Yes, I had to listen to that particular part about 50 times, and yes, she did say, "I have never found them to be accurate". I figure either she was referring to the folks who run the Navy clock, or else she simply misspoke herself. Given the overall incoherent quality of her side of the "debate", I wouldn't be surprised.

And yes, she did say "trammeled", not "trampled", in case anybody wondered. I had to listen to that about 50 times, too.

Phil, even though in the transcript you show up with a lot of "ums" and "uhs", still, overall, your contribution came across as much more coherent and somehow "adult" than Nancy's. This was because (surprise, surprise!) what you were saying in between the "thinking words" (which is what "um" and "uh" are called, words you say while you're thinking) you were actually retailing some facts--some actual knowledge was coming out, demonstrating a logical thought process--whereas Nancy's stuff--man, that was just gibberish there every so often. She was ranting on how NASA "allows" amateur astronomers to take credit for discovering comets, and how (I guess) the evil Bushistas "commandeered" the White House and are covering up Planet X so as to remove the "underclass of undesireables", and I never did figure out what the Indonesian government had to do with anything. I mean, oy. [clutches head]

For me, the end result of the "debate" is that she stands revealed as nothing more than your standard garden-variety Internet conspiracy theorist. And I sat there thinking, "So, aliens are sending us a message, and the message is, Don't trust the government? Right. Heard that before, actually, but, hey, thanks for the headsup, guys."

Historical note: I distinctly remember reading about "frozen mammoths found with greenery still in their mouths" back in the 1960s as a child, in the Reader's Digest, along with a bit of speculation as to the possibility of some hitherto unsuspected atmospheric event, some kind of huge "frost bubble" landing on them and freezing them so quickly that they didn't even have time to swallow their last meal. Interesting that it has now grown up into a fully mature Urban Legend and that the Twinkie Brigades have glommed onto it to prove their various points.

Correcting typo in OP -- "sci.astro". Thanks, ToSeek.

Upon Preview: Nebularain, I would strongly recommend not attempting to run any of Nancy's side of the "debate" through Babelfish--your head will explode.

[you can take the red pill--or you can take the blue pill...]

Another note: The comet with a Japanese name that came before Hale-Bopp was Hyakutake, not Yakataki.

__________________
"The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it." -George Bernard Shaw

Okay, got it, thanks.
Hyakutake

Jigsaw YOU ARE A HERO WHAT A LOVELY PERSON

am just in from work, will sit with some coffee and read, and read, and read, (get some more coffee) and read.

That should be Jim Scotti and Eleanor Helin.

Nice job on the transcript!

Jim.

Thank you.

Jim Scotti and Eleanor Helin. Got it.

I love you Jigsaw!

Well, maybe not. INCREDIBLE job, though. Thanks a ton.

Thanks for the transcript

__________________
Never argue with a moron. He/She will take you down to his/her level and then argue with you..
http://home.earthlink.net/~sukeert/main.html

Jigsaw

My thanks also. We Aussies don't often get to hear Phil, this was wonderful.

Dog.

Phil, Jigsaw's excellent transcript did show all the little hesitations, and ums, etc. that we all use in normal conversation, but when I listened to the actual program on another thread, I did not notice those things. They get magnified by print. You sounded cool, calm, and coherent. The ums and the ers were not even registering.

I agree Gethen. When the BA used them, you could tell he was thinking and trying to be precise; when Nancy used them, you could tell she was grasping. :lol:


And thanks Jigsaw, that was a great service for you to provide us all.

I agree, I've only listened to less than an hour so far, but you sounded good.
Excellent call on not indulging that. I can make fun of her till my eyes buldge out , but you have to keep professional. That's the cost of being a public figure and representative of science.

Jigsaw, let me add one more thank you to the list

__________________
I must not PX. PX is the mind-killer. I will face my PX. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the PX has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Aye, couldn't have been easy to translate most of Nancy's ramblings as you have done.

A big thanx from me has well. Our local CHED edited the debate and only aired the last 2hr, so I missed it.
I seem to remember a program called 'Advanced Text To Speech'.
Would it be able to crunch it into an MP3?
If we call it art, it avoids the copyright thing.

__________________
'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
("`-/")_.-'"``-.,,
\. . `; -._( );, `)
(v_,)' _ )`-. \ ``'`
_.- _..-/ /((.'
((,.-' ((,/

Try this (save target) if you want mp3

__________________
I must not PX. PX is the mind-killer. I will face my PX. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the PX has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Thanx. You stopped me before I invoked my wrath on my local radio station.

__________________
'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
("`-/")_.-'"``-.,,
\. . `; -._( );, `)
(v_,)' _ )`-. \ ``'`
_.- _..-/ /((.'
((,.-' ((,/

Gawd - Has Anyone else hear the clip where she talks about offing her dog?

