Sisyphus

They're really only "particles" in the sense that they're quantized and interact at a single point. Why does "something there" imply mass?

Do they address the whole "water habitat being enormously more massive than air habitat" issue?

Depending on how serious of an interview: In the trailer for "Clash of the Titans," the dramatically released "Kraken" looks nothing like a squid or cephalopod of any kind. Are you offended by this? Or is it a good sign that Hollywood apparently no longer sees squid as horrible monsters to be slain by handsome sword-swingers?

Forces cause things to accelerate, and acceleration is a change in the velocity (speed and/or direction). Things which do not have forces acting on them do not experience acceleration. i.e., they have a constant velocity, whatever that velocity might be. This is Newton's first law. Answering "why" it is is kind of tricky, because it's just a fundamental law of how things work. However, maybe it would help to think of it this way. Does it at least make intuitive sense that something which is motionless won't spontaneously start moving unless some force disturbs it? Well, Newton's first law is basically only saying that. The difference between zero velocity and some nonzero constant velocity is only one of perspective. If you are moving relative to the Earth, it is just as valid to say that the Earth is moving relative to you, and you are motionless. All the physics works exactly the same. (So, to more directly answer the question of "why would the earth keep moving in a straight line if there was no gravity," it's because in order to not move in a straight line, it would have to accelerate, and acceleration requires force.)

Oh, I agree with that. I don't think a deficit some years is fundamentally bad, but it has to be balanced with surpluses. And surplus means elected politicians have to be willing to cut spending and raise taxes even when they don't have to. And of course both of those things are wildly unpopular, and neither party wants to do either. And because our leaders are essentially short term managers for long term projects, that means that somebody gets to save the day, and somebody has to be the bad guy. And nobody is willing to be the bad guy. And when, miraculously, somebody is willing to be the bad guy and create a surplus, the sob stories and the tax activists start up. "It's your money! Demand it back!"

I don't think credit is the problem, per se. Credit makes capitalism possible. The problem is credit without a clear plan and secure means for paying it off. Which basically comes down to the same thing: only buying what you can afford, and not treating a credit line like it's the same thing as money.

There's twice as much energy relative to the ground, but isn't it the car's frame of reference that matters more? With the 200m/s car going east towards a stationary car, after the collision they're both going 100m/s east, right? So the first car accelerates 100m/s west, and the second car accelerates 100m/s east. Which is the same as what happens when they're both going 100m/s to start with and come to a stop. The only difference is that in the first case they still have kinetic energy relative to the ground, but that shouldn't matter unless they then hit something else before rolling and air resistance bring them to a stop. Right?

If you don't agree with the religious principles, then they should be irrelevant to your decision. It would be silly to specifically not do it just because somebody else's religion says they have to. And just because it's not founded on religious belief for you doesn't mean it isn't a part of your identity. Is it a part you want to preserve, or is it irrelevant to you? And do you enjoy the tradition? Those two questions are all that matter, IMO. For myself, I only keep up the fun parts of Christian traditions, most of which I guess are co-opted earlier traditions anyway. It makes Bill O'Reilly furious for some reason.

I don't know about that. Using dissatisfaction with our current crappy system to imply need for their specific changes, yes. But it's Republicans that have made most of the public debate just fear mongering, with "death panels" etc. Which is perfectly natural - You can't really promote irrational fear of the status quo, but you can of change.

So, to summarize: A head on collision between two cars going 100m/s is basically the same as hitting a stationary car going 200m/s, or being hit by a car going 200m/s while stationary. This is not the same as hitting a concrete wall going 200m/s, because the wall is a lot more massive than your car and gives a lot less. The masses of the colliding bodies matters. Just like it's not as bad for a mosquito to hit your windshield at 200m/s, because, since the mass of your car is so much greater than the mosquito, it's the mosquito that does almost all of the accelerating. Splat for the mosquito, no noticeable acceleration for you. (Or splat for you, but the wall doesn't move.)

If they really want to vote for those things, they should propose them as separate bills later.

I know it's hardly the point, but some of those are not hypocrisy. For example, arguing that tax laws which benefit you should be changed is not hypocrisy. Really, all but Streissand are at least debatable, and a couple are just silly. (I'm not interested in debating them, though.)

Sure, in the same trivial sense. At no point is the statement "it is [meaning the present time] yesterday" valid, by definition. The time we today call "yesterday" did occur, but at the time we called it "today," because that's what the word "today" means: the day on which the word is communicated. If it's meant in a non-trivial sense, that existence is in fact only composed of what we think of as the "present" while other times are illusory, well, then that can't be disproven. However, it's also kind of silly. All we have to go on points at the reality of different times, and it's not like we are incapable of moving beyond our instinctive conceptions, because modern physics is all about just that. Let's see, what else could "tomorrow never comes" mean? Why "comes?" The statement takes a view of time as moving past us, rather than us moving through time. The alternative would be "we never reach tomorrow." Or "tomorrow doesn't exist," if you think of time similarly to a spatial dimension. Or.... in a more figurative sense? What we imagine the future to be never quite comes to pass? I agree with that. Then the analog would be that the past is never quite as we remember it, which is also true, though not directly related, so a conditional statement isn't appropriate. I suppose it's similar though, in that "the past" and "the future" have these psychological auras about them that we never actually experience in "the present." So. What significant insights about me have we gained?

