Sisyphus

Not really. They're all consistent in themselves and can communicate with one another perfectly. What more do you want? What difference would it make to anyone? And if it wouldn't make any difference, then how is their "deception?"

I think it's true that a lot of it has to do with the response of the bullied. Generally speaking, kids just all make fun of each other all the time. It's part of socializing. If one kid doesn't react appropriately (in their eyes), they become targets for more seriously bullying. There are other reasons, of course. Some kids try to assert their status by pushing someone else down. Sometimes the ringleader has some special grudge against the victim and the others just hop on for fun. Etc. As for the "smart kid" thing, I agree. Smart kids don't get chronically bullied - socially awkward ones do. (Often they go hand in hand, hence the misconception.) As a kid I was "the smart kid" and shy and physically awkward to boot. As such, lots of people "tested out" bullying on me, but nobody tried more than once, because 1)I always remained calm 2)I made it obvious I wasn't afraid of anybody, and 3)I was better at making fun of them than they were of me, and could make the jackals (I mean, other kids) laugh at them.

What do you mean? Editorials are opinion pieces.

I couldn't disagree more. There is no equation less trivial than 1+1=2. It is the seed of all mathematical abstraction, the philosophical representation of mathematics itself. It represents, in simple, elegant notation, the very idea of the abstract unit, and all that its existence implies. Compared with that, Euler's Identity is just a neat trick.

I'd say it's quite relevant to the discussion. The point is that human beings are biologically capable of being aggressive sexual beings at the ages we're talking about them being targeted. That being the case, it would be very surprising if some adolescents weren't the pursuers in these relationships. It's not an empirical source, but it's a rationale for educated speculation.

An amusing but harmless flub. Of course, if Obama said the same thing, it would be a sure sign of his foreign policy inexperience, and possibly an allusion to his secret practice of radical Islam.

"Op-ed" stands for "opposite editorial," meaning only that it's traditionally on the page opposite the editorials. It is an opinion piece by an individual who may or may not have any connection with the paper. Anyway, I can see both sides of this. They're not obligated to (and shouldn't) print whatever they are sent, even from a presidential candidate. That would just be essentially free campaign ads. They should print every substantive statement of position or rationale behind it. And so, of course, it is the editor's call whether a given piece is a suitable op-ed, and they're free (and obligated) to reject whatever they honestly deem is not. On the other hand, if McCain intended it to be a direct counterpoint to an Obama op-ed, even if it did fail to adequately address the issues, it probably should have been printed anyway. If he wants to screw up his chance to explain himself, he should be allowed to, and people can judge for themselves. Maybe a better solution to satisfy both sides would have been to print the op-ed, accompanied by an editorial noting what it fails to address.

As far as up and down and in and out, I don't know whether there are any overall trends. It would only be a perfect ellipse if the galaxy were a point mass, which it obviously isn't. It's 100,000 light years across, made up of billions of objects unevenly spread out, and we're inside it. So any particular star is going to be pulled around quite a bit by nearby objects, etc. The overall path would probably be close to an ellipse at the largest scale, but not necessarily, as it could get "slingshot" around through encountering other objects, or even the influence of other galaxies. As for speeding up and slowing down: yes. The arms of the spiral are regions of denser matter, and act like traffic jams. Objects passing through the arms are slowed by gravity.

marine(uc): As SwansonT said, in order for evolution to take place, you need replication and variation. In other words, something which recreates itself, contains the possibility to change, and which can pass on those changes into future generations. With those conditions satisfied, evolution is basically inevitable, but without them it just doesn't occur. All living things possess those qualities, but something like water does not. Where the first life came from was not the result of evolution, but from different processes. And going from water straight to a living cell is skipping a lot of steps. Water by itself is never going to be anything but water. However, things like complex organic molecules, enclosed cell-like structures, and even sections of RNA do form spontaneously under the right conditions, and those are the sorts of places to start looking. The line between "non-living matter" and "a living organism" is pretty fuzzy. As for substances besides water being the basis for life, you're right. There's nothing in the definition of life about water, and there's nothing about the process of evolution that requires water be present. There almost certainly is life on other planets that uses other chemical structures instead. However, water is extremely good at nurturing life, and is probably as good or better than anything else. Also, the only life we've actually seen (all the life on Earth) comes from water-based environments, and everything else is just guesswork, so it's natural that we'd look for liquid water when we're looking for life on other planets. Anyway, the beginning of life is not yet fully understood, but there are some plausible hypotheses floating around. Look up "abiogenesis" for more information.

Well, the theory is that the war brought us out of it (or at least hastened the recovery) because it involved unprecedented government spending and employed literally millions of people. In other words, it was an enormous public works project, just like the New Deal programs only even more so, and there's no reason it had to be a war, unless maybe to gain sufficient political will. Of course, there are plenty of people who dispute that reasoning entirely, and say we would have recovered faster without either the New Deal or the war. And, of course, afterwards it left us with the self-perpetuating military-industrial complex, which remains in good times and bad.

More or less. But those are definitely approximations, given the enormous complexities involved. The sun isn't moving "due north," either, so I suppose that means the planets move in kind of "slanted" or "leaning" helices. Well, objects in our solar system are not in just one plane - the planets alone vary by ten degrees or so, and comets and other objects are generally inclined a lot more. The galactic plane similarly isn't perfectly defined (it is, after all, about 1000 light years thick). However, roughly speaking, they're inclined about 60 degrees to one another.

