Mr Skeptic

The magnetic field lines will always form closed loops.

We can have morality just fine without "free will" (a strange concept if I ever saw one). In fact, a lack of free will might call for harsher punishment. If someone did wrong because they chose to, or because they are inherently evil, either way I see no reason not to punish them. In fact, you can't have punishment if there is "free will" as the purpose of the punishment would be to discourage that behavior but you wouldn't be able to affect the actions of someone with "free will", only of someone who has at least partially deterministic nature. Though punishment is a legal concept, legality is basically codified and enforced morality.

A substitution reaction.

"Either I will roll a 6 the next time I roll the dice, or I will not. Therefore the probability that I roll a 6 is 50%." How about that one? To take it a step further, what are the odds that you can correctly guess the outcome? Are your odds of correctly guessing 50%?

The ideal way to analyze your results would be a mass spectrometer, nuclear magnetic resonance, UV/Vis or IR spectrometry, and such. However those are probably inaccessible to you. You could do a chromatography to separate your results, but that would probably only give you very poor results due to dilution and colorless compounds. While the experiment itself you could do in a science fair, the analysis not so much. Just be sure you understand what the experiment was supposed to prove.

Well, there's two ways to interpret what he said. One is that Paul is under grace and not under the law. He can do anything and not go to hell for it. But even without punishment doesn't mean it is a good thing to do, much as just because I'm allowed to doesn't mean I should drink myself silly. Another interpretation is, especially since the phrase is in quotes even inside the Bible, is that Paul is quoting theists in Corinth who have come to the conclusion that they can do anything and not get punished for it. And he is reminding them that just because they can doesn't mean they should. I'm pretty sure this is the correct interpretation. How do you interpret it then? (it's in 1 Corinthians 6:12 and 10:23) My morality is objective, but my values are not. Anyone who knows my values can deduce my morality, and convince me to change my mind through reasoning if they think of better ways to maximize my values than I do. This is true of not just me, but for everyone, theist or no. Everyone subjectively chooses their own values, and anyone who knows those values can objectively deduce that person's morality. There is, however, no way to objectively choose values, although some people pretend theirs are.

Isn't it more like "propaganda" than "manipulation"? Anyhow, his visualization aid really puts the numbers in perspective. Though as a physicist I already know how to divide . I think we could make a good case that this sort of number should always be given a context when presented to the public, eg 0.0029% of the federal budget rather than 100 million.

Well you could call it "bias" or "knowledge". It depends on the question and the person being asked. For example, "is 1+1=2?" vs "do peanuts kill more people than do terrorists?". The person can always make his odds a 50% chance by flipping a coin. Let's say we're dealing with a prediction so that the outcome isn't known for certain but has a 80% likelihood of being true and 20% likelihood of being false. Then flipping the coin gives you 50%*80% + 50%*20% = 50%*100% = 50%. The same will hold no matter what the probabilities of "yes" or "no" being the correct answer. Your odds are only 50% if you guess with no knowledge, and will be lower than 50% if you have mistaken knowledge and more than 50% if you have accurate knowledge.

Depending on what type of connection you have, if you loosen the connection back to the tank, eventually it will have water leaking out. Unscrew it enough, and it should start leaking but not come off. The flow of water should be fast enough (now based on the water pressure rather than convention), to force any bubbles through. This will be messy and even more messy if the pipe comes off completely. Also dangerous if the water coming out is hot. And it won't work if the water is not under pressure. Actually, if your water source is the part it says top up rather than somewhere in the tank, it would work even better if you can let the water out of the vent instead. And so long as there is a steady inclination upwards towards the vent, just vibrating the pipe should let the bubbles up toward the vent.

Sooo, what you're saying is that if it weren't for progressive taxes, the rich would not exploit/make money off the poor, or not as much? Because the way I learned economics, the objective is to maximize profits and progressiveness of tax rates don't really factor into that (not for microeconomics anyways). While it is true that any tax burden is shared by the producer and consumer, the consumer will still be economically better off if the producer is taxed an extra dollar and the consumer one dollar less and then has to pay back part of that in higher prices. Just not better off by the full dollar.

Generally for guessing a correct answer the probability of people getting it right is different than 50-50, depending on the question and the people. Often it is more than 50-50, but sometimes it is less. For example, "Does the earth orbit the sun?" They can guarantee getting a 50-50 chance of getting the correct answer by flipping a coin and saying yes for heads and no for tails.

