Sisyphus

I have the same question, with the added conditions that it has to be working from home in only minutes per day.

There is probably some truth to the stereotype of the socially awkward engineer, but I don't buy this explanation. For one thing, socially awkward /= antisocial in the sense of being ant-society. Second, the same stereotype applies to scientists, and there don't seem to be any terrorist scientists. And third, killing strangers actually is a social thing, in the sense of terrorist organizations being tightly knit.

They correct for numbers of engineers, so it's not just that there are more of them. I think it has a lot to do with temperment, which the article also mentions. What do religious fundamentalist ideology and the practice of engineering have in common? Strict application of inflexible rules, and lack of ambiguity, nuance, or interpretation. A desire to impose order.

He's only "straining" to make the analogy relevant. The reason for many worlds interpretation, etc., is not because of anything analogous to the car insurance company, it's because of things like the double slit experiment.

This is incorrect. That's not a straight line. I think there's some confusion here, I'm guessing based on the fact that light always travels in a straight line, i.e. follows the curvature of space exactly. Walking around on the surface of the Earth or two massive bodies orbiting one another are not examples of straight lines in any sense. The moon is continually accelerated at right angles to its velocity.

It's not replacing distance with time, it's just describing distance in terms of how long it takes something to travel with a fixed speed. You're not measuring in t, you're measuring in t*(d/t), i.e. distance. You could do that with literally any type of unit. Start with a fixed time: 1 year. Then you can measure distance in terms of how fast you need to go to get there in exactly one year. Or, under what constant acceleration starting from zero. Three acceleration dimensions! (Except not, because you're still just measuring distance in a convoluted way.)

"Space" implies three dimensions.

Really? So when I walk around a corner, I'm really going in a straight line through space that is bent 90 degrees?

They analyzed the DNA of King Tutankhamun, along with several other mummies. Turns out his parents were brother and sister, he had several maralial infections, and he had a genetic bone disorder that would have forced him to walk with a cane. Inbred, sickly royals: 'twas ever thus. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100216-king-tut-malaria-bones-inbred-tutankhamun/

Why not?

You're going to have to be more specific, I think. I don't even understand what motive the Russians are supposed to have in this, or how it demonstrates that the U.S. should be less cooperative with Russia.

It is exactly the same forces, forwards or backwards. That's the point. There would be no way to prove that a video of the event shown in reverse is not forward, except that it would be depicting very unlikely (but not impossible) events. Depends what you mean by "only" a progression of events. Is distance only an ordering of objects? In a way, yes. But that doesn't mean it can't expand, contract, or bend.

I think it's pretty clear that all the hubbub about "czars" is derived entirely from "czar" being a foreign sounding word (a Russian word, no less, for something undemocratic (a monarch), that almost sounds MUSLIM!), and they profit from the continued perception of Obama as foreign and scary. That a)it's just an informal title for an administrator, and b) the convention is as old as the Wilson Administration, doesn't seem to matter.

The word "procession" and "event" both imply time.

But if there was such a leak, wouldn't that be newsworthy enough to be covered by non-"alternative" sources? But assuming, for some reason, the Russians do want conspiracy theorists to believe that Obama is ordering the executions of rogue CIA agents, what lesson do you think can be derived from that?

"Memory augmentation surgeon" i.e. brain surgeon. "Pharmer-armer" i.e. farmer. "Space pilot"... what? Sooo.... astronaut? "Flying car designer." i.e. aerospace engineer. (Also, we can build flying cars now.) I would be interested in a list of jobs that won't exist in 20 years.

I don't get it. What lesson? Also, any legitimate news sources for any of this? I'm not familiar with either of the sites you linked to, but it appears the first is owned by the government of Iran, and the second is a conspiracy theorist site.

Why would there be a first or last dimension?

You don't need any different or "reversed" physical laws for the egg to reform itself and be tossed back up onto the table. Every force involved is time symmetrical. It's just that combination of forces and events is many, many orders of magnitude less likely an event than the egg falling off the table and breaking. There is nothing physically impossible in "forward time" about a series of tiny shock waves converging from the depths of the Earth to toss all the bits of egg together and into the air, reforming all the chemical bonds or whatever that were released, and coming to rest on a table. But it requires many, many things to happen, which individually might not be unlikely, but collectively, for them alll to happen, is almost guaranteed not to.

How often does one accidentally consume methanol?

I can't really support an OP Godwin (nor do I really follow that particular analogy), but I do agree with the basic idea. All opinions are not equally valid, though in many ways it is a necessary side effect of democratic thinking to treat them as such. And yes, some things are objectively true, but are treated as opinion and given "equal time" with nonsense. (It is frustration with this phenomenon that gave rise to the Flying Spaghetti Monster movement as a reductio ad absurdum.) And the fallacy of the middle is pretty common, and can be pretty easily exploited: propose something crazy, then argue down to a "compromise" that is in fact exactly what you wanted to begin with.

Patent pending?

The size and total mass of the universe is unknown, and possibly infinite. It also does not have a center in which mass might congregate. A black hole has its mass concentrated in a single point, the singularity. Obviously, that is not our situation, else we and everything else would be the singularity.

What if the question was rephrased like this: Hypothetically, there is an epidemic of a disease that makes people lose the capacity for complex thought and violently and relentlessly attack the uninfected. It apparently spreads mostly by biting. There is currently no known cure. Under what circumstances would it be ethical to kill these people by whatever violent means are available? Presumably not if you're talking about a sedated patient in a hospital, when it's not clear if a cure is possible. And presumably it is when infected outnumber uninfected by a thousand to one, civilization has collapsed, and an army of them is chasing you down the street. So when does it become acceptable? That's what I think ydoaps meant. It's sort of a combination euthanasia/self-defense question.

There's always snow in Hawaii in winter on mountaintops. Mauna Kea, the biggest mountain on the island of Hawaii, literally means "white mountain" for this reason.