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The legal case for exclusion is Article 1, Section 5, Clause 1 of the US Constitution, "Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members". The legal case against exclusion is Powell V. McCormack, 395 U. S. 486, (ref. http://supreme.justia.com/us/395/486/case.html), in which the Congress tried to expel Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. on the basis of Article 1, Section 5, Clause 1. The Supreme Court said "Bzzzt. Wrong" with an 8-1 margin. As things stand currently, I don't think the Senate has a basis for rejecting Burris' appointment. They might have a basis after the fact if Blago is impeached.

The intent of the leap second concept is to make it so that only the people who truly care about precise timing are the ones have to worry about it. Even then, most of those who care about precise timing don't have to worry about adding a leap second because they get timing information from radio (WWVB) or from the internet (NTP). Common clocks are off by quite a bit more than one second, so the insertion of a leap second doesn't really matter to us ordinary mortals who simply use clocks to time our meals, tell us when to get up to go to work, or tell us when to go to the conference room for the all-important 10:00 AM all-hands meeting.

Don't take my emperor's new avatar away from me!

Research apparently is ongoing in this arena. See, for example this, this, and this. .. or harvest anything (think erosion). Then again, tropical mountains are a great place to grow things (think cloud forests). The problem here is that they also have the greatest biodiversity on the planet. The crops that can be raised *now* for biofuels don't grow well on mountains, that is. See the response to point (a). So, what is more important: The incredible biodiversity of the cloud forests, or our incessant need for energy at any cost? The problem here is that the plains are the best place for the food we eat grows. If we are going to use land as a substrate for gathering energy, we need to look at places that have very little biodiversity and that aren't used for growing food. For example, covering deserts with solar cells.

What you are missing is transitivity. I'll spell it out for you. [math]F=ma[/math] Newton's second law. [math]F=\frac{GMm}{r^2}[/math] Newton's law of gravitation. [math]ma=\frac{GMm}{r^2}[/math] Transitivity. [math]a=\frac{GM}{r^2}[/math] Divide both sides by m. [math]a=\frac{d^{\,2}r}{dt^2}[/math] Definition of acceleration. [math]\frac{d^{\,2}r}{dt^2} = \frac{GM}{r^2}[/math] Transitivity again. Step 6 is a second order differential equation relating how distance changes over time: Motion.

What ever gives you the idea motion is not involved? Hint: Step off of the roof of a six story building. You are forgetting a basic mathematical precept here: if a=b and b=c then a=c. Newton's second law defines a force in terms of what a force does: F=ma. It does not say a thing about what a force is. Newton's third law doesn't even do that: It just says forces come in equal-but-opposite pairs, each operating on a different body. Newton's law of gravity defines one kind of force, the gravitational force. There are other forces, including some that are functions of position only (e.g., the electrostatic force).

Wrong. Wrong. Not even wrong. The universe doesn't care whether you want perpetual machine to exist or not. They don't exist.

More here: http:// http://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/2008/GSAResponse2changedotgovfoia.pdf Is Judicial Watch a right wing group? I just thought they were an overexuberant watchdog group who sometime yell fire when there isn't even any smoke. There is no smoke here. Nothing. The Obama campaign team requested a .gov site before the election and that request was appropriately rejected. Granting that request would have a clear violation. The Obama transition team requested a waiver the day after winning the election, and that was appropriately approved. Failing to grant that request would have been a dereliction of duty. The GSA is required to help the president-elect come up to speed on the nature of the job. Having a .gov site for the president-elect is part of coming up to speed in the internet age. The Obama team has been very adept at use of modern media. This is just a continuation of that savvy.

The report: Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report Some analyses: From http://blogs.discovery.com/news_space/2008/12/the-columbia--1.html “Clearly the accident was not survivable under any circumstances, but (the report) will probably help for designing things for future spacecraft -- and maybe even aircraft,” said David Mould, NASA’s assistant administrator for public affairs. Keith Cowing (nasawatch.com) summarizes the report at http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1314: The report goes into excruciating detail about the events that led up to the breakup of Columbia and the crew's death. ... Of course, learning lessons from fatal accidents is nothing new. Often times, it is all that can be gleaned from loss of a vehicle and its crew - whether they be at sea, in the air, on the ground or in space. Indeed, sometimes virtually nothing can be learned due to the nature of how the accident occurred. With regard to Columbia, as was the case with the loss of her sister ship and its crew, its loss was eventually attributable to both human and mechanical error albeit with two totally different portions of a Space Shuttle's mission. One happened at the very beginning of a mission, the other at the very end. Accidents are things to be avoided. However, by the very nature of how we currently send humans into space and return them to Earth, there is a substantial amount of risk involved. Much of that risk has been identified and is manageable. But not all of it. Of course, when you hear this discussion, someone inevitably says that the only way to make these things risk free is not to do them. Well, we have decided to do these risky things, now haven't we? Inevitably, when the accidents happen, we need to work our way through them, pause and reflect on what happened, and then press ahead. To be certain there is never a good time for a bad thing to happen. But not to benefit from the information that can arise from studying an accident's cause only serves to remove value from the sacrifice that a crew has made.

