I wouldn't say she was very hot, but she was one cool lady.

Methane bubbles burn at a really low temperature and won't damage the ceiling (if the fireball even survives long enough to get that high). The butane from the lighters is probably similar when delivered in this manner. The manner in which the combustion occurs changes the temperature of the flames. Any preheating of the intake air, or reflection of EM output will influence it. A bunsen burner flame can be vastly hotter than a methane bubble flame even though they have the same fuel.

Some chemicals burn at such low temperatures that they wouldn't even feel very hot. This could easily be done with pure isopropyl alcohol.

To command and require is not, I believe, to force or impose. We still have the choice.

Please stand on one foot, jump up and down and squeak like a chicken. I am not forcing you, I wont touch your leg or vibrate your tongue for you, but unless you do so, I'm afraid you'll have to be sent to a very hot place where you will burn and suffer and scream FOREVER. Its your choice, no forcing, you have the offer, you can choose completely of your own free will to accept it or not. Noones forcing you. You are free, I've even GIVEN you the freedom, as MY blessing. Am I not the nicest guy?

>> ^chtierna:
I for one think this Nancy person is very hot.


Too many Collagen injections. She could practically trip over those lips.

I for one think this Nancy person is very hot. Why she is almost hot enough to run for VP! On a serious note though, she was devastated. I was hoping Matthews would show the clip a third time, and then just stare at her in silent disgust.

Christ there are like 5 awesome lines in it...

"Well, you'll have to excuse me because I have to use the bathroom"

"Do you like marshmallows?"

"Excellent! There you are"

"Could we have assistance please in Row #1 please for toilet seats?"

"Will Smith is very hot too, if he was here right now, do you know what I would do?"

a) the water in the cup with the fork probably bubbled throughout the microwaving process.

b) metal in the microwave is for when the microwave is actively in use, afterwards is fine.

c) i suppose both. or place something in the glass with surface imperfections, such as a plastic fork.

d) superheating water can be dangerous, as it appears as though the water is not of boiling temperature. i'm sure you can still see water vapor, but it can be misleading, and putting your finger in the glass would be akin to placing your hand in violently boiling water. the container will also be very hot. also, most classic glassware and crystal can explode under those kind of temperatures.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I suppose it depends on your use of the the PQ. Some members may hold obscure non-sifted stuff as a personal library or as a way to give like minded Sifters an idea of the kind of stuff they like.

Some Sifts are before their time - the world catches up and then the post in the PQ becomes very hot.

I don't oppose culling either. Very much up to the individual.

>> ^doremifa:
I find funny women very hot. Maybe there's is something evolutionary for women to get attention and mate by using humor as bait.

Can I get a witness? Amen, brother. Sense of humor is an aphrodisiac for me. Now maybe Hitch doesn't care if they can even talk, but a funny personality goes a LONG way in the realm of attraction for me.

This video shouldn't just offend women, but men too. It makes every one of us look like all we care about is finding a warm vagina. And that's only true when I'm drunk.

I find funny women very hot. Maybe there's is something evolutionary for women to get attention and mate by using humor as bait.

I thought it was promoting the very hot up-and-coming sport of Beta fish fighting.

That Casiotone bass line send my fingers straight for the up vote.

So very hot.

The big question we will be answering is, how exactly do we roast a vegetarian?

I recommend olive oil and a very hot flame.

I come from an upper-middle-class liberal suburban place pronounced Missour-EE within a red state called Missour-UH in the United States of Jesus. My high school had a very high percentage of children of professors at Washington University, and if you added up all the jews, blacks, asians, and mixed people, that was probably over 50%. My mother hails from UCC, which is probably the second most welcoming and nondogmatic of sect of Christianity behind Unitarian Universalism (Barack Obama is in UCC). My father was a woowoo evangelical. Some of my recollections on the subject of religion during childhood are:

1. In third grade, some kid started going around asking everybody, with a dichotomous intonation, "Are you Catholic, or Christian"? I suspect he was an evangelical. I don't recall giving any reply, but even at the time I had doubts due to the lack of any fulfillment of prayer. I had grown to distrust all adults and authority figures as a reasonable extension of my discovery, as a five or six year old, of Santa Claus, the first thanksgiving, Pocahontas, and many other lies. I had also grown to suspect something was terribly rotten in our society due to the cruelty of many homophobic bullies who called me names that weren't even true and the teachers who didn't care. Because of my alienation, I was not inclined to presuppose that the majority opinion was more likely to be correct.

