imatfaal

Green-X - which society are you referring to? (I apologize if you have already specified and I missed it) It seems that you are generalizing western society - with respect, that is nonsensical. My country, the UK, is fairly homogeneous for a large state - but typifications such as "girls are treated better than boys" are impossible at a society wide level; even more so countries like the US which have vastly different communities (rural v urban, religious v secular etc) that hold little in common with each other.

Hal - I read Ophiolite's post as satire; and satire as part of a long tradition in this area of debate. It was merely a modest proposal

Sorry if this is a bit naive - but how can you reconcile charge quanitised in units of the charge of the electron with the +2/3 - 1/3 charges of the quarks?

There is also EU legislation on the use of the death penalty, torture, and inhumane treatment that are not optional (non-derogable).

doG The person who needs to check up on his physics and his logic is you. Dark matter is an inferred form of matter that is dark, which we know/suspect exists due to its gravitational effects - speed of rotation of galaxies etc; we are progressing quite well in identifying it. Dark energy is a cute name for a phenomenom that we have no fixed idea about - the universe is speeding up in its expansion and something is driving that acceleration. The only connection is in the name and the lack of knowledge. I recommend wikipedia a/o hyperphysics.

And whilst it might not be neccessary to remember the exact values for the speed of light and planck's constant - if you have to use google to ascertain that one is very big and the other very small then you are in trouble

Nice of you to highlight your own strawman in advance. I did not mention dark matter

Universal expansion can be greater than the speed of light as nothing is travelling through space - it is space itself that is expanding. It is fairly simple maths to find the required seperation of galaxies today for which the gap is growing faster than the speed of light.

Thornhill and Palmer's evolutionary biological explication in a Natural History of Rape whilst adding to the scholastic argument is hardly definitive. It was criticised for scientific laxity by other evolutionary biologists and scientists (eg see Nature review at the time) and by sociologists for being simplisitic and reductive. Personally I find it hard to reconcile Thornhill and Palmers assertions with the claim that in the USA nearly as many men are raped each year than women (don't forget the fact that prison rape is endemic in the USA). It also strikes me that the classification of Mooey's points as the the "feminist perspective" (implying that this perspective is opposed by an objective scientific reality) ignores the fact that all positions taken are contextual and no perspective is truely value free.

For those who missed Prof Hans Rosling's excellent programme on statistics a few years ago it has been repeated and will be available til wednesday for those able to access iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk...e_Joy_of_Stats/

At 380000 years (aside from the fact that the universe was opaque before last scattering and dark afterwards - thus no observations either way) the portion of the universe that we observe today had a radius of about 42Mlyrs. "If everything was together..." that implies an explosion from a point into space, this is not what is thought to have happened. Everywhere and everything started expanding rapidly space included. but otherwise yes, at 380000 years what is now the area of space (from which the cmbr we currently observe was emitted) was 42Mlyr

Got two free articles from foreign law journals that my library doesn't subscribe to and I couldnt be bothered to go the long way round for. Thanks for posting

doG - neither of those assertions are unchallengable. We have no coherent definition of dark energy - yet we have a meaningful discussion about that; ditto love, beauty ... The notion of falsifiablity only has traction in purely scientific realms - your argument would apply to all philosophies and much else. It is no more possible to prove (or disprove) the existence of God scientifically than it is to prove the world is round musically. (orig Laurie Taylor I think)

I think even Feynman would have trouble getting his mind around that!

It's a slightly unusual method of expression - although it would surely be understood. I might use that formulation, but only in an OTT manner; eg if I was celebrating 'Tonight we will drink neither beer nor wine but champagne!' It is old fashioned enough to be a bit hammy or camp and perhaps not an entirely natural usage. And as you can tell from the example I am off to the pub. Gnite!

