MigL

I shared a home with my dad ( now deceased ) for almost 20 yrs after my mother passed away. I certainly loved my dad, and I know how much he loved me. Just so we can continue this discussion, should we have ALSO been granted the same benefits that marriage brings, such as income splitting, coverage under medical and other benefits packages. etc. So we shared a home and had a loving relationship, what other criteria must be met to be a 'citizen treated in the same manner'? ( and lets not get silly and bring up the sex part, everyone knows married people stop having sex ) And just so I'm not off-topic, in Canada we have gay marriage with fully equivalent rights, and I have always supported that.

Having more than a little experience fermenting grapes/grape juice, I sometimes have found it necessary to add heat to keep the process going. Why, then would you need cooling ?

There are several ways to define temperature, such as molecular/atomic motion, or radiating spectrum. None of them are readily applicable to the 'interior' of the event horizon. The surface area of the event horizon can, however, be related to the entropy of a BH, and by extension, its temperature.

If gravitons had mass, that mass would restrain their 'range'. Since gravity has an infinite range, its mediating particles must be massless. And since they are massless, are constrained to move at c .

Were I able to conceive a baby, I believe I would not have an abortion. But that is a personal choice based on morality I choose for myself. I don't think its my place to set ethical and moral standards for others. My rights stop when they start to infringe on the rights of others. That being said, I'm safe knowing I can never get pregnant so the decision is purely hypothetical and not one I'll have to make anytime soon. And yes, I know my stance is a non-committal 'cop-out'.

I work in a chemical plant which specializes in pyrophoric material ( although I know very little chemistry ), so naturally everything has a nitrogen sweep/purge. One thing that always needs to be done before maintenance work on any equipment or vessel is identifying and locating on the PnID, and isolating/locking in the field, all nitrogen sources as you will not notice you are 'suffocating'. You will simply pass out and be dead within a few minutes. A lot of the fatalities in confined space entries are not from poisonous gases, but rather low oxygen ( and so high nitrogen ) levels.

Not at all sure why you keep trying to bring relativity into it... This has to do with the propagation of a pressure pulse through a material, by contact or minimum separation. In effect the constituent particles have to move, either close enough for inter-atomic forces to move the next particle, or by actual contact. I'm sure you are familiar with a sonic boom... That is what happens when you push air molecules faster than the speed of sound. You get a shock wave where there is a very steep discontinuity in speed, supersonic on one side, subsonic on the other, and a huge amount of localized energy. Enough to shatter windows miles away ! What do you think would happen to any 'realistic' rod ?

Yes I saw the earlier comments Strange, and I agree with your analysis of BH singularities. If they actually exist, they are at best, a local edge. The BB event ( notice I don't use singularity ) is different, as it is not localized but encompasses the whole universe, i.e. its global. It is an edge in time, before ( I hate using that word in this context )which there is no universe, as there is no geometry. You cannot get around it, it is a hard edge.

The universe, or rather space-time, does have an 'edge'. It is 13.7 billion yrs ago that the BB created 'geometry'. Everyone is fine with the notion that we can't know what happened 'before' ( can't really use that word, but have no substitute ) the BB, so why do we have to know what's on the other side of a spatial 'edge' ? ( not that I believe there could be an 'edge', since that would complicate things immeasurably, and I am a firm believer in Occam's razor ) And no, a finite but unbounded universe doesn't need to be contained in anything , or embedded in a higher dimension. Look up intrinsic vs. extrinsic curvature

At least he learned from his mistakes and didn't repeat them in WW2. And his mistake in the Dardanelles led directly to Ataturk and the birth of the Turkish nation.

Always liked Churchill... except for the annoying cigar habit.

