Water: Part II

I wish I could have thought of a clever title for this post. I thought some were cute, but they all got flushed.

Water is both essential to life and destructive at the same time.  What a paradox.  It's destructive in big tsunami like ways and in small, irritating, rusty ways.  Just the word "leak" can make some people shudder.  And why is that?  Why are there so many substances that do not react well to getting wet?

Electron cloud model of water atom

I started reading again on all the stuff I learned years ago about chemistry in order to bring some great enlightening insights to my readers on this subject.  When it comes to chemistry and physics, I think I would rather try to explain how quantum mechanics works.  I get excited talking about radio isotope decay and the significance of polonium haloes in granite, but water is far more difficult.  That's right.  The substance that should be the most familiar to us in at least two of it's forms is the hardest to explain.

This is because as much as people like to think that science can explain everything, the more you know about what science REALLY knows, the more you realize that they don't explain a lot.

Bohr model of the atom

Let's start with the fact that most atoms are invisible.  Yeah. Those cute illustrations of what scientists believe to be the working models of atoms are just illustrations.  Most people aren't even aware of this, because ever since grade school, we've been subjected to illustrations designed to teach us about the assumed properties of  atoms and even subatomic particles are presented with such assurance that this is "just the way it is."  And while the atomic models we are shown are the best models that can be developed based on the experimental behavior and empirical evidence, they are still just best guesses.

Our best scanning, tunneling, electron microscopes can only see the very largest of atoms, and the pictures are very fuzzy at that.  How many people outside the scientific community even understand that, below a certain size, you can't "see" molecular objects. That's right.  Once you get so far down in size, there is no actual optical resolution that works, because you can't focus wavelengths of light that would have to be so short that you can't create lenses to deal with them.  That's why the electron microscope had to be invented.  When you look at an image from an electron microscope, you are not actually seeing the object the way you would look at a bacterium under a standard optical microscope.  You are looking at an image produced electrically on a monitor that is interpreting the electrons that have been focused to bounce off the object you want to examine.  An analogy would be the image you get from a high quality radar array from many miles up in space looking down at a land mass on earth.

Physicists know that down to a certain point we can't observe what goes on at the atomic or subatomic level. How can we, when the very act of trying to see an object means bombarding it with electrons?  It would be like blind people trying to watch a basketball game by being on the court with the players and touching them and the ball in order to "see" what's happening.  So, always keep in mind that what we "know" about atoms and elements are based purely on observing how they react with other atoms and other molecules on a relatively huge scale compared to their actual size.  Most of what we know about electrons seem very well proven, otherwise we wouldn't have radio, TV, microwaves, etc.

We don't know with absolute certainty that the hydrogen atoms attach at an angle to the oxygen atom in that model you see at the top, but it's the best guess based on how we think water behaves relative to other molecules.  For instance, in the shapes and behaviors of proteins. But this does not explain why water has the extremely high dielectric strength that it does compared to other liquids.  Why is water such an extremely good solvent with so many other substances?  Why does water expand when it freezes, even when in higher density solution such as sea water?  We don't know why.  We only know that it does.  We can speculate that the electron orbital cloud of the hydrogen expands away from the larger oxygen atom, thus making it less dense compared to the surrounding liquid water molecules, but such a change in the spatial relationship would seem to indicate a higher, not lower energy state.  This is because, as some would suggest, the hydrogen bond state in water forms an "open lattice" structure and this open lattice gets bigger at the point of freezing.  Open lattice?  Suggesting that there is empty space between the atomic matter?  But nature abhors any kind of vacuum.  This is an odd mystery.

We don't fully understand how atoms attach to each other. Physics describes three types of bonding between atoms: hydrogen bonding, covalent bonding, and ionic bonding, but these descriptions are only due to observation of behavior at the macro level and based on theories about the electrical charges and numbers of electrons and protons that are in the atoms.  There is overlap in the characteristics.  Most of the bonds in the smallest molecules are covalent in nature, meaning that the atoms are sharing electrons to some degree.  Ionic bonding is more along the lines of purely electrical or "magnetic" type attraction between atoms.

