Phi for All

This is another intellectual theft by popular science. They've redefined words like "theory" and "logic" in a way that encourages sloppiness. "Consciousness" is another hijacked term that still has mystical power for some, despite a fairly decent understanding of it. Consciousness is going to allegedly save people so they can live forever as energy when their bodies die, you know. It's a lifeline for staying tethered to ignorance.

! Moderator Note In response to a reported suggestion, we're going to move this subject to Ethics for a slightly different perspective.

Over the last few years, I've prepared a list (a couple of times) of decent Republican legislation that was abandoned wholesale by the party as soon as the Democrats showed bipartisan support. The same is NOT true of the Democrats. It's the Republicans who publicly made no bones about doing ANYTHING IN THEIR POWER to keep Obama from a second term. This includes deceptions with the debt ceiling to fool a gullible, uninformed public (mostly their own base, btw), and most heinous, backing away from good laws that we really needed just because it made them look like they were cooperating with the enemy. This is NOT the way a political party helps its country. It's the way they help themselves to whatever they can get away with.

! Moderator Note This is a science discussion forum. We are not here to watch videos with no explanations. Musical soundtracks over unexplained video gives us little to discuss. Please give us more of a starting place for a scientific discussion. Our rules state you can't force us to watch your yootube channel in order to participate. You have a chance here to give us some more information to go on, since the membership has let staff know they don't want to respond to videos they don't watch.

! Moderator Note TJ, you've been told repeatedly NOT TO SPECULATE IN THE MAINSTREAM SECTIONS. Since you refuse, the next step is to put you in an approval queue. From now on, your posts need to be approved by staff before they'll appear to everyone else. We don't want the reputation for giving students bad information. No more speculation outside of Speculations, please.

You will be happier at a site where vegetarian science is discussed, but I don't think you'll learn as much. Other word-salad specialists will inflate your ego by telling you what imagination and potential your ideas have, and they'll all talk in circles because nobody is actually listening to your ideas, they're all wanting you to do the work to make THEIR ideas make sense. And since nobody there knows enough real science, you'll either fool yourself that you're making progress, or you'll end up getting frustrated just like here. But for a while, it will feel good to talk some crazy . You are certainly not alone in trying to make up for your lost chance at learning schooled science. But think about this, my friend: you took a shortcut in school that got you here, and now you're looking for another shortcut to get you out. Historically, I think that's a rotten choice for you.

! Moderator Note But it's been reported that the right leaner is suggesting all lefties aren't reasonable. Please, no more slurs against whole groups.

It seems that your style of "trying to make a point" is at odds with your desire to communicate. It hasn't been very effective for the last three years, bringing down all kinds of calls for clarity which mostly went unfulfilled (except in your mind). Perhaps a change of style is needed. Isn't the point of communication to successfully learn from each other, and teach each other? Your style is keeping your probability of success low on both counts. That's not logical. Shaka, When the Walls Fell.

Some people can't see the forest for the tree-huggers. Bias like HaroldSquared spreads is like a poison.

Can I ask the thread for a full-stop reconsideration here? The Path of Let's Be Reasonable seems to be blocked by the felled Tree of Emotional Certainty. Take a breath and let's look at this. We have a situation where someone is in extreme pain. Reason is being forced aside in favor of emotion. I think even seriously disabled will admit that pain + frustration + stress + anger aren't the best conditions for rational thinking. For most people, in my personal experience, the more you emotionally fixate on pain, the worse it is. I know the opposite is true. How many times have you been in pain, and something distracted you for a while and you forgot about it, only to have it come back when you remember? Also, from my personal experience, there are many people who struggle with executive functions because they have sensory problems of one kind or another. These folks often feel like events are coming at them too fast, they're uncentered because the light is too bright, or the music too loud, or the pain too distracting. They have to learn to deal with the sensory issues first, then when they're calm, they can much more easily tackle the executive functions and decisions. I learned this from looking into Asperger's Syndrome. The physiology is pretty clear; people are different. The cocktail of chemicals that keep life going are very specific in some crucial areas, but for the most part, there are a lot of variations that don't threaten survival. How our bodies deal with pain is influenced by a lot of other factors. So perhaps (and PLEASE take this as a suggestion to educate yourself about this rather than any kind of medical advice) you should look into ways to mentally secure yourself from the more obvious stresses (you're really smart, there are folks out there who care about you a great deal, you're capable of things few people are), before tackling how you deal with pain rationally.

I did this research some time ago, trying to figure out if a low-carb diet was right for me. I go to great lengths to justify save my bacon.

