KAI

I suspect that this answer is incomplete. Physicists often use some kind of MKS units to measure atomic and molecular distances instead of defining some kind of atomic specific unit near unity. So why astronomers invented a bunch of non MKS/CGS units is a valid question. I think you need the historical reasons from SeanLake's answer to help answer this. Astronomers couldn't measure distances with any precision historically, but maybe could measure distances in something like multiples of the Earth-Sun distance. That helped motivate them to memorize new units instead of new SI prefixes.

For example, this nature paper uses 26-Al to estimate 1 supernova per 50 years. This is WELL within the margins of uncertainty of theoretical supernova rate estimates from initial mass functions of stars + however you want to estimate Type Ia supernova rates. Note that uncertainties for any of this is going to be large since everything is model dependent (trying to count supernovae would be worse since you would have to model galactic dust and work with terrible statistics of supernova counts).

Note that you don't generally observationally determine the supernova rate by counting supernovae. As pointed out, obervational effects prevent one from seeing the remnants very well in the disk of the galaxy. Even the supernovae themselves may be obscured HEAVILY by dust. For example, the probable progenitor of Cassiopeia A should have been easily visible on Earth, but was only barely visible by Flamsteed in 1680 because it was so dusty. A more reasonable approach is to look at various elemental abundances.

Support for the Iraq war wasn't that high, and the number depended on UN support. Wikipedia has a nice summary. Essentially, only about 60% supported the war around the outbreak, although about 90% said that the war was justified shortly after the outbreak.

With creation myths, every pretty much every culture has one, so I don't think that it would be reasonable to claim that every creation myth falsifies the original claim because in principle there would be witnesses created in the miracle. I think that your answer basically boils down to the Lakota transformation, which would work, although I'm guessing that the Rabbi would complain about scale (but whatever).

This has gone on too long for comments, but the Rabbi specifically excludes creation myths and miracles from his claim. So that doesn't count for a counterclaim. Believing somebody was immortal doesn't matter since the claim is that a large number of people needed to WITNESS it (it isn't clear to me how a large group of people can witness immortality). I'm discounting the Pipestone story for now since the Song of Hiawatha isn't an authentic legend. The one bit at the end of Lakota story with transformation might work.

Thanks for the clarification. But read your myths - they don't debunk the central claim in the question. The key component of the claim is that the miracles must be performed in front of a large group of people. The Aztec god speaks to one guy. Marumba speaks to one or two people at a time. You cite the Song of Hiawatha for the Sioux, which is not an actual legend (it's a 19th century poem loosely based on some legends). The Lakota story has a miracle witnesses by a couple people again. The Flood story doesn't have anything to do with Moses. The Thebes story has 5 people.

The essence of the Moses story is that representatives of a nation went up a mountain and miraculously get guidance directly from a divinity while their People watched. That's what we want to match. Debunking this claim with "The Noah story in the Bible is very similar to Utnapishtim, so Moses is a duplicate" doesn't work. Noah and Moses are different stories separated by a huge amount of time! Similarly, most of the other proposed matches only hit on one or two details of the Mt. Sinai story at most. I'm not saying that the original claim is correct, but this response isn't hitting.

The main point is that I don't think that you can claim that any story with divine guidance is a duplicate of the Moses story. For a very weak match I'd at least like to see something like a mountain. For a good match I'd like to see something like the People sinning while the heroes were getting the revelation, leading to the heroes having to go twice. That might be too much, but something other than "divine guidance" has to match.

I'm sorry, but this is one of the worst highly voted answers I have seen on this site. Most of the response has nothing to do with the original question as I'll detail below. I think that people should be careful not to upvote questions relating to religion just because we expect the religious heavy claim to be wrong.

With creation myths, every pretty much every culture has one, so I don't think that it would be reasonable to claim that every creation myth falsifies the original claim because in principle there would be witnesses created in the miracle. I think that your answer basically boils down to the Lakota transformation, which would work, although I'm guessing that the Rabbi would complain about scale (but whatever).

This has gone on too long for comments, but the Rabbi specifically excludes creation myths and miracles from his claim. So that doesn't count for a counterclaim. Believing somebody was immortal doesn't matter since the claim is that a large number of people needed to WITNESS it (it isn't clear to me how a large group of people can witness immortality). I'm discounting the Pipestone story for now since the Song of Hiawatha isn't an authentic legend. The one bit at the end of Lakota story with transformation might work.

