John Cuthber

I thought the line was officially drawn where it would prevent harm to the US. On the other hand, it's not meant to be drawn to prevent legitimate criticism. If any of the "classified" documents fall into the latter category then the military has shown that it doesn't know where to draw the line. Perhaps someone else should do it. Perhaps someone independent?

I understand that the US military were given the opportunity to draw that like before wikileaks published; they declined.

you might find this demo an interesting place to start. http://www.chymist.com/colorful%20catalysis.pdf

Name one.

You can only blackmail someone if they have done something they are ashamed of. What happened to the idea that you should live your life in such a way that you don't have to hide your diary?

Amateur astronomers sometimes make important discoveries, simply because the sky is so big that the professionals can't look at all of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auger

Allopathic is broadly the opposite of homoeopathic. Homoeopathic medicine doesn't work. Presumably, that means allopathic medicine is the branch of medicine that actually woks. Marat seems to ignore quite a lot of reality in his post. Surgery- physically correcting problems. Antibiotics- poisoning the microbes that are causing the disease. Chemotherapy- poisoning the cancer cells which cause the disease. and others. Any neuropathy caused by vitamin B1 deficiency should (and I think would) be treated by the administration of vitamin B1. Why use a pro drug (i.e something that the body has to turn into the real drug) when the real drug is readily available and cheap? As for insulin, it seems he has missed out on developments like slow release forms (which have been around for decades) and pumps designed to provide it at a more natural rate. He laos seems unaware that, at least some, diabetics measure their blood sugar and adjust the insulin dose accordingly. In fact, about the only example of what he says that I can think of is the people take aspirin to reduce their temperature when they have a fever. A lot of us don't bother and current medical advice is only to do so if the temperature is high enough to be a problem in its own right.

Could you, for comparison, look up the prices of Lithium (hyrdr)oxide and lead oxide from the same supplier please. It's worth noting that Nd is about twice as abundant as lithium and 3 times commoner than lead.

In the spirit of this thread (i.e. pointless nonsense) I will point out that a milligram is actually rather heavy for a speck of dust.

I don't know who provided this data to wikileaks and I'm not too bothered. I would like to suggest that, perhaps, the reason the did it was not due to loyalty to one side or the other but because they believe that telling the truth is a good thing. It alarms me that there are people who seriously believe that telling the world that some US diplomat thinks Prince Andrew is a clot, constitutes an act of terrorism. Are they really that scared of the truth?

I tried this sequence of experiments, but I couldn't get them to work. I dropped an egg from one metre but I noticed that once I was no longer holding the egg and the earth apart, they both moved. The egg went down, but the earth moved up. So, the egg never travelled the whole metre. I tried it on the moon too. The moon, being lighter, moved up even more than the earth did. Finally, when I dropped the moon onto the earth, neither the moon nor the earth actually travelled the whole metre. At this point, I gave up because I didn't feel like doing the maths Tell me, when you did this, did the earth move for you?

The power of irony perhaps?

"The word "Suicide" should be totally left out of any context. " Indeed, perhaps we should check who first put it in. Oh! it's in the thread title.

"I think you underestimate the effect of cultural exposure to the discourse of "good people give to charity and people who don't give to charity are greedy." Of course there's no way to prove it if you aren't aware of it yourself, but I would guess it would make you feel like a greedy scrooge if you didn't give to charity, regardless of who else was paying attention or not." It's less specific than that. I feel good about doing things I consider to be "good". "Society" might see me helping little old ladies across the road, but it doesn't see me sending money to charity. This behaviour is almost certainly culturally based (my folks do the same) but the "culture" doesn't actually know what I do. In any event, it's still a cost to me for no concrete personal benefit, but a benefit to society as a whole. In that way it is similar to the suicide bomber. Obviously their personal cost is much bigger (and frankly, the potential gain is, IMHO smaller) but both of us do something at our own cost and which benefits our society (in a weird way for the bomber). I'm not sure that suicide bombers actually cause more upset than "ordinary" bombers. They may cause more damage (a person is a really good weapon delivery system) but I'm really not sure people are any more upset by them. I have never heard anyone say "Oh thank God it was just an ordinary bomber; not a a suicide." I have heard people say "Well, at least the bastard won't do it again; good riddance to him."

