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apogee
climber
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I saw a fire engine once.
PS...nice to see you back, Lois.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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I participated in an on-line climbers' forum called SuperTopo.
It was haunted by an entity calling itself LEB.
Does that count?
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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It's spooky, isn't it? Pate and I were clearly thinking about the same thing, at the same time.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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LEB, we're teasing you. Mercilessly, maybe, but we're just teasing. Sheesh!
I usually don't pay much attention to the crackpot threads - superstition/paranormal/conspiracy theory/religious etc etc. When I do, it's usually to mock them. Which they richly deserve.
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apogee
climber
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Teasing is only fun when it gets a reaction.
Strong reaction = more teasing = more fun.
Remember that, Lois. It will serve you well here, and beyond.
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TwistedCrank
climber
Ideeho-dee-do-dah-day boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom
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I was captured by aliens and was used in a captive breeding program.
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
I'm James Brown, Bi-atch!
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tell somebody who cares,
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Do 'cid involved adventures count?
Actually, I have tons of these adventures, without 'cid.
One time I was laying on the floor of our pad in SLC, meditating, when after a bit, my consiousness was itn the hallway outside of our unit. I noticed that there were flyers in all the mailboxes. A few minutes later I went out on a errand, and indeed there were flyers in the mailboxes; they hadn't been there when I entered the house...
there are some other ones too personnel for an anonymous public forum...
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Wolves did it, and swamp gas, and the political party you don't like...
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Kalimon
Trad climber
Ridgway, CO
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Bow to your Sensei!
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MisterE
Social climber
Bouncy Tiggerville
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I knew I was going to fail on a test once - does that count?
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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When you believe in, and follow, the wyde, it's all pranormal;
and that's made all the difference.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Isn't prananormal some sort of yoga?
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MisterE
Social climber
Bouncy Tiggerville
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I wish people WOULD post up experiences esp the grounded members of our forum
do you mean ESP or especially? Dammit Lois! You need to be clear - I just am not getting your signal here!!!111666
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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My new (8yr old) car has a button right on the dash, that says "ESP" I have been afraid to approach it.
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MisterE
Social climber
Bouncy Tiggerville
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My car stereo has a "skip" button on it. When I am rolling solo, I keep punching the damn thing - but it never makes her appear.
I always hope it will though...
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TripL7
Trad climber
san diego
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I had one a month ago.
No, wait...it was a year ago.
Huh?
what was the question?
Oh, yeah...
Well, i have to go to bed now.
Edit: i thought you said "a pair of normal experiances."...never mind!
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Somehow I think that exposing my supposed paranormal experiences on this noble forum would diminish the paranormality of the said experiences.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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categories of ghosts (from an academic ghost course i took):
crisis apparition--the visitation of a remote loved one at the moment of death; many of these occur during wartime. i'll bet there will be several people on this thread who can report about one.
post-mortem apparition--these occur within about 12 hours after someone dies; usually it's a "purposeful" ghost which performs a service that saves a life; these ghosts never return.
classic haunt--this is a ghost that develops a reputation. it's usually associated with a particular place, and the ghost is often involved in a repetitive action of some sort, played like a film loop over and over. it's often linked to a tragedy, like a murder or a suicide, and considered a "psychic scar".
poltergeists--a telling phenomenon, usually beginning with a sound which commands attention and then can take on a voice. poltergeists are linked to people, known as the "focus", not to places. the focus is usually someone of above-average intelligence, sexually repressed or under some other stress. often it's a pubescent female. the bell witch in tennessee was a famous poltergeist, encountered by many people, including andrew jackson, who said he'd rather have faced the british army again than have encountered this ornery entity. the movie "an american haunting" was based on it, but rather poorly done, imo.
living ghosts--doppelgangers, out-of-body experiences, ghostly appearances of living people. catherine the great, abraham lincoln, goethe, st. anthony of padua all have living ghost legends associated with them.
retrocognition and precognition--incidents of time travel, fore and aft. there's a book entitled "an adventure" by a couple women who claim to have been taken BITD during a tourist visit to the palace of versailles around the year 1900; there's a twilight zone episode based on the report of a british pilot in 1928 flying over a world war 2 airfield which had yellow biplanes of that future vintage.
just a smattering of it here. it IS a science, whether you want to recognize it or not. the fellow who taught the course, richard senate of ventura, spent years devoted to ghost hunting and has published several books on california ghosts. it all began for him the day--he saw a ghost.
LEB, there have been a couple interesting reports of the paranormal on ST. one is the experience of a genuine miracle by a fellow on the belief-in-god thread. you'll have to hunt that one up, but it involved the healing of a severely lacerated tongue by family and friends praying for it--a real crisis situation. the other is lolli's report of seeing a ghost at her ancient farmstead in sweden--something her children reported which she didn't take too seriously until the day she saw it herself. i don't think she'll mind me mentioning it here--i get curious about these things too and i followed up on her mention of it.
LEB's cat is an interesting candidate. animal ghosts don't get as much attention, but her experience was real enough to tell others about. it reminds me of an incident in rural minnesota in which a farmwagon full of people apparently disappeared when it went behind some trees.
the psychic and the paranormal seem to occur unexpectedly and at the edges of our consciousness, like things seen out of the corner of the eye, which disappear when stared at directly. it's easy to be skeptical about such things, but most skepticism is itself far less credible and usually obviously motivated by discomfort.
one interesting sidelight is the subject of ghost ships, the flying dutchman being the most famous, but there have been others as well, including a wartime submarine. ghost ships should be distinguished from haunted ships. the queen mary, now a tourist attraction docked in long beach, is one of the most haunted places in california.
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justthemaid
climber
Jim Henson's Basement
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Personally... I got nothin' so my belief in ghosts is Agnostic in nature, but the recently deceased "cat at the window" apparition is actually something I've heard of before. Hanging out with a group of friends one time they started comparing notes. On friend stating that his dead cat Rachel had appeared at his window a few days after dying and another friend stating that she had had a similar experience a year before with her cat. The identical cats appearing and disappearing for a day or two soon after death, then vanishing never to be seen again. Ghostly feline goodbye perhaps? Who knows.
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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i only had one. the vision if a sane rokjox entered my head...
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justthemaid
climber
Jim Henson's Basement
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Wishful thinking does not an apparition make. ;)
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Steve L
Gym climber
SUR
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I thought I saw a ghost in the shower once, but turned out it was just Phil Bircheff.
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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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i swear i saw a wolf in the high sierra, outta convict lake.
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426
climber
Buzzard Point, TN
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I had a mountain lion stalk me for hours one night hiking near mt. goode, that was way beyond normal
freeky!
i didn't think there were "sierra snow lions"...
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Captain...or Skully
Big Wall climber
Transporter Room 2
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I think TripL7 got it right.
My normal experiences come separately & singular.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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sounds like something genuine, but to really prove it, you'll have to put it in a test tube and hook it up to an oscilliscope. er, guess i'm showing my age. take it to fermilab--they'll have ideas.
like rox says, don't expect anyone but masochists to chime in. people won't talk about these things unless they feel they'll be taken seriously, which isn't exactly default mode.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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check back into the belief-in-god thread, lois. we hashed through some of this. i think you'll find ed hartouni fairly hostile to the paranormal, but i could be wrong. largo posted a long article by a sri lankan professor which conjectures, rather wildly, in my opinion, about advanced physics and matters mental and spiritual. jan from okinawa has some interest in this and is reading a book i recommended by dean radin, one of the few seriously scientific paranormal researchers.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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LEB-
I like your theory. I would reverse it also. I think some people, have sensory apparatus that others don't, which are genetic as they run in families. Of course all senses can be heightened by living a peaceful life in a quiet environment and meditating, but especially so if they were more sensitive to begin with.
One thing I've asked on another thread and never got an answer for is whether being able to feel earthquakes (and in one case an underwater nuclear blast) thousands of miles away, being very sensitive to air pressure changes and especially typhoons, and having a good sense of direction are related. I suspect they all have something to do with being more sensitive to air pressure changes but it could also be sensitivity to electro-magnetism since earthquakes, typhoons and lightning are the most extreme natural examples of its release.
More mundane are abilities with normal senses that are more keen than usual - being able to smell things other humans don't but animals do, hearing that goes into the higher and lower ranges than normal, the ability to see light emanating from a person.
I believe many of these did originally confer evolutionary advantages in terms of hunting and avoiding being prey, and later on, in shamanistic abilities.
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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ST,
I have had para-normal experiences.
Good thing too. When I was skydiving my parachute would open normally and I was saved from certain death.
Also when I fly my paraglider it functions para-normally.
Thank you for asking.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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I would add that whether a person is open to the paranormal has a lot to do with their culture. I've lived in two cultures now, Tibetan and Okinawan, where such phenomena are common place.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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I would add that whether a person is open to the paranormal has a lot to do with... science illiteracy.
Education or training in one science or two doesn't mean they're not illiterate in others. QT What do you call a bachelor of science grad who's never had a biochemistry course or control systems engineering course? ANS A scientist.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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"...where such phenomena are common place"
To be clear, what is the "phenomena?" Is it (a) the "openness" to the paranormal or (b) the paranormal perse. Let's be clear.
Yeah, if it's (b), note that it is "common place" in America, too. James Prague and Sylvia Browne are my personal faves. They're truly blessed with extra sensory apparatus that detects 5th dimensional energies, frequencies. Of course, the reason science doesn't pick it up is because it's purposely disguised by the angels Gabriel and Michael with special cloaks.
...............
EDIT My bad. Written up in the plural so apparently it is the "(paranormal) phenomena" itself. Yeah, it IS so commonplace. Only a certain "closemindedness" keeps EVERYONE from perceiving it, applying it, taking advantage of it.
I gotta get with it.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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ah, now you've got two of them to squash your posies, lois. i hope you're happy. but never fear. fructose is a real scientific lightweight, and you have ed here theorizing your experience away without taking the trouble even to suggest the mechanics of the vision of the dead cat.
(good reference here: 100 uses for a dead cat. sorry, couldn't resist that.)
c'mon, ed, tell us how it happens.
as i said, most skepticism is even less credible and usually motivated by an obvious discomfort.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Ignorance is bliss.
Re: Constraints of reality. Constraints of the natural world. Constraints of scientific wisdom.
Who needs constraints? Ignorance (a powerful tool) is your ticket to bliss.
Joseph Campbell: Follow your bliss.
Ignoramus: Seek the bliss. Don't let facts (the constraints of scientific wisdom reflecting the constraints of the natural world) get in the way of your bliss.
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thedogfather
climber
Somewhere near Red Rocks
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Read "Flim Flam" by James Randi Go see "Penn and Teller"
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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"I think some people, have sensory apparatus that others don't, which are genetic and they run in families."
................
Thus, machinery. More "machinery of life." Life, at base, is mechanistic. Living things, at base, are mechanistic. They're also mortal.
Spend your limited time, energies and resources adapting to the scientific wisdom, adapting to the constraints or limits of the natural world, not fighting them. Here's a thought: Take it on as challenge. Like climbing a route at your threshold. Don't shirk the challenge.
Reality consists of limits. Reality consists of limits. Reality consists of limits. Scientific wisdom reflects these limits; it expresses them. Science is a messenger. Break with the ancient Greek tradition. Don't kill the messenger.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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fructose is the prime apostle of a religion which he's inventing. it's a lot like scientology. james randi, michael schermer, both are religious zealots, relying heavily on belief systems in which they have much invested. none of these folks are real scientists, who have devoted their lives to science. basically what you might call science groupies.
not that i'm a real scientist either, but i am a real critic. :-)
when you look at real scientists, you will find more religious belief, although it might be a bit reticent, for reasons we have mentioned. my climbing mentor was a real scientist, a professor of physics, heavily into force field theory, a denouncer of the theory of quarks which was just becoming fashionable at the time. one day he surprised me by defending the language of the king james bible as something sacred.
of course, we have to consider first that you're making up this story about your departed cat, lois, just because you're some kind of attention hog, something hartoonio has accused me of. secondarily we should consider that it might be an hallucination and that perhaps you really loved this critter more than you're letting on. beyond that, let's use the word, the cat's spirit was back for a last, nostalgic look at those chipmunks. hunting means a lot to cats, and as a former hunter myself, i understand the hunting instinct as the beginning of analysis, which eventually leads to advanced mathematics, the workhorse which pulls the cart of science.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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TBird might think his posts are constructive. And for sure he thinks they're cute. But really he's put himself in the same camp as Klimmer. Just a noisy misinformationist.
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justthemaid
climber
Jim Henson's Basement
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@ Jan-
Jan- earthquakes and thunderstorms give off sub-sonic sound waves inaudible to the human ear, but measurable in real scientific terms. This is why some animals and probably some people as well can get premonitions or feel these things coming.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Beautiful.
I have a poster of TR and this quote- the last part of it. That inspired me to find it and hang it up again. Thanks.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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TR? teddy roosevelt?
so ed, basically you're saying it was just another cat from the neighborhood? of course, a definite possibility, though apparently not a probability from what lois had to say.
we have a report from justthemaid up there of two other people experiencing an apparently identical phenomenon. perhaps your probability curve is plummeting.
and one other nit to pick, ed. how do you measure something as ephemeral as an apparent phantom, here one moment, disappeared the next?
as far as energy fields go, a chill in the air is something frequently associated with ghosts, as though energy was being taken out of the air itself prior to an apparition. many ghostly phenomena are associated with electricity and electronics. you obviously have little acquaintance with these things.
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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And unless we are looking for a thing, and understand what we are looking for, we are unlikely to find it.
not trying to crap on your hypotheses but i found a jerk like you and i wasnt even tryin...
how does that jive with the paranormal? do you see wolves every night? does a wild bear sh#t in the forest? is a ducks a$$ watertight?
EDIT
ED,
RJ did use the disclaimer that he used on his first girlfriend when she was horny...
OK, well, I am not the guy for this.....
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justthemaid
climber
Jim Henson's Basement
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Just to clarify- I have never seen a ghost cat (or any other "paranormal" for that matter) myself... I only overheard a conversation between two people stating they had. The similarity to LEB's story was just interesting.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Yes, why would Skip need a ghost cat? She has some real ones, plus a tigger.
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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ed,
apparently you were unaware that RJ is the expert at all things that he posts on, paranormal or normal, gay or straight, divorced or married, dead or alive, unemployed or employed, rich or poor...
as weld_it would say, RJ is wicked sick smart
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BooYah
Social climber
Ely, Nv
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A toast to your ghost cat. A toast to ghost cats everywhere!
I reckon.
I'll reserve judgement 'till I see one with me own eyes.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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now there's a telling thing about the way ed thinks:
"you'll have to fit it into what we already know ..."
isn't that what they told galileo?
and ed, oh ed, please pick us a better hero than that huffenpuff TR. i think of him every time i have to pay $20 to go onto public land.
-
naughty, naughty, rox. it's spelled "kirlian". "krillian" has to do with those little buggers the blue whales eat.
LEB 1, ROX 1, and it's like golf, you want a low score.
kirlian photography has been thoroughly debunked, right? except that it exists.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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I believe that philosophers have a Latin name for what John mentions.
It is an unfortunately small step from "You can't prove it isn't true, and so it may be true." to "You can't prove it isn't true, and so it must be true." - the latter being the fallacy commonly committed by believers of all types.
The absence of a falsifiable, objective means of testing a hypothesis neither proves nor disproves anything.
ps Are you coming to the FaceLift this year?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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We have attempted to measure... the energy field of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.... We couldn't. Failure does not mean that it does not exist. It may not exist, or it may mean that we can't currently measure it.
So it is important to remain open-minded on this. Making any decisions or drawing any conclusions on the energy field of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is premature, arrogant, unenlightened, bigoted...
Same with global warming, astrology, God Jesus, fossil fuel depletion.
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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ahh you can measure all kinds of things...like the flying sh#t storm. i just use certain posters as my barometer.
another useful metric are the whackjobs who come to believe in all types of things on this site....
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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cats have a reputation for psychic ability, but i've never really encountered it. movie directors seem to rely on the device of the "psychic cat" a lot.
we have an old cat and i've become her primary buddy now that the kids have moved out. she's small and not particularly tough and has a history of being bullied by some of the tougher cats in the neighborhood, but she also stands her ground. what i find interesting is her complete fearlessness about the dark. she will often take time during the day before deciding it's safe enough to go outside, but at night she just waltzes out, completely in her element.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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just the maid-
Your explanation of subsonic sound makes a lot of sense in regard to sensing earthquakes far away. Thinking back to the time when I was meditating a lot and it happened, I felt these quakes as much as I heard them. Things which aided this experience were sleeping on the floor on a small island since sound travels through water more efficiently than air.
The interesting one was the atomic explosion which went on for ten minutes or so. It was an entirely different and much more powerful sound - a continuous low rumbling.
I figure it was either the French, the U.S. or the Israelis testing something underground on a remote Pacific atoll which probably means the Chinese equipment was not good enough to pick it up and the land based Russians were too far away.I later got a friend in naval intelligence to tell me that what I heard was definitely not an earthquake but that he couldn't say anything more about it.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Humans Glow in Visible Light
Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience.com – Wed Jul 22, 10:32 am ET
The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal.
Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.
(This visible light differs from the infrared radiation - an invisible form of light - that comes from body heat.)
To learn more about this faint visible light, scientists in Japan employed extraordinarily sensitive cameras capable of detecting single photons. Five healthy male volunteers in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of the cameras in complete darkness in light-tight rooms for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.
The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.
Faces glowed more than the rest of the body. This might be because faces are more tanned than the rest of the body, since they get more exposure to sunlight - the pigment behind skin color, melanin, has fluorescent components that could enhance the body's miniscule light production.
Since this faint light is linked with the body's metabolism, this finding suggests cameras that can spot the weak emissions could help spot medical conditions, said researcher Hitoshi Okamura, a circadian biologist at Kyoto University in Japan.
"If you can see the glimmer from the body's surface, you could see the whole body condition," said researcher Masaki Kobayashi, a biomedical photonics specialist at the Tohoku Institute of Technology in Sendai, Japan.
