Moontanman

Do you even bother to read the links you post? that link had nothing to do with titan flipping upside down...

This stuff has no bearing on my piece of mind, you may as well demand a scientific investigation of Middle Earth....

So far i think this has been a productive thread, i expect there will be more on this, the idea that intelligence might mold the shape of the bearer of that intelligence the same way water molds an animal that swims in it is interesting. possibly it requires time to digest the implications...

Evidently the Op doesn't even attempt to differentiate between truth and fiction...

I would suggest that citizens owning guns would not have any effect on such a catastrophe happening or not....

NIF, you are missing something very important here, the "radioactive clock" doesn't start until the material in question has stopped exchanging material with the outside environment. Plasma's do not keep the decay products from escaping, the idea that radioactive decay of plasma is accelerated has no connection what so ever with radiometric dating. Radiometric dating works by measuring the ratio between the original radioactive element and it's decay products, this doesn't start until the material has solidified. As long as the decay products can escape the "clock" doesn't start, it starts when the material in question stops exchanging material with the outside environment. The decay rate of plasma no matter how fast or slow it is has no bearing on radiometric dating because the decay products do not stay with the material but easily escape into the surrounding environment...

A mind or an observer is not needed to collapse the wave function, radioactive decay is all that is needed.... your so called scientific proof is biased and based on nothing but subtle apologetics based on cherry picked speculative interpretations not empirical evidence... there are many other schools of thought on this that do not support your god idea in the least... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_(quantum_physics) http://io9.com/5528321/how-smart-do-you-need-to-be-to-collapse-a-wave-function

Not everyone seems to agree with this...

Completely ionized atoms would never be a part of a life form nor would completely ionized atoms be a significant part of the solid earth. The decay daughter elements would not stay around to be measured if it all started out as plasma and so you would never see a uranium lead ratio that could be based on uranium plasma decaying into lead plasma. to say this in any way negates radioactive dating ignores reality completely...

Beyond comprehension? No of course not but killing people who are not directly a threat to your life is not a sane action. Revenge is not an acceptable reason to kill or even harm another person. So keeping guns away from insane people is not an option? Again, reasonable controls on guns would go a long way toward stopping these types of crimes, why is that not an option?

It's confusing to me, i cannot understand the whys behind gun violence, violence in general confuses me, this has to be deeper than guns are simply available, to me it looks more like insanity than gun ownership is the major driver in this... I don't see how you can assert this with any real certainty, are you saying that when an intruder comes into your home you are more likely to shoot one of your family members than the intruder? Also are you saying that having a gun and having an intruder has only the one option of shooting the intruder? I agree that killing someone over property is unacceptable but assuming they are not going to harm you is just as unacceptable... The middle ground is holding the intruder at gun point while the police are making their way to you... Isn't it more reasonable to use the gun as a threat instead of shoot first and ask questions later? I don't see use of a gun as a shoot first thing, in fact in my state if you do shoot an unarmed intruder you have some explaining to do to say the least. You can't shoot someone who is trying to get away either... A gun can be used effectively as a threat, as in put your hands up or I'll shoot type thing. The sound of a 12 gauge pump chambering a round is quite effective in intimidating an intruder, any intruder who has any desire to live. I just don't see it as an either or thing, there are more options than kill the intruder... Possibly my own gun training plays into this, I was taught to never shoot at anything I didn't know exactly what it was and to never shoot first and ask questions later, always give the other guy a spoken warning at least, if you see him first i can't imagine not telling him to stand down or be shot.. this of course implies you have the drop on him, if you do not then he has the option of killing you and you have no options... Simply shooting someone who is in your home is not an option for me... So no pepper spray or tasers?

I have to ask, on TV body armor, while keeping a person from being killed, doesn't totally negate the effects of being shot. Does wearing body armor allow you to just shrug off a pistol round or is the effect like it is portrayed on TV where the person is knocked unconscious or at least incapacitated for a short while after being shot? I remember carrying a gun to school to go hunting after school at a friends house... no one even noticed my shot gun on the school bus.... seems almost unthinkable now how common and accepted guns were then. Maybe in 50 years owning a gun will seem as unthinkable as taking a gun to school to go hunting does to us now... We've had armed school guards here for 40 years or so, race riots was the original inspiration for those guards... interesting rigney, the US is number 28 in gun homicides per 100,000 people, while the US is still high I am surprised so many other countries are higher...

