And that's why i'm no longer anal about people using modern words.

Except when people use then instead of than. That kind of thing can drive a man to murder.

Nerd detail: Light is only partially polarised after reflecting. Complete polarisation happens only at a specific angle depending on what it reflects off.

The self righteousness of your post almost made me feel sick. Vegetarianism SHOULD be a stepping stone to veganism? It SHOULD be whatever the hell you want it to be - for example a temporary situation for when you SHOULD return to eating meat.

Now i'm not going to do what you did and reel off the standard list of reasons why veganism is bad for you, they are well documented and discussed but we all know that it is very possible to have a varied and sufficient diet regardless of what you limit yourself to.

As for your comment about milk, i did a quick bit of research - most of the sources i can find saying that milk causes calcium to be ejected out of the body sourced from the bones and/or cause osteoporosis are new age blog style websites written by a vegan who - like you - clearly has some serious agenda.

As for decent sources, here is what i found:
- Several scientific papers noting that though some observational studies have shown more alkali diets being beneficial to bone health in pre- and post- menopausal women, it has yet to be proven in any definitive clinical trial
http://osteoporosis.org.za/general/downloads/dairy.pdf
(and other sources, but not as scientific)

- The Harvard School of Public Health state that it is not clear what the best source of calcium is for bone health. However the consumption of dairy products has more beneficial effects than just bone health - protection against colon cancer for example, also other vitamins, proteins and minerals that are present.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/calcium-full-story/#calcium-from-milk

Job losses may seem irrelevant to you, but i suggest that's because you have a very very tenuous grasp on the farming profession and don't rely on it for your income. No, you can't simply replace any and all dairy farms/farmers and workers with plant-based farming alternatives. There are a huge number of reasons for this which only a farmer would be able to tell us in detail, but for example - the equipment is different and requires a huge investment (both for acquisition and storage and transport and so on), the land and buildings are not necessarily interchangeable, the skills and knowledge are often built up since childhood and are not instantly transferable, the connections within the industry for logistics and business dealings are different. These are just a few that i thought up.

Yes, some animals are poorly treated in the farming industry and it makes me very sad to think of. However if you are careful and attentive you can ensure that you do not consume any products that were unfairly treated. This is like saying that a minority of clothes sold in shops are made in sweatshops by exploited child labour, therefore we should ban all clothes from the planet.

I could go on and on and on, and even begin my own dissertation on how "everyone going vegan" would be detrimental to overall public health and prosperity; if we grow more crops, more animals must be killed to ensure the crop is healthy and full.. we are not able to process celulose because we evolved.. there are things you can't get from plants that your body needs.. etc. But this comment is already very long, and i think i've broken the backbone of your argument already.

I will mention though that your crusade could end up being very damaging to the health of people who have auto immune diseases and/or allergies that rely on meat to have a balanced and varied diet. I recently discovered that i have coeliac disease (auto immune response to gluten) and secondary lactose intolerance, and i really wish i could explain to you just how difficult it is to avoid gluten containing grains and lactose.

For you it is a choice to not eat anything that comes from animals, for me it is a necessity that i have to avoid gluten and lactose otherwise i get debilitating pain within half an hour. If i did not have access to meat and eggs, there would be very little that i could eat. Wheat is added to almost everything, or almost everything is made in the same vicinity as wheat products resulting in cross contamination. Meat and eggs are sometimes the ONLY thing that i can be sure are safe to eat, and yet some self righteous do-gooder like yourself sits there on a high horse telling me how terrible it is that i inevitably, medically do what our ancestors have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years of human prosperity and ascendance.

If you'd had a bit more of an open mind when you wrote that comment, if i hadn't found out i have these medical conditions, if you'd said things in a debatable way, presented your sources (you provide none), offered it up for discussion rather than a commandment written on a stone tablet, then i probably wouldn't have replied like this. But when i'm forced into doing something and an interfering busybody strolls along and shrieks "oooooooooh you shouldn't be doing that!!!" it really does wind me up.

If you can trick someone to install something on their PC, i'd call that social engineering. You'll be able to do what you like, if you're clever you'll get anything you want, but it takes little technical knowledge to do. I'm sure this guy knows his stuff, perhaps it would be irresponsible to show something a bit more technical and hacker-esque?

Or is hacking like magic and once you learn how it works, it all seems like cheating?

I wonder if you can use the weight at the back of the car to make an aerofoil shape and reduce downward force -> tyre friction.

A seasoned troll would have done it anyway to goad a "Hah! I got you!" response, which would have given you the victory under the gr8 b8 m8 rules of 2012.

http://www.sodapopstop.com/products/detail.cfm?link=920

Irn Bru, the best drink ever. This is my worry - if i ever have to move to the US, how the hell do i get Irn Bru?!

