D H

That is assuming the planet is not librating so much as to make these goldilocks zones migrate so much over the 37 day orbit as to make the planet uninhabitable. This planet is a bit too much like the joke about the two statisticians who went duck hunting. But it is a good start on our hunt for a life-bearing planet, and it is very close.

Some other differences: Australia doesn't have a land bridge that connects it to third world populations. Australia did not (officially) support slavery and did not people by the boatloads to be slaves and whose descendants would be slaves. The US is still reaping the consequences of its checkered past with regard to slavery. Your checkered history includes a relatively small number of convicts, but those convicts did gain their freedom (if they behaved and lived) and their children were not non-citizens. Your checkered past also includes killing off most of the indigenous population. That is one thing that the US and Australia do have in common. Your very recent checkered past includes an official policy of condoning and even encouraging kidnapping children of the indigenous population. Nice job! First off, just because Australia has not yet had its housing bubble collapse does not mean you are immune. According to this Economist article, "By this measure Australian property is the most overvalued of any of the 20 countries we track." When your housing bubble does burst (and it will happen eventually), it will hurt, and given a 61.1% overvaluation per that Economist article, it will hurt a lot. Now to directly address what you wrote. You are comparing apples to oranges. Better said, you are comparing apples to very nicely picked cherries. Most of the people in Australia live in the narrow strip of land between the coast and the Great Dividing Range. Similar conditions exist in the US on the west coast. A more apt comparison would be housing prices in southern California to housing prices in Australia. Moreover, I dispute your numbers. Yes, you can find an $80,000 lot within miles of the center of Austin. A house? Maybe a house so badly in need of repairs that it is virtually unlivable. Maybe a house in an extremely undesirable neighborhood. The median price in Austin is well over $200,000, and Austin is one of the pricier cities in Texas. Texas, for whatever reason, did not suffer a housing bubble to the extent that other areas of the country did. Housing is cheap in Texas because land is relatively cheap, labor costs are relatively low, and construction practices are relatively shoddy. More nicely picked cherries. Let's look at the reasons for our lower life expectancy. We are still reaping the consequences of slavery. Life expectancy amongst descendants of slaves is markedly lower than life expectancy of the general population. Note well: I am not claiming that this is a good thing. It is a bad thing. But it is a bad thing that we have to live with. We have a large immigrant population, legal and illegal. Recent immigrants also have a reduced life expectancy compared to the population at large. We count births differently than do most other nations. A baby that shows any signs of life in the US counts as a live birth, but not necessarily elsewhere. This difference in counting artificially reduces the life expectancy in the US compared to other countries. A huge factor is that we in the US tend to have a rather unhealthy life style. Obesity in the US is rampant. I guarantee that if you plump up the population of Australia to the extent seen in the US you will see a decline in life expectancy in Australia. This plumping up has nothing to do with socialized medicine. At least the indigenous population of the US isn't as bad off as yours. An indigenous Australian would fare better in Bangladesh.

Don't kid yourself. We are patting them on the ass and telling them don't worry honey, you don't have to compete with those men who can run faster, jump higher, hit harder than you. We are then pretending that it is not only OK but absolutely essential to do so. Separate but equal didn't work and has been deemed illegal in the case of race, yet somehow separate but equal is exactly what is needed in the case of the genders -- and it is illegal not to have separate but equal systems.

Google the terms "hydrostatic equilibrium" and "lapse rate".

Sometimes, revenge served ice cold can be quite satisfying. We made one of our sons take the bus to school after wrecking one too many cars. Instead of taking the bus he scrounged rides from friends. No friends were available one day. He insisted that I had to pick him up after school. "Take the bus," I said. His response: "Seniors don't ride the bus. You have to pick me up. I can't ride the bus. What do you think I am? A kid?" I told him I couldn't; I had an important meeting that afternoon. "Well cancel it then!" I did cancel it, but for reasons completely unrelated to his pleas. I texted him, informing him that I had canceled my meeting and would pick him up. I could just hear his little wheel churning, thinking "I won". Little did he know ... Knowing that no kid likes to be picked up by some old guy wearing a dress shirt and tie and driving a new car, I went home to change. Put on my lawn mowing pants (torn, faded, orange; downright ugly). A nice worn purple plaid shirt went nicely with it. I was early, and my lawn needed a quick mow. Now I was sweaty, stinky, dirty, and wearing something truly hideous. Time to go. Those stinky, sweaty, dirty clothes and my nice car were an obvious mismatch. The old beater pickup, badly in need of a wash, was just what I needed. Almost. I put some junk in the bed just to make the scene complete. I pulled up to the high school, parked catty-corner, jumped up on the pile of junk and yelled my son's name, loud, and then again. I never saw a kid move so fast. "What are you trying to do? Ruin my life?" "Yes. Do you want me to pick you up tomorrow?" "I'll take the bus."

