31

Suggestions & Concerns / Attracting linguists

« on: August 22, 2017, 12:27:50 PM »

So, recently, there has been some discussion of whether we should try to attract more people interested in linguistics on this forum and how we should do that:
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=70713.150
I personally think it might not be a good thing to do, because, no matter how we try to attract more people interested in linguistics, we will probably also attract people who will write nonsense about linguistics (as happens on most of the forums claiming to be about linguistics), and we could even lose what we already have.
But let's hear your thoughts.

32

Technology, Science & Alt Science / The "science" behind Nazism

« on: August 07, 2017, 01:04:10 AM »

One of the most favourite arguments used by the Nazis was that there were already starving people in the world. The logic went: there is already not enough food for everyone, so human population can't grow indefinitely. So, we should replace all the inferior races of humans with the superior one. That's the Aryan (Indo-European) race. Proto-Indo-Europeans were the ancestors of all the white people. However, they were interbreeding with other races, so their skin got darker and darker. But, since German people have the brightest skin, we know they are the purest Aryans. And pure Aryans were ones that made all the major technological advancements. They invented the wheel, they domesticated the horse, they spread the use of honey... Therefore, we need to keep them.

How would you recognize this was pseudoscience?

33

Technology, Science & Alt Science / A question about iOS

« on: August 05, 2017, 01:35:51 PM »

If iOS is based on Darwin OS, can you use the "system" function from "stdlib.h" in your Objective-C programs for iOS? If so, what does it do there? What kind of shell is available? Does it allow you to redirect the output of a CLI program to a file and then read it?

34

Technology, Science & Alt Science / Church-Turing thesis

« on: August 05, 2017, 01:17:23 PM »

Why is the Church-Turing thesis accepted? I am having trouble conceiving a program for a Turing machine that adds up two arbitrarily large binary numbers.

35

Technology, Science & Alt Science / A question about computer processors

« on: August 05, 2017, 06:08:12 AM »

Imagine the following hypothetical scenario. Suppose I installed MS-DOS 5.55 (the version that NTVDM emulates) on a computer with a modern 64-bit processor. MS-DOS itself is runnable on modern processors, if it's run from a live CD, which you can download here:
http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/iso.html
However, it can't be installed on modern hard drives. But, for the sake of the story, let's say I manage to (this isn't a question about hard drives, but about processors). Now, let's say that I also install DPMI and Flat Assembler (it's doable in DosBox, and it would probably be doable on MS-DOS if I had an access to a compatible hard-drive). So, let's say I compile the following simple Assembler program:

Code: [Select]

format binary as '.COM'
use64
xor rax,rax
int 20h
So, I run the program. What do you think would happen? Would the program simply exit and not output anything, or would it block the whole system (by sending invalid commands to the CPU)? Why?

36

Technology, Science & Alt Science / How do the Americans' conspiracy theories sound to foreigners?

« on: July 31, 2017, 03:03:09 AM »

Why do you guys argue for a new investigation of 9/11? If so many both governmental and nongovernmental investigations didn't find any evidence of a conspiracy, isn't it extremely unlikely that new investigations will find anything? And you realize how costly those investigations are? It's obvious to anyone who gets deeper into 9/11 that the alleged evidence of a conspiracy is just misunderstanding of science. There are basically no unexplained events in the contemporary US history.
On the other hand, here in Croatia, modern history is full of unexplained events. During the time of Yugoslavia, most of the national minorities, especially Germans and Italians, either died in "accidents" or simply disappeared. It's depressingly obvious that there was a nationalistic organization that killed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people over a few decades. And the government still suppresses any investigation of it. And the reason is easily guessable: many of the modern-day Croatian politicians have nationalistic beliefs. And the death of the president Broz: it was rumored a few days BEFORE he died that there was a fascist organization that will poison him because of his alleged Russian ancestry. As far as I am aware, there have been zero investigations of the event. Maybe it's because some contemporary politicians were involved in it, and maybe also because people are very uncomfortable thinking that fascism might not have died out in Croatia by the end of the World War II. Why don't we ever hear those things discussed?

