Phi for All

Creepy?! What do you think we're talking about here? You don't think...?! OMG!!! You think I've forgotten about your "longitudinal strain" prank? My tailor still hasn't finished altering my suits. It sounds like you're warming up to the idea. Is this a new fixture? What does it do? Will I need to bring my voltage converter? Mostly, as in, "I hope I can talk you out of wearing those pants"? Mostly because you insist on wearing those pants.

Slow down! You can't enjoy a good oral exam if you rush things. Relax. No pressure. And no one's judging you for what you like to do with girls and their sororities. Not after the first one. Now, they line up around the block. We're booked till October but perhaps we can squeeze you in.

It used to be a digital exam, but some people don't appreciate LaTex.

It's that Nawth Carolina ayuk-sent. Not really. I just voted 217 times.

Done.

Each time you start a new topic, there's a Manage Topic Poll button right at the top middle of the page. Don't ask religious or political questions unless you're in the Religion or Politics sections. If you've read the Rules, you should be able to discern the difference between touchy and offensive.

How would you know they're not just full of hot air? Although a higher power that could affect gravity would be pretty awesome. Until you ran out of atmosphere.

I don't really want to start a whole new thread on conjecture alone, but how difficult do you think it would be to arrange for martial law to be declared over citizen unrest in the US? Since the country seems split down the middle right now, suppose Romney wins this fall and Ryan's budget causes feathers to fly. How difficult would it be to use the Patriot Act, coupled with Homeland Security and influence with privately held news outlets to spin up a conspiracy against the government that requires mass detentions and use of force against citizens? Rule of law isn't as much use to those who're labeled outside of it. I used to think we'd never be lied to by our president to start wars, and I never thought no-bid, multi-billion dollar contracts would be awarded to a VP's former company in such an obvious conflict of interest. There are lots of other things that we never thought would happen, until they did. I hate the thought of keeping guns on the chance we may need to protect ourselves from those who might use our government insidiously, but I'm not filled with confidence that it could never happen.

I didn't say they don't exist, just that multitasking is often misunderstood. There are plenty of good ways to set up parts of multiple tasks that are similar enough where you don't have to mentally switch gears, and thus be more focused and "in the zone" as CaptainPanic put it. I just don't think a lot of folks multitask the right way, yet they still insist they're "great multitaskers".

I wouldn't necessarily see that as evidence of a deity's guiding influence. That would seem more to me like a natural order that placed restrictions on how life can evolve, even in other parts of the universe. Even if a being could be observed performing some "miraculous" feat we couldn't explain, I'd still have to assume it had a natural explanation. If this being could cause matter to appear, or control weather at will, or move from location to location in the blink of an eye, I'd simply assume the being had a grasp of chemistry that far exceeded our own, or was able to manipulate wind and water using one of the known forces in a way we don't currently understand, or perhaps was able to access one of the higher dimensions in string theory to lend its movement a perspective beyond the three spatial and one temporal dimensions we know. I suppose you could call this being a god, but I don't think we'd still be talking about the omnipotent, omniscient capital G god most religious people believe in. Testable miracles or not, we'd still just be talking about an advanced life form.

I think women may have a slight evolutionary edge here, as the gathering role allowed them to have a wider, more "big picture" focus than men did. However, there's a difference between looking out for multiple food/tool sources and modern multi-tasking. I also don't think most people understand what multi-tasking is. They treat it as, "I've got several tasks on my plate, and I'm going to try to work on them all simultaneously". In reality, they end up working on one task until deadline pressures on another task force them to shift gears to work on something else, until the next set of pressures force them to shift gears again. That's not multi-tasking, imo, or at least not efficient multi-tasking. As for the cell phone use, some people don't understand why focusing on seemingly mundane tasks is important. They consider it intellectually superior to let the mind wander to other topics when the task at hand is routine and well-understood. Unfortunately, driving is anything but routine. But even washing dishes or making copies at work is important enough to focus on, and doing each task well is much more efficient in the long term than making those silly mistakes on something boring and having to redo the work.

Since this has been cited as the major influencing factor behind the 2050 extinction predictions, and would also help solve several other problems we're currently having, this seems like the most efficient solution for the resources we could spend on it.