The scientists detailed their findings online July 16 in the journal PLoS ONE.
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justthemaid
climber
Jim Henson's Basement
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Jan- your "feeling" is correct. Sub-sonics and infrasound have an enormous wavelength and are felt more than heard.
Years ago some friends of mine actually got a hold of a prototype infrasound emitter which we nick-named "The God Box". It had an enormous speaker (about 6 feet tall). There were only two of these speakers ever made and the other ended up with a scientific team in Africa doing experiments with elephants. When activated, you heard little or nothing, but you could most definitely feel it- like the rumble you feel in your chest in a thunderstorm. We'd turn off the lights and leave it on just to freak each other out, since the longer you left it running, the more indeterminate anxiety you started feeling.
I sometimes wonder if the other occupants of the apartment building were experiencing the "paranormal" when really it was just us with our toy... inducing their unease without them knowing about it.
There have been studies on certain sites around the globe that are famous for "paranormal" activity in regards to naturally occurring sources of infrasound to explain the perceived presence of "spirits".
One of my partner's in crime actually submitted a series of 3 articles to the (now defunct) "Experimental Musical Instrument Magazine" about The God Box. Touting it's potential virtues for performance artists as a mood enhancer. It lies dead and nonfunctional in a storage facility these days. No one alive knows how to fix it.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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the word paranormal applies to a whole range of phenomena and alleged phenomena. proving or disproving one, or one type, does not necessarily confirm or disprove others.
anyway, one site which would be referred to here is the oracle at delphi in greece, a grove of trees where the priestesses picked up whisperings, thought to be connected to unique subterrenean structures which could produce such sound. which has nothing to do with seeing a cat's ghost.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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just the maid-
I'm really curious as to where these natural sites are on the earth where sub sonic sound is being emitted?
Meanwhile, I never experienced feelings of anxiety with the earthquake and atomic experiences, perhaps because they were so far away or the sub sounds were overlain with enough normal sounds from the long journey. I do however, get a terrible feeling of dread whenever someone is playing music with booming base sounds. I will often pull out of a parking lot and go around the block to get away from a car that is playing really loud base rhythm. The sound is obnoxious but the feeling in the chest is worse.
Appropo of what Tony has been saying, I've asked many scientists about my experiences of hearing earthquakes and explosions, and the most common answer is "impossible" and the next most common, "I have no idea".
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Tony-
You are quite correct that there are two separate items here - physical senses which science hasn't yet studied and the paranormal. I keep hoping that if scientists are made aware of and able to measure physical senses they didn't know existed, they might be more open to an even less physical domain.
Then again, probably not. One of the great revelations on the God thread was that no matter what anyone told the skeptics about personal mystical/psychic/paranormal experiences lending themselves to faith in the unseen realms (after they asked us first), the reply we always got back was "statistical anomaly".
As a result of that thread, to me at least, "Statistical anomaly" and "if it isn't in the Bible it isn't real" will be forever linked as all too easy answers to real people's real experiences with the unknown.
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justthemaid
climber
Jim Henson's Basement
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The site at Delphi is actually a good example of an area that may have naturally occurring infrasound. It has a long and illustrious history as a spiritual site. I'd have to pester my buddy for the research on some other examples. The God Box was his pet project and my memory of his ramblings is 20 years old and sorta fuzzy at this point. I'll shoot him an e-mail.
I was sorta joking about the "anxiety" thing BTW. ;) In reality, most of the time it just sat there and *wubbed* innocently LOL. I think a lot of it was just us psyching each other out, although at certain settings I remember "feeling" the sound waves, and I can see how having that feeling just before a real event could be interpreted as a "premonition" later on if it hit you out of the blue and 5 minutes later you feel an earthquake or something.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Actually I though Delphi was the site of vapors escaping from the ground which put people in trances but no longer appears there because the flow was disrupted by earthquakes?
Anyway, I'm interested in any info that your buddy has.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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a scientist is someone who engages in science. each has his/her idiosyncrasies, beliefs, dispositions.
i've encountered a couple interesting examples of believing scientists recently. one is simon conway-morris, with whom i've been fortunate to have an email correspondence. i think he has the upper hand in an evolution debate involving the late nihilist, stephen jay gould.
the other, whom i learned about through one of morris's books, is the late fred hoyle, the cambridge astronomer who coined the term "big bang". hoyle was an atheist until he got onto something called the triple-alpha process, which has to do with the way carbon is cooked up in a supernova. it would be very interesting, and a test piece to his purported scientific prowess, if a lurking ed hartouni would come back and talk about that. it caused hoyle to do an about-face in his beliefs, after which he called the universe "a set-up job".
science is an increasingly unified body of knowledge based on truth, but truth, as anyone will know looking at the history of science, can be elusive. one of the great problems of science today is its arcaneness. it is increasingly difficult to get a unified picture because each of its branches has become so complex. still, i think it's something we should all tackle as best we can.
i don't claim to be a scientist, but i've actually had training in academic folklore, which we always considered a branch of cultural anthropology. perhaps more than most involved in these discussions, i've dealt with human belief, a strange, essential, often confusing phenomenon. i find it poignantly sad to read the beginning of the belief-in-god thread these days: "so what if at our death our whole existence ends? is that a big deal?" without some sort of belief, some sort of sense to make of the human condition, with some sort of hope attached to that, yes, it can get to be a pretty big deal, and the people prescribing meds for depression seem to be clueless about it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Tony B -
Fred Hoyle wrote many science papers and many technical and popular books on his thoughts.
Perhaps you should just go down to the town library and check them out for a read. Fred could better represent his views than I could. Once you do that maybe we can discuss what has happened since Fred's writing that may change some of his arguments.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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i might do that, ed, but not today. hoyle does seem to be an interesting figure who lived through some exciting changes in science.
the crux of my question: what was it about the triple alpha process that seemed to make a believer out of him?
hoyle inadvertantly named the big bang theory despite subscribing to the competing, and since discredited, steady state theory. i believe it was deep space astronomy which confirmed the former, finding that matter was simpler, mostly hydrogen, far in space and therefore back in time. hoyle also seems to have guided the by now widely accepted notion that basic elements are produced through fusion in several stages of supernovas.
the great god wiki tells us that triple alpha, although only a slimly probable occurrence, happens fortuitously in a resonance with an isotope of beryllium which hoyle himself predicted and which was later borne out by observation. bottom line, lotsa handy carbon. by coincidence (??), carbon is monstrously handy in the chemistry of life. people who deal in that say there is nothing quite like it. slim chance for carbon, slim chance for life, but it's a big universe and it could well happen elsewhere.
if i were a devout atheist, i wouldn't give up my disbelief for that, but perhaps hoyle was a closet believer, or a repressed one. is the universe a "set-up job"? i'm not close enough to the science to fathom that.
i can tell you one thing, however, from my own area, which applies to hoyle and perhaps conway-morris as well. people often feel compelled to re-create the myths with which they were inculcated as children. both of these scientists come from the english culture where the church of england has a significant presence. one can understand their inclination to be looking for god as they explore their rarified regions. me, i think science does best when it refrains from doing that, but it shouldn't be unnecessarily hostile either, nor should an individual scientist feel stigmatized for philosophizing.
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MisterE
Social climber
Bouncy Tiggerville
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I wrote down a dream I had in high school, I think I was a sophomore. I read it to the class - the teacher was taking a poll on whether the dreams were true or made up - and most of them thought I had made it up. The teacher was more sympathetic.
The dream was that I was running through the woods in the pouring rain, and came upon a pile of naked, dead bodies halfway covered in plastic from the waist down. As I approached the pile, I saw a single plastic bag tied to a stake driven into the body at the top of the pile...felt like it was for me. I looked at the other bodies, and their complexions were running in the rain. I ran away in the rain.
Suddenly, I was in a restroom with my face in my hands, crying. I looked up, and the complexions on the people in the restroom started melting - I looked at myself, and mine started running. Then I woke up and wrote it down (we were supposed to keep a dream journal for English class).
At the time, I lived on Guemes Island in the San Juan Islands in Washington, and had to walk about a block to catch the ferry every morning to Anancortes. This involved walking 1/4 block to the road along the beach, then following the road for another 3/4 of a block to the County ferry landing.
3 days after I read my dream, I set off to catch the 7:30 ferry. As I was traversing the beach, and there was a body on the beach, not more than 500 feet from our house. As I approached, I saw that it was naked, half-buried in the sand with the backside sticking out of the sand. The lower 1/2 of the body was wrapped in plastic. As I approached, an adult ran over and threw a blanket over the body, and chased me away.
I didn't think much about it at the time,(I just thought it was cool I had seen my first dead body, and wondered what happened but I skipped first period to go to my parent's fish processing plant to tell them what had happened. As I was describing it to them - naked body, half-way covered with plastic - it hit me. I remembered the dream, and just fell over onto the sofa in the office, curled up in a fetal position, moaning and completely shocked, horrified and bewildered.
I spent the next year (with permission from my English teacher) studying the paranormal, and really increased my marijuana intake - it helped me not remember my dreams. The other kids in the class looked at me strange the short rest of the year.
I recently quit smoking for the first time in ages, and find I am still very frightened of my dreams, now that I am remembering them again.
Edit: It turned out that a fishing boat had capsized in Guemes channel, drowning 3 fishermen. One other was found on the beach a mile down, and the third body was never recovered.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Fred named it "the big bang" because he was mocking the idea... it sort of backfired on him I guess.
the crux of my question: what was it about the triple alpha process that seemed to make a believer out of him?
anthropic principle (before it was called such)
there are good scientific criticisms of this idea
you can take your experiences to be real, or you can analyze them... unexamined experience can lead to all sorts of strange conclusions, yet most people will go with their gut rather than their head
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MisterE
Social climber
Bouncy Tiggerville
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you can take your experiences to be real, or you can analyze them... unexamined experience can lead to all sorts of strange conclusions, yet most people will go with their gut rather than their head
I spent years analyzing this experience. I drew no conclusions except fear of my dreams, and wishing whatever happened would just go away.
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tuolumne_tradster
Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
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From the National Media Museum...William Hope, "Photographer of the Paranormal"
These photographs of 'spirits' are taken from an album of photographs unearthed in a Lancashire second-hand and antiquarian bookshop by one of the Museum's curators. They were taken by a controversial medium called William Hope (1863-1933).
Born in 1863 in Crewe, Hope started his working life as a carpenter. In about 1905 he became interested in spirit photography after capturing the supposed image of a ghost while photographing a friend.
He went on to found the Crewe Circle – a group of six spirit photographers led by Hope. When Archbishop Thomas Colley joined the group they began to publicise their work.
Following World War I support for the Crewe Circle grew as the grieving relatives of those lost to the war sought a means of contacting their loved ones.
By 1922 Hope had moved to London where he became a professional medium. The work of the Crew Circle was investigated on various occasions.
The most famous of these took place in 1922, when the Society for Psychical Research sent Harry Price to investigate the group.
Price collected evidence that Hope was substituting glass plates bearing ghostly images in order to produce his spirit photographs.
Later the same year Price published his findings, exposing Hope as a fraudster. However, many of Hope’s most ardent supporters spoke out on his behalf, the most famous being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Hope continued to practice, despite his exposure. He died in London on 7 March 1933.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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LEB -
I responded, but it was apparently not acceptable to many posting to this thread...
...I'd rather just not participate. It's easy to ask flip questions and provide flip criticisms rather than actually spend the time to research the issue yourself...
...if you aren't willing to do a little work to answer you own questions, why should I spend my time doing it for you?
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Juan lives....
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Ed already answered your questions, a while back, you must have been asleep/overworked or sumpin'.
He does have the background you mentioned.
When you ignored his response and went on in perfect juan/Emily Latela assertive/willfully ignorant style, I was honor bound to say something. Whether you were conscious of it or not, some part of you did that on purpose! and it kept with the paranormal theme...
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goatboy smellz
climber
Nederland
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This forum is being haunted by an old lady from Jersey.
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TripL7
Trad climber
san diego
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LEB, bringing home charts is a no no. Whatever you do, don't lose any, very embaressing, to say the least.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I wasn't up to weathering another shitstorm so I deleted my responses... very busy these days and not enough time for responding on STForum...
trying to get a few things done tonight and then I'm blasting off to TM for 4 days, I'll be "off the grid" so don't expect anything more than what I post soon...
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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can't let this one by spin doctor F go by without comment:
We have a thread already dedicated to disproving God and the paranormal
the "Why does anyone beleive in God" thread
If you want to research these things, check it out, we have over 3000 posts debunking most delusions of paranormal.
running the 3,000 posts through vigorous analysis, there are 1,000 from ardent believers, 1,000 from ardent unbelievers, and 1,000 lost inbetween. the only "proving" on that thread is people proving to themselves that they're right.
logic, "proof" on ST goes something like this: a photo hoax from 100 years ago means that LEB couldn't possibly have seen a ghost cat.
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susu
Trad climber
East Bay, CA
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Does that kind of explain your name MisterE? It amazes me when I have crazy dreams or nightmares. In some ways, I kind of like them even if shaken bc of the curiosity stirred from a disturbing experience maybe. I would have freaked out to experience what you did, esp. just days later from your dream! But I do hope you wouldn't feel somehow responsible! Who can help what's dreamed?
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Charlie D.
Trad climber
Western Slope, Tahoe Sierra
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Here’s a climbing related tale I’ve told around a campfire or two, one I think MisterE will appreciate.
Several winters ago I was on a road trip in British Columbia with my buddy from Seattle skiing obscure resorts and the backcountry. Nothing but great powder, enjoying each other’s company and the hospitality of the Canadians that would send us on into each evening throwing back beers, eating too much and crashing hard in cheap hotels.
After once such day I drifted into a deep sleep and experienced an intense dream. I was in the alpine of summer high on a ridge wedged into the top of a dihedral watching my friend climbing up solo on the smooth face of the open book toward me. He was moving very delicately on small holds, stopped looked up at me, straight into my eyes. Suddenly he pitched over backwards, I covered my eyes and startled awake before I heard the sound of his impact below. It was a very vivid dream and I laid there wide awake thinking what the hell was that all about?
The morning came and at breakfast I related the dream to my buddy (assured him it wasn’t he who fell) before we headed off into yet another epic day in BC. Didn’t think of it again until days end in a bar when I asked myself that same question, what the hell? Sobered up lying in bed later, reading and thinking about family back home it hit me like a brick, holy sh*t my oldest son is climbing in Patagonia! I immediately sprang up and called home to hear this, “there’s been an accident, Bobby is OK”.
Making a long story short he was climbing with two others, topped out along a ridge high in the alpine. Bobby went looking for a rap point and came back just in time to watch his buddies anchors fail as his friend rapped off the ridge. Luckily nothing more than a broken pelvis, ouch!
Pretty weird, I watched my friend fall off and so did my son, approximately at the same time. I’m very close to my two boys, I can’t help but think some invisible energy on some level made me aware of what was happening.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Thanks for telling us your experience. I too have had such experiences on numerous occasions. Mine involve strangers rather than family. Sometimes they involve events that happen in the future just as I have forseen. Sometime I have known exactly what to do at the scene of a terrible accident because I had seen it all three years before. As Tony already mentioned, they are particularly common during war.
So far nobody knows by what mechanism they occur. Either it's so subtle that science hasn't discovered it yet or its by a means so beyond our current understanding, we will have to develop a whole new paradigm for it.
For sure, even one such experience, however unexplained, opens our minds to other possibilities and the wonder of how little is known yet about the human mind and brain.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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LEB-
The reason people keep referencing the God thread is because we discussed a lot more than God on it, including the paranormal (both as a secular phenomenon and a possible indication of a God).We especially spent a lot of time discussing the nature of our knowing anything (or lack thereof).
Fortunately for this thread, they're keeping busy over there right now with fundamentalists and rabid atheists going at it with the usual insults and Bible quotes so they haven't interfered much over here yet.
Meanwhile, I will note that it was a real revelation to me to read the article on mystical phenomena in the Catholic Encyclopedia as it mirrors so closely what the Tibetan Buddhists claim is experienced by some outstanding individuals. Although both occur in a religious context, the fact that similar unusual experiences exist in two such different cultures and religions, indicate that these mystical/psychic/paranormal experiences are a universal human potential.
The fact that myself and many others have experienced many such phenomena is also an indication that one doesn't have to be a saint to be connected to whatever it is.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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i guess i might as well mention this one--happened twice a couple years ago.
pulling into my driveway, coming home from work. no one else is home, and there's suddenly a call on my cellphone, and it shows the call is coming from the home phone. i looked at that and went in the house and it stopped ringing.
this happened twice, exactly the same routine, a week or so apart. the first time it happened, the call to the cellphone got a time stamp for a date in december 2012. the second time, the time stamp was normal.
one thing about me, i don't go looking for this stuff, it doesn't particularly scare me (i know all about the mayan calendar business), and i'm always looking for rational explanations. some kinda glitch with the phone company? well, maybe, but how often does something like that happen, your home phone calling your cellphone on its own? and how does it give a future time stamp?
i showed the 2012 time stamp it to my wife, who is used to this kinda stuff in our life, and to several people at work, who all thought it was kinda creepy.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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one of them bears my repeating from memory here, LEB, because i think it pertains quite specifically to the subject you've raised, and i would defy every skeptic here to explain it with "standard" science.
this fellow's sister had somehow fallen--not sure if she did it climbing or not--onto a sharp desert plant, maybe a spanish dagger, and severely lacerated her tongue. it was bleeding profusely and hanging in shreds. everyone brought her indoors and prayed, prayed real hard, before they wanted to take her to the hospital, and her tongue got miraculously back together. there was just some small evidence of a scar at the back of her throat, as i recall. a doctor later checked her over and acknowledged the small scar but couldn't explain the rest--her tongue looked normal.
what impressed me was how this fellow stood his ground to the predictable attacks here. does anyone else remember this, or who the fellow is? he wasn't lying, and for his money it proved his faith in god. my problem with that is that god's miracles get a bit selective and whimsical. it looks like god plays favorites, but no decent god would do that. what struck me about the incident was the group action, the outright terror, crisis, and willful accord in response to it. that indicates the parameters of the paranormal. was it god--or a human factor, beyond what we'd normally exercise?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Oh boy.