I don't support either the policies of the president Broz nor the War on Terror, I am trying to be as objective as possible.

37

Technology, Science & Alt Science / Philosophy applied to the computers

« on: July 11, 2017, 10:25:47 PM »

So, I've recently had to edit some relatively long text in Microsoft Word. It had paragraphs with titles. Titles had the same font size as the rest of the text, but they were supposed to be in bold and italic. Someone asked me to check whether all the titles of the paragraphs were of equal size. Isn't checking it just a hopeless waste of time? They have to be. When you start a new paragraph, type a title and press shift+enter, the title is already the size it should be. So, given what I knew about Microsoft Word, and I knew quite a lot about it, it's impossible that the titles somehow changed its font sizes. What probability should we assign to that happening? If we don't know that it's even possible, shouldn't we assign the zero probability to it? So did I, and I didn't check it. And I got very surprised when my friend found a title that wasn't the same size as other titles, and he got quite angry at me. He said that we should fix it just by changing the font sizes of these titles, but I said we should look for a cause, because if there was something in that document that had changed the font sizes of the titles, it would happen again and again. So I spent time examining all the styles and all the macros in that document, but I didn't find a cause. My friend, who knew far less informatics and philosophy than me, was right, it was enough just to change the font sizes back to where they should be, even though we have no bright idea what changed them in the first place. So, what do you think is the error in my reasoning? What probability should I assign to there being such a weird bug in Microsoft Word? I know a bit of computer programming, and to me a bug that randomly changes the font sizes of the paragraph titles a bit (and apparently nothing else) seems, well, impossible.

38

Technology, Science & Alt Science / Airplanes don't exist

« on: July 05, 2017, 07:10:29 AM »

Our culture makes us hold many irrational beliefs. One of them is demonstrably the belief that airplanes exist. It's told us by our parents, told by our teachers, and most of us never really investigate it. And there is not much evidence of that.
Most of the arguments we use to prove airplanes exist can be used to prove that dragons exist as well. We sometimes see white lines in the sky and we say they are evidence of jet airplanes. But saying they are the evidence of dragons is just as valid. There are people who say they have flown on an airplane, and use it as a proof that airplanes exist. But they could just as easily say it for dragons. And history tells us that before people claimed to have flown on a dragon just as often as people say today they have been on an airplane.
In reality, what we usually mean when we say airplane is so called jet airplane, and they can be disproven with some basic physics. Jet airplanes are supposed to work by having water (or some other liquid) as a fuel and engines forcing that water to go out, so that that water accelerates and, by the Newton's third law, makes the airplane accelerate also. But remember the Torricelli's law? Most of the people have learned it school, they just have never really thought about it. If they have, they would realize that it makes  the airplanes impossible.
One of the well-known formulations of the Torricelli's law is that, when a liquid goes through a small hole (an outlet), its speed is determined by the formula:

Code: [Select]

v=sqrt(2*g*h)But there is a pretty obvious implication here. That is:

Code: [Select]

a=0The Newton's second law tells us:

Code: [Select]

F=m*aTherefore:

Code: [Select]

F=m*a=m*0=0So, by the Newton's third law:

Code: [Select]

F1=-F2
0=-F2
F2=-0=0
So, the force acting on an airplane itself is zero, so by the Newton's first law:

Code: [Select]

F=0
 |
 V
a=0
So, how can jet airplanes work in reality if they don't even work on paper? You may give me some counter-example to the Torricelli's law. But do the counter-examples matter? They don't. The Torricelli's law is derived from the Bernoulli's equation, and it's derived right from the Newton's three axioms.
Also, the burden of proof is definitely on you. You can't prove for anything that doesn't exist that it doesn't exist, but, in general, if something exists, you are able to prove it. And Occam's razor always favors more an explanation that involves someone lying or hallucinating than an explanation that involves something as complicated and as crazy sounding as airplanes.
And you might ask me what if I am wrong. So what if I am wrong? At least I am thinking about whether airplanes exist, and other people aren't thinking about that at all, they just accept what most people believe as fact. And you are way more likely to be wrong if you aren't thinking than if you are thinking.
(This is a satire of many arguments made on this forum!)

