StringJunky

I think this is the phenomenon. There's a simulation on the page - Click link under quote:

They eat mice too apparently but they can also fly. They are slow growers, relatively poor egg layers and arten't the best meat birds.

Nice Job iNow.

Yeah. Best to tiptoe. It's all out there in the forum anyway. The study of the underlying nature of what we are and how we function is still very much in its infancy and you will see many different ideas. Because of this lack of definitive evidence either way, and what the existing evidence suggests is still some way off. Because things are this way in this science, I would not invest any emotional resources on some of the conclusions in the current state of our knowledge. Just accept that it is in flux and just be interested in the current versions but non-commital as to whether they are ultimately valid. I suspect the final analysis reveals a mix. It may well be a false dichotomy. @iNow Is that a pretty neutral assessment?

I would say 'influence' rather than 'dictate'. Dictate suggests this is absolutely controlled, which , of course, it isn't.

If the main branch is thick enough, drill holes around the edge of the freshly cut face (in the phloem which transports stuff down to the roots) and syringe or pipette neat glyphosphate in the holes and cover with plastic sheet of some sort to slow drying. I

Yes. You can do something or do nothing... nobody's watching... except your parents... maybe.

Evolution is a blind watchmaker. Nothing drives it. It is change in frequency of alleles over time. Evolution can go backwards; it's still evolution. Adaptation is caused by mutation, which is random. There is no purpose. Time to pull out the whisky.

To find a purpose.

Whether a depression is meaningful or meaningless depends whether the cause is endogenous (neurologica)l or reactive due to some personal adverse event or injury. The former could be classesd as meaningless because its cause is due to some unknown neurochemical events that is essentially spontaneous. If a person has a painful/debilitating, progressive, terminal condition. I wouldn''t call them deluded for being depressed and wanting to end their life.

And so it may be with our robots in the future.

The Bible. Adam and Eve and them eating from Tree of Knowledge... and all that.

There's nowt as strange as folk.

If the speed of sound is 1540 m/s, which means that, in one second, a one hertz (1 cycle) wave will be 1540 metres long, a 2 hertz wave will 1540/2 metres long. The formula you want to be using is the distance sound travels in one second divided by the frequency. How long will a wave be that is 11 million hertz?

Yep.

It all depends on how much authorities are going to tap dance around collateral damage or not.

There is a precedent for that, with all privately-held gold being compulsorily handed in in the 30's and stashed in Fort Knox, which was built for it. I can't remember why.

It needs a dictatorial government to solve.

"'In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded". - Terry Pratchett

The simplest answer is that there always was something.

I forgot to to add that most of the virtual particles add up to 'nothing' most of the time but sometimes two collide/interact and make a quantum. They may annihilate eventually, I'm not sure. The foam is nothing in the sense that much of the time it has no effect on the quantum world and then only intermittently. I think that's what scientists in this subject mean by nothing. I think this is one of those cases where a word means something a bit different to what we are used to.

Any entity less than a quantum has no effect on anything; it may as well be nothing. A quantum is the minimum energy required to have an effect on stuff.

Yeah, hanging on to an unchanging Constitution that needs to adapt with the times is, I'm sure, not what its original authors intended. If it wasn't designed to be changed, no Amendments would exist on it, which, of course, they do. I'd like to see the NRA refute that argument.

Gravity doesn't bend spacetime; gravity is bent spacetime. Matter tells spacetime how much too bend. Conversely, spacetime tells matter how to move i.e. its trajectory. 'Fabric' is just a metaphor and not to be taken literally. I think the term originates from the 'heavy ball on a trampoline' idea of bent spacetime, which the fabric represents. It only shows two dimensions; when there's actually 4. It's a very crude idea, not really representing the facts but just gives a glimpse of the concept. 'Spacetime' is actually a 4 dimensional map of the gravitational distribution in a space...it's a mathematical construct. It allows people to plot mass- energy values in time and space on co-ordinates in the spacetime map and see how they change under different scenarios... amongst other things. As you should see, spacetime is not a 'thing' but a way of describing how things behave and interact in space. That behaviour is what we call 'gravity'.