Sisyphus

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Turkey.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin Abdullah Gul, currently Turkey's foreign minister and devout adherent to conservative Islam, has won the election to become Turkey's new President, a post traditionally held by a secularist. The Prime Minister is also an Islamicist. This is potentially very significant internationally because of Turkey's unique and delicate position. Strict secularist and Islamicist factions are of roughly equal strength, and it is a country that is both European and Middle Eastern in culture. It has a long history of ethnic and religious persecution, but in recent years there have been huge reforms. It is trying to join the European Union, a bid which is the mostly hotly contested so far, mostly because of doubts about Turkey's commitment to secular and liberal ideals. If the bid fails, it could be seen as a deepening of the divide between Western ideals and Islamic culture. If it succeeds, it would be the only nation with a largely Islamic culture in the EU. It could be a true "foothold" of democracy and liberalism in the Islamic world, proving the two are not incompatible and that there need not be a war of cultures. Also, it would be self-motivated, which is absolutely essential. This is in contrast to something like Israel, which, among other things, was founded as a foothold of Western ideals in the Middle East, but imposed from the outside, which obviously has backfired spectacularly. Hence, the election of Islamicist leaders have made a lot of people very nervous, because so much is at stake. Gul seems to recognize this, and has been assuring everyone that he will respect Turkey's secular traditions and the secular nature of the Republic, and that he is committed to helping Turkey join the EU. However, past statements have not all been consistent with this approach, and only time will tell if he is just paying lip service until he can consolidate power more fully. The leadership of Turkey's "fiercely secular" (according to the Times) military, which has "forcibly deposed four governments since 1960," is in open protest at the result, complete with implicit threats. The situation could potentially, therefore, devolve into democratically elected Islamicists vs. unelected but armed secularists, a situation sadly familiar elsewhere. Um, thoughts?

I'll say!

...........So in other words, in answer to the opening question, "No."

Again, "directly acts?" If you just mean pull on one another, then the gravity of a black hole has no different effects from the gravity of a planet or a star. If the Earth, say, were to collapse into a black hole somehow (never mind how), that black hole would continue orbiting the sun in exactly the same way, the moon would orbit the black hole, all the satellites and the international space station and everything else would all stay in exactly the same orbits as they are now. The only differences would be in the region that is now the interior of the Earth, where the force of gravity, instead of linearly decreasing to zero as it does now, would exponentially increase as you move towards the center, up until the event horizon and whatever lies beyond. But, before the event horizon, it's still just "a lot" of gravity, not any kind of "special" gravity.

Define "close enough to act on each other." In most circumstances, you can just treat them as ordinary massive bodies, in which case they'll most likely just orbit one another. If there is no lateral motion, like any other massive bodies, they'll crash into one another. I don't what would happen then, but I imagine you'd get a crazy release of energy. Or maybe not, since all that energy would have to just be reabsorbed into itself as mass, and you'd just have one, bigger black hole.

Gravity is a force which attracts every piece of matter to every other piece of matter, from a pebble to a human being to planets and stars. It is everywhere. It cannot be blocked, and it cannot be lessened except by moving farther apart. The larger the piece of matter, the more it pulls on other matter, and the more other matter pulls on it. It is what holds planets, stars, and galaxies together. It is what causes the Moon to orbit around the Earth and the Earth to orbit around the Sun, instead of just flying apart in straight lines. As I said above, it is a force that exists between all objects. It can also be understood as a field (somewhat like magnetism), or even as the "shape of space." All of these are just mathematical models for predicting behavior, and we know pretty much exactly how it behaves in any given situation. Beyond that, "what it is" is kind of mysterious. As for "harnessing it," we've been doing that since the stone age! Any machine that needs there to be an "up" and "down" in order to work "harnesses gravity." Look at a water wheel. Gravity makes water flow downhill, and we harness the energy of that gravity by using the water's flow to turn a wheel.

So there are about a hundred Muslims for every Jew. I still think it's fair to talk about "Muslims, Christians, and Jews" because Zionism and the existence of Israel is still the single biggest battle cry among Muslim Jihadists. (Like I said, disproportionate.) The Abrahamic religions are inextricably tied together in common origin, millennia of common history, a common holy land. Each is defined in no small part by being different from the other two. Each is defined in no small part by how they struggle against those particular other beliefs and philosophies. Frankly, I'd say it's impossible to talk about religious conflict in one without talking about all three. That's why it's different from something like Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, which is little more than a matter of two expanding, unrelated religions bumping into one another.

