A conversation about Fine Tuning

[jillery]

The fine tuning of the Universe: Was the cosmos made for us?

A 75-minute dialogue between Sabine Hossenfelder, Luke Barnes, and
Justin Brierly, the host of The Big Conversation Show, sponsored by
the Templeton Foundation.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OoYzcxzvvM>

Short version: Barnes opens with the standard fine-tuning argument
that physical constants have unlikely values which allow for the
existence of a universe with humans in it. Hossenfelder opens with
the standard riposte that we don't know if the physical constants
could have had any other value than they do, so the presumption of
fine tuning is scientifically meaningless.

Some might find the topic or the persons too boring to listen to for
75-minutes, but I found it informative and interesting. A point
Hossenfelder raised is her frustration with many scientists' failure
to distinguish between scientific questions and non-scientific
speculations, fine-tuning being an example of the latter.

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

Aguirre wrote "It is possible to construct a cosmology in which all of
the parameters vary by (at least) several orders of magnitude from
their 'observed' values, yet in which stars, planets, and intelligent
life can plausibly arise. This greatly complicates, and reduces the
explanatory power of, anthropic arguments in cosmology." [Aguirre A
(2001) "Cold big-bang cosmology as a counterexample to several
anthropic arguments." Phys Rev D 64:083508.]
I'm not enough a physicist to comment on whether he was right.

--
Athel -- British, living in France for 34 years

[Öö Tiib]

Mathematically Turing machine (IOW: computer) can be made in 2D
universe with 3 natural laws (Example: [John Horton] Conway's Game
of Life).

For me that fact alone makes it relatively likely that our reality is some
kind of simulation. I'm perhaps biased here as I like simulation
models. I waste lot of my time (and computing power of devices in
my disposal) on various simulation models even when no one pays
me for it.

If it is so then whoever put up such a simulation in universe of whatever
kind is supernatural intelligent designer by definition. However as no
one attempts to research that or any other hypothesis of intelligent
design ... the ID science does not anyway exist.

[jillery]

Aguirre's argument is a good counter to the argument Barnes makes in
the video, as Barnes considers altering only a single physical
constant at a time.

However, Hossenfelder's objection also applies to Aguirre's argument.
Her point is one raised by Carlip the last time he discussed
fine-tuning on T.O. It is possible the initial conditions of the
universe could have varied in such a way that would have altered the
physical constants from what they are in this universe. That
possibility is the basis for Multiverse. But nobody knows "why" the
physical constants are what they are or how they were set or how much
they could vary. And so it's meaningless to make sweeping conclusions
based on presumption of their values being highly improbable.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 8:51:06 AM UTC-4, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> On 2021-06-22 11:49:39 +0000, jillery said:
>
> > The fine tuning of the Universe: Was the cosmos made for us?

This is a stupid use of the word "us". See below for hints as to what to put in its place.

> > A 75-minute dialogue between Sabine Hossenfelder, Luke Barnes, and
> > Justin Brierly, the host of The Big Conversation Show, sponsored by
> > the Templeton Foundation.
> >
> > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OoYzcxzvvM>
> >
> > Short version: Barnes opens with the standard fine-tuning argument
> > that physical constants have unlikely values which allow for the
> > existence of a universe with humans in it. Hossenfelder opens with
> > the standard riposte that we don't know if the physical constants
> > could have had any other value than they do, so the presumption of
> > fine tuning is scientifically meaningless.

This standard riposte is a cop-out of the worst sort. It creates the
illusion that there just might be some magical formula that
makes our observable universe as inevitable, in all its features,
as the most doctrinaire Thomist thinks the existence of God is inevitable.

Anselm even tried to find such a formula before Thomas Aquinas,
and it has come down to us with the name "Ontological Argument."
But I think it is safe to say that no professor of philosophy at an accredited university
actually believes that the argument is valid.

Much less, then, should anyone take seriously Hossenfelder's claim,
for which no argument at all is tendered.


> > Some might find the topic or the persons too boring to listen to for r

> > 75-minutes, but I found it informative and interesting. A point
> > Hossenfelder raised is her frustration with many scientists' failure
> > to distinguish between scientific questions and non-scientific
> > speculations, fine-tuning being an example of the latter.

I suspect the "frustration" is insincere, or at best, a complaint that
"fine tuning" biases the argument towards the existence of fine tuner.

That is why I much prefer "amazingly low tolerance for physical constants
that are compatible with our very existence."

That "very existence" includes not only being compatible with life,
but also with LONG evolution of that life to an intelligent species like our own.

> Aguirre wrote "It is possible to construct a cosmology in which all of
> the parameters vary by (at least) several orders of magnitude from
> their 'observed' values, yet in which stars, planets, and intelligent
> life can plausibly arise.

"orders of magnitude" is false where at least one of Martin Rees's "six numbers" are concerned:

Another number, Ԑ, whose value is 0.007, defines how firmly atomic nuclei
bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls
the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen
into all the atoms of the periodic table. Carbon and oxygen are common,
whereas gold and uranium are rare, because of what happens in the stars. If
Ԑ were 0.006 or 0.008, we could not exist. . [Martin Rees: Just Six Numbers (The
Deep Forces that Shape the Universe), Basic Books 2000, p2]
https://alta3b.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/six-numbers.pdf

The above url only gives a small fraction of the whole book, but that fraction
devotes a big fraction of its space to the above reasoning about Ԑ.

>This greatly complicates, and reduces the
> explanatory power of, anthropic arguments in cosmology." [Aguirre A
> (2001) "Cold big-bang cosmology as a counterexample to several
> anthropic arguments." Phys Rev D 64:083508.]

The word "several" seems to indicate that Ԑ was left out of the reckoning.

> I'm not enough a physicist to comment on whether he was right.

It does not take a huge familiarity with physics to follow Martin Rees's
excellent book. Another book, only slightly more demanding,
which goes deeper into fine-tuning and many other aspects of our existence is by Paul Davies:

The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?
https://www.amazon.com/Goldilocks-Enigma-Universe-Just-Right-ebook/dp/B0047O2BBQ


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[*Hemidactylus*]

In the category of “Dropped Names”

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 4:41:06 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:

> In the category of “Dropped Names”

You are behaving like an obnoxious twit [so what else is new?].

In the first place, "Chez Watt" is designed for statements that look
silly or incomprehensible on the face of it. Not only does it completely fail to fit that model,
but it was done in direct rebuttal to one of the standard atheistic attempts to
dismiss perhaps THE most powerful argument for the existence of a designer
of our universe and/or a multiverse with a staggeringly large number of universes in it.

And you snipped everything that made that clear, even the atheistic argument
and probably insincere "frustration" by the one who uttered it.

And don't even get me started on the blatant double standards you have
for what constitutes "name-dropping."

It just now occurred to me that jillery might have been spin-doctoring what Hossenfelder claimed
in furtherance of her militantly atheistic world-view. I haven't had the time to review that 75 minute
long clip, have you?

If you do view it, and let me know how [un]distorted jillery was with her synopsis,
I will not hold this post of yours against you. But I'm not counting on you doing anything like that.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Turing machines are a mathematical concept. They are completely powerless at
producing physical objects, including your body, and also your subjective awareness.

> For me that fact alone makes it relatively likely that our reality is some
> kind of simulation.

What do you mean by "our reality"? the only reality you have is your own reality as
seen by only yourself. Do you suspect that your whole life so far has been
a dream from which you could wake up at any moment? If you take seriously
the idea that you live in a simulation, you should also realize that whatever is doing the simulating
could wake you up from your life in a simulated Estonia on a simulated planet on a simulated 8-planet solar system,
into a completely different reality than what you have been experiencing.

> I'm perhaps biased here as I like simulation
> models. I waste lot of my time (and computing power of devices in
> my disposal) on various simulation models even when no one pays
> me for it.

Simulation models for the whole of reality? What are you talking about??

>
> If it is so then whoever put up such a simulation in universe of whatever
> kind is supernatural intelligent designer by definition. However as no
> one attempts to research that

...because the idea has been around since Descartes's "Meditations,"
where he analyzed the possibility that reality was a simulation by a "deceiving demon".
In his second meditation he put his finger on the one thing the demon could
not deceive him about: his own existence as a conscious entity with subjective experience.

He forgot about one other thing: the existence of time, as experienced by himself, always
tending in the one of two possible directions that makes sense, as opposed to tending towards
a simulation of past events flowing in a direction that makes no sense whatsoever.

On second thought, he may have omitted it through the realization that the deceiving demon could,
at any moment, "wake him up" into a reality where time does flow backwards -- or
into an even more absurd nightmare world. But it would still be his own conscious self experiencing it.

> or any other hypothesis of intelligent
> design ... the ID science does not anyway exist.

ID science exists, but it is not to be found in philosophical musings that redefine Descartes's demon
as something allegedly based on the technology of modern computers -- but not in any scientific way.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Glenn]

Oh I think fine tuning is a reality in the here and now. Hossy should be frustrated with herself.

[Öö Tiib]

These are devices that can process data. The data can be about anything,
including physical objects.

> > For me that fact alone makes it relatively likely that our reality is some
> > kind of simulation.
>
> What do you mean by "our reality"? the only reality you have is your own reality as
> seen by only yourself. Do you suspect that your whole life so far has been
> a dream from which you could wake up at any moment? If you take seriously
> the idea that you live in a simulation, you should also realize that whatever is doing the simulating
> could wake you up from your life in a simulated Estonia on a simulated planet on a simulated 8-planet solar system,
> into a completely different reality than what you have been experiencing.

I mean that whole of our reality, including me and my abilities and my
perceptions and my image of myself and so on can be just a part of simulation.
Then there are nowhere to wake up as I'm simulated.

> > I'm perhaps biased here as I like simulation
> > models. I waste lot of my time (and computing power of devices in
> > my disposal) on various simulation models even when no one pays
> > me for it.
>
> Simulation models for the whole of reality? What are you talking about??

I do not have such computers so can only simulate simplified models.

> > If it is so then whoever put up such a simulation in universe of whatever
> > kind is supernatural intelligent designer by definition. However as no
> > one attempts to research that
>
> ...because the idea has been around since Descartes's "Meditations,"
> where he analyzed the possibility that reality was a simulation by a "deceiving demon".
> In his second meditation he put his finger on the one thing the demon could
> not deceive him about: his own existence as a conscious entity with subjective experience.

This is philosophy that the consciousness itself can't be simulated. That
being in bad mood or in elevated mood or in shame or in pain or afraid or
feeling compassion or having phobia of some kind ... or just name it is
somehow magical.

> He forgot about one other thing: the existence of time, as experienced by himself, always
> tending in the one of two possible directions that makes sense, as opposed to tending towards
> a simulation of past events flowing in a direction that makes no sense whatsoever.

Time does not tick at same pace everywhere so it can be even claimed to be
indication of distributed computing and latency of communication between
computational parts.

> On second thought, he may have omitted it through the realization that the deceiving demon could,
> at any moment, "wake him up" into a reality where time does flow backwards -- or
> into an even more absurd nightmare world. But it would still be his own conscious self experiencing it.

Yes that is also belief that we are somehow "real" and not part of simulation.
Thinking about myself in past, I was different person in many respects.
Also once not long ago there was time when I did not exist. Even my father
and mother had not met yet.

> > or any other hypothesis of intelligent
> > design ... the ID science does not anyway exist.
>
> ID science exists, but it is not to be found in philosophical musings that redefine Descartes's demon
> as something allegedly based on the technology of modern computers -- but not in any scientific way.

It does not exist in any forms. No hypotheses postulated, research done, nor papers written.
Rene Descartes did live 17th century. We can have conspiracy theory that there just no one
accepts ID papers. In this internet of ours? Utter nonsense. So such papers do not exist.

[jillery]

By admitting you didn't watch the video, you prove you have no idea
what you're talking about.

>If you do view it, and let me know how [un]distorted jillery was with her synopsis,
>I will not hold this post of yours against you. But I'm not counting on you doing anything like that.
>
>
>Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2021 12:44:30 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 8:51:06 AM UTC-4, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>> On 2021-06-22 11:49:39 +0000, jillery said:
>>
>> > The fine tuning of the Universe: Was the cosmos made for us?
>
>This is a stupid use of the word "us". See below for hints as to what to put in its place.

Take it up with the authors of the title, who may be the sponsor of
the video, Templeton Foundation.

>> > A 75-minute dialogue between Sabine Hossenfelder, Luke Barnes, and
>> > Justin Brierly, the host of The Big Conversation Show, sponsored by
>> > the Templeton Foundation.
>> >
>> > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OoYzcxzvvM>
>> >
>> > Short version: Barnes opens with the standard fine-tuning argument
>> > that physical constants have unlikely values which allow for the
>> > existence of a universe with humans in it. Hossenfelder opens with
>> > the standard riposte that we don't know if the physical constants
>> > could have had any other value than they do, so the presumption of
>> > fine tuning is scientifically meaningless.
>
>This standard riposte is a cop-out of the worst sort. It creates the
>illusion that there just might be some magical formula that
>makes our observable universe as inevitable, in all its features,
>as the most doctrinaire Thomist thinks the existence of God is inevitable.

Your objection above is to Multiverse, which has nothing to do with
Hossenfelder's point. To the contrary, that point also applies
against Multiverse. You're just objecting here for the sake of it
without having any idea what you're talking about.

>Anselm even tried to find such a formula before Thomas Aquinas,
>and it has come down to us with the name "Ontological Argument."
>But I think it is safe to say that no professor of philosophy at an accredited university
>actually believes that the argument is valid.
>
>Much less, then, should anyone take seriously Hossenfelder's claim,
>for which no argument at all is tendered.

You admitted elsethread you didn't review video, which proves you have
no idea what you're talking about. But then, when did you ever let
that stop you.

>> > Some might find the topic or the persons too boring to listen to for r
>> > 75-minutes, but I found it informative and interesting. A point
>> > Hossenfelder raised is her frustration with many scientists' failure
>> > to distinguish between scientific questions and non-scientific
>> > speculations, fine-tuning being an example of the latter.
>
>I suspect the "frustration" is insincere, or at best, a complaint that
>"fine tuning" biases the argument towards the existence of fine tuner.

You know Hossenfelder's intent better than Hossenfelder does, because
you're such a great mindeader... in your delusional imagination.

>That is why I much prefer "amazingly low tolerance for physical constants
>that are compatible with our very existence."

You're entitled to your opinion, no matter how "untendered".

>That "very existence" includes not only being compatible with life,
>but also with LONG evolution of that life to an intelligent species like our own.
>
>
>> Aguirre wrote "It is possible to construct a cosmology in which all of
>> the parameters vary by (at least) several orders of magnitude from
>> their 'observed' values, yet in which stars, planets, and intelligent
>> life can plausibly arise.
>
>"orders of magnitude" is false where at least one of Martin Rees's "six numbers" are concerned:
>

>Another number, ?, whose value is 0.007, defines how firmly atomic nuclei

>bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls
>the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen
>into all the atoms of the periodic table. Carbon and oxygen are common,
>whereas gold and uranium are rare, because of what happens in the stars. If

>? were 0.006 or 0.008, we could not exist. . [Martin Rees: Just Six Numbers (The

>Deep Forces that Shape the Universe), Basic Books 2000, p2]
>https://alta3b.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/six-numbers.pdf
>
>The above url only gives a small fraction of the whole book, but that fraction

>devotes a big fraction of its space to the above reasoning about ?.


That is Rees' opinion, to which he asserts but does not "tender" any
argument. Rees' expressed opinion is similar to that expressed by
Barnes in the video.

Here's what Wikipedia writes:
***************************
Epsilon (e), a measure of the nuclear efficiency of fusion from
hydrogen to helium, is 0.007: when four nucleons fuse into helium,
0.007 (0.7%) of their mass is converted to energy. The value of e is
in part determined by the strength of the strong nuclear force. If e
were 0.006, only hydrogen could exist, and complex chemistry would be
impossible. According to Rees, if it were above 0.008, no hydrogen
would exist, as all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after
the Big Bang. Other physicists disagree, calculating that substantial
hydrogen remains as long as the strong force coupling constant
increases by less than about 50%.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe>
*****************************

Also, the strong nuclear force is what counteracts the electrostatic
repulsion of the protons. If the strength of that repulsion were
inversely altered to the strong nuclear force, then helium synthesis
could proceed apace. This is Aguirre's counterpoint.

>>This greatly complicates, and reduces the
>> explanatory power of, anthropic arguments in cosmology." [Aguirre A
>> (2001) "Cold big-bang cosmology as a counterexample to several
>> anthropic arguments." Phys Rev D 64:083508.]
>

>The word "several" seems to indicate that ? was left out of the reckoning.


Only in your obsessively presumptuous imagination.

>> I'm not enough a physicist to comment on whether he was right.

And neither is the peter.

>It does not take a huge familiarity with physics to follow Martin Rees's
>excellent book. Another book, only slightly more demanding,
>which goes deeper into fine-tuning and many other aspects of our existence is by Paul Davies:
>
>The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?
>https://www.amazon.com/Goldilocks-Enigma-Universe-Just-Right-ebook/dp/B0047O2BBQ

There are multiple levels to the fine-tuning speculation. Even if it
could be shown that the values of the physical constants are "highly
improbable", which it can't, that still does not show they were
adjusted for any particular purpose. And even if it could be shown
they were adjusted for a purpose, which it can't, that still does not
show that purpose was to make possible intelligent life. It is
equally logical that the purpose was to make possible bacteria, and
intelligent life was an unintended, or even undesirable, side-effect.

>Peter Nyikos
>Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
>University of South Carolina
>http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I describe a real game-changer below: what I found out about Aguirre's article.

On Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 1:31:06 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jun 2021 14:49:38 +0200, Athel Cornish-Bowden
> <acor...@imm.cnrs.fr> wrote:
>
> >On 2021-06-22 11:49:39 +0000, jillery said:
> >
> >> The fine tuning of the Universe: Was the cosmos made for us?
> >>
> >> A 75-minute dialogue between Sabine Hossenfelder, Luke Barnes, and
> >> Justin Brierly, the host of The Big Conversation Show, sponsored by
> >> the Templeton Foundation.
> >>
> >> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OoYzcxzvvM>
> >>
> >> Short version: Barnes opens with the standard fine-tuning argument
> >> that physical constants have unlikely values which allow for the
> >> existence of a universe with humans in it. Hossenfelder opens with
> >> the standard riposte that we don't know if the physical constants
> >> could have had any other value than they do, so the presumption of
> >> fine tuning is scientifically meaningless.

