MonDie

I wouldn't call the human itself a measuring instrument, but their sensory organs sure.

It wouldn't be proof, but it would be consistent with the hypothesis. Further investigation could still rule out the hypothesis. Another scientist would have to repeat the test on that subject to see whether the result is replicated. Psychologists experiment on human subjects all the time. The human is not the measuring device, but what's being measured.

Where's your dad at?

Barfbag, a hypothesis is testable if it makes predictions. Your hypothesis, the hypothesis that you can predict the future or others' mental states in the absence of any sensory evidence, clearly makes a prediction. It predicts that you will be right more often than we would expect if you had no sixth sense (the null hypothesis).

Enjoy some sobering tenor sax and jew harp until I return on July 8th. (I could only find the song in this video)

A good talking point. It's acknowledged that theories may be overturned later. What if they disprove some A that was used to disprove B, thereby undercutting the falsification for B? If any theory may be overturned, then any falsification may be overturned, hence any falsified theory may be un-falsified. What tells us which idea should be thrown out anyway? The criterion of falsification tells us nothing about which ideas should be thrown out when a contradiction is found. I'm personally partial to the coherentist approach, the support for an idea being the vast web of ideas that can be constructed atop it without internal contradictions. The idea that is more deeply embedded in this web of knowledge is the one that is preferential kept, leading us to ditch anything that contradicts it. But regardless of what you think of the coherentist approach, we need a standardized way to determine which idea should be ditched when two ideas are found to contradict. Taking this into account, why do we talk as if any theory may be overturned at any time by some falsifying observation? In fact, you cannot falsify anything with a strong conviction unless the idea it contradictions has support that is at least as strong as the falsification, since we can't trust the falsification unless we can trust that the contradicting idea, the falsificaton, will not itself be overturned later on. 2. Do we really live our lives as if our ideas may be falsified at any time? Do you really live your life as if the theory of gravitation might be false? Are you so wishy-washy that you would jump off a building hoping that you're wrong? Apologies. I really wish I could finish this essay, but I just don't have the time right now.

This is why the anti-Christ will have to be illiterate.

Who suggested there was science behind racism? Return reset for July 5th.

Although the OP considers whether we would recieve their signal, your response is relevant. If the ETs could pick up our signals, they could have responded to them. We can take this even further. If there's not limit on telescope resolution, then a sufficiently advanced civilization might have witnessed the beginnings of agriculture on Earth, and it might have sent a sufficiently strong signal to Earth.

It goes without saying that some allele frequencies will differ significantly because of different selection pressures. However, doesn't white skin probably involve some variations that are absent in native Africans either because they spawned after the migration or because they were eliminated from the African population at some point? Are there any cases of naturally white native Africans, or any cases of two native Africans producing a white baby? Maybe you can find some naturally brown people among both native Africans and "caucasians", but that's because the trait is polygenic.

This thread was so capricious and ill-concieved that I'm just going to leave the forum for a while. My return is set for July 1st.

You're investing time and effort. It's a relatively safer investment to hope that humanity continues on forever. Denying that death is the end. I think denial such as this is good if the person cannot confront the problem in a productive way.

Are you feeling ammorous?

It's plausible that a genetic variation could have multiple phenotypes just as a disease has multiple symptoms, so for example a variation might coincidentally make people both tall and have fast reflexes, but I doubt that this is true of skin color. Suprise surprise, the opening post was misguided. The pigment determining skin color is melanin. Unless you're albino*, your skin should at least produce melanin in response to UV light (tanning).** People with dark skin just have more melanin. Skin color genetics are probably related to the regulation of the enzymes involved in producing melanin. However, it's possible that all the genetics needed for white skin were already present in the African population, they just needed to come together through recombination after some natural selection increased their frequency. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albinism ** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanin

I want to see a study that compares the outcomes of home invasions for gun-owning and gunless victims.

Apparently I was using a narrow interpretation of "race" and hence "racist". http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/race However, this thread isn't about ethnic prejudice; it is about the idea that skin color or ancestry correspond to other significant genetic differences.

