This is exactly why I tried to keep my mouth shut. Since I was stupid enough to open the door by seconding TomW's concerns, I will rebut. First allow me to explain that in my opinion, people frequent this board primarily to share ideas regarding RE, theoretical and applied. I think the root of my concern is that debateUSA sounds like the kind of forum that would be used to engage in argument, simply for the sake of argument. While there are occasional differences of opinion presented here, that is a side effect of people having different approaches to solving a problem - at least that is how it should be. The concern is that if the board is swamped by folks who just like a good fight, the signal to noise ratio will inevitably suffer, making it much more difficult for people who don't really care about anyones opinions or feelings, but just want to know how many turns to wind on their coils or how to space magnets to maximize efficiency to find real information. I do not know how to put this gently, but your response suggests to me that you might be more interested in arguing details than sharing technical information that is often so well established that no room exists for debate. The suggestion that a streaming banner to ward off visitors is blatantly argumentative. In your second paragraph, I still sense the welcoming of debate, rather than the open sharing of information - regardless of what people are coming to debate, ghetto rappers or poor little birdies getting killed by whirling turbines, it is still a distraction that I would not welcome. I have many opinions but for me RE is not an opinion, it is an interest. I am not, as far as I know, part of any tight knit group, rather I am one person with many interests that are largely technical in nature. When I want to know about winding an output transformer for a tube amp (an area where much debate exists), I google for things like "output transformer", "transformer theory", or "tube amp transformer design", I read what is out there and if there remains any question in my mind, I experiment to determine what works best for me. Since my interest is in an end result, I try not to become embroiled in arguments about which of the known functional methods is intrinsically better, rather I decide what is easiest for me to implement to get the result I desire. I am sure that any arguable point relating to RE/AE would make a fine addition to a debate-oriented site, but I do not think that the injection of arbitrary debate into this forum is likely to be in any way productive. I would also be extremely surprised if anyone on this board, or anywhere else holds a world view that is restricted to energy alone, but this forum is where we talk energy, when we are worried about souls, we find a religious forum suitable to our tastes and bring those concerns up there. I am sorry that I will not be able to entertain you by debating any subjects over on debateUSA, I am not particularly worried about implosions - rather I just don't think it would be a productive use of my already scarce free time. In summary, I feel that your responding to a reasonable concern by issuing a few taunts and throwing down the glove serves quite well to illustrate the basis of the concern. If this forum were to get a large influx of people who conduct themselves this way, and other users of this forum were as foolish as me in taking the bait, there would no longer be room for productive conversation.
To anyone who has actually read this far: I do apologize for eating up your bandwidth, and I assure you that this will absolutely be the last time I am involved in any non-technical conversation on this board. I also would like to make it VERY clear that the opinions expressed in this message are strictly my own, and I do not speak for anyone else. I especially do not speak for any tight-knit communities, and I definitely do not speak for the admins of this board, who I hope will not take offense from this post.
