Sisyphus

And yet that mugger didn't have a gun, despite being of that exotic species reputed to possess mystical gun-acquiring powers (as well as a penchant for public use of them once acquired), "the criminals." But if he did have a gun, I'm disinclined to believe it would have ended better had John also had one. But I guess that's just my personal preference - I'd rather lose $50 than kill somebody. And I'd definitely rather lose $50 than lose a shootout. So unless you think it's common practice for some class of people to walk up to and shoot unarmed strangers (but with enough warning for said strangers to kickdraw!) just to get their wallets, no, I don't think it would have ended better. (And yet I'm not for banning guns! Is it really so hard to accept that different laws might be better for different places?)

Interesting question. Shouldn't be too hard: where n is the number of other participants, the probability of winning by putting all 10 in one pot is: 10/(10+n) The probability of winning by putting one ticket in each pot is: 1 - (n^10)/[(n+1)^10] To find the n where the first becomes better (if there is one), set up the inequality we want... 10/(10+n) > 1 - (n^10)/[(n+1)^10] ...and algebra the hell out of it: 10/(10+n) + (n^10)/[(n+1)^10] - 1 > 0 10 + (10+n)(n^10)/[(n+1)^10] - (10+n) > 0 (10+n)(n^10)/[(n+1)^10] - n > 0 (10+n)(n^10) - n[(n+1)^10] > 0 10n^10 + n^11 - ..... something long that has to include n^11 and 10n^10, difference can't be greater than zero for any positive n. So, putting everything in one pot is never smarter.

Your analogy is flawed, because you're looking at the weather from the Earth's surface (which is itself spinning) and the tire from an outside position that is not spinning with it. If it was only a matter of being dragged along, the winds wouldn't be moving faster than rotation, they'd be moving slower. Meaning they'd all be going east to west. If you were standing on the surface of the tire, you'd still have a headwind coming from the forward direction. Otherwise, you wouldn't have air resistance, you'd have wind pushing it faster and faster, and every spinning tire would be a perpetual motion machine.

Just a nitpick. Modern agriculture is not necessarily "unsustainable" any more than a hunter gatherer society would be. In fact our hunting and gathering has arguably been a lot less sustainable - prehistoric humans hunted lots of things to extinction, but carefully moderated and rotated crops can produce food pretty much indefinitely. Hunter-gatherers are also tend to be a lot more "precariously" dependent on constant conditions, as they have no means to intentionally modify or increase their food supply. A farming society (particularly a modern one), OTOH, can just pick different crops in the even of climate change, or use more land. (Not to say that there's no such thing as unsustainable agriculture - "slash and burn" method is a good example.) The rest of your post I agree with.

Sometimes it's easier to figure out the probability that you won't win. Remember, there is exactly one possibility, 10 losses, on one side, and every other combination of wins and losses on the other. Focus on the 10 losses. When you distribute the tickets evenly, the chance that you'll lose for any given one is 9/10. The chance that you'll lose ten times in a row, then, is 9^10/10^10 = 0.34867844 = ~35%. Therefore, the chance that you'll win at least once is about 65%, better than 10/19, which is about 52.6%. Put 1 ticket in each pot.

I would go beyond just formal logic and say "reason" more generally. It is possible to be convinced of the blatantly illogical, but in doing so one must of necessity implicitly believe that one's own power of reason has some use as a means to distinguish more true from less true, reality from unreality, etc. We are incapable of doing otherwise. And, to suppose otherwise is, as you say, a self-defeating hypothesis. It cannot be disproven, but it ends the conversation, as any further exploration requires the assumption of its falsehood.

The talk about Iranians with guns is stupid. It would be just like those talk radio guys to think that the only reason to have a peaceful protest is if you're not sufficiently well armed. What a depressing way to miss the point. Anyway, no, I don't think guns should be outright banned. I really have no problem with the idea of being armed as a right, as a means to defend oneself and a tool against oppression. (I don't think it's a necessary right, but I'm fine with it being granted. Prefer it, even.) I also happen to think that a lot - maybe even most - of our gun control laws just don't work as intended. As a pragmatist, I have to say scrap them. Now, that's not to say I agree with the saying about "only outlaws" having guns. Who are these "outlaws," anyway? Guys in black hats riding through town, robbing banks and abducting farmer's daughters? "Terrorists," maybe? Sorry, guys. That's just not how it works. Sure, you'll have lots of people with illegal weapons. Are they going to go around terrorizing the poor defenseless townsfolk? No. And, of course, I still support some limits to our right to bear arms. For example, I will never support the legality of private citizens owning nuclear weapons. I would consider an improperly secured weapon in a house with young children to automatically be child endangerment. I would be fine with required licenses for gun ownership, much like (and for similar reasons as) we have required licenses for driving cars. I am fine with different laws for different circumstances, and I am fine with individual municipalities deciding what is reasonable. If any particular relaxed laws cause significant, demonstrable harm, I am willing to reconsider them on a case by case basis.