A riposte that is undermined by what you claimed about her this time around.

> >>
> >> Some might find the topic or the persons too boring to listen to for
> >> 75-minutes, but I found it informative and interesting. A point
> >> Hossenfelder raised is her frustration with many scientists' failure
> >> to distinguish between scientific questions and non-scientific
> >> speculations, fine-tuning being an example of the latter.
> >
> >Aguirre wrote "It is possible to construct a cosmology in which all of
> >the parameters vary by (at least) several orders of magnitude from
> >their 'observed' values,

"all the parameters" has only to do with six parameters that Aguirre himself chose.
They do NOT include the dimensionless constant Ԑ that I wrote about
in my reply to Athel Cornish-Brown yesterday, and where the tolerance is between .006 and .008,
which is minuscule compared to "(at least) several orders of magnitude".

> yet in which stars, planets, and intelligent
> >life can plausibly arise.

... as long as Ԑ stays within its tight bounds. Aguirre isn't guilty of lying, but he is arguably guilty of
a misleading half-truth.

A Yahoo search led me to the following pdf for Aguirre's article:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/25314224.pdf

If it does not work for you, the following might: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0106143v1

> > This greatly complicates, and reduces the
> >explanatory power of, anthropic arguments in cosmology."
> > [Aguirre A (2001) "Cold big-bang cosmology as a counterexample to several anthropic arguments." Phys Rev D 64:083508.]

The research was funded by a grant. I wonder whether the granters were conned by the
quoted 2-liner into thinking that they had gotten their money's worth.

Athel wrote:
>I'm not enough a physicist to comment on whether he was right.

None of us is enough of a physicist to know that Aguirre did NOT make a revolutionary
discovery that Ԑ is (at least) several orders of magnitude more tolerant of life than had been suspected the year before.

The only way I could tell is to look at the article itself, and I'm lucky that it is so readily
available on line. How badly off all of us [1] would be if it had been paywalled!!

[1] Of course, I am excluding those people who only care about defeating fine-tuning arguments by hook or crook,
the truth be damned.

> Aguirre's argument is a good counter to the argument Barnes makes in
> the video, as Barnes considers altering only a single physical
> constant at a time.

Aguirre makes noises to that effect near the end of his article, ignoring the Ԑlephant in the room.

And even if one considers 2 or more at a time, there are n-dimensional measures in which all variations
in all parameters still show up as a minuscule fraction of the whole morphospace.

>
> However, Hossenfelder's objection also applies to Aguirre's argument.
> Her point is one raised by Carlip the last time he discussed
> fine-tuning on T.O. It is possible the initial conditions of the
> universe could have varied in such a way that would have altered the
> physical constants from what they are in this universe.

If Hossenfelder and Carlip actually wrote that and went no further, they were actually
supporting fine-tuning arguments, and undermining the "riposte" that you attributed to
Hossenfelder above.

> That possibility is the basis for Multiverse. But nobody knows "why" the
> physical constants are what they are or how they were set or how much
> they could vary.

Hope springs eternal in the breasts of militant atheists like yourself.

> And so it's meaningless to make sweeping conclusions
> based on presumption of their values being highly improbable.

But drawing sweeping hypotheses based on it is eminently in the spirit of science as it is practiced
and as Mark Isaak promotes in his .sig.

I'm sure, though, that this won't stop you from drawing great solace from your propagandistic use of the word "meaningless"
and silently telling yourself that fine tuning arguments cannot undermine atheism.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

The illusion of which I wrote above will forever remain in the realm of metaphysics.
Only those who don't know the limitations of science as it is now understood can think otherwise.

> >It just now occurred to me that jillery might have been spin-doctoring what Hossenfelder claimed
> >in furtherance of her militantly atheistic world-view. I haven't had the time to review that 75 minute
> >long clip, have you?

And now you, jillery, show how your reasoning abilities are negligible when your ox is being gored:

> By admitting you didn't watch the video, you prove you have no idea
> what you're talking about.

I know exactly what I was talking about: your synopsis, which now is at a stage
where you've painted Hossenfelder as talking out of both sides of her mouth.
See the game-changing post which I did to this thread about half an hour ago.

Of course, you didn't quote anything from her, so without looking at the video,
we don't know whether both, or one, or none of the two sides are being accurately portrayed.

> >If you do view it, and let me know how [un]distorted jillery was with her synopsis,
> >I will not hold this post of yours against you. But I'm not counting on you doing anything like that.

After all, when one takes Hemidactylus's behavior since March 2014 into account,
he is far more kindly disposed to you than he is to me.


Peter Nyikos

[*Hemidactylus*]

March 2014. Never forget!

Refresh my memory. What happened then?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

different meaning of the word "since"

> Refresh my memory. What happened then?

Once April began, you kept badgering me to look at a disgusting video. And you never looked back after that.
At one point, you teamed up with jillery to sneer and jeer at a "__________of the Month" award, pretending
to want me to guide you in the next one; but when I posted a riposte from The Jungle Book,
you showed how you have no sense of humor when the joke is on you.

Prior to April, you kept fooling me into thinking you were the second most likable regular in talk.origins.
For you, a well known saying needs to be modified:

Fool me a dozen times, shame on you; fool me a baker's dozen times, shame on me.


Peter Nyikos

[*Hemidactylus*]

Oh yeah Scannersgate. Almost forgot about that.

>
> And you never looked back after that.
> At one point, you teamed up with jillery to sneer and jeer at a
> "__________of the Month" award, pretending
> to want me to guide you in the next one; but when I posted a riposte from The Jungle Book,
> you showed how you have no sense of humor when the joke is on you.
>
> Prior to April, you kept fooling me into thinking you were the second
> most likable regular in talk.origins.
>

2nd?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

He's been gone so long that I'm not absolutely sure I got his name right: John Wilkins.

The sad part is, just about every likable person is gone from talk.origins: Arkalen, Inez, Dana Tweedy...
If I think hard enough, I might think of several more.

I have no illusion about being likable in this godforsaken forum -- I stick out as being the only "goddamn moralizer" here.
Most people here don't seem to give a hoot about dishonesty, hypocrisy, cowardice, unfairness, ...
*per* *se*. They only give a hoot when someone they dislike is displaying it.

And this is true despite the fact that all, even the most amoral ones,
recognize accusations of dishonesty, etc. as great sticks to beat people over the head with.
Some of the amoral ones will use them to beat with reckless abandon,
not giving a hoot about whether the accusation is valid or,
at the opposite extreme, a libel that would be legally actionable if the readership of talk.origins
were in the hundreds of millions instead of the hundreds.

I say all this without expecting anyone, least of all you, to be affected by any of it. It's all just FTR.


Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

On Wed, 23 Jun 2021 08:50:23 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>I describe a real game-changer below: what I found out about Aguirre's article.

Yet another baseless assertion for which you tender no argument at
all.

>On Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 1:31:06 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Tue, 22 Jun 2021 14:49:38 +0200, Athel Cornish-Bowden
>> <acor...@imm.cnrs.fr> wrote:
>>
>> >On 2021-06-22 11:49:39 +0000, jillery said:
>> >
>> >> The fine tuning of the Universe: Was the cosmos made for us?
>> >>
>> >> A 75-minute dialogue between Sabine Hossenfelder, Luke Barnes, and
>> >> Justin Brierly, the host of The Big Conversation Show, sponsored by
>> >> the Templeton Foundation.
>> >>
>> >> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OoYzcxzvvM>
>> >>
>> >> Short version: Barnes opens with the standard fine-tuning argument
>> >> that physical constants have unlikely values which allow for the
>> >> existence of a universe with humans in it. Hossenfelder opens with
>> >> the standard riposte that we don't know if the physical constants
>> >> could have had any other value than they do, so the presumption of
>> >> fine tuning is scientifically meaningless.
>
>A riposte that is undermined by what you claimed about her this time around.

Yet another baseless assertion for which you tender no argument at
all.

>> >> Some might find the topic or the persons too boring to listen to for
>> >> 75-minutes, but I found it informative and interesting. A point
>> >> Hossenfelder raised is her frustration with many scientists' failure
>> >> to distinguish between scientific questions and non-scientific
>> >> speculations, fine-tuning being an example of the latter.
>> >
>> >Aguirre wrote "It is possible to construct a cosmology in which all of
>> >the parameters vary by (at least) several orders of magnitude from
>> >their 'observed' values,
>
>"all the parameters" has only to do with six parameters that Aguirre himself chose.

>They do NOT include the dimensionless constant ? that I wrote about

>in my reply to Athel Cornish-Brown yesterday, and where the tolerance is between .006 and .008,
>which is minuscule compared to "(at least) several orders of magnitude".

Yes it does. As I cited previously, Rees' epsilon is but a special
case of the ratio of the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic
force.

>> yet in which stars, planets, and intelligent
>> >life can plausibly arise.
>

>... as long as ? stays within its tight bounds. Aguirre isn't guilty of lying, but he is arguably guilty of
>a misleading half-truth.


Wrong again. It need only maintain the same approximate ratio between
opposing forces. There is no logical reason to vary only one physical
constant at a time.

>A Yahoo search led me to the following pdf for Aguirre's article:
>
>https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/25314224.pdf
>
>If it does not work for you, the following might: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0106143v1

You conveniently forgot to tender any argument at all. Why is that?

>> > This greatly complicates, and reduces the
>> >explanatory power of, anthropic arguments in cosmology."
>> > [Aguirre A (2001) "Cold big-bang cosmology as a counterexample to several anthropic arguments." Phys Rev D 64:083508.]
>
>The research was funded by a grant. I wonder whether the granters were conned by the
>quoted 2-liner into thinking that they had gotten their money's worth.

Your comment above is mindless noise. What you "wonder" is irrelevant
to the topic.

>Athel wrote:
>>I'm not enough a physicist to comment on whether he was right.
>
>None of us is enough of a physicist to know that Aguirre did NOT make a revolutionary

>discovery that ? is (at least) several orders of magnitude more tolerant of life than had been suspected the year before.


Once again you obsess over what was *not* done. Aguirre's
not-discovery is as credible as Rees' not-discoveries of whatever he
has *not* done.

And our respective lack of expertise in physics does not inform the
consensus of physicists, which sides with Aguirre and not Rees.

>The only way I could tell is to look at the article itself, and I'm lucky that it is so readily
>available on line. How badly off all of us [1] would be if it had been paywalled!!
>
>[1] Of course, I am excluding those people who only care about defeating fine-tuning arguments by hook or crook,
>the truth be damned.

As opposed to those like you who only care about posting asinine
allusions like the above.

>> Aguirre's argument is a good counter to the argument Barnes makes in
>> the video, as Barnes considers altering only a single physical
>> constant at a time.
>

>Aguirre makes noises to that effect near the end of his article, ignoring the ?lephant in the room.

>
>And even if one considers 2 or more at a time, there are n-dimensional measures in which all variations
>in all parameters still show up as a minuscule fraction of the whole morphospace.

I have no idea what your comment above means, or to what you allude.
My impression is neither do you.

>> However, Hossenfelder's objection also applies to Aguirre's argument.
>> Her point is one raised by Carlip the last time he discussed
>> fine-tuning on T.O.
>

>If Hossenfelder and Carlip actually wrote that and went no further, they were actually
>supporting fine-tuning arguments, and undermining the "riposte" that you attributed to
>Hossenfelder above.

That's it? To assert your baseless opinion for which you tender no
argument at all? Perhaps that's because you know if you even tried to
back up your opinion, you would sound even more stupid than you
already do.

Worse, you split my paragraph and made it look like I credit
Hossenfelder for something I wrote. I explicitly described
Hossenfelder's riposte. To which I added the following as a separate
point:

>> It is possible the initial conditions of the
>> universe could have varied in such a way that would have altered the
>> physical constants from what they are in this universe.

>> That possibility is the basis for Multiverse. But nobody knows "why" the
>> physical constants are what they are or how they were set or how much
>> they could vary.

I posted my comments above to show how Hossenfelder's riposte also
applies to Aguirre's argument. Either the physical constants' values
are what they are, or they are not. Either way, their probability and
their purpose remain independent and separate issues.

>Hope springs eternal in the breasts of militant atheists like yourself.

Hope springs eternal in the delusional mind of militant trolls like
yourself who post pointless personal attacks.

>> And so it's meaningless to make sweeping conclusions
>> based on presumption of their values being highly improbable.
>
>But drawing sweeping hypotheses based on it is eminently in the spirit of science as it is practiced
>and as Mark Isaak promotes in his .sig.

Yet another baseless assertion for which you tender no argument at
all.

>I'm sure, though, that this won't stop you from drawing great solace from your propagandistic use of the word "meaningless"
>and silently telling yourself that fine tuning arguments cannot undermine atheism.

Yet more asinine allusions and nonsense non-sequiturs.

>Peter Nyikos
>Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
>Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
>http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

Your reply above is a classic example of you replying to anything
about science filled with asinine allusions, nonsense non-sequiturs,
mindless made-up crap, obnoxious obfuscations, self-promotions, and
Big Lies. You don't even try to control yourself. This is why I
don't bother to discuss science with you. Not sure how anybody gives
you any credibility.

[jillery]

On Wed, 23 Jun 2021 10:01:18 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"

For someone who spam brags about how he is a "goddamn moralizer", not
sure how you "moralize" your claim above that you know what you're
talking about, with your admission you didn't listen to the cited
video *before* you criticize what the video said. A more accurate
description for you is "goddamn rationalizer".

[Mark Isaak]

I also wonder if Peter realizes that "goddam moralizer" is essentially a
synonym of "sanctimonious jerk."

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred
to the presence of those who think they've found it." - Terry Pratchett

[Ron Dean]

I would argue that the Big Bang is very much part of the Anthropic
Principle.

[Ron Dean]

I certainly don't mean to be offensive, but Peter Nyikos, as Professor
of Mathematics does give him a very high measure of intelligence. And
since science is based on mathematics, I would argue that this man, as a
Dr. of mathematics is far more authoritative on the subject of science
than you or me.

[jillery]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 11:40:26 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Your comments certainly are not offensive, but I am surprised you
posted them, as you have often claimed you judge an argument based on
its merits rather than the person who makes it.

I acknowledge the peter's academic position demonstrates a level of
expertise in a particular field, and a certain level of intelligence
in general. My impression is comments like yours are at least partly
why the peter posts that particular .sig, to give his opinions an air
of authority.

Also I acknowledge there are some topics where mathematical expertise
is relevant, ex. statistics, fractals, topology, or where a precise
understanding of mathematical formula and/or number theory applies to
a specific point.

I do argue it's a mistake to presume as you say above, that expertise
in one field, even in something as broadly useful as mathematics,
means expertise in other fields, even in those fields which are
heavily dependent on mathematics.

For example, I would bet large sums that even you would not presume an
expert mathematician is qualified to operate on you, or even to repair
your automobile, or even to judge other experts' opinions in those
fields. That would be an absurd application of authority.

Also I do argue that intelligence is something people turn on and off,
selectively. They apply it as a matter of practice and/or training in
specific cases and/or times, and not in others.

An important point here is, knowledge and intelligence are two
different things, while your comments above conflate them.
Intelligence is an innate talent, which may be enhanced with use and
inspiration. Knowledge must be acquired, through experience and
learning.

Having said that, nothing in any of my comments about the peter is
inconsistent with these acknowledgements and arguments. It is a fact
that his expertise in mathematics does not inform his comments above
specifically nor in almost all of his posts to T.O. generally.

And to be explicitly clear, I do *not* argue the peter can't and/or
doesn't have expertise in other fields, only that it must be
demonstrated. His comments above do not so demonstrate, but the very
opposite, of willful ignorance and stupidity. These make his claim of
academic authority an ironic affectation at best, like Kent Hovind
calling himself "Doctor".

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

Clueless about this as well.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

I would argue that you don't ha ve a clue what you're talking about.
(Did your stock of question marks run out?)

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2021-06-24 17:16:17 +0000, jillery said:

> On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 11:40:26 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>

>> [ … ]

>>
>>>
>> I certainly don't mean to be offensive, but Peter Nyikos, as
>> Professor>of Mathematics does give him a very high measure of
>> intelligence. And>since science is based on mathematics, I would argue
>> that this man, as a>Dr. of mathematics is far more authoritative on the
>> subject of science>than you or me.
>
>
> Your comments certainly are not offensive, but I am surprised you
> posted them, as you have often claimed you judge an argument based on
> its merits rather than the person who makes it.
>
> I acknowledge the peter's academic position demonstrates a level of
> expertise in a particular field, and a certain level of intelligence
> in general. My impression is comments like yours are at least partly
> why the peter posts that particular .sig, to give his opinions an air
> of authority.

Were you suitably impressed by Dr Dr Kleinman's two doctorates?

[Ron Dean]

Yes, this is my position, but at the same time I took exception to your
verbal assault on a person, who whether you agree or not is uncalled for.

>
> I acknowledge the peter's academic position demonstrates a level of
> expertise in a particular field, and a certain level of intelligence
> in general. My impression is comments like yours are at least partly
> why the peter posts that particular .sig, to give his opinions an air
> of authority.
>
> Also I acknowledge there are some topics where mathematical expertise
> is relevant, ex. statistics, fractals, topology, or where a precise
> understanding of mathematical formula and/or number theory applies to
> a specific point.
>
> I do argue it's a mistake to presume as you say above, that expertise
> in one field, even in something as broadly useful as mathematics,
> means expertise in other fields, even in those fields which are
> heavily dependent on mathematics.
>
> For example, I would bet large sums that even you would not presume an
> expert mathematician is qualified to operate on you, or even to repair
> your automobile, or even to judge other experts' opinions in those
> fields. That would be an absurd application of authority.
>

Yes, absolutely but I've read Peter's statements over the years, and
while I don't always agree, I don't discount his arguments, he could be
right and me wrong. I try to keep an open mind and whether I agree or
not I do take what he says seriously: and I think he is well read and
understands science, especially where origins is the subject.