Monstrous - but I did enjoy the quote at the end:

__________________
bunk: Empty talk; nonsense.
de·bunk: To expose or ridicule the falseness, sham, or exaggerated claims of.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/eddo/images/fredheadtsp.gif

In case anybody's worried about copyright violations, I thought about it for a while, and I believe it would fall under the "fair use exemption for educational purposes".

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107
It's definitely (a) not-for-profit, (b) educational, and (c) only a portion of the relevant work. So I think the BABB is covered.

Great Job Jigsaw!

On some other threads I've suggested that we should avoid labeling people "crackpots" ect. After reading that I'm thinking there is room for some exceptions!

I feel you may be wrong.
That statute refers to the use of legal copies of a work, without paying a royalty. It does not refer to the use of an illegal copy (read pirate) of a protected work.

__________________
'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
("`-/")_.-'"``-.,,
\. . `; -._( );, `)
(v_,)' _ )`-. \ ``'`
_.- _..-/ /((.'
((,.-' ((,/

Pinemarten, it's THE Fair Use Exemption, capitalized. It's the Big Kahuna of exemptions, it's the Loophole the size of Jupiter that everybody legitimately uses, from teachers making xerox copies for their classrooms to students xeroxing articles from magazines in the library, to you yourself taping Gladiator off the TV or "Sk8ter boi" off the radio. It's a "fair use" of the copyrighted work, and the writers of the copyright law put that exemption in there precisely for that reason.

The only reason I had to think about it for a while was that I wasn't sure whether Coast to Coast themselves would have a problem with it and might come after the BA with lawyers, screaming "copyright violation". I wasn't sure whether they sell tapes of their shows, which might make it an issue for them, but I guess not.

Read the exemption again.
Boiled down, it means it's okay to make copies of a copyrighted work or to quote from copyrighted pieces as long as it's for educational purposes, and you aren't making any money off it, and it's only a portion of the work (not the entire thing, IOW).

And anyway, if the BA thinks the transcript and the MP3 that Fluffy made are in violation of U.S. copyright laws, he is of course perfectly welcome to delete them from his website.

__________________
'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
("`-/")_.-'"``-.,,
\. . `; -._( );, `)
(v_,)' _ )`-. \ ``'`
_.- _..-/ /((.'
((,.-' ((,/

Yes, but the fair use exemption is what MAKES a copy legal. If you photcopied every page of a book and sold it that would be illegal, but if you only copied parts of the book and used those copies for educational purposes only, that would not be illegal.

Welcome to the board.

It stilll boils down to the original.
If the original is not sanctioned/accepted/legal, then all copies of the unsanctioned work are illegal versions.

__________________
'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
("`-/")_.-'"``-.,,
\. . `; -._( );, `)
(v_,)' _ )`-. \ ``'`
_.- _..-/ /((.'
((,.-' ((,/

[sees "Edmonton" under Pinemarten's location]

Maybe you're coming from "Canadian copyright laws"? American copyright laws permit the "fair use" of portions of copyrighted works, as outlined in the quoted Fair Use Exemption, and it's perfectly legal. Really.


Read what Jethro said again.
The keyword here is "parts" of the work, and "educational". We're not talking about making xerox copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and selling them--yes, that would be illegal.

But making xerox copies of a certain page in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and using it in class to illustrate a point is most emphatically not illegal in the U.S.

So, according to the Fair Use Exemption, typing up a transcript of part of a radio show and posting it in public is legal, and making an MP3 recording of part of a radio show and posting it in public is legal. They're both for educational purposes, they're not for profit, and they're only a portion of the work.

Fluffy also has an MP3 of Nancy's interview where she talks about killing her dog, and that's legal, too.

Val Trotten - you said:

"I'm not sure it was effective enough to dissuade any of her followers.
That's the sad part.
They probably think she won."

I posted something the other day to the effect that it was time to accept that this thing has been debunked to the degree it can be debunked, it was time to let it go. A lot of people disagreed with me; saying it was irresponsible to let this kind of talk go unchallenged. The response made me question my statement, but I think it is worth going into the mentality of the true believers.

Now, there have been individuals in history who picked a judgement day time and date based on biblical interpretation, got a group of followers together, got up on the hill to wait and pray, saw the time come and go, and these cranks STILL managed to keep some of those original followers and do it to them again. For the hard core adherents, this is the mentality you are fighting.

The ZetaTalk "argument" relies on three critical foundation assumptions:

First and most important, that Nancy Lieder is in fact receiving exclusive communications from aliens.

Second, that many of the scientific theories we have about heavenly bodies are wrong.

Third, that there is a largely invisible, global conspiracy that involves every major governmental and scientific authority on earth.

