Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

Even if you can get the the 1.25" barlow into the 2" diagonal, you won't be able to get the 2" eyepiece inside the 1.25" barlow, no matter how hard you push

Depends on if you like apples better, or oranges. :-)

Either of these make a fine, very sharp scope. If you can build the newtonian yourself, going that route with a premium mirror will result in more performance-per-dollar spent as you can afford more aperture, and the open tube allows the optics to cool faster.

Coma at f/6 should be unobjectionable IMHO. Though different people have different tolerances of such things.

the jump from 10" to 13" is pretty similar proportionally to the jump from 3" to 4" or from 6" to 8".

In my experience this is enough of a jump to make a significant difference in amount of detail that you see in side-by-side comparisons, but not a big enough jump to make for a "totally different experience" as you put it, from what you experienced before.

You're looking at a 72% increase in light grasp but keep in mind that difference in brightness has to get up to about 40% or so just to get to be really noticeable to most people.

When stepping up in aperture it seems to me that increases of around 50% diameter make the 'worthwhile' step-up threshold. Different people may have different personal thresholds of course.

As far as I can tell this does not prophesy a reversal by creationists so much as simple disbelief in the return of Christ. This was an easy prophecy to make in the days when there were hardly any Christians as it would have been true as soon as it was written down.

In orbit, you're falling around and around. You're not 'free' of Earth's gravity at all, in low-Earth orbit the strength of gravity is actually close to what it is on the ground. You don't feel it because orbit is a free-fall state, you're falling toward the ground, but you're traveling sideways fast enough that the ground falls away (due to Earth's curvature) at exactly the same rate. If the ground were smooth enough, i.e. no hills or valleys, it would in theory be possible to enter a very, very low orbit just by running extremely fast.

Taking a detour toward the Moon you curve outward in an orbit of constantly increasing radius until you pass the midpoint and begin to enter lunar orbit.

2 points of historical order: 1) church and state were separated 220 years ago, not 40 years ago. 2) Some of that separation was undone 50 years ago when certain national mottos and pledges and emblems were changed to be more religious in response to the threat posed by Godless Communists (when "e pluribus unum" was replaced with "in God we trust" and when the phrase "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance). So really in the last generation in some respects church and state have been less separate than they were in the past.

But this misses the point. Anyone who studies history knows that any time you start mingling religion and government it rarely does anything to strengthen the religion but often does much to strengthen the government. Reasons are obvious, when the government starts declaring its actions in the name of God people have less inclination to question the government's actions. Who wants to speak out against the will of God?

This is why we don't have religion in state schools. You are of course free to choose a religious education for your children. But state involvement entails the risks inherent in mixing state and religion. For examples, see Iran or Afghanistan. Or Spain under the Inquisition.

There is an infrastructure of organized instruction in morals and values. It's called parents. If we're losing our morals and values it's because parenting is going out of style. Everybody's letting their kids be raised by daycare mills in their formative years. Then in school they load up with extracurricular activities because, well, that's what you do these days or are content to let them sit on the computer but between that and the parents working 2 jobs there's no family face-time anymore. So kids are learning all their values from each other or (shudder) the internet. And it feeds into church too, kids aren't coming to church with their parents, partly because their parents feel "too busy" to go themselves or simply because they're losing touch with their kids anyway to the point where they're not expected to go where their parents go. Pardon that little rant and I know it rambled, but I think this is a real problem.

"Don't side with these enemies of God"

This very concept of Satan as a rebellious angel I always had a logic problem with. An angel decides he can challenge the Almighty, a being of infinite power who builds Universes in His spare time. Is Satan guilty of simple stupidity, or outright insanity?

I picture a conversation between Satan and one of his henchmen just before the rebellion:

Satan: Hmmm, how big does God look to you? How strong do you think he is?

Henchman: Infinity.

Satan: Oooooo, we can take him!

Thank you for coming Brien. I will miss your posts and the discussions that arise therefrom.

Brien -- yeah maybe you should take a little break, sounds like you have enough going on at the moment. We're all here because we like to wrestle with the Big Questions. But participating in forums like this is very taxing and mind-bending and we're not built to think this hard about concepts this big for extended periods of time. I mean, you can't go on having regular bowel movements if you're wrestling with Life, The Universe and Everything every hour of every day.

Well it's not like there's apes rooting around for nuts and berries all of a sudden one of them gives birth to a person.

What happens is one gives birth to one that has slightly larger-than-average brain size. Or longer-than-average fingers. Or maybe it can stand up a little straighter and taller than the average ape.

This ape eats a little better than the others, because it can dig better, reach higher, or be more clever at finding food than the others. As a result it has a statistical edge at successfully mating and reproducing, and its offspring in turn have a slight edge in survivability if they inherit this ape's traits.

As one might expect it's a painfully slow process for these slight statistical advantages to translate into noticeable changes. So it takes millions of years.

As for the Adam and Eve story, I think it's a nice story. But I think it's just that. A story. As an explanation of origins, to me personally, it stretches the limits of credibility. Not to mention the fact that Adam and Eve's children have to reproduce by marrying their siblings -- eewwwwww!