Mr Skeptic

I think that they are being a little inappropriate here. The two words need to be looked at individually, not as part of the pledge. Had they been in the pledge to begin with, that would make sense, but since they were added to the pledge, then the addition of them is a separate process, and so needs to be looked at separately. In doing so, this addition would fail the Lemon test. Well if it isn't a real issue, why not just remove the contentious words from the pledge and move on? Then the liberals wouldn't have any excuse to make this into an issue, problem solved. I'm a genius! (Also, people have been upset about those words in the pledge since they were added, much like gay people were upset about the treatment they received but didn't dare to complain until recently). --- My solution? Simply modify the pledge to be religion-agnostic. Have the atheists give a brief pause, and the religious folks say the name of the god or gods they believe in, and then continue on.

Considering the poverty line of about $1 a day, that could well be 3 years salary, if they went without eating to save for it.

Look, rather than provide the answers to every single question there, we can do much better. Why don't you have your son ask about the specific questions that he cannot answer? We can give not only the answers, but an explanation, and can also guide him in finding the answer himself. That is what he will need for tests, not just this one, but all of them: to know how to solve problems. And in real life he will need to know how to find answers. You are making it too easy for him to find answers artificially, but that won't help him learn. It might help him do better on this particular test, but future tests will be based on past knowledge he is expected to have learned. He will only become more dependent on spoon-fed answers the longer you let him do this and the more advanced tests become. And at some point the spoon-fed answers just won't be good enough. PS: One way to retain attention is to take notes. Dunno if this is applicable to his school, but it would help. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedFor the first question, these are simple definitions. Those are really easy to do. Here are the answers: deep time relativistic time uniformitarianism parent isotope daughter isotope

Evolution, simply defined, is a change in the allele frequency of a population. (An allele is a specific "version" of a gene.) Every new mutation generated is a new allele and therefore evolution. Every allele lost is also evolution. Any increase or decrease of a certain allele's frequency is also evolution. This is distinct from speciation and the theory of common ancestry. As a mixed population, we share a common gene pool and therefore cannot speciate -- our alleles are exchanged with each other and so we remain compatible. We will remain a single species, unless perhaps we get reproductively fragmented once more, such as due to space colonization.

Perhaps, but for lenses and such there is a size factor, based on the laws of physics rather than on technological issues. More interesting would be self-replicating nanobots.

We have just changed the rules, for now, of what constitutes "fit". Diversity is in general a good thing -- especially when it comes to disease resistance. This is because diseases frequently depend on their host having specific genetics. A change away from that, while it may have a detrimental effect, can also confer resistance to a disease, even a disease we have never been affected with. It is no simple matter to say that a gene is good or bad -- it depends on the environment. Look up sickle cell anemia, and also the delta 32 mutation, for examples of this. So long as we are not losing the beneficial genes, then the extra diversity should be a good thing. Should our society collapse, the maladaptive traits will be weeded out quickly enough. In the meantime, there is also the possibility of extra evolution occurring, since there won't be heavy pressure to maintain genes as they are, allowing them to change more. Also, people like to focus a lot on the "not dying" portion of fitness. In reality, not dying is nearly irrelevant to fitness. What really matters is how many surviving offspring you have. The trick, of course, is that dying before having kids sets your fitness to approximately zero or even negative.

True, but I think any monotheistic religion would feel comfortable with this usage. People with more or less gods than 1 would feel insulted, however.

Well I suppose sugar maple would be a good example. Insects feed on the sap of pretty much any plants and trees, however.

I'm afraid that it is actually technically completely legal, even if against the spirit of the constitution. I'm not really sure how you could go about making it illegal. But we're getting way off topic by now. Perhaps this could be moved to its own thread?

These are some fairly basic questions, albeit over a wide range of topics. The point of a study guide is not to memorize the answers to those specific questions, but to know how to answer that sort of question. Ideally, your son should be able to answer these, or at least know how to look up the topics he is unfamiliar with. Failing that, it would be better to have your son answer the ones he can, and then ask for explanations, not just answers, to the rest.