39

Flat Earth General / What does "free thinking" mean to FE-ers?

« on: July 04, 2017, 07:14:41 AM »

FE-ers like to say they are free thinkers, but what do they mean by that? Most of the FET is nonsense that just sounds scientific. You know, like trying to explain the optical effects of the shape of the Earth via refraction. People who accept such things are probably thinking something like: "Well, it doesn't make sense to me, but I guess it would make sense to a scientist. We are just not yet loud enough to reach a respectable scientist!" And FE-ers are, as can be confirmed by anyone who's been on this forum for a while, unable to provide any evidence for what they so firmly believe (not even misunderstandings of the science, as the creationists provide in place of actual evidence). That's the exact opposite of what I'd consider free thinking. But let's hear the other side of the story.

40

Technology, Science & Alt Science / Is the Stockholm syndrome real?

« on: July 03, 2017, 10:52:32 AM »

Stockholm syndrome is a supposed effect that the victims of slavery and similar things aren't objective towards their abusers. Allegedly, they think what they have done to be more ethical than it actually is. That is used to explain the distrust of the institutions by people who have been saved by them. I think that's a politicisation of science. That's basically a way for the institutions to deny the unintended consequences of their interventions. The concept is simply incoherent. When we say that something is unethical, we usually mean it makes somebody unhappy. So, what do you think about that?

41

Philosophy, Religion & Society / A "simple" ethics question

« on: July 03, 2017, 09:24:31 AM »

Suppose you've just bought yourself some new expensive clothing. You walk by a river bank. You suddenly see a child drowning. There is no time to take off clothing. Would you save the child? Most of the people would say they would. But think of it this way: how many more children could you save from starvation if you sell that your new clothing and give that money to charity? There are tens of millions of starving children, and a meal for most of them costs less than a dollar. So, is it actually ethical to save a drowning child if you have expensive clothing?

42

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Why are people so affraid of anarchy?

« on: June 28, 2017, 12:39:39 PM »

Government isn't actively trying to protect us. It only intervenes when a psychopath has already murdered someone. And then they put him not to a place where he will rehabilitate, but to a place from where he returns with even more psychological problems, which made him murder in the first place. For all we know, they could in fact be making things worse. Justice systems, judges and lawyers, have no interest in bringing peace and justice to the society, they make money by making other people argue with each other. Even if people are naturally violent, the last thing you need is a government. Government is made of people with power, and power corrupts, it doesn't make people better. If politicians really wanted to help the poor, they would give their undeserved money to charity, they certainly wouldn't pass a law that effectively makes it illegal for the poorest to have a job (called minimum wage law). If they really cared about the environment, they would stop subsidizing factory farming, that hurts the environment more than any other industry. They certainly wouldn't pass the emission standards laws that cause monopolies by hurting small corporations more than big ones. Politicians are good only at having long, boring and nonsense discussions. And laws are statements about how society should work made without evidence, and they should be dismissed without evidence. So, why are people so affraid of anarchy?

43

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Is it actually a good thing to trust the institutions?

