John Cuthber

"I think all british students learn French." I don't.

In addition to being unwise the problem is logically impossible. Your potential height is as tall you as you can get. You can't get taller than "as tall as you can get". However I made that point just so as I can re-itterate the advice given above; it's not worth it (I'm rather older than you so I won't be doing any more growing and I'm 5' 9''. It doesn't bother me)

The product of the reaction of ethylene and chlorine is dichloroethane. Dichloroethane is also known as ethylene dichloride even though (unlike ethylene) it no longer has a double bond. It's a quirk of old nomenclature. Look on the bright side, we no longer refer to the stuff as "oil of dutch chemists".

Baking powder would work. Alka seltzer (sp) tablets (the stuff sold to treat hangovers ) would work too. http://www.alka-seltzer.com/as/experiment/student_experiment.htm

Does abateNth pass the Turing test?

Is it just me or is this "nearly definitely winds. decayer, the atmosphere and planet can be considered at rest with each other" a contradiction? The wind is what you get when the air isn't at rest wrt the earth. Also I'm sure the earth's rotation is part of the explanation of things like the trade winds, doldrums and jetsrteam.

"That's my idea at randomization" Indeed.

I think you will have a problem. Milk curdles when acidified and I don't know if you can get it that acidic without curdling. Certainly when it turns sour the stuff denatures and that's due to bacterial action producing lactic acid so it's not acid enough to be bacteriostatic.

English and French (badly). A foriegn language qualification was a requirement for the university I wanted to attend- my school happened to do French. Oh BTW, puting English and American might be amusing from the point of the English but it might upset the Aussies and Kiwis. Even more complicated if anyone happens to speak any of the native American languages.

"Can we not also say that about colors of people??" No, because people were not "bred". Feel free to actually answer the question rather than setting up a strawman. "I asked a question earlier I believe abouthow many of these dogs are actually verified as pit bulls. I still have not recieved a backed up answer." This point was already discussed: post number 162 etc. I grant that the answer is that we don't really know, but it's the best data we have. Again, feel free to find some better data. You will probably want to do the same with the data that says that roughly a third of fatalities are due to pitbulls. Again I'd be quite happy to see it. For the moment however we can only use the data we have; I'd like to use that data to try to answer a question asked earlier "How about you quantize how much "more likely" a person is to wind up with a death on their hands if they buy the pit bull, eh? Are we talking 90% more likely, or 0.00002% more likely? " Well, if pitbulls are responsible for a third of the fatalities and are a third of the canine population then the answer to that question is "not at all more likely". On the other hand if that third of deaths turns out to be due to a tiny minority of dogs then the answer might be a hundred times more likely. What we need is some estimate of the fraction of dogs in that population are pitbulls. Personally I have no idea; I've never worried particularly about dogs on the other side of the atlantic. On the other hand I can find data from a group who care deeply about them. This site gives data on the most popular breeds http://www.akc.org/reg/dogreg_stats.cfm Unfortunately, it doesn't give numbers- just a ranking. On the other hand I have found some of their older data refered to here http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Carol-Stack-1293/dog-breeds-8440.php Well, even the ranking data tells us something. If a breed is 5th on the list I don't see how it can be more than a fifth of the population (and it's probably much less). The astute will have spotted that there are no pitbulls on the list and it gives the top 156 breeds which sugests that pitbulls (at least so far as that site is representative) constitute less than 1 dog in 156 in the US. That rather crude data would sugest that pitbulls are at least 50 times more likely to cause a death ( 1 in 159 of the population but 1 in 3 of the deaths). However, the valid point has been made about misidentification of breeds. Lets assume that several breeds got lumped together. Say that these people think any of these is a pitbull. Boxers 6th Bulldogs 10th place Rottweilers 15th Doberman Pinschers 21st Mastiffs 28th That site gives a total of about half a million dogs, of which the boxer is the only one on my (admitedly fairly arbitrary) set of "dogs that get mistaken for pitbulls". There were 37,268 boxers ie about 7%. All the other 4 must be less than that, in fact they must be less than the 10th dog with just 24,144 representatives so they must each be less than 4.7%. At most these 5 breeds represent about a quarter (26%) of all the dogs registered. So we know that the third or so of deaths are atributed to a breed that is roughly a quarter of the dogs. In reallity that figure is gonig to be an overestimate because the less common breeds won't all be 4.7% and, probably more importantly, those percentages are % of the dogs in the top 10. They will be a smaller percentage of "all dogs". So what we have is some data that shows that pitbulls are more than about 27% more likely to kill someone than other dogs. Once more, if you want to find better data plesase do. On the other hand, please don't argue with the numbers unless you have some better data. This is meant to be a scientific site. Now another point, some people have asked things like whether or no t I have a dog. I would have thought thte answer was obvious from what I posted a page or two back; I don't. I'm also not sure it matters very much. Believe it or not I'm not actually biased against pitbulls as such. Here's one last try at an analogy before I give up. Imagine you saw this advert (it doesn't much matter what the product is) "New! Bloggs and co's new "thingy"! Statistically shown to be at least 26%* more likely to kill an innocent bystrander than any competitor's comparable product!" (* some estimates say it's 50 times more likely!) Now, I don't know aboout you, but not only would I not buy the product, I'd wonder why the authorities hadn't banned it and prosecuted the seller for negligence, stupidity or reckless endangerment. In my judgement, that would be a defective product- too dangerous to market. (before you write about how some cars, bikes, whatever are a zillion times more dangerous than others I'd like to point out that they won't meet the criterion of being a comparable product.)

