Jon Letendre

No, these are questions that can be answered via a Google search and study of the issue.  I meant exactly what you will find via study of the correct sources on the subject and nothing else. 

So you accept that rate of plant evolution is relatively linear? The proto types of the proto-types of tree/ferns mentioned were in the process of evolving for the prior 350 million years? I was under the impression that a rough estimate is like a billion years after the earth formed and ‘cooled’ , attained a state that we would recognize as earth like now, unicellular life got started and then maintained a rather static almost homeostasis rate of growth but not development , for as much as a few billions years of nothing but unicellular life forms until bam! eukaryotes!
I think eukaryotes fossils are like 1.9 billion years old , looks like fits and spurts there , but maybe linear if the ages are misaligned, I suppose.
And isn’t fossil fuels really a misnomer ? 

Sight of Superlative Achievement
Stephen Boydstun (2007)
My favorite character in Atlas Shrugged is John Galt. One of the crucial traits of this character is his extraordinary technical ability. I can adore a fictional character, and part of the reason I adore this one is his possession of that trait.
Adoration is one thing, admiration is another. Galt’s technical genius is admirable only in the derivative sense that I would admire that trait in a real person. I cannot admire a fictional character. I can admire the character’s creator as creator, but not the character.
Fortunately, there are in our time many individuals whose mathematical and scientific accomplishments are at the high level of the fictional character John Galt. They are not well known to the general public. I want to tell you about one such man.
Eli Yablonovitch invented the concept of a photonic band gap. He arrived at this concept in 1987 while doing research on making telecommunication lasers more efficient. Another physicist Sajeev John arrived at the concept independently that same year. John came to the concept in the course of pure research attempting to create light localization.
Four years later, Yablonovitch was the first to create a successful photonic band-gap crystal. He used a variant of the crystal structure of diamond, a variant now called yablonovite. The structure was formed by drilling three intersecting arrays of holes, 400 nanometers in diameter, into a block of ceramic material. This structure, at this scale, was able to eliminate the propagation of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range. Photonic band-gap crystals are yielding a new generation of optical fibers capable of carrying much more information, and they are contributing to the realization of nanoscopic lasers and photonic integrated circuits.
The name photonic crystal sounds like a crystal made of light. That is incorrect. A photonic crystal is an artificial crystal (or quasicrystal) made usually of solids such as dielectrics or semiconductors. The electrical properties of a semiconductor are intermediate between a dielectric (an insulator) and a conductor.
In a dielectric material, the valence electrons of the atoms are tightly bound to them. They are confined to energy levels within the band of levels called the valence band. Above that band of levels is a broad band of energies inaccessible to the electrons under the laws of quantum mechanics. That forbidden band is called the band gap. Above the band gap is a band in which electrons could move freely in the material if only enough energy were applied to them to raise them to that band of energy levels. This band is called the conduction band.
In a semiconductor, the valence electrons are less tightly bound to atoms than they are in a dielectric. The band gap is smaller. A smaller boost of energy is needed to induce the flow of electrons, a current. The degree of electrical conductivity of a semiconductor can be precisely controlled by doping one semiconductor chemical element with small amounts of another.
When an electron is promoted across the band gap, an effective positive charge called a hole is created in the valence levels below the gap. The holes, like the electrons, can be entrained into currents. By controlling the supply of electrons and holes above and below the band gap, carefully designed semiconductors are able to perform electronic switching, modulating, and logic functions. They can also be contrived to serve as media for photo detectors, solid-state lasers, light-emitting diodes, thermistors, and solar cells.
The properties of an electronic band gap depend on the type of atoms and their crystal structure in the solid semiconductor. To comprehend and manipulate the electronic properties of matter, electrons and their alterations must be treated not only in their character as particles, but in their character as quantum-mechanical waves. The interatomic spacing of the atoms in matter is right for wave-interference effects among electrons. This circumstance yields the electronic band gaps in semiconductors as well as the conductive ability of conductors.
A photonic band gap is a range of energies of electromagnetic waves for which their propagation through the crystal is forbidden in every direction. The interatomic spacing in semiconductors are on the order of a few tenths of a nanometer, and that is too small for effecting photonic band gaps in the visible, infrared, microwave, or radio ranges of the spectrum. Creation of photonic band gaps for these very useful wavelengths requires spatial organizations in matter at scales on the order of a few hundred nanometers and above.
In the 70’s and 80’s, researchers had been forming, in semiconductors, structures called superlattices. These were periodic variations in semiconductor composition in which repetitions were at scales a few times larger than the repetitions in the atomic lattice. The variations could consist of alternating layers of two types of semiconductors or in cyclic variations in the amount of selected impurities in a single type of semiconductor. These artificial lattices allowed designers, guided by the quantum theory of solids, to create new types of electronic band gaps and new opticoelectronic properties in semiconductors.
Photonic crystals are superlattices in which the repeating variation is a variation in the refractive index of the medium. It is by refractions and internal partial reflections that photonic band gaps are created. The array of holes that Yablonovitch and his associates drilled for the first photonic crystal formed a superlattice of air in the surrounding dielectric solid. Additional workable forms of photonic-crystal superlattice have been demonstrated since that first one. Costas Soukoulis and colleagues created a crystal of crisscrossed rods, and it has yielded photonic band gaps in the infrared part of the spectrum. Photonic crystals have been created mostly in dielectric or semiconductor media, but Shawn Yu Lin and associates have created them in tungsten. These may prove useful in telecommunications and in the conversion of infrared radiation into electricity.
In 2001 Eli Yablonovitch co-founded the company Luxtera, which is now a leading commercial developer of silicon photonic products.
Photonic crystals, manipulators of light, they are alive “because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power—of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form.” –AR 1957 (re diesel-electric) 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Scientific American
1983 (Nov) “Solid-State Superlattices” –G.H. Dohler
1984 (Aug) “Quasicrystals” –D.R. Nelson
1986 (Oct) “Photonic Materials” –J.M. Rowell
1991 (Nov) “Microlasers” –J.L. Jewell, J.P. Harbison, and A. Scherer
1998 (Mar) “Nanolasers” –P.L. Gourley
2001 (Dec) “Photonic Crystals: Semiconductors of Light” –E. Yablonovitch
2007 (Feb) “Making Silicon Lase” –B. Jalali
 
