*promote babblefish & Higgs-Boson reference .

It's my favorite when he smacks his t's.

Gravitational Waves Jam has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

PLUTO MARS - Outbound Probe (A Capella Science) has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

A Capella Science - Puffed Up Cores has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

A Capella Science - Bohemian Gravity! has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

A Capella Science - Rolling in the Higgs has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

I still don't get how they used this to find the Higgs Boson.

Eh? I don't think @newtboy was comparing anyone to Charles Manson.

He was essentially saying "two wrongs don't make a right". Feels like a valid point to me.

If you want hyperbole, look at that bullshit Higgs quote. Let's actually ask how many police assaults are happening. Instead of making up figures (on a fucking logarithmic scale, no less), let's get some actual data. Let's find out who these police are, and let's prosecute the bastards. And then while we're at it, let's get a percentage figure on the number of decent cops doing their jobs vs assholes abusing their power.

But nah, fuck it. Far easier to just claim that any contrary evidence "no longer have any standing whatever" (by the way, it's "whatsoever") since grammar pedantry is so apparently important.

Data?? That just a fancy liberal word for story!

"Considering how many videos showing clear police assaults on innocent people one can see on any given day on Facebook, one cannot help wondering: how many such assaults occur in the country each day -- a hundred for each one caught on a video, a thousand, ten thousand? I am genuinely puzzled that, at this late date, anyone still fails to see that the principal-agent relationship between the police and the public has been completely reversed. The police now feel free to abuse and assault anyone and everyone at their pleasure and caprice. (Please do not give me any bullshit about bad applies. Such claims no longer have any standing whatever.)" ~Robert Higgs

I would think that if you were really interested in learning anything (be it about private law enforcement or anything else), you'd know how to manage your own discomfort in order to read something fully without being so reactive and defensive, which only serves to confirm your biases.

You say that "most people don't think of taxation as theft," but such a notion is actually irrelevant to the point here. Did you sign a social contract? I certainly didn't. There's no such thing (and to believe in one is to be living in a fantasy world).

Look: No one is forcing you to read anything you don't want to read. It's your right to learn or not learn whatever you want. In fact, you shouldn't read it (as if I stood to gain anything by your reading it). The ignorance here (in my view) is your own and only you stand to benefit by addressing it. Whatever your life circumstances, they're your problem and you certainly don't need anyone else's (particularly my) input on the matter.

Your comments... well.. They speak for themselves. I wish you all the best and know that if you are happy with your situation then I have nothing to contribute to it and if you are not, then you have what you deserve.

People who cling to dogma or sarcasm aren't likely to change their views regardless of the 'evidence.' They have a different agenda. And that's their prerogative. And someone will always exploit it (if it hasn't been exploited already).

Many people read Murphy's work (along with Mises, Higgs, etc.) including Harvard professors and the heads of central banks, and the kings of various political persuasions. How many people read your views on economics, or care about what you think is "worth reading" or not?

I shouldn't give you this outlet here to feel important (as if this debate served any other purpose), but i don't want to be an enabler.

I recommend that Mr. Damon study up. He can start with Lysander Spooner, Henry David Thoreau, Josiah Warren, and H.L. Mencken. After that, he can graduate to Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, Robert Higgs, and few other advocates of free market anarchism, but suffice it to say that, should he wish to have a better understanding of history, he'd better first know of which he speaks. (And no, it's not enough to have been neighbors with Howard Zinn.)

part of a longer talk at Skepticon 5
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Sean-Carroll-Higgs-boson-fundamental-nature-of-reality

Sean Carroll: Higgs boson & fundamental nature of reality has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims.

I want to talk about something that to my regard is pure lunacy. But, to me, though I appreciate the doubters, the ones who question everything; would change their attitudes completely. None of the atheists should go on ranting until they take the ultimate bungie jump a human can have: DMT. One thing I would note is that I do not know if it was put there by aliens, evil spirits, sacred spirits, the Earth itself, God. No, I do not know and no one knows. I do not know if there is a price to be paid by having witnessed the underpinnings of technology, soul, afterlife, the universe, consciousness, the brain or whatever the hell it is. I have no idea, I just know that this experience is as real as fuck. Mind blowing. Scary. Terrible and healing all at the same time.

I was agnostic going into this, did not believe in soul, appreciate string theory, quantum mechanics but do not believe in it at some factual level, did not believe in any sort of God, or the afterlife. In mere seconds all my notions of what I thought or did not think or could never had merely thought up, all my permeating existential beliefs were thrown off like a nuclear bomb had gone off; revealing some partial truth of what we really are, witnessing an alien computer program, based on simple equations that manifests consciousness itself. Not a new conclusion and one I thought only drug addled scifi writer or schizos would ever believe.

It were as though I had found some way to put my head into the Large Hadron Collider itself whilst every proton turned into Higgs Boson; I then found out that this is not uncommon for such an experience. I know that can sound incredibly narcissistic, incredulous, unbearable, impossible. But what I got out of it was humble and that is another story.

There are experiences out there in which a person can feel as though they had been thrown into another dimension, experienced the Big Bang and met Gods of the Ultimate Power, they may or may not be and died on levels not many ever knew possible. In mere seconds the regular doors of perception are shut and a new life is born. That is where it gets tricky.

