Phi for All

Saw my first electric kettle in Germany a few decades ago. I couldn't believe how much more efficient it was than a pan on the stovetop! Finally found them here in the US and haven't used anything else since.

For me, tea needs to either be icy cold or blisteringly hot, and I'll keep sipping as long as it stays at the extremes. And I prefer fresh mint to lemon juice, which is weird because the only other place I like mint is in toothpaste or breath mints. I love peppermint Altoids, but I'll turn down a peppermint candy cane at Christmas every time. And while I appreciate a little honey in tea sometimes, no sweetener ever touches my coffee. Bleh, just bleh!

Or his parents inclinations and methods weren't standard and their child benefitted from the focus. I'm not saying the "wiring" aspect isn't correct, but it seems like it's arguing more for "nature" and less for "nurture", and it's almost certainly quite a bit of both.

If your doctor is after you about the fats and sweets, the bergamot in Earl Grey tea pairs really, really well with lemon, and not just because the British say so. In this case, they are spot on.

But do you think Terrence Tao could have accomplished the same without the training and support he received at a young age? You claim he's different than average, but how much of that difference was because his father was a doctor and his mother was a maths and physics teacher?

And this is why science and religion conflict. Science requires more than your incredulity and insistence. Evidence we can observe would be helpful.

See, this tells me you don't understand some of the fundamentals of science. If you posed an hypothesis that was sound, that you could support with evidence, that you could build a model upon to make successful predictions, AND that we could find no fault with, no flaws that falsify the explanation you've given, then it wouldn't be a threat to our way of thinking. It would BECOME our way of thinking, because it would be a well-supported explanation on its way to becoming a theory. Can't you see that? We've been pointing out mistakes, so how could your idea possibly be a threat?

Are you talking about the BB? It was NOT an explosion. If you're talking about stars forming from clouds of gas, what about that behavior do you find objectionable? You can visualize it? Given the gaps in your science knowledge, I suspect your "visualization" is filling those gaps with whatever makes the most sense to you, which is no way to do science.

Yes. So many that you need to be more specific about what you're looking for. From what I've read, size is only a small factor. The way the various regions are "wired", and the ways the regions communicate with each other is much more important.

I think graybear13 is channeling Emily Litella. "What is all this fuss I hear about the Supreme Court decision on a "deaf" penalty? It's terrible! Deaf people have enough problems as it is!"

Don't be fooled by pop-sci vividness. Think about it. Why have you only built 1% of the things you could have built with your LEGO blocks? Because you built the 1% of things that made the most sense to you, that were of the most value, and that pleased you most. A great deal of the rest of what you could have built made no sense, had no value, and was just plain ugly. One can easily imagine that there might be some useful chemical combinations we haven't discovered yet, but most likely there are an enormous amount of chemicals that aren't as good as the ones we know about.

Not an expert, but if this is an "uncontrollable desire" then a neurological source seems unlikely. Most movement disorders are described as "involuntary" and "abnormal" spasms and contractions. Would you describe your "desire" as more of an urgent need to change positions, or is it actually a physical twitch that moves you without conscious effort? Your physician should be able to distinguish between behaviors if you describe what you're going through, but it sounds to me like something similar to restless leg, where you feel uncomfortable until you turn over and change positions.

Can you verify this premise for us first? Do you have any evidence this is so? I'm not a fan of IQ tests, but I've never heard of a ceiling score of 160. I have heard of people who supposedly have a higher score.

Paulsrocket has been banned for really bad faith arguments (like you can't trust science because it's always changing).

! Moderator Note Enough! Take your ignorance and go someplace where it's welcome.

Do you see how contradictory and confusing your posts can be? Please aim for more rigor, you're challenging mainstream science so you need to be extra persuasive in your arguments. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary support.

This is meaningless. We can't know anything about the universe before the BB. Spacetime is what becomes so extremely distorted that, beyond the event horizon, there is no way to navigate anywhere but towards the degenerate matter. In a spaceship in normal spacetime, the gravitational attraction from a sun is something you can compensate for by firing your thrusters, using more thrust the closer you are to the sun so you don't fall in, using any of a number of directions to take you away from the sun. But once you move beyond the event horizon of a collapsed sun (black hole), spacetime is so badly warped that no other courses are available to you except straight in. We can't observe exactly what happens, but the math says no amount of energy expended can overcome how distorted spacetime is inside a black hole. This isn't a very technical explanation, so I hope it doesn't lead you further into the weeds. Spacetime becomes extremely curved in the presence of the degenerate matter, but of course it doesn't cease to exist.

