StringJunky

Yes

Yes, it seems strange how you can chuck some things together and you get a completely new and different phenomenon seemingly unrelated to its components...like magic

Charles Do you experience a garlicky taste in your mouth sometime after using it? I read this can be a symptom of DSMO use. If so there's your answer. Try a strong nicotine patch on your arm...that will give you an answer as well...I guarantee it, it nearly made me sick as I got ones too strong for me. Also, If it didn't work millions of people wouldn't snort illicit substances up their nose would they?

A computer program is an emergent property of electricity consisting of a series of voltage or no voltage; the resulting data signal is not a separate entity from the electricity, just like thoughts are not distinct from the brain. Another analogy would be the concerted movement of water molecules to make waves...you can't separate the wave from water or assign it to a single molecule..it is an emergent property of all the molecules in the wave.. A thought is not a single entity, it is a product of many electrochemical reactions meshing together to create the phenomenon of thought. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts...this is the essence of what emergence means.

I don't think you intended to deceive but if you cut and paste a quote you should give a link to the source with it or else it looks like plagiarism.

This is quite interesting and has some EEG traces for lucid dreaming: http://magic-su.net/books/phys1.pdf

There is a state called lucid dreaming where there is a self-conscious awareness of dreaming and the dreamer can control events within it in the full knowledge that they are in a dream. This is not the norm when dreaming but it can happen to some at times, including myself.

Given the nature our mutual interest, which is science, I think there is enough inherent oversight that if there was any scent of foul play by a member of staff, the other mods and indeed members would soon weed them out...it's a non-issue. The votes are on public display to be counted by anyone anyway. Regardless of what I've just said, which was an attempt at looking at it objectively, my personal experience here is the mods are all good sports and collectively strive to engage in fair play. I trust them too.

I concur, Mods and Experts are all members and I don't think an unfair advantage is conferred upon them in a poll because they are so...at the end of the day, we have ordinary members that are every bit as knowledgeable and expert as the staff. It's just that the staff are the nominated referees but they work at it just like the rest of us and exceptional <insert quality> should be recognised regardless of forum status. Let it be a level playing-field for everyone is my opinion.

I think you have it the wrong way round...omnipresence is a requirement of omniscience...you cannot know everything without being everywhere.

Interesting article, thanks. Personal belief is clearly a tough cookie to crack. It seems to me in order to avoid that, ironically perhaps, one needs to sustain a 'belief system' that there is no absolute truth or we cannot know it by virtue of our lack of omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence.

Humour aside, I wish more people more people would so candidly admit (humour optional) when they are wrong. We learn nothing new when we are always right.

MSE's forte is as a real-time antimalware solution. No single solution is best. A good solution is to use one real-time (always on) AV and a couple of on-demand scanners like Superantispyware and Malwarebytes on a routine basis as backup. The best way to recover from an attack is to re-image your PC, not try to remove the malware. I think antimalware should be seen as detection utilities and not removal ones.

Here's some more you can browse.

It's also called 'shelf life': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_life Here's a source of a few links you might find useful http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/biosafety/salmonella/microbio_en.htm

Very good.

I agree with Captain Panic, don't make judgements about your body at your current stage of life because right now you are not finished article physically. On the subject of alcohol tolerance, the perceived "machismo" in being able to drink a lot is an ultimately hollow and naive one with possibly serious health damaging consequences...trust me on that one as I approach fifty.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result -attributed by some to Einstein. Just a possibly apt and humorous quote that came to mind reading this.

Avast, Antivir, MS Security Essentials are all fine as real-time AV's...it's a case of choose the one that suits. As for routine on-demand scanners having Superantispyware and Malwarebytes are in my armoury. For protection of online transactions and password protection (which is used by quite a few UK banks) I use Rapport. I just use the free versions. In the event of positively identifying malware on my system I reimage my system with a saved backup made by Macrium Reflect Free which I update regularly with new images. I never save my data or images on the system partition...these are kept on a separate one. I don't bother trying to get rid of malware by using the above utilities, they are for detection purposes only, as malware invariably trashes the registry, and repair is never satisfactory imo and is time consuming; a reimage takes me 20 minutes.

Esbo, we don't know...only various possibilities. As you are not able or at least not prepared to delve into the fundamental science there's no point continuing this. You can only skate on the the surface of a subject for so long before you have to get your head down into the hard stuff and that's where we are at now...the answer to the question is beyond simple analysis. I'm inclined to think, like Essay, that full absorption is probably harmful in too many situations for plants to adopt black. This comment from a NASA geochemist which I've drawn from a link of Greg's seems to support this view as well: David Des Marais, a geochemist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, calls the purple Earth hypothesis "interesting," but cautions against making too much of one observation. "I'm a little cautious about looking at who's using which wavelengths of light and making conclusions about how things were like 3 or 4 billion years ago," said Des Marais, who was not involved in the research. Des Marais said an alternative explanation for why chlorophyll doesn't absorb green light is that doing so might actually harm plants. "That energy comes screaming in. It's a two-edged sword," Des Marais said in a telephone interview. "Yes, you get energy from it, but it's like people getting 100 percent oxygen and getting poisoned. You can get too much of a good thing." Des Marais points to cyanobacteria, a photosynthesizing microbe with an ancient history, which lives just beneath the ocean surface in order to avoid the full brunt of the Sun. "We see a lot of evidence of adaptation to get light levels down a bit," Des Marais said. "I don't know that there's necessarily an evolutionary downside to not being at the peak of the solar spectrum." http://www.livescience.com/1398-early-earth-purple-study-suggests.html Which of all the hypotheses presented is correct? Take your pick.

As I've only been on these boards a couple of years and something like this has not come up since then it will be interesting to see how the conventional scientific community, as a whole, conducts itself as it plays out over time whatever the outcome. I hope the experts will keep us posted and interpret the developments for us.

Chemoautotrophs (or chemotrophic autotroph), (Gr: Chemo (χημία) = chemical, auto (αὐτός) = self, troph (τροφιά) = nourishment) in addition to deriving energy from chemical reactions, synthesize all necessary organic compounds from carbon dioxide. Chemoautotrophs use inorganic energy sources, such as hydrogen sulfide, elemental sulfur, ferrous iron, molecular hydrogen, and ammonia. Most are bacteria or archaea that live in hostile environments such as deep sea vents and are the primary producers in such ecosystems. Evolutionary scientists believe that the first organisms to inhabit Earth were chemoautotrophs that produced oxygen as a by-product and later evolved into both aerobic, animal-like organisms and photosynthetic, plant-like organisms.[citation needed] Chemoautotrophs generally fall into several groups: methanogens, halophiles, sulfur oxidizers and reducers, nitrifiers, anammox bacteria, and thermoacidophiles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotroph

You probably kept pressing the Back button which re-enters your submission. Once you've submitted, use one of the links at the top of the page to go to where you want....that's what I do. We've all done it....although not as spectacularly as you.

Just about all scientific papers are written in the form like the ones I linked. The reason lots of big words are used is for conveying the maximum amount of information in the smallest space and/or the shortest reading time. These papers are really written for other like-minded people that understand the lingo of a particular discipline and not the casual reader. Although I don't claim to fully understand all the implications of what each paper states, it is clear to me from these and what others have contributed here that black has too many problems to be taken on as a globally-prevalent light-gathering component, given other limitations of the external environment and within the leaf itself. In two billion years, plants haven't evolutionarily found a better colour to use...it is the best fit for terrestrial Earth....that's why plant's are green.