Phi for All

You should then also remind your son not to sell illegal arms to Iran, funnel money to what would become the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or support Apartheid. Just sayin'. Accountability is another concept that makes no sense with so many religions. We can NEVER know the extent to which our acts, even the kind ones, affect others. Giving money to someone may seem charitable but might keep them from finding their dream job. Helping one person might mean that someone more deserving suffers. Braking to avoid hitting a dog might cause someone further back in traffic to swerve and hit someone else head-on, killing them all. And conversely, doing something unkind could end up being the greatest benefit that person ever knew. How can we be held accountable for all the myriad variables in our lives and those affected by us?

I like the wager. The Christian heaven would have to have a lot of people who were total scum in life but repented on their death beds as they accepted Jesus. How is that better than having people who spent their lives making this world better for those who live in it but didn't place utter, unquestioning faith in a god who wanted them to focus on personal redemption?

We've renamed, we've changed the rules, we've repositioned, we've made procedural changes, and all of it based on critiques we've received from the membership. What we've learned from all this is that every change only mollifies a particular group of speculators for a short time, and then a new group arrives with fresh criticisms that are counter to what the last group found objectionable. At a certain point, it becomes obvious that it's not the process that's flawed, but rather that most speculators don't like to be corrected at all. This is usually supported by the assertions that are made ("This theory is so simple it MUST be true"). Making conclusions before you've explained your idea is not a good way to present them to people familiar with reasoned argument. I'm not sure that a more "flexible" speculative approach would be good for anyone. It sounds like it would simply be used to leap over some early fundamental errors and try to draw conclusions based on shaky ground. How does that honestly help anyone? Pages of discussion wasted because we wanted to be more flexible and allow early mistakes to go unchallenged. Who are we trying to please with that scenario?

Do your launch and re-entry costs include the actual costs of mining the asteroid to collect the platinum? Even without those costs, my earthly competition is making a great deal more profit, so why am I risking so much to bring it back to Earth? Check out this blog post. I'm not sure I completely agree with some of this guy's assumptions, but I think he's taking more into consideration than either of us is. I still say the best use of metals we find in space is build more ways to explore space, rather than try to bring it back down. We'll need it out there, so why not use it out there?

Your post was hijacking someone else's thread, which I explained quite clearly in my modnote. We try to discuss one topic at a time. Your speculative ideas should be in their own thread. Ordinarily, the staff hides posts like that (we never delete anything). However, after a conversation with michel123456, it was suggested that putting hijacking threads in the Trash Can offered a bit more transparency for the process, so this was the first time I've done this. Apparently, do AND don't = damned. I'm not putting it back in the other thread. I think it's been made the OP of its own thread in Speculations.

! Moderator Note Non-mainstream concept, moved to Speculations.

! Moderator Note An attempt to hijack this thread with another speculative hypothesis has been removed to the Trash Can (in the interests of transparency). Efforts to help one non-mainstream idea with another non-mainstream idea may seem helpful to the one posting it, but it only serves to make a discussion about the original more difficult and confusing. Please consider how difficult it is to provide evidence for speculations and have respect for your fellow members. Hijacking is against the rules you agreed to when you joined. Keep your speculative ideas in your own threads, If you have a problem with this modnote, please use the Report Post function. Do NOT further derail this thread by discussing it here.

You must leave now.

TODAY it's working for me that way. It wasn't on Wednesday, and I can't trust that it will tomorrow.

I'm finding this doesn't work consistently. edit: crossposted with swansont, so I'll add that I sometimes use the editor to separate the sentences I want to quote, then go back to the normal mode so I can more easily highlight and wrap quote tags around them. Then I can also deal with the spacing. I don't like having responses crammed between the lines. I think it's easier to read with a space above and below, even though this may not seem an efficient use of space.

AFAIK, every pack of birth control pills has three weeks worth of hormone pills and a week's worth of placebos. The sugar pills are to be taken after ovulation has been prevented, when the extra hormones would be unnecessary. Taking the placebos keeps you in the habit of taking the pills every day.

In looking for a technological way for individual humans to fly, no engineer is going to waste time on a design that mimics a bird flapping its wings. It's too inefficient with regard to weight vs the power needed to achieve and maintain flight. Even if the design didn't require taking off from the ground (which is very difficult even for some of the bigger natural avians), there are many other paths to sustainable flight using fixed wings. Flapping is hideously expensive in terms of propelling something as heavy as a human. Please start another thread on this. Let's keep this one focused so we don't confuse those who join us later on.

