Sisyphus

Online IQ tests are all pretty meaningless. If they were accurate, the whole world would be geniuses! And yes, it's certainly possible for IQ scores to change, although once you're an adult, it's usually not by much, and in fairly predictable ways. Also keep in mind that no IQ test is very precise. You can't really have an IQ of "127," for example (although it's amusing how many people are proud of their very specific "IQ"), but you can in that general range. Also, the farther you go from the mean (100), the less precise it gets. I'm actually unsure about the whole validity of the concept of IQ, frankly. It is clear, at least, that some people are definitely smarter than other people, and that the degree to which they are smarter is largely fixed. And IQ does more or less seem to correspond to this, so it is measuring something. But I very much doubt that it's a single, linear substance, and that minds only differ in one way, as IQ-obsessives seem to believe. I tend to think the "multiple intelligences" model is probably more accurate, although I'm far from convinced that even that is terribly rigorous. Ultimately, the mind is just insanely complicated, and any top-down analysis will always remain an abstraction and an approximation..

The point being that there's a difference between calling something unexplained and calling it miraculous. The latter assumes that everything knowable is already known, which is an assumption that science never makes.

Sometimes you do. The Clinton impeachment backfired for the Republicans, for example, even though Clinton was technically in the wrong, because people correctly surmised that it was a ridiculous witch hunt. There might be some minor post-Bush legal issues, but I doubt there will be anything major. And I think you're right that if Bush himself gets in major trouble, he'll be pardoned by Obama. And I also strongly believe that would be the smart thing politically and the best thing for the country, even if, as I suspect, there are legitimate grounds for serious charges. All signs thus far indicate that Obama was dead serious about trying to re-unite the country, and I applaud him for it wholeheartedly. Foam-mouthed liberals who think Obama's election is their chance to finally stick it to Bush are living in a bizarre fantasy. Let it go. Bush can't hurt you anymore.

That link didn't work. I looked it up myself, however, and I couldn't find any evidence that "mysterious disappearances" are more common there than anywhere else. So it seems there's no need for wacko pseudoscientific explanations, or even mundane explanations, because there's nothing to explain.

In answer to the question about other types of cells, I'm going to say no, since you're essentially just talking about an organ transplant.

It would still just be a straight line, though, albeit a diagonal instead of a horizontal.

I think a lot of people are going to be very surprised that they live in new age technobabble danger zones.

I don't understand. If the mass is constant, why would you be graphing it, and why vs. acceleration particularly? (And yeah, if you did, it would just be a flat line.)

Well, yeah. Agreed.

"Don't ask, don't tell" refers to the policy by which homosexuals are not allowed in the military, but the military is not allowed to initiate any investigation. So essentially you can be gay as long as you make a token effort to lie about it, and they're happy to let you continue lying. Ending that policy would indeed make it officially of no relevance whatsoever, which is really what it should be.

I think it would be pretty absurd to try any eight year old as an adult, and I'm surprised a judge would consider such a thing. That said, I have no problem with detaining the criminally insane indefinitely, if there's no way to release them without causing substantial danger to others, and that includes children. Most of them can be effectively treated, and some can't. Sometimes it takes years to know which is which.

Surely we can stipulate exceptions if you live in the mountains of Afghanistan. To Flashman's sarcasm: I'm sorry, but we have to draw the line somewhere, and your slippery slope can go in both directions and end up just as ridiculous in the other. It's simply not acceptable to me, for example, that my neighbor be allowed to construct his own functioning nuclear ICBM. He's got too much of a temper, and I just don't value my second amendment rights enough to allow the highly likely annihilation of myself and the other millions of people within the blast radius. Yet of course, outlawing all weapons is both clearly unconstitutional and even more clearly impossible. And so, since neither logical extreme is an option, I'm afraid we have no choice but to make reasonable judgements (gasp!) on a case by case basis.

Unions are a natural and nowadays mostly unfortunate result of the free market. Originally they were greatly beneficial to the average worker's quality of life and to the economy as a whole (by helping build a middle class), but like any capitalist entity, they never have "enough," and a lot of them have gotten pretty ridiculous (like the autoworkers). That said, even today I don't think they're all bad. For example, I've seen several clear examples of teachers' unions genuinely improving quality of education. And while I don't think they need or deserve government protection, I'm not about to send in the riot cops.

Is pornography really "underground?" I mean, stuff like child porn is, but is there seriously a lot of money in the illegal stuff? If so, that is really depressing.

The total ocean volume doesn't matter. Sea level rise is approximately volume of melted land ice divided by total ocean surface area. I say approximately because the more the ocean rises, the more surface area it has, because more land is underwater. When you're talking about millimeter rises that is probably insignificant, though.

It depends on how you're measuring expansion. That is the rate at which the area of the universe would expand. However, distances between objects (i.e. arc length, or circumeference) expand proportionally to radius. In the analogy to our universe, it would be distances between objects (which I believe is the context expansion is usually talked about) vs. "volume of the universe," which presumably would expand with the cube of the former. (Again, though, I'm no cosmologist.) Oh, and when I said "omega constant," I meant Hubble constant. Sorry.

