Profile for Synergy
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Synergy |
| Member number | 6292 |
| Title | Shaper |
| Postcount | 2009 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Wednesday, August 29 2007 17:29
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"#68 You now belong to this Board. If you try to escape, you will return. Always (exception: Synergy)." I can see this list is a bit outdated. Does my six month absence represent the longest successful planned escape? See, my problem is not so much the irresistibility of the fine folk at this board, as the fact that this Jeff guy keeps making these cool games I want to play. It's his fault really. Feel free to email your complaints to him. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Wednesday, August 29 2007 17:08
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No one can hijack or derail a thread. Everything here is collective in nature. Collective weight causes the mutation of topics, a redistribution of energy. If there were more life left in the main points of the global warming thread, I would expect them to be embroiled. Because something else so easily and passionately captured peoples' fancy, that is where the energy now lies. If Stillness or anyone else introducing religious/spiritual perspective into a discussion can successfully derail the main point, what does that say about all of us and our true interest? Seriously. It means we are more interested in and engaged by something in that aspect of the discussion. Even if it means our interest is to try to take another particular point or person down a notch. You can't argue against the motivation of people. People do what they want. People vote with their feet. It takes two to tango. Insert further lame, yet relevant clichés here. The sudden shifts and unpredictable mutations of topics here is really quite fascinating all in itself. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Wednesday, August 29 2007 16:43
Profile
I'll comment again, as someone who spent much of his life operating on the unchallenged assumption of the inerrant, God-given truth of the Bible, I now find it amazing how few such believers really examine why they have come to believe and defend such a massive, and unsubstantiatable claim. Why? Why do you think you believe it? Would the average person have come to the same conclusion if they weren't raised to believe it without question? We are so much more the predictable product of those who hold tremendous power over us to shape our minds and lives—our families. The apple so infrequently falls far from the tree. I grew up Christian because I was surrounded by Christians, not because my young reasoning had the capacity to judiciously make such a choice for myself at a tender age. One of our great conceits as humans is to think down upon those who came before who us who grew up in some now blatant error or mythology. We underestimate the deep, vital, powerful need of belonging, of security, of making meaning, and that promotes everything from clannish behavior to bandwagon effects to peer pressure to lemming-like self-destruction. Muslims breed Mulsims, Christians breed Christians, Hindus breed Hindus, and so religions perpetuate. We want to belong. We want to believe. We need God. We need to believe others about us are authorities. We crave trust in people bigger, smarter, wiser, more noble than us. We need our heros. We need our superheros (why do comic books and movies continue to flourish even with adults?), we need our gods, devils, angels, and demons. It is too fearful to face the simple, likely reality that no one really knows a whole hell of a lot or that there really may be no buffer between us and the divine. Most simply regurgitate what went before. Those who truly have mystical, divine encounters really can't communicate or preserve them for others anyway. Paul spoke of things he could not communicate after acquring his vision and gospel from three years of seeking in the Arabian desert. For all the remarkable and unprecedented spiritual notions he shared, I expect there was more he could not or would not. The more one has true spiritual experience, the more one realizes it really cannot be handed to anyone else. It is made to transform you into a living example of its reality, but you are the open book. You really can't write one to communicate the glories you have received. The uniniated will always take a transcendent thing and drag it down to be debased and sullied. Revelations are transcending and transforming experiences, not knowledge for the head to be codified and passed along to instruct all others. Whoever said God was so Orwellian in uniformity, one size fits all, one Hebrew Bible is the truth for all times and cultures? Absurd. Insulting. Impossible. Who wants to have anything to do with such an uncreative and lazy God Who only spoke for a short while to one obnoxiously wayward people in B.C. eras? Do Christians ever ask these questions about themselves and the God they embrace against instinctual revulsion in their deepest hearts? No God as big as loving as even the Hebrew God could possible relegate itself to such littleness and cultural myopia. Religion flourishes because it gives safe harbor from the fear of the unknown, the unknowable, the personal freedom and responsibility to have to seek and find truth and the divine for yourself. No one can hand it to you, but we crave to have it safely and patly