Mr Skeptic

Volatiles are substances that evaporate easily. For the purposes of a flame, anything that has a boiling point lower than the temperature of the fire, will evaporate. If it is flammable, it will both evaporate and burn (so form a flame).

I hate obtrusive ads that are obnoxious and take longer to load than the page I'm trying to read, so naturally I use adblock plus (with the default filterset, EasyList). However, I'd like to contribute to websites I visit, especially those using unobtrusive ads like text-only adsense. I know I can add individual exceptions, but I'd kind of like to have a different approach. Is there a filterset for adblock plus that blocks only obtrusive ads?

Cute. Seems like "speed".

No, the flame is not due to the carbon but due to the volatiles contained. If you burn coke (coal roasted to remove the volatiles), you will get little or no flame. If you burn hydrogen you will get a flame without involving carbon. The heat produced is the energy that is released by forming more or stronger bonds. Almost all chemical reactions will produce heat, especially ones that happen spontaneously. I'm not sure what the exact requirement is to consider it a fire.

What if they attach healthcare to the freedom to buy food (as opposed to growing your own)?

Of course. You can't go about pretending that the market is something that it isn't -- it isn't magic. It only works under certain circumstances. Health insurance is one of the circumstances it doesn't work efficiently. Ergo, there isn't and will never be a good free market solution. Plugging your ears and cheering for the free market will not change the facts. If you disagree, you are more than welcome to show that healthcare does actually satisfy the requirements for the free market to work effectively. Oh, and another one I forgot to mention was the problem of free riders. The person who does not buy health insurance and cannot afford to pay his medical bill but by law is required to be given treatment, is a free rider. The free market cannot deal with free riders. Mostly because the free market is not allowed to -- they cannot control a public resource. Because we refuse to let people die in the streets due to lack of treatment, we have made emergency care a public resource of sorts.

I never said that. Are you concerned about the genetics of my skin cell? My skin cell is indistinguishable from the skin cell of my identical twin, yet it is not "part" of my twin. The only reason it's "my" skin cell and not his, is because it is in my body, and drawing nourishment from my body. Should someone transplant a skin cell from my twin to me, then it will become my skin cell. Should someone transplant a skin cell from someone else to me, it will also become my skin cell (though my immune system may have a different opinion). If that other person then dies, I still have a line of cells derived from them, with their genetics, living in me. But that other person is still dead if his brain is destroyed. Just because there are living human cells from him, does not mean he is alive. What I am saying is that being human and alive does not equal a "human life". A "human life" refers to the whole human, and usually in fact refers to the information contained in their brain. Here's a thought: a zygote contains roughly the amount of information that can be contained on a CD. It has the DNA information, and a few other bits due to its internal arrangement. How much information do you have? How much information do you think it would take to store who you are, everything you know and remember? I define a person as the information and computational capabilities similar to that of a healthy adult human. Whether or not they are in a human body makes no difference to me. Transfer this information to a robot body and you have a robotic person. Transfer this information to a computer simulating an avatar in an imaginary world and you have a person in a virtual world. Replace some of the human cells with another human cells, or an animal's cells, and you have the same person as a chimera. Replace all of their cells with animal cells without losing the information and computational capabilities, and you have a person made of animal cells. Note that my definition allows degrees of closeness to personhood and contains no arbitrary cutoff. I don't think there can be a cutoff because something starts a non-person and eventually becomes a person through a process of development. Yet the coma patient still has a present. He still has a favorite color, a favorite flavor of ice cream -- even if he himself does not remember it. A lot of information is still present. He can still see for example, and do you have any idea how difficult it is to see? Go ahead, try to make a computer see and you will know just how hard. This requires a lot of information and computing power. Also he still has a personality, even if different than in the past. A zygote has none of this, no nervous system, and no future (no more than any other cell that is). And yet before being born, a baby can have consciousness, a personality, music it likes or not, etc.