Now is it any wonder there was so much disagreement over on the God thread when so many of its posters- they know who they are- were so thoroughly steeped in woo-woo, superstition, paranormalist or supernaturalist beliefs and desires? OMG!
Where is the effort to deal with nature as is? to derive meaning and purpose from nature as is, to derive coping skills and life strategies for dealing with nature as is, straight-up, without relying on "immeasurable" qualities to provide comfort or meaning or purpose. For these personalities, it doesn't seem to exist. -Which speaks volumes.
Ghandi: Be the change you seek in the world.
Kittesy: Spend your limited time, energy and resources learning those cause n effect rules of the Cosmos that ARE measurable, that point the way to life strategies for better living. -Plenty of those to keep anyone busy for several lifetimes.
HFCS: Do NOT confuse the supranormal (real-world, rare, royal flush-like phenomena or weird bizarre phenomena, e.g., or the brain's perceptual tricks, illusions, etc.) and the paranormal (paranormalist fantasies or paranormalist delusions) - like all the pinhead fools of the species do.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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just dealing with nature as-is here, fruc. i did get these strange phone calls, and i'll bet if you took the time to investigate the case of the lacerated tongue, you'd find plenty of witnesses to a genuine miracle. just a hunch of course, i could be wrong about that one, but you're not really a curious guy. you're lazy like most of skeptical layabouts.
supranormal and paranormal are your distinctions. you like to make up your own language. problem is, you haven't been able to fool anyone with it.
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TripL7
Trad climber
san diego
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T-Bird, that was the madbolter1(I am pretty sure)who told that story about his young sister etc.
Edit: madbolter1...on the evening of June 3/June 4 conversation on the "Why do so many people believe in God..." I agree, this was a bonafide miracle/good story!
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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unfortunately, LEB, the concept of god will always be tangled up with the paranormal. if you're shy of controversy, it's the wrong field to be messing with.
if you have religious sensibilities, that's your prerogative--pursue what you're comfortable with, but you won't be getting a unified picture, you'll have the natural over here, the paranormal over there, the supernatural in yet another place.
i see both the claimed miracle and the ghost cat as fair game. i operate on the premise that truth is approachable and will have a universal integrity.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Tony, what if what seemed like a miracle was in fact an innate ability that some humans can access with will or under duress? What if that ability was somehow 'forgotten about' or you were always led to believe that people don't normally do that? Would that take it out of God's hand or would it put it there solidly?
Lois , how can you separate "the Paranormal" from miracles and other supposed divine intervention experiences? They all fall into what we experience as real or not, but it is only the individuals ability to discern that limits any interpretation.
In my world, it's all normal. Fear and ignorance are the only limiting factors. Culture is a filter that we view the universe through.
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Mimi
climber
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'Culture is a filter that we view the universe through.'
Very good evening to you, Wayne. Interesting concept. Or at least our tiny existence here at the moment.
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GBrown
Trad climber
Los Angeles, California
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Early '70s, Boston, dream.
It's a moonlit night on a big ledge way up a cliff. I'm standing behind my grandfather; we're looking out at the valley below. I feel such immense love for my grandfather that I cannot communicate in words. I lean forward and kiss him on the back of his neck and flow all the love I feel through that communication. He turns around and looks me in the eye and flows this direct and incredible love back to me through my eyes. It is as if I have been bombarded with his love and suddenly the landscape is clear and sharp in the night; it feels as if the earth is breathing deeply; the stars suddenly flash brightly and my feeling is that of ecstacy.
Instant scene change: I am holding my granfather's hand as he seeks a foothold below in the dark as we start to descend the cliff from the ledge. His full weight is on my grip and his hand is slipping slowly through it. I feel great fear that he will fall and die and there is nothing I can do about it, but suddenly the weight is off my hand - he has found a foothold, he is safe and not about to fall and die.
Instant scene change: I am walking beside my grandmother down the slope below the cliff down into the valley. I suddenly realize that my grandfather is not with us and is still back up on the cliff. I stop and turn to go back and get him but my grandmother says that he's alright. I realize that everything is fine and continue down into the valley with her.
I wake up, remembering the dream in all its vivid detail.
In the morning I get a call from my mother informing me that my grandfather died in his sleep that night, lying beside my grandmother as he had for 55+ years. I loved him dearly and never shed a tear other than those relating to happiness.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Hi Mimi, a pleasant evening to you also.
I think what I was trying to say was that what is now paranormal may sooner or later become a reality. Even in one generation.
edit- wow, G.Brown that is a powerful dream. Maybe we need a powerful dream thread.
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skywalker
climber
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Gee... I always avoid these topics...I am actually of the belief that when you die its like before you were born...but may I share...when I was ~8ish I went to the kitchen one morning and a stream of water (pee sized for a lack of better dimensions) was shooting out of the floor to the ceiling and dripping down the cabinets. I woke up my Dad who also witnessed the phenomena and we tried to find the source. We found the source and drilled a hole through the floor and confirmed said source. Problem was there wasn't a pipe anywhere near, and my Dad is a handyman. Sometime later in the same kitchen my brother and I just ate a snack and there was a glass of water on the table and it just suddenly shattered. I still have no explanation for either of these two experiences but I will never forget them!
S....
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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must have been a wonderful grandfather, gbrown.
in rare instances, one of the best things in life can be death itself.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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thanks for the reference, tripl7. it's worth reading over--madbolter1, june 3-4 on the belief-in-god thread, a very impressive anecdote and some stout sparring with rrradam's hipshot abuse.
where is that rrradam these days?
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GBrown
Trad climber
Los Angeles, California
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LEB - This was a cool topic to originate.
I agree with Wayno and Tony that we don't have to worry about the inclusion of experiences which are interpreted as religious. The "para-" in Paranormal comes from the Greek meaning "beside, near or from", i.e., it is separate from "normal". The word "paranormal" is so loaded with inferences and TV associations, etc., that the terms "extra-normal" or "extra-ordinary" ("extra-" coming from Latin for "outside of") may create less of a reaction.
You have asked for personal accounts of experiences; you haven't asked for dissertations, opinions, arguments, theories, references, things which other people have said happened to them, etc.
SO LET'S LOOSEN UP. DON'T BE SHY. IF YOU'VE HAD SUCH AN EXPERIENCE, SHARE IT. Simple. :)
I'll give you another one. (Like many "extra-normal" or "extra-ordinary" experiences, it is so intimately connected with the normal that it is very much a personal experience and not something perceivable to an outside observer.)
In 1967, Rich Goldstone and Jim McCarthy had just taken the aid out of Coexistence at the Gunks - a step up in Gunks-5.10 at the time. The following weekend, Stannard enlisted me for a second ascent (or was it the 3rd John?). I always loved seconding John because if he didn't make it on the first try, I wouldn't have to burn out putting in the pro to the crux. My upper body strength was always sub-par to the "big guys" - couldn't do a muscle-over on a bar or very many pull ups. Reach, balance and on-the-edge cool were my forte.
With RRs spreadeagled on barely existant footholds, and the face bulging above the horizontal handhold, I had just enough strength to hold on with my left hand while slowly caressing the bulge with an extended right arm. At full extension, I got the hold.
The next thing I knew, I was standing where my right hand had been and blowing like a hard-ridden horse. I had no immediate recollection of what I had done and was slightly startled but needed to put my attention on the immediate needs of the climb and getting another pin in in short order.
I later pieced together a dim recollection of doing a mantle on that hold so I could reach the next one and that the whole short sequence was a series of musclular exertions that I was not connected to in my "normal" manner. I never could find the usual perceptual images (visual, sound, feel of the rock, muscle and joint activity, etc.) from the approximately 5 seconds of my existence except from an extra-normal viewpoint that was sort of outside the body while pervading the body with a focused intention that it succeed in doing those moves.
Knowing my body strengths at the time and the dynamics of the required moves, it was, one way or another, an "extra-ordinary" feat for me.
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Leggs
Sport climber
California originally, Old Pueblo presently..
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drljefe here,
I see dead people.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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"Paranormal" is such a loaded phrase; too much preconcieved baggage. Maybe you would have gotten more (unguarded) response had you said 'Unexplained/unexplainable' experiences?
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drljefe
climber
Old Pueblo, AZ
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I started having ghost experiences as a kid. A few heavy ones. That one~liner photo I posted upthread was a particularly crazy instance.
I "deja vu" everyday.
I've seen some messed up "witchy/ dark magic/ native american" stuff.
Then there were all those crazy things on the road with the Dead.
I've always figured that if we are really only using ten percent of our brains, what's up with that other 80 percent? (10 percent GONE in my case) There have to be instincts/perception/sensors that are supressed or untapped.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Everyone has those experiences, I think many don't acknowledge them. We are aware of more than we are comfortable living with.
The Cat is a good example, I don't know that it is useful to try to figure it out, but better to let the experience open to you over time. Do you know more from having the 'facts'? or from being informed by what the situation over time builds for you?
What about schroddinger's cat? Ed could help us understand this "paranormal" construct...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat
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drljefe
climber
Old Pueblo, AZ
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Definitely not all "dark", which isn't to say not scary.
The witchcraft jazz, and native american strong magic are things I never want to witness or experience again. Powers used in a malevolent fashion ain't cool. Homey don't play that. Skinwalkers can take a hike.
And if I never saw another ghost again, I'd be stoked.
But I just got a house in the oldest part of town...
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Leggs
Sport climber
California originally, Old Pueblo presently..
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But I just got a house in the oldest part of town...
~our house isn't haunted, babe... but i'm not sure about the Water Co. building across the way... THAT PLACE creeps me out~let's explore
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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that house reminds me of the whaley house museum in old town san diego, purportedly the most haunted house in the u.s. most of the museum workers will have a ghostly encounter to tell of.
it seems old man whaley just loved his old place and decided to continue to hang out and has been a bit proprietary about what is done with it. whether you want to believe it all or not, it has resulted in an extraordinary window back into early california.
richard senate, who still seems to be going strong in the ghost business, says that a number of ghosts seem to involve people with big egos and big ideas. an interesting report in that vein is the ghost of abbott kinney, the imaginative developer of venice, california, sometimes seen walking abbott kinney boulevard. one of my favorite haunts there is abbott's habit coffee shop, "damn fine coffee", with a gleeful, coffee-guzzling devil on the logo, a great place for an old fart to look at young women who have not yet learned the secrets of putting on weight. it's almost like italy that way.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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LEB, i'd be interested in what you learned researching this fellow.
lolli mentioned that there was a whole pamphlet published about the history of her haunted farmstead, but she didn't take much interest in it. some people are fairly "live and let live" when there's a ghost around.
richard senate took us on a field trip to downtown ventura, where he worked in an official capacity as city historian at the time. he's kind of a "real deal" guy with many interests, not just a morbid fascination. he published a book on erle stanley gardner, who was a practicing lawyer in ventura and who used much of his experience there in the perry mason novels.
the ventura mission has a number of ghosts associated with it, and richard spoke of trying to form a "friends of ghosts" society to extend a peaceful hand, if possible, to troubled ghosts from the living.
one ghost we tinkered with was at the ortega adobe, just down the street from the mission. richard gave everyone bent-coathanger divining rods for this, and i frankly didn't think much of it all. nobody was picking up the ghost or the old building walls or whatever, but we continued poking around the place for an hour. he told the story of the patriarch of the ortega family--this was the family that started the ortega chile company. the guy was in his 90s and sitting on the front porch watching a couple young men trying to break a mule to saddle. he didn't think the whippersnappers knew what they were doing, so he insisted on taking over. he wound up with a broken neck and was taken indoors.
i agreed to give the divining wires a try and damned if the things didn't start acting up. they pushed against me and i backed against a wall of the house. that was the spot, richard said, where the old man died. i felt kinda involved, so i went out to my car and got my lovely hohner chromatic (harmonica) and played the old geezer an impromptu elegy. we all left with a feeling of peace and, for me, connectedness to someone departed.
drljefe seems to have had some experience of skinwalkers, which tony hillerman mentions in many of his novels from navajo country.
the navajos traditionally live in a six-sided house called a hogan with a view to the rising sun. hogan sites are selected for the beauty of the view out the front door. the greatest ideal of the navajo is to "walk in beauty".
if someone is dying in a navajo household, they are taken outside to die, lest their "chindi", the bad part of their souls, be cursed to confinement in the home and harrass the family. if someone should die indoors--i'm mentioning this because of the ortega story--a hole is broken in the wall for the chindi to escape, and the family must abandon the house forever.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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well, that's pretty amusing.
seems like i've read that in england you have to disclose such things. some properties carry a lot of baggage.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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"Don't cross the streams,"
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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tony bird
LEB
priceless
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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wade should stick to what he does best, subliminal advertising.
after the failure of his previous sideline, he took to hanging around medlicott dome, where you can always pick up used ropes on the cheap. he enhances them with leftover aloha shirt dye and markets at josh campgrounds. i wish i had his business acumen. if you need further explanation:
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1226243&msg=1226255#msg1226255
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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the battle here is experiences vs. rational explanation
it is a difficult battle for rationalists to win, everyone has experiences and "believes" in them where as they don't have a firm grasp of rational explanation.
Let's take another tact at analysis: astrology.
For the purpose of simplifying the analysis, assume that all stars in the Zodiac are at the distance of Alpha-Centauri, 4.12e16 m, and also have the mass 2.19e30 kg
The gravitational force on a 3kg newborn would be something like 2.57e-13 N
Could that force be large enough to have any effect on a 3kg infant?
Well, what else would exert that force? it turns out that an object weighing 1.28 grams a meter away. There are a lot more objects like that, and larger forces from just random items near the birth..
So could the alignment of the stars have any influence on the infant's character?
The answer is no.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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you should be thanking me, I have a lot of reservations posting to this rather intellectually flaccid thread
did you understand my last post, LEB?
we do not have detectors sensitive enough to measure the force of Alpha-Centauri
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Ah astrology!
I once bought a booklet -Through the Year with Pisces (the most psychic of the astrological signs by the way) and at the end of each day compared what it said would happen that day with what did happen that. Over a year, I found it to be correct 50% of the time - random chance.
On that level I agree with Ed.
However, in India, astrological charts are drawn up at the time of birth to let the parents know the particular karma of that child. They're seen as personality charts and many of them seem to have been remarkably accurate. Of course it could be random chance and only the successful ones get publicized etc.
However, something else could be at work too. What if our personality is partially determined not by the stars but by what is going on within our own planet and solar system at a certain time? The ancients looked to the stars as the answer but perhaps electrical, magnetic, biological etc. cycles are going on that we are yet unaware of, which occur each year when the earth is in a certain position and therefore the correlation is there with the stars but they are not the cause?
We have after all, discovered that the time of year we are conceived and born affect our body, personality and mortality rates even in modern times with modern medicine. We can also correlate phases of the moon with behavior, something that is magnified on a small island where this makes for big tide changes etc. etc.
Perhaps the larger question is where do we want to put our society's time and money?
Building bigger accelerators, sending more probes into space, learning more about our earth, or learning more about our own biology? So far we actually know very little about ourselves, our planet or our vast universe.
Edit:
It therefore seems more appropriate to concentrate on figuring out the obvious first, such as DNA and child raising practices on the outcome of the human personality, rather than much more subtle possibilities like the electricity, magnetism, chemistry and biology of the place and time when we were born which which may or may not be a factor.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.. - William Shakespeare
Which is about all that needs to be said about astrology, and similar nonsense.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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d-know
Trad climber
electric lady land
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boo.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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ok, I am going to be unpleasant...
LEB - you have failed the easiest of tests to pass. That failure indicates to me that were I to spend time answering the question you are yearning to have answered, that it would be a total waste because you would not understand the answer in the least.
I don't have time to waste.
Jan - honestly if you want to believe in such foolishness go ahead... but you make such a silly, gratuitous swipe I can hardly avoid rising to the bait. You state:
Perhaps the larger question is where do we want to put our society's time and money?
Maybe if you looked at the USG's apportionment of funding research, say for FY09 where the final numbers are known, you'd see that $10B goes to the NIH, the National Institute of Health. All DOE funding is $4B, NASA, less than $1B, NSF is something like $3B...
So NIH receives the largest share of R&D budget... accelerators, by the way, and other such things, High Energy Physics (HEP), are less than $0.7B total...
Now NIH R&D is directed to learn the biology of us...
...oh, I forgot, that is for a western view of biology, NIH only spent $122M on their "National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine" (about 20% of the HEP spending in DOE).
And it turns out that the technologies that are required to do HEP R&D are useful for the NIH R&D too... not to mention the fact that the fundamental physics is an important foundation to biology, and a part of the way "we learn more about our own biology."
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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funny thing, jan, i kinda went through the same process after i got interested in things paranormal. i followed the newspaper horoscopes and found they pertained to me 0 percent of the time. worse than random there--a total flunk-out.
on the other hand, i was born in november and have been called a classical scorpio, whatever that is. i do consider a subtler possibility, especially having grown up in the upper midwest, where each season has a dramatic presence. perhaps there is a profound imprinting of the mood of nature when an infant comes into the world. when the year comes around to that point again, this first impression is revived, and the child feels somehow at home there. that could affect personality.
ever notice how this hartouni character won't answer a single scientific question posed to him politely by people who seem to respect his knowledge? instead he talks about the gravitational effects of alpha centauri. that's a strong indication he doesn't know much about anything else.
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Captain...or Skully
Big Wall climber
Transporter Room 2
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I'm wit' D-Know. Boo!
(Hey, he's a FunkMaster. He knows things, Cool things, to which you may relate).
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Sir loin of leisure...
Trad climber
I'm from Idaho..bitch
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I had a dream that leb was gone...so disapointed am I...
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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thanks for making my point Tony
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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you don't know how to talk, think or use words, ed. all you can do is act above it all. that's called poseurship.
you've gone back and deleted all your posts and promised to go away, and then you return to the thread you love to hate, like a dog to its own vomit--kinda proves my point, don't you think?
