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Thomas Gerbasi, UFC - Cover this game long enough and you'll get a few perks, one of which is interviewing some of the most interesting athletes in the world, guys with great stories and the willingness to tell them. No one's quite like Quinton Jackson though, and in my years of covering mixed martial arts, rarely has someone been as quotable as the former light heavyweight champion who takes on his nemesis Rashad Evans in the main event of UFC 114 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 29th.
By Thomas Gerbasi
Cover this game long enough and you'll get a few perks, one of which is interviewing some of the most interesting athletes in the world, guys with great stories and the willingness to tell them. No one's quite like Quinton Jackson though, and in my years of covering mixed martial arts, rarely has someone been as quotable as the former light heavyweight champion who takes on his nemesis Rashad Evans in the main event of UFC 114 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 29th.
Of course, back in his wilder days, half of the stuff he would blurt out wouldn't be suitable for print, but even then, Jackson would always give a reporter what he was looking for and always much more. So here are some gems from my chats with the man nicknamed "Rampage".
On his less than ideal formative years, growing up in Memphis (2003)
"It's not an excuse. My family is from the country and they grew up poor on a farm, but a lot of my uncles have their own businesses, are airplane pilots, and they did something with their lives. My mom was poor and I didn't have everything I wanted. And I want to have things. I want to do things. So if I had the chance to make money fighting I'm going to do it and be the best so I can make some money and take care of my family. I'm going to give back to my mom and help them out so my little brother and sister can have things that I had to do without. One of the problems with me why I didn't do so good in school is that I was surrounded by the wrong people and I was kinda poor, so the kids would make fun of me because I didn't have the clothes that they had. So I really couldn't concentrate on getting my lessons. I always had to fight and talk s**t to my classmates so they would leave me alone. I don't want my little sister and brother to have to go through that. I fight now, save some money and send it back home so they can just worry about getting their education. They can wear nice clothes and do nice things. My mom don't have to worry about how she's going to feed them and pay her bills and everything."
On his introduction to wrestling (2003)
"One of my uncles once sat me down and told me that if I didn't change the way I was living and the way I was acting, I wasn't going to live long. I saw a lot of my friends disappearing, either going to prison or getting killed, and I didn't want that type of life. Strangely, something changed when we moved out of the neighborhood and we moved to a place where they had better things. They had wrestling in school and a lot of other things. Normally I was going to an all-black school, but there I went to a mixed school and got surrounded by a mixture of people. It was more positive for me and I felt how good I could be. My grades got better and I stopped doing the hustling I was doing. I got a job and I changed. And I kinda liked it. It was cool to try and do something positive. Sometimes it was hard for me to be totally good. I still went back to my roots when I had to, but I liked the change. I was wrestling and I wasn't fighting as much on the streets.
On his first exposure to mixed martial arts (2003)
I went off to college to wrestle and when I got back he (friend and former wrestling rival Dave Roberts) took me to one of these fights. "These wrestlers were fighting and kicking everybody's ass. I was like, 'damn.' I grew up fighting all the time, but I always got in trouble for it. I was thinking, 'damn, I can fight without getting in trouble.' That's all I was thinking about. I started doing it, and I got pretty good at it, I guess."
On getting acclimated to mixed martial arts, conducted before his fight with Kevin Randleman (2003)
"Nothing's ever been given to me, so I'm used to it. Most fighters have a real strong background. Take Kevin Randleman for instance. He's got a real strong wrestling background. You take other fighters; one may have a strong kickboxing background while another has a strong jiu-jitsu background. I didn't have that in anything. I just grew up fighting on the street all my life. I just knew how to fight."
On his early days as a pro fighter (2005)
"I was living in an RV when I first started fighting in Pride. I was kinda homeless. I moved from my family in Memphis to California and started training. And some things didn't work out. But I didn't want to give up, so I had to live where I had to live. I lived in worse places before, so I did that and God pulled me through. He got me where I am right now."
On fighting in Japan (2008)
"My family wasn't surprised that I was gonna be a fighter because growing up, I was just natural at fighting. I just told them I was fighting over in Japan and they couldn't understand why I chose Japan. I told them I didn't choose Japan; Japan chose me. But they knew I was happy and I was loving it, and I was doing pretty well – I was making a living."
Before his first fight with Chuck Liddell (2003)
"Any fighter can beat any other fighter on any given day. Randy Couture beat Chuck (Liddell) that one day; maybe if they fought the next day Chuck could have beaten him. You never know. I try to keep a positive mentality at all times but I don't want to be a cocky fighter. It's not my style. I talk s**t, but that's just me. If you pay attention, I really don't talk s**t about my opponents unless they did something wrong to me. And when I talk about people's mamas, even they laugh about it."
On Liddell before their first fight (2003)
"I don't like to watch a lot of tape on my opponents. I watch to see what I need to know and that's it. I don't want to watch too much tape and then you go out there worried about what they're gonna do. Liddell's a tough fighter but he makes some mistakes in there. Everybody makes mistakes; I'm just gonna try and capitalize on the ones he makes."
On competing in the Pride Grand Prix tournament, where he would eventually face Chuck Liddell and Wanderlei Silva in the same night (2003)
"I've got the least experience of everybody in this tournament. I've just been fighting on the street all my life. That's what I bring to the table. Even though these guys may have more professional fights than I have, I've got more fights. And when I fight, I'm fighting for my life. Maybe that will help me out a little bit."
On dealing with the fans during his stint in Pride (2003)
"It's cool but I don't fight to be a famous guy or anything. I started fighting to pay the bills. I like the fans and everything, and they're cool, but what heterosexual guy wants to get their rocks off by a bunch of guys knowing them? If I was a movie star or something, it would be different, because girls would know who I was too. But in America, only guys know who I am, so it's not a big deal to me. In Japan, girls come up to me too and ask for autographs and stuff like that too. But in America, girls rarely know who I am. This is not a sport that girls watch. If I was acting in a soap opera, it would be different. Girls would come up to me and then it would be worth it. Girls going crazy over you, yeah, but a bunch of guys, come on. It's nice and cool and everything, but it's not something that floats my boat."
On dealing with superstardom in Japan (2005)
"I don't wear my chain around and I don't walk around like I'm a big fighter all the time with my fighter shirt on. I try to blend in because everybody and their mama has cameras out there. If one person starts taking pictures then the whole street starts taking pictures. I'll be there for hours signing autographs and taking pictures. My friends will leave me – they always do – and I'll be there by myself."
On getting some 'get back' (2005)
"I want to beat everybody who beat me. (Wanderlei) Silva beat me twice, and he's the only person who did that, so I guess I want to beat him twice as bad as I want to beat everybody else who beat me. Even though I fight for money, I don't want to lose, and I do want to be the best."
On winning the UFC light heavyweight title (2007)
"The best thing that's come out of me being champ is I got a chance to meet Beyonce, so I'm happy about that. That was my lucky day, 7/7/07."
On his fighting philosophy (2007)
"I'm the type of fighter that wants to please the crowd. Win, lose, or draw, I want to put on a good show. That's what I do. I want everybody to be amused from the moment I walk out to the moment I leave. That's me in a nutshell and that's what I get paid for. I'm an entertainer and I'm gonna entertain everyone."
