Cap'n Refsmmat

Pff. Texas is better: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/GI_Bill_produces_a_shock_in_Texas.html

Can you stop being so derogatory? You seem to take every opportunity you can get to use this kind of language.

Let me try a thought experiment to get this thread onto better ground. A lot of the arguments for abortion center on the principle that the fetus, being merely a collection of cells, is either not "alive" or otherwise incapable of suffering. So, suppose this happens: a patient is at a dentist for some oral surgery -- perhaps a wisdom tooth extraction or something. While the patient is unconscious, the dentist sexually assaults the patient. The patient never finds out, suffers no injuries, and contracts no diseases. It's like nothing ever happened. Is this moral? The patient was unconscious and incapable of suffering, but under ordinary conditions certainly would have. One might argue that this thought experiment is irrelevant because the patient is clearly a "person", whereas the fetus isn't -- but what makes the moral difference there? Is it because the person can suffer and the fetus can't? What is it? I'm not really too terribly against abortion, and yet I can't even answer these questions well.

DrDNA makes a valid point. The statistics for unsafe abortions would be far different in a developed country like the US vs. a developing country. You can't safely jump to the conclusion "that means many people will go to illegal abortions, which are statistically unsafe" because medical care (and a lot of things) are generally safer in developed countries, even when done illegally. At least one hopes.

How so? What about the way light travels redshifts it?

I will often see one of my cats in my peripheral vision, then look and discover it's actually some lumpy object that is kind of cat-shaped if you look at the right angle. Could be the same phenomenon here.

Z-O4mJKEEqQ Find some of his other stuff on YouTube. He's brilliant.

Activated. You'll have to edit any previously-posted comments to make the tags appear, since BBCode restrictions only apply to posts made or edited after restrictions changed. I'm so predictable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider To answer your question, the Large Hadron Collider intends to shoot beams of protons at each other to see what happens. So yes, we can manipulate protons to make them move and collide and so on.

Fun moment today: performing card magic on the bus on the way home to some fellow students. Facial expressions are so fun to watch.

I refuse.

Ah, yes, the good ol' "He exists" "no He doesn't" "yes He does!" "you're stupid!" debates. No thanks.

I don't.

I see it this way: Life is a series of problems waiting to be solved. Whether they be problems at your job, like "how do we make this sprocket attach to the widget correctly" or "why can't we find the Higgs boson", or at home ("how do I balance my budget this month"), they all take some creative thought. Your education should provide you with the background information required to help you find better solutions to those problems. Because remember, whatever field you end up in career-wise probably won't follow perfectly from your education. If you get a degree in psychology or English, you probably won't get a job just analyzing people's minds or understanding literature. (Some people do get those jobs, but they're rare.) You use the knowledge you got during your education and apply it to something else. You'll be learning the job-specific details on the job, not at school. School is just for the background information.

I was recently posed an interesting question: Viscosity is generally related to the strength of intermolecular bonds in a fluid. Strong bonds lend to greater viscosity. So how is it that something like oil, which is non-polar and would have low intermolecular forces, can be more viscous than water, which experiences hydrogen bonding? The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that oil, with its hydrogen content, actually does experience hydrogen bonding. But I don't think that's right. Is there any more logical reason?

I think buttacup might mean fat grafts.

That's a school-sponsored event. I don't think the Internet is quite the same.

My point is that if you have to argue about definitions, you probably don't believe in God.

chitrangda (formerly book worm) has been banned for three days by request to prevent SFN from distracting from school work.

A control in an experiment is a sample you do as a "baseline" to give you an idea of what "normal" might be. So if I were testing to see if adding dirt makes water have more bacteria, I'd have a bottle of clean water and one of dirty water and test both of them. The clean water would be the "control." So make one of your water sources the "control", what you'd call "normal" water. You can then compare all of your other tests to it and see if they have more or less bacteria than "normal" water.

You can see what the different modes look like above the OP on the right where it says "Display Modes." The merged posts feature would definitely break when replying to two different posts -- it'd merge the replies. We'd have to turn it off if we wanted threaded mode to be the default view. I think the trouble with threaded mode is that it is not very intuitive to use at first. Linear just shows the posts, which is simple -- threaded would need some major user interface improvements to be good for regular viewing.

It is possible to force people to select a specific post to reply to before being able to use Quick Reply, but I'm guessing in a significant portion of cases they'd just click the last post in the thread for convenience. It's sort of a major change in the entire conversational style of the forum. I'm not sure which would be best for SFN.

I once had a network hard drive that died, but the disk still worked -- it was just the chip that connected from Ethernet to PATA that had fried, leaving it unable to work over the network. So I took the disk out and just stuck it inside my computer. It worked just fine.

I like how the non-theistic posters in this thread have to discuss exactly what is meant by the poll, whereas the theistic ones can just say "yes." Does it really have to be this complicated?

Does the drive make noises or have lights that blink or anything to indicate that it's running?