/lab Live RSS feed for /lab en /lab/res/1498.html#1552>>1550
This thread has only demonstrated quite how blindly people will follow "science" to the point of unscientific dogma. People like you.

]]> /lab/res/1498.html#1551>>1549 That's the second time someone's done this in this thread. If you can't contribute, don't bother posting.

]]> /lab/res/1498.html#1550>>1549
As demonstrated in this thread.

]]> /lab/res/1498.html#1549>>1548

No.

]]> /lab/res/1498.html#1548>>1547
I am only talking about personailities being predicted by the time of year they were born in, nominally defined by the stars that happen to be above at the time. It is entirely scientific.
The only real opposition seems to be based entirely on reductio ad ridiculum.

]]> /lab/res/1498.html#1547>The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that astrology is not complete nonsense
The more you learn about science, the more it will seem like complete nonsense. Seriously.

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>>1528
For one thing, a number of dowsers also claim that they can find stationary objects like archaeological ruins or mines (or anything that produces or disrupts "earth rays", I presume).

Furthermore, small-scale experiments have shown that dowsers cannot determine whether there is water flowing in an underground water pipe (Foulkes: Dowsing experiments. Nature 229, pp. 163--168 (1971)) and there is a well-executed large-scale experiment with flowing water streams (Betz: Neue Ergebnisse der Rutengängerforschung. Wetter-Boden-Mensch (Zeitschrift für Geobiologie) 5, pp. 55-59 (1995)) in which the author claimed to have found a few talented dowsers, but the data actually supports the opposite (see http://www.csicop.org/si/show/testing_dowsing_the_failure_of_the_munich_experiments/).

Really, just because a TV show can only spend something like 10 minutes on a particular topic so the viewer won't get bored, doesn't mean that there hasn't more research been done. It has. (Really, the above clip looks to me like they wanted to show an easy to understand double-blind trial that can be recorded by a camera. When the water is underground and flowing, it's hard to show images of what's actually going on.)

]]> /lab/res/1498.html#1529>The position of planets and stars can predict YOUR future!

]]> /lab/res/1498.html#1528>>1526
While i am not the person you're replying to, and am quite sceptical of water dowsing- presumably a realistic study would involve looking for flowing water rather than bottles.


Personally I wouldn't expect them to do any better. But the point stands.

]]> /lab/res/1442.html#1527>>1524
Alright. Just putting that below the colour key would have helped tremendously, and if you just had the diagram like it is and not the information that it is from GOCE, I consider it undebatable that the diagram would be useless.

]]> /lab/res/1498.html#1526>>1525
These dowsers agreed to participate in this study, which pretty much means that they thought they could detect the bottles of water. That first guy even says that he expected his powers to extend to the posed problem, and his explanation for it not working is that God didn't had been playing a trick on him. Such an explanation makes his claim unfalsifiable, which is pretty much the definition of pseudoscience. Generally, they all seem pretty surprised that they couldn't find the waterbottles, whichever explanation they have for their failure. (However, other than Dawkins, I don't consider it in any way remarkable that they are making up excuses; the concept of cognitive dissonance and its proposed effects seem intuitive to me.)

Really, are there dowsers who claim that they can find underground water, but not bottles of water in boxes? What kind of test would you propose?

]]> /lab/res/1498.html#1525>>1520 Science itself is open minded but some of the people who wield it are not. There was that guy who first suggested that space contained molecules when the accepted doctrine was that space only contained ionized hydrogen. He was hounded from his job and thrown out of all the societies he belonged to while his work was actively blocked. He has since been proven right. You probably know who he is if you are in physics.

Here's the Dawkins example from my previous post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VAasVXtCOI
Dowsers claim to detect flowing bodies of water under the earth. He tests them by asking them to detect bottles of water hidden in buckets. He isn't genuinely entertaining the possibility that dowsing is might work, because if he was he'd have set up a better test. I'm not saying the dowsers aren't nuts, just that this method is skewed towards the outcome that Dawkins wants.

These are examples of what I mean by closed minded and I'm referring to the scientific establishment, not the scientific method which, as you say, is as open minded as can possibly be.

Going back to astrology, if results of the various tests are as damning as you say, I'd agree that it's pretty conclusive.

]]> /lab/res/1442.html#1524>>1523
>Latitude/longitude in degrees

yes well done captain obvious

>not elevation in metres

okok this was a simplification on my part. It is geopotential height, with reference to mean sea level, in metres.

]]> /lab/res/1442.html#1523>>1447
Not >>1445, but I don't see what's so TROLOLOLO about this. I don't know what GOCE is, hence the map doesn't make very much sense to me like this. Latitude/longitude in degrees is pretty much the only sensible interpretation for the labeling of the axes, but I have no idea what the colouring means. A unit might help. And it's certainly not elevation in metres.

]]> /lab/res/1498.html#1522>>1521
>You're assuming the correlation is false until proven true, though, which is just as closed-minded.
Correlation is a property of stochastic distributions. It is not a boolean value.

>Besides that, you seem to think "Science" has a mind.
You're wrong. As I've said, "science" is the use of the scientific method. The scientific method dictates procedure, which has been designed with a certain attitude in mind. A very successful attitude, as everywhere that the scientific method has been applied, it has led to significant improvement of quality of life.

>I would wager the "majority of studies" are focusing on the causality alone.
You might want to look up what an "empirical study" is and what statistics can do, silly.

Besides, your trolling skills are admirable, if one can say that about trolling skills. I might even reply again. Nevertheless, moan.

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