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The false histories of Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Kilted Heathen

Crow FreyjasmaðR
That's basically a tautology.
No, it's really not?

Anyway, this happened centuries later and had nothing really to do with al-Ghazali,
At most a century. al-Chazali died in 1111, and the Islamic Golden Age ended in 1258 with the Siege of Baghdad. What's more, with writings like "Indeed the science of religion has been destroyed because the learned men have espoused evil. Allah is, therefore, our help and refuge. May Allah protect us from this delusion, displeasing to Him and pleasing to the Devil." (The Book of Knowledge: Section II) it's not entirely impossible that his writings didn't cause a shedding of the knowledges of "the learned men".

Absolutely false.
Absolutely no. You gave a list (repeatedly) of statements dated from November and December of 2002. Screencaping nothing but 2002, as you admit.

And in 2001, he is incredibly vague. "It's a war against evil people who conduct crimes against innocent people", "Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them", "Ours is a campaign against evil", Boy he really loved that line. "We're fighting evil". And "evil" as nondescript and vague as it was quickly became hijabs and mosques and turbans. You cannot deny this, and I remember it happening. It's so easy to say that you're not waging war on Islam, and so hypocritical when that's exactly what happened. His words allowed for that to happen.

So I absolutely deny there was anti-Muslim sentiment because of Bush's statements.
File in with the other tin-hats then. There's room next to the "jet fuel can't melt steel" crowd.

So, no. There is absolutely no claim that it was solely a Christian God that named the stars.
Right, because given his very prominent and fervent faith he could have totally been referencing other gods. Flaccid argument ignoring his staunch Christianity and the very real cultural division between the Christian "God" and the Muslim "Allah".

Posting three separate occasions of Tyson telling this story demonstrates it was part of his routine.
No, it demonstrates three speeches. Not a "routine". Especially given that he said he doesn't speak on religion all that often.

But to this day the false quote is on one of the Hayden Planetarium pages
Take it up with the Hayden Planetarium, then. Though I imagine, as a Planetarium, they're keen to have quotes related to the stars.

And you're telling me I'm incredibly stupid
For someone getting so bent out of shape over misquoting, don't put words in my mouth.

Well, there's the Bush and Star Names story
Which wasn't really about religion.

which reinforces the stereotype of intolerant, hate-thy-neighbor Christians.
justin-timberlake-smh.gif


Then there's this fiction that Islamic innovation came to a halt--
With the end of the Islamic Golden Age. Which it did.

Then there's the fiction that Newton didn't bother trying to model n-body mechanics because he thought God kept the solar system stable.
No, there's the truth that Newton believed the Solar System could only be held in perfect balance by god, as stated in his work The General Scholium to Principia Mathematica: "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." Which Tyson correctly quotes in his essay from 2005, The Perimeter of Ignorance. An essay which is devoid of a claim that Newton "didn't bother" modeling n-body mechanics.

Then there's the fiction that Copernicus kept his ideas secret until he was on his deathbed, for fear of the church.
You're going to have to provide a source for this claim of yours, because the most I can find from Tyson regarding Copernicus was a statement that his Heliocentric model challenged human importance, which it did.

Then there's the fiction that the Christian leadership during the dark ages were flat-earthers who suppressed scientific inquiry.
Another source needed, the most I can find is lambasting modern Flat-Earthers.[/quote][/quote]
 

Debater Slayer

Vipassana
Staff member
Premium Member
Pretty much all people (not just the celebrities) who make a song and dance of identifying as 'freethinkers' and 'sceptics' all think the same way and all believe in the same pseudo-historical myths.

They are also massively self-congratulatory about their own "Rationality" while being as impervious to evidence as the worst kind of religious fundamentalists. As everyone else in their thought bubble is publicly committed to "Rationality" how could they all be wrong?

There's no need to actually bother researching issues as "all rational people agree on the facts" so they just assume someone else bothered to do the research that demonstrates they are all right.

I'm not sure what you mean by "make a song and dance of identifying as 'freethinkers' and 'sceptics,'" but since millions of people worldwide identify with these labels and certainly don't all exhibit the errors in thinking that you mentioned, I think the statement is inaccurate--unless you were talking about a specific subset of self-identified skeptics and freethinkers.
 

