Sisyphus

And I'm sure Mitt Romney will run for President in 2012, and he's still the most likely nominee. But where is he right now? Certainly not leading the GOP. As for Gary Johnson, that might actually be a possibility. When the GOP reinvents itself (which it must do, at least in rhetoric) it might just swing in a more libertarian direction.

Since they say the Grand Canyon was formed by the Great Flood, ask him why the whole world doesn't look like the Grand Canyon. So, um, why are you going there, exactly?

I said it was a meme driven by Democrats, but I didn't say there was nothing to it. Do you guys (ecoli, Sherlock) not think he's an influential figure? The DNC have had a big laugh over Michael Steele (the nominal chairman of the GOP) publicly apologizing to Rush for criticizing him, but it is still kind of telling, isn't it? Even if he personally is not that important, isn't his style of politics the most consistent thing in the GOP right now? The point is that they a) don't have any strong national leaders right now, and b) have lost the support (and with it the influence) of all but the hardcore partisans.

It's deliberate on the part of the Democratic Party, specifically (apparently) Rahm Emanuel. They would like nothing better than Rush Limbaugh to be recognized as the de facto "leader of the Republican Party," since most people see him as an obnoxious and ridiculous figure. As in, "the Republicans are so lost, this is the best they can come up with!" The strong association is terrible PR for the GOP, especially since Rush will always self-promote and force himself into public view as much as possible (even as GOP leaders would likely prefer to lay low for a while and regroup), making him kind of an advertising machine they don't even have to pay for. Rush, for his part, plays directly into it, since he's incapable of turning down attention, and has a big enough ego that he probably sees himself as the intellectual force behind the GOP anyway.

Probably should have linked to this earlier, but: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elements_by_density It's too bad all the heaviest ones are so expensive/rare/dangerous/unstable, as tossing around unexpectedly heavy objects is ripe for physical comedy.

With radar astronomy, though, you still have to be "looking" right at it, right? So it seems scanning the sky wouldn't be that different from just using a telescope. Once you did find it, though, I guess it would be a better way to get more precise location and trajectory. (Again, assuming it would work on objects that small over distances that great, but that's a relatively minor technical problem, I guess.)

They're not actually paying off loans, though, right? Just (somehow) offering a chance to refinance at lower interest? Or am I misunderstanding? And yeah, just paying off toxic loans would really piss me off, as someone who has been responsible and actually paid off my own debt. But even that I'd be open to, despite its maddening unfairness, if a convincing pragmatic case could be made that it would significantly stabilize the economy. Just don't let me hear the phrase "social justice," or I may puke.

Some time ago I was considering joining the Triple Nine Society, named for the sole entrance requirement, a 99.9th percentile score (as opposed to 98th for Mensa) on an approved IQ test or standardized academic test (I was looking at this one because they accept SAT scores, so I wouldn't have to take another test), because I was curious if the membership really was very smart, or (as I suspected) a bunch of maladjusted losers with nothing better to be proud of than a fanciful "score," or both. In the end I was too embarrassed to actually join, but my brief research did nothing to dissuade me of my suspicions.

But what's the effective range of omnidirectional radar? Not far enough to be useful in this case, surely?

I don't think you're appreciating just how big an area we're talking about and how many "receivers" you'd need. In order to catch something at least 500 million miles away, you're talking about a net with an area of about 3 quintillion square miles (3,000,000,000,000,000,000). This is very incorrect!

I'd say that some IQ tests can give a pretty good approximation of certain kinds of intelligence. High precision is probably impossible and probably meaningless (there's really no such thing as an IQ of 132 as opposed to ~130), and the farther away from the mean you get, the less precision is possible and the less meaning it has.

Or we can all live in arks.

Not the stupidest idea, no (that's a very high bar), but... I'm not really clear on what you're describing. If it's just a laser tripwire, then objects would only be detected if they passed directly between two stations, which would make it pretty much useless, considering the distance involved (Imagine a cage with bars 100 million miles apart. What can it hold?). And even if that weren't an issue, say if you could somehow detect anything that passed through a plane defined by three stations, there's still at least two more problems. One, getting them out there (where "out there" is defined as far enough away from the Earth to offer good enough warning to actually do something about it, let's say a fairly arbitrary minimum of 500 million miles), and two, getting them into orbits where they all stay put relative to one another and to the Earth (or at least the Sun, if they're far enough away). And even if all of this is possible, you still have to show how it's potentially easier and/or more effective than looking around with telescopes. So yeah, screw me and keep thinking, but remember that it is the approval of curmudgeonly naysayers that gives new ideas legitimacy.

Yes, cost was what I was implying. The point being that "detecting motion" is a lot easier said than done. You want to see an object at the edge of the solar system, you better be looking directly at it with a really powerful telescope, long enough to notice that something is wrong. And you can only look at tiny, tiny slice of sky at once. Remember, they're still discovering planet-sized objects out there, let alone a rock a few dozen meters across. Also, on what basis are you saying it's likely that we'll be hit by something in our lifetimes that will cause enough damage to shift public opinion enough to devote such enormous resources to preventing a repeat?

Cute.

You're asking why they don't have millions of high-powered orbital telescopes whose sole function is to point in every possible direction looking for incoming rocks?

If it passed through, it couldn't cut, now could it?

I don't see why that makes two points impossible. When I say there can be infinite points between them, I don't mean there's an infinite distance. Any two points with a finite distance between them can have an unlimited number of different points between them.

I'm not surprised at bipartisan support, actually. The Democrats are supporting the President, and the Republicans support it because at this point they'd like nothing better than to pretend Iraq never happened.

No, you wouldn't, because there's no such thing. Two mathematical points can't "touch" without being the same point. By definition, points have zero magnitude and no "parts." Their only quality is location. If the location is the same, it's one point. If their locations are different, they're not "touching," and you can fit an infinite number of different points in between them.

Also revolving doors and revolving restaurants.

Maybe it's just a misnomer. Or maybe it's because the needle is doing a revolution around the record? It seems like it's just a matter of perspective: the Moon revolves around the Earth, or the Earth-Moon system is rotating?

What you're talking about is the reason relativity comes into play. No matter what the source is, light always moves at the same speed relative to anything else. If you're moving towards me at 0.5C and you turn on a flashlight pointed towards me, the beam will move away from you at C from your perspective and move towards me at C from my persective. From your persective, the beam will seem to move towards me at 1.5C, and from my perspective, the beam will seem to move away from you at 0.5C. This absolutely seems contradictory at first glance, but nonetheless it is what happens. The contradiction is resolved when you account for special relativity, in which it turns out that time and distance are not constant but depend on one's frame of reference.

That's definitely true. I think it also has to do with a feeling of control, the same reason far more people are afraid of flying than driving a car, even though statistically the latter is orders of magnitude more dangerous. If I'm going to die violently, I want it to be my own fault, damnit!

I would also suggest going to the Wikipedia articles for black hole and for wormhole. That will give you an overview. Any questions you have after reading those you can ask here.