John Cuthber

I understand from someone who did time that the idea that there's a lot of gay sex in prisons is a myth. Sure, those who are so inclined pair up. The rest form deep meaningful relationships with their right hand (so to speak). It doesn't really matter. 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.

Good question. They are in contact so there should be no voltage between them, but depending on what electrodes you use, you might measure a voltage. The simple answer is they are at the same voltage as far as most exam questions are concerned.

Is it lowering the tone of the discussion to mention a turkey baster at this stage? Lack of physical attraction does not prevent conception.

Trivially, the answer is "false" There is no syntactical error in that sentence. There is neither a syntactical nor factual error in the sentence "Thursday is purple". Since it is not possible to demonstrate that thursday has a colour that differs from purple. In this case the error is semantic. And, if you like, you can have a linguistic error too. if you really put your mind to it, you could combine all those errors in one sentence. Then you could count the errors. And, finally, if you make the sentence self-referential and include a negation, you can generate a paradox. Like you did. BTW, the correct response to the giant on the bridge is to walk away.

+ car crash = plainly bad idea. Yes, I realise that any decently useful energy density is a potential bomb if it goes wrong, no matter what the storage medium. But you are talking about the difference between a petrol bomb and an atom bomb. Did you think that through? My current personal preference is for either methanol, derived from nuclear power or biofuel of some sort. Both, I realise, have problems that still need sorting out.

Yes there has. Homosexuals are a clearly identifiable group. Calling them "wrong" is an insult. Your question was "would the above discrimination on gays and lesbians, including those from religion be valid?" And the answer is" No, of course not."

Very broadly, the wavelength of sounds you can hear varies with the size of animal you are. That's to do with acoustics of the ear. There are other factors. high frequency sound is attenuated rather rapidly as it moves through the air. So, it makes sense to hear high pitched sounds if you are interested in things that are physically near you. A mouse can hear much higher frequencies than us, but they would be less use to use because a lot of things we are interested in are far away and so that sound wouldn't reach us. A mouse isn't interested in what's happening a few miles away because it will never bother to walk that far. Low frequency sound, on the other hand, carries rather better so it's useful to be able to hear it. However, if you want to know where it is coming from, you need big ears, widely separated. That's easy if you are the size of an elephant. It's not so useful if you are human-sized. Finally, it's all very well getting the information which that sound carries, but you need a big enough brain to process it. Brains are expensive to run (in evolutionary terms) so there's a trade off between the benefit from better hearing, but the cost of processing that data.

OK, so lets run the numbers. Imagine that 100 US kids sit the test given in the first of the tables which iNow provided. Lets make the absurd, but simple assumptions that All "non-immigrant" US kids get as many marks as their counterparts in Shanghai (oh yeah- as if...): that's 613 All illegal immigrant kids get zero (again, that's absurd, but it's the biggest difference between US and illegal immigrants that you could get.) So the 92% who are legal get 613 marks each That's 56396 marks. And the other 8 (the immigrants) get zero. So the 100 kids get 56396 marks in aggregate. 563.96 marks each on average. That's not a million miles from the estimate I gave this morning (Sorry about the typo- I fixed it) But, in fact, they got 481 marks So, even if the illegal immigrants got the same scores as lumps of wood and their classmates matched the best group in the world, they still couldn't explain how badly he US did. So, when I asked "Even if they were completely ineducable, could 3% of the population really make that big a difference to the test scores?" The answer is , mathematically clearly "no". And yet for some reason you seem to have said "Yes it can" Is that because your maths isn't very good and is that because maths education in the US isn't very good? Yes you did. You said "Yes it can. 8% of children born in the US are the children of illegal immigrants...thats quite a bit. " in response to "Even if they were completely ineducable, could 3% of the population really make that big a difference to the test scores?" That's the trouble with arguing badly on a discussion site. We can all see exactly what you said, and you look silly if you later try to claim you didn't say it.

Illegal immigrants are not generally children so they can't affect those figures for education directly. Even if they were completely ineducable, could 3% of the population really make that big a difference to the test scores? The highest scores are about 600: if you take off 3% for people who can't do stuff you would expect the average to be somewhere like 580. You will need to find something other than xenophobia to explain the scores. Anyway, if you ignore China then you get beaten by another 27 countries. Splitting China into regions may be "cheating" but it's not relevant. You still have a problem.

