Phi for All

! Moderator Note Replies to the UFO tangent have been split to HERE and locked for future reference. Since Moontanman wants to discuss that separately in another thread, it's off-topic here.

That's not a mix. That's like saying "Life's a bitch but there's candy". You're still stuck with a pessimistic view of life, but the candy helps you deal. Pessimism simply keeps us finding the flaws in the system, and optimism keeps us fixing them. You do need a mix, but you also need to believe you're progressing in this manner. It's like the matter/antimatter relationship. There needs to be a bit more positive than negative in order for anything to exist. Perhaps think of it that way?

So try the experiment. Pick a day and look for the folks who give your car space to merge, or hold a door a bit longer for you, or just smile when you look at them. Watch for people being nice to others. Write them down, make notes. Check the headlines for positive news, and read the stories. Invest in some goodness. I think humanity is always looking for improvement, and that means you have to keep an eye out for it. If that eye only sees the negative, you'll spend your life identifying problems but you won't be able to do anything about them. Don't deny yourself the tools you need. Not everything can be fixed with a hammer.

It's not the vehicle, just some of the passengers. Civil AND clever are rare, and we thank you for your contributions.

I didn't suggest you simply adopt a positive outlook. I suggested doing an experiment like a scientist and test yourself for cognitive biases. That way you can see for yourself how heavily you influence your own decisions based on outlook. If you're truly interested in revealing faults instead of obscuring them, it's a very easy experiment. After all, the ideal is to have a decent balance between optimism and pessimism, so you can use them properly as objective filters instead of being dominated by one or the other. You say this, but....

You can, though. People overcome their natural biases and their tendency to confirm them all the time. You just need to be aware that you tend towards the negative view when it comes to many subjects. Be vigilant about cherry-picking only those things that confirm what you fear or suspect. Try selecting for only positive events some day. Make a note of good things that happen, and ignore the bad. Having a positive outlook is hard work, and well worth it, but you have to practice. You've had a LOT of practice with the negative, so why not try this? What do you have to lose besides your pessimism? "I can't help it" is a horrible phrase btw, and you should strike it from your vocabulary. It's one of those throwaway phrases that people say, it's rarely true, and it keeps you from even trying.

Oh, your posts are THAT bad...

That was only a secondary objective. We failed in our primary task though, since you still found us.

Big, bushy, twig-ridden beards, oversized overalls, and several good-looking teeth. It IS good to see them again! Cap'n pretended to call from a hospital to get an urgent message through to Dr B. That's a felony these two are obviously trying to cover up now. We should have put a calendar on your golf cart.

Something low-tech, like a calendar for blike's golf cart?

Um, correct. But my response was to your figures on the centuries it would take for decomposition to take place. It was evidence for an argument about landfills that runs counter to your own, that they CAN be hazardous places even with the right stuff in them. You assumed those landfills would remain inviolate for the time it takes the plastics to degrade, and I tried to show that might not be true. I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear, or made it look like a straw man, and hope this makes my position easier to understand. Is it paid for by taxes? I like approaching this as a public solution, since it seems like that model is best suited for something that a) most citizens would benefit from, b) doesn't need a profit to remain sustainable, and c) has limited growth potential (as a private business, there's only so much compostable garbage in an area). The city/county has LOTS of uses for compost, and any leftover can be made available to citizens.

Most of those folks get paid by ad revenue based on views. That's the majority of what I use YouTube for, watching someone else do work on my model of car/computer/refrigerator/ceiling fan/whatever so I can figure out if I want to fix it myself or not. I agree that many aren't good at explaining, but as long as they keep the camera on what they're doing, I can usually ignore what they're saying. I'm not sure one could charge for these types of tutorials, even if they were really good. Why hasn't anyone launched a subscription version of Facebook, and removed the threat of sharing your information with advertisers? Free is still a powerful concept, powerful enough to overcome a lot of concerns. I think it's the computers on board new cars. You need special diagnostic tools to access them, and figuring out what's causing a problem is a piece of cake if you've got them. Otherwise, you have to do it the old-fashioned way, and choose from three or four possible causes and start checking them out one at a time, hoping you discover it quickly. This is what allows them to build engine components that Average Joe can't access easily. My father had a '71 Bronco you could climb inside the engine compartment to fix. My latest vehicle I can change air filters and battery on, but not a lot else. Is any of this done during sleep? I keep thinking there should be a way to learn (implant memories/knowledge?) effectively while sleeping, as long as the sleep cycle wasn't adversely affected. I seem to remember some claims about learning a foreign language while you sleep. Has that method been rejected?

