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Airmid

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Everything posted by Airmid

  1. You say that you're not a Christian, but your wife is, and derives her moral decisions from the Bible. You also said that you were having a discussion over morals with her, and asked us if we think it's ok to use quotes from the Bible as arguments. My answer: no, it isn't ok. I think that you shouldn't use arguments in a discussion that you don't support yourself. If you truly think women are not equal to men, and that wives should be submissive at all times (and I sincerely hope that's not the case), then it's a different matter. In that case you can discuss with her what you think, and why, based on your own moral framework. There's a weird tendency in us humans to want to mess with other people's beliefs and morals. As soon as someone claims to belong to a certain religious or otherwise morally involved group, we insist that they confirm to what we think the "rules" of that group are. How many times didn't someone bluntly point out to communists they can't buy an expensive car, or to muslims they can't drink alcohol, or to vegetarians they can't wear leather shoes? And we do this while we think it's perfectly alright for a person to buy expensive cars, or drink alcohol, or wear leather shoes. Frankly, I think that it's none of my business how other people deal with the details and dilemmas of their beliefs, as long as they stay within the law and don't force me to give up my own beliefs. So, in my opinion, in any discussion about moral issues, we should focus on our own beliefs and arguments, and not on what we think the other person should believe. ku, I wish you good luck, and I hope you and your wife will find the patience to solve this issue. Airmid.
  2. Thanks, I think the word "shell" in your reply opened Pandora's box for me. This is what you're talking about, isn't it? Airmid.
  3. Could someone please explain to me why Be-8 is unstable? I tried to find the answer on the web, but all I could find were references to how unstable it is, and what the consequence of that are. Thanks, Airmid.
  4. I'm curious... how do non-religious people take an oath in the US? Airmid.
  5. Since most of your links are either broken or restricted access, I've been looking for some new ones: Wiki Interview with J. Lehmann J. Lehmann's page Personally, I'd wait a bit before we declare this to be the holy grail of farming. However, I think this could be a very good solution for the management of tropical soils. Tropical soils are notorious: they have high rates of nutrient loss through erosion and leeching and have a reduced capacity to retain moisture. Adding organic material to these soils helps to overcome these problems. But with the fast decomposion rates in the tropics the effect doesn't last. Therefore, mixing a more resistant form of carbon into these soils sounds like a good idea. I'm more sceptical about the benefit for other regions. For instance, soils in my region already contain quite a bit of carbon, and I doubt if adding more to it will improve yields. But it might also work for (tropical) Africa, and I think it's important to research that possibility, especially if the char can be produced locally. Airmid.
  6. Actually this part of our constitution dates back to 1579 (Treaty of Utrecht). Airmid.
  7. The moment Turkey turns into a theocracy, it no longer meets the criteria for EU membership, and should be thrown out. I also think that, if that happens, Turkey will want out, especially if they implement the Shariah. Islamic economy (I mean, economy that follows the rules of the Shariah) is basically incompatible with western free market economy. So it wouldn't make sense for Turkey to stay in the EU in case that happens. Airmid.
  8. Airmid

    Dumbbells

    Now I wonder.... how come you assume the previous posters are men? *ducks* Airmid.
  9. My constitution guarantees citizens freedom of religion, and states that discrimination on grounds of religion is a crime. If yours says differently, I pity you. That out of the way, lets discuss Turkey and the EU. Personally, I see no fundamental reason why Turkey shouldn't join the EU, as long as they meet the conditions that the EU has set for membership. In my opinion, Turkey should not be made a special case. The conditions for joining should neither be more stern, nor more lenient than those for other European states. For me, it's an important sign that Turkey should want to join the European Union. They're in quite a precarious position: they are more or less a buffer state between the capitalist west and the islamic east. They already have chosen sides though, being a NATO member since 1952. That they should want to tie in their economy as well with other European countries conforms this choice. Airmid.
