Sisyphus

I realize it's not autism, but since the symptoms seem pretty much identical, I'm wondering if the causes are related. We still really don't know what causes autism, right? Maybe it's also impaired communication between parts of the brain but for more subtle reasons than pieces missing.

That would depend on how big your simulation is, eh?

The general statement, "our existence is a simulation," is not falsifiable (as far as I can think of) and hence not science. However, there could be many ways you might make a more specific statement in which there would be testable consequences. What's amusing is that even if such a hypothesis were confirmed correct, it still wouldn't really be confirmed, because the "true" reality might or might not be in itself a simulation, and we a simulation within a simulation. What makes this idea so annoyingly plausible is that we could one day design such a simulation, in which we design a reality complete within its own rules and even it's own intelligent beings who don't know they're in a simulation. Presumably we could design whatever rules we want, even rules that are "physically" inconsistent but intuitively work out, so our simulated beings could live in a world of gods and magic spells and ghosts and whatever else we want. That, of course, gives a plausible (if extremely unlikely) account of how such things might exist in our world, if our world is, in fact, a simulation. It also gives an account of how seemingly nonsensical and inconsistent behaviors we see in nature in say, quantum mechanics, might in fact really be nonsensical and inconsistent, because the gods are playing dice in a much more literal sense than Einstein meant...

Again, I'm telling you that's incorrect. It's not just me saying this, it's a well known proof. Hell, Isaac Newton himself proved it in the Principia. It doesn't matter where you are inside in the hollow sphere, the forces always cancel. It is the exact same problem as being within a hollow sphere of electrical charge. Remember, when you're right next to one wall, the matter pulling you towards the wall is having more effect, but there is much more matter pulling you away. Also, the false positive thing is meaningless. 1) You can't "fool" matter. 2) There is no force needed to explain circular orbits. It's just inertia and perpendicular gravity.

Interesting. I wonder how that condition relates to autism.

With the icecaps melting at an unprecedented rate, the Arctic Ocean and lands north are suddenly not looking quite so useless as they were before. Soon there will be fully navigable sea routes north of Russia and Canada, potentially cutting thousands of miles off of many shipping routes. Glacier-locked islands are now potential ports as whole new coastlines appear, and vast natural resources, including a whole lot of oil, will soon be accessible. While some are still insisting global warming is some kind of elaborate hoax, an international power struggle between governments who do take it seriously is already beginning. Canada and Denmark are involved in bitter territorial disputes, with some of the most hilariously polite saber-rattling the world has yet seen. (Several planted flags have been removed and graciously presented to their respective embassies.) Canada is also launching an ambitious "boots on the ice" campaign to establish more permanent and substantial military presence in the Northwest Passage, and the Canadian navy aggressively challenges all ships passing through (including even American vessels). Most bizarre of all, Russia has planted a flag on the bottom of the ocean at the north pole, asserting a right to the seabed and all resources therein contained. This last is a product of a maritime law treaty which, for some reason, gives nations control over continental shelves which extend from their territorial waters. It is signed by over a hundred nations, including all the major sea powers except (predictably) the United States. For now it's mostly just a bunch of weird news items and Daily Show fodder, but the fact is that a lot of people are taking this very seriously, and a lot of money and strategic advantage is at stake. So what do you guys thinK? A new colonial era in the north? Panicked overreaction?

I don't know what you mean by "false positives." In classical physics, you just integrate for the whole mass to get a vector for gravitational pull. In relativity you're looking at the shape of space where you are. In neither case does it matter what the attracting body looks like. "Center of gravity" is an abstraction and a useful simplified approximation at long distances, but it has no physical being. I'm not sure where you're getting "leftover potential energy," or what you think that has to do with an orbit.

Your basic premise is false. An object inside a uniform hollow sphere experiences no gravitational attraction from that sphere, either towards the center or towards the walls. After that I don't know what you're talking about.

No, that's right. The people of New Hampshire are crazy about their primaries.

