Phi for All

It's not really about belief. Accepted scientific theories have loads of evidence to support them. They represent the most likely explanation. Skeptical people don't accept anything as "proof", and most scientists are skeptical by nature. Theories are not proof, they just represent the best we know to this point. On the other hand, when something has literal mountains of evidence to support it, like evolution, it's safe to say it's most likely the correct explanation. But since we haven't yet run every experiment we can imagine on every possible creature on the planet, we say that evolution is still a theory.

edwardreed has been banned for multiple acts of plagiarism. He was warned to give citations and failed to cooperate. To those whose work he stole, we apologize sincerely for the leeway he was given.

I really like the features on that McIntosh. It looks like a quality unit so I just ordered two of them, one for my home theater and one for the servant's quarters.

Well, then I can't help you there. It's an infinite possibility vs finite spare time kind of thing. I see a lynch mob in small bang's future. So it's the holes in the box that make it a box? Or are the sides more important? I could see that, since you couldn't even have a top without at least two of the sides. I think we've gone far beyond the grammatical reasoning. I was just using it to separate a case for the box being different from the house. What we really need is a way to differentiate "in" from "inside". Stupid English. What if we had a wall to wall piece of cardboard that covered every inch of the floor in a house, and also ran six inches up each wall? Then you could have your definition of a box, and it would fit my definition of being able to interact with the house while in a box.

Beautiful. And that even refutes Cap'n Refsmmat's answer in post #2. If you're in a box in a house are you in a house or a box?? Answer: Neither, you are both the box AND the house! Very Zen. Good find, Appolinaria. OK. If you keep adding atypical things to the scenario, like restraints on a chair, and refrigerators on toilets, you're distorting what I've said in order to justify your argument. Moving the goalposts like that seems weak. Is that a straw man tied to the chair? Is this our final answer (for the million)? I'm not sure how I'll react if you're correct. Looking back, if you remove all but the first two posts of the thread, which is the more interesting answer? But you still won a house. Yay! I'm sorry, were those last two sentences supposed to make ME sound silly?

Perfect. And that's actually just what I want, something to play the disks in both formats. What I don't want is another situation like I have with my smartphone. I use my Blackberry Curve as an alarm clock, a timer and a stopwatch and it's got more songs than my iPod. I use it as a notepad for shopping at a dozen stores, it's my calendar and my source for email on the go. I can't hardly live without the map function and it takes good pictures and video. The only thing I don't like is it's not a very good cell phone. Gah! I'm not a big fan of 3D, and wouldn't that require me to get a 3D TV as well? Some movies are just incredible in 3D, totally justifying the extra expense, like Avatar. I guess it's the flying element, it always seems so perfect in 3D. Most of the stuff I see in 3D seems gimmicky and contrived for the format. I've read where the industry loves 3D because it's so hard to pirate. I can understand that, but I think they're involved in a little piracy themselves when they get to charge extra for the glasses every time and then make you give them back after each performance. When pressed, the theaters say it's because people always forget them, so they just automatically charge for them as a "convenience".

Is there like a pedophile handbook that teaches them to mention the witch children in Africa? I only ask because the Is it OK to have sex with kids? thread in the Ethics section mentions it too: Just sayin'.

I suspect you're right. Good point. Great answer. None of those examples precludes you from interaction with the house the way being in a box would. Being in bed is at least one normal interaction with the house. If you're in the box, you can't interact normally with the house until you get out of the box. The OP said nothing about being dead, although that's the type of twist one usually looks for in a riddle. Perhaps that's the answer. You're in a coffin in a mausoleum, which looks like a house: So what would a great answer be? You're interred? Not significantly. A house normally has windows. And your earlier example removed the top of the box. Is a house still a house if it has no roof? If you won a contest that had strict rules that said the grand prize is a house, and they tried to give you one without a roof, wouldn't you argue that a house needs a roof or it's not technically a house? I definitely detect a more team-spirited approach this time. I wish small bang would answer the direct question I asked in post #22.

