Mr Skeptic

To do the siphon passively, you'd have to do it by filling the tube with water and holding the ends shut until it is in position. Otherwise you have to suck or push the fluid up it. However, if you use capillary action, the water will go upwards due to surface tension, for a limited distance. I suggest using water (maybe with food coloring) rather than syrup, since it would be closer to what goes on in the tree. Syrup would be much too thick. So here's what I suggest: get a glass very full of water. Get a piece of paper towel, and fold or roll it into a thin long strip. Then place one end into the water, and the other end hanging over the edge of the glass. Do this at home to see what it does. Note that capillary action is one of the aspects of how trees work, so I would think this would be even better than a siphon.

It's just a signal for your body to go into overdrive.

It's certainly interesting that most of the New Testament was written by someone who was a volunteer Christian hunter. That and how different his teachings are from the others.

You'd certainly look weird doing that (unless there were physical objects rather than projection). I think that if the presenter doesn't want to share his slides then he probably wouldn't appreciate you taking pictures, whether or not he says anything. As for flash, if you took pictures of a projection with flash, you'd be pretty disappointed.

I think lots of religious people will be annoyed at you claiming that God does not have morality.

Miracles are good things that someone believes happened that he is sure there is no explanation for. To that person, that is a miracle, and in that sense miracles exist.

You need to know what it means to plot one thing vs another. Find out what the slope of the graph represents, then the answer will be clear to you.

Moral relativism is one thing; factual relativism quite another. Wrong again, what you had the possibility of becoming was decided long before that, along many steps over billions of years. The particular line of cells that was to become you went through a long evolutionary pathway, accumulating mutations until developing into humans and some of the genetic variability of them. Even if you wish to limit that to only humans, there is the process of gametogenesis, whereby the cells of your mother and father formed a sperm and egg via meiosis, at that point determining the possibilities for your genetics to about 1 in a million (approx for the number of sperm in a group) times 1 (the egg) (so total 10^6 or so). This out of all the possibilities, about 1 in 2^1000 or about 10^300, of each sperm and egg that could have been made. Why choose the point that limits the possibilities by 1 in 10^6 rather than the one that limits these possibilities by 1 in 10^294? And even so, both the above also occurred for each of your ancestors, so that that was part of what limited the possibilities of what you could become. And then after fertilization, your genetics continues to change. Certain things will forever change the genes that are expressed (part of epigenetics). And then, you are not only your genes but what you are is a product of the environment as well. Different nutrition will change some of your attributes. Different education will change other of your attributes. So will chance events. Some of these things will have a larger effect than others, but roughly half of what you are will be determined more by your environment than by your genes. Then I would consider you both alive and human, just not a person.

Sure, but (if we assume an even distribution among the things the author mentioned in the same group but without percentages), the tea party rally would have for every two signs about the subject of the rally (ie, taxes), one sign about Obama's race, religion, or citizenship, and two signs about Obama. Or, if you consider the rally to have had multiple subjects, the most popular subject was being angry about Obama, and Obama's race, religion, or citizenship half as popular as the other subjects.

Death is a complicated thing, and I don't think anyone knows quite the difference between alive and dead. Most cells need constant maintenance, and without it they would become irreparably damaged. Some cells can go into a resting state where they can stay dormant for thousands or perhaps millions of years... but revive when given water and nutrients.

If you want to reverse the siphon, you need to lift the other end so it is higher than the first. I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Are you talking about capillary action, or a siphon? Could you explain it better?

I'd have to ask, why is there even one sign about Obama's race, religion, or citizenship, in a rally about spending? These things have nothing to do with spending, and the rally's organizers should really take them all down. That 6% such signs were left even after the organizers kicked out protesters carrying particularly inappropriate signs does say something. 25% of the signs were still about Obama himself. Only about half the signs were even vaugely about what the rally was about. That's just a recipe for disaster. These are people who, as a group at least, don't like Obama/Democrats/the government, and spending/taxes/deficit/liberty/socialism/role of government are just some of their main points (they don't have a main point). If those are even vaguely evenly distributed, that would make signs about Obama more prevalent than the ones about the point of the rally, or equal to the various points of the rally. They'd be better off getting rid of most of these other protestors, especially if they're just tag-alongs. A 10-25% or so of these people but with a clear message would do a much better job.

Leptons (such as electrons) are lighter than quarks, and also considered point particles. Also, leptons do not have to come in triplets or matter/antimatter pairs. So I'd say leptons are smaller. And even lighter than that are neutrinos, which are so light we can't even be sure they have mass (but have theoretical reasons to think they do). And photons are massless. It could be that our so-called fundamental particles are themselves made up of other things. There's theoretical reason to think they aren't, but they could be if our theories are wrong. So far, there is no evidence I can see for that, but it will never be possible to say for certain. And then there's string theory.

