Do you believe in ghosts?

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fade

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Two things I miss about South Carolina (my home state): pulled pork, and ghost stories. It's almost like an epidemic there. There's one for everything. The cool thing is that most of them are creepy. In fact, Fade names the creatures he encounters after SC ghosts (it's set there). The hag article above reminded me of SC's ghost infatuation.

There's one I particularly like called the Hound of Goshen, which is similar in some respects to Jurassic Bark. It's the ghost of an ill-fated traveler's dog that sat atop his grave until it died of starvation. Carriages and cars along the road report a large, white dog that noiselessly travels alongside them, keeping pace no matter the speed. At the closed cemetery gates, the dog turns and bounds through.

---------- Post added at 03:46 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:36 PM ----------

I totally forgot about the science discussion! I feel like Tackleberry showing up after the gunfight.

Here's some Actual Slides™ I use in my Geology 101 class about this very topic: http://egg.louisiana.edu/~jack/science.pdf
 
M

Matt²

yeah, and this one just froze up my computer!


---------- Post added at 07:01 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:00 AM ----------

(True story.. as I was typing this the first time, my computer literally froze, which it NEVER does!!)
 
The answer to every single ghost story ever in history:

1) You were dreaming
2) You wanted attention
3) You exaggerated something
4) You were hallucinating

Or any combination of the 4.
 

fade

Staff member
A misconception by whom? Aristotle wrote the things he wrote. Who was he trying to convince, then, if everyone believed it?
 
M

makare

Philosophers tend to think about common things especially if they are professional philosophers with nothing else to do.
 

fade

Staff member
A google search does reveal a well-known flat earth misconception, but around Columbus's time, not Aristotle. Sure, other Greeks believed in various Earth models, but on the whole, they were flat earth.
 
I'm pretty sure 2000 years ago would be at most the 1st century BC: Spherical Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yeah, they did have ideas about the Earth being flat, but it wasn't exactly the only idea around...

I'm afraid we must demand that you change your presentation to state that "2300 years ago there was still a debate about whether or not the world was flat, spherical or on the back of a turtle"!!! :p
 
M

makare

Hmm how do we assess this? Are we going by what the average person thought or what educated people thought? Even today there is quite a disparity there back then probably even more so.
 

fade

Staff member
Alien, I totally agree that the idea was around well before Aristotle. I'm not arguing about that. Date or not, it's still a cool set of evidence that Aristotle came up with. I would love to meet him. He's on my "dinner list".
 
You want to invite Aristotle over for dinner, poison him and bury him in your tomato garden?!

But i remember Asimov writing a response to some lit student about how science wasn't so much wrong as simply evolving or something that mentioned how even more ancient peoples realised the earth had a curvature by seeing how ships or other stuff slowly disappeared on the horizon etc... so it wasn't as simple as them just being flat earthers...

But it's not really that important that i'm being very serious about you having to change your presentation...

Hmm how do we assess this? Are we going by what the average person thought or what educated people thought? Even today there is quite a disparity there back then probably even more so.
Actually that was kinda what i was thinking of when i said it was a misconception...
 

fade

Staff member
Well I did say "common knowledge" in the presentation.

---------- Post added at 07:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:21 PM ----------

Like I said, I'm not arguing that other people put forth the idea before Aristotle. That was most likely true. But Aristotle, being the bug in people's ears, probably brought it to the forefront.
 
Well I did say "common knowledge" in the presentation.



Well... fine, i'll have to accept it then.... :mad:



Oh, and something for the previous thing: Georges Lemaître - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Lemaître proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'.[1][2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre#cite_note-1


Man, i should have known from the get go that the reason why it was so similar to some mythology is because a priest was involved...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre#cite_note-1
 

Cajungal

Staff member
Oh man, this happens to me a lot right as I'm falling asleep! It's so spooky... I dream a lot at night, and usually I'll have those falling dreams that wake me just as I'm drifting off. The falling is usually accompanied by some sort of loud voice. Not supernatural, but still weird. And kinda fun.

I'm not saying you're crazy or anything. It's happened to me before, about twice. Sounds plain as anything and then goes away.
 
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