imatfaal

the more I read in this thread the more I realise that it is not just nationality that will influence an answer; almost every part of our personal political make-up determines how we answer the question. I tried to be even handed yet my answers make it clear I approach the question from a left leaning economically socialist and politically liberal viewpoint and I think JohnB's post above shows similar characteristics but from a different perspective. ie Any definition of conservative with the word "reactionary" is bound to be from a opponent; even though it is a good and balanced description of the view. One no longer needs to ask the politically charged question "are you a liberal or a conservative?" - merely ask the neutral question "could you define liberal and conservative?" Come to think of it, that's probably what [imath]\Phi[/imath] was doing all along.

I am listening to 'Life and Fate' by Grossman on Radio 4 at the moment and it is hard to believe at the moment that we really do value human life

But the whole point of the cogito is the fact that it isn't cogitare ergo esse (to think therefore to be) it is first person singular - cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, je pense donc je suis. The processes of thinking must in the extreme require some form of entity - but you cannot narrow it down to yourself. My whole argument is about misrepresenting experiences and that there is no barrier beyond which we can say truth lies, everything is contingent upon the circumstances even the identity of the first person

Well - whilst with one ion travelling at relativistic speed you can choose any frame (including the frame of the ion) that would allow you to model the ion as non-contracted, with two ions travelling in opposite directions there cannot exist a frame in which at least one ion isn't length contracted

1123581321 - you are not really gonna learn unless you put down your method. the comments from forum members are all correct as far as I can see, but they cannot really help till you are more explicit. maths just doesn't work in leaps - it works in small repeatable and easily understood steps; I would do your equation in 5 steps, even though I know what the answer would be in 1 step.

No - that was my point entirely. without an assumption, we cannot be sure that our belief that we are experiencing/thinking/rationalising is anything other than a hiccup in another entity's thought process. i illustrated this point by showing that my conscious mind (as it encompasses me) can be easily fooled into placing another's experience into the tray that holds my experiences - how can you show that your experience of thinking is anything other than that.

first thing to do would be simplify it and make it clear to the board where the exponent ends. the next step is fairly easy - but fswd is correct; show us what you got already

Hello All This is on behalf of Robert - here is his paper. Comments would be most welcome and should be addressed to Robert Physical Constants & the Solar System #2.pdf

Hal - that would require overturning the notion of the limited company, which would have greater implications than the stock market. perhaps what is needed is merely an increased policing of the fiscal rectitude of the directors of limited companies and a lower tolerance for bad decision making. at present neither share holders nor directors are personally liable for losses beyond initial share capital (unless other assets are place as collateral) and the benchmark for a director behaving so badly that it is seen as a breach of fiduciary duties is very high - so few directors get hit in their own pocket. it can be argued that if we lowered the test (to closer to that of trustees' failure of fiduciary duty) then more bad behaviour would reflect back on the directors and less insane risks would be taken. to get corporate losses to be weighed against shareholders would lead to a massive reduction in available capital for industry, which no matter how noble the original ends would probably cause massive harm to what is an already well established system

The traditional reactionary response to attack is retaliation - and in this case it was retaliation without even a firm idea of who the target of the response should be. If you are willing to take another step towards a critical reading of the response, then one might argue that reactionary forces within government require overseas military engagements and their consequential benefits to the military industrial complex. On the bailout side - we are caught between a rock and a hard place; we have allowed large commercial enterprises to privatize all profits during the boom years (they cry out for free and unregulated markets) yet they socialise the losses when the market turns or the gamble fails to pays off (they claim to be an integral part of society). We either need to take them at their word and let the devil take the hindmost - or we need to nationalise a better percentage of profits during the good times. The economic argument - which seems sound but which I do not believe works out in the wild - is that any form of regulation is best done by the invisible hand of the market. The same or better results will be achieved by automatic/market regulation as through external/governmental regulation - there will be much lower inherent costs of the regulator, and less chance of clumsy regulations causing more harm than good. Pollution is a fine case in point - "the polluter pays" should work well, financially astute corporations will understand that prevention is better and cheaper than cure and find methods that allow them to out-produce competitors by being greener; of course what happens is that they realise that a bunch of lawyers is cheaper than that, so they pollute like crazy, deny any responsibility, and procrastinate till the problem is shifted or they have removed the profit offshore and they can go bankrupt and leave clean up costs to government. what's mind-bending is that the preceding lines also pretty much sum up what happened with collateralised debt obligations

I don't think there was a eureka moment when a researcher realised where he was going wrong - perhaps a little over dramatizing on my part, although I am not alone I read it in those terms at the RHIC website (and I am pretty sure those guys understand lorentz contraction)

