Plan B Forum

Tutankhamen Al Jolson--I'd walk a million miles, for one of your smiles, my mummy.

Big RR wrote:Tutankhamen Al Jolson--I'd walk a million miles, for one of your smiles, my mummy.

Yo... this belongs in the 'Pun' thread.

liberty wrote:Jim that only means that anthropology is a science in which the amateur is better than the professional.
***
Since this is true of anthropology why can’t it be true of "climate change" that is also something people are attacked for disagreeing with the orthodoxy?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the New Dark Ages.

Seriously, this is the kind of shit that's going to get us all killed.

"Nichols, in short, provides a brief History, informed by psychology and political science, of what he argues is a new phenomenon whereby people in the United States are not just regularly wrong or ignorant but 'proud of not knowing things'" -- Kirkus Reviews

"Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger." --Amazon

Tom Nichols's political orientation may be a bit right-wingy for my tastes, but he's certainly not wrong on this question.

We need that free university education - ASAP.

Big RR wrote:

Jim that only means that anthropology is a science in which the amateur is better than the professional. The amateur anthropologist can say what he thinks without fear of losing his job, something the professional can’t do; in order to provide for his family he has too stay politically correct. In science truth is everything. The people who did the DNA study did not comment on their results they published what they found and let others comment. Why do you think that was the case?

Since this is true of anthropology why can’t it be true of "climate change" that is also something people are attacked for disagreeing with the orthodoxy?

Science deals with facts, and I place far more faith in the facts discovered and theories propounded by the trained scientists based on those fact. Yes, those disagreeing and voicing alternative opinions are held to prove their positions by facts and/or experimental evidence, but do you really think the opposite should be true--that every crackpot amateur or professional should given a platform without this? It's been true throughout the history of the development of science, and one can look at the changes in physics in the late 19th/early 20th centuries to see how those propounding the departure from clasical to relativisic physics were held to the same degree of scrutiny. It's not politics, it's the way science progresses; most of the crackpot theories disppear when viewed in this way.

So I am far more likely to accept the view of the anthropology community on whether caucasoid/caucasian is a valid subgroup or not than I am someone who has read a few articles and claims to be an amateur anthroplogist.

If an amateur paleontologist discovered a dinosaur fossil, would his discovery be any less valid just because he would not be getting paid for the work done. In the beginning of science and especially before it was accepted all scientist were amateurs and some were not even academics. Hell Joseph Priestley was a church man, a believer in god, something that many liberals today believe would disqualify one from being a scientist, but he discovered oxygen and published his finding.

Do you think I am lying? Check this out:

https://listosaur.com/science-a-technol ... scoveries/
5 Amateurs Who Made Key Scientific Discoveries
HomeScience & Technology5 Amateurs Who Made Key Scientific Discoveries
• BY Dave Dickinson
• IN Science & Technology
• May 8, 2015

Did you know that the job title of “scientist” is largely a 20th century creation? For most of history, amateurs with no formal scientific training helped advance science, as they pondered the universe in their spare time from often-menial occupations. Some found patronage, while others — such as Johannes Kepler — had to cast horoscopes or dabble in the black art of alchemy to help make ends meet. But by the late 18th century, many people had come to recognize the value of science, and “scientist” became a respected profession. Although most scientific endeavors today have gone from the domain of the lone individual to large-scale collaborative efforts, amateurs can still make a contribution. Americans tend to equate “amateur” to “novice,” although perhaps the term should be thought of as someone who pursues their passion.


5. William Herschel
William Herschel spent the first half of his life as a musician. In his mid-30s, he began studying astronomy, and discovered the planet Uranus.
William Herschel’s first love was music. The German played several instruments, including the organ, and composed two-dozen pieces of music. After moving to Great Britain around age 20, Herschel spent many years as a church organist and music teacher, but around age 35, he picked up a hobby — astronomy. Building his own telescopes, Herschel peered into the night sky, pondering the universe. He read the leading astronomy books of the age to bolster his knowledge of the topic. A few years later, on the night of March 13, 1781, Herschel found what he initially thought to be a comet. He soon realized that the apparent motion of the object tracked over several nights meant it was a large object in the outer solar system. Herschel had discovered Uranus, the first planet of the telescopic era. The surprising discovery landed Herschel a job as royal astronomer (we can be thankful that his proposal to name the new planet “George” after his benefactor, King George III, didn’t stick). Many years later, Herschel also discovered what he called “calorific rays,” which we now refer to as the infrared part of the spectrum.
Due to its nature, astronomy has always been a field where amateurs can make epic discoveries. Henrietta Swan Leavitt is one notable example. In the late 19th century, Leavitt worked as a human computer, menial work that involved crunching numbers and cataloging and characterizing stars captured on photographic glass plates. In the early years of the 20th century, Leavitt first identified the period luminosity relationship for Cepheid variable stars, a crucial cosmic yardstick astronomers still use today to measure distance in the universe.

4. Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday had a grammar school education, but provided keen insights into the principles of electromagnetism.
Although he received little in the way of a formal education — he never got past grammar school — Michael Faraday stood as a giant in early 19th century science. Faraday spent his teens and early 20s working in a bookstore, where he read many of the cutting-edge scientific books of the era. That self-taught knowledge led him to pursue science. Faraday’s insight into the principles of electromagnetic induction and the movement of magnets in an electric field made the introduction of the electric motor possible. His concepts were also crucial toward the first true unification of two separate physical forces of nature, as work began by Faraday enabled contemporary James Clerk Maxwell to provide a complete mathematical description of electromagnetism. In chemistry, Faraday introduced the now familiar system of oxidation numbers and discovered benzene. Einstein himself cited Faraday as one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century, and the unit of capacitance known as the farad is named after Faraday.

3. Mary Anning
Mary Anning’s discoveries helped transform the field of paleontology. Credit: B.J. Donne
The science of paleontology didn’t really come into vogue until the 19th century, as scientists came to realize that the giant skeletons being unearthed were actually those of prehistoric creatures. A British fossil collector named Mary Anning became one of the most unlikely pioneers of paleontology. Anning had a very limited education, learning to read and write in Sunday school. Growing up in poverty, she and her family sold fossils they discovered on the beach to raise money for food and necessities. The young Anning became quite gifted at discovering fossils. At age 12, she uncovered the first ichthyosaur skeleton; in her early 20s, she discovered the first complete plesiosaurus skeleton. (On a more unsavory note, she also astutely pointed out that coprolites were actually fossilized dinosaur dung.)
Anning carried out her mostly solitary — and sometimes dangerous — work along the cliffs of the English Channel in southwest England. Yet she was much more than just someone with a knack for finding fossils. She amazed many scientists of the day with her keen insights into fossils and geology. Unfortunately, women of that era were not given equal status with men — especially a poor, “uneducated” woman working in the male-dominated field of science. So Anning labored mostly in obscurity and poverty during her life. She died of cancer in 1847 at age 47.

2. Félix d’Herelle
Félix d’Herelle attended only a few months of college, but the self-taught scientist became a pioneer in the field of microbiology.
Born in Paris, Félix d’Herelle briefly attended college before dropping out, and spent most of his late teens and early 20s traveling in Europe and South America. He later invested in a chocolate factory. But he also had a keen interest in science, and built himself a home laboratory in 1897 at age 24. His early forays into science involved studying distillation and fermentation processes, but his real love was bacteriology.
D’Herelle’s career in science took an unexpected turn in 1907 when he accepted a job in Mexico. There, he seized upon two epic discoveries: that bacteria could be used to control insect infestations, and that viruses could be used to fight bacterial infections. In essence, those breakthroughs made him the father of biological pest control, as well as a pioneer in the field of using phage therapy in fighting diseases such as dysentery and cholera. In his time, d’Herrelle had plenty of critics, who disdained his arrogance and insistence on doing things his way — a product, perhaps, of being self-educated. But there is no denying his contributions to science and the field of microbiology.

1. Gregor Mendel
An Augustinian friar, Gregor Mendel’s groundbreaking work charting crossbreeding in pea plants laid the foundation for modern genetics.
A key tenet of modern biology is genetic inheritance. Although the idea that crossbreeding could yield desirable traits had been known for centuries in agriculture and animal husbandry, an Augustinian friar named Gregor Mendel became the first to study and characterize this effect. Mendel meticulously studied pea plants and noted color, shape and variations over successive generations. He coined the terms “dominant” and “recessive,” referring to traits that popped up in some generations of plants but not in others. Mendel’s work languished in obscurity and didn’t gain acceptance until after his death in 1884, but today serves as the very foundation for modern genetics.

