Recent content by dlorde

The problem here is the usual one - that the science behind the concept is fine, but the application of it (the applied science) is flawed. The practitioners, the forensic analysis companies (and government analysis labs), necessarily use shortcuts that are believed to be 'sufficiently...

Indeed! The full presentation is known as chimerism and is extremely rare. I understand that there is also a more common situation where pluripotent cells from the prenatal child get into the mother's bloodstream and can be found harmlessly distributed around the body, functioning in various...

I agree with that, but it's worth bearing in mind that Hyman was (is?) an expert statistician, magician, and an authority on experimental design, practice, procedure and analysis, so he'd be better placed to critique the experimental work. Together, they should have made the perfect review...

The Daily Mail seems to have cherry-picked positive reports for the article - understandable, as their interest is selling papers. The problem with this remote viewing research was that while Utts' report supported the evidence for it, her colleague on the panel, Dr. Ray Hyman, described her...

I can't really say - a major problem with anecdotal reports is that there's usually no way to conclusively confirm their accuracy, and, as I described at length above, there are a myriad ways that what we experience and/or remember can be faulty. The only way to be sure is to do an experiment...

That really would be amazing! Those are excellent books - I'm a very big fan of Feynman - he was someone who never simply accepted things he was told, he preferred to work them out for himself. I highly recommend "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman", it's not so much about science as about...

Yeah, I know. Sometimes it seems there's more junk science out there than correct science. I can wait until you unpack ;) Good luck with the move. Have you seen this Derren Brown video ? I think that's a good philosophy whether you believe in a next life or not. It's still on the list, and...

Apologies in advance for this long ramble, but you did ask ;) Dark matter is just the name for some form of physical matter that we can't detect using light or radio-waves. We know it is there because it affects the way galaxies rotate and interact (as if they had more matter than we can see)...

That's the big problem, Charles, there is nothing known to physics that can explain it. Nothing that could conceivably account for any part of it. That is a major reason why so many people are adamant that it can't be true. The nature of our individuality must involve some information -...

Hi Florence, I'm impressed you read those articles - I hope you were able to make sense of them. Yes (well, there are plasmas too, but let's not quibble). Not quite - The atoms in a solid are tightly bound to each other, they aren't free to move around and bounce off each other. Each atom...

Don't worry, There's plenty of good science that is counter-intuitive and sounds crazy at first. I'm just trying to help keep the science detail on the rails. Amid all the uncertainties and speculation, it's wise to be correct with the stuff that is known for sure.

I hope you won the battle! No, really, the measurement unit of energy is a joule, not a frequency. A joule is roughly the amount of energy (or work, or effort) it takes to lift, for example, a small apple. There are different forms of energy; sound energy involves vibration, and thermal...

Thanks - I thought so - I was kind of prompting for confirmation ;) Amen to that!

OK - I thought you might be able to point me to some decent evidence for the 'ancient aircraft' hypothesis - Google returns lots of results, but there's no quality filter... I'm afraid I simply won't have the time - it's three times longer than the bible! I'll try to find a decent synopsis. OK...

Physical evidence from observation and experiment. The topics in the text I listed previously contained descriptions that appear to contradict what has been learned from observation of the real world. Unfortunately, the text you posted has disappeared without explanation, so I am unable to be...