I'm not the one who believes this either. But it seems a bit ironic that you always seem to believe your observations about "people in general" are to be taken as a quasi-sum of reality. Your style is to dismiss arguments (in your mind only) with wide gestures designed to simultaneously sweep them away and lift the rug at the same time. So this claim seems a bit pot/kettle-ish. Let me mix my metaphors further and remind you that if your brush is too wide, you're could be painting yourself too.

Actually, based on fossil records, you're right about the "wear rating", but wrong about the h/g's shorter lifespan being responsible for better teeth. The agrarian societies chewed on grains and tubers much more than the h/g groups, wearing the teeth at a faster rate. The diet of the h/g groups was more geared to meats and greens. Mummies show that Egyptian society fostered bad dentition. There are examples of agrarians using roots to protect their teeth, but for the most part, h/g societies had better teeth because they didn't eat so many carbs. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140716-sudan-sedge-toothbrush-teeth-archaeology-science/ Access to sweets via fruits and berries increased with agriculture also, rather than more randomly found in a nomadic lifestyle. I'd like to give credit to eating more meat, but it was probably the carbs that ruined teeth more quickly before people figured out how to fix them.

... so there can never be pure energy (sorry, I wasn't sure that was clear). You can't separate the energy from the object it's a property of.

But it's a very good example of how "logic", based solely on "this makes sense to me", makes no sense to anyone else.

That's a good point. Hunter/gatherers didn't have as many problems with their teeth. Lots of fossils of really bad teeth on early agrarian societies, though.

"Children gathered the bones in a bag and now it is stored at our house." I hope this is what you meant to say. "The bones of children gathered in a bag" might be a crime.

If you have an infection from an abscess, the only thing you could do for it without dentistry is to rest, let your body fight the infection. This may be a case where chewing food could spread the infection, or one where rest is considered a more primary concern than eating.

I want you to know I stopped reading right here, right at the first sentence. You asked this question in response to my request for information on the "dirt-disturbing" process. You immediately went Red Herring with a really obvious strawman (is anyone interested in your question, seriously? NOBODY asked for the differences between disturbed dirt and concrete, nobody had to). You should have asked the more obvious, more pertinent question: What's the difference between dirt and disturbed dirt if we're talking about holes? Logic tells me a hole in the ground, filled in with more ground, is no longer a hole. In a month, you won't even know a hole had been there. But you'll always know if the hole is filled with concrete. It will always be a concrete-filled hole in the ground. I'm not sure if this is just semantics. I am quite confident, however, that using time to identify a process for deciding whether dirt is just ground or if it had previously been removed to create a hole is meaningless. Next you'll be telling us how many years each type of dirt requires before it's just dirt again, and can no longer be called an accessory to creating a hole.

How long does the "dirt disturbing" process take? I'm assuming it's measured by time, since I could easily compact the dirt I put back so it didn't appear "disturbed". It's not a texture thing, right? I think there's a BIG difference between a hole in the ground full of dirt (which isn't a hole anymore), and a hole in the ground filled with concrete (discrete concrete). I think you're the one constructing artificial semantic differences.

If we have a safe range, even if it's just 1000 years, that's enough for more generations than I can trace my family back. It should be more than enough time to make back the colonization investment, and hopefully we continue to plan long term by investing in the next colonization, the one that saves us from extinction in 1000 years. It's odd, isn't it? "It's going to erupt sometime in the next 50 years". Vague gamble with a definite expiration date, might make you take your chances right up to the very end. "It's overdue and might erupt at any time". Walking the tightrope here, you need to do your business and get out after a decent profit to minimize risks. The longer you stay, the more you risk losing it all. "It's going to erupt for sure in 47.4 years". This seems like a no-brainer to me. If you know when the eruption takes place, you can plan accordingly for optimum benefits.

The hard part to plan for is where we'd be technologically by that time. Look at the last 500 years, and imagine where we'd be in 50,000 years. That cataclysmic event might be child's play for us by then. Is the threat that the supervolcano is going to wipe out all higher order life in 50,000 years, or sometime in the next 50,000 years? Since we can establish colonies, the first one isn't as much of an investment gamble as the second.

... but not making it better. In fact, while it may help you, it makes it more confusing for everyone else. That violates a basic tenet of science. You're supposed to aid understanding, not kidnap it and beat it into an unrecognizable mess.

LOL, existential restart!

During the surgery, your body experienced time normally. Your mind was not conscious of the passage of time, though. If you aren't aware of anything (unlike sleep where you can be aware of a loud noise or a serious change in temperature), that seems to fulfill the definitions of nothingness we're using here. The gap between awareness episodes is an almost palpable experience, possibly heightened by the knowledge of everything that went on around you while you were unaware.