John Cuthber

Sensei, Have you any idea what you are talking about? I ask because Most blackboard "chalk" is actually calcium sulphate. Calcium carbonate is an electrical insulator, so it's not going to work as an electrode. Carbon dioxide doesn't smell much. Macro, yes, you can get it to decompose at lower temperatures but the reaction is slow. It would work better in a vacuum chamber. The temperature given (825C) is the temperature at which the equilibrium pressure of CO2 is 1 atmosphere. It's a bit like saying if you want to remove water from something, you can boil it off at 100 C. But even at lower temperatures, it will still dry out. The difference is that , you need to get the carbonate fairly hot before the decomposition happens at any noticeable rate. (at room temperature, it doesn't happen at all)

The law treats everyone as equal: we all have utility. If that "perversion" is criminal then the law should deal with it, if not, why worry? But it's difficult to answer in the abstract.

.. - John Cuthber, on 09 Feb 2014 - 7:21 PM, said: ..- Did that get scrambled somehow when you posted it?

You seem to think it's common sense that our universe didn't pop up out of nowhere. There is evidence that it did. The alternative you seem to be putting forward is some "intelligence" that built the universe. OK where did He come from? Your "objection" to the scientific view is even more irrational than the thing you are complaining about. A creator? "Surely not ! Come on that is stretching things a bit too far ". it's certainly stretching things more then the Big Bang does. Did you not realise that?

"Without going too much into it, but just by guessing the chemical structure of the sun, " We don't "guess". That would be silly. We can analyse it. ". So by dating the age of chondrites we assume our earth must be of same age.." The chondrites are old. They were formed on Earth. The Earth can't be less old than the chondrites.. That's not an assumption, it's a deduction. "If science proved anything in history then that we absolutely will never be able to estimate what's possible and what not. How can you say something is utterly impossible, " Among other methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

The last time I tried this, I used a bit of thin copper wire and two razor blades. I imagine that Mr Young used something else. I believe that the classic school classroom version used a photographic plate, exposed + developed to make it black & opaque with the two slits cut into the gelatine with a sharp knife. the important bit is that the results don't depend strongly on the materials you use.

I'm not absolutely certain, but I think you can convert a graph of a function to its "inverse" by reflecting it in the line x=y.

You are wrong. A lot of dead people in Japan proves that the atom bomb exists. So the rest of your ideas make no sense. Also there is no reason to believe that God exists. You can't use Him to try to do anything in science.

If you wanted to break every bond in a cell, you would have to supply energy to break them. There would be an absorption of energy, not a release. The biggest human cells (egg cells) are about 100 µm across To a good approximation they can be considered to be water. 100µm diameter means a volume of something like 10^-12 m^3 With water having a density of 1000 kg/m^3 that means the cell has a mass of something like 10^-9 Kg or a microgram, The heat of formation of water is about -286 KJ/mole A kg is about 56 moles so that's about 16000 KJ/Kg or about 0.016 Joules of energy. By comparison, the energy released by the "pop!" you get from a test tube full of hydrogen is the result of burning about 10 ml of hydrogen The density of hydrogen is of the order of 0.1 mg per ml so 10 ml of it will be about 1 mg On burning that will give something like 10 mg of water. By the same sort of calculation as given above for the cell, producing 10 mg of water will release about ten thousand times more energy. If you could persuade the hydrogen in that cell to fuse to give helium (nobody knows how to do that) it would release something like a million times as much energy. That would give something like 16 KJ About a quarter of the energy I get from eating a chocolate biscuit. So, what you read was seriously utterly wrong.

I know that he has been banned again (this time in the guise of Maddy) but It might be worth pointing out that my reply to the OP was made when it only said "what is f vector dot ds vector" Since it's a dot product, you know it's a scalar quantity. I'm not certain, but I think that is enough to answer the question once you know what the options are. BTW, Maddy/ Jay / Rajnish Kaushik it's bad manners to change your post like that after someone has replied. It made it look like I had not answered your question when the fact was that it was impossible to answer because you hadn't told us the details.

" But it isn't religion itself that causes people to kill and die for it. It's misinterpretations of the message religions try to spread." No, it's the fact that the bible tells you to kill people. It's pretty clear. You can't "interpret" stoning someone to death as anything other than incitement to murder. "In my opinion religion is a moral codex, which we should follow. " Really, so the bit that tells you where you should get your slaves is morally sound advice is it? Well, that's one point of view, but I think it's a rare one. Have you actually read the Bible?

I think the most child-friendly way of explaining that we know the world is more than a few thousand years old is dendrochronology. You can show children the rings in a tree stump and let them count back to the year they were born, and the year you were born and so on. Since we have tree ring records going back more than 11,000 years, there's no way that the world is younger than that.

There is not enough information there to give a better answer than A scalar.

""I am not talking about what CAN happen. " Actually, you are. The presence of the word "if" in this sentence demonstrates that "It does if you never have sex with a member of the opposite sex. " And, as I have pointed out , it doesn't.; Ask Louise Brown. iNow has raised a very good point, the question has been answered anyway. The answer is no (for a number of reasons) Is this thread going anywhere?

