Sisyphus

forufes: How about this? http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA111.html Or this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve

What?

The logical necessity I was referring to was that 100% of your direct ancestors managed to reproduce. As for the length of the line, it's not inarguable until you look at the empirical evidence.

Well yes. You and I and everyone else are descended from a very, very long line of individuals who successfully produced offspring. Obviously. Similarly, the human species (and every other living species) is descended from a very long line of species who managed not to go extinct. That's more just logical necessity than employing any principle of evolution.

No I haven't read the book. I just speak English, and know that there was no maize in the Eastern Hemisphere pre-Columbus. Main Entry: 1corn Pronunciation: \ˈkȯrn\ Function: noun Usage: often attributive Etymology: Middle English, from Old English; akin to Old High German & Old Norse korn grain, Latin granum Date: before 12th century 1 chiefly dialect : a small hard particle : grain 2 : a small hard seed 3 a : the seeds of a cereal grass and especially of the important cereal crop of a particular region (as wheat in Britain, oats in Scotland and Ireland, and Indian corn in the New World and Australia) b : the kernels of sweet corn served as a vegetable while still soft and milky 4 : a plant that produces corn; especially : Indian corn 1 5 : corn whiskey 6 a : something (as writing, music, or acting) that is corny b : the quality or state of being corny : corniness 7 : corn snow You can't just decide that a word means something else. Enough already. That looks like wheat to me.

Yes, exactly. He didn't mean maize. Please consult a dictionary. The Egyptians didn't have a word for maize, because there wasn't any in Egypt. That is a far more basic fact than any dispute over translation.

Well, that's extraordinarily silly. So they're claiming this is the "real" 13th amendment? So lawyers (members of the International Bar Association) would be prohibited from serving in government, supposedly. But, that would mean that pretty much every action of government since 1819 has been illegitimate. Since Iowa joined the Union in 1846, then that means it technically doesn't exist. So Iowa Republicans are claiming that they're all frauds. Hmm.

It's British English. "Corn" only means maize in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. I'll repeat myself from earlier. Maize is native to the Western Hemisphere only. That is a fact. ...and I still don't know what this thread is supposed to be about, honestly.

"Corn" as in maize is native to the Western Hemisphere only. There was no maize in Europe, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East before Columbus. The ancient Egyptians did not grow maize. "Corn" is also a generic term for cereal crops, however, including wheat. The Egyptians would not flood their crops. The reason the flood was important was because it left behind extremely fertile soil when the waters receded. This is ridiculously well documented.

The organism with the largest genome yet discovered is Amoeba dubia, a single-celled blob with a genome 230 times as large as humans'. It's not yet clear why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-value_enigma

The problem is that it seems you're equivocating "chance" as in randomly picked from the set of all possibilities with "chance" as in the result of natural processes. Hoyle's Fallacy is a fallacy for that reason.

To be "binary," space would have to be made up of exactly two irreducible components. Is a planet irreducible? (No.) Is there anything in the universe that is neither a planet nor a black hole? (Yes.)

The problem isn't that it's an analogy, it's that it's a fallacious one. And to answer your question, yes, I do think there is a "reasonable" probability, though treating the rise of life as one event and calling the processes "random" are both misleading. And no, I don't know exactly how it occurred. Nobody does. We have some plausible hypotheses about many of the steps. An appeal to ignorance would be suggesting that because we don't know what happened, X must have happened. I'm not doing that.

Is it? I thought you were talking about Fred Hoyle's analysis, i.e. "Hoyle's Fallacy." That is about specific complex structures arising by chance simultaneously.

Chimps are vengeful: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/A+hungry+chimp%27s+revenge+is+sweet.-a0166502025 Probably a lot of other animals are too, depending on how loosely you're willing to define it. The threat of retaliation despite no direct benefit to oneself is a useful deterrent.

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Who is suggesting that fully functional life as we know it would appear suddenly and spontaneously? Is that how you're interpreting "arise by chance?" The rise of life as we recognize the term would be a many step process, and those steps would not have to (and in fact probably could not) happen simultaneously. The "lightning hits bowl of goop" type origins of popular imagination and common straw man do not resemble anything scientists are actually investigating. The origin of life is still mysterious and hypotheses are incomplete, but such as they are they're a lot more plausible than that.

