Is science at odds with philosophy?

[Opdrey]

Okay, here you go Mike, pictures and everything.

https://www.keepingfaith.me/resources/common/pdfs/The Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano - Historical, Theological, Scientific and Photographic Documentation.pdf

Does this one meet with your approval?

You da man! thanks!

 

[partinobodycular]

You da man! thanks!

Actually it was your link in post #514 that led me to that page, so kudos to you as well.

 

[Mountainmike]

Meanwhile Tixtla, Sokolka , Legnica, Buenos airies.
Are All independent. . All samples were verified by pathologists , multiple pathology labs and cross checked as the following conclusion, true for all:

Human flesh, traumatized cardiac tissue. That will not provide nuclear DNA identity, but does provide mitochondrial DNA type from middle east. Leucocytes that show trauma, also show very recent life which is inexplicable. Samples that should have decayed but have not. The pathologists declare it inexplicable.

That is the verdict of science. The sheer number of tests done on these samples and cross checking, therefore peer review of the tests confirms the above.
If It was anything other than something that challenges your apriori mindset, you would be more convinced.

( by way of comparison of amount of data, You seem convinced of an absolute travesty of bad science that was the shroud dating that had only one sample essentially repeated, with a plethora of mistakes, and they even fiddled the data to pass a chi squared conformance. If they had not fiddled the data, they would have noticed, that for every 2cm up the cloth, the data changed in more or less linear fashion by 100 years. The point I make is you were far more convinced on far less data with only one sample, only because the date they arrived at matched your apriori belief...The EM on other hand have many, tests repeated many times by others. AKA peer checking.)


So as far as EM - The moving finger has written.
None of your red herrings, straw men comparisons with big foot, personal attacks on me, or the time I have spent in labs (which is more than you think) , all that is irrelevnant, as is your belief these were not real, just based on your world view.
So the moving finger has written and none of that Can change but a word of it. By alll means criticise, after not before you research them. This is not about you and me. This is about forensic testing.

How is it possible to explain? Try paradigm shifts.
Paradigm shift 1
You are accustomed to things doing what you expect. People - beings are not like that. Sometimes they do. Mostly fairly reliable but that is as good as it gets. If you expect them to do exactly the same in response to stimulus, you will be disappointed. If this is a being, it will do unusual things from time to time...

Take a few weeks in rwanda when one half of the population picked up machetes and chopped up the other half into pieces, the friends, neighbours, school mates, girlfriends. So many bodies there was nobody left to bury them. They never didit before. They never did it again. The perpetrators still do not understand why they did it. The victims can no longer trust anyone again (an appariation of a lady prophesied it years before, but alas not enough listened to her - I digress). My point is beings are unpredictable. Humans are beings.

Paradigm Shift 2
A thing that gets an occupant, no longer behaves the same. Whether that is microbial or bigger. A live thing that gets a parasite, no longer behaves the same. So expect massive changes in results when an occupant is involved. How that paradigm shift came to be is secondary. The fact it happened - an apparent occupant as recently or actually live heart myocardium explains the results. So accept what science tells you is there.

It may surprise you to know, that most so called miracles or inexplicable things with theistic overtones do not have enough evidence to comment either way. I have researched many. I am not obliged to believe them. They are not the source of my belief. I do not need tthem to be true. Some have plenty enough evidence to discount them. But having searched much of my life, a small proportion of them are truly inexplicable, because of inexplicable evidence, but because I have spent a life time searching , the small percentage amounts to several tens, I believe are true.

In comparison - You have faith that all can be explicable by a deterministic automaton view of the universe. Mostly it does behave like that, you could not model it if it did not. You believe consciousness is just a brain process (which incidentally, a lot of professional analysts like Greyson are beginning to doubt) But You cannot be sure . so you have faith too. Just different from mine. There are anomalies. You reject them out of hand.

It really is not helpful for non pathologists to second guess pathologists. I accept what they say. The pathologist on Lanciano even ,said it was inexplicable that the samples had survived this long. Flesh lyses quickly and putrefies. The problem with second guessing, is someone chose to mention a mammoth. Except the mammoth was in permafrost, till a thaw let it free! So it is not comparable. So I trust the pathologists. Also that dead things stink at room temperature because they rot. I trust my nose...

