Phi for All

! Moderator Note Waaaay too personal. Attack ideas, please, not people.

Just saw a documentary about a male spider that's evolved a red face to make the voracious females hesitate just long enough so they don't get eaten immediately. She first assesses whether they're poisonous or not, then decides if they're pretty enough to mate with. If not, she eats them anyway!

I hope his expansion of the IRS will include efforts to remove private interests from the relationship between the average citizen and their government. Those private interests are the ones who lobby to make the tax structure far more complicated than it needs to be to force People to use accountants and services like TurboTax and H&R Block. The IRS (I think it was Hassan Minhaj on The Patriot Act where I heard this) has the ability to simply send us a bill (or a refund check) based on the records they keep, and you would only send in a return if your figures were different. I can't help but think how Republicans of 30 years ago would have jumped on board wholeheartedly wrt infrastructure. What's happened to them? Biden obviously wants to put a LOT of people to work, fix a bunch of roads and bridges, and today's GOP is shaking their heads like it's a bad thing. Are they still fixated on building walls? Every Republican friend I have has been raging about fixing infrastructure as long as I've known them, and I can see it in their faces that their current leadership is leaving them baffled as to why they don't want to work on roads and bridges. And I'm so glad about the family and education support. This is why a society has a government in the first place, imo, to provide a high base level of opportunity for as many of its People as possible. The US has a VERY big ignorance problem right now, and better education has to be a priority.

You seem like you're going out of your way to be "difficult to understand", despite the evidence that your points are being lost, and that at one point you were concerned about it.

! Moderator Note Please open another thread for a different topic. "Solid evidence" means you're no longer talking about conspiracies.

! Moderator Note In this section, you need to show us why we should bother to redefine concepts that are already well understood in favor of your idea. So far, it seems like you simply ran into some social science you didn't understand, and rather than ask questions until you did, you chose to make up this stuff instead. So please show us why it's not only necessary, but should replace the science we have.

This is basically correct. And the BB theory doesn't quite go all the way back to t=0, so not only can we not know anything about the universe prior to that time, it's also, by definition, NOT "the creation". There you go, trying to describe pre-BB existence again, even though you said you assumed it's unknowable. 😁 "Beyond our physics" isn't a valuable phrase. We exceed our own knowledge on a minute-by-minute basis, and expressing our best current explanations as theory allows us to constantly update the sum total. "Just popped into existence" is particularly unhelpful when trying to map all the variables that went into the LCDM model. It's inaccurate, misleading, and trivializes the rigor with which these calculations are currently applied. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but like any theory it has its areas of application, and it has its limits (extrapolating back to the moment of the Big Bang using GR yields infinite temperatures and densities before we actually get to t=0).

VenusPrincess has been banned for continued breaking of the rules on civility and bad faith arguments.

I'm sure you have some unevidenced position that lets you define "this" in a way that's only meaningful to you. Your statement has no reasoning behind it, it's vague and retaliatory, and just like conspiracy arguments, it has no evidence to lend it credibility. Or were you waving your hands goodbye?

! Moderator Note This kind of waving-hands bullshit doesn't fly here. You've made multiple extraordinary claims with no intention of backing any of them up (not like you really could, since so many are incorrect) even after being told to do so or be in violation of our rules. We don't skimp on rigor in discussion here, and your style of making unevidenced claims as an argument against current mainstream explanations simply isn't worth the time it takes to respond to you. Nobody is learning anything from your posts except the bizarre things you believe. Evidence is the key here; if you post again on this forum, please use some to support your statements. Any more of this style will be fodder for the Trash Can. Thread closed.

! Moderator Note This question is for members only. Anyone who joins to answer this with a link to commercial software will be spam-banned.

! Moderator Note This, among other posts, is an example of bad faith arguments. You appear to have no intention of supporting your extraordinary assertions with even a minimal amount of evidence, let alone the extraordinary amounts it should take. You mention "skews" and "rapes" and "flaws" that show a limited understanding of the science involved. You make statements when you should be removing ignorance with questions. Step up the rigor or this gets shut down. This is a SCIENCE discussion forum.

