All of what you said is contradicted by basic primatology. We are not deer. We are great apes.
Great apes do not mark their territory with piss or pheromones. Great apes live in groups, so they don't need to smell each other to find each other -- they wake up with each other every morning, and go to sleep next to each other every night. They are all right in front of each other's faces.
Great apes attract and find mates based on vision, not smell. Have you ever seen a female chimp in heat? I have. Her hind end swells up to the size of a human buttocks. Here's a picture. With baboons, the labia become swollen and cherry-red. It looks like the mother of all veneral diseases.
This is true for out closest relatives -- gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos.
Sure, guys might be attracted to the scent of a woman, but what really gives you a boner is the sight of sexually mature breasts or a mature female butt with the wide hips. Porn is images, not smells.
When a human female menstruates, she is not leaking 'hormones'. It's not a stream of estrogen. The reason it's so exciting to wild animals is because she is bleeding and shedding endometrium tissue, and the animals are smelling blood.
No, if you were to take the thing that the dog sniffs at and put it in your mouth, *that* is what the dog smells. Basically, our keenest sense of smell is internal, inside of our face, and really only works on things we place in our mouths, whereas dogs' keenest sense of smell is the wet, scaly skin on their nose.
It's the difference between sniffing a cup of coffee and tasting it in your mouth. When you have the coffee liquid sloshing around in your mouth, all of its coffee 'flavor' beyond the basic bitterness is actually sensed by your sense of *smell*. When the dog pokes its nose at the coffee, it's as strong as if the dog were tasting it. To put it another way, they have their sense of taste on the end of their wet noses.
This is demonstrated by people who have lost their sense of smell, called Anosmia. Not only have they lost the ability to smell things by sniffing, but they have lost all ability to taste the flavor of things. Wikipedia says this:
"It should be emphasized that there are no more than 6 distinctive tastes: salty, sour, sweet, bitter, umami and possibly fatty acids. The 10,000 different scents which humans usually recognize as 'tastes' are often actually 'flavor', which many people who can smell confuse with taste."
Let me play devil's advocate -- can you be sure that a human male doesn't have as strong a scent as a human female? Maybe women in the women's barracks are able to smell a man when they are amongst only women just as well as you and the other guys are able to smell a woman. Maybe human males have specific receptors for whatever chemicals a human female secretes.
... our other stereo sense organs (eyes and ears) are placed just about as far apart on our heads as is structurally possible"
For our eyes, that's not really true. Our eyes are placed slightly apart, looking forward so that their respective fields of vision overlap each other. Then our brain calculates how far away objects are from us by noticing how much inward each eye has to rotate to hold the object in focus.
Prey animals, like deer and cows for example, have eyes mounted on totally opposite sides of their heads, like our ears. Each of their eyes sees an almost complete separate image. Their total field of vision is almost 300 degrees. Owls are predators par excellance, and have stereoscopic ears set just below their eyes. Their entire face is bowl-shaped like a radar dish.
So, if we evolved solely as prey animals, we probably would have eyes on the sides of our heads, near our ears. If we evolved solely as hunters, we would probably have forward facing ears that we could rotate, like cats or wild dogs. There is some debate, but some anthropologists argue that our forward-facing eyes and stereoscopic vision comes from having to navigate in trees. This is also backed up by the fact that we have 3-color vision, which you need to see ripe fruit, where as hunters like cats and dogs see in black and white. There are vegetarian, tree-dwelling monkeys that have forward-facing eyes, stereoscopic vision, and have 3-color vision*.
It is interesting that smell, if it is truly a stereo sense, would have both nostrils so close together. Maybe that's because light and sound waves don't get mixed up as much as scents on the wind, so each input would be very different. Also, smell seems to be a short-range sense, whereas sight and sound are long-distance senses. I don't mean that prey animals don't smell things far away, but it's not as usefully accurate as long-distance hearing or vision. If you're relying on smell to tell you when things are sneaking up on you, it will probably be too late by the time you really get a good whiff. A sound or a sight really tells you where they are, and which direction you need to run in. My guess would be that the stereoscopy of smell would be useful when you are examining something up close, such as a plant or carcass.
*By 3-color vision, I mean that we have specific receptors cell in our eyes for 3 discrete wavelengths of light -- red, green, and blue. Some birds, for instance, have four.
When we talk about our sense of taste in everyday conversation, what we are really talking about is our sense of smell.
The taste buds on our tongue have only four types of receptors: salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. Each has a specific region on the tongue -- for instance, bitter is on the back of the tongue.
