John Cuthber

Reality is complex. that's why we have studied the manufacture of spectrometers very carefully. We have tested them both as a QC exercise and also by using them in countless situations for over a hundred years. The one currently under debate is just on a different rock. Why would it be different from one on the rock we call Earth? Obviously, there might be something odd happening, but that would breach your own stated view on universality. Nonsense, not least , because it's trivially false. You don't see the back of the sun. We see very nearly half of it from here. You have this idea backwards. We see roughly half the moon, but only a very little of the earth. If we climb a tower we can see further. The higher you are above the surface of a sphere, the more of it you can see.

Diddums. Says who?

Indeed, Especially, given that, as individuals we aren't really all that good. It's only by cooperation that we achieve truly great things.

It often is; it certainly is if they got where they are by inheriting a company, or by getting away with sharp practice, or they happened to choose VHS rather than betamax, or they took over an existing company, or they were in the position of having a powerful friend block a competitor. You say "You make the company, or the employer pay more taxes...." And then you forget the important bit. Why is that? Is it that you don't want to acknowledge it? Anyway- since you won't look at the real world, I willpoint it out for you. You make them pay more tax and then you (as the state) use that money to do things like build roads (which practically no employer can afford) which allow the business to distribute the goods it makes. And you use it to build and run schools- so that the business can benefit from having a better educated , better trained workforce. And you use it to provide healthcare so that the business benefits from a healthier workforce- they work better , worry less and have better attendance. And so on. Now it's true that a big employer could, in principle, do any of those things. But big employers like that are rare. A government gets all the benefits of ensuring that nobody shirks their share and they also get economies of scale which no other mechanism would allow. So, there are lots of benefits that you simply ignored. You say "Rich people are not our enemies, they are the holders of the means of production." The two clauses are unrelated to eachother They often hold the means of production for no good reason except luck. When they club together and ensure that they get all the money and leave the rest in poverty then yes, they absolutely are the enemy. (and they have). https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/hope-despair-inequality/421806/ I doubt that, but let's look at the alternative- the usual system that people consider is the "flat tax" rather than a progressive tax rate. It's not hard t show why it's bad for everyone. Imagine a group of people- it could be a country but it's easiest to show the reasoning with a small group- say a small town. They decide that they want a "thing" again, it doesn't matter what the thing is- a school, a park, a hospital, a statue to the town's founder- whatever. The distribution of salaries in most places is fairly similar. A few people earning a lot, many earning in the middle and a few earning very little. For simplicity there are 100 people in town. 3 earn a million a year, 5 earn just 10,000 and the rest earn 20,000. The cost of living is 9000 a year. So, let's see what happens with a flat tax. Clearly you can't set it higher than 1000 a year, because that would kill the poorest families. So, the tax income for the town can't exceed 100,000. Sadly, the Thing the town want costs 200,000. OK, let's consider a progressive tax of 5% The poorest families are still alive- which is a good thing. In fact, they are better off- they pay 500 rather than 1000 as they would under the flat tax system. They contribute 1500 between them. The "middle class" each pay 1000 and there are 98 of them, and that's another 98000 in the town's kitty, and the rich pay 50,000 each so that's 150,000 to add in. So the overall tax collected is 249500. Because they recognised the problem with flat tax they can buy the Thing and live happily ever after. (and, in case you are wondering, yes, sure, one of the 3 rich guys could simply have paid for the Thing, but it would have cost him 200,000 and this way he gets it for 50,000) Please do not ever try to tell us that progressive tax is a bad thing. (unless, of course, you think truth doesn't matter)

It has nothing to do with relativity. You can, in principle, get an image of the whereabouts of a gun emplacement by getting a thick wall with a hole in it and seeing where the shells land on "your side" of the wall. Perspective is, as I said simple geometry. Make up your mind. If I was stood on Mars with the spectrometer, I'd take to Mars exactly the same "interpretation" of the laws as I have here on Earth. If, the machine didn't work on Mars then it wouldn't have worked here on Earth. So that idea doesn't wash. This isn't postmodernism. Reality is real.

Is it? I thought political power was wielded by those with money and power. Granted the woman down at the driving licensing place can be a bit bitchy, I don't think she's in the same league as the Bush or Trump dynasty (or, if you like, the Clintons) when it comes to abuse of power. How corrupt would an election need to be before you recognise that the president wasn't legitimate? Here's a related notion- just to get away from stuff that affects you personally. Here in the UK we recently had a referendum on the decision to leave the EU. One major factor in that was the "pro leave" campaigners saying we could stop giving £350 million to the EU each week and spend it on healthcare instead. The vote was very close. The "leave" campaign won 52% vs 48% And early in the morning, as the results were announced, the leader of UKIP- the major (in fact, only) pro-leave party was challenged on the truth of that £350 million figure and he said "Well, yes, you are right, we shouldn't have said that". So, once the vote was won, they admitted they had deliberately mislead the voters. Was the outcome legitimate? Similarly, imagine that it turns out that Russian involvement in the US election was significant to the point where it could be shown that , without the Russians helping trump, he would have lost. I'm not saying that happened- the sentence started with the word "imagine". If it turned out that the only reason Trump was in power was not due to the will of the US people, but to the actions of a foreign government, would he be- as you put it "illegitimate"?