A "none of my neighbors seem to fit in any of those categories" B "the gun my friend found ... cat dragging in a bunch of baby opossums... tore her whole house part ..t turning up an old loaded gun behind the couch" I think you can have A or B, but not both.

Oh come off it. Admit you experimented with rounders at some stage- we all did, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. If homosexuallity were wrong in any meaningful sense, it would have died out. In reality it's fairly common, not just inn our species, but in many others. Homophobia, on the other hand, only seems to be found in one species and it's not common even there. So, which one is "unnatural" or "wrong"?

Re. "Homosexuality and Lesbians" are they wrong as per science?" No. And you might want to check what the rules say about badmouthing groups of people.

If they really believe that contrails nonsense they may be beyond saving.

Are there similar discussions about Mick's observation - Even if it can't go wrong, it will? And how about Fitzpatrick's corollary - Murphy was an optimist? A demonstration of Mick's observation is provided by the Titanic. It was unsinkable- it sank; or the German Enigma coding machine which was uncrackable- it was cracked. The ideas all serve to remind people that even when you are sure something can't go wrong, it's sometimes worth having a back up plan in case it does. So yes, it does have value.

I'm not sure the two Ps are equivalent there. One is (tacitly) the probability in some given interval of time, the other is the probability summed over all time. If it can go wrong (say there's a 1 % chance per week) then eventually it will go wrong. If it hasn't gone wrong yet, you have not waited long enough. Empirically, it would take an infinite time to show that Murphy's law is false.

Which word? And you will wait a long time, because this will barely work. It is, at best, a tide powered system and those work much better on a bigger scale. I doubt the effect of the Earth's rotation is measurable with apparatus like you have described. The spin of the pendulum has nothing to do with the spin of the Earth. It is due to the string untwisting.

Before you can talk meaningfully about what might affect telepathy, you need to show that telepathy is real. Nobody ever has. If you can, I suggest you go here first and pick up a million dollars. http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html Unless you can prove that telepathy exists, you are not doing science and you are wasting our time.

You didn't guess correctly. The question is complete. You are not allowed to use anything else. No iron filings and bits of paper, no needles and glasses of water. Just the two bits of metal. The classic form of the puzzle relies on the idea that the magnet is magnetised so that one end is a North pole and the other end is South. That's the most common configuration, but it's not the only possible one. For that simple configuration the test is easy (and has already been described). For other possible configurations of magnetisation, it may or may not work.

Did you actually read the page you cited? There is an explanation right there.

Do you mean this? http://www.ebay.com/itm/Handbook-Organic-Chemistry-Hans-Beyer-and-Wolfgang-Walter-1996-Hardcover-Hans-Beyer-Wolfgang-Walter-/344161922239?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5021a62cbf It would be a breach of copyright to make and distribute a pdf copy of it.

" In the US students who are poor but gifted don't have to worry about fees - the US has an incredibly advanced system of grants for good students, most often financed by private companies." We used to have an even better one- Grants for every student, paid by the government in order to make sure that all our talented people got the education they deserved and the nation benefitted from their skills. Perhaps you could explain how that was "incredibly ineffective " and how that example of socialism meets the idea that "socialism always creates problems that is later pretends to solve" Unfortunately, the government decided to scrap it (the real reason was in order to keep the dole queues down- but that's another issue). Also, you seem to be arguing against yourself when you say " Instead of wasting money on helping the poorest students you should spend it on the best ones because they are the most important for the economy and science." We don't need to help the best students- their mummies and daddies can do that because, according to you " people are gifted because they had gifted parents and if they are gifted, they aren't poor." Wouldn't it be better if you just stopped saying that sort of thing?

That's largely due to having lots of people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laureates_per_capita And I think that on a per capita basis the UK does rather well in this too http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2012-13/world-ranking

That's odd, because it is actually diamagnetic. Like water and a lot of other things, hemoglobin is repelled (weakly) by a magnet.

Have you noticed that many of those reports are in journals that are intrinsically biassed? Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, PSI Research and Psychoenergetic Systems Wouldn't exist if there was no such thing as "paranormal" behaviour. So they are logically bound to publish stuff that supports it, regardless of the quality of the work.. None of the reports is published in a reputable mainstream journal Why not? If this stuff were real, it would be a massively important discovery in a huge number of fields from electronics to economics and physics to psychology. Why isn't it in "proper" journals?

Why do people think hemoglobin is significantly magnetic?