For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
By riverrock
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1891447
Unicorns have written descriptions since 400BC and are now believed to be white Indian rhinos, since hunted by humans to extinction ( the grey versions survive).

In a court, corroborated evidence is considered fact. People attesting to something is considered evidence. A fact is something that is considered proved. There is more than one way to consider something proven. People's experiences shouldn't be discounted.
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By eltonioni
#1891451
riverrock wrote:Unicorns have written descriptions since 400BC and are now believed to be white Indian rhinos, since hunted by humans to extinction ( the grey versions survive).

Perhaps so, but rhinos aren't unicorns either. :)


riverrock wrote:In a court, corroborated evidence is considered fact. People attesting to something is considered evidence. A fact is something that is considered proved. There is more than one way to consider something proven. People's experiences shouldn't be discounted.

It's only 30 years since a Pope declared that Galileo was right. Can't quite remember whether he actually properly apologised for the 17th century Catholic Inquisition Court putting him under house arrest for the rest of his life, but a least he wasn't burned at the stake as a result of the heresy verdict.



I've spent my working life around spooky old buildings and have quite a few first hand tales that I could tell. A couple were quite terrifying at the time and one included a hasty departure in the early hours. At one time I was open to ideas, especially the apparently scientific ones such as resonance and tape-recorder theory. Having had a really long and hard think about it over a few years, I was utterly wrong, there are far more sensible explanations for the events. It really is a load of old guff.
By riverrock
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1891459
eltonioni wrote:Perhaps so, but rhinos aren't unicorns either. :)

What's in a name?


It's only 30 years since a Pope declared that Galileo was right. Can't quite remember whether he actually properly apologised for the 17th century Catholic Inquisition Court putting him under house arrest for the rest of his life, but a least he wasn't burned at the stake as a result of the heresy verdict.

History is hard and looking at something with modern knowledge often isn't a fair way to judge something. If you look in detail at the case, Galileo had no scientific basis and couldn't prove his theory at the time. Scientific evidence of the time pointed towards the earth center model. Direct evidence supporting heliocentrism had to wait for the emergence of Newtonian mechanics in the late 17th century, the observation of the stellar aberration of light by James Bradley in the 18th century, the analysis of orbital motions of binary stars by William Herschel in the 19th century, and the accurate measurement of the stellar parallax in the 19th century.
So the church, which financed and led most western scientific work at the time, followed the science.

Who knows what we think we know as scientifically proven now, turns out not to be correct.
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By Miscellaneous
#1891471
First of all my apologies for the use of the word nonsense in my previous reply, on re reading it it does come across harsher than intended. One of those words which when typed reads differently than when said. At least in Scotland. :wink:

riverrock wrote:Who knows what we think we know as scientifically proven now, turns out not to be correct.

I think you make the point very well above in essentially describing science. Any 'scientific proof' comes with the proviso it is based on best present understanding. That's science.

An explanation or fact is independent of the knowledge and/or beliefs of humans. :D

That is factually demonstrably correct any number of times. :D
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By eltonioni
#1891483
I admit to stealing the unicorn reference (while adding my own flourish) from Steve Pinker's latest book. Here's the full passage from Enlightenment Now;

That leads to the second ideal, science, the refining of reason to
understand the world. The Scientific Revolution was revolutionary in a
way that is hard to appreciate today, now that its discoveries have become
second nature to most of us. The historian David Wootton reminds us of
the understanding of an educated Englishman on the eve of the Revolution
in 1600:

He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at
sea. . . . He believes in werewolves, although there happen not to be
any in England—he knows they are to be found in Belgium. . . . He
believes Circe really did turn Odysseus’s crew into pigs. He believes
mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw. He believes in
contemporary magicians. . . . He has seen a unicorn’s horn, but not a
unicorn.

He believes that a murdered body will bleed in the presence of
the murderer. He believes that there is an ointment which, if rubbed
on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound. He
believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to
how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be
interpreted by mankind. He believes that it is possible to turn base
metal into gold, although he doubts that anyone knows how to do it.
He believes that nature abhors a vacuum. He believes the rainbow is
a sign from God and that comets portend evil. He believes that
dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. He
believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars
turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours.7
A century and a third later, an educated descendant of this Englishman
would believe none of these things. It was an escape not just from
ignorance but from terror. The sociologist Robert Scott notes that in the
Middle Ages “the belief that an external force controlled daily life
contributed to a kind of collective paranoia”:
Rainstorms, thunder, lightning, wind gusts, solar or lunar eclipses,
cold snaps, heat waves, dry spells, and earthquakes alike were
considered signs and signals of God’s displeasure. As a result, the
“hobgoblins of fear” inhabited every realm of life. The sea became a
satanic realm, and forests were populated with beasts of prey, ogres,
witches, demons, and very real thieves and cutthroats. . . . After
dark, too, the world was filled with omens portending dangers of
every sort: comets, meteors, shooting stars, lunar eclipses, the howls
of wild animals.


To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition
showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the
methods of science—skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical
testing—are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge.


It's always been the case that today's science is tomorrow's superstition, not the other way around. We're not at the zenith of Human understanding, we're merely the current perpetrators of what will be disproven in the future.

