What is evidence?

[The Grand Nudger]

-but that's cheating, the partially filled bottle of liquor acts as a lens. 

[LadyForCamus]

An arborist around my parts got chewed up in the tree-chipper-thingy (sorry, don't know what it's called, lol) this past summer. It was his first day on the job. There was like...nothing left of him when it was all over. *shudder*

[Arkilogue]

Good question, arkilogue. What is evidence?

This tree can be visualized with the naked eye. This unfortunate fellow a flesh and blood human being. Spike marks in the tree an obvious result of spike vs. tree. You have experience and knowledge of the tree trimmers trade.

Your thorough investigation was possible without instrumentation. No microscope, telescopes, carbon 14 dating . A video recording of the event would have aided you in your analysis.

However, if you had not visualized the evidence at the scene but had merely done your investigation as a thought experiment you would have had no evidence, merely speculation.  You would have been able to imagine thousands of ways a man could perish in an accident such as this. A police or insurance investigator would quickly tire of your "evidence" and move you along. "Just the facts, please".

Now, I assume that Arkilogue will soon explain to us how he sees into the quantum world and outward to the the universe in its entirety. Through space time itself! Without so much as a particle accelerator or microwave telescope. I imagine he sees far into the universe while 30ft up a tree.

Perhaps you miss-read or I'm miss-reading you, there were no spike holes in the tree and I take this absence as evidence he was not using spurs to climb/trim it. There's an extremely minor possibility could could have ascended a rope with spikes on but he would also not need to stand in the crotch of the tree. He would have had a much wider choice of working positions out of harms way. He also was not a professional tree trimmer but had done it for long enough (imo) to correctly feel when a branch has the potential to kill. And it was at the end of the work day when people tend to get sloppier, rushing things that should not be rushed. Many influencing factors.

I was the instrument...with several fields of gain, calibrated and refined over many years of direct experimentation. But there may be evidence at the scene I do not have the trained forensic eye to look for. Just as some one who was not experienced in tree trimming would not know to look for the things that I did. So how do I or does anyone gain knowledge of what they don't know to look for? Or more importantly why to look for it. Our evidence is only as good as our instrument. For example, surely there is real evidence whether he used gloves or not. Oils from the skin and finger prints left on the bark. But do we have the instrumentation sensitive enough to find it? What if we had a nose as good or better than an elephant that can smell water 12 miles away?

Yes I could imagine thousands of ways...and I would be the one asking the police for "just the facts."

I have looked at much of the findings from telescopes and accelerators. Without them I would have much less data to throw at my model and much less confidence in it's plausibility.

My basic job as a tree trimmer is to turn potential energy into kinetic energy in a manner that does not kill people. It involves counter balancing and accounting for many variables in dynamic play, several under my direct influence. But most it involves the ability to project my body and feel the mass of what ever size branch I'm cutting, and feel it's resulting angular momentum, spin and inertia of mass in free-fall. Just like the earth is doing around the sun, just like the sun is doing in a vortical spiral arm around the center of the Milky Way. Just like the Milky Way is doing in a dance with uncountable other galaxies around no discernible center of gravity.

I simply turned my projection of mass to 100% and space to infinity. To me, one of the most interesting aspect of this though experiment is that gravity is pulling outwards on all points from all directions but there is no where to go, it surrounds itself forever in all directions. It is both a closed and open system, kinda like the screen wrap in the game Asteroids only in 3d. =) Like a lattice or a field, the properties are invariant no matter where you pick as a center. It's all center and there is no periphery. A unified quantum state.


The model I work with tells me our section of the universe which patterns for our quark density, is unfolded as a ring torus in rotation along both the vertical and horizontal axis. It's horizontal motion predicts an incoming side of space-time flow and an outgoing side. A hemispherical asymmetry of the visible universe around us. I find "evidence" of this prediction in the hemispherical asymmetry of the CMB.

[chimp3]

I understood you , arkilogue. And folks, I told you so.

[Arkilogue]

I imagine he sees far into the universe while 30ft up a tree.

I often go 100+ in 25-35 mph trade winds.

But one interesting adjustment from human perspective bias I have gained in my view of the earth from the tree tops; Nothing is standing "straight up", everything is sticking out sideways. There is no "up" on a sphere unless you include spin but even then the experience of "standing up" at the pole is little different than on the equator....more spin would change that.

The perspective change is from being a vertical person on a planar planet to being a spherical planet under one of billions of persons that stick radially outward in all directions. I try to think global and act local.

[Arkilogue]

An arborist around my parts got chewed up in the tree-chipper-thingy (sorry, don't know what it's called, lol) this past summer.  It was his first day on the job.  There was like...nothing left of him when it was all over.   *shudder*

Yeah that happens. The one I work with has two self feeding tooth wheels and can chew through a 10 inch diameter log. There are 2 yellow "oh shit" cables hanging in the feeder mouth that you could potentially grab to reverse the feeder wheels to have the beast spit you back out. Once it grabs a branch I GTF out of the way because that branch can grab me or flop around to bust me in the face/hand/neck/ass/ribs/leg/bollox.

Tree work switches places yearly with deep sea fishing for the job most likely to kill you.

[Arkilogue]

I kinda agree with Arky ... sometimes absence of evidence is evidence of absence. I wonder what other questions to which I might apply this principle?

The larger problem is not knowing what evidence to look for the absence of....but perhaps that's a philosophical dead end.

[LostLocke]

-but that's cheating, the partially filled bottle of liquor acts as a lens. 

I thought glass was what you used to see the Veegtron, no?

(Remember *that* guy? )

[Arkilogue]

I understood you , arkilogue. And folks, I told you so.

[The Grand Nudger]

Godammit man, get to the crazy shit already. We're two pages into this and I need my fix!