Severian

That is actually a very good question. To rephrase it a little (if I may), you are actually asking why the insertion of a virtual electron-positron pair in a loop does not contribute to the mass of the photon. Generally one would expect that it does, and thereby change the speed of the particle (so your intuition is exactly correct). However, in this case the mass of the photon is protected by the electromagnetic U(1) gauge invariance. Any mass term would break the gauge invariance, so are not allowed. In other words, the theory is set up in such a way that the contribution to the mass from this effect is zero (although it does change the electromagnetic coupling).

Does any one else find that ironic? How can you hope to vary your proficiency when you have none in the first place. Spell checkers are your friend....

Jaxodraw is your friend: http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net/

Cool. So according to IMM's own moral system, she should be able to eat fish now.

My advice: never trust advice posted on a web forum.

Again I disagree. It is perfectly OK to stick to your guns. If you think something is right, then it is wrong to say that it is wrong just to fit in with other people. The problem is when you associate characteristics of an action with a person. By that I mean, there is (or there should be) nothing wrong with saying that a person's action was bad or 'evil' but one should not then imply from that that the person is bad or 'evil'.

I can't afford a new PC at the moment, and the old one would be fine for a couple of years with a new graphics card, so I think I will risk it. The worst that can happen is that it doesn't boot and I will have to buy a new PSU, but even a 450W PSU isn't that expensive.

That doesn't really make sense. 'Evil' is just a definition in religion for someone who is opposed to your view. More modern religious people would use the word 'wrong' instead (eg. anyone who believes in evolution is 'wrong') simply because it invokes less of an image of attacking you 'opponent' with a pitch-fork. But what is in a word? I personally believe anyone who doesn't believe in democracy is 'wrong' and I could promote that word to 'evil' if I felt like it, but would the meaning really change? I suppose 'evil' holds a slight connotation that it is the person and not the idea who is at fault, but that isn't really my view either - i am sure an evil person can be correct in some of their ideas and good in some of their views. Again this is just definition. You may define certain 'internal elements' of a religion as bad, but that is just your point of view. The practitioners of the religion will not regard it as 'bad' because then they would then not believe in it. Even Satanists do not regard themselves as evil (go look at their websites).

I think any argument for religion (in general) being bad that you can come up with could equally well apply to any ideology. After all, many many people have died and many atrocities commited in the name of democracy.

While on the topic, let me take the opportunity to pick some brains. I have a 3.2MHz Pentium 4, with 2GB of RAM and an ATI 9800XT. The weak link is now the graphic card, so I was thinking about a GeForce 7800GS. I have an AGP so I think this is basically the best I can get. Anyway, I have seen this recommended on various review sites, and in their tech specs they often say that the recommended power required is 350W. My current power supply is 305W, so I am a bit below, but if I go to one of these websites where you can enter all your components in order to check if you have a big enough power supply, they claim that the 7800GS actually takes less power than my ATI. I also notice that NVidea do not have a recommended power on their tech specs, and I have read elsewhere that these power recommendations generally are conservative. Non-brand power supplies often are rather unreliable in their power output so the recommendations are usually a bit higher to allow for this, and a Dell power supply should provide a bit more juice. Does anyone have any experience with this? Do I need a new power supply too?

Would you include the scientific method as a dangerous ideology if taken dogmatically?

Even if they did feel pain, dropping them into boiling water will kill them instantly. I don't see why it would be more painful than any other death.

What's the difference? Why should the state make moral judgements about our relationships? A 3-way relationship is just as valid to society as a 2-way one. And why do we have to be sleeping with someone to be granted benefits? What does it have to do with the state? What utility does the rest of the population get from a gay coupling living together which it does not get from two blokes sharing a flat? On the contrary, you are being discriminatory by holding sexual relationships to be more worthy than non-sexual ones.

Are they also going to give benefits to groups of people who are in a mutual relationship? How about giving benefits to people who live together without romantic attachment (ie. flatmates)? Or is the 'American Taliban' going to try and strip these people of their rights?

- You believe the life of a chimp is equal to the life of a human baby.

That's not true. I would be given emergency care in Germany if I were hit by a car, but that is not anything to do with the EU - I would get the same in the US. Then I would be shipped back to the UK for treatment once I was stable. You would only get treated in Germany if you have health insurance. Similarly I would not be eligible for unemployment benefit in Germany (is that what you mean by 'doll'?) and a German would not be eligible here. If I wanted to move to Germany when I was 65 I would not be eligible to collect a pension, except for the 2 years I worked there.

But that was my point - it is not a free market. And I could get a free market without the EU. All I need is an economic treaty, not a political one. Without the EU, I would have been paid the money that had gone into my pension. With the EU I lost it. Why should I regard this as good? I was employed by the German government, so I would have been welcomed into Germany without the EU. My wife would have had access to the NHS pre-EU too. Not that the NHS is any use, but that is another issue. This is not true. I pay my money to the state I am living in, not the EU. And as I pointed out, my pension could not be transfered back to the UK, so I just lose the money. It has nothing to do with the German state pension - this was a pension paid to me by the organisation I was working with, and normally I would expect to collect that pension no matter where I was living. The EU had actually restricted the pensions market. It is a bit far fetched to suggest that the EU is better off because its leaders are not democratically accountable. I couldn't even name my MEP, and they have no power anyway.

