Sisyphus

There are claims of support for ID, but they are mostly just god of the gaps stuff ("irreducible complexity," i.e. we haven't yet figured out how it works, therefore it must be miraculous and intentional) and misunderstanding of the Anthropic Principle.

We are surely the most destructive species, but we're far from unique in being "out of equilibrium." No equilibrium lasts forever. Agent Smith also really needs to look up the definitions of "mammal" and "virus."

It matters because traveling at light speed is fundamentally different, hypothetical or no. It's not just a matter of being impossible. It's not described in the same way. For example, as you approach light speed relative to me, I'll observe your time compression approaching infinity. The model breaks down. Time is not part of what a photon "experiences." So, once again, your question is relevant to observers moving at significant fractions of C relative to one another. Anyway, neither you nor I will perceive that either one of us is moving faster than light. Always specify reference frame, and it will make more sense. Say you travel to a star 10 lightyears away, and undergo enough acceleration that due to relativistic time compression, you only experience 1 year for the journey. In my reference frame, you spent somewhat more than 10 years to travel 10 light years, and your time appeared to slow down quite a bit. In your reference frame, however, you only spent 1 year making the journey, but the journey was a much shorter distance. At all times, the speed of light relative to each of us was observed to be equal in every direction: C.

Sometimes it is helpful to talk about why a given topic is not scientific, or to have a place where one can be free to speculate more freely on topics perhaps tangentially related to science but not constrained by the same need for actual support. That's what I think, anyway. You're free not to participate, which is made easier by the fact that it's a separate subforum.

Don't talk about "moving at the speed of light." That's impossible. Also don't talk about moving at some velocity without specifying what it's moving relative to. That's meaningless. What you mean is moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light relative to something else, like the Earth. And finally, always keep in mind what reference frame you're talking about. From your own perspective, your own "clock" always runs at the same speed. It's only for observers in a different frame of reference that your time is moving slower. It is true, however, that from your perspective, the time your journey takes will be shorter than would seem possible for someone in another reference frame, for example only having 1 year pass (for you) while traveling 10 light years. But you are still not traveling faster than the speed of light, from either perspective. From the outside, you're traveling less than the speed of light and taking longer than 10 years (and your time appears to be moving slower). From your perspective, you're traveling less than the speed of light, taking less than a year, and only traveling less than one light year. Actually, to be more accurate, from your perspective you aren't traveling at all, and your destination is approaching you at some speed.

Coincidentally, 10^47 is my lucky number.

From a quick Google search, I see several different methods claiming to be able to cat-proof a fence. It's probably worth at least looking into, although it would involve at least some additional work, expense, and something permanent you'll have to look at.

You're right. From now on, I'm not letting mice starve when there are perfectly edible young birds just out of their reach.

Sunlight that the Earth itself intercepts is the original source of most of the energy we use, so yes, it's possible. There are also ideas to put solar collectors in space and beam the energy to ground-based collectors via lasers, which would be consistent clean energy. There hasn't been anything like that so far because of technical issues and, even more, because of the huge costs of sending stuff into space. However, I recently heard that there is at least one company (called Solaren) that plans to do exactly that in the next few years, although it remains to be seen whether they can actually do it.

It's possible (though unlikely) that the thing "works," just within the laws of physics, i.e. there's an input of useful energy somewhere that's not accounted for. It's even possible that the inventors honestly think they've broken the laws of physics, which would make it not a "hoax," per se. But no, they have not. I agree with mooey.

I hear this a lot, and I've always found it to be fallacious. If you don't exist "yet," there's no "you" to have harm done to. If any of a trillion tiny things had gone differently in either of your parents lives, one of billions of other people would exist instead of you, or no one at all. These "potential people" were not "killed," and it would be silly to mourn their deaths or accuse your parents of mass genocide. (Even if it's an active decision on their part, like saying "we don't want to have children yet.") They simply were not given the opportunity to live, which is NOT even remotely the same thing. So something which has the POTENTIAL to become human is not the same thing as BEING human. Nor, even what it would become if left alone. Humans have rights and moral significance while they're living human beings. Before they exist, or after they've died, the situation is certainly different.

How many federal assets are located within the borders of Texas? It seems like one effect of the pork-barrel game is that everything gets really spread out. If your tank is built with parts manufactured in 47 different states, if the various components of your infrastructure seemlessly ignores state borders, if your missile silos are spread throughout the heartland, if NASAs mission control, jet propulsion laboratory, and main launch site are all thousands of miles apart, etc., I imagine extracting one particular state and declaring independence would be extremely messy. Besides, I doubt Texans would enjoy losing the status and priveleges of superpowerdom.

Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, just like velocity is the rate of change of position. So, if the acceleration is -9.8 meters per second per second, then your velocity is going to decrease by 9.8 meters per second for every second, meaning at a given time t seconds after you start, your velocity is going to be 9.8*t less than your initial velocity. And you know your initial velocity, which is 7 meters per second. So the equation for velocity is going to be: v = 7 - 9.8t So you can see, 1 second after you throw the ball in the air, it has the velocity has changed by 9.8, down from 7, meaning it will be -2.8 meters per second. And so on, for any other time. When will the velocity equal zero?

if you assume there is a designer, then looking at the product can potentially tell you things about the designer and what it was designed for. But if you want to know whether it was designed, you're out of luck. Without knowing anything about the hypothetical designer and the designer's motives and intentions, the proposition that something was done with conscious intent is completely unfalsifiable. Maybe I like bubbling sulfur ponds, etc. Nor is it verifiable, really. When talking about human designers, who we understand quite well and have loads of experience with both human designed and undesigned objects, there are some telltale signs, like "Made in China" printed on the bottom. Even with the seemingly obvious we need to be careful, though, as there are many things which seem "obviously" designed by intelligence but later turn out not to be. And that's just in the realm of everday experience, with beings the same as us. When positing a "universe designer," the question becomes rather absurd. Utterly unfalsifiable, and we are many degrees removed from having any idea what to look for for verification.

Don't know where you are, but in NYC the average low in April is 44. 12 degrees lower than average and precipitating at the same time would be a coincidence big enough that you can't count on it happening every year, but it's still well within the category of "normal."

Yes, that's wrong. What you want is to figure out equations for height vs. time, velocity vs. time, and acceleration vs. time. Each of those is a derivative (rate of change) of the one before it. You already have the last one: it's a constant. a = -9.8. What, then, is velocity? You have the initial velocity, 7, and you have it's rate of change with respect to time, -9.8 per second. So what would the equation be, if v is velocity and t is time?

I think if you specify the abstract thought, and not chemical energy being expended (or whatever), then it's pretty safe to say "no."

Interestingly, the impression I get from the BBC is one of considerably less bias than most American TV news. British members might feel differently, I don't know. Please, we practically invented sensationalist journalism.

So basically, only a fraction have been successfully traced, and of those 90% are of American origin. So everybody is wrong. If you consider those as something close to a random sampling (which is very probably not the case), 90% is reasonable. If you assume that the highest estimate of total guns is accurate and that every single American gun was submitted and successfully traced (also almost certainly not the case), then FNC is right. In other words, there's a huge margin of error, and everyone is wrong. Par for the course. How about we stick with "thousands of American assault weapons, making up a significant fraction of the total, have found their way to Mexican drug lords." Just curious: where else do they come from? Even if you can't trace to a significant owner, you should at least be able to tell if it was manufactured in the U.S., shouldn't you? If an American company makes a given weapon, then somebody must have bought it legally in America at some point, right?

What?

Consciousness and sentience are both slippery and imprecise terms that mean different things in different contexts. Others to throw in the mix are "awareness" and "self-awareness." I know, I know: I'm very helpful. You're welcome.

I agree. The universe was obviously designed by committee.

Alright, but "doing best in the struggle for existence" is necessarily defined by having the most and/or most successful offspring, right? It seems like you could flip it around and call that the goal, in which case preserving the best designs would be the side effect. Which I guess is one reason why it's pointless to talk about "goals" at all, since there aren't any. But there would be goals with an artificial process, so we would have to, as you say, design an environment with that goal in mind, and pretty much hope for the best. I'm sure it would yield something that can solve problems and interact convincingly with humans, but it seems like it would almost certainly end up doing those things in ways quite differently than human brains do. Or am I just totally off base? EDIT: How about modelling an actual human brain as closely as possible, and applying evolutionary algorithms to that model? (Is that what we've been talking about all along?)

I assume a designed algorithm would be quite different from natural selection, though. For one thing, the "goal" would be different. With natural selection, the "goal" is always passing on genes to successful offspring as many times as possible. For an evolved AI, we're going to have to figure out different criteria (I assume), which might make creating something akin to a human intelligence tricky. More trivially, there would also be much less time between generations, and less randomness (in nature, the individual can only have a better chance of survival based on genetics, but its still just a chance).

No, I mean there's literally nothing being proposed. The text: http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/81R/billtext/html/HC00050I.htm I mean, it's all well and good to say that, but what is anyone suggesting actually be done? What is the federal government supposed to do? "Don't violate the Constitution." Um, ok. We'll try. Is it implying a legal argument? What argument might that be? And why aren't they bringing it to the Supreme Court? Because, it seems to me, they don't have anything substantial to say, and because this isn't really directed at the federal government, it's directed at their constituents, to take advantage of vague popular unrest.