If you think current bureaucracies are bad, wait til you see an even bigger one, and one which has no competitors either. But at least it should put an end to official wars, and only leave terrorism and crime.

Just because there are two possibilities doesn't imply a 50-50 chance. This is only true if there are two equally likely possibilities. As for coins, the are usually tested for fairness, although a few coins have had significantly different than 50-50 chance.

Is it really a fair point? If you read lemur's post (now first in this thread) it assigns a motive to swansont, which seems opposite of what his motive really seems to be. But that could just be another grammatical mistake (the post already has one). If you interpret that as having meant that questioning the numbers rather than decrying the premise that the numbers could be used in that way validated that premise (silence implies agreement), it seems like a fair point, except... this argument validates the "silence implies agreement" idea, which itself is a logical fallacy. Best to simply take things at face value and not try to read between the lines when there might be nothing there.

! Moderator Note This thread was split from here: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/51723-koran-burning-the-left-feeding-the-left/page__st__40__gopid__564573

! Moderator Note lemur's argument about swansont's counterargument technique has been moved here: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/51813-is-this-a-good-counterargument-or-does-it-validate-the-premises/page__pid__564116#entry564116 If you feel there is something from there that needs to be said here, say it but make sure it is not in an argumentative tone.

Well there's the "active content", all the latest posts of the day. Hard to find though, it is way at the bottom. Or, you can log out, click view new content, and then log in or bookmark the page. Yes, we do need better lists of our content.

It is just a variation of the sentence, "This statement is false". A variation which removes the self-referential aspect, sort of, by replacing it with reference to a different sentence which then refers back to the first: "The following statement is true" "The preceding statement is false" Having Pinocchio there just complicates matters.

Oh, I think I see what you are getting at. Yes, on occasion collisions will result in one molecule being given a boost in energy, so that the molecules have varying energy and speeds. This is true for any molecule, not just ions. Upon collision, the energy can be used for a chemical reaction. This can be seen in activation energy, the energy barrier a reaction needs to overcome before it can occur and fall to a lower energy state, and how temperature affects the rate of a reaction.

Well certainly plenty of theists have come to the conclusion that everything is permissible. Mostly a type of Christians, I think. After all, all that is needed to forgive every sin is to accept Jesus' sacrifice, right? It really didn't take people very long to figure that out! "Everything is permissible for me" -- Apostle Paul And who is suggesting we simply go with our instincts? In our modern society that would be a recipe for disaster! No, we reason out the best moral codes for our time, rather than rely on instinctive or traditional morals. And the most important morals which we can enforce, we codify into laws.

OK, so children and non-human persons (corporations) are poor at risk assessment. But tell me, which human responsible for these incidents has personally lost out due to their decision?

Well, Gnosticism means a totally different thing than you said; it is definitely not the opposite of agnosticism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism A clarification of atheism: most atheists while not believing in god(s), also do not believe there is no god; this position is called weak atheism or agnostic atheism. The atheists who believe there is no god are called strong atheists, and make most of the noise among the atheists despite being a small proportion. Much time is lost in religious discussions when theists assume their opponent is a strong atheist despite the unlikeliness of that.

Well, you have to think of it in terms of the laws of thermodynamics. The first is conservation of energy, and since thermal energy is a form of energy, it can't just be continuously generated. The second law is that heat flows from hot objects to cold objects, so the ions could only heat up the solution if they started off more energetic than the solution, and in doing so they would lose said energy (after the first few collisions) due to the first law, until they are the same temperature as the solution. Or if you really like, you can do this in terms of particles colliding elastically, but things would get complicated really quickly since there are so many particles.

Back on topic, though the original Koran burnings have been canceled, a few people burnt some anyways. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1311785/Indian-police-kill-18-Kashmir-Koran-burning-riots.html?ito=feeds-newsxml Also, the crazies at Westboro Baptist Church burnt a Koran along with an American flag. On the news/reporting side, "Mohammad Yahya, a protester apparently unaware of Pastor Jones' decision to cancel the burning ceremony, said: 'The Governor [of Logar] must give us an assurance that the church is not going to burn the Koran, otherwise we will attack foreign troop bases in our thousands.' " It's so much more fun to publish things that spark outrage, I suppose.

Yes. Men are physically stronger than women, and this holds true for both the average and the extremes. While you could easily find a woman who could beat you at a given sport, that won't be so at the highest extremes. For some sports, such as the races, it doesn't really matter whether the people compete together or separately, since they can be compared directly. Feel free to do the comparison. We also have separate bathrooms for men and women. Yet more evidence of segregation.