Cap'n Refsmmat

There's also the entire field of psychoacoustics, which seeks to understand why some combinations of sounds are pleasing and some aren't.

Preaching and soapboxing are against religion rule #3 and SFN rule #8. Please do use the Report link at the bottom left of the post if you notice it. I was very happy with the Religion forum until just recently; I think a few recent conversations have diverged from our original goals. But looking at the Religion forum topics list, I think many of the "successful" topics weren't exactly "religion and science." I wonder how we can better clarify the role of that forum...

I don't think doing a chemistry experiment by eyeballing the numbers will get you much accuracy. Particularly when we're talking grams, not kilograms.

I don't have Penrose's book, but I do have the paper from Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that you say his work was an "outgrowth" of. Despite your claims to the contrary, it says nothing about infinite universes -- it refers to inflationary cosmology, which can have finite or infinite universes, and explores difficulties in the entire theory. It makes no specific claims about infinite universes that I know of. Are there other peer-reviewed papers that he has published on the subject? Lorenzo and Sorbo (UC Davis physicists) characterize inflationary cosmology as having "survived extensive theoretical and observational scrutiny and has come to be seen as the leading theory of the origin of the universe (see for example [2])" as of 2008, while of course noting there are open questions -- which still may be solved. But we'll see what you think about the chance of the universe being infinite when you get back later, apparently.

Depends on the type of job you want in the intelligence agency. Here's the NSA's careers site, for example: http://www.nsa.gov/careers/career_fields/index.shtml

Fair enough. The answer to #107 is "no," because you misunderstood Mr Skeptic. Let me quote: Mr Skeptic's hypothesis does not mean that if, for example, there is a minute chance that two people on Earth have the same DNA, the size of the universe alters that chance. It means that if an event has a probability of occurring, and the size of the universe alters how many chances that event has, the probability that it will occur at least once in the entire universe is increased when the size of the universe increases. For example, if we are looking at the chance that life will occur by chance alone anywhere in the universe, it increases when the universe (and amount of matter, and number of habitable planets, and so on) increases in size. A large universe gives more opportunities for life to arise; an infinite universe gives infinite opportunities. If we are looking at the chance that life will occur by chance alone at one specific location, the size of the universe is irrelevant. Only the age is. It's generally considered bad etiquette to ignore questions when you're making claims. As DJBruce points out, this is why limits exist. When we multiply by infinite, we get an undefined result; but when we increase the operand towards infinity, we can see the result also tends to infinity. So as the universe increases in size to infinitely large, the probability of life scales similarly. You again forget that the same inflationary model that can predict an infinite universe can also predict a finite universe, depending on observations. If you throw out the inflationary model because of issues, you are left with an assortment of finite or infinite models. And again Mr Skeptic's point about probability still stands. So long as there's a chance of the universe being infinite, his argument works. I'm a capable argumentative multitasker.

What request or demonstration do you refer to? I refer to posts #103 and #105. You did not bring up any requests for clarification. If you're thinking of #107, I let Mr Skeptic answer that rather than putting words in his mouth. If you want to accuse me of avoiding clarifying, please request I clarify first. And while we're at it, you haven't answered my questions in post #101. I believe Mr Skeptic's calculations don't require an infinite universe to be a certainty. Just a slight possibility. "How Probable is Inflation?" is also 22 years old; Lorenzo and Sorbo present a newer calculation in Physical Review that is more favorable. What point is there to speak only of life on Earth? Suppose the probability of life emerging on Earth is small, but the probability of life emerging anywhere in the universe is rather large. In such a universe, it would be likely that some planet would have beings like us pondering the existence of life. In other words, that would stack the universe in favor of us existing, on whatever planet.

