Sisyphus

Several people already have, including a couple of real live physicists. But again: forces act in equal and opposite pairs. Each force in this pair can be acting on a different body, which is how things move. If you push on a rock, there are two equal and opposite forces: the force acting on the rock in the direction you push it, and the force acting on you in the opposite direction. Once again, your misunderstanding is in assuming the opposite forces have to be acting on the same object, as if they were thrust and drag.* You push on the rock, and the rock pushes on you. The rock is not pushing itself in the opposite direction. You are each being pushed apart with the same force. *And once again, thrust and drag are not an example of a force pair. I'll repeat myself: I don't know what else I can say. Except, I guess, that if you're deliberately wasting our time, then a hex on you and your loved ones.

The correct thing to say is not, "I think Newton's Third Law is wrong." You should say, "I do not understand Newton's Third Law." The law itself is not up for debate. Yes, the rock pushes back on you with as much force as you push on it. Your confusion is in mixing up what the forces are acting on. You are acting on the rock, and the rock is acting on you. Each of you individually therefore has an unbalanced force acting on you, since the equal and opposite forces are acting on different objects. Thrust and drag are not the equal and opposite forces. Again, your confusion seems to arise from thinking the opposite paired forces have to act on the same object. They don't, and if they did, then nothing could move. The thrust pushes the air backwards with a certain amount of force, thereby pushing the plane forwards with an equal force. That is thrust. As the plane moves through the air, it has to push the air in front of it out of the way. The air then pushes back on it with an equal force. That is drag. There are four forces in total, in two opposite and equal pairs. One force from each pair is acting on the plane itself.

I'm not taking sides here, but it seems like that should be amended to "first generation cousin marriage." The added defects from inbreeding would compound with each generation, while the added defects from older parents would not.

Whether or not its domestic matters from a national security standpoint. The enormous influence that certain nations wield just by virtue of controlling large oil reserves is, by any reasonable account, an undesirable circumstance. As for the market effectively limiting us to clean fuels, that's not going to happen, but rather than having the same silly argument over and over, if it helps you, you can think of the relevant regulation as protecting our collective property rights by limiting the externality (in this case, environmental damages of various sorts).

That's really just offering the best product, though, not being "altruistic."

"Resisting force" is always equal and opposite in direction. You push a rock, it pushes you back with the same force, and you both move.

The preview on xkcd looked promising.

Sure, as long as "alternative energy source" is defined such that it has to satisfy the criteria we need. Renewable, domestic, below a certain threshold of environmental impact, etc.

People do want to believe, CHAOS. We've got SETI looking for any sign of intelligent life. We've got mission after mission to Mars, and you better believe that every last person in mission control would like nothing more than to find a sign - any sign - that we're not alone, even if our neighbors are nothing more than microbes, even if they're already extinct. These are reasonable, scientific efforts. We haven't found anything yet, but we're still looking. The reason people don't believe is not because they don't want to, but because there is, so far, no credible evidence. There's nothing presented as "evidence" that doesn't either have a far more likely explanation or is simply not real. But some people want to believe so badly that they'll try to make the facts fit. And if they don't understand science and are willing to take new age religions at face value, they can be persuaded of anything. So yes, in a universe as large as ours, it is practically certain that there is other life out there. But we haven't found it, and because of the distances and time frames involved, unfortunately we may never find it. But I hope we do.

[wild nonsequitor]No, he didn't. Even then they knew the Earth is round, and about how large it is. He did, however, argue that the Earth is at the center of the enormous spinning sphere of the fixed stars powered by a thought thinking itself that is the source of all animation in the cosmos. But I guess that takes longer to say.[/wild nonsequitor]

But does it outweigh the cost? And do you really believe that is why they do it? Or is it more likely that... That's the key point. They're human beings, and human beings aren't all greed machines. As for the argument about their liberality, I really don't care. That's not the point I was trying to make. You subtracted the word "idealist" (which was the important one) and added "elitist." I know. I'm just personally curious. And if you see yourself as a conservative and me as a liberal (which I don't call myself, btw), then I'm the "enemy," and if that's the case then I'd like to know. True, true, and maybe but not necessarily true. Don't care don't care don't care. My only point is their reasons are ideological and/or personal, not profit-motivated.

Looks like we're cross-posting. The altruistic tendencies themselves don't pay off. But they certainly don't, in this case, prevent Google from being profitable, since they have an excellent product and an efficient business model. ...which I didn't make. I find your defensiveness surprising. Do you now consider yourself fully in the "conservative" tribe? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Agreed on both points. I don't see that at all, sorry. They might be relatively hurting, but the cost is born by pretty much everyone, and a lot of us are a lot worse off because of it than those hedge fund managers ever will be (except those, I guess, who end up in prison).

I agree completely. ecoli was implying (it seemed to me) that the altruism was a result of market forces, i.e. that it wasn't actually altruistic at all. I was saying it's more despite market forces than because of them: not everyone, including not everyone in charge of large businesses, is merely a profit-driven cog. Hooray? There are such laws, but outright lying isn't really the problem. You can't make laws against being misleading or being unjustifiably boastful about your altruism. (Well, you could, but you shouldn't, as the enforcement would be arbitrary.) It's just too easy to fake, and this (combined with individual consumer apathy) means that government, as the representative of the people's collective interest, is still the only consistently effective agent for preventing externalities like environmental pollution.

