John Cuthber

"First of all, Dawkins crosses the boundaries of science on many occasions by implicating science in metaphysical matters where science does absolutely not belong and does have nothing to say about : metaphysical matters are way out of the "jurisdiction " of science" Please cite an example. If you can't do that then most of the rest of what you wrote isn't worth reading. "Guys like Dawkins and co are certainly no better than those despicable religious extremists ignorant idiots ." "Guys like Dawkins are in fact worse than them..." Plainly wrong. Dawkins and co don't kill people do they? "So, what makes Dawkins and co worse is that they do what they do against religion in the name of science" Telling the truth in the name of science is perfectly reasonable. Yet you think it's worse than what the killers of these folks did? https://mysticways.wiki.zoho.com/ACCUSED-AND-MURDERED-AS-A-WITCH.html You think that arguing strongly, and with evidence is worse than this guy's murder? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Lee_Rigby Have you really thought that through? " the real threat to or real danger that threatens true knowledge is not ignorance , but informed ignorance , the pretention of knowledge " Like pretending that The Koran provides knowledge when, in fact it demonstrably talks nonsense like saying that salt water doesn't mix with fresh , or the Bible when it tells you that the sun goes round the earth? What similar lies has Dawkins told?

Dbaiba, Stop messing about and post the verses. (and, in the interests of not wasting time on your last pointless attempt at diversion, those emperor's heads are depicted on coins that still exist.) Now, please post the verses from the Koran which say what you claim they do.

Well, here's his page http://www.santilli-foundation.org/Confirm-No-Exp.php and what he says is "in the transition from Zenith to the horizon, the entire spectrum of Sunlight experiences an IRS of about 100 nm." Which so sort of right, the sun is red at sunset. We know that, and we know why (it's to do with scattering). but he also shows a graph of the intensity vs wavelength. Sure the "peak" shifts to the red as the blue light is scattered away, just as we would expect, but, the absorptions at about 680 nm and 760 nm are not shifted. Now, if there were really a change in wavelength of light passing through the air, those absorption would be smeared out. They are not. So his own data shows that his ideas are wrong.

Dawkins is, in one sense, an extremist. He pulls no punches and is prepared to point out all of the problems with religion. Many other writers don't do so. However, it's important to remember that an "extremist" atheist like Dawkins (or me for that matter since I hold much the same views) is totally unlike religious extremism. Check out the death tolls. Killed in the name of religion: lots. Killed in the name of atheism: nil. (please don't waste time + bandwidth talking about Stalin or Mao etc. here) .

The mass of the magnets doesn't (directly) affect the voltage. The voltage depends on the rate at which the conductors pass through the magnetic field, and the strength of the field. Generally, a bigger magnet will produce a stronger field and it will have more mass. But you might also get a stronger field by using a different material for the magnet e.g NIB instead of steel.

Someone buy Ed some baking powder.

Alterations in the humidity over Greenland may well cause problems in other countries. So, once again, "How do you come by this knowledge?"

3 phase is great for transmitting power over large distances and running big industrial motors. The thread is about electricity "from scratch". Now, if you have lots of high purity copper wire you can use it to build a generator and a motor and a link between them. Or you can put the steam engine or water wheel near then thing you want to rotate and use a shaft or belt to drive it.

"Already perfect" hardly seems the right term for something with a 100% failure rate if measured over 125 years. It seems to me that if EdEarl's requiremnt is met then Pwagen's will be addressed. How about the eye as a candidate for improvement? A good fraction of us need glasses and that's before we start on the problem of people with real impairment of vision. As things stand, we seem to be working on the wrong problems as reported in this joke. There is more money being spent on breast implants and Viagra today than on Alzheimer's research. This means that by 2040, there should be a large elderly population with perky boobs and huge erections and absolutely no recollection of what to do with them.

No.

How expensive is equipment in Malaysia? Though the real question is what do you want to do?

Yes, any good scientist should be able to explain that such a skeleton must be faked. The Snopes site refers to the square cube rule but perhaps we should explain it here in the thread. If you scaled me up to be ten times taller I would weigh 1000 times as much (the cube of the scaling factor) but the bones in my legs and spine would only be 100 times stronger in resisting being crushed by my weight (100 is the square of the scaling factor). So my legs and spine would not be able to hold up my weight. Actually it's worse than that, since the leg bones would be 10 times longer they would be too spindly to avoid breaking by bending out of shape. So I'd be 1000 times heavier but my legs would only be 10 times stronger. They would fail as soon as I tried to stand up. There's a similar problem with the amount of oxygen I would need and the area of my lungs. I'd be 10 times shorter of breath than I am now. So yes, I can say for certain that there has been no such discovery.

