Firstly i'd like to say that it's clear to me you're not interested in discussing this, but rather somehow interested in some sort of conflict. I'm not, and i spent a good while thinking about my post before making it; your suggestion that i didn't read your post is soundly rejected. Possibly you didn't read or acknowledge the content of your own post because you have forced yourself into a position where all i have to do is show one single example of something being funny at the expense of no one or nothing to prove you wrong and now you have to be rude (the first sign you know your position is indefensible) and provide little to no justification of any of your numbered points (because you know they are weak).

I'll be honest, i'm not going to entertain suggestions that a joke can be at the expense of an inanimate object or fictional character. Between that and your distinctly shoddy arguments I think you're trolling.

A joke at the expense of a stick? At the expense of a fictional character? ET is not something or someone. It doesn't exist, it is a construct of our imagination and does not have physical form. It isn't even a "thing" (if i say that unicorns are arrogant bastards, does that make me xenophobic? They don't exist, but if ET can suffer jocular expense, unicorns can suffer expense at my comment also. I hate martians too, they're all short, ugly, grey bastards. Am i a racist now?). The zebra thing isn't actually a riddle - it pretends to be a riddle and ends up being silly; i can't understand your reasoning on this and you didn't explain it (no surprises there, your post is full of holes).

When you tell someone a joke, you are entering into a contract by which both people know that word play or trickery is going to be involved. By taking part in the joke, you are voluntarily allowing yourself to be misled so that a juxtaposition of ideas in your head makes you laugh. You aren't laughing at the expense of yourself. In the same way as reading a book or watching a film - you are not being lied to, you are not being tricked, you are a willing participant. When a magician performs a trick for you, you are suspending your disbelief and participating in a flight of fancy for entertainment purposes. Magic isn't shadenfreude either - no one suffers expense, they both enjoy and know that skilful subterfuge has taken place - though i'm sure you'll argue the contrary before you admit you've over committed to your point.

If a clown puts on an act for you and you laugh when his trousers fall down, you aren't laughing at the expense of the clown because he did it intentionally to make you laugh, he did not suffer expense. You are not laughing at the expense of yourself because you know that what he is doing is an act, you did not suffer expense (except for the ticket price, badum tish - there's another 'joke' at the expense of nothing/no one).

What you've tried to do is supply the definition of "joke" or "humour" such that the definition involves the word "trick" in a negative context and thus lead to shadenfreude. Not everyone thinks the same way as you do, which is what i tried to explain to you earlier; if you want to say "to me, everything is shadenfreude - i laugh only ever at the expense of something/someone" then i say fair enough, but that is not what you initially said.

So if/when you first heard the stick joke, you laughed AT the stick? The ET joke, you laughed AT ET? You laughed AT the mathemetician? I don't believe you, but regardless that isn't the point you made; many if not most other people are not laughing at ET or the stick, they are laughing at the juxtaposition of ideas. And therefore comedy/humour (not your very specific definition of it, which is irrelevant to our debate) is not ALWAYS at the expense of others, even if i accept that something that doesn't exist/is inanimate can suffer an emotional expense.

And finally, i don't understand the metaphorical suggestion that i shunned your need for air, when actually i spent a good 20 minutes providing you with air only to have you turn round and say "that's not air, it's nitrogen and oxygen with trace amounts of other gases!" and pull a trollface before passing out. Don't worry though, i'll drag you back to shore and make sure you're ok (this post).

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Hand-vs-Liquid-Nitrogen-and-the-Leidenfrost-Effect

Upvote for the awesome captions!

Hand vs. Liquid Nitrogen and the Leidenfrost Effect has been added as a related post - related requested by Zawash.

The recovery diver is using a Heliox (helium plus oxygen) gas mixture. Normal air is mostly nitrogen and oxygen, but both of those gasses can cause problems under the extreme pressures of deep dives. Nitrogen at high pressures makes you drunk ("nitrogen narcosis") and oxygen can be toxic.
In Heliox, the nitrogen has been replaced by helium, avoiding the drunkenness at the cost of a high-pitched voice. Concentrations of oxygen are also usually lower, reducing oxygen toxicity.

You will probably never see a video showing the creation and use of nitrogen tribromide. And if you do, I'm sure it will not end well.

