cutler121

Yup, having the same problems everyone else is describing. Hopefully its not another DDOS attack on the server.

The addition of the research and connections seemed like one of the most exciting additions to MD for me in a long time. Since it has been almost a month and nothing new has happened (ie no new clues, no ability to submit research, no way to unlock level 3+ clues) I wanted to check back to see if this feature was still going to be implemented. As far as I can tell I have already unlocked the 16 readily available clues (+2 new ones in necro with the halloween party) is there any way to help with this feature? I would be happy to help if there was a mechanism or desire for volunteers by the PTB. Cutler

[quote name='adiomino' timestamp='1297743224' post='78874'] My question is.. does it really take photoshop to put transparent gifs on the avatars we draw? Becauuse.. I thought i heard of other ways. Eh.. Photoshop is expensive too isn't it? meh [/quote] I use CorelDraw but that is even more expensive (unless you live in Thailand its only about 3$ US here). Cutler

[quote name='Kafuuka' timestamp='1297274574' post='78695'] Medicine does not have as its main goal the purpose of understanding life; the pure science behind that is biology. Medicine is to biology as engineering is to physics. That does mean that people who practise medicine have to know a lot about biology and the line between applied and theoretical research can be quite thin, especially with people majoring in biomedicine. Pharmaceutical research uses, at least we hope it does, the same approach as 'pure' science: you generate a theory and then you test it with an experiment -> you make a new drug and then you test it on a subject (usually not immediately on humans though). [/quote] Exactly, science can be done in the medical field, but doctors aren't scientists. Unfortunately many doctors (MDs not PhD or MD/PhD) think that they are scientists which has ended up harming many people. Their mistakes are a perfect example of why just because something seems to make sense doesn't mean it is correct or a good idea (ie Hormone replacement therapy for menopause, cholestoral lowering meds, routine neonatal circumcision, etc). [quote name='Kafuuka' timestamp='1297274574' post='78695'] Maybe I'm too young for it, but I have never had high hopes for string theory to be validated by an experiment in this century. The one small conference I listened to as a physics student, a lot of theoretical string theorists were talking about their revolutionary new insights. One of them mentioned that at very high energies, energy would "leak to another dimension" and at that point I really failed to see how you could ever honestly try measure that. [/quote] What they were describing is a prediction of multi-dimensional theories which would be detectable once collision energies reached high enough levels. That is why string theory is actually good science, it makes predictions which can be shown to be incorrect. The problem I had with the field was that those experiments are so far away (assuming no major unforeseen jumps in technology occur) that many string theorists began to feel the need to justify the theory because it is so amazingly consistent and it is the only theory that extends the known data. That isn't science it is mathematics or religion depending on whether you accept things completely on faith because it all makes so much sense or axiomatically with a few facts that just need to be proven. The science doesn't need those justifications, but the scientists did since the experimental verification was so far away. [quote name='Kafuuka' timestamp='1297274574' post='78695'] As for gravity: All theories are indeed theories that might prove to be imperfect or even completely wrong. Given our current understanding of it though, the chances of gravity being completely wrong are negligible in my opinion. In this statement I am also rejecting Berkley and the matrix and similar theories, being a pragmatist: you just can't do anything interesting after accepting Berkley imo. [/quote] Lets say someone comes along tomorrow and makes a little device that is able to completely negate gravity in a small area. That would totally contradict every theory of gravity there is, but even in that case, the majority of the textbooks which teach about gravity (at the undergraduate and graduate levels) would at most change by a footnote. People would talk about how the theory of gravity was completely wrong, but anywhere that effect wasn't present would be just as well described after realizing gravity could be turned off by classical mechanics as before. Now if your worldview is that we are living in the matrix ... cool. Cutler

[quote name='Kamisha' timestamp='1297217229' post='78665'] well actually science only shows you the most probable answer it does not prove anything. it just proves that the most probable answer is _______. That's why tectonic plate movement is stated as a theory and we use laws. We never say this is whats happening. We say this is what a theorize is happening. [/quote] That's actually rather misleading and misses the point of what science is all about. Science proves many things to be false. Many of the best scientific theories are known to be partially incorrect for example Newtonian gravity. BUT there isn't a more powerful description which can make predictions about how gravity works the majority of the time. The fact that it breaks down at speeds approaching the speed of light, near highly compact mass sources, and possibly on galactic scales doesn't diminish the fact that it is a description of the world that is amazingly accurate. What science allows us to do is have a theory about how the world should work which makes predictions that can be tested and either verified or disproved. The very strength of the scientific method is that it provides a methodology which continually improves our understanding of the universe because we are able to pose more and more pointed questions about exactly those parts of the universe we don't fully understand. [quote name='Kamisha' timestamp='1297217229' post='78665'] In fact a hardcore scientist would dispute gravity. [/quote] Sorry to have to be harsh here but that is total rubbish. I invite anyone who would like to dispute gravity to go to your nearest tall building and step off. Many people misunderstand that science isn't about absolutes, the fact that a theory isn't 100% correct doesn't mean that it is 100% wrong. The basic scientific understandings in most any field of science are for the most part both intuitive and backed up by scads of unrelated evidence. The whole point is that scientists (without which there would be no science) are working to understand the world around them. Unfortunately many people view some fields as scientific for example medicine or anthropology when they really are not at all. Kamisha's post seemed to me to hit exactly the most mistaken opinions of science which are unfortunately widespread. So one last personal aside, back when I was working as a high energy particle theorist, the mathematics to describe the self-consistent theories of particle interaction at that time called string theories (or slightly thereafter m-branes) had progressed so far that there wouldn't be experimentally verifiable results for 50 to 100 years to disprove some of the theoretic ideas people were working on. At that point for me the field became mathematics and I completely lost interest and subsequently changed to a different field to pursue more verifiable ideas. But as a parting shot I published one final paper which showed that the theoretic foundation of almost all of the string theories (and the extensions from those) were inconsistent. Only the 6 and 10 dimensional theories (not 4) had any chance of being valid descriptions of the world. As anyone who followed the field is aware, the remaining consistent theories all turned out to be subcases of a single 11-dimensional brane theory, but until particle accelerators catch up with the theory nobody will know which if any is correct. Science is a way to look at the world, as are religion, philosophy and MD. Chose which ever combination of those or any other worldview you most prefer, just be aware Kamisha you might be called out as being ignorant if you misrepresent the basics. Cutler

