mistermack

Citation. See above. So it's perfectly obvious that they were talking about the length of a day in time, rather than a solar day. You're making the ludicrous assumption that when they said day, it meant absolutely anything you like. Where's the justification for that? If that was the case, why on Earth would they say six days? The meaning is obvious.

I don't think there's much of that in the old testament, the bit with the six days stories. Anyway, Christians are hardly exceptionally tolerant or forgiving compared to atheists. No it doesn't. They would all have understood a day as a length of time. It's not as if days varied in duration from day to day. That's because you weren't born 3,000 years ago.

That sounds reasonable, although it wasn't explained that way to me at the time. Oxygen service was checked again and again, it was considered so hazardous, everything had to be a special grade of stainless, and all the seals special materials, and then a special degreasing regime at the end. My role was just to put the flow characteristics into a pre-determined formula, before today's computer programs became widespread. Setting up infra-red lasers seems like a lot of effort for a party trick, but it looks the best suggestion so far.

What they believe themselves doesn't bother me at all. They can perform all the gymnastics they like to keep believing as far as I'm concerned. What I really object to, is them inflicting the same bollocks on innocent children, and including it in law. So adapting the myth in order to perpetuate it isn't just harmless nonsense, it's making sure that the next generation are equally infected.

Obviously not for everyone. Not for me. The whole intention is to preserve superstitious belief by constantly adapting it, as it begins to look silly with newer discoveries. A step in the right direction would be to accept that the original authors obviously made the story up, not that "a day doesn't have to mean a day". It's just adapting mysticism with more mysticism. Or piling bullshit on top of bullshit, would be my preferred description.

Science doesn't claim to be giving you the truth, just the latest and best working theories. Christianity relies on the truth of the Bible, because there's no other evidence for believing in a God or a Christ. When you start saying a day doesn't have to mean a day, where does that leave the rest of it? A God doesn't really mean a god? Rising from the dead doesn't really mean rising from the dead?

Who cares what they say now? The people who WROTE the bible knew what they meant by a day, and they knew exactly what their audience of the time understood by a "day". The Catholic Church can perform it's present-day contortions to make things fit, but they can't change the obvious original meaning by the original authors.

Maybe not, but lots of things do. I used to specify control valves, and the ones for oxygen use had to have special cleaning including thorough degreasing as any trace of contaminant could spontaneously ignite. A tiny spot of something reactive on the match might be enough. I doubt if it is oxygen, it was just a thought. It would be hard to generate enough to raise the ambient concentration, I expect.

I'm guessing another possibility might be sodium chlorate, spread on iron dust on the sheet. It gives off oxygen, which might be pure enough to ignite a match, especially if you prepared the match by nicking it, or putting a dab of something very combustible on it.

Yes, there ought to be a rule that you can leave those discussions, and just take part in the ones that interest you.

More of a Dan Brown, I would say.

As soon as animals evolved movement, the potential was there for instinct to improve survivability. Non random movement could help find food, and anything non-random was instinctive. So I think it goes right back to the the first non-random movement of animals, after the split from plants and fungi, 1,500 million years ago. Movement could have been random for a long or short time after that. I don't know how it would be possible to find out. Like any other characteristic. In the genes. I don't think it's likely, although I guess it's possible in some cases. The Monarch is a very weird case, if I remember rightly. From memory, it takes several generations to fly north, turn around and fly south again. So how it manages to do that by instinct would probably be a one-off, and would need special study to find the answer. Or maybe it's not unique in that, but it's the only one I've heard of.

Incorrect. g ( gravitational force) is zero at the center, but the Specific(per unit mass) Gravitational potential is -3GM/2R where M is the mass of the planet, and R is its radius. At the surface of the planet (or any point above it) the Specific Gravitational potential is -GM/r where r is the distance from the center of the planet ( on the surface r=R) Yes, agreed. Got it now, thanks.

In my early teens, my uncle got me on breaking bottles. He said it's impossible, to break an ordinary empty bottle, in an ordinary empty polythene bag. I swore I could do it. I was off looking for a hammer.

As I understand it, the gravitational potential is zero at the centre of a planet. (if you ignore external gravity sources like the star or galaxy). If there was a hollow in the centre, a stone placed at the centre would not fall left, right, up or down, so there is no potential energy.

The same applies to the lighter gases too. A helium balloon can only float upwards because it's LIGHTER than air. If air weighed nothing, that simply couldn't happen. You can buy the proof on a street corner.

