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11th August 2020, 02:35 PM | #2241 |
Penultimate Amazing
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I don't get along too well with complexity, I guess, and no doubt there are more efficiently scientifc ways of going about things, but I would surmise that if (and it's a big big if indeed!) one wished to evaluate things honestly, it might be possible to do the test in more than one stage, and without such elaboration as seems to be contemplated here.
For example, one could do a blind test without any consideration of what the modem is doing, and how much output it is putting out. Just do the test. If headaches occur in a pattern that does not correspond with on times for the modem, it does not matter what the modem is capable of, because you're getting headaches with it off. If headaches occur that correspond with modem on times, or if no headaches occur at all, it may or may not matter what the modem is capable of. Further, more precise testing would be warranted then. But the first possibility would be fairly definitive. If headaches occur when the modem is off, or if they stop while the modem is on, then you have convincing evidence that the modem is not causing them. The test would have to be done honestly, of course, but if the test is truly blind and if both parties to the test keep honest records of time, it would be a useful first step. Why is this so hard to do? |
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11th August 2020, 03:56 PM | #2242 |
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Note also,
So (the rule of) PS really only did some work experience as part of the courses he never attended. Students doing work experience generally got stuck with filing or photocopying back in the day. Perhaps Joburg City Power had really good photocopying equipment? |
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11th August 2020, 04:29 PM | #2243 |
Illuminator
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11th August 2020, 09:17 PM | #2244 |
Penultimate Amazing
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These are the details that call PartSkeptic's account into question. I funded my way through uni by working as a kitchen porter. (not a fun job). Occasionally, I was pressed into duty as a silver service waitron. And I had no clue what I was doing. They just chucked a purple waistcoat on me and sent me forth. Sink or swim was the order of the day.
Nothing wrong with that per se, one does what one must to make ends meet. The problem here is that PS thinks such pointless anecdotes lend him credibility. We have all been there in some way, shape or form as we got to where wherever we are at now. PS thinks that this means he is an expert on whatever. This would be akin to me claiming to be a gourmet genius chef by dint of washing the pots and pans. That is an absurd notion. At best, PS was merely told what it was and instructed not to touch it as he earned a few quick bucks. How do I know? Well in the ensuing decades, I have hired and fired hundreds. I know for a fact that one does not allow a spotty teenager to drive a screw, or a forklift, or anything that matters let alone a spectrum analyser. Not happening under my watch. This mad claim just gets added to the Abe Simpson heap of anecdotes. Likely with an onion tied to the belt as was the style at the time. |
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Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my hard drive? ...love and buttercakes... |
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11th August 2020, 09:29 PM | #2245 |
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The other odd thing is that City Power Johannesburg was founded/incorporated in 2000 and licensed to trade only by 21 Dec 2001.
By my reckoning I’m 10 years younger than PS, yet finished my Engineering degree time at University in 1985. Perhaps he was a mature-aged student. |
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Vote like you’re poor. A closed mouth gathers no feet" "Ignorance is a renewable resource" P.J.O'Rourke "It's all god's handiwork, there's little quality control applied", Fox26 reporter on Texas granite |
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11th August 2020, 09:46 PM | #2246 |
Illuminator
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11th August 2020, 10:03 PM | #2247 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Everyone's journey is different. I completed my degree in 1992 because I thought I knew it all, and wandered of into the school of life. That school taught me that I certainly did not know it all. Back to school for me after three lost years thinking I knew better than everyone else. Such is the arrogance of callow youth. To this day, I regret those lost years spent in the idiotic delusion that I was smarter than everyone else.
Lesson learned the hard way, I guess. Scroll forward a generation, and my eldest is just starting to learn that hard lesson. Let him learn it the hard way. I need to step back and watch it happen. Painful as it is. I cannot teach him, he has to discover it all of his lonesome. Else the lesson is worthless. |
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Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my hard drive? ...love and buttercakes... |
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11th August 2020, 10:32 PM | #2248 |
Penultimate Amazing
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So 60+ thereabouts. Not really a problem, is it?