On life in the UFC (2008)
"This is the thing about the UFC that a lot of people don't know – it's not only made me more successful, but it's also bringing my family together. My Mom is more active in what's going on with me, my Dad has been to every one of my UFC fights, even in London. He never came to my PRIDE fights. My cousins, aunts, and uncles saw me on The Ultimate Fighter show, people I don't even get to talk to that often, they all want to come to my fights. The UFC is not only doing great things for me financially, but for my family as well, and I can never repay those guys. They treat me so good. I fought for PRIDE for years and I still felt like the red-headed stepchild there. But the UFC, I beat their posterboy, Chuck, and I'm sure they didn't like that but they still accepted me and treated me better than PRIDE ever did."
On his fighting style (2008)
"I always try to learn new stuff. I'm really a brawler, and a lot of times brawlers don't know much – they just brawl – but I want to transform into a technical brawler. I want to get better on the ground and get my wrestling better. But things have suffered – I don't slam people as much because I'm concentrating on other stuff. So it's good and bad, because I like slamming people."
On the interviewing process (2008)
"It is hard, because a lot of fighting is mental, and those are the questions that I really don't like to hear. So if I don't want to talk about something, I just won't talk about it. I'm a mentally strong person, and I have to be, especially with all this stuff going on in my life. But I've always been known to put stuff to rest when it's time for me to fight – I get tunnel vision."
On training in England (2008)
"I need trainers around me that aren't just there for themselves and saying 'look at me, look at me.' I need trainers who want to put the hard work into me and who aren't out for themselves. Plus, I always had a problem having sparring partners and stuff like that. The Wolfslair allows me to have good sparring partners and trainers, and it makes you hungry training in another country where it's cold and where the people are just hard workers. That's what I need right now."
Before his third fight with Wanderlei Silva (2008)
"I don't pick and choose my opponents like some fighters. I don't think Silva has my number; I changed my number a long time ago. I got a new phone, homey. (Laughs) He beat me when I was young. I think Silva used to be one of the luckiest fighters on the planet, and his luck ran out. I think I did make a lot of excuses for those losses that I had with him, but I know why I lost, and I know why I'm gonna win this time."
On beating Silva (2009)
"It felt really good taking down Wanderlei. He's a guy I've been wanting to beat for years because he's just one of those guys you know you can beat. He's tough, but I just knew I could beat him. It would have been nice to beat him when he was champion and on top of his game, but a win is a win."
On Rampage (2005)
"I've been fighting all my life. It (success) surprises me sometimes. But I try not to let stuff go to my head and I try to be the same person I was before I even started fighting and just live my life.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Suppose several police departments are transferring $10,000 of drug money across country from New York to Los Angeles. Along the way, the money will change hands three times. We have independent evidence that there is corruption in the three police departments that the cops are from. On the whole, the likelihood that a cop from any of those departments is honest is .8. If a corrupt cop gets custody of the money, then he or she will take some. If an honest cop gets custody, they will deliver it to the next leg of the journey without taking any.
Question: What are the odds of all of the money arriving in Los Angeles?
Probability theory says that the answer is .51. Or .8 x .8 x .8. If we add two more cops at the .8 honesty rate it goes down to .32. And that's despite the fact that majority of cops in each department are honest.
The majority of Americans consider themselves to be Christians. And if you consider yourself to be a Christian, then you believe that Jesus was a real person and he was resurrected from the dead.
Your only source of information about this event is the first four books of the Christian New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Jesus is alleged to have come back from the grave around 35 AD. Mark was written about 30 years later at 65 AD. The consensus seems to be that Matthew and Luke were written between 70-100 A.D. John was written around 90-100. How many links in the chain of transmission are there between the events in question and when the authors of these books wrote down the story? We don't know. They were not eyewitnesses; they heard the stories by word of mouth, most scholars believe, and there could have 2, 20, or 200 links between them and the original events. How reliable was each one of those links? We do not know.
We do know this. Eye witnesses are quite poor, especially when they are extraordinary events.
They mix the orders up, the miss important details, they revise, they augment, they embellish, and so on. Even moments after an event, they make serious mistakes.
What do we know about testimony? We know that when a person testifies that some claim is true and all we have to evaluate is the testimony, we can attach a value to the probability that what they are saying is true. In general, when people assert that x is true, and they mean it, we can and should ask, what is the probability that it is true, given that Smith, for instance, asserts that it is. For most of us, it would mean something for Smith to say it earnestly. And if Smith says he is utterly convinced of its truth—he says he's 100% certain that it is true—then that should count for a lot in my assessment of whether or not x actually is true.
What do we know about people's confidence levels and the real accuracy of their claims? In general, people are over-confident. They will claim to be accurate and certain more often than they are. In one study, subjects were asked to spell a word and then indicate how confident they were that they had spelled it correctly. When they were "100% certain" in fact they only spelled the word correctly 80% of the time. You've had this feeling of certainty many times about a spelled word. When you have it, it would be very hard to dissuade you without substantial proof, that you were wrong. But there are the real rates. (Adams and Adams, "Confidence in the recognition and reproduction of words difficult to spell," American Journal of Psychology, 73, 544-552)
Other recent work has shown a remarkable level of change and choice blindness in test subjects. Have subjects pick the most attractive person from a group of pictures of people, surreptitiously switch the picture on them, and then ask them to explain why they think the switched picture is of the most attractive person, and they don't miss a beat. They start explaining why without even noticing the switch. Have shoppers taste a range of tea samples and have them pick their favorite. Then switch it without their knowing and ask them to taste it again and explain why they think it is the best. Even when you replace their favorite, say apple cinamon, with a completely different flavor, 2/3 of the subjects don't notice the change and the confabulate a justification for why that's their favorite.
The data in change blindness cases is even more remarkable. Here's a video of two teams of people passing a basketball, one group in white shirts and one group in black shirts. Watch the video carefully and try to count the number of times that the white team passes the ball. http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/flashmovie/15.php
A surprising number of subjects do not notice what should be obvious. In some of these studies, 75% of the subjects do not notice. (Change Blindness)
So robust empirical evidence shows us that change and choice blindness, and overconfidence cast substantial doubt on the reliability of eye witness testimony. Volumes of other studies document the problems with eye witness accounts.
Do we have any way to attach a reliability estimate to the first person in the chain, the individuals who are alleged to have witnessed the resurrected Jesus himself? We do. Every year at the shrine at Lourdes, France, more than 80,000 pilgrims visit. The spring waters there are alleged to have healing powers, after a woman claims to have seen the Virgin Mary. Over the course of a century, then, that is more than 8 million visitors.
The official representatives of the Catholic church have been conservative about the real occurrence of miracles there. They have officially recognized 66. Let's be generous and grant that 66 real miracles have actually occurred there.
Let's also be conservative and suppose that of the 8 million visitors, half of them felt that they had observed or felt a real supernatural or spiritual event. This number is conservative because the vast majority of people going there do so with the strong expectation that miracles have occurred there in the past, and that they will be miraculously healed as well.
So for the visitors at Lourdes, what is their reliability for reporting miraculous events? 66/4,000,000 or .0000165. That is, even setting the number of felt miracles low and agreeing with the church about the number of real miracles, the probability that the miracle claim from any given pilgrim is true is .0000165.
Should we think that the general reliability of the early Christians who spread the Jesus story was greater or less than the pilgrims at Lourdes? I should think it would be much lower. The pilgrims are modern, educated, scientific era people. Many of them are doctors, lawyers, and scientists, people who are trained in making good decisions and being skeptical. They have the benefit of 2,000 years of investigations into the natural causes of allegedly supernatural events. The early Christians, by contrast, would have been largely illiterate, poor, uneducated. They would not have the benefit of the huge body of scientific and empirical knowledge that we take for granted.
