John Cuthber

Whatever. The assertion was made that "If no-one knew how lift works, it would be pretty hard to design aircraft that stay up in the air." Is that assertion credible?

How good a grasp of the Navier Stokes equations did the Wright brothers have? Do you have details of their wind tunnel? Nobody knew how birds worked- but we could copy them well enough. Do you consider that the birds know how to build a bird? It's an interesting philosophical point.

"If I can imagine it, it is possible!" Can you imagine a rational square root of two?

An idealised 100% efficient magic spinning wheel will be more efficient than a fast breeder reactor. (By definition because it is 100% efficient) On the other hand, it will never actually exist. Which should I buy shares in?

You would need a panel of one handed economists. An easier approach might be to look at the experiments done outside the USA in, for example, England, France and Germany where a system similar to Obamacare has not bankrupted the economy, and provides healthcare at about a third of the cost of the US. Presumably this system was costed up by the people who first proposed it (I think that may be the Republicans, but I'm not certain)- they must still have the details of that proposal they could look at.

"Only hydrogen isotopes have different chemical properties," Not quite true http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01496398808057664#.Umlk__n_kao But the differences are usually only laboratory curiosities, rather than practically useful.

Have a look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_battery In particular, look for the bit about "local action"

You don't seem to know what you are talking about. There is no salt bridge there. You have two cells. In one cell the electrodes are zinc and graphite. In the second cell the electrodes are graphite and copper. There is nothing happening here that is not predicted by the known behaviour of electrolysis.

http://xkcd.com/285/

How do you define the efficiency of something that doesn't work?

Many of the materials you are talking about are available commercially. They are rather expensive compared to the ordinary H versions. Apart from heavy water in the nuclear industry, I can't think of any applications of stable isotope substituted chemicals outside the laboratory, but that isn't because we don't know about them, it's because they are not very different from the ordinary versions and they are much more expensive. http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/etc/medialib/docs/Aldrich/General_Information/bioms_brochure.Par.0001.File.tmp/bioms_brochure.pdf

I thought the Tea party had just tanked in the polls. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/22/cnn-poll-gop-tea-party-unfavorables-at-all-time-highs/

Do you know how many isomers you are talking about? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_straight-chain_alkanes The number of, for example, alcohols is much bigger than the number of isomers of the corresponding alkanes

I hope you enjoyed the golf. Re " the only thing getting warmer (bigger) is Uncle Al's bank account. " you are still plainly wrong. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/jonescru/graphics/glnhsh.png

It's not a majority yet, but it's apparently their plan. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/texas-gop-s-2012-platform-opposes-teaching-of-critical-thinking-skills

I'm not sure what that is, but it certainly doesn't count as evidence. Should this thread be in the religion forum (or,perhaps the trash can)?

There are two universities in my town. Plenty of the bar staff are students. I'm pretty sure I could find a bar tender who could explain relativity to the customers.

OK, what about the ecd? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture_detector which is much more useful in my opinion. On the other hand pretty much anything seems to be more use than this thread.. Here's his view on arrogance. I wonder if he has a youtube movie about irony? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEkETUeYgcw

Fine, we can ask the Wright brothers.

The OP is wrong, but understandable. This is just wrong. I think the modnote earlier in the thread would apply to it. If you want to say something speculative, do it in the speculations forum.

Moontanman, May I suggest you delete the bit asking about his views on homosexuality. He clearly hasn't a clue what he's talking about. There's no way he can justify his post so there's not much point asking him to. The only plausible outcome is that he will offend people and he's already suspended for that.

The misogyny is due to the nature of society in the times referred to. Some people seem to think we should still act that way, or at least, they don't denounce a book that says we should. The real tragedy is that such attitudes still prevail in some parts of the world today. Anyway, there is no evidence that virgin birth took place and thus there is no need to discuss how it might have happened. The same goes for the other "miracles". Until someone can show that they really took place there's not much point worrying how

then you are were on the wrong site.

Was that an insult? I read it as a signature, like this. Yours faithfully Moron. But I have to say that I struggled to parse any of it. No matter how I read it, none of it seems to make sense. The real problem is that, replies and views are not disabled, so it can't mean that. I'm not sure whether swansnot is a reference to the nasal mucous of swans (which would be odd) or a misspelling of Swansont- in which case I wonder what happened to the capital letter. Of course it might also be a mistyped version of "swans not" The traditional exclamation mark for "Hey!" seems to have slipped off and been tacked on at the other end of the sentence (along with another whose purpose is unclear). The best I could do was "Hey! Swans, not you, have disabled views and replys, IMBECILE!!" which seems a bit silly

For a start, look at the sentence construction. You did say that life after death is probable because I 'm not clever enough to understand the universe. Well there was or wasn't life after death before I was born. So there's no possible way that it can depend on how clever I am. So your assertion is illogical. "You are, egotistical, "how do you know?"" Like most scientists, I freely admit that I don't know, and that's why I seek evidence. Would you like to explain why you came to the idea that there is such a thing as a word virus and what you mean my that? Come to think of it, would you like to provide any evidence at all (incidentally old books and hearsay don't count) of any of the assertions you have made.