All of the debate about the weather, earthquakes, rotation slowing, the photos and interpretations of telescopy, gravitational effects, and brown dwarfs are fairly esoteric and difficult for even a scientifically educated layman like myself to really judge (it comes down more to who I trust and common sense than actual scientific knowledge on my part). On the other hand, those three claims are outrageous, unbelievable, and most critically, untestable. How do you prove or disprove someone is receiving "messages," by modes unrecognized by science, from beings there is no evidence of? Of course, what is always pointed to is the accuracy of the "predictions." And the adherents say, it's astonishing. And the detractors say, it's ludicrous. You can look to any claimed soothsayer, from Nostradamus to Cayce, and see the same debate. The fact that the ZetaTalk adherents are constantly revising their archives (shades of 1984) just makes it more complicated.

Again, what do you say to the response that our science is wrong? People know that what we know or think we know gets revised all the time, and it is very hard for a person with no scientific training to understand the difference between what is a reasonable question about the assertions of science and what is a very unlikely one. Of course there are many things that science doesn't know. Paradigms of science will change. But a really radical idea (say, a massive object entering the solar system that doesn't obey any of the gravitational or optical rules we propose about heavenly bodies) is something else. But this debate just distracts from the basic reality - that unless you believe premise one and premise three, the issues of scientific accuracy in this specific context don't even come up. A crank can say the moon is made of green cheese. Show that gravitational analysis proves that the moon is made of rock, the crank simply says, yeah, well you don't really understand gravity and you don't really understand cheese, and besides, it's all a cover-up.

Bringing us to premise three, which is basically the catch-all. Where do we look for objective data to compare ZetaTalk claims against? The authorities. The observatories, the keepers of atomic clocks, academia and government. Believe that these people are all involved in some pernicious cabal and suddenly it all goes out the window. Whenever people get on the global conspiracy bandwagon I wonder if they've ever actually worked and observed actual human beings acting in organization. If they had they'd notice that we're not very good at organization, that we get worse the more we spread out (observe the European empires and the Soviet Union), and that we're terrible at keeping secrets. Of course, there are lies, dirty business, and secret agendas all over the place - but the particular and limited does not extend to the general and total - in fact, all of the real "conspiracies" act against the notion of a "global" organization, since they are mainly national entities contending against one another. But the rub is - the more there is no real evidence, the more that most people don't believe, why, the more believable it becomes to the conpiracy theorist - what better proof than just how effective the disinformation campaign has been? Of course, that isn't logic, its paranoid delusion and defies proof by its very nature.

Which gets to the fundamental point. A person who allows those three premises to convince them to disrupt their lives, abandon what they have and espouse beliefs that make most of the people they know think they're crazy... is to some degree crazy. The paranoid, delusional individual will hear and see the evidence that fits their core delusion. Any of us could go stare anywhere at the sky at sunset and, if we were really paying attention, see some speck or blob or transient flicker and say, hey, what was that? Nothing, or nothing important... unless you believe in Planet X in which case it becomes EVIDENCE. Likewise, weather, earthquakes, so forth just simply happen. They happen and happen and happen all the time. The tornados in the midwest, my home, are crazy this year. Is this exceptional? Can I blame global warming, el nino, or planet X? Sure, but there is absolutely not enough data to truly justify any of these claims. Who knows how many tornadoes hit the midwest in, say, 1311? Nobody. Nobody does and nobody ever will. But again, if you're looking for the evidence your delusional mindset demands, line up those headlines and say, wow, isn't that impressive. It's all coming true.

There are no winners in this debate. The true adherents will not be turned, until the doomsday date is so far gone that there just isn't any way to deny it, and some crackpot response will be concoted for that, and even then some of them will get dragged along with the increasingly ridiculous justifications. You have to remember, these people have sunk a lot of personal, mental, financial and reputational capital into their beliefs. It is human nature to hang onto what you have invested in, even when it stops making sense (or you ought to realize it never made any sense in the first place).

People who are on the fence may be swayed by this kind of debate. That's a good thing. It's sad that scientists are getting their time wasted arguing with fruitcakes, though.

In order to have a copy, one must have an original. No such original exists.
If I go to a concert with a tape recorder, and play the tapes in my music class, I am breaking the law.
The C2C MP3 is not a copy of a protected work. It is a pirate (read pirate) of a work. The original doesn't exist, it was a live broadcast.

__________________
'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
("`-/")_.-'"``-.,,
\. . `; -._( );, `)
(v_,)' _ )`-. \ ``'`
_.- _..-/ /((.'
((,.-' ((,/

Jigsaw:

MOST excellent work in getting the transcript up! Thank you for the effort and hard work!

JT

__________________
"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it." - Florence Ambrose

Pinemarten, if the "owners" of the live broadcast want to take exception, they are free to. I would think they would have done so by now.

http://www.darkinsight.com/xml/default.asp?id=7&mnu=7

Originals here. I think they own them, since at the bottom of the page they mention some that they don't own.