Sisyphus

"Hey, what kind of lines work on you?"

I've always found that nearly-scalding hot water is brings the best and longest-lasting relief from itching, but I realized my explanation for it (that it "fries the nerves for a while") was unscientific, and I really have no idea how it works. Looking into it, I discovered that the whole phenomenon of itching seems to be very poorly understood. Can anyone give a decent account of the mechanism, and answer why heat (and for that matter, scratching) brings relief?

That's not quite true, but the point stands that in the Cold War we got into the habit of supporting bad guys just because they were our bad guys, no? I'd also remind everyone that the Korean War was fought not by the United States but by the United Nations, which is rather different (or at least I think it is). And even that, probably the greatest success of "world policing," has resulted in a fifty year military commitment and the particular ire of a rogue nuclear power - N. Korea doesn't even direct rhetoric against S. Korea anymore, but it does against the United States!

I suppose it could be a complication inasmuch as making Sudanese people poorer could make the situation worse, not better. It's also not clear who it's supposed to inspire to act. The impotent Sudanese "government?" The Janjaweed?

It's hard to say. Some policing has turned out well, and some hasn't. On the one hand, you have, say, the existence of South Korea. On the other, you have endless commitments, international resentment, and the intoxication of power. We in the U.S. have gotten very used to being able to just "change" anything we want, anywhere, with basically no sacrifice on the individual level. How accurate that is is questionable, but the mindset is quite real. The debate is always "should we" and not "can we," and it results in a funny perspective. The U.S. has military operations of one sort or another in most other countries, and this seems normal to us. Yet the idea of a hundred different foreign militaries operating on American soil without American permission sounds completely absurd, and it is completely absurd. The prospect of war with Iran is the prospect of invading Iran. Nobody in their wildest dreams imagines that Iranian tanks in Washington is even the remotest possibility. I believe this power is extremely corrupting, and it is of unprecedented importance to constantly work to keep things in perspective, and, as with any absolute monarch, our national conscience has to be especially robust to take up the slack from lack of adversity. So I guess in answer to the question, interventionism is not necessarily bad, but it MUST be approached with the utmost skepticism and reluctance in all cases, because our situation constantly pushes us towards abusing power, and it must be compensated for.

"Generate lightning" is rather vague. Do you mean, like, "shoot" lightning at people? Or cause lightning to strike? Or cause a contact shock?

I'm not necessarily disputing that it would "implode," I'm just asking what the significance of that fact, if true, would be. If the "Iraqi government" is completely unable or unwilling to control the violence on its own, then what does that mean? If the guys we're trying desperately to support are weaker than the guys we're trying desperately to wipe out, what does that mean? I was suggesting Vietnam as an analogy inasmuch as it was a situation in which we threw in our lot with an uncommited and corrupt faction against a more passionate and numerous adversary. In that situation, victory is impossible, even if you win every battle. Is it exactly the same? No. Is it useless as an analogy? No.

Is it possible that one double murder, unusual only in its brutality, is less of a sellable news story than an entire collegiate sports team of high prominence implicated in rape? I ask because I don't think I can name any "ordinary" murders, in the last few years, that have become big national stories. Yet there have been tens of thousands of murders in that time. There has to be a high body count, like the "Beltway sniper" or the V. Tech shootings, or celebrities involved, like OJ. I mean, I wouldn't claim that Al Sharpton isn't a hypocrite, but he's one man, and usually with this stuff his antics are the bigger story than whatever tragedy he's exploiting. I'm not particularly impressed by the National Review's argument, here.

I suppose you would have to ask what the effect the continued presence of the American military actually has. Are we really preventing civil war, or just helping to arm various factions within it? Are we suppressing terrorism, or acting as a magnet for it? We have captured or killed thousands and thousands of enemies of many different organizations and ranks, but do the attacks diminish? Is the "insurgency" in its "last throes," or is there even an end in sight? Is Darfur a helpful analogy, wherein one group has the will and power to slaughter another if there's no one (presumably us) there to stop them? If that's true, then that implies the new puppet regime lacks the will and/or the power to prevent genocide in their own country. What is the significance of that? Are they simply incompetent, or are their motives suspect and contradictory, their commitment far less than our enemies? If so, would Vietnam be a better analogy? Can anyone who's been following this for the past four years even straight-facedly claim to know what a "failure" would actually be?

Would you even need to shield it? I mean, there would be leakage, of course, but how much? If it would take 2 million years for Mars to lose its atmosphere again, then who really cares? It can be built up faster than its lost. That's what I was thinking. Isn't the Martian atmosphere non-toxic, though? It's almost all CO2, right? You couldn't breathe it, but I doubt it would matter if it mixed with habitat air as long as you maintained the O2 levels.

It seems like there has to be value in an atmosphere, doesn't there? It would act as a meteor shield, at least. It would also moderate the temperature some, so you wouldn't get the extremes of the moon. Maybe it would also make airtightness less an immediate problem of life and death because leaks would be slower (and the atmosphere is non-toxic, albeit oxygenless). It has extremely high winds, which might be useful for power (or maybe not, what with the really low pressure). An atmosphere also leaves open the possibility of airborne vehicles, whereas on the moon you'd have to use either ground vehicles or rockets to get around. Again, though, feasibility is questionable because of pressure.

Can you support that? I really don't know how the "ho" incident unfolded, but it seems improbable that Imus merely saying that would get any significant coverage before people (like, say, Al Sharpton) started getting outraged.

