mistermack

If you don't want to see, then you will not see. I see activists seeking out staunchly Christian bakers, and ordering cakes with provocative messages on them. You see nothing of the sort. Just innocent people wanting a cake. There are none so blind as those who will not see. One of the few true sayings from the bible. http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2016/october/crippled-by-lgbt-targeting-christian-bakers-close-shop So do I, but then, I think all of Christianity is ridiculous. Just because YOU think it's ridiculous, that doesn't mean it is. If only everyone thought the same, it would all be fine, I'm sure. But presumably Pizzas to cakes is ok? Really, the point I'm making is that the anti-discrimination laws (which I support) are not put in place for activists to force unwilling people to take some part in a political campaign that they disagree with. They are there to stop discrimination in commerce. I think the bakers have used the wrong defence, that's all. If they make it clear that they are happy to provide a non-political cake to gay people, they would stand a much better chance in court. If it's a case of political activism targeting innocent Christian bakers, I'd like to see it fail. If it's bigoted Christians discriminating in a nasty way against a gay couple just wanting a cake, I'd like to see THAT fail.

It could be food that's at the heart of the phenomenon, rather than a deliberate tactical change on the part of the animals. If shy animals get disturbed during the day, they will spend more time hiding, and looking out for danger, and less time feeding. So they will be more hungry at night, and will forage at night, when they are not being disturbed, in response to the hunger.

That's absolutely fine, if it's just a case of an innocent couple ordering a cake for their wedding. However, these cases seem to be cropping up too frequently to be just normal trade. It looks suspiciously like activists are selecting committed Christian bakers, with provocative orders, fishing for a refusal, so that they can portray themselves as wronged and discriminated against. And not just in the USA. A similar case was brought in Northern Ireland. http://felixonline.co.uk/articles/2018-06-23-the-curious-case-of-the-gay-cake/ I think if the baker suspects that he's being used in a crusade, he's entitled to refuse. So long as he makes it clear that it's being used in a political campaign that he is objecting to, rather than serving gay customers. Would a newspaper owner have the right to refuse to carry an advert for gay marriage rights? It's a political stance, and you surely have the right to refuse to support a political campaign, if you disagree with it? Would I have to bake a cake in the shape of a gun, with a gun rights message on it, if I was a lifelong committed anti-gun activist? (which I am). That would seem perverse to me. Surely there's a freedom there, that overrides the customer's rights? After all, nobody is barring the customer from getting a cake. They are just saying "If you want a political cake, get it elsewhere". So long as the baker made it absolutely clear that they were happy to supply that customer with a non-political cake, they should have the right to refuse a political one.

Since the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces are short range and die off quickly, I don't see that they can come into the picture for dark energy. So that leaves gravity as the remaining option, as dark energy is proposed to be acting over huge distances. Would that be right?

I wasn't making that claim. I was referring to others, who regularly make it in online debates. If you're not aware of that claim being made by creationists, then this thread isn't going to mean much to you.

Sorry to come in so late on this, but is the action of dark energy considered to be one of these, or a brand new fundamental force? Or just another 'don't know' at the current time?

Going below 1 atmosphere becomes more and more risky. At the top of Everest, it's about 1/3 of a bar, and will kill most people pretty quickly. I think the highest permanent settlement on Earth is roughly half the height of Everest, but the local people have evolved tolerance to those conditions, so most visitors would get sick living there.

No, I would have quoted your words. I was really referring to the numerous youtube recordings of debates, in which otherwise sceptical people take the fine tuning argument semi-seriously. I don't personally, I think it has the obvious flaws that I pointed out. The main thrust of the fine-tuning argument for a creator is that very tiny differences in the fundamental constants would have resulted in a universe with no life. Or in other words, that the odds against life appearing in a suitable universe are gigantic, so it must have been designed that way. It really is an argument about odds, even if you don't see it that way. The people who are pushing it as an argument for design ARE seeing it that way. And it really is like the lottery winner example. They are saying, "here we are, in a universe that is SO unlikely, that someone must have made it happen". It's just like a lottery winner claiming that someone must have made it happen. To me, it's just as silly an argument. Someone HAD to get the winning lottery ticket, and likewise, the universe HAD to turn out in some form or other. The lottery winner can imagine that it was all done for his benefit, but It's a stupid idea. Likewise, claiming that the Universe was done for our benefit is just as stupid.

The "non stop" element of flying isn't so much a measure of stamina, as a reflection of feeding method. Birds like swifts can stay aloft for weeks, because their food and water is caught in the air, so they don't have to land to refuel. And they can sleep on the wing because they are so light that it takes hardly any energy to glide around in the dark. Arctic Terns are similar in some ways. Their food supply is in water, which covers 2/3 of the planet, and doesn't vary in character like land environments do. So they can travel vast distances, and snack as they go. I'm quite impressed by swans and geese. They are heavy birds, they don't get much help from gliding on thermals, they flap their wings practically the whole way, and they only get to refuel when they reach a suitable stop-off point. And yet they can fly at huge altitude in thin air that would kill a human. Even the common mallard duck can reach altitudes above 20,000 feet. Pretty special for that funny little thing waddling around your local pond.

