Mr Skeptic

The use of GM is of course increasing. (can't go anywhere but up from nearly zero). GM is just taking a step further what we have been doing for hundreds of years (selective breeding), which itself is a step further from what we have been doing thousands of years (accidental selective breeding via the larger heavier seeds at the bottom of jars being what is left over for planting etc). In the US GM food doesn't even have to be labeled as such unless the product is significantly different than the original, and most of it hasn't been. There are some risks to using GM food but almost none of them are the reasons people make up for worrying about because they don't really know what they're talking about.

All you have to do to get your answer is sum up an infinite series.

1/2 the time when you flip it once you get a heads.

1/2 the time when you flip it the second time you get a heads, but you only have 1/2 chance of getting to this step

...

So the sum is 1/2 the time once + 1/4 the time twice + 1/8 the time 3 times + ... + 1/2^n th time n times. To convert all the fractions to how many flips you would actually get, you would multiply this by 2^n, but then to get the average you would divide by 2^n, so both those parts can be neglected. Then take the limit as n goes to infinity.

So,

[math]\lim_{n \to \infty} \sum^{i=0}_{i=n} \frac{i}{2^i}[/math]

Eh, watch out for errors. I'll check up on this later, I have to go no. Hm, that would be an interesting result although it might be infinite.

It helps to know what terms mean. If glass was a supercooled fluid it could easily be disturbed with a nucleation site and form a crystalline structure, and like supercooled water would be still liquid. Glass doesn't do that. Some people thought glass was a viscous liquid, but there is no evidence of that. Contrary to myth, glass does not seem to flow, although it will if you heat it up enough to soften it. On the other hand, amorphous solid describes it very well, since glass has no specific crystalline structure and like a solid does not flow on its own. Me, I just call it glass.

Whatever the evolutionary theories say, what I see is that nature progresses from simple forms to more complex ones.

Evolutionary theories also say that bugs on windy islands might lose their wings if the wind kills more of them than flight allows them to reproduce, or that fish that live in caves will lose their eyes if the biological costs of eyes and damage/infection of the eyes outweighs the benefit they might get from perhaps being able to see if only there were light. Guess what we see? Some bugs on windy islands lose their wings, some fish living in caves lose their sight. While I agree that evolution might tend toward complexity this is by no means necessarily true and certainly not in every case.

Cells naturally clone themselves all the time, whenever they reproduce. For stem cells the cells might differentiate before reproducing, which would ruin some or all of what makes stem cells special. But growing them with special conditions so they don't differentiate is possible, and in fact the lines of stem cells on which research was allowed to be federally funded in the USA, all came from 12 or so embryos and still being used. (I don't know if the funding issue remains).

I'm pretty sure that there can be genetic reasons to be born blind, but it can also be non-genetic reasons. You'd have to ask a doctor about a particular case if you want to know.

So do software companies and corporations pay "white-hat" hackers to try and crack their stuff as a preemptive security test? This might be a stupid question...I know nothing of the sort.

Indeed. Some white hat hackers also find security flaws on their own and sometimes even publish them, for reputation or to try to enact some sort of change (change for the good if they're a white hat, such as if a company is pretending that their product is perfectly secure and hiding problems instead of fixing them). In that case, they usually contact the company which made the flawed product and tell them about the bug before publishing. On the other hand a black hat would sell that information secretly or use it to infect computers.

The truly sad thing is that by artificially creating a shortage of female sex partners by their general practice of withholding sex, women have increased their power by creating an unnecessary sex economy at the price of making themselves sex objects. Feminists think that men make women sex objects, but it is in fact women who do. If there were not this artificial shortage of female sex partners and the resultant commodification of women, relationships between men and women could be more like normal friendship.

Haven't you considered that perhaps there are other reasons why women might be biologically or culturally less inclined to sex? For example, if you consider the biological cost and effort required to go from conceiving a child through pregnancy through child rearing until the child is self-sufficient, compared to the effort and biological cost to ejaculate. From a social point of view, pregnancy and its consequences for an unmarried woman brought much more shame on a woman than a man even if caught having an affair, and also increased the chance that the woman would get caught (no contraceptives historically, and no safe abortion either), and that if caught someone would care. Also socially, women had hardly any choice in working especially when with a baby and men were the main wage earners. So is it really a surprise that in the interests of maximum reproduction a man might want to have sex as often and with as many women as possible, whereas a woman would have a far more limited sex drive further reduced by social pressures, and that they might perhaps be more interested in stable relationships than carefree sex? Perhaps rather than wonder about some global yet still secret conspiracy to deprive men of sex, you might wonder that they have any sex drive at all.

If you want to horribly stigmatize people with a disease, odds are many of them will never wish to be tested for that disease. You'd have to make testing obligatory for all people.

A significant portion of the first segment focused on Assange's view that the political impact of the information he holds factors into his decision on what to publish.

 

I think it's time to shelve the notion that Julian Assange just wants information to be free.

Well he certainly has no business publishing state secrets that have no political impact. If the people don't care they probably don't need to know. And people who thought that "Assange just wants information to be free" didn't get that from Assange -- he has made pretty clear what intentions he has and his actions confirm it.

If you want crystals then you need to get the product out of solution, preferably slowly to get larger crystals. The ideal way to do this is via slow evaporation. If you don't want large crystals you could boil it, but in either case you probably have some residual HCl which can go into gas phase and which you really don't want to breathe. And if you don't want the hydrated form then you need to desiccate it afterward, which will probably ruin the crystals.

what do you do if you don't know what category to put a thread in ex: http://www.sciencefo...541#entry586541

Just take your best guess. Some things no one really knows what category they belong to, and some clearly belong in multiple categories. Sometimes you pick the category as part of directing which way the discussion should go, for example putting a biochem question in biology or chemistry would give different directions.