[quote name='The Great Pashweetie' timestamp='1296872770' post='78485'] I have an idea... quite a stupid idea, but an idea( i have no programming experience, so apophys your on your own for the coding :S) a group of competitors starts in a place, they run to a place, trying to beat everyone there, go to a clickie and get a count, at first i thought that this would be, everyone runs into a land getting the clickie, but now i think the locations should be un-revealed so that the first person to get to them all isnt just the fastest of them all, but the smartest of them all, after getting all the clickies (must be in a correct order to get the count back at the start, the start is the first count (10 counts in all))you return to start and get the last count, winning! I thought of this idea after winning a previous head contest because it always seemed like we were running around playing hide-and-seek ... and so... this stupid idea was born! TGP [/quote] Plagiarized ideas aren't necessarily stupid. The clickie race has already been run last year though. Cutler

[quote name='apophys' timestamp='1296817317' post='78463'] @TTL: A quest can be forcibly limited by mindpower, but there should be a good reason if you do so. Yes, Shadow, the idea, plus accompanying text, at every step. You need to show me what text the participant will see, tell me what he needs to do, and how he does it. Code workings are not required (I can do that, or I can get help If I get stuck), but it has to be physically possible to code, or else the quest will not be run and reward will not be given. Practically, the code (if any) is the only thing that can be left up to me to do. [/quote] I had a quest idea that would be entirely run within clickies as a two person paired interactive adventure. I actually made the code to implement it but it ended up being so complex that I decided to just simplify it for use as the MD Creature Card Game and the private chat rooms. Unfortunately both of those got killed with the death of the astral plane. If you want the code and Mur allowed it to be used, I would be happy for you to use it to implement my interactive paired quest adventure idea. Cutler PS I had several other simpler ideas for quests that I didn't end up implementing when I still had free time. Feel free to PM me if you would be interested in hearing about one of them.

Quantum Mechanics Just a quick question, how many of the people in this thread believe themselves to be scientists? I am just interested if any real scientists would have any interest in this thread. (BTW I consider myself a real scientist, my CV would agree lol) Cheers, Cutler [quote name='apophys' timestamp='1296569137' post='78322'] I am annoyed that in school, history, civics, and similar subjects are nowadays grouped under the tag "Social Science." It used to be "Social Studies," which was far more accurate. The only common subject in the grouping that is a science is geography. A sign that a subject is likely not a science: essays required. You don't need to be able to write a standard essay to be able to do science. But then again, essays have been slowly infecting almost every subject... On a different note, here's a wonderful example of the peer review system being slow on the uptake. It's not that the paper is wrong or anything, but... just read the article. [url="http://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/"]http://fliptomato.wo...s-75-citations/[/url] Oh, by the way, quantum mechanics isn't all that complicated to understand, in principle, when you get a good explaining text, and are beyond a high school level (I don't mean the average high school graduate; I mean actually knowing the material). [/quote]

Ok, So this is just about as random as you can get, but it does provide a nice mathematical formula for the (correct) two numbers Mur provided and the first number in the sequence also just happens to be the exact number of days in a year which is interesting. The sequence I define as Mur#(N) is Mur#(N) = (6-N)*( N^5 + (N+1)^4 + (N+2)^3 + (N+3)^2 + (N+4)^1 + (N+1)*(2*N)^2 + (N-1)^(N+1)) The first four Mur numbers are : Mur#(1) = 365 <--- Days in a year Mur#(2) = 1028 <--- Murs first number Mur#(3) = 2481 <--- Murs second number Mur#(4) = 4970 <--- any significance? Cutler

[quote name='Chewett' timestamp='1295797723' post='77920'] arnt murs Numbers 2481 and 1028? Thusly The series doesnt include 1028 as you have highlighted 1024 [/quote] Lol OOps I read the number incorrectly. Feel free to keep neg repping me though. Lol Cutler

See my next post below :-) Cutler

[quote name='Rendril' timestamp='1294319217' post='76958'] @cutler: I got the reference, bigger letters mean you might need to use more [/quote] Yeah don't I know. No problem with size here Cutler

[quote name='Rendril' timestamp='1294298197' post='76937'] The captcha was stripped down a lot to make it more readable, would it help if the letters were bigger? [/quote] LOL The capcha which finally let me in was: KY and when I got that I slipped right in. Cutler PS. For those of you who still don't get it, KY jelly is a medical lubricant used for digital rectal exams and often used as a sexual lubricant as well.

Well today after six unsuccessful attempts to enter the correct security code, I got the following: [img]http://www.robcutler.com/KYimage.png[/img] luckily that let me slip right in Cutler PS I just had to share this since one of the earlier security codes was NO and it didn't accept it.

Happy New Year All ! I had a nice treat for New Years Eve, my son (Tyler) who is now 5 months old walked over to me (in his little walker) and put his arms out for me to hug him. How adorable is that? [img]http://www.robcutler.com/TylerWalk.jpg[/img] Cutler