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The surface area of the world's oceans is 361,132,000 km^2, or 3,611,320,000,000,000,000 cm^2. Seawater has a mass of about 1.025 g/cm^3. The top 1 cm of the ocean therefore weighs about 3,701,600,000,000,000 kg. The space shuttle is capable of lifting 24,400 kg to low earth orbit. (That's just to get it orbiting. It isn't even able to reach escape velocity.) So, in order to launch enough seawater into orbit that you would lower worldwide sea levels by 1 centimeter, you would need about 150 billion space shuttles. So, that's the problem.

Well, you have the mass of the first dye, and you're looking for the mass of all the dyes put together. What ratio are those two quantities in?

Well, first of all, we're not dealing with a common ancestor 65 MYA. There were already many species of mammals at that time, as true mammals have been around for about 200 million years. (Plus, remember, there's only about 5000 mammals species today.) You're only dealing with the speciation of, say, primates in that time frame, rather than all mammals. Second, they don't have to be simultaneously speciate everywhere at once. Why would they? It's a tree of life, with branches splitting into more branches at later dates. Not a lawn of life, where everything starts at once. Speciation still happens today. If a bat species diverges into two populations, obviously that doesn't require that it be isolated from all other mammals or all other life, just one another. Third, what, specifically, is hard to believe? 65 million years seems like an extremely long time to me.

A photon is a discrete unit of light. Light is a wave, and thus always has a frequency/wavelength. The "electromagnetic spectrum" is just the range of these frequencies. There is no such thing as a photon without a frequency or outside the electromagnetic spectrum. Pretty much anything, I would imagine, I guess depending on what you mean by "interact." Well, all matter emits light, at frequency dependent on temperature. No.

Well, first of all, I think laws enacted as a reaction to a specific event tend to be ill-conceived in general, and political and emotional rather than pragmatic and principled. The prime example is the response to 9/11 (everything from starting wars to banning shampoo bottles on airplanes), but pretty much whenever anything bad happens, politicians either feel they have to do something so as to not look helpless, or even worse they use it as an excuse to do something. That is not how or why decisions should be made. So, with that word of caution, there is still legitimate debate over whether we should be drilling in deep water. I don't have sufficient technical expertise to evaluate risk, or, for that matter, ecological damage. I do think it's likely, based on comparisons with other oil spills, that the damage will be beyond what I would consider acceptable. So, provisionally granting that, the next question becomes, how likely is something like that to happen again in X timeframe, given industry practices and the various institutional flaws the Deepwater Horizon incident brought to light? Was it a total fluke? Or was it a total fluke that it hasn't happened more often? How do the risks and projected damage compare with whatever alternatives would take the place of deep water drilling? I think a limited moratorium, until risks can be properly reevaluated (since it seems they weren't properly assessed in the first place), is a not unreasonable course of action. I also think we should be exploring ways to gradually ween ourselves off such practices (rather than chanting "drill baby drill"), but that an outright permanent ban would be very premature.

There is no such thing as stationary in any absolute sense. If you are stationary in one frame of reference, then you are moving in all others. And, there is no reason to choose one frame of reference over another besides convenience - the math works exactly the same. (e.g., when doing calculations about the motion of a car, a stationary Earth is generally preferable. On the scale of the solar system, a stationary Sun is generally preferable.) So, how much time/space distortion you are experiencing depends entirely on what frame of reference it is measured from. Also, the universe does not have a center. (But that's a whole other can of worms and not important to your question.) No. Light always moves at the same speed, from every perspective, in every frame of reference. The man on the train will see the light moving at C (the speed of light) relative to himself. The man on the platform will see the light moving at C relative to himself. Note that they will not agree on how fast the light is traveling relative to one another. This thought experiment just shows that there is no such thing as an incompressible object. The upper limit to how fast the force can be transmitted through the bar (via a shock wave) is at the speed of light. In reality, no material even comes close to that limit.

That is what Descartes says, yes. Though really, "I exist" is a stronger statement than "a mind exists," which is a stronger statement than "thought exists." The concept of the mind as a single, irreducible being is a supposition, and not a trivial one, either. In fact, I don't even believe it's correct. (Yes, I know I use the word "I.") Incidentally, Descartes does also go on to argue for the reality of the perceived world, though I only vaguely remember how that argument goes. I think it rested on a theological-like argument against a "deceiver god."