John Cuthber

No, I 'm saying an all powerful God is impossible, which is a logical truism.

If it's impossible to say whether something is right or wrong then it's not delusional to believe either side of the argument. When it's clear that one side is impossible and you still believe it...

Not really.

"Look at how many people come to this site with a complete misconception about how the universe works. Someone comes to this site and believes that an atom has a nucleus with electrons traveling in circular orbits around it, similar to the way the solar system works. They've believed this for years. Friends have confirmed it. They learned it from a person in authority. They never bothered to question it. Now they arrive at this site and learn that is not true. Were they delusional before they got to this site?" No, they were uninformed. There's a difference. I don't need an electron microscope and a knowledge of quantum mechanics to see that there is a fundamental difference of approach between the church and the scientist. I don't need any special equipment to realise that an all powerful God is logically self contradictory.

You say that you are in a low risk group. So does (almost) everyone else, including those who will go on to shoot themselves one way or another. That's what makes you undistinguishable from my point of view. "Or you think that while being driven home from the hospital on side streets by your forty year old accident-free son, your odds of getting in a car accident are much lower than your odds of a seat belt damaging your colostomy bag." strawman. "Lousy definition, but it fits anyway. Why do you claim otherwise?" Because the claim was that it had a specific meaning that differed from the one in the dictionary. "Blunder is telling people about themselves..." It's like saying that illegal means fraud. A definition of fraud will (probably) say that it's illegal, but it doesn't mean that the words are synonyms .

I realise that it's not quite the same thing but there's plenty of evidence for animals displaying apparent altruism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_in_animals It seems to me that, at least the forerunner of conscience was present in our ancestors long before we invented God to explain it. I'm pretty sure that no group of humans would survive for long without a system of working together that could be called a conscience. If anything, it seems most likely that we had a conscience; and religion copied it into their "holy books" because it would be silly to leave it out. Any society that didn't understand that you should "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" wouldn't last long enough to found a church.

There is a non-religious basis for it. To be simplistic, it's your mother telling you to think "what would happen if everyone did that?"

Boring answer for one rather small, but nearby rock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenographic_coordinates Other planets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude#Longitude_on_bodies_other_than_Earth

And after you have finished the ad homs, it remains true that that my best estimate of the odds in your particular case is the average odds for the group you are in. It's not an error or a blunder. The error is yours, you assume that you are "a distinguishable individual in a group of distinguishable individuals". From my point of view, you are an American with a gun. Neither you, not the other 3E8, are distinguishable. You think that your odds are better than the average, but I imagine most of those who died did so too. You keep missing the point that all the people who shot someone by accident thought they were safe- just like you do. If they hadn't thought they were safe they wouldn't have picked up a gun. You may say that you are an excellent gun owner, you may prove to be mistaken. What I have assumed is that while there are certainly some groups more at risk of, for example, suicide then others, you don't actually know which group you are in. Lets's simplify things. We just consider suicide. We don't consider the means or the reason. We assume that if they decide to end it all, they do so and they succeed And lets make a very simple model of the probability. One person in 10 is "potentially suicidal" and the other 9 are not. those who are not "potentially suicidal" never commit suicide The "potentially suicidal" group effectively toss a 100 sided die each year and if they get 100 they kill themselves. If you know which group you are in then you can assess your odds of suicide. 1 % per year or zero, depending on the group. What if you don't know which group you are in? Now lets look at theodds for the group as a whole. First consider a population of 10,000 people How many suicides are there? Well, 9,000 of them don't even get close because they are not in the "potential suicide" group Of the remaining 1000, on average 1% ie 10 individuals take their lives. 10 suicides from a population of 10,000 So the overall odds are 1 in 1000. The odds for suicide for an individual in this population (which, I remind you has a very uneven distribution of probability) is 1 in 1000. Now, compare that to an individual's risk given that they don't know which group they are in. They have a 10% chance of being in one group (where the risk is 1 in 100) and a 90% chance of being in the other where the risk is zero). So their overall risk is (0.1 *0.01) +( 0.9 * 0) which is 1 in 1000. The individual who does not know which group they are in has the same chance as the average for the population. That's why it's the best estimate of your chances- because you only think you know which group you are in. You think you are the group who doesn't need a seatbelt, because you are not going to have an accident. That's what the car-crash victims thought: they were clearly wrong, and we can wait and see if you are too. BTW, re "Blunder is telling people about themselves and what they are assuming about themselves, without finding out first - such as telling people they are assuming no chance of accident or suicide for themselves, when you have no information on that subject." No, it's not. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/blunder and re " Lots of Americans have no personal experience with guns either - only a minority of us ever shoot or carry or even own one." That's odd, I read somewhere that there's a gun in 45% of US households. Can anyone imagine how I came to the conclusion that gun ownership was common?

