I think worse than any of that is that the talk is boring and hopelessly self-involved.

Brilliant!

This is one of the most brilliant TDS clips of all time.

I agree with what you're saying but it may be worth considering that Zinn was born in 1922; history may not have been taught this way when he was in school.
>> ^9058:
On the contrary i endlessly heard how we slaughtered indians and beat slaves. There was no patriotic reasoning for taking the land with violence and smallpox, just that we did it. So I cant help it if my propaganda alarm goes off in the back of my head when watching this.



I remember when I took Utah history classes when I was a kid the Mountain Meadows Massacre was still being taught as a slaughter at the hands of an Indian raid when historians have known for a very long time it was an organized massacre at the hands of Mormon settlers. This was only 12 years ago.

He did receive a lot of opposition, but he also met with quite a bit of success. He was appointed the chair of experimental physics in Graz and of theoretical physics at the University of Munich, so he certainly wasn't on the outside of the scientific establishment at the time and he had a number of supporters for his theory. The opposition certainly didn't help with his unhappy state of affairs at the end, though.

I'm not really arguing that the title is wrong, I just don't like calling the life of a man that accomplished so much tragic for my own reasons.

>> ^MycroftHomlz:
He met with some really heavy opposition during his time. And while I think he may have been bipolar, the vast majority of the scientific community outright rejected his theories. Certainly saying the equation killed him is a hyperbole, but his life was most definitely tragic. He believed without evidence in atoms came up with probabilistic theories that were seen as in direct opposition to Newtonian Mechanics. For most his life people rejected his theories... that wears on people.

I don't mean to be picky, but I don't like the title. I don't think you can call his life tragic just because it ended in a way most of us wouldn't choose. The presentation here is a little over dramatic, I think, but it does make the story entertaining. But saying that his equation for entropy killed him or that his life was a tragic struggle against the established view of science is a little off the mark. He did suffer from bipolar disorder, but that seems more unfortunate than tragic.

I love that they covered this. The derivation of the Dirac equation is one of the masterpieces of modern physics and it rarely gets talked about.

Does this guy remind anyone else of Dr. Breen from HL2?

Only much more terrifying...

Are these guys talking about the Fort Hood shooting? What makes that a terrorist attack and not the Virginia Tech shooting?

Anyone know the song...sounds kind of like Xavier Rudd?

>> ^Xaielao:
And beyond that, the whole idea of a family as we know it today originated only about 60 years ago, and the entire idea of marriage as we know it today in the US barely more than 100 years old. The human species isn't designed to have one mate for life and for most of our existence such an idea was preposterous in most parts of the world.


I'm sympathetic to what you're saying but this seems to be going a bit far. Monogamy and marriage are both concepts that go back much further than the last 100 years. I think the better point is to show that this isn't the only way humans choose to live. What little anthropological data I've seen on the subject suggests that humans tend to organize into polygamous marriage or at least serial monogamy.

My point is that fighting against people saying that same sex marriage is unnatural by trying to make the case that the traditional monogamous marriage is unnatural is going farther than I think the logic can take you.

I think you're right Westy, I probably overstated what I meant. My real point is that they shouldn't overstate their evidence like this. Pointing out that no other steel structure has collapsed due to fire sounds really dramatic but there's a lot of important reasons that 911 is different. Similarly, establishing that the building fell at near free fall speed again sounds like a damning piece of evidence but there's a lot of good reasons why that would be expected. They don't have to accept the explanations against these pieces of evidence, but they're being disingenuous by not at least mentioning them. The lay person may accept these as much more powerful facts than they really are as a result and that's the bulk of my complaint.

The real reason for my comment is that I'd like to see a video like this done professionally without a lot of whiny finger pointing at the established explanation. It makes it hard to believe you're getting an unbiased account of the facts. If they started the video with a presentation of the accepted explanation in a way that demonstrated their understanding of it and from there presented evidence for a different conclusion then I'd be more likely to take it seriously. They must show that they can see the value in the standard explanation but believe the alternative better accounts for the facts; otherwise they get mired in conspiratorial thinking relying on hidden evidence which can be difficult to take seriously. As it is, I'm only left with a vague feeling that there may be things I should research on my own to make a conclusion but that I can't take anything from this video without a grain of salt.

Sorry for the rant.

I keep waiting to see what's so convincing for the people here and I can't find it. But rather than counter-arguing I'll give my advice as a scientist to the people who present these things.

1) Quit talking about the "myth" and "official story." You should be proposing this as a hypothesis as an alternative to the standard hypothesis. Presenting the scientific method as a way to tell the truth from lies is a perfect example of this where they should have simply described it as a method for determining the truth. You're giving away an emotional conviction toward the conclusion of the study.

2) Quit mentioning that no building has collapsed due to fire before. It's irrelevant.

3) Almost all of the eyewitness accounts should be ignored - especially given the chaotic nature of the events that day and especially people claiming to have heard explosions.

4) The fact that the towers fell mostly on their own footprint is exactly what you'd expect from a building collapsing under the weight of the topmost floors. There's simply no source of momentum to force the tower to fall sideways. Building 7 is more interesting though and the video spent more time on this.

6) Too much of the analysis is based on small samples and having been done by this Dr. Jones alone. It seems as though there could be several other explanations for the thermite evidence Jones found that isn't presented. I'm not even saying they're better explanations, but I feel pretty certain someone has presented other explanations and this guy doesn't present them.

...Anyway, I'm getting bored. Basically, by the way this is presented I can't believe this guy, or any others I've seen, are being objective and so I can't shake the feeling that there's lots of data that isn't being presented here. I spend a lot of time listening to technical talks and you can quickly tell the difference between someone presenting scientific results and someone trying to sell you something.

Following on sineral's comment there's an aspect that's always bothered me and that's to say why is the look-up table necessarily not conscious. If the input/output of the Chinese room is functionally identical to having someone that 'understands' Chinese inside the room than how does it immediately follow that the room doesn't understand Chinese.

There's a sort of unexplained axiom that understanding and consciousness go beyond the simple, functional input/output of the system that I don't see as being self explanatory. They go back to the qualitative experience of consciousness (qualia) that can't be refuted but doesn't necessarily have to be taken seriously if it doesn't affect the functionality of a conscious system. I take the same issue with the zombie argument.

God I love this movie...haven't seen it in ages.