John Cuthber

A blacksmith makes two knives- they are, for all practical purposes, identical. A surgeon buys one of the knives and uses it to save people. A mugger buys the other and uses it to kill. The knives have no purpose until someone chooses what they wish to do with it. Unless there's "someone" who is choosing what mankind is for, mankind has no purpose. And the idea that the "someone" exists is not science, because it's not testable.

Obviously true. But not relevant because there will have been a time between "everything is on floppy disks" and "everything is on memory sticks" when both formats were widely available and, if the data was important, it would have been copied to the new format. Was it all important or forgotten about? It can't have been both. Incidentally, if you need to read a file from an 8 inch floppy disk I still have a couple of drives and I guess these days someone would hook up an arduino or some such to handle the interfacing.

Unless it takes you are really long time to get to bed, that's not a critical requirement.

Looks like drive by spamming to me.

So, you don't think that people copy stuff onto new media? Well.... we do. So, it doesn't matter if I can read a floppy disk or not, because I can read the copy that's been made onto whatever medium I currently use. And, because it's digital data, it's a perfect copy of the original digital version. That's the point which you seem to be deliberately ignoring. You don't need to be able to read the outdated formats because the data is copied onto the new ones. Sheesh!

I don't know what you mean. That's exactly why I asked for the definitions.

The view that nitrogen is a "cooled solid substance which is sublimating at room temperature" is- shall we say- interesting. Dry ice is a good option So is a smoke machine.

So what? The point is that a digital copy (on any "new" medium) of that floppy is a perfect copy. And a digital copy of that copy will still be a perfect copy- even when it's transferred to yet another medium. So, the data is immortal- you just need to keep copying onto the latest format. It can also be shared "perfectly" across the world, so the destruction of a single copy doesn't matter. Who cares about the disk? Incidentally, asking if science can be your religion makes about as much sense as asking if science can be your favourite colour or if February can be your religion.

Has anyone defined "lightest" and "colour" in this thread yet?

This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_(cosmology) is real. As I said, I didn't check out the vid.

How do you know? Did you measure them and check? On the other hand, I hate to say this but he's right about the AoE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_(cosmology) (strictly, I didn't check if he was right, but he's not bat-shit crazy wrong about it.) I invite whoever downvoted his post to reconsider. What problem(s)?

So, we live in the biggest one we have found. The vitally important word there is "known". There may be bigger ones- we haven't finished looking. In what way? It's like saying "I live in the middle of all the places that are within 10 minutes walk of my house- so it must be special. Yes they have. In particular, parallax measurements on nearby stars. This is what science has already shown. We aren't in the middle.

It has already been proven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem If it is one of "Those pesky perpetual motion machines" then it is.

No. You can't get more energy out than you put in. The "small" motor " wouldn't produce enough power to drive the torus. A big enough motor to do that would need more power than the torus could provide. It's a lost cause.

If I was sat at the centre of the earth (I'd be a bit warm etc...) I could look up + see my bed doing about a thousand miles an hour. But as I climbed the ladder back to it, it would seem to slow down. When I got to the top, it would be stationary, and I could just climb in. Rotating vacuum seals are a pig. Imagine a rigid spaceship that's mushroom shaped with a really wide "cap". If you make the cap wide enough then, even a very small rotational speed will give you the artificial gravity you need, while the narrow stem is still in microgravity.

You should ask your doctor about it. If it is new, you should ask your doctor about it urgently.

No. I didn't ask you to say if we had the same mother (That was your strawman) - I asked you to say if, at some point far back in time, our ancestors- at that time- must have been the same. What was to be shown was the falsehood of my assertion that, if we went back far enough, we all have the same set of ancestors and thus your definition of race- based on ancestry- is unworkable. I'm off to bed now so you have plenty of time to think about it. See if you can come up with something better than three letters of trolling.

No. But I did say "if you go back far enough. Is it that you don't understand that one generation really isn't very far, or are you just trolling? Do we have the same set of (Great^30) grand mothers? We each have roughly half a billion and there were only about 160 million women to choose from. Mine were the women who were around at the time. Who were yours?

That's not a scientifically valid point. You seem unable to do better than to say it's a laugh or stupid, or whatever. But you can't actually show that it's wrong, can you? Either prove that your ancestors differ from mine (or anyone else's) , or accept that your definition is useless.

Not at all stupid. I have two parents, four grandparents, 8 great grandparents and so on. If that carried on then 30 generations ago I'd have had about a billion (great)^30 grand parents. 30 generations is roughly 600 years. so that would have been about 1400 AD. But there were only roughly a third of a billion people around. https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth I had three times more ancestors than there were people. And, of course, if you go back further , it gets worse. I run out of people who could have been my ancestors. So, how does that work? Well, some of them are the same people- they will all have been distant cousins etc. That same analysis also works for "some bloke in China". He can follow the same route and conclude that many or most of the world's population in 1400 were ancestors of his. (And an even bigger fraction if he goes back further). So, if you look back far enough, every human on Earth was his ancestor and every human on Earth was my ancestor. So the Chinese bloke and I had- necessarily- the same set of ancestors. Or, you can look at it the other way round. At some stage there was the first "tribe" of "humans"- it doesn't matter much what definition you use for humans. All my ancestors at that time were part of that tribe. All the Chinese bloke's ancestors were part of that tribe. If you go back far enough you end up with what might as well be called Adam and Eve- the first two humans. All the tribe must be descended from them and so the Chinese bloke and I are descended from them. We really do- very obviously- all have the same set of ancestors. I, for one, would like a less simple one- one which makes sense.

Since the actual answer is "yes"- that's why both use DNA as their genetic material- it's clear that you don't even science. All humans have at least one common ancestor- mitochondrial Eve. So, if the definition of race is "shared ancestry" then all humans are (as I pointed out) part of the same race.

The "prediction" you say you can make from the knowledge that someone is "Chinese" was that they have black hair. OK, if I tell you that an animal is a great ape (Hominidae), what can you tell me about that animal's hair colour? (Here's a hint- if it's not an orangutan, it's almost bound to be black haired) So, your "race" is no more use than the Family, and yet you are hoping to use it to subdivide a single species. Good luck. Well, yes- sort of (though it's not very specific). Now, tell me where in science they use the concept "looks like they are from China (or thereabouts)"? Also, I already asked you this. How do you define "race"? We still all have the same ancestors, notably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve so that's still a useless definition.

Because the whole godforsakenly expensive point is (usually) that they do experiments in microgravity. If they are doing something in 1 g then they can do it at home.

I may have missed it. Can you tell / remind me what definition of "race" you are using?

Never seen a bald Chinese person? Never seen one with grey hair? Never seen one who dyed their hair. And that's before we get to all the Chinese people whose ancestors are not Chinese. Why bother to say they were Chinese, rather than they were black haired ? On reflection, to a pretty good approximation for humanity as a whole, we all have black hair.