Hellbender

being shot by a pump pellet gun that was pumped like 11 times. I think I passed out from that. when I got burned on a grill. all the headwounds I have gotten for being clumsy and/or reckless.

"Are you referring to those Americans who 8 generations ago had Scottish blood in the family tree? If so, they can stuff those opinions into that fake sporran and shove the whole lot up their ass." yes. It has come up in an argument before on a cryptozoo thread. We were talking about how they (nessies) could be giant gastropods(!) and one guy who claimed to have scottish blood said he didn't want to think of it as anything but the famous plesiosaur image out of pride in his heritage. "FYI there were no aquatic dinosaurs or flying ones either. You are thinking of plesiosaurs, which were certainly not dinosaurs, but lived at the same time as them." what I meant was plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs, and pterosaurs are not either. But I made a simple mistake, there were and are lots of flying dinosaurs. "....It's the 'if'..." you are right, it is the if, along with the oviparous thing. But if you toss those "ifs" aside there are too many "definites" that rule out it being a plesiosaur. I'm willing to accept that maybe some strange animals live in that loch, but the facts are against them being plesiosaurs.

...extremely large aquatic dinosaurs... FYI there were no aquatic dinosaurs or flying ones either. You are thinking of plesiosaurs, which were certainly not dinosaurs, but lived at the same time as them.

wow I've never heard of that. Well I retract what I said earlier about reading that none were found. I will have to look at that.

the yellow thing could be a daphnia or water flea...no clue on the other one, but it looks familiar. Myabe I will try to look it up.

its a lot like playing silent hill, but not wanting any of the monsters to see you. Very original, deep game.

LOL! Eww I guess you are right, but still, I had to watch a lot of movies in college about extinct hominids and they made them all look like what their likely appearance in life was, and then later that interbreeding thing was mentioned. Bony forheads and wide noses aren't my thing in a girl, but I guess some individuals wouldn't mind. Also come to think of it, I do see some people who have a lot of archaic features. Anyone ever watch football?

Remember tinytigey, put down your bible and keep the "sci vs. reli" debates out of this.

Has anyone ever heard of "cold-reading" techniques employed by "psychics" to "help" people (my quotation mark liscence is being revoked) talk to their dead relatives? It's a laughably simple way of making the victim of your hoax seem you are a genuine psychic. Through a series of rapid fire random guesses, shotgunning stuff like names and initials and using the victim's body language you can make it seem as though you really are (to the bereaved or gullible anyway) talking to and getting info from their dead loved one. It sickens me that people are still actually duped by these "sleight of mouth" tricks. It especially annoys me when it is someone I know going on about how amazing that charlatan John Edward's show was last night. Here's alink for the curious http://skepdic.com/coldread.html.

My first word was a made-up word that I thought meant something.

you are right, I should have picked a different forum for trying to spark a debate of this sort. But I really did want to talk about fossils too.

This is one of the theories presented to me in biological anthropology. HUman fossils found before and after the Neanderthals went extinct showed no signs of interbreeding. Surely some of the Neanderthals traits would have shown up sometime, but there really is no evidence for this. I'm sure it wouldn't be waste of time to test, liek you said, syntax. Besides knowing what neanderthals looked like, I find it hard that any Homo sapiens would even want to copulate with one....

Hmm I'm gald you enjoyed this movie, and it must have been cool back then in the theaters, with all the pretty LSD colors and whatnot. I still don't like this film. So he's a big giant fetus at the end.....okay. I know it was supposed to be symbolic of something, but there were no resolutions, no questions answered. I will not argue with you that the realism and setting were bad however. The sets were good and elaborate and sometimes really gave you rhe feeling of being in space. I thenk "Alien" does this much better though. What was that black monolith? What happened to Dr. Floyd? Why did HAL go nuts? Why was the main character watching himself get older and older at the end? How did the black rectangle thing go from Kenya to burying itself on the moon? What did the black thing do to the astronaut at the end? You may answer these questions if you want but I intended them to be rhetorical.

When I am watching a movie I like to be entertained. I want the characters to have depth. I want to care about the characters. I want the plot to be based on something that I can easily understand and the story told in a cohesive way. This movie had none of this in my opinion. It reminded me of the film "Contact". When i finished watching the both of them I felt like I just wasted 2 hours of my life. I didn't understand the ending of either of these movies at all and that made me mad too. I might try reading the book actually so I don't still feel so confused when I think about it.

...particular scene from 2001: Space Odyssey... I hated this movie. Absolutely hate almost ever minute of it. ANyways in this scene we really don't know what these apes are supposed to be, but I doubt they were humans and neanderthals. I think they were supposed the common ancestor of both of us, australopithecus. Also did you notice there were some real chimpanzee babies in that scene? what a sucky movie, I had to say it again.

