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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5049863" data-attributes="member: 4720">Man, lost track of this thread over the holidays....As a scientist I have to tell you... that's bunk.  Nature is complicated.  It's so complicated that you can spend a lifetime in full time study and still not grasp a lot of it.I talk to non-academic friends and family about the bare bones of my work and their eyes glaze over.  I have to turn it into a simplistic caricature of itself to explain it to people one department over.For every simple physical rule there are 10,000 mitigating circumstances, variable conditions, and random starting states, to say nothing of random assortment at several different levels of analysis.Ascribing things to human behavior ("Thor is angry." or "The witch next door soured my milk.") is actually a gross simplification compared to how it actually works.... And those are simple examples."Make sure you get out of the ball by midnight!""You can walk out of the Underworld together, but you can't look back.""On this holiday you have to leave bread crusts on the window sill for the <insert fey creature here>""At the stroke of midnight on the New Year, we throw open all the windows of the house and bang pots and pans to scare out evil spirits."Sound like rules to me.  Also don't sound like science.Rules do not have to involve science in the slightest.</blockquote>