Very interesting, eyeballfryer. I’m such a wimp though, I think I only step off the high dive, not jump! Interesting thoughts to consider! I know I don’t like the zero-grav feel. It definitely has its own feel. Something that might make me tend to contradict what you said, is this bad ‘feeling’ SEEMS to get ‘worse’ (or better, if you like that thing) the more I accelerate. Maybe I’m wrong. I haven’t spent a lot of time freefalling, unlike some people I’ve known.
I have been thinking for some time that the easiest way for me to get rich is to write a high school physics text book that explains that there is a theory that the Earth goes around the sun, but actually, as we can all see, the sun rises and sets and travels in an arc through the sky. So the Earth is the center of the solar system. I plan to sell these to all the schools that teach that the jury is still out on Evolution.
[Unrelated: the following is a diversion, but this whole thread is a diversion, so if you (the reader) are not up to some stimulating/challenging, if long, reading, skip it instead of complaining, I’m not forcing you to read.]
You can make fun of them if you want, but your confidence doesn’t mean you know more. The way evolution is most-commonly taught, is not backed by actual scientific evidence. I say this with no religious dog in the race. Actually the commonly-understood understanding of Evolution seems like a religious dogma, the way it’s insisted with vehemence, fear, conflict of interest, group pressure and negativity, to compensate for lack of physical evidence. It’s such a badly-formed idea, that they had to create out of thin air, the so-called “Theory of punctuated equilibrium” to actually explain away the need for evidence for their “theory”—and it’s not a theory, not what they’re prognosticating. Evolution may happen, but not the way it’s currently taught/understood/accepted. The way it’s taught today could be a hypothesis, yes (the bar for being a hypothesis is very low, which is why they don’t want to label it that). Theory? No. BUT… the so-called “theory of punctuated equilibrium” is even more flimsy, it’s just a creation out of whole cloth. It’s a so-called “theory” which says that the reason there isn’t physical evidence of actual morphing of one animal to another, is because a specie spends eons not evolving, but— but— then, when it DOES evolve, it’s SO fast, it’s just too fast to leave a findable fossil record! It’s literally a ‘theory’ which says ‘we don’t need physical evidence for this other thing to be a theory’. So, a theory is supposed to be based on physical evidence, but since it’s lacking, it can’t be a theory, only a hypothesis. So they introduce ANOTHER theory, which has even LESS physical evidence—NONE, to be exact, to prop up the previous theory. Make sense?
So, ‘my theory doesn’t have enough physical evidence to support it, so I’m going to create another theory, which uses zero evidence, which says that my theory doesn’t need physical evidence to be true.’ So I’ll play by their own rules: the “theory” of evolution is not supported by evidence. You DO have a very obvious ‘connect the dots’ in the fossil record. But that’s the problem: it’s a bunch of quite well-defined, SEPARATE dots. Lots of this type discovered, and lots of this other type discovered, which looks similar, but not a smooth, continuous morphing. Just a bunch here, and a bunch of the others there. If it were the way it was claimed, we couldn’t have this well-defined, common specie and that well-defined common specie, they’d all be in their own smooth, infinitely-variable state of evolution. But that’s not what we see from the fossil record. So, they try to get you to believe these species are all morphing from each other, when in the evidence just isn’t there, it’s something else. It MAY still be true, but it’s NOT supported by evidence enough to be a theory as widely- and emphatically-insisted upon as it is (methinks they do insist too much), and certainly not to be considered “fact”, as you will commonly hear from sources of wisdom like TV show “South Park”.
I’m not saying nothing’s happening, I’m not saying each specie got created individually along the timeline by some metaphysical Creator. What I’m saying is that the dominant model purposely leaves out evidence due to bias. This so-called theory of Evolution has been weaponized to destroy people’s belief in God. I’m not saying that from my standpoint: that is how it IS used, and they make sure college kids take the courses so they lose their faith. And it works; I know several people who became atheists, at least for years, as a result specifically of their college course in Evolution. I actually recently concluded that this was one of the major reasons kids are so encouraged to go to college, even though it teaches very little and does not seem to give most people a professional or salary advantage anymore (and certainly not in my experience). The thing is, the people I referred to who became atheists, didn’t realize that they weren’t being told the whole story. I also don’t necessarily think their belief in God should’ve been restored just upon realizing that they were essentially lied-to or given a slanted viewpoint in that class, but I’ve noticed that’s what happens too. So, this whole evolution “thing” is a very powerful idea, even if wrongly so. This is known, so it is used for political purposes.
Prognosticators of current evolution hypotheses also gloss over the obvious question if a specie evolved into another, why are there still fish in the ocean, why are there still algae, why are old, original, or ancient species still here, if they’ve evolved beyond that? If it’s better to be an animal than a plant, why are there still plants? HOW the hell did an animal evolve out of a plant? How many animal-plants are there in the fossil record?
