Mr Skeptic

Not necessarily. It could have just been a local variation -- for example your breathing and sweating should raise the humidity in your vicinity and so lower the dew point. Not everywhere in a forecast area will the temperature and humidity be exactly the same.

hoosier, are you willing to experiment? Try drinking a solution of 1 teaspoon salt in 1 quart of water. Does that make you feel sick?

Part of the point though is that the death penalty is very convenient for certain types of governments. In the US, the death penalty is so inconvenient that lawyers frequently pursue life in prison instead.

That sounds more like an ozone layer depletion. But first the other 3 angels need to do their thing.

But gods aren't a pattern -- they're whimsical, changing their mind all the time and doing different things. Nature is what does patterns. Patterns --> natural laws.

I wouldn't call creation by an omnipotent a theory, not even a hypothesis. It would have to make predictions. No predictions --> no hypothesis. Its just useless nonsense. "A literal interpretation of the Bible" would be a hypothesis, since it makes predictions (wrong predictions such as the genetics restrictions Noah's ark would require). But the nature of that thread is different than from most. It looks to me as the posts on that thread are speaking more on behalf of SFN than saying their own thing.

Then I suggest you try reading the question first. I too have great difficulty answering a question I haven't read.

No, I don't know whether I really exist. I mean, that I can think means that there is something to me, but I can't prove this isn't a dream, simulation, etc. I assume all this is real, since it doesn't really make any difference (unless there is a flaw somewhere that would allow me to escape to the real reality).

I agree with Ophiolite. There can't be inaccurate claims in that sort of thread. It should be edited to add the proper context for that figure or something -- only if it is wrong, of course. But forufes, while burden of proof may be on whoever makes the claim it is not realistic to expect them to support it even after they are gone. Remember, you are making a claim too (that he is wrong, not just that you don't believe him) and from that claim an unusual demand -- that we edit someone's post from 5 years ago.

It smells more of the graceful art of politics, of saying things that might be technically correct but using them to mislead. For example, almost everyone things it is incredibly unlikely to have life (or even worse, a specific life-form) arise by pure chance. Which is why no one believes that. Life is not the only thing that can self-replicate, you know. However, to calculate the odds of life forming by pure chance would require one to know every single possible form of life there could possibly be, which is impossible. So, generally these calculations are for a specific life, and by necessity absurdly smaller than for life in general, and even then it is addressing a false argument, since no one proposes a pure-chance process.

What I did? Or did you have an equation?

[math]\frac{x+1}{x-2}-\frac{x-1}{x+2} = \frac{6x}{x^2-4}[/math] You multiply the top and bottom of each fraction by the bottom of the other and then you can add them together. But to "solve" requires an equation, and all you have is half of an equation.

The nastiest disease I am familiar with is Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, which results in, among other things, an urge to self-harm. This urge is not limited to such things as biting off one's lips, tongue, fingers, etc, gouging out own eyes, and other forms of only physical self-harm. No, it also includes urges such as to reject treats, act hatefully to those they love, that sort of thing too. There is no cure. That this sort of thing can happen would show either evil or incompetence on the part of any designer we might have.

Doing "nothing" also uses energy (at your basal metabolic rate, or higher if you're awake). Trouble is that then people eat and that counteracts the energy their body uses to maintain itself and do stuff.

Think of it this way: suppose that you were entirely blind, but had a near-limitless supply of tennis balls. You could "see" by throwing tennis balls at objects and seeing how they bounce off. If you were trying to "look" at a light-weight object, you'd move it around a lot because the tennis balls are fairly heavy. A similar problem arises with the very small things: photons have momentum, so they will nudge the items that you are trying to observe with them. Even worse, to get a clearer picture you need to use a small enough "ball", but the shorter the wavelength the higher the momentum. This limits how well you can observe an object, since you either will not be able to tell exactly where it is or where it is going, and trying to do so will nudge it. One of the more popular models of quantum mechanics describes things as being in a certain wavefunction, and observing the wavefunction collapses it. Thus, observers such as people, sunlight, cameras, or rocks will collapse wavefunctions if the interact with a particle.