All of the other qualities of food that we normally ascribe to taste are actually olfactory stimuli. When food is in our mouth, some of it wafts back up into our nose, where our most sensitive smelling tissue lies. This sensation is what we are referring to when we talk about the particular taste of chocolate, coffee, oranges, wine, etc. -- aside from their sweet, sour, salty or bitter qualities.
In humans, this sensitive smelling tissue lies inside the face behind the nose, in the nasal canal. In dogs, it's the wet tissue that makes up the surface of their nose. That's why dogs' sense of smell seems so much better than ours -- they are basically tasting the air and everything they get close to with their nose. You can smell about as well as a dog can, if you stick things in your mouth. But given what dogs are mostly interested in smelling, who would want to?
There are similar tricks happening here in the good ol' US and A.
Our congress is routinely passing bills at 4 in the morning, which were written by lawyers from industry in secret committees, with copies of said 1,000-page bills distributed to congresspeople only 24 hours before the vote.
The metaphor that Buckaroo uses is something like tiny marbles in an orbit configuration. So an atom is a tiny cluster of marbles, neutrons and protons in the nucleus, and tiny electron marbles orbiting some distance from the nucleus, and mostly empty space. Even the author uses the metaphor of a bee in a cathedral when describing the nucleus.
But aren't these tiny marbles actually just a sort of bundle of waves? That what we think of as tiny parts of matter that give the hardness to matter not really hard at all, but just a collection repellent forces? That an atom really isn't mostly empty space, but that 'space' is full of the wave functions of the electrons in 'orbit' of the nucleus?
Yes, The market has spoken, and it is still speaking. If the 'community' can raise the € 200K, then the market will again have spoken. If they are unable to raise the money, and some other company buys it, the market *again* will have spoken.
You seem to imply that because this game has failed once with a certain development cost and subscription model, nobody should ever waste their money or time with it again. That's not how the market works. Now, with the bankruptcy, somebody else has a chance to acquire these goods for considerably less than it cost to develop, and maybe with the reduced costs they can make money with a cheaper subscription and less initial cost to recover. Or, if people chose to donate money to get it released as open-source, that is also the market speaking.
Pelosi was politically cunning when she said that impeachment was off the table. If she had been calling for impeachment, it would have looked very bad for her, since she was in line for the presidency, if the president and vice-president were convicted. The right-wing smear machine would have gone into overdrive. Instead, she chose to say that impeachment was "off the table", which has no meaning or binding power. Congress can move to impeach the president at any time they want. They are not bound by something Pelosi said on a talk show when she wasn't even speaker of the house. If it is "off the table", they are free to put it back on at any time.
It's about removing the government's ability to regulate business and promote the interest of citizens above the interest of corporations. They don't feel that corporations should have any accountability or responsibility whatsoever. It's about creating a climate and culture where the government doesn't oversee corporations and punish wrongdoing. Bush & Co. don't have any specific interest in telecoms; they just want corporate feudalism in general.
... what can adequately be explained by incompetence. In this case, SCO's incompetence, and utter lack of any kind of sane case. What might look like Novell slowly but surely bleeding SCO dry could just be SCO's braindead stubbornness in pursuing their case, or lack thereof.
I don't really know the legality and details of the SCO case or the MS/Novell agreement, but this sounds way too clever and complicated for the average corporation to pull off. If Novell is so smart and crafty, why can't they do a better job competing against MS in the marketplace? Does Novell's business acumen lie only in creating clever trapdoors in risky legal deals? It sounds more like the author is writing the plot for a corporate-legal thriller than any analysis of reality.
Here is a good start, if you want to learn how to torture confessions out of witches: Malleus Maleficarum. You can also check out the Formicarius and the Directorium Inquisitorum, which wikipedia says "was to become the definitive handbook of procedure for the Spanish Inquisition until into the seventeenth century"
Now where are the atheist texts showing how to torture religious beliefs out of theists?
I read quotes from the priests conducting Inquisition when I got my Religious Studies degree from the Ohio State University. I didn't read the source material; I even forget what author or book quoted the priests. If you email me at lawpoop -at- gmail.com, I'll find a source and get it to you.
"I'm not sure I understand the significance of this. Is motivation for killing the key issue?"
Yes it is. Grandparent said that the only thing keeping atheists from going out and killing people is guilt, and fear of punishment from society. Grandparent also claimed that Christians restrain themselves from killing because they fear eternal damnation.
