npts2020

Yes, I can now see why you had questions about what I said.

Well, in America you and your wife can incorporate or form a church simply by filling out appropriate paperwork. (Expect the IRS to be watching if you ever accumulate substantial assets or cash flow).

Yep. This is basically how skin grafts are grown for burn victims.

I misunderstood exactly what a thermite reaction is, thinking it applied more generally to burning metals. The point about the airplane still stands though. Firefighting protocol on an aircraft carrier says to get a burning jet overboard ASAP before it burns its way through the decks, the fire would be hot enough to melt steel.

Clothes will also dry in freezing cold air when hung out on a line so the fact that the heating element doesn't work only decreases the efficiency and doesn't prevent the machine from totally working. I am not familiar with spinners in a pool locker room but I would be willing to bet that their rotation speed is much higher than a dryer, similar to a washing machine's spin cycle. The high speed will fling the water out of the fabric. In a dryer the idea is just to keep exposing surfaces to hot air for efficiency sake (reason for the slower speed). Assuming they are already wrung out from the spin cycle of the washer, somebody would have to show me that a dryer spins fast enough to be above the minimum speed required for a measurable amount of water to do anything besides evaporate from the clothes.

CaptainPanic; You might well be correct but there is absolutely nothing in "The Economic Stabilization Act of 2008" to prevent the Secretary of the Treasury from giving the TARP money to whomever he wants. It would be fairly surprising to me if there is any of that money left by Inauguration Day. While I am all for big auto discontinuing their line of "horse buggy whips", to allow it to happen precipitously with no plan for replacement will not do a struggling economy any good. Of course, if the goal is just to keep labor cheap, it should succeed spectacularly.

At any rate there are more reasons than any climate modeling (good or bad) to be able to discern that humans are having a major impact on the environment especially with regards to climate change. When someone can show me that human activity does anything besides add to any other cause of global warming, then I will agree it is not necessary to take action to severely limit those additions. Look at satellite photos of the poles for as long as they have been taking them. Visit a glacier and see how far it has receded in the past 40 years, there are several near Mt. Rogers in Canada that have been kept track of for at least that long. Look at migrating species, some have started going south two weeks or more later in the season or northward that much earlier. Even where I grew up in central Pennsylvania I can see the difference, in the 50's, 60's, and 70's it was normal to have snow on the ground all winter long once there was an initial heavy snow, in the past 20 years I would be surprised to learn that there had been snow all winter a single time. In the Poconos the season for our family maple syrup operation has definitely gotten earlier in the year by at least 2 weeks. In the 60's we never began setting up before mid-March, now you will miss much or all of the season if you wait til then, these days you want to be finished with setup before March 1. All of the syrup producers I have spoken with in the last ten years have told me similar stories about the season getting earlier as far away as Quebec and northern Maine. Look at temperature records for as many cities as you can as far back as you can get them, how many record or abnormally hot vs. cold days are there? None of this tells me that humans are the cause but then we come to ice cores. Ice cores are not a good year-to-year measure, however, they are very accurate for long term trends, which fortunately is what we are interested in for climate change discussions. Those long term trends tell us that the climate undergoes periodic changes of warm and cold, even fairly sudden ones on occasion. The part that should concern us is that those same ice cores tell us that the rate of warming is unprecedented for at least the past couple of hundred thousand years (as far back as they go). Once one accounts for all other possibilities, the elephant behind the curtain becomes human causes. Expecting a model to exactly predict what happens in the real climate, is similar to expecting one to model evolution and come up with a human after starting with a one-celled organism. Just because it can't be accurately modelled doesn't invalidate the theory which works in all other respects. If anyone wants links to support any of the above I will do my best to find them but it is basically a compilation of what I have experienced and read on the subject for the past 35 years or so.

This part is a really big deal on an aircraft carrier if one of the planes crash on the flight deck. Those jets are mostly magnesium and once the jet fuel ignites the magnesium, they have to be pushed overboard before burning a hole down through the decks.

If there were no friction between the ground he was standing on and his feet, Snoop would have nothing to keep him from being pushed backwards and would continue sliding/rolling until running into something.

Not if there is still any money in the TARP fund. It has far more to do with who has been in your corporate management and on your board of directors and how much money you donated to whom in congress. I don't doubt that the majority of congress really has little clue of the effect bailouts have and are just doing it because someone they think knows better than they says it is a good idea. There are some there who know perfectly well what a high stakes gamble flooding the market with currency backed by nothing is but figure they will not be around to have to clean up any mess, so why care? When there is some accounting for the money and a transparent and consistent system of making loans to corporations by the government, then maybe I will believe that the whole purpose of the bailouts to date has been for any reason other than to allow Wall Street to loot the American treasury. iNow; One can only hope they can get to the bottom of the money trail to start figuring things out. Pangloss; You live in a Democracy (sort of), that makes you the overseer. Now how much time you got to devote to your job of overseeing? This is how we got here, there is nobody with the ability and power to do any meaningful oversight. We will be lucky to ever get the particulars of exactly what has happened much less hold anyone accountable.

