Sisyphus

What are you talking about? What activities are forced on children in schools, unhealthy, and only possible between two married people of the same sex? Wouldn't that require teachers to be forcibly marrying students of the same sex, then making them do.... what?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time (Should have brought this up earlier.) What's all this with antimatter? What is the distinction you're making between "reverse time" and "reverse movie?" It seems to me that if you "reverse time" and end up with a sequence of events that is something other than the "forward" events in reverse order, that just shows you've done something wrong. So yes, the ceramic shards get knocked together into a teacup and tossed up onto the table.

Are they more energy efficient? My toilet is powered only by water pressure supplied by gravity from a reservoir at a higher altitude. If I was to manually dispose of it, that would almost certainly mean transporting it in trucks, like regular garbage. (I live in a large apartment building.) Surely that would be more energy. I think the appeal is more in using less water and recycling the "fertilizer" directly. These are real benefits (the importance of water conservation varying from region to region), but I'm still skeptical about health issues. In places without sanitation systems, people, you know, die of cholera a lot. Plus the smell, which I'm sorry but I can't just take their word for. Plus I guess I'm just defensive about one of the few remaining activities nobody was trying to make me feel guilty about.

That wouldn't be repulsion between the apple and the Earth. You're leaving out forces. Also, think about "time 3," after the apple hits the ground, and is just sitting there. When an apple hits the ground, its kinetic energy is transferred to the ground in a waves that dissipate outwards. Looking at the same event in reverse, you have an an apple sitting on the ground (still held there by gravity), but then shock waves converge and toss it into the air. Not a very likely event in forward time, but that's entropy for you. I think you'll find that any situation put in reverse still shows gravitational attraction working the same way.

That's not evident to me. In fact, I don't think it's true, now that I think about it. An orbit in reverse is still an orbit.

The amount of water that hits you will be proportional to the time you spend in the rain, the size of the cross-section of your body perpendicular to the relative velocity of the raindrops, and the magnitude of that velocity. The first factor is obviously inversely proportional to your velocity relative to your destination. Hence running will decrease it. The second factor is the tricky one. If the rain is falling straight down, and you are standing still, your cross section is just the top of your head, your shoulders, your beer gut, whatever. If you're moving forward, this is equivalent to you standing still and the rain slanting towards you. Your cross section is larger, because humans are tall and skinny. It doesn't increase linearly, though, and approaches only your vertical sillhouette as your velocity approaches infinity. And the final factor, the magnitude of the velocity, is just the velocity of the falling raindrops minus your velocity (keeping in mind that velocity is a vector, of course). Since it's perpendicular, it can be pythagorean: (rain falling speed)^2+(your speed)^2 = (relative speed)^2 To simplify, let's just say your body shape is a perfect sphere, thus having the same cross-section from any angle, so we can remove that messy term. So the wetness = time in rain * magnitude of incoming velocity. So let's say the rain falls at a speed of 1, and you walk at a speed of 1, and it takes you 1 time unit to get to shelter. Wetness = 1 time * sqrt(2) = ~1.41 When you double your speed to 2, your wetness = 0.5 time * sqrt(5) = ~1.12 It's less, because as you increase speed, time decreases linearly, but rain hitting you per unit time increases less than linearly. So run.

Saying that "philosophy" is nonsense is a philosophical statement. Thus, by your own assertion, you are psychotic, and we would do best to ignore your ramblings.

Throw in something quantum, and you fellas have got yourself an investor.

I can't watch videos right now so I don't know how relevant it is, but Scientific American recently put out "Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense," that might be helpful: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seven-answers-to-climate-contrarian-nonsense

Or it might not be a traditional bell curve at all, measured on the same scale as the general pop. But we should back up - what IQ test are you talking about?

Assuming this sub-group has a higher mean (median?) score on IQ tests, I don't see any reason to expect the score distribution would simply be a "shifted" curve congruent with the general population's curve and measured on the same scale.

Well sure, but politically feasible? "The government has MY money, it's not spending it, and it's not giving it back? Revolt!" Wasn't that the whole rationale of the Bush tax cuts?

