Sisyphus

It doesn't seem like it could stay the same much longer. According to this article in New Scientist about one attempt to come up with a new measure by creating the roundest objects on Earth, the International Committee on Weights and Measures will make a decision in 2011. Looking at the Wikipedia article on the kilogram, there are several competing alternatives. Such as: "the mass which would be accelerated at precisely 2×10−7 m/s2 when subjected to the per-meter force between two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross section, placed one meter apart in vacuum, through which flow a constant current of 1⁄1.602176487×10−19 (≈6,241,509,647,120,417,390) elementary charges per second" "the mass of a body at rest whose equivalent energy equals the energy of photons whose frequencies sum to 1.356392733×1050 Hz” "the mass equal to that of precisely (1000⁄196.9665687)*6.02214179*10^23 atoms of gold" etc. Each has different problems in experimentally reproducing them. It's much more interesting than I would have guessed.

When people disagree about facts, repeating yourself over and over is not helpful. You have to provide evidence, and use logical arguments. You say everyone is "refusing to know," but you are saying one thing (without evidence), and everyone else is saying something else (with evidence). You seem to think what you're saying is obviously true, and doesn't need explaining. It isn't. In fact, to most of us, it seems obviously not true. If we're all "refusing to know," then explain why we are and you aren't. (And "because what I'm saying is true" is not a valid answer.)

1) There are six types of quarks. 2) The number of neutrons in nuclei don't have to equal the number of protons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model

The supreme court only declared that they had ordered the arrest later on, so I'm not sure of the order of events. Also, Obama did at least say that Zelaya's actions were also illegal and unwise. Apparently the U.S. government had strongly advised him to knock it off before all this happened.

Well, President Zelaya of Honduras has been forcefully removed from power and removed from the country. A lot of people, including Obama and many major news outlets, are calling it an "illegal coup." But is it one? As I gather it, Zelaya, approaching the end of his term and facing constitutional terms limits, tried to put out a non-binding referendum on whether he be allowed to run for re-election. The problem was that the Honduran constitution apparently forbids even attempting to overturn term limits. (They are very afraid of populist "presidents for life.") The legislature refused to support the referendum, and it went to the supreme court, which ruled against the president. The president then ordered the military to carry out a survey, but major elements refused on the grounds of it being an illegal order, and several commanders were dismissed. Zelaya, who apparently is still quite popular, then gathered together protestors to retrieve ballots from a military base and carry out the survey. For defying the supreme court, he was ordered arrested, which the military did. He was removed from the country, and a (disputed) letter of resignation was produced, and the chairman of the legislature was sworn in as president, as per the constitutional order of succession. So, does anyone have better information. Is this a coup?

Yes, in terms of strict cost-benefit to yourself. But that's not all there is to it. You are empathic. Trying to separate that from rationality doesn't work. If you're going to ask why you should care about other people/beings, you may as well ask why you should care about yourself. Seriously, why? Your cost/benefit analysis is meaningless if you don't care about yourself, and caring about yourself is not rationally arrived at. What you've done is assume one irrational (but factual) premise, deny a different irrational (but factual) premise, and try to derive something rational from them.

Protons have much, much more mass than electrons. It's their charge that is equal and opposite. And while an equal number of protons and electrons results in a neutral charge and is stabile, it is not a law, written or otherwise, that there must be. Atoms with extra or missing electrons are called ions, and chemical reactions wouldn't be possible if atoms couldn't give up or gain electrons. Electricity is a flow of unattached electrons.

Why does nature need to provide a lattice?

Why would bouncing a photon off of something be "really there" while bouncing an electron off of something be "more like a religion?" Also, what swansont said.

Well, it's simple enough if you disregard air resistance. Kinetic energy is equal to (1/2)mv^2, with energy in joules, mass in kilograms, and velocity in meters per second. Including air resistance makes it a lot more complicated, since it's dependent on the shape of the object.

Heat does not have a fixed place in the spectrum. Infrared is associated with heat only because most things radiate primarily in infrared around the sorts of temperatures that don't kill us. Lightbulbs, having very hot filaments, give off a lot of visible light. Even human beings give off a very, very small amount of visible light.

When we say space is three dimensional, all we mean is that you need at least 3 parameters to describe a precise location. You could use length, width, height. You could use latitude, longitude, altitude. Or you could use something else.

