shadowacct

1984?? Kim Il Sung? Of course, I'm exaggerating a lot, but I really believe that this will be the final consequence of a government, based on Dawkins ideas. It certainly will not start with this (that is not what Dawkins wants), but it may well end with this. It will start with calling the ideas of large parts of society harmful (e.g. the Roman Catholics, the Muslims, or whatever religious group). All kinds of rights these people have in society will be withdrawn (e.g. their holidays, their century-old rights on the use of land and buildings), because they are regarded as being harmful and harmful things should not be supported by the government. After some time, there will be common consensus that religion is not good for society, so it is decided to make organized religion a forbidden thing. Next step will be intervention in the private life of people (e.g. parents may not raise their children with their personal faith and the things they find most important). Of course, children all will receive a unified governmental thought-control during their young school years. Finally, we have a new "GOD", called "REASON". In reality, however, reason will be dead by long at that time. I have seen too many examples of regimes which started off with some 'good ideology'. They developed into the worst regimes mankind has known in its history. I do not say that this is Dawkins idea, I'm 100% sure not. But history has shown, that if such ideas are combined with power (e.g. through a government), then they turn into a monster. Here I think that Severian is right. Dawkins represents a certain power through his affiliation at a prominently visible organization, and as such he has a responsibility to represent (and use?) that power wisely. There is another important reason, why a government, such as described by John cannot work. The decisions, made by such a government are based on only one aspect of human life: reason/intellect. In real life, human life is controlled by many (sometimes competing) forces. Emotion, feelings, love, beauty, all of these cannot be controlled by reason. E.g. the decision to keep an old but impractical building, is that based on reason? I do not think so. It is kept, because someone thinks it is beautiful. Another person may find it valuable, because it is so old and mystical. Yet another person likes the cool and dark rooms because they give him a feeling of being connected to earlier generations. From a rational point of view, the building should be broken down right now and be replaced by a modern one, which is highly efficient with energy, which uses the occupied space in a more practical way, etc. But here, ratio does not work. Trying to organize life completely based on ratio, only uses 20% (or so) of man's capabilities. Wouldn't that be sad? Life would become narrow. We actually have seen such things happening in the real world. Romania was in the process of getting rid of all those 'old and impractical' habitats. Old villages were broken down, the land was used for agriculture and the people were put in a few high flats, occupying less than 10% of the area of the original village. The same happened in the cities, where old 16th, 17th and 18th century buildings were broken down. Fortunately all this stopped after 1990.

My point is not that Dawkins thinks that religion has caused trouble in the past (it did and we should not deny that), but that he is generalizing to a great extent, such that it even becomes absurd and something to laugh at (sadly). Some wars indeed were/are caused by religious differences, but most religious people are peaceful and do not want any war at all. In my opinion, war is not the result of religion, nor of atheism or agnosticism. It is the result of extremes. Extreme religion (e.g. Taliban extreme 'Islam', Lord's Resistance Army as extreme 'christians' in Uganda) causes a lot of pain and suffering. But I use ' ', because these are not real muslims and real christians. Also, extreme atheism causes similar pain and suffering (e.g. North-Korea, communism in the recent past in the USSR, Pol Pot). So, the common thing is not religion, but the common thing is taking extreme positions. It does not matter whether one is religious or not. It is the extreme position which hurts. And I find it very frightening that Dawkins also takes an extreme position and that so many people are blindly following him. In Dawkins case it is an extreme form of atheism. Of course, Dawkins does not call for a crusade against people who think otherwise. But he does place them in a group of lower-level people. He does not say it explicitly, but you can read it between the lines of all his written texts. Religious people are fools. New age people are fools or charlatans. This kind of thinking is the first step downwards to a more polarized society and to destruction of social cohesion. If the UK would receive a government, which is totally in line with the point of view of Dawkins, would the UK be a good place to live? I'm afraid not. This could become a really suppressive government. It would be immoral to raise your children with your personal faith, so it might even be forbidden. Any other point of view besides the commonly accepted theory of evolution would be forbidden in public life. In the final run we would get thought-police. Such a country would not be better than the current situation of Iran. I think I would prefer Iran. I do not agree with young earth creationists, and also I do not agree with new age points of view. I personally believe that they are not good descriptions of our world, but this does not mean that we should fight such points of view as if we are fighting the plague. We also simply should accept that not all people are thinking scientifically. In fact, the majority does not. Whether they are religious or not, they simply do not think logically and along paths of strict reason. And probably that is good. Some people do and they can become good scientists. Other people don't and they can become good artists (or painters, or whatever..). This line of scientific thinking goes through all groups of people, religious or not. People are different, but not at a lower level. I hope that true scientists, who really want to do good reasoning will open their eyes and think twice about what Dawkins writes and says. He is endangering science, and if many people will follow him, he will even endanger society as a whole.

