Sisyphus

I love it. And somewhat appropriate, given the chaos of taxonomy and eventual downfall of Pluto that it in large part caused. As for the moon, well, "nomon" can mean law, name, custom, or conventional wisdom. This moon, then, is symbolically without and against those things, appropriate for one so utterly remote from light and the ways of man.

The most obvious choice would be the ACLU, although their efforts are pretty spread out.

Also be wary of appeals to emotion. Graphic descriptions of disgusting and unsettling things are usually a sign that the person has no real substance to their arguments.

Yes, that's more or less how I understand it. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.

I don't think Iran could be particularly effective in a stabilizing role, anyway. It would just get non-Shiites really angry, and confirm their paranoia. (Imagine if JFK had had daily phone conversations with the Pope.) There's a lot of Hatred towards the United States in Iraq, but at least it's uniform hatred, and we're not perceived as favoring one ethnic group over another.

Because the collapse is not all stuff moving together. Technically, nothing is actually "moving" at all. It's just getting closer, since space itself is shrinking.

Nah, this is pure military-industrial complex at work. Disgusting and inevitable.

It should hold for general relativity, too, unless I'm being stupid. Moving stuff around xyz-coordinates shouldn't change the metric.

I remember reading that somewhere. I think it was calculated based on the mass density of objects intersecting Earth's orbit, be it solar wind, loose dust, intersecting meteroids, etc. It couldn't actually be measured, I don't think. I'll try and find a source.

I think this is the source of the confusion. The answer is no, since the Earth-ball system has not become any closer to everything else. There is still the same overall density, despite this gravitational collapse, since there is just more empty space around it. Analogously, if I move all the furniture in this room into one corner in a big pile, I've greatly increased the furniture density in that corner. However, I haven't made the room any smaller, and I haven't affected the overall furniture density, since its the same amount of stuff in the same space.

A couple random things: Even ignoring gravity, mass can be calculated via inertia, i.e. from the force needed to accelerate the mass a certain amount. Or, simply, mass is proportional to force divided by the resulting acceleration from that force. This (inertia), I think, is more fundamental to mass than gravity, but since they always go hand in hand it usually doesn't matter in practical terms, especially with large objects like planets where gravity is always measurable. The Earth's mass actually increases every year by a few hundred tons because of space dust and meteorites. However, this is an immeasurably small fraction of the Earth's total mass.

I was in the high school library doing an assignment that required me to use news websites. CNN.com refreshed, and I saw the world exploding. It was very, very surreal. I didn't live close enough to actually see anything, but there was a smell in the air, and fighter jets screaching overhead all day. Probably the most disturbing moment of the day was the perverse glee I saw on a few guys' faces. "We're going to war!"

I wonder, is merely being the appropriate (and nearly constant) distance from the sun, being of roughly Earth-mass, and having sufficient water and organic elements enough? Seems like you would at least also need a thick and largely non-reactive atmosphere, maybe a decent magnetic field, and perhaps other things as well. Assuming these calculations are right, I wonder how many of these "Earth-like" worlds are actually Earth-like.

To be fair, though, do you really not think there's a difference between perjuring in a private lawsuit and being (alright, allegedly) dishonest with regards to matters of war and peace?

As long as it goes back to the Reagan Administration supporting all these people, I don't see what any Democrat would be complaining about. There's clearly enough blame to go around, and little enough difference between adminstrations that it would be hard to say either Democrats or Republicans are especially responsible.

Is the question whether this actually violates any British law? If so, I have no idea. However, if the question is whether there ought to be a law, then I wholeheartedly say no. That would be a very silly reason to so blatantly attack civil liberty.

Yes, I'm sure you can imagine all kinds of things. I myself am not at all convinced, and I honestly don't know what would happen. More peace, probably, but at the cost of a precedent of crazy racist fundamentalists getting their way with violence. I'm not advocating that Israel should annihilate itself, in any case. Pointless inasmuch as they can't guide policy decisions, I suppose, but pointless is not the same as uninteresting. So sure, if Israel had never been formed, would there be more peace today? I don't think there's any question that there would be, but the ultimate result is still up in the air. Perhaps the presence of Israel will ultimately force the Islamic world to confront (and ultimately embrace) modernism sooner than it would otherwise. Or maybe it has the opposite effect, by making modernism into the enemy. I think that's a fair question.

That's really exciting. Life similar to us (in the sense of being able to exist in the same environment) might be fairly common after all. And interstellar colonization is not necessarily an absurd proposition. Fantastic news on both counts.

The Middle East is part of the world, isn't it? Even beyond that, if you don't think the existence of Israel makes Islamic-Western tensions any worse, I don't know what world you've been living in. Is it the cause of everything? No. Would it's nonexistence solve everything (or anything)? Almost certainly not. But yes, it definitely makes things worse.

I haven't had any formal training, but I've found in real life the most important principle of self-defense is a state of mind. In other words, react instantly, suddenly, and viciously, but stay perfectly calm and use the other guy's momentum and ego against him. I am neither big nor strong (though I'm stronger than I look, which helps), but I've certainly humiliated my share of would-be bullies. Care to elaborate on that?

Can I ask what's so great about New Zealand?

Agreed with ParanoiA. I don't know whether that's off-topic, since I don't really understand the point of this thread.

Haha, are there really debates about fox hunting? You crazy limies...