John Cuthber

"The Bible both says God is beyond time" That's special pleading. It's a logical fallacy. I could equally well say that "the universe is a special case- the need for creation doesn't apply to it". Also, you have yet to answer the point about the observed reality of things popping in and out of existence. There's evidence for that- but none for God.

There isn't enough information to answer the question.

About 1 minute and 5 seconds it it tacitly asserts that things don't just come into existence- because if they did, we would notice them. This fails to take account of the facts that Things do just pop into existence and we do observe them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect Just plain wrong.

I ate part of a banana which I knew wasn't ripe. It wasn't very nice. Rather than accept that I made an error of judgement in eating it, I am going to make up some unreasonable tale where the shopkeeper (or whoever) did something which would be technically very difficult and which would mean that they got a bad reputation and lost sales. WTF?

Religion certainly isn't based on facts so it seems reasonable to say it's based on dogma: what else? Who told you that scientists get used to the marvels of the Universe? That's the sort of thing we are talking about- it's one of the entries in the dodgy accounts book. To me, no religious belief could be as profoundly marvellous as the observation that apparently, if you get a lot of hydrogen and wait 13 billion years, it starts to wonder where it came from. Why do you think I'm getting science from any religious /cultural anthology? They certainly wrote "the truth as they saw it" but they were blinded to the fact that they were quite often very wrong. (I'm not talking about minor glitches here, but about things like where to get your slaves, and the "proper" way to keep them). They made those mistakes because they failed to test their ideas (and indeed forbade such testing "Test not thy God").

Sorry, but I'm sure I read somewhere that one should not bear false witness- that is one ought not say that one witnessed someone doing or saying something unless they did. Now I didn't actually say "My knowledge may be poor, but I don't propose to seek to improve it" I said "I don't propose to seek to improve it by looking at a site written by just one side of the debate." So, you are not only wrong by the standards of the site in that you keep derailing the thread (OK I might be helping you do that), but you are wrong by your own standards. (And now to get back to the thread before the mods shout at me). Surely the fact that you are prepared to break your own faith's rules to deny science means that there is a real dilemma and that trying to serve both sides of that divide must be a greater strain on mental resources than, for example, my perspective where I only have to be consistent. It seems to me to be like the dodgy bookkeeping where you have two sets of records- the correct ones you use to run the business, and the bent ones you show to the auditors. I only need to stick to one consistent story- the one backed by scientific evidence. Surely, to keep the faith, you need to deal with two sets of records. One says the the Earth stays still and the other says that the Sun and Earth both move as they orbit their combined centre of gravity. How can it not be easier to just have one consistent story (which sometimes admits it doesn't know; yet), rather than to have two- where one has several hundred documented contradictions?

Given this http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/77792-where-do-i-find-the-experimental-tests-of-the-law-of-conservation-of-energy/#entry758360 I wonder what will happen next

"The ratio between the variable p of Mersenne primes and the amount of digits they have seems to be close to 3.32. I am trying to determine if there is a constant," For reasonably big numbers the ratio will tend to a constant. Consider these numbers 1,10,100,1000 est They have lengths of 1,2,3 etc. Their logs(base 10) are 0,1,2,3 So, the number of digits a big number has is roughly proportional to the log of the number The numbers you are looking at are of the form 2^n ( the -1 hardly matters) and the log (base 10) of 2^n is also roughly proportional to n So you are looking at two sets of numbers which are both proportional to n. So they will also be proportional to each-other. The number may be prime, but that has nothing to do with the ratio of the length of a number expressed in base 2 being proportional to the length expressed in base 10. Try it with numbers that are not prime. 2^n has roughly n/3 digits This page says it a whole lot better than I did http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470124604.app15/pdf

Unless you weigh and analyse everything you eat, you don't know how many calories you eat.