Hey, remember that girl who had to have her stomach removed after drinking liquid nitrogen cocktails?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'magnets, track, no resistance, electrons, liquid nitrogen' to 'magnets, track, no resistance, electrons, liquid nitrogen, superconductor, levitate' - edited by xxovercastxx

Cold would make a steel frame contract (a little) and make it more brittle / less malleable. But, it'd have to be *extremely* cold (like, liquid Nitrogen cold or beyond) to make it so brittle that it would be more likely to break before bending.

As a result of being merely natural environment cold (in liquid water so not less than 0 C) it probably was a bit more brittle (and therefore harder / less malleable) than the same metal would have been at higher temperatures. Maybe it took a measurable percentage more force to bend in those conditions -- but clearly not enough to prevent it from folding like a paperclip given the massive force on it.

Possible that I'm off on some or all of that, been a long time since Engineering Physics at Uni.

In case anyone is wondering, modern F1 engines use springless pneumatic valvetrains, using Nitrogen instead of springs. It was only a few years after this video that F1 started using pneumatic actuators, I think it was the mid-80s Renaults.

Desmodromic valvetrains are sometimes used in motorbikes (Ducatti uses them for instance) but they would be too heavy for F1, and I don't even remember anyone experimenting with the idea.

True but the Atheist also holds the "belief" that there is not GOD. So which belief is more correct? For me to get into a biblical debate with you and the atheist sift community would be pointless. It's like the saying you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink. So this makes me search the web for other ways to argue the point. Here is 1 of them.

Mathematically speaking evolution falls flat on it face..
Lifted from site: http://www.freewebs.com/proofofgod/whataretheodds.htm



Suppose you take ten pennies and mark them from 1 to 10. Put them in your pocket and give them a good shake. Now try to draw them out in sequence from 1 to 10, putting each coin back in your pocket after each draw.

Your chance of drawing number 1 is 1 to 10.
Your chance of drawing 1 & 2 in succession is 1 in 100.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2 & 3 in succession would be one in a thousand.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2, 3 & 4 in succession would be one in 10,000.

And so on, until your chance of drawing from number 1 to number 10 in succession would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in 10 billion. The object in dealing with so simple a problem is to show how enormously figures multiply against chance.

Sir Fred Hoyle similarly dismisses the notion that life could have started by random processes:

Imagine a blindfolded person trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. The chance against achieving perfect colour matching is about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. These odds are roughly the same as those against just one of our body's 200,000 proteins having evolved randomly, by chance.

Now, just imagine, if life as we know it had come into existence by a stroke of chance, how much time would it have taken? To quote the biophysicist, Frank Allen:

Proteins are the essential constituents of all living cells, and they consist of the five elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur, with possibly 40,000 atoms in the ponderous molecule. As there are 92 chemical elements in nature, all distributed at random, the chance that these five elements may come together to form the molecule, the quantity of matter that must be continually shaken up, and the length of time necessary to finish the task, can all be calculated. A Swiss mathematician, Charles Eugene Guye, has made the computation and finds that the odds against such an occurrence are 10^160, that is 10 multiplied by itself 160 times, a number far too large to be expressed in words. The amount of matter to be shaken together to produce a single molecule of protein would be millions of times greater than the whole universe. For it to occur on the earth alone would require many, almost endless billions (10^243) of years.

Proteins are made from long chains called amino-acids. The way those are put together matters enormously. If in the wrong way, they will not sustain life and may be poisons. Professor J.B. Leathes (England) has calculated that the links in the chain of quite a simple protein could be put together in millions of ways (10^48). It is impossible for all these chances to have coincided to build one molecule of protein.

But proteins, as chemicals, are without life. It is only when the mysterious life comes into them that they live. Only the infinite mind of God could have foreseen that such a molecule could be the abode of life, could have constructed it, and made it live.

Science, in attempt to calculate the age of the whole universe, has placed the figure at 50 billion years. Even such a prolonged duration is too short for the necessary proteinous molecule to have come into existence in a random fashion. When one applies the laws of chance to the probability of an event occurring in nature, such as the formation of a single protein molecule from the elements, even if we allow three billion years for the age of the Earth or more, there isn't enough time for the event to occur.

There are several ways in which the age of the Earth may be calculated from the point in time which at which it solidified. The best of all these methods is based on the physical changes in radioactive elements. Because of the steady emission or decay of their electric particles, they are gradually transformed into radio-inactive elements, the transformation of uranium into lead being of special interest to us. It has been established that this rate of transformation remains constant irrespective of extremely high temperatures or intense pressures. In this way we can calculate for how long the process of uranium disintegration has been at work beneath any given rock by examining the lead formed from it. And since uranium has existed beneath the layers of rock on the Earth's surface right from the time of its solidification, we can calculate from its disintegration rate the exact point in time the rock solidified.

