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Some do both: They crack some pots ...oops... propose alternate hypotheses that purport to disprove relativity at the same time they praise Einstein as the only true genius. The pyschoceramics aim highest in a very vain and very fruitless attempt to prove that they are smarter than their gods.

The first blog has some gems: A simple one is that the physics community looks down on outsiders, notably outsiders who pretend doing physics. A particular manifestation of this is ignoring e-mails. Dear Dr Smolin, if you want to locate the next Einstein, why don't you begin by answering e-mails sent by no-names like myself ... Dr. Smolin's email address is publicly available. This means he gets several hundred messages per day offering to fix his credit rating, to fix his libido, to fix various shortcomings, and to fix the problems with physics. Guess how many of these messages he sees? If Ed Witten came to me saying "I have this great idea for a new piece of software", it is quite likely that the idea might be good even if he probably doesn't know crap about C++ template metaprogramming, compiler implementation for coroutines, or Itanium speculative loads (which are the kind of technical topics I do need to master in my work). Bad analogy. While programmers implement a new piece of software, the idea for this software often does come from the outside. A much better analogy would be if Ed Witten (assuming he knows jack about the technical details of software development) told a programmer to implement a database using the "Boolean anti-binary least squares approach" (kudos Scott Adams) without having the foggiest idea how a database works or is constructed. All in all, a very nice piece of crac...err...alternative science. The second blog has its faults, too. The author definitely has something against Smolin. However, some bad physicists have a vested interest for these myths to spread. Some of these laymen - including Lee Smolin - have a completely religious attitude to Albert Einstein's name. In other words, Einstein was the exact mirror image of the people who like to use Einstein's name for populist purposes, e.g. Lee Smolin. Smolin dislikes established results of science, he doesn't understand them, he hates mathematics and the concept of mathematical beauty, and 90+ percent of his papers are pure junk.

I'm brain dead. Too much proposal work over the last week. The definition of obtuse is correct, and that definition is exactly what I meant when I made my obtuse comment. The problem with the sine function is that [math]\sin \theta = \sin(\pi-\theta)[/math]. For example, given only the sine of the angle between two lines is [math]1/\surd 2[/math], there is no way to tell if the angle is 45 degrees or 135.

I guess I should have used a smiley on my obtuse obtuse comment. An obtuse angle is one greater than [math]180^{\circ}[/math].

They almost certainly would not have responded, particularly to SETI. Except for the one-time broadcast of the Arecibo signal, SETI listens for signs of intellgent life. It does not broadcast. SETI "listens" with very narrow beam radio antennae. They have not heard scratch yet. Then again, the SETI range is very short (a few hundred light years) compared to the size of the Milky Way (100,000 light years). Just because we haven't heard anything does not mean there is no intelligent life "out there". All not hearing anything means is that we haven't heard anything. They might be too far away. They might be using some technology we do not have. The might even be quite close and using the technology we have at hand, but we just don't know how to hear them. The world is broadcasting radio signals, and quite a bit. However, current transmissions are nearly indistinguishable from noise. Our Wi-Fi and cellphone towers use spread-spectrum technology, which looks amazingly like white noise. Digital TV signals will soon be encoded and compressed. These signals are indistinguishable from noise without a-priori knowledge of how to decrypt these signals. A remote intelligent civilization could not tell we are here if they missed our first eighty years of broadcasting. Similarly, we will only be able to detect signals from some remote intelligent beings that are very close to us and are in the infancy stages of high technology. That said, I am not a big believer in the Drake equations. Intelligent life, if it is out there, is in a galaxy far, far away.

Any satellite orbiting the Earth would simply continue to orbit the Sun if the Earth suddenly ceased to exist. The Earth's orbital velocity around the Sun is about 29.8 km/sec. In comparison, the Moon's orbital velocity around the Earth is a paltry 0.9 km/sec. A low Earth orbit satellite moves faster at 7.9 km/sec, which is still small compared to 29.8 km/sec. It takes an immense amount of energy to make something orbiting the Earth crash into the Sun. In fact, it takes more energy than is needed to make the object escape the solar system.

