Mr Skeptic

I'm pretty sure the people who calculated that know that items don't magically appear from nowhere when they are imported. And I'm pretty sure it is about consumption, not production. Feel free to check for yourself though.

I'm pretty sure contact area does matter for friction, probably because the surfaces are not smooth and perhaps also because rubber is flexible. More contact area is probably going to increase rolling friction too. And trains are always going to beat cars at rolling friction, because steel wheels aren't all squishy and frictiony. There's also the issue of air resistance, but in the future automatically controlled cars (auto-automobiles?) could form "land trains" by driving bumper to bumper to minimize drag.

The sustainable population depends on whether you want to live like, say, someone from the US, or perhaps like someone from Cuba. You can only have 1/5th of the people if they are living like an American. Got to stay to the left of the red line on that graph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint

There is however some wiggle room since we can use non-renewable resources for now and perhaps during that time improve our renewable resources technologies and so increase the sustainable population.

Just because Chinese is spoken by over a billion people doesn't mean it is necessarily all that popular. Consider for example the comparative size of the British islands. And yet English is now spoken all over the place. Same with Spain and Spanish. China has been isolated, largely by choice, for quite a while. Perhaps as they become wealthier lots more people will want to learn Chinese to do business with them, or now that they are not quite as isolated as before. Until then, I'm sure it will remain a very popular language ... in China.

If you want something more awesome, explode your nuke just outside the event horizon, where you can still see it. A large part of your nuclear explosion will travel around the black hole, and the whole thing will be greatly red-shifted.

now can you give the line # and the page # in

"English 10: developing competency " ?

How about you read your book and do your homework?

What? I explained exactly how conservatives generate reduced spending in the economy generally. Why are you being so discursively strategic instead of just discussing the issues?

I think it was pretty clear that he meant whether they reduce government spending. I don't believe I've seen any politicians bragging about how they reduce the population's spending.

Insane_alien, Mrs Zeta thinks that unnatural selection is going to take over. SM

Which is nothing more than natural selection in an "unnatural" environment.

Yes, fairness... Once you define fairness, then you can get about to designing a fair tax. I alluded to my view of what would be fair all the way back to post 4. My view was that of equal pain, which would necessitate a progressive tax system. However I stated that all as my opinion, since understandably people would disagree with me.

However, we have had some mathematicians worried about fairness and maybe they have some idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_division

Fair division, also known as the cake cutting problem, is the problem of dividing a resource in such a way that all recipients believe that they have received a fair amount. The problem is easier when recipients have different measures of value of the parts of the resource: in the "cake cutting" version, one recipient may like marzipan, another prefers cherries, and so on—then, and only then, the n recipients may get even more than what would be one n-th of the value of the "cake" for each of them. On the other hand, the presence of different measures opens a vast potential for many challenging questions and directions of further research. There are a number of variants of the problem. The definition of 'fair' may simply mean that they get at least their fair proportion, or harder requirements like envy-freeness may also need to be satisfied. The theoretical algorithms mainly deal with goods that can be divided without losing value. The division of indivisible goods, as in for instance a divorce, is a major practical problem. Chore division is a variant where the goods are undesirable.

I'm sure something there would be applicable. But note that even the mathematicians have not decided what exactly "fair" means.

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As for "getting what you paid for", the government does give a fair accounting of what you (the people) have received with the money you gave them. Since they are not buying things for your personal benefit but rather for everyone's benefit, of course the accounting is of what was bought and not of how it relates to you. Although people often complain that taxes are unfair they really do agree that the taxes they're paying are fair, since they don't choose to leave the country for a better bargain.

Yes. Left turns take longer, because you cannot turn on red and there is one more lane of cars you have to wait for. So long as you have enough separate places to go, you won't have to go around the block to turn left via this method.

You, however, are not a UPS driver.

And cold blooded murdering s.o.bs. sitting in jail cells for life at my expense, are at the top of my A list.

Humor me... How much is the total cost (counting trial costs) of carrying out a death sentence, and how much for life imprisonment?

Is speculation in multiverses as immoral as speculation in subprime mortgages?

Does speculation mean the same thing as speculation?

I wonder where the perception that sexy blond women are generally dumb, and ugly scruffy scientists are generally geniuses comes from. Also, what is the evolutionary advantage of dorky (socially inept) teenagers who are computer geniuses. Prove me wrong, show me a beautiful computer hacker.

Sexy blond women are not dumb in general, but sometimes they get a position they don't deserve from their smarts due to being sexy and blond. If so, they could be dumber or less experienced than the average person in that position, even if smarter than the general population.

Being unkempt is not the same as being unattractive. It just means they have more important things to do than grooming, such as learning/experimenting. Also being a scientists probably correlates pretty well with being smart.

As for knowing about computers, being unsocial gives you a lot more time to learn.

And for proving you wrong, how about you read the link I gave.

Maybe or maybe not. The issue is what it means for sins to "carry the same weight" and for them to "separate you from God." Without concrete interpretations of what these words mean, they are just lofty-sounding words.

No, it's just a different way of looking at things. Being a sinner is like being pregnant. Yes, you can get "more pregnant" as you progress or commit "worse sins", but you are either pregnant or not, sinner or not. Committing a little sin makes you a sinner as surely as committing a grave sin. I don't think it's quite that sins are considered equally bad but they equally make you a sinner and there is just one possible punishment.

