Mr Skeptic

So what you're saying is, it is closed minded to consider a possibility other than the one Voltman believes in unless the one that Voltman believes in is disproved first? As for your misunderstanding of how science works, let me clear this up for you: it is always the responsibility of the one making the claims to provide evidence of them. So for example I can't publish a paper suggesting a relationship between salt and cancer and inviting people to prove me wrong, I'd have to provide evidence for my claim myself. Those who claim there is a god should provide some damn good evidence of this strange creature. So under the assumption that religions have some sort of credibility, adding them up results in atheism being the most likely (as most of them say most of the gods don't exist). On the other hand the religions contradict each other and so clearly cannot have much credibility, which again suggests atheism. The only way to have credibility is to believe in only one or a few of them, but how could you choose one from so many? In any case atheism is the most open minded position, since it considers all the possibilities. A major scientific conference would have hundreds or thousands of attendees, many of which would be scientists. These are people who don't believe in random superstitions and have the utmost standards of academic integrity -- thousands of credible witnesses at the conference compared to the testimony of maybe 100 "true believer" witnesses for the Bible, it is pretty clear which would be more credible. And as you said, the various gods are attributed some random "miracles" all over the world, but surely said gods would realize how many more converts they could get by attending a scientific conference and of course they can't be too busy if they're doing a bunch of minor miracles all the time. Too bad that religion gives the wrong answers... Of the testable predictions made by religions I can't think of any that have been proven true.

Fusion power has significant inherent difficulties, especially considering fission will work just fine for a few centuries. Particle physics should at least tell us something new.

I don't believe you. 1+1=2, universe or no, and it was true (with the same meanings as we now use) before anyone ever gave it any meaning. It's more accurate to say math is discovered rather than invented.

Well, according to Jesus that's equivalent to "committing adultery with her in your heart". Your wife probably wouldn't go that far but I doubt she would appreciate it either. It is simply a natural thing to do, but then so is cheating on your partner, and really it's a matter of whether it harms your relationship or not. On the other hand, it isn't very healthy to be too much under the control of your wife, and there are some positive aspects to jealousy.

Perhaps democracy isn't the best solution. The main problem (for the population in question) would be the tyranny of the majority. For example, in the Muslim states alcohol will probably remain illegal even in a democracy, because most of the people consider its use immoral, much like other drugs are treated elsewhere. Similarly, religious freedom probably won't suddenly be tolerated even in a democracy. If these people are to have these unpopular freedoms, they would probably have to be granted them by an authoritarian leader against their will. A constitution could also protect freedoms against the will of the majority by requiring a sufficiently large supermajority. Another way to protect against tyranny of the majority would be with a republic, at least if the representatives are willing to do the right thing even if its unpopular and the people can accept that.

Almost no one uses that definition. A universe is an object and everything causally connected to it, or a space and everything spatially connected to it and contained within that. Our own universe seems to be too large for us to see, so we call our little bit the observable universe, and the rest of that the universe because putting an arbitrary boundary on the observable universe seems like a bad idea, but anything which you would have to leave our universe to be able to get to is no longer in our universe, and also can't affect us (because you can't leave our universe).

Everything that had a beginning had a beginning. Everything that did not have a beginning did not have a beginning. A cyclic universe could be considered either way, as an eternal universe going through cycles, or as a universe caused by the universe that came before it which in turn was caused by the universe that came before that one, etc. Unless you reject the law of cause and effect, you can only ever have eternal things with no beginning or finite things with an infinite chain of causation.

Yup. You can touch hot objects very briefly without getting burned. Any inflammation or blistering would have happened by now, so you should be fine.

In fact, salt makes water even harder to freeze.

Not really. It would be like asking when did god begin, the answer is it was always there. A cyclic universe is an eternal universe, except that it goes through different phases in a cycle.

Have you tried dunking the Sn into the HCl?

Well we've had a little bit of a problem with plagiarism recently, but that got me thinking... spam more or less has to be either gibberish or plagiarism. The gibberish is easy enough to notice. Well-written spam would be harder to spot, but it would have to look a lot like plagiarism. Right?

Me too!

Generally for burns you want to cool the area as quickly as possible, since the residual heat could continue to cause damage. Too late for that now, of course. Odds are your hand might hurt more later. If there was any damage there will be an inflammatory response which causes swelling and pain. You'll have to wait and see.

You're right, somehow I forgot that zero was neither positive nor negative. So zero goes between positive and negative among the reals, integers, rationals, etc, so all of those might be considered triplets. On the other hand, I know that some people consider there to be two zeros, positive zero and negative zero. It pretty much only matters when taking a limit. Well I'm kind of curious for a mathematical analogue to quarks, but also as to whether there is something that is fundamentally a triplet in math (whether or not quarks actually follow that). Oops. I thought that was something else. Thanks for the link.

Good luck with your research!

Well if you see HTML on our posts, that would explain why we see some in yours. Let me guess, the character "<" appears to you as "<" rather than as the "less than" sign? So when you copy it it has these parts in it? But no one else seems to have that problem. What browser are you using? And do other web pages have HTML visible to you? As for paradox, this is an example of what a paradox isn't. No one can give an example of a paradox because by definition they don't exist.

It would be a horribly complicated calculation. You are doing work to compress snow, your body uses energy even at rest, your body is very inefficient at doing some kinds of work, snow is lumpy and some parts slipperier than others, and other problems. I suppose you could model that as an increase in the coefficient of friction between humans and snowy/clear sidewalk, but I doubt that would be a good model because it wouldn't really follow the formula for friction (for example on slopes or when carrying extra weight). In theory, no work is done moving an object any horizontal distance (without friction), and if you do have friction on the ground it wouldn't matter much if you have a wheel.

Why should we bother looking through 17 million results when you could just give us the link to go there directly? Incidentally, I can see your link just fine. Nevermind, it didn't work. Your quotes still contain HTML. Must be something with your browser.

! Moderator Note Vak's tangent on tired photons split to here

! Moderator Note Split to speculations, but at this rate it'll end up in the Trash Can soon enough

If anything if the days used to be shorter, than our cycle would be expected to be shorter than a full day, not longer.

No, that is not what he suggested searching for. Also, "nofollow external" does not show up at all in the search string. My guess is it's a message to spiders not to follow the link and that the link is not on scienceforums.net, but maybe its something that the censoring agencies stuck into your computer to confuse you. As for you leaking HTML, I suggest you go to Settings>General Settings on this website (this link might take you there: http://www.scienceforums.net/index.php?app=core&module=usercp&tab=core ), then check the box that says Enable visual (RTE) editor? Rich Text Editor requires IE6+, Mozilla / Firefox 3.0+, Safari 4+, Google Chrome, or Opera 9+

Capillary action is the same sort of thing as surface tension -- the attraction of the fluid molecules to the capillary walls. Please do read up on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capillary_action

Eh, that's just some HTML that leaked into your post (post #33 seems fine to me). Just copy/paste your link and we can copy/paste it into our browsers, no need for you to have it in link form if you don't know how. Or just write it out by hand, if you don't know how to copy/paste.