doG

My education is just fine. Still waiting for you to support your assertion. Mods, could you please deal with the personal attacks and lack of support of John's assertion?

I don't know about 'very' common but it is common. The required chest depressions are deeper than regular breathing and prolonged CPR really works the ribs to and fro more than they ever move naturally.

I usually state that as, Science is about the facts, regardless of belief and religion is about belief, regardless of the facts!

More claims and still no support. A couple of thousand years or so is 1500 years or so? Which is it and can you support it? No historical records? Are you really claiming the native Americans didn't even have marriage ceremonies, or the equivalent in their culture, performed by the tribal chief long before any kind of records were kept? That the lack of records means they didn't happen? Long before any preacher came prancing around here? What about the Mayans? They were getting married long before Jesus was even born. No, I really doubt your assertion as valid. Why don't you see what kind of support you can dig up and practice using that link button in the post editor?

They've had for quite some time in the West, a couple of thousand years or so. We have to deal with how things are, not how they were. Really? Are you actually trying to claim the church has had a monopoly on marriages for a couple of thousand years or so? I'll wager you can't support that assertion. No it doesn't. It gives the church an undeserved win over something that was never theirs to begin with. The church needs to keep their nose out of other people's business.

My first thought is of those that were once theist that have been unable to kick the habit completely. Of others, I take it that they do not really know what an atheist is, that they have misapplied a label to themself that doesn't apply.

I don't think you'll end up with a file the CNC can use. I'd look for a DXF plugin for GIMP and draw it as a vector file from the start. You might also try looking for a simple CAD program to use. They all have DXF available as a standard file type.

Yay! You can see the equation for this at MathWorld.

Who would you bribe? The 435 people writing the law or the 10,000 voting on whether or not to pass it? Who would get kickbacks? There would be no incentive to give either to those writing law because they would no longer have the power to pass it. Similarly, bribe and kickbacks to those voting on the laws would have no input on what laws are written for them to vote on or the content of those laws. In the system I imagine we would have one body of elected representatives writing law in Washington and people in the community, like those currently chosen for jury duty, reviewing and voting on the laws written by the representatives. There's no need for the community voters to even be known when the law is written. It's like not knowing who your jurors are going to be when you commit a crime.

So humans too incompetent to understand what a lord and savior is, much less to accept Christ as their own, are not welcome in heaven? That really sucks for all the mentally incompetent, huh? That's OK, I haven't accepted him either so maybe they'll get to see me in hell. It looks like another good reason not to worship the petty god thing!

My guess must not be the one you're asking about then. I know one was used in that song but I guess it's not the answer you're after.

Actually there's two key parts. The other is to prevent those that write the laws from voting on them. This would increase the difficulty of abusing legislative practices like earmarks for example.

Then I'd say your ability to calculate the probability is flawed. In a bag full of green marbles the probability of picking a green marble is a probability of 1. OTOH, the probability amplitude in quantum mechanics is a complex number.

Your study sounds like a crude vodka experiment

Just wondering..... David Berkowitz gave an odd reason for killing, he claimed that to keep the demons quiet, he started doing what they wanted. Gary Ridgway, whose IQ was 80, which signified a slight mental deficiency, plead guilty to 48 charges in 2003, but claimed to have killed 71 women. Charles Manson was religious and used this to manipulate people into forming the Manson family. His family calling him “Jesus Christ” and did everything he wanted, including murder. Albert Fish may have been America’s most vile pedophile, serial killer, and cannibal. He believed God ordered him to castrate young boys. This was diagnosed as religious psychosis and is what led to the several mutilations and murders he committed. Coral Eugene Watts drowned women in a bathtub in order to prevent their spirits from escaping. He committed between 80-100 murders. When a detective said that he did not have enough fingers and toes to count all the murders he committed, Watts replied that there were not enough fingers and toes in the room. (There were four men in the room.) These men did what God wanted them to do. Does that mean they get to go to heaven? Just whose fault is it that they were crazy anyhow, theirs or God's?

