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This is an interesting but, ultimately, fairly meaningless question. (Also, it isn't obviously related to the original point about English being "most rational, and sophisticated") The problem is, mainly, how do you define a word. Do you count inflections as separate words: e.g are "dog" and "dogs" one word or two. What about different meanings: "dog" the animal versus the verb "to dog"; and what about all the different meanings of that verb. And then the conjugations of the verb (dog, dogs, dogged, dogging, etc). Is a hyphenated term one word or two (or more). If you decide that the forms of a verb are separate words, then what about languages that have more complex verbs forms, or those that gave none. Then, English uses a sequence of separate words to express a concept while Japanese, for example, uses a single word with multiple suffixes (e.g. "I did not want to eat" vs. "tabetakunakatta"). Does that make English or Japanese more "sophisticated? Then again, English has lots of irregular verbs (it sometimes like they are all irregular) whereas Japanese has only two common ones. So which is more "rational"? https://blog.ititranslates.com/2018/03/07/which-language-is-richest-in-words/ p.s. I put this in "Other sciences" because I think linguistics counts as a science

We can observe the accretion discs that form around them, the impact their gravity has on other masses in their vicinity, gravitational waves. That sort of thing. Similar story to dark matter. All we have been able to 'see' is the shadow cast by hydrogen attracted to it, but we knew it was there already by the impact it has on galaxy rotation.

Well, I find it interesting. Thank you for raising it ( honey ) There's also the question whether or not loanwords should be included within a particular lexicon... • Cafe; French • Trek; Afrikaans • Pyjamas; Urdu • Bona fide; Latin And the size of the English language will depend on whether these are to be counted as 'proper' English words.

Allover, you're making some interesting points. About the black and white dreams. These are not the natural way that we dream. Our eyes are adapted for colour vision. This colour vision is supplied to our brain. Which records the vision in memory. In full colour. And we see that vision in our dreams To prove this, think of something you've seen in the past. Perhaps a person, or a place. See it - now - in your mind's eye. Whatever you see in your mind's eye - I bet it's in colour. Not in black and white! Your memory records the colours. Seeing things in black and white has been a temporary thing caused by past lack of technicolor on screens.

After more than four decades of private study, there remains much I haven't figured out myself about dreams and the nature of dreaming. However, what meager insights I have managed to glean from the science suggest that every aspect of dream content is descriptive of either a mental or social influence. To understand why Doc Gooden often appears as a character in your dream, you'll have to view him as you would a word in a sentence that conveys either a mental or social meaning. For example, a house's depiction in your dream could describe your unconscious perceptions of either a mental or social structure such as the state of one's sanity or marriage. Very often, the people in our dreams interpret the mental effects of certain social influences. In your dreams, Doc Gooden describes as social influence that has had a Doc Gooden-like social affect on either your thoughts or behavior. How you might perceive Doc Gooden's personality in real life defines what social affect his character in your dreams interprets. If I may add, whatever we are capable of experiencing in physical reality, can and does appear in our dreams. The content of our dreams relies on the stores of memories we've amassed through life experience. For example, if we were raised in a world without knowledge of cars, cars would not appear in our dreams. Dreaming in either color or black and white isn't unusual. Like every other aspect of dream content, coloring is an interpretation--how our active unconscious brain interprets some aspect of what it believe it's experiencing amid the sleep process. If I may also add to other references in this discussion regard an inability to recall dream details and content, memory was evolved for experiences that had a real physical/material impact on the survival of ancestral animals. Dreams are mental experiences and do not arise concurrent real life experience. Our dreaming brain is able to detect our dreams' non-association with impactful real life experience and, consequently, do not retain memories of them easily.

This may be of interest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauzl_lead_block_test

I assume you are familiar with the English language. Nouns can be abstract. This ability is one of the strengths of English as a language as it provides for more than one type of noun, and all that entails. It is also a rational language, which means that there are things (trains of deductive thought) you can say in English that cannot be said in maths, ie mathematically.

To understand where your claim that accelerator results are essentially "fudged" is in error, you need to look ar the history of accelerators. One of the early types, the cyclotron relied on the fact the accelerated particles took the same amount of time to make one trip around no matter how fast they were moving, as they naturally went around in increasingly larger circles as they sped up However, this only worked for so long, as relativistic effects began to take hold. The speed/radius ratio drifted apart at higher speeds. Thus the snychrotron had to be developed to reach greater particle speeds. In other words, if it hadn't been for Relativity rearing its head, cyclotrons wouldn't have the upper speed limit they do.

No, but you don't need to go that far. You can put clocks on planes and send them around the worldThat was done almost 50 years ago. Their level of precision allows smaller effects to be measured than ages of astronauts. More recently, it's clocks on satellites (e.g. GPS) Mass differences from a nucleus being in an excited state vs ground state has been measured. The frequency shift of atoms owing to their height in the gravitational field has been observed.

You don't need to travel at near light speed or loop round Alpha Centauri. The effects happen at slower speeds and shorter distances. They are just smaller. But luckily, we can build instruments accurate enough to measure them. There are a huge number of experimental confirmations of relativity (that is why it is a theory, i.e. a really solid and well tested explanation, rather than just a guess) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity

We can't sanitise the planet and still live here... Avoidance only delay's our exposure, maybe that's enough to maintain the world we know, I'm not suggesting we don't try, I'm just suggesting we don't know... Was the world better, before or after the plague???

Azides, solids containing a lot of Nitrogen, seem to fit the bill. Their most common use is automotive air-bags.