Hydrogen bonding is not completely understood. As of this post, in the year 2011, there is still a call for scientists to come up with a definition for hydrogen bonding. (Note the line just before the contents box at the link.)  How is it that hydrogen bonding is described as being weaker than ionic bonding?  Sodium chloride crystals (table salt) are a simple paradigm of ionic bonding between chlorine gas and sodium metal.  But I can take a pint of pure (distilled or deionized) water and dissolve up to four or five tablespoons of salt in the water.  This demonstrates that the bonds of the crystals have been broken while the physical state of the water has remained unchanged.

The same weak hydrogen bonds that allow you to push your finger down on a plunger and "atomize" water from a spray bottle are the same strong hydrogen bonds that give nylon it's elastic strength.  The same hydrogen bonds that allow water to evaporate off your skin  are the same hydrogen bonds that connect amino acids across the spiral lattice of phosphates that make up the DNA helix, but that can easily be "unzipped" by ribosomes to create RNA or recreate new DNA molecules.  All of the soft tissues of your body are swimming in a sea of water.

The element of water behaves differently with so many other elements, and even behaves differently depending on the amount of the element present.  For example, you couldn't survive if you didn't eat enough salt in order to have sodium ions in your body.  Every nerve cell in your body depends on sodium ions carrying nerve impulses.  But what happens when pure sodium comes in contact with water in an unregulated environment?  Watch the video:



You couldn't do that safely with lithium or especially rubidium.  They are far more reactive than sodium.  If you'd like to see how stupid and spectacular some people can be with sodium, go to this link on YouTube.  The third video in the list is really an example of what not to do.

This is enough for today.  Go ponder what a miraculous substance water really is.  How anybody who understands the little bit we can comprehend about the world around us can be an atheist is beyond my ability to explain.  I will continue to repeat what I've said before.  People will believe what they want to believe no matter what the evidence suggests or proves.  Accepting this has kept me from going crazy when talking to people.

Shalom Y'all

Water: The Simple Is Fascinating

We take it for granted every day.  Oh, I don't just mean that we usually don't think much about it until we are thirsty or want to wash our hands. We don't think much about the miraculous nature of water.  Water has extremely unique properties.  Is it extreme to say that water's properties are uniquely extreme?  The facts that you will read in this post and those to come should bear this out.

How important and unique is water?  The answer to that is revealed by the fact that scientists are looking for it on our nearest celestial bodies.  Why?  Because of it's absolute necessity for life.  This is where I have to interject something important.  I like science-fiction stories as much as the next guy, and while there is some amazing technology that has arisen from people daring to question conventional wisdom and keep pushing the envelope, there really are limits and absolutes.  Water is one of those absolutes.

Even the most bizarre forms of life that we find on this planet still have to use water as part of their metabolic processes.  No water; no life.  It's just that simple.  That is why scientists look for the existence of water as being the primary requisite for life any place in the universe.  Of course, it's simple to say that water is absolutely necessary for life to exist.  The hallmark of good science is to ask why that is.  Real scientists keep asking the question "why" until the question is answered, whether we like the answer or not.  Studying water down to the molecular level gives us the answers for why it is so necessary for life.

There are at least 19 features of water that are anomalous.  These are features that should not occur according to the prevailing scientific knowledge about chemistry.  These are features that do not occur with any other liquids in the known universe.  If it were not for these things that shouldn't be, no life could exist on this planet.  We will only look at a few of these items at a time, due to time and space considerations. You've got other things you have to do.

Water behaves like no other liquid in any given range of temperatures.  Let's just take it's freezing point.  Extremely high when compared to alcohol.  Of course, water readily mixes with all the various types of alcohols, which is why we can have anti-freeze in our cars.  A fifty percent mixture with ethylene glycol can protect from freezing below 0° Fahrenheit.  Most all lipid or fat type liquids  have much lower freezing temperatures, except for natural animal fats, but that's a subject for a whole different post.

