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chilehed

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Everything posted by chilehed

  1. Thanks again. Got a problem though:401 - Unauthorized There was an error loading the page you requested: http://detector-cooling.web.cern.ch/detector-cooling — Access is denied due to invalid credentials. You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.
  2. Anyone know where I can find tables of kinematic viscosity for ethylene glycol / water solutions? I need to design a cooling system using a 50/50 mix @ 100C. Thanks in advance.
  3. I rather suspected that. ;-) The idea that they are far apart is a very recent invention, at least in Christendom.
  4. In Greek philosophy, logos referred to the rational principle which governs all things, by which the universe was created. The Jews adopted the term to refer to God, because he is that principle. And in this passage John is identifying the logos with the person of Jesus.
  5. Not at all. What you've described is called "credulity". A short version of the definition of faith, as used in Christendom (Catholicism in particular) is "an act of the will by which one adheres to another who is known". If you like I can discuss the meaning of the Hebrew. The definition you proposed is one that arose during the so-called "Enlightenment". It has no similarity to the historical meaning of the term in English, being a distortion that was propped up as a straw man by people like Bertrand Russel.
  6. If you start out by misdefining terms then the rest of what you do is useless.
  7. Because by definition some things are not reproducible in the laboratory and cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula. Historical events and the existence of persons are among them.
  8. I was meaning “you” in the generic sense; I wasn’t intending to imply that you specifically had done that. But it’s certainly been done in this thread. But would you require that same standard of proof to be applied to the existance of Sophocles? To support a statement along the lines of “scence has demonstrated that...”, I expect a standard of proof appropriate to science. But that standard is not appropriate for every investigation. I’m glad that we could come to agreement on that. Perhaps I don’t understand what you mean by “proof”. If you mean a closed-form mathematical solution or the ability to go into a lab and reproduce the results, then you’ve got a confirmation bias because you’ve defined that there can be no proof for the existance of any person, any historical event, or certainly any miracle. By that standard you’d have to conclude that, although you must have a great-great grandmother, in principle there’s no way to prove who she was or what she did. Same thing for the existance of George Washington, or the Battle of Hastings, or Sophocles. In fact, you’d have to hold as unproven pretty much everything you know, unless you saw it yourself. Indeed, I rather suspect that the vast majority of your scientific beliefs are held by you based solely on the evidence of historical documents and interviews of people. Thus, according to your own standard, you must hold that none of it’s been proven. Certainly you could go into the lab to verify them, but failing that all you can say is that there’s supporting evidence. In reality, that’s not what you do. What you actually do is accept as proven that for which there is an adequate degree of documentary evidence. And having established the standard for what’s adequate, we have to stick with it in order to not make a special pleading. How hard have you really looked? That gets to the question of self-will and the problem of how one can know that he’s not self-deceived in matters of moral theology, but we don’t have to go there now. At the moment we’re just talking about the evidence for the historicity of Jesus.
  9. Begs the question. Fallacy of the undesired result. Displays ignorance of the subject. You might try reading the passages in question, they say nothing about a woman being abused by her husband. And again, its not relevant to the topic at hand. In the OP you indicate that youre aware that the texts make use of a variety of literary forms, and yet you insist on ignoring those forms. Begs the question. Besides, youve already conceded that this is not the case, and that there is no reasonable cause to say that science proves that miracles are impossible. Special pleading, and displays ignorance of the subject. You would do well to take your own advice. You asked what would change my mind. All youve offered is question begging, special pleading, ignorance of the contents of the texts you reject, an insistence on repeating logical fallacies that you've admitted are logical fallacies, and snarky remarks about the intelligence of those who disagree with you. I can assure you that that won't work. Unless you have something rational to offer, Im done here.
  10. Indeed, to reject is different than to merely not accept, which is why I said it the way I did. I’m just pointing out that when evaluating the question of whether or not God exists, it's irrational to refuse to admit the possibility that miracles can occur, because such refusal would beg the question. It certainly includes the anicent texts. On what reasonable grounds do you propose that I should ignore them? Again, that’s the fallacy of the undesired result. It also contains the hidden assumption that Christianity is not true, and thus begs the question. Not relevant to the subject at hand. But I’d tell her what the position of the Church is: that it might be prudent for her to seek legal separation from her husband.
  11. There's no point in talking about evidence if you're going to use question begging and special pleading to reject the evidence you don't like. Okay. So we've established that we can't reject an allegedly historical account merely because it records a miracle. Laws of nature are descriptions of the way things work due to natural processes. The question here is whether or not there's sufficient evidence to convince a reasonable person that miracles occur, and my position is that there's more than enough. Since we've already established that there's no rational reason to presuppose that they can't, it's reasonable to require proof that they can't before I abandon the conclusion to which the evidence points. For Sophocles the only evidence we have of that are about 200 texts, the oldest of which dates from 1,400 years after he wrote them. For Plato it's about 7 texts, the oldest of which dates from 1,200 years after he wrote them. So for Sophocles and Plato what we have are manuscripts that other people wrote, claiming that they correctly record their words. That's exactly what we have in the case of Jesus, except that for him we have roughly 24,000 manuscripts and fragments, many of them dating to well under a century from when they were written. That's called the fallacy of the undesired result. Just because you don't agree with what he said doesn't mean that he didn't say it... and the argument rests on the assumption that he did exist, he did say it and it was accurately recorded. You're quite effectively sawing off the limb on which you sit. Have you ever tried to understand what standards are used by the Catholic Church to determine whether or not an event is miraculous? If there's a possible scientific explanation, there's no possibility of it being declared a miracle.
