Sisyphus

I agree. That is a good point. It can't not disrupt the flow, in fact, since that is where its getting its energy from. One million 1kw turbines have to extract the same kinetic energy as a 1 gigawatt dam. I don't know for sure, but it seems at least plausible that the overall effect would actually be a lot greater if you spread them out over a long stretch of river. (Or it might be the other way around.) [/speculation]

You can do that indefinitely, but at that point you're no longer dealing with quantum mechanics. You're talking about philosophical sollipsism. "How do we know the machine has recorded something real until we look at it" vs. "How do I know the world doesn't disappear when I close my eyes." No difference.

I think that's inevitable, yeah. Ours seems like it would have to be an extreme example, but I think the "feedback mechanism" is universal. Every species becomes a part of its own environment, thus making the environment different from what caused it to evolve to that point in the first place, etc. We humans have obviously radically changed our own environment in a very short period of time (and everybody else's environment, too - the rise of human civilization is a global mass extinction event), and what's going to happen in the long term is anyone's guess.

I'm guessing it would be more than a million. Not sure what the design you have in mind is, but 1 kilowatt seems like a lot for something the size of a car tire, harnessing just the horizontal flow of a river. I could be wrong about that, though. I just looked up the soon to be completed Three Gorges Dam in China. It will be the largest dam in the world, and is very controversial because of the flooding it caused, destroying habitats (though creating others), forcing the mass relocation of over a million people, and drowning archeological sites. However, it will have a mind-boggling capacity of 22.5 gigawatts (about 11 times the Hoover Dam), supplying tens of millions of people with electricity and reducing the amount of coal they need to burn by about 40 million tonnes per year, including the more efficient ship transport it allows via ship elevator and smoothing out droughts and floods. It will also pay for itself in ten years.

The word does cause confusion, but it just means interaction with something external. I think it comes from the initial Heisenberg thought experiments in a "how do we determine position and momentum at the same time" kind of thing, and would still apply in laboratory experiments (where, in the case of QM, it always means recorded by some type of machine, for obvious reasons). It is similar to the way we say that "no information can be transferred at faster than light," where "information" isn't limited to something understood by conscious beings.

All that's needed for selection to occur is for different genes to be correlated for any reason with different average numbers of viable offspring. (And even without that, there would still be drift.) Civilization has obviously changed our environment a great deal and therefore changed the course of evolution, but it certainly hasn't stopped it.

I've never tasted any of those.

It also depends on where you're applying to. Even perfect SAT scores are not an automatic ticket to entry at many places.

Does anyone else experience it?

brieflyobtanium

Yeah, what? You have reason to suspect someone is somehow inducing vertigo in you with an otherwise indetectable device operating on some unknown principle from 200 yards away?

We don't know that the bee is agitated or prone to stinging, whether there are gloves involved, etc. The premise of the question states merely that he is holding a bee in his hands. Also, the use of "his hands" presupposes that it is possible to "have" something, if not necessarily in the sense of property.

Well, at a minimum: hands, a bee in them, a Y chromosome.

Nice! The newest entry in Kleinwolf Presents Weird Topics About Masturbation! By who, and on what basis? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_ejaculate Isn't it quite clear where it's found?

Well, I'm guessing you end up digesting some of the larger particles you breathe in. I don't know why you would ever think of spiders in particular, although I guess if you sleep with your mouth open, and your home is extremely infested with very small ones, I guess it's technically possible, just as it would be technically possible to swallow any other small very small object without realizing it. Any "statistic" is pretty silly though. "Can you die from it" is a similar question, because, well, you can die from pretty much anything. I doubt anyone ever has, though.

What that thought experiment demonstrates is that there is a limit to how rigid anything can be. Nothing can transmit force at faster than the speed of light.

I don't know what this means. I should think it would take at least 4 points to define a 3D volume. Or are we talking about something else entirely? What do you mean by "comparison?" You have to explain yourself. What relationship? Define "value of separation" and "states" as used in this sentence. I don't understand what this means. Don't just repeat yourself - explain. In everyday language.

I still don't understand the bulk of what you're trying to say, but this I understand and must disagree with. There is no proportion between a mathematical point and a finite volume. Nor between a line and a finite volume, nor an area.

One way of putting it is that the Cold War led us to approach foreign policy based on the fairly ridiculous premise that the world was a zero-sum game against a single opponent (the Soviet Union, which had the same approach). This is obviously an oversimplification, but it has enough truth to explain most of our more questionable actions. Post-Cold War, we no longer have that excuse...

Yeah, it's got nothing to do with consciousness. To be "observed" means to interact with something.

Amazing camouflage!

Um, that's echidnas, not echinoderms! They are mammals, albeit bizarre ones.

I very much doubt it would be cheaper than a dam for the same amount of power generated.

Presumably it's something that people are often searching for? I tried a few plausible variations on Google, but I couldn't get this thread on the first page.

In the context of classical physics, the Earth's gravity is the "tether." If it were to suddenly turn off, we would indeed all fly off on tangent trajectories, just like a rock released from a sling. As is, the Earth's spinning does create a centrifugal effect, which is why it bulges slightly at the equator, and why it's easier to launch rockets the closer to the equator you are.