Mr Skeptic

First, note that your equation starts with 2 molecules of H2N3, so either divide the whole equation by 2 or your final answers will be double (you can divide later if you prefer). In any case, gas pressure is related to the number of gas molecules rather than their composition -- a big gas molecule is pretty much equivalent to a small one. So all you have to do is consider how many molecules you end up with compared to how many you started with.

I didn't say objective reliability. How long do you think that Rush can hide from the authorities? He'd get dragged to jail in no time, and fail to release the info.

No, it will appear as some color or another. To get a vague idea of what can be seen with two color receptors, take a paint program and just make several combinations of only two of the three colors. To get an even better idea, you'd need two colors that are more opposite each other, but that would be more complicated to do.

Rush has no practice, no reputation for reliability, and most importantly, no information to leak.

But you almost never can. For example, if you give me a bunch of gibberish it could still be, for example, a lottery number, a telephone number, a message encrypted via a one-time-pad. It is the context and not the contents that determine whether it has meaning. In case you're wondering, tautologies are always true. Calling something circular logic doesn't mean anything when you don't know the meaning of circular logic. Well, it turns out you are wrong. A counterexample is a genetic algorithm. What a genetic algorithm does is start with random data and from simple rules weed out the least useful of that data. OK then but it would be best to be clear from the start what exactly we are talking about. I'm sure we agree on what "digitally encoded" means. What about "coherent", "functional", and "information"? And since we are no longer talking about Shannon information, please avoid using theorems related to Shannon information for this definition of yours. And as to my questioning the relevance, if we are going to use this to talk about life, it would be kind of useless to define the above if it does not describe the information contents of a cell. For example, "digitally encoded" does not match.

The difference is in the number of genes. If you have one gene for color with two different alleles, you can get 2 or 3 different phenotypes (dominant, recessive, and co-dominant). For example the genotypes might be RR, Rr, rr. Whereas if there are multiple genes involved, presumably each with more than one allele, you can get lots and lots of variety. In this case the genotypes might be AABbCCDd, aaBBCCDd, AaBbccDd.

A liquid culture medium.

And this is true for a "specific" god as well, such as the God of the Bible. For example some interpret the Bible literally while others treat it largely metaphorically, and these camps often have various different ideas of what God is like.

PhDwannabe, you seem to be our local expert on IQ tests. I've noticed that most online IQ tests are absolute rubbish. Do you know any good ones?

He's an unpaid volunteer working a dangerous job to whom people go to when they want documents leaked. His qualification, as far as I can tell, is "the best there is". To me this just shows how dumb some people are.

The expansion is always faster than the speed of light, if the two points in question are far enough apart.

No, you need to go study Newton's laws of motion again. If I pull on a string I exert a force and there is an equal and opposite force pulling the other direction (the tension of the string in this case). For gravity the equal and opposite force is the gravitational effect of the second body on the first.

Just means both sides hate you Some people consider atheist and theist to be mutually exclusive. Some people use atheist, agnostic, and theist to be mutually exclusive, with the atheist part referring to strong atheists and agnostic the middle ground for those uncommitted. Methinks Ophiolite and ydoaPs are using different definitions.

My two cents: 1) Well, DOH! 2) No, he didn't

Looks like someone here wants to vaporize our solar system

Part of evolution is eliminating unfitness. Either within species or between species. Also sometimes species evolve to be completely dependent on a particular environment (see islands and predators for example), and then when the environment changes they might go extinct.

Antimatter is not the opposite of matter.

Science is all about predicting things. Since there is no predictive value to God,* whether he exists or not is irrelevant. Given the two theories with identical results (laws of nature, vs laws of nature and there's a god somewhere too), most scientists will chose the simpler of the two. *If god had predictive value then you could disprove god by the failure of said predictions to occur.

Agreed. But there are already machines up there, such as a space treadmill, for putting pressure and exercising. Also your idea will not get rid of one of the problems of astronauts involving internal blood pressure differences. It need not be very far at all. I suggest you go to an amusement park and check out some of the centrifugal force based rides, or a playground with a merry-go-round, or find any centrifugal force based entertainment. In any case, the weight and cost of a wire is very low even for several meters of it.

Some of the "revealed truths" of the Bible turned out to make false predictions (eg the genetic diversity predicted by the Flood story). However you are correct -- we know nothing, and there is no way to know anything. However, certain assumptions have proven to be very effective at predicting the things we will observe. Of course we can't guarantee that, for example, stuff won't start falling upwards tomorrow, but that doesn't mean considering that possibility has any benefit. Much as I dislike the necessity of postulates, there doesn't seem to be any alternative. If you prefer, you can think of our statements as having an implicit (if postulates, then) before it, so that we can in fact make true statements.

