Pet Peeve: Nonsense in knowledgable contexts.

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by Dinosaur, Nov 4, 2013.

  1. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    It annoys me when I see astrology data & other nonsense in publications other than The National Inquirer & similar sources.

    The editors & publishers of serious newspapers know that astrology, channeling, OBE, et cetera are nonsense.

    Publishing such bulls**t should be viewed as aiding & abetting scam artists
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Most people regard horoscopes as entertainment. It's become part of our culture, like religion.

    None of my newspapers publish anything sanguine about channeling or OBE. In fact they're even rather hostile to religious fundamentalism.
     
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  5. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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    Anyone with any sense just passes that crap over and even passes the rest of the newspapers crap over as well.
     
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  7. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    @ Dinosaur,

    It is a valid opinion that Astrology is not real.

    That is ALL it is however. It is similar to debating religion in that it has not been proven not to exist.

    Let us look at where astrology originated. It has been with us since the earliest forms of writing and predates the Sumarian culture.

    The Sumerians are factual and lived 5000 years ago. They had advanced Astronomy, Legal Systems, Mathematics, Literature, and knew many astonishing things.

    wikipedia
    Other examples of Sumerian technology include


    One thing mankind recently discovered is how Neptune looked as the Voyager spacecraft passed by. Telescopes could never prepare us for the way it really looked.

    The Sumerians also had a "Theory of Everything" regarding physics. It was based on Octaves and they thought everything was related to movement and sound.

    Prior to World War II a man named Walter Russell predicted that Plutonium must exist. Had Mankind paid more attention to him he could have prevented WWII.

    Wikipedia
    Russell portrayed the principles of the unity of universal law in a way which he believed brought many mainstream theories into direct conflict, or incompleteness, such as some of the principles of Isaac Newton e. g. weight as Russell explains: "... Weight should be measured dually as temperature is. It should have an above and below zero... "[18] He presented a view of the periodic table of elements that led him to the prediction of the existence of plutonium and the two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium[19][unreliable source?] which were known in theory but as yet undiscovered in nature, (as well as elements which are still undiscovered in nature) e. g. the inert gases 'alphanon', 'betanon' and 'gammanon'[19][unreliable source?] as well as the creation of heavy water.[19][unreliable source?] Russell's periodic table has not been adopted by mainstream chemistry. However in 1923, Charles Steinmetz of General Electric was able to corroborate the existence of some of the predicted transuranium elements by direct experimentation in the laboratory which helped to usher in the Atomic Age, in 1945.[20][unreliable source?]

    In 1963, Walter Cronkite in the national television evening news, commenting on Russell's death, referred to him as "... the Leonardo da Vinci of our time. Nikola Tesla wrote a foreword in one of his books as they were friends.

    Okay. Why mention Sumerians belief in Octaves and Sound being central to everything?

    Well this is also the basis for the Walter Russell Periodic Table.

    May Russellian Science and Sumerian science are both right. If they are then everything in the Universe affects everything else and astrology is possible.

    A lot of people are exploring the genius of Walter Russell.

    Google the name and read for hours. All his books are free online.


    Watch this as an example...

    [video=youtube;WvCHOBxN-wU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvCHOBxN-wU[/video]

    [video=youtube;3DSnhTpJHZ4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DSnhTpJHZ4[/video]

    or

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcsHfwppI1A

    If Nikola Tesla and Walter Russell are correct, then astrology is probable. So....

    Believe what you want, but there are scientific arguments supporting astrology.
     
  8. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    4,885
    I would be interested in some citations for the following.
    It is amusing to note that we are now in the age of Aquarius. This has resulted in two versions of astrology.

    Claiming that astrology has validity comes under the scope of the following.
     
  9. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    2,088
    @ Dinosaur,

    You are not making a valid point?

    I have said there is some scientific argument towards the existence of Astrology.

    I never said it was proven.

    Did everybody float around until Gravity was discovered?

    Did everyone freeze before we could prove and measure heat?

