Moontanman

Here is an interesting take on this. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tortoises-to-the-rescue&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_EVO_20110627

Dude, please try to use the quote function, it is confusing to try and sort out what you are saying from what others you are quoting. but to getting back to what you said, can you really think that a court of law would recognize mental telepathy because you and your wife talked to god? I mean really? Most people who would stand up in court saying they hear god end up in psychiatric care, what you are saying is not even hearsay, it is just a totally unsupported claim, it might be true and so might the UFO film in another thread in this forum but I have my doubts... Well the way you look at it is wrong, the ancients used trail and error, it does work for simple things but real science is accomplished through the scientific method, once this was established science began to progress at a startling rate. Nope, not science by any definition of the word dude.... if that is science then so is astrology and alchemy and counting the bumps on your head, not science, just groping in the dark for low hanging fruit... I thought he had already reveled himself to you, when can i expect the heavenly phone call? Or are you just special? Ok brainteaserfan, I'd like to discuss this concept of a Christian democracy, we should probably start a new thread so as to not hijack GIA's thread but I would like to understand what you mean by a Christian democracy, lets try to discuss it as accurately. fairly and civilly as possible, are you game? Or maybe they were trying to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority? I am sorry what has this got to do with anything? I know many witches, very nice people, very family orientated law abiding citizens. Have I missed something here? I honestly do not want to dissuade you from your religion but i strongly recommend you read the bible, not in bits an pieces picked out by some pastor trying to make a point but read it, word for word and see what it says, it's the best defense against religion getting out of hand I know if, to really know what it says.

Thanks swansont, i am going to just quit posting news and read your stuff... no just kidding, it was misleading thanks for pointing it out.

New alloy converts heat directly into electricity By Ben Coxworth The heat given off by electronics, automobile engines, factories and other sources is a potentially huge source of energy, and various technologies are being developed in order to capture that heat, and then convert it into electricity. Thanks to an alloy that was recently developed at the University of Minnesota, however, a step in that process could be saved - the new material is able to convert heat directly into electricity. http://www.gizmag.com/alloy-converts-heat-into-electricity/19025/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=8b45e8a4ee-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email

I have apologized for misreading your statement but I will not allow you to use that to assert i am wrong, i have asserted nothing that I cannot back up with evidence, if you feel i have in anyway gottin out of hand I suggest you report me to the moderators, i assure they will be just as quick to shoot me down as they would anyone else, as for brainteaser, leave him to me, he has been just as disrespectful and i will not allow his assertions to go unanswered. sorry i am not as subtle as you or he would prefer, it gets old fast refuting the same old tired crap over and over while your opponent never makes any assertions that can be backed up by anyone but people who have a bias. to assert that any secular information cannot be neutral suggest that secularism is based in the same type of belief that religion is, this is demonstrably wrong can and if not could be easily refuted by you are anyone else but so far I have seen no refutation what so ever, just assertions that mythology stand on the same ground as rationalism, you can claim that until the cows come home but it will never be true by mere assertion. You are welcome to believe in any fairy tales you choose due to secular laws, not any god's laws, if you can refute that feel free to do so or as you say, go outa here, it is sad you cannot refute any of my assertions of secular law or the reason it is so important to us all, from religious to the atheist or anyone who is anywhere in between. I feel very strongly that the religious people of our country need to understand that freedom of religion protects us all from the abuses of religion unleashed. it is easy to show evidence of what happens when religion is allowed to dictate reality, people die, often horribly for simply believing the "wrong" way. Even if I was a devout "religionist" i would be able to see how separation of church and state is important to us all. It truly saddens me to see the very people who are protected by law denouncing that very law. No you cannot, it might start out that way but it has never ended up that, never ever.... Umm, just a wild guess here but because it is the truth? is the truth so hard for religious people to understand? rationalists do not deny reality no matter if it agrees with them or not. Religionists on the other hand consistently claim to have the absolute truth but it is never backed up by anything but lies and misinformation and the insistence that bronze age mythology is the absolute truth, religious apologetics is all you ever get from them, it is a fact that the 'Christian religion as we know it has asserted from the very beginning that lying to preserve religion is ok, in fact it is required, any evidence of anything that disagrees with the Christian religion has to be denied. Look it up, i am tired of looking up stuff. i would start with the guy who started the entire protestant movement and go from there, Martin Luther is his i name I think, admirably the catholic church does not (at least anymore) assert dogma over reality but protestants not so much... Which Scriptures were taken out of context, please be specific. Not obviosly biased? Research? so Thomas Jefferson was ok except for his critique of Christianity? seriously, not biased, the entire site is biased toward Christianity and the fact is that at that time it was near impossible to live in the US and not at least give lip service to Christianity in some way, if they were so Christian why did they suggest such a strong separation of church and state? if they really believed it why did they geld it? But even if they were indeed devout Christians I can and still have demonstrated very well that our civilization is not based in any religion but our first world civilization is indeed based in rationalism, take that away and we are back to square one, burning witches, hanging catholics or who ever happens to disagree with you and you don't get to feed clothe and heal the billions of people on the earth who need it because the support for those things would never have been invented with out rationalism, secularism is why you can have the debate of which religion you want to take over to begin with....

