John Cuthber

Exactly who were those people? I know that some people were quite clearly expressing the opinion that diplomatic to depose him means should have been tried first, but I don't know anyone who said he should stay.

Fuzzword, your prize is a spell checker- previously unused.

I rather suspect that dropping food on Afghanistan will do a better job of defeating the Taliban than dropping bombs ever will. Incidentally, when someone wins this "war on terror" , who signs the armistice?

I'd just like to tell the people who believe that this is going to work that I have an opportunity to sell a well known bridge in London and also to get lots of money out of some rich businessman's account in Nigeria.

"if the concept is what keeps us somewhat moral" It isn't. We decided, for example, to ignore the idea that God had told us that it was moral to offer your under-age virgin daughters to a group of gay men as a sexual partner in order to (so to speak) save your own arse (technically, that of two house guests). We collectively made that decision in spite of God, rather than because of Him. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2019:4-9;&version=KJV; I don't know anyone who would admit that they think that the bible gives good advice on this.

Why is this posed as an either/ or question? Is it not possible that he was both evil (whatever that means) and psychotic?

Galloway has, shall we say, a problem with his judgement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1NIuCt72bU However, there's a difference between visiting Saddam and supporting him. And I invite you to recall that the second biggest contributor of troops to the war in Iraq was Britain, and we had a left wing government at the time (albeit not as Left as I'd have liked). (Unless, of course, you meant that Blair + co's decision to lie and mislead in support of Bush, rather than to support the UN's search for weapons, was "co-existence with totalitarian, theocratic fascists") BTW, who was it that trained and installed Saddam and the Taliban in their positions of power? Of course, I remember now; it was those damnably communist Americans.

I guess the relevant part of that is this question "God, however, has greater abilities and knowledge than we do, including control over life and death. If God kills someone, he is able to bring them back to life" and this this "answer" "God, however, has greater abilities and knowledge than we do, including control over life and death. If God kills someone, he is able to bring them back to life" Fine, except, have you noticed something? He never does His job in this respect. I can claim that, if I kill someone it's OK because I can bring them back to life. As long as, in each and every case, when asked to I say "I could reincarnate them, but I choose not to" I'm in exactly the same position as God. Somehow I can't see any court accepting that. More importantly from a scientific point of view, why did you just blindly quote some nonsensical website, rather than actually thinking about what it said? Incidentally, re rule #4 Which Sabbath?

If I changed places with God, the first thing I would do is cease to exist. On the other hand, He (in spite of never having existed before) would become me. As "Me" I guess he (formerly (He) would carry on doing just the same as I would do if I carried on being me. Absolutely no observable change would take place. To cut a long story short, it wouldn't matter.

Aha! Now I think I know what you are on about. They use a mixture of nitrogen and CO2 to froth some beers with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draught_beer#Keg_beer it gives smaller bubbles that last longer. But there's no chemical reaction between the two gases. Unless, according to this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16375522 you freeze them into a block of solid neon at 4K and zap them with a laser.

I guess it exists because someone has measured the IR absorption spectrum of the stuff. What I don't believe is that it's stable.

Incidentally, why do you think NCO2 is stable? The only reference I can find to it has it trapped in a frozen neon matrix just a few degrees above absolute zero. Those are not easy conditions to achieve so they must have had a reason for choosing them. The simplest reason is that it reacts with anything less inert than Ne and it decomposes if its not kept very cold.

Why did you bother with that stupid strawman? I didn't say it proved He didn't exist. I said it proved that He's immoral. More importantly, the argument does stand (at least until someone actually refutes it). So your God is a monster.

Most moisturisers I have seen include a chemical which is likely to be beneficial for moisturising: they contain dihydrogen monoxide*. Almond oil doesn't. * This stuff http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

Another advantage to starting with just half as much air in the way is that you wouldn't need to make the pointy end so strong in order to push the air out of the way. You could make the rocket lighter and that would save significant fuel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Q (You may be amused to hear that I recently learned about that on a ride at the Kennedy Space Centre.)