But let's be exceedingly charitable and grant that the early Christians were 10 times more reliable about reporting miraculous events than the modern visitors to Lourdes. And let's suppose that there are only 3 steps of transmission between the events in 35 A.D. across 30 years to when Mark first wrote the story down. And let's suppose that those three links were much more reliable than the cops in the story above. What are the odds that the resurrection story is true:
.00165 x .9 x .9 x .9 = .00012
That is, on a vastly charitable estimate, there is a one in ten thousand chance that the story is true.
Should we be that charitable? No. We should not be generous about the 66 miracles at Lourdes. Many of the cases in support would crumble under any serious, objective scrutiny. I would be surprised if 5 of them didn't have an obvious natural explanation. And I suspect that many more people than 4,000,000 thought they felt or saw something spiritually significant there. If there have been 6 million of them, and 5 real miracles, then the reliability rating of Lourdes pilgrims is 0.00000083333. And the reliability rating for early Christians should be much lower given that they did not have the advantage of 2,000 years of science and a modern education to augment their analysis of miracles. Nor should we grant that all of the tranmission links in the story to Mark would have a .9 reliability. There are too many unanswered questions, too many doubts, and the human propensities to embellish, omit, revise, and confabulate are too great.
Still granting only 3 steps, a more reasonable estimate is:
.000000833 x .7 x .7 x .7 = 0.0000002858
or about 1 in 5 million. According to the U.S. National Weather Service, the odds of your being struck by lightning in your lifetime are 1 in 5,000.
When people take the Jesus stories seriously and make comments like, "Why would the early Christians lie?" or "what incentive could that have for making it all up?" or "how could they have perpetrated such a deception?" they are simply ignoring the strength of the tendency in the human mind to see miracles or events of spiritual or supernatural origin at every turn. We don't need to have a better, alternative explanation to be quite sure that Jesus was not resurrected from the dead. The reliability of the information transmitted in those stories to us is just too low.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Putting Odds On Jesus
34 comments:
- M. Tully said...
"Why would the early Christians lie?"
Why indeed (hmm, I have an agenda I want to sell, is it in my best interest to lie? Looks like a good argument for a peer review process). The question I like to ask is, "If a priest of a new religion today claimed to have cured leprosy by simply touching the person, 'what evidence would you require to accept the healer's claim?'"
And the follow up, "Do you have that same level of evidence for the claims you make about your own particular supernatural healer?"
But to get the heart of probabilities, of all the mysteries in human history that have ever been solved, how many have natural explanations? That would be all of them. Of all the mysteries in human history that have been solved, how many have supernatural explanations? That would be none of them.
So, if we encounter an event that we can't currently understand, what is the probability that it has a supernatural origin?
The math for a natural explanation: all/none=?
No matter how counter intuitive the natural explanation may be, no matter how disconcerting saying, "I don't know" may be; a counter intuitive or reserving judgment answer is, by probabilities...
...infinitely more likely to be correct than any supernatural explanation.
Supernaturalists should not get into probability arguments. The math takes no more than simple algebra, and is "infinitely" stacked against them.
So what is the probability that the constants of physics are what they are by nature's rules alone? What is the probability that something as complex as human intelligence evolved by natural means alone? What is the probability that the human moral sense developed by natural means alone?
The answer to the above questions are, "I don't know (I have no other universes to compare things to.)" But whatever those probabilities may be, they are INFINITELY more probable than a supernatural agent was involved.
What are the odds indeed. - April 26, 2009 at 7:55 PM
- Matt McCormick said...
Good ideas, MT. But there's a problem. Increasingly, believers have taken to portraying naturalists or non-supernaturalists as being in the grips of a circular ideology. They protest because it appears that we are insisting that no explanation except a natural one is ever possible or necessary, and our grounds for thinking that are that no non-natural explanation is ever necessary. If you set this problem up like you're doing, then it appears that you're just defining "acceptable explanation" as meaning "natural explanation." And that appears to be circular. We want to allow for the possibility that a supernatural explanation could be called for or it could be the best account of what is going on in some circumstances. The problem is, I am arguing, that the substantial burden of proof has not been met in the Jesus case. We can allow that miracles could happen in principle. But in the case of the single most important miracle to the Christian religion, the likelihood that a real magical event happened is vanishingly small.
Nevertheless, I share your sentiments. I am placing the odds at 5 million to one on the basis of some liberal assumptions. The real likelihood is probably much smaller, if that's possible.
MM - April 26, 2009 at 9:26 PM
the first four books of the Christian Biblethat would be the first four books of the Christian New Testament.
- April 27, 2009 at 6:26 AM
- Matt McCormick said...
Right, RS. Thanks. Fixed.
MM - April 27, 2009 at 7:31 AM
- M. Tully said...
"They protest because it appears that we are insisting that no explanation except a natural one is ever possible or necessary, and our grounds for thinking that are that no non-natural explanation is ever necessary."
Good point. I'll have to rework it. The funny thing is that if supernaturalism gave better explanations of observations and made better (as far as I know it doesn't make any) verifiable predictions, I would jump on the supernaturalists' train in a heart beat. My base assumption for naturalism is in fact based on probabilties.
Maybe I just need to state that premise at the outset? - April 27, 2009 at 6:14 PM
- Steve Martin said...
The tendency in the human mind would be to save their own skins.
They ran away from Him at the cross.
But after He appeared to them again after His crucifixtion, they willingly went to their deaths rather than to deny Him. - April 28, 2009 at 9:46 AM
- M. Tully said...
You continue to repeat the same old canards.
"But after He appeared to them again after His crucifixtion..."
In keeping with the probability theme of this post. What is the probability that a man who was clinically brain dead returned to life (take the number of clinically demonstrated resurrections and divide that by an estimate of the total number of people who have died). The probability is staggeringly low. So what level of evidence should I require for an event that has such a low baseline probability?
Well, what level of evidence would you require if someone reported that it happened to the Great Wiki in the forests of the Amazon only 100 years ago? Would you accept a book put together by Wiki accolades, with no provenance of authorship, first transcribed approximately 50 years after the event happened? Even if the book had written in it, "Wiki appeared to thousands after his death?"
Or would you ask, "Who were these thousands? Did a number of them go on record as being skeptical about Wiki before the event? Did they record what they saw soon after the event? Out of thousands, were there at least a score of real time reports?"
Can you produce contemporary, non-accolade source citations of said appearances of Jesus after proven clinical brain death?
And even if the Wikifarians could produce such documents, would you say then that Wiki must have come back from death? Or would you ask, "What standards of evidence did these people of the Amazon use? How do I know Wiki was actually brain dead? Did they have EEG technology? How do I know Wiki did not have a twin brother or use doubles as actors and heads of state have been known to use?
So, really Steve, when commenting on a post about statistical probability, using an example about a single sourced, accolade produced, five decade post-event testimony about an alleged happening with an extremely low baseline probability is, quite frankly, a way to show that your position is in fact most improbable. - April 28, 2009 at 4:23 PM
- M. Tully said...
OK Matt,
I've rethought it.
"They protest because it appears that we are insisting that no explanation except a natural one is ever possible or necessary, and our grounds for thinking that are that no non-natural explanation is ever necessary."
No, I'm not insisting that a non-natural explanation is never possible. I am only asserting that based on probabilities that a natural explanation is, by a large magnitude, more likely. If the supernaturalist wants to put forth the evidence, that contrary to probabilities, the event still has a supernatural origin, I am willing to entertain that (quantum mechanics shows that improbable events do in fact happen all the time). However, if they are making a probability based argument for their assertions (i.e. supernaturalism is the most probable explanation for the event) then my argument stands as written.
