Where are all of the Truly smart people?

@ JakeR (23. )
Kudos is singular; kudo is an erroneous back-formation that assumes that kudos (which is sometimes used as plural) is in fact a plural.

“Peas porridge hot.
Peas porridge cold.
Peas porridge in the pot, nine days old.” -nursery rhyme.

There was a time when “peas” was singular, but like “kudos” fell into a wrong correction of which we have never recovered. Now we have one pea, and two peas. Also, we make pea soup instead of peas porridge.

A living language changes; only the dead ones remain intact.

Except that the nursery rhyme refers to pease pudding, made not from garden peas but from split peas. Pease was indeed once a singular noun, but that does not change the qualitative difference between a pea / two peas / many peas and some kudos. Your analogy is not valid.

While languages indeed change, they either change through a consensual process, or they split into multiple languages (which is what appears to be happening to English in places like India and Singapore – the form of English spoken there is sufficiently different from English English that a native English-speaker would only understand a fraction of it).

They do not change by one person getting something wrong.

Having said that, I will reiterate that I think Phil was knowingly playing with the language when he wrote “a kudo”.

One prover kept seeing smoke rise from the milk sugar as she ground and scraped.

suggests that these people have never worked with finely-divided powders before. It is common to see small air currents lift faint but visible puffs of very fine particles from a finely-divided powder.

. . . we’d all be glowing in the dark from all the radio nucleotides dumped in our water . . .

Erm, I think you meant “radionuclides”.

Nucleotides are the organic building blocks of nucleic acids (comprising a base, a pentose sugar and one, two or three phosphate groups).

A radionuclide is the general term for radioactive isotopes of elements, when one is discussing more than one element. If discussing a single element, the term “radioisotopes” is more likely to be used.

If homeopathy worked why no homeopathic beer? A single drop of the real stuff could get the world drunk! And of course why isn’t every glass of water you drink instantly lethal, not to mention disgusting, given how often its been cycled and the chemicals used to treat it?
More importantly why don’t those who believe ever ask these sort of questions?

These are perfectly valid questions.

However, the homeopaths will answer this with some mumbo-jumbo about what they call “succussion” – that’s the way in which they bash the container when they are diluting a “remedy”. Homeopaths allege that without the succussion, the “remedy” has no power.

AFAIK, no homeopath has seriously tried to demonstrate this.

What we have here is a homeopathic proving. How can you consider yourself competent to comment on homeopathy if you don’t recognize a proving when you read one?

Because:

(1) The described procedure proved nothing;
(2) We all live in the same universe and are therefore stuck with the same laws of physics and chemistry; hence,
(3) Anyone with some genuine knowledge of chemistry or pharmacology is qualified to comment on homeopathy.