LITERALLY NO ONE IS ASKING YOU TO DO SO. We are simply asking you to tell us the details of the analyses and discuss it like a scientist would.



You are talking in generalities. That isn't the statistics of the individual tests. You have yet to provide a single number on anything from all your readings. So either the books you have don't include ANY statistical analysis of the data or you don't understand it enough to point it out to us.



Given your lack of experience with hear tissue morphology, what, exactly would you gain from seeing a picture of it?



And, again, how about all the books on "real hauntings"? And UFO's.



You would be able to tell us the actual likelihood of error if you cared enough about the actual science to read it. But again that isn't important to you because the science isn't the key part...the proof of the miracle is all you care about.

Next time you wish to talk to people who actually have significant experience in science look for the following:

F-test
t-test
p-value
Mean
Standard Deviation
Median




I'd be happy with an objective answer.



Again, no one is suggesting this be done. Why do you insist on bearing false witness against people you are debating with?



And yet you can't even be bothered to summarize technical details for us?



You are reasonably insulting as well. Calling me "lazy" and making up things about me that I never said.

I would suggest that you might wish to reacquaint yourself with Matthew 7:3



I mean no offense but I honestly have trouble believing this claim.



You have done a very good job of hiding it.



This isn't a court of law. I thought you understood this. You should be able to provide us with statistical data explicit in the studies you rely on.

 

[SelfSim]

To wit:

This investigation, performed between November 18th, 1970 and March 4th, 1971, had the following aims:
a) to check the histological structure of the ligneous - hard tissue, left as Flesh;
b) to define if the hardened stony - cretaceous substance left as Blood has the same characteristics of this;
c) to point out what biological species Flesh and Blood belong to;
d) to find out the Blood group in both tissues;
e) to investigate on the protein and mineral components of the Blood.​

The investigation seems to presume from the outset that the sample is indeed flesh and blood. Such an assumption could lead to a less than rigorous methodology.

I agree .. and sometimes guesses like that can also actually turn out as being agreed, as being entirely consistent with test results, which may be the case here. (This is with deference to the expertise of the forensic scientists - not having looked at their actual qualifications).

But so what? Its the next bits which hijack those results with an assumed true posit.

And if the same methodology was followed in the investigation of subsequent Eucharistic "miracles", then the same outcome might not be so surprising.

There's a heavy influence of Platonic Realism philosophy flowing throughout the entire approach/report. In typical scientific papers, this is either disclosed upfront, or has no bearing on the conclusions. In this case though, it most obviously does.
This paper is thus intended for a Catholic audience .. and not a scientifically (objectively) thinking Catholic (or other religious/believing ones).

I can see why @Mountainmike therefore views its finding as 'evidence for' supporting his (and shared Catholic) beliefs in 'miracles'. He's not viewing it from an objective (scientific) standpoint after all.

This seems even more plausible when one considers the fact that numerous cases of supposed Eucharistic miracles have been documented in North America, and as far as I can ascertain, all have turned out to be fungus. Is there a difference in methodology between the investigations undertaken in North American as opposed to those undertaken elsewhere which could explain the discrepancy?

Coincidence with the predominance of Catholocism in those countries, eh?

 

[Opdrey]

That is the verdict of science. The sheer number of tests done on these samples and cross checking, therefore peer review confirms the above.

So why is this not shouted from every pulpit in the Catholic Church every single day? Why is the Catholic Church not now obviously the ONE TRUE FAITH?

None of your red herrings, straw men comparisons with big foot, personal attacks on me, or whatever time I have spent in labs (which is more than you think) , all that is irrelevnant, or indeed your belief these were not real based on your world view. Can change but a word of it. By alll means criticise, after not before you research them. This is not about you and me. This is about forensic testing.

If I may, for a moment actually talk about a real thing which happened to me, I hope it will serve to explain my skepticism.

