Posts by Stu who?

Pope says gravity proves technology can't supplant God

Higgs may be God and we can prove it soon

Yo anon. Good post. By the way the Higgs reality or not will soon be resolved unequivocally. Belief will not be required, it will be found, found with several flavours or not found. The sceptic nonreligion of science will elevate Standard Model (one and only one true Higgs boson in the 15 TeV range) or let us know that Supersymmetry may be a better bet ( several Higgs show up) or a return to drawing board may be needed (no Higgs found).

Putting phiosophical objections aside ( how will we KNOW?, who trusts CERN?, conspiracy etc) this will be a settled question. Peer reviewed summaries in the field do not allow a Higgs consistent with standard model to fail to appear in this energy range. After a year or two with none, then there IS NO HIGGS - fact. Standard Model (most accurate theory ever devised) would be contradicted.

Then the M theorists, string jockeys and brane-foam apologists will come clamouring for grants to support their religoin - the unchartered world of maths pretending to be physics where a 40 year sinecure in untestable speculation funds many an old prof's Porsche.

My faith? Higgs will show up with measurable properties and we move on.

aye right

So a believer is trying to help me? Only in the context of his own delusion. Islamists spout their venom, hate Christians, Jews (the People of the Book), atheists (me) but above all apostates, (people who disagree with them or renounce some trivial notion of the one true faith etc)

Islam is comfortable with conversion by force ( on threat of death) and has not, like its more urbane, of late, predecessor Christianity, recently invented faith by choice.

When a pope spoke to god and pronounced infallibly that the medieval superstition surrounding the assumption of the virgin was a true creed to be believed unquestioningly, was he therefore trying to help anyone roasting in a fire for dissent?

Now we know that heaven is not literally up there above the clouds, where exactly did the not-to-be corrupted corpse of Mary actaully head when it reached the exosphere? Orbit? Still going?Like a holy Energizer Bunny swinging around perihelion into the void?

Atheist proselitysation does exist I grant you, since I do it myself :-) is not about certainty or claimed intelligence. Its about altruism - the same instinct that has me help a stranger or rescue anyone in trouble, give my change to winos or a charity. I just want them freed from the narrow minded controlling influence of religions that justify everything from fatwahs to paedophilia, corruption and political interference that organised Squad seem so keen to promote.

I attack no one's faith - I just point out they don't share it, exactly the same, with any one other person. Most cannot articulate what they believe in or not and accept with a shrug that the inconsistencies are behind much evil in the world but they are pretty sure there is "someone" or "something else" out there. Really? And He (with a penis then?) approves of Inquisitions? Auto da Fe? Martyrdom?Purgatory? Original Sin? Papal authority? She (boobs?) disapproves of abortions, gays, proven facts like an ancient earth (~4 billion years old), or natural selection, or the solar system, etc. etc.

The questioning intelligence absent in true believers is indeed scary, but the lack of critical thinking and evident wishful thinking in Dawkins' "benign herd" that support religiosity are far more dangerous phenomena abroad than any that the nutters exhibit.

If you must think of your dead relatives as with you in a spiritual way and that gives you comfort or you talk to them in your head - go for it. However you don't say that. You use 3rd party grammar for such people. Dare I say it is because you don't believe it, yourself even though you wish it true? Your attitude then is revealed as one of the shepherds, aloof from the flock, claiming humility but behaving disingenuously. An episcopalian, a mullah, a guru or a witch doctor you reveal it is you that considers yourself better and you need a compliant congregation to exploit and maintain your self importance. Not me. I just like an argument.

epicycles and ex cathedra tosh

What nonsense you talk. Galileo had his book (which claimed only a mathematically superior predictive calculus could be had for planetary motion if one supposed the Copernican hypothesis - and this only as the winning dialogue in a fictional debate among the ancients) pre-approved by the Vatican. Publishing in his day being more than just printing a pdf to a wireless laser printer, he was undone by a change of Pope and a new guard seeing heresy in his work. Or more probably an "oops he's right" moment.

Thirteen years of house arrest and an apology from Rome in the 1990s are not the behaviour of an institution certain in its faith and confident to inform reality. Notwithstanding Galileo's personal foibles, we know he was correct and was wickedly abused by the same authority whose permission to publish he had sought and obtained. That'll teach him huh?

Your incoherent God, man, Church rant appears to excuse the excesses of Religion with the notion that other people than the religious do bad stuff too so the church must be good? Because it says so? Even as anointed pederasts and official cover-ups are brushed aside with untold millions of dollars of cash controlled by God's anointed vicar on earth? Bull.