As insane alien said, there's actually no such thing as decceleration in physics. Acceleration is just a change in velocity. And velocity is a vector - it has magnitude and direction. What in your problem is called a velocity of -3 is really just a velocity of 3 in the direction we've arbitrarily decided to call "negative." This is the same as saying it has a velocity of -3 in the opposite direction, that we've arbitrarily decided to call "positive."

Aside from granting me the ability to annihilate whomever I choose and thus basically hold the entire world at gunpoint, can these aliens help out in other ways? Or am I limited to giving human beings orders and working with whatever we already have?

Evolution is both theory and fact, but the strawman you put forward is neither. A strawman is when you falsely represent an opposing viewpoint in order to more easily discredit it. The theory of evolution does not say what you say it does, and so your arguments against that version are irrelevant to the real thing.

I'm flattered, really, but I'm a heterosexual male in a happily monogamous relationship.

Don't copy paste the whole book. Just talk about it here. Do you have a question, or a discussion you'd like to start?

Why "up to ten?"

Yes, Haekel's hypotheses of some kind of deterministic progress from species to species, with humans as the end result, have long been discredited. Evolution doesn't have a goal. Darwin had basically the right idea. Do you have some broader point to make, or is this just a historical tidbit you thought people might find interestin (which it is)?

Wow, CompuServe.

That's seriously how it's defined? That you have to be part of a group? So, an individual suicide bomber isn't technically a terrorist, no matter what the target or motives?

No, you're perfectly free to ask any question you want. This is a problem with answers. Prove to me there's no serious debate about the existence of leprachuans. Penrose is a whole other can of worms, but we don't have to get into that, because AFAIK not even he is claiming what you are. If it turns out I'm wrong about that, we can get into who, exactly, takes him seriously, and what has or has not been falsified. "A debate" is meaningless. The only thing you need to do to prove there is a debate is to hold a contrary position yourself. This thread is proof of "a debate." Quite. Now you're just being deliberately ironic.

Or to put it another way, the only requirement with regards to area is that the combined area of all plates remains constant. There's no reason individual plates should have a constant area.

I think you could say that there are a lot of very interesting large-scale effects that arise out of far smaller events inside small, squishy, extremely complicated objects. And until you figure that out, the larger events might indeed be quite a puzzle. Or maybe not. Even if the specific mechanisms were mysterious, some notion of what's going on could be deducible, to a degree that I imagine depends very much on the nature of the observer.

You're not alone, no. A lot of people (especially young people) think they would rather be dead than old and decrepit. Of course, usually the "and decrepit" part is the most important part, even if only implicitly. You still want to die at 65 if you're in great shape, mentally and physically? Are you afraid, like the Who ("Talkin' bout my geeeeneration!") of losing a youthful outlook and becoming The Man? Or, like Hunter S. Thompson, just want to prove that you can, as an act of freedom?

Or you'll swallow a tapeworm head? Don't do that.

No, it has not. QM does indeed suggest some things about reality that were previously hypothetical. However, that is not one of them.

Ok, the statement is equivalent to: "I have no way of proving whether or not the world disappears when I close my eyes." This is true. It can be applied to anything, and "anything" includes quantum mechanics. However, it has no special significance to QM.

Obsessing over death is one thing, but I don't understand why you would want a set time limit. I'll keep going as long as my mind is lucid and my body lets me live in peace. Otherwise, maybe I'll ask myself if I want to die every hundred years or so...

"Some researchers" = Pythagoras, btw Anyway, yes, if you put constraints on the number and duration of notes and on duration of melody, then there are a finite number of possibilities. Finite but ridiculously large. We're not going to run out. And if we did, it wouldn't really matter, since what's on the page is just the bare outline of any musical performance. Plus, it's not like it's remotely possible for any one person to hear every possible melody in a lifetime, so finding the good ones is still a worthwhile pursuit.