Back about 20 or so years ago I was hired onto my second postdoc. I was brought in to test the work of previous postdocs in a lab that had made a MAJOR discovery. If this major discovery had ended up being true you would probably know the names of my bosses (everyone would). It would have revolutionized the transportation sector. We had visiting scientists from GM and other auto manufacturers prepping to dump gigatons of money onto the researchers who had made the discovery.

They had DATA! They had multiple runs showing the results that so astounded everyone! They were so sure of this they got theoretical chemists involved to model what might be happening. It beggared the imagination how this could work the way it was working.

Obviously a lot of people were skeptical. Me and the new tranche of postdocs and grad students were brought in to verify the data and run it on new equipment.

One time I got the equipment to give me an outstanding result as well! It was amazing! But the more we all ran the test we started to realize that we just weren't able to get it to happen consistently. Oh yeah and it turned out that maybe there might be a leak in the system. We were assured the earlier runs there was no leak anyone could find. But, again, that probably wasn't actually correct.

In the end we couldn't find the effect consistently and when we did it was far more likely to be a leak than to be something that fundamentally altered how we understand these materials we were looking at.

I left after a year and moved onto another job. The lab there ultimately folded and the names of the researchers were becoming a by-word for "failed science".

You see these two researchers were VERY SURE they were right. VERY SURE. They had data that supported it (as well as about 10000000X more data that didn't). One of these researchers was actually pretty well known in the UK for his earlier work on this type of material. He was almost famous for it. But he flew too far up in the clouds and made an error.

Now I do NOT believe anyone involved was being intentionally dishonest. And they were certainly well-educated scientists and extremely skilled. But it just didn't pan out. And we really wanted it to.

The researchers left that university (one was refused tenure the other left in solidarity) and they meandered off into obscurity. I'm pretty sure they believed it was a real thing, may still to this day. But it wasn't.

And there was "data" there too.

Does this make sense to explain why a real scientist would be skeptical of astounding claims? Even when there's supposedly "data"?

It may surprise you to know, that most so called miracles or inexplicable things with theistic overtones do not have enough evidence to comment either way. I am not obliged to believe them. They are not the source of my belief. I do not need tthem to be true. Some plenty enough to discount them. But having searched much of my life, a small amount of them are truly inexplicable, but because I have spent a life time searching , the small percentage amounts to several tens, I believe are true.

I will ask again: did these miracles cause you to become a Catholic or were you a Catholic when you read about these miracles that were so soundly proven?

You have faith that all can be explicable by a deterministic automaton view of the universe.

Not really.

You believe consciousness is just a brain process (which incidentally, a lot of professional analysts like Greyson are beginning to doubt) But You cannot be sure so you have faith too. Just different from mine. There are anomalies. You reject them out of hand.

True to an extent. The primary difference is I attempt to moderate that "faith" by not simply accepting those things which make me the most happy.

 

[SelfSim]

That will not provide nuclear DNA identity, but does provide mitochondrial DNA type from middle east.

Where are the reports of these DNA tests?

Leucocytes that show trauma, also show very recent life which is inexplicable. Samples that should have decayed but have not. The pathologists declare it inexplicable.

So what? The samples may have undergone chemistry changes due to exposure. This has not been eliminated in the analysis. That door was never closed out by these dudes.

That is the verdict of science.

Nope .. its not.

The sheer number of tests done on these samples and cross checking, therefore peer review of the tests confirms the above.

Show me the peer reviews in reputable scientific journals.

 

[Mountainmike]

Back about 20 or so years ago I was hired onto my second postdoc.
etc etc

I do not doubt it. On another thread, I noted that most "eureka drugs" from university departments show little efficacy or safety problems, when they are analysed by ACCREDITED labs, that go back to control the cell lines, the processes, the reagents, the contaminants, and characterise the drug substance. and the chemical debris from the process .. Reality is the university labs were not sure what the drug substance was, it could even have been contaminants that seemed to have some efficacy!.
Thats why you can trust accredited labs better than the average university prof.

