John Cuthber
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Everything posted by John Cuthber
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Do you realise that many, if not most, atheists do not reject forgiveness, they just reject the idea that it's a good thing because the sky fairy told them it's good?
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In order to measure the radius of an atom, it would need to have a surface. It hasn't. However you can measure the "surface" that encloses most of the electrons most of the time. On the other hand you can measure the size of atoms that are packed into solids and those values are available. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_radius
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As evidence I cite this http://xkcd.com/850/ and then, of course, I have to backtrack on the idea that Americans can't use irony. In any event, the coefficient of expansion of copper is something like 20 ppm per degree. When water freezes it expands by about 10% i.e. about 100,000 ppm. The shrinking copper isn't the important thing.
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Consciousness cannot be created nor destroyed?
John Cuthber replied to Dean Mullen's topic in Speculations
There's also the tricky issue of where the consciousnesses were before the big bang (or if you prefer, before genesis). -
"I am very sure that any responsible plumbing contractor in the US would run screaming from this one for good reason." Why? after all, it works perfectly well in millions of homes (including mine). You seem to have proved my point by tacitly asserting that the US system is the best, without any supporting evidence.
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"What is your opinion of secret organizations " It's difficult to answer that because I don't know about them.
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You also don't want to react hydrogen and chlorine in a sealed vessel; the reaction is explosive.
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Yes, I could, but I'm saving my money for a grammar and spelling checker.
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"Spyman, since you obviously are unable to grasp the simplicity of this mechanism this will be the last time I will communicate with you" In my personal opinion this is good news. Stranger pilgrim, feel free to come back with a link to the youtube video if you get it to work. (I'm not holding my breath).
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Consciousness cannot be created nor destroyed?
John Cuthber replied to Dean Mullen's topic in Speculations
There are about 6 billion consciousnesses on this planet (we usually call them people). There didn't used to be. Where did the new ones come from? -
If you want the less classical version then the electrons are delocalised all round the nucleus and pull it in every direction so the net effect is nil.
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Basically it endures because it works better than any other model we have. That web site says "Please see below for a summary of eleven of the current and significant flaws in the theory." However there are no flaws listed on that site. There are links to a bunch of other pages and they seem to witter on about using anti hydrogen as a space travel fuel (which is speculative at best). If you want this thread to go anywhere I suggest you succinctly list what you think are the flaws and then, in all sensible probability, people here will show why they are mistaken, not based on evidence, or irrelevant.
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Compared to the repulsion between the protons, the electrons are very far away (Also they are light and moving. On average any given electron doesn't pull the nucleus in any particular direction.)
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Who says? Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractory_period_(sex)
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There are measurable effects of the environment on the half life of some elements. IIRC it's the k capture decay of some Be isotope, probably 7Be. The half life depends on the chemical environment because that affects the electron density at the nucleus. It's small, obscure effect. For a heavier atom (and almost all atoms are heavier than Be) it would be even smaller because the chemistry only affects the outer shell electrons and the nucleus can capture the inner shell ones. The instability of heavy atoms isn't an entropy effect- it's brought about by the electrostatic repulsion of all the positive charges on the protons. The repulsive force is overruled in the presence of lots of neutrons because they stick to the protons using the strong nuclear force, however the strong force is only effective at short distances so the nuclei cannot be physically big. There is a cop-out way round this. You can thing of a neutron start with a bunch of extra protons as the nucleus of a truly giant atom, held together by gravity. It is difficult to do chemistry with neutron stars because you need rather bigger test tubes than the normal suppliers stock.
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Some people may believe your ideas, but that just proves you can fool some of the people all of the time. There's no evidence supporting your ideas. If you fly a balloon long enough and high enough it gets caught up in the jet stream which is caused (in part) by the Coriolis effect. So, it doesn't go straight up and down as you think. You are simply wrong. There is no "sideways" component to gravity. (Edit (this is a reply to an earlier comment made by Griffiths uk- sorry for any confusion)
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Per haps we should set up some sort of hall of fame for the least meaningful posts here. Dickhead's offering would be a contender.
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Was that video meant to be a spoof?
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"Can you know God without understanding or recognizing his perfect works?" Nobody understands how, for example, a dandelion works. If that plant is a work of God then nobody meets the criterion of "understanding or recognizing his perfect works" So nobody knows God. That's fine by me; I'm an atheist. It must be troublesome for any theists out there. Perhaps the simple answer is "No, neither with, nor without, understanding anything, you can't know God because He doesn't exist." Re. "Physicists have pointed out that in the math that explains the universe, if we changed any of the constants by even .00000000001, man would disappear and would not have ever been born." Douglas Adams came up with a great reply to that. "This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well. It must have been made to have me in it!'"
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Can HIV pass through condoms?
John Cuthber replied to John Salerno's topic in Microbiology and Immunology
Do you mean the Richard Bowman Pearce who writes drivel like this http://notaids.com/en/parasites Since SMF asked for science, I don't think you have answered his request. Is there any scientific backup to your statements (rather than ill informed dangerous nonsense that denies the role of HIV in AIDS)? -
I know enough about explosives that I know about remote handling. (incidentally, it was single screw). I could screw it to a bench on one side of a thick wall, and fit an extended axle on it that runs through to the other side of the wall. Do you think that would be beyond the capability of someone from the 18th c? I don't, on the other hand know a lot about book writing. Nevertheless, your point about the relative rarity of such information in books might be an advantage to our would-be author. Imagine that, for some reason the world goes to pot. If I was alive one thing I'd try to do would be move South. The North of England is cold and wet. I'd have a better chance of making a living by farming somewhere warmer. I'd not be the only one to do this so I suspect a lot of people would abandon towns + cities in the colder parts of the world. They might well abandon it before they ran out of paper- after all, literacy wouldn't be a high priority for a lot of people. That's OK for a while but think about "adventuring" (because people are like that). So it's possible that some adventurer treks North to see what he can find and comes across an old abandoned explosives factory. All the timber and building stone is gone. The corrugated iron roof is a wreck but one of the old store sheds is still more or less intact. The old door must have been bolted securely when "the event" happened or the place would have been stripped, but a good few years of rust has addressed that. He breaks in and finds the entrance to a cellar- the old factory's library.
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Yes, you were pretty much right as far as I can see. Did the site from the RSC help?