As much as I would like to believe, and I really would, I am going to require a bit more than lights in the sky, I bet Industrial Light and Magic could do that in a New York minute....

Oh horse shit, are we going back to the dueling links again? Can you give me one from a site not affiliated with the promotion of religion and if you do want a religious government I suggest you move to Saudi Arabia, nice little religious government they have going there, of course you could go back to the Christian religious governments the people who came here were so desperate to escape from and get into some good old fashioned killing anyone who doesn't agree with your particular brand of mythology, mmmm roasted witch, sounds good doesn't it? You cannot provide any evidence that your idea of God is anything but mythology because so far you haven't shown any. I would think that by now you would have used your "big gun" to blow me out of the water, you can't do it because there is no evidence for God, none what so ever, NONE! But i can assert rationalism as the prime mover of our civilization and the primary cause you have the right to even discuss what religion you want to believe. Secularism is the very reason you have the right to choose your religion, it's not god's law you can choose your religion, it's man's law, do you really want to go back to the good old days of requiring everyone worship your way and to hell or jail with everyone else, get a damn clue....

Driving while talking on a cell phone is quite unfair to the people you kill when you ram them because you weren't paying attention... and don't say you can drive just as good while talking as you do when you are not, you know it's not true and no study has ever shown that talking while driving is anything but impairing to the driver and dangerous to every one else...

Ok, i apologize, i did indeed misread your statement but the fact remains that theist and deist are not the same thing and fact no Christian by definition can be a deist. Are both of you really trying to assert that your particular take on the mythology of theism is absolute truth and therefore really suitable for being required or even supported by a government that is based on freedom of religion? If you are then there is no more room for discussion, your path leads to an intellectual black hole from which nothing returns. No, many of them claimed to be deists and by definition cannot be Christians.

So any mention of God is automatically the Christian god? In what reality do you live? What about the Lord Krishna? or Allah, or any of the the other to numerous to count, gods goddesses and various deities made up by and asserted as absolute truth by so many people it becomes silly to argue the point gods? BTW i think that the addition of in god we trust on money and the addition of under god in the pledge is illegal and immoral due to the both the notion of promoting any one god over another and for the immoral reasons it was done, by McCarthy era red herring hunters.... I was afraid you wouldn't see my point and your assertion that any of my links said the founding fathers were atheists is indeed incorrect, they were deists, not atheists, the idea that any one who doesn't agree with your assessment of god is an atheist is indeed one of the prime lies promoted by creationists and really dishonest as all creationist apologetics are. In the time frame of the American founding fathers to assert you were an Atheist would have been quite unhealthy and dangerous for any individual brave enough to assert such a thing. think about the time you are talking about, it hadn't been far too long since witches were burned and Catholics hanged, an atheist would have been low hanging fruit to say the least

Oh I agree whole heartedly that time travel is indeed science fiction, well actually science fantasy but why quibble over such a small detail. I wasn't saying I thought those things i numbered where true only that to actually time travel they would need to be true which if our assessment of reality is even close to being real they are not...

So we are going to do dueling links to information? All I can say is the link saying the founding fathers were Christian was... shall we say, less than objective? It's a religious site that promotes, can we all say it together, religion of all things How about this one? http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html or this one http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/farrell_till/myth.html or this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism we could do this all day or we could read the constitution and see what it says about religion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_the_United_States The United States of America is not a Christian Country in any sense of the word and is in fact prohibited by law from promoting any religion, I think that many of the religious nuts in our country should think about this very carefully because who is to say that if indeed this country or any country for that matter does indeed promote the Christian religion who is to say it will be their particular brand of Christianity the Government endorses

That is true but you still age at the rate that is normal for you and you still spend time in time, just a slowed down version in relation to others who are not moving in relation to you. When i think of time travel i think of simply stepping into a machine and arriving at a destination as though you are going to the mall or the next room. You have a valid point but to me that is not visiting the future independent of time but still with in the "Now" of everyone else. You simply age slower, there is no disconnect with time that time travel implies.

