Good one, thanks for asking! It's actually very interesting, I'm happy to explain.

You see, the reason why things ordinarily shrink when they freeze and expand when they thaw is because when you get things warmer, they vibrate more, and this tends to cause the molecules to take up more space.

Liquid water also vibrates more than frozen water. But, water molecules have a very unusual shape, being comprised of one atom of oxygen stuck to two hydrogen atoms. Because of this characteristic "Mickey Mouse" shape, when they slow down, the molecules of HČO tend to form hydrogen bonds. The hydrogens link together holding the oxygens apart, forming big holes in the molecular structure. These big holes are why ice seems larger - it contains more empty space than liquid water.



But, even supposing I couldn't explain it, this would still be a tremendous logical fallacy. You seem to think that if reason cannot explain everything, then it cannot explain anything. This is a common mistake.

There are many wonderful mysteries to explore, but that doesn't mean that making up explanations works. It doesn't. Reason is making accurate explanations for the things that can be explained and giving an honest "I don't know" and "Let's find out!" to everything else.

Where did I say they have to?

This is ridiculous.  What makes you think scientists can't explain it?  Have you checked?  They explain it all the time.

Here is a quote from the web site for the International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam:

This unusual behavior has its origin in the structure of the water molecule. There is a strong tendency to form a network of hydrogen bonds, where each hydrogen atom is in a line between two oxygen atoms. This hydrogen bonding tendency gets stronger as the temperature gets lower (because there is less thermal energy to shake the hydrogen bonds out of position). The ice structure is completely hydrogen bonded, and these bonds force the crystalline structure to be very "open", as shown in the following picture:

Here are two pictures showing the difference between liquid and frozen water:

Liquid water:

Frozen water:

This also explains why ice floats in water, because it is less dense. 

There are any number of science-related web sites that explain it. 

University of Cambridge  - Why does water expand when it freezes?

Reference.com -  Why does...

The expansion of water upon freezing - Hyper Physics

Here's a video that illustrates it:

From the textbook Structural Biochemistry:

The reason that water expands when freezing is that when it is near its freezing temp (below 4°C), the hydrogen bonds between water molecules become stronger. Because the bonds between water molecules are stronger, they are more unlikely to break and re-form like when in its liquid state. In its liquid state, water molecules are constantly moving (forming and breaking hydrogen bonds) resulting in less expansion. The water molecules therefore are more refined and are arranged in a manner that forms a six-sided crystal, which makes the ice less dense than the liquid water. When water freezes, it expands by approximately 9%.

Another illustration from a textbook:

Do you really think I made up all these web sites and textbooks and illustrations myself? Like, yesterday?

It is a form of oppressive government.

This is even more ridiculous than your previous assertion. Am I an oppressive government, making laws against your religion, throwing you in jail for your practice? Have I suggested government intervention in the slightest way, shape or form? Of course not, and your paranoia to the contrary is hysterical. In what way have I prevented you from believing what you want, living how you want? By posting?

Your contention that my words on Cafe Mom are somehow oppressing you is laughable, sorry.


You, like every other person in a society of personal liberty, can believe what you want, live your life the way you see fit, etc, and I would fight to the death for your right to continue to do so. Do you understand? It is your protected right to think anything.

However, that doesn't make it a good idea.

For example, there is no way I can force you to stop thinking that the expansion of frozen water is unexplainable, and I would not try to force you, and I would never see you persecuted for this view, or required to recant it.

That doesn't make it a smart or good idea to continue to think it. It would be better for you, better for society, if you understood what the science textbooks say about water.


Do you see the difference? I'm not a fascist, or even a prick, just for pointing out that your view seems to be wrong. Any more than first grade teachers are fascists, for flunking students on the math quiz who don't accept that 2+2=4. There are answers which can be shown to be accurate explanations. Accuracy is not fascism, it's just the best - most accurate - type of explanation.


But this discussion is a terrific illustration, so I'm looking forward to continuing it. Thanks so much, OrangeHair!

