Phi for All

Radical Edward, great to have you back! A legend steps out of the pages of history. I hope you'll stay to recharge your intellectual batteries.

Let me ask you this: You're in NYC now, where there is a robust Jewish community influence. Does it differ from what you were used to growing up in Israel?

How about feeding a lab rat nothing but pesticide-laced Doritos for a few months? You could start out with small doses until it built up an immunity to the toxins, but eventually the loss of protective enzymes would lead to its cancerous death.

This *sounds* foreboding, very doomy doom, but can you give me any actual examples of what you mean? What actions did we procrastinate on to the point where we are now too late?

Have you done the calculations on how much energy the pump uses as opposed to how much energy the water turbine produces?

Still, it might be worth a try for limited applications, like digging post holes to a certain depth.

YT, what mechanism is causing the "digger" to keep lowering as the hole gets deeper? What's powering the pump and does it use more power than you can create with pumped out water? Not necessarily "whatever". Wouldn't there be limitations on the pressure it creates?

Just cover him with salt.

Update: Graviphoton's seven day suspension has been extended to coincide with eventual contraction of the universe.

Force of habit. I usually move these things to Engineering so it doesn't bother the physicists. Not a bad idea though. Eventually it will gain the stigma that Speculations has with the crackpot-types, but I like the idea of a sticky that hopefully cuts down on the number of times we have to remind people that friction and gravity actually exist.

Nice sentence. Not aimed at any particular opinion, but nicely sums up the membership of at least one Canadian extremist group. We knew they had to exist, ay? "They got some woman sewing stars on a flag, they're dyeing their coats blue and you don't even want to know what they're planning on doing to your tea, man! That GW guy is behind it all!" You are an evil, evil man. May you rot and burn in... Belize.

False dilemma.

Generalizations are stupid. People aren't stupid, not if they're alive and functioning in today's society. People just say stupid things, like "People are stupid, bottom line". I think he was! I'm not sure about the IQ thang, but many of you are just talking about behavior. I think perceptions are influenced by many factors these days, the least of which is the prevalence of the entertainment media highlighting stupid antics. YouTube shows several million videos of skateboarders trying to shred a metal handrail down some steps, and they always slip up and destroy themselves. Conclusions: all skateboarders are vandals and idiots. But they're not. Similarly, the Fundamental Attribution Error is at work here. You see someone doing something questionable and because you don't know the context, you assume they're stupid. We forget that we ourselves have done seemingly stupid things for very good reasons. I saw a guy buy an ice cream cone from a street vendor once. He took a couple of licks as he walked away and suddenly flicked the whole thing out into the street. I thought he was pretty stupid until I caught up with him at the crosswalk and heard him explaining to his friend about the last time he had to go to the hospital because a bee stung him. I never saw the bee so I didn't know the context that would cause him to do such a weird thing.

"I wouldn't worry about global warming if I were you, Venus has been warming and cooling since it began and this time is no different." -Krrtl Rynkzzyn, Venusian Senior Prophet

I actually like this question, since it touches on the part of creationism that I can never get around (besides the murder of science that's usually performed). If we were created by an intelligent god, and designed also to be intelligent, why would we ever come to the conclusion that our God poofed all those fossils into rock strata and made all of it appear to be millions of years old? It took mankind quite a long time and much experimentation and invention to be able to accurately date the physical evidence and the findings seem quite intelligent. The answers fit like puzzle pieces. How is it more intelligent to believe that God put that evidence there just to fool people? How can creationists believe their god would be so deceitful? I realize that every religion has an answer they believe to be THE ONE TRUTH, but if creationists believe in an intelligent designer of intelligent creatures like us, why does the designer want us to spend 2000 years (1/3 of Earth's history??!! lol) crawling up out of our ignorance, only to throw over what He plainly put there for us to find in favor of an answer involving omnipotence and fraudulent pranks?

Pick which of these iterations you want to keep, Graviphoton. You have too many threads open on the same topic. I lose sleep at night worrying about how much time our members are wasting. Is this the one you want to keep?

Why don't you just follow in the footsteps of so many famous You-Tube producers and dare someone else to do it while you film it?

Let's move this to Engineering to start. If you don't get a good answer there we can move on to Physics.

Viable for me would be cost-effective and sustainable. It would make no sense to replace oil for any application with something that is either a LOT more expensive or will be depleted just as quickly. Is there anything that we MUST use oil for that has no cost-effective, sustainable alternative? If there is we should be saving oil for that. I just couldn't think of an application that didn't have several other solutions.

Science can only measure natural phenomena. A designer who chooses to be unobservable is, by definition, supernatural. You are certainly free to not rule out any possibility but science has boundaries on what it can measure. This is the reason ID is not a scientific theory. Certain parts of it can't be tested at all, therefore it can never pass the kind of rigorous scrutiny science demands.

Sorry we jumped on the ID thing so hard but everyone here has heard science put down by IDers and creationists, usually with incorrect information and deliberate falsehoods. Evolution isn't about how life developed. It's about the change in allele frequency in a population over time. Abiogenesis attempts to explain the origins of life on earth. Two separate theories that are often confused by ID proponents and creationists (not that you're either).

Good catch. I was answering what I thought CarolAlynn meant, rather than what she actually said. Sloppy on my part, to be sure.

Bit of a step down, though. And I doubt it would be legal, since if the president couldn't fulfill the office the VP would get a third term as president. I don't know for sure though. Not many presidents have the stamina for more than eight years in the White House. Many enter vibrantly and leave looking like the walking dead. No. Wait, let me think about it. No.

The eye is useful, definitely. Eyelids are useful too, in keeping the eye clean of debris, especially if you exist on land. But for many aquatic species, eyelids are unnecessary because they already possess a long enough tongue to clean them. It's not so mind-boggling to understand why evolution would choose not to give some lizards eyelids. It wasn't necessary. Some patterns are just physically better, like triangular construction for strength, the Golden Mean for efficiency and many others. Science isn't interested in "why". That's for metaphysics, religion and philosophy. We *need* science to be objective and free from what we want to believe. I think we also need metaphysics, religion and philosophy to ask "why". But we need to keep science separate so it's effective. Being open-minded sometimes means you're led by the heart. Being skeptical means you want answers that follow some kind of logical path to make sure you're not just hearing what you want to hear.

Please note that jsispat's idea (not a theory) was not "ruled out". His methodology leads him to a false conclusion. He has taken an analogy too far. Perhaps he should define what he means by "alive", since it obviously doesn't conform to any definition recognized by science. Having common definitions is crucial to the scientific method. Oooh, could you get me something that looks like his autograph?