And that would be the key. One idea I would propose for such a system is to continue to elect 1 representative for congressional districts sized such that the current enumeration that results in 435 representatives would continue. We just don't have room for 10,000 representatives in the House of Representatives and legislative debates would be never ending and stagnant. These representatives would never again for on the laws they write though, they'd have no say on the passage of laws they write. Instead I would favor a system where members of the community would access legislation and vote on it. There would be approximately one representative for every 30,000 people that would act as electors to vote on pending legislation. They would be chosen at random, or indirectly, from people that put their name in the hat. They would not be chosen by any direct votes solicited from the population based on their promise to lean this way or that on the issues. They would have no more weight than the general population in influencing the representatives in Washington to write any particular legislation. They also would not do this as a job for compensation. It would be a community service for them as they maintained their careers at regular employment. At any rate, it's just a thought but I feel it would offer better representation than we have now.

Attacking the poster is not debating the content of the post Mr. Ad Hominem. Do you not have any legitimate points to counter with?

I don't know that counter-intuitive is the right descriptive term, I would use counter productive. IMO a 2, 3,4,....party system will never represent the diversity of the population of 300+ million people. The collapse of a system to 2 parties is the result of the desire for power since any 1 party in a 2 party system will have more weight than it would in a system with more parties. IMO this has happened because the majority of those seeking a position as a representative weren't genuinely interested in representation but power as a primary motivation for seeking office. If I had my way the House of Representatives would have 10,000 representatives or more. 400 or so would go to Washington to write law as they do now but representatives in the general population would vote on those laws, not those representatives writing the law. It would add a check and balance to the current system of legislation which has broken since the cap on representation was introduced. I would add a similar check and balance to the Senate as well.

This is wrong. Back up and start over. This is right. There is another approach you can try that might help you understand the area of a polygon in general. In the case of your hexagon it can be divided into 6 equilateral triangles which is unique to hexagons among polygons in general. It can also be divided into right triangles as can any other polygon. This fact can be used to derive a general equation for the area of any polygon with n sides of length s.

Here in the lab I use a Brookfield dial reading viscometer that I routinely check with a viscosity standard obtained from Brookfield as well. While water is used as a standard for specific gravity it is not a suitable standard for viscosity. Water is particularly sensitive to temperature when compared with other viscosity standards. Silicone fluids provide good temperature stability and are less temperature sensitive than other standards. I also have some graduated cylinders and various viscosity cups but they do not usually offer a suitable level of accuracy when needed. They are a cheap solution but I would not recommend them for fine measurements.

And those are some kind of trump cards how? Faith? I don't think so. I'm from the southeast U.S. where 50% or more of the population are Christians. People that are not skeptics and simply believe what they have been told all of their life because of.........faith. To me they are no proxy for objective reality, they are evidence that faith itself is some kind of mental disorder. The very fact that these people believe in faith without question is evidence that they are broken. Many of them have come to rely on prayer to cure the ills they face in life and believe it is weakness in their faith when their prayers are not answered. Their ability to reason rationally is flawed. I do want to clarify though, I am not talking about those that have given it thought on their own and come to their own conclusion that they choose to believe there is something more as the safe bet just in case there is something more out there. This group will concede that maybe there is something more and maybe not. They believe because they choose to do so after applying rational thought. OTOH, I am talking about the average southern bible belt christian that believes for no other reason except that it's what always been spoon fed to them without question or thought. They don't believe because they choose to, they believe because they've been told to, told to believe and told not to question it. Told to believe because of faith and faith alone. They are exactly the reason I cannot have faith in "other" humans as a proxy for "objective reality".

This one?

That should be challenged as unconstitutional. IMO, the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which guarantees freedom of religion effectively guarantees freedom from religion as well and the 14th Amendment extends that to the citizens of the states of the union. Religious majorities should not be able to pass laws via polls that effectively force religious views on others.

False, those are not the only choices. I married a widow with 3 kids and fathered 2 of my own and reared all of them. One of her kids dropped a grandchild on my doorstep and I reared her too. Now I'm a widower with a new girlfriend and kid number 7, stepchild #5, I'm a dad to, a young man that's never had anyone to call dad. I don't think it selfish or indulgent at all that I've fathered 2 of my own along the way, the oldest of which now has a stepchild of her own. Some of us have the heart to do both.