Mr Skeptic

Maybe they think BS stands for BullShit

I thought that the strong force's strength first increased with distance, and then decreased with distance. Otherwise everything would be neutron stars.

You should take philosophy.

To always have a great wise quote that applies to the situation, you need great wise quotes that contradict each other. I'll start: One man's food is another man's poison. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Distance makes the heart grow fonder. Out of sight, out of mind. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The quacking duck gets shot. Any others?

[math]KE=\sum \frac{1}{2}mv^2 = \sum \frac{1}{2}m(r^2 \omega^2) = \frac{1}{2} (\sum mr^2) \omega^2 = \frac{1}{2}I \omega^2[/math] The rotational kinetic energy is really the sum of the kinetic energies of its constituents (from the center of mass reference frame). The moment of inertia depends on the mass distribution. For a ring (or a hollow cylinder), all the mass would be concentrated at R, so the moment of inertia would be [math]I = \sum mr^2 = MR^2[/math]. However, a flywheel is usually a disk (or filled in cylinder). Since some of the mass is located at a radius r < R, a disk will have a smaller moment of inertia than a ring of the same radius. The moment of inertia would be like that of a set of concentric rings. If the disk was of constant density, each ring would have mass [math]m \approx \frac{M}{\pi R^2} 2\pi r dr[/math] proportional to the circumference. Overall, it would be [math]I = \int_0^R mr^2 dr = \int_0^R \frac{M}{\pi R^2} 2\pi r^3 dr = \frac{2M}{R^2} \int_0^R r^3 dr = \frac{2M}{R^2} \frac{1}{4}(R^4 - 0) = \frac{1}{2}MR^2[/math], half of what it would have been for the ring. You'd probably want to ignore my dusting up of my rotational mechanics, and just look the thing up on a table. There are tables for all the simple shapes, and you wouldn't want to calculate I for yourself (except to understand what is going on, or as practice). Unless your flywheel is a ring, your mistake was the value of I.

It was just in time for Wikipedia's fund drive, too

Once again, Wikipedia compares favorably to another encyclopedia. This time, the German version of Wikipedia was compared to the online version of a traditional encyclopedia.

Unless you care to show how it is impossible for the world to have been created by anything other than a sentient being, nobody is going to listen to you. If we turn this into a discussion of creationism, nobody will listen to the other side and nothing useful will come of it.

I think that "open source" knowledge will mostly replace proprietary knowledge, if for no other reason than that it is more convenient. Projects like Wikipedia can only get better. The more time and people involved, the better. Proprietary knowledge, on the other hand, requires that people get permission before using it, and fixing mistakes in it is much more cumbersome. I think that within about 20 years, we will have free textbooks that rival or surpass the quality of proprietary textbooks in all subjects. Soon, nearly all general knowledge will be free for everyone. Copyright will probably still be around for more specific knowledge and entertainment, but its role will be largely reduced. All that completely separate from the fact that copyright infringement is illegal even if you can almost certainly get away with it. If by "meaningless" you mean that it will be unenforced, that is not very likely. Actually, if a law is usually unenforced, it runs the risk of being struck down. The government is not allowed to selectively enforce laws, so if most everyone who does something illegal gets ignored, the government can no longer use that law against specific individuals.

Because of how we vote.

Rote memorization is what you get when you have a lot to learn and little time to learn it all. Personally, I forget most of everything, and that is probably true of most people. But by learning the definitions of things and a few of the more important concepts, I can derive much of the rest (in some subjects, anyways). I think the tendency to learn facts of ideas is an aspect of personality. Some people do well at memorizing facts, and some do well at learning theories. Both are useful for different subjects.

Would that make the Goa'uld from Stargate (they have genetic memories from both their parents, so most of their behavior wasn't learned by them) not be intelligent? Yet their knowledge was learned by their parents. I guess what I am getting at is that instinctive behavior would have been "learned" ever so slowly by a creature's ancestors. The individual creature may have near zero learning capabilities, but it may have significant knowledge nonetheless. This could be considered a creature with significant "crystallized intelligence" but near zero "fluid intelligence". Interesting idea. If someone was born with all the knowledge of several PHD's but learned little new, would he be considered intelligent?