One More: David H. Levy
David H. Levy co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which crashed into Jupiter in 1994. Credit: NASA
Backyard astronomers continue to contribute to the field of astronomy, often employing homemade observatories that would be the envy of major universities. What can you observe with a backyard telescope? Just consider the work of David H. Levy. The Canadian has discovered 22 comets, nine of which he found using his backyard observatory. He earned worldwide fame in 1993 for his co-discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as part of a photographic survey. Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter in the summer of 1994 as astronomers watched in fascination with both ground- and space-based instruments. Levy is also an accomplished author, and continues to hunt for comets from his Jarnac Observatory south of Tucson, Arizona. By the way, while none of the other scientists mentioned in this story earned a college degree, Levy owns a master’s degree — in English literature.
Slideshow image: © Angello Deco/Shutterstock.com

Written by Dave Dickinson
David Dickinson is a backyard astronomer, science educator and retired military veteran. He lives in Hudson, Fla., with his wife, Myscha, and their dog, Maggie. He blogs about astronomy, science and science fiction at http://www.astroguyz.com.

It’s posts like that which make you think is he really that stupid or is he deliberately missing the point.

BoSoxGal wrote:We need that free university education - ASAP.

I'm doing pretty well with just a high-school education, thank you.  Of course, I got it in the 1960s, when you were still expected to go to school to learn stuff, not just show up, play sports, hang out, and be counted.
(I was also parochial-schooled for ten of those twelve years ... which I believe also made a big difference in the quality of the education I got.)

The other point I wish to make is that one of the most important things I got out of those twelve years was that just because you stop going to school you are not expected to stop learning. And even today, more than 45 years after I walked across that stage and got that fancy piece of paper, I'm still learning new things every day — including what Kirkus Reviews had to say in its review of Tom Nichols' book:  "people in the United States are not just regularly wrong or ignorant but 'proud of not knowing things' ".

-"BB"-

Crackpot wrote:It’s posts like that which make you think is he really that stupid or is he deliberately missing the point.

Well, Mr. Crack Head what was his point? Perhaps his point was the individual has no right to question the wisdom of the collective. But the group has not always been right which has been demonstrated by the bandwagon effect from time to time. Surely you know you of the bandwagon effect so no example should be necessary. As I said the collective is not always correct. Galileo was the individual and the church was the collective. Galileo was right and the church was wrong. In science the one can be right and the ninety nine can be wrong.

lib, is this an effected bandwagon that you speak of?

And for every person like Galileo who was eventually proven right, I can probably find you a half-dozen examples of people who also posited a reasonable, sound-on-the-surface, seemingly well-thought-out idea, theory, or conclusion that flew in the face of 'accepted science' — and turned out to be totally, completely, incontrovertibly, 200-percent wrong.  Just as an example, how about John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, who co-authored a book in the middle 1970s which predicted that an alignment of the planets of the solar system (the so-called "Jupiter Effect") would create an abnormal gravitational pull on Planet Earth, comparable to how the proximity of the moon to Earth affects the tides of the seas, and cause a number of catastrophes — including a great earthquake on the San Andreas Fault — on March 10, 1982?  Didn't happen, did it?

Or how about the 'Heaven's Gate' crowd, which committed mass suicide so they could hitch a ride on a passing comet as the world ended, or the number of people who claimed to have unlocked the secret of that ancient Mayan (or was it Aztec?) calendar, and that it supposedly predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012?  Last time I checked, the comet never showed up and the world is still here.

These were amateurs too ... ignorant amateurs who basically took science fiction and tried to spin it as science fact.

-"BB"-

Mayan.

Bicycle Bill wrote:And for every person like Galileo who was eventually proven right, I can probably find you a half-dozen examples of people who also posited a reasonable, sound-on-the-surface, seemingly well-thought-out idea, theory, or conclusion that flew in the face of 'accepted science' — and turned out to be totally, completely, incontrovertibly, 200-percent wrong.  Just as an example, how about John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, who co-authored a book in the middle 1970s which predicted that an alignment of the planets of the solar system (the so-called "Jupiter Effect") would create an abnormal gravitational pull on Planet Earth, comparable to how the proximity of the moon to Earth affects the tides of the seas, and cause a number of catastrophes — including a great earthquake on the San Andreas Fault — on March 10, 1982?  Didn't happen, did it?

