exchemist

This is why the insurance companies are under no illusions that climate change is real. I understand that Jamaica has something called a catastrophe bond. They will need it. As to your question, I expect the fate of Miami will be that of Galveston (which I have visited): A direct hit, monumental damage - and then a half-hearted recovery that knocks the heart out of the place as people move away.

I’ve read his Wiki entry and can’t see why he would be politically sensitive. Nobel for literature, has written about apartheid S Africa in the course of a long and varied literary career, but I couldn’t see anything to trigger concern. Do we know what the intended purpose of his visit was?

OK , this is now sounding increasingly psychiatric. I think you should talk to a doctor, if you haven’t already done so.

You may not be a complete idiot, I grant you. But you have now been given two good reasons why your accusation must be baseless. So maybe not idiotic, but silly at the very least. And you are ranting again. If you go on throwing out this abuse at all and sundry, people will eventually tire of you. It’s a pity, because I was hoping to have a sensible discussion with you about science and religion, as it is a topic close to my heart. But evidently, it is not to be.

Moderators can know. But you are not a moderator.

You cannot know this. Up and down votes are made anonymously on this forum. (Mind you, just because you are paranoid it doesn't mean everyone isn't out to get you. 😆)

But it doesn’t demand everyone has to do all the legwork for himself. That would mean humanity would never move forward by benefitting from work done by others. It is absurd to suggest that relying on an established body of prior knowledge is somehow automatically “ideology”. As for evolution, the evidence for it is enormous. But yes, to recognise that does mean trusting in the work by a lot of other people, not just going out and doing your own DNA analysis or digging up your own fossils.

No. The px and py orbitals are unhybridised in a triple bond. It is the unhybridised p orbitals that form π-bonds. In the carbon atoms on acetylene, H-C≡C-H, each has two σ-bonds at 180 degrees to each other, formed by the sp hybridised orbitals. One of these is to the H atom at the end of the molecule, and the other is between the 2 carbon atoms. That leaves 2 unhybridised p orbitals to overlap sideways on in 8-8 formation, making 2 π-bonds. In summary: sp hybridisation of a carbon atom gives 2 σ-bonds at 180 deg to one another, in a (1D) line. That leaves 2 unhybridised p orbitals to form 2 π-bonds. sp2 gives 3 σ-bonds at 120 deg to one another, in a 2D plane. That leaves 1 unhybridised p orbital to form a π-bond. sp3 gives 4 σ-bonds at 109.5 deg to one another, in a 3D tetrahedron. That leaves no p orbital unhybridised, so no π-bonds.

Yes I suppose I should have qualified my response to indicate I was referring to the on line variety, as mentioned by @CharonY .

Agreed. It’s too silly to spend time on. In fact I think somewhere there is a forum policy that says we don’t waste time on such non-issues.

Because it is sp hybridised instead of sp2. That means s and pz are hybridised (if we take the z axis as being along the line of the bond), leaving both the px and py to overlap sideways on, 8-8 style, as I explained before, but at right angles to one another. This is actually shown in the diagram.

A crank, usually. And by usually I mean practically always.

Sure. That's what people do.

Please let's not fall into the silly trap of reading Genesis, the oldest book in the bible, literally. No mainstream Christian today who has thought seriously about this story would take it that way. This Wiki article is worth reading on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegorical_interpretations_of_Genesis

Ha, I stand corrected! This seems to be a term no longer recommended and for some reason it had entirely passed me by.

Where does the bible speak of "dynamic energy"?

"Neo"? where do you get that from? "Neo" forms no part of the standard nomenclature for these compounds. It is a prefix meaning "new", e.g. neoprene which was, when it was invented in the 1930s a "new" kind of synthetic rubber. Also "propy" doesn't mean anything. I'm afraid I cannot make sense of your question here. Can you try again and this time uses a few more sentences to explain more clearly what it is you want to understand?

