The Dink Network

shevek@fmf.nl
Private Message

This community the friendliest? Where people gang up on certain people and make fun of them? Pick on them endlessly?

Sorry, but I'm not seeing it. It may be because I'm not looking at deleted posts, but what I see here is, with some exceptions, extremely polite behaviour compared to other places on the internet.

If you're referring to this particular thread, I don't see it here either. Nobody is ganging up on you. Nobody is insulting you. You make a claim that several people disagree with, and we tell you so. We invite you to explain why you think your claim is plausible, and give arguments why we think it isn't. For me, this is a normal part of a discussion. There's nothing insulting about it.

I've seen the question "how do all these idiots always find The Dink Network" asked many times.

You have? I think I've only seen it in the quotes on the bottom of the page, and I'm not even sure about that. Do you have links?

because these are the same scientists making that claim, that would mean they'd be unreliable and that dinosaurs didn't necessarily exist back then either.

I think I have identified a misunderstanding. Your definition of "dinosaur" seems to be "any species which lived xx years ago", while my definition is about which species it is. I'm not even entirely sure what defines a dinosaur, actually, but that is irrelevant; this different definition results in an important other difference: if turtles lived alongside (my definition) dinosaurs, then you call them dinosaurs, but I don't. With your definition (if I got it right) I agree that some dinosaurs have survived the mass extinction event.

However, I think my definition is the one most people use, so I would suggest that you change your terminology, to avoid misunderstandings like this in the future.

Science is based on pure assumption and is more often wrong than right.

That's an interesting statement, which might actually be true. The basis of science is to assume something, which may very well be wrong, test it, and discard it if it was indeed wrong. However, this also means that even if most of the hypotheses (which is what the assumptions are normally called) are wrong, the ones that are kept are usually right, at least for the situation they were tested in.

Also, this works better for an exact science like physics than for something more fuzzy like history. But the main feature, that mostly correct things are kept as "true", remains.

But yes, science is often wrong, and scientists know it. It is their goal to find the answers, which doesn't mean they have all of them.

I never said dinosaurs were dragons.

This seems to be a language issue. In English, a dragon is an actual animal, still living today. In Dutch we call them "Varaan", which doesn't sound at all like "Draak" (which is a fantasy dragon that flies and spits fire). But in English they are the same word.

Calling differential equations 'simple math' is quite telling...

I was talking from the engineer's perspective. There are indeed differential equations involved, but they are solved. What you practically have to do to get the age is a log function. But perhaps you are right that calling it "simple" was not justified.