Sisyphus

Straightforward question, perhaps complicated answers. $100 billion is, I think, many times more than a person could reasonably spend on themselves without going out of their way to specifically waste money (though it is a net worth within an order of magnitude of a few dozen people in the world), so I guess for most people it will be a three part question: how much money do you want for yourself? How would you spend it on yourself? What would you do with the excess?

I don't know. Probably counterproductive?

A reaction to what? The problem of sensationalized news coverage becoming the news itself is as old as journalism. Isn't it? I guess I just don't understand why you're framing this as a phenomenon of the left.

That's pretty much the entirety of Fox's political coverage, no? It's just most of the time, it doesn't leak out of the echo chamber. Exceptions: "ground zero" "mosque," Terry Schiavo, etc.

Eliminating altogether would be extremely undesirable, as there aren't really any workable substitutes for many of its most important applications. And enforcement would be very difficult anyway, due to its generally easily acquirable nature and the strong motives for evading such a law (think the war on drugs times a thousand). However, restricting certainly makes sense in some cases, though usually because of shortages rather than harm directly caused by usage. In fact, whole governments have been based on such restrictions.

More precisely, the clock is running more slowly in a reference frame in which it is moving. Clock A and clock B have some relative velocity. In the reference frame in which A is at rest and B is moving, B is slower. In the reference frame in which A is moving and B is at rest, A is slower. Both are equally valid. Anyway, as Paul Murphy said, the important thing is that the traveling twin has accelerated and changed rest frames 3 times, while the stay at home twin has not. Since simultaneity is also dependent on frame of reference, during those two seconds of turnaround, the traveling twin's present will change to one in which the stay at home twin is older.

I take it you're speaking in Aristotlean terms, which is why people are unlikely to know what you're talking about on a science forum. I do, but I still don't know why motion (that is, change) would contradict identity. Also, this isn't really a physics question, so I'm going to move it to General Philosophy.

This thread is a work of art.

The truth of "asshat" is more poetic than literally coherent, I think.

An ad hominem argument is one which attacks the person making the claim as a substitute for attacking the claim itself. Are you suggesting that shouldn't be discouraged? Or is it that you think that people are using term incorrectly?

Depends on how sensitive its eyes are. 98% is not 100%, which is why you can get a sunburn.

I think the word "calculated" is causing some confusion. I think what you mean is more like "measured." So, yes, something with no measurable effects cannot be measured (he said tautologically).

Of course, that's not unique to zero. No measurement is infinitely precise.

So the answers given are not the ones you want because they are actually correct, and you want one that uses bad math?

The autism spectrum is about a whole lot more than social skills. I think a test that measures to what degree on is capable of thinking in the needed ways sounds reasonable, since presumably that's what is at issue. I don't know how good a tool it actually is for that, but to me it's at least not obviously useless.

If the shirt doesn't reflect any blue light and you shine pure blue light on it, it will look black. Yes. Yes. Yes, exactly. You could tell the difference using different colored lights. What makes the shirt yellow depends on the shirt in question.

The human eye has no way to distinguish between a source that produces both red and green light, and a source that produces yellow light. Similarly, under white light (a mixture of all colors), the human eye has no way to distinguish between an objects which reflects both red and green light (and absorbs all others) and an object which reflects yellow light (and absorbs all others). This makes sense - it's still just red+green photons and yellow photons entering your eye, whether or not it's direct from the source or reflected. However, those two objects would look different under different colored lights. For example, under pure red light, the first objects would look red because it reflects red light, and the second object would look black because it doesn't.

The square cube law applies to everything. It's why a two story house can be made of wood, but not an 80 story skyscraper. So yeah, it's relevant to evolution. In order for an animal to increase or decrease much in size, lots of other things are going to be selected for at the same time. The same can happen to a mouse. An elephant is a "scaled up" smaller mammal. And if you make a mouse as big as an elephant, after all the other changes you'll have to make it's going to end up looking and acting more like an elephant than a mouse, because the overall body plans are dependent on scale. But there's only so much you can change. The largest land mammal is obviously many many times larger than the smallest, and so too is the largest spider thousands of times larger than the smallest. It's just not unlimited.

Well sure. Animals can be different sizes, they just can't be directly scaled up versions of one another. You can have a huge range of sizes of, say mammals (or spiders), but there's a reason an elephant does not look or act like a giant mouse. And any basic body plan is going to have an upper size limit at which it is viable. Spiders have exoskeletons, which for various reasons seems to impose an upper limit not much larger than the largest such animals we see already. Kind of like internal skeletons are not really viable for animals the size of an ant.

The problem is that a spider as large as a truck tire probably couldn't even move or breathe, let alone "pounce" on anything. Body plans just don't scale that way, because strength does not scale in proportion to size, surface area does not scale in proportion to mass, etc. The largest terrestrial arthropod in the world is the coconut crab, and they probably can't get much bigger than that. Coconut crabs are, necessarily, very sluggish in proportion to their size relative to their smaller relatives. Make something that size that can leap out of a tree and sink fangs into your neck, and you'll have to make so many changes that it will be nothing like a spider.

Ha, yes it does. But honestly, I find the view that it doesn't exist to be strange. It seems to mean holding the implicit view that something is only real if it is mysterious.

No I didn't:

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Why would everything be the same color? Color is just the wavelength of light. If you mean what is the use to us of being able to distinguish the wavelengths of light that enters our eyes, then yes, of course, it helps us perceive the world around us. You can still see without it, though. It's the difference between a color photograph and a black and white photograph. One just gives you more information. Both are quite limited, though. Our eyes can only detect a very narrow range of wavelengths compared to all the light that exists. And our color perception even within that range is easily fooled - we can't distinguish between yellow light and a mixture of red and green light, which is why computer displays and televisions can show us all colors using only different mixtures of red, green, and blue light.

Well, Mr Skeptic already gave the complete set of correct answers in post 3 for a fully analog clock with smooth motion. If the minute hand ticks but the hour hand is a smooth motion, then DJBruce's answer is the only correct one, assuming you don't count mid-tick, in which case the question is unsolvable without more information. If both hands "tick," it is simpler: However, I don't know that I've ever seen a clock like that. And if you're going to ask when the ends of the hands are equidistant when the hands are different lengths, then that's unanswerable unless you know the ratio between the minute hand, hour hand, and clock face radius.