>
> Also I do argue that intelligence is something people turn on and off,
> selectively. They apply it as a matter of practice and/or training in
> specific cases and/or times, and not in others.
>

IOW, where biases enters the picture intelligence loses.

>
> An important point here is, knowledge and intelligence are two
> different things, while your comments above conflate them.
> Intelligence is an innate talent, which may be enhanced with use and
> inspiration. Knowledge must be acquired, through experience and
> learning.
>

I absolutely agree.

>
> Having said that, nothing in any of my comments about the peter is
> inconsistent with these acknowledgements and arguments. It is a fact
> that his expertise in mathematics does not inform his comments above
> specifically nor in almost all of his posts to T.O. generally.
>
>
> And to be explicitly clear, I do *not* argue the peter can't and/or
> doesn't have expertise in other fields, only that it must be
> demonstrated. His comments above do not so demonstrate, but the very
> opposite, of willful ignorance and stupidity. These make his claim of
> academic authority an ironic affectation at best, like Kent Hovind
> calling himself "Doctor".
>

What exactly did you find objectional regarding his
impression regarding the Ladies response. I didn't have a positive
opinion of her arguments either.

[Öö Tiib]

Oh? You perhaps mix up posters Ron Dean and Dale. They are totally different
people ... the nice traits they share is that they want do discuss and they prefer
to do it politely. My impression is that Dale is younger but somehow solipsistic
and hard to understand while Ron Dean is older and wiser and typically
explaining his reasoning quite well.

On current case however the Ron Dean's reply was to me ... and I am also in
doubt what did it mean.

[jillery]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:08:31 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>

You criticize me for my "verbal assault" while you completely ignore
every single item I noted of the peter's verbal assault. Did you even
read the above? If not, then you have no idea what you're talking
about. If so, then how do you give a pass to his asinine allusions,

nonsense non-sequiturs, mindless made-up crap, obnoxious obfuscations,

self-promotions, and Big Lies, all while pointing your finger only at
me?

You have in the past posted your own "verbal assault" in response to
much less. Has the peter's "goddamn rationalizing" infected you, too?

>> I acknowledge the peter's academic position demonstrates a level of
>> expertise in a particular field, and a certain level of intelligence
>> in general. My impression is comments like yours are at least partly
>> why the peter posts that particular .sig, to give his opinions an air
>> of authority.
>>
>> Also I acknowledge there are some topics where mathematical expertise
>> is relevant, ex. statistics, fractals, topology, or where a precise
>> understanding of mathematical formula and/or number theory applies to
>> a specific point.
>>
>> I do argue it's a mistake to presume as you say above, that expertise
>> in one field, even in something as broadly useful as mathematics,
>> means expertise in other fields, even in those fields which are
>> heavily dependent on mathematics.
>>
>> For example, I would bet large sums that even you would not presume an
>> expert mathematician is qualified to operate on you, or even to repair
>> your automobile, or even to judge other experts' opinions in those
>> fields. That would be an absurd application of authority.
> >
>Yes, absolutely but I've read Peter's statements over the years, and
>while I don't always agree, I don't discount his arguments, he could be
>right and me wrong. I try to keep an open mind and whether I agree or
>not I do take what he says seriously: and I think he is well read and
>understands science, especially where origins is the subject.

The peter's post above is one of his better posts. Most of his
replies are far, far worse. So if you really have read the peter's
posts "over the years", then your convenient amnesia would be even
worse than I thought.

>> Also I do argue that intelligence is something people turn on and off,
>> selectively. They apply it as a matter of practice and/or training in
>> specific cases and/or times, and not in others.
> >
>IOW, where biases enters the picture intelligence loses.
>>
>> An important point here is, knowledge and intelligence are two
>> different things, while your comments above conflate them.
>> Intelligence is an innate talent, which may be enhanced with use and
>> inspiration. Knowledge must be acquired, through experience and
>> learning.
> >
>I absolutely agree.
>>
>> Having said that, nothing in any of my comments about the peter is
>> inconsistent with these acknowledgements and arguments. It is a fact
>> that his expertise in mathematics does not inform his comments above
>> specifically nor in almost all of his posts to T.O. generally.
> >
>>
>> And to be explicitly clear, I do *not* argue the peter can't and/or
>> doesn't have expertise in other fields, only that it must be
>> demonstrated. His comments above do not so demonstrate, but the very
>> opposite, of willful ignorance and stupidity. These make his claim of
>> academic authority an ironic affectation at best, like Kent Hovind
>> calling himself "Doctor".
>>
>What exactly did you find objectional regarding his
>impression regarding the Ladies response. I didn't have a positive
>opinion of her arguments either.

Go back and read the quoted text.

[Ron Dean]

On 6/24/21 2:41 PM, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> On 2021-06-24 15:10:59 +0000, Ron Dean said:
>

Sorry, this was not a question! What makes the BB a part of the
anthropic principle is the fact that if it's force it was slightly
stronger the universe would expand too fast for stars to form, it
slightly weaker, it would collapse. In either case there would
be no universe and we would not be around to observe it.
>

[Ron Dean]

It's so easy to slander, criticize and engage in character assassination
without any evidence to backup the accusations. And this means the
accuser recognizes that he is in over his head. IOW he knows he has
lost. But one does change the message by shooting the messenger. Such a
person is utterly useless in any discussion which resorts slander rather
than addressing the issues. So, please don't allow this to be you.

[Öö Tiib]

Those are claims that I've never understood what assumption these
are based upon. Have you understood or just trust the claimers?

Lets revision what we know. We know most of matter what we are
made of and have formulas about how it behaves. However several
things just do not behave by laws we think these should. Our galaxies,
gravitational lensing, microwave background etc.

To fix it we have added placeholder things to our universe that
we call "dark matter". By our calculations our universe has to
be made of about 85% such a matter for things to start to make some
sense again.

So how can we claim in what manner that something about 85%
of what we know next to nothing behaves under forces of
different magnitude?

Or lets say magnitude of our ignorance is way smaller and it is
lot less than 85%? Then general relativity theory is incorrect
and should be modified in some manner. Then we do not
even have correct ideas yet how gravity behaves?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

It's nice to see you again, Ron. I wish you had hung around longer a while back, when you
were confronted by Steven Carlip on the subject of fine tuning of the constant lambda.
You would have seen how Carlip kept ignoring one post after another that I did on the
logarithmic variation on lambda that he used to deceive you. I used some graduate level reasoning
to show how he was disregarding some of the physical implications of what he was
saying about it.

Carlip vanished after a few weeks of this, much to the chagrin of jillery and her crowd,
and has never returned. Nobody here can come close to his level of expertise in physics and cosmology.
In particular, jillery can't even muster a high school level argument, but has to content herself
with talking around the subject and outright chicanery.

The post to which I am replying is a very long one, so I will leave the expose of jillery's shameless
chicanery to another post tomorrow. It is pure trolling of a very elaborate sort, complete with
an unmarked snip to make it seem like I was responding to something utterly different from
what I was responding to.

The trolling is meant to divert my attention from the thing she really fears: the threat to her "village atheism"
provided by fine-tuning arguments that she is incompetent to refute. And it is a particularly effective
argument that I focus on below.

On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 11:41:06 AM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
> On 6/24/21 1:25 AM, jillery wrote:
> > On Wed, 23 Jun 2021 08:50:23 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> > <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I describe a real game-changer below: what I found out about Aguirre's article.
> >
> >
> > Yet another baseless assertion for which you tender no argument at
> > all.

Jillery makes a feeble response to an actual argument by me below, and this is her
way of discouraging readers from looking at mine.

> >> On Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 1:31:06 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> >>> On Tue, 22 Jun 2021 14:49:38 +0200, Athel Cornish-Bowden
> >>> <acor...@imm.cnrs.fr> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> On 2021-06-22 11:49:39 +0000, jillery said:
> >>>>
> >>>>> The fine tuning of the Universe: Was the cosmos made for us?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> A 75-minute dialogue between Sabine Hossenfelder, Luke Barnes, and
> >>>>> Justin Brierly, the host of The Big Conversation Show, sponsored by
> >>>>> the Templeton Foundation.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OoYzcxzvvM>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Short version: Barnes opens with the standard fine-tuning argument
> >>>>> that physical constants have unlikely values which allow for the
> >>>>> existence of a universe with humans in it.

<snip of things germane to jillery's trolling, to be dealt with tomorrow>

> >>>> Aguirre wrote "It is possible to construct a cosmology in which all of
> >>>> the parameters vary by (at least) several orders of magnitude from
> >>>> their 'observed' values,
> >>
> >> "all the parameters" has only to do with six parameters that Aguirre himself chose.

> >> They do NOT include the dimensionless constant Ԑ that I wrote about

> >> in my reply to Athel Cornish-Brown yesterday, and where the tolerance is between .006 and .008,
> >> which is minuscule compared to "(at least) several orders of magnitude".
> >
> >
> > Yes it does.

Jillery speaks from profound ignorance.

> > As I cited previously, Rees' epsilon is but a special
> > case of the ratio of the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic
> > force.

Actually Ԑ is a completely different ratio, between the mass of four hydrogen nuclei
and the mass lost in the conversion of them to one helium nucleus. The "special case of..." part
is jillery garbling the exact physical relationship between Ԑ and the things she mentions.

What is of more immediate importance to the fine tuning argument surrounding Ԑ,
jillery is ignoring the fact that this "special case" has a special effect on a
vital process in our universe, according to Rees:

"Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen
into all the atoms of the periodic table. Carbon and oxygen are common,
whereas gold and uranium are rare, because of what happens in the stars. If

Ԑ were 0.006 or 0.008, we could not exist."
https://alta3b.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/six-numbers.pdf

I quoted this in reply to Athel Cornish-Brown, and all that jillery has done
is to slap on a general comment without addressing the vital application that Rees writes about,
and to imagine [see her opening salvo] that her slapped-on comment is proof that I never had an argument at all.

> >>> yet in which stars, planets, and intelligent
> >>>> life can plausibly arise.
> >>

> >> ... as long as Ԑ stays within its tight bounds. Aguirre isn't guilty of lying, but he is arguably guilty of

> >> a misleading half-truth.
> >
> >
> > Wrong again.

It is absolutely correct, and what jillery writes next is a version of what I wrote that is devoid of quantification.
And she is oblivious to the fact that Ԑ is a ratio of two masses, not directly "between opposing forces".
They do enter into how Ԑ relates to all the other constants, but they do not affect the bounds within it
must stay, if life as we know it is to exist.

> > It need only maintain the same approximate ratio between
> > opposing forces.

Correction: Ԑ "need only be maintained" in a narrow band between .006 and .008 by those
opposing forces.


Later in the site I linked, Rees explains more about Ԑ, showing clearly how it is a ratio of two masses:

"The nucleus of a helium atom weighs 99.3 per cent as much as the two protons
and two neutrons that go to make it. The remaining 0.7 per cent is released
mainly as heat. So the fuel that powers the Sun - the hydrogen gas in its core
- converts 0.007 of its mass into energy when it fuses into helium."

> > There is no logical reason to vary only one physical
> > constant at a time.

Jillery slapped on this comment without thinking: I was referring to ALL of Aguierre's
six constants, and any others one might want to include, and she can vary them to her
heart's content within the limits Aguierre and others prescribed, but if Ԑ strays even .001 from its given value,
it's curtains for life as we know it.

That last clause is the common thread running through all fine-tuning arguments for either a
designer of our universe or an inconceivably vast multiverse -- neither of which appeals to
"village atheists," of which jillery is one.


<snip for focus>

> >>> Aguirre's argument is a good counter to the argument Barnes makes in
> >>> the video, as Barnes considers altering only a single physical
> >>> constant at a time.
> >>
> >> Aguirre makes noises to that effect near the end of his article, ignoring the ?lephant in the room.
> >>
> >> And even if one considers 2 or more at a time, there are n-dimensional measures in which all variations
> >> in all parameters still show up as a minuscule fraction of the whole morphospace.
> >
> >
> > I have no idea what your comment above means, or to what you allude.

Ron, if you wish, I'll explain this to you. Jillery is indulging in unadulterated wishful thinking here:

> > My impression is neither do you.

<snip the trolling by jillery that I talked about, to be dealt with tomorrow>

> > Your reply above is a classic example of you replying to anything
> > about science filled with asinine allusions, nonsense non-sequiturs,
> > mindless made-up crap, obnoxious obfuscations, self-promotions, and
> > Big Lies. You don't even try to control yourself. This is why I
> > don't bother to discuss science with you. Not sure how anybody gives
> > you any credibility.

The foregoing pack of lies is mostly based on the trolling that I snipped,
but it is also trying to make up for the way jillery was forced to talk around a
subject that she imperfectly understands.

> I certainly don't mean to be offensive, but Peter Nyikos, as Professor
> of Mathematics does give him a very high measure of intelligence.

Yes, without that high measure it would have been impossible to have written over 100 peer-reviewed
research articles, about half of them solo and the other half co-authored,
in leading mathematical journals.

But you give me a more credit than I deserve next, Ron:

> And since science is based on mathematics, I would argue that this man, as a
> Dr. of mathematics is far more authoritative on the subject of science
> than you or me.

Science is a vast field, and I cannot claim to be authoritative about more than
a small sample of it. But I am careful to study the things I write about in talk.origins
to a good depth, and avoid writing about subjects that I haven't studied sufficiently.
I actually had to do a bit of homework today on the ratio that jillery kept talking around, for instance.
But given the low level of intelligence with which she expounded on it, I didn't need much time.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS I hope to see you hang around for at least another week, Ron!

[Ron Dean]

This is out of my field of expertise, but as I understand it - it seems
reasonable. The Universe is said to be almost 14 billion years old.
Our solar system is 4.5 billion years old. The universe is expanding
at a rate that is within the Goldilocks parameters. If it was not the
case, then the universe could have collapsed after perhaps 2 or 8
billion years or yesterday.
After the Big bang. It required certain periods of time for gasses to
coagulate to form stars, There clouds of gasses are presently forming
stars. There other clouds where gasses are still scattered.

>
> Lets revision what we know. We know most of matter what we are
> made of and have formulas about how it behaves. However several
> things just do not behave by laws we think these should. Our galaxies,
> gravitational lensing, microwave background etc.
>

I know nothing of this gravitational lensing except the microwave back
grown is the echo of the Big Bang which was predicted decades
before it was discovered.

>
> To fix it we have added placeholder things to our universe that
> we call "dark matter". By our calculations our universe has to
> be made of about 85% such a matter for things to start to make some
> sense again.

OK

[jillery]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 17:51:30 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> spams more Big Lies. Not sure how anybody
gives him any credibility.

Anybody who wants to read his made-up mindless crap can find the
original.

Anybody who wants to inform themselves about the topic can start here:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe>

A small counterpoint to the peter's Big Lies:
*************************************

Epsilon (e), a measure of the nuclear efficiency of fusion from
hydrogen to helium, is 0.007: when four nucleons fuse into helium,
0.007 (0.7%) of their mass is converted to energy. The value of e is

in part determined by the strength of the strong nuclear force.[17] If

e were 0.006, only hydrogen could exist, and complex chemistry would
be impossible. According to Rees, if it were above 0.008, no hydrogen
would exist, as all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after
the Big Bang. Other physicists disagree, calculating that substantial
hydrogen remains as long as the strong force coupling constant
increases by less than about 50%.

*************************************

[jillery]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 17:36:59 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[...]

>>> I certainly don't mean to be offensive, but Peter Nyikos, as Professor
>>> of Mathematics does give him a very high measure of intelligence. And
>>> since science is based on mathematics, I would argue that this man, as
>>> a Dr. of mathematics is far more authoritative on the subject of
>>> science than you or me.
>>
>> Clueless about this as well.
>>
>It's so easy to slander, criticize and engage in character assassination
>without any evidence to backup the accusations. And this means the
>accuser recognizes that he is in over his head. IOW he knows he has
>lost. But one does change the message by shooting the messenger. Such a
>person is utterly useless in any discussion which resorts slander rather
>than addressing the issues. So, please don't allow this to be you.

Since you mention it, where is your righteous outrage against the
peter's slander, failure to address the issues, and shooting the
messenger? How does his self-advertised academic position let you
give him a pass?

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2021-06-24 20:14:06 +0000, 嘱 Tiib said:

> On Thursday, 24 June 2021 at 21:46:06 UTC+3, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>> On 2021-06-24 15:10:59 +0000, Ron Dean said:>> > On 6/22/21 10:53 AM,

>> 脰枚 Tiib wrote:> >> On Tuesday, 22 June 2021 at 15:51:06 UTC+3, Athel

Yes, you're right. Apologies to both.

> They are totally different
> people ... the nice traits they share is that they want do discuss and
> they prefer
> to do it politely. My impression is that Dale is younger but somehow
> solipsistic
> and hard to understand while Ron Dean is older and wiser and typically
> explaining his reasoning quite well.
> On current case however the Ron Dean's reply was to me ... and I am also in
> doubt what did it mean.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 2:51:06 PM UTC-4, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> On 2021-06-24 17:16:17 +0000, jillery said:
>
> > On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 11:40:26 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> [ … ]
> >>
> >>>
> >> I certainly don't mean to be offensive, but Peter Nyikos, as
> >> Professor>of Mathematics does give him a very high measure of
> >> intelligence. And>since science is based on mathematics, I would argue
> >> that this man, as a>Dr. of mathematics is far more authoritative on the
> >> subject of science>than you or me.
> >
> >
> > Your comments certainly are not offensive, but I am surprised you
> > posted them, as you have often claimed you judge an argument based on
> > its merits rather than the person who makes it.

I've given plenty of merits to base it on, and have explicitly offered to give Ron Dean more,
in the long reply I did to him yesterday. The ball is in his court now.

> > I acknowledge the peter's academic position demonstrates a level of
> > expertise in a particular field, and a certain level of intelligence
> > in general. My impression is comments like yours are at least partly
> > why the peter posts that particular .sig, to give his opinions an air
> > of authority.