Holding something suspended by an electromagnet without including a feedback system of some sort is, I think, a pipe-dream. (you might be able to do it with a rotating field, but it's still going to be horribly complicated. However if you can turn the system upside down and hold the material up by eddy current repulsion from below then that makes things a lot easier.

As far as the observable universe is concerned, if the rest of it were like our bit then we would see stars and galaxies with particular emission spectra . We do. That's not proof that the universe is consistent throughout, but it is strong supporting evidence. It's not perfect- you need to add things like dark matter for which there is no direct observation to get the maths to work, but it's still a good assumption. The alternative is that we simply give up.

"I have been trying to do some research on what happens if Nitrogen is mixed with Carbon Dioxide." Nothing happens: they don't react.

Just a quick line to trash the idea that Moh's hardness scale tells you anything about whether or not you can drill into hard rocks. In the good old days when record players had diamond needles you had to buy a new stylus from time to time because the diamond wore out by being rubbed against the shellac or PVC that the records were made from. Also, the "star child" DNA is likely to be degraded so there's no surprise it isn't a perfect match for human DNA.

Never mind the Swiss rodents. If I remember rightly the US constitution enshrines the right to arm bears.

I just had a look at the original post in this thread. It says " However, if the wit of this child was of extraordinary nature, with a gift for analytical reasoning, he might indeed discover the relationship with fuel that fire has. He might require loose applications of the scientific method to conclude experiment with various fuel sources and draw some factual conclusions based on his experimentation. But he would not be aware of a rule book. With a certain amount of experience, he might rightly conclude that "wood burns", but he might also INTUITIVELY know that dry leaves will burn too without testing it out. This conclusion might be based on the obvious connection that wood has with leaves. In other words, he may not find it remarkable that the leaves burn when he actually burns some. He already knew that they would burn based on intuition so it wasn't a surprise. He didn't use scientific method, he used simple reason. " It seems to me that, based on an observation- wood burns- the child has created a question - do wood-like things burn then formed a hypothesis - if wood-like things burn then leaves will also burn. They subsequently test that hypothesis and find it to be true which leads to a more general and useful hypothesis- "things that are like wood burn". That is the scientific method. Just because the kid doesn't have it written down in a book for them doesn't stop them using it. So, it seems that the idea that the scientific method is limited doesn't add up.

This assertion is at odds with experimental results for the Casimir effect. Particles pop in and out of existence even in an "empty" space and they cause measurable effects. Your reasoning is based on a false premise (as well as being deeply logically flawed)

Did you not watch the videos in post #7, or is it just that you didn't understand them? They make it clear that objective morality exists and that God;'s reported behaviour is immoral.

Do you actually have any evidence for the strange assertion that, for example, the 100 metre track was only 75M? How do you explain the fact that the audience (many of whom will have seen lots of tracks in the past) did not notice? Also, they can check the times (to a good approximation) with a wristwatch. If the 100M sprint really takes about 10 seconds but only covers 75M then the runners are hardly running. What stops one of them really putting the effort in and seeming to run 100M in something under 8 seconds? It is an extraordinary claim and before you go any further you need to provide some evidence that it is true.

OK, Here's a compromise. I think that resistance is a genuine intrinsic property of an object. WHR seems to think it's a mathematical abstraction based on the ratio of a voltage to a current and is, therefore undefined when the current is zero. However, in some cases such as tunnel diodes, the word "resistance" is used to represent the first derivative of voltage with respect to current: that's how you get negative resistances. Here's a picture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voltage_controlled_negative_resistance.svg dV/dI is a better mathematical model than V/I because it includes these negative resistance cases and it's properly defined at zero volts. WHR can have his abstract model- provided that he uses the more representative one and I can say that the resistance is properly defined at V=0 and is (for sensible resistors) the same as it is for other (moderate) voltages. Incidentally, in saying that a bit of platinum wire has a resistance that varies with temperature, you are accepting that the resistance is an intrinsic property of that bit of wire, albeit one that varies with temperature.