Non-sequitor. How is this attributable to our health care system? I would attribute it instead to Obesity. Americans have a greater problem with obesity than do those in most other developed nations. There is a definite link between obesity and birth defects, birth complications, premature births, etc. Unfortunately, we are just leading the way. The rest of the world (unversal health care system or not), is starting to get obese. Poverty. Like it or not, there is a much greater income disparity in the US than in most other developed nations. The poor have worse health care (provided by the government) than the non-poor (provided privately). The poor have higher birth rates than non-poor and are more likely to suffer from alcohol/drug addiction, both of which magnify this effect. Illegal aliens. The US has a lot of illegal aliens, and illegals have lousy health care. If you want to make the problem with the number of illegals even greater, give them free, quality health care. Positive birth rate. Western European nations have a big problem with a birth rate that is below that needed to sustain their population. These nations also have universal health care. They pump an inordinate amount of money into prenatal and neonatal care to counterbalance this problem.

Stop being so obtuse, Atheist.

Absolutely not. The reals are not a set. They are an algebraic structure (and a very special one at that), [math](S,+,\cdot)[/math]. The operations of addition and multiplication are a part of what constitutes the definition of the reals. Take these away and you do not have the reals. Getting closer. However, these labels pertain to an algebraic structure with one operation. The reals of course form a ring because any field is also a ring. However, there are many rings that are not fields. Similarly, there are many fields that are not complete or orderable. On the other hand, any complete ordered Archimedean field is isomorphic with the reals. For example, suppose you define some algebraic structure [math](S,+,\cdot)[/math] in which the members of [math]S[/math] can be classified as "nonnegative" or "negative", but in which the product of two negative members is negative. That algebraic structure is not isomorphic to the reals. Wrong again. A vector space is a space over a field. Just as a group is more than just a set (it is a set plus an operation that is closed with respect to the set), a space is more than just a field. No. The reals are one thing, and one thing only (within isomorphism).

I agree that this particular thread is a bit over the top. I see no problem with ripping Farsight's pseudoscientific ideas to shreds. This is how science works and how scientific ideas progress. Because of the internet, the scientific community needs to be vigilent against crackpotism. Ignoring things such as intelligent design or RELATIVITY+ is certainly the wrong approach. These are cancerous memes that must be addressed before they metastatize. Ripping Farsight as a person to shreds rather than ripping his ideas to shreds is problematic. We should leave the ad hominem attacks to the realm of politicians and crackpots.

Just to give you more to have angst about: forest fires, volcanos, west nile virus, bird flu, ... see http://www.disastercenter.com/ for more. Regarding the original issue: while Apophis doesn't appear to be a significant risk, there are many, many other potential impactors. NASA's Near-Earth Object Program http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ tracks the known potential impactors and assesses the risks of an impact. Ok, so I fed your ansgt. Fortunately, the climate in Houston should not on your worry list, at least this year. We are 1.5oF below normal for the 2007 through July http://www.srh.noaa.gov/hgx/climate/gls/normals/gls_summary.htm#2007. August has been below normal as well.

I've tried arguing with Farside before. It doesn't work. So, taking this thread a bit off-topic: Even professional physicists are guilty of hand-waving. We just hired a physicist away from academia (he was told to dumb-down his courses; that was hist last straw). He had a bit of difficulty grasping how we propagate rotational state of a space vehicle. The crux of his problem was that nearly every textbook, including my own trusty Classical Dynamics, Marion, 2nd Edition (I'm an old fart) and his newfangled 6th edition, does a nice little of hand-waving in deriving what some call the "transport theorem", which relates time derivatives as observed in an inertial frame to time derivatives as observe in a rotating frame: [math]\left(\frac{d\vec q}{dt}\right)_{\text{inertial}} = \left(\frac{d\vec q}{dt}\right)_{\text{rotating}} + \vec \omega \times \vec q[/math] where [math]\vec q[/math] is some vector quantity and [math]\vec \omega[/math] is the angular velocity of the rotating frame with respect to inertial. Marion (and others) derive this for the special case of a displacement vector. The hand-wave is to generalize this derivation to any vector without justification. This hand-wave appears in junior level classical mechanics texts up to graduate-level classical mechanics texts. The general proof requires showing that the derivative of a transformation matrix is the product of the transformation matrix and a skew-symmetric matrix. We found one text that actually did this. Even then, there was some hand-waving in going from the skew-symmetric matrix to the cross product. Mathematicians would still cringe. Back on topic: Yes, physicists are guilty of hand-waving. (My mathematical cohorts tell me that is the only thing we physicists know how to do well). However, physicists will do real math when pressed to do so. The difference between a crackpot and a physicist is that physicists know how to use a pencil and how to use a trashcan.