I've told jillery many times why I post the four-line .sig in a minority of my posts,
but she conveniently keeps "forgetting." It marks posts that are, at least in part,
relevant to the scientific or philosophical issues that are what talk.origins was set up to deal with.

> Were you suitably impressed by Dr Dr Kleinman's two doctorates?

Athel, Kleinman never had an air of an expert in engineering, in which he got his
Ph.D., or in medicine, for which he had an MD.

He even claimed that he tells his patients that "God does the healing, and I take the money."
That is shocking: not giving the fantastic healing powers of the human body any credit.
That kind of thinking could set medicine back hundreds of years.

Did you do a lot of lurking around the Dr.Dr's posts in the two years before talk.origins's biggest crybaby
somehow persuaded DIG to ban him? It wasn't for the kind of incompetence I've recounted just now, believe me.

I've snipped the text below, since you had no comment to make on it.


Peter Nyikos

[Ron Dean]

OK, Jill, I went to Wikipedia, and found nothing contradicting the above
statement.
Perhaps, you would quote exactly from this source, which falsifies the
paragraph. however, I decided to research this paragraph by Peter, and I
found the same information and same values in the book "Just Six
Numbers" by Martin Rees (pages 54-55).
Also in your reference, Wikipedia under Examples: I found the same
data which Wikipedia attributed to Rees.

So it's obvious that if this is a lie, then it's Rees who is guilty.

[jillery]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 08:52:52 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 2:51:06 PM UTC-4, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>> On 2021-06-24 17:16:17 +0000, jillery said:
>>
>> > On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 11:40:26 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> [ … ]
>> >>
>> >>>
>> >> I certainly don't mean to be offensive, but Peter Nyikos, as
>> >> Professor>of Mathematics does give him a very high measure of
>> >> intelligence. And>since science is based on mathematics, I would argue
>> >> that this man, as a>Dr. of mathematics is far more authoritative on the
>> >> subject of science>than you or me.
>> >
>> >
>> > Your comments certainly are not offensive, but I am surprised you
>> > posted them, as you have often claimed you judge an argument based on
>> > its merits rather than the person who makes it.
>
>I've given plenty of merits to base it on,

Only in your self-promoting delusional mind, and certainly not in any
reply to jillery, which is the context to the comments above, not that
context matters much to you.

<snip your remaining self-promoting delusional spam>

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, June 25, 2021 at 2:51:05 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 17:51:30 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com>

> spams more Big Lies. Not sure how anybody
> gives him any credibility.

If you are not sure how anybody does NOT take crap like your first four words
as gospel truth, without being shown any of the alleged lies, then you are an egomaniac who
is out of touch with reality.

But I know that you are far too sane for that, and anyone who reads the post of mine that you
didn't dare to quote from, or even to link, will know that YOU are indulging in the Big Lie technique,
defined here in a way you never dared to define it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

The following Big Lie by you fits the definition in the first paragraph of the wiki entry perfectly.

> Anybody who wants to read his made-up mindless crap can find the
> original.

...to discover that you have told a multiple lie in the above sentence. And since you were too
cowardly to provide a link, I am providing it here:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/CgjITcZq-AQ/m/e2iqSR-ZFQAJ
Re: A conversation about Fine Tuning

>
> Anybody who wants to inform themselves about the topic can start here:

Unfortunately, they will have to end there as well, without further sources.

> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe>
>
> A small counterpoint to the peter's Big Lies:

It's not a counterpoint at all to the truthful things I wrote.

> *************************************
> Epsilon (e), a measure of the nuclear efficiency of fusion from
> hydrogen to helium, is 0.007: when four nucleons fuse into helium,
> 0.007 (0.7%) of their mass is converted to energy. The value of e is
> in part determined by the strength of the strong nuclear force.[17] If
> e were 0.006, only hydrogen could exist, and complex chemistry would
> be impossible. According to Rees, if it were above 0.008, no hydrogen
> would exist, as all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after
> the Big Bang. Other physicists disagree, calculating that substantial
> hydrogen remains as long as the strong force coupling constant
> increases by less than about 50%.
> *************************************

Of the two sources given, the research article is paywalled, while the link to the pop science
magazine "Discover" version does not work.

However, anyone who reads the abstract of the paywalled article and who has read
a good amount of cosmology (like myself) can surmise that this has to do
only with the formation of elements in the Big Bang, and not in the stars (especially supernovae)
afterwards.

In our universe, there is no getting past helium in the periodic table, according to the details
of the modern Big Bang theory. All heavier elements are the result of stellar evolution.

But the same reason that a mere 50% increase [1] of the coupling constant already causes a big dearth
of hydrogen (leaving only an unspecified "substantial amount") also applies to the future evolution of heavier
elements in the stars. I would have to ask a physicist at my university to be sure, but the natural
conclusion is that the burning up of stars would be many times faster than that in our universe,
leaving inadequate time for life to evolve.

[1] not "several orders of magnitude," as claimed by Aguirre

And chew on this, readers [excluding, of course, incorrigible people like jillery]: the other
end of the acceptable range may be a good ways away from a universe where heavier
elements can be generated in enough time to produce the chemical basis for life as
we know it.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS If jillery claims that life can evolve based only on hydrogen and helium, she will be
the biggest gasbag in talk.origins. ;-)

[Dale]

In the category of "Chez Watt"

On 6/22/2021 4:36 PM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> In the category of “Dropped Names”
>>

[jillery]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 11:43:22 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Friday, June 25, 2021 at 2:51:05 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 17:51:30 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> <peter2...@gmail.com>
>
>> spams more Big Lies. Not sure how anybody
>> gives him any credibility.
>
>If you are not sure how anybody does NOT take crap like your first four words
>as gospel truth, without being shown any of the alleged lies, then you are an egomaniac who
>is out of touch with reality.

If anybody doubts the veracity of my first four words, it is trivially
easy for them to find and read your posts in this topic, and prove it
for themselves.

<snip your remaining spamming Big Lies>

[jillery]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 14:16:32 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Your comments above are unclear. I cited and copied the text from
Wikipedia. So the relevant issue to your point is whether Wikipedia's
paraphrase accurately conveys Rees' text from the book. If you
believe Wikipedia's paraphrase is inaccurate, then explain how.

You also conflate multiple issues raised in the peter's posts. Nowhere
do I say or imply his post misrepresents Rees, nor do my points depend
on it.

The peter's comments about Rees are only a small part of his posts.
The majority of his posts consist of obfuscating made-up crap, which
you had to wallow through in order find that small part about Rees.
And even that small part doesn't rely on the peter's expertise,
academic or otherwise.

So your previous expressed basis, that the peter's academic position
implies general expertise in things scientific, and somehow that
excuses his spamming made-up crap, is demonstrated nonsense.

And since you made a point of specifically criticizing me for my
"verbal assault" on the peter, you don't get to continue to ignore his
verbal assault on me. Not sure how you give the peter any
credibility.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, June 25, 2021 at 2:21:05 PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
> On 6/25/21 2:48 AM, jillery wrote:

> > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe>

> >

> > *************************************
> > Epsilon (e), a measure of the nuclear efficiency of fusion from
> > hydrogen to helium, is 0.007: when four nucleons fuse into helium,
> > 0.007 (0.7%) of their mass is converted to energy. The value of e is
> > in part determined by the strength of the strong nuclear force.[17] If
> > e were 0.006, only hydrogen could exist, and complex chemistry would
> > be impossible. According to Rees, if it were above 0.008, no hydrogen
> > would exist, as all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after
> > the Big Bang. Other physicists disagree, calculating that substantial
> > hydrogen remains as long as the strong force coupling constant
> > increases by less than about 50%.
> > *************************************
> >
> OK, Jill, I went to Wikipedia, and found nothing contradicting the above
> statement.

It IS from Wikipedia. Didn't you see the link above the quote?

> Perhaps, you would quote exactly from this source, which falsifies the
> paragraph.

She did.

> however, I decided to research this paragraph by Peter, and I
> found the same information and same values in the book "Just Six
> Numbers" by Martin Rees (pages 54-55).
> Also in your reference, Wikipedia under Examples: I found the same
> data which Wikipedia attributed to Rees.
>
> So it's obvious that if this is a lie, then it's Rees who is guilty.

You are allowing jillery to dictate the terminology used here.
She is hopelessly addicted to words like "lie," "liar," etc., using them as sticks to beat
people she hates over the head with, without caring whether there is any truth to them.
If she weren't also a habitual liar, one would judge her mentally incompetent for the way
she flings these accusations around with reckless abandon.

You should be able to judge for yourself whether either of the two sources that Wikipedia
gives for that minor 50% disagreement could possibly make a liar out of Rees.

Just look at the dates in the Wikipedia footnotes: 2001 for Rees [2], 2009 for the research paper [14]
that is linked *immediately* after the part jillery quoted, what emerges is that Rees evidently
used all the research available to him at the time. To suspect Rees of lying is a slap in the face
of a great astronomer and cosmologist who has an excellent understanding of the philosophy
relevant to these subjects.


But back to the quote from Wikipedia above. Have you seen the post I did shortly after you did this one?

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/CgjITcZq-AQ/m/c3lnjILTFQAJ

Re: A conversation about Fine Tuning

In it, I gave information that suggests that [14] supports the hypothesis that a value beyond .008 is
incompatible with stars lasting long enough for life to
evolve to an intelligent species?

Since I posted it, I found out that I had clicked in the wrong place on reference [16], which was
incorrectly placed right after reference [14]. The Discover article it links was done in 2000,
beautifully writing about a preliminary version of Rees's book. I think you will love it.
Here it is:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140722210250/http://discovermagazine.com/2000/nov/cover/

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[jillery]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 14:16:46 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

<snip your spam for focus>

>You are allowing jillery to dictate the terminology used here.
>She is hopelessly addicted to words like "lie," "liar," etc., using them as sticks to beat
>people she hates over the head with, without caring whether there is any truth to them.
>If she weren't also a habitual liar, one would judge her mentally incompetent for the way
>she flings these accusations around with reckless abandon.

Once again you accuse jillery of doing what you do.
Once again you post yet more baseless assertions for which you tender
no argument at all.

Not sure how anybody gives you any credibility.

<snip remaining spamming noise>

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 10:41:06 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak,
like jillery, bypassed my last reply to Hemidactylus, and
wrote:
> On 6/23/21 10:25 PM, jillery wrote:

Having dealt with jillery's post to which you are tacitly expressing agreement, I am leaving only one line
from it:

> > For someone who spam brags about how he is a "goddamn moralizer"


> I also wonder if Peter realizes that "goddam moralizer" is essentially a
> synonym of "sanctimonious jerk."

I've known it for most of my life. So you've tacitly refuted jillery's self-serving claim that I am bragging.

However, there is a good reason I keep putting the term into quotation marks. It's a direct quote.

And it is a sign of how your kind and jillery's kind are sadly deficient in curiosity [1] . I've been calling
myself that for years, and nobody has ever thought to ask me why I use that term for myself.
Even you aren't doing that, but you at least are showing some tiny interest in a different way.
Even that is more than anyone else has done.

[1] This lack of curiosity plays out in many ways in talk.origins. Part of it is a philistine lack of interest
in the many great mysteries of science, especially how to get from simple nucleotide building
blocks to life as we know it, and how meiosis arose, and metazoans, and the Cambrian explosion.
In your case, you have seen the mystery of how bat wings could have evolved on strict Darwinian
principles, but you disappeared, leaving Burkhard to make a complete ass out of himself as he
tried to pinch hit for you.

I could say a lot more, but I'll just close with remarking that the general attitude towards these
mysteries is "the best answer to them for us is, we don't know" and "science will find the answers".
All of which is completely counter to the spirit of science, as your .sig should suggest to you,
but doesn't seem to:

> "The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred
> to the presence of those who think they've found it." - Terry Pratchett

I seek the truth about the mysteries. Y'all's use of statements like the two in quotes makes y'all sound
as though you've found all that is worth saying about them at our present state of knowledge.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Not a bad start -- but if you let me, I can help you add to it.

But that depends on whether you want to be helped. Yesterday, in direct reply to a post of yours,
I wrote a long demonstration of how such physical phenomena
can be handled skillfully. Near the end, I offered to explain something very
basic to the whole theme of fine tuning of many constants at once.

Not only have you not taken me up on the offer, but you have shown no
sign of having ever looked at that post, nor the other reply by me to you
on this thread, that I made today, and loaded with helpful information about, inter alia, the Big Bang.

Thanks to your inaction, I am postponing the demonstration of how
jillery indulged in a kind of chicanery that is rare even for her, that I
described briefly to you yesterday. I told you that I would do it for you today,
but since I have seen no sign that you saw the post in which I wrote it, jillery is off the hook until Monday.

[As I hope you know by now, I only post on weekends under the most extraordinary circumstances.
The latest exception came a year or more after the preceding one, if memory serves.]

Auf Wiedersehen and Au revoir,

or should I say Adios?


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I thought I'd already posted this when I replied to Mark Isaak this evening, so what I wrote
to him at the beginning might be puzzling. But not for long, I hope.

On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 1:26:06 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Jun 2021 10:01:18 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 8:56:06 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> >> On Tue, 22 Jun 2021 14:50:02 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> >> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

> >>
> >> >On Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 4:41:06 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> In the category of “Dropped Names”
> >> >

> >> >You are behaving like an obnoxious twit [so what else is new?].
> >> >
> >> >In the first place, "Chez Watt" is designed for statements that look
> >> >silly or incomprehensible on the face of it. Not only does it completely fail to fit that model,
> >> >but it was done in direct rebuttal to one of the standard atheistic attempts to
> >> >dismiss perhaps THE most powerful argument for the existence of a designer
> >> >of our universe and/or a multiverse with a staggeringly large number of universes in it.
> >> >
> >> >And you snipped everything that made that clear, even the atheistic argument
> >> >and probably insincere "frustration" by the one who uttered it.
> >> >
> >> >And don't even get me started on the blatant double standards you have
> >> >for what constitutes "name-dropping."

> >> >
> >> >
> >> >> > This standard riposte is a cop-out of the worst sort. It creates the
> >> >> > illusion that there just might be some magical formula that
> >> >> > makes our observable universe as inevitable, in all its features,
> >> >> > as the most doctrinaire Thomist thinks the existence of God is inevitable.
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Anselm even tried to find such a formula before Thomas Aquinas,
> >> >> > and it has come down to us with the name "Ontological Argument."
> >> >> > But I think it is safe to say that no professor of philosophy at an accredited university
> >> >> > actually believes that the argument is valid.
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Much less, then, should anyone take seriously Hossenfelder's claim,
> >> >> > for which no argument at all is tendered.
> >

> >The illusion of which I wrote above will forever remain in the realm of metaphysics.
> >Only those who don't know the limitations of science as it is now understood can think otherwise.
> >
> >
> >> >It just now occurred to me that jillery might have been spin-doctoring what Hossenfelder claimed
> >> >in furtherance of her militantly atheistic world-view. I haven't had the time to review that 75 minute
> >> >long clip, have you?
> >
> >
> >And now you, jillery, show how your reasoning abilities are negligible when your ox is being gored:
> >
> >> By admitting you didn't watch the video, you prove you have no idea

> >> what you're talking about.
> >

> >I know exactly what I was talking about: your synopsis, which now is at a stage
> >where you've painted Hossenfelder as talking out of both sides of her mouth.
> >See the game-changing post which I did to this thread about half an hour ago.
> >
> >Of course, you didn't quote anything from her, so without looking at the video,
> >we don't know whether both, or one, or none of the two sides are being accurately portrayed.
> >
> >
> >> >If you do view it, and let me know how [un]distorted jillery was with her synopsis,
> >> >I will not hold this post of yours against you. But I'm not counting on you doing anything like that.
> >
> >After all, when one takes Hemidactylus's behavior since March 2014 into account,
> >he is far more kindly disposed to you than he is to me.

> For someone who spam brags about how he is a "goddamn moralizer",

It isn't bragging; quite the opposite, as you can begin to see from my last reply to Hemidactylus.

What's more, I have never completely let go of the possibility that the hereafter
is governed like a Stalinist Gulag, where common criminals lorded it over people
whose only fault was to protest against an unjust system. If it is, you might
find yourself handsomely rewarded for your habitually dishonest behavior and unreasoning hatred,
while I am punished for being a "goddamn moralizer" for condemning it.

As to which of us is following the "right" path, only the afterlife, if there is one,
can show that.

> not sure how you "moralize" your claim above that you know what you're
> talking about,

I told you above. And you deliberately ignore what I wrote, as anyone reading this
post attentively can see.


> with your admission you didn't listen to the cited
> video *before* you criticize what the video said.

The present moment is still *before* I do that, if ever.


> A more accurate
> description for you is "goddamn rationalizer".

You are just venting your irrational hatred. And the way you post this garbage in plain
defiance of what I wrote in the post to which you are replying, without deleting any of it,
convinces me that you are flaunting your incorrigibility.

This calls for drastic measures, somewhat akin to when I boycotted the posts of
your most loyal ally, Oxyaena, and her close ally, Erik Simpson, for almost a full year.
In your case, it would be a big mistake to do the same thing. But early next week,
I will have decided just what course to actually take.


Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 15:22:22 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 10:41:06 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak,
>like jillery, bypassed my last reply to Hemidactylus, and
>wrote:
>> On 6/23/21 10:25 PM, jillery wrote:
>
>Having dealt with jillery's post to which you are tacitly expressing agreement, I am leaving only one line
>from it:
>
>> > For someone who spam brags about how he is a "goddamn moralizer"
>
>
>> I also wonder if Peter realizes that "goddam moralizer" is essentially a
>> synonym of "sanctimonious jerk."
>
>I've known it for most of my life. So you've tacitly refuted jillery's self-serving claim that I am bragging.

To the contrary, most sanctimonious jerks I know brag about it
regularly. That's just one of the ways they show they are
sanctimonious jerks.

[jillery]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 18:00:48 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> A more accurate
>> description for you is "goddamn rationalizer".
>
>You are just venting your irrational hatred.

Incorrect. If I was venting irrational hatred, I would sound just like
you.

>And the way you post this garbage in plain
>defiance of what I wrote in the post to which you are replying,

Liar.

