John Cuthber

I think what he says is pretty much correct.

Actually, we do know what being rich means: we can measure it and correlate it with religion. You, on the other hand, are living in the Humpty Dumpty world again. You are changing the meanings of words so that they say you are right. However, it's a silly ploy. We know what the words mean so you don't convince anyone.

The question is meaningless. How do you travel at an imaginary speed? I can say, without anyone being able to show that I'm wrong, that if you travel at an imaginary speed you turn into a rubber chicken.

I guess it's the "number line" which is sometimes (rather confusingly) represented as a circle with infinite radius and where + and - infinity coincide (on the dubious basis that their reciprocals are the same). If that's the case then the answer is fairly simple. Imaginary numbers are not on that line, they are on the imaginary number line which crosses the real number line at zero. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_plane http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ArgandDiagram.html

My only interest is in trying to ensure that stuff posted on this site is actually scientific. Incidentally, while "I don't know" is a valid answer to the question "why do people write stuff like this?", it doesn't move the discussion forward. I'm not terribly concerned about why you copied it here, but I'd like to know what it was written for in the first place. If it's a genuine concern then why not put in real evidence rather than claims about bubbles in cells and scaremongering pictures of damaged metal? Above all, they need to explain why the widespread use of ultrasound didn't bring about an epidemic of birth defects (or if it did, how come we didn't notice like we did with thalidomide). Otherwise it's not really science. Here's an idea of what the scientific version would look like. Based on the fact that high intensity ultrasound can damage things I hypothesis that the low intensity ultrasound used in scanning babies is harmful. From that hypothesis I make a prediction. If ultrasound produced damage then, when the technique became widespread, the number of birth defects would rise. Further, if the number of defects rose, then people would notice (based on the observation that they noticed thalidomide). No such rise has been observed. Therefore the original hypothesis is wrong. That piece by Emily Williams isn't science. The deliberate scaremongering isn't helpful either. If there is actually any substance to this then it's important- far too important to be dealt with as badly as that quote which started this thread.

That's like saying my cup of coffee is solid because it has sugar dissolved in it and sugar is a solid. As something dissolves it changes phase. I asked a question. Do you have an alternative explanation for the observed behaviour? Why do people write this sort of thing? Is it just attention seeking? If not, what is it?

So, to summarise, Chicago has high levels of poverty and poor schooling which lead to a high murder rate in spite of stringent gun control laws. (And a few bent politicians got jailed, which is good).

They didn't do ultrasound scans before they invented them (obviously). Nowadays, practically every baby in the Western world is scanned. If ultrasound caused birth defects then the number of such defects would have risen and people would have noticed and stopped scanning babies. There was no jump in the number of birth defects to correspond with the jump in the number of babies scanned. So you can conclude (on the basis of a truly massive scale experiment) that the effect is either very small or non existent. Why do people come up with this sort of stuff? In particular why say things like "As occurs with almost every solid within a liquid (e.g., cells), small gaseous pockets hide within crevices." without some sort of evidence? After all, these cells have never been exposed to air- where would the gas in the crevices have come from? Why put in a picture of a damaged lump of metal? It's got nothing to do with the situation in utero. Are people like Emily Williams just trying to attract attention to themselves?

Tracer round ignites propane tank. 1 min 44 sec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-vjLBBBz-o

Looks like he needs a better vest http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wUqUrR8L1Zo

To take the second part first: you said "Religion is not just about faith, just by believing in something you won't become religious, religion is about knowledge and its a way of life to many of them and its the way they live is what determines whether they are religious or not and not what they blindly believe in. " That excludes a lot of what people call religion. Since you say that the "knowledge" involved isn't the actual things I find out from my senses, what is it? Does my recollection of once having dreamed that I was a fish mean that I "know" what it's like to be a fish? More importantly, where does this "knowledge" come from? Are you seeking to pretend that it's not derived from what people are told (via their senses- specifically that of hearing) as children. Isn't this "knowledge" really just blindly believing what the priests say? How can you distinguish it? We are back in the world of Humpty Dumpty- you use "knowledge" to mean something other than the usual accepted meaning of the word. At best, this makes it impossible to understand you.

Pretty much, yes. It depends on the glass and the thickness, but on the whole windons are pretty much opaque to UV from 300nm to the soft Xray region.