You don't need to have the EU to have no trade tariffs. Considering I am married to a German, have lived in France and Germany, and work with many foreign nationals, I don't think anyone would ever call me a nationalist. I would be happy with an EU governement as long as it was democratically elected and half-way competent. However, I also think that many governmental duties are best performed at a local level.

Because I saw it for what it really is - an undemocratic institution that imposes its will on democratically elected governments, places unnatural barriers on free trade, and makes integration more difficult. I am not opposed to the EU in principle - I am only opposed to its current implementation, which I think acheives the exact opposite of what it was intented to acheive. For example, look at the common agricultural policy. Can that truely be a reasonable way to encourage free trade? Of course not - it is an unnatural barrier to the the trade of EU farmers outside France. Look at EU regulations. Some of them are very reasonable (and some of them are none of their damn business) but if you are going to have EU wide regulations, they need to be enforced EU wide. Living in France I would routinely see examples of violations of law and fair-trade agreements - the French authorities just didn't care. They don't enforce the regulations, so the regulations become a barrier to goods from countries where regulations are enforced. For example, the local video store where I lived would rent out US versions of DVDs long before they were released in Europe. Sometimes you could get them before they were even out at the cinema. They were obviously bought in the US and shipped over. They would all have an into warning telling the viewer that they were 'not for rental' and to contact the authorities to report misuse, but no-one cared. The DVD hire store was on the town's main street! Or how about all the problems I had getting my car registered in France? BMW had issued me with an 'EU' version of the road worthiness certificate (MOT). I was quite please because (I thought) it meant that I would have no problems anywhere in Europe. But no, the French authorities told me that I needed the French version and refused to let me import my car! I had to go back to BMW and get a French version, which took forever and a day. Another example is regulations for selling food. I am fairly au fait with the regulations in the UK imposed by the EU. For example, meat products on display are required to have a continual flow of cold air passing over them. The counters which do this are expensive, but it seems fair enough to avoid spreading diseases. But go to the market in France, and you will see meat sitting out in the open air on a warm day, covered in flies. Once again, they don't bother to enforce the regulations. It is the same with other safety regulations. British manufacturers need to pass stringent safety tests before being allowed to sell their goods in the EU. But French authorities do not enforce these regulations on their manufacturers. This is not so apparent when living in the UK because then they are screened by UK authorities, but you really see it when living on the continent. And it is not just France. In Germany, after working their for two years (forone of their governent labs) I found out that I would not be given any pension credit for my time there. They told me that I would have been given a pension previously, but the regulations had changed under the EU, and now I was expected to be given the pension by the UK government, which is significantly lower. What about student funding? We give stipends to UK citizens doing PhDs in the UK, but we withold that funding from EU citizens from outside the UK. So it is very diffuclt for us to take non-UK EU students. Isn't this the sort of thing the EU should be sorting out? Why doesn't it? By contrast, where they do make an effort to sort it out, they **** it up. There are grants available for postdocs to come to the UK from other UK countries. But they EU politicians in Brussels clearly have no idea how scientists are paid. They set the EU funding rates so high that the EU funded postdocs are paid more than the professors (for US readers, in the UK the term 'professor' is only applied to the most senior staff - more junior tenured staff are 'lecturers' or 'readers'). This causes a lot of resentment in UK universities. I could go on and on about the things I have seen that make me think we would be better off without the EU...

I used to be a big supporter of the EU. Then I spent a few years living in France and Germany. Now I think it should be scrapped.

I used to lecture on environmental physics (global warming, C02 emissions, ozone layer, alternative energy etc) so I do (humbly) believe I know a bit about it. But I must confeess I never go to the biology forums, because ... well... they are full of biologists.

Why is passing 300,000 posts more interesting than passing 299,999?

I think I am AB- but I am not sure. I have never donated blood, but I think that is mainly because I don't trust doctors and nurses.

I am not saying that they are physically beautiful (although many are in my opinion, especially the females) but the presence of mankind has led to some of the most beautiful things on the planet. Look at the thread by bacule on Suerat's painting for example. The world would be a much much poorer place without mankind.

Bear in mind that some particles, like the photon, are their own antiparticles. Most probably (in my opinion) the matter-antimatter asymmetry will be coming from neutrinos. If the right handed neutrino has a majorana mass (one of the possible ways of explaining why neutrinos have such low mass is the "see-saw mechanism" which requires this majorana term) then they can convert matter into antimatter. Basically the (chiral eigenstate) neutrino would be ints own antiparticle, so it could decay to particles (like and electron) or antiparticles (like a positron). This is lepton number violation, which is a form of matter-antimatter symmetry violation.