Mr Skeptic

Impossible. Even a Touring machine would have to have "before" and "after" states to do calculations, hence a timelike causal chain. How can you use past and present tense without time? Any change from previous to next state is related to time (hence previous and next) That is partially correct. However, without the passage of time, the ball will not fall. It could be arbitrarily redefined (and indeed has been several times). Oh, did you intend to change the attributes of, say, caesium atoms then? Even if you are moving at relativistic speeds, then distance changes as well as time. Yes, but that is because some people are speculating or being unscientific; it does not excuse that behavior in others.

A smuggler needs to make sure that they are helping out a bona fide illegal alien. They can't afford to show their route to an agent who might get them all imprisoned.

If you freeze something that was alive in a reversible manner is it still alive? I ask because frozen things lose many of the attributes normally held by living things.

Interesting to see Google on the list...

Yup, I read about the same thing in New Scientist, and thought it pretty amazing as well. Talk about childhood memories!

Well, there's also the problem of all the immigrants that go to the US (legally), for college, but then decide to stay (illegally) for work. The fence wouldn't help with that.

I'd eat the fruit, it has plenty of seeds and tastes better.

I think I found the original paper [warning, pdf]. It's in English. I'm no climatologist though.

Well, it depends. It does "work" if you want to get people to talk, but the data you get is extremely unreliable. You'd need to verify everyting that was said. A group with a pre-agreed response to torture would be hard to verify. A clever person could get you running in circles for quite a while. In the case of the war on terror, you could define torture "working" if it reduced the terrorist threat. If instead it simply increases the number of people who hate America but does little for procuring useful, factual information, then it doesn't work in that context.

That's what the Force is for. You know, sensing electricity, deflecting lighting attacks, and summoning lightsabers.

I'd imagine that a fourth dimension would look like time, and a 4-dimensional object like a 3D holographic video. However, I can't imagine seeing all of a 4D object all at once, without using my own fourth dimension.

thedarkshade, you might consider reporting the teacher to the relevant authorities. If several people are complaining about her, it is likely she will be replaced. You do have to make sure that her disciplinary actions were undeserved, as I'd imagine that "romantic literature" has potential for many tangents some of which may be offensive. Or, you could see if you could switch to a class with a different teacher. What college was that at?

I doubt that the study took into account the efficiency of gasoline production. The amounts of biomatter wasted in turning ancient forests into gasoline has got to be impressive as well. No fair counting the efficiency of making beef but not the efficiency of making gasoline!

Our perception of time is manmade though I read a while back a New Scientist article about all the tricks that the mind does with respect to our perception of time. For example, we process audio quicker than visual, but the mind delays the audio so that it matches the visual. There are also factors that affect how quickly we perceive time as passing. However time as measured by clocks is quite objective.

What might be interesting if someone wore a filter that matched the absorption spectra of one of the r/g/b cone cells, or even disabled that color cone with with some medicine. Then after a while take off the filter or let the cells function, and see what color things look. It would be effectively like someone who is colorblind seeing in full color.

The thing though is that Jedi were able to block even laser weapons with their lightsaber, and even reflect them. As for physical objects, they would have been able to push around bullets. I do understand that the blocking was not foolproof though, but it would have made for a dull story if they could just shoot each other.

Nuclear power (as an electricity source, as others have mentioned it also has evil uses) is a safe*, carbon-neutral, reliable power source. All of its most dangerous waste gets put in big metal boxes that can survive being hit by a train. Comparatively, coal power plants are dangerous*, emit CO2, and are a more limited resource. Hence, it seems like a correct choice to use nuclear power instead of coal power; however, there may well be better power sources in the future or even now under certain circumstances. * If you compare the number of deaths caused by coal and nuclear, it turns out coal is more dangerous. Much of this is simply due to the volume of coal burned, hence lots of coal must be mined (and miners occasionally die in cave-ins), and lots of pollution is released (into the air, also causing deaths). Meanwhile, nuclear uses very little fuel, and produces nearly no pollution that gets into the environment (it's put into storage). Historically, coal miners had horrible working conditions and low lifespans, and coal plants did not even try to clean their emissions. Historically, there has been one nuclear power plant disaster. --- Oh, I should add that nuclear power plants themselves have many additional uses. There was an incident in Canada where one of the two nuclear plants responsible for making isotopes for medicine was shut down, which was quite a disaster for anyone needing those treatments. However, and this I think is the greatest danger, nuclear power plants can be used to make weapons grade plutonium.

It would have a negligible effect on a compass. Iron ores, on the other hand, would mess up a compass pretty good if there was enough of it. If it was freshwater you could use a metal detector to find the gold, but if it was in salt water the signal would rapidly decay.

Gold is diamagnetic, meaning it has an incredibly weak repulsion to magnets (you probably won't notice this). Perhaps a larger effect is that if the magnet were moving, it would induce currents in the gold that would oppose the movement of the magnet, resulting in noticeable drag. Not sure what underwater has to do with anything though. Oh, and nice avatar

You could just use a piece of cloth. The old style slingshot was a piece of cloth with strings tied to opposite sides. You twirl it and then let go of one string, and the egg will fly at whatever speed you were twirling it at. They are harder to aim though, so be careful not to get egg on someone's face

What for? Are you trying to make explosives of some kind? That looks rather dangerous...

Ha! Don't count on it. If the woman is thinking logically and cares about intelligence (eg she's well educated herself), that may be true. But when love is in the air, logic goes out the window. OTOH, guys don't select for intelligence too much either.

What I found to be more convincing than fossils (as they seemed a bit arbitrary in their comparisons), was direct knowledge of DNA. This is a rather new field, and it compares DNA (which you can consider to be numbers in base 4). There is little room for bias errors here, and it does support evolution.

You could think of the wave having a size (its wavelength). If you consider a photon to be a bouncy ball moving at c the size of its wavelength, it is easy to imagine it bouncing off a screen with small holes. However, that is not a particularly good description of light, as it is actually an electromagnetic wave rather than a ball. The fields have a size that they have significant strength in, and if they are large enough fields, they can induce motions of electrons in a conductor. The moving electrons generate opposing fields, and this is (a somewhat more accurate description) of why large EM waves bounce off metal. Smaller waves are the "size" of large molecules, and even smaller ones are the "size" of atoms; these will be unable to reflect from metal like the larger waves.

The world already ended... for the Mayas anyhow.