John Cuthber

I think that calling the centre of a star "low temperature" is unrealistic. Certainly some tunnelling takes place in starts, and in theory two of the protons in my nose might fuse, but the rate of the reaction is, for all practical purposes, zero.

That looks like a plausible value for the solubility. Why do you ask?

The problems was not that he "stepped out of line": the problem was that he was a liar and a fraud.

You are mistaken. Energy is energy. Since the body oxidises glucose etc to obtain energy the available energy is that same as if you burn it.

1 in 36 South Korean babies are now deemed to have some form of autism. The drugs used to treat autism, atypical anti-psychotics, are frank neurotoxins if the autism does not create a Patient For Life the drugs probably will 54% of US children have chronic illness. http://xkcd.com/285/ We have a speculations forum for this sort of stuff.

This is as good a place to start as any http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoult's_law In general the assumption of linearity is probably more accurate at low concentrations. Unfortunately the data you want has a lot of variables and I doubt that it is logged anywhere. You will probably need to determine this experimentally.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heusler_alloy

Good point about the possible difference in death rates, but I did mention that birth rates are not exactly 50:50 and that this sort of thing only really works in maths problems.

(Ignoring the idea that it's politically impossible at the moment because not many people would vote for it.) That seems fair enough. We can tax the church and the non profit organisations. I suggest that we tax their profits at the same rate as ordinary companies are taxed. Of course, since the non profit organisations don't make a profit... Incidentally, there has to be an opportunity for a "non-prophet organisation" joke here somewhere.

I have not read it, though I had bits of it read at me at school. Now, will someone please explain, if I were to read it (starting from the beginning) which bits should I actually believe? Has the whole of the first testament been overturned, or was it just bits of it. Have those overturnings been overruled again? What would be the point of me reading it since no two people seem to agree of which bits of it are still the word of God (which leads the the question of did He get it wrong in the first place?) and which bits are now outdated. However, it's fair to say that some bits of it- not least those cited above - indicate that it's not a sensible guide to how to lead your life anyway, so why would I bother to read it?.

OK, since that's one of the ten commandments I guess the others are also nullified. What about the creation myth and the story of the flood? Is it all tosh, or just the bit about adultery?

Find the caps lock key.

It's not possible to calculate it, but it has been measured. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body#Elemental_composition and the individual elements will add to exactly 100%. You are made from chemicals and nothing else. The important bit is the way in which those elements are arranged. The relative amounts are pretty much the same for all mammals.

Takes one to know one.

So, if I look at a book written in the wrong language, using the wrong alphabet, I can find links to a date in the wrong calendar which refers to an event that 95% of the world's population don't really care about. That is about as good a proof of the existence of God as I have ever seen. Incidentally, if a =1 b=2 and so on Numerology= you mongrel=gloomy rune or a host of other things. http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=numerology&t=1000&a=n

I preferred the version I heard at school "1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” followed by a thud and a squeal, then "For F*ck's sake mother!" Interestingly, they brought the woman, but not the man. "Its probable that Jesus came to save the world from a catastrophe which could have been caused due to changes in the numinous world and not so much to die for our sins so that we can keep committing sins again and again thinking that God will forgive us. " It's probable is it? What value of probability do you ascribe to that idea and on what basis?

In your world the researchers thought having the streets "running with piss" was harmless: the peer review, and their subjects agreed. That's a very odd viewpoint. Even if you missed that, how come you missed it on the other 3 occasions? And, in general terms, "Republican" is used (at least in the sort of discussion in this thread) to mean right wing. That includes "moderate right wing on our spectrum " "But life is just so much easier if you can place people in little boxes and be derisive, isn't it?" Other boxes include "progressives" " your pisspot friends".

Re "1. Bull. You made the comment about advocating violence in direct response to my comment where I was talking about the Catholic and C of E mainstream. If others understood that you were referring to looney Baptists then I can only gaze in wonder at their psychic abilities." What I actually said was "John, either these gay haters are a tiny minority, in which case we can go ahead and let gay couples marry, or they are not, in which case they are a much bigger problem than this and you shouldn't say they are unrepresentative." Now, do you think I would call the catholic and C of E a tiny minority? No, of course not. So it was perfectly clear that when I referred to them as gay haters, I was referring to (gosh) the people who clearly hate gays. No psychic ability needed, just a bit of common sense. "2. My nation ignores them too. Which makes them a diversion and not really germane to the topic of what to do in your nation and mine." The topic was started by a Texan. What your country or mine do is a bit tangential to the topic, on the other hand the antics of the loony baptists are quite germane. "3. So what? We're having more trouble by morons trained by Al Gore than we are from evangelicals." Lucky us, but so what? Just because group A and group B are both wrong doesn't mean that you shouldn't question group A because group B are also wrong. Also, I believe that the same sort of sloppy thinking and abdication of decision making is involved in both politics and religion. So getting rid of one would help to address the issue of the other. "4. A sound argument indeed. Would you care to enlighten this poor simpleton as to why? Since as I pointed out the current campaign of 10 years or so has just been working out so well." Because it hands power to an undeserving, unelected and (I suspect) unrepresentative group. " 5 Riiiiiiight. Is this because discrimination is okay if you agree wiith it and is bad if you don't like it? Or what?" No it's because it's not a bad thing to question discrimination so that you can decide between discrimination against murder of discriminating against sexuality. In some instances "It's discrimination" is a valid argument and not "pointless" "6. You do know that the Empire is dead, don't you? We have a much better thing now called the "Commonwealth". It let the white man put down his burden quite some time ago. We don't have to tell other cultures how to live anymore." What has the "white man" got to do with it? Right and wrong transcend nationality, colour and religion. If some religious group doesn't agree then they are quite simply wrong.