If by REAL numbers you mean 1,234,567,890 instead of 1.234567890e09, what exactly makes the former REAL and the latter not REAL? If by REAL numbers you mean the reals, sorry, such a beast does not and cannot exist. Almost all real numbers are not computable.

BTW, the correct answers to my question in post #89: In both cases, the probes will accelerate for 20 days as measured by the spacecraft clock, or 21.08 days on Earth. By this time the probes will have covered a distance of 0.015898 light years as measured from the Earth and achieved a velocity of 0.512008 c. The probes will then drift for some time at this velocity until it is time to accelerate (decelerate) to come to a stop (relative to the Earth) at the target star. So, how long do the probes need to drift? The acceleration at the end of the flight is simply the reverse of the acceleration undergone at the start. The probe will need to start firing once again when it detects that the distance to the target star is equal to the distance to the Sun at the end of the initial boost phase. That distance is not 0.015898 light years. It is instead 0.0136561 light years thanks to length contraction. The distance to the target star will also undergo length contraction. At the point when the boost phase ends, Alpha Centauri will appear to be only 3.7315 light years away as opposed to 4.3441 light years away (the original 4.36 light years less the 0.015898 light years traveled during the boost phase). The coast phase needs to end when Alpha Centauri appears to be 0.0136561 light years distant. The coast phase thus lasts 7.2613 years from the perspective of the probe but 8.45339 years from the perspective of the Earth. Putting it all together, the trip to Alpha Centauri takes 8.56884 years as measured by someone on the Earth but only 7.37082 years as measured by the probe, a difference of 1.19802 years. The calculation of what happens to the probe sent to Tau Ceti is similar. In this case the trip takes 23.2952 years from the perspective of an Earth-bound observer but only 20.0205 years per the spacecraft clock, a difference of 3.27472 years.

First things first: What makes you think that this is the case?

I've never disputed these results. Yes, you have. You did so when you said that acceleration is the cause of time dilation. If by that you mean that proper acceleration is Lorentz invariant, I agree. If you mean something else you need to elaborate. d is not absolute. It isn't even absolute in vuquta relativity. You have time dilation, and time dilation and length contraction go hand in hand. Your result is mathematical nonsense and also is in contradiction to experimental results.

Wrong. You are ignoring length contraction.

A simple thought experiment for you, vuquta. Ignore that interstellar space is not empty. Pretend that a vehicle plowing through interstellar space at some velocity relative to the solar system will maintain that velocity forever. Ignore that stars have a non-zero velocity with respect to the Sun. Assume humanity has developed some technique that enables it to send probes to other stars. Humanity however has not progressed all that much. The probes still use the burn-coast-burn approach that is used today. We'll send out two probes, one to Alpha Centauri (distance =4.36 light years) and another to Tau Ceti (11.9 light years). Each probe will accelerate toward its target star and 10 g (98.1 m/s2) for 20 days as measured by the probe, coast for some time, and the decelerate at 10 g for 20 days to come to a rest with respect to the target star (and the Sun, per assumptions). In other words, both probes undergo the exact same acceleration profile. The two probes differ only in the direction of travel and the duration of the coast period. My question to you: After correcting for the finite speed of light, what is the difference between the time on Earth and the timestamp on the signals sent back by the two probes? Special relativity has an answer. What does vuquta relativity say the answer is?

