Bill Angel

Suppose you had an ideal gas contained in a perfectly insulated box, and you made a movie showing the movement of all the molecules. You then ran the movie backwards. The motion of the gas molecules would look the same as when the movie was run in the forwards direction. But if the box was not perfectly insulated, and the temperature outside the box was initially warmer or cooler than the temperature inside the box, the movie would not look the same when it was run in the forward or the backward direction. And if someone inquired as to which version of the movie showed what actually happened as time passed, it would be the one in which there was an increase in total entropy of the system.

You could utilize iridescent soap bubbles, or the bodies of iridescent insects.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient So natural selection has worked on mammals to produce more complex brains that improve the species' sensory and bodily functions. And of course there is man's significant linguistic ability, another product of evolution.

There is a famous assertion by Einstein that "God does not play dice with the universe". Einstein was resolute that the universe should be wholly predictable through physical laws. Perhaps that shooting in Connecticut was wholly predictable through physical law, as was the death of over 300,000 caused by an earthquake in Haiti iputn 2010. Could not one's religious views be that God set the Universe into existence via the Big Bang, and then let events play out according to the physical laws that underlie them?

Here's another take on the issue: Firefighters Shot Dead at Upstate NY Fire Should all firefighters be required to carry firearms?

That's a good idea, especially if the tear gas could be deployed by one of those small robots such as are used by the police for bomb disposal. A small robotic device could scoot in close to the ground and release the canister of tear gas. It would also distract the shooter, giving the shooter's potential victims an opportunity to flee.

There is an issue summarized as "Federal law trumps State law". If States pass laws banning assault weapons, would such laws be overturned by the Federal courts because of an individual's rights to own guns under the 2nd Amendment?

Season's Greetings from Arizona

I don't know if this has been posted elsewhere at scienceforums.net. I did a search and couldn't find it. So I thought to post a link to it here: CERN Physicists Predict Cosmic Quantum Phase Shift to Coincide with End of Mayan Calendar

If somone leaves their guns and ammo unsecured in their home, the likelihood that their children will use them to murder them is rather low. More likely is that the guns will be stolen. Also there have been cases of children bringing their parent's loaded firearms to school to show to the other schoolchildren. See 6 year old brings gun to Houston school, three hurt

And yet Israel's Prime Minister Rabin was a assassinated by an Israeli with a gun.

Why can't the government require that all firearms in a person's home be stored in gun safes? And that those safes can only be opened by keying in a PIN, like at an ATM machine. That requirement would have prevented that young man in CT from gaining access to his mother's guns.

The ammonium nitrate doesn't react with water, it is just hydrated by it. That means the water molecule is left intact and is just electrostatically bonded to the ammonium nitrate molecule. The water being absorbed by the ammonium nitrate is an endothermic process and is reversible. You can heat up the ammonium nitrate and drive the water off the compound.

The mixing of ammonium nitrate and water is an endothermic reaction that is used in cold packs to absorb heat. It is also reversible.

There is another situation that might be relevant to this discussion. Many people, including myself, suffer from an affliction known as psoriasis. In patients with psoriasis, certain immune cells are activated and produce too much of a protein called tumor necrosis factor (also known as TNF) a protein produced by the body, usually in response to infections. Medications such as Enbrel and Humira are taken to supress the production of this Tumor Necrosis Factor. But in supressing the production of this TNF factor, the medications also suppress the person's immune system, making them more susceptible to infections. Now here is the connection to the poster's question. After taking Enbrel for three years, the medication had noticibly lost its effectiveness in supressing the symptoms of psoriasis. It's as if my body's immune system had developed a counter-response to the medication, making it less effective. Since the medication's purpose was in effect to "attack" my immune system, my immune system was able to counter this attack and become resistent to the medication's effects. This result caused my dermatologist to switch me onto a different medication, Humira, which works in a slightly different manner in supressing the immune system than Enbrel and to which my body's immune system has not yet developed a counter response. So my answer to the original question "Is it plausible, to you, that the immune system can be conditioned, 'exercised' and strengthened?" is YES, but in the medical situation I mentioned I wish that it wasn't the case, that it didn't happen the way that it does.