Do flat earthers even believe in gravity? What if they think it's not masses attracting, but just a universal "down" force? Or maybe the Earth is just perpetually accelerating uniformly up?

Liquids don't become solid in coagulation. The clot is made up of solids that are ordinarily carried along by the liquids. Disclaimer: I know very little about the actual mechanisms.

Whether there is "implied consent" in a marriage or other established relationship depends on the couple. My live-in girlfriend and I certainly engage in unprompted behaviors towards one another that would be wildly inappropriate on a third date. That doesn't mean you have a "right" to do whatever you want with your partner against their will, it just means that an expanding set of behaviors are "opt out" rather than "opt in." And yeah, that can include sleep, since anything like that will wake you up pretty quick and give a clear "opt out" opportunity. YMMV.

I don't think morality is about harm done, I think it's about intent to do harm. Attempting to kill someone and failing is far worse than causing someone's death by accident. If you're having sex with a coma patient, then presumably you think of them as a person (otherwise you wouldn't be having sex with them), and you are violating that person. Would you mind be raped as a coma patient? Do you think the victim would mind? Yes? Then it's immoral.

It seems like the main problem is that you seem to think that thermal energy = heat. It doesn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy You don't extract work from something just because it has a temperature. You extract work from a difference in temperature. And creating a difference in temperature takes work. More work than can be extracted from it. So, to take something which is warmer or colder than the air, there is a certain amount of energy which it has to gain or lose in order to be in thermal equilibrium with the air. That flow of energy is called heat. And that amount of energy is the most you can ever extract from the process. If it were otherwise, I could power my apartment with my refrigerator, instead of having to power it. (But I suppose that's exactly what you're claiming I could do!)

I've thought about something like this too. Like an "every law expires" amendment, to fight the natural tendency of government to get ever larger. No matter how it's phrased it will probably be easy to get around, though. I disagree strongly. Making it flexible is forward thinking. And the way it's constructed now it is basically only for extreme cases, because amending the Constitution is so difficult. Strongly agree. Strongly agree. Funny, but who makes up the exam? Way too easy to manipulate as a serious suggestion. Strongly agree. Pointlessly limiting. Agree. Maybe. That would essentially just be to repeal the 17th amendment, which did have good reasons to exist.

I wouldn't say that. The most recent amendment (27th) was ratified in 1992, 18 years ago. Some other gaps: 12th-13th: 61 years 15th-16th: 43 years 21st-22nd: 18 years 26th-27th: 21 years

Pretty sure you can just add the fields together. That would make it less than double the strength, because a point at the surface of the nearer magnet would be a magnet's-width distant from the far magnet. This is something that it would be pretty easy to test, though, at least crudely, by for example seeing how much weight they can support.

You don't even have to look at the mechanism to know it can't work according to these numbers, because that would be a perpetual motion machine. A "kender engine" powered by a temperature differential cannot generate more energy than is used to create that differential in the first place. There is an error in reasoning somewhere.

Merely having a past isn't sufficient or having a future is not sufficient. My grandfather was alive in the past, but he's not now, in 2010. He isn't a person. And he wasn't a person in 1850, because he didn't exist yet. Though since it turned out he did exist at some point, you could say that in 1850 he "had a future." Similarly, a zygote might exist now, but since I don't consider that a person already, then the person it might or might not become seems to be in fundamentally the same category as my grandfather in 1850. A future person is not. I should point out, because it technically is the subject of this thread, that most religions seem to make this distinction, too. Belief in an afterlife doesn't necessitate belief in "pre-existence," does it? (Though some believe that both are logical necessities.) Another thing to consider is that the zygote in fact doesn't have a future, unless it is brought to term. So the "future self" of an aborted fetus actually has less existence than my pre-grandfather. All it has is a potential future, but then so do my grandchildren. Or any of the other millions of combinations of sperm and egg that never came to pass. But then you say, doesn't the comatose patient only have a "potential future" too? For that matter, don't we all, by the very nature of the future? Well, yes. But we can form a consistent system that allows to society to exist when we give rights to beings with a past and a potential future. We don't if we try to give rights to beings without a past. Ultimately, I think that's what it comes down to.

Events ABCDE and abcde are also just deductions. What we "observe" is our retina registering a few photons. From that we deduce that a giant ball of fusing hydrogen exploded millions of years ago. This isn't obvious. An ancient might think it's a hole in the Celestial Sphere. Similarly, you deduce that giant lizard-like creatures once walked the earth, based on curiously shaped rocks.