Phi for All

I suppose the worst part about knowing who gave what rep is when it becomes part of the discussion. If it forces a person to further clarify a position then that's not so bad, but if it degenerates into a brawl about why you clicked a certain button it's going to generate a whole bunch of off-topic reprimands from the staff. Do you think we should have a rule that says discussion of rep points is always off-topic? Do you know if you can multiquote a new post after you're notified and you see it's something you'd like to comment on? That would be very neat.

We charged your account a penny for every warning point you've had in the last 8 years. That's how we were able to afford the software upgrade.

Pretty slick the way it let's you know someone slipped a post in ahead of you while you were typing, huh? I think consensus is we're going to go with this new visibility and gather some evidence of its effect. It would be optimum if we could take this privilege away from someone we caught abusing it (quite obviously dealing negative rep for vendetta), but I get the feeling the software won't allow that. It also sounds like 3 negative rep points per day will also be part of the experiment. What about positive rep? Does anyone know what their current limit is on positive rep? That should probably be doubled or tripled as well. I try to reply when someone is wrong/has a bad attitude/posts fallacies, etc, but often I have nothing more to add to a well-written, well-thought-out post so I just give it a big +.

Here's my prediction on this trial/test/experiment. It will be fine for the vast majority of long-time users, but it will be abused by those who tend to accrue the most negative rep, and by newcomers who slip up or take a long time to get a feel for the community and the style of the forum. I also think it will make most of the long-time users more thoughtful about giving negative rep. In any case, I'd like to ask the membership to take it easier, with regard to negative rep, on newcomers who simply post a wrong answer. We can do more with our replies and hopefully not bury a noob under a bunch of bad rep points, which tends to affect their attutude, which affects their behavior, which affects our attitudes....

Cleaning dishes/pots/pans before food dries on them saves a lot of scrubbing (which I find annoying) or soaking (which my wife finds annoying). It takes a lot less time than you think and your dinner won't get cold if you clean as you're cooking. The hardest part is taking plates to the sink as soon as you're finished eating if you eat dinner in front of the TV as we often do. If your car engine is overheating, turning on the heater will circulate coolant around the engine, bringing the temperature down a bit. It will roast you if it's high summer but almost anything is better than having the engine fail due to overheating. It beats walking home or waiting for the tow truck in the summer heat.

Awesome! Come Spring my family is going to look forward to a visit from the Escher Bunny!

I would truly hate that if it happens.

Wasn't there also something in there about "Beware the rabbit that lays brightly colored eggs"?

I disagree with your opening premise. It assumes that religion and science are equally valid and I'll tell you why I don't think they are. Personally, I see my "belief system" in three parts. Faith is an unshakeable belief in something that has nothing but that faith to support it as an explanation. In essence, it's believing with all my heart in something I can't possibly know to be true. Faith can cause you to do things based on a belief that has no basis. People have been known to lose everything because their faith guaranteed them a certain outcome. Some Christian Scientists have lost their lives for no reason because they chose faith over known medical procedure. Hope is believing in something that might be true but acknowledging that it might not. I can hope I'll win the lottery but my knowledge of probability would keep me from rushing out and buying a yacht before the drawing. Trust allows me to accept the explanation that has the most evidence to support it. This is what science means to me, accepting that an ongoing search for the best answer is much better than believing something that others hope or have faith is the Truth and never question. Trust is earned every day by being honed and supported and constantly examined, never being held as sacred and unassailable. So no, I don't think religion and science have the same validity. Religion relies on the flimsiest of beliefs, faith, while science earns my trust every day with constant examination and curiosity.

Right, you copied it from here: http://www.wutang-corp.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2284637 (you should always link to things you copy/paste so the original author gets credit for it). The point is, anyone can say, "There is a theory...", but on a science site like this theory is much more than just someone's opinion of what may have taken place. I could find no studies online to support this idea, much less the kind of work that would go into an actual theory.

It does sound good, except as Moon mentions new accounts would be at a disadvantage, but I think a person should be here a while before they can judge things fairly. It's just that I don't think the software will ever work that way. As Cap'n said, he can set the limits on + and - but can't do anything fancier than that.

