Originally Posted by crashsite

When I am starting to learn something brand new I tend to look for children's books and will watch children's TV science shows. There are plenty on PBS and the NASA channel. Jumping into a forum like this isn't likely to give you very good results if you can't even understand the language that's used...much less the technical content...much less if you aren't even interested in the answer in the first place.



No. Mormons consider themselves to be completely "non-whacko". And, I suppose if you compare them to somebody, like the Pope, that dresses up in clownish costumes and waves smoke around in the air while mumbling in Latin...perhaps, in the big picture view of things, Mormons are no more whacko than anyone else.




Considering that di-lithium crystals are the product of science fiction, I'd tend to agree that they may not be the best place to begin trying to understand crystal technology. Sometimes you gotta use a little common sense.



If you've been living on planet Earth for more than about six months and you haven't run across any whackos yet...you're just not paying attention to your surroundings.

I was under the impression – perhaps the wrong impression, that when people from different fields worked together on a project, they didn’t have to know each others’ specialties. That is the purpose of them working together – not just to work faster by involving more people on the same problem with the same training, but to communicate across barriers that limit their particular field. I was thinking that mathematical representations might serve as a gauge for what is going on in a system, and characteristics of some of these representations might be able to be communicated to people in a laypeople’s language. Of course, a layperson might not be able to make a mathematical representation, but such a representation might be able to be described to them in much the same way that a piece of art can be described.

Of course, if you don’t take my questions seriously, I don’t suppose that you will expect anyone else to – including Mormons.

I don’t know of the extent of the word crystal. I don’t know how dilithium molecules react with other substances, but I’m assuming that if they can react to form a variety of products then the shapes of these might have to be explained by individual molecular bonds and not arrangements on a larger scale. I may have made some assumptions about how dilithium gas would react to the introduction of other molecules without considering the initial conditions.

It is my interpretation that your responses have a degree of conclusiveness – one that suggests to me that you do not expect a response to your statements. If you would like one, then you’ll have to be more specific about what type of person you are referring to when you write wacko.

Originally Posted by crashsite

It's all very subjective. To me, the idea of some guy going out in the woods and coming back with a story of having talked directly with the religious trinity and John the Baptist (who, it was reported did have his head) is pretty whacko. To a devout Mormon, it seems perfectly natural and normal. In fact, the Mormons believe that the president of their church, even today, can speak directly with God.

I have a general rule. If it looks like a whacko, quacks like a whacko and waddles like a whacko...it's most likely a whacko. So, if my analyses seem a bit direct, it comes from a lifetime of repeatedly being proven right when it comes to whackos.

Here's a quickie. Let's say that some guy decides that there's technical merit in some terminology that was dreamed up in the mind of a science fiction writer and tries to make sense of how it might work in the real world. Just for argument's sake, let's use a term like, "di-lithium crystals" (a critical component of United Federation star ship warp drives and the object leading to many a fist fight with alien beings by one Capt. James T. Kirk). Someone who would treat that sort of science fiction as being real is...well...pretty much a whacko.

Are you seeing a trend develop here?

The world is full of whackos. I'm just a little surprised that you don't seem more enthusiastic about sharing your ideas with them.

I don't identify some people the way that you do so I don't know how useful it would be for me to communicate with you about population groups.