    Just because there was no Extraordinary Evidence supporting any theories about Gravity does not mean Cavemen were not subjected to it.

    I know the Monicker under my name says "Finally we know everything", but it really is meant as sarcasm, and I would like to think science still has things it will discover.

    So. Unless you have proof Astrology does not exist I suggest you quit whining about it and turn the page of your newspaper.
     
  10. Randwolf Ignorance killed the cat Valued Senior Member

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    4,201
    Yes. Let's all play prove the negative. Silly boy...
     
  11. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    12,451
    Anything supported by Tesla is worth questioning.

    As for Russell, his ideas are not consistent with established science, so to accommodate him being right one would have to chuck out a great deal of science that works, without having anything to replace it - a huge step back into ignorance. So unsurprisingly nobody is going to do this.

    As for this screed about the Sumerians, one point I think you overlook is that we know a great deal more about what the planetary bodies are than they did, and what we know conflicts with the notions of astrology.

    The thing about Octaves is amusing but goes nowhere. The periodic table is NOT built of octaves, it is merely that there are 8 electrons in the s + p orbitals of each sub-shell.
    In fact, the 1s is the fundamental, the 2s is the 1st radial harmonic (one "octave" above), the 3s is the 3rd (the "fifth" above the 2s) and so on. Gosh, maybe the Sumerians predicted the quantum model of the atom! Well, er, no.
     
  12. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    2,088
    @ Exchemist,

    I appreciate you have at least looked at Walter Russell (also Nikola Tesla). You are correct that his views are not consistent with modern science as his theories involve a god entity which is hogwash to most scientists of our time. His ideas suggest we are only in existence because of our motion and that a spider web could cut a lead brick if the spider web was moving at incredible speeds.

    Nonetheless; The Internet age allows us more freedom to explore non conventions of science. Our age of books produced en masse, and library's and schools filled with them forced our views to be rigid and conforming.

    I lot of Walter Russell views do conform with accepted science however, and even though he called it something else he was the first person to say Plutonium does exist, and he told scientists this in 1926. Nikola Tesla told him mankind was not ready for his insight (something along those lines).

    @ Randwolf,

    The point I made to Dinosaur was that science does not need to be proven in order for it to govern our lives. I am sure Cavemen did not prove Gravity, yet they still had weight.

    Nobody asked you or Dinosaur to prove a negative. Our understanding and science might not even be capable of this at present. I simply say turn the page from the astrology section and let it be. Astrology has come down from the times of Babylon and Ancient Sumer in forms almost complete. It has had a predominate place in history up until this century where for the first time we are trying to write it off as rubbish. What if civilizations in the past had advanced knowledge? What if ancient civilizations had aircraft? We will never know as these things would long ago have faded into dust.

    @ Exchemist,

    I want to mention a separate point you made.

    Perhaps not. The Cuneiform texts told us what we would find as we approached Neptune before Voyager II did. How did they get such accurate descriptions of our planets up close and personal?

    Read this...

    This is stuff you can read yourself in translated Cuneiform...
    Now you said we know MORE... Read this...


    IF INTERESTED PLEASE CONTINUE READING AT....
    http://enkispeaks.com/2013/08/16/evidence-validates-sumerian-story-of-gods-from-nibiru/

    I would think twice before saying we know more than them. Our information has better tools for measuring in many instances, but their general knowledge seems greater than ours.

    This culture and its science seems to be very advanced. Dismiss their astrology at will, but I believe it has merit.

    It is true the Sumerians claim their knowledge came from another planet in our Solar System. This is not a conspiracy theory or something I am making up. The Texts are still being translated and hosted in University libraries for any subscribers to read freely. Perhaps a more advanced civilization (Atlantis style) moved in on them with some type of aircraft and told them stories, the possibilities are only imaginable.

    Mesopotamia might have known more than us concerning astronomy in some areas. They certainly knew more about some aspects until Voyager II set us straight.

    Sumer was real. Their texts are real. This is not make believe I am posting. Research their writing yourself.

