Phi for All

What if they used Kabbalah? Or the I Ching? or the Book of Mormon? It's kind of a love/hate relationship between government, business and the public when it comes to science. Business needs the possibilities provided by knowledge, but it doesn't want the public educated too much or they start questioning the carefully funded status quo ("Why are AA batteries so expensive? If the materials were really that valuable, wouldn't we be recycling them?"). Government is torn between the businesses who help them fund campaigns and the public who votes them into office. And the public would probably love to learn more about everything, but also cares little for putting much money or effort into it. The public wants information in bite-sized chunks and science information is like eating a pizza; you take a normal bite of crust but a lot more cheese and toppings than you planned on comes off with it.

I think you should either give us a link to where this was said or you should stop making the claim. Until that time I think your talk of cowardly bullies is fairly hypocritical.

Only if you publish the results when they fail.

How is he putting words in your mouth? He quoted what you said and asked you to clarify it. It DOES seem contradictory to say you're not accusing anyone of wrongdoing and then claim there is a "stink" that needs to be erased. Who caused the stink if no one did anything wrong? I think the real stink is coming from Romney's campaign. Why anyone would want to vote for a man who would take a cheap political shot at the tragic death of one of our ambassadors is beyond me. This is one of those situations that are far too easy to exploit, since technically you could always say that not enough was done to protect ANYONE who gets killed. To use it to imply some kind of intentional negligence is criminal and unworthy of someone who wants to lead the country. Congratulations, Mitt Romney, you have justified the accusations of all those who claimed Bush was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Is there a reason you can't share this with the rest of the membership? Behind-the-scenes discussions are limited in their productivity.

If the president goes after Romney every time he says something hypocritical or implausible or contradictory (like bashing Obama as elitist for going to Harvard), the president would quickly find himself only voicing negativity and looking like a bully instead of a leader. I think Romney's campaign knows this and continues to throw out absurdities to provoke Obama into lashing out.

Only if they're gummy cows. Gummy bears would be a normal circle-of-life issue.

What don't you think he meant so literally? If you're talking about "fairy sight", I'm well aware he was using it as a for instance. But this is a common misconception, that there are physical things out there we may not have the senses to perceive. I can assure you, unless whatever it is interacts physically differently with our universe, there would be other ways we could determine the presence of something that exists but can't be sensed. "Advance mankind" seems synonymous with improvement. Evolution doesn't have an agenda to improve us.

Evolution doesn't "advance mankind", in the sense that everything we gain from it is an improvement. We're not moving towards some kind of ideal state. But if there was something to be sensed that we don't have the senses for, it would still leave some other gap in the pattern we could distinguish. Granted, we have no evidence for the existence of fairies, but we also don't have any evidence of unexplained encounters with them. No running into things that aren't there, nothing physical that seems to do something for no reason, and no smoke/dust/powder that seems to avoid certain spots as if something we couldn't normally see was there. Again, most everything leaves patterns or gaps in patterns, such that even if we lacked one way to perceive them, there are other ways they can be detected. Like cockroaches always seem to disappear before you can turn the light on, but if you lay down some flour on the floor you can see their footprints and tell they've been there.

There's a future in bovine dentistry.

It also just occurred to me that secularism also represents an enormous amount of people (the state) who are choosing not to be governed by religion (the church) but in a way that doesn't really call for defensiveness. It's more vague and ambiguous, and could therefore be more scary to some because it doesn't support your position or refute it. Does that make sense? Like someone approaching you from the dark on the street but not really menacing you overtly. You're unsure whether to continue past them or get ready to fight.

Yet it shows you the limitations of words when applied to physical concepts. Maths is NOT shorthand. Mathematics is a language with a much more formal structure and definitions that aren't in dispute the way ordinary languages can be. It allows for the discernment of patterns and allows data to be analyzed much more precisely than ordinary language. It's always interesting to me that people who have a hard time with GR or SR (it's almost never both) also claim that the maths are unimportant. That at least is one pattern ordinary language can deal with.