Which is nice. It's one of the things you can do if you have a state that ensures either a viable pension or enforcement of rules that the people who promised to pay your pension actually do so. If you live an a less developed part of the world where the only people who will look after you in old age are your children then just having two would be almost suicidally stupid. Now the interesting point; resources are finite; if you have lost then that's because someone else has fewer. In many cases that's because you were in teh lucky position of being able to get them while "the other guy" wasn't so lucky. Once you realise that your "success" is not due to but largely to luck then you might see why some might

It's a common mistake to suppose that the polarisers work like a sieve., i.e. the light gets through the gaps between the "wires". In fact, it's the other way round. The long thin lines of (in Land's example iodine molecules) "short circuit" the electric component of the wave and thus absorb it. The light that gets through is the like light that is polarised at right angles to the axis along which the molecules are aligned. You can make this even clearer if you use microwaves because, for them, the wires that make the polarise can be made big enough to see. The fact that you were not aware of that shows that you don't really know what you are talking about. On that basis, I suggest you do a lot more reading, and rater less writing (In particular less writing that doesn't end in a question mark)

I rather doubt it could. Cooled below -12 it would condense water from the air as ice. When it warmed up + melted the reaction would be rather obvious- probably leading to combustion.

what does "mulear oxidize pastuerize product" mean?

Which ley-lines are you looking for? Wiki gives this map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line#/media/File:Pizzalines8.png

Well, OK, you spotted his sloppy use of language but it does get smaller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter Apparently this concept is difficult for some people Perspective happens with a pin-hole camera. It's simple geometry, and nothing to do with our eyes.

This is interesting https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/spacecraft_instru_calibr.html it tells you how they will know what colour things are on Mars.

At only 3000 degrees the water wouldn't be fully dissociated. Even if it were, there would be other products- notably the neutral H2 and O2 molecules, and their ions and radicals like OH. Having only 2 products would be a very odd state of affairs; the equilibrium would be different. Do you understand this sort of thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisothermal_plasma

Yes. Do you understand this https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/blue-sky/en/

Most of the light is going out from the Sun. Light coming from anything else must have been scattered. How is this difficult?

That's why all the sky is blue (where you can see it)

Unsurprisingly, the rationalwiki page is rational. You disagree with it. Do you think there may be a valid deduction to me made from those two observation?

Non equilibrium Why do you ask?

That makes exactly as much sense as saying they should have arrested him before he set off the bomb. There is also some irony to the idea that you seem to thing that you should be allowed to busy stuff that's a potentially dangerous oxidising agent, but other people shouldn't be.

No. It's because the parsec relates directly to how astronomical distances are actually measured. Having irrational units isn't a big problem- which is just as well. If you measure the diagonal of a unit square the units are apparently irrational because he side and the diagonal are incommensurate. The definition of the ampere means that the permeability of a vacuum is irrational. Measured things (like the length of my keyboard) are actually irrational anyway. It's nominally 40 cm, but if I measure it to the nearest millimetre it's 40.1. If I measure to a tenth of a mm it's 40.13. If I keep measuring to more precision I keep getting more digits. If I could measure to an infinite precision then the length would have an infinite number of digits and so it would be irrational. Please don't waste time introducing the Planck distance.

"What does ... mean in this expression." It means the same as it would in written English. Essentially "Something has been missed out here, but it is obvious from context". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis It saves the bother of writing out x 3 + x4 +x5+ x6 Some people...

Yes, you can see that he's having a joke. Or do you really not understand that people grin when they are messing about. Obviously, what he dis was wrong on a number of levels, but it's not what you are trying to pretend. To show that your tacit assertion was false.

You could use just 1 pair, but the "words" would need to be a lot longer so- as I already pointed out- the risk of copy errors increases. (effectively the 2 bases would be the 1 and 0 of a binary code.) It's messy, but possible. It would also need a "reading" mechanism that could encompass 6 bases at a time to "read" each codon. It seems evolution got past "first base" a long time ago.

OK, so, at the moment, we have a very Right wing govt in the UK and we have the loony right out on the streets; the likes of "Britain furst" are picking up members. Similarly, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote- where the pro Brexit side won we had a massive increase in racially motivated violence. Now, I'm not saying that all Brexiteers were racist, but practically all the racists were pro Brexit. So the evidence shows (unsurprisingly) that when a group perceive that they are "winning" they go out and brag about it, while those who feel they are on the losing side are intimidated into staying home. I'm not sure which effect wins- especially since it's difficult to trust the news media.