Phi for All

I don't think this is a good strategy for a discussion. It's like inviting people to a serious talk and then telling them the serious part isn't ready yet. This isn't like a movie trailer where you're whetting our appetite with some of the best scenes you've got. It's more like you're showing the outtakes.

You seem old enough to pick your battles more wisely. Swansont offered you a much better deal than trying to squeeze some sense out of this tainted thread. If you don't remember, he asked you to START YOUR OWN THREAD, nice and pristine, where you craft the OP to point the conversation in a meaningful direction, a direction you'd like to explore. Why are you doing this instead of that?

You have not tried to understand the science, or even learn to understand it, and that's why you can't imagine that other people have tried and succeeded. It like me being unable to understand how Usain Bolt can run so fast, given that I've never tried to run a race in the Olympics, nor studied how to improve my understanding of running. Should I claim he can't possibly do it? Should I ignore the evidence? Isn't it just me waving my hands in incredulity, as Bolt runs past me, faster than I can believe?

Listen, it's very clear you're throwing out guesswork and calling it science. That's not how it works. The reason you can look something up in Wikipedia and trust the explanation is because those explanations have EVIDENCE to support them. There is NO PROOF in science, only explanations. It's the explanations that have the MOST EVIDENCE that we trust the most. Does that make sense? Without evidence, you don't have knowledge, you have a guess. Anybody can guess, so that's why nobody is agreeing with you. Understand? A guess is just your opinion, and science has excellent tools for removing opinion and focusing on EVIDENCE.

I was also considering the possibility that the OP is trying to give intellectual discussions a bad name.

Chew quietly. I think you've been mumbling about NEVER combining creativity and logic. Otherwise, this whole thread is one big strawman.

It's a signal to all of us. This is going to be 4 years of watching Trump swindle the country, listening to the GOP justify why he's a better representative for the US than Obama, and learning just how petty this stain of a human being can be. We'll be seeing and hearing plenty of evil, but will be expected not to say anything about it.

A couple other good questions are "Do you approve of Trump's forced changes to the Republican platform regarding Russia and Putin?", and "Did that change represent your feelings in the matter?"

Control. And it masks a lot of flaws in an argument.

For a question in a thread about logic, that's a shitty and condescending answer.

! Moderator Note It's intellectually dishonest to start a discussion with the intent to re-direct it towards your personal agenda. Let's please avoid this as a tactic in your already failing discussion strategy. Please note that you seem to think you're being controversial, but all you're doing is breaking our rules and claiming we're wrong. If you continue like this, there's not much staff can do help you stay. Just sayin'.

It's not wise to think of anything as completely separate and distinct from anything else, but it is discrete.

I'm 59, and the selfie-stick didn't come out till I was 56. Before that, when I caught someone taking a selfie, I had to hit them with a rolled-up magazine.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Roy_Spencer.htm He's just wrong.

True. I was thinking he'd heat fewer rooms up more quickly, running the blower less. But checking with an expert friend of mine, your blower lasts longer if it's properly rated (30 BTUs/sf for moderate climates). So it might help slightly, but over time might cause more wear than it's worth. So it's not forced air, but you still have the problem of the cold room pulling heat from the warm rooms if it's not sealed against this. It doesn't really matter if the radiator is off in the cold room, if the warm rooms are radiating also.

The big room would need to be truly sealed off from the rest of the house. You need to block the air at the takeoff from the duct from blowing into the pipe leading to the big room, and you need to stop the other rooms from pulling heat from the big room. I don't think you'd get any benefit unless you could leave it like that the whole season.

We've had a few posts and even some topics opened lately about dismissing ideas for lack of evidence. Most are criticizing some kind of "liberal" agenda on staff's part, so it occurs to me this is in part motivated by the recent POTUS election. I want to clear up some points on that. It's both an official stance (because it concerns the rules, and because I'm posting this where the only reply can be from other staff members), and a personal one (since it may concern judgements not covered by the rules). Adherence to the rules that have evolved over SFN's lifetime is hardly "liberal". We're interested in discussions that are scientifically productive, to ensure a sound learning experience for everyone involved. This means following rules. In this, we're actually being pretty conservative. Adherence to scientific methodology is also a conservative stance. Here, I'd have to say we're only moderately conservative. We're far too liberal for many of our most experienced scientific minds (bless you all for your patience and understanding, you know who you are), and it's true we give some folks more rope than others. It's not because we think anyone's wrong idea is better than another's, but often there is a reverse benefit that might be realized by further discussion (How-Not-To threads are valuable - in moderation). But if you joined and now think we're too liberal because we dismiss an idea for lack of supportive evidence, you need to know that's not going to change. We're not going to start allowing Wild Ass Guessing to take the place of scientific enquiry. If you have a question, post it in a mainstream section, and discuss the question without resorting to your speculative ideas. If your idea is speculative, you need to understand that it has no weight without evidence in support. No matter how nifty you think the idea is, it's just another WAG until you support it, and you can go to LOTS of other forums for that kind of "science". It's just not something we want to waste anyone's time on past a certain point. That point is when it should dawn on a scientific mind that evidence is the weight our scale measures best.

What do you think?

You would prefer tacit support of your positions, I know. Such is the weakness of pseudoscience and make-believe. This is a science discussion forum, and this is the mathematics section.

There's no shame in trusting the preponderance of evidence. In this case, it shows that video-only education often leads to fundamental misunderstandings, which leads to unsound thinking, which leads to numerology vs mathematics discussions.

Are you serious? Regardless of your point, serious scientists reject numerology. Period. And most serious scientists don't do yootoob, they publish papers. Things you should be reading, to learn things properly. Hmmmm.

Please provide links to MIT, Stanford, Khan Academy, and TedTalks on numerology.

I dislike this statement immensely. Logic is part of maths, but the kind of "logic" numerology uses is tainted and subjective. Not all valid arguments are sound.

! Moderator Note Do NOT post drivel like this in our science sections! If you have an alternative idea to mainstream science, something you can more obviously support than this nonsense, please post it in Speculations. But don't post this there! This is garbage. There are so many things wrong it would be like an anti-Christmas present to allow members to correct you. Please stop fooling yourself, and go back to school.

You can pretend to be exacting and accurate, but who here is going to buy it? You blew that bridge up long ago. You can't tell me you wouldn't be screaming if the Russians had released the GOP emails they hacked and held back the Dems. Again, why aren't you worried that the Russians are using the emails they hacked from the GOP as blackmail leverage against the US? Your attitude doesn't pass the stink test. You're just a party sheeple, and anybody is OK as long as he's Republican. Even Trump, who is putting his buddies at Exxon Mobil in a trillion dollar bed with one of the US's worst enemy. The sheer corruption going on as the alligators are being swapped out and put back in the same swamp should have you screaming, but it's OK because it's not Hillary.