Bollocks. Things like the clean air acts were political solutions. Seat belt laws were too. Granted the "law of unintended consequences" often affects the outcome, but to say that political solutions don't work is simply absurd. Anyway, could you please answer my earlier questions Why do you think I should start my own thread so you can explain an apparently off- topic post which you made in this thread? Why do you think Australian weather variations from day to day have anything much to do with the net energy flux of the whole earth? Do you understand that the heat that people use is tiny compared to that received from the sun?

Notice in your graph of Hurricanes, most of the Hurricanes go east and out to sea, Sandy turned west when it reached New Jersey. That is unusual dont you think? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy " Why doesnt CNN / BBC / ALJAZEERA ever talk about the effect of weather modification on climate?" Probably for the same reason that they don't talk about alien invasions: there are none to talk about.

If I was to start a thread saying that Immortal is channelling the spirit of Humpty Dumpty "When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' would it get merged with this thread?

1 is meaningless since it says "everything apart from some things" 2 is clearly nonsense, if it were true then, for example, you wouldn't be able to see through air. 3 No, water is an obvious exception. 4 Ordinary glass is quite good at blocking UV, especially short wavelength UV. 5 Any cardboard thick enough to be used for packaging is likely to be pretty much completely opaque to UV. It will generally block UV better than it will block visible light so, if you can't see light through it, it's going to block UV. 6 Paper isn't going to work as well as card, but the UV brighteners in most paper will still block a lot of the UV. 7 Some plastics are intrinsically pretty transparent to UV (polythene and polypropylene for example): other are not (polycarbonate and PET are opaque to most UV. The fact that most plastics contain additives makes it difficult to guess how any given bit of plastic will stop UV. 8 Yes! he finally got one right ( though it contradicts 3) 9 It depends more on the openness of the weave than anything else, a thick black felt will block UV rather well. A string vest won't, because it's full of holes. 10 Wow! another one right. 11 I might bet on a plasticised PVC umbrella blocking UV better than a cheap cloth one. If you can see through the holes in the cloth, it won't work very well.

I think it's a bit late for them to go to the doctor's.

I wonder: if I were to go back through immortal's old posts, would I find one where atheism is described as a religion? Edit. Well, I guess it's only fair to say I checked and it seems he didn't. But then, since he doesn't include a lot of religions as being religious, that's no great shock.

True, if you want to see the size of the effects you need the numbers. But you can still say that both effects are real. As it were, even if we didn't have a bit of a fever, we would still get hotter- that's what blankets do. Re the OP's question " is there a link to the formula for calculating the atmospheric temperature rise in relation to CO2 concentration (including explanation of the variables and their units)?" The simple answer is no. It's enormously complicated because there are a whole bunch of feedback systems in place etc. If the atmosphere was fully mixed and isothermal, it would be easier but the effects of differencing temperatures and also different concentrations of gases at different heights make it a pig to calculate. Things like rain and storms also add to the difficulty.

The classic one is Brin's process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brin_process but the temperatures are rather higher than you are wanting. There are also the special sorbents used in this sort of thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_swing_adsorption

Pretty much anything that blocks visible light will block UV. A black cloth would work fine.

Surely Occam's razor works the other way. We know there's more CO2 in the air and we know it traps IR. So, it's like saying that we put another blanket on the bed and we are warmer. The simplest explanation is that the blanket is why it's warmer.

Cardboard (especially if it's black) would be a good way to block UV, but if you want to be really sure use aluminium foil.

There were plenty of options http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_thermal_weapons perhaps more interestingly the question in the OP "Could plasma one day be used for actual guns?" asks if the plasma could be used for guns, rather than for ammunition. A gun made from plasma would be a challenge to hold and aim.

Perhaps I should clarify something. If I say someone does something because they are "following the word of God", I mean that they are failing. If it is the right thing to do then they should do it because it is right. If it is the wrong thing to do then they should not do it no matter what the "word of God" is. So, there's no way that my view can be construed as defending maniacs who harm others in the name of their religion. That applies to terrorist murderers like those responsible for 9/11 and it also applies to those who seek to damage the learning of children by coming up with BS like the creationists. Now, the point about religion is that it's what you believe because you were taught it by people variously labelled as priests or whatever- rather than because of (indeed, often in the face of) the evidence. Just because you think that some group has misunderstood (deliberately or accidentally) the word, that doesn't mean that their belief is not religious. From their point of view, it's you who has got it wrong.