John Cuthber

Yes.

Oops! Quit right. I can't type. I was aiming for the start of the palaeolithic so it's 2 zeros too many. 3 million years. Still a long time before there were any books to read while you waited for modern civilisation to turn up.

Accroding to Eric, "Nowdays if you see tennis one gets to see all middle aged tennis players like they first spent youth elsewhere, got married and even had children, and then came to play deliberately in international tennis." In the real world. (Evonne) is the only mother to have won the Wimbledon title since before World War I. from. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evonne_Goolagong

When people talk about the origin of life they don't mean 99.9% of the way through evolution. They mean the origin. And, to me, you seem to be back tracking furiously from your original assertion that "Humans can read and talk, which has helped us to evolve," As I pointed out before (unless you take a version of the word read that means that all living things can read- which makes it pointless) Estimates for the date vary, but humans evolved about 300 million years ago. They did that without the help of any books. and re. "Au contraire, mon frere. The chimp, who learned to prank the others with his leopard alarm call, has learned to "write" a leopard into the situation, knowing how others would "read" it" Come on, even you accepted that it's not the real use of the words and that's what the quote marks are for.

But, to decide if that individual is male or female: young or old and tall or short takes 3 bits, which is more than 2.78...

"Is it not science that created the atom bomb? Did it not displace thousands of "innocent lives?" Is it not the belief in god that can transform a drug abuser into a new person by pure faith alone? Would anyone that believes in god, create an atom bomb? Does math not give science a way to measure things? Does "strong nuclear forces" keep the entire universe together?" No, that was technology. No, that was politics No, not reliably, there are drug dependent theists. Yes, for example, Hitler was working on it. You might want to look to the Middle"east for other examples. Frankly, given the prevailing attitudes when the first bombs were created I think it's certain that at least some of those involved were religious. Not really, though it does help to model things. No it's too short range. Gravity holds the universe together (though there may be other factors. Science is looking into this. Theology just pretends that Goddidit is an answer.) One of the fundamental tensions between science and religion is that religion keeps disproving things that religion claims are true. I object to this "While on the religion side most scientist denote the existence of god never thinking twice that maybe the belief in god gives someone hope in where, " the leaders" of this world can't." Did it not occur to you that we may well have thought twice about it and come to the conclusion that, since it is a false hope, it is no real hope at all. Plenty of people find happiness in a whiskey bottle. That doesn't make drunkenness a good thing. So why is it a valid reason to support religion? "Take this away from the believer in god, they may end up an abuser "again", a hater "again" etc.. " If you think religion stops abuse then you should watch the news more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_sex_abuse_cases Similarly, if you think that hate isn't a feature of religion then you have not been paying attention. "Maybe science and or school was too difficult for the believer, so they chose an idolization such as god to have something to believe in." So poor educational success is a reason to applaud wooly thinking? What did you think you meant?

Define "recently" but "The three operators' doses were far above permissible limits at 3,000, 10,000, and 17,000 mSv; the two receiving the higher doses died several months later." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident

The Queen is head of state and head of the Anglican church- so it must be right.

Take your pick. Then show me an example of a bacterium reading. However when you talked about "Humans can read and talk, which has helped us to evolve," I think most people will have thought you meant words on paper etc. The fact remains that, since humans first emerged the only real evidence of evolution are a couple of odd traits like skin colour, and maintaining the ability to digest lactose into adulthood. Almost all of our evolution from blue green algae to the present day has had nothing to do with any ability to read that some of us may have had. Incidentally, since there has never been any question that people can read, what purpose did you think that picture served? Was the idea to distract attention from the fact that you lied about what I said earlier?

I'm puzzled that you see blatant lying as trivial.

Do you actually think that is plain English?

Yes, but what you are asking me to do is prove that there are no flat Earths anywhere in the universe or that there is no atom somewhere that is indivisible. Your idea may be true, but so may countless thousands of others. Why should I think yours is likely?

"So, what do you mean by "read"? Use an alphabet? Then the Chinese can't read. " Clearly bollocks*. The Chinese have had an alphabet for ages. (and this puts you close to a breach of rule 1 c) "Slurs or prejudice against any group of people (or person) are prohibited." "You keep saying: "All I have to do is trace our origins back to a point where they didn't have the ability to read." So now, do it. " OK, lets, for an example start with the point where we split from lemurs. Show me a literate lemur. A literate dog? A literate reptile? and so on. "So now, please fill in the blank: You and I are ______. " OK, the blank should read " different from what our distant ancestors were because we have evolved, but we did most of that evolution without benefit of reading (by most sensible definitions)." When you reported yourself did you mention that your post reached rules 3 and 4? misrepresentation is, in most jurisdictions, unlawful. You plainly misrepresented what I said. Also your post could be viewed as an extreme case of straw manning. Which, as a logical fallacy, is banned. *It's my habit to use the word "Bollocks" to describe the sort of nonsense that's built on a tightly held belief that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The word literally means "priests" and its use has been tested in law and found not to be obscene.

The bible certainly makes testable predictions, for example Mark 11:12-14 " The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it." Now there are two possible interpretations Either Jesus was a moody git and was just cursing that single tree (which in the grand scheme of things is a bit pointless and hardly worth noting down for posterity) or it was a curse on all fig trees- in which case it's plainly wrong.