This is why conspiracy is exactly the wrong thing to promote. It preys on a natural suggestibility we have when we don't feel comfortable, and reduces the standards we normally hold ourselves to. If a conspiracy had any actual evidence, it would be admissible in a court. It could be shown to have happened. It would no longer be just a conspiracy. But since it has nothing real to support it, those proposing it rely on suggestion and misdirection to form fallacious arguments, the only kind they can support ("Science can't explain why Polaris remains perfectly aligned above the North Pole without a flat Earth").

As soon as conspiracy enters these debates ("Scientists are deceiving us with this round Earth lie"), facts, logic, and critical thinking take a second place to suspicion, fear-mongering, and incredulity. If a person's biases become even more strongly confirmed in the face of facts that show how wrong they are, that person isn't being rational, and further debate with them is pointless. Something besides a conversation is needed to help them.

! Moderator Note Moved from The Lounge to Medical Science.

! Moderator Note Sorry, but this is a science discussion forum. Conspiracies have no evidence to make talking about them meaningful, otherwise they'd be fact. Cherry-picking from the entire web means the probability of finding just about anything you want is very high. It's like reading garbage into the writings of Nostradamus, or pointing in hindsight to the accuracy of your horoscope. If you can think of a way to support your proposals with evidence, so your concerns gain a more trustworthy basis for conversation, the thread can stay open. Otherwise, we don't waste the membership's time with conspiracy. More rigor, please.

Consider a spherical cow, sliced thinly and pan-fried.... Maybe we should reach out and ask them to join? Open a thread about how beefy science has become in the 21st century and they'll just HAVE to respond. I think that's the problem they have with Neal; they prefer steak, and Tyson is a big name in chicken. Just sayin'.

Michio Kaku was the "pop-star" that got me interested in science discussion, but it quickly became clear that the woo kept his name bouncing around far more than his scientific rigor.

I read a good Vox article that points out how a relationship between Hollywood and various police departments basically allowed the police in the US to frame themselves ALWAYS as the protagonists. TV shows and movies hire police consultants who've been able to edit scripts they didn't feel reflected true procedure, so what we think we know about cops has been shaped by cops ever since Jack Webb and Dragnet. Prior to that, the police struggled with an image of corruption and buffoonery.

Emotions are great motivators, but many folks don't use them correctly, imo. They get passionate or angry or frustrated in a way that wastes the energy that could be used. It's like using a motor to spin a flat piece of metal. It just spins and does no work, but if you angle the metal so it resists the air you create a propeller, something that actually does some work. So find something productive to achieve, and put all your anger and passion behind THAT. Don't just wave your hands. Be careful assigning behavior like this to all humans. We've prospered as a species partly by balancing our fears and our curiosities. Boldness isn't lessened one bit by lots of careful research and testing the waters. Without careful consideration, "bold" becomes "rash and foolhardy".

You've expanded the scope of what "digitally immortal" means to you, so my questions about data storage media and a source of power are made moot. Apparently our current digital technology will be sustained forever by space and time and energy simply because you've applied some laws. I fail to see any benefits to this approach, but if it helps you make sense of the universe, I would be interested in hearing how.

! Moderator Note You really need to stop organizing your arguments in this conspiracy model, where you make opinionated insinuations you don't intend to support with evidence. It's virtually impossible to discuss anything meaningful, especially on a science site, when such bad faith is exhibited. That's why it's against the rules.

That stretches the definition of both words into meaninglessness.

If we're all living, we're evolving. If we're living in different conditions, we're selecting for traits every generation that make us more successful in those conditions. That's one of the ways to show there is no "purpose" for evolution. Success in an environment is just about surviving until you can pass those genes along, as iNow has been saying. "Purpose" is an abstract concept, an assumption made by highly intelligent humans who make sense of their world by imposing patterns upon it, then interpreting the patterns.

This is the Evolution, Morphology, and Exobiology section. Supernatural explanations like the above are completely off-topic. There's nothing physiologically we're designed best for. There's no "intended use" for our bodies, because there was no intention. We have developed a high degree of intelligence that, along with other combinations of factors, allows us to adapt in ways other creatures can't. But then, they can do things we can't do. Toss us in the ocean without our tools and we won't do well. But if you're looking for something we alone seem best suited for, then I would say spreading life from Earth to other planets. We have evolved the capability to do that.