Phi for All

Personally, I would feel horrible that MY anger, something I should be responsible for, put another person in a position of such stress. From what you wrote, the teacher wasn't what was making you mad (I don't know what "pick-up ways" are), yet you took it out on someone who could have been a mentor. The way you describe it, you were aware of how creepy you were being, and how badly it was affecting this teacher. Ethically, that's when you should have stopped. Why didn't you?

What exactly are you thinking about announcing, per your title? Do you think you're a prophet?

I'm not sure "fun" is the culprit here. Convenience is an attractive concept for many, one that often dances fancy with our health. And honestly, I think a lot of people eat just because it's a certain time of day, or because they're at a certain location ("We're at the mall, oh! there's the food court"), and healthy choices are limited. I can see the "fun" aspect on a vacation. People seem to flock to all the kettle-fudge-ice cream-dog-on-a-stick places, willing to pay tourist prices for the good goo. I quit smoking twenty years ago, but I still can't begrudge folks their bit of poison, in whatever form it takes. But eating isn't drinking or smoking or doing drugs, it's sustenance and it's important to get it right more often than not.

There's a photo-voltaic plastic sheeting you can use to both seal the building envelope (protecting vs the elements from the roof down) and generate electricity, typically for common areas like hallways, lobbies and bathrooms. And don't forget the other side, the units that use the power you're generating. All your mechanicals should be as energy-efficient as possible, as well as lighting (go LED). We have lighting sensors now that can harvest daylight, using whatever the sun is doing and adjusting light accordingly, dimming the lights when it's really bright out, and bringing them up when it's cloudy. Many occupancy sensors for lighting are now being replaced by vacancy sensors. It gives you a feeling of power when an occ sensor turns the light on for you, but it's much more energy efficient to have the sensor turn the lights off when it senses you've gone. Similarly, radar bulbs can sense movement and go from 20% light to full as you enter their range. I didn't take it to mean the building had to withstand a siege, just gather enough water to run it's own plumbing systems (which would include drinking fountains).

See what I mean? Clever.

Those are some very clever people, but let's not forget the person who came up with gourmet coffee. Before that, we bought pre-ground coffee in steel cans with plastic resealable lids. Now, we pay five times more for beans in a paper bag we have to grind ourselves. The clever part? We're convinced it's better this way.

That's just a single person in there, huh? That's awesome, can you imagine standing still until someone looks your way, thinking you're a replica, and then you slowly move your head around and take a step towards them.... I keep wondering when we'll hear about someone with a bad hangover getting shot in Texas because he exhibited "zombie-like behavior".

People hear your voice through the medium of air, but you're hearing your own voice via the air AND the bones in your head. The bones lower the frequency of the vibrations from your voice and it sounds different to you until you hear your voice recorded. What's recorded is actually the way you sound to others. We sometimes hate it because we're so familiar with how we perceive how we sound, and that perception is at odds with recordings. Imagine how someone like James Earl Jones sounds in his own head. He's probably like, "My voice doesn't sound DEEP enough!"

"I've never tried it but I know I suck at it" is an insignificant position to take on anything. If you've never tried something, it's normal to approach it with some trepidation, but assuming you'll fail before you start is NOT normal or beneficial. Surprise! My example didn't make you feel anything, YOU did that on your own. You made a little block of self-esteem and placed it where it could be built upon. This gives you the confidence to build more, and before you know it, you're able to look back and realize you always were significant, and now you have the confidence that makes others realize they need to listen when you're talking, good things/smart things/interesting things happen when you're around. Significance is partly you acknowledging that you're a vital part of the life around you, and partly others realizing the same.

I'm the most self-significant person I'm aware of. I'm happy with my sphere of significance. It extends just far enough outside my circle of friends and family to support my credibility so I can make a good living selling things. Nobody I haven't met yet seems worth trying to increase my significance to include them. This summer I was reading about that guy in South America who came up with a cheap way to light homes during the day in poor countries. He didn't get rich off his idea (a 2 liter bottle with some water and bleach and a plastic film canister poked through the roof diffracts the light from the sun), but he helped millions of people with this invention and I think that's significant.

Yeah, those sick and disabled people never pull their own weight. Stephen Hawking hardly lifts a finger.

It was sort of doomed from the start. The title is pretty bad. Putting homosexuality and lesbians in parentheses is like saying you want to talk about "Hardware Stores and Home Depot"; the latter is a subset of the former. The word "wrong" is inappropriate when talking about homosexuality, and trying to make it seem like science agrees is completely inaccurate. On the whole, lots of misinformed judgement going on.

Thank you SO MUCH for this! It's beautiful, Daedelus, truly. You're a very gifted man.

Technical point, but none of those "recent styles" you mention are recent. All have been around since we have. And you're right, they all seem to be doing the job correctly up till now. Well no, not really. Science discovered how to deal with the conditions, but they were already in existence. Contraceptives and condoms are inventions based on scientific research. Sorry, even in nature there are exceptions to the male/female reproductive structure. There are species that can change gender when necessary, there are species that practice asexual reproduction and even species where the males carry the offspring. I'm not sure what you mean by "if and only if both subjects are 100% with no deficiencies". Reality shows us this isn't true, which is generally the case when you start throwing around figures like "100%". 100% what? But homosexuality has no effect on physics, none whatsoever. It does impact biology, so I agree with the choice to move the thread here. Because he was very specific about attacking your idea, which is what science discussions are good for. He didn't attack you personally, which would have been against our rules. This is a ludicrous argument. You say it's simple, then give a scenario that is unbelievably complex and absurd as an example. You've narrowed down the situation to the point where only your argument prevails in your mind, and that's very dangerous if you think what you're doing is thinking critically.