--
and LEB, since you've stirred up all these flies, i'm personally kinda curious about what, if anything, you've ever had to do with climbing. i'm relatively new to ST and have no problem with nonclimbers hanging out here, but i know the reason is that climbers are just plain more intense and more interesting than other people, especially surfers. if you really like it here, why don't you quit your job, let the husband manage the farm and pack off to yosemite with that bear of yours?
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GBrown
Trad climber
Los Angeles, California
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LEB,
I dragged the text below out a post I made in July to the "... believe in God?" thread.
I had 2 dogs for awhile. They were tight pals and they had a game they would play where one would guard 1/2 of the yard from the other while the other tried to get past the "line" before being intercepted. Then they would trade places and play some more. One evening while I was outside reading a book, they were sniffing around real bored in the yard - Ruff was sniffing around the gate about 30 feet away with his butt toward Moonshine. I was looking at Moonshine and I saw her look at the "half-way-line" and get the idea of playing the game. She looked over at Ruff and her head tensed sharply in Ruff's direction. Ruff's head came up instantly from the bottom of the gate as if he'd been slapped and he looked over his shoulder to Moonshine. She was standing right at "the line" and she pointed her nose down to it and turning her head to the left and then to the right she traced the line across the yard, looked back at him and only then moved the rest of her body - into the crouched, ready position of the "defender of the line." Ruff "smiled" and the game was on.
What I saw at the time was a direct dog-to-dog communication that did not involve visual or sonic perceptions but had the effect of one dog practically shouting at the other with an instant response. It was extra-ordinary. As I've experienced (and subsequently confirmed) perception of my daughter being in extreme fear over a distance of about 600 miles, I have no doubt that communication, at least an elementary level, can occur over a distance of 30 feet without ordinary mechanics.
 - - - - - - -
Ed, there's no justification for you damn bad manners. People are important and deserve respect. There's no importance in this damn universe that isn't evaluated by living entities. The only value science has is the value it has to life, their survival and the quality thereof. If you can't be decent people, then whatever alphabet soup you carry after you name spells "I screw you". You're a respectable and admirable person so act like it.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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ed is a physicist, and physicists generally have a hard time refraining from snobbishness. no one can argue that they tangle with some pretty sophisticated stuff. i've been fortunate to know enough physicists personally to get past the preliminary awe most people experience with them.
one of the big problems is the very devotion required to become a physicist. the mathematics is so demanding that most of them generally leave their way with words at the starting gate. doesn't mean they don't have anything to say--they just don't know how to say it. i hope i'm getting your goat with this, ed--you deserve it.
ed seems to be involved in high energy physics which is perhaps the cuttingest edge of the whole field and, as he posts, quite sadly underfunded because it happens to be pure research and probably not that directly related to the "strategic" (read world domination) objectives of the people who spend our tax money. he has my sympathy for that. i've read some of what gordon kane has written in this field and the man has the rare gift of telling it to the layperson without talking down. i recommend kane for ed's reading list.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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TB: ever notice how this hartouni character won't answer a single scientific question posed to him politely by people who seem to respect his knowledge? Quite the opposite. Ed spends a lot of time here discussing scientific questions with lay people, as far as possible in language that's understandable. Whether he should bother is another matter. Too often the other person(s) clearly have their minds made up, whatever the facts and science may say.
The fable of attempting to teach pigs to dance comes to mind.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Ed-
I think I was somewhat unclear so I have gone back and added this phrase to what I wrote.
"It therefore seems more appropriate to concentrate on figuring out the obvious first, such as DNA and child raising practices on the outcome of the human personality, rather than much more subtle possibilities like the electricity, magnetism, chemistry and biology of the place and time when we were born which may or may not be a factor".
Otherwise, I think you are being hypersensitive and are just burned out with being ST's "Mr. Science" which is understandable. I mentioned particle physics because that is the only branch of physics that I am even remotely aware of. It had nothing to do with you personally. In fact I have defended spending on basic research including accelerators, on other threads.
Meanwhile, please be aware that I do not necessarily believe everything I've been exposed to in Asia. However, I give it all respect and I am always curious as to whether there is something there that western culture doesn't understand. I would be a lousy anthropologist if I went around making judgements about other people's cultures and beliefs because they didn't agree with mine. I also have had the experience that western people and cultures don't know everything and the culture is always deeper here than first meets the eye.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Tony and G Brown-
No need to insult Ed just because he had a bad day and got a little irritable. I agree with Mighty Hiker that Ed has been more than generous in explaining science on various threads. I know that many of us have benefited from those explanations.
Even when we don't always agree with him our thinking is often refined on the subject because of his input. He'll never convert me to a purely materialist viewpoint but I understand that materialist viewpoint a lot better now and also the weaknesses of my own arguments and why they don't convince him either.
THANKS TO ED FOR ALL THAT HE HAS DONE TO MAKE SCIENCE UNDERSTANDABLE !!!
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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i've only been in this blogsville a couple months and have encountered nothing but unpleasant ed, who will just have to get used to an equally unpleasant tony. pate and huffcuss are easily handled because they're less knowledgeable about everything except their respective misogynies. ed is starting to look like fun. let's invite him to stick around in all this paranormal vomit.
ed's knowledge of science is quite narrow, as it often gets in the high energy field, and oblivious to--and on this thread emotionally threatened by--areas in which he is not familiar. i've tangled with physicists before on the subject of the paranormal. it's surprising what you find when they finally let their guard down. at first they fight like banshees.
a good scientist is collegial. ed is defending his ego, a medium-sized trout among the scientific minnows here. the more you act like a minnow, the more he'll love you. do a little reading in his area, difficult but accessible if you have the motivation, and you'll lose your sense of awe. not only that, but he'll be scared to death because then he'll have to communicate instead of blustering as he did calculating the gravitational effects of alpha centauri or trying to send me to the library to read fred hoyle's old books. he could easily have addressed the triple alpha process if he knows anything about it. one of the fellas i ski with, professor of physics, phd yale--i had to explain it to him. as i said on another thread, yale can be a surprisingly lightweight institution. my son just graduated there and i've become painfully aware of the gaping holes in an ivy league education.
the bluster is ed's last line of defense. behind that is dumb ed. he's the product of an academic process which is basically a knowledge bashing contest. to survive, you stay in your own bailiwick and make lots of noise, knowing more and more about less and less.
------
LEB hasn't answered my questions about climbing. perhaps there's something pleasant for her in the abuse she gets from pate and wade, so i won't interfere in what may be an enjoyable, dare i suggest erotic, dynamic for all involved.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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LEB-
Well I agree that it would be better to be straightforward if a personality problem is at the root of this. One of the problems of trying to be rational all the time, is that it then becomes difficult to deal with the messier aspects of life, like personality conflicts.
Rationalists have a hard time with their irrational emotions and religionists have a hard time with their unspiritual emotions. I try to play it down the middle after exploring either end of the spectrum, but I have been accused of copping out and alternately believing in nothing or everything.
Meanwhile, you have to realize that what you are proposing is very similar to, though on a much subtler scale, the now discounted idea of the "ether" around us as one of the elements. One of the easiest ways to get a scientist to lose it is to talk about something that resembles this discredited notion. You couldn't have pushed a more reactive button.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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i've only been in this blogsville a couple months and have encountered nothing but unpleasant ed
Tony you seem to specialize in not knowing what the f*#k you're talking about. I knew I recognized you. You're that guy at the Deli giving Bachar beta for the Nutcracker.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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hey Tony, perhaps a light weight education from Yale is better than none at all... but after all, your idea of a person as a vessel to be filled with knowledge is rather outdated...
... you also characterize yourself as a "critic" not a scientist, so I wonder where you get you strange ideas of what "good science" is...
...you seem to have to have me be some sort of egoist... my point on the budgets was that there is a lot more spent on NIH R&D than anything else, Jan's point was that we should spend less on arcane areas of knowledge and more on what matters to people, we already do that.
LEB - I find you needing answers to your questions... you're theory is that somehow there are very faint "signals" that the body "detects" which are not detectable by our instruments. It is a very simple theory, and one that does not take into account all of the consequences, all of the other things that would observable were it to be true. I offer the astrology example to show that there is a very weak "signal" from distant stars, a force which is not measurable on earth by our instrumentation, and yet if you assume that it has any effect, then the objects in the room have equal or larger effect, at least in terms of the force which transmits the star's presence. So even if we cannot measure the star, we know that it is not at all likely to mean anything in terms of determining something as complex as personality and fate.
Jan - Indian Astrology determine the influences from the heavens in sixteen varga or divisions. Interestingly, I doubt that anyone posting on this thread believes that something as complex as a human personality can be described in such a small number of divisions.... certainly various tests of personalities are even more complex, and come to highly contentious conclusions.
But what would you have to do in order to study the distribution of human populations and the correlations with the position of stars in the heavens for this 12-dimensional space?
Lets take roughly 100 divisions in each of the dimensions, that is, probably the limit to the determination of the positions by non-aided means. That is a volume of 10^24 possible combinations, currently there are only 10^9 people, which means that the full space represented by that astrological system is "unpopulated" or sparse... most of the space has no observational data. I haven't added in the additional divisions of each object, roughly 1000, the vast majority of which are correlated, perhaps this number is only 10 if you include the stars as only one object...
My point here is that there is no empirical support to the astrological conjecture even if you consider it to be simply a complex clock, first the model of personality is overly simplistic, secondly most of the range of the model cannot be tested because there are not enough people who have ever existed to test it... by large factors.
Further, one could test the differences of personalities, fates, etc, by location and time in a survey of individuals born close in time and location... no such strong correlation exists, which is an assertion that I make based on common human observation over hundreds of thousands of years, yet now is the best time to test such things as there are more humans alive now than ever before.
The problem of building such systems of knowledge is much more difficult when the numbers of people in ancient times is taken into account... estimated in 5000 BCE to be 5 million, total, a dauntingly small number to make any such systemic study possible...
This has little to do with the strength of the force, but calls into question the veracity of "ancient wisdom" which is limited, especially when it comes to making conclusions that are unsupportable based on the small number of ancients that existed.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Ed, why do you visit this thread when it's chockfull of ignorance and superstition? As if all this stuff hasn't been throroughly debunked (a) decades ago (b) over many exhaustive studies.
And when the paranormalist or supernaturalist says otherwise, they're just trying to get traction off a dead subject no more worthy of astrology.
re: astrology. The link having to do with the months is not tied to the stars as astrology idiots think but to the seasons. There should be a field of study perhaps called seasonology. I knew about it even before graduating high school. Analytic scientific types, e.g., tend to be born in winter months (which might mean they were conceived by the alpha males the previous spring, first in line, first dibs, something like that). Stars, no; seasons, yes.
As far as Tony goes, he's just one more attention-seeking misinformationist not worth any self-respecting poster's time. Just like Klimmer.
...........
Jan wrote-
"So far nobody knows by what mechanism they occur. Either it's so subtle that science hasn't discovered it yet or its by a means so beyond our current understanding, we will have to develop a whole new paradigm for it."
Careful, you're sounding here like a mechanist.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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well he got off his high horse and answered the questions. i hope you gals find it helpful--mathematical fantasies applied to his own fantasy of what we're trying to talk about here. you see, the idea of a person as a vessel to be filled with knowledge is way out of date. a person is a vessel to be filled with numbers.
LEB, this is all coming back to you. you won't talk about your climbing, which is really the primary function of ST. anything on the side is like a conversation you have climbing. even if you're cranking 12s, you talk. if you're really good, you talk and crank at the same time. wade here can only talk in pictures, a bit of a learning disability, but we've learned to be tolerant.
but LEB, really--are there forces we can't detect? ed gets paid to detect things. he goes hunting for them with huge, expensive machines. he also understands that detecting, or the effort to detect, can destroy or alter the subject, so it gets real tricky. he's going to have a hard time with a ghost cat that gets shy when you go for your binoculars.
huffcuss, ed is here for the same reason you are--to act superior. it's what people do in order to prove things to themselves. you'd die without the opportunity.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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I visit (1) for entertainment, (2) to keep an eye out on what the other side is up to you, you irresponsible misinformationist.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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HFCS= you're giving too much credit...Never engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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" So far nobody knows by what mechanism they occur. Either it's so subtle that science hasn't discovered it yet or its by a means so beyond our current understanding, we will have to develop a whole new paradigm for it."
Careful, you're sounding here like a mechanist.
Fructose-
Who's to say the new paradigm has to be a physical mechanism?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Meanwhile, isn't it interesting that if I talk about astrology from the point of view of Indian cultural beliefs, including its role in determining eligible marriage partners, many western and certainly all western scientific people will judge it superstition, but probably find it somewhat bemusing. Yet if the same information appears on a paranormal thread, these Indian ideas suddenly become threatening and controversial??
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Jim E
climber
away
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ok, I am going to be unpleasant...
OMG! I can't stop laughing...
Pate, have you seen this 'documentary'?
Had the greasemonkey ST cloak running. Didn't realize I was missing such a classic... classic... whatever this is. Bummed I missed out on Ed's earlier "unpleasantness". I love it when Ed gets "unpleasant".
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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The Paranormal is just the part of reality we haven't got good tools or awareness of yet.
There was a time when science couldn't detect many of the forces that they can commonly measure now, and many principles of science, like ideas about time and space, would have sounded ridiculously paranormal before they were "Proved" to scientific satisfaction.
Pure arrogance to think we know so much when we've only been at scientific discovery for a few thousand years (really much less) what will we know in 75,000 years if we survive as a species that long?
Peace
Karl
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Karl, not. We must have different dictionaries, different lexicons.
What you describe is the supernal. Supernal and supernatural are different. Supernal and paranormal are different.
Supernal describes (a) phenomena or (b) knowledge outside the realm of humanity, human sensory appartus or human understanding.
Paranormal describes ghosts, etc. Watch Poltergeist. Read a book by Sylvia Browne. That's paranormal.
Don't try to smooth over, air brush, the superstitious ignorance out there. It only leads to more trouble down the line.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Tony wrote
funny thing, jan, i kinda went through the same process after i got interested in things paranormal. i followed the newspaper horoscopes and found they pertained to me 0 percent of the time. worse than random there--a total flunk-out.
and Ed wrote
Jan - Indian Astrology determine the influences from the heavens in sixteen varga or divisions. Interestingly, I doubt that anyone posting on this thread believes that something as complex as a human personality can be described in such a small number of divisions.... certainly various tests of personalities are even more complex, and come to highly contentious conclusions.
Limited information is worse than no information. Those who know anything about astrology know that it's not only what sign your sun is in, but where that part of the zodiac is in the sky, as well as what part of the zodiac is rising on the horizon, plus the same information for all the planets and then angles they aspect themselves with. Then all those things moving constantly. It's hugely complicated and a good Indian astrologer studies with big dedication from a young age. LIke being an olympic gymnast, It's not considered something you can pick up later in life (although plenty do) It works because the universe is made of consciousness and everything is a reflection of the whole.
So newspaper astrology is almost worthless.
When I'm in India, I go to a cheap ($13) astrologer. One time I took my friend who didn't give him her legal name and he did her predictions right there without having any time to research her.
Here’s an abbreviated list of some specific stuff the Astrologer was able to state without knowing my friend or her real name:
How many brother and sisters she had, which ones have problems and the state of some of their health and marriages, which ones she is biologically related to
How many kids they had and how many died already,
That her mother and father are divorced
That she lives far from where she was born and that her mom returned there but that her dad lives close.
That she has a scar on her right knee
That she is a teacher
How many marriages, when they ended and why.
How many kids she has, their character, and relationship with her. Also miscarriages.
Type of childhood experiences (very specific)
What issues trouble her relationship and why (not generic)
It goes on and on. I guess some things are free will in this life but other stuff is scheduled in advance. Of course, we can choose how much to react and resist to any event.
But those who insist on denial will either have to ignore this or consider me nuts, but hey, it's not even me that's nuts, I got a witness for it.
PEace
karl
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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huffcuss certainly has a dictionary of his own. he has incorporated my less-than-authoritative greek etymology in it, and he took my idea of seasons and personality, posted a little earlier in this thread, and embellished it and coined a word for it: seasonology. he's quite nimble that way, but like wade, he only shops other people's pictures.
no need to apologize, pate--you owe me that beer anyway and maybe we'll be even then. but examples of hoaxes don't disprove the paranormal. this very thread has brought out a number of credible specimens.
dr. f, your explanation is exactly like ed's--a similar-looking cat from the neighborhood, never mind that she seems to live on a remote farmstead, knows the animals that frequent it, and this cat seemed to have had unique markings. your mind is made up precisely because you will be disturbed considering the implications of what she's saying. if you examine her narrative, the possibility of what you and ed suggest gets pretty slim. it puts you in the position of not believing credible reports because, basically, it messes with your system.
karl, yes, it was the newspaper astrology. don't know the first thing about what they do in india. you're making this up, right? getting that many things right puts the probability of random guessing pretty low. i think ed hartouni could probably give us a few impressive numbers. which means you're a god-damned liar, you as#@&%e. or to use huff's much more polite language, misinformationist.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Sorry Fructose, but these kinds of experiences are common in India. Americans married to Okinawans have similar experiences when visiting local shamans. This leads me to believe that much of the information comes from the psychic dimension rather than astrology. Whatever the source, it's related to what the Indians call our personal karma.
If you want to hear about something else very interesting, get Karl to tell you about the book of Brigu.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Bears repeating:
Yeah, I'm afraid we're no longer a science and technology culture but instead a celebrity and woowoo culture.
When China kicks our ass later this century, it won't be without a reason or two.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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why, 'tis brigadoon.
out of words and repeating your pictures for emphasis--you guys are pathetic. at least ed keeps his mouth shut when he runs out of things to say.
