Sisyphus

The way I always understood evaporation was that the water molecules are jiggling around, and occasionally during this random motion one will break loose and mix with the air. It seems to me the equivalent on the macro scale would be choppy waves that occasionally splash upwards. So I maintain it's a splash. What it splashes on would, I guess, be whatever solid it eventually condenses on, after its journey being buffeted about by air molecules. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged That would be true if each individual unit of water had to wait to leave the faucet for the preceeding one to reach its destination, but that isn't the case. It's a continuous stream. X units per second leave the faucet, so an average of X units per second must reach the bucket. The only wiggle room is the time after the faucet has been turned off, but before the last of it is done falling, i.e. the final position of the bucket. Average distance doesn't matter.

One thing to remember about the atomic bombs is that while the weapons were novel, the strategy was not. Whole cities had been destoyed from the air before, with tens of thousands of civilians killed at a time. So there's really three questions. 1) Are such tactics ever justifiable? 2) Were they justifiable in these two cases? and 3) How do the particular weapons used (lone atomic bombs, instead of thousands of clusterbombs or whatever) affect the justifiability?

What? Are you asking if those words are all synonyms?

The starting positions wouldn't matter. It would be the ending positions that matter. The first drops of water are going to make it there long before its full no matter what. This can all be ignored, however, if you just say the faucet will have to be running for the same amount of time no matter what. If the bucket is close to the faucet, the last of the water will only have to fall a short distance after the faucet is turned off, making the bucket itself full very slightly sooner than if it is farther away - by the time it takes water (or anything) to fall that extra distance. Where it started or how it has moved in the intervening time don't matter, though. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged But could that evaporation be considered "splashing out" on a molecular level, and thus be discounted by the terms of the question?

If you're moving it up and down the same amount (that is, if the bucket isn't getting further and further away or closer and closer), then it would take the same amount of time. It must, as the same amount of water is coming out of the faucet per unit time, and all of it is going into the bucket. It will just fill slightly unevenly - faster when moving up, slower when moving down, but averaging exactly the same.

The expansion of space is not movement, it's just an increase of distances. Other galaxies are not moving through space away from us. Rather, "more space" is being added between us. And some are already receding at a rate of more than 1 light year per year. This does not mean that "time stops," however, because: 1) Once again, it's not movement. 2) There is no such thing as absolute velocity, just velocity with respect to something else. I feel like we've had this conversation before.

Why? I don't have one (or any smartphone), but it seems like a pretty good one. Not that I'm recommending it, just curious about the specific, intense aversion.

Good! Then we agree: let's stop this ridiculously counterproductive outlawing, and think up ways that would actually mitigate said tragic waste instead of making it worse at huge expense.

I think you know that's an egregious strawman, so I'll assume you're joking in this, and take your surrender at your word.

You can't, really. But that's not the point. You asked what was the social benefit of drug use. However, the real question is what is the social benefit of legalization, which is a different question. Clearly there are benefits, so the assertion that there are none is disproved. And these should be weighed against the cost of keeping them illegal. That is what is being compared. Drug use vs. non-drug use is just a red herring. And just as you can "insert your favorite crime," you can also "insert your favorite currently legal recreation." Do sports have a social benefit, other than the fact that people enjoy participating in and spectating them? They do have a cost, in injuries to players, countless hours lost that otherwise might have been "productive," post-game riots, etc. The point is that obviously there are pros and cons to making anything illegal, and it has to be considered on a case by case basis. So pointing out pros that can be applied to "your favorite crime" is precisely the point. Not "are there benefits" or "are there costs" but, "how do they weigh against one another?"

Some day it might: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch Probably not, though, for a variety of reasons better explained by someone else. The answer is not orbital motion, though. There was an initial expansion that has to be overcome, first of all, and that might just have "escape velocity." (If you throw a ball in the air hard enough, it will never come back down, even though the Earth's gravity never drops to zero no matter how far away you get.) And there's dark energy, which appears to actually be accelerating the expansion, but isn't well understood, least of all by me.

If the APY is 7%, the monthly interest would be $25.88.

That was not the argument. The argument is that the social cost of outlawing it is greater than the social cost of legalizing it, full stop. The comment about alcohol was just a correction of a blanket statement about "recreational drugs." It does, however, also serve as a useful analogy for several reasons, not just because "if it is legal, then everything should be." It is useful rhetorically as a counter to fearmongering. More than that, though, it's a test case. In America, at least, we had a disasterous period of prohibition of alcohol. This dissuaded practically nobody that wanted it, but it did make the product less safe, and fund vast networks of violent, highly organized criminals willing to run the black market, and put a lot of otherwise productive people in jail. Sound familiar? And when prohibition ended, was society suddenly overrun with the "social ills" of alcoholics? And then, of course, there's the Netherlands. You ask if there are any cannabis-related problems in the Netherlands, but that's the wrong question. You should ask whether those problems are worse than in places where it's illegal.

