Sisyphus

Bipedalism wouldn't have evolved if there hadn't been benefit all along the way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipedalism#Evolution In the future, you shouldn't make assumptions like that. Just because you don't know how something evolved, doesn't mean there wasn't a good reason. That said, there is going to be random genetic drift that doesn't necessarily provide much benefit, especially in small populations. Just probably not a fundamental change like basic locomotion.

Correct.

Well, it could disappear completely. It just wouldn't gradually fade away. But yeah, a rare recessive gene could be dormant for a very long time, getting passed down and spread out but never expressed. A carrier of one copy of a gene has a 50% chance of passing it on to his children. If both parents are carriers, then there is a 25% chance that they will both pass it on, at which point the child will have two copies and it will finally be expressed.

Less time will have passed for the clock that accelerated and was brought back to rest again. It's what actually happens, not just appearances. As for why it happens, the short answer is that all of special relativity can be deduced as logical necessities from the observed fact that light moves at the same speed in all frames of reference. In other words, for that to be possible, a, b, c, and d all have to be true, where a, b, c, and d are some pretty amazing properties of time and space. And, sure enough, a, b, c, and d are experimentally confirmed! For a more specific answer, you're asking a very big question. "Explain relativity to me."

Skin tone is affected by many genes. One gene doesn't get diluted - you can have one copy of it, two copies, or none.

Yes, science is a continually self-correcting process, which is one of the reasons it is the best tool we have for understanding the world. I don't know what non-constant laws of physics has to do with that more than any other new discovery, or what either has to do with Stephen Hawking. But back on topic: if this were true, couldn't it resolve the alleged problem of cosmological "fine-tuning?"

I live in New York City. I can afford to own a car, but I don't, because it is literally more trouble than its worth here.

Well, apparently Roman propaganda still survives. That might cheer up the senator.

I agree that that is what "artificial" means, implicitly. It's an artificial distinction, to be sure, but it's a natural artificial distinction to make for beings like us, not to mention useful. Just don't forget its artificiality, or else you naturally end up with artifacts like the naturalistic fallacy.

Sadly, that's not true. I know this is OT, but the United States also has a considerable history of banning books, mostly under the pretense of "obscenity" laws. For example, James Joyce's Ulysses, now generally considered as one of the greatest works in the English language, was classified as obscene and banned in the United States from 1921-1933. At various times "sedition" has also been criminalized and interpreted broadly, wherein for example advocating communism could get you arrested. Laws in individual states have been stricter, and some remain in effect today. It is, for example, illegal in many states for convicted criminals to publish books about their crimes.

So wait, are you correcting yourself within this post? The last sentence is right. The "two events cannot switch chronological order" part is not right.

It doesn't matter whether anyone sees the results. What matters is whether the physical layout forces the photon or whatever to go through one slit or the other. A detector alone would accomplish this.

I personally know a number of Christians who believe they are fighting a holy war by being a member of the U.S. armed forces. My understanding is that that point of view is not very uncommon, though I don't have any statistics. Sorry, I thought my rhetorical point would be clear. I was implying that equating all of religion with radical Qutbism is the same as equating all of Islam with radical Qutbism, and that both positions are unreasonable.

That is absolutely not true. But if it was, what would be your point? 100% of them are religious. Why should I care what a religious person thinks? Why the hell should I allow a place of worship on American soil, when religious people attacked America nine years ago today?

Ok, how about we change that from "any Muslim" to "any religious person." When religious people stop blowing stuff up, maybe then I'll give a damn what you have to say. Do you see how unreasonable that sounds?

Islam is not an entity. Really? Because I hear that discussed in Western media all the time, usually preceded by "we're not allowed to say this."

It isn't that you can know the position and not the momentum or vice versa. It's that both have degrees of uncertainty that are inversely proportional. i.e. the more precise the particle's position, the less precise its momentum. I don't think you would ever experimentally have a situation where you have an exact value for one and infinite vagueness for the other, though I guess that would be the extreme case. One way you could increase the precision of momentum measurement while decreasing precision of position would be by "looking" at it with longer wavelength photons, which would disturb the momentum less but have a lower "resolution" than shorter wavelengths.