How water behaves in a very narrow range between freezing and boiling is what makes it so incredible.  For simplicity, let's think about water on the Celsius scale.  It might have been a good idea if we had adopted this scale for use in America rather than the seemingly arbitrary scale of Fahrenheit, where water freezes at 32° and boils at 212° (at sea level, another interesting factor).  The Celsius scale would seem to make more sense since water itself is the basis for the scale.  Zero degree is the temperature at which water freezes.  One hundred degrees is the temperature at which water boils.

Most all substances, be they solid, liquid or gas become denser as they get colder  Some very amazing qualities have been imparted to metals through a process of heating and then freezing them down to temperatures approaching absolute zero. The molecules slow down and get closer together.  Denser objects are more affected by gravity relative to the substance around them, therefore, denser, colder water will sink. However, water is completely unique in that water has a very specific maximum density at a temperature of  4°C or 40°F.  In lakes, this is vitally important because it creates motion and subsequent circulation of water.  More oxygenated water at the surface gets circulated to organisms at depth.  This is why large lakes don't just stagnate and die, unless something occurs to interfere with the process.  More amazing is that water is the only liquid that expands when it freezes.

Have you ever thought of what would happen if water didn't do that?  Because water expands when it freezes, it becomes less dense than the surrounding water and floats.  If water behaved like it should, according to physics, and became denser, it would sink to the bottom.  In a short time all life would cease to exist on the earth.  This planet would just be a big ice ball.

More to come.

Peterson Postmodern Connection

The issue of gun control and individual freedom can bring about some discussions that drive logical people to want to tear our hair out.  The apparent inability of some people to use linear logic and reason to come to rational conclusions in spite of feelings and emotion has given rise to Joe Huffman coining a name for the condition Peterson Syndrome, in "honor" of Joan Peterson of  the Brady Campaign.

Some of us have spent some time discussing how it is possible to be so disconnected from reality.  While Huffman and myself, as well as others seem to be able to describe Peterson Syndrome, we would still like to understand where it comes from.  After all, you want to know if it's organic or communicable, and if it is communicable, you want to be able to take all possible precautions against it.  I never got around to writing an in depth post explaining how I believed it was the result of postmodern education. But then, today, I started at Smallest Minority, where Kevin led me to Labrat's post at Atomic Nerds.  His post led me to MaxedOutMama.

Wading through all of this seemed to confirm for me that what I originally suspected.  That Joan Peterson and this professor Venkatesan have the condition we now call Peterson Syndrome as a result of postmodern indoctrination.  This is a very subtle form of solipsism.  It is very subtle because you have to let someone like the professor, or Peterson, talk long enough for the origin of their irrationality to manifest itself because neither of these women would consciously be aware of, let alone admit, that they were steeped in solipsism.

I can understand that Peterson has succumbed to her mental disorder because she lost a family member to a violent predator using a gun.  I would liken it to a child getting thrown by a horse, who then is afraid to ever go near a horse  from that day forward.  She allows her emotions to completely override rational thought, and gets support from like-minded individuals.

The postmodern thinking described by the two citations at MaxedOutMama's blog, as well as her explanation got me thinking again about how people like Joan Peterson become the way they are.  The best quote from the professor that drove it home for me, was the following:

In graduate school, I was inculcated in the tenets of a field known as science studies, which teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth and that science is motivated by politics and human interest. This is known as social constructivism and is the reigning mantra in science studies, which considers historical and sociological understandings of science. From the vantage point of social constructivism, scientific facts are not discovered but rather created within a social framework. In other words, scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.

Wow.  Just, Wow.  No wonder her students were making fun of her.  The first part of that statement isn't completely bizarre, but the last statement is whacko.  Let's break it down.

You are not in any kind of reality if you think that facts are created rather than discovered in the realm of science.  That there are people who believe such a concept would explain why so many buy into the global warming hoax.  If your social framework is that capitalism and free markets are bad, there is no better idea than to make naturally occurring gases that are good for plant growth into some kind of evil pollutant. If you want people to believe that biochemical molecules can somehow defy the laws of physics and that complex, coded information simply arises out of inanimate matter, I suppose the view of the professor makes sense to you.

