Phi for All

Sebasfort has been banned after his first 5 posts here. We normally have more patience trying to get people to take their fingers out of their ears and actually DISCUSS a subject, but nobody here deserves to be abused from a soapbox like that. All rant, no reason gets old FAST.

Joseph Lazar has been banned for breaking our rules against sockpuppetry and abusive posts (among others), and for his tireless efforts to raise awareness about how unsupported his ideas are.

"Sadly, this" refers to Strange's learning about the album only because the writer died. He wasn't talking about "that", so your argument is an obvious bananaman.

Perhaps this is Twinings way of helping the police put these criminals behind bars, like dye packets in the money from bank heists. Green is the new black.

Is the honey darker in shade than the tea? If so, it would naturally make the tea darker. You mention it turns "black", but you also say it turned a "dark color". Which is correct? Not all dark colors are black.

Marzipan is made from almonds, and is undoubtedly easier to sculpt with: The big question is, can they get it to taste just like chicken?

Both your sky spirit and your imagination seem to have rejected accumulated human knowledge. Ignorance is bliss! Enjoy your strange, self-induced feelings.

And we learned a lot in each so far. Why reject so much accumulated human knowledge in favor of the unevidenced power of your sky spirit?

And you think scientists are rigid thinkers, behind the ball when it comes to the future?! Most of us have moved past the Bronze Age.

Let me guess, it's on her Kaboom!

Which, coincidentally, happens to be my Native American name.

Does being bipolish in Warsaw mean anything different than elsewhere? Have you posed for any of the geeky magazines? Really well done, Janus. Ya know, someday these scientists are gonna invent something that will outsmart a rabbit.

Sometimes I wonder if you're really serious about being a nerd, koti. You're never at the rallies, and comments like this make me question your sincerity.

Bugs Bunny in front of a lithium-cracking facility? Hilarity will ensue, surely.

Nothing is ejected from a black hole once it goes past the event horizon. Past the EH, the curvature of spacetime is so severe that nothing has enough energy to move on a path other than straight into the degenerate matter.

We don't get in anywhere? We spend most of our time? Again, how does it help to mischaracterize the situation? We do progress, we spend time improving, but a LOT of progress is stifled because so many people claim we aren't doing anything, and they ignore the good that IS being done in favor of complaining.

How is it helpful to make such vague and broad judgements against any of the actors in today's world environment? It would be nice if things were so easy to pigeonhole, but most things happen on a spectrum, and most things are much more highly nuanced than simple conspiracy can address. How about drilling down to some meaningful arguments?

So what? Does that mean we can't work towards a better goal? We can set up the world like that if more people thought it was possible.

You need to write a book about what TV shows you're watching. Or post this in What Are You Watching?

We're trying to help you refine and improve your idea. You need more than "innovation" to account for the way humans evolved to walk upright. Every animal on the planet is capable of new behavior. Even unicellular organisms can react to new environments. Humans are able to access a broader range of innovative behavior because we can take the same information other animals get and put it together in more meaningful, more predictive, more adaptive ways because of our higher levels of intelligence, cooperation, and communication. Also, while logic has its place in maths and sciences, I think you're talking about critical thinking, or reasoned thinking rather than formal logic. It also isn't correct to refer to "proof" when you mean "evidence". That can turn a perfectly supportive statement into an assertion that needs more than an opinion. The members here respect the difference between "evidence suggests humans walked upright to free up their hands for tool use", and "human evolution is fundamentally different from that of other animals".

Intelligent human predators learned that herd animals can stampede when a bunch of hunters charge the herd on two feet, waving their arms, and making lots of noise. Must have been pretty scary looking to a quadruped, and is yet another example of the potential benefits of moving on just two of your four limbs. We can make ourselves look a LOT bigger.

There is evidence that early humans drove certain types of prey to the edges of cliffs so they'd fall to their deaths. No weapons needed. It's a pretty intelligent hunter that can get an animal to kill itself.

The evolution of the human hand influenced the tools we were able to utilize, not the other way around. We first used rocks as hammers because they fit in our hands so well with our opposable thumbs (they still do). Rocks broke into sharp shards, and then we had knife blades, which also fit our hands well. But both of these tools worked more efficiently, and fit the hand even better when we developed handles to protect our hands, extend our reach, and provide a better physical angle for the work we performed with them. The tools developed, but their impact on the evolution of the human hand hasn't had enough time to make the fundamental changes you've implied. We can use a LOT of tools well because of our hands, but those tools didn't shape our hands. We chose them because they fit the jobs and our hands. Crows can use sticks to pick up other things and fly away with both, but it's because the stick works well with their beaks, not because the tool shaped their beaks. Does that make sense? Weapons were held the way they were to gain the most advantage in their use. A rock can be held in the hand and swung hard to inflict damage, but the same exact hand can swing a rock tied to a stick with MUCH greater impact. The hand didn't need to change, the tool was made more efficient (hey look, an innovation!).

I'm assuming by "processed" you mean "something that had to be made" like a stone knife, as opposed to "most primitive tools" like using a stick to get ants out of a log? I can agree to this. You're basically saying it's more innovative to strip the extra branches off a tree limb to make a stick than it is to simply pick up a stick. Is that right? Why do you place the use of fire for cooking meat in the Stone Age? Surely primitive humans encountered lightning strikes first among the trees. It was partly cooking our food that allowed us to lose the big gut that processed raw meat and kept us from walking upright and running on the plains. I see a bigger problem than safety in your assumptions. You have us running on the plains before we could possibly be quick enough. But that doesn't automatically make it the most important type of tool we've ever come up with. Except it could have been a rock. Can you copy/paste your details here? I can agree that it is one, but not that it's either the first or the most basic. I could be persuaded that this is so, but more evidence is needed.

Sorry, but I don't like the implications that evolution isn't happening without innovation. I don't agree that weapons are the best human tools. I think the path to bipedalism is much more evidenced than you're claiming, and I don't like your conclusions. There are some lizards that run on their back legs, and one might think they're evolving to bipedalism, but actually it's just the momentum of their running and their counterbalancing tail that lifts their front feet off the ground. I think you need to reevaluate your premises.