Mr Skeptic

It is more like saying "If I drop a beetle from any height it won't get hurt because it has a very high surface area to mass ratio. An ant has an even higher surface area to mass ratio, so no matter where I drop it it won't get hurt." As mentioned by others, the nature example is actually more convincing than the theoretical reasoning. People have made many mistakes in theory. But we have been constantly bombarded by very high energy particles from outer space since the creation of the earth, and no black hole has come of it. Since it is the energy of the collisions that might create the black hole, and cosmic rays can have higher energies than the LHC can produce, if the LHC can destroy the earth it should have already happened.

I was about to make a list like yours. In addition, I wanted to add: The burden of proof is on the people who want to implement the ban. If you did not understand this, no doubt you saw many posts by the no-ban crowd as unfair. The pro-ban crowd needs to demonstrate that not only would a ban be a good thing, but that it is worth the restriction on freedom that it entails. There is also the possiblility that most of the problem with pit bulls, if it exists, may be due to public perception. Because they are percieved as dangerous and aggressive, owners who want a dangerous and aggressive dog are more likely to get a pit bull and train it to be aggressive. Also due to public perception, people are more likely to show fear in the presense of pit bulls, which will also trigger aggression. Again because of public perception, people are more likely to identify an aggressive dog as a pit bull (though John Cuthber did a decent analysis of this in #268). In any case, whatever is due to public perception will shift when a different dog becomes the "most dangerous" dog. The repeated denial that pit bulls have no value has got to stop. Again, it is the pro-ban crowd that have to show that pit bulls have no value over any other dog. But here are some examples as to how they might be valued. As more powerful dogs, they would have more value as protection. They also have an emotional value. Before I said that it is hard to quantify the emotional value, but now I suggest that you consider the economic costs of owning a dog and that the emotional value is more than that. Since people are willing to pay significant amounts for purebred pit bulls, they are at least more valuable than mongrels. Pit bulls also likely have higher costs in food and vetrinary care than mongrels. The emotional value of the dogs is higher than the costs of ownership.

Ex-creationist here. But that is an important topic. It is unlikely that anyone would devote much time to a single piece of legislation that might or might not be passed and would likely have no noticeable effect anyhow.

LEDs are solid-state, extremely efficient, and very long-lasting. However, they are expensive and small, use a smaller portion of the spectrum (read: ugly), and require low voltage DC. This makes them ideal for electronics or battery power, incidentally. Fluorescents are relatively efficient. They use high voltage electricity passed through a tube containing low-pressure mercury (though other material may be used), exciting the gas to release UV light. The UV is used to excite a fluorescent powder to emit visible light. Incandescents are dirt cheap to produce, but very inefficient. They function by heating a filament till it glows, however much of the glow is in the infrared and the bright filament is harsh to look at. They can run at pretty much any voltage, AC or DC. They usually burn out the most frequently. --- Also, compact fluorescents are now at about the level where they could replace most incandescents, and are more efficient and a longer lifetime. They fit in the screw sockets of incandescents, and now some are actually smaller than incandescents.

Not blackmail. For one thing, it is closer to extortion, but still a little different from that (as it is done for moral reasons rather than profit). Also, it should be allowed at least if done by consumers. In theory, the free market is supposed to have perfect information knowledge. However, that is impossible. A boycott calls attention to aspects of a company that "should" have been known by everyone, and if it was known, the company would have suffered a sharp drop in business due to personal consumer choice. So in a sense, a boycott balances the imperfect information nature of the market. However, if a competitor or for-profit group is organizing boycotts, that would be immoral and probably illegal.

An AI intelligent enough to earn money on its own would have to be made by a human. The human(s) that created it would consider themselves the owners of that AI. How would an AI acquire its own independence?

I once saw a demonstration of balloons in liquid nitrogen. Very fun, they shrivel to almost no size when placed in liquid nitrogen. You can stuff a bunch of balloons into a small container, and when you pull them out, they reinflate.

Actually, heat is one of the simplest forms of energy to produce other energy from. Heat has been used to create light for thousands of years, and with the invention of the steam engine, into motion or electricity. However, to extract energy from it, you need a temperature difference. There is also a limit to how efficiently you can extract energy from it based on how big the temperature difference is. If there is no temperature difference, then you can't extract energy and you have "waste" heat that can't be used. It would indeed be wonderous, but also against the second law of thermodynamics. Sort of. You can imagine atoms/molecules as perfectly bouncy balls. The hotter a group of these are, the faster they are moving. If the faster ones bump into slower ones, then the slower ones speed up and the faster ones slow down -- the transfer of heat from high temperature to lower temperature. The opposite won't happen. This is just one aspect of entropy, though. I hope it is what you were looking for.

Hey, I've had part of my garden eaten by a cow. I demand revenge, in the form of steak.

Somewhat, but that is because they don't all agree on the definition of life. Viruses have no or almost no metabolism, and no catabolism. This restricts their ability to reproduce such that they can only reproduce with the help of (living, or at least mostly intact) cells. So there are many aspects to viruses that don't conform to the usual definition of life.