No-one needs God to come up with right and wrong. It's in our DNA. We know, even as we cheat.

Sorry Pope - the debate is over

The brightest theologians and philiosophical consensus all came to the same conclusion back in the thirties. You cannot prove God nor that there is none. All sources of evidence for a deity whether authority, revelation, scripture or hearsay may be simply rejected by the sceptic. Proof being not possible, the only justification of faith is a conscious decision to believe in the impossible, which is the choice of the religious; or to decline to do that, which is the choice of the sceptic. The absence of faith is not itself a faith - this accusation often leveled against science or atheism is based on a false argument. Science is perennially contingent and in the face of evidence evolves, changes, sometimes reflects often contradicts for a while. Then it moves on. This is why science supplants religions but has nothing, that is not provisional, to say about the impossible until a testable hypothesis is framed . Above all you can personally test any of its hypotheses if you have the smarts, the cash and favourable peer reviews. No revelation required. The success of this approach must stick in your pontificate craw as so much of what was claimed by your predecessors as theirs to proclaim (origins of man, place of earth in the universe, age of the planet etc) has been shown to be just wrong.

So, Pope, your usurpation of the scientific terminology of proof, to debunk a claim never made for technology, that it seeks to supplant your God, reveals not just your ignorance of science (for gravity is the weakest of the forces we know), but also reveals your true fear. Religions - yours as all the others - may just become irrelevant. The opposite of God is not Satan, far less Science, but "Who cares?"

Nous n'avons besoin de cette hypothese.........

If you want to see scientists behaving with faith look at the boundaries where we don't know. Some have faith in Supersymmetry, others in standard model and Higgs. More believe in branes or foams or multiverses. They all know that their "faith" will be tested in a hadron collider or supernova somewhen and many will be proved wrong. Science will embrace the new and move on. A good scientist (though many are human too) will joyously toss his prior certainty aside and embrace any new proof of a theorm for the real achievement it represents.

Popes on the other hand? Wibble.

Twitter joke martyr loses appeal

oh dear oh dear

This is how our hard won freedoms erode. The mere fact that the airport and police did not take any steps to protect the public, that might have disrupted travel, shows they categorised it as prank. To then prosecute with vigour the perpetrator is a travesty and to deny the appeal is downright sinister abuse of judicial power. A sad day indeed.

Best Buy opens UK online store

Best Blag

Warning - giving your card details to Best Buy is like keeping your PIN in your wallet and leaving your wallet on the bar.

In one day, without physical possession of my card, someone ran up £9400 of fraudulent transactions at eight or so Best Buy locations in Florida. This would require at best extreme incompetence or at worst collusion by an employee. Boo hiss. Took me a year and an ombudsman to sort my Citi Bank (boo hiss) account and credit record.

Plague - avoid like the....... :-( You have been warned

World's first pedal-powered ornithopter takes flight in Canada

Powered flight? Sh**e!

What mince you speak. The first real human powered flight was required to fly a figure 8 with a pole at each end of several metres to be "confirmed". (Gossamer Albatross for your search engine). The Canadian scientists who confirmed this flight should have stuck to claiming the Canada Arm was a major contribution to the Shuttle program.

Please shut up about the Mull of Kintyre Chinook crash

It's not the FADEC it's the cover up

The controversy about the Chinook crash has never been about the teething problems of FADEC or its eventual ascendancy as superior to manual engine control. It is about the perfectly normal tendency of software, especially new software, to be full of bugs that managers and accountants want to pretend are not there or not important. The RAF found pilots grossly negligent so that the culpability of those involved could be covered up. No one now asserts that the 'without doubt' test for such a finding is justifiable except interested parties. The families want the slur removed, that is all.

It is not a tech issue.

BT brings jobs back from India

you are joking

What nonsense that it isn't about customer service. The Indian call centre staff were/are infuriating, incompetent, audible on the b/s words, " I do so apologize Mr..." and inaudlible on the information words "mumble" and they couldn't vary from a script - even when, as a caller, I could diagnose exactly where the problem was ( moved line in the end office to fix hard fault and at same instant losing broadband provision - duh).

And NO, I HAVEN'T CHANGED MY MICROFILTER, (do these ever fail?) No connected fax machine, hands free or cuddly toy gives you the remotest excuse to fob me off. Why don't you LISTEN!!!"