Sayonara

I would consider that an inference rather than an implication, given that Mokele's comment was couched as a question. iNow's similar comment in the post immediately before seems to be several degrees more in enthymeme territory, with the quotation marks and mischievous winking smiley.

I would lose the invectives if I were you. They make your position look weak, despite not having anything to do with it. They are also, of course, just plain rude.

The Bear's Key can now post in politics due to... erm... magic.

Any useful form of prevention would pretty much require people like the Neumanns to understand that legal protection of life trumps legal protection of religious freedom every time.

Mokele made a comment which relates specifically to those who accept the theory of evolution. There is no implication that those who do not accept that theory cannot be rational, thinking human beings. Phi for All has deleted no content from this thread. Pmb may be confused by the effects of the consecutive post merger, since the logs do show that he removed a CPM marker from one of his merged posts. You're not the only one.

Short tempers make for short threads.

Welcome to the SFN Newsletter for 2008-2009! This is a new feature that we are running for new and old members alike. The aim is to take a look back at the past year and all the changes and notable events that occurred in it. Contents: Traffic and Usage New Staff Members User Awards Recent Forum Changes Upcoming Changes Forgotten Features Traffic and Usage: All stats run from January 1st 2008 to December 31st 2008. We gained on average a steady 350 new members each month up until August, with a sudden leap to 450 in September which was the record month for the past year. The level of member activity has remained between about 90 and 130 unique members online each day all year. There is no real pattern to the rate at which new threads were posted. The peak months were June, September, and December with about 630 new threads each. The slowest month was January, with only 438 threads created. Likewise, there is no obvious pattern to overall posting activity. June had the record number of new posts with 7335, and November was the slowest month with just 5058. In December things picked up again and this month came second overall with 6748 new posts being created. In June we exceeded 400,000 posts! YT2095 retains his crown as SFN's most profligate poster, with 13,927 posts at the time of writing. The most used forum is General Discussion, and the Official "Introduce Yourself" Thread is the most viewed and most read discussion with 1,284 replies and a whopping 57,852 views. The top five referrers are Klaynos, YT2095, antimatter, Sayonara³ and the tree. The top five recipients of reputation points are D H, iNow, mooeypoo, swansont, and YT2095, who each have over 400 rep points at the time of writing. Keep it up guys! New Staff Members As part of recent changes to the way that the staff manage the forums, we have been on a bit of a recruitment drive and as a result several new members of staff have been appointed. These are: Bignose (Resident Expert), CharonY (Resident Expert), D H (Resident Expert), hermanntrude (Resident Expert), Klaynos (Moderator and Resident Expert), lucaspa (Moderator), mooeypoo (Moderator), Ophiolite (Moderator), Sisyphus (Moderator). User Awards The results from the annual user awards came in in June: Most Helpful Member: Klaynos Most Improved Member: Klaynos Most Enjoyable Member: AzurePhoenix (Second year in a row) Best Debater: Sisyphus Most Interesting Member: AzurePhoenix (Second year in a row) Most Knowledgable Member: Severian Recent Forum Changes The sharp-eyed amongst you will have noticed many new features being enabled on the forums over the past few months; many of them over the festive holidays. These are: "Similar Threads" list When you view a thread, the forum automatically finds threads which it thinks might be related. These are listed at the end of the page, so you can easily find other discussions on similar topics. Off-site Bookmarks Bookmark links for sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Google have been added to the bottom of most thread pages. New Forum: "The Sandbox" The Sandbox is a whole new forum where you can post any old gibberish while you test out forum functions and code. This is primarily for people who are new to VBulletin-style forums, but there is no reason why established members cannot use it to try out new features as we add them, BB code they have not attempted to use before (such as table layouts), or complex code such as Latex maths formatting. The Sandbox is also now the new home for staff threads which explain how to use certain features, such as... Tags Tags are metadata which you can add to threads to help the forum and search engines categorise the content. This makes the threads easier for living users to find. See the tagging guide to learn how to use them properly. "Merged Posts" Revamp The way that the forum merges consecutive posts by the same user has been modified to make it easier for members to spot posts which have been glued together. See this thread for details, and to vote on whether or not you think it is an improvement. Politics Forum Restriction The Politics forum has always been a hotbed of debate, and to prevent threads from being hijacked by one hit wonders or hit-and-run posters a restriction has been placed on it. You must have 30 posts or more and you must also have been a member for more than ten days to post there. Once you reach both of these levels the permissions to post in Politics are automatically added to your account. Facebook Page SFN created a Facebook page, so you can now show your support by becoming a fan of SFN. New Style For those who don't like the default look of the forums, Cap'n Refsmmat has devised a new experimental style. User Blogs and new Front Page Back in February we enabled User Blogs, which is basically exactly what it sounds like: free blogs for SFN users. We also launched the new front page, which integrates a blog feed, recent posts, and some stats. New Server In July we moved to a new server, kindly hosted by Dave. The new box is more secure and much faster, and almost never goes down or develops problems. Ground-Up Tutorials In March we launched the Ground-Up Tutorial threads, or "GUTs" as we like to call them. They are still a work in progress, and you can read the launch thread for more information. SFN Spy The nifty SFN Spy tool was installed in January. Upcoming Changes We are currently planning a couple of new features, one of which is a "Picks" forum where the best of the best content will be showcased on a month-by-month basis. There will also be a major announcement about SFN later this year, so watch this space! Forgotten Features Every once in a while it is good to remind people about features they may be missing out on: Thread Rating If you particularly enjoy or detest a thread, don't forget that you can give it a rating of 1 to 5 stars by using the thread tools just above the first post on any thread view page. Star ratings are visible to other members in the forum view, and they are a good indicator of whether a thread is going to be a worthwhile read or hilariously bad. The FAQ The link to the FAQ disappeared from the menu bar some time ago when YT2095 left the staffroom door open overnight, but the FAQ itself is still there. It explains many of the features of SFN and is worth a read. BB Code Index The BB code (Bulletin Board code) used on SFN is listed and explained on this thread here. It may explain a thing or two that you weren't quite sure how to achieve!