But the sperm and egg existed before fertilization. That particular milestone is simply the elimination of the opportunity of all the other sperm. It is possible to take an individual sperm and put it at the egg. Doing it this way shows quite clearly that the information was there beforehand. Incidentally, this way the sperm can be examined for defects and even the sperm's chromosomes. This can be done to prevent certain genetic diseases. But if we choose the sperm, we are choosing which out of a million humans to make... yet not all of them can be made. Do we then hold a funeral for a million humans who could have been? Do we hold a funeral every time a girl has a period? Why is it that before fertilization is considered a valid time to end these lives, but afterward it becomes murder? Fertilization is the starting point of one or more genetically distinct humans... No one has yet answered my question (from elsewhere), "If life starts at fertilization, then how many lives start at fertilization?" Remember, identical twins are from the same fertilized egg, and also we can artificially create twins by splitting the zygote very early in its development. Because what makes us special is in our brain, without that brain there is nothing but what might someday be -- and that can be taken back as far as you like, well before fertilization.

It begins about 3.8 billion years ago, and hasn't stopped since. If you mean when does a person start, it is when they have a conscious brain, and a person ends when their brain becomes unconscious for the final time.

So then religion is the only reason you can think of not to have abortions? But how could you ever convince someone who does not believe in your religion?

I think we would have noticed that, by adding up the momentum of the photons released when matter/antimatter collide. That's how we found the neutrino (for neutron decay).

Hm, I think you'd want to have custom made hardware for that. Or at least use a military/NASA version. Part of your problem would be that the way the chips work is we make them ultrapure with two different contaminants, and we make that as small as possible. But the contaminants are more or less dissolved and can migrate a little, even with a solid. But I think if you go with NASA/military hardware, and keep your spare parts in a very cold freezer, they should keep long enough. Of course if Moore's law keeps up, 100 years from now your computer will get beaten by a fancy calculator... Also, in the future we are probably going to change our basic microchip technology, for example if we go with nanotubes they probably won't have a problem with diffusion.

OK, your siphon has to be such that the bottom end is below the water level. To get it to function, you need it to be full of liquid to below the level of your pool of liquid. That way the weight of the liquid on that side is greater than on the other side, and it pulls it up and in. If there are bubbles, you'll need it to be a little extra below, since the bubbles are light and stretchy. The two ways I know of to get a siphon going are to suck on the bottom end like a straw, or to dunk the whole thing in liquid and hold your thumbs over the ends. Note that if you dunk it in water (because the syrup is sticky) you'll need it to be a little extra below the syrup because the syrup is probably more dense. Basically, what I'm saying is have a lot of extra room below your pool of syrup, in case you need it. This will also make the siphon drain more quickly, though that might not be what you want for the demonstration.

Personally, I think the Democrats should have just gone ahead and let the Republicans filibuster, rather than cringing at the very mention of it. I'm really annoyed about how our clown/congresscritter hybrids have changed the rules of the filibuster to make it more convenient for themselves at the expense of the American public. Anyhow, let the Republicans filibuster and people would realize just how obstructionist they were being. Too late for that now, of course. Anyhow, the Dems failed to live up to the promises/expectations, which of course just angered the Republicans for having made them, and disappointed the Democrats. So now their support is weak and their opposition strong. Personally, I think we might be better off kicking out all our congresscritters and replacing them with random people off the street, but that's just my opinion. Maybe some well-timed revelations or rallies could turn the tide though. I wonder what the effect of the Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive will be; they are timed for just before the election and could end up dominating the news.

Well, you could take a voice recorder and ask for a copy of his powerpoint. There's also taking notes, but they're not teaching a class so they're not going to pause for you to write down notes. If you know what the seminar is about, maybe briefly study the subject so you're more familiar with it. But really there's no good solution.

But it's not non-existence vs existence. Usually people who choose not to have a genetically sick child will still have a child, either via a donor, adoption, screening of sperm, or screening of zygote. What if your parents had used birth control, huh? Oh wait, they probably did until they decided to have a child.

Well tautologies aren't totally unhelpful. Consider the mathematical theorems, for example.

Not so fast, mercury levels is not the same thing as trophic level. Compare: But the juveniles are too small to eat. Because the dominant plant in the ocean is microscopic, most of our seafood is going to eat zooplankton and so be at the 3rd trophic level or higher. So baleen whales are really low on the food chain, much lower than adult tuna, and comparable to sardines.

OK, nice and simple: they boil at different temperatures, and after they boil they can be condensed so you get it back.