    Sumerian Proverbs....

    "Let it be excessive, so it does not need to be supplemented"

    "One does not return borrowed bread."

    "The fox, having urinated into the sea, said: "The depths of the sea are my urine!"

    "You should not boast; then your words will be trusted."

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV_jCzTeR1U

    The Sumerians said Aliens taught them, however the Annunaki and Planet X/Nibiru is a different story altogether...

    Did they say this once. No. They taught this over and over and over again in their schools.

    Watch from 11 minutes on or all of it.....
    [video=youtube;nn3d5uanmPA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn3d5uanmPA[/video]


    Spooky...

    Not to some of the know it alls here. I will take astrology under consideration.
     
    Last edited: Nov 6, 2013
  13. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Oh God not bloody Nibiru again!

    No, this is crank stuff, and I'm not wading through all these pages of what I am perfectly sure will turn out to be nonsense. If there was anything to all this, we would know about it. There is no conspiracy to suppress it and someone could get a professorship out if it. So the fact we haven't and nobody has tells me all I need to know.

    But,in order to be scrupulously fair, if you can reference any material supporting these ideas that has been published in reputable archaeological or scientific journals, I will read it. But ONLY then.
     
  14. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    @ Exchemist,

    A lot of the old Cuneiform was available free on the internet, and I have spent days reading it. I have not looked in a while but believe a lot of it is cataloged and would require a subscription just to point you in the right direction.

    I never claimed Nibiru is or was real. It is my belief that the Sumerians were duped by an advanced civilization living elsewhere on earth, which could explain why the thought them gods/space travelers.

    I will look for some Cuneiform translations, but my interest in Sumer was exhausted long ago.
     
  15. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Civilization, as we understand the word, was a suite of technologies that arose in the Bronze Age, around 3000BCE in Mesopotamia, and somewhat later in the rest of the world. (The Incas developed it only about 1,000 years ago.) Of course there were Stone Age cities long before that, but metallurgy made a huge difference.

    Sumer was established a thousand years before the Bronze Age and so was one of the first Stone Age "civilizations" to take advantage of the new metal-based technologies.

    There were no civilizations more advanced than the Sumerians. Metal technology leaves lots of durable archeological artifacts, and there aren't any.
     
  16. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    2,088
    @ Fraggle Rocker,

    The Sumerians were fairly adamant that Aliens came to them. I am merely proposing a somewhat advanced civilization might have existed elsewhere on the planet. The term Atlantis is a contender for such a place. I think it is more likely a superior civilization existed than to think aliens came in spacecraft to mine gold.

    Are we to believe Sumer just jumped into advanced Mathematics, Astronomy, Legal systems, Literature, Discovery of Wheel, agriculture, Policing, taxation, government, over 3000 laws, writing, a form of abacus, astrology (even if not accepted here) and much more. They documented the procession of the Equinox (extremely hard), could calculate the space inside a sphere (can you?), and a complete form of writing was developed. The Babylonian empire also predates Egyptian rule and they had the know how to build the sphinx and pyramids which are still marveled at today.

    If such an advanced civilization had existed on a continent that has since sank into the sea (Atlantis reference again), then perhaps earlier discoveries of these primitive technologies might have been erased.

    It is the classrooms of Sumer that taught Aliens had come to them, not me. This is their version, not mine. I just think a neighboring civilization seems more practical than believing in actual aliens. The choices are yours of course.
     
  17. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    12,451
    OK, but I've tried googling "Sumerian Astronomy" and all I get is a disputed Wiki article on Babylonian astronomy, plus a lot of links to crystals-and-shit woo-woo sites. By contrast, there is a great deal on the web about other aspects of Sumerian culture. So I'm going to assume that no academic has thought there is enough in Sumerian astronomy to be worth writing up.
     
  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    At the cusp of the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, contact between tribes became more common. But until then contact was more limited so people developed remarkably different customs, forms of dress, etc. Not to mention the effects of inbreeding on appearance in formerly isolated tribes. An "alien" could be simply somebody who looks a lot different from your own people.