Coil guns can accelerate their ammo to arbitrary velocities, not limited by the speed of the gases like with gunpowder. So you can use one to punch clean holes in brittle objects that a bullet would shatter.

Much good it's done them But I agree; it's the thought (and, of course, methodology) that counts. The search may be science, but I think that the value of the Drake equation is just guesswork at this point.

We require "dodgy old language". If we did not have potentially vague and/or ambiguous language, we would have to know the exact definitions of every word we wanted to use. It would definitely improve communication and careful thinking, but would be too restrictive. People seem to acquire language mostly by induction, so they can recognize the meaning of a word, but not necessarily define it clearly. Our language is the way it is because our mind is like a neural network shaped by experience rather than a specific algorithm. Not to say that clear definitions are not useful. I certainly value very clear definitions in anything I study, but they can be hard to learn and even harder to agree on. For subjects I don't care about much, it often isn't worth the effort.

You've never had a good chat with a philosopher, have you?

Would this fall under the category of sensory memory? Some of the display times were pretty short. It would make sense that chimps have very good sensory memory.

Is that scary, or what?

They say that ideas change because the people who believed the old ideas eventually die out True, but criticizing him and then trying to prevent him from responding to the criticism would be too far (if that is indeed what they did). Glad to hear that. I don't really know that much about SETI other than that they haven't found ET yet but are using lots of cpu power to analize signals. ((source: http://www.psysr.org/groupthink%20overview.htm)) He's explaining it quite convincingly, and it's really fascinating to read. ~moo Sorry to totally yank this out of context, but might Crichton be accusing science of groupthink?

How does the whole immunization thing work? Does the immune system actively learn how to make proteins with specific properties (ie, antibodies)? Seems like that would be a very useful research tool if we could "tame" it.

I'd use "equivalent mass" and "equivalent energy" only if I were converting mass to/from energy.

Random ads. Think of it as Ben Stein donating to our forum.

Well, we would have to wait until he denies a critic the use of his post to tell for sure. Maybe having a bunch of media people mad at you just makes you paranoid. Well, he was arguing that people who go against the consensus get "charged with heresy", so it gives evidence for his argument. Though it would have been much less self-serving if he had used somebody else as an example. The Drake equation is obviously correct. Anyone who knows how to cancel terms can see that. Using it as evidence for anything at the moment is completely arbitrary, though. Until we can estimate either theoretically or experimentally how likely we are to find a sun with a planet capable of supporting life, that has life that is intelligent and willing to talk with us and are still alive, it is useless. And after that, we already have the answer. The equation is only there to make it look like they know what they are talking about. The act of looking may be science, but the "estimating" how much life is out there looks like guesswork. Personally, I would rather they spent their bits modeling protein folding. Oh, and the Drake equation forgot to include the fraction of civilizations that use EM in the same spectrum we use to communicate.

Fred56, remember when I said you should say "relativistic mass" when you meant "relativistic mass"? This is why. Using that one extra word will save all of us the annoyance of much disagreement and using a whole lot more words.

The only reason you wouldn't have circular reasoning is if you are not trying to prove the beliefs of science. What of it? Just because some things are true and unprovable, doesn't mean that the beliefs of science are the ones that are true. It could just as well be belief in god that is true and unprovable, so you are back where you started. And you see no problem using the method of science to prove the beliefs of science? That's why I gave you the example of the Bible saying the Bible is true. --- Looks like revprez understands what I am talking about. Science is based on certain beliefs; hence it is a belief system. Not a religious belief system, but a belief system nonetheless. The beliefs of science are not provable, but then I don't know any beliefs that are provable save as a consequence of other unprovable beliefs.