Accredited labs do not do all kinds of everything.They are not an answer to all problems But What they do do is very high standard, with massive QA, QC and controls, enough to pass the highest regulatory standards. So Such "eureka" profs were the bane of the life of the scientists at the lab I helped start. They wasted a fortune in resource.

HOWEVER.

When it is not one team claiming this. Or one incident. When it is multiple teams, multiple locations, multiple phenomena, all of whom are cross checking with multiple tests in accredited labs, used to expert witness standards, The likelihood of a mistake is vanishingly small.

Also notice the massive difference. These guys are not trying to either explain it, or use the effect( as was suggested in your case) . In essence all they are doing is documenting WHAT IS THERE. It is validating evidence, not an explanation of it. I find it hard to believe so many labs got it wrong describing what was THERE particularly when you can see it slides!.

If it matters - I became a catholic in mid life, not because of evidence of miracles. But this is not about me.

 

[Hans Blaster]

( by way of comparison of amount of data, You seem convinced of an absolute travesty of bad science that was the shroud dating that had only one sample essentially repeated, with a plethora of mistakes, and they even fiddled the data to pass a chi squared conformance. If they had not fiddled the data, they would have noticed, that for every 2cm up the cloth, the data changed in more or less linear fashion by 100 years. The point I make is you were far more convinced on far less data with only one sample, only because the date they arrived at matched your apriori belief...The EM on other hand have many, tests repeated many times by others. AKA peer checking.)

Cloth? cm? what kind of "hosts" are these?

 

[Opdrey]

Thats why you can trust accredited labs better than the average university prof.

I will readily agree that labs operating with set SOP's and controls can be very good. But your antagonism toward "university labs" is not warranted.

So Such "eureka" profs were the bane of the life of the scientists at the lab I helped start. They wasted a fortune in resource.

What kind of lab was it that you started?

If it matters - I became a catholic in mid life, not because of evidence of miracles. But this is not about me.

It is about you in no small way. You are fiercely defending miracles that confirm CATHOLIC doctrine. Does that not surprise you that you accidentally wound up in the ONLY TRUE FAITH? You are quite fortunate that you happened to, late in life, stumble upon the only faith that is true while the countless billions of people who are not of that faith are doomed to damnation.

The reason it is important is summarized thusly:

1. Your primary defense of the analyses has nothing to do with the actual statistics of the measurements but rather with the fact that there were different labs and you have an inherent trust of contract labs and trade books from the book store.

2. You refuse to consider the concept of "contamination" (even when the articles you favor explicitly discuss this topic) and call it any number of names.

3. You claim to have scientific experience, scientific "breakthroughs" from your research and even started a lab! But you don't speak in any way like an actual scientist. You mock any potential error in the findings as absurd when, in fact, a real scientist ALWAYS allows that error could be in there. The only people who dispense with any discussion of error are non-scientists. It's literally the most important thing we are taught as scientists.

Here's what it looks like to me:

You are a good Catholic. You believe and that is fantastic. You happened to find some books that sound to you like they found evidence of miracles. Maybe they did, maybe not. The fact that it confirms your faith is sufficient for you. That's fantastic. Seriously, it is great. I am happy for you.

The real problem is you seem to want to talk about these things as if you are speaking from a position of science. Not so much. Yes you have your favorite data in hand (or at least what some author opted to give you) and you don't like it when anyone fails to be moved by that set of data. Meanwhile those of us who actually have worked in science know from personal experience that not all things are as they seem from a few experiments or analyses.

I am not saying, nor have I EVER said these miracles are not real. I will repeat that so you will have to go out of your way to ignore it: I have not said that these miracles are not real. They may very well be real. I am not at a point where I will drop my skepticism. Your bar for rejecting the null hypothesis is much, much lower than mine.

 

[SelfSim]

The real problem is you seem to want to talk about these things as if you are speaking from a position of science. Not so much. Yes you have your favorite data in hand (or at least what some author opted to give you) and you don't like it when anyone fails to be moved by that set of data. Meanwhile those of us who actually have worked in science know from personal experience that not all things are as they seem from a few experiments or analyses.

