Radical Edward

I am referring contextually. when one "hits" a person, generally it is regarded as a method of causing pain or injury, whereas the intention in hitting a nail is clear. one rarely "hits" in order to discipline, and should you wish to use the word hit, it must be made clear whether the intention is one of discipline or not. Furthermore, there is another distinction to be drawn between discipline and punishment. sadly I don't have time at the moment to discuss it in more detail, but if you agree, dosagree or feel like coming up with some boundaries, I will be back on monday.

There is a really interesting looking article in http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/ could someone with access and interest have a look at it and maybe do a summary? thanks there is also one on titan somewhere too.

sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees.

well anything that wasn't completely accurate would rapidly become wildly inaccurate.

I strongly disagree with this - the use of the word medicine again, is the sort of language that I was pointing our earlier. The things being given to children such as Ritalin are Drugs of the mind altering variety. They should not be administered unless under the most severest circumstances, and definitely not at the rate that they seem to be being handed out over in the US of late.

hit generally means to cause physical injury, wheras a smack is just to cause pain, that is how I see the difference between the two, and that difference is rather distinct. Adults should not hit one another, largely because they are capable of understanding one another, young children are not. Furthermore, when it comes to smacking, it was only ever used on me in times of imminent danger, say if I was about to wander onto the road (as soon as I could walk, I hated being restricted) or something else. My personal view is that if used at all smacking should be related to these types of events. Social misdemeanours should result in social punishments.

none of Zarkov's statements had any relation to reality. if you find any remnants of things he said, ignore them

you would also probably need a computer with larger than the entire computational power of the universe.

remember that genes code for nothing more than proteins.

why do people climb mountains? why do people look for mathematical solutions that will have no use to anyone? why do people write powtry no-on will ever read? because they can. It is human nature.

heh, all the anti smackers say "hit" and "abuse" again. furthermore, saying "my parents never smacked me and I don't have a problem" and also vice versa, is no real argument, "you" are not a statistically relevant sample. how does one go about explaining to an average 1 year old the concept of danger?

sines and cosines are as much up as they are down, so an integral over infinity will always be zero.

almost certainly. I looked into it with regards to writing a protein folding simulator, and that would have been extremely difficult. If I could get it to work though, I would become a millionaire very very quickly.

they don't. when a particle and it's corresponding antiparticle collide, they are both annihilated, usually turning into gamma radiation, or perhaps other particles, depending on the interaction.

as a slight side note, looking at the language difference between pro-smacking and anti-smacking (since spank has other connotations) shows that the one that has to resort to the most emotive language is the anti smacking brigade. They commonly use words like Hit, Beat and Abuse, when, more often than not, this does not reflect the actual punishment meted out to the children. Of course if the words hit, beat and abuse are actually applicable, then something should be done about it... and it is amusing to note, that it is in todays atmosphere of high crime, social problems and juvenile delinquency, that they are proposing the removel of a method of discipline. That aside, it strikes me than many parents aren't capable of bringing their children up, and have not instilled a sense of respect and discipline at an early age. When children are very young, they are incapable of understanding many things since they do not have the experience... so trying to explain to a child why something is bad is almost impossible. In the very early stages of develoment, much like a dog, a child has to learn right and wrong through association with some stimulus, in this case pain (since there is no other real immediate negative stimulus that you can associate with). once the child has learned to associate this with appropriate language, then smacking doesn't even need to be used anymore... for example I wasn't smacked at all after a couple of years of age. I certainly don't remember it. Many parents are irresponsible with it though, smacking the child almost indiscriminately for any little misdemeanour... which will not demonstrate to the child the importance of the smack at all. the child will then become immune to it in effect, having been desensitised... while it will cry at the initial pain, no lesson will be learned. This is again as a result of bad parenting. I accept that there will always be exceptions in these cases, but what I have given is an outline of my general feeling on the topic.

<MrL_JaKiri> 'I hate these lateral thinking puzzles, you have to think laterally' I think sums it up rather well

<MrL_JaKiri> it's just a matter of stating that empirically newtonian physics holds past the speed of sound thanky for pointing out my fuzzy/incorrect line of argument

of course. according to current science and understanding there is no universal rest frame, but then current science suggests exactly the fact that there is no universal rest frame. were there to be one, I think there would have to be a massive rewriting of relativity. incidentally, what would the rest frame which has the Cosmic Microwave Background equal (barring fluctuations) in all directions - in that there is no red shift on one side and corresponding blue shift on the other - be a rest frame relative to? It would seem to be that would be a rest frame relative to everything at the time of decoupling of radiation and matter, or am I getting to grandiose?

I disagree strongly. many people, perhaps the majority, are too stupid to make a proper decision for themselves. this is the fundamental problem with discussions on things like drugs and guns here. Were drugs and guns to be legal and freely available, then I suspect that the people here are intelligent enough to make an informed choice. Most people are probably not.

none. law is bad.

your view on atomic structure is rather simplistic. I will be kind and ignore isotopes for now, as they are largely irrelevant. when looking at individual atoms, you are not too far off, although each one of those variables has sub variables - the arrangement of the electrons in th"shells" is dictated by quantum mechanical rules, which get consecutively more complex as you get to larger and larger atoms. Something like hydrogen is really easy to describe, but something like Iron isn't. as soon as you start allowing intercactions between different sorts of molecules, you then start having to consider all the energy levels and interactions, and competition between different, atoms trying to interact with one another. once you start to get to large molecules it gets even more complicated, as you have to take molecular size, bond strength, and other niceties such as hydrophilia/phobia. This isn't even looking at different material properties such as plasticity, metallic, crystalline and so on. In short, I think you are approaching the simulation from entirely the wrong direction. The only way to make a program of the sort you describe, is to actually have a table of material properties, and then assign each ting to a particular material type. so glass would be an amorphous brittle solid at room temp, diamond a crystal, copper a metal, and so on. Generally speaking you can give a particular material a class which will give it a bunch of properties that are the same as all others in that class, and all you need to tweak is things like the colour and so on, and the numerical material properties such as melting point and so on. Of course you would still be faced with some oddities, sand/dust/grains being one, as they have some solid properties, and some liquid properties, but these could be put in a misc category. Atomic Physics and material Science are huge fields, and if it was so easy to simulate them, someone would have already done it. Even something like protein folding is hideously complicated.

It isn't really a definition per se, as it is a rather circular argument since one could equally say, entropy always increases in the direction that time flows. Time itself clearly has a dimensional quality, as is illustrated by Relativity. we find it easy to define space, but not time, even though they are all dimensions. however in the presence of very high gravity, space and sime start to become more mixed, until you get to the event horizon, where all you can say, is that the future is in a direction towards the singularity.

I've not heard of this.... do you have any links or anything?

small, but infinitely larger than any civilisation at all living without numbers. One of the fundamental bases of civilisations is trade, in goods or services. those goods or services would invariably have to be quantified, especially once the services become more intangible. as for technology, it is all fundamentally mathematics based. one has to have an idea of what one is trying to create/construct, and the properties of the materials and so on, and as faf said, as soon as you are looking at electronics, you are looking at maths. randomly sticking stuff together and hoping it works is equivalent to watching a tornado going through a junkyard and expecting it to build a jumbo jet.

no. does it make any difference?