Threads merged due to similarity of content. Abdul-Aziz, it is insufficient to only cite the surname of a paper's author along with the year of publication. You should also include (usually at the end of the text) the title of the paper, the name of the publication in which it appeared, and the other pertinent details. There is a good guide to Harvard-style referencing here: http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.htm

You are presenting your theory. The onus is on you to provide any relevant reasoning or calculations, and common sense would seem to suggest that these are best derived before the theory is publicised. If you don't want peer review, don't ask for it. This is a big no-no. Please read the SFN rules and the associated SFN Etiquette thread. Whether or not there is any point in continuing to argue for your position is contingent on the availability of evidence, not some phantom "mainstream science" working to block your idea. You need to change your approach if you want people to give you the feedback you feel your theory deserves. The first step is to adopt a less hostile and confrontational attitude, and the second step is to provide the calculations or reasoning that people ask for so that they can understand what you are proposing.

Stop posting the same thread over and over. Your other threads on this topic have been deleted as duplicates.

Please give it up for the latest addition to the team, Ophiolite. Wooo! Wooooo!

Doesn't matter. Closed threads stay closed. You agreed to abide by the rules of this site as part of the registration process, so you should probably read them. That way you will save yourself and others a lot of time.

I scored a 15, so I am going to go and revise and hopefully score a 50 on the resit.

There's also the idea that a lot of what makes "genius" is the ability to link knowledge in novel and unconventional ways to produce something which is intellectually startling. Although a brain from 70,000 years ago could be as 'smart' as our own, without the comparatively vast amounts of knowledge which we have now such links would be few and far between. It's like having a quad-core computer but only running Windows 95 on it.

I didn't say at any point that "god did it" is wrong. What I am objecting to is the use of "god did it" as a declaration which is intended to end debate or inquiry. But you can't have your cake and eat it. If you nobody can be certain of a first cause for life (for example), then saying "god did it" is intellectually dishonest even if it can't be shown to be factually incorrect.

There may be some truth in that idea for certain populations. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. And nothing breeds necessity faster than a good bout of adversity.

Religions which rule out life on Mars, yes.

A lack of long-range communication, record keeping, and sufficient population pressures. I don't exactly dispute your assumptions (although you are just chucking out figures without justifying or sourcing them), but I do suggest that you might want to state (i) what you consider to be a "genius" and (ii) why the presence of these "geniuses" in any given population should lead to "science".

Don't worry; according to your rep icon you will 'become famous soon enough.'

Crackpot.

"Rep power" is the number of reputation points you give someone when you rep+ one of their posts.

As with many combinations of words it has one possible sensible interpretation only to people who already know what it is supposed to mean. If this ridiculous pantomime of false innocence and indignant replies continues I guarantee you will start accruing infraction points left, right, and centre. Familiarise yourself with the SFN rules immediately. O rly? ...and... You have already been warned about the condescending attitude several times. Infraction on its way.

Sisyphus is on top form today then. EVERYBODY HIDE!

It certainly is, and yet you keep asking for examples to demonstrate things which have already been demonstrated by example. Your MO is hardly subtle, is it? This is a science forum. There is nothing preventing anyone from 'arguing' with NASA. Whether or not they make a compelling case for their disagreement is up to them. Read what people are telling you. If you don't think it addresses your points, then explain why instead of ignoring them and just repeating the same query. Otherwise this could go on forever while people blindly try to edge closer to understanding what you are going on about.

I turned them on yesterday. Let the w00tage commence. I have also added a new forum, The Sandbox, where you have free reign to test any posting functions and BB code.