Large Hardon Collider

[Shiroikage]

Oh man, you guys are talking about interesting things and I need to study. I will check back tomorrow if I remember.

[Max™]

Know what I wanna hear more about?

DNA computing, every time I see talk of protein folding, I double-check to see if it's some new DNA computer wizardry.

Any of you protein folks heading into or heard anything new on that front?

[Khamsin]

Conventional mechanical/electrical computers were made to accomplish tasks beyond the capabilities of frail and limited biological beings such as ourselves. Stronger, faster, better memory and computational skills, don't need food or sleep, capable of working without distraction, etc. As technology advances, we move toward better, more capable, more efficient computers. It'll be ironic if the future of computing lies in biology and emulation of how living systems work on the molecular level. As if the most advanced computers and technology was right under our nose all along.

But I don't believe that will entirely be the case, since while biological computers such as our brains seem to be far better at certain tasks such as subjective information assimilation, identification of things based on vague or poorly defined criteria, decision making without having to clearly define all the rules, etc., we also seem to be fairly fallible both in our ability to be distracted, misled, imperfect memory recall, etc.

In the end, we'll need a powerful computer on the scale of proteins and molecules, with a human level of subjective analysis and decision making, but also keep perfect memory recall, nonvolatile storage, the ability to work at trillions of calculations per second, and the many other things that make conventional computers better than our brains.

[Max™]

http://www.madprime.org/article_imag...gonick_pg1.gif
http://www.madprime.org/article_imag...gonick_pg2.gif

http://www.madprime.org/articles/tag/computing

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/5229

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_nanotechnology

Hadn't looked into it since hearing about it years ago.


Also, a neat pic I found of proteins.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...views-1tim.png

[Psion]

Well that cleared up a lot of the confusion over DNA computers I had! Thanks for that comic!

On a totally different topic, and one that's considered highly controversial and a pseudoscience by most of the scientific community, I would like to know people's thoughts on the matter. Please keep an open mind, and use actual data to back it up, not stuff like "it's impossible" or "It's all wishful thinking and hallucinations". Basically, argue scientifically and not pseudoskeptically. The topic I wanted to ask about is that of Psi phenomena, and also where my name comes from! =D Now, what is Psi? Is it:

A) Psychic powers like ESP, psychokinesis?
B) Magick?
C) Chi/Ki/Qi energy?
D) The afterlife/reincarnation/ghosts?
E) All the above and more!

E is the correct answer, and the field of science that studies these strange phenomena is known as parapsychology. Some (a lot) of you have probably heard of it before, and like me, dismissed it as a bunch of quackery and hippies using their tape recorders and cameras in haunted mansions to find ghosts or the like. However, my damnable curiosity for any and everything unusual, and having Wiccan friends made me look into the field more to see just how badly they do their experiments.

...And found out that along with the few quacks and amateurs who try to "help" and wind up damaging the fields credibility, there's actually quite a lot of parapsychologists who conduct very strict standards in experiments, and even set the bar so to speak for a lot of methods used in other fields of science today, before it was widely discontinued after the 70's. However, the remaining institutes, despite extremely poor funding, still conducted things such as Ganzfeld experiments to test for telepathy, and accomplished an overall hit rate between 29 to 33%, instead of the 25% hit rate if it were merely chance. This is taking into account the file drawer effect, including all negative results, checking to make sure that there was no sensory leakage, and other rigorous controls checked by stage magicians to make sure that there was no way for subjects to cheat. With over 2500 sessions counted, the odds of their hit rate was anywhere from tens of thousands to one chance, to over a million billion to one. There's different statistics depending on how statisticians count the results, with the lowest odds occurring if the non standardized versions of the ganzfeld experiments are included. When only the standardized and properly done experiments are included, the odds are highest, including negative results. Anyways, for some background:

Ganzfeld is where halved ping pong balls are taped over the eyes of one person, and a bright red light is shined over them, to produce a static visual field. White noise is played through headphones of the participant as well, who is resting in a room shielded against noise and I think electrical signals and other stuff. (I forget x-x) The white noise and static visual field causes the participant's mind to encounter unchanging stimuli, which it then quickly tunes out. Having tuned out the two strongest senses off, and the third strongest of touch quickly phased out also by lying down and not moving, the brain quickly runs out of things to process and starts making shit up, causing the receiver to hallucinate. (You can try this at home btw.) In a completely different room, the "sender", another participant, is shown the receiver via camera and is given a picture or movie clip to be sent mentally to the receiver. After half an hour, provided the receiver hasn't fallen asleep (a real problem), and having spoken aloud any thoughts or things they see, the receiver is shown 4 targets via computer screen, and asked which target is correct. The odds should be 1 in 4, but in reality it is closer to 30% overall. Interestingly, creative individuals achieve much better scores overall than logical people, with participants from art institutes and musicians doing the best overall. Even more interestingly, practiced users of mediation and practiced psychics achieve the highest scores. Also, those who DON'T believe in psi overall achieve significant negative results, below chance. This is known as the sheep-goat effect, and it drags overall statistics down when including all results.