The wacko (and unfortunately, dominant) wing of the Republican party think they lost the election because McCain wasn't one of their own. The only way the Republicans will learn that they have truly lost touch is if they lose 2012 in a big way with one of their own. That might not happen if the Democrats go insane with power over the next four years.

Here is a very detailed explanation: http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/origins/carbon-kb.htm. UPDATE, automerged with the above: Apparently is an understatement. (Note: I think that 2006 should be 2008. I know I visited talkorigins.org several times in the last two years, last time being about a month or so ago.) What is more alarming is that the Google searches for "carbon 14 RATE", "carbon 14 diamond", and "carbon 14 coal" yield hits predominantly in woowoo fundamentalist sites, and no hits on the first 15 pages (10 links per page) to anything at talkorigins.org or pandasthumb.org, period. I eventually managed to find an excellent article (see the top of this post) using pandasthumb.org search tool. That led me to this non-technical article, http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/08/diamonds-arent.html, and from there followed a link to the asa3.org article. I found this on page 10 of Google's "carbon 14 RATE" search: http://www.holysmoke.org/cre018.htm So, what gives? Has Google itself been hacked?

talkorigins.org supposedly has an article on this very subject (per Google), but I haven't been able to get to talkorigins for some time. Hypothesized explanations: #1. The small apparent non-zero values are less than measurement error. In other words, the readings are consistent with zero C14 content. In fact, the experiments cited by the creationists appear to be attempts to establish the measurement error of there equipment. Older carbon dating techniques directly detected decays of C14 atoms. The problem: If the material is too old, the small amount of C14 present may not decay in the measurement interval. Newer, more accurate techniques use mass spectroscopy. Mass spectroscopy, like any man-made measurement, is not perfect. In particular, given a pure sample of C12, I suspect a mass spectrometer would indicate that a non-zero amount of C14 present. It is nigh impossible to measure exactly zero. #2. Contamination. It doesn't take much contamination to spoil a sample with near-zero quantity of C14. Creationists pounce on this explanation as meaning all carbon 14 readings are suspect. False. While that same level of contamination (if this is the explanation) will add some error to the dating of some reasonably aged sample, the error will be small -- so long as the sample is not too old. The contamination is additive, not proportional. #3. Alternate source of C14 production. Natural diamonds are not pure carbon. The most common contaminant is nitrogen, 0.1% in gem-quality diamonds. Nearby radioactive material could trigger exactly the same C14 production process from nitrogen as occurs in the upper atmosphere, albeit at a much reduced rate. Another possible avenue is C13, which has a small but non-zero neutron absorption cross section. By either mechanism, this is essentially internal contamination. All this means is that measured dates older than some oldest reliable date are just that -- to old to date reliably. I might be able to see if I can come up with some references. I won't be able to do so in the near term -- my wife and kids want me to stop dorking with the internet and go out to eat.

I should have said "theoretically". We directly observe sunlight and solar wind, thereby providing indirect evidence that the Sun is losing mass. The combined effect is a decrease of 9×10-14 solar masses per year. To conserve angular momentum, Mercury's orbit (specifically, its semi-latus rectum) must increase by a factor of 9×10-14 per year, or a paltry 5 millimeters per year. This is far too small to be observable.

Yes, but not succinctly. This is part of the reason why people have to go to school for many, many years. You asked a related question in your first post: can the process be mechanized? The answer is no. We can't even fully mechanize (describe algorithmically) the process of creating scientific laws, simple empirical relationships. This is exactly what the no-free-lunch theorems say. Wikipedia article: No free lunch in search and optimization The papers that started it all: Wolpert, D.H. (1996) "The lack of a priori distinctions between learning algorithms," Neural Computation, 8(7), 1341–1390. (Note: PDF file starts at the end. Go to the last page and read backwards.) Wolpert, D.H. and MacReady, W.G. (1997) "No free lunch theorems for optimization," Evolutionary Computation, 1(1), 67–82. A bibliography page: http://www.no-free-lunch.org If merely producing good scientific laws is not fully mechanizable, what hope can there be for mechanizing the process of explaining scientific laws (i.e., coming up with a theory)?