What the core of the Sun shows though, is that if you want to increase the reaction rate, raising the temperature can be counter-productive, if you can't contain the expansion by upping the pressure. The density drops and the reaction slows. It's not easy pressurising plasma without physically touching it, due to the extreme temperatures. Surprisingly, the record plasma pressure so far is only two atmospheres, according to this : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/17/mit-nuclear-fusion-record-marks-latest-step-towards-unlimited-clean-energy Presumably, pressure is where the H bomb has a big advantage. You can confine the explosion physically, for a tiny bit of time, whereas you can't in a Tokamak reactor.

I wondered if the more sudden delivery of the vaccine in the blood system might be more likely to trigger an allergic reaction. I'm sure that would have been investigated a long time ago, but I don't know what the answer is. If it was the case, I suppose the advice would be to deliberately avoid a blood vessel. Don't know if that's the case either.

I think what's confusing the OP is the buoyancy effect. Air SEEMS to be weightless because it's floating in other air. Take a giant balloon full of water, it's obvious that the contents are very heavy. But put the same balloon in a swimming pool, and it floats around, apparently weightless. It's the same for any fluid, floating in a similar fluid. It's exactly the same for a gas. If you have a huge balloon full of air, you can't feel the weight, because it's floating in air, like the water balloon floating in water. So the apparent weightlessness of the air in a balloon is an illusion, caused by the buoyancy effect. If you sealed a rigid container of one cubic metre, and placed it on a weighing scales, in a vacuum room, and gradually pumped the air out of the room, the weight reading of the container would gradually increase, as the air was pumped out, and when you had nearly all of the air removed, the container would actually register more than a kg more. If the OP were to read up on buoyancy, it should become clear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buoyancy

Yes, the way I see it is that for two systems at the same temperature, the one with the higher pressure has more collisions per second than the other, because the density is higher. There's less space to travel to hit another particle. More collisions means more pressure so the two have to go hand in hand. So pressure is a vital factor in fusion, because density is. You could say that it's really density that's important, but to raise the density, you have to raise the pressure. When the talk about the triple product of density, temperature and time, they are really saying that density and temperature are the critical factors, and you need to be able to hold it long enough for fusion to happen. Going by what happens in the Sun's core, where a drop in temperature actually speeds up the fusion, because it raises the density, it appears that density, and hence pressure, has more effect than temperature, at fusion conditions. The pressure in reactors is provided by the confinement method. It's either magnetic as in a Tokamak, or inertial, as in Laser systems. On the TV last night there was a brief bit about the US laser experiments. They said that the power used on the "target" was something like sixty times all of the power being used in the US. But only for a matter of milliseconds. The pressure for the reaction is provided by the inertia of the target. It can't expand fast enough to lower the pressure. Presumably, to design a constantly running system, you would constantly replace the target, and keep zapping them, maybe using the heat from the previous target to help the next one to fuse. In the extreme conditions of fusion, it would be difficult to find materials that could survive long enough to keep replacing the target accurately, I would have thought.

On the question of intelligence, one factor that seems to be operating is that warm blooded animals on average seem to go higher in the intelligence scales. Of course there are bound to be exceptions, but if you look at mammals vs lizards, or birds vs fish, the warm blooded ones seem to display a bit more. Even in fish, the great white is often referred to as one of the most intelligent fish, and it also has a degree of warm-bloodedness. A big brain is quite energy hungry, but for us humans, the energy burnt in the brain gets circulated and contributes to the maintenance of our body temperatures at 37 degrees. In hot weather, the same heat can be difficult to cope with, and it may be that we evolved the bare skin and sweating partly to compensate for some of the brain heat that we constantly produce.

I'm only guessing anyway, just hazarding an opinion. I think though, that if pain via the brain is involved in healing, it's likely to already have been investigated. The brain does influence growth, via the pituitary so it's not impossible. Maybe stem cells could be activated by a hormone via the brain.

It is a fact though, that sick animals tend to retreat to a quiet corner, and curl up and wait out the infection. And of course, doctors prescribe bed rest for the sick. I'm not sure if it's true, but it seems that healing seems to happen a lot quicker overnight when you're asleep.

'Kavanaugh's Revenge': Every Democratic senator in a competitive midterm race who voted against Brett Kavanaugh lost http://uk.businessinsider.com/democratic-senators-who-voted-against-brett-kavanaugh-lost-close-reelection-races-2018-11

Not necessarily. Stomach pains can indicate food poisoning, and probably did during our evolutionary past. Toxins can circulate in the blood, and damage muscle and organs, so cutting down on energetic activity might protect the body until the infection is cleared. Something similar might well apply to viral infections. Athletes can do real harm to their fitness, by overdoing it while they are suffering from an infection.