A nice library can be found here: GMP: http://www.gmplib.org Something like 10000! can be done in a fraction of a second on an ordinary PC. I use this library a lot for all kinds of number theory computations. Also things like Miller-Rabin tests for probabilistic primality tests and many other things can be performed with an amazing speed. This library really is the #1 in multiple precision arithmetic. If you want floating point, then use MPFR, which builds on top of GMP. Links can be found on the webpage.

Dawkins is as religious and narrow minded as the ones he is fighting so stubbornly. To me, he is as narrow minded as many of those young earth creationists. Dawkins does not apply truly scientific methods. He hinders scientific advances, because he has taken his position firmly and he has a belief made of concrete. The problem is not that he has such a concrete belief, the big problem is that so many young scientists are following him as their great hero. In the long run, science will be done harm. Another objection I have is that he does not differentiate in all things he is talking about and which he is supposed to be studying. He is talking in extremes. Again, that is not a good scientific attitude. Finally, he is spreading hatred. He is as fundamentalist as the fundamentalist bible belt christians who tell you 10 ways of how to go to hell, or fundamentalist muslims in the middle east, where women are not more than cooking and cleaning machines and sex objects for the dominant husbands. So, it is time that he shuts up and stops spoiling all those young scientists with his black/white reasoning. True reasoning covers the entire palette of colors, not only black and white. Having only black and white (not even in-between greys) results in a very distorted view. Hence my statement: Richard Dawkins = The Enemy of Reason

Richard Dawkins = The Enemy of Reason

This is the only correct remark in your post .

Swansont is right. The overpotential for formation of oxygen at the anode can be as high as 1 volt and for formation of hydrogen at the cathode it certainly is more than 0.5 volt. So, better to start with at least 3 volts, but a 4.5 volts cell would even be better.

You all are talking about singularities, but most likely there is no singularity inside a black hole. The mathematical model of GR predicts a singularity (solutions for some variables going to infinity), but this does not mean that it really exists. I'm quite confident that the model of general relativity only has approximate validity and that the closer one gets to the center area of a black hole, the worse its approximation is. Just think of it as with Newtonian mechanics. That also is an approximation of reality. It is a VERY GOOD approximation at speeds, densities and gravitation levels we are used to, but the closer one goes to the speed of light, or the more intense gravitation becomes the worse the approximation. At the speed of light, the model of Newtonian mechanics is totally useless. In the same way, the model of GR becomes less and less useful as one is approaching the center area of a black hole more and more. Personally I think that if a good unification of GR and QM is found, then no singularity exists anymore in the mathematical models.

I would call a sphere not a real extension of a circle. A cylinder (with open end caps) could be called more of an extension, it simply is the product [math]S^1 \times L[/math], where [math]L[/math] is a line segment. Another extension could be a torus, being [math]S^1 \times S^1[/math].

Assuming that you mean this is a function from R to R², then this indeed is a transcendental function. Sin(x) and cos(x) cannot be represented as a finite series of powers of x. If, however, you mean the parameterized curve x=cos(t), y=sin(t), then you have an algebraic curve. This is the unit circle, and it can be written as x² + y² = 1. You can have sin() and cos() function in algebraic functions, but then they need to be combined with proper functions, which 'cancel' the transcendentence. A trivial example is f(x) = cos(arccos(x)), but there are less trivial examples, e.g. f(x) = sin(arccos(x)) is algebraic (being part of the unit circle).

http://www.emovendo.net/magnet/pyrolytic-graphite-block.html http://www.emovendo.net/magnet/bismuth-metal-balls-9999-17-ozs.html

If evaluation is like Dave suggests, then the answer is the square root of 2, sqrt(2). The power-repeating function can be written as .....^(x^(x^(x^(x^x)))). Now start evaluating from the right and compute the series z0 = x = sqrt(2) z1 = sqrt(2) ^ z0 z2 = sqrt(2) ^ z1 z3 = sqrt(2) ^ z2 z4 = sqrt(2) ^ z3 z5 = .... etc. You'll see that this converges to 2. It is easy to prove this. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. So, the solution is x = 2^(1/2) = sqrt(2). For general N in the range from 1 to e (2.7181...), the solution of the equation ...^(x^(x^(x^(x^x))))...) = N can be written as x = N^(1/N). For N larger than e, I'm not sure whether this equation has a solution, I have strong doubts on that. I did some further analysis. I think that beyond e (2.71828...), there is a branch-point for x as function of N. The solution breaks down into a set of complex solutions. No real solution exists for N > e. For N < 1, the solution, posted in my previous post remains valid. The solution of that type is valid for the interval <0, e].