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I shouldn't have to post this, because I know where you're coming from, but I will for the sake of good discussion... rac·ism /ˈrāˌsizəm/ noun noun: racism prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized. I will add that sometimes even the majority is marginalized; South Africa under Apartheid. The point being that you don't get to redefine racism because the end is justified. Similarly, you don't get to redefine tolerance to only the beliefs you agree with. Or free speech to only what you want to hear. No matter how noble the cause. ( yes, I've said the cause is noble, but that doesn't change the fact that arguments can be made against it ) You and Zap had better grab onto something; that's a pretty slippery slope you're on.

This discussion of affirmative action being a type of racism reminds me somewhat of the paradox of tolerance where ostracizing others for being intolerant is described as itself being a form of intolerance.

I think you misunderstand AA. The government actively established and promoted a system where whites were favored over blacks. This resulted in a society where (generally speaking) whites have the money and the power, in a self-sustaining system that perpetuates a society where (generally speaking) whites have the money and the power. (i.e. Whites have the money and power to ensure their children get a better education and more opportunities than blacks, and therefore get the better jobs, more money, more power, able to pass that privilege on to their children, and on and on.) Unless there is some sort of change, this will continue indefinitely or only be changed at a very slow pace. So what to do? The government decided that they needed to start ensuring that minorities were able to get past the white privilege of money/education/power by ensuring they got a seat at the table, and were able to begin competing on an equal basis in society by getting the same education and opportunities (and thus power and money) and the whites have been getting all along. Once blacks are able to compete with whites on an equal basis to get their kids in the better schools, etc., this self sustaining system will then include whites AND blacks. Unfortunately as there are a limited number of opportunities, if you guarantee a spot for a black person, then someone who may be more qualified (or at least equally qualified) has to suffer. Is that fair to the white person who gets passed over? No, it is just as unfair as it was for the black person who used to get passed over. But this is not about individuals, it is about what is best for society. Basically the government said, "we screwed up society for minorities and are choosing a less than perfect option for righting the ship". So "In what world, then, does it make sense, that in the case of two equally qualified individuals the tie-breaker is determined by 'features' of whatever group is needed to fill a quota ?" Answer: In a world that screwed up society by favoring the "white" feature, and are trying to make amends by favoring the "black" feature for a while until things are the way they should have been without our interference way back when.

Can you help me to understand your point? For example if I write 3 + 4 x 5 = ?, everyone agrees that the anseer is 23; because by convention we multiply first and then add. But that's just a convention. If we all agreed to add first then multiply, the answer would be 35. It's a purely arbitrary convention that could easily be different, as long as everyone agrees on what the convention is. As you know, the Internet is full of order-of-operations puzzles that are the result of poor math education regarding operator precedence. If it makes you happy, 1 isn't a prime because that's the convention. We could make a different convention, regard 1 as prime, and adjust all the theeorems accordingly. It really makes no difference. So what is your core issue or concern? It's just a convention. The reason for the convention can be motivated by higher algebra, but in the end it's still a convention and truly makes no substantive difference. It's similar to why we go on green lights and stop on red. At the dawn of the automobile age we could have adopted the opposite convention. It makes no difference as long as everyone agrees.

Which debugger have you tried? By generating a ">" do you mean an input prompt or that program prints ">" or something else? Which line in the program generated ">"? If the program you posted does not print anything, not even "Testing the code", it probably means the program failed or stopped before the first print statement. If the code is not yours maybe you could provide a source where it comes from? Also note that you open a local file 'war&peace.txt'. It may be easier to help if you post an example that does not rely on local data? Are you sure the program finds and is capable of opening war&peace.txt? Note that some systems may have issues with a file name containing "&".

You need to quit focusing on race. They are just fixing a problem they caused with a group of people. Could have been blacks, women, left handed people, or those whose first name begins with "M". Let's say your parents had four children, two boys and two girls, and only gave an allowance to the boys even though all did their chores. If the parents finally realized the error of their ways and decided to only give allowance to the girls until they are all caught up, would you call that sexism? You are forcing the situation into the definition of "racism" even though there is no discrimination, prejudice or antagonism directed at white people. Doing things based on race is not automatically racist. If you give a white person money one week, and a black person the next week, have you been a white racist and black racist on alternating weeks? Your argument is similar to the kid who kills his parents then demands pity because he is an orphan. You are setting up a situation where no one can ever be compensated for wrongs done to them because someone will always be hurt by the remedy. For example, let's say I own stock in Pfizer and Pfizer is sued because they don't properly test a drug and people die. By your argument, those victims should not be compensated because that compensation will depress the value of my stock holdings. It is you who are on a slippery slope.

I've long taken personal exception to the under-representation of old, bald, white men, with questionable bladder control amongst Olympic athletes.

I asked what was entangled. Can you answer that question, instead of a different one? How do you “trap” photons “between the electron energy levels of the crystal”? This would give you p and x. What is the relevance? This is mostly word salad. There is no evidence that gravitons exist, and no evidence that they expand.

Imagine that...

The gravitational fine structure constant is the number that controls coupling of gravitons to energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_coupling_constant It's the order of 10-45 in international units.* Would you be as kind as to tell me where in your "calculations" is the faintest inkling of how you would evidence this from a purely electromagnetic model? Thank you. Although the non-answer I can only predict. (*) It's a dimensionless number. You calling me, or anybody else here, "troll" won't have much of an effect.