Since the world began, scientific discovery by humans has been driven mostly by need.  Need for better ideas, tools, and techniques in everything from agriculture to warfare. That there may have been a political (warfare) reason to try to figure out a trebuchet or discover the chemistry of gunpowder doesn't make the facts of chemistry work differently because of why you need it.  Food plants don't sit around thinking about whether or not you have the right historical and sociological motivations or understandings about how to cultivate them. Ergo, to make the outrageous leap to concluding that last sentence just makes me want to find whoever passed on that idea and drop them in the Australian outback.

As someone who passionately defends the truth of the Bible based on hard, proveable science and history, I find it hard enough to have discussions with people about real science and the scientific method even when they haven't had their minds warped by ideas like that.  How then do you have a rational discussion about scientific facts versus theory with someone who thinks that social construct determines facts?  In short, you don't.  Facts that conform to a social construct are not facts at all.

If there are people with the title of professor in colleges and universities spreading this kind of mental disease, it's no wonder we can't have any civil discourse on politics.  We can't have any discourse.  It's no wonder I run across comments on various blogs that reflect complete ignorance of historical facts on the constitution.  It's no wonder that so many people don't, or simply can not, distinguish between raw facts and interpretations of evidence.

Because we didn't make a concerted effort to embarrass people like that professor out of the classroom long ago, we end up with people like the person Kevin Baker is engaging in this post.  People who a hundred years ago we would have just pointed at and laughed at, because even a sixth grade child could have explained why what they were espousing was sheer nonsense.  Now such people are numerous enough to have elected a president to what once was the most powerful country on the planet.

Knowing God: Part 2

This is part 2.  Click here to read Part One.

It was the following day that I took time after class to go to the biggest Christian book store in Tampa.  This place had been in business a long time.  A free standing building about a third of the size of your average Barnes and Nobles, maybe a little smaller.  It wasn't just some little shop in a strip mall.  I figured if any place has some books with the answers to help me with all of the doubts and questions, surely this was the place.

My assumption was totally wrong.  There was a big section that had lots of different translations of the Bible.  At that time, I didn't understand why that was necessary.  Of the most popular translations, you even had different variations: red-letter, chain reference, topical, etc.Nobody to explain why all that was necessary, but it was all there.  Then there's all the different binding, and, oh-my-goodness!,  the selection of very fancy covers or carriers to tote them around in. A whole corner of the book area was devoted to such paraphernalia. Then there was a huge section that had to do with "Spirituality." Then an area about "self-improvement." Biographies took up another section.  There was a section with Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias and other large reference works. Of course there were books about end time prophecy.  Everybody wants to know what's going to happen and when. Smaller sections covered evangelism and church organization, and of course there were lots of books about current events and culture and what was wrong with the world. There were books on single topics or areas that I don't even remember.There was a large section of the store devoted to popular or contemporary gospel music, both recorded and sheet music.  Then there's the clothing.  Tee shirts, jewelry, choir robes.  Sunday school supplies, lesson books, felt boards, posters.  Artwork, paintings, candlesticks, knick-knacks, whatever.

I think I'd spent over two hours browsing the titles and reading the jackets to find something that dealt with just the basic questions I had.  In the reference section there was some fat volume about Bible criticism.  Perhaps it was Gleason Archer's When Critics Ask or some such, but that's the kind of stuff for second and third year seminary students and dealt with internal textual minutia that didn't have anything to do with answering any of my deeply held belief in evolution.  It seemed like I was wasting my time and I was coming to the conclusion that I wasn't going to find anything because there was nothing to find.

Let me back up a bit here.  As I was being made fun of for my new faith, I was asking questions of the priest and the other people I went to church with.  A lot of those people had gone to church all their lives and seemed to have great faith, and for heaven's sake, what's the point of getting a seminary degree and becoming ordained if you aren't going to learn how to answer people's questions about why we should believe in this stuff.  But when I would ask my questions, pointing out the glaring contradictions in what we accepted as fact from science versus what the Bible said, the only responses I got were pretty much one of three kinds:  "What's important is just having faith." "The accounts in the Bible are just parables or allegories, they're not to be taken as literal history."  "Evolution is just God's way of doing things."

