Sisyphus

This part is incorrect. The moon is indeed slowly receding, but this would never cause it to break away. It would continue to recede until tidal friction had tidally locked the Earth to the moon, and they both rotated at the same speed (and revolved around each other in the same period). At this point, the day, the month, and the lunar day would all be about 47 of our days, and it would not recede any more. However, it would take about 50 billion years for that to happen, and conditions will change long, long before then. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedOh, and BTW, most of the answers to the questions in this thread can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon

Only about a quarter of the national debt is foreign-owned, and only about 20% of that is owned by China, for about 5%. Japan owns more. Not that that's a great situation, but it's quite different than the impression you usually get listening to people talk about it, which is that all of our debt is owed to China.

I wasn't agreeing with Akhenaten. I was just saying that motion is always relative. That 1kg ball is not already moving through space. There's no such thing as inherently moving, just moving relative to something else. In one frame of reference, it already has a velocity of zero. Relative to the center of he galaxy, it's moving quite fast. And relative to it, the center of the galaxy is moving quite fast. And relative to some other frame of reference, it's moving at 99% of the speed of light. All of these frames of reference are equally valid.

The point being that it needs that entropy to exist. Life cannot be self-contained, and so couldn't ever absorb the entire universe (and thus become self-contained by definition).

There is no such thing as "inherent motion," just relative motion. So yes, it's quite possible to be motionless, and much easier than what you propose. You just have to choose a reference frame in which you have zero velocity.

Alright, but the point is that the plant uses energy to decrease entropy inside itself, and that energy was generated with a greater increase in entropy in the sun. So there is a net increase in the whole system, always.

One has to consider entropy. A living thing decreases entropy within itself in exchange for increased entropy externally. This is a fundamental property, probably. So it doesn't seem like life could ever maintain itself if there was no nonlife, since entropy will have to increase somewhere.

Just as a tangential aside, there are indeed many many place names in the United States that come from native names. For example, 22 out of 50 states: Nebraska Kansas Kentucky Massachusetts Connecticut Missouri Iowa Wisconsin Illinois Minnesota North Dakota South Dakota Mississippi Texas Utah Ohio Michigan Oklahoma Alabama Tennessee Alaska Hawaii

Oh I agree. I was just saying that borrowing money is not inherently irresponsible, if there is an actual plan to pay it back. And we shouldn't be throwing around 100 billion dollars (yearly cost) we don't have. But maybe that isn't what we're really doing. If it really is successful in lowering health insurance costs, in the long run it would actually save money.

A big part of getting a high credit score is having debts and paying them off on time, thus demonstrating that you are stable and responsible enough to do so. There are lots of other things that go into the calculation, but that's pretty fundamental. It's not exactly a "financial responsibility index." It's a "statistical likelihood of being a good investment for lenders" index.

They claim that it is substantially cheaper, more efficient, and more adaptable than existing fuel cells, and that is possible (though not yet sufficiently demonstrated). It isn't just a scam, since they have units in actual use, but it isn't really clear what it's all about, either, apparently due to a combination of intentional secrecy and sensationalist reporting. Not magic, not even a fundamentally different technology, but still potentially game-changing if it can live up the hype. Or maybe it's just the Segway of electricity generators.

Haha, that's a new way to take "the Earth goes around the Sun." Your home planet is so fat, when it goes around its sun, it really goes around its sun.

I should think the sun would be pretty easy to find.

What kinds of wave power? Seems like all you would need is a floating object, with resistance to vertical movement powering a dynamo of some kind. That wouldn't be any mroe dangerous to marine life than any other floating object.

And vice versa, apparently!

No, it isn't. The astronaut in the closer orbit is moving faster. Much faster, actually, if the astronaut is only 1000 miles away.

Grams and kilograms are arbitrary measures of the same thing, but C is a fundamental constant. I would love to hear an explanation of what C is that doesn't invoke any notion of time, or doesn't invoke any notion of space. (If they're the same thing, both explanations should be possible, and in fact be identical except for switching out one word for the other.)

IIRC, the short answer is that events always will be in the same order if one could travel between them at less than C. If the path between them is "steeper" than C, their chronological order depends on reference frame. That's what I meant by the "same location," which was a poor phrasing. No object can be at both such events, because no object can travel at C. And, for example, Paris is an object, as is Napoleon, as are you and I.

Yes, a conversion dependent on the relative velocity between reference frames, "velocity" being defined as displacement/time, which would be meaningless if they were the same thing. My point here is that time is not a synonym for distance. You can't just take the t out of equations and replace it with a d, or vice versa.

Another way to look at it is that, ignoring friction with air, the path of anything you throw in the air is actually part of an orbit that intersects with the ground. If you take a ball that could somehow pass right through the ground and throw it, it will orbit the center of the Earth. The path it will follow will be a very long and skinny ellipse, that only emerges from the ground at the point you threw it from, and disappears back into the ground at the place a normal ball would have landed.

It's not circular reasoning at all. You have your string, EFGHIJKL. It is an abstract representation of part of a genome. And, as part of the genome, it has some effect. Or rather, it has the potential for some effect. This effect either increases fitness, decreases fitness, or is neutral, and is thus subject to selection. You are simply saying that it is "meaningless" because it doesn't have the same effect as the original ABCD. That is what is circular reasoning, defining what is meaningful in such a way. It only makes sense with the precondition that what exists is an intentional and unalterable "language" rather than a physical process, i.e. with the precondition of a religious notion of intelligent design and degradation over time.

Gravity works the same on Earth and in space. When you jump in the air, you are constantly accelerated towards the Earth. You have an initial upwards velocity, and you are accelerated downwards such that your upwards velocity decreases until you stop and begin accelerating downwards. In an orbit, you have an initial velocity that is sideways to the direction of your acceleration. So as you move, your position relative to the gravity source changes, and so does the direction of force. The result is that you continually circle the source without ever hitting it. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged This question doesn't make any sense, because "force" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does. A force is something which causes an acceleration over time. As for why you fall back to the ground, but the planets never hit the sun, that question has been answered several times. A good introduction to what an orbit is, and how it is the same as gravity on Earth, is the example of "Newton's cannon." http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/newannon.htm

Events at the same location will always be in the same order no matter what reference frame. Events separated by distance can, to a limited degree, have their sequence depend on reference frame. It's not just a consequence of delaying the signal. It's how things "really are." It's just another way of saying that simultaneity is relative.

It isn't random, though. It's random mutation, filtered by natural selection. By necessity, what is "meaningful," i.e. what leads to an increase in fitness, is what remains. Ergo, more "meaningful information" than you started with. And again, an otherwise unsupported argument from authority is never a valid argument, let alone when the authority has as little credibility as the one you cite.

That is not what GR says. Light follows a straight line. Orbits do not. If it were a straight line, then a laser beam shined off the surface of the moon would circle around the Earth and come back again. The spherical shape of the moon is not the result of rotation. It is a result of its own gravity pulling it into that shape, as with any other massive body of sufficient size.