Severian

Are you saying that subverting and ultimately ousting a democratic government, and putting a puppet dictatorship in power so that you can secure the oil interests of your own national companies is "trying your best" and doing "what seems like the right thing"?

How on Earth could anyone think Putin was a good choice? He had just finished converting Russia back into a dictatorship by staging a rigged election, and he gets lauded by the west? Ludicrous!

No, I was making the point that she might not be best placed to set herself up as a moral arbiter over others, which is what she was doing. She brought the moral values of others into question, and I merely questioned her authority to do so. That is very clearly an attack on another member, despite his claims to the contrary. If you had been paying any attention at all, you would have realized that the parts in quotation marks are directly lifted from her own post. Why is it acceptable for her to attack Christian moral values, but it is not OK to criticise her moral values in response? I even used the same words!

What other points? I didn't think you made any. Are you refering to this thread?

I was going to reply to this, but I think ParanioA put it quite nicely already. That much is already clear. It seems that words have completely different meanings to you than those attributed by normal people...

I presume your difficulty is coming from the indices being up or down. If it disturbs you, you can really avoid it. Regard all vecors (index up) as being standard column vectors and all co-vectors (index down as representing a column vector premultied by a matrix, the metric (i.e. a dagonal matric with diagonal entries 1, -1, -1, -1), e.g. [math]x_\mu = g_{\mu \nu} x^\nu[/math]. Then all indices are up (except for the matric) and you can explicitly write in the sum over repeated indices. That procedure makes the algebra look exactly like matrix algebra, so should be more familiar.

I made no personal attacks, and no ad homenim. Mooeypoo had explicitly set herself up as a moral arbiter, judging which 'moral values' were worthy and which were not. So her moral character, and indeed past actions, become relevant to the discussion. For clarity, an ad homenim would have been, say, attacking a poster for their inability to post in adult English, rather than talking in baby-speak, or perhaps for using the work 'owned' in a childish context. But I would never do that, because the stupidity of the post itself is usually an easier target. A judgement made by a Jew is a Jewish judgement, not a value. A value held by a Jew is a Jewish value. Rubbish. At the very most it would be anti-zionist, not anti-semitic. Israel is neither wholey composed of Jews, nor does it represent the totality of Jews on the planet. It is simply pathetic to declare ant-sematism every time anyone criticises Israel. Ironically, Mooeypoo is the anti-semite since she explicitly attacked Jewish religious teachings. Their motivation in setting up a state separate from religion was not to prevent people from being religious. Quite the contrary, it was to facilitate the practice of any religion the population liked, free from persecution. If the 'founding fathers' could see you know, they would turn over in their graves.

How many do they have to kill before they get your vote? Or is it gross incompetence that floats your boat?

Also on channel 4: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/thousands+fighting+science+cuts/1210957 And it looks like US science is under attack too: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=632 http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/1218/1

Duh! Christians, obviously. You just did, two posts ago, and have the arrogance to do so in the same post you claim you don't: "biblical values" are Christian, so you are saying you consider Christian values to be lesser (just not all of them). There you go again. erm... yes you are - you just did (see above) I don't see a lot of Christians who claim there shouldn't be atheists as citizens either. So what makes you think my comments were directed at you personally. I don't even know you. They were directed at the crap you posted. But gee, these atheist women are touchy! Just a statement of fact and a parallel to your attack on 'Christian values'. While I admit that a lot of so-called Christians have done some very evil things in the past, your lot seem to be making an art out of it. You were in their military. That seems clear enough. It seems you know a lot less about me than I know about you. I am not American. Well, that's good, because offense was intended. It is about time social illiterates like you learned that if you give offense with cheap attacks on people's belief systems, you can expect some flack back.

The obvious thing to do would be to pump more energy into fundamental physics research, so that we might come up with a better long term energy solution. But we won't do that because the governments are only interested in things which happen on the timescale of their tenure.

