Glider

Dogs don't eat cats either.

That would be a parabolic mirror. It's used to collect sunlight from a relatively large area and focus it on a very small area, heating, cooking or burning whatever is at that point.

I doubt it. He would have had to use either parabolic mirrors with adjustable focal lengths, or many, many individual mirrors all focussed on the same point (acting like a parabolic mirror). Finding enough glass would have been the least of his worries.

I think you're right. But then the situation stops being an objective moral dilemma and becomes defence of you and yours; a different situation altogether. EDIT: I think YT is on the right lines myself.

And plants bend towards light, but that's due to the action of photophobic growth hormones being more active on the shaded side of the stem. To use the term 'cognition' to explain the heliotropic properties of a plant would be inappropriate. There is a difference between 'sensitivity' to something and 'sensing' it.

Cognition is difficult in single celled life like algae, dontcha think?

Drugs are drugs anywhere on the planet. Whether or not they are legal varies from country to country, but the definition of 'drugs' has already been...er..defined.

I think atm is right. If killing is against your priciples and you are put in a situation where you are given the choice "Kill the chicken or we kill the dog", it is ego that makes you think that the death of the dog would be your fault. If you take a life to save a life, you have compromised yourself by becoming involved in an obvious no-win situation. If you choose not to become involved and they kill the dog, then the responsibility for the death lies with those who killed the dog, not you, and the net result is the same, one dead, one alive. This is obviously an absolutist argument though, and is based upon your considering all life equal. Things get more tricky if you take a more relativistic view on the value of life. But ultimately, the agument that you are responsible for a death somebody else caused is spurious. The ultimate choice and responsibility will always lie with those who do the killing, your involvement is almost irrelevant, i.e. if it wasn't you put in that situation, it would probably have been somebody else, and something would still have died. In such a situation, the choice of whether something lives or dies is not yours. Your choice is only whether or not you choose to play their game and become like them in the process.

Is it? I never new that. I know Spanish and Italian are strongly Latin based, but I thought French evolved from the Gauls (Gallic). Well, there y'go. Learn summat every day.

Don't forget French. There's been a lot of French input due to William the Bastard.

Yes, I think it would. Synesthesia is not usually the resault of head trauma, it's innate, so I think there might be some interest in this case.

A good point, and well made. I won't take that bet

No, that's right, we can't know. We do not have direct experience of the event. But we do have belief and the weight of evidence (so far) suggests that this belief is justified. The points raised so far do not provide anywhere near equal justification for doubting that belief.

An excellent book. For any who are interested, the full reference is: Cytowic, R. E. (1993). The man who tasted shapes. USA and Great Britain: Putnam's sons (US). Abacus (UK). (ISBN 0 349 10548 0).

When I was in Sydney I could see the big dipper. It was at the 'other end' of the sky and upside down, which was weird, but yes, you can see it from both hemispheres.

How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Two One to blow up the giraffe and one to stretch the banana.

Higher levels of potassium would put you into coronary arhythmia. You wouldn't need to be tazered.

I agree fully with you and Sayonara. I've become fairly inured to the 'graphical'. But I do not want to watch a person killed.

I know what you mean. I've seen people die violently on a few occasions. It always disturbed me deeply and it never got easier. I hope it never gets easier. It shouldn't ever be easy to watch somebody killed (the method is irrelevant). I think that for people to able to watch such a death and remain unaffected by it is very telling. I think it's evidence of an increasingly brutalized and brutal society in which people are becoming desensitised and increasingly incapable of putting themselves in the position, or taking the perspective of another. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's what we're really like and we've just become self-deluded by the thin veneer of civilization and self-righteousness we've adopted to convince ourselves of our moral superiority. In any event, the popularity of the spectacle of violent death over the last two thousand years, from the time of the gladiators to public executions, to sharing video footage of it over the internet, suggests that for all our alleged 'progress', we haven't come very far.

It's like the difference between owning the Mona Lisa, and claiming you painted it. They are different things. You could clam ownership, but not to be the original source. If you claim to be the original source, even if you own copyright, you are plagiarising. In academia, when writing a paper, if I quote or refer to work I did previously, I still have to cite and reference the original source, even though I was the original source. It's not just about not stealing the work of others, it's about transparency; about being seen not to have stolen the work of others.

I agree.

Explain exactly how this is racism? What you describe has nothing to do with race, it has to do with ability to pay.

Due process? You can't hunt down people before they do something like this, because before they have done anything, they are innocent. This is a fundamental part of the law that the troops are out there trying to establish (allegedly). If you think it's only Iraqis who are capable of such brutality, you should hang around an A&E (ER) department on a Friday and Saturday night, see what Americans and Brits are doing to each other these days.