A book is a pretty reliable method, but it would be boring for a live presentation, for which a presentation with slides would be ideal. It really depends on the depth with which you want to argue. Note that written argument by its very nature makes many of the tricks and fallacies that could be used with live voice or video harder or impossible. Ask yourself, what does a video have that a written argument does not? And what does a video have that a written argument does not and is relevant to the argument?

Considering that so many people are concerned about various forms of religious-rooted oppression occurring in secular life through government, I have begun to wonder why there is not universal liberation among secular people. For example, secular people often criticize sexual prudishness and attribute religious restrictions on sexuality to pre-modern and/or irrational superstitions - but what would then account for relative sexual inhibitions among secular people who seemingly hold no form of religiosity or other anti-sexual superstitions? Why don't such people have casual sex with anyone they come in contact with, for example, if they're reasonably sure they can prevent disease, violence, etc.? Why don't they unabashedly discuss their sexual behavior and desires without inhibition or shame? In short, why would sexual inhibition continue once religious taboos are no longer observed? Is there something about sexual repression that goes beyond religion?

Some things that religious people say do have basis in facts separate from the religion in question. Just as religions consider lying, stealing, etc immoral so do secular people for practical reasons. As for sex, some people do have sex with whomever they can. There are some practical reasons not to, especially for girls, since they might not want to get labeled a "slut". Likewise for the men, that sort of reputation could reduce the chances of women wanting to go out with them, and even more so when it comes to marriage. People are biologically jealous when it comes to sex and that is enough to prevent sex from ever being too casual. This can be seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom as well, where I assume the influence of our religions does not extend.

And as for religion being opposed to sex, that is also not universally true if you consider the various fertility goddesses and how to worship them.

In elementary set theory, Cantor's theorem states that, for any set A, the set of all subsets of A (the power set of A) has a strictly greater cardinality than A itself. For finite sets, Cantor's theorem can be seen to be true by a much simpler proof than that given below, since in addition to subsets of A with just one member, there are others as well, and since n < 2ⁿ for all natural numbers n. But the theorem is true of infinite sets as well. In particular, the power set of a countably infinite set is uncountably infinite. The theorem is named for German mathematician Georg Cantor, who first stated and proved it.

It's already been proven, of course.

An anti-virus virus has been tried. It is less "fit" than other viruses and furthermore caused a lot of network traffic because instead of just sending copies of itself it had to also download updates. Some modern viruses do make some sort of changes to the computers they infect that prevent further infection, mostly so other people can't take over that computer.

I don't think growing whole humans would be practical (and would be considered unethical, brain or no, by a lot of people). Growing individual organs from a mold would result in quicker development as compared growing a complete human, and since people wouldn't want to wait a decade or two for their new organs that would be the way to go.

Sure about that?

The OP says it's a tube from pole to pole.

Oh, I forgot that bit. There will still be some angular momentum issues based on the earth's orbit and tilt (so that if it is summer or winter dropping something down the tube would change its distance from the sun), but that would be a much smaller effect.

Such a tube could not exist on Earth because of the molten area and the pressure. However if you could build some sort of tube, then an item dropped would hit the wall of the tube due to conservation of angular momentum.

We do have a Quick Questions thread.

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/6772-the-official-quick-question-thread/

Consider the length of tubing needed to contain 1 L of fluid, and a flow rate of 1 L per second. If the overall flow of volume is the same, in the narrow tube it must be moving faster -- it has a longer length to clear in 1 second.

In real life, how something tastes good to you is just how something tastes good to you. Doesn't matter if other people agree on it, nothing about the fact that you like ice cream changes or is derived.

There are people who work with flavors/aromas, which is much more complicated than with light because we have so many different taste/smell receptors. Likewise, there are people who study the pleasure centers of the brain. Guess what they use to describe things... All you're doing is pointing out something for which the maths describing it are far too complicated or unknown for us to talk about, but that doesn't mean that there isn't math to describe it, just that we don't understand it.

If you've already made up your mind, what are you seeking advice for? Surely you don't need someone else to confirm your wishes so you can tell your dad that someone else agrees with you?

If you have a certain job that you enjoy perhaps that would be the better option. Both college and work experience are valuable, however work as a waiter doesn't seem like it would suit you nor be particularly valuable. You can also enroll in college part-time. As for "hacking", perhaps you should consider whether people would be willing to hire former hackers to work with their computers, websites, or program for them. It could really mess up your life (yet more) if you get yourself a criminal record for hacking, so a little self-control there.

Psychics excel in "reading" their customers. A wedding ring for example, everyone knows what that means but there are much more subtle things, your dress, your demeanor, and the very things you say, like Sherlock Holmes does in his books. In fact, one of their favorite techniques is basically making their customer answer their own question (reply with something generic and vague and ask for confirmation from the customer, who will then provide the details). The psychic would be very unlikely to be "saying" bad things about you if your family did not already think such things about you.

So if you do want to trick the psychic consider also the details of your appearance, so that they match whatever deception you're planning. There's three sort of things you could ask them, one being something they clearly won't know the answer to, one getting them to talk about people or things that don't exist, and perhaps for fun you could have them talk about your actual family (with fake names in case he knows their names, but real details) and have him say bad things about them right back at them. Of course all of those involve visiting the psychic, so if you don't want to do that there is the fact that she hasn't claimed the $1,000,000.00 prize for the Randi Challenge.

If you drop a bullet on your foot and shoot your foot from the same height, which lands first?