Science News
1991 (Nov 2) “Drilling Holes to Keep Photons in the Dark” –I. Peterson
1993 (Sep 25) “A Novel Architecture for Excluding Photons” –I. Peterson 
1996 (Nov 16) “Light Gets the Bends in a Photonic Crystal” –C. Wu
1998 (Oct 24) “Crystal Bends Light Hard, Saves Space” –P. Weiss
2003 (Oct 4) “Hot Crystal” –P. Weiss
2005 (Nov 5) “Light Pedaling” –P. Weiss
 
Nature Photonics
2007 (1:91–92) “Bandgap Engineering: Quasicrystals Enter Third Dimension” –C.T. Chan
 
Fundamental Papers – Physical Review Letters
1987 (May 18) “Inhibited Spontaneous Emission in Solid-State Physics and Electronics” –E. Yablonovitch
1987 (Jun 8 ) “Strong Localization of Photons in Certain Disordered Dielectric Superlattices” –S. John
1989 (Oct 30) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case” –E. Yablonovitch and T.M. Gmitter
1990 (Nov 19) “Full Vector Wave Calculation of Photonic Band Structures in Face-Centered-Cubic Dielectric Media” –K.M. Leung and Y.F. Liu
1990 (Nov 19) “Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures: Bloch Wave Solution of Maxwell’s Equations” –Z. Zhang and S. Satpathy
1990 (Dec 17) “Existence of a Photonic Gap in Periodic Dielectric Structures” –K.M. Ho, C.T. Chan, and C.M. Soukoulis
1991 (Oct 21) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case Employing Non-Spherical Atoms” –E. Yablonovitch, T.J. Gmitter, and K.M. Leung

I hope it is.

