Phi for All

! Moderator Note We have a section on Religion to discuss religious topics with a scientific approach to the subjects. We do expect even religious discussions to use scientific rigor, otherwise it's all about "belief" (which is subjective to each person, and therefore not reliable) instead of "trust". In science, we want to be able to trust what we accept as information, and use that to help us build ideas into hypotheses, make predictions that confirm or refute, develop ways to test, share and discuss our results, and eventually build a solid theory that is trustworthy. I just wanted to clarify the site's position. I don't want to participate in the discussion as staff. Carry on.

B. John Jones has shown no desire to learn science in his discussion of it, so together with his willful disregard of the rules he agreed to when joining, we're going to upgrade his suspension to a full ban. We wish him, well....

! Moderator Note If you can support the idea (not a theory; theory is the best you can get in science, and would require a LOT more examination) with science, you can discuss that part here. Evidence is the key to matching concept to reality. Without it, we're just guessing, and not doing science. The Other Sciences section is NOT for religious or philosophical topics. Would you like me to move this to Religion, or to Philosophy?

I think it's a slippery slope fallacy that dependency on technology is automatically bad because it may fail and nobody will know how to live without it. Very weak as a supportive argument, very shaky. Ah, mysterious wisdom! It's religious spackle magic to fill any knowledge gap! But doesn't it create a dependency of its own?

! Moderator Note Your ground rule is superseded by our site rule about rigor in presenting speculative ideas. You can't remove the science from a good science discussion. You're asking people to respond to unsupported guesswork, ungrounded in reality, so anyone could say anything, and that's not our way, sorry. There are some wild west type forums out there that aren't as strict, but we need to stick to science here. If you can figure out a way to support your idea about a "life-force" and "brain control" with evidence, you can start a new thread, but I'm going to close this one for lack of rigor.

Talking is to the tongue what typing is to the fingers. It's a lot of little movements that aren't very fatigue inducing, and we can do them for a long time. But try something that uses more of the tongue's muscles, do it long enough and your tongue will get tired.

Give your cat a bath. Your tongue will be fatigued, trust me.

All it takes is having it happen once to make it seem important enough to remember. Future failures are dismissed and forgotten, until that next time it happens successfully (because your mind is actively looking to recreate that pattern). Two times! Two times you thought of someone for whatever reasons (often more direct than you realize) and then found them nearby. Because of the forgotten false positives, this seems like more than coincidence. If it happens a third time, or anything that even comes close to it (you thought of one friend but found another), it doesn't matter how many times you failed and forgot about it, you are now emotionally attached to the absolute fact that you have some sort of precognitive ability to sense when people you know are nearby. There's another possibility for a natural explanation. It could be a form of reverse fulfillment. The odds of someone (anyone) you know being in a certain radius of you is higher than the odds of a specific person being near, and probably higher than you think in many settings. If you spot someone, then think about something you were thinking about earlier that could be tied to them, you could distort that in your mind to mean that you'd thought of this exact person earlier. This would increase the odds of success. This is similar to the Birthday probability, where any group of 57 people has a 99% chance of having two people with the same birthday.

Or, more likely still, it succumbs to the pressure and moves sideways.

Again, nobody claimed it's impossible. It doesn't matter at all how many people "believe" these extra senses exist if they can't provide evidence (see Religions of Earth). So how can "not even all that unlikely" be a valid conclusion when the evidence in support is zero? This sounds like more cognitive bias, wanting something to be true. Because it would be awesome. Probably.

Did you read the links Strange gave in post #3? It explains how gravity, the viscosity of the rock on Earth, and their sheer weight combine to limit how high a mountain can be on Earth. Reading is better than guessing.

In the absence of evidence, we assume that something other than supernatural telepathy or precognition or "morphic resonance" are at work. The most common cause of such phenomena? Some sort of cognitive bias. And stop strawmanning. Nobody "dismiss[ed} phenomena out of hand", it's only been mentioned that the probability of a natural explanation is higher than a supernatural one.