--------
i guess what LEB saw, dr. f., was not enough evidence for those who choose not to believe in such things, or not to believe her. she says she saw what looked like her recently deceased cat, alive and in its usual position, on the lookout for chipmunks, which was the way it spent much of its life. she found this odd, went for the binocs to see whether it was just another cat, as you and ed are contending, and when she came back it was gone.
evidence is important. to judge this, we'd have to know something about LEB's neighborhood and the cat activity there. going by her report--not that many other cats around, hardly see any others, her cat had unusual markings and it seemed to be taking up a familiar position. no hard proof, just an inkling she had, strong enough to post it here and endure a predictable torrent of impolite skepticism. by the way, you fellows would be far more credible with polite and calm discussion. your sophomoric attacks belie a real discomfort.
what LEB describes has the characteristics of a haunt. i've never heard of an animal haunt, but it seems justthemaid has. casual evidence, yes, but look how it accumulates.
as i suggested previously, maybe i'm missing what's really going on here. maybe LEB is a masochist and you guys are all sadists and you're having the time of your lives beating and being beaten while i'm stupid enough to take it seriously. and damn the others for taking it seriously too, reporting prescient dreams and so forth.
admittedly, LEB's incident, if it wasn't a troll for ritual abuse, is not the strongest field report of the paranormal. other reports are far stronger. ask lolli about the ghost on her farm, seen by her children and then by herself. you'll have to tax yourself for that one--other people popping in from the neighborhood playing an elaborately planned peek-a-boo?
if we could ever get this subject out of the ghostbusters circus, we might get on to being analytical about it, which is what the material begs for. a certain receptivity on the part of the observer seems to be required. second glances, which bring more focused and rational attention, often make the visions disappear. yes, it has to do with the observer as well as the object, the psychology as well as the physics.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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divad
Trad climber
wmass
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maybe LEB is a masochist and all you guys are all sadists and you're having the time of your lives beating and being beaten while I'm stupid enough to take it seriously.
That right there, in a nutshell, pretty much sums up the LEB legacy on the Taco.
Hi Lois!
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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No, Pate, that there is just the more efficient way a climber hauls his partner's ass up a route.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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thats the haul line...
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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I'm guessing that's not a Bible...
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ron gomez
Trad climber
fallbrook,ca
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It's Jim's bible! That ain't no joint in his hand either, his Camel non filter that he smokes to the very end, no waste for The Bird.
Peace
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Yeah, I'm afraid we're no longer a science and technology culture but instead a celebrity and woowoo culture.
When China kicks our ass later this century, it won't be without a reason or two.
You might be interested to know that religion is undergoing a revival in China as it modernizes and discovers that materialism is not ultimately satisfying. No less than Tony Blair has established a faith foundation to promote inter-religious understanding at Beijing University.
http://www.tonyblairfaithfoundation.org/newsroom/c/our-news
Not to mention that China is the home of acupuncture, chi gong, and other forms of energy manipulation, in addition to the usual martial arts and meditation.
My first introduction to multiple ways of thinking incidentally, happened on my first trip to Asia when I visited a Chinese physicist that I had met at CERN and was very surprised to find that he believed in ghosts.
Of course Chinese people have never been confined to just one belief system. They've always constructed their personal philosophy from a blend of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and folk traditions. Modern ones have added a knowledge of Christianity and Islam as well. Meanwhile, the two fastest growing religions in China are Tibetan Buddhism and Pentacostal Christianity, both into personal experiences of the non ordinary.
As far as I'm concerned, it's people who believe in only one system, one way, black or white, either or, type thinking that are the woo woo ones. Of course that's fine if you find it personally satisfying, but I find it boring and limiting and very very western.
China does in fact represent the future, and it will be full of diversity. Their experiment with atheist Marxism was good for the destruction of the old system, but proved unworkable to build anything positive. They will not fall again for a supposedly new, more modern, more scientific monoview of the world.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Jan- Your post was so predicted.
You do write so condescendingly at times. As though we sists or science aficionados, advocates, never break out of our test tubes. As though we never look up to have any grasp of eastern cultures.
Make an effort to come to grips with nature as is. Specifically, (1) its mechanistic mechanics, (2) the mortality of its living things. Leave the superstitions where they belong. In ol times. That's the challenge, that's the chore. Yours, too, obviously.
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Mimi
climber
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Corn sugar, you're way off base regarding Jan's perspective. You should apologize to her for your insolence.
Regarding the Chinese however, I believe they and the rest of the planet are caught up in materialism like everyone exposed to it. We're all doomed.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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No free passes, Mimi. Not for religions. Not for girls.
Jan's a paranormalist, deep in superstitions. Who uses her "scientific" training in anthropology (so it's reported) to disrespect the physical sciences at just about every turn. To get ahead, you gotta call em as you see them.
If Jan's really interested in these topics, she needs to take a few electronics engineering courses, which bring with them control systems, info science, mechanistic mechanics savvy.
Hope this isn't the end of our beautiful relationiship, Mimi.
............
(1) Whether superstitions are Eastern or Western, they are still superstitions.
(2) Don't patronize women, treat him as equals.
..........
cf:
"Corn sugar, you're way off base regarding Klimmer's perspective. You should apologize to him for your insolence."
NOT!
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Mimi wrote-
"Regarding the Chinese however, I believe they and the rest of the planet are caught up in materialism like everyone exposed to it. We're all doomed."
Once again, the overly familiar bait n switch: from (biotic) materialism to (economic) materialism. If he's a (biotic) materialist, then this must mean he's an all-around materialist (i.e., economic materialist, consumer materialist). Not.
It's time we had a new language system to reflect the new thinking. Thank the Gods (Ashtar to Zeus) some are working on it.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 10, 2010 - 01:33am PT
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i've developed an admiration for pre-communist china, a more humane way of doing empire, a tolerant, humanist culture. power politics is a monster, but it's an inevitable one until we learn to get back to the good things of tribalism. china did empire better. the west has been overbrutal, beginning with rome, and that dark modus festers beneath the veneer of christian pacifism.
it's worth a talk. communism represented a europeanization to the chinese, their ticket to getting into the big, modern, western world in an idealistic way. you have to remember that they reacted to the colonization/exploitation free-for-all led by the british, with the french, german, americans and japanese all joining in. the only good thing that came of that was tsing-tao beer. the chinese weren't prepared to handle that kind of unscrupulous aggressiveness. the japanese have still have egg on their face from that era, but the british have it much worse.
and now, jan, you tell me that phony tony blair is beating jimmy carter at the religious hypocrite elder statesman game. i can't think of a better emetic.
----
wade, you are a master subliminalist. how did you know the cheshire cat has been one of my heroes since childhood? treat yourself here to something lexical:
http://www.cat-lovers-gifts-guide.com/cheshire-cat-quotes.html
(wade icey--yet another specimen of the paranormal, more psychic than most women. what a thread!)
LEB, be careful about metaphors. they extend themselves unexpectedly and bite the beauteous gluteus. say what you will about pate, latrines are necessary things. without them, we'd all wind up full of sh#t.
and LEB, if you come around here you have to talk climbing at least part of the time, whether you're a climber or not.
huffcuss, you annelid, what the hell is a sist? do you mean cyst?
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Aug 10, 2010 - 02:20am PT
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Aug 10, 2010 - 02:52am PT
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HFCS wrote
Karl, not. We must have different dictionaries, different lexicons.
What you describe is the supernal. Supernal and supernatural are different. Supernal and paranormal are different.
Supernal describes (a) phenomena or (b) knowledge outside the realm of humanity, human sensory appartus or human understanding.
Paranormal describes ghosts, etc. Watch Poltergeist. Read a book by Sylvia Browne. That's paranormal.
Don't try to smooth over, air brush, the superstitious ignorance out there. It only leads to more trouble down the line.
Can't agree bro. Ghosts are simply outside the realm of humanity's easy detection. Perfectly natural in their own sphere.
I know a number of folks (including me) who have had experiences with "Ghosts" which are merely spirits sort of stuck near this realm. Many of these folks were atheists or agnostics who saw the "ghost" and later identified it with relatives as being identical to someone who lived there in a previous generation but died a violent, untimely death. In fact, when you find out about anyone claiming to see ghosts and know who they were, you'll find that suicides, violent deaths, and such are what results in spirits having to hang out near this earth world for longer than those who die of ripe old age. Kind of a mystery but fairly consistent.
They are only supernatural because they are outside our realm of usual perception. Lots of things used to be out of our realm of perception but now science has given us tools to detect them. Ghosts exist in a dimension bordering human perception but generally outside it. Certain conditions can make them visible to us, perhaps briefly, sort of like the Aurora Borealis sometimes comes South enough to be visible where it usually isn't present
To make this more on topic, There is a cabin or two in Curry Village that gets consistent reports of Ghosty stuff, and Sierra Sky Ranch, between Oakhurst and Yosemite has a number of Ghosts and is regularly investigated by folks who are into that stuff.
Peace
karl
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Aug 10, 2010 - 04:56am PT
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Fructose-
I get the feeling that you do not really understand what a cultural anthropologist does as opposed to a physical anthropologist or archaeologist who deals almost exclusively with the physical.
Cultural anthropology by contrast, is an art form as much as a social science. To really get an inside view of a culture, one has to enter into it with no prejudgements. One records what people say they believe and looks for patterns and causes, but never, or very rarely, makes value judgements. It's called cultural relativism and implies intuition and empathy. That, not logic, is the foundation of the discipline.
Our theory is based on what we actually find, not what we hope or want to find. No one would last more than a few days in a nonwestern village telling the locals that they are ignorant and superstitious. Not to mention that we have often discovered that many seeming superstitions actually have deep ecological logic once we are clever enough to figure it out.
This is not always the case, particularly in applied anthropology which I have also done. I did make the judgement to encourage Hindu women to stop rubbing fresh cow dung on their new born baby's umbilical cords as it gave them tetanus. I used a universal humanistic/spiritual value (not just a western or Christian one) when I decided that a baby's life was worth more than an erroneous local belief.
There were days when I discovered local beliefs like this that I took to my stash of scotch when the day was over, but I never expressed outright disapproval. Instead, I thought of clever work arounds that would be acceptable cultural substitutes for what they were already doing. I convinced them to change by using their own local reasoning in new ways, not by telling them they were ignorant and superstitious.
As a result, I have been told by Chinese, Okinawan, Indian, Nepalese, Tibetan and Sherpa people that I am the first western person they ever met who truly understood their culture, which is probably the greatest compliment that an anthropologist can receive. I got to this understanding and acceptance by learning their culture, not judging it. Like almost everyone who learns another culture deeply, I also came to the view that other cultures understand things ours don't and do a lot of things better than we do.
If you deem this unscientific or antiscientific, so be it.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 10, 2010 - 07:58am PT
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getting back to the subjects of latrines, of pate, the subliminal and LEB's upcoming career in rockclimbing, i think we all ought to chip in and buy her a copy of how to sh#t in the woods by kathleen meyer, a colorado river guide who has rediscovered this lost art. if LEB still associates latrines with camping, there's a good chance she'll be stuck in a curry village tent cabin when she dies with the ghost of TR (ed hartouni knows who that is), trying to atone for allowing the damming of the hetch-hetchy (maybe wasn't his fault, but he could've done more).
but LEB, part of your problem with pate is the subliminal resemblance your two photos bear to nuns. perhaps wadesky could photoshop one of them a little to bear that out (pesky puns). you just have that look, so sorry to tell you. you kinda remind me of sister alberta marie, the great, overbearing influence on my adolescence. the cut of your hair squares your face off in exactly the manner of many nun's habits. if you want to get pate off your trail, you gotta get as unnunnish as possible. the first step is to shop some of chris mcnamara's fine advertisers and go for the steph davis look. the second step is to get your tootsies on the rock. once you start flinging real rock talk around here you'll be surprised at the empowerment, babe.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 10, 2010 - 10:44am PT
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here is a critique of astrology which sets up a number of questions related to LEB's original question and why her "research" methodology is seriously flawed.... she can't or won't see it, which is part of my frustration in dealing with her... if research were as trivial as she (and others of you) make it out to be then why would we scientists be in business at all?
http://www.astrosurf.com/nitschelm/Modern_criticism.pdf
Kelly, I. "Modern Astrology: A Critique"
Summary
This article is a methodological and philosophical critique of astrology. It argues that astrology, as it is presently practiced by the majority of astrologers (in either its traditional, or psychological form), offers no valid contribution to understanding ourselves, nor our place in the cosmos. Astrology itself is deeply problematic from beginning to end. Central notions like "as above, so below" and "interconnectedness" are too poorly developed by astrologers to amount to anything useful. There is little consensus on basic techniques and theories, and little agreement on how to settle differences among astrological techniques and theories. Astrological symbolism is unsystematic and based on metaphors, analogies, verbal associations, and mythology, all of which are developed in different ways by astrologers with no clear way of evaluating them. The philosophies or world-views associated with astrology are underdeveloped or poorly articulated. Modern advocates cannot provide research studies that have results commensurate with the claims made in astrology books. Astrologers rely on anecdotes or testimonials as central evidence, seemingly unaware or uninterested in the potential flaws and biasses inherent in such stories as evidence. Astrology as a discipline is a prime example of what happens when advocates consider only confirming evidence for their multitude of conflicting claims with little regard for contrary evidence, which is either 'explained away' by appeals to other parts of the horoscope, or with slogans like 'the complexity of astrology,' and 'astrology is another way of viewing the world.'
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:33am PT
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Ed, see my post on Astrology above and explain how it's possible.
You could post a similar critic on politics, how it's ineffective, lame and mispracticed and its principles don't work and it might be equally valid.
I didn't post the predictions made regarding myself, which were equally precise, specific and timely.
I didn't cause people would simply ignore them and discount me because that's human nature. You could get beat over the head with this stuff and still pretend to rationally and scientifically ignore it.
Just because a certain science is generally mispracticed and misunderstood doesn't mean it doesn't have its own power.
Peace
Karl
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 01:06pm PT
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Pate, looks like you've been tagged, bro.
.............
Alright, why don't we get specific. In my world, it's called hyperionics. -Which is the study of anything that is not obedient to the basic sciences, i.e., physics and chemistry, not the school subjects but the mechanistic processes. (That's a simple enough definition. Right?)
So, as an example, armed with this understanding, say, as any school kid would be after taking a course in Hyperionics 101 in tomorrow's high school or community college, he'd know about, for instance, (a) paranormal hyperionics, (b) supernatural hyperionics, (c) ghost hyperionics. (-Which for the most part are the subjects of this thread. Right?)
Now, with this little bit of background, those like me can express to you our stance in Believersville: Hyperionics (in all its forms) is as antiquated, as uninformed, as unscientific, as unsubstantiated, and therefore as bogus, as astrology (belief that stars, planets, celestial objects control our lives). So that's a point, one point.
One more point. "Hyperionics is bogus." Yeah, that's my stance. Is it "close-minded?" Opposing sides (aka the naysayers) will say so. But then again, from my side's perspective, it is a decision. It is the consequence, the product, of decision-making - as I've said before, arguably the premiere feature of our species- decision-making is - so I'm proud of it and honored to express it. Through decision-making, for better or worse, is how we come to our ideas, thoughts, beliefs and ultimately action (behavior) on the way to getting things done.
"Closemindedness" hardly fits. Indeed, it's a leftover term from all the arguments down through the decades with religious fundamentalists. In contrast, scientists, applied scientists, science advocates are some of the most open-minded human beings I know. Show them a ghost, show them even the tiniest iota of any phenomena that is hyperionic, i.e., that is not "obedient" to physics and chemistry - and you shall see how open-minded they are.
Closemindedness, no. Decision-making, yes. That is the correct framing. You boys and girls who find yourself at odds with the mechanistic mechanics motif of the Scientific Story should make an effort to distinguish the two.
Decision making in the areas of (a) how the world works and (b) how life works is a good thing. It's a good thing- esp when it is right decision making. To you decision makers: You should be proud of your decision-making capability. Be proud of your decisions. State them. State your beliefs (i.e., mental holdings) in regard to your decision making and education and experience. Be proud of them. Live up to them. As a decision-making creature of the Cosmos. And then let the chips fall where they may. Be accountable for them. That's how it should work. That's how it does work.
........
EDIT
Jan and I have been butting heads. Why? because (a) she claims she's scientific, then again, it is as if every other one of her posts are dissing "mechanistic mechanics" and pushing for belief in dynamics or entities or things or phenomena that operate independently of (or not "obedient to") basic physics and chemistry. -Which no side of modern science today recognizes. Because there is no substantive evidence. Indeed, because every thing (e.g., every engineering product) the world today knows about operates "obediently" in terms of physics and chemistry. Today's so-called Scientific Story- from quantum mechanics to biochemistry to evolution to neuroscience to cosmology- all contribute to the idea that life and living things are obedient to physics and chemistry in a mechanistic mechanics way (via mechanisms of action, e.g., or biophysics).
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 01:43pm PT
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Reality consists of limits - the limits of the natural world. The Abrahamic religions don't do a very good job at respecting them. Nor do they make any effort to deal with them straight up, as is.
The Abrahamic religions build up expectations that nature, that life, is larger than it is, more than it is. Then along the course of life these expectations are dashed. By a growing maturity in the understanding of things. But then millions wonder why as adults growing older they are saddened, despirited, if not depressed. For many, it is no mystery.
Make the effort as early in life as you can to deal with nature and its seamy sides straight up. Make the effort to build your expectations in accordance with how the world works and how life works.
No living thing is "above the law" - the law of the natural world. This includes anthropes.
.............
EDIT to ADD: 12:55pm. Good. No additional post in a couple of hours. Thread is now buried. Hope we put this lame silliness to rest. We can hope.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 10, 2010 - 09:01pm PT
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i don't think ed will ever be disposed to anything but hostile engagement in these matters, and i wonder why all his buddies here just don't leave him alone about it. face it, ed's a skeptic and has his own beliefs and won't look at these things with an open mind. he's probably a fine scientist, but he's not the guy to be consulting here.
perhaps jan might get back in touch with that fellow she met at CERN.
meanwhile, LEB, let me refer you to something largo posted on the belief in god thread, july 17, 2:11 pm. it's a speculative treatment of the physics of mind, if you will, by a sri lankan professor, apparently philosophy of science, although not really a physicist.
huff, you gotta make up your mind. either stamp out all of us tin-hatted loopies with your stellar logic based on words and ideas we're sure to have in common, or start your own pretty universe based on all those cool words you like to invent. you're not going to get either one done if you try to do both.