« on: June 08, 2017, 06:04:47 AM »

I am going to tell you a story from my experience. I think there have been many cases in which good people trusting institutions did bad things to me because of that, but this one is certainly true.
My parents got divorced when I was little and they hate each other very much. In Croatia, there is an institution called "socijalna skrb" (I am not willing to find an English equivalent) that's supposed to help the poor and stop family violence. One day, while I was in school, "socijalna skrb" phoned my unemployed father to urgently come to their office. He hoped they would finally give him financial help so he came there. They didn't give him financial help. Instead, they "informed" him about me having written bad things about him in a letter to the "socijalna skrb" in a near-by town. They allegedly came to know that from my mathematics professor. My father and I were arguing all evening about that supposed letter, he did not believe me I didn't actually write any letter to the "socijalna skrb". After hours of arguing, he hit me in the face. He had never done that before. And he almost certainly wouldn't have done that if he hadn't trusted "socijalna skrb". A few days later I asked my mathematics professor about that supposed letter. Needless to say, he just stared at me blindly. Again, this is a true story, it happened recently. And I am by no means the only victim. "Socijalna skrb" has been sued countless times, but every time the court reinterprets the case again and again until it looks like it's not the fault of the institution. "Socijalna skrb" is supposed to end the family violence, when they are ones who cause the family violence. Its employees are in a delusion that they are helping the poor, and they just make things worse. Croatia is a very democratic and a very liberal country with relatively low corruption, yet the institutions still find a way to destroy peoples lives. I can imagine it can only be worse elsewhere.
So, let's hear your thoughts about trusting the institutions!

44

Technology, Science & Alt Science / Is object-oriented programming pseudoscience?

« on: May 31, 2017, 07:34:19 AM »

For those of you who are unaware, object-oriented programming is basically an attempt to increase the productivity of programmers by making the programming languages follow the subject-verb-object word order. It is a paradigm found in many popular programming languages such as Objective-C, C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic, and so on, C being somewhat of an exception.
For instance, the C directive:
memset(field,0,10);
that fills the field (a part of a memory) with ten zeros, would be written in C++ as:
field.insert(field.begin(),10,0);
"Let the field insert, at its beginning, ten zeros."
This might appear to be a great advantage at first. However, to enable such statements in C++, you need to make the so-called classes and objects, which quite often make the code very complicated. A meta-analysis of the empirical studies funded by IBM found no benefits of using object-oriented programming whatsoever.
http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~v8q/Homepage/Papers%20Old/spetep-%20printable.pdf
So, my question is, is OOP actually a pseudoscience? It appears to be. It makes countless nonsensical rules on how to use classes and objects just to explain away why it doesn't appear to increase the productivity. That's no better than what astrology does, when its proponents say that the predictions fail because it's hard to make a horoscope. There is no scientific consensus about those rules whatsoever, the proponents of OOP can't agree even on whether C++ is an object-oriented programming language or not. It makes countless statements regarding formal logic and philosophy that programmers have no hope evaluating (much like the conspiracy theorists bombard people with claims about the photographic anomalies most of the people can't evaluate).
Attempt to increase the programming productivity using the declarative programming languages (like Haskell or Wolfram Language) appear to be much more scientific, at least the empirical studies that favor them, but they seem to attract very little attention.
So, let's hear your thoughts.

45

Suggestions & Concerns / One thing this forum is surprisingly good for

« on: May 19, 2017, 08:29:56 AM »

It's discussion about linguistics.
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=70713.0
So, what do you think, why is that the case? How can we make all of the discussions look like that?

46

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Alternative to the laryngeal theory

« on: May 18, 2017, 11:22:59 PM »