Whoa, dude, you need to study that in a different thread. But it's clear that you really need to study it.

You could use a hand pump if you didn't want to inflate it with your legs. All that pedaling might be hard on you, especially if you're a little stiff.

It's my understanding that GR has models with no mass in the universe whatsoever, and spacetime still exists. If a BH is responsible, I don't think those models would work. Mass is not required for spacetime.

From a purely practical perspective, if you had a foot-long tube that glowed between the handlebars, with the lamp on the end facing forward, you'd be much more visible from the side at night. The tube can be rigid, or perhaps made from inflatable material so it relaxes when you aren't pedaling.

In my experience, the religious folks who come here denouncing science are usually trying to make science seem less accurate and powerful as an explanatory tool, to sort of blunt the edge they feel is cutting into their souls, if you will. One member recently made the point that we're supposed to focus on the fact that his god made the heavens and the Earth, and that all the discrepancies in the detailed development of that in the Bible were unimportant. I think it's a case of wanting the validation that science would provide for their stories and histories, but not wanting everything that turns up in a rigorous examination. Like opening up your home to inspection, only to find out that the inspectors are using a powerfully bright light to see into every dirty corner. It's cherry-picking the way you test your information, hoping for favorable results that don't contradict the rest of what you believe. It's not good science, but I don't think that's what they're looking for in the first place. I think many religious people are anti-science because science doesn't stop looking for explanations, and they've already found what they believe are answers.

Not at all. No experiments with precognition or telepathy have yielded any meaningful evidence to support them. How many times has this happened? Have you kept track of the frequency? How accurate is this ability? Are there times you get this feeling, go check right away and the person isn't there? Do you count those attempts? If you could document this, you could give us more information. As it is, there's no reason to suspect your ability isn't within statistical parameters for wishful thinking or guesswork.

Some projectile rounds need a sabot casing for the flechette inside. Sabot and flechette are both French words. Then we started talking about density again, and you replied.

! Moderator Note First, this isn't a speculation, it's more of a suggestion, so that's where this will be moved to. Second, we understand that you'd like to have a more free-wheeling, screw-the-rulebook type of discussion. It requires much less rigor, and pretends to offer a way to pierce the boundaries of mystery and move beyond what we already understand using intuition instead of evidence. It's much easier to guess than to actually know your subject well. But didn't you come here to discuss science with people who know more than you do? Most of us did. That's what makes the site valuable, our knowledge, our attention to methodology, and being rigorous about our approach to scientific explanations. There are other science sites where you can say anything you want, and others can say anything they want back, and we decided we didn't like the way those discussions developed. If all you have is a hunch, the best approach is to start a thread in Speculations, let us know it's just a hunch, and ask questions rather than make assertions. You really don't learn anything by making assertions without supporting them with evidence. As soon as you make them, that's the first thing other members ask for.

We see this claim a lot, yet never see it supported by relevant example. It seems to be one of those "kids these days" type arguments that have no actual basis in fact, and reflect a deep misunderstanding of basic scientific methodology. "Modern science" is a phrase sometimes used to demonize it, the way the contemporary use of the word "natural" has come to demonize humans. I'm betting "modern science" is considered godless by the devout, who believe scientists used to be much more religious.

It does contradict what is being taught. Perhaps because it's untrue. Or by a really rigorous, thorough, double-blind experiment (which means no eye contact with iNow).

I thought the sabot were the outer casings that fit the bore of the launcher and then fragment away to reveal the actual projectile (the thin central part you're calling sabot). Have I had that wrong?

... of a human author, it seems. Your lists make you look bot-like. What you think sounds clever looks randomized strictly for artificial dissonance. I say artificial because it gets old quickly, instead of being intriguing the way it would if there was a real thread of reasoning to follow.

! Moderator Note Guess who gets to take a vacation for hijacking the thread right after a warning about not hijacking threads? You do, jerrygg38. You haven't found any supportive evidence for your old hypothesis in over seven years, so please stop bringing it up here.