studiot

Again I sympathise with this and can confirm both experiences. +1 When I worked in Saudi, I found the best way to be paid was to be paid in Saudi Riyals in cash and take the cash to one of those money traders in a souk (which is a rabbit warren of alleys) to be changed into steerling. One day when I went to one of these the guy had a little kiosk, with neat piles of money on shelves behind him dollars, sterling, marks etc. As I arrived he took of his headress and spread it over the shelves. Then he wandered off somewhare down the alley, without a backward glance, for a glass of chai. On another occasion there was a gold trader with a proper shop (garage). at some point he had too many gold bars so he put some outside in a box. After a few days, temptation got to much for an itinerant worker and he helped himself to a couple. I learned later that the police had cut off a hand. Now I don't condone quite a few arab practices but I can say this regime worked in general. I can definitely say that I felt much safer in that rabbit warren souk, as did properly dressed lone western women, than I would do in any other comparable rabbit warren anywhere else in the world. Thanks. +1 I hope you also got the joke.

Interesting discussion about my little quotation and a few other things. I wonder what William will make of it when he returns. I would like to say that I read a different message into his posts and my replies were meant to generate reassurance for him. I hope I succeeded a little bit. I like to think ( ) I did a little bit. cogito ergo sum, Yes Descartes wrote in teh language of learning of his day - Latin I don't know how many here studied Latin but you distinguish the first person singular (I) in this. Now I offer a different view of I, negating those who say I was inappropriate. I also noted, as have others, that William's question and thinking is about an interaction. An interaction requires at least three things. At least two interacting entities and the results and consequences of the interaction. As a mathematician I look back at set theory and think of I as the set under investigation and the rest of the universe as the other participant. As to blue balls, someone suggested that blue requires white light. That suggests ruling out any connection in the ball's appearance with the ball itself, putting all the source of blueness on the light. Surely this is not the case ? Do you think that whatever quality renders it blue is absent when illuminated with yellow light ? @William Patterson Why do you think a blue (or any other coloured ball) will not cast a shadow under different illumination? Finally William was also interested in Quantum Theory and we seem to have lost that connection in the discussion.

Thank you both. I never said poop patrols were ideal I just said it is now a whole lot better. Fining parents doesn't seem to work very well perhaps because kids don't actually get fined (much) these days, if they ever did.

I should have added to my thoughts that modern Science has developed some neww pragmatic approaches to this. Firstly Science seeks reproducibility so that we can observe that if I poke my surroundings in a certain way I will observe certain responses that are reproducible. But we have progressed further because Science has discovered that there are responses that an not definitely reproducible yet it has developed ways and means to handle this situation via statistics and probability. So we now realise that the are some aspects of reality that may occur one way or may respond in a different way and put hard figures to this. Quantum Mechanics is part of this modern modern thinking and you computer depends upon such statistical figuring to work as the electrons in the circuits obey statistical rules, not deterministic ones. Take switching on a light switch. 99.99% of the time the light will come on. But the remaining 0.01% will lead to a bulb or electricity failure. So even this prettur regular part of our world is slightly probabilistic. Yet we easily accept this and don't worry about it. Perhaps QM seems more like mystical woo than science sometimes but it does work. So take heart, we have progressed and we are still progressing, but we are not fully there yet. Perhaps there is an unachievable goal but still....the story goes on.

I hope you have now got the idea that reality is not 'fixed' whatever it is it depends on the conditions or circumstances and also the observer (Thanks Sensei +1 for pointing out the differentobservers experience different realities). Also in your posts and those of others we note that lots of great thinkers, down the millenia have wrestled with this question without coming up with any definitive result. But rather than being weighed down by all this, look on the bright side. Perhaps that famous phrase "I think therefore I am" is a good start. Once you accept something along those lines, you can proceed to "I am not alone" or "There are other things out there and they interact". So you can't separate things in isolation (as Science often tries to do for simplicity) you have to consider the whole totality of 'things and their interactions. Or even their possible or potential interactions because not all such necessarily actually happen. But here is a further development of my blue ball question. Perhaps you have seen the images from the Hubble and more recently the James Webb telescopes ? But we cannot see them ! The light the telescopes are observing are in the infra red - wavelengths we cannot see ourselves. So those wonderful pictures are rendered in 'false colour' by computer. That gives us something to process when attempting to understand the reality of it.

