PrimateDave

Joined

• started 24 topics
• posted 1,633 times   see topics posted on
• send a message

Posts by PrimateDave

• 
  10

  Back from my 300 mile bicycle ride

  by poppers in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i finished my 5 day ride on friday to help raise funds for the ms society.

  i had an absolutely great time.

  thank you to those who helped support me.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  PrimateDave

  Most excellent! And for a good cause too!
• 
  33

  Counting the errors in one section of the Origin of Life brouchure

  by bohm in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  from page 12:.

  the theory of evolution tries to account for the origin of life on earth without the necessity of divine intervention.. .

  false: simply plain false on both accounts.. however, the more that scientists discover about life, the less likely it appears that it could arise by chance.. false: author state conclusion which is not supported by the text.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  PrimateDave

  I used to believe in Intelligent Design. I read Behe's popular book promoting ID. It was a fascinating read, and it quite cemented my attachment to JW Creationism at the time. Of course, this was long before I had access to the internet, back in the mid 1990s. If you had asked me where I would be in 2010 back then, I would have told you I would be in the Paradise TM .

  A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. - Simon and Garfunkel, "The Boxer"

  So, it wasn't until I finally allowed myself to be completely open minded in my search for knowledge that I was able to learn some necessary concepts for understanding the Evolution of life. And it finally struck me, the absurdity of the Biblical Creation account and its reinterpretation by the WTS to appear to be "scientific." Not only do they incorrectly reinterpret this old Jewish myth, they knowingly hide the best Biblical scholarship available which places ancient Jewish literature within its proper historical context.

  There is no question that the "Origin of Life" brochure is a propaganda piece. There are a lot of hidden assumptions contained within it, many of which are not exclusive to the Witnesses. If there is one thing I have learned, the Witnesses are not so different from the "world" as they would like to think, as many of their internal narratives are simply rebadged versions of those found in the broader culture of Western Civilization.

  (I have to go now. I may try to write some more on this later.)
• 
  33

  Counting the errors in one section of the Origin of Life brouchure

  by bohm in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  from page 12:.

  the theory of evolution tries to account for the origin of life on earth without the necessity of divine intervention.. .

  false: simply plain false on both accounts.. however, the more that scientists discover about life, the less likely it appears that it could arise by chance.. false: author state conclusion which is not supported by the text.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  PrimateDave

  Very well done! Unfortunately, my mother has swallowed these brochures whole. Simple, "common sense logic" is very appealing to her. Any time Evolution is mentioned on television, she gets exasperated at the "ignorance" of the narrator of the nature program. She wanted me to read the brochures, and I obliged. However, I do not want to discuss this topic with her. Such a discussion will do me no good.

  I think she is under the misguided impression that my atheism is rooted in Evolution. No, my non-theism is more rooted in a disbelief in the deities of the Jewish mythologies. The book of Genesis is one of the most absurd literary works anyone could base a belief system upon. Bohm, you illustrate very well the logical hoops that the WTS has to jump through in support of literalist, inerrantist theology. I could concede intelligent design, but then who designed the designer?
• 
  12

  Ok, enough of the Progressive sales lady ads on here!!!

  by WingCommander in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i know jw.net doesn't have any control of the ads we see when we visit on here, but i gotta say i'm fed up with the progressive sales lady popping up everywhere on here.

  ugggh!!

  it's not that i don't like her, i actually thought the commercials on tv were cute at first and she's almost hot in a milf kind of way.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  PrimateDave

  I believe they are targeted. I visited Pizza Hut dot com one day, and then for a couple of weeks had Pizza Hut ads here at JWN. Lately, it's been Tiger Direct. I almost bought some stuff from then, but New Egg had something I liked better.
• 
  12

  Free energy motors

  by Kosonen in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  here on youtube you can see a free energy magnetic motor.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oj7nxtwaei.

  there are a lot of examples of free energy motors working on magnets on youtube.

  this could have been used instead of polluting powerplants.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  PrimateDave

  http://www.energybulletin.net/node/53339

  Arrogance and scientific rules of thumb

  by Cheryl Rofer [...]Cheryl worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for 37 years on topics including the nuclear fuel cycle, fossil fuels, lasers, technologies for destruction of hazardous wastes and decommissioning of nuclear weapons, and management of environmental cleanups.[...]

  I often get irritated when I read poorly informed discussions of scientific and engineering issues. Why? I think it’s the arrogance. That arrogance comes in several forms:

  Hey, you science guys! You’ve got something wrong!

  I’ve figured out a solution for a problem that other people seem to find difficult.

  No, I didn’t have to check what’s been done before.

  And there are more.

  These assertions are indicators that the person behind them doesn’t know what s/he is talking about.

  That’s one of my rules of thumb. Scientists have a lot of rules of thumb, which sometimes makes them seem arrogant.

  “I’ve found a way to run your car on water instead of gasoline.”