Ho Hum, The dog didn't attack at 12 Noon. It didn't attack at one pm. It diodn't attack at half past twelve. It didn't attack at quarter past. It didn't attack at 7.5 mins past. It didn't attack at 3.75 mins past.... Since there are an infinite number of occasions when the dog didn't attack I think it's not rational to rational to count them. Have fun counting them if you insist, but don't say I have lost rationallity. "As demonstrated above, the numbers simply don't bear out this position" If we accept that a third of the deaths are due to pitbulls (which is what the numbers show) and that they are not a third of the dog population (which seems very reasonable)then the numbers do support the fact that they are responsible for more than their fair share of deaths. I used the 9/11 data because it's well known and gives rise to a very small percentage. It's emotionally charged because people died. You were the one who said a small percentasge of dead people was a blip. I pointed out that it isn't. I'd still like to know who would have suffered if these dogs had never been bred and how that suffering compares with 66 dead people.

Presumably the zero means "not detected". What's the detection limit and how good is the precision of measurement there (these are pretty low levels and I suspect the measurement's accuracy may suffer on that account). I really don'y believe you can distinguish between 0.00001205 and 0.00001206 so I think that's an outbreak of spurious accuracy. In any event I don't think you will be able to answer the question becuse you don't know what the soil is like and also you don't know what it was like before people started growing crops there.

"I believe John was responding to me, where I thanked him for his honesty." I was. BTW, Small children, who form a sadly large fraction of the victims of dogs, not just pitbulls, are not really in a position to pick a fight with a big dog and the dog could generally run away faster. The same goes for the elderly. I don't care how many occasions there are where a dog didn't attack; I'm only concerened about the occasions where they did. The question is not "do we ban all dogs?" but "do we ban a type of dog that seems to cause more than its share of human deaths?" There are instances of drugs (IIRC oral chloramphenicol) being taken off the market or being restricted to the treatment of specific diseases because of side effects that happen at the "1 in ten thousand " level. These are drugs with clear therapeutic uses but a hundredth of a percent is considered too much. On the other hand, there are drugs that still get used even though the risk of death is considerably greater than that. Those drugs are still used because they provide a benefit that no other drug can. If I put forward the sugestion that your pinky finger got banned you could point out firstly that it isn't in the habit of killing people and secondly that it has a unique benefit- specificly it's the only one you can clean your ear out with. There are no analogous claims that you could make for pitbulls. Imagine a world where these dogs had never been bred. Most of those 66 people would still be alive. Who would have suffered? ( People would have used other dogs as guard dogs and pets) There are roughly 6 billion people in the world. About 3000 of them were killed in the September 11 attacks. That's about 0.00005% of the population. Would you like to write that off as a statistical blip? Sometimes a small percentage is still too big.

I base my ideas on two pieces of evidence. 1 is that 66 people were killed by pitbulls and this represents a large fraction of the deaths from dog attacks in comparison to the number of pitbulls versus the number of other dogs. This was put forward here some time ago and hasn't been challenged. Pitbulls are not one third of the dogs, but they cause a third of the deaths. The second piece of evidence is the one that's missing and that I keep asking for. If there were something special about this particular breed that would offset the fact that it tends (more than other dogs) to kill people I would be happy to see it. In the absense of such a "saving grace" I don't see why we should permit these dangerous animals to walk the streets. I have repeatedly asked the people who interact with these dogs what's better about them than other breeds and all I get is that some individual thinks his dog is cute/ trustworthy/ inteligent /whatever. So what? All pet owners think that about their pets. If fate had given them a poodle rather than a pitbull they would probably have formed the same attachments to that. There is clearly something special about pitbulls- they (as oposed to other dogs) kill more than their fair share of people. I see this as a problem What can pitbulls (as oposed to other dogs) do to make up for this problem? I'm also intrigued by the people whose dogs can spot undesirables. It's interesting to see from the death toll how many of these are elderly or children. Isn't it more likely that the dogs can spot an easy target? If a human behaved that way it would be called bullying. BTW, would dishonesty have any place in a scientific forum?

The event horizon of a black hole is the surface inside which the escape velocity is bigger than the speed of light. A photon fired upwards cant get through it. However, while the escape velocity from the surface of the earth is about 11Km/s (IIRC) it's perfectly possible to build a ladder and climb into space. You don't need to excede the escape velocity to get out provided that you have something to climb. The idea that there's no light in a black hole isn't valid. It's perfectly possible that the universe is a black hole and the bit of it I'm in isn't dark. The problems of falling into a black hole don't necessarily start at the event horizon. If the hole is massive enough the graviattional potential gradient near the event horizon might be small enough to not matter. You wouldn't notice that you had gone through the event horizon. If that's the case then the point about integrating a finite force over a finite distance is valid. There's no requirement for any infinite energy.

