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We don't know what is going on behind the scenes. I am hoping that something is going on behind the scenes here. Neither party can afford to come forth on its own to touch the second rail (defense), the third rail (entitlements) or to increase taxes. All three have to be done, and this has to be a joint proposal.

Nobody wants to touch the second rail (DoD) either. The only rail anyone in either the legislative or administrative branches are willing to touch is the rail that carries no current whatsoever, the 12% of the budget represented by non-defense discretionary spending. Completely zeroing out non-defense discretionary spending will not even solve the deficit problem, let alone the debt problem. Even completely zeroing out all discretionary spending, including defense, will not solve the deficit problem. The only way to solve the deficit problem is to touch the third rail. That won't happen until the third rail short circuits everything. Stealing from the Social Security lockbox has been, until now, the way out of the deficit / debt morass. Politicians have known for a while that trouble is in the offing because Social Security was expected to transition from having more money coming in than going out to having more money going out than coming in in 2016. Well surprise, surprise, the economic downturn moved that 2016 event to 2011. Social Security is now in the permanent deficit camp. It won't take all that long before the third rail does short circuit everything. Edit Nobody wants to touch the fourth rail (increased taxes) either. All four rails will need to be touched.

I'm going to be nice. You are taking a jaunt down Crackpot Alley. That was nice. I could have been much, much meaner. (I have been much, much meaner to PhDs who took a jaunt down Crackpot Alley.) A satellite, and the Moon, are orbiting because they are falling all the time. A force that is normal to the velocity vector does not change the magnitude of the velocity vector. It instead changes the direction of the velocity vector. This is high school / freshman mathematics. It really would behoove you to learn physics and mathematics.

Ah. Much better. My thoughts on the current WYSIKSWYG/WYSIPINWYG (what you see is kinda, sorta what you get / what you see in preview is not what you get) editor are [expletive deleted].

Rant on. Sorry for the repeated edits. I really hate the way this new forum software mangles what I write. It apparently is trying to be "What you see is what you get ." This is not the case. This system instead follows the "What you see is kinda like what you get" paradigm. The underlying software apparently randomly routs posts to either the surprise party module or the practical jokes module. What you get depends on which module gets your post. Rant off. You really shouldn't do that. It is OK to quote a small part as a teaser, but it is not OK to quote the whole thing. This is anything but an excellent blog. It is extremely poorly written. It looks to me that someone wrote the article in some language other than English and then used google translator to feed the blog. Evidence: It starts with the title of this blog article, "Scientists found one largest planet at the edge of the solar system." I suspect what happened is that someone google-translated an overly sensation article in The Independent (a British newspaper) to some other language, added some graphics from wikipedia, and translated back to English. So, what is this about? John Matese has been looking for evidence of a large body in the Oort cloud for a long time. His most recent publication on this topic is "Persistent evidence of a jovian mass solar companion in the Oort cloud", Icarus 211:2, 926-938 (February 2011). Article link: doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.11.009. An eprint is at the arXiv, http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.4584. Lisa Grossman, "Dark Jupiter May Haunt Edge of Solar System," Wired Science, 29 Nov 2010 http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/11/oort-cloud-companion/ A century of comet data suggests a dark, Jupiter-sized object is lurking at the solar system's outer edge and hurling chunks of ice and dust toward Earth. Lisa starts out somewhat cautious here, and ends with a quote from Matese, "We anticipate that this WISE is going to falsify or verify our conjecture," he said. "We just have to be patient." The Wired Science article isn't too bad. It acknowledges that this is conjectural. Not all such articles do. Paul Rogers, "Up telescope! Search begins for giant new planet," The Independent, 13 Feb 2011 http://www.independe...et-2213119.html If you grew up thinking there were nine planets and were shocked when Pluto was demoted five years ago, get ready for another surprise. There may be nine after all, and Jupiter may not be the largest. This overly sensationalistic article in The Independent has spawned a bunch of spinoff articles. Here's one: Jesus Diaz, "The Mystery of the Giant Planet Hidden In Our Solar System," Gizmodo.com, 14 Fen 2011 http://gizmodo.com/#...ur-solar-system There's a giant planet right here, hiding in our Solar System. One that nobody has ever seen, even while it is four times larger than Jupiter and has rings and moons orbiting it. There are even worse ones out there; I won't go into those. Here's Phil Plait's take on this imbroglio: Phil Plait, "No, there's no proof of a giant planet in the outer solar system," Here is a wired science article, not quite so sensationalistic, Bad Astronomy Blog, 14 Feb 2011 http://blogs.discove...tem/#more-28256 I'm getting a lot of email and tweets about NASA supposedly having proof of a giant, Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the Sun way beyond Pluto. Let me be clear: while certainly possible, this idea is not at all proven, and in my opinion still pretty unlikely. If you want a good blog on astronomy, Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Blog is right up there at the top.