  10. At least one of the new flows in associated with a fault in the surface of Mars. That's why they came up with the "ice dam" explanation to explain a sudden rush of material to the surface. The fault in the rocks can be seen as a channel which had already been filled with the fluid, but an ice "cork" prevented it from appearing on the surface. A slight increase in pressure could have popped the cork, creating the sudden flow. If this explanation is right, you'd have to aim your nanoprojectile very carefully towards a fault. Airmid.
  11. I listened to the press conference over the internet. There were 2 major reasons to believe why a fluid had to be involved. First, there's the morphology of the flow. On the more detailed pictures, it can be seen that it flows around obstacles in some cases, and sometimes splits into separate flows that either team up again after the obstacle, or run separate for some distance until the smaller one ends. There's also the shape of the end part of the flow: it splits out in finger-like appendices where the terrain gets more level (the flows are on rather steep slopes, which isn't clear to see on the picture in that article). Dust flows (on earth and on mars) tend to have quite a different morphology, while fluid flows on earth tend to follow the same pattern as these ones. Second, whenever subsurface material is freshly exposed on Mars, it is of a dark tone. It may bleach in time, but you should rather think in a timespan of millions of years for that to happen, not 7 years. There was one other possibility that has been looked into: that the flow was simply a seasonal frost pattern. However, this has been ruled out, because pictures of the same flow have been made some months apart and the flow pattern has been shown to persist, which could not have been the case if this simply represented frost. Two such new flows have been detected in the past 7 years. There are pictures of other similar flows from Mars, but for those it isn't clear when they were formed. Some more pictures can be seen on the NASA website. Airmid.
  12. Like the rest of you, I was pretty disgusted at first too when I read about that proposal. But then I started remembering the "hippie spelling" that was so popular in the Netherlands in the 60's and 70's. For some reason, the use of the letters x, c, and y (among others) was unacceptable to the hip youth. The "x" would be replaced by "ks", the "c" by either "s" or "k", depending on how it was pronounced, and the "y" either by "i" (vowel) or "j" (consonant). There were other alternative spelling rules too, but those probably wouldn't mean much to an english speaker. There was quite a lot of peer pressure: if you used normal spelling you were not "hip" and had a hard time to be socially accepted. So many students used it, even in their papers and exams, and expected to get good grades, and got them. Maybe the teachers were a bit infected with the hippie-virus too? Anyway, it seems that "hippie spelling" had a lasting effect on our official spelling. The dutch language goes through a major spelling revision every 50 years or so and some of the "hippie spelling" elements were officially incorporated. And now, for example, we write "seks", "piramide" and "katastrofe". The moral of the story? Language is not static, but is in constant development, with new words being added and other words getting in disuse. The same goes for spelling, although I think English is an exception there. (And I think that's the reason why english spelling is so hard.) What the kids are writing today, might be good manners tomorrow! Airmid.
  13. We seem to have read quite a lot of the same things! And yes, new organisms are being discovered like every day, and new pathways, and even new biotic key elements, like amino acids. I'm excited about all this, but also quite disappointed. Excited, because it shows how versatile earth life is and how much there's still out there to be discovered. But also disappointed, because all those new discoveries are essentially more of the same. The shadow biosphere discussion essentially is about the question: How rare is life in the universe? If life in the universe is common, then there's a chance that it didn't emerge once, but twice or even more often on Earth. In that case we might be able to find creatures on Earth, that don't follow the familiar DNA-based pattern. Airmid.
  14. That's a good argument, but only if you couple it with the "if they weren't rare we would have found them by now"-argument. Common sense tells me that if alternate life forms exist, they indeed must be rare. But on the other hand that might be a pitfall. According to Carol Cleland, we haven't seen 99% of earth's critters yet; according to others 80%. And it's not good (statistical) science to base major conclusions on 1% (or 20%) of a population. Airmid.
