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Yes, in multiple places. See http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf) and search for "book". The word is used 11 times. From the majority opinion, (pages are page numbers in the majority opinion, not PDF page numbers), Page 16 First is the uncertainty caused by the litigating position of the Government. ... The Government also suggests that an as-applied challenge to §441b’s ban on books may be successful, although it would defend §441b’s ban as applied to almost every other form of media including pamphlets. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 65–66 (Sept. 9, 2009). The Government thus, by its own position, contributes to the uncertainty that §441b causes. Page 20 The law before us is an outright ban, backed by criminal sanctions. ... Thus, the following acts would all be felonies under §441b: The Sierra Club runs an ad, within the crucial phase of 60 days before the general election, that exhorts the public to disapprove of a Congressman who favors logging in national forests; the National Rifle Association publishes a book urging the public to vote for the challenger because the incumbent U. S. Senator supports a handgun ban; and the American Civil Liberties Union creates a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate’s defense of free speech. These prohibitions are classic examples of censorship. Page 33 If Austin were correct, the Government could prohibit a corporation from expressing political views in media beyond those presented here, such as by printing books.

The federal government, which obviously was on the side of the FEC in this case (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), lost the case back on March 25, 2009 when oral arguments were made. What if a corporation backed the publication of a book instead of a movie? Alito asked "would the Constitution permit the restriction of all of those as well?" The answer was "I think the Constitution would have permitted Congress to apply the electioneering communication restrictions ... to additional media as well." He later made it crystal clear in response to a hypothetical question about a corporation (rather than its campaign finance limited PAC) publishing a book: "we could prohibit the publication of the book." McCain Feingold pretty much died because the FEC over-argued its case (and somehow managed to do so with both feet firmly planted in mouth).

Earth atmospheric mass losses are about three kg of hydrogen and fifty grams of helium per second, which compared to the mass of the Earth is fairly tiny. However, 3 kg/sec is about 100 million kg/yr, or about 4×1017 kilograms over the 4.5 billion years the Earth has been around. The latter number of course assumes a constant rate over that 4.5 billion years.

Something that emits one 400 nm photon per second could not be called a "laser". Lasers emit coherent light. With what is that well-isolated photon coherent?

Several hoaxsters. The history goes back quite a long way. The idea took hold in the 1970s when hoaxsters were running rampant. No. People are gullible fools. The governing adage is "a fool and his money are soon parted." Hoaxes can be an incredible source of money for those who have no scruples. It is a lot easier than doing the real work. People want nice, easy solutions to hard problems. Think Bernie Madoff.

The balloon analogy is just an analogy -- and it is an analogy used to try to convey the idea of the expansion of the universe to us dumb lay people. Cosmologists do not use the balloon analogy themselves. Most uses of the balloon analogy talk about points, not spots. Points have zero dimension; they do not grow. It is just an analogy. An easy way to the analogy better is to add an attractive force between the spots (or points, or ants) on the surface of the balloon that diminishes with distance. At short distances, this attractive force will overwhelm the expansion. At longer distances between points on the surface, the expansion becomes large while the attractive force becomes small. Forget about the center. Martin already addressed this issue: There is no force to feel. For that matter, we don't feel gravitation, either. Once again, forget about everything but the surface. The purpose of the balloon analogy is to get you out of your Euclidean shell. You keep wanting to go back to it. Bad idea. Much worse, in my mind. The raisin cake analogy suggests the universe is some lump of stuff in some infinite three dimensional space. One problem with the raisin cake analogy is that invokes the image of the Big Bang as an explosion in space rather than an explosion of space. Another is that it invokes the idea of an ether. Bottom line: The point of all of these analogies is to help make some of the concepts of modern cosmology understandable to the lay community. You are trying to make too much of them, and in doing so you are missing the key points of the analogies.

Stop posting garbage in science news, please.

You don't appear to want to discuss anything. This is not a place for making religious soapbox statements. This is a place for rational discussion. This is a scientific forum. You agreed to abide by the rules of this forum when you joined. If you don't wish to do so, perhaps you should find some other place to soapbox.