I'm often coming across this fine tuning argument, and a surprising number of people that I expect to be critical a far more tolerant of it than I expected. I really can't see why they give it even token respect. Maybe I'm missing something, so here's what I think. The argument is that the odds against the universe being the way it is are huge. So lets have a look at long-odds occurrences. Imagine meeting a winner of the world's biggest lottery. He's won 200 million dollars, for which they probably sold five hundred million tickets. What would you think, if he claimed that the lottery was fine-tuned so that he would win? He has the evidence, he can show you his winnings. But everyone knows that SOMEONE has to win it. How much would you pay him for his next ticket? Really, his sample of one is worthless. It's highly likely that he won by chance, just as all the other lottery winners won by chance. So really, a sample of one tells you nothing about fine tuning. If he won the lottery again, from just one ticket, then everyone would sit up and take notice. And if he said again that the lottery was fine-tuned for him to win,, people would take him very seriously indeed. So when it comes to claiming fine-tuning, a sample of one is worthless, as sample of two is a million times more persuasive, and a sample of three is pretty conclusive. But with the Universe that we inhabit, we only have a sample of one. Maybe there were millions and billions of ways that they universe could have turned out, with just the tiniest differences in the fundamental constants of space time. But just like the lottery, it had to end up as ONE of those possibilities. And it did. It ended up as what we see. Maybe it could have taken any one of a billion forms. It just so happened to take this one. That's all.

I'm not aware of snake venoms that can do that. I was talking about the abundant plant and animal poisons that have evolved to protect the owner from being eaten, like frog and toad poison, or the long list of plant poisons. Snake venom didn't evolve to do that. It's actually modified saliva, I believe, and can't really be too harmful to the digestive system, or it would kill the snakes that produce it. If the predator who ate the snake had ulcerated guts, it might get into the blood and kill that way I guess.

I think it's a brilliant idea. You could call it the "transistor radio".

It seems a very simplistic mechanical version of something that is far more complicated. From where I'm looking, most conscious processes are using stored memories and learning. When you read the word "complicated", you aren't seeing it for the first time. So when your eye flits over it, your brain matches it to a memory (or two, or two hundred.....) and fits it in with the sequence of read/remembered words that went before. So the main job of your eyes is not to create brand new images for processing, but to stimulate memories. If you look at a clock, you instantly stimulate memories of clocks, what they are for, what the hands do, etc etc. You don't just process the image. It all happens in a microsecond, you aren't even aware what's going on.

It's not just that Karma doesn't exist, except in our heads. Good and bad, which it is based on, only exists in our heads as well. They are basically the consensus of human opinion on how we should treat others. Killing innocent children, for example, is frowned on by every society, in normal times. (not that it stopped King Herod, according to the Bible). So we regard it as bad. But that's all it is, the expected and usual opinion of the majority of people. Male Lions kill innocent cubs when they take over a pride of females. The females don't like it at the time. But their next reaction is to come into season and mate with the killers of their cubs. It's nature, neither good nor bad to them. There's no reason for good and bad actions to have some sort of magical persistence in time, other than being remembered as a favour or wrong done to others. There is no magical memory, outside of the human brain. And the idea of rebirth is just as silly. So Karma might be real, if it's a result of actual actions by real people repaying favours etc. Otherwise, it's just fantasy.

Here's my best guess of the process of learning how to start a fire over historical time. Firstly, the use of fire from lightning strikes. Probably goes back two million years or more and would have been by Homo Erectus and their forerenners. Then there is the learning how to keep fires going over long periods which would have been a gradual process of gaining experience. Then there is learning how to move fire, by carrying smouldering timber over a distance, and getting a new fire going where you want it. To move it a long way, you could make a number of new fires along the way, to get fresh embers as the old ones gradually died down. Then would come keeping a permanent fire going, in a cave or settlement. I reckon the caves were great for that. Here is some pretty certain evidence, dating back to Homo Erectus more than 800,000 years ago, in a cave in South Africa. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17598738 Then you might have hunting parties travelling for days, and wanting to carry fire with them, for a night camp fire. They would have experimented with various ways of carrying smouldering stuff with them, and conveniently, the horse hoof fungus, and King Alfred's cake, will smoulder for a very long time without going out, and would have been one of the best materials for that. I think that carrying embers would have been the first use of those fungi, rather than flint/pyrite firelighting. When it comes to making sparks, I know from my own experience that that is easy to discover, having done it myself in my early teens with round cobbles lying around in ploughed fields where I lived. You would only get weak sparks, that you could only see in the dark, or twilight, but if I did it, I'm sure Neanderthals would have done it and noticed the same thing. And, in the process of flint knapping, you would notice that flint on pyrite stones produced the best sparks. Still very small and weak, but more of them than random rocks. Eventually, if someone was showing off making sparks, and one landed on some fungus material that was lying about, a spark would take, and the connection would have been made. Once that connection was made, it could be repeated, and the method could be refined.