Until any of these guys can figure out why the human mind can explode on an infinite universe level of pure digital consciousness, think it can perceive these things and witness them on all levels and in new ways and come back to a normal human life in a normal brain without having in fact died? Well, I think they ought to stop talking and do more research. We have no facts and an experience like that will make it very apparent that the walls of reality can be so easily shattered to see new alien worlds, languages, dimensions, spirits, births and rebirths beyond all human comprehension. It sounds like the ultimate atheist experience, right? Not at all, it leaves room for something of the highest power that is manifested through pretty much any religion. We have to remember... you have to go to school, you have to get a job, we get wrapped up in our world. We have to act like we know what we are talking about and I am saying there is no evidence out there to support the fact that anyone can say that there is absolutely no God. There is absolutely no afterlife. Anyone that feels that they know anything about the nature of reality and who they are or what any of it means and apply lectures to it in the event that they become so arrogant and stubborn that they say what they think is absolutely correct when it is not accounted for by science, should do this. Do it after a lot of research. I say science but it is a paradox, I believe in Science first and foremost, it is our hope for tangible evolution, repeatable fact, but I am fairly sure this is something Science will never figure out. And after reading a similar experience: http://ewwty.com/2012/02/24/dimethyltryptamine-dmt-experience it seems in this experience there are some reoccurring themes. Science has so far written this off in the easiest way it can: to call it a psychedelic or a hallucinogen. So, find out. We know absolutely nothing in a very non existential way.

As Richard Dawkins once put it:
“Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.”

As prof. Cox touched on, we don't just need people at college/university, but we need a public that understands the scientific method and thinking. I mean forget higher education for a bit, what we need, is middle school and hell, kindergardens, that teach kids HOW to think, not what to think. You dont need everyone to know the mass of the Higgs or what the Golgi apparatus does, what you need is for everyone to understand what kind of thinking that led to discover such facts, we need humans trained in the art of critical thinking, people with stimulates the brain. If kids have learned nothing else in school by the age of 15, at least they should have learned critical thinking.

>> ^ponceleon:

Don't have time to see the whole thing now, but I feel like the new challenge for journalism in the information age is that they need to understand that freedom of the press is not freedom to report without checking facts. Sensationalism is the rule rather than actual reporting. In an age where "reality" TV is scripted and caters to the lowest commmon denominator, as a society we have to hope that this too will bounce back.
If anyone saw last night's South Park, it was pure brilliance. We just need James Cameron to come in and raise the bar dammit!


Journalists work for money the same as most folks. Good journalism in the sense you're talking about takes time, and therefore is expensive. Furthermore, balanced, dry articles about the nuanced nature of the world around us don't lend themselves well to attention-grabbing headlines, a problem perhaps exacerbated by the need for page views and the ability to track, per article posted, what people view most.

I mean, really, what are more people going to want to read - or rather, see - "Higgs Boson identified with high probability" or "Lady Catherine caught with her tits out - photos inside!"?

We've conflated information with entertainment. I wonder how to turn that particular tide back.

i grew up with a pretty gnarly scoliosis. Body language that wasn't strained or uncomfortable was nearly impossible.
Most of us have distortion in our spines that effects who we are, how we move, and how we present. Perhaps you do not, but ignoring the physical realities of the species to pretend that how we are perceived is mostly a conscious choice, is understating the matter.


>> ^draak13:

Dude...this is what happens when physicists think they're neurologists.
You should write up a proposal on that fiend of gravity idea and send it in to NIH. You could propose an experiment to replace the actual science, real observations, and real experimental work that she went through. You could describe how the solitons traveling down the neural pathway are intercepted by the higgs field, causing the altered hormone levels and improvements in interview scores that she observed. You could then go on to say how all of that was not an idea worth spreading, because surely nobody would benefit from performing better in interviews and presentations.
Come off it, man. This was the best TED I've ever heard, and everyone who listened to it, except for you, is a better person for it.
>> ^criticalthud:
Our neurology dictates our tendencies, which includes our structure and our posture.
Amy -a good try from a psych/freudian perspective but this is probably not an idea worth spreading.
a better idea worth spreading is that your neurological system is a pressure based, fluid system that is still trying hard to adapt to being upright, and in the process must deal with a myriad of pressure distortions within that occur as the body, over time and trauma, distorts in the field of gravity.

Dude...this is what happens when physicists think they're neurologists.

You should write up a proposal on that fiend of gravity idea and send it in to NIH. You could propose an experiment to replace the actual science, real observations, and real experimental work that she went through. You could describe how the solitons traveling down the neural pathway are intercepted by the higgs field, causing the altered hormone levels and improvements in interview scores that she observed. You could then go on to say how all of that was not an idea worth spreading, because surely nobody would benefit from performing better in interviews and presentations.

Come off it, man. This was the best TED I've ever heard, and everyone who listened to it, except for you, is a better person for it.

>> ^criticalthud:

Our neurology dictates our tendencies, which includes our structure and our posture.
Amy -a good try from a psych/freudian perspective but this is probably not an idea worth spreading.
a better idea worth spreading is that your neurological system is a pressure based, fluid system that is still trying hard to adapt to being upright, and in the process must deal with a myriad of pressure distortions within that occur as the body, over time and trauma, distorts in the field of gravity.

Even if it is the Higg's, from my limited understanding, you have to use a linear accelerator to gauge the spin state of a particle (of which it needs 0 spin to be the "Higgs" and a whole number to be a boson).