"1) I never claimed it was a majority cause. That is a strawman." Oh, come on. I never said you did What was that about a strawman? "2) And as our subsequent calculations have shown, it does have an effect. That this effect only accounts for a part of the difference does not make it insignificant or irrelevant." At best it's 87% irrelevant. "3) I brought it up to illustrate a point." And, as I pointed out, it's a very poor illustration Why did you choose one that's somewhere between bad and awful rather than something that is a good example.? ( that's the second time of asking, and you have not answered it)

Here's the rest of what you said ". A 40 year old virgin CAN reproduce, but his odds of doing so sure aren't helped by him remaining a virgin. Its obvious that a homosexual CAN reproduce. However, if being homosexual makes it less likely for you to have sex with a member of the opposite sex, then you are less likely to conceive. Its pretty simple and I am not sure what the controversy over this point is. Sure, we can now avoid sex altogether, but that is really irrelevant in the context of its evolutionary history and current population genetic structure. " Please point out the bit which stops this bit ""It does if you never have sex with a member of the opposite sex. "" being wrong as a reply to " "Lack of physical attraction does not prevent conception."" Or, if you prefer, please show how it makes this statement of mine "Lack of physical attraction does not prevent conception."" false. Seriously, it's perfectly possible for people to have kids without sex, and that's all I said. If you google "turkey baster" the top two hits are not about basting turkeys. Like I said, it's not quote mining, it's error correction.

I suspect that most of us know that there are cultural differences between , for example, the US and Finland. There are also differences in the fraction of the population that are "immigrants". Why did you choose such an obviously rubbish example? Why did you continue to try to defend it when I pointed out that, even if immigrants were totally brain dead, they couldn't explain the effect we were discussing? and, as I pointed out, if you are going to complain about me citing figures for illegal immigration I will remind you that you brought the subject up. http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/81558-quality-of-us-education/?p=790080 That's not a strawman, it's an observation. The overwhelming bulk of the explanation, whether it's 95% or 87%, is due to something else. You already had the figures at hand to calculate that and yet you didn't. Why did you pick "immigrants" as the first part of the cause of the "problem" you mentioned, even though you had the data to show that they are, at best, a small part of that cause? That's a valid question, btw, I'd like an answer to it.

I said "Lack of physical attraction does not prevent conception." And, as A direct response you quoted me and replied "It does if you never have sex with a member of the opposite sex. " which plainly isn't true. That's not quote mining, it's pointing out an error.

Eat raw potatoes for a week and see if you still think processing is a bad idea. If that doesn't change your mind, have a go at raw cassava or cashew nuts. Raw meat is not generally considered a healthy option. Most human tissue will regenerate to at least some degree. Teeth don't. The small cuts made by things like biopsy samples do regenerate.

"23% of US Children have immigrant parents" Are we holding this discussion in Cherokee or some such? You seem to forget that I'm citing the 8% figure because it's the figure you gave. If it's not the right number, don't blame me. The fact remains that the extent of the effect of immigration is somewhere between small and tiny. Why did you bring it up ?

"Did I say "lack of physical attraction prevents conception"? The answer to that would be no." Actually, I think you will find that you did. What you said in response to "Lack of physical attraction does not prevent conception." was "It does if you never have sex with a member of the opposite sex" which is incorrect. The error is particularly clear when it's following on from "Is it lowering the tone of the discussion to mention a turkey baster at this stage?" How most people beget the next generation is completely beside the point.

Did you understand what the turkey baster gets used for? As I said, Lack of physical attraction does not prevent conception. You need a male and a female to have kids- but it doesn't matter if they are not in love. It doesn't matter if they are not in the same room.

The speed of a fan in RPM tells you very little about how much air it moves. You could imagine a fan with blades that are very nearly flat and perpendicular to the axis. It would hardly move any air at all no matter how fast you spun it. It's complicated http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propeller#Propeller_thrust I think most people would look at the manufacturer's data and see if there was a propeller that would do what they wanted.

559 is not 8% of 3242 so you have chosen a data set that massively exaggerate the effect of immigrant children on the population as a whole by assuming there are a lot of them. Lets run the real figures again, based on the numbers you have supplied. Once again take 100 children Of those 100, 8 are immigrants and score (by your figures) 8*464.9 giving 3719.2 The other 92 are non-immigrants and get 92*502.1 which is 46193.2 So the whole group of 100 got 3719.2+46193.2 = 49912.4 between the 100 of them. That's 499.12 each on average. Now, if the group were composed entirely of non-immigrants, the average score would be 502.1 So the difference is 502.1-499.12 = 2.976 (out of 502.1) That's about 0.6% Looks like there's some way to go before you can explain the difference between, for example, the US and Korea. That's 481 vs 554 About 13% So immigrants are responsible for roughly 0.6/13 or 5% of the difference. Feel free to try to explain the other 95% of the difference.

Pain makes you do whatever you can to stop it. If the "interrogator" wants you so say you are a spy from Mars, you will say it. So it's useless for getting information, but relatively good at suppressing dissent. That's why governments still do it.