@Mountainmike speaks more like a back-office person who was never in the primary 'firing lines' of research ..

 

[Mountainmike]

1/ I wager you trust the results you get from your spectrophotometer and if you get the same output from four different machines , on four independent samples you would be convinced that the spike you see really is the element it purports to be. The chances of error in that case are incredibly low.

The likely correctness of Routine test results ( when process qualified) are a whole different ball game from - your example of error - whether a new process achieves a new effect, or whether that is mistaken. The latter is primarily the role of university labs, not accredited routine testing.

I’m not knocking them generally , but university processes are not as secure as is needed in the bio pharmaceutical regulation world, ( or forensic world) horses and courses. University labs can’t afford the straight jacket, but make mistakes without it.
But be aware inadequately researched eurekas waste a lot of money , an experience you claim to share. (I have stated previously it was a biotech lab, that deals with bio pharmaceuticals, not small molecules. - a whole new layer of controls. Having to control living cell lines)

So it seems to me you are letting the question of whether you “like”the test results interfere with reasonable questioning of them. The results on EM simply define what is there.
It is A different ball game from creating a new chemical process, with far less room for error.

2/ perhaps read your own posts on “ false witness”.

I have not downplayed the question of comtamination at all. I have noted our lab controlled water, air filtration, particulates and pressure differences , qualified reagents , and autoclave everything. Systematic Cleaning occupied much of schedule time. All processes repeatedly test qualified. A thorough non conformance process and quality system. I have also noted that biopharm processes are about characterisation and control of impurities.

I simply put contamination in PROPER scientific context, which is by reference to the situation in which you raise it, and what matters in THIS case.

In all of these cases the tests indicated , recently live , traumatized heart myocardium when analysing the red areas of wafers. The test and identification of samples Is the kind of thing pathologists do every day.

The idea that identifiable myocardium can appear as a result of contamination is frankly farcical.
It is an unscientific suggestion. People or things do not spread heart myocardium. It kills a victim to extract it. Even if that was possible , random people have identifiable nuclear DNA, this did not.

So You have no credible hypothesis for how contamination can look like heart myocardium, in several different places, and no hypothesis for why no nuclear DNA identity was found , if it was a result contamination. That was my objection. Your reference to comtamination is therefore a red herring in this context.

These tests are stating what is there, using standard technique. That the situation where they are found is unusual , does not falsify test results.

Contamination is a typical off the shelf accusations levelled at any phenomena , like “ substitution” or conspiracy, or “ the church did it” without any thought for how that may apply in practice in specific cases to arrive at false results.

Focus. How can contamination produce samples that are identifiable as heart myocardium?

3/ without reading the books you won’t know what is in them.
Do you disdain books about chemistry too?

In a book, I am presently reading a cardiologists opinion of the balance of types of white cells found in the Buenos airies phenomena.

There are several types that kick in during different stages of an inflammatory response. The balance seen in the EM is unusual and in his view is typical of physical trauma, in a healthy person it is a dysfunction. That is a scientific view by an expert in the field . He presents references to studies of those topics. He is also critical of some of the testing indicating that some records on the earlier Buenos airies miracles were not good enough. There were several EM around that time, in addition to the one you are aware of.

So discounting them without reading the books IS unscientific.

You will never have a valid opinion either for or against these until you study what is known of them.

I will readily agree that labs operating with set SOP's and controls can be very good. But your antagonism toward "university labs" is not warranted.



What kind of lab was it that you started?



It is about you in no small way. You are fiercely defending miracles that confirm CATHOLIC doctrine. Does that not surprise you that you accidentally wound up in the ONLY TRUE FAITH? You are quite fortunate that you happened to, late in life, stumble upon the only faith that is true while the countless billions of people who are not of that faith are doomed to damnation.

The reason it is important is summarized thusly:

1. Your primary defense of the analyses has nothing to do with the actual statistics of the measurements but rather with the fact that there were different labs and you have an inherent trust of contract labs and trade books from the book store.

2. You refuse to consider the concept of "contamination" (even when the articles you favor explicitly discuss this topic) and call it any number of names.