The problem is, all of those answers mean that you couldn't trust what the Bible said about anything.  My logical mind wouldn't let me come to any other conclusion.  Especially since the Bible itself claims over and over again that it is the truth. I was not about to buy into any solipsistic nonsense about it.  And if you are one of those idiots who believes in solipsism, you might as well stop reading and go someplace else, because I got no use for you, unless you want to be disabused of that garbage.

Some people can somehow find a way to shut down that part of their mind that demands to know; "How did we get here, and why are we here?"  I really don't understand how someone of even average intelligence can do that, but that's a whole new post.  Those fundamental questions are why we spend trillions of dollars all over the planet,  building superconducting super colliders  and engaging in quantum physics research.  It's why we keep peering farther and farther out into space and launched Voyager and have radio telescopes listening for aliens.  I have a strong suspicion that even the people who claim not to care about the basic issue of human origins really do care when faced with their own mortality or deep personal crisis.

It would also be another thing if the Bible didn't deal with the issue of our origins, but it does.  It doesn't simply tell us, "God just created everything you see, and He really doesn't want to be bothered with telling you how He did it."  Quite the contrary.  It not only tells us the order that certain things were made, but defines what a day is and how long it lasts, and the order in which things were created made no sense according to everything I'd been taught in school.  And that was just scratching the surface of all the problems I had with the stories in the Bible.  I walked out of that store feeling pretty let down.

As I went to pull out of the parking lot the radio was playing something I found very irritating at that moment and so I hit another preset, to land on a station that carried Dr. D. James Kennedy's Truths That Transform just in time to hear that the program was about a book that was full of evidence that countered evolution.  It  seemed to have basic rebuttals to some things that I'd always just accepted as fact: Carbon dating, how primitive early man was, billions of years of geological evidence, etc.

Wow, why hadn't I ever heard anything like that before?  Even so, it sounded like stuff that should be pretty easy to falsify if it was just typical Christian propaganda.  I ordered it.  The book itself was pretty simple and seemed to be written for a general audience, but with lots of references.  I no longer have it in my library, having loaned it out many years ago and never gotten it back, but its footnotes and bibliography got me started on research, and within a couple of months I was spending a lot of money buying books from other sources, and finding out some really amazing things.

Like the fact that some of the best and brightest scientists with advanced degrees, all over the world, not only believed that the Bible was true, but that the earth was very young.  I'm not talking about crackpot, or fringe scientists, but guys with Ph.D.s from major universities and who were well respected and even taught at such places or were doing cutting edge research.  Like Dr. Richard Damadian who invented the MRI., Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith a holder of three separate doctorates in the medical field; Dr. Russell Humphreys who was once the lead scientist in high energy plasma physics.

Those are just modern scientists.  I'm sure nobody cares that Isaac Newton, or Michael Faraday, or Louis Pasteur or most of the scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries were devout believers in the Bible and believed that the pursuit of science was, as Faraday put it, "thinking God's thoughts after Him."

All of this information really shook me up.  I read volumes and volumes of material.  I read the criticisms of these men and their research and conclusions and found myself having to agree with them.  I discovered Dr. Robert Gentry's work on polonium radio halos in granite and how none of the evolutionary scientists could find a flaw in his logic of what the implications were.  It actually made me angry for weeks.  I'd been misled for a long time.  I'd been lied to.  I thought "all" scientists were in agreement that evolution was a fact and that there was no mitigating evidence to the contrary. You see, it's one thing to present both sides of an argument fairly and let the audience decide, but that's not what goes on out there.  I would get to experience it first hand for myself, long before Ben Stein would come out with his documentary, EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed.  I have been in college classrooms and in churches and parties where, once I began laying out evidence that made evolution easily falsifiable, my opponents would say I was nuts, but couldn't produce or cite a single piece of evidence to refute me.

