John Cuthber

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant

All very well, but it doesn't address the problem. A whole lot of people will "receive nothing" through no fault of their own. Having done nothing deliberately wrong- but simply because they were unaware of what was "right" they are punished by God. Bit of a bastard isn't He? "The scriptures are ambiguous and the truth cannot be extracted from them by those who are ignorant of tradition." So, what are the scriptures for? Is it to feed hour of debate on internet fora? Or is that just an example of; exactly what a preacher would say in order to maintain mystique and power?

If people were not spraying neonicotinoids you would almost have a point.

"One cannot be an understanding person if he cannot understand. " Indeed, and, since you are asking for a link to the basic electrostatics that Swansont posted,you have made it clear that you are the one who does not understand. The fair weather currents have that name for a reason. There are other currents that counterbalance them, but they don't happen in good weather. There is no net flow of electrons from the earth. If it were negatively charged then such a flow would take place until the charge was dissipated. Then it would stop.

What was the point you though this made?

What does the BBC have to do with it? This http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/chensheng-lu/files/in-situ-replication-of-honey-bee-colony-collapse-disorder.pdf is not the BBC's work, it's Harvard's

Did you look on eBay?

It's fair to say that, since we have finite brains and live in an infinite universe we won't ever learn everything about it. However we might hope to learn all the rules. I'm a chemist and a long time ago I learned that you can oxidise secondary alcohols to ketones. That's pretty much general. There are an infinite number of secondary alcohols so it's clear that nobody has tested all of them, but we still know that they can all be turned into ketones. In the same way, there are an infinite (or at least very large) number of stars, planets and so on, but we may well be able to establish rules about all of them. If we learn all the rules then we can work out what will happen next (down to the theoretical limits set by QM and the practical limits set by our ability to make the observations) In that sense I think it's entirely possible that we will come to "know everything" I think it was Confucius who said "true wisdom is not knowing everything, but knowing how to find everything out" I can see a few things that might stop us doing that. We simply might not be bright enough to find the rules. There might be so many rules that we can't find them all. We might give up looking because we think that it might be impossible. I will be happy if we avoid the third option.

I'm just wondering if anyone out there thinks that returning to the days where abortion was illegal won't mean a return to illegal abortions. Perhaps I should buy shares in backstreetabortionists dot com just in case these folk get in. Also, does any of you have any information about this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect

I'd bet that practically all the people in church, the last time I was there, would have had little or no understanding of "the higher teachings of St. Paul and Christianity" I'm amused as hell to see that they face eternal damnation. They didn't read the right books. God sends them to hell "Two wrongs doesn't make a right." Tell God. "You guys do need a reality check, group thinking is dangerous and it only leads to delusion." OK, and the next question is "how do you have religion without group thinking? BTW, am I right in thinking that next weeks topic for discussion will be "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin- with particular focus on the correct Latin/ Greek/ Hebrew translations and transliterations of the word 'pin'?"

Fusion power works just fine, the reactor is about 93 million miles away.

Way back in the first post you said "A case can be made for the earth and our sun to both be holding negative electrical charge charge. " If that were true then there would be a potential difference between different places, depending on how far they were from the two charged objects. There is a conducting medium around them- the solar wind. Why has this charge not leaked away? Maintaining such a charge in a conducting medium would require power. Where does that come from and how is it coupled to the system? What evidence do you have for your extraordinary claim that "A case can be made for the earth and our sun to both be holding negative electrical charge charge. "? "Please tell, why would that appeal so much to you? Why try so hard to poison the minds of those who might follow and benefit from my logic?" I frankly don't see logic in your poasts. I see an unsupported assertion and no explanation of how an obviously unstable system is maintained.

Man builds a machine that seems to go on forever. At best it seems to go for a few minutes. It won't work. Very pretty, but not real. I'm also a bit suspicious about what's hidden in the middle column.

Sorry, what on earth are you on about? Who are " that guy in the hat, the others and that little girl"? I take it you mean the folk in the video. Well, actually they aren't generally quoting anyone. They are putting forward a point of view. As such, the level of proof needed is rather less than on, for example, a scientific web site. As you say, those statements (on the web page you posted) could be researched. And they must have been, in order to quote them (assuming they didn't just make them up). So why not give a reference for them? Could it be that, in context, they make a lot more sense that they are portrayed as doing? My guess would be "yes" but perhaps you would like to do the research and check. Go on- prove me wrong. Show me that all the things that "liberals say" are actually said by liberals, and in circumstances that don't significantly alter the meaning.