2. Around this time, my (divorced remarried noncustodial) father also took me to see a faith-healer. I don't recall what he was trying to cure me of. He attended some crackpot semirural megachurch, and his business was "no money down" real-estate, another religion.

3. Within two years afterward my father was involuntarily committed to a mental institution for schizophrenia because he believed he could communicate directly with the spirits of Joan of Arc, Jesus, and other saints, and they told him to fight demons by committing arson. He later said the charges were trumped-up and unsuccessfully tried to get out with a religious freedom argument.

4. Teachers from sixth through twelfth grade stressed the importance of critical thinking and incorporated it into the curriculum.

5. In seventh grade, I recall being asked of my religious affiliation, and replying that I was sitting on the fence between agnosticism and atheism. There was no retribution or suprise or stigma. I was already an outcast and had nothing socially to lose, anyway. About a year prior I first acquired persistent unsupervised access to the internet, which I have had ever since. In the following two years I did quite a lot of research online and debating in online bulletin boards. This drew me closer to atheism by gaining a greater understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, etc. In other words, a greater understanding of how the world came to be the way it is. However, I would still call myself a teapot-agnostic.

6. In high school, I found a clique of atheists and agnostics. Shortly after 9/11, when the Missouri legislature enacted a bill that compelled schools to recite the pledge of allegiance at least once a week, some of my classmates and I openly expressed our disapproval on the grounds of separation of church and state. No gasps were heard. This was long before the Newdow case. When the Bible As/In Literature was taught in English class, several of my classmates and I expressed our disapproval again on the same grounds. In classroom discussions on that book, I recall many viewpoints being expressed with no great gasps of shock. I, the nerd, said openly that I thought the bible was a collection of fairy tales, poems, and forgeries, while the big football jock next to me expressed a predilection for biblical literalism in not so many words. I recall a very hot semi-orthodox Jewish girl who told me she would only date Jews.

I agreed with, or even said openly online, much of what is contained in the God Delusion, before the book was published. I suspect some others have had similar experiences. Not every consensus is a flock.


The ID movement, and the fact that every single suicide hijacker/bomber is faith-based, and the loosening of taboos by (e.g.) the Daily Show, have probably been three of the most important factors that led to the books of Dawkins and Hitchens. In Dawkins' case, the ID movement alone may have been the most important factor because of his biological profession. Hitchens tends to write books extremely quickly (averaging a book a year for the past 24 years), and it's very plausible that he began writing his after, and because of, the success of The God Delusion.

Most nonatheist people's comments on the Sift about Dawkins accuse him of being too shrill. Accusing one's opponent of too much enthusiasm (stridency, shrillness) is irrelevant to the subject matter of the debate. I personally find nothing unpleasant about Dawkins' manner of speech except his affinity for hooptedoodle. His grotesque description of the god of the old testament is spot-on. A book only appears strident in relation to one's perception of orthodoxy, and neither the orthodoxy nor one's perception of orthodoxy are necessarily correct. Rather, debate the substance of the issue. Neither Dawkins nor any of his followers is advocating curtailing the religious freedom of believers, so his opponents have nothing to fear but the holes in their theories.

holy crap, that comment was awesome. thank you for such a quality contribution. I wish i could give you more than just a comment upvote

In reply to this comment by Thylan:
I'll try and rack my addled brain for an analysis of this in terms of amateur physics.

