Mr Skeptic

That's all pretty much correct. However we don't know whether space is really infinite or not. As far as we can tell, the density of matter in space is more or less constant on the large scale, so that if space is infinite matter will be too.

One other thing... there's more than one kind of infinite, and some things are more infinite than others (countably infinite, uncountably infinite). Though I don't think that matters unless the probability of a human like you arising is infinitely small.

0 x infinity, 1/0, 0/0, all these are undefined.

Thank you, that was a very well thought-out answer.

 

*EDIT*

I just noticed that you copy-pasta'd your reply from wikipedia without citing a source. For shame, sir. For shame.

 

Are swelling, inflammation, and edema all the same thing?

How about this for a well thought-out answer: maybe you should read the wikipedia article first if it is so helpful, and then ask about the things you don't understand?

But rktpro, he is right. Copying content without citing sources is plagiarism.

Integrate it over time again, and center of mass is conserved.

Perhaps this will explain then:

http://en.wikipedia....Logistic_growth

It doesn't matter a rat's ass what the rate of population growth is, so long as it is above 1 and the carrying capacity does not change. Eventually, carrying capacity is reached and growth cannot continue past that point (not without being followed by a population crash). The only difference is how long it will take. You think that buying some time will be of any value whatsoever? Say you manage to launch 200,000 people into space. Congratulations, you postponed our population problems by a day.

I don't know if the phenomena of more boys being born when people go to war, could be considered evidence of a conscious universe, I just know this phenomena is widely recognized and the attempts to explain why this happens are not satisfying.

Or it could be evidence that people will believe myths more easily than they should:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2973/are-more-male-babies-born-after-wars

Ive heard the celery takes more energy to digest than it gives, yes, no?

It might depend on the variety.

Ice water takes more energy to digest than you get out of it. Because you have to warm it to body temperature.

[...] there are in fact enough sexually-interested people for everyone always to be sexually fulfilled all the time.

Do you have any evidence of that? Your whole argument is based on a premise that appears to be false.

I'm the one who gave you the negative rep. It's off-topic, blatantly wrong, and the reason why was already explained to you. In short, you are mixing the resources of one region and anywhere anyone from that region has ever emigrated to, as if all those resources were available to the people in the first region, and so incorrectly counting emigration as a larger effect than death for population control.

Hey, this just might be the best "crazy new theory" I've seen on the whole forums.

i respectfully disagree - I would go with Blackstone (who wrote the book on Criminal Law) echoed by Ben Franklin "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"

I agree, but only to a point. Is it still better that 100 guilty escape than that 1 innocent suffer? 1000? 1,000,000? At some point we need to accept that we will punish the innocent, or that we cannot punish anyone at all.

Plain water will dissolve the salt crystals. Is that what you want?

Isn't saying that evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis a little bit disingenuous? I know Darwin's theory of evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis but wasn't abiogenesis a type of evolution, the evolution of less complex chemicals into more complex chemicals resulting in organisms of some sort?

Evolution cannot function until you have something that self-replicates. I believe Darwin suggested God as the creator of the first living thing (whether he believed that or not is a different story), but then with that first life and evolution explained the rest of the species. Modern abiogenesis theories try to make use of evolution and extend it beyond what we would consider to be life, but that can only go as far as a self-replicating entity. You can't explain via evolution anything that can't replicate, so while you can sneak a little evolution into abiogenesis you still need a mechanism to make the first self-replicators.

what happens when salt and bleach is mixed

I think you just get salty bleach.

can you poor bleach in you're water softener to clean out the lines?

I doubt it would help much, unless you are concerned about its color or possible bacteria.

Sure it does. You can argue that it's not intended to be believed as written, but that it is what it says. That's what "literal" means.

But maybe the genealogies are metaphorical!

Is there really a conflict between religion and science? Or is it more that religion cannot be proven and assumed to be true using our current scientific methods? What exactly is it that the religions of the world propose which contradict the teachings of science? Would anyone be able to provide a list of these contradictions if this is indeed the case?

There usually is conflict but there need not be. For example there is among some the sentiment that if it seems that something the Bible is saying is not true, then the Bible is simply not being interpreted correctly. Others have the sentiment that if it seems that something the Bible is saying is not true, then what was seen is simply not being interpreted correctly. Though it might not seem it, both are equally valid and simply depend on your choice of initial axioms. Similarly for other religions. Also, there is no requirement that a religion make testable claims, and so some religions could exist entirely separate from science.

If we move away from specific facts and look at the methods used to determine truth, there is some conflict between science and religion. Inasmuch as religion contains supernatural things, these things must by definition be accepted by faith (if we could replicate them they would be natural). Science on the other hand starts off with very simple axioms, that the world is understandable, consistent, objective; these axioms rather than being stated formally like in math or logic are ingrained in the scientific method. And since miracles do not fit this description (they are inherently inconsistent with the axioms), they cannot be accepted by science as such: for example, if a miracle can be consistently replicated by anyone as required to be accepted by science, it would no longer be considered a miracle.

And more so if we are talking about "people" rather than "households".

Only partially. Some signal processing is done along the way, which is fine if you know what the signal processing was and did that to your signal before inputting it to the brain. However, if nothing else than your reflex reactions would be bypassed.

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

Maybe it is using seconds/cycle instead of cycles per second?