I point out that there have been serious Christians -- people who really believed what they were doing was what God wanted them to do, as in the case of the Inquisition -- who have carried out torture and mass murder, while atheists haven't really organized and carried out such evil. There are dictators who were communist atheists who carried out mass killing campaigns, but I argue that these individuals were power-hungry psychopaths, and they weren't really motivated by converting people to atheism, but just to rule over people by instilling fear. They fit the same profile as Christian Fascists or any tyrant ruler throughout history. They didn't really care about atheism enough to kill people over it -- they just wanted to kill people.
I look up to Mother Theresa and MLK also, but I don't think that Atheists are the devil or psychopaths. I am not worried that Richard Dawkins wants the US to bomb Iran to hasten the second coming, for example. I have seen evidence of plenty of atrocities carried out by religious people motivated by their religion; I haven't seen evidence of atheists violently imposing their beliefs on non-believers.
Right. So we have evidence of power-hungry psychopaths killing people in order to gain power, whether they were Christian fascists or Atheist Communists. So we agree that the killing had nothing to do with their professed beliefs.
However, in the case of the Inquisition, we have evidence of serious clergy members who tortured and killed people and were clearly motivated by their strongly held religious beliefs. They tortured unbelievers because they did not believed, and were happy that they were able to convert a person just moments before their cruel torture ended that poor person's life. And if the person never converted before they were killed, they were happy that they rid the world of one of Satan's helpers.
So again, seriously religious people are capable of mass torture and killings, along with psychopathic dictators. We don't have evidence of atheists killing people en masse because of religious belief.
If you had evidence to back this up, it would be more believable.
If you look at Stalin's writings and actions, it was clear that he really didn't give a damn about the communist revolution. He just wanted unfailing loyalty and obedience from his underlings.
If you look at the writings of the clergy members who were involved in the inquisition and witch burnings, it was clear they strongly believed what they were doing was helping those they were torturing and killing achieve salvation through suffering and accepting Christ. The torture and punishment got more and more severe until the person buckled and accepted Christ and the church, and if it eventually killed them, the priests were happy that they rid the world of one of Satan's minions. They clearly believed that they were doing the Lord's work.
Here's the truth. Government is nothing more than a legitimate protection racket. It's a mafia.
We will always need protection, and those protectors will always demand their protection money, or taxes.
I disagree with libertarians who can we can or need to get rid of government. It's a necessary evil, as one of our founding fathers taught us. If we got rid of government, that just leaves a power vacuum for a mafia or warlord to step in. What we need to do is work hard to ensure that we have just, fair government that serves the peoples' needs.
"Morality is fundamentally independent of religion - just look at the Scandinavian countries that are overwhealmingly atheist but have very little crime and violence."
This is demonstrably false. First of all, Scandinavian countries are overwhelmingly Lutheran. When you are born in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, or Norway, you are by default part of the Lutheran church. Even though they don't attend church regularly, the vast majority identify themselves as Christians and voluntarily choose to pay the optional church tax.
In the US, people tend to think that the definition of a Christian is one who attends church every Sunday. Scandinavians don't view Christianity that way; they view themselves as Christians because they belong to the church and support it through taxes.
I argue that religion is fundamentally about morals. If you read the Jewish Bible, it's a code of law: what is right and what is wrong. The same is true for Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism -- all the world religions. Yes, they do talk about supernatural things, afterlife, etc. but mosts of the texts are devoted to what is right and wrong.
"Problem with weight, is a balance is going to be SLOW."
When I was a kid, a buddy of mine had a coin sorter where the coins slid on their side through a track. There was a trap door held up by a spring that opened for a certain coin, but let others roll over it. I forget exactly which coin triggered the door, but needless to say, it was triggered by weight. So the spring was tuned to support weight up to a certain point.
You don't need to know exactly how much a coin weighs, just that it weighs more than 2.5 grams. I would guess if your spring is tuned to 2.7 g, it would be pretty good at selecting 3g pennies and letting 2.5 g pennies slide by.
All you need to do is line a kitchen microwave with kiln brick for insulation and run it for 10-20 minutes with your copper and crucible inside. So long as you properly insulate it you will be fine.
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All of what you said is contradicted by basic primatology. We are not deer. We are great apes.
Great apes do not mark their territory with piss or pheromones. Great apes live in groups, so they don't need to smell each other to find each other -- they wake up with each other every morning, and go to sleep next to each other every night. They are all right in front of each other's faces.