..we had the ability to make many different noises thanks to a special bone in the throat (i forgot its name) and though new evidence showed they might have had the same ability as well, most scientists doubt that they had the gift of language.... its the hyoid bone, and neanderthals has it too, but they couldn't vocalize as well becasue their throats aren't as high up as ours.

Siren is a fairly new game here in America. It may not be as popular yet in Canada. It is about a town in Japan (all the characters are Japanese too with Japanese names) where some wierd cult stuff happens and the dead walk and become "super-zombies" known as Shibito. I love this game, but some people don't like it too much. If you like silent hill and metal gear you will love this game. By the way the first Silent hill was for Playstation, all the rest are for Ps2. The third and fouth titles aren't completely set in silent hill either.

..Evolution is a faith, a belief, a RELIGION; the religion of atheism and humanism!.. Do you know who Kent Hovind is? I'm sure you do. I'm not even going to touch this. This claim is so laughable that to me its more of a joke. A bad, stupid joke. What is the harm in atheism or humanism? Is my lack of a preposterous god-belief offending you all the way down there in Texas? TS bud.

Back to the topic, I think another way to spot a pseudoscience is when its proponents attack science or scientists directly, or say that science has no way of measuring or detecting its' (the pseudoscience's) effects. Anyone who likes debunking like me should visit James Randi's site http://www.randi.org/

Response to original post I can start my tell you what Nessie isn't I used to get a lot of heat from people of scottish ancestry (it is a sort of national pride thing for them) for saying this, but I strongly doubt it is a plesiosaur. Or a reptile of any kind. Plesiosaurs are reptiles. Now I know all reptiles are not cold-blooded, but if plesiosaurs were, I doubt they wouldn't freeze to death in a lake that is reputed to have "cold, icy water" as soon as fall rolled around. Scientists think that unlike ichthyosaurs, which were ovivivoparous, plesiosaurs were oviparous, and so had to lay essgs on land. If nessie were a plesiosaur, they would be predictably sighted, clear photos would be taken, they would be capture or killed for study and we wouldn't be talking about this. Plesiosaurs breathed air, like all reptiles. Even if they could hold their breath for a long time, they would have to surface for air sometime. Imagine a population of big animals surfacing all the time. That lake is heavily traversed and even if it was a small population, there would certainly be a clear sighting sometime. Too many people seeing too many different types of thing when they say they saw nessie. One way to decide if a cryptid is at all plausible is if they is good uniformit yof sightings. Not everyone who claims to have seen nessie has described a cryptocleidus. There are accounts of "giant frogs", "crocodiles", "eels" and "huge salamanders" (read the Nessie section of "Unexplained!") The power of suggestion goes a long way. It wasn't really until after the 1930's(have to check that one) that everyone started claiming to see a plesiosaur like animal.

Excellent original post, sayonara. I love how this is a science site but somehow people still rattle on their preachy, dogmatic crap (yeah I said it) about "God being at your door". I love the scare tactics these people use, and the mindless parroting of so called "proof" of Noah's Ark and stuff like that. I got news for you all, becasue some prominent creation "scientist" like Kent Hovind says something is true by no means makes it right. He is the in the propaganda, not science field.

you're welcome, Fellowes. I know I love silent hill, and after playing the first one years back I thought about the movie-like quality of the plot and setting and whatnot. I guess it doesn't bother me that they are discontinuing Doom, after I finished Doom2 for the 50th time and got done hoping for Doom3 I lost interest. The Quake series sucked. I played the original and thought it was okay. The 2nd, which had nothing to do with the first sucked too. I never played QuakeIII becasue it had no single player and all I got is dial up. *cowers*. I am hoping to see what their new line of stuff might be though. I also think "Siren" would make a great Video game movie, if they did it right.

Lol who would want someone like that as a pet?

Who me? Sorry it was a response to the original post, I still don't have the hang of this site yet.

Thanks Ophiolite. Its not that I like to pick fights about this sort of thing.AS you can see, creationism is something I am willing to put a lot of time and energy into debunking, even though I know I am not going to change someone's religious beliefs, some will admit there is at least something to evolution. BUt you are right about how the debates degenerate. I was a memeber of a cryptozoology forum site, and there was a special forum page dedicated to this debate, and needless to say it always had the most threads. You'd be talking about how an elasmosaur's neck never evolved something or other and a creationist would start a whole preachy diatribe about how evolution is false becasue the bible said so. No wonder I am no longer a memeber of that site.....