"I can't wait until they could put wings on humans. Because when they could put wings on humans, they could put wings on pigs, and when they could put wings on pigs, lots of pretty girls from college owe me sex." -Chad Daniels

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This is most likely the case. I didn't buy the cheapest one the first time but it still wasn't terribly expensive, maybe $120. The second one was an impulse buy for like $75. This makes sense. I'll have to start looking for a good model. Any recommendations? This is what I'm used to. Ever since Nintendo started the trend of practically giving away the players and making their real profits on the games, I've been used to the players being fairly high quality. And although I so much preferred the CD and DVD formats over their predecessors, I was also aware of how much more markup the manufacturers were making. DVD disks are so much cheaper to make than VHS tapes were, they were cheaper to ship, cheaper to store, had fewer defects, yet they charged almost 50% more for DVDs. That always pissed me off, and it only got worse as the market became disk saturated. By the time they let us start burning our own CDs and DVDs, we knew how cheap the disks were, yet the price for movies only came down a couple of bucks, and they started marketing all the stuff that normally ended up on the cutting room floor as "Bonus Features". Actors flubbing their lines became "Gag Reels". So when Blu-ray promised even more of that, I have to say it didn't make me real excited. Yes, the HD picture is very good. But after a while, without the old standard sitting next to it to show how much better it is, it just becomes the standard. It's still pretty breathtaking right now, but I know marketing and I know there is a lot of hype to force this format change. And now the disks are again much more expensive, packed with camera angles I don't really need and director's narratives I won't listen to and deleted scenes I wish had been left deleted.

Well, since you're still stuck in the box, and you actually wish to interact with the house rather than just defiling the floor of whatever room you're in, you'd have to assume someone moved you into the house's bathroom, close enough to the toilet for this to be effective. Or perhaps right on top of the toilet, depending on where you're cutting the hole, what gender you are and how thorough a job of bathroom-going you plan on accomplishing. And even if we assume you're just a guy cutting a hole big enough to pee through, we further have to assume you have the... reach to be able to make this practical. That's really too many assumptions for a riddle, don't you think? I mean, I'd be a bit angry if the answer was that convoluted. Technically, you wouldn't just be "in" a box, you'd be more like "standing in" a box. And again, technically, if the box is open, you've just changed the definition of "box" to include "open box". Is it just the vertical sides that define a box? How many more iterations will it take before you have me standing on a flat piece of cardboard that you're still calling a box? I use this word "technically" because this is a puzzle after all. The OP stated a simple premise that seemed to have a simple answer. Ah, but that's usually where the "puzzle" part comes in. One tries to find some technicality to exploit to come up with an answer that's not so simple (well, some people do). And just like I'd be a bit irked if the answer is some convoluted stretch of the imagination with all kinds of caveats and assumptions not implied in the OP, I'd consider it a spectacular waste of time if the answer was the simple one, that you are in both a house and a box. Not a great riddle, that. Hey, that IS a good one. You should start your own puzzle thread instead of hijacking this one, Hardly. I love that joke, though I'm not at all surprised you never understood it before now.

Well, nice try, Lucky, but you're still functioning as a human while you're in your skin or your clothes (although you really can't be "out" of your skin, that's a bad analogy). If you're in a box in a house, you're in a box. You can't do anything you normally do in a house. You can't use the bathroom, go to the fridge, you can't even do the most basic thing to change being "in" a house: you can't go "out". Why? Because you're in a box. The box is in a house. The puzzle requires a human in the box, not a laptop, so let's toss out that bizarre example. And a human only partially in a bag, not fully enclosed? Ridiculous.

I have more DVDs than Blu-ray movies, and I'm finding the Blu-ray players I've had don't play them as well. The disks freeze in spite of being in pristine condition. I get a lot of "No Disk" messages also. I'm also concerned about the investment. Blu-ray took such a long time to dominate the market, and what with the economic slump, I find the hardware to be very cheaply made. The first Blu-ray player I had had to have the buttons on the top because it was too light to push them from the front. I'm wondering how much to invest in a physical format when downloading technology seems to be getting much better.

What a fascinating piece of technology! The industry obviously failed to get the market primed for this new format change, what with the economy and consumers that are getting tired of the hype. The technology itself is pretty great, quality-wise. I'm not that into the depth of experience offered with Blu-ray movies, watching the endless "making-of", deleted scenes and inside stories offered, but the picture and sound quality are definitely a cut above. My problem is that, with the earlier format war with HD DVD and the slow market, the Blu-ray players have moved past my original dilemma of how to keep playing my DVD collection while building a new format library and are now into streaming Netflix and Pandora and trying to act like my smart phone for versatility. I run Netflix through my Wii console so I'm really just looking for a player that plays both Blu-ray and DVDs but I'm on my second Blu-ray player and it's now refusing to be consistent with the old format. I don't know if this is an attempt to push us further away from the old format, or if they are just skimping on something that will eventually die anyway, or if I'm just not spending enough on a player I only need to do one thing, play disk movies. I'd like to hear what others think of the technology, and what the economic slump means in terms of how long and how much and wtf is going on with Blu-ray.