This topic has brought out some interesting cultural differences in other wise rather similar people. John Cuthber who I seldom disagree with, whose opinion I respect greatly, to me seems almost like an alien from another planet in his views on guns. He has caused me to inspect my own views on this and I found my views to be somewhat less than rational in comparison. I don't know why but the fact my own views are somewhat less than rational doesn't seem to effect my own rationalization for owning a quite deadly weapon in the least. I consider myself to be a reasonable man, virtually no one is in any real danger of being killed by me with my gun, John has convinced me that my need for a gun is less than realistic but yet i have no intention of destroying my gun (selling it would simply pass the buck) in fact my wife has almost talked me into buying her a new pistol for Valentines Day. That last one illustrates how deeply ingrained into the culture of the southern US guns really are... or that we are nucking futs... Why can I not be rational about this? It's quite easy for me to see the folly of guns being readily available in a rational society, why is it so difficult for me to include myself in the set of people who do not own guns? The idea that what a gun looks like has anything to do with how deadly they are is not logical but appearances seem to be the main thrust of gun control so far by the people we elect to represent us and most people seem to be behind this idea of what a gun looks like is more important than what it does. All of us seem to understand that something needs to be done, either make everyone own a gun or at least every house hold should have a gun... or no one should have a gun for any reason... in almost any other case I would say that surely there is a middle ground but for guns there really doesn't seem to be a middle ground, not in the USA, are we, the people of the USA really that different than the rest of the world? In the southern USA guns are more than just an important part of our culture, they represent freedom, safety, independence, individuality, strength. At one time guns were as necessary as an automobile is now but they have become comparable to vestigial organs, no longer necessary for survival but still with us and as impossible to get rid of as whale leg bones. The whale doesn't need them but removing them would still kill the whale...

That is just... maddening, I know we all enjoy freedom of speech but do we or even should we enjoy freedom of lies? Does freedom of speech include intentionally deceiving people and telling lies as truth? Conservative bikers....

Do you have a link? I have to think it's a classic case of projection... something Fox news is very good at doing....

Exactly how long are you assuming the conditions for the origin of life lasted on the Earth?

Well then it must be true...

Lets back this up just a small amount, there are other schools of thought about the origin of life. I've skimmed through your links and while I cannot critique them I do know that they are not the last word. I don't understand this statement, when you have an entire planet full of various chemical cycles going on continuously with no doubt billions of reactions a second even the improbable becomes inevitable and RNA needn't be the first self replicating molecule. Now this is my own personal opinion but I think the origin of life was a synergistic process where many cyclic chemical reactions, each producing something that other cycles used slowly formed both inside and outside bubbles of detergent like chemicals formed by wave action. These bubbles of chemical reactions combined and were torn apart many times before the ability to divide came about. I have a couple pretty good videos on file that explain parts of these processes but the idea that suddenly a cell formed and was able to reproduce due to a complex chemical like RNA was almost certainly way down the line from the first actual reproducing chemical systems...

Funny how you would know the details of such rooms....

I loved that movie, when Bruce caused the monkey to crawl out of the guys ass i laughed until i cried, my ribs were sore for days....

Immortal you need to read the rules, yes they apply to you and your religion, this is a science forum and as such you need to back up your claims with evidence that can be tested and confirmed scientifically. Yes, even in the religious forum.... I have asked you over and over to show us the scientific evidence you have incessantly claimed you have and so far you have failed to do so. The bold part of your quoted message is not true, you have shown no such thing, that statement is dishonest. I request that you withdraw your assertions if you cannot back them up...

I think it's important to note that humanoid does not mean mammal, just the general shape of a human...

yes, I would have to agree with that, my own attempts to imitate the sun for growing coral showed the human eye is a very poor judge of both color and light intensity but the sun does have an objective color, 5800 kelvin average temp and color temp... We perceive it as white light but the atmosphere scatters the blue making the actual disc of the sun appear yellow... http://www.universetoday.com/18689/color-of-the-sun/

The sun is a yellow dwarf star John, it appears yellow to the human eye, but combined with the blue sky the light is white, the sun is not reddish....

I can see some real problems with that, while stegosaurus might have had a small brain i doubt it's internal functions were any less complex that a elephant, they both have or had complex internal organs and immune systems if they hadn't they couldn't have survived. Bird brains are not organised like mammal brains and are thought to be able to do more with less mass. I suggest that dinosaurs brains were organised much like bird brains and so did not require such a large brain to run their body functions. nearly all ideas about brain size are tweeked to make a human look like they are at the top of some artificial hierarchy. this i think is because humans are building the hierarchy. At one time it was assumed that brain size was the deciding factor until we found that some animals had bigger brains, then it was brain to body ratio but even some fish have much higher brain to body ratios, then it was complexity but it is a fact that some animals have brains that are both bigger and more complex than humans. Now some researchers are beginning to see that the way a brain is organised might be more important, this accounts for why birds with such small brains can perform tasks equal to primates and even talk and use words correctly.