3. You claim to have scientific experience, scientific "breakthroughs" from your research and even started a lab! But you don't speak in any way like an actual scientist. You mock any potential error in the findings as absurd when, in fact, a real scientist ALWAYS allows that error could be in there. The only people who dispense with any discussion of error are non-scientists. It's literally the most important thing we are taught as scientists.

Here's what it looks like to me:

You are a good Catholic. You believe and that is fantastic. You happened to find some books that sound to you like they found evidence of miracles. Maybe they did, maybe not. The fact that it confirms your faith is sufficient for you. That's fantastic. Seriously, it is great. I am happy for you.

The real problem is you seem to want to talk about these things as if you are speaking from a position of science. Not so much. Yes you have your favorite data in hand (or at least what some author opted to give you) and you don't like it when anyone fails to be moved by that set of data. Meanwhile those of us who actually have worked in science know from personal experience that not all things are as they seem from a few experiments or analyses.

I am not saying, nor have I EVER said these miracles are not real. I will repeat that so you will have to go out of your way to ignore it: I have not said that these miracles are not real. They may very well be real. I am not at a point where I will drop my skepticism. Your bar for rejecting the null hypothesis is much, much lower than mine.

 

[Opdrey]

1/ I wager you trust the results you get from your spectrophotometer and if you get the same output from four different machines , on four independent samples you would be convinced that the spike you see really is the element it purports to be. The chances of error in that case are incredibly low.

And unlike you I actually know how to express that in the data. And trust me, the p-value will NEVER be perfectly 0.

The likely correctness of Routine test results ( when process qualified) are a whole different ball game from - your example of error - whether a new process achieves a new effect, or whether that is mistaken. The latter is primarily the role of university labs, not accredited routine testing.

Wow. You claim to have started a lab but you clearly haven't. If you think statistical analysis and error estimation are something accredited routine testing labs don't use you are 100% wrong.

If you wish to try to convince people you are something at least do a better job of researching what they do.

I’m not knocking them generally , but university processes are not as secure as is needed in the bio pharmaceutical regulation world, ( or forensic world) horses and courses. University labs can’t afford the straight jacket, but make mistakes without it.

You don't really know what you are talking about here.

I have not downplayed the question of comtamination at all.

That is not true.

Focus. How can contamination produce samples that are identifiable as heart myocardium?

_sigh_. The assessment it was myocardial tissue in the 1200 year old sample was made based on visual analysis of "Mummified" tissue that showed signs of "homogenization". So right off the bat there's always the possibility of error.

But here's another one: what if sometime in the last ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED YEARS someone contaminated it with hear tissue? Do you not think that is possible? Remember this thing existed at a time when it was COMMON to bamboozle churches to sell relics.

You will never have a valid opinion either for or against these until you study what is known of them.

And I assume the same of you.

 

[Mountainmike]

And unlike you I actually know how to express that in the data.
....
You claim to have started a lab but you clearly haven't.
...

Here ends our conversation. I spent years modelling stochastic processes. Quantum processes on occasion. I almost certainly know more stats than you ever will.

Are you incapable of discussion without ad hominems? Seemingy so.

The four EM I suggested you focus on are tixtla, sokolka, buenos airies , legnica.
All in the era of DNA. I mentioned lanciano, only because you refuse to pay for information, in a world that charges for it. You will stay uninformed until you accept that.

You still have not explained how tissue recognised as heart myocardium can ever be a contamination? It was a typical lazy sceptic trope. Chuck some mud, however irrelevant. Hope a bit sticks. All the sceptics will "like" it, simply because it reinforces an apriori belief, regardless of what the scientists say!

 

[Opdrey]

Here ends our conversation. I spent years modelling stochastic processes. Quantum processes on occasion. I almost certainly know more stats than you ever will.

That is not apparent from your posts. In fact I never saw you mention one single thing about statistics. I was the ONLY person to bring up statistics. And statistics are INTEGRAL to any analytical process. The fact that you couldn't speak even marginally about this tells me all I need to know about your claims of statistical knowledge.

Are you incapable of discussion without ad hominems? Seemingy so.

