exchemist

It is recognised in a number of jurisdictions, including the UK, that senior judges, because they are appointed towards the end of distinguished legal careers, tend to reflect the social makeup of the legal profession 30 years before. Judges are famous for being a bit out of touch. Yet these people make the law, today, for the whole of society. It can make sense, therefore, to prefer a candidate - if, as in this case, a sufficiently able one is available - that widens the range of social representation on the bench. (You can look up tosser if you like - it is impolite and chosen for that reason.)

You need justices that represent the range of people they are judging. And by any standards this candidate seems better qualified than some of the recent appointees. If she were no good she would not have been confirmed. (Peterson is a bit of a tosser, in my opinion.)

Haha. It won't work. Of that, there is no doubt whatsoever.

I think I may now have understood why you think that this device could work. I notice you said in your opening post that:- "The trick is that the weight that rotates upwards does not move further away from its fulcrum at the top right of the disc. So technically no work is performed moving the weight closer to the axle of the wheel. The work performed is the wheel rotating." It looks as if you think that because the torque exerted by the descending weight, which is at full extension along its arm, exceeds the torque due to the rising weight, which is progressively being wound in along its arm, there is a torque imbalance in favour of accelerating the wheel. This would of course be in conflict with the energy analysis, which would be that as the rising weight is returned to the same height as the descending weight, no net work is done and thus the wheel will not accelerate. But I think you will find there is an additional source of torque, exerted on the arm of the rising weight, due to the mechanism used to pull it in. This will exactly counteract the torque imbalance arising from the difference in leverage from the weights themselves. So no free lunch.

Then what the hell are you talking about Nietzsche for, you berk? This is pointless. I've had enough.

Medical mistakes are commonplace. However it is extremely rare indeed for an error to be made when someone is pronounced dead, since that is pretty easy to determine, as has been explained to you several times now.

The fact that cars sometimes crash does not call into question the laws of mechanics. Similarly, occasional medical incompetence does not call the science of what happens at death into question.

OK so two ideas: a struggle that some people have against poverty, and Nietzsche's idea that if one does not believe in God one has to replace the role of God in some way. The first one seems to be a social issue rather than anything to do with religion. Marx, at any rate, did not seem to think religion helped with it. On the second, you will need to explain first of all why Nietzsche thought that a replacement for God would be needed, if one did not have religious belief.

Read your own link: https://mashable.com/article/woman-wakes-up-in-morgue

Eh? Who the f*** is "Fred", suddenly? And why don't you answer my question? A struggle has to be against something. Who is struggling and against what? Is this "Fred" person struggling against a "wealth gap", or something? If so, who cares? And what does this have to do with atheists believing in religion? Or are you just someone who habitually makes no sense?

None of these links has any scientific evidence of a person resuming life after being dead for hours. At best they are unsubstantiated anecdotes and, in one of them, the article even explains why they were not actually dead.

And yet you are unable to produce any of this supposed evidence. ( [whispers] That is because it doesn't exist. We all know that, you see.)

Don't worry, there are plenty of people here who are at least as adept at mathematics as you are likely to be. It's a science forum. By the way, I watched the video and burst out laughing. The wheel conveniently moves only a quarter of one turn...... and then one of the weights falls off. Hilarious. Why not wait until the thing can perform a full rotation - without bits dropping off - before trying to make a video? But of course the snag then, from your point of view, will be that it will be obvious it doesn't work. As always, a video is fairly useless at describing a mechanism. One needs a diagram with a written explanation, showing how the wheel is constructed. I notice for instance that the weight that is initially at the bottom starts to slide inward on its shaft as it rises. It is not clear what mechanism is doing that and this is crucial as it is obviously doing work on the weight against gravity. Can you provide a diagram and explanation of the mechanism that lifts the weight? There is an Earth Science section on this form, with a whole sub-section devoted to climate.

You are still trying to shift the burden of proof onto your readers: "Prove me wrong!", the age-old cry of the crank down the centuries. Science relies on reproducible evidence. Without that, you have nothing to persuade anyone to take you seriously.

It won't work of course, so you are wasting your time. The reason why (apart from the obvious point about violating conservation of energy) is that when the weights are closer in to the wheel and have less leverage, there are more of them. This counteracts the torque of the weights that are at full extension from the wheel on the other side. As for your point about gravity having energy, yes we know: it's called "gravitational potential energy" and we learn about it in school, around the age of 11.

Haha, spoken like a true crank! It doesn't work like that. If you have a claim to make, it is for you to provide the supporting evidence. Other people don't have to run around and jump through hoops, to see if your ideas may possibly have anything behind them, especially when they think they are most likely nonsense. It's your job to show they are not nonsense. Nobody else's.

