every now and again an unusually powerful burst of solar radiation promotes genetic mutation in all organisms on earth. After that a whole myriad of possibilities are opened up.
“Is that the time? I must be off. Nice talking to you.”
9. Dear Passing Neo-Darwinist: Is that your final word on the subject?
“Yes.”
10. Dear Passing Neo-Darwinist: Thank you for your valuable time.
“Don’t mention it, it’s what we’re here for.”
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