Bender

A magnets field doesn't get depleted by use (under normal circumstances), much like how a gravitational field doesn't get depleted. A bit of potential magnetic energy would be converted to kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy, and then those three energy types individually would go up and down, while their sum monotonically decreases as friction converts them into heat.

I don't see what you are getting at. Are you suggesting mass isn't conserved?

I strongly belief in children's rights, and one of those rights is proper education. That cannot be guaranteed if left entirely to commercial enterprises. It also shouldn't depend on the wealth or the ideologies of the parents. I don't see any advantage to the existence of private elementary or secondary schools.

Correct. It is quite easy to fake a movie.

I guess what I disagree with is this. Private schools shouldn't be able to do as they wish. In fact, everyone would be better off if there were no private schools at all. Btw, my children are baptised and go to a Catholic school. Where I live, it is mostly a sign of quality. They usually tell the fairy tales as fairy tales, with little risk of indoctrination. I consider it a "vaccination" against religious extremism and I want them to know what religion is before they can properly make up their mind.

What is wrong with your children learning about other religions? In what way does it infringe on your rights?

This has probably been done for simple animals or plants. It is indeed the same for a baby. I never quite understood why you would want to study it for newborn babies in particular.

In a way, science is experience, but in a rigorous way. Without the rigor, experience is nothing but a bunch of anecdotes. I have tested magnets and wheels and rolling balls and conservation of energy separately. There is no need to test them again combined in a different configuration.

God can only be the best explanation due to lack of creativity. Any other explanation is better than God, because any other explanation is less complex. Take eg number 4: the existence of an infinite number of is universes is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis and offers a much better explanation than "I don't know so a wizard must have done it" Number 5 is a circular argument: there is a God, so there must be objective moral values, and since there are objective moral values, there must be a God

I completely support this sentiment. It can even be a separate subject together with some philosophy and ethics. Parents want their children to be taught the specifics of one religion, it should be done outside a school and not during school hours (and definitely not using public funding).

Water and carbon are exhaled, causing loss of mass. This mass loss was found in one of the first rigorous quantitative experiments performed by Santorio, who weighed everything he ate, drunk or excreted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorio_Santorio I don't know whether anyone bothered to repeat the experiment on babies. Newborn babies are weighed a lot, and the amount of milk they drink is sometimes logged. Perhaps someone also bothered to weigh the dypers? It would be pretty hard to properly execute, since babies have the tendency to vomit or excrete matter in the short time between dypers.

insects also crash into everything all the time.

Too depended on the required level of complexity to answer. What is your field?

There are a lot of atoms in our brains, which all can take up a lot of different configurations. Our universe seems to be heading towards a heat death, and even if that takes a long time, it would take much, much longer for a set of atoms to accidentally align in the same way as your brain aligns now. If the universe is infinitely large, however, there will be a planet somewhere with the exact same collection of atoms as you sitting on it, wondering on an internet forum about his brain.

No. As you said, it is debatable. Our brains are very good at making stuff up and fooling us. I expect more of the making up and fooling takes place in damaged brains.

True.

If you make a wave in water, and it bounces off a wall, it is still the same wave? I think that is a pretty meaningless question, just like it is meaningless to say two photons are "the same". Is a photon deflected by an electron "the same"? After all, due to the Compton-effect, the scattered photon has a different wavelength. High energy photons can "decay" in particle - anti-particle pairs, but only near a nucleus. The nucleus is required for conservation of momentum.

The spider releases a wire and let it float on the wind. Since it is very light, it doesn't take much of a breeze to travel quite far. As soon as the sticky wire encounters something, it sticks and the spider can tension it. After that, the rest is relatively easy and explained by this picture:

Let me break down where you got it wrong: 1) the expansion or contraction goes much, much faster than cooling 2) the hot water will first contract as it cools to 4°C before it can start expanding again. It cannot simply skip that 3) ice will not have a higher temperature than liquid water at the same pressure. It is possible that the liquid water is supercooled, but in that case, it is already below freezing temperature and only needs a slight nudge to freeze. (one of the hypotheses I have seen concerning the Mpemba effect involves the hot water getting supercooled, so that would be the reverse of what you suggest)

Yes for the gravity part. Whether or not you are in free fall has no influence.

It depends on how fast it is falling and how high it is. The time dilatation originating from the height can be found in the graph, since it is independent of the speed.

To be fair, the outcome does depend on slight variations of the input, so he might have thought it could be a chaotic system, or wanted to know how large the variations could be. Also, the quotes you give are the words of some dude's blog. To really know what Diaconis' purpose really was, it would help to find quotes from the man himself.

That's not how entanglement works. It does not allow for information to move faster than light.

We build test setups to prove things we already know all the time, to demonstrate them to others. A machine demonstrating that coins can be made to flip in a predictable way is much more convincing than just saying that's how it is.

I can only multitask when all but one of the tasks is automated. I can eg talk to someone while juggling and balancing on a cylinder, because the latter two are automated. When someone talks to me in the car, I switch to automated driving, which means I'm very likely to default to the trajectory I'm most used to. I have even ended up at my previous appartment more than a year after moving, because I was deep in thought.