Hop_David

Member
At most a century. al-Chazali died in 1111,

Tyson gives the Golden Age as 800 to 1100. So he thinks it ended in Ghazali's lifetime. He says it collapsed. Or that Ghazali's nonexistent claim cut off the knee caps. "It stopped!" he shouts "It just stopped!" He's not describing a gradual decline centuries later.


and the Islamic Golden Age ended in 1258 with the Siege of Baghdad.

And some scholars have it ending as late as the 15th or 16th centuries. See the Wikipedia article.

Abu al Hasan, the father of symbolic algebra was born more than 3 centuries after Ghazali's death.

Absolutely no. You gave a list (repeatedly) of statements dated from November and December of 2002.

Along with a link to Bush's quotes on Islam. Here it is again.

From my partial screen capture of a very long page you concluded that Bush didn't say much to defend Islam outside of November and December of 2002. Bush said plenty to defend Islam in 2001.

And in 2001, he is incredibly vague. "It's a war against evil people who conduct crimes against innocent people",

Yes, Bush described the terrorists as evil. How horrible!

But never did he equate the terrorists with Islam in general. Many times he went out of his way to say the terrorists did not represent Islam. And he said many times in 2001 as well.

Right, because given his very prominent and fervent faith he could have totally been referencing other gods

Here is Bush's eulogy for the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts where he quotes from Isaiah. Eyup. He is totally trying to set Christians above Muslims in this speech. How do you breathe when your head is covered in tinfoil?

Take it up with the Hayden Planetarium, then. Though I imagine, as a Planetarium, they're keen to have quotes related to the stars.

You didn't know Tyson is the director of Hayden Planetarium? That is why they had Tyson's Bush and Star Names video up on their website until 2017. Or that they have his false claims on this page to this day.

And never mind that Tysons toxic cult of personality still presents the story as fact to this day. Tyson's Bush and Star Names video was posted here in this forum as recently as July, 2021.

No, there's the truth that Newton believed the Solar System could only be held in perfect balance by god, as stated in his work The General Scholium to Principia Mathematica: "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." Which Tyson correctly quotes in his essay from 2005, The Perimeter of Ignorance. An essay which is devoid of a claim that Newton "didn't bother" modeling n-body mechanics.

Here is Tyson saying Newton could have easily knocked out Laplace's n-body perturbation theory in an afternoon if he hadn't ceded his brilliance to God.

Never mind that Newton spent a considerable amount of time and effort attempting to model n-body systems. Specifically, the 3-body system of the earth, moon and sun. He was only partially successful.

And never mind that Leonhard Euler also tried. Many regard Euler as the greatest mathematician that ever lived. Laplace held that opinion.

After Euler Joseph Lagrange took a crack at it. Have you heard of the 5 Lagrange points? They should actually be called the Euler-Lagrange points as Euler discoverd L1, L2, and L3 while Lagrange discovered L4 and L5, the points trailing and leading the orbiting body by 60º

More than 100 years later Laplace built a better n-body model that explained the solar system's long term stability. But he built on Newton's considerable efforts to model n-body systems. Laplace also built on Euler and Lagrange's work.

Tyson states as undeniable fact that Newton could have whipped it out in an afternoon. A somewhat questionable claim. As it took 4 of humankind's greatest mathematics more than a century.

And Tyson's claim that Newton invented calculus on a dare? Also bull ****. See Thony Christie disembowel Tyson's ridiculous history regarding Newton.
 
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Hop_David

Member
I'm not sure what you mean by "make a song and dance of identifying as 'freethinkers' and 'sceptics,'" but since millions of people worldwide identify with these labels and certainly don't all exhibit the errors in thinking that you mentioned, I think the statement is inaccurate--unless you were talking about a specific subset of self-identified skeptics and freethinkers.

Credulity and dishonesty is widespread among self identified skeptics and free thinkers. I would call it systemic.

But perhaps it is unfair to tar all self proclaimed skeptics with the same brush.

A few examples of atheists not afraid to gore New Atheist sacred cows are Thony Christie and David Mcafee.
 
