John Cuthber

Trust me; if I set out to insult you, you would know about it. On the other hand, I'm quite happy to point out the problems with the society in which I live- not least among those problems is runaway capitalism. I'd be happy to do away with money. But we don't improve society by believing fairy tales. We know that plants get their mass from the air, water and minerals they grow in. Wishful thinking about other mechanisms will not help feed people. We know that the world has not changed size - at least since they built stonehenge- because if it had, the stones would no longer align with the solstice.

`You say you have have two years experience of converting energy to mass. I'm saying you didn't understand the question, or you are lying. Which is it?

Got evidence for that? LOL

Do they do proper double blind trials or should we be ignoring them?

Do they use evidence?

Nonsense. Why do you think that's an "either / or" thing? Microbiology gives you better medicine and better food.

Then get off the internet. And don't let me catch using other advanced technology; no fires, nor clothes for you.

Are you planning anything for Christmas? Or is that silly because it merely "seems" like it will turn up in 2 or 3 weeks' time?

Google gives plenty of hits for ""let them think what they like"" and they didn't seem to be about thought control. There are better things to pick up on than a dubious bit of English idiom. It's Monday today. If someone tells you that they think it's Tuesday and you do not correct them then you are letting them think it is Tuesday. It's also fair to say that the idea of a calculator is fundamentally the same whether you count fingers or shuffle electrons (or slide bits of wood against eachother). The distinction you are making is more like the difference between a petrol, diesel or electric car. I could just about accept that the "invention" was to have some sort of temporary record outside your brain to facilitate arithmetic. How you do that is a matter o technology. I also suspect that you have massively over-analysed a throw-away comment.

The word "agenda" means "to be done." Unless your agenda is wasting time and posting nonsense, you are making no progress. Neither toothpaste nor your examination of a rock is ancient.

If your teacher did not realise that people with higher IQs usually get paid more (and thus suffer less if they plan badly), then your teacher is an idiot.

Why did you expect tosh? Is that an example of the implications of you looking at a rock?

But you failed because, unlike someone doing science, you failed to explain what " polymorphic spacetime" is. would you like to try again?

That is true, but almost meaningless. It's the same as saying "Anything that could happen could happen". It's true, but it doesn't tell you anything.

That's a remarkable response to someone saying

I'm happy to quote exactly what you put forward. I suspect that, if what you said supported your case, you would have quoted it.

Nobody has disputed that. But the house is not. Similarly, the potential for intelligence is there in pond scum, but intelligence is not there. So, you were wrong to say "These means that intelligence must have always existed."

That's not a fact. It's barely an hypothesis. Even if it was true then questioning ideas would still be important. You put forward an idea "And breaking off a section, I noted it was stratified to a much higher degree and depth, and it was hardened minerals. What then are the implications?" The idea you put forward was that you noticing something about a broken rock has (implicitly, significant) implications. Well, prove it...

That's just wrong. A pile of bricks (etc) has the potential to become a house. But that does not mean that it was a house. Consider the island of Surtsey. it's new - the result of a volcano in 1963. There are no houses on it, and there never have been. If I put a stack of bricks, cement etc on it there would be a potential house on Surtsey. But that would not mean that there had ever been an actual house there, would it? And , in the same way, just because the cyanobacteria on Earth a few billion years ago had the potential to evolve into intelligent life, that does not mean that there was an intelligence there. Do you now understand that your view was wrong?

Asking you how you rejected the null hypothesis is a quintessentially scientific response. Did you not understand that? Today is Put on Your Own Shoes Day. Hasn't the same gravitas.

Quick thank you for not taking the piss out of my grasp of arithmetic. Sixty years, not 80.

There are two ways to look at this and I'm going with "Nobody got hurt and it's a great opportunity to modernise this facility which has been an epic emblem of astronomy for eighty years". Is anyone with me? Incidentally, when it was built in 1960 there was rather less focus on ensuring that planned maintenance could be done safely.

I'm going with "none whatsoever". Feel free to show that I'm wrong.

I think that makes you double second cousins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin#Multiplicities

I think you are "second cousins". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin Strictly speaking, your question is ambiguous. You don't say who the "we" are in Do you mean you and your mum, you and your dad or you and the children of the... whatever On a related note...