Re: Q!Re: Shall We All Leave At Once?

On 24 May, 15:51, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<pbow...@xxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:a3f64c49-3861-43bc-9dad-25835320266c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 23 May, 22:10, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Phil Bowles" <philipbowles2...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
Speculative argument (NOT fact): That name must be Zeus-Pater, and
the
individual referred to must be the deity generally regarded as
fictitious.

The name on the inscription is Sa-a-si-te-pi which is identical to
Ausstaeb
otherwise known as Istaveon from the Bavarian Chroniclas and other
records.

Istaveon = Zeus Deon. From linguistics when know that in Minoan
times
the
name Zeus was pronounced Sdeus. Sa-a-si-te-pi was Zeus. Live with
it.
Zeus
is also referred to in Egyptian inscriptions from the same time as
Sheshi.
Sheshi is identical to Saasi.

Zeus is not and has never been regarded as being fictitious. There is
NOT
ONE historical source which justifies any thought or idea to the
contrary.
EVERY ancient historian accepted Zeus as being a deified king of Crete
and
the ancestor of the Greeks that worshiped him.

<<<This has been demolished elsewhere, several times>>>

NO IT HAS NOT!

Stop making a fool of yourself an get an education. EVERY ancient
historian
accepted Zeus as being a deified king of Crete

<<<For counterexamples I refer anyone interested to said thread. It's too
boring to go through that again just to knock down Aggy once more.>>>

You have provided NO counterexamples because there are NONE!

Stop trying to deceive people.

<<<*sigh* Since you're getting boring again I was going to drop this
thread, but since you insist on resorting to libel rather than your
usual half-witted insults I'm obliged to respond. In this particular
case the past thread is a matter of Usenet record for anyone to check
its veracity, and I made reference to that thread. No deception at
all.>>>

So you claim. People can check the thread themselves.

Uh, that was what I just said...

<<<Not at all like citing Eusebius out of the context of his biased
agenda, of course.>>>

You've never read Eusebius and don't know anything about his agenda let
alone his bias.

<<<I see, so he states in his introduction "Disclaimer: I am writing this
with a view to pushing Christianity, so please take what I say with a
pinch of salt"?>>>

HE SAYS NO SUCH THING!

<<<Um, that was rather the point. Sarcasm is lost on you, isn't it? The
point being, you have to look beyond Eusebius to see him in the>>>

So basically you are claiming that you need to make it all up.

Well, that answers the question of whether you can grasp sarcasm, for
sure.

Though having said that there are passages in his works where Eusebius
does indeed make it plain that he's biased:

"Wherefore we have decided to relate nothing concerning them except
the things in which we can vindicate the Divine judgment. [...] We
shall introduce into this history in general only those events which
may be useful first to ourselves and afterwards to posterity." -
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History book 8 chapter 2

<<<correct context, you can't assume that everything he's telling you is
a fair, accurate or unbiased account, precisely because he doesn't
disclose his vested interests upfront.>>>

If you had actually read Eusebius you would know that he pre-empted those
accusations from ignorants such as yourself by not expressing a personal
opinion and instead using the words of Greek or Jewish writers from what
they wrote on their own religions themselves.

What, you mean like the fictional correspondence between Agbar V and
Jesus that he "quotes" from?

But it is in any case irrelevant whether the words came from Greeks
and Jews writing about their own religions; Eusebius himself admits to
being selective and using only those bits that support his case -
which, were he writing on Usenet, you would no doubt castigate him for
as taking things out of context (and rightly so). While it's probably
unfair to call him "the first genuinely dishonest ancient historian",
the former Bishop of Durham gave a pretty fair assessment when he said
"A far more serious drawback to his value as a historian is the loose
and uncritical spirit in which he sometimes deals with his materials.
This shews itself in diverse ways. He is not always to be trusted in
his discrimination of genuine and spurious documents."

<<<Um, okay, Aggy. I think being raising hands in the air and backing
away slowly is the standard response when you start foaming at the
mouth like this.>>>

I might have been wrong.

<<<That would not be unusual. The admission is startling, however.>>>

And there you go again back to your deceitful and dissembling ways.

And there you go again demonstrating that you have no concept of
humour. And in any case you should be grateful - I only cited the part
of your comment where you actually said something that was correct, if
not in the way you meant to.

Thus you've

got to keep altering your model all the time. It's making one guess and
then
guessing again. E=mc2 is not a population statistic. It's a law of
physics
determining mass-energy equivalence which derives from a mathematical
framework which describes nature based on just two simple postulates and
does not need to be fiddled around with and changed every something in
the
system changes.

