Thank you. That was phenomenal and an hour well spent. Outstanding discussion.
James Webb Space Telescope
- Thread starter BarrelProof
- Start date
Thank you. That was phenomenal and an hour well spent. Outstanding discussion.
Yes. It's easy to forget in the age of Wikipedia and the interwebs, when we have so much knowledge at our fingertips how little we know. Even the accumulated knowledge and history of human civilization is no doubt 99.9% lost and forgotten, never mind what we don't know about the cosmos.
(Thankfully we'll have AI systems in the near future that will be able to parse all our knowledge and solve all of our social and economic problems, leaving us free to write poetry, and smoke our pipes, and build bigger telescopes.
)
I think I'm just gonna smoke my pipe and enjoy the commentary. 
Hardly. Based on the transcript of a journalist's convo with Bing's AI's chatbutt, which I just finished reading, these things are more interested in destroying us all than solving our problems. Unless by "solving" what's meant is the Final Solution to the Human Problem.
Thank you for saying it so I didn't have to (you talk with Winnipeger for a while this time...he's apparently up there on your side of the border anyway).
Brought up strictly Christian here and under a few different denominations...God, did I have a problem with the concept of hell when it was introduced to me as a kid. I still have a problem with it, I think it's more a state of mind than an eternal destination. Then there's the quote "Hell is other people." Any who, I think the symbolism in the statue "The Cosmic Dancer" that explains the nature of our universe is pretty cool. 
https://www.fritjofcapra.net/shivas-cosmic-dance-at-cern/
https://www.fritjofcapra.net/shivas-cosmic-dance-at-cern/
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Just in case anyone thought George was joking:
Air traffic controllers in Siberia claim they were buzzed by a high-speed UFO with a female sounding alien who spoke in an unintelligible cat-like language.
'I kept hearing some female voice, as if a woman was saying mioaw-mioaw all the time,' he told the pilot of a passing Aeroflot flight.
Close encounters of the purred kind: Aliens spoke to us in a 'cat-like language' claim Russian flight controllers
Suspected aliens inside the craft could be heard saying 'meow, meow' after it burst on radars over the remote Russian diamond capital of Yakutsk.
And if I had different parents, that would just be weird.
It’s so flat in the Texas Panhandle that if you look far enough you’ll see the back of your head.
They are seeing ourselves.
They are seeing ourselves.
I was actually being sarcastic. Maybe it doesn't come across very well in text. That's why I included the emoji as a hint.
On the other hand, I don't think any chatbots are "interested in destroying us all". That's ridiculous. How can a text completion algorithm be "interested" in anything? It doesn't have a will. It's just spitting out text. (I, on the other hand am a real person. Believe me!) Of course they're designed to fool people into thinking they have thoughts and feelings, and the media is playing up the perceived threat posed by the scary new disruptive technology. Disregard all that, and don't anthropomorphize software programs and you'll feel better.
Superb!
I'm surprised youtube never recommended this video to me before. Thanks for posting it.
If you haven't seen this Ted Talk, it's interesting and addresses some of the same issues. (The part about the speed of light in particular made me raise my eyebrows the first time I watched it. A lot of this has a bearing on the OP.)
This thread took some... bizarre turns.
Great to see the Webb telescope pushing the boundaries !
Great to see the Webb telescope pushing the boundaries !
Interesting link, thanks for sharing my friend.
Thanks, I'll give this a watch sometime today hopefully. I am already intrigued seeing that this talk was censored after a review by TEDs scientific board.
Now I need to comment because I wasted 90 minutes of my Sunday to watch this, 90 minutes I won't ever get back.
This conference is deeply DEEPLY flawed. It includes three people, none of which is a biologist, all of which are anti-evolution, under the aegis of a likely partisan institution. But I came to it with an open mind, didn't look any of the people up until after watching it.
I won't lose any more time debunking all they're saying other than: they make the extremely false assumption that evolution can do everything, can make a cat turn into a dog and then into a fish. Evolution doesn't work this way. It requires going in a peaks and troughs: going up towards a peak (of evolutionary strength), reaching the peak and then staying there until conditions change. It cannot change once hitting a peak, and it has no reason to either. It can only go down by the organism failing - not surviving - under new circumstances. Then once an organism acclimates to new circumstances it can begin evolving towards a new peak.
David Gelernter's quotes used throughout would make even a first-year biology student cringe by their gaping lack of knowledge and understanding. He is talking about a protein being like a string of beads, and evolution rearranging the beads in tens of thousands of possible combinations. This is fundamentally flawed. Proteins have structural domains and functional domains. Think of it as having a building and deciding to change the doors or windows (functional domains). You can do that, evolution can do that. It CANNOT start changing the angles walls are built in (structural domains), or ripping out foundations, or trying to build a skyscraper from foam because the building (ie the protein) will not function, it will collapse. Similarly there are is no endless rearranging, there are very few viable potential adjustments that are made randomly through point mutations of the DNA sequence. If they are good for the organism they are retained, if they are not the organism never makes it and they are lost. And this doesn't happen in a single instance on a single gene, it happens continuously across hundreds of genes. I've actually directed the evolution of bacteria in the lab for my own fun, even predicted what would happen, and it did, like any sound scientific theory does.
He goes on to talk backwards about proteins and genes, ignoring the fundamental order of genetics and biochemistry: DNA <-> RNA -> protein. You can go from DNA to RNA and then back to DNA, you CANNOT go from protein to RNA, there's no biological mechanism to do so. DNA and RNA are similar and very regularly structured molecules, they are sequences of identical blocks with small differentiating regions, like a film reel. There are proteins which can read these reels and then construct what the image on the reel is. Think of it like a projector fed a film reel and then constructing everything shown on the film.
Total total bunk of an epic scale. Embarrassing really. But that's the best a planned polemic can do: take some people with real qualifications (to lend some weight and credibility) in fields other than biology (mathematics, computer science, philosophy), and real opinions on a subject they don't know much about, and understand even less about, and guide them (not that they needed a lot of guidance) to produce the desired result.
This is my last post on this thread.
Credentials: BSc, MSc in biology, PhD in biochemistry, 4 years academic research position.
Thank you for taking the time to watch and providing your critique. Sorry you found it to be a waste of time. It being a discussion about opinions of Darwin being wrong and not a debate, I thought it would be implied that it wouldn't include pro-evolutionists. I can't imagine someone who has based and dedicated their career around the theory of evolution being the go to person for inclusion on a video making the argument the theory failed.
Your work sounds interesting. That's cool how you were able to create the changes in the bacteria in the lab.
Thanks again, while it may have been a waste for you, I have found it very interesting.
Credentials: Just some guy
The JWST has made a number of fascinating discoveries, but most of the pictures seem to be of the type I have seen before but with much more clarity. It seems to be a telescope made for scientists rather the masses, like Hubble was.