Phi for All

! Moderator Note Well, try to be a bit clearer here at SFN. Chances are you inadequately supported an argument against the mainstream definition of spacetime, and that's going to put you in hot water with physicists who need a temporal dimension so the math works out right. When people get meaner and meaner, don't assume it's just them. You're trying to redefine something that already has specific meanings and applications, so don't be so surprised that you get pushback. I removed the link from the title since that looks like advertising, and I moved the thread from Science News to Classical Physics until you establish a discussion. If you get your mainstream explanations, it can stay here, but if you decide to paddle off mainstream science, we'll move it to Speculations. Enjoy and welcome. Personally, I'm put off by Barbour's first cheap, pop-sci argument, that since you can't hold time in your hands it must not exist. Can you hold any of the spatial dimensions in your hand? I'll finish the article but it doesn't make a good first impression.

I used to hire off-duty Denver cops during Christmas to wander around an urban mall area to cut down on shoplifting, and I learned how tightly-knit the legal system is. The police and the prosecutors need to be tight to make sure they get it all right and put the bad guys away. They protect each other from scrutiny because they want to be effective at their jobs, and don't always see sexual assault as a crime with a victim. The straw for me was all the stories from the time of Moore's alleged assaults, and how all the cops knew to keep ol' Roy away from the high school girls. It was common knowledge at the time he was 30 that he dated high school girls. And the topper for me was how his wife resorted to posting fake news to deflect from the accusations. Moore wants to stay in the game with a bad hand, and that means he's bluffing. He comes from the Trump mold of power and privilege, and he's just as used to lying as Trump is.

This seems like whataboutism. The issue is that there is a large percentage of men who assume they have a right to sexual advances on women they don't have sexual relationships with. What you're suggesting seems like saying it's OK to do that since there are not an insignificant number of women who do it too. Seriously, whatever your experiences, men have been trying to force women into sex against their will, and assume privileges that were never offered since we started writing history. How many of those histories detail a man being forced against his will? Remember, there are no bad words for a man who likes sex, but I don't have time to write down all the awful words we have for lusty women. Sorry about this, but men in general are always going to be the culprits in this, whether by direct action or by tacit inaction.

But you choose to strongly state her guilt, for something she might have done in your mind that multiple prosecutors couldn't prove and are certain doesn't exist. I didn't vote for her in the primary, but I think she is the victim of some far-fetched witch-hunts. For me, it's enough that she is part of the system that allows the extremist rich to take unfair advantage of everyone else, and I think her main opposition is simply a different set of extremist rich people who've conned you into demonizing her. This is a big part of the problem. You're convinced about Hillary, but far less sure about the creepy Trump doppelganger. It seems you've forgotten how to be outraged at the deception. Think about it. You turn Clinton's control of her emails into an AUTOMATIC "end run around the FoIA", but Moore gets the benefit of the doubt despite all the testimony from victims. Hillary has been through the ringer and hasn't been charged as a criminal, and Moore has had a blind eye turned to his crimes because he was part of the system that would have investigated him. What are you "far less sure" about?

Our perceptions of wealth have been shaped to allow for this behavior, I think. The smallfolk have always had to bow to the will of the upper class, allowing them their depredations in order to not upset the status quo. It's more acute now because the disparity is more acute. I wish we could see an overall shift in attitude that would value more than financial strength or your ability to make money as the worth of a person. I think extreme capitalism spawns the attitude that everything the underclasses have is cheap, and everything the upper class has is valuable. That includes your body, your self-worth, and your integrity. And there is also the persistent and contrary myth that men just can't help themselves. I blame the biblical story of Sampson and Delilah for a lot of it. The man/hero is so strong and virile and powerful, except when it comes to women, then he can't help himself and is undone. If the story had ended with him being killed for his weakness and stupidity, we probably wouldn't have so many Christians going along with the idea of a strong, famous man who can't keep his pants on. But the writers have Sampson regain his strength and defeat his enemies in the end, so we're left with an image of heroic virility tinged by a weakness even God will forgive eventually. Women are portrayed as openly conniving and treacherous in this story, while Sampson is a justifiable idiot who got the girl and became an icon of strength instead of gullibility.

