John Cuthber

"Hey! I'm Tony. I'm a life-long deaf person. I'm not handicapped...I'm just different." Hi. Nice to meet you. Isn't it fortunate that, on line, the ability to hear is irrelevant. I don't know if you realise it but the word "handicap" is viewed as pejorative. None of the people you mentioned who may have been autistic were noted for going "cap in hand" begging for handouts. So, it's not really the right word and it's arguably insulting. You might want to think about the demographic of this board: if I was looking to find a lot of people with symptoms of autism, I'd probably start here. However your real problem is going to be justification of the word "Mad". I'm still looking forward to that.

I'm not sure that it's chemical reactivity that would stop this working with tin (or other fairly un-reactive metals.) The metal would "bury" water molecules in the deposited layer and that would spoil it. Silver mirrors deposited from solution were the medium of choice for a long time. They are clearly good enough for astronomy since they were used for it. There are reactions which deposit gold mirrors (and also copper and nickel ones)

"If every word was a homonym to every other word, we wouldn't have language at all." Next time someone asks me to illustrate the"thin end of the wedge" logical fallacy, I will cite that. "If it's a superficial convention, then it's one we should avoid." why? Just because it offends you ? I rather like it. I think it adds interest to the language. "If it's based on fundamental rules of grammar, I will follow the rules." I don't think there are any "fundamental" rules. I suspect it's all just as arbitrary as calling ships "she" and Gods " Gods.". Do you have any evidence which suggests otherwise?

Looking forward to your explanation of describing people with autism as "mad or handicapped"

"I don't like it when "God" can mean two different things." Good luck with English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym But the point is that this is just a meaningless convention like calling ships "she".

Did you know that alcohol is a group 1 proven human carcinogen? I was rather shocked to find that most of my friends (who are both scientists and drinkers) did not.

Unless it's actually your job to shoot things, many adult's guns are toys too.

It doesn't need to be a proper noun before He takes a capital letter. It's just one of the weird laws of English that Gods get capitals.

Just a thought. Nuclear bunkers don't normally fly. The shielding needed would be prohibitively heavy. I suspect that 46 g of TNT would punch a hole in the skin of an aircraft. And there would be more than 1 speck of dust. (BTW, I'm amused by Dekan's failure to accept relativity on a thread about relativity.

I wasn't aware that anyone had claimed they were "mad or handicapped" they just suggested they might be autistic. Most doctors giving a diagnosis on a patient they have not met are probably pathologists coroners or whatever. Feel free to laugh at them if you like, but don't expect the rest of us to join in.

Overtone, "A serious, Federally `enforced attempt at a level of gun control that would have prevented that killing might set off civil war in the US. And it would be justified." Seriously? Educating people about the risks of guns so that they realise that they don't need them or want them round the house should lead to a civil war? What about a ban on giving them to 5 year olds? Is that really grounds to star ta civil war? Or were you just not thinking very hard?

Slave trading was customary in the area I used to live. "It's custom" is a very poor reason to do anything "One youtube commenter says it's good to teach gun safety early on. I guess that justifies giving the child his own deadly weapon." and one of the first rules of gun safety is "don't give a gun to an idiot". I don't mean the kid who couldn't be expected to know better: I mean whoever gave the gun to the kid is an idiot.

Indeed, the best evidence for UFOs comes from important people who claim to have seen them. This evidence is, however, a logical fallacy called "argument by authority". Not very good evidence, is it? Also , it's clear that these people have "everything to lose." For example, if Buzz Aldrin said he had seen UFOs then he would suddenly stop being a pioneering astronaut. (Unless, of course, he wouldn't)

LOL So skilled, but not skilled enough to know what infinitessimal means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitesimal And I don't think OCD is rare enough round here to impress anyone.

Nope, I'm a complete sceptic. That's why I think that it's a tentatively identified flying object. "When asked if he thought it may have been a "glider or something like that" the pilot replied: "Well maybe a microlight. It just looked too big for a balloon." which isn't very newsworthy.

Obviously, this wouldn't have happened if the 2 year old was also armed.