I hope it only sounds like BS, but I am not so sure, and this is very troubling for this OO forum...

Craig Murray in the UK has written extensively about the incarceration and trials of Julian Assange.
About the publication of the unredacted documents see "Julian Assange’s Grand Inquisitor" by Chris Hedges.
But what the WSJ (mainstream media beholden to the Deep State) says as well as the above is irrelevant.  The CIA is in large part a pack of murders – good riddance to bad rubbish.
 
 
 

Commenting on just this part:
If you torture a man for 14 years and he dies a month later, you don’t say he died of natural causes.  Good grief.
What’s under the ellipsis – “the Devil or” – mocks the truth.
 

Video on this page.  (Start viewing at 1:30 because the video begins with an excerpt which you will see later in its place.)  She did a great job, very impressive.
 

If there didn't exist facts relative to deeming the therapy 'safe'( this term has specific meaning when applied to medical interventions and coming from medical experts) there was nothing to investigate. So what facts did you investigate relative to safety?
It seems you just accepted an argument from authority and then reasoned your way to a rationalization, people do that all the time.
Two times in this thread you have asserted that you will not be participating in the discussion and then continue. Is this a good look for a moderator of an O'ist forum? (It feels like lying)
 

Reason and investigation of the facts. Also, the context that my grandfather had just died of it a couple months before and to protect my mom who I was staying with at the time who has COPD. Just because there is a standard time for testing doesn't mean in context of a disease that nobody has natural immunity to that individuals such as myself can't take vaccines or medical drugs that have not went through the full process of testing outside of that context as it would be a potential sacrifice of one's life to do otherwise. It would be similar to someone with cancer taking an experimental treatment. Also,  why is any of this important as it's a personal choice. I don't even fully understand the full purpose of this entire thread about denying the existence of a disease where essentially every fact of evidence and perception proves the existence of while no evidence exists that shows that it doesn't.  It's just arbitrary although I have some ideas why someone would claim this against the overwhelming facts of reality. This is just a very strange discussion. 

No, that would be secondhanded, I did it to prevent myself from getting Covid and studied mRNA vaccines before taking the vaccines. This is ridiculous and I'm not taking part in this strange discussion anymore and will read to moderate it against arbitrary conspiracy theories and from those seeking to ignore reason,  evidence, and proper epistemology. 

Monart, here's a link to Brownstone Institute and their many articles
https://brownstone.org/
the gold standard for all things pandemic, good science, optimal health and freedom-orientated, fronted by the heroic Jeffrey Tucker ("Liberty or Lockdown?"). They have been my bright reference point

Can you give some examples of the CDC saying that?
 

@necrovore That would mean those people would have to had advanced knowledge years prior to the pandemic of the existence of the covid virus which is a big leap implying a planned conspiracy when it is much more likely that it was simply a coincidence involving passive attacks from the Left on the religious Right. While there likely are occasional side effects of childhood vaccines (like watching a commercial for any medicine or vaccine shows in detail) we've essentially all had them and they have been scientifically proven to be extremely rare with the benefits outweighing the slight risk. Obviously, that doesn't imply forced vaccinations are moral or should be legal outside of maybe an extremely lethal and highly contagious novel disease, covid doesn't qualify, although I personally got the vaccine the week it was allowed.  (J&J which to prove the above point of risk was soon taken off the market due to the blood clot risk). The main principle involves the fact that the government should not be involved in education as it should be private or funded via charity as like most things current governments are improperly involved in when their only valid jobs are the protection of individual rights. 

How were mRNA vaccines against the covid virus created and developed if the DNA sequence of the virus was never "purified and isolated" (concepts that do not apply to DNA sequencing btw), or are they also non-existent conspiracies?

Why you keep going…

…Because you seek to know truth, to show it, to let it be known and shown. You resist and defend against the truth being denied, distorted, or defiled. And more so with fundamental, radical axiomatic truths. Objectivism is such a fundamental truth.