The biggest joke with this is that you ignored the exploding rocket. "I like to think you just skimmed my post without much of a regard instead so to avoid issues like this in the future I suggest you give posts more though and read things more carefully." Anyway, as you would know if you understood how the control systems worked, the reactor was shut down. The absorbers were in place and there was no realistic possibility of a criticality incident.

So far as it goes anywhere, that proves that you are wrong. It suggests that the momentum is constant and, therefore, the energy is constant (since I doesn't change, and J is constant, it can't change w, so it can't change 1/2 I w squared). But we know that the earth is radiating energy into space (because it's warm) so it must be losing energy. If it's losing energy then it can't be getting that energy from it's rotation which is constant. (There are small effects due to tides and hypothetical effects due to gravity waves to consider, but those are small and immeasurable small respectively)

Good point. Where would you start? would you start with the homoeopaths, since they have the least plausibility or perhaps with those selling rhino horn on the grounds that they are not only committing fraud but are driving innocent animals to extinction? At least the homoeopaths have inspired a few good jokes. My two favourites are "have you heard about the homoeopath who forgot to take his remedy and died of an overdose ?" and this cartoon http://xkcd.com/765/

Even if you say it's driven forward by swimming pixies I can call them an engine. Whatever engine you choose will need to obey the laws of thermodynamics and will therefore need power. It could be wave powered or wind powered if you like but that's just just a fancy engine. What are you actually trying to achieve?

Maybe God hates religious people.

Well, I might flunk stats 101 if you were marking it, but I'm a scientist. I have quite a good grasp of stats. It's among the things that I get paid for. You don't need a uniform distribution if you are considering the whole group (the US population) and it doesn't matter whether you distinguish hand guns from other or not for two reasons- firstly handguns are much more common and secondly, as before, I'm considering the whole ensemble of guns. In the absence of any further information, the best deductions that I can make about you are that you behave like the average. For example, you do not believe that it is likely that you will commit suicide or have an accident. That assumption is also made by many people who die in accidents or suicides. If I were saying rifles are more dangerous than pistols then you would have a point. I wasn't saying that so your argument is invalid. Invalid means wrong." Of course you have the right to protect yourself and you property. Believing that doesn't make you a gun nut. What makes you a gun nut is thinking that owning a gun will help you to protect yourself and your property, even though the stats show that you are a hundred times more likely to shoot yourself with that gun as you are to shoot someone who deserves to be shot. It's the same idea that stopped people wearing seatbelts (before they were made compulsory) "I'm not going to have an accident, so I don't need to wear a seatbelt." is very similar to "I know that lots of other people get killed accidentally by guns, but I won't have an accident."

Since the mechanism needs to supply the energy needed to push the craft forward, why not just call it an engine?

No it doesn't: simple.

Crows can count. Thus numbers are not a human construct.

Of course, that's what they are for. The stats certainly applied to the 606 individuals who were accidentally shot. And you have to remember that those deaths involved people who thought that they knew how to use a gun safely- or they wouldn't have had one.

Can you two sort out whether or not Alaskans exist? Are they the crazy types who go hunting wolves (from choppers) or is it that the crazy wolf hunters don't exist? Anyway, "According to the FBI’s Crime in the United States 2011 report, there were 260 incidents of justifiable homicide by private citizens in the United States in 2011. Of those 260 incidents, 77 percent of those (201) involved firearms." There are, as you said, about 600 deaths from accidental discharge of firearms http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/deaths_2010_release.pdf So your gun is roughly three times more likely to kill someone by accident that it is to kill someone invading your home or mugging someone in the street. On the other hand, there are about 20,000 suicides (OK some of them would have killed themselves without guns and some people manage to fail to kill themselves even with a gun) So, very roughly, you are a hundred times more likely to kill yourself with a gun as you are to kill a burglar or whoever with it.

It might, or it might warm the air and reduce the probability of rain. I'm willing to bet that nobody has done a proper double blind controlled study. So it's unreasonable to assert (as Immortal did) that " if agnihotra works in bringing rain to regions affected by drought then start taking the existence of these gods seriously because without Agni there cannot be Agnihotra." because it begs the question: it presupposes that the effect is real. It's also a logical fallacy in that he said "because without Agni there cannot be Agnihotra." This like saying that without Father Christmas, there can be no ritual of leaving cookies out for him (and carrots for Rudolph too). It's clearly simply not true.

"You are operating on misinformation.... no one hunts endangered species, it's illegal," http://www.polarbearhunting.net/tale.htm http://www.cites.org/gallery/species/mammal/polar_bear.html "Your only source of data is propaganda."

Another question is "who cares?" Rhino horn is only useful if you are a rhino. It's fraudulent to sell it on the basis of any medicinal claims, even if it's otherwise legal.

Erm, not my filed but, isn't the game on the Sabbath? Are these guys being paid to work on the Sunday? Looks like God lost to Mammon whoever wins.

There's no second exit from the room, just a door through into the rest of the house. It means I can circle round. I have no objection to you killing intruders. I just wish you would realise that your gun is not as likely to do that as it is to harm your family.