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divad
Trad climber
wmass
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Aug 10, 2010 - 09:12pm PT
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Paranormal is 99% coincidental. The other 1% is weird unexplainable sh#t.
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 10, 2010 - 09:25pm PT
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Corn Sugar,
You are so full of yourself it is truly a wonder. And to top it off, you conform more to all the worst attributes of a preacher/true believer than all those to which you look down your nose.
This is a first time post, but I am well aware of the characters here. If I had to describe you from your posts, it would be as a youth without experience. If you are not this, then you haven't learned diddly.
SF
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 09:38pm PT
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Let me guess, a believer in ghosts? a fundamentalist Christian? Beliefs matter. Science illiteracy mattters. Just minutes ago I read a piece about a Muslim father suspected of killing his two daughters and fleeing the country (a so-called "Honor Killing") because they didn't adhere to Quranic teaching and what the God of Moses (Allah) wanted. So let's hear YOUR philosophy on things.
What I'm full of... is science education and a determination to live up to it. If my ilk weren't so rarefied in the population I wouldn't have to express it so emphatically. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Express YOURSELF. Or go away. Am I full of bullsh#t, if so, let's hear it. In what subject. Ad hominem attacks get us nowhere.
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 10, 2010 - 09:45pm PT
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If my ilk weren't so rarefied in the population I wouldn't have to express it so much. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
See, you are on a mission. Fundamentalist I am not - and you do great disservice to science.
SF
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 09:45pm PT
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Tony, are you incapable of assimilating a new word? if not for a lifetime, how about for just a conversation? And if you don't like a new word, a neologism, just substitute any old symbol for it then. Umm, how about XY or HY or HY1000. Is that more comfortable? Or, how about #$#. Aferall, words are just symbols. -Which a smarty like you already knows. Right?
So lets try it out:
HY1000: (a) the study of phenomena, any phenomena, that isn't obedient to physics and chemistry (b) such phenomena; Usage: HY1000 is bogus. As bogus as astrology.
Yeah, that's better. [\sarcasm]
What's more: You could've just not bumped this ridiculous thread, too.
.......
Now here's a thought: Among other things, you are also an obstructionist to attempts at a creative push to get past long-term stagnancies. Proud of that you are. I want to thank you for the practice. The practice of dealing with this type of person.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 09:48pm PT
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Post up, Scarface, put your thoughts were your pointed finger is.
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 10, 2010 - 09:54pm PT
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Corn sugar,
Do you live here? You need to get out and observe the world. Your pontification is quite limiting.
All good science starts with observation. You are a preacher. You pontificate. You live in a self made prison cell of rationalizations I'm afraid. People like you drop bombs on places like Nagasaki.
SF
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 09:56pm PT
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Better post something substantive, I'm quickly losing interest in you. Call me on my b.s. or go away. Wait, is this Klimmer? You troll!
Now I'm thinking Scarface=Klimmer. LOL!
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 10, 2010 - 10:03pm PT
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Corn,
You don't mind if I call you Corn do you? You sure enjoy barking out orders. Was Jim Jones your cousin? Klimmer I'm not. I've made my living in Science and you are a poser.
SF
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Aug 10, 2010 - 10:09pm PT
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I am more fond of Fructose as his given name.
Corn just seems so agricultural.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Aug 10, 2010 - 10:10pm PT
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The entity known as LEB: Remember, there was a time when the hard core "scientists" of the day thought the sun and the rest of the universe evolved around the sun. The mind boggles, as do historians. Galileo rolls in his grave.
So as to make another futile contribution to the education of LEB, I wish to point out that it was hard-core Catholic theologians who insisted that the universe, including the Sun, revolved around the Earth. (Not "evolve" around the Sun.) And it was hard-core scientists, such as Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei and others, who in the 16th and 17th centuries insisted that the solar system was heliocentric - at their peril.
But did you know that Florence Nightingale discovered penicillin?
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 10, 2010 - 10:37pm PT
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I was wondering when Corn's alter ego would show up. For those who don't know Pate = Corn.
Get a life Pate. You are vile.
SF
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 10:41pm PT
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Pate, he is so Klimmer. Or at least he's playing Klimmer. LOL! I'm thinking of a few here at the fire who might be able to pull it off. (I wonder how he spells seperate. He used to call me corn sugar, too.)
Hey, cool to read your posts on the cemetery thread. When I come East, I want to check that out, too.
.....
Mighty Hiker, point well taken. At least by some of us.
.....
Scar- You're a troll. Like Klimmer, you'll get no more conversations from me in the second person. Sorry, you're not worth my time.
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 10, 2010 - 10:45pm PT
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Damn! Both Pate and Corn's reality is here on the Taco. This is sad.
SF
edit: what is the sound of Corn and Pate not posting? I don't quite know, but a hint of it sure is sweet.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:00pm PT
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LEB's observation was awkwardly phrased but not incorrect. Gallileo did believe the standard explanation which went back to Aristotle by the way - long before the Catholic Church - until he began to wonder if it was correct, and then investigated for himself. He changed his mind based on his observations. Paradigm-curiosity-doubt-observation-new paradigm.
Educated people who believe in the paranormal in my experience, follow the same path. Unless a person has had a very specific religious training, most of us have grown up in a rational and scientific world where we were told such things did not exist. Then we observed something that did not fit the rational model and began to ask questions which led us to discover that other educated rational people had these experiences also. We came to accept that something is going on for which there are no current explanations. Paradigm-curiosity-doubt-observation-new paradigm.
Since the scientific establishment is so hostile to any new paradigm along these lines, most of us just keep quiet about it. We do know the history of scientists being persecuted for their ideas and acknowledge the Inquisition as being part of the reason they have such strong feelings about it.
Persecution of scientists did not make science go away and persecution of people who have experienced the paranormal will not make paranormal experiences go away either.Persecution always strengthens the belief system of the persecuted.
One then has to ask why people like fructose are intent on creating another alienated and hostile group in our society? Perhaps he secretly sees himself as a new Grand Inquisitor or is he hoping for a holy war or a crusade with him leading the charge?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:04pm PT
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Yeah, that's it Jan. LOL!
........
Wait, could Jan be Scarface?
........
In the past: Eukaryotes were eager to separate from prokaryotes.
In the present: Naturalists are eager to separate from supernaturalists.
It's called evolution. Or, perhaps better, the evolutionary urge.
....
Remember, if there wasn't any divisiveness in our world, we'd all still be amoeba in the pond scum. It's the way of the world. Sad, I know, as it does have its growing pains.
........
I'm repulsed by male-on-male smooching. (Although I am "for" those who roll that way.) I'm repulsed by supernaturalism (in different terms, supernatural hyperionics, also ghost hyperionics, paranormal hyperionics). What more can i say, it's in my makeup. ;)
..........
EDIT
I know, let's preserve it for the public record:
Jan wrote-
"One then has to ask why people like fructose are intent on creating another alienated and hostile group in our society? Perhaps he secretly sees himself as a new Grand Inquisitor or is he hoping for a holy war or a crusade with him leading the charge?"
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:11pm PT
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if there wasn't any divisiveness in our world, we'd all still be amoeba in the pondscum.
Complete BS from someone who lives exclusively in his/her head.
SF
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:16pm PT
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I've lived in the premiere climbing area of the world for decades and I climb all the time.
Yet I have never seen anyone climb a 5.14.
I don't think they exist!
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:17pm PT
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Pate,
You do have a big bark but I picture you more as a hyperactive toy poodle. Sorry, I just call them as I see them.
SF
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:23pm PT
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Karl, have you any idea the can of worms, or cans of worms, any wider acceptance of paranormal forces (aka hyperionic powers) would open up? Have you thought that through, really?
"Oh, she said she saw a ghost picking at the o-ring of the booster on the Challenger just before launch."
"It wasn't Satan that directed the knife but a semi-transparent demon."
"I swear Mommy, it wasn't my thought. The evil man next door planted the thought in my head. But I can't explain it, please believe me, I couldn't control it."
Be careful what you wish for.
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:30pm PT
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Corn,
Do you mean hyperironic that you live on the net?
SF
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:40pm PT
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Paranormal forces (poltergeists, channeling, etc.) if they existed would be an anathema if not a total deal-breaker to problem solving, complex problem solving esp. So thank goodness, thank the cosmos. -Because they don't exist.
The world is intelligible. It's the business of science to work through it, to figure out how the world works.
Unfortunately, in the process, it rolls over the cherished, time-honored beliefs of many. That's what's happening here.
Astrology is bronze age ignorance.
Hyperionics (belief in paranormal forces) is bronze age ignorance.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:48pm PT
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interesting suggestion, pate = corn. i tend to doubt it because corn hasn't invented any words about nun bondage. they seem distinct personalities. on the other hand, they say advanced schizophrenia is like that.
the noisy boys have succeeded to drive off most of the posters, too bad. we were getting some interesting material here. it doesn't take much to bring it out. this stuff is ubiquitous. unfortunately, it doesn't take much to scare it off either.
jan and lois are pretty stalwart women, and lois isn't even a climber.
jan, did you look at the thelma moss material i sent you awhile back?
karl, i also prefer to think that they don't exist. i could also do without the existence of 5.12s and 5.13s.
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:52pm PT
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I've lived in the premiere climbing area of the world for decades and I climb all the time.
Huh? I thought you lived in Yosemite.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:53pm PT
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Too many assumptions Corny
Gamma rays exist and pass right through us but they can't drink your beer and neither can ghosts.
The criteria for whether something exists or not is not the implications for our practical convenience, but whether they actually exist or not. How they can or cannot affect this world is a different issue and can be greatly misunderstood (just like anything beyond our measurement or understanding at this stage)
Peace
Karl
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:53pm PT
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Pate, LOL,
And use your real name.................... although I know.........
You are now bordering on the dreaded paranormal
hmmmm
SF
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 10, 2010 - 11:59pm PT
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"The criteria for whether something exists or not is not the implications for our practical convenience, but whether they actually exist or not. How they can or cannot affect this world is a different issue and can be greatly misunderstood (just like anything beyond our measurement or understanding at this stage)."
On that we agree.
Sweet dreams, Ghostman.
.....
Tony wrote: "interesting suggestion, pate = corn. i tend to doubt it because corn hasn't invented any words about nun bondage."
No, here Pate and I differ. I'm into this:
And apparently I'm not the only one as it's garnered 449 views in just a couple of months. Go Richard B.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 11, 2010 - 12:14am PT
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you posted that before, huff. it gets kinda old, like the guy on the waterskis.
was she an hourly or an overnight?
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Aug 11, 2010 - 12:33am PT
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 11, 2010 - 12:48am PT
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I think that science is a way to understand if something is actually happening or not... assuming it matters to you, of course
Karl provided testimony regarding astrology, but one can ask a scientific question, too, as Shawn Carlson did, which he published in a Commentary in Nature 318, 419 1985 titled "A double-blind test of astrology"
It tests the 'fundamental thesis of natal astrology' as stated:
"the positions of the 'planets' (all planets, the Sun and Moon, plus objects defined by astrologers) at the moment of birth can be used to determine the subject's general personality traits and tendencies in temperament and behaviour, and to indicate the major issues which the subject is likely to encounter."
The experiment was designed with input from both the science and the astrological communities.
In part 1 of the experiment, volunteers had astrologers construct their horoscopes based on information they provided. They were their own horoscope and two others chosen at random, and were asked to select a first and second choice. The volunteers also rated on a 1-10 scale how well each interpretation fit them (10 being the best fit). A random selection would be indicated if the volunteers picked their own horoscope one third of the time, the astrologers said that the volunteers should be able to select their own horoscopes "more than half" of the time.
In part 2 of the experiment, the participating astrologers were separately given the natal chart of a random subject and the result of the California Personality Inventory and two other CPIs chosen at random. The astrologers were asked to select a first and second choice CPI to match the horoscope, and rate each CPI on a 1-10 scale, 10 being the best fit. Again, a random selection happens one third of the time, the astrologers thought they could pick the correct CPI more than half the time.
The selection of the volunteers was such to eliminate biases based on their beliefs regarding astrology. Similarly, the National Council for Geocosmic Research (NCGR) helped suggest astrologers they vouched a competent, they also helped with the experimental design. They assented that the this was a 'fair test.'
Additional bias reduction was done by defining a control group in each of the two parts of the test, for example, by worrying about "Sun-sign bias," etc. The control group does not contain the individuals actual horoscope, but does of one born under the same Sun-sign greater than 3 years apart... if the control group frequency of selection equals the test group's frequency of selection, then the astrological hypothesis is false.
I won't bore you with the actual numbers... unless you ask... as Tony seems to have something against numbers...
interestingly part 1 was confused by the fact that the in the part of the test where the subjects were asked to select there own CPI, they did that at a rate consistent with random choice, so even though they selected their horoscopes at a random rate also, the conclusion is consistent with the scientific hypothesis, but doesn't rule out the astrological hypothesis (because the subjects apparently couldn't tell).
however part 2 the astrologers failed to perform at their stated level by more than 3 standard deviations, and by limits set at the onset of the experiment that a 2.5 standard deviation difference was "significant" as agreed upon by all those participating in the design of the experiment.
"We are now in a position to argue a surprisingly strong case against natal astrology as practiced by reputable astrologers. Great pains were taken to insure that the experiment was unbiased and to make sure that astrology was given every reasonable chance to succeed. It failed. Despite the fact that we worked with some of the best astrologers in the country, recommended by the advising astrologers for their expertise in astrology and in their ability to use the CPI, despite the fact that every reasonable suggest made by the advising astrologers was worked into the experiment, despite the fact that astrologers approved the design and predicted 50 percent as the 'minimum' effect they would see, astrology failed to perform at a level better than chance. Tested using double-blind methods, the astrologers' predictions proved to be wrong. Their predicted connection between the positions of the planets and other astronomical objects at the time of birth and the personalities of the test subjects did not exist. The experiment clearly refutes the astrological hypothesis."
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Aug 11, 2010 - 12:51am PT
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It was overly kind of them to use the phrase "reputable astrologers". An oxymoron if ever there was one.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Aug 11, 2010 - 01:00am PT
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That all might be true Ed, but like I said, where I experienced it, it's an art practiced constantly from an early age and the ones I've known were the best of the best.
Doing it right is 5.14 and you need a gift as well. Climbers know when they can climb 5.14, astrologers think they can predict with 5.14 skill when they cant.
Again, look at the degree of specificity in the predictions I related. It's a far cry from vague personality characteristics. I have no doubt the majority of western (and maybe most eastern) astrologers don't have the right stuff to do 5.14 work
Peace
Karl
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 11, 2010 - 01:14am PT
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Corn,
You are some digme piece of work, what's it like wearing blinders? That is a great man.
SF
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 11, 2010 - 01:16am PT
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well Karl, how do you really know?
neither you nor I climb 5.14, to us it's just taking someone's word for it
you can believe what you want, your particular position is constructed such that it cannot be questioned, it is, after all, your belief.
but the whole point of my set of posts is to try to frame the astrological, and the paranormal, in terms of a testable hypothesis... to try to understand just how to perform a fair test to see whether or not the claims are correct
when this was done in the astrology case, the astrologers were shown to have failed. If that is true, we don't have to worry about how astrology works, because it doesn't.
my expectation is that if the test was done with your 5.14 astrologers, the result would be the same, there is no significant difference between the astrologers or the astrology, but I recognize that is just a conjecture, and one unlikely to be tested.
Similarly we can pick a set of hypotheses regarding LEBs "experience" and try to understand just how likely her interpretation is...
...it will most likely be a useless exercise as the "believers" will continue to believe and the "nonbelievers" continue to provide arguments based on an analysis of the circumstances which will be declared irrelevant by the "believers"
Unfortunately, such arguments need to be precise and quantitative, LEBs desire to do a "qualitative" study will not resolve the question... the anecdotes provided here only tend to confirm LEBs experience, but these do not constitute a test of her "hypothesis."
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Aug 11, 2010 - 01:53am PT
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well Karl, how do you really know?
neither you nor I climb 5.14, to us it's just taking someone's word for it
I guess what I'm saying is, if you lined up a bunch of fine climbers from Supertopo at the bottom of a 5.14 and asked each one in turn to send it, and nobody could, that wouldn't prove that 5.14 isn't climbable.
you can believe what you want, your particular position is constructed such that it cannot be questioned, it is, after all, your belief.
That's not true at all. While I don't care to share my own example, if the astrologer tells my friend all this and much, much more. I'll quote my last post
How many brother and sisters she had, which ones have problems and the state of some of their health and marriages, which ones she is biologically related to
How many kids they had and how many died already,
That her mother and father are divorced
That she lives far from where she was born and that her mom returned there but that her dad lives close.
That she has a scar on her right knee
That she is a teacher
How many marriages, when they ended and why.
How many kids she has, their character, and relationship with her. Also miscarriages.
Type of childhood experiences (very specific)
What issues trouble her relationship and why (not generic)
and I know he has absolutely no way of researching her in advance, there is a certain amount of evidence there. These are not vague maybe questions.
A friend went to the same astrologer. He said they should visit their father as he would die very soon. That person's father did not die and so they thought the astrologer was wrong. But a year later they confronted their mom regarding some inconsistency in bloodtypes in their family. Mom admitted that the Dad who raised them wasn't the biological dad, and that the biological Dad had died six month ago.
Just for one personal example, the guy told me a few years back that in the fall of 2009 I would be subject to an injury in my ankle area or shoulder. I've hardly ever been injured but pulled a piece and ruptured my achilles tendon in a 20 foot fall (that was very clean but my toe hit one little sloper)
You can cite all the studies you like, the world is not as we see it and it doesn't even show everyone the same stuff.
but the whole point of my set of posts is to try to frame the astrological, and the paranormal, in terms of a testable hypothesis... to try to understand just how to perform a fair test to see whether or not the claims are correct
when this was done in the astrology case, the astrologers were shown to have failed. If that is true, we don't have to worry about how astrology works, because it doesn't.
