Mr Skeptic

But why would an author have exclusive rights to a material? Because the government reduced your rights and increased theirs. Their exclusive rights were given to them, and removed from you. If this transfer of rights had not occurred, then you would have a right to copy the material.

But it is true for every instrument, including things like biological creatures used as a measure. So how would you measure this constant time of yours?

Ha ha, good one. A group has more resources and less individual bias (in general at least), so it would make sense to treat their opinion as more valuable than that of a single individual. And, of course, the fact that a group is composed of individuals might have something to do with it too.

We don't.

The name would be savant syndrome. Usually it is accompanied with lower general intelligence; if that is not the case for you you would be one of the lucky ones. A savant normally would have an extremely limited special ability; yours seems to be a more general mixture of memory and visual calculation (and sound calculation too?!?). Overall, I think that your ability is way cool, and if you like art you could make very good use of it as well.

I think the proper answer then is such: Torturing the kid is morally wrong. Allowing lots of people to die when you could have prevented it is even more morally wrong. Hence, if faced with the choice I would choose the lesser evil. As mooeypoo said, in the real world you can expect countless alternatives so it is not clear cut.

Yay! The Holy Grail has been found! Again!

If the earth's mass were increasing enough to expand the earth, wouldn't that be noticed as higher gravity if nothing else? Whereas if the size of the earth were increasing but its mass constant, gravity would be weaker.

The wording does suggest that Congress may only grant exclusive rights in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. But if granting these exclusive rights actually reduces progress, it would be unconstitutional, right? As it is, patents have little use (they are often not detailed enough to be much use), and instead are a hindrance. In many cases, employees are forbidden to read patents, as that way when they get sued for patent infringement on something similar they developed, they can argue that they invented it independently. In this age of information, there must be a better way to promote progress than with patents. Also, it says that Congress may grant exclusive rights to the inventors and authors, not to megacorporations that buy them from the inventors/authors. Just to nitpick a little more with D H, Copyright violation is refusing to accept the restrictions on our rights that Congress has placed on us by exclusively granting those rights to inventors and authors to promote the progress science and the useful arts. In particular, it is neither theft nor a violation of anyone's rights (it is a refusal to accept a restriction on your rights).

I think that it is a flaw in our understanding that we cannot describe the reference frame of a photon. After all, the photon is there and it has no problem existing in its reference frame.

I thought that by definition, another universe would be completely isolated from our own.

Oh, dear. I believe it was my mention that science was as much a belief system as religion in the other thread that started this mess. For the record, I am in no way affiliated with Fred56. Anyhow, here goes: Religion is based on specific beliefs (articles of faith or whatever they're called). Math is based on specific beliefs (they call them axioms). Science is based on specific beliefs (the scientific method). For example: # That the world is consistent. This is implied by the requirement of repeatability. # That the world is objective. This is implied by the requirement that experiments must be repeatable by other people. # That the world is observable. This is implied by the requirement that observations be made. # That the world is understandable/predictable. This is implied by its dedication to understanding/predicting the world. Unlike math and religion, science is not nearly as forthright with what it believes, so it is harder to say what science believes. ---- All of science, religion, and math would be a subfield of philosophy. You start with some premises, and by logical reasoning, attempt to arrive at as many interesting or useful conclusions as possible. The difference between them is the premises they start with, and the conclusions which must then logically be reached. You could say one more useful than another, or that one is more intuitive than the other, but not that one is more correct than the other. There is really no way to prove the premises either true or false.

I think that, in as much as it can be seen, both the past and the future "exist". If the world were perfectly deterministic, you could "see" both the past and the present, and could consider time much like any spatial dimension and say that stuff both in the past and in the future exists, and describe it etc. In a non-deterministic world (as predicted by quantum mechanics), information about the past is irrevocably lost, and new information gets created. So in a non-deterministic world, I would say that the past is fading rapidly, and the future is materializing. I feel as if I just said a bunch of mostly nonsense.

These things you have suggested are illegal, and if caught you could get in trouble with the cheese police. I would recommend that you not tell anyone about them until you have lobbied for Congress to repeal the First Law of Thermodynamics. When you build your perpetual motion machine, please send me a copy. But I want a working one, not a theoretical one, OK?