And I am all for it. My question to you is why are we not treating ALL of the corporations we are giving money in exactly the same way? You cannot convince me that AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Citibank or a host of other corporations getting "loans" from the government have run their businesses any less ineptly than the Detroit automakers. What is the criteria being used for who does or does not get bailed out?

Well I am against the idea of bailouts. Unfortunately, that is not the path our leaders have chosen. Given that we are already doing bailouts to the tune of trillions of dollars to entities that IMO are less likely to pay it back than the automakers, it just seems stupid to me to not loan money to the three companies who have putatively produced more wealth than any other three anyone could name in the past century. At least it would be giving money to someone who actually produces something and has tangible assets unlike your average financial institution......

Bio-tagging was the reason I had heard also but there is probably a host of uses for similar types of tagging other than flourescence as well. Why brand your cattle when you can just have them flouresce?

Well, time for migration, mating, hibernation and I am sure some other things are not likely to be related to being hungry for more than a few species.

Exactly. Kinda like hanging them instead of leaving them in a pile, then blowing hot air over them.

I completely agree with those who say that the government bailing out businesses is generally a bad idea. The problem is that we have already given ridiculous sums of money to businesses this year. In this respect we are being penny wise and pound foolish. Even compared to only the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, what the automakers are asking for is a pittance. When you are flooding your financial sector with trillions of dollars, why is it so untenable to spend less than a tenth of that on the largest part of your manufacturing sector? What do you suppose the numbers of jobs saved per dollar spent is for either sector's bailout? You may trivialize the hardship that some people will face from the collapse of the Detroit automakers but I believe if there is no plan for the resulting mess, it will end up costing us all far more than the money they are asking for. Finally, the auto industry has a perfect record for paying the government back, can the same be said about the financial sector?

There are far better reasons to be a vegetarian than any concern for cows or chickens. It is a personal choice I don't expect anyone else to follow unless they care to for their own reasons. Whether any "aberration" of an animal or plant is a good or bad thing, I think is an entirely different subject of discussion. Other than proof of concept, I see little reason to make pigs flourescent. Whether this is good or bad, I guess you would have to consult with a bio-ethicist (kinda like asking the preacher if it's ok).

My parents were both creationists but I don't recall ever thinking about things in any other than an evolutionary manner. Even though I was still mostly "going along with the program" until graduating high school I can recall having an interesting conversation with a pastor about this topic at about 12 years old where he couldn't answer any of my questions to my satisfaction. Soon after I read "On the Origin of Species" and could only think about how much sense what Darwin was saying, made. There was no looking back after that, everything I have learned since has reinforced my evolutionary outlook and I have spent ever since trying to correct family and acquaintance misconceptions about the subject. We could always popularize "Monkeys' Uncle" bumper stickers.

Very true in the washer. Similar to swinging a wet towel around your head. It would be a mistake to think that has more than a negligible amount, if anything, to do with the drying in a dryer, though.

ParanoiA; I hate the idea of giving Detroit money as much as anyone but with no alternative opportunities on the horizon (besides the national personal transit system I like to talk about) you are likely to have 10% or more of the population unemployed for a significant period of time. The last time we just allowed everything to fold, it took nearly a generation and a large scale war to return to anything resembling a healthy state. I don't relly follow your analogy about pain being good for anyone, how much pain do you suppose Bill Gates suffered to get where he is? At any rate I don't see how unnecessary pain can be helpful to anyone. If the government is willing to leave people to struggle on their own why should those people even support the government to begin with? IMO the concept of social Darwinism (pain is good, weeds out the weak, etc.) is the fallback way of looking at things for those with a lack of enough imagination to visualize other human possibilities.

I will even sell you asteroid insurance in your new universe.

IMO you have answered "what is science" in your last full paragraph and I think few on this forum would much argue with it. As to "what is scientific objectivity", I say it is the ability to overcome preconcieved notions in order to see what ideas best fit experience. Objectivity in general cannot be perfectly defined since everyone relies on prior experience to shape their view of the world. I realize these are imperfect definitions but, like science, are the best we have at the moment and subject to change (usually incremental) when something better comes along.

Other than my being a vegetarian, there is probably nothing wrong with it. Likewise, chickens with four wings, cloned beef, or any other abberation of an animal you can think of. Not that I think that those are any worse than the "normal" meat for eating, they are just not on the menu.

It is important to remember that numbers are an artificial human construct based on the appearance of the universe to us, whereas the universe stubbornly resists fitting precisely into our constructs.

It is the heat that dries the clothes, not the centripital force. The reason a drier rotates is for the same reason you hang clothes on a line instead of just leaving them in a pile to dry.