Sisyphus

Then I don't think you're reading him correctly? Ok, so your position is that climate science on the whole is fraudulent? Phrenology is falsified by biology, medicine, etc. Where is the analogy here?

Remember the "does this answer make sense" test. The cow and goat finish in 45 days. Therefore all three must take less time. The animals eat at a constant rate and the grass grows at a constant rate, so the amount of grass in any scenario decreases at a constant rate. For example, with just the cow, after 45 days half the initial grass is left. The cow must have therefore consumed half the initial grass + whatever grass grew in 45 days. Now, the cow and goat finish in 45 days, half the time as the cow alone. But as stated above, the cow has eaten half of his 90 day total, which is half the initial grass + the growth of grass in 45 days. What's left for the goat to have eaten is the other half of the initial grass. So the goat can eat the initial grass by itself in 90 days. The goat needs the duck's help to eat initial grass plus 90 day's growth in 90 days, so it follows that the duck eats grass exactly as fast as it grows. The cow and the duck can eat everything in 60 days. Which means (since the duck cancels out the growth) that the cow can eat the initial grass in 60 days. The goat needs 90 days, so the cow can eat 1.5 times as fast as the goat. And, since goat + duck = cow, the duck eats 0.5 times as fast as the goat. So: The cow eats 1/60th (or 3/180) initial grass per day. The goat eats 1/90th (or 2/180) initial grass per day. The duck eats 1/180th initial grass per day. The grass grows at 1/180th initial grass per day. So all three eating together plus the grass growing means a net decrease of 5/180 inititial grass per day, or 1/36th per day. They finish in 36 days.

I'll change my mind about the likelihood of global warming when the scientific consensus changes. What other criterion is reasonable? As iNow points out, popular opinion, the votes of politicians, anything Al Gore does, or anecdotes about a few scientists aren't relevant. As for supporting policy, there would have to be a strong consensus against, if only because of risk vs. reward considerations.

She says they're frivolous. The truth is a bit shadier. It's still not clear to me that that is the main reason she was trying to put forth, though.

Just you?

Others may or may not be joking, but I seriously had no idea there was a newsletter. Apparently I was voted "best debater" at some point, which is nice, as my chances for "most alert moderator" have taken a hit, I think. Oh, and welcome back, or whatever.

I know. I was just adding that any "orbit" can intersect the surface, and that in fact we witness this all the time in everyday experience, for anything in free fall. But in everyday experience, it's basically always an ellipse, as we don't typically encounter objects moving at escape velocity or faster. (As always, of course, all of this only applies to a classical approximation.)

Or just tossing a ball (ignoring air resistance). On small scales, you can assume that the gravitational field is uniform and parallel and thus trajectories will be parabolic. Really, though, the path of the ball is the portion near the apogee of an extremely eccentric ellipse that just barely emerges from the surface. Collapse the rest of the Earth into a point mass while the ball is in mid air, and it will continue to follow the same path, but instead of intersecting with the surface will continue orbiting, swinging very close to the center of gravity while moving extremely fast, return to where you threw it from, and go around again indefinitely.

Do you not understand the problem with linking to an entire book?

One example is roads. You can have public roads, or you can have private monopolies granted by the government. The "barrier to entry" is that you can't have competing owners of the same real estate.

I heard they think they could do it for $10 million in less than ten years, if they wanted to.

Animals that often get shot, I assume. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Dunno about that. Armor would have been far more useful earlier, when we were jabbing each other with sharp sticks. Yet sharp sticks still work. And steel manmade armor, presumably harder than anything biological, was very cumbersome and ineffective against even the crudest firearms.

Not if by "possible in reality" you mean describing the attributes and behaviors of physical objects. (Math doesn't really get interesting until you get beyond the stuff useful to physicists. ) You might be able to use weirder math to describe more complex phenomena in unusual ways, but ultimately math is just the language. It's like saying any grammatically correct English sentence you can say has to be true (or potentially true).

Two moving bodies exerting attractive forces on one another inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them (e.g., Newtonian gravity) will always follow the path of one of the conic sections: circle, ellipse, parabola, hyperbola, or straight line. Which one just depends on their initial velocities relative to the attractive force. Orbits are pretty much all ellipses, however, because the circle is a special case - it needs exactly the right initial velocity in an exactly horizontal direction. Less and its the apogee of an ellipse, more and its the perigee. A straight line occurs with no horizontal component to the velocity, a parabola is when you have the exact minimum escape velocity, and a hyperbola is anything greater than escape velocity (so not really an "orbit"). You can show this with calculus, and in fact it's pretty much the reason Isaac Newton developed calculus in the first place.

