Strange

I have said three times now that I am not saying he is a liar. I will type it again very slowly so you can follow: I AM NOT SAYING HE IS A LIAR. Okay?

No maths as it is an informal, jokey statement (there appears to be nothing in this thread that deserves to be taken seriously). But, as I said: we know people do lie sometimes. But we have zero evidence of aliens living among us. Therefore lying is a possible explanation while aliens is an extraordinarily unlikely one. (And I repeat, as this appears to be wilful-misunderstanding-night, I am not saying he is lying.) It is also ironic that you ask me to support my statement but are gullible enough to just accept there must be 30 species of aliens living among us because someone says so.

I didn't say that. I strongly disagree with that statement. It is: this is known as the "big bang" theory.

No. I didn't say that. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was life elsewhere in the universe.

Not a bad approach. In one job, I decided to do all formatting with VBA macros because the documents had to be imported from another system, and it is much easier to keep documents consistent this way (as Word makes a crap job of applying a template to existing documents). Here is the code snippet to set the page footer, including adding a copyright and page number: ' set footer for odd pages Set r = .Footers(wdHeaderFooterPrimary).Range ' delete anything already there so we start with a clean slate r.Delete ' Insert footer text r.InsertAfter (vbTab & vbTab & CopyrightNotice) ' Insert page number after first tab r.SetRange Start:=r.Start + 1, End:=r.Start + 1 ActiveDocument.Fields.Add Range:=r, Type:=wdFieldPage I think I found I had to add the copyright text and the tabs first in order for there to be a place to insert the page number field. (But it is more than 5 years ago, so I don't really remember.) There is a center aligned and a right aligned tab setting. The code to format the page footer is: ' Set page footer format Private Sub FormatFooter() Dim s As Style Set s = GetParaStyle("Footer") With s .BaseStyle = ActiveDocument.Styles("Normal") With .Font .Size = 8 .name = StandardHeaderFontName .Color = RGB(77, 77, 77) .Bold = True .Italic = False End With With .ParagraphFormat .LeftIndent = 0 .FirstLineIndent = 0 .LineSpacingRule = wdLineSpaceSingle .SpaceBefore = 0 .SpaceAfter = 0 With .TabStops .ClearAll .Add Position:=MillimetersToPoints(82.5), Alignment:=wdAlignTabCenter .Add Position:=MillimetersToPoints(165), Alignment:=wdAlignTabRight End With End With .Borders.DistanceFromTop = 8 With .Borders(wdBorderTop) .LineStyle = wdLineStyleSingle .Color = wdColorBlack .LineWidth = wdLineWidth050pt End With End With End Sub Hope that helps...

Of course not. I specifically said I didn't doubt his sincerity. I can't imagine why someone would lie about something like this. Although, deliberately lying is infinitely more likely than aliens. After all, we know people do lie sometimes. But we have zero evidence of aliens living among us.

Hey, that's ignorance, not lack of intelligence. Which is OK, because ignorance is fixable. As long as one is smart enough to be aware of the ignorance....

Of course. Everyone is. Everyone should question assertions that are unsupported by evidence. There is a saying: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Hey, stop being so flippant! (And I beat you to it. )

That is not a difference between solids and liquids. It is entirely due to the ice, in your example, being attached to the bucket. Admittedly, you can't attach a fluid in that way. But if the material in the bucket were a solid that wasn't stuck to the bucket then you could no more hold it stationary over your head than you could the water. I don't think you are being pedantic. Your are just dragging in irrelevancies ("what if the water was replaced with oobleck", "what if the bucket was porous", "what if ...") Mike's antigravity machine cannot work. And he will discover this when he goes away and builds one.

I doubt the veracity of his information, not his sincerity in believing it. I suppose he could be deliberately lying, but that is usually the last thing I would consider (well, aliens walking among us is the last thing I would consider ).

Don't worry. I learnt a long time that I am not as clever as I thought I was.