My awareness is that much of what you are saying seems quite fair from the scientific viewpoint but is based on assumptions about the world that from the mystical viewpoint, aren't true. We are living in a dream that is amazingly fluid. The game is rigged so you can't prove its a game, not until you have the keys, which you can't share. The rats stay in the maze until the scientist is finished with the experiment.
I know that sounds bogus and I don't care, because you don't have to believe and you're just fine the way you are.
Peace
Karl
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 11, 2010 - 02:00am PT
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thanks Karl,
peace
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 11, 2010 - 02:09am PT
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i don't take much stock in astrology either, but it would appear there are different kinds of astrology. in karl's case, perhaps a gifted psychic who seems to rely on astrology-related ritual. i suspect the astrologers in the study which ed cites had no such psychic powers. there are two very different cultures involved as well.
if you want to put your mathematical mind to work, ed, go over that list of information which that complete stranger was able to divine for karl's friend, and tell us the chances of such accuracy happening randomly, out of the blue, without some hidden mechanism at work. the only thing i can think of is that the guy has a legion of private investigators.
australian aborigines are reported to be able to communicate over distance psychically. this involves ritual, and it isn't easy, but there are many reports of its amazing effectiveness.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Aug 11, 2010 - 02:53am PT
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Tony wrote
i don't take much stock in astrology either, but it would appear there are different kinds of astrology. in karl's case, perhaps a gifted psychic who seems to rely on astrology-related ritual. i suspect the astrologers in the study which ed cites had no such psychic powers. there are two very different cultures involved as well.
This is certainly true. An astrologer without a some psychic awareness is unequiped. Like the tarot, those symbols are pointers and inspirations but inadequate in themselves to get specific without highly developed intuition.
And when you only charge $13, it's hard to hire a lot of investigators, particularly when you have no idea somebody is going to walk in the door for the first time in advance
Peace
Karl
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Aug 11, 2010 - 02:56am PT
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I never watch TV but I'm visiting my folks for a few days. I just happened to turn on the TV right to an episode of "Family Guy" where Meg's Ass is haunted and possessed by ghosts! Just after I posted this stuff!
The universe has a sense of humor
Peace
Karl
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jstan
climber
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Aug 11, 2010 - 03:28am PT
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In the absence of a good study with testing we have only anecdotal data. You cannot conclude much from that. Very substantial studies have been made of the effectiveness of prayer. One report had it that prayer anticorrelates. Without seeing the statistics I would question the statistics or the design of the study.
Another point. When faced with something that seems unusual our normal response is to assume some particular mechanism is active. The aborigines are communicating psychically, for example.
Assumptions are not a good way to fill a hole in knowledge. Women have a much more acute sense of smell than do males. Dogs and bear even more so. Ants travelling along a trail of pheromes know the state of mind possessed by those leaving the trail. Whether the trail leads to food or whether the colony is under attack.
When we don't know something the best response is to admit we just don't know - yet.
As regards LEB's cat, we are programmed to see what we have seen before. Possibly there was another cat in the same place because the place possessed a scent or some other artifact left by the other cat. It had been marked. And Lois decided it was her cat because that was what she expected to see in that place. These are the possibilities I would plan to test. Because such things are often experienced.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Aug 11, 2010 - 03:45am PT
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There have been many studies done over the years by many reputable people studying anomalous phenomena. Some of these studies have come up with rational conclusions. A certain percentage remain unexplained. Unless there is a desire to explore these matters further, the funding to do such studies will remain slim. Add on top of that all the negative social implications of accepting the fact that there is more that we don't know than what we do know, and you get the kind of weird bullshit that goes on around here.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 11, 2010 - 03:51am PT
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Now why did I not get to the point that succinctly?
Props.
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allapah
climber
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Aug 11, 2010 - 04:38am PT
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sub-nucleic minutiae propagating information from micro to macro affecting the order in which things happen permeating causation with a WEAK entropic force (which is why you can't adequately test the phenom using sci method 'cause it's weak and doesn't occur in very many places and the friggin observer blows the outcome ) these resonant entropies accounting for paranormal phenomenon
why not a study where climbers quantified their synchronicities (via some simple form) before and after climbs and outcomes were correlated with precognitions? how psyched were you, what were the omens, what tunes were playing in your head
i don't suppose it would ever work, better just to go climbing pure and simple
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Aug 11, 2010 - 07:23am PT
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How did we get into such an involved discussion of astrology anyway? I think most of us here agree that it doesn't work the way it's traditionally been said to work (star power) and if it does work, as in the example Karl provided, we pretty much agree that something else must be going on? That something else seems to be the paranormal but that is quite different from how astrologers claim their "science" works.
Meanwhile, a few words about Sai Baba who is many things to many people.
He claims to have been Shirdi Sai Baba in a past life when his mission was reconciling Hindus and Muslims in India.
This lifetime he was born to an Untouchable caste and promotes education and hospitals for the deprived. His hair alone is enough to remind Indians that he comes from a very ancient tribal group who were forced into lowly status by later invaders. Love his miracles, love his hair, love him, love other people of low status who look like him.
He has promised to be born once again and has predicted the year and name. It will be interesting to see what the message of his next life will be.
Dealing with the issue of reincarnation and the high quality people like the Dalai Lama, who claim to be reincarnated, was one of my earliest introductions in Asia to the paranormal by the way.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 11, 2010 - 08:58am PT
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a haunted ass. who knows, we could still draw pate productively into this discussion.
the thing about the paranormal, jstan, is that most of the data is anecdotal by nature and will probably remain so unless and until some sort of consensus emerges on how to approach it. various hauntings have already been attacked with various scientific instruments. i'm afraid the only thing you come up with are--more anecdotes.
perhaps i stumbled over something back there--the involvement of ritual, be it an astrological routine, a tarot reading, or what two branches of an aborigine tribe engage in, miles apart. i grew up in the land of empty, burned-out ritual, the roman catholic church. rituals only work when you bring something of yourself to them. the catholic church's big mistake is to assume it'll all come down to you from above.
it's not just "belief", which can be as light and casual as signing your name to a petition. there's a real intensity in passionate ritual which somehow gets into the deep-running still water of what we are. and this might produce paranormal effects. and probably not every time.
take that case of the lacerated tongue, damnit. seems to have worked once. jstan, let's volunteer you, or maybe even ed, to be the subject of a double blind study. don't worry, we all love you, so we'll be doing our best. take a swan dive onto a spanish dagger yucca with an open mouth, get your flapper good and mashed up, and we'll all pray to our respective higher powers to put it all back together on the spot. ought to settle the matter once and for all, no?
say what you will about LEB, she's obviously thought through all the possibilities and seems to have a trained, analytical mind. how can this be possible in a woman? you don't have to keep hitting her over the head with your live-cat-from-the-neighborhood theory.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 11, 2010 - 09:53am PT
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OMG. It's a confederacy of Horoscope readers. (cf: league of morons, Osbourne Cox; confederacy of dunces) You'd think this was the 13th century, not the 21st. No wonder we never got any traction over on the god threads. This thread is an embarassment.
To the children who happen across this thread, click away. All this pseudo crap was settled in the 50s to 80s of the LAST century. By scientifically savvy, scientifically passionate people. Move on. Don't get sucked in. Get away now.
You wonder why the U.S. lost its science and technology leadership in the world - and continues to do so at an alarming rate - this thread points to the reason. Shame.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 11, 2010 - 10:43am PT
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Yeah. And others, too. Hence the incentive for getting involved, speaking out, doing something, on and off the Taco.
LOL. -From behind the facepalm, that is.
You have a way with imagery and words, Pate, thanks for hanging out here.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 11, 2010 - 11:21am PT
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Lois:
If it was just a similar cat in that place I am not sure what was supposed to be paranormal about the event. My bad.
Cats mark their domains and your pet had probably marked it's favorite spot. Possibly the second cat had knowledge that the owner of that spot had died and so a very nice spot was now open for a new owner.
When we get up in the morning our minds are not in the same state they are at the end of a work day. The state in which you found yourself that morning may have had much to do with your experience. Possibly you had been dealing with loss while sleeping.
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 11, 2010 - 12:45pm PT
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By the way, since I "live on the net" I am considering redecorating. I don't like the stupid theme very much.
Oh Pate, are you butt sore again? Take a deep breath, and go on a vacation. It will serve you well.
OMG. It's a confederacy of Horoscope readers. (cf: league of morons, Osbourne Cox; confederacy of dunces) You'd think this was the 13th century, not the 21st. No wonder we never got any traction over on the god threads. This thread is an embarassment.
To the children who happen across this thread, click away. All this pseudo crap was settled in the 50s to 80s of the LAST century. By scientifically savvy, scientifically passionate people. Move on. Don't get sucked in. Get away now.
Corn, It appears that it is all black and white to you, that with the passage of time always comes improvement. At any level you look at it, like your fractal avatar, one will find golden ages. There have been amazing eras and places of human enlightenment at various scales.
Since you seem to enjoy your constrained perspective so much may I suggest that you take down your numerous filters and go on a vacation as well. Try not to do so with Pate. You suck up to him too much as it is.
You have a way with imagery and words, Pate, thanks for hanging out here.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 11, 2010 - 03:02pm PT
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Jan - the point is that the astrological hypothesis is shown to fail, that is, you can't tell anything about a person from knowing the time of their birth (except their age), that would exclude your speculation on some sort of undetected global cycle... which was the point of my posting, that testing that hypothesis eliminates all of the other discussion.
LEB - you can chase your cat's tail around in circles and not actually come up with anything definite "qualitatively." Ask yourself these questions:
How many times have you seen any cat at that spot?
How certain are you of that?
How many times have cats been at that spot and you didn't see them?
How certain are you of that?
How many times have you seen a cat at that spot and forgotten that you had seen them?
How certain are you of that?
Now do the same with the the word 'cat' replaced by 'a cat similar to your cat'
and again with 'your cat'
the estimate of certainty is important too...
...why go through this? because if what you saw was just some random occurrence then we don't need to use it to justify a discussion of the "paranormal," if it is just random then it is quite "normal."
By the way, you can't answer the questions easily... as you will find out when you try to apply actual quantities, a big reason to try to do so... that exercise quickly uncovers the weakness of you understanding of the observation, and points the way to a better observational regime.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 11, 2010 - 04:37pm PT
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Intermission-
Pate, what were you doing, playing around with the source code or something on that other thread? Hmm... interesting...
Back to the program-
I still think it's Klimmer or one of the fundamentalists.
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stevep
Boulder climber
Salt Lake, UT
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Aug 11, 2010 - 04:52pm PT
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What if it is not LEB's cat, but rather Schrodinger's cat?
Could it not be dead and alive at the same time?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 11, 2010 - 05:13pm PT
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LEB=Schrodinger?!
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Aug 11, 2010 - 05:25pm PT
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So is Schrodinger alive or dead then?
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jstan
climber
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Aug 11, 2010 - 06:08pm PT
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If Lois knew the story behind Schrodinger's cat, she could go to town on it.
It were best if we keep it a secret.
Shhhhhh!
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scarface
Trad climber
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Aug 11, 2010 - 06:33pm PT
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try to make us look like idiots.
Try? Not me. You do the work quite well yourself.
Here's another idea for you Pate. Since you are glued to the net, why don't you take the plunge and join Second Life. Take your virtual reality where it is welcomed. All your rules and prescriptions here are the real big yaaaawn.
SF
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Aug 11, 2010 - 11:09pm PT
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BooYah
Social climber
Ely, Nv
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Aug 11, 2010 - 11:14pm PT
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Well, maybe he's telling you that in order to study something, one must have a "thing" to study.
You have mere conjecture. A Will o' the Wisp, as it were.
Nothing=0
You need to stop bothering Mr. H. He's a good fellow & tried hard to follow your path of bullsh#t.
I couldn't either, Ed.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Aug 11, 2010 - 11:18pm PT
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zero to the power of ten equals...
nothing at all..
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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Aug 12, 2010 - 12:45am PT
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nothingness fills a void though boys.....can you say LEB?
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Aug 12, 2010 - 12:53am PT
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Aug 12, 2010 - 01:49am PT
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Aug 12, 2010 - 12:04pm PT
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I found this info from Wikipedia to be interesting.
I was researching something else and just stumbled across it.
Hans Jürgen Eysenck (March 4, 1916 – September 4, 1997) was a British psychologist of German origin, best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, though he worked in a wide range of areas. At the time of his death, Eysenck was the living psychologist most frequently cited in science journals.[1]
Despite this strongly scientific interest, Eysenck did not shy, in later work, from giving attention to parapsychology and astrology. Indeed, he believed that empirical evidence supported the existence of paranormal abilities.[18]
"Unless there is a gigantic conspiracy involving some thirty university departments all over the world, and several hundred highly respected scientists in various fields, many of them originally hostile to the claims of the psychical researchers, the only conclusion the unbiased observer can come to must be that there is a small number of people who obtain knowledge existing either in other people's minds, or in the outer world, by means as yet unknown to science."
18. Eysenck, H.J. (1957), Sense and Nonsense in Psychology. London: Pelican Books. p. 131.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 12, 2010 - 12:10pm PT
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what if your emotional state affected the way you perceived what was going on around you, including your memories surrounding the event?
perhaps we are not aware of the influence that those emotions have over our perception of what is going on around us, and when we later try to understand those remembered events, we cannot reconstruct them in a logical fashion.
while one interpretation of that may be something beyond the normal occurred in the physical universe, another one might be that something beyond the normal occurred to ourselves, that selected one set of events to be remembered.
LEB must be familiar with people who are convinced of the most irrational things because of stress, to themselves they are acting rationally. There is just a gradation of mental states from not obviously irrational to totally crazy... which could be difficult to self-diagnose.
It is odd to me that we tend to believe that our own perceptions remain constant and true and seek to understand those strange experiences in the explanation that the universe is unknown rather than the most obvious explanation that we have mis-perceived and mis-understood our own experience.
So tortured explanations involving a universe beyond the physical one we know have a credence built on our belief in the continuity of our own, internal perception which has no basis in reality.
Our internal perception is built on a model of how the world works which is full of holes that we are not usually aware of, that model works well, but is just a model. When things happen that exceeds the model's ability to explain, then this sort of strangeness occurs.
It is why using quantities rather than qualities is preferred in scientific work, and why we are so comprehensive in understanding the limitations of our scientific observations.
What energy is there out and about in the universe?
As you sit reading this post, you sit in an lake of particles that fill the space with more than 5 times the amount of your own matter, and in ocean of energy exceeding 20 times the amount of what stuff you can see around you.
We don't know the nature of this stuff... we didn't know it existed 20 years ago and it will probably take 20 years before we map it all and get some idea of what it is...
...but it does not explain you experience. To explain that, you have to look into yourself and understand just how it is you know to ask that question.
My frustration, LEB, is that you are not interested in the question, but just the answer.
It is not so easy.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 12, 2010 - 12:38pm PT
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"A friend of mine who is very grounded - to say the least - and quite a non-believer in this sort of thing, insists that the power went out on the street the night his father died (after a long protracted illness)..... but for the one street lamp outside his home."
Here's my paranormal experience perhaps like that above.
I threw all the individual circuit breakers at the cabin to "Off". Then I turned on the stove powered by two phase 240V. All the lights in the place came on weakly, even though their breakers were off.
When it comes to two and three phase hook-ups you need to follow the wires. In my three wire two phase supply the steel cable, all 255 feet of it, supporting the two hot wires is used for the "neutral" return. I have not followed it up since I don't know what SCE's side of the circuit is. I don't know what delta or Y hookups SCE uses to down convert their three phase to residential two phase. On my side I suspect the current drawn by the stove produced an IR drop in the neutral return and that produced a weak voltage on the circuits whose hot line was open. The cabin has "neutral" and "ground" running to a common ground plane. I thought even that sort of interesting.
Bottom line? When something weird happens in an AC electrical system
don't be surprised.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Aug 12, 2010 - 01:00pm PT
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I have also heard stories of "close calls" in life-threatening situations wherein people reported sensing a deceased family member.
My Friend and his Mom are/were total agnostics. So the Mom lived in San Francisco and her ex-husband lived 100 miles away and they didn't stay in touch. One day she woke up to a pounding on her bedroom door (or 'feeling of pounding') and intuitively knew it it was ex-husband and that he was now dead. (he had been in fine shape) She called her son in the town where the ex-husband was living and found that he had just blown his brains out.
My friend and his mom remained agnostics, even after that and some other experiences that clearly pointed to life after the body is dead. Denial is a big part of our mental makeup.
Peace
karl
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Aug 12, 2010 - 01:08pm PT
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Thanks Ed and jstan-
You guys think so differently than I do, it's always fun to read what you write to keep stretching my brain in new directions. I think it's good that you don't give up on us also. Even though some of us will never come around to your conclusions, we have been forced to refine our thinking on the topic.
One of the reasons I prefer to discuss nonordinary experience within a more traditional religious or spiritual context is that much more has been experienced and written about in that context than the paranormal. Also, once you place it in that sphere, scientists don't feel the need to debunk it. They just shrug and tell us that it's outside of their realm.
When we call it paranormal, then science gets involved and can not help but be disbelieving if not downright hostile. Even if both Ed and jstan secretly thought there was something to the paranormal (and I am NOT suggesting that they do), they wouldn't dare to say so on a public forum like this one because of the ramifications on reputations and careers.
Of course as soon as I mention religion or spirituality, that causes hostility as well on the part of many participants here so maybe we should be talking about transpersonal psychology or the collective unconscious instead, and leave paranormal out of it. A number of eastern religions sell themselves in the West as psychology anyway, as they soon picked up on the hostility toward religion on the part of many educated western people.
As for whether we're fooling ourselves, it's possible, especially if a person only has one or half a dozen odd experiences like LEB's cat. When they run into the hundreds and in many different contexts involving past, present, and future, then it becomes harder for the recipient of those experiences to believe that they are self created.
