John Cuthber

Since it's a bloody stupid idea from a scientific point of view, there's no need to discuss the human rights issues. It's not that, in themselves, those issues are unimportant, it's just that they are a secondary consideration. Obviously it's morally abhorrent, but that's not a logically supportable position. The loss of biodiversity is.

Actually, it wouldn't be running at anything like optimal conditions all the time. As you specify it, it generates (and wastes) large amounts of hydrogen. That makes it dead in the water as far a efficiency is concerned. You seem to have missed the point. An oxy acetylene torch with the oxygen turned off burns very badly, but if you fed compressed air in through the oxygen inlet it would work just fine (albeit not as well as it does with oxygen. Using oxygen isn't magic.

There are a couple of points that need looking at. The first is the idea that a gas torch produces a lot more power when it's fed with oxygen. It doesn't. An acetylene torch without the O2 is dreadfully inefficient. But most of that problem is due to the fact that not enough air gets to the flame to allow all the fuel to burn- hence lots of soot. A propane torch, designed to run with air, is a lot more efficient than an oxy acetylene torch without the oxygen. (even a candle is probably more efficient). So it's not the fact that you use oxygen that makes a lot of difference: it's how the torch is designed to mix the gases to let them react well. On the other hand, and oxy propane torch will burn hotter than an air propane torch- because it doesn't waste energy heating up nitrogen (which is pretty much just along for the ride). In a similar way, a car running with oxygen rather than air could run hotter and more efficiently. The problem would be providing enough oxygen. Electrolysis is a non-starter. It takes a lot of electrical energy to split water. However there are things like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_separation which let you get fairly clean oxygen from air. It might just be possible to design a system that uses this idea and is more efficient than a normal engine. But I'm not betting on it.

Perhaps a better question is, "If the government tells you that there's a hurricane coming should you get out of the way or should you pray? Countless examples have shown that prayer doesn't shift or stop hurricanes. It seems that trust in God has less direct benefit in this case than trust in the government. That's a pretty strong condemnation of God.

The "walking on water" trick is even easier. A strong sheet of glass just below the water surface.

Well, I guess that's a step forward. It's a real experiment (whatever it may show- the experiment is a lot better than just words). Can I ask a few questions? They may need you to do some further experiments, but those shouldn't be too difficult. Firstly please repeat the experiment, but without the magnet. I know that may seem odd, but if you get the same answer then we know that it's not the effect you think it is. The second question is more complex: what anti aliasing are you using? If you need an explanation of that term look here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing but this should give you the idea. Imagine that you take pictures of the second hand of a watch but you take them every 59 seconds. If you look at the pictures then they seem to show the second hand moving backwards by a sixtieth of a revolution each 59 seconds. If you convert that to a frequency the rotational frequency will seem to be 1/ 3540 revolutions per second but we know that the real rotation is 1/60 per second. Now imagine that the gauss meter samples the magnetic field at some (unspecified) frequency and in addition to the field from the magnet, it samples the stray magnetic field from mains powered electrical equipment. You can get the same sort of artefact frequencies as the pictures of a watch if the sample frequency is near an integer multiple of the mains frequency (and my guess is that it will be).

In a way, you did. You told us that the universe would have needed some sort of support while it was built. And yet, because of the way the universe works (at least locally and as far as we can tell, throughout the whole thing) we know that the universe wouldn't need a scaffold. You plainly have at least one very strange idea about how the universe works. I think you should find out a lot more before you try and argue on a science website. Not only do you need to learn the science, you need to learn how to construct a debate. Making sweeping statements like "The Concourse of Atoms Could Not Make the World." is absurd unless you back it up with evidence (and I remind you that old books are not really evidence). The simple answer to "The Concourse of Atoms Could Not Make the World." is that they could, and they did. There's an entire universe of evidence; and you are trying to use a couple of old books to disprove it. Are you trolling or do you just have a very poor understanding of logic?

OK, so just talking about the DNA was oversimplification but whatever the egg is wrapped around is a thing that is destined to become a chicken. It can not, for example, become a crocodile or a duck. I think it's a chicken. You choose to call it something else. As I said, it depends on the nomenclature.

It seems to be a matter of nomenclature. I think it's a chicken once it has chicken DNA (even if it's very young).

There are two possible meanings to "the chicken's egg" one it laid (or would potentially lay) or the one it hatched from In either case, the chicken was there first. Ihe phrase "the chicken's egg" means the belonging to the chicken. If the chicken isn't there yet the egg can't belong to it.

Sounds more like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie to me.

The banks claim that they are so clever that they don't need regulating- they can do it themselves. Yet they screwed the whole world's economy. It's ironic to compare them to Einstein precisely because he was actually clever whereas the banks just claim to be clever. The fact that it's an entirely different field (finance vs. physics) isn't the point.

