DrP

Attacks on ideas are not meant personally. There is a lot of stuff that you listed an each point could be addressed, but it would take a while. As it is a science site I think the protocol is to take each claim, like for example the discussion we had about prophetic dreaming, and address them one at a time. You explain your reasons for believing the way do, which is fine and right, but then others are entitled to pick apart the claims and ask questions and probe into any other possible explanations and ask for proof of any supporting claims made. It isn't personal. If there is no actual evidence provided for something that you believe, or that evidence is lacking, then you can surely expect challenges. As you can challenge anything anyone else has stated as a fact. They aren't mean't to insult you. If we miss something that you said that you think proves your point when asked for evidence, you can re-point us to the evidence with a short simple sentence. No disrespect here - but any number of things from you last post #46 could be challenged, if asked for just one piece of evidence to support a particular claim then it needs to be backed up with a short sharp sentence and maybe a reference rather than an essay which bring in many other claims that in there own right need support with their own discussion. So with a statement like that one could respond by picking one of the claims from the list and asking for supporting evidence... without expecting you to be offended by the question or the request for evidence and then one should be free to critique that evidence if it is not clear or suspected to not be fully supported beyond word of mouth or opinion. I won't do that here as the thread is about consciousness, but that I suppose is relevant to a lot of the discussions.

1 - I don't think I directly said you were a liar, I think I said you bent the truth in that other thread about placebos, which is a little different. I'm not sure if you did it intentionally either. 2 -I also over reacted a little in that other thread when we were talking about Randi. Maybe a little embarrasment was felt, but not for the reasons you stated. 3 - This topic does interest me because of some of the experiences I've had and beliefs I once held. I don't claim to be a brilliant debater - we have written a lot and maybe I have over looked something. There are so many points to discuss it might be best to stick to one at a time, or maybe not at all. Regarding the dream - it IS pretty amazing when stuff like that happens.... I know..... but that's just it, stuff like that happens. 4 - I am able to change my mind on things.. I wrote this a while back. http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/92254-a-statement-of-faith/?hl=%2Bstatement+%2Bfaith Peace out.

So your dream was wrong then - you didn't visit the station. Whatever - I agree with your other statement - our conversations are over.

The man ensures people are tested under strict scrutiny to ensure they can't cheat - the tests are clearly fair, the participants are clearly cheats or dolts - which can been seen easily by watching his show. Sorry - I over reacted a bit there- stressy and at work.

sciencemadness.org is a good place for to ask questions regarding amateur chemistry.... although they get a little hung up on energetics for my liking, they make some pretty coloured stuff and nice crystals. They also have good ideas for problem solving and will probably be keen to help a beginner if you abide by the standard safety rules of being a chemist.

regarding Randi - I have seen many of those vids where people have tried and failed to claim the $1M. Every time it seems he gets a team of specialists in the field to make sure the test is fair. I think he is great - to say "nobody can prove anything to him" is ridiculous - the reason they can't prove anything to him is because they are a bunch of charlatans and their 'special powers' are just parlour tricks and cons... if not, then why haven't they claimed the money? He is open to being shown evidence of these extraordinary things that people claim.... no-one has EVER proved their claims.... why is that? ANS: because they are full of crap.

Yea - it's frustrating isn't it - I've said before about the person that claimed video evidence of paranormal activity.... there was a shop video of a bag of sugar floating off a shelf and then falling. This person was convinced it was a ghost. Our local paper reported a week later that the shop owner had made the video as a hoax for publicity... I showed this to the 'believer' and they just claimed that the shop keeper had been paid to say it was a hoax or that he was lying.... even though there was an interview with him saying it was a publicity stunt they still were convinced the vid was absolute evidence of the paranormal.

A toilet seat that doesn't touch your dong when you sit down.

Even if it were true then so what? We are all so close to being bananas or mice or chimps that it shouldn't really matter at all who is more related to what. I expect the difference between a chimp and a Nigerian and a blonde blue eyed German will be so slight that anyone who tries to say that one is superior to the other is just being a dick. We are here, we are alive and we are learning and progressing as a human race.

What about some kind of autoclave then?

Out of interest Dave Moore - which nuclear plant was it and when was this leak? I bet that was a bit of a drama being evacuated from the nuclear plant. Did they screen you for radiation? It must have been in the papers too.... "School trip to nuclear plant cancelled due to reactor breach!".... unless they covered it up of course.