So what are you advocating? Concentration camps perhaps? Or maybe just 're-education centres'? Well with the attention spans nowadays, it may be a good idea to teach techniques to increase one's concentration. They are mostly just taught to people with ADD, but an increased ability to concentrate would be useful to a lot of people. As for re-education centers, I don't see how they would be at all useful; after all if someone is already educated, there wouldn't be any need to educate them again. I suppose it could increase the rate of acceptance of new ideas (as compared to the old fashioned way of "Old ideas don't die but the people who believe them do"). I hope that was as random and amusing to you as your reply was to me...

What if the God used an evolutionary algorithm?

The edits were hilarious! Good job!

Since the OP defined a religion as a belief system' date=' they were either referring to worldview or just gave a synonym instead of a definition. Sounds kind of like science.

I do think we can create knowledge, but the way we function seems to require that the knowledge be linked to something. However, this would bring up quite a conundrum, as to do that we need to start with some knowledge.

Depends on if you count certain rocks as higher concentration of CO2, and of course lots dissolves in the ocean. Not too hard to do; however, it would make no sense to do this while we are still burning coal for power. Perhaps we would be better off using cheap, disposable, self-replicating solar power units to do this Yes, if you could do it fast enough to reduce the CO2 concentration. The best methods I have heard of might be putting iron into the ocean dead areas to stimulate algal blooms and using vegetable matter to extract burnable gases then burying the charcoal. Since the concentration of CO2 is absolutely tiny compared to that of oxygen, it wouldn't hurt to just get rid of the CO2 rather than convert it into oxygen. Various suggestions have been made, such as putting it in old oil wells, or in the depths of the ocean. If placed into the ocean, it would be gone for hundreds of years, which should give us time to figure out a better solution.

It all depends on how you define life and how you define purpose (like iNow said). That would be unlikely. As conscious beings, we can choose a purpose for ourselves. We have a tendency to categorize things. Also, it is much easier to recognize a pattern (this is life) than it is to define a pattern (life is such and such). However, the labels we attach are arbitrarily defined, and unless we can agree on what each label means, it is very hard to communicate. If you are looking for a specific answer, things will keep going in circles. I answered this already. The purpose of life, in as much as it has one, is to replicate itself. To sustainably replicate itself, it must also locally reduce its entropy, and to do that, it must be an open system that acquires energy and materials. A design purpose could be assigned to life by comparing it to the product of an evolutionary algorithm whose fitness function is the overall number of surviving offspring. In that way, a purpose can be assigned to it despite the fact that it was neither purposefully designed nor is in general conscious.

Did he specifically say that you had to levitate only the frog? Things would be much simpler if you could levitate the frog on a magnet First of all, can you get about 6 MegaWatts of power? That's what the other group used, and you may need more than that if your magnet is less efficient. Well, one is in the link you gave, http://www.hfml.ru.nl/20t-magnet.html And there's always Wikipedia. http://www.hfml.ru.nl/20t-magnet.html Quite simply, they use helices of copper with holes through them instead of wires and liquid cooled, because the forces involved would snap wire coils, and lots of heat is generated. Also because the fields are too strong for a superconducting magnet. The other team used water at 10 C. Your liquid nitrogen could make quite a mess due to boiling and potentially making things brittle. Without boasting, huh? Of course it is possible, it's been done already.

That would probably be more effective than trying to drive a steam engine with his flaming.

More like trawling than trolling...

Yet it is an important topic. Religion has and has had a huge influence on history, morality, and politics. However, having a religion subforum would be an attraction to people who might not make good scientists. So if you do have a religion subforum, make sure to have links to various sites dedicated to religion and encourage people to go there instead. However, many of us would like to discus religion with other members of SFN. I suspect the pre-convinced problem is not due to religion itself, but rather to the unprovable aspect of it. Relativity and quantum mechanics has its share of people convinced they are right even when they are not (though these are "provable", much of the math is beyond people so it is essentially unprovable to them).