I think that the standard two solutions are a long bloody war, and a race to get there first.

A chimera has living cells from two different zygotes. This can happen shortly after the zygote stage, or in the case of transplants and transfusions, well into adulthood. There is no dominant DNA -- the cells from one zygote will have that zygote's DNA and proteins, and the cells from the other zygote will have that other zygote's DNA. In the case of transplants and transfusions, we consider the owner of the brain to be the same person, regardless of what was transplanted where. In the case of natural born chimeras, we sane people never considered them to be separate persons.

One has a tenth more faith than the other? You measure faith by the aspects of it that you can see. And if you can't see it, you rely on the person's own declaration of how much faith he has. Just like you would measure someone's, say, love of chocolate.

We can contain antimatter just fine, as far as I know. Producing it, on the other hand, is much harder. Last I read they were talking about having produced it at a very high efficiency... something like 0.00001% efficiency. Eh, we could have been using fusion propulsion decades ago. Check out Project Orion (not to be confused by the shuttle program of the same name). Heavy lift capability (millions of tons) combined with potential for interstellar travel. It does have a drawback or two however...

So basically, belief of a more than 50% probability of something being true is faith? But why do you put the 50% as the cutoff point when the cutoff point could be anywhere?

What I'm saying is that chimeras are a single individual made from two different zygotes. I'm glad you agree. But, if you say each zygote is an individual person, where did one of those persons go? This of course is no problem for me since I don't consider the zygotes to be people, so I don't have a disappearing people problem. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Sure, the skin cell is for the most part indistinguishable from a zygote, although granted it is smaller and has a different set of genes active and won't grow up to become a person later on. Of course those aren't differences that seem to have any relevance to personhood. My skin cell is alive, and it can be removed from my body and kept alive separately, just like a zygote. I never called it a being though, nor an organism.

It doesn't matter; as things are now the highway is necessary anyways.

I wonder though, if it really is more efficient. Sure, the train itself is more energy efficient. But what of all the energy and labor that goes into making the tracks and the trains? Why does the train cost more?

Yes and no. The "old fashioned" theory was that the entirety of vermin were spontaneously generated from rotting food. All flies came from rotting food, and did not have a parent. Someone figured that flies reproduce just like us, and disproved the above by letting a piece of meat rot while no flies were allowed to reach it. The modern idea, called abiogenesis, is an explanation for the first life form, which we know there was. Some form of abiogenesis must be true. So that's rather the opposite of disproven.

What is binary: having some amount of faith, having enough faith to do X, having some amount of money, having enough money to buy Y. What is not binary: the amount of faith you have, the amount of money you have. Evidence that the amount of faith is not binary: it is possible for someone with faith to have more faith than someone else that also has faith. Evidence that the amount of money is not binary: it is possible for someone with money to have more money than someone else that also has money.

The simple fact of the matter is that you are wrong, or at least on your own, legally, morally, ethically, and etymologically speaking. No one considers certain types of chimeras two people, not if there is only one brain. Nor do people consider a recipient of a blood transfusion or an organ transplant to be two different people. Sorry. Edit: Also there are no known cases of fraternal (dizygotic) conjoined twins. http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/mole00/mole00359.htm

Why not remove stuff from the blood via the kidneys as has been done for millions of years?

No, black holes cannot spew out matter. Think of a baby eating (without vomiting). What goes in, stays in, but that doesn't mean that it all goes in. Black holes are messy eaters. Some scientists have tried to calculate a maximum size to black holes, based on the energy density of the universe. This is not an intrinsic limit, but rather that our models of the universe require that black holes could not have had that much matter available to the to consume in the time available since the start of the universe.

Correct. However, the heavier gas also weighs more. So given the choice, a light gas that generates the same thrust is better.

I think that all you'd need is a fuel cell that runs on glucose.