The truth of what constitutes "fairness" in taxation is out there somewhere, perhaps somewhere between YdoaPs argument that anything but a flat tax is communist / socialist / marxist and Marat's argument that a flat tax is put together by someone stitched from dead people. Name calling is not a rational way to argue your point.

People wanted to be fooled. There's a sucker born every minute. The same does apply here. People who know better have said this is a crock, and that is all this is: A crock. There are lot more people out there who do not understand science and want to believe something than there are people who do know science. It is a lot easier and a lot more profitable to pander nonsense than it is to do real science (or real economics). This is the basis behind all of the electric universe nonsense, the 2012 nonsense, the young earth creationist nonsense, and a whole lot of other nonsense that can be found on the internet these days. There is a lot of good information on the internet. Unfortunately, there is even more bad information than good on the 'net. Learning to distinguish between the bad and the good admittedly is not easy. This electric universe / plasma universe / plasma cosmology crap has been pitched one too many times (or rather, ten-plus too many times) just at this site. To be rather blunt, it gets kinda old seeing the same nonsense come up again and again. To make matters worse, there is no arguing with crackpots; they are after all immune to logic and evidence. I am not saying that rigney is a crackpot. He has however been duped by crackpots.

Your understanding of physics is severe handicapped without even the extremely basic understanding that the 1/r3 magnetic force is radically different from the 1/r2 force of gravitation. You have relegated yourself to the world of (inevitably wrong) analogies and the world of being snookered by utter crackpottery such as the video you posted in the opening post. You have been snookered. If you can't do this extremely simple high school math then you'll just have to take our word for it. Sorry, that's the way it is.

This looks a bit too much like homework, so all I am going to do is give a hint. Let A=sI+B. Then if x is an eigenvector of B it is an eigenvector of A, and vice versa (you will need to prove this).

Why is that wierd? The speed of light has different values when expressed in meters per second, miles per hour, or furlongs per fortnight. There are several ways to look at mass-energy equivalence. By way of analogy, look at Newton's second law as expressed by Newton: Force is proportional to the product of mass and acceleration: F=kma. The constant of proportionality has a numeric value of 1 when working in metric units, yielding F=ma. The constant of proportionality is 32.1740486 lbf/(ft/sec^2)/pound when working in English units. So is F=ma as expressed in metric units a convenience or is it a reflection of something deeper? In other words, does force represent a dimension separate from the dimensions of mass, length, and time, or is it a derived unit? The consensus is that force is not fundamental, that F=ma is the correct way of looking at things. That we need to use F=kma in English units is an artifice of the English system rather than something deep and fundamental. So, one way to look at E=mc^2 is that this is an artifice of the metric system (and the English system of units, and even the furlongs-firkins-fortnights system). In this viewpoint, length and time are not independent fundamental units. Length and time are instead the same thing. That means that length/time is a unitless quantity. The c^2 in E=mc^2 is an artifice of our view that length and time are fundamentally different. In this view, the natural choice is to choose units such that c=1, yielding E=m. This is a widespread but not a universally accepted view. Others do view length and time as being different but related things, related by the metric tensor, but different as well. That the signature of the metric tensor is +++- (or -+++, etc) indicates to some that time and length are fundamentally distinct concepts. In this point of view, that [math]E^2-p^2c^2=(m_0c^2)^2[/math] indicates that mass can be converted to energy (and vice versa) rather than being one and the same.

