John Cuthber

Perhaps I should clarify my original post in this thread. I was being ironic. There's no way that you would do that synthesis to do anything other than make amphetamine. There may be countries where that would be legal but I doubt it.

I still rather suspect that most of the heat from a flame isn't emitted as IR. It's easy enough to check. Place your finger and inch to one side of a candle flame and see how hot your finger gets. then repeat the experiment with your finger an inch above the flame. Because the distance is the same the amount of radiated heat should be (near) the same. I suspect that you will rapidly accept that convection , mixing and conduction are a significant loss path. Feel free to do this with any other flame you like. As Mr sceptic says, using IR transfer is practical; but it's damned inefficient. I'd still like to know where you are going to get the pure oxygen from. Seriously, why do you think your idea is better than this? http://www.calor.co.uk/outdoor-living/patio-heaters/

"Thank you for continuing to make suggestions, and to point out potential problems with my design. " There's just one potential problem with your design. It won't work. You don't seem to understand that.

Be very careful with that reaction sequence. It would be terribly unfortunate if someone thought that you were trying to make amphetamine or something similar, and tipped off the authorities.

This sort of thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_effect might help. However the Faraday effect needs a medium. It doesn't work in a vacuum

Once again, you seem to have come up with an idea that is somewhere between impossible and impractical. The helium is expensive and pointless. Gas flames are not very good emitters of IR. Separating oxygen from air requires a lot of energy and wouldn't achieve much (as far as I can see the only benefit would be that it would prevent formation of NOx fumes; it might slightly increase the radiation efficiency). What's wrong with a patio heater or a gas powered grill? The biggest problem with bus shelters is, I believe, vandalism. Your suggestion wouldn't help that.

"I agree that that may have been my best choice but I cannot post there yet." There's a reason for that. I'm pretty sure this thread is breaking the rules.

I don't see what this has to do with psychiatry or psychology. Shouldn't you have posted it under religion?.

"The temperature of the fire at the WTC was not unusual, and it was most definitely not capable of melting steel." Which part of "This issue has already been addressed. The iron doesn't have to melt or burn. It only has to undergo a phase transition in order for the building to collapse. " did you not understand? "The maximum flame temperature increase for burning hydrocarbons (jet fuel) in air is, thus, about 1,000°C" Demonstrably false. All you need is a lit candle and a thin bit of copper wire. Do you realise that saying things that are not true on a science website is more likely to hinder your cause than to help it? "It just seems hard to believe that fire alone could have caused this." I think we have already heard the argument from incredulity a few times. You should stop using it now because it just looks a bit silly.

And the scientific side of the debate can be found here http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/17/bad-science-chiropractors

First off, we heard you the first time. "Any science teacher, architect, structural engineer, welder & metalegist would know that structural steel will not be weakened to even near failure by burning jet fuel," and your evidence for this is what exactly? I have personally worked steel by heating it to red hot. If the flames from the jet fuel were not at least red hot they would not have been visible. People report seeing flames (and the video supports this). The flames were clearly hot enough to soften steel. "you will not be able to miss the key factor on making steel melt ... time time time!" Bollocks. The melting point of water is zero degrees C, hotter and it melts, colder and it freezes. Time doesn't enter into it. The same is true for steel. I can burn steel in seconds with a candle flame as long as the steel is thin. "They are bright red but still not hot enough to melt." No, but they are soft enough to roll into shape. That's the point. Did you think they heated the stuff to red heat because they liked the colour? "If it could be meakened or melted by jet fuel, how could it be used to power the jet engines" Because the structural parts of jet engines that take the brunt of the flame are not made of steel but from so called super-alloys. Even then they need to be cooled to stop them melting. These materials are very expensive so they don't build skyscrapers out of them. You may have a point about poor standards of education, but you seem to be looking in the wrong direction.

Khaled, I think Alpha's point is that you could do that equally well with a binary code. Why are there 4 bases, not 2? Mapping the quaternary code onto a binary one wouldn't be difficult. However, if you did so then the data strings would be longer. It may be that 4 bases constitute a compromise between shorter genes and having a more complicated system of lots of bases. Of course, it might simply be that, because it works, it has carried on

Is this "The factors cited are inadequate " an argument from incredulity? If not, please show some supporting numbers.