Objectivism is an integrated system of philosophy you come to know as truth by way of looking at reality by your own mind and reason. You did not give trust to experts, not to professors or priests, as to whether Objectivism was true or false. You know for yourself that Objectivism is true.

In the same independently thinking way, you come to know and defend the truth of covid. Or not?

We have a better chance of surviving four years of Biden than of surviving four years of Trump.
 

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. "Why Can't Professional Philosophers Get Rand Right?," by Mike Mazza (New Ideal):Mazza indicates that parochialism, of which the above is only a type, is a problem even for those few non-Objectivist academics who have been sympathetic to Rand, and is right to call out professional philosophers, of all people, for falling into it.

2. "Selfish Randsday to All," by Harry Binswanger (Value for Value):I especially recommend visiting this post for the excerpt from Rand's The Fountainhead, which powerfully demolishes the trite, but deadly and wrong sentiment that it's easy to be selfish.

3. "Portraying CEOs as Cartoon Villains," by Jaana Woiceshyn (How to Be Profitable and Moral):This dishonest practice has always been a hallmark of the left, but the right has moved from failing to even pretend to stand up for business to joining in.

Indeed, such phrases as corporate media -- once a shibboleth of the left -- now get bandied about as if we're all communists now.

4. "Has the Right Been Eviscerated by Trump?," by Peter Schwartz (PeterSchwartz.com, 2019):This post is even more relevant now than when I read it in 2019.

And if the above isn't disturbing enough, news from the latest CPAC will more than underscore Schwartz's point.

-- CAVLink to Original

No, it doesn't follow that it's a bogus award, just because Mr. Eckert wants proof of virus isolation from Dr. Kammerer first, while Dr. Kammerer want proof of the award first.  Consider the flip side, since Dr. Kammerer doesn’t want to show her proof first, does it follow from that alone that she doesn’t have it?  No.

In an article reporting Dr. Kammerer's side of the dispute:
"In a letter from a lawyer dated October 17, 2022, the law firm Rogert & Ulbrich informed SaMiraFamily AG and Mr. Samuel Eckert that Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer complied with the request and will present proof of the existence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus with proof of the existence of the amount of the request."
In an article reporting Mr. Eckert's side of the debate:
"In view of the expressed "suspicion of fraud", the accusation of "cheating" and the fact that Kämmerer announced more than once to the public that she had the evidence necessary to fulfill the promise, but she did not want to "give it away" and obviously still doesn't want to, Transition News sent her and her lawyers several questions."
So, it's at least a stand-off: each side wanting the other to provide the proof first.
But the fundamental question remains. If the proof exists that SC2 has been isolated, purified, and distinctly identified, and that this proof is so widely available that asking for it is absurd, then where are the documents for it? If the proof is so obvious and publicly available as to be unquestionable and unchallengeable, then why does Dr. Kammerer not want to "give it away"?
Is it like someone claiming they have proof that Objectivism is false, but doesn't want to "give it away"?
 
 

I'd think "perception" contains the idea of awareness, and is not helpful in a statement of what is awareness or how it comes about. But perhaps you just mean by "perception" here inputs from sensors bring information of things to the processing plant. That is OK.
What is the relationship of information processing in neural networks and my information processing in awareness that I am typing a question ending at the question mark? If the information processing of the neural-network activity underlying my information processing in conscious awareness just is that conscious information processing, that identity needs to be established by argument and research results. On the face of it, it appears that when we are consciously taking in information and making it integral to our actions, we are not thinking about those underlying neuronal information processes (firing patterns of neural networks), but of things like what marks we are making on the computer screen and what worthwhile thoughts of worldly entities, characters, passages, and situations in topic (or tangentially) we are striving to attain and share.
Perhaps you could show us where you think is the cutting edge of research on that question is today. (Please don't say "I'm the cutting edge". That is not credible nor informative, what one is aiming for is not what one has in hand, and it bespeaks a failure to look and assess beyond ones own thought in the enterprise of human knowledge.) I'm not aware that any well-founded right answer to my question has been reached, but I'm not really up to date on latest research. I've noticed the following works tackling the question or issues pertinent to it through some years now. Of any you have studied, do you find any to be getting somewhere (or for that matter, of any interest to you)?
Artificial Intelligence – The Very Idea (Haugeland 1985)
The Remembered Present – A Biological Theory of Consciousness (Edelman 1989)
Consciousness Explained (Dennett 1991)
The Race for Consciousness (Taylor 1999)
The Quest for Consciousness – A Neurobiological Approach (Koch 2004)
Consciousness (Hill 2009)
Mind: Your Consciousness is What and Where? (Honderich 2017)
The Feeling of Life Itself – Why Consciousness is Widespread but Cannot Be Computed (Koch 2019)
Conscious Mind / Resonant Brain – How Each Brain Makes a Mind (Grossberg 2021). 
 