“This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”

Vilas - you misunderstand science entirely if you think that your postulate trumps experimental evidence

No - it means that the universal expansion means that it has taken 13.7 billion years to cross a gap that if the universe were static would have taken 42 million years. There is no centre of the universe. If you go about 42 Gly away from earth (in any direction) - an astronomer at that spatial point looking towards the milkway will, at present be able to detect cosmic background radiation that was emitted in the era of last scattering from the region of space that went on to form the milky way. The radiation that alien astronomer detects will have travelled for 13.7ish billion years and crossed a distance that was 42 Mlyr and is now 46 Glyrs - ie exactly the same as us. Everywhere sees CMBR at a distance of about 46 Glyrs and redshifted by over 1000 times what ever direction they look in. There is no centre

Vilas - I will dig out a link, but I believe that the data retrieved from relativistic collisions of large ions can only be fully explained if the ions are modelled as contracted to disc-like entities unpon collission rather than the spherical shape at rest

Capt P - I agree with your examples to an extent. however, the patellar reflex is very simple and can actually be traced to a neural level (and no higher centres involvement); conversely the great feeling of resting one's head on the chest of another is very high level (and more emotional than hard-wired). The reaction of that cat seemed to be almost total motor relaxation

Half-photon? No - spontaeneous parametric down conversion takes a stream of photon and every so often one photon is down converted into two entangled photons (lower energy) . In this case the polarisations are orthogonal. We call one the signal and the other the idler. I don't know where you got sympathetic metamorphosis from - it's not in the wiki article so putting it in quotes is perhaps disingenous. The wiki article isn't great - perhaps you could have look at this explanation that was linked into it http://grad.physics.sunysb.edu/~amarch/ You need to pay particular attention to the way in which the polarization is used via experimental co-incidence counting rather than remote manipulation that the wiki article implies

From my reading I think the general view of Dark Matter is that it is particulate - ie it is bits of as yet unknown stuff that will remain same size against a background of expanding space. I think, dark matter will - like ordinary matter - become more rare in an increasing space. In the future an average cubic lightyear of space will have less matter and less dark matter than an average cubic lyr today. Dark Energy is really just a name given to a phenomenom we don't fully understand - but it is not thought to be particulate, it is more a conceptual- force, field, energy etc; and of course it is, by definition, the reason for the expansion. It does not dilute with expansion however - ie it maintains its ability to expand space and does not lose its effect. Conversely to matter, in the future a cubic lightyer of space will expand (ie same "quantity of dark energy") by the same amount as it does now

In the latest Swan's on Tea blog there is a link to a slighty spooky video of a cat being completely calmed (practically "deactivated" per the vid title) by a bulldog clip to the scruff of the neck with no discomfort or obvious side effects. Its quite a remarkable transformation for such a feisty and seemingly independent animal to be calmed, almost frozen, so entirely and in such an outwardly humane manner. Is this behaviour a throwback to the time as a kitten in which mother cat carries kittens in her mouth (and the young cannot wriggle too much) or is there something deeper? There is no chance that such reversion to infantile automatic behaviour exists in humans is there?

Politics arises from the free discussion in the pub, in the agora, on the internet forum - to attempt to constrain politics to a sensible, non-emotive, and purely rational discussion is reductive and futile. Politics does not admit to the same reasoning processes and testing that science and maths do - the only judge of inanity, of self-contradiction, of arrant nonsense is history. That being said though, Bob does have a point that the politics/religion/philosophy sub-fora have had a particularly poor slew of threads recently. Personally, i think it is a passing phase which will in the fullness of time be reversed. Another major problem is that many of the posters in those sub-fora (there are exceptions - most of whom have posted in this thread above) reply without reading or understanding the fore-going thread. Maybe a bit more calling for citations, fewer knee-jerk reactions, and a tiny bit more moderation/guidance will help to improve matters.

Marat - Hansard doesn't list Jack Straw speaking at all on German Reunification. He was Shadow Education Sec at the time so it would have been out of his realm. Are you sure you meant Jack Straw?