Sisyphus

Sagan, like many, used that as a teaching tool, but it certainly wasn't his idea originally. See Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott (which is what Sagan was referencing in Cosmos).

Technically, a "Dyson sphere" is just anything which intercepts all or most of the radiation from a star. A "Dyson shell" is the hollow sphere of solid matter, and it's got all kinds of problems relative to other methods. Gravitational instability, as SkepticLance mentions, is one, as is the ridiculous required structural strength, and the fact that you somehow have to build the whole thing at once. The wikipedia article about them goes into some detail, although it doesn't offer a lot of specific numbers. If there ever will be a Dyson sphere (and it shouldn't have to be said that that is one enormous if), I'm guessing it would be "built" over a very long period of time, and consist of an ever-increasing swarm of orbital objects, be they habitats or collectors/reflectors. Type II civilizations aren't built in a day...

I've heard plenty of plenty of people say it's always bad, but I've yet to hear anyone claim it's always good. I'm not even sure what that would mean - something like Stalinism?

Really? It seems to me they're just saying the same thing you did: "It's about sport, not politics." Were you being sarcastic? Or are you alluding to something else?

On a related note, look at the situation with President Sarkozy. He had previously threatened to boycott the games over the situation in Tibet, but recently softened his stance:

Because the force of gravity varies inversely with the square of the distance between the attracted bodies.

I don't know much about engines, but why wouldn't you expect the car with greater HP to win? That is, if the term "power" when talking about engines is the same as the conventional usage, meaning work per unit time. Isn't torque only important inasmuch as power is a product of torque and angular speed? EDIT: Also, chill out. Why on earth would this subject cause such hostility?

I may be missing something here, but doesn't that just make abstience-only education all the more pointless? My school district had what was probably among the most liberal sex-ed programs around. It began very early (well before anyone hit puberty) and was extremely comprehensive, covering the proper use and statistical effective of every contraceptive known to man, as well as all the different "ways," including the medical significance of, yes, homosexual acts. And what was continually hammered home during all of this was that the only 100% effective contraceptive was abstinence, which is something I don't think most abstinence-only proponents realize. And a lot of people held off on sex for that reason. And plenty of others did have sex (like teens everywhere), but I never heard of anyone having unsafe sex, because everyone knew how incredibly stupid that would be, which is saying a lot for teenagers, who do incredibly stupid things all the time. So it worked. I know that's merely anecdotal, but it was very convincing (and backed up by the statistics anyway). As for abstinence-only programs, they're taught the only alternatives are total abstinence or immediately get AIDS or something. But even an idiot teenager can see that's bull, because they see their peers having sex and nothing bad happening to them. And so they think they're being lied to (they are) and that sex is safe (it isn't), so they get it on anyway without knowing what they're doing, and end up preggers.

That's exactly right. The irony is, of course, that "abstinence education" doesn't even work for that. Teen sex rates aren't any lower, and teen pregnancy rates are much higher. Those statistics are widely available, but abstinence education is still pushed for and practiced in many places. So in a way, it isn't even about keeping kids from having sex (since it doesn't, and we know that), it's just pure idealogical stubbornness. "We must tell them that sex is the worst thing in the world, no matter how much we have to lie to them, and how many lives are preventably ruined (they were sluts anyway)."

It smells like pork-barrel pseudo-corruption to me, but at least it (apparently) ends with this deal, and the place gets cleaned up. Net gain!

There's a lot of truth in that, and it's why hardcore Christians can't really sustain a comfortable alliance with either major party: Democrats are secularists skipping towards Gomorrah, but Republicans are heartless, greedy warmongers. Remember, we've already had exactly one Evangelical President: Jimmy Carter.

How much progress has actually been made is not really clear. Yes, they blew up a cooling tower, but apparently it had already completed its task anyway. They still have nukes, as well as most of the equipment for making more. Also remember that we're basically taking their word for it about everything else, and they've lied before. That said, I don't believe that North Korea really wants a nuclear standoff, and I don't think they were ever really a "state sponsor of terrorism" in the first place.

The full text of both candidates responses:

Anyone following this (I really haven't)? Is it as big of a landmark as the hype would suggest? As far as its immediate impact in national politics, I did like this nugget from McCain: For Obama's part, he has refrained from taking a position on it, about the ban only saying (in an April debate), "I confess I obviously haven't listened to the briefs and looked at all the evidence." He supports individual (rather than merely collective) rights to bear arms, but also "common sense local laws." He was quick to disavow an aide's claim that he thought the ban was Constitutional.

I agree it's good reasoning (and a common liberal viewpoint, incidentally), but it's not the Supreme Court's job to decide whether a law is good, only to decide whether it's Constitutional and to be the highest authority in interpreting it. Otherwise they're just "legislating from the bench," something which one side or the other inevitably accuses them of after every high-profile decision.

Sorry, what does a series of polygons have to do with continuity?

Generally more is meant by "perpetual motion" than "a constant nonzero velocity." Since obviously, as you say, you can pick any constant velocity you want by using a different reference frame. A basic definition of the usual sense is "a closed system that produces more energy than it consumes" or some such.

You mean that's not in Severian's basement?

It did always seem odd to me that something dangerous enough to bury in a mountain for thousands of years can't be put to work somehow.

Agree with that basic distinction, in theory. Iraq, of course, is one giant gray area. You've got a whole bunch of armed civilian groups, some of them killing soldiers, some of them killing each other, some killing unarmed supporters of various groups, and it's not at all clear who's doing what.

Well, are you going to share?

So really you just want judges who will address the issue at hand and not let religious belief take turn them into legislators. I don't think having too many judges who are of a particular belief is a problem, as long as they can keep it separate. And as for judges who can't keep it separate, one is too many, regardless of what religion it happens to be.

What do you see as the disadvantages of being "too Catholic?"

That is a good argument for why natural selection is good at maximizing survival value, but I wonder if survival value need be our only criterion for "value" in general. If, hypothetically speaking, conditions became such that lower intelligence was selected for (far from implausible - our own high intelligence is an evolutionary fluke), then we would evolve in that direction. Yet most of us would probably consider that a "bad" thing, because we place a value on intelligence independent of it's usefulness in propagating our own genes. Thus we might decide it's worthwhile to intentionally mess with natural selection, even while being fully aware of natural selection's power.