Great apes attract and find mates based on vision, not smell. Have you ever seen a female chimp in heat? I have. Her hind end swells up to the size of a human buttocks. Here's a picture. With baboons, the labia become swollen and cherry-red. It looks like the mother of all veneral diseases.
This is true for out closest relatives -- gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos. Sure, guys might be attracted to the scent of a woman, but what really gives you a boner is the sight of sexually mature breasts or a mature female butt with the wide hips. Porn is images, not smells.
When a human female menstruates, she is not leaking 'hormones'. It's not a stream of estrogen. The reason it's so exciting to wild animals is because she is bleeding and shedding endometrium tissue, and the animals are smelling blood.
No, if you were to take the thing that the dog sniffs at and put it in your mouth, *that* is what the dog smells. Basically, our keenest sense of smell is internal, inside of our face, and really only works on things we place in our mouths, whereas dogs' keenest sense of smell is the wet, scaly skin on their nose.
It's the difference between sniffing a cup of coffee and tasting it in your mouth. When you have the coffee liquid sloshing around in your mouth, all of its coffee 'flavor' beyond the basic bitterness is actually sensed by your sense of *smell*. When the dog pokes its nose at the coffee, it's as strong as if the dog were tasting it. To put it another way, they have their sense of taste on the end of their wet noses.
This is demonstrated by people who have lost their sense of smell, called Anosmia. Not only have they lost the ability to smell things by sniffing, but they have lost all ability to taste the flavor of things. Wikipedia says this:
"It should be emphasized that there are no more than 6 distinctive tastes: salty, sour, sweet, bitter, umami and possibly fatty acids. The 10,000 different scents which humans usually recognize as 'tastes' are often actually 'flavor', which many people who can smell confuse with taste."
Let me play devil's advocate -- can you be sure that a human male doesn't have as strong a scent as a human female? Maybe women in the women's barracks are able to smell a man when they are amongst only women just as well as you and the other guys are able to smell a woman. Maybe human males have specific receptors for whatever chemicals a human female secretes.
Which parts specifically are wrong? The mapping and the four 'tastes'? Or the whole thing entirely?
... our other stereo sense organs (eyes and ears) are placed just about as far apart on our heads as is structurally possible"
For our eyes, that's not really true. Our eyes are placed slightly apart, looking forward so that their respective fields of vision overlap each other. Then our brain calculates how far away objects are from us by noticing how much inward each eye has to rotate to hold the object in focus.
Prey animals, like deer and cows for example, have eyes mounted on totally opposite sides of their heads, like our ears. Each of their eyes sees an almost complete separate image. Their total field of vision is almost 300 degrees. Owls are predators par excellance, and have stereoscopic ears set just below their eyes. Their entire face is bowl-shaped like a radar dish.
So, if we evolved solely as prey animals, we probably would have eyes on the sides of our heads, near our ears. If we evolved solely as hunters, we would probably have forward facing ears that we could rotate, like cats or wild dogs. There is some debate, but some anthropologists argue that our forward-facing eyes and stereoscopic vision comes from having to navigate in trees. This is also backed up by the fact that we have 3-color vision, which you need to see ripe fruit, where as hunters like cats and dogs see in black and white. There are vegetarian, tree-dwelling monkeys that have forward-facing eyes, stereoscopic vision, and have 3-color vision*.
It is interesting that smell, if it is truly a stereo sense, would have both nostrils so close together. Maybe that's because light and sound waves don't get mixed up as much as scents on the wind, so each input would be very different. Also, smell seems to be a short-range sense, whereas sight and sound are long-distance senses. I don't mean that prey animals don't smell things far away, but it's not as usefully accurate as long-distance hearing or vision. If you're relying on smell to tell you when things are sneaking up on you, it will probably be too late by the time you really get a good whiff. A sound or a sight really tells you where they are, and which direction you need to run in. My guess would be that the stereoscopy of smell would be useful when you are examining something up close, such as a plant or carcass.
*By 3-color vision, I mean that we have specific receptors cell in our eyes for 3 discrete wavelengths of light -- red, green, and blue. Some birds, for instance, have four.
When we talk about our sense of taste in everyday conversation, what we are really talking about is our sense of smell.
The taste buds on our tongue have only four types of receptors: salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. Each has a specific region on the tongue -- for instance, bitter is on the back of the tongue.