You are wrong, for two reasons. The first is selective reading. Read the text that you yourself quoted: For a low earth orbiter such as the Space Shuttle, the velocity is so great that slowing due to time dilation is the dominant effect. It is clearly stating that time dilation due to relative velocity and time dilation due to gravity are two different effects. General relativity adds gravitational time dilation to the mix. Gravitational time dilation is not the sole explanation of time dilation. The second reason you are wrong is that this paper is yet another that does not support your interpretation. In general relativity the GPS satellite is not accelerating. It is gravitational potential, not gravitational acceleration, that causes gravitational time dilation.

Are you saying that time dilation only occurs in an accelerating frame?Yes. vuquta: The paper that you cited does not support your position. Neither does experimentation.

The cause is that Earth was rotating 4.5 billion years ago. What made that happen? Lots of things. The collision with Theia changed the Earth's angular momentum by quite a bit. Before that, the proto-Earth had some rotational angular momentum due to its formation from a rotating gas cloud. Before that, who knows? For example, a star passing nearby the gas cloud from which our solar system formed could have given the gas cloud some angular momentum due to gravity gradient torque. Bottom line: A long time (9 billion years or so) passed between the big bang and the formation of our solar system. Lots of things could have happened in that long time to transfer angular momentum to what eventually became our Earth.

Not just if they run a DNS. ISPs are targeted. So are financial transaction providers (e.g., paypal, credit card companies), and so are ad servers. Re-read section 2324 (e) Service of Court Order. Link: http://www.govtrack....id=t0%3Ais%3A48

That's the Yarkovsky effect (Wiki). Since the high temperature typically occurs around 3 or 4 PM local time and the low around 6 AM, the Earth is going to be subject to this effect. This will result in a small secular effect (while specular and diffuse reflection will just have the effect of altering the effective gravitational force from the Sun).

The effect of solar radiation pressure on the Earth's orbit is very, very small. Assuming perfect absorption and uniform emission (the simplistic calculation in the source for the number in the wiki table), the effect is 1.6×10-14 smaller than the gravitational force exerted by the Sun on the Earth. That is three and a half orders of magnitude smaller than the uncertainty in the acceleration of the Earth due to the Sun's gravitational field. In any physical modeling endeavor, one generally ignores effects that are two or more orders of magnitude smaller than uncertainties for the simple reason that the uncertainties will overwhelm those tiny effects. The net result of this effect (the simplistic one, anyhow) is to very slightly reduce the effective gravitational force of the Sun on the Earth. Let's see what the impact is. Imagine some alternate universe where the Earth (same mass as our Earth) is still orbiting the Sun (same mass as our Sun) but that Sun is not shining. We'll assume that that other Earth has the same orbital velocity as does ours. That means that that other Earth will be orbiting at a slightly different distance from its dead Sun than is our Earth from our shining Sun. How much of a different distance? About 1.6×10-14 AU, or about 2.4 millimeters.

If someone was caught physically transporting stolen merchandise into the US the immediate solution is quite simple: Seize the stolen merchandise and put the person who was carrying it in jail. That simple remedy is not available when the transportation is electronic rather than physical. The remedy Congress has come up with is better than nothing. It is essentially making domestic internet providers partners in crime with the non-domestic sites that profit from these stolen goods. It is important to remember that the targeted sites are dealing in stolen goods. Just because the transportation is electronic rather than physical does not not make the legitimize the transportation of those stolen goods. That said, there certainly is a potential for governmental abuse with this bill. How the government uses these powers, should the bill become law, does bear watching.

The Congress also deems murder to be bad. Is that censorship? More to the point, suppose I went out, bought a best-selling book, photocopied it, printed reproductions, and started selling them. Congress deems that to be bad also. It is in fact illegal. That said, doing this is going to require me to have a printing press, a distribution system, etc. I would have to do quite a bit of work just to make a few dishonest bucks. Fortunately, technology helps. Instead of printing books, I could buy a top-selling music CD or video game. Bypassing the copy protection on these apparently is child's play. Now, instead of having to have a bulky and expensive printing press and a bulky and expensive supply of paper, all I now need are some much smaller and cheaper electronic devices and a bunch of smaller and much CDs. Blank CDs in bulk are a dime a dozen or so. That said, I still have to have some way to distribute my cheap to produce product. The real nice thing about the internet, from the perspective of the criminal mind, is that it makes it even easier to make a dishonest buck. Technology has long been a boon for the savvy criminal. The only problem here is that Congress has been painstakingly slow to react to an ever growing crime problem.

