User:Ed Poor

Although I find Wikipedia a useful resource, it's not very accurate. Around half the time I look something up, I find an error that I can correct off the top of my head.

For eight years, I have aimed at nothing here other than an unbiased and reliably sourced encyclopedia. Even when I have a definite opinion on a topic which is at odds with the majority opinion of other contributors, I have never pushed for an article to endorse my own viewpoint or condemn theirs. Rather, I have worked to make the article describe all relevant viewpoints fairly.

"The cynic is his own worst enemy. It requires far less skill to run a wrecking company than it does to be an architect."

 Ya need to wake up and smell the fresh air
 and hear the seagulls calling
   and the surf rushing to the shore;
 feel the sand beneath your toes and more.

 Ever questing for that perfect balance
   between wave and board
 Swimming out eager for a thrill
   and riding happy homeward.

Factoids

Prejudice:

• William James wrote, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."]

Evolution:

• "Colin Patterson (1933-1998) was the Senior Principal Scientific Officer in the Paleontology Department of British Museum of Natural History in London, from 1962-1993."
• "Colin Patterson was employed in the palaeontology Department of The Natural History Museum in London from 1962 until 1993. He held an individual merit appointment beginning in 1974. Although retired at the age of sixty, he continued to work daily in the Museum until his sudden death in 1998."

Pseudoscience: "Pseudoscience, which involves passionate belief with no evidence, is often the result of convictions based on religion or politics."

Voodoo Science:

• "scientists, many of whom have impressive credentials, who craft arguments deliberately intended to deceive or confuse."

Scientific claims:

• The most important discovery of modern medicine is not vaccines or antibiotics, it is the randomized double-blind test, by means of which we know what works and what doesn't.

Relativity

Relativity and relativism:

• '... the physical anomalies that led to relativity can be explained without it. For example, the famous equation "E = mc2" was derived using relativity theory. But later Einstein re-derived it, this time without relativity.'

• Atomic clocks do slow down when they move through the gravitational field. But the slowing of clocks and the slowing of time are very different things. GPS has "relativistic" corrections to keep its clocks synchronized. But those corrections depart significantly from Einstein's theory. They refer clock motion not to the observer but to an absolute reference frame, centered on the Earth.

• Relativity and relativism arose at about the same time, and the scientific claims surely bolstered the cultural applications. Now there is skepticism about both.

GPS: "... because the satellites are constantly moving relative to observers on the Earth, effects predicted by the Special and General theories of Relativity must be taken into account to achieve the desired 20-30 nanosecond accuracy."

• "Special Relativity predicts that the on-board atomic clocks on the satellites should fall behind clocks on the ground by about 7 microseconds per day ..."
• "A calculation using General Relativity predicts that the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by 45 microseconds per day."

• In detail: "The engineers who designed the GPS system included these relativistic effects when they designed and deployed the system. For example, to counteract the General Relativistic effect once on orbit, they slowed down the ticking frequency of the atomic clocks before they were launched so that once they were in their proper orbit stations their clocks would appear to tick at the correct rate as compared to the reference atomic clocks at the GPS ground stations. Further, each GPS receiver has built into it a microcomputer that (among other things) performs the necessary relativistic calculations when determining the user's location."

Other

Intuition (Amar Bose):

• Bose says that his best ideas usually come to him in a flash. "These innovations are not the result of rational thought; it's an intuitive idea." Popular Science Dec 2004

Whole note: The most basic note is called the whole note because ... it lasts a whole measure [in common time].

"... the oppressed blacks on the Southern plantations identified with the Israelites in Egypt."

"... Black slaves in the South identified with Moses and the Israelites enslaved in Egypt..."

Feminism aims at returning society to an idealized primitive matriarchy.

North Koreans "suffer from an incredible blackout of knowledge about the outside world. The control on the population exceeds anything the world has seen to date." [1]

More about me

This user has been on Wikipedia for 22 years, 7 months and 17 days.