In his book, Human Destiny, Le Comte Du nuoy has made an excellent, detailed analysis of this problem:

It is impossible because of the tremendous complexity of the question to lay down the basis for a calculation which would enable one to establish the probability of the spontaneous appearance of life on Earth.

The volume of the substance necessary for such a probability to take place is beyond all imagination. It would that of a sphere with a radius so great that light would take 10^82 years to cover this distance. The volume is incomparably greater than that of the whole universe including the farthest galaxies, whose light takes only 2x10^6 (two million) years to reach us. In brief, we would have to imagine a volume more than one sextillion, sextillion, sextillion times greater than the Einsteinian universe.

The probability for a single molecule of high dissymmetry to be formed by the action of chance and normal thermic agitation remains practically nill. Indeed, if we suppose 500 trillion shakings per second (5x10^14), which corresponds to the order of magnitude of light frequency (wave lengths comprised between 0.4 and 0.8 microns), we find that the time needed to form, on an average, one such molecule (degree of dissymmetry 0.9) in a material volume equal to that of our terrestrial globe (Earth) is about 10^243 billions of years (1 followed by 243 zeros)

But we must not forget that the Earth has only existed for two billion years and that life appeared about one billion years ago, as soon as the Earth had cooled.

Life itself is not even in question but merely one of the substances which constitute living beings. Now, one molecule is of no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary. We would need much greater figures to "explain" the appearance of a series of similar molecules, the improbability increasing considerably, as we have seen for each new molecule (compound probability), and for each series of identical throws.

If the probability of appearance of a living cell could be expressed mathematically the previous figures would seem negligible. The problem was deliberately simplified in order to increase the probabilities.

Events which, even when we admit very numerous experiments, reactions or shakings per second, need an almost-infinitely longer time than the estimated duration of the Earth in order to have one chance, on an average to manifest themselves can, it would seem, be considered as impossible in the human sense.

It is totally impossible to account scientifically for all phenomena pertaining to life, its development and progressive evolution, and that, unless the foundations of modern science are overthrown, they are unexplainable.

We are faced by a hiatus in our knowledge. There is a gap between living and non-living matter which we have not been able to bridge.

The laws of chance cannot take into account or explain the fact that the properties of a cell are born out of the coordination of complexity and not out of the chaotic complexity of a mixture of gases. This transmissible, hereditary, continuous coordination entirely escapes our laws of chance.

Rare fluctuations do not explain qualitative facts; they only enable us to conceive that they are not impossible qualitatively.

Evolution is mathematically impossible

It would be impossible for chance to produce enough beneficial mutations—and just the right ones—to accomplish anything worthwhile.

"Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 10^50. Such a number, if written out, would read 480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000."
"Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 10^50 has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence."
I.L. Cohen, Darwin Was Wrong (1984), p. 205.

I think the implications for better energy efficient lights are offset by the cost of keeping nitrogen liquid

Your video, Orange LED in liquid nitrogen, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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O by the by, neutrons decay in free-space, in other words, free neutrons are radioactive. With a decay time of less than 15 mins, it means 2 things: slow neutrons will be less detectable at distance because they decay, you still need to be relatively close to the source of neutrons to detect them regardless of speed. Neutrons are also the only form of radiation that will make things radioactive, meaning if you get to close and the bombardment is to intense , you can cause damage to your equipment via internal radiation of beta and gamma rays.

This is also why they use water in nuclear reactors, hydrogen, and in particular deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron) slow neutrons better than anything. Water is mostly hydrogen by mole, so it is a very good moderator, both light water (regular water) and heavy water (deuterium water).

What is happening in this particular case is known as nuclear spallation. When a high energy proton hits something like carbon or nitrogen, it will at times knock a proton or neutron loose. Those neutrons are moving at relativistic speeds in most cases, so on the flip side, when those neutrons bounce their way out back to space, if there is water in the way they get slowed way down...enough that they decay before they reach the detector.

This is the same exact effect that allows for carbon dating, sometimes, the high energy neutrons that come out via spallation will in turn knock out a proton from a nitrogen atom, it then becomes mildly radioactive carbon. This happens at a relatively predictable rate, and since the decay of carbon 14 is also predictable, dating is possible.

Science rant over

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