Phi for All

Another "I know squat about science, it makes no sense to me, so it's wrong" argument from incredulity. Completely unassailable since it was derived emotionally, from religious beliefs, making it impervious to reason. I get tired of bothering with people who are proud of their ignorance, and work hard to keep it sacred and unchanging.

We've had so many of these discussions about science as a belief. None of them are interesting, since they rely on a tortured definition of "belief" that somehow includes absence of belief as belief. Like bald is a hair color, or my lack of stamp-collecting means I'm an anti-stamp collector, someone who doesn't believe in stamp collecting. It's also painfully obvious there's a HUGE agenda going on with dad. He's here to preach, not to learn or discuss. Is there a good reason to go through this crap ad nauseam?

Science has it's definitions and uses of the concept of time, but they often don't match up well with definitions others use. Mathematically, or in use with our coordinate system, time is part of equations we can use to quantify rates of change. It's got different definitions and uses in philosophy and religion, so they don't interchange well. Thus they're a ripe target for the creationists who want to trap long-winded science-types in a semantic and circular argument.

I don't find any evidence for god(s) or unicorns either, so the default is they don't exist. How is that a belief? It looks more like absence of belief due to absence of evidence. Neither here nor there, I suppose, since you reveal that you weren't interested in learning anything anyway.

I don't drink, so we'd all be better off without alcohol.

Why sorry?

Mostly, it's been never finding evidence that the laws of physics were ever any different in the far past on Earth. That's how science works, looking at evidence. If there is none, we assume the answer is no, until something shows us differently.

Except a shadow isn't a physical thing. It's a space where a light source is occluded. If light is absorbed by an object rather than reflected, it will add mass through energy. Block the light with shadow and the mass is removed, but it wasn't because the shadow had negative mass. Limited analogy: It's more like a canopy that keeps the rain from adding mass to objects below it. The canopy doesn't have negative mass, it just keeps extra mass from accumulating on the objects.

My POV sees men paying a dollar for a cupcake (the normal price) as normal, not discrimination. That women make 70 cents to that man's dollar, and so only pay 70 cents for the cupcake is showing that inequality for what it is. Yet your POV says that's discrimination in reverse somehow. Women aren't being favored in this situation, but I'm not sure you'll ever be able to see it that way. You're too fixated on the the unfairness, and don't understand why spotlighting the fact that this is what women deal with every day is valid, while claiming it's unfair for men isn't. There is a difference between men being paid more vs women being paid less, as you yourself point out. However, you don't respect that stance since you then claim it's all discrimination of one group against another, instead of what you said earlier, that WOMEN ARE PAID LESS!!!!! This reminds me of your stance that crazy ideas come from both major US political parties, when the evidence clearly shows a preponderance on one side. You can't say that men are being discriminated against by any of the suggestions put forth so far. Remember how what the men are paying is the normal price?

This is the part all of us need to work on. Taking a personal feeling, and turning it into a "we" situation to make it seem like more of a mainstream POV. Not singling you out, EdEarl. "We" quite often includes those who couldn't live without the LGBT folks in their lives. People's lives are enormously different in the details, which drives so many things in our society. If people weren't so different, we'd only need one brand of every type of product, only one flavor of ice cream. In fact, that's what this argument is like, it's like saying rum raisin is an unnecessarily complicated flavor and we'd be better off without it.

It never ceases to amaze me how your perspective works. In the instance you're mis-describing, the normal price of the baked goods were a dollar. That's what a white male was charged, normal price, $1. Got that? Now bear with me. Some people were charged less to show how pay disparity works. MEN WEREN'T CHARGED MORE, I REPEAT, MEN WEREN'T CHARGED MORE!!!!!! You obviously perceive this as unfair, and you should, but it's what's been going on with women's pay for quite some time now. Yet, you still perceive all this as being "additional obstacles" thrown up at men to even the playing field. I'm sorry, but wtf does paying women fairly do to throw up obstacles at men? Is that really how your mind works, that if we try to fix the system so it STOPS unfairly abusing women, that it makes it harder for men?!

