You mis-spelled 'Tribalism'. Your tribe might be your nation, your religion, your skin color or your political party.

Unfortunately tribalism was bred into us back when we were apes. Experiencing evil is part of being human.

You're saying that Thor is a transitive property. I'm guessing that like XOR, it's an abbreviation of 'Therefore-Or', and is some kind of operator akin to the fuzzy logic Union operator.

If that's true, then we can use De Morgans' law to state that:

NOT(a THOR b) = NOT(a) THOR NOT(b)

This is true of a class of operators M, if any M(j) in the set obeys the commutative relationship:

a M(j) b = b M(j) a

and the distributive relationship:

a (M(j))^x b = (a M(j) b)^x

But if that's true, then we can write:

(M(j))^x = THOR^x

Or in other words, any operator that holds M(j) will possess the power of THOR.

Thanks! You just cleared up forty years of Marvel comic plots for me!

Speaking as a physicist myself, I'm not sure he knows what he's doing. Physicists tend to oversimplify things.

Picture a massless, spherical cow.

Now picture that massless, spherical cow bouncing like a pinball around a giant tornado hemmed in by a thousand-foot wall...

Not faces that are easy to punch. Faces that can take a punch. This isn't an attempt at humor, I'm serious. A strong jaw, chiseled features, and a cleft (therefore padded) chin -- these are modifications that help a face receive punching with minimal injury. They have also become preferred characteristics in sexual selection.

Perhaps God created our faces so that we could withstand a punch. Jesus did say to turn the other cheek. It could be that He knew we could take it.

Of course sexual selection matters. Women select for the men whose faces can best withstand punching.

Mutant registration acts are fictional also. I think you have to look at this as if we're living in a comic book world. If mutants are real, then are mutant registration acts legal and ethical? Can you then compare them to vaccination registration acts? I don't have an answer to any of these questions. I think it's a very thorny debate.

Don't pin your hopes on teaching people what your religion believes. *Every* religion believes in wacky, nonsensical things that can be twisted around and laughed at.

Teach people that your religion *acts well*. That should be your central difference with Scientology -- the Scientologists break the law to spy on and destroy their enemies, while legitimate religions treat people fairly. Belief does not matter at all. The way a religion acts is what makes them honorable or criminal.

The problem is that in order to do that the original companies need to sell the Intellectual Property to the new owners. That won't happen cheap. Even the City of Heroes IP, which was shut down by NCSoft because it was no longer worth running the servers, could not be sold for less than ten million dollars. IP is expensive. The companies are all speculating that they might be able to make a new game with the same IP someday. With that kind of IP hoarding mentality, they will never let another company run servers for a defunct game that might someday compete with them for the same IP.

No reason to get snarky, especially when the original post is correct. There are magnetic materials in birds' eyes. However, they only register when exposed to a magnetic field under certain conditions, as a quantum phenomenon. It is an electron spin transfer that is delayed by the quantum Zeno effect to a timescale where the birds' retina can detect the difference.
It's not as simple as a compass that points them in the right direction. Birds use some seriously weird quantum tricks to see magnetic fields.

Hmn. My link didn't work, so let's try it here. This is a study on avian electromagnetic vision, with a simulation of what a bird sees when looking at the magnetic field of the Earth. http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Researc...

I think the bigger problem is that the avian electromagnetic sense is tied to their eyesight. So the electromagnetic noise isn't just causing them to fly in the wrong direction, it's interfering with their ability to see. This may cause them to run into buildings, wind turbines, and power lines more often than usual.

It might not be that the young mice have something the old mice don't. It might be that old blood has too much debris -- malformed platelets, histamines, hormones, viruses, and rubble from collapsed cell walls. That junk could be gunking up the metabolic works in the elderly. Then you're not looking for a protein factor, you're looking for a filter, which is much more difficult to develop.

I spell it CDO, because it doesn't annoy me as much when it's in alphabetical order.

What you call 'spiral dynamics' sounds a lot like Machiavelli's theory of political history, which he laid out in his book The Prince.

Machiavelli postulated that Monarchy tends to devolve into an aristocratic and oligarchic Tyranny, Tyranny is supplanted via revolution by Democracy, Democracy eventually (and inexorably) falls into Anarchy, and Anarchy is solved when one person rises to lead the masses and forms a Monarchy.

History is cyclic. The question is whether we can break the cycle, and do we want to. As powerful as the security state has become, we're likely to break the cycle by spawning an eternal Tyranny instead of a sustainable Democracy.