What's all this about "laying your own pipe?" No, of course you can't, because you don't own the land through which the pipe would have to run. You can dig a well on your own property, though, or collect rainwater, or bring in what you need by other means. The statement "nobody is forcing you to use public water" is 100% correct. Do your taps not have an off position? Now, if you're going to say that none of those things are practical, then I agree. Having extremely cheap, drinkable water literally piped to one's house is so convenient that it's hard to justify not using it. But nobody is forcing you. And you might say it's a de facto monopoly because nobody can sell water at remotely competetive prices, due to the advantage of being able to lay pipe through public land, a right in most places granted to the public as a whole (i.e., the government) and not private individuals. And common sense would agree with you. But bottled water is still a huge business, so who the hell knows.

The government doesn't have a monopoly on water. It has a monopoly on public water mains, in much the same way as it has a monopoly on roads. The difference is that we really don't have a choice on whether to use public roads if we want to leave our own property, but nobody is forcing you to use public water. Objecting to flouride in the water is thus roughly equivalent to objecting to painted lines on the roads, although actually with less grounds, as, again, you don't have to use public water, and you can easily filter it yourself if you do. You can't, however, just decide to paint over the lines you don't like.

That's not really an illustration of the UP, though. It might be a rough analogy, but it would be easy to take it too far and get the wrong idea. A blur doesn't show an uncertainty or indistinctness of position, it shows that the object was in all of those positions (which may as well be precisely determined) during the time in which the shutter was open. It's just like overlaying a series of precise position measurements. On the quantum scale, the water really would occupy a range of position, and the boys would not have a momentum. It would not just be a limitation of the equipment.

Indeed. Something like ebola is really nasty, but the fact that it shows symptoms and then kills so quickly makes it much easier to contain. Compare with HIV, which is comparatively very difficult to transmit (basically just sex or blood sharing), but becomes an enormous pandemic because the period without symptoms (but with ability to transmit) is so long. If it was anywhere near as easy to transmit as a cold, everyone would have it.

So you want a rapidly fatal disease that spreads by making humans crazy enough to bite one another?

Most of us now live our lives a way in which large physical size doesn't really help us, but we're hardly far removed it. A big strong guy is more effective not just at fighting (pre-guns), but at physical labor. That would explain a sexual selection for larger than average men, and sexual selection can be self-reinforcing even once the original cause becomes irrelevant. In order for the factors you mention to have an effect, people would have to be shot at all the time (and be saved by not being too big a target!), or be so near starvation that how big a body you have to feed is the difference between life or death for you or your children.

Weird. If it was about running for President, why wouldn't she just not seek re-election as governor, instead of resigning 3 1/2 years in advance? I guess it's pointless to speculate with this little information.

I don't know if it's really accurate to say the Moon "detached." It is probably the collected debris thrown clear when a roughly Mars-sized (much bigger than the Moon, but quite a bit smaller than the Earth) crashed into the young Earth. Anyway, if you were to add the Moon's mass to the Earth's, gravity here wouldn't increase much. The Moon's mass is only a little more than 1% of the Earth's, and gravity would increase by even less than that proportion, because the Earth's radius would also be larger.

The hand is a solid, fairly rigid object. It's molecules are bonded together (the nature of the bond depends on the material). Move one, it exerts a force on every one touching it, which itself moves, and so on. Exert a torque ("spinning force") on one, the one next to it is carried along on a longer path, and the next, and so on. There is indeed a very slight lag, because there is no such thing as a perfectly rigid object. It takes time for the motion to be successively transferred from the inside outwards. The maximum speed at which this motion can ever be transferred is the speed of light, but any material you're likely to see will be much, much slower than that (but still fast enough that it effectively seems perfectly rigid). For your third question, I'd just ask why you think it shouldn't?

Why "of course?"

Electrons, like all particles, can in some ways be mathematically described as waves. Simplistically, a wave can't have a single, precise location unless it is infinitely "bunched up," in which case its wavelength is indeterminate, and it can't have a precise momentum unless it has a precise orientation and wavelength, in which case there is nothing to pin it down to any particular location whatsoever. When particles interact with something, depending on the nature of the interaction, they can be forced to have a position and/or momentum to greater or less degrees, but due to the nature of the wave, increasing the precision of one makes the other necessarily indeterminate.