Prometheus

Exactly. All you are trying to do is redefine the word 'happiness'. This is not science. Yes happiness has some physical basis in our brain. This does not change our experience of happiness, or what happiness is. This is just one definition of the word happiness: there are many others. Why are you so focused on this type of happiness at the exclusion of all others? This doesn't change what happiness is. It just means happiness has some physical basis in our neuro-chemistry. Fear is just a neuro-chemically mediated response. Knowing this does not make that angry bear any less scary.

I agree there is a scientific term 'feline'. However someone (Carl Linnaeus to be specific) didn't first define the species feline and then seek experimental evidence to confirm his classification. He just defined species in such a way as to be useful. We could, if we wish, redifine what it is to be a cat. Then some things which we call a cat will no longer be a cat. The reclassification would not change the 'science' behind cats.

So anything that applies to all human beings is scientific? Let's test the logic with a simple syllogism. Anything that applies to all human beings is scientific. Not all human beings have sight. Therefore sight is not scientific. Or Anything that applies to all human beings is scientific. All human beings have a concept of god(s) (whether they believe in it or not) Therefore god(s) is scientific. Is this correct?

Let's stick to the term sight for now as it is not emotive. Sight is a mental experience. Agree. Sight is a scientific term. In what sense? How does the scientific term sight differ from the everyday use of the term sight? Is there a metaphorical meaning to the term sight too? I am not aware of such.

In what sense is it a scientific term? A word can have two meanings: if one of the terms is 'scientific' it doesn't make the other use of the term fake (whatever that means). 'Acceleration' has both an everyday meaning and what you would say is a scientific meaning. The everyday meaning is still perfectly valid, we just have to be clear to which we are referring.

Lots of interesting points; too many to respond to, suffice it to say I agree witht the general concensus. As i understand it there was no pressure applied to allow plain wedding bands - when the policy first came out, this exemption was already included. However, given that the wedding band exemption stands i can understand female Muslim workers also wanting exemption. If it is OK to exempt some people for their cultural beliefs, it should be OK to allow exemption for religious beliefs. It's either permissable to have exemptions, or no exemptions are allowed. Having some things exempt and others not seems to be the source of this quagmire.

There is a UK hospital called Bare Below the Elbows (BBE). It requires healthcare workers in the clinical area or upon patient contact are have nothing covering their skin from the elbow down. Its aim is to reduce hospital acquired infections. There is some debate as to whether it actually works, but for the sake of this thread let us assume that it is effective. There are some female Muslim healthcare workers who, for religious reasons, want to be exempt from this policy: that is they wish to be able to cover their arms at all times. The question then is whether this exemption should be allowed. We are balancing peoples right to practice their religion against a professional duty to reduce the risk of infection to the patient. As an interesting parallel, there already exists an exemption in that all healthcare workers are allowed to wear a plain wedding band. This establishes a precedent that we can increase the risk of infection being transmitted to patients so that healthcare professionals can conform to the cultural norm of wearing wedding rings.

The way i like to think about it (which i warn you may not be correct) is in terms of square matrices and the effect they have on a shape, say. Take a 2x2 matrix and a triangle on the Cartesian plane, then applying the matrix to the triangle will do something to the triangle on the plane - maybe its a different kind of triangle or maybe its a line or maybe we just rotated or reflected it. This also helps me make sense of the determinant of the matrix (if i remember correctly!), a determinant of one meaning that whatever we have done to the triangle it has the same area as it did before. That's how i like to think of it anyway, be interesting to know how accurate this is. Doesn't work for non-square matrices though.

That's rather convenient for you. I'm also awaiting a response, to post 41. You ask for evidence then do not look at it when presented. You join a discussion forum then refuse to discuss points which you find difficult to answer. Why would you do that? If you are have time limitations you not try focusing a thread on just one small aspect, instead of making meandering verbose posts.

I'll always recommend Khan academy for the basics.

So you have listed a small number of antibiotics and briefly describe how resistance to these might occur with a little preamble. What does this add to the discussion other than obfuscation? Please be specific how this list added in any way to our discussion. Next you have assumed that because genes can transmit horizontally that they have done so in this case. An obvious logical fallacy.You would have to provide evidence of this. Evidence like this. You have asserted your assumptions as scientific fact, while at the same time admonishing others for not explaining things scientifically. This is why people are becoming frustrated with you. To be clear, if someone calls you a dick, that is not an ad hominem attack, it is just an insult plain and simple. They have to say your idea is wrong because you are a dick for it to be a fallacy.