This post, and even this entire blog is not for the purpose of laying out over 24 years of my experience and research into the debate and the evidence.  I've been a subscriber to Creation and now Answers magazine, as well as the scientific, peer reviewed journals of the Creation Research Society, and Answers In Genesis' Technical Journal.  I've listened and read, over, and over, and over to the evolutionists talk about how creationism isn't science, but then they never deal with the science.  Their argument always gets reduced to being about religious people trying to impose their beliefs on everybody else.  This has become so routine, that I have never been afraid to engage in debate with any doctor of any discipline anywhere at anytime regarding creation versus evolution. I'll try to keep to the topic of how the decay theorem proves that radiometric dating is always just a guess, or really a SWAG, and they'll just tell me it's "settled" science, without dealing with the mathematical equation.  They have nothing, and they prove it every single time.  Maybe I should share some of those encounters in other posts, but that's not the purpose of this particular post.  Here, I am just wanting to deal with the idea of knowing God. The background is important, however, because we are not talking about God as just anybody wants to understand Him.  The God that you understand on your terms is no god at all.

Once again, my logical, science loving mind was very concerned with the question of: Which God?  Is there just God and all roads lead to him?  Is the god of the Hindus and Buddhists and the Muslims and even the Mormons all the same entity?  Is religion just this big, complex salad bar that we all slide our tray along and get to pick and choose what we like, but we all end up eating in the same dining room?  All of these religions contradict each other on so many points and so many levels.  They can't all be right.  The universal language of the Universe is mathematics.  All the laws that govern this Universe are very exact and precise.  It stood to reason in my mind that a God who created all of this must have some very well defined rules.  It also made sense to me that any entity or religion that claimed to know God would not reflect any characteristics of a God that were inconsistent with nature.

Being logical, I asked myself: "What if I were God?"  Would I create a universe with very precise and logical mathematical laws, incredible beauty, mind-boggling diversity, then create sentient beings capable of tremendous abstract thought and deep emotional capability, and then leave them to their own devices and not provide a way for them to find out about me?  Maybe it's just me, but I find that line of thinking stupid beyond words.  So, now a big part of my journey was going to be about discovering whether or not I could know if I had the right God.  This would prove to be my journey on the road called epistemology.

I had already had enough experience from as far back as I can remember of experiencing the most asinine and moronic behavior in churches.  It still goes on to this day.  One need only turn on the TV and experience the clownish antics of the prosperity hucksters and simple-minded "evangelists."  Way too much of what the world encounters under the label of "Christianity" on television looks like a combination of Ringling Brothers and Saturday Night Live.  I would have to find out, apart from the "church" that God is not afraid of the toughest questions I can put to Him.  I would also have to learn that the vast majority of stuff done in His name had nothing to do with Him.

The next post on this theme is going to deal with,  "How do we find  the real God?"

You can move to the next post by clicking on Knowing God: Part 3

Peterson Syndrome

I won't get into my reasoning and thoughts about predestination. That's a subject that I wouldn't discuss with someone unless they were a fairly accomplished Bible scholar and over the age of 30 and it would help even more if they had children.  I only mention that to say this: I am very blessed that I did not start college until I was almost 26 years old.  I had been orphaned at 13 and lived at the Florida Sheriffs Boys Ranch. I had intellect, but no wisdom, and no one to help me or make me realize that good academic scores would realize a big payoff in the future.  After graduating high school, it would be straight into the work world.  Before beginning college I would have had at least six very different jobs.  One of them involved digging in the hot sun to install phone cable with a guy who had a Ph.d.  in some liberal arts field that I don't even remember.  By the time I was 20, I was THE store manager for an auto parts chain. I would go on to more things, and all of that experience gave me some wisdom.

Don't ever confuse knowledge with wisdom.  You can know a lot of crap that is factual and not have "a lick of sense," or wisdom.  You can spend a lot of your time and intellectual power to learn a lot of facts and information that is very useful, or stuff that won't make a pile of dirt worth of difference to your well-being.

