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Flat Earth Debate / A glass dome in the sky is a dumb idea and most people should and do know better

« on: July 15, 2014, 02:07:53 PM »

There are well over 500 FE'ers in the current membership register. 

Oh wow!  I was sooo wrong in my interpretations of the numbers of adherents involved!  Sorry for being so deliberately deviant jroa!

The fact (?) that there's apparently over 500 flat earthers—and not the mere 400 I quoted—obviously changes everything.  That makes it all the more obvious that those 7 billion round earthers must be wrong in actuality.  That additional 100 flat earthers really changes the balance of opinion entirely doesn't it?

And thanks for pointing that out jroa.  It's almost enough to make me accept the flat earth belief now.  (Sorry, that was a mean little joke wasn't it hehe?)

     

The truth is not the truth because of statistics.  In fact, statistics have nothing at all to do with truth. 

Virtually everyone used to think that blood letting and leaching would "balance the humors" and cure diseases.  Today, most people understand that this is not true.  According to you, it was the truth hundreds of years ago and time caused it to not be true today.  This is a retarded way of thinking.

Do you really not understand that the majority of people can be wrong?  Statistics is not about finding the truth; it is about finding the likelihood.  You should really learn the difference.

I have to agree with jroa on this one, the statistics you're citing don't prove anything. Furthermore, there isn't any evidence to back them up. You're assuming that the 500 members all believe the Earth to be flat, and none of the rest out of 7 billion believe the Earth is flat. So this is a poor way to advance your argument, based on obviously faulty numbers.

Even if you say, and I think we can probably all agree on this, that the numbers are heavily in favour of the non-flat believers, it's still a poor argument. What you need to address is why the majority might believe it. In the case of blood letting, it was a practice that actually did work in some cases, and this theory of the humours seemed to make sense to people at the time since there wasn't a better explanation available. Today, "Round Earth Theory", i.e. modern physics basically, is the best available explanation based on the current data.

What happens as I see it, the best, most sensible theory tends to get accepted by the majority of people. Of course that doesn't make the theory "right" - no theory is ever "right", it's just that now we have more and better ways of measuring things, which should make our theories better at explaining and predicting phenomena.

So now since we have better data, we have better theories. These get adopted by the scientific community as, if not "right", then at least the best avenue in which to direct their time and money researching. Then these get communicated to the public at large. Since most people aren't scientists, they tend to accept these theories as "right" or "true", or at least they "believe".  In this sense then it's the correctness of the theories that inform the statistics.

If I'm right about the relationship between how good a theory is and how many people believe it, then ausGeoff probably does have a point in citing the statistics (if he can actually back up the numbers with real data), but of course what he can't do is say "because 89% of people believe it, then it's true". Which I don't think is what he's saying, although that's what jroa says he's saying. So jroa is probably making a bit of a straw man to knock down here.

tl;dr Statistics may not prove anything in and of themselves but it's not wrong to cite them in support of your argument as long as they are real numbers you didn't just pull out of a hat.

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Flat Earth Debate / Tectonic plates don't work on a Flat Earth

« on: July 15, 2014, 02:03:33 PM »

Tectonic plates as we know them don't sound very likely on a Flat Earth, at least a finite flat Earth with an edge. Either the plates would have to be fixed to the edge, because the edge is exposed and would therefore likely cool and harden, fixing the edge in place, or for some unknown reason it might still move, in which case the plates would slide off the edge, or magma would leak out. Since the Earth has apparently been around quite some time, and chunks of it haven't slid off into space, I think we have to conclude that tectonic plates can't really work on a flat Earth.

There have been several questions on this in Q&A, and usually the FE answer is, "why can't plates exist on a flat Earth?". Well there you have it - they can't because they would either slide off, which obviously hasn't happened, or they'd stick to the edge, which obviously isn't happening.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Evolution - Intellectual laziness?

« on: June 19, 2014, 03:31:05 PM »

Legion posted this today, I thought it definitely needed its own thread:

Let's take Darwinian evolution as an example. Everyone of reasonable intelligence knows that evolution happened. It is proven. Conclusively.

I hear nonsense like the above all the time. There is a guy I work with who's a passionate evolutionist. After many weeks of debating, I managed to get him to admit there is no evidence which proves fish-to-philosopher evolution. Or even makes a coherent case for it. But, he still believes in it because he is educated and will agree with the consensus.

I'm not saying he is wrong. I am saying he is a lazy fucker who took the easy option.

Could it be that people just blindly accept evolution as a scientific theory without really looking into it? Well, duh, yes. Does that mean everybody does, or even most people do? I doubt it. On the one hand, we are certainly inundated with facts about evolution and nature, through media, school etc. On the other, whenever I have delved a little deeper into it, which admittedly hasn't been terribly often or particularly deep, things seemed to check out to my satisfaction. The resurgence of Creationism, recently rebranded as "Intelligent Design", has prompted me to look at things in more detail, and again, evolution still looks to be the best explanation.