No it hasn't. Unless you would like to provide some references to the scientific literature on this?

I assume if he had any evidence, he would present it. "I am privy to insider information" is about as convincing as "the leprechauns told me" (when it comes to a subject for which there is zero evidence).

Did you hear about the insomniac, agnostic, dyslexic who lay awake all night wondering if there was a Dog... Just in case anyone is tempted to take this seriously ... The germanic God/Gott/etc derives from proto-indoeuropean word mean "to invoke" or possibly "to pour a libation". Interestingly, the word dog in English is relatively new (well, from the 16th century, when it replaced hund). The origin is unknown...

He has more than one name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God More seriously, God really does have a lot of names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God I assume the "not taking in vain" commandment is the reason that some people write "G-d" for example. But apart from the fact that this euphemism is pretty transparent (it certainly isn't going to fool anyone who is omniscient) it also seems unnecessary: if one is discussing God, then one isn't taking his name in vain. (Whereas, for example, stubbing your toe and swearing, or describing some Hollywood actor as a G-d would be.)

I don't know (or care) who Paul Hellyer is. Does he present any (objective) evidence?

Is it? Alien conspiracy theories? On Russia Today!? One of the few outlets to make the Weekly World News or Daily Mail seem credible. Not profound, but "deep something".

Mmmmm... Numerology .... Delicious. I assume the 74 subscript is supposed to highlight the small proportion of words which numerologically add to 74? Not many, are there? And not especially significant, either. Oh, dear. Had to split a word arbitrarily to make your magic number appear. #sadface Why 21 and 19? Wow! 21 is divisible by 7 !!! Leaving 3 which is nearly 4!!!! But 19 is prime... But if you subtract 7 it is divisible by 4 !!!1!! And this is why it is numerology: Meerkat doesn't add up to the right number ... "meerkats"? No, still not right ... "the meerkat"? No... Aha "A meerkat! That'll show it isn't numerology! I knew I would find something eventually!" But if "ameerkat" adds up to 74 by summing the letters (why don't spaces count, I wonder?), then "god" must add up to 7+15+4=26. Oh dear. Aha! But that is the number of letters in the alphabet!!! And what about dio, dieu, kami, etc? What is special about English? But English doesn't have a phonetic alphabet. The writing system represents semantics and history as much as phonology. They are based on accidents of history, multiple adaptations to different languages and transcription errors. Also, there used to be a different number of letters in the alphabet so your numbering scheme is all wrong. So using the correct numbers, "meerkat"=68 and "god"=25. Why don't we have 7 fingers? Or 7 on one hand and 4 on the other?

I agree completely. I think studying history of science (and mathematics and technology) is very valuable. I suspect that we might get fewer people claiming various modern theories are wrong, if they had a clearer understanding of how they came to be. If that is what GeneralDadmission is trying to do, then I encourage it. And kudos to you for helping him (I'm afraid my contributions have been limited to pointing out [what appear to be] some of the bigger misconceptions).

As energy also has a gravitational effect (as do pressure, momentum, etc) looking only at mass will will not tell you much about gravity. You are basically going back to a Newtonian view.

Dark energy is not a solution: it is a label for any/all hypotheses. Some of those solutions/hypothesis are literally some form of energy. Other solutions/hypothesis are NOT energy. But they are still included under the label "dark energy".

You have already said that there could be no doubt about the observations which means there is a need for something called "dark energy". In fact, you are more certain about this evidence than I am: But now you seem to be claiming this is invalid, somehow. Please make your mind up.

In the classical view, the expanding universe can be tracked back to a point of zero size. This, I assume, is where the "something from nothing" myth comes from. You are correct that "nothing" is impossible in our universe, but it can be useful to consider it as a theoretical model. The various "vacuum solutions" to the equations of GR, for example, can tell us interesting things about how space-time behave. (For example, even an empyy universe will expand.)

Length contraction is caused by relative velocity so I don't see how it is relevant here.