Ewmon, I'm not being facetious. OK, so chimps can read, but their distant ancestors couldn't. Now look at what I said. "All I have to do is trace our origins back to a point where they didn't have the ability to read." and at what you said that I said. "All I have to do is trace our [human] origins back to a point where they didn't have the ability to read." Do you see what you did there? You put a word in to change the meaning and make it wrong. Our distant ancestors (and up until very recently most of our ancestors) couldn't read (unless you choose to redefine the word "read") So reading may have affected our evolution since we became human (particularly in the last few hundred years) but it didn't help humans evolve. It's like saying that cars helped apes evolve into humans. I think it's fair to say that you have not just lost the argument, but you have admitted it. In order to make it look as if I'm mistaken you deliberately change what I say and post it as a quote. I think that should be a banning offence, it certainly shows that you have no integrity. I'd sooner continue this discussion with Kanzi: he probably wouldn't resort to the sort of thing you did.

"If you currently have any scientific knowledge they could deny to any of the above proposals, I also will appreciate your communicate. " OK, here's a bit of scientific knowledge. Outside of mathematics it's not generally possibly to prove that something doesn't exist. So, now you know that this " I would like to know if anybody has proved that it cannot be true" doesn't make sense.

If you feel that you were insulted in this thread then the correct course of action would have been to report that insult. Just for the record, what insults have been levelled at you? (quotes would be good here).

I wouldn't ordinarily bother to ground a 24 volt supply. On the other hand I wouldn't use that high a voltage for electrolysis. It's horribly inefficient.

Just a thought from a member of the other 95% of the world's population. You guys really thought that providing for the poor might be unconstitutional? Weird!

The area is r squared, but I haven't specified the units.

"To not believe in the ancient astronaut fact is to not believe in reason, logic and scientific fact. On the contrary. To believe in this idea or anything else without any real evidence is not to believe in reason, logic or science. There is no evidence for the "ancient astronaut" "Like I said before, anyone that doesnt believe in gods and magic believes in this" Nope, I don't believe in any of those 3. "they just may not know it yet. Its simply a mental block thats been socially developed since we could understand our language." Ignoring the absurdity of your suggestion that you know what I believe better than I do, you have overlooked the fact that there are many languages. Some of the best known examples of the bollocks you are discussing were written by the convicted fraudster Erich Von Daniken. They were not originally written in English. So, if it were a problem with our language (English in my case) it wouldn't happen in his language (German). "When in reality a person that says theres nothing else out there and we've never been visited is either insane, arrogant, or brainwashed by some religeon. " Odd as it may seem, nobody actually said those (or, at least if they did it's not relevant). There may well be other intelligent creatures out there. They may have visited (though the odds are poor simply because of the distances involved). What people are saying is that aliens didn't build the pyramids etc. And they are saying that for two simple reasons. Firstly, there is no reason to speculate that anyone other than people made the pyramids. It would have taken a lot of hard work and skilled craftsmen but that's all that would be needed- no magical intervention from spacemen. Secondly, if they were built by aliens, how come the first ones were a bit crappy? Are you saying that the aliens came here and told us to build big piles of rock but, in spite of having technology that would let them cross galaxies, they couldn't figure out how to make a heap of rocks and get it right first time? Perhaps someone should calculate There is more's crackpot index. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

The American right wing: Pushing back the boundaries of completely bat-shit crazy since 1862

Given that I'm 47 and single I don't think I need to worry too much about any descendents. "I have defined mass as the conserved comparative resistance of non-uniform (and uniform) atoms in response to and as a consequence of a uniform attraction on all atoms" So, electrons don't have mass the? If this "The relative atomic weight of an atom expressed in grams as weight [mg] using the periodic chart represents one mole of that element." is the "plain English" version, can I try the ornate English version instead please? "That number represents the number of atoms in a gram atom, or the gram atomic number of an element." Nope, its a gram atomic weight. Here is a plainer English explanation of Avagadro's number. Sometimes we find it easier to work with groups of items rather than individual ones. For example we commonly buy eggs in dozens. The same thing happens with atoms but, because they are very small, we use a very large number. We could choose any big enough number , but the one we use is called Avagadro's number. It's usually written as 6.0221415 x 10^23 That's about 6 followed by 23 zeros. The reason we chose that number is that it's how many hydrogen atoms there are in a gram of hydrogen.

So what? We evolved before we could read so reading didn't help us evolve. Moving the goalpost by redefining "reading" won't help here. All I have to do is trace our origins back to a point where they didn't have the ability to read. I look forward to your post about great works of literature from blue/green algae. Also, you missed the point re "No one has given proof that humans have stopped evolving; therefore, we continue to evolve. " Nobody has said otherwise. Nobody suggested that humans have stopped evolving. In fact what I said was "That we still evolve isn't the issue." which implies that they are still evolving.

You can do better than that. We evolved into humans before we learned to read. That we still evolve isn't the issue. What you said was "Humans can read and talk, which has helped us to evolve," Nope, just plain wrong. For most of human history and all our precursors, we couldn't read. So no, there's no way it helped us evolve. BTW, re the tadpoles "Some spadefoot toad tadpoles become cannibals while the rest eat the normal algae." At best, you have shown that, like some humans, some tadpoles are killers.