You can pretty much go in circles forever. You can say, "God doesn't have to comply with logic we understand, He's incomprehensible." To which I can reply, "If you're positting an entity about which nothing can be said and which we can have zero comprehension of, then you're not thinking about anything at all, and the word 'God' doesn't signify anything," to which you can counter, "But that's part of the incomprehensibility!" to which I say, "But that's just tautological nonsense!" to which you say, "Such is the irreducibility of faith," at which point we have no choice but to just go drinking.

I wonder how feasible large-scale renewable (e.g., from bacteria) production would be. Perhaps using sewage? I don't know. We probably wouldn't see those kinds of efforts until after "peak natural gas," anyway.

Mars is still a lot more "Earth-like" than the moon, inasmuch as it has more gravity and an actual atmosphere. It also has a lot of water, albeit mostly trapped in the polar ice caps. However, there is a small amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, and the surface is at least relatively close to the temperature range for liquid water. For these and other reasons it would almost certainly be by far the easiest to terraform. It has its own problems, obviously, but none quite as severe as the problems of, say, Venus, or Jupiter's moons.

<TAZER!> (Wouldn't it be cool if that worked?)

Well, there are a few issues here. Was that particular statement bigotted? I don't think so, at least not in the way you're suggesting. Bigotted against atheists, I guess. Context is important. Is it a statement that warrants an apology in general? I don't think so. Maybe a "sorry for phrasing it poorly and if it was taken the wrong way" kind of thing would be appropriate. Is it analogous to Imus' "nappy headed hoes" thing?Not exactly. Sharpton was being serious, but was probably misinterpretted. Imus was intentionally being racist, but as a joke. It is analogous inasmuch as a significant number of people might be offended by perceived bigotry. They are different in terms of intent. Is Al Sharpton a hypocrite for refusing to apologize, while not even accepting Imus' apology?Pretty much, but it is debatable, because the intent was different. However, I would say he is hypocritical for taking the semblance of bigotry extremely seriously when it's directed towards blacks, but not in any other case. Does Al Sharpton, as a public figure specifically devoted to combatting bigotry, have an extra responsibility to be careful in avoiding it himself? Probably? Was Sharpton unreasonably harsh in his approach to the Imus incident? Yes, absolutely. Imus deserved a rebuke, maybe, but not to be made into a pariah. Lighten the **** up. Is there "media bias" revealed in the discrepancy in coverage between the two incidents? Hardly. The news story with Imus was not what he said, but that so many people were offended, and the chain reaction that caused. There's no story here.

Or in the words of Homer Simpson, "Could God microwave a burrito so hot that even he couldn't eat it?" I'm going to agree that the question is meaningless. Each term precludes the other from signifying anything. If God is omnipotent, then the phrase "a rock so heavy he can't lift it" is empty of all meaning, so the question doesn't make sense. It's like asking, "Am I bigger than a flibbertysnot?" The word "flibbertysnot" has no meaning, and so the question is not a question except grammatically. It is also similar to the often-asked question, "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?" If one exists, then by definition, the other can't.

From what I remember reading, they wouldn't necessarily be faster except in certain kinds of tasks. Specifically, tasks which require checking different possibilities of something, like codebreaking. I might be wildly off about this, but it has something to do with every permutation existing in a probability function, then collapsing in such a way that only the right answer can be real. In other words, crazy magic. I suspect there would be more general increases in performance, though, since other processes could probably be done in a different way so as to exploit the quantum properties. Again, though, I don't know much about it.

So, wait. Is there a big conspiracy in the scientific community because scientists "hate progress?" Are the basic facts not a matter of consensus? Or is it just that, in the words Stephen Colbert, "reality has a well-known liberal bias?" ANYWAY, yes, I agree there's a building sense of urgency. People who ten years ago couldn't care less are taking steps in everyday life. Politicians who five years ago talked about it derisively have softend their rhetoric or reversed their positions. In the public perception I think it's gone from being a scary but largely hypothetical scenario to mainstream and immediate.

Diligence, study, and practice, I'll agree with. But originality? Memorizing the "best" response to a few hundred permutations? Blech. I prefer puzzles. I can really sympathize with Fischer Random chess.

Hehe, good old crab. The best response is "anything else." To (sort of) answer to the question, my openings are usually pretty boring and predictable (d4, nf6, bla bla). Then again, openings in general are the "boring and predictable" part of chess, so I won't apologize.

Your causal account doesn't make sense. "Equal distribution of weight allows greater pressure right?" No, it doesn't. Also, even if that were the case, it can't be the cause of 20 more volcanoes in the last 50 years.

Ok, am I the only one who actually read this bill? You're damn right it's sensationalized: the entire substance of it is expanding the legal definition of gender from only genetic to include self-identification, for the purpose of including it under existing non-discrimination laws. There is nothing about "banning references to mom and dad" or anything like that. How about instead of flipping out about what opponents of the bill say is in it, we look at the bill itself: The text of it is here: http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/sen/sb_0751-0800/sb_777_bill_20070223_introduced.html Yes, I know the "political correctness is out of control" bandwagon is a fun one, but that's the whole problem. It's so commonplace to exaggerate PC stuff that it becomes conventional wisdom that there is this big problem that everyone can get outraged about, and it doesn't even exist! The big irony of it all is that the most politically correct position you can take is to complain about political correctness! Thing is, I would even vote against this bill. I think it's too vague and too redundant, and I think there should be a legal distinction between biological and non-biological categories, even if both should have the same status. But those ridiculous alarmists destroy their own credibility by intentionally clouding the issue, and it really pisses me off.

Apparently the moon gets charged like this every 18 years or so, when its orbit grazes the edge of the Earth's magnetosphere and it picks up a bunch of ions from the solar wind. It could be annoying for lunar astronauts because the surface dust will act "stickier," but that's about it. See: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/418/3?rss=1