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That is the distinction between a minor planet and a small object. Minor planets are massive enough that they can self-gravitate and form a more-or-less spherical object. Small object are shaped like potatoes because they have enough mass to randomly pull objects toward them but do not have enough mass to make those random conglomerates of mass form a sphere.

Yes. So lift the bucket of photons over your head, and voila! the net gravity force on you is reduced by a tiny amount. Alternatively, walk into a building. The mass overhead also reduces the gravitational force by a tiny amount. Another alternative: Let it snow. An extremely precise gravimeter in Finland is so sensitive that it detected when the snow was cleared from the roof of the building in which the gravimeter is housed.

[raises hand, waves vigorously] Oh! I know! Call me! Let's suppose we have a bucket lined with a perfect reflector, and I do mean perfect, R=1 exactly. Let's suppose this is a Hotel California type of bucket: Photons can check in but they can't check out. Let's suppose we can pump the output of a laser into this Hotel California photon bucket. Let's suppose we use a 3 terawatt laser to do so. One last thing: Let's suppose this laser can run continuously for a full year. With all of these ridiculous suppositions, what will be the intrinsic mass of this year-long collection of photons? The answer: A bit about 1050 kg. How ridiculous are these suppositions? Let's start with the 3 terawatt laser. There are some very high-power lasers out there, but they all achieve their high power by releasing a largish amount of energy over an incredibly short interval of time. Continuously operating lasers are orders of magnitude less powerful than these pulsed lasers. Another problem with a continuously-operating 3 terawatt laser: That is just shy of the power consumption of the entire US. There are also a just few problems with our Hotel California photon bucket. This notion belongs in the bit bucket.

Would you please drop the Hilter nonsense, cypress? Invocations of Godwin's law never amount to anything. It is bad enough when opponents of some topic invoke Godwin's law. When the proponents self-invoke it, out of the blue, the discussion is absolutely worthless. All that your continued invocation of Godwin's law does is to make your argument look incredibly weak. That said, everything you have said is incredibly weak.

Emphasis mine: You've found one. There are more solutions. Your teacher apparently is not as easy as you thought.

Nice quote of context of your own words. The very next sentence in that post is emboldened below: Do not send a single penny, let alone a few, to this crackpot.

Correct, but at the same time very, very wrong. What you wrote is correct because of course our limited knowledge of today does not explain everything. Wrong because the only people who use that argument do not understand what science is. Very very wrong because you are implicitly invoking the god of the gaps argument. That argument didn't fly very far over a century ago, and its flying power has only diminished since then. How politicians of all ilk abuse scientific notions has absolutely zip, zero, nada to do with the validity of those scientific notions. All that this does is to speak ill of the politicians. Non sequitur.

If Bachmann is one of your prize assets y'all are in big trouble in 2012.

I strongly recommend that under no circumstances should any member of ScienceForums send this person *any* money, even "a few pennies".

Stalin made Hitler look like a rank amateur. All of this is completely off-topic regarding the validity of evolution.

The unnamed Indian source specifically said dollars, not rupees. The extremely mainstream conservative media has not dropped this claim as of yet. I strongly suspect you picked up this tidbit of misinformation from the extremely mainstream conservative media, so I am going to pick at you and at them. I am, or was, one of the more conservative members at this site (just ask Bascule). This lyin' putrid garbage from the mainstream conservative media has as of late really turned me off of the right wing. Given their market share, conservative TV and radio are *the* mainstream media, yet they are acting even less responsibly than ever. If you watch them or listen to them, do keep your thinking cap on. You Tea Party advocates: I truly hope you will like the mess you have just created. Minnesota is stuck with Michelle Bachmann for at least two years. Wisconsin and Kentucky are stuck with Ron Johnson and Rand Paul for at least six years. This is not a good start.

What's that?