But above all, the biggest lie spun is that all evolution is done by random mutation. I don’t know if that is more of a whopper than life was created by sheer random chemical reactions or not—I won’t go into the creation of life itself, but religionists due to their interests have covered that area pretty well, even from a mathematical chance perspective (which I don’t necessarily espouse, but found very interesting). I don’t have a personal interest, I just want things being taught without bias; that doesn’t happen.
The biggest thing they leave out is that the specialness of DNA. They will not touch the topic that DNA appears to have intelligence of its own. That is too problematic, which is why they dogmatically say that ALL changes in lifeforms are by mutation (the superlative itself invokes suspicion, and risks weakness). Basically: everything by accident, not on purpose. In my opinion, it’s a spiritual message being sent, and one I believe is false, which is why more lies and obfuscation are needed to “support” the idea.
It’s very clear to me that life can adapt with a purpose. I don’t know about evolving into a completely different life form, but DNA (or some essence of the organism, but it does mostly appear to be DNA) does appear to be able to change itself on on purpose. I don’t know how it knows; that’s not the question though. The question is, does it know. In other words, are changes in DNA code made from ANYTHING other than mutations. I say yes. And it’s clear that DNA has some kind of awareness of its own. And it would logically or at least apparently have to, if it ADDS INFORMATION TO ITSELF. Where is it even getting that information from? How does DNA know how to counter a problem and write new code that’s a solution for it? I mean, think about this. DNA is SELF-WRITING CODE, which comes up with answers to problems, using information for a solution that we can’t explain how it would have access to (or even ‘what’ information it would be accessing!). We have code, but do we have code like that? I mean, to borrow an Einsteinian term: it’s spooky, but they want to say it’s just random mutations.
This should be studied. But it’s mostly ignored, due to bias/embarrassment/closed-mindedness… which are all unscientific. But science to me resembles religion to me, now more than ever). It’s my understanding this is the whole concept behind Intelligent Design. Not that a god did it, but that DNA (or something relating to it) is capable of deliberate, purposeful changes, and has some kind of awareness or intelligence. You don’t need any esoteric belief for this, but staunch atheists tend to run from it or be reviled by it, due to their own bias, because of what the implications (somewhere in their psyche) might be, even if those implications are not necessarily true. Similar to how atheists seem to feel a need to believe that consciousness does not survive death, because they seem to think that that would prove or support the existence of God, when it doesn’t, necessarily (though it certainly doesn’t hurt that concept, either—and therein lies a beginning the problem). An atheist will conveniently solve the problem by just insisting that consciousness does not survive death, and then use that somehow as evidence that God doesn’t exist, which would be a logical fallacy.
DNA is, quite obviously, code. We all know what code is now in the context of computers, but this concept wasn’t even around 200 years ago. DNA is obviously code on its face, it even resembles binary. But it’s not:it’s trinary. More advanced, easily argued, than binary. DNA even has its own error-correction mechanism! Telomeres, and I believe other aspects which bear a striking and obvious similarity to parity data or cyclic redundancy checks in computers. It becomes difficult, at least to the point of straining credulity, to argue that “evidence supports” the concept that nature created self-correcting trinary code/language all by a series of mis-steps or random happenstances, with no deliberateness or intent anywhere.
The more you learn about it, the more it doesn’t seem this way. You start seeing the fingerprints of… something, someone, I don’t know. I don’t take a stab, because really, from the evidence-based model we don’t have enough info, we haven’t even passed “Go” yet; so we should focus on “what”, not “why” or “who”.
But this is, to my understanding, really all “Intelligent Design” is trying to say. That message, however, is warped, mischaracterized, and lied-about by the religiously-oriented dogmatic, biased, conflicted-of-interest atheist wing which has effectively taken over the educational system in the US and plenty of other places, and won’t allow these ideas to be taught or even considered. Did your Biology teacher ever describe DNA to your class as code? None of my teachers did. That would open up too many undesirable questions… which could risk defeating the purpose of the lesson (which wasn’t really about biology). And on the concept of Intelligent Design (the way I understand it), it’s obvious it must be mischaracterized and lied-about in order to justify suppressing it. If I’ve not perfectly expressed the main concept of Intelligent Design (I’m not sure anyone has a lock or ownership on the concept), I’m sure I at least characterize it better and fairer than the pro-evolutionists.
There are animals with very specialized capabilities and body parts, which would only begin to be functional when that part is fully formed. The way mutations work, that part would not keep mutating and mutating until it was a totally working, amazingly specialized part. Along the way, according to the dogma, such an animal, or line of animals, would not be as successful in mating, while carrying around a gimpy body extention which will someday become a very specialized body part but is now just dead weight. An extra set of wings. Or wings at all, for instance. That is not something that’s just gonna grow out of a whole line of animals for no reason, and then on top of that, in the meantime win the Darwin ‘mating game’ race of highest reproduction rates while carrying around all that useless weight, until those parts finally (and supposedly randomly) become functional. If this were true, species would be carrying around all sorts of tumor-like protrusions, virtually all of which would never form into anything useful, and which would also hamper reproduction.