Unfortunately i don't have time now to study the potentially interesting articles you reference. However, i can provide you some direct evidence against this statement. Let us take antibiotic resistance. We have populations of a certain bacteria that were once susceptible to antibiotics which are no longer susceptible to antibiotics. We can isolate the gene which is responsible for this change (aka evolution): Taking the article you raised that found no genetic variation occured after 600 generations and the conclusion you draw from it at face value, we would appear to have conflicting evidence: which is what science is all about. It may be fruitful, since you do not believe in evolution, to offer an alternative hypothesis. We can then apply the process of accumulating evidence and seeing whether each supports the alternative hypothesis or the null hypothesis. This way we may decide which of the two (or more) ideas are supported by the most convincing evidence.

Just to be sure here Forex: what, if anything, do you imagine could change your mind on this topic?

Cheers guys, Not come across Lambert's W-Function before - would not have thought up that solution. I'll check it out and let you know how it goes. Update: I get the same equation as wolfram now leading to a sensible sounding answer (about what i'd intuitively expect, which is always nice). Luckily all my parameters are positive so avoided that potential mess. Still need to investigate the function though to understand it properly. Thanks again everyone.

I have: $C=\frac{\lambda}{\mu}e^{-({\mu} - {\lambda})t}$ I just want to make lambda the subject, but things got a little messy. After rearranging, differentiating and solving the quadratic I got an explicit solution. I've attached my solution as a jpeg file (was having a nightmare with LaTex). Would anyone care to have a check for mistakes, it got messy so i wouldn't be surprised if there were.

It could just be an artefact of how the data is collected - for instance more people than you'd believe sit at home after a heart attack and only seek help after the weekend (having a heart attack isn't always obvious), if these events which actually occurred on the weekend are counted as having occurred on Monday then we have a source of bias. It's conceivable that it's a real affect though - can you point us to the data?

Further, it is spiritually anaemic. Awe, reverence and respect make up at least a part of anyone's spiritual journey and i can think of few things which can inspire these qualities as a theory, albeit still being refined, as beautiful as evolution. Whether one believes in god or not we can all share in this experience by learning how facts relate to the theory. "Goddidit" not only silences the intellect, it also blinds us to beauty.

According to this tectonic plates move at between 1-10cm/year. According to this fingernails grow at around 3.6cm/year. So a casual glance shows ocean floors 'grow' at around twice the speed of finger nails: i.e. not very similar. However, given the amount of variation in these figures depending on numerous variables i'm sure you could cherrypick some subset of the populations' fingernail growth and some particular plate and find they have very similar growth rates. But why would you? You might as well start picking letters out a Harry Potter books to find messages from aliens. Or miracles in the Quran. Or the face of Jesus in toast... Coincidences happen all the time.

Tell us what you've done and in particular where you are stuck.

I take your point, but still the latter example doesn't sit well with me. I just can't imagine what an experiment to test for 'randomness' in a physical process would look like. I understand such experiments do exist though - i'll be studying some QM next year, so i'll wait until then to explore further.

We can agree that life is sacred without recourse to the rest of your preamble.

On a related issue i have often wondered how we can know certain physical processes are 'truly' random. For instance, we can measure some decay rates. Then we could generate some pseudo-random numbers with the same parameter found for the decay rates. Now give these data sets to someone unaware of how they were generated - how would they be able to tell one is a random process the other a deterministic, albeit complex, process? As far as i can tell all we could say is that both processes seem to behave in a way which we can model as a particular random process.

But isn't the unique half-life a description of what would happen in the limit? For any finite amount of an element it would only approximate this limit, with closer approximations with larger amounts. Presumably the decay rates of different elements have been measured and found to follow a Poisson process, just with different parameters. How would this mean they are not random?

I have come across the idea that locus of control is at least correlated with depressive symptoms, so i quickly googled it to get a general idea of the evidence behind the claim. I found abstracts of 2 meta-analyses, but couldn't find the full texts so can't be sure of their quality. Maybe others will have better luck and could comment. http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1988-35828-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1996-03051-015 These suggest that more depressed people have less sense of control. I find it hard to pretend to have any control over things when i consider how insignificant all humans are in the grand scale of the universe, but i take solace in the idea that within my small patch of existence there are at least some things which i can influence, if only myself and those immediately around me. Like the saying goes Or more colourfully