>without deleting any of it,
>convinces me that you are flaunting your incorrigibility.
>
>This calls for drastic measures, somewhat akin to when I boycotted the posts of
>your most loyal ally, Oxyaena, and her close ally, Erik Simpson, for almost a full year.
>In your case, it would be a big mistake to do the same thing. But early next week,
>I will have decided just what course to actually take.

Your boycotts are as intellectually dishonest and cowardly as Harran's
killfiles, but much less effective, as Google doesn't support that
feature. I for one would be overjoyed if you would do something,
anything, to reduce your obfuscating spam and Big Lies.

[Öö Tiib]

My impression is that we have only vague ideas why universe is
expanding at what rate and why it seems to accelerate and at what
rate. Most of such ideas again involve "dark energies" we have no
idea what these are. We are trying to jump ahead of our knowledge.
Kid should not try to solve systems of equations that involve partial
derivatives, integrals and trigonometry while not yet capable to
count and to measure properly.

> > Lets revision what we know. We know most of matter what we are
> > made of and have formulas about how it behaves. However several
> > things just do not behave by laws we think these should. Our galaxies,
> > gravitational lensing, microwave background etc.
> >
> I know nothing of this gravitational lensing except the microwave back
> grown is the echo of the Big Bang which was predicted decades
> before it was discovered.

Yes but think that dark matter does not interact with radiating energy in
ordinary manner otherwise we would see it. So there had to be other
reasons for it to expand. But it still alters CMB through its gravitational
potential. That is considered one of evidences that there is dark
matter.

> >
> > To fix it we have added placeholder things to our universe that
> > we call "dark matter". By our calculations our universe has to
> > be made of about 85% such a matter for things to start to make some
> > sense again.
>
> OK

So hopefully you see that we do not have fully satisfying answers to
questions that I asked below.

[*Hemidactylus*]

What’s with the obsession with the Left and Stalinism to the point you
fantasize eternal persecution in a heavenly gulag? That can’t be healthy.

>
> As to which of us is following the "right" path, only the afterlife, if there is one,
> can show that.
>
>> not sure how you "moralize" your claim above that you know what you're
>> talking about,
>
> I told you above. And you deliberately ignore what I wrote, as anyone reading this
> post attentively can see.
>
>
>> with your admission you didn't listen to the cited
>> video *before* you criticize what the video said.
>
> The present moment is still *before* I do that, if ever.
>
>
>> A more accurate
>> description for you is "goddamn rationalizer".
>
> You are just venting your irrational hatred. And the way you post this garbage in plain
> defiance of what I wrote in the post to which you are replying, without deleting any of it,
> convinces me that you are flaunting your incorrigibility.
>
> This calls for drastic measures, somewhat akin to when I boycotted the posts of
> your most loyal ally, Oxyaena, and her close ally, Erik Simpson, for almost a full year.
> In your case, it would be a big mistake to do the same thing. But early next week,
> I will have decided just what course to actually take.
>

Your penchant for utilizing suspense in soap opera fashion has elements of
drama queen written all over it. This decision of yours will be a sure
nailbiter for everyone named and unnamed lurkers included. The most
momentous occasion in the unfurling drama that is talk.origins.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

Appropriate theme music:

https://youtu.be/98T3PVaRrHU

[jillery]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2021 01:43:16 -0700 (PDT), Öö Tiib <oot...@hot.ee>

Based on the comments above, both you and Dean are confused about some
things.

Gravitational lensing is strictly a consequence of General Relativity
and has almost nothing to do with the Big Bang.

CMB is the afterglow of the temperature of the universe at the exact
moment it cooled enough for protons to capture electrons. That
primordial glow was redshifted over time into micowaves. These
phenomena were predicted 20 years before CMB was discovered, precisely
because physicists can measure the exact temperature when protons
capture electrons.

Before the CMB, the universe's expansion was dominated by radiation
pressure, another phenomenon physicists can measure.

After the CMB, the universe's expansion is slowed by the gravitational
attraction of matter. This is another phenomenon physicists can
measure.

Whatever dark matter is, it does not cause the universe to expand.

You and Dean might find the following useful:
<https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_bigbang_timeline.html>

>> > To fix it we have added placeholder things to our universe that
>> > we call "dark matter". By our calculations our universe has to
>> > be made of about 85% such a matter for things to start to make some
>> > sense again.
>>
>> OK
>
>So hopefully you see that we do not have fully satisfying answers to
>questions that I asked below.
>> >
>> > So how can we claim in what manner that something about 85%
>> > of what we know next to nothing behaves under forces of
>> > different magnitude?
>> >
>> > Or lets say magnitude of our ignorance is way smaller and it is
>> > lot less than 85%? Then general relativity theory is incorrect
>> > and should be modified in some manner. Then we do not
>> > even have correct ideas yet how gravity behaves?
>> >

[Ron Dean]

On 6/25/21 5:16 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, June 25, 2021 at 2:21:05 PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
>> On 6/25/21 2:48 AM, jillery wrote:
>
>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe>
>>>
>
>>> *************************************
>>> Epsilon (e), a measure of the nuclear efficiency of fusion from
>>> hydrogen to helium, is 0.007: when four nucleons fuse into helium,
>>> 0.007 (0.7%) of their mass is converted to energy. The value of e is
>>> in part determined by the strength of the strong nuclear force.[17] If
>>> e were 0.006, only hydrogen could exist, and complex chemistry would
>>> be impossible. According to Rees, if it were above 0.008, no hydrogen
>>> would exist, as all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after
>>> the Big Bang. Other physicists disagree, calculating that substantial
>>> hydrogen remains as long as the strong force coupling constant
>>> increases by less than about 50%.
>>> *************************************
>>>
>> OK, Jill, I went to Wikipedia, and found nothing contradicting the above
>> statement.
>
> It IS from Wikipedia. Didn't you see the link above the quote?
>
>> Perhaps, you would quote exactly from this source, which falsifies the
>> paragraph.
>
> She did.
>

Then, I missed it.

>
>> however, I decided to research this paragraph by Peter, and I
>> found the same information and same values in the book "Just Six
>> Numbers" by Martin Rees (pages 54-55).
>> Also in your reference, Wikipedia under Examples: I found the same
>> data which Wikipedia attributed to Rees.
>>
>> So it's obvious that if this is a lie, then it's Rees who is guilty.
>
> You are allowing jillery to dictate the terminology used here.
> She is hopelessly addicted to words like "lie," "liar," etc., using them as sticks to beat
> people she hates over the head with, without caring whether there is any truth to them.
> If she weren't also a habitual liar, one would judge her mentally incompetent for the way
> she flings these accusations around with reckless abandon.
>

Actually, I was challenging her description of the paragraph.

>
>> You should be able to judge for yourself whether either of the two
sources that Wikipedia
> gives for that minor 50% disagreement could possibly make a liar out of Rees.
>

It's obvious, I was not clear. I certainly did not mean to say Rees was
lying. I consider Rees work an extraordinary important information source.

>
> Just look at the dates in the Wikipedia footnotes: 2001 for Rees [2], 2009 for the research paper [14]
> that is linked *immediately* after the part jillery quoted, what emerges is that Rees evidently
> used all the research available to him at the time. To suspect Rees of lying is a slap in the face
> of a great astronomer and cosmologist who has an excellent understanding of the philosophy
> relevant to these subjects.
>

I do not believe there was lying in either Rees or the Paragraph you
presented. Accousing Rees was definitely was _not_ my intent or purpose..

>
>
> But back to the quote from Wikipedia above. Have you seen the post I did shortly after you did this one?
>

I still have a job and a family to support, so I don't always get around
to responding to everything in this NG. This activity holds a distant
place in my daily responsibilities.

>
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/CgjITcZq-AQ/m/c3lnjILTFQAJ
> Re: A conversation about Fine Tuning
>
> In it, I gave information that suggests that [14] supports the hypothesis that a value beyond .008 is
> incompatible with stars lasting long enough for life to
> evolve to an intelligent species?
>

Yes, I've seen this.

>
> Since I posted it, I found out that I had clicked in the wrong place on reference [16], which was
> incorrectly placed right after reference [14]. The Discover article it links was done in 2000,
> beautifully writing about a preliminary version of Rees's book. I think you will love it.
> Here it is:
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20140722210250/http://discovermagazine.com/2000/nov/cover/
>

Thanks, I did read this article and you are right; I loved it.
>
I have not always held the position I do now. In my earlier years I was
a confirmed naturalist, I accepted the contention that the
supernatural should never play a part nor influence scientific
investigation: nor should or could the outcome of scientific research
result in supernatural conclusions. However, I have since come to the
conclusion that wherever the process leads, science should not be
guided by philosophical considerations. If the outcome of scientific
investigation leads to the supernatural, then acknowledge the fact. And
At the present time, I believe scientific findings clearly lead in this
direction.

[jillery]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2021 09:53:47 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
wrote:

One more time:
******************************
Subject: Re: A conversation about Fine Tuning
Message-ID: <7gacdgl7l6pugfl5t...@4ax.com>

On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 15:20:15 -0400, jillery <69jp...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>Your comments above are unclear. I cited and copied the text from
>Wikipedia. So the relevant issue to your point is whether Wikipedia's
>paraphrase accurately conveys Rees' text from the book. If you
>believe Wikipedia's paraphrase is inaccurate, then explain how.
>
>You also conflate multiple issues raised in the peter's posts. Nowhere
>do I say or imply his post misrepresents Rees, nor do my points depend
>on it.
>
>The peter's comments about Rees are only a small part of his posts.
>The majority of his posts consist of obfuscating made-up crap, which
>you had to wallow through in order find that small part about Rees.
>And even that small part doesn't rely on the peter's expertise,
>academic or otherwise.
>
>So your previous expressed basis, that the peter's academic position
>implies general expertise in things scientific, and somehow that
>excuses his spamming made-up crap, is demonstrated nonsense.
>
>And since you made a point of specifically criticizing me for my
>"verbal assault" on the peter, you don't get to continue to ignore his
>verbal assault on me. Not sure how you give the peter any
>credibility.

***********************************


Apparently you have no intention of addressing your willful blindness
to the peter's verbal assaults even as you explicitly criticize me.

[Öö Tiib]

It indicates presence of unknown source(s) of gravity.

> CMB is the afterglow of the temperature of the universe at the exact
> moment it cooled enough for protons to capture electrons. That
> primordial glow was redshifted over time into micowaves. These
> phenomena were predicted 20 years before CMB was discovered, precisely
> because physicists can measure the exact temperature when protons
> capture electrons.

The results of measurement of CMB by the Planck spacecraft
(2013–2015) support the Lambda-CDM model of Big Bang.
"CDM" there being "cold dark matter".

> Before the CMB, the universe's expansion was dominated by radiation
> pressure, another phenomenon physicists can measure.
>
> After the CMB, the universe's expansion is slowed by the gravitational
> attraction of matter. This is another phenomenon physicists can
> measure.
>
> Whatever dark matter is, it does not cause the universe to expand.

On the contrary by current model many galaxies would fly apart (or fail to
form) if they did not contain large amounts of it. My whole point was
that lot of something that we do not know what it is alters processes
and we have next to no idea about what else there can and would be if
anything, for example initial energy of Big Bang was different. We know
it would be different but how we have really no ideas.

[jillery]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2021 11:17:52 -0700 (PDT), Öö Tiib <oot...@hot.ee>

Sometimes the gravity sources are unknown, other times they are quite
obvious. In any case, gravitational lensing is well understood.

>> CMB is the afterglow of the temperature of the universe at the exact
>> moment it cooled enough for protons to capture electrons. That
>> primordial glow was redshifted over time into micowaves. These
>> phenomena were predicted 20 years before CMB was discovered, precisely
>> because physicists can measure the exact temperature when protons
>> capture electrons.
>
> The results of measurement of CMB by the Planck spacecraft
>(2013–2015) support the Lambda-CDM model of Big Bang.
>"CDM" there being "cold dark matter".

Umm... CMB aka Cosmic Microwave Background has nothing to do with CDM
aka Cold Dark Matter.

>> Before the CMB, the universe's expansion was dominated by radiation
>> pressure, another phenomenon physicists can measure.
>>
>> After the CMB, the universe's expansion is slowed by the gravitational
>> attraction of matter. This is another phenomenon physicists can
>> measure.
>>
>> Whatever dark matter is, it does not cause the universe to expand.
>
>On the contrary by current model many galaxies would fly apart (or fail to
>form) if they did not contain large amounts of it.

Correct. Dark matter is gravitationally attractive, as is all matter.
It does not cause the universe to expand.

>My whole point was
>that lot of something that we do not know what it is alters processes
>and we have next to no idea about what else there can and would be if
>anything, for example initial energy of Big Bang was different. We know
>it would be different but how we have really no ideas.

Ok. I acknowledge we have no idea what is cold dark matter.

[Öö Tiib]

Yes, and its magnitude indicates dark matter. We do not seem to disagree?

> >> CMB is the afterglow of the temperature of the universe at the exact
> >> moment it cooled enough for protons to capture electrons. That
> >> primordial glow was redshifted over time into micowaves. These
> >> phenomena were predicted 20 years before CMB was discovered, precisely
> >> because physicists can measure the exact temperature when protons
> >> capture electrons.
> >
> > The results of measurement of CMB by the Planck spacecraft
> >(2013–2015) support the Lambda-CDM model of Big Bang.
> >"CDM" there being "cold dark matter".
>
> Umm... CMB aka Cosmic Microwave Background has nothing to do with CDM
> aka Cold Dark Matter.

Everything is interrelated. Scientists consider the observations of relation done
but Planck spacecraft as dramatic success of LCDM cosmological model.
Majority of accuracy of our numbers today is from that spacecraft. Earlier
observations had lower quality.
"Standard big bang nucleosynthesis predictions for the Planck LCDM cosmology
are in excellent agreement with observations." <https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01589>

> >> Before the CMB, the universe's expansion was dominated by radiation
> >> pressure, another phenomenon physicists can measure.
> >>
> >> After the CMB, the universe's expansion is slowed by the gravitational
> >> attraction of matter. This is another phenomenon physicists can
> >> measure.
> >>
> >> Whatever dark matter is, it does not cause the universe to expand.
> >
> >On the contrary by current model many galaxies would fly apart (or fail to
> >form) if they did not contain large amounts of it.
>
> Correct. Dark matter is gravitationally attractive, as is all matter.
> It does not cause the universe to expand.

Yes, it is small but non-zero Lambda (or vacuum energy) that is
causing its expansion to accelerate by LCDM model.

> >My whole point was
> >that lot of something that we do not know what it is alters processes
> >and we have next to no idea about what else there can and would be if
> >anything, for example initial energy of Big Bang was different. We know
> >it would be different but how we have really no ideas.
>
> Ok. I acknowledge we have no idea what is cold dark matter.

The ideas about nature of that Lambda (or doubting in it) seem even more
speculative (or in difficulties).

[Ron Dean]

I objected to the "name calling". I didn't think it was called for.
I thought you failed to understand the paragraph, labeling it a lie.

Went to a funeral out of town, saw aunts, and cousins I haven't seen in
20 years. So sad, that this is what it takes to see family.

[Ron Dean]

I would appreciate any help.

>
> But that depends on whether you want to be helped. Yesterday, in direct reply to a post of yours,
>

Thank you, I going back in search for this post. I had to go to the
funeral of an aunt so, I'm behind in my responses.

>
> I wrote a long demonstration of how such physical phenomena
> can be handled skillfully. Near the end, I offered to explain something very
> basic to the whole theme of fine tuning of many constants at once.
>
> Not only have you not taken me up on the offer, but you have shown no
> sign of having ever looked at that post, nor the other reply by me to you
> on this thread, that I made today, and loaded with helpful information about, inter alia, the Big Bang.
>
> Thanks to your inaction, I am postponing the demonstration of how
> jillery indulged in a kind of chicanery that is rare even for her, that I
> described briefly to you yesterday. I told you that I would do it for you today,
> but since I have seen no sign that you saw the post in which I wrote it, jillery is off the hook until Monday.
>
> [As I hope you know by now, I only post on weekends under the most extraordinary circumstances.
> The latest exception came a year or more after the preceding one, if memory serves.]
>
> Auf Wiedersehen and Au revoir,
>
> or should I say Adios?
>

No, I going back to it!

[jillery]

On Sun, 27 Jun 2021 22:49:12 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>I would appreciate any help.

Really? Who do you think you're fooling?

[jillery]

On Sun, 27 Jun 2021 02:48:12 -0700 (PDT), Öö Tiib <oot...@hot.ee>

It's not clear what you mean by "its". There are multiple instances
of gravitational lensing. Any sufficiently dense and massive
gravitational source can cause gravitational lensing. Dark matter is
not unique in that respect.

>> >> CMB is the afterglow of the temperature of the universe at the exact
>> >> moment it cooled enough for protons to capture electrons. That
>> >> primordial glow was redshifted over time into micowaves. These
>> >> phenomena were predicted 20 years before CMB was discovered, precisely
>> >> because physicists can measure the exact temperature when protons
>> >> capture electrons.
>> >
>> > The results of measurement of CMB by the Planck spacecraft
>> >(2013–2015) support the Lambda-CDM model of Big Bang.
>> >"CDM" there being "cold dark matter".
>>
>> Umm... CMB aka Cosmic Microwave Background has nothing to do with CDM
>> aka Cold Dark Matter.
>
>Everything is interrelated.

That's true. And because everything is interrelated, it's important
to specify the distinctive relationships of those specific things
you're talking about.

>Scientists consider the observations of relation done
>but Planck spacecraft as dramatic success of LCDM cosmological model.
>Majority of accuracy of our numbers today is from that spacecraft. Earlier
>observations had lower quality.
>"Standard big bang nucleosynthesis predictions for the Planck LCDM cosmology
>are in excellent agreement with observations." <https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01589>

I acknowledge the CMB is strong evidence for the LCDM cosmological
model. The LCDM cosmological model describes the relationships
between dark energy, dark matter, radiation, and ordinary matter. That
does not mean CMB and CDM are the same thing.

