mistermack

It's probably not as simple as that. Waste is at it's highest in places that have lots of water. You wouldn't be taking an iceberg there. In places where you would take an iceberg, water is probably very scarce, and waste will be already minimised due to cost.

Even the most remotely Christian debaters I've seen, who readily admit that the gospels are just stories, still say that if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, the religion is a nothing. Both.

The sort of person who can study bible history, get a degree, doctorate, design and set that very course that you mentioned, and yet STILL believe that Jesus was the son of God, born of a virgin, died and rose again after three days of being dead, and ascended into heaven. Unless of course, it was set by an atheist. Possible, but not very likely.

I'm impressed. I'll be even more impressed when I see you lick your own dick. (And teach me how it's done !!) Edit: I mean teach me how to lick MY dick, not ...... Oh, forget that bit.

It's got "Con" written all over it. Five times the power to weight ratio of lithium Ion??? A modest little claim.

Cats and dogs are on a higher level than humans. They must be. We voluntarily feed them, keep them warm and dry, pay their medical bills and exercise and entertain them. And they can lick their own genitals. Humans don't even come close.

It was years ago that I had the dental abscess, but I still remember the pain. And when the dentist pulled the tooth out, I couldn't believe the stink !! At roughly the same time, there was a report in the news of a man in Japan who committed suicide by jumping off the top of a high office block, because he couldn't stand the pain of a dental abscess. I wasn't at that point myself, but I can fully understand how he came to jump. Edit: In Australia, in the eastern rain forest area, there grows a tree called the suicide bush. It's related to the stinging nettle, but the stings are so painful that it's reputed to drive people to kill themselves. And the stings can last for years : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides

It's a good point, although I wouldn't class it as pain. I would say that it's similar in many ways though. Fear and pain are overwhelmingly a good thing, for the survival of the species and the individual. If our ancestors hadn't had both, we wouldn't be here now. But fear, like pain, can be debilitating and work against the individual, if it happens to excess and doesn't fade away once it stops being useful.

If you're going to give a value to the consensus among bible historians that Jesus was a real man, why stop there? After all, the consensus among bible historians is also that Jesus was the son of God, born of a virgin, and rose again, after being dead for three days, and ascended into heaven. Even Bart Ehrman believed all that stuff in the past. To his credit, he thought about it, and rejected a lot of it. But only after getting his doctorate at a theological seminary : Wiki: Ehrman grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, and attended Lawrence High School, where he was on the state champion debate team in 1973. He began studying the Bible and the Biblical languages at Moody Bible Institute, where he earned the school's three-year diploma in 1976.[1] He is a 1978 graduate of Wheaton College (a Christian residential college) in Illinois, where he received his bachelor's degree. He received his PhD (in 1985) and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied under Bruce Metzger. Both baccalaureate and doctorate were conferred magna cum laude.[2] This is not untypical of New Testament scholars. This is where your precious consensus is coming from. Ehrman is a huge exception in rejecting some of it, he's not typical in that way. And you won't find many atheists following the Bible study trail.

I've had various bouts of severe pain in my life, including a shattered ankle, back pain that would make me literally squeal, and diabolical migraines. But the very worst was a tooth abscess. It literally brought tears to my eyes. The shattered ankle hurt, but not hugely. I only got it checked to be on the safe side, I thought I'd just sprained it. There is a kind of head pain that I've had that is really fleeting, probably no more than a tenth of a second. But it's so intense that I do believe you would pass out, if it lasted much longer. I thought it was just me, but a friend of mine described exactly the same thing to me, a few months ago. He'd never had it before, so he was quite relieved when I said that I got it regularly. I've had MRI head scans for head pains in the past, and they found nothing physical, so they put it down to severe migraines.

Agreed. My own conclusion is that bible historians are making far too much of some very dubious evidence. It may seem now, that the stories are too detailed and numerous to have come from nothing. It may seem that people like Paul were too committed to lie or invent. But what historians ignore is just how clever some of those people were, 2,000 years ago. And the people that they were writing for were also clever, and discriminating, so the stories had to be good. All of the rubbish has been discarded, and what we're left with can look pretty impressive if you don't read between the lines. It's DESIGNED to convince. That's it's only purpose. And that's why you need independent corroborating evidence, to establish something as true, especially in the field of religion.

It clearly IS how things work. Dream on!

It's clearly possible for an equally informed historian to look at the same evidence and come to the opposite conclusion. Which is Ten Oz's point. That the evidence is crap. While I've seen people give the opposite view to people like Carrier, I haven't seen his facts negated, or his arguments thoroughly rebutted. The fact that you are reduced to arguing for the consensus, instead of demolishing the "negative" view with facts shows just how weak the factual basis for the real Jesus. There might have been one, there might not. Given the way that the story was "managed" in the early church, anything's possible. I saw a documentary on Mary Magdalene the other day, and one historian even made the argument that the early church was started around HER, and she was written out, and replace with a man, because the people who had got control no longer wanted a religion based around a woman. While it's a stretch, it's not an impossible stretch, because we just don't know. The past is too murky when it comes to religion. Here in Britain, we have the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table. With complicated stories about his birth and his love life etc. Nobody knows if it had a real man at the root. And that's from only 1300 odd years ago. About the time that Allah was yakking a load of rot to Mohammed. If someone had given Arthur a god sidekick, instead of a magician, the world might now be a different place.