And yet, a few notable people throughout the ages still aren't enough to explain how we've become the only species capable of leaving the planet, or even understanding why it might be important. Add in the vast majority of humans (by that I usually mean 75%+) that have enough willpower (or motivation?) to turn notable dreams into reality, and your assertion that we're designed for laziness seems unlikely. What you perceive as laziness could just be working smarter instead of harder. Humans are known for adaptations like that. Some have been mentioned, but you opted to make more assertions rather than comment on them. Very frustrating discussion tactic. I think the "speeches" are necessary to open up your perspective a bit. You seem to overgeneralize when talking about this subject. It's hard to know if you understand what we're saying when you don't respond to specific points. The methods mentioned so far have been met with (almost) disinterest on your part, and you seem to revel in the rant more than seeking solutions. We call that soapboxing. It sort of takes the wind out of people's interest in the discussion when all the solutions get rejected, tacitly or not. The speeches are also trying to show that perhaps things aren't as drastic as you make them out to be. I mentioned confirmation bias before, and it's a very common human trait. We get an idea in our heads, and we start selecting for those things that support it, and ignore the rest. This is the sort of thing you should be vigilant about, not some vague "willpower". If you want to have an open mind to better see reasonable options, you just need to stop making sweeping generalizations and assumptions about the world around you.

! Moderator Note Thread closed then.

Practical application is probably more in line with how we actually learn (as opposed to just input from a source). The education system could apprentice to professionals for specific lessons. Kids could learn arithmetic by training with an accountant, or history from being tour guides at museums, or writing from a newspaper. If you don't make an effort to remember something you've learned, the probability of retention goes down over time. Knowledge you gain in practical application is retained longer because you don't just learn it, you use it in real life, and you use it repeatedly. Maybe we'd use this system more if it didn't look so much like child labor.

I've nodded at parts of that view, and shaken my head at others. To do that, I had to take my fingers out of my ears and listen. We can argue, but I'd rather have a discussion, where reason is persuasive.

...is a strawman argument. Nobody is talking about a single piece of anything. But people have short memories and developers grab that land up to build on. The landfill I grew up with just 45 years ago has homes built on top of it now, expensive ones. I prefer a bit of social management when it comes to these types of practices. The national efforts to clean up US highways and cities in the mid-60s were extremely effective. All very positive, and all this time later I could NEVER throw trash out the car window. You should add some kind of incentive to change bad habits, like what the UK did by charging 5p for plastic grocery bags. If the Guardian can be believed, you guys cut consumption by 85% in the first month!

Who decides which is truest? Is there an objective measure for "true"? How can we know with our limited experience of the universe?

Let me be clear on this. When I mentioned your youth, it was only in reference to a scarcity of first-hand experience with medicine. Youth doesn't diminish your observations, but it might limit your perspective. My perspective is that we aren't using a cohesive enough framework for our advancements, and are choosing to experience them in a very subjective and limited way. It has nothing to do with how fast we're "moving", and everything to do with a lack of direction and cooperation. I think we could improve humanity with a good branding campaign. Decide as a species how we want to perceive ourselves and our world, and then make sure all our efforts reflect that. I'd want us to be Earth's champions, and treat the whole planet and everything on it a LOT more wisely. With that as our "brand", it could lead us to some really smart activities, like working worldwide on a solar electric grid to provide free electricity to every human group. That would naturally lead to demanding cleaner water and air, and better decisions about how we're going to share the planet with other species. Actually, the foundation of the incandescent light bulb held the LED lights back for years. There's absolutely NO REASON for an LED light to emulate a bulb shape, other than to fit an existing fixture. LED bulbs had to have that stupid E26 screw-in base as well, something I always felt shortened the life of incandescent filaments. An integrated LED fixture these days bears little resemblance to what lit your home when you were born. As in, you think the world was created by a deity a few thousand years ago? If so, please don't bring it up anymore in this thread, unless you think those insights would help further improve humanity. The part that offends me is that you talk with such conviction about stuff you obviously haven't looked into very deeply. But it's your ignorance to work on. I have my own areas where I need to learn more. I think we all do. Life is more efficient at using and dissipating radiation from the sun than inanimate matter is. It's necessary for us to even be talking about it, but I don't consider it to be "sacred" or anything. Preferable, wonderful, and hopefully meaningful, but not part of some hierarchy that must be followed. Or rather how close the first steps were, since we certainly have the ability to walk farther. Also, we don't know that the universe is infinite. Ah, that explains your attitude about theory. Science is NOT about answers, it's about the best supported explanations. That's what a theory is, the explanation for a set of phenomena, backed by supportive evidence and mathematical models of the behavior. Think about it. What do you do when you think you've found an "answer"? You stop looking. With a theory, it's constantly being looked at and tested and challenged with new observations and experiments. A theory can change when new evidence show it needs to. It's the only way to be sure we're not fooling ourselves into thinking we've found an "answer". Phlogiston was a theory, and we should be glad nobody treated it like an "answer". What scientific "answers" have you found so far?

