[meteorite-list] OT: Dowsing is real, but exoplanets are dubious?!

From: JoshuaTreeMuseum <joshuatreemuseum_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2010 13:29:03 -0400
Message-ID: <DD063A609CEB451BB7A7A24A48089896_at_ET>

Hi Mark,
I never said I believe that sticks point to meteorites. I simply said I
observed the phenomenon of two wire rods crossing over an iron meteorite.
There are many observable phenomena that can't be explained by science.
Nobody knows what dreams are or how hypnosis works. Nobody knows how
abiogenesis worked. Nobody can explain what consciousness is or how human
intelligence came to be. And there is certainly no one that can explain how
the entire Universe appeared out of Nothing.

I was joking about the pictures being photoshopped, referring to their
extreme low quality. They probably are planets, but I can't tell from the
crummy pictures.

No technology exists today that can read human minds and tell if you're
lying or not. Machines can provide indications that you may possibly be
lying, but that's as far as it goes. It's a really big stretch to assume
that changes in blood pressure, breath rate and respiration rate somehow
prove that you're lying. There could be any number of causal factors for the
changes. It' silly to think that that these changes can somehow read your
mind. There is no scientific formula or law of physics that establishes a
correlation between simple physiological reactions and the complex mental
processes involved in lying. There is no scientific evidence proving that
polygraphs can detect lying at a better than random rate anymore than there
is sound scientific evidence that dowsing works. As I already said, fear is
the biggest causal factor, not lying. Any good liar can easily pass the a
polygraph test. Google Aldrich Ames, remember him, the super-spy? So, you're
telling me you believe that mind reading machines exist, but metal rods
won't cross over an iron meteorite. To each his own I say.


I don't know anything about lie detectors other than they scare the hell out
of people." --Richard Nixon

Phil Whitmer
-------------------------
Strange that you are happy believe that a stick is able to point to a
meteorite all by itself, yet don't accept that lie detectors work
(despite a considerable weight of research), and think that the Steward
Observatory, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, the
European Southern Observatory, Leiden University in the Netherlands and
Germany's Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy, have ""photoshopped"" an
exoplanet pic??


After all didn't you say..


>First off, let me say that all you naysaying dowser denialists need to

get off your high horses, come down

>from your ivory towers and enter the realm of simple, reproducible,

empirical evidence-based experimental

>scientific methodology instead of parroting dogmatic drivel and

appealing to the authority of idiots.


:)
Received on Mon 18 Oct 2010 01:29:03 PM PDT