As much as you are. I just got tired of you making stuff up about things I said (bearing false witness) and I thought I'd call you out.

You still have not explained how tissue recognised as heart myocardium can ever be a contamination? It was a typical lazy sceptic trope. Chuck some mud, however irrelevant. Hope a bit sticks. All the sceptics will "like" it, simply because it reinforces an apriori belief, regardless of what the scientists say!

I'm sorry but your act of being a scientist isn't flying. Especially to someone who has done that very thing.

Next time do some more research about what labs do, how error works in analytics, how to provide a literature citation and maybe don't knock down statistics so much and then claim to have vast knowledge of the topic.

 

[Mountainmike]

I told you I modelled physical things in both observation, control, tracking communication worlds. All of that in the real world is stochastic, fighting against noise limits, amplified by unstable process. It uses stochastic observers, multistate filters , nonlinear optimization hill climbs, Random walks, martingales, markovians and so on. One of the fascinating questions is at what point do you stop modelling the process, and start to model noise. That is where maximum entropy comes in, also for super resolution of antennas in a generic sense. Synthetic apertures. Then there are classifiers for threat identification, part of military systems. Lossless communication in noisy channels with optimum data reduction, and how to enhance noisy images .I have modelled semiconductor process, including some oddities like amorphous silicon. Even did algorithmic control for an exothermic chemical reaction once (a real bad boy - phenol formaldehyde ) etc etc etc etc etc

I just do not feel the compelling need to blow my own trumpet as you always seem to do. Empty vessels and all that...

That is not apparent from your posts. In fact I never saw you mention one single thing about statistics. I was the ONLY person to bring up statistics. And statistics are INTEGRAL to any analytical process. The fact that you couldn't speak even marginally about this tells me all I need to know about your claims of statistical knowledge.



As much as you are. I just got tired of you making stuff up about things I said (bearing false witness) and I thought I'd call you out.



I'm sorry but your act of being a scientist isn't flying. Especially to someone who has done that very thing.

Next time do some more research about what labs do, how error works in analytics, how to provide a literature citation and maybe don't knock down statistics so much and then claim to have vast knowledge of the topic.

 

[Opdrey]

I told you I modelled physical things in both observation, control, tracking communication worlds. All of that in the real world is stochastic, fighting against noise limits, amplified by unstable process. It uses stochastic observers, multistate filters , nonlinear optimization hill climbs, Random walks, martingales, markovians and so on. One of the fascinating questions is at what point do you stop modelling the process, and start to model noise. That is where maximum entropy comes in, also for super resolution of antennas in a generic sense. Synthetic apertures. Then there are classifiers for threat identification, part of military systems.

Then why did you studiously avoid any discussion of noise in the data you prefer for the miracles? I'm genuinely curious because you seem good at listing all these things you did but when it comes to actual application of that knowledge to a specific topic it just went out the window.

I just do not feel the compelling need to blow my own trumpet as you always seem to do. Empty vessels and all that...

You actually DID enjoy blowing your horn, yes you did! You have talked a great deal about your "post graduate" status (whatever you mean by that) and the lab you STARTED. You've tooted your own horn but given that you don't seem to see the beam in your own eye you are busy picking at the mote in mine.

(Although I noted that you dropped the whole "post graduate" thing when you met people on here who actually went all the way through grad school and got actual graduate degrees. Those people all know how to make a literature citation.)

 

[partinobodycular]

In all of these cases the tests indicated , recently live , traumatized heart myocardium when analysing the red areas of wafers. The test and identification of samples Is the kind of thing pathologists do every day.

This is one of the areas where I have a problem with the conclusions stated in the investigation. Is the finding of "traumatized heart myocardium" based solely on the expert's subjective opinion? I.E does the expert simply look at the slide and decide what type of tissue they're looking at? If so, then I can think of a number of historical instances in which an expert's biases influenced their conclusions, and that conclusion subsequently influenced the conclusions of the experts who came after them.

I wonder about which conclusions drawn by the investigation are based on objective tests, and which are based on an expert's opinion.