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Debater Slayer

Vipassana
Staff member
Premium Member
Credulity and dishonesty is widespread among self identified skeptics and free thinkers. I would call it systemic.

But perhaps it is unfair to tar all self proclaimed skeptics with the same Brush.

A few examples of atheists not afraid to gore New Atheist sacred cows are Thony Christie and David Mcafee.

I still don't see how the statement could possibly be accurate and not overgeneralized unless you're talking about a specific subset of self-identified skeptics or freethinkers, such as certain atheist celebrities.

Not all skeptics and freethinkers are New Atheists either. I self-identify as a skeptic (but not a "freethinker," since that label has less meaning to me), and I haven't remotely identified with New Atheism in a few years. So I think you might be generalizing a bit too much in this case despite making good points overall about a specific type of people among self-identified "freethinking" and "skeptic" circles.
 

Hop_David

Member
I still don't see how the statement could possibly be accurate and not overgeneralized unless you're talking about a specific subset of self-identified skeptics or freethinkers, such as certain atheist celebrities.

Not all skeptics and freethinkers are New Atheists either. I self-identify as a skeptic (but not a "freethinker," since that label has less meaning to me), and I haven't remotely identified with New Atheism in a few years. So I think you might be generalizing a bit too much in this case despite making good points overall about a specific type of people among self-identified "freethinking" and "skeptic" circles.

You could be right. Loud and strident people are more visible and it's easy to think they represent a larger group.
 
No, it's really not?

It is.

A Golden Age is a period of unusually high levels of progress, prosperity, etc. If there was no decline or slowing of this progress, prosperity, etc. it would still be a Golden Age.

How would you define the end of a Golden Age without noting any decline or slowing?

At most a century. al-Chazali died in 1111, and the Islamic Golden Age ended in 1258 with the Siege of Baghdad.

If you say the Golden Age ended with the sack of Baghdad, don't you think that 'Mongol conquest' is likely to be far more important in any changes than some things said by a single scholar a century earlier?

Especially given that the sack was said to be accompanied by destruction of so many books that 'the Tigris ran black with ink'

What's more, with writings like "Indeed the science of religion has been destroyed because the learned men have espoused evil. Allah is, therefore, our help and refuge. May Allah protect us from this delusion, displeasing to Him and pleasing to the Devil." (The Book of Knowledge: Section II) it's not entirely impossible that his writings didn't cause a shedding of the knowledges of "the learned men".

When you have very clear and very significant real-world events that occurred, simply saying 'here is one out of context sentence, it's not impossible that this was more significant than all of the very clear and very significant real-world events' is not a very persuasive or well reasoned argument.

aG's attack on philosophy seems to have actually spread awareness of the ideas rather than limited them, and in general he is not hostile to scholarship.

He is primarily concerned with the philosophers 'staying in their lane' and asserting the primacy of religion in the event of any disagreements.

His views aren't exactly the paradigm case for modern scientific rationalism, but they aren't exactly earth-shattering to the extent that they overshadow wars and imperial fragmentation, Mongol conquests, economic decline and other far more clearly significant factors.
 
I still don't see how the statement could possibly be accurate and not overgeneralized unless you're talking about a specific subset of self-identified skeptics or freethinkers, such as certain atheist celebrities.

Not all skeptics and freethinkers are New Atheists either. I self-identify as a skeptic (but not a "freethinker," since that label has less meaning to me), and I haven't remotely identified with New Atheism in a few years. So I think you might be generalizing a bit too much in this case despite making good points overall about a specific type of people among self-identified "freethinking" and "skeptic" circles.

While it may be mild hyperbole, it is a specific type, the kind who is publicly self-congratulatory about being a "freethinker and sceptic".

From my experience, when someone decides to publicly refer to themselves as a "freethinker", the odds are very much in favour that they believe in numerous common, but false, anti-religious tropes.

The more they feel the need to let other people know they are a "freethinker and sceptic", the greater the likelihood of this being true.

but not a "freethinker,"

Then it doesn't apply to you :D
 

The Kilted Heathen

Crow FreyjasmaðR
Tyson gives the Golden Age as 800 to 1100.
If you're referring to around the 50 minute mark of your favorite video, he states that the end of the golden age happened in the 12th Century. The 12th Century is 1101 to 1200 CE. He also mentions the invasion of Mongols and the sacking of Baghdad.

