John Cuthber

"They count ... "Excess drinking" as a disorder," Good. http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2010/en#/F10.2

" It cant help but sound like science fiction." Possibly to you, but not to everyone. The wiki page actually cites evidence- such as the picture of a modern child with hydrocephalus. It's not just "opinion" is it? Then you can look at the possible other explanations of Mt Pye's assertions.

"Now behold, I have two daughters who have not had relations with man; please let me bring them out to you, and do to them whatever you like; only do nothing to these men, inasmuch as they have come under the shelter of my roof.” Genesis 19:8

Did you hear about the homoeopath who forgot to take their "remedy" and died from an overdose?

Fraud sells well. It's also cheap. What you have are some pills that misrepresent themselves as being part of a fraudulent system.

Homoeopathic is one synonym of fraud, but it's not the only one. It relates to a particular idea, which is that the more you dilute something the better it gets. http://xkcd.com/765/ Actually , it's slightly stupider than that. You don't just mix the ingredients. Its' really important to bang them on a lump of rubber (I'm not making this up. "Homeopathic remedies are prepared by serial dilution in alcohol or distilled water, followed by forceful striking on an elastic body, called "succussion". Each dilution followed by succussion is assumed to increase the remedy's potency. Homeopaths call this process "potentization". Dilution usually continues well past the point where none of the original substance remains." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy ) So calling "Nat Mur" homoeopathic is only "legitimate" if it has been "properly processed" Nat Mur is a pseudo Latin version of muriate of natrium or chloride of sodium i.e. salt. If you have to dress up your claim in that sort of tosh... Other varieties of cobblers also exist. At one level, holistic medicine is legitimate. People react to all their circumstances and so their health can be affected by lots of things. You really can reduce the duration of someone's sore throat by making their work more interesting. Adding a non-existent amount of extract of bee sting to their diet isn't, however, one of those things.

A couple of points. In classical biology, if and only if these aliens could interbreed with humans then they are classed as humans. Also people look at eyes a lot. Someone with odd pupils would stand out very quickly.

At the risk of complicating the subject: "More than 70% of the prison population has two or more mental health disorders. (Social Exclusion Unit, 2004, quoting Psychiatric Morbidity Among Prisoners In England And Wales, 1998)" from http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/help-information/mental-health-statistics/prisons/ "According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 56 percent of state prisoners and 45 percent of federal prisoners have symptoms or a recent history of mental health problems." from http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/09/22/mental-illness-human-rights-and-us-prisons#_Mental_Health_and Incidentally, I suspect that the difference between the 2 percentages may relate as much to the relative sizes of the prison populations (730 per 1000,000 (USA) vs 156 per 100,000 (UK)) as it does to intrinsic or diagnostic factors. Do these folk actually have a debt to pay?

Given the choice between thinking that those people are honestly making that statement about babies or that they are making it as a publicity stunt, I know which my guess is.

You don't? Which part of "like charges repel" is giving you trouble? And, while I accept that a calculation wouldn't be very precise. it would show that the molecule simply wouldn't exist. (I can state this with no fear of being proven experimentally wrong)

You will seldom get anyone (right or left leaning), to accept the stance of these two Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva which is that it's acceptable to kill newborn babies. Surely you could have found a more balanced site than "LifeNews.com is an independent news agency devoted to reporting news that affects the pro-life community." So why did you cite them? Essentially, all you have done is say "there are two loonies who claim to be left wing" and here's a biased report that says so. It's not evidence that the difference between right and wrong is unclear or a matter of opinion. In particular, it doesn't refute my assertion about how you can tell the two sides apart. On the other hand, I agree with you about "It is hard to understand some of the quirks of the American psyche from the outside. We don't have the very strong evangelical movement that you do and the bizarre claims of some of the televangelists over the years have left us scratching our heads and thinking "Someone believed that BS?". " Americans do seem to have their own particular brand of stupidity.

OK, why would a positively charged H3O+ ion stick to a positively charged H+ ion that is repelled by the laws of electrostatics? H4O++ isn't going to exist because it would fall apart to H3O+ and H+ If you got bored you could work out roughly how much energy would be released by the decomposition of the hypothetical molecule and then work out the equilibrium constant for the reaction.

It could in principle, but in practice it will come from the body heat of the animal. So, what you gain one way, you lose the other. That's the thing about the conservation of energy. In order to warm up, the animal had to burn some calories- exactly equal to the number of calories you are talking about with the work done by the expanding gas.

"I think that is very poor not to accept a theory because "Sitchin's ideas were rejected by scientists and academics".... I espect more of you and that you may have your own criteria" What do you think we pay scientists and academics for then? I have not seen anything about the pyramids that requires anything more than human bloody mindedness to achieve. And I worry about anyone who uses a 40 ton crane (whether that's its mass or its capacity) to move a 2 ton tree.

It is indeed absurd. You talk about things that burn but without getting hot, then you misunderstand relativity. If you compress the gas it does gain mass. Anyway, to get to your point re "The reason I asked the question was that the 'retardation of aging and disease by dietary restriction' is now officially said to be a matter of *calories*. I want to know if this is just loose talk or whether they mean it literally. " Since food's energy is measured in calories less food means fewer calories. What's the difference?

I already understand a lot of things, but the purpose of that post isn't one of them. The English-language version of WIKI tells you more about him http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin#Astronomical_and_scientific_observations It says things like "Sitchin's ideas were rejected by scientists and academics, who dismiss his work as pseudoscience and pseudohistory. Sitchin's work has been criticized for flawed methodology and mistranslations of ancient texts as well as for incorrect astronomical and scientific claims"

By 2013 London should have sorted out all the things it planned to do for the Olympics.

Looks like you were right

It seems they won't even accept one fact: there are inscriptions on gravestones that were cut in with chisels many years ago.

When you say "When the government wants oil companies to do things that make no business sense government coerces them into doing those things by creating taxes with built in tax breaks for those that play along." do you mean, if the government wants them to do stuff, it pays them a subsidy to do so? Anyway, I still can't see where iNow has said anything like what you say he has. Could you fins a quote?

I believe the right sort of unicorns can only be caught in a trap baited with the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. This won't stop people trying other methods.

Go to the local churchyard and you will see grave stones cut to very high precision and with names etc cut into them. Then look at the dates. Plenty of them predate lasers and such. You simply don't understand what people can do using their skill.

I know, it amazes people that the power output is so low. It's also just as well for us that it is so slow, or the sun would have burned out before we had time to evolve. However, when people talk about "low temperature fusion" they mean something other than what happens in stars.

I'm sure we both look forward to the day when the US joins the rest of the civilised world and stops killing its own citizens in the name of "justice". Anyway the answer to the question of showing if it's right or wrong is simple and I have mentioned it before. What would happen if everyone did that?

OK, for a start, while I could try to imagine something where " Imagine there is negligible energy difference between the initial bonds and the final bonds after burning." it wouldn't burn. Also, I have news for you. The stored energy in a compressed gas bottle is measured in calories. (Though these days, Joules are nor popular as a unit of energy.) If you multiply the pressure of the gas (in Newtons per square metre) by the volume of the cylinder (in cubic metres) you get the stored energy in Joules. Divide by 4.184 and you get the energy in calories.