It is more subtle. I watched my own long dead father decline over time. It is a cruel thing. The decision to place him in a nursing home was really distressing. The turning point was when I rocked in and found him on the floor. And then my sis rocked in with his prescription. He insisted that he was "safe" to live alone while lying on the floor. After some argument, we simply said "if you can climb off the floor, then you have a point to make". He lust lay on the floor unable to even stand up. And claimed that he could if he wanted to. But he preferred to be prostrate on the concrete floor because it was somehow better. Than something unidentified. |
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Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my hard drive? ...love and buttercakes... |
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11th August 2020, 10:44 PM | #2249 |
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11th August 2020, 10:47 PM | #2250 |
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Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my hard drive? ...love and buttercakes... |
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11th August 2020, 11:47 PM | #2251 |
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Whoops
Let me double check what I remembered reading..... "When I was about 25 in 1975, I unknowingly ate a marijuana cookie at a party. I hallucinated for the rest of the evening. The universe vanished and I joined the singular cosmic intelligence." http://www.internationalskeptics.com...&postcount=467 |
11th August 2020, 11:56 PM | #2252 |
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12th August 2020, 01:26 AM | #2253 |
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12th August 2020, 02:19 AM | #2254 |
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12th August 2020, 07:24 AM | #2255 |
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Of course. You don't seem to realize that he, being utterly brilliant, created his own calendar. It uses a truncated Lunar Calendar with Tuesday and Thursday removed as those days make him nauseous, additionally he didn't like the traditional 24 hour day so he removed the '4' because he doesn't like 4 and so it became just twenty-hours. With these and other modifications he removed ten fake and unnecessary years from calendar - which no one needed.
In a special innovation he has decided that starting in 2022 the years will start going backwards and he'll also announce that he's found a new number between 5 and 6. |
12th August 2020, 09:12 AM | #2256 |
Penultimate Amazing
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While most of the above is true, I should, feeling a little usage-geeky this morning, point out that taken literally the above statement teeters on the edge of impermissibility. Certain days may indeed make PS feel nauseated. Whether they make him nauseous is a matter of individual opinion best left unspoken!
I, for example, am almost completely immune, thanks to my copper bracelet and a daily regimen of alla-bolla-zonga beans. |
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Like many humorless and indignant people, he is hard on everybody but himself, and does not perceive it when he fails his own ideal (Molière) A pedant is a man who studies a vacuum through instruments that allow him to draw cross-sections of the details (John Ciardi) |
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12th August 2020, 10:08 AM | #2257 |
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12th August 2020, 04:49 PM | #2258 |
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13th August 2020, 01:12 AM | #2259 |
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It is entertaining reading his earlier posts, in other threads, as it helps understand his scattergun method of getting "hits".
Originally Posted by PartSkeptic in 2016
Same thread
Originally Posted by PartSkeptic in 2019
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13th August 2020, 09:15 AM | #2260 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my hard drive? ...love and buttercakes... |
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13th August 2020, 11:21 AM | #2261 |
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Tat may be true, but he should look at history. Die-offs may takes hundreds/thousands of years, changes will be subtle and unless he has a photographic mind he won't notice any difference in his lifetime. Of course there is always the cataclysmic event like a 6 mile asteroid crashing into the Earth, which speeds up the process.
It has been +/- 650 my so we might be due for another event(I'm not predicting or wishing, just indicating we have been struck in the past and we will be struck again by a monster it is only a question of when). |
13th August 2020, 12:52 PM | #2262 |
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It's pretty pointless wishing for an "I told you so" moment when either all the people you want to tell that to are dead, or you yourself are dead.