Avocado ice cream and Guiness ice cream both sound pretty delicious, actually. Though if it were me, I wouldn't use Guiness, I'd use one of my homebrews, which are far superior (and several times as alcoholic) as that mass-produced stuff. I've got a few bottles of Russian imperial stout, chocolate nut brown ale, and pumpkin oktoberfest that are dying for some ice cream experimentation. Actually, I had some pumpkin ice cream recently, and it was great. Try that.

That prices would decrease is inevitable, but don't overstate the case. Moore's Law-like improvement is so extreme it can't be counted on for anything - not even computers.

ecoli, I agree with you on most points, but not about corporate altruism. Google tries not be evil because it's controlled by a couple of liberal idealists, not because of market forces. If it were controlled by a mass of anonymous stockholders whose only common interest was profit, they wouldn't be able to do that. Similarly, Bill Gates, being a generous individual with more money than he could ever personally use (and who is not the Microsoft Corporation, btw), can afford not to be a homo economicus. If he were just obeying market forces, he wouldn't be doing any of that, as market forces are driven by profit alone. That's not to say that you don't have a point. Even faceless corporations with bottomless profit motive have cause to worry about image. But it simply doesn't happen on that kind of scale, and usually more is spent on publicity for charity than charity itself. Similarly, corporate environmentalism is real for the same reason, but even today it is far outpaced by greenwashing, as the profit motive dictates the appearance of social responsibility, not the thing itself. I suppose you'll respond that better informed consumers would fix that, and that might be true in theory, but where are they? If consumers are uninformed about such things today (and they are), what is going to fix that? What market force will drive that? You think Ralph Nader is motivated by profit motives?

What do you think the success rate is for this kind of thing? Do you suppose anyone went to see this universally panned flop of a movie on the vague recommendation of this robot?

I'd like to see a study on the effects of burning zombie fumes. You might not be able to "zombify a molecule" (although we might be surprised - it all depends on the physical causes of zombification), but it could still be highly toxic. I don't want to survive a zombie attack just so I can unleash a chemical WMD on every survivor outpost left standing.

As you say, the "Green Economy" is a big part of the economic plan as a whole, and I don't think that's just talk. In fact, it occurs to me that the economic crisis might actually serve as an excuse for some sweeping changes that the Obama administration would want to do anyway but wouldn't be able to without a crisortunity. In that way, it really would be "Obama's 9/11." But yeah, obviously it's still far from ideal and not what they were expecting to be dealing with, so the plan has to change, too. Obama claims he intends to get around to everything eventually, and we'll just have to wait and see if and when that happens. I don't think it's just a matter of being willing to compromise a standard of living, though. In my mind it's not so much that the economy is hurting as it's highly unstable, unpredictable, and generally unprecedented. So it's not just a matter of "we have to accept x unemployment and y DJIA to achieve Z goals," it's "**** **** **** THE BUILDING IS ON FIRE." So that kind of necessarily has to take top priority.

I don't really understand what you mean. Why is this the perfect time?

I'm not the best person to answer your questions, but I should say that you don't have to be "quite the atheist" to believe in evolution. You talk as if atheism is a religion, and "evolutionism" is a part of it. I'm guessing that's what you've been taught, but it isn't accurate. (In fact, you kind of seem like a creationist pretending to be an "evolutionist," but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.) Even the Catholic Church officially acknowledges the fact of evolution. To answer your questions, you might want to check out the Wikipedia articles on human evolution, mutation, and introduction to evolution, and then ask any more specific questions you have here.

Yes. It involves calculus. You treat objects as collections of infinitesimal connected point-objects exerting forces on one another, each point is in continually accelerated by the others, bla bla bla. It's far easier to use rotational equivalents. Whether or not the gun is attached, it would be impossible to change the ball-gun system's center of mass by any internal action. If it's not attached, then the gun flies backwards with as much force as the bullet flies forwards.

Medieval-type castles would obviously be effective, but you could probably make do with a lot less than that. Zombies shouldn't be nearly as hard to keep out as your average medieval army. Armies have battering rams, trebuchets, ladders, tunnels, bows and arrows, etc. Zombies are stupid and have only their hands as weapons. An ordinary brick wall should be able to hold off a zombie horde indefinitely, or at least a very long time. The only issue would be if they could somehow climb sheer walls, but if that were the case, you'd be in big trouble in a castle, too. So really, you could take any large building, brick up/barricade the windows on the bottom one or two floors, and keep watch from the roof.

In case it isn't clear, when people say you'll "slow down," it's more accurate to say that you'll accelerate to a closer reference frame to the average in the Milky Way. And you'll do this because of collisions with objects and gravitational influences, not because there is some inherent tendency to make objects move at the same velocity. There is not inherently a force needed to "maintain velocity," since every object is already at rest in its own reference frame. And it is meaningless to say that an object has a certain velocity without also specifying the reference frame in which it has that velocity. ...just so we're clear.

Well, as Klaynos says, it depends on your frame of reference. Looking at the Moon: from the Moon's frame, it is at rest. From the Earth's, it is following a slightly distorted elliptical path. From the sun's, it closely follows the Earth's nearly elliptical orbit, but weaves in and out of it in a nearly sine wave like pattern. From the galaxy's, it's a wobbly, slanted helix following a very rough ellipse around the core, chaotically tossed around on its way.