You were talking about passing down dna, that presumably occurs at the beginning of life, not the end. I still don't see you have made a connection for either quantum mechanics or dna to reality, whatever reality is. Here is a non quantum question for you to think about as I am going to bed and you have only two posts left in the next 24 hours. I have a blue ball in a dark room. I illuminate it with a sodium lamp. What colour is it ? What is the reality of the colour of the ball ? Good night for now.

What about it and what do you mean by 'reality is passed down by the dna' ? What happens when there is a mistake in the passing down process ora new trait appears - Is that not also reality ?

Surely it would be much more useful to add a post counter and numbering than to add an up/downvite identifier ?

Does this rambling have a point or is it meant to be a question ? And what exactly is the speculation that you are making, please. ?

Dare I offer the pun - rubbish ? It's somebody's law that Work expands to fill the time allowed for its completion. I somehow think that this can also be applied to rubbish bins. Rubbish expands to (over) fill the available bins.

One year we went to the dutch Efteling theme park. There were lots of bins proclaiming loudly "Papier Hier" (Perhaps @Eise will sort my spellin ?" as you passed I think they also said "Dank u Vell" if you put something in. We all thought them a great idea, but I didn't notice the sentiment carried on outside the gate into the rest of Holland. When I still a boy, my grown up cousin was very close to another dutch family. So I learned that Holland was the only other country that (then) built what we called council houses. I also learned that they had council house tenants that acted in the same way as our worst ones so they built some houses completed out of concrete, furniture included and said "If you won't keep the place clean and tidy we will. Once a week we will wash the place out with a fire hose whether you are in there or not". I understand this was very effective.

I already gave you a 'road map' to explore induction v deduction in your other thread. However since you are still hazy here is another road map for you to follow. As can bee seen there are several meanings to the terms induce and induction, just within Mathematics and Philisophy/Logic. At the bottom of the right hand page (291) there is a more general term - inference which is used even more widely than induction I would add imply as well. Which brings me to Scientific Inference H Jeffreys Cambridge University press. Here are a couple of extracts about induction more widely that are worth reading. The theory of what is called first order induction, as in the first attachment above, will be found in Lemon. The full theory, including the so called induction axioms, of what is called second order or probabilistic induction will be found in Computability and Logic Boolos and Jeffrey (no s at the end this time) Cambridge University press A further type of induction - transfinite induction, will be found in any good number theory or foundations of mathematics book eg Stewart and Tall

Whilst I agree with mistermack's sentiment, I think he is being a bit overdramatic. So my answer to the above question is very firmly I don't want to pay to clean up rubbish that I wouldn't dream of leaving. Yes it is better for the litterer to pay cleaners than be prosecuted. Let us face it, it took the serious illness of quite a few children and the deaths of some, followed by intensive prosecutions, before the message about dog's mess got through. Our streets and parks are now much better for it.

Absolutely first class observation that is so often forgotten when people discuss logical analysis. Paradoxes, conflicts etc so often arise because of an inappropriate combination of statements. +1

But do they really ? Then why do they just drop fag packets , wrappers etc as they are walking along ? They own these things but they do not wnat them. But what they also do not want is to own the problem thay they not only own them bu they are responsible for them. But I also missed out a factor in my previous post. The poor or bad examples set by, leaders and other well respected members in the community. This extends beyond litter but the real problem is the message being sent is that petty misdemeanous don't matter. Ther are plenty who are not interested in either the carrot or the stick. The motto of Peter Symond's School, Winchester is "Manners Maketh Man"

Can I recommend EJ Lemmon's book Beginnibng Logic. It is good because Lemmon goes into both the formal logic and maths way of presenting statements and compare them. His style is very clear and easy to follow.