Whether Hitler was a devout Christian or hated Christians has nothing to do with evolution, period. Whether Hitler ascribed to evolution or didn't has nothing to do with the validity of evolution. Whether Hitler used evolution to justify his misdeeds has nothing to do with the validity of evolution. Politicians of all ilk try to use science to justify their views and acts. That those views and acts are wrong, sometimes very, very wrong as was the case in Nazi Germany does not necessarily mean that the underlying science was wrong. It just means that the connection between science and their views/acts was wrong. That might be what Darwin wrote, quoted out of context. The theory of evolution has undergone two, maybe three or more, significant revolutions since Darwin first espoused the concept 150+ years ago. Scientists do not treat Darwin's word as the be-all and end-all of evolution. He was the starting point, not the culmination, of modern biology. You are arguing against a theory that does not exist today. In short, you are using illogic and fallacies.

Sometimes it is a good idea to put your critical thinking cap on, jackson33. This number is ludicrously out of whack with reality. What, are they sending 100,000 troops to India? No. Even though the claims of this trip become ever more exaggerated with time, the numbers do not come anywhere close to 100,000. The 100,000 troops we have on the ground in Afghanistan today cost about $190 million per day. When I first heard this doozy the number of people was about 2000 and the number of hotel rooms was 800 (Obama is a cheapskate! He's making people double, even triple up on rooms!). Let's take these numbers as a given and use a completely over-the-top rate of $1250 per night. Okay, there goes the first million. Where does the remaining 199 million come from? Per diem? That would be quite the extravagant per diem! Renting forty 747s and only putting only 50 people on each plane so they can stretch out and par-tay? The numbers just won't add up to $200 million/day, no matter how many fictional "warships" one adds to the tale. (That 34 warship nonsense is, BTW, more nonsense.) Suppose for the sake of argument the total cost of the ten day trip turns out to be $60 million. Will the promulgators of this nonsense issue a retraction? My prediction: Not a chance. That $200 million / day figure will never be mentioned again. They will simply change gears and attack Obama for his $60 million dollar boondoggle.

There are two independents in the Senate, both of whom caucus with the Democrats. One of them, Bernard Sanders, is far left while the other, Joe Lieberman, remains a registered Democrat and most likely will run as a Democrat in 2012. There are no independents in the House. How can you say that independents "just create gridlock" when there are no true independents in Congress? Besides, what's wrong with a little gridlock? Gridlock is one of the best ways of keeping Congress from passing stupid laws.

That historical perspective argument is a bit of a red herring. Using the same argument one could point to the Grand Canyon, the Badlands, the Channeled Scablands, and other areas as signs of the futility of modern farming practices aimed to minimize erosion. Bad farming practices that resulted in the loss of a few inches or feet of topsoil pale in comparison to nature's ability to tear down entire mountain ranges. We still employ those modern erosion control farming practices because failing to do so leads to big problems for us. One thing that that historical perspective does show is that eventually we will need to undertake efforts to mitigate those huge natural variations in climate. Given our current level of technology we currently could do nothing to forestall one of those huge climate shifts that we know have taken place in the past. Fortunately we have thousands, possibly tens of thousands of years before the next ice age hits. Until then, the concern is with the much smaller variations, natural and manmade, in climate we are seeing now and what impacts those changes may have on modern human society.

Have you stopped beating your wife? Answer yes or no only, please. Godel's theorems are not so much about lying as undecidability. That somewhat simplistic description skips right over some of the key aspects of the theorems. Two things must come into play for Godel's theorems to apply. "Have you stopped beating your wife?" is a loaded question. Godel showed that it is possible to construct loaded questions in any mathematical system that is as strong as Peano arithmetic. The basic problem is that Peano arithmetic has addition and multiplication. Get rid of multiplication and the problems are gone. The correct response to "have you stopped beating your wife?" is "Neither." Requiring that the answer be either yes or no and nothing else is the law of the excluded middle / principal of bivalence. Some mathematicians reject the law of the excluded middle because it, along with multiplication, is at the heart of the undecidability issue. Suppose you are asked to prove that there exists two irrational numbers α and β such that αβ is rational. This is easy with the law of the excluded middle. √2 is irrational. By the law of the excluded middle, √2√2 is either rational or irrational. If it is rational, game over: We have found the requisite α and β. If it is irrational we have also proven the conjecture because [math]\left(\surd 2^{\surd 2}\right)^{\surd 2} = 2[/math]. This is an invalid proof to a constructivist. A constructivist would demand a proof that √2√2 is irrational (which it is, thanks to the Gelfond-Schneider theorem).

