John Cuthber

Also, helium (liquid or gas) is an excellent conductor of heat.

I can't access it either, but I can read the last bit where it says they couldn't observe any IR absorption at all. Helium really shouldn't have any IR activity (nor visible nor microwave nor UV up to fairly high energy)

And, in doing so you ignored the fact that missing the word discussed out was rather more likely to be a slip of the pen (so to speak) than a change in policy. The irony being that you chose not to answer the question, nor to discuss the topic. It's also just plain wrong to say " He only wants confirmation of his own convictions." in response to an offer to "Agree? Disagree?" Did you only read the first half or something? Meanwhile, back somewhere near the topic. It's difficult to come to an absolute conclusion about this because of a number of factors. By far the biggest is that the term "broken" isn't defined, so here's my take on it. Firstly, we are all "broken". We all do things that have no real logical basis. We cannot generally explain why we prefer one piece of music over another- and yet we do generally have preferences. We follow hunches. Granted that we usually stop doing so if the evidence against them is strong enough, but it usually takes something pretty convincing. We really don't like changing our outlook. Since we are all broken the question is not an ad hom. It's a (not as clear as it could be) assertion that "People who deny climate change are, in that regard, slightly more broken (i.e. illogical) than the rest of us". Which is hardly even controversial these days. Incidentally, there's another reason why this (and the related thread on religion) might not be an ad hom. It's not a slur to tell the truth. To claim that it is an insult, you first need to prove that it's false (otherwise it's protected as free speech). It would worry me if the mods were to close this down without being able to show the falsehood of the assertion. A different bunch of mods might not see is as a an ad hom, simply because they saw it as clearly true. Closing it down would be their imposition of their beliefs on the forum and I'm not sure that's their role. It is the job of the mods to ensure that the rules are followed to a reasonable degree- for example that people don't post insults. However I don't see it as their role to say what is factually wrong (and therefore an insult) where that decision very much debatable. Happy to discuss this, but not in this thread. If anyone feels strongly about it, I'm sure they will start a new thread ( hopefully not including the phrase "People who ... are broken").

And the reason for not just washing them in the bath/ shower is...?

Is "thought matter" well defined? If so is there any reason to suppose that any significant number of atheists who believe in it? "but it's still not "illogical" to believe in a god, since you can't prove it doesn't exist, " And it's not illogical to believe in a six foot invisible rabbit because you also can't prove that the rabbit doesn't exist. But, as has been pointed out before, most people would agree that anyone who did believe in it was, in some way, broken. Specifically, I think they would be classed as psychotic. I'm still waiting for someone to satisfactorily explain why it's thought mad to believe in one invisible thing, but not another. Why does religion get special exemptions from the normal rules of human behaviour?

So, rather than summing an infinite series to get pi , you sum an infinite series to get e then plug that into the infinite series to get the Bernoulli number, then you use that to calculate another infinite series to get tan(x). It seems a lot of trouble to go to.

Oh, btw, re. "0.999999....=1, but it doesn't actually ever get there. This means that the difference between two numbers cannot actually ever be zero, just infinitely small." Just plain wrong. 0.9 recurring is exactly 1 and the difference is zero: the proof is on the web if you want to look.

Zero centigrade is the temperature half way between +1 and -1. On a cold night the temperature will drop through zero, for an instant it will be zero. Zero exists.

What sort of bearings do they use in these? They put up with quite large forces while cutting and they run at a comparable speed to what you are looking at.

Sounds like this guy's brand of gibberish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken It has been debunked to the point of being comedy.

My word I have watched some trash in my time... Anyway, it's not clear to me if they are saying that calcium is bad for the skin (which I doubt) or that being crouchy is bad for it (which is vaguely plausible since stress is bad for just about everything).

Imatfaaal, could I trouble you to define the bit in your equation that says "Bernoulli" please?

I think you are right on each point. And his reply really hasn't helped. Esbo, The poles would get colder because the wind wouldn't carry heat to them. That's what convection currents do. They move heat from hot places to cold places. Please try to stop ignoring the rules of physics.

To be fair, Esbo has a point. Wind, here on earth, is largely driven by convection currents (in conjunction with Coriolis forces etc). Those convection currents are driven by the heat from the sun warming the equator more than the poles. The wind and the convection currents are the same thing. If you stopped the wind then the equator would get hotter and the poles would get colder. ( I will come back to that) One thing that keeps the ground warm is that radiation outwards from it is reduced by the presence of CO2 in the air. The large scale circulations move heat from ground level upwards. Once that warm air has risen there is more scope for heat to be lost by radiation because there is simply less air above it absorbing that radiation andtrapping it a la greenhouse. But, remember the bit about the equator getting hotter. How much hotter? Well, just hot enough to ensure that the incoming heat from the sun is radiated away. The pole get colder. How much? well, just as much as to compensate for the added losses from the hotter equator. Overall there's no change but the local effects could be a problem. However. There's no way that the effects of tapping a very small fraction of the energy of the wind will make a measurable difference. The effect is too small to worry about.

Why isn't this in the homework section? Perhaps more importantly, why have you posted it twice?

What idiot gave them free will, knowing that they would do that sort of thing? God can't abdicate responsibility that way any more than I can shoot someone then say "it wasn't me that killed him: it was the bullet".

If you are in the UK this may help http://www.ukdps.co.uk/ But be careful, you might think you are joking: they system doesn't.

Nor does anything else, yet plenty of things are shiny This is one of the easier of GX's requirements to meet. Cellulose does the job in principle- the yellowish colour is due to impurities.

Many things seem odd at first. Like God telling the Hebrews to kill the Philistines in the land of Palestine after they left Egypt. This seems cruel. But if you read about the Philistines, they worshiped Baal. And part of the worship of Baal required sacrificing babies. Isn't it rather a pity that God made the Philistines that way?

I think a pair of these would be a lot better than ball bearings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapered_roller_bearing but I don't know how much more expensive they would be

Wind doesn't cool or warm the earth as a whole. It only moves heat from one part to another. The mean temperature of the earth is going to depend on the heat transfer to and from the earth, not within the earth's boundary. Interfering with wind patterns may have local effects, but it can't have global ones. It robs Peter to pay Paul ( or robs your deposit account to pay your current account as has been pointed out.) The only thing that would make this thread sillier would be to tun it into a poll as if science were some sort of popularity contest or reality would change f enough people disagreed with it.

Are you saying that it's "creative and intellectually open" to look at that great variety of phenomena and, to all of them, say there's just 1 answer and the answer is "God did it"? If so you seem to be using a rather unorthodox definition.

I'm prepared to believe that, for example, you might be more likely to get hay fever if you are exposed to pollen at some particular age (or narrow age range) in childhood and also that if you get hay fever you are less likely to spend time running round on fields. So it's plausible that people born at one season of the year are less likely to become sport stars. The idea that the position of the stars, at the time of your birth, has any effect is untenable. For a start, there simply isn't a mechanism for it to be true. For an encore, we would have noticed. Swansont's comment is a valid point. Why wasn't the baby in the next crib to Hitler's also evil?

I don't know what it's "supposed " to be. I guess that depends on who is making suppositions. Another question is which bible do you mean? so I wouldn't overemphasise its importance to Christianity it if I were you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Biblical_canons

Cool, but how do you calculate tan(x)?