People are more afraid of them, hence they make better guard dogs. This may be the same reason that they may be proportionately more aggressive, as dogs will sense fear and become aggressive (try running away from a dog, odds are it will chase you). If that is the case, then whatever breed replaces them as the scary dog will also replace them on the aggression list. I'm sure that there are many other reasons, including emotional reasons which are hard to quantify. Also as stated there is a question as the whether the statistics apply to "pit bulls" or to "dogs identified by people who saw the attack as big scary pit bulls".

Well, Rama II had a psychopathic crew member, half the crew dead by the end of the series, shamans, magical drinks, prophesies, and if it had some actual science I didn't notice it. I don't mind human drama, but I could do without the magic part, which was not even part of the plot. Haven't finished the third one, but so far it doesn't have magic, but is again full of human drama. Also, I either missed a big chunk of the series (the first meeting with the Node), or the plot has been slice'n diced.

Yes, it will. Just like whacking a hornet's nest will "reform" the nest. Just like bombing the Vatican will "reform" Catholicism. Just like bombing your house or your favorite garden will "reform" you. Almost everyone who is Muslim will be very angry, and anyone who was already angry will become far more angry. They will seek revenge, in large numbers. Terrorists will get huge amounts of funding and recruits. In fact, many religious leaders will become very upset, even if they hated Islam. Why? Because such an act would be viewed as not just an act against all of Islam, but an act against religion, which currently has a rather untouchable status. Also, every single country that doesn't want to get hit by countless terrorists will denounce the bombing. I don't see how you think any of this won't happen, or that it would be a good thing. What will happen? The same thing that happens to any other contradictions in holy texts -- they get ignored, considered non-literal, or reinterpreted. For example Genesis has a creation story that scientists say cannot be literal. Therefore, some say that the Genesis creation story is not to be taken literally, and others say that God created the earth with an appearance of age. Elsewhere the Bible says that not a single star is missing, yet supernovas are real. That gets completely ignored. The likely thing is that Mecca would be rebuilt if possible, and whoever bombed them would earn a permanent place in their interpretation of prophesy as the ultimate evil. If it is rebuilt, many would ignore the bombing (instead claiming eg that they just tried to bomb it) like Holocaust deniers, and others would reinterpret the text as saying eg that only the ultimate evil could have harmed Mecca or that it wasn't actually protected.

Depleted uranium (uranium with most of the U235 removed) is used for high caliber armor piercing ammunition. It has a self-sharpening property that makes it ideal for poking holes in tanks. However, slightly radioactive powder can be dispersed in the air (which is actually rather dangerous, airborne radioactive powder), so some people want it banned. Depleted uranium can be used in a breeder reactor to produce a lot of additional nuclear fuel, but that carries a risk of illegal nuclear weapons because the plutonium is far easier to separate than uranium.

I was reading about recent research concerning self-organizing cell structures. Some, for example the flagella, are made of protein units in regular arrangements. Some require a seed to get started. They exist in equilibrium, with the rate of units falling off equal to the rate of units getting replaced. The clever thing about that is that it doesn't require guidance to build or repair itself, only free proteins. Haven't heard anyone call it crystals before, but it fits the definition.

Welcome iNow!

Hm, I think my vocabulary is a bit broke. I'm trying to compare the trees by genetics, not any other factors. Certainly the growing conditions are going to have some effect, but no matter what soil you grow eg a wild mango in, its flesh will still have a liquidish consistency as compared to the "tame" strains which have a solid consistency.

On the other hand, someone with a Muslim background might understand them enough not to do something incredibly stupid.

Just assume that both trees are healthy. For most strains the different growing conditions will probably have far less of an effect than the actual strain.

Lies. There is no such thing as unlimited, though "effectively unlimited" comes close.

You'll be getting a very biased sample unless you are intentionally trying to sample the scientific community not just your average joe.

What are people's experiences with regard to wild fruits and the specially bred fruits that are normally farmed? Which do you like better, and why? If you've eaten both wild and cultured strains of fruit, compare them. For myself: Guavas: Wild guavas taste much better; cultured ones are much larger but taste like crap Mangoes: Wild mangoes have more flavor, but are smaller and have a juicy/fibery texture (that's a bad thing, the fibers get stuck in your teeth); cultured ones are larger, have better more solid texture, and still taste pretty good. Bananas: smaller but slightly better taste, less yellow and spoil quicker Oranges: had just the one tree growing in my yard, they were fewer and greener looking but tasted incredibly sweet, about the same size. Grapes: not sure if they were "proper" wild grapes, incredibly tiny and more acidic, stronger but not necessarily better taste, mostly skin and seeds; cultured ones are much larger and all sorts of delicious

Yet still a valid question. Are pit bulls, overall, bad? How they compare to other breeds is also a valid question, but I don't think it is the most important.

Didn't "well-regulated" mean "having proper weapons and training"?

No, to build a proper bomb you need some other things as well. Most bombs require explosives that are very carefully shaped, and also need to be detonated almost exactly simultaneously. And you need to hit the mass with neutrons at just the right time. These complications are enough for a country to make a bomb that was kind of a dud. However, simply putting enough uranium will make an explosion, even if very inefficient. The major difficulty with getting uranium is separating the isotopes, you can't use U-238 but it is hard to separate from U-235. However, using plutonium it is easier to do because you can chemically separate plutonium. So I am more scared of illicit plutonium bombs.