Phi for All

I didn't know the deodorant manufacturers were trying to imitate pheromones. I thought they were just trying to mask the scent of sweat, which we chose to classify as "bad". With this in mind, for reproductive uses, I think most people find a neutral olfactory situation preferable to anything else, since what smells good is not universal. Not smelling bad is the ideal, I guess, which is also not universally agreed upon, but stands a better chance of favorable impressions being made. Does that make sense? I think the chances of attracting a mate are better overall if your smell is not an issue, rather than trying to have a smell that's pleasing to the opposite sex. I'm not sure if anyone's deodorant has ever offended me, but I've smelled some perfumes that immediately turned me OFF. It's interesting to observe animals treating smells as data, and then watch human reactions to certain smells. It is possible to push past the revulsion we've been trained to treat certain smells with, and I think removing that emotional bias makes the information contained in the smell more accessible to us. I'm poorly trained in smell and don't have keen senses overall, but I have noticed that my perceptions greatly affect how I treat various smells.

Actually, I can understand fundamentalist atheist suicide bombers. "My reward is eternal relief from hearing you all preach!"

It's weird, isn't it? I blame the lazy media for making "chemicals" synonymous with "man-made abomination", so they can stir people up while pretty much telling the truth. They've helped foster this idea that man is somehow outside of nature and needs to get back in.

Actually, going out of your way to "make" yourself more trustworthy and likable usually ends up raising more flags. Try this: put yourself in the shoes of the people who are just about to interact with you. How is what you're about to say or write going to be perceived by those who hear/read it? Have you given them the right information to form a positive perception about you, or are you about to jump out of the middle of your mind with little context and freak the crap out of them? If you give some thought to how others perceive you, I think you'll learn more about what others consider trustworthy. Perhaps first, you should ask yourself what you find trustworthy in others, then just enhance those traits in yourself. You have them all, but maybe haven't updated them in a while. You can't make someone trust you, but you can make yourself trustworthy. As for likable, that's way too subjective. What makes other people likable to you?

If you wait till the partner is finished, he won't get hurt, Mr Impatient.

This is a problem. I could easily go through Ophiolite's last few posts and highlight the reasons he's already mentioned why he got the impression you might not be trustworthy. Why are you asking for them again? This tells me you're not using your critical thinking skills while you're reading. We all have a blind spot when it comes to ourselves, especially when criticism is involved we don't want to hear. On the plus side, you're not writing any more of those word-salad posts (that I've seen, at least) that you thought made you sound so knowledgeable but really did the opposite. You used to get called out on that regularly by many members. More evidence of a blind spot that tells you something is OK when you do it but not when others do it. I remember being reminded of high school boys in Colorado winter, who think wearing board shorts and a t-shirt to school when it's -10F makes them look tough and cool, when in reality everyone thinks their idiots. You can't string a bunch of words together on a site like this with so many erudite members without looking like you're trying to dissemble and deceive. You think you're coming off as knowledgeable but in general it just raises red flags with many people. So kudos for moving away from THAT style.

Only if you think we're NOT supposed to use our intelligence to find a way to colonize other worlds. Evolution doesn't have an ultimate goal, but it seems evident to me that humans are the only species on Earth that could lead the way off of it.

Proof is for math. If I was looking for proof, faith would be the logical way to believe. This is another bit of lazy definitions. Too many people want proof, and are too willing to accept some pretty feeble evidence as "proof" that a god(s) exist. I don't really think in terms of percentages, or shouldn't. It's more a "preponderance of evidence" for me. I TRUST that evolution is the best available explanation for the diversity of life on this planet. I've seen arguments both for and against, and have been able to weigh evidence against what both sides have to say. The more I learn, the more I trust the theory, knowing that just one thing that refutes it could change what I've come to trust. I think it's smart that theory isn't set in stone, that it can be flexible and grow and change based on reality. I HOPE my consciousness lives on after my body dies. I have nothing to support that, it's just wishful thinking. It differs from faith or trust in that I'm not going to do anything about it, not going to start worshiping a deity or sell off my house so I can build a pyramid. My hope is not going to affect anyone else, and I'm not going to start telling everyone to hope for an afterlife too. Everything I read about FAITH says it's strong, abiding, ignores detractors, suffers through adversity and should remain steadfast and unwavering. To me, this sounds like someone who has put blinders on, closed off his mind and refuses to consider any other explanation. I don't have this kind of faith in anything.

I think the culprit here is a lazy definition. Just like "theory" has come to have a very relaxed common meaning, "faith" is misused to mean "trust" in everyday speech. "Have faith that all will work out for the best" is very different than, "Have faith in Jimmy, that he won't wreck the car like he did the last two times he borrowed it". I think if a great deal of religious people were asked to really think about what faith is, what their religion wants it to be, they'd find the definition incompatible with how they really feel. Take just the Christian god - we're talking about a deity that chooses to be unobservable directly, who has been attributed with healing cancer but refuses to regrow a lost limb, and whose followers so completely disagree about what it means to worship It that they've busted up the religion into over 9000 different sects. How can I claim to have FAITH, supposedly my strongest form of belief, about something I can't possibly know?

I break belief down into three parts: trust, hope and faith. Trust is based on reality, experience and observation. Scientific explanations have a methodology you can test yourself, making trust easier. A good explanation doesn't have to be "proven" as long as it was developed to be trust-worthy. Hope is wishful thinking. When there are things I want to be true but can't support with evidence, my belief is more hope. I HOPE this person I'm going to the movies with won't steal my kidneys. I have lots of supportive evidence that this person is a good candidate for movie-watching, but I have very little criteria for determining if anyone is a secret kidney thief. So I hope. Faith is believing strongly in something you have no way of knowing for sure. Faith is a type of belief that really is reserved for things that aren't observable or testable. Faith is held up as the strongest belief but it has the least to support it.