They're not saying your hazmat reg is unofficial. It's an official regulation that affects only the manufacturers of hazardous materials. And only when they have to label something hazardous: It's too specific and brief to be anywhere near what the government would need to make English the official language of the whole country. It's just basically saying that if you are going to sell your hazardous products in the US, you have to warn people, in English, and provide enough information that they can check it out before using it.

ABSOLUTELY NOT! Don't you EVER try to start one of these preachy, overly-biased threads outside of the religion forums again. If you once tried to hold an honest discussion about these matters, things would be different, but it's abundantly clear you're not here to learn, you're here to teach, and preach, and rant, and rave. Do you ever plan on discussing science here sometime? ! Moderator Note Moved to Religion.

I've often wondered how much of aging is decay and how much is the result of applied wisdom? When we're young, we run up and down the stairs each time we need something or want to put something away. As we get older, we learn to be more efficient and start putting things on the stairs that need to go up, then take them all at once to save trips. And do our reflexes slow down as much as we think? I remember in my 20s when I saw a glass get pushed off the counter as I was doing dishes and I quickly slid my bare foot under it so it wouldn't break, barely catching it in time and risking slicing my foot open if I miscalculated. And I remember something similar happening in my 40s but I hesitated and let the glass break. Were my reflexes slower or was I simply more cognizant of what a serious foot injury could do to me, being now wise enough to quickly reason that a glass wasn't worth the lost days at work and the emergency room bills if I miscalculated? Doesn't accumulated knowledge affect how we live our lives? I certainly don't take as many physical chances as I once did. Is that because I'm not as physical as before or is that why I'm not as physical as before? It's not as important to me to catch every frisbee my family or friends throw like it was 30 years ago. I never thought about pulling a hamstring or the results of falling while running at full speed when I was young, but those are definite concerns now. What would accumulated knowledge do to us physically if we were immortal? I'm assuming the kind of immortality where we could die from serious injury but old age is not a concern. I suppose it would make a difference if we could regenerate damaged tissue but I still think wisdom and experience tempers our thought processes and makes us act differently. How differently would we act after a few thousand years?

This is the one that really makes me sad. It's creationist 101, and it's been handed down since the Scope's trial. It really shows that the speaker has no interest in understanding how evolution works, and is content to repeat the ignorant catch phrases of others. No offense meant to you personally, Brainteaserfan. This is a strawman argument I've heard my whole life, it's inaccurate, it's dishonest and it pains me to see it still is used on the youth in this country.

I really wish they would. This would accomplish several things. Congress would be showing the people that we've gotten along quite well up to this point without an official national language law, and that only something unlikely and drastic would ever create a need for one. It would also point out that we don't need a law for every damn thing, that common sense can be quite powerful when used more than occasionally. And lastly, since the majority of US citizens have no appreciation of subtlety, they would completely miss the point and have every member of Congress removed so we could start fresh.

Your situation seems better than average, and I'm not sure it's representative of homeschooling in most areas. I think you have a well thought out program that lends itself to creating great potential. Again, you may be an exception. Most young-earth creationists I've had discussions with believe all of science is suspect since they think it's deceiving everyone about the true age of the earth. And it's not just one small part of one subject. Geology, history, astronomy, biology, so many areas of education are affected when you ignore evidence of an ancient Earth. And not all homeschools are for religious reasons. In fact, some people in areas where religion takes precedence over education homeschool their kids to keep them away from public schools where the teachers fudge the curriculum in favor of their religion.

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I think it varies as much as any educational environment. Great experiences and horrible ones, and everything in between. And like the environment, the students can vary the same way. I don't think there is an optimum way for everyone. Socialization definitely needs to be augmented, imo, but there are lots of after school activities, organizations and groups that can do that. Look at your average textbook and think about having to remove anything that talks about the world before 4000 B.C.E. Your books have to have pictures of dinosaurs and early humans co-existing. You can't get those in public schools.