Even on the scale of the history of civilization, younger sex is the norm. "Waiting until marriage" is also prevalent, but it's important to remember that thirteen was considered old enough for marriage in most cultures and for most of history, especially for females. For the record, I'm not advocating either "norm" - we're definitely better off waiting until emotional maturity catches up with physical maturity, I do think that "statutory rape" with large age differences is rightfully considered a crime, and I have no problem whatsoever with sex outside of marriage. I guess I'm just a product of my times that way...

Well, the real answer is "an infinite number of different reference frames," since you can set your reference frame as whatever you want. What I think you're going for, however, is probably the center of mass of the galaxy. That's usually the frame implicitly being used when talking about the "sun's motion." If the sun were moving north relative to that frame (which I actually don't know, but I'll take your word for it), the Earth would be moving in a helix (not a spiral, but commonly called one) relative to that same frame.

To be fair, McCain is pushing nuclear power. I sort of get the impression he's just pushing that because Obama isn't (he's been pretty hostile to nuclear for most of his political career), but I guess it's better than nothing.

From the perspective of the Earth, the Earth is motionless.

I know this sounds like a smartass answer, but I still have to say: 1 + 1 = 2 Foundation of all mathematical abstraction.

Sort of. There is a certain, fixed amount of energy needed to break off an electron, called the ionization potential. However, it doesn't really work the same way as latent heat in melting and boiling, since it doesn't happen at a fixed temperature. In fact, the line between normal gas and plasma is quite fuzzy, since a) almost any gas is going to have some ions, b) the transition is gradual as temperature increases, and doesn't happen all at once, and c) a gas will behave like a plasma even if only about 1% of its atoms are ionized. Thus, it's not totally incorrect to think of it as a quality of hot gas rather than a separate phase. Calling it a separate phase is the convention, but that's mostly arbitrary compared to the differences between solids, liquids, and gases.

Can't really do that without specific drag coefficients, friction, etc. You could just guess, but that would just be another "I think," and might not realistically reflect what two different bikers would actually experience. My guess would be that mass is roughly proportional to volume, while drag is roughly proportional to surface area. Weight, then, would increase faster than drag, favoring the bigger rider. I would also guess that other friction that would be negligible compared to air resistance in this scenario, but I don't know without actually going out and testing it.

What this means in practical terms is that it's just gas that can conduct electricity. What sort of explanation did you have in mind?

Just curious, what arguments do your friends use to say you can go faster than light?

i.e., an asteroid Not really. There's nothing in the definition of an asteroid about physical or chemical composition, aside from it being a solid, coherent body within a certain size range. And a boulder is just a big rock. You would suppose correctly. Not trying to be a jerk, just making the point that using context in a definition is sometimes useful and important. Even if, by some technicality, you were to prove me wrong, I think you still get my point.

Yeah, and you can change a boulder into an asteroid just by flinging it out into space.

I'm not an expert on this stuff (Martin, who is, will probably be stopping by soon enough), but I'm pretty sure there's no theoretical basis for black holes reaching "critical mass." If anything, it's the opposite: if they're smaller than a certain mass, they "evaporate" faster than they grow, and they emit more and more radiation until they "flare out" at the very end, when they're very small. More importantly, though, I don't think it's accurate to compare the singularity at the big bang with the singularity of a black hole. A black hole is a compression of matter, but the big bang was a compression of the entirety of space itself. That's why it wasn't really an explosion like how you're talking about it, since there would be nothing for it to explode into. It's not as if there was a tiny ball of everything in the middle of a big empty space. It was a tiny ball of space. Except that's inaccurate also, since a "ball" has an inside and an outside, and this only had an inside. If you can't picture what I'm talking about, don't worry: nobody can. It can exist in reality and in mathematics, but not in our imaginations.

To elaborate on Klaynos' answer, black holes don't "suck things in" any more than any other object with gravity. This is a common misconception, so it bears repeating. If, for example, the Earth were to suddenly collapse into a black hole, the Moon would continue orbiting in almost exactly the same way it does now. It would still be orbiting an object of the same mass and the same distance away. The fact that that object would now be the size of a marble instead of a planet wouldn't really matter. What does make black holes different (well, one of the things), is how close you can get to them. Remember, the force of gravity from something is proportional to the square of the distance from its center. (So if you're half the distance away, the gravitational pull is four times as powerful.) Here on Earth, the closest we can the center without starting to go inside is the surface, which is still about four thousand miles away. And even here, we need huge rockets to "escape" the Earth's gravity. We would need that same kind of power if we were going to escape from an Earth-mass black hole if were four thousand miles away. But, since that black hole would be tiny, we could get much, much closer, and therefore experience much, much higher gravity. It's not a "different kind" of gravity, but their unique properties (extreme density) mean that things can get closer, and experience more. But again, at the same distance away, the gravity from a black hole is no different from the gravity of a planet or a star or anything else.

That's correct, but I'm not so sure you can completely disregard wind resistance in this case. The main factor, gravity, will have identical effect on both riders, but you want to know who wins. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that at the Tour de France they don't say, "Well, they were pretty close, so I guess it's a tie." (They're not physics students.) So then, the question is who is more slowed by wind resistance. The bigger guy will experience more because he's pushing more air, but he'll also have twice as much force working against it (his weight), so my guess is he's slowed less, and he wins (but not by much).