Kyrisch

This sounds like a basic description of a covalent bond, like the bonds in water -- [math]H_2 O[/math].

That's interesting to know, thank you. I am inclined to point out, however, that my thread containing three superficially anti-religious (of which you only picked that one) Jefferson quotes was a sort of tongue-in-cheek response to Jackson33 who had earlier posted superficially pro-Christianity Jefferson quotes. My intentions were not to surmise about Jefferson's character based on those utterances, but to illustrate the caveat that is to do such a thing.

To keep it simple, light always travels in a straight-line path through space-time. Gravitational bodies warp and bend space, causing the shortest-distance-path to seem curved, the way the line connected two points on the surface of a sphere is curved. So, let's think about your situation: where would the photon be coming from if its direction were exactly orthogonal to the surface of the sphere (with radius the schwarzchild radius of the black hole)? The only way this could happen is if the photon came out from the black hole (from the other side of the event horizon). This is clearly impossible.

...but how can you prove whether or not a plingybob exists if you don't know what it is (i.e. what attributes it has)?

The second bit hardly seems true. Take a look at this to-scale representation of the planets' orbits.

You can't answer the second question until you answer the first question.

The whole thing seems rather unnecessary. Why is your theory more useful than the one accepted at present?

This is true.

It's not that the rods and cones cannot 'process' those wavelengths, but rather that they are not physically sensitive to light whose wavelengths are not in the visible spectrum.

This would be a viable theory, if simply making noses and ears larger helped improve the acuity of the respective senses. Is this the case? Pretty clearly not. As a side note, the eyes certainly don't grow, and sight deteriorates just as much as hearing tends to in old age, generally. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged The first link with which you referenced your statement blatantly contradicts you. It is actually a common misconception that we were "meant" to die out in our 30s and 40s. Actual text below:

I'd just like to point out that this is the reason that everyone was making a fuss about how many lives a fertilized egg (or more ambiguously, a blastula) represents. A person is not only a human, but also an individual. If the human is not individual, they are not a person. At the point of fertilization, the egg has the potential to grow into any indeterminate amount of human beings and cannot, therefore, by your own semantic argument, be a person.

Any neutrally buoyant object in air will remain in place barring perturbations. All one must do is make a balloon which weighs exactly the same as the amount of air it displaces (so the gas inside the balloon must be slightly lighter than air to compensate for the mass of the balloon).

The second one actually seems a little garish. I like the first one; it's smoother.

If the gravity acting on it were perfectly evenly distributed, then it would probably. Why not?

Allow me to clarify. It's very obvious that the general consensus is against the idea that life begins at fertilization: is contraception mass murder?, et cetera. But I'm speaking about the other end. If life doesn't begin at fertilization, where does it begin? Any cut-off further along with be necessarily arbitrary and will fall prey to the same arguments. Just like you can't use "it will become life" because it includes birth control causing the fertilized egg to fail to implant as murder, you can't use sentience as the definition because it excludes vegetative and comatose people. Anything specific will exclude something, and 'hands off and let the people involved decide' leads to women killing their five-year-olds because they don't want them anymore.

The assumption that our subjective and intersubjective experience actually lends information about objective reality is necessary for sanity. If it is any consolation, it makes the most sense in light of Occam's Razor. However, it remains true that we will never know if any such non-testable theories are true. If you believe that the only things that are real are those things we can interact with and observe, this solves the problem because it implies that entities which are not detectable do not, by definition exist. This again, however, is an 'unsupported' assumption. In existentialism, this has a name; it is the fundamental idea that the universe is necessarily absurd. Absurdism is generally against scientific and rational thought, lampooning it for these very unsupported assumptions, but I still believe that to truly accept the Absurd is to be literally insane, and probably sociopathic. At best we can understand it, allow it to humble us, but find solace in Occam's Razor.

Doesn't pro-choice necessarily extend the right of the mother over their child's life even past birth? I haven't seen this addressed yet.

Seeing only the most recent posts on the home page, and in them only the original text, my respect for your taste in literature took a fatal hit when I saw that you had replied in such a way to the thread "Anyone reading 'Twilight'?" ...Little did I know, you were referring to something completely different. It's okay, no harm no foul. You're lucky I'm the kind of guy who investigates though.

I think crowned is a bot. All of his posts look like that and have the same general tone to them.

From the alien's point of view, it would take a near-infinite amount of time for you to reach it due to time dilation at near-lightspeeds, so that discrepancy would not occur.

The show is very entertaining, but I find that there is almost gratuitous experimentation. Most of the myths that come in could be disproved with some back-of-the-envelope calculation, but their answer is always to reproduce the myth physically. This isn't exactly the best idea because their experiments aren't exactly the best-controlled so in the end not much science is being done. Regardless, I agree with i_a, it is the best of the science shows out there in both aspects of scientific content and entertainment.

How exactly does that work, Bob?

I read it when it was first popular at my then-girlfriend's request. I really did not enjoy it. The writing was bad quality and the plot was shallow. I fail to see how it is comparable at all to Harry Potter. The movie, too, was not very good at all. I have to admit, however, the second movie was much better. I think they invested all the money they got for the popularity of the first movie and invested it (mostly in the werewolf cgi). Whatever they did, the second one was definitely more enjoyable but still not exactly a good movie.

Since a quick search reveals that there has not been a thread devoted to this subject for at least a year, I have decided to open this up after reading Severian's claim of advocation for the death penalty in another thread. My argument comes in two parts: first, that the actions of the justice system are meant as a deterrent for crime, not a punishment. I believe this because of the problem of free will. Sociologist Malcolm Gladwell's work tends to get to the core of the issue. In his books, he illustrates through citation of various social phenomena as well as many classic psychological experiments that people's actions are more heavily influenced by outside sources than many people would realize. I, however, will even go so far as to point out that many internal drives are similarly out of a person's control. This does not make the action that results from such a drive right in a moral sense, but it does absolve an individual from a lot of personal responsibility, as hard to accept as that may be. As such, I don't want to get into an argument about whether or not free will exists because I'm not adopting and radical stance on the matter. I am simply saying that when a psychopath is driven to murder, it's because he's a psychopath, not because he has chosen to murder. Furthermore, he did not choose to be a psychopath. This, however, does not mean that the whole justice system is invalid. Imprisonment and other such consequences to violent or otherwise illegal actions are valid as deterrents to crime, though not as punishments. While people are naturally vindictive, the judicial system cannot fairly be. So, why the death penalty? This seems exactly what I mentioned above -- a reflection of the vindictive nature of people to whom wrong has been done. As a deterrent, it can only be preferred if it better deters crime. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case. Further, it isn't even cheaper. While death penalty advocates claim that it costs the same as maintaining a life sentence in prison, less conservative estimates place it as far more expensive. The death penalty is simply unreasonable. Just because it makes people feel better that the person who killed their loved one is being put to death does not mean it is right to be vindictive.

I'm immediately turned off by the tone of the blog. Their use of the word 'pervert' just goes to show that people view pedophiles as monsters, not human beings convicted of a sexual offense. It is tantamount to the use of the word faggot and is just brutish and unbecoming of an honest intellect. The rest of the post follows suit with the chillingly obvious appeal to emotion: "is this justice?" Seriously, people with fetishisms are not terrorists...