It's also telling that you ignore the Book of Knowledge written by al-Ghazali, in which his sentiment is repeated frequently. Because it's not a "non-existent claim," it's a paraphrasing of al-Ghazali's sentiments that the pursuit of "Learned Men" is an earthly endeavor, not a divine one, and that earthly endeavors lead to the devil and displease allah. Anything short of looking at allah's creation and marveling at it displeases allah. In short; learned mathematics is the work of the devil.

And some scholars have it ending as late as the 15th or 16th centuries.
"Some scholars". Some scholars will tell you the Roanoke Colony was abducted by aliens, or that the Mayans had jet airplanes.

Abu al Hasan, the father of symbolic algebra was born more than 3 centuries after Ghazali's death.
In Spain, of which Tyson clearly states saw some advancements, but nothing major. He also didn't invent these symbols (for those reading, things like +, -, x, etc), he took them from mathematicians in North Africa that beat him to the punch by a century. Yet again, not a major advancement to math and science.

Along with a link to Bush's quotes on Islam. Here it is again.
Giving the link ad infinitum doesn't diminish that his very vague and nebulous hunt against "Evil and those who harbor it" sowed many of the xenophobic and Islamophobic views that we saw from that era. You can dismiss this as "oh, he called terrorists evil the horror!" all you want, yet this does not diminish the fact that saying "They're evil" without being clear sets up for many many issues that could have been avoided had he not set up this Crusade mentality, and simply owned up to the political motivations of 9/11, and that frankly we had it coming. But no, rather it was those dirty evil people who hate our freedom and our way of life. The ominous They that live in caves, clutch the Quran tightly and curse America as Satan.

His statements about "real Islam" and "good Muslims" is about like saying "I'm not racist, I have a black friend!" He did not defend Islam, he employed the No True Scotsman fallacy against extremists.

Here is Bush's eulogy for the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts where he quotes from Isaiah. Eyup. He is totally trying to set Christians above Muslims in this speech.
Quotes from Isaiah, the Bible (no, he did not have the Torah in mind) and appeals to a very Christian mindset. Which leads to the point of that segment (which you seem to be missing in your fervent obsession with Tyson) that despite the notions of Christian Supremacy and the very present division perceived between "God" and "Allah", the two cultures have much more in common than Christians and Muslims both think.

You didn't know Tyson is the director of Hayden Planetarium?
And is he the Webmaster? Neil Tyson has acknowledged, amended, and clarified his various quoting inaccuracies. So it still seems very ridiculous that you're dredging them up as though they're still actually relevant. It puts you on the same level as his "toxic cult" that present the past as fact (yet, with no evidence of this persistence of the fanbase; in fact I saw several on Reddit urging him to straighten the record as expected of a scientist, which he did). So it still very much seems like you that has the issues, the obsession, and the problems.

Never mind that Newton spent a considerable amount of time and effort attempting to model n-body systems.
And still said that the only reason it worked was "Because God". You have the evidence right there, and you'd rather blatantly ignore them to pretend like Tyson was wrong in that statement.

Tyson states as undeniable fact
No, he states an incredulity that a scientist would stop short at "because God". Which Newton did. You have a problem with this obsession.

And Tyson's claim that Newton invented calculus on a dare? Also bull ****.
You're getting bent out of shape that he generalizes Newton's almost blithe and hobbyish development of calculus when answering who his favorite scientist is and why? Essentially Fanboying? I don't need to read a blog from someone who seems just as irrationally angry as you are over all this to know that you both need a hobby. Perhaps you could discover Faster Than Light Travel thusly. Who knows.

No, it really isn't. It's specifying what is declining, when it could be a number of things from culture, sciences, agriculture, etc. A tautology, rather, is something like "Eight people died in a fire last night as a result of a fire that killed eight people".

If you say the Golden Age ended with the sack of Baghdad, don't you think that 'Mongol conquest' is likely to be far more important in any changes than some things said by a single scholar a century earlier?
The Point was that due to this theological philosophy - that "Learned Men" produce works displeasing to allah - is why Islam has never really recovered from said Golden Age.

