Norbert

I guess but nobody seems to be doing that either.

Just when you think you've got an original idea, or near original idea anyway, you find out that somebody's beat you to it! Go figure. The collective brain can be reduced to culture, and it simply doesn't exist because there is no such thing as a global culture. We are not all connected directly to each other. What we have is an interaction of a few very large but rather empty collective brains (pop culture, etc) and millions of smaller, perhaps more interesting collective brains whose contributions mean almost nothing outside their small realms.

With all the clean water crises affecting so much of the world, you start to wonder if there are ways to actually create water for some these people using various chemical reactions. There are many reactions that yield water and other products which are not too difficult to filter out and not terribly harmful to the environment. Why can't we utilize these reactions for purposes of water genesis? I always wondered. What do you think of this?

Wow, if only that were possible. We aren't there intellectually as a species, and I fear we will never get there.

Yes, you can look at religion as being a set of metaphors for very real, natural processes. You sometimes end up with highly tentative conclusions but unraveling this architecture of logic, or rather creating it, can be a highly empowering and satisfying investigation. God can be thought of as the culmination of physical forces which can act on mater to create things. Going form the most basic to the most abstract, transcendent. From planets and stars forming to the the entirely new, but not separate, dimension of consciousness. In this view, gravity is god. Evolution is god. Etc.

Very interesting, I just learned about something called an island of stability. It is hypothesized, and actually really quite likely, that there are some (1 or 2) elements somewhere down the line with an incredibly large atom BUT that have a (relatively) stable state. This is why they try to smash atoms in particle accelerators, hoping that eventually they will run into a few atoms of a stable element, because the ones they found up until this point are all rather useless due to their high instability. A lot of evidence seems to suggest that one or two may turn out to be incredibly useful due to their very high density, weight, etc.

My apologies, Rigney, for the loathsome accusation. You have to understand ,though, that in a world so thick with bias it is really easy to get FED UP and even a little paranoid. My gf is 1/2 black and I just get so fed up with racism... there was no evidence of any of that existing in rigney's post but the language and tone were similar to something that would have a racial basis... I am sorry. You have to give credit where it's due. Obama became president in historically one of the most racist, if not THE most racist country in the world. How could you deny such a historic figure another 4 years? Even if he wasn't that great, which he IS, it would still be inappropriate to just oust him in the middle of his history-making incumbency. Anyway, I'm going off topic. My apologies to rigney and I hope we can move on.

Life came into existence some 700 million years after the earth's formation. That's an incredibly long time. The ingredients were here, it was only a matter of time before something interesting coalesced from them. I'm sure life formed a few times before that point but wasn't as successful. A better question would be what are the odds of our planet being just far enough yet near enough to the sun to support life...

Yes, it's measured by satellite and it is the surface soil/sand/rock temperature.

Maybe I wasn't totally clear but I meant between him and Romney. There are many men who do who aren't named Obama, of course.

I've read that, at the level where official temperature readings are taken, the hottest possible air temperature due to weather is between 131 - 133 degrees Fahrenheit. This seems awfully low, considering how hot surface temperatures can get in the Lut Desert, Iran -- close to 70 degrees centigrade. I'm sure if they set up an appropriate weather station in the middle of the Lut, they'd measure temperatures much above 133 degrees F. The current, official hottest temperature on earth is 129 degrees F, recorded at Furnace Creek, Death Valley, Ca. in 2007 and on a few earlier occasions. The previous record was held to be 134 degrees F, at the same location, but the thermometer was later determined to have had been too low (too close to the ground) to qualify it as an official reading. Another extreme temperature often cited is 136 degrees F in Aziziya, Libya. That reading was taken over a tarred concrete surface, which means it is highly inaccurate. So I think the Lut would have the highest possible temperatures given how the surface temperature reaches 70 degrees centigrade there. With such high surface temperatures, how hot can the surrounding air get? If I were to guess I'd top it off at around 137 - 141 degrees F. What do you all think?

Between him and Romney, he's the one I'd trust because he has more going for him. 1) He WAS president for 4 years, he has had plenty of experience. 2) He has unfinished business -- you can't separate a man and his business, it's a sacred bond. 3) His having humble beginnings and a connection to real humanity (not solely political elites) doesn't make him infallible, but it does make him better than someone who does not.

