Displaying 181 To 210 Of 416 Comments Vote Now for PlanetPOV’s Top Posts of 2009! Hey, that’s a great slogan. And what a bumper-sticker it would make, eh? Or does one already exist? » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 9:06 am I am just amazed at the writing at this place. And you know, there are so many topics and issues, some big, some small, some inbetween and all of them important, it’s like a feast or something. But the voting is hard… » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 8:40 am I’m tired now… my eyes look like poached eggs from reading one article after another. I’ve been trying to read some every day. I’ve had to stop. Wishing everyone at Planet all the best, and remember: though not everyone will win a prize, being nominated is an honor, and though not everyone was nominated, being at Planet is a joy. abby » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 6:30 am Cher: That is good to know. Because of course the more human involvement there is, the more subjectivity. Again, thanks for a great article, really well-done. » Posted By abby4ever On January 3, 2010 @ 10:00 am Chernynkaya: what a lot of work you put into this article. And it is so interesting to me, especially the stuff about Google News. I use them frequently because you get so many different sources and different kinds of sources. But this robut, who programs it? » Posted By abby4ever On January 3, 2010 @ 6:24 am Another one I like that will be even less unique, is that famous one from ‘Gone With The Wind’, where at the end Rhett says to Scarlett: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” I picure McCain and Palin, parting after their loss, and her saying to him: “But where will I go, what will I do?” or something like that, the same as Scarlett said to Rhett. And then McCain…who in my view used Palin unmercilessly to win the election..says he doesn’t give a damn. That might be unfair to him; for all I know he was torn asunder about what she went through, and they parted clinging to each other and crying their eyes out. » Posted By abby4ever On January 3, 2010 @ 2:06 am Me too. I used it a couple of times during the primaries when the attacks from the right on Obama got to be a bit vicious. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 9:02 pm One of my favorite quotes from a film is from Jaws, when Roy Scheider, after getting his first real look at the monstrous thing, turns around and says to Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 8:41 pm The Infantilization of America But KQ, not all people are as brave as you. As accepting or as objective. Some people really struggle with things like this and cannot help themselves…and who knows? Something in their own lives may explain, or help explain, these reactions you see. They may just recently have dealt with a death or a long illness. Others just can’t stand for anything to be too real, and are that way about everything. If we could see into their hearts…but we can’t. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 9:24 pm Your little avatar is one of my favorites, I can never see it without smiling, sometimes even laughing for joy. It just kills me. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 9:12 pm I totally agree! » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 9:11 pm At first glance I thought you were talking about Queen Elizabeth, and I thought to myself: “What on earth…what have I missed on the news???” Ha! That’s me: slow on the uptake. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 8:31 pm Khirad: Your ‘You are safe here’ welcome to tb92 reminds me of my coming in from a heavy snowstorm we had here over the holidays: my husband was waiting for me with a jacket of his that he had warmed on the radiator. (He knew I had to go back out.) Nothing in the world feels as nice, and welcoming, as that…except, perhaps, coming to Planet from… the dark side. Nice post. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 8:21 pm Welcome, tb92. I don’t know your screenname, we must have passed each other over at hp, at high speed. You won’t miss the word filter, that’s for sure. And I do believe this place will continue to live up to what I said in my article. abby » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 8:06 pm Hey, that would explain the down-and-out way I’ve been feeling the past fortnight. I miss the money talk. Didn’t realize it until I saw your comment. LOL !!! » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 7:10 pm Don’t be daft, boomer. You brighten up every thread you are ever on and that’s a fact. Good grief. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 10:23 am What a lovely reply. I think you yourself had better keep posting, too. And, just as you have said to me, let us be the judge. Thank you, bitohistory. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 9:43 am I was going to thank the person, in the article itself, who suggested that I post it as an article, but I was worried that if it was badly received, that itself would reflect badly on that person. Do you know what I mean, Emerald? LOL !!! Thank you for the kind words. :] » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 8:47 am Addendum to boomer: And I don’t mean that you do have inadequacies but your posts make up for them, either. I mean: there is nothing inadequate about your posts. On the contrary… Just want to be sure you don’t misunderstand my words. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 8:35 am Yes, tiger, the relief of not being censored, is very great. That word filter at hp always makes me feel as if I am posting in a dictatorship. And the freedom from attacks, especially the personal ones, is wonderful. I think most everyone here is just more grown up than at other places. In any case, it’s a lovely site. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 8:28 am Thank you so much, java, for your kind words. What I meant by contributing virtually nothing is that I’ve only done two articles, compared to how many other posters do or have done, and the articles themselves are not rigorous, as theirs are. These things take time. Yes, minds can be changed on sites like these, isn’t it neat? I mean the exposure we get to so many differing views. And the expertise. Or, sometimes, just that one little thing that someone writes that stays with you…and then the light pops on, and you understand something you didn’t understand before. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 8:21 am Oh boomer, if I were you I wouldn’t worry about inadequacies. I enjoy your posts so much, I imagine most here do. I do understand what you mean about the Planeteer family being supportive. It has been far easier here, for me, anyway, to be new than it ever was at hp or even FRT. I could say more but perhaps that’s enough. » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 8:14 am More seriously, we say things like ‘Something is missing’ as an expression, of course; however, we use that expression because we really believe it… really believe that something is missing. That’s the assumption. But an assumption that doesn’t get you anywhere is like driving down a motorway and never getting to your destination. Do you just keep going, or do you pull over and look at the map again to make sure you are going in the right direction? » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 12:38 am To me it isn’t human greed, because human greed has always been around. To me it is something (just in theory, mind you) that not only hasn’t always been around, it has never been around. Until now. Or it has been but has taken an entirely new and different form. That’s why I said of it that it is new and fresh…and accomodating. I tell you, Emerald, we’re right on it. We have to push on with this until we crack it… (I insert a little humor with that last but not because I take lightly what happened to your friend’s Mom). » Posted By abby4ever On January 1, 2010 @ 11:33 pm Once again I fell asleep over the keyboard, this time wondering if we will ever find an answer to Emerald’s question: why the senseless violence? Wide awake again, I am no closer to answering it than I was before. I look at it this way… and it is so abstract it looks like a cop out. Human beings have either lost something they’ve always had and can’t find it again… and it isn’t something human beings simply want, it is something they need in order to function as thoughtful, civilized creatures…or else human beings have acquired something they never had before, and it not only isn’t something they need but it’s something they should never have, the human psyche just can’t handle it. I know this looks like I am setting up a false choice with an exclusive ‘or’, as in: it’s either this or that, it can’t be any third thing. (Oversimplification is a good way to get yourself out of a pickle.) But I’m not trying to do that. There’d be no point in setting you up like that unless I had a pat answer coming in at the end, with the above being my of steering you toward it. And I don’t. My point is this: it isn’t always true that when things start breaking down like this, something is missing . That we have lost something essential. It could just as easily be the case that something has been added…something that is incompatible with the thing that makes us thoughtful, civilized creatures. Something so new and fresh and accomodating that we are just plain drunk on it. But what could it be? (Btw, Hopeington, if you are still around, the above is a very fine example of what I meant when I said to you that I do ramble sometimes.) Maybe if we stop asking what is missing and, just for the sake of exploring other possibilities, start asking what has been added, we might get a bit farther with this. Just a thought. » Posted By abby4ever On January 1, 2010 @ 11:08 pm Emerald: yours is a sad post but the content is not unfamiliar to me. Over here in the UK we have lots of pensioner attacks…attacks on elderly, retired people… and they are increasing. Equally, though, we have attacks on just about every age group. Gangs of youths roam the streets of London (and elsewhere), drunk as little skunks. They vomit in the streets, urinate on parked cars, break windows. Last month a gang of youths put a firework through the letterbox of a home of a young single mother; the house caught on fire and both she and her little boy died. If the owner of a property being vandalized goes out to stop these outrages upon his personal and private property, he or she is likely to be beaten to a pulp and very possibly to death. The newspapers are peppered with stories of incidents like these, they happen every day. Three months ago a gang of youths beat a father of 3 little boys to death, in front of his house, all because he didn’t have a cigarette for them when they demanded one. Like you, I don’t know what explains crimes on the elderly. Unless it’s the fact that the gov’t has so coddled youths that the youths no longer fear anyone older than they are. When it comes to youth crime, over here, anyway, I think what partly explains it, is this: the gov’t has virtually taken all authority away from parents. You cannot lift a finger against your child; if you even shove a rebellious teenager around and he gets a bruise, he can report you for parental abuse. Not that I am for child beatings. But when you broadcast to the entire country thropugh a megaphone that your own child is off-limits, that child will lose all sense of authority. And respect. And fear. And responsibility too. After telling parents their own kids are off-limits, the gov’t saw to it that parents can be prosecuted if their child doesn’t show up at school, if it becomes habitual. How