Yes, it's similar to the situation where animals kill and eat venomous snakes. They can eat the venom without any harmful effects, but if they got bitten by the snake, the venom would kill them. I remember that there is a trick question, how many poisonous snakes are there in the world? The answer is two (I think). One is a japanese grass snake. Can't remember the other. They will both kill you or make you very ill if you eat them. All of the other dangerous snakes, the ones that can kill you with a bite are VENOMOUS snakes. They aren't poisonous to eat. The digestive system has evolved to extract the good stuff, and defend you from the bad. Although of course, there are plenty of natural poisons that CAN kill human when eaten.

The dead one might just be a shed skin.

The limiting factor isn't the day-to-day food supply. It's the periods of famine. You only need one period of famine every ten years to wipe out a population. If your hunting and gathering can all be done in a few hours, under normal circumstance, that doesn't mean that your population is not at risk. Storing food was what enabled populations to expand. It gets you (or some of you) through the lean times. Farming can produce grains for storage. Cattle herding removes your reliance on the wild herd. And fish can be dried and smoked for storage. That's what enables populations to expand.

No, it really couldn't. It takes a lot of skill and knowledge to produce fire from naturally occurring materials. If you don't have those skills, you will NEVER get a fire going by accident. Here's Ray Mears, talking about the flint/pyrite method. It's clear when these experts do it, that they would stand no chance without the dried fungus. What he says about the strength of the spark is instructive : I like the way he talks about the smell as well, it's just how I remember it from when I were a lad.

No, I haven't. Wild clematis (old man's beard) always looked promising too, but I haven't tried that either. I focused on what I could carry, to get a fire going in any conditions. The ferrocerium rod is a fabulous bit of kit. You can pick it up out of a puddle, wipe it, and it will give you big fat hot sparks that will light dry grass directly. And charred cotton cloth will catch brilliantly, so long as it's dry. For all weather, a combination of ferrocerium rod, piece of cloth or paper, and tiny spot of petrol will light a fire in virtually any circumstances. I think I'm going to have a go with pyrites now though, it's a challenge.

It's hugely variable. The critical factors are not so much the temperatures, as firstly the quality of draught proofing, then the insulation. Only after that comes the type of heating and method. After all, if you don't lose any heat, you don't need any heat. You're only replacing what leaks away.

The two types of fungus are far and away the best for catching a weak spark, there's not really anything natural that gets close to them. Cotton will work as well, if it's charred beforehand. Cotton balls will light from a good strong spark. I just read that Otzi the iceman was found to be carrying the same kit that the guy in the video used. Horse head fungus, flint and pyrite for sparks, and various plants for kindling, a full kit. Which is encouraging, but of course he was a modern man, with a copper axe and a bow and arrows etc, from 5,000 years ago, when some building at Stonehenge was already established. A much more modern era. It does show that it was possible to keep stuff dry enough to use though, although the fact that he carried it all with him indicates that it would not be all that easy to gather suitable dry stuff just when you needed it.

Yes, about 155 pounds of air !!

I don't wan't to give the impression I'm sure one way or the other. I'm just playing devil's advocate really. Birch works ok for sparks from a ferrocerium rod. They are brilliant things, you can light paper or grass directly with them, I have several. A firesteel struck with a flint might just light birch if you got it really really dry, and roughed it up. But you wouldn't stand a chance with the sparks off stone. This has bugged me now, I'm going to have to get some flint and pyrites and try it out. I have tried most firelighting methods but not that. The problem generally is getting your tinder dry enough. Easy enough at home, but out in nature, everything gets damp, without central heating and plastic boxes. Getting a fire going in winter, from a spark off a flint and pyrites stone, would I think be a pretty daunting task.

No, but we were really just doing it to make a noise, as much as anything. You could only notice the odd spark if it was dark, so we weren't really doing it to make sparks. It was fascinating though, to see that you could produce a spark from a stone, in the dark. The best effect was got if you took a good sized cobble, and threw it at a shallow angle against a brick wall. (there was a railway arch where we used to play). You could get a trail of sparks if you threw it hard enough at the right angle. Since Neanderthals would have been knapping flint, it would be inevitable that they would notice sparks, if they did it in the dark using a pyrites hammer stone. That in itself would be a pretty impressive party trick back then. Whether they could take it any further, and actually light a fire, we will probably never know. The survival guy makes it look easy. But lots of things are easy, once you know how.