>> >> Before the CMB, the universe's expansion was dominated by radiation
>> >> pressure, another phenomenon physicists can measure.
>> >>
>> >> After the CMB, the universe's expansion is slowed by the gravitational
>> >> attraction of matter. This is another phenomenon physicists can
>> >> measure.
>> >>
>> >> Whatever dark matter is, it does not cause the universe to expand.
>> >
>> >On the contrary by current model many galaxies would fly apart (or fail to
>> >form) if they did not contain large amounts of it.
>>
>> Correct. Dark matter is gravitationally attractive, as is all matter.
>> It does not cause the universe to expand.
>
>Yes, it is small but non-zero Lambda (or vacuum energy) that is
>causing its expansion to accelerate by LCDM model.

The Lambda of the LCDM cosmological model refers to dark energy, which
is the repulsive gravitational part, the very opposite of the
attractive gravitational part of dark matter. Both are called "dark"
in part because they are transparent to photons, and in part because
their causes remain unknown. That dark matter and dark energy share
these two features does not mean dark matter and dark energy are the
same thing.

>> >My whole point was
>> >that lot of something that we do not know what it is alters processes
>> >and we have next to no idea about what else there can and would be if
>> >anything, for example initial energy of Big Bang was different. We know
>> >it would be different but how we have really no ideas.
>>
>> Ok. I acknowledge we have no idea what is cold dark matter.
>
>The ideas about nature of that Lambda (or doubting in it) seem even more
>speculative (or in difficulties).

What is speculative about Lambda aka dark energy is its cause. There
are phenomena grouped under "Lambda" which are reasonably documented.
Even if dark energy turns out to be a modern equivalent of
luminiferous aether, these phenomena would still have to be explained.

>> >> You and Dean might find the following useful:
>> >> <https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_bigbang_timeline.html>
>> >> >> > To fix it we have added placeholder things to our universe that
>> >> >> > we call "dark matter". By our calculations our universe has to
>> >> >> > be made of about 85% such a matter for things to start to make some
>> >> >> > sense again.
>> >> >>
>> >> >> OK
>> >> >
>> >> >So hopefully you see that we do not have fully satisfying answers to
>> >> >questions that I asked below.
>> >> >> >
>> >> >> > So how can we claim in what manner that something about 85%
>> >> >> > of what we know next to nothing behaves under forces of
>> >> >> > different magnitude?
>> >> >> >
>> >> >> > Or lets say magnitude of our ignorance is way smaller and it is
>> >> >> > lot less than 85%? Then general relativity theory is incorrect
>> >> >> > and should be modified in some manner. Then we do not
>> >> >> > even have correct ideas yet how gravity behaves?

[jillery]

On Sun, 27 Jun 2021 22:39:40 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>

That was not your original expressed objection. You later objected to
my alleged name calling, but you *still* say nothing of the peter's
explicit name calling. Do you really think his name calling was
"called for".

>I thought you failed to understand the paragraph, labeling it a lie.

Yes, and I corrected your misunderstanding, that the peter's lies are
not what you thought they were. But you *still* don't acknowledge
your error, or his lies, which you had to read in order to get to your
presumed error.

The more you post, the more you show your willful blindness.

>Went to a funeral out of town, saw aunts, and cousins I haven't seen in
>20 years. So sad, that this is what it takes to see family.

Is that supposed to excuse your inexcusable behavior here?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

You are playing "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" about jillery's
flaunting of her incorrigibility.

> This decision of yours will be a sure
> nailbiter for everyone named and unnamed lurkers included.

You are behaving like a drama queen all through this post, hypocrite.

If you were any good at reading between the lines, you would know
that I will have to think very carefully about what sort of policy
to adopt against a cunning polemicist and propagandist like jillery.

To adopt the wrong kind would be like Br'er Fox flinging Br'er Rabbit into the briar patch.

>The most
> momentous occasion in the unfurling drama that is talk.origins.
>
> Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
>
> Appropriate theme music:
>
> https://youtu.be/98T3PVaRrHU

When was the last time you displayed any insight into your behavior?

Was it before March 2019, the month when the boycott against Oxyaena and Erik began?


Peter Nyikos

[Jonathan]

On 6/22/2021 7:49 AM, jillery wrote:
> The fine tuning of the Universe: Was the cosmos made for us?
>
> A 75-minute dialogue between Sabine Hossenfelder, Luke Barnes, and
> Justin Brierly, the host of The Big Conversation Show, sponsored by
> the Templeton Foundation.
>
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OoYzcxzvvM>
>
> Short version: Barnes opens with the standard fine-tuning argument
> that physical constants have unlikely values which allow for the
> existence of a universe with humans in it. Hossenfelder opens with
> the standard riposte that we don't know if the physical constants
> could have had any other value than they do, so the presumption of
> fine tuning is scientifically meaningless.
>
> Some might find the topic or the persons too boring to listen to for
> 75-minutes, but I found it informative and interesting. A point
> Hossenfelder raised is her frustration with many scientists' failure
> to distinguish between scientific questions and non-scientific
> speculations, fine-tuning being an example of the latter.
>

Has it occurred to anyone the universal constants
....evolve, like everything else. So they would be
ideal for life at every point in time?

The Chairman of Princeton Theoretical Physics Dept
and original author of the cosmic coincidence problem
and a founding father of modern cosmology thinks so.


A Quintessential Introduction into Dark Energy

By Paul J. Steinhardt
Department of Physics, Princeton University

(excerpts)

By analogy, in the current context, quintessence would
be the fifth dynamical component that has influenced
the evolution of the Universe, in addition to the
previously known baryons, leptons, photons and
dark matter.

Unlike a cosmological constant, the
quintessential pressure and energy density
evolve in time, and w may also do so.

Furthermore, because the quintessence component
evolves in time, it is, by general
covariance, necessarily spatially inhomogeneous.

In some models, quintessence also has a time varying
speed of sound that can enhance the effect of fluctuations
on the CMB and large-scale structure.


3. Fine-tuning, cosmic coincidence, and the quintessential solution


Whatever form the dark energy takes, two new cosmological
problems arise. First, the component must have a tiny energy
density (ca. 10¡47 GeV4) today.

How does this small value arise from a microphysical theory?
We will refer to this puzzle as the fine-tuning problem’.
A second problem arises when the cosmological model is
extrapolated back in time to the very early Universe, at
the end of inflation, say.

The quintessence energy density decreases at a different rate
the matter density, and their ratio shrinks by many orders
of magnitude as we extrapolate back in time. The observations
tell us that, somehow, the ratio was set initially just right
so that now, fifteen billion years later, the ratio is of
order unity.

Accounting for the special ratio in the early Universe will be
referred to as the `coincidence problem’ (Steinhardt 1997).

The coincidence problem is a generalization of the flatness
problem pointed out by Dicke & Peebles (1979).

The fine-tuning and cosmic coincidence problems are vexing.
They are often posed as a paradox: why should the acceleration
begin just as humans evolve?

In desperation, some cosmologists and physicists have given
renewed attention to anthropic models (Weinberg 2000).
But many continue to seek a dynamical explanation
which does not require the fine-tuning of initial conditions
or mass parameters and which is decidedly non-anthropic.

A dynamical approach would seem to demand some
sort of quintessence solution, since it would have
to entail some interaction between the dark energy
and the matter radiation background.


https://physics.princeton.edu//~steinh/steinhardt.pdf





--
https://twitter.com/Non_Linear1

[Öö Tiib]

2003

> By Paul J. Steinhardt
> Department of Physics, Princeton University

Perhaps he has read something from Lawrence Maxwell Krauss
like "The Fifth Essence", 1989 and/or "Quintessence: The Search for
Missing Mass in the Universe", 2000.

[Jonathan]

I like that paper because it begins with a
wonderful and concise summary of the current
state of cosmology. Little has changed since
then except for...his cyclic model.

>> By Paul J. Steinhardt
>> Department of Physics, Princeton University
>
> Perhaps he has read something from Lawrence Maxwell Krauss
> like "The Fifth Essence", 1989 and/or "Quintessence: The Search for
> Missing Mass in the Universe", 2000.
>

Steinhardt is hard to beat for a definitive source.

He wrote the book on inflationary theory, the
core of the Big Bang theory and also his newer
cyclic model that is now the leading rival
to the standard model.


He is well known as one of the original architects of the
inflationary model of the universe, having constructed
the first viable models and having shown how inflation
can generate nearly scale-invariant density variations
(recently confirmed by observation); he was also the first
to show that quantum fluctuations make inflation eternal,
which ultimately leads to a multiverse.

Concerned that the multiverse effect and the sensitivity
to initial conditions destroy the predictability and
other attractive features of inflation, Steinhardt later
co-developed the “cyclic model” of the universe, which
is now considered the leading rival cosmology.
https://paulsteinhardt.org/bio/#







https://twitter.com/Non_Linear1

[*Hemidactylus*]

I haven’t been paying much attention to them. Maybe you should try that.

>
>> This decision of yours will be a sure
>> nailbiter for everyone named and unnamed lurkers included.
>
> You are behaving like a drama queen all through this post, hypocrite.
>

Is that a tu quoque back acha? 🤪

>
> If you were any good at reading between the lines, you would know
> that I will have to think very carefully about what sort of policy
> to adopt against a cunning polemicist and propagandist like jillery.
>

Could reading between the lines be part of your problem, false positives or
imaginary patterns projected by your inner schemata?

>
> To adopt the wrong kind would be like Br'er Fox flinging Br'er Rabbit into the briar patch.
>

Didn’t Disney cancel Song of the South and Splash Mountain?

>
> >The most
>> momentous occasion in the unfurling drama that is talk.origins.
>>
>> Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
>>
>> Appropriate theme music:
>>
>> https://youtu.be/98T3PVaRrHU
>
> When was the last time you displayed any insight into your behavior?
>

I can’t recall the particular episode. Was it before or after Stefano
messing with Marlena’s soul led to her demon possession?

>
> Was it before March 2019, the month when the boycott against Oxyaena and Erik began?
>

I thought March 2014 was the important date because Scannersgate.
Cronenberg is an acquired taste.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, June 25, 2021 at 10:51:05 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 15:22:22 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 10:41:06 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak,
> >like jillery, bypassed my last reply to Hemidactylus, and
> >wrote:
> >> On 6/23/21 10:25 PM, jillery wrote:
> >
> >Having dealt with jillery's post to which you are tacitly expressing agreement, I am leaving only one line
> >from it:
> >
> >> > For someone who spam brags about how he is a "goddamn moralizer"
> >
> >
> >> I also wonder if Peter realizes that "goddam moralizer" is essentially a
> >> synonym of "sanctimonious jerk."
> >
> >I've known it for most of my life.

I see I was unintentionally misleading here, because I was trying to see the issue from Mark's POV.

What I meant was that I've known for most of my life that amoral persons like Mark Isaak do take the two
terms to be synonymous. And that is true also of where I first read the expression.

But "moralizing" and "sanctimonious" have utterly different definitions in the Merriam-Webster
dictionary, which is second only to the OED in authoritativeness.

Mark Isaak talks the talk of morality from time to time, but when he told the Dr. Dr. that he needed
to resign from the medical profession because of the (alleged) lie that the Dr. Dr. told, he
certainly wasn't walking the walk. For one thing, Mark's reaction was totally blown out of proportion
as to its cause. For another, when someone finally documented Mark's statement that was at issue,
it turned out that the Dr. Dr.'s recollection was at least as close to the truth as Mark's version.

So Mark was sanctimonious, but only play-acting at moralizing, when he went into that tirade.

> > So you've tacitly refuted jillery's self-serving claim that I am bragging.

> To the contrary, most sanctimonious jerks I know brag about it regularly.

Aren't you confusing two things -- people who brag about how moral they say they are
with people who actually claim *explicitly* to be sanctimonious?

I find it hard to believe that anyone could be so self-defeating as to use the word "sanctimonious"
in describing himself and bragging that he is that way. Even to use it as a form of self-deprecating
humor could easily backfire.


In any event, I don't fall into either extreme: I know how just being the moralizer that I am is enough to earn
the epithet "goddamn" in the eyes of the most influential people in talk.origins, including you and Mark and your admirer Burkhard, and I keep calling attention to that fact. As I wrote in another reply to you [1] have
no idea which of us will be better off in the afterlife, if there is such a thing [which I tend to doubt].

[1] It is still preserved in the reply Hemidactylus did to me a few minutes ago. Keywords: Stalinist Gulag


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Below, I document some cunning manglings of text and deceitful misdirection by
jillery, designed to rewrite talk.origins history in her favor, undetected.

But I detected it, and am documenting it below as an illustration of how I
can and sometimes do prove that some claims by jillery are lies (three or more, to be exact, below).
What jillery perennially claims to be her "documenting lies" by me consists of
labeling statements by me as lies with no attempt to show that they ARE lies.

On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 1:26:06 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:

> On Wed, 23 Jun 2021 08:50:23 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

> >On Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 1:31:06 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:

> >> On Tue, 22 Jun 2021 14:49:38 +0200, Athel Cornish-Bowden
> >> <acor...@imm.cnrs.fr> wrote:
> >>
> >> >On 2021-06-22 11:49:39 +0000, jillery said:
> >> >

> >> >> The fine tuning of the Universe: Was the cosmos made for us?
> >> >>
> >> >> A 75-minute dialogue between Sabine Hossenfelder, Luke Barnes, and
> >> >> Justin Brierly, the host of The Big Conversation Show, sponsored by
> >> >> the Templeton Foundation.
> >> >>
> >> >> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OoYzcxzvvM>
> >> >>
> >> >> Short version: Barnes opens with the standard fine-tuning argument
> >> >> that physical constants have unlikely values which allow for the
> >> >> existence of a universe with humans in it. Hossenfelder opens with
> >> >> the standard riposte that we don't know if the physical constants
> >> >> could have had any other value than they do, so the presumption of
> >> >> fine tuning is scientifically meaningless.

Sabine claimed that, given that these constants can't be changed, it is not scientific to say
"there is something here that is in need of an explanation." Her idea of what is scientific
gets clarified further a little later, when she claims that the existence of a multiverse
"is not a scientific hypothesis."

> >
> >A riposte that is undermined by what you claimed about her this time around.

> Yet another baseless assertion for which you tender no argument at
> all.

You made it seem that way below, by snipping the statement to which I was responding
and making it look like I was responding to something completely different.

Then you moved the three lines you snipped to a later place in your reply, finishing your
deceit about "no argument at all" by the way you placed it, and indulging in new deceit
by accusing me of the very splitting of your paragraph that you had performed.


<snip to get to where you did it>

> >> However, Hossenfelder's objection also applies to Aguirre's argument.
> >> Her point is one raised by Carlip the last time he discussed
> >> fine-tuning on T.O.
###It is possible the initial conditions of the
### universe could have varied in such a way that would have altered the
### physical constants from what they are in this universe.

> >If Hossenfelder and Carlip actually wrote that and went no further, they were actually
> >supporting fine-tuning arguments, and undermining the "riposte" that you attributed to
> >Hossenfelder above.

> That's it?

Now that I have restored the three lines you snipped to their rightful place [marked by ###
instead of >>> ] it is clear that if Hossenfelder said that, then she was contradicting the
reason you attributed to her giving for the presumption of fine tuning to be "scientifically
meaningless."

Yes, "that's it" until someone disagrees with what I wrote in response to the
three lines that you snipped and I restored.

But you didn't do that: you went into a phony rant about the virtual reality that
you had created:

> To assert your baseless opinion for which you tender no
> argument at all?

It isn't an opinion, baseless or otherwise, about the three lines that preceded
mine in your mangled version of what actually transpired.


You go on to milk your virtual reality for all it is worth, and then
some, with your next bit of insincere crap:

> Perhaps that's because you know if you even tried to
> back up your opinion, you would sound even more stupid than you
> already do.

Correction: more stupid than the wholly fictitious character that you dishonestly
tried to pass off as myself, thanks to your deceitful mangling of text.


Not content with that, you falsely accuse me of doing the very thing you did:

> Worse, you split my paragraph and made it look like I credit
> Hossenfelder for something I wrote.

You are telling a triple lie here. First, it was you who split it. Second, you DID credit Hossenfelder
and not yourself for the three lines you ripped out of their rightful place.

Third, you falsely credit yourself for the content of those three lines below,
at the place to which you moved them.


> I explicitly described Hossenfelder's riposte.

That was a while back; in between came some information about Aguirre.


> To which I added the following as a separate point:

No, the two were not connected. That "separate point" is the following three lines,
which I restored to its proper place earlier:

> >> It is possible the initial conditions of the
> >> universe could have varied in such a way that would have altered the
> >> physical constants from what they are in this universe.

When you first wrote that paragraph, you certainly made it seem that these three lines
are "Her point ... raised by Carlip [also]". See my restoration above.


> >> That possibility is the basis for Multiverse.

Now these WERE your words; but Sabine pronounced the whole idea of a multiverse to be
"not a scientific hypothesis," and so you were on your own here.

By the way, you are the only person I know of who writes "Multiverse" without preceding it
with "a" or "the", and who capitalizes the word.


I've deleted the remainder, where you only delivered baseless taunts and no longer
continued the far more strenuous and reprehensive task of deceiving readers
into thinking that you and I were doing something far removed from what actually happened.


Peter Nyikos

[Mark Isaak]

The dictionary definition of "moralize" I used says, "comment on issues
of right and wrong, typically with an unfounded air of superiority." In
other words, moralizing is typically sanctimonious.


If you want to find the most moral posters, you must somehow find a way
to count the nasty accusatory posts that people thought about sending
and did not. The people doing that are the ones practicing moral
principles.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 11:01:06 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 6/28/21 5:08 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Friday, June 25, 2021 at 10:51:05 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> >> On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 15:22:22 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> >> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 10:41:06 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak,
> >>> like jillery, bypassed my last reply to Hemidactylus, and
> >>> wrote:
> >>>> On 6/23/21 10:25 PM, jillery wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Having dealt with jillery's post to which you are tacitly expressing agreement, I am leaving only one line
> >> >from it:
> >>>
> >>>>> For someone who spam brags about how he is a "goddamn moralizer"
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> I also wonder if Peter realizes that "goddam moralizer" is essentially a
> >>>> synonym of "sanctimonious jerk."
> >>>
> >>> I've known it for most of my life.
> >
> > I see I was unintentionally misleading here, because I was trying to see the issue from Mark's POV.
> >
> > What I meant was that I've known for most of my life that amoral persons like Mark Isaak do take the two
> > terms to be synonymous. And that is true also of where I first read the expression.

