Begging your pardon, Sir, but it has been in my experience that of the many posters here, Q.E.D. is one of those least likely to be full of shit.
Besides, this is GD. For such a claim, either a cite or an apology would be in order. :dubious:
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Well, I guess there’s a first time for everything.
Do you not read for context or what? Take a look at the bolded, indented bit just above the comment you take exception to. Now take a look just below the comment you objected to. You should see a bit of text underlined – that would be a cite demonstrating that Drake is a highly-respected scientist at the forefront of a very serious and viable research effort, not some has-been loony with a tinfoil hat. His current estimate was not pulled out of the air forty years ago but is based on the best information currently available. Drake most certainly is due respect, not smarmy condescension.
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Great. Not only do you not read your own cites, you don’t read your own posts. To refresh your memory, you originally claimed
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When I pointed out that the most liberal estimates are actually in the millions, you rather snarkily called BS. In fact you were full of shit but instead of admitting it and moving on, you’re compounding your error by pretending the discussion was about something else.
It’s tempting to vanquish the likes of Lekatt by stretching the truth to make your point that much more devasting. But it is always wrong to do so.
Those who would fight monsters must take care lest they become monsters themselves. – Nietzsche
hahaha
Here’s what’s funny about it. I accept eye witness testimony. Debunkers reject eye witness testimony, at least on any topic they don’t believe in…
HTH
Respect must be earned, not blindly thrown at someone with a fancy title. Unless Drake has access to secret information unavailable to the interested public he is extrapolating all over the universe from one point, Earth. Excessive extrapolation is bad science, no matter who is doing it.
I do like your tinfoil hat touch though…
So you know somebody or have heard from somebody that saw the Military taking an interest in Crop circles? Or is this just a barb at skeptics in general because you can’t think of anything better to say?
And we all know how reliable eyewitness testimony is, right?
It’s just barely possible that that someone went to Disneyland as a kid and got hugged by bugs bunny, but when a third of the people who are asked claim they had that experience, you’ve got to wonder about the utility of eyewitness accounts: Things We Clearly Remember, Though They Never Happened
The crowd was 275,827 at the game when Hank Aaron broke Ruth’s lifetime home run record. There are 185 “Hank Aaron record” balls at last count.
Yes, but according the the New age crowd, this is not existant. People remember things clearly, never lie, never confabulate, and never are mistaken. Eyewitness testimony is 100% accurate, and if DNA tests prove otherwise, well, science is hokey. Those skeptics and rationalists are all close minded!
That is the funniest thing I’ve read all week, and you have some strong competition.
Answering the OP’s original question:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2002/crops.html
That should be plenty of ammunition to use against your friend.
As I’m sure you know, there are eyewitnesses and there are eyewitnesses. Debunkers appear to never accept any eyewitness testimony. There is a balanced middle ground, but my contacts with debunkers leads me to the conclusion that they have no interest in being balanced.
I do not accept all eyewitness testimony. However I don’t make the mistake the debunkers do of throwing out all eyewitness testimony just because some of it is bad. It’s a fairly easy concept to grasp, even if it’s not very popular in some places.
HTH
I participated, albeit unwittingly, in an experiment waaaay back in high school which convinced me that eyewitness testemony is unreliable enough that it should be the last thing considered by a jury or anyone else.
I took part in a seminar for high school journalists in 1960. About a hundred of us from several Southern California districts were gathered at Alhambra high school. We were listening to what we thought was a lecture on journalism when a man ran onto the stage, lunged at the speaker, knocked him down and then ran off the stage. When the crowd settled down, we were told that what we had just seen was an experiment. We were to go to several rooms with typewriters, where we would compose a news story describing what we had seen, with particular attention to the appearances of the “assailant.”
You can guess the outcome. Of a hundred (a round figure, after 42 years I don’t remember the exact number) stories, no two were the same as to the description of the assailant, or what he was wearing. Soime even disagreed as to which wing of the stage he approached from.
Eyewitness were we all, and confused.
I rest my caase.
Hey! They’re also probing a few rednecks’ anuses and sucking the blood out of cattle! Let’s give credit where credit’s due!
Criticizing extraterrestrial’s recreational habits is just not PC anymore. We have to learn tolerance.
Sigh. Another credulist. You sound like lekatt and those laughable yahoos in Signs who couldn’t reason their way through an open door.
It’s not up to intelligent, honest, and rational people to prove that all crop circles are man-made, it’s up to you guys in the tinfoil hats who have to prove with compelling, high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific evidence that even one of them was made by extraterrestrial or other paranormal forces! YOU have the full burden of proof here, not us.
Beyond the fact that you’ve refused to provide any credible evidence that they are, let me remind you that some of the leaders of the military/CIA are just as credulous, ignorant, and desperate for magic as you foil-hats are. Why would you ever think otherwise? Hell, they actually funded “research” into remote viewing! How much more evidence that they can be stupidly credulous do you need?
You better get used to being a prisoner forever, then!
Somewhat less experimentally, I once helped as part of the technical crew for a small- very small- local theater group. I did general gofer and construction work.
In one play- I can’t even recall the name- a character was supposed to throw a knife at another actor as he/she was exiting through a door in the backdrop scenery.
We rigged a quick-and-dirty device on the wall of the backdrop, with a couple of bands of surgical tubing. When a tech backstage, looking through a peephole, saw the actor “throw” the knife (and palm it) he- the tech- would simply yank a cotter pin, which would drive this fake knife blade out from the wall with a satisfying “thunk”. The lights went down on that Act immediately thereafter.
After one show, a friend of the throwing actor came up and asked, incredulously, how he had learned to throw with such accuracy.
The actor showed the man the trick, and how it worked. The man said, directly, as he was looking at the spring-loaded wall gadget, something like “that’s not possible, I saw the knife fly through the air!”
This man was looking at the mechanism that did the trick, and had been told by a friend of his how the trick worked- and had it demonstrated for him- and did not believe it.
Sadly, the world is full of people like him, and lekatt. Even in the face of the truth, they’d rather believe the lie because the lie is more interesting.
If there is no external evidence to validate the eyewitness, then how can you sort out the fact from the fiction?
How do you know which eyewitness testimony to accept, while making absolutely certain that confirmation bias isn’t sneaking in?
Imagine a chemist who, after conducting a round of experiments, learns that a few of his test tubes were dirty. How does he determine which set of results to keep and which to throw out? Can we let the chemist himself decide? Of course not.
Recently, there’s been a bit of a dustup over the Bush administration’s use of eye witness accounts and personal testimony to “proove” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to the security of the united states. Many of the intelligence experts who examined the data found it unconvincing, but others believed that the accounts were accurate, and the threat was real. Now that our troops are actually in Iraq searching for WMD’s, it turns out that they’re as scarce on the ground as “genuine” crop circles. Of course, the standard of proof used by cerealogists seems to be even lower than that of our political leadership.