No. michel. You are misunderstanding the diagram. Yet another reason the diagram is a POS. Time to take another look at a single frame of that movie. Imagine two stars, call them stars A and B. Star A is ten light years distant from us in the +x direction and has zero proper motion and zero radial velocity with respect to us. Star B is observed to be ten light years distant in the -x direction and is receding from us at 0.001 light speed. Due to the null relative velocity between star A and us, star A is always ten light years away from us. If we plot star A's past, present, and future on our spacetime diagram the result will be a vertical line. The distance between this vertical line and the vertical time axis is 10 ly (or 10 ly scaled so that we can see it on our diagram). Star B is moving away from us. The light we are seeing now was emitted by the star 10 years ago when it was 10 ly away from us. Right "now" it is 10.01 ly away. The light we see from the star now and where the star is "now" are two different spacetime events, and hence are two different points on the spacetime diagram. We can plot all of star B's past, present, and future on the spacetime diagram. In this case we get a line that is very slightly tilted from the vertical due to star B's 0.001 radial velocity with respect to us. Suppose that unbeknownst to us, star A just "now" consumes the very last bit of its available hydrogen. The helium flash, and the star's subsequent expansion to being a red giant will be visible to us in ten years. Assume our spacetime diagram has godly powers, so the helium flash can be marked with an X and the expansion to red giant can be marked by coloring the future line of the star red. Now imagine a movie made out of a time-lapsed sequence of spacetime diagrams. Note that there is no motion here in the sense that we think of as motion. The star is perpetually 10 light years away from us. The movie would show motion. That X that marks the helium flash, along with the red line behind it, moves down the diagram as time marches on. Ten years from now that X will cross the diagonal line that represents our past line cone. At that point in time we will finally see the helium flash.

Spacetime events are things that ideally have infinitesimally small time duration and infinitesimally small spatial extent. The event of Armstrong's first footstep on the Moon is a good example of a spacetime event: It took place at a very specific location in space and at a very specific time. You are adding the signal to your existing confusion between event and object. Don't do that!

That is not even close to the accounting to which I was asking referring. That accounting tells people the projects that their taxes are funding. I am asking for something I've never seen expressed: What is the monetary value of a well-maintained road system, of a well-defended country? How does these monetary values apportion to the citizenry? How does this apportionment depend on a citizen's wealth or income? My guess, and it is just a guess, is that value received from the government is greatest at the extremes of the wealth/income scales. The government does spend a lot on the behalf of the poorest and the richest members of society. My point is that since the benefits from switching to a flat tax system will accrue primarily to the rich, how can such a tax be called "fair" without knowing how the spending on the rich compares to the taxes paid by the rich?

You are confusing spacetime events and objects. Suppose you take a time-lapsed series of photographs of the night sky centered on Polaris. Polaris is not popping in and out of view. You can see it in each of those photographs. It is the events rather than the objects that are popping in and out of view. In your time-lapsed series of photographs, each captured image of Polaris represents a different spacetime event. The wikipedia diagram you are asking about shows spacetime events. It does not show the objects that underlie those spacetime events. Yet another reason the diagram is a POS. It raises more questions than it answers. Good diagrams such as Minard's famous chart depicting Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812 are self explanatory and convey a whole lot of information. Diagrams such as Minard's are worth a lot more than 1000 words. Not all diagrams are worth 1000 words.

In other words, "what happens in the past light cone stays in the past light cone." This is not an award-winning diagram.

How do you know this? Have you done a full accounting of the goods and services you receive, including the roads you drive on, the education you have received, the roads others drive on and the education that others have received to make your job possible? I see this lack of accounting to be a huge part of the problem. I would love to see such an accounting.

Let's do just that. Who was it who opened this silly off-topic can of worms. The first occurrence of the word population was in post #92, emphasis mine: Moontanman is not opening the overpopulation / population control can of worms here. So who did? Hint: It was you, in post #104: It sure looks like you are alluding that space exploration is a part of the cure to the overpopulation problem here. You gave the appearance of continuing in the same vein in post #120: Apparently we do misunderstand you. It now appears you are not talking so much about overpopulation of the Earth being a problem as the rather stark underpopulation of humans everywhere but on the Earth as a problem. Getting back to the off-topic issue of population control, post #125: Are you so sure that this isn't enough? Good chunks of the civilized world have a negative population growth problem. In other words, overpopulation is not a problem in Western Europe, Russia, etc. I would venture that getting women educated and into the workforce (along with getting kids out of the workforce) played a big part in making overpopulation a non-issue in the civilized world. If we don't solve overpopulation on a global level, and soon, we may never reach the luxury of being able to view the fact that humans have not spread beyond the Earth as a problem. Now can we please go back on-topic?