I'm not sure what you mean about vertically aligned about the equals but I agree that I find the smae letter sizing problem when I paste in. This never used to happen, but started here about one improving update ago. My solution is to highlight the offending formula in TEX and change the font size in the site input editor box.

I can't agree with those who think enough people are public spirited enough to keep places basically litter free. The issue has to be a mix of education and enforcement of both those who create unwanted items (trash) and those who spread it. Just go to any school in the UK and watch what happens at chucking out time. Kids unwrapping someinthing and dropping wrappers immediately as they walk. No attempt to find a bin or store the 'trash' for later disposal. Older people used to just flick cigarette butts, matches, vaping canisters anywhere along their path. After I returned from a holiday a few years ago I remarked that I had spent a very pleasant day in Munich, and what a clean city it was. I had only seen 3 pieces of litter the entire day in a city of 3 million people. My friend said yes its clean because of the fines. Harry went out for the night, drank too much and was fined 50 marks (on the spot) for vomiting in a taxi.

Gosh and I though that some scholars received a thorough grounding in the classics. Forget the word even in its scientific use it has nothing to do with whatever you are asking about. You might like to be informed that mechanics and electrics are different sciences following different physical laws. You cannot explain all of mechanics in terms of electrics or all of electrics in terms of mechanics. That is why science recognises four fundamental forces operating in the universe , gravity and the 'electric force' being two of them. But then that is only when working within the force model of things. There are several other models with different interpretations.

Why would a truly irreligous scientist know or care how many persons or persons 'wrote' the bible or how many books, chapters, gospels, appendices, apochripahas etc it has ? I'm sorry if my oblique references were too obscure for you.

I don't see how this represents a chain of reasoning explaining how you get from my demonstrating that there is more than one meaning to the word grounding to your assertion that Surely you can see that many implications could result from from my demonstration. So it is encumbent upon your own goodself to sift through and discard inappropriate ones before asserting anything ? In fact the correct implication is that scientists use particular definitions of many if not most words so that they are not confused with everyday definitions or if there are multiple definitions the appropriate one is chosen. Exactly so +1

Try reading through again what I have said to both yourself and Genady very carefully. A point I was trying to make is that there is plenty of theory that comes before deduction / induction. None of that is repeated in the definitions or theorems of deduction / induction, but it is all still potentially applicable. For instance what is a deducton from a premise ? Its structure is antecedent- connective - conclusion So here goes 3 plus five makes eight. Therefore Uranus is closer to the Sun than the Earth. This introduces the idea of sound v unsound reasoning. The premise is true, there is a connective, yet the conclusion is false Because the reasoning is unsound. This also works the other way.

Can you please explain in detail the steps of reasoning that led you to this curious conclusion. I would conclude something quite different from the information you have supplied. Please note for the record I am referring solely to grounding, not balloons, walls, forces, balanced etc.

No. A child that has misbehaved my be 'grounded' , but that is also an entirely different non scientific usage. I agree the experiment is not relevant to this thread, any more than most of your posting. However I also observe that you appear from your responses not to have understood it. Firstly Millikan's experiment was to measure the ratio of charge to mass of the electron, not the charge or the mass. Secondly the oil drop experiment did confirm Faraday's electrochemical experiment that there is a fundamental unit of charge that the charge always changes in integer multiples of. Millakan's book is a masterpiece of patient experiment - observation - deduction.

@exchemistI declaire you sockhunter extra ordinaire. Yes, I have yet to see any science in this thread. I thought that the Religion section here was supposed to host scientific aspects of religion, not religous content. There are huge discrepancies beween certain 'books', particularly in the old testament. Scientifically we can trace this to the fact that in the centuries BC there were two widely separated centres of jewish culture where the books were authored. Alexandria and Jerusalem. Further the Alexandria versions were written in Greek and the Jerusalem ones in Hebrew Most of our translations stem from the Greek version, I suspect because there were more Greek scholars than hebrew ones , years ago. There is a postgraduate course somewhere in Kent where you can study these things. Also the point about 'sin' is what led to the legal doctrine of 'criminal intent'. Can an idiot sin if she is incapable knowing what sin is ?