1 Not at first. It was a chicken embryo before its cells differentiated and became it's ovaries. And, of course, there's a 50% chance it was male anyway. 2 No, not entirely. The DNA that defines "chicken" will have come from both parents. Incidentally, I didn't ask about the chicken's egg, because that would be begging the question. The possessive form presupposes that there is a possessor.

That's the point. Is it really true that Americans don't understand irony?

The reason I lump all the religions together is that there only seems to be one universe. It can have had no more than one creator. Whatever name and other features you ascribe to the hypothetical creator doesn't really matter since there's no evidence He exists anyway.

I think you are right, but you have missed something. Whatever criteria we choose for being a chicken , rather than a "pre- chicken" there was, indeed a "first ever chicken". However, that chicken embryo existed before its mother built a shell round it. The chicken came first.

I think that being a space explorer gives the highest doses.

If the question refers to eggs in general then they certainly pre-date chickens. But that makes the problem trivial (and hence no fun at all). If the question is thought of as which came first, the chicken or the chicken's egg? Then it's more interesting. (I think the answer is the chicken, but I will leave you all to speculate about it)

Sodium metabisulphite ( available from home brewing shops or the web) will convert Cr(VI) to Cr(III).

My mother died shortly before Easter. Prior to her death she had, of course, a real existence (towards the end of her life she didn't do a lot- but she did exist.) She died on a Friday: the best estimate I can come up with is about 08:30. I found out an hour or so later, from my brother. Form my personal point of view, something like 50 miles from where she died, she was only imaginary anyway. I couldn't ask her a question or see what she looked like. She actually became imaginary the last time I left her. That would have been some time previously- probably at the railway station- some time (Months) before she died. It's hard to see this as having any effect on the discussion. "At what point, if any, did you remove her from the "real" category, and put her in the "nonexistent" category. " When I found out that she no longer existed. That is, when my brother called me and told me so. "Does that moment coincide with the actual moment of her death? " Nope, it took a while, but that is par for the course of scientific observation. At best there's a delay due to the finite speed of light. "Was there any length of time, that passed, where she was "alive" in your memory and model of the world, where she was actually not alive in reality?" yes but ditto. "Would this knowledge of her, as a living Grandmother, that you had for that brief time, be considered by you, to be fact or fiction? " No, neither, it would have been a mistake. I thought she was alive. In reality she was dead. Ignoring how I would (for example) have actually reacted to someone asking if I should refer to my mother in the past or present tense, and ignoring the fact that I knew she was gravely unwell, I would probably have said " I don't know". That's often the scientifically correct answer to difficult questions.(* I will come back to this) " Take a simple thing like the statement "let's meet at Joe's at seven". When does the fiction become fact? As soon as it is said? As soon as it is heard? As soon as it is agreed upon? As soon as you are on your way to Joe's? When you and the other(s) are actually at Joe's?" Which fact do you mean? The existence of an intention, the existence of a plan, the existence of (at least ) one party at Joe's or the existence of the meeting? I think it's easy enough to answer the question, as long as you say what the question means. * It's often the case that the sensible, scientific, honest, answer is " We don't know". Religion often asserts that it knows the answer, yet, on examination, that answer is found to be unsupported.

Did anyone else not understand my comment on Thomas's post (#17)?

OK, what was the solvent? I ask because CuCl is not soluble in water. Also, is there some reason why you are struggling to tell the green stuff from the white stuff? This looks a lot like a homework question "dressed up".

And I'm going to repeat my original question, but in a slightly different form. Say I have a processor chip in my PC dissipating 50W (which isn't a lot according to this) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation Now I want to cool it with a peltier unit. If the efficiency is really only 5% then I need to use 20 times more power to cool it than it dissipates. So I would need a kilowatt of peltier power to keep the processor cool. But that peltier unit is driven from the PC's power supply unit. That power supply isn't rated for anything like 1KW. So the 5% figure is impossible. As I asked before who would use them?

I think the first thing you need to learn is some basic economics. Typical bolt is 500 MJ That's about 140KW Hr i.e. about 0.14 MW Hr Which you could sell for £56/Mw hr (http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/energy-latest-news/uk-peak-electricity-prices-reach-17-month-high-152903995.html) So it's about £8 worth of electricity. There are estimated to be about 45 strikes per second worldwide. But it's practically impossible to "harvest" them all. The simple way is to use some big tower. The empire state building is struck something like 25 times a year. So, for something the size (and cost) of that building, you can harvest about £200 worth of electricity. Never mind any technical challenges: this just doesn't fly.

The large text in those cases indicates that the content is noteworthy. That excuse does not apply in the case of your postings.