J'Dona

It's about time, I think. I know that the word "planet" has no significant bearing in science itself, but culturally Pluto really always has been different, or treated differently, from the rest of what were the nine planets. But forget about it feeling left out: it's now the chief prototype for an entirely new classification of stellar bodies. My only question is, if one of the criteria now for a planet is that the object must have "cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit," then does this mean that Neptune technically isn't a planet because it hasn't cleared Pluto, which crosses its orbit?

You're right about English being too complicated as it is. And doesn't it have the largest number of words of any language? Esperanto is a good choice in that it does use words from various European languages to make up its vocabulary, such as English and Polish and Latin, so people [who speak a European language] are likely to already be familiar with much of it; however, the same can be said for Latin also, as the Romance languages stemmed from it, and massive amounts of English are drawn from it also. I studied Esperanto from the age of 7 to 13 (though I hardly remember any now) and found that I knew where many of the words came from, and the same is true for Latin now (though of course much later, when I have a slightly better vocabulary). I admit Esperanto seemed easier to pick up, and would probably be a better choice (for English speakers at least) as a simplified language. Latin simply has extant literature from over two thousand years ago, and more depth and uses in technical fields. (But then Latin is also a "dead" language, so we can't exactly add words for "computer" or "mobile phone.") As a total aside, I'll bet learning both Latin and Esperanto would be the ultimate primer for over a dozen European languages—I'm going to check if I still have the books.

The funny thing is, it's not even the system used by the English any more. The only country in the world, other than the United States, which uses the Imperial system is Liberia.

I'd be interested in it as well, particularly for Latin: it, along with Ancient Greek, is after all the foundation in some sense of modern scientific nomenclature, and just about any scientific work you pick up from before 1850 is written in Latin. I may be biased because I've been trying to teach myself Latin for some months now (postponing Ancient Greek, which I had done for some months before that), and did verbs for four hours this morning. I suppose it would be difficult to maintain interest, unless we had some members who qualified as experts to instruct or advise other members and such, or even just to ask questions and practise with on some languages.

As far as I know, "autosexual" is the correct term in that usage, Neil9327. That's another point of debate (on a more political side): whether self-identified asexuals who are attracted to themselves (it's a person after all!), or who have a sex drive which is not directed at people, or who are even attracted to other people but who have no desire for sexual relations are asexuals or not. The last seems quite a liberal definition (and could possibly be a result of other things, such as, for example, schizoid personality), but to consider only those without a sex drive at all may be too drastic, and leaves a fair amount of those who presently identify as asexual in a fuzzy, undefined area. In chat, one member was wondering whether it could be attributed to hormones. Already given "no sexual attraction" to other people, people who identify as asexuals can sort loosely into those with: -- a sex drive and romantic attraction to others -- a sex drive and no romantic attraction to others -- no sex drive and romantic attraction to others -- no sex drive and no romantic attraction to others all of which or only the last of which may be actual asexuality, depending on who is defining it. But the variance between them shows that if asexuality is a hormone problem, it should be able to explain the various forms of it (after lack of sexual attraction), and the subtleties in that person's experiences.

I think a difference is being drawn between sexual attraction and romantic attraction, which aren't necessarily connected. For example, JesuBungle may enjoy the properties of J Lo, but claiming by extension that he would care for her until she is old and eighty is not necessarily true.

When you say "someone who has never shown any interest in the subject," what precisely are you referring to? I only mean if you mean a lack of interest in the subject of sex itself, the subject of attraction, or the subject of attraction (i.e. the person). Any discussion is going to have a problem with definitions (complicated by the definitions themselves not being official), as asexuality itself is only just emerging as a concept of sexuality in humans, whether or not it is legitimate. Bogaert talks about "sexual attraction", but this needs to be separated from sexual desire and sexual drive, which are different things.

I notice that no thread on SFN has considered it in depth, so I offer this thread. There is consfusion as to whether asexuality, being defined provisionally as "having no sexual attraction to a partner of either sex," is a sexual disorder, dysfunction, or orientation. I've been reading on it, but there is a paucity of scientific research available, so it may be that for now opinion is as good as we have ... but we can still hear that. The main debate is whether asexuality is simply a form of inhibited sexual desire or a separate sexual orientation. To get discussion moving, here is a 2004 article from The Journal of Sex Research by Anthony F. Bogaert, which provides the above definition and notes the apparent prevalence at about 1% of the population; thus, if it is a unique sexual orientation, you can see the significance, being similar to the percentage of the population which is homosexual (about 3%).