We should have a bit of humility because our decedents will inevitably look back at us, laugh, and say "what on earth was Grandad thinking?"
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By Paul_Sengupta
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1891488
eltonioni wrote:We should have a bit of humility because our decedents will inevitably look back at us, laugh, and say "what on earth was Grandad thinking?"


Especially if the internet is used for research. Many of the things you've posted you could probably find people who still believe them. There's a difference between the fools of the time, common man, and the great thinkers of the age.

However some of today's great thinkers are making wild guesses about the universe of which we have very little understanding at present.

Someone mentioned the David Attenborough programme yesterday, we still have very little understanding of bird and whale song.
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By eltonioni
#1891494
Paul_Sengupta wrote:
eltonioni wrote:We should have a bit of humility because our decedents will inevitably look back at us, laugh, and say "what on earth was Grandad thinking?"


Especially if the internet is used for research. Many of the things you've posted you could probably find people who still believe them. There's a difference between the fools of the time, common man, and the great thinkers of the age.

However some of today's great thinkers are making wild guesses about the universe of which we have very little understanding at present.

Someone mentioned the David Attenborough programme yesterday, we still have very little understanding of bird and whale song.


You are absolutely spot on Paul.

I have a hunch that the next Enlightenment will be the first real time translation of a pig / cow / sheep saying "please don't kill me".

That's going to be a rough time for humanity and it might not be very far off - we'll probably see it. God knows how we're going to justify it.
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By PeteSpencer
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1891496
Paul_Sengupta wrote:
Someone mentioned the David Attenborough programme yesterday, we still have very little understanding of bird and whale song.
.

During the fairly affluent 80s there was a fad for all the yummy mummies( though we didn’t know them as that yet) to use whale music recordings to help them through labour.

The labour ward echoed to the sound of clicking and eerie booming - I often imagined Jacques Cousteau would come splatting through the door. dripping water and seaweed :lol:
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By Miscellaneous
#1891520
eltonioni wrote:God knows how we're going to justify it.

To whom? :wink:
Remember the whole concept of justification and 'animal rights' is of our making. It's not something imposed on us externally.

(None of which is an attempt to excuse cruelty)
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By Propwash
#1891524
kanga wrote:But aviation lends itself to a great genre of aeronautical ghost stories :)

(Forsyth: The Shepherd
Masefield: The Montrose Ghost
various tales of particular hangars been haunted .. )

And:
P.W.Ames: "The Novice" from that collection of aviation short stories "Lines in the Sky" (still available on Amazon Kindle). :wink:

PW
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By kanga
#1891536
Miscellaneous wrote:.. the whole concept of justification and 'animal rights' is of our making. It's not something imposed on us externally.

(None of which is an attempt to excuse cruelty)


.. and it's a very cultural issue: my Inuit and First Nation contacts take very different attitudes:

- they shoot to wound, not to kill, caribou, so that they can use the animal's residual strength to walk it to the campsite for final despatch; but then use every part of the animal

- they traditionally hunted adult seals (not pups, 'whitecoats'), to get more meat, skin, bones - until outsiders' trading posts turned the white fur into a 'cash crop' for distant fashion houses. Then, much later, evocative pictures of pups being 'cruelly' clubbed on ice floes (no more 'gruesome' than the scenes in any 'Western' farming slaughterhouse), globally circulated, created pressure on Government of Canada greatly to curtail all seal hunting. This has led to significant poverty and malnutrition among Indigenous peoples for whom it was a vital subsistence resource.
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By PeteSpencer
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1891545
Paul_Sengupta wrote:
This anything to do with you, Pete? ;-)

https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/weird-suffolk-rougham-haunted-control-tower-2672690


Nope, but some members of the control tower association have seen ‘stuff’.

The control tower certainly is a spooky presence on the airfield skyline on a foggy Suffolk morning . I’m sure you can sometimes hear four big radials . :shock:
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By eltonioni
#1891547
kanga wrote:
Miscellaneous wrote:.. the whole concept of justification and 'animal rights' is of our making. It's not something imposed on us externally.

(None of which is an attempt to excuse cruelty)


.. and it's a very cultural issue: my Inuit and First Nation contacts take very different attitudes:

- they shoot to wound, not to kill, caribou, so that they can use the animal's residual strength to walk it to the campsite for final despatch; but then use every part of the animal

- they traditionally hunted adult seals (not pups, 'whitecoats'), to get more meat, skin, bones - until outsiders' trading posts turned the white fur into a 'cash crop' for distant fashion houses. Then, much later, evocative pictures of pups being 'cruelly' clubbed on ice floes (no more 'gruesome' than the scenes in any 'Western' farming slaughterhouse), globally circulated, created pressure on Government of Canada greatly to curtail all seal hunting. This has led to significant poverty and malnutrition among Indigenous peoples for whom it was a vital subsistence resource.


Very off topic now; :oops:

Traditionally, people moved to where there were the resources they needed, rather than hanging around for generations to suffer poverty and malnutrition. It seems curious that modern decadence and expectation hasn't bypassed 'traditional communities'. Environments have been stripped by all species since time immemorial and that's a reason to move, not to sit wishing for the old times. Presumably the kids have shipped out?