Sign me up. I’d love to have a symposium every night!
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What scientific research would you like performed that isn’t happening?
This is getting abstract. What should be happening that isn’t?
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Things that are real won’t vanish when you stop believing in them.
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Then believing in things which are real is just as unnecessary. Also, I don’t get why people keep on about “belief” in these recurring topics. Belief about anything never makes any difference. There is no direct experience of the outside world to believe in, and no concrete sense of self to believe it with.
As I explained in an earlier post, I can pray to or have a ritual for a deity without needing to believe in it.
I find most arguments both for and against gods equally absurd, mostly because they just obsess over belief. Without belief, the “empirical evidence” atheists carry on about also loses its meaning, because then there are no phantasms to chase after. Meanwhile, critiquing what a person may believe does not in itself tell one anything useful about the world at large.
You’re the one who claims that philosophy is a waste of time, Shaddack! So why even bother with a “What is “real”, anyway?” line of enquiry? If people waste their time on delusions, then teaching them how to think more effectively will be far more successful than challenging them about what to think. The content of delusionary thought is mostly irrelevant, and probably interchangeable with no end of other wack notions. It’s like fighting to yank away a baby’s security blanket, they’re only going to scream and clutch it tighter! No matter how much you hope they’d just grow out of it. But if they learn, they might just outgrow it.
Sure.
In my little corner of “science”, Seismology… earthquakes… we have government funded organisations which are often quite large such as USGS, or small offices of 2 guys begging for every penny, who do alerts and collect up data for use by others both commercial and otherwise.
We have private companies building equipment and software for money, doing reports for engineeering projects. which is a fine incentive to innovate.
And we have private enthusiasts doing their own little bits of research, some worthwhile and often retired geologists, some a bit on the nutcase side.
We have international exchanges of data and conferences where people exchange ideas.
It’s a complex web of resources, motivations and abilities.
It’s not a simp!e grab for money. The people who do this stuff are generally enthusiasts of the subject of their employment. They do it for the love of it, and then to get paid.
And I am sure any Scientific field has a similar complex mix of humanity.
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Suddenly I’m intrigued… I’d like to know, what kind of nutcases?
Like… Flat Earthers? Or people who don’t believe in plate tectonics?
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I am working on a toy you may like - a GPS-synced multichannel sound card. One of its uses are seismic arrays. Should work like a normal soundcard, but with either a separate channel for additional data or with the pulse-per-second and NMEA serial signals encoded to the least significant bit of the sampled analog data (can be audio, can be data from seismometers…). Then you can have the data time-tagged with sample-accurate precision and either streamed away in real time or saved for later correlation with data from other stations. (Could this be used for seismic imaging of underground structures?)
…but the isochronous data transfer is losing data like mad. In a very deterministic fashion. I have to dive into the datasheet again and try to find out why…
Predictors mainly. Guys who beleive that if you play with numbers enough you’ll predict the next big earthquake. Something gamblers can succumb to. And so far, no, you can’t.
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Sounds fun.
We’ve got a guy working on a similar little box. Currently he is finding that SD Cards, as you find in your phone, may be nice cheap storage but they’re not made to be continually written to and they can corrupt.
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Good! If it is a public project I could chime in.
Thought. This may be due to the issues with the filesystem. Try to create the file to be the maximum size, fill it with zeroes (optionally), close it. Then write into it. That way the filesystem won’t be updating the file allocation data, and the only writes you’ll have there will be the ones with your own data. Much fewer writes that’d wear the flash.
Another thought. Use the card as a raw block device, without any filesystem. May also work well.
Yet another thought. Add some sequence/timestamp data to the beginning or end of each block written to the device. Then the data can be restored from a corrupted one by reading all the blocks, picking the ones that belong to the desired file, and only the newest ones. (E.g. use a 32-bit field for the file ID, another one for the timestamp, and another one for the block sequence number. Should be enough to recover the data from randomly written block device.)
Let me guess, they reply with “we just don’t have enough data”? 
Thanks, Satan.
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And it’s going on… within scientific frameworks. Not those alt-media darling “rogue scientists” that exist to promote quackery. An open mind should not encourage the brain to fall out. There’s not a lot of “guerrilla science” that comes up with anything of value for that reason these days.
The parapsychology departments, nestled in the heart of the engineering groups of legitimate universities have found absolutely nothing with all of their research.
If you want to blame anyone, blame Capitalism.
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I believe yes there is, it’s the “solid”, as in “do me a solid” that the base kindness (which has to be a step above basic human respect and dignity to count as a kindness rather than just not being a jerk). Then there’s the usual micro, nano-, giga- for increases or decreases in scale.
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No kidding, I said as much.
Saying that my speculations aren’t “required” sounds rather pompous to me. Do you disagree that Catholic confessions and propaganda were often self-serving and inaccurate? So why should I (or anyone else) be convinced that the well-known assumption that Baphomet is derived from Mohammed be relevant? I think that the older pagan myths and reconstruction of hidden traditions is simply more interesting. Plus, the scholarship has gotten a lot better since the 20th century.
(Why do you assume that I am “trying to” do anything? I am happy that I could give you an opportunity to showcase your erudition. Was the gold star on your thesis of the invoking or banishing variety? XD /s)
If you’re dealing with a thesis committee, it is always banishing.
“Interesting” does not mean “more factually accurate” though. That’s my point.
Of course no one can know for sure but making up more extravagant reasons goes against Occam’s Razor.
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Oh, well, in that case…
Fine - perhaps “often-cited” would have been a more accurate choice.
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