"Whereas the Earth takes nearly 24 hours to complete just one single rotation. That seems quite slow." It seem slow if you think that the speed of sound is slow. The equator is moving at about a thousand miles an hour.

A hollow shell would be unstable, it would collapse if anything hit it. We know that the sun gets hit by comets and such from time to time so the sun can not be hollow.

"I wonder if any of it could be true?" Quite possibly, but rather a lot of it is not. It also, as one would expect, doesn't include any context so it's pretty obvious that it's quote mining of the worst type. Why did you cite it?

OK, first off I apologise for sloppy choice of language. Sustaining a field in a conductive medium requires power not energy. Secondly, the first time you say something that's plain wrong it is a mistake. If you are told (repeatedly) that it's wrong and you keep saying it then you are only pretending that it's true. I'd be happy to defend that position in court if the question were to arise, but that would be a waste of your money and my time. It would be better to get back to the science. If there's a potential difference within bits of the sun and its surroundings, how come the charged particles don't move and cancel the potential out? Sustaining such a field would require the continuous input of energy (i.e power) and you have not explained where that comes from or how it is coupled to the particles. If you don't do that you should realise that this whole idea is dead in the water.

"But then again, I believe that the existence of God cannot be proven right or wrong with Science unless Science is able to reach out to what happens before and after life and death, heaven and hell." But that doesn't make sense. Unless and until there is some evidence for an afterlife, heaven or hell, there's no way to study it. It's like saying the existence of unicorns can't be proven right or wrong until science has explained whether the horn spirals to the right or to the left. It's a logical fallacy called "begging the question".

Well, how far have you got? (after all, this forum won't just give you an answer, it will provide help and guidance)

You seem to ignore reality a lot. It's not a good way to do science. You might want to look at this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

LOL I guess you think that String Junky and Moontanman are their real names. There's a tacit assumption on this site that names are not always real. My real name wouldn't actually fit in the space provided so you are calling me a liar because I didn't do something which isn't possible. I'm sure others will make up their own minds about your decision to do that. Also,you seem not to have understood what I posted and somehow you think that makes it a lie. I pointed out that lots of people perceive the moon as being a number of colours. They did, some of them said so. I grant you I could have edited the list of images or copied the names that people had given the images but I didn't bother. I thought that you would be able to work that out for yourself. It seems I was wrong. I also didn't specify the conditions under which the pictures were taken because (obviously) I simply don't know. That's not dishonest- you can look at the evidence in more detail if you like. I just pointed you in the direction of lots of images of the moon. So, you should believe me because I don't lie.

The cartoon bits are fine, but I think the video footage at about 1 minute is more convincing.

"It's been eighty years since Werner Heisenberg taught us this so it's time we all understand it. " OK, you first. Because the way you are talking about QM uncertainty has little or nothing to do with how it really works. It's true that, for any given photon, it's path and so on are unpredictable. But we don't take a picture of the moon with a single photon. We use countless millions of them. And the behaviour of the average of a large number of photons is predictable to a very great accuracy. By the way, do you plan to comment on the fact that my observation contradicts your assertion. That's nothing to do with QM- it just means you are not right.

"If you use a prism to split a beam of light and project the results on a surface you get a band with 3 or 7 distinct colors, not a continuous graduation of color." Assuming the light is white to begin with, you will get a lot more colours than that. Estimates of the number of colours that the eye can distinguish vary from about 100,000 to 10,000,000 A good spectrometer can do a lot better. The idea that there are 7 colours in the rainbow was down to Newton's views on the occult- seven was a "lucky" number. The human eye can't even tell the difference between yellow light and a mixture of red and green light. Have a very close look at this smiley and you will see that it's made up of red and green dots. "Does the prism suffer from 'optical illusions'?" No, but nobody said it did, so that's a straw man. I said the eye has problems, not a prism. "You offered false information to refute my original question by posting a bunch of images which did not fit the conditions" Nope, I posted a link to a bunch of images. By the way, don't call me a liar. At least some of those were labelled by the people who took the pictures as being coloured. Obviously, the colours in the pictures will be more or less distorted by the cameras (and any other processes- notably the setting on your monitor). But the people who took the pictures sometimes described them as a blue moon or some such. The colours were seen by the photographers. But the moon can't actually change colour- it's a rock, lit by sunlight So something else must have changed- that might be scattering or it might be an illusion. The point remains that, last night I saw the moon as yellow early in the evening (when the sun was around and the surrounding sky was blue) and white later on (when it was against a black background.) What I saw was the opposite of what you said. It's also exactly what would be expected as a consequence of the eye effectively adjusting the white balance.