Cap'n Refsmmat

The force of your push is transmitted through electromagnetic interactions between the atoms in the stick, and the interactions only travel at the speed of light. Realistically I think the push would travel at the speed of sound through the material, since the speed of sound is by definition the speed at which a push like that would be transmitted. Think about pushing on the end of a spring. It takes a moment for the push to propagate through the spring, since the compression wave has to travel through it. A stick is just an incredibly stiff spring.

Suggestions, Comments and Support is listed as your most active forum in the left column of your profile: http://www.scienceforums.net/user/70237-pmb/

Moderators are bound by the same forum rules as anyone else. Discussing moderation actions in the midst of a thread about walruses is off-topic; the best approach is to PM the moderator in question or report posts as needed.

Indeed. The OED lists "because" as an adverb, conjunction, and noun. An example of adverbial use given is S. Chaplin Day of Sardine viii. 164, "I know a lot of people that rant on about their religion and it doesn't do any good. Because why? Because they're trying to convince themselves, maybe?"

There's nothing left in the SFN staff lounge apart from cheese nips.

Could we please confine discussion on wave-particle duality to the thread about wave-particle duality?

Yes, that's right, today is the tenth birthday of SFN's founding on July 4th, 2002. Since then we've had almost 670,000 posts, 50,000 members, and 1.3 gigabytes of posts and private messages. Happy birthday to SFN, and thanks to all the members and staff that have helped it last this long.

Allegedly, that was its original nickname. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#.22The_God_particle.22

Sorry, I prefer discussions that are intelligible.

"You're stupid" is not an ad hominem argument. "You're stupid, so your argument is obviously wrong" is clearly an ad hominem, because it uses insult rather than logic to attack an argument. Your textbook may provide examples that make this distinction clear.

Roberts' decision was surprisingly readable. He knew the general public would want to scrutinize every word, so it starts with an introduction to the powers of Congress and the role of the Court before getting into detail. I think he's trying to preempt misinformed criticism from the public. I haven't yet read any of the dissents. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf

Yep. We occasionally have spammers sign up and send out three hundred spam PMs. I just set the limit to a PM every minute for members with more than 30 posts, since it most spammers are nuked before they hit that point.

Members automatically become Senior Members after 30 posts. Senior Members get to do a few things that ordinary members can't, such as send more private messages or post status updates on their profile. Mostly this is to stop spammers, which often register and post spam to their profiles without ever posting on the forums, so we never notice them. There aren't any other groups for members apart from Resident Experts and the moderator staff.

MyWifesSkin, you might like to read Brian Deer's articles about Wakefield, as published in BMJ: http://briandeer.com/solved/bmj-wakefield-1-1.htm http://briandeer.com/solved/bmj-wakefield-2-1.htm Wakefield was in it for the money, not the science.

Dave owns the server, blike owns the domain name, and either Dave or I own the license for the forum software. Ownership is sort of distributed.

That just encourages them to think that privacy is about hiding things, which isn't true. They could easily retort that the government isn't asking for naked pictures, so the government should be allowed whatever surveillance scheme it's dreamed up.

You can click on any of the example equations in the tutorial (or any equation posted anywhere on SFN) to see the code used to make it. Square roots are made by \sqrt{}.

I use Papers for organizing all of my papers. It provides full search and sorting features, so you can keep different collections of papers for different purposes.

My guess would have been that JPMorgan Chase was relatively well-regarded among banks for a while, until it had an "oops." If even the good banks screw up occasionally, what does that say about the bad ones? Funny how everyone's interpretation of the irony is different.

There's already an extensive amount of work that goes into ensuring the ideal combustion conditions for gasoline inside an engine. You can tell when an engine has too much gas and not enough oxygen -- black soot pours out of the exhaust, since some of the gasoline can't completely burn.

Sure. But I can choose not to talk politics if I don't want to; I can't choose whether people judge me on my politics if they have full access to all my emails.

Like Target's power to detect pregnancies? https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all Yes, it gives everyone more power. More power over me. More abilities to make decisions about me without my knowledge or input. I would rather not have my neighbors choose to decide whether to invite me to their barbecue by looking through my browsing history and email accounts to see if they like my politics.

I can think of reasons to make privacy a right-wing issue, but none that have been widely adopted. In particular: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565 Privacy's point is not to hide things. It's a protection against government power. Giving the government the power to read your email, tap your phone, and record your porn usage isn't bad simply because it's embarrassing. After all, the data will likely only be seen by a computer. But it gives the government enormous power to make decisions about you -- decisions about whether you may take a commercial airline flight, get a security clearance, or even get a job -- without your knowledge or consent, and without you knowing how they make the decisions. In short, a lack of privacy gives the government the power to be even less transparent in its decision-making, and gives it yet more power over its citizens. It's not a question of discovering your fetishes or being embarrassed, and we shouldn't respond to the "I've got nothing to hide" argument as though their conception of privacy is right and having nothing to hide really is an excuse. It seems to me that small-government enthusiasts have good reason to favor privacy as much as left-wing groups do. (this will be the third time I've used this post on various sites on the Internet)

Whoops. Thanks. Fixed.

But then who will be around to force the mammals to give back what they stole from dinosaurs?