  15. I'm voting for octopus. Their ability to learn ranks with dogs, or even dolphins. They have lots of tricks on their sleeves to get at food and escape predators. They also have learned to use the right trick for the right situation. They have been shown to use tools. They have been shown to have distinct personalities, and even "moods". That probably doesn't sound really special, since primates can do all that and more. But the octopus is a solitary animal, and is not being raised by parents. So it hasn't been taught to deal with situations, like chimps or other social animals are. In stead, it seems to have figured out how to do that all by itself. And that's why the octopus gets my vote. Airmid.
  16. Here's an article that I found very interesting: http://http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2161&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 In it, prof. Carol Cleland discusses the possibilty of a "Shadow Biosphere" on Earth, alternative lifeforms that coexist with life-as-we-know-it. She also discusses the arguments that scientists use to show that such an alternative biosphere is not possible. I find her train of thought very appealing. I would very much like to know what your opinions are on the subject. Do you think she has a point, or do you have arguments to say otherwise? Airmid.
  17. J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb" and also the world's first anti-atomic bomb activist. Airmid.
  18. Solar eclips at march 29 2006 Visible in Asia, Europe, Africa Georgia, Turkey, Nigeria and others will have a total eclips Northwest Europe will have about 1/3 around noon GMT Eclips info Airmid.
  19. Very much so, that's why I commented on "fancy names" in my previous post. I know, it's tempting to actually believe all this stuff, especially because they wrap it up so prettily. But think of the harm that could come from it: "You have cancer? Don't go to hospital, they've got it all wrong, but instead buy my machine!" Again, there's not a thread of proof for their claims. And that's going to be my final words on this issue. Take care now, abskebabs! Airmid.
  20. I'm a great fan of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, so it has my vote. Airmid.
  21. To convince your parents, I'd use arguments from Darwin's On the Origin of Species. After all, Darwin wrote in a time when ID was the norm, and yet the book did a pretty good job in convincing people that evolution is real. He builds a real good case for natural selection, and once you've accepted that, speciation and all the rest comes naturally. Airmid.
  22. abskebabs, the articles and links you provided place our authors firmly in what is in my eyes the most irritating group of New Age devotees: the branch that insists to "prove" their ideas by abusing scientific research. Now I don't think there's anything wrong with New Age belief in itself. People should believe what they want to believe, as long as they don't hurt others. But any belief should be treated for what it is: a religion. Lets have an illustration of how they try to scientify their beliefs. Suppose I believe that bathing in yellow light has healing properties, and that I want to prove my claims. So I do a quick search and find a scientific article about how sunlight makes plants grow. "Hey", I say, "See, this is my proof, because sunlight is yellow too!" Of course, such reasoning is nonsense, notwithstanding the fact that the data I used are perfectly sound. I read the same kind of reasoning in the articles and links that you posted. Only it's not sunlight, but quantum effects that is used as "deus ex machina" to "prove" their belief in paranormal healing, ESP, channelling, and whatever.
  23. That's exactly the problem. Lets take a nice simplistic view on the issue and talk about greenhouse gasses. Greenhouse gasses block heat radiation from earth into space, but they do not block incoming sunrays. So, the presence of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere actually makes the Earth warmer than it should be. That's not a bad thing in itself: without greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere we'd freeze to death. At the moment though, the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is about 25% higher than a century ago. This means the Eart's energy budget is unbalanced at the moment: each year we receive more heat than we can lose. So if the concentration of greenhouse gasses would stay the same for the next century, we'd still be heating up. But on top of this we're still raising the concentration of greenhouse gasses. In another 50 years, we might easily have increased it to 150% of what it was a century ago. So in our simple model, each year Earth's energy budget will be even more unbalanced and we will heat up faster and faster. Of course this model is far too simple to accurately model our atmosphere and biosphere. There's a lot being done to develop better models, but there's still a lot more work needed if we want to completely understand what's going on. What alarms me is that quite a number of the current models point out, that we might reach a point in the future where the Earth's system is so much unbalanced, that the system collapses. Of course, the models might be wrong, but I can't help feeling we're taking a big risk here.
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