Right, the idea is supposed to be deficit spending during hard times (for temporary stimulus) and emergencies (because we need the flexibility), balanced by surplus in ordinary times to pay off the debt. Unfortunately, the second part means that a bunch of elected politicians have to say "we can't give you what you want, AND we have to raise taxes," and commit to that for the long term. So...

Saying you hope there is a military coup is not technically the same thing as calling for one, I guess.

Feasible? Haven't we been doing that all along? I think a better question is whether it will ever be politically feasible to run a surplus. Increasing spending and cutting taxes is apparently pretty hard not to do, even in times of prosperity.

What do you mean by freezing a point in time?

If "somebody thinks it will destroy the country" was enough to somehow make it illegal, there would never be any legal course of action. The "check," in the case of "bad but legal decisions of elected officials," is simply the electorate.

What would be the argument that it is unconstitutional? You seem to be implying that it is so because it is against the general welfare, but then, presumably any action you think is a bad idea would also be "against the general welfare," and so you could claim literally anything you want is "unconstitutional" with the same completely subjective rationale. Was there another argument you had in mind?

Children being children.

It is approximately Euclidian on the largest scales we can see. It isn't so on every scale, and it still might not be on extremely large scales. However, if it really is "flat" on the largest scales, that presumably just means it is infinite. It specifically does not mean an expanding 3D sphere, and all that implies (an "edge" or whatever). Everything is regressing from everything else at rates proportional to distance, and that isn't consistent with what you would see with an expanding 3D object, like a conventional explosion. So I guess, how does this make it harder to imagine how space was (and continues to be) created? Maybe this analogy could be useful: imagine that the number line is the universe. Obviously, it is infinite in extent (though 1-dimensional), and has no edges. The objects in the universe are located at the integers. For simplicity, imagine they are not moving relative to one another. Now imagine that space is expanding, such that it has doubled in size. Now all the objects are 2 units apart, located at the even integers. They haven't moved, there are still the same amount of them (infinite), but everything is twice as far apart as it was before. The "universe" has "doubled in size" in that sense, though that's only measurable with average distances, and it didn't have a finite size to begin with.

There is a force: gravity. However, there is not a change in energy, and there is not an "external" force. Force and energy are different concepts.

Two things: 1) Electrons are not in "orbit" in the same sense planets are in orbit around the sun. An electron is not like a ball whizzing around in a circle. Its location is described by a wave function. Its "orbit" is more like a "cloud of probability" than a circular path. (That's still an oversimplification, though.) 2) Constant acceleration does not mean a change in energy. A satellite circling the Earth has a constant gravitational potential energy with respect to it, and no external energy source is needed. Yet it's constantly being accelerated the rate of freefall.

I don't really know the answer to that, but I am prompted to ask how complexity is being defined. What would count as "more complex?" A parrot is more complex than an amoeba, presumably, but according to what quantifiable criteria? (A potentially easy one - size of genome - is problematic, since an amoeba's genome is actually dozens to hundreds of times larger.) More pertinently, how would it be defined on the smallest scales, i.e. in the timeframes of direct observation? You wouldn't expect viruses to necessarily evolve into something else in that timeframe (and possibly not at all - evolution tends towards more success at passing on genes, not more "complexity," and viruses are damn good at that, which is why not only are there still viruses but there are more than ever). So anyway, we're stuck with "complexity" in a subjective sense, which makes it difficult to judge incrementally. And we're stuck with an extremely short timeframe for direct observation, which means we're limited to mostly incremental changes, and mostly in organisms that have the capacity to evolve very quickly and have very short generations, like microorganisms. That said, I did find this at talkorigins that is sort of pertinent:

No, it is not made up of "energy and matter." It is made up of matter in a certain arrangement. This matter has mass, its molecules have kinetic energy, etc. "Change into a form of energy" does not mean anything. The arrangement of molecules and atoms changes.

So then I think you need to support the assertion that all those starvation deaths are the result of American capitalism.