When you have very clear and very significant real-world events that occurred, simply saying 'here is one out of context sentence,
Only it's not one sentence out of context. It is a pervasive theme and ideology that is repeated throughout his teachings in regards to "religious science" and the rejection of earthly endeavors. And when you have a culture that is so closely married to Religion, and holds these religious authorships in such high and political regard, it will be a shackle for progress.
 

Hop_David

Member
"Some scholars". Some scholars will tell you the Roanoke Colony was abducted by aliens, or that the Mayans had jet airplanes.

Eyup. George Saliba is a flaming crank for suggesting there was innovation going on in the gunpowder empires. (Hint: Saliba has been at Columbia University since 1979).


Quotes from Isaiah, the Bible (no, he did not have the Torah in mind) and appeals to a very Christian mindset. Which leads to the point of that segment (which you seem to be missing in your fervent obsession with Tyson) that despite the notions of Christian Supremacy and the very present division perceived between "God" and "Allah", the two cultures have much more in common than Christians and Muslims both think.

Oh my gosh. You're still insisting Bush's eulogy for the Space Shuttle Columbia Astronauts was a rant against Muslims? Have you even listened to the speech? Even Tyson admits he was wrong.

Screen Shot 2021-09-14 at 6.37.10 PM.png




No, he states an incredulity that a scientist would stop short at "because God". Which Newton did.

No, Newton did not stop.

He invested quite a lot of time and effort on n-body models. As did Euler (do you even know who Euler is?). As did Lagrange. As did Laplace.

Tyson likes to shout that Newton could have easily done it in an afternoon. But he had God on the brain.

It took four of the humankind's greatest mathematicians (including Newton) more than 100 years to build perturbation theory. It is one of the stupidest claims I've heard.

You're getting bent out of shape that he generalizes Newton's almost blithe and hobbyish development of calculus when answering who his favorite scientist is and why?

Because it is quite obviously bull ****. Let's review.

The "dare" is the famous Halley question about orbits, asked in 1684. Newton started his calculus work in 1666. You don't see a problem with that?

It should be very obvious to anyone who can do 3rd grade arithmetic that it wasn't Halley's dare that prompted Newton to think about calculus. Then what was it? Maybe Newton's older Cambridge colleague Isaac Barrow had something to do with it. Barrow, Fermat, Descartes, Cavalieri, Gregory and others had laid the foundation of modern calculus in the generation before Leibniz and Newton.

Building calculus was the collaborative effort of many people over many years. It was not invented by a single person over two months time.

Tyson has Newton inventing calculus and writing Principia on Halley's dare. In two months! Before he turned 26! I'm sorry, but Tyson's history is complete and utter garbage.
 
No, it really isn't. It's specifying what is declining, when it could be a number of things from culture, sciences, agriculture, etc. A tautology, rather, is something like "Eight people died in a fire last night as a result of a fire that killed eight people".

Haven't we been talking about the Golden Age of Arabic Science? The end of that is marked by a decline in science.

Also a tautology is numerous different things.

Tautology (language) - Wikipedia

One of these things is something that is true by definition for example saying "assless chaps" or "the end of the Golden Age was followed by decline"

Chaps are by definition leg coverings and if there is no decline, the Golden Age has not ended.

It's also telling that you ignore the Book of Knowledge written by al-Ghazali, in which his sentiment is repeated frequently. Because it's not a "non-existent claim," it's a paraphrasing of al-Ghazali's sentiments that the pursuit of "Learned Men" is an earthly endeavor, not a divine one, and that earthly endeavors lead to the devil and displease allah. Anything short of looking at allah's creation and marveling at it displeases allah. In short; learned mathematics is the work of the devil.

You: aG said learned mathematics is the work of the devil.
aG: "geometry and arithmetic, both of which are, as has already been said, permissible"

The Point was that due to this theological philosophy - that "Learned Men" produce works displeasing to allah - is why Islam has never really recovered from said Golden Age.

He is not talking about learning in general, but specifically the Aristotlean and Platonic philosophers who he disagrees with. In addition several of his critiques are actually correct.