My hard won wisdom borne of experience was with me when I started taking the requisite classes for my associate of arts degree.  So, when I had to sit in a college classroom and listen to some instructor pontificate on a subject, my BS meter would go off like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl. I was nothing like the teenagers fresh out of high school who sat there listening to every word that came out of the instructor's mouth as if it was all beyond question.  I had many "lively discussions" with many of my professors, to the shock and disbelief of surrounding students, especially when I made them admit their errors and biases.  It was a couple of years into my college work and also teaching Creation/Biblical apologetics that I discovered what the problem was in academe.  Which brings us to the following quote by Joe Huffman regarding his naming of the condition that we conservatives encounter in people on the left:  Peterson Syndrome; named for Jan Peterson who advocates for the Brady Campaign.  [Hat tip to Kevin at The Smallest Minority]

She is frequently incoherent. She cannot distinguish the difference between intentions and results. If she is a liar she would not repeatedly make these kind of mistakes. Or if she is a liar then she is very very smart and skilled to consistently use the same sort of tool without ever slipping up.

I claim it is not necessarily and in fact probably isn't stupidity. If this were stupidity then this sort of faulty thinking would not continually show up throughout human history even with people that are exceedingly well respected. Every age and society has stupid people in it and they are easily recognized and the instances of them being well respected are exceedingly rare. This is some other type of mental disorder.

This mental disorder can be, and has been, easily detected. Ask the question, "What is the process by which you determine truth from falsity?" People suffering from this mental disorder not only won't be able to supply an answer but frequently cannot even understand the question. The question is nonsensical to them. They are lacking a thinking process. Hence, by necessity, they fail to process information. Asking them to supply a process when they are totally unaware of the existence of such a concept results in the same sort of difficulty as asking a person blind since birth what color the walls are. They have no common basis with the questioner such that they can even understanding the question. This is the same sort of response we get from her. She cannot understand concepts that to us are intuitively, blindingly, demonstrably, obvious. It is nearly impossible for us to believe that she does not understand what we are saying. But if she were blind you would not claim she was stupid or a liar if she did not know the color of the wall.

Joe describes the condition, but does not offer a cause.  This is what I would like to rectify.

The problem begins when the philosophy of education shifts from teaching students HOW to think to just teaching them WHAT to think.  I wondered how we got to this model of education in the United States and most of the western world. In my own autodidactic studies, and teaching of apologetics, I saw the need to demonstrate to my students how important it was to use logic to determine truth.  I had known that in the past, even high schools had debating classes and competitions, but this had become passé.  That's where the breakdown of education had begun.  Having to learn how to reach a conclusion and then articulately defend it is the real measure of knowledge.  With rare exception, such learning is now missing from all "higher" education past the twelfth grade.  When that which is supposed to pass for education has been reduced to merely memorizing facts and information with no understanding of how the information should be usefully applied, society is heading for disaster.

History bores the snot out of kids in the public government school indoctrination centers because it has been stripped of the information that makes it relevant in the name of "separation of Church and State."  Math is boring because it isn't coupled to history and the significance of what each discovery in the field did to improve the human condition. Science is boring to many students for the same reason.  I've always loved science and thought it was fun, but it had nothing to do with what I learned in school.  It was because I was always finding stuff on my own and doing my own experiments.

How many people understand syllogism?  Far too many people cannot recognize a false premise to start with.  This is what creates the famous GIGO condition that software engineers and other scientists in the hard sciences are painfully familiar with (Garbage In, Garbage Out).  If the basic facts or information is flawed, no amount of wishful thinking is going to create a better outcome.  Not within the confines of this space/time continuum.  That is the first lesson of logic.

This will be my first essay on understanding the Peterson Syndrome.  If you'd like to contribute your thoughts on the matter, email me at:  moses5768@yahoo.com.

Integrity In Science

More than fifteen years ago, I was calling BS on the idea that CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) could possibly be hurting, let alone destroying the ozone layer.  Most people who bought into that nonsense wouldn't know a triple oxygen molecule from dihydrogen monoxide.  By the way, there are tremendous amounts of dihydrogen monoxide in pretty much all of the tap water around the world.  This chemical is so deadly that if you inhale enough of it, you could die.

Today, I had the fortune of running into the post below.  All the necessary links are contained within.  I have to say that I am just a bit proud to have been on the cutting edge of reality and truth on this subject years ago.