Heat is a physical property, and relates directly to energy. Fire is not, its a chemical process, called combustion. Combustions requires Oxygen.

There are many methods of extinguishing fire, and which is appropriate depends on the properties of the material that is combusting, inorder to be effective. There are 2 primary mechanisms of extinguishing a fire of which I am aware, and they rely on either:

1. removing the heat energy form the situation.
2. removing oxygen from the situation.

Chemical processes (e.g. combustion) require an activation energy level to be achieved in the system before they will occur. Cooling/removing heat lowers the energy in the system and can prevent the reaction. Differnt materials have a different activation energy before combustion will start, so this method is very material dependent.

They also, as noted, require oxygen. Oxygen can be prevented from access to a body/clothes, by coating them in water. the water then acts as a barrier to the oxygen. It can also cool a material (by extracting some of the heat energy, and being changed from cool water to warm/hot/boiling/steam/super heated steam...

Oil well fires can be put out by explosions, because this process rapidly exhausts the available oxygen in the region of the fire. The oil on fire is "put out" because oxygen is starved form the chemical process. What you are left with is "Hot oil", which dose not spontaneously reignite as it takes a flame for oil to begin to combust. That flame, adds a very localized area of very high energy (oil burning releases a LOT of energy) and that is enough to archive the activation energy of the combustion of oil, making it a self sustaining reaction (oil on fire stays on fire). But simply being Hot is not enough.

CO2 fire extinguishers work on electrical fires, where putting water would be bad for the material. The CO2 floods the area, pushing the oxygen out. Once the oxygen is deprived, the fire goes out. Because they shoot out gas, they could blow a lite particulate material all over the place, and so might not be advisable to use in all fires.

Back to Chip pan Fires:

Water and oil don't mix. Throwing water on burning oil, does not "coat the oil", separating it from air, and thus water will fail to prevent oxygen from fueling the combustion process. However, the water will get hot. Very hot, and very fast. The water will become agitated steam, having sunk into the oil (it doesnt get that hot instantly, it has to become so after contact whit the hot oil has been sustained, and as it wont float on the oil or mix well with the oil, it will be sinking into it).

So, you have oil, a very hot and combusting liquid. Inside this combusting liquid, you add another liquid that is transitioning from liquid to gas (water -> steam) and when water changes state into steam, it has a volume change. the same volume of H20 as a liquid takes up a LOT more volume when its a gas at the same pressure. This gas, flows up through the oil at high speeds, as it expands. Invariably, this force of up rushing gas takes the burning oil with it, distributing upwards and into the room and smearing burning oil all over the room, and possibly you. BAD.

The solution:

Place a fire retardant material (one that needs a VERY high activation energy for it to ever combust, a lot higher than the heat of a standard kitchen fire), over the chip pan. This acts as a barrier to oxygen. Oxygen will not pass through this material into the pan, and so, the remaining oxygen trapped between the surface of the oil, and the material covering the top of the pan, will soon be exhausted. The fire will go out (combustion end) as soon as the oxygen has all been used.

Although professional kitchens are likely to have a special cloth somewhere on the wall for this very purpose, you can improvise at home. Take a cloth, wet it, and wring it out, as directed. The purpose, is that you need to make the cloth a barrier to oxygen (air). Making it damp, will mean that water molecules are trapped in the holes/weave of the material, and so its much better at preventing air to travel through it. Also, the water itself wont combust (water doesn't burn) and, because it is coating the cloth, the water is also a barrier to the oxygen touching the cloth. This means that the cloth cant burn. The heat of the fire would dry the cloth out, if the stove is not turned down, and this would be bad. IF the cloth is not "wrung out" it will be dripping. Water dripping form the cloth, into the chip pan fire would be bad, especially if it was dripping as you laid it over pan. Not moving the pan when tis heavy, and filed with burning oil, and likely to be so hot you drop it, is also self explanatory.


I hope that makes sense, explains what happened, and why the correct method works.