It's not your past that hurts you, imo, it's how you approach this problem. I think you doom yourself with your appraisals. You started out insulting this site, even though you had hoped we might be able to help you. Similarly, you judged your first college dismally, and you had a dismal experience. You sort of shoot yourself in the foot right off the bat, and lead with negativity while still hoping for a positive outcome. I think you're doing the opposite with Vanderbilt, putting them on a pedestal that's just out of your reach. Not as a challenge, but as a way to claim that nothing less will do, so if you fail you can at least say you were going for the big prize. You didn't say why Vanderbilt is the goal, other than you've always wanted to go there (which is NOT a great reason, btw). This is your education, and it should be tailored to what you want to do. Are you wanting to do scientific research? Or is it more prestige that you seek?

I don't know how to respond when you put so much of your imagined motivations into your claims about what I said. You've read into it what you wanted, it's slanted and biased your way, when all I wanted to point out is that there has been an unnecessarily perpetuated male domination for years in many situations, processes, and levels of society. I'm sorry you deny the obvious, and I'm sorry you choose to assign motives I don't have to my words.

Revelations pattern recognition. A lot like the Nostradamus quatrains, people have been seeing patterns in the Book of Revelations for centuries. People see the word "count", and think calculate, then compute, then suddenly the Bible is predicting computers because someone "counted" something.

I so agree with you here. I try to make sure the people who have to put up with me in person, friends and family, get some extra attention as often as possible. Even if it's just a kind word or a cup of tea, these are the people who love you best, and they deserve to be treated by you accordingly.

And not all of them are used to express pain.

Wow, that's pretty dodgy stuff. Why would anyone assume the sounds of released gases from plants that are cut are screams of pain, and not just, you know... the sound of released gases? There are no studies provided, though the first says there have been many. I get the feeling all the studies were similarly vague and unconvincing. If you have any links to a peer-reviewed study, I think that would hold more weight than the sketchy claims of someone who claims it's pain that causes chemical distress calls in plants, instead of simple chemical mechanisms for defense.

Citation?

Is it cruel that actual science pulls the wings off so many flights of fancy? Or is it more humane to at least tie a reality rope around their waists so they don't float away?

What would be the mechanism? We don't need to "prove" anything, we just need to look at how an object made of identifiable materials, constructed in a way that we can easily trace, could possibly have the kinds of systems that we identify with feeling pain. And to forestall your next question, if they have some kind of inanimate object pain receptors we've never observed before, then our definitions aren't compatible, and the question is meaningless.

Try this: list some names people call men who like sex a lot. Stud, wolf, gigolo, playboy, Romeo, etc. Now list some names people call women who like sex a lot. Whore, slut, tramp, floozy, harlot (these are the nice ones). Notice the difference in how we perceive who's enjoying sex by gender? All the names for men sound pretty cool and sexy, while all the names for women sound shameful and hurtful. This kind of thinking pervades our society, and causes us to judge women by different standards than men when it comes to sex, at least. This is the kind of thing I want to change. It's not giving anyone more rights than anyone else, it's about respect for half the planet's human population based on the fact that they are human, and happen to be women as well.

Most of the extra is junk DNA that serves no purpose. The onion happens to be an organism that faithfully reproduces everything, which results in a lot of junk being carried over each generation. It doesn't harm anything. We have some junk DNA as well, but our genomes are much cleaner than an onion's. Natural explanation, no need for magic, god(z), or incredulity.

Remember that evolution takes place constantly, with small changes. It's not easy to point to a place in an evolutionary line and claim there should be another species between. Have you seen a color wheel with hues in the thousands? If you can find one that doesn't have white lines between them to distinguish them, it's almost impossible to tell where blue ends and indigo begins, or just exactly when does orange become yellow. That's how it is with evolution. It doesn't usually change a species abruptly enough to point to a definite delineation. Over vast amounts of time, however....

"Time field" is a Doctor Who concept. How do you bridge the gap between fiction and reality?

I was thinking Ignorance Quotient.