For me too, so long as this definition isn't used out of the context of messages. How can you call something a dog if you can't ever tell the difference between it and a cat? If you call such a thing a cat then it might as well be a cat, and if you call it a dog it might as well be a dog. Well, that you got something backwards (shannon information and compressibility). My words function in informing humans of things. They also function as part of several compute programs. Yet another function of my words is to change the pattern of light pixels on computer screens. The point is that Shannon information can be created via random processes. The event of which the message informs is a random event. What is the relevance of this? It looks an awful lot like word soup for playing "gotcha" with.

Philosophy is the search for the truth. I can save you a few decades of schooling: the answer is we haven't a clue, but at least we can prove we exist in some form or another because that is necessary for thinking. You'll also learn about making convincing arguments when you don't know what you're talking about (ie, how to convince people about your premises, or from given premises reach a conclusion). This latter aspect will be more useful -- it will let you ponder joblessness, for example. Science is the search for practical truth, and by practical I mean having predictive value as to what observations we expect to make given certain circumstances. Impractical truth is not part of science (for example, whether reality is just a computer simulation, whether there exists an invisible pink unicorn, whether there is a god that has no predictable effect on the universe). Some questions just aren't part of science, but for the most part those questions don't really matter.

For the formula: [math] \lim_{n\to\infty} 1-\left(1-10^{-41000}\right)^{n}=1-0=1[/math] Translation: Suppose you want to find the probability that an event occurs at least once, given it has a probability of p per try to occur and n tries. As stated it is a nasty thing to calculate, but it turns out that it is really easy to calculate how likely it is for n events to occur in a row. The probability that your event does not occur is (1-p), and the probability that it does not occur n times in a row is (1-p)^n. This is the probability that the event did not occur given n tries, so to get the probability that it did occur, you subtract this from 1, for 1 - (1-p)^n. The limit part is formally necessary because infinity is not a number, but taking limits solves this. As it turns out, raising a number who's absolute value is less than 1 to a large power makes the number smaller and smaller, and the limit of this done infinitely many times is zero. The chance that it won't happen at least once is zero, which leaves the probability that it will happen at least once as 1. For this formula: [math] \lim_{n\to\infty} \left(10^{-41000}\right)\left(n\right)=\infty[/math] Translation: This formula is sometimes used by the lazy to approximate the value in the above formula, and works OK under certain constraints. So for example if you roll a 6 sided die once it has 1/6 chance of landing on 1 at least once, if you roll twice it is about 2/6 and three times about 3/6. You may be familiar with this formula in this context, and noticed it will give nonsensical results for certain values (such as rolling 7 times, or infinity). The proper thing to do in this case is to use the previous formula, which will give probabilities of 1/6, 11/36, 91/216, and as you can see will never give values above 1. The proper meaning of this formula is to give the expected average number of results, for example if you roll a dice 60 times you expect to get 10 1's. I used both formulas, the first to give you the probability an event with probability of 10^-41,000 happening at least once in an infinite universe (it's 1), the second to give you the approximate number of such events (infinite). As you say, whether the universe is infinite or not is currently speculation. That, however, does not mean that you can discount it because your argument depends on the premise that the universe is finite. So if you say that whether the universe is finite or not is speculation, congratulations, you have said your own argument consists of nothing more than speculation upon speculation. So unless you can prove that the probability of life forming entirely by chance is exactly zero, or that the probability of the universe being infinite is known to be less than 10^-41,000, this disproves your argument. It goes without saying that the probabilities for life by the actually proposed mechanisms are much much higher than via pure chance, but that's not really relevant to my argument (just for the folks who are wondering why we're talking about 10^-41,000 -- it's because for this argument the actual probability isn't really relevant).

So in summary, you've been carefully following someone, and asking around online, to see if they are being too obsessive about their health?

The main limits to efficiency for a coal plant are the maximum temperature reachable, and also that some heat is lost by exhaust gas. A nuclear reactor, for example, uses the same steam parts but its temperature is limited by safety and the melting point of materials. If you did this, you'd have to waste tremendous amounts of energy cramming air into your burner. Note that the reaction C + O2 --> CO2 leaves the number of gas molecules unchanged, and so any increase in pressure is due to the change in temperature. For something as small scale as yours, there is no way that the gains will overcome the losses.