What I'd like to see in this thread is not examples of people you know or heard of that are in fact lazy and didn't bother to check the facts. I'm way more interested in the "survival of the fittest" - the fittest facts that is. So bring your best arguments, either for or against evolution.

For myself, I'll offer what seems to me to be the most compelling evidence that's not too in depth on one particular aspect. First, it seems we have developed the technology to identify the age of rocks and the fossils they contain. The oldest rocks contain fossils of the simplest forms - single celled creatures. Subsequent layers contain worms, molluscs, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals etc, until the most recent contain creatures we are familiar with today. Second, I think it's fair to say that creatures have grown and developed in the past much as they do today, either by sexual or asexual reproduction. Some variation gets in there due to mutation from time to time, and the gene pools of various populations can change in this way over time to adapt to a changing environment.

That's about all I need to accept that evolution can work, although there's many, many more specific examples out there. To me it seems as uncontroversial as toast for breakfast, what do you all think? Would be glad to hear from legion on this one.

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Flat Earth General / Contrails or chemtrails?

« on: June 13, 2014, 12:43:28 PM »

Chemtrails are not urban legend. You can see them with your own eyes during the day sometimes, dipshits.

No, you can't.

Are you blind?

Those are contrails.

According  to what? Conservative news media? Oh please. Don't tell me you believe that shit, room.

I see contrails left by jets. I see them all the time. I fly a lot for work, and I can see the trails are made by the engines. Is your most compelling evidence for chemtrails that the media, books, technical papers on contrails, and general observation all agree that contrails are what they appear to be?

About the only place I see stuff on chemtrails are conspiracy forums, personal blogs and youtube videos. None I've seen make any compelling arguments. Why should anyone trust those unreliable sources?

Really, what is the evidence for chemtrails? Should I expect the answer to be "of course there's no evidence, it's all covered up"? Why would anyone accept no evidence as evidence for something?

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Flat Earth Q&A / Annual and sidereal doppler shift.

« on: June 10, 2014, 05:56:43 PM »

Spectroscopy of stars near the ecliptic shows that there is a varying doppler shift from red to blue with a period of exactly one year. This implies that we move alternately toward and away from a particular star each year. The shift is consistent with the Earth's orbital velocity in RE theory.

Similarly, there is a daily redshift consistent with the rotation of the Earth. These shifts have to be accounted for routinely by astronomers.

In FE, what is the explanation for the observed sidereal and annual doppler shifts?

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Suggestions & Concerns / "Muggsy"

« on: July 12, 2013, 09:16:39 AM »

User muggsybogues1, horrible poster, probably troll, actually inspired me to register so I could argue with his shitty, nonsensical posts. Shame on me, though, there's plenty of ridiculous accounts on this board.

Yesterday, I ran into muggsybogus1, who happens to have the exact same avatar, and is either a super-shitty, horrible troll faking an already horrible (possible) troll account, or an alt of the aforementioned muggsybogues1. Either way, I feel something should be done, preferably something disturbing and personally embarrassing to the bogues/bogus twins.

Additionally:

muggsybogues1: Registered January 11, 2013. My BIRTHDAY. OK, that's weird, but whatever.

muggsybogus1: Registered July 11, 2013. OK that's my EX-WIFE's birthday. WT-everloving-F

If I was RUSpinningAround or someone like that, I'd be in my basement now tacking red strings to maps and newspaper clippings and shit. Come ON people, WAKE UP!

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Flat Earth General / Turns out the Earth really is flat*

« on: April 27, 2013, 07:10:52 PM »

*Almost, nearly, very close to being flat anyway.

This article probably puts it better than I can, but it really is true. The ancients were "right", and calling the Earth flat even today is (almost entirely) correct. That is, correct in the way that Newton was correct about gravitation (and mostly still is, despite Einstein).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/life-and-physics/2013/jan/03/flat-earth-science-asimov

The original article by Asimov is also excellent. http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

The gist of both is this:

"... when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."


Anyone care to comment on this? I'm saying that I'm only slightly more correct in saying the Earth is round. The difference is negligible really. Accepting this put no shame on the FES, on the contrary, it practically puts it on par with Newton! I for one am proud to admit the Earth is (almost completely) flat!

Anyone?

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Flat Earth Q&A / Why is the North Pole the center of the Earth?

« on: April 01, 2013, 12:46:48 PM »

I was looking at Thork's post from this thread

http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php/topic,58111.0.html#.UVnmGZOG28A:

It is possible to distort any map.

Below are two similar maps, one is equal area, one is equidistant.





The second map is distorted to stretch the North pole and narrow the South pole using the equator as a datum. There is no reason why you couldn't do something like this on a flat earth map of a flat earth. It would still work perfectly for navigation and would allow you to plot with more accuracy in the Southern hemiplane as those areas are spread.

This distortion of everything south of the equator seems to be a major problem for the FET.

It got me wondering - Every FE map I see shows the North Pole at the center of the Earth's disc. Why is this? Why shouldn't the South Pole be at the center, and the "ice wall" represent the Arctic ice cap? This is clearly biased towards the hemisphere where the FET was formed, and the arbitrary convention of showing North at the top of maps, isn't it?