Let me guess, you're rooting for Romney? Rigney rooting for Romney, sort of has a nice ring to it. What Obama said is NOT Bullshit and you yourself know it, seeing how you very consciously omitted the rest of his quote. You don't like Obama, that's what it is, isn't it? Pshsht. You probably have some sort of racial bias stirring your bile and obscuring your mind too. I suggest you get rid of that, it has not place in the modern world. The fact of the matter is only Obama has the integrity of a real politician. Only Obama can be trusted because he knows what its like to be on the bottom or nearly there, he has humble beginnings. He actually has a tie to normal humanity. He may not have been THE Messiah we all expected these past 4 years but you must realize that the job of a president is no walk in the garden. IT IS HARD. I think he did a great job and I know he can do a lot better, and you can't deny that this time around he actually HAS the experience, even if he didn't 4 years ago. Romney? Not so much... As Bill Mahr put it: "He's half white and half black, so far we've only seen his white half. This time around we'll see his black half"

Less is better than a lot but still not as good as really, really, really a lot.

That's what I figured, but I bet there are a vast number of unstable ones, or perhaps even stable/unstable elements that could exist but were never formed because conditions in the universe simply did not allow it yet. That brings me to another question. Is any given universe, assuming its identical or nearly identical to ours in terms of physical forces, somehow limited to the elements we know of?

Wow, that must have been scary. You were indeed quite lucky if you came out of that relatively unscathed. I guess I could have used my observations with aluminum foil to get an idea of what might happen if I tried melting aluminum cans. I always wondered why it didn't melt down in a fire, just sort of burned. I figured the reason was because it wasn't pure aluminum or that it was so thin and coated with some other substance.

Are there undiscovered elements (naturally occurring and stable) somewhere in the universe? Or have we pretty much found all of the naturally occurring elements that are stable?

You're right. I told the other tenants and they will also try to convince him to do something about it. Now, back to my question. Do lead paint chips and peeling lead paint emit lead compounds into the air in significant quantities? If wind blows across a lead-painted surface that's peeling, does that air now contain amounts of lead significant enough to cause a detectable increase in blood lead levels if one breathes it??? The scary thing about lead is that it takes an amount invisible to the naked eye to incapacitate you mentally and physically and even kill you.

Interesting. I did not think aluminum would be any different from a metal like lead for example, I just figured it would require a higher temperature to melt. I guess it's more reactive with oxygen than lead so you need to smelt it in an oxygen-free environment. Yeah, that's plan A, B and C, etc. The self smelting was something like plan W. Will they just assume my collection is mixed scrap? I'm pretty much 100% sure my collection is not mixed because I did a magnet test on each new can that I encountered and it never stuck. I can usually tell what an aluminum can looks like as opposed to a steel can, the shape and the sound it makes are different. I guess some cans can be made out of a non-magnetic metal that isn't aluminum but I haven't read of any such alternatives.

I see I've asked a stupid question. But it's genuine. It might be obvious to most people here but it is not obvious to me.

This is just a hypothetical question, I am not planning on actually smelting any metal, at least not at the moment. I have a collection of aluminum cans that I amassed over a period of 6 months on my long walks along the forest preserve trail (along a river) and the surrounding area/neighborhood. A lot of my cans were at some point in the river and have accumulated some river sediment on the inside. Some of them were found by the side of the road and have sand and even small pebbles embedded in them. Other cans contain cigarette butts, gooey substances that resemble thick saliva, ants and other dead bugs and insects, small and assorted pieces of plastic, etc. I have a 15 heavy-duty garbage bag collection of flattened cans, quite a lot. Cleaning them all out by hand would be a very onerous and not to even mention dangerous task. I'd rather not do it. What if I were to melt these cans down together with all their non-metallic impurities? I am aware that normally the less dense impurities come up to the top and the denser ones sink to the bottom, but would the presence of plastics, some of which might contain traces of other metals, be a particular concern? What about sand and small rocks? Would the silicon in them separate from the oxygen and sink to the bottom as slag? I think I'll sell my collection to a scrap yard eventually, once the price of aluminum gets to a reasonable level. If that doesn't happen I might want to smelt them and make ingots for easier storage.

Yup, I live in the US and the house was built LONG before 1978 in the prime lead paint era -- 1961. I was aware of the law and assumed this guy had some integrity, apparently he doesn't. I guess I didn't want to judge a book by its cover, he's an immigrant and I refused to fall for stereotypes. He barely speaks English. Either he is playing dumb or corruption prevented him from finding out himself when he bought it, and he is genuinely oblivious. I don't really know. It's hard to believe the latter scenario, though. In any case, I will speak with a lawyer. I happen to know one personally.

So it does sound possible? Do you think the organism would develop more efficient ways to pull the lead from the blood and block it from depositing in tissue, or would it develop ways to actually put the lead to good use, like it does with iron and other metals?