handed to us. It's easy. It's safe. It's lazy. It keeps us from truly evolving past nursery school spiritually. I am not saying the inspiration of others is not vital and wonderful. I am saying it can't actually give you anything spiritual yourself except the inspiration to seek out the source of inspiration yourself. I'll be damned if one in a million Christians ever truly does that for herself. There is a reason they are called "pastors" and "flocks." If it wasn't for other masses who cling to the cherished, desperately needed belief in one divine textbook for life dropped out of the heavens...if it wasn't this large collective of believers who sycophantically chant the same thing over and over, truly, how likely do you think anyone today would come to the conclusion that that big, messy book of 66 books represents the untainted tongue of God to all peoples in all times and places, as if God was a 2500 year old Hebrew? There are significant portions of denominational Christianity who don't even claim the inerrancy of the Bible to the degree that more recent Protestant/evangelical sorts have come to declare like some mindless mantra. And again, I challenge, why do you need to believe it? What is destroyed and what changes if there is more onus on you...you and God together to ferret the inspiration and truth out of any word spoken or written present or ancient past? Do you believe in the Spirit within you to rightly divide? Because, I see little discernment and even less dividing where the worshipped sacred musty texts the ancient Hebrews handed us are concerned. Can't you for a moment take one step back and laugh at your own absurdity to cling to such an unlikely belief? Can't you look at why a person might gravitate toward such a belief in the first place and seek refuge within it? Laugh at yourself. It's okay. We are all a bit ridiculous, predictable, and childlike. If your God is God at all, you have nothing to fear except fear itself. God is big enough to take care of the universe and you, despite you. Twice in the past few months around here, I referred to some interesting studies done on the flood mythology/Noah story relative to the various accounts of ancient Mesopotamian cultures. One small, but very salient point elaborated upon in that context was how early transcribers both in Hebrew text and in other ancient languages both managed to mistransliterate years by a factor of ten. In the Hebrew texts, we wound up with Methusaleh living to 969 years old as a result. This sort of basic information is dismissed with a wave of the hand by the "perfect Bible" proponents, because any one little error devastates their theology, and conceivably as a result, their God. It's a mighty precarious perch to teeter upon if God's being or relevance depends upon a perfect collection of ancient writings, which you believe will give you perfect life...don'tcha think? If it can be demonstrated that there are errors handed down even from ancient times, what happens to your safety net? But, does it have to be the case that an imperfect Bible = an imperfect God/Spirit/Love in the universe? From here.: "The Genesis 5 numbers were mistranslated by an ancient scribe who confused archaic proto-sexagesimal number signs with cuneiform sexagesimal number signs. The numbers in the Sumerian king lists were also mistranslated by an ancient scribe who confused the archaic sign for year with the cuneiform sign for 3600." Read the article yourself for more details on how a very simple and believable mistake accounts for the very ridiculous and unbelievable years that appeared for a period of Bible history. This is just one little example of human error not precluded by a Deity overseeing the perfect preservation of Scripture. Did this Deity prevent King James from introducing some 10,000 errors into the first English translation of the Bible? When did God stop protecting the perfection of the Bible? Please explain to me how all this works, and how you know this is how it all works. If you have to be a scholar of ancient Greek and Hebrew and have no access to original texts from the B.C. era in order to have any hope of reading the original inerrant scriptures, what good does that do the other 6.6666 billion of us? Such simple, understandable errors cannot be entertained as possible with the glorious, sacred textbook of God. For so many, it destroys everything. One of my biggest beefs about Christianity, or nearly any organized religion is that they promote spiritual dependency and laziness. They have the truth for you. You remain a docile, ignorant sheep depending on the "authority" of someone else who went before you to verify and validate your belief system. You ride upon the claims and assertions of myriad so-called self-appointed authorities from the past, as if by sheer inertial mass and weight, a lie becomes true. I have no problem seeing that uncountable scores of millions have embraced outright fallacies for centuries and millennia. I believe in a God who has no trouble permitting us to do such spiritually childish, foolish things until we learn better, including giving up our superstitious, book-worshipping ways. As Paul exhorted, "but when I grew up I put away childish things." What do you think the childish things Paul was alluding to were? He was talking about religious beliefs and practices, including ones ordinated by scriptures. To quote another: "You would not come to Me that you might have life. There are three gods in Christendom: Bible, Satan, and Jehovah, in that order. Listen to what they attribute the most power and authority to in all their words, and that precedence is clearly established. Christianity is the cult of book-worship, and their satan is bigger than their supposedly omnipotent, omniscient God. Anyone who can scoop up the vast majority of God's own children and run off with them forever is a bigger god than God. But that's another rant about further unchallenged absurdities. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Tuesday, August 28 2007 17:36