Since I live in a country where these dogs are banned I haven't had any dealings with them. Truckrazy, last time I checked most dogs act pretty much the way they are taught to so there's nothing special about pitbulls.

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what's special about pit bulls (apart from the death toll). Saying they can be trained to do things isn't an answer unless you can show that no other breed of dog can be trained to do those things. The fact that these dogs acted as children's nannies in the past isn't relevant. Imagine the outcry that you would get now if someone left their children all day and made the excuse that "the dog's looking after them". To be strictly acurate the "toxic ice cream" analogy would have to have some weird toxin that sometimes killed the person next to you rather than the person who ate it. Cigaretes are probably a better analogy and they are now very restricted in most of the Western world for essentially the same reasons given for banning pitbulls.

"Theoretically, copper should dissolve equal along all the surface (both in and outside)." who's theory is that?

Thanks for the reply. "I think taste *is* important. It's what makes eating pleasurable," Phi for all, have you ever been really hungry?

The figure of 66 dead shows they are good at killing people. It's perfectly possible that none of those was an intruder but that some other type of dog did kill an intruder in which case that breed is better. We simply don't have the data so, once again, I ask you to provide evidence that pitbulls can in some magic way distinguish intruders from, for example, children. You made the assertion; back it up or withdraw it. "It does add to the debate since my position is based on a principle over 200 years old," My point rests on the fact that recklessly endangering human life has been legally debarred for a lot longer than that. "That's how you solve the problem, rather than treat the symptoms." If that worked we wouldn't have that death toll. "You haven't proven owning a Pit Bull is pointless." No, I have repeatedly asked what the point is and I have repeatedly received no valid reply. "they kill intruders" might be valid but there's no proof (or even evidence) that it's true. "No sir, shame on you for dismissing the value of crime PREVENTION. Man-eating animals and guns from hell scare the crap out of low life bottom feeders looking to terrorize some family. A Pit Bull's name, alone, can disuade someone from breaking in your house. The same cannot be said of a lick happy Laborador." I'm well aware of the value of crime prevention; it prevents human suffering. That's exactly the same reason I want to see this risk controlled. I see you are still happy to let the dog take a bullet for you because it's too dumb to know better. "DOG particulars John - I don't know why you went pedophilia on me. Your rights end where mine begin. " I was pointing out that society decides what rights you have. You assert that you have the right to keep a dangerous dog though you cannot provide a valid reason (at least you haven't yet done so). I'm just saying that society can, if it chooses, take that right away from you if it feels that the right causes more harm than good. "No one has a right to hurt others. " Quite, not even by recklessness; and I see keeping a dog that's known to be dangerous as reckless behaviour. "If I did own one however, I would be damn sure I had a privacy fence, and a system for isolating the dog from visitors and innocents - because it's my responsibility." If that were a legal requirement for anyone who wanted to keep one, and if it were enforced strictly then there would be no need for a ban. Unfortunately, many of the people who want these dogs are exactly the people who couldn't be trusted. Pragmatically, a ban can be enforced (and it has been here in the UK ). http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1991/Ukpga_19910065_en_1.htm Stupidity on the owner's part cannot be legislated against so society has to find another solution.

Much of physics is about producing mathematical models of the universe that predict how things will behave. I don't think that pointing out the fact that the equations for thhose models are not soluble without making aproximations is a strawman, I think it's a geunine rebuttal of the idea that "physics is everything".

Nice idea but who pays for things like this "If a farm has a water way running through it, that stream should be fenced off so that farm animals cannot reach it, and the space between fence and water should be planted in a suitable 'weed' capable of absorbing nutrient run off. " and what do you do with the weed? Wouldn't it make more snese to grow a crop there?- perhaps the easiest would be the same crop as is in the rest of the field. Come to think of it, if you don't do that you can leave out the fence. If you do all that all you need is a ban on application of fertiliser within x feet of a stream. There are similar bans on the use of pesticides near boundaries.

What, no solution to the 3 body problem. Surely that means the physicists can't do the maths on the second simplest atom in the universe (never mind anything more complex). Doesn't that rather limit things? Incidentally, as a chemist I can solve that equation exactly, but I do use a rather odd looking computer.

(I'm using the US and Russia as examples of protagonists here- it doesn't really matter who the parties are) If the US built a laser powered by a big mirror I think one of 2 things would happen, the Russians would throw rocks at it and destroy it (a mirror that big in space would need to be very fragile otherwise it wouldn't be light enough to launch) or A small meteorite would destroy if and the US would blame the Russians. A "nuclear powered x ray laser in space" might just be possible and was put forward as part of the "star wars" project.

You might wanrt to look at the chemicals used fo PCB (printed circuit board) etching. It won't give a very tidy finish so you will still need to do some mechanical type work on it.