! Moderator Note Let's not contaminate a mainstream topic with speculation. Stick to what you can support.

If there's a mistake in your reasoning, it's probably here. I know there are many compounds found in fruit that aren't easy to get in vegetables, like lycopene and hesperidin, and I'm sure it goes the same way in reverse. Biologically, fruits and vegetables are completely different parts of the plant. I think it's a mistake to suggest they're the same except for the sugar content.

Wrong, actually. The expert could explain it to another expert (or someone with a fairly solid mathematical education) in 5 minutes. If they gave the same explanation to someone without the requisite knowledge, it would take the same 5 minutes, plus an indeterminate amount of time for each question the expert explanation creates in the mind of the math neophyte. Does that make sense, that you need a certain amount of knowledge to be able to follow a more sophisticated argument?

No. Instead say, "Want quick-read threads? Vote YES!" l personally dislike the idea. Forcing science discussions to be short goes against the nuanced and layered information structure of most explanations of natural phenomena. This is exactly why pop-sci articles cause as much trouble as they do to spur interest in the sciences. An explanation or argument should take as long as it takes. I think we already have a Quick Question thread for simple answers. I'm not sure what the objective is for a whole subforum of it, but if it attracts those who can't be bothered to read details, it sounds like it will mostly be good for dragging our reputation down as a serious science discussion site.

You said "cure all diseases on Earth". We wouldn't be here. It's a technicality, but as I said, I didn't much care for the choices. Since you've now specified that achieving 1) will be done without negative consequences (like simply doing away with humans), I'd choose that. The more I think about it, whatever processes they used, we'd still be able to observe them and learn from them. If it's truly an end to global warming, it would also necessarily include a sustainable replacement technology (or an advanced infrastructure using existing sustainable technology), so again we get more learning experiences.

I don't like the choices (I'd prefer to learn something advanced), but if we chose 2) for our whole species, wouldn't it accomplish 1) and 3) as well? Then we could go back in a few centuries. Just sayin'.

Liberal news outlets are condemning the behavior of the liberal politicians. FoxNews and other conservative outlets are talking about how "outspoken" Judge Roy Moore is in his denials, and of course Trump is trying to pretend it wasn't even his voice talking about grabbing pussy. It seems like the Trump Effect has taken over, and Republicans have no idea how to tell when someone is lying anymoore.

I was kind of hoping someone had a way to unblock a drain "just using logic". That would be awesome.

A recent example was given in a black hole thread. "We can't observe what happens past the event horizon" was sensationalized as "Physics as we know it breaks down inside!" There's a bunch of misinformed implications in this, but there's also an assumption that the average pop-sci reader is driven to material that implies scientists are equally clueless about these things, and I find that sad.

Pretty much the exact opposite of Batman. I definitely think this is one of those romantic fictional concepts, "the steely-eyed hero is immune to fear, and never lets his emotions keep him from doing what's right". The problem is, emotions can be pretty handy in a tough spot. Learning how to use them to best advantage, to blend them with the rest of your skills is harder to do than just eliminating them altogether, but worth it. "Ignore your fear" is the mantra of someone who is just about to be blindsided by something dreadful.

If the US publically funded healthcare, I think we could easily make Portugal's system work. We'd move a significant portion of our prisoners out of the for-profit prison system and into medical programs that are aimed at helping them rather than making money off of them. But because healthcare is privately operated, and we pay 2-3 times what the rest of the world pays for healthcare, our own citizens don't trust the doctors. So much ignorance surrounds these issues. If we believed we were worth the investment in healthcare, if we believed the country we pledge allegiance to had our best interests in mind, how much less of a drug and alcohol problem would we have? I'd love to find out.

