John Cuthber

What gulf?

Man is a composite of mainly water, some carbon, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus sulphur iron etc. The heart is a pump. It's the brain that falls in love- we know we can measure the changes in dopamine levels there. yours is a made up story that doesn't tally with the facts. The evidence is plentiful and it contradicts what you say. And God might still be a pizza.

The answer is yes, but then again He could be a soggy banana peel. There is no evidence on which to make a decision so the speculation is pointless.

Someone tells me "you have got to help me! there's an elephant in my garden". I'm going to say "I don't believe you and, to prove it we are going to look in your garden and see." If it turns out that the elephant is real I'm going to be surprised- there's every chance that my surprise will be obvious: gawping ans swearing may well be involved. But, until I see it (or hear it or see a crowd of people running about yelling or whatever - some sort of evidence) I don't believe it. I can't, while en route to his place suddenly decide to believe it's real. . Anyway, are you telling me that I can claim to have Elvis riding an elephant while it bonks Shergar in my back garden and you can choose to believe me . I mean that if I were to hook you up to a lie detector (for the sake of this discussion it's a magic one that works) and ask you if you believe in Elvis etc and you could honestly say that you believe it? That's interesting. It means that you can fool the detector because a minute later you can decide not to believe it and pass the test for the other statement. Then you can change your mind again. You will say that two statements ("Elvis is there" and "Elvis is not there") are- to the best of your belief- true even though they are contradictory without receiving any information in between or making some realisation. I think that you may find that counts as insanity. Still, it's a very useful skill. If you fall over and break your ankle you can choose to believe that it's still n one piece and jog home. Had a heart attack? Not an issue- choose to believe that it's indigestion and keep going. Dying? No problem, simply choose to believe that you are immortal. One potential problem is that you might get bored. Never mind- do what you like. You can choose to believe that you can pay for it and that it's morally acceptable. If you get caught and jailed who cares choose to believe that you are lazing on the beach. Are you beginning to see the problem here? No matter. Choose to believe that there isn't one.

I thought it was melons rather than pumpkins that had that effect on some men. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=microwave%20a%20melon (other cucurbits are available)

Why is it that people just don't realise how powerful a hurricane is? I'm lucky: I haven't seen one but a spot of googling tells me that they dissipate something like 10^12 Watts of wind power and something like 10^15 Watts total. That's something like 200 times the total installed power rating of all the generating kit on the planet. Say that we were foolish enough to install 5000 wind turbines and, to be even more absurd, lets imagine that the hurricane obligingly spreads itself along the whole coast (rather than turning up in one place and trashing it.) 10^15 Watts divided by 5000 turbines is about 10^11 Watts each. The biggest wind turbines in the world are rated for about 10^7 Watts So each one would be overloaded by a factor of something like 10,000. How long do you think they would last? The recent hurricane destroyed kilometres of concrete and steel as it rampaged through a city. What do you think a kilometre sheet of anything would do apart from contribute to the clean-up costs? Seriously, there's only 1 way to avoid hurricane damage. Get out of the way.

What I'm saying is that if you said you had an elephant in your yard I'd simply not believe it. If you could offer some evidence, maybe a clipping from your local paper, you could convince me but without that I just wouldn't think it was true: I'd assume you were joking.

We can barely get robot cars to work on nice flat roads. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car I think it's a bit optimistic to thing they could cope with a forest floor. Incidentally, the word is forestry.

How could you says such a thing?! You missed the apostrophe.

If you mean things like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Cliffs_of_Dover then all of it is biological The cliffs are composed mainly of soft, white chalk with a very fine-grained texture, composed primarily of coccoliths, plates of calcium carbonate formed by coccolithophores, single-celled planktonic algae whose skeletal remains sank to the bottom of the ocean during the Cretaceous and, together with the remains of bottom-living creatures, formed sediments. And writing like this makes it hard to read.

After more than a month, I note that this thread has got no closer to answering the question than we were at that start. I think the evidence shows that Mr Obama and Mr Romney were somewhere else at the time. Any number of individuals and groups have been the subject of vague accusations and speculation. The truth is that we don't know: we probably never will and this thread isn't going to help answer the question. Is there a point to keeping this thread live?

