Phi for All

Just be careful not to poison the well, effendi.

That's just it, I'll bet the majority of gun owners have not had any kind of formal training or certification. I'd even go further and say that most guns are not kept properly safeguarded against children. I've heard people say that having a gun under lock and key is worthless when you have an intruder in your house. Part of the problem with a lot of the studies is that it's hard to say whether having a gun actually saved a life, while killing someone with a gun definitely results in death. Do you know for sure that an intruder has murder on his mind? Many gun owners say they don't care, that their property is worth defending with lethal force because they and their families are in harm's way. I'd be interested in the statistics showing how many unarmed intruders were shot because they had someone's stuff in their hands when they got caught. It's a tough call. I would never want to risk killing someone just for stealing my stuff. On the other hand, I'd defend my life and my family's lives by any means if I knew we were in danger of losing them from armed intruders. I have guns I've trained with, but they're locked up, I don't keep them where I could get to them if I heard a bump in the night.

What you quoted made it sound like Obama was saying the business owners didn't build their businesses. That's not what he meant. He was really saying that business owners didn't build the highways and other infrastructure items paid for by tax dollars, that they didn't educate their own workers in public schools, that they didn't get where they are simply because they worked hard and were smart. Everyone in our system today was helped by that system in one way or another.

The links you gave were quite enlightening. I also found it interesting that overall gun ownership is declining while more and more people are saying our guns laws should either remain the same or be even less restrictive. And hasn't for a long time. I'd be willing to bet that as more prisons are privatized, the publicly funded prisons will house only the costliest, most violent criminals, and the private prisons will take everyone else. And that's when you're going to see lobbying against the death penalty by previously right-wing elements. Killing your inventory is bad for business, after all.

Hunting guns will probably keep getting exclusions, and I'm OK with that as long as restrictions are in place and registry is mandatory. I don't consider assault rifles to be hunting guns. The biggest argument for guns, self-defense, can easily be shown as false in study after study. But the argument about only criminals having guns is a very visceral and potent one. And you have the fear factor over the last decade of terrorism making even non-gun owners think we shouldn't give them up completely. The other argument you hear is part of the constitutional argument, that we should have guns in case we need to take the country back from bad government. I can't think of any way that private owners of guns could possibly stand up against the military if an aggressive government decides to declare martial law. At that point, anyone who isn't a duly appointed law-enforcement officer or a member of the military is going to be fired on if they insist on toting their guns around. This also gives the aggressive government justification for using the military on civilians. As long as we have a non-biased media who isn't in the pocket of government or special business interest groups, I'm sure any overly aggressive government would be immediately chastised for using deadly force against its own citizens. I suppose the best reason to keep the gun laws the way they are is so prisons can continue to be privatized. Money is made from selling the guns, maintaining the ammunition and then you get to have an inmate that brings in prison revenue for life. Hmmmm, maybe we should abolish the death penalty....

I think they also have to leave themselves some wiggle room in case there's a technical error and the case gets thrown out. They can't try him for the same offense twice, so they have to make sure they've got their bases covered. Death penalty cases are much more difficult on the victim's families as well, since they tend to get drawn out longer. I don't think it's a matter of the victims having undue influence so much as wanting to make sure everyone's on the same page before the prosecution starts.

Newhart is famous for his "on the phone" routines. All his television shows capitalized on this too, he often got calls from various people. His timing is impeccable, and that trademark sort of dialogue-stutter is so realistic you could swear there's someone on the other end of the line. Imo, you can't go back too far for your comedy though. I remember seeing some old Ernie Kovacs shows and that guy had pauses between jokes you could drive a truck through. As people got used to the medium of television, they picked up the pace.

"I have some input for you from a hardware perspective." "I prefer exothermic reactions, so how about spreading some of that hotness over my way?" "I expect a little resistance when I turn up the voltage."

I'm just going to say this straight out, nothing personal, but you're at least four years away from publishing in any reputable journal. You won't be taken seriously because your terminology isn't up to standard and your knowledge of mainstream science is only at high school level. There's a lot you're about to learn in college. You have to crawl before you can walk. Beginning actors shouldn't tackle Shakespeare, 1st year med students shouldn't attempt brain surgery and novice scientists shouldn't try to get hypotheses peer-reviewed. You should study the scientific method. This will show you how scientific knowledge is like building bridges. You always start with the best foundation you can, and make sure each part you build onto is solid, and each part you build with fits with those before it, so you can trust each foot of the bridge as you're building it. Intuition needs to be tested repeatedly before it's trusted, and I think you have a lot of intuition telling you you're right about your ideas. That's fine, but a good scientist never takes anything for granted unless it's been repeatedly tested using sound methodology. Imagine someone saying, "Wow, I have a whole new way to build bridges, and I built this one from scratch using my new idea. It hasn't really been tested until now, so all of you just trust me and go ahead and drive your cars across and you'll see how great my idea is." This is not how bridges are built, and it's not the way science is done.

I'm sure you've read threads other than the ones you've started, and you can see that the terminology is very important in science. Definitions used by everyone must be the same, otherwise you see more quibbling about terms than discussion. As an example, I think quibbling is what you mean rather than "debate". Debate is just a formal discussion, debate is what we do here. Those who've studied science their whole lives have added layer upon layer to their knowledge. It's the way science works, with theories overlapping and supporting each other with evidence that compounds their predictive power. It's tough to jump into that with your own ideas and not encounter some turbulence. I personally like to read more than I post. The scientific method gives me explanations I can trust, and mainstream knowledge has the most evidence gathered using that method, with the most scientists analyzing, discussing, debating and arguing the merits of ideas, hypotheses and especially theories.

