Phi for All

Competition between teams of elite athletes has many admirable aspects, but I'll never participate in that, only watch it. So I choose to focus on the spectator aspect, which is where I think modern sports drag us down as a species into tribal, paint-your-face animalism and brutishness. The teams pretend lofty values while celebrity sports stars get away with murder. Fans continue tribal rivalries well after they leave the stadiums. They get their interests artificially whipped up while they're part of the mob and most likely don't hear any respect in the after-fight interviews. I'm perhaps jaded by the asshat white males I see in their team-festooned pickup trucks behaving like cavemen while whooping it up on the highways on the way to a game. Sports are promoted as rivalries, and I think far too many people make far too much money keeping humans at each other's throats about one thing or another. What works for arms dealers works for sports as well. It's just business.

I'm not willing to give up my shilling. In the US, when private providers take over public utilities, they often get subsidized for unprofitable circumstances. An ongoing argument with the TVA (government owned power provider) is that it should be sold to private interests, AND because the Tennessee Valley is a difficult area physically to reach with power lines, in order to continue to provide affordable service to the residents, those private interests want government subsidies as well to offset their added costs. So my bet is that somewhere along the line, some of your England & Wales water providers are getting some extra taxpayer funding because some folks are harder to reach but can't afford the added costs.

So there are no areas in England or Wales that pose a distribution problem for private providers? Places where getting water to people costs more, but the residents overall can't afford private schemes?

Sorry, but I see this as wishful thinking. In reality, sports in general seems to be just another way to pit rivals against each other in a non-lethal way, but only exacerbates the problems with modern humans competing for "fun". We've worked hard so most people don't have to compete for resources, yet the animal in "us" wants the pleasure of crushing "them". The mindset sports encourages in modern, money-oriented settings is similar to modern business practices, and "winning at all costs" takes precedence over "reaching the top together". I don't think sports unite us, just the opposite. Saying it's a good thing because people all over the world are into it is bad reasoning. Humans are into a LOT of things that are horribly harmful to us and the planet.

Bet you a shilling your government subsidizes the water companies in addition to what they get from consumers. Usually it's for R&D, future technologies, better methods and practices, whatever. The US often lets the private companies only do the really profitable work, and it keeps the low-profit parts publicly funded. Our private prisons don't have to house certain inmates if they prove cost-ineffective.

That qualifies as a major capitalism shakeup, if they can pull it off. What about renationalizing water in England and Wales? I always thought roads were the most logical thing the citizens of a country could own, until I heard that y'all gave up your WATER to private interests.

If you believe George Carlin, Jeff's thrust is to prick holes in the stiff front erected by the national space programs.

Exactly. For an outdoor fireplace, it would seem the main factors are heat, light, and duration, all to provide various ambiances (I'm assuming this fire isn't for cooking). You can adjust these by configuring your fire differently, or by using different woods. Soft woods get started more easily, but hard woods burn longer. You need some context before you could say a specific treatment was harmful to a particular process. I'm not a big wood burner, but isn't this why firewood should be seasoned before burning, to dry it out as much as possible?

That pretty face has been getting you in trouble your whole life.

One of the creepiest things I remember seeing was in the opening credits for American Horror Story: Asylum. For just a split second, they show a woman bent all the way over backwards, walking on her hands and feet up some stairs like a big spider. It was SO unnatural, and it still gives me the willies thinking about it.

I'm not so sure. "Creepy" feels to me like a judgement based on specific differences, and ambulation may be one of them. Spiders and snakes seem "creepy" because they don't move right from our perspective, never have and never will. Too many legs on the spider, and none at all on the snake! The way they move is creepy mostly because it seems more unpredictable than the two or four limb movement we encounter most. If it's harder to predict what they might do, that adds to how creepy something is. Don't get me started on jumping spiders. Eight legs means when you jump, you're so fast it looks like you just disappeared. Despite those who keep them as pets, I don't think comparing any reptile or arachnid with a domesticated mammal is meaningful. Insect bites are a problem almost everywhere, and long term consequences complicate surviving them: https://sma.org/southern-medical-journal/article/national-estimates-of-noncanine-bite-and-sting-injuries-treated-in-us-hospital-emergency-departments-2011-2015/