That's interesting. Not only am I dead, but so are lots of my friends. I'm so glad you told us. It's not generally a good idea to mix drugs, but most of the time you will get away with it. Unless your liver is already shot and/ or you are taking lots of alcohol and/ or aspirin there's not a problem for a fit healthy person. Acetaminophen (paracetamol for those on this side of the pond) is hepatotoxic, particularly in overdose. On the other hand, paracetamol based remedies for the after effects excess drinking are on the market and they don't carry a warning saying that you should make sure you are fully sober before you take them.

G X, No real flame gets remotely close. Which requirements are you prepared to drop? Swansont, a hydrogen/oxygen flame is not incandescent in the sense G X means. There's nothing solid to emit "black body" radiation. It would emit a fair bit of IR ( I'm not sure exactly which bands). Hydrogen flames are notorious for being difficult to see because they don't emit much visible light. They do emit UV.

If you got two and put them in series then they would have an overall working voltage of 10 volts so the 9 volt battery (without a regulator) would be a reasonable match. And, for Tony's benefit. Those two capacitors, charged to 5 volts each, will hold exactly the same amount of energy whether they are in series or in parallel.

How long was the film? The US patent office requires it to run for a year before they even look at it. I think they are being absurdly generous.

"These people can't help but behave the way they do when they use this site." That's their problem, not Facebook's and not mine (as a FB user). "Similarly social networking sites predispose people to cheat on their spouse " I can't be bothered to find the xkcd cartoon for "citation needed". Adults behave in a childish manner quite a lot when they get the chance. They used to use pubs, parties, April fool jokes etc. Now some of them use Facebook, but the jokes are essentially the same sort that were previously photocopied and passed round the office. Things like this http://www.ahajokes.com/eng011.html "There will be many who will resist this temptation to act childish or cheat on their wives when the opportunity presents itself, but this is undeniably the result of Facebook" So, nobody cheated on their wife before Facebook? I await with interest the first man to claim in court "it's not my fault- a well known social networking site made me do it!". Do you not think that some people will think that his real reason was boring old lust, and he is trying to use Facebook as an excuse.

There are three problems with Pascal's wager. You can't Choose to believe something. It's odds on that you will choose the wrong faith and the third problem which is that it is deeply offensive. In Pascal's day it was reasonable to assume there was only one "proper" religion- Christianity- and the rest were all "heathen mumbo jumbo" ( Not sure what he would have though of Judaism, perhaps "Christians who haven't noticed the latest news yet"). In today's multicultural society there are - for better or worse, a shedfull of religions and beliefs. To ignore all of them and assume that there is one "true Path" that you could follow is incredibly conceited. Only religion could make you act that way.

Is that a serious question? Did you not realise that, in 1950 a lot of people didn't live long enough to get lung cancer?

"To store the maximum amout of energy connect the capacitors in parallel." Why? In particular, there are some nice big capacitors used for energy storage that are only rated for a few volts. If you connected them in parallel and hooked them to a 9 volt battery you would destroy them. I think it would be more useful to ask what, exactly, the OP wants from this set up.

"There are lots of failed attempts. And there are lots of failed attempts that involve magnets (and ferrofluids). The distinction is in the details." For example, your failed example is newer and less excusable than the one I cited. "In the esoteric world of the philosophy of science you can never actually prove a theory true. You can only show that it's more and more likely to be true. (You can, however, show a theory to be false." Feel free to come back and show us when you have proved thermodynamics to be false. Since you don't seem to wish to accept reality I guess I should point out one reason why your system (or the 17th C Bishop's) won't work. If the magnet at the top left is strong enough to pull the moving thing ( ferrofluid or steel shot) across from the top righ of the diagram to the top left or up the slope, then it will be too strong to let that moving thing go somewhere else- like the bottom of the diagram, or down through the hole in the slope. It's different in detail; but the reason it won't work is exactly the same and, if you had thought about the Bishop's "mechanism" and why it fails you would have realised why you system would also fail.

I guess it's interesting to know that an idea from 1648 has been updated. It didn't work then and it won't work now. There's a picture of it here. http://www.chem.unsw.edu.au/staff/hibbert/perpetual/Freelnch.htm

But the good news is that you will qualify for a Darwin award of your very own.

Much of the Earth's heat is produced by nuclear reactions. If it were not then we would have cooled down ages ago. This was the flaw in Lord Kelvin's estimate of the age of the Earth; he didn't know about radioactivity. However the important thing to remember is that maintaining a magnetic field does not (in principle) require power so you don't need a power source. It's sufficient that the earth's core is molten and moving through the field to maintain that field. The current will have resistive losses so there will be a transfer of energy which will slow down the rotation over the ages.