All of the other qualities of food that we normally ascribe to taste are actually olfactory stimuli. When food is in our mouth, some of it wafts back up into our nose, where our most sensitive smelling tissue lies. This sensation is what we are referring to when we talk about the particular taste of chocolate, coffee, oranges, wine, etc. -- aside from their sweet, sour, salty or bitter qualities.
In humans, this sensitive smelling tissue lies inside the face behind the nose, in the nasal canal. In dogs, it's the wet tissue that makes up the surface of their nose. That's why dogs' sense of smell seems so much better than ours -- they are basically tasting the air and everything they get close to with their nose. You can smell about as well as a dog can, if you stick things in your mouth. But given what dogs are mostly interested in smelling, who would want to?
There are similar tricks happening here in the good ol' US and A.
Our congress is routinely passing bills at 4 in the morning, which were written by lawyers from industry in secret committees, with copies of said 1,000-page bills distributed to congresspeople only 24 hours before the vote.
The metaphor that Buckaroo uses is something like tiny marbles in an orbit configuration. So an atom is a tiny cluster of marbles, neutrons and protons in the nucleus, and tiny electron marbles orbiting some distance from the nucleus, and mostly empty space. Even the author uses the metaphor of a bee in a cathedral when describing the nucleus.
But aren't these tiny marbles actually just a sort of bundle of waves? That what we think of as tiny parts of matter that give the hardness to matter not really hard at all, but just a collection repellent forces? That an atom really isn't mostly empty space, but that 'space' is full of the wave functions of the electrons in 'orbit' of the nucleus?
Yes, The market has spoken, and it is still speaking. If the 'community' can raise the € 200K, then the market will again have spoken. If they are unable to raise the money, and some other company buys it, the market *again* will have spoken.
You seem to imply that because this game has failed once with a certain development cost and subscription model, nobody should ever waste their money or time with it again. That's not how the market works. Now, with the bankruptcy, somebody else has a chance to acquire these goods for considerably less than it cost to develop, and maybe with the reduced costs they can make money with a cheaper subscription and less initial cost to recover. Or, if people chose to donate money to get it released as open-source, that is also the market speaking.
Yeah, but seriously, I can't imagine that Bush would manage to get convicted and Cheney gets off the hook. If Bush goes down, so does Cheney.
Pelosi was politically cunning when she said that impeachment was off the table. If she had been calling for impeachment, it would have looked very bad for her, since she was in line for the presidency, if the president and vice-president were convicted. The right-wing smear machine would have gone into overdrive. Instead, she chose to say that impeachment was "off the table", which has no meaning or binding power. Congress can move to impeach the president at any time they want. They are not bound by something Pelosi said on a talk show when she wasn't even speaker of the house. If it is "off the table", they are free to put it back on at any time.
It's about removing the government's ability to regulate business and promote the interest of citizens above the interest of corporations. They don't feel that corporations should have any accountability or responsibility whatsoever. It's about creating a climate and culture where the government doesn't oversee corporations and punish wrongdoing. Bush & Co. don't have any specific interest in telecoms; they just want corporate feudalism in general.
... what can adequately be explained by incompetence. In this case, SCO's incompetence, and utter lack of any kind of sane case. What might look like Novell slowly but surely bleeding SCO dry could just be SCO's braindead stubbornness in pursuing their case, or lack thereof.
I don't really know the legality and details of the SCO case or the MS/Novell agreement, but this sounds way too clever and complicated for the average corporation to pull off. If Novell is so smart and crafty, why can't they do a better job competing against MS in the marketplace? Does Novell's business acumen lie only in creating clever trapdoors in risky legal deals? It sounds more like the author is writing the plot for a corporate-legal thriller than any analysis of reality.
... is to have a VJ battle of the two documentaries and release the resulting mash-up.
Here is a good start, if you want to learn how to torture confessions out of witches: Malleus Maleficarum. You can also check out the Formicarius and the Directorium Inquisitorum, which wikipedia says "was to become the definitive handbook of procedure for the Spanish Inquisition until into the seventeenth century"
Now where are the atheist texts showing how to torture religious beliefs out of theists?
I read quotes from the priests conducting Inquisition when I got my Religious Studies degree from the Ohio State University. I didn't read the source material; I even forget what author or book quoted the priests. If you email me at lawpoop -at- gmail.com, I'll find a source and get it to you.
"I'm not sure I understand the significance of this. Is motivation for killing the key issue?"
Yes it is. Grandparent said that the only thing keeping atheists from going out and killing people is guilt, and fear of punishment from society. Grandparent also claimed that Christians restrain themselves from killing because they fear eternal damnation.