ecoli: What iNow (and the folks he is quoting) are basically saying, is that health insurance does not satisfy the requirements of things that can be met efficiently by the free market: Perfect Information What we have is very, very poor market information -- advertisement would be completely unnecessary and irrelevant, people wouldn't have to spend hours looking through the various policies but would magically know what all of them contain and choose the best one, etc. No monopoly (aka near-infinite competitors offering indistinguishable products) Each health insurance company offers a different product, and usually has a monopoly on that product. The various policies make each offering a different product, and there isn't necessarily all that strong of a competition between them. Furthermore, switching insurance companies can be nasty as they will refuse to inherit any pre-existing conditions, not to mention the bother of finding a better choice. Rational consumers Nope, consumers buy based on poor knowledge, are influenced by advertising, and don't always read every single word of the policy to make sure that it is a good one. Price is the one thing that is easy to compare, but frequently the low price comes at the cost of certain coverage. Also, you talk of the companies wanting to improve quality as a means to gain customers. This could not be further from the truth. It is the perception of quality that matters. One of the things about health insurance is that for the most part people will be satisfied getting very little of their money back, but the few who really need it happen to be extremely expensive. If the choice is between spending millions on one person's healthcare (and note that they might die anyways), or spending those millions on damage control and advertising, which do you think would most improve the perception of quality?

Depending on the level of "communicate", this could easily be the best option. I assume you don't mean to grant them an artificial general intelligence? Eh, the solution for cell aging. We already know of telomers, and we have a pretty good idea of aging in general. I actually think this is one I'll see within my lifespan (assuming there are ways to extend lifespan in the meantime). There's more to aging than just cell aging however. And cell aging is more than just genetics -- damaged proteins embedded in the nuclear membrane I think were also part of the problem. A gene stabilizer would not help with those. Why not go ahead and call it the "fountain of youth" or "elixir of life"? This seems to me like the biggest breakthrough. We are working on the brain-computer interface, but so far we have a lot of problems due to the electrodes being encapsulated, rejected, provoking inflammation, and all around not lasting all that long. The organic computing thing is a nice bonus, but not even particularly necessary. If you want eternal life, a digital copy of yourself will be more durable than an ageless frail human body, since you can make backups in case of an accident. -- What did you think of my suggestions in post #36?

My skin cell is also undeniably alive and undeniably human. Yet no one seems to consider it a "human life". The question about the pill is not about sperm being sacred -- it is a bit past that. It works in much the same way as an IUD only via hormonal rather than physical means. It allows the egg to be fertilized, just not to attach to the womb. The egg still develops into a morula then a blastocyst over about 5 days, but when it reaches the womb it cannot implant and so cannot grow past the size of the original egg. Basically, it works by not allowing the blastocyst to draw nutrients from the mother. It doesn't actually chase it down to kill it, more of a death by apathy sort of thing. It definitely is not preventing them from becoming a person. They already are/were a person, only unconscious. The "person" might have also already died (if there is enough brain damage then all that makes that person a person is long gone). You can definitely kill the cells and organs, but a person is more than that. In my opinion a person is a particular form of information and computational capability. Think of it this way: you can ask, who is this person? What did they do? What do they believe? What is their personality? What is their favorite food, color, or music? Some of these questions can be asked and answered of a child well before birth, but none of them apply to a zygote nor before the development of the nervous system.

This is true but I think he sometimes overestimates the evidence he provides, and from there can be overly demanding.

Not as simple as that actually. They're just fine with big government telling you what you can do in your bedroom with consenting adults, what you can inject into your body, and in general having big government tell you how to live your life. They just don't want big government doing any form of wealth redistribution.

I considered this before, as the "medium" for an electromagnetic wave and with massless charged particle-antiparticle pairs. However I never went so far as to calculate it. I'd like to know how you got your wave to go at the speed of light however since some of the energy would inevitably have to end up as potential energy for the separated charges. It would seem to me that this would give a lag depending on the density of the particle-antiparticle pairs, and any mass they might have. As for finding the speed of light, before finding it as a solution to Maxwell's equations, people had no idea light was an electromagnetic wave (and I don't think they had a concept of an electromagnetic wave either). It wasn't the actual speed so much as that it was there, that was impressive. You can certainly have fields with no net electric charge (dipoles for example). There's also electromagnetic waves of course, which don't require your particle-antiparticle soup to make sense. The reason I considered a particle-antiparticle soup in the first place was to avoid some action at a distance sort of things, but then I also end up with the field of an electron having to be made of said soup and that really gets annoying. Oh and just wondering, how do you propose we get magnetic fields without magnetic charges?