Oh, in the afterlife? Looking down on all the skeptics suffering in eternal damnation because they wouldn't believe you and were nasty to you? Nah. You'd need an afterlife, some sort of heaven and hell setup, and the ability to think impure thoughts when part of the eternal cosmos strumming a harp and stuff. I'll stick with pointless. |
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13th August 2020, 01:18 PM | #2263 |
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13th August 2020, 02:37 PM | #2264 |
Penultimate Amazing
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And that just gets us into a whole new bucket of WTF? Will I be reunited with my hex-wife? I would rather chew razor blades. That would be worse than hell. There is a reason that we divorced. Well, many reasons. Being stuck with that loon would be a fate worse than death. And an eternity of singing "Hallelulah" to a total cockwomble of a god? No thanks.
This then leads believers to make wild claims about what "heaven" is really like on the basis of **** all and they always fail miserably. Now, I have the advantage of having had the experience of the OOBE experience on the slab, complete with the traditional "light at the end of the tunnel" crapfest, so I know for a fact that the whole edifice of that nonsense is built out of bricks of BS. If anything, it confirmed my atheism. ETA: Apparently, I survived. |
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Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my hard drive? ...love and buttercakes... |
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16th August 2020, 02:15 PM | #2265 |
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Part Skeptic did retract their ability to detect wifi within 15 minutes to be fair.
PartSkeptic replied with the following The real question should be, what is causing PartSkeptics symptoms when PartSkeptic acknowledges that it's only max power that gives the headache? what is causing the symptoms the rest of the time? |
16th August 2020, 04:49 PM | #2266 |
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Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my hard drive? ...love and buttercakes... |
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17th August 2020, 03:32 AM | #2267 |
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Well, this is the issue, From the very beginning, PS was insistent that his symptoms were caused by EMF, and no other explanation was remotely plausible.
Now he seems to have realised that he has effectively disproved his own conjecture, and is now looking for a way to prove that it really is the evil wi-fi's that give him headaches (plus, it must be added, an enormous number of other symptoms as well), so he can salvage some kind of credibility. At least in his own eyes, I guess. |
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19th August 2020, 04:42 AM | #2268 |
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19th August 2020, 05:48 AM | #2269 |
Schrödinger's cat
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Yes, it's possible that everything PartSkeptic has ever posted here is a lie. It's possible everything I've ever posted here is a lie. It's possible everything you've ever posted here is a lie. It's possible everything every forum member has ever posted here is a lie. But if you start by assuming that, then it's impossible to have any kind of discussion here at all. Why even read the forum, let alone join it and contribute to it, if that's your starting assumption?
My policy has always been to start by assuming that the people I'm conversing with here are posting in good faith, and only question that assumption when given good reason to do so. PartSkeptic has never given me such reason. However inconsistent, mistaken and even, occasionally, downright delusional what he posts may seem, he has always seemed to me to sincerely believe what he is saying. |
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"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett |
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19th August 2020, 05:50 AM | #2270 |
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It's a week since PartSkeptic last visited the forum, this was his last exchange:
So it looks like Jim_MDP has given PartSkeptic the excuse he needed to run away. Maybe he has finally grasped the impossibility of the task he set himself when he agreed to do a proper blind test. I just wish I could entertain any hope at all that he'd learned something from his failure. Oh well, at least I can stop hitting my head against this particular brick wall. |
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"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett |
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19th August 2020, 07:20 AM | #2271 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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19th August 2020, 08:42 AM | #2272 |
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The really annoying thing is when he does return, I'll know I'll be unable to resist making yet another attempt to talk some sense into him.
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"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett |
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19th August 2020, 09:37 AM | #2273 |
Penultimate Amazing
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The degree to which we have to accept PartSkeptic's anecdotes, or even to pay attention to them, is the degree to which he has based any cognizable argument on them. Some of them are just plain irrelevant. But he intends them in some cases to establish his authority as an experimenter. They are meant to create confidence in the reader that the investigation into the causes of his headaches, or the effects of electromagnetic field energy, is being conducted responsibly.