Like most issues, probably no one thing is responsible. Personally, I think it's partly because some people assume that all morality stems from religious beliefs, particularly their religious beliefs, so a state with no religious basis (or the wrong one) is immoral. I also think Christianity in the US is threatened by the differences within the religion itself. It's not always easy to defend a belief when other Christians may not believe exactly as you do. Secularism might seem to deny that the faith you hold is valid since it puts it on a par with other, possibly conflicting beliefs. I think most strong believers also hold that someone has to be right and the rest are wrong. To say that all beliefs are equal or that religion shouldn't bias government violates the sacred aspect most of those beliefs shelter under. And lastly, I think strong believers tend to think of secularism as godlessness. Rather than acknowledging that the state can't be biased by ANY religion, many confuse this with a direct shunning of the principles of their particular religion.

! Moderator Note Last warning. Any more attempted thread hijacks or other violations of the rules you agreed to when you joined will result in your being banned. You've been suspended for these things before and show no signs of learning from it, so we must assume you really don't want to be here.

Since mathematics is the language of physics, this is like saying "If Shakespeare can't be explained without resorting to English then whoever's explaining it doesn't truly understand it."

I can take virtually any book and find correlations with modern society and then claim a pattern has formed. Oh look, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice signifies the dealing between modern day Israel and Iran! If you substitute Islam for Christianity, it all becomes so clear!

That's not a smirk. This, THIS is a smirk: This one is patented, I think. It says, "Nobody cares about lies in politics, not from Republimicans anyway."

No, I demand that it stay on topic and not stray to some two year old video with absolutely no relevance.

I thought it was funny (odd) that Romney mentioned right off the bat that he was going to strangle Big Bird. Considering that Bain Capitol owns 850+ radio stations, I thought attacking public broadcasting would've shown a clear conflict of interest. Overall though, especially since I thought Romney was going to get all tripped up by his many recent gaffes, I thought he did very well against an incumbent president. I'm guessing the president had a lot of restrictions given to him by his debate advisers, like don't mention Libya, don't mention airplanes, don't mention how Congress has been blocking you (that one I can sort of see, it's completely true but could be taken as a sign that he can't get them to work with him). It sucks that Congress can be so partisan but it's the president who looks bad if he complains about it. What I thought was funny (depressing) was the comments afterwards about how both men threw around too many numbers and got too detailed about some of their policies. It's sad that the majority wouldn't want to know more about these things.

! Moderator Note Please curb the urge to make this personal. Attack the idea, not the person with the idea. That's the rule.

NO! Just stop it! I am so tired of this ploy of yours, asking one unreasoned question, getting it answered fully, and then posting some quote-mined hatchet-job video that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING!!! Trying to discuss these issues with you is like digging holes in the ocean.

But we were talking about Congressional Republicans blocking Obama's job creation bill. Both Romney and Congressional Republicans claim they want to create jobs for Americans, but when they had a chance to prove it earlier this year, they decided to obstruct instead. What's wrong with giving a tax break to companies that want to hire Americans, and denying the deductions business gets for relocating overseas? It sounds pretty ideal to me. It would have been a great incentive, just the right amount of carrot and stick. If you have a real argument that makes it sound like the Republicans didn't purposely harm the American economy in order to get Romney elected, I'd love to hear it. "Romney isn't a congressman" is very weak, imo.

We have them, I'm not sure where they are. The right wing stance is usually a religious one. There really is no scientific basis that can guide a ban on abortion. It would be stupid, as stupid as Prohibition was. When you have something so necessary to society that so many people will do it whether it's legal or not, arguing against it is pointless. And unlike alcohol, abortion has some extremely compelling reasons why it should be allowed.

The Bring Jobs Home Act would've only impacted businesses that were continuing to send our jobs overseas and taking deductions for it. Again, if what you say is true, either someone is lying or someone isn't really interested in helping fix our unemployment problems: http://www.cnn.com/2...cked/index.html

On job creation?! Who in the world would have predicted the GOP would block initiatives aimed at "onshoring" jobs for Americans? Isn't that exactly what Mitt says he really wants to do? Doesn't that mean that either Mitt is lying again, or the GOP is willing to harm the country to get back in power?