Hmmm, that's a tough one. Genetics jokes and stories are out there, but I don't know of any books (if your next post claims to have found one I'll know you're spamming for its author and we will boot you - and NOT royally). If I were you, I'd buy two pairs of denim pants, cut a leg off one pair and sew it onto the crotch of the other pair and tell him they're mutant jeans.

God loves gaps, especially paragraph breaks.

I, along with many of our other members, would greatly appreciate it if you would .

Most of that article is aimed at internal effects and the length of estrogen exposure. Does breast tissue density have an impact on how a woman looks? AFAIK, density is determined by a mammogram but has no external indicators. I was wondering what made you say, "it seems the later the menopause starts the younger&healthier the women look like". Is this anecdotal or do you have anything else to support it?

Please see my study on the effects of toluene exposure on London rodents.

Menopause has its own problems. Weight gain during menopause may be more affected by psychological factors than by physiological ones. Women athletes have it particularly rough because estrogen can also make certain ligaments looser, resulting in more injuries. I've never read anything about how the onset age of either puberty or menopause affects a woman's looks. Do you have a link to any studies or articles about the benefits of later menopause or menstruation?

Allright, let's go with that. But I reserve the right to reopen the case if and when new information is made available.

You're actually more predisposed to have fins like a fish. Shoulder blades are NOT vestigial remnants of wings. No creatures in our ancestry ever had wings so there's no gene to activate. And as far as growing them out of your back, again, no vertebrate has EVER had six limbs. We're just not framed that way. To paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli, what you're proposing is not even impossible. There's simply nothing there to build on, even if there were selective pressures that demanded it over thousands of generations. We'd actually be much more likely to eventually develop skin webbing down our sides between our arms and legs to glide like flying squirrels before we'd ever grow skin or feather-covered wings out of our backs. It has been thought about in depth before. Even here we've had a few threads about it: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/34142-can-working-wings-be-grafted-on-a-human-answered-no/?hl=wings http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/65966-wings-how-long-would-it-take-to-evolve-them-and-other-questions/?hl=wings At this point I think you need to do the math to show you how big those wings would need to be just to get you off the ground. And as soon as you figure that, you'd need even more skeletal and muscle structure to support them, which means they'd need to be even bigger, requiring more and more structure. Are you still human if your sternum is six feet long and you have a 60 foot wingspan? What do you do with a 30-foot wing when you're not flying? The basic answer to your question is that Angel wings like Warren Worthington III are completely fictional. It's not a matter of difficulty, it's not about sociological or physiological predispositions. It's basic physical laws of the natural world that won't let you have something like wings without giving up a great deal of what makes you human.

If you highlight but leave the first letter out of what you want to delete, you can still use the backspace key and hit it twice. This might be easier than rewiring the brain to hit the space bar instead.

I was afraid Popcorn would start starving himself if I mentioned the weight factor. He really wants wings. But it's more than the weight as well. Birds have hollow bones and practically no muscles anywhere else, so having wings would require so massive a change that you wouldn't be human at all. Big brain? Has to go. Legs for running? Nix that, maybe little spindly clawed sticks for hopping. Popcorn, don't get pissed, get an ultralight.

How can your first sentence of your first post here accuse us of having no explanation? Are you willing to give up your arms for wings? A wing or an arm is just a specialized leg, and we only have the capacity for four legs. There aren't any vertebrates with six legs since we all have common aquatic ancestors who only had two sets of fins. There is no way wings would ever sprout out of your back. It's possible for our arms to evolve into wings (over a multi-generational period), but there's no selective pressure for such a thing to happen. It may sound cool but think about what a human would do in modern times with no hands with thumbs, no ability to wield tools? Wings would be a tremendous backslide, especially since we can build an ultralight plane for when we feel like flying, and still get to keep these nifty hand things.

Do what I do, superglue a Cheez Nip to the space bar as a tactile reminder. But don't try to eat that one. Trust me.

If you highlight text you want to delete from a quote, like a portion you're not responding to, you can hit the space bar instead of backspace or delete and it will keep the tag. You may have to then hit backspace to start at the beginning, but you won't lose the tag.