Phi - this is a debate that will vary massively from country to country, and even depend on capitalisation. In the UK Liberal and Conservative are political parties (the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative and Unionist Party) whereas liberal tends to mean not bound by tradition, progressive, and tolerant, and conservative (often even called small c conservative) means tending to traditional behaviour, restrained and reactionary. In economics this is doubly weird as many Conservatives are liberal economists (free market/ neoclassical /laissezfaire) and many Liberals tend to have conservative economic policy (structured, guided and managed).

thats easy. you take the important numbers 2 (for yin and yang), 3 (for the trinity), and 11 (for continuation - ie after the 10 divine commandments) 1. 2 raised to the power of three multiplied by the primes between 2 and 11 inclusive [(2^3)*2*3*5*7*11] gives 18480 2. nestle this product between the magic numbers 2 and 11 yet again and we obtain 2(184840)11 = 218484011 3. multiply this by the numbers 2 3 and 11 and you get [2*3*11*218484011]= 14419944726 4. the next 5 is 2+3 and then you add this multiplied by 101 ( 11 split by divine nothingness) and you get 14199447265505. simple really (if you neglect the fact that I missed a 4 out in the first calc - damn) CdeS-G

As Mr Hat said we usually look at collisions (or in fact the debris created by collisions) rather than the particle in motion - how could we look at the particle without it colliding with something? One result that shows an ability to understand how things change in motion is quite interesting. If we experiment on heavy ion collisions at very high speed we get a slightly different result than expected in our models (if we used nice spherical ions in the computer). If however we used flattened discs in the computer simulations instead of spheres (ie length contracted) then we get a much higher degree of agreement with real results. It is not direct - but it is a nice way of probing how things behave at very high speeds

my insistence that it is circular is not necessarily a fault with the idea. to get ab initio reasoning going, you need a basis - which kinda defeats the object of the game. I do not agree with your second sentence at all; the fact that I can experience something has very little connexion with the reality of that event - I know exactly what it is like to grow up in paris and combray in the early years of last century, to be the son of a traitorous jedi knight, or a mad danish prince but then I remember that was a book, a film, and a play. This is flirting with solipsism - but in my mind there is a clear divide between the walk from my house to combray (via Swanns house) and the walk from my house to chigwell (via the fruit farm), and my mind clearly marks one as fictional and the other as real; however I would really struggle to find a way to prove which was real to an outside observer without recourse to the argument that one of them was real. the reality or not is imposed from within - not from without.

dftt! http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2800681&postcount=22

only if n is a distance otherwise it is dimensionally challenged

You have no respect for the Geneva Convention (conventions - there are more than one) ? Why ever not? And also not sure what conventions on the treatment of victims of war has to do with anti-semitism in Churches

thanks - it was the mathematical artefact at the horizon that I meant. Hey - if we could get rid of the singularity at middle I would be booking tickets for oslo!

AJB - glad you mentioned that, I am arguing this in another place; am I right in thinking that the mathematical singularity (ie getting an undefined/infinte answer) that you must get by using schwarzchild coordinates can be avoided by using Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates or Eddington–Finkelstein coordinates - and that when these other systems are used you no longer end up with infinite time dilation

"Now, philosophy has degenerated into a pedantic Ivory Tower fussiness and stuffy academic playground for professional students. " This is what is known as a false premise or possible even two - philosophy must advance knowledge/though to be useful - modern philosophy does not advance knowledge - modern philosophy is therefore useless I am not sure I agree with the first one and the the second is, to my mind, completely untrue; the conclusion that they cannot be defended might seem to flow validly from the premises but is untrue due to the false premise(s). It could also be described as begging the question - I think you have assumed the truth of your argument in the premises. You seem to state that any philosophy since the renaissance has been futile and with no connexion to the real world - Marx, Bentham, Nietzsche, Popper, Weber etc - these people have affected politics, the law, the state, science and sociology and many other facets of human life.

I thought Chris Ecclestone was great - present one is good (frankly anyone other than colin b and sylvester mccoy). But like Sean Connery IS James Bond - Tom B IS Dr Who

What causes these tags My link edited for spelling and to fix link Ok no longer happening

I had heard almost entirely good things about NPR - but the quality of their commentators and/or research team might need to be improved They spent two days!! That's either a downright lie or someone AT NPR needs to learn to use Google - its the first result! <br><br>edited for spelling and to fix link<br>

As you obviously cannot get up to speed on the specific area that the research group concentrate on, both because you are unsure of what it is and in such a short time - perhaps read up on the Scientific Method in general, the need for objectivity, repeatability, and falsifiability - which will crop up what ever area your labs are studying. Statistics and data analysis are pretty universal - but very hard to get a grip on Good Luck btw