Based on all the evidence we have to date, a supernatural explanation is infinitely (if you must assign a number, I like 6.6 x 10^-34) less probable than a natural one.
Consequently, I am not saying that supernatural explanations should be rejected out of hand. I am only saying that a supernaturalist argument that is based on probabilities, is by all available data, wrong. If a supernatural explanation is put forward that argues that despite the probabilities, the evidence dictates a hearing, that argument deserves consideration (and for that matter our assent if that is what the evidence dictates).
I am not making a circular argument that supernaturalism is wrong by definition. I am only making the argument that supernaturalism by probability is wrong by data. - April 28, 2009 at 5:15 PM
- Matt McCormick said...
Agreed. The non-believer, if they are serious about all of these demands they make for evidence, must always be prepared to allow that some sort of evidence would be convincing, if only hypothetically. Otherwise, they are just being dogmatic.
MM - April 28, 2009 at 8:13 PM
- dillinger916 said...
Hello, I'm a friend of Gamaliel (no last name needed, I'm sure he's the only student you had with that name), he was a student of yours, showed me this blog, found it interesting. I'm agnostic myself, but definitely lean more towards atheism. Anyway, early Christians would lie because most of the people making up these stories probably used the stories to tell the aforementioned uneducated, poor folk back in the day that if they didn't fly right they'd end up in hell, so don't do anything stupid to ruin your chance in getting into heaven (i.e, challenging authority, etc...). This is my thought at least, I could be wrong, I am about most things after all. XD
- April 30, 2009 at 3:26 PM
- Samphire said...
Steve Martin said...
"The tendency in the human mind would be to save their own skins. They ran away from Him at the cross. But after He appeared to them again after His crucifixtion, they willingly went to their deaths rather than to deny Him."
Who were "they"? And what contemporary evidence do you have that any were executed? - May 1, 2009 at 4:56 AM
- feeno said...
5 million to 1 odds? Those are better odds than the Cincinnati Bengals winning a Superbowl?
Steve Martin, You are a wild and crazy guy. But you are right.
People die for a lie all the time, when they think it's the truth. But Jesus' disciples died for what they actually saw.
Peace out, feeno - May 1, 2009 at 5:34 AM
- feeno said...
5 million to 1 odds? Those are better odds than the Cincinnati Bengals winning a Superbowl?
Steve Martin, You are a wild and crazy guy. But you are right.
People die for a lie all the time, when they think it's the truth. But Jesus' disciples died for what they actually saw.
Peace out, feeno - May 1, 2009 at 5:36 AM
- Samphire said...
feeno said...
"People die for a lie all the time, when they think it's the truth. But Jesus' disciples died for what they actually saw."
feeno, I ask you the same question I asked Steve. Harry McCall made a similar statement a month or two ago at Debunking Christianity but, despite some offensive and ridiculous bluster, he too was unable to answer the question which is: What were the names of the disciples who were martyred shortly after the crucifixion and what contemporary (secular or biblical) evidence do we have of these supposed deaths? - May 1, 2009 at 7:30 AM
- feeno said...
Hello Samphire
Did you mean Harry asked the question and Steve couldn't answer it? 'Cause I think Harry would agree with you about this?
The only death mentioned in the Bible for any Apostle was that of James.(Acts 12:1-3). Unless you count Judas' death?
I would like to take the time to share what I believe is a really cool story about the other James in the Bible.
Jesus had a brother named James. This James thought his brother Jesus was nothing more than that, his brother. (John 7:5). And In all 3 gospels it mentions that "Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor." (Matt 13:53-58). But later one of these same brothers not only writes a book that almost mirrors Jesus' sermon on the mount, but was thrown off the top of the Temple, and then when he didn't die, they beat him to death. Why? because he refused to denounce Christ.
Something changed with James. He went from skeptic to martyr. What changed? I think it was the fact that he witnessed his Brother after he was crucified, died and buried.
Now most fundies like me get most of our facts on the deaths of the Apostles from an old book called Foxe's book of Martyrs. Written by Foxe. (First name escapes me.) But you can check out all of his resources in the back of that book. You can probably find a copy on line for 5 or 10 bucks.
Sorry that my last comment up was posted twice, I still stumble around the computer.
Have a great weekend, I'll be checking back by.
Peace out, feeno - May 1, 2009 at 9:00 AM
- Samphire said...
Thanks for the reply, feeno.
I do have the Book of Martyrs. As far as I know (please correct me if I am wrong) James was not a disciple and, in any event, was not martyred for at least 30 years after the resurrection and so I don't think he qualifies.
So, which of the 11 original disciples who witnessed the resurrection went out into the world to spread the Gospel in fear of their lives and were soon martyred?
After asserting something similar Harry McCall couldn't answer the question either but told me to go and get an education. I'm not making any point here other than it is a claim I have heard made for 50 years as a proof of the historicity of the resurrection and yet nobody seems able to back it up with even a couple of names. - May 1, 2009 at 10:36 AM
You may have noticed, Professor, that John Loftus is making fun of your proabability argument over at this Debunking site.
Why you would use his book to study atheism is beyond me...first, because is is not really about how he became an atheist and second because he only argues for atheism in the last couple of chapters; making egregious errors in the process.
The book itself is misleadingly superficial, as it covers over 40 arguments in some 400 pages; this leaves some with the impression that they are then knowledgable about the those arguments when he has spent as little as a dozen pages on subjects like the Resurrection or Biblcial Archaeology.
More later...
DebunkingLoftus.blogspot.com - May 1, 2009 at 11:55 AM
- feeno said...
Hello again Samphire
I'm not sure why you haven't been able to get a response, it's a reasonable question.
I know that according to the Ecclesiastical Antiquity The apostle Paul, again not an original Disciple was beheaded by Nero around 67or68 A.D.
Matthew killed by a sword in Ethiopia.
Peter again probably killed by Nero. Crucified upside down?
John was boiled in a vat of oil, somehow he managed to live.
I personally don't think any Disciple necessarily were "soon" killed after the resurrection. But they seemed to be in constant danger of prison, persecution or the threat of death.
I'm sorry this is such a lame response, it's all I got. I will re-fresh myself with Foxe's book.
Later, feeno - May 1, 2009 at 12:02 PM
- eheffa said...
What were Foxe's sources for all this information?
If his primary source was the Early Church & you accept that, then I trust you are quite happy accepting the infallibility of the the Pope & any other ancient assertions made by the Catholic Church & her oh-so honest minions....
-evan - May 1, 2009 at 1:39 PM
- eheffa said...
Just for the record; the edict declaring that the Pope is infallible is not really that ancient. (Formally declared in July 18, 1870)
Nevertheless, the reality is that the Church has a pretty checkered past & a history of exaggeration & falsehood that makes it a singularly unreliable source of information.
-evan - May 1, 2009 at 1:49 PM
- Samphire said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
- May 1, 2009 at 2:59 PM
- Samphire said...
feeno said:
"I know that according to the Ecclesiastical Antiquity The apostle Paul, again not an original Disciple was beheaded by Nero around 67or68 A.D." But Paul was neither a disciple nor a witness to the resurrection nor a biblical or historical martyr. Also, he is unknown to secular history.
"Matthew killed by a sword in Ethiopia."
Again, neither biblical, immediate nor historical.