He is criticising them for slavish adherence to the Greeks and for their assumptions in the perfection of human reason in philosophical and scientific endeavours. These are things that genuinely did limit progress in both Europe and the Islamic world.

Modern science was generally the result of rejecting these ideas.

Why should we assume, without any evidence, than an 11thC text on Sufism prevented the entire Islamic world in all its diversity from reaching its former heights, rather than the fact that the Golden Age happened with stability, great wealth, centres of scholarship united in same empire, the impact of a new technology: paper, etc. and these conditions were never fully replicated?

"Some scholars". Some scholars will tell you the Roanoke Colony was abducted by aliens, or that the Mayans had jet airplanes.

Why do you think that Tyson who has never read aG or studied Islamic history or philosophy is likely to be more correct than people who actually have read aG and have studied Islamic pholosophy?

The puzzle goes something like this. From the seventh to twelfth centuries, which I suppose is what people like Dawkins mean by the “Middle Ages,” the Muslims conquered a vast empire, produced scientists and mathematicians like Ibn al-Haytham and al-Khwārizmī, and philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes. Sadly, starting in the thirteenth century or so, a situation of terminal decline set in, both politically and intellectually. The Muslims were pushed back in Spain and then pushed out completely. In the eastern heartlands, the ʿAbbāsid caliphate ended with the murder of the last caliph by the invading Mongols. Philosophy and science were forgotten, with Averroes the last to engage seriously with the ideas of the Greeks. Thankfully, the Latin world woke just in time from its medieval slumber. Following the translation of the precious works of Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, and others into Latin, medieval Europe surged into its own golden age, with scholastic philosophy gracing thirteenth-century Christendom, only to be later displaced by the rise of modern science.

Rather than offering you an explanation of this decline, I’m going to tell you that there is no decline to explain. To the contrary, a good case can be made that the very period in which philosophy and science supposedly died in the East was actually a “golden age” of philosophy in the Islamic world. This was proposed by Dimitri Gutas, who put the end of the golden age in about 1350, a full century after the height of the Mongol invasion.1 As Gutas pointed out, things did not end there either. By the fourteenth century we are already seeing the rise of the Ottomans in Anatolia. Along with the Safavids in Persia and the Mughals of India, the Ottomans will be one of three great Muslim powers of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. All three of these dominions made contributions to the history of philosophy and science.

Peter Adamson - Philosophy in the Islamic World

Don't forget the time the Muslims were in 'decline' was the time Europe was rising. It is quite plausible that people in the West stopped paying much attention to what was happening in the rest of the world so the 'decline' is largely a matter of ignorance of Islamic scholarship.

Only it's not one sentence out of context. It is a pervasive theme and ideology that is repeated throughout his teachings in regards to "religious science" and the rejection of earthly endeavors. And when you have a culture that is so closely married to Religion, and holds these religious authorships in such high and political regard, it will be a shackle for progress.

As noted above, it is certainly out of context as you present it as a criticism of being learned, not promoting certain philosophical views.

You also have to make a case that society was more religious after aG than before, and that 'more religious' reduces scientific progress. Scientific progress in Europe seems to coincide with people becoming more religious post Reformation for example.
 

Hop_David

Member
You're getting bent out of shape that he generalizes Newton's almost blithe and hobbyish development of calculus when answering who his favorite scientist is and why?

Because Tyson uses his absurd fiction to support his claim that Newton was paralyzed by religious beliefs.

According to Tyson, Newton invented calculus and wrote Principia on a dare in two months, all before he turned 26.

If all that were true, maybe Newton could have done Laplace's n-body perturbation theory in an an afternoon like Tyson claims. But, like most Tyson's attempts to do history, it is badly addled fiction.

Essentially Fanboying? I don't need to read a blog from someone who seems just as irrationally angry ...

You think it's irrational to get angry over Tyson's false history? You think it's okay to lie if Tyson is pushing what you think is the correct narrative?

as you are over all this to know that you both need a hobby. Perhaps you could discover Faster Than Light Travel thusly. Who knows.

And maybe you could build your perpetual motion machine if you weren't wasting time trying to convince people that Bush's eulogy for fallen astronauts was a rant against Arabs.
 
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