John Cuthber

"Suppose each guest can be compressed but not to an infinitesimal size." Then you can't fill the last room because no guest would fit in it, so there's always a guest left over. With that stipulation the hotel goes out of business even before you try to add more guests (though I'm not sure if that bankruptcy takes zero time, infinite time or finite time)

An unorthodox answer that might do is to the ferment the carbohydrates to alcohol and boil that off.

Well, if it's right then it's right; but that's not how I would calculate it.

Did they notice that Christianity in general, and Protestantism in particular, are sects?

There's nothing wrong with teaching creationism. It should be part of religious studies. However it has absolutely no place in the science classroom. Worse than that, it encourages perversions of science like this. http://creationmuseum.org/ and misrepresents them as if they had any credibility.

Unless and until he can get the right formula for ammonia I think we should leave him with this sort of supplier. http://www.handycandy.co.uk/ Making candy might be a bit dangerous. Incidentally, when I was getting my first science toys the only reason they didn't include a nuclear reactor was the price. There were none of these phony comments about safety.

NH4? "I wanted to perform an experiment with aluminum and HCl." "The chemicals I used were Toilet bowl cleaner and Lye." Is it just me who thinks it may be just as well this guy doesn't have access to many chemicals? (And I still want to know where the Cl2 came from)

"I ended up with some gasous ammonia and chlorine gas" How, and how do you know?

Last time I checked it was generally considered that genetic diversity was a good thing. Can anyone think of a reason why that doesn't apply to humans?

He did explain where the 10^260 came from "This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20^200, that is a one followed by 260 zeros!" He just didn't explain why anyone would care about it. It's the chance of any particular polypeptide being formed by randomly threading 200 amino acids together. Since nobody thinks that's how the peptides are formed, it's not important. It's the same silly straw man argument that the God squad came up with about an explosion in a junk yard creating a jumbo jet. It's deliberately chosen to give a number so big that, even with a generous estimate of the number of trials, it's still hugely improbably. The maths is just a distraction from the fact that it is a straw man. The probability that I created life on a wet Wednesday afternoon because I was bored is vanishingly small, but that doesn't matter because nobody seriously believes that am responsible for life. Nobody wastes time doing the arithmetic on how unlikely it is. What bothers me more is his persistent refusal to explain why he made something up, attributed it to me , refused to back up or apologise for his assertion then lied about having apologised saying "@John I already did apologize sir!"

Chilehed, If you don't tell us what you think is a miracle then we won't know. If you don't tell us what you think is archaeological evidence for them we won't know. Also, you say "you've given a good explanation of why physical sciences can provide no arguments either for or against the existance of God. I'm glad that we can agree on that." and "There are no physical science reasons for believing he does not." Please make up your mind.

You do know that biodiesel isn't made from corn don't you?

Physical science doesn't provide support for the idea that unicorns don't exist. Do you believe in them, and the fairies at the bottom of the garden (please note the fairies hide when you look for them)? Brainteaserfan's point is that you can't physically prove that something doesn't exist. Also, re "There are good philosophical reasons for believing God exists... There is good evidence that miracles have occurred, and miracles are possible only if he exists." http://xkcd.com/285/

It reads local time more accurately than any other clock does.

To be fair, he hasn't been opposing evolution. What he has been doing is putting forward a poorly constructed "theory" which is based on a set of premises which are, as I pointed out earlier, simply are not true. So far as I can see, his "theory" is "life isn't created by a fantastically improbable event" which is true, but dull; since only the God Squad think it was (and even some of them are having doubts) He seems to be right for the wrong reasons. Adding to the "not true" stuff, he made up some stuff, then said I had said it. I'm still waiting for him to respond to that with his apology.

"FYI, acetaminophen and alcohol are metabolized by the same enzyme in the liver. " FYI they are not. One is oxidised by cytochrome p4502EI and the other is dehydrognated to acetaldehyde by alcohol dehydrogenase. Ibuprofen is metabolised by a different enzyme again, but more similar to the one that oxidises paracetamol.

I think the best you can do is something like "which door, or set of doors, among these doors leads to death?" It depends on whether you view the liar as "blindly lying" or "deceitfully lying". If it's the latter you are toast. If the guard you pick is honest (permanently or temporarily) he will indicate two doors that lead to death. You pick the other If he says the opposite of the truth (again, permanently or temporarily) then he will point to the one safe door. If he is a devious liar who wants you dead, he picks one of the death doors at random and the safe door. Incidentally, if he always seeks to make false statements then, were he to indicate just one door he would tacitly tell you that he was the liar. In doing so, he would effectively tell you something true. But he's not allowed to do that. The problem seems to be that "liar" is poorly defined.

I'm beginning to wonder if Himoura is not able to understand the reasons he's wrong or if he's a troll. I mean, he keeps banging on about poker, which is a game of skill, as if it's like drawing a lottery ticket. ( I'm a lousy player, but I think I'd beat someone who thought it was just a game of chance) He started off with a bunch of bullet points that simply were not true. He got all angsty when his speculation got moved to speculation. I predict an assertion sometime soon that we are all "part of some conspiracy to stop the people finding out the truth" BTW re. "You are saying that something extremely rare happened and nothing can ever happen to destroy it or knock it out of balance. " Nope, I didn't. Now, please either apologise for misrepresenting me or show where I actually said that.

"How is it wrong?" By being observably false "Has an explosion ever produced order outside of the big bang?" Who cares? Once is enough. " Nope." Yep, once; and we are part of it. "So basically there is zero evidence to sugges an explosion can create life" apart from all the life you see that arose from the BB. You are saying that because something happened once it is rare and because it is rare it couldn't have happened. that's patently absurd. Do you see the flaw in this? You are unique. The probability of your existence is essentially zero. Therefore you don't exist.

"The aftermath of an explosion has never produced order, only chaos." Just plain wrong. The big bang, which can reasonably, if inaccurately, be described as an explosion, eventually gave rise to us. At the very best that assertion is begging the question. "We have no knowledge of what transpired before the big bang. What we do know is that explosions do not occur randomly for no reason; something has to set them off." That's self contradictory. If we don't know what happened before the big bang then we don't know if something had to set it off. "The idea that the Earth can somehow maintain the conditions necessary to support life for 4.5 billion years as a result of "good luck" is completely unacceptable." It is widely accepted. So, all three bullet points on which the "theory" is based are logical fallacies. Speculation is a rather flattering description here.

That's odd, it let me see it.

Incidentally, there seems to be a different viewpoint towards rich young asses going round trashing the place then offering to pay inadequate compensation, while presumably using their social standing to avoid prosecution. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-boris-johnson So, it seems the former member of the Oxford Union debating society and current prime minister and his friends don't understand the difference between right and wrong to an extent expected of a grade school debate.

"Amaranthus palmeri is a species of edible flowering plant in the amaranth genus." From WIKI with added emphasis. But, more seriously, a herbicide tolerant weed is just a weed if you don't use that herbicide. It didn't take over the world before, and it won't do it now. Monsanto's patently unreasonable behaviour where they " sue farmers for "illegally growing Monsanto seeds" on their farmland. " is, IMO a bigger problem.

Don't worry airbursh, if he can't access wiki he probably can't nuke a city.

"umm.... Men throw away people too. Ever hear of abortion?" For some definitions of the word "people", but not most.