"Peter again probably killed by Nero. Crucified upside down?" Ditto
"John was boiled in a vat of oil, somehow he managed to live."
Ditto. And which John?
"I personally don't think any disciples necessarily were "soon" killed after the resurrection. But they seemed to be in constant danger of prison, persecution or the threat of death."
Where is your evidence? The ancient world seems to have been awash with itinerant preachers (the 1st century equivalent of American evangelical TV channels) who, away from orthodox Jewish fundamentalism, were free to preach whatever they wished. Where was the danger?
"I'm sorry this is such a lame response, it's all I got." That's OK. It seems that the truth is that the disciples were not actually under immediate threat of death for their beliefs. This does not reflect on the historicity of the physical resurrection (which I deny) but simply kills the argument that the disciples were putting their lives at risk by preaching their Jewish version of the "gospel".
Perhaps Steve has something to add. - May 1, 2009 at 3:21 PM
- Bill Pieper said...
Matt-- You pick a pretty easy target when you go after just the Christian god. Not that I disagree,but there's so much implausibility and internal contradiction to the Jesus story, plus the the really bad fit of the Old Testimate with the New, that the wonder is they've been able to sell it at all. I'd rather buy a new Chrysler Imperial, even now.
But a brave man you are in vowing to prove the negative, something usually conceded to be impossible.
Moving beyond Cristianity, though I still wouldn't take Pascal's wager (basic to it is that the god in question is so human-centric as to care whether one believes or not), I nonetheless ascribe to there being a god of some sort, but utterly beyond human ken. In fact we have photographs, and better ones than have ever been shot of Bigfoot.
I'm talking about the star-birth/ star-death panoramas beamed back by the Hubble telescope. Something genuinely awesome is going on out there, and whatever it is or how it works, it holds sway over everything you or I could conceivably conceive of. So why not call it God. - May 3, 2009 at 1:15 PM
- SwimmerBoy84 said...
The reason not to call it God is that God actually means something more than our awe at the beauty of the stars. If you're going to call that God, why not call it Zeus, or Quetzalcoatl?
- May 3, 2009 at 10:28 PM
- Bill Pieper said...
As a reply to SwimmerBoy, who weighed in on the comment from me just prior to his, I believe he misinterpreted me on two points.
I said nothing about the beauty (in the fireworks sense, that is, of the Hubble photos, though it's an interesting question as to why most viewers seem to see them as beautiful)being my reason for suggesting that God is a fit name for the process on display. It is the pure power to create something out of nothing and nothing out of something that warrants the name God.
Moreover, my use of God in that context is as an all-enveloping term which would incorporate Zeus and all other specific but more limited conception of supreme power. To be supreme, in other words, means to include and supercede all others. - May 6, 2009 at 10:49 AM
- Scarecrow said...
"It is the pure power to create something out of nothing and nothing out of something that warrants the name God."
But the singularity is not "nothing" So your premise seems to be quit simple minded and wrong.
And at the oppisite end we have never seen "nothing" in our universe. Nothing as far as I know does not exist.
Nothing if it exists at all may be unstable. Just a thought. :) - May 9, 2009 at 11:36 AM
I like this odds game. I agree there was a lack of witnesess for a historical jesus. But what about all the testimonies of religious experience in general involving jesus throughout history? I mean the odds must be in favor of at least one account panning out?
- May 25, 2009 at 10:28 AM
- eheffa said...
Anonymous said: I like this odds game. I agree there was a lack of witnesess for a historical jesus. But what about all the testimonies of religious experience in general involving jesus throughout history? I mean the odds must be in favor of at least one account panning out?The evidence would suggest that rapturous religious experience is a neurologically based phenomenon common to many otherwise incompatible religious belief systems. The Mormon's experience the "Holy Spirit" but reject the Divinity of Christ. The Pentecostal or Charismatic Christian experiences the "Holy Spirit" too but would reject the notion that the heretic Mormon is worshiping the same god. They both can't be right.
Recent studies using enhanced MRI or PET scans ( I don't recall which) demonstrate that Catholic Nuns & Buddhist Monks when praying & meditating deeply will light up the same part of their brain when this happens.
The most likely explanation for these varieties of religious experience is that this a physiological / neurological phenomenon without any supernatural implications & certainly unconnected to the veracity of the belief that spawned the experience. - May 25, 2009 at 10:51 AM
eheffa I am all for science explaining supernatural experiences. Possibly a religious experienced marked as a supernatural is in fact natural but yet explained by science. But wouldnt this lend credibility to religious experience? As something actually tangible and not just a product of human imaginiation? I think the age of enlightement brought men who worked hard to understand religious experience as an explainable phenonmenon.
- May 25, 2009 at 11:52 AM
- 精神年齢 said...
- July 6, 2009 at 6:50 AM
最近仕事ばかりで毎日退屈してます。そろそろ恋人欲しいです☆もう夏だし海とか行きたいな♪ firstname.lastname@example.com 連絡待ってるよ☆
- July 17, 2009 at 8:02 AM
- 家出 said...
- July 19, 2009 at 4:25 AM
This is one of the most biased arguments I have ever read. The math used to back up the authors claims is absurd. The relationship the writer trys to establish between people's memories when pictures are switched and seeing someone "RISE FROM THE DEAD" should be argument enough to establish this story is written by an idiot, for idiots.
- September 30, 2009 at 3:27 PM
- macroman said...
feeno et al: I think there is some evidence that James the brother of Jesus was killed for saying Jesus was the Messiah, not that Jesus was raised from the dead. Not the same thing?
- May 9, 2010 at 4:01 AM


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A literary critic once remarked, "The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived." In his brief life, London sought adventure in the far corners of the world, from the frozen Yukon to the South Pacific, writing gripping tales of survival based on his experiences — including The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Sea Wolf.
His story is the subject of a new biography, Jack London: An American Life, by Earle Labor, curator of the Jack London Museum in Shreveport, La. Labor wrote his first book about London in 1974, but the 85-year-old scholar says with London, there's always more to write.
"He was a fighter. He was a terrific competitor. He wanted to win whatever he did," says Labor. "He was also a genius. He had terrific personal charm or charisma. Everybody talks about that. At the same time, while he was physically tough, he was emotionally sensitive. He could cry over the death of his favorite animal, or over the tragic episode in a novel."
London was born in San Francisco in 1876 to a poor family. When he was 14, he quit school to work in a cannery — 15 hours a day for 10 cents an hour. By the time he was 18, he had sailed to the Bering Sea on the crew of a sealing schooner and hopped freight trains to Niagara Falls, where he was arrested for vagrancy and spent a month in the Erie County Penitentiary. It was a traumatizing time for London, who was precocious but still an adolescent.
The only known recording of Jack London's voice is a 1915 letter he spoke into an early dictation machine. Dr. Carl Haber at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory restored the scratchy sound from a wax cylinder. On the recording, London says he can scarcely think about the abuse he experienced as a teenager in prison, much less write about it. "What I found there was unprintable, and almost unthinkable," he said.
Radicalized by his experience, London joined the Socialist Party, read voraciously and began to write stories and essays. He spent one semester at the University of California, Berkeley, then quit to join the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897.
After a winter in the Yukon, London returned with only $5 worth of gold, but a priceless lode of stories. London's 1903 novel, The Call of the Wild, tells the story of Buck, a kidnapped ranch dog sold to Gold Rush prospectors, who brutally train him to adapt to his new life:
The Call of the Wild was a sensation — it sold one million copies and made London the most popular American writer of his generation. London used his fame and money to embark on new adventures. He went to the Far East as a war correspondent. He sailed the Pacific in his own ship for two years, a trip that included a visit with headhunters and cannibals.