I had lunch at a diner in Yellowstone National Park not long ago, and the fork, spoon, straw, and cup were all made from compostable plastic. They had reusable plastic baskets for the meal itself, but everything else was meant to be thrown away to compost (including napkins). I'm sure the plastic was more expensive than regular, but I'm also sure if everyone used biodegradables, the cost would come waaaaaay down. Rather than figure out what to do with the trash we generate, I think we should focus on smarter packaging so it's not automatically trash. They have a prototype orange juice machine that 3D prints your cup from the peel of the orange being squeezed for your drink. Reusable boxes and other tactics that delay or remove the need for landfills are going to be more important than ever.

I can. I think early scientists get a special place just because they were pioneers. Hawking may have stood on the shoulders of giants, but other scientists are standing on Hawkings shoulders. I don't follow at all. The distance to the asteroid was much greater. The asteroid was a fraction of the size of our moon. And it was done remotely, with a drone, which adds several degrees of complexity. I think you're being dismissive of the accomplishment. Grrr. A science-minded person should know that theory is as good as it gets. A theory is the strongest explanation for various phenomena we have, and is the basis for quite a lot of predictive power. A theory is NOT a guess. This is normal. Your perceptions are more clearly defined for your environment than your parent's were. You know what they taught you PLUS what you've picked up on your own (they didn't know how to make the VCR stop flashing 12:00, but you figured it out). Every advancement leads to more innovation and advancement, and the pace of our society picks up. One of the places you can see this is with old movies. I would imagine you have trouble with old black & white movies from the 30s-40s. Even I have trouble because the pacing is so slow, the plots are too obvious (so many later ones were based on these old movies), and I feel like I'm ten steps ahead of the characters. I can see where you might think our society isn't moving quick enough for you, but you need to consider that many innovations can't be implemented fast enough before they're obsolete. Computers suffer from this, since new tech often comes to market just in time to be outmoded by the next new thing. I just don't think you're listening loud enough. The light bulb, which was a more efficient space heater than it was a light source, was finally replaced by its solid-state counterpart, the LED. In one breathtaking product, we see energy consumption cut in half, along with solving the problems of broken glass, electrocution, and UV radiation. I guess you don't count when something is improved, but I have to tell you, the modern LED is NOTHING like an old incandescent light bulb. Gates? Phhht. His Windows was based on Apple's design, but founded on DOS. I contend we'd all be much better with computers if Gates would have folded and allowed more competition from Apple and Linux. Same reason we had VHS instead of Betamax, dumb technology with smart marketing. I think it sounds like confirmation bias. You don't think there are enough strides in medicine, so you don't listen when you hear about new strides in medicine.

Citation, please? It's also a huge generalization based on personal opinion. I've personally never met one of these children who thinks the world is complete. If you don't think Stephen Hawking made dramatic changes to science, how are we to trust your opinion on "true generational genius"? Your examples are hogwash. Have you seen what's happening with 3D printing? Are you aware of how difficult it is to shoot a rocket from Earth and land on an asteroid? I don't think you're looking past your few hogwash examples. If that's "all you've heard" in medicine, you're not listening. You sound quite young and perhaps haven't experienced the need, but for those of us who're experiencing medical problems, the field you claim is stagnant has made some of the most amazing strides in all areas. The biggest problem with medicine today is how to pay for it. A universal risk pool funding a national system seems like the wisest choice. Thank goodness there are plenty of creative people in your generation. Not everyone needs to be. We need all types, and sometimes folks forget that. Creative people don't always have the drive to see their projects through, or get caught up in minutia, and they need others to help them make dreams happen. I think there will always be some evil around, but I agree that obsession with money is hurting our global development. Rather than do away with it, I'm more of a fan of using it as the tool it is. Rather than doing away with it, I think we'd be smarter to use all our economic tools rather than just private ownership. We should remember that democracies were established partly so the People could own part of their lives, so the King/Queen didn't own everything. I also agree that education is more important than ever. Our biggest flaw in modern times is that we don't know what we don't know. Ignorance encourages emotional reactions that often run counter to critical thinking. How great would it be for all people to use reason first, then get emotional about THAT?

Are those thermal bags in the back? He clearly has enough McNuggets to survive the apocalypse, or at least until the next PUTIN POTUS takes office.

More like he works for the Antichrist. He's all four horsemen rolled into one, pushing us towards intellectual pestilence, ideological war, social famine, and the death of our democracy. Except he's not a horse guy. Is there a Golf Cart of the Apocalypse?

! Moderator Note OK, so not a physics observation, and not about acceleration. I'm going to close this so it's not confusing for future readers. If you want to pursue this outside of physics, please start another thread.