"Due to current legislation, helium is being sold to private companies at dirt-cheap level" I think that sums up the problem; the US government is dumping the stuff into the market. This indicates to me that they have no understanding of long-term investments. Perhaps we need a new government there.

" 'Momentum per square inch' really has no meaning" True, but monentum per second per square inch is pressure. If you are talking about transfers then they take finite time so the concept isn't entirely meaningless- just muddled. The original question is too poorly specified to be answerable. A lump of iron and a lump of sponge differ in compressibility as well as density, which adds another complicating factor.

However you figure it a ten pound lump of iron has a mass of ten pounds and a weight of about 45 Newtons. You can calculate that by saying it's made up from about a hundred moles of iron atoms so that's about 100 * about 6000000000000000000000000 atoms each with a mass of a zillionth of a kilogram, but unless you know how much each atom weighs and how many of them there are you are still stuck.

The one who broke the window should obviously pay because they are responsible for the damage. However, in the case of slavery, the people responsible for the damage are long dead. The moment is lost; we can no longer bring those people to the table and hold them to account. Even if we could they would simply say that it is, in their frame of reference, perfectly reasonable to have slaves. Any attempt at "payment" for the barbarous way in which slaves were treated seems patronising to me. It seems to be saying "My (great)^n grandparents did things that were bad; I feel bad about that. Here is some money to assuage my conscience. It doesn't make the evil of slavery go away. If we really want to say that we now realise that slavery is a bad thing we would do a better job of showing it by spending the money to abolish slavery that still exists today. http://www.antislavery.org/english/

"And why isn't Assange a terrorist who deserves to be sitting in Gitmo or some torture chamber somewhere? " It's called free speech. Anyway, I'm interested to see that these leaks "put lives at risk". If a government's agents do things that are not reasonable then people will get pissed off with them (when they find out). As the saying goes "truth will out" - you can't expect to keep everything secret. Perhaps it would be better if the government realised that, one way or another, their dirty laundry will end up in the public eye and behaved in a way they could justify if called on to do so. What actually puts lives in danger is to mistreat a bunch of people until they feel that their only recourse is a terrorist attack. For example, if there are two sides in a dispute, giving aid to one side will, obviously, piss off the other side. No matter what the pros and cons of the original dispute were, acting in this way will put you at risk from those who see you supporting their enemies.

Mathematically, subtracting the tax(es) will make a difference to the relative costs. Who cares? It's not as if I can ask the filling station to subtract the tax for me. In the here and now I would pay near 7 dollars a gallon for petrol and about 22 cents per KWh for electricity. Feel free to make assumptions about my mileage, the depreciation, whether I'd drive a 4 by 4 gas guzzler or a moped. (I don't drive so it's not my problem)

I thought Freud and his ideas were dead and buried. As far as I can tell, quietly giving money to charity counts as "an act like suicide-bombing that overcomes self-interest (ego) in favor of a "higher" cause ". (I give money because I think it is simply right to do so. I'm a staunch atheist so I don't expect any reward, and I don't ordinarily mention it so it's not done for bragging rights. Since none of you know who I really am, posting about it here still means it's an anonymous donation). I'm not the only one who does this, and Western secular society doesn't mind a bit. Did you consider the fact that what makes suicide bombing unsettling is that we don't want to get blown up? I don't really care if the bomber is there at the time and also dies or if he uses some sort of remote control device. The thing that matters to me is that getting blown up will kill me and I find that deeply unsettling. I didn't like it when I was woken up one morning by the IRA bombing Paddington railway station a few hundred yards away. I didn't like it when they blew up the high street where most of my family do their weekly shopping. It wouldn't have made me feel any better or worse if they had been suicide bombers.

It depends whom you are sleeping with. How bad do the risks need to be before you realise that a potentially life threatening risk isn't worth it?

Just for the record, this "The instant loss of blood supply causes the animal to lose consciousness almost the moment it comes into contact with the knife." is an unsupported assertion, no matter how often you say it.

"Tell me Cuthber, what in the world does run-of-the-mill criminals and terrorism have in common? Man, that's like washing the white and colored clothes together and using bleach only as a disinfect" What they have in common is that they both kill lots of people and neither of them has a legitimate reason for doing so. They are both a bunch of dross. Why treat them differently?