You were scheduled for as trip to the nuke plant right? .. So it is not unusual to have a dream about it the night before. If you are dreaming about a nuke plant (brought on by the fact that you have a visit planned the next day) it is not then unreasonable to assume your brain creates a drama about a leak. The fact then that there was a leak is really uncanny..... but not impossible. It happens all the time. Then... we have to actually believe you. You have bent the truth before on here - we've know you for just over a week or so and have already seen you bend the truth several times, so why should we believe you now? There are several possible explanations for your earthquake dreams... some more likely explanations than others. You seem bent on believing it is precognition.... most probably it isn't. ........ .. . ... Then there is the matter of memory... I have 2 stories from when I was a kid. One about a knife, the other about an air gun and a bird. I share these stories sometimes and have done several times with my father. These days, although I don't see him that much, HE is the one who know tells these 2 stories as if they were his own. His memory (OR MY memory) has changed events to make the experience his own. He know tells people the story of the knife and that of the gun and bird as if it happened to him as a child..... even though it was me. I haven't really challenged him about it - he doesn't take criticism or correction too well and I can't be bothered to go through it all.... some of his other claims have changed too in recent years. I ask him about something he said years back and he doesn't even remember it or it he argues something completely different.

Depends on the glass.

Of course they had language... even if it was grunts, erggs and urggs. It then evolved into the many languages we have worldwide.

Was it cold when it was put in the steamer? Was it a thin glass mug? The glass here that John suggests would be much thicker and wouldn't be going through fast temperature changes.... extreme temperature changes throughout the year, yes, but slow changes that wouldn't cause it to shatter.

Well if you are changing the question to human ears then the whole thing falls apart anyway no? - human ears? In space?

I have had these experiences too (as I wrote above).. I was sleeping in the afternoon on secondment in Reading. The day before a friend and I had visited a sickly person in a home. I had a very vivid dream of meeting my pal there after waking and we were to see the old guy again... I woke up, went to the home and walked up exactly the same time as my pal came from the other direction. I was once reading through some bible verses and I was interested to know what parts of the old testament prophesy the birth of Christ.. I let the pages fall open and it fell to Daniel... prophesying the birth of Christ, then it fell to a verse in Isiah, then it fell to 4 other references in the OT that talk of / predict the birth of Christ.... that's 6! 6 in a row... I think there might only be 6 references that prophesy his birth idk, but I got all 6 - one after the other at random by letting the pages fall open. I once performed an exorcism in a student house that they all felt was haunted... I prayed in their kitchen for a sign to guide us, to let us know if we were barking up the wrong tree or if indeed the house was haunted - as soon as I asked the question the alarm on their oven went off. They all panicked - I told them not too as it could be 1 of 3 things.. 1- a coincidence that the thing went off just at the right time, 2 - God letting us know it was a ghost in the house, or 3 - something else entirely that we do not know. The girls panicked and said the alarm had never gone off before and that it was a ghost. I said they should not worry because if it was a ghost then God would not have told us it was there unless I could do anything about it and I performed the exorcism. Later that week I had some severely harsh dreams in which, at the time, I believed the majority of the spiritual warfare took place. I once dreamed that I would cast a demon out of a man - a week later that man and I prayed together and I suggested his problem might be spiritual, I prayed to bind the demon and he had to run to the toilet doubling over and puked his ring. I was talking at work about co-incidences and how that if I had a million dice in a bucket and threw them all at once off a skyscraper then, if given long enough, it would be a surprise if 1 million 6s did NOT turn up... they should and would eventually. Later that night I played a dice game with a different pal and I spoke of the conversation... the first 11 (or 18 - can't remember exactly) were 6's and we both had a spooky feel about it... but I then argued that it proved my point - it HAS to happen, otherwise it isn't random.. for it to be random, there must be these long runs of 1,000,000 6's in a row every xyz million years or so. NONE of this proves or disproves anything other than coincidences DO happen. There have been hundreds and hundreds of times when this did not happen also, so what? Do we ignore the 1000 times we do not see a pattern and jump to the conclusion that there is a god or something supernatural going on when one turns up? I can explain every one of these occurrences in ways that do not involve the supernatural.... and I have many, many more similar stories. So what? New age people say I am spiritual, Christians would say I have gifts of the holy spirit, scientists might say I was deluded or just experiencing a string of coincidences. Maybe something IS going on which we do not understand, but I am pretty certain beyond doubt that it isn't the explanation given by Christians. I used to believe it was, but it just isn't. It's something else - mainly coincidence, maybe some hypersensitivity or something, I do not know... but I know what it isn't! Re - the earthquakes - you missed what I wrote about not remembering dreams until our memory is jogged by the occurrence? Also - did you see my sub conscious start to exaggerate my own tale above? Was it 11, was it 18 time?... in twenty years time I might actually remember it as 18 throws... but who knows. My brother and I cut for a deal once and we cut to pairs about 7 or 8 times straight... it was crazy!... Was it supernatural? - of course not.