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This thread should be considered proof of mutation/evolution. Who is SkeleTony, anyway and what planet is it from? I am of the opinion that there is nothing even in what is now called the spiritual realm that won't eventually be seen in natural terms. Energies may be invisible, but they follow principles to do what they do. If there are energies harnessed by a "spiritually-focused" person to create an effect upon the material, is it supernatural, or merely a natural law of energies in operation which we don't understand yet? I don't believe in magic to believe in the spiritual realm. It's just largely unexplored and undefined by science so far. But I expect it will be increasingly, given time. The two will marry. Einstein and the 20th century laid a good groundwork to open it all up. The fact that some energies seem to be able to travel at the speed of light/speed of thought around the world, as in the curious, sometimes psychic link of twins, for instance, does not make it unscientifice or magical. I don't see any ultimate division between the "spiritual" and the scientifiic. There are energetically-based principles of connectedness in the universe which I don't think we grasp yet, and I believe they can appear to supersede time and space in the conventional sense. I don't have a problem with time having starting and stopping points, but I can't really grasp with my mind what that "looks like." The Bible actually rarely talked about true eternity if you study Greek "aeon." What is depicted moreso with deity is a state of incorruptibility, a changeless state. Time is observed as things change. If nothing changes (expands/decreases) does time exist? I think any concept of eternity in a spiritual context isn't about time or timelessness at all. It's about a state of being in which corruption and death no longer exist. What existed before this universe? Perhaps a few billion prior universes in an endless cycle of expansion and contraction and recreation. Who knows? It's probably mind-boggling. This one here ain't going away for some billions of years frow now, best we can gauge, so I'm not too concerned about it not being truly static. Our sun is going to burn out one distant day from now. This solar system is not forever. Hard to argue for a static universe, I think. Surely we have time enough to do what we need to do in the meantime. After that...who knows? If there is an incorruptible "spiritual" energy at the core of our being, then it is not tied to this time and its universe, I'll wager. I believe what Stillness referred to, and a closing word from a prophecy of Daniel's, the principle of which I believe applies to both the material and the spiritual universe is, "and of the increase of the Kingdom of God there shall be no end." There seems to a principle of ever-unfolding expansion in the spiritual understanding of the universe. Of which the climate on this planet is one small, integral, and immediately relevant part. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Friday, August 24 2007 22:37
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As ever, the amusingly wry logic. My problem is not that a scientist or anyone else is not perfect. It's when people act or imagine otherwise, that I revulse. Science does not convey its current consensus on a thing as quite possibly very wrong, incomplete, ignorant, or otherwise fallible. Lipservice gets paid to it, but attitude rarely actually conveys it. "Science" gives every indication of thoroughly enjoying and buying into its godlike perception among so many. I maintain my assertion that the scientist is the high priest of the modern age. I see virtually no difference in the end result. Masses are misled and led into fear over and over again. They lay their bodies upon the altar to give themselves as human sacrifices to Thalidomide, asbestos, and the latest-plastic baby bottles. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| A5 Questions in Avernum 4 | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Friday, August 24 2007 21:54
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Random is being stabbed repeatedly at this moment. -S- [ Friday, August 24, 2007 21:54: Message edited by: Synergy ] -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Friday, August 24 2007 21:50
