Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Matt Moneymaker Argues with "Girl" 140 Characters at a Time

Meet @HayleyStevens, a skeptic blogger

Matt and my nephew
Let me say from the outset, the few interactions I have had with Matt Moneymaker have been completely positive. My 12 yr old nephew is a big fan of his and Matt was very kind when I introduced them to each other. Matt had the utmost time and patience for the kinds of questions a kid would ask, all while during the filming of an episode.

And while I disagree with some BFRO's methodologies, I think Matt and BFRO have made some great contributions to the community.

With that said, there is a kind of comedy that can happen when tweeting back and fourth, tweet battles seem to force a reactive quality to the conversation on both sides, there is never quite enough characters to put any type of phrasing in context. I don't think either side comes out the winner on twitter.

This is most likely the case in the twitter conversation between skeptic Hayley Stevens and Matt Moneymaker. The whole conversation goes weird when Matt assumes Hayley is a "little girl," a realistic assumption, in our opinion, based on her twitter profile picture, that doesn't condone the tone of Matt's tweets, but I would not guess Hayley is, in fact, 27. Of course, that's us assuming an assumption was made based on the pic. 

Hayley has her side well documented on her blog, HayleyIsAGhost.com. Unfortunately her documentation of the the twitter conversation is one-sided showing Matt Moneymakers tweets out of context. Also unfortunately it seems that Matt Moneymaker has deleted his tweets. And beyond these two unfortunate events, there is a third unfortunate event, I have spent WAY too much time trying to piece the whole conversation together.

For what it is worth, here is the twitter conversation between Matt Moneymaker and Hayley Stevens that was shared and retweeted among the skeptic bloggers (as best as I could piece it together). Hopefully it does not look like I'm trying to pick a winner, I just wanted to give the conversation more context. If you think either side ended up with a constructive outcome let me know.

9:16:00 AM Matt Moneymaker
Often when ppl get hit by rocks thrown by squatches the rocks are thrown from a distance in total darkness. Ppl dont even see the squatches.

9:17:00 AM Hayley Stevens
 it [sic] that's true, how do you know they're there?

9:30:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
how do you know it is them that makes those noises? If you don't see them?

9:37:00 AM Matt Moneymaker
A dog is barking but u cannot see it. How do u know it is a dog? If u know what squatches sound like u know when they r near.

9:42:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
dogs are a documented species of animal. As far as I'm aware there's no documented and verified record of sasquatch.

10:04:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
and your answer didn't make sense

10:26:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
because the answer you provided didn't make sense.

?????? Matt Moneymaker
It didn't make sense to you because you are too young. Ask your parents. Seriously. They will explain things 2 u.

10:33:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
I'm 25, I've been researching anomalous phenomena for a decade. I know about this than my parents. Try me.

10:41:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
it seems like a leap of logic to me, is what I was pointing out.

10:41:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
I don't understanding how you know the sounds are sasquatch when previously nobody knows what they sound like.

????? Matt Moneymaker
So if I explain how I and others recognize their sounds then why bring up official classification? You missed the point.

10:54:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
in that case why not show me where they're documented? So I can understand your point?

????? Matt Moneymaker
Hayley, many elusive species made recognizable sounds before thety were officially documented. Sounds helped w/ the discovery.

10:55:00 AM Endless_Psych
You know what I don't think grownups generally do? Use youth as an excuse not to answer a question.

10:55:00 AM Endless_Psych
Indeed far from grown up some might actually call that childish

???? Matt Moneymaker
What children do is ignore when their question has been answerd repeatedly if they really just don’t comprehend

???? Matt Moneymaker
Hayley my point is that I usually speak with older people and the answer I gave would make sense to them just fine

10:57:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
How do you know that is a sasquatch making those noises?

11:00:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
Your answer doesn't stand up to scrutiny, so I asked you to clarify. That isn't me ignoring your answer.

11:04:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
and my point is that you can't identify an animal by sound if there's no pre-existing record of what it sounds like.

???? Matt Moneymaker
U can identify an animal by it's sound if you have heard them many times, regardless of pre-existing records. Ask an ecologist

11:08:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
The first time you heard a sasquatch you knew it was a sasquatch how?

???? Matt Moneymaker
I actually didn't know what I was hearing the very first time I heard them in the field, almost 30 years ago. Long story

???? Matt Moneymaker
Someday u can treat me to tea and scones and ask me whatever you like about squatches. A twitter box is too limited for that

11:20:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
at some point you decided you'd heard Sasquatch though. What evidence did you base that decision on?

11:20:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
I'm writing up my thoughts, you can address them then, in your own time and perhaps without attacking me personally.

11:22:00 AM Matt Moneymaker
Hayley stevens Just don't make child-like assumptions about what exists and what doesn't exist. Others may know more than you do abt things.

12:37:00 PM  Hayley Stevens
 the only impressive thing here is your arrogance

12:23:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
I suggest that says more about your logic than it does about your professionalism though.

12:25:00 AM  Hayley Stevens
I don't really have anything to say to you, if you can't answer the points I wrote out without being patronising then fine.


Monday, August 13, 2012

New Human Species Gives Bigfoot More Plausibility

Multiple hominids lived side by side and even interacted with each other
"There was plenty of opportunities ecologically to accommodate more than one hominid species."
-- Fred Spoor at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany

Scientist are becoming more interested in the possibility multiple hominids living side-by-side. A drastic contradiction to the old theory that there was only room for one hominid at a time, each one replacing the former. New fossil evidence increasingly tells us that there were many more hominid species then we first assumed and it is likely they lived side-by-side.

This side-by-side hominid interests began to catch fire with the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis) and has gained further traction as new hominids are discovered to coexist. Dr. Jeff Meldrum, an anthropology professor at Idaho State University suggests the advent of new coexisting hominids gives greater weight to the possibility  of a modern relict hominoid living among us. Dr. Meldrum recently shared as much earlier this year during his presentation in Richland, WA. (See the short excerpt from Dr. Meldrum's presentation below.)


The multi-hominids coexisting trend continues as recently as this month (August 2012). A LiveScience.com article reports a possible newly discovered human species may have roamed the planet at the same time Homo erectus and Homo habilis.

New Flat-Faced Human Species Possibly Discovered

Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor
New fossils from the dawn of the human lineage suggest our ancestors may have lived alongside a diversity of extinct human species, researchers say.
Although modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only human species alive today, the world has seen a number of human species come and go. Other members perhaps include the recently discovered "hobbit" Homo floresiensis.
The human lineage, Homo, evolved in Africa about 2.5 million years ago, coinciding with the first evidence of stone tools. For the first half of the last century, conventional wisdom was that the most primitive member of our lineage was Homo erectus, the direct ancestor of our species. However, just over 50 years ago, scientists discovered an even more primitive species of Homo at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania they dubbed Homo habilis, which had a smaller brain and a more apelike skeleton.
Now fossils between 1.78 million and 1.95 million years old discovered in 2007 and 2009 in northern Kenya suggest that early Homo were quite a diverse bunch, with at least one other extinct human species living at the same time as H. erectus and H. habilis.
"Two species of the genus Homo, our own genus, lived alongside our direct ancestor, Homo erectus, nearly 2 million years ago," researcher Meave Leakey at the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, told LiveScience.
The bottom line is, as academia finds more and more hominids living side by side in the past, it may not be such a far stretch for them to contemplate it is still happening today.

You can read more details of the possible new species at http://www.livescience.com/22198-new-human-species-discovered.html


  

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