(I will try to explain my ideas without presupposing that a reader has a lot of knowledge of the Indo-European linguistics, regardless of how long it would take to explain them.)
As anyone who is even remotely familiar with Indo-European linguistics knows, it’s relatively easy to reconstruct the consonants in the proto-language. The same, however, isn’t even remotely true for the vowels. To understand the problem, consider this: let’s try to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European word for three. I happen to know its pronunciation in three distantly related Indo-European languages: Latin tres, English three and Serbo-Croatian tri. The first phoneme was quite obviously *t, English th is easily explainable via the Grimm’s law. The same goes for the second phoneme, it was *r. Now, the third phoneme is a bit trickier, but nevertheless remains deducible. Latin word suggests the phoneme *e, and English i sound is a result of the Great Vowel Shift, therefore it also suggests an original *e sound. However, Serbo-Croatian clearly suggests there to have been an *i sound. There is no rule that would make an e sound in other Indo-European languages correspond to an i sound in Serbo-Croatian, Serbo-Croatian words for six and seven are šest and sedam, not **šist and **sidam. However, here is a clue, the Ancient Greek word is treys. Now it makes sense. It was a diphthong! Loss of the final s in Croatian is easily explainable, in Proto-Slavic there was a so-called Open Syllable Law, and no syllable could end in a consonant. Syllable-final consonants either became initial (the liquid consonants r and l) or were elided. That’s why no native Serbo-Croatian word ends with an s. The English word can probably be explained in a similar manner, so that the original Proto-Indo-European word was *treys. Can we reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European word for two? Well, not that easily. So, the English word is two, the Latin word is duo and the Serbo-Croatian word is dva. So, the first phoneme was *d. English t can be explained as a simple application of the Grimm’s law. The second phoneme was *w. Serbo-Croatian v and Latin u are both its allophones. But let’s try to deduce what the third phoneme was. The English u sound comes from, via the Great Vowel Shift, from the *o sound. Latin also points to the original *o sound. So does the Ancient Greek. But how to explain the Serbo-Croatian a sound? It’s not like Latin o corresponds to Serbo-Croatian a,  Latin word for eight is octo, and Serbo-Croatian word for eight is osam and not **asam. It’s as if there had originally been two words for two: *dwo and *dwa. Most of the linguists agree with that notion, and believe that change of the vowels, called ablaut, was the main way to derive new words in Proto-Indo-European. Its traces are visible in modern Indo-European languages. For instance, many English irregular verbs have their forms formed by change of the vowel, for instance: sing-sang-sung. There are languages today that have this feature as the main way to derive new words, for instance, the Semitic languages (that are not Indo-European, and are probably not related to Indo-European languages at all). However, there would appear to have had been many types of ablaut in Proto-Indo-European, way more than in those languages. So, it’s been hypothesized that there had been some phonemes in Proto-Indo-European that colored the vowels (much like the r colors them in modern English, a is pronounced significantly differently in fat than in far). So, the hypothesized phoneme that colored e to a, but did nothing to other vowels is noted as *h2. So, the Proto-Indo-European word for two is then reconstructed as *dwoh2. So, only one type of ablaut is hypothesized to exist, the alternation between o, e and no vowel. If an ablaut occurs that turns *dwoh2 into *dweh2, the word would, in modern languages, be rendered as if it had been pronounced *dwa. This bears a lot of explanatory power. But how were those sounds pronounced? Most of the linguists believe they were h-like sounds, and the theory about them is called the Laryngeal Theory. This is where I don’t agree with the mainstream linguistics any more. I think that those sounds were, in fact, semi-vowels (sounds like the consonantal y and w). I believe that, for instance, the often reconstructed cluster *eh2 was, in fact, a diphtong, usually pronounced like i in ride. To understand why, consider this example: the Proto-Indo-European word for mother is reconstructed as *meh2ter. The Latin word was pronounced mater, the Greek word was pronounced meter, and the Sanskrit word was pronounced mitar. The a in the Latin word mater  is explainable the same way the e can be explained in tres, the same goes for the Sanskrit mitar, and the Greek word is explained via the analog monothongization as ae (pronounced like i in ride) in Classical Latin turned to e in the Romance Languages. Or consider the Indo-European word for beech, *bheh2gjos. The Latin word from it is fagus (bh turns to f in Latin), the English word from it is book (Old Germanic people used to write on the beech wood, beech comes from umlaut of book + the ending e that caused the palatalization), and the Serbo-Croatian word is bukva. The simple truth is, by regular sound changes, the English word would be **bak (Grimm’s law) and the Serbo-Croatian word would be **boz (satemization, *eh2 almost always turns to o in Serbo-Croatian). But let’s suppose *eh2 was here pronounced like ow in bow. So, that the Proto-Indo-European word for beech was *bhaugos. The mystery solved! au easily turns both to a, to u and to o (as it did in Late Latin). There are reasons to think that h2e gave ay in Illirian. Namely, it’s said by Pseudo-Scylax that Aenona (the ancient name for the Croatian city of Nin) comes from the Illyrian word for rocks, Aemonoi. That’s almost certainly from *h2ekjmon (like English hammer). Now, let’s analyze the arguments purported for the Laryngeal Theory. I’ll ignore the arguments from the purported loanwords, or, even worse, cognates to Indo-European from Proto-Semitic, because they are almost always based on a single phoneme in the supposedly related words. The strongest argument put forward is that the Hittite word for in front of (like Latin ante) has been transliterated as hanti. Now, Hittite was written in a syllabic script. So, how do we know that the first glyph represented ha? Because of the Hittite transcriptions of the Akkadian words. Now, in my dialect of Serbo-Croatian, there are no h-like sounds. And, in the loanwords, the h-sound gets replaced by a semivowel (either y or w). I see no reason to think that Hittite was any different.
I am not a linguist, but I think I know enough linguistics to make some conclusions by myself. If I am not right, then I am just wrong, not, as some say, not even wrong.
I would like to discuss my theories with other free-thinkers. If you think you can redirect me on some more suitable forum for such things, please do that.

