Cap'n Refsmmat

As one with expertise in matters of law and civil rights, I'm sure you're aware that concepts such as "freedom of speech" are limitations on the laws and actions a sovereign government may make, not the actions of a privately owned and operated facility. We may prohibit whatever forms of speech we see fit. Since you have read and studied our forum rules, I'm sure you're aware of rule 1.a. Violate it again and you will earn yourself a suspension from this site. Presumably this is why most animals did not evolve the ability to fly. A trait does not have to be advantageous for all animals everywhere for it to be advantageous for a few. A popular hypothesis is that proto-wings gave small mammals much more effective thermal regulation, as they could easily use the nonfunctional wings as regulators. What evolved to support life in difficult climates eventually found use saving the life of animals which did fall. Consider: The first animals to fly probably did so by gliding, not by flapping their wings in powered flight. Hence they began by falling and surviving due to their protowings slowing the fall. Their wings would not cause them to fall and damage themselves, as they would not be functional enough to fly under their own power. Here are some resources for you: http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB921_2.html http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrates/flight/evolve.html

I think you're mixing him up with crazynutsx.

We ban maybe six or seven accounts daily for posting spam, but there's a large number more that hide for months, or try to spam through their profile or by profile comment. They can be hard to catch.

Take two atomic clocks which exist in inertial reference frames in relative motion. Each is traveling at a constant velocity in a region of space with no gravitational fields. Each is kept in otherwise identical conditions, apart from the relative motion. The clocks nevertheless will disagree with each other. What state of physical space causes this? There is no way inside each clock to discern between constant velocity motion and being at rest, as you know, so there is no physical state to account for the dilation.

My point is that if time is an entity independent of our timekeeping, it is unknowable through experiment, as we can only measure timekeeping, not time. Hence it is meaningless to talk about time as something other than what clocks measure.

They're all automated spammers, and so they all registered with the same date of birth.

I take it you're not familiar with Talk.Origins, crazynutsx? http://talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

Why do you assume this is done to make it appear that medicine is progressing, rather than being done to fill slow news days in the media? It's actually surprising how few major studies, cited and depended upon by thousands of doctors, are ever replicated and tested -- and often they turn out to be wrong.

If [math]13b = -46[/math], you just divide by 13 to get [imath]b=\frac{-46}{13}[/imath]. However, you have made an error in this step: [math] (15a + 10b = 5) - (15a + 3b = -51)[/math] 10b - 3b = 7b, not 13b, and similarly for the others. You subtracted 15a but added the rest, which is incorrect -- every term must be subtracted. You'll get: [math]7b=56[/math] And you can divide by 7 to get b. You've made the same error here. 2n - 5n = -3n, not 7n. Once you have solved for b and n, you can use that value to substitute into the other equation and solve for the other variable.

I'd be very disturbed if my doctors were treating my cancer with a treatment everyone "knows" works despite having never been tested in a single clinical trial. You'll also find that many news reports in medicine cover things everyone "knows" that have turned out to be completely wrong.

Something like that. Not necessarily. Suppose I have a very large spherical shell of mass. From a long distance away, it has a gravitational force on me which I can feel, creating a gravitational potential. If we've defined gravitational potential to be 0 at an infinite distance away (as is conventional), then as I approach the shell the gravitational potential becomes more and more negative. Now suppose I enter the shell. Inside, the gravitational potential will be constant and negative, because of how the gravitational force from all around cancels out. There will be a large negative potential, but no gravitational force whatsoever. So if I measure the potential difference between inside and outside the shell, I'll see a significant value, but it's not an impetus to cause a force. Mass creates a gravitational force, and electric fields create an "electric force" of sorts. The gravitational potential and the electric potential difference are only ways of measuring the work they may do. (Now, if you represent the potential as a scalar field, you can use the gradient to find the direction of force on the object, but it's not the potential causing it -- potential is just a way of measuring it...) Why can't we select an arbitrary frame?

That's generally the best practice for systems that need to be secure. You make an "air gap" between the data and the rest of the world, so it cannot leak out or be attacked. Unfortunately most companies and computer users do not follow best practices. If they did, most attacks would never happen.

Do you have a link to articles about the case? I'm not familiar with it.

So you're saying that the gravitational time dilation is actually just the clocks being messed up by gravity, and their measurements are wrong. That has nothing to do with the subject of this thread, so perhaps you'd like to open a new discussion about it in Speculations? What gave you that impression?

A majority of ulcers are caused by a certain species of bacteria, which may be treated easily with antibiotics. Your doctor can also recommend a diet that will lessen the symptoms before the treatment begins. Aloe vera could actually help heal the ulcer, but it will not kill the bacteria that cause it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/1883718.stm Hence aloe vera alone will not solve the problem or prevent recurrence. Of course, that's assuming it really is an ulcer, which cannot be verified without a doctor's opinion. Get it checked out!

So are you saying there's a gravitational effect on clocks apart from the measured and predicted gravitational time dilation?

Gravitational time dilation is of course part of general relativity, and its predictions have been tested and verified along with the rest of it.

Sugar is a solute as well, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Did the sugar make it melt more slowly overall, or just more slowly than the salt did? That's good for traction, right?

I believe what md65536 was trying to get at was this: We observe time dilation (or something which appears to be time dilation) through empirical observation. We can make predictions about its behavior through mathematics and our current theories of physics. If we propose an answer to the question, "What dilates?", is there any way to test that answer through empirical observation? Clearly at the moment we can observe dilation but do not know what is dilating. If I propose three different answers to that question, is there any way to discern between them experimentally, given that the clocks will show time dilation in exactly the same way no matter which of the three answers is correct?

If you used exactly two times as many moles of sugar as of salt, they'd be equally effective. The effectiveness of salt is because it dissociates in solution into two particles, Na+ and Cl-, while sugar does not. The nature of the solute is otherwise unimportant, interestingly enough.

Indeed; freezing point depression does not depend at all on the substance dissolved in the water, but only its quantity, so there's no solute you could add that would elevate the freezing point without changing the chemical properties of water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colligative_property Now, you could perhaps mix the water with other liquids, but that's a different mechanism entirely.

So you've answered the question and intentionally mislead us, but you'd like us to post a list for you. Right. Has it occurred to you that perhaps this is a service none of us have ever needed, and hence we know about no more poison-testing labs than anyone else?

- Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, by Diarmaid MacCullough, page 207.

That still doesn't mean the electrons are pushing on the insulator. The fact that electrons must be excited to make the light in a spark does not mean that the electrons at an insulator are pushing on it with some powerful force until it just breaks. They're still not analogous because the emf is the potential difference across the electric field (in a manner of speaking), and only translates to energy if some charge is placed in the field. It could potentially be doing work, yes, but this is not the same as energy being a potential to do work. An object with a given amount of energy can do a given amount of work that corresponds exactly to how much energy it has, and as it performs the work, that energy is depleted. An object exerting a force can do any amount of work depending on how much energy it has (not how much force), and the force is not "depleted," only its energy. That's because F=ma refers to net force, and more than one force can act on an object simultaneously. If I push on an object, and you're on the other side pushing back with equal force, the object will not move because the net force is exactly 0, and hence a=0. But we are still exerting a force, yes, without moving.