Cap'n Refsmmat

(Apologies for the slight loss in continuity here when we removed some gibberish. ajb's post up there makes a little less sense when the post it was responding to vanished...)

Aha! I found the official Catholic position on this: (note the domain name in the link) http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p3s2c1a1.htm (The numbers are footnotes on the linked page, which point to specific Bible verses.) So, that's their justification. Line 2130 is particularly pointed, I think.

Honestly, though, you should make your dragon an homage to Terry Pratchett's dragons. http://wiki.lspace.org/wiki/Swamp_dragon

Hydrazine is used in some hypergolic rocket fuels, where two components ignite when they meet. If you could make both parts (I think the mixture for hydrazine involves methanol and hydrogen peroxide), you could spray them together and have it ignite after it's left the dragon.

It could establish a symbiotic relationship with methane-producing bacteria. Give it exceptionally long intestines to ferment with, and a diet to go with the bacteria. Then it has to ignite the methane. I'm not sure how you'd go about that; not many body tissues would survive the heat, or even generate enough heat to light methane. On the other hand, you could use these beasties: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1109_051109_rocketfuel.html The hydrazine is unstable, and a catalyst (I hear aluminum oxide works, although that's not usually part of a balanced diet) would cause it to decompose in a rather exothermic manner. Dunno if it makes a fireball though.

My mom eats loads of salt and she's been twenty-nine for quite a few years now.

What about the cherubim on the ark? They're angels, and thus images of things from heaven.

Indeed. Everyone knows we should really eat the rich.

Power is not the same thing as energy. None of that makes mathematical sense.

Toxins aren't bacteria, either.

The transcendent model (and St. Anselm in particular) would hold that God has no image, body, or representation (as he's not part of this universe), and there can thus be no image of God for practical reasons. Yeah, although I don't know much about ancient Hebrew. It'd be nice if I could ask the translators. And when you ask them "what about all the rules in Leviticus and Deuteronomy? You know, menstruating women are unclean and anything they touch must be washed, and all that," they say, "Ah, but we Christians don't have to follow the Jewish law!" I'd think that any directive is fairly important if God speaks it... I wonder if any of the famous theologians have weighed in on this. I have Anselm's Proslogion here and I might see if he has something to say about the Old Testament and Jewish law.

Indeed. Charlatan, could you, er, stop being a charlatan? Please don't go around posting answers to questions that you don't actually know the answer to.

Bart Ehrman is not strictly a deconstructionist. He simply follows the history of the New Testament, other writings by church leaders at the same time, and history to show how the Bible used to be interpreted differently. Lost Christianities is a story of how others interpreted the Bible (in ways completely different to how we now interpret it) and how early Christianity was formed. It is not Ehrman's attempt to deconstruct the text, merely his attempt to understand how it was made and how Christianity came to be.

It doesn't specifically say a symbol of God, just a symbol of anything in Heaven. Now, the NRSV states "You shall not make for yourself an idol" rather than a graven image. According to the OED, in Jewish and Christian use, idol means Now, other translations I find say "graven image" or even say "likeness", so I gather the meaning is not quite certain. One could take the passage (as a whole) to mean either "don't make idols to worship, just worship me" or "don't make images of anything, and only worship me". Regardless of which you think is right, one can easily see that Christians would jump for the first version, and I can't blame them. When I get home I can check my NIV Study Bible to see what the evangelicals think about it.

It talks about both. Note that it does not specifically say graven images that resemble God. It says "anything that is in heaven above." Now, if we take the transcendent model of God which is so popular in Christian theology, this is not a problem in the slightest, since God is immaterial and has no body, and therefore no image can resemble God. As for things in heaven, it's debatable -- Jesus ascended to heaven, but by the doctrine of the Trinity, he's also god, and so he might as well now be immaterial as well. That gets a bit confusing. Now, what I'm really curious about is what "graven" is supposed to specifically mean. The OED gives two definitions: I wonder what the original intent was. No. Read the entire section. "Don't make symbols of me... and don't bow to them." Well, I don't really see the Amish going down to the store and buying a poster of the Jonas Brothers for their kids, but sure... There is no "original version", so it's really a matter of choosing a translation that uses the best sources and the best translation techniques. That's very, very hard. For example, your Hebrew site uses a 1917 Hebrew version (presumably because it's now in public domain) that was published before the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered. Texts like the NRSV retranslate from the same Masoretic text while taking into account the Dead Sea Scrolls and other recent discoveries. Now, I'm sure if you're fluent in Hebrew, you could find a modern printed Masoretic text that takes into account all the newest discoveries. But this is really a side note, since I don't think the commandments have changed too much...

That's why he has the engine's total impulse, rather than the thrust. Most model rocket motors are labeled with their impulse in Newtons. Now, I can't think of a direct way to do this without loads of approximation. You'd have to assume the impulse is instantaneous to make a quick solution out of kinematics, but of course that's false. So I'm not sure how you'd go about it.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article7114851.ece

I think kemo1988 knows that, seeing as he's already calculated the pressure he needs.

Worshiping is not the same as praying to. You can pray to a saint while looking at their idol, but you're not worshiping them. Take a look at Deuteronomy 5:8-10, where the commandments are repeated: Note the line "You shall not bow down to them or worship them." This is a prohibition of submitting to any deity but God, or making an idol of another deity and submitting to the idol. If you want to read it your way, the prohibition of making an idol of things "on the earth beneath" would seem to prohibit, say, making statues of people we like. But I think God starts having a problem when we worship the statues.

That is, in fact, what they're trying to do right now. They're fabricating steel boxes with pipes attached that they can sit on top of the leaks. It'll take a few days for the boxes to be ready and in place.

I have moved some off-topic posts that don't answer your question to this thread, where perhaps they can be discussed properly.

"Canceling out" is division. (a + b)(a - b) = b(a - b) Since (a - b) is 0, b and (a + b) could be anything and the equation would still be true -- each side would still be 0. If a = 2, they'd be 2 and 4, respectively, but the equation would be true. Try to divide out (a - b) and it'd no longer be true.

No, there's a limit on edit time. You can certainly make a new post though.

Done. See post #3 in this thread.

Here's where I'm working this semester. There's a lot more to the lab, but I don't yet have any good pictures of it. (Click for a big version.)