John Cuthber

Well, how far have you got? What would happen to the things if you put them in water? What about the other things that you can use to help?

I'd love to pretend that I'm terribly clever and transliterated the Greek characters. I was going to do that, but when I highlighted it, one of the options Chrome gave me was to search for "don't move..." The browser did the transliteration for me.

Indeed, otoh "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried". BTW, I think Southpark is funny and I'm not living in the US.

"What about considering studies that were suggesting a causation of smoking with cancer being squashed by influential scientists (funded by the smoking industry) as a mere correlation? " Er, what's your point here? The relationship between cancer and smoking has been found out in spite of vast sums of money from the tobacco industry trying to silence it. Most countries now have fairly strict laws about where you can smoke. " Council for Tobacco Research" are nicknamed "the flat earth society" for their refusal to accept the bleeding obvious. Nobody takes them seriously.

I was thinking about "“Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have”" Or was it the one about being able to count on Americans to do the right thing?

HCL would do, but the by-product would be chlorine which is unpopular with the neighbours. Sulphuric would be better. Also you need some sort of inert anode.

Perhaps it's just me but I think that a fairly obscure material, like ammonium fluoride, molten and under pressure in the presence of one of the halogens is quite hazardous, but pretty unlikely to be the cause of injury to anyone who happens across this page on the web because most people won't have the materials to try it.. On the other hand, the aluminothermic reaction of something rather hygroscopic- say calcium sulphate- to produce a few products two of which are rather hazardous is a bigger problem. If we were in the business of closing threads because they mentioned something that could be dangerous I think we would close this one http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/68449-make-calcium-metal/page__pid__699182#entry699182 before bothering with one about NH4F.

The word is just fine. The connotations of it are something else.

Do you guys have a consensus on the meaning of "a good POTUS"? 'cause as far as I can see, you are not going to agree on the answer to he OP without one. (I doubt that you will agree, even if you can say what is "good" in this context, but I'm certain you won't agree until you have that definition.)

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/inane

It says Don't move through the door if the light is green. God knows what it means.

Iota, post a copy of some of it.

" But dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) is still just a subspecies of Wolf (Canis lupus), no matter their variation." It would be interesting to watch a chihuahua trying to inseminate a great Dane. If they can't breed they are not the same species. Sure, with external assistance ( or perhaps just a step ladder) they can manage, but without help they can't breed. "I may be wrong, but as far as my research can tell, antibiotics did not create antibiotic resistant bacterium. There have always been such bacterium and the destruction of non-resistant bacterium and success of the resistant bacterium under the survival pressure put forth by antibiotics has caused the spike in their prevalence, not mutation of evolution outside of natural variation." You are misinformed. Bacteria can acquire genetic material from one another and acquire resistance. In any event, if I get , for example, an infected finger that infection grew from a small number of individuals- possibly just 1. If, in due course, they acquire resistance how could that happen. Either the first bug was resistant, or it wasn't. There's also the question of bacteria acquiring resistance to sulphonamides which are entirely synthetic. They didn't exist before mankind made them. Some bugs are resistant to them. They must have acquired their resistance recently.

If I have a coil of superconducting wire with a current flowing through it, it has a stored energy 1/2 LI^2. That energy is stored in the magnetic field round the magnet. As far as I can see, the energy is transferred to the magnetic field and then to the other wire. Energy is conserved because the field acts as a temporary store.

How about, there is a disaster coming: plenty of people refuse to accept it, and the decision to not build reactors in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima is a political ploy?

"Any evidence of mutation occurring during the span of Human scientific observation?" Plenty. The differences between breeds of dogs or the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria are probably the most frequently cited. Or, if you take a rather loose view of "the span of Human scientific observation" the fact that may, but not most, humans are lactose tolerant into adulthood. There are examples of organisms that might well resemble the intermediate forms between fish and amphibians These are probably the best known http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lungfish If there weren't plenty of examples of this sort of thing then scientists generally wouldn't subscribe to the ideas of evolution. There are and they do. Every time someone has said "evolution isn't possible because..." science has come up with a counterpoint.

Then it can't be just gelatine. Put one in some warm water and see what happens.

Would those of you who don't believe in zero please let me know how many unicorns there are in the room with you at the moment? Thanks.

I think the essence of the issue is that all new ideas are ridiculed at first but that the ones that are correct get accepted (in some cases ratehr slowly). The alternative would be that new ideas were accepted immediately. Now, we have seen on this site some remarkable ideas put forward. Just think of the mess that science would be in if all the crackpot ideas were accepted. It's a type 1 vs type 2 error problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors And the odds of a new idea being true and useful are pretty thin so the boundary for accepting them is set very high. Incidentally, if Studiot's list had been Benveniste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Benveniste Blondlot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray and Hahnemann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy and Fleischmann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion he could have made the same point. All these people were ridiculed.

To be fair, he did. He calculated the force on a test mass near a bike wheel. And the "theory" was shown to be wrong by experiment.

If I put forward the suggestion that all crows are black and I post a video of some black crows, that's not proof that my theory is correct. If I post lots of pictures of black crows then it's circumstantial evidence supporting the suggestion, - but its not proof. If someone posts a picture of a crow that isn't black then my suggestion is plainly wrong. Just one solitary counter example is all it needs. At that point, there's nothing to gain from looking at pictures of black crows is there? Now, why would I watch your video?

If the experiment won't kill a few people it's probably not worth doing. http://www.lab-initio.com/screen_res/nz212.jpg

Galileo's work was accepted by scientists quite quickly. It was the church that took 400 years to accept that they had screwed up. At least part of Noether's problems with acceptance were related to her sex and the view that society took. If anything, the fact that she was given teaching jobs at universities indicates that her work was recognised as brilliant at the time. Do you mean Frank Whittle, of jet engine fame? According to WIKI " During May 1948 Whittle received an ex-gratia award of £100,000 from the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors in recognition of his work on the jet engine, and two months later he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE), Military Division." It seems the establishment accepted his ideas. And so on. It's fair to say that recognition isn't always as quick as it should be. And sometimes the person dies before they get fully recognised http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin but that doesn't just happen in science- ask Van Gogh

I didn't watch your videos because I only need to watch one experiment that shows your "theory" is wrong, to know that it is wrong. How many times it worked isn't the issue. It's the fact that it failed that matters. Do you understand that?

The joys of a shared language. I could have got thrown out of high school for trying to look for a screw in a girl's pants. (Though I wouldn't have expected them to have cuffs).