I don't know where you got that from, Strange; that's not the argument at all. To examine just one obvious difference... A mind has adaptive capabilities. Its basic principle of operation may be similar to a computer, but it can also generate new circuitry to deal with complex problems. A computer cannot. Yet ! I remember what I learned when I first started working out with weights 41 yrs ago... If you put a 6 hp load continuously on a 5 hp machine, you blow the machine. If you put a 6 hp load continuously on a 5 hp body, you end up with a 6 hp body. The mind and computers behave analogously because the mind can adapt. A computer cannot 'grow' more circuitry nor can it re-write it own code as it sees fit. If computers ever gain the ability to create circuitry as the problem demands, my assertion is that they will be no different than a human and will have all the extraneous stuff that Jimmy alluded to. They will essentially be a new life form

You can program 'fear' as a response to an input ( or several ) into your computer, Bender, and every single computer running that program will have exactly the same response. Yet some humans are afraid of the dark, some aren't. Some are claustrophobic, some are not. Some are afraid of heights, some aren't. Do you see where I'm going with this ? We are not simply 'running a program'.

I don't know... Sometimes we cut more slack, and are more tolerant of total strangers, than family members or friends. A slight by someone who is close to you hurts more than the same action by a stranger. I know several families that haven't spoken to each other for years, because of something that they wouldn't give a second thought to, if done by a stranger. Maybe its an Italian thing...

One of the biggest factor is that people with legitimate prescriptions can put up with some pain and make a good buck selling their pain medication ( as waitforufo didn't do because he's a good guy ). Everything is available on the street. Heck, I know people who are selling prescription Viagra to make a few dollars ( until some old guy has a heart attack ). But there have to be buyers for the market to exist. What drives people to take substances they know are harmful, so as to feel a little better ( or less aware of their circumstances, I should say ). And its not just a New York state or Canadian issue. Other areas have their own problems. Like the Crystal Meth problem in the former coal mining areas of the Appalachias/west Virginia. You don't need to be an expert on the drugs themselves to recognize how it impacts your community, and how to help mediate the problem.

I've always preferred the term 'self-aware' to consciousness. Being self aware implies a recognition that some states of being are more or less preferable than other states. In essence, we become accustomed to being with company as opposed to being alone, that being incapacitated is less desirable than being able, that life is preferable to death, etc . And almost all living things display these traits to some extent; we are not special. Bender's computer may have a name and an IP address, but it does not 'fear' being turned off or having its hard drive crash. But should we ever develop AI, who is to say that those systems won't be just as self aware as we are ? IOW a new life form .

Interesting DrP, assholes have certainly proliferated in the last 540 mil yrs. And, they seem to be getting bigger...

It is certainly interesting. The process which results in Hawking radiation forces the 'loose' half of the virtual particle pair to become real. I wonder if forcing the 'loose' particle to become real is similar to an interaction, and so, would break any entanglement with the 'captured' particle ?

OOOPS ! Typing without spell check is like driving without a seatbelt.

The mass/energy of the Black Hole gives rise to an event horizon of a certain area. This area can be related to the entropy/temperature of the BH. So another ( dependant ? ) descriptor would be the entropy/temperature of the BH. Hawking radiation is a consequence of that property

How is Planck's black body radiation derivation a 'popular myth' ? It is a fairly straight forward classical derivation considering the density of states of radiation in thermal equilibrium inside a box, as had been done by others before him, resulting in divergence at high frequencies. Max Planck 'fudged it' by introducing the concept of quantization, and everything worked out. In QED. where the fields are treated as operators, the second quantization leads to the photon density, and the exact same results. ( I recall seeing the QED derivation a time ago but don't remember where ) So the 'classical' derivation of the black body distribution law gives the same results as the quantum field derivation.

The 'original' one would be the UV catastrophy which led to Max Planck's quanta.

Not to take anything away from Janus' excellent explanation... But if the BH is small enough so that you can get close enough to it, once the gravitational differential between your head and feet exceeds the 'tensile' strength of your body, it will get stretched or 'spaghettified'. In effect, once the difference provided by 1/r^2 over approx. 6 ft is strong enough to tear you apart. This can be well outside the event horizon for a small BH, and well inside the event horizon for a large BH.

Once a month, my nails and teeth grow much longer, my body becomes covered with coarse hair, and I get the urge to howl...

There is no 'classical physics this' and 'quantum physics that'. There are classical models and quantum field models. They are applied to the appropriate situation, to give meaningful results. Sometimes, when the wrong model is applied, you get garbage. Sometimes, as studiot has pointed out, you get equivalent results.