So right. In that case the tension on the string is greater than that needed to maintain circular motion. If the tension were just F=mv^2/r the ball would not move inward. Assuming that the force is still mv^2/r leads to a nonsense result: Try to patent this idea. (Hint: The Patent Office rejects all claims to perpetual motion machines without prejudice.) Edit Well, I sure do feel stupid. The work done in making a ball undergoing circular motion move from radius of r to r/2 is indeed [math]\frac 3 2 \frac {L^2}{mr^2}[/math]. To see this is so, imagine that the force is infinitesimally greater than the force needed to maintain circular motion. That infinitesimal extra force will pull the string in very slowly, and will not contribute to the work (it is infinitesimally small). How about the kinetic energy? The kinetic energy at some radius r is [math]\frac 1 2 \frac {L^2}{mr^2}[/math]. Assuming angular momentum is conserved, the kinetic energy at half that radial distance will be [math]\frac 1 2 \frac {L^2}{m(r/2)^2} = 2\,\frac {L^2}{mr^2}[/math]. The difference between the kinetic energy at radius r and radius r/2: [math]\Delta KE = \frac 3 2 \frac {L^2}{mr^2}[/math] which of course is equal to the work performed.

No work is performed in circular motion. The force is always normal to the path, so [math]\mathbf F \cdot d\mathbf l \equiv 0[/math].

What is the feasibility diagram for this problem? Is the J & K proposal at a vertex of the feasibility diagram? Which vertex optimizes the profit?

Kuhn was right in that scientists do belong to specialized communities and that scientific revolutions do occur. He was, IMHO, flat-out wrong regarding incommensurability and incommensurable paradigms. Kuhn's first transition is from pre-scientific beliefs to science. Those initial scientific concepts are not so much incommensurable with the pre-scientific beliefs as they are incompatible with them. Galileo and Darwin were not attacked because their ideas were incommensurable with the pre-scientific beliefs. They were attacked because their ideas were commensurable with the pre-scientific beliefs -- and in utter conflict with those beliefs. The attacks on Galileo and Darwin resulted because their pre-scientific critics knew exactly what they were saying. Kuhn asserts in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that incommensurability between the pre- and post-scientific revolution communities results in part because of shifts in the meanings of key terms. Kuhn specifically picks mass as an example: … the physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means identical with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name. (Newtonian mass is conserved; Einsteinian is convertible with energy. Only at low relative velocities may the two be measured in the same way, and even then they must not be conceived to be the same.) This is an out-and-out straw man, and a rather deliberate one at that (Kuhn was educated as a physicist). The concept of rest mass in relativity is completely commensurable with mass in classical physics. The scientific revolutions in physics at the onset of the 20th century did not create incommensurable communities. The tools, techniques, and lingo of the new physics were comprehensible by physicists whose training was purely Newtonian. Most older physicists joined these new communities. Some physicists admittedly did choose not to join the relativistic and quantum mechanics communities. Einstein, for example, never accepted the uncertain nature of quantum mechanics. There was no incommensurability, however. Einstein understood quite well the tools, techniques, and lingo of quantum mechanics. He used this understanding to develop the EPR paradox. The EPR paradox has since been resolved and has been observed. The EPR paradox is a paradox in the Greek sense (a rather counterintuitive result) but is not a paradox in the logical sense (a contradiction that disproves something).

Surely not. The place to start is with the two body problem in Newtonian physics. If the Sun and Mercury were the only bodies in the solar system, Newton's law of gravity was perfectly correct, the Sun's mass was constant, and the Sun was perfectly spherical, then Mercury would orbit the Sun in a never-changing ellipse. While gravity does indeed make Mercury constantly accelerate toward the Sun, it's motion normal to its radial vector keeps it from falling into the Sun. None of those "ifs" is true. The other planets, particular Jupiter, act to perturb Mercury's orbit. These perturbations change the orientation and shape of the orbit (and do so by quite a bit over astronomical time). However, they do not change the orbital energy by much at all and the changes are cyclic. Newton's law of gravity is only approximately correct. General relativity does a better job, and it predicts a slight change in the orientation of Mercury's orbit. This slight change, the relativistic precession, explained a discrepancy that astronomers could not explain before GR. This is one of the key reasons general relativity was accepted so quickly in the scientific community. This precessional advance is just a change in the orientation of Mercury's orbit. It will not make Mercury fall into the Sun. General relativity also predicts that Mercury will emit gravitational waves (akin to electromagnetism), and this will make Mercury's orbit decay. The decay is extremely small, however. Mercury is moving far too slow for gravitational radiation to have any sizable impact on its orbit over the life time of the solar system. The decay from gravitational radiation is immeasurably small. The Sun is not perfectly spherical. The deviation from sphericalness is very small, and once again only acts to change the orientation and shape of Mercury's orbit. This affect is even smaller than the relativistic precession. Finally, the Sun does not have a constant mass. It loses mass in the form of electromagnetic radiation and solar wind. This mass reduction means that Mercury will slowly move away from the Sun. This outward drift resulting from solar mass loss is in fact larger than the decay resulting from gravitational radiation. Mercury is moving away from the Sun (at an extremely small rate).

