Kyrisch

Well, air reflects light to some extent, otherwise the sky wouldn't be blue. Granted, it's barely significant, but still.

I never quite understood why the force of friction between two surfaces is independent of the area of contact between them. It seems to me that it should have a directly proportional relationship, but in physics we always used the equation [math]F_f = F_N \mu [/math] which doesn't take any sort of area into account at all. What's the deal?

What is going on in this thread? O.o

Because the only reason that it was able to do all that was due to the conditions on early Earth and gratuitous amounts of time. Even if we do set up that extensive of a lab something interesting would only happen after we let it simmer for millions of years...

We could under simple laboratory conditions compel some simple self-replicating molecule to come into existence, but it wouldn't prove anything because the boundary conditions would be so simple as to no longer relate to the kind on early Earth. On the other hand, we don't have the resources to recreate the vast laboratory that was early Earth. In short, the event is too complicated to model simply, and too complex to model fully.

This is a bit of a non-issue. You see, the term abiogenesis refers to the formation of the first self-replicating structure. We defined the event as the formation of the first structure that was able to "leave offspring" (mind you, at this point it was merely a ribo-nucleic or proto-nucleic acid that would spontaneously replicate through base-pair matching or some analogous process, as demonstrated in the videos iNow posted above). As such, your personification is a sort of false analogy -- it never had to "figure it out".

There are roughly a billion billion planets in the universe. Even if the odds against an event like abiogenesis is a billion billion to one against, chances are it happened once. Since we're here, it's only logical to accept that our planet was the lucky one.

Rectangular arrays are easier to count, and the problem of fitting hexagonal boxes into non-hexagonal things would counteract any strictly gained efficiency. Look, you can give all the examples you like, but you still haven't addressed any of our counterpoints.

Just in case anyone's still curious: [hide] All the possible combinations of x + y + z = 13 and their products xyz: 1•1•11 = 11 1•2•10 = 20 1•3•9 = 27 1•4•8 = 32 1•5•7 = 35 1•6•6 = 36 2•2•9 = 36 2•3•8 = 48 2•4•7 = 56 2•5•6 = 42 3•3•7 = 63 3•4•6 = 72 3•5•5 = 75 4•4•5 = 80 All other combinations are commutatively equivalent. Looking back on the list, only one product appears twice. As such, the only way in which the student would need more information is if the number on the study were 36 because otherwise he would be able to figure out the ages based on the product. This is where the tricky part comes in; by saying that his eldest plays the violin, he implies that the ages are 2, 2, and 9 and not 1, 6, and 6 in which case he would have two 'eldest'.[/hide]

Zeno's paradoxes, in short, represent the problem with the mathematical logic of the time which were later solved when Newton invented the Calculus.

What justification did they have to ban the account in the first place?

Oh no! Someone is wrong on the internet!

Further, however, is always that fact that it does happen. There are stories all the time about babies with eight limbs and mermaid feet and cows with bizarre deformities on farms. It's just much rarer, and often disastrous enough to, as iNow said, cause early death.

[hide]the letter e...[/hide] there are so many versions of that one.

Your numbers are not incorrect, it's just that you're not drawing a valid conclusion. It's not your math, it's your concept and theory that we are rebutting.

Not much call for..?! -- it's the single most popular cheese in the world!

And this is where you inadvertently prove the point that has been the main response to all this that you're spewing all along. Trigonometry wasn't invented by people, its laws and identities were discovered, defined by the actual physical constraints of geometry, something that exists independent of the human mind. The reason that 90º is such a prevalent constant in the identities because it corresponds to a rotation, again relating back to the fact that dimensions are defined (and are so because the math is simplest) to be orthogonal to each other. And furthermore, your logic is faulty due to a huge and obvious fallacy of accident. There are plenty of curves in human engineering, from all sorts of recreational balls to lightbulbs to clocks to knobs to wheels. And you may argue that this is because such things necessitate a spherical shape in order to function -- well, so do all those things composed of right angles! If laptop screens were not square, they would not be able to fold efficiently over; if computer keys were not square, they would have bad packing efficiency; if rooms were not rectangular, it would be difficult to put furniture in them in any efficient way -- flat sides go well against flat sides. Any angle other than 90º (such as 120º) would cause oblique sides and awkward furniture arrangement. Curved surfaces would be even worse. Instead of having randomly shaped furniture to fit that various circumstances arising from a non rectangular room, it's much, much easier to just make everything rectangular and have it all fit nicely wherever one chooses.

Yes, one which will hopefully soon appear on the Banned/Suspended Users thread...

We have witnessed planet formation in other solar systems; we have a pretty good idea that it's something like the accretion-disc model. Unless you can point to someplace where your thing-a-ma-jig is happening, it's not a model, nor a theory. It's barely even a conjecture. It's a random imaginative guess, and that, good sir, is not science -- it's stupid.

FAIL. Right here. RIGHT HERE. You use a theory to explain a set of data, not the other way around. I don't know why you guys bother with him... This thread is so ridiculous I'm suffering from Poe's Law between this guy being a troll or just that bleeding thick.

I don't understand this phenomenon... Why does this kind of stuff never go away?

The reason that 'coincidences' seem to occur so damn much is really rather simple: The fact is, you do not consciously perceive everything that happens around you all the time, but rather a small stream of filtered consciousness. Unimportant and uninteresting events are ignored by your higher senses and only the remarkable and, as it happens, coincidental occurrences are given any real attention. As such, you acquire a warped sense of the probability of events, due to the incomplete register of all possible events (what is missing being everything that your subconscious ignores) and highly improbably events seem to occur more often than they should.

Appeal to authority is a fallacy unless you actually put forth the evidence that they endorse. Just saying that "these talking heads agree with me" is no good. ... Don't you think that gasoline fuel would burn at a higher temperature than a normal blaze? C'mon.

7_8, can't figure what the middle should be yet. [hide]The first digit is the sum of the second and third digits of the last number, the last digit is the sum of the first and second digits of the last number plus n, where n=0 for 101, n=1 for 121, etc.[/hide] Am I close?

Haha, forgive the trite aphorism, but "braveness is not absence of fear, it is conquering of fear". I think the aspect of bravery goes a little beyond not fearing something.