Ringer

That it is not a very good idea to start learning about fringe ideas without having a grasp on accepted models that have stood the test of time. If the idea is completely incorrect and it's your starting point you will spend a lot of time invested in learning nothing.

Your secret society example has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. A password doesn't need a referent because it's meaning doesn't need to fall into a semantic category. Much like a string of characters can be a password on a computer, the meaning is not a part of its use so it does not have one. God, in the way it's being used, has a meaning and is being used with the assumption it has a referent so the analogy doesn't apply.

Have you talked to your academic adviser where you study? They usually have a good amount of resources and it's part of their job to inform you of this stuff. That being said there are search engines to try to find areas of your specialty though you may need advanced degrees for a lot of them: http://jobs.newscientist.com/ http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/

If your taking Organic classes at school then I would advise just picking a starting reagent and an end product then mechanistically going over different ways to go from one to the other. That's what I did constantly and it helped me out a lot.

Why is it you seem to refuse to actually discuss points made by others?

Are you saying no one knows enough about atheism to talk about it? Because if so that's ridiculously false.

But anecdotes don't count as empirically collected data (nor would eyewitness testimony alone prove someone's guilt in most cases). Maybe having a solid recording of the species or a body, but certainly not people's stories.

It wouldn't just have to be Creationist claims, I would be open to any sort of claims and their variations such as different ESP claims. Though I would ask for other's help for things I am not familiar with. Also, the ICC doesn't go very in depth with a lot of their responses, IMO, and tend to just give the information without discussing the problem with the claim's reasoning. The way they have the drop down list may be annoying to some as well, so it may also help to have the responses in a page format instead of having to go back and forth through the indexed list. I agree, and I do enjoy doing these things. I talk to my friends about these types of things and how to go about dealing with them. I thought I could do the same for a wider community if it would be of help. It has also helped me learn quite a bit more than I normally would.

I've been thinking about creating a blog to identify common arguments against scientific topics such as evolution and ways to answer and educate for people who find themselves arguing with creationists, anti-vaccine people, etc. If I did I like for people to post questions or arguments that commonly (or even not so common) come up that they may have trouble addressing. I was just wondering what the feelings are towards something like that are. Would it be worth the effort and time or would it just be a waste? Input would be much appreciated.

When trying to create a new blog it returns an error message saying the function get_blogs_of_user() is undefined on line 31.

The light around the cells comes from using a light microscope. The cells move around and create space between the membrane of other cells and the solution surrounding the cells and let the light through.

There is also a core agreement of many people who take LSD and other hallucinogens and report a feelings of euphoria and such. The same core feelings attributed to religious experiences. In the book American Shaolin the author reports a religious experience from training in martial arts. There are many ways that these feelings come about, but can be explained much more easily as actions of hormones and neurotransmitters than using mysticism. The doctrines have a much simpler explanation, humans share certain core values and wish to pass these values on. They just so happen to take the form of stories because children listen to stories more than rules.

To steal from swansont, 'the plural of anecdote is not evidence, it's anecdotes'.

I've never seen such a theory, or evidence to support such a theory. Please provide some so no one thinks you're just blowing smoke. Why would hunter gatherers use chants during a hunt or while gathering? Constant communication is unnecessary during both those things and a chant would just give away your position to prey. It would be completely ridiculous for us to 'sing' while hunting, if you don't think so try it and see if you get anything. We didn't need music as a communicative network, we had speech. Since speech and music would travel relatively the same distance and speech would not need anything extra to be produced it wouldn't be very likely everyone communicated through music. Don't think just because we do things they were beneficial to reproduction at one time stuff gets left in or produced unnecessarily all the time. TLDR; Give evidence, and your idea is stretching even an adaptationist viewpoint to the extreme.

According to the history books one of my wife's guinea pigs, Feynman, is quite good at physics. Pinker, on the other hand, was more into psycholinguistics.

http://persistentastonishment.blogspot.com/2011/05/six-graphs-answer-questions-about-phd.html This may give you some information on different PhD group's employment statuses.

I know, now I'm curious. I really want to see what was said.

So what you're wanting to do is select for an increase in average iq since it's not being selected for? *cough* Flynn Effect *cough*

That's even less helpful.

There are a large number of problems with getting samples from untrained people. Namely the samples were probably contaminated, but if not that would be cool. I would be making any bets though.

You know clinical is a very small subset of psychology right? And that psychiatrists are not psychologists, but medical doctors.

Most probably do, the reason being it's more probable than magic.

What would the frogs be breathing in besides normal atmospheric gases. As far as I know photosynthetic byproducts in marijuana are no different than most other photosynthetic plants that grow in similar environments.

There are also many websites that have anything from video lectures to short talks. Here are a few to start you off: http://video.mit.edu/ http://www.academicearth.org/ http://thesciencenetwork.org/ http://videolectures.net/ There is also TED but I find that it's hard to determine if the video will be good or crap until you watch it, so if you are looking to actually learn a subject I wouldn't start there. [edit] Didn't realize Edward also mentioned websites, Khan is a good place to start, but sometimes he explains things oddly or mildly incorrectly (at least last time I looked at some of the videos). But you can't expect the guy to be able to expertly teach every subject.