Phi for All

I think the definition of alien is straightforward, but you may want to define what you mean by dimension,

I think the controversy revolves around whether we're doing something "unnatural" when we change nature for the better. As a species, we have incredible capabilities for adapting the world around us to our needs, maybe more so than any other animal. Some people draw a line that can't be crossed when they feel our adaptations thwart some kind of imagined natural order. Some people think chemicals are unnatural. GMO apples will be modified to last longer in the store, be hardier in transit, and at least the Arctic variety will resist browning, which is the main reason many people throw out apples uneaten. Many of the modifications are for the supply-side benefits, but some address demand-side concerns as well. Above all, the fruit still has to be delicious and nutritious. Will there be repercussions down the road, like Monsanto's rBGH products? It's entirely possible. Education is the key here, rather than knee-jerk reactions and misinformation. Genetic modification is a tool, a powerful one, so we need to watch out what people are doing with these tools. But don't blame the tool itself.

Is this one supposed to be for sobering the husband up? "Give him some coffee because he's drunk and beating you!" These guys don't know beans about coffee motivation. The last thing a wife-beater needs is focus and a surge of energy.

"Logic" seems to suffer the same misuse as "theory" does.

Adenosine looks for its receptors, and if it finds them it has the effect of making you drowsy. Caffeine looks for the same receptors, and if it finds them first, adenosine is blocked.

And we'd like to have a reputation for a decent amount of rigor when it comes to reviewing ideas. We're not a journal, but we'd like to follow proper methods that have some assurance of helping people strengthen their idea, or realize it was wrong. That being said, I agree that the vast majority of speculators here don't know the basics of science at all, and come here because they think they have something groundbreaking, hoping someone here will become enthused and supply the math that proves them right. They don't know what they don't know, and think they understand everything because they understand some things.

Perspective: You choose your own level of peer review. We're not as rigorous as the major journals here, but enforcing certain standards is important to the site's owners. You can always choose a place with lower standards to discuss your ideas if other factors are more important to you.

! Moderator Note Posts about an algorithm for job hunting have been split off into their own thread. No hijacking, please!

That's not what you said before. Nobody is going to think it's extraordinary that you can reach a heartrate of 240 with exercise, that's just normal. Perhaps I misunderstood. Doesn't sound like the kind of thing you can predict so you can't test it. It also sounds like pattern recognition and confirmation bias, so nothing extraordinary there. I thought you had something with the heartrate changes. It's starting to sound like you're normal, with a normal amount of control that you only think is abnormal. Most of what you've said is indicative of an active imagination.

Mine's from Square Jellyfish, cost me $15. All it has to have is that tripod 1/4 20 thread mount, and hold the camera steady. Tripod does the rest.

Seems? Don't use that word when you're talking about measurements. If you're timing the beating of your heart with a stopwatch or other timepiece of any accuracy, there should be no "seems my resting heart rate is almost double the average". It either will be or it won't. Ignore the pain resistance for now. Way too subjective even if you could come up with a decent way to test it. I don't understand why you got "crazy" feedback from a doctor if you can make your heart beat at 250bpm just sitting in his office doing nothing. That's direct evidence of something extraordinarily atypical, and I can't imagine any doctor that wouldn't want to write a paper about you if you could truly do this in a predictable, repeatable, testable way.

I picked up an attachment that socks into my tripod, and it has a couple of spring-loaded clamps that grab my phone and hold it steady. A must have if you're like me and the phone does everything except brush your teeth.

Figure out ways to test these assertions, so you can measure the results and present them as supportive evidence for the hypothesis that you can control your blood circulation with a 99% accuracy. Otherwise, it's all just extraordinary and speculative claims. In a mainstream section, no less. Do you have access to a sphygmomanometer and a stethoscope? How can you measure enhanced muscle strength? How can you remove as much bias from your testing as possible? As for "sending blood to areas of your body at will", since that's an ongoing process, how would you measure the difference when you attempt to control it? Dulling pain will be difficult to test, since judging pain is extremely subjective, and experiments involving pain can be dangerous. You might want to start by defining some parameters. When you say you can control your heartrate, do you mean you can make it slow or speed up without any physical changes, or do you mean you can make your heart beat anywhere from 30bpm to 240bpm just by using your mind?

It matters to us that you're ill and need help. The BEST thing to do is involve a healthcare professional immediately for a personal diagnosis. Your health is too important to trust to online guessers, yes?

Rather than being a stimulant, caffeine suppresses adenosine, which makes you drowsy and unfocused. I think it's the focus it gives us that makes it a relaxing social experience. I can relax with a client over coffee because I can focus on what they want and exclude all the other stuff I have to deal with on a daily basis. Feeling sharper and more on top of the situation makes me feel relaxed, does that make sense? When I'm tired, I tend to have a hard time with focus, and all the stuff I still have to do looks like a big pile of work rather than individual jobs. Adenosine makes it all seem fuzzy and exhausting, something I can deal with after I've rested. Some caffeine lets me pick out what needs to be done next, no matter what it is or how tedious.

