Mr Skeptic

What about a system like Slashdot? They allow people a limited amount of points to add or subtract karma from specific posts. The system allows you to select the amount of karma a post must have to be visible by default, and posters can accumulate sufficient karma to add or subtract a point from their posts automatically. However, that system would drastically change the beautiful atmosphere that is at SFN (well, as compared to many other forums I have been at). Perhaps a system where posts in the Religion forum are automatically hidden unless the user has been shown to be mature there. That would quiet people without silencing them completely.

First of all, your H disappears. I would suggest adding water as a product, and possibly H2 or O2 if you need. Then I recommend balancing the least common element here (Cu). Then if you need to balance one of the reactants containing an element you already balanced, you need to multiply all terms containing it (eg both Cu and Cu(NO3)2) by the same amount so it stays balanced.

Right, to balance an equation you need to know the reactants and products. In some reactions, you could deduce some of these. The equation in post 1 though has iron and sulfur disappearing, and chlorine and hydrogen appearing. Probably.

I agree here. Unexpected feedback loops the main trouble with messing around with complex systems, correct?

Why not? Eureko sounds like eureka!, an exclamation of discovery. Discovery is related to knowledge, and knowledge is strength (or at least can prevent people from making a fool of themselves :doh: ). Strength in German is Kraft, which is the name of a cheesy food company. So now I linked your name to cheese

No, that is why I added that it would be an unprovable belief about God that made it a religion. That is, of course, neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to call something a religion, but I believe it applies to Strong Atheism, since they affirm that there is no god and are not willing to look at evidence to the contrary. That is also not a good definition. Science is also a belief system; is science a religion?

Hm, In a logic course I took, the teacher taught me that to negate a sentence in English, you can tack the phrase "It is not the case that ..." in front of it. This is because in English, it is not clear what is a negation and a correct negation could be interpreted differently, resulting in something not quite a negation. For example, compare the phrases: 1. Jim believes in God. 2. Jim does not believe in God. 3. Jim believes there is no God. 4. It is not the case that Jim believes in God. Statement 2 could be interpreted as statement 3 because of how the concept of "not believing" something is frequently used, even though it would be the most obvious negation. A more elegant negation might be, "Jim lacks a belief in God.", but that is not immediately obvious. The negation in statement 4 is crude, but effective.

I'd say that Strong Atheism and Strong Agnosticism are religions (because they believe unproved things about God/gods), but not Weak Atheism or Weak Agnosticism. Also, if you spend time trying to "preach" it, it may be a religion. For SOME people, atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps but spending time mocking those that do collect stamps is a hobby.

The mention of the photoelectric effect is probably as an example of photons having momentum. Others have said that they dislike the terms "rest mass" and "relativistic mass"; misunderstandings like these are why these terms are useful. I don't think I've heard the term "equivalent mass" before, thought. OK, I looked it up and "equivalent mass" is used in all sorts of ways for different subjects. Fred56, I would recommend you replace "equivalent mass" with "relativistic mass" for this particular purpose.

Ever hear of Kraft foods? If I knew what you were talking about, I would probably have a real-world example of related knowledge.

I've thought of that too. The speed of light would have to change as well. Overall, the changing constants may be more scary than an expanding universe, but potentially more interesting as well. If we could figure out why constants might change, we might be able to figure out how they came about in the first place.

Hey, didn't they do a study on that? I think they found that you could guess who would win an election 70% of the time by looking at the candidates for a tenth of a second? Twas a small study, though. Newscientist

Seems like it would be an incredibly powerful insult for troll whannabees. Thanks for the insight!

I never said it wouldn't be a dangerous attitude for them

A random list of feedback systems I have heard about potentially resulting from climate change: + Change in snow/ice cover amplifying heating or cooling. + Melting permafrost releasing additional CO2 and CH4. + There's also some CO2 and rocks containing CO2 trapped in glaciers. + Climate change could kill large quantities of vegetation, resulting in decreased CO2 absorption and increased CO2 release as they decay. + Increased temperatures decrease amount of CO2 absorbed by oceans. ? Increased heat can increase moisture -- water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but additional cloud cover will increase albedo. - If the ocean currents are stopped by climate change, very bad things happen to both ocean life and land life. - Desertification will increase the amount of sand blown to sea; this will provide an iron source for algal blooms since large portions of the ocean are iron deficient. - Lengthened growing season will allow some plants to better absorb more CO2. - Increased ice cover will reduce the amount of CO2 absorbed by oceans allowing volcanic CO2 to accumulate, whereas decreased ice cover will increase CO2 absorbed by the ocean (relevant to ice ages). --- There's feedback loops all over the place. These might not be correct, and are certainly not exhaustive. If we somehow activate a powerful positive feedback loop, we will regret it. This is actually what scares me about global warming, not the warming itself.

Anything hot will emit light. If you can find the emission spectra information about a molecule, you should be able to identify it using a spectrometer, as well as find out what color it would look if it were visible.

The dye should be quite inert compared to the peroxide. But wouldn't it be much easier and perhaps cheaper as well, to simply buy hydrogen peroxide? As grifter said, to check whether you have hydrogen peroxide you can put some raw potato pieces in it (hydrogen peroxide is highly toxic so aerobes have enzymes to break it down, which will produce oxygen bubbles). Hydrogen peroxide itself looks much like water; it should not have an odor or be viscous.

The alkali metals have a very definite emission spectra visible to the naked eye because they produce light at nearly exactly the same wavelength, so that you don't need to diffract the light into components to see what is there. I don't know about the alkaline earth metals, though. Most elements have emission spectra that are either not visible or of several colors so you couldn't tell by eye.

The balrog would say, "F. U."? Or did you want a balrog to reply politely?

The flux of chicks through an egg shell when it hatches is equal to the number of chicks enclosed by the egg?

I'm no chemist, but you may be able to solve this like you would a set of equations using the matrix method. That may be more trouble than it is worth, though. Perhaps it would help if you solved the more uncommon element first?

Life has a few "purposes." One of life's goals is a local reduction of entropy (reduce it's own entropy). Another of life's goals is to produce offspring (create more lifeforms).

So things that are wrong in some circumstances could be morally right under unusual circumstances?

Add up each individual element. There should be as many atoms of each element on both sides.

Just remember to keep the energy formulas for massless particles separate from the energy formulas that allow for massive particles and you will be fine