Sisyphus

I'll definitely keep an eye on it (thanks for bringing it to our attention), but there's no way this is like swiftboating, at least not yet. For one thing, I think hardly anyone will actually believe the Clintons are racist (except the Limbaugh crowd, who will believe absolutely anything about them as long as it's negative, but they're not voting in Democratic primaries!). Second, I believe that Obama has been able to achieve such broad support specifically for NOT playing the race card. He and his advisers must be aware of that, mustn't they?

That is true, but that's not merely perpetual motion. Motion does not imply a change in energy. A steady orbit due to gravity would be perpetual motion, and would not require infinite energy, in theory. In practice, of course, there is always entropy which manifests itself in a variety of ways, but that is not related to the orbit itself. Taking away all other factors, there is no reason an orbit cannot continue forever. That's not really the reason. Classically, an electron orbit could continue indefinitely. Yes, basically. No. In fact, quantum uncertainty means that nothing is 100% anything. I take you to mean a finite amount of time in which you end up in the same situation you started in. Right? Can't happen. That is one of the possible ends to the universe, yes. See heat death of the universe. I don't think that hurts...

I can't, because none exists. You know, like I said.

The laws of physics actually do allow for perpetual motion, and a planet orbiting in a true vacuum would be an example of it. What they don't allow for is getting out more energy than you put in. That's what most "perpetual motion machines" really are: sources of energy from nowhere, which is impossible. However, since in the real world you're always going to have "friction" of one kind or another (no truly closed systems, entropy, yatta yatta), in order to actually have perpetual motion, you would need a magical source of energy to make up for losses. So to summarize: there could be perpetual motion, there just isn't.

Every few weeks FOX News makes up a new story about Obama and then retracts it a few hours later. It's enough to get the stories out there, and is almost certainly the source of those factual inaccuracies bouncing around the internet. Obama hasn't commented on this publicly, but he has refused to go on any FOX program.

Does nobody care about MY claim? The Roman Empire included present-day Israel, the conquest of which was favored by the gods. You might even say "promised" by them. I am descended from Roman citizens, and thus the land is MINE by right, and the peoples living therein owe my kind a WHOLE lot of back-tribute.

The point is obviously mockery, but it's mockery of a very particular group of people. Not "Christians," but "Christians who pretend to be persecuted for their beliefs (which is offensive to those who actually are) AND who feel they have to make war on science to prove their faith." Is it going to win "converts," whatever that means? Probably not. It's a joke. A joke. A not particularly mean joke, at the expense of people who deserve it. A little healthy, light-hearted satire of the self-righteous. You don't like it? I really, really don't care. It's a bumper sticker. Get over it.

Obviously, Italian-Americans are the rightful rulers of Europe, North Africa, and most of the Middle East, inasmuch as they are descendants of the Roman people, whose dominion is blessed by Jupiter. (Sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn't it?)

Russian...

That would be an awesome campaign ad.

Welcome to another round of Stupid Election-Year Pandering. This is fairly typical of the genre, citing absurdly revisionist history and making supposedly patriotic gestures that ironically are directly and unambiguously opposed on multiple levels to the principles on which the nation was founded. Just wait, we'll see another flag-burning amendment proposal any day now.

They're pretty much all various forms of entropy. The question is how is it going to manifest itself.

That's not different from every other animal, it's the same as any animal with a very large, continuous range. Until recently, it wasn't plausible that a south African would mate with an east Asian, but there still would have been a link between them via the continuous presence of human beings. "Very little interbreeding" is a world of difference from "no interbreeding." You would get some genetic tendencies depending on the environment and degree of isolation, but it would reach equilibrium very quickly due to the genetic exchange that does take place. As for populations that actually were isolated, they wouldn't speciate for a different reason: not nearly enough time. "Native" Americans, for example, can only trace their ancestry there a few thousand years, during which time there were several crossovers from the Old World!

Isolated populations could be considered starting points. "Races" are probably a bad example of that, since what we culturally consider to be races (white, black, asian, etc.) have never actually been isolated from one another.

They do reach a maximum speed. There is a constant force of gravity acting on them, which would accelerate them faster and faster, but there is also the opposite force of wind resistance, which increases the faster you're going. Eventually, the force of wind resistance will equal the force of gravity, and so you'll have no net force, and so you'll stop accelerating.

Agreed 100% with iNow. I'd also add that blaming other people (like your roommate) is not only incorrect but very unfair to them.