The biggest problems with the balloon analogy is not that it is 2D; this is just a simplification to make the expansion of the universe comprehensible to us normal humans who cannot think beyond 3D. That the balloon analogy is 2D rather than 3D, well try to imagine an expanding hypersphere in four dimensional space. Good luck with that! There some bigger problems with the balloon analogy: It assumes a finite universe. That remains an open question as far is I know. It implies that the universe is embedded in a higher order Euclidean space; that a Euclidean point of view is somehow preferential to a non-Euclidean description. Once again, though, the balloon analogy is just that -- an analogy. It's purpose is to illustrate the expansion of the universe in a way that is easier to grasp than the rather abstract mathematical description.

Try using Euler's formula. In particular, [math]2\cos\theta = e^{i\theta}+e^{-i\theta}[/math] Addendum aoshima, what have you obtained for the characteristic polynomial? Also, you know the form of the solution. It was handed to you on a platter. This known solution looks a lot like the N+1 roots of unity -- except n starts at 1 rather than 0. The n+1th roots of unity are the solutions to [math]z^{n+1}-1=0[/math]. Dividing by [math]z-1[/math] removes the trivial solution: [math]\frac{z^{N+1}-1}{z-1} = 1 + z + \cdots + z^N[/math] Some adroit substitutions of the characteristic polynomial will yield something similar to the above.

A good start is to construct the characteristic polynomial. Hint: Use recursion.

Try again, this time using something called whitespace. Mod hat: Thread moved to Speculations, with strong recommendation to delete.

5. Doesn't make sense. Wave function collapse is an irreversible process. (Some physicists who are not in the Copenhagen interpretation camp argue that the concept of wave function collapse doesn't make sense, period.) 6. Collapsar or frozen star.

Voting for fusion is a very nice thing to do. Voting will not solve the fundamental problem: It doesn't exist. We know how to do uncontrolled fusion, but not controlled fusion. It has been a pipe dream for at least 50 years. When I was young the timeframe was supposedly ten years. It hasn't happened yet, and I am far from a spring chicken now.

Over a long time the Earth will dry up no matter what we do. The Sun is getting hotter; life on Earth has about half a billion years left. The amount of energy in hydrogen fusion is immense. If we unlock controlled fusion we will have the power to mine some truly immense sources of hydrogen (e.g. Jupiter). We may however turn the entire surface of the Earth into a radioactive wasteland in the process. Fusion is not without cost.

I find that a bit (more than a bit!) troublesome. Papers should ideally stand on their own merit, regardless of who authored them. This viewpoint, rejecting papers because the author was stupid enough to publish in a low impact journal, yields some amount of credibility to crackpot claims regarding the validity of the peer review process. Some journals, particularly in the life sciences, use a double-blind peer review process to address this bias. From this Nature editorial, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7179/full/451605b.html, the group that exhibits the greatest reluctance to using a double-blind review process are journal editors. I guess that stands to reason from a Bayesian prior perspective. The people most likely to produce ground shaking results are those who have previously produced such ground shaking results. However, as is the case in the stock market, past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future success.

Pangloss, is your faculty advisor listed as a coauthor? I get the feeling the answer is no. This might explain the "strange reluctance" described in the OP. The faculty is not going to tell you that it sometimes is a good idea, politically speaking, to specify someone as a coauthor. That this may not be a particularly good idea ethically speaking may be part of the reluctance.

Add in the fact that those long-range missiles inherently have to be moving very fast (remember that coriolis force is proportional to velocity) and yes, that is right, mooey.

The coriolis force appears in any rotating frame of reference. The effect on the trajectory of a baseball are very small and can be ignored. The effect on a long-range missile, or a Foucault pendulum are not small.

Then why do atheists ask the same question? Please keep religion out of this! That is a religious belief in and of itself. That is a different question. Whether Neanderthals had the gift of gab is an open question. They do appear to have the same mutation to the FOXP2 that is in part responsible for our ability to speak. Suppose we die off, or suppose we simply never existed. Would some other animal eventually have evolve the same capabilities that we have? I suspect so. It did happen once, after all. This is very similar to the question of whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. The answer to that is almost certainly yes. There is no way to tell, however, if the odds against are enormously large.