I think the biggest disconnect is that "they" worship a book, while "others" look to understand reality either with a belief in God but still using the data of reality as a guide or with no belief in a god but just a need to understand how reality works with no beliefs.

Time travel has always fascinated me, the idea, to me anyway, postulates some things that we at least think cannot be true. #1 would be that you can step outside of time into some sort of higher dimension that is separate from time or able to see the entirety of time. This also seems to indicate there is universal time that is independent of time as we know it and non relative to what we would call time. #2 I think the idea also would have to allow FTL or at least the idea that time is not relative to motion but has a constant quality we just cannot detect that is above what we see as relativity. Lets call it T1 and what we experience as t2. #3 this would allow a time traveler to go back in time, any travel back in time would have to change the future in some way, this would imply the time traveler would appear out of no where with no past or future once he had traveled back, this would eliminate the problem of causality. If these three things could be some how gotten around them time travel would be possible but since we don't see individuals popping into existence from nowhere with no past or future then i think this would imply that there are no time travelers nor can there be. I think there is no past or future as a real place you can travel independent of "now" We all travel to the future but it is not independent of the "now" we are currently in nor does the past exist as a place, only the now exists, no past or future. Of course that is just my speculation, no data to back it up what so ever...

Why attempt to explain something in extreme detail to people who wouldn't understand evolution if it jumped up their ass and don't give a shit anyway? I have drunk way too much coffee today

The chasm dividing them is an artificial one created by biblical literalists who cannot understand that the bible doesn't have to be absolute truth for god to exist. For them it's either God creating with out evolution or evolution with out god, they are simply worshiping a book instead of the idea of god, i would call it idolatry. I so look forward to debating this with you, I would love to read of just one instance of actual Irreducible Complexity, just one is all I want, I await your reply with baited breath....

Progress was quite modest until secular governments gelded religion and secured the rights of humans over the word of god, only then did we begin to progress and only after the scientific method was worked out did we really start to progress at a rate comparable to what we see now. I may be slightly over the top with my assessment but I take full responsibility for what I say and in no way demean anyone who wants to believe and allow others to believe their own way a idea that was conceived by man and the right to do so is BTW the result of mans laws not god's. BTW if god is the supreme being of anything i have to admit he is the supreme being of fairness, "he/she/it" unambiguously ignores everyone with complete fairness.

Their hands were never concerned with my pockets Rigney, i happen to be intimately acquainted with the dirty little secrete of fundamentalists, metal, physical and sexual abuse of true believers, adults and children, spouses, read that as women and the cover up by inducing fear of going to hell if you say anything that might keep others from believing. The bending over backward of both male and female clergy and parishioners so far their heads come out of their own mouths to insure the sheep never know or never tell. The biblical literalists are nothing but self inflated bags of hot flatulence. They are all jackasses who would cover up anything no matter how bad to keep the money flowing and the people mesmerized by their lies and bullshit. The instill fear of god into everyone and indulge themselves in every way on the backs of the people who fear god. As long as the sheep give their money to the shepherds the bullshit will continue to flow out from the sheep to the shepherds and the stench will fill the air and choke us all. Right now the battle lines are being drawn, I just watched face the nation and the leading female republican tell how god tells her to run for president so she can protect the constitution and make sure Christians rule, Conservatives have aligned themselves with the fundamentalist Christian right. Again we will be be asked to choose between God and what is right and again i suspect we will choose God and the blame for all our woes will be laid at the feet of Progressives as the Conservatives do their best to ignore the mistakes of 8 years of Conservative rule and try to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and make sure the word of God and the fear of hell fire backs up their bullshit. If you love freedom and respect the founding fathers you will vote democrat, not because they are correct but because they will allow you to be wrong if you want but if you believe that God and government is the same thing and should be totally intrusive and unaccountable then vote Republican, they'll get around to screwing you in one way or another but if you play their game you might be allowed to enjoy it. I want to know why the hell my spell checker always suggests Conservative be capitalized but not liberal or progressive??? Can anyone say conspiracy???!!! So irony is totally lost on you? I thought it quite witty and that answer has confounded many a creationist over the years

The only obvious thing I can think of that's added to honey to increase the weight is honey comb, you can't eat it, it's nothing but wax, I never buy honey with the comb in the bottle. Wild honey or as we called it wild mountain honey is rare now days, mostly due to the same diseases that are harming domestic bees. With no one to take care of them wild bees are simply dying out, the European honey bee is a domesticated animal, it's presence in the new world is as an invasive exotic, Native Americans called them "white man's flies" their elimination from the wild will help bring about a resurgence in native bees few of which make honey or sting for that matter.