47

Philosophy, Religion & Society / How accurate are the reconstructions of the proto-languages?

« on: March 20, 2017, 09:46:56 AM »

I will start with a simple example of what I am talking about. Antun Mayer, a prominent Croatian linguist, made a paper in 1935 trying to explain the toponyms of Slavonia. If you happen to know a bit of Serbo-Croatian, you can download it here:
http://hrcak.srce.hr/50001
So, he was trying to explain the name of a stream named Bosut. He noticed that the same Indo-European root that gave the German word Bach (stream) would in Slavic languages give *bos. And, to him, that was an acceptable explanation of the name Bosut!
Why am I so certain that's not an explanation? Well, first of all, the Proto-Indo-European word would be reconstructed, given our current understanding of the Proto-Indo-European phonology, as *bʰeh₂ḱ, which is unpronounceable. Secondly, the Proto-Slavic word for stream was *potok, and, I have checked it, in no Slavic language the word for stream has the root *bos.
So, what he did was that he basically made up an Proto-Indo-European word to explain just two words in different Indo-European languages.
I am not attacking Antun Mayer personally, I think that's the problem with modern etymology in general. I can think of quite a few examples of proto-words being made just to explain one or two words.
So, my questions for you are: how often does this happen, what's the probability that they get it right, and how much does that alter our perspective of the culture of the ancient people?

48

The Lounge / Etymologies

« on: March 17, 2017, 03:05:59 PM »

So, which word in English you know of has the most interesting etymology? My favorite is indri. It's the largest known lemur, and our name for it on Malagasy means look!. Evidently this was what the native guides of the French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat, who was the first to describe the animal, said when they spotted the creature and called his attention to it, and he mistook that for its name.
Interesting etymologies are often myths (kangaroo, for instance, doesn't mean I don't know! in Aboriginal, regardless of my geography textbook telling me so), so let's use a somewhat reliable source like https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/ .

49

Technology, Science & Alt Science / Zeno's paradox proves digital physics

« on: January 21, 2017, 05:49:54 AM »

Zeno's paradox known as the paradox of Achilles and a turtle goes like this: Consider a race of fast Achilles and a slow turtle. At the beginning of the race, the turtle is placed ahead of Achilles by 100m. Both of them start to run. Achilles reaches the place where the turtle used to be at the beginning of the race, however, the turtle has already moved a little. Achilles then runs to the place when the turtle was when he was 100m ahead of his start, however, the turtle has moved a bit more. And by the time Achilles reaches the place where the turtle is, the turtle will have moved even farther away. Therefore, Achilles can never overtake the turtle, only the distance between them decreases, but it never reaches zero. Now, obviously, Achilles will eventually overtake the Turtle.