Hal Lewis: My Resignation From The American Physical Society – an important moment in science history

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Anthony Watts

Hal Lewis

We’ve previously covered the APS here, when I wrote:

While Copenhagen and its excesses rage, a quiet revolution is starting.

Indeed, not so quiet now. It looks like it is getting ugly inside with the public airing of the resignation of a very prominent member who writes:

I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
…
In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.- Hal Lewis

Below is his resignation letter made public today, via the GWPF.
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.
What I would really like to see though, is this public resignation letter given the same editorial space as Michael Mann in today’s Washington Post.
Readers, we can do this. Here’s the place at WaPo to ask for it.  For anyone writing to the WaPo, the  national@washpost.com, is the national news editorial desk. Spread the word on other blogs. Let’s see if they have enough integrity to provide a counterpoint. – Anthony
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Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).
Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
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Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making) 

When There Is No Doctor

Everybody say hello to Ginger.

As a flavoring, I've always loved ginger.  It can go well with both sweet and savory dishes.  For versatility in cooking, that's hard to beat.  This has been my first attempt in growing ginger and so far, so good. Since ginger is really tropical, we will have to keep it in pots so it can move back and forth from the greenhouse.The following segment was lifted directly from the University of Maryland Medical school:

Ginger, the underground stem, or rhizome, of the plant Zingiber officinale has been used as a medicine in Asian, Indian, and Arabic herbal traditions since ancient times. In China, for example, ginger has been used to aid digestion and treat stomach upset, diarrhea, and nausea for more than 2,000 years. Ginger has also been used to help treat arthritis, colic, diarrhea, and heart conditions. In addition to these medicinal uses, ginger continues to be valued around the world as an important cooking spice and is believed to help treat the common cold, flu-like symptoms, headaches, and even painful menstrual periods. Native to Asia where its use as a culinary spice spans at least 4,400 years, ginger grows in fertile, moist, tropical soil.

All I did to grow these little plants was to break off a couple of "fingers" from a ginger "hand" that we bought at the local grocery store. I let the little root stub dry out for about a week and then planted it in my own mix of potting soil with just the very top edge exposed to the sun and kept the soil moist.  I've got about a half dozen of these plants in process now.

Since even the head actuary for the Social Security Administration has come out with his own report explaining how there is going to be a dramatic loss of doctors and available health care professionals and facilities once the new "health care" bill goes into effect, it would behoove one to start making plans for the kind of medical care one could expect in places like Cuba or Canada or Great Britain or Zimbabwe, or even worse, like  North Korea.  Add to this scenario the conditions that will exist under "cap and trade", and travel with anything other than bicycles and horse and buggy will be extremely rare, so getting to any kind of modern medical facilities will be a monumental task.

That means that out of sheer necessity, people are going to have to return to the tried and true methods of herbal medicine that have worked for millenia. In some ways, this is really a good thing, since man-made pharmaceuticals tend to make the "cure" worse than the disease.  If you pay attention to the side-affects of most drugs, any natural alternative is far superior.  In addition, many drugs don't really treat the cause, but merely treat or mask the symptoms.

Twyla is a nurse with over two decades of experience including surgical O.R. My university studies were in pre-med biology. I've been dabbling in the use of herbal medications since 1980, and I've often had success where the most help I've gotten from an allopathic doctor was "I don't know; maybe."

Therefore, I'm going to post from time to time on one or possibly two or more herbs or plants that have medical uses.  I'm going to try to give you the best possible pictures and descriptions to help you identify these plants. This is going to be about facts that can be verified.  I'm a big believer in epistemology and logic.  REAL science. Whenever possible, double-blind studies are the best way to verify the truth or falsity of a theory. Anecdotes are useful to discover possibilities, but they don't prove anything.  You must be able to isolate and control variables, and more importantly you must have enough understanding to distinguish between what is objective fact and what is subjective opinion, something that is sorely missing in the modern world.  Most people wouldn't recognize a faulty premise or a coherent syllogism if it walked up and slapped them. This is mainly why the world is in the mess that it's in.

Shalom,  Moshe