I would like to meet Captain Picard and Lt. Commander Data. Also Hazel-rah and Fiver.

Does this include Muslims?

Well in that case perhaps you should not say "non-believers" go to hell. Muslims are believers.

I asked you about Muslims. I'll ask again. Do Muslims go to hell?

By definition Muslims do not do this.

So, Muslims go to hell when they die.



Why do you like this?

Why do you do this if you don't like it?

Well that seems kind of selfish. I certainly wouldn't value personal peace over the souls of billions of good-hearted Muslims, Hindus, Shintos, Buddhists, etc. being tortured forever and ever. I couldn't live with myself.


But, perhaps you are not aware that you don't have to believe one to believe the other. For example, Unitarian Universalists believe that Christ's redemption applies automatically to every person that lives. This seems much more loving and fair. And UUs certainly seem to experience as much positive change and peace from their beliefs as other Christians.

If you wanted to do something you like instead of something you don't like, you could believe that instead.

It is selfish for you to think that as long as YOU get peace, it's perfectly okay for other good people to be tortured forever and ever.


And, it's also selfish to pretend that Muslims have every bit as much opportunity to "accept Christ" as you did. Did you know that they already have a religion, complete with a god and a prophet, of their own?

How is a person, who was raised to worship Allah and praise Mohammed, supposed to realize that their own religion is wrong? How is it fair to punish them forever and ever for doing what they are raised their whole lives to believe is the right and moral choice?

No person with a conscience could enjoy Heaven.

If it's not good then why do you want it to be true?

Your religion seems very unfair to Muslims, Hindus, Shinto, Sikhs, Buddhists and (until recently) almost everyone not of white European descent.

Muslims talk to God five times a day. They think God is in their lives, helping them to be good. How come He never tells them they are not going to heaven?

According to verse in the Quran, Jesus is not the Son of God.

The Muslims are praying to the same God you pray to, the God of Abraham.

Have you ever talked to a Muslim? The Holy Spirit is telling them they are right.

That has nothing to do with refuting Islam; Muslims believe in Divine Creation too.

Muslims think they are answering. They think they are doing what God wants them to do.

No, he doesn't. You would do better to understand what you are doing yourself.

People become Muslim because they are convinced of the truth of Islam and have had experiences with God.

Seriously, you should talk to a Muslim sometime. They would certainly tell you that God is the reason for everything in their lives.

Muslims have the exact same reasons for believing Islam to be true. (Ditto Hinduism, etc.)

How are they supposed to know that the bible is better?

Yes, the Holy Spirit is telling them to be Muslim.

Maybe they *are* listening to the Holy Spirit. Maybe in reality you are closing Him off and doing what you want.

This is utterly ridiculous.


1) "Provided by your insurance" is not "free." Your insurance is part of the compensation you earn from your employer in exchange for your work. Insurance coverage is not free, it is earned and payed for.


2) Birth control is essential to population control and it can only be effective for this if a certain level of saturation is achieved across the society. This cannot be accomplished if there are socioeconomic barriers to birth control saturation. If we care about future generations of humanity at all, it is our responsibility to the health of the planet to get and keep our numbers under control. Making family planning easy is a primary goal.


3) Self-determination over reproductive decisions is one hundred percent at the heart of women's equality. None of the Democratic platform on reproductive health is "reducing" women to their reproductive organs. It is not about their organs, it is about their decisions. It is demanding that women themselves have the freedom to make every decision about their own reproductive life, and have the tools to use that freedom.


4) Women are concerned about jobs, but they are also concerned about the increasing encroachment of state legislatures on women's decisions, particularly personhood amendments aimed directly at limiting pharmaceutical birth control, and at developing "conscience clauses" to allow agents all up and down the supply chain, from insurance companies to employers to individual pharmacists, to refuse to do their part in getting women the birth control they need for complete enfranchisement.

This is alarming and does not bode well for women's equality. So it is important to continue to demand that the gains we have made for equality are not chipped away by encroachment on our decisions.