I agree with Glider that the question is poorly phrased. Yes, of course it's human. It's a human embryo. And when I cut myself I lose human blood, and if I develop a tumor it will be made of human cancer cells. But is it a human being? No, not especially. I don't mean that flippantly, it really is a gray area. To us, the status of human being obviously carries a lot of weight, and it is considered special because of (and is defined by) many unique traits, none of which are really shared by an embryo. A human embryo taken in itself is not fundamentally different from any other embryo, which is to say it is a blob of tissue acting as a parasite. That "it will become" a human is true in a sense, but the same can be said of the pre-conception egg and sperm considered together, or of the food the mother eats and whose mass will be incorporated into the embryo. Life is a continuous process, and does not lend itself to strict boundaries.

Not that long term they don't. Not with fundamental research, and not where there is no expectation of profit at ANY point. Sorry, it just doesn't happen.

I think maybe the people of Madagascar might be upset by that, anyway. People anywhere are going to resent being "colonized." Really the only solution is to pack up and head to Antarctica.

I very much doubt it. Upstaters have no particular attachment to Giuliani, and NYC is more than "slightly" against him. He was viewed as kind of a cartoonish villain before 9/11, and he's been using NYC as a punchline in his national campaign, and he's taking ridiculous amounts of credit for things he had nothing to do with, like being some kind of hero on 9/11. Resentment abounds. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, won two state-wide elections here by broad margins, despite all the people who hate her so much.

I agree wholeheartedly that that is a problem. But consider, also, the problems with the alternatives. Science is expensive. Somebody has to pay for it. Government, at least in theory, is the one institution not guaranteed to be driven by somebody's private interest. Any private institution WILL be, whether that interest is idealogical (like funding "creation science") or economic (like trying to prove that the medication I sell works best, or that the cigarettes I sell aren't addictive, or that the pollution my factories produce isn't really hurting anyone). Even private universities, which for the most part have no inherent biases in their findings, are still biased in the direction of their research towards projects that will make them money (weighing cost of project vs. donor-gathering prestige). The government, therefore, despite its own obvious shortcomings in this regard, nevertheless is the only institution that can fill certain roles. Namely, big, expensive projects that won't make anyone enough money in the short term to justify private investment.

That's the difference between focusing on multiple things at once and performing multiple tasks at once. The latter is possible, but only when those tasks have become familiar enough so as to be automatic and not require our conscious attention. That's why you can, for example, walk and talk at the same time.

Is there any indication that any of them do? Is there any indication that those are more heavily "Democratic" beliefs? After all, Reagan claimed to see a UFO, too, and he also believed in astrology. BTW, for the record, it matters less to me whether Ron Paul believes in evolution than any of the other candidates, because I don't believe he'll push his view on anyone. It still matters, though, because it demonstrates a capacity for ignoring scientific fact. I wouldn't give anyone a pass for believing in psychics, astrology, etc. for the same reason.

I've thought about that myself, in the context of trying to imagine what life would be like if we "cured" old age. (I can't, BTW. Our whole society is built on the fact that people grow old and die.) Not just with scientific ideas but with social ones, as well. If you plucked people out of various cultures and eras and showed them the modern world, almost all of them would be horrified, albeit for a whole range of different reasons. Or in politics: the main draw of Barak Obama is that he is NOT a baby boomer. Why? Because baby boomers are still fighting the battles of their youth - the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, etc. Actually, science is one area where you would expect this not to be the case. It is, after all, a system with built in methods of improving itself. And yet sadly, it doesn't seem to be immune, either. I once had the great privilege of talking with Freeman Dyson, a very respected and very old physicist, about essentially this very subject. He recalled being a young man talking with the ridiculously revered Einstein, and how sad it was that he just couldn't accept the ideas of quantum mechanics that the young guard were pushing forward. Now, of course, the roles are reversed, and Dyson thinks that most of the ideas that excite young physicists are foolish dead-ends.

To make a more optimistic view, this might actually have the opposite effect her assassins (whoever they might be) intended. Bhutto was an inspiring story, a pro-western, female, populist leader standing up to the increasingly authoritarian regime. Now, however, she's a martyr, with the sympathies of the entire world. There is no way that the people of Pakistan will just let this die down now, and real democratic reforms are inevitable. Perhaps not in this election (the party leader is now Bhutto's 19-year-old son - yikes), but damn soon.