However, I am thinking on a daily basis now of the many things Ed and others have said about humans egotistically projecting their own fantasies on the universe and trying to figure out how we could possibly determine if that's the case or if we are all little bits of consciousness floating on the sea of the Great Consciousness which makes more sense to me.
For sure, if reincarnation exists, I want to come back a few hundred years in the future with the same cast of characters here to continue the discussion!
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jstan
climber
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Aug 12, 2010 - 10:22pm PT
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"Unless a given ability or sensor is affording an individual(s) selective advantage, it is going to become extinct rather rapidly. Such is not to say that it could not spontaneously reappear occasionally as a mutation nor that there could not be some vestigial remnants of it. It is hard for me to believe that our 5 senses (4 for me) are literally all of the conceivable ones which could have evolved"
Lois:
Here you are leading us on. Very sneaky. You well know cave salamanders lose their eyesight. How fast it happens nether of us can guess. And you have heard whales are thought to be able to sense the earth's magnetic field and this is how they navigate at sea. We still don't have a mechanism by which sea birds navigate. Recent data gained by putting transmitters on sea birds indicates they fly day and night. So the sun is no help for many hours a day. You know all of this. You think we don't know you know this.
Gotta watch this chick.
Ed said a lot of good stuff. In short, what we remember and perceive is about as reliable as eyewitness testimony. It is highly questionable.
Jan:
Generally I will say whatever I think. At this point my reputation is long past the point where it could be either saved or lost. Anyway. Five cents and a reputation gets you only a five cent cup of coffee.
We all tend to think in the paradigm with which we are most familiar. This is probably a weakness. I understood Largo when he posted a picture. I still have not done anything he understands. The score right now is Long 1/ Stannard 0.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 12, 2010 - 10:41pm PT
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Lois:
I was kidding you Lois. You knew we knew you knew we knew what you were saying. It didn't need to be said.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Aug 12, 2010 - 10:51pm PT
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 12, 2010 - 11:29pm PT
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Just watched Deal No Deal with Grandma. Reminded me of playing blackjack in Reno and my attempts at counting the cards over a couple of semesters. Casinos - along with Deal No Deal - win (over the superstitious, the psychics, etc. time and again) because they play in strict accordance with probability science. Any of you paranormalists or supernaturalists ever had a probability and statistics course or stochastic systems course (required in engineering colleges)? (If so, what was your grade?) You probably won't understand this (sorry for the condescending tone but you deserve it) but if there were such a thing as "hyperionic influences" (by ghosts, e.g., or telekenesis or of any sort), probabability and stocastics would go down the drain as the very effective spot-on applied sciences they are. Sorry to further spoil the fun. Carry on, hyperionic junkies.
jstan- Nice to read you know something about voltage drops.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 12, 2010 - 11:32pm PT
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I wouldn't ask you, or the docs I talk to, a question that I hadn't researched...
but that's just me, I know...
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allapah
climber
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Aug 13, 2010 - 05:19am PT
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possible syncronicity rating scale
Unit of measure is a "domain." Degree of syncronistic resonance is measured by how many causally-disconnected domains are interfacing. Because human perception is unreliable, we assign 0 domains to the reporter of the syncronicity. Other domains could be defined by: a person, a mountain, a body of tunes, a body of literature, an internet forum, a death, or better yet, a near-death (nothing like an adrenalin-infused near-death situation to crank up the happenings!) Each domain has its own set of boundaries, probabilities, and improbabilities...
I would give Karl's syncronicity a few posts back a 1.8
The mom and her dream is worth 0 domains because she is the reporter.
The ex-husband (and everything he was about) is worth 1 domain.
The death is worth 1 domain (because energy is passing through a boundary layer.)
The number to the left of the decimal is the number of whole domains (minus the reporter, whose testimony is worthless) The number to the right is a subjective measure of just HOW FRIGGING unlikely the acausality was. The fact that the people were agnostics drove the number up a bit.
Seems like this is not OT because climbing decisions sometimes concern these things. But if it seems totally silly, well, i guess it is....
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jstan
climber
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Aug 14, 2010 - 02:24pm PT
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Lois has pleaded for help in resurrecting this thread so I'll do my best.
HFCS commented:
"jstan- Nice to read you know something about voltage drops."
A story I thought funny after I figured it out.
In temperatures some where above 100ºF I traced out all my wiring and then took the potentially huge risk posed when one tears out all the as-built. After rebuilding it the way god intended using a multimeter I checked two circuits that should have had no connection at all to make sure god understands voltage drops.
I got 0.5 Ohms!
Two hours later after rechecking everything I noticed I had left the refrigerator plugged in with hopes of keeping the beer below luke warm. Inductance had led me astray. A refrigerator motor looks like a half Ohm in DC but its impedance is orders of magnitude larger at 60 Hz.
I did learn something though. When powered down that refrigerator defaults to motor "on".
Now as to the paranormal domain. The experience clearly shows our neurological systems cease normal functioning above 100ºF. This we should have long known based upon middle eastern history. All the trees in the middle east were cut down thousands of years ago and brains there are permanently exposed to 100 Watts/meter2.
We here in the US, however, know how critical brain temperature is. Why, otherwise, would scalp injuries bleed so profusely. I mean...... that is obvious. So it is we protect our trees so religiously.
Here.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 14, 2010 - 02:29pm PT
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Mission accomplished.
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Oxymoron
Big Wall climber
total Disarray
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Aug 14, 2010 - 02:38pm PT
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Pate was correct. There is NO reasoning with the delusional.
Who made you the Empress, anyway? Bite!
Maybe you'll be hit by a truck.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 14, 2010 - 02:45pm PT
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Very interesting and it gets to the point I raised. Our brains are not, always, working normally. When someone is near death is it so hard to conceive the brain remains unaffected?
Everywhere you turn you see evidence for faulty brain function. Capech?
And on the electrical energy side; if you stand below a major power transmission line running at as much as 750,000 volts while holding a long fluorescent light bulb up in the air
it will light up!
Our knowledge is limited as regards all the external factors that may be affecting our brain function.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Aug 14, 2010 - 02:55pm PT
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If you've ever held someone's head in your hands when the light in their
eyes goes out then you might find some merit in this thread. Much of
what Lois says is valid and worthy of discussion. The literature is pretty
extensive and so many people who have 'come back' seem to express similar
experiences. Granted, they may be influenced by prior knowledge but it
would seem that there are enough to validate it to some extent.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Aug 14, 2010 - 03:12pm PT
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This a thread to among other things explain and share things that on the surface seem irrational. Often, through talking about it we can see where our emotions and preconceptions have mislead us. With any luck we get a better understanding. We pretty much always open new doors.
I'm not a big follower of supernatural hibijibi, But I know there's sh#t we just don't understand. A good way to start is to talk it out, as crazy as it sounds.
A lot ofrational stuff is wild enough bee magic , to most of us;ie dark matter, string theory, geologic time......
I' m taking a break fixing up my rental and it's time to get back to work. Doesn't somebody need to rent a pad in portola with a fifty foot ow roof crack (wooden) I'd hate to take it down
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 14, 2010 - 03:25pm PT
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ever read that book life after life, a compilation of anecdotes of near-death and death-and-back experiences, i believe written by an MD?
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MisterE
Social climber
Bouncy Tiggerville
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Aug 14, 2010 - 03:33pm PT
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Aug 14, 2010 - 03:50pm PT
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I, thought, that was what you were trying to do, sis.
Eery ( Eyery?) Erik, that woman is channeling my ex-wife!
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Aug 14, 2010 - 03:53pm PT
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DT's? Really rox? They do make vodka out of potatoes.....
Lois, any match that produces Natalie can't be all bad!
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Oxymoron
Big Wall climber
total Disarray
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Aug 14, 2010 - 03:58pm PT
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I will go where I will & say as I wish.
I LIKE to tease your dumb ass.
There is no fence I won't cut. or wall I won't peer over.
I'm a bee in the ointment. Chaos fascinates me. So bite me.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 14, 2010 - 04:12pm PT
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a ghost is first and foremost a perception by the living. i think that would give us a basic consensus. my posting about "ghost science" early in this thread is a listing of the categories these perceptions fall into. they've been researched analytically for quite some time.
LEB, you seem to want to get into the advanced physics of it, and i doubt things are ripe for that. advanced physics itself comprises several schools of thought and it's an area which will probably never have the consensus you want. if you want to apply physics to this realm, there really isn't an alternative to getting into it yourself, or at least dealing with a physicist, like that fellow jan mentioned, who might be sympathetic.
the posting by largo which i mentioned is a step in that direction. misterE's link mentions a michael talbot, who may be your guy.
-----
i dunno where pate is in the mental health department, but i've found his obsession with nunporn to be downright healthy. at least it's been helpful for me to overcome certain vestigial qualms from a catholic adolescence.
my only problem is that most of them don't look like real nuns. they look like vogue models picking up some extra cash without so much as mumbling a hail mary. whatever website pate is downloading this second-rate stuff from has a real quality control problem. the real convents which survive these days are all strapped (hehe--what a word, huh?) for cash flow. that may be the place to start.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 14, 2010 - 04:35pm PT
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LEB, i gave you date and time on the god thread. just scroll to that point--as good as lattitude-longitude.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 14, 2010 - 08:18pm PT
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Coming from?
About what?
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Aug 14, 2010 - 09:27pm PT
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OT - climbing related, Hudson Wyo is the fatherland of Bob Scarpelli, the world's best offwidth climber, till Shanti came to town!
Related, re DT's; I will always keep a grasshoper on hand for those critical moments with my droogs
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jstan
climber
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Aug 14, 2010 - 11:50pm PT
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Jstan
"Very interesting and it gets to the point I raised. Our brains are not, always, working normally. When someone is near death is it so hard to conceive the brain remains unaffected?"
Lois in reply:
"Jstan,
I am really not pushing any one side of this or the other. I am not vested in either scenario meaning that paranormal phenomenon exist or that they don't. I am just interested in the topic and would like to take a look at the evidence. "
Lois again:
"jstan,
Well it is difficult for me to discern your - and other persons' - position on the subject of the paranormal. I, personally, try to keep an open mind and not get too vested one way or another although I do have leanings toward the positive (meaning supportive) side of the continuum. I cannot precisely tell where you stand."
Lois shall we apply Occam's Razor to your OP as we construct a hypothesis?
Your cat dies and your mind is processing that data during sleep, as is normal but probably had not completed it because you were also processing a lot of data from your new work environment. You were doing the processing needed for you to accept the fact the cat was not going to appear again, presumably something you did not prefer.
When you saw a similar cat in the act of claiming its new favorite position (what one cat really likes is probably going to be preferred by another) your mind, as it normally does interprets the data coming back from the eyes and the lower brain function. But this time it interpreted the image as identical to the one you had seen many times before. We do that, because as you yourself pointed out, it is more efficient to throw in the image that has been received before. Those synapses are stronger because they have been used before.
As a result you have the "strange" feeling the "cat came back."
Now it is not "my position" that this is the explanation. I claim this is a very simple hypothesis supported by data in the form of past experience and medical research that could well be what happened.
It is simple, and requires no assumptions about phenomena for which we have no objective data.
Now you know all this, so I did not need to go through this.
Do you suppose you could share with me what you are really up to here?
Besides being cool, we could begin to make some progress.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Boulder Creek CA
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Aug 15, 2010 - 02:43am PT
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I have been occasionally following this discussion thread with a 'strange feeling' of interest and dismay.
I consider this to be a very important subject of discussion; and find it very disturbing when some people can't even seem to maintain a dialog on simple aspects of the subject without lapsing into rude mutual disrespect; particularly considering the generally high level of intelligence and education of the participants.
Even the most interesting threads of reasoning and observation here seem to get buried in the noise. And there is a lot of published research materials on this subject that have not even been touched upon here. Accordingly I am not ready to leap into this thread, but will venture a toe in the water:
I was raised in the church in Boise Idaho; and rejected much of their teachings at a young age and gravitated towards a materialist philosophy. I grew up thinking of myself as a scientist, with an extensive chemistry and physics and computer systems lab in my garage and with telescopes and rockets.
Most of my professional career has been spent working with scientists and engineers in aerospace and environmental management. My specialty is developing systems management frameworks.
At a young age I went looking for a different sort of lab and gravitated to rock climbing, which proved to be excellent for the purpose; although the politics of Camp 4 turned out to be a major distraction to my reasons for climbing.
I have spent a lot of time solo climbing and wandering the wilderness and oceans. One unexpected result of this is a large collection of personal experiences that are very difficult for me to explain in materialistic terms. When you ask for personally experienced paranormal experiences, I hardly know where to start; other than to say that I am not at all surprised by some of the other stories that have been shared here.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Aug 15, 2010 - 02:48am PT
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allapah
climber
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Aug 15, 2010 - 03:07am PT
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in the nineties benowitz and i got the waterman grant for winter climbs from the alaskan alpine club for the e. face Thorn in eastern alaska range (deltas)- we got flown in with old harvey wheeler in his 170, he used to take off right out of his driveway down there in the failed agriculture project lands outside Delta Junction where he had intended to be a crop duster, he was never as happy with dirtbag climbers-
we got dropped off johnson glacier but had to ski over to robertson, the first part of the trip was absurdly cold, we couldn't do a thing, we had four hours for travel each day before you had to start digging cave cause it was too cold for tents- we got to the Thorn, way too cold, allapa!, no FA today! that would fall to jeff years later with studly grade 5 ice drip... we skied back to the LZ, waited for harvey for weeks in the wind
during this time, i had a dream- i was in my parents bedroom from childhood and there was a volkswagon in their room, engine running- in the passenger side was this dude i barely knew from fairbanks, Mark... he was trying to tell me something.. i leaned closer to listen... he opened his mouth, and out of it came this horrific sound, like a Klingon death wail... i woke up and the sound was a savage gust of wind bending the bibler over into our faces...
when we got back to town weeks later, the big news was that 3 fairbanks guys had gotten munched over on the castner glacier, ice climbing in a gully with no runout zone the snow just stacked up on them- well, this was nearby where 10910 and i had been- the castner and the johnson are alaska range neighbors, we were probably the only two parties in those hills that day... one of the guys was Mark, guy in the Bug in my parents' bedroom in my dream, guy i had only met once (though jeff and i had mentioned him once or twice in conversation during the interminable hours in the tent on the Thorn attempt)- of course, i attempted to correlate date of accident with my dream... i didn't remember exactly, but they were within 48 hours of each other for sure...
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Aug 15, 2010 - 03:12am PT
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C'mon, Tom, don't leave us hangin' - tell us what you know.
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Wonder
climber
WA
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Aug 15, 2010 - 03:15am PT
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o Leb, I'm not reading all the crap on this thread
BUT, I remember OAAT (once apon a time ) you sent me a email that you said you knew that dead Yabo wanted me to listen to a song that you had sorta paranormally knew he wanted me to listen to.
Whats up with that?
I call BS.
I got it saved if you say it never happened.
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dirtbag
climber
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Aug 15, 2010 - 03:32am PT
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 15, 2010 - 03:34am PT
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I don't think that's a nun
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Aug 15, 2010 - 12:20pm PT
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I am literally ambivalent concerning this subject.
20,000 words of ambivalence. Go Girl, um...Tony...um...DMT?
umm...never mind.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 15, 2010 - 12:29pm PT
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OK. I see what is going on.
Now the thread should die.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 15, 2010 - 12:53pm PT
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oh damned thread! die, i say!
--captain pate-hab
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Starman
Trad climber
Sterling, MA
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Oct 20, 2010 - 02:21pm PT
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Hey Lois, here ya go... Y'all were asking about this kind of stuff many many posts ago. Take care -- Steve (Italics mine.)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69J35X20101020
CERN scientists eye parallel universe breakthrough
By Robert Evans
GENEVA | Wed Oct 20, 2010 11:21am EDT
GENEVA (Reuters) - Physicists probing the origins of the cosmos hope that next year they will turn up the first proofs of the existence of concepts long dear to science-fiction writers such as hidden worlds and extra dimensions.
And as their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva moves into high gear, they are talking increasingly of the "New Physics" on the horizon that could totally change current views of the universe and how it works.
"Parallel universes, unknown forms of matter, extra dimensions... These are not the stuff of cheap science fiction but very concrete physics theories that scientists are trying to confirm with the LHC and other experiments."
This was how the "ideas" men and women in the international research center's Theory Group, which mulls over what could be out there beyond the reach of any telescope, put it in CERN's staff-targeted Bulletin this month.
As particles are collided in the vast underground LHC complex at increasingly high energies, what the Bulletin article referred to informally as the "universe's extra bits" -- if they do exist as predicted -- should be brought into computerized, if ephemeral, view, the theorists say.
Optimism among the hundreds of scientists working at CERN -- in the foothills of the Jura mountains along the border of France and Switzerland -- has grown as the initially troubled $10 billion experiment hit its targets this year.
PROTON COLLISIONS
By mid-October, Director-General Rolf Heuer told staff last weekend, protons were being collided along the 27-km (16.8 mile) subterranean ring at the rate of 5 million a second -- two weeks earlier than the target date for that total.
By next year, collisions will be occurring -- if all continues to go well -- at a rate producing what physicists call one "inverse femtobarn," best described as a colossal amount, of information for analysts to ponder.
The head-on collisions, at all but the speed of light, recreate what happened a tiny fraction of a second after the primeval "Big Bang" 13.7 billion years ago which brought the known universe and everything in it into being.
Despite centuries of increasingly sophisticated observation from planet Earth, only 4 per cent of that universe is known -- because the rest is made up of what have been called, because they are invisible, dark matter and dark energy
Billions of particles flying off from each LHC collision are tracked at four CERN detectors -- and then in collaborating laboratories around the globe -- to establish when and how they come together and what shapes they take.
The CERN theoreticians say this could give clear signs of dimensions beyond length, breadth, depth and time because at such high energy particles could be tracked disappearing -- presumably into them -- and then back into the classical four.
Parallel universes could also be hidden within these dimensions, the thinking goes, but only in a so-called gravitational variety in which light cannot be propagated -- a fact which would make it nearly impossible to explore them.
(Editing by Jonathan Lynn)
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