hypervalent_iodine

Hm, alright, well for the benefit of continuing discussion I'll move this to religion. This is a thread about God, so I don't see how it couldn't belong there. In future, please be more mindful of where you place threads.

! Moderator Note Ophiolite, The comment you made very much insinuated that pmb was immature and was taken as an insult. Staff would appreciate if you did not do this. And in future, if you don't agree with a mod action, please use the appropriate channels (report or PM) instead of derailing the thread.

! Moderator Note AethelWolf, I'm giving you two options here: 1. I move this thread to Religion and you focus the conversation on that aspect. 2. It stays here and I close it for violation of the rules outlined in my previous note (the one about needing evidence).

*Note that this is an unofficial mod warning, as I have participated heavily in the thread.* Moontanman and Aethelwolf, cut it out. Calling someone an arrogant asshole or saying they are acting like one is an insult, Moontanman, and you should know better. Your comment was out of line. Aethelwolf, calm down and start acting your damned age. The comment was reported, though (weirdly enough) not by you. If you take issue with something like that, report it, ignore it and let us deal with it.

! Moderator Note Final warning or the thread gets closed. Starting acting with some maturity.

! Moderator Note There is more, Cool it. Insults to other members here won't be tolerated.

You've missed my point, though I could have probably elaborated it a bit better. The idea of using the reputation system is not to punish someone because of personal opinions of them, it is (as you yourself highlighted) to indicate support for a quality post. The act of giving out rep points should not have anything to do with who you are giving them to. Furthermore, the reputation a member earns is not a reflection of the person, it is a reflection of their posting. So again, it's not personal. *her Again I stress, it is not about the quality of the poster, it is about the quality of their posts. I actually quite like the idea of your first point here, although I think rep points in the Philosophy and Religion and Politics sections can probably stay. Your second point could end up being quite...nightmarish. We do our best to avoid accusations of bias while moderating and I feel that introducing a second reputation system exclusively for staff could open the door to all number of claims about our integrity, etc.

! Moderator Note dapifo, Please do not hijack other threads with speculative material. We have a forum for that.

And to elaborate on this post and repeat something a number of people have said but that certain people in this thread continue to ignore, it's not personal.

I've got just the thing for you.

To give you an idea of the 'science' behind homeopathy: She is apparently a leading authority in homeopathic medicine.

Care to elaborate?

Firstly, no it wasn't. Secondly, why assume that it was?

Then don't make posts that garner negative responses amongst members. Moreover, instead of assuming it's to do with how much people like you (and ignoring the posts people have made here in the process), maybe have a look at the content of the posts that were neg repped and work from there. I have to ask, is thread really about the rep system as a whole, or is it specifically about your discontent at the rep points you and/or pmb have been given? Seems to me it's more of the latter.

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/67333-could-there-be-a-god/page__st__20

This is really not much more than anecdotal. Maybe you do put time into your posts regardless of any reputation based repercussions. And good for you if that's true (I have no reason to doubt you). You are not everyone else, however and just because you do happen to put thought into what you write does not mean that the system is being abused. I am confused as to how you come to that conclusion, unless you meant for your first sentence to refer to your last one in that paragraph (in which case, see below). You misread what I wrote. I said that it is rare for someone to go around and punish another member by neg reping their posts because they don't like them as opposed to what they've actually said in the post(s). I then went on to say that it would be quite hard for a member to do that anyway, since you are incredibly restricted in the number of neg rep points you can dish out. The only way you could do that is with sock puppets, but then that would be incredibly obvious and very easily fixed. You also have to consider the fact that the other people reading the posts are capable of individual thought themselves. If they don't agree with how something has been repped, it's likely that they'll counter it. This post is a classic example of that. It has in total, 19 neg reps and 17 pos reps. Most of the neg rep points are by random new members out for a casual Sunday troll (and are likely from only a coupe of members in total; I didn't check the IP's), whereas almost all of the pos reps are by members who have been here a while and made in excess of 100 posts each. Are you talking about your rep points or pmb's? Because I can tell you that the 6 neg rep points you received in the thread you're referring to were given out by 5 different people.

I doubt it would exist in the ocean, but: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0009261487804906 Also, Captain You've argued a strawman here. Plenty of atoms exist with formal charges > +1, but this is not (I think) what John was arguing. He seemed to be more pointing out the fact that the reaction between two cationic species is not going to happen readily because the charges repel, which is true. That being said, there was this: Which comes from this PDF article.

! Moderator Note juanrga, Please go back and have another read of Captain's mod tip.

