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Last night one of the team names at trivia was something along the lines of, "We won because of alternative facts." Which is good, because they didn't using non-alternative facts.
Another team name. "There are more people here than there were at the inauguration." Or something similar. Beer drinking and remembering verbatim do not go hand-in-hand.
I am feeling so free with the ability for science to now embrace alternative facts! (science related humor - NOT political)
With alternative facts, these are all possible:
The moon stays away from Earth because the Earth farts and smells bad.
When a parachutist jumps from an airplane, he doesn't fall. The entire Earth rushes up to greet him.
Elves enslaved by Daleks are forced to labor on treadmills to power the windmills and create wind.
Hamsters are the real source of energy from nuclear power plants.
Planes don't really fly. They are clutched in the claws of invisible flying dragons from Pern.
England really IS run by lizard people.
If alternative facts, are different from accepted facts, this may mean a disagreement about a fundamental understanding. All facts are alternate to any other set of facts.
New information (new facts) often cause scientists to carefully verify the new facts, then if verified, move on to evaluate any change to accepted theory which is appropriate to work with the new data.
Newton didn't understand time-space as Einstein did, and Einstein had issues with quantum mechanics. New facts, new theories, were invented / discovered to create an ever richer understanding of our reality.
Confusing fiction, or nonsense, with alternate facts seems a bit childish. An alternate basis is often used for in various fields of science.
You realize we are in an interglacial period of a very long ice age. The ice age has not ended, and won't until the poles melt. Historically earth has been much warmer than it is today. We are living in a colder earth than prior life experienced. We have some concept about why ice ages start and end, and why interglacial periods start and end. However, that understanding also indicates interglacial periods exist only 20% of the time for the past 3-4 million years. Our current technology may not be able to feed and provide energy for a population of 7-9 billion people during an ice age.
IPCC models use various alternate facts (starting points and starting assumptions). The methodology also varies, as do the results. Facts are massaged statistically, sometimes with good reason (a source of data failed for a while), sometimes not (small sample of tree rings to disprove ubiquitous warming during the various warm periods of the Holocene Epoch). Which facts are good, which aren't? Depends on your agenda, depends on your need, on how your science and models. Every IPCC climate model uses and creates alternate facts. Do we toss out everything because there isn't total agreement on "the facts"?
Last edited by functionofx; 01-29-2017 at 10:12 PM..
Do not adjust your junk. We are in control of the horizontal, we are in control of the vertical.
Buddhists have a wonderful way of dealing with the whole mess of reality. In essence, it is all crap, it is all in the mind. Nothing really exists anyway.
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