Rant on This diagram exemplifies that wikipedia can at times be an utter POS (piece of excrement, but substitute a four-letter synonym for excrement here). The POS nature of wikipedia comes out strong in articles on physics, where the physics is anything beyond that learned in high school. Suppose you went to the wikipedia article on "Forests" and found a sidebar discussion on the climate-dependent number of spots on a specific species of beetles that lives only in the south-facing crevices in the bark of a specific species of trees that lives only on the north slopes of a specific forest in Lower Slobbovia. The only logical response would be "WTF? This article is a POS!" There are far too many wikipedia articles on concepts in advanced physics that dive into the deep end of the trivial minutia pool of knowledge. This diagram is one of those. There is a trite saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Better is that a good picture is worth a thousand words. Given that this image is actually 100 pictures (frames) rolled in one, it had better be worth 100,000 words. It isn't. It is instead worth two words: ignore it. Rant off So, what is this image showing? The first thing to realize is that any and every frame in this animation shows only one spatial dimension. You are at the very center of the frame. Ahead is to the right, behind to the left. The vertical dimension is time, future up, past down. The next thing to do is to try to understand what a single frame is showing. The two diagonal line segments emanating from the center and going down represent the light you are seeing now. The light you are seeing now from a star that is 4 light years (ly) distant from your perspective was emitted 4 years ago from your perspective . For a star that is 8 ly away, the time of emission was 8 years ago. Those events, light emitted 4 years ago by a star 4 ly away and light emitted 8 years ago by a star 8 ly away are two points on the past light cone. Because light travels at a finite speed, everything that you see now occurred at some time the past. Suppose that right now you catch a baseball that someone threw to you. Let's plot the event of the person throwing the ball on the diagram. The person was some distance away from you, presumably in front of you. That gives the horizontal coordinate. The vertical coordinate depends on how fast the baseball was thrown. The vertical (time) coordinate for a ball thrown by a professional pitcher is a lot less than it is for a baseball thrown by your six year old son who you are trying to teach how to throw. Both of these spacetime events, a 100 mph fastball versus a gentle lob, will be somewhere within the past light cone. The boundary of the past light cone describes the events you are seeing now. The interior of the past light cone describes all of the events that can possibly physically effect you now. Light signals you received some time in the past are also in the past light cone. For example, the event of Neil Armstrong broadcasting "That was one small step ..." is in interior of our past light cone. Next suppose you send a radio broadcast to some piece of equipment that is now on the Moon. The location of the event of the reception of this signal on the spacetime diagram is on one of the two diagonal line segments emanating upward from the center of the diagram. Those two line segments depict all of the events of some other observer receiving a light signal that you are emitting now. Next suppose you toss the baseball back to the person who threw it to you. That person will catch the ball sometime in the future. The catching of the ball is yet another event that can be plotted on this spacetime diagram. The event is in the future and some distance in front of you, so the location of this event is up and to the right of the center. The ball travels at much less than light speed, so the displacement is close to being purely vertical: It is inside the future light cone. The location of any event in the future that results from you doing something now is somewhere inside the future light cone. Finally, the location of the light emitted right "now" by a star 8 ly away is 8 ly to the right (or left) on the horizontal line. You can't see that light yet. You'll have to wait 8 years. So, let's animate the image. The event of the star 8 ly away emitting light now moves into the past as time moves on. In 8 years the event will have moved to the boundary of the past light cone. This is when you can see the event. Add in acceleration and you get the picture portrayed on that wiki page.

