John Cuthber

"I also do not regard one life as more valuable for simply being a different species." So, you don't kill plants for food then? "To say this is very foolish and its the same as saying "My life is worth more than yours because you are black or my life is worth more than yours since you are disabled"" Nope, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope "Life is a precious thing and we should not waste it so carelessly." Nature wastes a lot more of it than we do. "I believe if there is an alternative to testing on animals outside the human species that we should do it." And that alternative is?

I'm pleased that you have stopped repeating yourself. I'm just going to repeat this once more I think that you are not understanding that it would be fatal in the short run When you say "You might as well be concerned for the long-term effects of passengers on a plane whose wing has just broken off." you are assuming that those people grew up to be old enough to get onto the plane. A cell with that mutation probably wouldn't last as long as it takes to walk up the steps from the departure hall. You also say "All it would take is one mutation to produce this enzyme.". OK, from what current enzyme could you get a "phosphine producing enzyme" in just one step? Do you have an answer to that, or were you making stuff up? Re "It wouldn't need to be passed on to other cells." Do you have any idea how small a cell is? If you turned the whole of a cell into phosphine there wouldn't be enough to start a fire. "cell were close to the skin the phosphine would seep out the skin" Nope, it would get trapped by hemoglobin on the way. "trigger an igniting spark" Nope, There's not going to be enough from one cell to make a spark.

I think that you are not understanding that it would be fatal in the short run- cells get damaged so the two components would mix. The cells and those around them would die. The mutation would wipe itself out, and it would do so long before there was enough PH3 to do anything more than smell funny.

Point out that they are "cheating". Explain to the audience that "What my opponent did there is called a 'straw man attack' because..." or whatever.

Blue Spike, A sort of similar system exists and is useful- ask anyone who cuts up onions. (as far as I can tell that sort of thing is much more common in plants than in animals) However, as far as it happening in humans is concerned... Congratulations. You have rediscovered the concept of a lethal mutation. http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Lethal_mutation They don't last long. There's also no selective pressure to produce that enzyme, nor is there anything from which it could reasonably arise. AdvRoboticsE529 it's not that we don't want the question asked. It's that we (Well, I: i can't speak for everyone) don't want it asked repeatedly, even after it has been answered, and in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that the question is worth asking. If there were cases of SHC then it would be valid to ask who and why. Since there is no evidence for them, it's not worth asking the question. It's certainly not worth asking it twice.

Yes, you need to average the effect of the other electrons using an average weighted by the probability of the electron being in a particular place. That distribution depends on all the other electrons.

The point I' making addresses his assertion " In the definition of variance, I have made this statement before, a component is the summation of the difference of 'x' squared values minus the mean, depending on the person I have spoken with before, the set of reasons are different, most common answers is that it inflates the values, ensures positive value" The SD is the root mean square deviation from the mean. It seems he's been told that the use of the square of the difference between the mean and the value is that "is that it inflates the values, ensures positive value" which sounds arbitrary. If you just want positive numbers you could take the absolute value of the difference and if you wanted to exaggerate it you could take the 4th power. My point is that the choice of averaging ( x- the mean value of x) is not arbitrary- it's the one that actually gives the right answer (for the normal distribution). He seems to have been misinformed and thinks that stats is a set of choices and you pick the definitions arbitrarily. To some extent that's true. But they have to be chosen in such a way as to be consistent. He seems not to realise that.

Why are you still saying that? I already pointed out that it's impossible. Do you not read people's replies- or is it that you didn't understand it?

seem to whom?

Because you need to know where the electrons are to calculate the forces the uncertainty principle tells you that you can't know where they are the electrons- wherever they are- also affect each other. Have a look at the "many body problem"

There are several issues. Firstly, people use hydrogen and helium ions in place of electrons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_ion_microscope and they do that for the reasons you have given. Also, if you use heavier particles they tend to damage the surface you are looking at.

Do you know that, because of the effects of quantum mechanics, this makes no real sense "suppose the average of different vectors in mechanics, which gives the true final vector" Also this "You can try to test the function in economics with statistics, it usually will not work and is quite inaccurate." indicates a problem with the model- not with statistics,.

