Sisyphus

Mercury is also liquid at STP, and its specific gravity is about 13.5. In other words, lead will float on it, but gold will sink...

How about you explain why?

A balloon of some kind? I don't know. It's notoriously difficult to get any useful information from UFO eyewitness accounts. It's not because the witnesses are crazy (although some definitely are), but the very nature of it leads to a very low signal to noise ratio. If you don't know what you're looking at, then you don't know what's significant about it that could tell the right person what they need to know, and you see patterns and behaviors that aren't there, because you have no context for what's normal, and that's just what human brains do. You should hear some of the crazy descriptions out there, that turn out to be just imaginative distortions of something totally mundane seen in an unfamiliar context.

So even if that worked, it wouldn't be "anti-gravity," except in the way that an airplane is also "anti-gravity," i.e. it just exerts a force in the opposite direction. Now, not having seen how this is supposed to work, I can tell you that if it violates Newton's third law, then it doesn't. To push itself upwards, it has to be pushing something else downwards with equal force. Is it?

Can't watch it. "Overcome" in what way?

I actually doubt there's very much "suppression" of technologies going on. I think in most cases it's just a matter of pursuing treatments at the expense of pursuing cures. That doesn't require any active conspiracy, it would just mean that businesses aren't actively seeking to obsolete themselves.

Mr Skeptic did it correctly to begin with. There's no point in measuring 6 vs. 6 because it literally gives you no information.

Mr Skeptic did it correctly to begin with. There's no point in measuring 6 vs. 6 because it literally gives you no information.

I don't know what you're talking about. Legalization is not a conservative position, it's a libertarian position. In fact, according to Gallup, only 21% of Republicans favor legalization, 37% of Democrats do, and 44% of independents do. Source: http://www.csdp.org/research/gallup_marijuana_2005.pdf

You really think he should be spending his time lecturing the American people on the benefits of cannabis legalization? Is there even any evidence that he thinks that would be a good thing?

Isn't that how a democracy is supposed to work? Instead of getting mad at Obama for not doing what the majority doesn't want him to do, how about we work on trying to turn that majority into a minority?

I understand your point, JohnB, and it's something I've thought about before. I'm not sure how much it actually happens, but it's certainly the case that those who make their living solving or mitigating a certain problem have a direct interest in preventing a less labor intensive solution from becoming available, which is to say an interest directly contrary to the consumer. If, for example, I invented a cheaply manufacturable pill that could permanently cure all allergies with a single dose, that would be a huge benefit to humanity as a whole, but it would also put a whole lot of people out work, including the entire allergist profession, and severely hurt the revenues of several major drug companies. So, competition between these companies and these doctors drives them to be the more and more effective at mitigating the problem, without any incentive (and indeed a major disincentive) to actually solve it.

Groan...

Yes, driving while under the influence is illegal, and it should be illegal. There's nothing subjective about it. People have different tolerances for alcohol, too, but the maximum legal blood alcohol content for driving doesn't take that into account, and I'm totally fine with that. Just make it illegal to drive while having levels in your system that would significantly impair someone with low tolerance. If laws are currently insufficient in this regard, they could easily be made sufficient, with drunk driving laws as a model.

What about the "homo" part? Fear of sameness? It's not a clinical term anyway, and I agree with Sayonara that it's just one of those irregularities. If you came up with a term that was clearly more accurate and descriptive, I'd be ok with trying to replace it, but I don't think homoaggredi is such a term. In fact, I think it's actually less accurate. "Phobia," in its various shades of meaning, I think actually describes the phenomenon in its various manifestations fairly well. Fear can manifest in aggression, too. There's a reason it's called "fight or flight."

No, it does not. An analogy with magnets is just going to be needlessly confusing, I think. It works quite differently. EDIT: Just so there's no confusion, there are some weak magnetic fields on the Moon from various sources, but nothing analogous to the Earth's global magnetic field: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_field_of_the_Moon

I would also add "abstinent" (from cannabis). To those made skeptical by the "let's get high" mentality, the most credible advocates of legalization are those who don't partake.