  “Bosh.”

  One of my favorite sources of rules of thumb is thermodynamics. It doesn’t tell you how to do things, or how fast you can do them, but it tells you whether something, like running your car on water, is impossible.

  Most people know that there are three laws of thermodynamics: energy can neither be created nor destroyed; you can’t break even except at absolute zero, but you can’t reach absolute zero. Adding some chemical specifics gives very useful rules of thumb. Engineers have other rules of thumb, from thermodynamics and practical experience.

  I’ll give a few examples of those rules. They become so engrained if you do science or engineering for a while that you don’t think of them--they become a sort of common sense, different from everyday common sense. So when someone says something that contravenes them, a scientist is likely to reply sharply that that’s wrong.

  Rule #1 (no significance to the numbers): If it’s an obvious idea, chances are that someone’s thought of it before, and there’s a good reason why it won’t work. This is not a reason to give up, but rather a guide to checking the idea out.

  This rule doesn’t flow directly from thermodynamics. It’s more in the realm of how science works. One of the most basic things that a scientist learns is that his/her own mind is the first place that mistakes will be made. It’s too easy to bend facts in your mind toward what you want, to determine a conclusion and then figure out how it has to be done. So when a scientist has a great idea, the first reaction is to ask whether it fits with the rules of thumb and whether it’s been done before. If it goes against any of these, a scientist’s reaction is, “What did I get wrong?” not “That’s the way it ought to be.”

  I had a boss once – a physicist in a project that was mostly chemistry – who believed that creativity depended on not knowing too much about a subject. This is a view taken by many physicists and too many of those proffering solutions to the Deepwater Horizon blowout. My boss would come around with a great idea; we would tell him what was wrong with it; and then he’d let it go. It wasted time, which is why I prefer some base of subject knowledge as a takeoff point for creativity, but he put the process of science into play and lived by it: peer review. There are a lot of ways to check out a new idea: ask other people; repeat the experiment; check the literature. You can’t get creative if you stick with a loser idea. The important thing is to give it up once someone shows you it’s foolish.

  BP’s blowout at Deepwater Horizon is particularly difficult to comprehend because of its scale. Most of us are not accustomed to thinking of the pressures under a mile of water, nor gases flashing out of the liquid as the petroleum bursts from the pipe, the enormous pressure behind it, the five-story blowout preventer. The construction of the well is not easily visualized, particularly if you’ve never learned how a well is constructed, now with an unknown degree of damage. I’ve dealt with drillers, had the business of mud described to me, and I can’t describe it now in any detail myself.

  So extrapolations from experience in watering the garden are unlikely to provide solutions. Heck, if you think that the well can just be buried, plant a hose in the ground shooting full force upward and try to cover it with dirt. Nor are computer games or action movies a good guide to what can be done.

  Rule #2: Input for a product should be water and air; other things cost more. KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. Also: Occam’s razor . Basically, the simplest explanations and the cheapest inputs, are usually best.

  These are three statements of a similar principle. I learned the first from a chemical engineer. The others are more general. They are nice tests of an idea: how cheap and easy is it? How could it be cheaper and easier? This can lead to cutting corners, but it doesn’t have to.

  Those rules are directly applicable to the solutions being offered for the BP blowout, but there are other rules that have more general application.

  Rule #3: Carbon dioxide and water are products, not reactants. The system hydrocarbon plus oxygen has more energy (enthalpy) in it than water plus carbon dioxide. This is mostly a consequence of thermodynamics’ First Law. If you get energy out of a system, as in an automobile engine, you can’t get much more energy out of the products. So all the schemes to run your car on water are bosh. No, you can’t use a catalyst to turn it around; catalysts only speed up reactions that are allowed thermodynamically. You have to add energy to do anything chemically with carbon dioxide and water.

  Rule #4: Stuff mixes. I’ve recently been engaged in a discussion with a person who has convinced himself that the science on the CFC ban was wrong. His reasoning is that you can pour out gaseous CFCs in a stream because they are heavier than air; therefore they must fall out of the atmosphere and never reach the ozone layer. The Second Law says that things tend toward maximum disorder, which means they mix. Once mixed, stuff doesn’t unmix. Have you ever seen the sugar jump out of a cup of tea and form one of those nice little cubes? Gases mix even more easily.

  Rule #5: Everything takes more energy than you think. I’ve seen, far too many times, the lament that our current electrical generating plants “waste” one-third of the energy in their fuels. Welcome to the Carnot cycle! It’s one of the first things thermodynamics students calculate, a sequence of energy generation and use. And the result that those students get, largely a consequence of the Second Law, is that about a third of the input energy goes to entropy, not usable. There are other cycles and other ways to use energy that are more efficient, but if you’ve got a Carnot cycle, the most common cycle for power plants, you’re stuck with that one-third entropy. The Second Law says that there’s always going to be some left-over, not-usable energy, and that there will be even more when you try to reverse a process, like turning carbon dioxide into something else.