It doesn't need to fly in the US, Canada, Western Europe, or Russia. We don't need enforced population control. We have voluntary population control with nary a regulation on births. This is one of many reasons why a space program will not help solve the population problem. The countries capable of flying a tiny number of people into space do not have an overpopulation problem. Overpopulation is for the most part a problem of second and third world countries. Those countries are not going to undertake a Chinese-style solution. The UN would have to step in -- essentially an act of war. The lie of "we're from the government and we're here to help" would become "we're from the UN and we're here to cut off your testicles." A far into the future space program could help solve this population problem: "There are only 10 billion humans in the universe, and we're all right here. That's a problem! There should be trillions and trillions of us."

How, exactly, is that any different from any other so-called "fair" tax, and how, exactly, does that equate to "everyone pays less"? If "everyone pays less" the tax system is not revenue neutral. If "everyone pays less" the government receives less. If everyone pays the same, why change? Any revenue-neutral change to the tax system means some people will be winners, others losers. Your proposal is simple. However, just because its simple does not mean it is fair. It just means that it is simple. I thought it was payment for goods and services provided by the government. If that were the case, shouldn't I be receiving a balance statement from the government saying that my benefits were this and that, and therefore my taxes are such and such? Instead, all I get is a book telling me how to fill out my tax forms based on my income. If taxes were based on goods and services the rich and the poor would pay a whole lot more in taxes than they do.

What does that mean? It was invented by the devil. All taxes are evil. It is legalized armed robbery. Think of it this way: Should you evade paying your taxes and should the IRS find out, they will come after you. With guns. Taxes are also very essential. Without government we would still be living in a world of stone knives and bearskins. However, because taxes are inherently evil, talking about "fairness" is a bit silly. To me, a better metric is to spread the inherent unfairness of taxation as evenly as possible. Minimize the pain. A regressive tax does exactly that. Oh please. It's none of the above. This is a scientific forum. Certainly you can do better than that.

What you missed is the "everyone pays less" line, which how the flat tax is rigged by its proponents to make it look attractive. In a truly revenue-neutral flat tax everyone does not pay less. The rich pay less, by quite a bit. Almost everyone else who pays taxes now will pay more under a revenue-neutral flat tax. Most flax tax proposals are anything but revenue neutral, even the ones that claim they are (which they are not). How is this any different from a congresscritter who tells its constituents that, thanks to the hard work of their representative, the district is receiving more in government spending than it pays in in the form of taxes? This wasn't the hard work of their representative. Almost every congresscritter can say this. It's not too hard when they don't (or didn't) care whether the budget was in line with receipts. What is so wrong with a progressive tax system?

That "everyone is taxed less" is the lie that belies the flat tax. To keep the receipts to the government the same the taxes on the middle class go up, and go up by a huge amount. Why not just fix the existing system, and what is so wrong with a progressive system?

The problem with a flat tax is that it disproportionately burdens the middle class, not the poor. This is why a flat tax is an insane idea. If Congress did put this through, the political makeup of the next Congress would be, oh, a bit different than the Congress that created the flat tax. The tax structure would be restored to being progressive, with a vengeance. The redistribution of wealth boat started sailing before the American Revolution with public schools, toll-free roads, etc. The sails were changed to modern diesel engines in the 1930s and then to nuclear powered engines in the 1960s. To the fairness crowd, "fair" apparently means paying less in taxes but not losing any benefits. Or perhaps it means that suckering the middle class into paying more taxes and getting less in benefits is "fair" because "all's fair in love and war". I would really like to see a study of benefits received less taxes paid as a function of income (and as a function of wealth). Being a nerdy scientist/engineer, I would like to see [math]f(\mbox{income}) = \frac{\mbox{benefits received} - \mbox{taxes paid}}{\mbox{income}}[/math] with a full characterization of "benefits received". My thoughts: This function ideally should be positive for almost everyone, and much higher than nominal for the poor. We have governments because they are (or should be) a net benefit for almost everyone. The poor need some help, and they are getting some. This function in reality follows a bathtub curve (it curves upward at both ends). Both the rich and poor benefit from government out of proportion to income, to the detriment of the middle class. A fair tax would turn this bathtub into a steep-walled jacuzzi.

It's the other way around (that is, diffuse rather than "super-dense"). If dark matter clumped the way "normal" matter does it would only serve to exacerbate the galaxy rotation problem. Dark matter comes to the rescue only if it forms a diffuse cloud around galaxies, aka the dark matter halo.