Bender

This says it all really. If you have two half full batteries and put a light bulb between them, the light wouldn't go on, because the current wouldn't flow.

It occurred to me that, because 10^184000 is so insanely large, my probability of 63% is somewhat misleading. For a 10% probability, it would also take 10^184000 seconds. Likewise for a 99.9% probability, is would take 10^184000 seconds. It would also take 10^184000 years, since there is no appreciable difference between 10^184000 seconds and 10^184000 years. We lost all these distinctions when I rounded to 184000, or in fact when someone rounded to 130000 characters. Some more fun with insanely big numbers: you could freely change the typing rate without changing the result significantly. If instead of a rate of one character per second, you only type once during the entire life expectancy of our universe, it would still take 10^184000 years (or microseconds, or universes, or whatever). On the other hand, if instead of monkeys, you use the fastest computer in existence and let it generate random characters as fast as it can, it would still take 10^184000 years. 10^184000 is so large that you could change it by a factor of one googol, and you wouldn't even notice. Regardless of how stupid large this number is, infinity is still in another league. In an infinite amount of time, Hamlet would show up an infinite amount of times.

If you draw it, you see that it is one quarter of a circle

Every starting letter could be the first letter of a specific string of 130000 characters. The probability of that is 1 in 26^130000 or 1 in 10^(130000.log26)=10^184000. The probability that a letter is not the first of the collected works of Shakespeare is (1-1/10^184000). If we repeat this for 10^184000 times, at eg 1 letter per second, it takes 10^184000 seconds. The probability of not writing the collected works of Shakespeare is [math](1-\frac{1}{10^{184000}})^{10^{184000}}[/math] I'm a bit rusty on my statistics and short on time. If you are interested in knowing the probability of writing it in a certain amount of time or the amount it would take to be eg. 95% sure that you would have typed it, you need to look up binomial or poisson distributions. Edit: ok a quick search yielded that the limit of [math](1-\frac{1}{n})^{n}[/math] is 1/e or 37 % so after about 10^184000 seconds, you would have 63% chance of randomly typing the collected works of Shakespeare.

I have never experienced that, nor witnessed it in others. Any evidence for that? People get great pleasure from eating e.g. icecream or chocolate (according to some even more than from sex), but buying and eating those in public is no problem. There are plenty of other examples of people enjoying themselves in public.

I think that is your main problem. I, and almost everyone I know, prefer to see other people happy, because seeing people happy makes us happy. People will not do any effort at all to make people like you less happy (you seem to manage that quite well on your own). At best they are indifferent about your happiness. The social taboo has to do with culture and tradition and seeing other people have sex makes most people uncomfortable. It has nothing to do with limiting happiness: nobody cares if you masturbate all day at home (how would they know).

So can we agree that good vs evil is a continuous spectrum? Why is your arbitrary opinion about where each action is positioned on that spectrum more valid than my arbitrary opinion? I have never heard of dog-torturing holidays. If you are not religious, why bring it up? The statement is meaningless without religion. What about crabs, lobsters or squids?

But if everyone is evil, isn't everyone deserving? You do know that all dogs are domesticated, don't you? There were no dogs before humans domesticated them. None. (Don't bother pointing out that there are wild dogs because they were released somehow, that is irrelevant to the discussion) Why do you excuse a dog for doing as it was taught, but not a poor Chinese man for inheriting his fathers "dog torturing business"? That's a pretty arbitrary line, isn't it? So torturing and eating octopuses is fine too? What if someone shows up and says you are evil and need to be tortured for all those horrible things you do to worms?

Yet you insist on wasting other peoples time. If someone does not care about what you have to say, and is not going to read any of it, why do you insist on having it show up on his screen? Then why participate? I don't like Facebook either. I visit it once every couple of months for the off chance somebody sent me a message.

I actually agree with you that putting people in jail is rarely a good idea. Indeed, I do not belief in justice on its own. I am surprised that you don't think it is a good idea, because it certainly increases hate, which you like, and it is torture of humans, which you also like. What about eating worms or insects? Is that evil? Of course dogs torture and kill other dogs. Is it ok to torture these dogs?

There are several ways: - some people are born with something finger-like at the end of a stump, with which they can control a kind of switch. - myo-electrical sensors can pick up muscle activity: in case a part of the lower arm is still present, so are parts of the muscles. These muscles can still be activated by the brain, and in doing so electrical signals are sent to the muscles, which can be detected. The nice thing is, to open and close the prosthetic arm, the same muscles can be used as for opening and closing a normal arm (this is most likely the case for this girl) - implants can detect nerve activity. This can not only give control over a more complex prosthesis, it can even feed back information from tactile sensors in the robotic fingers.

