Cap'n Refsmmat

I'm looking for a few enthusiastic folk with some writing talent to join Snail and me in a new venture: dbunked. dbunked will be a collation of pseudoscience and scientific myths debunked -- much like Snopes, but for the science world. We also hope to help improve the popular perception of science by sending letters to media agencies when they goof, and by publishing editorials and features that emphasize the importance of good scientific thinking. If you're interested in helping, visit our signup page and follow the instructions. If you'd like to be a "resident expert" for dbunked, and you have impressive credentials, visit our expert signup page. You don't have to be able to spend hours every day writing, either. even if you only have the time to help edit articles and provide feedback, we'd love to have you -- we need all the help we can get so we can get dbunked off the ground. Thanks!

Are you using an encrypted (SSL or TLS) connection to that computer? If so, the certificate that computer is using is not certified by a Certificate Authority. That will not compromise the security of the system in any way -- it only means the person on the other end has not paid several hundred dollars to have a company check to make sure they are who they claim they are.

Let's see how long it takes for Psycho's ISP to issue him a new IP address.

It's well-known and I doubt it has viruses in it. There's really little point to using it as a proxy unless you're doing things on the Internet you don't want traced, however; it's quite a bit slower than a regular Internet connection. (Your traffic is routed through random "exit nodes" around the world, which tend to be slow because of the amount of traffic through them.)

Indeed.

Hah. Next I'll have you redirected to goatse, so watch out.

If there was a poster of that, I'd buy it.

Congratulations, now nobody remembers what this thread was about. Now, about this Hitler thing...

Godwin's Law, people.

This is not right. Our goal is to help, not to make you afraid of us. Guest026, your goal is not to give slackchad the answer with no explanation. iNow was on the right track trying to explain his answer. And I'd suggest you try a bit harder next time, anyway. slackchad, I'm sorry this thread turned out this way. People are approaching these threads with the wrong attitudes and I don't like it.

You could only do that if students didn't have so many extracurricular activities packed in. It's not uncommon to hear people say they get home at 9PM every night.

Well, that's true, but the problem is not with how many classes students are required to take. It's with how much they learn in them. It's at least somewhat better than it looks.

Erm, what school system have you been in? Every district I have seen requires at least three years of math (not just Algebra 1). Also note that while the food looks unhealthy, it's actually quite different than the stuff that looks the same they sell at Wal-Mart. They stuff enriched flour and all sorts of "nutritious" stuff into it and make it to all sorts of wacky government standards. You can't judge the food by how it looks.

Covering the logo? What size monitor do you have? Unless you're under 800x600 (or you have a weird DPI setting) the ads should stay clear of the logo.

I seriously doubt they would. You can ask around at your school, but those aren't the sort of things a school would have.

I'm not sure if the system deducts posts from you in that case. Eventually your postcount will go down, though, because we run "recounts" every once in a while that will make sure you don't get credit for posts in GD.

Flaw. It wasn't random. Evolution discards the mistakes and keeps the good advances. Nobody said early cells had to be complex with all sorts of organelles. They could easily just be goop that can reproduce. That's all that's necessary. Life has high tolerances. Don't fool yourself by thinking that the way life works now is the only way it can work. Life could work many thousands of different ways, using different compounds and different processes.

What sort of tubes? Can you use glue or tape?

And therein lies the flaw in your argument. Evolution is not the belief that Earth came about through various processes and then life formed. The Earth's formation is covered under various fields in cosmology, and life's formation is abiogenesis, not evolution. http://talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html#CB0

The black hole isn't "pulling faster than light." Pulling doesn't have a speed; what matters is how hard it's pulling.

Why would he have been decapitated? A proper convertible would have a rollbar that would prevent it.

Evolution is indeed partly about mutations. A gene mutates, making it do something different, and if that something different is good, it is passed on to many offspring.

Inference, not interference. An inference is an educated guess you make about something based on the evidence you have. An observation is "the fruit is green"; an inference is "that means it's probably ripe."

Where is this thread going?

I just found a highly interesting article about the human perception of myths and falsehoods: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300933_pf.html In case the article vanishes or you can't read it, here are some key quotes: Wacky. It leaves the only option as "fight back, but very carefully." What will this mean for the popular understanding of science? Certainly we now realize that myths are deeply rooted in human psychology, and fighting them isn't as easy as saying "no, it's wrong." Now what? Now, where's the bugtracker for the human brain?