And I demonstrated that no such illogical outcomes would occur. You appear to have ignored that. The model that produces an infinite universe is testable and falsifiable. As Mr Skeptic pointed out, it is the same model that produces a finite universe, but with different input observations. Those observations are being made, and point to an infinite universe conclusion. If you want to reject widely accepted cosmological models, I'd appreciate peer-reviewed sources to back up your claims. Don't shift the goalposts. That's not what was stated in the first post in this topic. Hoyle's mathematics apply to any Earth-like planet.

But then they wouldn't be attracted to the floor. The ones on the side of your body would be horizontal, so they'd be equally attracted and repelled from the floor. The ones on the bottoms of your shoes would be attracted, but the ones on the top of your body (shoulders, perhaps) would be oriented the opposite way and would thus be repelled from the floor. It wouldn't work.

Magnets are dipoles. You can't have a magnet that is only North or only South. It will have both poles. So they'd interact with each other. Even if it did work, now the astronauts would repel each other. Kind of inconvenient.

Laser beams still spread in space, so distant targets would be harder to kill. You might be interested in this: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=laser-downs-uavs

It's now

What if someone hasn't decided if they're a theist or not?

Dunno about that. Our local paper had an article about for-profit institutions; basically, most of their courses are offered by community colleges for a fraction of the cost, and the default rate on student loans by for-profit institution graduates is the highest around (40%). Students graduate and discover they can't get a job with their certifications, and they just paid $20,000 for them. I think the skills they're referring to aren't the ones you get at a typical for-profit place: These are not skills you get at the for-profit institutions. I just glanced around a few sites and the most technical their programs got was networking and "PC technician." One offers an industrial engineering BSc, but, well, so do most state schools.

Agreed. But why limit ourselves only to life on Earth? Mr Skeptic's argument is that an infinite universe provides infinitely many other planets where life can arise. The size of the universe does not affect conditions on Earth, but it certainly provides other Earth-like planets for life to appear on.

Certain edge cases -- singularities, whatever -- are acknowledged by physicists as areas where relativity does not apply. There are a few similar cases with QM. What you promised was the arguments of detractors, not already-acknowledged incompletions in the theories.

Uh, no. The observable universe is still finite, so the realm of potential beings who could contribute DNA is finite. Furthermore, faster-than-light travel is currently thought impossible, so the sphere of possible influence around Earth is perhaps a few dozen light-years. However, life could arise anywhere in an infinite universe, including outside the region we can observe. In other words, there's a causal limit caused by distances; nothing outside the observable universe can have a causal interaction with us because forces cannot possibly reach us. The infinite size of the universe thus doesn't matter at all for court cases, or any other possible scenario that involves beings moving around the infinite universe.

I see. Yeah, a system with a large temperature gradient would be lower entropy than the same system with the temperature spread out and equalized. So at high temperature, entropy is higher than for the same mass at a lower temperature, as you said. Now, I'm sure we agree that heat flows from high temperature areas to low temperature areas. Since high temperature areas have higher entropy, Where's the contradiction? You've just explained why Mr Skeptic is right.

I've done live Fourier transforms of a changing signal before. See, for example, baudline.

What sort of picture would you be tessellating? Drawing the waveform of the signal doesn't require fancy OpenCL help.

Oscilloscopes record audio signals. Well, it may not be sound but oscillating voltage, but it's a series of data points, not an image. I don't see how geometry or tessellation applies. Do you know what kind of data processing (Fourier transforms, whatever) you'd have to apply to your data?

How would you process audio data using OpenCL?

So does "energy density" a combination of how dense a material is and how high its temperature is? i.e. an energy-dense material would be either dense or very hot, while a different material with lower density or lower temperature would have a lower energy density. Correct? Then you state that an energy-dense material is low-entropy. Correct? This is to contradict Mr Skeptic's statement that

Those 32 lanes come from two 16-lane slots used simultaneously. That'll get you 32GB/s. You'd need four of those (eight slots total) to get to 128GB/s.

What does "bridged dualy @ PCI-E 3.0 x32" even mean? I'm guessing you mean 2 32-lane cards, but they're maximum 16 lanes.