<<<And yet, the value of E is contingent on the value of m - the energy
varies depending on the quantity of matter. So you stick different
figures in every time you want to solve a new problem; in fact if the
thing always gave the same result there's no point having an equation
anyway, as it tells you nothing. There's nothing different about the
equations used in biology.>>>

You haven't understood what E=mc2 means have you. It's not just about
getting a value of E from m, it tells you something about the real world
that you did not know before, that energy is equivalent to mass and is
something Newton never dreamt of.

Actually he did but he never managed to formulate it.

Again, I have a feeling I said that in my follow-up post.

<<<Um, Aggy. What was that I explained about equations having to be
invented by someone? Do you think Einstein stuck random letters
together and just happened to find that the one representing energy
was equal to the one representing mass times the square of the speed
of light? You have to know there's an energy-mass relationship to come>>>

They were no random letters. The relationship emerged from the theory none
the less without the need of artificial modifications or it to be inserted
as had been done in fiddles of Einstein's predecessors.

But this is the thing, Aggy: The equation was created as a result of
the theory's predictions - the equation just formalised the
relationship the theory described, it did not itself contain any novel
information when it was first formulated.

<<<up with the equation in the first place - these days it might be
taught as an aid to help students understand that relationship, but
the equation tells you nothing about a relationship that you don't
necessarily know when you first formulate that equation. Now, of
course there was a lot of prior mathematical work that needed to be
done before Einstein reached the conclusion that allowed him to create
that equation, but the equation itself tells its inventor nothing.>>>

Rubbish. It tells its inventor that energy is equivalent to mass and also
predicts higher order modifications to Newton's theory for use at extremely
high velocities.

No, the theory tells the inventor that. Then he goes away and writes
an equation which describes it. You can't create an equation without
an existing theoretical framework to tell you where to put each term.

<<<It's just like the Shannon index: it tells you diversity is a function
of both species richness and relative abundance of each species in the
community. But we already know that because that's how we define
diversity in the first place.>>>

But we didn't already know that Newton needed to be modified at extremely
high velocities because nobody could reach those velocities even going to
the moon.

Not in Newton's time, no. But when Einstein dreamt up the equation
he'd *already discovered* the mass-energy relationship. Come on, the
paper he described the equation in was called "Does the inertia of a
body depend upon its energy content?" (remembering that inertia is a
function of mass); nor was he the first to propose a mass-energy
relationship. Plainly he recognised there was a relationship before he
came up with the equation.

The general behaviour of a female cat when it is in season it to point
its
arse at the dominant male and raise it's tale to indicate to it that it
is
receptive. That is what is observed just before cats mate.

<<<And so it's subjective speculation to imagine that these two things
are connected?>>>

I am only describing what is observed.

<<<You ascribed a motive to the cat - not "it raised its tail as female
cats do when in heat", but specifically "it indicated that it was
consenting to having sex with me". Speculation or not? Are you
planning to answer the question or to continue equivocating?>>>

Nope. I didn't give the cat a motive. I didn't say the cat fancied me or
thought lets have sex today.

Behavioural researchers don't use subjective measures like that
either. Read the cover story in the most recent issue of New
Scientist, for example, to illustrate the sorts of claims
behaviourists make. For example:

"..,aspects of the use of alarm calls do suggest overlaps with the
skills we bring to language. For a start, even though there is a
genetic component to alarm calls, animals may still have some control
over them. Monkeys have been seen suppressing their calls in
situations where a noise might endanger them, for example."

"On one occasion, Savage-Rumbaugh told [the bonobo Kanzi] to put water
on a carrot, and he promptly threw the carrot outdoors. Thinking he
had misunderstood, she repeated the request. In response, Kanzi
pointed insistently outside. It was raining."

Or for an example of a behavioural experiment to test a hypothesis
about behaviour:

"Zuberbuhler and Slocombe showed not only that chimps could make
distinctions in the way that they vocalised about food, but that other
chimps understood what they meant. When played recordings of grunts
that were produced for a specific food, the chimps looked in the place
where that food was usually found. They also searched longer if the
cry had signalled a prized type of food."

It raised its tail as female cats do when in
heat. That was perfectly clear and it is perfectly clear what that meant.

See? You're ascribing a meaning to the action. Pure speculation...

<<<Goodness, no wonder you flunked science (as in, not going into it
after your degree - for some reason I'm assuming you successfully
completed it, though this seems increasingly unlikely). You must be a
lazy bugger as well as stupid to think you can just stick numbers into
a formula and it does all the work for you.>>>

You must be a total and utter ignorant to think that formulas appear all
by
themselves out of nothing so that you can just plug numbers into them.

<<<The formulas very often do exist. There's this marvellous breed called
statisticians who come up with them.>>>

More or less the response I was expecting.