All this is beside the point - apart from being also wrong about why the historical procedures you refer to were performed. The fact is that cell death (as @CharonYpoints out, a better term than decomposition in this context) is known to occur within minutes of the cessation of supply of oxygen. And that's it. There is nothing more to discuss, unless as I say you can produce well-attested evidence of people coming back to life many hours or days after cessation of brain activity (which we can use as a proxy for brain cell death).

Physical decomposition, which, as I've pointed out, occurs in a matter of minutes after the circulation has stopped, except in a few highly exceptional circumstances. Permanent cessation of all brain activity is a pretty good indicator of this, having the advantage that you don't need to open the skull.

No theory is ever proved in science. However, we have a pretty good theory of what constitutes death, viz. permanent cessation of all brain activity. None of the examples in the Lazarus syndrome article represent anyone coming back to life after brain death. There are cases in which the heart can stop and then resume, and so long as the brain is not starved of oxygen completely during this time a resuscitation may be possible. If it is starved of oxygen, there will be progressive brain damage, eventually sufficient to prevent resuscitation at all, generally within minutes of the circulation stopping. (There have been cases involving low temperatures, in which someone can survive longer, due to the brain being cooled so much that its oxygen requirement drops, but these are rare and are explained by our current knowledge in the relevant science.) There are no well-attested cases, so far as I know, of anyone at ambient temperature returning to life after all brain and heart activity has been stopped for hours. If you believe differently, it is up to you to provide the evidence, not for us to somehow prove the absence of it. (That's because science does not require us to spend time trying to prove the absence of fairies, pink unicorns or other alleged phenomena for which no evidence has been produced.)

I don't see how it does any such thing. What struggle? Why would there be a struggle? Struggle against what?

As I have no idea what your "parable" is supposed to illustrate, I can't answer that.

It is always rational to think you may know better than a random group of people, if you have checked your information is good. Many people are badly informed about a lot of things. What mood they may be in is neither here nor there. It is obviously not rational for an atheist to believe religious claims, since if he did then he wouldn't be an atheist, would he? What are you trying to ask?

Well no, it is the presence together of asparagine and simple sugars that forms acrylamide. Caramel doesn't have asparagine in it, as it is formed by heating sugar alone. But there is some in molasses and also in dark bread crust and things like that. It appears acrylamide has been shown to cause cancer in rats at some level, but it is unclear whether the levels at which it occurs in most food items are at all risky. There is always, in these cases, the question of whether there is a safe dose, below which any mutagenic effects can be corrected by the body. The same argument is perennial in discussion of radiation doses, I understand. Since the body has mechanisms for repair to genetic damage, it seems reasonable to think that there is may be a safe dose, below which any damage can be handled, but this is contested by some, I gather.

Got it! See this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-3040.2012.02565.x To summarise: when potatoes are stored cold there is an imbalance between the rate of starch breakdown and the rate of sugar utilisation by the cells, presumably because their metabolic rate is decreased by more than the rate of starch breakdown. This leads to a build-up of free sugars. These, on frying the potato, undergo the Maillard reaction with amino acids, leading to dark brown compounds. (Apparently if the amino acid is asparagine, acrylamide can be formed, which is a suspected carcinogen. Yikes!) But in spite of this, potatoes are commercially kept in a cold store, to stop them sprouting or going off. So the solution seems to be to use the freshest potatoes you can get. Possibly better from a market stall than a supermarket, though not necessarily: all depends on time between field and sale. Possibly best to fry potatoes in the summer and autumn, when they have not been kept so long, as well. Anyway, a few things to try.

This is really interesting and may provide the answer to something that has bothered me for a while as a cook. When I make sauté potatoes, I generally steam them first, then slice them (skin still on) and fry them in hot oil. If I use a floury variety, they generally come out golden and crisp on the outside, which is what I am aiming for. However sometimes I find this fails and instead they go dark brown in patches, don't crisp up, leaving them unpleasantly oily, and taste sweet. I had put this down to sugars forming, which caramelise on frying, but could not work out why this sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't, even when consistently using the same type of potato (Maris Piper, usually). I now wonder if it could be due to the supermarket storing them at too low a temperature as, when we go to France in summer, I never have this problem. The potatoes are fresher there and probably not kept in a cold store, whereas I suspect the English supermarkets shove all their fresh produce into a cold store so it is pot luck whether or not they are there long enough to develop sugars. Do you know the mechanism of the sweetening? I assume it must be breakdown of the starch polysaccharide to sugar monomer, but what triggers that? Some enzyme?