I strongly disagree. Recreational consumption of alcohol, a "harder" drug than cannabis, is extremely widespread, and enjoys tremendous popular support. Not to mention nicotine, or even caffeine. What I think you mean to say is that a majority (probably, for the time being) of the public do not want certain specific recreational drugs to be widely used. And in that sense you have a point, from a pure democratic perspective. Although I have to wonder to what degree those feelings are the result of misinformation, if government officials are dismissed for saying scientifically correct information. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Rather unhealthy, yes. But then, the whole point is that alcohol is worse. And a better point is that the social cost of fighting a "war on drugs" (I realize that's an American term, but the same principles apply) is tremendous as well. Aside from just a personal freedom standpoint, how good for society is filling up prisons, funding organized crime, and tying up the resources of law enforcement?

The rationale given was that he crossed the line from giving advice to campaigning against the government's position. That seems like just a lame excuse, but it's not entirely indefensible. The broader issue definitely is science vs. politics though. "This was not about Prof Nutt's views, which I respect though I don't agree with them." Oh really? You don't agree? On what basis? Sounds like straightforward truthiness to me, deciding to "disagree" with science when it's inconvenient, as if everyone's opinion is equally valid on scientific fact.

How about the same intake for food and air? Or dangling gonads? Or food cravings that would make us wildly unhealthy if fully indulged? I'm sure you could name thousands of things that might be "designed" better, including the basis for pretty much any medical disorder.

I haven't been part of this argument, but it seems to me the debate is about what to call it, not what to do about it. The "solution" would just be calling it like it is. I don't think anyone here is talking about censorship.

You don't bend space, nor does your momma. It's clear from the article that this is a new feature, meaning they've invented mass. Unless you're calling them liars?

With SCIENCE!

Astronauts are falling towards the sun, as is the Earth. It's just not getting closer, because it is moving fast enough sideways that the direction it is being accelerated is constantly changing. If you throw a ball horizontally, it follows a curved path to the ground, right? Even though through the whole path it is being accelerated down by gravity. Yet the Earth is curved, and "down" at the point where you throw it is in a slightly different direction as "down" where it lands. Throw the ball hard enough, and the rate at which the path curves will be the same as the curvature of the Earth, and it will just circle endlessly without ever hitting the ground, even though it is "falling" the whole time. That is what an orbit is. If it wasn't falling (constantly being accelerated by gravity towards the Earth's center), it would fly off in a straight line, not go in a circle.

I wasn't deliberately obfuscating anything. To the contrary, I was trying to preempt exactly that. People do mean different things by "god," "magic," etc. Often there's no definition at all, or an incoherent or self-contradictory one. Under some definitions, literally everything that happens is technically miraculous. Under some, it's a logical impossibility. For example, if "magic" occurs, then by definition it is not in violation of natural law. You say "out of the ordinary." I know what you mean in a colloquial sense - people don't typically rise from the dead - but that isn't sufficient. Another way of putting that would be, "based on full knowledge of natural laws and full knowledge of prior conditions, something that could not have been predicted." Yet that is a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics, and thus ultimately every event. Is every event then miraculous? You also put forth "in violation of accepted laws." But what does that mean? It just means the accepted laws were wrong. Have events occured that falsified accepted laws of nature? Yes, obviously. Are they miraculous? Depends on your definition, I guess. And finally you use the word "immaterial." But what does that mean, exactly? Something we can look at and hold? Is, say, dark energy immaterial and therefore technically magic? Is mathematics magic? Is angular momentum, being a property and not a substance? Is the property of being a comfortable chair? Is consciousness? My point with all of this, I must iterate, is that precisely defined language is essential for coherent discussion. In fact, stating exactly what you mean by a question oftentimes makes the answer clear from the beginning, or even shows the question itself to be meaningless. Not doing so oftentimes leads to simply talking past one another until the semantic bickering is drawn out by necessity anyway. I say this from long experience, which I think you'll find that you share.

It eats up everything in a certain frequency range, but it says "In case you're wondering, the energy absorbed by the black hole is emitted as heat." Surely that means blackbody radiation?

No, "black hole" is definitely what is intended. Read the article.

But:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24234/ Check out this article about an "artificial black hole." Except it isn't a black hole, it's a material that is almost perfectly black within a certain spectrum of microwaves. But wait! It "bends space!" But wait! No, it doesn't, just "as far as light is concerned," whatever that means. How sensational! And it's in Technology Review, which is published by MIT.