No, I don't think so. It's just a fundamental constant, a property of the universe itself. Actually, I'm not even sure if it would make sense to talk about it having a different value, since the definitions of speed and how we experience speed, i.e. distance over time, etc., all seem to fall out of it and be a consequence of it. Make .5C the new C, and everything slows down, including the clocks, so it's the same as if nothing slowed down. That's just speculation, though, so don't take me too seriously if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about.....

Mathematically you can always get smaller, without limit. Physically we don't know. It's possible that space is continuous (and therefore infinitely divisible), and it's possible that it's discrete. The latter is very, very weird though. As for matter being broken down, we don't know that either. We thought we've found the fundamental, indivisible building blocks before, and we've been wrong a couple times. For example, the word "atom" means fundamental building block, but clearly that proved to be premature.

But wouldn't that make it least likely?

That really is amazing, but I wish I knew how they calculated those odds. 10^24 to 1? Seriously? What factors could possibly give you that result? If it is true, though, it's wonderful news. It would mean there's probably still life in comets, right? And if that's the case, then we'd have good chances of finding it wherever it could be supported, just because comets crash into stuff. Also, I guess we should expect lots more missions to passing comets...

Oh, to the contrary. Occupation almost always takes place after wars, and it always has. What do you think Reconstruction was after the American Civil War? What do you think we did in the Phillipines after the Spanish American War, or Germany and Japan after WW2, or what we're still doing in Korea? Keeping the peace and rebuilding has ALWAYS been an important job of the U.S. military. Now, looking at those examples, obviously we've had very mixed results, and our failures weren't exactly because we "went too easy on them." Reconstruction was mostly a failure, because the South thought we were being too harsh and domineering. The Philipines was a hopeless quagmire because the natives didn't feel like trading one foreign ruler for another. We didn't police Germany after WW1, but our harsh conditions (backed up with vague threats) were a major contributing factor to WW2. Germany and Japan were successes, soundly and unconditionally defeated, but afterwards treated with dignity and, yes, "fairness." Korea, also, was a success, even though we're still there, because we're there to assist only where the legitimately sovereign government asks us to. Are you kidding? If a foreign power invaded the United States and forcibly deposed the President, then yes, I would most definitely support the new guy less. I'm not fond of our President, and I wouldn't vote for him, but of course I support our democratically elected government. Except that sometimes it is. In Vietnam, we "won" almost every single battle with overwhelming and often indiscriminate force, but we made no progress. Why? Because our enemies were more popular than we were. That's a matter of fighting the war and deposing the powers that be. We're talking about after the war. We didn't harshly police them, because we didn't need to, because, ultimately, they liked us (albeit probably just in comparison to the past and possible future alternatives). We attacked Iraq in the first place 90% because we thought they were a threat, in the form of WMDs. Or at least that's what we were told. And even barring that, do you really think the Israel/Palestine problem is the result of coddling Palestinians?

Iran is much more homogeneous in terms of ethnicity and religion, it's true. There are significant minorities, but not in such great numbers that an ethnic civil war would be really plausible. However, there are many other complications, such as... Iran is a very large country, with 2.5 times the population and 4 times the area of Iraq. For some reason (I don't pretend to know why), we can't secure the road to the Baghdad airport. How would we ever police Iran? Iran is more or less democratic (There is a "Supreme Leader," but that leader is appointed by the elected legislature.). Overthrowing a democratic regime, no matter how crazy the demos seems to be acting, would be spectacularly unpopular around the world, not to mention that by definition most Iranians would rather we didn't. We'd have less internal fighting and more fighting us, and any "regime change" we forced would lead to a government with less popular support, not more. Iranian culture is in a delicate place. Sabre-rattling Islamicists are in control, but there is also a large and growing peaceful movement for liberal secularism, particularly among the youth. Rolling in on tanks, thereby confirming everything those Islamicists say about us, would be just the thing to crush the very spirit we want to foster. The Iranian and new Iraqi governments are all buddy buddy now. Do we seriously want the Iraqi government that we've gone to such extreme lengths to install and defend to turn against us? Why did we oust Saddam, again? I don't know what to do about Iran, but I'm quite sure invasion is not the answer.

