DV8 2XL

The stuff is breath of the bitch goddess Disaster, I'm tellin' ya. Not a winter goes by that I don't hear of someone severely damaging a car, snow-blower, or power sled mill with it. Use with extreme caution.

Don't. Not unless you want to throw a rod, bust a cam, or crack a piston. It's a crap shoot every time you use that stuff.

The short answer to that is all of medicine is more of an art than a science. That is, there no three ring binder with a process written in it for producing a new therapeutic agent. There are sets of tools and there are empirical techniques that are used, plus a good bit of serendipity to discover a new drug.

It was meant to be sarcasm. I have trouble conveying sarcasm in English without missing the mark. At least I didn't come off as insulting you. Still, in a more serious vein, what is your reason for holding to determinism?

I read somewhere there is a bit of a stink developing over drug companies getting information on traditional herbal medicines from Third World countries for free, then being unwilling to sell western drugs and antibiotics at cut prices back to these same places. Apparently some governments are talking about invoking intellectual property law in this matter.

And your justification for assuming the universe is an algorithmic entity would be then? What! Don't tell me bascule is a closet Strong Determinist.

"It self-completes by solving the halting problem. It solves the halting problem by terminating. There are no non-terminating algorithms because all seemingly non-terminating algorithms exist within a single terminating algorithm, the universe. In the end, there is only one algorithm, the universe, and its inevitable outcome is to choose to self-terminate and thus self-complete." This is a non-valid solution to the Halting problem because it is the equivalent of saying that you can predict that some program will halt because you are going to turn off the computer. True in the tautological sense, but not the algorithmic solution that the problem is seeking.

Basicaly you are restating the problem of squaring the circle and the impossibility of this undertaking follows from the fact that π (pi) is a transcendental number—that is, it is non-algebraic and therefore a non-constructible number. The transcendence of π was proved by Ferdinand von Lindemann in 1882. If you solve the problem of the quadrature of the circle, this means you have also found an algebraic value of π, which is impossible.

What is more terrifying about this is it's potential to turn someone into a pleasure slave. That is willing to follow any order for the next fix. imagine if you will a factory full of workers willing to work only for sustenance and a jolt. Or worse an army.

Sisyphus, why are you soiling yourself by replying to that garbage?

Just to close I do agree that only a fool would play with this compound. Don't worry about me; I'm about forty years past that sort of stupidity.

You can strip TiN from stainless with a warm solution of conc. nitric acid.

Especially the one component. There is no consumer use that I can think of.

No kidding! My tongue was pressed into my cheek when I wrote the above.

Tell NoName and friend that adding magnesium to the mix will increase sensitivity, with any luck they can blow a finger or two off next time.

The brinell hardness is calculated by dividing the load by the area of the curved surface of the indention, (the area of a hemispherical surface is arrived at by multiplying the square of the diameter by Pi and then dividing by 2)

Classic Euclidean geometry. I say that because Euclidean geometry, the way it use to be taught in the old days was one of the best introductions to procedural logic that one could have. I mostly drew on the cognitive skills that I learned there when I started to learn FORTRAN.

Your going to have to do better than that if you want an answer. As it stands your question is not clear. Are you asking which is the more efficient or which is the more effective?