This doesn't invalidate your general idea, but the people on the surface of the balloon would see linear expansion, as measured by distances between objects. Per the question, it seems like if the omega constant is constant, you could probably find some linear derivative or something, but I'm not even remotely qualified to assess the significance of that.

Race being a factor is different than "playing the race card." Obviously many black people voted for Obama because of his race, but that doesn't mean he deliberately encouraged that. In fact, I'd say he was extremely careful not to do that, so he wouldn't be "the black candidate."

I don't know anything about propellers beyond the basic concepts, but I'm curious: what experiment do you have in mind?

I'm probably going to regret getting in the middle of this, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. If you're all more interested in proving particular people wrong than finding agreement, feel free to ignore me. It seems to me there's a lot of cross-arguing going on. There's a lot of accusations and bickering about what is and is not "valid." I don't care about that. I'm going to treat all arguments as "valid," and simply answer the ones I disagree with. Since Mr Skeptic is playing the Devil's Advocate to my own beliefs (or maybe he believes those things - I don't care), I'll address his most recent post. That is, indeed, a faulty argument. However, I'm pretty sure that's not the argument being made. The anecdotal stuff does not show there's no statistical difference, but it does show there is no absolute difference and at most a statistical one. And that is no basis for a just law. Analogously, men are more likely to commit violent crimes than women, and black people more likely than white people, but it would be unjust to, for example, use that as justification for revoking the second amendment rights of anyone with a Y chromosome or excessive melanin. People are judged by their actions, not the actions of their demographic. I don't really know where these questions you're asking come from (this thread is far too tedious to read through carefully), and it's not clear whether you mean them to be arguments on their own (they're not) in the form of rhetorical questions, but if you're so eager, I'll give it a shot. In return, I'd ask you to explain why you think each presupposed answer is an argument against gay marriage. No. Or at least, not without help. Of course, straight people would be extremely foolish to do it without help, either, and some can't even do it then. Certainly not. Of course, that's not the relevant statistic. It should be, do gay couples who would get married if it were legal WANT to have as many children as married straight couples. If gay men are less likely to want to settle down (and I'm guessing they are), that's irrelevant, since it's only the marriage-inclined ones who enter into it. Also, the system is biased against gay adoption, so you would also have to estimate data if it weren't biased instead of using present figures. I don't know. I don't think so, honestly. Should it? Is underpopulation a problem? For that matter, would allowing gay marriage affect population growth in any way? Nope. Probably not. Though I'm not sure what the point of this question is, since it's never a question of breastfeeding vs. formula, it's a question of getting formula from a gay man vs. from a foster parent. It seems to care, and I'm ok with that. (But again, I would argue that gay adoption, over all, would help children's health.) Clearly, lots of them do. Again, they do. Now that seems fallacious. "Not caring what they think" is one hell of a way to frame it. I would characterize it more as "tempering the tyranny of the majority." People's rights or lack thereof are not contingent on not being deemed icky by a large number of people. That is a foundation of an ethical society, and the rationale behind, for example, the Bill of Rights. I admit I don't know what you're talking about here. Presumably this was a very specific argument that you're responding to. But it is the case that states have to honor the laws of other states. You might see this as overly pedantic, but what do you mean by "the same?" You can say that members of one group are statistically more likely to act a certain way than members of a different group. But the fact that there is nothing necessarily different about individuals in the different groups, that necessitates a just law treat them equally.

It shouldn't be restricted at all. Government should have nothing to do with marriage. Instead, you could have a "designated beneficiary" or some such, to be granted all (or at least most) rights currently awarded legally married spouses. You could restrict it to one person to prevent abuse.

Yes and no. Kinetic energy is always relative. Temperature is the average kinetic energy of the atoms in a system relative to one another. So in that sense the overall velocity of the system doesn't count. But more importantly, it doesn't mean anything. A pebble cruising at 100,000 km per second relative to what?

This I never understood. How was the war not also just "printing money" and massive government employment and spending? If you buy that the war pulled us out, how is it so hard to believe that the New Deal helped?

They have energy, which is proportional to frequency, but not temperature. Temperature is derived from an average kinetic energy of atoms, so it doesn't really apply to a single particle.

It does seem like it might be fairly analogous. After 9/11 it did seem like everything the government did or the President said related to the "new" war on terror, and there was an atmosphere that the old rules didn't matter because of this new, huge amazing thing. It's really too early to say if the economic crisis will go the same route, but the bailout does seem to point that way. Of course, iNow's points are important, too. The Obama administration might end up being defined by this, but it doesn't "belong" to him in the same way, since both the catastrophe and the drastic reaction to it have both happened before his watch even begins. In that sense even an analogy with Hoover, FDR, and the 1929 crash doesn't really fit.