Women voted for Obama and the Democrats because this matters and they know it. The only person reducing women to their organs and and treating them like prostitutes is you.

First of all, it's not necessary to be "universal." Secular society is an exercise in standards rather than absolutes. Societies all over the world have defined - and continue to refine - standards of acceptable behavior which do not recourse to supernatural authority. Most even have granular systems - what we would call a "case-by-case basis" - for evaluating situations with nuances beyond the standards. In other words, it doesn't have to be "universal" to work.

Secondly, it's easy to define good in terms of human behavior. "Good" is what contributes to well-being and "bad" is what contributes to harm. Good systems are systems that work.

We have determined what contributes to well-being and what works mainly by the trial and error of human history. That is why our broad morals today are so much better than those of people in the past. For example, we were able to see that ancient systems of subjugation - like slavery and sexual inequality - were immoral, and we were able to create a more just and moral society. Of course we still have a ways to go, but like our technology, our techniques improve as we learn.

That is why learning moral systems are preferable to fixed moral lists - they can get better.

No, I don't make any claims about stuff like that. But, it's obvious we are making our morals as we go.

That has happened many times in the past. In many cases we learned from those mistakes. In some cases we didn't, and are bound to repeat them. That is the trial part of trial and error.

Eventually we get most of the old kinks ironed out. Then circumstances change and we get all new parameters to fuck up in for awhile. But there is no other way to find out what's what.

Still, we started democracy and even gave women the vote. Some progress seems to have stuck.

Reality is what it is. Things work or they don't. If they don't work, eventually people change them.

I'm really not concerned with "atheism" or your other pet peeves. I am concerned with descriptions of reality that are accurate.

The description that humans are making our morality as we go is accurate. The history of enfranchisement is the history of moral observation leading to moral progress. Things have gotten better, and not by the supernatural. By humans learning and growing.

If that proposal is incorrect, it's not enough to just say "That sounds like X, therefore it's bad." Explain HOW it is incorrect.

The idea of God existing is perfectly accepted in Islam right now. The idea that values are derived supernaturally is their biggest problem.

Well, we sure took a fuck of a sweet long time realizing this. Slavery existed since the dawn of civilization, with most people and cultures having no problem with it, or with other forms of out-group subjugation, and they ran along for thousands of years unchecked, until very recently.

What changed, so that people only suddenly remembered that slavery violated the human rights of those created in the image of God a mere couple of hundred years ago?

It's like assuming there could be some utopian society with everyone using "math." Crazy, right?

Reason is a system of observation and accuracy. It can be learned, like math or any other system.

And, it's certainly easy to see how reason has spread like wildfire through the human race since the Renaissance, resulting in all the incredible technological and moral advancement that uplifts our lives from what they were like in the Dark Ages. We are already a utopia of reason compared to them.

The standard of reason is what is accurate and what works. It's not arbitrary. Accuracy can be checked. Working can be demonstrated.

That is the beauty of deriving the descriptions of reality FROM reality. They can be checked, compared, improved. Standards derived from tribal taboos usually just stagnate.

It's possible people could decide there is a God, and what He wants is slavery. Many people have thought this in the past.

Theism does not prevent slavery, that's just silly. They coexisted throughout most of human history.

It doesn't meet the criteria. First of all, it would not be working for people who did not want to be sterilized and euthanized, would it? So, it would not meet the criteria of working. Secondly, overcoming natural human compassion requires massive scapegoating and outgrouping of the marginalized, usually by resigning them to sub-human status. So it could hardly qualify as accurate either.

Lastly, it would horribly damage the people who carried out the pogroms, as such things always do. So it would not work for them, either.

Please, remember the criteria when proposing dystopian scenarios, thanks!

Reality cannot lie. So, suffering cannot hide from reason.

It's hard to imagine that situation ever occurring. I'm sure we could come up with hundreds of imaginary scenarios where torture could be considered justified, each increasingly less likely to really happen.

