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The Calculus textbook I have is called Calculus: Concepts and Contexts by Stewart. You can also try out the Schaum's Series.

Make L the subject of the equation for [math]\frac{1}{3}pK^{\frac{1}{3}L^{-\frac{2}{3}}}=w[/math]. My friend told me that the answer is [math]L=\left(\frac{p}{3w}\right)^\frac{3}{2}K^2[/math], but I got [math]L=\left(\frac{p}{3w}\right)^\frac{3}{2}K^\frac{1}{2}[/math]. Am I right or is my friend wrong? _____________________ Kettheya Uong

I've been increasingly concerned about my height ever since I read a scientitic article that explained how women are instinctually extremely discriminatory when it comes to male height. If I stand up for a long time my feet feel sore. I wonder whether the weight on my body pressing against the legs could actually compress the bones in my legs enough to make me shorter. If you sit down, the body weight from your upper body is not longer pushing down on your legs. So does standing up often make you shrink? Or is the effect negligible?

I've been obsessed over my addictions for a long time and being a science-minded person I try to look at addiction from a scientific (as well as economic) point of view. My model for addiction is that there is an innate animal instinct within people that drives them to perform actions that give immediate short-term satisfaction with no regard for future long-term consequences. If there is an action that high satisfaction that can be obtained at low cost, then the animal instinct will go for it. One way to stop this is to increase the costs of the action so that it is no longer profitable. To prevent yourself from going to a casino you can destroy your car so that you will have to walk 2 hours to the casino instead of driving for 5 minutes. To prevent yourself from looking at pornography on the computer you can tell someone else to install an Internet filter program on your computer. However, finger cracking addiction is difficult to cure because your fingers and knuckles are always on you. You cannot take your fingers off. There is no practical way you can increase the cost of cracking your figners. Maybe I'll have to wear special metallic gloves that forbids joint movement. My parents get angry at me when I crack my fingers and knuckles but all they do is tell me to stop. It's easy to command someone to do something, it's something else to tell them how to achieve that something. I tried one time to wrap my fingers but the problem with this is the itchiness and the fact that skin needs exposure to a certain amount of air or else it becomes moist and irritable.

Atinymonkey is right. Pedophile experts have shown that the characteristics common to pedophiles do not match the stereotypical characteristics attributed to pedophiles. Michael Jackson is hardly a threat to children compared to the many pro-pedophilia advocates out there. There are many websites on the Internet that attempt to normalize sexual intercourse between adults and minors. The people behind these projects may be smart-looking academics, psychologists, etc.

There is nothing wrong with sleeping with children so long as you don't touch them while sleeping in any illicit way. Many parents sleep with their children. Some argue that it is sick that Michael Jackson slept with someone else's children, but I don't see the problem with that. If Michael develops a relationship with someone elses child to the point that his relationship to that child is almost fatherly, then sleeping with the child would be expected. The same sort of logic applies to adopted versus biological children and their relationship with the parents. It depends on the circumstances of the relationship and not on similarity of genetic sequence. As many here have mentioned, Michael may be weird, but there is nothing wrong with being different.

A parallel between patriotism and religion can be very practical because politicians can analyse the elements of religion that make it potent, isolate these elements, and then apply them in political campaigns to serve their own interests.

In my opinion, one way to look at government is to take a "scientific" approach, i.e. to see government from a realistic perspective, looking at the individual politicians in government, the laws that constrain them, their interests, and the political process as a whole. Disciplines like public choice theory, law, and political science often help facilitate this view. But while this is the "scientific" view of government, because it views government and governmetal processes as a naturalistic process dependent on axioms of self-interest and so forth, there is also a religious side to government that attaches a spiritual element to government. This is patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism and nationalism assume that there is more to a country than the sum of the individuals in it, that there is some sort of spirtitual entity that unites people, that there is an "American soul," that there is something sacred about a country's border. This I believe is the religious side of politics. It panders to the emotions of the masses. It blinds them from the actual mechanics of the political process. Science is about the many laws and theories that describe phenomena. Religion attributes all phenomena to a supreme being. Parallels can be seen with patriotism. The nation-state is a mass of individuals within a border constrained by a specific set of laws set up and enforced by institutions, but patriotism or nationalism simplify all that by characterising the nation-state as if it were a supreme being. Not to appeal to authority or anything, but it's curious that Albert Einstein himself describes nationalism as an "infantile disease" as well as the "measles of mankind."

The look of this site has changed and I've noticed that the ads at the top cover up the SFN logo as well as a few other problems. Are these problems due to my having a 800 x 600 screen resolution or something else?

