Cap'n Refsmmat

I don't think he likes to talk about his potatoes much.

Would there be any math folks that would use that? I presume most of them know LaTeX already. It's JavaScript, so it wouldn't be too hard to implement in vB.

I'll poke around in vB and see if I can get that to work.

Go back and read Glider's post, will you?

I think the females here are afraid of revealing themselves because they know they'll immediately be piled upon by lonely nerds.

Does that mean that a mute person is not sentient? And besides, its lack of science knowledge does not mean that it does not "feel" the pain. It does not change anything.

How do you know?

This may not be the Politics forum, but applying these guidelines, this thread does not belong on SFN. Closed.

Same with us.

I'm referring to the assertion that that is how chickens "feel" it. How do you know that?

How do you know?

Indeed, though I lowered the number to 30 to make it a little easier on people. We're trying to make people register on SFN because of the science, not because of the Politics section (and, as iNow said, we're trying to keep the idiots out).

Fixed that for you.

Okay, but does the chicken really suffer? That's what the OP wanted to know, and that's what you can't determine.

rofl. Well, you can tell the moderators there that we have some proven techniques to get rid of him, if they'd like some help.

The question of whether they can feel pain, however, is a mite different. We can't exactly ask the fish "did that hurt?" and we can't sufficiently define how an animal feels pain, so there is still open debate on the subject. They may not be sentient, but does pain depend on sentience? Also, thedarkshade: fish can and do have memories that last much longer than ten seconds. Their memory isn't really relevant to pain, though.

I might remind you that this is "scientists vs. normal people," not "scientists vs. the Pope."

Correlation [math]\neq[/math] causation.

Erm, okay.

That depends on whether you think you'd suffer more from missing a finger or suffering some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder, and I suppose that varies from person to person. (Then again, you might get the PTSD from the act of removing the finger, so I guess it's a lose-lose.) The better question to ask is "are there alternatives that don't cause any permanent harm at all?" Several people have implied that there are, but nobody's really delved into that.

I doubt packing tape would be harder to cut than duct tape. However, if you did something like, say, heavy-duty canvas covered in a layer of duct tape on each side, it would be a pain to cut at all. You could throw in heavy-gauge wires weaved into the canvas to make it more of a challenge.

Whoa, weird. I hadn't done anything yet. I'll take the credit anyway. You're welcome @thedarkshade: I upped the size restrictions a bit. Hope that helps.

Discarded Science: Ideas that seemed good at the time..., by John Grant. Just started it today, so we'll see how it is...

Okay.

Ahem.