And he wrote about it all. "He encountered a lot of people of different ethnicities, and he was able often to imagine himself inside of that group and see the world from their point of view," says Jeanne Reesman, director of the Jack London Society and a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. "To take the point of view of a young slave rebelling against his colonial masters in the South Seas, for example. Most people in America really didn't know anything about those people."
London wrote 1,000 words a day, and he almost never revised what he wrote. Biographer Labor says London needed to publish because he was always broke.
He was a dreamer, and a visionary. And his dreams and visions almost always outran his finances. But he wanted the best of everything. ... I think in some ways he was trying to make up for what he was deprived of as a kid.
"He was a dreamer, and a visionary. And his dreams and visions almost always outran his finances," says Labor. "But he wanted the best of everything. He wanted the best barn. He wanted the best home. He wanted the best boat. I think in some ways he was trying to make up for what he was deprived of as a kid."
After years of heavy drinking on and off through his adventures, London's lifestyle caught up with him. On Nov. 22, 1916, he died suddenly from kidney disease at just 40 years old. He left behind 52 books and 200 short stories — work that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Jack Kerouac.
But Labor says London's artistry is only now being recognized by the literary establishment. "I think one reason is that he writes so clearly, that anybody with a good basic education can understand what he's saying. He puts the critics out of business," says Labor.
Though London died young, his legacy and writings speak to a life lived with abandon. A journalist who visited London weeks before he died reported that London said, "I would rather be ashes than dust ... The function of man is to live, not to exist."
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Intruder Calls 911 Before Homeowner Does [AUDIO]
A Portland, Oregon woman came home Monday night to find an intruder in her house. So she did the logical thing and called 911.
Little did she know, the intruder had beaten her to the punch.
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When help did arrive, police arrested the 24-year old Chapek for trespassing. Read on to hear both calls.


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The challenge I put before you is one of self-transformation. To grow up. This is not only about technology, but technology is necessary to participate in this way of life. If you want to live and play on my level, you need to acquire new capacities. To reach Utopia, and experience life here, you must discover the means to three fundamental transformations.
The First Transformation: Extend your life.
Your biological body, in it its current form, will not take you far. It wears out too soon. Eighty years is not enough even to get started in a serious way, much less to complete the journey. Maturity of the soul takes more than eighty vigorous years to develop. Why, even a tree-life takes more time to complete.
Death is not one but a multitude of assassins. Do you not see them? They are coming at you from every angle. Take aim at the causes of early death - infection, violence, malnourishment, heart attack, cancer. Turn a big gun on aging and fire. Claim control over the biochemical processes in your body in order to eliminate, by and by, illness and senescence. In time, you will discover ways to move your mind to more durable mediums. Then continue to improve the system, so that the risk of death and disease continues to decline. Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.
Oh, aging is a cruel cage. Gnaw and pull at the bars, and you will slowly loosen them up. One day you will break the grid that kept your forebears imprisoned. Gnaw and pull, redouble your efforts!
The Second Transformation: Amplify your cognition.
Your brain's special faculties: music, humor, spirituality, mathematics, eroticism, art, nurturing, narration and gossip! Aren't these the spirits with which to fill the cup of life? Blessed you are if you have a cask of any of these, or even as much as single vintage bottle.
Be not afraid to grow. The mind's cellars have no ceilings! But what other capacities are possible? Imagine a world with all music dried up - what poverty, what loss. Thank not the lyre but your ears for the music - and for the babbling brook, and the human voice.
What other harmonies are there in the air, that you lack the ears to hear? What vaults of value are you standing outside, lacking the key sensibility? Your brain needs to be enhanced beyond any genius of your kind, both in its special faculties and its general intelligence, so that you can learn, remember, and understand better.
Mind is a means: for without sagacity you will lose your way or get bogged down, and your journey will fail. Mind is also an end: for it is in the spacetime of awareness that Utopia will exist. May the measure of your mind be vast and expanding.
Oh, stupidity is a loathsome corral! Gnaw and pull at the poles, and you will slowly loosen them up. One day you will break the fence that held your forebears captive. Gnaw and pull, redouble your efforts!
The Third Transformation: Elevate your well-being.
What is the difference between indifference and interest, boredom and thrill, despair and euphoria? Pleasure. A few grains of this magic ingredient are worth more than a king's treasure, and we have it aplenty here in Utopia. It infuses everything we do and everything we experience. We sprinkle it in our tea.
The universe is cold. Fun is the fire that melts the blocks of hardship, and creates a bubbling celebration of life. It is the birth right of every creature, trampled upon since the beginning of time. There is a beauty and joy here that you cannot fathom. It feels so good that if the sensation were translated into tears of gratitude, rivers would overflow. I wish I could elaborate but language abandons me. I grope in vain for words to convey to you what all this amounts to…
I will not speak of the worst pain and misery that is to be got rid of; it is too horrible to dwell upon, and you are already aware of the urgency of palliation. My point is that in addition to the removal of the negative, there is also an upside imperative: to enable the full flourishing of enjoyments that are not currently viable. The roots of suffering are deep in your brain. Weeding them out and replacing them with nutritious crops of well-being will require fine instruments for the cultivation of mental soil.
For Nick Bostrom, utopia is akin to living forever ["any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good"], never growing old ["aging is a cruel cage"], never suffering the most painful emotions ["what a gruesome knot suffering is!"], only experiencing the positive, more euphoric emotions, and being all mind and no body ["mind is . . . an end"]. The fictional author of this letter, "Your Possible Future Self," is not something beyond or past the human [a pure machine, let's say, devoid of human-ness or human "parts"], but is rather, something further along the evolutionary human chain yet somehow stripped of everything we usually associate with "being human": mortality, limits to comprehension, passio, and the situation/habitation of time.
So here's my question to all of you: if you could live forever, would you want to? Would you still be human?


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Your Refrigerator Is Running — Can You Hear It?
You're probably familiar with the many telltale, well-known signs of hearing loss — asking people to repeat themselves frequently, turning up the TV to uncomfortable levels for others in the room, or leaning into a conversation on one side to use your "good ear."
But what if speech is clear to you and you never turn up the TV — but you can't hear whether the car you're standing next to is running? This is an actual type of hearing loss, called reverse-slope hearing loss (RSHL), and people with this type often don't realize they have a hearing impairment.
What Is Reverse-Slope Hearing Loss?
Hearing Loss Basics
The most common type of hearing loss — the kind most people think of when they think of hearing loss — is characterized by loss of sounds at higher frequencies and is sometimes called high-frequency hearing loss. These frequencies correspond to what we think of as high notes or high-pitched voices. As such, when someone first notices this type of hearing loss, it's usually because they're having trouble hearing women's voices or those of the children in their life, and having difficulty hearing conversation in a restaurant.
Because this particular kind of hearing loss doesn't affect lower frequencies but does affect mid-level and high frequencies, it has a distinct appearance on what's called an audiogram — the graphical representation of the results of a hearing test. On an audiogram, the graph starts in the upper-left-hand corner and may slope downward steeply, like a ski slope or more subtly as a gradual decrease across this frequency range. This is where this type of hearing loss gets its most common name: ski-slope hearing loss, sometimes shortened to simply sloping loss.