Again, I think knowing who gave any kind of rep would be just fine for someone like you or iNow or StringJunky, but there are those who would abuse this information and swear vendetta, using every negative point they get to drag your rep down and pay you back. Worse still, I think it's the same people who already have a negative reputation who're most likely to do this. But I think we could easily try giving people three negative rep points per day as a test of the system. It sounds like Cap'n could change it back to one fairly easily, and we could monitor it to make sure any damage done through abuse is minimal.

I think if you can't set it up the way StringJunky defined it, it's probably better to leave it the way it is. Now if you could just separate the + and - on either side of the score for that post so it wasn't so darn easy to push the wrong one....

The whole problem with allowing more negative rep is that it would be fine with people like you, but not everyone is like you. There are those who would abuse this if it was allowed. Perhaps an Admin will weigh in on this. We could find out if it's even possible.

Can you give a scientific citation for this "theory" that doesn't stem from a music fan site? Or by theory do you mean "an idea somebody came up with in the shower that sounds pretty believable"?

We'll have to leave this for a less intelligent species. Part of having great intelligence is being capable of creating really big problems, but another part is being able to solve them. I'll leave the rest of what you say alone, since it's not really pertinent to this discussion. I'd hate to hijack dragonstar57's thread.

So you could give negative rep twice a day, but not two times to the same person in a day, is that right? Not sure if the system is that sophisticated. We never want negative rep to be used as a personal attack, so your suggestion doesn't violate that tenet. I've even stopped using it for bad answers, unless someone ignores better explanations with more supportive evidence in favor of their own answer that has little or nothing to support it. Mostly I use it for bad attitudes and rudeness. It seems to work out that the people with the worst behavior also tend to give poor answers.

I would say no, that a god (whatever that means, whichever god you're referring to) did NOT create the universe. As iNow mentions, that explanation requires far more incredible paradoxes while mainstream scientific explanations don't, and gods can't be falsified in any case and thus fail any kind of meaningful consideration. Besides that, gods are not observable phenomena, so science really can't include them in any viable model. The energies involved in the Big Bang make it impossible currently to determine exactly what was happening at t = 0. And since time itself seems to begin at that point.... You're right though that 600 years ago we didn't know as much as we do today. A big part of that, a really big part, is using the scientific method to ensure that we're always looking for better explanations. If religion had kept us from using the scientific method, we'd be stuck at "The Truth", the god-did-it explanation as interpreted by the church of 600 years ago. Yay, science! To this day, I still think the best explanation I've heard for the existence of gods and religion is from a post you made, iNow. You had quoted someone talking about how it's an adaptive survival function for humans to imagine things that don't exist. The hunter who imagines there's a lion in every shadow survives more often than the hunter that doesn't, and this naturally leads to imagining beings responsible for everything that happens that we can't explain.

There, I merged this thread with another copy of the original we had. What was blanked is now in post #7.

If better education is made available worldwide, it would automatically take care of most of your concerns. It might also help further the extension of our maximum abilities that's already happening and has been since we discovered farming and animal husbandry. More well-educated people, more great minds to help solve problems. And it leaves our biodiversity intact. To and too is faux. Actually, deux et tout sont faux.

Wow, how childish is it to blank out your OP just because it got criticized? How can someone claim it's SCIENTIFIC and then act like that?

As overtone has noted, there are no races genetically within the overall human "race". What you're talking about is strictly a cultural phenomena. Raise anyone in a culture where music and rhythm are encouraged and you'll have a human with more of a sense of rhythm than a human not raised in that culture.

Beyond the biodiversity problem already mentioned, what version of "smart" are you talking about? There are plenty of people you might call "not smart" that could outthink you in many different scenarios. Better to educate the people we currently have and leave evolution to itself. Of course, making education desirable to those people is part of the problem as well.

So does holding hands, so how do you know it's the prayer and not putting your hands together that stimulates the release?

Sorry, but gack! We hate the term, "Just a theory" here. This is a science site, and in science a theory is the best it ever gets, representing thousands of people working sometimes their whole lives to form the best explanation for a specific phenomena. We'll forgive you, just this once... Light energies? Simple biology works just fine. Sorry to jump on your first post with both feet. I hope you stick around. It's not personal, around here we attack the idea, not the person who has it.