Sayonara

This is normally the point where you need to stop and think "it's too good to be true". If in doubt, Google services before you use them. Bad service always gets bad press. BTW, it says £4.50 per week on the front page; once in the service terms and again in a nice big blue thing in the top right corner. What made you think it was free?

Not a Father Ted fan then.

Is it getting smaller, or just further away? /fuel

No, no, a thousand times no.

And GR does fit, massively and impressively so. So let's confine this thread to the OP's topic, which means anti-BB participants present evidence.

The writer of the passage is imagining how god might describe "the pride of the fleet" as far as his creations go, in a conversation with another character which has a particular point to make. He is using whatever powerful imagery comes to mind based off stories he has heard himself, limited knowledge of oceanic life, and mythical beasts. That does not even break the anecdote boundary. It is utterly, irrevocably, FICTION. Unless there is a valid academic point to be made here, and not simply "someone said god once mentioned something like a dragon so they must exist", can we please not bring religious texts into the GS forum.

I volunteer Firefly to train sharks, tigers, and rattlesnakes to eat egg and cress sandwiches.

Job 40 describes something so vague it could be any kind of large animal. The idea that it describes a dinosaur or dragon is an interpretive choice on the part of the reader.

Fickle, whorish PHP.

You appear to have completely ignored my post. The dictionary gives definitions for common usage. It is not a technical glossary for physics.

If you are imagining a single timeline, this scenario still attracts the Origin of Information problem.

Depends on how time travel actually works (if at all), but there are several possible answers. Bridged timelines and pre-intercession influence are two of them. This topic has done the rounds on SFN again and again and again and oh my god again, and it is very rare to see an original or thought-provoking discussion.

To be fair, the multiple persons thing was not my idea (although it came from an off-the-cuff comment of mine), but I do agree that a party of more than one person falling foul of sharks is possible. I think we probably all do, if we completely lay aside the issue of frequency. To be honest, I don't want to labour the issue too much. The possibility of under-reporting is less important in its own numerical right than it is for the purpose of reminding you to consider anything that might affect your hypotheses. I think that is sensible, but bear in mind that we can't just focus on groups who were successfully rescued and disregard those which were not. It stands to reason that people who are not attacked by sharks stand a better chance of being rescued than those who do. You can acknowledge certain possibilities without throwing your whole idea; it is all about managing your variables. This is kind of the point. The implication of this paragraph is that it is much easier for attacks to be carried out with no witnesses or trace of a body away from the coast, where attacks go unrecorded. We know that attacks do occur away from the coast, since they are accounted for in the outstanding minority. The information we lack is the degree to which that minority represents the entire set of attacks made away from the coast. Since you have your idea, a good way to progress this thread now would be to devise a reliable means of testing the hypothesis.

No. Quantum wires CAN be made out of nanotubes, but they are not all manufactured so. A quantum wire is named for its transport properties, not for being 1-dimensional. Although the Wikipedia entry is hardly a good physics source, all of that is perfectly evident from reading it. The particular wires Klaynos referred to are manufactured from gallium arsenide. They have physical diameter, but meet the requirements for a 1D object because the diameter is roughly the DeBroglie wavelength of an electron in that wire. Of course, whether or not you agree with the physicists working in this area is up to you, but personally I'd tend to respect their expertise. See this article: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/5013 It might help to separate the notion of a dimensionally restricted object, in or across which nothing can move in particular directions, from the notion of a mathematically ideal spatial dimensionality which is so infinitesimally small as to be non-existent. I am not sure but it also appears you may be confusing the dimensionality of the object with the n-space it resides in.

Refer to my previous post.

"Rare" is a relative term. How many millions of people enter the Earth's seas every year? Additionally, you are ignoring the possibility of all members of a party being killed before making a report. Note that they do not all need to be killed by sharks - there is a reason why it is called "the cruel sea". It seems to me that you are writing off an important uncertainty factor to make the facts fit, without being sure about your assumptions. Personally I don't care if the figures you use are right or wrong, but I would have thought you'd want to be very confident of them.

Do we know what the Vatican means by "genetic manipulation" being a sin, or are we just taking blind shots?

Why does the weight of the Uzis matter? Is he going to throw them at the Emperor's head?

Would it? Globally, how many people go missing at sea or on coastlines in a year? For someone with a stated interest in the topic, you are not making a very visible effort to check up with reputable sources and determine if this possible under-reporting can be written off safely. If it were me, I would not simply rely on conjecture and anecdote.

On this site we attack the argument, not the person making it. Refer to the site rules and etiquette notice if you are unsure.

Speed is a scalar quantity, not a vector. Changing the sign of the speed to negative does not mean it goes in the opposite direction, it just means you are using an unconventional perspective. Accordingly, changing the sign of the time lapse to negative simply serves to preserve the positive sign of your answer, and does not have any temporal meaning.

You calling it a major exaggeration is no more likely to be accurate than the figure of 36. Yes, it is much easier to communicate when one is not dead.

Yes, they are likely to be rare. But my point is that with the low figure SkepticLance has for shark-related deaths per year, you only need 36 people out of all those who go missing at sea or from beaches per year to be killed due to shark activity, and the figure is then an under-estimate by an order of magnitude. Sorry if you were taken aback by the "argument from incredulity" thing, it was late here and I was just being me All the reasons given... except the aliens one I would imagine. Note that you don't have to be eaten, just killed. There is also the fairly common eventuality that bodies recovered at sea or on coastlines are often too badly damaged for coroners to properly identify a cause of death. I am suggesting that shark-related deaths are under-reported for the simple reason that there are so very many more deaths of unknown cause and persons recorded missing at sea than there are identifiable deaths/disappearances. That's exactly my point; I was just pointing out to SL the danger of accepting that "only four per year" figure as being concrete. Let's make no mistake about this: the people who survive shark attacks are very lucky. You only need a relatively small wound from a modest sized animal to do serious damage when you are in the water; without help being immediately at hand getting to safety and/or medical attention is very problematic. Yes, because (a) nobody ever finds themselves in water under unexpected circumstances, and (b) nobody was ever separated from their group and met a fate the nature of which could not be established. What does not happen, larger numbers are killed than are killed? I do not follow your logic. Are you countering the "under-reporting" argument, or suggesting that people in groups are not usually killed by sharks at all? There is a very good possibility that this happens frequently. A lot of predatory behaviour comes directly from a form of cost-benefit comparison.

See very well timed post by Klaynos. Yes, it does rather beg the question, you are right. But on the other hand exactly the same answer can be given for an object of any dimensionality; what I was trying to get across is that there is no reason to view a one dimensional entity as being any more or less peculiar than a two or three dimensional entity.

Argument from incredulity. Also note that "completely alone" has been added by yourself.