John Cuthber

So far, I have seen reasonable arguments put forward for wearing bump cap, earplugs, safety glasses, gloves, and metatarsal steel toed boots. It has been pointed out that police , who need to be recognisable to the public, wear uniforms and that the military do the same for that and other reasons. It's perfectly sensible that Construction workers usually require safety footwear and hardhats. This has little to do with school uniforms. Surely schools now require pupils to wear safety gear in science and metalwork classes? The School football team is likely to have a uniform that permits them to recognise one another rapidly on the field. It has been pointed out that a uniform permits children from a particular school to be recognised; this is particularly helpful to the bullies from other schools. The peculiar argument has been made that poorer parents are better off paying for a school uniform in addition to the fashionable clothes that their children will wish to wear when away from school. It has been put forward that "by requiring everyone to wear the same uniform, the issue of personal appearance is necessarily thrust into the background, so that more important and interesting issues such as personal opinions, behavior, and knowledge can be foregrounded." and this idea has been challenged by Marat's observation that "Rebellious types could insist on their idiosyncracy by wearing their tie in the form of a noose, wearing the same suit and tie every day for a month, sleeping in their clothes in order to cultivate an informal, rumpled look, etc." My experience was similar. Some lad actually read that the rules said "Boys must wear a maroon tie" and got himself a maroon bow tie. They had to rewrite the rules. I think Destiny's assertion that "But if they ever hit public schools, there will be an open rebellion against the federal government of United States. A rebellion that will result in massive loss of life" is gloriously absurd, but I still haven't seen a good argument in favour of uniforms.

There is a difference between someone with the misfortune to have a heritable disease and someone who chooses to screw their sister. "Unfortunately, most people with polycystic renal disease decide to have children because of the same murderously idiotic cruelty, " Or possibly because the child will be no worse off than they are. Since they don't commit suicide they cant be that unhappy with their lot.

"What types of trade-offs would you make if you were the head of a family with one member needing dialysis? " It wouldn't matter a damn because I couldn't afford one. That's the sort of thing that governments do. By the way, Marat, why do you want to put helicopter manufacturers out of business? (Or did you not realise that there's a downside to your suggestion too?)

Genghis Khan is reputed to have claimed that a girl carrying a bag of gold could cross his lands unmolested. He probably exaggerated a bit but he may have had a point. "Which civilization killed 80.000 people in one day? " We did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki But it may have reduced the net death toll of the war.

By the same token you might ask why the equations are all in terms of x^2. Why not cubes or x^2 and a bit? The simple answer is that, if you don't use a negative sign, you get the wrong answer.

Marat, you seem to have missed a vital point here. Healthcare is what economists refer to as an infinite sink. People die. The point of healthcare is (broadly) to postpone death. However, no matter how much you spend, people will still die. At some point you have to stop putting money into healthcare (which can use all the money and still fail to keep everyone alive and healthy) and put some money into other things. All you are arguing about is exactly where to draw the line. The healthcare system costs about 122 billion a year. The royal family costs 38 million. Is one worth 0.03% of the other? Who knows? It's a matter of personal opinion. I'm no royalist and I would cheerfully see them left to look after themselves as a glorified "theme park". That's not really the point. If you take something that isn't healthcare- defence or art or education or road maintainance and say "We should spend x pounds a year on this" someone will disagree with you. We spend something like 46 billion on defence. Is that a sensible amount? Would it have been better not to get into a silly war in Iraq? Who knows?

"But we don't know well about it at the molecular level." Yes we do. The simple answer is that at higher temperatures the electrons have more energy. So they can occupy energy levels further away from the nucleus. That makes the atoms in the copper slightly bigger. Since the number of atoms in the copper bar is the same and the atoms get bigger the bar gets bigger.

So, when it comes down to it, what you said isn't true. The royal family, right or wrong, are not paid for as art. "there is no color of right for a single family, just on the basis of birth, to have been deemed entitled to those lands in the first place." Do you not believe in letting people inherit things? Incidentally, the students are complaining about the fact that the politicians lied as much as they are complaining about the fees.

"Works both ways -- prove that carrying a gun won't reduce crime. In your opinion it's "silly", but others feel differently. " I thought it worked in this way; if you can prove that a change is (at least probably) worth making then we make it, otherwise we maintain the status quo. So, if there's anyone out there who really thinks that giving every loony in town a gun is a good idea, lets here why.