It is a rough estimate of the probability that the universe is infinite (we don't yet know). Given an infinite universe, now calculate the chance that at least one life form formed by a process with a probability to occur of 1 in 10^41,000 (your numbers): [math]Probability = 1 - (1 - 10^{-41,000})^{\infty} = 1 - 0 = 1[/math]. On average you would expect there to be [math]10^{-41,000} \infty = \infty[/math] life forms forming by said method. So the probability that some life formed by such an unlikely method is the same as the probability that the universe is infinite -- which I estimated at ~50% -- and the number of such life that would exist in that case would be inifinte. Feel free to look up more accurate numbers, but know that they will be much closer to 50% than you will be comfortable with. The numbers may instead refer to the curvature of the universe; in that case the closed universe is finite and the flat and open are infinite. The reason I would not expect to ever find such life forms is that our observable universe is quite finite due to the expansion of space, and in any case if we did find a life form it would most likely have been formed by a much more likely method, such as one of the current theories of abiogenesis.

They feel nothing because all parts of them and their spaceship are being accelerated by exactly the same amount. You only feel a force if different parts of you are being accelerated to different degrees and your internal body forces are acting to make up at least some of the difference. For example when standing, your leg bones and muscles counteract the gravitational pull on your head, the skin under your feet is under some pressure, etc. (Not entirely true as there are a few bumps on earth and earth's gravitational field that can be measured by specialized and very sensitive probes)

Even if the economic mess we're in is Bush's fault, it is now Obama's responsibility (as far as any presidents are concerned -- I think that too much of the blame and credit goes to presidents while others skulk in the relative shadows doing their thing). Now Obama has lately claimed to be in charge of the economy (the rose-tinted forecasts of economic recovery) and that he has not achieved his stated forecast is indeed his fault.

No, I would not expect to see an "end" of any kind. And end of space, whether in this universe or another, just doesn't make much sense to me. Infinite space or space looping back on itself makes more sense.

Well it makes sense -- the brain surgeon is smarter, right?

Firstly, I see no reason to believe there is a universal consciousness, whatever that means. Perhaps in the far future a large portion of the matter throughout the universe will be dedicated to computing. However, such a universal consciousness will run into a problem -- the limited speed of light, and after that the expansion of the universe. Even if sentient beings from throughout the entire universe decided to build interconnected computing devices, these would have a problem that communicating with far-away parts of itself would have a lag of at least 1 year per lightyear. Being unaware of what you are thinking for a billion years seems like it could cause problems. Worse than that, because of the expanding universe some portions of the universe will be cut off from each other, so that communication from one side to the other would be impossible. This would preclude a universal consciousness, since it can't be universal.

And yes, a lot of equations require you to use an absolute scale. The reasons we don't use an absolute scale are both historical and convenience (because people don't really like all their temperatures to be 3 digits long).

Except its velocity might be more like 15,000 mph -- and yes, you can deflect that by crashing something into it. All it needs is a little tiny nudge in the right direction (if it is in fact going to hit earth), and it will be deflected.

Not only that, but we are changing the direction life evolves in. Many species have new adaptations for dealing with city life, such as louder songs for birds.

How so? We haven't had much success getting very ancient DNA. This seems rather like a common misunderstanding. Modern bacteria and modern humans are just as old and just as evolved -- although we humans may have had more changes. Because of the way eukaryotes work, we have more DNA than prokaryotes or viruses. As for junk, there is always a limit to how much junk DNA one can have, since eventually it would become a significant drain of resources and subject to selection pressure for deletion. Also, much non-coding DNA appears to have some function or another, so be careful of the term junk DNA -- it is often used interchangeably with non-coding DNA and may not be referring to actual junk.