What on earth does this mean ? "but I used to get really bad jet trails." It reminds me of an old cartoon: two birds are flying along when Concorde overtakes them and disappears into the distance. One of the birds says "I wish I could fly that fast" The other one says " You probably would if you had four backsides and all of them were on fire".

Not to mention all three jerks and jounces. But, as far as the use of English in science is concerned, most of the things in the OP are not dimensions.

Science isn't a democracy. It doesn't matter how many people believe something is true if an experiment shows that it isn't. And, since you are arguing about the meaning of a word in English, perhaps you should accept that the English speaking world is likely to get the meaning right.

It is ironic that we bust a gut teaching children about the dangers of opiates, but gloss over the harm done by alcohol. We also often ignore the laws about it. A person with an alcohol or drugs problem is a person with a problem. Their age doesn't matter. It's true that all the various legal ages of permission are compromises. in some cases we pay them more heed than others. Underage voting is easy to prevent and so we do, though, since so many people vote the same way as their fathers did, I suspect it wouldn't make a huge difference. Underage sex is frowned upon, but tolerated as long as both parties are near the same age. Underage drinking is even more tolerated. What we do depends on how difficult it is and what the perceived harm is. Since society has a blind spot for the harm done by alcohol, we don't make as big a deal of drunk teenagers as we should do.

"So, while the 25-year-old may not be able to drink responsibly, at least the damage caused by such irresponsible behavior is different than in the 15-year-old," Yes, for example, the 25 year old may have children to look after and, perhaps a responsible job (OK the odds are thin) and a driving license. It's clearly a much bigger problem if we have a 25 year old who can't deal with drink so, there should be a maximum drinking age. Hang on? That doesn't seem to make sense. "I think that we could perhaps derive a legal drinking age that makes sense from a biological point of view." Nope, biology is very variable so you would need some way of testing people before you allocated a "safe" drinking age for each of them. That'snot going to work in anything like a free society. Is this sort of thing http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277955/Special-Investigation-Why-ARE-doctors-addicted-drink-drugs.html really news to you? The fact remains that alcohol is one of the most harmful drugs, yet it is permitted.

To be fair, the 3 normal "states of matter" have the same issues. Supercritical fluids and things like silly putty rather mess with the definitions.

"I don't use heroin because it would turn me into a zombie in a short time, and I would stop functioning properly in my society." Actually, it's perfectly possible to be a heroin addict and a functioning member of society. which makes this a bit ironic "I think a large part is due to a total lack of information. Kids at the age of 14 just don't know the damage they're doing." Society makes laws, but society is always changing so, the laws made some time ago might not reflect the current opinions of society. In those cases the laws that are no longer considered important (or at least considered less important that they used to be) are not enforced. In the limit, I might be caught and prosecuted for some offence and I might be legally guilty but, if the jury thought that I hadn't done anything wrong I could be acquitted even though I was technically guilty. With an arbitrary point like a "drinking age" there is a logical problem. Some people at 25 are still not as good at making decisions as other people could when they were 15. Society can account for this by having laws in place which serve to prevent exploitation of the more vulnerable (we will prosecute the barman who lets teenagers get seriously drunk) , but not always enforcing those laws "to the letter" because society also values freedom of choice (we don't prosecute the barman who lets a group of people celebrate someone's 18th birthday even though there's a fair chance that not everyone in the group is 18 yet.) Amusingly, this is the same type of issue as gun control: in the UK alcohol is tolerated while guns are closely controlled while in the US it's the other way round.

OK, does ordinary air behave very differently from, for example, the air at the bottom of a deep salt mine where the ionisation is less due to screening from cosmic radiation. For glasses the typical "transition" is where the viscosity reaches 10^12 poise (IIRC- but it's some arbitrary number) How ionised does a gas have to be before it's counted as a plasma?

"but an issue may surface on removing the ammonia from the copper complex." Unless you know enough chemistry to realise that, if you leave a solution of copper salts dissolved in ammonia to dry out the ammonia evaporates and you get left with essentially copper hydroxide. Boiling off the ammonia achieves the same effect. Of course, you can try oxidation with ozone if you like, but it certainly isn't the easy way to do it.