John Cuthber

It may not be perfect, but at least it passed Roman numerals 101

I have heard it said that, if you have the right staff, you just have to ask them to do something, then get out of their way. It's a crass oversimplification of course, but it's not utterly devoid of reason.

You just wrote off "don't hurt yourself and others" as "unhelpful advise". Do you think that will have advanced your cause? BTW, as written, your question has no real answer.

Raising to the power half is taking the square root, and, as I said that's ambiguous.

To be fair, there is no way to know from just the formula whether that's Ni(IV) and I(VII) or Ni(V) and I(VI). You also can't rule out a peroxy species unless you happen to know about orthoperiodates.

I think Peter has realise that he isn't going to go anywhere with this discussion. I presume that's why (notwithstanding the site's rules) he's failing to respond to issues raised- like the fact that anaerobic bacteria can, and do cause extensive damage in the body. Maybe I'm wrong in which case Peter. Either explain away gas gangrene, or accept that there's plenty of anaerobic tissue in the body. (and then I can start on why the type K and type H drugs will also probably kill the patient.) BTW, "growth factor receptor inhibitors". (700,000 hits!)" Unicorns; 8,500,000 hits Congratulations- you just announced that you think unicorns are real.

Peter, Do you know where the name "Cancer" came from? It comes from the Greek for crab. The tumour was often noted to have blood vessels that resembles the many legs of a crab. So, at best these cancers might be marginally anaerobic. Onthe other hand, you may remember that I posted a reference to gas gangrene. It destroys legs and arms etc and is caused by this bug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridium_perfringens which is an anaerobic organism. So, muscle tissue is anaerobic enough for anaerobes to grow and at least some cancers- enough that they got their collective name from it- are well supplied with blood and, therefore, oxygen. Do you see how that's a problem? And the answer to "Then I wonder how your fellow anatomy 101 students will react to your claim that "Most of the human body is an anaerobic environment."? " is probably, just fine because most of it is, at best, marginally aerobic.

"I am not sure I understand your rebut." There may be a reason for that. The reason might be related to my earlier post.

Even a bad cartoon is better than most of this thread.

"I'm just providing the approach and a lot of those details need other scientist and engineers to work out." http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-10-02/

Probably a good thing since many of those detectors could only detect a local cataclysmic event. Not observing something weak and rare doesn't mean it doesn't exist- it just means it's weak and rare.

Can anyone rule out the suggestion that the aliens came to visit because the Thrung was too bloomthurgy ? Seriously, are we in any position to guess? They might do it for the same sort of reasons we might- or they might not.

I take it that you have not responded to my post earlier because you realise I'm right.. in any event this "Ringer, on 12 Oct 2013 - 05:02 AM, said: Only for those patients whose cancers have cells which are rapidly dividing, whose cancer cells divide every few days. For those more aggressive cancers the cure is more rapid. For slower growing cancers you have to keep the treatment going for longer, perhaps have treatment on, treatment off weeks, waiting for the opportunity to catch and kill each cancer cell as it divides. " would be funny, if it weren't tragic. You can't (repeatedly or continuously) suspend human cells growth for weeks and expect the patient to live. Incidentally, you won't get far trying to pretend that using a sequence of treatments for cancer is a new idea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotherapy_regimens

"So what is the viable explanation of General Relativity? " The speed of light is constant, because you can calculate it from the permittivity and permeability of a vacuum, and you can't have a speed measured WRT a vacuum. If you say the speed of light in vacuo is constant then you get various consequences. You can make predictions from those consequences- such as the precession of Mercury. If you check, you find that Mercury does indeed precess in the way predicted. As for this "Well, to me that is like saying that if Copernican astronomy does not agree with the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy, then it must be wrong. " you clearly need to think it through some more. Does your idea predict anything different from GR? If so, then as far as we know, it's wrong because no experimental evidence disagrees with GR. On the other hand, if your idea does agree with GR then what advantage does it offer? It gives the same answers and it doesn't have a clearly established basis (unlike GR); why bother with it? "But there is one experiment General Relativity cannot explain. Explain how an astronaut with a clock in his satellite gets the same speed for the satellite as a scientist on the ground with a clock that shows a different rate of time. " I think you will find that GR does explain that perfectly well, but you haven't understood it.

I think that you have forgotten that taking the square root of something is ambiguous. Root(4) has two perfectly acceptable answers, 2 and -2 I think that you have used that as the basis for saying 2=-2 because they are both root(4).

I must have missed something. "The problem is, however popular the idea may have become with scientists, it is mathematically incorrect. The correct way to describe relativity is with the Galilean transformation equations," yet "In any event, if you are as good at mathematics as you claim to be, you should be able to see that every prediction of General Relativity you cite is also predicted by the Galilean transformation equations as I use them. " Either they agree or they don't. If they agree then it's redundant (and fails by comparison with GR which has a viable explanation). On the other hand, as far as I know, there are no observations which do not agree with GR so, if this new version of physics doesn't agree with GR then it also doesn't agree with reality. If your predictions don't agree with reality it isn't because reality has made a mistake.

Actually, We have quite a clear idea about this. It's only you who is missing it.

The problem is two fold. Firstly, nuts and bolts are manufactured things, bacteria are not. Secondly what you are asking for is a nut with a thread like this spiral staircase. http://william-wright.com/2013/07/04/ever-decreasing-circles-at-rbs/escher/ Also, the defining properties for that organism are still 1 it eats cancer cells (otherwise it's useless) and 2 It doesn't eat other cells (otherwise it's pathogenic). Do you agree that the organism must have those two properties? Do you also agree that they are by far the most important properties? For example it barely matters if the organism is a bacterium or a fungus. If so then you accept that then you accept that those two criteria pretty much define the organism. But I have already pointed out that such criteria are untenable for an organism. It would wipe itself out. That's why I'm saying it's wishful thinking. You can spend time at the bus stop imagining that the bus will get there soon, but that doesn't affect the speed of the bus. You can imagine some magic potion or bug that kills cancer, just like you can imagine an Escher-threaded bolt- but that doesn't make it real.

"Better languages" is a phrase that needs clarification. Like a lot of nerdy teenagers in the 80's I learned to program computers in BASIC. Then I studied chemistry and worked as a chemist for 20 odd years. Then I got a job with to a lot of data processing and analysis and it's impossible to do that by hand- you need a computer. Well, I was 45 or so, an old enough dog not to want to learn new tricks, so I wasn't planning to learn a new language just because someone has written it and so I took to using VBA . I know it's not fast, it certainly isn't modern. And it's a bit of a pig to get it to do some things- but it always was, and I learned how to do that decades ago so it's not such a problem. I was wanting to fire up a computer and get it to do something, I was much happier starting with something which at least has some resemblance to the stuff I had used in the past. So, if the OP is starting back into the world of programming at 74, BASIC''s descendents might be the best choice- there might not be " better languages than Basic". at least for starters.

But CSI isn't science. Like Bond, it's entertainment.

Did you know that there's a version of Visual Basic (strictly VBA) tucked away in Excel? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee814737(v=office.14).aspx

It seems that CSI has a number of errors. http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/jboze3131/csifacts.htm

I'm guessing Commercial and Industrial, but I'm amused that Google interpreted "C+I" as Roman numerals and gave the answer CI

Or not, if it's molten or dissolved in something other than water. Aqueous is a word that is used to describe solutions: it means that they are solutions in water.

Does that mean you think all the Gadgets that Q made for James Bond are real and that bad guys can't ever shot straight?