Below, Mark shows me just how well I "read his mind" on his POV: very well indeed.

> > But "moralizing" and "sanctimonious" have utterly different definitions in the Merriam-Webster
> > dictionary, which is second only to the OED in authoritativeness.
> >
> > Mark Isaak talks the talk of morality from time to time, but when he told the Dr. Dr. that he needed
> > to resign from the medical profession because of the (alleged) lie that the Dr. Dr. told, he
> > certainly wasn't walking the walk. For one thing, Mark's reaction was totally blown out of proportion
> > as to its cause. For another, when someone finally documented Mark's statement that was at issue,
> > it turned out that the Dr. Dr.'s recollection was at least as close to the truth as Mark's version.
> >
> > So Mark was sanctimonious, but only play-acting at moralizing, when he went into that tirade.

Below, Mark, you implicitly admit how right I was in the two preceding paragraphs, even from your own POV.

> >
> >>> So you've tacitly refuted jillery's self-serving claim that I am bragging.
> >
> >> To the contrary, most sanctimonious jerks I know brag about it regularly.
> >
> > Aren't you confusing two things -- people who brag about how moral they say they are
> > with people who actually claim *explicitly* to be sanctimonious?
> >
> > I find it hard to believe that anyone could be so self-defeating as to use the word "sanctimonious"
> > in describing himself and bragging that he is that way. Even to use it as a form of self-deprecating
> > humor could easily backfire.
> >
> >
> > In any event, I don't fall into either extreme: I know how just being the moralizer that I am is enough to earn
> > the epithet "goddamn" in the eyes of the most influential people in talk.origins, including you and Mark and your admirer Burkhard, and I keep calling attention to that fact. As I wrote in another reply to you [1] have
> > no idea which of us will be better off in the afterlife, if there is such a thing [which I tend to doubt].

> The dictionary definition of "moralize" I used

... is from a dictionary with "Oxford" in its name, but having no more direct connection with the OED
than umpteen "Webster's" dictionaries have with the Merriam-Webster Collegiate, or Unabridged,
or online dictionaries.

The online one says:

: to explain or interpret morally
2a: to give a moral quality or direction to
b: to improve the morals of
intransitive verb
: to make moral reflections

> says, "comment on issues
> of right and wrong, typically with an unfounded air of superiority."

The word "unfounded" makes this crass editorializing, more along the lines of
Ambrose Bierce's _The_Devil's_Dictionary

> In other words, moralizing is typically sanctimonious.

You are free to adopt this definition in your cherry-picked dictionary, and as long
as you don't pretend it is an authoritative definition, I say, "Whatever floats your boat."

>
> If you want to find the most moral posters, you must somehow find a way
> to count the nasty accusatory posts that people thought about sending
> and did not.

IOW, your idea of a "most moral" poster is completely in line with your amoral character.
For people to refrain from accusing someone of dishonesty, hypocrisy, cowardice, unfairness, etc.
when they have strong evidence for this accusation,
is to refrain from moralizing in the Merriam-Webster sense of the word.

It also ignores the statement widely attributed to Burke: "In order for evil to triumph,
all that is necessary is that good men do nothing."

But then, the words "evil" and "good" have no meaning for you unless they suit a selfish
or leftist agenda, do they?

> The people doing that are the ones practicing moral
> principles.

Thanks for admitting, from your own POV no less, that you weren't practicing moral principles
in that clash with the Dr. Dr.

>
> --
> Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
> "The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred
> to the presence of those who think they've found it." - Terry Pratchett

In another reply to you, I explained how you have acted contrary to the spirit of your .sig.
So far, that seems to be a post that "you can't see because you don't want to see it."
I wonder whether this reply of mine will meet with the same reaction from you.


Peter Nyikos

[Mark Isaak]

Another thing moralizers need to be aware of is Fundamental Attribution
Error.

(And for the record, I find nothing you say about me or anyone else in
this forum to have any value.)

[jillery]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 19:24:09 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> continues to spam about imaginary molehills
he inflates into delusional mountains:

>Below, I document some cunning manglings of text and deceitful misdirection by
>jillery, designed to rewrite talk.origins history in her favor, undetected.

And you *still* can't read minds any better than you can read written
English.

It's about time you actually listened to the cited video. Give
yourself a gold star.

>> >A riposte that is undermined by what you claimed about her this time around.
>
>> Yet another baseless assertion for which you tender no argument at
>> all.
>
>You made it seem that way below, by snipping the statement to which I was responding
>and making it look like I was responding to something completely different.
>
>Then you moved the three lines you snipped to a later place in your reply, finishing your
>deceit about "no argument at all" by the way you placed it, and indulging in new deceit
>by accusing me of the very splitting of your paragraph that you had performed.

I snipped nothing, liar. In fact, I was very careful to *not* snip
anything, including your mindless spam, in order to preserve it for
documentation purposes. Instead, I restored the meaning of what I
wrote, which you previously mangled with your mindless spam into
incoherence. Which I explained in the very post to which you reply
here. And now you mangle below that very explanation into incoherence
with yet more or your mindless spam. Not sure how anybody gives you
any credibility.

<the following mangling spam left unaltered for documentation
purposes>

Yet more of your lies from a lying liar. What you deleted are
responses to *your* baseless taunts and deceptions. Apparently your
Big Lies and self-serving dishonesty fool the foolish, but it doesn't
fool anybody who knows what they're talking about.

[jillery]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:08:23 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"

<peter2...@gmail.com> continues to spam about imaginary molehills
he inflates into delusional mountains:

>On Friday, June 25, 2021 at 10:51:05 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 15:22:22 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 10:41:06 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak,
>> >like jillery, bypassed my last reply to Hemidactylus, and
>> >wrote:
>> >> On 6/23/21 10:25 PM, jillery wrote:
>> >
>> >Having dealt with jillery's post to which you are tacitly expressing agreement, I am leaving only one line
>> >from it:
>> >
>> >> > For someone who spam brags about how he is a "goddamn moralizer"
>> >
>> >
>> >> I also wonder if Peter realizes that "goddam moralizer" is essentially a
>> >> synonym of "sanctimonious jerk."
>> >
>> >I've known it for most of my life.
>
>I see I was unintentionally misleading here, because I was trying to see the issue from Mark's POV.
>
>What I meant was that I've known for most of my life that amoral persons like Mark Isaak do take the two
>terms to be synonymous. And that is true also of where I first read the expression.
>
>But "moralizing" and "sanctimonious" have utterly different definitions in the Merriam-Webster
>dictionary, which is second only to the OED in authoritativeness.
>
>Mark Isaak talks the talk of morality from time to time, but when he told the Dr. Dr. that he needed
>to resign from the medical profession because of the (alleged) lie that the Dr. Dr. told, he
>certainly wasn't walking the walk. For one thing, Mark's reaction was totally blown out of proportion
>as to its cause. For another, when someone finally documented Mark's statement that was at issue,
>it turned out that the Dr. Dr.'s recollection was at least as close to the truth as Mark's version.
>
>So Mark was sanctimonious, but only play-acting at moralizing, when he went into that tirade.

I suppose, for self-serving meanings of "sanctimonius", "play-acting",
"moralizing", and "tirade".

>> > So you've tacitly refuted jillery's self-serving claim that I am bragging.
>
>> To the contrary, most sanctimonious jerks I know brag about it regularly.
>
>Aren't you confusing two things -- people who brag about how moral they say they are
>with people who actually claim *explicitly* to be sanctimonious?

Since you asked, no. You're welcome.

>I find it hard to believe that anyone could be so self-defeating as to use the word "sanctimonious"
>in describing himself and bragging that he is that way. Even to use it as a form of self-deprecating
>humor could easily backfire.

No need to believe, just look in any mirror. It was you who pinned
"goddamn moralizer" on yourself, and then repeatedly bragged about it.

>In any event, I don't fall into either extreme: I know how just being the moralizer that I am is enough to earn
>the epithet "goddamn" in the eyes of the most influential people in talk.origins, including you and Mark and your admirer Burkhard, and I keep calling attention to that fact. As I wrote in another reply to you [1] have
>no idea which of us will be better off in the afterlife, if there is such a thing [which I tend to doubt].
>
>[1] It is still preserved in the reply Hemidactylus did to me a few minutes ago. Keywords: Stalinist Gulag
>
>
>Peter Nyikos

Your comments above are yet more of your spamming meaningless noise.

[jillery]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 18:45:31 -0500, *Hemidactylus*
<ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote:

>> You are playing "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" about jillery's
>> flaunting of her incorrigibility.
>>
>I haven’t been paying much attention to them. Maybe you should try that.

You pay enough attention to semi-regularly post nonsense non-sequiturs
and asinine ad-hominems about them, and to encourage the peter's
spamming Big Lies, and to enable his efforts to make T.O. a Hellhole.

[jillery]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 04:58:09 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>You are playing "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" about jillery's
>flaunting of her incorrigibility.

You are playing "throw made-up crap on the walls to see what sticks".

[jillery]

I acknowledge there are lots of unknowns and uncertainties to all
cosmological models. Cosmic Inflation does have answers to some of
the problems you describe above. But you're right, some physicists
like Steinhardt disagree with those answers, or think their hypotheses
provide better answers. Meanwhile, their hypotheses have problems of
their own. For example, the cyclic universe doesn't explain how the
universe could shift from an accelerating phase to a decelerating
phase. And it doesn't explain why the cyclic amplitude wouldn't
decrease over time.

WRT to quintessence and repulsive forces generally, there are several
ways to explain them without requiring additional fundamental forces.
The LCDM model presumes dark energy is correlated to spacetime itself.
Even with a constant energy density, the total dark energy increases
as spacetime increases, even as the energy density of gravity
decreases. Another way is if our relatively lower mass observable
universe is accelerating into a relatively higher mass unobservable
universe.

[Ron Dean]

You were mistaken, that was the original objection.

>
You later objected to
> my alleged name calling, but you *still* say nothing of the peter's
> explicit name calling. Do you really think his name calling was
> "called for".
>

I do not read every post either you or Peter places on the talk origins
NG. So no, I didn't see it. But I did see yours.

>
>
>> I thought you failed to understand the paragraph, labeling it a lie.
>
>
> Yes, and I corrected your misunderstanding, that the peter's lies are
> not what you thought they were. But you *still* don't acknowledge
> your error, or his lies, which you had to read in order to get to your
> presumed error.
>

I do not think I was mistaken in this particular case.

>
> The more you post, the more you show your willful blindness.
>

This constant degrading, disparaging and malign others earns nothing
positive for you.

>
>> Went to a funeral out of town, saw aunts, and cousins I haven't seen in
>> 20 years. So sad, that this is what it takes to see family.
>
>
> Is that supposed to excuse your inexcusable behavior here?
>

You certainly have absolutely no room for complaint.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Which you don't bother to identify or give any reason for thinking I violate it.

> (And for the record, I find nothing you say about me or anyone else in
> this forum to have any value.)

None of it fits your agenda, eh? Thank you for adding evidence to what I wrote further up,
by breezing past it as though it didn't exist:

> > But then, the words "evil" and "good" have no meaning for you unless they suit a selfish
> > or leftist agenda, do they?

and also what I wrote in support of a Yes answer to the question:

> > IOW, your idea of a "most moral" poster is completely in line with your amoral character.
> > For people to refrain from accusing someone of dishonesty, hypocrisy, cowardice, unfairness, etc.
> > when they have strong evidence for this accusation,
> > is to refrain from moralizing in the Merriam-Webster sense of the word.
> >
> > It also ignores the statement widely attributed to Burke: "In order for evil to triumph,
> > all that is necessary is that good men do nothing."

And thanks for so well confirming what I wrote above:

> > So far, that seems to be a post that "you can't see because you don't want to see it."

Also, thanks for showing that I was wondering in the right direction at the end.
You didn't exactly fail to see the post to which you are replying,
but you completely ignored its content.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 1:31:06 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 04:58:09 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

In reply to Hemidactylus:

> >You are playing "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" about jillery's
> >flaunting of her incorrigibility.

> You are playing "throw made-up crap on the walls to see what sticks".

You had to do massive deletia to make that libel look plausible. Hemidactylus
didn't deny what I wrote; he just didn't realize that this is the first time I've seen anyone on
the internet flaunting their incorrigibility with the damning evidence in plain sight.

And you deleted that, too, so that it would no longer be in evidence. But it is
the reason why I've decided to take the drastic measures I explained to Hemidactylus.

Which you also deleted, you spineless coward.

If you didn't snip so much evidence over the years, I might not be taking such drastic action today;
but the combination of the two things, your perennial snip-n-deceive and the flaunting of your incorrigibility,
make it prudent to do something akin to the 2019 boycott of Oxyaena and Simpson.


Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 08:44:36 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"

<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 11:01:06 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 6/28/21 5:08 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> > On Friday, June 25, 2021 at 10:51:05 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> >> On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 15:22:22 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> >> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 10:41:06 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak,
>> >>> like jillery, bypassed my last reply to Hemidactylus, and
>> >>> wrote:
>> >>>> On 6/23/21 10:25 PM, jillery wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> Having dealt with jillery's post to which you are tacitly expressing agreement, I am leaving only one line
>> >> >from it:
>> >>>
>> >>>>> For someone who spam brags about how he is a "goddamn moralizer"
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>> I also wonder if Peter realizes that "goddam moralizer" is essentially a
>> >>>> synonym of "sanctimonious jerk."
>> >>>
>> >>> I've known it for most of my life.
>> >
>> > I see I was unintentionally misleading here, because I was trying to see the issue from Mark's POV.
>> >
>> > What I meant was that I've known for most of my life that amoral persons like Mark Isaak do take the two
>> > terms to be synonymous. And that is true also of where I first read the expression.
>
>Below, Mark shows me just how well I "read his mind" on his POV: very well indeed.

Only in your delusional dreams. All you do below is practice dueling
dictionaries, without actually dealing with the actual label you
actually applied to yourself; "goddamn moralizer". "goddamn"
explicitly modifies the meaning of "moralizer". It's the meaning of
the entire phrase, which is relevant here.

There is an official online Oxford English Dictionary, maintained and
updated by Oxford University Press. You can access it free using a
card from participating libraries, or if you pay $100 for an
individual subscription.

Ironically, almost all of the Google hits for "goddamn moralizer" are
for your posts to T.O. I suppose that's one way to get free
publicity.


>> The dictionary definition of "moralize" I used says, "comment on issues

>> of right and wrong, typically with an unfounded air of superiority."
>
>... is from a dictionary with "Oxford" in its name, but having no more direct connection with the OED
>than umpteen "Webster's" dictionaries have with the Merriam-Webster Collegiate, or Unabridged,
>or online dictionaries.
>
>The online one says:
>
>: to explain or interpret morally
>2a: to give a moral quality or direction to
>b: to improve the morals of
>intransitive verb
>: to make moral reflections

You don't provide a link to your "online one". For someone who gets
his knappies in a bunch when other posters don't provide links, not
sure how you conveniently forgot to do it here.

[jillery]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 13:42:57 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>

You're just digging yourself ever deeper:
*******************************

Subject: Re: A conversation about Fine Tuning

Message-ID: <KH1BI.68915$iY.5...@fx41.iad>
On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 11:40:26 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>I certainly don't mean to be offensive, but Peter Nyikos, as Professor
>of Mathematics does give him a very high measure of intelligence. And
>since science is based on mathematics, I would argue that this man, as a
>Dr. of mathematics is far more authoritative on the subject of science
>than you or me.
************************************

>> You later objected to
>> my alleged name calling, but you *still* say nothing of the peter's
>> explicit name calling. Do you really think his name calling was
>> "called for".
> >
>I do not read every post either you or Peter places on the talk origins
>NG. So no, I didn't see it. But I did see yours.

The very post in which you posted your second complaint *included* the
peter's comments you continue to pretend you "didn't see":

****************************
Subject: Re: A conversation about Fine Tuning

Message-ID: <PK4BI.16793$9q1....@fx09.iad>
On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:08:31 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>Yes, this is my position, but at the same time I took exception to your
>verbal assault on a person, who whether you agree or not is uncalled for.
****************************
Why do you persist in posting false claims that are trivially proved
false?

>>> I thought you failed to understand the paragraph, labeling it a lie.
>>
>>
>> Yes, and I corrected your misunderstanding, that the peter's lies are
>> not what you thought they were. But you *still* don't acknowledge
>> your error, or his lies, which you had to read in order to get to your
>> presumed error.
> >
>I do not think I was mistaken in this particular case.

You replied to my explanation of your mistake, all still preserved in
the quoted text above. You did not correct me then. But since you now
say you don't believe my explanation, please specify how you still
think my explanation is in error.

>> The more you post, the more you show your willful blindness.
>>
>This constant degrading, disparaging and malign others earns nothing
>positive for you.

This constant, degrading, disparaging and malign *behavior* by you

earns nothing positive for you.


>>> Went to a funeral out of town, saw aunts, and cousins I haven't seen in
>>> 20 years. So sad, that this is what it takes to see family.
>>
>>
>> Is that supposed to excuse your inexcusable behavior here?
>>
>You certainly have absolutely no room for complaint.

Feel free to cite and specify any inexcusable behavior I have
demonstrated in this topic. So far, all you have done is to post and
repost false claims against me. You're not the R.Dean I remember.

[jillery]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 11:34:06 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"

<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 1:31:06 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 04:58:09 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>
>In reply to Hemidactylus:
>
>> >You are playing "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" about jillery's
>> >flaunting of her incorrigibility.
>
>> You are playing "throw made-up crap on the walls to see what sticks".
>
>You had to do massive deletia to make that libel look plausible.

Nope. Your trademark phrase proves my point for me. That's why I
copied it.

>Hemidactylus
>didn't deny what I wrote; he just didn't realize that this is the first time I've seen anyone on
>the internet flaunting their incorrigibility with the damning evidence in plain sight.

Liar. You see it every time you post.

>And you deleted that, too, so that it would no longer be in evidence.