Alright, then, slightly longer answer: rational distribution of empathy. If that makes sense. Empathy is a fundamental part of what it means to be human, and it's necessary both for society and for one's own mental health. It's also unavaoidable, unless you're a sociopath, which is considered a serious mental disorder. So "why empathy" on an individual level is kind of a moot point. It's here, and collectively we're much better off because of it. Where "rationality trumps emotion" is in where that empathy is applied, deciding what qualities the objects of it have that make them "worthy" of it, and then being consistent. That's why you might be pro-choice even though pictures of aborted fetuses turn your stomach, or give moral significance to non-human animals to varying degrees.

"Weird" is subjective, and we don't know what you already know or how well you understand it. Thus, I don't know what I could say that you would find weird. One anecdotal observation I've had is that people who understand quantum mechanics poorly tend to either not see what the big deal is (where you seem to be right now), or go to the opposite extreme and attribute anything "weird" they can think of to QM (what several recent threads have been about). Anyway, manipulating equations is never going to "blow your mind." The counterintuitive parts come from trying to intuitive grasp what those equations actually represent.

Yeah, I think that's being misleading. What you'd really use is psychology, perhaps with math-aided analysis (though I don't know what that would be). However, if you were playing against a computer randomly picking rock, paper, or scissors, there is nothing you could possibly do that would ever change your chances from 1/3 win, 1/3 lose, 1/3 tie.

I don't know what effect Britain's highly restrictive gun laws have on crime. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they contributed to a high crime rate, but comparing London and New York doesn't really work. For one thing, there are many U.S. cities with violent crime rates several times that of New York. What are the relative levels of gun ownership, status of laws, etc. between those cities? What about between neighborhoods in NY? Do you think the safest neighborhoods are the most heavily armed? I don't, but I can't find statistics on gun ownership at that level. That would be a correlation, not causation, anyway, but it might be interesting. Here's the murder map, anyway: http://projects.nytimes.com/crime/homicides/map?ref=nyregion (Anecdotally, I live in Astoria, and I don't know anyone who lives in the city and owns a gun except for cops.)

That doesn't seem like a remotely accurate characterization of D H to me, and I don't know how you could possibly get that from that post in particular. And since I happen to think his assessment of ICH is dead on, you're pretty much calling me all those names as well, though I'll decline to duel. I will say that that description ironically pretty well describes how you come across to me, though, just with a few words switched around. ICH certainly seems like a prime example of a highly filtered, highly simplistic black and white alternate reality, where "the West" is to blame for literally everything bad. "Ha ha ha!"

7x3=21 What difference do you have in mind? The probability you'll pick up a certain kind of card is always [number of that type of card]/[total number of cards]. That's it. There's no more to it.

Yes, and kidneys may merely utilize what we call urine producing ability in the same way. Just nets to capture the urine-producing essence, echoing through the cosmos.* *evidence pending** **but you can't disprove it!

If I may step in: 1) "On the deepest level," as Mokele used it, means an understanding of the fundamental mechanisms, not a total understanding of everything there is to know. Since QM, if it plays a roll, would obviously be playing that roll "on the deepest level," that's all that is necessary to falsify it. 2) Neurotransmitters are hardly just "chemica transport systems for electrons."

Sherlock, what did I say to give you the impression I wasn't talking about public roads? That's what I'm talking about with "restrictions." You can't get a road-legal M1 Abrams, you need special licenses for motorcycles or heavy trucks, and while it isn't illegal to have an unregistered car as long as it never leaves private property, AFAIK it is illegal to sell it. That kind of thing. It's not a direct analogy nor was it intended to be, but just a reference point. Cars are well-regulated, potentially dangerous tools that have many laws designed to prevent us from killing each other, yet they are ubiquituous, and few people find the rules pointless or excessively repressive. If there was a constitutional amendment guaranteeing our right to use vehicles, would there be court cases challenging, say, DUI laws on that grounds? Well, probably. But would they win?

I'm thinking more and more that car ownership might be a pretty good model. You're free to own and use a wide variety of vehicles, though not without restrictions. To use them, you need to prove to the state that you can do so safely and be issued a license. All individual vehicles are also all individually registered and licensed. And if you use them in a reckless manner, even if there's no harm done, there are penalties, sometimes as severe as confiscation, loss of license, or jail time.

The hypocrisy, though glaring, is not very interesting to me, when compared with the wackiness of a governor disappearing for a week to South America without telling anyone. Anyway, if you want to make news for hypocrisy these days, you have to be a prominent morality police blowhard and be soliciting sex from other men in the sleaziest way you can manage. This? Yawn is right. (I am still waiting for the GOP to formally apologize to the American people for the Clinton impeachment, however.)

Not if they're just following a set of rules.

At least with regards to NYC, that's incorrect on both counts. We do have some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, but there is not a complete ban. And there is very, very little gun crime.