No, I think it's independent of the size of the tube. The atmospheric pressure at sea level is 760 mm of mercury, regardless of the measuring tube. Which equates to about 10m of water. I found one fact on the net, that water will boil at 23 deg C, at a pressure of one fortieth of an atmosphere. So the small diameter of the Xylem seems to come into play, by preventing cavitation at low pressures. That still doesn't overcome the 30m problem. If you have a simple tube, with one end in water, and the other a perfect vacuum, then the maximum that the water can rise is 30m, because that's the value of atmospheric pressure, in m of water. Because pressure is force/area, if your tube doubles in cross section area, the upwards force is doubled, and the weight of water in the column also doubles. So whatever the diameter, a given vacuum gives the same height of column supported. If you had a six inch pipe, with a near total vacuum at the top, I would expect the water to be pushed up 30m, and be boiling at the surface, if it was at room temperature. So I don't think you can make it work for any tree over 35 m in height, with maximum root pressure, and a 100% vacuum at the top. There must be something else in play for the very tall trees.

There seems to be something missing then. If the maximum that a vacuum can lift water is ten metres, what's lifting it above that? It doesn't come across from the pages that have been linked so far. Reading a bit more, it appears that the exact mechanism isn't agreed as yet. Wikipedia mentions root pressure, transpirational pull, and "pressure flow hypothesis". Pressure flow hypothesis: Sugars produced in the leaves and other green tissues are kept in the phloem system, creating a solute pressure differential versus the xylem system carrying a far lower load of solutes- water and minerals. The phloem pressure can rise to several MPa,[11] far higher than atmospheric pressure. Selective inter-connection between these systems allows this high solute concentration in the phloem to draw xylem fluid upwards by negative pressure. This seems to be the answer to some of the problems I mentioned : Transpirational pull requires that the vessels transporting the water be very small in diameter; otherwise, cavitation would break the water column. And as water evaporates from leaves, more is drawn up through the plant to replace it. When the water pressure within the xylem reaches extreme levels due to low water input from the roots (if, for example, the soil is dry), then the gases come out of solution and form a bubble – an embolism forms, which will spread quickly to other adjacent cells, unless bordered pits are present (these have a plug-like structure called a torus, that seals off the opening between adjacent cells and stops the embolism from spreading). It seems to be a lot more complicated than a simple tube.

I was thinking along those lines, but I couldn't reconcile the height of tall trees with the partial vacuum caused by evaporation. From memory, going back to my school days, atmospheric pressure will only lift water approximately ten metres, at sea level in response to a nearly full vacuum. So in trees that are 100m tall, you would need pressure from the roots to take it the rest of the way. If the evaporation was able to reduce the pressure in the tubes close to zero, you would think that the water would boil.

Trees can do it. Up to a maximum height of 115 metres. The way that they manage it, I believe, is by evaporating the water in the leaves, reducing the pressure in the tubes, so the liquid is forced up by root pressure. Obviously, the water evaporates at the top so it wouldn't be usable. I don't know how the roots create enough pressure to push water to the top of a Coastal Redwood, or Australian Mountain Ash at over 100m tall. Maybe energy manufactured in the leaves is used to create the root pressure, so it might not be possible to copy the process.

There you go again with your "majority view". It's meaningless. And it's very often self perpetuating. After all, who is teaching the new crop of historians? People who hold the "majority view". It's a bit like the Christian religion itself. It's self replicating down the ages. And climate research IS a good example of a self perpetuating consensus. Nobody in their right mind would go into climate research, if they didn't already believe in MMGW. They would just be signing up to a lifetime of being shunned, and unemployable. Unless they were prepared to keep their mouth shut and live a lie. Climate research is now for believers only, and that's pretty close to bible history too. It's nice to see one or two dissenters, but they need to be pretty special people to make a go of it.

Not due to the transparency, but to the very effective insulation. This includes control of the blood supply to the skin, as well as hollow fibre fur. I remember years ago installing passive infrared detectors in my burglar alarm system. You could defeat the detectors, by holding up a high tog duvet in front of you, and moving slowly. A polar bear would have hot spots, like the eyes and nose, and breath, so I would think that a PIR detector would pick them up in a cold space.

It's there in response you your equally huge assumption, that the majority view among religious historians is somehow significant. Perhaps we should both drop the huge assumptions. There's an inbuilt problem with addressing the question of whether the Jesus was an actual man or not, if you're a professional historian. And that is the book-buying public. You are cutting yourself off from a lot of sales, if you argue for an out-and-out no. I'm not particularly keen on Richard Carrier, but I have to admire his stance. It would have been a lot easier to go for the easy money, or stay on the fence. Maybe there's a market there for his stance though, smaller but more exclusive.

Religious historians, like religious writers in antiquity, need to be taken with a huge pinch of salt, for the same reasons. They favour what they WANT to be true. To lump them in with other historians is a bit like giving intelligent design equal billing with proper science. That doesn't mean that their arguments can be ignored. But it does mean that I don't think that their opinions should be given the sort of weight that you give them.

I read the other day that song thrushes and black caps eat deadly nightshade berries. No more details than that. They would make a better seed dispersal candidate, as rabbits would be more likely to chew the seeds up, and they eat their own shit and digest it twice, so the seeds might not survive being eaten.

I reckon that Venus would come pretty close. It's rotation has very little tilt, and the atmosphere is so thick and hot that the heat is probably spread around the planet very evenly. Not a pleasant place though, so conditions are predictable but pretty horrific.

I'm still guessing that it's birds that spread it, as well as rabbits. I know what rabbit shit looks like, and I haven't seen any, nor any scrapes. But maybe we've just got some tidy rabbits. I'm not sure if the seeds would pass through a rabbit undamaged either. But I'll avoid eating any rabbit shit, just in case.

And cattle too, I mentioned it above. It's surprising that those animals evolved an immunity, rather than an aversion to the plant. You would think that it would be less costly to just evolve a few circuits in the brain, than to evolve the physical ability to cope with the poison. But maybe by evolving the immunity, it gave those animals a food source that other animals are shunning, so they have a more exclusive access to it. It could be a life saver in hard famine times, when every other available scrap of food has been eaten.