I point out that there have been serious Christians -- people who really believed what they were doing was what God wanted them to do, as in the case of the Inquisition -- who have carried out torture and mass murder, while atheists haven't really organized and carried out such evil. There are dictators who were communist atheists who carried out mass killing campaigns, but I argue that these individuals were power-hungry psychopaths, and they weren't really motivated by converting people to atheism, but just to rule over people by instilling fear. They fit the same profile as Christian Fascists or any tyrant ruler throughout history. They didn't really care about atheism enough to kill people over it -- they just wanted to kill people.
I look up to Mother Theresa and MLK also, but I don't think that Atheists are the devil or psychopaths. I am not worried that Richard Dawkins wants the US to bomb Iran to hasten the second coming, for example. I have seen evidence of plenty of atrocities carried out by religious people motivated by their religion; I haven't seen evidence of atheists violently imposing their beliefs on non-believers.
Right. So we have evidence of power-hungry psychopaths killing people in order to gain power, whether they were Christian fascists or Atheist Communists. So we agree that the killing had nothing to do with their professed beliefs.
However, in the case of the Inquisition, we have evidence of serious clergy members who tortured and killed people and were clearly motivated by their strongly held religious beliefs. They tortured unbelievers because they did not believed, and were happy that they were able to convert a person just moments before their cruel torture ended that poor person's life. And if the person never converted before they were killed, they were happy that they rid the world of one of Satan's helpers.
So again, seriously religious people are capable of mass torture and killings, along with psychopathic dictators. We don't have evidence of atheists killing people en masse because of religious belief.
If you had evidence to back this up, it would be more believable.
If you look at Stalin's writings and actions, it was clear that he really didn't give a damn about the communist revolution. He just wanted unfailing loyalty and obedience from his underlings.
If you look at the writings of the clergy members who were involved in the inquisition and witch burnings, it was clear they strongly believed what they were doing was helping those they were torturing and killing achieve salvation through suffering and accepting Christ. The torture and punishment got more and more severe until the person buckled and accepted Christ and the church, and if it eventually killed them, the priests were happy that they rid the world of one of Satan's minions. They clearly believed that they were doing the Lord's work.
Here's the truth. Government is nothing more than a legitimate protection racket. It's a mafia.
We will always need protection, and those protectors will always demand their protection money, or taxes.
I disagree with libertarians who can we can or need to get rid of government. It's a necessary evil, as one of our founding fathers taught us. If we got rid of government, that just leaves a power vacuum for a mafia or warlord to step in. What we need to do is work hard to ensure that we have just, fair government that serves the peoples' needs.
"Morality is fundamentally independent of religion - just look at the Scandinavian countries that are overwhealmingly atheist but have very little crime and violence."
This is demonstrably false. First of all, Scandinavian countries are overwhelmingly Lutheran. When you are born in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, or Norway, you are by default part of the Lutheran church. Even though they don't attend church regularly, the vast majority identify themselves as Christians and voluntarily choose to pay the optional church tax.
In the US, people tend to think that the definition of a Christian is one who attends church every Sunday. Scandinavians don't view Christianity that way; they view themselves as Christians because they belong to the church and support it through taxes.
I argue that religion is fundamentally about morals. If you read the Jewish Bible, it's a code of law: what is right and what is wrong. The same is true for Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism -- all the world religions. Yes, they do talk about supernatural things, afterlife, etc. but mosts of the texts are devoted to what is right and wrong.
"Problem with weight, is a balance is going to be SLOW."
When I was a kid, a buddy of mine had a coin sorter where the coins slid on their side through a track. There was a trap door held up by a spring that opened for a certain coin, but let others roll over it. I forget exactly which coin triggered the door, but needless to say, it was triggered by weight. So the spring was tuned to support weight up to a certain point.
You don't need to know exactly how much a coin weighs, just that it weighs more than 2.5 grams. I would guess if your spring is tuned to 2.7 g, it would be pretty good at selecting 3g pennies and letting 2.5 g pennies slide by.
All you need to do is line a kitchen microwave with kiln brick for insulation and run it for 10-20 minutes with your copper and crucible inside. So long as you properly insulate it you will be fine.
"Maybe I should be shot?"
Another option is to just ignore all the correcting posts.
"If only there were some way to distinguish them automatically using an electromagnetic signature or something (ahem)"
How about by weight? A copper penny is 3 oz., while a zinc penny is 2.5. Seems ideal for a coin-sorter type device.