Honey is supposed to be very difficult to synthesize, I have kept bees, i have seen "bee farms" millions of hives are used to insure crops are pollinated all over the world, yes Dekan, honey bees and honey are real.... there are however lots of different kinds of honey, from pure clover honey to the tupelo honey of song, i prefer the dark almost black honey from the main hive that is aged several years in the presence of bees, it's very dark, almost black and has a harsh bitter sweet taste but I do love it. When i was young i used to follow wild bees, yes it is possible to do this, to their tree cut it down and harvest the honey, very dark black honey often mixed with mashed bee larvae, we called it "wild mountain honey" nothing better on your morning toast... The ancient liquor Meade is supposed to be based on honey but I am not sure the modern version is.

Ahh relaxation (whirls his double bladed ax over head as neighbor calls police....)

Another point that should be made is or has to do with medicine, a great many bio-active compounds are found in nature, if we had to discover these compounds by simple trail and error it would take millions of years to just find one compound. Life on Earth is a invaluable resource of bio-active compounds, most of which we have yet to even know of much less test. You cannot know or even pretend to be able to predict where the next life saving bio chemical will come from, the cure for almost anything can be waiting in the venom of a tiny rare cuttlefish (actually this little guy is under investigation for it's possible medicinal qualities) or some other rare or odd animal, compounds found in sponges have been found with medicinal qualities, acidians, echinoderms, a great many fish can be health giving just by eating them. We cannot say how small the ecology can be and us still live but we do know that every time something becomes extinct a whole zoo of bio active chemicals goes extinct with it.

So all the evidence you have is your wife confirmed it? Interesting I admit but hardly conformation. The forefront of the research you assert is still sucking hind tit to real science, I'll stick with real science, there are worldwide conferences on creationism too, they release papers in their own journals too, doesn't make it any more likely the Earth is 6,000 years old, it just means a lot of people believe it, belief does not equal evidence. I am talking about believing in God instead of reality, if you read the Christian bible you will find very little limits to what can be justified by saying God wanted it to be done. The 10 commandments are a joke when it comes to what god wants, about the only one God will not allow is have no other gods before me, the rest are completely conditional. We live in the first and only civilization based on science, everything around you is based in science, from the computer you are on right now to the aircraft flying over head to all the food and water, power, medicine, everything that keeps you and me alive. Take away science and billions of people would die within days if not hours. All we have is based in a falsifiable reality, no amount of praying or belief will provide for us unless we want to go back to preindustrial civilization, that would necessitate the removal of most of the people on the earth. Try praying to make the electricity come on, or to make the water flow or to heal the sick, there is a reason no faith healers are employed by hospitals, have faith the sewage system will operate. Our entire world is based on the assumption that we can know reality and it is the same whether or not you believe it is real or not. You cannot pick and choose which parts of our science you want to keep and which parts you do not believe in, your belief no matter how strong will never change reality. Civilization as we know it developed because of science not in spite of it or parallel to it or separate from it, science and the scientific method is why were are here having this conversation, with out it most of us would never have existed to have this debate. Belief is not what our civilization is based on, belief is the greatest threat to our civilization, once you actually believe your god is the only true god and his word as written is the only truth then everything falls into chaos and war and destruction, religions never bring people together, the more than 30,000 Christian sects demonstrate this quite well, they only fractionate into smaller and smaller groups that hate each other because they do not "believe" the correct way. They only believe that if everyone would just believe the way they do then we would all have peace but history shows this to be false, only when religion was gelded by secular governments did civilization prosper and advance, science has done more for humanity in the last 100 years than religion has done in all of history, i think quite it telling that god never once has pointed out antibiotics, or pain medicine, nothing what so ever but hate and division under the disguise of peace and love. Christian fundamentalists are the least of it, far more Muslim and Hindu creationist types are under our radar but just as dangerous, if the creationist mind set ever takes hold in our society we will experience the greatest fall of civilization the world has ever seen, the fall of Rome will be a bad weekend during spring break compared to the number of people who will die if our civilization falls. We cannot allow biblical literalists to take hold of our technology or our civilization, they would use it to end all freedoms as we know them or possibly worse just turn "it" off and let the world die. Now you know how i feel about religion, literally

This apparent discrepancy would seem to be the result of a sampling bias, "the low hanging fruit" so to speak. The ones we have discovered so far are the easiest ones to find, big planets close in the star are easier to find than small planets close in with big planets far out like our solar system. Once we get the ability to find the smaller planets close in we will know more about how the "average" planetary system is, it may very well be there is no average planetary system or that ours is odd but we just don't have the data to say for sure yet. There is some evidence that our own planetary system was at one time wildly different than it is now with planets migrating in and out from the sun as they formed, there is just not enough data yet to know for sure.