I'm a recovering net addict. The thing about the Internet is that there is a dark side that includes violence, gore, hate, and so on. As drug addict starts with the soft stuff (marajuana) and then moves on to the hard stuff (heroin), the same seemed to happen to me with the Internet. I started with the soft stuff like CNN and Yahoo Finance, but then over time I moved on to the harder stuff like pornography, gory sites, hate sites, extremist political sites, and Fox News. I frequently went to message boards related to these topics and posted there. This was all when I was 14 or 15 years old. What these deviant sites did to me is normalize these deviant behaviors, making me think that everyone behaved like this, that this behavior was commonplace, when in reality it was only the practices of a minority. My grades went down a little, I lost more friends, and then when I suspected I was addicted to the Internet, I decided to fix myself up. What I did was I installed Internet Filtering Software. I installed two. One was freeware, Naomi 2.5, and another I purchased, Content Protect. I randomly generated a 20-digit number and used it as the password, wrote out two copies of the password, and then hid both of them in hard-to-reach places in my house. I censored porn, violence, hate, and adult stuff. If you tell yourself not to go to these sites you won't success because on the Internet you only need to tap a few keys and you're somewhere you know you shouldn't be. If you are to stop yourself from going to these sites you need to erect the barriers yourself. By hiding the password in hard to reach places I am increasing the barriers, increasing the costs of looking at illicit material. After trying the treatment for a while I noticed that I felt kind of isolated and cut off from the world. I suspect this must have been the withdrawal symptoms people talk about. It may have also been becuase this was a self-help plan, not something recommended by a cousellor or an expert. Every now and then I go to Google and try to enter these sites but keep getting knocked back. Entering the overriding password is too hard anyway because I've buried the password under heaps of books on the other side of the house, so after a long period of failure you learn to give up and go instead to the cleaner websites.

Yeah I tried doing that. I put a band aid around a finger that I always cracked. The problem was that I always subconsciously pulled the bandaid off while my fingers are fidgeting. Furthermore, I became addicted to the smell of my skin after it's just been bandaged, you know that sweet chemical smell on your moist skin? So not only did I crack my fingers but I also sniffed them like cocaine. Also, you get a lot of stares when you go out in public with bandaids wrapped all over your hands. People ask me if I've been in some sort of blender accident and I'm too embarrassed to tell them that I've got a finger-cracking addiction.

Some people say that smelling coffee will wake you up and make you more alert. Is this true or do you actually have to drink the coffee so that the caffeine enters the bloodstream. If you're worried about too much caffeine in your sytem, would smelling coffee regularly be a good substitute for drinking coffee?

Do you think patriotism is very similar to religions?

If many of you were in the same position as the politicians, you'd be tempted to put your own interests ahead of that of the state. That political process has to take into consideration the self-interest of the politicians and be designed in a way that minimizes social harm resulting from politician self-interest. The reality of policians acting according to their own personal interests really illustrates the illusion of the national consciousness. The masses tend to believe that policians embody a nation, that their personalities represent that of the nation, when in reality a nation-state is just a legal process.

I don't know whether my seat-monitor alignment is incorrect but everytime I'm on the computer I have a habit of leaning forward without realizing it. I'm worried that too much forward leaning might arch my spine and give me a nerdy hunchback appearance. Is it natural to learn forward while sitting? Is it how I'm supposed to sit?

Americans must be watching too much Fox. Hasn't microscopic life already been found on Mars? Or did the survey specifically exclude microbes?

Sometimes when I take a glass from the pantry I pour myself some Coke and drink some only to realize that the glass was just recently washed. In the Coke I could taste some detergent residue. Is drinking of detergent in small amounts harmful?

We could simply stay away from sources of information we know will be negative and focus on more positive sources of information. For example, art house movies tend to be much more negative than mainstream Hollywood movies. But what EColi said may be true. There seems to be a Jerry Springerization of journalism to cater to those among humans with baser instincts. More populism, more patriotism, more xenophobia, and so on.

Thank you, you're right. I've edited it.

Would increased supply of pornography in a society increase or decrease birth rate? Are there any studies that look at this question? An argument can be made that pornography encourages sexual expression, increasing the likelihood of impregnation, thereby increases birth rate. On the other hand, the sexual expression may be in a form that doesn't involve sexual penetration (e.g. masturbation). Furthermore, high birth rate is dependent on stable families and pornography exposure may give viewers unrealistic expectations about how beautiful women should be and how frequent sex should be, weakening the importance of family.

Do you think mandatory country-of-origin label on goods are necessary? Mandatory country-of-origin labelling costs very much and there seems to be very few benefits. See http://www.countryoforiginlabel.org/overview.htm

In a lecture theatre, sit at the top and do a quick count of the proportions of blondes in the theatre. From what I've noticed, in math and science classes it usually ranges from 0.05 to 0.10. Next we need to know what the proportion of blondes in the general population is.

Isn't this seignorage? Or am I using the wrong terms? To get something like this going there has to be a powerful world institution of some sort that will handle this redistribution of wealth. This isn't really sharing the wealth, just redistributing money from rich people, who don't really need the money, to poor people who really need the money. Within states this happens happens all the time and is handled by the government. At an international level, however, it doesn't really happen because there is no world taxing organisation, although redistribution does occur through foreign aid. However, foreign aid very often just puts money into the hands of dictators, thereby oppressing the actual people even more.

There's also the problem of government failure. A corporation and a government are very similar in structure.

The official SF debate about the Holocaust is at http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=5707