 

[Opdrey]

This is one of the areas where I have a problem with the conclusions stated in the investigation. Is the finding of "traumatized heart myocardium" based solely on the expert's subjective opinion? I.E does the expert simply look at the slide and decide what type of tissue they're looking at? If so, then I can think of a number of historical instances in which an expert's biases influenced their conclusions, and that conclusion subsequently influenced the conclusions of the experts who came after them.

I wonder about which conclusions drawn by the investigation are based on objective tests, and which are based on an expert's opinion.

This is where my lack of knowledge in biology comes to the fore. I have no real appreciation for visual analysis of things like this. I have plenty of experience with identifying stuff under a microscope by appearance and morphology, and as such I know that it is always possible to "infer" some aspects.

I understand @Mountainmike 's point of us all operating on "faith", especially when it comes to science we are not experts in, but to out of hand simply dismiss the possibility of error or misidentification is absurd in the extreme.

This discussion is nothing like an actual discussion of the facts. This is Mountainmike decreeing that it must be true because a lot of skilled people he doesn't know said it was and there's almost no chance for error or misidentification or anything because contract labs did something that someone else wrote about. Oh, yeah, and university labs don't know how to do science.

 

[Mountainmike]

I did not avoid the discussion of noise.
I kept the discussion to RELEVANT things.

When four of these phenomena show heart myocardium showing trauma and white cells, confirmed by a lot of others, no "contamination" hypothesis can help. There is no statistical likelihood of people losing bits of their heart!

In the case of the accredited tests for human tissue, no nuclear DNA profile, repeated in four independent places with multiple different labs. It is way past a reasonable assumption of doubt UNLESS you can postulate a mechnanism in which all the samples are correlated, eg if it was a fraud,in which the same or adjacent samples were tested you would expect the same result. (that logic was lost on our RC daters). But these are independent. There was no common person involved, they occurred at different dates, were tested in different labs. So no common equipment failure can be blamed either.
But even if you reject the DNA .... it is still heart myocardium, so you cannot suspect contamination or measurement error it does not make sense.

One of the important thing to do in all defence systems is to know what their error limits are! So not surprisingly I am well up on all the sources of error, and how they interact.

In some areas it of course does matter.

Take the statistical significance of a measurement in the utterly irresponsible dating of the shroud of turin, whose daters not only failed to obey the sample protocol of multiple independent samples, they also fiddled their figures to achieve conformance and to suit their apriori assumption of same date:

The truth as always was more interesting than the fiddled date. It actually showed a date gradient of a hundred years for every couple of centimetres. If only they had studied the science, not enforced their beliefs on it.
In that case stats of a measurement did matter. The chi2 tests failed on the data so they fiddled the data to pass...
It is what happens when sceptics get near religious phenomena. Many lose objectivity.
Thankfully the community in general did not lose objectivity, now shroud research has binned the date and moved on.

Then why did you studiously avoid any discussion of noise in the data you prefer for the miracles? I'm genuinely curious because you seem good at listing all these things you did but when it comes to actual application of that knowledge to a specific topic it just went out the window.



You actually DID enjoy blowing your horn, yes you did! You have talked a great deal about your "post graduate" status (whatever you mean by that) and the lab you STARTED. You've tooted your own horn but given that you don't seem to see the beam in your own eye you are busy picking at the mote in mine.

(Although I noted that you dropped the whole "post graduate" thing when you met people on here who actually went all the way through grad school and got actual graduate degrees. Those people all know how to make a literature citation.)

 

[Opdrey]

I did not avoid the discussion of noise.
I kept the discussion to RELEVANT things.

Noise and error are the most important thing in the sciences. You should know that.

When four of these phenomena show heart myocardium showing trauma and white cells, confirmed by a lot of others, no "contamination" hypothesis can help.

-sigh-

There is no statistical likelihood of people losing bits of their heart!

Is there possible error in identifying heart muscle microscopically?

But even if you reject the DNA .... it is still heart myocardium, so you cannot suspect contamination or measurement error it does not make sense.

How do you know it was myocardial tissue?