It seems like the only sensical solution is that we assume that space and time are made of pixels, that the space is made of small cubes and that no particle can occupy only a part of such a cube, and that time is also not continuous. Then, the distance between Achilles and the turtle can't be between zero and the length of a pixel, but it goes immediately to zero when it comes the time when it should be smaller than a pixel, as it happens in computer games. I have a good reason to think this type of logic is right, it has lead to the correct philosophy of matter, atomism, in the ancient times. And since the time and space are demonstrably made of pixels, it has to be that we are all part of a computer simulation. Outside of our simulation, Achilles perhaps really couldn't overtake the turtle in a race. I know that this, that we are a part of a computer simulation, may be hard to swallow, but logic leads to such a conclusion. There are many scientists, including the nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft, who realize this.
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319412849
The guy who probably did the most research on digital physics is a theoretical physicist called Stephen Wolfram.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/09/books/you-know-that-space-time-thing-never-mind.html
The inventor of the computer, Konrad Zuse, also suggested this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#Calculating_Space
Most of the proponents of digital physics agree that our world is a type of computer simulation called cellular automaton, though there are some who suggest it's a Turing Machine.
Let's hear your thoughts.

50

Technology, Science & Alt Science / Bilocation

« on: January 02, 2017, 02:19:49 AM »

So, recently, I've read an article (not in English, though) about how bilocation, an alleged mystical ability of a person to be at two places at the same time, can be explained using quantum physics. Their main argument is that photons interfering with themselves in the double-slit experiment (because the interference pattern emerges even when we let only one photon at a time) can only be explained by there being a bilocation of photons, and so that the same can happen with human beings. I happen to know a bit about quantum physics, and I think that's not true. Here are my reasons for it:
1. Photons are indeed waves (being both wave and a particle) and the same happens with water waves in the double-slit experiment, right? If so, why don't people talk about the bilocation of water-waves?
2. There are macroscopical particles that also produce interference pattern in a double-slit experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodynamic_quantum_analogs#Single_and_double_slit_diffraction
And, obviously, nobody in their right mind would say that those particles were in two places at the same time, when we see they weren't. I am not saying that pilot-wave theory is correct, it doesn't pass the Occam's Razor, I am just saying that quantum physics doesn't say that a particle can be at two places at the same time.
3. Even if small particles can do bilocation, they do it in situations which are not at all analogous to the supposed bilocations of people. They do it only when they aren't in interaction with other particles, even a simple observation stops them from doing so, and supposedly bilocated people are usually observed and have complex interactions with things.
I should say once again that I am not a scientist, and I don't do anything related to quantum physics. However, I don't accept arguments from authority here, because I don't think it's hard to find a mad scientist who believes in bilocation, just like it's not hard to find a scientist who believes in other pseudoscientific concepts. If you think I am wrong, show me the actual arguments.
So, how can we make people less prone to pseudosciences like those? People certainly aren't willing to learn enough quantum physics to be able to differentiate actual quantum physics from pseudoscience. People could just look up on English Wikipedia to see the critics of a pseudoscientific concept, but most of the people I know don't speak English enough to understand it. So, what do you think?

51

Technology, Science & Alt Science / Windows programs on MacOS

« on: December 31, 2016, 09:43:40 AM »

Hey, guys, do you know how do to run Windows programs on MacOS, without installing Windows on a Mac, using programs such as BootCampAssistant, or even on a virtual machine, for example using VirtualBox? I don't have a copy of Microsoft Windows available right now, but I do have Microsoft Office 2007 on a CD. I've heard of someone claiming to have installed Microsoft Word on MacOS. Frankly, I think he is just making stuff up, but, if it's possible, I would like to do that. Programs like TextEdit or even OpenOffice Writer have a lot of frustrating bugs when dealing with Word documents. So, is there something like WINE (for Linux) working well on MacOS?