Greg H.

This is probably the worst summation of how entropy works I have ever seen. Entropy will only increase within a closed system, which the earth, and every living thing on it, are not. With an outside energy source, such as the sun, or the heat from the earth's core, a system can, in fact, locally decrease entropy.

David Hume would disagree with your position on suicide. He discusses the potential damage to society by suicide starting with paragraph 22 of the essay "Of Suicide", but I think he summarizes the position succinctly in the opening thought when he says: He goes on to address the obligations of the individual to society versus the self, and discusses the increasing burden one may place on society. It's an interesting read, if nothing else. As for myself, personally, I can't imagine my life being so bad that I would need a speedy withdrawl from it. However, there are very few true horrors in my life - for which I count myself lucky. Others may not be so fortunate.

Another good book on the problems of communicating with aliens would be Dragon's Egg.

I have dice with 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20,30, and 100 sides at home. Why is 6 arbitraily more important than them? Also, why is a hexagonal shape important, but not say, a triangle, square, pentagram, or octagon, which are also fairly common? Additionally, 6 and 8 have just as many ways to generate them on two dice as 7 does (by my count). I'll refer back to the previous poster's main point: Numerology is crap.

The problem with the claim is that there is an inherent flaw in the way it's worded. "Prove to me no two fingerprints match" is like asking someone to prove there are no magical grains of sand on earth - it's an impossible task without devoting an equally improbable amount of resources to the task. What we do have is a proponderance of evidence that no two people have ever been found to possess the same fingerprints despite the literally millions of fingerprints available for comparison in databases currently. Even identical twins will possess unique fingerprints. At issue, however, is the method of comparison. If the resolution of the comparison method is poor enough (i.e. if the raw fingerprint is only a partial print, or the print is of poor quality or degraded, or if the algorithm doing the comparision is not precise enough) false positives could be generated.

At the risk of stealing CP's thunder, I thought I would open this topic up, since it is so current on the world stage. From my perspective, a revolution becomes ethical when a government begins to exploit its citizens - it's the definition of exploit that's the problem, really. If I had to define an ethical revolution concisely, it would be a revolt against an unethical government, based on the premise that what is legal is not always what is ethical. But this forces us to then define an unethical government. I would define such a government as having to meet four criteria: 1. It fails to adequately protect its citizens from both foreign and domestic threats, 2. It fails to adequately defend the rights of the citizen or abridges those rights unnecessarily, 3. It exists solely or apparently solely to exploit its citizens, and 4. It provides no system to balance the power of the government versus the power of the people. A succinct way of putting it might be that an unethical government is one that exists in spite of the will of the governed, not because of it.

Maybe we should pin this as a inspiration only area?

Actually I do belive in something. I believe in evidence. I believe in the human ability to define the natural world with our intelligence, not our superstition. I believe that if there is no evidence for the existence of something, the best position to evaluate claims about that something is the position of the skeptic. I believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I believe that we have grown beyond our need for a supernatural explanation for the way the universe works. You are certainly not required to share my beliefs, but do not be surprised if I ask you for evidence to support claims you make based on yours. And I would be very intested in knowing in what way I "attacked your beliefs".

Unfortauntely, we do not really have the time to throughly review the entire history of physics with you - if you're really curious, there are plenty of resources available to you that will explain modern scientific models, and the evidence that supports them. Unfortunately, I really don't think you have any inclination to learn anything at all; your mind is already made up, and you are interested neither in receiving knowledge nor in providing it. I'd like to move that the thread be closed by the mods.

You and I will have to agree to disagree on that topic.

This topic is rapidly degenerating into "No You!" being tossed back and forth.

The fact that every scrap of experimental evidence we have on the matter contradicts this theory tells us it's wrong. My signature applies here. "Remember - if the predictions of your theory disagree with reality, it is not reality that is wrong."

That's nice. I'm an atheist married to a pagan. What difference does that make to the discussion at hand? You're trying to argue from logic on a topic that defies it. THe level of inconsistency in the biblical texts goes far beyond these few examples, and there is simply no way to defend the entirety of the text as a whole based on a logical argument.

I never said their belief held any consistency or logic. Only that they don't view Jesus as a scapegoat, which was the topic of the thread.

Division is really "seperation into equal sized groups". How do you separate anything into groups of size 0? You can acheive the same result by subtraction, but with subtraction, you're actually reducing the size of the single group, not splitting the group - while they can be used to acheive the same result, they are fundamentally different operations. This of it like this - if I divide a pie into 2 pieces, I have two pieces of the same pie, but they're both still there. If, on the other hand I eat half the pie (subtract half of it), I will only ever have half the pie from that point forward. Think of division in this way: [math] 5 \div 2 [/math] means to divide a set of 5 into 2 equal sets. That's what division means. So then [math]5 \div 0[/math] means to divide a set of 5 into 0 equal sets, which is nonsense, since the smallest number of equal sets that makes sense is 1, which is the original set of 5.

True - and you can see the effect if you draw a triangle on a globe. If you connect three cities on the earth that are far enough apart that you have to account for the curvature of the surface with lines representing the shortest distance between the cities, you end up with a Reuleaux triangle, if I remember correctly.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe#Flat_universe for more information on what astroners and cosmologists mean when they say the universe is "flat".

Actually, if you look at the experimental setup he used, it's based on Inertial Electrostatic Confinement, which is most decidedly not cold fusion. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2573998/I-star-jar-13-year-old-youngest-person-world-build-NUCLEAR-FUSION-REACTOR.html for more detail. And the problem isn't getting atoms to fuse - we've been doing that since the 1950's. It's getting them to fuse in a controlled fashion while producing more energy than the reaction consumes to remain stable that's the trick.

From the Christian point of view, Jesus willingly sacrificed himself - which does not make him a scapegoat, but a martyr. It's a subtle, but important difference.

Replying strictly to the question in the thread title, no. Meat and cheese both have nutritional value (even if you choose not to partake of them), and can be consumed in moderate quantities without harm. The same cannot be said about cigarettes, which have no positive or redeeming qualities, except for filling the pockets of their corporate investors. The key is exercising moderation in consumption - after all, even water will kill you if you drink too much of it at one time.

Actually things escape the earth's gravity all the time - we call them rockets. Acouple of them have even escaped the sun's gravity and are currently burrowing into interstellar space.

Actually, yes, some things are. At least according to the laws of the natural world as we currently understand them.

I agree with the sentiment - I'm cynical about the execution. Here in the US especially, large portions of the population are prone to ignoring the loong term consequences of their actions. Maybe a game changing technology is what is needed to wake people up out of their apathetic approach to conservation and future planning, though.

There ara a lot of social and economic implications to everyone living significantly longer. Economic growth in terms of jobs needs to keep pace, especially if retirement ages start going up, and you need somewhere for all these people to reside. Crop production has to scale, and raw material consumption in other areas, especially energy consumption, will rise significantly. According to the NIH, we are already gaining about 1 year of life expectancy every six years - with the current average at about 78 years, we can reasonably expect the life expectancy of an otherwise healthy citizen in the US to reach 100 by the year 2150. That might be enough time for the government and our society to come to grips with the issues this will cause. Maybe. Not to be a gloomy gus - I would love to live longer - have more time with my kids, my parents; I don't know anyone that wouldn't. But the long term consequences cannot be ignored, and the time to start discussing them is now, not after we're living to be 140,

I would just use a hydrogen or helium bladder rather than plasma, tbh.