Reverse-Slope Hearing Loss
RSHL is so named because its shape on an audiogram is the reverse of ski-slope hearing loss. In this type of hearing loss, the low frequencies are affected far more than the higher ones. This gives the audiogram the opposite shape — the graph starts in the lower-left-hand corner and slopes upward steeply. Because it affects mainly the lower frequencies, it is also known as low-frequency hearing loss.
RSHL is rare: It affects only 3,000 people in the U.S. and Canada. Put differently, for every 12,000 cases of hearing loss, only one person has RSHL. Like ski-slope hearing loss, there are different degrees of RSHL.
Causes of Reverse-Slope Hearing Loss
Many people don't suspect they have RSHL unless someone in their family already has it, which underscores one of the main sources of RSHL: genetics. Wolfram syndrome, Mondini dysplasia, and inheritance through a dominant gene have all been identified as sources of RSHL.
Certain diseases have been implicated as well, mainly those affecting the hair cells, which are responsible for sending sound information from the inner ear to the brain. Examples include sudden hearing loss, Ménière's disease, and viral infection.
The third most common source of RSHL is anything that causes a change in the pressure of the endolymph, a fluid in the inner ear. This includes things such as spinal or general anesthesia, intracranial hypertension, and a perilymphatic fistula.
How Is Reverse-Slope Hearing Loss Diagnosed and Treated?
From symptoms to industry norms, hearing care is focused chiefly on ski-slope hearing loss, so RSHL can be difficult to recognize, diagnose, and treat. Because it is often hereditary or genetic — that is, because they were born with it — many who have RSHL don't realize that the way they hear is different, so they may never seek out a hearing appointment.
Symptoms of RSHL
- Difficulty understanding speech on the phone. The aspects of speech that give it clarity (the consonants) are in the higher frequencies, the treble side of sound, but the aspects of speech that give it volume (the vowels) are in the lower frequencies, the bass side. Because RSHL involves the lower frequencies, speech loses its volume but retains its clarity. Face-to-face conversation, therefore, is not usually a problem. But the phone mainly delivers the low and middle frequencies, so it can pose a problem for RSHL.
- Ease understanding women and children but not men. Again, because RSHL affects the lower frequencies, those with RSHL more clearly understand higher-frequency speech — that of women and children — than lower-frequency speech, such as that of men.
- Inability to hear low-frequency environmental sounds. Thunder and a refrigerator humming are examples of low-frequency environmental sounds. Because the click of a refrigerator is a high-frequency sound, someone with RSHL might hear their fridge click, but they wouldn't know if the hum was the fridge turning on or off, even if they were standing right next to it.
Diagnosing RSHL
Because of the prevalence of ski-slope or other high-frequency hearing loss, diagnostic tools focus on that type. Therefore, many with RSHL may "pass" a hearing screening or are treated as though they have other issues. Naturally, this leads to frustration for all involved.
Key to diagnosis is a well-educated patient. Because this condition is rare, many in the hearing care field simply haven't encountered it. RSHL has a distinct set of characteristics that an audiologist will look for but is not limited to:
- Unusually good speech
- Sensitivity to high-frequency environmental sounds
- Poor speech perception in the absence of visual cues
- High speech-detection thresholds
- Pure-tone hearing losses
- Inability to adjust to standard ski-slope hearing technology settings
A simple test any hearing care provider can use as an initial screening for RSHL is the Ling sound test performed while standing behind the patient. RSHL is most likely present if the "s" and "sh" sounds are heard at a much softer sound level than the other sounds.
Treating RSHL
Those with RSHL tend to have high expectations of hearing aids, which can lead to frustration. An audiologist who hopes to successfully fit an aid for RSHL has to build the settings from the ground up, for several reasons.
- Manufacturer-recommended hearing aid settings are meant for high-frequency hearing loss. As previously mentioned, only 3,000 people in the U.S. and Canada have RSHL; many millions have high-frequency hearing loss. It makes sense that the industry would weigh toward the type of hearing loss with the highest incidence but still allow audiologists to customize individual aids for rare types of hearing loss.
- Hearing aids may be programmed based on computer settings that are based on the audiogram. These computer settings assume the most typical situation: ski-slope hearing loss. These settings rarely work for RSHL.
- Hearing aids are built with the expectation of a high-frequency hearing loss. Often high-frequency losses need amplification in the high frequencies. The shape of the aid complements the shape of the typical ear canal, and this combination dependably treats high-frequency loss very well. But RSHLs require different amounts of amplification across a different range of frequencies.
- People with RSHL have already successfully adapted to their speech needs. Having been born with this condition, many with RSHL develop the ability to navigate speech easily.
Treating RSHL means parking industry standards and theoretical fitting curves. It requires taking time to really listen to the patient, and then build the settings channel by channel, frequency by frequency, to what they find comfortable, audible, and helpful.
But there are certain starting points that may help in the treating of an RSHL. A study by Kuk et al. determined that
- A digital, multichannel, nonlinear hearing aid is optimal
- Wide dynamic range compression, a low compression threshold, and high-level compression might more effectively preserve hearing and comfort
- Amplification in the lower frequencies is preferred, but gain may vary depending on input levels
- A broad bandwidth with individualized amplification customization is desirable
- The paired comparison technique may help customize individual settings
Why Is It Important to Treat Reverse-Slope Hearing Loss?
You may well be thinking, "Those symptoms don't sound so bad — why bother putting myself through all the frustration of getting diagnosed and fitted?"
The key reason is safety. Much of what you lose with RSHL is environmental sound. If you can't hear a car coming, you can't avoid it. If someone some distance from you is trying to warn you away from something, you might not hear it, because volume is a product of the lower frequencies.
Another reason is enjoyment. There are many aspects and nuances in music that you might be missing out on if you have RSHL, because you're missing the low-frequency sounds — for example, much of what is below middle C.
Contact us today if you think you or someone you love might have reverse-slope hearing loss.
Kuk F, et al. Changing with the Times: Managing Low-Frequency Hearing Loss. Hearing Review. November 2003. http://www.hearingreview.com/2003/11/changing-with-the-times-managing-low-frequency-hearing-loss/. Accessed Feb 2, 2018.
Bauman N. The Bizarre World of Extreme Reverse-Slope Hearing Loss (or Low-Frequency) Hearing Loss. http://hearinglosshelp.com/blog/the-bizarre-world-of-extreme-reverse-slope-hearing-loss/#characteristics. Accessed Feb 2, 2018.


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Planner doodles | D96
Planner doodles | D96
All doodles are hand-drawn by yours truly.
Size & Material:
▪ Sticker sheet size is 3.60"x4.50" approx.
▪ Package includes: 1 sheet of sticker per order
▪ Listing images posted are digital and the colours in the printed version may differ slightly. Your product will not have a watermark.
We offer both lettermail and tracked package shipping at checkout. Processing times are posted at the announcement bar.
Estimated shipping times:
✉ Canada: 1 to 15 business days
✉ USA ship via lettermail (untracked) : 10 - 30 business days
✉ USA ship via parcel (tracked): 7-15 business days
✉ International via lettermail: up to 8 weeks (business days)
✉ International via parcel: 10-25 business days
What paper do we use in the shop?
What paper do we use in the shop?
For our stickers, we use non-removable matte sticker paper, which is available in standard, premium, and clear/transparent matte.
▪ Clear/transparent matte sticker paper has a frosted finish.
▪ Premium matte sticker paper has a high-quality image result, waterproof and smudge-free. Highly recommended.