Of course out-group prejudice under-pinned the idea that caucasians were superior, but a bigot doesn't have to attribute those percieved short-comings to biological differences to be a bigot. I'm talking about racism as the idea that we belong to different races.

I wish this person would actually provide quotes from their links. I'm reading the discussion sections and seeing a lot of correlations that could be explained in other ways. http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/9/1/48.full In other words, maybe gun purchase is correlated with other suicide risk factors (like mental disorders). They do however mention another study that probably gives a better case for this argument. The homicide correlation could merely reflect that people tend to buy guns when they're at a higher risk of homicide. For example, maybe gun buyers tend to live in places with more crime. The quote below shows that some of the calculated hazard ratios for homicide were as low as 1.4. It would be nice to know the confidence intervals for the different hazard ratios. Assuming they're all equally confident, however, the lower hazard ratios might be due to sample differences, but they might be due to better experimental controls as well. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full

The reasoning of racists seems simple enough. If we developed a unique skin tone, perhaps we developed other unique genetics that influence things like intelligence or civility. Nonetheless the concept of race was shown false by genetic analysis, which raises the question of why skin color changed, but nothing else changed. Please criticize my response to this question, or provide your own response. EDIT: Actually, nearly everybody has some melanin in their skin, so the gene is still expressed to some degree. Read post #9. My understanding is that darker skin is due to pigments deposited in the skin. Lighter people have less of these pigments, which means that genes for darker skin aren't being expressed. Albinism being a recessive trait further evidences that white skin is just the non-expression of certain genes. This suggests that lighter skin was merely a loss-of-function mutation, which are far more common than gain-of-function mutations. For more evidence, look at most other non-human animals. Aside from other apes, what non-human animals have non-white skin? White skin wasn't anything new; it was simply a reversion to a prior state. Truly novel traits would have taken longer to appear.

"in every case where the home owner was unarmed the home owners were abused or killed." What's the percentage for cases where they were armed?

Apparently aperture synthesis (use of multiple telescopes) is used to get good resolution from radio telescopes. Apparently radio telescopes do get electromagnetic interference, which is why they're often placed in valleys. I would imagine we have at least one radio telecope in space, but I wouldn't imagine it has the advantage of aperture synthesis. If I were the aliens, I would make the signal by reflecting sunlight with a satellite mirror. It would reflect a wide array of wavelengths and avoid the energy costs of generating EM waves.

Although denial may work for emotional coping, denying a problem can undermine any productive response to that problem. However, people can't always give a productive response to stressors. Unless your the patient's doctor, efforts to prevent an impending death may be futile. Further, intense anxiety can be crippling, although we like to hope with delusional optimism that we'll always be able to respond productively to stressors. Well, prepare to be disappointed. Can dirt feel disappointed?

What unit of distance is used for R? I had no idea we were talking about antennae. I just took a crash course on them. http://www.antenna-theory.com/basics/radPattern.html http://www.antenna-theory.com/basics/directivity.php http://www.antenna-theory.com/basics/gain.php How do you know that a signal of 4.3x10-15W wouldn't be detected? Isn't this a question of antenna precision, and a question of standard deviation in the other coinciding sources of radiation or any noise produced by the instrument itself? Anyway, my coutnerargument might not hold water. I found a equation relating angular resolution to wavelength in the context of microscpy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution#Explanation The drop in signal strength is proportional to the drop in wavelength squared. It looks like minimum resolvable distance is proportional to wavelength. Perhaps this could rephrased as an "area of interference", using minimum resolvable distance as the radius, but the usefulness of this conversion would depend on what the signal needs to be resolved from: the star that this inhabited planet orbits, some background radiation, what?

I'll have to look up the concepts. Have you considered the raltionship between wavelength and resolution? A finely resolved signal will have less interference. Flourescent microscopes, which use UV to flouresce visible light from the dyes, somehow get finer resolution through the use of UV. Electron wavelengths as small as 0.01nm make electron microscopes the finest. They could reflect a signal rather than emit it, making wavelength-related energy costs a non-issue.

I didn't know what those constants stood for.