This is just one of many experiments conducted by parapsychologists around the world, and there's more spectacular cases as well, with some results from practiced mediums who weren't allowed to see or know participants beforehand, and some not even allowed to ask questions of them, were able to achieve correct data of anywhere from 70 to 90%.

Also, a recent study shows that 60% of americans have encountered a paranormal event, which is equal to about 230 million from the US alone. Britain had a similar study and similar results, and similar results worldwide. Some countries even view it as normal and not paranormal at all. With billions of people who've had experiences, the amount of anecdotal evidence is staggering even with only 1 in 1000 results not being explained by conventional science, hallucinations, mental instability, or misinterpretation of an event.

There are critics of such things of course, with James Randi being the most prominent example, as well as Susan Blackmoore (I think it was Blackmoore). However, while many point to the fact that the 1 Million dollar challange of Randi's being unclaimed still as proof the paranormal doesn't exist, I suggest that you take a look at the history of his challange, as well as the rules. In fact, the final decision comes from Randi whether something is paranormal or not, which is not scientific at all. Susan Blackmoore has been hailed as a parapsychologist gone skeptic as well, but her "10 years" of experiments turned out to be 2 years of hastily assembled and poorly controlled studies that still managed to achieve overall significant chances. (though due to poor controls, should not be counted on either way).

Despite the mountains of evidence pointing toward the paranormal being possible, psi phenomena are still regarded as pseudoscience, which seems rather strange. I realize that psi turning out to be a real effect would have an incredibly huge impact on all areas of science, especially considering the fact that a scientific observer would have to take his own biases into account for results, but the potential of such an effect would probably be the biggest thing since the ability to manipulate electricity and the discovery of how it relates to magnetism. If the way to generate and enhance psi effects were created, and the ability to manipulate it precisely found, we might find ourselves in a new era where contemporary medicine is augmented with healing intentions, new physics were discovered, and new ways of communication and manipulation are available.

This is all assuming it were real of course, but with so much evidence more than subtly hinting at it's existence, it seems quite logical to study it more in depth, considering the amount of potential it has. What do you all think?

[Shiroikage]

No.

[Kuya]

I will read your post someday.

[Cyn]

When you do, tl;dr it for me please.

[Kaylia]

I wear a tinfoil hat to protect myself from EM waves. You're never safe enough.

60% of americans have encountered a paranormal event

This statistics scare me more than the underbed-monster.

[Kaylia]

But seriously, wtf Psion? Don't bring up the word "serious studies" and telepathy...there is no such things.

Science so far aknowledge only 4 force (gravity, strong, weak, electromagnetic), and any physical interactions has to be influenced by one of these. If there was another that was strong enough to influence our every day life, something on par with the EM force, we would have seen it by now. None of these 4 forces could explain the weird shit you mentioned.

[Psion]

What is your evidence of telepathy and "no serious studies"? And according to survey, 60% of americans HAVE seen these effects. I'd compare it to electricity. Before we learned how to manipulate electricity, we had static electricity, easily made but weak, and lightning, powerful but uncontrollable. Likewise, the majority of people have encountered weak effects of some sort, and a few are "hit by lightning" so to speak. It probably is controllable if it exists, and more powerful that it seems, but because we don't understand how it works and how to make it, it seems weak to everyone. What's worse is because it's seemingly mentally influenced, you run into the same troubles with psychology, since the human mind is anything but predictable and standardized.

And please, a couple centuries ago scientists would have laughed and said quantum mechanics was a load of shit. You can't just bring in current models and say "THIS DOESN'T FIT WITH CURRENT SCIENCE, THEREFORE IT DOESN'T EXIST." The fact is, there is a lot of studies (and like it or not, they are serious and very guarded against errors) that show evidence of psi phenomena happening. As it is we don't fully understand everything in the universe, so you cannot say that psi doesn't exist based on existing models, because our existing model does not cover everything in existence. For all we know it might be quantum mechanical effects on a macro scale, something that seems impossible, but before it was thought that quantum mechanics could not happen in warm and wet enviornments, or on a larger than subatomic scale, which has been shown false in recent studies.