can you control your own kids if the gov’t won’t let you, and then be punished, even jailed, for not doing so? Sometimes I think the compass of the UK has been broken, and, metaphorically speaking, people are just wandering aimlessly about, in some cases virtual hostages to their own children, not knowing which direction to take, to fix it…while the gov’t goes on legislating contradictions, like the one I just mentioned, above. » Posted By abby4ever On January 1, 2010 @ 6:51 pm Dark Matter (WIMPS) the other Holy Grail in Particle Physics KQ: What good does it do to herd all the theories that can be falsified, together, and pick them off in a process of elimination in order to get at the one good one, if even that one must be falsifiable to be any good? Worse, what if you put a little theory together made up of, say, only 3 propositions and all of them were necessary truths? (Or arent there any of those, in science?) Good look falsifying that one. Yes, yes, I am confused (I must be); all I really want now is a drop-dead-gorgeous definition of ‘falsifiability’. By ‘drop-dead-gorgeous’ I mean one that is so clear that it cannot even possibly be misunderstood. Not even by me. That’s all I want. Thanks for taking the time to write such a long reply, it was interesting… and not at all condescending the way some explanations in science can be. I am glad you will have a science section here. » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 10:56 am KQ: I am over here on your Dark Matter thread, I came over here to tell you that I’ve never understood why a theory must be falsifiable to be any good, that I just Googled that and found this: From Yuksel.org, on Popper’s theory of falsifiability: “FALSIFIABILITY. A scientific hypothesis must provide a logical possibility to be refuted by a probable true observation statement. Therefore, according to Popper, falsifiability is a required characteristic for a scientific theory. Science evolves by shedding its falsified theories. Popper’s falsification model is similar to the notion of “natural selection”. The best theory survives… “Falsificationism encourages all kind of speculative theories, as long as they are stated clearly and precisely. The inadequate or the unfitting ones will be tossed away by examinations. A scientific theory can never be said that it is true, but it can be said that it is closer to the truth than its predecessors.” http://www.yuksel.org/e/philosophy/falsifiability.htm and what I want to know is whether what I found, above, is correct. You are the scientist around here, are you not? The thing is, the above still does not explain why a theory’s being falsifiable would make the theory itself any good. Weeding out false theories is one thing, and good; but suggesting that being able to be false is an essential property of any theory with any claim to power, is something else entirely. I am not sure, at all, that he is saying that but if he isn’t, what is he saying? abby » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 9:55 am KQ: I didn’t set out to introduce religious talk into this disussion about dark matter. I know that’s an entirely separate issue. In my comment just above, I just wanted to be sure that the playful-back-and-forth, quasi-religious chit-chat I had enaged in on your thread, with some others here and all of it quite spontaneous, was not taken by you as, again, ‘evidence of my not taking your article seriously, as my belittling the importance of scientific inquiry, or, most especially, of my making fun of your beliefs in any way.’ I want to do a short article on some things I said to you above but didn’t realize it until after I’d said to you: ‘Don’t know if you will agree with any of this’. (But first, one on gun-banning, I am just itching to do something on that…). (It wasn’t your ‘God Particle’ reference that set me off, it was the quote I used from AstronomyToday. (And I think you are not entirely serious with your “I guess I invited the religious talk because I pointed out that the Higgs Boson is called the » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 7:54 pm kq: don’t take my horsing around on this thread as evidence of my not taking your article seriously, as my belittling the importance of scientific inquiry, or, most especially, of my making fun of your beliefs in any way. I know next to nothing about dark matter and I much appreciate anyone trying to explain it to me. That said, I do get a little impatient with scientists and astonomers who belittle religious statements and then make scientific ones that, in form, anyway, are just like them. It could be said that scientists know for certain no more about dark matter than Christians know for certain about God, yet, like Christians, they talk as if they were there at the foundation of the world…in their case, the universe. It does amaze me how tolerant they are of their own speculative statements, often making them as if they are the proven fact of the day, and, at the same time, how intolerant they are of religious statements. I believe it was the analytic philosopher A.J. Ayer who, in a vicious attack on religious statements, was the first to call them ‘meaningless’. In my view, some of these scientists are just like him. Wanting to call meaningless anything that doesn’t fit in with their own, it has to be said, purely theoretical statements. Once a scientist gets into an area where he can’t prove the existence of something because of the unique nature of that something, be it dark matter or something else, he is in a very strange area indeed. For a scientist. Once there, and in my view, he loses his right to belittle others who can » Posted By abby4ever On January 2, 2010 @ 1:10 amComments Posted By abby4ever
Robots don’t have agendas the way news outlets and newspapers do. Ha!
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