Or how about the 'Heaven's Gate' crowd, which committed mass suicide so they could hitch a ride on a passing comet as the world ended, or the number of people who claimed to have unlocked the secret of that ancient Mayan (or was it Aztec?) calendar, and that it supposedly predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012?  Last time I checked, the comet never showed up and the world is still here.

These were amateurs too ... ignorant amateurs who basically took science fiction and tried to spin it as science fact.

-"BB"-

That is true and you can add to the list of crackpots and charlatans the Afrocentrics. Their ideas sound reasonable to liberals who bend over backwards to believe them so that you won’t be called a racist. However, many Afrocentric assertions are crap; the ancient Egyptians were not a black nation, Cleopatra was not a black woman, Hannibal was not a black man and there were no black Roman Emperors.

RayThom wrote:lib, is this an effected bandwagon that you speak of?

No here it is FYI:

bandwagon effect noun
Definition of bandwagon effect

: the phenomenon by which the growing success of something (such as a cause, fad, or type of behavior) attracts more widespread support or adoption as more people perceive and are influenced by its increasing popularity During recent presidential elections it has become vital for candidates to win early party primaries in several states to start a bandwagon effect. Most people withhold support and contributions until they are sure the candidate has a good chance to win. Campaign "momentum" is highly prized because it creates a bandwagon effect that brings even more supporters into the fold.— Hy Ruchlis et al. Researchers have found two factors that may account for momentum's success. I call the first the bandwagon effect. As a stock keeps outperforming the market, more and more investors "discover" it and jump on board—propelling it even further ahead of the market and seducing still more buyers.— Mark Hulbert

liberty wrote:

RayThom wrote:lib, is this an effected bandwagon that you speak of?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... _Jul09.jpg

No here it is FYI:

bandwagon effect noun
Definition of bandwagon effect

: the phenomenon by which the growing success of something (such as a cause, fad, or type of behavior) attracts more widespread support or adoption as more people perceive and are influenced by its increasing popularity During recent presidential elections it has become vital for candidates to win early party primaries in several states to start a bandwagon effect. Most people withhold support and contributions until they are sure the candidate has a good chance to win. Campaign "momentum" is highly prized because it creates a bandwagon effect that brings even more supporters into the fold.— Hy Ruchlis et al. Researchers have found two factors that may account for momentum's success. I call the first the bandwagon effect. As a stock keeps outperforming the market, more and more investors "discover" it and jump on board—propelling it even further ahead of the market and seducing still more buyers.— Mark Hulbert

Ohhh... thanks, lib, for the clarification. I thought you were talking about a real wagon of some kind.

I thought you were talking about a real wagon of some kind.

It's not a real wagon. It's been banned.

liberty: Have you ever even heard of the Scientific Method? The value of science isn't that it's never wrong, or that its "experts" are "respected authorities"; its value is that it contains within itself a process for determining whether or not it's wrong. And the same process applies to everyone: professional and amateur scientists alike.

RayThom wrote:

liberty wrote:

RayThom wrote:lib, is this an effected bandwagon that you speak of?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... _Jul09.jpg

No here it is FYI:

bandwagon effect noun
Definition of bandwagon effect

: the phenomenon by which the growing success of something (such as a cause, fad, or type of behavior) attracts more widespread support or adoption as more people perceive and are influenced by its increasing popularity During recent presidential elections it has become vital for candidates to win early party primaries in several states to start a bandwagon effect. Most people withhold support and contributions until they are sure the candidate has a good chance to win. Campaign "momentum" is highly prized because it creates a bandwagon effect that brings even more supporters into the fold.— Hy Ruchlis et al. Researchers have found two factors that may account for momentum's success. I call the first the bandwagon effect. As a stock keeps outperforming the market, more and more investors "discover" it and jump on board—propelling it even further ahead of the market and seducing still more buyers.— Mark Hulbert

Ohhh... thanks, lib, for the clarification. I thought you were talking about a real wagon of some kind.

You have always appeared to be a stand up guy so if you say it I accept it.

Econoline wrote:liberty:

Have you ever even heard of the Scientific Method? The value of science isn't that it's never wrong, or that its "experts" are "respected authorities"; its value is that it contains within itself a process for determining whether or not it's wrong. And the same process applies to everyone: professional and amateur scientists alike.

I agree a hundred percent. And I will say that any person who calls himself a scientist amateur or professional and whose hypotheses is conclusively proven wrong will accept it. As I said before, in science the truth is everything.