Well I can see its far bigger than I thought. You're really going to have a problem when you try to holster that one.

Indeed; when I heard of the effect the healthcare bill was having on the stock prices of medical insurance companies, I started worrying.

Theoretical physics is mathy and philosophical, where logical reasoning is used in lieu of experimentation. This may be to avoid time consuming and unnecessary experiments, but also is the only physics that can currently be done on certain topics dealing with things currently beyond our experimental capabilities.

The way it works is that (almost always) forming chemical bonds releases energy. Forming stronger bonds releases more energy than forming weaker bonds, and also trading a weak bond for a strong bond releases energy. The rules governing what makes a strong and weak bond are rather complicated, but in general if you combine a highly electronegative atom (an oxidizer; one toward the top left of the periodic table) with a significantly less electronegative atom (almost all of them) then you get a fairly strong bond. Oxygen is actually the second most electronegative atom (beat only by fluorine) and is highly abundant, making up 21% of our atmosphere. As you might know, heat usually speeds up chemical reactions (more particle collisions and they are more likely to overcome the activation energy). Burning is a chemical reaction that releases heat, and in a sense is therefore self-catalyzing. That is why paper doesn't burst into flames in the atmosphere but will burn nicely once you put a lit match to it. Burning does not require a flame. A flame will occur if there are volatile constituents, such as hydrocarbons.

I was just trying to point out that sometimes well-supported opinions happen to be wrong.

It will still have water soluble proteins in it.

That would likely mean it would rot easily. You might want to keep the microbes separate. All plants are gene-modified. Some are modified both randomly and non-randomly and others entirely randomly. That actually is a benefit. It helps clean out your digestive tract. So non-sterile; it would have to be refrigerated and consumed extremely fresh. I suspect staying on any diet would benefit them greatly. I think the hard part here is not so much the diet as the staying on it. I suspect this product would not taste very good, and that's being optimistic.

And how is religion defined in the law? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedHm, I found this: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Religion The Supreme Court has interpreted religion to mean a sincere and meaningful belief that occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to the place held by God in the lives of other persons. The religion or religious concept need not include belief in the existence of God or a supreme being to be within the scope of the First Amendment.

This was not my intent' date=' and I will now repeat my previous request. Please don't attribute to me things which you personally forecast MIGHT happen. I will add to it, please don't assert as fact what you personally think my motivations MIGHT have been for creating this thread.[/quote']Oh, please. Do you think everyone is that stupid?[/quote']I don't know what to tell you, Phi. That was NOT my motivation. All I can do is repeat this fact. If you don't accept it, then fine, but you're wrong. What can I say iNow? All the evidence we have really does point to that conclusion. Of course it's not enough evidence to make a certain conclusion so to be fair we should word this as an opinion. You have a different opinion, but I must say we have substantiated why we hold this opinion and you have not. Therefore this opinion is better than yours Oh, and I'm pretty sure you have a lot of so called "subjective evidence" to support your opinion, but everyone knows real evidence is objective

I think the problem here is not the part about forcing a broad education at the start (this allows people a taste of a variety of subjects), but rather the ignoring of individual talent. A few things really are important, like literacy, and basic math, and yes, even the hated english classes, yet many students might avoid these if they didn't need to learn them. We are now at the stage where for certain people we could have a very very high quality of self-taught, interest-specific education via resources like the internet, and at a very low cost. Unfortunately, the government seems to think it best not to spend a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the money they spend on education, on a resource that will be freely available to everyone in perpetuity.

You can use other oxidizers instead of oxygen. However normally oxygen is the oxidizer since it is so abundant in the air.

Atheism is no more a religion than theism. These are very broad categories. Some specific flavors of atheism, such as these are considered religions. As for this New Atheism thing, I think it would depend on how you define religion. Wikipedia sayeth: A religion is a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a supernatural agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs. (this is sourced to here) This would make strong atheism a religion, since it is a set of beliefs (that there is no god) about the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe (naturally caused, following natural laws, and with no inherent purpose). As for weak atheism (agnostic atheism), they simply lack a belief in gods, but they do tend to have the same beliefs as strong atheists in regards to the other aspects I mentioned.