The way I'm interpreting what you're writing, it sounds like forgiveness doesn't play any role; but my impression is that Christianity offers forgiveness in exchange for commitment to redeeming oneself through good deeds.

You can do good deeds, and that is a good thing. But nowhere in the Bible does it say that your good deeds can ever justify a sin. How many good deeds must you do before you are justified in murdering someone you don't like? No, it doesn't work like that. Good deeds can be seen as a sign of true repentance, but they will never justify a sin. Never can you say "look at all the good I've done, you must forgive me". It's always by grace. It's always "please forgive me", at which point you might point out past good deeds or offer to do additional good deeds, but it is never up to you to forgive yourself on behalf of another person. (Forgiving yourself is of course a different story)

But this is all off-topic. I think we can all agree that sin is bad, regardless of the details. Whether or not God treats all sin as the same, we people do not and that is what would be relevant to the thread about legality.

Yeah, it seems to me that this is like making a crippled airplane. If they want to go so close to the water why not just use one of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofoil

It "flies" on water greatly reducing friction, but can still carry huge loads (including itself so it doesn't have to be made from light, expensive, and very un-green materials). And it can use water to propel itself which is 1000 times denser than air.

Maybe you should start your journey and quit worrying about what to name the first step.

I'd say it is "possible", but if it had even a remotely reasonable chance of actually happening, the banks and billionaires would be all over it. Playing this game is gambling against the pros in a game of skill that you don't even know how to play. Also, if someone could make the money in their country increase a few hundred thousand times in value they would have already done it.

You could call it conjecture, hypothesis, premise, postulate, supposition, statement A, axiom, assumption, or something like that. Yes, you should make clear that there is not necessarily any reason to believe it is true. If you believe it can be proved true, sometimes it is useful to assume it is false, and then show that that assumption leads to a contradiction. You can also, without proving it true, derive (true) statements of the form "If A, then B.", where A is your conjecture and B is a result of your conjecture being true.

Just to give an example, the statement "rectangles exist" is treated as above in geometry. It is also known as Euclid's 5th Postulate.

I don't think the whole country would like having electricity for only a few milliseconds at a time.

Then just multiply the number of lightning bolts per second by the energy per lightning bolt, and compare to world electricity production. Have fun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning

Here's my calculation:

http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1600&bih=978&q=500000000+J+*+1400000000+%2F+year&btnG=Google+Search

I haven't read everything in this thread, but I just wanted to offer a fast reply to the original poster's question: Is homosexuality genetic?

 

The answer is: NO

 

There has never been any conclusive (or even suggestive) scientific evidence to my knowledge that would imply that homosexuality is triggered

by the existence or lack of a specific gene. It is largely an unexplainable phenomenon...but it has everything to do with environmental conditions

and influences and nothing to do with genes.

Two things:

1) Since when is "genetic" the same as "a single gene"? By that argument there is no evidence that species membership is genetic.

2) If homosexuality isn't genetic, than how come it in fact is largely genetic? http://www.tim-taylo...es/studies.html

OK, I'll bite. How many kilowatt-hours do you think a lightning bolt contains? That's what I thought.

No, we don't. . .which is why I originally made the post. We don't always find the Sub Saharan African DNA in individuals, when theoretically we should.

Some people show up 0% Sub Saharan African. Why this occurs has yet to be explained.

It's been explained to you plenty. It's because we ignore 99.9% of our DNA when doing that test, and focus on that 0.1% that is different.

There's also proprioception, which is sometimes considered a sense. It is as important to sense your insides as the outside, and perhaps even more important.

Well said NTett, I fully agree that the more newly evolved genetic frequencies aren't any "better" or "worse" than the older ones...this isn't the question at all here. Nor am I on any sort of racist agenda trying to prove genetic purity or dominance.

 

With regards to the Chimp example: of course this is a bit extrapolated, since I am comparing different species (chimps and humans) to varied members of the same species (African Vs. European). And you are certainly right in your points, I should have worded it better. The 98% similarity in DNA between humans and chimps is what we have from our common ancestor; in other words, we didn't evolve directly from chimps. But even then, the point here is that we are expecting to see this 98% similarity when we test any two chimp and human subjects. . just as we would expect to see some traces of Sub Saharan African DNA leftover in any two different humans tested. . .

And we do. We just ignore it for the test in question. Looking at similarities doesn't help you tell the difference.

The "concept" of a species being newer (I never used the words 'better' or 'superior') is not a concept at all, it is a fact. Sharks for example, are much much older than humans. Our species' genetic origins only have their roots dating back to about 500,000 years ago. . .this is most definitely "newer" when compared to any given species of shark for example. You are right however, that you can't ever be 100% sure that any given species is genetically closer to its ancestral species. . but in some cases there is considerable archaeological/fossil evidence to support it.

How are the Selachimorph any older than us Teleostomi? We were both Gnathostomata before we went our separate ways (and we still are). Of course species Homo sapiens is more recent than superorder Selachimorph. But I bet there's newer shark species than Homo sapiens. And certainly any shark species of your choice will be younger than us Teleostomi.