This is an excellent explanation for someone of his age and his skill with video editing obviously helps a lot. It held my interest, the world needs more entertaining and educating videos like these.

My only criticism - and some youtubers have already pointed this out - is that the explanation of time dilation "..the same bodily change that happens on earth takes much longer to occur when you are moving so fast.." is wrong.

Signals sent within the body can be analogous to a clock - any fixed duration measured between two ~lightspeed reference frames will be different, including seconds measured by an atomic clock - but time dilation specifically has nothing to do with the mechanics behind how you measure the time or the time it takes a signal to travel. It's a property of the nature of spacetime. Time itself actually slows down. There's no 'trick' to understanding how or why, it's just a property that it has. We can forgive him because he'd already demonstrated that physics is the same in any inertial reference frame and there is no "preferential" reference frame; therefore the motion of the reference frame can't be responsible for the observed difference, so he obviously already really knew all this.

There's no shame in getting that wrong, because he'll be taught more and better about it as he progresses through school. Generally the arbitrary subjects are the hardest to live with because you just have to accept them as they are rather than 'understand'. Quantum mechanics is the same - you just have to accept the rules and apply the maths. Everyone struggles with it, even Feynman said "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

I've always said the word genius is bandied around way too much, and this video is a fine example. CRT screens/tvs follow the same idea - individual lights illuminate in sequence quickly enough to form a static picture, each pixel changes very slightly 100 times per second (refresh rate) to give the illusion of the original picture in motion. The CRT beam scans ("rasters") from top left to bottom right (for example) in exactly the same way that the device in the video spins (it rasters in a circle) and however many times it spins per second is the refresh rate.

It's a cool project and his PCB work is nice, and he's done a good job of translating a picture into a timed set of lights. The videographer uses the term genius because he was not previously aware of the long history of rasters. This would be a useful tool for teaching children about the process - CRTs might not be popular anymore, but CCDs are fundamental to (astro)physics, and the principles behind both cover a huge range of potential teaching topics.

Fusion is well within our reach. It just doesn't have the funding (and therefore the fast research/development cycle) because the oligarchs are not done selling us fossil fuels yet.

There is evidence that having a diet with higher than average protein (and obviously you're aiming for lean meats) is more conducive to weight loss. As you wouldn't want to lose muscle mass, it's not so much the protein intake you're wanting to cut.

However, obviously whatever you're doing is working fine as it is, and perhaps the overall smaller portion is better for some.

I've got my own experience exercising and losing weight, 3 stones in 3 months. What i did was extreme and i'd eat only 1500 calories (over a thousand deficit), spend about half of the day sleeping, and swim hard enough to be exhausted after 30 mins every day. I definitely noticed that changes to my diet caused rapid and obvious benefits over, for example, increasing the exercise or mixing it up with HIIT.

It gave me a newfound respect for Bale and Gyllenhaal and their weight transformations. Absolutely incredible, i don't know how they managed it because i felt like death warmed up at times and compared to them mine was a life of excess.

I'm not a historian so i might be getting this wrong, but i'd been led to believe:

a) Germany itself was in debt after WW1, and the economic hardship forced on them in the form of reparations has been postulated as a reason why the Nazi party rose to power in the first place. When people are desperate, they look for someone to blame. Over in the UK, the government have ensured that we're blaming immigrants and anyone on welfare for these economic hardships that were caused by the rich elite and ruling classes, corrupt to the very core and no longer working in the interests of the country and its people.

b) European countries agreed to forget large portions of Germany's debts, because back then we seemed to know that is was pointless to wreck a country and cause untold misery, pain and death to the residents all in the name of profiting off them.

I am so disgusted and overwhelmed by how badly everything is being run, and how obviously it is being run for the benefit of a minority. I hope Greece sticks two fingers up to the lot of them and does an Iceland, followed by every other European country doing something similar. We can't hope to carry on like this, we can't let power hungry psychopaths control the world... we won't survive like this.

It's weird how he locks the front wheel in place and says "so angular momentum isn't the cause", then goes on to explain that angular momentum helps to prevent the front wheel turning too sharply and so is actually critical in keeping the bike upright.

A computer big enough to accurately calculate the position and properties of every "particle" (and ever decreasing subdivisions of energy and matter) would need to be the size of the universe in the first place. We can't even simulate enough particles in an n-body simulation to match the number of stars in a galaxy, let alone individual molecules, or shall we go further and say atoms, or further and say protons, neutrons and electrons? And that's for ONE galaxy amongst hundreds of billions in the OBSERVABLE universe... using only ONE force - gravity!