I'd like the citation for this "That meant that in some government department on some given day someone actually said, 'How many dialysis patients should we condemn to death to buy a new silver set for Buckingham Palace?' " But, since it's Marat saying daft things about Britain, I don't expect an answer any more than he gave one here http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/53400-the-english-lisp/ Meanwhile back at the topic, it's interesting to note that funding windmills in Africa is a long term investment that should bring benefits both for the locals and for the world as a whole in the form of greenhouse gas reduction. The payment of student's fees also used to be a long term investment because they students go on to get better jobs and pay more taxes. Since the "new" "Labour" government decided that 50% of school leavers should go to university, paying for them to go and spend a few years learning "media studies" became impossible, even when you add the benefits of taking them off the dole queues.

Frozen hydrogen in a vacuum chamber.

"But we deeply don't know heat conduction mechanism microscopically." Is this the Royal We? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-Kubo_relations

"What material will best prevent the heat?" Ice.

In the real world, they have. I realise that they may never happen in yours.

The laws of physics. Specifically, it's impossible to stop it emitting other wavelengths because it would always try to act like a black body emitter. In order not to emit at other wavelengths it would have to have zero emittance at those wavelengths. To do that it would need to be a perfect reflector. Nothing's ever perfect. I'd still like to see an answer to Mr Skeptic's question.

I remain puzzled. If the president were to pass a law saying that everyone had to wear a clove of garlic round their neck to maintain homeland security, people would be outraged because the idea is just plain stupid. It wouldn't work. Nobody has answered my question about how making everybody carry a gun would help maintain security. I presume that's because there is no way it would help. Perhaps that's why people would be upset by a silly gun carrying law. Now, I happen to live in a country where mandatory payment into an insurance scheme for healthcare works quite well. Many of the problems with it arise from the current and previous government's attempts to make it more "businesslike". Why are so many Americans upset about this idea, while they are happy to accept a system which actually costs more (as % GDP) and which offers no help to those who cannot afford to pay?

Mooey, just for the record, there are fewer women in science, not less women.

I am puzzled. If you force everybody to buy a gun why would that make a difference to homeland security? How would all these guns have prevented, for example, 9/11? If you give everybody guns then you obviously arm all the nutters. Is that somehow a good thing?

Just a quick answer to "Is it physically-possible to construct such a device?" No Just a quick joke. Never accept a dinner invitation from someone who cooks carrots and pees in the same pot.

Can they cheat a bit? Lots of creatures that grow in the sea make their own shells from (mainly) calcium carbonate. They have to do some sort of chemistry to do this. In a similar way I don't see what would stop your creatures growing a coat of gypsum. Gypsum is fairly soft and should be acid resistant.

Learn to read. That way you could get to grips with the fact that at least one US politician has a lisp and that I already apologised for the error about Hesseltine. Then perhaps you might care to answer the questions I asked; twice.

Oops! sorry, I was in a hurry this morning. Can we pretend I said "So, on the basis of a waiter, a foreigner, and 5 people who are nearly all dead you are prepared to judge an entire country. If this were not a science site that might be OK. As it is, it's a bit silly." Also, now I have had a bit more time I tried this "Try listening to Zeinab Bedawi for a while on BBC World News. It affects me like chalk screeching on a chalk board." She has got a slight lisp (strictly a sibilant S rather than a lisp); big deal. I'm glad that tiny errors in speech don't move me to slander whole countries. (fortunately, miss-spelling Badawi doesn't trouble me much either). Perhaps the fact that she is Oxford educated explains it, though I doubt it. I also now have time to point out that Marat failed to answer my other points. i.e. There is the so called "Chinese" lisp (OK, technically, its rhotacism rather than a lisp but that's what it's called) Are you going to psychoanalyse one of the largest groups on the planet on the basis of one speech trait? and The reverse of the "English lisp" is common among French speakers trying to learn English. They pronounce th as either s or z. Are you going to speculate wildly that they all want to be geriatrics?

This is one way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean-Stark_apparatus Herew's anothe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Fischer_titration How hard did you look before posting?

So, on the basis of a waiter, a foreigner, and 5 people who are all dead you are prepared to judge an entire country. If this were not a science site that might be OK. As it is, it's a bit silly.