Something I’ve also thought about is chromosomes. You don’t hear anyone talk about this one. At what point does a lifeform go to a completely different number of chromesomes? Who’s the first one to pop out with extra (or fewer) chromosomes? Does just one baby animal one day, pop out with an extra or fewer pair? Or does a whole species one day just start being born with a larger or smaller number of chromosomes than their parents? The ridiculousness becomes obvious quickly, because we see no evolution of just part of a chromosome. How would a whole set just appear or disappear anyway? There is no smooth morphing when it comes to a chromosome. It’s either there, or it’s not.
Let’s suppose it’s possible for a single organism to reproduce an offspring with a totally new set of chromosomes. How would that organism then be able to reproduce with its like kind—or anything else for that matter? Because there’d be a different number of chromosomes—by definition, the genetics would be different. And let’s say even that would happen. How would it then become persistent? There are too many obvious problems here, which you just never hear raised.
So the question is how a whole group or specie just suddenly has an extra (or less) set of chromosomes. To challenge people who think they are educated who like to use their belief in the hypothesis of evolution as a way to make themselves feel superior, I sometimes ask people how many chromosomes a chimpanzee has. Of course, they don’t know. The answer is 48. Then I ask them how many chromosomes humans have? This one, they should know. I’ve never met someone who does, though. So, I tell them to guess. They usually guess something equal to, or greater than 48. The answer is 46. Everyone’s always surprised. So at this point, someone out there who knows a thing or two about genetics will say that humans have a chromosome where the 2 analogous chimp ones have been stuck together, as if with glue. Yeah, that’s part of my point, and that in itself leads to interesting places. So you don’t hear that one taught a lot either.
I’m not an expert, but I have looked into this. The more I studied the human genome, visually looking at sections of the human chromosomes—this is more esoteric, but it was visually evident to me, especially upon discovering junk DNA, that “someone has been here”. I could not escape the obviousness. And I didn’t (and don’t) want it to be true. There are large sections of the human genome which, visually, clearly, quite clearly, have just been “flattened”. That’s the best word I have—you have to see it visually—it’s impactful. I subjectively get the distinct impression that code, lots of it, used to be there… and now nothing of value is there. It actually visually reminded of me of when I’ve digitally edited things out of an image by using a virtual paintbrush, using a mouse. This was not the result of bias; in fact, like I said, I had bias in the opposite direction… won’t go into that here. I mean, I remember the moment, visually looking at that… you own wisdom says (mine did, anyway), someone has been here and flattened this. It’s been removed. Deliberately. I don’t know what that was, why it was done that way, but that is my opinion and until better information comes along, that is my belief and sense of it. And you will note I distinctly differentiate between evidence, opinion, belief, hypothesis and theory. I try not to use the word “fact” much, as the word is so loaded and carries an air of superiority which I’ve learned should trigger suspicion. And in my experience, what is considered a ‘fact’ is unfortunately quite subjective. But what is an opinion/belief/evidence/hypothesis/theory is more solid.
Evolutionists claim to be rooted in science and that all science should be based on physical evidence, but they do not hold themselves to the same standards they vaunt. If science were less religion-like, less dogmatic, more open-minded, we’d be a lot farther along in discovering who and what we humans truly are. I think the answers, if the questions had a chance to get questions, would lead into esoteric areas which would contradict religious/dogmatic sensibilities. I see atheism as a religion and include it in that religious/dogmatic description, but the ‘religionist’ side is also greatly at fault. Above all, in my observations of people, I’ve found that conflict of interest is extremely pervasive: almost but not quite universal influence. Those who really do pursue the truth at all costs, usually get squashed or at least quite fought-against, not to mention the derision of the superior people who don’t even realize how inferior they really are. I really hate Normalcy Bias (obviously). All that stuff is intellectual and spiritual weakness. Real smarts isn’t about who can most-successfully suppress new ideas and evidence in a university department, or who can deride an individual or group with the most venom for not fitting into an accepted cult of science. Or who can agree the most with the current, most-accepted model, as if it’s a contest to get some seal of approval for conformity or compliance. Real intellect, real smarts, or let’s say “the truth”, is a lot more subtle than that. And harder to achieve.
Hey, it's for aluminum foil hats with dissipative coatings on the inside. 
I think we can get them at a good price and possibly, if we hit the minimum, we can get antenna with them! 
Unfortunately, it's one size fits all, so I don't know how it will work with all the Big Heads, but maybe we can get a consensus of the average head size and testing on how much aluminum foil will expand over big heads. Possibly a lubricant of some type... well, scratch that. I got some awful images coming into my brain from that one.