I will share some science, instead of my ideas. Based on the best current information, the universe isn't expanding INTO anything. The universe is all there is, so "from a single point" and "everywhere at the same time" are not different theories. The universe expanded from a very dense and very hot state, and the expansion evolved into what we observe now. The LCDM model details all the maths that support this. Do you think there's a problem with the model? The universe may be infinite; we don't know. It may be finite, we don't know. The observable universe is finite. Spacetime is geometry, not a physical thing that can be layered over a structure. You can't bring me a bucket of spacetime. It's a system of reference that denotes the degrees of freedom we have to move about; three spatial dimensions and a temporal dimension so we can measure when and where any phenomena take place. NOT an explosion! Explosions explode outwards INTO something. The Big Bang was a rapid expansion of the whole universe. The maths we have can take us back until just a moment before the beginning of the expansion, but then they show us INFINTE densities and INFINITE heat, and we know that can't be right, so the model starts where our knowledge starts, at 10−43 seconds after expansion began. We CAN'T know exactly what was going on before, since the last thing we know is that the entire universe was filled homogenously and isotropically (everything was made the same and behaved the same) with this density and heat. "Ideas" about what happened before can only be worthless guesswork, since there's no way to check or predict.

Mean? We won't attack you personally. We'll be civil because it's our #1 rule. But we will attack your ideas. And hopefully show you where you need more study. You use a lot of unfamiliar terms, and some of your information is broken. Light can't escape from a black hole, for instance. The negative reactions are for the misinformed bits. If you stick around and read more than you post (a wise formula), there's a whole lot of good science for you to discover.

! Moderator Note You had me at baseless. Thread closed, because everybody has better things to do.

This seems like a false dilemma, and I'm unsure why you feel the need to box him in like this. Do you dislike Feynman, or do you dislike popularity, or do you dislike intelligent people who become popular? Is it a requirement for you that physics be anonymous, or that studying science be free from a popular approach?

! Moderator Note You can discuss it here, but don't try to sell it here. That will get you banned.

1 part mud, 2 parts plant oils, 6 parts earthworm.

! Moderator Note I'm tempted to pin this as an example of bad-faith arguments for posterity. You've obviously reached the bottom of this particular barrel, so rather than watch you continue to scrape, I'm closing this.

Some version of Skitt's Law will get you if you misplay the ridicule card. If the box on the ground is full of stones, and the tree is next to a glass house....

We still don't delete it. We Flag As Spammer, and the software hides it and adds the IP address to an Invision Community database of suspected spammers. The protocol for Speculations is adequate support of the claims made, and the OP has had a couple of weeks to respond, so we can close this per the rules. This is what we do most often, rather than trashing or hiding. Sometimes a bizarre perspective can help others form a better argument, but this OP clearly doesn't define evidence the way most here do. ! Moderator Note Thread closed.

! Moderator Note We delete NOTHING, ever. We hide inappropriate posts, we throw posts in the trash, but we don't delete it if someone took the time to write it. We like to give people the time to develop a discussion, and they can't if the mods have a hair-trigger when it comes to what they think is a waste of time. While posts are required to be reasonable, many members struggle with language and precision, so we give them a break. Long answer to a quick question, as long as a member doesn't break the rules, they should be able to post without staff guessing about their motives and temperament.

"Like" and "Upvote" give +1 to reputation (pick one or the other), "Downvote" gives -1. If you trigger the auto-destruct sequence, the whole site goes on red alert and you will be given a warning point which will never expire.

I'd love to believe that, but unfortunately extremism is at an all time high, and there are far too many who would claim it's part of the government's attempts to forcefully vaccinate us and take over our minds with their technology. The Jewish Space Lasers are aimed at the planet, not at aliens in space! Aliens aren't abducting children, it's Democrats!

Like has been available since the last software update, iirc. I don't use it. I think Like is part of a positive-only system of reputation, for those who want to focus on that. I think the Admins have it set where both are active.

Anand_Haqq has been banned for avoiding science, soapboxing, and hijacking threads, all behavior that is anathema to a science discussion forum.