Try to suspend your disbelief and act like a scientist. check the data, not your common sense. I'm not saying psi exists for a fact, but there is evidence toward it and you cannot dismiss it out of hand without checking the evidence for it rigorously.

[Kuya]

It is funny how all these sort of things sound the same. Like the people who claim that 9/11 was staged or that global warming is a conspiracy. The format and character of these arguments are always so predictable.

edit: intelligent design too

[Kryssan]

All statistics given off hand are not worth investigating. At least quote Wiki or something.


As much as I love magic, I'm afraid I have to join the disbelief bandwagon on this. I would go so far to say there is no psi force or whatever. The closest imaginable thing to such a link would be a hyper-heuristic multi-dimensional quantum computer that is networked via a macroscopic quantum link. It would be 'telepathy' as far as humans could describe. Telekinetics would be something akin to perpetual motion/antigrav. You can generate a strong enough electrical field in a closed environment to 'simulate' an antigrav device - MythBusters showed one of these devices in an episode. But its not the real thing, and its not levitating. Criss Angel is an illusion artist - understand and accept that. To answer your question, I think psionics is just that - an illusion.


TL;DR: Refer to Clarke's Third Law. That is all.

[Tristam]

What the.....

[Kaylia]

What is your evidence of telepathy and "no serious studies"?

What is your evidence for telepathy and serious studies?

Were they able to reproduce it? No. Did they follow the scientific methods? Unlikely. Did they manage to conclude that telepathy or w/e do exists? No.

What is your evidence of telepathy and "no serious studies"? And according to survey, 60% of americans HAVE seen these effects. I'd compare it to electricity. Before we learned how to manipulate electricity, we had static electricity, easily made but weak, and lightning, powerful but uncontrollable. Likewise, the majority of people have encountered weak effects of some sort, and a few are "hit by lightning" so to speak. It probably is controllable if it exists, and more powerful that it seems, but because we don't understand how it works and how to make it, it seems weak to everyone. What's worse is because it's seemingly mentally influenced, you run into the same troubles with psychology, since the human mind is anything but predictable and standardized.

Your argument is invalid because when they saw electricity, they didn't knew shit. They couldnt see smaller or farther than what their eyes would show them.

Now, we can see at extremely small and large energy level, and our models describe with accuracy everything inbetween. The magic you're speaking off would need to intereact with us in a domain we understand well....that's very unlikely...almost magical.

[Psion]

All statistics given off hand are not worth investigating. At least quote Wiki or something.


As much as I love magic, I'm afraid I have to join the disbelief bandwagon on this. I would go so far to say there is no psi force or whatever. The closest imaginable thing to such a link would be a hyper-heuristic multi-dimensional quantum computer that is networked via a macroscopic quantum link. It would be 'telepathy' as far as humans could describe. Telekinetics would be something akin to perpetual motion/antigrav. You can generate a strong enough electrical field in a closed environment to 'simulate' an antigrav device - MythBusters showed one of these devices in an episode. But its not the real thing, and its not levitating. Criss Angel is an illusion artist - understand and accept that. To answer your question, I think psionics is just that - an illusion.


TL;DR: Refer to Clarke's Third Law. That is all.

You forgot the first two laws:

#1 When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
#2 The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

And seriously, do you really want me to give references to articles I've seen? That's gonna be a pain, but I'll try to find some. <(_._)> Granted, with any field its important to take anything with a large (cellar) of salt, but there's still quite a bit of studies that show it's not all the quackery that it's cracked up to be.

[Kaylia]

Magics can exists, we can't disprove that. We can't disprove God, or unicorn either. What we can say however is that no "magical phenomenon" ever happened in front of a camera, or lab instrument, or if they happened, they were so insignificant they were too small too be seen (and would not have any impact on our every day life since they are so small).

And seriously, do you really want me to give references to articles I've seen? That's gonna be a pain, but I'll try to find some. <(_._)> Granted, with any field its important to take anything with a large (cellar) of salt, but there's still quite a bit of studies that show it's not all the quackery that it's cracked up to be.

Please do.

[Kryssan]

Actually, I didn't.


No old scientists are refuting you, and nothing is impossible - merely mathematically improbable. Still, my hand hasn't passed through the table yet.



And yeah, generally, when you want to invoke scientific discussion, you, I dunno, provide sources?

[Psion]

I'm working on it I'm working on it... Give me a bit more time to find more articles. I'm just doing a quick search so I haven't read them all yet, but if you want sources I'll make sure not to disappoint. Found three so far.

[Max™]

Sure you guys wouldn't rather have me ramble about gravity, or time, or posting random pictures of stars, or "quoting wiki to hide a lack of understanding" instead of this?