However, imagining a situation where torture is justified is not sufficient excuse to make torture a legally acceptable practice. If I felt torture was justified, I would certainly not expect to walk free afterwards. If I engaged in torture to save my child, I would expect to be arrested, tried and convicted of torture, and accept whatever criminal sentence I was handed. If the torturing was worth it "to save my child," all that other stuff would have to be worth it too.

People often say we need to provide "torture loopholes" for law enforcement in "ticking bomb" scenarios, but I disagree. No loophole. No matter how justified they thought the torture was, no matter how many lives they might have saved, they should still be criminally accountable for it.

He would have done a crime. Why shouldn't he be convicted of it?

Of course. But if the last thing available is a crime then they need to be accountable for the crime.

Holding people accountable for the torture they perform has zero to do with sympathy for the torture victim.

Absolutely! However that doesn't mean the law no longer applies. It does.

If saving the life of your child makes torture is justified, then it also makes the jail sentence for the torturer justified. If I would do anything to save my child, that really means anything, not just torture.





One important thing to remember about torture is that it does not actually work for extracting information. People who are being tortured will say anything they think will get you to stop torturing them.

It has never been a reliable means for extracting true information.

That doesn't mean the torture would be successful either. We could discuss a hypothetical world where torture works, but the more hypothetical you get the less the question has any meaning. As long as we are just imagining that anything is possible, I'd just imagine we have Romulan cortical scanners and we can extract the info straight from his brain.

That would turn our police into monsters. It's not worth it.

I wasn't under the impression that torture would be covered under "good faith".

True, but police officers have been prosecuted for assault when they used excessive force, or did what amounted to assault instead of "good faith."

Well that would be an incorrect impression. However I'm not for torture in any situation.

Perhaps, but only in retrospect. That's not a good reason to make a legal "torture loophole" up front, or provide "good faith" legal cover for torture. Torture should always be illegal.

Coming up with extreme examples to find situations where torture is forgivable is really just a thought experiment. This kind of thing almost never happens, and if it did torturing might not even work. I wouldn't draw any conclusions about the efficacy of the torture defense from this discussion. :-)

There is no evidence that it does. Ya gotta go with what you got. When we examine what is occurring, what we see is people doing things.


So, what's wrong with that? It's simple. It's beautiful. It is verifiably, demonstrably true.

What's more, things can be learned from watching how it works. What they are doing can be examined, tested. Systems can be improved, old mistakes eliminated. It is a process of error correction based on what occurs which results in increased understanding and massive force multipliers to our capabilities.

That is learning and growing.



On the other hand, opining that some unknown quantity of the process might be attributable to some unknown quantity of supernatural stuff acting undetectably in some unknown way, doesn't do anything. No new information can be determined. Nothing learned. Nothing changed. Nothing improved.

So which is really doing the heavy lifting on learning and growth?

Wow, no, I don't agree with any of this. There is no evidence for magical wrongdoing or magical comeuppance. "Evil" is not a quantity that exists independently; it is a qualitative evaluation we ascribe to actions we don't like. And, you have a very poor understanding of the role of selfishness as a survival mechanism if you think it's "evil."

Humans are social animals. We have always lived in social groups where we are required to work for both ourselves and for the group. So humans are no more or less inherently selfish than we are inherently compassionate, loving, helpful and giving. We are both, and neither are 'evil.' They are two different skill sets to be deployed under different circumstances.


In order to survive in scarcity, we had to be caring and generous to our ingroup, but selfish and even violent toward our outgroup. Additionally, heirarchical rankings within the group require constant decision making about whether to advance one's own position at the expense of another, or to give one's support to another's position. Lastly, small bands on the edge of survival need all kinds of personalities to survive, to fully exploit all the opportunities that arise. So, humans naturally come in many different personality types, some much more generous, others much more selfish, and both kinds of people are important to have in your group.

So there is a fully biological explanation for why humans are prone to act for themselves and for the group.