OK here is the web link to the paper I referenced: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/kettell/cloud/faithless.pdf. Hope you can open this. It's quite readable, unlike so many academic papers. (As for all art being propaganda, I think that's baloney, but then I like Bach, whose instrumental music is abstract. But in any case I was talking about the gospels not being agitprop, so unless you are describing them as art I wouldn't think the aphorism applies.)

Indeed, the origin of life cannot be due to evolution, since that already requires replication, the ability of an organism to pass on its traits to descendants. The study of the origin of life on Earth (abiogenesis, as distinct from evolution) is a very interesting topic. A lot of models for various biochemical building blocks have now been identified, though we are still nowhere close to putting them together to create a model for how life first arose. Research continues to make progress but it will be a long road.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. WB Yeats. It was ever thus. Partly because the best can see nuance.

Yes, quite, the gospels are not agitprop. OK so you are referring to evangelical New Atheists on the one hand and fundie Christians (or Muslims or Jews, actually) on the other? Yes, of course they are fighting one another. I also agree it could indeed be seen as a sociopolitical fight, in that both camps want to mould society according to their worldviews. While this is nakedly obvious on the part of the Religious Right in the USA, it is less so for the New Atheists. But I found this article on the topic of the political dimension to New (evangelical) Atheism: I thought it was quite interesting, though it was written in 2013 and my feeling is the New Atheism movement has grown weaker since that time. There is little doubt from reading this that the New Atheists have, or had, political goals. What I wonder now, though, is whether this crusade has gone anywhere. I see a lot less about it than a decade ago. I wonder if this may be linked to the failure of the Intelligent Design movement, which I know exercised people like Dawkins greatly. By the way, and a bit off the subject, I was also struck by the description of how the New Atheists see religion: "Tied to this is a view of religion as propositional, as a set of truth claims about the nature of reality that is to be treated as a scientific hypothesis and duly weighed against the available evidence. As such, new atheists maintain that since no evidence of this kind that can withstand scrutiny has ever been produced, the claims made by religion must therefore be rejected as false." It seems to me this is a bit shallow, ignoring as it does the often profound value of religion in people's lives as a guide, a coping mechanism, a source of tradition, identity, the aesthetic (architectural, visual, musical, literary), shared ritual and community. But that's possibly a different subject.

Oh I didn't intend to single out religious extremism as unique. I simply read your OP as being about extreme religious faith, specifically, so that is what I addressed. There is all manner of extremism at large, certainly, and some of it definitely hijacks religion as a cover story in order to make intolerance seem respectable. But it can work the other way round as well. For example in the USA, and to some degree in Continental Europe, there is the so-called Religious Right, whose objectives seem to be a blend of intolerant social conservatism and old-fashioned religious views. Basically they are trying to advance a social policy agenda, but one inspired largely by their rather antediluvian religious views. I'm not sure I buy your idea of an atheist/theist class struggle, though maybe you can develop it more to help me see what you mean. For the most part, atheist and religious believers get along fine and are thoroughly intermingled, it seems to me, rather than being identifiable classes.

You can speak for yourself of course, but I don't think you can clam to speak for all "physics guys". That would, superficially at least, seem to suggest any physics guy has to be an atheist, which is far from being the case e.g. Born, Abdus Salam, Robert Millikan, Faraday, Lemaitre (obviously!). But perhaps I'm reading you wrong. After all, the qualifier "unfounded" does a lot of work in your statement. None of the people I've listed would accept their religious belief was unfounded, I suspect, though I'm sure they would agree it does not rely on evidence to the standard demanded by science.

What a load of pompous, AI-generated ballocks. 😆

No, I don't think so. (Full disclosure: I'm English, so anything extreme fills me with misgiving😄). Most people with religious faith don't have it by the bucketful, but it still helps them in their lives. There is an obvious danger in extreme faith, in that it can make the believer inflexible. So when something comes along that shakes that faith, there may not be ability to flex, adapt and move forward with a different, modified appreciation. My experience is most well-adjusted people are able to manage a degree of uncertainty or doubt without being unduly troubled by it. I think this is the healthy way to be.