Phi for All

I think that in dietary terms, if someone is eating 6oz of fish, it's considered a serving of protein. In technical terms, by the Nutrition Facts label, only a quarter of the serving is considered actual protein, at least in the case of tuna fish.

Oh, those are great, I bought a four-pack recently. Loved them! Lost them all within two days.

"Professional journalist" these days means working for a corporation that is at odds with journalistic integrity. You don't get to dig for the truth on the Burger King horse-meat story if you work for Clear Channel Radio. The powers that be at Bain can blackmail you with your job.

Actually, it's more like our lawyer steps in to prevent a liability for the site. If you prefer, you can picture him descending a rope from a black helicopter.... Well, that's definitely one way to make a first impression. We prefer to attack the arguments here, and leave the people alone. It's possible to make a mistake in English while being fluent in it. I can cite precedence.

! Moderator Note Moved from Modern and Theoretical Physics to the Lounge.

I, on the other hand(foot), want to test this idea, so I'm going out to buy more pens and socks. Now where did I put my sunglasses?

Well, I can't find a pen. However, I'm using my car, which is filthy because I bought a car wash last time I filled up with petrol, but the line at the car wash was too long. Now that there's no line at the car wash, I can't find the gas receipt with the car wash code on it. I'm writing in the dirt with an old single sock I found. For the small black hole hypothesis to work, there must be something intrinsic to both socks and pens that causes them to be preferentially absorbed. They share no common materials. They serve completely different functions. But a pen and a sock are both appendage-oriented, so what if the key lies in their placement? What would happen if you put socks on your hands? Or wrote with a ballpoint pen gripped in your toes? Perhaps an alien living in the black hole is trying to stop us from discovering the ultimate power source, using a ballpoint pen with socks on your hands!

Well, yeah! Why would you want a pen to run out of ink more quickly? I love it when a favorite pen seems to last forever. I'm glad pen manufacturer's aren't emulating the computer printer manufacturers. Then the ink would cost a fortune and run out quickly. When I buy a really great pen, I always buy some extra refills. Trouble is, by the time the original barrel runs out, I forget where I stored the refills.

We should test that. I could add a poll.

Thanks. Using the Report Post button really is the best solution. I've been on the road a bit more lately, but I get reported posts sent by email, and I try to get to them when I reach my computer. We broke something strange, because this new filter is letting the Vi@g@r@ and Goochiebag crap through. Something isn't set correctly, and it will get fixed, and it's overdue and we will rejoice when it happens. Summer, busy, sorry, patience, thanks.

Why? What force is acting on them?

I think most of the claims about toxins being excreted through the skin are bogus. There's really not much of a mechanism for this in the body. Stuff we don't need is mostly evacuated through urine and feces. I think our skin would look pretty bad if we were constantly pushing toxins (poisons?) through our pores. I know those detoxifying foot baths are a scam, claiming to pull toxins through the bottoms of your feet and into the water, making it cloudy. The electrolysis process is merely coloring the water brown or orange due to corrosion of the iron electrodes in the bath. It's not toxins you see in the water, it's rust. It would still do that even if your feet weren't in it. I think if there is any efficacy in mineral oil helping to "detoxify" your body, it would be in helping soften and break up debris clogged in pores. That's not really toxins coming from inside your body, unless you consider dead cells, oils and dirt toxins. Perhaps that's where we'd need to start this discussion, defining exactly what is meant by "toxins".

! Moderator Note Moved to Chemistry for a more comprehensive response. And welcome to SFN!

Things that are wrong, imo (partial list): 1. Some people see mainstream scientific study as too difficult, and so they invent a fantasy where they step "outside the box" and use their "intuition" to seek the "Truth". It feels right to them only because they get to feel they are seeking answers without any of the responsibility of actual, rigorous study. They get to flit from topic to topic, only choosing what interests them most and cherry-picking those bits of data that support what they have chosen as "Truth". They make conclusions base on inadequate knowledge, building hypotheses on a foundation full of gaps and pockets of misunderstanding. I feel this is wrong because it robs those people of the knowledge of all those who HAVE put the time into building "the box" into a set of explanations with the most supportive evidence. It's wrong because it dupes those people into thinking that mainstream science is wrong because it's hidebound and lacks their "intuitive grasp" on the subject. It's wrong because it makes them think their rejection of mainstream study is a form of skepticism, when it's really just a lack of focus, attention and appreciation for a seemingly plodding, time-consuming and often uninteresting methodology. It's wrong because it somehow makes them ignore the fact that the methodology works, it works very well, and it's the best process humans have ever come up with for explanations about the real world. 2. Littering. 3. People who claim X is wrong, but admit they don't really know much about X.

Do you also agree with him now that he has acknowledged that it IS a paradox?

The Bible's. Many of those who interpret that work often say it's because we couldn't bear to see him (even though we're made in his image), or that if he revealed himself to us it would negate free will, or that it would make faith meaningless. No matter which version you believe, God is, by definition, not going to allow himself to be observed in a testable, repeatable, predictable way in order to satisfy science of his existence. Are you saying that "unlimited power" has the limitation that it can only be used within the parameters of the physical laws of the universe? That would separate it from "the ability to do anything".

I'm there right now, with at least ten others logged in. We're going to play You Might Be A Geek If... pretty soon.

God is unobservable scientifically by definition. He seems to have chosen not to manifest himself in a way we can test. It could be that omnipotence is just another definition that puts God more firmly in the realm of the supernatural.

I thought I made it fairly clear that I wasn't sure of your point because you kept referring to yourself and God with regard to omnipotence, and therefore wasn't sure it was a misspelling. It became the point because you kept doing it. It didn't make sense to me. We agreed on that quite some time ago. And now we agree that it is a paradox, it seems.

Perhaps it's spelling mistakes, but when you continue to use yourself as a referent for omnipotence and mix "he" and "we", it makes it seem like you're saying because we can't do it, he can't do it. The paradox, and yes it does exist, is with the definition of omnipotence, not with God's lifting ability. It can't happen because there will always be something that omnipotence can't do, making it internally inconsistent.

I don't understand your point. Did anyone ever claim omnipotence was anything other than a property of a god? It's not a property you can use yourself as an example for. And the claim that God is omnipotent is what motivated the observation that such was a paradox, so it's a logical rebuttal, not "something ridiculous like that".

The Joe Nacchio story is very appropriate here. He was headquartered here in Denver, and I remember well the campaign against him. The spin going on then made me nauseous. Every story in the local papers made it seem like he bilked investors, and they even fined him and then gave the money back to investor "victims". And the only real crime there was the FBI announcing the bogus investigation for insider trading, which sent Qwest stocks tumbling. It's doubtful Nacchio was completely clean, but he wasn't the one who made the stocks drop. The government selected his case to prosecute, among all the other questionable insider-trading cases.

The statement IS logical. If you're capable of doing anything, then both these things should be within your power, lifting an unliftable weight and making a weight too heavy for you to lift. SamBridge can weld anything he wants to, but nobody is calling him omnipotent, so his argument isn't applicable. You really don't get to decide that. That's why we're discussing it. It's not really questioning God, it's questioning this concept of being able to do anything you can think of, this omnipotence. If God could really do ANYTHING, then why hasn't he done some non-paradoxical things like growing a limb back for an amputee? Supposedly, he cures people of all kinds of cancers and diseases on a daily basis, but there's no documented cases of regrown limbs.

Bravo, Daedelus!

Bummer. Baked beans are off.