1others manage OK 2 my nation pretty much does ignore them, but that doesn't stop them being wrong. 3 evangelism is one of the bigger groups of US Christians. 4 what you have put forward is a way to lose the battle. 5 simply, no 6 many of those practices are religious and is a reason why power should be taken away from religion

Note to John. "This is perhaps the centre of our disagreement, we are reading it two different ways and the wording is ambiguous on this. " It wasn't ambiguous as you claim. It was perfectly clear that , if the researchers were saying it was harmless then they were not talking about everyone, all the time. If there was any doubt then iNow's comment "Okay, I think we all largely agree that it's better to use intended facilities when urinating." should have clarified it. or when I said "you still don't understand that some things are OK from time to time, but not as a habit (like eating too much)." or when I said "Btw, if you can single handedly get the street "running with piss" then I think you should see a doctor." So the issue is not that you shouldn't even try to understand the causes of a disagreement: it's that you should start to realise early on that you are just plain wrong. How many attempts did it take us to get you to accept that the church has not, historically, had a monopoly on marriage?

I think that the answer is "Not from the point of view of any human, and who else actually has a point of view?"

Intelligence is always a good thing. Propensity to murder - just like almost else that shrinks the gene pool- is a bad thing. Incidentally re "Humans can read and talk, which has helped us to evolve," Nope, we evolved before we learned to read.

Close, actually it may be a bit worse than that. there's a fair chance that a lot of the silver will dissolve in the tin and form a single homogeneous blob. Joninrocies, how cold is your garage? I't not a rhetorical question. If it's cold then there's some chance that the tin will have converted to the other allotrope. That will make the stuff brittle and so it would be easy to powder. In any event, if it's really a mixture of the powdered metals, rather than an alloy then treating it with HCl will remove the tin and leave the silver behind. But I doubt that you will get it pure enough to sell at the market price of silver (or even half that). Powdered metals will dissolve a whole lot faster than pellets of course. Another (odd sounding) approach would be to add several times the bulk of zinc and melt the lot together. Then take the zinc/silver/tin alloy and dissolve that. Zinc dissolves readily anyway. The clever bit is that the silver and tin are left behind as very fine powders. The tin will dissolve and the silver will be left behind. Another simpler approach would be to heat the mixture in air and burn the tin off. However there's no way I can be sure if any of these would work. I'm afraid you will have to experiment. Let us know how you get on. Suxamethonium, Once the surface of the metal is covered by silver chloride the dissolution will practically cease. The solubility in conc HCL is a bit marginal. Heating silver chloride does not make it decompose (at least not up to stupid temperatures, it boils over 1500C) though heating with soda does. solutions of silver salts in ammonia are annoyingly explosive. Also the tin will form SnO2 with HNO3 and that too will stop the reaction

FFS OK, so I kill all the other blokes and then I'm the only one who can father children. So those children all have to commit incest So My genes are goosed by inbreeding. Evolution wipes out murderers quite quickly. While I'm at it. "What if everyone was homosexual? It would be the end of human procreation ... and I guess that puts an end to the what-if-everyone philosophy. " Then that population didn't evolve, so it can't exist so it's not relevant. What if the population has genes which in some combinations lead to homosexuality, but in other combinations lead to other traits such as helping to care for other people's children. Well, in good times the gene hardly influences population growth- there are plenty of straight couples. On the other hand, when times are hard, such "helpers" benefit the population enormously. That is an evolutionarily stable set up. I wonder if you can think where you might see it? Like I said, learn about evolution.

"Can you provide a quote from the Pope? Or a Cardinal? How about the ArchBishop of Canterbury? Not everybody who disagrees on gay marriage also advocates violence towards gays. That is simply bullshit." What? I was talking about the guys in the video clips not the pope. The bullshit seems to be coming from your direction. Discrimination is, of course, unavoidable. Most of us discriminate against murder. However, as has been pointed out, child abuse has a victim and is a crime. Gay marriage doesn't and isn't. Can you really not see the difference? Conflating the two is strawmanning.