So is this the actual topic you wanted to talk about? First reply and you jump away from the significance to talk about money? Surely you're not conflating wealth with significance?

! Moderator Note The replies are attempting to "Help". We don't have a "Homework Answers" section. Sorry.

I would never trust the guy who wrote that app. The crazy got him.

Do it! Do it NOW!! MWAHAHAHA!!!

I agree that parents and students need to collaborate more on the student's education. I also think the current quality of education in the US has been more the result of political efforts to discredit public education and pave the way for a voucher system that privatizes everything. At the state level, these politics are quite heavily entrenched in making sure the system doesn't work well, and have been even before Bush pushed through (and then underfunded) No Child Left Behind. We saw the same thing with FEMA. If the administration in charge doesn't want the program to work, it won't. If they want it to work and they fund it right and staff it with people who also want it to work, it works really well. There are some things that are better funded by public monies, and I believe education is one of them. I'd love to see us adopt some of the public education practices that are working for Norway in a big way.

With regard to thread hijacking, I think the desire to spread new-found knowledge is a natural product of the scientific method. In a discussion forum such as this, however, it's essential that we focus on the topic of the thread starter, and not try to introduce knowledge that will cause a significant shift in the discussion. The best thing to do is start your own thread. Link back to the original and start with something like, "While following the discussion in the Relativity & My Aunt Hazel thread, it occurred to me that my new hypothesis might be applicable here." It gives context, doesn't hijack someone else's discussion and keeps both threads clear of unnecessary cross-talk and confusion,

"Come with me, if you want to discuss science!" --The Hegemonator Unfortunately, if someone WANTS to be a moderator, we have to assume they're deranged in some way. Our process is usually to find someone worthy, and then blackmail them into serving. imatfaal, for instance, doesn't want anyone knowing that he wears false eyebrows. Of course, I have a lot more on him than that, so he's not off the hook yet. Of course, if anyone could catch us a snipe, it might impress the staff in your favor....

We've evolved an incredible intelligence as a species. Together with our communications skills, walking upright to free hands with opposable thumbs and tool use, this intelligence needs a methodology for explaining the natural world that is resistant to bias and emotion. IOW, we're so smart we need an effective way to channel that intelligence so we create a foundation for future learning. We're the only species on this planet capable of getting off of it. Earth will eventually be destroyed as Sol goes red giant, so unless we're willing as a species to sit here and be destroyed utterly, one benefit of science is that we may be able to colonize other planets and keep some of Earth's life living. You're allowing yourself to be too general in your claims. And expense is not really the concern of science; non-scientists typically control the money and set the prices. Your perspective regarding the mess the world is in is also highly subjective. With regards to human rights, we're better off globally than we ever have been in the past. With regard to food, shelter and medicine, again we're better off globally than we ever have been before. The radiation from cell phones is non-ionizing. If it were dangerous to you, your eyes would probably fry first due to proximity and a lack of blood flow to dissipate heat. We don't see that happening, and all other experiments point to no short-term damage. Tests are still being conducted to determine long-term damage. These tests are being done scientifically, to maximize the trustworthiness of their findings. Texting while driving can hardly be blamed on science. That's like saying everyone who was murdered with a baseball bat has Abner Doubleday to blame. If he hadn't invented baseball, we wouldn't have had all those big sticks lying around to kill people with. And we have more plates than ever before, so I think we can handle it. Would you blame Milton-Bradley because they invented the board game you stayed up late playing last night and made you late for work, causing you to be fired? I guarantee they didn't design their game to get you fired. The same can be said of virtually any scientific invention. They aren't designed to harm the environment, that's a side effect, and another part of science is to correct its mistakes, so generally anything that is harming the environment has a team of scientists studying how to reduce that harm. What are you really asking here? Are you saying that we'd all be better off without science? I see a world of millions of separate villages, isolated from a common humanity by a lack of broad communication, with an incredible amount of warfare with crude weapons and warped, uneducated ideologies. I don't think we'd all be in some idyllic pastoral setting, living off the land and working and playing nice with each other. That's certainly not what happened historically, say in the Dark Ages.

Agreed. What's needed is to show a relevant difference between Islam and any other religion, something that would allow us to treat it differently with regard to judging its peaceful intentions. I haven't seen anything close to that so far. I think the attempt to brand the religion as inherently violent has failed. The religion itself doesn't perform the violence, so the followers MUST be at fault. When we look at individual followers, we see great diversity in the way they practice their religion. Only a small percentage condone the violence done in its name, so the followers aren't inherently more violent than anyone else either. No relevant differences that we can plead makes them special. Is it time now to talk about why so many fear that Islam's followers will suddenly unite, start frothing at the mouth and cleanse the Earth of infidels?

I never left the question. Isn't it abundantly clear from the last five pages that this question doesn't have a meaningful answer, due to the variations that resist being generalized? The only rational answer is "yes and no", the same as many other major religions.

More bad logic. No major religion in the world would tell you you're not a member unless you obey every single law they have. Such an extremist stance seems hypocritical when applied to another extremist stance. And you add the caveat "law-abiding" for citizen but not for Muslim. I can still be a citizen even if I occasionally break the speed limit. Your definition means there's like, what, four or five actual Muslims in the world? Can we please think of it in a different thread, one that isn't about a specific religion's peaceful intent? But they can also be driven to beneficial reform by their fundamentalist fringes. It's not always a bad thing, and even if it is, bad things can teach us too. And too much power isn't good in anyone's hands.