A couple of court cases: Storer v. Brown, 415 U.S. 724, 735 (1974) http://supreme.justia.com/us/415/724/case.html Sore-loser laws further the State's compelling interest in the stability of its political system, outweighing the interest the candidate. South Carolina Green Party et al. v. South Carolina State Election Commission et al. No. 09-1915 (2010) http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-4th-circuit/1531943.html It ain't easy being green.

Wall o' text, man. Some guidelines: Sentences end with one period, not two or three. The period that ends a sentence needs a space or two after it. The same goes for a comma. There are these neat little things called blank lines that help separate your ideas.

Nonsense. You are arguing for a theory that perfectly describes some phenomenon and perfect information about that phenomenon. There is no such thing as a perfect theory or perfect information. Shoot, there is no such thing as perfect information in a system as simple as modeling the behavior of our solar system. The solar system is chaotic. Biological systems, which are a whole lot more complex than our solar system, are blatantly chaotic. It is so dang chaotic that applying the concepts of dynamical systems theory to biological systems has been a bit challenging. (That dynamical systems theory is rather math-intensive and that many students decide to study biology as opposed chemistry or physics because they suck at math makes applying dynamical systems theory to biological systems doubly challenging.) Nonetheless, people have been working on doing exactly this for the last decade or so.

Balderdash. Yes, Lorentz ether theory is experimentally indistinguishable from special relativity. So what? Lorentz ether theory is a dead-end proposal. The axioms of Lorentz ether theory are ad hoc and downright ugly. Compare that to the two very simple axioms of special relativity. Those ad hoc axioms of Lorentz ether theory means there is no going forward with this theory. Compare that to special relativity. It leads to general relativity, with special relativity falling out as a special case. Lorentz ether theory does not fall out of general relativity as a special case. The axioms of Lorentz ether theory are just too ad hoc and brittle for that to be the case. Finally, Lorentz ether theory, unlike relativity, is not a physical theory. One of the axioms of Lorentz ether theory postulates the existence of an absolute reference. The theory falls apart without this absolute frame. However, the theory adds the caveat that this absolute reference frame can never be detected, that length contraction and time dilation hides its existence from any experiment designed to detect it. That axiom is unfalsifiable, and that makes Lorentz ether theory a nonscientific theory.

A quick search on a web site that describes formal and informal fallacies and I see that this argument is a composition of two fallacies, specifically the composition fallacy and the straw man fallacy. You have equated the small area we need for housing to the total area we need for everything but housing. That is a composition fallacy. You used this fallacy as a means of ridiculing the notion of over population, and that is a straw man argument. There is no room for the fact that we are living beings in your equation. Where, for example, are the farms and rivers in your equation? I don't know about you, but I do like to eat. I also need an occasional drink of water as well. Where are the roads to distribute that food, the reservoirs to hold the water? Where are the sewage systems to collect and sanitize the resultant waste? What are you going to do, airlift food and water in, airlift honey pots out?

Google the term "genetic drift".

Because obtaining ethanol from corn arguably is not a net energy source. If that is the case then all that rising oil prices will do is to make ethanol even less competitive with oil rather than more competitive. An EROEI significantly greater than one is needed to make ethanol competitive with oil. Ethanol from sugar cane, with an EROEI of about 9, does the trick quite nicely. Assuming the issues of efficiently getting ethanol from cellulose in volume are resolved, getting ethanol from trash trees such as aspen or even corn stalks would do the trick. It is driving with food that is pseudoscience.

All the time? Of course not. Since this thread is eventually going to result in an invocation of Godwin's Law, I'll just bite the bullet and do so now. Chamberlain's appeasement with Germany was exactly analogous to the character in the comic lending the crocs a hand. On the other hand, never yielding on anything is just as bad. Knowing when to compromise versus when to hold ones ground is an art, not a science. You came that close to owing me a new computer monitor with that sweeping generalization.