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quote:No, there really should only be one like me. It's enough. I'm curious what it is you think my religion is? I recognize the traits and inclination in myself which I think are humanly common and result in religions. I can think of little I hold to at this point which I would call a certainty in the realm of spirituality/reality. I sense and observe that there is always much more to everything than we know. This applies to science, which I love, lest anyone imagine otherwise. Spirit is a word that can often be equated to attitude. All institutions generate attitudes/spirit which color and shape them. Science is not a thing apart from human agency and coloring. Therefore it cannot be the godlike formula for truth its dogma declares. It is a very good method. What the spirit of science at this time lacks as a whole is humility and pause. It's too quick to be sure of itself, to think it's got a thing figured out, despite how perpetually it is revised over and over. I resist pride and arrogance before anything else in this world. I take up the fight in those places where I believe I see the arrogant spirit/dogma of science has taken root foolishly and may well be leading masses of people to live, think, and fear a certain way based upon likely unrealities. Everything is psychological. Everything is spiritual and attitudinal. These cannot be separated out from the human being or from "science" which is composed of collective human belief, practice, and behavior. Thuryl, regarding being wrong = being belittled. I would say that depends entirely if one believes it need be a blow to ego or self to be wrong, to admit one is wrong. Being wrong is nearly always part of the process of becoming right or more right in anything. What's wrong with being wrong? I'm more interested in how people are right and how they are wrong (attitudes/behaviors) than in the mere fact that they are or aren't. I'm happy to be wrong. Often. I may stick my ground doggedly on certain matters, but even in this issue here of global warming, I am saying, I don't know. My favorite mantra of my current life is, "I don't know." I wish science would admit this more often too. Scientists are the rock stars of the geek set. They know they have a perceived sense of power, wisdom, knowledge, authority. People listen to their conclusions. People alter their lives based upon what the scientists offer them. I tell you that on a psychological/spiritual level, this has a tremendous, yet subtle effect on what goes on in the realm of the scientist. Power corrupts. It is marvelously subtle and insidious. It is not that scientists are bad or that pastors are bad. It is what happens to people who find others believing in them. Ah, the intoxication of being somebody. People so intoxicated frequently soon come to buy their own press, and science is no exception. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Thursday, August 23 2007 03:16
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The fallacy of the scientist is he imagines he is not prey to his own breed of mythology. We all have our myths. They run deep us. The scientist seeks to stave off existential dilemma by faith in a type of logic and a type of technique, as if all that has meaning or purpose in the universe is that which is soullessly reduced by and to technique. A world of scientists would be an Orwellian nightmare realized. We've simply swapped one dominant religion for another. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| Do not seek to hide your jealosy behind ridiculous questions! in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Thursday, August 23 2007 02:52
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quote:All your base are belong to us. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Tuesday, August 21 2007 21:44
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One part of me finds this whole issue as it presently exists highly amusing. There is an absurdity to it. We do seem prone to drawing conclusions prematurely, if you ask me. It fulfills a deep human need much better than dealing with lingering uncertainties and unknowns. Science likes to do it as much as anything less "scientific." It just looks more sophisticated, impressive, and authoritative the way science does it. I expect to live long enough to see radical shift and focus in all this theory. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| Hall of Lamps (spoiler) in Nethergate | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Tuesday, August 21 2007 21:39
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Yes, it can be shockingly difficult if you go in too soon, especially if you find all the hidden parts. Romans get it the worst I think, but both sides can be quite challenging. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| Hall of Lamps (spoiler) in Nethergate | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Monday, August 20 2007 23:07
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I hope you're as tough as you think you are. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| Typo under Temple of Brigantia in Nethergate | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Monday, August 20 2007 09:12
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Well, if you consider other early Celtic lore, you have Merlin, a wizard, so wizards in ancient Britain is hardly an inappropriate concept, even if you don't have wizards, per se, by name anyway, in the game. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Monday, August 20 2007 09:03