I'll help you out there, Severian: Organ Fugue in G Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach Pachelbel's Canon by Johann Pachelbel (preferably with violin) Memory by Andrew Lloyd Webber (when sung properly) Us and Them by Pink Floyd If this were a list of greatest songs, rather than most beautiful, I would want to replace Us and Them with Comfortably Numb, which I saw performed by David Gilmour and sung in part by David Bowie on the 29th; it made me a better and more valid human being. And fair enough, Gilded, but I'm just wondering how you can classify Fury of the Storm as "beautiful" music, it being technically outstanding but otherwise shred guitarwork!

J'Dona is a name I invented by randomly hitting the keyboard and inserting vowels/an apostrophe. It's also the name of a character in a book which I may start to write in 20 years time. The avatar is a photoshop edit from here: http://www.goats.com/archive/031103.html

Well, yes ... and it really didn't matter anyway, which is why I said "let's say this is true for the sake of argument," i.e. I was ignoring the point so that I could just consider your argument. You were still considering its momentum, though, for reasons I can't understand as you had been talking about gravity. Can you explain what you were doing there? Why do you say it would need "more than light's speed" to reach the Earth's mass, though? You know that the mass of an object tends to infinity as the speed tends to c, and from what I can work out an object with a millionth the Earth's mass would need to travel at about 0.9999999999995c to match it. Edit: Embarrassing grammatical error

KBR, this is the fourth or fifth time you've come to SFN now. You didn't secure a following the previous times, and your material doesn't look to have appreciably changed—though I would of course concede to a challenge on this point as I haven't the will to read through the previous posts. But, assuming a constant standard of competence from users here, a more favourable response from new members since your last visit is not very likely. At any rate, the same forces that made you leave the previous times are likely to act again. But, if your ideas have developed significantly from your last visit, could you provide us with a summary of the major differences so we can discuss your ideas most productively? (A summary, not exposition, please. People will skip long-winded and long-worded posts when the poster could have said the same more concisely with as much or more accuracy.)

Actually, hot air rises depending on gravity. On spacecraft, where gravity is not zero but where the surrounding environment is in free-fall with the candle, candle flames are extremely dim and spread in all directions. A space shuttle has far, far less than a millionth of the Earth's mass, but let's say this is true for the sake of argument. But what is this about its gravity? What you've described above is the speed at which the shuttle would need to move for its momentum to match that of the Earth's—and only assuming that momentum increased linearly with velocity, which is incorrect at high speeds due to relativity. The Earth orbits at about 30 kms-1, actually. At any rate, the Sun we orbit moves as well, and so does the galaxy we are in. In fact, there's no reason to think that the Earth doesn't move incredibly quickly like any other body in the universe; we certainly aren't stationary. In what you must consider to be a deadly coup de grâce, you are really only demonstrating here that you consider this topic to involve beliefs, rather than science. What you have said does no damage to the predictive accuracy of relativity because the argument itself was a strawman. So you are saying that time passes more quickly for objects which are moving at higher speeds? This is demonstrably false: the presence of clocks (atomic clocks, which are less subject to physical effects than entirely mechanical clocks) on fast-moving aircraft, spacecraft, and satellites have determined this many times, and this is described very well by relativity.

Are you certain that "unnatural" human behaviour even exists, at least in the sense you have described? Cannibalism, paedophilia, and slavery are generally considered (in modern civilisations) to be inhuman and immoral things—and yet all of these have existed and were often normal parts of society throughout human history. Can you rightly declare them to be unnatural because they are classified as immoral (and hence unnatural, by your definition of morality) by a morality which did not appear until long after all three were commonplace? I am sure you agree that most people have different senses of morality: this is demonstrably true. In that case, natural and unnatural behaviour would be relative regardless of the morality of the observer, since this is relative as well. Edit: Just noticed that you've discussed some of those examples in other threads, but I hadn't seen them. If you respond to them I'll leave it to be done here rather than draw unreliable inferences myself.

Here qwerty, try this site: http://www.bugmenot.com and put http://www.sciam.com into the text box. That should give you the login and password of someone who entered their details for others to use. Incidentally, that site also works for just about every major news site online.

Mostly hard science fiction (which tries to be as scientifically detailed or accurate as possible), some space opera (more character drama, like Star Wars), or a mix of the two (called "new space opera", but that sounds stupid). I like fantasy just as much though if it's logically consistant and detailed, like Lord of the Rings.

Just to answer ths point quickly, breaking the sound barrier was only a technical problem facing engineers of the time. When they said it wasn't possible, it was because they didn't have strong enough materials then, or powerful enough engines, but eventually they designed them and the sound barrier was broken. On the other hand, bringing an object to light speed is not just a technical difficulty, but rather it's not physically possible for the reasons described in posts above. Certainly, this might be disproven, but as far as I'm aware they've accelarated particles to fractionally less than the speed of light in particle accelarators, and this limitation and the relationships described hold true, so it's safe to assume for now that it's reliable in the same way that we assume the law of conservation of energy is.

As an object's velocity increases, its mass increases (look here for a page with the formula). It increases in such a way that if its speed were to reach the speed of light, it would basically have infinite mass, and any effort to accelerate an object to that speed would require infinite energy (since you would need a greater and greater force to bring an object closer and closer to the speed of light as its mass increased). So it's a physical limitation, not a technical one; all theorised faster-than-light propulsion technologies in science fiction and that have to use elaborate things like wormholes to try and get past this issue. Things don't become smaller as they approach light speed, but they may appear to to an outside observer. I think this is called Lorentz contraction, and occurs when, say, a stationary observer watches an object passing by at close to the speed of light (or the observer can be moving and the object can be stationary, same result. Each appears contracted to the other).

Okay, that's weird. I did it again, and I got the exact same economic score, but my social score was about 1 lower. Economic Left/Right: -6.13 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.49 I did change some of my answers to strongly or not on reconsideration, and changed the answer outright one or two, but I was consciously wondering why I hadn't gotten a more negative Social score than I did before so this may have skewed the results. Either I was just feeling more authoritarian when I did it before, or this is a reaction to the higher score. Cheers for the graph Lance!

Ack, busted! A thread on the main page too! While usernames and avatars will almost always have particular meaning to the person who uses them, they usually don't say anything to someone else. I mean, what does "J'Dona" mean to anyone besides "awkward to type"? It might help to take into account other historical details about their avatar, their name, or their signature. For example, it's interesting to watch how often a person changes their avatar (if at all) or what size it is, or if there is a recurring theme. Things like this can be more telling about a person than their actual choice of avatar, like how the way that someone says something can be more significant than what they said. For example, my own progression in avatars since joining (minus a few uncoloured transitional ones) have been something like this: There's a trend here, you could say. I also put some effort into making them, since most were originally black and white (at least when I only had Paint to work with), and I care enough to bother posting about it, so I must consider avatars to be quite important. So what does this say about me? Clearly, I am schizophrenic, and my suppressed alien alter-ego seeks detailed portraits as a form of self-expression.

Actually, being able to choose your own username on forums and such is one of my favourite things about the internet. To me there is something special about a name you assign to yourself, rather than one which was assigned to you (assuming it wasn't just a random set of keystrokes ... the username, that is!). Given names tend to carry more emotional attachment, but not the same meaning as one which you chose yourself. I don't have any problem with people actually knowing my first name (it's Jesse), but I'd be disturbed if someone insisted on using it, and maybe a little indignant. It's all personal preference, though. In a way it's a form of role-playing, which can be true of the avatar as well. Of course, it may not help if the things they describe aren't related to you at all; J'Dona sounds feminine when I am actually a male, and I'm not really a grey alien with a glass of beer in my hand, just as I'm sure you aren't Amy from Sonic. But they're touches of personality, or maybe references to things we like, which can help to set us apart in a more personal way than, funnily enough, a given name and a self-portrait would. We didn't choose those, after all; they don't reflect our personality quite so much. Avatars in particular are very telling. Sayonara, for example, used to use an avatar of Invader ZIM because he aspires to rule to Earth. dave used to use one of a small fish because, presumably, he is fond of water which is contained in glass tanks. blike and YT2095 use old pictures of themselves because they think they looked better back then.

Economic Left/Right: -6.13 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.56 The last time I did it I was around -5.00, -4.00, but that was several months ago.

Well, they seem to have demonstrated that they could plant fake bombs on 3 subway trains and a bus, which is the same as the 7th of July attacks. If they could plant fake bombs with detonators (or perhaps very weak ones, since the bus windows were blown out), they could surely plant real ones. This is only two weeks after the previous attacks and under elevated security. The message seems to be that despite all security and condemnation in the UK and the death or capture of the terrorists involved in the 7th of July attacks, an identical attack can still be done. By using dummy bombs they can convey the message (albeit less forcefully) without loss of life, assuming that this matters to them. If not, and these bombs were intended to cause damage, then it is a bit pathetic of them, yes.

From what I thought, a terrorist could be defined as someone who commits acts of violence and intimidation on civilians to advance political, religious, or ideological goals. By that definition, the London bombers were terrorists because they killed civilians and attempted to intimidate a society which opposes their values (Al Qaeda's, that is). On the other hand, the Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah, whose targets were military personnel, were not terrorists (unless they did attack civilians). The Wikipedia article defines terrorism as simply "the use of violence for the purpose of achieving a political, religious, or ideological goal," which I don't think is right at all. By this definition, any soldier who commited violence in war would be a terrorist. Actually, almost anyone who commited a violent crime would be a terrorist. If you hit a man for promoting racism (the end of racism being your ideological goal), you would be committing an act of terrorism.

God gave us two kidneys so that we could sell one on eBay. - my brother