Cap'n Refsmmat

It's worth noting that the FDA refused to approve thalidomide in the United States, saying that further research was needed. The process worked.

It would help if you told us what the error message is.

There's a "Watch every topic I reply to" setting in your Notification Options. There's not a convenient way to view all your watched topics that I know of (it's buried in the settings), but if you set watched topics to provide inline notifications, then new posts in your watched topics will appear in the notifications drop-down at the top right of every page.

There is also a "Watch Topic" button at the top right of each thread. In the notification options you can choose how to be notified whenever a watched topic is updated.

Please stay on topic. You can have the social Darwinism discussion in some other thread.

No, Python isn't compiled into C. There's a C program that reads Python source files and directly interprets them. There is also PyPy, which is a Python interpreter written in Python. There are entire books on how to create computer programming languages. It's a very difficult subject. The famous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs teaches programming while having you build an interpreter for Scheme, for example.

But it's not the same rate for all of them. Capital gains tax rate is based on your tax bracket, as swansont noted yesterday.

For example, suppose a particular isotope has a 50% chance of decaying during one year. If you have ten trillion atoms of this isotope in a sample, you'd expect about half to decay in a year. After another year, you'd expect half of the remainder to decay, and so on. Exponential decay. You may wonder why the odds of an atom decaying don't increase over time. You might expect a ten-year-old atom to be more to decay than a brand-new atom. This could give you a constant decay rate, but it implies that atoms somehow "know" when to decay and decay faster the older they are. This isn't the case, just like how a losing streak of ten games in a row doesn't make you more likely to win the next game. Radioactive decay is stochastic -- atoms have no sense of time, and their odds of decaying are constant no matter their age.

I don't buy the virtual machine hypothesis. Malware is capable of hiding itself without such trickery. It's possible that malware could disable system processes and virus scanners to hide itself. You may want to run something like Windows Defender Offline, which scans the system for viruses without firing up Windows, giving the viruses no chance to hide themselves.

So there have been three previous Mars rovers: Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity. Sojourner was tiny (10.5 kg) and wasn't able to travel very far. Spirit and Opportunity were larger (185 kg) and able to travel much longer distances. They carry various cameras and spectrometers for examining rocks. Curiosity is huge (900 kg), nuclear-powered, and loaded with instruments. It has a laser spectrometer that can zap rocks from a distance and measure their composition. It mounts a weather station, spectrometers, X-ray diffraction equipment, and a gas chromatograph. Spirit and Opportunity were like loading a few instruments from the lab into the back of a golf cart. Curiosity is like loading up the back of a minivan. It just does loads more stuff.

Is your computer connected directly to the Internet, or does it connect to a wireless router of some kind? It's highly unlikely that anyone is directly accessing your machine and manually manipulating it; viruses are good business, and so they're entirely automated. The symptoms you describe do not sound like any virus I know. If your graphics and sound cards are turning off, I'd suggest checking your PC to ensure the power supply is functioning well and the system is not overheating. juanrga is right to suggest XP is rather insecure. I'd suggest installing a clean copy of Windows 7 (or Linux, if you so choose), installing all the security updates immediately, and then installing Microsoft Security Essentials or another good antivirus program. Use the latest version of your Internet browser and use Plugin Check to make sure your plugins are up to date. If you really want, you could set up a virtual machine in VMWare or Virtualbox and connect it to your router. Then set up a DMZ on the router to point incoming traffic to the virtual machine. However, it's vastly more likely that you'll pick up a virus during web browsing than it is that it'll remotely infect your computer.

That's not the fundamental flaw of the scientific method; that's the fundamental flaw of humans.

You're not alone. Nobody buys into these theories unconditionally. Any scientist recognizes that they are limited by the evidence at hand, and that they need more data to test their hypotheses. This is why you still see astronomers trying to detect dark matter and measure the expansion of the universe. Science knows it doesn't know everything. Otherwise, it'd stop. (quote shamelessly stolen from Dara O'Briain)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19150849 The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter managed to photograph Curiosity as it descended by parachute. Whoa. Bigger picture: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/673747main_pia15981-43_full.jpg

It's aliiiiiiiiiiive!

False. It requires four times as much energy to move something twice as fast. Kinetic energy grows with the square of velocity. You could easily observe this by, say, using batteries to accelerate a small device, and recording how much battery charge it takes. Or using rubber bands to launch something and observing the number of rubber bands required to launch a certain mass at different velocities. Why don't you try a test and tell us?

Suppose you became dictator of the world and could decide what children in state-funded education (up to the age of 17 or 18) learn. You can teach whatever you want. What curriculum would you choose?

Suppose you apply a force of five Newtons to the box, horizontally. Net horizontal force on the box: five Newtons, from your push. Net horizontal force on your hands: five Newtons from the box, plus additional forces from your arms and other body parts as your feet push against the floor and keep you in place. The net horizontal force on the box is not zero, and therefore it moves. That is the simple application of Newton's laws. The equal and opposite reaction pushes on you, not the box, and so it cannot prevent the box from being moved. This is a lesson applied by any freshman physics student who constructs a free-body diagram. It is successfully applied to predict the behavior of physical systems, from the simplest to the most complex. You may argue with the interpretation of Newton's laws; however, you cannot argue against the experimental evidence contained in every freshman physics lab course.

We keep records, so we will always remember. But we do not suspend people unless they are persistently violating the same rules despite admonishment. So, for example, someone who violates the rules once and then transgresses again six months later isn't in line for a suspension.

False. You misunderstand Newton's law. The equal and opposite reaction is not applied to the same object as the original force. For instance, if you push a box, there is not an equal and opposite reaction pushing the box back towards you. No, there is an equal and opposite reaction pushing on you. There's one force applied on the box and one force applied backwards on your hands. Freshman physics students apply this law all the time in free-body diagrams quite successfully. I'm sure you will agree that it takes a very small force to smash a fly. The train will apply a small force to the fly, and the fly will apply a very small force to the train's windshield, causing no noticeable damage whatsoever.

There's plenty of comparison. One may compare a prediction of the dark matter hypothesis to the observational evidence collected by telescopes -- those distortions. Those distortions are accounted for by the hypothesis. Don't try to discount the evidence by saying it's just "distortions". Everything you observe is just distortions in the cells comprising your nervous system. That doesn't stop you from believing in the existence of your chair.

Buttloads. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evidence (Those would be metric buttloads. A common scientific unit.) There's a lot less evidence to say what it is, but evidence of its existence is hardly lacking.

Whoa whoa. What experiments are these?

Most universities should allow you to double-major in math and physics. You may find it difficult to squeeze in the philosophy, though; for example, at my university, double-majoring students typically fill their elective hours in one major with required hours from the other major, leaving very little time for other electives. Of course, if you're sufficiently ambitious you can probably cram it all in.

Update: the strange pouring behavior (puffing and hissing) appears to occur even with the lid off. Pouring in room-temperature water causes it to suddenly boil, rather than calming it down as you'd expect.