I have a chiropractor coupon for your back and a 2-for-1 deal on detached retinas from Designer Eyeballs.

I replaced an old clockwork type timer with a digital timer last year. Piece of cake, minimal expense, never again get a bill like you're going to get next month.

Has someone been setting alight the UFO-shaped beacon?

I'm uncomfortable with this approach to discussion in general. Without identifying what we're talking about specifically, it asks us for a qualitative assessment with little data to go on, and basically begs the question that's being asked behind a veil of righteousness. "Should policemen who enforce laws they know to be wrong have their badges taken away?" No room for context or nuance, without knowing the specific law or laws that prompted the question in the first place.

If I understand you correctly, you seem to say that pleasure, or lack of it, is the basis for good/bad feelings, and that anything not pleasure-related is neutral in our minds? Is this right?

It's not persecution, the way you portray it in the above post, that's a strawman argument. It's enforcing the rules you agreed to when you joined, and when you wanted to post your non-mainstream ideas. It's not a punishment, it's the format that everyone else is using. So in essence, what you're arguing here is like saying, "I know I asked you all to sit at my table and play cards, but I don't seem to be able to win, especially when the dealer keeps enforcing the rules. Can we just get rid of him so I can enjoy playing cards??" Over the years, we've gotten to know quite a bit about what makes productive scientific discussion, and our rules have been adapted to maximize what we've learned. And we've learned that, while it may make you feel good to just blurt out whatever's in your head, it annoys the hell out of people who are taking the time to look for the merit in your ideas. That's what blogs are for, not discussion forums. We discuss to learn, and to learn we need to have a format people trust to be productive. When people have to spend the majority of their time correcting and clarifying what you mean by what you're saying, they lose interest or don't participate at all, and the discussion fails. And I hate it when they fail and the person with the idea blames it on stubborn scientists, too set in their ways, can't stand change, won't listen to new ideas, censorship blah blah blah, anything but what the rest of the people in the conversation are really complaining about; a lack of supportive evidence for assertions made without regard to accepted terminology and methods.

This is a Red Herring argument, since I have no control over what you think, and merely commented on the way you attempt to explain your ideas to others. When I moderate, I do so in in green or red modnotes to enforce rules. That's my point. I see you trying to get those ideas out of your head and in front of others, but your approach is sloppy and most of the replies to your posts are asking for clarification or trying to correct some bit of science you have wrong, demonstrably wrong. Go ahead and look back at the thread. Change needs to be desirable, and in science that means your explanation has to be better than what the best current explanation is. That's what you need to show us, and you aren't. You've got that ass-backwards. It's not the speculative uncertainty that's unscientific, it's your presentation of it, as everyone has been trying to tell you. Stop making this about suppression, or fear of change, or heavy-handed moderation. It's about the rigor-free approach you have to definitions you're mis-using to try and get the thoughts out of your head. That's why you get so much pushback. It's my hope that you might see it as a friendly gesture to help you develop a way to make your explanations clearer to those you discuss them with. I don't have anything more to give you at this point, since I don't have the patience or time others have shown you to sort through what you mean and don't mean, what you're talking about when you mention evolution and evolve inappropriately in the same sentence. Science has precise meanings for words, and scientists try to use those meanings when they aren't modeling their concepts mathematically. If you don't use the math, you really should at least use accepted terminology correctly, don't you think?

But they don't, and people have shown you why. You ignore them and insist on using the word "evolve" in ways that are wrong when applied to evolution. Torturing definitions to fit an idea is one of the biggest reasons why threads like this circle the toilet for 3 pages without explaining anything. It's lazy, inefficient, and definitely not science. Please, please, go back to school. You're obviously smart, but you don't have the proper framework to discuss ideas at this level. Mainstream education gives you a fine brush and a precise canvas to paint on so you can express yourself most accurately, instead of throwing buckets at every wall you see and expecting people to "get" you.

It's hard to believe you posted this here, but it explains why your resistance to reason is so high.

Don't most people here name the fallacy, so you can look it up and see what they're talking about? They should. And to be absolutely clear, the logical fallacies we try to avoid are a fairly small list of the total. Strawman is the most abused, imo, which is a subset of the Red Herring. These divert discussion away from the focus, and they're really annoying to people who can't let something wrong go uncontested (which is probably most of us). Personal attacks are another, and are a subset of the ad hominem. We attack ideas here, but since many find it hard to separate their ideas from themselves, there is much confusion and many misunderstandings. For the most part, however, a logical fallacy is bad if that's all you've got. If I'm arguing that censoring internet access is like burning books, that it will inevitably lead to more restricted access, that's actually a Slippery Slope fallacy. However, if I can back that up with historical evidence where book burning led to more book burning (which isn't that hard to find), then it becomes more than fallacious logic.