Confusing: yes. Misleading: no. It is not that nobody wants to change them, it is not easy to change it everywhere and the old word is going to keep showing up anyway, so the end result is having more words to describe the same thing. And a word is just a convention after all. It is pretty pointless to challenge it. Much like the fact that using tau makes much more sense than using pi. I think most scientists would agree, but everybody is used to pi and a factor two is no big deal anyway. About your example: I don't think that "gas" is a good example of a STEM-word that "academia" is very protective about.

Who does? Facebook is a company and, within legal boundaries, can decide what happens on their servers. If you don't like that, host your own server, or rent one, or find one that suits your purpose.

Nonsense. Why shouldn't Facebook users filter the stream of info to get more quickly to things that interest them.If I don't like someone, I don't have to invite them in my home and listen to them. If you think people block you to hurt or censor you, you are too selfcentered.

I everyone is evil, the concept has no meaning. Good and evil are relative and subjective. What about the humans that don't torture dogs, which is nearly all of them? What about humans that torture humans?What about dogs torturing dogs? You are not helping in achieving that goal.

In that case, he could eject from the bike midair to increase his range, dumping the bike. A higher acceleration of the bike would also increase the range.

What I usually do is greet them without slowing down. That way you are polite, yet make it clear that you're going somewhere. Chances are this acquaintance is not really interested in the talk anyway, and relieved he doesn't have to talk to you.

That is a good point. A solution could be to use a quad with some kind of autopilot.

Why bother relying on the primates to teach the children? We can do that better. How evolution works: - take a population - select 10% smartest (dispose of the others somehow) - have these breed. By random chance, some of the offspring will be slightly smarter than the parents (and some will be dumber) - repeat The only reason to train them at all, is to be able to test their learning potential, to be able to select the smartest. You will have to start with a sufficiently large population to keep the genepool healthy. The process will also be slowed, because you also have to select on eg genetic defects, docility, pelvis of the mother co-evolving with the larger brain... You only really need to train the last generation thoroughly. By the time this experiment is done, we can probably do this better and more efficiently with genetic engineering. Much like how genetic modification of crops is much faster than using selection. PS: you eliminate epigenetics (environmental effects) by raising them all in the same environment.

Motorcycle jump records seem to be over 400 feet at a speed of more than 100 mph. http://xgames.espn.com/rally-moto-x/article/8181746/alex-harvill-sets-motorcycle-jump-record The problem would be getting to that speed in a short distance on top of a roof. Suppose the roof is 100 m long and the bike can do 0-100 km/h in 3 s, which means an acceleration of 33 m/s2. He could the accelerate for [Math] t=\sqrt {100/16} s \approx 2.5 s [/math] Which means he can get to about 80 km/h, or roughly 20 m/s. [Math] x=v^2 / g=40 m[/math] So 40 m is definitely realistic if you have a decent ramp. The ramp has to be pretty high, to limit the force. Other variables include landing lower, which gets you a bit further, or a smaller ramp, which gets you less far.

Ok, not a reactionless drive but a perpetuum mobile: same category. Like I said, you are trying to disprove Newton's laws with a system based on Newton's laws.

Acquired skills are not inherited , so there is no need to constantly challenge them with problems. You only need to determine which individuals are smartest and have most potential for learning, which probably requires a decent amount of challenging. Then you have those individuals breed. The downside of primates is that they take a long time to become fertile, so 30 generations would take at least 450 years. Perhaps other animals with shorter breeding cycles could have faster results, depending on how much they lag behind in intelligence. I can't find how long it takes raven to become fertile, but on top of that, they lay multiple eggs, compared to only one baby every five years for a bonobo.

God could show up and make his existence known. As it stands, none of the above is falsifiable, but neither have we found any evidence for any of it. Occam's razor suggests that in such a case, it probably didn't happen. But it will never be possible to completely disprove it. On the other hand, if it can be shown that macroscopic objects can exist in quantum superposition, that would be a strong indication that the entire universe exists in superposition (manyworlds interpretation). In that case, there are an infinite number of universes, so us being here to discuss this would not be a happy accident, but a statistical necessity. It still wouldn't disprove any of the above, just make it even more redundant.

It wouldn't make much difference. Having our technology would give the new species a couple of thousand years advantage, which is mostly negligible compared to the time needed to get to a place where they can even hope to understand quantum mechanics. Even if one of us sticks around to carefully explain it to them, that wouldn't make too much of a difference. You might have mixed up the point of this thread. It is about a different species evolving, not humans re-evolving somehow.

You haven't presented what you are trying to do. All we have to go on is "unbalanced wheel", but making a wheel that is not balanced is not very groundbreaking, so I guess there is more to it. If it is what I guessed, yet another reactionless drive, then you do want to disprove Newton's laws of motion. After all, these laws state that reactionless drives are impossible.