Don't be ridiculous. Of course Christians think that their values are 'better' otherwise they wouldn't have them. And who are you to define what is 'better' anyway? This is once again displaying the usual arrogance of the atheistic/secular viewpoint that there is some 'logical sefl-evident derivation' behind their set of values and that anyone who disagrees is wrong. Christians (and Muslims, Hindus etc) at least have the decency to be honest and say that their value system is not derived but given. Quite frankly, I am quite happy not to share any 'human values' with someone who was a member of the Israeli military. Isn't one of your 'human values' to 'beat the crap out of' anyone who disagrees with you?

So what? I was not arguing about the religious beliefs of the 'founding fathers' (what a crap and cliched description). I was arguing against the illogicality of the expression "Being founded by persecuted Christians, does not equate to founded on Christian values". And in that regard, the point I made (that the values of 'persecuted Christian' are by definition ' Christian values') is entirely valid, and no argument has so far been made against it. Any value which Christians hold is a Christian value. Any value which libertarians hold is a libertarian value. They may even have some in common, and being a libertarian value does not in principle stop a value from being Christian too.

Of course it does, by definition. In order to found a country value judgments must be applied, and since they were applied by people who were Christians they were Christian values by definition. If the US had been founded by Hindus then it would have been founded on Hindu values.

Wasn't that the original intention? The separation of church and state was intended to protect freedom of religion by preventing persecution from the state. After all, the puritans originally came because they were being religiously persecuted.

Economic Left/Right: -1.88 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.74

There are lots of ways of doing it. In fact: [ce] a TiO2 + (a+b) C + 2a Cl2 -> a TiCl4 + (a-b) CO2 + 2b CO[/ce], will work for any a and b. Though a>b to prevent zero or negative CO2

I am not quite sure what you are asking. The fact remains that the electromagnetic interaction gets weaker with distance while the strong interaction gets stronger with distance. In the Standard Model, this is predicted by the fact that the electromagnetic mediator (the photon) has no self coupling (is not charged) while the strong interaction mediator (the gluon) does have a self coupling (it is colored).

The energy is conserved, as it always must be. It is transfered from potential energy (in the force) to mass-energy (in the new particles) Because there isn't enough energy. When you separate the quarks far enough, there is enough energy to make a quark anti-quark pair, but they will then snap back (converting the remaining potential energy to kinetic energy) and form two colorless mesons. Clearly it would be more efficient if we could explain all the forces using a photon, but unfortunately this doesn't work. We need to have a particle which couples to itself to explain the behaviour of the strong interaction as we change distance. The photon doesn't couple to itself (it is neutral) but the gluon does.

Here is a BBC story on this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7137387.stm

I wasn't sure where to post this, since it is the politics of physics, but I thought the politics forum was more appropriate. The UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council today published their delivery plan for the period 2008 - 2012. The STFC is responsible for particle physics, astronomy, nuclear physics and the funding of large science facilities generally. It was formed recently by a merger of PPARC (the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council) and the CCLRC (Council for the Central Laboratory of the the Research Councils). Strangely, just after its formation, they announced that they were short by about £80M, so that new logo and all the new headed paper must have cost more than expected. This means that they needed to cut something and according to the delivery plan they want to withdraw the UK from the International Linear Collider project. If this happens, I suspect it will decimate particle physics in the UK. Fine, we have the LHC to keep us busy, but we will miss out on all of the planning for the ILC and never be able to take a major role. I am also somewhat bemused by their 'Big Questions' which they state they are trying to answer. The only one remotely applicable to particle physics is "Why is there a Universe?", which I am sure any veteran of these boards will recognise is not a scientific question at all. One wonders what they were thinking...

Germans...

There may be no such thing as free energy, but there is plentiful energy. The vacuum energy stored in the universe is so huge that if you took away enough to power mankind for the next billion years, you wouldn't notice the difference. If we ever figured out how to tap it, we would effectively have free limitless energy.

I once went to the may ball of one of Cambridge University's colleges (St Johns) and they also had a psychic. It was all just a bit of a laugh and no-one took him seriously.

I wouldn't put it like that. QCD strength always increases with increasing distance. This is often likened to an elastic string. But when you get far enough away there is so much energy in the binding that you can make a quark-antiquark pair from the binding energy. The string snaps.