What gives you the idea that it would?

Welcome to Science Forums, Copernicus_Meme! You're off to a good start here. Nice post. Using references adds a lot of value.

I'll try to get this topic back on track -- to wit, how are scientific theories produced, and can the process be mechanized. The problem of forming a scientific law (a simple empirical equation) is hard all by itself. Suppose we have 1000 measurements of some phenomenon. What are the independent variables? Suppose we randomly pick one. One can then easily construct an exact fit by fitting those 1000 measurements against a 999 degree polynomial. The result will of course be absolutely meaningless. Even empirical regression is a bit of an art. Why a polynomial rather than say an exponential? This variable as the independent variable rather some other variable, or some other variables? What constitutes error in the fit versus error in the model? If generating a good regression model is a challenging task, coming up with a good theory that explains why the model is the way it is is extremely hard. Everyday (non-genius) scientists do a passable job at regression on a regular basis. They don't do such a good job at putting the pieces together; that takes true genius. An example is that of black body radiation. Wien's Law for black body radiation (1986): [math]I(\nu,T) = a \nu^3 \frac 1 {e^{\frac {b\nu}{T}}}[/math] where a and b are constants of proportionality. What made Wien pick that particular model? It was purely ad-hoc, not motivated by any extant theory. This model yields a good match to the high frequency spectrum of a black body radiator, but not the low frequency spectrum. (Not surprising: Wien was trying to model the high frequency spectrum.) Planck saw that a simple correction would yield a model that matched the full spectrum of a black body radiator: [math]I(\nu,T) = a \nu^3 \frac 1 {e^{\frac {b\nu}{T}}-1}[/math] Seeing that this seemingly simple change would work for the full spectrum was a small stroke of genius. It was however a purely empirical relationship, with two tuning parameters. A little more work reduced this to one tuning parameter, h (Planck's constant): [math]I(\nu,T)=\frac {2h\nu^3}{c^2}\frac 1 {e^{\frac {h\nu}{kT}}-1}[/math] The other constants are k, Boltzmann's constant, and c, the speed of light. Seeing that Planck's constant has much wider applicability ([math]E=h\nu[/math]) than an empirical tuning parameter in the black body radiation law took several more years. Edit: I found an interesting read on the above topic: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/373

You are encouraged to do so, but you must keep those "provoking ideas" within the realm of science and on-topic. While Shannon's information theory most certainly is within the realm of science, it is not germane to the topic at hand. First and foremost, it has nothing to do with how theses are generated. Secondly, it has nothing to do with how theses are evaluated.

You need to look in a mirror, granpa. You have made six off-topic posts in this thread: This one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one. Your posts are off-topic as Shannon's theory is a syntactic information theory. This thread is about semantics. Semantic information theory is a different beast than syntactic information theory. Shannon's theory proscribes means for transmitting the contents of a message over a noisy channel. Shannon's theory does not care about meaning of the message. It is quite happy in getting zero transmission errors after successfully sending and receiving the message "A triangle has four sides." This message has null semantic content. Another between Shannon's theory and semantic information theory is the location of the "truth" data. Because syntactic information theory doesn't care about the semantics of a message, the means for detecting and correcting errors must be embedded in the message. The truth is not embedded in a scientific thesis. The thesis must instead be tested against external reality. Shannon was very clear in his development of his information theory that he was not addressing information theory as a whole. From Shannon, C., 1953, "The lattice theory of information", IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 1(1), 105-107: "The word 'information’ has been given different meanings by various writers in the general field of information theory. It is likely that at least a number of these will prove sufficiently useful in certain applications to deserve further study and permanent recognition. It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account for the numerous possible applications of this general field." Some reading on semantic information theory: Carnap, R., Bar-Hillel Y., 1952, "An Outline of a Theory of Semantic Information", TR 247, Massachussetts Institute of Technology. https://dspace.mit.edu/retrieve/4903/RLE-TR-247-03150899.pdf Floridi, L., 2004, "Outline of a Theory of Strongly Semantic Information", Minds and Machines, 14(2), 197-222. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002537/01/otssi.pdf Floridi, L., 2005, "Is Semantic Information Meaningful Data?", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, March 2005 http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002536/01/iimd.pdf Also see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic

Yes, there was. UN Security Council Resolutions 686, 687, and 1284, to name a few.