I am inclined to believe that life was formed by another way than the theory of evolution

Correct. Life is formed by abiogenesis, and with life species are formed by evolution.

Next, if evolution works by natural selection, many creatures today would not be able to exist. Such as the giraffe, by the time it could have evolved the sponge-like apparatus that is needed to bend its neck to drink, every one of them would be dead, or going further back, the reason it would need a longer neck in the first place, to collect food, if there were continuous droughts, or whatever brought along the change, the change itself would be much much slower than the event that occurred to make it happen. Or the bombardier beetle, the chemicals it uses would kill it before natural selection would have a chance to use it.

At best these are arguments from ignorance. In the case of the giraffe especially, since both the traits in question can form gradually together eliminating your supposed problem. More than that, by comparing DNA of species, you can build a tree of life by considering the closest species the more related. This can be done for any protein common to most life, and each time you do it you get roughly the same tree of life. The odds of this being a coincidence are astronomical.

Next, the mutation selection theory, the odds of a gene mutation happening are 1 in 10 million cell divisions, and the odds of 2 happening to one cell are one in 100 trillion. With the vast majority of mutations doing nothing, some being harmful, and many others fatal.

Then it should not surprise you that we still share a large percentage of our DNA with species such as bacteria.

The chances that it is to the benefit of the creature is very slim. And finally on this topic, never once, has a mutation been observed to create new DNA by which an organism could evolve.

Sure it has. I'm certain gene duplication events must have been observed by now.

Lastly, as for the common ancestor theory, evidence has shown that instead of a cone-like depiction of creatures, starting from few and spreading to many, that it is more of a inverted cone, starting from many and becoming fewer.

Well no wonder you don't believe in evolution, with people lying to you like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Patterns_in_frequency

Briefly, if extinction happens faster than speciation for a prolonged period of time, we would all go extinct. As shown by the fossil record, even mass extinctions do little to reduce the number of species because they are followed almost immediately by rapid speciation.

A calorie is an amount of energy, about 4.18 Joules, the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram (1 mL) of water by 1 degree Celsius. Food is measured in Calories which is kilocalories, or 1000 calories, or the amount of energy needed to raise 1 liter of water by 1 degree Celsius.

Your body uses energy during metabolism. The end effect is to combine sugar with oxygen same as if you had burnt it in a fire, though in your body some of that energy is transferred to ATP before being used. Your body does not have a way to use energy except via production of ATP (or other metabolic products), but ATP can be wasted by running two bodily processes in reverse, or by dissipating the proton gradient in the mitochondria that would have been used to generate ATP, or by using ATP to do unnecessary work (exercise, shivering).

you by means of a natural or man-made substance increase the rate by which your body burns calories?

Some metabolic poisons will do this. Some metabolic poisons have been used very effectively as weight loss aids. Overdosing on such drugs can quickly result in death.

No. Profiteers want to maximize profits now, whereas conservationalists want to save resources for later. If you could find yourself a profiteer who was willing to postpone income for a long time (say 200 years), then they would be largely equivalent to the conservationalists. As for raising of prices, at some point that will reduce profits and the profiteers will not go past that point, because it is not profit margins but profit that they are looking for, and eventually people stop buying things when they are too expensive.

Nerve impulses from the senses travel like any other, though they start off at a sensor instead of another nerve. If you close your eye and put some pressure on it with your fingers, you will probably see some visual effects. Rub hot peppers on your skin, or mint, and it will feel like temperature effects. You could directly stimulate the nerves with electricity, but to make specific effects you'd have to have some very fine wires carefully placed. In theory you should be able to completely control the senses of a person like that, a perfect virtual reality, but in practice that would be too complicated. Vision in particular would require massive numbers of electrodes, and smell we hardly know anything about.

There is no such thing as the "Planck wavelength" (it's Planck with a "ck", btw.).

Oops! I meant the de Broglie wavelength.

Yes that seems to be somewhat accurate. GDP is a measure of what is produced and not a measure of wealth increase. So if things are lost or destroyed so that they must be replaced, then all the more GDP. This sort of thing has been suggested as one of the uses for war.

In my calculation I have just looked at the total magnitude of the forces involved. Just to get an idea of what stopping distances would be reasonable. Three meters to me sounds shorter that I initially thought. So, like you say Mr Skeptic you could arrange the angles etc so that 1m of snow give you an "effective depth" of greater than 3 meters.

 

It is starting to sound more and more possible. Though I am not sure if my 50g is too high or if we would still expect minor injuries. Either way, I would not want to try it.

I think that a deceleration of 10 g would be a more appropriate target. We'd want to leave the getting hurt to when something goes wrong, and given a lack of a pressure suit and likeliness of uneven stresses and variable deceleration, we'd have to stay well away from injury-level g forces.

Also, we would need to know more about the physics of the snow. I expect that the "parachutist" would compress the snow and not travel that far though it. Thus, accelerations >50g are likely. More injuries that we might expect from my calculation. Then like you have suggested, it may be possible to just skim the snow and decelerate that way. I just think it is all too tricky to pull off regularly with a lot of men.

Per the russian stories, there was a reasonable number of both injured and uninjured men after the jump. Something about necessity combined with a lack of parachutes. So I'm not looking for something you could reliably do, only that you have decent odds of surviving uninjured enough to fight.