Daimonie's Blog

I just came back from the grand nation of England. Here, we encountered scary things such as hills and well-mannered rain. Also, there was some scary blue stuff in the sky following us around. As I came back, I saw a rather annoying  post  on Krauss his page. Now, I was also in the mood to make a blog post.  Let's do this. Update: I've put a few updates throughout the article. Quite a few of the arguments are somewhat harder to rebuke, which is common for gish gallop. Somewhere in the end of 2015, a long blog post of mine should rebuke basically everything they have come up with. Update: The long blog post I announced in the previous update is here .  Rebuke: 10 Arguments For The Flat Earth And What It Has To Do With Spirituality A short look of the title tells us it's more of the click bait that pages with 'truth', 'spirit' and 'collective' usually bring us. Surprise. We have been told, since we were toddlers, that Earth is like a roun...

A claim often made by various conspiracy theorists is that the "Big X" has paid/bought the scientists endorsing it. Let's consider that. Is it possible for any company to buy science? First off, we must consider how many scientists there are. I know that there are about 200 countries in the world. Some of them are large; some are small. My own country is small, but does feature a number of universities (Netherlands). If we take my country as an average, I'd guess there are about six universities with ten people per university in any field. This means that there are 200 * 6 * 10 = 12 000 scientists in any field, worldwide. What would it cost for a scientist to sell his integrity? Depending on the region, less or more than you'd expect. In my own country, I'd value it rather high; after all, I'm in a field where it's relatively certain that I will have a (reasonably well-paid) job. In others, e.g. the states, research grants are so arbitrar...

A nice anti-gmo study was posted on IFLS. Let's take a look! "We have found that gmo-fed humans have a mass of 48-114 kg, whereas  non-gmo fed humans have a mass of 38.4 - 84kg.  Therefore, it has been shown that non-gmo fed humans have less mass." Rebuke: A long term toxicology study on pigs fed a combined genetically modified (GM) soy and GM maize diet. Well, let's take a look at the abstract. A significant number of genetically modified crops have been approved to enter human food and animal feed since 1996, including crops containing several GM genes `stacked'into the one plant. We randomised and fed isowean pigs (N=168) either in a mixed GM soy and GM corn (maize) diet (N=84) or an equivalent non-GM diet (N=84) in a long-term toxicology study of 22.7 weeks (the normal lifespan of a commercial pig from weaning to slaughter). Equal numbers of male and female pigs were present in each group. The GM corn contained double and triple-stacked varieties. Fe...

An anti-GMO article was posted on IFLS; Let's respond. The 8 shocking reasons are false. Let me show you. Response: [8 Shocking reasons GMO's are bad for you]. 1. Health consequences are largely unknown. [health consequence of gmo] on scholar.google gives a great many results. This article seems rather nice: http://rameznaam.com/2013/04/28/the-evidence-on-gmo-safety/ 2. GMOs are unlabeled in America. And the european union has banned gmos! That's good to know, as I live there and didn't know that. Indeed, the EU doesn't  know it either; http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/biotechnology/index_en.htm . On a sidenote, they aren't labelled in our shops either. 3. Genetic modification reduces genetic diversity. That's not even true; we introduce a variation artificially, but they still vary. Indeed, the aim of GMO's is often to increase the robustness of the crop to many kinds of things, including those noted in this reason. I'm not sure how...

I haven't checked for a while, so I was rather surprised when I looked at the views - almost 1400 now. I wanted to thank everyone reading and sharing these posts - they're written with the goal to look at things, to elaborate and illuminate; contributors to that should be thanked. And really, don't be shy to point out mistakes in this - I am not an expert in these topics, nor am I an accomplished writer. Response to [...] measles vaccine: fourteen things to consider. So, holiday season. I have a lot of time on my hands and there's another one of these vaccine posts. Time to look at one: m Measles and measles vaccines: fourteen things to consider. ~by Roman Bystrianyk (co-author Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History) [vaccinecouncil.org,  http://goo.gl/RTFi5E ]  The measles. Let us consider what we know about it. To be honest, I really don't know much about it - so let's turn to wikipedia: Four day fevers Coughs Hea...

It's time for a longer response, yet again.  This article  has popped up a few times on IFLS. It's starts out with this: In June 1936 Max Hahn and his wife Emma were on a walk beside a waterfall near to London, Texas, when they noticed a rock with wood protruding from its core. They decided to take the oddity home and later cracked it open with a hammer and a chisel. What they found within shocked the archaeological and scientific community. Embedded in the rock was what appeared to be some type of ancient man made hammer. Alarm bells are already ringing - as they always do when something shocks the "archaeological and scientific community". A quick search tells us that stone tools were used starting about 2.6 million years ago .   A team of archaeologists analysed and dated it. The rock encasing the hammer was dated to more than 400 million years old. The hammer itself turned out to be more than 500 million years old. Additionally, a section of the wooden h...