A paving slab on a bike inner tube will make a pretty good vibration isolator. However, to answer the actual question you can get away with very long leads but exactly how long depends on things like the output impedance of the source driving them.

Ditto for sterling and the euro or even gold. So, not really interesting or relevant is it.

"The light can feel a little more glaring." Meanwhile, back in the world of science... "I just went to a sauna at a local gym, and (I could tell by the off-looking color) they were using CFL bulbs in the above fixture. The sauna is heated by electric resistance elements, so using "energy efficient" bulbs makes absolutely no sense. With all that heat in the sauna, the lifetime of those spiral bulbs are probably also compromised." Welcome to this week's episode of solving the wrong problem. It's dumb to use electricity to heat things because it's inefficient. If they heated the room sensibly then saving the electrical power wasted by a tungsten lamp would still be valid.

"The law will not allow any incandescent bulb currently in existence. And there is plenty of scientific reason to doubt that such a bulb will ever be available. " Nope, halogen lamps are incandescent and available: and they are efficient enough to be legal. The thing is that they are only marginally more efficient than ordinary tungsten lamps.

"It seems like something that is hard-coded into nature" In a way, it is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations#Vacuum_equations.2C_Electromagnetic_waves_and_speed_of_light though, that's a classical theory. I don't know if there's a comparable explanation in QM

No what I'm saying is that, even when given a clear incentive (like a prize) to believe something (like the idea that I have an elephant in my garden), you can't. You can't choose to believe it, so belief isn't a choice. It's nothing to do with religion or even truth. If you look really carefully, you will see that I didn't mention religion at all.

OK, so the auditor is overzealous. The rest was largely drivel. Did you notice, for example that, while they added on the mercury released during the manufacture of the CFL they didn't do that for the incandescent?

I'm amused by the idea of becoming an ordained minister and conducting weddings etc.

I may be unhelpful and even unclear, but I'm not an idiot. So when I asked "Why do you think " the government is and has been spraying chemicals into the atmosphere, ?". " I was asking why you hold that opinion (a question you can answer) rather than "to what end are the government doing this" (a question which you already said you didn't know the answer to). So, here's the clearer version for the hard-of-thinking. Why do you suffer from the delusion that the government is and has been spraying chemicals into the atmosphere? Do you have, for example, any evidence (and I will point out that crackpot web sites are not evidence)? Do you have a viable explanation why they would do so? Can you show us a plausible mechanism by which they could do this? Incidentally, a "chemical free plant" is just silly. It shows that you don't know what the word chemical means. Wouldn't it be better to learn about the subject before writing me off as "unhelpful" or tell us to "Do research before you buy into the government and media." It wouldn't take much effort on your part to realise that plants contain water, cellulose and chlorophyll which are chemicals. You might even work out that every single thing that a plant (or animal or rock or book or computer) is made from, is made entirely of chemicals.

I don't see how that's any more true than saying "If I have complete free will I can change my skin colour at will". Anyway, unless someone can tell me how they can win the prize then I think the question has been answered. Belief isn't a choice.

Part of the explanation is that the doctor could only harm a rather limited number of people but a pharma company could harm many. Also, you seem not to take account of the doctor's knowledge and experience.

The shaft seal problem is easy. You use a magnetic coupling (like a magnetic stirrer on a grand scale. But I don't see why this system is better than the usual trickle tower type (which has no moving parts). This sort of thing. http://www.airpoll.co.in/packed-tower-gas-scrubber.html

""In fact, a single tube of bubble-gum flavored Colgate-for-Kids toothpaste contains enough fluoride (143 mg) to kill a child weighing less than 30 kg. (Whitford 1987a)."" A couple of cigarettes contains enough nicotine to kill a child. That's a reason not to feed cigarettes or toothpaste to children, rather than anything else. It has, quite clearly, nothing to do with the issues of water fluoridation. People are not made of glass. The fact that glass is corroded by HF is totally irrelevant to its toxicity, but it's a good scare tactic. Most Western European countries don't fluoridate water, but that's a political decision based on the moral issue of freedom of choice. It's not a scientific point so it's not relevant to this discussion.

At the very least, when you find yourself in a very deep hole, you should stop digging.