I guess you have to ask why those particular candidates are the ones people give money to. Often it's those who will benefit a particular private interest, but those kinds of donations are usually spread around to anyone who will accept them, which is generally everyone. There are differences between the parties, yes, but between, say, one Democratic candidate and another, what makes the difference is who the donors think have "ability, vision, and leadership." No, it's not particularly democratic (obviously those who can afford to give more have a bigger say), but it's also not unrelated to real merit.

(Not that it matters much, but the moon is about 1/80 the Earth's mass, not 1/6. The surface gravity is 1/6, but that's because the moon's radius is much smaller than the Earth's, and you're closer to the center when standing on the surface.)

Wow.

What do you mean by that? You think Clinton is an "extreme element?" How so? I agree with the first sentence of this post and completely disagree with every subsequent sentence. They aren't really things I feel like arguing about, I just thought it was funny.

Yes, I've heard of Knoxville, but I certainly wouldn't call it a city. But then, I'm your typical arrogant New Yorker in a lot of ways.

Indeed, gravity is always a symmetrical force. You always exert exactly as much force on a body as that body exerts on you. Just another example of Newton's Third Law of Motion.

I'm not a Hillary supporter (I'm not an anyone supporter, yet), but I do find all the massive amounts of irrational hatred people have for her kind of silly. I have yet to hear a non-lame answer when I ask why people dislike her. It's always "she seems insincere" or "she's too ambitious" or something. Oh really? And a politician, you say? The truth is 1) she lacks personal charisma (but is able to make up for it by being a shrewder political strategist than most) and 2) she has had powerful PR machines trying to turn her into a caricature for 15 years now, and lots of people buy into it. The truth is she's an extremely smart, moderate liberal pragmatist, she's less cynical than most of her colleagues, and she's very impressive in a debate. You could certainly do worse.

There are at least five things wrong with that sentence.

I'm sure this sort of thing is done all the time, but I'm also sure it has almost no value, for the reasons discussed above. There are too many other variables, and parties change too much over time to get any kind of meaningful answer.

There's also the factor of buoyancy when falling through a fluid such as air. If the mass of the displaced air is significant compared to the falling body, that will make it fall slower, as well. The "practical" weight of the falling body is the weight of the body - the weight of the air it displaces. As mentioned above, a lower weight has a harder time overcoming air resistance. Sometimes this value is even negative, as in the case of a helium balloon, and the object "falls" up. But again, to reiterate, neither air resistance nor buoyancy play any role in a vacuum.

If you fire it faster than the speed for circular orbit, your firing point will become the perigee of an elliptical orbit. If it's faster than a certain threshold (escape velocity), it will escape the orbit altogether. If you fire it slower than the speed for a circular orbit, your firing point will become the apogee of an elliptical orbit. This is what is happening when it hits the ground, actually, just the surface of the planet is getting in the way. If you fire it non-horizontally, your firing point will be some other point on an elliptical orbit, or it will escape, depending on trajectory and velocity.

...but smaller than New Jersey. I dunno, on the one hand I agree, Jews are a tiny group compared with Christians or Muslims. On the other hand, they have played a disproportionately large role in religious conflict. Zionism vs. fundamentalist Islamicism is probably the bitterest, most sustained, and most significant religious conflict in the world right now, and that's saying a lot. Also, for what it's worth "Jews, Christians, and Muslims" is sometimes used not as a list of three things but as one group, i.e. the Abrahamic religions.

All sorts of crimes can be solved with complex math. I seen it on the TV.

47 is 42, corrected for inflation.

My tangential 2 cents: I haven't read the God Delusion or any other work of Dawkins, so this is admittedly uninformed speculation, but it strikes me that, just based on the title, that isn't necessarily an unscientific opinion. In other words, whether God exists is definitely not a scientific question, but what causes the belief in God, and whether that belief negatively affects other aspects of thinking, are scientific questions. If Dawkins thinks that belief is a pathological delusion, and he has reasonable arguments to back it up, that's hard to criticize. He's guilty of insensitivity, perhaps, but if religion is a plague, then I suppose fighting that plague is more important than sparing feelings.

I have a hard time picturing what one would actually see in this situation, say, from the hub looking out or the rim looking in.

That's what mass does!

The Milky Way still seems way, way bigger than you'd need to fool a few billion beings. I'd also point out that what is physically possible is quite unknown, since, by hypothesis, everything we know about physics is just a part of this particular simulation. Only metaphysics could give us useful information on the "real" reality.