Do you remember then saying: You may need a remedial remembering program. I had an interesting conversation poolside this weekend with some Republican and Democrat friends about conservatism and liberalism. It turns out we're all conservative when it comes to our teenage daughter's clothing. It turns out we're all liberal when it comes to the government telling us what we can do with our own bodies, especially regarding the recent attacks by Tea Party conservatives on women. We're all conservative when it comes to government spending (and it turns out that we all hate corporate subsidies, and one family is in the oil business). We're all liberal in regards to healthcare reform; none of us likes the current overall system (not necessarily just Obamacare), and feel there are too many people with their hands out between us and our doctors. So yes, I think you've become paranoid and you're just trying to put a circus-tent-sized label on everyone you think may object to your gun or your feelings about minorities or anything else you've been told the liberals are making bold steps to deprive you of. You can't stand the fact that someone who may be a liberal could actually have a good grasp of what's going on with our country, and so you only buy black and white paint to color your world. You're convinced liberal is bad, so you try to bring every discussion around to ground you feel safe objecting to. You end up arguing against things no one else is arguing about.

It's not good for the door to drive a car through it? Just a guess.

Here is a statement President Obama made after the recent shooting in Aurora, CO. Many say this is the most direct statement he's made regarding gun control since he's been in office: rigney, do you 1) disagree with what the president said here? Do you 2) think we should let criminals and mentally unstable people have the access they currently do to weapons, particularly assault rifles? And do you 3) think taking measures to prevent criminals and mentally unstable people infringes on everyone else's 2nd amendment rights? Please answer 1-2-3. These should be simple enough questions for yes or no answers.

No no, let's not change the focus. I asked if you thought what you pointed out as coming out of Oklahoma was subverting the US constitution. Do you think those laws they passed are constitutional? These are actual laws they've passed, not made-up laws you claim are "bold steps to take away our guns".

So, you don't see any of this as subversion of the US constitution, even where it's been pointed out?

You know who else was proud of trying to subvert the US constitution? The Communists of the Soviet Union.

Learn to distinguish between someone showing an idea to be wrong and someone attacking you personally. If this is the way you choose to learn, fine. But you need to stop confusing ideas with the person who has them. As I said before, the vast majority of ideas people have are wrong, but they can often lead to successful ideas. Neither successful nor unsuccessful ideas make the person who has them brilliant or stupid. Take your "self" out of the equation, and realize that criticism of your ideas is not criticism of you.

You're trying to convert a logical argument into a reality-based one. Energy transfer is negated by market demand (if raising livestock for consumption was inefficient enough to upset cost-effectiveness, it wouldn't be a viable business model). Usable space for raising livestock can be (and is most often) done in areas people don't find attractive to live. And it's simply easier (and more efficient and economical) to improve inefficiencies than to prohibit consumption. So you think we could eventually develop the technology to feed the world on plants alone, but you conclude that bioengineering of animal protein sources will never reach similar technological levels? Again, that doesn't seem like it's based in reality.

Mining companies have to use some kind of oil or grease for equipment. That might come in 55 gallon drums.

I'm not calling you a crackpot, and I'm not belittling you. I'm saying you have to figure out how to make your arguments more cogent. You can't fall back on crackpot arguments.

Gilded, where you been, buddy? That's so cool that you knew we were talking about you before I sent the PM. Was this part of that time travel thing you will eventually not be having told me about?

This argument assumes that livestock eat plants that could have been eaten by humans, and that's not the case in most instances. It also assumes that all land currently grazed by livestock is suitable for farming, which is obviously not the case without a great deal of expense. And I'm not denying the antecedent, you're proposing a false dilemma. Just because current methods of factory farming are inefficient doesn't mean we need to stop eating meat to fix the problem. In that case, they aren't valid since improving the process to be more humane and efficient is hugely preferable. It doesn't involve giving up several species which have become domesticated and wouldn't survive in the wild, and are our only naturally occurring sources of vitamin B12. You'd also have to prove that there is enough arable land to provide enough of a plant-only diet for the entire world. Extreme measures like completely giving up meat on a voluntary basis are completely untenable. The amount of resources we'd have to expend selling such an idea would be cost-prohibitive, and quite frankly, I think would work about as well as any other kind of prohibition has worked with humans, especially omnivorous humans. Methane from livestock doesn't contribute to the net gain in greenhouse gases because the CO2 obtained from methanogenesis is from sources that used up atmospheric CO2 in the first place. I can search for a paper which shows this, but what you're suggesting is killing off the world's livestock in order to prevent them from burping. How is this a viable solution?

MOST ideas don't work, so this isn't a rational argument. You HAVE to do better than this in explaining your concepts, because "People laughed at Galileo" is the crackpot motto.