Well, there would be two stages. First, you exert a force (pushing) on the chair, and the chair exerts a force on you. You both move, in opposite directions. This is where the chair moves along the floor. The center of mass for you/chair, however, has not yet moved. Next, you exert force in the opposite direction, pulling the chair towards you. (You probably do not even notice that you are doing this part, because it is just an automatic response for keeping your balance.) However, this time, the chair does not move relative to the floor, because the lateral force between chair and floor is less than the static friction of same. Hence you move but the chair does not, and the overall center of mass shifts in the direction that the chair moved. The end result of these two motions taken together is that you end up sitting in the same position in the chair, but the whole you/chair system has moved relative to the floor.

I don't think he means it's an "alternate" version or something, just that perhaps a little more explanation is warranted for how something which could only be formed in the heat of a supernova ends up in little nuggets in the Earth's crust.

What I mean is this. You push the chair quickly and move it by moving your own center of mass in the opposite direction (by pushing off the chair). Then, you move your center of mass back again (by pushing in the opposite direction), but that part of the motion is slow, meaning the force on the chair is less (but over a longer period of time), meaning that force cannot overcome the static friction between chair and floor. In a frictionless world, the chair would just wobble back and forth, and the whole system of you and the chair would not change it's center of mass.

NYTimes article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/us/politics/12straw.html I realize this is a very poor indicator of future success, but it does, at least at this point, make him "the man to beat" among the Republicans, and should gather him so momentum. Romney got 32%, Mike Huckabee got 18%, and Sam Brownback got 15%. Neither Giuliani nor McCain participated, presumably out of fear that a poor showing in a venue dominated by hard right-wingers and social conservatives would hurt their chances later on. I don't have much commentary personally beyond saying the field looks pretty bleak, as I can't think of anything good to say about Romney or the other two. At this stage social conservatives are carrying the day, but I guess that's to be expected in the early primary.

I'm not quite clear on what you're describing, but I'm pretty sure all mystery will disappear once you take friction into account.

It certainly looks bad now, but then, I have a hard time understanding what they hoped would happen. What would the surge "working" look like? Certainly Tony Snow hasn't given a straight answer.

I keep waiting for ridiculous pork-barrel spending to be a major campaign issue. I thought maybe the Gravina Island "Bridge to Nowhere" would be an effective poster child for the corruption of the system, but I'm starting to think it's just impossible. Like the military-industrial complex, once this sort of thing is allowed to happen, there isn't any plausible, non-catastrophic means for it to stop. The only ones who theoretically have the power to stop it (that is, Congress) have a huge vested interest in not doing so.

Ha. Stupid subconscious.

I doubt killing ODB would have much effect on Islamic terrorism. He's in hiding and very unlikely to be actually coordinating anything. His value is as a symbol, and in that he's valuable to them either alive or dead. Dead he's a martyr. Alive he is a symbol of the impotence of the West in their failure to find one guy despite an unprecedented manhunt. At this point I don't even think it would be much of a morale boost in the West, since it's taken so long, and if we do find him it won't seem like anything but dumb luck.

Yes, actually, and sorry if I came off curt before. A geometric series is an example of exponential growth. Specifically, it is discrete exponential growth, as opposed to a continuous function, say. What this guy probably meant to say was arithmetic growth, which is neither linear nor exponential. The rate of growth is increasing, but at a linear (or at least non-exponential) rate. For example: Linear 1 (+1) 2 (+1) 3 (+1) 4... Arithmetic 1 (+1) 2 (+2) 4 (+3) 7 (+4) 11 (+5) 16.... Geometric 1 (x2) 2 (x2) 4 (x2) 8 (x2) 16 (x2) 32...