John Cuthber

I'm really starting to like the guy who believes in dragons. It's roughly as plausible as Todd Akin's views on human biology, and a whole lot less offensive. Surely there's someone out there who can find some footage of a Left winger making a total knob of themselves?

pgharvey Your ideas are full of more holes than a string vest yet you expect someone else to give up and "just let it go and not bother responding anymore". Nope, that's not how it works. You came up with this idea so it's your job to try to prove it. Since it does not agree with reality (Cavendish's experiment or the behaviour of balances) it's false. The idea is dead. You are the one who should just let it go.

"If you're trying to imply I don't know how to handle azides, you're wrong." The people in the obit columns thought that too.

It's amusing to note that wiki has articles entitled clintonism, thacherism, balirism obamaism, clintonism and so on which note the political views or movements of the politicians concerned. The entry for Bushism lists examples of his inability to string a sentence together. And yet, someone can ask, apparently in all seriousness for " a quote from any reputable republican that can top any of the gaffs Biden has made ".

I remain disappointed by the lack of tragicomic videos about notable left wing politicians making absurd claims. Even just a run-of-the-mill flat-earther or YEC would be a start. Surely the entire Left wing can't actually be "really quite sensible"?

I did it on a scale of an ounce or so. I'd not consider trying it on a much bigger scale but I'd probably not need to. Powdered charcoal (from any source) would do the job. Stainless steel will do as a reaction vessel. The reason I used the caustic as a flux is that it has a low melting point. On a bigger scale there's less need for it because the air has less chance to get to the freshly produced metal. In any event, on the scale you are talking about the generation of carbon monoxide is likely to be an issue. Work outside or get a couple of alarms.

I rather doubt that somehow, just as the communists came to power, everyone suddenly stopped believing in God. So if the criterion for an atheist society is the lack of "prevalence of belief in a supernatural agent" then most communist countries were probably never atheist anyway.

OK http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms.htm or ''I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.'' —Mitt Romney, using an unfortunate choice of words while advocating for consumer choice in health insurance plans (January 2012) and ''Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.'' —Rep. Michelle Bachmann, April, 2009 But all of these are just slip-ups. They are not in the same league as belief in dragons (Though Bachman might really believe what she said: it's hard to tell. If she does then she's got about as good a grasp of reality as the dragon guy.) Perhaps the most striking quote is this recent one from Romney " I did go back and look at my taxes and over the past 10 years I never paid less than 13 percent. I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year. " I guess it's near enough to true, but it means he thinks it's morally and politically acceptable to brag about paying a tax rate that would be appropriate if he were on about $10,000 per year. According to wiki "As a result of his business career, by 2007, Romney and his wife had a net worth of between $190 and $250 million" As far as I can tell, even if nearly all of his income is long term capital gains he should be paying 15%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United_States I'm warming to the guy who believes in dragons. Now Rigney, can you please show me the batshit crazy left wingers? (or is your belief in them a bit like that bloke's belief in dragons, i.e. not actually based on reality?)

I wouldn't use a light bulb because it's a slightly different sort of risk so it might be thought of as misleading. Perhaps this would work. According to this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust there's about 2 parts per million of uranium or, if you like,2 grams of uranium in each tonne of the earth's crust. so if the only source of radioactivity in dirt were the uranium (and it isn't - there are other contributors like potassium and thorium) dirt is about 2 millionths as radioactive as pure uranium. So the bismuth, which is a thousand million times less radioactive than the uranium, is about 500 times less radioactive than average dirt. Actually, the ratio is rather bigger than 500 There's about 5 times more thorium than uranium in dirt but it's about 3 times less radioactive so the radiation from Th is comparable with that from Thorium. So the dirt is about 500 times more radioactive than Bismuth. Then there's another factor. The decay products. The immediate products of radioactive decay of uranium are themselves radioactive. And then there is a chain of further reactions until you get to something stable so, for each decay due to uranium there will (eventually) be about 15 decays from the so called daughter products. So for naturally occurring uranium (with all the decay products) the total radioactivity is about 15 times that due to just the uranium. Bismuth's decay product is stable so there isn't a similar multiplication factor. So now the dirt is about 15,000 times more radioactive then the bismuth. People don't generally worry about dirt being radioactive. Having said all that, Greg's comment about pepto bismol might convince some people better.

As you might imagine, I'm not that familiar with the behaviour of US politicians. Can you provide a link to Youtube or something showing Biden to have lost his grip on reality please? I can see some stories where he made dumb comments through lack of thought but there's a whole world of difference between thoughtless slips like those and a belief in dragons.

Earnshaw's theorem doesn't rule out diamagnetic levitation

Stalin and Mao didn't create true communist states (and I don't think anyone could). "All men equal, but Party members more equal than the others" isn't true communism. In a way, a society where the more strongly you shout about your faith in the party the better your chances of success, looks more religious than a typical Western democracy. Cross out "the bible" and put in "the little red book" in its place and it's easy to see the "communist" states as religious dictatorships without a God. It's also worth noting that those groups haven't survived very well. The Soviet Union has collapsed and Chinese rule only survives by the oppression of its people. Neither of those looks like much of a "society" to me. So, in short, we haven't really tried a society based on atheist principles.

A few clicks of the mouse tells me that the Curie temp of iron is rather higher than that (770). And it still won't work. Earnshaw's theorem isn't just a suggestion: it's a mathematical proof. You might be able to arrange for a lump of Gd in a strong temperature gradient to levitate in some sort of stable manner, but that requires an energy input and if you are going to do that it's probably easier to use a feedback system.

Check the obituary columns for people who died from azide poisoning, then contact their next of kin.

I'm still hoping that Rigney (or someone) is going to provide us with some entertainingly batty, credible Left-wing politicians. Otherwise, given the clear examples of nutty Right wingers and a lack of Left wing loonies, I'm going to say that the question which forms the title of this thread has been answered in the affirmative. A party which fields a candidate who believes in dragons has clearly lost its collective mind. If nobody can demonstrate that the Left is just as bad* then I think we can close the thread. * If the two sides are as bad as each other then we might need to redefine "lost their minds" but otherwise, I think belief in dragons counts as a reasonable working definition.

It also increases the rate of vehicle accidents. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/9/72 Perhaps we should start taking it seriously.

http://xkcd.com/285/

The talk about Stalin and co just proves that dictatorships are bad whatever the religious ( or non- religious) beliefs of the dictator. Not really relevant.

Do you know that sodium azide is roughly as toxic as sodium cyanide?

It won't work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnshaw%27s_theorem

If you really want to drop his blood pressure, why not actually do as he asks and provide some evidence of batshit crazy left wingers actually being chosen to represent a legitimate political party?

It might be helpful to clarify the difference between machine code which is effectively written (or built) into the processor and assembler which is designed for people to use. They are closely related, but not the same.

Religion exists to fill the gaps in human understanding of the real world- especially the "big questions". Those question (where are we from , when did the universe start etc) have now been answered by science (at least as well as religion ever did). So religion no longer has a purpose and it has effectively died. It's just that a lot of people have yet to realise that religion is dead.

Molten NaOH is a flux (and not nice stuff) The reaction is something like 2 Bi2O3 + 3C ---> 2Bi + 3 CO2 Followed by the reaction of the CO2 with NaOH. I chose NaOH because it's got a low melting point.

I can't in all good faith recommend melting together bismuth oxide, charcoal and caustic soda unless you already have experience with that sort of thing- but it works. How much of the stuff do you have?