    Virtually all historians agree that the Atlantis myth is about Thera/Santorini, an island in the Mediterranean that was the major naval base of the Minoans. It was destroyed by an earthquake and the resulting tsunami, and the Minoans receded into history.

    Well sure. No matter how advanced your spacefaring technology might be, it will never be worth the time and expense of traveling to another solar system just to take home some gold.

    They had a whole millennium of pre-metallurgy Stone Age civilization to do those things.

    As for the wheel, the potter's wheel had already been invented in Neolithic communities, where pottery was practical because they were no longer nomadic. How many times did one accidentally spin off of its axis and go rolling through the village, making the people wish they could harness that phenomenon?

    Surely these people attempted to build larger wheels out of the cross section of a tree trunk, the only kind of lumber they could cut with flint tools. They discovered that a cross section doesn't have enough strength to support a vehicle of useful size. The invention of metal saws allowed them to cut boards and make wheels out of vertical sections, which are much stronger. The wheel was surely a technology that had already been designed, waiting only for the tools to be invented that would make it a reality.

    The Bronze Age was also marked by the domestication of the horse and other draft animals. Now that they had carts with wheels, all they needed was a tame animal stronger and faster than a human to pull a larger version of it over longer distances.

    The building of the Pyramids began in the third millennium BCE, which puts it in the Bronze Age. They had metal tools at their disposal.

    We have a much better understanding of plate tectonics than you postulate. Thera/Santorini has a total area of only 90sqkm/35sqmi--and it is not actually sunken! Nothing the size of a continent, or even a large island like Greenland (or even Britannia), could have sunk without being known to us. After all, they're not sawed off of the earth's surface, transported to the middle of the deepest ocean, and dropped there. They are simply lowered a little as a result of vulcanism, tectonic activity, or rising sea level. This will happen to the Maldives in a century or two. Also Florida and Bangladesh.

    Metal artifacts last a long time.

    Sea level was much lower about 20KYA, at a low point in the latest Ice Age (which is about to end, with all the glaciers and icecaps melting, and sea level rising to cover all the coastal cities where half of humanity lives). We are indeed finding ruins of villages twenty miles offshore underwater. But their Stone Age technologies are consistent with the people we already know about from that era. The Solutreans, a tribe of Cro-Magnon, built primitive boats and sailed to what is now the northeastern USA. Unfortunately, for reasons we may never know, their communities died out before the Siberians came over the Bering Land Bridge several thousand years later. There are no remnants of Solutrean culture and technology among the Native Americans.

    In those days no one realized that the moon was as large as it is and that the sun is much larger than the earth. They didn't know that there are other planets in our solar system and other stars with planets that might be inhabited. I haven't studied Sumerian so I don't know what word is being translated as "alien," but I assure you that they weren't thinking of people coming from Alpha Centauri in rocket ships.

    As I said before, to them an "alien" was anybody who looked a lot different and practiced strange customs.

    Sure. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that during the heyday of Sumer, there was another civilization with spectacularly advanced technology. All anybody anywhere had was bronze metallurgy. It was still a thousand years before the Iron Age.

    The transition from bronze to iron metallurgy was arguably more of a social paradigm shift than a technological one. Copper and tin ore are almost never found in close proximity. So city-states had to maintain good relations in order to trade vital resources. The discovery of iron metallurgy made it possible for one entity to make war on its neighbors without endangering its supply chain.

    Iron ore is so ubiquitous that it even allowed "barbarian" tribes to start forging their own weapons so they could attack the cities.
     
  19. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    2,088
    @ Exchemist,

    Their teachings about their living gods being from space, etc were not written in peer reviewed scientific journals. You could find it in prose, and teachings repetitively. The name Enki seems to come to mind. I'll search wikipedia as you say it is mostly disputed.

    I have read some of these lengthy Cuneiform stories, but have no idea (but would love to ) know where I can subscribe to read translated Cuneiform and Papyrus in the future. I find reading 5000+ year old stories and ideas interesting.