As you indicate, masks are not the sole solution. Rather they are part of a holistic approach to prevent the spread; such as social distancing, personal hygiene and not touching the mask with one's hands when it's on. I wonder, though, if the recent increase in cleaning may have a long term detrimental impact on health. Not just the sudden and protracted exposure to (new) chemicals but also the potential to lower one's resistance to harmful bacteria, viruses etc. My mum used to say that you have to eat a bit of dirt to stay healthy. Like many folk lore sayings, this appears to have some truth behind it - geophagy

! Moderator Note You are just making more and more claims that are completely unfeasible. You have provided no evidence for your claims (hardly surprising as evidence contradicts many of them). Do not open another thread on this topic. And do not hijack any more threads.

Trying to extrapolate effects in biology are often difficult- there is little evidence that action potential velocity leads to better processing. There are a lot of constraints (including energetic ones) and I think the physiological consequences are unclear. That being said, axon diameter actually do show some dynamics. Neurofilaments regulate axon dimensions and swelling has been observed during action potential generation as well as via mechanical tension of the cytoskeleton. Intuitively it makes sense to increase action potential velocity in connections that are heavily used rather than broad range increase which might mess up timing and activity coordination.

Three thoughts occur to me: You speak as if pre-cognition is a real thing. There is no substantive evidence for its existence and no plausible mechanism to account for it. The internal dynamics of a dream have only passing relations to the real world. Extrapolating from one to the other only makes sense in terms of neuroscience, psychology and such. You have essentially described a three step process. First, an event occurs. Two, "you (POV)" express puzzlement at the event. Three, "you (other character)" provide an explanation. There is no reason to think that step three must have been determined prior to steps one and two. Even if it does it, it lies at a deeper level of the subconscious. Thus, nothing approaching pre-cognition is present. Anyway, welcome to the forum.

I'll give you a practical example from not too long ago. NASA had a mission which sent a pair of probes to an outer gas giant moon. The probes consisted of an orbiter and a lander. The lander would communicate its data to the orbiter, which then relayed it to the Earth. A problem however occurred. The communication protocol between lander and orbiter required the data to be sent at a specific rate, and it turned out that there was a mismatch between the lander and orbiter which prevented them from talking to each other. The "fix" involved using Doppler shift. By adjusting the orbit of the orbiter, they created a "window" during which the Doppler shift effect between the two exactly canceled out the mismatch between the two. The lander would dump all its data during these windows. So how does this show the invariant speed of light? If the speed of light is invariant, then the Doppler shift only depends on the Relative velocity between orbiter and Probe. Ergo, You only have to worry about the orbiter's orbit relative to the Moon. If it were not invariant, then all the various motions of the Moon orbiting the Planet and Planet orbiting the Sun would also play a role in the determining the Doppler shift. NASA would have had to factor all this in when working out their windows. But they didn't. ( If they had, this would have been huge news, as it would have been a refutation of a prediction of Relativity.) As for the "Einstein as authority" argument. Einstein would have disavowed it, as he was no fan of authority himself. Relativity is held in high accord not due to any reverence for Einstein, but because it keeps passing every test thrown at it. And we do continue to test it. We test it for the very reason that we don't just accept it as "absolute truth", but are looking for any weaknesses it may have. But as long as it keeps making accurate predictions, it will be treated as being the closest thing to "truth" we have.

The difference is that Aristotle didn't do science in the modern sense of the word, his assertion was just a philosophical speculation. There was no evidence, and no way for him to really test the hypothesis. The theory of relativity is a completely different story - it is based upon the shortcomings of earlier models, and it is directly amenable to the scientific method, i.e. it can be tested and falsified. To date, it has been in full accord with every single experiment that has ever been thrown at it; no violations of relativistic principles have ever been observed anywhere, despite it having been extensively tested over the last 100+ years.

I agree, while as you say we as a society we need make it clear they have done wrong, the rehabilitation could be about teaching them the skills they need to contribute to society in a positive way, which is what we want. There is no point taking someone who can't read and write, who commits crimes, to one side, put them in jail, releasing them only for them to go back to what they were doing before, because they lack literacy skills for example. Surely this is a barrier to them getting a good job, decent accomodation and adult education courses may not be available or there could be other barriers. So yes, jail needs to send a strong message, but also perhaps help people back on track but not be seen as a free ride to a free 2nd chance education you are till locked up in your cell, still denied freedom to come and go, and still subject to rules. Lets find out why that person in jail, clearly there are some crimes that warrant locking up for a very long time, but it seems for many, prison is a revolving door, we also need to perhaps fix the system so ex offenders can actually work in certain posts, perhaps having been on the wrong side of the law, been in jail, but took the chance and to work hard, and gain a good set of qualifications to turn their life around, that person could mentor people and steer them away from jail which from experience they would not want any one else to have to go through. Jail should not be the only way to turn lives around, we need proper funding of adult education and homeless / addiction / other groups who take people who have fallen off the radar and actually help them, that may stop them falling in to the revolving door mentioned above. Also no reason really why some ex offenders should not be able to say join the army, police or other services, for the same reason, as a community officer you perhaps are there to prevent and help people to stay on the right track.

Strange, your post is sophistry!

Sinclair Basic is very good.

The thing is this. If you truly consider that all languages are equal, that must mean you think that the Japanese language is just as good as the English language. Therefore, why don't you suggest that we conduct future discourse on this forum in Japanese? Hai?

Hello Everybody, I just wanted to express my opinion on magic tricks. I have seen many magic tricks on YouTube and other media platforms. And, most of them are extremely hard to explain. My opinion on it is that some of them are just illusions, and some of them are real. What do I mean by "real?" By that, I mean that if a magicians disappearing trick is real, it means that the magician has actually disappeared.