Iraq and Afghanistan are very different places, and I think speaking of them collectively is misguided. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was largely secular, relatively modern, and even urban. There was religious tension and persecution, but between groups who actually lived side by side basically peacefully before the American invasion. It is now divided into disparate factions, but if anything that will force them to work together. (You can't establish an oppressive theocracy without a large majority of one religion.) It might still all go to hell, but I think there is reasonable hope for the emergence of a liberal democracy, or something at least tolerably close to it. But Afghanistan? There you have no liberal traditions whatsoever. You have more or less religious hegemony, so there's no motive for flexibility and cooperation leading to secularization. You have a society violently divided along elaborate tribal alliances. You have a very rural and dispersed population. I think that kind of "victory" will be a lot harder. But is it actually necessary? What are we fighting for, really? Ideally, we'd like to help them establish their own liberal democracies, because liberal democracies don't fight each other. But is that the only way? Saudi Arabia is an ultra-conservative monarchy with only the Quran for a constitution, but they are also the single most loyal ally to the United States. On the other hand, they are also the culture that produced 14 of the 18 9/11 hijackers and Osama Bin Laden himself. Have "we" "won" in Saudi Arabia?

Muslims would not be burning Bibles or Christians (at least not because they're Christian). Or at least they wouldn't be if they were actually following the Quran (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_Islam#The_Qur.27an_on_Christianity). Obviously any group that includes a quarter of the world's population is going to include members who exhibit all sorts of crazy behavior, and claim to somehow speak for those 1.57 billion people. And indeed, there are a large number of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who believe they are there doing Christ's will, and I imagine a lot of Muslims in those places think "the Christians" ought to stop blowing up their wedding parties, and such. Of course, that is an unfair and irrational position to take.

I don't know about "baseless southern christian bullshit," but I'm not going to pretend it isn't irrational, 70% agreement or no. It's not that I don't see the (extremely simplistic!) connection, it's that I think it's dumb. Just like I don't think burning an American flag and threatening violence is a rational response to hearing about a few dozen idiots burning Qurans, no matter how popular such a response might become, or how emotionally satisfying it might be for those who don't feel obligated to think. And yeah, I think making a big deal out of it in the media is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in both cases, perhaps deliberately so. And yes, I do think that someone who discovered the "ground zero" "mosque" on their own would be much, much less likely to be angry about it than someone who had it brought to their attention on Glenn Beck's terms. And FWIW, I think objecting to a boxcutter factory in Shanksville would also be silly. (That doesn't mean I don't see the connection.) I don't think that would happen, though, despite the stated rationale being more or less equivalent, because I don't think the stated rationales are really what it's about. But that's a whole other can of worms, I guess.

Frankly, yes. Sure, maybe some people would be angry if they knew about it, or maybe not. After all, it isn't even at ground zero, and it's not even the first mosque in the immediate neighborhood, and the beliefs of its backers are directly opposed to those 19 murderers. I have a hard time seeing what someone looking at the facts rather than the discussion could find to object to. And I'm sure a great many people would think a Koran-burning was stupid and offensive, had they happened to hear about it despite it not being reported on. But certainly in both cases it is the discussion itself that made it an "issue."

I think what Pangloss means is that "NIMBY" is a pejorative term implying a hypocritical position: I want this to exist, just not near me (even though it has to be near somebody in order to exist). Since you seem to support the lawsuit, also calling it NIMBY is confusing. I'm guessing you just didn't mean in it that sense. How about we not be so quick to insult people when we don't immediately understand one another?

NASA astronauts consume an average of 0.84kg of oxygen per day, so that's 307kg per year. How much trees produce is harder to find, as I guess it depends on the type of tree. I searched for answers and got a huge range of figures, from "a mature leafy tree" providing enough O2 for 10 people, to 22 trees (type unspecified) needed per person, or 18 people per acre of "forest." In any case, if all you need is oxygen, I expect you'd be better off with algae, which can reproduce like crazy and is "all leaf."

Indeed. Moved to science news. Per the topic, meteorites that size might not even have reached the ground. Meteorites in the 5-10m range hit the Earth about once a year, and they just explode in the upper atmosphere. From the ground it might look like a distant lightning flash. They need to be a lot bigger to really cause damage.

lemur, I don't think anyone is blaming Einstein for nuclear holocaust.