 
 
 

Yes, indeed,  it would be an easy award to win if SARS-CoV-2 has already been isolated. You suggest that, as nobody took up the challenge, SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated.
If you have given it a serious look, you would have seen that the offer is not quite serious:
From the site and the video linked to, I saw that the person who initiated the challenge and offers the reward is a certain Mr. Samuel Eckert.
On October 17, 2022, Fr. Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg contacted this Samuel Eckert through her lawyers. She accepts the challenge. She will provide the required proof. For the fact that she, as you requested, is indeed a virologist, she sent attached her publications.
She then asked Mr. Eckert to prove that he does possess the amount of the award, e.g. by depositing it in an escrow account.
Now this Mr. Eckert answers something like: wait a minute, the objective of this challenge is not to pay 1.5 million, but to open a debate etc. !
In another video (this one, minute 15:43), Mr. Eckert explains that first should Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer provide the required proof for existence of SARS-CoV-2, and only then will Mr. Eckert prove that he has the money ! A bogus award, in other words.
It would have been better if, before suggesting that nobody accepted the challenge and implying that this is an additional indication that  SARS-CoV-2 doesn't exist, you would have given this challenge a serious look.☹️
His site indicates that this Mr. Eckert is a conspiracy theorist (no viruses exist etc.).
This is not the first conspiracist you are approvingly citing on this Objectivism forum: it was also Christine Massey (from YogaEsoteric and FluorideFreePeel), then the book Virus Mania: Corona/COVID-19, Measles, Swine Flu, Cervical Cancer, Avian Flu, SARS, BSE, Hepatitis C, AIDS, Polio. How the Medical Industry Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense.☹️☹️

Isn't it proven that there was a big spike in respiratory deaths starting in 2020, which must have had some cause or causes?
 

Again, papers like “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies” appear to have identified SARS-CoV-2 definitively and independently, but a reading of the documentation shows otherwise. Yes, as I've said before, I've read the paper you named (along with several others over the years, including the progenitor paper from Wuhan, "A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019".)
The purpose of the paper is to offer a new, better method of purification that can be applied to SARS-CoV-2 (SC2). The method was developed using an SC2 sample that the authors did not acquire themselves directly from a patient, but from another, outside source, "SARS-CoV2 isolate Finland/1/2020". They cultured and re-purified it, then compared it with "the SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan (NC_045512.2) reference genome" for validation of their new purification method. So the paper is actually a description of how the authors (re)purified what they assumed to be SC2 (from Finland) and then compared it with the originally alleged SC2 genome (from Wuhan).
The first study from Wuhan that reported a "novel coronavirus" is the primary reference study to which all subsequent studies. As I pointed out before, and as close reading would show, the Wuhan study is biased, flawed, and suspect, in ways that include the authors' not taking into account the pre-existing respiratory disease epidemic from the severe air pollution in Wuhan.

I enjoy your posts.  It's like you take my own thoughts on subjects and then express them much more eloquently than I can currently due to constantly being in a relatively stressful situation mostly outside of my control and essentially uncaused by myself that no matter what I do to attempt to thwart it keeps getting continually sabatoged via outside sources.