Alkonoklazt has been suspended for a week because staff would like a break from all the rebellion against the system.

This is wrong. Even in billions of years when we move out of the sun's main sequence and into the red giant phase, it won't "kill" "the entire solar system". It will change a great deal, but the system will still exist. Honestly, you need to study more and read popular science articles less. What on Earth makes you think we aren't looking? Or, in your ignorance, do you imagine the efforts aren't "focused" enough for your understanding? Trying to learn that now (we've only had one chance in the past), but some people insist on holding their ignorance close, like an old friend, and ignore our current efforts. I guess it's easier to gripe about it than learn about it. You started out with a title about exploring our own solar system, then immediately went to "focusing on finding other, younger systems with planets that can harbour and nurture life", and ended with conspiracy, conflating crashing a satellite into the moon with mass extinction events. None of this has squat to do with Astronomy and Cosmology, it's a flawed starter right out of the gate with too many misconceptions, and past discussions with you (particularly wrt expansion vs explosion) have shown you're very wedded to your ideas and don't deal well with being corrected. Can you give me a focus for this thread (FTL travel in Engineering maybe, or Ecology & the Environment for a conversation about negative effects), so it doesn't end up like all the rest, with you getting your reputation marked down for being sloppy and unrigorous while nothing meaningful gets discussed?

Seriously?! Not a single comment did that. Every single reply has told you exactly what the problem is with your argument. Now you're either engaging in bad faith, or you just can't grasp the concept that when the entire universe expands, it's NOT expanding INTO anything. It can't, because there is NOTHING else except the universe. If you can focus on this and stop ignoring it, you may begin to see and break this 20 year cycle of ignorance. We all wish you the best!

! Moderator Note This has been explained so often to you in this thread that it's clear you're trolling the forum with specious arguments you have no intention of ever giving up. This breaks the rules we have on bad-faith arguments, soapboxing, and trolling. I'm closing this since you keep bringing up other issues every time you get corrected. This behavior will get you banned if you keep it up. Nobody wants to discuss anything with someone who ignores facts in favor of some agenda.

I think you're right. When I'm talking about people believing strongly in something they can't support, I'm using faith to mean blind faith.

I understand all that, I just see no particular efficacy in using the same term to describe what I see as completely different behavior. If history has taught me that someone is usually very capable at work assigned to them, I'll tell them I trust them with this new assignment, not that I have faith in them. I'm using past experience as a metric of my trust. And I really needed a word to describe the kind of belief that the Abrahamic religions were requiring of me. Sacred ideas, inviolate texts, holiness everywhere, and things that didn't make sense but I was supposed to believe them anyway, That belief was supposed to be unshakeable, and these beliefs were the most important beliefs. So that's what I use the term faith for, belief that doesn't require evidence to support it.

I observe quite a big difference between the way someone believes in things they can verify, and things they can't but still believe. To me, it's all belief, but faith, and we're talking about religious faith here, seems different than trust. I don't think your OED definition hits the mark. It mashes together the concepts I'm trying to separate. It's definitely not about "I have faith that PersonX is a good person", which I would put under a third category of belief, wishful thinking. It's something you hope is true, can't prove, but aren't as adamant about. And yes, it's made up. That's the way the language works when there's a need to differentiate. The way I'm asked to believe in science is different than the ways I was asked to believe in Christianity. And I'll admit that you have a completely different outlook in the UK on religion than my examples in the evangelical US. I have relatives that will tell you faith is the strongest form of belief BECAUSE it requires no evidence. They talk about how your faith must be unshakeable and steadfast, and how any doubt is wrong. They're proud that they don't question the things they're taught. Asking for evidence is almost sacrilegious. So yes, making a distinction between faith and trust isn't a mainstream concept, but it's one that's helped me in reasoning my way in modern human life.

mar_mar has been banned for soapboxing and bad faith arguments.