John Cuthber

You would need to come up with a reason why a razor blade in a cardboard model of Maggie would go blunt. What's the mechanism? It's your extraordinary claim- so you have to justify it, not me. No. Let's not forget about the razor blade which my schoolmate experimented on and which proved "pyramidology" wrong. Lets remember exactly what it did: it did nothing. Do you see how that ugly fact slays your "theory"? While I'm at it "The cat's body dried out, although the air in the King's Chamber is always humid." How is the air always humid? Where does the water come from? In a dry country like Egypt, that would be a hell of a lot more practical use than a razor blade. Is there actually a proper measurement of the humidity? Was the equipment calibrated?

It sure isn't- but you are reporting it on a science site. There are no real difficulties with testing this. They tested sildenafil. I know it's the same effect, but the "difficulties" would be the same. At least with 75mg of aspirin you know that the toxicity is trivial for healthy individuals. It's not as if you would have a shortage of men prepared to try it. I agree that I have never had occasion to try to improve my sexual performance (from my point of view or anyone else's). But from time to time I have taken aspirin and, if it had the effect that you suggest then I'd have noticed (even though it's not my specialist area)

Nobody seems to have picked up on the obvious laser shortage in that design. Anyway, I was thinking of something like this as a beheading device www.google.com/patents/US2237210.pdf

I'm trying to work out what the joke should be for the punch-line to be a "Noble piece prize". In the meantime, I'm giggling at that video.

There are two glaring absurdities about this "Have you never heard of pyramidology? It is the science of pyramids. Take a sharp razor blade and put it under a cardboard pyramid. It left undisturbed, it won't go blunt in 400 years." the first is that nobody will have spent 400 years watching a razor blade. The second is that you don't seem to have noticed that razor blades do not spontaneously become blunt. They get blunted by use. It's probably true that if you put one in a cardboard pyramid it would stay sharp for 4000000 years as long as nothing happened to it. It would also be true if you put it in a cardboard model of Maggie Thatcher. Now, when I was at school there was a different, and more interesting claim made about pyramids and razor blades. The claim was that if you put the used blade in a pyramid it would spontaneously resharpen itself. Now that would be worth knowing about. So a mate of mine tried it. It didn't work (of course). I saw that razor blade not get sharp. Has anyone here actually seem any real evidence of "pyramid power"? If not then the evidence is one nil to the "it's balderdash" team.

1 It's called chemistry. I would explain it, but you don't want to be rushed. 2 No, of course not, but the date of the discovery has absolutely nothing to do with what it contains does it? 3 Well, OK, but please don't waste any more time on this mystical nonsense until you have learned some. For the benefit of anyone who doesn't mind being rushed a bit. The elements found are phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen carbon and hydrogen It's easy enough to show there's nothing else. You weigh out some DNA. You burn it in a stream of pure oxygen. You pass the products of combustion through a solution of hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide. The sulphur is converted to sodium sulphate. Then you add barium chloride and dilute hydrochloric acid. The sulphur is converted to barium sulphate. You filter that off and weigh it. Then yo do the same thing with a known mass of sulphur. Form the ratio of the masses of barium sulphate produced, you can calculate the ratio of the amounts of sulphur. You know how much there was in the second experiment and so you can calculate how much there was in the first one (with the DNA). So you can work out the percentage in DNA. Of course, it's zero but I'm illustrating the general idea here You do something similar using a solution of barium hydroxide which forms barium carbonate. And, by weighing that, you can find how much carbon there was. You can do similar things with hydrogen (weighed as water absorbed onto phosphorous pentoxide) The nitrogen is measured by Dumas' method(Which you can look up here) Finally you measure the oxygen- that's the trickiest one. Hydrogenation to give water is one way to do it- isotopic dilution is another. Anyway. When you have finished you know how much P ,S, H, O, and N are present in a known mass of DNA. When you add them up they weigh the same as the DNA did. So there's no room for anything else. So we know there's nothing else. It's a pity Myuncle doesn't want to learn that sort of thing.

That particular logical fallacy is called begging the question. And I'd like to see some real evidence about the "pyramid power" thing, but I have yet to hear any.

Unless you do the trial " double blind" there's really no way to get any information about whether this is a placebo effect or not. Seriously, how do you think people would have missed this? Remember that the effect of viagra was discovered by accident- they were looking for an effect on the blood vessels of the heart.

I suspect that both sides of the debate exaggerate their cases. In an attempt to bring some levity to the discussion http://xkcd.com/690/

Not enough lasers. (There are never enough lasers!) Come to think of it, since decapitation seems a reasonable mark of success, why not a cutting blade at about 5'6''?