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I added another link to my previous post to the article that discusses that a bit. "Separate records of sunspots, auroral activity (the Northern Lights) and terrestrial deposits of certain substances generated in atmospheric reactions triggered by solar output, suggest the Sun was persistently active prior to the onset of this Little Ice Age, as scientists call the event." I believe Kel earlier quoted this" The new study shows that the TSI has increased by about 0.1 percent over 24 years. That is not enough to cause notable climate change, Willson and his colleagues say, unless the rate of change were maintained for a century or more." The same article contains: "A separate recent study of Sun-induced magnetic activity near Earth, going back to 1868, provides compelling evidence that the Sun's current increase in output goes back more than a century, Willson said." Verdict out. Stay tuned to planet earth for more updates. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Monday, August 20 2007 08:43
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I wonder how they are defining solar output in this study? It sounds like something different from sunspot cycles, etc. which have been at the center of the theories I am discussing. Sunspots and flares have significant affect on our weather, magnetic field, and numerous things. Sunspot activity is at an 8,000 year high, and has been over the last seven decades. I believe the current extreme weather we have been seeing in recent years is likely largely attributed to more extreme sunspot activity. We are having a very unusual cloudy/rainy summer here in Seattle. I've never seen one like it in my life. Hurricanes have been growing in intensity and, I believe, also in frequency for some years. The south is blisteringly hot right now. Climate patterns have been shifting rather dramatically. Many say, ooh, global warming. I say, ooh, sunspots. From this article on sunspot activity, which does not attempt to correlate climate and sunspots, yet nonetheless contains this quote: "Previous studies have suggested cooler periods on Earth were related to long stretches with low sunspot counts. From the 1400s to the 1700s, for example, Europe and North America experienced a "Little Ice Age." For a period of about 50 years during that time, there were almost no sunspots." The study also contradicts what the Brit study appears to be stating, that there has been no increase in solar output? NASA study. I especially don't trust the British on this matter. They are probably the most rabid proponents of global warming on the planet, and coined the term in the first place. It is claimed that Margaret Thatcher had British scientists manipulate their science in the 80's to support the new global warming concept in order to politically fight unions in Britain. Either way, who are you going to ally with? The British? NASA? Neither? You can't really trust anybody's science, because someone else is always contradicting you. Science is religion. Choose your faith. It takes a lot of time and weight and embarrassing hindsight to more conclusively piece together the realities of the universe. And then something new comes along to radically shift the perspective anew anyway. Why have we not learned pause and humility yet after millennia of this behavior and conceit? I think a clear verdict is out, but that as our ability and motivation to study the sun improves, we will find more and more correlation between sun activity and earth activity, along with any other planet in the solar system. -S- [ Monday, August 20, 2007 08:56: Message edited by: Synergy ] -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Sunday, August 19 2007 07:23
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quote:There are many sun cycles, the 11 year sunspot cycle you described being the shortest known. There are other cycles ranging from 40 to thousands of years. These all in combination and particular strength have been correlated to much climate behavior in the past, the ice ages, etc. To Ephesos: My concerns are not about aesthetics, and if you knew me just a bit better, you'd know that. I am concerned about welfare, our health, and the liberation that comes from truth. My concern about the CO2 scare is that we are very likely to impose truly onerous regulations worldwide in the near future based on it, in a time when we may not be able to afford sinking our national economies into a red herring. If we think post 9-11 loss of rights has been bad, I expect our resulting losses and burdens from the CO2 hysteria to be many times worse. Some western nations may be bankrupted, and that is not going to help us take care of all the other human concerns we need to live and flourish. It's not just a cute misdirection, if we are indeed wrong about CO2. There are huge sacrifices we are likely to soon be making based upon the belief, and I am not talking about oil companies. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Sunday, August 19 2007 07:12
