John Cuthber

No. It's a reflex action- like when you put your hand on something hot + pull it away before you even know it's painful. (And that's before we get into the question of whether or not flies are conscious.

Well, that may be true in your opinion, however, in fact, it's not. The reflexes can still happen even in a brain dead individual http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0041134503012752 The classic "test of reflexes" is this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patellar_reflex And if you get someone else to tap your knee just under the cap you will notice an odd effect. You see your foot move before you feel the tap. You can't have made, even an unconscious, decision to move the foot before you felt the stimulus.

They do. https://www.thoughtco.com/do-insects-have-brains-1968477 Similar reactions are found in most animals, including us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_arc

Why?

Well, it's clear to me that, without evidence, you are making stuff up.

All the good chemistry jokes argon.

Does "making up random stuff" count as philosophy? If philosophy proceeds without bothering to see if it is right or not then it's hard to tell the two apart. Before you ask Is philosophy more advanced than science in understanding reality because ... you need to check that philosophy Is more advanced than science in understanding reality

Today I learned that Stringjunky doesn't distinguish between weight and density. I must get involved with trading kilos of lead vs kilos of feathers.

I discovered that: It's impossible to talk about poop without someone making a "bullshit" pun there's gold in there (presumably significantly more in some cases than others; I quite like Goldschläger.) The nitrogen in poop is almost certainly worth more than the gold.

I don't know many hop heads, but based on a sample of one (Tkadm30) it seems that they have limited social skills in that they are unable to follow local etiquette, For example, by cherry picking data, failing to make his question clear, and ignoring previous information. Those actions are impolite on a science web page.

As I have pointed out before, the idea that smoking dope fine tunes anything is the sort of think you only believe while smoking. Seriously, a few billion year's worth of evolution worked to make your brain pretty damned good, and you still think you can improve it by getting stoned?

Yes I can provide the evidence. If any of this stuff was real they would have claimed the million dollars by now. Also, if you could really do these magic tricks you would have a great evolutionary advantage. So, such an ability would spread rapidly through a population and after a while, everybody would be able to do it. We can't, so the trait doesn't exist.

TLA Three letter acronym ETLA Extended three letter acronym

Why wouldn't they? We have 9 pages of stories saying that most of what Trump said was run-of-the-mill for the Republicans anyway. Trump was just a bit less subtle about his biggotry

It seems they have swapped their mind for power.

A mosquito was heard to complain, that a chemist had poisoned his brain The cause of his sorrow, was para dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane. (Not original- I wish it was)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymethylpentene

i wish

About a million years ago when I was a kid, there was in Scientific American magazine, an advert for a company who was demonstrating their ability to "think outside the box" by suggesting that power cables could be made from sodium. They had a point; it's not a bad conductor, and it's very cheap on a dollars per cubic metre basis. Obviously, three was a potential issue with rain- but, as they pointed out, many cables are coated with insulators. So they actually made cables from extruded polythene (which is cheap + boringly unreactive towards sodium) filled with sodium. I'm pretty sure you could do something similar with lithium. I can't be bothered to look up the melting temperatures at the moment. The metal and plastic won't have the same melting point so, if the metal is more refractory, extrude wires of it and dip them in molten plastic. if, on the otehr hand, the metal has the lower melting point, extrude plastic tubing and then pour molten metal into it. Halogenated materials are, in general, denser than hydrocarbons anyway.

Coating an alkali metal with a halogenated hydrocarbon probably counts as manufacturing an explosive under most jurisdictions.

I nodded off fora bit there. Did I miss the explanation of the fact that the "chain of begettings" only includes something like 10% or 1% of the people it should have*, and yet the rest of the book should be regarded as essentially correct and complete? * It explains about 6000 years, but we know that there have been people for something like 10 or 100 times longer (depending on what you actually count as "people")so something like 90% or 99% of it is missing with no note of this fact, nor any explanation. Of course, the other problem is that the "chain" only goes back to the first human. The first life goes back a few thousand times longer. But, according to the Bible we were all made within a week or so. So the "chain" needs to go back not just 6000 years but nearer 3,000,000,000 So 99.98% of it seems to be missing. Seems a bit shoddy for the "word of God".

It would be interesting to coat "lithium sand" with polythene and then you could put it in a cloth bag to use as s float. The failure of a small number wouldn't matter much. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja01856a501

How can you know that? It's not recorded anywhere is it? And, most of these "heroes and Godly people" only get 1 mention in the Book- and that's for the "begetting" they did. There's nothing very heroic about getting someone pregnant. Why not face the fact that you made that bit up in an attempt to cover up for the stupidity of the Bible?

You can't prove it. That's because there is no evidence. But it can buy you a lifetime. And the Bible is the simple answer "Goddidit". It's science that's complicated- and beautiful.

The Law of Leviticus was (and remains, according to what Matthew said about Christ's words) the law of God. What did you think it was? The law of the local metropolitan council? I read it; it makes no sense. Why have a big long record of A begat B and so on, but miss some out? If any of them is worth remembering, then they all are. However this also leads to another interestignproblem. If reading the list of begettings gives you the wrong answer, how do you know that reading the rest of (the whole or any part of) the Bible doesn't also lead to the wrong answer for essentially the same reason? Or were you just "cherrypicking"?