If it's simpler than a V2 then nobody knows where it will land. What sort of nuclear reactor is not a great target? One thing that would disrupt the chain reaction would be to drop a few tonnes of steel into it. You wouldn't be talking about "deformation" but vapourisation. The structures needed to maintain criticality would be lost. And, odd as it may seem, this sort of thing has been thought about. Nobody discusses the countermeasures.

You may think it's racist to point this out but Pakistan, Iran and a few other countries are run by largely religious governments and yet they are seeking to build ( or continue to build) nuclear weapons. The colour of their skin or the nature of their faith doesn't alter the fact. I didn't mention France, England, America , Russia or whatever because you might try to say that those are secular governments. Good luck finding an atheist queen, prime minister or president though. There is no meaningful "chemistry" in a hydrogen bomb. There seem to me to be two sorts of discussion on dimensional analysis on this sort of site. There are the ones where someone who understands it uses it to prove the falsehood of some weird claim. And there are ones where, when asked, the poster is unable to explain what they mean. So, what does this mean? "No valid support at all, both religion and science may be the same as dimensional analysis in where natural units disappears.""

I can't help thinking that someone would have noticed earlier.

The tennis season carries on round the year in different hemispheres. How did they hide a pregnancy? Did they send that off to some sort of boarding school? However the really interesting question is what did they do in the meantime? They claim to be 25. You say they are middle aged- that's typically taken as about 40. What did they do for 15 years? Anyway, to look properly at this you need to research the dates of birth and dates of first turning professional etc of the players and plot the two numbers. If there's a correlation then tell us about it. Incidentally, you might as well do the same with the men.

3 is still a better estimate for the true value than 2.7 because they are both lower boundaries. Both estimates are absurdly small, in my case this was deliberate.

We know what elements are and we know how to isolate them. In particular, we know that the periodic table includes the whole set. We also know exactly what elements are in DNA (phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen carbon and hydrogen if you are interested) It's like saying "what if there are lots of invisible cats in the world?" There are not, even if they were not visible, we would know they were there because we would hear them and keep tripping over them. I think you should do a lot more reading about chemistry.

Classically, it would never reach absolute zero. The colder it got the more slowly it would cool.

It is difficult to be certain but I think this question is more related to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_mass than with one possible effect of a shortage of sildenafil. In that case Studiot seems to have hit the nail on the head.

That particular variation is only expected for one type of radioactivity- electron capture. For other types the rate wouldn't be affected, even down to absolute zero (though getting it hot enough would influence the rate). Fundamentally, since the earth is warm, it is a source of heat and the original question is poorly defined.

I rather doubt anyone is still reading this thread in search of information on anything to do with the title. If the best resolution of a deliberate change of someone's text- while claiming that it's the original- is an explanation, then I'm still waiting, even for that. We ban spammers immediately even though they are just a nuisance. I'm puzzled why we let people make deliberately misleading statements when that it the very antithesis of science. There seem to be two issues of contention. Ewmon's assertion "Humans can read and talk, which has helped us to evolve, but we don't read and talk constantly and indiscriminately. " If the point was about the word reading in it's most general meaning then, since all animals and many plants do it, there's nothing special about humans. If we mean the common use of the word- letters on paper etc. then it can't have influenced much of human evolutions, simply because most humans never learned to read. To the extent that it did have an influence, that must be small because, since humans (in the sense of modern humans who have the brains needed to read) first walked the earth we really haven't evolved much: not least because we haven't had much time. Of course, if you take the word "read" in a very general sense which Ewmon has subsequently done, then the assertion is untrue. We do "read" our environment constantly and indiscriminately. The same goes for "talk" if you interpret it as meaning to impart information. The second issue was that he changed what I said from "All I have to do is trace our origins back to a point where they didn't have the ability to read." to "All I have to do is trace our [human] origins back to a point where they didn't have the ability to read." Well, the second one simply isn't what I said: it's impossible and because of that, it's insulting to pretend that I would say it. And I don't see it so much as trying to "win": just trying to ensure that the information on this site is accurate.

Weird. I wonder what he thinks of First consider the Earth-centered model of the solar system, which Ptolemy suggested, as an example,

Any answer to that has to be speculative but how about this one? For the same reason that cathedrals don't look like cheap office blocks.

Zapatos is right, even Southpark did a better job than that song.

If there are two mechanisms to calculate a lower boundary for something and they give different answers then the higher one is a more accurate estimate of that boundary. While there are many examples where evolution screws up a bit, the fact that our DNA has the equivalent of rather more than 3 bits suggests that we are worth more than 2.8 bits.

Can you stop wittering on about different types of reading? While I think most people would have interpreted your comment as referring to words on paper, my point still stands. For whatever definition of reading you choose, human evolution predates it because humans evolved a long while back and their ancestors ever further back. Humans can indeed read. Their distant ancestors couldn't. And so, the humans evolved from ancestors that couldn't read. Human evolution was from creatures that couldn't read Human evolution did not depend on reading.