  There are more. Maybe the ongoing nature of the BP blowout, leading to repeated rebuffs of all those suggestions that aren’t likely to work, will teach some of the public that such rules of thumb exist and are useful.
• 
  40

  Evidence that God hates cats

  by SweetBabyCheezits in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i, for one, sensed that cats were from the devil ever since that demon-cat, toonces, was shown driving an automobile on live tv.. (orange feline, 2/3 of the way down on the right side, getting his.).

  .

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  PrimateDave

  

  For some reason I thought this image fit the topic description...
• 
  10

  Jesus Christ = Zombie + Frankenstein + Dracula

  by Simon in

  1. social
  2. humour

  pretty accurate and sums up what a fundamentally crazy belief it is .... .

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  PrimateDave

  Then there's that eating of his flesh and drinking his blood thing too.
• 
  98

  My sucky situation

  by brotherdan in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hi guys,.

  sadly some of them had been in bethel for 5 - 10 years and were still cleaning toilets.. after about 2 years of it i couldn't do it anymore.

  i always knew something wasn't quite right with this organization.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  PrimateDave

  Welcome to JWN!

  Welcome to freedom!

  Maybe you should call your wife's bluff. Tell her you will accept a divorce if that will make her happy, because you will no longer be a JW. If she doesn't want a divorce, and you are willing to keep the marriage, then form a truce. You two will no longer discuss religion. You won't talk against the WTS to her, and she won't pressure you to go back to the Watchtower.
• 
  112

  If the bible is god's handbook for man, why is it such gobbledegook?

  by Aussie Oz in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  i don't mean the basic moral code of behavior (that many non biblical lands also just happen to have) that people use to model their lives, but the 'deeper' stuff.... assuming that god has had his divine plan for vindicating himself etc ever since he figured that adam may screw up, and he needed to let faithful mankind know the 'plan' and how to survive it all.... why is the important stuff all gobbledegook?.

  the time frame, prophecy, signs and so on are all so obscure that even the cleverest theologians can't understand it or agree on it.

  the 'truth' is so muddled and juggled up that every understanding can be logically challenged with an equally challengable one.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  PrimateDave

  If god wanted my attention, it could have made an indestructible object with the proportions of 1:4:9 somewhere on Earth. He could then have placed a similar object on the moon, and then a third object in the orbit of Jupiter.

  Seriously, though, the Bible is a collection of writings that have been idolized by a group of related religions that claim to reject idolatry. (What irony!) Bibliolators hold their idol in the highest esteem, higher than whatever divinity actually exists, if any. For example, if modern science demonstrates that living things evolve, bibliolators consider it an affront against their chosen idol instead of simply accepting that the Bible writers didn't know squat about geology, paleontology, astronomy, genetics, or even simple addition and subtraction since half the time their numbers didn't add up.

  At least not all Christians are bibliolators.
• 
  49

  The Economy for 2010

  by oldflame in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hello all my jwn friends.. .

  i felt the need to share what i have heard recently.

  i have a very close friend who has a brother who is an economist.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  PrimateDave

  Just in case you missed it,

  Confessions Of A Wall St. Nihilist: Forget About Goldman Sachs, Our Entire Economy Is Built On Fraud

  And so he began:

  “Let’s say the government decides one day, ‘You know, we oughta listen to Che here, let’s throw the book at every firm and every executive that our people can make a case against. Because you know, gosh, it’s all about rule of law and blind justice, just like Che says.’ OK, so now this means indicting just about every serious player in finance, so they take down Goldman Sachs, they take down Citigroup, JP Morgan, BofA… and they also serve all the big funds who are at least as guilty, if not more. So they shut down Pimco, Blackrock, Citadel… maybe they indict Geithner and Summers, haul in some of Bush’s crooks… right?”

  “Too bad they don’t serve popcorn here, this is getting good.”

  “OK, now guess what you’ve just done? You’ve just caused the markets to completely tank. Remember what happened after the Lehman collapse? Remember how popular that made every politician in Washington? Still wondering why they coughed up a trillion bucks? They were scared for their lives; that’s why they voted for that bailout. You’d have done the same goddamn thing. But if we go after everyone guilty of fraud and theft, the market crash this country would see would make 2008 look like Sesame Street. Open that can of worms labeled ‘Fraud’ and the whole fucking economy collapses. You may as well prosecute people for masturbating. No one will know where the fraud investigation stops and who will be charged next—everyone will try to cash out, and the markets will tank to zero. And guess what happens when the markets tank to zero? Every fucking American with a retirement plan, or an investment portfolio, or a 401k—every state pension plan in the country, every teacher’s pension fund, every fireman’s pension—every last one of them will be wiped out. That’s what the Lehman collapse taught us.”

  “Us? It didn’t teach us anything but that this country is run by maniacs.”