If religion is not an issue, why did you mention it? Let's leave religion out of this, please. To make this very clear: We are apes. I am not attacking evolution. The issue here is are there any characteristics that are unique to humans? Uniqueness implies not just a difference of degree, but a difference of kind. In other words, an emergent property. You are talking about animal communications. Linguists have long recognized a huge gulf, a difference of kind, between animal communications and human language. A couple of recent articles: Derek C. Penna, Keith J. Holyoaka, and Daniel J. Povinellia, Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2008), 31:109-130. preprint: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Penn-01062006/Referees/Penn-01062006_bbs-preprint.htm Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as “one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification as to where human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds. David Premack, Human and animal cognition: Continuity and discontinuity, Proc Natl Acad Sci (2007), 104(35):13861–13867. PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1955772/ Microscopic study of the human brain has revealed neural structures, enhanced wiring, and forms of connectivity among nerve cells not found in any animal, challenging the view that the human brain is simply an enlarged chimpanzee brain. On the other hand, cognitive studies have found animals to have abilities once thought unique to the human. This suggests a disparity between brain and mind. The suggestion is misleading. Cognitive research has not kept pace with neural research. Neural findings are based on microscopic study of the brain and are primarily cellular. Because cognition cannot be studied microscopically, we need to refine the study of cognition by using a different approach. In examining claims of similarity between animals and humans, one must ask: What are the dissimilarities? This approach prevents confusing similarity with equivalence. We follow this approach in examining eight cognitive cases—teaching, short-term memory, causal reasoning, planning, deception, transitive inference, theory of mind, and language—and find, in all cases, that similarities between animal and human abilities are small, dissimilarities large. There is no disparity between brain and mind.

Where did you get this well-known fact? Oxygenated hemoglobin is red in color. It is deoxygenated hemoglobin that is blue.

Only if the fusion engine infrastructure can be made sufficiently small. Otherwise you'll have a fusion-powered equivalent of SMART-1, which took 13 1/2 months to spiral out to the Earth-Moon L1 point and another 2 1/2 months to spiral in to its target lunar orbit. And only if you want to explore the solar system. Yeah, but those spots are all a mile or more underwater.

That is *not* what toastywombel asked. In twisting his words you are doing exactly what creationists do to make a parody out of evolutionary science. What toastywombel asked was In other words, he very specifically acknowledged that humans are mammals. He is asking if anything marks us as unique. that we are mammals And I say, what is the different between a duck? Your question doesn't address the issue raised by toastywombel. It is off-topic. You are quite alone in that regard. Language is widely regarded as unique a uniquely human capability. Why are you trying to cast this as a religious argument? toastywombel most certainly did not do so. He did not ask what makes us better. He asked what makes us different. The naked mole rat is one of only two mammals that are eusocial. While that does not make them "better," it most certainly does make them "different." There are plenty of unique, or near-unique capabilities in the animal world. We happen to be a uniquely yammery species. While people say many things about Noam Chomsky, some derogatory, none will accuse him of being strongly religious. Here is Chomsky on human language versus animal communications ( http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/chomsky.htmp): When we ask what human language is, we find no striking similarity to animal communication systems. There is nothing useful to be said about behaviour or thought at the level of abstraction at which animal and human communication fall together. The examples of animal communication that have been examined to date do share many of the properties of human gestural systems, and it might be reasonable to explore the possibility of direct connection in this case. But human language, it appears, is based on entirely different principles. This, I think, is an important point, often overlooked by those who approach human language as a natural, biological phenomenon; in particular, it seems rather pointless, for these reasons, to speculate about the evolution of human language from simpler systems – perhaps as absurd as it would be to speculate about the “evolution” of atoms from clouds of elementary particles. Language is something more than speech. People who have sustained damage to various parts of the brain can for example find themselves able to speak but do so meaninglessly (Wernicke's aphasia) or speak words but can no longer form sentences (Broca's aphasia). Speech in turn is something more than the grunts and gestures that constitute animal communication.

You are using appeal to ridicule, a logical fallacy. You agreed not to do so when you signed up to this site. ArjanD, it is one thing to argue that psychiatry is not perfect and is in need of improvement. No surprise there; no science is perfect. It is quite another to argue that psychiatry is completely invalid. Your arguments to date have Been fallacious, Involved reading things into journal articles not supported by those articles, Relied on crackpot sites and very low impact journals. Does psychiatry over-prescribe psychoactive drugs? That is a different question than claiming that psychiatry is illegitimate.