Well, why don't they? It's true that a thousand years ago, the Islamic world was a long way a head in maths and medicine among other things. But now, they are not. Here's some evidence to support that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country So, why is it that the West (broadly Christian) has a flourishing science base and the Islamic world doesn't? Even if you accept the questionable assertion that Islam invented science- it also forgot it. Could it be that part of the reason that science is undervalued in Islam is that their Holy book says daft things like salt water doesn't mix with fresh and that people who question that book are labelled as unbelievers or apostates and killed for it? Could it be that a theocracy couldn't permit science to develop because it feared that, if people actually questioned the book, they would find it wrong and that would undermine the state's power. Is it possible that the decision not to educate half the population held back progress. To be fair, early Christianity was no better but we have addressed that by separation of religion and state. As far as I can tell Islam would not permit that- no other authority is permitted. It seems to me that any theocracy prevents progress and that idea is anathema to science.

I am curious to know what section 7 "The OPERA experiment - neutrino anomaly" is about. Why is it worth including a chapter about a mistake in measuring something, caused by a poorly made connection? Also re. 26 "Space and time from the standpoint of Newtonian mechanics" Newton is plainly wrong and this has been clear since there were studies of the orbit of Mercury.

But religion is not a valid source of knowledge. Why do you have to keep using illogical assertions in an attempt to back up your point of view. And why did Dr Lennox have to do the same. And why are you refusing to answer my questions. Is it because you are unable to?

Nice try, but he didn't say anything like that. It's just like the guy in the debate. You are using a straw man argument. Is it a deliberate lie or are you just unable to understand what you are doing? This "Just know yourself and you would "know " God as a result" is also a logical fallacy called special pleading. Please don't do it again. And, incidentally, it is you who believes in the Tiger, not me. You say that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

1 Strictly, he's dishonest or an idiot. However I don't think he is an idiot so there's only one reason why he didn't actually answer the point raised- but went on about something else instead. 2 OK, why do you think that, when Hitchens asked why God had done nothing to help mankind for almost all of human existence (then did something ineffectual), Lennox talked about the harm done by people to people? Was it because he thought they were the same thing - in which case he's an idiot, or was it because he wanted to distract attention from the point, because he couldn't answer it? 3 Yes, there are, but the point is that he chose not to answer the question. Why do you think he chose to do that? 4 I listened and I heard. I heard Lennox being dishonest so I stopped listening. Not because I didn't like what I heard, but because he was plainly not telling the truth. What point is there listening to someone who lies? You certainly can't learn from them, because you can't know if they are telling the truth. If I listen to Dr. D'Souza 's debates and find similar lies will you accept that you are wrong? Or will you not listen because it's not what you want to hear?

OK, so I started watching one of the debates between Dr.Lennox and Hitchens. It's here It starts with Hitchens saying that mankind has been here for roughly 100,000 years and for, let's say, 98000 of those, mankind lived in fear of natural disasters, starvation, and disease. Then, having watched, for all this time and done nothing about it, God suddenly decides it's time to act. So he has someone tortured to death in an obscure bit of the Middle East. Dr Lennox replies that he agrees with Hitchens in condemning the evil done in the name of God, but that such evil is done by men- not by God. So, his first act is to simply not address the issue. He was there in the room, he heard what was said and he then pretended that Hitchens had been talking about the evil done by men. Well, he scarcely mentioned that. Hitchens had been talking about natural deaths from disease and such. So, it's clear to me that Lennox couldn't answer the point that Hitchens had raised- so he lied. He "answered" a point that had not been raised. It's called a straw man argument. It's a logical fallacy and so it's poor debating technique, but that's not the real issue. It's a lie. If you need to tell lies in order to support your beliefs, it's time to change your beliefs. Obviously, I'm not going to waste my time listening to dishonesty, so I'm afraid I stopped listening very shortly after Lennox started talking. So, Daiba, Are the other debates you suggested that I watched any better, or are they dishonest too??

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminar

How do you get to sleep at night, knowing that there's a tiger in the room? I realise that there's no evidence for the existence of the tiger but "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence". Sometimes the lack of evidence for something really is evidence that the thing isn't there.

A baseball sized lump of stuff from the middle of the sun wouldn't be much use. (Even if you could keep it hot enough and dense enough to maintain the fusion reaction.) The rate of heat production in the sun has been compared to that of a compost heap. The only reason it produces a lot of heat is that it's really big. So the challenge is not just to replicate the sun, but to do a lot better. Solar panels are a whole lot easier.

I don't think that mineral oil would do much to stop sweat escaping. Excretion via the skin is an obscure way of dealing with toxins, but it does happen. http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/urea+frost and "Above this we risk selenium poisoning, the most obvious symptom of which is extremely foul breath and body odour" from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/science--molecule-of-the-nmmonth-too-much-of-a-good-thing-selenium-is-known-to-prevent-certain-types-of-heart-condition-and-can-ward-off-cancer-but-it-may-also-cause-foul-breath-says-john-emsley-1511573.html

At least some toxic materials are excreted via the skin, but I don't think the presence of a layer of oil would stop this process.

Hi Mozart, glad you got it sorted.