Actually, I think you have it backwards. Faith is the type of belief that relies on luck and chance (were you born in the "right" society that teaches the "right" religion?), where science employs a methodology that is much more trustworthy. When "repeated trials" happen to a religious person, they focus on a favorable outcome, so you can't trust any "evidence" gathered with this type of bias. When a scientist performs repeated trials, they meticulously try to remove all personal bias from the results. I'm always a little disconcerted when I talk to people who don't realize how easy it is to fool us, especially if we're fervently trying to fool ourselves.

Agreed. I think the laryngeal nerve in the giraffe is one of the best pieces of supportive evidence for evolution there is. What intelligent designer would use fifteen feet for a one foot path? In some way, I'm sure this adaptation is beneficial to the tree as well. And it's better to be an umbrella than a sippy-cup for Hawaiian honeycreeper finches. Some of the flowers they drink from have curved to match the honeycreeper's beaks (or did the beaks curve to match the flowers?).

Perhaps it invokes these things for you, but I meant natural as opposed to supernatural. I wasn't talking about "nature", but rather what happens naturally in the physical universe, without the need for explanations which require some kind of supernatural guidance or force. The great Douglas Adams told us we need to be on the watch out so we don't find ourselves like the puddle, who wakes up one morning and realizes his world fits him so staggeringly well it must have been designed especially to have him in it. It's a powerfully attractive idea but it really doesn't reflect reality. Natural explanations cover all the bases so far, and they can be trusted.

I took this to mean, "Why don't we have creatures with giraffe-like treetop-eating capabilities everywhere there are tall trees?" I wasn't really considering animals like the alpaca. They only aspire to be ruminants. As for treetop dining, meh.

It seems reasonable that the more important the job, the more important it would be to take everything into consideration. In detail. In context. That's not to say I think you should go into detail here (please don't, really). You can keep trying to what-if yourself into a tailor-made justification, but I don't think you're going to get much more of a meaningful response without detail and context. If I were you, I would stop trying to act as if it's unimportant (because it will be to many), and start working on why that's not you anymore. It's definitely NOT a non-issue, but it's hopefully a demonstrably PAST issue.

First, I really dislike when you chop up and re-vamp my sentences before responding. Professionally, this is extra effort for you and risks removing context. Personally, it seems rude that my style is tossed out so you can rearrange my words to suit you. I'm sure this isn't your intent, because you are a nice guy. Second, I feel fairly confident that anything you could hold up as evidence for a clever project designer actually more accurately and more rationally supports a natural explanation. Again, our awe and incredulity should never lead us into an irrational view of reality. I get that it's all wonderful and mysterious and cosmic. It's just too easy to imagine things that aren't there if you don't have a methodology that increases trust and reduces subjective assessments.

Isn't this the way of all adaptations? The size of the great white shark keeps it from going into tight areas, the fleetness of the cheetah limits its stamina so it can't run far, the flight capability of birds steals most of their physical resources and leaves them disproportionately disadvantaged in areas other than flight. The giraffe is pretty intimidating due to its height, and a herd of them probably doesn't need to run all that often. They seem like they might be so successful at that tree-top eating niche that no other species has been able to evolve to compete. We used to have more long-necked creatures. I wonder also if perhaps the trees where giraffes live need them to prune the tops so the trees can broaden out to provide more shade and environments for other creatures. Lots of plants and creatures co-evolve successfully.

While you're being a nice guy and letting us define "the cleverness", you're also Begging the Question here, since by defining "the cleverness" we're assuming a clever system created the universe. I just can't go that far. It could have been but I see no evidence, and my own awe and incredulity is not enough to support such a stance. I think it was less a case of eggs beaten and more one of cherries picked.

"Some perversions" found in a background check doesn't sound like your garden variety private scandals. Multiple recorded counts of actions officials deem perverted would most definitely matter to me if this was someone I was considering hiring. I would require multiple references confirming that this individual was a) as good as he says, and b) had control of his perversions. But as iNow says, this person's science can be assessed without knowing anything about him, so perhaps that's what Dr Krauss meant when he said it didn't matter.

This isn't the default position. It's more rational to say, "To date, there is no need for a supernatural explanation of the workings of the universe." Scientific methodology tells us we should be skeptical that god(s) exist and that they don't, simultaneously. We don't know for certain, just that so far it seems unlikely. Best we can do, given that we're talking about an unobservable yet omnipotent being.

Then no, now is not the time to announce yourself.

What exactly are you thinking about announcing, per your title?

CVS is like (or used to be like) many US pharmacies. They make the sick people walk all the way to the back of the store for the pharmacist, but the ciggies and candy bars are right up front near the registers. And you're right, CVS obviously thinks the goodwill they'll garner from this move offsets the hit to sales. I hope it works out for them, then other drug stores may follow suit. Frankly, them selling cigs is like your dentist giving you candy.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but part of the problem is that you need wheels that can take you 15 feet but you also need as little weight as possible to get airborne. Balsa planes typically have those crappy hollow wheels that are good for about a foot before takeoff. When you say it has to "go" 15 feet, does it have to go via ground or will flying count? How are you converting the trap's energy to a propeller? Are you just turning the trap sideways to power a propeller shaft? Have you tested that part?

You might want to check out LEED certification to see how the US Green Building Council determines energy efficiency for buildings.