The guy has a great point about the Big Bang - a billion billion galaxies worth of matter and energy created in a split second from nothing? Doesn't sound like like the conservation of energy that is so fundamental to physics, right? But that's no reason to throw out hundreds of years of evidence and research which has proven conservation of energy to be true since then. The big bang makes the most sense given what we see today... if you want to propose a better theory, it has to make more sense than the Big Bang theory. Saying that the big bang doesn't make sense is not an appropriate starting point for a new theory, and doesn't lead to "so therefore we're in a simulation."

And it's not good enough to appeal to simplicity like @robdot is doing - basically saying that everything we see could very easily be an illusion for our benefit. That's an argument for God, in my opinion... just like how religious fanatics say "it was God's will for this to happen" we'd instead say "well, that's what the simulation wanted to show us" and call it a day. Furthermore if the manifestations of physical laws out there in the universe are illusions, they are at least consistent illusions that we can calculate and predict. And in that case, what is the difference to our lives whether we call it "reality" or "simulation" or "computer"? It it still what we always knew it was. If something created our universe and allowed it to run like a simulation, it is almost certainly intangible to us and for all intents and purposes meaningless too, because we can't touch, feel, see or understand it on any level.

This is one of the topics i asked of my favourite professor - how can we trust what we see if it could be faked, and what exists beyond our universe? His answer was, if i have to doubt what i see, i might as well not do anything at all, and if you want an answer to the second question talk to a philosopher. This is a philosophical discussion, not a scientific one. The scientific method doesn't care what you call the place you live in nor "who" we think "created" it. You can't hope to understand anything if you don't base it on the evidence you have. You certainly can't form a theory on the basis that all evidence is untrustworthy.

ExxonMobil had the Bush administration lobbying strongly to replace the chair of the IPCC with a more agreeable alternative, which we know about because of a leaked memo. So let us not pretend that the IPCC are above the skepticism of being politically influenced. The name "intergovernmental panel" says it all, in my opinion; i had assumed the I stood for Independent.

I don't apologise for not reading the entire thread because i noticed that in your first post you said the following, and it gave me cause to doubt your take on the science in the rest of the thread. I've been in too many discussions in which i spent hours researching only to find out people were completely wrong, and i spent 45 mins on your first paragraph already. Anyway here is the quote again:

"IPCC best estimates for 2100 are about 1.5 degree increase, so another hundred years and increase that is about twice as bad. Of course, it's twice as bad as what we saw the last 100 yeas and not only survived, but thrived under."

Firstly, the planet's flora and fauna have most certainly NOT thrived during that time. Humans have flourished by exploiting nature, so yes we have 'thrived'. In the same way that if i were to steal money from a dozen old ladies, i might say i was thriving even though i was out of work during the economic downturn. Pretty much every source agrees that the one thing the ecosystem is not doing is thriving - we are in or on the verge of the sixth mass extinction on the planet. So this is an inspiring yet futile "hurrah for us!" bravado that ignores the truth; we stand on the deck of a galleon around a big bonfire, ripping up planks and chopping up the boat, throwing it on the fire and going "we're all lovely and warm!" as we sit lower and lower in the water.

Secondly and in my opinion most significantly, according to the IPCC conclusions on page 8 you have used the term "best estimates" to mean "best case scenario" rather than "most reliable estimate" - which is why i have downvoted that comment, as it is misleading and incorrect. I would say it's cynically misleading, but i suspect you've lifted that from a cynical source rather than being cynical yourself.

I don't know if you realise, but you referred to only one result out of four, the rest of which strongly indicate a greater than 2 degree rise. Your reference is to RCP 2.6 which assumes CO2 emissions peak between 2010 and 2020. A decade in which the most populous countries on the planet are developing and a decade in which we must start to reduce global emissions so that we have a good chance of your best case scenario happening. We are already half way through it, and according to Mauna Loa observatory and every other source i could find (including EPA, NOAA and IEA) we are still increasing our CO2 emissions year on year including this year, where we've broken the 400ppm milestone, 120ppm greater than pre industrial times, half of which occured since 1980 (Pieter Tans).

So in fairness, you might have underplayed the IPCC report (which you seem to get almost all of your information from) in as much as newtboy might have overestimated the dangers and rapidity of climate change. I think you're out on a limb by telling him that the scientific community disagrees with him and he's using dodgy sources, when you've cherry picked one quarter of a conclusion from one source (the IPCC) to argue for your best case scenario which you refer to (unscientifically and incorrectly) as the "best estimate".

However, i do at least appreciate that despite your doubts (and in my opinion, slight confusion over the results, i don't think you're being intentionally misleading) you are very much behind changing our behaviour and using resources that are more appropriate... and that's what really matters right now is that people recognise the need to change.