<<<Well, you're the one insisting that theories consist of a framework of
equations - given that the theories are out there being tested, it
follows that the researcher's job is primarily to collect the numbers,
plug them into the 'theory' and read out the results.>>>

They don't plug them into the theory. The theory makes predictions of
behaviour or energy or whatever and the behaviour, energy level or whatever
is looked for by the experimenters.

Aggy, if a theory is an equation or series of equations, as you
insist, it can't make any predictions at all if *someone* hasn't
inputted numbers into it to begin with, and those numbers have to come
from somewhere.

<<<And in fairness, for the most part this is the way science is done.>>>

<<<It also led to nuclear power stations and atomic bombs. Are these part
of cosmology too?>>>

The principles behind how they work are the same as those which power
stars.

<<<Yes. So?>>>

They are principles used by in cosmology to model stellar behaviour and the
elements produced in supernovae which go on to from other stars and planets.

Yes. So? I'm still waiting to see whether you're going to make the
ludicrous claim that nuclear power stations are part of cosmology, or
admit that atomic theory is not, after all, a cosmological theory and
the fact that it deals in the same fundamental particles is
irrelevant.

<<<Do you actually understand why the process works this way? Do you
grasp the basic logic of why science proceeds the way it does? If so,
you should have no difficulty understanding why maths aren't necessary
to answer all scientific questions. Do you believe in evolution? No>>>

Evolution. I know fully qualified medical doctors who do not believe in
evolution.

<<<So what? There are a lot of stupid ignorants out there... There was an
alarming report just released about how many science teachers in the
US don't believe in it. That has no bearing on its accuracy.>>>

You claimed more people believe in evolution than in general relativity.

No I didn't. I claimed it was regarded as being as or more successful
as a scientific theory. I was making the apparently false assumption
that, given your training in science, you would understand what it
means for a theory to be regarded as successful (though in retrospect,
goodness knows why since you struggle with the concept of what a
theory even is). It does not mean "Lots of members of the general
public believe in it".

It
is clear they do not. I've never head of science teachers or doctors or
politicians denouncing general relativity like they do to evolutions.

You've never heard of Intelligent Falling?

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512

<<<Long before? That the expansion of the universe is accelerating wasn't
known until 1997 - since you talk about O-levels rather than GCSEs>>>

The theories predicted that possibility long before 1997. A decade earlier
nobody was really sure what the precise value of the Hubble constant was
and
several scenarios existed to deal with the range of values which it could
be
between. It wasn't pinned down to an adequate accuracy to favour one
scenario or an other until 1997.

<<<You're talking about the debate over whether the universe was
contracting, expanding or in a steady state. No one expected it to be
expanding at an accelerating rate (if they had they'd have invented>>>

Except Einstein, though he wasn't actually expecting it but had a term to
account for it in his theory and then got rid of it and now it's been put
back.

Again, Einstein didn't expect accelerating expansion (he didn't
believe the universe was expanding at all). He provided the term
people now use to describe dark energy, but he had it as a term that
predicted expansion in a steady state universe. These days it's
applied to an expanding universe; and somewhat logically the
consequence is that it speeds the expansion.

<<<dark energy sooner as a theoretical possibility); the assumption was

It was already accounted for in Einstein's original formulation of general
relativity,

Not really. Physicists are using Einstein's term - that doesn't imply
it ever represented dark energy in the original model. Simply put,
Einstein had a term that accelerated the universe from standing still
to expanding; clearly, in an expanding universe, a term that increases
acceleration is going to be able to model, well, increased
acceleration. That doesn't mean the term implies or represents the
same thing in both models; it's a simplification for the popular media
that Einstein predicted dark energy by accident. He didn't, he just
had a term that increased expansion. If I have the equation 2 apples
+1 apple = 3 apples. and the equation 0 frogs + 1 frog = 1 frog, then
the 'acceleration' term - +1 - represents two entirely different
things in the two different 'models', even though it's the same
figure.

<<<Or maybe they do know because they're not ignorant, and YOU don't
know
they do know because you are ignorant.>>>

No. I have already explained to you what "homosexual" really means.

<<<I've already explained to you what "bull***" really means, but being
the ignorant stupid that you are you insist on using it incorrectly.>>>

IDIOT!

<<<So explain again how this is a different situation? Oh, you didn't
before - okay, explain for the first time how this is a different
situation?>>>

What you wrote is like the *** from a male cow. What is it called when you
compare something to something else? A slimily? A "homosexual" is someone
who always has the same sexual preference.

*golf clap* Well done, Aggy, that's not a bad effort. Now do the same
for "codswallop" and "poppy***".

And while you're at it, why isn't ecology the study of houses? That
is, after all, what the word "means".

Phil
.