Joyeux Noël à tous! DV8 2XL dans la ville d'hiver, Montréal

From a press release published July 7th by Cornell University: Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study. "There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These strategies are not sustainable." Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy input-yield ratios of producing ethanol from corn, switch grass and wood biomass as well as for producing biodiesel from soybean and sunflower plants. Their report is published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76). In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that: * corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; * switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and *wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced. In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel production, the study found that: *soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and *sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced. In assessing inputs, the researchers considered such factors as the energy used in producing the crop (including production of pesticides and fertilizer, running farm machinery and irrigating, grinding and transporting the crop) and in fermenting/distilling the ethanol from the water mix. Although additional costs are incurred, such as federal and state subsidies that are passed on to consumers and the costs associated with environmental pollution or degradation, these figures were not included in the analysis. "The United State desperately needs a liquid fuel replacement for oil in the near future," says Pimentel, "but producing ethanol or biodiesel from plant biomass is going down the wrong road, because you use more energy to produce these fuels than you get out from the combustion of these products." Although Pimentel advocates the use of burning biomass to produce thermal energy (to heat homes, for example), he deplores the use of biomass for liquid fuel. "The government spends more than $3 billion a year to subsidize ethanol production when it does not provide a net energy balance or gain, is not a renewable energy source or an economical fuel. Further, its production and use contribute to air, water and soil pollution and global warming," Pimentel says. He points out that the vast majority of the subsidies do not go to farmers but to large ethanol-producing corporations. "Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's energy security, its agriculture, economy or the environment," says Pimentel. "Ethanol production requires large fossil energy input, and therefore, it is contributing to oil and natural gas imports and U.S. deficits."

Einstein's simple and elegant theory shows that time is relative to the inertial frame, i.e. that there is no 'universal clock'. Each inertial frame has its own local geometry. This geometry is related to the energy of the reference frame. So if by 'local conditions' you mean 'local inertial frame', then the answer is yes.

Well I haven't been arguing a dualist position, only that more is going on than can be modeled on a Turing Machine. Whether a physical correlate of consciousness can or cannot model the subjective qualia is somewhat different and here bascule and I agree that it can. Our debate is on mechanisms.

Quite the contrary - it is the central issue to the computability of consciousness. You may find Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach a better developed treatment of this topic than my poor attempts to explain it.

This is not saying that we have to prove the logical consistency of consciousness, that's not relevant; by Godel's second theorem, a human mind cannot formally prove its own consistency... ...because all arguments about the consciousness implications of Godel's theorems are really arguments about whether the the Church–Turing thesis is true. No it's not a non-issue, I'm afraid; it is about as big an issue as there is in this matter.

No, no alas, no. This is a grave misinterpretation the Incompleteness Theorem. Gödel's first incompleteness theorem basically says that: For any consistent formal logical system that basic arithmetic can be done with, it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement that is true but not be proved within the system. That is, any consistent logical system of a certain expressive strength is incomplete. Note what I put in bold because this is the critical point: 'no complex enough system' is where this bites the hardest. Gödel's second incompleteness theorem goes on to say: For any consistent formal logical system that basic arithmetical can be done with, that also has a method of formal provability, includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if it is inconsistent. Gödel's second incompleteness theorem implies that a system satisfying the technical conditions outlined above can't prove the consistency of any other system which proves the consistency of the first system. This is because then first system can prove that if second system proves the consistency of first system , then the first system is in fact consistent. Again note the bolded part of the statement. So, the only way that an system of logic and that includes any machine built to do logic can 'know everything about itself', (as it were) is if it is so simple that it can't do enough logic to do arithmetic, AND any system that can analyse a system complex enough that it can do arithmetic - has itself to be powerful enough, and can't be analyzed by the first. Worse no matter how many meta-systems are constructed to analyse the ones before them, one that can be analysed by the first cannot be constructed, to close the loop. And you just can't beat it. Now if thought is a pure (deterministic) formal system, such that it can be modeled on a Turing Machine it's subject to these limitations. Thus by Gödel's second theorem, a human mind cannot formally prove its own consistency. The only way out is to assume some other (non-deterministic) algorithms are at work, because then this doesn't apply. Or, as Hilary Putnam puts it: "Let T be a Turing machine which "represents" me in the sense that T can prove just the mathematical statements I prove. Then using Gödel's technique I can discover a proposition that T cannot prove, and moreover I can prove this proposition. This refutes the assumption that T "represents" me, hence I am not a Turing machine." Now that doesn't make Penrose and Hameroff's conclusion that quantum phenomena are responsible right, nor do I think the Orch-OR theory is right, but I am hard pressed to see that any deterministic theory can be made to work. P.S. Limitive Theorems is a catch-phase that D.R. Hofstadter used to describe: Godel's Incompleteness theorem; Church's Undecidability Theorem; Turing's Halting Theorem; and Tarki's Truth Theorem.