The incoming photon and the outgoing reflected photon are not the same photon. That said, the frequency of the outgoing reflected photon is slightly red shifted. Conservation of energy comes into play as well as conservation of momentum. For a normal reflection (the solar sail is perpendicular to the Sun), the change in wavelength in the solar sail's rest frame is approximately [math]\Delta \lambda \approx \frac{2 h}{m c}[/math] where m is the mass of the solar sail.

That link doesn't work. And oh fudge, it can't be corrected. The new underlying software is "too smart" (read: Stupid). That simplistic radiation pressure calculation (which is low, BTW) represents for force spread over the entire Earth. The Earth is huge in comparison to the Shuttle. There is a clue in the article as to why you don't feel anything. The cited number is referenced in a footnote, which says that that force is "1.63 x 10[sup−14[/sup] x gravitational attraction between Earth and Sun, assuming total absorption of sunlight." The force exerted by solar radiation pressure on the Earth is many, many orders of magnitude smaller than the gravitational force that the Sun exerts on the Earth. That gravitational is an easy number to calculate: [math]F_{\text{grav}} = \mu_{\odot}M_{\oplus}/R_{\odot,\oplus}^{\,\,2}[/math] where μ⊙ is the standard gravitational parameter for the Sun (132,712,440,018 km3/s), M⊕ is the mass of the Earth (5.9736×1024 kg), and R⊙,⊕ is the distance between the Earth and the Sun (1.00000261 AU = 149,598,261 km). Grinding out the numbers, the gravitational force exerted by the Sun on the Earth is 3.5 yottanewtons. Yes and no. Yes because the calculated result (the one in the wiki page) is based on the solar constant, and the amount of power available from the Sun is also based on the solar constant. No because force and energy are different things. Can you give some explanation here because that makes no sense to me (not saying it's wrong, just makes no sense to me). Wouldn't that mean its wavelength is changed by being reflected? Conservation of momentum. Suppose the solar sail is oriented normal to the Sun (which typically is not a good idea). When the solar sail absorbs a photon, the immediate change in the solar sail's momentum is exactly equal to the momentum of the photon. Absorbing a photon transfers the energy carried by the photon to the solar sail in the form of heat. The solar sail will re-radiate that absorbed energy into space in the form of thermal radiation. If the sail was thick, the sunlit side would be a lot warmer than the dark side, so the thermal radiation would generate a force away from the Sun. However, solar sails have to be very thin, so there isn't going to be that big a temperature difference between the sunlit and dark sides of the sail. The thermal radiation away from the Sun will be more or less equal to the thermal radiation toward the Sun. The net force from that thermal radiation will be very small. Thus the total force generated by absorbing photons is the product of the photon flux (the number of photons hitting the solar sail per second) and the average momentum of a single photon. Now for reflected photons. A reflected photon will go straight back to the Sun. To conserve momentum, the change in the momentum of the solar sail has to be twice that of momentum of the incoming photon. There is no thermal energy change in the solar sail from this reflection, so the total force generated by reflecting photons is twice that of absorbing photons.

It's incorrect because the angular momentum of the universe as a whole is most likely zero, and that is the angular momentum of the big bang.

No. There are non-computable numbers. In fact, almost all real numbers are not computable.

Right here.

Yes. Athletes need strength, agility, balance, etc. Some people have very little, others have a lot. The distribution forms a curve, more or less bell shaped. Men and women are different physically even at the middle of the curve. At the four-sigma plus extremes of the curve where athletes of the highest levels of competitiveness levels exist the difference is quite marked. Consider the 100 meter sprint. Men broke the 10 second barrier more than 40 years ago. Women, not even close. Nowadays a winning time for a mens 100 meter dash that is over 10 seconds is a sign of a mediocre race. If track and field was run as a gender neutral competition there would be no female competitors at the highest levels of competition.