Well the reason that's different is because perfume is not toxic, chemically addictive, or psychoactive. (Or if it is it's far less so than tobacco or cannabis.) Strong perfume is merely distasteful (according to some). I do wonder what would happen if taken to extremes, however. If I bought ten thousand bottles of cheap perfume and sprayed their entire contents into the air in the downtown area of a major city, would I be arrested for anything? (Air pollution codes, perhaps?) Should I be?

So Jackson, you think Rush Limbaugh is upset at the "political incorrectness" of profiling based on political affiliation? Anyway, I think if there's no evidence political bumper stickers are the basis of persecution of some kind, there's nothing to make a stink about. What exactly is the stink, anyway? That it's political persecution? That associating libertarians with militias is libelous to libertarians? That militias are every red-blooded American's right and duty, and any action to restrain them is fascist?

It's cliched but very true what they say, that good children's literature appeals to the child in the adult and the adult in the child. I think the Harry Potter books succeed much more in the former than the latter, but I've long since given up arguing about it.

I used contribute quite a bit. A few major edits, even the bulk of a few entire articles, but mostly minor stuff. I was also somewhat involved in the community in itself, where I helped to moderate disputes, tutor new editors, discuss articles for deletion, etc. A few months ago I went through a period where I was way too busy to help, and I haven't yet got back into it. I still think it's a wonderful project, though, and most of the criticisms people have of it are actually false, and the methods of dealing with problems are surprisingly highly effective. Still, though, the more obscure the subject, the less eyes are watching, and there's still opportunity for trouble. (Oh, and I used a name that's nothing like "Sisyphus," so don't bother. I keep all my online identities separate.)

"Turned off" completely, or just turned off the villain's artificial gravity? If the latter, then if it's already a black hole I don't see why it would behave differently than any other black hole, i.e. it would either evaporate or grow, depending on its size and the rate at which matter is being added. If the former, isn't that pretty much impossible to say? I thought the idea of a singularity is that the conventional rules of "what would happen" break down? As for your question #4, though, I think "not necessarily." It would really depend on the mass of the singularity, I'm thinking. A black hole with the mass of only a few tons, say, is still only going to have the gravity of a few tons, which is to say very little. It's radius of destruction (a field strong enough to rip stuff to shreds) would surely be microscopic, maybe even on the atomic scale. You'd have to do the math yourself, but I'm guessing unless it's really massive (or an "artificial distortion" equivalent to a really massive black hole), it's just going to fall right through a person, leaving just a tiny, tiny hole behind. Actually, it would fall straight through to the center of the Earth, and keep going most of the way up the other side. And back and forth again, through the Earth, leaving tiny but widening (and widening at an increasing rate) tunnels behind as it absorbs everything in its path, until eventually it's massive enough to cut a decent swath, at which point I'm thinking we start getting more and more earthquakes. And eventually, of course, it will swallow the whole planet. But we'd all be dead by that time anyway...

(1/2)mv^2 is only applicable in classical systems, i.e. at insignificant fractions of light speed. Kinetic energy at relativistic speeds is [math]\frac{mc^2}{\sqrt{1-(\frac{v}{c})^2}}-mc^2[/math]

Agreed, always hated "freedom tower." Sounded Orwellian, or like a superhero's headquarters, and the generally childish/scary rhetoric from the same era that brought us "Axis of Evil." Of course, as a New Yorker, the whole project is just extremely exasperating in general. They built the Empire State Building in one year, people. Shouldn't things be easier now? EDIT: Just read the article, and I can't not comment on the fact that the first anchor tenant is going to be a Chinese real estate company. How much bigger of a metaphor could you get?

Right, but you'd be using incomprehensible numbers of atoms (i.e., big machines) to create that pressure. What I mean is why would you expect a nanomachine to be able to exert what would be, relative to its size, an enormous force needed to overcome repulsion? How does scaling it down make it easier than macro-scale machines mashing stuff together really hard?