This sounds very much like the first phase of a migraine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migraine#Aura_phase. You do not want to proceed to phase 2, believe me.

CE = computer engineering Core focus is on how to build computers. Covers concepts from the electronic gates up to the operating system. CIS/MIS = computer/management information systems Core focus is on tools (e.g., databases, spreadsheets) needed to solve business problems (e.g., payroll). CS = computer science Core focus (undergrad level) is on computer programming, data structures, algorithm theory, and computer architectures. DBA = database administrator This is a job title, not a field of study. A DBA maintains some database, such as a databases of corporate clients, company products, and company employees. SE = software engineering Core focus is on techniques needed to build and maintain LARGE software systems. In comparison, computer scientists solve toy problems.

Try opening one of these in Notepad and you might see what the problem is. Note: The visible contents of the two files are identical. http://www.caam.rice.edu/~caam452/CAAM452Lecture4b.ppt http://www.caam.rice.edu/~caam452/CAAM452Lecture4b.ppf

I noticed this effect when one of my kids was holding a balloon in the car. The balloon went forward when I accelerated and backward when I applied the brakes.

IA is right, it moves to the left. This left/right business is making it apparent that SFN members may have some dyslexic tendencies. To avoid confusion, why don't ya'll talk about what happens to a helium-filled balloon in a moving car that suddenly comes to a stop?

To the moderators: why are you tolerating this thread? The thread started on a low point (been there, done that) and proceeded downhill. While a 911 conspiracy theory thread differs in subject from a thread on evolution versus creationism, the religious nature of the arguments do not. Take a typical pro-creationist post, substitute NIST with Darwinists, evolution with "the planes did it", and voila, we have a good 911 conspiracy theory post. There is no arguing with a creationist; they are immune to logic, evidence, fair play. We don't allow threads on creationism at this site because they never go anywhere. The same should go for 911 conspiracy theory posts.

Compare the two series on a term-by-term basis. It might help to temporarily discard some of the leading terms of the target series. You can always add those discarded terms back in later.

You have a sign error here. You should do that all the way through to the end. What you did here is invalid (you are treating the problem as one dimensional):

The shuttle will accelerate if it is firing its thrusters. For example, the shuttle main engines stops firing when the shuttle is about 150 miles per hour short of orbital velocity. This is the main engine cutoff (MECO). The shuttle separates from the external tank after MECO. The shuttle and external tank rise to apogee with no engines firing. At apogee, the shuttle fires its orbital maneuvering system jets to give it that extra 150 mph and then stops firing again: it is in orbit and doesn't need to fire its thrusters any more. The external tank doesn't have any thrusters; it just falls into the Indian Ocean.

The left is not alone Bascule. The slope is quite slippery on the right side of the hill as well as on the left. Moral conservatives use the slippery slope to argue against civil unions (next step is legalizing child molestation), right to die (next step is forced euthanasia), ... The slippery slope is often just a way to justify intransigence. All uses of the slippery slope argument are unacceptable excuses for logic.

I can't resist. Pangloss, the situation in Darfur is entirely your fault.

Lance had the title wrong. Climate Research : Vol. 13 pages 149 to 164 Soon and Baliunas Environmental effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. Here it is in Google Scholar . Top two references.

Are we really that stupid? Oh never mind, this very thread answers my question. BTW, communism (Russia and China) rejected evolution. It did not fit with the communist manifesto or with Lysenko.