You know what else I want to hear? The sound of those electrical lines whooshing through the air, all of them Doppler shifting the pitch to make a hoo-WOP-hoo-WOP sound.

Like Batman? I think there is a romantic notion that a non-reaction to fear is beneficial. It can seem like the opposite of cowardice. Every person I've talked to about their combat experience say that fear keeps you sharp, so you should work with it rather than trying to smother it. Fear under control keeps you reasonable, and without it we're all apt to do stupid things.

I want to hear it, and even more I want to feel it in my bones, the way you do when something heavy thuds to the ground nearby. But I don't, so I suspect folks are just giving in to need for closure of the pattern.

I thought we already had an engineering process for gravity that lets us travel in space.

Dalo has been suspended for a week for repeated soapboxing over some basic misconceptions. We hope he'll take this time to read his threads again to see where the membership has offered very good advice and explanations.

! Moderator Note The resemblance wouldn't have a chance to form if you could explain the problems you have with mainstream science so the membership can understand what you're questioning. Questions for clarity, interrogations even, these are all part of the scientific method. But the "favorite police interrogation technique" resemblance is because you don't seem to be taking anything said on board. You still make the same mistakes, and by now it looks pretty willful, like you just want to make people waste their time explaining what you should have learned in school. You act like you're some kind of pioneer, when all everyone sees is someone unwilling to be clear about exactly what they don't understand about basic science. Not sure what to do with you. If it looked like you were trying to learn, we'd give you all the time in the world. As it is, you just keep rowing your canoe out of reach while claiming to want to board the ship. People are very patiently throwing you lines, which you watch sail past without grabbing onto. Now you claim instead they're using police tricks, and coordinating personal attacks. I think you need to take a vacation, re-read ALL of your threads, absorb the replies, and mark the difference between criticizing your ideas or thought processes and attacking you personally.

I think we're seeing the effects of extremist capitalism. By that metric, those with money can determine the value of virtually everything. Work is valuable when it's a extremist doing it, but not so much if it's Middle Class Joe, or Poor Mary. An extremist's land and health and property is very valuable, but yours is probably not. Hard goods they make are valuable after we've made them with cheap materials and our cheap labor. Our laws are even cheap now, and we often have no idea what's being subsidized by tax dollars to make it more attractive to extremist capitalists. I can't get the image of ticks sucking the blood from an unsuspecting creature out of my head. And how can we trust truth when it's warped and used against us so persuasively? The solutions I see are mostly based in taking public control back where it makes the most sense, and that's exactly what these capital terrorists don't want. We seem to have let an inordinate amount of them into our decision making processes and information organizations, and they've got the population half full of fake news gas and are spinning them around blindfolded, handing EVERYONE a stick and making up pinata stories.

Have you studied the mechanisms involved? When you use the word "super", aren't you referring to high intelligence? Birds give up every milligram they can afford in order to fly. Everything that goes into making a big enough brain for super intelligence is going to add weight. Birds can't even afford the extra muscles for SWALLOWING, so they've adapted a method of picking water up in their mouths and then moving their heads up quickly to let gravity force it down their throats. Same deal with the other creatures, if they start evolving bigger brains they lose much of what makes them a fish or a bug. Humans have the brains but we lack a lot of other abilities fish and bugs have. We started out as fish like all vertebrates, but eventually intelligence was selected for and we added to that with our cooperative minds, our opposable thumbs, our tool-use, and our detailed communication. We do some detrimental things to our environment (and no, we aren't alone in that), but we're also the only creatures who have the capability of leaving the planet. No other species has access to the energy to overcome planetary gravity.

Nice, very subtle. Reminds me of some of the Yiddish jokes I've heard, where the punch line is very low-key. A man goes to visit his aged father and finds him in front of the television. Son: "Hey Poppa, what're you doing?" Dad: "Watching basketball." Son: "What's the score?" Dad: "86 to 82." Son: "Who's winning?" Dad: "86."