Are you saying you don't want to learn from discussing your hypotheses, you just want people to accept them without question?

This is an issue that most people are on the same page with, but they let the rhetoric thrown around by politicians obfuscate matters. No one I know, no one I've ever asked thinks a widowed mother of three should be tossed out on the streets with no welfare, and those same people don't want to pay for a work-capable opportunist to sit around drinking beer and watching soaps on the TV we all paid for with that welfare. My conclusion is that people are willing to fund welfare that reaches the right people. There's some common ground the vast majority have. We just need to identify those areas where it makes sense for us to spend federal dollars, remove any profit incentive since that's what's been attracting the sharks, and then be vigilant to make sure it's well regulated and uncorrupted. It's insane to think that privatizing formerly publicly-funded programs like prisons and schools could do anything but increase the problems created by the greed inherent when profit is the motive. Leave profit for business, and leave the business out of our public programs. They are not compatible.

"Ready to learn" is a fantastic way to be. Congratulations on coming here and asking questions. If the universe in your first idea "died down", where did the energy for a supernova come from? An explosion needs to explode into an existing space, and at T=0 there was nothing to explode into. Thinking of it as an explosion also confuses people into thinking the Big Bang started somewhere you can pinpoint and moved out like a debris cloud a bomb might make. This also is inaccurate. The universe is even now still expanding and cooling but is at the same time fully self-contained. There are some analogies that may help, like thinking of a loaf of bread that expands, with raisins in it for galaxies, so as the whole thing expands the raisins get farther apart too.

I didn't want to take anything away from the thread honoring swansont's achievements, so I split these posts off into their own thread. Post a good pick up line for a scientist from a particular branch. If any of these actually happen to work for you, we'll want details, and possibly some evidence.

This is why we need to take our government back from the ones pulling the assholes' strings. Restraint in government is called "regulation", and you're right, we need to tighten them up (again), and make sure we never let them get this lax again. Our taxes represent a lot of power, but I personally think this power should be used for us all, and not for profit-based motives. This is money that should be used for the country as a whole, not to fund some trickle-down mess that mostly benefits those at the very top.

Next time you may want to quote the parts of any offsite link you think are relevant. I know I stopped reading when the author brought up another God-of-the-gaps type argument about no one yet being able to replicate RNA to create life. Maybe not now but we're getting very close, and when we do, another gap in our knowledge gets filled rationally, with natural, real-world explanations. Just saying. Edit to add: Your signature seems quite at odds with creationism. Curiosity is not normally a strong suit with those who deny what reality shows them.

Now if I could only get you to compare yourself to Galileo I'd have bingo....

It's all in the pick up lines. Spot the disciplines: "You look extremely reproductive tonight, my dear!" "Do you like the drink I made you? Wanna see what it made my lab rats do?" "If I kiss you, you have to kiss me back. It's a Law."

This makes it sound like you have some misconceptions about the theory. Nothing about it suggests there was anything, or nothing, before it happened. Nothing about it suggests it was a singular occurrence. We can only measure what occurred very shortly after the expansion started, and that's what the theory focuses on. This thread is definitely speculative, though, since there really is no current way of measuring what happened before. But I wouldn't call it a fantasy. There's nothing supernatural or whimsical at work here.

! Moderator Note Let's hope that now being able to ignore one's nemesis is a satisfactory solution. And to anyone else reading this, please don't EVER go through and delete whole posts from any thread you've been in. Take the time to post things you're proud of. Since there is no further reason for this to be open, I'll close it now.

Nice strawmen. I said you do as much preparation as makes you feel safe enough. Whether or not it really is enough is beside the point. Again, your ability to deal with calamity is greater when you know what you're dealing with. That's not ever going to change, so whether you ever find out about the calamity or not, knowledge is the only thing that can really help. Ignorance pretty much guarantees you're going to succumb to whatever comes along. And I said I wanted to know about the asteroid, not that I'm telling the entire planet's population. But I understand why you have to use fallacies to make ignorance look good.

I don't know about all of them, but swansont typically wears nothing but a trench coat with a big button that says, "Ask me about my angular momentum!". Women dig it when he talks about rotating rigid bodies.

You're keying on a few words that fire up your emotions. Granted, Obama probably should have said, "If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that alone", but go out and try to build a business with no publicly-educated employees or customer-base, no publicly built roads, no airports and no other publicly funded infrastructure.

In this instance, it's not so much a normative judgement as it is using income as a basis for figuring income taxes. This is our tax revenue, and we have a great deal of that money already set aside as foreign aid. When we give subsidies and exemptions to companies that further offshore work our own workers could do, it further reduces the strength of public revenues and weakens wage growth while prices continue to climb. Again, it's not a normative judgement. Someone who is in the top 5% of wage earners is NOT normal, nor is the person who is in the bottom 5%, specifically in regards to their income. padren, great post, but I still maintain that the wealthy need MORE of the infrastructure we all pay for. They have more to lose if we fall, they use more of it, and as you said, if they want to do business here instead of Somalia, they need to pay the bill.

The Big Bang is actually the name we use for what happened AFTER T=0. You really can't have a good model, much less a theory, of what went on at T<0. The math fails us at T=0, physics sort of gives a shrug. It's still valid, I'm pretty sure, but you can't really work with infinite density and zero volume in a mathematical model. We need to understand how quantum mechanics combines with gravity before we can get any closer to understanding T=0, much less what went on at T<0. With your first idea, are you saying that every star in the universe went supervova at the same time? Your second idea assumes that two universes could occupy their own finite spaces and somehow grow to collide with one another. Did they merge, in your opinion, or did the two cancel most of each other out, creating a hot dense expansion of the remainder? The Big Bang, despite it's name, was not so much an explosion as an expansion.