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quote:Except when it's not, when it threatens some established interest no one with clout is able or willing to challenge. I still consider science to be painfully resistant to simple truths about human health, because it so goes against what it wants to believe and what huge industries need to be true. LIke getting inducted into an elite club with real power, who is going to rock the boat and survive? You have to be "fringey" to be able to go up against some of these collectivized, vested systems of established belief. It's just like religion. You have to form a new sect, a new denomination and break away from the huge, corrupt mother church. Some dinosaurs take a long time to die. Some ocean liners take a long time to steer in a new direction. Thinking and belief, whether scientific, or religious, also can shift with difficulty when so much has been invested in a prior mindset. People don't readily like to admit they've been dreadfully wrong. It scares the public, to reveal too much fallibility too quickly. It scares the people within the institutions who are hardly prepared to admit they spent the last four decades being proponents of a fraud. You don't think these things afffect how business gets done? And science is simply a business when it comes down to it. It has a bottom line, both financially, and self-protectively. Things take time. Perhaps an old, vested generation has to die out for new ideas to be embraced. Scientists and their organizations are not less human or more inherently noble than any other. I am not commenting on any individual in that system. I am commenting on the nature of the system. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Sunday, August 19 2007 06:59
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quote:Am I to suppose that the experience of one barely beginning scientist in Australia is supposed to represent the experience of the average scientist all across the world? We don't have to work in every field to be able to observe how business runs in the west. I observe human nature and the nature of institutions and corporations. I read. I learn about scientists who comment that if they go against the dogma of their group, will become unviable. To come to the conclusion that the data does not support CO2 causing global warming can cost you your job in this politically-driven environment. Just because inconvenient truths like these are not the ones making headlines does not mean they are not occurring. This is human nature in a modern, competitive, corporate world. And you don't have to be a scientist to observe it. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Saturday, August 18 2007 21:35
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And that's where religious dogmatism comes into science. Contrary science is dismissed as random supposition by laymen. Majority means nothing. If we really look socially at how movements in science occur, even consensus means less than it appears to imply. There is bandwagon effect, funding, ego, industrial and governmental interest, along with probably a dozen or more other things to consider what gets studied, how it gets studied, for whom it gets studied, why it gets studied, in what context it gets studied, and by whose funding it gets studied. Science is not more noble than any other profession. In fact, I'd call it as dirty and skewed a business as any other profession. Scientists are bought all the time, just as middle managers in companies play ball even though they don't like the corporate environment. Do you imagine the average scientist has much clout or say how or what he or she is going to do working for some company? There is a mythology of the scientist, I perceive. If we would stop worshipping scientists as our new high priests, we'd see this better, I think. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Shaper
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written Saturday, August 18 2007 21:20
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I believe the point is that cooling and warming perpetually follow one another given enough time. So it has been and will continue to be. The constant is change. We see the climate doing something different this decade or century than it did the last, and we freak out. So, if I am as full of it as any other, then you concede that Al Gore or any so-called scientist may equally be likely to be full of it? -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| Avernum 5, July Update in Avernum 4 | |
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Shaper
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written Saturday, August 18 2007 21:14
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Too many people exploding and dying around here. July should be closed down for a good mopping. It's over anyway. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
| A little confused in Nethergate | |
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Shaper
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written Saturday, August 18 2007 21:08
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Suspicious Vlish seems to be aptly named.?A lot of creators can't leave well enough alone and love to tinker with/improve old product. Evidently it is one of the banes of being an artist of sorts. I, for one, am pleased that Nethergate was updated. I never finished the original game, because I wearied of the clunky engine. It was a fine game and much more enjoyable in the new format. It's also okay if you didn't like it, but it doesn't mean Jeff is lazy or uninspired. By all appearances, the man is very diligent and hard working. I say this as a beta-tester of the last four games. I see how hard he tries to make a good game and accommodate the gamers. I can understand wanting something wholly fresh. Within two years, I think we'll have something new, when Geneforge and Avernum wrap their stories. I'm proud to have a cool, clunky local little company like Spiderweb faithfully cranking out decent product and staying afloat in the pool with the big fish. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • NR Items • The Lonely Celt Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |