Hermagoras
Posts: 1260 Joined: June 2007
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Thanks for the help OA. Here's my response (posted over there):
Quote | Salvador, Quote | It is . . . easy for me to express my idea in a way that confuses the issue rather than clarifies it. |
You ain't kidding, buster. But I object to a lot more than your wording. You write,
Quote | The difficulty is using the English language to express mathematical concepts. Thus it is easy to mis-interpret the intended meaning. |
True enough. But the problem is not the English: what you said would be contradictory in any language. It's practically a syllogism. I'll call it
Cordova's Rule Premise A: The green line represents an unchanging rate constant. Premise B: Points far away from the green line represent fraudulent data. Conclusion: Non-fraudulent data must show a rate constant that is or is very close to unchanging.
If you hold the first two premises, the conclusion follows. If you think the rate constant changes, then either Premise A or Premise B must be wrong.
But the rate constant diminishes, it does not go up, with age. Hey, even RH Brown accepts that, and Michael Brown. So why would we expect any of the dots to go above the green line?
A few more questions: Quote | Good data correspond to changing rates that are changes within reasonable physical and chemical limits |
What are those limits, and how did you determine them? Quote | The green line represents the ideal, and some amount of variation from the ideal is permissible. |
I don't see why it's the ideal, or how you've determined what's a permissible variation. It certainly doesn't seem like an ideal that anyone in the scientific community buys. And please don't quote that 1974 letter again -- as I mentioned, that was refuted at the time of publication, in the very next pages. Quote | But anyway, consider this illustration. Let's say college students did an exothermic chemistry experiment and the ideal result would be their thermometers would read 78.0000 degrees. The good data will tend to congregate around 78.0000 degrees. Now, we may have slight erors and variations in each student's test tube, and that results in differences from the ideal. We can define the range of results about 78.000 that would be deemed "good", i.e. say numbers from 68 to 88 degrees. |
Argument by analogy: a nice rhetorical form. It's a bit simplistic, though, and it assumes a lot. It's only appropriate if the unchanging "ideal" rate in your premises is correct, which requires (I believe) rejecting either the kinetic equation and the accuracy of empirically measured D/L ratios.
A more appropriate analogy would be if you gave everybody a thermometer in a room at 72.0 degrees F and then sent them out in different directions in the dead of winter. Each person was told to check the thermometer at a different time: the first at 1 minute, the second at 2 minutes, etc. Probably there'd be some variation depending on where they walked, the different conditions, etc., but the measurements taken later go lower and lower.
H |
-------------- "I am not currently proving that objective morality is true. I did that a long time ago and you missed it." -- StephenB
http://paralepsis.blogspot.com/....pot.com
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