No it isn’t. The strong, weak, and EM interactions are distinct phenomena and not mediated by gravitons. Actually, a QFT for a spin-2 massless graviton (such as would be required to obtain GR in the classical limit) is straightforward enough to write down. The problem is that the result is physically meaningless, since it can’t be renormalised. So this evidently isn’t the right way to go, because it doesn’t work.

I was going to explain that the reason 1 isn't prime is that 1 is a unit in the ring of integers. However, the SciAm article by Evelyn Lamb that you linked already has a thorough discussion of this point. If it doesn't satisfy you then perhaps nothing will; because that's the deepest reason 1 isn't a prime. It's because it's a unit, meaning that it has a multiplicative inverse. A ring is a system of numbers in which you can add and multiply, and there are additive inverses, but not necessarily multiplicative inverses. The integers are a ring because, for example, 5 doesn't have a multiplicative inverse. In the rationals 1/5 is the multiplicative inverse of 5 but 1/5 isn't an integer. In a ring, an element that does happen to have a multiplicative inverse is called a unit. In the integers, 1 and -1 do happen to have multiplicative inverses. In fact in each case they are their own multiplicative inverse. It doesn't make sense to ask if a unit is a prime. for reasons that Ms. Lamb goes into. I suggest re-reading that part of the article. For reasons of simplicity for SciAm readers, she gives the more general definition of prime number but can't use the word ring or the term prime ideal, which is really what's going on here. When she says, "Specifically, one important change was the development of sets of numbers beyond the integers that behave somewhat like integers." she is talking about rings. And the concept that defines what a prime is, is called a prime ideal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_ideal @studiot, The article mentions Eisenstein's criterion, so that's related. If you consider the multiples of 5 in the integers, namely the set {0, -5, 5, -10, 10, ...}, it has the property that if the product xy of two integers is in that set, then at least one of x and y must be in the set. If you consider the multiples of 6, namely {0, -6, 6, -12, 12, ...} it's possible for the product xy of two integers to be in the set yet neither of x and y is; for example, 3 and 4. Such sets are called ideals. The actual definition is more general and I'm simplifying too, but not as much as the SciAm article did. So the multiples of 5 are a prime ideal and the multiples of 6 aren't. Part of the definition of a prime ideal is that it can't be all of the original ring. But the set of multiples of 1 is all of the integers. So the ideal generated by 1 can't be a prime ideal. But again that's just because of the definition ... which is what you are unhappy about! So perhaps this will still not be satisfactory to you. The other reasons people gave here are good too. Unique factorization doesn't work with 1 as a prime unless you add phrases to qualify it. But really, if you didn't find the SciAm article satisfactory, I don't think there's going to be a better explanation. The real answer is that when we generalize the integers to rings, and we want to define what primes are, we do so in terms of prime ideals. And prime ideals don't include the multiples of 1 because the ideal generated by 1 (or any other unit) is the whole ring. And now we're into abstract algebra. But again, the SciAm article actually explains all that without using the words ring or prime ideal. I think you should just read the article again because it contains the answer you're looking for.

Nope How do you have knowledge of other peoples thoughts?

Interestingly, if economic inequality wasn’t so bad in our country, then it wouldn’t matter quite so much who scores those select few slots in the pinnacle education institutions for a leg up on others. Yes. It is indeed very much both.

I think I'd rather educate discriminating individuals not to discriminate. I don't insist that this is easy, or even possible in each instance, but the same may be said of justice. On the whole I'd prefer the former (education) and nothing says we can't strive for both.

Because Star Trek is science fiction.

Trolls are people too...

I'd accept your neg rep, if it taught you a lesson...

Your education... I'm sad to say...

Again, this is about the science, not you. Quit making it personal. No one cares what you believe. They care about the science.

You are coming across as a bit of an ass. Dial down the anger and just discuss the science. This is not a contact sport.

Of course, it makes absolutely no difference to me... 😉 What would you gain, if your wild arsed guess' prove to be correct???

Your neg rep given to me and continued moving of the goal posts suggests you missed my actual point. Disappointing, but unsurprising.

You were given an answer to your question. I have no plans on chasing your moving goalposts.

Merely repeating an invalid assertion doesn’t magically make it true.

The expanding graviton looks like this. They start at a point, and expand at the speed of light into a sphere of radius r = ct. The odds that an expanding graviton will connect with a particle is unavoidable. When they do, they become what wave functions are describing. The become captured gravitons. Captured gravitons can escape and continue to get very large. When they do, they become part of the spacetime continuum. The surface of a graviton is a photon. It there is no energy, the surface of the graviton is a virtual photon. If there is energy E = hf, then a localized part of the outer sphere is a real photon; the rest is a virtual photon.

Are you all stumped? All science is empirically based. Even theoretical physics should be tethered to established physics. If it's not, then how do you know you're not just practicing Astrology? Numerology?

Are superstrings supposed to be the only thing that exists, that creates everything? We're not dealing with single photons. We're dealing with two photons that are quantum entangled. Now can you please make the argument of why a quantum entanglement with two entangled photons cannot be described with a wave function?

So your content to being told that we live in an infinite multiverse that is made of superstrings, no questions asked. You don't want any empirical evidence, you just accept those things at face value? Is that correct? Your neg rep given to me and continued moving of the goal posts suggests you missed my actual point. Disappointing, but unsurprising. So your deflecting a simple question. Okay, where are the real physics conversations going on? The ones with actual experiments? Superstrings are a mathematical invention that the creators don't even believe describes our universe. But when someone comes along with a simplification and an experiment, then suddenly everyone gets hostile Someone here even gave me a bad mark because I said that ALL science is based on empirical evidence. When did you guys become a religion? Who was your first saint?

This topic was killed by trolls.