I don't believe it is necessary to speak in terms of intentions of a creator in order to make predictions as to the future of the universe. Cosmologists are concerned about questions such as whether the universe is flat or curved and how much matter the universe contains. Based upon determinations of matter and curvature, they can make predictions as to weather the universe will keep on expanding forever, or whether a "Big Crunch" will occur with all of the universe disappearing in a singularity. There is no need to bring speculations about a the nature of a God or his intentions into the picture.

Astronomers can use their telescopes to look billions of years back in time, to a time when there is no evidence that sentient life existed. There is no evidence that the universe was different, that the laws of physics were different, than they are now. So I don't think that you can look at the laws of physics and say "from these laws sentient life will emerge". So one could just as easily argue that there is a God who created this universe with it's particular laws of physics, but He doesn't particularly care whether or not sentient life exists in His universe. Also self awareness or sentience seems to be an emergent property, in that it can evolve from lower life forms that are non-sentient. What evidence supports this? For me the evidence is that one really can't draw a line that demarcates sentient from non-sentient life. And if one thinks that one can, where does that demarcation line exist in the continuum of life that that extends from one celled animals at one end and is anchored by human beings at the other?

True, but people's belief in non existent entities has also manifested itself in science. At one time scientists believed in the existence of Phlogiston, but this is a belief that's been abandoned. Perhaps belief in God can be viewed as a belief in a scientific theory that is now obsolete, like Phlogiston?

One idea suggests itself about how such ideas could be researched. Scientists use MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) devices to study how the brain responds to stimuli. A person could be evaluated to determine how well they can identify rhythmic sequences while an MRI machine determines which areas of their brain are active. Perhaps scientists will find that members of certain ethnic groups do better than others at this task, and differences in performance correlate with different patterns of brain activity. I mention this because I had the chance to participate in a similar kind of study involving word identification, with my head stuck in an MRI machine.

The number π (pi) is an irrational number . An irrational number is any real number that cannot be expressed as a fraction a/b, where a is an integer and b is a non-zero integer. Now quantum numbers are rational numbers, for example the spin of an electron is 1/2. Now any quantity that is expressed in terms of pi is an irrational quantity, like the circumference of a circle of unit radius which is 2 * pi. So circumference is an analog rather than a digital quantity that can be represented by a quantized value.

What you are asserting sounds reasonable, but ignores the fact that the federal government possesses “sovereign immunity". "In the United States , the federal government has sovereign immunity and may not be sued unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit". I would presume that a plaintiff's only grounds for being able to sue the government for modifying the path of a hurricane would be negligence i.e. that the government performed the task badly.

There is interesting information at the National Weather Service's National Hurricane Website, in particular about the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. I don't think that it would be "legal suicide" if the Government developed and implemented methods that reduced a category 2 hurricane to a category 1 hurricane, which also is a much less ambitious goal than attempting to extinguish the force of a category 5 hurricane. Also, a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that a more complete understanding of the physical processes taking place in hurricanes was needed before any additional modification experiments should be conducted.

Hurricane modification doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. Project Stormfury was an attempt to weaken tropical cyclones by flying aircraft into them and seeding them with silver iodide . The project was run by the United States Government from 1962 to 1983. While the project was not succesful, even a small reduction in the speed of a hurricane's winds would be beneficial; as the damage potential of a hurricane increases as the square of the wind speed. A slight lowering of wind speed would have a large reduction in destructiveness.

Well, if my idea is looney, I'm in interesting company. There is an article titled How To Stop A Hurricane: 4 Strange Theories On How To Subdue A Natural Disaster The article mentions an idea by Bill Gates and his associates that involves pumping huge quantities of chilly water into the eye of hurricane which will purportedly make the storm fizzle out. I don't know if his idea is more practical than mine, but I think that the two ideas have a theoretical similarity.

Deferring a discussion of the legal and practical issues that you raised, I would address the scientific questions that you mentioned. I am encouraged to believe that scientists will get a handle on solving them through better mathematical models of how the atmosphere behaves. A good article discussing this issue is Tomorrow's weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals To quote from that article: If computer models become good enough to estimate the vertical transport of heat in a tropical storm, then it should be possible to estimate how much ice would be needed to suppress this vertical transport and therefore suppress the formation of a hurricane. The section in the original article that I quoted is, I believe, relevant to this: There is another good explaination of this in the article How do hurricanes form? This article has a diagram showing the movement of warm moist air in the center of the storm (represented as red arrows). So the question is, how much ice would be needed to be added to suppress the flow of that warm moist air up the tropical storm's "chimney"?