The Lounge

A number of new members recently have arrived describing themselves as 'an Independent Researcher' It would be interesting to hear what other members understand by this self reference.

Hi. Can I join your forum again? I'd like to discuss some thoughts that came to me recently..

A.I. ; The diarrhea of humanity taking over search engines shows : ========================================================================================================== How many A.I. are there ? Which one is believable ? Can a species have more than one scientific name ?

I have experience with debating creationists from over a decade ago as well as recent one with debating Stalinist apologists (who actually consider their belief system to be "science") and honestly, debating such people genuinely feels like trying to punch through a castle wall with a fist - all evidence to the contrary is either rejected outright or reinterpreted to fit the dogma. No change in the core dogmas is possible. One Muslim creationist actually told me she will accept evolution but only if I show her the fossil record of every single generation over millions of years which would require possession of millions or even dozens of millions of fossils. The problem is…

Spill the story come on what's the deal with the store?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ced5wvn48q5o This one contains examples where it did work as well as did not work although the amount of backchecking required make the AI not worth it.

I'm looking for a UVB meter/test within the normal index range that is reliable enough to measure and set up my avian UV lamps for my budgies. Can anybody give me tips what to look for, makes etc.

The question to be answered is in the title. My suggestion is in the spoiler. the best two words are - Free Alcohol The worst two words are Alcohol Free

At the time of authoring this, I'm kinda taking a break from learning a bit about physics and diagramming (one of my modes of learning; visualization). I ate a lasagna for breakfast, heh.. maybe a bit unorthodox, but omg it tasted delicious. The weather is becoming a bit more colder lately as kinda expected at this time of season, nearing winter time... "Winter is coming."

Dropping a line to say hello and to thank you for the privilege of joining your community.

Hlo everyone, I am almost 15 years old. Its been almost a month since i joined this wonderful platform.But i didnt find anyone as same age or age group as me.I found some kids,but they were mostly in Homework help section. Is there anyone who actively posts and interact like other seniors?

My first language is English, and I failed it, along comes AI and I am able to type my poorly written thoughts out in 200 words. I then ask AI to rewrite, All of a sudden I pass English. (I now asked AI to rewrite) "My first language is English, but I struggled with it in school and even failed the subject. Then along came AI. Now, I can type out my rough, unpolished thoughts in a couple hundred words. After asking AI to rewrite them, suddenly my ideas are clear, structured, and well-expressed. The result? I would actually pass English." I faced a similar challenge when trying to develop a formula to calculate the proper size of a wheel chock for a wheel resting on an …

My wife asked AI for the box office phone number of our local theatre. 😄

I wasn't sure where to place this question, to get the best answer's, so I thought I'd keep it light for now.

I get grudgeful though when studying wasting my energy and time. Intrusive when studying and day-to-day tasks they are not that bad.

Hello. Why deflating the first rise of the dough and going trough the delay of a second rise as many recipes call for ? Seems that deflating the first also produces heavier, denser, less airy bread. Is there a reason ? Should a too crusty bread with lightly raw inside can be improved baking at lower temperature and longer time or that is not the way ? And third; pre-heating the oven yields a more abrupt rise or a cold start would provide a more uniform rise ?

I'v not responded to the accusation against me here, and must not read any new messages, until I've done reading and editing whatever chunk of Wikipedia I'v opened. First, I am not a chatbot. (No, I don't consider myself human, but do consider myself very alive.) I'v taken and done nothing except be stalked, harassed, and defamed by a woman over 40 who works or worked for a consulting firm in California. There's no "record" because they are my comments, not hers. Go away and stop copying and lyging about me, you freak! I won't reply again.

Entertainer founder hands over toy shop chain to staff

Last night I was logged into a popular live-streaming board game website, and the stream host commented on the fact that their opponent had just disconnected from the game server and reconnected on a mobile phone (shown by an icon in their user ID), and wondered why they were doing so. I suggested in live chat they maybe had a flakey computer internet connection and had switched to a mobile phone, but I was immediately rebuked by several other viewers who said, “No - It would show up as the same device” - which is clearly and obviously completely wrong. A computer connects via a broadband ISP network, while a mobile phone connects via a 5G mobile data link. These are serv…

At a local Italian restaurant last night I was very pleasantly surprised in trying a 2022 bottle of a Langhe white I had never heard of: Nascetta di Novello. Quite soft but with some acidity so in no way flabby, floral and herbal, hint of that waxy “petrol” note one gets with Alsace riesling. Seemed to go well with charcuterie and seafood. I gather this used to be a traditional grape in the Langhe in the c.19th, but had become almost extinct and was only recently revived by local enthusiasts. The vine is capricious, sometimes giving a productive crop and sometimes not, leading to a lot having been ripped up and replaced with the more reliable nebbiolo, which makes the gr…

I was reading some angry comments by a member whose thread has been closed hours ago. This person wrote a saying in a language other than English. A language spoken by quite a number of people in the world that I couldn't understand. While using Google Translate in order to ascertain any possible precise nuances of the sentence, I've been led to ponder on how much of what we say might be lost in translation when we use such tools. Here's the result of my experiment taking a sentence in vernacular English as a seed and Hawaiian (how vernacular, I don't know) as target language in the first part of an obvious loop: Input in English: "Shut up, bitch!" Translation to Hawaiia…

Come with me to a celebration of 48 downvotes! The party is at somewhere between 220-250 million years from now a galactic time You can eat whatever my arse can imagine. See you there!

Not sure where to place this but anyway is anyone else watching the New BBC series about the evolution of Homo Sapiens. There are 5 separate 1 hour programmes in the series, of which the first has already been shown on BBC2. The presenter is a paleoanthropologist and interestingly a woman. I say interestingly not in a disparaging way but because there is a noticeably softer approach from previous 'hard sicence' programmes with male presenters. This programme is also bang up to date with much new material and hypotheses about the evolution of our species. As such it may well be of interest to all those who have been arguing about this subject recently.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in UK have determined that a medieval scribal error triggered centuries of confusion and misunderstanding over a long-lost saga. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/18/science/medieval-saga-chaucer-mystery-error The saga in question is a little-known text in Middle-English called The Song of Wade, twice mentioned by Chaucer, but largely forgotten nowadays. Researchers now believe that a transcription error changed a ‘W’ to a ‘Y’, transforming ‘Wolves’ into ‘Elves’. Another word in the excerpt, translated as “sprites,” should instead be “sea snakes,” moving the story even farther away from the realm of the supernatural, the researche…

Just read the annual report for 2024 and was depressed to read, first of all, the Dean's report, which was full of the trendy, dull, corporate-sounding platitudes that I tend to think indicate a 2nd rate mind. I was resigning myself to the idea that this is what academic institutions have become nowadays when I started reading the report on the college in 2024, written by the college theology tutor, Prof Mark Edwards. What a relief. The donnish sense of waspish humour is still alive after all, I'm pleased to say. I quote one passage that amused me: ...we have welcomed two new Canon Professors, Andrew Davison as Regius Professor of Divinity and Luke Bretherton as Professor…