Thanks for the clarification. But read your myths - they don't debunk the central claim in the question. The key component of the claim is that the miracles must be performed in front of a large group of people. The Aztec god speaks to one guy. Marumba speaks to one or two people at a time. You cite the Song of Hiawatha for the Sioux, which is not an actual legend (it's a 19th century poem loosely based on some legends). The Lakota story has a miracle witnesses by a couple people again. The Flood story doesn't have anything to do with Moses. The Thebes story has 5 people.

The essence of the Moses story is that representatives of a nation went up a mountain and miraculously get guidance directly from a divinity while their People watched. That's what we want to match. Debunking this claim with "The Noah story in the Bible is very similar to Utnapishtim, so Moses is a duplicate" doesn't work. Noah and Moses are different stories separated by a huge amount of time! Similarly, most of the other proposed matches only hit on one or two details of the Mt. Sinai story at most. I'm not saying that the original claim is correct, but this response isn't hitting.

The main point is that I don't think that you can claim that any story with divine guidance is a duplicate of the Moses story. For a very weak match I'd at least like to see something like a mountain. For a good match I'd like to see something like the People sinning while the heroes were getting the revelation, leading to the heroes having to go twice. That might be too much, but something other than "divine guidance" has to match.

I'm sorry, but this is one of the worst highly voted answers I have seen on this site. Most of the response has nothing to do with the original question as I'll detail below. I think that people should be careful not to upvote questions relating to religion just because we expect the religious heavy claim to be wrong.

@DaveJohnson Arthur A Levine books is an imprint of Scholastic (since 1996), so I'm not sure that the distinction between Arthur Levine in DVK's answer and Scholastic in this one is relevant. DVK's answer clearly states that the idea came from Levine, so claiming that that is "quite" different than being a suggestion from them seems odd to me. The guy is working for Scholastic through his imprint. I agree that DVK's answer is better as it comes from a better source, but downvoting what appears to be a consistent and correct answer (that came sooner) seems odd to me.

@DaveJohnson What part is contradictory? The only part that could really be interpreted that way is the last sentence. And that one is sourced to a BBC interview by...JKR herself.

As to theoretical answers, your FAQ here says that they are "inappropriate". You suggest soft deletion through downvotes if such responses are seen, and I'm pretty sure that I've seen hard deletion, but I don't care enough about the difference to prove the point. In any case, both of these policies are clearly contradictory with the general practices of the methods of science and reason, hence by objection.

@Sklivvz The Welcome to New User FAQ states the original research is "not generally allowed" and that it must be referenced. Since original research generally can't be referenced by definition, the difference between "original research" and "unreferenced" (which is not allowed) seems semantic. Furthermore, the accepted answer in this meta post just outright states that original research is not allowed.

@Sklivvz You are going to have a very difficult time claiming that we use the methods of science while closing all posts that use originality or attempt to implement the scientific method (it would use unsourced thinking!). You are going to have a hard time claiming that we use scientific reasoning when posts based on independent reasoning are automatically closed. We archive things and don't do original research. That's great, but it is not using the methods of science. The fact that we like empiricism (or some other aspect of science) doesn't mean we are doing science.

@Sklivvz The definition of "Scientific skepticism" from wikipedia that was linked above states that a skeptic "openly applies the methods of science and reason all their claims...". Yet we generally aren't allowed to do this (we can only report that others have done so). Your counter to the fact that we aren't allowed to directly apply the definition of scientific skepticism is that we are allowed to act as scientific librarians. Since I do not believe that librarians are necessarily scientists or skeptics, I do not find this very convincing.

I completely disagree with the last section (and therefore the whole post I guess). Is a scientific librarian a scientist? (No). Simply gathering information/evidence and pairing it with claims is not scientific skepticism. It is not an application of the scientific method in any sense that I understand it - it is some kind of journalism or being an archivist. Science is fundamentally a framework for testing and modifying ideas, but we aren't really allowed to do that here (modifying existing ideas is original research). What we do is archive information about a specific question.

I don't necessarily agree. "Useful" is usually understood to mean "useful for falsifying a hypothesis" in this context. I think that it is clear that they are claiming that the predictions from the models are "useless" in the sense that they cannot be falsified using plausible data. So there is a statistical meaning of "useless" which could be used to answer the question as asked. Roughly: can plausible data be used to falsify the predictions made by this model?