    Wikipedia is hard to post keep non disputed materials on so start here maybe..
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enki
    "My master has spoken to me, Enki has said to me: "Inana may travel to Unug, but you are to get the Boat of Heaven back to Eridug for me"

    In some translations (those are from Oxford digital Archives), Use of words like "Boat of Heaven", or "The house lowered down from heaven" sound like aircraft to some reading.

    These are just a few types of references to aircraft I may have found in randomly searchimg the oxford site. Could the Interior of "tangled Thread" mentioned in the last quote seem like wiring. An uneducated member of a non techie tribe might describe the interior of any electronic device as "tangled Thread". But that would of course be impossible (wouldn't it?).

    These translations are at ...
    http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi
    (oxford Digital Sumer Translations)

    That is just literature.

    http://www.mathematicsmagazine.com/Articles/TheSumerianMathematicalSystem.php#.UnvlVnBwqSo

    The above link is from a mathematics magazine. It does point out that math developed then is still in use today in regards to a 360 degree circle, A dozen doughnuts, etc.

    The Cuneiform it is derived from is listed and dated at the bottom.

    Math and literature are only several sciences however, and some of the most complete translations come from books and can be purchased. The largest amount of translations can be found in books by Zacharia Sitchin.

    If you indeed question the beliefs of the Sumer people, then perhaps one or several of these books may be of interest to you. It was Sitchin who described what Voyager II would encounter when it arrived at Neptune for example.

    @ Fraggle Rocker,

    Obviously you are behind on the conspiracy theories abounding about Nibiru/Planet X (I am not endorsing this opinion), however the concept is that there is/was a planet IN OUR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM that ran opposite our own revolution around the sun. This planet allegedly has an oval shaped trajectory and required gold to seed its upper atmosphere for survival on its odd trip. So really they could not afford not to farm gold wherever they could. It meant the end of all life on their world.

    Anyways.. I do not support that idea. Just clarifying your point.

    Zacharia Sitchin's translations of Sumerian have sold millions of copies in over 25 languages, but his translations are dismissed by skeptics who think he is not translating correctly. For instance: This is how he portrays the start of our mankind ...
    from wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin

    I was unclear on your stance (timeline) about whether they used working wheels or not however (From oxford Digital Sumer translations) ...
    http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi

    http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi
    All from Sumerian texts.

    Sumerian texts are only partially translated (1/4), and many translations are set aside as woo. Unless you are willing to try translations yourself it may be several centuries before accepted versions abound.

    Maybe Astrology is woo, but the Sumerians used it, and its origins are unknown unless they invented it. Walter Russell and Nikola Teslas ideas about a unified Theory involving sound as a template is in agreement with Sumerians. Could they be smarter than us?
     
    Last edited: Nov 7, 2013
  20. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    12,451
    I'm sorry but this is nuts. There is nothing in the Wiki article about astronomy or aliens from space. (I found the most interesting part was an early version of the story of Noah.) It is barmy to extrapolate from boat of heaven to "aeroplane" and from "tangled thread" to "wiring".

    And no, there is no evidence that Walter Russell and Nikola Tesla were "smarter" than us.

    I've now had quite enough of this credulous nonsense.
     
  21. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    17,455
    hmmm . . .
    if edison had HIS way we would be struggling to get DC to all those rural folks.
    it took tesla to make that possible, not with DC either.
    to paraphrase edison:
    "tesla is weird, i know of no one that designs stuff in their head and it works."

    in my opinion tesla made the industrial revolution possible by providing cheap power.

    about astrology:
    it's simply another method of ordering data.
    i guess with the right ordering and analysis you might be able to make predictions.
     
  22. BWE1 Rulers are for measuring. Registered Senior Member

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    Even gravity does not "exist". What does this mean?
     
  23. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    2,088
    @ BWE1,

    I do not understand your last post. Exist means it is in reality. Gravity does exist. Huh?
     

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