As Pixel42 so adroitly put it, that's irrelevant. Unverified anecdotes are not evidence of competence. And evidence of competence is not empirical data obtained under justified controls that render it evidence that tests a hypothesis. The overarching problem with PartSkeptic's argument is that it's a giant non sequitur as far as skeptics are concerned. If the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, then to what extent does it matter whether the premise is true? We can believe every word of PartSkeptic's anecdotes and still be disobliged to consider it evidence for a conclusion that can only be drawn on the basis of experiment. And a lawyer writing a persuasive brief will always argue the alternatives, because you never know how a judge will want to decide. The desired decision might be, "The proponent is not judged to be competent, so it doesn't matter what is alleged to follow from claims of competence." Or it might be, "The conclusion being drawn does not follow from the proffered premise, even if the premise were true." Both are correct reasoning. But inasmuch as some of the anecdotes are patently false, and that he doubles down on them when challenged, ignoring the anecdotes altogether leaves us with the wrong impression that this is an good-faith debate with sound-minded participants. If PartSkeptic legitimately believes in the things he says which cannot be true, then there is something going on that we can't resolve in this venue. And yes, trying to talk sense into people who didn't reason themselves into the delusions they express is a losing battle every time. Whether PartSkeptic's medical claim can be tested blindly with the resources at hand is still a viable, open question in my opinion. But what is evident to me is that the role he wants us to play in that exercise is not that of advisor. I believe he either wants us to accept his anecdotal findings -- his vague recollections of whether the wifi corresponds to his headaches -- or dismiss them in a way that he can consider inappropriate. |
19th August 2020, 11:58 AM | #2274 |
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19th August 2020, 05:04 PM | #2275 |
Illuminator
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I think you, Jay and others did great work, that educated all of us a little bit more, as a side benefit. However, people have different thresholds and when Partskeptic was outright lying about Jews overwhelming pre-war Berlin and deserving what they got from the Nazis, it seemed reasonable that the majority of forum members would switch to attack mode.
There were other little hints in Partskeptic's posts that did suggest he was a full on racist. |
19th August 2020, 11:47 PM | #2276 |
Illuminator
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You are astute enough to have figured out the trigger to why I no longer post. However, it is not because I doubt my claims or the impossibility. I am old-fashioned and draw the line at some one swearing at me. BTW - I hope you did not get a headache from hitting your head. The emf test is now a low priority. I will post when I do it and get a result. Success or fail. Otherwise, I see no point in any further exchanges. |
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20th August 2020, 08:36 AM | #2277 |
Mistral, mistral wind...
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If you're not going to post a detailed protocol of the tests that got you any particular results, then there's not much point in posting the results; you'll just be going round and round again with folks who will have no reason to believe anything you say because you haven't given them any.
If you're gonna flounce, just flounce already. |
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20th August 2020, 08:45 AM | #2278 |
Penultimate Amazing
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The forum gives you the ability to avoid seeing posts from people who you believe are offensive to you. I would argue it gives you more credibility to avail yourself of that feature than to pretend to be offended every other day at how badly you think you're being treated. Especially when you've ignored so much substantive discussion instead.
Quote:
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20th August 2020, 09:05 AM | #2279 |
Mistral, mistral wind...
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Kind of reminds me of Michel H and his interminable "telepathy tests." The claim was simple enough, and the test designed around the claim, at least in principle, seemed sound enough. But it wasn't bad enough that he had no way to control for people who simply guessed the correct answer (out of four) instead of "receiving" it; he then had to invent "credibility ratings," based on such things as a respondent's internet name or the tone with which they answered, so he could discard answers that didn't help his thesis.
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I'm tired of the bombs, tired of the bullets, tired of the crazies on TV; I'm the aviator, a dream's a dream whatever it seems Deep Purple- "The Aviator" Life was a short shelf that came with bookends- Stephen King |
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20th August 2020, 09:58 AM | #2280 |
Penultimate Amazing
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