! Moderator Note If you wish to debate a mod note, you know the appropriate channels. But, for the sake of completeness: You've spent the entire thread evading this question: You did in fact respond to this, but unfortunately, it was equally as evasive with a bit of added ad hom: And despite all his patience, you still haven't answered this: ! Moderator Note You see, all answers are replies, sure, but not all replies are actual answers. We want answers, not evasive and insulting replies. Whether or not you said it's testable is not the point. The rules of this forum, which I both linked and quoted in my above post, dictate that what you present here has to either have evidence to support it or has to be in some way testable by current science. If you have any more issues with mod actions, please use the report feature or PM an available member of staff. Please do not continue to derail the thread by debating this note.

You may want to have a read of this: http://www.sciencefo...on-versus-time/ It's short, but offers some explanation as to how members choose to use the reputation system. Simply, it encourages people think a bit more before they post. The main use of the positive rep points that I've seen is to congratulate something that is well thought out and well presented. I myself give pos reps to such posts even if I don't necessarily agree with them. Within a thread, rep points can help direct members (particularly new members and those who can't tell the difference) to posts that should be paid attention to and which ones to maybe ignore. To my mind, the points given to individual posts are more often what people will pay attention to as opposed to the total number of points an individual has received. I really wouldn't worry about one thread that went badly. Most often, neg reps are given to posts that are insulting, posts that are an obvious attempt to troll and ignite a flame war or posts that come across as deliberately ignorant (the latter kind of falls under the second category). It is very, very rare that a member would use the reputation system to punish someone simply because they don't like them. This would indeed be quite difficult to accomplish, as regular members are restricted to 1 neg rep per day. On the flip side, what we do sometimes encounter are members creating sock puppet accounts to increase their reputation. Remember too that mod staff and admin staff can see who gives out what. If something seems off, we can check it and reverse it. In the case of spam sock puppet accounts, the great and almighty Cap'n has this special move with instant cool-down best described as, 'BAM, -1000 rep points.' I've seen it happen only once and it was glorious.

! Moderator Note Think what you like. Firstly, ecoli didn't report this thread (yet) and even if he did, I've in fact had it open for a few hours ready to add a mod note when I had a spare moment between reactions. Secondly... ! Moderator Note ...what ecoli said. You shot yourself in the foot by placing this thread in the Speculations forum (although it doesn't really belong anywhere else, I'll admit). As it happens, it has an additional set of rules. I would like to draw your attention to the following: ! Moderator Note You have an obligation in this forum to support your speculations or explain how it could be tested. You have an obligation to respond and answer the questions asked of you by other members. You also have an obligation not to insult members or get narky while attempting to do so. Failure to comply will result in this thread being closed.

I was just about to quote that same excerpt. Seems strange that they wouldn't have tested it. The likelihood of encountering glass-like surfaces compared to rough surfaces in the natural environment seems like it should be much lower.

! Moderator Note Stay on topic please!

Small note: the definitions of what is a base and what is a nucleophile do differ, but you should have also elaborated on what you meant by that, as it is a little confusing. Nucleophiles are Lewis bases by definition. So, all nucleophiles are in fact bases, but not all bases are nucleophiles. The distinction that you often see is that a nucleophilicity is all about reaction rate, whereas bases are all about the stability of the end product and by association, reaction equilibrium. A simpler explanation comes from considering the fact that oxygen is more electronegative than sulphur, which means that it is less likely to want to donate its electrons to attack an electrophile. Atomic size comes into play due to the fact that you get better orbital overlap and because the nature of the orbitals makes them more susceptible to being polarized, which increases nucleophilicity. This in turn makes reactions such as the SN2 reaction occur via a transition state that is lower in energy. There is also the hardness of the nucleophile to consider. This isn't really related to the OP, though. The size of the molecule as a whole is more or less how you've described. I'm not going to elaborate, however, as SFN has a policy of not providing answers to homework questions. In future, if you could please provide less in the way of straight up answers to these sorts of questions and more in the way of guidance and help towards getting the answer, it would be appreciated. That way the student actually learns something.

It's less to do with how electron withdrawing the carbonyls are and more to do with resonance stabilisation of the resulting anion. The more stable the product (in this case the anion), the lower the energy barrier to its formation and therefore the more labile / acidic the proton. And FYI, alcohols can act as acids. With B, you have multiple resonance contributors (compare it to the resonance structures for C), which makes the anion of B more stable than the anion of C and therefore, the proton on B more acidic. The 'rules' you linked aren't so much rules as they are guidelines, which is something of a common theme in most all the 'rules' you'll encounter.