▪ Standard sticker paper is similar to regular paper or copy paper.
Hello! I just wanted to let you know that our standard matte sticker paper will be discontinued soon. We're finishing up our remaining stock. I chose to do this since managing so much stock and fulfilling orders are becoming harder and take me longer.
Most importantly, I want to make sure I'm giving you the best quality sticker. In the future, only premium matte and clear matte sticker paper will be available to purchase.
I'm so grateful for your ongoing support in making this decision. Much appreciated!🤗


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Assistant Manager
Job Description
Supercuts is one of the industry's most recognized salon brands. We offer outstanding development and training, with special emphasis on technical skills, have an established career path for those who want to grow their careers, offer a competitive wage and outstanding benefits, and are dedicated to every one of our stylists and their success.
Every Supercuts stylist undergoes intensive training, attends regular seminars and is recertified annually to stay ahead of the trends. Ongoing training and education are not only a focus at Supercuts, but we pay our stylists to attend. That's why they're among the most skilled and confident in the industry.
Supercuts offers a wide range of professional services, including haircuts, color and highlights, waxing and specialty services. We use proprietary tools and techniques for exceptional results. No-appointment necessary, and guests can check in online or by phone.
At Supercuts, we are dedicated to creating a friendly, welcoming atmosphere and delivering the highest quality standards for our stylists and guests. Simply put, this has made us the industry leader since 1975.
The Assistant Manager will work with and support the Salon Manager that is responsible for all facets of a salon's operations and provides leadership and tools for staff to help them increase their clientele and the business. The Assistant Manager will also provide all hair care services offered by Supercuts and ensures the highest quality of guest service standards and salon profitability. The Assistant Manager provides guests with excellent service providing the full range of hair care services offered by the salon. Supercuts endeavors to provide every guest with a great experience every time they visit by providing quality consultations, exceptional service and the knowledge to duplicate the desired look at home.
Minimal Qualifications:
- Current cosmetology or barber license and manager license as required by state/provincial regulations
- Ability to work a flexible schedule, including evenings and weekends
- Ability to provide exceptional guest service, understanding the guest's needs, providing quality consultations and performing services requested in an efficient and professional manner.
- Ability to perform administrative tasks such as completing schedules and transactions on the computerized register, performing close-out procedures and light housekeeping duties (Banking Procedures, Inventory for salons, staff meetings).
- Ability to resolve guest issues
- Ability to effectively lead and develop a team, creating a positive work environment, training and providing guidance on business and technical competency matters and resolving associate issues
Physical Requirements:
- Standing for sustained periods of time
- Frequent lifting up to 10 pounds, occasionally up to 25 pounds
- Continuous repetitive movement with fingers, hands, wrists and arms.
- Continuous grasping and reaching, often above shoulder level
- Ability to be exposed to various chemicals and fragrances used in performing services
- Ability to observe guest's hair, including close vision, color vision and ability to adjust focus
- Ability to communicate with guest regarding services offered and requested and the guest's needs and wants
- Occasional travel to meetings out of town, sometimes over night
You are submitting your information for potential employment opportunities with an independent franchisee of Regis Corporation or one of its subsidiaries (collectively "Regis"). If hired, you will be a direct employee of the franchisee, not of Regis. Franchisees are independent business owners/operators who set their own wage and benefit programs which can vary from Regis or other franchisees. Only the franchisee is responsible for employment matters at the salon including hiring, firing, discipline, supervision, staffing, scheduling, wages and benefits. Regis will not receive a copy of your employment application and will have no involvement in any hiring or other employment decisions.
Application Instructions
Please click on the link below to apply for this position. A new window will open and direct you to apply at our corporate careers page. We look forward to hearing from you!
Apply Online


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Penske is one of the leading providers of one-way and local truck rentals in the U.S.A. and Canada. With Penske Truck Rental youÆll enjoy the 10% Moving.com discount off every rental.
Get a QuoteIf you are planning to move, and wish the experience to be as stress-free as possible, finding a reputable Great Mills truck rental company should be your first step. Today, hiring moving trucks is a favorite option for people moving either locally or long-distance. Truck rental or van rental allows you to move your belongings without worrying about unnecessary stress to one of your own vehicles. There are many truck rental companies that offer rental trucks for moving from Great Mills to any location of your choice.
Selecting the right size of truck is a key component of a successful move. Moves within Great Mills may require a pickup truck rental, a van rental or a trailer rental rather than a full-size moving truck. There are many times when bigger isn't always better. A truck that is too large for its cargo load won't offer the same protection against contents' shifting and sliding during transport, unwanted movement that can damage furniture and other fragile items. There is a basic formula for determining truck size, but your five rooms of furniture may include several large pieces that make using a larger truck necessary. A knowledgeable facility staff will help you rent a truck that gets the job done efficiently and safely. They can arrange rental insurance that protects vehicles and contents, something the average auto policy excludes. At the same time, the staff can recommend the correct number of furniture pads, packing boxes and accessories for protecting your belongings.
People wishing to relocate tend to have many questions about all aspects of renting a truck, from safety of propery to the cost for varying service levels and truck types. Luckily, Moving.com is here to help. It is understandable to have questions, since moving affects so many aspects of your life. Will my property be safe? You should contact your truck rental company directly to know exactly what measures are taken to safeguard your property. You may decide go directly to the company's location in Great Mills to inspect the fleet.Is truck rental expensive? Moving companies and truck rental companies often offer packaged deals, which may be cheaper than organizing a move's components individually. For how long will I need to rent a truck? This mostly depends on the destination, and the amount of the property being moved. Work with your chosen truck rental company to determine exactly what size of vehicle you will need to rent.
Demographics | Income and Jobs | Ethnicity | Residential |


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Any other questions?
Please don't hesitate to get in touch, I will be happy to help you out :)
Delphine's personal collection of original vintage wallpapers from the 1930s to the 1980s. No reproductions.
Vintage small pattern floral wallpaper with a red, yellow and green flower pattern on a white textures background.
Repeat pattern: 20
Productcode: WF 28
No reproductions, only original vintage wallpapers
All wallpapers in our collection are in good condition.
Each roll is inspected once more before shipment.
I ship worldwide , and do my best to ship packages the same day or the next day after receiving your order.
The delivery time for standard shipments is 2 to 6 days, depending on the destination. If you have any concerns about the delivery time feel free to contact me.
For standard shipments we use Bpost and GLS. For Express shipments we work with UPS, Fedex or DHL.
Feel free to use your own UPS, Fedex or DHL shipping account.
One roll of wallpaper weights approximately 1 kg.
It might happen that you wish to return or exchange your order for whatever reason.
I offer returns or exchanges within 7 days of receiving your order.
You can return your product for a different product or a refund to the original payment method.
Please understand that the return shipping fees would be at your expense, so avoiding returns is important.
If you have any doubts, do not hesitate to contact us. I would be happy to advise you or provide you with additional information and images to help you make the right choice.
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In 2005 we bought a 46' catamaran in Thailand as a wreck. We removed the cabin, bridgedeck, main crossbeam and all the bulkheads then completely redisigned and rebuilt her in Phuket over the course of 5 years. It seemed like a good idea at the time..
Vessel Name: | Rum Doxy |
Vessel Make/Model: | 46' Custom Catamaran |
Hailing Port: | Santa Barbara, California |
Crew: | Mike Reed, Annette Reed |
Extra: | A "rum doxy" is 18th century pirate-speak for a woman of remarkable character and ambiguous virtue |