QUOTE Dave Moore: "I asked a question "Are placebo's getting better"." No you didn't - you aske "WHY are placebos getting better?" and declared as a fact that they were..... then later it turned out that in fact they were NOT getting better and it was only for pain killers, where we well know that psychological effects can influence the way we experience pain. ....... with all this dishonesty and lying, why would you expect anyone to believe you when you say your dreams come true.... later will you might well admit that it doesn't always happen - how can we trust your word anymore? SORRY: I missed the whole of page 2 of the conversation before posting this... I'm out of date here. (and the quote button doesn't work for me when I am at work either... which you say it doesn't for you either, but then you go and say "HE can't even use the quote feature"... Double standard? And you wonder why you rub people up the wrong way. Total!

I think there is 'noise' in the microwave range as cosmic background radiation.

British royals naming a baby George is not that unlikely really is it? And the horse thing was wrong anyway. Do you ever watch Derren Brown? He is great at explaining tricks the mind plays on people and offers some pretty plausible explanations for people believing in spiritual and supernatural things that turn out to be just normal things or pure coincidence. What appears to be beyond the possibility of probable likelihood for one person may just be a freak happening of several events, where for another 20,000 people nothing happened. His show where he gets a person to get the winning horse every time is pretty good - someone somewhere WILL pick the winning horse every time... if there are 20 horses and 20 people pick different horses then 1 person is guaranteed to win. It doesn't mean that they were psycic before the race. For something to be truly random, there will be patters that look non random within the chaos - it has to be this way or it would not be random. However small a probability of something occurring, given enough time we would expect to see that improbably event turn up at some point. Dave More: "I'd have to be lying right?" No - obviously not - you just don't understand how coincidences work or how we perceive them. In all of the 'co-incidences' you listed from 1 to 6 your brain would have locked onto the occurrence as something related to Lincon because that was in your mind. Stuff like that happens to everyone all of the time. What your brain ignored were the thousands of other bits of info from the same day that were unrelated to your tale. You hum a song - it come on the radiop - spooky? No - it will happen from time to time, you just don't recall or register the other 100 times you hum a song and a different one comes on. Get with reality dude! ............................................... .............................................. ..................................... I can't explain the dreaming - that doesn't make it supernatural though. I have had predictive dreams also. I would say though, that most dreams we have are not remembered. Sometimes something jogs our memory whilst awake and we recall our dream. Maybe you dream of earthquakes regularly and only remember them when there is one on the news the next day, Who knows.

Heavy agitation, stirring and gently warming it through might speed it up. Once you find the perfect process for your product you can set it in stone and not change it - you may need a little trial and error for the first few batches maybe.

OK a guess - maybe the extended time is to allow the alcohol to fully extract/mix in with oils. Solvation can take some time. Are you suggesting that the perfume sits AFTER the extraction of the oils or that the extraction itself takes w2eeks. I can fully see how the extraction of the oil could benefit from plenty of time to sit around.... Actually - it will probably depend on the exact product you are making, what leaves or plant material you are using as the source of the oils you are extracting. I would assume that the process for each product would become refined by the maker and you will get a feel for what timescales are best for your product, which could change depending on what solvents you use and what source material you use to extract the oils from. I would say that you could do some tests - leave on for a week and one for a month and compare.

A friend of mine just had a small tumor from his lung removed.... they went in through the keyhole and zapped it with a microwave laser apparently. (I guess that should be maser). They have a camera on the end and they burn the whole thing out. I hope they got it all and it doesn't come back.

hmm... there is also an important phase change in steel at 700C which effects it's structural strength. It doesn't need to go over 1000C for it to be weakened.

Ok thanks. I think it must be the extreme bitterness of Guiness. Maybe it tricks the taste buds. My mouth is salivating right now in thinking about it. lol. Maybe I'll get myself a can of it later tonight for research purposes! ;-)