Don't be so stupid. Everything you posted is available to anybody and
everybody who cares to read your mindless made-up crap, for as long as
Usenet servers archive it. I have no obligation to help you
perpetuate your stupid spam.

> But it is
>the reason why I've decided to take the drastic measures I explained to Hemidactylus.
>
>Which you also deleted, you spineless coward.
>
> If you didn't snip so much evidence over the years, I might not be taking such drastic action today;
>but the combination of the two things, your perennial snip-n-deceive and the flaunting of your incorrigibility,
>make it prudent to do something akin to the 2019 boycott of Oxyaena and Simpson.

Don't like that I don't repost your mindless made-up crap? Then stop
posting mindless made-up crap. Not sure how even you *still* don't
understand that.

[Mark Isaak]

On 6/29/21 11:16 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 12:06:06 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>
>> Another thing moralizers need to be aware of is Fundamental Attribution
>> Error.
>
> Which you don't bother to identify or give any reason for thinking I violate it.

I and others have done so many times in the past. You only disdain
their observations. Besides, the FIRST rule of worthy moralizing is to
apply the principles to oneself. You should be able to identify
violations yourself.

>> (And for the record, I find nothing you say about me or anyone else in
>> this forum to have any value.)
>
> None of it fits your agenda, eh?

You do not get to speak for me.

> Thank you for adding evidence to what I wrote further up,

> by breezing past it as though it didn't exist: [...]

On the contrary, I directly addressed what you wrote.

> And thanks for so well confirming what I wrote above:
>>> So far, that seems to be a post that "you can't see because you don't want to see it."

I was just thinking the same of you. Curious, isn't it?

[Glenn]

And from that search I found, among other examples, of what Peter means:

"except when I see what I looks like despicable behavior towards
someone ELSE; in such cases I will continue to be a "goddamn moralizer."

So to *you*, "the peter" is a "goddamn" moralizer.

Where did you and Mark and all the other evolutionists get your stupid pills from?

[Ron Dean]

On 6/28/21 5:44 AM, jillery wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Jun 2021 22:49:12 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I would appreciate any help.
>
>
> Really? Who do you think you're fooling?
>
Nobody, including you has all the answers. Only the arrogant, vain,
self-important, know-it-all people need no help. If you are born all
knowing then education is a waste of time. I don't fit this description.
Do you??

[Ron Dean]

On 6/26/21 10:41 AM, jillery wrote:

I cannot read your mind, so I don't know what you saw as verbal assault
by Peter. Please enlighten me! I only criticized that which I saw which
came from you that I believe was a mistake on your part.

[Glenn]

Nah. Just give him a minute to answer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twJqr-u5xm0

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I reply in detail below to jillery, but only because I think the lexicographic issues
are worth reading by others whose ideology allows them to be more flexible towards
me than jillery. IOW, this reply is primarily for them, even though I address jillery in the
second person below.

On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 2:51:06 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 08:44:36 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 11:01:06 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >> On 6/28/21 5:08 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> > On Friday, June 25, 2021 at 10:51:05 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> >> >> On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 15:22:22 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> >> >> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >>> On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 10:41:06 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak,
> >> >>> like jillery, bypassed my last reply to Hemidactylus, and
> >> >>> wrote:
> >> >>>> On 6/23/21 10:25 PM, jillery wrote:
> >> >>>
> >> >>> Having dealt with jillery's post to which you are tacitly expressing agreement, I am leaving only one line
> >> >> >from it:
> >> >>>
> >> >>>>> For someone who spam brags about how he is a "goddamn moralizer"
> >> >>>
> >> >>>
> >> >>>> I also wonder if Peter realizes that "goddam moralizer" is essentially a
> >> >>>> synonym of "sanctimonious jerk."
> >> >>>
> >> >>> I've known it for most of my life.
> >> >
> >> > I see I was unintentionally misleading here, because I was trying to see the issue from Mark's POV.
> >> >
> >> > What I meant was that I've known for most of my life that amoral persons like Mark Isaak do take the two
> >> > terms to be synonymous. And that is true also of where I first read the expression.
> >
> >Below, Mark shows me just how well I "read his mind" on his POV: very well indeed.

> Only in your delusional dreams.

As usual, this mindless [1] formula of yours is wishful thinking.

> All you do below is practice dueling dictionaries,

This is another case of you flaunting your incorrigibility, though not as crassly as you did when
I decided on a drastic course of action: among "All [I] do below" there is something
you left in but didn't comment on:

> >You are free to adopt this definition in your cherry-picked dictionary, and as long
> >as you don't pretend it is an authoritative definition, I say, "Whatever floats your boat."

Had you commented on it, I would have added that if he did claim authoritativeness,
I would remind readers of that editorializing "unfounded," and ask them to compare it with the
lack of editorializing in the Merriam-Webster online definition reproduced below.

[1] For a while it wasn't mindless, because you had to remember to write "delusional"
instead your former mindless "wet," but by now you've salivated "delusional" often enough.

> without actually dealing with the actual label you
> actually applied to yourself; "goddamn moralizer".

Not relevant in the comparison Mark and I were involved in.

> "goddamn"
> explicitly modifies the meaning of "moralizer". It's the meaning of
> the entire phrase, which is relevant here.

Already addressed above, you incorrigible twit:

> >> > What I meant was that I've known for most of my life that amoral persons like Mark Isaak do take the two
> >> > terms to be synonymous. And that is true also of where I first read the expression.

> There is an official online Oxford English Dictionary, maintained and
> updated by Oxford University Press. You can access it free using a
> card from participating libraries, or if you pay $100 for an
> individual subscription.

But that is quite distinct from the dictionary that Mark conveniently forgot to identify.
I know about it from having encountered it in a dispute with another ally of yours, Bob Casanova.
And thanks for letting us know how it is nontrivially paywalled, which makes the M-W the
most respected of free online dictionaries by default [of the OED].

> Ironically, almost all of the Google hits for "goddamn moralizer" are
> for your posts to T.O. I suppose that's one way to get free
> publicity.

The only ironic thing about it was what I mentioned to Mark, the dearth of curiosity
by the anti-ID regulars of talk.origins about the phrase. And you don't show any
curiosity about it either.

>
>
> >> The dictionary definition of "moralize" I used says, "comment on issues
> >> of right and wrong, typically with an unfounded air of superiority."
> >
> >... is from a dictionary with "Oxford" in its name, but having no more direct connection with the OED
> >than umpteen "Webster's" dictionaries have with the Merriam-Webster Collegiate, or Unabridged,
> >or online dictionaries.
> >
> >The online one says:
> >
> >: to explain or interpret morally
> >2a: to give a moral quality or direction to
> >b: to improve the morals of
> >intransitive verb
> >: to make moral reflections

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moralize

> You don't provide a link to your "online one".

Due to absent -mindedness, remedied this time around.

> For someone who gets
> his knappies in a bunch when other posters don't provide links,

You are making a mountain out of a molehill. Mark neglected to even identify the link,
but Mark is your buddy, so you would make molehills out of every mountain he craps against me,
if you don't ignore them at all.

Anyone who knows about the status of M-W among lexicographers knows how to
modify the very simple url I gave for any word in the online dictionary, hence, "molehill".

> not sure how you conveniently forgot to do it here.

Now you are sure -- or you would be if your ideology didn't compel you to disbelieve
what I wrote above about it being a simple oversight.

> >The word "unfounded" makes this crass editorializing, more along the lines of
> >Ambrose Bierce's _The_Devil's_Dictionary

Funny, you made no effort to dispute this. In fact you left the crickets chirping over
it, as your faithful ally Bob Casanova might say.

See my later reply to Mark. Although he replied to the post where the preceding
paragraph originated, he "couldn't see any of the text because he didn't want to see it."

The same applies to two key parts of the text that I had to duplicate to remedy
your incorrigibility, jillery.


Peter Nyikos

[Mark Isaak]

On 6/29/21 2:09 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> But that [an official online Oxford English dictionary] is

> quite distinct from the dictionary that Mark conveniently forgot to identify.

The New Oxford American Dictionary, which is resident on my computer.

[jillery]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 18:24:38 -0700, Mark Isaak
<eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:

>On 6/29/21 2:09 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> But that [an official online Oxford English dictionary] is
>> quite distinct from the dictionary that Mark conveniently forgot to identify.
>
>The New Oxford American Dictionary, which is resident on my computer.

An irony here is it is the peter who *still* hasn't identified the
dicitionary he used, while accusing you of using a counterfeit Oxford
dictionary. Oxford University Press publishes several dictionaries,
for different languages and with different emphasis and in different
media. The New Oxford American Dictionary is in fact published by
Oxford University Press since 2001. According to its preface, it is:
*******************************
a dictionary of current American English, based on currently available
evidence and current thinking about language and cognition.
*******************************

[jillery]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 16:07:39 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>

wrote:

>On 6/28/21 5:44 AM, jillery wrote:
>> On Sun, 27 Jun 2021 22:49:12 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I would appreciate any help.
>>
>>
>> Really? Who do you think you're fooling?
>>
>Nobody, including you has all the answers. Only the arrogant, vain,
>self-important, know-it-all people need no help. If you are born all
>knowing then education is a waste of time. I don't fit this description.
>Do you??

You have been provided lots of help by lots of people over the years.
Your replies to them were generally not appreciative, and occasionally
explicitly unappreciative.

[jillery]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 12:53:04 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>

Your comment above is more of your mindless made-up crap, to accuse
others of doing what you do. Your quote above is the peter putting
words in other posters' mouths. Nobody in T.O. uses that phrase but
the peter. Not sure how you think that shows anybody's stupidity but
his and your's.

<snip your remaining spamming stupidity>

[peter2...@gmail.com]

The post below illustrates why my announcement yesterday about my
new policy did not (yet) cover posts jillery makes in reply to others.

Boycotting all of Oxyaena's posts wasn't particularly hazardous because Oxyaena lacks the
degree of ambition jillery consistently displays, and the number of deep connections
jillery has made with posters like Mark Isaak.

On Wednesday, June 30, 2021 at 6:36:06 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 18:24:38 -0700, Mark Isaak
> <eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:
>
> >On 6/29/21 2:09 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>
> >> But that [an official online Oxford English dictionary] is
> >> quite distinct from the dictionary that Mark conveniently forgot to identify.

> >The New Oxford American Dictionary, which is resident on my computer.

As I wrote, the "Oxford" is partly justified by the physical location of the
top editors. It has no direct connection with the OED, as seen by its crass editorializing.

If the rest of the dictionary is full of editorializing like the one I identified, then it is no
wonder a dedicated perpetrator of injustice like Mark Isaak downloaded
the whole thing for easy access.


Now jillery displays the incorrigibility that she has come to be quite open about:

> An irony here is it is the peter who *still* hasn't identified the
> dicitionary he used,

A double falsehood: I identified it in my first post on the subject as the Merriam-Webster online dictionary,
and in my second post I rectified an oversight by also providing a link to the definition
I quoted in my first post.

Jillery is flaunting her incorrigibility in a slightly indirect way. She actually
responded to my first post, so she knows the "*still* hasn't identified" is a lie:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/CgjITcZq-AQ/m/Mp867UkTFwAJ
Re: Chez Watt(was Re: A conversation about Fine Tuni ng”

The above is the link to my second post. Jillery can still fob this off as a "post that she didn't see"
and so her double falsehood has only one part that is a lie beyond all reasonable doubt.

> while accusing you of using a counterfeit Oxford
> dictionary.

A lie: I never used the word nor the concept of "counterfeit".

> Oxford University Press publishes several dictionaries,

...and tons of other books on just about every subject under the sun.

> for different languages and with different emphasis and in different
> media. The New Oxford American Dictionary is in fact published by
> Oxford University Press since 2001. According to its preface, it is:
> *******************************
> a dictionary of current American English, based on currently available
> evidence and current thinking about language and cognition.
> *******************************

Self-serving advertising. I'm reminded of the worst beer I ever drank saying
right on the can, "We honestly believe this is the best beer...". It had no head
at all: its bubbles were like the bubbles in a soft drink that was charged with
carbon dioxide, popping as soon as they reached the surface or before.
The taste was no better than the Schlitz beer of the 1970's, of which an
extensive book on beers wrote: "Just awful: weak, sour, computerized brew."
On a scale of one to six steins, it gave Schlitz one.

This was in the years before the Samuel Adams brewers precipitated a huge revival
of quality beer in the USA, so the most steins an American beer got was four.
Rolling Rock was one of them. Six steins were awarded only to
the very best beers of the time, including Pilsner Urquelle.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

This post illustrates, even better than the one I made less than half an hour ago,
why the policy that worked pretty well with Oxyaena and Erik Simpson
is not feasible against jillery; so last night's post only addressed the theme
of what I would do about direct replies by jillery TO ME after the announcement was made.
The policy I will adopt for other posts by jillery will be announced later today.

On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 1:31:06 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 18:45:31 -0500, *Hemidactylus*
> <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
>
> >> You are playing "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" about jillery's
> >> flaunting of her incorrigibility.
> >>
> >I haven’t been paying much attention to them. Maybe you should try that.

Like I wrote, Hemidactylus looks like he simply didn't comprehend the unique
nature of jillery's flaunting of her incorrigibility. Naturally, jillery deleted
the damning evidence this time around.

> You pay enough attention to semi-regularly post nonsense non-sequiturs
> and asinine ad-hominems about them, and to encourage the peter's
> spamming Big Lies, and to enable his efforts to make T.O. a Hellhole.

The timing of the above crap is something few regulars besides jillery would attempt.
Hemidactylus came close to becoming an accessory after the fact to jillery's *direct*
flaunting of her incorrigibility, and this is the way jillery repays him.

But it fits in with jillery's power-hungry behavior in talk.origins. She is throwing her weight
around, letting Hemidactylus know who's got the more loyal allies on their side. Even
their biggest joint ally, Burkhard, never (AFAIK) showed Hemidactylus as much respect as
he did to jillery when he profusely apologized to jillery under the mistaken impression that he
might have *plonked* jillery once upon a time.

Peter Nyikos

[*Hemidactylus*]

peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The post below illustrates why my announcement yesterday about my
> new policy did not (yet) cover posts jillery makes in reply to others.
>
> Boycotting all of Oxyaena's posts wasn't particularly hazardous because Oxyaena lacks the
> degree of ambition jillery consistently displays, and the number of deep connections
> jillery has made with posters like Mark Isaak.
>

You are engaging in interpersonal banter about other posters above and make
no scientific statements. Should you have deleted this post before hitting
send?

And when boycotting Oxy’s posts did you still engage in comments of a
personal nature about Oxy? Will you be refusing personal content from
jillery but still post about them?
>
[snip]

>
> On Wednesday, June 30, 2021 at 6:36:06 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>
>> for different languages and with different emphasis and in different
>> media. The New Oxford American Dictionary is in fact published by
>> Oxford University Press since 2001. According to its preface, it is:
>> *******************************
>> a dictionary of current American English, based on currently available
>> evidence and current thinking about language and cognition.
>> *******************************
>
> Self-serving advertising.

But could actually be sincerely held as a corporate person. They could be
geared toward a mission of doing the above. You might not like the result.
Intent versus impact.

> I'm reminded of the worst beer I ever drank saying
> right on the can, "We honestly believe this is the best beer...". It had no head
> at all: its bubbles were like the bubbles in a soft drink that was charged with
> carbon dioxide, popping as soon as they reached the surface or before.
> The taste was no better than the Schlitz beer of the 1970's, of which an
> extensive book on beers wrote: "Just awful: weak, sour, computerized brew."
> On a scale of one to six steins, it gave Schlitz one.
>

I’m not into week pee beers.

>
> This was in the years before the Samuel Adams brewers precipitated a huge revival
> of quality beer in the USA, so the most steins an American beer got was four.
>

Sam Adams does ok, but they had a wheat beer that tasted like old school
wallpaper paste. Does the stein scale extend into negative numbers?

>
> Rolling Rock was one of them. Six steins were awarded only to
> the very best beers of the time, including Pilsner Urquelle.
>

Never had that. Mostly porters, stouts, and brown ales.

What types of beer do you prefer? Sorry if that’s too personal and runs
afoul of your current posting guidelines that you apply to others but not
yourself…apparently.

[*Hemidactylus*]

peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This post illustrates, even better than the one I made less than half an hour ago,
> why the policy that worked pretty well with Oxyaena and Erik Simpson
> is not feasible against jillery;

Worked well for…you? Didn’t you still engage in banter about Oxy and Erik?
That wouldn’t work well for third parties.

> so last night's post only addressed the theme
> of what I would do about direct replies by jillery TO ME after the announcement was made.
> The policy I will adopt for other posts by jillery will be announced later today.
>

Oh the turgid dramaturgy.

>
> On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 1:31:06 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 18:45:31 -0500, *Hemidactylus*
>> <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>>> You are playing "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" about jillery's
>>>> flaunting of her incorrigibility.
>>>>
>>> I haven’t been paying much attention to them. Maybe you should try that.
>
> Like I wrote, Hemidactylus looks like he simply didn't comprehend the unique
> nature of jillery's flaunting of her incorrigibility. Naturally, jillery deleted
> the damning evidence this time around.
>

Yawn.

>
>> You pay enough attention to semi-regularly post nonsense non-sequiturs
>> and asinine ad-hominems about them, and to encourage the peter's
>> spamming Big Lies, and to enable his efforts to make T.O. a Hellhole.
>
> The timing of the above crap is something few regulars besides jillery would attempt.
> Hemidactylus came close to becoming an accessory after the fact to jillery's *direct*
> flaunting of her incorrigibility, and this is the way jillery repays him.
>

Wait, what?

>
> But it fits in with jillery's power-hungry behavior in talk.origins. She
> is throwing her weight
> around, letting Hemidactylus know who's got the more loyal allies on their side. Even
> their biggest joint ally, Burkhard, never (AFAIK) showed Hemidactylus as much respect as
> he did to jillery when he profusely apologized to jillery under the
> mistaken impression that he
> might have *plonked* jillery once upon a time.
>

Yeah that really hurts my feelings. I thought Burk would show more
favoritism toward me than that. And when Burk acts fond of Mark Isaak I get
real jealous and sulk in a corner.