Moontanman, I would vote that up, but you forgot the apostrophe. Anyway, water is strong enough to break metal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_jet_cutter

1 is a strawman. 2 It doesn't matter who believed it: what matters is that Galileo was convicted of heresy for saying it because it was contrary to the teachings of the church. 3 The opinion of the church on the telescope is well documented. For example http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/12/the-church-and-the-telescope-16101671.html They had the same problem with the microscope. The fact that they now do astronomy indicates that they are slightly muddled. They don't know whether to stick to what it says in the Bible or to actually keep their eyes open. Do they defend tradition or not? The answer seems to be that they try to, but when the evidence becomes overwhelming, they give up and pretend that they never had a problem in the first place. (same with evolution, BTW) 4 My knowledge may be poor, but I don't propose to seek to improve it by looking at a site written by just one side of the debate. Did you expect that link to be taken seriously? 5 Way to go - insulting someone who can't defend them self. So, in your world-view locking someone up under house arrest, threatening them with torture and death for being right (and being an arse-hole about it) is the right way to behave? Doesn't sound very tolerant to me. 6 what is plain is that they would punish anyone who got the geometry right and by "right" they meant not in accordance with the (whether you like it or not) geocentric Bible. Psalms (3:1) The Lord reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; the Lord is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved. Or Joshua So the sun stood still,and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since, 7 and yet she died because they were worried about what would have been considered to be the termination of a pregnancy- banned in her country at that time. Why was it banned?- the pernicious influence of the church. 8 I don't need to insist on what the Bible says- I can simply quote it and let it say what it says. 9 case in point- Galileo The Church did seek to impede science. That's not a fantasy- it's history. 10 I don't see a lot of point replying to an unsupported assertion.

As far as I am aware, they can't. Please show us the nature of the calculation.

I have at least a reasonable explanation. WDid he leave because he suddenly became very upset?

If you substitute the word "damned" by "flavoured" and the word "God" by "salt and vinegar" you end up with a reasonable description of a popular variety of potato based snack. But that doesn't really help much. Anyway "damned" in definition 1 is an adjective or the past participle of a verb and Man is a noun so you plainly can't substitute one by the other without changing the whole meaning. The reason they wanted to call it the goddamn particle is that they knew they wouldn't get away with some of the other (even more) rude words.

Did he think he had?

Has he ever eaten turtle soup before?

On any meaningful scale the maintenance costs are probably the killer so the salt-marsh probably wins. However, if you are going tu use desalination then a single effect solar still is about the least efficient solution (though it has the advantages of being cheap and simple). There isn't the information to hand to calculate the benefits of using multiple effect evaporators. I don't have figures for the difference in heat of evaporation of water from salt and fresh water at different temperatures and pressures, not have I the data on the typical gas concentrations in sea water. However, real chemical engineers who build sea water distillation plants (and who do have the data) use multiple effect evaporators. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-effect_distillation And there's nothing to stop those being powered by concentrated solar power. Of course, unless the desert happens to be below sea level, the other big energy cost is pumping the water uphill to the place where you want it.

A candle flame glows because it has a lot of hot soot in it. That soot will absorb some light (and re emit it). How much will depend on how big and how sooty the flame is. A quick experiment showed that the attenuation was small with a common household candle flame. Nothing to do with stars.

Assuming the calorie count you give is correct (and I doubt it- do you really weigh everything you eat?) then all you would have shown was that people's thermodynamic efficiencies are rather variable. We already know that so it's pretty pointless to restate it. The experiments were done so long ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Prescott_Joule#The_mechanical_equivalent_of_heat that there's little point in revisiting them. There are instructions on-line for repeating the experiments as a school demonstration. http://depts.gpc.edu/~claphast/PHYS2212L/ElectEquiv.pdf perhaps you should do the experiments yourself rather than asserting, without any evidence, that they don't work.

Nobody said it did. However, you are overlooking the conservation of energy. The energy which is used to make steam can be captured when that steam is condensed back to water. So you can use the same energy to evaporate several sets of water. Did you actually read the article?

Why do you bother to state the obvious?

In one case you do something which you know isn't right, because that's the only way you get the money and in the other case...

Unfortunately, it's easy to get the wrong answer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-effect_evaporator

If the universe isn't real then it won't matter if someone closes this thread.

No it isn't- or at least not with the usual conventions. pH= -log [H+] is better and, btw, the word is calculate.