Cap'n Refsmmat

Presumably one could easily defeat this argument by saying that is up to God to decide which pregnancies work and which don't.

Do you have plans for building higher-level languages on top of your WPU system?

48/2y is kind of ambiguous, since it could mean (48/2)y or 48/(2y), depending on what the author means.

If this were true... [math]\frac{48}{2}y = \frac{48y}{2y}[/math] One could divide out the y: [math]\frac{48y}{2y}=\frac{48}{2}=24[/math] And hence doing (48/2)y would be no different from doing (48/2), and clearly that can't be true. This is what really happens: [math]\frac{48}{2}y = \frac{48y}{2}=24y[/math]

I agree that we should avoid making discussions personal matters when they are intended to be an exchange of ideas. However, I don't think there are many ways to enforce this besides careful moderators. For example, on the discussion site reddit, usernames are often ignored, since they're displayed in a small boring font and there are so many users that you rarely see the same names. There's no way to get a sense for a user's past behavior when there are millions of active users. However, I still see personal attacks and arguments in discussions of controversial topics. reddit discourages this by providing an upvote/downvote system, through which blatant insults are downvoted until they are simply hidden by the software -- but this just as often results in unpopular opinions being downvoted into oblivion, even if they are articulated particularly well. Similarly, I think hiding usernames altogether may encourage rowdiness and abuse further -- anonymous forums are the ones with the most flaming (e.g. 4chan). There are a number of discussion sites (such as The WELL) which mandate the use of real names, and some of them have become famous for their constructive and welcoming communities. Sites such as TechCrunch have recently moved to a Facebook-based commenting system, which displays real names with comments, and found that it reduces trolling and abuse by attaching the abuse to a real name. Now, I'm sure there's room for improvement in our moderation and our format. I'm just not sure what changes would be improvements and what would be destructive. (As for the psychiatrists and the computer program: as far as I know, no computer program has successfully passed the Turing test in human-computer interaction, although perhaps for limited interactions it may be possible.)

It would be (almost) trivial for me to construct a program which, when fed a database of previous posts, could identify the authors of new posts with significant accuracy. I find that identifying a pseudonym to an argument can be helpful when determining how to approach a debate or grasping a user's point if it is unclear -- you can check through old posts to determine what they are arguing.

http://www.guardian....article/9643229 For sanity, here's the abstract of the actual paper: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6031/862.abstract Admittedly the study is limited: it tracked one week of lectures and used a single quiz to evaluate learning. It's certainly not definitive. But a change in instructional technique that results in twice the learning? That's pretty impressive. (Incidentally, my university is adopting a "learning assistant" program in which undergraduate physics students who have already taken the introductory courses are paid to sit in and help out students in group discussions and interactive parts of class -- I'm trying to sign up for next semester)

I'm not sure I follow how an action which only by fortunate accident turns out to be legally justified is still illegal. For example, if I pull out my gun and shoot a random person, it's murder -- unless, fortuitously, that person is in the act of threatening another person's life, in which case the cops will pat me on the back and let me go. My lack of foreknowledge does not change the legality of the action.

I'm not accusing you of doing what I described, just pointing out that the "do you have any evidence?" question often does not stop people.

I have noticed a striking tendency for members to draw conclusions about others with little evidence. For example, while debating another member it's common to conclude they must intentionally be using deceptive debate tactics, or that their logical fallacies are introduced as intentional red herrings, or that a pattern of reported posts is evidence of intentional subversion. Generally I find it safer to assume that your opponents faults are a result of their faultiness, rather than malice.

Marat: Partly you have hit upon one of my ideas when adjusting the layout and visual design of this forum. By default, the forum software makes details like the user's postcount, registration date, avatar, chosen title, and location very prominent, but I redesigned the post layout so that only the user's name and post content are prominent. Avatars are pushed off to one side as decoration and the postcount placed in faint text at the bottom of posts, after the post content. Making posts anonymous or identities consistent only for each discussion would encourage devious tactics. We've had users who intentionally troll discussions to get negative reactions; if they appear under a different name in every discussion, it'd be difficult to detect or stop their behavior. I'm surprised you think there is a high level of viciousness on SFN, however. In comparison with much larger and more anonymous communities, we're remarkably nice. Now, staff can't read every post, so I encourage anyone who encounters rude behavior to report the posts involved. We do read and react to every report, even if the response is not publicly visible.

Hm. Consider it done. I hadn't thought of that.

During the winter you don't want to ventilate the attic but insulate it well, because drawing in more cold air will just let the heat from your house leak into the attic. Ventilating it well also doesn't protect you if it's already 100 degrees outside, since you'll have a 100-degree attic no matter how much you ventilate it.

Our atmosphere isn't being launched straight upwards in a rocket very often. The thing that throws the rocket off is the vertical motion. If you had a rocket hover an inch above the ground, it'd land at almost exactly the same spot it started at.

It doesn't return to its start point, as it happens.

It doesn't.

Well, you want a well-insulated attic floor (to keep heat from moving through the attic floor and into the house) and an automatically activated ventilation fan; we have one at home that works off a thermometer and turns on automatically when the attic gets hot.

Sort of. It's buoyed up by the air underneath it as well, so it doesn't need to orbit at 17,000 miles per hour to stay at a constant altitude. The latter. You will fall directly towards the sun, ignoring any spin it might have.

Question: If I take a large planet, put some air on it, and set it all spinning, with the air spinning too, and then leave it be for a few million years, will the air stop spinning?

The hot air balloon moves with the air. If there's a wind, it goes with the wind. If there's still air, it stays still.

Gravity doesn't drag the air. It pulls it down, against the ground, which has lots of pointy things which tend to interact with the air.

Yes, that's because objects travel in straight lines when they're released. The air around Earth is spinning along with the Earth, and hot air balloons just float in that air. Gravity does not drag.

Yes, we have noticed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect

It does not get "dragged around". It is already rotating with the Earth, so when you drop it it continues rotating. Think of it this way: As you sit on a chair on Earth, you are rotating around at several hundred miles per hour as the Earth spins. If you jump, you do not suddenly fly into the wall as the Earth spins beneath you; you have inertia, and you still move as the Earth does, so you land right back in your chair.

No. The gravitational force on an object is [math]F_g = mg[/math], where m is the mass of the object. However, [math]F=ma[/math], so the acceleration a is equal to g, which is a constant related to the size of Earth.