  12. That's called "special pleading". How much evidence would you require? An amount equal to that available to establish the historicity of Sophocles or Plato, perhaps?
  13. Forgive me. I must have misunderstood what you meant by "The Bible begins with a talking serpent and other miracles that defy nature and physics.. This should be warning enough, for anyone who can think independently that the Bible should not be read literally." and "... that would mean that they would have to believe in fantasy miracles and magic. Most will not take that leap of faith." and "How deeply do you believe in fantasy, miracles and magic? As an adult, do you see your fantastic beliefs as those of a healthy mind?" and "What would it take for you to change your mind about fantasy, miracles and magic being real?" So then I gather that your objection is not that miracles are impossible, but that the documentary evidence is insufficient to convince a reasonable person that they have occurred?
  14. So then you admit that it's unsupportable to claim that science proves that miracles are impossible.
  15. If I had made an argument from ignorance, then you might be correct. I did not do that. I'm familiar with the arguments to which you refer in the OP, that there's no evidence that Jesus existed and all of that, and I find those arguments to be poorly formulated and based on flawed reasoning. I find that the historical evidence is more than sufficient to lead a reasonable person to conclude that Jesus is an actual historical figure, and that the miracles attributed to him did happen. I suppose that I could reject the evidence out of hand on the grounds that miracles are impossible, but that would beg the question. This is absurd. You asked what would be necessary to make me change my mind, and I told you. You said in the OP that miracles defy science. That assertion can be true only if science has demonstrated one of the four things I mentioned: that all causes are observable, that miracles are impossible, that everything real is demonstrable through the scientific method, that there is no God. It hasn't done so, not can it. If you can provide a valid proof of your positive assertion, then I'll have to carefully reconsider my position on the existance of God. I won't hold my breath, because thus far no one's come up with such a proof and when I asked you for one you complained that I'm being unreasonable.
  16. A scientific proof that all causes are observable.A scientific proof that miracles are impossible. A scientific proof that everything real is demonstrable through the scientific method. A scientific proof that there is no God. It's not possible for Jesus to merely be a good man whom we should emulate, because such men don't claim to be God. If he's not what he claimed to be, then he's not a good man at all. So I see no way at all for me to ever accept that view.
  17. Yep. Once at the midnight drags I saw some guy show up in a beat-up looking RX-7, and all the V8 guys laughed at him until he sandbagged them out of a few hundred bucks. Thing hauled ass.
  18. No, for a number of reasons. The large swept surface of the combustion chamber causes problems with high surface temperatures at some locations (puts a limit on compression ratio) and low surface temps at others (pulls heat out of the charge which reduces its availability to do work). Also, even if the tip seals were as effective as the rings on a piston, they allow a huge leak path as they pass by the spark plugs. And the odd shape of the combustion chamber makes it hard to attain high compression ratios, and causes issues with quenching early in the cycle. Because they have few moving parts, and a high power/weight ratio. And some people think they sound cool.
  19. Damn... can I come over and watch? Sure enough, I screwed that one up. Misplaced the decimal.
  20. Impressive. The big pumpkin guns have muzzle energies of about 1.5 MJ: 10" bore, 3000 psi air, and a 10 lb projectile at 600 MPH muzzle velocity. I've seen one of them shoot a large (like about 12" or more diameter) branch clean off of an oak tree at about 100 yards.
  21. I've been given a bit of Fortran code and I have no way to run it. Can anyone lead me to a good compiler? Thanks.
  22. Back when I was in college physics, when we were talking about optics, my professor told us in passing that reflection isn't actually like balls bouncing off of a wall, that what really happens is that the incident light is absorbed by and then immediately re-emitted from the atoms of the surface. After class I told him of my understanding that exited atoms emit photons at random times and in random directions, and asked him how it could then be that in the case of reflected light the direction corresponds to the angle of incidence. If reflection actually involves an absorption/emission process, I'd expect reflections to be a lot more diffuse than they are. He began nodding his head before I'd half asked the question (he knew what was coming), and answered "we really don't know". This evening my 12-year old son was asking questions about reflections and polarization, and it reminded me of all of this. Can anyone tell me if my prof was correct, and if he was explain how it works (without too much technical detail because I'm just a Mechanical Engineer and my background in theoretical physics is very limited)? Thanks.
  23. A LOT! Assuming that the water freezes solid into normal ice at 32F, find the bulk modulus of ice, then calculate the stress knowing that you'd have a strain of about 10% A spoiler to this is that the freeing temperature of water drops as pressure rises. then, under sufficient sufficient pressure, ice can form alternate crystal stuctures that are more dense than normal ice, and that have different melting temperatures.
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