Slavery is better explained as an extrapolation of the human tendancy to spread along heirarchical ranks. This works okay in tiny bands where the distance between individuals is not great. As groups grow larger the distance between the ranks grows and calcifies. At the level of civilization, castes develop which are then exploited, usually as the only means to advance production. Cultural stigmas and barriers are constructed to keep the production ranks full, almost always in full ideological compliance with the predominant religion, which defines station as an act of Providence.

What changed was the development of the system of reason. The Enlightenment broke people out of the old way of understanding, which was by authority, and the old way of living, which was by tradition. Instead, we began a new way of understanding, by observation, and a new way of living - by deliberately designing our systems.


Funny, once we starting choosing how to live by observing what works, it wasn't long before institutional slavery was a thing of the past - a first for civilization. It wasn't long before we enfranchised women. It wasn't long before we enacted civil protections for everyone under the law, even racial minorities, even sexual minorities, even children, all practically unprecedented in human history. It wasn't long before we used the new system of reason for error-correction, to fix biological hangovers that no longer work outside the jungle.

As soon as we had a choice, we chose better.

First of all, asserting that belief stops scientific advancements would be wrong. So, congrats! But, that's not what I am saying.

My assertion is that unreason retards human progress. It doesn't STOP it, because unreason and reason exist simultaneously in society. While a bunch of people are being thoroughly ridiculous over here, a different bunch could be over there, curing diabetes with new techniques for causing the body to grow pancreatic cells. Scientific progress can be made, even in the presence of some unreason in society.

But the unreason is still having a negative effect. Think how much sooner we would be curing diabetes if Bush hadn't spent his presidency vetoing stem cell research for religious reasons. Think how much better we would understand genetics, if many of our citizens weren't under the impression that biodiversity dates to the ark. Think how much more sense biology class would make, if there weren't people trying to wedge confusion about the origin of species into the science classroom.

Think back...think how much earlier we would have understood astronomy if the Church had not stood against heliocentrism for centuries.

Think forward...think how much faster we could have gotten on board to mitigate climate change if people had been accustomed to using reason, and paying heed to climate science. Etc.

And then, go beyond science. Think how we could have avoided the Iraq war if people had used critical thinking about the evidence. Think of the rifts that would be healed by dissolving unsubstantiated ideaological positions. Think how much further we could be from letting religious agendas drive our politicians. Think how much more effort and attention people would be able to devote to real solutions that can be shown to work instead of wishing for magic and finger-crossing!


Reason is the system that works for figuring out what this is and how to do it well. We've already learned so much using it! Now it's time to unleash its true power.

Not that many scientists, and fewer lately, and much less, the further into science you go.

A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center, found that members of this group are, on the whole, much less religious than the general public.

Other studies show that the longer and higher up people go in science, the less likely they are to believe religious posits. Among those distinguished by election to the National Academy of Sciences, more than 90% are non believers. Older scientists are less likely to be believers than younger scientists.

So, science does not seem to be informing belief in the supernatural, in fact rather the opposite.

So glad nobody laid this crap on me when I was a kid! This is very offensive to my sense of morality.

I was taught that killing is wrong. Also that punishment which cannot be learned from is wrong, and that mercy is sparing the undeserving.

Unfortunately, a lot of people still offer this kind moral rationale, for example to justify the U.S. bombing Afghan wedding parties. "Terrorists get married too!"

I am so grateful I don't have to try to justify that to myself.

Well I'm not.






It's easy, actually. I just find out what is right before I start making claims.

Well, it happens from time to time, but not for long. The key to being right is being willing to change when you find out you could be wrong.

I disagree that having a faith religion is being comfortable with the unknown. It looks more like being so uncomfortable with the unknown that you have to make up a story to fill it in.

As I said, I disagree that believing supernatural stories is being comfortable with a lack of answers. Saying "I don't know" is being comfortable with a lack of answers. Luckily, "I don't know" is also a right answer when it is true.

About what claims? Be specific.










*crickets*