Phi for All

! Moderator Note Semjase, if you want to discuss religion here, we have certain expectations regarding evidence, fact vs opinion, and non-alien involvement, which you clearly are not meeting. This thread is closed.

I would think it must affect your vocal chords, much like not walking affects your leg muscles eventually. Disuse is probably better than abuse, though. You can probably recover from disuse by gradually strengthening the voice through speech, humming and singing. Here's some PubMed studies on voice disorders. Not all will be applicable, but it's a good place to start. I would suggest picking a few that sound good and read them aloud.

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/37193-no-you-cant-make-sodium/

Don't they all still say, "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"? I "trust" that more than I have "faith" in anyone's god. Legal tender is recognized by the legal system to be a valid form of payment. That's why I can "trust" it, rather than "hope" it will be accepted, or have "faith" that it will (which is silly, since some places may not, like hotels and airlines). If I had "faith" that my currency would be accepted, I wouldn't bother to carry a debit card AND a credit card.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it has something to do with an underwater glider of some sort.

Well, thanks for talking with us. I want you to know I've read every word you've written. I've also studied the Bible and read it cover to cover multiple times. I highly recommend a complete read-through, rather than relying on others to produce perfectly applicable verses cherry-picked from the writings of multiple authors, none of whom ever met Jesus in real life. Since you say you're not coming back, I'll leave you with this to ponder. Judaism protects their copies of the Tanakh (what you would call the Old Testament) by requiring strict supervision of their making and delivery to the temples so the word of God remains the same as the original. They even carry on an oral tradition that stresses the original pronunciation and cantillation as they're read aloud. In talking to you about the New Testament, I got the sense that this kind of accuracy is very important to you. You gave a very honest, rational reply when you said that accuracy compared to the original texts was what gave a translation merit for you. So I can't really believe it when you tell me it doesn't bother you that the Good News Bible is so far off the original texts. You and I both know it should bother you.

IMO, we should have taken the sympathy and well-wishes most of the world was openly offering after 9/11 and we should have used that to form a strong diplomatic mission to stop the active and passive funding of terrorists all over the world. Quietly strangling them is infinitely preferable to giving them a worldwide media stage for recruitment. I don't think you can ever fight terrorism with conventional methods since it obviously has the reverse effect most people wanted. It was a small percentage of already wealthy warmongers who profited from pursuing those wars. We are NOT safer because of them. We were fooled into thinking the military response was a strong and smart response, and it's proved to be neither. And while negotiations progressed with the world leaders, we should have gone after Osama bin Laden covertly and taken him out in EXACTLY the same way he was eventually removed. He died like the coward he was, with no martyr's fanfare and no grave to attract mourners.

They both have noise cancelling microphones under their shirts (the younger guy taps his at 0:49), so that supports the hypothesis that the older guy is in on it. It could be that he agreed to be miked but it shows it's not just a random guy the performer walked up to. There's also a suspicious jump cut at about 0:33. Definitely some editing there, and completely unnecessary if the guy could really do this within the time he seems to. The camera is obviously repositioned at that point.

! Moderator Note I stopped posting in this thread as a member quite some time ago, so I'm going to step in as moderator and say we need to stop the personal attacks. ACG52, pushing SamBridge's buttons about reputation is NOT on topic. SamBridge, don't let yourself be led off-topic. Responses to this modnote will be deleted. You all know by now how to deal with modnotes if you have a problem with them.

I wouldn't discount the power of advertising either. You don't see a lot of commercials for broccoli and sprouts. Anyone who thinks they're completely impervious to cheeseyburgery, sucrolicious, microwave fat pocket affective conditioning is just fooling themselves.

I'm not sure an intricate design like this will ever be seen as anything but a flowery pattern from a distance. I think a big part of the intrigue from a T-shirt will be seeing the detail become clearer as you get closer to the person wearing it. I think it's very appropriate that, like evolution, it's an interwoven concept that only breaks down into details when you study it closely.

Do I get to define "geological upheaval"?

Sexual cement does nothing to prolong the act like you'd think. Lubrication works so much better.

No, they're really not. Science doesn't require a creator. Religion will never get scientific credibility until those pesky gods agree to appear and be tested. Until then they are just like ghosts and Bigfoot.

Wow, we certainly read a lot into the OP that wasn't really there, didn't we? If the MacGyver family is Mythbusting opposite Joe Millionaire or Dancing with the Stars, guess which one is going to spark a latent interest in science? I say get them into the classroom and let the teachers guide their enthusiasm into more proper scientific channels.

