Tag: Carver
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Talk to them. Let them talk to you.
Random thought, partly repetitive, returning to the subject of communicating with other planets. Before 1920 most professional scientists (including Darwin) were deists. They believed in purpose, even if Galileo had weakened the hold of purpose on physics. Most scientists were fascinated by the possibility of life elsewhere, and several (including Marconi and Tesla) tried to…
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Not free
My version of Santayana: Those who don’t know that history repeats are doomed to be ruined by the repeaters. Those who think academic cancelling is new and abnormal will waste their time fighting a permanent and natural tendency. Frank Edwards runs down the history of academic censorship on the subject of ET life. In 1880…
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Explicit tag
I’ve been using the Entertainment tag on the UFO and Fortean items lately. I should make the connection more explicit. The Forteans were trying to pull science back into the realm of entertainment and mystification and fascination. Their constant theme, starting with Charles Fort himself, was that Big Science is no longer observing Nature with…
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More Tur(k)ing test
A few weeks ago Eric Holloway set up a fiendishly clever machine vs human test, essentially proving that one of the major AI engines is partly or mostly human. Now he’s done it again. Here’s the sequence leading up to the crucial moment. 153 EMH: what is a belief? 154 GPT-3: A belief is a…
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Reprint from 2018
Especially germane on the subject of protests, media insanity, etc. = = = = = START REPRINT: Want to break the “cycle of violence”? Break the media. The press has been running this routine for at least a hundred years. It’s not mysterious or “unintended”. It’s an intrinsic part of their business model. Blood sells…
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Actions, not words
Listened again to Lindsay MacHarrie’s dramatization of the Cardiff Giant story. In 1869 George Hull, a skeptic with plenty of money, was arguing with a pastor about the Giants mentioned in the Bible. Hull hired a sculptor to make a huge gypsum man, carefully aged it, and buried it on his brother-in-law’s farm. Hull got…
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Only the media is worse.
A pair of CBS news broadcasts from June 1940 show that Repooflicans were just as cowardly then as now. The difference is in the media, which was REQUIRED BY LAW TO BE FAIR in 1940. Both parties were having their conventions, which were more genuine then. Real decisions were made IN the convention BY the…
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