Studiot, The difference between dimethyl ether and ethanol is where the nuclei are. You do need to consider the interactions of the nuclei- they have almost all the mass so they strongly affect the way things react. Then there are the effects of nuclear spin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_isomers_of_hydrogen though those are normally very small. alkis3 if you want to do the calculations, the only data you need are the masses and charges of the electrons and nuclei. Good luck- you will need it.

You do know that the binomial distribution holds whatever the probability of getting heads is, don't you? It assumes that there is a probability and that the probability is constant with time- that's all. After that, it's just maths and , as such, objective. Perhaps it would be better if you said what problem you are actually trying to solve. otherwise I think we will just go round in circles,

Do you have any idea how difficult that problem is? You need a supercomputer, even for fairly simple systems.

OK. Start with a binomial distribution- say tossing a coin. Half the time you get heads and half the time you get tails. You can calculate the distribution for the number of heads you get with any given number of trials. That's fine, but it's a discrete distribution and a lot of real ones are continuous so they found a replacement - its the normal distribution and it's the distribution you get from a very (in principle, infinitely) large number of coin tosses. If you look athe the variance (a measure of how wrong you are likely to be) you can calculate it. It turns out that, if you want to use the same "measure of wrongness" for binomial and normal distributions you need to use (x-mu) squared. Neither the normal, nor the binomial distributions is "subjective". They are mathematically deterministic.

No http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body

No. The use of "squared" is not an arbitrary choice, it follows from the properties of the distribution. Do you actually know that maths behind statistics, or are you criticising it blindly?

What land?

"I am implying energy exchange between the somatic parent and the environment. (not local transfers)." All transfers are local on a galactic scale, but not on an intramolecular scale. Scale is a matter of viewpoint, not absolute. What did you actually mean? "A corpse, as far as I know, does not show an increase in entropy." It does. "If you could visualize a automaton with a carbon fibre body and an "interactive" intellect then by my hypotheses it could be defined as "living"." Yes. And so could a fridge. Unless you actually believe that a fridge is alive, your hypothesis is wrong.

"Statistics is not certain, for most concepts there are no proofs. In the definition of variance, I have made this statement before, a component is the summation of the difference of 'x' squared values minus the mean, depending on the person I have spoken with before, the set of reasons are different, most common answers is that it inflates the values, ensures positive value" Nope. The choice of squared (rather than , for example, the absolute difference or the 4th power ) is a decision made on the basis of the underlying distribution. If that distribution is normal (or is modeled as such) then the square of the difference is the one that gives the right answer. And re Davidivad's comment "i implied nor said outright anything resmbling statistics being invalid." Nope, and I didn't say otherwise, so it's you who is straw manning. However you did say "right and wrong are subjective ideas in themselves, we pick the interpretations of those best able to pick the least of evils." And that's not science.

Sure, here's my input In addition to being very flammable, phosphine is very poisonous. Before anyone got round to producing enough of it to catch fire, they would die. Perhaps more importantly, any cell that had that mutation would also die- before it had a chance to reproduce.

They would be wrong. Meanwhile, back at the topic...

When you have finished talking, water will still have a large latent heat of vapourisation, and a boiling point near 100C. So, heating anything with a lot of water in it to a temperature much over 100C will still require that you supply enough energy to evaporate off the water. Until you come up with a credible means for the supply of that energy there is no way that spontaneous combustion can take place. So as I said. "Can peopIe SpontaneousIy Combust?" Probably not: too much water.

That post contains a number of misconceptions- sadly very common ones. Statistics is - like the rest of maths- objective. You can apply a number of statistical tests to some data and get different outcomes. There are two reasons for that 1) some of the tests are simply not appropriate. 2) the tests have different powers and- they always give an "answer" that's probabilistic in nature so they can legitimately differ. It is the job of scientists to be objective. It's also their job to either know what statistical methods to apply or to get help from a statistician. The problem is that most scientists think they know what they are doing, so they don't ask the experts unfortunately they also overestimate their own abilities and use the wrong methods and tests.. so, when you say "it is up to the professionals of the field to decide if it is useful." Do you mean you should choose the right tools for the job (in which case I agree) or are you saying "keep on doing different tests until you get the answer you want" ? in which case you are talking about the antithesis of science. It's also bizarre to claim, on a science website that "right and wrong are subjective ideas in themselves" The right answer in science or maths is the right answer.