Dude, you need to read your history. All those things, marriage included, predate the Bible by quite a bit. And the B.C/A.D. reference is simply a convention that's used because it would cost too much to replace it (much like adopting the metric system in the US). Then your argument is hypocritical, since you claimed that all versions of the Bible " have equal merit to me as long as the translation is consistent with the original text". I've shown that this isn't so with your version, yet you just blow it off and say "it never bothers me". This seems more like you're simply not questioning why the original text was omitted. Another convenient argument where you get to say one thing, have it refuted, and then claim it really doesn't matter. More circular arguments, where the only evidence to support why you believe in the Bible comes from the Bible. It seems much more likely that the early Christian leadership, including its sponsor Emperor Constantine, simply wanted a flock of unquestioning, faithful sheep who wouldn't cause trouble for the secular authorities the way all the others did. In fact, many scholars believe that Acts of the Apostles was purposely split off from the Gospel of Luke and renamed so as to send a message to Constantine that Christianity wasn't going to cause him any hassles. It's very obviously written from an apologist point of view. My point was this: Many books that had been considered for the New Testament were passed over by the Council of Nicea because they weren't considered divinely inspired, even beautiful accounts like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Phillip. If the books that did make it into the New Testament really were divinely inspired, what gave your translators the right to change or omit any of it? All 9000 sects claim to agree with what the Bible teaches, and that's really the point. They all interpret the Bible differently, including you, and while you think many are wrong about some things, they think you're the one who's wrong. And I think it's an incredibly specious argument from all of you to claim that your sect is the only one that knows "what the Bible teaches". Arguing and confrontation are part and parcel of any good discussion. If both parties agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary. Aggression is what we're all looking to avoid, and that's easily done if we attack ideas and not the people who have them. You can't simply claim you have the answers and let it go at that. You do everyone, and mostly yourself, a great disservice when you think that way. This is the part of religion that doesn't mix well with science. Science is all about questioning and testing, not assuming and pretending to know what you don't know. A healthy understanding of God?! I thought you couldn't know the mind of God. And you haven't given me any indication in your arguments that you have a healthy understanding about science either. Personally, I think a person can have their religion and study science as well. They just have to realize that there is a clear line between the natural and the supernatural, and that blind faith is the weakest of all beliefs while it pretends to be the strongest. Hope that your beliefs are correct, take all the good that your religion teaches and practice those kindnesses every day, but be skeptical when someone tells you they know the Truth with a capital T.

I think it's already taught in public schools, and enforced every day. They just don't have a class named Morality, it's more in how the teachers conduct their classrooms and the examples they set. It's one of the things I had against the No Child Left Behind program. The emphasis was so heavily weighted on taking tests that it gave teachers little time to emphasize the moral lessons kids learn in school every day interacting with each other. That said, I do think classes in Ethics would be good at younger ages. Far too many people (in the US at least) think it's OK to turn their problems into other people's problems. I see people a couple of generations younger than I am littering, swerving across multiple lanes because they need to exit the highway NOW, letting their dogs crap on the sidewalk and leaving it, and lots of other inconsiderate actions. We expect people not to steal and kill, but I think ethical values are built on a lot of much smaller thoughtful actions.

At this point, the US needs just about anything it can get to keep kids interested in science. I'd fill my wet suit with Mentos and Coke and do my Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man impression on FOX News if I thought it would keep Intelligent Design out of my daughter's classroom.

Absolutely not. Faith wanes and waxes, so what happens when a person who's morals are based on their faith suddenly doesn't believe anymore? People can be taught morality without it being contingent on what's going to happen to them after they die. And if your religion teaches that you can sin but then be forgiven, what's stopping you from abusing that little loophole?.

I had it happen on and off all day today, a bit yesterday during the day.

Oh, there's ALWAYS a reason if you're in my dungeon.

Virtually every generation since the Bible was put together has seen themselves in these prophecies, and they were all wrong. Are you going to be part of the next generation that falls for vague, easily adapted fears and generalizations? I'm not. If Jesus pulls his supercharged cloud up to my house and starts beheading zombies with his lightning katana, I will be visibly impressed. If he still wants to redeem me, cool, but if he tells me I should have listened to a specific sect of Christian dogma over all the others, I will be happy to spend eternity wherever he unjustly decides to put me.

Often it just takes time to figure out that the way we're saying something isn't coming across the way we really mean it. You don't have to change yourself to get good reputation, sometimes you just have to realize how badly you're sounding to everyone else. It happens, and like me I'll bet you took a hard look at what you said and it made you realize mistakes in either content, tone or accuracy. It takes a mature mind to take the bad on board with the good and move on.

YouTube would be a great place to start. Lots of home experiments there, including parents and kids blowing stuff up and making things glow/freeze/melt/erupt. If you need someone on the ground in the Western US to check with middle school science teachers for likely candidates and their families, let me know and I'll call your office.

There are plenty of places that will take pre-made T-shirts and screen your design onto them, even in small quantities. If you're convinced these would be popular though, you would have a lot more profit, control and higher quality by buying a bolt of 100% cotton fabric, finding a large-format printer who can do cloth, and put out an ad for a couple of seamstresses who can do T-shirts. For the printer, make sure that they don't keep a file of your design. Get this in writing. The fabric should have consistent thicknesses in the threads, not a mix of thin and fat ones. You should be able to see very little light pass through the cloth when you hold it up to the light. You shouldn't have to go to London to find some good seamstresses. I wouldn't look for a shop at first, if you think you could find some grandmother types who would love to earn some extra money for something they probably do in their spare time for free. If they don't have a T-shirt pattern already, you should be able to pick one up fairly cheaply. It shouldn't take them more than 30-40 minutes to sew each shirt.