Cap'n Refsmmat

Posts in this forum have to be approved before they're visible, hence they don't show up in the Spy instantly.

The major climate differences (like "sharply cooler temperatures") were visible for twelve months only. That says nothing for smaller, less easily noticeable effects.

Today, on a whim, I installed a vBulletin plugin called vB Spy that allows you to watch new posts being made as it happens, without having to sit and refresh the New Posts page every five minutes. It even shows snippets of the posts. For your viewing pleasure, here it is: SFN Spy

I presume you're referring to this quote: Note that it says weather, not climate. Local weather might be different in places, but it's the global climate that matters, and a difference of fractions of a degree probably isn't noticeable in local weather patterns. (and see the latest announcement for how I noticed and replied so soon)

Reference?

There doesn't seem to be an effective vB plugin for controlling signature font size. It can be done manually though -- mods can just PM people with big signatures and complain. If there's a signature that's a problem we'll try to sort it out.

Is this relevant?

You can probably find good translations of books about relativity in Swedish. And don't worry, your English isn't bad at all. Compared to a lot of people on the Internet you're doing very well.

Global warming is not a "theory". Global warming is something we have observed. A theory would explain why global warming is occurring and predict that as CO2 rises, temperature would rise, or something similar. The government should legislate based on the evidence for or against any given theory. Did I say I do?

Creationism doesn't count as a "theory" in the same way evolution does. You're equivocating by using two different definitions of "theory."

Any possible topics to write about? I was thinking we'd cover calculus in more detail, some physics ("Relativity in a nutshell", basic Newtonian stuff, etc.), basic chemistry, and that's about all I can think of.

To clarify from youdad's point, the word "theory" in science means something like this: Evolution has been tested by observation and it has passed. What Ron Paul is implying, however, is that evolution is a "theory" in the sense that it is not fact, and that is not what is meant by "theory of evolution."

Some of the staff recently brought up a rather interesting idea: Ground Up Threads, or GUTs as we like to call them. A GUT would explain a subject from the ground up (surprise) to the casual reader in a post-by-post format so the tutorial could be easily browsed and searched through for ideas and so the tutorial could be easy to understand. SFN could host GUTs on mathematics (similar to dave's long-lost calculus tutorials), physics, biology, and pretty much any science topic imaginable, as long as someone is willing to write the tutorial. Do you believe SFN should try this? If so, what should the GUTs be about?

"I don't accept it... you know, as a theory." I think that's fairly clear to me. He's basically evolution-agnostic.

swansont has already pointed out that there are multiple volcanoes erupting every year.

Physia, I'd like to point you to section two, rule #8 before you keep going.

It is pretty amazing to realize that I've posted nearly twice as much as vBulletin thinks.

That's what the nine people with blue usernames are for.

Spend more time looking at the listing by new threads I posted yesterday. Physics beats politics there.

Ah, I see. Might I ask which? Right. Even YT doesn't have 10% of SFN's posts.

You've been poking around with the stats a bit, haven't you? It turns out that the mod forum is where the vast majority of discussions and decisions take place, and we usually only use the admin forum when we're talking about server stuff. Quite. That's also why Ecology and the Environment is so high up on the list -- all the global warming debates. I could, as a better metric, run it for new threads rather than new posts. I'll try that tomorrow and see if I get anything interesting. edit: Or, I can try it tonight. Here's the lineup: Reported Posts: 9% General Discussion: 7.7% General Physics: 7% Politics: 6.2% Removed Thread Holding Area: 6.2% Inorganic Chemistry: 4.7% Pseudoscience and Speculations: 4.5% General Chemistry: 4.1% General Biology: 3.6% Homework Help: 3.4% That's a listing by number of threads created rather than number of posts. Reported Posts contains a thread for every post reported in the past month, in case you're wondering. Please note that this doesn't include threads created more than a month ago but posted in sometime this month.

Or, to be more specific, stuff we don't want around on the main boards. Rather than deleting it we keep it in a special forum so we can look back at it later if we need to. And yes, there is a forum called Moderators. No, you can't see what's in it.

I just thought I'd release some statistics I've generated over the past week. I've been having some fun messing with them to see what seems to be popular on SFN, and I thought you all would enjoy the numbers too. Dividing SFN posting over the last month into individual forums, here are the top ten forums for posts on SFN: Politics: 13.1% General Discussion: 12.3% Ecology and the Environment: 7.6% Pseudoscience and Speculations: 6.4% General Physics: 4.6% General Biology: 3.6% Science Education: 3.4% Astronomy and Cosmology: 3.1% Relativity: 2.8% Computer Science: 2.6% Those percents are by post volume, meaning Politics received 13% of all posts, and so on. This does show off our current trend: arguments in politics and arguments about global warming. If we do that by categories rather than by forums, the top five are: Other Topics: 36.1% Physics: 15.4% Biology: 15.1% Other Sciences: 6.2% Chemistry: 5.6% If we re-run those statistics by users, our top ten posters on SFN in the past month are: iNow: 8.1% swansont: 4.8% Mr Skeptic: 4.4% Pangloss: 4.2% thedarkshade: 4.1% Fred56: 3.7% YT2095: 3.3% Lockheed: 2.9% Cap'n Refsmmat: 2.9% mooeypoo: 2.8% Congratulations to iNow for posting twice as much as anybody else! And finally, if you're interested in seeing your own post breakdown (what forum you post in most), head over to this page and put in your username. Note that the postcount it gives you will be larger than the one here on the forums because it counts all of your posts, including ones in forums that don't count to your postcount here. Have fun.

This may be a little late for an announcement (a few people have noticed this already), but the Politics forum is now closed to members with less than 30 posts who have been registered for less than one month. The restriction is designed to help keep idiots out of Politics while keeping discussion of generally good quality. We certainly hope you've joined SFN for the science anyway, not the politics section.

That's essentially what a seizure is. Sure, we might not use all of our brain at any one time, but humans do use most of it for different tasks.